... And if neuroscience did have it all figured out? If neuroscientist could predict every word you'd write in this essay? Or explain exactly, in matetialistic terms, why you said everything you said? Would that take away the wonder? If you think so, I think you're confusing reducibility with realness. I might be reading you wrong though!
Also what exactly do you mean by more than its parts? Is a university, or a country, more than its parts?
Thanks for commenting, Mark. I don't think of consciousness as a language prediction machine. Not all conscious beings have language as we understand it; very few do. But to answer your question, if a scientist could predict every word I said, I would marvel at the incredible feat, and I would feel unoriginal and I might feel so dejected I would give up on writing novels, but I wouldn't feel less conscious.
By 'more than its parts' I mean something like, 'the parts may be necessary but they're not sufficient'. Not sure whether a university or country is more than its parts. It probably wouldn't take much to bring me around to that view. But then I would need a great deal more convincing to believe those are conscious.
You wouldn't feel any less conscious and you wouldn't be any less conscious! And, of course consciousness cannot be reduced to a language prediction machine. I'm a materialist, a realist about consciousness, and I certainly agree with that. But as I read you, I think that you, confuse the question of whether something is reducible to lesser parts with whether it is a REAL phenomenon. I think that if consciousness is bodily activity there is nothing "mere" about that, and it doesn't take any wonder or beauty of it. I think that it doesn't make consciousness any less real or wonderful or beautiful, it doesn't undermine it one bit. Or as the Buddhist in me would say: form is emptiness, emptiness is form.
Of course, consciousness is perfectly real. But there's no reason to think that our intuitions about what it is made of are reliable, not to any degree at all.
Do you believe in Darwinian natural selection? Do you believe it can account for the appearance, internal and external behaviour of plants and animals? Unless you're positing that there are violations to to these principles, then I think you are subject to an illusion about what philosophy and neuroscience is. Philosophers and neuroscientists are animals. There's nothing special about them. They, or any other humans, are not in a priviliged position where our behaviour can break free from this. Whatever we do, no matter how we contract the muscles in our vocal cords and tongues, or fingers, is animal behaviour.
Please don't mistake my comment for some Skinnerian behaviourism. My point is that whatever you say, or I say, or anyone says, is an expression of a belief. I express my materialist views because of how my brain is wired. You express your anti-materialist or materialst-sceptical views because of how your brain is wired. Re-wire it a certain way, and you would be transformed into a materialist. And the same for me. None of us have to abandon the belief that consciousness is real for any of that to happen.
If you accept that what you say can be explained by mechanism, in principle, then there's simply no way to simultaneously hold on to consciousness as some deep mystery not reducible, in principle, to brain activity. If mechanism explains every such objection to materialism, then those objections are empty.
Consciousness is real, but it is not a mental object viewed by a mental subject.
If any of this interests, you, I'm soon posting on exactly this. Anyway, thanks again for your post and your comment!
I'm glad you think consciousness is real! I didn't mean to say all reductionists buy into illusionism about consciousness. I see why this post might have come off that way, though.
The belief that the brain's wiring determines belief is also belief, as you seem to be saying, but where is the ground for it? Or rather, why choose the brain-determines-belief belief over its opposite or any other belief? It's an epistemological loop you're describing here, and I'm just not seeing the exit.
I do accept that what I say can in principle be replicated, even with alarming, eerie accuracy, but whether it's meaningful to the machine replicating it is another story. I don't want to say it's impossible, only that it's a further problem to be answered. How, I don't know. But replication is not the same as understanding, just as symbols are not the same as meaning.
"Consciousness is real, but it is not a mental object viewed by a mental subject."
If I understand you right, I can agree with this. The other day I was working up a post about this idea. I think in introspection or retrospection we often do fall into the trap of seeing consciousness as an object to itself, but to do that is to forget we're seeing through consciousness, so whatever it is we're assuming just IS consciousness, it ain't 'the thing itself'. But I still think introspection is worth doing, even if there are hurdles, even if it's not perfect.
Philosophy aside, I don't think the evidence is overwhelmingly in favor of the theory that the wiring of our brains determines thought. The evidence, so far as I know (I'm no scientist!), seriously undermines that theory when you put it all together to get the bigger picture. For one thing, it doesn't account for thought changing the brain as well. I think it's highly plausible that it's not always a one way street...but there's much more to it even than this. I'll have to refer you to the scientific paper by Marco Masi for details, if you feel like reading it. I think his paper will do a much better job than I could from my purely philosophical perspective:
Thank you! I've read the article now, will get back to that below!
I'm glad that my realism about consciousness makes you glad, but I'm afraid I will probably disappoint you straight away. You see, I AM an illusionist! However, I think you've got illusionism all wrong, like most people, but you're not to blame! Not only is the message that illusionists are trying to convey so counter-intuitive that it's hard to understand (whether one agrees with it or not). Also, Illusionists are largely to blame, for their bad choice of name, their bad marketing, and their lacking communication of what they believe. But to the point: all illusionists that I know of (most notably Dennett) are realists about consciousness. The illusion is most certainly not that consciousness is real - we all agree that it is! (there are eliminative materialists, or "rabid reductionists" who deny the existence of consciousness, of the whole, who may refer to consciousness being an illusion but that is NOT what illusionism is saying! (those folks have done much damage with their rethoric).
And really, I think you're already starting to see what the illusion is. You said: "If I understand you right, I can agree with this. The other day I was working up a post about this idea. I think in introspection or retrospection we often do fall into the trap of seeing consciousness as an object to itself, but to do that is to forget we're seeing through consciousness, so whatever it is we're assuming just IS consciousness, it ain't 'the thing itself'. But I still think introspection is worth doing, even if there are hurdles, even if it's not perfect."
YES! This is the illusion. You're on to it! And what's more, if you're into "spirituality" for lack of a better word, this is the path to liberation from the illusion of subject-object duality. You're spot on about eastern philosophy being relevant here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HRuOEfnqV6g.
Core to illusionism - eastern or western - is the illusion of what introspection accomplishes, what it IS. For example, most people accept that we do not experience external objects as they are - rather, as the mind constructs them, as becomes evident in demonstrations of visual illusions. The non-duality illusionist perspective points out that just as the mind constructs representations of external objects, it also constructs the sense that there is a "me" - a subject - observing the external object. Non-dual illusionism about introspection then, points out that the mind constructs the sense of a mental me observing mental objects.
The word illusion here, as the professor of philosophy Jay Garfield points out in the video above, is not meant to imply that introspection is not real, or that consciousness is not real, or anything like that. It is just implying that there are a lot of mental constructs we are typically unaware of as being constructs, and that what we intuitively deduce is unreliable. It implies that things often are not as they first seem.
While consciousness is unquestionably real, there is also an important sense in which the subject-object duality is real. How? Because constructs are real. It's really that simple. Constructs are not fake, unreal things. When we're falling for a visual or auditory illusion, that mental construct is a real experience. When we fall for the Müller-Lyer illusion for example, we really do experience one line longer than the other. Likewise, when we "fall" for an introspective illusion, that is also perfectly real, as an experience, as a construct. Also, Iagree 100% introspection is worth doing, as do the Buddhists that think about the mind in terms of emptiness and form (I highly recommend the video above). There's much to gain from that I believe, as a frequent meditator myself.
As you say - consciousness is not really the object, or the phenomena, we seem to be observing. Rather it is the entire construct of seeming to be a subject observing a phenomena that seems a certain way. It's the whole thing. The observed and the observation. You cannot take them apart. Likewise, the redness of red is not really the redness of red - it's the red coupled to the seeming of the redness of red! There is not the redness on one hand and how it seems to "us", and what it does to "us" on the other. These things are inseparable, and the separation, the categorisation, is fundamentally illusory.
So, the following should naturally follow: when a brain is falling subject to the Müller-Lyer illusion, we shouldn't look look for representations of two lines in the brain, wehere one line is longer than the other. Sure, the lines are known to be "represented" on the retina and in V1, but nobody expects one line to be longer than the other there. Nor anywhere else. All we need to find is the visual construct of two lines - and then the neuronal machinery that is activated to compare sizes and lengths, and how it makes this error. Then we have explained, in full, why one line appears longer.
Similarly, it's a category error to look for how the brain produces redness. What you need to look for is how the brain forms belief that there is a subject seeing something, and that what it sees is red. Not only that, but neuroscience needs to explain why in many cases, the brain models things such that it will talk about redness as an ineffable quality, and in many other cases it will not (such as mine). If neuroscience can explain behaviour, the behaviour of meditators and philosophers and neuroscientists themselves are not excempt!
So, if you manage to explain, in these terms, how you come to say what you say, and how I come to say what I say, then we are done! Then you have explained both my and your redness. The intuitive sense that you have not, that is the illusion!
(Put another way: It is not that the brain creates a narration - and that somehow, mysteriously, that narration is "like something". Rather - the narrative IS that it is like something to be us. It's not an extra property - it's built straight into the narrative. You get what I'm saying?? And no, it's not fake. This is precisely what brings the narrative to life! Constructs are real.)
Importantly - our tendency to view ourselves as agents in the world - as subjects - rather than just embedded in a large web of happenings - is immensely useful for our cognitive machinery. By internalising the scheme of agents acting in an external world of objects - creating a kind of "virtual" playground - we can simulate events to better predict what will happen if this and that happens, thereby informing our actions. Thus, the inner world is born. What about the individuals, groups, cultures who didn't take this inner virtual world as the most important and real thing in the world? They're long gone, as natural selection and memetic evolution has ensured. So, this is incredibly powerful machinery at work, and core to the success and dominance of humanity. But when doing philosophy of mind, it often leads us astray.
