An Ontological Solution to the Mind-Body Problem James Mensch Charles University, Prague  Table of Contents Introduction: 3 Chapter 1: The Hard Problem of Cognitive Science 33 Chapter 2: The Aristotelian Alternative 49 Chapter 3: The “I” of Consciousness 71 Chapter 4: Consciousness and Embodiment 87 Chapter 5: Embodied Space and Time 97 Chapter 6: Arousal, The Without in the Within 108 Chapter 7: Being And Appearing 124 Chapter 8: The Motion of Recursion 144 Chapter 9:Implications for Artificial Intelligence 163 Bibliography: 190  Introduction §1. The Statement of the Problem One of the most remarkable passages in Victor Klemperer’s memoire of living as a Jew in Nazi Germany concerns a pencil and paper that a guard gives him half-way through his week of imprisonment. Sentenced for violating the blackout regulations, he is plunged into despair. He feels surrounded by nothingness: “the nothingness around me because I am cut off from everything, the nothingness inside me because I think nothing, I feel nothing but emptiness.” Victor Klemperer, I Will Bear Witness, A Diary of the Nazi Years 1933-1941, trans. Martin Chalmers (New York: Random House, 1998), p. 409. Receiving the pencil and paper, he recounts, “At that moment my life was just as much transformed as when the prison door slammed shut. Everything was lighter again, indeed had become almost light.” Ibid., p. 412. As he also relates: “On my pencil I climb back to earth out of the hell of the last four days.” Ibid., p. 413. The action of writing saved him “from the obsessive search for thoughts.” Writing, he “felt this relief again and again.” Ibid., p. 414. How are we to understand this remarkable effect of seeing his thoughts expressed in writing, i.e., having them present such that he can return to them, correct them and add to them? Anyone who has written an extended letter, article, or book knows how essential it is to preserve one’s thoughts on paper or a computer screen. The experience is one of the silent processes of thought becoming present in a form that can be repeatedly made conscious. Moreover, reading what one has written affects the unconscious process and stimulates it to come forward with new thoughts, which, as conscious, affect in turn the unconscious process, provoking further thoughts. This view runs counter to the view held by many cognitive scientists, who either deny our possessing cognitive representations or dismiss them as epiphenomenal. Varella citation For Frank Jackson, for example, such representations have as much causal reality as a rainbow. “They do nothing, they explain nothing.” They are simply “a useless by-product” of our evolutionary development. Frank Jackson, “Epiphenomenal Qualia,” Philosophical Quarterly 32: 135, 134. His very experience of writing his famous article, “Epiphenomenal Qualia,” undermines this view. Such an experience involves a constant shifting back and forth from the anonymous brain processes that result in thought and the conscious presence of such thought. Without the latter, particularly in thought’s presence as written down, no extended process of thinking would be possible. This is true for the modern age that relies on writing. In mnemonic cultures such as those of ancient Greece, the permanent conscious representation was held in memory. What does this need for conscious presence tell us about the mind’s relation to the brain? Can our current understanding account for it? David Chalmers expresses the contemporary consensus of cognitive scientists when he writes that “the really hard problem of consciousness is the problem of ‘experience.’” It is the problem of the “subjective aspect” of our perceptions, for example, “the felt quality of redness, the experience of dark and light, the quality of depth in a visual field.” David Chalmers, “Facing up to the Problem of Consciousness,” Journal of Consciousness Studies, 2(3):200-19, 1995, p. 3. This “felt quality” refers to contents in their qualitative presence, contents that cognitive scientists term “qualia.” As felt, qualia are not just contents, but contents that we are aware of perceiving. The distinction is that, for example, between a camera’s registering of light and its perception by us. Unlike the camera, we are aware of receiving the light. Such self-awareness distinguishes the conscious apprehension, say, of redness from redness as an objective quality, i.e., as something independent of consciousness. We not only bring this color to consciousness, but are aware of our seeing it. As a result, the quality is not just present, but felt to be so. The question is: how is this possible? What are the processes involved in this? §2. The Difficulty of the Problem Since the birth of modern science, this problem has appeared insolvable. The premise of this book is that this is because of the ontological framework assumed by science. Its conceptions of space, time, and the reality that they position are such that it becomes impossible to relate mind or consciousness to the physical processes of our embodiment. To understand these conceptions, we can turn to Kant, whose Critique of Pure Reason, is informed by Newton’s ideas. Kant notes that when we engage in external perception, what we regard is always now. Looking with our eyes or hearing with our ears, we register only what is presently occurring. Thus, I cannot visually see the past. Neither can I see the future. If I could, I would read tomorrow’s stock report and choose my stocks accordingly. What this signifies is that external perception, at any given moment, only gives us the static relations involved in the spatial configurations at that moment. To grasp temporal relations, I must turn inward. I have to regard my memories and anticipations. Through these, I grasp temporal durations. Turning inward, however, I suffer a blindness parallel to that of external perception. While the latter cannot visually see time, internal perception cannot grasp space—i.e., actual spatial extensions. See Kant, “Kritik der reinen Vernunft, 2nd ed., B37, Kants gesammelte Schriften, ed. Königliche Preussische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 23 vols. (Berlin: George Reiner, 1955), pp Thus, I cannot say how many centimeters a perception of an object is. Neither can I say that one memory is to the right or left on another memory. The same holds for my anticipations. Spatial terms, thus, do not apply to the consciousness that consists of my perceptions, memories, and anticipations. This is the insight behind Descartes’ calling mind unextended. Extension simply does not apply to the conscious contents that fill it. See Meditations on First Philosophy, trans. L. LaFleur (New York: Macmillan, 1990) p. 74. So conceived, this distinction between internal and external perception has two results. The first is that space and time are definitionally distinct—that is to say, each can be defined independently of the other. The second is that the same holds for consciousness and the external world: The spatial world grasped through external perception does not include consciousness; it can be defined as it is in itself, independently of it. Such independence is, in fact, a mark of it objectivity as grasped by science. Similarly, consciousness is definitionally distinct from the world. Its present, momentary reality as consciousness includes anticipations and memories and, with this, temporal extensions. Such temporal relations, however, are not present in the world. The world’s present, momentary reality is innocent of extended time. Given this, consciousness and the world are radically distinct realities. The temporal relations that characterizes the one are independent of the temporal relations that mark the other. They cannot be related since there is no conceivable explanatory bridge that would link the two domains. This separation of space and time will seem improbable to the reader After all, the external world that we grasp is filled with movement. But movement involves time. How can we, then, assert that time is drained from the world when we visually regard and describe it in our accounts of the world? This objection has all the validity of common sense. But it is one that modern science rigorously ignores. Proceeding through external perception, it registers the results of its experiments. It then expresses the relations it uncovers by mathematical formulae. It discovers, for example, that in a vacuum an object near the surface of the earth falls at 9.80665 m/s2. This means that every second an object is in free fall, gravity will cause the velocity of the object to increase 9.80665 m/s. So, after one second, the object is traveling at 9.80665 m/s, after two, it is travelling twice this amount, and so on. To calculate the velocity of an object in free fall, I simply need to measure the time and apply this formula. Have not I thus grasped time in my account of the external world? Not exactly. Every application of this formula takes, as it were, a snapshot of the world. It tells us how it appears at the temporal instant we have chosen. What we get are a bunch of static pictures, thus replicating our external perception at distinct instants. We do not, however, get the reality of either time or motion in their ongoing character. What about expressing the acceleration of the object in free fall through a graph of an upward curving line, where one axis measures time and the other distance traveled? This spatial figure is, however, frozen in time as are the empirical observations on which it is based. What we confront here is the spatialization of time. Recording the free fall of a body, we get a collection of simultaneities—namely those from the spatial positions of the hands of our clock and the corresponding spatial positions of the object. When we draw a graph of our results, we represent them through a spatial figure. The result of this procedure is, thus, to drain time from space. The very act of doing so, however, eliminates consciousness from the world. The world we grasp through this procedure is objective in the sense of being independent of consciousness. But it is also exclusionary. Ontologically, i.e., as a set of temporal relations, consciousness is excluded from the physical processes that science accounts for in its timeless mathematical formulae. Needless to say, in this view, there is no mind-body problem. We have no need to search for an bridge that would explain subjective phenomena in terms of material reality. Such phenomena would, rather, lack all status. A bridge to them would be a bridge to nowhere. It would not connect us to anything. §3. Patočka's insight If, however, we wish to acknowledge the existence of both consciousness and the physical reality of the world, we have to affirm that consciousness and the material world are not definitionally distinct. This implies admitting that consciousness entails its embodiment. Just as words cannot be defined without syllables and syllables without the letters composing them, we cannot define consciousness without including its material basis. On an ontological level, the same holds for our view of space and time. Rather than being definitionally distinct, each must entail the other. Their relation can be expressed in terms of Merleau-Ponty’s definition of our “perceptual faith.” As Merleau-Ponty writes, we believe that our gaze terminates in external objects. We take for granted that, as embodied, we are included in the world that our gaze presents us with. Doing so, we take ourselves as one of its spatially extended objects. Equally, however, we take this visual world to be within us. We close our eyes and it disappears; we open them and it is again present. The spatial world, we assume, lies included in the temporal world of our consciousness. Accepting both views, we assert “I am in the world and the world is in me.” Ibid., p. 8. Implicitly, we assume the intertwining of space and time and, coordinated with this, the intertwining of our consciousness and its embodiment. In both cases, rather than being definitionally distinct, each entails the other. In applying these conclusions to the mind-body problem, we shall avail ourselves of the insights of the Czech philosopher, Jan Patočka. He writes: … space and time, considered as distinct dimensions of “movement” and of “modification,” which alone are originally given (that is, space and time, considered as dimensions of the “change” that provides their basis)—are only a development, each time different, of the “possibility” of movement or modification. They do not become factual space or time except through an actual movement or a modification of what is the case. Patočka, « Phénoménologie et Ontologie du Mouvement », p. 38. Implicit, here, are a number of assertions. The first is that space and time are not originally given. Motion is what is primary. Space and time, rather than being independent realities, are actually dimensions of motion. It is what provides their basis. It is also what actualizes them, i.e., makes them “factual” space and time. This actualization, as we shall see, occurs through placing each in the other. As a preliminary exposition, we may note that we distinguish time in terms of its “before” and “after” through motion, saying, for example, that “before” a moving body (say the hand of a clock) was in this spatial position and “afterwards” it was in this different spatial position. Motion places time in space by placing its moments in distinct spatial positions. Alfred Reinach writes in this regard, “Motion is what makes the spatial interval a traversed space (not a distance—the distance is the interval itself considered statically—but something of the order of a mixture … ). The space traversed is a space that is somehow unified, interconnected, animated by an internal unity. The space traversed is an event; it is an entirely new unity in relation to the static unity of the partes extra partes” (Über das Wesen der Bewegung,” in Gesamelte Schriften, Halle, Max Niejeyer, 1921; cited by Patočka in “Phénoménologie et Ontologie du Mouvement,” Papiers Phénoménologiques (Paris: Millon, 1995). Similarly, motion places space in time, since a moving body traverses space in a definite time. Such mutual placing signifies that we are dealing here not with two separate realities, but rather with a single fundamental reality. It points to the fact that space and time are abstractions drawn from a primary reality, which is that of motion. This mutual dependence of space and time mirrors, according to Patočka the interdependence of the world and consciousness. Both are dimensions of motion, both are actualized through it. Patočka expresses this point when he writes that his goal “is a philosophy of a distinct kind, one which takes movement as its basic concept and principle … What is distinctive about our attempt is our interpretation of movement; we understand it independently of the dichotomy between subject and object,” i.e., between “on the one hand, an objective world, complete, self-enclosed, and, on the other hand, a subject perceiving this world.” Body, Community, Language, World, trans. Erazim Kohák (Chicago: Open Court Publishing, 1998), p. 153. Prior to both is motion. It is what actualizes and links the two. There is, here, a double claim. The first is that the priority of motion to space and time is also its priority to the objective spatial world and the temporal, subjective perceiving of this world. The second is that just as motion actualizes space and time (making them “factual”) so it actualizes both the world and its appearing. In Patočka words, movement is what “first makes this or that being apparent, causes it to manifest itself in its own original manner.” “Nachwort,” in Die natürliche Welt as philosophisches Problem, Phänomenologische Schriften I, ed. Klaus Nellen und Jiří Němec, trans. Eliška und Ralph Melville (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1990, p. 242. It is also “ what makes a being what it is. Movement unifies, maintains cohesion, synthesizes the being’s determinations. The persistence and succession of the determinations of a substrate, etc., are movements.” “Phénoménologie et ontologie du mouvement,” in Papiers Phénoménologiques, trans. Erika Abrams (Grenoble: Jérôme Millon, 1995), p. 31. Movement, in the latter assertion, is understood as including “ontological” motion. It is not just the movement of already existent entities. It also includes that motion that actualizes entities. This actualization embraces, as entities, both what appears and the sentient organisms receptive to its appearing. It is by virtue of the motion that makes an object be what it is that the object can be present in the sense of affecting, through such movement, its environment. It is also by virtue of the motion that makes an entity sentient—constitutes its functioning organs of sense—that this affection becomes the appearing of this object. Patočka’s claim is, thus, that “movement is the foundation of every manifestation.” It is “what founds the identity between being and appearing. Being is being manifest” (ibid.). Being is being manifest insofar as motion has a twofold effect. It makes actual the space and time that form the framework for appearing. It also brings about the actualization of both what appears and the sentient beings to whom this appears. §4. The Aim of this Book The passages we have cited come from a number of scattered sources, including the unpublished manuscripts that Patočka left behind. He, himself, never argued for their claims in an organized fashion. Involved at the end of his life in the Czech Charter 77 human rights movement affirming human rights, he died of a massive brain hemorrhage. Having been questioned repeatedly over the preceding two months, he succumbed shortly after an eleven-hour interrogation on March 13, 1977. See Erazim Kohák, Jan Patočka, Philosophy and Selective Writings (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), p. 3. His work on motion, which occupied him in the last decade of his life, thus remains in fragments. In a certain sense, the aim of this book is to provide the ontological framework hinted at but never developed by Patočka. In doing so, we shall explore the phenomena that exhibit the embodiment of consciousness—the phenomena that demonstrate that, definitionally, consciousness entails embodiment. The same holds with regard to the phenomena underlying the interdependence of space and time. This does not mean that the present work should be taken as a scholarly commentary on Patočka or, for that matter, on the other philosophers brought in to support its arguments. Its aim, rather, is to present a distinct approach to the mind-body problem, one whose validity should be judged by the soundness of its arguments and the evidence presented to support them. In considering this evidence, readers will have to abandon their prejudices—i.e., their ways of conceiving space, time, mind and the world, which for the most part have been informed by the framework of modern science. If our analysis is correct, it is precisely this framework that informs the mind-body problem, making it insoluble. Beyond providing the framework for Patočka's insights, we also intend go beyond his general position and ask what sort of motion actualizes appearing, i.e., makes its structures applicable to sentient organism. Our questions will be: What are the characteristics of the motion required to actualize consciousness? How does such motion result in experience—i.e., in our ability not just to register contents, but to be aware of such registering? In examining these issues, we will have recourse to Husserl’s descriptions of consciousness of time. In particular, we shall examine his accounts of short term memory and anticipation—in his terminology, retention and protention—in their role in giving us a sense of time. We will then inquire into the type of motion that actualizes the relations of retention and protention. Such motion, we will argue, is essentially recursive. It involves repeatedly performing an action on the result of this action. In the case of retention, this means retaining some impression, then retaining this retained impression and then retaining the retention of this retained impression and so on. It is through such a chain of retentions of retentions of an originally given content, we will argue, that consciousness is actualized as extended temporal entity. It is also through such a chain, in which it continually presents itself with a given content, that it becomes self-aware. We say self-aware since what it presents to itself is the result of its own action of retention. The same can be said for the action of protention or anticipation. It is also recursive and it also presents consciousness to itself—this time as an anticipated state. As experimental evidence shows, such recursive motions are present in the material functioning of the brain. To cite just one example, the Dutch, neurophysiologist Viktor Lamme, writes that the recursive motion where “area A speaks to area B, and then B talks back to A, … makes the activation reverberate, causing ‘recurrent processing,’ the reinjection of information into the same circuit that originated it. ‘We could even define consciousness as recurrent processing.’” Cited by Stanislas Dehaene, in Consciousness and the Brain, Deciphering How the Brain Codes our Thoughts, New York: Viking Penguin, 2014, p. 156. Such recurrent processing does not just present consciousness to itself, it also, in the form of processes of retention and protention, constitutes it an extended temporal entity—one whose present reality includes both the retained past and the anticipated future. In this, it can be understood as placing time within the spatial relations of the brain. The same motions can be also understood as placing space in the temporal relations they generate. The details of this argument will be presented in the following chapters. For the present, it is important to note the ontological nature of our account. This involves revisioning space and time. We do so when we accept that the motion that realizes space and time by placing each in the other is, ontologically, prior to both. It is not the traversal of distance in a given time. It is simply the change, the sheer otherness, of what comes to occupy the now. Time arises when this change involves recursion. It is then that nowness that characterizes the presence of the world becomes part of an extended temporal environment that includes the retained past and the anticipated future. Retrospectively, we can project the results of this recursive motion on the change that underlies it, i.e., think of such change in temporal terms. But this, in a real sense, is misleading. It is, in fact, to fall back into the framework that makes the mind-body problem insolvable. The priority of motion to time can be put in terms of Husserl’s assertion regarding the phenomena of retentions and protentions in their generating temporal relations. He writes: “Timeconstituting phenomena, therefore, are evidently objectivities fundamentally different from those constituted in time…. Hence it also can make no sense to say of them (and to say with the same signification) that they exist in the now and did exist previously, that they succeed one another in time or are simultaneous with one another, and so on.” Zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewusstseins (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966)., pp. 74-5. Such phenomena, in generating temporal relations, are prior to such. Similarly, the motion that actualizes these relations cannot be thought in terms of such relations. §5. An Outline of the Chapters. Since the argument of this book is, at least in its details, long and complex, an extended outline of its chapters can prove useful. The first chapter, “The Hard Problem of Cognitive Science,” places the standard formulation of this problem in a wider context. This context is historical, stretching from Descartes to Chalmers. It also involves the philosophical problem of the subject’s relation to the world. Thus, it seems equally true to say that I am in the appearing world, i.e., that I am one of its appearing objects and to claim that this world is in me, i.e., that I am the place where it appears. In Husserl’s words, I seem to have “both the being of a subject for the world [i.e., a place of its conscious appearing] and the being of an object in the world.” The problem with the “perceptual faith” that embraces both of these alternatives is that each seems to exclude the other. From the perspective of the world, the material processes that constitute my being seem incapable of generating the appearing contents of consciousness. Locke, in fact, says that “there is no conceivable connection between the one and other.” Equally, from the perception of such contents, no derivation of the physical world seems possible. The conceptual basis of their opposition, this argues, is to be found in the opposition between the external perception that grasps the world and the internal perception that turns toward the contents of consciousness. What makes the hard problem “hard” is science’s privileging of external perception. Doing so, it adopts an attitude that drains time and, hence, our essentially temporal consciousness from the world. It, thus, precludes the attempt explain our consciousness in terms of the world. This opposition between external and internal perception lies behind a number of further oppositions. When I privilege external perception, I naturally assert that I am a subject in the world, i.e., one of its many objects. Privileging internal perception, I take myself as a subject for the world—a subject in and through which the world appears. This world, I claim, is in me. Similarly, with the scientific focus on external perception, my attention is on the “the structure and dynamics of physical processes”—those of the brain and sense organs. The phenomenological focus on internal perception, by contrast, attends to the contents and processes of consciousness. Furthermore, the focus on external perception directs itself to what is there, available to everyone. Since the objects it grasps are available to the “he” and “she” of others (the grammatical third person), this focus is designated as a “third-person” one. By contrast, the focus on internal perception yields only objects available to me. It is a “first-person” focus since no one else can access my consciousness. Analytic philosophy, in privileging the scientific perspective, generally adopts the third-person focus, while phenomenology adopts the first-person one. All these oppositions recall Kant’s antinomies: opposing statements that seem to cancel each other. Their opposition, Kant points out, is more apparent than real, given that they both share the same inadmissible premise. This signifies that to uncover this premise is to expose the faulty conceptual framework that underlies their opposition. The question this first chapter leaves us with is that of the nature of this premise. The second chapter, “The Aristotelian Alternative,” opens by noting that in confronting an impasse, it is often helpful to consider contexts where the impasse does not occur. Aristotle presents, in an exemplary fashion, such an alternate context. To introduce it, we first consider the common view that we know the world by producing representations (inner replicas) of it. The difficulty with this is: how could we ever know whether such replicas are at all “like” their originals. What, in fact, does the notion of the representation being “like” the original signify when we take the modern scientific view and see both as mathematically describable material processes, one designating the activity of our brains and the other that of the object we are attending to? A similar difficulty occurs when we note that the effect of this object is determined by material structures of our perceptual and cognitive organs. Different organisms—say, a cat, a parrot, and a man—have different structures and, hence, different replicas of the original within their heads. Can we say that one replica or representation is more “like” the original? Equally problematic is the idea of the object in itself, apart from all our representation. This cannot be posited as an empirical reality, but only as a logical necessity. Such necessity, however, is called into question once we see logical reasoning as a biologically grounded process. Why cannot we say that even logic alters with the evolution of the brain? Aristotle’s account presents a context where such concerns do not occur. In part, this is because he works with very different conceptions of space and time. He understands space as “place,” i.e., as an answer to the question “where” something is. He writes that it is “the first unmoved boundary of what surrounds [the object],” this boundary being determined by the object’s motion. Ibid., 212a 20, p. 68. Thus, during the week, I am in a certain town, since the town is the unmoved place where I work, shop, and visit friends. During the month, the boundary may expand to my region. In Aristotle’s view, the body, through its motion, generates space, understood as place. A parallel argument is made with regard to time. Like place, it cannot be considered apart from the moving body. The presence of the moving body is registered as the now, its motion being registered as the shifting of the now. The flowing of time, in other words, corresponds to the body’s movement insofar as it manifests the body’s shifting relation to its environment. Thus, we say that before it was in one position and afterwards it was in another. “Before” and “afterwords,” here, only make sense in the context of moving from one position to another. In fact, without motion, we do not register time at all. In Aristotle’s words, “when we have no sense of change, . . . we have no sense of the passing of time.” Ibid, 218b, 24 Space and time in this context are relativized. They are not independent realities but simply attributes of bodies, the motion of which allows us to attribute a “where” and a “when” to them. As attributes, they are neither subjective nor objective. Their reality occurs through the realization of an entity’s capacity to be present and of our ability to register such presence. They exist through this mutual realization. The same holds in Aristotle’s account of what it means to know something. Rather than dealing with replicas and originals (representations and things represented), we have the mutual realization of a knowing subject and a known object. The object as knowable actualizes the thinking mind and the thinking mind actualizes the object as knowable. Both are required. As Aristotle states, “before it thinks,” that is, before it grasps and apprehends an object, “mind has no actual existence (energeia).” De Anima, III, iv, 429a 24, all translations from this text are my own. It is, in other words, “potentially identical with the objects of its thought, but is actually nothing until it thinks.” Ibid., 429b 31. When it does think, there is a single reality composed of the knowing mind and the knowable object. Mind, here, is actually identical with the objects of its thought. Aristotle makes the same assertions with regard to the perceiving subject and the perceptual world. He writes that “the actualization (energeia) of the sensible object” is “in the sensing subject.” De Anima, III, 2, 426a10. The latter is where the object is actualized as sensible. Its actualization as sensible is “one and the same” with the actualization of such perception. Ibid., 425 b27. As Deborah Modrak notes, the idea of this unity of functioning can be traced back to Plato. “In the Theatetus (156 d - e), Plato asserts that the eye becomes an actually ‘seeing eye’ in one and the same process in which the thing seen (the ‘other parent of the color’) becomes ‘a white thing’” (Aristotle, The Power of Perception, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987, p. 30). Perceiving and perceived here are both aspects of the same actualization. Such a view, needless to say, undercuts the oppositions made in our last chapter. For Aristotle, we are in the sensible world as perceivers of it. But, equally, the sensible world is in us since it is actualized within us. There is here, Aristotle stresses, a single actualization and, hence, a single reality. The same claim can be made with regard to the soul’s relation to its embodiment. The soul actualizes its embodiment. It animates it and makes it alive. Equally, this embodiment in its functioning actualizes the soul. It makes it the informing form of a living body. The soul, here, definitionally includes the body since both share in a single actualization. The question this review of Aristotle’s position leaves us with is that of its applicability to our current understanding of the mind-body problem. On the one hand, we can say that Aristotle had no conception of the physical processes that underlie the brain’s functioning. The basic conceptions of modern science were, in fact, foreign to him. On the other hand, it is these very conceptions that make the mind-body problem unsolvable. At very least, then, this should make us pause before we reject tout court Aristotle’s account. His intuitions regarding motion may in fact play a role in the resolution of our