Personal identity-"The Self"

[thrasymachus]

Yes I agree - depending on your definition of Self. To me the definition involves some experiential sense of being Me. We can't observe that in a brain, but we can note correlations between what my experience of being me is like to what is going on in my brain. There is some sort of relationship between my brain processes, and my experiential states - the 'mind-body' relationship.


This can help us get a handle on why we are the way we are. Why our experiencing of being a Self is the way it is. Because evolution 'works on' physical brains to help us adapt and survive in ways we can understand. A very simple example, it is evolutionarily useful to feel hungry when we need calories, to motivate us to eat; or to feel pain when we stick a hand in a fire, to avoid injury. Evolution gives us that type of explanation for what it's like to be a human Self, why we experience hunger, pain and presumably everything else if neural correlation always holds.


If I think what the experience of specifically being a Self, a Me, is like, it's the experiential sense of being a discrete being with a unified field of consciousness, located in space and time with a first person point of view correlated with this body. Who experiences interacting with the 'outside world', in ways which make sense in evolutionary terms.

Right, the "experiential" self. What else is there? Interesting question about evolution: If an organism's environment calls for physical strength, then we would see a lot of muscle, and the process that put that muscle on would random gene mutations, whereby weaker mutation pools would die out and the stronger would survive. Pretty straight forward.

But a closer look: The what of survival and reproduction as it is not determined by the evolution, but is rather there as a manifest trait that either survives or not. The "giveness" of possibilities is outside this process. So, the self as an emerging entity is not qualitatively determined by evolution, but is only a surviving set of characteristics. Also, what has for a human self emerged is "open" and this openness is very conducive to survival and reproduction. Openness is not like brute strength where there is a matching of survival and reproductive need with the evolutionary response. Openness is without a nature, and it allows us to be different from pigs and cows and even different from the evolutionary process as a selective "tool" for in the "freedom" of openness, nothing steps forth to make a claim. All, rather, are there to be claimed or not, and this is our freedom.

What emerges in this freedom are the institutions of the self. We "create" teachers, surgeons, games, and in general, our terms of engagement.

Obviously, evolution makes sense, but it seems to be very limited in defining the "open" self in its daytodayness.

Sorry I don't understand this, can you re-phrase it?

Physical reductive explanations always beg the question, what do you mean by physical? Experience, the idea generally goes, is emergent in one way or another, of something more fundamentally "real" and our experiences are REALLY just this other underlying Reality. Trouble with this is that this underlying reality is presented to us IN experience, too! Talk about what experience is grounded in that is not experience is farcical. Experience is the foundation, not anything else.

I didn't mention that. Maybe, I'm not sure. Nobody knows the nature of the mind-body relationship, including me. We can note correlations, but we don't know the reason for them. It might be the case that conscious experience is a novel emergent property of certain material processes - namely brains. That's sort of analagous in terms of the processes of a material substrate giving rise to something of a very different nature which can process information in ways which are representative/meaningful to us. But Searle convincingly makes the point in his Chinese Room thought experiment ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room ) that conscious experience isn't a necessary property of the computer itself. So the analogy is not apparently explanatory or nail the mind-body relationship.

Material processes? Not that this is wrong, but any material process that lies outside of experience is going to be metaphysical. Usually scientists just doesn't care about this; but then, nor do they contradict this. It's just not their field of interest.

The Searle Chinese room: The self is certainly not a grammatical structure. I remember Pagoksa in South Korea, a Buddhist temple, and one of the monks came out and spoke to me. He said, you want to know what Buddhists think of enlightenment? And he threw his arms out sort of dramatically, as if to say, here I am. An utterly wordless response, yet it was clear that speaking wasn't the point; in fact, speaking leads away from the direct, intuited sense of pure presence, which is abiding in all we say and do in our everydayness, our "Buddha nature" which is always already there, our actuality beneath the speaking, planning, conversing, complaining. Reason and its concepts are a train wreck when they run into the actual.
So it is when computers "talk".

Hmmm I don't think that follows. I was meaning trivial there to point out that physicalist descriptions of brain processes don't feel like they do justice to what the meaningfulness of conscious experience entails. Not only that describing the neural activity of C Fibres is nothing like describing pain. But that conscious experience is what gives everything meaning. It's not only radically different, it's what makes existence important, meaningful, makes it matter. The two things are of an essentially different nature in that most significant respect.

I got the impression that you were saying evolution bequeathed us trivializing "limitations and flaws" and we were rather stuck there. I want to say that evolution is simply out of its depth in discussing matters of the self. Unless, that is, if all one has in mind is how an trait might have been "chosen" by natural selection, which is a narrow course of analysis. On the one hand, language presents the world so we can work out its problems, and everything is a problem, and it does provide passage into the depths of the soul (so to speak, or, not so figuratively if you like). I mean, a feral person, I could argue, someone without language could never thematically make the move into the broader or deeper thoughts of the self. On the other, there is this strange opacity that language constructs that keeps meaning at bay, keeps the world from presenting its fullness. C-fibers is a very useful concept, but, I would say, not so much for describing the self.

But that doesn't mean conscious experience didn't emerge from physical processes as a function of evolutionary utility. That this is the complete explanation for the existence of conscious experience itself. And evolution provides a complete explanation for the way humans experience being selves. It feels to us so essentially incongruous, but it still might be true. Looking elsewhere might be a fools errand, based on this feeling it can't be all there is to it. We don't know.

Regardless, I'm suggesting evolution can apparently fully explain the specific nature of human consciousness (and cat consciousness and parrot and haddock consciousness, etc). And we can understand this by looking at how evolution molded brains, which conscious states correlate with. That's the handle it gives us on this, but we don't know if that's the full explanation, or even the most significant part. However, it is an explanation we can reliably work with, and study.

And I don't think any other approach gives us that. Without understanding the mind-body relationship, what other more reliable or informative option do we have?

Don't know what you mean by "complete explanation" if you also hold that "conscious experience is what gives everything meaning." Why not let the self be what it is without underpinning it at all with something else? Of course, this makes all of science and human knowledge sit upon nothing, but not quite: we are still here, and what we are is given, and this given is not invented by history or practical need; it is not like a government, or an administrative structure that gets its definition from the human imagination. Our being here with all its affairs, attachments, institutions, caring possesses the basis what we are. Physicality is a vacuous term. Being in love is not. How could the former possibly subsume the latter?

[Gertie]

Thras

But a closer look: The what of survival and reproduction as it is not determined by the evolution, but is rather there as a manifest trait that either survives or not. The "giveness" of possibilities is outside this process. So, the self as an emerging entity is not qualitatively determined by evolution, but is only a surviving set of characteristics. Also, what has for a human self emerged is "open" and this openness is very conducive to survival and reproduction. Openness is not like brute strength where there is a matching of survival and reproductive need with the evolutionary response. Openness is without a nature, and it allows us to be different from pigs and cows and even different from the evolutionary process as a selective "tool" for in the "freedom" of openness, nothing steps forth to make a claim. All, rather, are there to be claimed or not, and this is our freedom.

Sorry but I'm finding your point here difficult to parse. I'm not sure what you mean by the ''giveness of possibilities'', ''not qualiatively determined'' , ''openness' and ''nothing steps forth to make a claim''.

If you mean that the evolution of consciousness opens up new aspects to the world, including all that being a Subject entails (qualiative meaning, value, agency, self-directed purpose, etc) which evolution can't explain, I agree.

But still, the way brains evolved will give an explanation for why we value what we value, the utility of agency and purpose etc. It won't explain the nature of meaningfulness itself. Of the experiential quality of life. Only 'what it's for' in functional terms.

Physical reductive explanations always beg the question, what do you mean by physical?

Fair point. By ''physical'' I mean the scientific model of everything the world is made of (material stuff) and the forces which are involved in its processes.

This model does not include, predict or explain experience. For now at least, there is an 'explanatory gap'.

So evolution gives us a handle on why, as social mammals, humans care for our off-spring for example, but not the how of the qualiative experience of caring at all. The qualiative nature of experience is a mystery.

Experience, the idea generally goes, is emergent in one way or another, of something more fundamentally "real" and our experiences are REALLY just this other underlying Reality. Trouble with this is that this underlying reality is presented to us IN experience, too! Talk about what experience is grounded in that is not experience is farcical. Experience is the foundation, not anything else.

Yeah that's a weird thing to get your head round! It doesn't mean that what we experience via sensory perception isn't a real external world, just that we can't know for certain. Or rely on the accuracy and completeness of the representation. Experience is what all knowledge is founded in, but not necessarily all that exists. So it doesn't mean experience can't be an emergent property of what exists independently of it.

Ie it doesn't mean experience is ontologically fundamental.

Material processes? Not that this is wrong, but any material process that lies outside of experience is going to be metaphysical. Usually scientists just doesn't care about this; but then, nor do they contradict this. It's just not their field of interest.

Can you clarify what you're getting at here?

The Searle Chinese room: The self is certainly not a grammatical structure. I remember Pagoksa in South Korea, a Buddhist temple, and one of the monks came out and spoke to me. He said, you want to know what Buddhists think of enlightenment? And he threw his arms out sort of dramatically, as if to say, here I am. An utterly wordless response, yet it was clear that speaking wasn't the point; in fact, speaking leads away from the direct, intuited sense of pure presence, which is abiding in all we say and do in our everydayness, our "Buddha nature" which is always already there, our actuality beneath the speaking, planning, conversing, complaining. Reason and its concepts are a train wreck when they run into the actual.
So it is when computers "talk".

