Subject and Object

Metaphysics & Epistemology
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I’d like to open up a discussion about a paper I first read almost thirty years ago and that has stayed with me ever since. Mait Edey’s paper first appeared in the Journal of Consciousness Studies, Volume 4, No. 5/6, 1997, and I recently discovered an updated version of it online. Edey died at the age of 81 in 2016.

Edey’s argument is that the subject is not an object, consciousness is not a property, and the subject/object distinction – which we make effortlessly in every moment of attention – is more fundamental than, and prior to, the mind/matter distinction that has generated the entire philosophical confusion around consciousness.

I wonder if this resonates as deeply with anybody else as it does with me.

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Nothing to disagree with here although I’d like to hear the argument of why consciousness is not a property of the mind. If it’s not a property of the mind then what is it ? I will be reading the link you’ve posted soon but this is the only thing that came to mind straight away :slight_smile:

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Consciousness is not merely a product of the universe; Reality is fundamentally informational and cognitive, with the universe possessing a self-processing structure. What we call physical matter is therefore not the ultimate layer of existence, but an expression within a deeper cognitive reality

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Responding to the paper:

Questions about the nature of the self are of course intimately linked to questions about the nature of consciousness. The assumption that the self is something in the universe, or one part of the universe distinguishable from the rest, is linked to the assumption that consciousness is a state or property of some part of the universe, whether of an organism, a person, a brain, part of a brain, or perhaps even a machine.

Exactly. The reification of consciousness – the taking it as a stuff or a property of stuff — “traps” us. I have met very very few people who “see around” this prejudice.

Yet I am claim that we pre-theoretically know better !

Theory is blind to its non-theoretical basis. “Floating mouth belief.”

If the concept of consciousness is hard, the concept of being, discussed further in the next chapter, is no easier. There is as yet no conceivable scientific approach to the problem of being, which is sometimes expressed as the ancient question: Why is there anything at all, rather than nothing? Actually, this question, as phrased, seems to pose the problem of existence: why are there objects, rather than nothing?

To me the problem of being is the problem of consciousness. Consciousness is being.

We both like the word “presence” as a kind of fusion of these labels. The hard part is getting others to “hear” that we are not talking about a “stuff” in the world or in the skull. But just the “presence” of the world.

Others “meet these signs” with certain prejudices. We all meet the signs of others with prejudices. “Obviously consciousness is inside stuff.” Dualism is “obviously” the basic situation. In other centuries, the world was “obviously” the creation of a particular “God.” And time was “obviously” God’s time, just as space was “obviously” God’s space. Likewise perspective is “obviously” a secondary component of reality, etc.

Philosophy “lives itself” against this “obviously.”

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Nice paper. I enjoy reading it.

Though they divide the universe differently, and draw different boundaries, these concepts or theories have in common that they do all divide the universe somehow and do all draw a boundary somewhere. Each listed theory conceptualizes the self as something compound or having parts and a structure, something changeable, something with a boundary which in some cases may expand or contract.

I agree.

I can’t be really sure whether Henology may have a good role here. As I understood the first part of the paper, Mait Edey did a critic on subject-object relationship because some philosophers had drawn different boundaries, splitting everything radically in different parts.
If I am not mistaken, Mait Edey wanted to explore a solution where reduction of the variety of existences back to a single stuff or substance. Thus, Henology.

Without consciousness, none would be “self”.So let us focus the meaning of “self” here in what is literally a radical manner — getting at the root. Consider the terms of such familiar distinctions as between, for instance, observer and observed, seer and seen, hearer and heard, or thinker and thought, where the role of consciousness is explicit.

There cannot be an object without an observer/subject/hearer/thinker, etc.

So as a practical matter, for the sake of argument, let’s accept Gallagher’s stipulation and focus it by saying that “consciousness” and “awareness” are equivalent where their meanings overlap (while acknowledging that in common usage areas may not
overlap). Of course, we each may size and locate the areas of reference somewhat differently. But if we can agree that there is indeed some overlap, albeit so crudely conceptualized, then we ’re in a position to notice that the overlap is the really interesting and problematic part.

Indeed, that was problematic and complex to follow. :sweat_smile:

It appears to you, not you to it.

I think this is very open to debate.

It is true that planets (for example) do exist even if humans would have never been born to look at them. However, thanks to our observation and contemplation, we gave a “presence” to the planets in the universe.

With the observer (us), the planets have a meaning in our reality. Without the observer, the planets were merely chunks of spheres gravitating in space. So, I honestly believe that we appeared to the planets, and not vice versa.

Overall, a nice and interesting paper.

Disclaimer: I’m a rookie in philosophy, so take my opinions on this paper with caution. Thanks!

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I prefer to think that a “being that learns” is what a subject looks like from the side. A subject is that same being, taken as the here the world is met from. I do wonder if tying subject to learning makes sense, or does it turn the subject back into an object?

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Well, to a subject another subject could be an object even though that object is a subject in themselves.

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Certainly does with me. One of those “the negation of which is a contradiction” kinda things.

