unconscious reality only has a third person perspective, — hypericin

From whence do the pre-sentient denizens of the cosmos derive 'a perspective'? Unlike our various panpsychist friends, I'm loath to admit they have any: consciousness is required for there to be any kind of perspective.

From phenomenology of biology, in particular Hans Jonas' book on that - the most rudimentary of organisms distinguishes 'self from other' in a way that no non-organic matter does. It is the very first thing that an organism must do to maintain itself against the relentless onslaught of entropy. That, I see, as the fundamental emergence of consciousness, on a very rudimentary level, although not of sentience, which comes later.

Unless there wasn't a time when consciousness didn't exist. If it is fundamental, a property of things, as, for example, mass and charge are, then it was always there — Patterner

My hesitation with this line of panpsychism is that it extends the concept of matter so as to include consciousness as an attribute, rather than questioning the object-centred metaphysics that made consciousness invisible in the first place. From a phenomenological standpoint, consciousness isn’t something that can be injected retrospectively into an already third-person model of reality. Any framework that begins by screening out subjectivity — as the physicalist model has done — will inevitably fail when it later tries to reintroduce it as a fundamental property alongside mass or charge.

That is why thinkers like Michel Bitbol press the need for a change of stance or attitude. This form of panpsychism still retains the self–other, subject–object paradigm that underlies naturalism; it simply enriches the inventory of properties without questioning the framing itself.

In that sense, even the question “what is consciousness?” is improper if it is posed within that same objectifying register. (It's what don't like about Anikka Harris and Galen Strawson, who are trying to rehabilitate physicalism, rather than seeing through it, mainly, I suspect, out of the fear of religion.)

As I've said on these forums many times an idealism that does not posit universal mind in some form is incoherent and cannot explain what is clear to us from everyday experience―that we live in a shared world. — Janus

But it can, though. We live in a shared world, because we have highly convergent minds, sensory systems, and languages. So we will converge on similar understandings of what is real, due to those shared elements. I mean, genetically, we're all identical, up until the top-most layer of differentiation.

There's a thought-experiment I will give to make this point. Imagine a sentient mountain. Mountains have lifespans of hundreds of millions of years. From the perspective of a sentient mountain, humans are far too ephemeral and small to even notice. Rivers, you will notice, because they'll be around long enough to carve out ravines in your sides. But humans are to a mountain as microbes are to humans.

Speaking of microbes, if there were rational sentient microbes then the scale of human existence would likely also be incomprehensible. Humans would be so vast, and their life-spans so long, they would seem like solar systems to humans.

So, there are shared worlds, on many levels. There's this human world, which is shared by the other billions of humans. But the fact that we inhabit a shared world says nothing about its ultimate nature, whether and in what sense it has a reality above and beyond the sensory and experiential data that we receive and interpret. Kastrup's criticism of materialism is that it posits something beyond and outside those experiential states which account for those states, as being somehow fundamental and ontologically prior to the mind which receives and interprets these data.

The appeal to a universal mind does not arise from idealism as such, but from the attempt to preserve the intuition that the world must exist in the same way when unobserved as when observed. But that intuition is inherited from realism, not established by argument. Once we recognise that any account of what the world is “in itself” already deploys the cognitive resources of the mind, the supposed need for a universal observer evaporates.

As Zen puts it, “Mind is no mind.” That seems to me exactly the point here — mind is not something we can turn into an object, whether individual or universal, even though experience is always for a mind. The mind is the ever-present subject, nowhere to be found.

For long stretches of time, during normatively stable periods within a science or a culture, there is but one or a handful of related accepted ways to model truth and error. — Joshs

There’s an anecdote I sometimes re-tell that bears on this point. It concerns the arrival of the Endeavour in Botany Bay during James Cook’s voyage in 1770. Joseph Banks noted in his journal that a group of Indigenous people camped on the shoreline, roughly a mile away, showed no reaction at all to the ship’s presence. It was only some hours later, when a small boat was launched and rowed toward the shore, that they began to respond.

The point is not that the ship was misinterpreted. It seems not to have been interpreted at all — until the small boat entered the space of possible interaction. Only then did it cross the threshold from ignored anomaly to meaningful presence, presumably because its scale and form bore at least some resemblance to a canoe. (That part is conjectural, of course, but the lack of any initial reaction was a recorded fact.)

There’s another anecdote, often attributed to the anthropologist Colin Turnbull, concerning a chieftain from a forest-dwelling group in central Africa who was taken by car to a mountain lookout. After some time, he knelt down and began pawing at the ground in front of him. According to the translator, this was because distant herds of savanna animals were being interpreted as small creatures nearby — the result of a lifetime spent in dense forest, where visual depth rarely extends beyond a few metres.

Taken together, these strike me as illustrations of what one might call cognitive relativity: the way an underlying cognitive framework conditions how visual phenomena are interpreted — or, in the first case, ignored altogether. On a far more sophisticated level, Einstein was making essentially the same point when he insisted that theory determines what can be observed — something Manjit Kumar discusses in Quantum, and which influenced Heisenberg early on. The claim isn’t that observation is subjective, but that intelligibility comes first: a framework has to be in place before anything can count as “what is observed.”

I’m not endorsing out-and-out relativism here — I think there are real constraints and non-negotiable elements in experience. But these examples are a useful reminder to keep an open mind about the limits imposed by our own frameworks. It is especially relevant in discussions of phenomenology, which is very sensitive to the way that the implicit metaphysics of day-to-day culture shape our attitudes to experience.

You can hear them scream! — Patterner

Unless yours is the hand holding one end, in which case the shriek will be yours.

