The idea of a disembodied subject seems to derive from a focus on the visual. We also touch and feel, taste, hear and smell things which to varying degrees seem to bespeak embodiment more essentially than seeing does.

It also seems to be seeing that primarily discloses things as indentifiable objects and perhaps this leads dialectically to the notion of disembodied subject, at least until it is realized that we actually need to move around to synthesize the notion of an environment external to the body.

This is very cursory and needs a good deal of fleshing out of course.

I think you are right that the emphasis on sight misleads us. Strangely enough, Husserl's careful analysis of sight is also curative. The spatial object is always given to us from this or that perspective. The 'total object' is 'transcendent' in the sense that it's never given to the eyes all at once.

For practical purposes, we seem to ignore how the object is given. The report and the reporter are 'transparent' except to the degree that they are relevant.

:up: I think this is a good OP. I'm going out soon, (it's 5PM Saturday evening here and I'm off to a "vinyl revival" two turntable DJ-ed reggae dance party) so no time for further conversation right now. I look forward to seeing some responses from others tomorrow.

You did mention in another thread you’ve been reading Husserl, right? Your penultimate paragraph is phenomenological through and through, in its guise as embodied cognition.

You did mention in another thread you’ve been reading Husserl, right? Your penultimate paragraph is phenomenological through and through, in its guise as embodied cognition. — Quixodian

Yes, I consider myself very much in the phenomenological camp. Merleau-Ponty, inspired by Husserl, famously stressed the flesh as a metaphysical concept (so I am processing influences here).

I think that Hegel is maybe the grandfather, if Husserl is the father of phenomenology.

Consider this shocking understanding of idealism.

The proposition that the finite is ideal constitutes Idealism. The idealism of philosophy consists in nothing else than in recognizing that the finite has no veritable being. Every philosophy is essentially an idealism or at least has idealism for its principle, and the question then is only how far this principle is actually carried out. ... A philosophy which ascribed veritable, ultimate, absolute being to finite existence as such, would not deserve the name of philosophy; the principles of ancient or modern philosophies, water, or matter, or atoms are thoughts, universals, ideal entities, not things as they immediately present themselves to us, ... in fact what is, is only the one concrete whole from which the moments are inseparable. — Hegel

https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/help/mean08.htm

Idealism is named after its awareness that all finite objects are ideal (useful or pleasing fictions.) A finite object is a disconnected object, an object that makes sense on its own. Hegel's idealist sees the semantic interdependence of entities. Subject and substance are entangled.

Scientific realism (the ontological thesis of the pure or independent object) thinks it can see around all human subjects because it can see around (in a certain sense, itself to be further clarified) any particular subject.

But [and this for me anyway was the breakthrough, however simple it looks in retrospect], the concept of the subject only has meaning from our typical experience as social creatures with sense organs in a shared world. The subject is just as dependent on the object as the object is on the subject. Similarly, there's no left without right.

I think this is a good OP. I'm going out soon, (it's 5PM Saturday evening here and I'm off to a "vinyl revival" two turntable DJ-ed reggae dance party) so no time for further conversation right now. I look forward to seeing some responses from others tomorrow. — Janus

Cool. I look forward to continuing the conversation. This topic is my jam lately.

Another way of phrasing it:
The only world that we live in and care about and can talk about meaningfully (the 'lifeworld' in its fullness and depth) seems to depend, mostly tacitly, on the life of our flesh. When humans talk about reality, they implicitly talk about something that involves the perception thoughtful flesh, which we drag along everywhere, like it or not.

Some people say colors aren't real, because our nervous system paints them on some Reality that's never seen naked. But I say that instead the rose is red. It's only a fictional confused rose that has no color or shape and is the gray or vanishing fantasy of a metaphysician. Instead of a layer of appearance between us and reality, we can think in terms of depth. We always have the real, but we can also always have it more adequately and clearly.

External bodies become known to us only in the manner in which they penetrate our bodies, through the eye, the ear, the mouth, the nose, or the skin. Talk of being penetrated is a little unmanly, and that might explain why philosophers prefer to think that it is no worldly thing, but ghostly phenomena that enters "the mind".

