Narrative is often said to be reparative, yet this claim remains conceptually unstable so long as narration is treated as a post-hoc representation of an already constituted experience. Drawing on a Merleau-Pontian phenomenology of the lived body, this article argues that narrative is better understood as an embodied practice of expression through which temporal and affective orientations are...
Abstract This article develops a conception of meaning in the sense of “meaning as interbeing,” i.e., meaning as an emerging property in the intersection between proto-meaning and epistemic frames. The foundational basis of this argument is built on two streams of thought, Deguchi’s relational ontology of the WE-turn and the meta-ontological perspective of what is discussed in this article as...
Abstract This article reconstructs Yasuo Deguchi’s We-Turn framework through the lens of conditionalism, the view that events – including actions – are wholes composed of interconnected necessary and jointly sufficient conditions. This approach raises crucial questions about the individuation of such wholes, particularly in avoiding infinite regress and arbitrary system boundaries. I compare...
Abstract This essay connects the mystical concept of “supernothing” with Bergson’s notion of the image of nothingness as a movement in the making. I do this also with respect to the film The Empty Man (David Prior, 2020) – which explicitly cites Gorgias’s four-part embargo on nothing (it exists, it cannot be known, communicated, or understood): nothingness is re-rendered as movement, in...
Open PhilosophyDecember 2, 2022Gómez-Emilsson Andrés, Percy Chris
The “Slicing Problem” is a thought experiment that raises questions for substrate-neutral computational theories of consciousness, including those that specify a certain causal structure for the computation like Integrated Information Theory. The thought experiment uses water-based logic gates to construct a computer in a way that permits cleanly slicing each gate and connection in half,...
Abstract According to Viveiros de Castro, comparison as ontology defines the ontological turn in anthropology. It presents a necessity for philosophy to approach the matter with comparative strategy. Morten Pedersen claims that ontological turn should be interpreted as a fulfillment of an anthropological version of Husserl’s method. Thus, phenomenology enters the field of interest along with...
Abstract Some authors argue that phenomenal unity can be grounded in the attentional structure of consciousness, which endows conscious states with at least a foreground and a background. Accordingly, the phenomenal character of part of a conscious state comprises a content aspect (e.g., hearing music) and a structural aspect (e.g., being in the background). This view presents the concern that...
The dual-aspect monist conjecture launched by Pauli and Jung in the mid-20th century will be couched in somewhat formal terms to characterize it more concisely than by verbal description alone. After some background material situating the Pauli–Jung conjecture among other conceptual approaches to the mind–matter problem, the main body of this paper outlines its general framework of a basic...
At a time in which religion is breaking away from the normative power of its traditions and new forms of spiritual experience are emerging, religious philosophy must find criteria for what a religious experience is and how to judge its truth. In their empirical critique of religion L. Wittgenstein and R. Carnap accepted two forms of religious experience, which they described with an optical and...
Open PhilosophyOctober 6, 2019A. Reggia James, E. Katz Garrett, P. Davis Gregory
Recent advances in philosophical thinking about consciousness, such as cognitive phenomenology and mereological analysis, provide a framework that facilitates using computational models to explore issues surrounding the nature of consciousness. Here we suggest that, in particular, studying the computational mechanisms of working memory and its cognitive control is highly likely to identify...
In this article, we look at the hard problem of consciousness from the perspective of process metaphysics. We thereby identify three problematic premises of the problem that pertain to the constitution of consciousness and its causal relation to the world. We argue for the necessity of re-thinking the corresponding phenomena in terms of internally-structured processes. The hard problem would...
Abstract This paper, through a realist reading of Husserlian phenomenology, aims to explain how the consciousness-sense has access to reality and, in general, to objectivity. There is a ‘strife’ between the essence of a thing and the specific concreteness in which it always becomes manifest, such that the identical object is indicated by changeable predicates, but at the same time always...