Nagel’s “The Core of ‘Mind and Cosmos’" through an Earth Centrist lens

Philosophy of Mind
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I am certainly not arguing that everything arising in conscious experience (CE) is exactly as it seems. Science has a remarkable track record of correcting illusions and exposing the unreliability of many of our intuitions. The issue I’d like to address is more specific – how is it possible to treat CE as merely another “seeming” – something that, in ‘reality,’ might turn out to be nothing, or nothing over and above neural processes, while it merely ‘seems’ otherwise?

I want to distinguish between the particular ‘contents’ of CE – what I see, hear, feel or believe – and the more basic fact that CE is occurring at all. The former is often found to be misleading on investigation, but CE itself is not simply one more item of evidence within such an investigation – it is the condition in which evidence, judgement and inference are encountered at all. Every judgement, every scientific observation and every theoretical inference occurs within it. CE is not just another hypothesis within the arena of evidence – it is the very arena in which evidence becomes available in the first place.

Descartes was reaching for something like this when he sought his “indubitable starting point,” and I think he moved too easily from the fact of CE to the existence of a distinct “subject of experience.” There’s an interesting analogy here with the relational approach found in RQM and OSR – i.e. just as relations need not imply independently existing relata, perhaps the occurrence of CE need not imply a distinct subject of experience “standing beneath it.” Both cases reflect a tendency to turn something fundamentally relational or processual into a substantial entity, and my suspicion is that this follows from an instinctive but misplaced drive to model ‘reality’ on the basis of the subject-predicate structure of the language we use.

Your phrase “brain blind” is interesting. I take your point to be that the neural processes generating thought, perception and self-awareness are largely inaccessible to conscious inspection – i.e. the fact that something seems a certain way doesn’t guarantee that our interpretation is correct. I understand your point that, if we want to establish whether such intuitions tell us something about the nature of the world or ourselves, we need to create testable hypotheses and subject them to empirical testing to see if they can be invalidated. But how can that testing be carried out in the case of CE itself? CE does not appear within CE as one object among others – it consists in the very existence of those appearances. The inspection of CE would have to be another event occurring within CE! – i.e. there is no standpoint outside CE from which CE can be inspected in the same way that we inspect an object arising within CE. Isn’t the supposed “inspector” therefore already part of what is being investigated?

I recognize that this doesn’t make phenomenology infallible, and nor does it establish that our intuitive conception of CE is correct – but it does establish something more modest: that the occurrence of CE cannot itself be treated as though it were just another hypothesis inferred from something more fundamental. We can certainly investigate and perhaps discover that much of what we ordinarily take CE to be is mistaken, but the fact of CE can’t be dismissed as an “illusion” without presupposing the very thing whose status is supposedly in doubt.

We have already agreed that scientific description abstracts away from the first-person character of CE in order to construct descriptions that are independent of any particular observer’s perspective, and that has been an extraordinarily successful enterprise. But my question is whether such a method can be turned on CE itself – the very condition within which the method arises. We may have taken the one fact that cannot coherently be treated as optional – the fact of CE – and relegated it to the status of just another potentially misleading appearance of an independently inferred reality. That seems to reverse the epistemic order. Where we do need caution is in discerning what CE is telling us about any such inferred reality, rather than directing it at the fact that CE is occurring at all.

So, are our first-person and third-person descriptions of the world just a limitation of our conceptual apparatus, or does the very existence of that distinction tell us something about the ontology of a relational world in which both are investigative entry points of the same reality? I don’t think that question has been satisfactorily answered yet.

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I’m curious are you familiar with the work of Professor Michael Gratziano, professor of neuroscience and psychology at Princeton University?

My lab currently focuses on the brain basis of consciousness. Brains arrive at the conclusion that they have an internal, subjective experience of things — an experience that is non-physical and inexplicable.
How can such a thing be studied scientifically? When an information-processing device such as the brain introspects, or accesses internal data, and on that basis arrives at the conclusion that it has a magic property inside of it, the first question for a scientist is probably not: how did that device produce magic? Or even: what is the magic? Such questions are probably not coherent.

Instead, in my lab we are asking: how does a brain arrive at that kind of self-description? What is the adaptive advantage of that style of self-description? What systems in the brain compute that information? What happens when those systems are damaged? When and how did they evolve?

