I don’t think I sufficiently grasped your last post, but I can re-affirm here that I insist on the ontological difference. So consciousness is not, in my view, the “content” of experience. Nor is consciousness “experience itself.” Consciousness is the “being” or “presence” or “quality” of this “content.”
Joe is “conscious” of a passing steamboat because that steamboat is “there” ( for him.) In my view, what is there for Joe is an “aspect” or “moment” of the steamboat itself.
What I am not saying is that “consciousness is a stuff in Joe’s head,” and that this stuff includes an “internal picture” of the steamboat.
For me, this “something other” is “not a thing at all.”
My view is eccentric, I confess. But it involves a complete rethinking of the concept of “the physical object.” It is miles away from indirect realism.
I agree that it is “too simple” to study like some entity “in” the world. Something is “here.” The “here-ness” of whatever is here is what I’m gesturing toward. Though “here-ness” is a noun, the point is that “here-ness” is not a “stuff” that is itself here. Though the pointer/sign “here” is here.
I’ll drop a few quotes here. I am not endorsing the source but it’s chewing on the issue, and I am quoting some of its quotes.
“Being is presence,” writes Heidegger. This “decisive experience of my path of thinking cannot be remembered often enough” (GA 98: 278).
But on its own, the assertion that “being is presence” leaves us in the dark. What does “being” mean? What does “presence” mean?
“Being is presence ” is supposed to be a rich and provocative claim. This means that “being” and “presence” cannot be synonyms . To say that something is present “speaks more clearly” than just calling it a being. It says something more. But “how so” (GA 73.2: 1230)?
Yet here I am, doing just that, and telling Fasching, if he’s listening, that he should mix some Heidegger with his Vedanta.
You speak as if phenomenology is a dead thing, and instead of talking about the issues you chatter about the dead.
But let us take a break from the issues and gossip for a bit. I already emphasized that “the ontological difference” is “bigger” than Heidegger, who is far from the only thinker to notice it. I don’t recall Fasching ever mentioning Heidegger, but he’s basically talking about the same “difference” between presence and what is present. Likewise with Wittgenstein, who mentioned Heidegger maybe once.
As I see it, these people become all the more “real” the more one enters the issues personally. It’s through the issues that they become interesting. If you want to say “I don’t believe the ontological difference is interesting or relevant,” then why not just say that ?
At the risk of usurping a topic based on of natural selection with one based on speculative metaphysics…….
Agreed, which is why I said consciousness is the relative quality, or degree, of the subject’s state of being conscious, which just is the full content of rational machinations, of which experience is an important but nonetheless a minority shareholder.
Which to me sounds an awful lot like your very own “being” or “presence” or “quality” of this “content.”
To elaborate a little……what else could consciousness be except the stuff in Joe’s head? There are certainly no real physical objects contained therein except his brain, and there ain’t no steamboats to be found in nasty wetware, I bet.
And insofar as Joe has indeed perceived what he eventually represents to himself as a steamboat, that which now resides in his consciousness because of it, can certainly be thought as an “internal picture” of the phenomenon given to him by his own senses.
I wonder……do you realize this can only be the case iff Joe already knows what a steamboat is? What is “there” for him, if he doesn’t? Or, what would be “there” for him such that he is capable of that specific determination?
I think my idea of consciousness is close enough to yours that I don’t need to comment further about it. The specifics may vary, but that’s to be expected, considering the subject matter.
I should put my cards on the table. I complete reject ( these days anyway) the understanding of perceptions as “internal pictures” of “external causes” of those pictures.
Sure. Joe’s perception is situated socially. Jane, who grew up elsewhere, sees “some strange thing on the water.”
It’s nice when people agree, but I can’t find my own position in your words, and I reckon it’s more honest to say so.
To express my position crudely, as a first approximation, what are called “perceptions” of an object are genuine “pieces” of the object. Instead of an “external” object that inspires “internal pictures,” we have “aspects” or “moments” of objects. These qualitative manifestations are typically interpreted as “icons” made of a psychical stuff, so that subject is “given” these “icons” and not the “real” or “true” object. My position, which is nothing I invented but only work at elaborating, attempts to evade this dualism by reconsidering the structure of the object. The subject “as consciousness” has no “interior.” Consciousness is the presence of world-from-perspective, including the presence of an “interior monologue” and the discomfort of indigestion, both of them also “in the world,” but less obvious to others than a blemish on the empirical subject’s forehead. The “empirical subject” ( as opposed to the consciousness associated with that subject ) is also part of the “content of experience,” seen in the mirror perhaps, brushing his teeth.