Searle is making the point that 'syntactica'l physical processes are different to 'semantic' experiential meaning. Language here is being used as a more of a metaphor I think, to signify that representations and symbols can be constructed by physical processes (like the way our sensory brain systems configure in ways which represent the world, encode information via patterns of interactions) which can do a functional job, but can only be meaningful as experience. Computers can do the information coding processes, but it's meaningless to them. Searle is saying there is therefore a difference between physical processes and experience. (Identity Theorists who claim ''mental states are brain states'' need to address this). Searle does believe experience is reducible to biological brain processes tho (and possibly other material processes), which he calls Biological Naturalism.

Hmmm I don't think that follows. I was meaning trivial there to point out that physicalist descriptions of brain processes don't feel like they do justice to what the meaningfulness of conscious experience entails. Not only that describing the neural activity of C Fibres is nothing like describing pain. But that conscious experience is what gives everything meaning. It's not only radically different, it's what makes existence important, meaningful, makes it matter. The two things are of an essentially different nature in that most significant respect.

I got the impression that you were saying evolution bequeathed us trivializing "limitations and flaws" and we were rather stuck there.

I'll go with both senses.

to be continued!

[thrasymachus]

Gertie wrote
Sorry but I'm finding your point here difficult to parse. I'm not sure what you mean by the ''giveness of possibilities'', ''not qualiatively determined'' , ''openness' and ''nothing steps forth to make a claim''.

If you mean that the evolution of consciousness opens up new aspects to the world, including all that being a Subject entails (qualiative meaning, value, agency, self-directed purpose, etc) which evolution can't explain, I agree.

But still, the way brains evolved will give an explanation for why we value what we value, the utility of agency and purpose etc. It won't explain the nature of meaningfulness itself. Of the experiential quality of life. Only 'what it's for' in functional terms.

What I have in mind is this: There you have that DNA in the primordial muck producing primitive organisms. These survive and reproduce according to their viability in their environments, and this makes viability a very simple determination. But what actually results out of a DNA mutation itself has a nature that simply emerges in the meiotic process. Random errors have nothing to do with what actually emerges, for the "selection" process is not qualitative. The quality that emerges is entirely off the chart of what can be explained, and when it manifests, it is either carried over into future gene pools, or it is terminated. Evolution can do no more than this. It's a bit like the bouncer who either lets guests in or denies entry. There is a standard in place that makes the determination, but what the actuality of the prospective guest is is not determined by the very simply process of elimination. In other words, evolution did not "make" the smells we receive. These were just givens, and while valuing was certainly "chosen" over not valuing as it is apparently useful for surviving and reproducing, the "what IS it" of valuing is not to be understood. We just know it was useful for the species.

Fair point. By ''physical'' I mean the scientific model of everything the world is made of (material stuff) and the forces which are involved in its processes.

This model does not include, predict or explain experience. For now at least, there is an 'explanatory gap'.

So evolution gives us a handle on why, as social mammals, humans care for our off-spring for example, but not the how of the qualiative experience of caring at all. The qualiative nature of experience is a mystery.

I quite agree. To say this is quite a step forward. The "explanatory gap" is filled by an assumption that things are well in hand, science is on the job and explanations are solid, defensible, not to be questioned. But, as Kuhn points out, these assumptions are really paradigms, constantly changing, and grounded in nothing beyond paradigmatic stability, which is fleeting.

Yeah that's a weird thing to get your head round! It doesn't mean that what we experience via sensory perception isn't a real external world, just that we can't know for certain. Or rely on the accuracy and completeness of the representation. Experience is what all knowledge is founded in, but not necessarily all that exists. So it doesn't mean experience can't be an emergent property of what exists independently of it.

Ie it doesn't mean experience is ontologically fundamental.

Very hard to get your head around, and it is clear to me that it gets harder the more you look. I just ask the simple question, what can I know outside of experience? One can't just say, well, look, it really looks like my knowledge of that book being on the table grasps something about affairs that are true whether my experience is there or not, but what about the logic of the assertion that is the structure of the way "the book is on the table" is a knowledge claim? thought is logical thought, has a form, like "if....then...". is the conditional and "certainly not Harry,' is a negation. But there is no logic outside of experience.

I am sure experience is not an exhaustive ontology. But what is not experience needs to be treated for what it is in our world: transcendence. The stickiest of wickets, but there are philosophers who put this matter front and center. Then there are those mystics.......What IS nirvana, anyway? Like being in love, perhaps, only many times more. But this goes to value, affect, the oddest things in the universe, by my thinking.

Can you clarify what you're getting at here?

No more than the above. One says "material substratum" for example, and I say, what is that? and the best that can be proffered is talk about what is not the substratum, but what the substratum underlies, particulars. Material as an ontology has no predicative possibilities, so nothing to say, which is like saying it is a meaningless concept. Of course, there is metaphysics, which would make this something on a par with God.

Searle is making the point that 'syntactica'l physical processes are different to 'semantic' experiential meaning. Language here is being used as a more of a metaphor I think, to signify that representations and symbols can be constructed by physical processes (like the way our sensory brain systems configure in ways which represent the world, encode information via patterns of interactions) which can do a functional job, but can only be meaningful as experience. Computers can do the information coding processes, but it's meaningless to them. Searle is saying there is therefore a difference between physical processes and experience. (Identity Theorists who claim ''mental states are brain states'' need to address this). Searle does believe experience is reducible to biological brain processes tho (and possibly other material processes), which he calls Biological Naturalism.

Right, and I always thought the Turing test was nonsense, and Searle was right. Reducible? Certainly a dangerous word. Searle, from what I've read, and this a strong claim coming from just a non professional philosophy aficionado, is way off the mark in his understanding of philosophical priorities. But this claim leads to areas of ethics and aesthetics which are involved and, well, not well received. Right up there with religion.

[Gertie]

Thras

Gertie wrote
Sorry but I'm finding your point here difficult to parse. I'm not sure what you mean by the ''giveness of possibilities'', ''not qualiatively determined'' , ''openness' and ''nothing steps forth to make a claim''.

If you mean that the evolution of consciousness opens up new aspects to the world, including all that being a Subject entails (qualiative meaning, value, agency, self-directed purpose, etc) which evolution can't explain, I agree.

But still, the way brains evolved will give an explanation for why we value what we value, the utility of agency and purpose etc. It won't explain the nature of meaningfulness itself. Of the experiential quality of life. Only 'what it's for' in functional terms.

What I have in mind is this: There you have that DNA in the primordial muck producing primitive organisms. These survive and reproduce according to their viability in their environments, and this makes viability a very simple determination. But what actually results out of a DNA mutation itself has a nature that simply emerges in the meiotic process. Random errors have nothing to do with what actually emerges, for the "selection" process is not qualitative. The quality that emerges is entirely off the chart of what can be explained, and when it manifests, it is either carried over into future gene pools, or it is terminated. Evolution can do no more than this. It's a bit like the bouncer who either lets guests in or denies entry. There is a standard in place that makes the determination, but what the actuality of the prospective guest is is not determined by the very simply process of elimination. In other words, evolution did not "make" the smells we receive. These were just givens, and while valuing was certainly "chosen" over not valuing as it is apparently useful for surviving and reproducing, the "what IS it" of valuing is not to be understood. We just know it was useful for the species.

I'd say value, meaning, mattering and all that goes along with it only comes into the world with the arrival of conscious experience. It's possible conscious experience is fundamental and has always been there in some form, and has some 'laws' or ways of operating which contributes to the way it manifests in relation to the material aspects of the world. This might imbue evolution with some teleological, value-driven direction. The problem is such speculation looks untestable.

Where-as scientific physicalism is a flawed and limited model model, but it works, in that it gives us a way to interpret the contents of our experience we can inter-subjectively agree on. My question is - what better approaches to do we have? Within that model , we understand that things can go awry in genetic reproduction, and I assume the ways they can go awry is explainable, as is selection for fitness. And so we can understand why feeling hungry when we need calories or pain when we put a hand in the fire is useful in evolutionary terms. Why as mammals we care for our helpless off-spring, and we're getting an idea of how this caring spread to others, the mutations which brought it about.

What can't be explained by the physicalist model is if experience itself comes into existence via some kind of DNA mutation in physical processes - if it is emergent. But we can see it is a good fit with that explanation. And we'd assume it started as a tiny advantage, a few cells becoming sensitive to vibrations or light changes perhaps. Maybe other types of mutations popped up and disappeared, we might have had different senses, like bat radar, electro-magnetic tingling or whatever. If it's possible to develop experiencing AI, we won't know 'what it's like' to be a conscious machine, it might be machines value completely different things, are 'hungry' for electricity, or way weirder stuff, who knows.

We also know that some conscious species don't behave as if they have any 'values' except survival. So we can't automatically assume that what our particular species sees as valuable and meaningful is a necessary inherent feature of experience. This is a problem for approaches based on introspection, they are necessarily biased.

Fair point. By ''physical'' I mean the scientific model of everything the world is made of (material stuff) and the forces which are involved in its processes.
This model does not include, predict or explain experience. For now at least, there is an 'explanatory gap'.

So evolution gives us a handle on why, as social mammals, humans care for our off-spring for example, but not the how of the qualiative experience of caring at all. The qualiative nature of experience is a mystery.

I quite agree. To say this is quite a step forward. The "explanatory gap" is filled by an assumption that things are well in hand, science is on the job and explanations are solid, defensible, not to be questioned. But, as Kuhn points out, these assumptions are really paradigms, constantly changing, and grounded in nothing beyond paradigmatic stability, which is fleeting.

Again, fair point. Tho some people assume that, some don't, there's no consensus. It's one of those areas where the more you look into it, the more you realise why no Science Of Consciousness has been settled on. Some think an explanation will require a paradigm shift, I'm open to that. I'm pretty sure that our current scientific model isn't complete at least, some new understanding of emergence might save it, it's an open question.