All of these questions are scientifically approachable. My lab is currently testing a specific, mechanistic theory of awareness described in my recent book, Consciousness and the Social Brain.

Might any of Dr. Graziano’s ideas speak to you?

Or this deeper dive into the biological “mechanics” of CE

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Is it not possible that CE experience is nothing over and above neural processing. The concept we naturally seem to form of it makes it seem like some non-physical “something”, but is it not possible that this model is mistaken?

If CE is something more that neural processing, what could that ‘more’ be and how would we go about discovering it and revealing it’s nature?

For me the claim that CE is the necessary condition for those things just assumes what it purports to prove. Perhaps neural processing of information (and of course language) is sufficient for assessments of evidence, judgement and inference.

That is the reason for my skepticism of phenomenology. It just assumes that consciousness or “being-in-the-world” is ontologically fundamental . (This is the cue for “someone” to chime in and mistakenly accuse me of being a positivist).

I’m not so sure about this. Perhaps the intuition that we not only experience the world, but experience ourselves experiencing the world (qualia) is a useful (perhaps even necessary) fiction like the idea of a self over and above the body―the source of all dualism, . It seems the grammar of our very language, and of course culture, has evolved to reflect this all-pervasive dualistic thinking.

I suspect the former, but I am unable to imagine how the truth about this could be definitively demonstrated outside of science, if at all. Rovelli says in Reality is not What it Seems that both science and poetry are important for revealing truths about human life. I agree with that because the seeming as well as the determined truths may be profoundly moving and enriching of human life. We don’t expect poetry to point to some determinate reality in order to secure it’s value. I’d say the same about phenomenology―it can reveal how things seem to us, and who’s to say the seeming is not as important in a different way as the determinate truths revealed by science.

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Apologies for the length of my reply and for any repetition in it, but I think we’re getting down to the real nitty-gritty of this issue, and I want to make the most of the opportunity to debate it at this level.

Yes, it’s possible that CE is nothing over and above neural processing, but it’s also possible that it can’t be accounted for in terms of neural processing alone. Let me put it this way: there is no standpoint within CE that can step outside CE altogether in order to test it from an independent epistemic vantage point, and that epistemic constraint does not allow the question of ontology to be settled. The fact that a hypothesis cannot currently be empirically decided doesn’t justify eliminating it on ontological grounds, so the only positive proposal I’m making here is methodological – that we avoid turning an epistemic limitation into an ontological conclusion.

I don’t think phenomenology purports to be ontologically fundamental. Phenomenology suspends the question of whether consciousness is the ultimate metaphysical substrate in order to show that CE is the unavoidable condition under which any ontology is encountered, formulated and assessed. Let me be clear: the fact that ontology must be articulated through CE is not the same as claiming that CE is ontologically fundamental.

But I’d like to side with you on the issue of the neural processing of information being sufficient for assessments of evidence, judgement and inference. Where we part company is precisely the point that Chalmers makes – even if all the relevant functional and neural processes were accounted for, there would still seem to be a further question from the first-person perspective: why is there anything it is like to undergo those processes?

If we take our scientific models of the world to be exhaustive descriptions of reality then the question becomes pressing – we are led to ask what functional role CE plays. But it isn’t clear that the question can be answered in functional terms at all, because the methodologies used to derive those models abstract away from CE.

I’d like to side with you again, this time on the issue of language and culture inculcating dualistic thinking. And I’m particularly engaged by your conjecture regarding the reflexive nature of CE – that “the intuition that we not only experience the world, but experience ourselves experiencing the world (qualia) is a useful (perhaps even necessary) fiction like the idea of a self over and above the body.” But I wonder whether there are actually two claims here that are worth separating out: firstly that CE has phenomenal character, and secondly that CE involves a representation of itself as CE. Maybe it is the subject that is the fiction, without the occurrence of CE itself being a fiction.

It may be that what we call “the world” and what we call “CE of the world” cannot ultimately be separated into two independently existing poles. If so, then the mistake may not be one of choosing the wrong pole as fundamental – it may be in the assumption that there have to be two independently existing poles in the first place. And any attempt to account for this interdependence will itself have to be made from within one of the poles that has itself been generated by this conceptual bifurcation.

