[MD] Reifying carrots

[david buchanan]

"This book, more than any other (besides Being and Time), opened my mind to how philosophy always goes astray when it fails to consider the metaphorical nature of philosophical discourse. Chalmers is able to conceive of consciousness as this disembodied inner movie only because he uncritically uses object-metaphors and treats consciousness as a nonphysical thing modeled on our everyday interaction with physical things.
In my opinion, William James was making the same basic point in his famous article “Does ‘Consciousness’ Exist?“. James’ point was not that thoughts and introspections don’t exist, but rather, that consciousness does not exist in the same way a rock exists, hence, consciousness “does not exist” (as an entity). But thoughts and introspections certainly do. As James says,
To deny plumply that ‘consciousness’ exists seems so absurd on the face of it — for undeniably ‘thoughts’ do exist — that I fear some readers will follow me no farther. Let me then immediately explain that I mean only to deny that the word stands for an entity, but to insist most emphatically that it does stand for a function.
While this might sound absurd to traditional Heideggerian scholars, I contend that Heidegger would emphatically agree with James on this point. Consciousness is not a present-at-hand thing. But it still exists. How? As an operation. As something we do."


> From: valkyr at att.net
> Date: Sun, 5 Dec 2010 13:30:36 -0500
> To: moq_discuss at moqtalk.org
> Subject: Re: [MD] Reifying carrots
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>      "Even when the mind is settled in meditative stabilization without human conceptual constructs, it is not considered by Buddhist contemplatives to be entirely free of all traces of conceptualization.  One's inborn sense of a reified self as the observer and the reified sense of the duality between subject and object are still present, even though they may be dormant while in meditation; and when one emerges from this nonconceptual state, the mind may still grasp onto all phenomena, including consciousness itself, as being real, inherently existing entities.  To penetrate to the fundamental nature of appearances and their relation to consciousness, it is said that one must go beyond meditative stabilization and engage in training for the cultivation of contemplative insight."  
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>      (Wallace, B. Alan, 'The Taboo of Subjectivity: Towards a New Science of Consciousness', p.112)  
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