Yeah that's a weird thing to get your head round! It doesn't mean that what we experience via sensory perception isn't a real external world, just that we can't know for certain. Or rely on the accuracy and completeness of the representation. Experience is what all knowledge is founded in, but not necessarily all that exists. So it doesn't mean experience can't be an emergent property of what exists independently of it.
Ie it doesn't mean experience is ontologically fundamental.

Very hard to get your head around, and it is clear to me that it gets harder the more you look. I just ask the simple question, what can I know outside of experience? One can't just say, well, look, it really looks like my knowledge of that book being on the table grasps something about affairs that are true whether my experience is there or not, but what about the logic of the assertion that is the structure of the way "the book is on the table" is a knowledge claim? thought is logical thought, has a form, like "if....then...". is the conditional and "certainly not Harry,' is a negation. But there is no logic outside of experience.

Agreed. The state of affairs of the world seems to have patterns independent of us which we formulate into notions like Logic, and as long as seems to work we stick with it. When our Logic fails, we re-formulate.

I am sure experience is not an exhaustive ontology. But what is not experience needs to be treated for what it is in our world: transcendence. The stickiest of wickets, but there are philosophers who put this matter front and center. Then there are those mystics.......What IS nirvana, anyway? Like being in love, perhaps, only many times more. But this goes to value, affect, the oddest things in the universe, by my thinking.

I don't know if we'll be able to escape inter-subjective agreement on the nature of the model of the world (including our Selves). We see progress in science, in kit which helps open new peep-holes, tools like maths and logic which seem to have a reliability about them, until they don't. But then the next discovery might completely overturn that toolkit. Personally I'm all for finding your bliss how ever you can, but I don't put stock in the sort of mysticism which claims to have found pathways to ontological enlightment by altering states of consciousness.

Can you clarify what you're getting at here?

No more than the above. One says "material substratum" for example, and I say, what is that? and the best that can be proffered is talk about what is not the substratum, but what the substratum underlies, particulars. Material as an ontology has no predicative possibilities, so nothing to say, which is like saying it is a meaningless concept. Of course, there is metaphysics, which would make this something on a par with God.

I don't think that way, and find it hard to grasp. My approach is that my experience is necessarily paramount to me, it's everything, and I want it to be as fulfilling and good as poss. But solipsism aside, there are billions and billions of experiencing creatures on the earth, in this blink of history. And I am barely significant. Both these things appear to be true, subjectively the world is within me, objectively I am within the world. Subjective experience and material stuff seem to be true as far as I'm able to comprehend, happy and sad, all sort of contradictory, awkward things seem to just be the way things are. Reality isn't obliged to meet our expectations, comfortableness, tidiness. If it turns out I'm in reality the happenstance of genetic mutations, reducible to particles and waves and forces which will disperse, that doesn't make me or what I value any less meaningful.

Searle is making the point that 'syntactica'l physical processes are different to 'semantic' experiential meaning. Language here is being used as a more of a metaphor I think, to signify that representations and symbols can be constructed by physical processes (like the way our sensory brain systems configure in ways which represent the world, encode information via patterns of interactions) which can do a functional job, but can only be meaningful as experience. Computers can do the information coding processes, but it's meaningless to them. Searle is saying there is therefore a difference between physical processes and experience. (Identity Theorists who claim ''mental states are brain states'' need to address this). Searle does believe experience is reducible to biological brain processes tho (and possibly other material processes), which he calls Biological Naturalism.

Right, and I always thought the Turing test was nonsense, and Searle was right. Reducible? Certainly a dangerous word. Searle, from what I've read, and this a strong claim coming from just a non professional philosophy aficionado, is way off the mark in his understanding of philosophical priorities. But this claim leads to areas of ethics and aesthetics which are involved and, well, not well received. Right up there with religion.

Not well received? How so? As regards morality, that is only meaningful to creatures with experience, I think once it's acknowledged that it's the qualiative nature of experience which gives morality meaning, philosophy can knuckle down to sorting out the details.

[HJCarden]

My question would be even if you had the same body, a consciousness and the same memories what if there is a unique self/soul/essence that can't be transported so one had no emotional responses to those memories. Couldn't the same argument be used to Locke's belief that it is our memories that make us what we are whereas maybe it is our response to those memories that make us what we are.

For some more information that might help you discovering this subject, I would suggest Sartre's work on the self, and the idea that the self is something that is often not best perceived from within. Imagine someone who dresses as if they are Napoleon. They learn French, speak of military strategy and invading Russia in the winter, and truly believe that they are Napoleon. However, we all know this person isn't Napoleon, we're not idiots. Therefore, we have a better access to the "true self" of this person than they do. So part of this question I believe depends on if outside observers would agree with us. Would your friends still see you as the same after this teleportation method?

[thrasymachus]

Gertie wrote
I'd say value, meaning, mattering and all that goes along with it only comes into the world with the arrival of conscious experience. It's possible conscious experience is fundamental and has always been there in some form, and has some 'laws' or ways of operating which contributes to the way it manifests in relation to the material aspects of the world. This might imbue evolution with some teleological, value-driven direction. The problem is such speculation looks untestable.

well, consciousness has been around for a very long time, certainly, but I don't look at it quite like this, that is I don't think it matters when it arose in evolution. I am more interested in the qualities exhibited that are present and wht this tells us about the world. They could have sprung up in a single night and they would be no more or less than what they are. Even of one is an unrelenting scientific realist, there is still no ground for dismissing what the self is in all its "subjectivity": the subject is what the world does at time t in world w, and to draw up a theory of everything, the self is not only there, in the physics, albeit problematically so, but surely the most salient feature of it. One of the most inane parts of the assumption that science is the be all and end all in a comprehensive analysis of "the world" is that it wants to take scientific paradigms and fit the self into them. This is what paradigms do, subsume particulars under principles. It gives science interpretative hegemony, forcing us to think that mind, ethics, aesthetics, thought, meaning, value are only what science can understand, rather than allowing each their due, to borrow a term, equiprimordiality: All that is there should be understood as there for all that it is. Now, you can say, of course you already do this, realizing the science is incomplete, best guess, a work in progress and so on, BUT: the interpretative bias is already in place.

To me, this is a singularly important thing to see. This scientific bias rules over qualitative questions, when only quantitative ones are truly within sciences purview. This is why I wanted to make clear what evolution explains: It can no better explain what an emotion is than a physicist can explain what a force "is". Physicists watch, measure, compare, predict, test, but none of this is for philosophical affective ontology. A force, if pushed to the limits of analysis OUT of the familiar contexts of measurement and the rest, is simply a mystery, a given.

Science secretly rules the ontology of the question "what is it?" of any and all that stands before us, from forces, clouds, sensory production to torture and horror, delight and bliss, . I think we do this unconsciously, when asked a question that means to go to a more penetrating analysis, we by default bring science in, thereby looking away from what it is that is there, in the world.

Where-as scientific physicalism is a flawed and limited model model, but it works, in that it gives us a way to interpret the contents of our experience we can inter-subjectively agree on. My question is - what better approaches to do we have? Within that model , we understand that things can go awry in genetic reproduction, and I assume the ways they can go awry is explainable, as is selection for fitness. And so we can understand why feeling hungry when we need calories or pain when we put a hand in the fire is useful in evolutionary terms. Why as mammals we care for our helpless off-spring, and we're getting an idea of how this caring spread to others, the mutations which brought it about.

Sure, it works. I can't imagine arguing against science and its method, which I think is non-dismissible since it is part of the structure of thought itself. And if the self were a stone or a lamp then science could exhaust all that is there paradigmatically. But the self is not anything like these. A self is experience, and there is temporal structure of conceiving, acknowledging, anticipating, fearing, engaging; perception is really apperception, and there is this transient present of the self's apperceiving engagement that moves constantly toward the future, issuing from the past; there is aesthetics, value, ethics, caring, questions, torture, wretched misery, gorgeous blisses, thought, understanding, and so on. Evolution can tell us why these were chosen in an analysis of environments and survival conditions, but, per above, it says nothing of what these are. The self is, if you like, chosen, but the choosing did not make a self.

What can't be explained by the physicalist model is if experience itself comes into existence via some kind of DNA mutation in physical processes - if it is emergent. But we can see it is a good fit with that explanation. And we'd assume it started as a tiny advantage, a few cells becoming sensitive to vibrations or light changes perhaps. Maybe other types of mutations popped up and disappeared, we might have had different senses, like bat radar, electro-magnetic tingling or whatever. If it's possible to develop experiencing AI, we won't know 'what it's like' to be a conscious machine, it might be machines value completely different things, are 'hungry' for electricity, or way weirder stuff, who knows.

Right. And it would be foolish to deny the value of this kind of work. And it is interesting to imagine other types of systems with alternative tastes and desires. Interesting, but it doesn't reveal what a self is. This takes an examination of the self, the way it is put together as it shows itself, and the analysis of a feature, cognition, affect, and the rest, in terms of its DNA, were we to know this exhaustively would give us a genetic profile, and this could be used in a number of meaningful ways, but it would not tell us what a self is. To understand a self, one has to observe a self in all its revealed properties.

We also know that some conscious species don't behave as if they have any 'values' except survival. So we can't automatically assume that what our particular species sees as valuable and meaningful is a necessary inherent feature of experience. This is a problem for approaches based on introspection, they are necessarily biased.

I think this goes to the point I am trying to make: What survives and reproduces simply has to outcompete the competition. That's it. Many things that have nothing to do with this are freighted along with those that are determinant. The Evolved self has a great deal that is even evolutionarily arbitrary. But I take the matter further: It is all evolutionarily arbitrary in terms of the "what it is".

