Gib, your views here all seem to depend on an inside/outside distinction. Does that sound right to you? Experience is “inside”, physicality is “outside”. If you agree with me regarding this assessment, on what basis do you create this division?
I just can’t agree with this. Joy is felt as a physical entity??? Can you point to a ‘joy’ in the world? What about the concept of infinity? Am I sensing a physical object when I bring up this concept? What about the meaning of words when we hear/read them (not the sound/look of words, their meaning)?
Sure, but that doesn’t mean the stimulation feels physical. Before we knew anything about the brainsciences, did we ever think some thought and say “Woops, there go my neurons and chemicals in brain center X again”?
Perhaps the question ought to be put to you thus: why should a physical thing/process like the brain feel at all?
If I can rephrase your ‘inside’/‘outside’ distinction as ‘first-person’/‘third-person’, then yes I it sounds right. I draw the distinction because both points of view seem to be present. If indeed mind reduces to brain (or visa-versa), then the mind and the brain are the same thing only experienced from these two points of view (respectively). I don’t understand what a mid-way point between first-person and third-person could possibly mean (hence the gap). I don’t even understand how physical brain processes could result in a first-person point of view, or any point of view, to begin with.
But isn’t the 1st person - 3rd person distinction merely a matter of point of view? You seem to be substantialising the distinction. I can’t see both sides of a coin at the same time - but there is no gap, and there is no mid-way point.
You have not read what I said carefully. I said the EXPERIENCE of joy is a physical phenomenon, not the concept (except that it is physically represented in the brain like all concepts are). Infinity is a concept and it too is represented in the brain. So too with the meaning of words. Concepts do not exist in some non-physical realm. They exist as patterns and processes in our brains.
What does this mean? Feeling is physical. You can’t feel anything but physical stimulation. If I say, “It just felt right to me.” I am experiencing physical sensations of “rightness”. What I mean is that there are physically felt sensations that I associate with something being the way I think it should be.
As I pointed out we do NOT feel neural processing and this is precisely why we came up with the whole non-physical “mind” idea in the first place. Now that we understand that thought is a physical process we do not need to attribute that process to a non-physical phenomenon.
The brain itself does not feel. It processes stimuli detected by other organs of the body (skin, eyes, ears, internal nerves, etc.) in order to arrive at an appropriate response to the situation. A body feels (senses its environment) in order to survive.
But how is a first-person point of view even possible? Does a rock have a first-person point of view? How does one suddenly emerge? The brain, of course, is several orders of magnitude more complex than a rock, but what does complexity have to do with there being a first-person point of view?
I can agree that experiences like joy are represented physically in the brain, but this is different from saying they just are brain processes (that’s question begging as far as I’m concerned). If joy is ultimately physical, but it doesn’t necessarily feel physical, then the problem is in how to explain the way it feels.
The sensation of red, for example, feels like a property belonging to a physical object (an apple, a fire engine). It does not feel like neuro-chemical events. How does a neuro-chemical event end up feeling like something it isn’t?
I don’t mind explaining the processes that mediate outer stimulation and behavioral response in purely physical terms (that is, after all, what the brainsciences seem to show us), but this is a better explanation for what causes us to behave than for how it’s possible for us to ‘feel’ anything.
If you don’t feel your thoughts, how do you ever know you’re having them? I can certainly feel my own thoughts - directly, immediately - and I call this introspection. This is where we get the concept of ‘mind’ from - not from some mysterious gap between outer stimulation and behavioral response that we had to invent something for filling it. We are directly and intimately acquainted with our own internal mental world, and it does not feel like neuro-chemical events (as you rightly pointed out), but it does feel like something else (as you seem to have overlooked), and I’m satisfied to describe this feel as non-physical. It is this non-physical feel, like that of joy, that stands in need of explanation.
Okay, how does a body feel then? It’s no less physical, is it?
Joy is not just represented physically in the brain. It is felt physically in the body. There are physical sensations that occur in the body when I experience/feel joy. I also have concepts about joy but these are not joy itself. Joy itself is a felt set of sensations. There is an important distinction to be made between ideas about experiences and the experiences themselves. It seems to me that you are conflating the two and that this is the source of your confusion.
When you say joy does not feel physical I think you are saying that joy does not seem like something physical in your conceptualization of it. The problem is with when you use the word “feel” to refer to something other than a physical sensation. The word “feel” refers to physical sensations. We feel heat (a sensation) but we do not feel profit (a concept). What you are referring to is your concept of what joy is, not the physical sensations occurring during the experience of joy.