If you accept natural selection and cultural evolution, you must also accept that none of us, no philosopher, and no meditator, can break free from these constraints. We're operating as embedded in that reality, not from above. It doesn't matter what "reality", or the base layer (if there is one) is fundamentally made of. As long as the laws of physics and natural selection hold true in living organisms, then they suffice to explain the behaviour of animals - philosophers and neuroscientists included. That doesn't make philosophy useless or fundamentally deluded, as long as these constraints are recognised. Crucially, this poses exactly zero threats to the realness of consciousness - unless you a priori define it as something over and above what the physical can account for.
So yeah, I am an illusionist about consciousness, and a realist too. As for the article you posted, it immediately revealed its subject-object duality fallacy. In the first paragraph it talks about "epiphenomena" and "emergent property" which is exactly what illusionism points out is NOT happening. These words reveal that he views himself as as subject that "sees" or experiences the mental object, or phenomena, of consciousness. His whole opposition to illusionism/functionalism is done from a mistaken view on what is being claimed. And I disagree wholeheartedly about what neuroscience is indicating. As a physician who has studied neuroscience and neurology, and is following neuroscience, there are zero results indicating violations of the laws of physics. That doesn't mean thoughts are not real. But it means, no matter how counter-intuitive as it may feel, that when you express your thoughts, that is physics, biochemistry, neurons doing their thing.
Finally, I think you're also misunderstanding my neuroscientist predictor scenario. I'm not saying that a LLM that to an impressive degree can mimic the behaviour of humans typing text are conscious like humans. I'm saying that if neuroscientists can explain, in mere physical, mechanical terms, how you come to say the exact string of words that you say to challenge materialism, without any extra-physical "consciousness" playing any role in how you came to say that - then the neuroscientists have essentially proven that what you say is a model expressing itself. It is physics playing out as expected. It is computational, virtual. It is perfectly real, but it's not something over and above the material. Please note, this is completely independent of whether something non-physical exists. If it has no causal efficacy on what you say, then your talk is not truly about that non-physical thing.
ADHD rant over. Anyway, thanks!
Not sure if my long rant helped, or if you or anyone will read it. Anyway, thanks!
I hope you don’t mind if I comment on this post. I think you did a fine job explaining your views and I found myself agreeing with most of what you asserted, especially your take on constructs being legitimately real. And I agree with these assessments as well:
“…our tendency to view ourselves as agents in the world - as subjects - rather than just embedded in a large web of happenings - is immensely useful for our cognitive machinery.”
“…that when you express your thoughts, that is physics, biochemistry, neurons doing their thing.”
Physics is essentially the science of motion in a physical reality and everything that goes with it. However, it is my contention that the very notion of law is also a construct that does not correspond nor reflect the true nature of our reality. So the assertion that:
“As long as the laws of physics and natural selection hold true in living organisms…” & “…there are zero results indicating violations of the laws of physics.” These assertions becomes moot to any argument referencing the existence of any so-called law.
Also, I agree that “it is physics playing out…” however, I disagree that it is computational. Our universe is not deterministic nor is it random, it is simply indeterminate, which simply means that we collectively have not nailed down the life force that drives the novelty and complexity that we observe and which we ourselves are active participants.
Furthermore, it is my conclusion that mind as we refer to it is a cognitive system built into the brain, and for all practical purposes that cognitive system is quantum. There is cutting edge scientific research being done that demonstrates that the microtubule bundles located in the 80 to 100 billion neurons of our brain are quantum devices.
So it is now becoming obvious that there is literally a ghost in the machine if you will, and that ghost is a quantum system. Furthermore, consciousness is the experience of that quantum system and the physics of that system is anything but computational.
Hmm, not sure if I'm following you. I might have used "laws" sloppily. I'm not claiming to know exactly what constitutes a law, though I would say that I'm a Humean about the laws of nature.
I don't mean computational as in a digital computer. I mean simply as in processing information. Whether you accept that our brains are only information processors or not, it seems quite obvious by now that this is largely what they are doing.
As far as I can tell, theoretical physicists and philosophers of physics are don't agree on whether our universe is deterministic or not, and some say that we simply don't know. I certainly agree we don't understand the ins and outs of what creates all this complexity, but why propose there is a "life force" behind it?
As far as I know, there is a single paper claiming to have shown quantum effects in microtubules. But even if they are right - what is the relevance? What does it matter if the brain oozes with quantum phenomena, or has none at all? How does this have anything to do with whether there is a ghost in the machine or not? Quantum systems are - as far as I am aware - just as "computational" as Newtonian systems are.
"consciousness is the experience of that quantum system"
This is exactly the subject-object duality I tried to argue is illusory. There is no "you" to observe a quantum system. "you" are not an "observer" experiencing what is going on in the brain.
When you see the redness of red, there is not the redness on one hand, and you seeing it on the other, with your conceptual overlays. That is not how it works. Likewise - no matter if the brain is full of quantum effects or not - there is no way "you" can sense that it is so. Introspectively, you are completely at loss of what kind process is creating your experience. Introspection does not grant you any access to this, whatsoever.
Sorry it took me so long to get back to you. Thanks for taking the time to explain your views. I do tend to see eliminitivism and illusionism as the same thing, probably because my take is so different from both.
I don't see experience as non-veridical, but rather as the only way of knowing anything at all. As you've pointed out, this initial skepticism about our relationship to reality is where representationalism (the idea that experience is a mental construct) derives from. The problem with that view is, there's no reaching around our supposed representations to uncover the 'things themselves', no way of knowing what the representations are representations of. So how do we know our experiences even are representations?
The reason both illusionism and eliminitivism run together for me is they both pit the scientific against experience. They both assume that scientific investigation tells us what reality is really like, but not experience (one says the experience doesn't exist, the other says it does, but it's an illusion). The problem I see with both views is that neither explains how science, given the skeptical starting point, can give us knowledge about reality. Science is, after all, nothing over and above the experiences of the scientists doing it, so if it really is true that experience is illusory, then it follows we can't know anything at all. Both views should lead to deep skepticism, but the proponents of these views don't seem to see that. They tend to think science can somehow stand outside of experience, but how? To call experience massively erroneous or wholly illusory is to set up an epistemological black hole from which not even science can escape.
Plus, when you think about it, Illusions and errors are always discovered and corrected within experience, not outside it. When I decide to use a ruler to measure two lines that appear to be uneven and discover they're actually the same length, that was just more experience involving a ruler instead of just my eyes. Everything is within experience. If experience isn't veridical, we are in deep doo doo.
Again, illusionism is not saying that experience is an illusion! It is saying that any experience of being able to introspectively find out what experience is or isn't MADE OF is an illusion (in the sense that it enforces a false belief - it's still s real experience). Those are two very different things!
Your main counter-argument, as I read it, is a common one. Unsurprisingly, I think is mistaken. I might not understand you perfectly, for many reasons, one of which is I'm not a native english speaker.
Experience IS veridical! But not on what the fundamental truth underlying that experience is! It's only veridical on itself - what the experience is! Your experience is that one line is longer than the other. That is true! And also, the experience of realising that "out there", the lines are the same length, is true. But crucially, this requires third-person correction. In my view, this is just what the illusionists have done with me. And through meditation and lot's of pondering etc, experience no longer even seems non-physical to me (most of the time). So if experience is veridical in the sense that you claim, I can claim that I know directly that mind is physical. But I certainly don't want to make that move.
Is this a fair way of characterising your problem with illusionism: If our intuitions are wrong about consciousness being non-physical, as illusionists claim, then it follows that the illusionists intuitions and beliefs, limited by the restraints of cognition, could be just as wrong? And in the end, illusionists rely just as much on "experience" as anybody else, which completely undermines their postition?
I have two main problems with that. The first is "in experience". This is reifying and presuming experience or consciousness to be a medium, a workspace in which scientists and philosophers operate. This is just a presumption. This is based on your sense of your mind being a medium, a container! This sense part of the content of your mind, it is not the actual mind itself! This is the cartesian theater-illusion. There is no "inside" and "outside" experience in the way you envision it. Except as a construct, as such it is true.
Second - of course illusionists aren't infallible. Illusionism, or any other position, does not protect you against false beliefs and conclusions. For all I know, I could be schizophrenic, and so could you. Almost nobody with psychosis accepts that they are psychotic. Illusionists are not claiming that experience isn't useful data! However, the first-person data on how things seem are just that - how they seem! Not on what the underlying truth IS. Visual illusions demonstrate this well, and so do cognitive illusions (the monty hall problem) and introspective illusions (there is a "me" observing "objects" or "phenomena" within consciousness. The third illusions here is by far the hardest to see throught though, but Buddhists have done it more than a millenia ago.
Illusionism does not pit the scientific against experience - it explains it in scientific means! Illusionism does take some things for granted, as starting points: Physics holds true on earth, including biological systems. Darwinian natural selection is true. That's all you need. It doesn't matter what the physics is "made of" (if that's even a sensible question to ask - personally I don't think so). If you only accept those two things, then illusionism has you covered. In fact, as far as I can see, it's the only theory that unifies science and experience without large open-ended mysteries, the others largely just postpone the problem of explaining what consciousness is. If everything is made of consciousness, for example, that still doesn't tell me anything about what this fundamental consciousness is supposed to be?
Why do you think a "sane" persons first-person experience is veridical in any deeper sense than an insane one's? We need to presume a few starting points: other people are real. The world out there is real (no matter what it is made of). Physics theory and biology and Darwinian evolution is more than just a confused dream. If you agree with that, then our behaviour here lives withing that framework. We cannot lift ourselves above it. Your sense of being an independent observer is in many ways an illusion. Your visual system has adapted to be as efficient and simultaneously intelligent as possible, and it's incredible - and what ever lives there is REAL as an experience. But it just isn't giving you direct access to anything other than what things seem like. The same is true for all cognition and introspection. Unless we want physics and biology to break down inside brains.