Scare quotes for "the mind" because it seems to imply a universal generalised 'realm of ideas' in which your mind and my mind float ethereally in a universe of ideas, supping on the nourishing philosophies that abide there and remaining essentially disembodied.

"A mind" might better be imagined as the emergent will of the population of cells that constitute a body in interpenetrative relation to an environment. Where 'will' can be understood as the action of the organism, in terms of a discriminating response. Air is taken in, oxygen is preferentially absorbed and CO2 is preferentially released in exhalation, and that discrimination continues until the organism dies. These cells always knew the difference that science has lately named.

Science is then an aspect of the emergent (constructed) will of a social species, emerging from a 'method' or practice of interaction with the distinguished social and physical environments. The method in turn being distinguished from more varied (chaotic) practices that did not make the hard distinction between the social and the physical as religions and polities.

Thus a crude physicalism in outline.

Physicalism has a bit of a blurry meaning, so I'll try to more carefully specify that what I'm challenging is the intelligibility of the species-independent 'pure' object. I freely grant that mountains and mothers are independent of any particular individual human being, at least in a powerful sense that rules out crude egocentric. But I don't think we can talk more than nonsense and round squares about a world apart from human cognition. It's almost tautological, and yet the simplest things are sometimes slipperiest.

Scare quotes for "the mind" because it seems to imply a universal generalised 'realm of ideas' in which your mind and my mind float ethereally in a universe of ideas, supping on the nourishing philosophies that abide there and remaining essentially disembodied. — unenlightened

I suggest that ideas do indeed exist at something like the 'more subjective' or 'less material' end of the spectrum. How they exist is something we can clarify endlessly. Where we seem to agree is that the individual subject is very much embodied. So is the 'cultural subject,' but more strangely.

You mention penetration anxiety, and I think that is related to a more general flight from vulnerability. It's a bit of a tangent, but I suggest that the spirituality of science involves living more in more in something like Popper's 'world 3' and identifying more and more with culture that depends on human bodies in general but no human body in particular.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popper%27s_three_worlds

The flame of knowledge leaps from melting candle to melting candle. We lose (even get bored with) the idiosyncratic mortal self except as 'hardware' for the infinite game of rationality's endless selfclarification. I imagine old Socrates, no longer troubled by the usual lust or greed, more interested in world-revealing critical conversation than anything else. Objectivity is implicitly social.

Talk of being penetrated is a little unmanly, and that might explain why philosophers prefer to think that it is no worldly thing, but ghostly phenomena that enters "the mind". — unenlightened

I, am an impenetrable fortress. Nothing, I repeat nothing, from that "external world" can infiltrate my defenses, and move me. All which exists within my mind comes from the inside. Thus is my reality.

There is however, a sense in which ideas come to my mind from somewhere other than my mind. Since they cannot penetrate through my fortress, and enter from the external, and "ghostly phenomena" is silly talk, I conclude that they enter my mind through "inner space". And since the ideas which enter my mind through inner space seem to be very similar to the ideas which enter your mind through inner space, I can conclude that we are very well connected through inner space.

Scare quotes for "the mind" because it seems to imply a universal generalised 'realm of ideas' in which your mind and my mind float ethereally in a universe of ideas, supping on the nourishing philosophies that abide there and remaining essentially disembodied. — unenlightened

Yes, it's good to understand "inner space" in terms of disembodiment because there cannot be any spatial extension, which is a requirement for bodies, in the intensional realm.

"A mind" might better be imagined as the emergent will of the population of cells that constitute a body in interpenetrative relation to an environment. Where 'will' can be understood as the action of the organism, in terms of a discriminating response. Air is taken in, oxygen is preferentially absorbed and CO2 is preferentially released in exhalation, and that discrimination continues until the organism dies. These cells always knew the difference that science has lately named. — unenlightened

Now you've lost me. You're talking about the internal "mind" in terms of external bodies and movements, and things penetrating the impenetrable fortress. I suggest you go back to the drawing board, and refigure your ideas from the inside. Don't let that thing you call "science" penetrate your soul from the outside inward, thereby corrupting the entirety of your mind.

