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Here is the usual photo of me At One. While I don’t remember exactly what I was thinking, I am quite sure I was thinking clearly. Since no one thought I would be “thinking” anyway I was left alone…in peace…to think. I’ve been trying to get back here for what is now most of my life. Here I recognize my face. Or rather, here I recognize “myself”. Undiluted. (more…)
Flow:Triangulation exhibition featuring Jose Polet – France, Policarpo Ribeiro – Brazil, Tonietta Walters – USA
Graham Center Art Gallery @ Florida International University
January 6th through February 6th, 2009
Reception: February 5th 6pm – 9pm
An essay on delusions from the Intro to Hegel Group.Â
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/intro_hegel/message/1161
This is why I decided not to reference Hegel at all. Though right on the money…who can keep track of negation of the negation or delusion of the delusion?Â
Originally uploaded by Xhyra Graf.
I don’t think I noted anywhere that in this one of the digital erasure series, the digital image was taken from a drawing of the magazine chick.
In my other life [the purgatory of the corporate world], I spent quite a bit of my free time reading Vogue, Cosmo and all those other self esteem smashing mags. Although, I was mostly occupied with cutting out pictures of clothing that made awesome lines for collages. This photo at the time blew me away with its ‘not realness’, it was just incredibly beautiful in a way that only post processing can make something beautiful. No wonder women have issues… Anyway the point is that yeah, by the time we process something so that it reaches the conscious level, it kind of looks like this digital erasure version; where we have kept the salient features and it in essence becomes something else entirely. This post was supposed to be about the fact that I’m reading Philosophy in the Flesh by Lakoff & Johnson… so far, so…well, nothing. I am reading it because I have to more so than because I need or want to. I hate that.
Look, I hope they become more subtle in the points they are trying to make because so far in lauding the amazing revelation from cognitive science that our reason is shaped by the vast and deep levels of unconscious, autonomous thingies going on in our brain and bodies*, they have 1.) Attributed to Kant the very zero sum interpretations that are commonly and mistakenly attributed to Kant**; the reason I wanted to avoid him in this paper, 2.) assumed that self-reflection is only guided by a philosopher’s [and that includes their interpretation of phenomenologists] definition of mind, reason or introspection and are 3.) still binding the parameters of reality to human measurement and excluding the concept of transcendence by asserting that there is no such thing as ‘disembodied consciousness’.
I’m sure I heard somewhere that religious experience of the mystical kind was probably just ‘unordered consciousness’… hello? Um…Am I the only one that doesn’t have a problem with this? Outside of our preconception of space and time, unordered, disembodied…did anyone really read Kant? Besides the fact that he wimped out of saying that some may be able to know of experience outside of space & time we just can’t [yet] objectively prove it in a way that would make it real knowledge. Well, one would never finish a treatise, critique or master’s paper if one didn’t leave out certain things in order to make one’s point. Language, bah! I really know that I am annoyed right now. I don’t need proof. [Oh God, if I continue to write honestly, I will be the Qualiaphile Daniel Dennett. Noooooo! I can see it now "All of you that stubbornly refuse to see the reality and importance of qualia are just pandering to a psycho-neurologically embedded disfunction in the neural networks controlling the quantum relations throughout the stabilizing pan-energy fields that serve to stave off wavefunction collapse in the face of the unknown; the neural correlate to both dogmatic atheism and dogmatic theism, differing only by individually determined spatio-temporal locus of previous neuro-quantum states that affect the type of observer entanglement. The parameters, structures and predictive efficacy of the Qualia phenomenon can be elucidated by Quantum Mechanical Liturgical Eisegesis or HeteroPhenomeNeuroTheology." Hmmm, I do seem to be a bit more comfortable now. I understand Dennett finally.]
Of course there is disembodied consciousness; it is a consciousness that can grasp and interact with, even for specious present, the reality ‘out there’ that is different from, larger than and outside of our ‘embodied’ understanding without reading Philosophy in the Flesh or any other frelling book. Well… maybe the Bible or the Bhagavad Gita or the Tao Te Ching, Qur’an, Torah, a Buddhist Canon, Lord of the Rings, Dr. Suess, something, anything other than Late 20th Century Analytic Philosophy. Frell.