Fasching is a Heidegger scholar who attempts to integrate Heideggerian concepts like the ontological difference with phenomenological notions of consciousness. This is a perfectly respectable effort, but my point was that Heidegger would likely critique this attempt by arguing the terms he uses, including the ontological difference, Dasein and Being, have very specific roles to play in his thinking.
Heidegger opposed the understanding of concepts like subjectivity, being and consciousness found in Husserl and Sartre, which are implicit in Wittgenstein’s work and I believe in Fasching also. It’s fine to reject Heidegger’s reasons for objecting to attempts to steer the ontological difference in such a direction, but some would say that this obscures the most radical elements of his work.
I may not always understand what you, or anyone else, are getting at, but I understand this. And I agree. I think I agree for the reason you are saying.
I also agree because, if, by ‘“content” of experience’, you mean things I am thinking of/perceiving/have “images” of in my mind, I think that’s too limiting. I do not think consciousness has anything to do with any mental abilities. Sure, humans have such abilities, and, therefore, such contents. At least some animals too, I’m sure.
But I think consciousness is fundamental, and all things experience. But most things do not have mental abilities, so do not have what you are calling ‘"contents of experience’ (if I am, indeed, understanding what you mean). Their experiences do not include such contents.
My thinking is very different. I don’t think there is any consciousness in which things can reside. I think there are things in his mind. Thoughts. He is thinking about things. That’s accomplished by the physical activity of his brain. Ions going in and out of neuronal membranes, currents of such moving from neuron to neuron.
Consciousness is his experience of this activity; of his thinking. Consciousness is the subjective experience of it that changes it from merely the physical events of ions moving through the membranes of chains and webs of neurons into something meaningful.
Let’s see what Husserl’s phenomenological approach has to say about consciousness. He rejects the idea of consciousness as a container. For him it is a synthetic process.
Dazed by the confusion between object and mental content, one forgets that the objects of which we are ‘conscious’, are not simply in consciousness as in a box, so that they can merely be found in it and snatched at in it; but that they are first constituted as being what they are for us, and as what they count as for us, in varying forms of objective intention…One forgets that… an intending, or reference is present, that aims at an object, a consciousness is present that is the consciousness of this object.
The mere existence of a content in the psychic interplay is, however, not at all this being-meant or being-referred-to. This first arises when this content is ‘noticed’, such notice being a look directed towards it, a presentation of it. To define the presentation of a content as the mere fact of its being experienced, and in consequence to give the name ‘presentations’ to all experienced contents, is one of the worst conceptual distortions known to philosophy.”(Logical Investigations).
How am I to understand stuff, which just is to be meaningful, when that which constitutes any of those physical events is not found anywhere at all in the meaning I’m supposed to get out of them?
The ol’ physics/metaphysics squabble: the former doesn’t inform us of what we want to know; the latter does but the means for it are scarcely inclined to be accepted.
I like this wording. “Mental contents”, different from “conscious contents”. Entities with the mental capacity have mental contents. They also have subjective awareness of, are conscious of, those mental contents.
Entities without the mental capacity don’t have mental contents. But they have subjective experiences of whatever sort entities of their nature have. Plants don’t have mental abilities or contents, but they have subjective experiences of being plants.
I’m not thinking this is what Husserl meant. That’s just what went through my head when I read that part of the sentence. It seems a good way to differentiate what I think is going on.
Oddly worded, in my view. I am conscious of the object. That’s not the same as “the consciousness of the object.” But I know my view isn’t his.
What’s he saying? Like when you’re walking down the street, obviously seeing things because you’re not bumping into them, but not really noticing them?
I compare it to the automatic door at the supermarket. The electric eye detects my approach, and triggers the mechanism that opens the door. It doesn’t know a person is approaching, and that it needs to open the door so I can get in. It doesn’t know what a person, door, or building are, or that it is doing anything. It’s just electric signals.