Are we entitled to assume that third-person investigation can exhaustively account for the first-person phenomenon within which that investigation itself occurs? If not then the very idea of reflexive awareness (the notion that “I am aware that I am aware”) may reflect the kind of dualistic thinking you rightly point out as being reinforced by language and culture – i.e. features of the world-pole of the bifurcation. So instead of thinking in terms of a world and a subject that enter into relationship with each other, perhaps the CE/world distinction is not something that stands outside relational processes at all, but is itself constituted within them.

On the issue of “useful fiction,” perhaps the problematic thing isn’t CE but the conceptual model of a “conscious subject.” So instead of thinking “the subject has CE of objects,” we might consider something more consistent with RQM – and one possibility is that the polarization might itself be a feature of relational organization rather than a relation between two independently existing polse. Then “I am aware that I am aware” might indeed be a second-order construction rather than evidence for an intrinsically self-aware subject. In that case, what needs to be dissolved isn’t CE but the subject/object architecture imposed upon it.

You ask: “who’s to say the seeming is not as important in a different way as the determinate truths revealed by science?” We seem to be agreeing on the idea that first-person and third-person descriptions of the world (phenomenology and science) are different “entry points” on what presents as a problem of reconciliation. But why should the distinction between “what reality is like from within” and “what reality is like when described from without” be assumed to be merely epistemic? I keep coming back to the question of what this might be saying about the ontology.

You seem to be suggesting that science tells us about a “determinate reality,” while phenomenology tells us about the ‘seeming.’ I’d like to suggest that there’s already a problem with calling one side “determinate reality.” Science itself gives us models, measurements, mathematical structures and intersubjectively reproducible results. These are extraordinarily powerful ways of constraining and refining our descriptions of reality, but they do not amount to a God’s-eye view. The epistemic strength of the scientific enterprise comes from systematically controlling and cross-checking appearances. But it’s not my intention to undermine scientific realism – my intention is to suggest that we shouldn’t assume that the distinction between phenomenological appearance and scientific description maps neatly onto a distinction between appearance and reality.

Getting back to RQM, I think we have agreed that the idea of a God’s-eye description of physical reality has to be abandoned – physical properties are instantiated relative to interacting physical systems, without requiring an absolute, observer-independent state description. If a physical framework such as RQM can abandon the idea of an absolute perspective without abandoning reality, why should we expect the first-person/third-person distinction to be just a defect of human cognition rather than as another feature of a perspectival relational reality?

RQM provides an example in physics of a framework in which abandoning an absolute perspective does not mean abandoning reality. Might something analogous be worth considering regarding the first-/third-person distinction? In short, perhaps the mistake is not that of treating CE as fundamental, but of treating CE and world as two independently constituted poles whose “relative fundamentality” can be decided. So rather than the usual combatants – “world engenders brain, brain engenders CE” versus “CE engenders world” – my proposition is that relational organization may give rise to an apparent subject/object polarity, so that subject and object might not be ontologically primitive at all.

The radical significance of RQM lies in the claim that physical properties are relationally instantiated, and I’m asking whether something structurally analogous might apply to the subject/object distinction – whether subject and object might themselves be features that arise within relational organization, rather than independently constituted poles between which relations subsequently obtain. In other words, maybe it is the subject/object distinction that lies at the heart of this thorny issue.

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I’m super-busy next couple days, so I’ll respond when I get a chance…

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Many interpret it that way. But my own take on phenomenalism —which I see as the source of phenomenology as ontology — is that the-chair-for-me-now is “part” of the chair itself. It’s not a “seeming” of the chair — as if “inside picture stuff” — but a “relative-perspectival fragment” of the chair “itself.”

The “hard problem” seems “real” to people to the degree that they presuppose dualism, which is to say a framework that opposes emergent inside-stuff to a non-emergent outside-stuff.

Those within this framework tend to understand “phenomenalism” to label a reduction of the world to inside-stuff. I say that it is instead a rejection of inside-stuff and a rethinking of the structure of “outside” stuff.

Science presupposes public objects that are also qualitative ( empirical). I see it as carefully developing itself as a tool for Anyone, largely in terms of an adjustable view-from-Anywhere. Not a (paradoxical to me ) view-from-Nowhere.

I understand of course that phenomenalism — as I understand it ---- clashes with the typical sense of “the past” in the sense of an “objective reality real-number timeline.” For most philosophers perhaps, the future is “symmetrical” with the past. For many philosophers, the future is “really already here.”

