Is it possible that 'the singularity' is the distant echo of 'the One' in Plotinus?

Doesn't it? Not clear. Why not? — Constance

Because it doesn't belong to the domain of appearance. When you perform an arithmetical calculation, you're not utilising the senses through which you grasp appearances. Again, the phenomenal domain is 'what appears' as per this post.

You put a / in the opening bracket. You can amend that.

I don't see how, at the level of basic questions, anything can be posited that is not phenomena. — Constance

Simple arithmetic would do. That doesn't belong in the phenomenal domain.

A footnote on "phenomena" - in classical philosophy "phenomena" was part of a pair, the other term being "noumena", "Phenomena" referring to "how things appear" or the domain of appearances.

The meaning of "noumena" is complex, especially because it is now generally associated with Kant's usage, which was very much his own. Schopenhauer accused Kant of appopriating the term for his purposes without proper regard to its prior meaning for Greek and Scholastic philosophy (ref, and a criticism which I think is justified). The original meaning of "noumenal" was derived from the root "nous" (intellect) - hence "the noumenal" was an "object of intellect" - something directly grasped by reason, as distinct from by sensory apprehension. It ultimately goes back to the supposed "higher" reality of the intelligible Forms in Platonism.

In traditional philosophy, this manifested as the distinction between "how things truly are", which was discernable by the intellect, and "how they appear". This was the major subject of idealist philosophy (e.g. F. H. Bradley's famous Appearance and Reality). In this context, "appearance" was invariably deprecated as "the shadows on the wall of Plato's cave".

The emphasis on "phenomena" in phenomenology begins with the focus on the lived experience of the subject as distinct from the conceptual abstractions and emphasis on the object which was typical of scientific analysis and positivism. "Phenomenology is...a particular approach which was adopted and subsequently modified by writers, beginning with Husserl, who wanted to reaffirm and describe their ‘being in the world’ as an alternative way to human knowledge, rather than objectification of so-called positivist science. Paul Ricoeur referred to phenomenological research as “the descriptive study of the essential features of experience taken as a whole” and a little later, stated that it “has always been an investigation into the structures of experience which precede connected expression in language. (ref)”

This emphasis on the subject (not on "subjectivity"!) eventually gives rise to Heidegger's 'dasein' and to the school of embodied cognition and enactivism which is still very prominent. You could paraphrase it as "naturalism is the study of what you see looking out the window. Phenomenology is a study of you looking out the window."

@Constance - in respect of the 'reflexive paradox' you might have a look at It Is Never Known but it is the Knower (.pdf) by Michel Bitbol. He is also French but his work is much more relevant to 'the hard problem of consciousness' than Jacques Derrida in my opinion. ;-)

You can define 'machine' however you like. — Isaac

No I can't. A machine is not bucket of water, or a fruit-bearing plant, or an animal. I'm not going to engage in pointless arguments.

If you define a 'machine' as human-made... — Isaac

"Machine: an apparatus using mechanical power and having several parts, each with a definite function and together performing a particular task."

Are there machines that are not made by humans?

You yourself, and humans generally, are not machines, but organisms, and also intentional agents, I would have thought.

I remember both. I must be an old timer. (Vale MM, I never liked his posts, but he was struck by an awful misfortune.)

Oh yes, David Loy is one of my favourite authors in that space. I saw him speak and introduced myself to him at Science and Nonduality a few years back. I think Non-duality was adapted from his PhD thesis if I remember rightly. I frequently peruse his Articles page https://www.davidloy.org/articles.html

I think you must be referring to Heisenberg, not Heidegge — Janus

Yes silly me. I was just reading something about him. :yikes:

Of course, I'm looking for trouble bringing something like this up here. — Constance

Not with me, you're not. :wink:

I think the Tao Te Ching, as well as Kant and Heidegger, make statements that are, at least potentially, empirically verifiable. — T Clark

I think you're stretching the definition of empiricism. Heidegger Heisenberg is an especially interesting case, though, because he was an atomic physicist, not just a philosopher, but, you know, his philosophical stance was very much influence by Plato. But then you're getting into the whole 'philosophical interpretations of quantum mechanics', which is a whole other rabbit hole. That book I often mention, Quantum, by Manjit Kumar, is an excellent source, though, with a lot about Heidegger.

But anyway, I think if you judge the original Chalmer's essay on its merits, it makes a pretty clear-cut case. It's about something very specific - without having to refer to Taoism or Kant or quantum physics.

//amended to reflect misreading in my first response.//

Conscious open brain surgery shows a connection between brain and experiences, thoughts, emotions, memories, but does not show generative causality. — Constance

Are you referring to Wilder Penfield's research here?

