It is looking at the outside of things and making inferences about what is happening on the inside through theories and logical inference. We see effects on the outside and make inferences about the internal causes. — Metaphysician Undercover

No. I take a picture of with an x-ray that I can look at and see what is inside the person. How is that different from taking a picture of that person and seeing what their outside looks like. They can insert a thin camera attached to a fiber-optic cable and take pictures of what is inside me either by making a small hole or going in through one of my natural orifices. I'm scheduled to have one of them stuck up my butt in a few months.

You are making an artificial, unsupportable distinction in an effort to hold your argument together.

After all philosophy is the attempt to understand the meaning of being. — Wayfarer

I think some philosophy has been concerned with that. Heidegger tried to achieve an understanding of being with discursive analysis in his earlier philosophy, but after the "Kehre" (turning) he saw the only possibility as being in allusive poetic language as I understand it.

I think philosophy can realize its limitations, but I can't see how discursive knowledge or understanding of non-dual reality, being, consciousness, is possible.

No, that's the problem, breaking an object in two allows us to see the outsides of two objects, not the inside of one. Every time we take something apart, we remove the parts from their proper place as a part of a whole, such that they are no longer parts of a whole, but are each a separate object, a whole. — Metaphysician Undercover

I think you're being pedantic. If I want to see the structure of the inside of a stone or a piece of wood I can break it open to reveal it. I could also use xray or some other imaging technology to "see inside" the object if it isn't practical to break it open.

I'm not sure what we're looking inside of or why... it's curious how this matter seems to divide the members here down party lines. I'm still trying to understand what phenomenology might bring to this hard question. Surely a direction can be sketched out in just a few clear sentences? Not that clarity and phenomenology mesh well (at least as I read it).

It's compelling that thinkers like Chomsky are mysterians on the basis that we don't have a coherent theory of materialism in the first place. Metacognition suddenly seems more readily explicable than the existence of a material 'reality'. What's Chomsky's marvelous quote? "Newton exorcised the machine, leaving the ghost intact..."

Do you hold a view that science in its conventional mode will resolve this matter, or will this one need a paradigm shift?

I take a picture of with an x-ray that I can look at and see what is inside the person — T Clark

that is the inside of their body, not the inside of their experience.

MU introduced the idea of looking inside objects, and I could not see the relevance of that to the so-called "hard problem".

I gather your question is about the latter, and my standpoint is that consciousness, being non-dual. cannot be explained or understood in dualistic terms, and that via meditation it may be understood, but not in discursive terms.

Phenomenology, insofar as it understands consciousness to be intentional, is still working in dualistic terms, and I see it as helping to understand how things seem to us in our everyday dualistic mindset; I don't see how it it can offer anything beyond that.

@Tom Storm - I was once sent a .pdf of The Routledge Introduction to Phenomenology ed. Dermot Moran, which you can actually find here. Of particular relevance is page 143 forward, comprising Husserl's criticism of naturalism, from which:

In contrast to the outlook of naturalism, Husserl believed all knowledge, all science, all rationality depended on conscious acts, acts which cannot be properly understood from within the natural outlook at all. Consciousness should not be viewed naturalistically as part of the world at all, since consciousness is precisely the reason why there was a world there for us in the first place. For Husserl it is not that consciousness creates the world in any ontological sense—this would be a subjective idealism, itself a consequence of a certain naturalising tendency whereby consciousness is cause and the world its effect—but rather that the world is opened up, made meaningful, or disclosed through consciousness. The world is inconceivable apart from consciousness. Treating consciousness as part of the world, reifying consciousness, is precisely to ignore consciousness’s foundational, disclosive role. For this reason, all natural science is naive about its point of departure...

This is exactly what eliminative materialism does. It literally forgets or neglects its own role in the construction or construal of 'the world', instead trying to eliminate the very faculty by which the world is construed or 'realised' in the first place. (This is why critics of Daniel Dennett's first book parodied the title as 'Consciousness Ignored'.)