To some degree, it’s a matter of prioritization. I personally plant my own flag in the primacy of perception. So the “real” is what is reliably available to perception, to oversimplify. And this takes us basically to J. S. Mill and Mach, and then on to Husserl, etc.

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I don’t know how the physical accounts for seeing the color red. Ions pass through the neural membrane when the ion gated channels are opened, an electrical charge builds, molecules called neurotransmitters are released from one neuron and absorbed by another, etc. Nothing in any description of the physical events suggests our seeing red.

There is nothing red anywhere. Objects are not red. Photons are not red. Even if photons were red, they are not traveling up the optic nerve and into the brain. No part of the brain turns red in response to the electrical signals that travel into it after photons hit the retina. The brain is entirely in the dark. But we see red.

I’m not sure what you mean. Do you not experience yourself experiencing the world? Do you think you are an automaton that only speaks words it has been taught, but what those words describe is fiction?

That things “seem to us” is what it’s all about. Photons hit retina, changing the shape of the 11-cis-retinal molecule, which changes the shape of the protein rhodopsin, which is now called metarhodopsin II. Metarhodopsin II binds to transducin, causing the GDP that was bound to the transducing to fall off, and GTP binders to the transducing. Street sooner notes steps, an ion channel on the cell membrane closes, and the concentration of sodium ions in the cell drops. Soon, the imbalance in the charge sends an electrical current through the optic nerve, to the brain.

How does all that seem like anything? The brain can compares patterns of electrical signals with stored information about patterns of electrical signals that had arrived in the past, and what events took place then, and a response it output.

There isn’t a mechanism for all of that seeming like anything. As Andy pointed out, this is Chalmers’ question:

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CE certainly seems to be something over and above neural processing, simply because prior to the advent of neuroscience neural processing was nothing at all to us. How do we connect the understanding that CE cannot exist without neural processing with the in vivo impression of how CE seems to us? How we connect two things which seem so radically disconnected?

Is there any standpoint outside of CE? I think the answer depends on what is meant by “inside CE”. If we take CE to denote the in vivo impression of how CE seems to us then much of science does stand outside CE. On the other hand if we say that there can be nothing at all for us outside of conscious awareness, then by definition nothing can stand outside of CE.

The ontological question cannot be settled if by “settled” is meant that any position could be proven with certainty. I agree that we should not turn an epistemic limitation into an ontological certainty. I think ontological conclusions (which should perhaps always remain provisional) are best based on science. That said science itself consists largely in defeasible theory. And yet if we cannot even begin to imagine how some hypothesis could be tested, I think that is grounds for, if not totally eliminating it, at least setting it aside for now.

I think it is best of I only respond to this for now, because I have limited time and also I think this is the central issue of the discussion.

I agree that the chair-for-me-now is a part of the chair insofar as it is a interaction between the chair, the environmental conditions and the sentient body. On the other hand I think the chair as ontological, non-human process, is completely independent of the sentient body. In other words the chair-as-perceived and the chair-not perceived are not the same. The chair-as-perceived is a function of the chair-not-perceived, but the chair-not-perceived is only for us a function of the chair-as-perceived. For me, these are just two ways of thinking about the situation.

I see your position as an ontological argument based on epistemic limitation as @Andy and I touched upon above. In other words, and not meaning to offend you, I see your position as an “argument” from incredulity, and since such an argument is basically rhetorical I find no point in arguing against it, other than to say that if we don’t know what the physical is, then how much less do we know what it is capable of? I can’t make sense of imputing to physical, apparently non-sentient, things, some kind of sentience―a purported sentience based on our sketchy intuitions about the nature of our own sentience.

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I can’t make sense of that, either. But I don’t think consciousness is sentience. I think it is subjective experience. If we’re considering, say, an electron, it experiences its own existence. And what is that like? There is no thinking, no emotion, no sentience. I don’t claim I can make sense of that. It just exists as it exists.

Yes, its bizarre. And I’d be happy to abandon the idea. But the physical is not getting us any answers. We can’t claim to know everything about the physical. But we know some pretty amazing stuff. Quarks make up hadrons, such as protons, neutrons, pions, and baryons. But they only exist as components of composite particles. They don’t exist individually, in isolation. They can’t exist in isolation. Crazy stuff that we’ve come to understand!