David Chalmer's original essay, Facing Up to the Hard Problem of Consciousness, really is addressed to 'scientism'.

Scientism is the belief that the scientific method is the best or only way to understand the world and solve problems. It is often associated with the belief that science can or should be applied to all areas of knowledge, including those that are traditionally outside the scope of science, such as morality and the meaning of life. Some people view scientism as a positive approach that can lead to new discoveries and insights, while others see it as a narrow-minded or reductionist way of thinking that oversimplifies complex issues. — ChatGPT

Daniel Dennett is 'Professor Scientism'. His book Darwin's Dangerous Idea lays it all out. He says that Darwinian evolution is a 'universal acid' that eats through everything it touches. And the very first thing it touches is philosophy!

This is the topic of my two first (and possibly only) essays on Medium.

I don't know if Kant nor the Tao Te Ching have specific any bearing on the question.

The argument I was making was specifically about the assumptions behind modern scientific method, and how it tends to construe the world in certain terms - namely as something mind-independent and inherently existent (sorry for the jargon). The hard problem then arises because despite the astonishing reach of modern science, it can't really find, or account for, the nature of mind. And then, that 'eliminativism', typified by Daniel Dennett and his colleagues, tries to explain this away by positing the mind as an illusion (regardless that illusions themselves can only occur in minds.)

Now, if scientists generally were more aware of Kant, then the whole situation might be different. But I think awareness of Kant's philosophy is pretty minimal amongst mainstream scientists. On the whole they tend to favour cognitive realism.

As for the Tao Te Ching, it is a statement from that particular source of the perennial philosophy - you could find comparable aphorisms in Christian mystical theology, but again, for those who understand the world that way, there is no hard problem (or any problem :-) )

Didn't notice it, I'll go back through the thread.

The Republican extremists have increasingly resorted to threats and blackmail to get what they want, and blackmail is definitely not 'politics as usual'. There are dire predictions of the hard right using the threat to block the debt ceiling increase to extort concessions from the Government, mainly to reduce spending on social services, a tactic which was initiated by Newt Gingrich, although he at least showed a modicum of common sense in deploying it (as per this NYT OpEd.) But, sow the wind, reap the whirlwind, as the saying has it, and Gingrich laid the foundation for this destructive phase of right-wing radicalism. And as has been pointed out, Government borrowing is to cover costs already incurred by the Government. If the Republicans want to reduce spending, well and good, but they need to go to the polls on that basis, and win elections to do it, not use extortion tactics to bludgeon their way

I studied Jung and Joseph Campbell for a year as an elective in the 1980's. — Tom Storm

Kudos for that! I only encountered them tangentially in Comparative Religion, Jung was anathema in the psych department. (I’m listening to the audio book of Kastrup’s Idea of the World whilst working out. It’s pretty dry but all grist to the mill.)

Maybe there should be a thread as per Kasturp - why materialism is baloney. — Tom Storm

I've absorbed quite a bit of his work in the last few months but from experience this forum is generally hostile to his orientation.

This primary goal originated when some purely unintentional (goalless) entities happened to have (by random strokes of luck).... — litewave

You do see how the assertion that 'something just happened' does not actually amount to any kind of rationale?

Like I said - lumpen materialism. Yours is the very position for which the nature of consciousness is a hard problem, but there's no point in recapitulating the entire argument.

Yes - well, when you can demonstrate a self-creating machine that follows goals, then I will accept the answer. Because machines are human artefacts, produced intentionally to deliver a result. They embody the intention of the agent who builds them.

So, if you project that into the distance future, what do you think is emerging from the activity you describe. If we can assign meaning to the contents of the universe then then do we inherit the right to develop those contents in the way we choose to? If we gain the tech to be able to? — universeness

There are natural constraints on humans as natural beings. One of them is, I'm sure, the inability to adapt to long-term existence in space. We've co-evolved through billions of years with the biosphere, so I don't know how far we can diverge from that through technology, especially if we're unclear about what we're actually seeking, which seems to me seeking immortality through science.

Speaking of Artificial Intelligence, I tossed the question 'what is avidya?' to ChatGPT and slightly edited the output as follows:

Avidya is a Sanskrit term that is often translated as "ignorance" or "delusion." In Eastern religions such as Hinduism and Buddhism, avidya refers to a fundamental ignorance or misunderstanding of the nature of being. This ignorance is seen as the root cause of suffering and the source of suffering, because it leads us to see in a way that is not in accord with the way things really are. — ChatGPT

So are you saying that omniscience is one of the emerging goals that is a 'natural consequence' of being an entity which can demonstrate intent and purpose? — universeness

I'm far from even beginning to understand what omniscience would imply, beyond the etymological definition of 'all-knowing'. What I'm saying is that I think there's a sense in which we believe science can be all-knowing, that there is nothing which science cannot, in principle, figure out, and that we will transcend our biological and terrestrial limitations through technology.