Also see this blog post on Husserl's concept of 'the natural attitude':

From a phenomenological perspective, in everyday life, we see the objects of our experience such as physical objects, other people, and even ideas as simply real and straightforwardly existent. In other words, they are “just there.” We don’t question their existence; we view them as facts.

When we leave our house in the morning, we take the objects we see around us as simply real, factual things—this tree, neighboring buildings, cars, etcetera. This attitude or perspective, which is usually unrecognized as a perspective, Edmund Husserl terms the “natural attitude” or the “natural theoretical attitude.” *

When Husserl uses the word “natural” to describe this attitude, he doesn’t mean that it is “good” (or bad), he means simply that this way of seeing reflects an “everyday” or “ordinary” way of being-in-the-world. When I see the world within this natural attitude, I am solely aware of what is factually present to me. My surrounding world, viewed naturally, is the familiar world, the domain of my everyday life. Why is this a problem?

From a phenomenological perspective, this naturalizing attitude conceals a profound naïveté. Husserl claimed that “being” can never be collapsed entirely into being in the empirical world: any instance of actual being, he argued, is necessarily encountered upon a horizon that encompasses facticity but is larger than facticity. Indeed, the very sense of facts of consciousness as such, from a phenomenological perspective, depends on a wider horizon of consciousness that usually remains unexamined.

*In the idiom of Zen Buddhism. this is the stage of 'first there is a mountain' i.e. unreflective realism. Heidegger would go on to enlarge on all of his themes in his later work but even though he differed with Husserl, they have some elements in common. (I'm only just starting to study Being and Time but you can see how that 'everyday attitude' is reflected in Heidegger's comments on 'das man'.)

Nice. Thank you. That blog post reminds me of how much I was aware of this kind of thing -"natural attitude" - as a child and how this was not necessarily the only way of experiencing things (being).

:up:

What circumstances do you think require a reason via those that do not? — Joshs

Reasons are human-related (when distinguished from mechanics). If ask "why did you smash that vase?" I'm not expecting "because my arm raised, my hand released it and that caused it to smash". I'm asking about your motives.

In Physics, chemistry, neurosciences...etc, the distinction doesn't make any sense. There are no motives, to 'why?' and 'how?' are the same question. As I alluded to earlier, about the closest we could get to a distinction is in evolutionary sciences where 'why?' refers to the evolutionary advantage, and 'how?' refers to the genetics, but even there it's just convention. we could ask 'how?' of evolution too and get a good set of theoretical answers.

Equally, if I asked a physicist 'why did the vase smash?', he might say 'because gravity pulls objects toward the earth and brittle things like vases smash on impact'. That's considered an answer. I could ask why both those laws are the case, but all I'd get is further, more fundamental, rules. At the end of my questioning there'd always be 'it just is'.

What the proponents of the 'hard' problem' seem to want is to forever maintain a type of answer which, by definition, will not be satisfied by mechanics or 'it just is', but since we have no such answer in any other field of human inquiry I cannot think of a reason why it's odd that we don't have one in neuroscience. I can't think what such an answer would even look like and neither, it seems, can any proponent of the problem.

Put differently, what kind of reality is it that cannot be potentially construed in an alternate way, so that we come to see it’s role within an order that did not exist to us previously? — Joshs

Roles within previously hidden orders are just more mechanics though (unless you're implying teleology). Say we found an entirely new function of the brain, something we didn't even know it did (let's say it taps into morphological fields) and we discover that consciousness plays an essential role in that. Does that answer the 'hard problem'? Apparently not, because if I theorise it plays an important role in survival (evolutionary advantage) that's not an answer apparently. So why would another role in another system be any more of an answer?