I really care for you to respond again, if you can take the time. If not, thank you anyway. Cheers!
Again, I will try to challenge you a little in a short, separate reply. Of course, as optional to reply to as the other one :)
1. Do you think the greyness of grey is less of a "quale" than the redness of red? Does a red apple "minus" colour equal a grey apple?
2. Do you think it is, in principle, possible that my red is the same as yours, even if you like red and I dislike like it? In other words, is there a colour "essence" there, and then secondary reactions to it?
3. If yes, is the "what-it-is-like" to see red part of the colour essence or part of the reaction? Or are there two distinct what-it-is-like "feels"?
4. Is it possible that if you hear a Swedish sentence, even though you don't understand it, it still sounds the same to you as it does to me? The auditory "qualia" could very well be the same?
6. Is it conceivable that a colour qualia invert sees red exactly as we see grey? They will talk about that quale as "fiery", "vibrant", "vivid" - yet it actually looks and feels to them like grey looks and feels to you?
6. Does Mary the colour scientist, while in the black-and-white room, experience her surroundings like you or I would, if we were locked up in a black-and-white room? Does she experience the "lack" of colour that we do? (I'm not at all asking what happens when she's let out).
Edit:
I see now that I misposted another reply to a previous of your comments. I'll just paste it in here, in case you're interested.
Let me just try another much simpler argument. It is common for people with schizophrenia to believe the imagined voices in their head are not their own. Or that someone else is placing or removing thoughts in their mind. Typically, it is not possible to convince them otherwise, no matter how skilled or persuading you are. Do you accept that there are physical reasons for these delusions? They are highly inherited, neuroscience has uncovered plenty of hints for why this happens, and certain molecules quite often can change these beliefs.
If you accept this - shouldn't you also be prepared to accept that your beliefs are a matter of physical structures in your brain? Isn't your belief that you're hungry, for example, a physical thing?
Now, why would beliefs about consciousness, such as the obvious non-physicality of "qualia" be any different from other beliefs?
For sure, my beliefs are just the same. I can be deluded about everything. The best I can do is try to find a belief system with minimal internal incoherence. I believe I have done so, but that too can be deluded.
That's why Dennett points out the importance and power of collective knowledge and intelligence. It's the only way forward.
Let me just try another much simpler argument. It is common for people with schizophrenia to believe the imagined voices in their head are not their own. Or that someone else is placing or removing thoughts in their mind. Typically, it is not possible to convince them otherwise, no matter how skilled or persuading you are. Do you accept that there are physical reasons for these delusions? They are highly inherited, neuroscience has uncovered plenty of hints for why this happens, and certain molecules quite often can change these beliefs.
If you accept this - shouldn't you also be prepared to accept that your beliefs are a matter of physical structures in your brain? Isn't your belief that you're hungry, for example, a physical thing?
Now, why would beliefs about consciousness, such as the obvious non-physicality of "qualia" be any different from other beliefs?
For sure, my beliefs are just the same. I can be deluded about everything. The best I can do is try to find a belief system with minimal internal incoherence. I believe I have done so, but that too can be deluded.
That's why Dennett points out the importance and power of collective knowledge and intelligence. It's the only way forward.
> Suppose one of my flip flops falls off my foot. I wasn’t aware of wearing flip flops, the feeling of them on my feet, before, but I become aware of the feeling after one falls off. How would I have even noticed the change had I not been experiencing wearing the flip flops before?
There’s no ignoring the pitiful sound of a single flip-flop calling out for its partner without reply. It’s particularly sad because the loss of one spells the end of the other, should its mate not be recovered. This is the sound of doom.
Luckily, one usually loses a flip-flop by flinging it end over end directly in front of one’s own nose, which is a great source of delight, so long as it’s retrieval is assured.
Haha...yes, how lonely it is to be a lonely flip flop, and what a perilous predicament to be in. A lonely flip flop had better hope I am its owner as I tend to hang onto things like that "just in case", but then I continue to hang onto them even long after it becomes clear its mate will never be found, out of sheer laziness.
Personally, I believe in "souls" in a roughly Aristotelian sense, as the "form" of the body - the organizing principle/process that makes a living body a living body, rather than a different configuration of atoms. And interestingly, the SEP notes that functionalism "is rooted in Aristotle’s conception of the soul", so it very much lives on in one of the major schools of philosophy of mind. I also wouldn't hesitate to say that non-human animals, plants, fungi, and even things like rivers, forests, and planets have souls. It follows very naturally from the Aristotelian definition.
Although I don't believe there's (necessarily) an immaterial part of the soul, as Aristotle did (for humans anyway). I just don't think that's necessary, and if we just take form as truly real (as I think we all naturally do until we're indoctrinated with reductionist materialism), then we get really real souls that supervene on the physical.
I think the trouble is people got the idea that rationality is opposed to romance and mysticism, and so reject words like "soul" (and even words like "consciousness" at the extremes) by instinct. I think they're wrong, they can be compatible and even complementary, and that our world needs more romance and mysticism. I think it's crucial for us if we're to develop a better ecological understanding of ourselves as part of nature and one another.
Thanks Joseph! I had Aristotle very much in mind here. Plato is more my cup of tea, but I think Aristotle is more approachable for most, at least in this crowd. Because you're right, functionalism and Aristotelian hylomorphism go hand in hand, especially for those who want consciousness to be "multiply realizable".
Curious what you mean in the 2nd paragraph. Do you think form can be material?
Totally agreed that we need to see ourselves as within nature rather than outside it. We do give lip service to that idea, but in the next breath violate it. I wonder if hubris can be turned into a computation?
I wouldn't say that form can be material, but generally, form cannot exist without matter. E.g. with a bronze (matter) sphere (form), the form exists through the matter, not as a separate immaterial substance that gets added to it. I think this is roughly the difference between Aristotle's & Plato's ideas of form. Another example is words: the word as a whole is the form, and its "matter" is the letters of the alphabet - remove the letters and we destroy the word. Essentially, the form is the whole viewed *as a whole*, and the matter is the whole viewed as its constituent parts. We can't remove all the parts and keep the whole.
Ah, okay, I get what you're saying now. So matter is necessary but not sufficient. Yep, that's very much Aristotle! I'd say I'm Aristotle at a minimum, Plato on my good days. :)
I think you know my views on much of this. I do think that if we make a list of what we *don't* mean by "consciousness", we're left trying to describe by what we do mean. And it's hard not to implicitly import many of the things we previously excluded. At least if we want to continue saying there's a deep metaphysical mystery here.
It's interesting how much we divide what the ancients meant by "soul" into different things, like life, mind, consciousness, and the modern religious concept of the immaterial immortal soul. Joseph mentions Aristotle's concept of the soul, which Aristotle divides into a hierarchy including the vegetative soul, the sensitive soul, and the rational soul. I agree that Aristotle's version is the most plausible of the ancient takes on this. Of course, I would say that as a functionalist.
Overall then, we could see the soul as everything that converged to form us, and everything we effect in the world. It's the nexus. Can the nexus survive beyond its current place? When we consider what a nexus is, that seems like a misguided question. But it's worth remembering that nexuses can evolve and move, particularly living ones. So the nexus we are today isn't the same as the one we were as children. In any case, the effects of a nexus can continue long after it's gone. Maybe that's the immortality worth reaching for.
Yeah, I get that what I said sounds largely negative, not this, not that. I meant not just this, not just that.
I think Aristotle makes a great deal sense when it comes to understanding ourselves in nature. There's something about the idea of a soul hierarchy that feels deeply intuitive. I think his ideas would be more popular these days if he weren't so boring to read and so uncool. Our democratic sensibilities bristle at this idea of a hierarchy, but I think we tend to see him as making sharp exclusionary divisions when really it's more of a nested structure. There's no sharp break between inside and outside, such as we see in Descartes. Anyway, it's much simpler to begin with a world-soul and see ourselves as a part of it than to figure out how individual human minds can climb outside themselves to reach an utterly alien world beyond.
Nexus. I haven't heard that word in a while. It's an interesting way of thinking about consciousness. I do think souls evolve, as it's hard to see what a particular soul would be without it's lived life. What could I be without all the particular experiences I've had? Some traditions believe the evolution of the embodied soul is the point. I'm not sure what the point is, but the Aristotelian holistic approach seems more promising.
I read somewhere that most of what we have from Aristotle amount to lecture notes, which sort of explains why his stuff reads the way it does, even with a good translation. At least his chapters are short. Not that I've ever made any real effort to read him directly.
On hierarchies, I can see that. I guess there's value in clarifying that these are definitional and conceptual hierarchies, not command and control ones. I need to remember that the next time I write about my own.
In a soul world, how would things get started? In my view, part of our nexus is billions of years of evolution, both biological and cosmic. But if it's all soul, how does the evolution of souls happen? (Just pondering. No worries if you're not feeling like going down this rabbit hole again.)
Another great essay Tina, good to see you back at work...
My vision of our shared universe is that life is both ubiquitous and universal at every level of complexity. To be even more succinct; if we recognize motion as first cause, then motion that results in form/structure can be used as the very definition of life. This ubiquitous life can be further classified as both organic and inorganic life.
The only unanswered question so far is this: What is the basis for this life? I will address that question another time because the answer resolves David Chalmers “hard problem of consciousness”. It also answers the compelling mystery of what drives complexity and diversity.