But then, there's also the realisation that this might be impossible in principle due to the inherent limitations of our cognitive systems. For example, the writings of Donald Hoffman, a professor of cognitive science - he claims that "perceptual experiences do not match or approximate properties of the objective world, but instead provide a simplified, species-specific, user interface to that world" and that conscious beings have not evolved to perceive the world as it actually is but have evolved to perceive the world in a way that maximizes successful adaptation.

So again there are some knotty philosophical issues that need to be clarified before rushing headlong towards a projected future of technological utopianism.

Yes, I see your point.

I've been reading up on biosemiotics and noticed this paragraph about intentionality at a cellular level:

What turns living creatures into semiotic systems is their ability to interpret the world, and single cells, according to Markoš, have this ability because their behaviour is context-dependent. This is why even single cells are subjects, not objects, and this is why we recognize them as living creatures, not machines. — Marcello Barbieri, A Short History of Biosemiosis

It makes the point that living beings are intrinsically interpretive, even on the most basic level, long before language and rationality have entered the picture. Whereas the strict mechanist/materialist view is that living beings can be understood simply as the sum of cellular transactions on a physical or biochemical level. This also seems to be the gist of your disagreement with Isaac.

My point is that collections of elementary particles are not just useful fictions but real things, — litewave

Isn't it just lumpen materialism? You still haven't allowed for intentionality other than as a byproduct or epiphenomenon of these essentially unintentional relations.

To what extent do you think that human beings are 'information processors?' — universeness

Sentient beings are the means by which meaning manifests in the universe. Rational sentient beings are able to understand that.

How much credence do you give to the idea that we are heading towards an 'information/technological singularity? — universeness

It’s a science fiction fantasy arising out of the sublimated longing for omniscience in the same way that the fantasy of interstellar travel is the sublimated longing for the heaven we no longer believe in.

Wayfarer has already done this on our behalf. — ucarr

:up:

I often wonder just how much of what we believe is arrived at through such personal processes - some ideas seem to neatly complement our existing aesthetics and values. I find Husserl, such as I have read, engaging too. — Tom Storm

In my case, the affinity I discovered with Husserl had a lot to do with the convergences between phenomenology and Buddhist abhidharma (philosophical psychology) which I learned about through Buddhist studies. That seminal book "The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience" by Varela, Thompson and Rosch, draws many parallels between them.

One is that both place a strong emphasis on the role of perception in our experience of the world. In Abhidharma, perception is seen as an active process of constructing meaning out of sensory data, and it is understood as being a fundamental aspect of the way that we make sense of experience. Likewise in phenomenology, perception is seen as foundational to experience, and the meaning that we attribute to the things that we perceive is central to our understanding. This ties in with the phenomenological idea of the 'lebenswelt' (life-world) and 'umwelt' (meaning-world), which is very different to the idea of the objective domain completely separate from the observer. It recognises the sense in which we 'construct', rather than simply observe, the world (which is also the understanding behind constructivism in philosophy.)

There's also a subtle convergence between the Buddhist principle of śūnyatā (emptiness) and the Husserlian epoché (suspension of judgement):

Emptiness is a mode of perception, a way of looking at experience. It adds nothing to and takes nothing away from the raw data of physical and mental events. You look at events in the mind and the senses with no thought of whether there's anything lying behind them.

This mode is called emptiness because it's empty of the presuppositions we usually add to experience to make sense of it: the stories and world-views we fashion to explain who we are and the world we live in. Although these stories and views have their uses, the Buddha found that some of the more abstract questions they raise — of our true identity and the reality of the world outside — pull attention away from a direct experience of how events influence one another in the immediate present. Thus they get in the way when we try to understand and solve the problem of suffering. — Thanissaro Bhikkhu, What is Emptiness

Epoché, or "suspension of judgment" likewise involves setting aside one's preconceptions and assumptions, and simply observing and describing phenomena as they present themselves to consciousness, without attempting to interpret or rationalise.

There are some similarities between these: both involve a type of detachment or non-attachment, and a willingness to suspend judgment and simply observe without trying to interpret or explain with the caveat that the two practices have developed within different philosophical traditions and have very different connotations and implications. (And it actually goes even further back, to the legendary origins of Pyrrhonian scepticism and it's purportedly Buddhist origins in Pyrrho of Elis' voyage to India).