Again, fair point. Tho some people assume that, some don't, there's no consensus. It's one of those areas where the more you look into it, the more you realise why no Science Of Consciousness has been settled on. Some think an explanation will require a paradigm shift, I'm open to that. I'm pretty sure that our current scientific model isn't complete at least, some new understanding of emergence might save it, it's an open question.

But the current scientific model will have to become phenomenological in order to account for the self, that is, to simply describe it, as you would the a volcano or tidal events. What is a tide? We first observe tides' behavior, then look to causes, and all of this can get very technical, even down to a chemical analysis. What is a self?

First observe: there is this me, and every thought that appears is somehow summoned in a field called experience, and these thoughts have structure such that concepts synthesize particulars so a particular is designated by a priniciple, so when I say, look, a bald eagle! the appearance before me is recognized by a general term. this synthetic process in the self is what underlies all thought, and when we think of a self we are thinking, and all thought is in essentially synthetic, which is the subsuming of particulars under a rule or principle. So when I even apprehend the self at all it is done THROUGH this synthetic conceptualizing, that is, indirectly, and so the issue of what the self is (along with all other things) goes to what is acknowledged indirectly through language, logic, synthetic subsumption, on the one hand, and what is there, in pure presence. And this goes to......

This is just a miniscule sample of what an analysis of a self would be from a phenomenological descriptive pov. I think this kind of thing (which gets massively intricate) is the only way to really see the self as it stands there, not at all unlike what it would be to "observe" anything. This "self world" of course, evolved and has a "physical" brain correlation (but keep in mind, heh, heh: one can only apprehend the brain-thing through the interpretative medium of thought, language, experience, and thus you have the basic perennial philosophical paradox of knowing).

I don't know if we'll be able to escape inter-subjective agreement on the nature of the model of the world (including our Selves). We see progress in science, in kit which helps open new peep-holes, tools like maths and logic which seem to have a reliability about them, until they don't. But then the next discovery might completely overturn that toolkit. Personally I'm all for finding your bliss how ever you can, but I don't put stock in the sort of mysticism which claims to have found pathways to ontological enlightment by altering states of consciousness.

so regarding that bliss and other affective or otherwise "observable" content of the self, this kind of phnomenological analysis does not put all things of the self under the microscope; rather, it puts the microscope UNDER an analysis of the self: What Is a microscope? In an examination of the self, we find these conceptual principles putting sensory data into action, into judgment in the world. I say, there is a microscope! and the first thing analysis discovers is meaning. There is caring, interest, combined with the synthetic unity imposed upon the affair in the experience. There is no consciousness of the microscope prior to the interest arising, then in the continuity of experiential events there, the microscope and its possible application rises up and is now present. How is it I know this as a microscope? It is already there when the imposition arises, as it is with all dealiong in the world. I cannot apprehend a thing "spontaneously" (though it seems nothing is truly spontaneous) unless there is an antecedent body of thought that is always already there to be deployed. This novel event in which the "microscope concept" is deployed is also in time and space, and there is required a severing of prior thought......

And so on. It may sound tedious, but then, take any book of empirical science and you will find tedium. Here, it is phenomenological "science" and an exploration to the descriptive details of the self as it is in itself.

Sorry about that. If you were to read Husserl's Ideas I you would find just how this goes, only done by a legendary philosopher.

Notice how this is not an empirical analysis, but a structural analysis, and it does not tell us an answer to the :what is it" question either; but it does allow these contents of the self take first place over the empirical, elevating experience ot an equal place in the "world" rather than reducing them to secondary status, refering to "that from which they emerged" or some other reductive talk.

I don't think that way, and find it hard to grasp. My approach is that my experience is necessarily paramount to me, it's everything, and I want it to be as fulfilling and good as poss. But solipsism aside, there are billions and billions of experiencing creatures on the earth, in this blink of history. And I am barely significant. Both these things appear to be true, subjectively the world is within me, objectively I am within the world. Subjective experience and material stuff seem to be true as far as I'm able to comprehend, happy and sad, all sort of contradictory, awkward things seem to just be the way things are. Reality isn't obliged to meet our expectations, comfortableness, tidiness. If it turns out I'm in reality the happenstance of genetic mutations, reducible to particles and waves and forces which will disperse, that doesn't make me or what I value any less meaningful.

Not sure why billions and billions would make you insignificant. Number is arbitrary to significance. Then what IS non arbitrary? Well, importance. What is this? Meaning, value, the joys and blisses and horrors and so forth. That you would feel you are insignificant in this way is exactly why science has to be reigned in, for science does move in the direction of reducing a self to the status of an object, and objects are, like grains of sand, or sacks of potatoes.

Most nihilists I run into think like this, "oh, the countless billions!" But this really entirely misses the point. A person is a self, and a self is the most extraordinary thing because it is the very center of meaning making; not so much dictionary meaning, but meaning in the palpable sense.

Cows and chickens, too? Yes, cows and chickens, too. I have no idea why any of us are born to suffer and die, but the determination of what it means to suffer and die does not rest with number nor any of the incidental entanglements we find ourselves in. It rests with meaning as such. As to our comforts and the rest, this is a question for metaethics. I different colored horse.

[Gertie]

Thras

Gertie wrote
I'd say value, meaning, mattering and all that goes along with it only comes into the world with the arrival of conscious experience. It's possible conscious experience is fundamental and has always been there in some form, and has some 'laws' or ways of operating which contributes to the way it manifests in relation to the material aspects of the world. This might imbue evolution with some teleological, value-driven direction. The problem is such speculation looks untestable.

well, consciousness has been around for a very long time, certainly, but I don't look at it quite like this, that is I don't think it matters when it arose in evolution. I am more interested in the qualities exhibited that are present and wht this tells us about the world. They could have sprung up in a single night and they would be no more or less than what they are. Even of one is an unrelenting scientific realist, there is still no ground for dismissing what the self is in all its "subjectivity": the subject is what the world does at time t in world w, and to draw up a theory of everything, the self is not only there, in the physics, albeit problematically so, but surely the most salient feature of it. One of the most inane parts of the assumption that science is the be all and end all in a comprehensive analysis of "the world" is that it wants to take scientific paradigms and fit the self into them. This is what paradigms do, subsume particulars under principles. It gives science interpretative hegemony, forcing us to think that mind, ethics, aesthetics, thought, meaning, value are only what science can understand, rather than allowing each their due, to borrow a term, equiprimordiality: All that is there should be understood as there for all that it is. Now, you can say, of course you already do this, realizing the science is incomplete, best guess, a work in progress and so on, BUT: the interpretative bias is already in place.

You can understand that experience is what brings everything meaningful into the world, and still appreciate the knowledge and insights the scientific method offers. It's not an either/or. And evolution can tell us why we have particular dispositions that can be valuable. For example we developed many social traits living in a small tribal setting which don't work well for the globally inter-dependent world we live in now. Understanding these mechanisms can help us mitigate negative anachronistic effects.

To me, this is a singularly important thing to see. This scientific bias rules over qualitative questions, when only quantitative ones are truly within sciences purview. This is why I wanted to make clear what evolution explains: It can no better explain what an emotion is than a physicist can explain what a force "is". Physicists watch, measure, compare, predict, test, but none of this is for philosophical affective ontology. A force, if pushed to the limits of analysis OUT of the familiar contexts of measurement and the rest, is simply a mystery, a given.

Agreed there is a paradigmatic difference between qualiative and quantitive. Hence the Hard Problem. I don't want to settle for experience being an impenetrable given tho. And noting correlation between brain activity and experience gives us a way in to learn more. It already tells us there is some kind of mind-body relationship. And that's given us the chance to think about experience as something which evolved in certain ways for certain types of reasons. That's hugely informative. And a potentially useful knowledge base for understanding ourselves. As is noting physical brain plasticity, that we aren't completely 'pre-programmed', that there are healthy and unhealthy ways for kids to grow up we can broadly identify. It can inform notions of volition and criminality. An understanding of the roots of our notions of right and wrong. And so on.

Science secretly rules the ontology of the question "what is it?" of any and all that stands before us, from forces, clouds, sensory production to torture and horror, delight and bliss, . I think we do this unconsciously, when asked a question that means to go to a more penetrating analysis, we by default bring science in, thereby looking away from what it is that is there, in the world.

Well it's impossible to see the world afresh like a young child every time you open your eyes. We all inevitably create models of the world. And the inter-subjective (aka ''objective'') one science offers provides us with a shared field in which to interact which works. That's incredibly valuable in innumerable ways. It's currently under some stress from post-modern analysis, and we can see how easy it is to crack the reliable shared framework it provides. Notions like ''my truth'',''my values'', cynicism about scientific claims re climate change, masks, vaccines, etc, conspiracy theories about institutions. Reason and science have offered a post-religious framework for individuals and societies, while 'Subjective' matters have been individualised and given less value, and perhaps we're undergoing a rebalancing. But it's an ad hoc one, and blowing up our enlightenment based social frameworks without a route to something better is looking perilous. So I come back to the same question - can you come up with something better?

Where-as scientific physicalism is a flawed and limited model model, but it works, in that it gives us a way to interpret the contents of our experience we can inter-subjectively agree on. My question is - what better approaches to do we have? Within that model , we understand that things can go awry in genetic reproduction, and I assume the ways they can go awry is explainable, as is selection for fitness. And so we can understand why feeling hungry when we need calories or pain when we put a hand in the fire is useful in evolutionary terms. Why as mammals we care for our helpless off-spring, and we're getting an idea of how this caring spread to others, the mutations which brought it about.