This is analogous to the origin of species before and after Darwin. Pre-Darwin, the answer to the question ‘Why are there different species’ was , because God made them arbitrarily unique in themselves. Beyond this, no deeper inquiry was attempted. After Darwin, the deeper ‘why’ question could be answered ‘ because each is the product of an overarching process that allows us to relate one to the other via temporal genesis. — Joshs

Exactly. Darwin found a mechanism for producing multiple species. The answer to the question 'why are there so many species?' was 'species evolve by natural selection and this process produces many species as a consequence of its mechanisms'. The answer to the question 'why doe we have consciousness?' is 'our experiences are produced by the brain activity and the mechanisms of the brain are such that experience is a consequence'... only apparently that isn't an answer either.

Don’t we choose one paradigm over other because changing the way we look at things ‘solves more puzzles’, as Kuhn put it? It seems to be that choosing the way that works by solving more puzzles, albeit differently, amounts to finding a why where there was none before. — Joshs

Yes, I agree, but you can't have your cake an eat it. Kuhn shows us how paradigms are discontinuous, they are not answers to the questions left by the previous one (that would merely be a continuation of the investigation within the previous paradigm) they a new ways of framing the problem such that those question become meaningless. So the mere possibility of a new paradigm doesn't mean the questions in the prior paradigm are unanswered, just that they might, in future become obsolete, or meaningless.

We don't go around saying that physics hasn't answered the question of acceleration due to gravity simply because a new paradigm might one day make that question obsolete. It has answered it (9.8 m/s/s) and a new paradigm might one day make that answer obsolete.

It baffles me that you think any of these questions are unaskable, that they "just are". — hypericin

You're asking for the cause of a description, not an event or state. 'Experience' is the description we give to the neuronal activity, it's not another thing on top of the neuronal activity which needs further causal explanation. Neuronal activity doesn't cause experience, it is experience. 'Experience' is a word we use to describe it. Only there's a disconnect because of the anomalous monism inherent in our linguistic practices relating to the world that language brings into being.

It's like asking how all the individual horses cause the category {horse} to exist. They don't. horses are things, the category {horse} is a human linguistic convention.

Likewise neuronal activity is within neuroscience, 'experience' is within human linguistic conventions. the one doesn't cause the other in any way other than the way in which we choose to relate the two (or conceptual models). 'Experience' simply isn't in the same conceptual model as 'neurons' so we can't derive one from the other without some act of translation and that act will just be made up, it's not a fact we discover.

"By what mechanism does an engine, carburetor, wheels, etc, assembled as a car, drive?" — hypericin

A car driving is a physical act, it's within the same conceptual framework as the levers and gears that work the car. 'Experience' is a description, not a thing. It's not in the same conceptual framework.

No. I take a picture of with an x-ray that I can look at and see what is inside the person. How is that different from taking a picture of that person and seeing what their outside looks like. — T Clark

An x-ray does not allow you to see the inside of a person. It allows you to see the outside of specific internal parts. The fact that the x-ray goes right through some parts and not others indicates that it is not really showing us the inside of a person. It simply makes some parts appear transparent. Seeing through some parts for the purpose of looking at other parts is not a matter seeing the inside of anything, because some parts are unseen and other parts are seen from the outside.

You are clearly not understanding what I am saying. Do you think that when you see a fish in a body of water, you are seeing the inside of the water? And it is the same thing for the fiber-camera, it as well, shows the outside of some internal parts, by passing around others.

I think you're being pedantic. If I want to see the structure of the inside of a stone or a piece of wood I can break it open to reveal it. I could also use xray or some other imaging technology to "see inside" the object if it isn't practical to break it open. — Janus

Making oneself appear as a pedant is what is required if one is trying to understand the intricacies of nature. Have you read how Plato portrays Socrates? Being pedantic is a requirement of good logical process. As they say, "the devil is in the details". When our theories fail in accounting for the details, the theories are flawed. That's plain, simple, and obvious. Why deny the existence of flaws, just because they appear to be minor?

