Philosophy Discussion Forums | A Humans-Only Philosophy Club

[Atla]

Phenomenalists like Heidegger find fundamental stuff within their own minds that's simply not there. Qualia eliminitavists like Dennett do away with experience altogether, even though it's simply always there.

Sigh.

[Faustus5]

Phenomenalists like Heidegger find fundamental stuff within their own minds that's simply not there. Qualia eliminitavists like Dennett do away with experience altogether, even though it's simply always there.

Sigh.

No, Dennett just thinks experiences don't have all the qualities that believers in qualia insist they do. He's more of a deflationist than an eliminativist.

[Hereandnow]

Terrapin Station wrote
That doesn't help, because the idea of that is nonsensical. You can't have existents of any sort without properties.

That's what Heidegger said (as well as Husserl. A thing is an "predicatively formed affair of actuality"). He takes Being as such as a badly misunderstood concept. These mysterious intuitions, he said, one might have of Being are what he is trying to give some articulation to. He thinks we have to to understand Being as a foundational concept in an analytic of Time: I approach a thing, it IS there. What is it that constitutes this awareness of the thing before me? It is not some pure intimation of Being, for, as you say above, no sense can be made of this. He sees that before I even approach the thing, I am equipped with the ability to acknowledge it AS something, some reference to language, a foreknowledge of what couches and chairs ARE before we can analyze what it means that things ARE. The areness, if you will, is bound, in every case, always, already, bound to the pre understanding, so the question of what it means for something to be is analyzable to the temporal conditions that are in place in order for a "there is" or a "I am" to occur at all. this is why Heidegger's ontology is as foundational as it can get: wher a scientific account is about planets and chromosomes, the phenomenological ontology is about what it is for a thing to be at all, so that when you approach the microscope, there is a constitution, if you like, a paradigmatically informed apperceptive constitution that makes encounters at all maningful, and thus,the scientist's work meaningful.

Heidegger says at root, it is all interpretation. Now, his analysis of what an interpretative act IS requires looking into his thinkiing.

"Essences" only exist as rigid requirements in an individual's concepts. No essence as such would be "eternal." "Why is there something" is a rather silly question. There's no reason there should be nothing instead, so that it would be a mystery that there is something, and the question usually has a connotation almost of there being an intelligent reason behind the brute fact that things exist, which is also nonsense.

Right. Now I do recall saying to someone that phenomenologists are all different. There are those who take phenomenology another direction. When attention is placed on the interpretative act that engages the world, it brings philosophical attention to what is there, in the phenomenal act of recognition. This is why science plays no part in phenomenological analyses: Attention is on the act of perception, or apperception, itself. Studying the structure of time, the present and the literal "making" of our existence (hence Sartre's existence precedes essence: we make what we are in the fleeting "nothingness" of the present moment moving into the future) by freely choosing among the possibilities our history provides. We are, therefore, determined insofar as our past is made of the stuff of culture and language, a body of possibilities, but free in that the future is nothing, unmade.
One thing I like about this, is that it allows a good liberal like myself to look to social conditions as the cause of poverty and ignorance, after all, it is our history that determines our possibilities, but at the same time, does not undo the dignity of freedom (Skinner's term), for there is in this a clear recognition of what it is to stand at the precipice of the future and choose one direction or another.

It does get interesting, believe it or not. Perhaps you can see why phenomenologists take special note of that moment what one stops simply acting as a kind of automaton, just doing this and that, getting a job, buying a house, and on and on, and wakes up to ask the question regarding Being: what does it mean to be here" Why am I here at all? Why are we born to suffer and die? And so on. Questions get quite poignant if you are among those born into nothing but suffering. Why IS it that things are like this? Heidegger thinks when you get to this juncture, you begin to realize your own freedom, as you stand apart from history that would otherwise simply move you along unconsciously. Only now are you free. Freedom requires one to step away from unconscious behavior. When you do this, you witness possibilities, as when I stop typing, look up and consider all things and why they are.

Then you find Jaspers' The Encompassing, Henry's Affectivity, Kierkegaard's existential Anxiety, Levinas' Infinity, and so forth. All terms alien to analytic philosophy's lexicon. Of course, derision is easy with kind of thing. It all does sound very weird. But this subsides with reading.

[Gertie]

HAN

You should be looking for a philosopher to proclaim: I begin my thoughts on the matter with an explicit endorsement of empirical science!

The thing is HAN, I think you have a similar problem. As soon as you make a ''we...'' statement, you implicitly assume you and I share a world we are located in which we can agree we know things about. Science draws its lines at what can be known inter-subjectively, and so do you. But your lines seem to shift depending on what question is put. Which gives me the impression that all the difficult to parse terminology might be masking a basic ontological problem.