I can't help but remind myself that the 'puzzlement/wonder' it creates is a motivator for trying to go beyond that. So, as a way to solve the antinomy, I propose that we need to accept both stories and reconcile them. Yes, our consciousness is contingent, is ontologically dependent etc and it can't be the ground of 'intelligibility' of ourselves and the 'external world' (and also the 'empirical world', at the end of the day). But at the same time, I take seriously the other 'side' of the antinomy and I also affirm that intelligibility seems to be grounded in consciousness. However, in order to get a 'coherent story' that includes both insights, I acknowledge that I have to posit a consciousness of some sort that can truly be regarded as the ground of intelligibility. — boundless

I hear you! Obviously this is a deep and difficult question, but again, my orientation is shaped by my reading of Buddhist philosophy. You will recall that there is an unequivocal statement in the Pali texts, to wit, 'there is, monks, an unborn, unmade, unfabricated', and that if there were not, there would be no possibility of escape from the born, the made, the fabricated (reference). 'There is!' Of course, what that means - what precisely is the unborn, unconditioned - is beyond discursive reason. Probably also out of scope of naturalism, which puts it out-of-bounds for most here.

Nagarjuna goes beyond phenomenologists. — boundless

He does indeed. I'm also reading some of Bitbol's essays on Buddhism and he acknowledges this. That will be the subject of the third essay (if the next two are accepted by Philosophy Today.)

It invites the question: are these claims about the way things really are? I think this is a tender point for Bitbol. He wants to gatekeep the bounds of reason, but in order to do this he needs to grant reason a level of authority that he also seemingly wants to deny to it. If reason has the power to say what is unconditionally the case when engaging in critique, then how can we deny it that same power when it comes to ontology?...Does my critique of Bitbol hit the mark? — Esse Quam Videri

What exactly is he discerning in this essay? Bitbol is not claiming that he can determine what reality is like independently of experience. Notice at the outset, he says 'no alternative metaphysical view is advanced.' He is claiming that reason can notice when it has overstepped its bounds by mistaking the conditions of experience for objects within experience. That critique does not establish an alternative ontology - it is ameliorative rather than constructive. The aim is only to show the mistake inherent in trying to treat the issue of the nature of consciousness in objective terms, as the subject matter is categorically different. I don't think he's challenging naturalism when it comes to its legitimate subjects of interest, but its missapplication in philosophy of mind. All of which was anticipated by Husserl in his transcendentalist phase.

Nāgārjuna isn't really proposing a philosophy in the modern sense of the word, but rather something more like a path of liberation from philosophy (in the modern sense of the word). — Esse Quam Videri

There's a Buddhist metaphor that comes to mind. This is that the Buddha's teaching is like the stick used to stir a fire to help get it burning. But when the fire is burning, the stick is tossed in. There's another simile, the 'simile of the raft'. This compares the dharma to a raft 'bound together from fragments of sticks and grasses' (hence, nothing high-falutin') which is used to 'cross over the river' but which is discarded when the crossing is accomplished (Alagaddupama Sutta.) This has been compared to Wittgenstein's 'ladder' metaphor, that philosophy is like a ladder that is discarded after having been climbed.

But what is that rock, really? Objectively, it does not appear as you see it. In reality, it, and all of reality, outside of human perception, it is a conglomeration of colourless particles and waves, a haze and maze of uncertainty that turns into certainty only when you observe it. (I have heard it described as wavelength collapse, but I don't know enough about it to comment.) — Questioner

I read your posts, generally, as common-sense realism. We're evolved hominids, the universe is governed by the laws of physics, mind arises from brain, in line with the principles of evolutionary biology, and so on. Things that everyone knows, or thinks they do. But it is just that common-sense realism which is being challenged here. Granted, it takes some background reading to get the drift of these challenges, but suffice to say, many popular claims about what science has established and understands in respect to the nature of consciousness are subject to criticism - not on empirical grounds, but on philosophical grounds, i.e. what they mean.

Reductive materialism is the view that the mind is 'nothing but' the activities of neural matter and that as knowledge of neuroscience develops, so too will the grasp of this correlation. That neural reductionist view is propounded by a group of influential scholars and academics and is also associated with the 'new atheist' writings of popular intellectuals such as Richard Dawkins. By this means, it is hoped to reduce the understanding of consciousness or mind, to the network of physical causation by which other natural phenomena are explained.

The phenomenological critique is not that neuroscientific or evolutionary accounts are factually mistaken, but that the reduction of the nature of mind to physical causation is an extra step that is not warranted by the evidence. But those arguments are lengthy and difficult to summarise in a forum post. Perhaps a good starting point would be this essay Minding Matter, Adam Frank, who is a professor of astronomy. It actually discusses in some detail, but in a reader-friendly way, the philosophical challenges that 'wavelength collapse' pose for reductionist materialism. But there are many other such arguments, including those discussed by Michel Bitbol in the essay that this OP is based on.

The experience depends on the brain, but the brain depends on the experience, but temporal order isn't an issue because time doesn't exist before the experience. So the appallingly offensive bootstrapping is perhaps permissible. I don't buy it, but you need to grasp the argument before dismissing it. — bert1

It has some support in physics.

The notion of evolution is not applicable to the universe as a whole since there is no external observer with respect to the universe, and there is no external clock that does not belong to the universe. However, we do not actually ask why the universe as a whole is evolving. We are just trying to understand our own experimental data. Thus, a more precisely formulated question is why do we see the universe evolving in time in a given way. In order to answer this question one should first divide the universe into two main pieces: i) an observer with his clock and other measuring devices and ii) the rest of the universe. Then it can be shown that the wave function of the rest of the universe does depend on the state of the clock of the observer, i.e. on his ‘time’. This time dependence in some sense is ‘objective’: the results obtained by different (macroscopic) observers living in the same quantum state of the universe and using sufficiently good (macroscopic) measuring apparatus agree with each other.

Thus we see that without introducing an observer, we have a dead universe, which does not evolve in time. This example demonstrates an unusually important role played by the concept of an observer in quantum cosmology. John Wheeler underscored the complexity of the situation, replacing the word observer by the word participant, and introducing such terms as a ‘self-observing universe’. — Andrei Linde, Inflation, Quantum Cosmology and the Anthropic Principle

If consciousness is not there from the beginning — Patterner

The problem is that 'there' is implicitly objectifying. It is locative. You're already orienting the discussion in terms of space-time by using it.