Science is then an aspect of the emergent (constructed) will of a social species, emerging from a 'method' or practice of interaction with the distinguished social and physical environments. The method in turn being distinguished from more varied (chaotic) practices that did not make the hard distinction between the social and the physical as religions and polities. — unenlightened

Science was a mistaken venture from its outset. The human beings thought that they could proceed outward from the inner space, and find freedom in a supposed vast expanse of the assumed outer realm. But they are now finding out that there is really no way to escape the penitentiary to the outside, as there really is no outside, no such thing as an external world, or "outer space". The humans have found out that everything which happens happens through the inside, and we just misrepresent these happenings, and mistakenly misunderstand them through three dimensional or four dimensional geometry which portrays, or models, all this activity as outside.

Until we recognize that true freedom can only be found through inner space, we'll be continually banging our heads against that impenetrable wall to the external; a process which prevents us from the freedom of disembodiment. Why bang our heads endlessly against a barrier which we know from experience has real substantial existence, instead of turning around and finding true freedom through the interrelations of inner space?

Thus a crude physicalism in outline. — unenlightened

Physicalism is dead. The scientific method which kept knocking itself silly by banging its head on the impenetrable boundary has finally given up the ghost, which has retreated to the inner space.

I suggest that ideas do indeed exist at something like the 'more subjective' or 'less material' end of the spectrum. How they exist is something we can clarify endlessly. Where we seem to agree is that the individual subject is very much embodied. So is the 'cultural subject,' but more strangely. — plaque flag

Yeah, I'm more trying to encapsulate the difficulties of physicalism than present the creed for adoption. It's dead, but it continues as a zombie to consume life.

Science seems to begin in a Cartesian dualism of mind and body that at first limits itself to bodies as it's proper subject, but ends up having to deal with mind and subjectivity that it has explicitly ruled out of its domain. Philosophers of science and neuroscientists and scientific psychologists have somehow to give an objective account of subjectivity, which contradiction necessarily results in a mixture of fiction, nonsense and vacuity.

So given that an objective account of subjectivity is impossible, I return to Descartes' characterisation of subjectivity in terms of 'thinking'. Philosophers valorise thinking, and make an identification with it. I think - I cannot doubt that I think because to doubt is to think, therefore I am certain of my existence as thought.

*Silent pause ...*

In those pauses, when there is no thought, yet there is subjectivity. I conclude that thought is a mechanical physical process such as a computer or a neural network performs, that a subject can be aware of in their own brain, not subjectivity itself, and what thought cannot doubt is not thereby confirmed to be the case, because one can be aware of the silence of thought.

There is however, a sense in which ideas come to my mind from somewhere other than my mind. Since they cannot penetrate through my fortress, and enter from the external, and "ghostly phenomena" is silly talk, I conclude that they enter my mind through "inner space". And since the ideas which enter my mind through inner space seem to be very similar to the ideas which enter your mind through inner space, I can conclude that we are very well connected through inner space. — Metaphysician Undercover

Sounds a bit like the internet. But I think you are continuing the Cartesian split and trying to account subjectively for objectivity which must result in the same kind of contradiction - here we are sharing ideas through physical means, are we not? Interior requires an inexplicable exterior and neither can account for the other that it rejects. Can we not reject the split, except as a methodological tool for understanding one aspect of a single world? And then characterise that aspect that our scientific method brackets off, not as another world, and not as ideas, but as the meaning and the caring of the world.

Yeah, I'm more trying to encapsulate the difficulties of physicalism than present the creed for adoption. It's dead, but it continues as a zombie to consume life. — unenlightened

It may be a parasite on the glory of technology. Granted that we worship power, any philosophy that seems to ride that particular coattail is a good bet. A rising politician needs a sophist to write speeches, not some angsty phenomenologist or a suspiciously detached Socrates content with no more than the conditions for the possibility of free-critical truth-seeking conversation. I might start another thread about the unworldly foolishness of the philosopher as opposed to the pragmatic sophist.

