Tag Archives: phenomenology

Some Comments on Edelman and Tononi’s book A Universe of Consciousness

I started reading Edelman and Tononi’s book A Universe of Consciousness and I wanted to offer some skeptical comments. I’m generally skeptical about any theorizing of consciousness these days, not because I’m against theorizing in science but because I have been leaning more Mysterian in my epistemology towards “consciousness”, where “consciousness” refers to subjective experience. I think any fundamental theory of consciousness is doomed to fail because it will run into vicious circularity as I will explain below. Take this seemingly innocuous statement offered at the beginning of chapter 1:

Everyone knows what consciousness is: It is what abandons you every evening when you fall asleep and reappears the next morning when you wake up.

Already E&T are helping themselves to some heavy duty theoretically loaded assumptions. E&T are talking about consciousness as subjectivity, so why assume subjectivity goes away completely during dreamless sleep? How do we know there isn’t something-it-is-like to be asleep and we just don’t remember what-it’s-like? If subjectivity is at 100% during wakefulness why not think it goes down to 1% or .05% while sleeping instead of 0%? Perhaps what-it-is-like for humans to be asleep is analogous in subjective intensity to what-it-is-like to be bee or lizard when awake.

By helping themselves to the assumption that consciousness goes away completely during asleep E&T allow themselves a “starting point” or “fixed point” from which to begin their theorizing. It becomes their rock-solid assumption against which they can begin doing experimental work. But from a fundamental point of view, it is an unargued for assumption. Where’s the evidence for it? Introspective evidence is not enough because introspection is turned off during asleep. And empirical evidence? How are you going to measure it? With a consciousness-meter? Well, how are you going to validate that it’s calibrated properly? Say you build one and point it at a sleeping brain at it registers “0”. How do you know the measurement is correct? What’s the calibration method?

They also assume that consciousness is an “relatively recent development” evolutionarily speaking. If we are talking about self-consciousness this makes sense but they are not. They are talking about subjectivity, the having of a “point-of-view”. But why not think a bee has a point of view on the world? Or why assume you need a brain or nervous system at all? For all we know there is something-it-is-like to be an amoeba. E&T want this to be another “fixed point” because if you assume that subjectivity requires a brain or nervous system it gives you a starting place scientifically. It tells you where to look. But again, it’s never argued for, simply assumed. But it’s not logically incoherent to think a creature without a nervous system has a dim phenomenology.

Suppose you assumed that only brained creatures have consciousness and you devise a theory accordingly. Having made your theory you devise a series of experimental techniques and measurements and then apply them to brained creatures. You “confirm” that yes indeed brained creatures are conscious all right. What happens when you apply the same technique to a non-brained creature like an amoeba, testing for whether the amoeba has consciousness? Surprise surprise, your technique fails to register any consciousness in the amoeba. But there is a blatant epistemic circularity here because you designed your measurement technique according to certain theoretical assumptions starting with the “fixed point” that consciousness requires a nervous system. But why make that assumption? Why not assume instead that subjectivity starts with life itself and is progressively modified as nervous systems are introduced? Moreover they assume that

Conscious experience is integrated (conscious states cannot be subdivided into independent components) and, at the same time, is highly differentiated (one can experience billions of different conscious states).

Why can’t conscious states be subdivided? Why assume that? What does that even mean? Divided from what into what? Take the sleeping at .01% consciousness example. Why not think wakeful “unified” consciousness at 100% is the result of 1000 tiny microconsciousness “singing” side-by-side such that the total choir of microconsciousness gives rise to an illusion of a single large singer? When E&T say “one” can experience billions of states, who is this “one”? Why one, and not many? Their assumption of conscious unity is another “fixed point” but it’s just an assumption. Granted, it’s an assumption that stems from introspective experience but why trust introspection here? Introspection also says consciousness completely goes away during asleep but as we’ve seen it might be wrong about that.



