Intercontextualism

[exogen]

for lack of a better name I term the idea that I have been playing around with that I think best encapsulates reality as intercontextualism. the idea is basically that there is no master context for which everything takes place in. everything exists or is in relation to something else. do the parts make the pattern or does the pattern make the parts? the existence of the parts alone forms a pattern, but the existence of the pattern presupposes the parts, so the relationship is interdependant. even chaos it self implies or presupposes order. you cannot say which comes first, they are both required by vertue of each other. it's not a question of the trying to decide if the chicken or the egg are causally aranged, but in understanding that the existence of the overal ralationship as a whole cannot be logicly separated.

 

similarly my view on reality as it pertains to us is that reality always exists from some point of view/perspective/reference point. there is always a subject-object relationship, without which we could never realise that reference point. a subject by itself is just stillness and being it-self, and an object by "it"self is slilent, meaningless and beingless. ironicly pure subjectivity, or being, is a kind of nothingness because there is no form. out of this nothingness form arises, which gives way to the subject-object relationship creating the posiblity for reference points.

 

trying to separate formlessness/nothingness from being, which enables the subject-object relationship cannot be done because they are always mutually implied and therefore could never be isolated. they both have importance in defining and giving rise to what is going on. therefore they provide an equal weight in terms of understanding the context, hence they are intercontextual.

 

everything in the universe is intercontextually determined. all reference frames (points of observation) are each a posiblity among and infinite number of other posibles. being that they are all equally posible they all imply each other being that each is just a variation on the all the rest. so each moment in time, each sliver of experience implies all others, including yours and mine and everyone that exists at all points in time because each is a variation on the rest. the context of one implies the other and so on infinitely. but being that it would be illogical if these all did not cohere and fit togather ontologiclly, we can rule out the posiblity of their existing an irrational experience. not the experience of irrationality of perception or anything like that but total chaos would not exist unless somehow connected to the rules that are determined by the whole.

 

so the universe's "laws" do not exist "out there" and there isn't any "out there" needed to ground reality because all moments of time determine all other moments intercontextually. everything is simply determined by every other thing due to it all being interconnected. so the question is not does the chicken come before the egg or not, but that the realshipship as a whole, and which ever really does come first is all determined by each part of the pattern.

Edited May 8, 2011 by exogen

[Shirtless Crackhead]

I have an answer for that and if you had continued you would have seen just exactly why it is that conciousness cannot be a material entity and why in all likihood materialism is just wrong. but we would need to get past that point.

 

Post this wherever it's going to go.

[exogen]

I want to point out that I have done my best to sumerise these arguments in a few paragraphs. this is the kind of things people write books on remember.

 

Consciousness and all its content, which includes meaning, qualia etc. (basically experience with a big "E" to include more than simply empirical experience) cannot be a mere appearance or in any way unreal for if it was then such a statement itself would have to be mere appearance and itself unreal, which would apply to all truth statements including the notion that consciousness and experience is unreal. This would be contradictory and hence as John Searl puts it, "for consciousness the appearance is the reality". This is simply the notion the while I might be wrong that my experience of a hot summer day is anything other than a "virtual" experience and not necessarily representative of anything outside my experience (realism) I can't be wrong that I am having an experience, even if that experience again, may not be representative of something else (see BIV). Thus based on the fact that my experience cannot be an appearance and does not necessarily tell me if my experience is anything else other than the virtual rawness of that experience, for all I know experience in general may be all there is. So what we have here is not so much an appearance vs. reality distinction (Kant) but a reality vs. reality problem.

 

At this point arguments in favor of a monistic realism can take many forms. Let's take materialism as an example. Materialism posits in regard to the mind body connection that my consciousness and all subsequent experience is a physical state of matter. The problem with this view is that it reduces or redescribes the reality of consciousness as being something other than it actually is. My consciousness itself actually cannot exist in that case because all it is is unconscious third person (objective) stuff or "things" interacting albeit sophisticated ways, but none the less completely devoid of "experience". It's like saying if the brain was a material object and all that existed was material objects then the subjective could not exist because by definition under a monistic realism like materialism, all that exists is the objective ontology which is simply not the same as a subjective one. so we can see that the conceptual modle of reality here being materialism simply defines conciousness away by removing the logical posiblity of a subjective ontology from the onset.

