Klax, I wish you would have clarified your previous question to me.
Regarding:
I am certain that I am contingent in nature (being) and yet necessary with respect to my action.
How’s that for splitting the needle?
It isn’t a question of empirical facts. You can’t just look it up. Not all truth is reducible to propositions. Reality is deeper than we can go rationally. We need to use all the access points. (No that doesn’t mean we just have to blindly believe anything whatsoever.)
1 Like
You’re very welcome. Somewhere up there, the first quote I gave I didn’t provide the source, waiting to see if anyone would ask. No one did but it comes from the same book. I actually wish you would take it on to the point where you could make informed criticism. I don’t have enough science to be very objective about this and the next chapter. Buy I understand philosophy through his theory better than I had before.
1 Like
Who needs natural empiricism? All you need is natural rationality. That’ll do. Nature is certainly deeper than rationality can go, but at no point, depth does it require the unnatural to fill the gap below.
1 Like
Take what on? That rationality runs out? That rationality is a narrative? That nature is a narrative? So what? That that creates a gap for magic? What? How? Where? For utter twaddle like a fundamental consciousness generating field. I hope that’s just you and not McGilchrist.
1 Like
Absolutely correct. It is only our conception of natural that gets augmented. The need for extra natural causation simply indicates the inadequacy of our current model.
1 Like
Oh just a small ask. I’m just proposing that you read his The Matter With Things and critique it for me. Just 1500 hard copy pages I understand though 3,000 on Kindle. I may never need another non fiction book.
BTW, if you listened to any of the video can you place his accent?
1 Like
Curious if you’re able to tell if nature and reality are synonymous.
Please tell 
@Klax, you might want to let Mark know, if he stopped ignoring me, he’d see it didn’t take 1500 pages to find Iain McGilchrist contradicting himself.
1 Like
Ah, you crossed my golden bridge. The inadequacy is an illusion. Science and rationality will forever increase the depth of nature we plumb without hidden variables, occult fields. The capabilities of eternal, infinite nature from its grounding principle need no other magic.
Your superfluous, imparsimonious (a euphonious idiolect of mine) ‘God’ of the gaps is the same as all the ‘real’ ones.
1 Like
It isn’t real enough to worry me but I understand you feel the need to protect against such things. 
1 Like
So if you’re not worried, why the projected defence of an unwarranted cause?
(Your friend indeed, but in combat mode I give no quarter regardless 
)
1 Like
Well if you find slaying all your demons is dragging on too long perhaps it would be better to have them to tea and hear them out?
1 Like
It’s a real (or natural) wonder to read your comments and substitute reality for where you write nature.
Similar to removing all of Mark’s references to a plural pronoun.
Happy to have anyone for tea. The Devil himself if he brought fresh sweetcorn. I forget to welcome my demons in instead of telling them to foxtrot oscar, I used to repress them which made them worse of course. Created unforgivable sin even. Now I welcome them all with humility and grace including apology for the repression and the cursing. When I remember…
You are in a far superior category, enemy mine, a worthy adversary. You truly bring out the worst in me.
1 Like
Better the worse you know than …
. What was I thinking…
1 Like
Continuing the discussion from Discussion of chapter 5 from Hart's The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss:
I think I’m caught up on all my reading assignments, finally. The discussion here has been the best of all the reading I’ve done on related to this thread. Thanks to you both, @markd and @klax for keeping it lively and intelligent.
I found Koch’s (“What is Consiousness”) descriptions of methods for measuring consciousness particularly interesting. Horgan’s blog post (“Is Cionsiounsess Real”) was rather disappointing, though. He focused so much on that he objected to Dennett’s views, that I learned little more than that his views are objectionable. : ( From what little I learned, though, I think they would make more sense to me.
I come back, too, to a need for clear definitions. The use of the term “consciousness” is quite varied, from the patient who experienced a traumatic brain injury to the patient recoverning from such to me staring at my cup of coffee in the morning to the person who feels connected to the universal All in some way. My understanding of it is quite limited compared to the last option.
My experience observing altered levels of consciousness in a variety of people who have experienced brain damage and/or healing leads me to believe that whatever it is, it is a function of the brain itself. These observations are also bolstered by ancient biology classes and all those psych courses (Intro to Psych, Ed Psych and Psych of Exceptional Children) which focused mainly on the brain. I’ve never seen a reason to look at consciousness as different from a function of the brain.
That being said, I in no way wish to diminish the magnificence of consciousness. I rather see it as evidence of how fabulously amazing the human brain is.
1 Like
Reminds me of Berry wondering whether the river itself was the trough formed by the banks of the land that contained it, the water there at the moment ww see it or just water running where other water has run. Are our brains like the banks that contain the flow of consciousness or are they the wells from which the flow issues?
In a sense we can never twice step in the same river. By virtue of bodily including brains do we ensure we are always the same consciousness or does consciousness flow, evolve and sometimes surprise us over time? From Wendell Berry’s Jayber Crow:
it is hard to look at the river in its calm, just after daylight or just before dark, and believe that history has happened to it. The river, the river itself, leaves marks but bears none. It is only the water flowing in the path that other water has worn.
Or is that other water really “other”, or is it the same water always running, flowing always toward the gathering of all waters, and always rising and returning again, and again flowing? I knew this river first when I was a little boy, and I know it now when I am an old man once again living beside it … and almost seventy years! … and always when i have watched it I have been entranced and mystified. What is it? Is it the worn trough of itself that is a feature of the land and is marked on maps, or is it the water flowing? Or is it the land itself that over time is shaped by the flowing water, and it caught by no map?
Both.
How that is achieved, or precisely what is happening in the brain may not be clear, but as the article “What is Consiousness” discussed, it’s measurable, and it’s in the head. There are all sorts of things and processes that need to work properly to maintain consiousness (as well as any brain function). But those things and processes are natural body processes within the singular unit of an individual human being, which support the proper function of the brain.
Evidence of consiousness is measurable. So are the effects of being consious, the development and alteration of memory (which I am guessing is related to consciousness) and reasoning skills.
Even if we don’t understand precisely what is happening that we call consiousness, we have very good evidence that something is happening and to what degree, and we can observe the outcome of much of it.
1 Like