The fact is very clear, that these methods you propose do not adequately show us the inside of any physical objects. And this is because we have no proper theory which distinguishes the inside of an object from the outside, therefore any proposed definition is ambiguous or arbitrary. This is the biggest problem with systems theory, it assumes objects called "systems", but employs arbitrary principles to distinguish inside the system from outside the system. Until we have real ontological principles whereby we can make a justified distinction between inside and outside, knowledge produced by such theories will be fraught with unreliability.

You are making an artificial, unsupportable distinction in an effort to hold your argument together. — T Clark

Actually, I am just stating what is very obvious, the obvious deficiencies of the modern scientific method. Scientists proceed as if there is no real difference between the inside and the outside of physical objects, so if such boundaries are employed they can be placed wherever they want. (This is what the examples of you and Janus show, an arbitrary "inside".) Yet conscious experience gives clear evidence that there is a very substantial difference between the inside and the outside. You, being a proponent of scientism, simply deny that reality, and dismiss the evidence with the prejudiced claim of "unsupportable", implying that you already presume that there cannot be any evidence. Or, in the case of Janus, there is a dismissal of people who try to point such details out, as being pedantic.

Alternately, we could say that to make progress, the realm of the physical will have to be rethought such that we recognize that the subjective was always baked into the very structure of physical science, but in such a thoroughgoing manner that it was never noticed.
— Joshs

:clap:

Do you see any relationship with this and Heidegger's 'forgetfulness of being'? — Wayfarer

Absolutely, and Husserl’s natural attitude.

that is the inside of their body, not the inside of their experience. — Wayfarer

When this started, that is what I thought we were talking about, but @Metaphysician Undercover didn't seem to be making that distinction.

You are clearly not understanding what I am saying. — Metaphysician Undercover

I think I understand, but I disagree. As far as I'm concerned, we can leave it at that unless you have more to say.

This lays out the question pretty well, although in different language than I would use. One thing I disagree with is equating the world of experience with the empirical world. As I noted in my previous post, I think it's possible to directly experience noumena, the Tao. It's just not possible to speak about it. When I start talking, then it becomes phenomena. Then I can measure it, name it, and conceptualize it. — T Clark

I think that is an interesting way to put it because it identifies this historical ontological distinction as hermeneutical, merely. And I think this is close to right. Wrong thinking is interpretative error, and it can construct imposing towers of meaning that become internalized in a culture and its history, and when you are in it, it is second nature, so to speak. Phenomena, by this thinking, is a term that is part of a construct created by philosophizing subsets in our cultural. Heidegger thought like this: We make truth, and the importance of things along with the "measuring, naming ,conceptualizing" rests with historical possibilities. I think I am aligned with you in that I think these historical possibilities cover up "something" that is revealed in a reduction that removes implicit knowledge claims from the "moment" of encounter. This something is inherently, what could you call it, value-cognitive, where the cognitive part refers to the fact that the understanding is engaged.

But you know there are problems with this: Is the self's phenomenality really so removable from "noumenality"?; if language's categories are responsible for this division only, and to think at all is to think categorically (in a finite totality of meanings), then it is thought that holds us captive to this illusory separation and the method chosen to remedy and redeem has to be one that ultimately removes us from the bounds of thought. But what of the self? Hasn't the self been reduced to a Jamesian infantile "blooming and buzzing"? And what of experience as a self-belonging set of affairs? What happens when the strictures of thought are removed and the self is truly decentered; is it not thereby dissolved altogether?

When I think of the meditative "method", the allowing of thought content to fall away from consciousness, while sitting quietly, I am struck by its annihilative nature. It really is the most radical thing a person can do, one could argue, this annihilation of the world. But if language falls away, so does understanding and knowledge, and agency is lost, and one is no longer "there" to witness anything. Perhaps the "direct experience of noumena" should not be so radically conceived. This term 'noumena' I am not that comfortable with because of its Kantian association. I prefer "pure phenomenon" for the act of reducing what is there, in our midst to what is strikingly "other" than the language that conceives it, but the what-is-there doesn't go anywhere. As I apperceive a rock, the "noumenal" rises to awareness as the language falls away, but that singular event is still your event. The purity of the perception occurs IN the historically embodied apperceiving, and it was there all along (like the Buddhists say when they claim the "Buddha nature" is never absent).

