Rolling Philosophy

Dualism is such a busted flush.

Lucky you, so...

To say that *I think* my experience can be explained in terms of biological process - by which i take you to mean law- governed, predictable? - seems a performative contradiction to me. There can be no 'I' thinking this, if what the 'I' thinks is the case.

xp

I don't think there is an I in the sense you mean. A theoretically predictable law also leaves room for tremendous difficulty of prediction, maybe up to the point where prediction is only a theoretical possibility rather than a practical one.

There can be no 'I' thinking this, if what the 'I' thinks is the case.

Explain to human beings thinking about being human beings

Any human beings? Could you 'explain' vision, in terms of biological processess, to a blind person?

... yes?

I mean no obviously I couldn't give a blind person the experience of vision through any kind of explanation. I also couldn't give a paraplegic the experience of playing Dance Dance Revolution, but I could still tell him how the game works.

GCSE Biology iirc

I'm down with Davidson here - monism, but dual-aspect, or some such. Perhaps engaging in philosophical thought when I have to leave the house in one minute is not a good idea.

Why can't it be thinking this as part of a biological process?

May it can be, maybe it is in some ultimately real way, but it can't 'think' this, if 'thinking' means what it thinks it means.

'Maybe it can be'

I mean no obviously I couldn't give a blind person the experience of vision through any kind of explanation

well y'know to me that seems like a pretty big explanatory failure.

I begin to feel like this is almost a religious position - in the sense that those on one side just *feel*, intuitively and strongly, that there is something that the scientific picture leaves out, and those who seem to feel that there is nothing in need of explanation.

No there is plenty in need of explanation, it's more a case of believing that it's explicable vs believing in magic.

Obligatory douchey dichotomy there, soz.

well y'know to me that seems like a pretty big explanatory failure.

I'm very skeptical about the capacity of language to explain any phenomenology, let alone a phenomenology of vision

i'm kind of being facetious

Expressibility thru language feels like a red herring here tho, since nobody's claiming that language = the totality of brain function I don't think.

I think phenomenology is basically outwith the capacity of explanation, it is something that can only be understood through experience. This may or may not be controversial.

Actually i think bernard's DDR paraplegic was interesting. Is that a simple and mundane example of something non-phenomenological that cannot be 'explained'? Or is it phenomenological at its core?

I think it's telling that all of us who can see "understand" the experience of sight phenomenologically (even if we aren't conscious of it) and very few of us could explain scientifically the processes of light and the biological basis of seeing. Even a complete full case of the latter doesn't give the former (and, obv, vice-versa too).

Telling what? How do you go from the uniqueness of phenomena to separating them from an aspect of brain function?

I guess I also don't see what the basis is for putting such extreme burdens of explanation on a biological theory of consciousness that, as far as I know, would posit the inseparability of mental 'experience' and (for lack of a better word right now) behavior. Like, it is one thing to aggregate a number of empirical behaviors into one common phenomenon called 'sight'; it is another thing to posit that there is some 'experience' of sight which is shared by all people who have engaged in those behaviors; and it is still a third thing to insist that any explanation for the phenomenon of sight must also be able to make the 'experience' of sight accessible to people who have never engaged in any of the behaviors.

also I would maybe want to dispute this
all of us who can see "understand" the experience of sight phenomenologically (even if we aren't conscious of it)
on the basis of optical illusions, that internet video with the basketball-passing people, etc -- what we "understand" is how to utilize our eyes in many of the most common situations to achieve a desired end result, like reading a word or tracking an object.

I guess I'm not really sure what we're arguing about anymore (or are we arguing at all?). It seems to me like a mechanistic explanation of various phenomena will never fully account for the full phenomena. For instance, I'm not sure that science* (*I don't really know what this word means here either, but I imagine we're using some loose Enlightenment distinction) can explain why when I look at something sad its affect is transmitted and I experience sadness too. It can maybe point out the spike in a particular chemical in my brain, but it can't locate the genesis of that chemical outside my internal processes. When someone says something mean to me and my feelings get hurt, science can't trace that affectual spike through the air. To bernard snowy, tho, I'd definitely agree with his second option (that there is some 'experience' of sight which is shared by all people who have engaged in those behaviors) and I'm more skeptical about language's ability to transmit that experience whatsoever. I just worry tho that giving everything a mechanistic explanation is a way of ignoring parts of the phenomena that we know are real but that can't necessarily be measured.

never fully account for the full phenomenon*

"y sad things make u sad" seems like a unproblematic candidate for scientific explanation to me. mirror neurons, intention as representation, something evolution something, blah de blah. For me at least, I think it's purely the non-material, phenomenological quality of experience, which is not captured by current scientific thinking.