But nothing about consciousness. Neural correlates of consciousness is all we can do. Nothing on consciousness. With our not insignificant technology, we can’t find a hint of anything physical about it.

And we don’t understand it in any way that’s measurable. How fast is consciousness? How far can it go? How dense is it? We can measure the characteristics of physical objects and physical processes. With pretty impressive detail. But nothing about consciousness. We can’t describe it mathematically.

I think the fact that we have only “sketchy intuitions” about the nature of our own consciousness is important. I think it’s something more legitimate than incredulity.

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Let me clear up any confusion I might have introduced here. The “problem of other minds” looms large, but I don’t want to drag that into the debate. I’m prepared to accept symmetry by default – i.e. to accept that other people have first-person perspectives in the same way that “this” first-person perspective is associated with a physical person. I’m also prepared to accept that third-person reports about first-person perspectives can be reliable to whatever extent language permits, so I’m not disputing a correspondence between CE and NCCs. Furthermore, NCCs and behavior can certainly be studied scientifically so I’m not going to quibble over whether or not science can say anything about CE, even given that CE itself is not an empirical phenomenon in the same sense as are NCCs.

The point I’d like to make is that scientific investigation itself takes place within CE. Other people, experimental apparatus, observations, measurements, and even the scientific reports we read are all part of the “contents” of CE. Whether or not they are anything more than this is an ontological question.

Both scientific and ontological accounts are provisional, and both should be logically consistent and empirically adequate. The difficulty arises when more than one ontological account satisfies those criteria, so that scientific methodology can’t discriminate between them. I’m wary about eliminating an ontological account just because our present methods can’t test it, so I agree that if an account isn’t scientifically tractable then science has to set it aside unless circumstances change in such a way that it becomes tractable. But that is a methodological decision, not an ontological judgement.

This brings me back to the question I’ve been banging away at. In the case of CE, science can investigate the neural and behavioural correlates, but scientific methods don’t treat the first-person character of CE itself as the kind of evidence from which scientific theories are constructed. Since this methodological exclusion is built into the scientific enterprise, I’m not sure how the method itself could establish that “what it excludes” has no ontological significance.

I’m suggesting that the issue isn’t whether one or the other (science or phenomenology) has entitlement to the status of “fundamental to reality.” I’m suggesting instead that we should contemplate the possibility that these are genuinely different entry points into the same investigation. The question then becomes whether or not the distinction between these two entry points (first-person and third-person) should be regarded as nothing more than a consequence of an epistemic constraint, or whether it actually tells us something about the structure of what is being investigated. To repeat, I’m wary about eliminating an ontological account just because our present methods cannot test it

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I didn’t have the problem of other minds in mind, so I’m not sure whether you have misundertood what I wrote or whether what I wrote somehow implies that problem in some way I was not aware of.

I was just trying to pin down what could be meant by “outside of CE”. I’m also not sure what you mean by NCC.

Just what is meant by science taking place within CE was what I was trying to get clear on with this:

So, there is the question of how we interpret the claim that science takes place CE as I tried to gesture at above, and then there is the question as to whether the practices and equipment of science are anything more than CE, as you ask below. They are certainly part of CE, but do they also exist apart from it. I guess that is the question we can ask of the world itself, of everything and anything at all.

I think it certainly tells us something about the human mind. Does the way we model the world tell us anything about the world that is being modeled? Is that the question? Or is the question as to whether how the way we can reflectively understand how we (seem to) experience the world tell us anything about, not merely the nature of the human, but the nature of the world itself. It’s not clear to me that the answer to the latter question is "yes’. That said, I agree with you that we should not eliminate accounts just because we cannot presently test them. On the other hand what if we cannot even begin to imagine how an account could be tested?

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I don’t think the problem of other minds can be completely avoided, so I wanted to clear the ground of that possible obstacle. I’m prepared to take the existence of other first-person perspectives as a working assumption rather than making the problem of other minds part of the argument. Ontological solipsism is the one possibility I’d like to sideline from the outset, simply because it leaves us with nothing useful to investigate. And apologies for not expanding my abbreviation: NCCs = Neural Correlates of Consciousness.