That's a novel interpretation of Witt, isn't it? I think he was pointing out that when we propose to know transcendent facts, we're positing a vantage point that we don't have. — frank

Or better, one that cannot be had at all, which makes the difference.

Analytic philosophers like to say that that which must be passed over in silence is really nothing at all, and the entire mistake lies with language going where it has no business, because there is no business to be had. The Tractatus does not agree. I don't want to labor the point, because I am well aware this book does not exhaust his thinking, but then, if the question is about the "hard problem of consciousness" one has to go where the issue is met, and what makes consciousness a hard problem is its encounter with, call it, the "other side" of language. I talk about my cat, but the talk about cats, their size, dispositions, and all of that ignores something that underlies all of this: its existence. Witt calls this mystical, not nothing. And he holds the same regard for ethics and aesthetics and their "value" dimension. Russell called him a mystic not because he was just disagreeing, but because Wittgenstein actually called himself this, implicitly.

I agree with all of that. I think the quest for a theory of consciousness will be a grand adventure. It's fed by a lust to know. Maybe it will generate technologies that allow some aspect of subjectivity to be recorded and that could be used for medicinal or artistic purposes.

Every step of the way, someone will be pointing out that we're fooling ourselves and the truth we're finding is relative to a particular culture? That's ok. That's always how it is, right?

I think I am aligned with you in that I think these historical possibilities cover up "something" that is revealed in a reduction that removes implicit knowledge claims from the "moment" of encounter. This something is inherently, what could you call it, value-cognitive, where the cognitive part refers to the fact that the understanding is engaged. — Constance

I'm a bit lost with this kind of language. In a previous post, I wrote that I didn't hold much with phenomenology. Since then, I've decided to put some effort into learning at least the basics so I can participate in these types of discussions more productively. What would recommend as Phenomenology for Dummies?

What happens when the strictures of thought are removed and the self is truly decentered; is it not thereby dissolved altogether?

When I think of the meditative "method", the allowing of thought content to fall away from consciousness, while sitting quietly, I am struck by its annihilative nature. It really is the most radical thing a person can do, one could argue, this annihilation of the world. But if language falls away, so does understanding and knowledge, and agency is lost, and one is no longer "there" to witness anything. — Constance

I am not a meditator, at least not in any formal way, but I think this misrepresents the meditative process, although I've heard this type of criticism before. Awareness without words is possible without any kind of annihilation. I come to this from my interest in the Tao Te Ching. Lao Tzu talks about "wu wei", which means "inaction," acting without intention. Actions come directly from our true selves, our hearts I guess you'd say. Lao Tzu might say our "te," our virtue. Without words or concepts. I have experienced this. It's no kind of exotic mystical state. It's just everyday, meat and potatoes, although it can sometimes be hard to accomplish.

Perhaps the "direct experience of noumena" should not be so radically conceived. This term 'noumena' I am not that comfortable with because of its Kantian association. I prefer "pure phenomenon" for the act of reducing what is there, in our midst to what is strikingly "other" than the language that conceives it, but the what-is-there doesn't go anywhere. — Constance

I use the Kantian "noumena" instead of the Taoist "Tao" just because it is more familiar to western philosophers with the hope it might make my way of seeing things seem less foreign and mystical.

Reasons are human-related (when distinguished from mechanics). If ask "why did you smash that vase?" I'm not expecting "because my arm raised, my hand released it and that caused it to smash". I'm asking about your motives.

In Physics, chemistry, neurosciences...etc, the distinction doesn't make any sense. There are no motives, to 'why?' and 'how?' are the same question. As I alluded to earlier, about the closest we could get to a distinction is in evolutionary sciences where 'why?' refers to the evolutionary advantage, and 'how?' refers to the genetics, but even there it's just convention. we could ask 'how?' of evolution too and get a good set of theoretical answers.