problem. Our third chapter, “The “I’ of Consciousness,” addresses a serious lacunae in most discussions of the mind-body problem. This is an account of the subject of consciousness. How are we to understand the “I” or “ego” that seems to accompany all our acts of consciousness? It seems natural to say that the “I” continues as the same throughout our experiences—that we are the same moment by moment as we approach some object to get a better look. The question is: what exactly is the same? It cannot be the shifting contents of consciousness. But if the I is not a content of consciousness, how is it known? Hume concluded that, not being a content, it must be a “fiction,” while William James wrote regarding the “I think,” “the thoughts themselves are the thinkers.” Psychology, Briefer Course (Cleveland: The World Publishing Company, 1948), p. 216. In this chapter, we consider Husserl’s alternative. Accepting that, as something unchanging, the ego cannot be a content of conscious, he asserts that the ego is implicit in the formal structure of consciousness. This structure is the centering of consciousness about a central point, the ego being its center. This central point, spatially interpreted, is the “here” from which I regard spatial distances. Temporally, it is “now” that stands at the central point of my temporal environment. Both are constituted, i.e., built up, in the flow of my experiences. Thus, the “here” arises through the constitution of the spatial world. Such constitution is a matter of our identifying perspectivally arranged patterns of perceptions and assigning them referents. We take these referents as spatial temporal objects, i.e., objects that show themselves perspectivally, i.e., from one side and then another, as we move between them. Their perspectival appearing is what positions me as the point from which they are viewed. It locates me at the center of my appearing world. As for the “now,” it is the result of the process through which we become aware of time. We do this through the retaining of what has occurred and the anticipating of what will occur. In this process, the now that is marked by our present reception of perceptual data becomes positioned between the past that we retain and the future that we anticipate. This, we take as the now of our selfhood, the now in which we act and experience the world. To describe its constitution, this chapter present an overview of Husserl’s account of temporal constitution. It ends by noting that the constitution of this “I” implies our embodiment since the impressional data that we retain and anticipate are supplied by our embodied senses and actions. It is the contents that they provide that “individualize” the ego, making it the ego of a distinct embodied person. With regard to the mind-body problem, what Husserl’s analysis shows us is that consciousness in its self-constitution as a flowing structure implies an I or self. The consciousness of the world is always personal. As the fourth chapter, “Consciousness and Embodiment,” argues, our embodiment makes us uniquely singular. We are not one among many possible instances, each of which is essentially substitutable for another—like coins in a change purse. Our organic functioning manifest a non-substitutable singularity. No one, for example, can eat for you. The fact that someone else has had their dinner does not assuage your hunger. Certainly, one person can fulfill another’s position; one teacher can substitute for another, performing the same tasks. Our bodies can be described and compared in terms of the features that they share. But the flesh that incarnates us cannot be shared. Such flesh, in its self-presence, distinguishes us from every other object in the world. This uniqueness appears in the phenomenon of self-touch. When we touch something else, we sense its qualities: its hardness, texture, temperature and so on. We do not, however, sense its being touched. We do, however, sense our own being touched when we touch ourselves. This self-presence reveals each of us as both subject and object. When one hand touches the other, the sensing hand functions as a subject, while the sensed hand takes up the position of an object. Thus, as a touched object, I am in the world, I am one of its tangible objects. As touching subject, this tactile world is within me. It is revealed by the localized sensations that are spread across the surface of my hand. There is, here, an intertwining in which I am in the world that I internalize. This intertwining, however, is not an identification. Each hand can function as a subject and as object. But it cannot at the same moment function as both. As Merleau-Ponty writes, “the two hands can alternate in the function of ‘touching’ and being ‘touched,’” Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962), p. 93. but we never confuse one with the other. Rather, a gap always appears between “my body touched and my body touching.” The Visible and the Invisible, trans. A. Lingis (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1968), p. 123. The fact that we cannot do both at the same time introduces a division in our consciousness. The division between subject and object applies even to ourselves. The reason for this is that, on the level of touch, our relation to ourselves is not direct, but rather mediated: the touched hand through the touching hand and vice-versa—in other words, we must touch ourselves to grasp ourselves as both a sensed object and a sensing subject. No other sense will do. But in such self-touch, the hand that positions the sensing hand as an object is not the hand that it touches. The spatial distinction of one hand from the other—and more generally, the spatial extension of our body as it functions in our self-presence—thus maintains the divide in our self-presence. This indicates that spatiality is inherent in the alterity that characterizes our self-presence. Consciousness, as such self-presence, is, thus, not just temporal but also spatial. In other words, its embodiment is inherent in its self-presence. The next chapter, “Embodied Space and Time,” looks at the implications of this for our concepts of space and time. Given the spatial character of our consciousness, can we still maintain the Kantian separation of time and space as based on his distinction between inner and outer perception? The former, in focusing on consciousness, is supposed to apprehend only temporal relations. But is this the case? Can, in fact, temporal relations be conceived apart from the “parts outside of parts” that characterizes space? A sign that this is not the case is implicit in Aristotle’s argument for the non-self-subsistent character of time. As he notes, considered in themselves, neither the past nor the future exist, since the past no longer is and the future has not yet come into existence. As for the now, it exists, but it cannot be considered as a part of time. A part measures the whole, but the present instant has no extension. No number of non-extended nows can be summed up to yield a temporal extent. Thus, time must depend on something outside of itself in order to be. Something outside itself must prevent its moments from collapsing into each other. To see what this is, we turn to the fact we grasp time through a change in what we experience. Without change, our sense of time freezes. The now ceases to “flow” when the contents occupying it remain the same. It is only when we experience the present moment with an ever new content, that we apprehend it as a streaming present. If we ask what is behind this change of content, reflection shows that the alterity that we experience—say, the different positions of the clock’s hands—presupposes space. Space, in its having parts outside of parts, is what is implicit in the alterity of content filled moments. Thus, what distinguishes the appearances of a moving body are not the moments that they inhabit; it is the spatially distinct positions of its path. It is the outside-of-one-another of such positions, the extension of the path, that translates itself into the extension of time. Without this spatial extension, the path would collapse as would the moments presenting the appearances of the motion along it. We make similar argument regarding the dependence of space on time. When we attempt to think space apart from time, it also loses its self-subsistent reality. The point follows from the fact that our lived experience of space involves the time required to traverse its distances. Absent such temporal measures, we do not have space, but only geometry; we do not have distance, but only relations of distance. We can, for example, say that the sum of two sides of a triangle cannot be smaller than the third, but we cannot say how large a geometric triangle is. Thus, when we drain time from space, what remains is the mathematical representation of space, not space itself with its definite distances. This mutual dependence of space and time signifies that we cannot accept the Kantian dichotomy between the mind as temporal and the external world as spatial. It indicates that just as we are in the world which is in us, so time and space manifest this double being-in. The fact that each must be understood in terms of the other, determines our experiential being-in-the-world. This is the being of living, embodied subject. For such a subject, distances are measured by the times needed to cross them, with the shortest distance being determined by the living being’s body. Its muscular structure and size govern how it is able to move between points. Thus, the localized space of an adult human being is different than that of a child. Both are different from that of an insect. What this signifies, as the French mathematician, Henri Poincaré, pointed out, is that the space we live in has as many dimensions as the muscular determinants of our motion. In Poincaré’s words, “Each muscle gives rise to a special sensation which may be increased or diminished so that the aggregate of our muscular sensations will depend upon as many variables as we have muscles. From this point of view, motor space would have as many dimensions as we have muscles” (Science and Hypothesis [New York: The Walter Scott Publishing Co., 1905], p. 64). A parallel argument holds with regard to time. These arguments show that the variables needed to describe the actions of living beings are necessarily more numerous than those required for inanimate nature. The organic and the inorganic, thus, evince different levels of complexity, the former including but not being limited to the complexity—the number of determining variables—of the latter. The importance of this conclusion will become evident when we seek to describe the functioning of consciousness. The Sixth Chapter, “Arousal, The Without in the Within,” both sums up the arguments of the earlier chapters and tests their conclusions by applying them to a specific case: that of arousal. To arouse someone is to awaken him, readying him for activity. Physiologically, this involves stimulating the cerebral cortex into a general state of wakefulness and attention. Psychologically, sensory alertness, mobility and readiness to respond all mark the aroused state. Arousal, then is a matter of external impulses activating internal processes. Thus, the sight and smell of its food arouses a species’ appetite. It awakens the drive of hunger, which is directed towards the food. Similarly, the sight, odor and touch of a sexual partner brings about sexual arousal and activation of the corresponding sexual drive. The question that such phenomena raise is: how does what is external affect what is internal? As such, it is an example of the mind-body problem, including the problematic relation of the first to the third person standpoint If we approach this question of the external and internal from a first person perspective, we cannot really speak of the felt impulse or drive as internal and the stimuli that activate it as coming from the outside. From this perspective, both the drive and the stimuli are within experience. So are the referents we constitute from our experiences. They lie included in consciousness as senses. For the third-person perspective, the opposite is the case: there is no “inside” of consciousness. Inside and outside are understood spatially. Within is inside is the brain; what is without originates outside of this location. Arousal is viewed not as a subjective interest in and turning toward the arousing object, but rather as a causally determined stimulus-response mechanism. The inadequacy of both approaches is shown by the phenomenon of arousal. In it, the outer arouses the inner. Somehow, what is outside in the third-person, spatial sense arouses what is within in the first-person, experiential sense. It thrusts the subject outside of itself into the objective world of affecting, spatially distinct objects. Merleau-Ponty’s insight was that this inadequacy is based on a false ontology. Both sides fail to realize that a person is both a place of disclosure and an object in the external world the person discloses. Ontologically, the person exists in the intertwining of the two. This is illustrated by the phenomenon of hand touching hand. A touching hand is a place of disclosure. As touched, however, ‘touching subject’ passes over to the rank of the touched.” It “descends into the things, such that the touch is formed in the midst of the world.” Ibid., p. 134. As such, it is located, spatially extended place of disclosure. It is in the world that is subjectively within it. It exists as this intertwining of the within and the without. Such intertwining is, in fact, a distinct ontological category. It is not reducible to the category favored by subjective idealism, which is that of being-for-a-disclosing subject. Neither is it reducible to the being-in-itself, the being that is independent of subjectivity, which is embraced by objectivism. Thus, it is not the case that a subject first exists and then becomes intertwined with the world. There is no self-subsistent selfhood. What we confront here is a single actualization of self and world, one where the constitution of the self as an object in the material world occurs in tandem with the constitution of the appearing world in in the subject. As example of this intertwined constitution, the empathetic arousal of one person by another is brought up. Here, the constitution of the self in the material world is that of the mirror neurons in the brain which fire on the observed action of others. The constitution of the appearing subject is that of the empathy which thrusts us outside of ourselves in our experience of the distress of the other. It is what makes us wince when the other is struck. Neither the empathetic response nor the firing of these neurons can be thought apart from the other. Like the touching hand that is in the world as a spatial place of disclosure, the empathetic response is in the firing of these neurons. They place the self in the world of the other in his distress. The Seventh Chapter, “Being and Appearing,” focuses on Patočka’s claim that motion is the ground of both being and appearing. It is both what “makes a being what it is” and what ““first makes this or that being apparent, causes it to manifest itself.” Before taking up this claim, we note the false premise behind the aporia of the mind-body problem. This is that space and time are definitionally distinct—that we can consider each apart from the other. The fact that each depends upon the other points to their having a common ground. It point, in fact, to motion’s action of making them intertwined. Thus, motion places time in space, since time’s “before” and “after” are marked by the different spatial positions that a moving object occupies. This difference in spatial positions is, as we said, absolutely essential since without it the moments of time would collapse into each other. Similarly, motion places space in time, since a moving body traverses space in a definite time. Without this reference to time, distance becomes simply a mathematical quantity. Patočka expresses their dependence on motion by writing that “space and time” are “distinct dimensions of ‘movement’ … They do not become factual space or time except through an actual movement.” Patočka, “Phénoménologie et Ontologie du Mouvement,” in Papiers Phénoménologiques, trans. Erika Abrams (Grenoble: Jérôme Millon, 1995), p. 38. If we accept this, then we overturn the Kantian divide between consciousness and the external world, the former being charactered by temporality and the latter by spatiality. It implies that motion, in placing time in space, places consciousness in the spatial world. Similarly, motion, in placing space in time, introduces spatiality into the temporal relations of consciousness. As the next chapter shows, the recursive motions of retention and protention are those that place time in space, and, in so doing, actualize consciousness as a place of appearing. Before such motion, there is only otherness in the now. It is the spatial basis of such otherness that that introduces space into time, i.e., prevents the collapse of the moments that consciousness retains and anticipates. Patočka, himself, does mention retention or protention. His focus is rather on motion as “a fundamental ontological factor,” one that “gives things the being that they are.” “La conception aristotélicienne du mouvement : signification philosophique et recherches historiques,” in Le monde naturel et le mouvement de l’existence humaine, ed. and trans. Erika Abrams (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1988), p. 129. This implies that motion is more than simply being a predicate of being, i.e., a characteristic of an already existent entity. As “ontological” motion, it can also be characterized as what brings the entity about. In doing so, it also occasions its appearing. This is because the movement that makes something be also causes it to affect its environment. It appears in affecting it, and it affects it through the very motion that causes it to be. This “asubjective” appearing becomes “subjective” in the presence of a sentient organism, the latter being itself the result of the motions of its functioning. This derivation of both being and appearing from motion positions motion as the “explanatory bridge” between the two. This bridge, however, is not a conflation. The possibilities of appearing, i.e., the formal laws that motion actualizes, are not those of its material embodiment. Formally regarded, the possibilities of material nature are given by the laws of the natural sciences—laws that are expressed in mathematical formulae. Those of appearing concern the acts of syntheses by which we join together perceptions and identify them with referents. Phenomenology, as a reflective practice that focuses on such acts, draws from them their essential (“eidetic”) structures. Doing so, it attempts to give the formal laws of subjective appearing. The two sets of laws, Patočka notes, are not the same. For him, “manifesting in itself, in that which makes it manifesting, is not reducible, cannot be converted into anything that manifests itself in manifesting.” Plato and Europe, trans. Petr Lom. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002, p. 24. It is not appearing things, but rather “the showing of those things.” He writes in this regard: “Showing is not, then, as it may seem, merely an objective structure, because the objective, material structure is that which shows itself. Showing is also not mind and it is not the structure of mind, because that is also just a thing; it is also something that is and that eventually can also manifest itself…. showing itself is not any of these things that show themselves, whether it is a psychic or physical object … and yet it is still the showing of those things” (Plato and Europe, p. 22). Its distinction from the things that appears means that it, itself, is not a being. In Patočka's words, to assert that “‘[t]here is a structure of appearance’ does not signify ‘there is a being, a this-here, which one can call appearance.’ Appearing as such is not a being and cannot be referred to as a being.” “Epoché und Reduktion in den ‘Fünf Vorlesungen,’” in Vom Erscheinen als solchem: Texte aus dem Nachlaß, eds. Helga Blaschek-Hahn and Karel Novotny (Freiburg/München: Verlag Karl Alber, 2000), p. 119. As he also writes, what we have to do with here is not “given as a being, rather it is the givenness and modes of givenness of a being, which modes themselves cannot be designated as beings.” Ibid. These “modes of givenness” form a separate category, that of the possibilities of appearing. Such possibilities, which phenomenology studies, are distinct from the possibilities of the material processes of the organisms to whom things appear. Together, they form two co-ordinate sets of possibilities. Such possibilities imply each other and, with the appropriate motions, become realized in sentient organisms reacting to their environments. Patočka writes in this regard, “Causality in no way signifies the creation of the appearing as such, but rather the adaptation of the organic unity to the structure of appearing. Ibid., p. 132. This adaption, which makes the laws of appearing applicable to a sentient organism, can take a number of forms, depending on the organism’s structure. Each species can be said to make a selection from the possibilities of appearing by virtue of its embodiment. As for appearing itself, it is, Patočka writes, “a specific world structure … without itself being actual” (i.e., without its being a being). “Epoché und Reduktion,” p. 125, n. 174. It represents “a lawfulness that … cannot be grounded or drawn from the object.” This follows because the lawfulness that is drawn from objects forms the content of the natural sciences. The lawfulness of appearing, by contrast, concerns the appearing of the objects studied by these sciences. What exactly is the motion that actualizes appearing as conscious appearing? Chapter 8, “The Motion of Recursion,” argues that such motion is recursive. A recursive process is one where the results of a process are fed back into the process producing a new result, which is again fed back into the process. To take a simple example, in mathematics a recursive function is one that operates on a number (its “argument”) and uses the resulting number as its new argument. Thus, taking the function x + 1 and letting the initial argument for x be 1, the function equals 1 + 1 or 2. Taking this result as the new argument for x, we let x = 2 and x + 1 now gives us 2 + 1 or 3. Such a return of the result to the function can be repeated indefinitely to generate the set of positive integers. Retention is also an example of recursion. As Husserl notes, it is a serial process, one where an impression is retained, and then this retention of the impression is itself retained, and then the retention of the retention of the impression is itself retained and so on. In the generation of the series of retentions of retentions … of some original impression, the process thus also works on its own result. This process can be represented symbolically in the series: i, (i), ((i)), (((i))), with the brackets symbolizing retentions. Similarly, hearing series of notes—A, B, C, D, E and retaining them can be symbolized by the series. A, (A)B, ((A)B)C, … (E(D(C(B(A))))). Here, the retained notes are all co-present, but distinguished from each other by the retentions that each has been subjected to. This retentional process allows us to move from the hearing of the successive tones of a melody to the hearing of the melody embodied in their succession. In general, by making possible the extended temporal presence of a perceptual events, the process makes possible our present consciousness of temporally extended patterns of perception. What we confront, here, in fact, is the generation of consciousness itself. Before retention, there is only the flickering presence of what is momentarily present—rather like the presence to a CD player of the pits and lands of a CD disk. Retention is what transforms this to conscious experience of the music being played. Such experience includes a background self-awareness. This follows since our awareness of what we retain is an awareness of the result of consciousness’ own action of retention. If Husserl is correct, then the recursive motion of retention should actualize consciousness. Neurological science point to this insofar as it identifies recursive firing, where “area A speaks to area B, and then B talks back to A,” the result being “the reinjection of information into the same circuit that originated it” with conscious apprehension. In Patočka’s terms, there is, here, a double actualization. The motion that actualizes a sentient organism with its recurrent processing also actualizes the appearing that this organism experiences. This double actualization allow us to see how consciousness and its physical basis work together. This happens because the neural firings that generate the temporal relations that characterize consciousness also physically preserve these insofar as they induce other neurons to preserve the patterns of such firings. Such preserved patterns can be reactivated by a new conscious state, i.e., by the patterns of firings correlated to this new state. The presence of this new conscious state through such firing recalls—i.e. incites—the physically preserved state, which when activated generates a new consciousness state, and so on. The relation between the two is such that we cannot eliminate consciousness in favor its physical basis. Consciousness is an inherent part of this back and forth process. Its presence is a function of the motion that actualizes us as both physically sentient and self-aware.  Chapter 1 The Hard Problem of Cognitive Science §1. The Paradox of Subjectivity and the Mind-Body Problem Heraclitus remarked that ‘You will never find the boundaries of the soul so deep is its measure (logon).” Hericlitus, Fragment 45, In Greek: ψυχῆς πείρατα ἰὼν οὐκ ἂν ἐξεύροιο πᾶσαν ἐπιπορευόμενος ὁδόν· οὕτω βαθὺν λόγον ἔχει. The Greek text is taken from The Presocratic Philosophers, trans. and ed., G. S. Kirk and J. E. Raven (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1966, p. 205. Since humans began to philosophize, this prediction has shown itself remarkably prescient. From Plato onward, philosophers have attempted to penetrate the mystery of how the mind or soul relates to the world. Encased in the body, which Plato called its “prison,” the embodied soul is a part of the greater world. Yet, it also seems to be the place of the world’s appearing. As such, its “measure” seems as endless as the world itself. Husserl, called this dual perspective “the paradox of human subjectivity.” This is the paradox of its two-fold being. It has “both the being of a subject for the world and the being of an object in the world.” “Die Parodoxie der menschlichen Subjektivität: das Subjektsein für die Welt und zugleich Objektsein in der Welt” (Die Krisis der Europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie, 2nd. ed., W. Biemel, Hua VI, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1962, p. 182). As the former, it is where the world appears. It is through its functioning that the world becomes present. The “measure” of its functioning thus seems co-extensive with the world. As the latter, subject is itself but one object among many in the world. It appears as a particular human subject with all the vulnerabilities and limitations that we all too readily recognize in ourselves. Reflecting on this duality, Husserl asks: “How can human subjectivity, which is a part of the world, constitute the whole world, i.e., constitute it as its intentional product …? The subjective part of the world swallows up, so to speak, the whole world including itself. What an absurdity!” Krisis, p. 183. Our ability to grasp both sides of this paradox is part of what Merleau-Ponty called the “perceptual faith” that guides our lives. As he writes, when I see an object, I believe that “my vision terminates in it, that it holds and stops my gaze with its insurmountable density.” The object is out there in the world, a world that includes me as one of the visible objects. “Yet,” he adds, “as soon as I attend to it, this conviction is just as strongly contested by the very fact that this vision is mine.” Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, trans. A. Lingis, Evanston, IL., Northwestern University Press, 1968, pp. 4-5. I believe that my perception “is formed this side of the body.” Ibid., p. 8. Generated by my senses and my nervous system, the perceived world is in me. Thus, the very “experience of my flesh … has taught me that perception … emerges in the recesses of a body”—my body. Ibid., p. 9. Similarly, I put the perception that the other has “behind his body”—that is, in his head. Ibid. Yet, we both claim that our perception terminates in something out there. In fact, we regard each other and the seeing we engage in as out there among things. As embodied, we take ourselves as present among them. Thus, each of us, has to assert, “I am in the world and the world is in me.” As the former, I am an object among objects; as the latter, I am the embodied place of the world’s appearing. According to Merleau-Ponty, “The ‘natural’ man holds on to both ends of the chain.” Ibid., p. 8. He lives the paradox, undisturbed by it. How exactly is this possible? Is the perspective of the world compatible with my claim to bring things to perceptual presence? From the world’s perspective, the flesh that composes “the recesses” of my body consists of material processes. But, how do such processes result in the perceptual presence of the world? As John Locke centuries ago noted, we can grasp how a change in “the size, figure, and motion of one body should cause a change in the size, figure and motion of another body.” John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books 1995), p. 444. The question is how such motions “produce in us the idea of any color, taste, or sound whatsoever”? In short, how do they give rise to our perceptual life? The problem seems insolvable since, as Locke admits, “there is no conceivable connection between the one and other.” Ibid., p. 445. Gottfried Leibniz makes the same admission. He also believes that “[p]erceptions are inexplicable by mechanical causes, that is to say, by figures and motions.” As he illustrates: Supposing that there were a machine whose structure produced thought, sensation, and perception, we could conceive of it as increased in size with the same proportions until one was able to enter into its interior, as he would into a mill. Now, on going into it he would find only pieces working upon one another, but never would he find anything to explain perception.” Leibniz, “Monadology” in Basic Writings, trans. George Montgomery (La Salle, Illinois: Open Court, 1962), p. 254. These authors are confronting what has come to be called the “hard problem” of cognitive science. It has essentially remained the same since they first raised it. In David Chalmer’s words, “the really hard problem of consciousness is the problem of ‘experience.’” It is the problem of the “subjective aspect” of our perceptions, for example, “the felt quality of redness, the experience of dark and light, the quality of depth in a visual field.” David Chalmers, “Facing up to the Problem of Consciousness,” Journal of Consciousness Studies, 2(3): 200-19, 1995, p. 3. This “felt quality” refers to contents in their qualitative presence, contents that cognitive scientists term “qualia.” As felt, qualia are not just contents, but contents that we are aware of perceiving. Think of the distinction between our perceiving a color and a camera’s registering it. Unlike the camera, we are aware of perceiving it. As a result, the quality is not just present, but felt to be so. The question is: how is this possible? What are the processes involved in this? We know that this felt-quality has a physical basis, but, as Chalmers writes, “we have no good explanation of why and how it so arises.” Ibid. What is required, in Chalmers’ view, is an “explanatory bridge” that would link conscious processes to “the structure and dynamics of physical processes.” Ibid., p. 6. The same difficulty confronts us when we attempt understand physical processes on the basis of the self, understood as the place of appearing. When we regard the self’s contents, we find no bridge that would explain the material quality of the world §2. Space and Time and the Mind-Body Problem Our conceptions of space and time play a crucial role in the difficulty of establishing such a bridge. To see this, we can return to the distinction that Kant draws between our grasp of temporal relations and those of space. According to Kant, if we want to grasp temporal relations, we have to turn inward, that is, regard our memories and anticipations. This is because outside of us, it is always now. The external perception that directs itself to the world cannot “see” either the past or the future. Neither is present since the past has vanished and the future is yet to come. If this were not the case, we could directly perceive what is to come. Given this limitation, at any given moment, we outwardly see only spatial relations. As Kant expresses this insight, “time cannot be outwardly intuited, any more than space can be intuited as something in us.” “Kritik der reinen Vernunft, 2nd ed., B37, Kants gesammelte Schriften, 3:52. Thus, I intuit time in its pastness and futurity by turning inward and regarding my memories and anticipations. Inspecting them, however, I cannot speak of their spatial relations. I cannot, as the Introduction noted, say that a memory (as opposed to its object) is a given size or is to the left or to the right of another memory. My memories and anticipations are not out there in space; they are within me. The same holds for my perceptions, considered as conscious representations. The house I view has a definite size, but I cannot put a measuring tape up to my perception of the house. For Kant, this leads to the conclusion that space must be outwardly intuited. We cannot grasp it by looking inward. Similarly, “if we abstract from our mode of inwardly intuiting ourselves ... then time is nothing.” “Kritik der reinen Vernunft,” 2nd ed., B 51, 3:60. Without the consciousness whose relations it characterizes, time loses its reality. Such consciousness is, for Kant, our appearing selfhood; its reality as consciousness is essentially temporal. See ibid., B50, 3:60. As for the external world, it is, as revealed by external perception, essentially spatial. If we accept this division, then, in confining ourselves to inner perception, we limit our experience to temporal relations. What we confront, looking inward, is the temporal flow of consciousness. Space, from this perceptive, is grasped in terms of this flow. Thus, the rate at which an object seems to contract and become obscure is understood as the rate at which it departs from us. Similarly, relative distances are grasped in terms of the turning (the angular velocity) of different objects. For example, as I walk through a room, the different objects in it show different sides to me. They visually “turn” as I pass them, and I take those that turn faster as closer to me. I experience the same phenomenon when I look out of the window of a moving car, where some objects appear to fly by and others, which I take as further away, hardly seem to move. At the end of such analyses, we come to the reduction of the physical, external world, to the inner, temporal world of consciousness. In fact, strictly speaking, consciousness, when we consider it as the primary reality, is not spatially in anything. Husserl, for example, writes, that “the whole spatial-temporal world … is a being that consciousness posits in its experiences … but, beyond this, is a nothing [ein Nichts ist]” Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie, Erstes Buch, §49, ed. R. Schuhmann, (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1976), p. 106. Cited as Ideen I. Thus, “the world of the transcendent res [thing],” he writes, “is utterly dependent upon consciousness … a currently actual consciousness.” As for this consciousness, it “is absolute in the sense that, in principle, nulla ‘re’ indiget ad existendum [it needs no ‘thing’ to exist].” Ibid., §49, p. 104. Given this, we cannot say that consciousness is in anything. Considered as the realm of flowing experiences, it is what first defines what being “in” means. Both positions seem obviously one-sided. Husserl’s idealism seems to deny our embodied being-in-the-world, while the attempt to explain consciousness in terms of “the structure and dynamics of physical processes” seems to deny the world’s being in us—i.e., our being as its place of appearing. Both, thus, contradict our perceptual faith that we are both in the world and that this world is in us. Rather than providing an explanatory bridge, they seek to reduce one side to the other. This attempt is at the heart of the “hard problem” of relating the two. Take, for example, attempt to explain experience starting from the perspective of the world, the world that includes us as one of its objects. Engaging in it, we implicitly drain experienced time—the time that is extended by memories and anticipations—from the world. The point follows not just because science privileges external perception with its focus on the now—i.e., on what is simultaneously present. It is also a consequence of the mathematical formulae that physics employs. Such formulae can include time as a variable, but, as we noted, the relations that they specify are instantaneous. To take the simplest example, to find out how far one has traveled, one can employ the formula: distance equals velocity times time. Thus having traveled 100 kilometers per hour for one hour, the formula predicts that you will have traveled 100 kilometers. You can work this formula for any time you choose. Yet at whatever time you do choose, it presents you only with a snapshot. It gives you the way that the world will be outwardly intuited at that point. As Bergson noted over a century ago, employing such formulae, we are limited to simultaneities—the simultaneity, namely, of the hands (or number) on our temporal clock and the spatial position of the object. In his words, “all that mechanics [in calculating velocity] retains of time is simultaneity, all that it retains of motion itself — restricted, as it is, to a measurement of motion — is immobility.” His point is that the formula v =d/t does not express ongoing motion. When we apply it, this “algebraic equation always expresses something already done.” Time and Free Will, An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, trans. F. I. Pogson (New York: Macmillan, 1959), p. 119. The contemporary theoretical physicist Lee Smolin makes the same point when he argues we exclude time from the world when we record motion as positions at different times. In his words, “the process of recording a motion, which takes place in time, results in a record, which is frozen in time—a record that can be represented by a curve in the graph, which is also frozen in time.” Time Reborn, From the Crisis in Physics to the Future of the Universe (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013), p. 34. The result is what he calls “the spatialization of time.” Ibid., p. 35. This occurs when we “conflate the [mathematical] representation with the reality [of motion] and identify the graph of the records of the motion with the motion itself.” Ibid., p. 34. From a Kantian point of view, such spatialization of time follows of necessity from science’s focus on the external world, i.e., on its employment of external perception. It is easy to see how, in this context, the “hard problem” arises. In limiting us to simultaneities, science does not just drain time from the world, it also excludes consciousness. The point follows because consciousness consists not just of the now-point of a present perception. It also includes our memories, both short term and long term, of what we experience. Beyond this, it contains the anticipations by which we grasp the future. Without such memories and anticipations, we would be limited to the impressional contents of the present instant. We could not grasp any temporally extended event such as a bird flying through the garden. In a sense, our perceptual activity—if we could speak of such—would be like that of a CD player. The player is affected by the markings on the CD disk, but it neither remembers nor anticipates. We cannot call it self-aware since it lacks the memories or anticipations that would present itself to itself. In a world drained of time, then, consciousness has no place. When we take science’s mathematization of nature not simply as a description of nature, but as giving us its reality, such reality necessarily cannot include consciousness. The nature it studies neither remembers nor anticipates. It is not self-aware. As a consequence, the mind-body problem appears insolvable. By draining time from our understanding of nature, we have eliminated any possibility of an explanatory bridge. §3. The Mathematization of Nature Science has engaged in this mathematization at least since the time that its modern course was determined by Galileo’s and Descartes’ setting its foundations. For our purposes, a brief account of Descartes’ reasoning is sufficient to understand its consequences. Descartes, as is well known, begins with doubt. In particular, he emphasizes the fact that our senses are often deceptive. As he writes, it could be that “I was so constructed by nature that I should be mistaken even in the things which seem to me most true.” Meditations on First Philosophy, VI, trans. L. LaFleur (New York: Macmillan, 1990), p. 73. Thus, it seems to him “that in an object which is hot there is some quality similar to my idea of heat; that in a white, or black, or green object there is the same whiteness, or blackness, or greenness which I perceive; that in a bitter or sweet object there is the same taste or the same flavor, and so on for the other senses.” Ibid., p. 77. Yet none of this is, in fact, the case. Were he differently constructed, e.g., constructed after the pattern of some other animal, a different set of perceptions would occur. Given this, how can he know that he sensuously grasps the inherent qualities of objects? In fact, as he notes, his sensuous perceptions are not given to him to provide accurate information about the inherent qualities of objects. Their purpose is survival rather than truth. They are given, he writes, “only to indicate to my mind which objects are useful or harmful.” Ibid., p. 79. As such, the information they provide is strictly relative to his particular nature. They tell him what to seek or avoid in order to maintain his bodily integrity. The question Descartes faces is how to escape this relativity. His solution, broadly speaking, is that even though the sensuous qualities of nature, its colors, odors, sounds, etc., are subjectively relative, we can, by attending to the numerable aspects of what we perceive, reach a level that puts us in contact with the object itself. His claim, in other words, is that what is numerable transcends our particular perceptions and applies to the reality. Thus, to count only requires that I distinguish things. I may, for example, use echo location rather than sight to distinguish objects. But if I can distinguish them and am intellectually capable of counting, my embodiment does not relativize the result. The point is that such enumeration and, hence, the mathematization that this allows abstract from the relativity of embodiment. Moreover, mathematical relations have a clarity and distinctness that sensuous apprehension lacks. Such clarity and distinctness are, then, a sign that I have transcended my embodied situation and penetrated to the reality of things. As Descartes expresses this, what is numerable is “clear and distinct,” and “everything which we conceive very clearly and very distinctly is wholly true”—i.e., applies directly to the reality. Meditations on First Philosophy, III, p. 34; see also V, p. 62. Descartes’ focus on mathematical clarity and distinctness transforms the sensuous, appearing aspects of nature. It reduces them to their numerable aspects. Thus, to number color, we can translate it into the frequency and amplitude of light waves that transmit it. The same holds for sound, though here what we count are the pressure ridges in the air that reach our ears. Molecular counts will do for odors and tastes, while texture can be numbered in terms of differences in the positions of material particles and the elasticity (or lack thereof) that the particles manifest in their relations. The point of this is not the details of this account. They tend to change with each advance of science. Descartes’ founding genius lay rather in articulating a double intuition. He saw, first of all, that changes in the immediately sensible qualities of an object correspond to changes in the numerable qualities grasped through acts of our understanding. He then saw that this could be interpreted as a correspondence between perception and thing. In his words, “from the fact that I perceive different kinds of colors, odors, tastes, sounds, heat, hardness and so on, I very readily conclude that in the objects from which these various sense perceptions proceed there are some corresponding variations.” Ibid., VI, p. 77. To a change in sound, for example, there corresponds a change in the frequency of the sound wave. Of course, the change in the sound wave is actually quite different from the change in heard sound, which is experienced as a change in pitch. As Descartes admits, “these variations are not really similar to the perceptions.” Ibid. Yet even though what we experience is different from the reality, we can still get at it through a level of abstraction (that of mathematization) which captures the corresponding variations. Science, in its approach to nature, has largely followed Descartes’ path. It has progressively advanced in its mathematization of nature. With this, however, it has brought with it the mind-body problem implicit in such mathematization. On the one hand, the qualia—the experienced, sensuous qualities of reality, which form our conscious experience—have been banished from the reality of nature. At most, they can be characterized as epiphenomenal. For Frank Jackson, as we cited him, such representations have as much causal reality as a rainbow. “They do nothing, they explain nothing.” They are simply “a useless by-product” of our evolutionary development. “Epiphenomenal Qualia,” Philosophical Quarterly 32: 135, 134. On the other hand, such mathematization inherently fails to grasp the lived temporalization that characterizes consciousness, this being the temporalization that relates such qualitative contents. Thus, the project of constructing an “explanatory bridge” to consciousness on the basis of science, i.e., of proceeding from its account of reality to our consciousness, seems an impossible one. The same holds when we reverse our course and attempt to construct such a bridge on the basis of our conscious contents. Grasped through introspection, such contents, as we noted, do not have spatial relations. An anticipation doesn’t have a measurable size. A memory is not to the left or the right of another memory. Similarly, while an object I view has a given size, my perception of it does not. Even more telling is the way such contents function in our grasp of spatial-temporal objects. The latter appear perspectivally, which means that we can regard them from one side or the other. For example, as we turn an object in our hands, we experience a flow of perspectivally arranged appearances, which we take as appearances of this object. Such appearances, however, do not show themselves through further series of perspectival appearances. In Husserl’s words, “Das Ding nehmen wir dadurch wahr, daß es sich ‘abschattet’ nach allen gegebenenfalls ‘wirklich’ und eigentlich in die Wahrnehmung ‘fallenden’ Bestimmtheiten. Ein Erlebnis schattet sich nicht ab” (Ideen I, p. 88). If they did, we would enter an infinite regress of appearances showing themselves through appearances, which would, in turn, show themselves through appearances, and so on indefinitely. The contents of consciousness are, thus, essentially not spatial-temporal, physical objects. As such, they are inherently incapable of explaining the physical processes that characterize external reality. §4. The First and the Third Person Perspectives What we confront here are thus two, seemingly incompatible, outlooks. They can be broadly characterized as the first-person and the third-person approaches to reality. The first person view is that of experience, understood as essentially private and subjective. Its judgements may be characterized as “I see” claims; they are assertions regarding what we personally experience. The third person view moves beyond this to make claims about what “there is.” Its focus is on what is objectively there, what is available for everyone to experience. Science, with its focus on objectively measurable qualities, embraces this third person perspective. So does its philosophical analogue: analytic philosophy, which, by a large accepts, the claims of science. The “linguistic turn” that marks the analytical approach is understood as a turn from inner experiences, which are private and subjective, to their linguistic expressions which are public. Unlike the experiences that they report, such expressions are capable of being objectively analyzed. Through the use of logical symbolism, their relations can be mathematically represented. Spoken and writing expressions are thus “third person” objects in the sense that they are externally, rather than inwardly present. Linguistically, they are designated as “third-person” because they are available to the “he” and “she” of others (the grammatical third person). Analytical philosophy, in taking science as its paradigm, stands opposed to phenomenology. The latter begins with an epoché, which brackets the objective claims of science. It does so to focus on the evidence given by direct experience, evidence it takes as the ultimate justification of all objective claims. In defense of its position, it points out that every “he” or “she” is ultimately an “I.” There are no third-person perspectives without first-person ones. Given this, we must understand objective claims on the basis of the direct evidence that is genuinely foundational. To this, those who embrace the third-person perspective have a ready reply. They note that objective claims concern what is there, available for everyone to experience. As such they involve others and their experience. As such, the evidence required for objective claims necessarily includes a range of evidence that is not directly available to the phenomenological investigator. This non-availability is simply a function of the fact that the investigator cannot see through another subject’s eyes; he cannot directly intuit the experiences that form the basis of her assertions. Thus, the first person perspective cannot justify objective claims. It is trapped, epistemologically, in a solipsistic stance. Husserl, the founder of phenomenology, was aware of this difficulty. In his words, it is that phenomenology appears “incapable” of solving “the problems of the possibility of objective knowledge.” Because of this “it falls into transcendental solipsism.” Cartesianische Meditationen, ed. S. Strasser (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff , 1963), p. 174. Given this, we have to say that while every “he” or “she” is ultimately an “I,” unless we are to embrace solipsism, every first-person, every “I,” must acknowledge other I’s, other selves that for it are a “he” or a “she.” In their opposition, these differing standpoints recall Kant’s antinomies. They consist of opposing assertions such as “the world has a beginning in time” and “the world has existed forever.” Each of these apparently contradictory positions, Kant notes, maintains itself by refuting what it takes to be its only possible alternative. Yet, as Kant points out, the falsity of one of these opposed assertions does not imply the truth of the other if both are based on an inconsistent premise. In Kant’s words, “If two opposed judgments presuppose an inadmissible condition, then in spite of their contradiction (which is not actually a genuine one), both fall to the ground, inasmuch as the condition, under which alone each of these propositions is supposed to hold, itself falls.” “Kritik der reinen Vernunft,” B531, 3:345-6. For Kant, this condition was that the appearing object was the thing-in-itself. The same point, as we shall see, can be made of the opposing positions we have considered in this chapter. We began with the opposition between the view that takes me as a subject for the world and the view that I am but one of many objects in the world. We then considered the claim that the world is in in me and the opposing claim that I am in the world. We took up the opposition between an emphasis on the contents and processes of consciousness and the emphasis on “the structure and dynamics of physical processes,” and finally mentioned the opposing claims of the first- and third-person standpoints. They are all ways of expressing the same antinomy. In the following chapters, our goal will be to uncover the inadmissible premise that they all share.  Chapter 2 The Aristotelian Alternative §1. Knowing from a Materialistic Perspective In confronting an impasse, it is often helpful to consider alternate situations—i.e., contexts where the impasse does not occur. The antinomy confronting us concerns very basic conceptions, namely those of time, space, consciousness and the physical processes of nature. Is there a way to conceive these differently, this in such a way that aporia we have considered do not occur? Aristotle, in fact, offers a striking counter example to our modern conceptions, one that undermines the oppositions that we have considered. To grasp how very different his position is, let us consider our contemporary view on what it means to know something. In a certain sense this begins with our belief that the appearing world is within us. It understands this “within” as involving a representation or replica. Knowing is, accordingly, understood in terms of our producing an inner replica of objects that are out there in the world. In Descartes’ words, I believe that an “alien [or external] entity sends to me and imposes upon me its likeness.” Meditations on First Philosophy, III ed. cit., p. 37. As Descartes also expresses this, “… I believed that there were things outside of myself and different from my own being which, through the organs of my senses … sent into me their ideas or images and impressed upon me their resemblances (Meditations on First Philosophy, III, p. 38). I know the entity through this likeness. Now, there is an obvious difficulty with this view of knowing. It is: how could we ever know whether the image so produced is “like” the original? If knowing involves producing an inner replica, wouldn’t we have to compare the replica and original to see if they are similar. To do this, however, requires producing a new inner replica. But how would we know if this new replica is “like” what it represents. Its verification seems to require a third effort, which requires a fourth for its confirmation, and so on indefinitely. Wittgenstein describes a parallel situation of a person “looking for an object in a room. He opens a drawer and doesn’t see it there; then he closes it again, waits, and opens it once more to see if perhaps it isn’t there now, and keeps on like that” (Wittgenstein, On Certainty, §315, trans. D. Paul and G.E.M. Anscombe, New York, 1972, p. 40). This attitude makes sense if each look can only be verified by the next. Descartes, himself, only mentions this image and original relation in order to dismiss it. See ibid. Considered in itself, the original in consists of mathematically describable, material processes, which are, by nature, quite “unlike” our perceptual images. If, however, the world consists of such processes and we are in the world, don’t we have to understand our images in these terms? With this, a line of questions arise: Are our perceptual images the electric currents coursing through our synapses? Are they also the chemical processes which accompany these? Should we look to the changing molecular arrangements which occur during perceptual activity. Once we pursue this line of thought, we face the question of the sense in which the perceptual image could be “like” the original. The original, we assume, is a collection of mathematically describable space-filling processes, some of which set up parallel processes by impinging on our own sensory organs. Now, the two sets of processes (those of the original and its mental replica) are linked through the law of causality. This states that caused events are determined by the material make-up of the interacting bodies and the spatial-temporal relations existing between them. A change in any one of these changes the event. If the event is the production of the replica of the object, then the law makes this relative to (among other factors) the particular material structure of the perceiving organism. Different organisms—say, a cat, a parrot, and a man—have different structures and, hence, different replicas of the original within their heads. All this throws doubt on the notion of perceptual knowledge as a correspondence between the perceptual image and its intended object, a correspondence that takes the object as a standard for the image. If causality is the bridge between the object and ourselves, then as long as perception requires an embodied perceiver, the object that is grasped will be relative to the structure of this embodiment. As post-Darwinian thinkers were to realize, the fact that this structure is the result of an evolutionary line of development, one whose purpose was survival rather than epistemological correctness, also places limits on our understanding of the world. According to this view, each species (man included) will grasp the world in the way which allows it a particular advantage in its struggle for survival. The result is that there are as many appearing worlds as there are ecological niches. As for the world “in itself” which supposedly contains all of these, this can be posited, not as an empirical (observed) reality, but only as a kind of logical necessity. But, even this becomes questionable once we say that logic itself is a biologically grounded process. As Husserl asks in considering the implications of the theory of evolution: “Do not the logical forms and laws express a contingent characteristic of the human species, a characteristic which could be different and, in the course of its future development, will probably be different?” (Die Idee der Phänomenologie, ed. W. Biemal, The Hague: Marinus Nijhoff, 1973, p. 21). Gunther Stent raises the same issues in his article, “Limits to the Scientific Understanding of Man,” Science, CLXXXVII (1974), 1054. If it is, then it seems that “even logic alters with the structure of the brain.” Logische Untersuchungen, 3 vols. (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1968) 1:147, fn. 1. Given the affinity between logic and mathematics, the same argument can made in its regard. With this, Descartes confidence that mathematics allows us to abstract from the relativity of embodiment is itself undermined. Descartes confidence in mathematics, his belief in the universality of its application is apparent in analytical geometry. The Cartesian grid with its associated time line allows us to identify each object with a mathematical set of coordinates giving its position and time. As such, it opens the way to the mathematical description of nature. It also reveals the modern classical conceptions of space and time. The grid, in the universality of its applicability, assumes that nothing can exist without being in space and time. Even when nothing is depicted on it, the grid remains, signifying that space and time can continue even while the things within them come and go. If we accept this, then space and time become grounding conditions of the objects within them. The mathematical account of something according to its spatial-temporal relations becomes not just a description but also an explanation of its very being. It claims to explain why it is as it is. If we accept this, then we have to say that in describing perceptual images, we must grant them their own reality, one depictable on the grid. In fact, we have to assert both the image and the original take up space and have their positions in time, both having an equal claim to reality. At this point, if we claim that we predicate an idea in our minds of some external reality, we are actually claiming to predicate one distinct reality of another. Assertions, for example, that the “ball” is “red,” relate two realities §2. Aristotle’s Conception of Space and Time From an Aristotelian perspective, this claim is absurd. Predication is an activity which attributes what cannot exist by itself to what can. The crucial distinction is between a subject of predication (the reality or entity itself) and the attributes which form our description of the reality. To call such attributes “realities in a primary sense” (the sense of being able to exist independently) is simply to commit a category mistake. It is to confuse an attribute such as the place, time, position, quantity or quality of a reality with the reality itself. See Categories, 1b 25-2a 15. The reality can, by changing, take on different attributes. It thus can continue to be while its former attributes lose their existence as its descriptions. With this, we already have the basis for Aristotle’s alternative conceptions of space and time. Rather than being primary realities, they are regarded as non-independent attributes of them. To understand this, let us first consider his account of space. As an attribute of a body, space, for him, is actually “place.” This signifies that a place without a body, an empty space or “void,” is impossible. Aristotle’s Physics, 213b 31-33, trans. Richard Hope, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1961, p.. 69 Considered in itself, it is a kind of “nonbeing or privation.” One can no more positively characterize it than one can find “differences in nothing.” Ibid., 215a, 10-11. p. 72 A place with a body does exist, but only as an attribute. Aristotle, in trying to determine what sort of an attribute it is, notes that place can in no sense be considered as a cause of an entity. It answers to none of the four causes or reasons why a thing behaves as it does. It is not a body’s matter; it is not its form (or intelligible structure); neither is it the goal of its development nor any particular agent causing it to move. Not being a cause, it is, in fact, dependent upon the body. Such dependence signifies that empty space cannot exist. Now, according to Aristotle, the body itself is what first spatializes—causes us to apply spatial categories. The body does this through its motion. In Aristotle’s words, “we must keep in mind that, but for local motion, there would be no place as a subject matter of investigation.” Ibid., 211a 13, p. 64. This can be illustrated in terms of Aristotle’s definition of place as “the first unmoved boundary of what surrounds [the entity].” Ibid., 212a 20, p. 68. Place answers to the question, “where?” My answer to the question of where I am depends upon my motion. If I am seated writing at my desk, I am in my chair. If I get up and walk about my office, its walls are now my first unmoved boundary. If I now pace the hallway, perhaps visiting other offices on the floor, the appropriate answer to the question “where” is “on the fifth floor.” If I take the elevator and visit other floors, my “where” is the building itself. Similarly, during the day, I am at the university; during the week, I am in this university town; during the month, I am in this region, and so on. The point of this is that the entity itself determines through its motion its first unmoving boundary and, hence, what constitutes the limits of its environment. Only if we ignore the issue of motion can we define “place” as the interface between the body and what immediately surrounds it. Once we do consider motion, then, as Aristotle notes, this definition has to be modified. We have to say that “place is receptacle which cannot be transported” (Aristotle’s Physics, 212a 15, p. 65). Thus, the place of a motionless boat is given by the surrounding water, but once we consider the boat as moving down the river, “it is the whole river which, being motionless as a whole, functions as a place.” (ibid., 212a 19, p. 66). As the example of the boat suggests, the place of a body need not be continuous with the body itself. In doing so, it manifests itself. It shows “where” it is and has been. Aristotle applies the same sort of reasoning to his account of time. Like place, it cannot be considered apart from the moving body. In itself, it is nothing at all. In Aristotle’s words, a stretch of it “consists in non-beings” since it “comprises the past, which no longer is, and the future, which is not yet.” Aristotle’s Physics, 218a 2, p. 77. If we ask why neither the past nor the future are, we come to the basis of this assertion. Neither the past nor the future are in the strict sense present. They are elapsed or anticipated temporal presence. To become past is to depart from this presence, while to be future is not yet to be present. The premise, then, is that being is correlated to temporal presence. If we are to affirm an entity’s actual existence, it must be capable of sharing a now with us. In this now, it must manifest itself, i.e., appear and show itself as it is. The premise has been widely held. Augustine, for example, remarks with regard to predicting the future, “it is only possible to see something which exists; and whatever exists is not future but present” (Confessions, XI, §18, trans. R.S. Pine-Coffin, London 1961, p. 268). According to Heidegger, “the ancient interpretation of the being of entities” is such that an “entity is grasped in its being as presence, i.e., it is understood in terms of a definite temporal mode, the present” (Sein und Zeit, Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1967, p. 25). Whether or not this is actually the case, it is interesting to note that the this interpretation does characterize Husserl’s understanding. As he expresses it in a pair of late manuscripts: “Temporalization, this is the constitution of existents in their temporal modalities. An existent: a present existent with the past of the same existent, with the future coming to be of the same existent. In an original sense, existent = original, concrete presence. It is persisting presence which ‘includes’, as non-independent components in the stream of presences, both past and future” (Ms. C 13, March 1934, Späte Texte über Zeitkonstitution (1929–1934), Die C- Manuskripte, ed. Dieter Lohmar. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, p. 274). In other words, “Every concrete individual persists in time and is what it is because constantly becoming, it passes from presence to presence” (Ms. E III 2, p. 2, 1934, unpublished manuscript). As we note in our text, to say that being requires temporal presence is not the same as asserting that being is such presence. The latter is a modern view. Admitting that being must be capable of temporal presence, two different paths seem open to us. Either we can assert that being is an ultimate ground or we can ask after the ground of being in the sense of seeking the ground of this presence. The second alternative takes time as the ground of being insofar as it sees time in its successive nowness as making being temporally present. This dependence of being on time is implicit in the Cartesian grid. If to be requires being locatable on the grid, then time along with space is a grounding condition of being. The Aristotelian alternative reverses this, asserting that the presence of time requires the presence of being. In this view, it is not the case that temporality grounds being, but rather that being (in its capacity for presence, i.e., for manifesting itself) grounds time. The entity itself is at the origin of the timing or temporalization of its environment. The two positions can be distinguished by the difference senses they give to the word “presence.” In the first alternative, time can ground being only if being is reduced to presence and only if the sense of the latter is limited to temporal presence, i.e., to nowness. For such a position, the being of an entity is its nowness. For Aristotle, as we shall see, being is understood as the functioning, the actualization (ejnevrgeia) which results in the entity’s presence to its environment. The presence of an entity is the totality of its effects, one of which is the present, i.e., temporal presence taken as nowness. Since such presence is only one effect of being, one which Aristotle speculates, requires the presence of soul to occur, it cannot logically be equated with being. See Physics, 223a 15-17. To make them equivalent is to embrace the modern position which, in equating nowness, presence and being, allows us to say that time, in making an entity now, makes this entity be. For time to do this, it must be composed of nows. In the modern view it is. For Aristotle, however, “the present is not a part of time; for “a part is a measure of the whole, whereas the present is not such a measure.” As he also puts this: “time does not seem to be composed of ‘nows.’” Physics, 218a 7-8, p. 78. The necessity for this is more than the logical one that no number of atomic (partless) nows can be summed up to produce an extended temporal period. It follows from the fact that the presence that grounds time cannot be a part of time. If it were a part of time, then it would, itself, require the same ground or reason for its being that time does. Thus, to function as a ground, this presence—which concretely is the presence of the entity to us—must be prior to time. In other words, it is because being (in its presence to a soul) grounds time, that “the present is not part of time.” Failure to grasp this point makes Aristotle’s derivation of time circular. If the present is part of time then to use it to derive time from motion by noting the different presents (nows) associated with the different positions of the moving body is to derive time from itself. Bostock seems to assume this in his criticism of Aristotle’s derivation. See David Bostock, “Aristotle’s Account of Time,” Phronesis, Vol. 25 (1980), 151. Sarah Waterlow, by contrast, notes that the present, as grounding the unity of a temporal stretch, “cannot itself be represented as a temporal stretch,” i.e., as a part of time. (“Aristotle’s Now,” The Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 34, No. 135, April 1984 , 127). She bases this, however, simply on the present’s function as a reference point for the moments of the stretch rather than on the relation of presence and being (see ibid., p. 124). Our own position comes close to that of Paul Conen who asserts that the “substrate” of the on-going present (of “the dynamically grasped now”) is the entity which is moved. This implies that this now, which Conen says is “not in time,” but rather “is time,” is the entity’s attribute. See Paul Conen, Die Zeittheorie des Aristoteles, Munich, 1964, pp. 78-84, 167. Our own view, which sees the now as the presence of the substrate (i.e., of the entity itself), may be contrasted with Brann’s position. She asserts that “the now” which “hovers, as it were, over the moving thing ... must be the presentness of the perception of the moving thing” (“Against Time,” St. John’s Review, Vol. 34, no. 3 (Summer 1983), p. 75). We are saying that it is the presentness, not of the perception of the thing, but of the thing to perception. The now is, in other words, an attribute not primarily of our perception but of the thing perceived. As in the case of place, such grounding occurs through motion. It is not being’s presence pure and simple which occasions time but rather the change of its presence. The temporal result of an unchanging presence is an unchanging present. But as Aristotle observes, “there would be no time” if there were “only a single, self-identical present.” Physics, 218b 28, p. 79. In other words, “when we have no sense of change, ... we have no sense of the passing of time.” Ibid, 218b, 24 The entity, then, grounds time through the change of its presence. This does not mean that this presence manifests a sheer otherness. It combines both identity and difference. The identity comes from the identity of the entity whose presence it is. The difference stems from the differences created by the entity’s movement. As Aristotle writes: “The moving body ... is the same ..., but the moving body differs in the account which may be given of it.” In particular, it differs by being in different places “and the present (tò νῦν) corresponds to it as time corresponds to the movement.” Physics, 219b 20-23, p. 81. The assertion, here, is that the present or now which “is not a part of time,” but rather its ground, is the presence of the body. It “corresponds” to the body by virtue of being part of the body’s continuous self-manifestation. The continuity of time depends upon this continuity, this lack of any gaps in the body’s presence. The same point can be made, mutatis mutandis, about the continuity of motion. As Aristotle writes in On Generation and Corruption, motion is not continuous “because that in which the motion occurs is continuous,” but rather “because that which is moved is continuous. For how can the quality be continuous except in virtue of the continuity of the thing to which it belongs?” (On Generation and Corruption, trans. Harold Joachim. In The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon. New York: Random House 337a 27-29, p. 528). Similarly, time’s flowing corresponds to the body’s movement insofar as it manifests the body’s shifting relation to its environment. Thus, “it is by reference to the moving body that we recognize what comes before and after in the movement.” Physics, 219b 24, p. 81. We say, “before, the body was here, afterward it was there.” If, on reflection, we distinguish the before from the after, then the present appears as a division between the two: it is the presence of the body after it left one place and before it went to another. With motion comes the shift of the before and the after and, with this, the appearance of the flowing present or now. This shifting center of the temporal environment is simply a dimension (an attribute, an aspect) of the presence of the body as the shifting center of its environment. As such, the present appears as a kind of stationary streaming. We experience it as a flow, that is, as a constant succession of the “before and after.” Yet we also have to say that the present in which we experience this streaming is itself stationary and remaining. It is always now for us. The continuity of this now is the continuity of the presence of the entity. We experience the now as long as we are aware of being or, what is the same, as long as an entity’s presence is manifested to us. §3. The Subject-Object Relation Aristotle’s account of space and time implies the relativization of both. They are not independent realities, but simply attributes. They are the effects of an entity’s presence on us—effects which allow us attribute a “where” and a “when” to a being. This does not mean that they are subjective in any Kantian sense. They are not inherent apriori conditions for appearing. Rather, they describe on our encounters with external realities. Neither objective nor subjective, space and time exists in and through such encounters. If we take them as the framework for appearing, we have to say that such appearing occurs in a kind of mutual realization. This is the realization both of the entity’s capability to be present and of our ability to register such presence. Appearing as such demands both and is not reducible to either. The same can be said of the subject-object relation. There is a mutual realization involving both sides of this relation. Thus, Aristotle asserts that “before it thinks,” that is, before it grasps and apprehends an object, “mind has no actual existence (energeia).” De Anima, III, iv, 429a 24, all translations from this text are my own. It is, in other words, “potentially identical with the objects of its thought, but is actually nothing until it thinks.” Ibid., 429b 31. This implies that apart from an entity’s presence, mind ceases. Separated from the presence of being, mind (νοῦς), which is the perceiving (νοεῖν) of being, collapses. When it is perceiving, mind (understood as such perceiving) is identical with its object . Ibid., 430a 20 The removal of the object is the removal of its content. It leaves it in a state where it has “no actual existence.” Seth Bernadete writes in this regard: “Mind is that part of nature which has no one nature. It is nothing but possible. It is neither a being in itself nor any of the beings it thinks before it thinks them. It is the ‘so called mind of soul.’ It vanishes everywhere when it is not at work” (“Aristotle De Anima III, 305,” The Review of Metaphysics, Vol. XXVIII, no. 4, June 1975, p. 615). Such statements undercut any attempt to define subjects and objects in terms of independent positions on the Cartesian grid. The subject, here, only exists in the presence of the object. More precisely, in mind’s identity with the being of its object, its “actual existence” is just the presence—i.e., the manifestation of the object—to it. When Aristotle says that before it thinks, mind has no “actual existence,” he is literally asserting that it has no existence “in the at workness (energeia) of beings.” According to Aristotle, a being is actual, is “at work,” through the operation (or functioning) of its powers. See Metaphysics, 1045a 24, 1045b 19-20. In the case of subjects and objects, this functionings involves a mutual dependence. An object cannot function as an appearing object without a perceiving subject functioning as perceiving. Each determines the other. Thus, when the object is a moving body, subjective being involves temporality. It manifests the character of persisting presence—an ongoing nowness—within a shifting environment of the before and after. Given, as Kant writes, that “time ... is the formal condition of inner sense” and hence that it is in time that our experiences “must all be ordered, connected, and brought into relation,” from a modern, post Kantian perspective, this grounding of the temporality of the subject is one with the subject’s manifesting itself as a subject (Kritik der reinen Vernunft,” 1st ed., A99, Kants gesammelte Schriften, ed. Königliche Preussische Akademie der Wissenschaften. Berlin: George Reiner, 1955, 4:77.). From an Aristotelian perspective there is, however, a non-temporal aspect to subjective existence. To attempt to attribute this presence to either pole of the subject-object relation is to miss the essential nature of the relation. Its character is such that it cuts off from the start the fruitless dialectic of original and replica with which we began. §4. Space and Time as Expressing Potentiality Aristotle makes the same claim with regard to sensuous perception. For Aristotle, “the actualization (energeia) of the sensible object” is “in the sensing subject.” De Anima, III, 2, 426a10. The latter is where the object is actualized as sensible. Its actualization as sensible is “one and the same” with the actualization of such perception. Ibid., 425 b27. As Deborah Modrak notes, the idea of this unity of functioning can be traced back to Plato. “In the Theatetus (156 d - e), Plato asserts that the eye becomes an actually ‘seeing eye’ in one and the same process in which the thing seen (the ‘other parent of the color’) becomes ‘a white thing’” (Aristotle, The Power of Perception, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987, p. 30). Perceiving and perceived here are both aspects of the same actualization. Here, of course, it is natural to ask: what happens to the sensible object when it is not perceived? Does its being as a sensible object cease entirely? Does it cease even being something that can be perceived? To avoid this last assumption, Aristotle relies on a distinction in the notion of “to be.” This is that “being ... may be actual or potential. Physics, 200b 26-27, p. 41. This means that a sensible object, in the absence of a perceiver, can continue to be in the sense that it continues to be capable of being perceived. Thus, although the actualization of the perceived and its perception simultaneously arise and cease, “it is not necessary to assert this of their potentialities.” De Anima, 426a 20. The sensible object still “is” apart from its being sensed insofar as it can be sensed. Let us relate this to our point that entities, rather than being a result of their spatial temporal determinations, are what first determine space and time. Both space and time, we said, result from motion. Understood as an aspect of the entity’s self-manifestation, space can be seen as a system (or “place”) of those places that an entity occupies in its motion. Similarly, time can be taken as the temporal dimension of this motion as it manifests itself to us. It is our registering the changes in the entity’s presence. Space and time are thus actualized by the entity’s motion and its impact on ourselves. Before such motion, they exist only potentially. More precisely, they exist potentially as measures for this motion. When the entity moves, they become actual measurements indicating “how far” and “how long” the observed movement is. The radicalness of Aristotle’s position is indicate when we ask: Where are space and time? Are they just in our heads or in the world that includes us? If they are in our heads, this would imply that the world, whose appearance they frame, is in us. If they are in the world, then we are in this appearing world. For Aristotle, however, neither alternative is valid. Their actualization as the framework for appearing is a single one including both ourselves as perceivers and the world as perceptible. There is, here, but a single actualization. §5. Modern vs. Aristotelian Science In considering this Aristotelian alternative, a number of questions arise. They concern the possibility of applying this ancient position to the modern problem of the mind’s relation to the body. In particular, the issue is its relation to physical processes that science uncovers in investigating the brain’s functioning. Aristotle, it can be objected, had no conception of such processes. Indeed, the science that investigates them, with its focus on material causality, was foreign to him. Given this, how useful is his position in constructing an explanatory bridge between mind and body as science understands these concepts? Instead of addressing this problem, have we not simply moved to a context where the problem disappears? To give full weight to this objection, we must briefly consider Aristotle’s conception of “nature.” Modern science understands nature as ruled by causal relations between different entities. By contrast, Aristotle defined “natural” entities as those beings that were capable of self-movement. To have a nature (physis), for him, is to have an inherent “beginning” or source “of movement or rest.” Physics, 192b 12, p., 23. This, as Heidegger remarked, involves manifestation. In his words, “What does the word physis denote? It denotes self-blossoming emergence (e.g., the blossoming of a rose), opening up, unfolding, that which manifests itself in such unfolding and perseveres and endures in it.” An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Ralph Manheim, New Haven, 1975, p. 14. It is unfortunate that when he comes to describe Aristotle’s notion of time, he fails to avail himself of this insight. See Sein und Zeit, §81, pp. 421-22, Donald Lewis gives a sympathetic account of Heidegger’s position in his article, “Aristotle’s Theory of Time: Destructive Ontology from Heideggerian Principles,” Kinesis, vol. 2 (Spring 1970), pp. 81-92. Here, the ultimate cause of spatialization is the movement of such emergence. “Nature,” physis, has the sense of growing, developing and unfolding so as to manifest an entity. The planted acorn, for example, grows and develops so as to manifest the goal of this process: the fully formed tree. This last, as determining the pattern and direction of growth, sets the parameters of the tree’s environment. As occurring in and through this process, spatialization can be defined as a dimension of the entity’s self-revelation, its self-manifestation through time. The tree’s growth and development determines “place” as the unmoving boundary of the tree. The same can be said of the Aristotelian conception of time. It, too, is part of the self-manifestation of natural entities. For a natural entity, its ability to move on its own manifests itself in the time that measures such motion. The contrast here is with things made by art, things that we produce. According to Aristotle, things “not formed by nature”—such as human artifacts—“are not primary beings.” Metaphysics, 1043b 23, trans. Richard Hope (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press), p. 174. Unlike living things, they have no inherent principle of motion, their manifestation depends upon us and how we construct them. Our conceptions determine their shape and function. For Aristotle, in employing such conceptions, we mimic nature. Just as our idea of what we want to make determines our actions in making it, so does the plant’s idea or form (eidos) determine its development. The distinction is that while such ideas are external in the case of human artifacts (being in the mind of the maker), they are inherent in natural or primary beings. Determining the pattern of their growth, they function as their inherent principle of movement. In Aristotle’s language, they act as the plant’s formal cause. They in-form its growth. They are also, however, the plant’s final cause. They specify the goal of the growth, i.e., that which it will become when its growth is complete. Because of this, the temporality of nature is not that of past determining the present which determines the future. Nature, viewed in an Aristotelian manner, may be symbolically regarded by taking this line of determination and bending it in a circle. The leading element here is the future. It determines the past in its determination of the present. As determinative, the future stands as a goal, as a “final cause” of the natural process. The goal makes the past into a resource, into a “material” as it were, for the process of its own realization. The goal thus determines the past in the latter’s determination of the present by structuring it as a potential for some particular realization. What is here indicated can be illustrated in a number of ways—all of which are slightly misleading. Suppose, for example, that a woman decided to become a marathon runner. Her being as an actual runner is not a present reality. Neither is it past. It “exists” as a future whose determining presence is that of a goal. How long she has to train is determined by the resources she brings to the goal—i.e., how long she has trained in the immediate past. Thus, as the circle indicates, determination by the future is not absolute but occurs through the past. The determining presence of the past is that of the materials or resources it presents us to accomplish the goal. It is, of course, the goal which allows us to see such materials as materials for some purpose. The goal is what turns the past into a potential to be actualized by our on-going, present activity. To take another example, it is the goal of building which first makes timber into building material. Similarly the potential of stone to be a statue as opposed to a shelter demands the entertaining of a corresponding goal. What makes these examples somewhat misleading is that they are all from “art.” They are taken from that type of activity where humans imitates nature. This imitation is an imposition of goals whereby they makes nature participate in their future. Quite apart from us, natural entities have their own goals. Different plants, for example, turn earth, sunlight, water as well as a host of other factors into materials for their own particular ends. What is common to such processes is their teleological ordering. For Aristotle, such teleology stems from his belief that the being-at-work of the form is the ultimate causal factor. In natural processes, this being-at-work stands both as the goal and the cause of the entity’s realization. As we said, the goal is also the formal cause, that is, the form acting as an agent. The form informs the matter, directing its movement towards realizing the goal. The action of the form gives us the movement of nature, which time mirrors in its passage from the future through the past to the present. To speak of determination by the goal, we must, of course, accept our earlier assertion that it is not time that makes being “be” but rather the reverse. Being, understood as the being-at-work of the form, is the ground of the temporality of nature. This point can be put in terms of Aristotle’s doctrine that actuality is prior to potentiality. This priority of actuality is the priority of functioning over the capacity to function. What actually functions is the form (eidos) in its action of informing matter. Viewed teleologically, its functioning is that of the process’ final cause. As Aristotle expresses this relationship: “... everything that comes to be moves towards its source, that is, towards its goal; for its wherefore [final cause] is its source. Its coming into being is directed by the end which is the actuality, and it is thanks to the end that potentiality is possessed.” Metaphysics 1050a 8-10, my translation.. Thus, for Aristotle, the end directs coming into being. It is responsible for the motion of nature, the temporal reflection of such action being time grasped as a teleological flow. Without this end or, more precisely, without its functioning as a formal cause, there would be no natural coming into being and, hence, there would be no potentiality as a category of reality. Thus, what is potential can “be” without being presently actualized, but not without that which directs its coming into being. This implies, as Brann notes, “that there is no mechanical causation, which is a causation where each momentary state fully determines the next” (Against Time,” St. John’s Review, 1983, vol. 34, no. 3, p. 75). It is thus “thanks to the end that potentiality is possessed.” In other words, the end acts as a final cause determining coming into being; and as such, it makes potentiality possible. Let us relate this to our point that entities, rather than being a result of their spatial temporal determinations, are what first determine space and time. Both space and time, we said, result from motion. In nature their basis consists of those entities that have within them a beginning or source of the motion by which they manifest themselves. Understood as an aspect of the entity’s self-manifestation, space can be seen as a system (or “place”) of those places that an entity occupies as it unfolds itself under the direction of this source. Similarly, time can be taken as a parallel aspect. It is the temporal dimension of this unfolding as it manifests itself to us. It is our registering the changes in the entity’s presence. The determination of this motion by the end of this process is, then, the determination of the space and time through which such manifestation occurs. Rather than being independent realities, space and time exist “for the sake of” such manifestation. They are, as it were, its material or medium. We essentially say the same thing when we say that they exist “thanks to the end.” They are aspects of the potentiality which the end, in determining coming into being, makes possible. As teleologically determined, they are potentiality as a mode of presence. This account of Aristotle’s account of nature shows how foreign it is to our modern conception. Descartes expresses the latter in asserting, “all causes that we are accustomed to call final are useless” in investigating nature. Descartes Meditations on First Philosophy, p. 53. Modern science, following Descartes, has no use for teleology. Indeed, its progress was initiated when it abandoned the Aristotelian framework. Are we again to take this up and assert, for example, that a stone falls to the earth because this is its natural goal? Moreover, Aristotle does not “solve” but the mind-body problem, but rather avoids it entirely. To appeal to him is not to construct an “explanatory bridge,” but rather to show that no bridge is needed. It is the cut the ground away from this problem. In response, it must be said that this objection would be more telling if modern science could offer its own explanatory bridge. Yet as the first chapter pointed out, its very premises seem to rule out any possible solution. Thus, on the one hand we have a context where the problem, as stated in modern scientific terms, becomes insolvable. On the other hand, there is the Aristotelian context where it does not occur. While this context is underpinned by definite metaphysical assumptions, it does, it should be emphasized, have an empirical, descriptive basis. In describing our grasp of place and time, Aristotle gives a convincing phenomenological account. As the illustration of where the teacher is indicates, e.g., in the room, in the building, in the town, etc., we do take the place of something as its first unmoving boundary. Similarly, our sense of time depends on our experiencing motion. A modern might grant this, but reply that there is no such descriptive basis for teleology in nature. Except for certain cases, such as the least action principle, teleology is not observed in inanimate, material processes. To this, it could be said that to universalize such processes is to assert that they hold for being as such. This, however, involves metaphysical assumptions at least as grave as those found in Aristotle. The chief of these is the assumption that animate existence is not definitionally distinct from inanimate existence. Hence, the definition of the latter includes the former. Against this stands the evidence of life. Teleology is universally present in its processes. Thus, the internal principle that directs an organisms growth and development is found in its DNA. This final cause is also, in Aristotelian terms, the organism’s formal cause. In does not just specify the form or shape it will assume, it also acts to inform its development. Final causality is also evident in our daily lives, where we act to achieve our goals, the latter determining our actions. As we shall see perception and consciousness are also describable in teleological terms. Such examples indicate that the context in which context in which consciousness is to be understood is that of life. It involves the motion that is characteristic of it. We can further specify this context by turning to Descartes’ introduction of the mind-body problem. He initiates it by defining mind and body in definitionally distinct terms. Mind is non-extended and body is extended. While this allows him to say that “I am entirely and truly distinct from my body,” he leaves us with the problem of their interaction. In the Cartesian account of nature, the non-extended cannot act on the extended as there is no point of contact that would allow it to do so. For Aristotle, however, the soul is not definitionally distinct from the body. It is the living body’s informing form. In making it alive, it is its actuality. De Anima, 412a 19-22. The relation of the two is, thus, such that the soul’s definition includes its embodiment. Embodiment is a constituent part of the form of the soul, much like letters are a constituent part of the idea of syllables. Just as any account of syllables also takes account of the letters, so any account of the soul must include its embodiment. On this point see, David Charles, The Undivided Self: Aristotle and the ‘Mind-Body Problem’ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), p. 57. Given this, the context in which consciousness is to be understood is not just life, it is life as embodied. This is a context that we shall explore when we speak of the spatial-temporal nature of the soul or self.  