 

The usual objection is that it is an issue of behavior or complexity or function or emergent properties or one of the many theories used by materialists. But this just won't work to solve this "hard problem" because that is simply a functional description of behavior of the objects that are said to be all that exists (the how of things) and not the what, which is what the issue comes down to. The hard problem of consciousness is not about the how or the functional relationships of consciousness; it is about answering the "what". That cannot be anything else other than the raw, virtual experience itself, otherwise the fact of that ontology ceases to be real, at which point no truth statements can be made because the reality of consciousness itself cannot be real in favor of ontology. thus a subjective ontology cannot be explained via a pragmatic/functional kind of description (remember even consciousness can be described functionally without reference to it being material) because a functional descrption does not explain how two ontologies are actually the same.

 

 

The same argument can be made against any view that redescribes consciousness as being something other than the experience itself (Randomly out of a hat one could pick Leibnitz monads for instance. See Leibnitz on monads). Or a view like panpsychism for instance that postulates that the world is made up of a substance (a stuff) but that each bit of stuff has a proto-consciousness to it and the collection and interaction of greater complexity forms higher states of consciousness. But this also fails for the same reason. First it redescribes the subjective ontology which cannot work as mentioned above. Second is that it fails to explain why these separate bits of proto-conscious entities can form one consciousness expeirence. the devisionary nature of this theory fails to explain the wholistic nature of a subjective ontology (nonreduction). Again as with materialism the same problem with functional explanations is that they don't address the ontological question, which is what the hard problem boils down to. And any attempt to deny the existence of the hard problem refutes itself for the reasons explained before. Panpsychism also fails because it can't explain how a subjective ontology and an objective one are the same any more then the current issue raised by the hard problem can either. they are just contradictory to one another.

 

This leaves us with some possibilities.

 

1. Dualism. The notion that mind and matter are separate ontologies but interact with one another.

2. Epiphenomenalism. The view the subjective ontology exists but that it is caused by matter. In this way mind is literally not the brain but is caused by states of matter (the brain). Note while this is not a back and forth causation but a bottom up causation it still is a kind of dualism.

3. Idealism. All that exists is the mind.

 

Dualism itself can be ruled out on the basis that the mind can be demonstrated to not be causing what we would call "matter" (empirical phenomena) because mind states always correspond to brain states. Then there is the problem of interactionism.

Epiphenomenalism gets lost in skepticism because we can never be sure our experience corresponds to anything beyond it. Also the same problem with interactionism comes in here. An objective ontology cannot give rise to a subjective one because they are mutually exclusive. Idealism while at first seaming to be the most coherent doesn't work either because if it was all mind then reality should not have law like regularity (uniformity). Also as Husserl pointed out consciousness always refers beyond itself unless we are talking about self-consciousness.

 

I am saying let's stop throwing out the baby with the bath water with all these theories that try to get what the "real". I'm saying philosophy has utterly failed time and time again because it has asked the wrong question in this regard because it has made some flawed metaphysical assumptions to begin with that has led to this whole debate.

 

Intercontextualism explains this problem by simply throwing out monism, dualism, pluralism, and all of there subcatagories in favor of a more wholistic approach. I do not have a mind body problem because I do not postulate that there is a subjective ontology and an objective one that must in some way interact, or one giving rise to another or that there is only an objective ontology or even that there is a mix of the two. I just throw out all that and talk about the facts of a subjective ontology at answer the "what" because we already have that answer. in other words the mind body problem really isn't a problem at all because it arises out of a conceptual model, which is a way of looking at things as opposed to the experience itself, which we can't be wrong we are having. We have no need to look any further to answer the ontological question and the because we do try to answer the question of "what it is" we are left going around in philosophical circles for centuries constantly coming up with new theories which we can do endlessly and never ever get an answer. The answer is that our quest is misguided to begin with. The answer is that we already have the reality and realism and all those other isms I attacked before and ones like them actually are just imaginary ways of looking at the world and not the world as you experience it.