‘Shouting has no place’, he shouted

Given the limits of my understanding of phenomenology, it would be silly to take my statements as anything more than a first impression. — T Clark

I too am a newbie in this area but for whatever reason, I find that Husserl really resonates with me. Incidentally there’s another good online resource here

https://iep.utm.edu/phenom/

As I noted in a previous post, they seem like psychology to me more than they do philosophy. — T Clark

Husserl devoted considerable energy to rejecting charges of ‘psychologism’ i.e. that phenomenology was a form of psychology or could be reduced to it. Too great a task to try and explain, besides I’m not expert in it.

How is it a question of meaning? It's about a theory of consciousness. — frank

It’s about whether consciousness has any intrinsic meaning, what is the meaning of being. The mechanistic analysis never noticed that.

What’s the answer to ‘what does this DVD mean?’ That’s much nearer the issue at hand than how it works. What any DVD means depends on the content, whereas how it works has nothing to do with the content, to press the analogy. The hard problem is not about ’how the brain works’, it’s about the question of meaning.

:up:

Marjorie Taylor Greene: 'I never thought leopards would eat MY face,’ sobs woman who voted for the Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party.' — NY Times

From the same column:

(McCarthy's) mistake was convincing himself that a party obsessed with dominance would reward submission.

between a science that recognizes that reality is inextricably tangled with human cognition and one that doesn't. — T Clark

Any examples come to mind of sciences or scientists that do?

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

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

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

What would recommend as Phenomenology for Dummies? — T Clark

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

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

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

Maybe they wouldn't do it on purpose, but they've shown they're willing to play chicken with the fate of the world in service to their lunatic ideology. Although from a more hopeful perspective, we could be seeing the death throes of MAGA Republicans, as they prove beyond shadow of doubt that they're unfit for office.

Anyhow, is this a problem you recognize? Does the analysis make sense? What, if any, are potential solutions? — Baden

Somehow, the thought that immediately sprang to mind was Jean Baudrillard and Marshall McLuhan. We are transformed into actors playing roles in the spectacle of modern existence portrayed in the various media and hypermedia and assign ourselves values in accordance with the roles we adopt or are accorded by culture. Also that pecular pomo text I've encountered on the Internet, 'the society of the spectacle' by Debord. Don't know if I'm barking up the wrong tree here.

Upon thorough examination, the idea of a "self" is as arbitrary as the idea of a "chair", or any other object. In a purely material world, concepts like these simply don't exist. — tom111

Well, you're not a chair, because chairs are not intentional agents, and don't go around writing posts on philosophy forums. And a 'purely material world' such as what you posit, would have no intentional agents in it, so there would be no-one around to pose the question, or care about it.

Note the Ship of Theseus, 'a thought experiment about whether an object that has had all of its original components replaced remains the same object. According to legend, Theseus, the mythical Greek founder-king of Athens, had rescued the children of Athens from King Minos after slaying the minotaur and then escaped on a ship to Delos. Every year, the Athenians commemorated this legend by taking the ship on a pilgrimage to Delos to honor Apollo. The question was raised by ancient philosophers: After several centuries of maintenance, if every part of the Ship of Theseus had been replaced, one at a time, was it still the same ship?'

My answer to that is that it is the same ship, because it fulfils the same purpose, has the same form, and belongs to the same person. However, again, intentionality remains central.

As for the identity of human subjects, the question of the nature of the Self is really the same question as the question of the nature of the Universe, although in our materialistic age this will be far from obvious. However,

It is a perennial philosophical reflection that if one looks deeply enough into oneself, one will discover not only one’s own essence, but also the essence of the universe. For as one is a part of the universe as is everything else, the basic substance of the universe flows through oneself as it flows through everything else. For that reason one can come into contact with the nature of the universe if one comes into substantial contact with one’s ultimate inner being.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Indeed. But there are philosophies that explore the limits and the transcendence of discursive analysis. After all philosophy is the attempt to understand the meaning of being.

The function of insight gives a transcendental content that, when reduced to an interpretive system, becomes subject ot the relativity of subject-object consciousness. Therefore, there can be no such thing as an infallible interpretation. Thus we must distinguish between insight and its formulation. — Franklin Merrell Wolff (quoted in Nature Loves to Hide, Shimon Malin)

The expansion of space is a difficult issue to wrap one's head around. — Metaphysician Undercover

Yes. Perhaps one's head would need to expand correspondingly.