Can we not reject the split, except as a methodological tool for understanding one aspect of a single world? — unenlightened

Exactly. The heart of all of this is holism. Fundamental ontology is a holism that doesn't cut corners or rip out a mere aspect or piece of reality and try to put it under the rest.

...the pragmatic sophist. — plaque flag

:rofl: "I am the very model of a modern Major-General
I've information vegetable, animal, and mineral
I know the kings of England, and I quote the fights historical
From Marathon to Waterloo, in order categorical;…"

Fundamental ontology is a holism that doesn't cut corners or rip out a mere aspect or piece of reality and try to put it under the rest. — plaque flag

So the project is to find a way to explore that aspect that science has neglected by design, that we are calling subjectivity for the moment, and that cannot be the scientific method, but might be, I don't know, poetic, confessional, artistic, moral, sentimental, meditative, spiritual? Perhaps the method of no method?

So the project is to find a way to explore that aspect that science has neglected by design, that we are calling subjectivity for the moment, and that cannot be the scientific method, but might be, I don't know, poetic, confessional, artistic, moral, sentimental, meditative, spiritual? Perhaps the method of no method? — unenlightened

I think Husserl had the right general idea in his conception of phenomenology, which doesn't mean he was always right on the details. He understood very well that such 'science' is fallibly done with others.

Have you looked at the link in this thread? I'm currently struggling with it, but it may have something like a decent answer, if |I can get my head around it.

https://smartnightreadingroom.files.wordpress.com/2013/05/meeting-the-universe-halfway.pdf

I like what you wrote in that thread.
The observer and the observed are entangled in the observation, and this observation displays the same entanglement as every observation. The separation of the observer from the observed is never more than a convenient approximation that is never completely true.

Hegel wrote that any disconnected or finite entity was a mere fiction, had no genuine being. He then defined this view as the essence of idealism. So 'idealism' is the recognition that disconnected (finite) entities are ideal, imaginary, fictional. For Hegel, [good] philosophy is idealism as just holism, which is to say realism.

This claim gets something right but it's a little reckless.
“The "objects" to which our performances must be held accountable are not something outside discursive practice itself. Discursive practice cannot be understood as an intralinguistic structure or activity that then somehow "reaches out" to incorporate or accord to objects.

The objects are not independent of our conceptualization of them, but our conceptualization is not independent of the object. A meaningful and genuine subject is, in my view, an embodied subject in an actual world that is not just whatever the subject wants it to be. Also discursive practice melts uselessly into vague human coping if it's not basically or prototypically good old written and verbal discourse. The ameobic metaphor of such research reaching out to include a new object (a new species of cave fish) does not strike me as problematic.

Methodological solipsism even looks to be the proper approach if applied at the level of the species. — plaque flag

I think this is right. There's an argument people make that because humans and bees perceive flowers differently, every human being lives in their own private Idaho.

I think we have to accept both that what we experience as the 'external world' is a construction, and that we know this precisely because we do know something about how this construction is done.

Hume figured this out, and noted that he lacks the power not to believe in the persistence of objects, and concluded that there are things Nature deemed too important to leave to our frail reason.

The world that encompasses this flesh is at the same time always strangely given through this same flesh. — plaque flag

Damasio emphasizes that a brain's first task is keeping the body it's in in the homeostatic happy zone. The brain only models the world in order to better maintain the body it's responsible for.

I think - I cannot doubt that I think because to doubt is to think, therefore I am certain of my existence as thought. — unenlightened

What thought signifies to me is need, lacking. We think because we are in need. So when Descartes put thinking in relation to being, he should have recognized that we think because we are lacking in our being. We are, each of us, incomplete. So I think, not because I am, but because I want to be.