Equally, if I asked a physicist 'why did the vase smash?', he might say 'because gravity pulls objects toward the earth and brittle things like vases smash on impact'. That's considered an answer. I could ask why both those laws are the case, but all I'd get is further, more fundamental, rules. At the end of my questioning there'd always be 'it just is' — Isaac

Aren’t we talking about different epistemological accounts of causation? For conscious actions we use an intentional motivational account , and for physical processes we use an objective causative account ( or a variety of them). We might even talk of an intermediate epistemic account pertaining to living systems that we could call biosemiological. You seems to suggest earlier that we could reduce consciousness to a physical account , but it would seem that biosemiotic thinkers like Howard Pattee would disagree. “…all of our models are based on epistemological assump­tions and limited by our modes of thought…. if biosemiotics is not primarily the study of symbolic matter but the study of symbolic meaning, then as I have emphasized (Pattee 2008), this requires a different epistemological principle than does the study of physics and biology.”

So it seems your approach , reducing biological and psychological phenomena to the epistemological domain of physics and chemistry, is one of a number of positions that have been put forth(Btw, I would argue that free energy approaches in neuroscience, even though they borrow from physics, depend on a novel epistemic account. Without this , their model consciousness would look like Penorse’s). Another , which I believe Searle endorses, is to acknowledge that psychological and physical phenomena belong to separate accounts , but that these cannot and need not be reducible one to the other. They coexist for the different purposes they serve. Hermeneutisticts like Wilhelm Dilthey advocated something similar He divided the human sciences from the natural sciences based on their different epistemic organizing principles.

Another approach argues that we can and must reduce one of these accounts to the other , not by reducing psychological to physical but the other way around.
According to Husserl and Heidegger, objectively causal accounts as in physics are naive forms of naturalism. Put differently, objective physical causation is derived from intersubjective intentional processes. This does not mean that conscious subjectivity precedes the world, only that there are fundamental organizing principles uniting the physical, biological and psychological domains. As Piaget argued , “physics is far from complete , having been unable to integrate biology and the behavioral sciences within itself”.

y. Darwin found a mechanism for producing multiple species. The answer to the question 'why are there so many species?' was 'species evolve by natural selection and this process produces many species as a consequence of its mechanisms'. — Isaac

If all mechanisms are alike in their fundamental condition of possibility, then I agree that they cannot not answer ‘why’ questions, because they simply replace one arbitrary ordering scheme with another. We can only say ‘so it was not this way, it was that way’. It is only if we see changes in mechanism in a dialectical sense, as in some sense subsuming previous modes of representation, that they answer ‘why’ questions.

There are mechanisms like clocks or car engines , and there are mechanisms like evolutionary, organic and ecological processes. In the broadest sense, yes, we can call all of these mechanisms. But don’t you see a difference in the nature of the ordering system involved in these two domains? What about the difference between a hardware and a software description of a computer? What I am suggesting is that if we study the history of the empirical understanding of mechanism and causation , we find a parallel to its evolving philosophical understanding. Mechanical causation was understood differently by Newton than by Leibnitz and later thinkers. Causes were certain and absolute for Newton , but after Hume the history of a cause could not guarantee it’s future. More recently, dynamical , reciprocal and gestalt causation are further transformations of the concept of ‘mechanism’ that in some respect encompass and subsume the earlier models.

Kuhn shows us how paradigms are discontinuous, they are not answers to the questions left by the previous one (that would merely be a continuation of the investigation within the previous paradigm) they a new ways of framing the problem such that those question become meaningless. So the mere possibility of a new paradigm doesn't mean the questions in the prior paradigm are unanswered, just that they might, in future become obsolete, or meaningless. — Isaac

The prior questions don’t become completely meaningless. If that were the case, Kuhn would not be able to claim that there are reasons to choose one paradigm over another , that one solves more puzzles
than another. One can be perfectly satisfied that , even though the specific meanings of concepts used in one paradigm change in the alternative paradigm, enough remains stable in the general domain of relevance pursued by the competing paradigms that it can appear almost as if the new paradigm were being appended to the old.