Again you are confusing a concept (red) with something that can be felt (a sensation).
A neural chemical event can end up feeling like a lot of things depending on what associations have been formed between that event and sensations experienced with them in the past. A bell can “feel” (seem like) food. Remember Pavlov’s salivating dogs. It is called operant conditioning. This is how brain events come to be associated with sensations and hence to feel like something.
We feel what we have been programmed by our genes or by our past personal experiences to feel. Feelings are physical sensations that have become associated with certain things and events.
Just because your internal mental world seems like something non-physical to you does not make it so. As I have explained, what something seems like is a function of inheritance and past experience. Because of this a vague sense that something is non-physical should be cause for doubt (as should any unsupported hunch that something is one way or the other).
Because the subject is not privy to that by which the subject is constituted, its generative physical systematic grounds, other than secondarily as experience, representational (metaphorical) experience. Because the individual needs to be behaviorally motivated by his experiences, else the capacity for such experience would never have evolved in the first place. We do not experience synapses firing when we have a thought – we experience the thought, the subjective encounter on the level of conscious experience. This is the subject’s realm. Because understanding of the mechanisms and chemical intricacies that give rise to these experiences comes only later, much later, through science. We need to develop the conceptual ideas of these entities (neurons, neuro-chemical events, etc) in order to then signify our experiences under these signs, to subtlize our understanding conceptually of what is happening when we have an experience.
We experience “redness” because “redness” is part of an overall system of experiential attachment-to which motivates and informs behavior, and therefore motivates and informs that which motivates and informs behavior, i.e. thinking and feeling (experience). Sensation, energetic transfer and translation, catharsis, this is what constitutes the essence of our experiences… the subject will understand, will encounter this “sensationality” (being-sensitive-to) through and within the subjective realm (of experience mediated by the subject’s categories of experience, such as, for example with perception, color), which is the only way the subject can encounter anything.
I’m all too familiar with this distinction as I’ve entertained many such conceptions of joy and other emotional states over the years, and each time I felt fairly convinced that I had it right, whereas now looking back I can’t help to laugh at myself. But you must be aware that we hold onto our conceptions of things because we think they’re right. If I conceive joy as this non-physical state of mind, then it makes no sense to me to propose that joy is a set of physical bodily sensations even though I don’t conceive it that way.
I should hope we get our concepts of mental states based on how they feel to us, and if we assume this is true, we will always say that how we conceive them is precisely how they feel. I conceive joy more like an all-is-right-in-the-world feel, not an all-feels-good-in-my-body one, and I hold onto this conception because I think this is what I’m feeling in the midst of my joy.
Of course, we’d be kidding ourselves if we actually believed our concepts of mental states weren’t to some degree corrupted by alterior agendas - you want to promote physicalism, I want to promote idealism/subjectivism, so we will cling to our customized modes of conceiving such mental states inasmuch as it serves our agendas, and in accordance with my past experiences with my ever-changing conceptions of mental states, I’m sure our respective conceptions will seem entirely convincing to each of us.
Needless to say, I think if we pursue this line of argument further, we’re only going to come to an impass, the only way through it being to peer into each other’s first-person points of view and examine for ourselves how joy and other mental state actually feel to the other person. This won’t happen. I suggest therefore that we agree to disagree on how to properly conceptualize joy and other such mental states, and move onto an even deeper line of argument: how is it that we feel anything at all, whether physical or not, whether in the body or not? How does the physics of the brain (and the body) make ‘feeling’ possible?
I need some word to describe what I’m talking about, something that captures how we always have an immediate and direct sense that something is there (whether mental or physical, inner or outer, sensual or conceptual, etc.). I don’t think you’re going to deny that we all have the capacity to know - immediately, directly, automatically - when we’re thinking some thought X. I call this ‘feeling’ our thoughts, but if you like, would ‘being-conscious-of-our-thoughts’ suffice instead? And could I not just formally declare right now that this is what I mean by ‘feeling’ our thoughts?
Red is not a concept. It’s a property belonging to some physical objects. The sensation of red is the process/state of feeling the color of those objects. The concept of red is what’s expressed with: a property belonging to some physical objects. Have I somehow got the concept wrong?
