Tag: philosophy of mind

entry 37

Das Problem der Verbindung von Bewusstsein und materieller Welt wird nur dann besser beschreibbar sein, wenn wir zunächst einmal sowohl von einem vorgegebenen Konzept des Bewusstseins wie auch von einem vorgegebenen Konzept einer materiellen Welt absehen. Wir werden nur dann fortschreiten können, wenn wir uns zunächst von den Prämissen der [modernen] Welt trennen. Später wird sich dann zeigen, dass die alltäglichen Konzepte nicht verloren gehen, sondern nur suspendiert werden mussten, um einen neuen Ansatz zu ermöglichen. Unter veränderten Rahmenbedingungen können sie dann wieder eingeführt werden und unter veränderten Interpretationsbidungen erneut zur Geltung kommen.

– eine Art philosophisches Manifesto, frei zitiert von Frank Vogelsang: Offene Wirklichkeit (2012) s.105

entry 27

from the 2nd quarter of 2019, a new metaphor for mind that needs some further work

Consciousness/experience* (and/or thought) produced by a brain/mind is a liquid pooling on a surface, first forming in tiny droplets like condensation, and continuously spreading if left unchecked by sober/rational mechanisms that stop the pool’s growth. If unchecked, the pooling consciousness eventually touches and joins a surrounding ocean… An island in an ocean, the island’s shores keeping the ocean out and the island a dry, safe, enduring haven and platform, and somewhere on or in the island is a freshwater spring. The spring continuously produces water, and this water gives rise to its own biology and micro-climate, while the geology of the island insulates the spring water from the ocean. A normal human’s mind is, whilst sober, isolated from the outside, from other consciousness, but with the ability and potential to modulate and expand consciousness, intentionally or unintentionally, and to unforeseeable extent with unknown outcomes. Right now I prefer the simpler form/level of the metaphor – the liquid appearing on a surface and merging – despite being more abstract and less thorough than the idea/picture of the island in the ocean.

A related metaphor was introduced somewhat famously by Aldous Huxley: that the brain is a ”reducing valve”*. I’m suggesting that the individual brain/mind isn’t itself purely eliminative of consciousness – instead the brain/mind produces consciousness – it is one source of consciousness – while processes of sobriety/rationality perform the function of a reducing valve on the material produced by the brain/mind.

Both the metaphor of Huxley and its logical relationship to mine maybe unclear for the reader at this point. Before I go into more detail on Huxley’s writing, I suggest the difference between our two views maybe manifests in this difference on the level of the island metaphor: for me, the brain/mind is identified with something complex that is made out of and/or fed by the freshwater spring, while the insulating shore of the island that keeps the ocean away is external to the brain/mind, whereas to Huxley, the brain/mind directly receives the ocean, and the insulating shore of the island is identified with the sober/rational brain/mind processes.

Huxley writes that he tends to agree that ”[…]the function of the brain and nervous system and sense organs is in the main eliminative and not productive. Each person is at each moment capable of […] perceiving everything that is happening everywhere in the universe. The function of the brain […] is to protect us from being overwhelmed and confused by this mass of largely useless and irrelevant knowledge, by shutting out most of what we should otherwise perceive or remember at any moment, and leaving only that […] selection which is likely […] useful.”*** And that each one of us is potentially Mind at Large. […] Mind at Large has to be funnelled through the reducing valve of the brain […]. What comes out […] is a measly trickle[…]. To formulate and express the contents of this reduced awareness, man has […] those symbol systems and implicit philosophies which we call languages. ****

Based on these passages I think it’s clear that Huxley thinks the source of our consciousness/experience is the universal mind, i.e. the universal Mind at Large is provided to the individual brain as material to shape/work with – and with our individual brain/mind performing a function of reduction/elimination on this received universal consciousness. So our brain/mind’s function is first passive reception of mind and then [negative/critical] reduction of mind.