Building from this simplistic, grounding, original assumption, it is not difficult to imagine that mind itself with its experience of consciousness is a highly organized, highly complex life form. One can refer to that life form as a soul if one chooses however, to avoid duality one has to come to terms with what it means for a life form to be physical. You may recall that I addressed what it means for something to be physical in previous posts……
I think the motion of form is a primordial and intuitive understanding of life that makes a great deal of sense. Everything moves, after all, just at different speeds. We tend to see movement at our scale, but from a broader perspective it's hard to differentiate rocks from plants from animals from us. In which case what isn't alive?
I've written and self-published two books since 2015 but neither book is currently in circulation. I've considered starting a blog, but my interests are in metaphysics and besides, most people cannot hang with that type of abstraction. So it doesn't take long for someone reading my work to have their eyes to glaze over and fall into a stupor.
Underlying form just happens to be my thing. I'm alot like the late Robert Pirsig in that regard including a fair amount of mental "dis-ease" to boot. Unlike Pirsig, I can be very personable and charming. I turn seventy-two on the fifth of this month and my wife and I have been successfully married for over fifty years now.
Hang in there Tina, you've got a good head on your shoulders...
Yeah, metaphysics is a pretty hard sell, that's for sure. Maybe it's easier to take in small blog post sized chunks, though. Anyway, I wish you a very happy birthday and congratulations on your marriage. A fifty years is quite the success!
Ha! Great point about consciousness being self-evident vs the uncertain existence of the brain. Consciousness is what we experience directly, it is immanent, but the Brain is just a naming convention applied to a clump of cells:)
Thanks! I'm working on a novel that starts out with a middle aged guy whose body is discovered on a service road and an autopsy reveals he never had a brain. Other things happen, but now I'm messing around with the idea that many people haven't even seen a picture of their brain. Fun stuff!
I don't think you adequately dismissed the awareness hypothesis.
It’s perfectly fine to be wearing flip-flops that you are unaware of, just as it’s ok to have a heartbeat that you are unaware of or to be unaware of the way the muscles in your thighs extend when you are walking. There is no need to postulate partial awareness. You see and feel and hear things that you are unaware of all the time. When your flip-flop falls off, you become aware of it, just as you become aware when your heart skips a beat or your thigh hurts or someone calls your name. You have a thousand ideas, thoughts, visions, sounds and desires going on the background of your brain without you thinking about them. Is only when you think of your own thoughts that you become aware of them. That’s consciousness.
It sounds hard to drive a car without being aware of it — but what about bending your knees when you are walking or tapping your fingers while you try to remember the words to a song?
A friend of mine described the soul as the life force that tells your mitochondria to make energy and your leukocytes to fight infection and kidneys to filter your blood and your heart to beat and your brain to think. It’s the cooperation of all those things that makes you alive. When they stop working, your soul is gone and you are dead. There’s no need to think of the soul as mystical or separate from our bodies. It’s just the body doing what live bodies do. With this definition, jellyfish and oak trees can have souls too. Your brain needs a would to do its work, but so does your liver.
I'm beginning to think the flip flop example was...a flop. With "partial awareness" I'm trying to make it easier to describe experience on the whole as a more multifaceted affair with perhaps levels and layers, a background and foreground and maybe something between, various processes and degrees of awareness and self-awareness unfolding in time and retrospection, types of experience and their relations, as well as partially-hidden depths such as the subconscious...as opposed to simply conscious and unconscious, aware and not aware.
I like your friend's description of the soul as a life force. I tend to think of it that way as well. I agree, there's no need to think of the soul as mystical. Whether the soul can or can't exist without the body is something we can wonder about.
Thanks for reading and commenting! I'm glad what I wrote made you think. :)
I'm not sure what to think about partial awareness.
I’m supposed to be watching the TV now while I am typing on my iPad. I am vaguely aware of the TV but I am not giving it any attention. Every now and again, something catches my attention and then all of my attention goes to the TV.
It feels like there are maybe three levels of awareness. 1. None at all. 2. I’m vaguely aware that it’s there. 3. It has my full attention. I think it’s that top level that we call consciousness.
Thanks again. I just subscribed so i’ll be reading and commenting much more!
sounds pretty dualistic. the consciousness I attribute to others from the 3rd person point of view is by your definition non-identical to the consciousness they attribute to themselves and must, from my pov, be noumenal
i thought you were claiming that, by definition, two different senses of “consciousness” were are play: the one you know of yourself to have, and the one I attribute to you from the outside. “The appearance of consciousness from the outside is simply not the same thing as consciousness itself. I hope you feel I’m stating the obvious.”
By "appearance of consciousness" I meant external markers such as readings on medical monitors and the sort of behavioral observations someone might make to determine whether someone's awake or in a coma. I was mixing up two different consciousnesses there, consciousness as apparently awake and sensible (not in a coma) vs. experience. I don't think experience is knowable only from a first person perspective, or knowable only from a third person perspective, but that's a much more complicated issue that I'll have more to say about in future posts.
Not at all! I'm happy to provide a forum for discussion. I love seeing people talking to each other, not just to me. So please, please feel free to talk amongst yourselves!
"I don’t care who you are or what you believe, death makes dualists of us all."
An arresting thought.
The word "soul" has a lot of baggage, but only some of the baggage is bath water (to mix metaphors). A soul is a precious thing that you have to look after and keep clean. When we start to think of it as "mind" or "life" or "consciousness," maybe we forget the baby.
Point well taken. Maybe there is something more to the idea of 'soul' than those things, but I'm not sure what. I wouldn't want to taint the idea of a soul by equating it to something lower. Still, I hope it's not identical to the baggage I discussed.
Death is certainly...arresting. I think there's something about witnessing such moments that can reveal our deepest intuitions about these matters. What do you think distinguishes 'soul' from 'life'?
For want of another word, the poetry. You can sell your soul (not just to the devil, but to greed or lust or hatred, for example) but you still have to own your life.
This is not scientific way of talking, but philosophers aren't always midwifes to science.
Something even more intimate. We speak of "the soul's midnight." We have something called "soul music." These phrases point to the heart of our feelings -- or "affect," to use a fancy term I've been writing about.
Religious discourse is attentive to whatever we mean by "soul," but it also adds a lot of what we might call "mumbo-jumbo" (although that's probably a politically incorrect term these days!). Subtract the mumbo-jumbo and we're homing in on what "soul" means, but the mumbo-jumbo is too aversive: "not going there," as people say. Our loss.
"The appearance of consciousness from the outside is simply not the same thing as consciousness itself. I hope you feel I’m stating the obvious."
It's certainly obvious to me! But it seems obvious that it is not so obvious to many within philosophy of mind discourse (I have wondered if perhaps Daniel Dennett just was a philosophical zombie. That would certainly make the disagreement easier to understand!)
Perhaps the biggest problem in defining consciousness is that what we are talking about is the condition of possibility for any thought we have at all. If you are doubting whether consciousness is real, that doubt is a phenomenon that is occurring to you within consciousness (assuming you aren't one of the aforementioned p-zombies). That doesn't mean that the "ego" is somehow necessarily there (since the ego itself is just a collection of phenomena within consciousness) but that consciousness just is the "ground" of any phenomena appearing at all. It is itself not a phenomenon, but is the necessary condition for any phenomena. I think that is both rationally necessary, but also very hard to see, because most of the time we focus on the phenomena themselves, not how or why there should be any phenomena to begin with.
This was precisely why Husserl wanted to "bracket" any question of noumena altogether, and simply focus on the appearing of the appearances, to address the appearances as appearances to/for/within/as consciousness, and not to ask whether those phenomena referred to any noumenal beyond them or to take the phenomena as phenomena for granted either. But, again, I think this move is hard for us as humans. Consciousness is like the ocean to an angler fish: we spend all of our time in it, but can't see it precisely for this reason. If something appears everywhere, all the time, as the ground of everything, then it doesn't really appear itself at all. But of course, its non-appearing does not equate to its non-existence or non-reality.
This is great. You're getting into some of the things I want to talk about more in my next post. "The condition for the possibility of" is along the lines I'm going for as well, since that helps us to avoid talking about consciousness as a thing within consciousness.
I'm so glad you brought up Husserl. I really appreciate his method of bracketing to put aside the scientific assumptions that permeate our thinking, but without devaluing science or putting anything or anyone down. He prepares us for a mind-bending ride that we won't forget when (or if!) we finally do go back to thinking about things the way we did before. (If you can get through his extraordinarily horrendous writing and incessant false starts, that is.) Philosophers tend not to acknowledge how emotionally committed we are to our precious views. We just love poking the bear, but that's childishness really. And yes, it's hard to see the big picture when we're inside it.
I appreciated your discussion of Levinas, by the way. A long time ago I decided I was done with philosophers who can't write (even if their ideas are worth it) and so I never bothered to read him.
Just dropping in to say that I'm enjoying Marco Masi's book. It's a good guide to a new way of thinking that seems to be gathering momentum. Gary Lachman is another good writer in this vein.
Of course, it pleases me greatly that Masi eloquently discusses themes I've been exploring on my own blog. But this term "woo" seems to be in the air lately, and I know I've flirted with "woo," and Masi does and also knows it, and many in the movement do the same, with greater or less self-consciousness or embarrassment. I have to confess my own flirtation with "woo" is half-hearted.
Glad you like it! I know what you mean by flirting with woo. I think it's open season on woo. I'm having a flagrant affair with woo that is also at times half-hearted, though I like to think I could be convinced.
... And if neuroscience did have it all figured out? If neuroscientist could predict every word you'd write in this essay? Or explain exactly, in matetialistic terms, why you said everything you said? Would that take away the wonder? If you think so, I think you're confusing reducibility with realness. I might be reading you wrong though!
Also what exactly do you mean by more than its parts? Is a university, or a country, more than its parts?
