Consciousness outside the brain

[Ostronomos]

What allows consciousness to appear outside the brain does not appear to be controlled by other environmental factors. The conditions must be enabled by factors within the brain and the body in order to effect this outcome.

[Magical Realist]

What allows consciousness to appear outside the brain does not appear to be controlled by other environmental factors. The conditions must be enabled by factors within the brain and the body in order to effect this outcome.

"Space is not something objective and real, nor a substance, nor an accident, nor a relation; instead, it is subjective and ideal, and originates from the mind’s nature in accord with a stable law as a scheme, as it were, for coordinating everything sensed externally." --Immanuel Kant (Ak 2: 403)

[Syne]

Philosophers trying to talk authoritatively about science is the height of ultracrepidarianism.

[C C]

"Space is not something objective and real, nor a substance, nor an accident, nor a relation; instead, it is subjective and ideal, and originates from the mind’s nature in accord with a stable law as a scheme, as it were, for coordinating everything sensed externally." --Immanuel Kant (Ak 2: 403)

The Inaugural Dissertation of 1770 is a bridge or transition stage from Kant's early days to the mature philosophy of his Critical era. He was still working within conventional orientations where philosophers treated their "ultimate reality" as what was objective and real, and accordingly deprecated the furniture of "mental" and sensation to subjective and non-real status. Rather than fully recognizing that experience does conform to universal, consensus, or objective characteristics and rules across the population (which is actually the original source of "real", not the invisible worlds of rationalists mediated by language or mathematics). Even after isolating space and time as such templates, Kant is sloppily clinging there to that tradition of "subjective" classification.

As Prof. Henry Folse says in the later Prolegomena, "II. First Part Of The Transcendental Problem: How Is Pure Mathematics Possible?", Remark III (the bold commentary added) : "... space and time are therefore 'real' as forms of the experienced world; he does not deny their reality (as a true idealist would)".

http://people.loyno.edu/~folse/prolegome...#chapter_1

REMARK II (Kant, not Folse): "Idealism [without any modifying adjectives] consists in the assertion, that there are none but thinking beings, all other things, which we think are perceived in intuition, being nothing but representations in the thinking beings, to which no object external to them corresponds in fact. Whereas I say, that things as objects of our senses existing outside us are given, but we know nothing of what they may be in themselves, knowing only their appearances, i.e., the representations which they cause in us by affecting our senses. Consequently, I grant by all means that there are bodies without us, that is, things which, though quite unknown to us as to what they are in themselves, we yet know by the representations which their influence on our sensibility procures us, and which we call bodies, a term signifying merely the appearance of the thing which is unknown to us, but not therefore less actual. Can this be termed idealism? It is the very contrary."

It was the Neo-Kantians of the late 19th-century who introduced the deviant idea that physics studies the noumenal world, or things in themselves. Needless to say, science instead studies the empirical (natural) world, as Kant asserted. Atoms have been imaged and thus are phenomena; particle tracks in accelerators are phenomenal. The areas of scientific realism that seem to squirm in the unculled, multiple possibilities of metaphysical territory are those wholly dependent upon technical description. But if scientists assert that an _X_ belongs to nature, then the latter should be vulnerable to experiential evidence in the future (otherwise it's just speculation, either useful or inutile).

KANT: ". . . The enlarging of our views in mathematics, and the possibility of new discoveries, are infinite; and the same is the case with the discovery of new properties of nature, of new powers and laws, by continued experience and its rational combination. But limits cannot be mistaken here, for mathematics refers to appearances only, and what cannot be an object of sensuous contemplation, such as the concepts of metaphysics and of morals, lies entirely without its sphere, and it can never lead to them; neither does it require them. [...] Natural science will never reveal to us the internal constitution of things [things in themselves, as not dependent upon appearances], which though not appearance, yet can serve as the ultimate ground of explaining appearance. Nor does that science require this for its physical explanations. Nay even if such grounds should be offered from other sources (for instance, the influence of immaterial beings), they must be rejected and not used in the progress of its explanations. For these explanations must only be grounded upon that which as an object of sense can belong to experience, and be brought into connection with our actual perceptions and empirical laws." --Prolegomena to any future metaphysics

In terms of today, Donald D. Hoffman's "The Interface Theory of Perception" might roughly correspond to Kant's critical philosophy in some respects: https://www.scivillage.com/thread-8427.html