So there are necessary truths, sentences and such. Are there necessary individuals? — Banno

Individuals - the person, the ego, individual self - are contingent as a matter of necessity. Interesting that the term 'individual' used to denote the person only becomes current in the 17th century. 'In the Middle Ages, you wouldn't call a person an individual. Instead, the term was used to describe things that were units of a whole. For example, the Holy Trinity was described as "individual" because its three parts could not be separated. To be "individual" meant to be unified with others, not separate from them.' The meaning was practically reversed in the Enlightenment.

‘There are no necessary truths’ is self contradictory, because if it is true then it is necessarily so.

Right! I was going to add that the salient point of the Schopenhauer passage is the ‘co-arising of mind and world’ which becomes central in later phenomenology.

Just note that this (Schopenhauer) not any kind of phenomenology. It makes the thread a little confusing if you smash up differing philosophical approaches. — frank

Beg to differ. Schop as one of Kant’s principle interpreters is very much part of the phenomenological lineage. Not that any of them endorse him wholesale but this passage in particular is highly relevant.

But it would not be that particular music — Questioner

It would not be the same rendition, but it would be the same piece. Claire de Lune retains its identity whether played on piano, guitar, or a singing birthday card.

This is the tip of a very large iceberg for your ‘mind=brain’ materialism: how something like a composition, a sentence, a formula can retain its identity across different versions and even different media. ‘The same and yet different’.

Very perceptive as always. I will respond when time permits.

However, we need to ask ourselves which 'consciousness' is foundational. — boundless

But that question is still being asked from an external perspective i.e. treating consciousness as a phenomenon, something that exists or may not exist. I think you're actually conflating two perspectives, that of regarding consciousness as an attribute of sentient beings, as you would from an evolutionary perspective, and then the transcendental insight that consciousness is the horizon within which the nature of being is intelligible in the first place. That excerpt from Schopenhauer does address this. He acknowledges that life evolves from matter, that higher organisms evolve from earlier forms:

"On the other hand, the law of causality and the treatment and investigation of nature which is based upon it, lead us necessarily to the conclusion that, in time, each more highly organised state of matter has succeeded a cruder state: so that the lower animals existed before men, fishes before land animals, plants before fishes, and the unorganised before all that is organised; that, consequently, the original mass had to pass through a long series of changes before the first eye could be opened."

"And yet", he goes on, "the existence of this whole world remains ever dependent upon the first eye that opened, even if it were that of an insect. For such an eye is a necessary condition of the possibility of knowledge, and the whole world exists only in and for knowledge, and without it is not even thinkable. The world is entirely idea, and as such demands the knowing subject as the supporter of its existence." Of course that goes against the grain of 'the inborn realism which arises from the original disposition of the intellect'. I've had many long (and mainly fruitless) arguments about this point on the forum, contested by those who are adamant that the world is there, external, outside of us, and ideas internal, in the mind, subjective. This long course of time itself, filled with innumerable changes, through which matter rose from form to form till at last the first percipient creature appeared,—this whole time itself is only thinkable in the identity of a consciousness whose succession of ideas, whose form of knowing it is, and apart from which, it loses all meaning and is nothing at all."

At this point, 99% of people will object: “But we know that the world existed before there were any sentient beings.” My reply is that “before” is a mental construct. Fossils are not mental constructs, nor is the geological record. But pastness is not something contained in those rocks. It is a form under which they are understood. Outside that form—outside a temporal framework supplied by consciousness—the fossils do not say “earlier,” “later,” or “before” at all. They simply are.

The record constrains what can coherently be said, but it does not interpret itself. And without that interpretive framework, the notion of a world that “existed before” anything capable of experience is not false so much as unintelligible.

The earth, say, as it was before there was life, is a field of empirical enquiry in which we have come to know a great deal; its reality is no more being denied than is the reality of perceived objects in the same room. The point is, the whole of the empirical world in space and time is the creation of our understanding, which apprehends all the objects of empirical knowledge within it as being in some part of that space and at some part of that time: and this is as true of the earth before there was life as it is of the pen I am now holding a few inches in front of my face and seeing slightly out of focus as it moves across the paper. — Bryan Magee, Schopenhauer's Philosophy

The problem is that we have all reasonable evidences to conclude that we aren't necessary for the existence of the 'world'. — boundless

Do you recall that that blog post about Schopenhauer that you posted - how time began with the first eye that opened?

Understanding that the mind/consciousness is the function of the structure (the brain) dispels any notion of Cartesian dualism. — Questioner

Yes. That is plain materialism.

Function cannot be separated from operating structure, no more than the music played by a piano can be separated from the piano. — Questioner

Of course it can. It can be played on another instrument, recorded, or transcribed into notation. In every case the music stays the same while the material form is different.

Pretty well how I see it also.

Wayfarer is saying the goldfish doesn’t realise there’s water there, it can’t see the water and takes it for granted. While you are saying, I know the water is there, but it’s no big deal. — Punshhh

Notice that the term 'immaterial' came up a couple of times, first in this post of 180's and then shortly after by Janus (they seem to be in furious agreement).

What I'm saying is that this is the false dilemma of Cartesian dualism, which divides the world into 'the physical' (res extensa) and the mental (res cogitans). But this is much larger that 'the philosophy of Descartes', as it is woven into the cultural grammar of modernity - we naturally tend to 'carve up' reality along those lines. So the implication is, if something is not physical, then it must be res cogitans - hence 'the immaterial mind'.

Yes, I know what you mean.

I'm actually looking at The Idea of the World again as I write this - I bought the Kindle edition a year ago. The chapter I'm reading on the dissociative boundary is footnoted to many empirical studies of the phenomenon.

Here's a sample of his reasoning:

(An) objection is this: nature unfolds according to patterns and regularities—the ‘laws of nature’—independent of our personal volition. Human beings cannot change these laws. But if nature is in consciousness, should that not be possible by a mere act of imagination?