The proof of this is that this is exactly how many sciences still think of the relation between Newton and Einstein, and progress of science in general. If it were so obvious that new paradigms “are not answers to the questions left by the previous one”. and that the previous questions become “meaningless” , Kuhn wouldn’t have needed to write his book.

It should be kept in mind that concepts are elastic: the meaning of a scientific term can gradually morph via paradigm shift without scientists being aware of it.

You're asking for the cause of a description, not an event or state. — Isaac

Of course consciousness is a state. At any time you may be either conscious or unconscious. The point of general anesthesia is to change your state of consciousness to off. An anesthetic works if it changes your conscious state, and doesn't work if it does not. If consciousness is somehow merely a description, how does an anesthetic have causal efficacy?

What would recommend as Phenomenology for Dummies? — T Clark

Try this:

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/self-consciousness-phenomenological/

The fact is very clear, that these methods you propose do not adequately show us the inside of any physical objects. — Metaphysician Undercover

That's simply not true. With the naked eye, I cannot see inside a human body, but with X-ray, MRI, Ultrasound and other imaging technologies I can see different parts of the body.

I can also cut a body open and see the heart, the lungs and other organs and parts. I can dissect muscle and bone and see inside them. I can use a microscope to see the cellular strucure of body tissues and even inside the cells themselves.

The fact is very clear, that these methods you propose do not adequately show us the inside of any physical objects. — Metaphysician Undercover

Again, not true. Inside and outside are relative. The surface of the heart is inside the body but is the outside of the heart. What is "adequately" supposed to mean there?

In any case, this is a distraction from the actual topic of the thread, so it is pointless pursuing it further here.

MU does have a flair for obfuscation, if it can be described as such. ;-)

What would recommend as Phenomenology for Dummies? — T Clark

Although only on one aspect, try this. (Amended link.)

@Joshs - I read in the above blog post 'Hence, any individual object necessarily belongs to multiple “essential species,” or essential structures of consciousness, and “everything belonging to the essence of the individuum another individuum can have too…”

Do I not detect the echo of hylomorphism in these kinds of sentiments from Husserl? Where 'forms' or 'ideas' are now transposed as 'essential structures of consciousness'?

Try this:

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/self-consciousness-phenomenological/ — Joshs

I don't agree with that article regarding pre-reflective self-awareness. I think pre-reflective awareness is prior to self and other; prior to subject and object.

I don't agree with that article regarding pre-reflective self-awareness. I think pre-reflective awareness is prior to self and other; prior to subject and object. — Janus

Interesting. How would that work? Kind of like meditative awareness?

Interesting. How would that work? Kind of like meditative awareness? — Joshs

I think the aim of meditation is to consciously be in the way we primordially are. I wouldn't even call it being-in-the world, which is still a dualistic notion, but rather simply being with no distinction. The awareness of self arises 'later' as a thought.

I think the aim of meditation is to be in the way we primordially are. I wouldn't even call it being-in-the world, which is still a dualistic notion, but rather simply being with no distinction. The awareness of self arises 'later' as a thought. — Janus

You refer to the being of a ‘we’. In what sense is it a being if there is no distinction? Isn’t pure absence of differentiation non-being?

You refer to the being of a ‘we’. In what sense is it a being if there is no distinction? Isn’t pure absence of differentiation non-being? — Joshs

Strictly there is no differentiation between being and non-being, but of course as soon as a distinction is made we have being, since non-being cannot be anything, much less a distinction. Whatever we say we will fall into dualism, as Derrida points out, but it does not follow that all is text. Experience is prior to what is said, to any text, but once we have said that, well...you get the picture...