If the reductive account employed by physicalists is at all accurate, how something feels should never differ from the neuro-chemical events they are being reduced to. If the experience of seeing red is being reduced to neuro-chemical events (or bodily sensations if you wish), that experience should feel like those very neuro-chemical events. It shouldn’t even be possible to change how it feels (whether by the formation of associations via conditioning or otherwise). On the other hand, if you want to say that neuro-chemical events cause or make possible the feeling/sensing/experiencing of other things, as opposed to saying such feeling/sensing/experiencing reduces to those neuro-chemical events, then that’s a different matter (but still a contentious one).
Again, though, if it ever feels different from what it’s being reduced to, it can’t be what it’s being reduced to.
Like I said, twnf, what stands in need of explanation is why it would feel the way it does.
And of course, there’s the deeper question: why is there any ‘feeling’ at all?
What I fail to understand, 3XG, is why we need to experience anything at all. You make perfect sense to say that we need to be motivated by something in order to behave in a way that ensures our survival, but can’t that something just be the mechanical physical cause-effect dynamics that is the neuro-chemistry of our brains and how that affects our behavior? Why is there something that feels so non-physical on top of that, something that seems so superfluous if the neuro-chemistry is already there and sufficient in and of itself. And, more importantly, how does one explain the manner by which the non-physical-feeling element is reduced to the physical?
“Feels so non-physical”? I think you may be reifying feeling as such. To feel is to have a sensation-of, to sense, to be affected-by. This is an entirely physical phenomenon, this being-affected-by. That which is affected, if it is conscious (if it is in such a way that it has attained sufficient self-relationality with its own constitutive forms and thus “senses” itself in sum as well as in part, as well as “imagines” and “remembers” [becomes a subject, as in “residing within a subjective world/realm”]), then experiences, responds to, is influenced by this ‘that which affects’ in a purely secondary, metaphorical, sentimental manner – as passion, as direct imminent experience of its own sense of the qualia of subjectivity as such, its own realm, itself. This is why Shopenhauer was correct when he wrote that the world is the will’s self-experience.
Why would a subject experience sight as a mechanistic process? Sight is generatd by, is the product of this mechanism. Thus understanding/awareness-of needs to work backwards, into this process, in order to pierce it. The mechanism is below the subject’s conscious level of apprehension and cognitive-sentimental representation (which represents as form and idea, as abstraction). It is only when our forms and ideas learn, via science (grasped through philosophical method) to mirror these deeper parts of the mechanistic processes themselves that the subject begins to experience directly, through its own conscious-subjective categories of experience, this mechanization in a way that is rendered cognizant under these otherwise more surface-level categories themselves.
How is a rock even possible? How can it come to exist?
We all have a first-person point of view. Perhaps the way we conceive of physical material needs to be modified, if we think that physicality and cognition don’t go together. After all, the dilemma surely results from misconceptions, no? People don’t go around agonizing over the question of how gravity or pumpkins or sunlight or music or beauty are even possible. We fruitfully analyze how those things work, but we don’t treat them as metaphysical riddles.
I have reasons of my own to not think materialism is a worthwhile philosophy to uphold, but I think Faust is right, here, to talk about this in terms of a “gap”. There are no gaps. The world is completely and utterly solid.
Yes, being-affected-by is a purely physical thing, but in the same breath, you seem to be wavering back and forth between the physical conception of this and the experiential/subjective one - prematurely. How are you doing this? How do you go from this physical understanding of being-affected-by to this self-aware/first-person-acquaintance/“secondary, metaphorical, sentimental” (I don’t know how else to describe it) understanding as though you understood fully how the two are the same? I couldn’t do it without being aware that I’m jumping across the gap. How does it get “its own realm” out of this? Would you say a rock has it’s own realm of self-experience? It can be affected, can it not?
Good question! Why would it experience anything?
Then we’re moving away from reductionism and towards a cause/effect scheme (thank God). Sight is not reduced to the mechanism, but caused by it. The question remains, though, of how it is so caused.
The gap doesn’t exist in the world but in our understanding.
You’re right that we don’t go around stressing ourselves over questions about how gravity, pumpkins, and rocks are possible, but if we have to throw our hands up in the air when such questions are raised, then they are riddles. My beef with physicalism is not so much that if I have to raise my arms when the question of mind and matter is raised then physicalism must be wrong (although I think it is wrong), as much as it is that I’m still raising my arms after physicalism has had its say. It’s not an issue of wanting for an answer, but that physicalism claims to have the answer while I disagree.