Edited May 10, 2011 by exogen

[Shirtless Crackhead]

Searle has argued that critics like Daniel Dennett, who (he claims) insist that discussing subjectivity is unscientific because science presupposes objectivity, are making a category error. Perhaps the goal of science is to establish and validate statements which are epistemically objective, (i.e., whose truth can be discovered and evaluated by any interested party), but are not necessarily ontologically objective.

Searle calls any value judgment epistemically subjective. Thus, "McKinley is prettier than Everest" is epistemically subjective, whereas "McKinley is higher than Everest" is epistemically objective. In other words, the latter statement is evaluable (in fact, falsifiable) by an understood ('background') criterion for mountain height, like 'the summit is so many meters above sea level'. No such criteria exist for prettiness.

Beyond this distinction, Searle thinks there are certain phenomena (including all conscious experiences) which are ontologically subjective, i.e. are experienced subjectively. For example, although it might be subjective or objective in the epistemic sense, a doctor's note that a patient suffers from back pain is an ontologically objective claim: it counts as a medical diagnosis only because the existence of back pain is "an objective fact of medical science". But the pain itself is ontologically subjective: it is only experienced by the person having it.

Searle goes on to affirm that "where consciousness is concerned, the appearance is the reality". His view that the epistemic and ontological senses of objective/subjective are cleanly separable is crucial to his self-proclaimed biological naturalism.

Searle denies Cartesian dualism, the idea that the mind is a separate kind of substance to the body, as this contradicts our entire understanding of physics, and unlike Descartes, he does not bring God into the problem. Indeed, Searle denies any kind of dualism, the traditional alternative to monism, claiming the distinction is a mistake. He rejects the idea that because the mind is not objectively viewable, it does not fall under the rubric of physics.

Searle believes that consciousness "is a real part of the real world and it cannot be eliminated in favor of, or reduced to, something else" whether that something else is a neurological state of the brain or a software program. He contends, for example, that the software known as Deep Blue knows nothing about chess. He also believes that consciousness is both a cause of events in the body and a response to events in the body.

On the other hand, Searle doesn't treat consciousness as a ghost in the machine. He treats it, rather, as a state of the brain. The causal interaction of mind and brain can be described thus in naturalistic terms: Events at the micro-level (perhaps at that of individual neurons) cause consciousness. Changes at the macro-level (the whole brain) constitute consciousness. Micro-changes cause and then are impacted by holistic changes, in much the same way that individual football players cause a team (as a whole) to win games, causing the individuals to gain confidence from the knowledge that they are part of a winning team.

He articulates this distinction by pointing out that the common philosophical term 'reducible' is ambiguous. Searle contends that consciousness is "causally reducible" to brain processes without being "ontologically reducible." He hopes that making this distinction will allow him to escape the traditional dilemma between reductive materialism and substance dualism; he affirms the essentially physical nature of the universe by asserting that consciousness is completely caused by and realized in the brain, but also doesn't deny what he takes to be the obvious facts that humans really are conscious, and that conscious states have an essentially first-person nature.

It can be tempting to see the theory as a kind of property dualism, since, in Searle's view, a person's mental properties are categorically different from his or her micro-physical properties. The latter have "third-person ontology" whereas the former have "first-person ontology." Micro-structure is accessible objectively by any number of people, as when several brain surgeons inspect a patient's cerebral hemispheres. But pain or desire or belief are accessible subjectively by the person who has the pain or desire or belief, and no one else has that mode of access. However, Searle understands mental properties to be a species of physical property—ones with first-person ontology. So this sets his view apart from a dualism of physical and non-physical properties. His mental properties are putatively physical.

Quote links: 1 | 2

 

~

 

So yeah, you quoted John Searle incorrectly, from page 112 of The Mystery of Consciousness.

