for: Michel Bilbot, transcendental, transcendental - Kant, awakening, non-dual, nondual, nonduality, non-duality, emptiness, epoche, Maurice Merle-Ponty, perspective shift, perspective shift - transcendental

summary

• Michel Bilbot gives an extremely important talk on two related themes
  • Kant's concept of the idea of transcendental
  • Husserl's concept of epoche / phenomenological reduction
    • definition here:
      • https://hyp.is/go?url=https%3A%2F%2Fiep.utm.edu%2Fphen-red%2F&group=world
  • comparison of two perspectives of science as
    • panpsychism where atomic theories of materialism are held to be theories of everything
    • Husserl's phenomenology of human experience
• Bilbot points out the situatedness each individual is born into life with. Even acts such as visually seeing reveal our situatedness as a seer with clues such as perspective that reveals structures of the seer such as vanishing point.

adjacency

• between
  • Kant's transcendental
  • Husserl / Maurice Merle-Ponty / Heidegger's phenomenology and epoche / phenomenological reduction methodology
  • eastern mysticism and philosophical ideas:
    • nonduality - dissolution of the self / other dualism
    • awakening
    • enlightenment
    • emptiness
• adjacency statement
  • Michel Bilbot establishes the important foundation of one of Kant's major life works on the transcendental, and how Husserl's phenomenology and related process of the phenomenological reduction (epoche) is critical to understanding Husserl and Kant.
  • He then applies it to an analysis and comparison of science seen from two contrasting perspectives, atomic theories of panpsychism vs phenomenology.
  • Bilbot reveals that Husserl was deeply influenced by Buddhist thought

for: Michael Levin, Michel Bitbol, Karl Friston, Chris Fields

comment

• Recommend adding Michel Bitbol to the next talk between these researchers.

reference

• https://hyp.is/go?url=http%3A%2F%2Fdocdrop.org%2Fvideo%2FbzPu_USZ-0o%2F&group=world

for: question, question - hard problem of consciousness, question - Micheal Levin - Michel Bitbol

question

• What would Michel Bitbol think of what Michael Levin claims here?
• What does Michel Bitbol think about Michael Levin's research and the hard problem of consciousness?

for: scientific revolution, incremental science, science - epoche

quote

• So whatever problem you have in your knowledge, and suddenly you think, oh, that doesn't fit, there is a problem, and so on, what do you do?
• You stop projecting your attention onto the set of theoretical object you have, and you come back where you are.
• Where are you? In the laboratory observing dots on the screen.
• And then you think, is my picture adequate to the dots I'm seeing now in the screen?
• That's what occurs at each scientific revolution.
• Suddenly, if things, scientists say, poof, finished, all this theory,
• I have to think everything again from what is given to me.

for: key insight, science - key insight, science - epoche

key insight

• Electrons, protons, quarks, and so on, what they turn out to be is just inferences that we do from marks on the screens of our apparatuses in the laboratory essentially.

for: quote, quote - Michel Bitbol, quote - science - epoche, quote - science - aware spot, aware spot

quote

• The missing element in science is precisely the realization that all these objects are seen from somewhere.
• So, from somewhere in a very elusive sense, namely, from this famous aware spot, but also, in a very concrete sense,
  • all these things are seen from our everyday world, the life world.

for: epoche, quote, quote - epoche, quote - Michel Bitbol

quote

• when you have lost the world by the epoche, you can conquer it anew in a universal self-examination.
• What does it mean? It just means that when you analyze what is left after the epoche, you see all the processes by which we tend to reconstruct our belief in and extend in the world

for: quote, quote - Michel Bilbot, quote - circularity of materialism, scientific materialism - circularity

quote

• He (Galileo) concealed the origin of this knowledge by trying to show how you can derive the life of the nowhere out of the nowhere's intellectual byproduct.

author: Michel Bilbot

comment

• This is a very pith observation. It illustrates the circularity inherent in panpsychic scientific theory.
• In a sense, we are putting the cart before the horse by using theory, which is the nowhere's intellectual byproduct, to derive the life of the nowhere.

for: quote, quote - Galileo, quote - hiding the origin of knowledge, physical theory - hiding origin of knowledge

quote

• According to Husserl, Galileo was the one who performed the trick. Who suddenly was hiding the origin of knowledge.

for: nondual, nonduality, ground of existence, transcendental, Kant - transcendental, non-duality, non-dual, quote, quote - Michel Bitbol, quote - nonduality, quote - transcendental

quote

• What can you say about the transcendental?
• Can you speak of it?
• Can you use words to describe it?
• Can you characterize the condition of possibility of it?
• And Kant says no.
• This, namely, the transcendental, cannot be further analyzed or answered because it is of such condition that we are in need for all our answers and for all our thinking about objects.
• So, the transcendental itself cannot be an object of thought.

• Michel Bitbol explains Kant's definition of transcendental that makes sense to me for the first time!
• It is really quite similiar to the defintion of the nondual.