Gertie wrote
To clarify how I see this, EVERY conscious experience, no matter what it is, is immediately known, because the content of conscious experience IS the experience. Experience is always about something, it can't be empty of content. Hence the 'Experiencer-Self' disappears when I sleep. IMO it's not lurking watching a darkened Cartesian stage, it just isn't there. Because the Self is no more or less than a manifestation of the sum of all experiencing.
This: "the Self is no more or less than a manifestation of the sum of all experiencing" says a lot. Lots of philosophers hate concepts like intuition because it implies something direct, unmediated, which is close to magical. Something truly direct reveals its essence simpliciter. But, and to me this is a rather profound "but," hermeneutics frees us from this altogether: everything is in interpretation. There is nothing of the "thing out there" that is present in the apperception of the thing. In fact, if Wittgenstein (not a phenomenologist...or is he??) is right, the constraints of logic and language entirely delimit an apprehension of a thing, abstract of otherwise. There is no logic "out there", no truth out there because there are no propositions out there and truth is propositional .Anyway, I got lost. The "but" regarding the self: A kind of nothingness? This perceiving "agency" that cannot identify with any particular witnessed object, what vanishes the moment attention tries to put itself "there": Wittgenstein, who gets it from Kierkegaard, who got it from Hegel, then from Kant) found this elusive self in fleeting time, in the middle of the future and the past where the past presses forward to claim the future through an anticipation (apperception). Such an interesting concept, for the self is, on the one hand, nothing but the content that flies forward,
constructing a future, quite literally making reality. But when a Buddhist shuts down this machinery of reality construction, it is, the nothingness that reveals itself is just the opposite of nothingness: absolute fullness. Hindus talk like this, calling this "eternal present" Brahman. You have likely heard, the atman is the Brahman; well, Kierkegaard is all over this.
I thing the self's true nature rests with the meditative process of eradicating the, what to call it, the empirical/eidetic time-constructed self. This closes in on Husserl's epoche, which he and many others (see Steinbach's Mysticism and Phenomenology, partially online for free, I think) think open doors of extraordinary insight.
The human sense of self is 'what it's like' to experience being a discrete, unified being with a first person pov (associated with a specific human body) located in space and time.
Evolution can offer an explanation for why we complex critters need some unifying experiential process, otherwise we'd be experiencing a cacophanous jumble of sights, sounds, memories, emotions, thoughts, sensations, etc every moment. Our experience would be useless in enabling us to navigate the world. It all has be integrated in coherent way.
It is certainly safe to say that organizing critters beat out those that didn't in "choices" evolution made. But i have always had a problem with evolution as telling us much of anything, beyond, well, this works better than competitors. What works? Organizational skills with conceptual synthesizing functions? Yes, but evolution didn't make these, they simply were there, in the genetic accidents. They do match up with the occasion that "chooses" them, but the occasion does not define them, only chooses them. They are "made" out of the matrix of transcendental possibilities. Why I say transcendental is a long story.
So what we come to call a ''chair'' might first be experienced as shapes and colours and hardness or whatever. Later when we have experienced more about chairs, we will have associations which might also spring to mind (into conscious experience), like sitting, or emotion like 'phew' because I need a rest. (And we can in principle correlate those associations with neural connections which have previously formed, and come into consciousness as the connections are fired when I again encounter a chair).
It's all experience, completely immediate, unfiltered and known, because that's the nature of experiencing. But the way experience will manifest will change as I have knew encounters with chairs. Learning language enables a different type of experience, Including incorporating the thinky voice in my head which contemporaneously linguistically narrates my experience, helping to create an ongoing cohesive story of Me and my encounters with the external world. Including abstract reasoning. And communicating with others.
Most, I guess, think that thinky voice is a temporal construction, and there is no magical immediacy at all. When your eyes are there, fixed and clear, on the apple, it seems direct, but the understanding that is aware of it really "thick" with experience, or, axonal transmissions, if you like.
You say experience is "completely immediate" and there are many who agree. Consider: what you experience in your encounter with the apple is in time, and in the construction of the past moving into the future whereby the present becomes this anticipation, or, anxiety, dread. Existentialists think this the critical juncture of determining what a self is: the future is entirely unmade, a nothingness into which we move with only the anticipations of the past to ground the whole thing. Once you make the critical step to self awareness, you see that there is something IN this process that is not part of it, but stands apart from it, and this freedom. They are not talking about some break away from the principle of sufficient cause, which is a trivial thing, really, phenomenologically.
It is about this realization that one is, if you will, playing a role, acting a part, being driven along by the past's anticipations that move fluidly into future actualities unconsciously, as if one were a thing.
If one can understand this, then one is fit for phenomenological/existential studies. There is not much interest in what physical science has to say here because the ontological foundation of the self lies in this structural center of awakening to one's freedom from the spontaneous production of thoughts, behavior, interests and so on, and science becomes a part of this "spontaneous production" from which one has become free. Perhaps you can see why there are religious existentialists, for it is a philosophy that puts full emphasis on the living event of a self. This is the foundation, for it is presupposed by all else. A scientist will say, behold, a new way to measure star distance. The existentialist will say, wiat: this is a self thinking and speaking
antecedent to any observation about stars and the like. There are no stars unless the production of concepts, meaning, value "make" stars. Philosophy needs to look here at this structured self that is presupposed by science.