[Ostronomos]

"Space is not something objective and real, nor a substance, nor an accident, nor a relation; instead, it is subjective and ideal, and originates from the mind’s nature in accord with a stable law as a scheme, as it were, for coordinating everything sensed externally." --Immanuel Kant (Ak 2: 403)

The Inaugural Dissertation of 1770 is a bridge or transition stage from Kant's early days to the mature philosophy of his Critical era. He was still working within conventional orientations where philosophers treated their "ultimate reality" as what was objective and real, and accordingly deprecated the furniture of "mental" and sensation to subjective and non-real status. Rather than fully recognizing that experience does conform to universal, consensus, or objective characteristics and rules across the population (which is actually the original source of "real", not the invisible worlds of rationalists mediated by language or mathematics). Even after isolating space and time as such templates, Kant is sloppily clinging there to that tradition of "subjective" classification.   

As Prof. Henry Folse says in the later Prolegomena, "II. First Part Of The Transcendental Problem: How Is Pure Mathematics Possible?", Remark III (the bold commentary added) : "... space and time are therefore 'real' as forms of the experienced world; he does not deny their reality (as a true idealist would)".

http://people.loyno.edu/~folse/prolegome...#chapter_1

REMARK II (Kant, not Folse): "Idealism [without any modifying adjectives] consists in the assertion, that there are none but thinking beings, all other things, which we think are perceived in intuition, being nothing but representations in the thinking beings, to which no object external to them corresponds in fact. Whereas I say, that things as objects of our senses existing outside us are given, but we know nothing of what they may be in themselves, knowing only their appearances, i.e., the representations which they cause in us by affecting our senses. Consequently, I grant by all means that there are bodies without us, that is, things which, though quite unknown to us as to what they are in themselves, we yet know by the representations which their influence on our sensibility procures us, and which we call bodies, a term signifying merely the appearance of the thing which is unknown to us, but not therefore less actual. Can this be termed idealism? It is the very contrary."

It was the Neo-Kantians of the late 19th-century who introduced the deviant idea that physics studies the noumenal world, or things in themselves. Needless to say, science instead studies the empirical (natural) world, as Kant asserted. Atoms have been imaged and thus are phenomena; particle tracks in accelerators are phenomenal. The areas of scientific realism that seem to squirm in the unculled, multiple possibilities of metaphysical territory are those wholly dependent upon technical description. But if scientists assert that an _X_ belongs to nature, then the latter should be vulnerable to experiential evidence in the future (otherwise it's just speculation, either useful or inutile). 

KANT: ". . . The enlarging of our views in mathematics, and the possibility of new discoveries, are infinite; and the same is the case with the discovery of new properties of nature, of new powers and laws, by continued experience and its rational combination. But limits cannot be mistaken here, for mathematics refers to appearances only, and what cannot be an object of sensuous contemplation, such as the concepts of metaphysics and of morals, lies entirely without its sphere, and it can never lead to them; neither does it require them. [...] Natural science will never reveal to us the internal constitution of things [things in themselves, as not dependent upon appearances], which though not appearance, yet can serve as the ultimate ground of explaining appearance. Nor does that science require this for its physical explanations. Nay even if such grounds should be offered from other sources (for instance, the influence of immaterial beings), they must be rejected and not used in the progress of its explanations. For these explanations must only be grounded upon that which as an object of sense can belong to experience, and be brought into connection with our actual perceptions and empirical laws." --Prolegomena to any future metaphysics

In terms of today, Donald D. Hoffman's "The Interface Theory of Perception" might roughly correspond to Kant's critical philosophy in some respects: https://www.scivillage.com/thread-8427.html

Thank you CC!


There is room for growth for idealism it seems.

In my experiences with the paranormal and the after-life I was still in my body amid the material world but my attention was focused toward the experience in question. When I saw God on that early morning December 2008 after accessing perfection, I was doubtful of the experience a while afterwards as He appeared amid the material world surrounding me. So I chalked it up to an hallucination at first but then I realized a few months later that it was a reality as He was both 1. external and 2. intelligent. There were a great many number of experiences in the following years such as photons "knowing" and thus responding to what I was doing in the room I was in as well as my internal thoughts. Admittedly, rarely do such experiences occur.