Can you provide any evidence that your body is more real than your intangible thoughts, feelings, sensations and decisions?

[sinnerdexter]

You have to start by asking yourself what your terms mean. Why do you need some reality in back of the reality of everything you see, hear, and feel for it to count as real? Are there really different depths of reality? What would be the use or even the meaning of a phrase like ‘it could all be just a dream’ if we had no secure access to something which was certainly not a dream?

Since we can only first gain access, become aware of, ourselves as a thing which thinks if we are brought into focus and visibility as such a thing by the contrast with other thinking things and objects around us, then the fact that the outside and inside worlds both come into visibility only by the same contrast shows that neither has priority over the other. So the inner world of the mind is no more real than the outer world of objects, since conscious awareness of either depends on the existence of both together. This now means that there is no contrast of inferior and clearly demonstrable realities next to which we could denigrate some experience as being possibly unreal, less real than it should be, or ‘just a dream.’

 

[tonyrey]

Thoughts are generally associated with the brain and, traditionally, feelings with the heart. The reductive materialist believes blood is nothing more than a multitude of atomic particles which have been arranged into a fluid which delivers necessary substances to the body’s cells and carries away waste products. In our secular society the mind seems redundant if thoughts and feelings are said to be located in the blood. So it is important to stress that they do not originate in the blood but in the mind.

But you made an important point. The entire body is affected by what we think and feel but interaction between the mind and the body implies that thoughts are primarily related to the brain whereas feelings are more diffuse. Strong emotion makes us initially more conscious of our heartbeat and breathing.

And the notion of “gut feeling” may not be too wide of the mark. Pascal believed the heart has its reasons that reason does not know!

 

[Sarpedon]

However, even if the person on the desert island could sense his own will in directing his rationality, would he have had any capacity to develop a concept of self to which he could attribute that sensation of directing his thoughts? Without an opposing community of other selves to throw his own self-awareness of himself into relief as a self-awareness of a self like those around him, he would lack any sense of self and thus only experience his wilful direction of thought as another sensation, no different from the wilful actions of standing up or sitting down.

That’s an excellent point. I feel like an idealist would view it as a dichotomy between any and all experience vs the perceiver. For example, the Cogito is based around Descartes’ claim that while he could be deceived by any experience, he cannot doubt the fact that he is being deceived and therefore his own existence. I don’t think Descartes would argue that emotions are part of that existence that is not doubtable. However, I suppose the question would be whether you can have knowledge of self existence in a vacuum from all experiences, and whether that knowledge really is more solid than any other.

Or is there something about the exercise of will in directing rationality which says that there is an existent, thing-like self behind it which we would not experience in exercising our will to stand up or sit down? Descartes must have thought something like this in his cogito, ergo sum argument, that thinking somehow specially relates to self-awareness. But I suspect that while there might be a special sensation in wilful direction of thought, the person on the desert island could not associate it with a concept of selfhood rather than just seeing it as an unusual sensation.

Very true, I’m not sure that it is possible to isolate knowledge of your existence from everything else.

 

[sinnerdexter]

I am not sure focusing on an actual experience of an Other, or the community of Others as mediated through an actual language, as a condition for us experiencing the self as a self, is very productive.

The whole world is experienced as an other (even if not an alter-ego) insofar as it resists the human will. It does not present itself as either the product of my desire or as completely conforming to my desires. That already provides you with the basis of the distinction between the I and the not-I. And as pointed out earlier, the finitude of my standpoint already entails, for me, not only that a certain, relative, “here” is mine through all the flux of experience, but also the possibility of other egos than my own, with standpoints of their own, without any actual experience of an alter-ego. In other words, I am always one among (at least, a possible) many, even when alone.

salaam.

I am not sure that consciousness would need a physical body or another self opposed to it for it to become conscious of itself. Kant says on this point that what consciousness requires to become conscious of itself is a ‘permanent outside of itself,’ with ‘outside’ here being understood as ‘independent of’ rather than ‘physically outside of.’ Kant identifies this permanent with substance in the real world, which is permanent and conserved, and because the permanent in this case happens to be part of the physical world, he can derive from this the fact that we only know ourselves as subjects of experience by knowing the physical world outside of it. So the certainty of our self-knowledge and the certainty of our knowledge of the outside world are equal, since knowledge of each is required for the other.

But since all we really need is a ‘permanent independent of us,’ this could be a non-physical independent too. Peter Strawson in ‘The Bounds of Sense’ (London: Methuen, 1966) has an excellent discussion of this point in Kant, and he gives the example of a self lost in a dark world with occasional flashes of colored lights as his only experience. Strawson argues that if these flashes were totally random, the self would never see enough order independent of itself ever to become aware of itself as the continuing stage on which appearance appeared. But if the flashing of lights occurred in some repeated pattern, the self could become self-conscious, since there would be enough order outside of it to focus it into ordered awareness of itself. So this would not have to be a physical world outside of the self, but just some ordered form of experience.

Turning to the case of God, He would not need to be a body or have bodies around Him to know Himself, but would just need order. But I suppose before creating the universe there would be no order or any kind, so He would have nothing to bring His own consciousness into focus. Though God is a special case, and with infinite knowledge there may be complex reasons why He would not have to rely on ordinary devices to focus His awareness into self-awareness.

 

[antroji]

I am not sure that consciousness would need a physical body or another self opposed to it for it to become conscious of itself. Kant says on this point that what consciousness requires to become conscious of itself is a ‘permanent outside of itself,’ with ‘outside’ here being understood as ‘independent of’ rather than ‘physically outside of.’ Kant identifies this permanent with substance in the real world, which is permanent and conserved, and because the permanent in this case happens to be part of the physical world, he can derive from this the fact that we only know ourselves as subjects of experience by knowing the physical world outside of it. So the certainty of our self-knowledge and the certainty of our knowledge of the outside world are equal, since knowledge of each is required for the other.

Merrell-Wolff treated of this exact concern in his Philosophy of Consciousness Without an Object, dealing heavily with Kant’s perspective. As I understand it, M-W’s conclusion, having passed through a life changing mystical experience, is that Consciousness as a Principle yet has included in it Manifestation. That manifestation demands in all its forms the subject/object relationship. So we can have Consciousness as a Principle, and Awareness as experience in the quale of manifestation. Conscious-Awareness, then, is experience within Manifestation which embraces both quales: The undifferentiated ALL and the mode of experience which requires the s/o relationship.

A fascinating exegesis then can be made as to the natures of Reality as Being and existence as experience in awareness. The fascinating thing then is that we don’t ordinarily have access to Consciousness as Principle and remain blinded to it as a substrate of experience because of our conviction that the subject object sensory world constitutes all there is. Inherent in that is the abstracing of direct experience of Consciousness per se into an afterlife, when it is by discipline available while incarnate. His diary, published before the aforementioned title, goes deeply into this. Both books, I feel are significant for anyone wishing to understand a rather different perspective on how and why we know, and how belief is a step toward knowledge, not an end in itself, though useful as a structural element of discovery.

 

[sinnerdexter]

Merrell-Wolff treated of this exact concern in his Philosophy of Consciousness Without an Object, dealing heavily with Kant’s perspective. As I understand it, M-W’s conclusion, having passed through a life changing mystical experience, is that Consciousness as a Principle yet has included in it Manifestation. That manifestation demands in all its forms the subject/object relationship. So we can have Consciousness as a Principle, and Awareness as experience in the quale of manifestation. Conscious-Awareness, then, is experience within Manifestation which embraces both quales: The undifferentiated ALL and the mode of experience which requires the s/o relationship.

A fascinating exegesis then can be made as to the natures of Reality as Being and existence as experience in awareness. The fascinating thing then is that we don’t ordinarily have access to Consciousness as Principle and remain blinded to it as a substrate of experience because of our conviction that the subject object sensory world constitutes all there is. Inherent in that is the abstracing of direct experience of Consciousness per se into an afterlife, when it is by discipline available while incarnate. His diary, published before the aforementioned title, goes deeply into this. Both books, I feel are significant for anyone wishing to understand a rather different perspective on how and why we know, and how belief is a step toward knowledge, not an end in itself, though useful as a structural element of discovery.

I haven’t read Merrell-Wolff’s work yet, and since his thoughts on this topic seem quite complex, I think I will have to wait until I have had the chance to read him before I comment. I can say though that the whole question of ‘transcendental positioning,’ that is, where the subject and where the object are to be located in epistemology and philosophy of mind so that they can be brought back into relation in some way that avoids scepticism, is a vital and extremely difficult one in philosophy. The whole sequence of thinkers in German Idealism, starting with Kant and progressing to Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, wrestle with the best way to position and relate subject and object so as both to explain knowledge and avoid solipsism and similar problems, and I continue to get new insights on this problem every time I study the evolving thoughts on Schelling regarding this issue.