I fully agree. But you must realize this runs a certain risk. If we modify our conceptions of the material too much, it ceases to warrant the title ‘material’ - and then ‘materialism’ becomes an all too vague blanket term meaning “whatever happens to be out there” (idealism would then become a form of materialism).
Incidentally, reconceptualizing matter in order for it to fit well with cognition is precisely what my metaphysics is all about. And just to give you a glimpse of how the risk I alluded to is run, my reconceptualization would have it that matter ought to be reduced to mind rather than visa-versa. Is it then ‘materialism’ at all?
I agree with Whitehead here, that a rock does indeed have its own realm of self-experience, only it lacks the organization of its inner energetic system such that it becomes “aware of” (experiences) this realm itself (like we humans do when we “see” or “hear” etc). We humans live in our subjective realm, and the rock lives in its subjective realm. Whatever a perspective interprets, that is the “world” of that perspective, in the manner so (subjectively) interpreted by the perspective itself. Of course a perspective can be understood as any and every sufficiently entangled state of energy such that, when energy from outside of this state interacts with it, that outside energy is sufficiently changed/absorbed in a manner conditioned by the laws and inner structure of the state itself. Whitehead believes that all such “occurances” or “events” (“things”) are perspectives, are that from which and by which interpretation occurs. The human then is a special kind or condition of this general rule, by virtue of our conditional forms of (self)experience which render the experiential/intepretational process itself as an object of further experience/interpretation. The idea is somewhat of the process as reflected, mirrored back to itself, bend into itself, so to speak.
There is of course a vast difference between a man and a rock; the difference is organizational, structural. But the fact of experiencing as a subject exists wherever there exists a perspective from which what is outside of this perspective is drawn in and changed/absorbed in the image of (under the laws of) the inner logic and forms that are themselves constitutive of that perspective itself. The human participates more in this process because the human sees, which is to say, it “sees” the fact that it “sees”, that it’s organism interacts with photon energy. Many objects interact with photons but do not “see” that they are doing so; humans do see this, through the faculty of sight. We thus “understand” this process as we experience it directly, we ‘experience the experience’. This is what it means to be conscious. Of course, we take it much further, too, because we not only experience that we experience, but we experience that we experience that we experience – we directly experience (sense, are affected by) these (conscious) experiences which are themselves the experiences of “mechanistic” experience (interaction) with things like “photons” (energy). When an entity attains awareness of its own inner nature and structure, when it attains direct sensitivity to how its basic experiencing/interacting occurs, it is said to be conscious; when an entity attains awareness of this consciousness itself, which means when an entity makes of this consciousness an object of its subjective experience, that entity is said to be self-conscious. Of course there are degrees of each of there states.
Um.
This is what it means to be a subject; this is the sufficient definition of subjectivity.
Of course… was that ever in question…?
A sensitive grouping or"nexus" of energies sufficiently bound to each other, constititing a “perspective”, interacts with another sufficiently similar group/nexus, in so far as “photons” of energy travel from one to the other, being discharged/reflected from the one and then being absorbed into the other. In so far as the essence of that nexus from which the photons were discharged was imparted/imprinted into the photons themselves (the photons, constitutive of their own perspective, were changed (in wavelength, etc) by their encounter with it) this 'essence" (information) is then imparted into that nexus into which the photons are sufficiently absorbed. The extent of this “transfer of information” will then depend upon the extent of the structural similarities between the two nexes (sp?) in question.
TXG,
We are getting somewhere. This is good. I like the idea that any physical system will come with its own ‘realm of subjectivity’ - I can work with this - but we have yet to confront the question of the link between this realm and that of the physicality of the system itself.
Let me first give an example of your tendency to jump from the one to the other (as though seemlessly). You said:
And then directly following that:
Can a perspective be understood this way? Perhaps I need to read Whitehead.
In the first quote, you talk about perspectives and use the word ‘subjectively’. In the second you switch gears and start talking about ‘energy’ (and later ‘photons’). I understand energy to be a purely physical phenomenon. I don’t know how a perspective comes out of it - or any kind of subjectivity.
I wish I had your understanding - you don’t seem to grapple with this issue. I, on the other hand, can’t help but to feel that I’m leaping across a gap when I switch from the one vocabulary to the other.
And here you’re brazenly mixing terms from both vocabularies in a way that seems to completely overlook what I’m having trouble with:
Yes, and my question is: why is there a subject?