Sure, it works. I can't imagine arguing against science and its method, which I think is non-dismissible since it is part of the structure of thought itself. And if the self were a stone or a lamp then science could exhaust all that is there paradigmatically. But the self is not anything like these. A self is experience, and there is temporal structure of conceiving, acknowledging, anticipating, fearing, engaging; perception is really apperception, and there is this transient present of the self's apperceiving engagement that moves constantly toward the future, issuing from the past; there is aesthetics, value, ethics, caring, questions, torture, wretched misery, gorgeous blisses, thought, understanding, and so on. Evolution can tell us why these were chosen in an analysis of environments and survival conditions, but, per above, it says nothing of what these are. The self is, if you like, chosen, but the choosing did not make a self.

I think this can be put that science can help explain why human experience is the way it is, but can't explain why experience itself exists. Do you think that parsing misses something? For example do you think experience 'creates' time, rather than it is a way of experiencing stuff changing?

What can't be explained by the physicalist model is if experience itself comes into existence via some kind of DNA mutation in physical processes - if it is emergent. But we can see it is a good fit with that explanation. And we'd assume it started as a tiny advantage, a few cells becoming sensitive to vibrations or light changes perhaps. Maybe other types of mutations popped up and disappeared, we might have had different senses, like bat radar, electro-magnetic tingling or whatever. If it's possible to develop experiencing AI, we won't know 'what it's like' to be a conscious machine, it might be machines value completely different things, are 'hungry' for electricity, or way weirder stuff, who knows.

Right. And it would be foolish to deny the value of this kind of work. And it is interesting to imagine other types of systems with alternative tastes and desires. Interesting, but it doesn't reveal what a self is. This takes an examination of the self, the way it is put together as it shows itself, and the analysis of a feature, cognition, affect, and the rest, in terms of its DNA, were we to know this exhaustively would give us a genetic profile, and this could be used in a number of meaningful ways, but it would not tell us what a self is. To understand a self, one has to observe a self in all its revealed properties.

As I said previously, I think the sense of being a discrete, unified Me is explainable in terms of evolutionary utility. We are so complex, have so many different types of subsystems, our experience would be an incomprehensible cacophony of flickering sights, sounds, emotions, sensations, thoughts, memories, etc, without concurrently evolving some systems which make something useful and comprehensible out of that jumble. Hence we have a unified field of consciousness, the ability to focus and pay attention, we are able to correlate specific experience with specific body parts, with a first person point of view located in specific space and time. I'd suggest it is all these evolved features which add up to a sense of being a Me, a discrete, unified Subject-Self. Less complex creatures might have experience, say a moth might 'feel drawn to light', but not a sense of self as we think of it, or can reflect on.


The part science can't explain, seemingly in principle, is the existence of experience itself.

We also know that some conscious species don't behave as if they have any 'values' except survival. So we can't automatically assume that what our particular species sees as valuable and meaningful is a necessary inherent feature of experience. This is a problem for approaches based on introspection, they are necessarily biased.

I think this goes to the point I am trying to make: What survives and reproduces simply has to outcompete the competition. That's it. Many things that have nothing to do with this are freighted along with those that are determinant. The Evolved self has a great deal that is even evolutionarily arbitrary. But I take the matter further: It is all evolutionarily arbitrary in terms of the "what it is".

If I understand you correctly, I agree. It's hard to accept that meaning, value, everything that is worth existing for is arbitrary in that way. But maybe it is. We have this scientific account which implies that. What we don't have is a reliable alternative account to ground our sense of ''that can't be all there is!'' in. You can see certain types of religion as providing those sorts of answers, but then the obvious criticism is that's why we created them, to fulfil this need, rather than we are discovering something true about reality through them. Faith doesn't offer the type of reliability science does.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------


I'd like to home in on the following if you're game, because I struggle to grasp the terminology and maybe the concepts themselves. It will take me a while to parse what you're saying from here on, if you could put it as simply and clearly as you can that might help me.

If we're roughly in sync on the other stuff, this might be what I mean when I ask is there a more reliable approach to understanding experience. I'm sceptical, but I'd like to understand the argument. if you could lay the argument out simply for me? -


''But the current scientific model will have to become phenomenological in order to account for the self, that is, to simply describe it, as you would the a volcano or tidal events. What is a tide? We first observe tides' behavior, then look to causes, and all of this can get very technical, even down to a chemical analysis. What is a self?

First observe: there is this me, and every thought that appears is somehow summoned in a field called experience, and these thoughts have structure such that concepts synthesize particulars so a particular is designated by a priniciple, so when I say, look, a bald eagle! the appearance before me is recognized by a general term. this synthetic process in the self is what underlies all thought, and when we think of a self we are thinking, and all thought is in essentially synthetic, which is the subsuming of particulars under a rule or principle. So when I even apprehend the self at all it is done THROUGH this synthetic conceptualizing, that is, indirectly, and so the issue of what the self is (along with all other things) goes to what is acknowledged indirectly through language, logic, synthetic subsumption, on the one hand, and what is there, in pure presence. And this goes to......

This is just a miniscule sample of what an analysis of a self would be from a phenomenological descriptive pov. I think this kind of thing (which gets massively intricate) is the only way to really see the self as it stands there, not at all unlike what it would be to "observe" anything. This "self world" of course, evolved and has a "physical" brain correlation (but keep in mind, heh, heh: one can only apprehend the brain-thing through the interpretative medium of thought, language, experience, and thus you have the basic perennial philosophical paradox of knowing).....
...

so regarding that bliss and other affective or otherwise "observable" content of the self, this kind of phnomenological analysis does not put all things of the self under the microscope; rather, it puts the microscope UNDER an analysis of the self: What Is a microscope? In an examination of the self, we find these conceptual principles putting sensory data into action, into judgment in the world. I say, there is a microscope! and the first thing analysis discovers is meaning. There is caring, interest, combined with the synthetic unity imposed upon the affair in the experience. There is no consciousness of the microscope prior to the interest arising, then in the continuity of experiential events there, the microscope and its possible application rises up and is now present. How is it I know this as a microscope? It is already there when the imposition arises, as it is with all dealiong in the world. I cannot apprehend a thing "spontaneously" (though it seems nothing is truly spontaneous) unless there is an antecedent body of thought that is always already there to be deployed. This novel event in which the "microscope concept" is deployed is also in time and space, and there is required a severing of prior thought......

And so on. It may sound tedious, but then, take any book of empirical science and you will find tedium. Here, it is phenomenological "science" and an exploration to the descriptive details of the self as it is in itself.''

[thrasymachus]

Gertie wrote
can understand that experience is what brings everything meaningful into the world, and still appreciate the knowledge and insights the scientific method offers. It's not an either/or. And evolution can tell us why we have particular dispositions that can be valuable. For example we developed many social traits living in a small tribal setting which don't work well for the globally inter-dependent world we live in now. Understanding these mechanisms can help us mitigate negative anachronistic effects.

Evolution can tell us interesting things no doubt. But this sounds more like cultural anthropology than evolution. Then again, we did evolve into tribal conditions, and human features that survived have to be part of our hardwired social nature, not to be abandoned. Marxists, and others, thought differently: regardless of how came to be, it is our nature to have no nature at all, for humans are infinitely malleable. Existentialists, like Sartre, say our existence precedes our essence. But this is not very helpful in putting together a happy and flourishing society, is it? Not by my thinking.

Too many issues come to mind here. Utopias fail because of the thinking that there was some grasp of what it is to be human by nature. I like Skinner's Walden II, which might actually be as close as possibile. He denied freedom and affirmed conditioning.

But what you have in mind is a study of how tribal traits, their "mechanisms," can be reestablished in modern society to address alienation that modernity brought in. Of course, I can see this. But I can also see how this can turn into a rigid dogmatism, having discovered the true way, thereby eliminating alternatives and insisting on this. Hmmmmm I would have to read what evolutionists are actually saying about this. If it just trying create a work environment that is more agreeable to the psyche, e.g., then fine. But beyond this?

Just musing.

greed there is a paradigmatic difference between qualiative and quantitive. Hence the Hard Problem. I don't want to settle for experience being an impenetrable given tho. And noting correlation between brain activity and experience gives us a way in to learn more. It already tells us there is some kind of mind-body relationship. And that's given us the chance to think about experience as something which evolved in certain ways for certain types of reasons. That's hugely informative. And a potentially useful knowledge base for understanding ourselves. As is noting physical brain plasticity, that we aren't completely 'pre-programmed', that there are healthy and unhealthy ways for kids to grow up we can broadly identify. It can inform notions of volition and criminality. An understanding of the roots of our notions of right and wrong. And so on.

But I don't think science doesn't make any progress, or makes a difference in our understanding of many things. But the self: before one gets scientifically engaged in understanding its object, its first priority is to get the fullest, most detailed account of what their trying to study. What is water vapor? We first observe through microscopes and other equipment, then analyze, employ existing models for comparison, test samples, and so on. Part of this analysis can certainly be about how it came to be, studying the earth's geological history, determining how gases formed and separated over geological time, and this would be analogous to what evolution has to say about the self. But even here, one has to first observe water vapor itself in order to understand the relevance of the processes that brought it into existence.

How does one "observe" the self? Studying physically manifested behavior in conversation and behavior which reveals beliefs, personality, idiosyncrasies, habits and so forth does present the self, but the actuality of the self is not presented at all. This self is an interiority that is not revealed. Of course, we agree on many things and assume we are the same inside: I say, what was that strange sound? you say, OH,I don't know. Let's see. There is a lot in that when investigation moves forward, for agreement after agreement in all the details reveal it must be the same for the two of us, and this is obviously reasonable. But we live in a constant state of spontaneous interpretation (If you ever want to see how this is handled by a great analytic philosopher, check out Quine's Radical Translation), and we know that beneath this there is a "world" because our agreements tells us we are the same beneath the spoken word; after all, we have this world, and this world is our self. This is literally what we are. To go further than conversation we have "observe" our own interiority, for it is the only self we can actually "see".