Filed under Consciousness

Quote for the Day – What It’s Like to Be a Lion

If we were to interpret the lives of animals with a human eye, we would conclude that they are in flow most of the time because their perception of what has to be done generally coincides with that they are prepared to do. When a lion feels hungry, it will start grumbling and looking for prey until its hunger is satisfied; afterward it lies down to bask in the sun, dreaming the dreams lions dream. There is no reason to believe that it suffers from unfulfilled ambition, or that it is over-whelmed by pressing responsibilities. Animals’ skills are always matched to concrete demands because their minds, such as they are, only contain information about what is actually present in the environment in relation to their bodily states, as determined by instinct. So a hungry lion only perceives what will help it to find a gazelle, while a sated lion concentrates fully on the warmth of the sun. Its mind does not weigh possibilities unavailable at the moment; it neither imagines pleasant alternatives, nor is it disturbed by fears of failure.

~ Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, Flow (1991), p. 227-228

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Filed under Books, Consciousness, Phenomenology, Psychology

Steven Crowell defending phenomenology from the critique of Speculative Realism

From figure/ground interview

Let’s get technical. In one of his books, Guerrilla Metaphysics, Graham Harman, one of the co-founders of the philosophical movement known as Speculative Realism, makes a powerful critique of phenomenology. First, he identifies some inherent contradictions: “The cumulative lesson of this book so far is that phenomenology is caught at the midpoint of two intersections: (1) On the one hand, we deal only with objects, since sheer formless sense data are never encountered; on the other hand, an “objects-only” world could not be tangible or experienceable in any way, since objects always elude us. (2) On the one hand, phenomena are united with our consciousness in a single intentional act, while on the other hand they are clearly separate, since they fascinate us as end points of awareness rather then melting indistinguishably into us.” Second, he accuses phenomenology of remaining a “philosophy of access” and neglecting to recognize what his colleague Levi R. Bryant has called a “Democracy of Objects.” Harman writes: “Of any philosophy we encounter, it can be asked whether it has anything at all to tell us about the impact of inanimate objects upon one another, apart from any human awareness of this fact. If the answer is “yes,” then we have a philosophy of objects. This does not require a model of solid cinder blocks existing in a vacuum without context, but only a standpoint equally capable of treating human and inhuman entities on an equal footing. If the answer is “no,” then we have the philosophy of access, which for all practical purposes is idealism, even if no explicit denial is made of a world outside of human cognition.” What do you make of Harman’s critique of phenomenology and his new brand of realism?

Having not read this book (though a very good grad student in the English department who was taking my phenomenology seminar introduced me to some of its ideas), I don’t think I can comment responsibly on it, but the characterization of phenomenology seems insensitive to the crucial distinction between transcendental-phenomenological idealism and metaphysical or subjective idealism. In simplest terms: I reject the idea that phenomenology does not give us the world as it is. It is indeed a “philosophy of access,” but it is access to the world as it is. And I would also argue that it is a standpoint “equally capable of treating human and inhuman entities on an equal footing,” if by “equal footing” one means: attending to the things themselves, not setting up one entity as the measure of all the others, but letting entities show themselves as they are. However, I find the idea that one could do this without any concern for “access,” in a broad sense, very naive. For instance, it seems plausible to say that physics tells us about “the impact of inanimate objects upon one another, apart from any human awareness of this fact,” but presumably this is not what the author means. There are the standard examples from quantum mechanics about the influence of the observer, and the like. But beyond that, there is the fact that physics is a theory and a set of practices which provide normative conditions that allow for distinctions to be made between genuine interactions and mere “artefacts” of one’s standpoint, etc. Do these theories and practices count as a mode of “awareness”? If so, then physics must still be too idealistic. But I doubt that any scientific or philosophical position is conceivable that does not involve theories and practices that establish such normative conditions, and if that is so, then Speculative Realism will also involve some reference to conditions of our “awareness” of the objects it references. Transcendental phenomenology strives to do justice to this fact, and if that is a kind of “idealism,” it is one I can live with. As Husserl pointed out, the “transcendental subject” is not the “human being” as this is envisioned in the question, and I would argue that the same holds for Heidegger’s position. I am not impressed by positions that try to circumvent this point by appeal to primordial “events” or to a kind of post-humanism that most often merely borrows – very selectively – from biology and the like to answer philosophical questions. One does not need to make a fetish out of method to believe that certain questions need to be approached differently than others; in particular, philosophical questions have a reference to access built into them, and there’s nothing wrong with that. As for a “democracy of objects,” where does the “subject” fit in? If it is just another object, then we have lost our grip on the distinction.

