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Serge (and Ralph),

 

I have been out of touch over the past few months, but am now able (I think!) to engage once more with you and Ralph as you investigate ways of approaching an understanding of Consciousness (CS), so I’d like to ask you a question or two to find out if I’m anywhere near understanding your framework in terms I think I may myself be more comfortable with.

 

I’m not sure that I’ve ever completely accepted the way that you use ‘noumenal reality’ – when I first used it myself years ago there was ahowl of protest (on another forum), because Kant meant to refer only to the (mental) concepts we construct from our many empirical experiences (phenomena).  For him, I gather, these mental concepts could be dangerously linked together where the phenomenal experiential basis of their being was ignored, as, for example, in the consideration of ‘impossible worlds’ – as in the ‘squaring of the circle’.  Putting two valid concepts, square and circle, together as ‘one’, simply ignores the fact that in the experience base of our first construction of each of these concepts, the elements are incompatible, are opposites, of each other – the circle with no straight lines and the square with no curved lines.   Hence Kant’s warning that these ‘noumena’ (mentally constructed concepts) cannot bear the weight of all possible relationships (my example was of a blue flying pig), and so must be traced back to their empirical roots first.

My puzzlement is just how you can construct a theory on the basis of a postulate (noumenal reality) which depends on phenomena in the first place, and whose ‘be-ing’ always lies beyond our (evolved) perceptual abilities in the second place.  Kant said we simply couldn’t ever know the “world-as-it-is”other than by our own senses.  I, too, use the word ‘noumenal’ in order to point to the unknown (unknowable?) origin of the interaction of that unknown within the “world in itself” which produces the stimulus which then travels to, and interacts with, my own senses.  This understanding, of course, comes from a theory already constructed to explain how our senses are brought into action.   And here is where I think your theorizing is already ‘nested’ within a mental way of being which takes many ‘bits’ and makes of them one ‘bit’ (like Wheeler re physics).  Hegel suggests this in his Phenomenology of Mind when he discusses ‘Thinghood’, and Stanislaus Dehaene seems to affirm this state of our initial stage of perception in his book (Number Sense) where he concludes from studies of the perceptual behaviour of very young babies/infants that they do not attend to the exact identity of the objects they are viewing, but only attend to the ‘numerosity’ (they do not yet count, of course, but show surprise on change in number, and they do not have a base of experienced data yet).   If we have this deeply embedded system of creating a ‘whole/unity’ right at the beginning of our perceptual processes and we are ignoring this very important stage, it is hardly surprising that we find ourselves with the ‘binding problem’.   Has no one taken up this point yet?    If it is the case that we do bring together in a holistic/fuzzy way the wholeness of the object/event, and then discern the parts which contribute towards its whole, this is not quite how thisprocess is spoken of currently, even though Hegel outlined it long ago.  Dehaene goes on in a later book to suggest (I think!) the way in which reverberatory loops come into being during CS – presumably they ‘hold’ the primary sources in a particular state for longer to allow the checking needed to identify the object).

All of this perceptual processing takes place with the perceptual data only as content – there is no monitoring of one’s brain processes per se, so the whole process takes place without reference to, or any knowing about, the so-called ‘physical’ world.  Even later, onreflection, what comes to mind is the phenomenal experience already undergone, and while the ‘noumenal reality’ may be thought to have a kind of ‘mental being’, so to speak, yet it cannot ever be more than a further level of the phenomenal.

 

So my first big question is:  How can we ever bring together the mental (as experienced) and the physical (as presumed), without any other sense to link them.   Or will ‘logic’ fill the gap? And is logic a mental process, too?  I know very little about logic, and am driven mostly by simple curiosity, as you know.