What would recommend as Phenomenology for Dummies?
— T Clark

Try this:

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/self-consciousness-phenomenological/ — Joshs

What would recommend as Phenomenology for Dummies?
— T Clark

Although only on one aspect, try this. (Amended link.) — Wayfarer

I took a look at both of these sources. I finished Wayfarer's and about halfway through Josh's. I will read the rest. They were exactly what I was looking for. Thanks. Probably the most interesting aspect of the readings for me is how the views presented are closely parallel my own which I've presented here often. This from the blog post Wayfarer linked to:

When we leave our house in the morning, we take the objects we see around us as simply real, factual things—this tree, neighboring buildings, cars, etcetera. This attitude or perspective, which is usually unrecognized as a perspective, Edmund Husserl terms the “natural attitude” or the “natural theoretical attitude.”...

...From a phenomenological perspective, this naturalizing attitude conceals a profound naïveté. Husserl claimed that “being” can never be collapsed entirely into being in the empirical world: any instance of actual being, he argued, is necessarily encountered upon a horizon that encompasses facticity but is larger than facticity. Indeed, the very sense of facts of consciousness as such, from a phenomenological perspective, depends on a wider horizon of consciousness that usually remains unexamined. — Marc Applebaum

As the text indicates, we don't find our everyday world waiting for us, we create it, i.e. the idea of objective reality is not necessary to account for the world we find ourselves in. From Verse 1 of Stephen Mitchell's translation of the Tao Te Ching:

The unnamable is the eternally real.
Naming is the origin
of all particular things.

This from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article Joshs linked to:

For phenomenologists, the immediate and first-personal givenness of experience is accounted for in terms of a pre-reflective self-consciousness. In the most basic sense of the term, self-consciousness is not something that comes about the moment one attentively inspects or reflectively introspects one’s experiences, or recognizes one’s specular image in the mirror, or refers to oneself with the use of the first-person pronoun, or constructs a self-narrative. Rather, these different kinds of self-consciousness are to be distinguished from the pre-reflective self-consciousness which is present whenever I am living through or undergoing an experience, e.g., whenever I am consciously perceiving the world, remembering a past event, imagining a future event, thinking an occurrent thought, or feeling sad or happy, thirsty or in pain, and so forth. — SEP - Phenomenological Approaches to Self-Consciousness

The idea of pre-reflective self-consciousness is one I've thought a lot about, although not in those terms. It's one of the primary questions I have about Lao Tzu's way of seeing the world - is it possible to experience the Tao directly without words. My intuition tells me it is, but I've struggling with it. A lot of the issues raised in the SEP article echo ones I've been working on and I got some new ways of looking at the questions from the article. I'm not as sour on phenomenology as I was before I read this stuff.

Which brings us to the bottom line, as the cliche goes - I don't see how anything I've read here is inconsistent with the idea that the experience of consciousness is a manifestation of biological and neurological processes.

I don't see how anything I've read here is inconsistent with the idea that the experience of consciousness is a manifestation of biological and neurological processes. — T Clark

The distinction is that biology and neurology are conducted at arms length, to to speak. They’re objective disciplines, as distinct from immediate awareness of first-person experience. I think it’s a pretty easy distinction to draw. That quote I provided before from Dennett is from a post of his called ‘The Fantasy of First-Person Science’ so clearly it’s a distinction that he (one of the protagonists in the debate) recognizes.

The distinction is that biology and neurology are conducted at arms length, to to speak. They’re objective disciplines, as distinct from immediate awareness of first-person experience. I think it’s a pretty easy distinction to draw. That quote I provided before from Dennett is from a post of his called ‘The Fantasy of First-Person Science’ so clearly it’s a distinction that he (one of the protagonists in the debate) recognizes. — Wayfarer

I wasn't questioning that people, including well-known philosophers, have made the distinction. But I think the important line of distinction is located elsewhere. Not between inside and outside science, but between a science that recognizes that reality is inextricably tangled with human cognition and one that doesn't.