In this post we place brief sketches of some ideas to be developed. The criticism of the concept of 'possible world'. Our knowledge of the 'world' is approximative, incomplete, local and relative. Thus it makes little sense to speak of an 'alternative world' or of a certainty that such is even 'possible'. Rather there are local restricted domains and aspects of the world, coming from different spatio-temporal regions of the actual world, which we loosen and group together and inappropriately call 'worlds'. For instance possible gardens are based on the collection of actual (present or historical) gardens in the actual world (which depend, in this case, on human agency and choice), and these may or not contain roses. It is absurd to speak of an alternative global world in which the red roses in this garden are white. Possible worlds are an undue reification of aspects of imagination and consciousness. Criticism of statistical and probabilistic concepts: cannot judgments involving such concepts all be transformed into judgments without them, based on spatial-temporal events ? Is not the statistical and probabilistic inherently eliminable and reducible to mere arithmetic judgments regarding a collection of evidence from a set of spatio-temporal regions ? And are not such concepts based on partial, artificial, approximative abstractions which totally ignore the underlying epistemically open-ended structure of reality ? One cannot enter into a relation to something without entering into a relation with the relation and so forth. Logic is an a posteriori useful descriptive tool, not a foundation. There is a large amount of evidence that consciousness can subsist independently from the physical brain and that consciousness is not generated from the brain nor in particular are different psychological faculties determined by specialized functional regions of the brain. A philosophy which ignores this evidence is not philosophy but propaganda. Consciousness does not supervene on the brain or physical matter.
If linguistic utterances were a soup then Wittgenstein would hold that the meaning of 'soup' is reduced to the movements of the spoon (such movements could indeed serve as a non-verbal sign indicating 'soup'). One cannot abstract any symbol from meaning, nor use from mention (which is a misuse of the term 'mention' anyhow). When attempting to grasp an empty purely syntactic meaning-free entity one is actually trying to grasp an ideal type and structure with an unlimited number of possible perceptual variants and instances, an extension which may indeed by vague (for instance in the case of poor sight when we are not sure of a certain letter). Thus 'the letter 'b'' is an abstract concept with an extension and hence with a meaning. Frege and Husserl pointed out again and again that the meaning and reference of terms or propositions certainly cannot be exhausted by the accompanying 'mental images' which need not coincide for different people and cannot provide thus a foundation for a so-called objectivity of meaning. True. Yet digging deeper and applying the right introspective-descriptive method we may discover that intuitive mental content of a different order can be disclosed to consciousness which does indeed furnish a ground for inter-subjective, objective agreement. Yet this need not be naively taken to be some kind of identical extra-mental ghostly entity, and even less some kind of external sociological structure and dynamics, rather it is a directly accessible aspect of consciousness which while sharing the same type for the same meaning across different minds also allows room for individual variation. For instance if the common mental image is like the adornments that may adorn a statue (and there may be none at all), the statue representing a god, say for instance Athena, can be different one for different minds and yet be clearly isomorphic in a suitable sense across different minds for the same term or proposition. The fact that human beings must have hearts with the same structure does not imply that there is a common objective heart outside each body. The objectivity of meaning can be understood in a way similar to the isomorphic structure of our bodies, rooted in what we are, in the things themselves. If incomplete and having errors, few western philosophers have ever probed consciousness like Hume and Kant and laid bare the deep forces underlying it, including the nature and constitutive role of 'ego' and the construction of 'naive realism'. To these we add the powerful contributions of the fathers of introspective psychology (Brentano, the William James of 'The Principles of Psychology'). And see the work of K.N. Jayatilleke and the early Carnap (and also Rosado Haddock's on Carnap). Carnap uses the suggestive term : autopsychological.