I think we’re perhaps separating two questions that I had run together. I’m not claiming that because scientific objects appear within CE they therefore exist only as contents of CE. I’m making the more modest point that the entire epistemic activity by which science establishes anything about those objects occurs within CE. Whatever the laboratory, apparatus, other scientists or experimental results ultimately are, they are encountered, interpreted and communicated within experience.

So I’m not disputing the existence of a domain beyond the immediate contents of CE. The question I’m interested in is what we can legitimately infer about that domain from the different ways in which it becomes available to us. If we take the existence of other first-person perspectives as a working assumption, then we already have a plurality of perspectives exhibiting remarkably stable and mutually constraining correspondence. The interesting question, for me, is what ontology makes that possible.

That seems to me to lead into the question you’ve raised elsewhere about the synchronisation of minds. We don’t need to deny a common world in order to ask what makes a common world possible.

Yes, it certainly tells us something about the human mind. We have scientific descriptions that correspond remarkably well across a plurality of first-person perspectives. But my broader point is that the scientific enterprise itself is embedded in those perspectives. I’m not saying that phenomenology is therefore more fundamental than science, and I am not questioning scientific objectivity. Quite the contrary – the claim for scientific objectivity depends on the broad agreement of observations and measurements across different observers. The issue I’m interested in is not whether this correspondence exists, but why it should exist. And that brings us back to your question about the synchronisation of minds.

If we start with a plurality of first-person perspectives, each of which encounters a world that is sufficiently stable and shared for science to be possible, then we have to ask what might account for the remarkable degree of mutual constraint between those perspectives. One possibility is simply that there is a mind-independent world which different minds independently access. But that is already an ontological interpretation of the situation, rather than something established merely by the scientific methodology itself. I’m not suggesting that we should reject that interpretation. I’m asking whether we should assume in advance that it is the only possible way of understanding the correspondence.

That is where I think the distinction between first-person and third-person perspectives becomes interesting for the ontology. Perhaps it tells us something more than being just about the limitations of human cognition. Perhaps it tell us somthing about the structure of the relationship between perspectives and whatever it is they are perspectives on.

I don’t yet want to push this into a particular metaphysical system. The important point for now is simply that if we reject ontological solipsism while also rejecting the idea that minds are independent Cartesian substances, we still have a problem to solve – how does a plurality of first-person perspectives come to share a common, stable and mutually constraining world? But that’s a question I’d like to defer until I have some confidence that we’re on the same page.

Then we’re free to play around with accounts to our heart’s content, provided they’re logically consistent and empirically adequate. But we aren’t “doing science.” An account being outside the reach of present scientific testing may be a good reason for science to set it aside, but it isn’t a reason for concluding that the account has no ontological significance. The question I’m trying to keep open is precisely whether the boundary of scientific tractability should also be treated as a boundary of what it is legitimate to think about ontologically.

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I like the way you clarify your position here. I also like that you acknowledge that your approach and my differing approach are just two approaches among others, that do not exhaust the space.

If I understand you correctly, you think of C as the “chair-in-itself” and f(C) as “the-chair-for-subject.” To me this suggests that you at least tacitly understand f(C) as a “mind-stuff icon” that is causally determined by the-relationship-in-itself between the-subject-in-itself and the-chair-in-itself. “Consciousness” emerges from an in-itself “absolute” stuff. This absolute stuff is only available to us “through” this emergent representational consciousness. The “objective reality absolute stuff” need not have ever “been witnessed.”

Please correct me if I am wrong. I read you as quite open-minded on the level of detail. I respect the development, explicitness, and flexibility of your position.

To me your position even looks like the most feasible, if one takes an “objective absolute past” for granted. Meillassoux argues for such an absolute past, as you well know, by asking the correlationist a potentially embarrassing question. As you also know, I personally “read this question against the questioner” and, frankly, accept the gambit.

I am willing to follow what Braver call “the empirical directive” against prevailing assumptions about time. In my view, “correlationism” ( phenomenalism) only makes sense if pushed “through” prevailing conceptions of time. While Heidegger is famous on this issue, Peirce was there first. Peirce is absolutely radical on this issue, and he explicitly identified his “pragmaticism” as “a” phenomenalism. Of course I am not appealing to him as an authority. Instead I am fascinated by this radical moment in American philosophy. Of course we also have the “nondual” radical empiricism of W. James. This too only makes coherent sense with a radical rethinking of time and the structure of shared empirical objects.