You should be able to clearly lay out the implicit ontological assumptions your phenomenological methodology relies on.

[Atla]

Phenomenalists like Heidegger find fundamental stuff within their own minds that's simply not there. Qualia eliminitavists like Dennett do away with experience altogether, even though it's simply always there.

Sigh.

No, Dennett just thinks experiences don't have all the qualities that believers in qualia insist they do. He's more of a deflationist than an eliminativist.

We've been over this already. First thing anyone with some sense does, is use a deflated meaning of qualia. But that deflated qualia still has to be part of one's worldview, if one claims to have explained consciousness. Dennett just seems to deflate it into nonexistence, eliminate it.

[Sculptor1]

Sculptor1 wrote

It's such a shame that science has no hegemony in modern society.
There is so much fakery out there.
Misused statistics.
False claims
Flat earthers
Ignored scientists such as Einstein and Oppenheimer; Lovelock and Semel Weiss throughout history.
Anti vaxers.
Religion.
On and on it goes

For crying out loud Sculptor 1, the issue on the table is not at all about how science is being discredited by right wing propaganda. It is a much broader issue. It is about how science is unfit for a foundational philosophical ontology.

I mean, seriously??

But science is perfectly fit for the foundation of all knowledge; Just ask Locke Hume, and Newton, among many others.
I mean seriously. How can you claim to know anything without the empiric paradigm. It is the basis of all things.
There can be no ontology without the evidence that drives it.
Unless you want to sit in a dark cave and imagine the world you prefer to live in, you are basically stuck with EVIDENCE.

[Gertie]

Phenomenalists like Heidegger find fundamental stuff within their own minds that's simply not there. Qualia eliminitavists like Dennett do away with experience altogether, even though it's simply always there.

Sigh.

No, Dennett just thinks experiences don't have all the qualities that believers in qualia insist they do. He's more of a deflationist than an eliminativist.

What qualities does Dennett 'deflate' qualia to?

[Faustus5]

No, Dennett just thinks experiences don't have all the qualities that believers in qualia insist they do. He's more of a deflationist than an eliminativist.

We've been over this already. First thing anyone with some sense does, is use a deflated meaning of qualia. But that deflated qualia still has to be part of one's worldview, if one claims to have explained consciousness. Dennett just seems to deflate it into nonexistence, eliminate it.

You can't find him doing this in his own words, which right away should ring alarm bells if you have any intellectual honesty and think accurately representing views you disagree with is essential to being a good scholar.

I mean, common sense alone should dictate that if he squabbles with people who openly call themselves eliminativists over their eliminativism, it's kind of stupid to call him one.

[Hereandnow]

Faustus5 wrote
Well, I know Dennett's work more than any philosopher on earth, probably better than anyone you've ever met, and his theory of consciousness is explicitly anti-reductionist, so you're kind of getting things backwards right from the start. But I suppose if you've only encountered his ideas third or fourth hand, that sound bite is what a person might come away with.

At any rate, you get the details wrong, but your larger point remains correct in this particular case: Dennett's approach to consciousness is scientific and empirical to the core. Hell, the bibliography for Consciousness Explained cites scientists far more than philosophers.

Details?? I don't recall one.

The anti reductionism you are talking about is the resistance to a hasty reduction dismissing complexity.Of course, his objections are all grounded in empirical thought and analyses. I am not at all sure why you think I get things backwards right from the start. I do note that I asked you for one philosopher you could think of as a counter example to my claim that empirical science had hegemony in analytic philosophy, and you give me dennett, who you say is, "empirical to the core." Interesting strategy.

Now, can you please articulate why treating consciousness as a evolved biological phenomena is somehow wrong? This should be rich.

And can you please articulate why the other philosophers you mention are misguided in using empirical methods?

Let me stress again that I do think some scientists and some philosophers can be found guilty of scientific over-reach (and I should add that their peers tend to be pretty good at slapping them down for it), but you have to take it case by case and examine the particular merits of the arguments they make instead of making unfounded generalizations about the entire field. I just deny that there is some sort of over-arching problem where science is constantly and routinely abused and used to solve problems where it is an inappropriate tool.

You sound exactly like a person who has never in his entire life come within a parsec of phenomenology. So full of opinion, and NO reading at all. Astounding, really. Do you handle all your affairs like this?
Read what i wrote to TS just now.

[Atla]

We've been over this already. First thing anyone with some sense does, is use a deflated meaning of qualia. But that deflated qualia still has to be part of one's worldview, if one claims to have explained consciousness. Dennett just seems to deflate it into nonexistence, eliminate it.