I think Crowell presents a very nice reply to the critique Speculative realists usually bring to “philosophies of access”. Do yourself a favor and read the full interview (although I disagree with his critique of information processing, and some of the things he says about naturalism are a little disappointing).

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On the relevance of phenomenology to cognitive science

I just started reading Shaun Gallagher and Dan Zahavi’s textbook The Phenomenological Mind and I thought this was a particularly clear paragraph on the relevance on phenomenology to cognitive science.

Compare two situations. In the first situation we, as scientists who are interested in explaining perception, have no phenomenological description of perceptual experience. How would we begin to develop our explanation? We would have to start somewhere. Perhaps we would startwith a pre-established theory of perception, and begin by testing the various predictions this theory makes. Quite frequently this is the way that science is done. We may ask where this pre-established theory comes from, and find that in part it may be based on certain observations or assumptions about perception. We may question these observations or assumptions, and based on how we think perception actually works, formulate counter-arguments or alternative hypotheses to be tested out. This seems somewhat hit or miss, although science often makesprogress in this way. In the second situation, we have a well-developed phenomenological description of perceptual experience as intentional, spatial, temporal, and phenomenal. We suggest that starting with this description, we already have a good idea of what we need to explain. If we know that perception is always perspectivally incomplete, and yet that we perceive objects as if they have volume, and other sides that we cannot see in the perceptual moment,then we know what we have to explain, and we may have good clues about how to design experiments to get to just this feature of perception. If the phenomenological description is systematic and detailed, then to start with this rich description seems a lot less hit or miss. So phenomenology and science may be aiming for different kinds of accounts, but it seems clear that phenomenology can be relevant and useful for scientific work.

~The Phenomenological Mind, Shaun Gallagher and Dan Zahavi, p. 9-10

This general idea is echoed in Julian Jaynes’ quip that the attempt to find consciousness in the brain will inevitably fail unless you know what you are looking for in the first place.


Filed under Phenomenology, Psychology

Heidegger's Insight Into the Dynamics of Consciousness













Filed under Consciousness, Heidegger, Phenomenology

Ecological Realism and Affordance Ontology









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Filed under Heidegger, Phenomenology

Quote of the Day – Matthew Ratcliffe

Whenever we experience an itch, a mild pain or a tightening of the chest, we already have a background sense of being in a world, regardless of whether the foreground feelings are perceptions of the body or of something else. This background also consists of feeling. The body, in so far as it sets up the world in which we find ourselves, is neither a medium or perception within an experienced world nor an object of perception within that world. It constitutes an aspect of experience that is presupposed by both.
The world-constituting role of the body is recognized by Merleau-Ponty, who contrasts the lived body with the body as an object of experience and thought. The lived body is what I have referred to as the “feeling body”. It is never experienced in its entirety as an object of experience, even though it can undergo differing degrees and kinds of objectification. This is because it is the possibility of experiencing anything at all and therefore something that always remains, at least in part, in the background:

In so far as it sees or touches the world, my body can […] be neither seen nor touched. What prevents its ever being an object, ever being ‘completely constituted’ is that it is that by which there are objects. It is neither tangible nor visible in so far as it is that which sees and touches. (Merleau-Ponty, 1962, p. 92)

For Merleau-Ponty, the lived body is not only directed towards things in the world. It also opens up the world as a space of purposive, practical possibilities, and thus shapes all our experiences, activities and thoughts. Hence an aspect of bodily experience and a sense of belonging to the world are one and the same.

~Matthew Ratcliffe, feelings of being: phenomenology, psychiatry, and the sense of reality p. 107

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