While I would enjoy bringing others to “my” side of the issue, I’m grateful enough to discuss the issue at a high and intricate level. I think you know from previous conversation that I personally don’t prioritize the human species in the least with respect to phenomenalism. Following Feuerbach, I see rationality itself as separable from the famous naked ape that paves the surface of “Urth.”

We might frame this issue in this way: is the umvelt of a given organism something “in the minds” of those organisms ? Something “caused” by a “non-umvelt substrate” ? Or should we understand the umvelt as an “aspect” of “reality itself” ? We can understand “reality itself” as logical synthesis of all possible for-individual-organism “umvelt-moments.” Then we don’t have C set against f(C). Instead we have C as a synthesis of perspectival “fragments” that are not “inside minds” but are instead “relative manifestations” of shared reality itself. In this framework, we do not have “Newtonian absolute time.” Instead “consciousness” becomes a synonym of “local, organism-grounded time.” And “consciousness” is no longer a stuff “in” the world but the “shining” or “being-there-ness” of the world itself.

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As I see it, there’s a tendency to forget that empirical science is…empirical.

We “believe in” tiny things like “photons” because theories involving such entities “prove themselves” to individuals as capable of predicting and controlling experience.

The epistemic prestige of empirical science is “grounded” in the same “experience” that many want to understand as “basically secondary.”

Then “epistemic prestige” is itself a normative-social phenomenon. I am “proud of myself” for being “rational” in relation to norms that I tacitly understand to transcend me. Even the “sin” of anthropocentrism is a “sin” that humans decry and eschew. “Objective” means unbiased, and given that every subject is nakedly primarily biased — has its own location and sense-organs — this unbiased-ness can only be a very special lack of disqualifying bias. The juror “should” be biased in the sense of “speaking English” and “basically sane.” The juror should not be “biased” in the sense of being the defendant’s mother or the victim’s brother.

My point is that “pure objectivity” is a mute and helpless nothingness. The world we can talk about, within the limits of sense, is the world that we know, the experienced world, the world-for-a-human. We extend our empathy to our relatives, other animals. This makes sense to me. Our sci-fi shows that our human imagination and rationality already experiences itself as partially “beyond” its current biological basis.

Some take mathematical models from physics as access finally to a “trans-human” reality. I find this questionable, because what separates speculative mathematical creativity from genuine progress in physics is pragmatic success in the empirical world. It’s not that physics creates the lifeworld as a byproduct. Physics emerges with great caution and effort from the lifeworld as a tool within that same lifeworld. The tacit mathematical platonism that gets “projected” on these models is not only not anthropocentric but just an echo of classic human supremacy in terms of an “inner eye” for gazing on “essences.” Nothing is “more” anthropocentric than a “pure mental” reality that only humans can access. Now this can be softened the more we allow that our biology is contingent here. Voltaire was already at this high level. His early sci-fi presented humans as a relatively tiny short-lived and basically savage “barely admissible” version of a generalized rational species type. I am with Voltaire, but I don’t find “meaning” to be separable from “quality” in the sense of the total perception of a sign. I don’t believe in bloodless angels. Or that the world is “really” hyper-diaphanous platonic “form.” I see such “form” as a misreading of the temporal in terms of the spatial.

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Right. As others have noted, philosophy is “pre-science.” Scientific practice is “grounded” in “know-how” that is primarily tacit. Then we naturally want to “parse” the output of science in terms of a larger rational sense of the world. How does literary criticism “gel” with physics ? With biology ? With history or ethics ? I in fact live the collision of a plurality of specialized discourses. Some philosophy is attempt to deal with this collision.

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This response will be brief as I have little available time.

I agree with you about solipsism. There is a sense in which, for any individual, solipsism seems to be an apt description of experience, on the face of it. There is a way in which I may seem strictly speaking to hermetically contain my entire experience of the world. On the other hand, that others have their own worlds is never seriously in question, even though I have no direct access to those worlds. If I recall correctly Wittgenstein alluded to this strange “accuracy” of solipsism.

Anyway I agree with you that solipsism is best left out of serious consideration, because it is a slippery path leading nowhere.

I agree with you that we are necessarily conscious of all that would count as experience, knowledge and judgement, at least that part we can form into discourse. I am somewhat wary of the language of “occurring within” because it may mislead us into thinking of consciousness as a container. That said, I ma not imputing that confusion to you.