Chapter 3 The “I” of Consciousness §1. Difficulties with the Concept of the Ego It is a curious fact that often in the discussions of the mind-body body problem references are made to mind or consciousness but not to the ego or self that is the subject of consciousness. How are we, in fact, to understand the “I” or ego? The difficulty in doing so was pointed out by Hume. On the one hand, we have no doubt that the “I” exists. In Hume’s words, “we feel [the self’s] existence and its continuance in existence; and are certain, beyond the evidence of a demonstration, both of its perfect identity and simplicity.” On the other hand, it is hard to find any empirical basis for this view. Hume asks, “from what impression could this idea be derived?” “[T]here is,” he answers, “no impression constant and invariable” that we can point to. In fact, the “self or person is not any one impression.” A Treatise of Human Nature, Bk. 1, Part IV, sect. 6, ed. L.A. Selbey-Bigge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), p. 251. When we look inward, we find only a multitude of changing impressions. Given this, the notion of the self as a perfect self-identity, must be a “fiction.” Ibid., p. 252. If we look behind this this fiction, we can say that the mind is a kind of theater scene—a place, as it were, for the shifting contents. In Hume’s words, “the mind is a kind of theater, where several perceptions successively make their appearance; pass, re-pass, glide away, and mingle in an infinite variety of postures and situations.” Hume immediately corrects any impression that the notion of a theater has any ontological content. He writes: “The comparison of the theater must not mislead us. They are the successive perceptions only, that constitute the mind” (A Treatise of Human Nature, Bk. 1, Part IV, sect. 6, p. 253). This means that there is no existence of a self or subject other than that of a “bundle or collection of different perceptions” (ibid., p. 252). If it is, then “who” is conscious, who is doing the thinking when we say, “I think that …”? William James, considering the same evidence, responds “the thoughts themselves are the thinkers.” Psychology, Briefer Course (Cleveland: The World Publishing Company, 1948), p. 216. Aside from such empirical difficulties in finding the “I” of the “I think,” there is the logical one regarding the fact that while objects appear, the subject is that to whom objects appear. Objects—as the German word, Gegenstand, indicates—stand against us. We are the subjects against which they stand. Thus, rather than being some objective, lasting content of consciousness, the self seems to be the “place” where contents appear. As such a “place,” however, its only qualitative content is the flow of such contents. In saying “I,” we do not identify with this flow. The claim of the “I” is to be identical in the changing scene of our consciousness. As Husserl puts this, we take it as “something absolutely identical in all actual and possible changes of experiences.” As identical, he adds, “it cannot in any sense be taken as an immanent [reelles] component or moment of the experiences.” Ideen I, p. 123. It must, in fact, transcend these; in Husserl's words, it must be “a transcendence in immanence.” “Verbleibt uns als Residuum der phänomenologischen Ausschaltung der Welt und der ihr zugehörigen empirischen Subjektivität ein reines Ich (und dann für jeden Erlebnisstrom ein prinzipiell verschiedenes), dann bietet sich mit ihm eine eigenartige—nicht konstituierte—Transzendenz, eine Transzendenz in der Immanenz dar” (Ideen I, p. 124). The problem, however, lies in defining this transcendence—that is, giving it a positive character. According to Husserl, the ego or self “gives up all content” in the change of experiences. Ms. E III 2, Sept., 1921, p. 18. The content with which we might identify it changes, but it remains. This means that it “does not possess a proper general character with a material content.” Ibid. But, in the absence of such content, how can we know or describe it? In fact, Husserl calls the ego that stands over against objects—i.e., exist as their counterpart—"anonymous.” In Husserl’s words, “the ego which stands over against (gegenüber) everything is anonymous. It is not its own counterpart, as the house is my counterpart. And yet I can turn my attention to myself. But then this counterpart in which the ego comes forward along with everything which was its counterpart is again split. The ego which comes forward as a counterpart and its counterpart [e.g., the house it was perceiving] are both counterparts to me. Forthwith, I—the subject of this new counterpart —am anonymous” (Ms. C 2 I, Aug. 1931, Späte Texte über Zeitkonstitution (1929-1934), Die C-Manuskripte, ed. Dieter Lohmar, Dordrecht: Springer Verlag p. 2. All translations from this work are my own. The suspicion thus arises that while we may claim that we know that the self is, aside from the bare fact of existence, we cannot say what it is. §2. The Formal Character of the Ego. One solution to this dilemma is see the ego as a form of consciousness—a form that is embedded in the very flow consciousness. This is the solution that Husserl embraces. Having asserted that the ego “gives up all content,” he adds that it is “related to a stream of experiences, in relation to which it is also dependent.” Ms. E III 2, Sept., 1921, p. 18. Although it “does not possess a proper general character with a material content,” Ibid. it depends on the stream by being its form. In Husserl’s words, regarded in itself, the ego is only “an empty form.” Concretely, however, it is a form “that is ‘individualized’ through the stream: this, in the sense of its uniqueness.” Ibid. James Edie sums up nicely this view of the ego when he writes that it is “an impersonal, necessary, universal, eidetic structure,” one that, “is lived in and through each unique consciousness, each ego-life.” “The Question of the Transcendental Ego: Sartre’s Critique of Husserl,” Husserl in his Contemporary Radiance: Proceedings of the 24th Annual Meeting of the Husserl Circle, Waterloo, 1992, pp. 271-2. Its dependence on such life is a dependence on the contents that individualize it. They are what make it the ego of your life, rather than someone else’s. Given this, we cannot say that the ego could exist apart from the stream. Such an existence would be only that of an “empty form.” What exactly is this form? For Husserl, it is the centering of our experience, a centering that places the I or self at the center. In his words, “The ego is the ‘subject’ of consciousness; subject, here, is only another word for the centering that all life possesses as an egological life, i.e., as a living in order to experience something, to be conscious of it.” Ms. C 3, p. 26a, March, 1931, Späte Texte über Zeitkonstitution, p. 35. Thus, each of us can say, consulting our experience: "I am I, the center of the egological [Ichlichkeiten].” Ms. C 7, p. 9b, June-July 1932, Späte Texte über Zeitkonstitution, p. 122. In asserting this, we assert both our formal transcendence and dependence on the stream. The center’s transcendence comes from the fact that it does not change with the changing content that it structures. Thus, as I move about my house, I see the objects within it from different perspectives. Identifying patterns of perspectives, I assign them referents. I say, for example, that this is a lamp and this is a chair, interpreting the perspectivally arranged views that exhibit them as views of individual objects. In experiencing this, I remain at the center, the 0-point of such perspectival unfolding. Transcendence, with regard to the stream, thus comes from this centering. My “here” marks the ongoing spatial 0-point set by the perspectival unfolding of objects. Similarly, my “now” exists as the ongoing temporal 0-point between the past and the future. No matter what the contents are that fill my past and future, I remain between these two temporal dimensions. The mutual dependence of these 0-points is clear. Without the perspectival appearing of objects, I would lose my position as a spatial point of view. Similarly, without the past and the future, i.e., the temporal succession of perspectives, I would lose my temporal place between the perspectives I have experienced and those that I anticipate I will experience. §3. Temporal Constitution: Retention In identifying the ego’s persisting identity with the persistence of the centering of experience, we have implicitly described its constitution. For Husserl, the constitution of the ego in its transcendence of the stream is primarily temporal. This is because, “The transcendence of the spatial world is a second level transcendence.” Analysen zur Passiven Synthesis (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966), p. 205. It depends on “the stream of consciousness and its immanent time.” Ibid., p. 204. Thus, it is, as we noted, through the relative rates of perspectival unfolding that we judge spatial distances. Looking from a train window, the objects that barely move, i.e., slowly perspectivally unfold themselves, we take as far away, while those that rapidly pass we take as close to us. The same, but less dramatically, happens as we move about a room. Now, to grasp this unfolding which positions me as a spatial 0-point, i.e., as an abiding “here,” I must retain the views I have already experienced. I must also anticipate or protend the coming views. Doing so, however, I position myself as temporal transcendence, i.e., as an abiding now that exist between what I retain and what I anticipate. What is crucial here is the action of retention and protention—the very action by which we build up our sense of time. To make this clear, we have to, at least briefly, turn to Husserl’s account of time constitution. Impressions, i.e., externally received data, initiate this process. This is a point that he continually stresses. He writes, for example, “The ‘sourcepoint’ with which the ‘production’ of the enduring object begins is a primal impression.” Zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewusstseins (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966), p. 29. This means that “[c]onsciousness is nothing without impression.” Ibid., p. 100. Without them, it has no content; without such content, there would be noting for it to retain and, as based on this, nothing to protend or anticipate. Impressions, however, are insufficient. Limited to them, we would experience the constant alteration of contents in the now. But if we do not retain them, our consciousness would be, at most, a flickering experience of immediate impressions that would appear only to vanish. How, then, do we retain such contents and retain them not as something present, but rather as departing into the past? To describe the process, Husserl turns to our experience of hearing a melody. As the new tones sound, within a certain margin of diminishing clarity, the previous tones continue to be present. This makes it possible for us to hear the melody, enjoying the relation of the tones. In grasping this relation, the already sounded tones are not present the way the sounding ones are. Rather, they undergo continuous modification. They “die away,” they get fainter and fainter. There is here, as Husserl observes, a certain analogy with a physical object receding and contracting as it gets further away from us: “In receding into the past, the temporal object also contracts and in the process becomes obscure.” Ibid., p. 26. Ultimately, it disappears altogether. As Husserl insists, the dying away of the fresh experience that fills the temporal field is not a physical phenomenon. The tone that has sounded and yet is still present is not a “weak tone.” It is not an “echo” or a “reverberation.” Ibid., p. 31. Yet, even though no immediate sensuous contents are there to sustain its presence, we still have the experience of holding it fast for a while, our grasp of it getting weaker and weaker. For Husserl, a “retention” is this experience. A retention is a consciousness of the dying away, of the sinking down of what we impressionally experience. Ibid. This consciousness is one of the continuous modification of what we retain, the modification being that of its dying or fading away. Husserl understands this modification as a serial process. In this, he agrees with Kant who asserts that “if I were to lose from my thought the preceding [impressions] ... and not reproduce them when I advance to those which follow, a complete presentation [of an extended event] would never arise.” “Kritik der reinen Vernunft,” 1st ed., A 102, 4:79. The necessity here is that of preventing the impression from vanishing as I advance to the now of the next impression. The same necessity applies to the reproduction that preserves the past impression. It, too, must be reproduced if it is not to vanish, and so on serially. Husserl accepts this necessity in his account of the continuous modification of the dying away that marks our experience of retention. Thus, first we have the impression, which we experience as a consciousness—say, of a tone-now. Then, “when the consciousness of the tonenow, the primal impression, passes over into retention, this retention itself is a now in turn, something actually existing.” Zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewusstseins, p. 29. With the expiry of its now, this retention is itself retained, and so on serially. Thus, the retention “changes into retention of retention and does so continuously.” The result is that “a fixed continuum of retentions arises in such a way that each later point is a retention for every earlier point.” Ibid. What we have, then, is a chain of retentions of retentions of retentions … of some original impression. Each retention retains the impression by retaining the earlier retentions. Each, however, also modifies it insofar as the reproduction is never exact but rather more faded. The same holds for a temporal phase consisting of a number of impressions. See ibid., p. 29 How long is this phrase retained? Husserl never gives an exact answer. It would seem, however, that in the short term memory he is describing, the retained fades away within a minute or so. Afterwards, its recollection is a matter of long term memory. Our sense of what we retain not being present, but rather past, comes from our interpretation of what we retain. In Husserl’s words, the retained contents “carry primary interpretations, which, in their flowing connectedness, constitute the temporal unity of the immanent content in its receding into the past.” Ibid., p. 92; Thus, just as we interpret a spatial object’s getting smaller and contracting together as its spatial departure, so we interpret a primary content’s fading as its temporal departure from the now that we occupy. Attached to each retention is, then, “a primal interpretation.” The series of such interpretations gives us the ongoing interpretation of the fading, but still retained content as sinking into the past—i.e., as departing further and further from our now. Now, in speaking of such interpretations, we are not referring to a conscious process, but rather in an action we automatically engage in. As Husserl notes, “in infancy we had to learn to see things.” Cartesianische Meditationen, ed. S. Strasser (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1963), p. 112. This involved learning how to pick out coherent patterns of perspectivally arranged perceptions in order to assign them referents. Implicitly taking all the perceptions composing a given pattern as perceptions of this referent, we then interpret the latter as one thing—i.e., a given object—showing itself in different perspectives. For Husserl, our learning how to see shows that perception is interpretation. He writes in this regard: “It belongs to perception that something appears within it, but interpretation [die Interpretation] makes up what we term appearance—be it correct or not, anticipatory or overdrawn. The house appears to me through no other way but that I interpret in a certain fashion actually experienced contents of sensation. I hear a barrel organ—the sensed tones I take as barrel organ tones. Even so, I perceive via interpretation what mentally appears in me, the penetrating joy, the heartfelt sorrow, etc. They are termed “appearances” or, better, appearing contents precisely for the reason that they are contents of perceptive interpretation ” (Logische Untersuchungen, ed. Ursula Panzer in Edmund Hussserl, Gesammelte Schriften, Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 4:762). For Husserl, underlying this unspoken interpretation are the interpretations that yield our sense of temporal departure. §4. Temporal Constitution: Protention Our sense of time does not just involve a retention of the past. It also includes our anticipation of the future. When a person hears what she interprets as a familiar melody, she anticipates its notes. Her expectation of what is coming is fulfilled as the melody unfolds. A similar process occurs when you reach for a glass. As your arm moves toward it, the fingers of your hand open to its anticipated shape. Your arm extends to its anticipated distance. Grasping the glass, you apply just enough strength to lift its anticipated weight. Knowing how to do this involves having the correct anticipations. In the performance of this action, each anticipation is matched by a corresponding perception. When the match is perfect, the action proceeds effortlessly, the flow of perceptions being just what you anticipate. If, however, you miscalculate, if you interpret the glass as being heavier than it is, your hand will fly upward spilling its contents. Here, as in the case of the melody, raising the glass involves an ongoing anticipation of what will be experienced. Husserl terms our anticipations protentions. In his descriptions, they appear as the mirror image of retentions. Thus, just as the retentional process is a “steady continuum of retentions such that each later point is a retention of the earlier,” the whole forming a chain of retentions of retentions of the originally given impression, so protention also has a mediated intentionality. Its serial process, however, goes in the reverse direction. Here, “Every preceding protention relates to every succeeding one in the protentional continuum like every succeeding retention relates to the preceding one in the same [retentional] series. The preceding protention intentionally includes all the later. It implies them. The successive retention intentionally implies all the earlier.” “Jede vorangehende Protention verhält sich zu jeder folgenden im protentionalen Kontinuum, wie sich jede nachfolgende Retention zur vorhergehenden derselben Reihe verhält. Die vorangehende Protention birgt alle späteren intentional in sich (impliziert sie), die nachfolgende Retention impliziert intentional alle früheren” (Die Bernauer Manuskripte über das Zeitbewusstsein (1917/18), ed. R. Bernet and D. Lohmar, Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2001, p. 10.) . Thus, while the retentional chain can be described as an already-having of an already-having ... of an original impression, the protentional chain, as the inverse of this, is a having-in-advance of a having-in-advance ... of a future impression. The sense of futurity implied in this having-in-advance results from our interpretation of our protentions. The retentions of a content, as they succeed one another, fade until they decrease to nothingness. The protentions of a content, in their succession, increase in vividness, the succession terminating in the actually present content. We take such an increase as this content’s approach to the now that we occupy. Both primary memory (retention) and protention play their part in my grasp of the tones of a melody. In Husserl’s words, “Primary memory of the tones that, as it were, I have just heard and expectation (protention) of the tones that are yet to come fuse with the interpretation of the tone that is now appearing and that, as it were, I am now hearing.” Zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewusstseins, p. 35 The interpretation locates it in time. It has its horizon of pastness and futurity. This is absolutely necessary if it is to exist in time. As Husserl writes: “the immanent temporal object—this immanent tonecontent, for example—is what it is only insofar as during its actually present duration it points ahead to a future and points back to a past.” Ibid., p. 297 Husserl, we should note, is silent on the subjective origin of these protentions (as he is on the origin of the corresponding retentions). He only remarks that while impressions are externally provided, their retentions are “produced through consciousness’s own spontaneity.” Ibid., p. 100 The same, it would seem, holds for the protentions. Both are the result of our action. §5. Self-Awareness Such action accounts for the “subjective aspect” of perceptions, what David Chalmers calls their “felt quality.” As felt, qualia are not just contents, but contents that we are aware of perceiving. This means that consciousness must present them to itself. Now, retention and protention are just this self-presentation. Our background self-awareness comes from the fact that the retentions and protentions we generate keep before consciousness what it has experienced and what it anticipates experiencing as it steams. Husserl expresses this as follows: “Consciousness exists as flowing and is a stream of consciousness that appears to itself as a flowing. We can also say that the being of the flowing is a ‘perceiving’ of ourselves.” Die Bernauer Manuskripte, p. 44. This point follows because such flowing results from the retentional and protentional transformations of the impressions we receive. By virtue of these transformations, time with its contents appears to advance from the future, pass through the present, and depart into pastness. Every momentary consciousness is marked by these transformations. As such, “every momentary consciousness … is … inherently a protention of what is to come and a retention of what has already occurred.” Ibid., p. 46. The “of” indicates the self-awareness of this flowing since the retentions are a present awareness of what is flowing away, while the protentions are a present awareness what is flowing towards one. Thus, as we regard an object we are always self-aware, that is, conscious of our just past, our present and our just about to come states. Such awareness is built into our consciousness of the object given that we are conscious of it through these states. For Husserl, then, it is “completely understandable” that a consciousness, so structured as to have “a backward reference to the old and a forward reference to the new … is necessarily a consciousness of itself as streaming.” Ibid., pp. 47-48. §6. The Constitution of the Ego Husserl’s account of the constitution of our sense of time is extraordinarily complex in its particular details. For a more complete account of it, see, for example, James Mensch’s, Husserl’s Account of our Consciousness of Time (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 2010). The above, however, is sufficient to describe the constitution of the ego as a temporal 0-point, i.e., as a now that abides. Husserl describes this in the following passage: A lasting and remaining primal now is constituted in this streaming. It is constituted as a fixed form for a content that streams through it and as a source point for all constituted modifications. In union with this constitution of the fixed from of the primally welling primal now, there is also constituted a two-sided continuity of forms that are just as fixed. Thus, in toto, there is constituted a fixed continuum of form in which the primal now is a primal welling middle point for two continua taken as branches of the modes of [temporal] modifications: the continuum of what is just-past and that of futurities. Ms. C 2, p. 11a, Sept.-Oct. 1931, Späte Texte über Zeitkonstitution, p. 8. The German text is: “In diesem Strömen ist ein stehendes und bleibendes Ur-Jetzt als starre Form für einen durchströmenden Gehalt konstituiert und als Urquellpunkt aller konstituierten Modifikationen. Konstituiert ist aber in eins mit der starren Form des Urquellenden, Ur-Jetzt eine zweiseitige Kontinuität von ebenso starren Formen; also im Ganzen ist konstituiert ein starres Kontinuum der Form, in dem das Ur-Jetzt urquellender Mittelpunkt ist für zwei Kontinua als Zweige der Abwandlungsmodi: das Kontinuum der Soebengewesenheiten und das der Zukünftigkeiten” Despite its somewhat labored prose, this passage has a clear doctrine. It is that the egological now is constituted as a “fixed form,” through which time appears to flow and in which its moments appear to well up as present and actual. A focus on the now, in other words, exhibits the passing through the now as a welling up, the result being that the now appears as a “primal welling middle point.” The constitution of this point occurs “in union with” a second constitution—that of the continua of the past and the future. With the latter, we have the constitution of the temporal environment which allows the source of time to appear as a “welling middle point”—i.e., as a source of time—within this environment. We stress the word “appear” since the source of time, for Husserl, is not the ego, but rather the impressions that we retain and protend. Husserl never abandons this point. See, for example, Ms. B III 3, p. 4a written in 1931. Husserl immediately adds that with the constitution of the two continua, we have “a lasting and remaining form-continuity for what streams through it, which, as streaming, is always co-constituted.” This form-continuity is simply that of the centering of experience about the now, the central ego being the center of this form-continuity. Since the form-continuity is one of temporally streaming material, this center’s constitution always occurs together with the constitution of this material—a constitution that involves placing it in time through retention and protention. Relative to this streaming material, the ego appears to stream—i.e., continually advance towards the future. Relative to itself, however, it does not stream. Remaining between the streaming past and future, the ego remains now. Associating itself with the welling up that appears to arise in this now, the ego thus takes itself as acting in and through this non-extended, abiding nowness. In Husserl’s words, the result is “the primal phenomenon of my ‘I act’, in which I am a stationary and remaining ego and, indeed, am the actor of the ‘nunc stans’ [or stationary now]. I act now and only now, and I ‘continuously’ act.” Ms. B III 9, p. 15a; Oct.-Dec. 1931. As he elsewhere describes this, my acts flow away, “but I, the identity of my act, am ‘now’ and only ‘now’ and, in my being as an accomplisher, I am still now the accomplisher.” In other words, “I, the presently actual ego, am [always] the now-ego.” Ms. C 10, p. 16b, Sept. 1931, in Späte Texte über Zeitkonstitution (1929-1934),Die C-Manuskripte ed. Dieter Lohmar (Dordrecht: Springer Verlag, 2006), p. 200. All of this is, of course, correlated to my appearing as the welling source of time. Such an appearance is deceptive, as is the notion that what acts is this non-extended temporal 0-point. What acts, as Husserl stresses in the second volume of his Ideas, is our embodied selfhood. See Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie, Zweites Buch, ed. W. Biemel (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1952), §§35-42. This text will be cited as Ideen II. Our constitution of time, however, is such that we always locate this action in the now that forms the dividing line between our anticipated future and retained past. Since the action of retention and protention, in constituting the “continuities” of the past and future, constitute this now, the ego that is this now is self-aware. Its self-awareness is built into the action that constitutes its defining environment. This can be put in terms of the ego’s definition in terms of the centering of consciousness. Consciousness continually presents itself to itself as it streams. The addressee of this presentation is the ego that is the center of this centering. Since its own sense involves its environment, it includes such self-awareness. §7. The Ego’s Sensuous Embodiment We remarked at the end of the last chapter that, for Aristotle, the soul’s definition includes its embodiment. Just as any account of syllables also takes account of the letters that form them, so any account of the soul must include its embodiment. The same claim can be made with regard to the ego. The individual ego—the “I” that we take as unique self—implies embodiment. The point follows from the fact that the ego becomes a unique ego by being “individualized through the stream” of contents. The particular contents that form the stream make it an individual ego, one that inhabits an individual consciousness. The crucial point is that such contents come from impressions, which, Husserl insists, are not generated by consciousness. Experiences such as opening and shutting or eyes, straining to hear something, smelling a rose, etc. convince us that their origin is our bodily senses. Included here is our sense of bodily proprio-perception which yields the kinesthesia. Even with our eyes closed, we feel our body move as we walk about. The body, then, provide the contents that individualize the “empty form” of centering that is the “pure” or abstract ego. Its self-awareness is, thus, necessarily embodied. The same holds for the “I act.” What acts is our embodied selfhood. By this, we mean that the bodily “I can”—for example, I can turn my head, open my eyes, bodily see, etc.—is at the origin of the sensations that well up and become constituted as acts of the ego. Such acts inherently entail this embodied I can. To further explore embodiment as a constituent part of consciousness a new chapter is necessary—one focusing on our embodied selfhood.  Chapter 4 Consciousness and Embodiment §1. The Singularity of Embodiment. One of the striking things about the flesh that embodies us is its unique singularity. To be a unique singular is to exist in only one example. It is the opposite of being one among many possible instances, each of which is essentially substitutable for another—like, for example, apples in the store. The body’s non-substitutability is apparent in its organic functioning. It shows itself in the fact that no one can eat for you, sleep for you, breathe for you, or perform for you any of your bodily functions. Unlike our beliefs and convictions, the body constitutes the sphere of the private that cannot be shared and, hence, genuinely escapes linguistic expression. This can be put in terms of Aristotle’s assertion that the particular in its uniqueness can be sensed, but cannot be expressed in a language that we share with Others. In fact, it cannot be defined: “But when we come to the concrete thing, e.g. … one of the individual circles … of these there is no definition, but they are known by the aid of intuitive thinking or of perception; and when they pass out of this complete realization [of being perceived] it is not clear whether they exist or not” (“Metaphysics,” 1036a, trans. T. D. Ross, in The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon [New York: Random House, 1941], p. 799). Such sharing involves the common meanings that express the common features of objects. But my body, as mine, cannot be common. As mine, it is the flesh that individualizes me, making me this particular person and not anybody else. In this, it is different from my body as performing some function. Somebody else can go to the bank for me, tie my shoes for me, and so on. Since such functions are common, they can be linguistically expressed. So can the body that engages in them. Its appearance can be judged and compared with others according to various standards. Such comparisons, however, limit themselves to what is common, for example, the features of the face, not to that aspect of ourselves that is organically private. Such privacy is illustrated in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, with its account of Shylock’s inability to collect on his debt of a pound of flesh. The exchange economy consists of substitutable items, with currency serving as a universal substitute. But flesh as such is inherently non-substitutable and, hence, incapable of serving as a currency. §2. Self-Touch How does such singularity express itself in our consciousness? How do we, on the level our senses, distinguish ourselves in our uniqueness from other objects? Husserl remarks that “[a] subject whose only sense was the sense of vision could not have an appearing body.” Ideen II, p. 150. As visually present, his body would not distinguish itself from other appearing objects. To recognize it as my own, Husserl argues, I need the sense of touch. When I touch other objects, I feel their tactile qualities—their hardness, softness, etc. I do not, however, feel their being touched. Only my body affords me this possibility. Thus, touching my forearm, my hand feels its warmth, the hair on it, and so on. But my forearm also feels the hand that touches it—it feels, for example, its qualities of roughness or smoothness. Without this ability, I would be like the patient described by the neurologist, Oliver Sacks, who, on waking, attempts to make room for herself by shoving her own leg out of bed. Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986, p. 55. As Sara Heinämaa writes, there is here a clear “difference between Husserl’s phenomenological concept of embodiment and the naturalistic concept dominant in physiology and bio-sciences.” Thus, phenomenologically, “a paralyzed limb does not belong to the system of living organs but constantly remains on the margin of one’s life.” For the biological sciences, however, it remains part of our physiological identity (“The Body,” in The Routledge Companion to Phenomenology, ed. Sebastian Luft and Søren Overgaard, New York: Routledge, 2012, p. 227. Unable to feel herself being touched, she reacts to and moves her leg like a foreign object. My ability to feel myself being touched thus marks out the boundaries of my embodied self. I am the only object whose being touched I can experience directly. As Rudolf Bernet puts this: “it is one and the same flesh (and only mine!) that is and that simultaneously feels itself touching and touched … In the hand that touches and in the hand that is touched, my body simultaneously explores itself from the outside and feels itself from the inside” (“The Body as a Legitimate Naturalization of Consciousness,” Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 72 [July 2013], p. 50). Behind this uniqueness is the fact that I am, qua embodied, both subject and object. The touching hand, for example, functions as a subject. It has its localized sensations that are spread across the surface that is in contact with an object. When it is touched by the other hand, then it, itself, assumes the position of an object. It is now seen to afford localized sensations to the hand that touches it. As Merleau-Ponty describes this, “When my right hand touches my left hand while [the left hand] is palpating the things, … the ‘touching subject’ passes over to the rank of the touched.” It “descends into the things, such that the touch is formed in the midst of the world.” The Visible and the Invisible, p. 134. Thus, the touching hand that functioned as a subject assumes the position of an object. Unlike other objects, however, it can feel itself being touched. Doing so, it does not just declare itself to be within the boundary of my body; it also reasserts itself as a subject. It experiences the “double sensation” of both feeling itself being touched and feeling the qualities of the hand that touches it. Open to both, it is an object that is a subject in the sense of being a place of appearing. The uniqueness that characterizes me as both subject and object persists as long as I am capable of self-touch and the resulting double sensation. It, thus, underlies the sense of my persisting self-identity. Part of this involves my sense of being able to move my body directly. I do not move my arm, for example, as a foreign object. The kinesthesia afforded by my sense of proprio-perception give me the sense of its being moved. But as involving effort, the same kinethesia give me the sense of my moving it. Both are involved in its sense as mine—i.e., as a part of the body whose self-touch distinguishes it from the world. Thus, since the moved arm is sensed as both mover and moved, I have a sense of moving it immediately. As Husserl writes: “the body as a field of localization is ... the precondition for the fact that it is taken as ... an organ of the will,” that is, as “the one and only object which, for the will of my pure ego, is moveable immediately and spontaneously.” Ideas II, p. 152. The immediacy comes from my being both subject and object. As the former, I am the actor. As the latter, I am acted upon. Crucial here is the body as “a field of localization” of sensations—i.e., as a place of appearing. The kinesthesia localized in the arm that I move play a double role. Again there is the “double sensation” that we saw in the hand’s both feeling itself being touched and feeling the touched hand—i.e., presenting itself as a touched object and a touching subject. Behind this double sensation is a two-fold interpretation of the same sensations. When, for example, I press my hand against the table, “the same sensation of pressure,” Husserl writes, “is at one time taken as a perception of the table’s surface (of a small part of it, properly speaking) and at another time, with a different direction of attention and another level of interpretation, it results in sensations of my fingers pressing on it.” The same holds when I touch a cold object and feel both “the coldness of the surface of a thing and the sensation of cold in the finger.” Ideas II, p. 147. It also applies when I move my arm. The same sensations give me both the sense of the sense of moving it and the sense of its being moved. The ease by which I shift from one to the other allows me to conflate the two and see my movement as spontaneous. In spite of Husserl’s mention of “the will of my pure ego,” his descriptions indicate the necessity of abandoning the paradigm of a “pure” or disembodied ego acting on the body, a paradigm that sees the two as definitionally distinct. My sense of moving my arm immediately comes, rather, from the fact that this action is embodied. As such, the bodily sensations I have position me as mover and moved, i.e., as a self-mover. Since it is based on the functioning of my body, the uniqueness of my persisting self-identity implies its privacy. Thus, the kinesthesia that allow me to take my body as immediately moveable are private. I cannot experience another person’s sense of moving himself, nor he my own. As felt and moved by me, my body is thus a unique singular. Only I experience it and I do so in only one example. This uniqueness should not surprise us. It characterizes our organic functioning. Thus, our proprio-perception, like our sensing in general, is marked by the privacy of such functioning. Just as no one can experience your kinesthesia, so no one can perform for you any of your bodily functions. This is the truth behind Heidegger’s remark that each of us must die our own death. “Keiner kann dem Anderen sein Sterben abnehmen” (Sein und Zeit, p. 240). No one can do this for another person. Death, as the cessation of our organic functioning, is as private as this functioning. What this signifies is that if we remain within the “third-person” perspective—the perspective that science and analytical philosophy assume—the phenomena of such self-movement escape us. More generally, we cannot see consciousness’s definitional entailment of embodiment. §3. The Intertwining of Embodied Consciousness Such entailment involves the intertwining of consciousness and embodiment and, hence, of self and world. As a touchable object, I am in the world. As a touching subject, I have the tactile world within me. Merleau-Ponty nicely illustrates this sense of being within. Using the word tapisser, to cover, drape, line or wallpaper, he writes “our flesh lines (tapisse) and even envelops all the visible and tangible things.” The Visible and the Invisible, trans. A. Lingis (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1968), p. 123. Doing so, it provides measures “for being, dimensions to which we can refer it.” Ibid., p. 103. In other words, through our flesh, we can refer to the sensible aspects of being. We can measure it along the axes or dimensions of its sights, sounds, tastes, smells, and tactile qualities. The world that is present through our embodiment is, however, the very world that our embodiment thrusts us into. This means, Merleau-Ponty writes, “my eyes which see, my hands which touch, can also be seen and touched ... they see and touch the visible, the tangible from within” the visible and tangible world. Similarly the flesh that “lines and even envelops” the things of this world is “nevertheless surrounded” by them. Ibid., p. 123 It is within the world it reveals. Thus, for Merleau-Ponty, “because our flesh lines and even envelops all the visible and tangible things with which nevertheless it is surrounded, the world and I are within one another.” Ibid. This double being is simply a result of our being, as embodied, both subject and object. The relation of the two is that of intertwining. Such intertwining is not, however, an identification. This is because the two cannot be grasped together. As we cited Husserl, there is “a different direction of attention and another level of interpretation” when I move from interpreting the same sensations as pertaining to myself—for example, the coldness in the finger—and take them as pertaining to the object I touch with my finger. The same holds when I touch myself. As hand touches hand, I can attend to one hand as a sentient subject, but then I lose it as a sensed object. I cannot grasp it simultaneously as both. Derrida denies this simultaneity, writing: “The local coincidence that is important for Husserl in the touching-touched pair is grounded in a temporal coincidence meant to give it its intuitive plenitude, which is to say its dimension of direct immediacy. … if one questions this absolute simultaneity of the touching and the touched-and the active and the passive-for an immediate and direct intuition, this whole argument [of Husserl’s] risks becoming fragile” (Jacques Derrida, On Touching—Jean-Luc Nancy, trans. Christine Irizarry, [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005], p. 172). As Robin Durie points out, this insistence on “absolute simultaneity” ill accords with the shift of attention required to go from the hand as touching to the hand as touched (Robin Durie, “At the same time, Continuities in Derrida’s readings of Husserl,” Continental Philosophy Review (2008) 41, p. 81). He explains Derrida’s puzzling interpretation “of temporality as immediacy, as punctual instantaneity” as Derrida’s attempt to continue the analysis of Speech and Phenomena (ibid., p. 87). Merleau-Ponty describes this inability as follows: “If my left hand is touching my right hand, and if I should suddenly wish to apprehend with my right hand the work of my left hand as it touches, this reflection … always miscarries … the moment I feel my left hand with my right hand, I correspondingly cease touching my right hand with my left hand.” The Visible and the Invisible, p. 9. As he elsewhere writes, what we face here is “an ambiguous set-up in which the two hands can alternate in the function of ‘touching’ and being ‘touched.’” Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962), p. 93. There is “a sort of dehiscence” or bursting open that “opens my body in two,” splitting it “between my body looked at and my body looking, my body touched and my body touching.” The Visible and the Invisible, p. 123. This “dehiscence” is caused by the switch of interpretations. In attending to “my body touching,” I take the sensations I experience as pertaining to me—that is, to myself as a place of appearing. When I turn my attention to “my body touched,” I take these sensations as pertaining to myself as an object that appears The same holds for the sensations which, at one time, I take as my effort moving something, say my arm lifting a weight, and at another of the arm and weight as heavy.. The fact that we cannot do both at the same time introduces a division in our consciousness. The division between subject and object applies even to ourselves. This is a division that opens up a necessary “space” for perceiving consciousness. As M.C. Dillon has remarked, this non-coincidence is essential for perception. Given that perceiving something is distinct from being it, “there must be a distancing of it.” M.C. Dillon, “Merleau-Ponty and the Reversibility Thesis,” in Phenomenology, Critical Concepts in Philosophy, 2 vols., eds. Dermot Moran and Lester Embree (New York: Routledge, 2004), vol. 2, p. 298. This hold even in the case of self-perception. Now, if we ask why the two hands must “alternate in the function of ‘touching’ and being ‘touched,’” i.e., why, in Husserl’s terms, we cannot simply collapse the two interpretations of the same sensations, we come to the fact that, on the level of touch, our relation to ourselves is not direct, but rather mediated: the touched hand through the touching hand and vice-versa—in other words, we must touch ourselves to grasp ourselves as both a sensed object and a sensing subject. No other sense will do. Even our visual self-perception has to be mediated by touch. As Husserl remarks, “I do not see my body, the way I touch myself. What I call the seen body [gesehenen Leib] is not something seeing that is seen, the way that my body, as touched, is something touching that is touched.” What is lacking here is “the phenomenon of double sensation,” a phenomenon that could only occur if “one eye could rub past the other”—that is, if one eye could touch the other. Ideen II, p. 155. But in such self-touch, the hand that positions the sensing hand as an object is not the hand that it touches. The spatial distinction of one hand from the other—and more generally, the spatial extension of our body as it functions in our self-presence—thus maintains the divide in our self-presence. To overcome the divide, we would have to confuse one hand with the other; but this we never do. This points to the fact that the self-presence by which we distinguish ourselves from the world is fundamentally spatial. The subjectivity that is such self-presence is not, as Kant thought, simply temporal; it has a spatial character. This implication can be put in terms of Merleau-Ponty’s description of his left hand touching some object, while being touched by his right hand. As we cited him, the touched hand “descends into the things, such that the touch is formed in the midst of the world.” The Visible and the Invisible, p. 134. As the register of the Husserl Archives in Leuven, Belgium shows, Merleau-Ponty had read Husserl’s Ideen II. Touched, the touching subject is thrust into the spatial world. How is this possible? The answer is that it is already spatial. Spatiality is inherent in the alterity that characterizes our self-presence. Such spatiality is evident in the fact that the sensing subject is not, as Kant thought, just a place of temporal relations. As involving the touching hand, it has its localized sensations that are spread across its surface. This spatial quality of our sensations is yet another indication of the embodiment of consciousness—i.e., the fact that any definition of mind or consciousness must include its embodiment, i.e., its spatial character. To understand what this implies for our conceptions of space and time, a separate chapter is needed.  Chapter 5 Embodied Space and Time §1. The Interdependence of Space and Time Modern science, through its mathematization of nature, separates out space from time. Its formulae, as Bergson noted, drain time from space leaving us with us with snapshots of reality. Behind its position, we argued, was Kant’s separation of space from time. We grasp space through outer perception, while to grasp extended time, we must turn inward and consult our memories and anticipations. For Kant, this signifies that our self-presence is temporal. For modern science, with its focus on outer perception, it implies that such self-presence escapes objective description. The question that confronts us is whether such a separation can be maintained given the fact that consciousness entails embodiment and, with this, the body’s spatiality. This question can be expressed in terms of Aristotle’s discussion of the difficulties that confront us when we try to consider time by itself. Having noted that neither the past nor the future exists, since the past “has been and is not” and the future “is going to be and is not yet,” he raises the question of the now: if to be is to be now, the now certainly exists; but can we say that the now is a part of time? A part measures the whole, which is made up of its parts. But the present has no extension. In this, it is like a point on a line. Neither nows nor points can be summed up to give a definite quantity. Aristotle, Physics, 218a, 5-10, 18-19. The paradox, then, is that the past and the future do not exist and the now that does exist is not part of time. What the paradox points to is the non-self-subsistent quality of time considered by itself. As non-self-subsistent, time must depend on something outside of itself in order to be. To this, Augustine answered that that the past and the future exist in the mind and are dependent on it. They are present in a modified way through our memories and our anticipations. As for the now, it exists as the changing moment of our present perception. In Augustine’s words, “there are three times, a present of things past, a present of things present, a present of things future. For these three exist in the mind, and I find them nowhere else: the present of things past is memory, the present of things present is sight, the present of things future is expectation” (Confessions, XI, §19, p. 269). Such an explanation, however, does not respond to the central element of the paradox that Aristotle presents: If the moments of time do not have any extension, what prevents them from collapsing into each other? The question here is: What “spaces” them, as it were? What gives them the “parts outside of parts” that we associate with space? To answer the question of the “spacing” of the moments of time, we have to turn to the oft-noted fact that our experience of time is dependent on our experience of change. As John Locke observed, we have no sense of time in dreamless sleep. To experience its flow, we have to experience the change or succession of our “ideas” or perceptions. In Locke’s words, “That we have our notion of succession and duration from this original, viz., from reflection on the train of ideas, which we find to appear one after another in our own minds, seems plain to me, in that we have no perception of duration but by considering the train of ideas that take their turns in our understandings. When that succession of ideas ceases, our perception of duration ceases with it; which everyone clearly experiments in himself, whilst he sleeps soundly, whether an hour or a day, a month or a year; of which duration of things, while he sleeps or thinks not, he has no perception at all, but it is quite lost to him; and the moment wherein he leaves off to think, till the moment he begins to think again, seems to him to have no distance” John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Book II, Ch. 14 (Amherst: Prometheus Books, 1995), pp. 122-3. Hume makes the same observation. See A Treatise of Human Nature,, Book I, Part II, section iii, p. 35. Thus, without change, our sense of time freezes. The now ceases to “flow” when the contents occupying it remain the same. It is only when we experience the present moment with an ever new content, that we apprehend it as a streaming present. Given that the movement of time depends on the change of such content, what lies behind this change? What is its essential precondition? The answer is that the alterity that we experience—say, the different positions of the clock’s hands—presupposes space. What we register is other because it occurs in space. In space, it changes its color, its position, its shape, its relation to what surrounds it, and so on. Space, in its extension, that is, in its having “parts outside of parts,” provides the framework for such change. It supplies a necessary condition for the alterity that we register as time. This does not mean that the alterity of contents is itself responsible for separating the different moments of time. Space, rather, is the ultimate reason why the moments with their different contents do not coincide. Thus, what distinguishes the appearances of a moving body are not the moments that they inhabit; it is the spatially distinct positions of its path. It is the outside-of-one-another of such positions, the extension of the path, that translates itself into the extension of time. Without this spatial extension, the path would collapse as would the moments presenting the appearances of the motion along it. Given this, we cannot maintain the separation of space and time. We have to say that our self-presence as temporal includes spatiality. A similar argument can be made regarding the dependence of space on time. When we attempt to think space apart from time, it also loses its self-subsistent reality. The point follows from the fact that our lived experience of space involves the time required to traverse its distances. Thus, we say that a distant town is so many hours away by car; it takes us so many minutes to walk to a place, etc. Even on the astronomical scale, we continue to judge distance by time, saying, for example, a star is so many light years from us. Such judgments are native to us. They operate as we walk about a room, judging the relative distance of objects from us by the time it takes them to show their different sides to us. Absent such temporal measures, we do not have space, but only geometry; we do not have distance, but only relations of distance. We can, for example, say that the sum of two sides of a triangle cannot be smaller than the third, but we cannot say how large a geometric triangle is. The point is that when we drain time from space, what remains is the mathematical representation of space, not space itself with its definite distances. Only if we conflate the two, i.e., take the representation for the represented, as we do when we take a mathematical description for the reality that it describes, can we say that space can be grasped without recourse to time. This point holds even when, adopting relativity theory, we speak of space-time. The mathematical description of this still reduces reality to a series of timeless snapshots. §2. Lived Spatial-temporality This mutual dependence of space and time signifies that we cannot accept the Kantian dichotomy between the mind as temporal and the external world as spatial. It indicates that just as we are in the world which is in us, so time and space manifest this double being-in. We have to assert that time exists “in” space insofar we require time to traverse it. That we judge distance by the time it takes to cross it signifies that time is inherent in the notion of a space having a definite extent. We also have to assert that space is inherent in time, since space is what allows time’s moments to be distinguished. Distinguishing them, space, in its having parts outside of parts, allows time to have a definite extent. This double being-in determines our being in the world. It frames, as we shall see, the context of living organisms. This context, we should first note, is not that of classical Newtonian science. The latter is based on the observations of inanimate objects. It takes space and time as definitionally distinct and considers these to be uniform quantities. Thus, in the absence of external forces, a body, according to Newton, continues moving in a straight line at the same speed forever. Gravity, of course, curves space. Here, however, we are abstracting from the considerations that Einstein brings forward in his theory of general relativity. The time of this uniform motion is, itself, uniform. Its moments flow from the past to the present to the future with perfect regularity. Traditionally, the ideal of such space has been represented by the perfectly smooth surface of the dial of a clock. Time has been correspondingly represented by the uniformity of the motion of the hands about the dial. Space and time, here, are both “dimensions” of reality. Mathematically, a dimension is simply a variable determining a position. If we say that space has three dimensions, this means that three variables are required to fix a position within it. In this space, the shortest line between two points can be determined by the three variables (the x, y, and z coordinates) of these points. In classical physics, space is thus three-dimensional, and straight lines measure distances. When, however, we observe animate, living objects, we enter a different world. Here, space and time are intermingled. Distances are measured by times needed to cross them, with the shortest distance being determined by the living being’s body. Its muscular structure and size govern how it is able to move between points. Thus, the localized space of an adult human being is different than that of a child. Both are different from that of an insect. This means that the variables determining positions in such spaces and the shortest lines between them vary accordingly. As the French mathematician, Henri Poincaré, pointed out, it signifies that the space we live in has as many dimensions as the muscular determinants of our motion. In Poincaré’s words, “Each muscle gives rise to a special sensation which may be increased or diminished so that the aggregate of our muscular sensations will depend upon as many variables as we have muscles. From this point of view, motor space would have as many dimensions as we have muscles” (Science and Hypothesis [New York: The Walter Scott Publishing Co., 1905], p. 64). This is very different from the space in which an inanimate body moves, such motion being controlled, not internally, but by external forces. In terms of the mind-body problem, this multi-dimensionality of living space implies that we cannot resolve it by limiting ourselves to the three-dimensionality of inanimate space. The space in which the animate and the inanimate interact must be extended to include the variables characterizing animate space. This, of course, affects the presence of the outer (embodied space) in the inner—that makes possible the extension of time. The time that such apartness structures has be understood in terms of the motion of animate existence. Such motion has many forms, depending on the age, sex, and species of the animate organism. Here, all the work on the phenomenology of the body, its movement and its spatiality (including the work by feminists on the female body), is relevant to the mind-body problem. Underlying them all is the motion of the metabolic process that characterizes life itself. Such motion points to the special character of living space. Metabolism—Stoffwechsel in German—is the organism’s exchange of materials with its environment. The goal of this exchange is the maintenance of the organism, that is, its bodily continuance. As Hans Jonas writes, this signifies that an organism’s “being” is a result of its “doing.” As such its being is inherently future-directed. If to be alive depends upon the intake of new material, the now of such being-alive stretches beyond the present to what comes next. Here, the “will be”—the intake of new material—determines the “is” as represented by the organism’s present activity. Insofar as the organism exists by directing itself beyond its present condition, it is ahead of itself: it “has” a future. See Hans Jonas, Mortality and Morality—A Search for the Good after Auschwitz, ed. Laurence Vogel (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1996), pp. 86-89. In other words, the living being, as the necessity for exchange, has a teleological structure, one that involves a future-directed, self-affirmation. Now, the space of such self-affirmation, as traced by the organism’s paths, is neither linear nor uniform. As opposed to the uniform space of inanimate objects, it is, as it were, folded in on itself. It is the space the self-directed motion of the organism—the metabolic motion that has as its goal its own continuance. The same point holds for the temporality that this space structures. It is neither linear nor uniform. Directed by the future, it proceeds teleologically and does not flow equitably. Living beings thus evince a different temporality than that manifested by the inanimate world. That latter exhibits a linear causality, one where the past determines the present, and the present determines the future. We can see it at work in a game of billiards, where the positions and motions of the billiards at any one moment determine their positions and motions at the next. The animate world has a different causality and temporality. Here, the leading factor is the future. For us, it is what we want to accomplish. Suppose, for example, I want to build a bookcase. Having this goal, I check to see what my past actions have provided me with. I go to see if I still have the nails, wood and tools I bought a year ago. Finding them, I proceed to build. Causality here is goal-directed. The corresponding teleological temporality begins with my projected future, proceeds by way of my past, which is taken as providing the resources for what I want to accomplish. It ends in my present activity of actualizing this goal through my using the resources—the nails and the wood—that my past actions furnished. The same temporal flow of future, past, present appears in the perceptual process. According to Husserl, the determining factor in this process is the interpretative intention to see a given object. What we intend to see determines how we regard what we have seen. It makes us take it as material for our “project” of seeing a specific object. As such, it determines our present act of seeing with its horizon of anticipations. See Die Bernauer Manuskripte über das Zeitbewusstsein (1917/18), ed. R. Bernet and D. Lohmar (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2001), pp. 3-7. Given that what we intend to see as we move to get a better look is not yet fully there, the intended object stands as a goal of our perceptual process. As such, it is something to be realized, that is, something future. What we have seen and retained is something past, while the present act of seeing is, of course, now. The teleological temporality of the perceptual process is, thus, also that of the future (in the form of a goal) determining the past (by determining our interpretation of the contents we have received and retained) and, thereby, determining the present act of seeing. §3. The Dimensionality of the Animate and Inanimate This discussion of animate and inanimate causality naturally raises questions of their relation. Modern science, we noted, has no use for teleology. Given this, can its mechanistic account coexist with the teleological one? How could reality sustain two different causalities and, correspondingly, two different temporalities? How, in fact, could an explanatory bridge be constructed between the two? Such questions, of course, concern the mind-body problem. The physical processes that the natural sciences use to explain material nature eschew teleological principles. From Galileo onwards, it has be taken for granted that stones do not fall to the earth because this is, somehow, their goal. Conscious processes, however, do evince an inherent teleology. As Heidegger remarks, for us the future is the leading dimension. For Heidegger, while the past gives me the possibilities for my future action, it is only in terms of such action that they can be considered possibilities at all. They are such only as material for my projects. This means, in Heidegger’s words, “Dasein can authentically be past only insofar as it is futural [zukünftig]. Pastness originates in a certain way from the future.” (Sein und Zeit., p. 326). We structure our lives according to what we want to accomplish, i.e., the goals we set for ourselves. Such goals can range from immediate actions like fetching something, to long term plans. As just noted, goals are intimately involved in the perceptual process. How, in fact, do we construct a conceptual bridge between the natural causal accounts of material processes and the teleological action that characterizes consciousness and life? In response, we should first observe that the problem of two different accounts of causality does not touch this concept’s empirical basis. This basis, as Hume points out, is our experience of the prior and posterior. When this sequence is repeated with the same items, we assume that the prior causes the posterior. A Treatise of Human Nature, Bk. 1, Part III, sect. 14,, p. 171 Thus, in playing billiards, I constantly experience the ball I hit impacting another ball, causing it to move. I, thus, naturally take the motion of the first, which I first experience, as the cause of the second ball’s motion, which I subsequently experience. I follow the same procedure when I regard my own actions. Here my intending to do something, like going to the store, is followed by the action. In this case, my intention is prior and the action is posterior. I, thus, naturally take the intention as the cause of the action. It explains “why” I am leaving my home. The point is that causality, considered empirically, does not, per se, rule out either form of causality. What does is generally assumed to be the directionality of time. The difficulty concerns assuming two different directions of the flow of time: the teleological that begins in the future and the natural causal one that begins in the past. A temporality that embraced both directions would be self-contradictory. The contradiction would render its self-subsistence. Time, however, is not self-subsistent. This is the point of the paradox of the now. As we argued, what keeps its moments apart is not to be found within time. It is the outside-itself, the parts outside of parts, of extended space. Now, such externality is indifferent to the direction of the temporal flow. It can support the sequences that begin with our conception of a goal. It can also support the sequences that begin with the past. The same apartness of space serves as a framework for the goal directed motions of animate beings and the non-teleological movement of insensate material objects. This point can be put in terms of the two different senses of being “in” that mark our relation to the world. We are “in” the world as a body among bodies. In terms of our corporal relations, our temporality appears as linear and causal. When we play billiards, we assume the corresponding causality. To play billiards, of course, we also have to internalize the world. The world is in us as an perceptual object. The temporality of perception is teleological. So is the goal-directed activity of trying to get a ball into a side pocket. Here, the question is: how can we be both? What is the framework that bridges both senses of being-in? The answer is the spatiality of our subjectivity, i.e., the embodiment that is inherent in our consciousness. An insight into such spatiality can be gained by returning to Poincaré’s intuition that the space we live in has as many dimensions as the muscular determinants of our motion. Because it includes the animate, this framework has many more variables—dimensions in the mathematical sense—than those required to describe the motion and temporality of inanimate objects. This does not mean that the animate and the inanimate are opposed, that, to use David Chalmer’s phrase, there is no “explanatory bridge” between them. It only signifies that we cannot reduce the sentient to the non-sentient without the loss of the variables that would account for sentient, animate existence. To attempt to do this would be like trying to use Euclidian geometry to explain the multi-dimensional reality of a gravitational field. No one would say that Einsteinian and Euclidean space are unconnected, that there is no “explanatory bridge” between them. The space Einstein described becomes Euclidian in the absence of gravity. It is not opposed to, but only more complex than, Euclidian space. The same holds with regard to ourselves in comparison with inorganic, non-sentient matter. We are more complex, and we have to understand this complexity in terms that include, but are not limited to, those that described the inorganic. This can also be expressed by saying that while consciousness as embodied is not definitionally distinct from its embodiment, its definition, as including embodied life, is more complex than that of the inanimate matter that physics focuses on.  Chapter 6 Arousal, The Without in the Within §1. The Concept of Arousal It is time to take the results we have achieved and apply them to a concrete problem. Our aim is to not just clarify the positions we have taken, but also to present an example of their applicability. The problem we have chosen concerns the phenomenon of arousal. The conventional account of this seems straight-forward; but this is only because it fails to address its problematic character. In seeking to explain how an external object arouses a sentient subject, we are actually confronting a concrete example of the mind-body problem. In the standard account, the basic sense of arousal is to awaken someone, readying the person for activity. Physiologically, this involves stimulating the cerebral cortex into a general state of wakefulness and attention. The aroused subject shows an increased heart rate and blood pressure. Psychologically, sensory alertness, mobility and readiness to respond all mark the aroused state. Arousal, of course, involves more than the simple presence of an external stimulation. It requires impulses that are external and internal to the body. To be effective, the external impulses must find a corresponding response. Thus, it is no good trying to wake someone up by a sound outside of the range of their hearing. Similarly, the genital displays of one species will not cause sexual arousal in another. In neither case, can the external impulses activate the inner impulses or drives. This requires the presence of appropriate stimuli. Thus, the sight and smell of its food arouses a species’ appetite. It awakens the drive of hunger, which is directed towards the food. Similarly, the sight, odor and touch of a sexual partner brings about sexual arousal and activation of the corresponding sexual drive. Even in the case of arousal from sleep by such varied stimuli as a light being turned on, a noise, or the touch of a person fit into the pattern of an inner impulse or drive being activated by an external impulse. The drive in this case is towards the various stimuli that our senses prime us to receive. Our need for such is as basic as that for food. Placed in a situation of sensory deprivation, the mind attempts to make up the loss by generating hallucinations. What we confront here, according to Husserl, are “non-objectifying instincts.” They designate an instinctive “interest in the data and fields of sensation—before the objectification of sense data,” that is, before there is “a thematically actualizable object” for the drive to fasten on. “Interesse an Sinnesdaten und Sinnesfeldern - vor der Objektivierung Sinnesdaten ...” (Ms. C 13, p. 11b, Feb. 1934, in Späte Texte über Zeitkonstitution, p. 258). In each of these examples, hunger, sex, or simple sensation, the external stimuli trigger internal processes primed to response. Like the key fitted to the lock, they activate the mechanisms of such processes. §2. Its Problematic Character Arousal, in this standard account, is a matter of external impulses activating internal processes. Both psychological and physiological data can be brought forward to support of it. Such support, however, does not really clarify what “external” and “internal” signify here. From a first person, subjective perspective, we cannot really speak of the felt impulse or drive as internal and the stimuli that activate it as coming from the outside. From this perspective, both the drive and the stimuli are within experience. Both are “in” the subject understood as a field of experience, that is, as a place of disclosure. In this context, if we seek to distinguish the object from our consciousness of it, we can only do so in terms of time. On the inside are the momentary experiences that fill our consciousness. On the outside is the object taken as enduring through such experiences. It is the referent that we posit for such experiences, understood as the one thing that they are experiences of. This external object is, however, actually within consciousness. It is the result of our connecting our experiences by seeing them as pointing to a single referent. Rather than being external to our consciousness, this referent, as a one-in-many, “lies,’ Husserl writes, included within [consciousness] as a sense.” Cartesianische Meditationen, p. 80). If we shift our view to the third person (objective) perspective, within and without are not understood temporally, but rather spatially. Within is inside the brain, what is without originates outside of this location. Arousal is now viewed not as a subjective interest in and turning toward the arousing object, but rather as a causally determined stimulus-response mechanism. The paradigm for this can be illustrated by a thermostat. A decrease in the room’s temperature causes a coiled wire within the device to contract, tipping a small attached flask filled with mercury. This causes a contact to be made through electrical leads entering the end of the flask where the mercury has now settled. The current passing through this activates the heater. An increase in room temperature causes the coil to expand, reversing the process. This view of an external impulse (a decrease in temperature) activating a series of internal events suffers from an overriding difficulty when we apply it to arousal. If the first person view never gets us outside of experience, i.e., outside of consciousness, the third person view never gets us inside of experience. Thus, the thermostat has no consciousness. In looking within it, we never find anything resembling an experience of temperature. In fact, the very notion of an “inside” here is problematic. The difficulty we face in trying to access the inside of a person is amply illustrated by a scene from the film, A Man Facing Southeast. In it, an inmate of an asylum assists in an autopsy. Taking the brain in his hands, he begins to part it, remarking that here lie all the person’s memories, hopes, and desires—in short, the person himself. Man Facing Southeast, Director, Eliseo Subielo, 1986. The “madness” of the inmate is his belief that he has actually accessed this inner realm. As we slice into the brain, an external surface lies exposed to our view. The same holds no matter how much we cut. We are always on the outside. What is uncut forms the realm of the inside. This inside retreats, always lying spatially on the other side of the surface we have exposed. The difficulty with the standard account is clear. It leaves us at a loss with regard to understanding how the outside enter the inside so as to awaken it. The genuine outside involves spatiality. As indicated, the first person approach knows no outside. Everything for it is within experience. It can only consider the inside and the outside in terms of the temporal characteristics of experience. It cannot answer how the outside of experience, the genuinely spatial, enters the temporality of experience. Equally, the third person approach is also at an impasse. It cannot see how the inside of experience, the temporal, enters the outside of experience, the spatial. How does the subjectivity we access in our first person perspective embody itself in the spatial? How does it cross the threshold of its passive experiencing and engage in spatially determinate causal action? §3. The Inner and the Outer. In describing the problem, we have identified the inner with the temporal characters of experience, while we have taken the outer as the genuinely spatial. In doing so, we have followed Kant’s division. As we earlier cited Kant, “time cannot be outwardly intuited, any more than space can be intuited as something in us” (KdrV, B; Ak. III, B37, NKS 68). In fact, “if we abstract from our mode of inwardly intuiting ourselves ... then time is nothing” (KdrV, B51; Ak. III, 60). This is because the world that is outwardly intuited is entirely spatial. Considered in itself, it neither remembers nor anticipates. Motion, in its terms, is sheer change. As sheer otherness in the now, it is innocent of the past (which no longer exists) and the future (which does not yet exist). To grasp it as it is in itself is, therefore, to take a snapshot of it—i.e., to grasp its state in a chosen now. This, as we noted, is what mathematical science does when it resolves its formulas by choosing values for its variables. Science’s focus on outer perception is, of course, an abstraction. We engage in both inner and outer perception. Relying on the former, we believe the world is in us, that it comes to presence in our consciousness, understood as a place of disclosure. The sense of “within” that supports this belief is temporal. Objects are within us as enduring referents of our shifting experiences. Their presence is a function of our temporal synthesis—the synthesis that grasps a unitary referent for an unfolding pattern of perceptions, for example, the perceptions that present us with a box, which we are turning in our hands Relying on our outer perception, we also believe that we are in the world. We take ourselves as embodied and, hence, as one of the objects within the world revealed by outer perception. “Within,” here, is understood in a spatial sense. We believe we are definitely located within the world, so many meters distant from specific objects. How can we believe that we are in a world that is in us? The apparent impossibility of maintaining both views leads, as we earlier noted, to the division between analytic philosophy—which takes the third person view that places us in the world—and phenomenology—which proceeds from a first person perspective. More generally, it leads to the division between idealism and objectivism. Each stance takes the other to be based upon an illusion since each has a different notion of the subject. Idealism, taking the subject as that-to-whom-the-world-appears, understands it as a place of disclosure. Its focus is on inner sense, that is, on the temporal relations displayed by the contents of our consciousness. Objectivism, by contrast, takes the subject, as an object in the world. Its focus is on outer sense, i.e., on the spatial relations that this reveals. Employing the atemporal formulae of mathematics, it attempts to drain time from our experience by expressing its content in unchanging relations. Both the idealistic, first person approach and its objective, third-person counterpart are obviously one-sided. As we earlier pointed out, every “he” or “she” is ultimately an “I.” There are no third-person perspectives without first-person ones. Similarly, unless we are to embrace solipsism, every first-person, every “I,” must acknowledge other I’s, other selves that for it are a “he” or a “she.” The inadequacy of both approaches is shown by the phenomenon of arousal. In it, the outer arouses the inner. Somehow, what is outside in the third-person, spatial sense arouses what is within in the first-person, experiential sense. It thrusts the subject outside of itself into the objective world of affecting, spatially distinct objects. This is implicit in the fact that to be aroused is to be awakened. It is to be drawn out of oneself, to be, for example, pulled from the intimacy of sleep, of the world of dreams taken as a purely private, first person world, into the alterity of the external world. The resultant readiness for action presupposes our being outside of ourselves—our being in the spatially differentiated world of arousing objects. Surrounded them, we act on them. The fact of arousal is plain; the question is: how are we to understand this fact? §4. Intertwining as an Ontological Category To resolve this, we have to return to Merleau-Ponty’s insight. He argues that it is through our embodiment that we provide a place for the disclosure of the world in which we find ourselves. As we cited him, “our flesh lines and even envelopes all the visible and tangible things.” Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968), p. 120. . We grasp them through the “covering,” as it were, that our senses provide. Thus, the visual qualities our eyes afford us envelop the world, so do the audible qualities resulting from our hearing. The world that is present through our embodiment is, however, the very world that our embodiment thrusts us into. This means, Merleau-Ponty writes, “my eyes which see, my hands which touch, can also be seen and touched … they see and touch the visible, the tangible from within” the visible and tangible world. The Visible and the Invisible, p. 123 Similarly, the flesh that “lines and even envelopes” the things of this world is “nevertheless surrounded” by them. Ibid. It is within the world it reveals. The same holds when I touch the hand “that is palpitating the thing.” The ‘touching subject’ passes over to the rank of the touched.” It “descends into the things, such that the touch is formed in the midst of the world.” Ibid., p. 134. To translate this into the terms of arousal is to see the correlation between the world we disclose through our embodiment and the objective disclosure of ourselves in this world. Thus, as a sexually incarnate being, I am the place of disclosure of the object that awakes me sexually. I bring it to subjective presence as an arousing object. It, in turn, positions me in the sexually charged world, disclosing me as sexual being. Such disclosure is, of course, also a concealment when I take myself as just a sexual being, as simply one more body in the sexual world and not also as a place of disclosure. The same holds for all other forms of arousal that thrust me into their corresponding worlds. A person is both a place of disclosure and an object-in-the-world she or he discloses. Implicit here is a claim about the nature of our existence. As animate, aroused flesh, we exist in the intertwining, the being in one another, of the disclosing self and the disclosed world. Such intertwining is, in fact, a distinct ontological category. It is not reducible to the category favored by subjective idealism, which is that of being-for-a-disclosing subject. Neither is it reducible to the being-in-itself, the being that is independent of subjectivity, which is embraced by objectivism. Thus, it is not the case that a subject first exists and then becomes intertwined with the world. There is no self-subsistent selfhood. What we confront here is a single actualization of self and world, each being actualized through the other. This holds on the most basic level of self and affecting content. Normally, we say that a content—for example, an odor or a sound—affects the self and the self responds by turning and directing its attention to it. Yet, as Husserl observes, on the most basic level there is no distinction between the self that feels and the content that is felt. As he puts this, “Content is non-ego, feeling is already egological. The ‘address’ of the content is not a call to something, but rather a feeling being-there of the ego. . . . The ego is not something for itself and the non-ego something separate from the ego; between them there is no room for a turning towards. Rather the ego and non-ego are inseparable; the ego is a feeling ego with every content.” Ms. C 16 V, p. 68a, Sept. 1931, Späte Texte über Zeitkonstitution p. 351. The point is that each actualizes the other. Thus, affecting content is such only in relation to the capacity of the self to be affected by it. As for the self, it exists only in relation to such affecting content. Here, self and content are intertwined, each providing a place for the other to appear. The distinct ontological category of such intertwining is not just that of their mutual appearing. It is, as we shall see, that of appearing as such. §5. Self-Identity and Intertwining For a concrete example of this ontological category, we can return to the example of hand touching hand. When I use one hand to touch the other, I both feel the hand I touch and I feel this hand’s being touched. This sense of double touch does not hold when I do not touch my flesh. While I feel an external object, I do not feel its being touched. This fact allows me to identify my body as mine. It gives it its identity as my body. Such an identity is neither internal nor external. It is also not some blend of the two. It is rather something set by their intertwining. Thus, the touching hand is an internal (subjective) place of disclosure, while the touched hand, in Merleau-Ponty’s words, “descends into the things,” being externally positioned “in the midst of the world.” My bodily identity, as involving both, has, then, the character of a subjectivity positioned in the world. It is both, as touching, what brings the world to presence, and, as touched, part of the world that is brought to presence. The fact that the touched hand feels being touched means that this being thrust into world by being touched involves our selfhood as a place of disclosure. Such selfhood becomes itself spread out even as the touched hand as part of the external world is spread out in space. What we have, then, in this intertwining is the introduction of the spatial into the temporal, that is, the outside into the inside. This is what allows us to be in relation to ourselves across the divide of space. Limited solely to temporal relationships, we only have the abstract identity of being a subject for the world, i.e., being that-to-whom-the-world-appears. As distinct from what appears, such a subject cannot itself appear, i.e., cannot have an objective, present relation to itself as a subject. As Husserl puts this: “the ego which is the counterpart (gegenüber) to everything is anonymous. It is not its own [objective] counterpart as the house is my counterpart. And yet I can turn my attention to myself. But then this counterpart in which the ego comes forward along with everything which was its counterpart is again split. The ego which comes forward as a counterpart and its counterpart [e.g., the house it was perceiving] are both counterparts to me. Forthwith, I—the subject of this new counterpart—am anonymous” (Ms. C 2 I, pp. 2b-3a, Aug. 1931, Späte Texte über Zeitkonstitution, p. 2). For this, the subject must descend “into the things,” i.e., appear “in the midst of the world.” It must confront itself across the divide of space. The self that it does confront must be itself as a spatially located temporal place of disclosure. The nature of such a place can be indicated by noting the transformation it works on the subjective derivation of space from time. Such a derivation was originally thought of in terms of the grasp of objects as identifiable referents for patterns of perceptions. Each time we can identify a referent for some perspectivally arranged pattern, we are said to have grasped an object. The same holds for all the patterns and corresponding objects we grasp as we move across a room. Now, the transformation in question involves the interpretation of the phrase, “as we move across a room.” Moving across it, we move among its objects. Rather than interpreting this in terms of time, we now see this motion as the introduction of space into time. In other words, the temporal relation of one to many (one referent for many temporally distinct experiences) that was taken as definitive of space is now understood as including the spatial path involved in our moving among objects. The very intention to grasp a single referent for a pattern of perceptions has, in other words, a spatial component that involves changing our location with regard to the object by, for example, moving closer to get a better look, bending down and picking up the object and manipulating it with our hands. This involvement of space in our temporal grasp of the world shows itself in the spread out nature of time. What distinguishes one moment from the next preventing their simultaneity is, we have emphasized, the spread-outness, the along-sidedness of the space that is intertwined with time. It is a function of the extension of subjectivity taken as a located place of temporal disclosure. This can also be put by saying that the difference between two moments can, in Newton’s and Leibniz’s “calculus of infinitesimals” be brought as close as we please to zero. The fact that it cannot be brought to zero is not due to time itself, but rather by the introduction of the apartness of space into it. If space had no apartness, then all our registering of its features would be simultaneous. The content-filled moments of such registering would, then, collapse into one another. What this points to is the mutual actualization of space and time. Each provides a place for the disclosure of the other. Their reciprocal actualization is that of the framework for appearing. §6. Decentering Arousal A new type of arousal will allow us to expand the sense of this mutual disclosure. Thus far, arousal has been defined in terms of need and satisfaction—on the most basic level, instinctual needs and their satisfaction. The arousal of the drives associated with such needs thrusts us into the world that can satisfy them. My being in this world is self-directed. Driven by need, my being-in-the-world is, necessarily, my being-for-myself. There is, however, evidence that there is a thrusting of ourselves outside of ourselves that goes beyond need. This is an arousal of myself, not as a being-for-myself, but rather as a being-for-the-other. It is a thrusting of myself outside of myself through my embodiment in the other. I experience this whenever I see someone cut his hand and I reach for my own hand. When I do so, my action points to my experiencing the affection of the other as my own. I experience the cut here, in my flesh, now. This occurs in spite of the visual evidence that contradicts this. My eyes tell me that my hand has not been cut, the other’s has. Yet, on the level of tactile affection, I experience displacement. My actions indicate a type of arousal that thrusts me outside of my embodied subjectivity. The sense of such subjectivity involves both the here and the now. My sense of my being here is set by the perspectival unfolding of the objects within my visual field. They position me as a 0-point, a point from which these distances are to be measured. As such a zero-point, I have my constant “here.” My constantly being here as I move about is accompanied by a corresponding sense of being now. As now, I exist between between my retained past and anticipated future, a divide that I take as now. Given that the contents that fill this time are those that position me as a here, this now, which constantly remains between the retained past and the anticipated future, is necessarily linked with my constant sense of being “here.” Both, in turn, are linked with my bodily self-identity, the identity that comes from the double sensation of touching and being touched that identifies my body as mine. My here and now thus designate an embodied place distinguished by the fact that when I touch myself, I both feel what is touched, say my face or my hand, and I feel myself being touched. Given this, what are we to make of the fact that when we see another cut his hand, we reach for our own? It seems that there are data that do not fit, that cannot be constitutively integrated with the visual and tactile phenomena that give us our sense of being an embodied here-now. This point may be put in terms of the self’s intertwining with the content that affects it. As we said, affecting content is such only in relation to the capacity of the self to be affected by it. As for the self, it exist only in relation to such affecting content. Their actualization is mutual, each providing a place for the other to appear. But when I see the other cut himself and reach for my hand, this intertwining of self and content displaces the self. I experience, in other words, a decentering content. The self that is disclosed by it cannot be visually integrated with the self that appears as centered by its environment. It is, rather, at the place of the other self, the self that has cut his hand. Insofar as I feel the other cut his hand, there is a corresponding rupture in my sense of bodily identity. The phenomenon of double sensation extends beyond me to include the other. I feel his being touched. I, thus, experience in my very selfhood an incompatibility between my visual and tactile presence as a here-now and the actions and feelings that would locate me there where the other is. Seeing someone cut his hand is an exceptional event. Normally, regarding others does not involve witnessing their distress. It does, however, exhibit some degree of decentering. This can be put in terms of the fact that our body is not just sensate flesh. As animate, it expresses our “I can,” that is, our ability to engage in projects through our functioning bodies. Such projects range from those we learned in childhood, such as learning to walk, to dress and feed ourselves, to the various activities that characterize our adult life. We were not born with these abilities, but rather learned them from others. Insofar as this involved our “I can,” it demanded a certain decentering. It required that we place ourselves within the action of others, within their enactment of the “I can.” Thus, we learned to tie our shoes by imitating those who first showed us how. Doing so, we observed the process from their perspective. Somehow, we were there with them as they knelt down, grasped the laces, and moved and knotted them with their fingers. This empathetic ability to experience through the other is not just crucial to learning, it is a general feature of our encounters with others. A batsman swings his bat, a basketball player strains to get the ball in the hoop and we feel ourselves experiencing these exertions. The same ability allows us to watch movies and feel ourselves present in the actors. At work in almost all our forms of imitative learning, it is crucial to our social and political functioning. What is behind this ability? How are we to account for the presence of data that do not fit with those that constitute our visual and tactile sense of being here-now, but rather thrust us into the person we are observing “over there” at a distance from ourselves? §7. The Two Accounts of Arousal The above indicates that we have only half of what we need to understand the arousal that decenters us. Our descriptions have concentrated on our first-person, subjective experience. But if our selfhood is set by the intertwining of the inner and the outer, the temporal and the spatial, then the second of these pairs must also be taken into account. We must understand the objective process of this decentering arousal. Such understanding must not be reductive; it must not explain away our experience. Rather the intertwining of our subjective experience and this objective process must be such that each discloses the other. Each must provide the other with a context of sense, either spatial or temporal, that it is unable to provide for itself. For a third-person description of the objective process of decentering arousal, we can turn to the neuroscientist Vilayanur S. Ramachandran, the Director of the Centre for Brain and Cognition at the University of California at San Diego. He relates that primates’ frontal lobes contain neurons that fire as they perform specific movements. Thus, there are neurons that will fire when a monkey reaches out and grabs a peanut, there are also neurons that fire when the monkey pulls something, and still others that fire when it pushes something. They are called “motor command neurons” since they issue the commands that enable our bodily “I can.” Some of these, experiments show, “also fire when the monkey watches another monkey performing the same action.” Thus, the “peanut-grabbing neuron which fires when the monkey grabs a peanut” also fires “when monkey watches another monkey grab a peanut.” As Ramachandran remarks, this is “quite extraordinary because the visual image of somebody else grabbing the peanut is utterly different” from that of your own grabbing the peanut “so you have to do this internal mental transformation to do that computation and for that neuron to fire.” These “monkey-see monkey-do neurons” are called “mirror neurons.” “The Emerging Mind: Synapses and the Self,” Reith Lectures 2003, Lecture 2, p. 6, available at http://www.bbc.co.uk/print/radio4/reith2003/lecture2.shtml). In allowing us to mirror the actions of others, they are obviously crucial in our learning from one another. To take this account in a non-reductive manner is to understand it in terms of a first person account. It is, in fact, to see such neurons as interjecting into my here and now material that does not fit with this. The visual experience of the other’s performing some action locates it over there; its perspectival unfolding positions it at a spatial distance from my body. Yet I experience it as if I in my here-now were engaged in the action. It is because of this that I can, without effort, watch movies, theater pieces, and ball games and identify myself with the actions going on. Aroused by what I see, I mirror the emotional states and actions of the players. I may even, if I see someone being struck, wince myself. I can do this because the neurons in question insert into the constitution of my world data that belong to another person’s world. Such data overlay my “here” with another “here,” one that remains visually “there” at a distance from myself. The result is my arousal, my waking up from my primordial world (the world for me, in which I am the center). Aroused by multiple others, I am thrust into a world with multiple centers, multiple “here’s.” I “wake up,” as it were, in a third-person world, a world that is present to multiple subjects. This, of course, is also the world explored by science, including the neuro-science that gives us the account of mirror neurons. Its account of these neurons in the brain speaks of the “inside” in spatial terms, just as the first person account of data that do not fit understands the “inside” in temporal terms. Both, of course, are required for us to understand the phenomenon of decentering arousal. Without empathy, understood in the literal sense as our ability to feel something occurring in another person, we would not have the context to understand the import of the firing of the mirror neurons. Without the account of such neurons, we could not objectively understand the subjective presence within experience of what does not fit with it. Both are required to make sense of our experience of being thrust outside of ourselves into the objective world. What we actually confront here is a single reality, which is grasped in two different ways. Their insufficiency, when regarded separately points to the fact of their intertwining, one where each is required to make the other intelligible. It points to the fact of their being a single reality, one composed of the actualization of the subjective and the objective. In this, the very constitution of the objective is also the constitution of the subjective. The next chapters, in their discussion of motion, will make this more concrete. Before we turn to them, we should briefly mention the implications of decentering arousal. The objective world such arousal thrusts us into contains multiple subjects or centers of experience. From infancy onwards, we are progressively aroused by it and define ourselves accordingly. We see ourselves as members of a family, as spouses, as part of a team, as political actors and so on. The selfhood that is so aroused becomes progressively capable of multiple intertwinings, each with its disclosures. These disclosures make it subject to multiple definitions. Collectively, they exhibit it as a multi-staged, multidimensional process. This can also be expressed by saying that as we progress along the stages of life, we enter into various overlapping worlds. Our progressive intertwining with them defines the ongoing process that is our selfhood. This process recalls our initial citation of Heraclites, “You could not find out the boundaries of a soul, even by traveling along every path: so deep a measure it has.” Heraclites, Fr. 45, in The Presocratic Philosophers, p. 205. The depth of its measure is that of its capacity to be aroused, to be progressively awakened by what is beyond it.  Chapter 7 Being And Appearing §1. Motion as the Basis of Actual Space and Time We are now at the point that we can redeem the promissory note made at the end of our first chapter. This was to uncover the inadmissible premise behind the aporia of the mind-body problem. Kant, we recall, stated “If two opposed judgments presuppose an inadmissible condition, then in spite of their contradiction … both fall to the ground, inasmuch as the condition … itself falls.” “Kritik der reinen Vernunft,” 2nd ed., B531, 3:345-6. The fundamental opposition, in terms of the mind-body problem, consists, we argued, in asserting that space is primary or, alternately, time is such. Science implicitly assumes the primacy of space in in its focus on external perception and its mathematization of what is externally regarded. Doing so, it eliminates consciousness. If, however, we assume the primacy of time, the spatial world, itself, is deprived of any independent reality. It becomes, as we cited Husserl writes, a “sense” constituted by consciousness. Ideen I, p. 106. This opposition takes a number of forms: The self as a subject for the world and the self as but one of many objects in the world, the claims that the world is in in me and the claim that I am in the world, the opposition between an emphasis on the contents and processes of consciousness and an emphasis on the “structure and dynamics of physical processes,” and so on. At bottom, all these positions assume that space and time are definitionally distinct—that we can consider each apart from the other. This, however, is the inadmissible premise assumed by all such oppositions. Actual space and time, as opposed to their mathematical representations, are intertwined. Each presupposes the other; each is “in” the other. Thus, space, in allowing time’s moments to be distinguished, allows it to have a definite extent. Definitionally, its partes extra partes, is “in” time as distinguishing its moments. Similarly, time is definitionally in space insofar as we judge actual distances by the time it takes to cross them. Time, in other words, distinguishes actual space from its mathematical expression in units of measurement. This mutual dependence of space and time raises the question of their common, unifying ground. What is it that demands that each, as actual, be “in” the other? What places them in each other? The answer, as indicated by our analysis, is motion. Both space and time, as actual, extended quantities are, in fact, conceived in terms of motion. Thus, motion is what places time in space. We distinguish time in terms of its “before” and “after” through motion, saying, for example, that “before” a moving body (say the hand of a clock) was in this spatial position and “afterwards” it was in this different spatial position. This difference in spatial positions is, as just noted, absolutely essential since without it the moments of time would collapse into each other. Similarly, motion places space in time, since a moving body traverses space in a definite time. Without this reference to time, distance becomes simply a mathematical quantity. Alfred Reinach writes in this regard, “Motion is what makes the spatial interval a traversed space (not a distance—the distance is the interval itself considered statically … ). The space traversed is a space that is somehow unified, interconnected, animated by an internal unity. The space traversed is an event; it is an entirely new unity in relation to the static unity of the partes extra partes” (Über das Wesen der Bewegung,” in Gesamelte Schriften, Halle, Max Niejeyer, 1921; cited by Patočka in “Phénoménologie et Ontologie du Mouvement,” Papiers Phénoménologiques (Paris: Millon, 1995). Such mutual placing signifies that we are dealing here not with two separate realities, but rather with a single fundamental reality. It points to the fact that space and time are abstractions drawn from a primary reality, which is that of motion. Jan Patočka, the Czech philosopher, expresses this primacy as follows: … space and time, considered as distinct dimensions of “movement” and of “modification,” which alone are originally given (that is, space and time, considered as dimensions of the “change” that provides their basis)—are only a development, each time different, of the “possibility” of movement or modification. They do not become factual space or time except through an actual movement or a modification of what is the case. Patočka, “Phénoménologie et Ontologie du Mouvement,” in Papiers Phénoménologiques, trans. Erika Abrams (Grenoble: Jérôme Millon, 1995), p. 38. In other words, motion is what actualizes both space and time. It does so by placing each “in” the other. This double being in makes them dimensions of the primary reality, which is that of motion. Needless to say, to accept this is to reject the Kantian divide between consciousness and the external world, the former being charactered by temporality and the latter by spatiality. The above implies that motion, in placing time in space, places consciousness in the spatial world. Similarly, motion, in placing space in time, introduces spatiality into the temporal relations of consciousness. As the next chapter shows, the recursive motions of retention and protention are those that place time in space, and, in so doing, actualize consciousness as a place of appearing. The important point here is that world, apart from consciousness, neither remembers nor anticipates. Consciousness, through retention and protention, does. Before its action, the world exhibits only spatial relations. Change is not change over time, but simply otherness in the now. The spatial basis of such otherness, however, performs a crucial function; it introduces space into time, i.e., prevents the collapse of the moments that consciousness retains and anticipates. §2. Motion as Actualization: Patočka’s Revival and Transformation of Aristotle’s Thesis Patočka, in presenting his thesis on the primacy, does not bring up retention and protention. His main influence, in this regard, was Aristotle, rather than Husserl. In fact, he wrote extensively on Aristotle and was strongly influenced by him, the result being his extended, 1964 study, Aristotle, His Predecessors and Successors. Aristote, ses devanciers, ses successeurs, trans. Erika Abrams (Paris: Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, 2011). This work is a translation of Aristoteles, jeho předchůdci a dědicové. Studie z dějin filosofie od Aristotela k Hegelovi, Prague, 1964. As Erika Abrams, its translator, notes: “the problem of movement, which he particularly focused on, was omni-present in the phenomenological writings of the 1960’s and 1970’s.” Aristote, ses devanciers, ses successeurs, p. 7. In Patočka’s words, the problem is that of seeing movement as “a fundamental ontological factor,” one that “gives things the being that they are.” “La conception aristotélicienne du mouvement : signification philosophique et recherches historiques,” in Le monde naturel et le mouvement de l’existence humaine, ed. and trans. Erika Abrams (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1988), p. 129. In this, Patočka follows Aristotle’s description of energeia or actualization. According to Aristotle, not only has energeia “been derived from movements,” but “to be in act seems, above all, to be a movement.” Metaphysics, 1047a 30-33, trans. Richard Hope, p. 185. For Patočka, this signifies that motion does not just actualize space and time, it actualizes the entities within it. In his words, “movement is what gives things the being that they are; movement is a fundamental ontological factor.” “La conception aristotélicienne du mouvement,” p. 129. The actualization of ourselves as living beings, for example, includes the flow of blood in our veins, the movements of respiration, of digestion, in short, all the organic movements that are essential for our being alive. Beyond this, it embraces the movements of our limbs, of our organs of perception, and so on. All are, in Patočka’s words, “movements tied to the fundamental functions of organisms.” Ibid., p. 128. Although Patočka does not explicitly assert it, the same claim can be made on the inorganic level. Light, for example, exists by virtue of the movement of electromagnetic waves; the source of light exists by virtue of the movements that generate these waves. This also holds on the subatomic level. The particles composing atoms can never be at rest. Epistemologically, this holds since were an isolated particle completely stationary it would be unable to affect its environment and, thus, would be incapable of manifesting its presence to an observer. Ontologically, it holds since were the particle stationary and, per impossibile, knowable, it would be definitely locatable. As such, however, it would violate Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. One can put this by saying, “According to the uncertainty principle in quantum mechanics, quantum harmonic oscillators cannot remain stationary, but they have a non-zero minimum energy and must always be oscillating, even in the lowest energy state (the ground state).” Such oscillation makes electrons known since “[i]t is this quantum fluctuation of electromagnetic fields in the vacuum that ‘stimulates’ the spontaneous emission of radiation by electrons in atoms” (Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_field_theory. Implicit here is the notion that movement is prior to being. Motion is not a predicate of being, i.e., a description of an already existent entity. As “ontological motion,” it is what brings it about. Patočka expresses this in terms of the fact that an entity has a distinct number of predicates, but motion does not. In his words, the “concept [of an entity] tends to close up on itself with regard to its determination such that its existence requires only a finite number of terms.” It is because of this that it becomes an “ontological singularity,”—i.e., a definite being describable by a finite number of terms. Motion, however, “excludes such closure.” It “exceeds all determination in the direction of the in-finite, of the universe of everything that is.” “Phénoménologie et ontologie du mouvement,”p. 29. This means that “movement … is not itself a reality in the same sense as determinate realities.” Ibid., p. 42 (ibid., p. 42). It is, rather, the realization of such entities—this, regardless of their determinations. It is, then, prior to the division of being into the animate and the inanimate. Its sense as realization is, in other words, univocal. This signifies for Patočka that, whatever the entity, “[m]ovement is what makes a being what it is. Movement unifies, maintains cohesion, synthesizes the being’s determinations. The persistence and succession of the determinations of a substrate, etc., are movements.” Ibid. p. 31. Patočka’s conception of movement radicalizes Aristotle’s position. For Aristotle, movement is the movement of something—i.e., of some underlying substance. This position is crucial for Aristotle’s account of time. For him, the present or now (which “is not a part of time,” but rather its ground) is the presence of the body. This continuing now, which frames our perception, “corresponds” to the body by virtue of our registering the body’s continuous self-manifestation. The lack of gaps in the body’s presence is what grounds the continuity of time, just as the body’s shifting relation to its environment grounds time’s flow. Patočka, however, rejects this idea of a sheer presence that marks the unchanging substrate of motion. “Nachwort,” in Die natürliche Welt as philosophisches Problem, Phänomenologische Schriften I, ed. Klaus Nellen und Jiří Němec, trans. Eliška und Ralph Melville (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1990, p. 242. In order to present his account of “ontological motion,” the motion that is responsible for being, he engages in the “radicalization of Aristotle.” This involves “radicalizing Aristotle’s conception and understanding of movement as the original life that does not receive its unity from an enduring substrate but rather, itself, generates its own unity as well as that of the thing in movement.” Only this, he claims, “is the original movement.” Ibid., pp. 242-43. In defending his position, he notes that the understanding of movement as the change of the attributes of an unchanging substrate ill suits the coming to be and passing away of beings. What, we may ask, is the underlying substrate that persists in the movement that runs from the fertilizing of an egg through the growth and development of the embryo and then to the organism’s maturity and thence to its decline and death? In the absence of any substrate, can this be conceived as movement? “Our radicalization of Aristotle,” Patočka asserts, consists in answering this question “in the affirmative.” This involves conceiving movement as including “the movement of coming to be and passing away of what is.” Such “movement … no longer presupposes constituted being but rather constitutes it.” Ibid., p. 242. §3. Motion as the Ground of Appearing According to Patočka, in constituting being, movement “first makes this or that being apparent, causes it to manifest itself in its own original manner.” Ibid. This signifies that the priority of motion to being is also its priority to the appearing of being. Not only does motion, in actualizing space and time, actualize the framework of appearing. It also brings about the appearing of particular beings. Turning from Patočka and taking up the thread of our own argument, we can see why this is so. To begin with, we note that the most general sense of such appearing is “asubjective”—i.e., prior to subjective perceivers. Appearing, here, is thought simply in terms of a being’s affecting its physical environment. Such affecting is also the being’s “existing” in the etymological sense of the term. This is that of standing out, ex and istimi in the Greek. Things stand out, that is, ex-ist, by affecting their environment, such affection occurring through their motion. On the most basic level, living beings do this through engaging in metabolism, i.e., by exchanging material with what surrounds them. Inanimate objects do this through such motions as the vibration of atoms, the movement of electrons, the flux of subatomic particles, quantum fluctuations and so on. Without such motions, entities could not distinguish themselves from their environments; they could not affect them. Environmentally, then, without movement, they are indistinguishable from non-entities. Given this, we have Patočka’s claim that “movement is the foundation of every manifestation.” It is “what founds the identity between being and appearing. Being is being manifest” (ibid.). This follows because the movement that makes something be also makes it stand out or exist. In this, it makes it present to its environment. It appears in affecting it, and it affects it through the very motion that causes it to be. The above implies that being and appearing in this asubjective sense cannot be thought of apart from each other. Both are realized by motion; the motion that actualizes the one also actualizing the other. The fact that there is only a single actualization recalls Aristotle’s description of the teacher’s relation to the student. Physics, 202b5-8, Hope trans., p. 45. Here, too, there is only one actualization. The teacher in her teaching actualizes the student as a learner. The student, in turn, through his attention and questioning, actualizes the teacher. Each depends on the other. Thus, the learner can shut out the teacher; he can refuse to learn. At this point, the teacher remains such only in terms of her potential. For Aristotle, then, there is only one actualization, teaching and learning being two aspects of the same process. The same holds when we move to the subjective sense of appearing, i.e., turn to the process of seeing. According to Aristotle, the sensible object qua sensible requires the sensitive subject and vice versa. Thus, the functioning or actualization of the seeing eye requires the visible object, which, to function as visible, requires the seeing eye. Aristotle, as we saw, makes the same claim with regard to the mind. He writes: “As the sensitive [part of the soul] is to the sensible [object], so is the mind with regard to the thinkable.” De Anima, 429a17, my translation. This means that without the thinkable, the mind cannot think. But such thinking is mind’s actualization (energeia). When it does not think, it is not actual. In Aristotle’s words, oujqevn ejstin ejnergeiva tw'n o[ntwn priVn noei'n (De Anima, 429a 24): “Before it thinks, it is no actual being.” As for the thinkable, its actualization as thinkable requires the thinking mind. Once again, we have a single actualization. Prior to this, we have to do only with possibilities. It may be possible for an intelligible structure to be grasped; but in the absence of mind, this possibility cannot be actualized. §4. The Apriori of Possibilities as a World-Structure This conception of possibilities plays a crucial role in understanding the relation of consciousness to its embodiment. To grasp it, we must first note that a similar description can be applied to space and time: apart from each other and the motion that actualizes them, they, too, only designate possibilities. Thus, space apart from time is the possibility of having distances that can be crossed. Formally regarded, its lawful relations are expressed by geometry. Geometrical relations are not themselves actual, but rather specify the possibilities for actual relations. Correspondingly, we can say that time apart from space is the possibility of having durations that can be gone through. Its lawful relations are those linking past, present, and future. As formal, they also express possibilities for actual relations. The same point can be made with regard to being and appearing. Abstracted from each other and the motion actualizing them, they too are reduced to possibilities. The point follows in an asubjective sense since, without the motions that constitute entities, there is nothing to actually appear, nothing to stand out and affect an environment, i.e., appear in an asubjective sense. What we are left with are simply the possibilities of beings that could be realized given the appropriate motions. These include the possibilities of their affecting their environment, i.e., appearing in the asubjective sense. A similar description applies to appearing to a subject—i.e., the subjective sense of appearing: without the motions constituting sensitive subjects, such affections cannot result in sensible appearing. In the absence of these subjects appearing simply indicates a possible set of relations that, given the appropriate motions constituting a subject, can be embodied in appearing to an individual. A crucial point here is that intertwining—the double relation of being in—does not imply conflation. Thus, the intertwining of time and space does not imply the loss of their identities. This holds even though, as actual, they are not definitionally distinct. The same point holds with regard to consciousness and the living body that incorporates it. Although they are not definitionally distinct, actual consciousness being necessarily that of a living body, they are, as intertwined, not to be conflated. The same holds for the possibilities each expresses, when regarded apart from the other. Formally regarded, the possibilities of material bodies are given by the laws of the natural sciences—laws that are expressed in mathematical formulae. Such laws drain time from space. Motion is required for the possibilities they express to become descriptive of actual existents. Living bodies add to the possibilities of inanimate material bodies. They are, Chapter 5 indicated, more complex requiring further variables to describe their functioning. Such variables increase in number as the living body becomes more complex. The actions a nematode is capable of are less than those of an insect, which in turn are dwarfed by the actions of yet more complex creatures. The consciousness embodied by more complex creatures is, as we should expect, itself more complex. This does not mean that the possibilities of consciousness are the same as those of its material embodiment. If the possibilities of material nature, considered in their mathematical formulation, are those of space apart from time, those of conscious concern time abstracted from space. Given that when we look inward, we only find temporal relations, our self-presence, we said, is primarily temporal. This holds, in particular, for the presence to ourselves of our acts of syntheses by which we join together perceptions and identify them with referents. Phenomenology, as a reflective practice that focuses on such acts, draws from them their essential (“eidetic”) structures. Doing so, it attempts to give the formal laws of subjective appearing. Throughout this book, we have availed ourselves of its results. This holds not just for our account of temporal functioning, but also of our descriptions, generally drawn from the second volume of Husserl’s Ideas, of how our embodiment shapes our consciousness. In the absence of the motions that would actualize specific living organisms, such formal laws, like those of mathematical physics, express only possibilities. What we have, then, are two co-ordinate sets of possibilities. Such possibilities imply each other and, with the appropriate motions, become realized in sentient organisms reacting to their environments. Yet regarded in themselves, neither they nor the space and time that frame them can be conflated. Now, to accept the distinction of the two is to accept the “originality” of appearing, i.e., the fact that its possibilities are not to be drawn from those of the beings that appear. Patočka's arguments for such originality are instructive, since they help us to grasp the basis of the mind’s relation to our embodied, physical functioning. He writes that “manifesting is, in itself, something completely original,” which means that “manifesting in itself, in that which makes it manifesting, is not reducible, cannot be converted into anything that manifests itself in manifesting.” Plato and Europe, trans. Petr Lom. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002, p. 24. It is not appearing things, but rather “the showing of those things.” He writes in this regard: “Showing is not, then, as it may seem, merely an objective structure, because the objective, material structure is that which shows itself. Showing is also not mind and it is not the structure of mind, because that is also just a thing; it is also something that is and that eventually can also manifest itself…. showing itself is not any of these things that show themselves, whether it is a psychic or physical object … and yet it is still the showing of those things” (Plato and Europe, p. 22). Its distinction from the former signifies that it cannot be derived from them. In other words, it is not a function of an entity’s physical processes and qualities. Its originality is shown by the fact that every attempt to derive it from them presupposes it. In Patočka's words, “I cannot go back to what appears to explain appearing in its appearing, since the understanding of appearing is already presupposed in every thesis about the appearing entity” “Der Subjektivismus der Husserlschen und die Möglichkeit einer ‘asubjektiven’ Phänomenologie,” Die Bewegung der menschlichen Existenz, ed. Klaus Nellen, Jiří. Němic, and Ilja Srubar. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1991, p. 278, my translation. His point is that such an explanation would already assume, in the content of its terms, the very showing that it was trying to explain. As empirical, it would have to begin with the appearing of the processes and qualities that are assumed to lie at its basis. With this, we have another sense of appearing’s originality. Its distinction from the being that appears means that it, itself, is not a being. In Patočka's words, to assert that “‘[t]here is a structure of appearance’ does not signify ‘there is a being, a this-here, which one can call appearance.’ Appearing as such is not a being and cannot be referred to as a being.” “Epoché und Reduktion in den ‘Fünf Vorlesungen,’” in Vom Erscheinen als solchem: Texte aus dem Nachlaß, eds. Helga Blaschek-Hahn and Karel Novotny (Freiburg/München: Verlag Karl Alber, 2000), p. 119. As he also writes, what we have to do with here is not “given as a being, rather it is the givenness and modes of givenness of a being, which modes themselves cannot be designated as beings.” Ibid. These “modes of givenness” form a separate category, that of the possibilities of appearing. Such possibilities, which phenomenology studies, are distinct from the possibilities of the material processes of the organisms to whom things appear. If this were not the case, we could derive them from the scientific account of such processes. Appearing itself would be a material, causal process. This, however, would collapse the mind body problem. There would be no gap between consciousness and its physical embodiment requiring an explanatory bridge. The possibilities of appearing, however, are of a different order. They include, for example, that of a spatially located point of view correlated to an ongoing pattern of perspectival appearing. They also include the possibility of a 0-point in time, which is set by the remembered and anticipated perspectives of this pattern. Similarly, they embrace all the possibilities of appearing correlated to the specific forms of embodiment assumed by sentient organisms. Now, according to Patočka, the totality of such possibilities forms a “world structure.” For him, “[t]he original possibilities (the world) are simply the field where the living being exists, the field that is co-original with [this world].” “Corps, possibilités, monde, champ d’apparation,” in Papiers Phénomenologiques, trans. Erika Abrams. Grenoble: Jérôme Million), 1995, p. 124. Our human “totality of possibilities” is “a selection” made from this—one corresponding to our form of embodiment. Ibid., p. 123. Thus our animate organism represents a selection of the possibilities of material existence. The appearing of the world to this organism represents, correspondingly, a selection of the possibilities of appearing as such. On the original level (that of the world as such), we thus have “the impersonal order of the totality of possibilities, possibilities not pertaining to any being in particular.” On the level of my existing as a particular human being, we have “my totality of possibilities as a selection made from the sphere of the first” (ibid.). This selection is, on the one hand, that of our embodied existence with its senses and possibilities of mobility. On the other, it is that of appearing to this existence. With regard to the latter, we can say that the “impersonal order” of appearing as such involves pure possibility. It forms “a simple field of specific legalities.” Ibid., p. 126 The human totality of possibilities understands these legalities in relation to us, i.e., in terms of our possible experience as given by our embodiment. §5. Motion as Actualization For such legalities to be actualized, motion must intervene. This is not just the motion responsible for the being of the affecting agents, but also that of the being of the organism in response to them. Thus, the actualization of the perspectival patterns of the appearing of the objects in a room requires not just these objects’ motion in affecting me—i.e., their emitting electromagnetic waves that affect my eyes and brain. It also requires the motions of the latter in the encoding of the signals my eyes receive. Beyond this, of course, it requires my own motion as I walk about the room. This motion as well as those of the functioning of my eyes and brain depend on my form of embodiment. Given that this form is the result of a long evolutionary process, we can expand the sense of the motion that actualizes such legalities. We can understand it as including the motion of evolution. Evolution, with its doctrine of the survival of the fittest, is driven by the acquisition of features that offer advantages in the competitive struggle for existence. Now, if appearing is a “world-structure,” the evolution of organic beings would take account of it. Their evolution would involve their adapting to this structure—i.e.., actualizing a set of its possibilities—if such adaptation offered a survival advantage. The evolution of sensory organs and central nervous systems would, thus, provide such organisms with the physical apparatus that would make the structure of appearing—i.e., a subset of its “legalities”—applicable to their organic functioning. Here, we should note that while such functioning is causally determined, the structure of appearing is not so determined. The functioning subject, Patočka writes, is “the subject that is filled [with content] (das erfüllte Subjekt).” This subject “exhibits neither advantage nor precedence over other worldly realities.” “Epoché und Reduktion,” p. 123. In fact, “it appears as a living body (Leib) that belongs to the subject to whom everything shows itself.” This is a body that moves and has kinesthesia (i.e., senses its movement). Ibid. Like other worldly realities, this “full” or “concrete” subject stands in causal relations to the rest of the world. As Patočka writes: “Concrete subjects are things among things, which certainly stand in causal connections with other worldly things, and this connection is a specific one: it concentrates the effects [of the other things] in specific, highly differentiated, acting organs [those of the senses and the brain], and thereby actualizes the possibility of letting a perspectival world appear, a world that appears to someone.” Ibid., p. 126. Now, the presence of such causal connections does not imply that the structures of appearing that are actualized are themselves causally determined. The relation of the concrete subject—the biological agent—to such structures is that of providing the conditions—i.e., the motions—for their applicability. In their actualizing the appearing of the world, the motions of our brains and senses simply make the structures of appearing applicable to us. As Patočka expresses this: “Causality in no way signifies the creation of the appearing as such, but rather the adaptation of the organic unity to the structure of appearing, which co-determines the world and in a certain partial sense grounds it.” Ibid., p. 132. The point Patočka is making about “adaption” can be put in terms of the distinction between the validity and the applicability of a formal law. Different machines made of different materials can, for example, be constructed to do sums. The laws these machines obey are formal causal laws—be they the laws of electronics for an electronic calculator or those of the gear and lever for a mechanical adding machine. The laws, although formal, are empirically derived. This is why a single counter example undermines their validity. The formal arithmetical laws that such machines instantiate are, however, neither causal nor empirical. When an adding machine gives the answer 2+2=5, we do not take this as a counter example and question the laws of arithmetic. We also do not assert that the machine has violated some law of causality. We do, however, say that it gives a response that, from the standpoint of the laws of addition, is an invalid answer. If we accept this distinction, we acknowledge that such laws are, with certain conditions, indifferent to the conditions of their applicability. Patočka’s insight is that appearing itself has this formal character. It is, he writes, “a specific world structure … without itself being actual” (i.e., without its being a being). “Epoché und Reduktion,” p. 125, n. 174. On the one hand, it represents “a lawfulness that … cannot be grounded or drawn from the object.” This follows because the lawfulness that is drawn from objects forms the content of the natural sciences. The lawfulness of appearing, by contrast, concerns the appearing of the objects studied by these sciences. Now, according to Patočka, this lawfulness “determines experiential, natural and scientific knowing.” “Epoché und Reduktion,” p. 125. Phenomenology’s task, Patočka writes, is to investigate this determining lawfulness: “die Phänomenologie untersucht schauend die Grundstrukturen, aufgrund deren überhaupt Welt erscheinen kann und aufgrund deren etwas wie natürliche, d.h. nicht schauende, sondern hypothetisch erwägende, formal-leere und erst Voraussicht aufgrund der Erfahrung verbürgende Erkenntnis möglich ist. Das von der Phänomenologie Geleistete wäre zugleich eine neue Wissenschaft vom anschauungszugänglichen Apriori, ein Beitrag zur Metaphysik als Wissenschaft vom Aufbau der Weltstrukturen und eine Grundlage für die objektiven Wissenschaften” (ibid., p. 126). Given this, we cannot agree with Guy Deniau when he asserts “La formalité du discours de la phénoménologie asubjective est celle de la sécheresse d'un discours qui porte sur le rien du tout de ce qui paraît, c'est-à-dire justement sur l'apparaître comme tel, irréductible à ce qui paraît ‘objectivement’ ou ‘subjectivement’” (“La ‘formalité’ de la phénoménologie asubjective et la ‘mission’ de l’homme” in Jan Patočka – Phénoménologie asubjective et existence, ed. Renaud Barabars, Les Cahiers de Chiasmi International [Paris: Association Culturelle Mimesis] no. 2, p. 79. Deniau’s claim is: “La formalité de l'apparaître comme tel fait donc de la phénoménologie asubjective un discours vide de tout contenu, dès lors purement formel.” (p. 76). This is because its subject is simply the “gap” (écart), the nothing (rien) that, in separating subjects and objects, allows the latter to appear to the former. In his words, “En cet écart irréductible, non relevable en une synthèse, la phénoménologie asubjective trouve son ‘objet,’ et sa tâche.” (p. 78). Given the emptiness of this “object,” one may ask whether asubjective phenomenology under Deniau’s interpretation remains phenomenology—i.e., the study of appearing. This is not because it gives the physical conditions for knowing, but rather because, as the lawfulness of appearing, it determines the knowing that is based upon appearing. Put in terms of current AI parlance, what we have here is the claim of “computational functionalism.” Applied to consciousness, this is the claim that “[t]he material substrate of a system does not matter for consciousness except insofar as the substrate affects which algorithms the system can implement. This means that consciousness is, in principle, multiply realizable: it can exist in multiple substrates …” Butlin, Bengio, Yoshua, Deane, et alia. (2023). “Consciousness in Artificial Intelligence: Insights from the Science of Consciousness,” Arxiv, Cornel University. Accessed at https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.08708. