POETIX

[poetix]

There are two distinct reasons for treating the study of subjective experience - how things appear to us, what that appearing feels like, what textures and adumbrations it has - as first philosophy. One is to make sure we aren’t mistaking appearances for reality - we have to know ourselves, as knowers, before we can really know what we can know, otherwise we will keep mistaking how things are for us for the way things really and necessarily are. So that motivation gives rise to a phenomenology which is about taking ourselves properly into account when thinking about how we think about the world. That’s what Edmund Husserl was up to - he wanted to provide a foundation for science, and his phenomenological investigations were intended as a long detour along the path to that goal.

The other motivation is just subjectivism: the texture if our own experience is all we can ever possibly know, so the only real philosophical task is to describe it as profoundly and variously as possible. This is what gets people’s backs up, as it turns all of philosophy into theoretically sophisticated navel-gazing.

 

[sus]

Whereas phenomenology has yielded all sorts of interesting insights fmris have mainly been ground for a little bit of knowledge but largely a bunch of pretension to knowledge and inflated belief in how much we know because we're able to point out what part of the brain lights up. It's basically like aliens thinking they understand human culture because they watch how the lights turn on in cities all around the globe and when they turn off again. It's really just not that useful. And yet wyh suggests that neurology has made phenomenology obsolete? An absurd claim

 

[Clinamenic]

This stuff is just incredibly speculative as far as I understand. We have no idea how the brain is structured or how concepts are stored we don't even know if we are theorizing at the right level of abstraction

I wouldn't call it conclusive, but my impression is that we have a general understanding of what areas of the brain are more highly correlated with certain psychic functions (according to data derived from things like MRI and EEG), be they cognitive, emotional, sensorimotor, etc. Not that these functions are strictly localized and segregated, but that they aren't just evenly diffused throughout the brain

As for where concepts are stored, or if there is any unit to speak of for how we remember concepts, I agree that it is still largely speculative, to my understanding. But that article covered a lot of ongoing research that I wasn't at all aware of, research that indicated that the study of consciousness is actually becoming scientific, and not just speculative and.or philosophical.

 

[Clinamenic]

Although with EEG its also about voltage levels, as I understand, and not just brain region. i.e. different voltage levels being classified as different waves, and different wave types being associated with different types of brain activity, like REM sleep, cognitive focus, etc.

So yeah far from conclusive, and consciousness studies still seems like a largely inexact science (unless some ARPA branch has already figured it out), but I wouldn't just toss aside the findings from these techniques.

 

[Clinamenic]

Like I don't know how/if epileptic activity can be captured by MRI, but EEGs can, often clearly.

 

[sus]

I don't think we disagree see my latest comment after Poetix

 

[Clinamenic]

Well I do think data from MRI, EEG, connectomics, etc, could form a basis for a scientific understanding of consciousness that eventually makes phenomenology look like alchemy in hindsight, even if we consider the alchemical stage of knowledge an essential stage in understanding something.

 

[Clinamenic]

i.e. phenomenology as @poetix talks about it, in the tradition of Husserl and bracketing one's own subjective apprehension of reality, could be the kind of philosophy that gives us the right questions to be asking, asking within a more scientific setting of inquiry.

Zizek (or was it Badiou) said that was the purpose of philosophy is to figure out how to be asking the right questions.

 

[Clinamenic]

So without something like phenomenology, we would likely be much more like aliens inspecting city lights from beyond the atmosphere, insofar as we wouldn't be armed with the right methods of framing our own insights and understandings.

 

[Clinamenic]

The study of consciousness is arguably the ultimate collision of the gnostic and scientific modes of knowledge.

 

[Clinamenic]

That, or cosmology. And the two may not even be unrelated.

 

[sus]

So without something like phenomenology, we would likely be much more like aliens inspecting city lights from beyond the atmosphere, insofar as we wouldn't be armed with the right methods of framing our own insights and understandings.

I guess the question is what kind of knowledge do you care about and that comes from what you want to do with it

 

[Clinamenic]

I guess the question is what kind of knowledge do you care about and that comes from what you want to do with it

Here I'd just defer to science and industry, and say that the kind of knowledge I care about is that kind that reproducibly solves problems presented or anticipated by a given market. So technological knowledge I guess. (edit: but also knowledge that addresses ethical problems, so not just market-based technological problems)

 

[Clinamenic]

But more personally I care about any knowledge that makes my understanding of the universe feel more intuitive and comprehensive.

 

[linebaugh]

Im inclined to agree with suspended but I would like to hear @WashYourHands retort

 

[sus]

Here I'd just defer to science and industry, and say that the kind of knowledge I care about is that kind that reproducibly solves problems presented or anticipated by a given market. So technological knowledge I guess. (edit: but also knowledge that addresses ethical problems, so not just market-based technological problems)

What I mean by pseudo knowledge is that it feels like insight, but does not actually help you solve problems

You can imagine a class of pseudo knowledge which because it gave an aura of science, was widely used in industry to bolster agendas, included and cited in journalism as authoritative but did not actually provide much in the way of problem-solving or having tools for living/choosing/perceiving

I cannot for the life of me understand how fMRIs could replace phenomenology or in any way compete in its area of expertise, the area anyone on this board ostensibly cares about which is self-knowledge, and knowledge of how thinking works, although it may FEEL enlightening to go "my prefrontal is lighting up now" (as it does five million times a day for five million different reasons)

Which was the original contention here

 

[sus]

So I do not think it is a fake area of inquiry like behavioral science or social psychology or for the most part evpsych HOWEVER it really doesn't tell us much we care about even at the cognitive science level and the evidence for this is how little progress cogsci has made in the post fmri era

 

[sus]

I think you'd like this quite a bit @Clinamenic https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aH...kEtRDg5My00MkYyLTkwNzEtRDJBOTk1MUQ1OTk1?ep=14

 

[sus]

But to be fair WYH was talking specifically about understanding sensory processing and I forgot that his claim was narrower and he may be speaking on something in neurology I don't know about, which is lots of things! I just jumped to the generalization that phenomenology was made obsolete by neurology and that may not actually have been his claim

 

[Clinamenic]

Yeah I agree, I just think for its a massive deal for consciousness studies to make any bit of progress into the realm of scientific qua reproducible inquiry and findings, and I think the various modes of empirically screening and studying brains only add more data to be analyzed, not that all of it will prove to be equally useful.

But yeah, I'd be skeptical of anyone claiming to understand consciousness on a basis of regional electrical activity in the brain, given our current technology, to my understanding.