Sometimes it is. Most of the time (in my encounters anyway), physicalism is presented as a reductive account of the connection between mind and brain. Reductionism is an explanatory approach that takes the form: X is really Y. This is different from a causal account which takes the form: X is caused by Y. Often, physicalism, when I probe it painstakingly enough, turns out to be causal after all. But this brings it dangerously close to epiphenomenalism, which is (or can be) a form of dualism.
Again, all I see here is a mixing of terms from two vocabularies, but not what makes these terms equivalent in meaning.
In this understanding, there is nothing to “being a perspective” other than “being sensitive to, able to be affected by”. This is what I mean with the sufficient definition of subjectivity: to be a subject is to be that which is receptive, sensitive to something, able to be affected (which, in reality, means nothing less than being so affected).
What is your definition or understanding of subjectivity, and of perspective? I define these as above; perhaps you are conceiving of these notions differently, and thus smuggling in extra meaning which I am unable to address here? What, in your view, makes a subject or a perspective more than the minimal way in which I describe these above? Or rather, why exactly is my definition of these terms insufficient or inadequate for you? What is it that you think is not captured in these defintions?
The ‘gap’ exists in the human subject, and in any conscious subject/perspective. There is no gap otherwise. In a rock, for instance, there is no higher emergent realm of secondary self-experience as subjectivity, because the underlying organic structures which would mechanistically give rise to this higher realm are lacking; nonetheless, the rock is still a “subject”, a perspective from which interpretation (of energy) occurs, whether or not self-experience by virtue of organic organization occurs.
Thus the ‘gap’ we find in conscious and self-conscious subjects can be understood as the fact of the emergent nature of this higher relam of subjectivity: the subject is experiencing not “the world” directly (as the rock does), but is experiencing the world through the medium of its sense apparatuses, its organs. The world becomes distant, mediated by these intermediaries. Thus, the end-effect of these mediating organs generates higher experience “of the subject’s world”, because the subject (which is nothing more than that perspective from which and by virtue of which the realm of conscious and pre-conscious experiences (interactions) becomes an object) is that which then directly experiences these end-effects of organic perception/sensation (mechanization) as an entirely new world that takes form under that subject’s categories of experience (such as color). The gap is a recognition of the fact that conscious and self-conscious entities are not interacting with “the world” “itself” (that energy which exists outside of the entity itself) in the same or as direct a manner as entities like rocks; this encounter is mediated, created, represented by organic form, and the subject is then nothing more than that which makes of this realm an object to be experienced.
Subjectivity is the most basic fact of reality. Energy exists, and it is not singular, it is not “one thing” in so far as not attaining to parts or pieces/fragments. There are energies, even if they all participate in and are in fact a part of some higher single unified "thing’ (God, whatever). What we know “for sure” is that this energy exists, and it is always in motion and interacting with one another. Deleuze conceives of this most basic level of this reality as difference, as quantity (quanta) absent quality. Nietzsche conceives of it, after Shopehnauer, as will (“willing to power”). Heiddgger, as Being (as the being of beings), as that from and by which “beingness” (the why [thus how] of a thing’s existence) emerges. I prefer a sort of synthesis of these notions.
So what you are really asking is, why is there something (and not nothing)? To answer that question, I have no idea why. No one does. There just is. You tell me.
“Dualism” is a crude approximation of the idea that subject and object are fundamentally different, distinct from one another, even though intimately and constitutively connected in each other. As I pointed out, the subject emerges as that which makes of (some sufficient sum of) experience itself an object (of apprehension). When a perspective attains such that the “whole” is sensed in its parts in a sufficiently complex and intricate manner as to reveal the “essence”, the quality or “average” of that sum itself in a single object-image (sense), a subject is said to have been born.
They are equivalent because they are essentially the same as one another, composed of the same “stuff”, only one emerges naturally from the other because it becomes that by which the other is rendered into a (sufficiently) singular object of apprehension.
Is information not involved in causality? Someone speaks to you in physical sound, but we don’t understand that until it is information, we then think about it change it and put some other infor back out into the physical world.
The zombie is like an organic robot, consciousness would need that to be completely plastic in order to make full utility of it.
Hence we would be able to describe all we are as physical, because that is the vehicle we drive - so to say, but this doesn’t describe what we are as conscious beings. In other words there is a duel description potential here.