... Notice that the implicit assumption here is that all mental activity is acquiescent to volition, which is patently false even in our own personal psyche. After all, by and large we cannot control our dreams, nightmares, emotions, and even many of our thoughts. They come, develop and go on their own terms. At a pathological level, schizophrenics cannot control their visions and people suffering from obsessive-compulsive disorder are constantly at the mercy of oppressive thoughts. There are numerous examples of conscious activity that escapes the control of volition. Often, we do not even recognize this activity as our own; that is, we do not identify with it. It unfolds as autonomous, seemingly external phenomena, such as dreams and schizophrenic hallucinations. Yet, all this activity is unquestionably within consciousness. We perceive it as separate from ourselves because the segment of our psyche that gives rise to this activity is dissociated from the ego, the segment with which we do identify.

So that there is activity in universal consciousness that we do not identify with and cannot control is entirely consistent with idealism. This activity is simply dissociated from our ego and its sense of volition. — Kastrup, Bernardo. The Idea of the World: A Multi-Disciplinary Argument for the Mental Nature of Reality (pp. 136-137). (Function). Kindle Edition.

I don’t recall Kastrup inferring from his ontology that there is any sense of an overall plan for life. I know he isn’t arguing against one either; it seems to be bracketed for him. One imagines him eventually getting caught up (hijacked?) in one or other religious perspectives. — Tom Storm

Caution needed here. I think Kastrup's natural tendency is much more convergent with the Hindu mokṣa than Christan eschatology, Are Vedantic or Buddhist perspectives 'religious'? Well, in a way, but they're also very different to the Biblical sense of religion. They're much more concerned with insight into the nature of mind and maybe much nearer to elements of gnositicism than to straight-ahead Christianity. But a large part of our cultural conditioning is to put all of them under the umbrella term 'religion', against which there is considerable animus, as you can see from any number of antireligious polemics on this forum.

If everything we encounter is mental in nature, then in what sense are some things “alive” and others not? Under Kastrup’s account, are all entities manifestations of mind equally, or does “life” mark a further distinction beyond mere consciousness? — Tom Storm

In Kastrup’s analytic idealism, everything is mental in origin but not everything is a subject of experience. Non-living objects are the extrinsic appearances of mental processes that are not dissociated into bounded experiential perspectives, whereas living organisms correspond to dissociated, self-maintaining mental processes and therefore possess an inner life. “Life” does not mark a higher degree of consciousness, but a structural distinction: the emergence of a private point of view within mind-at-large. Tables and rocks exist as stable appearances of mental activity, governed by lawful regularities, but there is 'nothing it is like to be a table'. This distinction — between mentality as ontological ground and subjectivity as a special mode of organization — is developed most systematically in The Idea of the World.

A natural follow-up question is: if non-living objects are the extrinsic appearances of mental processes, whose mental processes are these? This is where Kastrup leans heavily on mind-at-large, a move that has clear affinities with Advaita Vedānta (he has many dialogues with Swami Sarvapriyananda) and with Berkeley, whom he occasionally acknowledges. But it’s also worth noting that if one tries to conceive of “the world” — a rock, a tree, anything at all — as existing in the total absence of mental processes, one quickly runs into an insoluble conundrum (per Schopenhauer, also the subject of one of Kastrup's books, Decoding Schopenhauer's Metaphysics).

I’ve been critical of Kastrup’s notion of mind-at-large, but I’ve come to see it less as a posit of a cosmic intelligence and more as a way of marking the unavoidable fact that existence always appears within the horizon of consciousness. In that sense, the world exists in and for mind, where “mind” does not name a single metaphysical super-entity so much as the condition that anything be manifest at all — that is, any mind.

The point is why bother saying that the mind is immaterial? — Janus

You're the one who made the suggestion in the first place:

The OP says that consciousness is primary against, presumably, the idea that the material is primary. If consciousness is not, according to you, material, or at least a function of, or dependent on, the material, then the implication would be that it is immaterial, and that disembodied consciousness is possible. — Janus

And then:

you didn't answer the question I posed re whether you believe that immaterial or disembodied consciousness is possible. — Janus

You're still seeing the debate through the apparent dichotomy of material/immaterial.

If we are so 'constrained' by our own perspective and we can't make statements about the 'things in themselves' - i.e. metaphysical statements - the problem I notice is that the apparent intelligibility of the world as we experience it remains unexplained. — boundless

I think you’re right that phenomenology alone doesn’t “explain” why the world is intelligible — but Bitbol’s point is that intelligibility isn’t the kind of thing that needs explaining by appeal to a reality-in-itself. The mistake, as he sees it, is assuming that intelligibility must belong either to the subject or to the world as such. His refusal to choose among those options isn’t skepticism, but a refusal to reintroduce a metaphysical comparison that phenomenological suspension has already shown to be unwarranted. Intelligibility is a characteristic of being-in-the-world. In fact, I wonder if the demand to “explain intelligibility” is itself a mistake — as if we want to explain explanation. Maybe that's an antinomy of reason! Bitbol’s refusal to supply such an explanation isn’t evasion, but critical in the Kantian sense.

But then, even given that scientific objectivity is not the be-all and end-all, there's still an enormous range of things it can accomplish. I don't think Bitbol is throwing that away or belittling it - just reminding us of the underlying assumptions which are so easily forgotten in our bedazzlement with what science can do. And also a reminder of the limits of objectivity.

We, as conscious beings, may face an insurmountable barrier in explaining consciousness itself. But from this apparent epistemic barrier it cannot be concluded that consciousness has no naturalistic explanation. Just that we might never get to it. — hypericin

You do wonder how different a 'naturalistic explanation that might never be grasped' is from a 'metaphysical postulate'.

My point was simply that Energy is not a tangible material substance, but a postulated immaterial causal force (similar to electric potential) that can have detectable (actual) effects in the real world : similar to the spiritual belief in ghosts. — Gnomon

The comparison to a 'spiritual belief' misses the mark because energy is a strictly defined physical property, not a metaphysical posit. While it isn't a 'tangible substance' like a rock, it is inextricably linked to matter via e=mc². It has measurable physical effects, including gravity.