Meanwhile, I think the individual brain/mind starts not with received universal consciousness/Mind at Large, but with much less: maybe just a tiny spark of consciousness that may be produced entirely by the brain itself or may be the brain’s permanent – albeit tenuous and astonishing – connection to universal consciousness. And that the evolved body/mind performs operations on this spark that shape it into all the forms of consciousness that biological life has and experiences, potentially growing and expanding until it [re-]connects to other or universal consciousness. (stated more directly in terms of a kind of spiritual cosmology)

 

*In this context, ‘consciousness’ and ‘experience’ are synonymous.

**see Huxley’s short book The Doors of Perception (1954)

***Italics indicate me quoting the book, and within the quoted passages Huxley was quoting and agreeing with a passage attributed to a Dr. C. D. Broad of Cambridge.

****from p.8 of the 2011 edition by Thinking Ink. Huxley connects the quoted sections to succinct critical epistemological comments that I recommend and think fit perfectly with Feyerabend’s philosophy – especially criticism of what I would currently call rationalist epistemology.

entry 26

This concerns philosophical discussions of the mind-body distinction and of the nature, concept and definition of consciousness & mind:

It maybe noteworthy that when more rationalistic philosophers, e.g. Karl Popper, are trying to define or explicate a notion of consciousness/mind for the purposes of a discussion/argumentation, they tend to emphasize sense-of-self as the defining or essential feature of consciousness/mind & de-emphasize actual qualia. (Which means they de-emphasize/ignore the concept that most directly and simply refers to subjective experience and the contents of consciousness in general – in favour of something more abstract.)

This maybe a consequence of the rationalistically stunted/inhibited introspection/vision of such thinkers: They fail to notice that one doesn’t actually see* a self – that self is a less concrete, more abstract entity, and that a sense of self is a very complicated basis for definition, as it is just an intuition/feeling of something that is already abstract and complex – unlike the more direct contents/constituents of consciousness, such as colours in a dream, which one does see. And the stunting of this kind of introspection or of introspective visual intuition occurs as follow:

Rationalists systematically ignore, neglect, devalue, inhibit, repress, and dismantle their intuition;**

then they destroy their understanding/idea of intuition;

then, in this new world where intuition is a broken and thus useless tool, they use just-based-on-an-intuition as an argumentative/rhetorical tool against opposing ideas, especially ones that clash with a rationalistic worldview.

*this can, theoretically, be generalized beyond the visual, but seeing suffices for the purposes of these points, and generalizing to something like perception in general to includes things like smells and tastes is counter-productively difficult because the notion of perceiving/perception is, in current philosophical discourse, too broken and confused.

**Taking intuition seriously/sincerely is antithetical to rational method/thinking, and intuitions are treated as something irrational and primitive that should be handled from the outside and treated with suspicion.

entry 25

2 very different interpretations/versions of dualism, i.e. of distinctions between the extended, material reality/objects and the mental reality/objects and of questions of the type:

Why should it be that how something feels cannot be identified with any physical property?(*, **)

To an analytic philosopher, this is a problem of how to [correctly] connect/relate certain symbols/words/terms (‘feel’, ‘experience’, ‘physical property’, ‘material object’, etc.) to a domain of reference, which is the pre-existing domain of external, objective reality.

Whereas, alternatively, it is instead an analysis of the concept of experience vs the concept of physical property – and an analysis of the relation between these 2 concepts.

In other words, the prior is an analysis of relations between symbols and a pre-defined domain of reference, i.e. pre-supposing a certain reality –

while the latter is an analysis of relations between two sets of ideas/concepts, entirely independently of domain of reference, i.e. before defining the properties of the reality to which the ideas are applied…

Or, put even more radically or critically: the prior is simply a question of how to define words to make them fit a given worldview – which is a technical, not a philosophical endeavour,

whereas the latter approach tries to discover and see the full idea under each of the two terms/words, because it leaves open the possibility that these ideas – which each are positive result of a long historical development and are each extremely important and central to many (different) people and traditions – may, if treated respectfully, be impetus/fuel/tools for doubting and developing our worldview/reality. That is philosophy.

ex

*In this particular wording, the question and dualism is discussed in Richard Rorty’s Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979 Princeton University Press)

** put differently: Are terms/words/ideas regarding subjective experience necessary, or can one fully cover/capture subjective experience with the terms/concepts that are called ‘physical’ in the cosmology/language of adherents to mainstream science/reality.