If we can explain our experience as physical then by all means explain it! Maybe the wavelength of electromagnetic frequencies explain it, but isn’t that like explaining colour with light-waves? Is thought literally electrons, if so how, are them chemicals, if so how ~ when we can have all these things outside the body without arriving at consciousness [unless we concede consciousness is universal, which is agreeing with the zombie argument in a manner]. So all we can come up with is that ‘an arrangement’ of such things is consciousness, but how?
One kind of thought is info, so what ‘is’ info? Not physical right!
Another kind is experience, so how can anything physical experience? The act of experiencing is not physical.
Same with knowing, feeling etc.
The zombie can appear to do these things, but as inhabitants of them we know it is more than a mere appearance.
I would prefer to use the term “awareness” and say we have an awareness of thoughts. As I mentioned before much of our learning consists of storing in memory our experiences. Sensory data (sight, smell, sound, etc.) is stored in the brain. Also, important to our discussion, emotions experienced with the sights, smells, etc. are stored with the sensory data (sights, smells, etc.) that triggered these emotions. For example, if, as a child, I was attacked by a German Shepherd, all of the sights, sounds, etc. of that event would be stored in my brain along with the emotions I felt during the event. From then on the mere thought of a German Shepherd would trigger the emotions felt during the actual event (although most likely less intensely). Because of this sort of mechanism thoughts evoke feelings and these feelings involve bodily sensations. Often the physical sensations evoked by our thoughts are extremely subtle and it will take a concerted effort to become consciously aware of them. However, even when we are not consciously aware of them they are affecting us at a subconscious level. I think this may be what you are talking about when you say joy just feels “like all-is-right-in-the-world”.
Yes, I agree. I was off track there. Red is a physical property of some physical objects. If there is a sensation of red then it is being stimulated by associations in memory related to that shade of red. As explained above thoughts can trigger stored emotional responses acquired through experience. In this way concepts/thoughts do trigger bodily sensations. These bodily sensations are what we feel however subtle they may be.
The events underlying many phenomena differ from the phenomena they produce. The interactions of atoms can produce any number of substances (plastic, glass, cement, even living cells). Information stored on magnetic tape can represent sound and/or images and can be decoded to reproduce the original sounds and images. Some substances “learn” from their “experiences” such as memory foam. The brain is a nearly infinitely configurable substrate. Patterns form in it through repeated perceptual patterns (conditioning) and, in the process, form relationships with existing patterns.
Well, that simplifies things a great deal, doesn’t it? Of course, it side steps the whole issue (for me at least). I called this ‘question begging’ in my OP and went on to argue that the problem persists for what I call ‘mind’ (even if you’ve usurped the entire English language and left me with nothing to refer to my concepts of ‘mind’ with), but if you’re being honest when you say you don’t understand what I mean by ‘mind’, then I’m not sure I can explain it to you without the terms and vocabulary I thought were sufficient.
Let me try this: we knew about our own thoughts - directly, immediately - long before we understood anything about neurology or the inner workings of our craniums. What did the word ‘thought’ refer to back then?
In any case, I can anticipate your response to this, and I doubt we’ll get anywhere with it (nonetheless, I’ll wait and see). In the mean time, let me point out that if you’re going to define ‘perspective’, ‘subjectivity’, etc. in purely physical terms as you do, then this Whiteheadian, Schopenhauerian notion of ‘subject’, ‘will’ doesn’t shed any light on the issue. For a rock to be a ‘subject’ just means “there is a rock there”. What is it’s ‘realm of subjectivity’ then? Is it the physical structure inside the rock?
Trying to be a real keener here and keep in mind the best I can your physicalistic definitions, I’m going to suggest that the gap doesn’t even exist in this case. It is once and for all filled! (by your ‘mediating sense apparatus’). But, alas, I live outside the physicalist language.
Now here we’re getting back on track! Yes, I very much agree that ‘subjectivity is the most basic fact of reality’, but do you see the implications of this? Isn’t it the case, then, that what is not subjectivity (i.e. physicality as seen in the third-person perspective) finds its basis in subjectivity? Isn’t it the case that it would be physicality that reduces to subjectivity?
This is another way to fill the gap - my prefered way - and is, in fact, idealism. It is also a way to reconcile Whitehead, Schopenhauer, Heidegger, et al. as I was afraid (above) was being undone.
I especially like Deisen: for a rock ‘to be’ is for it to have a first-person pespective, for it to be like something to be the rock. Now this would be as ever insufficient if we continued to insist that Deisen grew out of the third-person mode of the rock’s physical existence, but the other way around - that, Mr. Great, allows everything to fall into place. The rock exists principally as Deisen, and in virtue of that, we are allowed (being Deisen ourselves) to experience the rock from a third-person perspective (which so happens, given our constitution, to appear as ‘physicality’).