Sounds a bit like the internet. But I think you are continuing the Cartesian split and trying to account subjectively for objectivity which must result in the same kind of contradiction - here we are sharing ideas through physical means, are we not? Interior requires an inexplicable exterior and neither can account for the other that it rejects. Can we not reject the split, except as a methodological tool for understanding one aspect of a single world? And then characterise that aspect that our scientific method brackets off, not as another world, and not as ideas, but as the meaning and the caring of the world. — unenlightened

I am not actually denying the exterior. It is what it is, and that is what I described as a faulty representation. That does not make it unreal, as a representation it is real, but faulty. Likewise, "the physical" is very real, as a representation, it is just lacking in its capacity to accurately model how the universe actually behaves. So we can go to the "single world" scenario, but only by recognizing that the scientific method is not properly modeling the single world.

So here's the point. It seems like we share ideas through the external world, speaking writing, radio, internet, etc.. This is what you call physical means. In a basic sense, we reach outward, touch things, and move them around. But these supposed outward movements all come from an inner source, supposedly moving outward, and they end by altering the inner aspects somewhere else.. The supposed outward movement changes the supposed external world, in a way which other people can sense, perceive, and interpret for meaning. But this may be a complete misunderstanding.

Now imagine that there is nothing out there, nothing external, and all this activity is really happening in the internal aspects of bodies, and through the relations of inner space. There must be a boundary between the inner space, and the external nothingness. So each time that it seems like I reach out with my hand to touch something I am really hitting that external boundary behind which is nothing. The activity which you, or anyone else might see, and interpret as me reaching outward and touching an object is really all occurring within internal space, and you're actually seeing it through inner space. Though we model this interaction as occurring through external space, and as the external boundaries of objects hitting and moving each other, the real activity is occurring within the inner space of the objects, and their internal relations to each other. So when I reach out and move the object with my hand, we model it as the external part of my body exerting a force against the external part of the object, and this moves the object. In reality, I am moving it by means of the internal aspects of my body affecting the internal aspects of the object, through inner space, and it simply appears like the external part of my body exerts force on the external part of the object. through external space.

I think we have to accept both that what we experience as the 'external world' is a construction, and that we know this precisely because we do know something about how this construction is done. — Srap Tasmaner

The problem with the construction view (if taken too far anyway) is that we only believe we are trapped inside a construction because we take that same construction as a reality. Indirect realism, which seems admirably cautious, is incautious in what it takes for granted --- a meaningful concept of the subject doesn't depend on the same commonsense direct realism it sets itself against.

Are the sense organs their own product ? If we live in a construction, why should we believe there are really brains and eyes and ears that construct ? I prefer some kind of direct realism: There are eyes and ears and brains, and there is the being of the world (not the being of an image of the world) for a 'conscious' human. We have no experience apart from (by other means) than thru this living flesh.

Damasio emphasizes that a brain's first task is keeping the body it's in in the homeostatic happy zone. The brain only models the world in order to better maintain the body it's responsible for. — Srap Tasmaner

That makes sense. I see all entities on a the semantic inferential plane. We see our spouse's eyes and not internal images of those eyes --- even though we see with the eyes and light in complicated ways.

As I see it, a phenomenological direct realist is more willing to grant the reality of the brain than most. For it is not an illusion paradoxically created by itself.

Is it not a re-run of looking into the void, and the void looking into you. Is she not saying, "Don't imagine all the obseverish specialness is on the one side. 'Plaque flag, meet cave fish. Cave fish, meet plaque flag."

Discursive practice is made of the fundamental particles of the universe which is the intra-action. She talks about discursive practice rather than the atomic 'speech act'. Our discussion and her book are defining each other in a mutual process, a thread is an experiment that might work or not.

We are, each of us, incomplete. So I think, not because I am, but because I want to be. — Metaphysician Undercover

Psychologically, this rings true. The world pours into the emptiness of awareness, never filling it. Being unfolds in time. But thought is unimportant, in the sense that it does nothing to complete us and fill the void, only love can do that. But for the rest, it looks to me that you have simply swapped interior and exterior and repeated the Cartesian dualism. So you end up as an idealist trying to think happy thoughts instead of a pleasure-seeking materialist.