Furthermore, the discovery of quanta proved that energy isn't just a 'postulated force'—it exists in discrete, countable units (which is what 'quantum' means!) We don't just 'believe' in energy; we calculate it to ten decimal places to make your smartphone function.

But your Point is that reality is a simultaneous multi-level phenomenon??? — Gnomon

There are degrees of reality. Take a look at the Wiki article on The Analogy of the Divided Line from the Republic. The 'higher' knowledge comprises facts that can only be grasped by reason. They're not phenomenally existent as are material particulars.

Getting back to the paper I mentioned, which mentions Heiseberg's invocation of Aristotle's 'res potentia'. Heisenberg revives the Aristotelian concept of potentia (or dynamis), suggesting it is the most accurate philosophical description of what a quantum state really is.

Heisenberg’s treatment can be summarized as follows:

1. The "Middle Ground" of Reality

Heisenberg contends that a quantum wave function (the mathematical description of a particle) does not represent a "thing" in the traditional sense, but rather a tendency for something to occur. It's a probability distribution, meaning that the answer to the question 'does the particle exist' is not an unequivocal 'yes' or 'no' but a range of probabilities that it does. (This is what scientific realists such as Penrose can't accept.)

• Classical View: An object is either here or there.
• Heisenberg's "Potentia": In quantum mechanics, a particle exists in a state that is "something standing in the middle between the idea of an event and the actual event."
• Ontological Status: He describes this as a "strange kind of physical reality" that is more than a mere possibility (an idea) but less than a hard fact (an actuality). And this is an objective tendency inherent in nature, not just a result of incomplete knowledge of some pre-existing state of affairs.

2. The Transition from Potential to Actual
Heisenberg uses Aristotle’s distinction between potentiality and actuality to explain the "measurement problem" (often called the collapse of the wave function). He breaks down a physical experiment into three distinct phases:

• Preparation (Translation): We translate a classical setup (like a particle accelerator) into a mathematical probability function. This function represents the potentia—the list of all things that could happen.
• Evolution: The system evolves according to quantum laws. During this time, the system remains in a state of potentiality. There is no "actual" position or velocity, only a shifting distribution of possible outcomes.
• Measurement (The Act): When an observation is made, the "transition from the 'possible' to the 'actual' takes place." The interaction with the measuring device forces the potentia to manifest as a single, concrete event. An outcome is 'actualised' or 'manifested'.

3. Energy as Primary Matter

Here is where energy enters Heisenberg's picture, where he links the modern concept of energy to Aristotle’s concept of matter (hyle, the 'raw material' of the Universe.)

In Aristotle’s view, 'matter' wasn't a collection of tiny bricks (atoms, per Democritus); it was a 'substratum' that lacked specific form but had the potential to become any form.

Heisenberg argues that energy is the modern equivalent of this primary matter. Energy itself is not any particular thing, but it can be actualized into different forms—such as an electron, a proton, or a photon—depending on the physical conditions, and thence into the elements of the periodic table, and the whole three-ring circus of existence.

Whereas, philosophy straddles first and second order ontologies. It is about the real world, but a world that includes subjectivity and perspectives, and itself constructs perspectives upon that subjective-inclusive world. As such, there can never be a single philosophical "book of the world". — hypericin

:clap:

Yes, because "subjectivity" (like e.g. humanity or infinity) is merely an abstraction — 180 Proof

However, the subject is not.

None of which is the point, as you acknowledge. The point is, the term ‘immaterial’ has appeared twice in this discussion, the assertion being that I am invoking or appealing to ‘an immaterial mind’, even though original post says nothing of the kind. And why? Because to question physicalism is to imply an ‘immaterial mind’. Surely you can see how this maps against Cartesian dualism. Phenomenology starts by deconstructing this false dilemma.

However the world before humans existed is (or was, if you like) not a concept. This is so self-evident I cannot understand why you apparently fail to grasp this. — Janus

On the contrary, you’re already imagining yourself able to make the distinction between the world as it appears, and how it truly is, when that is the issue in question. That is what is not being grasped.

Your last sentence, for me, seeks to dismiss any disagreement with your ideas as being merely a product of cultural conditioning. — Janus

Not at all. I put that forward as to why you made the demand to ‘reveal my agenda’ and the insistence that ‘I must believe in an afterlife’ - when none of that is the least relevant to anything that I’ve said in this thread. I’m saying that these demands arise from particular mindset.

Sorry if this is muddy; it's hard to find the right way to express the problem. — J

I think there’s an inherent contradiction in the question you’re wanting to pose.

At issue was the discussion between Janus and myself, regarding ‘material conditions’ and in what sense the universe existed before human consciousness of it. (See the Merleau Ponty quotation in above).

The basic contention of phenomenology and also of transcendental idealism, is that the concept of ‘the world before humans existed’ is still a concept. So, on the empirical level, it is of course true that the universe pre-exists humans, there is abundant evidence of that. But the interpretation of the evidence into a coherent idea is still something that can only be done by a mind. Accordingly, we are not really seeing the world as it is (or would be) without any consciousness of it. Put another way, we are not seeing it as it is (or was) in itself, but as it appears to us. That does not make it an illusion, but it qualifies the sense in which it can be considered real.

Now I’ve been pressing this point in one form or another for years on this forum, and it often comes down to: ‘so, you’re saying “the mind is immaterial”? That is the question I was asked by Janus. It comes from the fact that I question scientific materialism as capable of providing a holistic account of the nature of existence. So if you question science, then you must believe that ‘the mind is immaterial’! And with that, goes the presumption that you probably believe in an afterlife:

You believe there is an afterlife, right? Why not be honest about what you believe and what your actual agenda is? — Janus

This is why I said that this question originates from the sense we all have (not unique to Janus), of the ‘real physical world described by science’, on the one hand, and the ‘mental picture of the world’, private and subjective, on the other. That is like a ‘master construct’, if you like, and very much a consequence of the Cartesian division between matter and mind. It is part of our ‘cultural grammar’, the subject-object division that lies at a deep level of our own self-understanding.