The ideas of mind and subjectivity are distinct from one another. Mind would be considered a special case of subjectivity, under my view here. But the word alone, “mind” is so simplistic and vague, it obfuscates the entire issue, thus I avoid using it. I prefer terms that are more specific, such as cognition, consciousness, self-awareness, subjectivity, etc. What is “mind” but the generalised, vague notion of all of these at the same time?
A rock/ant/beetle/flower/gorilla/[insert your favorite non-human entity here] “knows” (encounters, is subject to) the force of the hammer that smashes it without knowing anything about what a hammer is, what it is composed of, how it was built, or how and why it is being used.
Are you hung up on the word “thought” here? To what does this word refer? To what we commonly feel and experience as the self-awareness, sense of self, mediated through the cognitive faculty of language and representation-ideas (concepts).
See how much easier things are when we use specific, focused terminology? Now, lets debate over these more specific terms, if you still object to them, rather than viewing the issue through indistinct/vague notions like “thought” and “mind”. This issue, like anything, will only be as clear as is our ability to articulate it.
What is the response that you anticipate?
To me, physical is another of your obfuscating terms. To be physical, physic-al, is, in my view, to exist, that is all. What exists that is not physical? Energy? Thoughts? Emotions? Words? These are all physical beings in so far as they are constituted, propogated, stored, and encountered physically. Rather, because of our habitually vague and mystical way of thinking (that we inherit from progenitor cultures and religion) we naturally conceive of these sorts of things (colors, ideas, words) as “non-physical”, as having some sort of existence in a sort of “ether” or void, inner space, what have you. This is nonsense, to me.
The “physical structure”, as a sum, would constitute the “nexus” or object-hood of the “rock”, its “being there” in so far as how it is. Of course, rocks themselves do not “exist” unless a human exists to name it thus, to conceive of its form in such and such a manner, under such and such relative and subjective properties (as the human organism experiences the world). What is that same rock from the perspective of an ant? Or of a fly? Or of an eagle? Or a germ? Anything remotely resembling our “knowledge” of the “rock”? Of course now. Which view is “correct?” All are correct for the entity that is perceiving of that view. To be correct implies the perspective from which ‘being correct’ obtains. But I think this may be heading out of topic here…
Suffice that the realm of a rock’s subjectivity would be just the sum of the rock’s being-affected-by, those forces which encounter the rock and which in some manner or another change the rock, and which are therefore changed by the rock. This sum total “realm” of interactive mutual force relations would then constitute the rock’s “subjectivity”, from the point of view of how the rock itself is affected by these forces. Of course this generates the appearace of absurdity in so far as (you?) conceive of subjectivity only along the lines of a conscious, “living” entity like a human being and exclude entities which are not like this from the category of “being a subject”. Or is this not what you are attempting to do here? But when you say that the definition of subjectivity I have here offered is saying no more than “the rock is there” this seems to be exactly what you are doing here: reducing subjectivity as such to the subjectivity of the conscious living entity (humans, or maybe animals broadly?).
What does this mean, exactly, that you “live outside the physicalist language”? What is the physicalist language, what makes this language “physicalist”, and how/why do you live outside of it?
You seem very confused by this word “physicality”. All that exists is energies of various forms and types; “physicality” refers merely to this energy, to being energy. There is nothing that is “physical” that is not such energy. So the way in which you use the term physical here, as if it militates against my perspective or against the “Whiteheadean/Shopenhauerian” notion of the subject, confuses me.
What I am speaking of here, my views here are entirely consistent with idealism. So-called idealism is one of the foundational notions which best encapsulates my perspective here.
This first person perspective is merely the human notion of the subject, the anthropomorphizing of the subjectivity as such. Consciousness, awareness, “perspective” in the human sense of knowing/being/feeling/seeing/etc is not required of subjectivity per se: try to think outside of the human realm of consciousness here, to see what I mean: any time a congruence of forces bound together into some sort of sufficient “whole” (group, entity, occurance, event, whatever) attains a relation wherein a common state, common to all elements of this group, surfaces, takes precedence, emerges from the parts of this grouping (the “wholeness” itself, the being a singularity from among a multiplicity) we are speaking of a subject. Now, to be “like” something is more obfuscating the issue by viewing it exclusively through a human lens. There is no “being like a rock”, this is a surface level interpretation of Heidegger (based on his early work, to be sure, before the “split” in his thought). I recommend reading Heidegger’s book “What is called thinking?” for probably the best examination of his late thought after the split.