That may sound a bit weird to you, but it is one of the central thoughts to Heidegger's Being and Time, Sartre's Being and Nothingness, Kierkegaard's Concept of Anxiety, and many others.
See above. Maybe we just are using different definitions? I use ''experience'' to mean conscious 'what it's like' phenomenological experience. Not just sensory experience, but remembering,See above. Maybe we just are using different definitions? I use ''experience'' to mean conscious 'what it's like' phenomenological experience. Not just sensory experience, but remembering, emotions, sensations, imagining, linguistic thinking - all of it. I think of them as different categories, manifestations or 'flavours' of the same thing - conscious experience. What do you mean by ''experience''? Do we need to agree working definitions?
I was referring to reflection. When one is going about one's business, buying groceries, attending parties, whatever, one is not reflecting. One just goes along. Reflection begins with the question, the interruption. As to "remembering, emotions, sensations, imagining, linguistic thinking - all of it" I think these are all part of a composite self, but as to what the self could be, apart from these, this is the puzzle. After all, when I turn to reflect on my emotions, remembering and the rest, and hold them in view, I am still not the object of my attention, not the memory, not the imagined thing, but apart from this. This elusive self that tries to capture itself in a perception entirely resists being assimilated. One cannot go Cartesian and posit some res cogitans for this is just the same as assimilation: res cogitans is just another construction of ideas in our heads, composed out of familiar concepts like thought and being.
So I would say, reflection is the experience of thinking about something. Here it is experiencing thinking about experience
Sure it is thinking about something, but it is
Middle English, from Latin reflectere to bend back. It is a second guessing of what is first encountered. Initiated by a question about something. It is this stopping, calling doubt into a thing, that first establishes distance between one annd the thing what would otherwise make an unproblematic claim on conscious affairs. This is the beginning of freedom.
I have a tangential issue with this. This type of wording looks to me like you're conflating knowledge with ontological existence. The cup might exist regardless of me experiencing its existence. I can't know. I can only directly know my experience exists, but that doesn't mean the external world of cups and trees and rocks doesn't exist. I just can't know. I can't know if the universe sprang into existence the moment I (or another conscious being) came into existence - but if so it popped up with a solid backstory!
Knowledge and existence: Huge issue, and I will have to control myself. What if I say the cup cannot exist without someone regarding it, because "regarding it" is by no means a passive event. The chair as a chair is made in the "in between" where, if you prefer physicalistic terms, brain meets things. Chair is "made" in the interface, and to even refer to a thing at all, or to anything that is supposed to be outside of this relationship. is to bring in the relationship, for "thing" is a concept first, and belongs to the matrix of world experience, logically structured.
Does this mean there is nothing "outside? Of course not. But very clearly, your understanding is not outside, and all that you know, are familiar with lies with the understanding.
As to the whether the cup appears only when perceived: if by cup your mean the transcendental something outside of words and logic, then it seems silly to think it is not there independently, it's just that when we remove an apperceiving agent, you remove all that you can say. And if I take your meaning, when you reencounter the thing, you being the sensation, the logic, the words into play again, then all of your explanations are there once again.
In phenomenology, it is epistemological ontology: What IS, is the knowing. There really are no things, but only the "thinging" of apprehending the thing, for at the level of philosophical ontology, there is no "to be" only "being" and there is no world, only "worlding". The absolute stability outside of the temporal anticipating of future events is utterly metaphysical.
Yes I think it looks that way. If you think about the simplest conscious experiencing creature, say a moth which can only experience change in light, then it's hard to imagine that moth has something humans like us would think of a sense of self, of apprehending itself as a Me. It looks to me like only complex conscious critters need some integrating/unifying process for all the different brain subsystems to be usefully coherent. And from this emerges a sense of being a discrete, unified self. Imo.
Microbiology, insects, animals: interesting question regarding how much they "experience" anything. But the "from this emerges" puts attention to evolution "choosing" as it did to eventually produce consciousness as we know it. I think this point very important because many think like this, as if to observe the fossil record, compare human craniums and organs to those lesser evolved would give any insight as to "what" experience is. The very most it could say is that such and such a organic feature was conducive to reproduction and/or survival better than competitors. But the actuality of consciousness itself simply issues from happy accidents in chromosomal structures. The brain is not a "survival organ". It is an organ that is good for survival.
Well I'd say it's the first person pov (what it's like') aspect of conscious experience which is key. That's what distinguishes Subject-Me-Here-Now from those objects over there. My view is rationality and logic are rooted in how we perceive the patterns in the world. We note something can't be in two places at once, we note 'causal' patterns and so on. This is evolutionarily useful in navigating the world. And eventually we have created a model which has 'rules of logic', physical laws, etc. But then we're stumped when we come across QM. Because that suggests particles can be in two places at once, can effect each other at a distance, that causality is just mathematical probability. We didn't evolve to perceive tiny particles, we evolved for utility, to safely navigate the world, we didn't need to see tiny particles or have the cognitive toolkit to understand things like action at a distance. So human logic and reason, like our ability to observe, is imo also limited and flawed. Utility based - good enough to get the evolutionary job done.