Sigh, but what other tools do I have at the moment…it is appropriate that one of them is a linguistics professor. Frelling language…Why, why am I doing this to myself? I really should just make art and pray. Maybe I should take a look at my calendar and see if this is day 15.
* any joe schmo, artist or praying person can tell you – maybe not in the words cognitive unconscious - that there is rewiring of our ‘thinking’ done outside of ‘reason’.
** And of course, my interpretations are shaped by my background processes.
Tags: Flickr, Visual Philosophy
So I’m about here 
Where I hope to be sometime tomorrow is here 
 I really should be here but I don’t suppose that is going to happen this month with all the other crap I have to do. Hopefully, in the few weeks after the Brazilian visit [over Spring Break when I don't even have to talk to my professors] I will be able to concentrate. I better be able to get there because if I don’t then this paper is not going to be the paper it should be.
 Had some moments here today which is not a bad thing. [See this post] I just hope this all comes together properly. Then I can bask in the glow of something having been converted from this:
Â
to this:
 
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Ha! If I were fragmented I wouldn’t be able to refer to an artwork I did 5 years ago.
‘Process for A Phenomenological Approach’
Tags: Flickr, Visual Philosophy
The Specious Present: A Neurophenomenology of Time Consciousness
Even under a cursory reduction, already provided by the reflections of Augustin and James, time in experience is quite a different story from a clock in linear time. To start with, it does present itself as a linear sequence but as having a complex texture (whence specious, it is not a “knife-edge” present), and its fullness is so outstanding that it dominates our existence to an important degree. In a first approximation this texture can be described as follows: There is always a center, the now moment with a focused intentional content (say, this room with my computer in front of me on which the letters I am typing are highlighted). This center is bounded by a horizon or fringe that is already past (I still hold the beginning of the sentence I just wrote), and it projects towards an intended next moment (this writing session is still unfinished). These horizons are mobile: this very moment which was present (and hence was not merely described, but lived as such) slips towards an immediately past present. Then it plunges further out of view: I do not hold it just as immediately, and I need an added depth to keep it at hand. This basic texture is the raw basis of what I will be discussing in extenso below. In its basic outline, we shall refer to it as the three-part structure of temporality. It represents one of the most remarkable results of Husserl’s research as a result of phenomenological reduction. Another important complementary aspect of temporality as it appears under reduction, is that consciousness does not contain time as a constituted psychological category. Instead, temporal consciousness itself constitutes an ultimate substrate of consciousness where no further reduction can be accomplished, a”universal medium of access to whatever exists…Constitutive phenomenology can well be characterized as the consistent and radical development of this privilege of consciousness into its last ramifications and consequences” (Gurwitsch, 1966, p xix).
We find a converging conclusion in James concerning the apparent paradox of human temporal experience: on the one hand there is the unity of the present, an aggregate we can describe where we reside in basic consciousness, and on the other hand this moment of consciousness is inseparable from a flow, a stream (Chapter IX of Principles). These two complementary aspects of temporal consciousness are the main axes of my presentation.
I was reading 
 In the Theater of Consciousness: The Workspace of the Mind by Bernard Baars yesterday. In Chapter 3 to illustrate a point about prototypes and imagery he gave a list of words to read and asked what came to mind if we gave them some time to sink in:
So, I read them and eventhough he asked what came to mind, I had cause to pause when I read “If you are like most people, these names for abstract categories will bring to mind, not an abstract definition, but a specific mental image.” I felt a twinge. Um, no…
I decided I didn’t give it enough time and tried again. Um… (more…)
Collingwood’s first mature work, An Essay on Philosophical Method (1933), is a substantial treatise in metaphilosophy which seeks to delineate the subject matter and method of philosophical analysis. Philosophy, according to Collingwood, is a second-order enquiry whose task is to offer a reflection on first-order forms of knowledge. The subject matter of philosophical analysis is thus the fundamental concepts and principles which govern different forms of investigation and define the subject matters of the first-order sciences.