Anyway, again I am moving out of the topic area. My point is that there is no common realm, no primary status or ontological quality of “being an X” to which first personality or subjectivity as such refers or in which it participates. Perhaps that is not what you are saying here anyways; in which case, please clarify your position.
Well, this is a crude way of understanding the fact that conscious subjects apprehend each other as subjects in a more primary manner, because the metaphors through which they encounter the world as experience better touch upon and render the subjectivity of others that are sufficiently similar to oneself. “Dasein” is a decent term to use here for this, but it misses or rather oversteps the essential meaning of subjectivity that I am here addressing, as that by which the subject is so constituted in its subjectivity: the sense or character of the relation between subject and its constitutive (object)world. This is what we mean by the word “thinking”, as well as “feeling”; this feeling of the qualia of self-experience, of subjectivity that has become sufficiently aware (sensitive of) itself (of its object-world [of consciousness-unconsciousness]), this is what I am here talking about. I think Heidegger renders only a surface level understanding of this process.
If you want to reduce subjectivity to first-person perspective that is fine with me, as long as you are not conceiving of first-person perspective in terms of consciousness or self-awareness; perspective as such, in its most basic, consists of nothing more than the attaining (from within a multiplicity of force-relations) of the relative primacy of a sufficiently singular unity of beings-affected-by… entirely “physical”, natural, mechanistic, and impersonal, if you will.
It doesn’t seem to matter what term I use. You seem, like many physicalists in my encounters, to have hijacked language and banned the use of any words towards the concepts I wish to get across.
Let’s go back to my analogy of reducing red to particular patterns of black and white. If I say to you that I fail to see how such a reduction works, and you tell me that it works if we define ‘red’ as “a particular pattern of black and white”, do you really think that’s going to solve my problem? All it’s going to do is inform me that I can’t use the word ‘red’ to refer to that color we all see when looking at apples, fire engines, blood, and so on because - so you claim - that color is non-existent to you and the word ‘red’ never refers to it.
So to paraphrase: to ‘know’ my own thoughts is to feel the force of my neurons firing without necessarily knowing it is, in fact, neurons firing. Now let’s be clear that if we can identify any particular thought in contrast to any other particular thought, which would be a consequence of particular differences in the make-up or force (or both) of different neuro-chemical events in the brain, we must be descerning some qualitative difference. If this qualitative difference is not defined by the specific qualities that constitute each neuro-chemical event (from the subject’s perspective, that is, which (remember) is not informed of any such ‘neuro-chemical’ happenings, and therefore doesn’t know of the qualities defining them), then there must be specific qualities possessed by the thoughts themselves, qualities experienced by the subject himself from his subjective point of view. If these qualities do not inhere in the neuro-chemical events (otherwise to know of one’s thoughts is to know those neuro-chemical events), then how did they arise? Are they mirages? Apparitions?
To me, ‘physical’ means existing or occuring in space and time in a non-abstract way.
This to me seems much more focused than a blanket term such as “to exist”. If to be a physicalist is merely to believe that “things exist”, then we’re all physicalists (shy of only the most radical skeptics) and it doesn’t inform much.
Well, 3XG, I am human and can’t be anything but. How am I to see things other than from an anthropomorphic point of view? But all I really demand is that it is like something to be the rock - not that the rock must think, feel joy, anger, fear, or that it sense hot and cold, pain and pleasure, see red, blue, pink, or hear music and appreciate Beethoven or comprehend the intricacies of multivariable calculus, ponder over fond memories, make future plans, and on and on. I just can’t imagine a rock’s ‘subjectivity’ as not being like something. To not be like anything is just to be completely unconscious, to not experience at all, which as you pointed out eliminates the subject.
Great! So this isn’t a complete disaster 
Something new is emerging from this, some new insight - and it touches on my point above about descerning different qualities within different thoughts. I’ll keep you posted (this is good).
Yep, there’s that insight again. It’s fortunate that my own metaphysics features a term - ‘equivalence’ - that, by the sounds of this, could be brought into use here - equivalence: to be contrasted with ‘identity’. I’ll explain in the next post if it seems warranted after hearing what you have to say in response to this one.