Gotta go right now…until later…

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5.62/ […] what solipsism means is quite correct; only it cannot be said, but makes itself manifest. The world is my world: this is manifest in the fact that the limits of language (of that language which I alone understand) mean the limits of my world.

5.621/ The world and life are one.

5.63/ I am my world. (The microcosm.)

5.631/ There is no such thing as the subject that thinks or entertains ideas […]

5.632/ The subject does not belong to the world: rather, it is a limit of the world.

5.633/ Where in the world is the metaphysical subject to be found? […]

...

5.64/ Here it can be seen that solipsism, when its implications are followed out strictly, coincides with pure realism. The self of solipsism shrinks to a point without extension, and there remains the reality co-ordinated with it.

Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

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The chair-in-itself and the chair-as perceived I see as two different processes, The chair in itself is not “in-itself” in any absolute sense since it is not really separable from the cosmos. It is a cosmic process consisting in its local (and perhaps non-local?) relations.

If I don’t perceive the chair then it has no perceptual relation to me. I don’t think in terms of “mind-stuff”. The “chair-process” affects the “me-process” pre-cognitively. Neuroscience has observed and analyzed the nature of the process of affection, the process which results in me seeing the chair, touching the chair, sitting in the chair and so on. We have nothing other than that scientific analysis to inform us in our attempt to understand such processes, as far as I can see, apart from simply living them . Simply living them gives us no conscious access to the pre-cognitive conditions of their arising though, and we can come to realize that through reflection on our lives, and on what we are able to be conscious of.

There is no “objective reality absolute stuff” in my view there is only objective reality relational stuff. Most of it has no dependence on us for its existence.

I think there are objective relative pasts just as there is objective relational stuff. If something happened (and all happenings are relations) then the fact that it happened remains, even though the happening has disappeared from our “now”, apart from its residual traces.

I understand umwelts to be relational processes, just like anything else. So they are caused by other relational processes. As such I think they are as real as anything else.

This is all just my attempt to say as clearly as I can how I understand things, how I can make most sense of what I have encountered. For me all understandings are inevitably approximations.

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Thanks for searching these out, Andy. They make me want to read the Tractatus much more thoroughly than I have in the past.

“That language which I alone can understand”―does this contradict the “private language argument” or is he referring to something else?

Is he perhaps referring to the non-verbal “language” of my direct experience? (The universal, not the personal, me)

From my primal point of view the world and life are one. From a critical reflective POV they are not one, even though they are not separate―one is a subset of the other. We can flip perspectives and make either one the subset of the other, as is our dualistic wont.

I am my world, but the encounter with the other shows me that they are also their worlds, and this can be thought to also apply to non-sentient entities. The electron “feels” the affect of the nucleus. The cliffs “feel” the effect of the rain and wind. It is an immense world, its scope is far beyond the human, or even the sentient.

The subject that thinks or entertains ideas is like a rainbow or lights flashing on the waters. It does not belong to the world of actual (in the sense of “acting” or capable of acting) processes. It is in a sense a limit of its own little world―it is nowhere to be found, not even in its own little world.

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I like and share the holism that I find here.

The world is a vast unified process. So it seems to me. And maybe I can’t help but think of it that way. Sense-making “is” unification ?

In one sense, I agree. But I can’t help but feel that this tacitly understands perception as “inside stuff.” Which is fine. But I prefer to “build the world from perception.” Basically it’s not clear to me what “the chair” refers to if not the shared perceptual object. I only mention this in passing. You may not want to dive into this intricate issue at the moment.

Personally, I take “objective” to mean “unbiased.” Many use it in philosophy as if it means “from no point of view.” Or in terms of what “Really” happened.

If an “objective reality” is “what Really happened” apart from any perspectival manifestation, then we seem forced into some flavor of dualism. This frequently leads to a demotion of perception to inside stuff. But I’m afraid of tiring you or annoying you on this point. For me the primacy of perception has come to be negotiable, but I see us as all enacting this primacy non-theoretically. I feel personally constrained to keep my theory from floating away from the rest of my life. Basically I aim at a “fresh” empiricism. Not speculation but explication.

I can agree that umvelts ( worlds-from-POV) are relational. I also like your approximation attitude. I agree. I see us as arranging chains of signs. I am trying to aim mine back at the world as I live in it.