Central to Collingwood’s account of philosophical method is the doctrine of the overlap of classes. According to this doctrine, the concepts and principles with which philosophy is concerned allow for complete extensional overlap.
Philosophical distinctions, in other words, are semantic distinctions to which there may not correspond any empirical difference. The task of the philosopher is precisely to distinguish concepts which coincide in their instances. Philosophical distinctions differ from empirical classifications because the coordinate species of an empirical genus, unlike those of a philosophical one, form mutually exclusive classes.
The mind-body distinction, according to Collingwood, is similar to the distinction between duty and utility; it is a semantic distinction between concepts which coincide in their instances. Philosophical distinctions, whether they are found in ethics, aesthetics or the philosophy of mind, are semantic distinctions without an empirical difference. This is why what philosophers do differs from what natural scientists do: natural scientists classify, whereas philosophers draw distinctions.
The justification for philosophical concepts lies in the fact that they enable us to make crucial distinctions, such as the one between duty and utility, music and poetry, actions and mere bodily movements. The justification of philosophical concepts is accordingly neither inductive nor deductive. It is not inductive because philosophical concepts need to be presupposed in order to make the relevant distinctions. It is not deductive because philosophical concepts do not possess the status of Cartesian first principles on which the edifice of knowledge is deductively built. They are rather more like Kantian categories that are presupposed and implicit in ordinary judgments. To justify a philosophical concept involves regressing from a claim to the conditions of its possibility in the manner of a transcendental argument. Philosophical justification is therefore inevitably in a way circular, since in a regressive argument, unlike a deductive one, the truth of the premises is not established independently of the conclusion. Rather, the entitlement to employ philosophical concepts lies in the fact that they ground our knowledge claims.
According to Collingwood concepts have two aspects, intension and extension. The extension of a concept is the class of objects that it denotes. The intension of a concept is what it means. Collingwood clearly rejects the extensionalist account of concepts developed by Ayer, Russell, and the early Ryle (see below ‘The Reform of Metaphysics and Early Analytic Philosophy’) for he argues that the intension of a concept is not reducible to its extension. As he puts it: “two concepts ‘are the same thing’ in the sense that a thing which exemplifies the one exemplifies the other also, but ‘their being is not the same’ in the sense that being an instance of the one is not the same as being an instance of the other†(EPM, 50). His refusal to define concepts in purely extensional terms is crucial for his account of philosophical concepts because, as we have seen, philosophical distinctions are for him purely semantic in nature. Philosophical concepts do not carve out a segment of reality but rather provide a way of describing it: in its philosophical employment, the concept of action does not distinctively denote a subset of objects, i.e., the deeds performed by animals of the human species, but is rather a way of describing what happens as an expression of rational as opposed to causal processes.
Philosophy, Collingwood says, “does not, like exact or empirical science, bring us to know things of which we were simply ignorant, but brings us to know in a different way things which we already knew in some way†(EPM, 161). It is the task of philosophical analysis to make explicit principles which are implicit in the practices of first order sciences.
According to Collingwood, neither the proposition “mind exists†nor the proposition “matter exists†is a metaphysical proposition in the traditional sense. They are not metaphysical propositions because they do not assert the existence of metaphysical kinds (mind and matter) but of the methodological assumptions that govern the study of mind and nature. These propositions are, as Collingwood puts it, philosophical propositions which define the domains of enquiry or subject matters of the science of history and nature. Philosophical propositions, unlike metaphysical propositions, make an epistemological claim, rather than an ontological one. They assert that mind exists for the historian and that matter exists for the natural scientist. Further, philosophical propositions cannot be accommodated within a Humean epistemology since they are neither about relations of ideas nor about matters of fact. They are not propositions about matters of fact because they are not empirically verifiable. They are not propositions about relations of ideas because they are not self- evidently true analytical propositions. Yet although philosophical propositions cannot be accommodated within Humean epistemology, accepting them does not entail a commitment to the metaphysics which Hume wanted to reject. As already mentioned, philosophical propositions are not presented as necessary existential claims but as methodologically necessary ones. Philosophical analysis thus brings us to know “in a different way things which we already knew in some ways†in so far as it enables us to become aware of the assumptions that we implicitly and unselfconsciously make in order to provide radically different and sometimes incompatible descriptions of the same thing.