If I get alzheimers for example, and my brain gradually stops functioning properly, my reasoning will start to fail, along with memory and other functions which make up a coherent model of my world and my self, and the patterns of interactions between my self and the world. My model will change, I will still try to string a coherent story together, moment by moment, but I will look irrational to an observer. Without a properly functioning memory my sense of my own identity will change, more radically as brain functions decline. My sense of time, too, of how the world works, of what other people mean to me. All correlated to brain systems. That doesn't look like there is some infinite Self which happens to currently be inhabiting a finite deteriorating body. Or at least it doesn't suggest a need to invoke such a thing to me.
Much of this sounds about right to me. Only a fool would think there is no brain/mind correlation, or no evolutionary path in the emergence of the brain and its mind. If one stays the course and thinks like an empiricist through and through, then there is really no where to go from here. But then, at this point, one has not even begun to think philosophically.
First, keep in mind the argument above. It is not the case that a brain that is useful at solving survival and reproductive problems is therefore a "survival and reproductive" brain. Genetic mutation is not a Godlike teleology putting a thing to task. And I mean not at all, not in the least, any more than my arm is a sewing instrument because it can sew. It is free to do many things and sewing is one, and there is nothing of a "sewing nature" that defines what it is. Consider this reasoning as it applies to a brain. There is no evolutionary brain/mind. Such a thing grew into existence and
incidentally was able to survive and reproduce better than competitors. Its nature
is only what is revealed in an analysis of what is there.
Thus, rationality, memory and logic are not to be understood as evolutionary faculties. Reason is exactly as it appears to be, no more, no less. It is indeed very useful.
I consider this to be a rather important premise, and i t is not the kind of thing evolutionists take issue with for all know random mutations are entirely, by definition, arbitrary to practical purpose, or any purpose. They simply come into existence.
Second, this analysis of what is there at the level of basic questions is where philosophy begins.
One simply has to put aside all extraneous discussions, for the point here is purely descriptive. That is what phenomenology is, famouly called the phenomenological reduction or epoche, by Husserl. Behold what lies before you as it presents itself. It is exactly what a scientist does: observation comes first. The self is simply there to be observed, but here, it is not an empirical observation, but an apriori observation, that is, structures in the conscious world. See the above account, first paragraph.
I get the difficulty in trying to get a handle on this. But we do have a way. As I've outlined, if we look at brains and how they've evolved in our particular species, we have a very graspable explanation for why our particular species is the way it is. So what you're talking about is the human sense of self. Not the dog sense of self, or the monkey or moth. And the specific difficulty is to do with conscious experience. The body part of my self is not mysterious in this way, it's consciousness. The first person experiencing aspect of being a self. Which it's likely only highly complex evolved species, which need to integrate lots of subsystems, have evolved.
I do see the strong temptation to refer the entire issue to evolution, but I have to say it does not avail here. Consider that an evolutionary process is about
what is produced over millions of years, so the only way to understand what this is, is by examining it as it is, and to restrict analysis to "the things themselves" as Husserl put it (not Kantian thing in itself, note). This puts the theory of evolution in the same classification as any other science, and these are being put aside because what they do entirely presupposes the self that produces them with its logic and language and interpretative constitution. The two, empirical studies and phenomenology, for all sciences are simply an extension of the everyday way we have of relating to the world. Here, we are trying to understand the self, the agency that in the act of apprehending the world, conditions the world, constitutes it.
When you think of it this way, we can start of get a handle on the notion of self. If not an understanding of consciousious.
Not at all.
[I struggled with the infinity stuff you ended with, and have run out of steam. So I'll finish here for now.]
Well, it's the question of asking what finitude is. What is its nature? Why do we when stretching our thoughts and intuitions outward reach a limit? Look at it in strict physicalist terms: we reach a limit because we are a brain, and a brain has limits, obvious ones, like the physical boundaries of its mass. In fact, from an empirical scientist's pov, isn't this exactly what finitude is all about? Neil deGrasse Tyson would applaud! And he would likely retreat from the matter after this. Many post Heideggarian philosophers actually
begin here.
It is a very hard matter to wrap you mind around, for understanding is getting familiar, and there is little familiarity on this. takes time and exposure. At any rate, all of the questions, the termination of inquiry at every turn at the basic level, the self referential, or, deferential nature of knowledge, the wonder one experiences looking up at the clear night sky: the awesome reality of eternity is revealed there, in all these things. It is why metaphysics is not inherently nonsense.
Finitude. How is it that finitude intrudes upon infinity? Cancels it? Surely, infinity is the reality, and finitude is the limitation of reality. Where is one, really? How does this openness impose itself on everyday affairs? And this is the real rub: If our finitude is "really" infinitude, then the brain that is finitely conceived is, actually an infinite brain, nd the self, housed within the brain, is actually infinite, as are all things. This certainly does not mean we understand what this is about, but it has to be understood that the brain is conceived and apperceived IN the mind/self FIRST. Indeed, that physical thing out there is never experienced at all.
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