Thanks for commenting, Mark. I don't think of consciousness as a language prediction machine. Not all conscious beings have language as we understand it; very few do. But to answer your question, if a scientist could predict every word I said, I would marvel at the incredible feat, and I would feel unoriginal and I might feel so dejected I would give up on writing novels, but I wouldn't feel less conscious.
By 'more than its parts' I mean something like, 'the parts may be necessary but they're not sufficient'. Not sure whether a university or country is more than its parts. It probably wouldn't take much to bring me around to that view. But then I would need a great deal more convincing to believe those are conscious.
Thank you for your response!
You wouldn't feel any less conscious and you wouldn't be any less conscious! And, of course consciousness cannot be reduced to a language prediction machine. I'm a materialist, a realist about consciousness, and I certainly agree with that. But as I read you, I think that you, confuse the question of whether something is reducible to lesser parts with whether it is a REAL phenomenon. I think that if consciousness is bodily activity there is nothing "mere" about that, and it doesn't take any wonder or beauty of it. I think that it doesn't make consciousness any less real or wonderful or beautiful, it doesn't undermine it one bit. Or as the Buddhist in me would say: form is emptiness, emptiness is form.
Of course, consciousness is perfectly real. But there's no reason to think that our intuitions about what it is made of are reliable, not to any degree at all.
Do you believe in Darwinian natural selection? Do you believe it can account for the appearance, internal and external behaviour of plants and animals? Unless you're positing that there are violations to to these principles, then I think you are subject to an illusion about what philosophy and neuroscience is. Philosophers and neuroscientists are animals. There's nothing special about them. They, or any other humans, are not in a priviliged position where our behaviour can break free from this. Whatever we do, no matter how we contract the muscles in our vocal cords and tongues, or fingers, is animal behaviour.
Please don't mistake my comment for some Skinnerian behaviourism. My point is that whatever you say, or I say, or anyone says, is an expression of a belief. I express my materialist views because of how my brain is wired. You express your anti-materialist or materialst-sceptical views because of how your brain is wired. Re-wire it a certain way, and you would be transformed into a materialist. And the same for me. None of us have to abandon the belief that consciousness is real for any of that to happen.
If you accept that what you say can be explained by mechanism, in principle, then there's simply no way to simultaneously hold on to consciousness as some deep mystery not reducible, in principle, to brain activity. If mechanism explains every such objection to materialism, then those objections are empty.
Consciousness is real, but it is not a mental object viewed by a mental subject.
If any of this interests, you, I'm soon posting on exactly this. Anyway, thanks again for your post and your comment!
I'm glad you think consciousness is real! I didn't mean to say all reductionists buy into illusionism about consciousness. I see why this post might have come off that way, though.
The belief that the brain's wiring determines belief is also belief, as you seem to be saying, but where is the ground for it? Or rather, why choose the brain-determines-belief belief over its opposite or any other belief? It's an epistemological loop you're describing here, and I'm just not seeing the exit.
I do accept that what I say can in principle be replicated, even with alarming, eerie accuracy, but whether it's meaningful to the machine replicating it is another story. I don't want to say it's impossible, only that it's a further problem to be answered. How, I don't know. But replication is not the same as understanding, just as symbols are not the same as meaning.
"Consciousness is real, but it is not a mental object viewed by a mental subject."
If I understand you right, I can agree with this. The other day I was working up a post about this idea. I think in introspection or retrospection we often do fall into the trap of seeing consciousness as an object to itself, but to do that is to forget we're seeing through consciousness, so whatever it is we're assuming just IS consciousness, it ain't 'the thing itself'. But I still think introspection is worth doing, even if there are hurdles, even if it's not perfect.
Philosophy aside, I don't think the evidence is overwhelmingly in favor of the theory that the wiring of our brains determines thought. The evidence, so far as I know (I'm no scientist!), seriously undermines that theory when you put it all together to get the bigger picture. For one thing, it doesn't account for thought changing the brain as well. I think it's highly plausible that it's not always a one way street...but there's much more to it even than this. I'll have to refer you to the scientific paper by Marco Masi for details, if you feel like reading it. I think his paper will do a much better job than I could from my purely philosophical perspective:
https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1150605/full
Thank you! I've read the article now, will get back to that below!
I'm glad that my realism about consciousness makes you glad, but I'm afraid I will probably disappoint you straight away. You see, I AM an illusionist! However, I think you've got illusionism all wrong, like most people, but you're not to blame! Not only is the message that illusionists are trying to convey so counter-intuitive that it's hard to understand (whether one agrees with it or not). Also, Illusionists are largely to blame, for their bad choice of name, their bad marketing, and their lacking communication of what they believe. But to the point: all illusionists that I know of (most notably Dennett) are realists about consciousness. The illusion is most certainly not that consciousness is real - we all agree that it is! (there are eliminative materialists, or "rabid reductionists" who deny the existence of consciousness, of the whole, who may refer to consciousness being an illusion but that is NOT what illusionism is saying! (those folks have done much damage with their rethoric).
And really, I think you're already starting to see what the illusion is. You said: "If I understand you right, I can agree with this. The other day I was working up a post about this idea. I think in introspection or retrospection we often do fall into the trap of seeing consciousness as an object to itself, but to do that is to forget we're seeing through consciousness, so whatever it is we're assuming just IS consciousness, it ain't 'the thing itself'. But I still think introspection is worth doing, even if there are hurdles, even if it's not perfect."
YES! This is the illusion. You're on to it! And what's more, if you're into "spirituality" for lack of a better word, this is the path to liberation from the illusion of subject-object duality. You're spot on about eastern philosophy being relevant here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HRuOEfnqV6g.
Core to illusionism - eastern or western - is the illusion of what introspection accomplishes, what it IS. For example, most people accept that we do not experience external objects as they are - rather, as the mind constructs them, as becomes evident in demonstrations of visual illusions. The non-duality illusionist perspective points out that just as the mind constructs representations of external objects, it also constructs the sense that there is a "me" - a subject - observing the external object. Non-dual illusionism about introspection then, points out that the mind constructs the sense of a mental me observing mental objects.
The word illusion here, as the professor of philosophy Jay Garfield points out in the video above, is not meant to imply that introspection is not real, or that consciousness is not real, or anything like that. It is just implying that there are a lot of mental constructs we are typically unaware of as being constructs, and that what we intuitively deduce is unreliable. It implies that things often are not as they first seem.
While consciousness is unquestionably real, there is also an important sense in which the subject-object duality is real. How? Because constructs are real. It's really that simple. Constructs are not fake, unreal things. When we're falling for a visual or auditory illusion, that mental construct is a real experience. When we fall for the Müller-Lyer illusion for example, we really do experience one line longer than the other. Likewise, when we "fall" for an introspective illusion, that is also perfectly real, as an experience, as a construct. Also, Iagree 100% introspection is worth doing, as do the Buddhists that think about the mind in terms of emptiness and form (I highly recommend the video above). There's much to gain from that I believe, as a frequent meditator myself.
As you say - consciousness is not really the object, or the phenomena, we seem to be observing. Rather it is the entire construct of seeming to be a subject observing a phenomena that seems a certain way. It's the whole thing. The observed and the observation. You cannot take them apart. Likewise, the redness of red is not really the redness of red - it's the red coupled to the seeming of the redness of red! There is not the redness on one hand and how it seems to "us", and what it does to "us" on the other. These things are inseparable, and the separation, the categorisation, is fundamentally illusory.
So, the following should naturally follow: when a brain is falling subject to the Müller-Lyer illusion, we shouldn't look look for representations of two lines in the brain, wehere one line is longer than the other. Sure, the lines are known to be "represented" on the retina and in V1, but nobody expects one line to be longer than the other there. Nor anywhere else. All we need to find is the visual construct of two lines - and then the neuronal machinery that is activated to compare sizes and lengths, and how it makes this error. Then we have explained, in full, why one line appears longer.
Similarly, it's a category error to look for how the brain produces redness. What you need to look for is how the brain forms belief that there is a subject seeing something, and that what it sees is red. Not only that, but neuroscience needs to explain why in many cases, the brain models things such that it will talk about redness as an ineffable quality, and in many other cases it will not (such as mine). If neuroscience can explain behaviour, the behaviour of meditators and philosophers and neuroscientists themselves are not excempt!
So, if you manage to explain, in these terms, how you come to say what you say, and how I come to say what I say, then we are done! Then you have explained both my and your redness. The intuitive sense that you have not, that is the illusion!
(Put another way: It is not that the brain creates a narration - and that somehow, mysteriously, that narration is "like something". Rather - the narrative IS that it is like something to be us. It's not an extra property - it's built straight into the narrative. You get what I'm saying?? And no, it's not fake. This is precisely what brings the narrative to life! Constructs are real.)
Importantly - our tendency to view ourselves as agents in the world - as subjects - rather than just embedded in a large web of happenings - is immensely useful for our cognitive machinery. By internalising the scheme of agents acting in an external world of objects - creating a kind of "virtual" playground - we can simulate events to better predict what will happen if this and that happens, thereby informing our actions. Thus, the inner world is born. What about the individuals, groups, cultures who didn't take this inner virtual world as the most important and real thing in the world? They're long gone, as natural selection and memetic evolution has ensured. So, this is incredibly powerful machinery at work, and core to the success and dominance of humanity. But when doing philosophy of mind, it often leads us astray.
If you accept natural selection and cultural evolution, you must also accept that none of us, no philosopher, and no meditator, can break free from these constraints. We're operating as embedded in that reality, not from above. It doesn't matter what "reality", or the base layer (if there is one) is fundamentally made of. As long as the laws of physics and natural selection hold true in living organisms, then they suffice to explain the behaviour of animals - philosophers and neuroscientists included. That doesn't make philosophy useless or fundamentally deluded, as long as these constraints are recognised. Crucially, this poses exactly zero threats to the realness of consciousness - unless you a priori define it as something over and above what the physical can account for.