Collingwood’s conception of the subject matter of philosophy (the fundamental principles and concepts which underpin different forms of investigation) and of its task (the distinguishing of concepts that coincide in their instances) entails a particular view of the nature of philosophical problems. Philosophical problems arise because there are certain distinctions which do not map onto the empirical classification of reality. The distinction between mind and matter, as we have seen, is one such distinction, i.e. a distinction without a difference. According to Collingwood this is why we have a problem of mind body dualism, why problems such as that of freedom of the will and determinism, or of the criteria of personal identity versus bodily continuity, arise in the first place. They arise because of our implicit commitment to two concepts, that of mind and matter, which entail a radically different way of looking at the world and of explaining what occurs in it.
Many contemporary philosophers would endorse the view that in spite of the progress of natural science we have been unable to explain away the mind/body distinction. They may even maintain that the so-called ‘explanatory gap’ is always likely to remain with us. Some contemporary philosophers of mind then try to explain the persistence of the mind-body problem by claiming that there are two radically different modes of access to the mind and the body and, given the ineradicability of these two modes of access, we will continue to have two radically different descriptions of reality. Admittedly, this position bears some surface similarities to that defended by Collingwood, but it is in fact very different. Like many contemporary philosophers of mind, Collingwood holds that the mind/body distinction is ineliminable, but for him such ineliminability is not connected to the existence of different modes of access. It is rather due to the fact that we mean very different things when we speak about mental phenomena than when we speak about physical ones. The explanatory gap, according to Collingwood, is not epistemological but semantic. The resilience of the mind-body problem is thus due not to the ineliminability of two modes of access, but to the ineliminability of the analytic/synthetic distinction. As long as we will make distinctions to which there correspond no empirical differences there will be a role for philosophical analysis. The role of philosophy is to discern different senses even when there is only one referent.
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/merleau-ponty/#2: Thus we see that the consciousness for which the Gestalt exists is not an intellectual consciousness, rather it is a perceptual consciousness.
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/merleau-ponty/#3: He writes, “The real is a closely woven fabric” (PP, x). It is not constituted out of acts of judgment, or acts of predication. If this were the case, then it would have the character of probability. I would be constantly readjusting the synthesis which gave my representations the status of reality. He argues that this is not the case, and that even the most improbable phenomena are immediately accepted as real. For example, if I were to see a number of cows in the corridor of The New School for Social Research, my first question would be, “What are these cows doing in The New School?” It would not be, except on the worst of days, “Are these cows real?
Merleau-Ponty contests the idea that perception is a process by which the “external world” is somehow imprinted on the subject. According to him, perception is a behavior effected not by consciousness but by the body, but not by the body as a piece of the physical world, rather by the body as lived, a living body. He refers us to both the experience of our body considered in relationship to scientific knowledge, that is, the objective body, and the “other knowledge which we have of it, in virtue of its always being with us. And of the fact that we are our body” (PP, 206). For this “other knowledge,” the world is not a spectacle with the body as an observer; rather the world is given as a system of possibilities, not as an “I think” but as an “I can.” The reduction, according to Husserl, returns us to the subject. Whereas Merleau-Ponty tells us that the most important lesson of the phenomenological reduction is that a complete reduction is impossible. Why? Because that “subject” to whom we are returned is not a transcendental subject, but a subject that emerges from nature. In an article entitled “The Subject in Nature: Reflections on Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception,” Rudolf Bernet writes: “Nature is something at the heart of human existence that does not properly belong to the human subject: a ground (Grund) of its constituting capacities, that is at the same time, a non-ground (Abgrund), a capacity that evades constituting reason” (Merleau-Ponty in Contemporary Perspectives, Kluwer Publishers, The Netherlands, 1993). Bernet contrasts Husserl’s thought with that of Merleau-Ponty showing that, for the former, there is a reduction of natural life, whereas, for the latter, there is a reduction to natural life.
