Scivillage.com Casual Discussion Science Forum

Presence is a metaphysical experience of conscious encounter. It is neither an objective property out there nor a subjective phenomenal state. It arises temporally as the dual symmetrical coexisting of two ontic entities. What presences is also at the same time presenced.

Typically in our physicalist worldview presence is an extrapolation of our spatial construct. It is the proximally variable adjacency or intimacy between two distinct bodies contained inside one inclusive space of absolute absence. As a body I can BE with another body because of this containing and mutual absence of ourselves surrounding us and redefining us--from being just either/ors to being both/ands..

But how would other mutually exclusive ontic entities acquire presence to each other? How would two minds be present to each other who are not objectively or spatially defined but rather are totally temporally defined? Each having their own past and their own present-- two mutually-exclusive self-contained realities like Leibniz's monads each dwelling inside and yet containing their own universes.

The only way they can possibly be together and present to each other is by also sharing an absolute absence of themselves like physical bodies do with space. But this time that zone of absence would be the future itself--the one commonly accessible state of sharable being that transcends their absolutely sequestered and solipsistic bubbles. They can make contact and be with each other by being freed up to and opened up to their own inner co-presencing indeterminacy and freedom to be. Other minds then, other than each other not because they are physically objective in space but because they are in principle unexperiencable to each as two presents, can unite in the shared agency and purpose beyond the sealed up privacy of their respective realities. Isolated by what they are in themselves, they are reconciled by what they are intentionally being for. A sameness not of substance nor of locality but of their respective temporal transcendence into a shared state of pure possibility.

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Phenomenological thinking more explicative than explanatory. More demonstrative than abstractive. More consciousizing than semantically objectifying. The patient carrying forth into the inner realms of our own ongoing ontological origination--our own awakening--the torch of a deliberate and self-aware generation of tacit knowingness at all times. Phenomenology not as what breaks apart and dissects but as what awakens itself inside the very phenomenal presence of what it seeks to understand.

“The phenomenological world is not the bringing to explicit expression of a pre-existing being, but the laying down of being. Philosophy is not the reflection of a pre-existing truth, but, like art, the act of bringing truth into being.”― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception

The discovery in theoretical physics of pure forms empty of substance. Of the objective unit of the quantum and wave and field and force divested of any materiality. Of the pure number devoid of the numbered. Of the eternalized generalization or law distinct from any instantiation. Is this not itself a phenomenological expose of a kind of abstract thinking in itself on a collective scale, no longer referent to or applicable to specific physical phenomena but driven only by its own incrementally-built, peer-supported, and apodictically certain truth. More of a kind of a priori mystical state than an empirically-supported knowledge of the physical world. Physics wants to semantically simulate the kind of reality it constantly assumes--of an absolute and objective state of everything. It thus strives and indeed sometimes even accomplishes its own consensus-based objectification as an absolute interpretationless truth or fact.

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There is a sense of alreadyness--of a missed-out on completion--in our conscious experience of the objective world. That is less a property of the world itself than it is of the temporal nature of knowing anything. We are thus always experiencing the world around us as we remember it being--as something that has already happened. But then why undertake a project of knowing about if the about is already absolutely there and so without need of being known about?

Knowing is only necessary where something is being concealed and questionable, raising the profound question of the very purpose of consciousness/cognition itself. It's like knowing itself must introspectively understand its own possibility and manner of enactment. The how of its amazing lucid self-transparence and power to reveal the very reality it is always springing out of while also trying to perfectly represent it as not itself.

We must keep in mind that just because a subjective experience of an objective reality is perfect and reliable in every respect that it is still just an illusion or hallucination. Nobody is literally claiming that their accurate perception of reality IS physical reality itself. Noone believes that their own mirrored reflection or video of themselves is anything more than a mere indistinguishable appearance of objective reality. This is why regardless of its content or its flawless reproductive capability conscious perception is essentially different and indeed opposite to the hypothetical state of an objective physical reality. The replicating appearance doesn't ever exist without our concurrent viewing of. The mirror is empty when we are not looking into it. And the video plays nowhere other than inside our own viewing of.

But the view or scene nevertheless gets objectified as if happening without consciousness, which is precisely what we believe reality to be. Yet just in principle it can never be anything more than itself--an appearance or hallucination of reality as if it exists totally outside us without including us at all. As long as we define reality as what is beyond our consciousness of it, then consciousness will remain little more than a mere hallucination of it.

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Are you quantum entangled with your mirror reflection? Maybe. The light illuminating your body is also the light stimulating the surface of the mirror to present an exact replica of your body. Light being a holographic field of near instantaneous waves all connected together from one source. The information of one part is thus necessarily and instantaneously reproduced in all other parts. Maybe? lol

Not all our life experiences are informationally equivalent. Some are light and airy, like a summer rain storm that passes over us briefly. But others are dense and massive with truths, often taking years to absorb and fully learn from.

Objectivity vice subjectivity perhaps a matter of degrees depending on what we are talking about. Two blocks of ice extremely objective in that they firmly and permanently exclude each other on all sides. Two drops of water otoh mildly objective in that they exclude each other only provisionally, merging together subjectively upon contact as the same exact thing. Then there's two clouds, barely objective at all and amorphous, interpenetrating and including each other subjectively like two minds into another larger subjectivity. All phases of the same water but objective and in-themselves only to varying degrees. Are physicality and mentality just two different phases of the same underlying being? We need to be more like liquid water, carrying force and agency while never offering any resistance to change.

Objectivity is not synonymous with solidness, impenetrability, etc.. No wonder the whole topic completely befuddles you.

We are what flows from objective physicality or the past to subjective conceptuality or the future. From the condensed particularity of matter to the vacuous universality of mind. Between these two coexisting states we flow and ebb, crystalized into flesh thru sense and memory while evaporating into spirit thru thought and imagination. Between ice and cloud, the transformative liquid synthesis of both opposing states thru the self-presencing flow of conscious agency.

SMH 9_9

You can tell you are being corralled into the endlessly circular predications of declarative sense-making when your whole experience of reality is limited to being a lone subject trapped inside a world of arbitrary and meaningless objects. This is how the real and the immediate gets ongoingly reified into an always "already there" though only ever pre-conceptualized state of given and static physicality.

When it really comes down to it, objective reality is just the reified projection of our own involuntary and consensus-powered positing of absolute truth. Only if there are propositions that are absolutely true can there be a world of facts and in-themselves ontic entities called things. Reality in the end is the conceptual substantialization of the activity of unconditionally true propositionalizing and believing.

Something can only become real AND meaningful, as a noteworthy thing that is yet happening totally independently of you, if it simultaneously or dialectically both objectifies and expresses our concurrent cognizant state of it. There's no other sense in which something can be said to be to us. It MUST attach to us unconsciously in some deep way, being both an object we can know about and a symbol we can relate to. As a meaningfully knowable thing in-itself. Without the phenomenality of consciousness AND the semanticizing of conception , there is neither sign nor the signifier nor significance. All of these are only possible in the self-presencing experience of our own performative and epiphanous being.

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I don't think critically. I think affirmatively.