So I’m saying that the question comes out of ‘cultural conditioning’, and this is what happens when it is challenged.

let me see if I understand what you mean by "ineliminable" — J

it means, can't be eliminated from the reckoning. The salient point is again that in pursuit of objectivity, the presence or contribution of the subject is sought to be deprecated or 'bracketed out' so as to arrive at an ostensible 'view from nowhere', which is purportedly independent of any act of mind, existing 'in itself', so to speak.

We can imagine a world without any living things too, even though only a living thing can do any imagining at all. Unless one is a panpsychist, there was no consciousness in the early universe. — J

Of course we can imagine it. It can be modelled with high degrees of precision. But as I said in the mind-created world OP, that still requires or implies a perspective. If you take away all perspective, so that no point in the panorama is nearer or further, so that there is no scale, and then you take away all sense of duration, so that there are no units of time, and no distinction between past, present and future - then what remains to be imagined?

Hence Kant 'take away the thinking subject and the whole world must vanish'. Not because it has become suddenly non-existent, where previously it was existent, but because it is outside any conception of existence or non-existence. The mind provides that scale and perspective even to imagine a world with no concsious being in it. But we don't see it, of course, because we're looking through it, not at it. Hence the 'change of stance' that is required by phenomenology.

Hence:

Husserl argues that transcendental consciousness does not emerge at some point in the empirical history of the world along with living things. It doesnt precede the world either. Rather, it is co-determinative of history. Heidegger makes a similar argument about Being. — Joshs

“The world is inseparable from the subject, but from a subject who is nothing but a project of the world; and the subject is inseparable from the world, but from a world that it itself projects.” (Maurice Merleau-Ponty) This statement is meant to clear a path between two extremes. One is the idea that there is a world only for or in consciousness (idealism). The other is the idea that the world exists ready-made and comes pre-sorted into kinds or categories apart from experience (realism). Instead of these two extremes, Merleau-Ponty proposes that each one of the two terms, the conscious subject and the world, makes the other one what it is, and thus they inseparably form a larger whole. In philosophical terms, their relationship is dialectical.

The world Merleau-Ponty is talking about is the life-world, the world we’re able to perceive, investigate, and act in. The subject projects the world because it brings forth the world as a space of meaning and relevance. But the subject can project the world only because the subject inheres in a body already oriented to and engaged with a world that surpasses it. The bodily subject is not just in the world but also of the world. The bodily subject is a project of the world, a way the world locally self-organizes and self-individuates to constitute a living being — Excerpt from The Blind Spot - Adam Frank, Marcelo Gleiser, Evan Thompson

Is there a particular question you'd like to focus on from the OP? — bert1

Nothing in particular. Just the basic stance of phenomenology, as outlined in the various quotes and references and the questions that have come up.

So how would this influence the advance of a scientific understanding of mental processes? SOME paradigm is needed - that's foundational to knowledge, so It seems to me that it entails being open to new paradigms. — Relativist

Good question! The emerging paradigms of enactive or embodied cognition draw heavily on it. The key book in that genre is The Embodied Mind, Varela, Thompson and Rosch, revised edition, 2015. But phenomenology generally is nowadays considered in the social sciences and psychology (as per some links provided above.) Constructivism, which is related, is influential in philosophy, psychology and education, see constructivist.info for example. There's also QBism in quantum physics, which dovetails nicely with phenomenology. (The next in this series is Bitbol's philosophy of QM.)

So while Bitbol’s answer to the question “Is Consciousness Primary” is “yes”, he’s not thereby positing an ontological dependence between mind and world, only a methodological dependence (as others on the thread have also noticed). He’s willing to say what he thinks the ontological relationship between mind and world is not, but he entirely refrains from proposing any positive account of that relationship. — Esse Quam Videri

I see what you mean about possible tendentiousness on my part, but I don't know if it is warranted; I don't think I'm reading something into Bitbol that he doesn't say.

But notice Bitbol says that consciousness has existential and methodological primacy - not ontological primacy. He's not positing a 'cosmic mind' or 'universal consciousness' that is temporally prior to matter. He says what is required is a change of stance:

In line with Francisco Varela, I will rather advocate a radical change of stance regarding objectivity and subjectivity.

In my opinion, this results from a refusal to move from phenomenological critique to a positive, critically grounded account of being and truth. It mistakes the dissolution of bad metaphysics for the end of metaphysics itself. — Esse Quam Videri

That is a profound observation, and it exposes a very deep question. This is also why Bitbol finds the Buddhist philosophy of Nāgārjuna congenial (subject of the third essay). As noted in the preamble, Bitbol has studied Sanskrit so as to have a better grasp of Buddhist principles, and Buddhism is an essential component of the Embodied Mind book mentioned above.

So, to really unpack that would require a deep dive into Buddhist philosophy. Suffice to say, Buddhism has never posited a creator God nor ultimate substance (in the philosophical sense of that term). This leads many critics (for example the Buddha's Brahmin opponents) to accuse Buddhism of nihilism. But the Buddha doesn't say that 'nothing exists' or that 'everything is unreal'.

Nāgārjuna’s analysis is subtler: it is the rejection of the inherent existence (svabhāva) of particulars, not of their existence tout courte. Phenomena are real, but relationally and dependently — not as self-grounding entities possessing inherent reality. In that sense, Madhyamaka doesn’t abolish metaphysics so much as reframe it, replacing substance-based ontology with an analysis of conditions, relations, and modes of appearing. A key point is that there is nothing to grasp or posit as a first principle or ultimate cause. The causality Buddhism is concerned with is the cause of dukkha — the suffering and unsatisfactoriness of existence. And Buddhism refrains from positing views of what is ultimately real, as it has to be seen and understood, rather than posited, which leads to 'dogmatic views'. Nāgārjuna is well known for saying that he has no doctrine of his own.

consciousness may be considered as the function of neural processes arising from the material of the brain — Questioner

The linked paper provides six detailed arguments against the materialist view.