So yeah, I am an illusionist about consciousness, and a realist too. As for the article you posted, it immediately revealed its subject-object duality fallacy. In the first paragraph it talks about "epiphenomena" and "emergent property" which is exactly what illusionism points out is NOT happening. These words reveal that he views himself as as subject that "sees" or experiences the mental object, or phenomena, of consciousness. His whole opposition to illusionism/functionalism is done from a mistaken view on what is being claimed. And I disagree wholeheartedly about what neuroscience is indicating. As a physician who has studied neuroscience and neurology, and is following neuroscience, there are zero results indicating violations of the laws of physics. That doesn't mean thoughts are not real. But it means, no matter how counter-intuitive as it may feel, that when you express your thoughts, that is physics, biochemistry, neurons doing their thing.
Finally, I think you're also misunderstanding my neuroscientist predictor scenario. I'm not saying that a LLM that to an impressive degree can mimic the behaviour of humans typing text are conscious like humans. I'm saying that if neuroscientists can explain, in mere physical, mechanical terms, how you come to say the exact string of words that you say to challenge materialism, without any extra-physical "consciousness" playing any role in how you came to say that - then the neuroscientists have essentially proven that what you say is a model expressing itself. It is physics playing out as expected. It is computational, virtual. It is perfectly real, but it's not something over and above the material. Please note, this is completely independent of whether something non-physical exists. If it has no causal efficacy on what you say, then your talk is not truly about that non-physical thing.
ADHD rant over. Anyway, thanks!
Not sure if my long rant helped, or if you or anyone will read it. Anyway, thanks!
Mark,
I hope you don’t mind if I comment on this post. I think you did a fine job explaining your views and I found myself agreeing with most of what you asserted, especially your take on constructs being legitimately real. And I agree with these assessments as well:
“…our tendency to view ourselves as agents in the world - as subjects - rather than just embedded in a large web of happenings - is immensely useful for our cognitive machinery.”
“…that when you express your thoughts, that is physics, biochemistry, neurons doing their thing.”
Physics is essentially the science of motion in a physical reality and everything that goes with it. However, it is my contention that the very notion of law is also a construct that does not correspond nor reflect the true nature of our reality. So the assertion that:
“As long as the laws of physics and natural selection hold true in living organisms…” & “…there are zero results indicating violations of the laws of physics.” These assertions becomes moot to any argument referencing the existence of any so-called law.
Also, I agree that “it is physics playing out…” however, I disagree that it is computational. Our universe is not deterministic nor is it random, it is simply indeterminate, which simply means that we collectively have not nailed down the life force that drives the novelty and complexity that we observe and which we ourselves are active participants.
Furthermore, it is my conclusion that mind as we refer to it is a cognitive system built into the brain, and for all practical purposes that cognitive system is quantum. There is cutting edge scientific research being done that demonstrates that the microtubule bundles located in the 80 to 100 billion neurons of our brain are quantum devices.
So it is now becoming obvious that there is literally a ghost in the machine if you will, and that ghost is a quantum system. Furthermore, consciousness is the experience of that quantum system and the physics of that system is anything but computational.
Peace
Not at all! Thank you!
I'm glad we agree on those points!
Hmm, not sure if I'm following you. I might have used "laws" sloppily. I'm not claiming to know exactly what constitutes a law, though I would say that I'm a Humean about the laws of nature.
I don't mean computational as in a digital computer. I mean simply as in processing information. Whether you accept that our brains are only information processors or not, it seems quite obvious by now that this is largely what they are doing.
As far as I can tell, theoretical physicists and philosophers of physics are don't agree on whether our universe is deterministic or not, and some say that we simply don't know. I certainly agree we don't understand the ins and outs of what creates all this complexity, but why propose there is a "life force" behind it?
As far as I know, there is a single paper claiming to have shown quantum effects in microtubules. But even if they are right - what is the relevance? What does it matter if the brain oozes with quantum phenomena, or has none at all? How does this have anything to do with whether there is a ghost in the machine or not? Quantum systems are - as far as I am aware - just as "computational" as Newtonian systems are.
"consciousness is the experience of that quantum system"
This is exactly the subject-object duality I tried to argue is illusory. There is no "you" to observe a quantum system. "you" are not an "observer" experiencing what is going on in the brain.
When you see the redness of red, there is not the redness on one hand, and you seeing it on the other, with your conceptual overlays. That is not how it works. Likewise - no matter if the brain is full of quantum effects or not - there is no way "you" can sense that it is so. Introspectively, you are completely at loss of what kind process is creating your experience. Introspection does not grant you any access to this, whatsoever.
Sorry it took me so long to get back to you. Thanks for taking the time to explain your views. I do tend to see eliminitivism and illusionism as the same thing, probably because my take is so different from both.
I don't see experience as non-veridical, but rather as the only way of knowing anything at all. As you've pointed out, this initial skepticism about our relationship to reality is where representationalism (the idea that experience is a mental construct) derives from. The problem with that view is, there's no reaching around our supposed representations to uncover the 'things themselves', no way of knowing what the representations are representations of. So how do we know our experiences even are representations?
The reason both illusionism and eliminitivism run together for me is they both pit the scientific against experience. They both assume that scientific investigation tells us what reality is really like, but not experience (one says the experience doesn't exist, the other says it does, but it's an illusion). The problem I see with both views is that neither explains how science, given the skeptical starting point, can give us knowledge about reality. Science is, after all, nothing over and above the experiences of the scientists doing it, so if it really is true that experience is illusory, then it follows we can't know anything at all. Both views should lead to deep skepticism, but the proponents of these views don't seem to see that. They tend to think science can somehow stand outside of experience, but how? To call experience massively erroneous or wholly illusory is to set up an epistemological black hole from which not even science can escape.
Plus, when you think about it, Illusions and errors are always discovered and corrected within experience, not outside it. When I decide to use a ruler to measure two lines that appear to be uneven and discover they're actually the same length, that was just more experience involving a ruler instead of just my eyes. Everything is within experience. If experience isn't veridical, we are in deep doo doo.
Thank you, Tina! Very much appreciated!
Again, illusionism is not saying that experience is an illusion! It is saying that any experience of being able to introspectively find out what experience is or isn't MADE OF is an illusion (in the sense that it enforces a false belief - it's still s real experience). Those are two very different things!
Your main counter-argument, as I read it, is a common one. Unsurprisingly, I think is mistaken. I might not understand you perfectly, for many reasons, one of which is I'm not a native english speaker.
Experience IS veridical! But not on what the fundamental truth underlying that experience is! It's only veridical on itself - what the experience is! Your experience is that one line is longer than the other. That is true! And also, the experience of realising that "out there", the lines are the same length, is true. But crucially, this requires third-person correction. In my view, this is just what the illusionists have done with me. And through meditation and lot's of pondering etc, experience no longer even seems non-physical to me (most of the time). So if experience is veridical in the sense that you claim, I can claim that I know directly that mind is physical. But I certainly don't want to make that move.
Is this a fair way of characterising your problem with illusionism: If our intuitions are wrong about consciousness being non-physical, as illusionists claim, then it follows that the illusionists intuitions and beliefs, limited by the restraints of cognition, could be just as wrong? And in the end, illusionists rely just as much on "experience" as anybody else, which completely undermines their postition?
I have two main problems with that. The first is "in experience". This is reifying and presuming experience or consciousness to be a medium, a workspace in which scientists and philosophers operate. This is just a presumption. This is based on your sense of your mind being a medium, a container! This sense part of the content of your mind, it is not the actual mind itself! This is the cartesian theater-illusion. There is no "inside" and "outside" experience in the way you envision it. Except as a construct, as such it is true.
Second - of course illusionists aren't infallible. Illusionism, or any other position, does not protect you against false beliefs and conclusions. For all I know, I could be schizophrenic, and so could you. Almost nobody with psychosis accepts that they are psychotic. Illusionists are not claiming that experience isn't useful data! However, the first-person data on how things seem are just that - how they seem! Not on what the underlying truth IS. Visual illusions demonstrate this well, and so do cognitive illusions (the monty hall problem) and introspective illusions (there is a "me" observing "objects" or "phenomena" within consciousness. The third illusions here is by far the hardest to see throught though, but Buddhists have done it more than a millenia ago.
Illusionism does not pit the scientific against experience - it explains it in scientific means! Illusionism does take some things for granted, as starting points: Physics holds true on earth, including biological systems. Darwinian natural selection is true. That's all you need. It doesn't matter what the physics is "made of" (if that's even a sensible question to ask - personally I don't think so). If you only accept those two things, then illusionism has you covered. In fact, as far as I can see, it's the only theory that unifies science and experience without large open-ended mysteries, the others largely just postpone the problem of explaining what consciousness is. If everything is made of consciousness, for example, that still doesn't tell me anything about what this fundamental consciousness is supposed to be?
Why do you think a "sane" persons first-person experience is veridical in any deeper sense than an insane one's? We need to presume a few starting points: other people are real. The world out there is real (no matter what it is made of). Physics theory and biology and Darwinian evolution is more than just a confused dream. If you agree with that, then our behaviour here lives withing that framework. We cannot lift ourselves above it. Your sense of being an independent observer is in many ways an illusion. Your visual system has adapted to be as efficient and simultaneously intelligent as possible, and it's incredible - and what ever lives there is REAL as an experience. But it just isn't giving you direct access to anything other than what things seem like. The same is true for all cognition and introspection. Unless we want physics and biology to break down inside brains.
I really care for you to respond again, if you can take the time. If not, thank you anyway. Cheers!