 

You -> "for consciousness the appearance is the reality"

Reality -> "where consciousness is concerned, the appearance is the reality"

 

Btw, I never said consciousness was material, I said it was the brain doing what it does, which would seem to be Searle's opinion, as well as Dennett's (to me atleast) even though they go about it in different ways. But I also don't think it's impossible to see how nothing but "material" could give rise to that consciousness, then again, I'm a naturalist, and John Searle agrees that "consciousness is a biological phenomena".

 

But you keep thinking thinking whatever it is you are thinking, I think you really are quite dumb.

 

Video link ->

Edited May 10, 2011 by Enganacious

[Rachis]

Exogen...do you believe in the matrix?

[exogen]

[Rachis]

I don't think we are in the matrix, a dream, a vat, a computer program, part of a "material universe" or any other one of the infinite conceptions of reality that can be used to try and redescribe experience as being something other then it is (subjective ontology).

 

what's ironic is that what people normally concider to be mumbo jumbo (subjective ontology) is in fact the concrete

 

So you don't want to talk about what you believe to be a fundamentally sound way of looking at our existance?

[Shirtless Crackhead]

If the subjective ontology is the concrete of reality, then why don't schizophrenics who think they can fly, fly off rooftops instead of falling to their deaths?

[exogen]

[Shirtless Crackhead]

Simply put rach, the experience, which a capital “E” is what exists.

So someone who experiences an "alien abduction" proves aliens and aliens kidnapping people?

 

EDIT: Forgot the quote tags.

Edited May 10, 2011 by Enganacious

[exogen]

Edit: was typing as you must have been.

 

If the subjective ontology is the concrete of reality, then why don't schizophrenics who think they can fly, fly off rooftops instead of falling to their deaths?

 

 

For the same reason I argued against idealism in my second post. Reality always existing in a subject-object relationship does not force one to conclude that uniformity and logic is out the window. If anything that is what links all subjective phenomena as being part of the same reality. Now ontological objectivity is replaced by intersubjectivity, but being that we all are separate experiences our realities can overlap intersubjectively. That does not mean though that what people think has to be the case just because they think it. things can be law-like be we are law-like. Ontological subjectivity does not yield epistemological subjectivity, nor does ontological objectivity necessarily yield epistemic objectivity.

[Rachis]

I'm not trying to redefine reality. You are exogen. You are making some serious contradictions.

 

This goes back to me telling you that you complicate things more than they need to be. You use so many words to try and explain your point of view that you end up giving out false or incomplete ideas that end up going against what you've said. You need to simplify what you are saying. For someone who's getting the education you are I would imagine that you would know that simplification makes everything easier.

 

I would hope that eventually you would get this idea, but for a couple years now at least all you seem to do is throw out as much vocabulary as you possibly can without taking into account the message you are sending or whether or not it actually makes any sense. It might make sense to you in your head, but you are doing a terrible job of actually making it so that everyone else knows what you are thinking. You can't fault anybody for misunderstanding you when you don't make it possible for us to.

Edited May 10, 2011 by Rachis

[Shirtless Crackhead]

So if there's a conscious consensus, that forms reality?

[exogen]

So if there's a conscious consensus, that forms reality?

 

No, as I said ontological subjectivity does not lead to epistemic subjectivity. Remmeber though to not catagorize me as an idealist. some might even say that I'm a kind of realist, but obviously not a monistic realist like a materialist or something like that. the objects of experience exist just not outside the domain of the subject object relationship. there is a subtle but crutial distinction there.

[Shirtless Crackhead]

Then what forms that which we experience?

 

Plus if we experience your contradictions and you don't that's just intersubjectivity, ain't it?

[exogen]

Plus if we experience your contradictions and you don't that's just intersubjectivity, ain't it?

 

No. Go back a read my prior post. the exlcusive existence of a subjective ontology does not lead to the notion of epistemic subjectivity and the loss of objective truth.

 

Remember in my view, while you may not directly expierence someone elses experience (which is true no mater who's view we are talking about) that does not preclude the idea that everything is interelated and uniform/law-like. Ontological subjectivity does not sudenly undue logic.

 

Just because an idea might be foreign to you does not mean it is incoherent.

[Shirtless Crackhead]

in my view

[exogen]

Edited May 12, 2011 by exogen