@hue-man,
hue-man;137695 wrote:I don't find qualia to be strange at all, but I suppose that the strangeness of something is a matter of perspective.
You never find it strange that we exist at all? Especially when younger I was often struck by this. And it's not only that we exist, but that we exist in determinate ways. Why this planet and this body, and not another? To answer these questions by plugging them into some incomplete causal nexus is not to truly answer them. It's
all contingent, to someone in a certain frame of mind.
---------- Post added 03-08-2010 at 09:59 PM ----------
hue-man;137695 wrote:
Do we separate experience into subjective and objective? What exactly does objective experience mean to you? Maybe the separation of things into subjective and objective is not a matter of invention but a matter of discovery. Perhaps it is our intelligence that provides us with the capability to recognize such a distinction.
It's basically the difference between Kant and Hegel, or transcendental and absolute idealism. Distinctions are all subsumed within the absolute. This absolute is inferred/invented when a philosopher becomes conscious that all dichotomies are imposed by the "mind," including the mind/matter dichotomy. And this is why "mind" is in quotes. Wittgenstein also saw this, but phrased it differently. But a key Hegel phrase is "no finite thing has genuine being," and this is because finitude is nothing but the imposition of concept.
Kant's concept of noumena was just that, a concept. For us to contemplate is reality beyond us is arguably delusive, for these contemplations themselves are obviously
ours.
Hegel's Phenomenology traces the journey from consciousness to self-consciousness. The object-subject distinction is a phase. Examined carefully, it's only justified socially or practically, not logically. Where is in the world is the subject? Clearly, we associate the subject with the brain, but this is not a logical answer, but only a pragmatic approximation.
As the mind becomes self-consciousness, it sees that what it took for the other was very much itself, for to the degree that experience is real, it is also rational. What can be said about qualia, more than we
already say? We can not speak of them until they are bound up in our concepts. It's when we become conscious of ourselves as not only the structure but the structures of reality, on the most fundamental conceptual level, that we near freedom. Or so runs the theory.
nj)adj. , 1. Not previously known; unfamiliar.