Here's where we reach the problem of what 'science' is. If it's just accurately predicting various phenomena, then yes, it can probably be used to explain something like transmission of affect. But if it's more determining mechanistic functionality (particularly rooted in physics/biology) then I think transmission of affect will always be a challenge to explain. But you could also say that we understand some non-material quality specifically through a (also Enlightenment) study of things like sociology, social psychology, and even continental philosophy that deals with phenomenology -- like what puts Husserl outside the science discussion (esp since science's pedigree runs through philosophy).

really the problem we're all dancing around here is internal time-consciousness

guess I need to read Sein und Zeit after all...

this guy hacker is oddly enough not ending up too far from deleuze and guattari in his definition of philosophy

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6yi7m9IqsAU

video mustve literally just got removed b/c I watched it a few minutes ago and now its gone

yeah, that is weird

it was the excerpt from the crying game

oh yeah, forgot that part

my eternal love to the term 'hypokeimenon'.

what y'all reading at the moment? i just started iain hamilton grant's on an artificial earth: philosophies of nature after schelling, although i haven't read enough to say more than 'seems pretty cool'. i don't know shit about german idealism, so this is step one (or maybe like one point five) in my movement towards being hip to the current academic trends.

dunno about anyone else but i'd still be interested in an ilxor philosophy reading group. hm? although my interest in doing after finitude has waned, in large part because of reading what i think is his most recent (or most recently translated) article, on immanence, and wondering why he's such a crazyman. albeit a provocative one.

Anyone have thoughts about Alasdair MacIntyre and whether After Virture is worth reading? I loved Short History of Morality.

(braces)

mdx — I've seen that book before, although it was just called Philosophies of Nature After Schelling (assuming they're the same one — continuum press?) — couldn't make much of what I glanced at tho.

I'm not really reading any 'pure philosophy' at the moment (Derrida maybe the closest thing?) — mostly history-of-philosophy type stuff (just started on Martin Jay's book abt the Frankfurt School, which looks to be grebt, and I'm not sure why I put it off for long), + uh, various forms of 'theory'

ya, same book. not entirely sure what it's 'about' yet myself, but i've heard grant big-upped many times and he'll be speaking at a conference here next year, so i'm putting my faith in it.

Cool cool.

What's the, uh... occasion? context? something like that. of your reading him? Like, the philosophical background from which you are approaching him... or something.

xp,

Re MacIntyre - I have to teach AV at the moment to a bunch of trainee teachers who are being forced against their will to learn a bit of philosophy: they hate it, I hate it.

His basic argument is 'back to Aristotle' slightly via Hegel: What's Wrong With Modernity is individualism and the turning of us into atomised rule followers rather virtue- laden and valuing members of 'deep' communities, with high levels of commitment to defined and explicit ideas of the good. A bit dated in its attack on existentialism, and profoundly pessimistic in its prognosis for our future. Pompous with it.

my eternal love to the term 'hypokeimenon'

Gotta catch 'em all!

EXACKLY.

xps to Bernard - I mostly work on Deleuze and Grant himself is a Deleuze scholar (and he admits that the book views everything through a bit of a Deleuze-Guattari lens), so it seems like a good route into engaging with German Idealism beyond just passive interest. Also I've been nepotistically offered an open invitation to speak at the conference Grant will be at ( http://www.humanitiescentral.com/21st-century-idealism/ ), which I probably won't take up because I doubt I'll develop the appropriate confidence with the idealism in the time available, but I'll benefit from working towards it anyway.

I'm a big fan of MacIntyre fwiw. I know him also, fwiw.

"After Virtue" is great and well worth your time imho, it has a really amazing final turn to the contemporary and his local readings are sometimes rather startling (Jane Austen?)

I just read Reza Negarestani's "Cyclonopedia (Complicity with Anonymous Materials)" and it's a kerr-azy work of, ahem, "theory-fiction" that is a mashup of Deleuze and Lovecraft. It's not philosophy but it's not fiction either, a truly odd and original book from someone associated with the speculative realist turn but up to something else (a speculative surrealist?)

About to read Ray Brassier's 'Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction', will report back when done with that

ooh tell us more about the negarestani!! i was minorly obsessed with that guy when i was in my grim fascination phase with the hyperstition blog. which has since gone dark. his writing more than the others was seriously impenetrable and bizarre

nb i have zero philosophical training and don't read it at all, this was basically a weird internet hobby trying to figure it out

the book is incredibly dense at times, to the point of sounding like crazy repetitions of theoretical jargon swirled together, at other times it's a very strongly indebted to Lovecraft "story"/summary of the lost writings of a fictional academic historian of Persia whose theories about demons, oil, the Middle East as a sentient entity, the pressure dynamics of holes, calligraphy etc. are all coughed up in a delirious manner. There's a frame romance story that is not really dealt with much after the first thirty pages, it gets better and better as you just tunnel through it. It's definitely worth looking at if you like Deleuze and/or Lovecraft and/or the idea of those things turned into bouillon-cube-dense-prose stew.

ha yeah that sounds like his blog posts.

is he an iranian dissident of some kind? where does he teach/live?

i never really 'figured out' nick land either, but that dude seemed like a bigger dickhead

I interlibraryloaned that Negarestani book last year after coming across a stray reference to it on some blog (probably one of the speculative realism dudes)... it was uh weird as fuck