The caveat being the presuppositions grounding the arguments must be given and accepted beforehand.

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My mom as “body” is a perceptual object. But I also and indeed primarily treat my mom as as the world from another point of view.

We speak to others as “hearers” and “understanders” of our words. We enact a “faith” that our words are “there” for others. The other who “hears” me is not fundamentally an object in the world. I grant that this expression is awkward. My hearer is “located.” Of course your “consciousness” is “located” with your “body.” But this “consciousness” is not “stuff” but rather the “presence” of “my” world from another POV.

You might ask me to prove this, but what would that mean for me ? I have to trust that my signs that “prove” are there for an “object” in the world.

So weirdly you have to be “my signs” from “your POV.”

Your “consciousness” is the “being” or “qualitative significant presence” of “my” signs from the POV of your body.

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I think Heidegger is good on this.

As a subject learns, the “same” perceptual objects come to signify differently. The objects change. The subject is a “spin” on the objects that are “there” in a new way. The subject is the “how” of the manifestation of objects.

For instance, the coin is there as “heads” or “tails” as a function of the relative position of the subject’s eyes. This is a"physiological" example. But “years of studying phenomenology” likewise changes the way that the first pages of Being and Time “radiate.”

The subject as “consciousness” is prejudicial “deconcealment” of the shared world. The specificity of disclosure is exclusive. All vision is (mostly) “blindness” merely by being situated or specified.

And I personally can’t make sense of non-specified vision “from nowhere.” We do dream of an omniscient god, but this registers for me as a fantasy goal. We try to move toward the vague “illumination of every darkness” until we realize perhaps that “freedom from standpoint = the ruin of a subject.” In other words, “total vision” is total blindness, total nonsense. Like an spatial object with no shape.

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I think not.

Remember Kant’s thing-in-itself and the distinction between phenomenon and noumenon.

There is the object and the subject, but both cannot be simultaneous. I can’t be an object to my mother when she calls me. I am another subject.

I think objects are more related to the way we perceive things: a rainbow, the redness of an apple, etc. But these are not subjects; they do not observe. They are just phenomena perceived by our senses.

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Why not drop the whole subject/object palaver?

Not at all. Do question them. But they will answer in plain terms. (Unlike the aforementioned palaver.)

(1) Everything has a self, conscious or not. A rock has its own non-conscious silicate self. We have our own conscious biological self. The sum of this cup and that dog has its own variously conscious and non-conscious self. Let’s not get hung up on self. Although, a spatiotemporally bounded organism with a brain perhaps does well to identify itself as such, for reasons analogous to Goodman’s argument about the identity of a spatiotemporally bounded artwork.

(2) Consciousness isn’t a stuff, but why can’t it be stuff being conscious? Like walking isn’t a stuff but is stuff being walky?

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Yes indeed !

This is where the issue gets slippery. We don’t treat other people the way we treat stones. We speak to them. Walker Percy saw this.

A “physics only” rendition of the world can’t even make sense of itself. We live primarily in a “sign world” and we tacitly acknowledge others as “witnesses.” The stone can’t see me. But my momma can.

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I think we have to deal with the “problem” or “meaning” of “being” to get relatively clear on this issue.

A stone “is.” What does that mean ?

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I agree that consciousness can’t be reduced to “physical, behavioral, or functional” facts, and that subject/object is more fundamental than mind/matter.

I disagree with everything else in it. But it’s interesting, so I intend to post something when I have the time and I’ve read it properly.

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Something is a stone.

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Yes, I agree.

There is an interaction between me and my mom that I will never have with a stone.

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“Is there something ?”

There’s a famous 1919 lecture by Heidegger that lingers on this question.

To be sure, we don’t need to tarry with this “nonsense.”

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Right.

Here’s my take. What we mostly deeply if tacitly mean by “consciousness” is that “thereness of the world for.”

My mom is “conscious” because that red couch over there is also “there for her.”

I don’t pretend or even try to “explain” the world. To me it’s enough of a task to get a grip on what we already “do” without making it explicit to ourselves.

I want my theory to gel with my non-theoretical life. In fact, I talk to my wife as if my words are “there” for her. I myself am “there” for her. My “consciousness” is the “being there” of her “for” me. This “for-ness” is the “perspectival character” of what is there. She is only there “in person” when she as a body-object is near me as a body-object. In short “of course the brain matters.” But I scoff at people who tell me that other people are inside my brain, as if they are enlightening me on a “really quite sophisticated theory.” For presumably they are talking to ghosts that haunt their craniums, if they are incoherent enough to still believe in craniums. (I do believe in craniums and other people, just to be clear.)

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I recognize that you view here is dominant. So I am the weirdo !

But for me the issue is this presupposed gap between “is” and “presence.”

How do these objects exist without any possible reference to “manifestation” or “presence” ?

An updated phenomenalist is happy to count as “empirical” objects that are the least bit possibly “present”, even indirectly a theoretical posits that help us predict and control what can potentially become present.

So I am not at all saying that the chair “vanishes from being” when no one is around to perceive it.