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/merleau-ponty/#4: Merleau-Ponty elaborates a gestural theory of language. According to him, when I speak, “I reach back for the word, as my hand reaches toward a part of my body which is being pricked; the word has a certain location in my linguistic world and is a part of my equipment” (PP, 180). To speak is to make a gesture in one direction of my linguistic world. Immediately a difficulty emerges. It is clear that I can gesture, or point, to a tree in the visual world, a world which is shared intersubjectively. However, there is not only one given linguistic world. Nevertheless, Merleau-Ponty argues that there is a shared linguistic world, one that is the product of a sedimentation; it is the sedimentation of an intersubjective practice. This shared linguistic world exists not as the natural world, but rather as what Hegel refers to as “objective spirit.” It is an institution at the interior of which one can, indeed, gesture in the direction of a word and be understood. Merleau-Ponty insists that when I understand another’s speech, I do not somehow reproduce, in my own mind, his mental processes. Nevertheless, if there is an institution, then it must institutionalize something. He writes: “Our view of man will remain superficial so long as we fail to go back to that origin, so long as we fail to find, beneath the chatter of words, the primordial silence, and so long as we do not describe the action which breaks the silence. The spoken word is a gesture, and its meaning the world” (PP, 184).
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/merleau-ponty/#7: [Ontology of the Flesh] It is Merleau-Ponty’s contention that it is not possible to achieve this return to subjectivity. Reflection is always secondary, that is, it must recognize itself as founded on a pre-reflective experience of Being that cannot be assimilated, employing the felicitous phrase of Adorno, “without remainder.” This reflection which must always be mindful of its own situated character is what Merleau-Ponty names “hyper-reflection.”
Merleau-Ponty begins to give a positive elaboration of the ontological position to which he has been led. In a number of respects, his last work distances itself from certain central notions in the phenomenological tradition. Nonetheless, in one respect it is mindful of Husserl’s injunction, “Return to the things themselves.” Merleau-Ponty wishes to begin in a dimension of experience which has not been “worked over, that offers us, all at once, pell-mell, both subject and object–both existence and essence–and, hence, gives philosophy resources to redefine them” (VI, 130). When Merleau-Ponty speaks of “perceptual faith” his notion of faith is perhaps the very opposite of the agonized Kierkegaardian “leap of faith.” It is a faith the commitment of which has ‘always already’ been made, a faith which subtends the avowal of responsibility by which personal identity is formed. Perceptual faith is a faith that I am in no danger of losing, except in the philosophical interpretation of it which portrays it as knowledge. This chapter on what Merleau-Ponty calls the Chiasm is a continuation of his study of perception, however, at first viewing it may not appear as such. In the Phenomenology of Perception, he insisted upon making a distinction between operative intentionality and act intentionality, but in The Visible and the Invisible this distinction is deepened in such a way that the concept of intentionality itself is thrown into question. In his critical reflections on Sartre, which due to spatial constraints we have not been able to develop here, Merleau-Ponty said that for a subject defined as For-itself, as consciousness of itself, passivity could have no meaning. He argues that, defined as such, consciousness could not but be sovereign.
In his late thought, Merleau-Ponty poses the question whether a consciousness, defined as intentional, is adequate to think a notion of perception viewed as the self-revelation of the sense of a world in and through a being which is itself a part of the world, flesh of its flesh, a world which “… is much more than the correlative of my vision, such that it imposes my vision upon me as a continuation of its own sovereign existence” (VI, 131). For him, to see is not to pose a thing as the object pole, much less a noema (Husserl), of my act of seeing. Rather seeing is being drawn into a dimension of Being, a tissue of sensible being to which the perceiving body is not foreign. Merleau-Ponty speaks of the perception of the color ‘red’ as not merely the awareness of a quality belonging to an object. He claims that for an experience ‘prior to being worked over’, it is an encounter with “a punctuation in the field of red things, which includes the tiles of rooftops; the flags of gatekeepers and of the revolution; of certain terrains near Aix or Madagascar. It is also a punctuation in the field of red garments, which includes, along with the dresses of women, the robes of professors, bishops and advocates general…and its red is literally not the same if it appears in one constellation or in another….A certain red is also a fossil, drawn up from the depths of imaginary worlds” (VI, 132). When seeing, I do not hold an object at the terminus of my gaze, rather I am delivered over to a field of the sensible which is structured in terms of the “difference between things and colors, a momentary crystallization of colored being or visibility” (VI, 132).