This takes one into phenomenology.

Well it's impossible to see the world afresh like a young child every time you open your eyes. We all inevitably create models of the world. And the inter-subjective (aka ''objective'') one science offers provides us with a shared field in which to interact which works. That's incredibly valuable in innumerable ways. It's currently under some stress from post-modern analysis, and we can see how easy it is to crack the reliable shared framework it provides. Notions like ''my truth'',''my values'', cynicism about scientific claims re climate change, masks, vaccines, etc, conspiracy theories about institutions. Reason and science have offered a post-religious framework for individuals and societies, while 'Subjective' matters have been individualised and given less value, and perhaps we're undergoing a rebalancing. But it's an ad hoc one, and blowing up our enlightenment based social frameworks without a route to something better is looking perilous. So I come back to the same question - can you come up with something better?

I do not for a single moment doubt science. I in fact believe in an analysis of our essential self, we ARE the scientific method, because this method is simply the mind at work exercising its logicality. The conditional 'if...then...' structure is the very form of our ability to know. What is nitro glycerin? It is, "when it impacts a hard surface with velocity V, it will explode" and a multitude of other conditional forms referring to its smell, appearance, contextual assignments, and so on. What is a sidewalk? "When (If) my foot descends on its surface, (then) there is a resistance that is balanced by a physical response of muscle and weight propelled forward,...." This is a pragmatic epistemology, and I think it is exactly right: our knowledge of the world is pragmatic knowledge. The self is not IN time, it IS time, and time is the anticipation, a prefiguring, of the world's behavior so that when I encounter that sidewalk, and I know it, my knowledge is simply the readiness to handle it.

Husserl called phenomenology the science of the essence of consciousness.

I think this can be put that science can help explain why human experience is the way it is, but can't explain why experience itself exists. Do you think that parsing misses something? For example do you think experience 'creates' time, rather than it is a way of experiencing stuff changing?

That makes sense. The "how it got" here part is, I am sure, useful. But again, IT: what IS it that was :chosen" in evolution. To talk of IT, one must observe it. See the above.
Time? It is clearly not a presence, is it. Not an object, not a particular. So its properties are not going to be empirical. What ARE its properties? What do we witness, when we witness time? Is it an intuition? When Einstein talked about time, he was talking about equations and thought experiments that applied to objects (stars and distances and the behavior of their light), but all this needs to find its object, time itself. Saying something is IN time doesn't help because you don't know what it is for a thing to be IN it.

To find time is clearly tricky. Go to that which makes time meaningful, and this is events. So does the event point to something else? Not another event or object. It would be that which is presupposed by events, unseen, but has to be there because to posit nothing leaves a hole in explaining. But all one observes is the event.

To me, it is a question like, what is Being? The answer lies in the witnessed affairs that necessitate the term. But since it is not an object, one can wonder from whence it comes, and I think time is the structure of experience itself. Causality occurs in time, perhaps it IS time. But this is not to be witnessed out there. It is an intuition, you could say, but what is an intuition? We say this word, intuition, but what is the saying about? It is about, as a good pragmatist would put it, anticipating, prefiguring, and this makes time a pragmatic form of judgment and knowledge.

As I said previously, I think the sense of being a discrete, unified Me is explainable in terms of evolutionary utility. We are so complex, have so many different types of subsystems, our experience would be an incomprehensible cacophony of flickering sights, sounds, emotions, sensations, thoughts, memories, etc, without concurrently evolving some systems which make something useful and comprehensible out of that jumble. Hence we have a unified field of consciousness, the ability to focus and pay attention, we are able to correlate specific experience with specific body parts, with a first person point of view located in specific space and time. I'd suggest it is all these evolved features which add up to a sense of being a Me, a discrete, unified Subject-Self. Less complex creatures might have experience, say a moth might 'feel drawn to light', but not a sense of self as we think of it, or can reflect on.

Evolutionary utility? I say, of course. We see this utility in everyday living. But I ask, how does evolution assist our understanding of the self. you describe things in the same way James did describing an infant's world as "blooming and buzzing" and certainly the order we bring to this did evolve. But you would have to tell me how all that you say above is helped by inserting the term "evolve" in one form or another. they did in fact evolve, but what explanatory power does this have? You agree that the process has nothing do to with what actually comes into existence, for evolution is not making faculties and features as if molding them for its purpose. Rather, these things just arise, and either an organism gets lucky or not.

I don't see evolution as having any explanatory power beyond what its basic mechanism can determine, and a random mutation of genes has no features at all. all one could say is something was better for survival and reproduction than its competition and was overall, good for problem solving.

If I understand you correctly, I agree. It's hard to accept that meaning, value, everything that is worth existing for is arbitrary in that way. But maybe it is. We have this scientific account which implies that. What we don't have is a reliable alternative account to ground our sense of ''that can't be all there is!'' in. You can see certain types of religion as providing those sorts of answers, but then the obvious criticism is that's why we created them, to fulfil this need, rather than we are discovering something true about reality through them. Faith doesn't offer the type of reliability science does.

The reliable alternative account begins with description, the same way one would begin any inquiry. The principle idea I want to put out there is that before we ask questions AT ALL about how a thing came into existence, we have to look at what it is that we are talking about. This is not a matter for empirical science, but is certainly not to exclude the scientific method. It is initially descriptive, so before we even bring in the usefulness of empirical science and evolution, we need to know what we are talking about: a self.

I'd like to home in on the following if you're game, because I struggle to grasp the terminology and maybe the concepts themselves. It will take me a while to parse what you're saying from here on, if you could put it as simply and clearly as you can that might help me.

If we're roughly in sync on the other stuff, this might be what I mean when I ask is there a more reliable approach to understanding experience. I'm sceptical, but I'd like to understand the argument. if you could lay the argument out simply for me? -

It would not help for me to explain it. We should, if you are willing, proceed dialectically. I ask you, what IS a self, and in the answer the rule is, you cannot assume the self. One must "look" at the self. There you are, there is yourself, and as a good scientist (we are all scientists) observe the content of the self (not the personal incidentals, of course. No more than the "personal" life of a turtle would interest a marine biologist), the structure, essential parts, incidental parts.

I can respond to this.

[Gertie]

Thras

It would not help for me to explain it. We should, if you are willing, proceed dialectically. I ask you, what IS a self, and in the answer the rule is, you cannot assume the self. One must "look" at the self. There you are, there is yourself, and as a good scientist (we are all scientists) observe the content of the self (not the personal incidentals, of course. No more than the "personal" life of a turtle would interest a marine biologist), the structure, essential parts, incidental parts.

I can respond to this.

This is disappointing. I want to know what extra knowledge phenomenology imparts, and how. What is the claim, and how does introspection justify it?

If you are making the claim that there is something to be discovered via the particular methodology of phenomenology, you ought to be able to clearly say what is discovered and how. This is a basic ask on a philosophy board.

If you can't do that, I've no reason to assume it's a valid methodology, and we'll never get past Q and As and vague, obscurely worded claims which emerge from some amorphous feelings about things. Which science offers an account for which we can discuss in terms of evidence and gaining knowledge.

Back to my original point - science doesn't give us a complete or perfect account, but it gives us a handle on how to construct something tangible, a model, the details of which we can agree on or offer arguments against. How is phenomenology better, what does it tell us and how?

[thrasymachus]

Gertie wrote


This is disappointing. I want to know what extra knowledge phenomenology imparts, and how. What is the claim, and how does introspection justify it?

If you are making the claim that there is something to be discovered via the particular methodology of phenomenology, you ought to be able to clearly say what is discovered and how. This is a basic ask on a philosophy board.

If you can't do that, I've no reason to assume it's a valid methodology, and we'll never get past Q and As and vague, obscurely worded claims which emerge from some amorphous feelings about things. Which science offers an account for which we can discuss in terms of evidence and gaining knowledge.

Back to my original point - science doesn't give us a complete or perfect account, but it gives us a handle on how to construct something tangible, a model, the details of which we can agree on or offer arguments against. How is phenomenology better, what does it tell us and how?

Phenomenology is better because it is the cleanest accounting of the world, you might say. Read Heidegger and others and you will see that the strength of the argument that says our objective world is essentially interpretative, concepts themselves at the level basic analysis are interpretative tools (borrowed from the pragmatists here) and all ontology really is about is problem solving; indeed, it is the very structure of thought itself in the condition logical form: ask, what is it to know a thing is true. First, know that this an operation in language and logic. The entire affirms is contained in the conditions laid out by mind and if you think this system is connected to objects that are outside of it, then you are bound to explain how this epistemology works; how, that is, what can only turn out to be a empirical/causal theory can magically produce a knowledge relationship, a relationship that exceeds the simple mechanics of dented car fenders and pool table events. As this question has found its way into the collective mentality of this forum, all I have found is pure obstinacy in the face of a complete deficit in making physical models provided by empirical science work. "Oh, our scientists are making progress. I'm sure," is the response. It is not at all acknowledged that this goes to basics: If in fact science did discover what epistemic properties causality possessed, it would have to be a discovery that included the entire route of the causal sequence, that is, from the tree to the eye, from the eye to the brain, from the brain to the mind. But all of this is already conceived within the mind at the very outset. When you conceived of the tree to posit the tree as an object to be known, the causal sequence to the mind to be established, you are assuming the very thing that you are trying to prove: that there is a tree out there that can be accessed to be posited at all. This is the absolute worst imaginable question begging imaginable. You see how this goes, I hope: Let's try to prove a causal relationship between the mind and the tree otu there actually can be knowledge bearing, that is, epistemic in nature (because they are not in term of the principle of sufficient cause plainly stated: a dented fender does not know the offending guardrail). We begin with the tree, and we know there is light reflecting fromt he tree to the eye and the surface has reflecting and absorbing ......wait! Tree? What tree. The one there. Yes, but what you are trying show that it is possible for the tree to be epistemically acknowledged, but when you say, that tree, there, you are just assuming precisely this.