Again, I will try to challenge you a little in a short, separate reply. Of course, as optional to reply to as the other one :)
1. Do you think the greyness of grey is less of a "quale" than the redness of red? Does a red apple "minus" colour equal a grey apple?
2. Do you think it is, in principle, possible that my red is the same as yours, even if you like red and I dislike like it? In other words, is there a colour "essence" there, and then secondary reactions to it?
3. If yes, is the "what-it-is-like" to see red part of the colour essence or part of the reaction? Or are there two distinct what-it-is-like "feels"?
4. Is it possible that if you hear a Swedish sentence, even though you don't understand it, it still sounds the same to you as it does to me? The auditory "qualia" could very well be the same?
6. Is it conceivable that a colour qualia invert sees red exactly as we see grey? They will talk about that quale as "fiery", "vibrant", "vivid" - yet it actually looks and feels to them like grey looks and feels to you?
6. Does Mary the colour scientist, while in the black-and-white room, experience her surroundings like you or I would, if we were locked up in a black-and-white room? Does she experience the "lack" of colour that we do? (I'm not at all asking what happens when she's let out).
Edit:
I see now that I misposted another reply to a previous of your comments. I'll just paste it in here, in case you're interested.
Let me just try another much simpler argument. It is common for people with schizophrenia to believe the imagined voices in their head are not their own. Or that someone else is placing or removing thoughts in their mind. Typically, it is not possible to convince them otherwise, no matter how skilled or persuading you are. Do you accept that there are physical reasons for these delusions? They are highly inherited, neuroscience has uncovered plenty of hints for why this happens, and certain molecules quite often can change these beliefs.
If you accept this - shouldn't you also be prepared to accept that your beliefs are a matter of physical structures in your brain? Isn't your belief that you're hungry, for example, a physical thing?
Now, why would beliefs about consciousness, such as the obvious non-physicality of "qualia" be any different from other beliefs?
For sure, my beliefs are just the same. I can be deluded about everything. The best I can do is try to find a belief system with minimal internal incoherence. I believe I have done so, but that too can be deluded.
That's why Dennett points out the importance and power of collective knowledge and intelligence. It's the only way forward.
Let me just try another much simpler argument. It is common for people with schizophrenia to believe the imagined voices in their head are not their own. Or that someone else is placing or removing thoughts in their mind. Typically, it is not possible to convince them otherwise, no matter how skilled or persuading you are. Do you accept that there are physical reasons for these delusions? They are highly inherited, neuroscience has uncovered plenty of hints for why this happens, and certain molecules quite often can change these beliefs.
If you accept this - shouldn't you also be prepared to accept that your beliefs are a matter of physical structures in your brain? Isn't your belief that you're hungry, for example, a physical thing?
Now, why would beliefs about consciousness, such as the obvious non-physicality of "qualia" be any different from other beliefs?
For sure, my beliefs are just the same. I can be deluded about everything. The best I can do is try to find a belief system with minimal internal incoherence. I believe I have done so, but that too can be deluded.
That's why Dennett points out the importance and power of collective knowledge and intelligence. It's the only way forward.
> Suppose one of my flip flops falls off my foot. I wasn’t aware of wearing flip flops, the feeling of them on my feet, before, but I become aware of the feeling after one falls off. How would I have even noticed the change had I not been experiencing wearing the flip flops before?
There’s no ignoring the pitiful sound of a single flip-flop calling out for its partner without reply. It’s particularly sad because the loss of one spells the end of the other, should its mate not be recovered. This is the sound of doom.
Luckily, one usually loses a flip-flop by flinging it end over end directly in front of one’s own nose, which is a great source of delight, so long as it’s retrieval is assured.
Haha...yes, how lonely it is to be a lonely flip flop, and what a perilous predicament to be in. A lonely flip flop had better hope I am its owner as I tend to hang onto things like that "just in case", but then I continue to hang onto them even long after it becomes clear its mate will never be found, out of sheer laziness.
Great post.
Personally, I believe in "souls" in a roughly Aristotelian sense, as the "form" of the body - the organizing principle/process that makes a living body a living body, rather than a different configuration of atoms. And interestingly, the SEP notes that functionalism "is rooted in Aristotle’s conception of the soul", so it very much lives on in one of the major schools of philosophy of mind. I also wouldn't hesitate to say that non-human animals, plants, fungi, and even things like rivers, forests, and planets have souls. It follows very naturally from the Aristotelian definition.
Although I don't believe there's (necessarily) an immaterial part of the soul, as Aristotle did (for humans anyway). I just don't think that's necessary, and if we just take form as truly real (as I think we all naturally do until we're indoctrinated with reductionist materialism), then we get really real souls that supervene on the physical.
I think the trouble is people got the idea that rationality is opposed to romance and mysticism, and so reject words like "soul" (and even words like "consciousness" at the extremes) by instinct. I think they're wrong, they can be compatible and even complementary, and that our world needs more romance and mysticism. I think it's crucial for us if we're to develop a better ecological understanding of ourselves as part of nature and one another.
Thanks Joseph! I had Aristotle very much in mind here. Plato is more my cup of tea, but I think Aristotle is more approachable for most, at least in this crowd. Because you're right, functionalism and Aristotelian hylomorphism go hand in hand, especially for those who want consciousness to be "multiply realizable".
Curious what you mean in the 2nd paragraph. Do you think form can be material?
Totally agreed that we need to see ourselves as within nature rather than outside it. We do give lip service to that idea, but in the next breath violate it. I wonder if hubris can be turned into a computation?
I wouldn't say that form can be material, but generally, form cannot exist without matter. E.g. with a bronze (matter) sphere (form), the form exists through the matter, not as a separate immaterial substance that gets added to it. I think this is roughly the difference between Aristotle's & Plato's ideas of form. Another example is words: the word as a whole is the form, and its "matter" is the letters of the alphabet - remove the letters and we destroy the word. Essentially, the form is the whole viewed *as a whole*, and the matter is the whole viewed as its constituent parts. We can't remove all the parts and keep the whole.
Ah, okay, I get what you're saying now. So matter is necessary but not sufficient. Yep, that's very much Aristotle! I'd say I'm Aristotle at a minimum, Plato on my good days. :)
Good to see you back!
I think you know my views on much of this. I do think that if we make a list of what we *don't* mean by "consciousness", we're left trying to describe by what we do mean. And it's hard not to implicitly import many of the things we previously excluded. At least if we want to continue saying there's a deep metaphysical mystery here.
It's interesting how much we divide what the ancients meant by "soul" into different things, like life, mind, consciousness, and the modern religious concept of the immaterial immortal soul. Joseph mentions Aristotle's concept of the soul, which Aristotle divides into a hierarchy including the vegetative soul, the sensitive soul, and the rational soul. I agree that Aristotle's version is the most plausible of the ancient takes on this. Of course, I would say that as a functionalist.
Overall then, we could see the soul as everything that converged to form us, and everything we effect in the world. It's the nexus. Can the nexus survive beyond its current place? When we consider what a nexus is, that seems like a misguided question. But it's worth remembering that nexuses can evolve and move, particularly living ones. So the nexus we are today isn't the same as the one we were as children. In any case, the effects of a nexus can continue long after it's gone. Maybe that's the immortality worth reaching for.
Thanks, Mike. Nice to be back.
Yeah, I get that what I said sounds largely negative, not this, not that. I meant not just this, not just that.
I think Aristotle makes a great deal sense when it comes to understanding ourselves in nature. There's something about the idea of a soul hierarchy that feels deeply intuitive. I think his ideas would be more popular these days if he weren't so boring to read and so uncool. Our democratic sensibilities bristle at this idea of a hierarchy, but I think we tend to see him as making sharp exclusionary divisions when really it's more of a nested structure. There's no sharp break between inside and outside, such as we see in Descartes. Anyway, it's much simpler to begin with a world-soul and see ourselves as a part of it than to figure out how individual human minds can climb outside themselves to reach an utterly alien world beyond.
Nexus. I haven't heard that word in a while. It's an interesting way of thinking about consciousness. I do think souls evolve, as it's hard to see what a particular soul would be without it's lived life. What could I be without all the particular experiences I've had? Some traditions believe the evolution of the embodied soul is the point. I'm not sure what the point is, but the Aristotelian holistic approach seems more promising.
I read somewhere that most of what we have from Aristotle amount to lecture notes, which sort of explains why his stuff reads the way it does, even with a good translation. At least his chapters are short. Not that I've ever made any real effort to read him directly.
On hierarchies, I can see that. I guess there's value in clarifying that these are definitional and conceptual hierarchies, not command and control ones. I need to remember that the next time I write about my own.
In a soul world, how would things get started? In my view, part of our nexus is billions of years of evolution, both biological and cosmic. But if it's all soul, how does the evolution of souls happen? (Just pondering. No worries if you're not feeling like going down this rabbit hole again.)
Another great essay Tina, good to see you back at work...
My vision of our shared universe is that life is both ubiquitous and universal at every level of complexity. To be even more succinct; if we recognize motion as first cause, then motion that results in form/structure can be used as the very definition of life. This ubiquitous life can be further classified as both organic and inorganic life.
The only unanswered question so far is this: What is the basis for this life? I will address that question another time because the answer resolves David Chalmers “hard problem of consciousness”. It also answers the compelling mystery of what drives complexity and diversity.
Building from this simplistic, grounding, original assumption, it is not difficult to imagine that mind itself with its experience of consciousness is a highly organized, highly complex life form. One can refer to that life form as a soul if one chooses however, to avoid duality one has to come to terms with what it means for a life form to be physical. You may recall that I addressed what it means for something to be physical in previous posts……
Thanks!