Discursive practice is made of the fundamental particles of the universe which is the intra-action. She talks about discursive practice rather than the atomic 'speech act'. Our discussion and her book are defining each other in a mutual process, a thread is an experiment that might work or not. — unenlightened

I think we are mostly on the same page. The 'Lifeworld' is a dynamic meaningdripping unity. But it's given through or to distinct personalities in distinct bodies, which are admittedly permeable and do not have exact boundaries.

Yup. there seem to be multiple threads approaching the same thing from different angles. The Lifeworld is telling us we done gone wrong somewhere, and that is an inescapably moral judgement, in the sense that if you eat all the pies today, there'll be nothing for breakfast tomorrow. We have nature beat, so now we have to live in a desert. Oops! Some religious comment about karma, or living by the sword seems appropriate - old signposts we philosophers have encouraged folk to ignore.

Being unfolds in time. But thought is unimportant, in the sense that it does nothing to complete us and fill the void, only love can do that. — unenlightened

I would agree that love fills the void, and love is expressed in actions rather than thoughts, but I think thought is still required in a secondary way, as a cause of loving acts. Isn't it true that thoughtfulness is an indication of love, even if love does not actually require thoughtfulness for its existence? I don't see how thoughtlessness could be consistent with "love". This relationship between thoughtfulness and love demonstrates that thoughtfulness is dependent on love, such that love is essential to, or necessary for thoughtfulness. And loving acts are dependent on thoughtfulness in much the same way, such that thoughtfulness is necessary for loving acts. And loving acts are necessary to fill the void.

We might say that love comes from somewhere deeper than thought, and is prior to thought, therefore does not require thought, but the outward actions which express love require thought. So thought is like a filter between love and the actions it produces, it attempts to constrain the actions to be truly consistent with what is needed. Loving acts, though they may succeed in filling the gap of what is lacking, and what is needed, are really just an outward expression, or representation, of the true love which is deep within, as the cause of action. And love itself is even deeper within than thought is, as prior to (cause of) the thoughtfulness which itself is prior to the loving acts as the cause of conformity; that is conforming to what appears to fill the void.

But it's all a backward representation, because the true "void" which needs to be filled, is deepest within,
inherent within the thoughts, inherent within the love itself, whose lacking and need produces the inclination for action in the first place.

But for the rest, it looks to me that you have simply swapped interior and exterior and repeated the Cartesian dualism. — unenlightened

I really cannot understand how dualism is avoidable in an accurate understanding of reality. This is due to the nature of time. The problem is that the future is indeterminate, consisting of possibilities, while the past consists of what actually is determined. Being unfolds in time, as you say, and this is at the present, so the living being partakes in both the undetermined future, full of possibilities, and the determined past, full of actualities. How can we understand this two-fold reality without a dualist framework?

:up:
Yes, ethically motivated.

At the very least, earnest ontology is a will toward truth. I bring no blueprint for the better mousetrap. I like to think that I aspire toward a relatively radical self-honesty for its own sake (which is maybe to say that I find self-honesty apriori noble or worthy and worth striving towards.) It's important to be honest with others, but this is trickier, for reasons I probably don't need to go into.

Isn't it true that thoughtfulness is an indication of love, even if love does not actually require thoughtfulness for its existence? I don't see how thoughtlessness could be consistent with "love". — Metaphysician Undercover

When I say thought, I mean linguistic thought. Love begins in caring and nurture, you know nests, sitting on eggs, wagging your tail when the human looks at you.

As I see it, a phenomenological direct realist is more willing to grant the reality of the brain than most. For it is not an illusion paradoxically created by itself. — plaque flag

For Husserl, the brain is indeed ‘real’, but then he analyzed the real as a higher level construction of intentional acts, just as real spatial objects are constituted out of correlated perceptions. The object, whether brain or rock or atom, is not an illusion, rather it is an achievement of subjective and intersubjective idealization that is never completely fulfilled. All facts of nature for Husserl are contingent and relative. Consequently, we can’t use the ‘reality’ of the brain as an explanatory grounding for the constitutive process out of which it emerges as an ideal object. The real for Husserl is only ever a secondary and derived grounding.