After the autopsychological was chosen as basic domain, thus, the processes of consciousness or experiences of consciousness of the I, it must still be determined which formations of this region are going to serve as basic elements. One could, let us say, consider taking as basic elements the ultimate constituent parts obtained by means of psychological and phenomenological analysis of the experiences of consciousness, thus, let us say, the simplest sensory sensations (as Mach), or more generally: psychic elements of different sorts, from which the experiences of consciousness are formed. On a closer examination, however, we must acknowledge that in this case not the given itself, but abstractions from it, thus something epistemologically secondary, has been taken as basic elements…. Since we, however, wanted also to require from our constitutional system the consideration of the epistemological order of the objects, we shall, thus, start from what is epistemologically primary to everything else, from “[the] given”, and those are the experiences of consciousness themselves in their totality and closed unity…. To the chosen basic elements, those experiences of consciousness of the I as unities … we refer as “elementary experiences of consciousness. [Der logische Aufbau der Welt, pp. 91–2].Is not the concept of vagueness itself rather vague ? Many natural language predicates admit more-and-less (in the terminology of Aristotle's Topics) but our adverbial resources are often clumsy or insufficient to express the underlying linear order of the corresponding 'semantic space'. Language is discrete but consciousness and the world are continuous. Thus all difficulties involving vagueness and ambiguity can be resolved by introducing a fine enough (though finite) linear scale: this in practice is what is used in many sorts of questionnaires. Baldness is a predicate capable of more-or-less hence with an underlying linearly graded semantic space. It is absurd to believe that you can split a continuous linear segment into a binary classification.
Language - together with the orientation found in the Pali texts - is the antechamber and the initial map for entry into philosophical psychology, into the domain of pure consciousness. Thus read the Logical Investigations and then Sowa's Conceptual Structures for an a posteriori formal elaboration (but discarding the erroneous neuroscience found in the otherwise phenomenologically and logically interesting book).
In the Logical Investigations, Husserl is very frank about the intricacies, problems, confusions, pitfalls and puzzles of his project. The desire to separate mental experience, the actual lived experience in the process of consciousness, from some kind of ideal 'other' (meaning, the thing itself) which nevertheless, and most paradoxically, is also the object of pure, direct, intuition and hence just as much a part of lived conscious experience as the perception of an apple. Sowa holds that concepts cannot be directly intuited and pertain to some kind of underlying neural substrate - and yet they can be translated into inner verbal discourse and imagination. Husserl naturalizes psychology (misrepresents it) too much in order to contrast it with his method without presuppositions (already expressed in the Logical Investigations) and yet, I think, any philosophical psychology does not engage in this kind of naivety. The psychologist is concerned with consciousness and how consciousness comes to constitute or construct a representation of the world. Its building blocks are not naturalistic presuppositions but such things as sense icons, percepts, atomic sense data (which Husserl himself brings back in a very Kantian way into his noesis-noema scheme), or basic categories or whatever. But the fundamental principle (found already in the Pali texts) involves developing a pure detached awareness of the stream of consciousness as it is in itself (as distinguished for what is constructs and the exterior projections taken to be real) and in this way to obtain definite direct knowledge of (and even power over) consciousness itself - but without any necessity of denying an exterior world in itself, only the naive mental imaginative way in which the mind takes itself to be relating to it. If 'the world is my representation' it does not follow that there is no world, only that - in our mental life - we actually live and interact with a dream and projection immeasurably more than with the world itself in a strict causal sense. While we radically reject Sowa's neuro-reductionism, there is a similarity in that transcending consciousness there is likewise a physical world which can causally affect consciousness. We need to learn how to observe and see the meaning of words in our own minds. Rather than speak of mental experience, meaning, intention, meaning-fulfillment, or the complex structure of noema and noesis, we ask: what is the mental content associated to concepts (for the moment abstracting how such content can differ at different instances of the concept being thought or with context) ? For all their shortcoming, the older philosophers, Locke, Berkeley, Hume and Mill where very much more profound and radical than those influence by rationalism and scholasticism - and we hope to view their theories in a novel profound and consistent way (including the fundamental issue of the relationship between self and consciousness). The concept 'triangle' does not correspond to any hidden neural 'conceptual graph' nor social behavioral or pragmatic pattern nor to a mysterious eidetic form, purified meaning, etc. Rather (thanks to the right method of introspection) to a directly perceptible complex dynamic structure (an open-ended