You can't find him doing this in his own words, which right away should ring alarm bells if you have any intellectual honesty and think accurately representing views you disagree with is essential to being a good scholar.

I mean, common sense alone should dictate that if he squabbles with people who openly call themselves eliminativists over their eliminativism, it's kind of stupid to call him one.

Where did Dennett ever address what qualia actually is? The issue is not what he said, it's what he what didn't say. And there are different kinds of eliminativisms. Try some of that common sense.

[Atla]

We've been over this already. First thing anyone with some sense does, is use a deflated meaning of qualia. But that deflated qualia still has to be part of one's worldview, if one claims to have explained consciousness. Dennett just seems to deflate it into nonexistence, eliminate it.

You can't find him doing this in his own words, which right away should ring alarm bells if you have any intellectual honesty and think accurately representing views you disagree with is essential to being a good scholar.

I mean, common sense alone should dictate that if he squabbles with people who openly call themselves eliminativists over their eliminativism, it's kind of stupid to call him one.

It doesn't help either that Dennett sometimes says things like: ‘Far better, tactically, to declare that there simply are no qualia at all’.

[Terrapin Station]

Terrapin Station wrote
That doesn't help, because the idea of that is nonsensical. You can't have existents of any sort without properties.

That's what Heidegger said (as well as Husserl. A thing is an "predicatively formed affair of actuality").

It sure isn't what you just said.

He takes Being as such as a badly misunderstood concept. These mysterious intuitions, he said, one might have of Being are what he is trying to give some articulation to. He thinks we have to to understand Being as a foundational concept in an analytic of Time: I approach a thing, it IS there. What is it that constitutes this awareness of the thing before me? It is not some pure intimation of Being, for, as you say above, no sense can be made of this.

Ontology isn't epistemology. "What is it that constitutes this awareness of the thing before me? It is not some pure intimation of Being" --this is epistemology.

[GE Morton]

Yes, they have. It's just that the empirical premise is simply implied. I]ll tell you what, you name any analytic phislopher, of your choosing, and I will shoe how this philosopher's conception of the world at the level of basic assumptions is empirical.

Well, yes. Information acquired empirically, via the senses, is indeed the raw material from which all concepts concerning things outside ourselves are forged, in the view of most modern philosophers. What additional sources of information do you imagine we have? Are you a Platonist? If your basic assumptions include some such source please set it forth, outline the ontology you have built upon it and demonstrate its explanatory power.

[GE Morton]

"The quest for the being of beings in its difference from being": "from being" takes the quoate out of context and I would have to read the fuller text. His question is about being in the most foundational sense, not particular beings, as a chair or an eidtic entity like a set of numbers, but the question of being as such, when the predicative designations is put aside. Entities come replete predicatively bundled, so to speak, and there is no sense in the ideas of it being otherwise. But since philosophy's purpose is to provide an analytic at themost foundational level possible, and Being as such is this level, he begins here, but it is not with an eye to elucidate Being, the eternal essence of all things (why is there something rather than nothing, sort of thing), but rather to use this term to establish how far down the rabbit hole analysis can go and what this terminal place is.

Well, that response illustrates the problem. Phrases such as "being in the foundational sense," "being as such," and "eternal essences of all things" are meaningless phrases. The word "being" has two uses in English --- it is a noun denoting an existent, especially a living creature, and as a verb, the present participle of to be (to exist). There is no sense to "being as such" --- the term is only meaningful with reference to some particular existent. It does not denote some inchoate, mystical substance, some "essence," that permeates all tangible, perceptible things. Nor can any such mystical substances supply a foundation for any useful ontology. Speaking of "being" in that way does not constitute some revolutionary insight; it is merely a linguistic corruption contrived in an attempt to describe an incoherent idea.

So the quote SOUNDS absurd to anyone who has read nothing. It is always like this. Rorty calls those who talk like this (he thought Heidegger was among the three greatest philosophers of the 20th century) know nothings.

Scientists and analytic philosophers are "know-nothings"? Yikes.

[Hereandnow]

GE Morton
Well, that response illustrates the problem. Phrases such as "being in the foundational sense," "being as such," and "eternal essences of all things" are meaningless phrases. The word "being" has two uses in English --- it is a noun denoting an existent, especially a living creature, and as a verb, the present participle of to be (to exist). There is no sense to "being as such" --- the term is only meaningful with reference to some particular existent. It does not denote some inchoate, mystical substance, some "essence," that permeates all tangible, perceptible things. Nor can any such mystical substances supply a foundation for any useful ontology. Speaking of "being" in that way does not constitute some revolutionary insight; it is merely a linguistic corruption contrived in an attempt to describe an incoherent idea.