I don’t believe we would know what the electric signals in our brains mean, either, if all it was was electric signals. I think consciousness is a non-physical property of matter that is the capacity to experience. With our complexity, we experience the way we do. Without the capacity to experience, we would be an incredibly complex supermarket door.
The supermarket door experiences, but is not complex enough to experience the way we do. It needs much more complexity.
Husserl is saying that to attend to any experience is not merely to shine a neutral light on it, but to articulate a new sense, the active constitution of a new object. Consciousness awareness doesn’t just stare at pre-existing things, it constructs them.
I haven’t bumped into a reference to Heidegger in Fasching’s work so far. Above I suggested that Fasching’s work contributes toward a plausible appropriation of the ontological difference to the thorny issue of consciousness.
I don’t think it’s that simple, but why should that matter ? Consider this passage:
Philosophy’s own history is thus objectively there in a relevant sense for philosophical research if and only if it provides, nota diversity of curiosities, but rather radically simple matters worthy of thought; i.e., if the history of philosophy does not divert present understanding into merely seeking an expansion of knowledge, but rather forces the present back upon itself in order to magnify its questionability. Especially fora present whose very being is constituted by historical consciousness, anxiety over history and its appropriation calls for a radical understanding of what a particular instance of past philosophical research put forward as its basic anxiety in its situation and for its time. To understand means not simply to recognize established knowledge, but rather to repeat in an original way what was once understood in terms of its own situation and for that situation. Such a radical understanding happens least of all in the borrowing of theorems, propositions, basic concepts, and principles in order to revive and update them in one or another “new” form. When in its concern to understand itself it takes its models from the past, such an understanding will subject these models to the sharpest radical critique and will cultivate them into a potentially fruitful opposition. Factic Dasein always is what it is only as its own Dasein and never as the general Dasein of some universal humanity, whose cultivation would only bean exercise in futility. Critique of history is always only critique of the present. Critique cannot be of the naive opinion that it can calculate for history how it would have taken place, if only . . . Rather, it must focus on the present and see to it that it asks questions in a manner which is in accord with the originality within its own reach.
In my view, this is way too vague. Again, we aren’t, or shouldn’t be, primarily discussing the dead but the still-living issues they dwelt on when alive.
I don’t doubt that some will say this, but they need to make a case. And they need to specify those “most radical elements” in a way that demonstrates a genuine and necessarily creative appropriation.
I appreciate the curiosity. I’ve already expressed the gist in a few threads, but I will continue to dig for more pointers.
Let us imagine a computer ( a data center) the size of the moon. To me it’s plausible that humans will build, if they haven’t already, a selectively reactive entity or machine that is more complex than the human brain. It may act in a way that we call self-preserving. Even viruses do this in their way.
To me this consideration points away from complexity of internal structure and even of behavior to a thinking of sentience as “having the world before one,” which I’ve described as “presence” or “qualia.” I think people invent “qualia” because their counter-empirical notion of “the physical” obviously “leaves something out.” The problem, as I see it, is a dualistic conception of the physical as a kind of residue that remains when the adumbrations of the physical object are declared “internal” and basically “unreal.”
To me this is just correlation. Joe says ( and I hear the sound of his voice ) he is thinking about cheesecake. At the same time, some region of his brain lights up, as measured by some device. His brain’s very “being” is “qualitatively there” for me, because perhaps we’ve open a little window in his skull, where the probes are stuck.
The problem, as I see it, is that philosophers take for granted a “metaphysical version” of the brain that is not itself one more qualitatively perspectivally present object for various observers. In other words, consciousness in my case is the “presence” of Joe’s brain-meat, in the context of the display of some scientific instrument, and the hearing of Joe’s talk of cheesecake. Physical objects “are” the “contents of experience.” I call what I experience a “physical object” because I trust that others also experience it. But this does not imply, in my view, that objects are in our heads. Instead we need to get over the assumption that “thought” is an immaterial stuff, etc. Language is “qualitatively present.” Even the memory of music has its “quality.”
Are you familiar with Heidegger’s
critique of the concept of consciousness as a necessary implication of the thinking of subjectivity? He argued that consciousness always implies self-consciousness, the basis of subjectivity.
“Knowing-awareness has nothing to do with “consciousness”, which entirely and exclusively maintains itself in the forefront corner of the subject-object relationship.”(Mindfulness)