This is NOT a debatable idea, and analytic philosophers don't even try. They know this; everyone know you cannot refute idealism. Analytic philosophy has therefore been trivialized into petty obsessions with creating ingenious ways to come up with reductio ad absurdums (see Fate of Analysis by Robert Hanna) Ask Quine (dead, alas) about Kant you will not find much philosophical interest. Over a hundred years of Kant dominating philosophy and these guys made a break: forget that this can't be refuted. Just go on as if nothing happened. Wittgenstein is partly/largely behind this. But Continental philosophy carried on, following through on Kant, rejecting his rationalism, more here, less there, moving into existentialism, aka, phenomenology. Analytic philosophers try to preserve knowledge, show that it can be defended, pushing German idealism out. It is a fool's errand. They go nowhere, but look awfully smart doing it.

Why is this about the self? Because the self is supposed to be at the subjective end of this tree you see. The tree as an object of knowledge must be accounted for, and so the matter turns to the tree and me, and this goes to how it is that the tree can be separated from the "process" that makes "knowledge" what it is. This entanglement of knowing and the self is critical, for I literally have to remove what is not me to determine the knowing, and remove the knowing from the "objective" tree to posit the tree as a tree qua scientific entity. If I cannot do this, and I mean cannot makes these connections and separations work in a reasonably draw out thought experiment, then there is the critical element: the problematic of refuting idealism.

It cannot be done, though you are welcome to try and this juncture. Most that don't really understand the issue, and are disinclined to think clearly. Remember, this is not MY argument. Mine is an eclectic bundle of Wittgenstein, Rorty, Heidegger, Husserl....; I mean, this is why there is so much reluctance for to truly GET what is said, it takes time and reading. But on the other hand, see the ideas posted here, above: the case is made there.

What do you think so far? This is just the beginning. Of course, you have ideas of your own, but what is put forth here has its own margins of relevance. It will not do to bring up how effective empirical science is at solving our practical matters. This is THE typical response, and it is simply not responsive. The issue itself dictates what constitutes inclusiveness. One must stay within the argument given.

[Gertie]

Thras, thanks for this and sorry for the delay

Phenomenology is better because it is the cleanest accounting of the world, you might say. Read Heidegger and others and you will see that the strength of the argument that says our objective world is essentially interpretative, concepts themselves at the level basic analysis are interpretative tools (borrowed from the pragmatists here) and all ontology really is about is problem solving; indeed, it is the very structure of thought itself in the condition logical form: ask, what is it to know a thing is true.

Here's how I'd put it. My own experience is all I can know exist for certain. I can't test whether the contents of my experience refer to a 'real world out there'. But if I experience kicking a rock then I experience pain, and I can't experience walking through walls, so I have little choice but to Act As If my experience is representing a real world out there, independent of me, including other people. Then we can compare notes and come up with a shared inter-subjective model of the world we share - which becomes formalised as the scientific method. The question is, is that the best we can do?

First, know that this an operation in language and logic. The entire affirms is contained in the conditions laid out by mind and if you think this system is connected to objects that are outside of it, then you are bound to explain how this epistemology works; how, that is, what can only turn out to be a empirical/causal theory can magically produce a knowledge relationship, a relationship that exceeds the simple mechanics of dented car fenders and pool table events.

I'd say the basis for modelling the external world rests in firstly the contents of my experience, which don't require logic or language in principle. That I have a body which correlates with my first person experience, where-as everything else doesn't. I can move around at will, I can experience change - I am located in time and space within that world. Walls and trees are things I can't walk through, water satisfies my thirst, my hand hurts if I stick it in a fire, etc. I don't need words or logic to build this type of model. And causality presents to me as patterns. Every time I drink my thirst is quenched. Every time I try to walk through a wall I fail. Every time I throw an apple in the air it falls.

You're right I need language and logic to conceptualise my experience in abstract terms like logic and cause and effect. To create an explanatory model of how the world works, why I can never walk through the wall. And once these become part of my model, they in turn affect how I understand new experiences and expand and change my model. Language is symbol making, we can then manipulate the symbols in useful and consistent ways which cohere with our experience. It has become the way we think, that thinky internal voice in our heads we use to reason, and narrate our experience. Then in turn influences the way we are able to think structurally and semantically, which will carry the same problems into intersubjective model making. But it's language (or some sort of symbolic communication) which makes creating an inter-subjective model possible, where I can compare my experience with other people, and we can agree to call something true. Even though experience is inherently private and I can never know what your experience is like.


I don't think any of this is controversial. And it's roughly in keeping with what you've said I think, unless I'm missing something?

As this question has found its way into the collective mentality of this forum, all I have found is pure obstinacy in the face of a complete deficit in making physical models provided by empirical science work. "Oh, our scientists are making progress. I'm sure," is the response. It is not at all acknowledged that this goes to basics: If in fact science did discover what epistemic properties causality possessed, it would have to be a discovery that included the entire route of the causal sequence, that is, from the tree to the eye, from the eye to the brain, from the brain to the mind. But all of this is already conceived within the mind at the very outset. When you conceived of the tree to posit the tree as an object to be known, the causal sequence to the mind to be established, you are assuming the very thing that you are trying to prove: that there is a tree out there that can be accessed to be posited at all.

This is the absolute worst imaginable question begging imaginable. You see how this goes, I hope: Let's try to prove a causal relationship between the mind and the tree otu there actually can be knowledge bearing, that is, epistemic in nature (because they are not in term of the principle of sufficient cause plainly stated: a dented fender does not know the offending guardrail). We begin with the tree, and we know there is light reflecting fromt he tree to the eye and the surface has reflecting and absorbing ......wait! Tree? What tree. The one there. Yes, but what you are trying show that it is possible for the tree to be epistemically acknowledged, but when you say, that tree, there, you are just assuming precisely this.


This is NOT a debatable idea, and analytic philosophers don't even try. They know this; everyone know you cannot refute idealism. Analytic philosophy has therefore been trivialized into petty obsessions with creating ingenious ways to come up with reductio ad absurdums (see Fate of Analysis by Robert Hanna) Ask Quine (dead, alas) about Kant you will not find much philosophical interest. Over a hundred years of Kant dominating philosophy and these guys made a break: forget that this can't be refuted. Just go on as if nothing happened. Wittgenstein is partly/largely behind this. But Continental philosophy carried on, following through on Kant, rejecting his rationalism, more here, less there, moving into existentialism, aka, phenomenology. Analytic philosophers try to preserve knowledge, show that it can be defended, pushing German idealism out. It is a fool's errand. They go nowhere, but look awfully smart doing it.

I agree you can't disprove solipsism or idealism, but you can't prove them either. It's a dead end. We could just stop there. But if we're going to go further than solipsism, we each have to take a leap of faith that the content of our experience is representing something real beyond itself. Then we can start making our own model of that world-which-isn't-me, and start comparing notes with fellow human subjects as confirmation. And we end up with a model of the world which we share, and is comprehensible to us in similar ways. Eventually this leads to notions like causality, and the scientific physicalist model of material stuff and forces, QM, and whatever else will turn up.

It has also thrown up theories like evolution, which tells us we are limited and flawed observers of the world, and so our model is too. And I agree with you, this presumably applies to human logic and reason too (maths I'm not sure about). Our cognitive processes, like our senses, sensations, emotions, etc, are 'designed' for utility,. It's a paradoxical position to be in. As is the fact that all knowledge is rooted in experience, but the model we've created can't explain experience. A physicalist model can in principle construct a physical causal chain from photons hitting a tree, then an eyeball, stimulating physical responses in the visual system, even causally through to our motor systems to generate a behavioural response. But it can't explain why experience correlates with physical processes in parts of that physical explanation.

So we have a model which tells us it is flawed and incomplete, that we are flawed model-makers, and can't explain the experience the model is rooted in. This is all very unsatisfactory, so for the most part we have to settle for internal consistency and coherence, and the fact it works. But maybe there's a way out of it, if so, that would be better...

Why is this about the self? Because the self is supposed to be at the subjective end of this tree you see. The tree as an object of knowledge must be accounted for, and so the matter turns to the tree and me, and this goes to how it is that the tree can be separated from the "process" that makes "knowledge" what it is. This entanglement of knowing and the self is critical, for I literally have to remove what is not me to determine the knowing, and remove the knowing from the "objective" tree to posit the tree as a tree qua scientific entity. If I cannot do this, and I mean cannot makes these connections and separations work in a reasonably draw out thought experiment, then there is the critical element: the problematic of refuting idealism.

It cannot be done, though you are welcome to try and this juncture. Most that don't really understand the issue, and are disinclined to think clearly. Remember, this is not MY argument. Mine is an eclectic bundle of Wittgenstein, Rorty, Heidegger, Husserl....; I mean, this is why there is so much reluctance for to truly GET what is said, it takes time and reading. But on the other hand, see the ideas posted here, above: the case is made there.

What do you think so far? This is just the beginning. Of course, you have ideas of your own, but what is put forth here has its own margins of relevance. It will not do to bring up how effective empirical science is at solving our practical matters. This is THE typical response, and it is simply not responsive. The issue itself dictates what constitutes inclusiveness. One must stay within the argument given.

So far I generally agree with the problems you note with physicalism. We can't prove anything exists but our own experiential states. But solipsism can't be proven either. So that's a dead end, and any further discussion relies on us ignoring it. I'd go a sceptical step further and say you can't prove you need ''an experiencer'' to have experience, and the experiential sense of being a self is perhaps just another way experience manifests.