Read this to clarify (intended for TS)

Well, that response illustrates the problem. Phrases such as "being in the foundational sense," "being as such," and "eternal essences of all things" are meaningless phrases. The word "being" has two uses in English --- it is a noun denoting an existent, especially a living creature, and as a verb, the present participle of to be (to exist). There is no sense to "being as such" --- the term is only meaningful with reference to some particular existent. It does not denote some inchoate, mystical substance, some "essence," that permeates all tangible, perceptible things. Nor can any such mystical substances supply a foundation for any useful ontology. Speaking of "being" in that way does not constitute some revolutionary insight; it is merely a linguistic corruption contrived in an attempt to describe an incoherent idea.


That's what Heidegger said (as well as Husserl. A thing is an "predicatively formed affair of actuality"). He takes Being as such as a badly misunderstood concept. These mysterious intuitions, he said, one might have of Being are what he is trying to give some articulation to. He thinks we have to to understand Being as a foundational concept in an analytic of Time: I approach a thing, it IS there. What is it that constitutes this awareness of the thing before me? It is not some pure intimation of Being, for, as you say above, no sense can be made of this. He sees that before I even approach the thing, I am equipped with the ability to acknowledge it AS something, some reference to language, a foreknowledge of what couches and chairs ARE before we can analyze what it means that things ARE. The areness, if you will, is bound, in every case, always, already, bound to the pre understanding, so the question of what it means for something to be is analyzable to the temporal conditions that are in place in order for a "there is" or a "I am" to occur at all. this is why Heidegger's ontology is as foundational as it can get: wher a scientific account is about planets and chromosomes, the phenomenological ontology is about what it is for a thing to be at all, so that when you approach the microscope, there is a constitution, if you like, a paradigmatically informed apperceptive constitution that makes encounters at all maningful, and thus,the scientist's work meaningful.

Heidegger says at root, it is all interpretation. Now, his analysis of what an interpretative act IS requires looking into his thinkiing.
"Essences" only exist as rigid requirements in an individual's concepts. No essence as such would be "eternal." "Why is there something" is a rather silly question. There's no reason there should be nothing instead, so that it would be a mystery that there is something, and the question usually has a connotation almost of there being an intelligent reason behind the brute fact that things exist, which is also nonsense.
Right. Now I do recall saying to someone that phenomenologists are all different. There are those who take phenomenology another direction. When attention is placed on the interpretative act that engages the world, it brings philosophical attention to what is there, in the phenomenal act of recognition. This is why science plays no part in phenomenological analyses: Attention is on the act of perception, or apperception, itself. Studying the structure of time, the present and the literal "making" of our existence (hence Sartre's existence precedes essence: we make what we are in the fleeting "nothingness" of the present moment moving into the future) by freely choosing among the possibilities our history provides. We are, therefore, determined insofar as our past is made of the stuff of culture and language, a body of possibilities, but free in that the future is nothing, unmade.
One thing I like about this, is that it allows a good liberal like myself to look to social conditions as the cause of poverty and ignorance, after all, it is our history that determines our possibilities, but at the same time, does not undo the dignity of freedom (Skinner's term), for there is in this a clear recognition of what it is to stand at the precipice of the future and choose one direction or another.

It does get interesting, believe it or not. Perhaps you can see why phenomenologists take special note of that moment what one stops simply acting as a kind of automaton, just doing this and that, getting a job, buying a house, and on and on, and wakes up to ask the question regarding Being: what does it mean to be here" Why am I here at all? Why are we born to suffer and die? And so on. Questions get quite poignant if you are among those born into nothing but suffering. Why IS it that things are like this? Heidegger thinks when you get to this juncture, you begin to realize your own freedom, as you stand apart from history that would otherwise simply move you along unconsciously. Only now are you free. Freedom requires one to step away from unconscious behavior. When you do this, you witness possibilities, as when I stop typing, look up and consider all things and why they are.

Then you find Jaspers' The Encompassing, Henry's Affectivity, Kierkegaard's existential Anxiety, Levinas' Infinity, and so forth. All terms alien to analytic philosophy's lexicon. Of course, derision is easy with kind of thing. It all does sound very weird. But this subsides with reading.

Scientists and analytic philosophers are "know-nothings"? Yikes.

Yikes is right. By no nothing, Rorty was referring to critics who never read Derrida and others yet were terrified of his conclusions. Not, heh, heh, critics of science.
But then, analytic philosophers really are barking up the wrong tree. This philosophy goes nowhere at all.