The following passage from your OP describes the metaphysical positions — T Clark

I don't think the passage you're citing does present a 'metaphysical position'. Looking at it part by part:

'For Bitbol, phenomenology is the real starting point in the quest to understand consciousness, because it reveals something that scientific objectification systematically brackets out or ignores — namely the observer, the scientist, the one who makes observations, draws conclusions, and decides on the questions to be asked.'

I don’t see that passage as advancing a metaphysical position. It doesn’t make claims about what exists in itself, but about what scientific objectification leaves out by design. That’s a methodological and epistemological point about the conditions under which scientific knowledge is produced, not a thesis about the ultimate nature of reality.

'Yet the point runs deeper than methodological oversight. Scientific objectivity does not merely forget the observer; it presupposes the observer as the one for whom objects appear, measurements make sense, and evidence is meaningful in the first place. Before there can be data, models, or theories, there must be a lived field of experience in which anything like a “fact” can show up at all.'

Again - no metaphysics here. It is a fact that there must be an observer for whom the facts of observation and measurement show up. To say that 'facts require an observer' is not to say that reality depends on minds, but that facts are not the same as un-interpreted events.

Analogously, the distinction is made between 'data' and 'information'. The data are the recorded events or observations, but they are not considered information until they are assimilated and understood.

Bitbol wrote consciousness is “not a something, but not a nothing either.” Does that mean consciousness does not exist, isn’t real? — T Clark

Isn't that what this point is about?

On the one hand, consciousness cannot be treated as an object — something manipulable, measurable, or existing independently of the subject. This is because objects are by definition other to us, and are given only through the sense-data profiles which... are open to correction by further experience.

But if consciousness is not a “something,” it is also not a “nothing.” It is neither a useful fiction, nor a byproduct of neural processes, nor a ghostly residue awaiting physical explanation. Instead, says Bitbol, it is the self-evidential medium within which all knowledge about objects, laws, and physical reality arise. — Wayfarer

Put another way, the fact that T.Clark is able to know or sense anything, is because you are a sentient being and the subject of experience. But subjectivity is not a possible object of perception, as it is that to which or whom experience occurs. I think the fact you're having such difficulty grasping that distinction kind of reinforces the point at issue ;-)

This is one of my big problems with your presentation of what Bitbol believes--As I understand it, it is exactly a metaphysical claim. A valid and useful one, but still metaphysics. — T Clark

What 'metaphysical claim' do you think is being made?

As I see it, conscious experience is not a metaphysical entity, it exists in the world of apples and pogo sticks--an object among objects. — T Clark

There's a categorical distinction you seem to be missing. Where in the world of apples and pogo sticks is your experience? You can't locate it in some place, or distinguish it as an object. Your awareness of the fact of your own existence is categorically different to your awareness of the objects of perception. You could be in a sensory deprivation tank, or under the influence of a powerful sedative that blocks out all sensory perception, and provided you were conscious, you would know that you were conscious. That awareness would not be dependent on anything external.

Incidentally the article on which the OP was based can be found here Is Consciousness Primary? (.pdf) A representative passage:

Any objective descriptions arises, in history and on a dayto-day basis as well, as an invariant structural focus for subjects endowed with conscious experience (Bitbol, 2002).

Now, the problem is that the very success of this procedure of extracting invariants yields a sort of amnesia. The creators of objective knowledge become so impressed by its efficacy that they tend to forget or to minimize that conscious experience is its starting point and its permanent requirement. They tend to forget or to minimize the long historical process by which contents of experience have been carefully selected, differenciated, and impoverished, so as to discard their personal or parochial components and to distillate their universal fraction as a structure. They finally turn the whole procedure upside down, by claiming that experience can be explained by one of its structural residues. Husserl severely criticized this forgetfulness and this inversion of priorities, that he saw as the major cause of what he called the “crisis” of modern science (Husserl, 1970). According to him, it is in principle absurd to think that one can account for subjective conscious experience by way of certain objects of science, since objectivity has sprung precisely from what he calls the “life-world” of conscious experience. — Michel Bitbol, Is Consciousness Primary?

You believe there is an afterlife, right? Why not be honest about what you believe and what your actual agenda is? — Janus

And you say I'm putting words in your mouth :rofl:

This summary of phenomenology is general enough to accommodate the different varieties offered by the likes of Husserl, Scheler, Henry, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty (but not Heidegger). Having said that, I think Bitbol’s interpretation of phenomenology owes more to Michel Henry than to Husserl. — Joshs

Thank you, I value your opinion.

This is, as said, an introduction - as much for me as for the reader, as I'm exploring the subject by researching and writing about it. As it happens, I first encountered Bitbol on this forum, some time back, when he was mentioned by @Pierre-Normand. I've subsequently read and listened to quite few of his talks. I find him a marvellously congenial presence. I was also introduced to Dan Zahavi, by you, as it happens. Overall I'm very much taken by their philosophical stance. Oh, and am also reading Michel Henry. His 'Barbarism' is quite an accurate diagnosis of eliminative materialism.

Here was the original exchange. If you wish to recapitulate it, perhaps it belongs in that thread.

And indeed
"...so there is something more here than just perspective. Something explains this agreement. Sure, there are minds that make the sentences, and sing the songs, but there is more than just mind here".

There is something more than just perspective, but without perspective, there is no thing.

as predicted you didn't answer the question I posed re whether you believe that immaterial or disembodied consciousness is possible. — Janus

I see it like this: you are still very much under the sway of post-Cartesian dualism. Accordingly you habitually interpret what I write, and what Bitbol is saying, against that perspective. The world, for you, remains divided between res extensa, measurable by science, and res cogitans, thinking substance. Bitbol doesn't make any metaphysical posits about 'immaterial mind' or anything of the kind. But you will think that to question one is to assert the other. Hence the assertion of an 'immaterial or disembodied consciousness', which is the only possibility this schema allows. Whereas, the point of phenomenology is to call this apparent division into question at its very root. But again, you will say this is a dodge or a non-answering of the question.

this was the point of our walk through the mountains toward the sea — Banno

A conversation which clearly indicated that you didn't grasp the point with which you intended to take issue.