I think the motion of form is a primordial and intuitive understanding of life that makes a great deal of sense. Everything moves, after all, just at different speeds. We tend to see movement at our scale, but from a broader perspective it's hard to differentiate rocks from plants from animals from us. In which case what isn't alive?
I've written and self-published two books since 2015 but neither book is currently in circulation. I've considered starting a blog, but my interests are in metaphysics and besides, most people cannot hang with that type of abstraction. So it doesn't take long for someone reading my work to have their eyes to glaze over and fall into a stupor.
Underlying form just happens to be my thing. I'm alot like the late Robert Pirsig in that regard including a fair amount of mental "dis-ease" to boot. Unlike Pirsig, I can be very personable and charming. I turn seventy-two on the fifth of this month and my wife and I have been successfully married for over fifty years now.
Hang in there Tina, you've got a good head on your shoulders...
Yeah, metaphysics is a pretty hard sell, that's for sure. Maybe it's easier to take in small blog post sized chunks, though. Anyway, I wish you a very happy birthday and congratulations on your marriage. A fifty years is quite the success!
I just subscribed to your Substack in case you decide to start posting. :)
Ha! Great point about consciousness being self-evident vs the uncertain existence of the brain. Consciousness is what we experience directly, it is immanent, but the Brain is just a naming convention applied to a clump of cells:)
Thanks! I'm working on a novel that starts out with a middle aged guy whose body is discovered on a service road and an autopsy reveals he never had a brain. Other things happen, but now I'm messing around with the idea that many people haven't even seen a picture of their brain. Fun stuff!
I don't think you adequately dismissed the awareness hypothesis.
It’s perfectly fine to be wearing flip-flops that you are unaware of, just as it’s ok to have a heartbeat that you are unaware of or to be unaware of the way the muscles in your thighs extend when you are walking. There is no need to postulate partial awareness. You see and feel and hear things that you are unaware of all the time. When your flip-flop falls off, you become aware of it, just as you become aware when your heart skips a beat or your thigh hurts or someone calls your name. You have a thousand ideas, thoughts, visions, sounds and desires going on the background of your brain without you thinking about them. Is only when you think of your own thoughts that you become aware of them. That’s consciousness.
It sounds hard to drive a car without being aware of it — but what about bending your knees when you are walking or tapping your fingers while you try to remember the words to a song?
A friend of mine described the soul as the life force that tells your mitochondria to make energy and your leukocytes to fight infection and kidneys to filter your blood and your heart to beat and your brain to think. It’s the cooperation of all those things that makes you alive. When they stop working, your soul is gone and you are dead. There’s no need to think of the soul as mystical or separate from our bodies. It’s just the body doing what live bodies do. With this definition, jellyfish and oak trees can have souls too. Your brain needs a would to do its work, but so does your liver.
Thanks for making me think
I'm beginning to think the flip flop example was...a flop. With "partial awareness" I'm trying to make it easier to describe experience on the whole as a more multifaceted affair with perhaps levels and layers, a background and foreground and maybe something between, various processes and degrees of awareness and self-awareness unfolding in time and retrospection, types of experience and their relations, as well as partially-hidden depths such as the subconscious...as opposed to simply conscious and unconscious, aware and not aware.
I like your friend's description of the soul as a life force. I tend to think of it that way as well. I agree, there's no need to think of the soul as mystical. Whether the soul can or can't exist without the body is something we can wonder about.
Thanks for reading and commenting! I'm glad what I wrote made you think. :)
I'm not sure what to think about partial awareness.
I’m supposed to be watching the TV now while I am typing on my iPad. I am vaguely aware of the TV but I am not giving it any attention. Every now and again, something catches my attention and then all of my attention goes to the TV.
It feels like there are maybe three levels of awareness. 1. None at all. 2. I’m vaguely aware that it’s there. 3. It has my full attention. I think it’s that top level that we call consciousness.
Thanks again. I just subscribed so i’ll be reading and commenting much more!
sounds pretty dualistic. the consciousness I attribute to others from the 3rd person point of view is by your definition non-identical to the consciousness they attribute to themselves and must, from my pov, be noumenal
Maybe I am a dualist in some sense, but not a property dualist. I don't see why we can't refer to the same experience and know it differently.
i thought you were claiming that, by definition, two different senses of “consciousness” were are play: the one you know of yourself to have, and the one I attribute to you from the outside. “The appearance of consciousness from the outside is simply not the same thing as consciousness itself. I hope you feel I’m stating the obvious.”
By "appearance of consciousness" I meant external markers such as readings on medical monitors and the sort of behavioral observations someone might make to determine whether someone's awake or in a coma. I was mixing up two different consciousnesses there, consciousness as apparently awake and sensible (not in a coma) vs. experience. I don't think experience is knowable only from a first person perspective, or knowable only from a third person perspective, but that's a much more complicated issue that I'll have more to say about in future posts.
excellent news!
Tina,
I hope I didn't take away from your blog by engaging with Mark Slight as much as I did. He caught me in a generous mood I guess.
Thanks.....
Not at all! I'm happy to provide a forum for discussion. I love seeing people talking to each other, not just to me. So please, please feel free to talk amongst yourselves!
"I don’t care who you are or what you believe, death makes dualists of us all."
An arresting thought.
The word "soul" has a lot of baggage, but only some of the baggage is bath water (to mix metaphors). A soul is a precious thing that you have to look after and keep clean. When we start to think of it as "mind" or "life" or "consciousness," maybe we forget the baby.
Point well taken. Maybe there is something more to the idea of 'soul' than those things, but I'm not sure what. I wouldn't want to taint the idea of a soul by equating it to something lower. Still, I hope it's not identical to the baggage I discussed.
Death is certainly...arresting. I think there's something about witnessing such moments that can reveal our deepest intuitions about these matters. What do you think distinguishes 'soul' from 'life'?
For want of another word, the poetry. You can sell your soul (not just to the devil, but to greed or lust or hatred, for example) but you still have to own your life.
This is not scientific way of talking, but philosophers aren't always midwifes to science.
Midwives. Still drinking my coffee.
Ah, yes there is something more poetic about souls. So something like a sense of self or personality? Or personal or moral integrity?
Something even more intimate. We speak of "the soul's midnight." We have something called "soul music." These phrases point to the heart of our feelings -- or "affect," to use a fancy term I've been writing about.
Religious discourse is attentive to whatever we mean by "soul," but it also adds a lot of what we might call "mumbo-jumbo" (although that's probably a politically incorrect term these days!). Subtract the mumbo-jumbo and we're homing in on what "soul" means, but the mumbo-jumbo is too aversive: "not going there," as people say. Our loss.
"The appearance of consciousness from the outside is simply not the same thing as consciousness itself. I hope you feel I’m stating the obvious."
It's certainly obvious to me! But it seems obvious that it is not so obvious to many within philosophy of mind discourse (I have wondered if perhaps Daniel Dennett just was a philosophical zombie. That would certainly make the disagreement easier to understand!)
Perhaps the biggest problem in defining consciousness is that what we are talking about is the condition of possibility for any thought we have at all. If you are doubting whether consciousness is real, that doubt is a phenomenon that is occurring to you within consciousness (assuming you aren't one of the aforementioned p-zombies). That doesn't mean that the "ego" is somehow necessarily there (since the ego itself is just a collection of phenomena within consciousness) but that consciousness just is the "ground" of any phenomena appearing at all. It is itself not a phenomenon, but is the necessary condition for any phenomena. I think that is both rationally necessary, but also very hard to see, because most of the time we focus on the phenomena themselves, not how or why there should be any phenomena to begin with.
This was precisely why Husserl wanted to "bracket" any question of noumena altogether, and simply focus on the appearing of the appearances, to address the appearances as appearances to/for/within/as consciousness, and not to ask whether those phenomena referred to any noumenal beyond them or to take the phenomena as phenomena for granted either. But, again, I think this move is hard for us as humans. Consciousness is like the ocean to an angler fish: we spend all of our time in it, but can't see it precisely for this reason. If something appears everywhere, all the time, as the ground of everything, then it doesn't really appear itself at all. But of course, its non-appearing does not equate to its non-existence or non-reality.
This is great. You're getting into some of the things I want to talk about more in my next post. "The condition for the possibility of" is along the lines I'm going for as well, since that helps us to avoid talking about consciousness as a thing within consciousness.
I'm so glad you brought up Husserl. I really appreciate his method of bracketing to put aside the scientific assumptions that permeate our thinking, but without devaluing science or putting anything or anyone down. He prepares us for a mind-bending ride that we won't forget when (or if!) we finally do go back to thinking about things the way we did before. (If you can get through his extraordinarily horrendous writing and incessant false starts, that is.) Philosophers tend not to acknowledge how emotionally committed we are to our precious views. We just love poking the bear, but that's childishness really. And yes, it's hard to see the big picture when we're inside it.
I appreciated your discussion of Levinas, by the way. A long time ago I decided I was done with philosophers who can't write (even if their ideas are worth it) and so I never bothered to read him.
Oh yes. Levinas is tough to read. Apparently he was also a dreadfully boring lecturer. But in all that mud there are pure diamonds!
I believe it!
Just dropping in to say that I'm enjoying Marco Masi's book. It's a good guide to a new way of thinking that seems to be gathering momentum. Gary Lachman is another good writer in this vein.
Of course, it pleases me greatly that Masi eloquently discusses themes I've been exploring on my own blog. But this term "woo" seems to be in the air lately, and I know I've flirted with "woo," and Masi does and also knows it, and many in the movement do the same, with greater or less self-consciousness or embarrassment. I have to confess my own flirtation with "woo" is half-hearted.
Glad you like it! I know what you mean by flirting with woo. I think it's open season on woo. I'm having a flagrant affair with woo that is also at times half-hearted, though I like to think I could be convinced.