When we turn in the direction of the seer, we do not discover a transcendental ego but a being who is itself of the sensible, a being which “knows it before knowing it”(VI, 133). The sensate body possesses “an art of interrogating the sensible according to its own wishes, an inspired exegesis” (VI, 135). If I wish to feel the cloth of a coat that I am about to purchase, it will not suffice if I pound it with my fists or quickly wisk my hand over it. Rather it must be touched as it wishes to be touched and for this my body needs no instruction. Like the cloth, my hand is a part of the tangible world; between it and the rest of the tangible world there exists a “relationship by principle” (VI, 133). My hand which touches the things is itself subject to being touched. “Through this crisscrossing within it of the touching and the tangible, its own movements incorporate themselves in the universe that they interrogate, are recorded on the same map as it” (VI, 133).
The notion of “the invisible of the visible” continues the theme of a logos of the perceived world that we discovered in the Phenomenology of Perception, along with the theme of silence significance (pre-linguistic meaning), a silence which is not the contrary of language.
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/merleau-ponty/#8: In the academic year 1958-1959, Merleau-Ponty gave a course at the Collège de France entitled “Our State of Non-Philosophy.” He began by saying that ‘for the moment’ philosophy is in a crisis, but he continued, “My thesis: this decadence is inessential; it is that of a certain type of philosopher…. Philosophy will find help in poetry, art, etc., in a closer relationship with them, it will be reborn and will re-interprete its own past of metaphysics—which is not past” (Notes de cours, 1959-60, p.39. my translation). After writing this he turns to literature, painting, music, and psychoanalysis for philosophical inspiration.
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Flynn, Bernard, “Maurice Merleau-Ponty”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2004 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/merleau-ponty/.
http://www.imprint.co.uk/chalmers.html
 Facing up to the problem of Consciousness
If we take experience as fundamental, then we can go about the business of constructing a theory of experience.
Where there is a fundamental property, there are fundamental laws. A nonreductive theory of experience will add new principles to the furniture of the basic laws of nature. These basic principles will ultimately carry the explanatory burden in a theory of consciousness. Just as we explain familiar high-level phenomena involving mass in terms of more basic principles involving mass and other entities, we might explain familiar phenomena involving experience in terms of more basic principles involving experience and other entities.
In particular, a nonreductive theory of experience will specify basic principles telling us how experience depends on physical features of the world. These psychophysical principles will not interfere with physical laws, as it seems that physical laws already form a closed system. Rather, they will be a supplement to a physical theory. A physical theory gives a theory of physical processes, and a psychophysical theory tells us how those processes give rise to experience. We know that experience depends on physical processes, but we also know that this dependence cannot be derived from physical laws alone. The new basic principles postulated by a nonreductive theory give us the extra ingredient that we need to build an explanatory bridge.
Of course, by taking experience as fundamental, there is a sense in which this approach does not tell us why there is experience in the first place. But this is the same for any fundamental theory. Nothing in physics tells us why there is matter in the first place, but we do not count this against theories of matter. Certain features of the world need to be taken as fundamental by any scientific theory. A theory of matter can still explain all sorts of facts about matter, by showing how they are consequences of the basic laws. The same goes for a theory of experience.
This position qualifies as a variety of dualism, as it postulates basic properties over and above the properties invoked by physics. But it is an innocent version of dualism, entirely compatible with the scientific view of the world. Nothing in this approach contradicts anything in physical theory; we simply need to add further bridging principles to explain how experience arises from physical processes. There is nothing particularly spiritual or mystical about this theory – its overall shape is like that of a physical theory, with a few fundamental entities connected by fundamental laws. It expands the ontology slightly, to be sure, but Maxwell did the same thing. Indeed, the overall structure of this position is entirely naturalistic, allowing that ultimately the universe comes down to a network of basic entities obeying simple laws, and allowing that there may ultimately be a theory of consciousness cast in terms of such laws. If the position is to have a name, a good choice might be naturalistic dualism.