What are 'material conditions' and why are they significant?

Not so much begin with it, as remember that it has been forgotten, and why. Phenomenology is ameliorative of that, but I do know that most Anglo philosophers still have a blind spot about it.

Why thank you. But there is no 'one correct view' being promulgated here. One of Bitbol's video talks I reviewed was about the idea that Buddhist 'middle-way' philosophy was precisely the rejection of views. I might get back to that.

Bitbol moves backwards to Descartes. — Banno

Descartes is undoubtedly an influence (although I will also mention that this is another example of your 'presentism', that virtually all philosophy before about ten minutes ago has been superseded.) But there's a footnote in the Medium edition, to wit:

This idea has an obvious ancestry in Descartes’ cogito ergo sum, (‘I think therefore I am’) although phenomenology breaks with the Cartesian substance model of mind. Husserl retains the insight that the existence of consciousness is indubitable in the moment of its appearance, but without positing a thinking thing (res cogitans). Bitbol adopts this Husserlian reading rather than the outright dualism of Descartes.

Also notice the reference to Wittgenstein:

Bitbol opens his essay with one of the most disarming lines in the philosophy of mind: sensation is “not a something, but not a nothing either”. This deliberate paradox, borrowed from Wittgenstein, is not a rhetorical flourish but the key to Bitbol’s approach. On the one hand, consciousness cannot be treated as an object — something manipulable, measurable, or existing independently of the subject. This is because objects are by definition other to us, and are given only through the sense-data profiles which, as we have seen, are open to correction by further experience.

But if consciousness is not a “something,” it is also not a “nothing.” It is neither a useful fiction, nor a byproduct of neural processes, nor a ghostly residue awaiting physical explanation.⁴ Instead, says Bitbol, it is the self-evidential medium within which all knowledge about objects, laws, and physical reality arise (here the convergence with Kant is manifest). Any attempt to treat consciousness as derivative — as some thing that “comes from” matter — therefore reverses the real order of dependence. — Wayfarer

So, that is very different from Descartes' 'res cogitans', the 'thinking thing', which I think Husserl recognised as an oxymoron. But even so, Husserl, and all phenomenology, recognise Descartes' role as a precursor of phenomenology, in recognising the apodictic nature of consciousness.

So Bitbol is not saying that 'things are derived from consciousness', which is what you seem to think he is saying.

It rests consciousness on the distinction between "inner" and "outer "- the homunculus arrises! — Banno

I think you're misreading it, but I won't press the point.

I'm a beginner with Bitbol and much of phenomenology. But it resonates with me on several fronts. I agree that Bitbol is rather neo-Kantian, the first thing I learned from was his lecture on Neils Bohr Bohr's Complementarity and Kant's Epistemology. I've got another draft on his philosophy of science, which I hope will also be published by Philosophy Today.

This is very much a starting point - not a 'manifesto', not a 'system', so much as a reminder. It's very much connected with Heidegger's 'forgetting of being' - we become fixated by and with the objects of perception, the 'objective world' and consequently forget the matrix of being within which everything arises. But then as soon as you begin to say what that is, the point is already lost.

Bitbol does not seem to delve as deeply into Being or the essence of experience, and he appears to recognize epistemic limits more explicitly. Do you think this is accurate, and what is the significance of this for philosophy? — Tom Storm

As said, he's not a system-builder creating some grand all-encompassing scheme. It's more a matter of paying attention to the here-and-now.

I also have an essay planned on his dialogues with Buddhism, and the connection between the phenomenological epochē and Buddhist śūnyatā. (There's an historical connection, too, between Pyrrho of Elis, and the Madhyamaka Buddhists of Gandhara.)

Hope Christmas was enjoyable. — Banno

Sort of. Our families are now far-flung and there's not many at the table. But, thanks, and same to you.

Banno of course would point out that this is muddled, that we are inherently social beasties, and that our place in the world is not that of a homunculus siting inside a head looking out, but of a being already and always embedded in a world that includes others... and so on. — Banno

And, not really sure how that cuts against the quoted passage. Phenomenology is most definitely not invoking any kind of homonculus. The key books that I've at least partially absorbed are Husserl's Philosophy as a Rigourous Science, and the Crisis of the European Sciences. The emphasis on the reality of the living subject is precisely to ameliorate the sense of pervasive abstraction that arose out of Cartesian dualism.

disembodied ("immaterial") consciousness doesn't make any sense – is just wishful / magical thinking. — 180 Proof

Nothing in the OP, or anything I've said about it, suggests an 'immaterial consciousness', although the fact that it will always be so construed by yourself and Janus is philosophically signficant.

On the other hand we can certainly imagine that material conditions were present prior to the advent of consciousness or least prior to consciousness as we understand it. All our scientific evidence points to that conclusion. — Janus

Indeed it does, but outside that imaginative act what remains?

The point of Bitbol's line of criticism, is that both the subject and the objects of scientific analysis are reduced to abstractions in day-to-day thought. But these abstractions are then imbued with an ostensibly fundamental reality - the subject 'bracketed out' of the proceedings, the objective domain taken to be truly existent. But it should be acknowledged, the 'co-arising' of the subjective and objective is very much part of the phenomenological perspective.

I don’t deny the veracity of scientific reconstructions of a pre-conscious world. Bitbol’s point is subtler: such reconstructions are abstractions constituted within present experience, and it is a further step — one that often goes unnoticed — to treat those abstractions as ontologically fundamental while bracketing out the very subjectivity that makes them intelligible. The question isn’t “Did the world exist before consciousness?” but “What does it mean to assert existence independently of the conditions under which existence is ascribed at all?”

Closely related to this is the further assumption that consciousness is the product of those inferred facts — facts which, as facts, already exist within consciousness. There's a subtle but pervasiveness inversion going on here.

Phenomenology has a role in understanding mental illness by taking proper account of the first-person experiences of subjects. Some references:

Phenomenology as a resource for translational research in mental health

Phenomenology as a resource in mental health

The phenomenological nature of schizophrenia and disorder of selfhood