proliferation or papanca) in consciousness which is linked to the life-history of the mind (and to feelings and emotions, as Sowa discusses) and involves 'genetic epistemology'. All concepts have an 'original baptism' in the mind. Concepts are somewhat like living entities. Perhaps Hegel's logic (which brings to life the genetics and internal life, turmoil, psychology and complexes and politics of concepts) offers us an interesting template which is distinct both from the elusive intuitive transcendence of Husserl and from the crude and contrived decompositions and definitions of modern symbolic logic. It is the childish simplicity and unabashed naivety as a way to embracing concepts that is the key to wisdom, not artificial sophistication and abstraction. How do we explain that certain people can have the concept of 'triangle' and yet not know that the heights intersect at a single point ? Or that the sum of the internal angles is two right angles ? The difference is like someone who has read David Copperfield and someone who only has heard a vague outline of the plot (mathematical proofs are like stories). In fact concepts are learned in a context and as part of a theory and a system (in a loose sense). Like leaves and branches they cannot be totally separated and abstracted from their tree and root. We see this is the way formalizations of mathematical theories are carried out (for instance in Coq or Agda). Concepts are very fine grained and the mode or presentation and the enveloping theory and context are everything, logical equivalence is a posteriori and comes later. The ancients had a good insight into this in their theory of genera and species but their theory was never fully developed and remained mostly simplistic and artificial. But consider just how we possess concepts of extensive complex objects, like a novel. We have a concept of the novel 'David Copperfield': what are the mental contents associated with this expression ? We can survey them as a unified whole at once from a distance, without detail, much like surveying a landscape, or traverse according to a certain order the actual contents of the book in detail. It is this seeing as a whole, from afar, that needs to be phenomenologically elucidated. The perception from afar of a complex concept might need to evolve a choice of salient features and markers (cf. Sowa's discussion on the difference between recollection and recognition). If we can understand this we might be able to understand 'abstract' concepts as well. The concept of 'triangle' is associate to a spontaneous mental content which is a pair (T,D) in which T is an actual imagined triangle and D is a set of permissible deformations of T, for instance changing the length of the basis and changing the position of the upper vertex. Husserl's eidetic variation as a process is itself the expression of the mental content of the concept. More precisely we are given a space
Another overlooked point about Husserl. There is a strong and hidden scholastic strain in Husserl. But what is scholasticism ? Medieval scholasticism is often presented as a continuation of the philosophy of Augustine (which in turn borrowed heavily from Plotinus) and other neoplatonic texts. But in reality this continuation of certain currents of Islamic Aristotelianism is quite different and is not compatible with original neoplatonism or the more neoplatonic aspects of Augustine (it is only in so-called 'mystical theology' that genuine neoplatonic themes make an appearance). Much of medieval scholasticism looks forward to modern empiricism and nominalism and as thus has very little relation to neoplatonism. With the scholastic revival of the 19th century we have a yet further estrangement from neoplatonism, we have radically altered version of medieval scholasticism (neothomism) which rejects even further core augustinian and neoplatonic epistemological and psychological elements (this is related with the Roman Church's rejection of Ontologism). Thus it appears that Husserl latches on to some of the ideals of neoscholasticism (in particular via Brentano and Bolzano) and many of the problems involved may well stem from a confusion between a theory in its pure neoplatonic (or even Augustinean) form and its scholastic and neoscholastic distortions. Husserl's theory of pure intuition of eidetic forms and so forth is not original, if found in a certain form in Schopenhauer and Goethe, its true origin is in neoplatonism and its theory of the logoi and the nous. The subtext of the later Husserl is precisely the development of a unusual (supernatural one might say) mode of spiritual contemplation and intuition which presupposes a profound spiritual transformation of the subject. Recall also our criticism of Husserl in the context of interpretation of the allegory of the cave. It is the the silencing and emptying of the proliferations of mental thought-content (and its feeling, volition, mine and self - making, etc) which is the condition to obtain pure vision and wisdom. The maze of concepts (and the enigma of meaning) is only solved and overcome by discarding the whole thing (maybe as in Sextus) and gazing at it from the outside. Theory of knowledge aside, it is wonderful to understand how the mind works, how consciousness works - and if this understanding appears itself paradoxically part of the mind (and as yet unfounded) we say that it is made possible by something coming from without and truth is shown in power.
It is absurd to assume/believe that life/consciousness is not absurd. That is, to believe that logic can be the judge in its own case and a priori reject the absurdity/ illogicality of reality.
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