I'd also note a difference between solipsism and idealism. The difference being that Idealism generally assumes other people's experience exists too. And once that assumption is made, then we have already made a leap of faith, which also implies there is a world of some sort we share, we are within, and can have different experiences of. This is a knowledge claim which shares the same problem of untestability that physicalism does.

The difference is that physicalism assumes the contents of experience tell us more about that world we share, which we can intersubjectively compare notes on - like trees and eyeballs. Rather than it just being experience which exists, even tho all we can compare is our experience.

[Gertie]

oops your para here should've been in quotes -

First, know that this an operation in language and logic. The entire affirms is contained in the conditions laid out by mind and if you think this system is connected to objects that are outside of it, then you are bound to explain how this epistemology works; how, that is, what can only turn out to be a empirical/causal theory can magically produce a knowledge relationship, a relationship that exceeds the simple mechanics of dented car fenders and pool table events.

[thrasymachus]

Gertie wrote
Here's how I'd put it. My own experience is all I can know exist for certain. I can't test whether the contents of my experience refer to a 'real world out there'. But if I experience kicking a rock then I experience pain, and I can't experience walking through walls, so I have little choice but to Act As If my experience is representing a real world out there, independent of me, including other people. Then we can compare notes and come up with a shared inter-subjective model of the world we share - which becomes formalised as the scientific method. The question is, is that the best we can do?

The scientific method is not only not denied, but is affirmed most emphatically, as are empirical sciences. The former cannot be opposed as it is reason itself (the hypothetical deductive method is entirely grounded in the simple conditional, if...then...), but the latter, this goes to content, which is why I am insisting that a concept of the self must be based on "observation" of the self, and since empirical observation is not possible, we must look to the one place where the self makes its appearance: phenomena. Think of phenomena as a kind of Cartesian reduction to what is most immediate, what is THERE, prior, that is, presupposed, to the regular engagements in the world. This is the self cognizing, feeling, caring, believing, anticipating, wondering, apprehensive, and on and on. Sure, this lines up with what a brain does, but an examination of a brain reveals nothing of this.
I am aware that in the back of your mind there is this belief that correlation between mind and brain matter is more than just incidental, and you're right. Put it this way: experience reveals that there is a brain, and this brain comes to us through the processing plant which is the brain. There is this undeniable sense that what we are beholding is actually there when perceptual systems are absent. It lies with the consistency in which it appears to us, along with others, consistently through time, and so on, and phenomenologists, none, deny this. Kant called this noumena: what is outside the senses and reason that makes no appearance at all. If you cannot say/think what it is, then it is a meaningless concept.

This gets quasi mystical; even Wittgenstein called it transcendental. I look at this cup, I know there is a cup. I also know there is what we call infinity, but ask me about it and there is nothing to say. This cup "outside" of perceptual systems (out/inside is an experiential notion) belongs to that equally mysterious infinity. To me, I see this brain thing, know that all I understand is contained therein, then behold the world in front of me: the very in idea of finitude/infinity lies there, in that intuited no man's land where my bewildered mind faces what must be the eternity before me; it is the threshold where this physical brain-generated-mind-world's finitude meets eternity. I am literally looking at the interior of a brain, which, if you look at it, is obviously a localized unit in space. But then, the "true" locality of this brain lies in the "outside" of the finitude that is brain generated, as do all things that I can even consider. Eternity owns it all, but I cannot say what eternity is, nor can I even grasp it in any way save in the manner it enters into experience, which is as a profound deficit. See Emanuel Levinas' Totality and Infinity for a brutally demanding, but elegantly written take on this.

T wo things. The first is that this brief description of the existential enigma is NOT me just wandering through thought. It is a very old, ancient even, phenomenon. Continental philosophy takes this very seriously, and to see this, try reading almost anything by John Caputo. Not easy, though. The second is, if you follow this line of thinking at all, you may be able to see where this goes regarding the self. Consider: even of we take the tact of empirical science, we will encounter this threshold, and you will have to admit that the self, and everything, is "really" eternal, and it is our brain-finitude that sets up quantifiable events that can be addressed pragmatically in the scientific method. Kant was right. Even quantum mechanics phycists are telling us that reality is an "event" where perceptual faculties "meet" some unknown X (hyle), and this is exactly what Husserl's thought is about (see his intentionality) An object is not "that out there" exclusively of what we think. After all, thinking IS, the empirical scientist will tell us, also a series of physical events. Here, we are simply taking seriously the clear idea that what is physical is simply a place holder for what-cannot-be-said. Scientists just are not interested in the phenomenological ana;ysis so they don't bother.

I'd say the basis for modelling the external world rests in firstly the contents of my experience, which don't require logic or language in principle. That I have a body which correlates with my first person experience, where-as everything else doesn't. I can move around at will, I can experience change - I am located in time and space within that world. Walls and trees are things I can't walk through, water satisfies my thirst, my hand hurts if I stick it in a fire, etc. I don't need words or logic to build this type of model. And causality presents to me as patterns. Every time I drink my thirst is quenched. Every time I try to walk through a wall I fail. Every time I throw an apple in the air it falls.

Of course. Here, the matter is being put simply: this everydayness of life is a thing of parts. That is, it can be analyzed at the level of basic assumptions. There is a foundation that is analyzable. It is unfortunate, but to truly see what this is about, it is not enough to tell you about the rabbit hole of phenomenological analysis. One has to go into the hole oneself. A tall order, only for those who want to know badly enough.

You're right I need language and logic to conceptualise my experience in abstract terms like logic and cause and effect. To create an explanatory model of how the world works, why I can never walk through the wall. And once these become part of my model, they in turn affect how I understand new experiences and expand and change my model. Language is symbol making, we can then manipulate the symbols in useful and consistent ways which cohere with our experience. It has become the way we think, that thinky internal voice in our heads we use to reason, and narrate our experience. Then in turn influences the way we are able to think structurally and semantically, which will carry the same problems into intersubjective model making. But it's language (or some sort of symbolic communication) which makes creating an inter-subjective model possible, where I can compare my experience with other people, and we can agree to call something true. Even though experience is inherently private and I can never know what your experience is like.

If you want to know why you cannot walk through a wall, a phenomenologist cannot help you. It also cannot tell you why you get cavities. The model you would change would be your philosophical model of what the world is, not the physicist's model. They are utterly different, though, as with empirical sciences, interdisciplinary connections are there. Mostly I agree with what you say here. Just as an interesting note, this "intrasubjective" agreement within a symbolic system: the self IS this system, and empirical science is essentially a social enterprise! for language is inherently social and science is constructed in the matrix of language: "look there, a cloud! Hmm, if it in the sky that means it is lighter than air, somehow. let's analyze it." Now, analyze this analysis: an assertion, a conditional, a proposal/possibility. The entire event and all that will follow will not occur in language, but will BE language event.

Language is essentially communicative.

[Atla]

The entire affirms is contained in the conditions laid out by mind and if you think this system is connected to objects that are outside of it, then you are bound to explain how this epistemology works; how, that is, what can only turn out to be a empirical/causal theory can magically produce a knowledge relationship, a relationship that exceeds the simple mechanics of dented car fenders and pool table events. As this question has found its way into the collective mentality of this forum, all I have found is pure obstinacy in the face of a complete deficit in making physical models provided by empirical science work.

Wasn't obstinacy on my part, I genuinely don't understand what the problem is that you see. Why should this 'knowledge relationship' exceed the simple mechanics of dented car fenders and pool table events? For example we are talking about electrons flying through space, why would such things become 'knowledge bearing'? What does that mean?

[thrasymachus]

Atla wrote
Wasn't obstinacy on my part, I genuinely don't understand what the problem is that you see. Why should this 'knowledge relationship' exceed the simple mechanics of dented car fenders and pool table events? For example we are talking about electrons flying through space, why would such things become 'knowledge bearing'? What does that mean?

It is found in the simplest reasoning, right there, possessed in the empirical scientist's handbook. A car fender does not "know" the guardrail, and the model for causality shown here does not change with complexity. Why would it? The brain is a complex body of parts--axonal fibers, neurons, synapses, and so forth, and in order for the brain produced faculty of knowledge, the understanding, to know its object, it cannot change the nature of causality, as this latter remains qualitatively the same kind of thing in the causal relations of its parts, regardless of how comprehensive the empirical study of the brain may be, and no matter how extravagant the jargon gets to describe it. causality is causality, and as such (putting aside quantum entanglement for now) it is presented as closed systems interacting, transferring nothing epistemologically in the exchange. Pool balls do not know other pool balls because there is nothing in causality that is of a knowing nature. Likewise, there is this 4 or 5 pound mostly water (73%) blob here, and the object over there and they are casually interactive through light waves, sound waves, etc., and on to receiving organs, into brain chemistry, and into mind. And just as with pool balls, there is no knowledge, but simply events within the brain.

This leaves the matter of "aboutness". How are our experiences "about" things out there? This is pure pragmatics. The mind's truth and reality is a pragmatic matrix, and there is no Other thing out there; rather, our "knowledge" of out thereness is defined in terms of what we do, how we anticipate the doing-temporal field of conscious events.

Now, if you disagree, as I do, that this is a complete picture of human experience vis a vis the objective world, then you have stepped into a magic world. There IS something else: the absolutely mysterious OTHER. I am reading about this even now in John Caputo's book on Derrida, and Jean luc Marion's On Givenness and his Revelation and Giveness; and others.

This stuff is fascinating. No kidding. Philosophy can be sooo much more than the drab reductio's of analytic philosophy. Continental philosophy is about the world. Not simply how well concepts hold up.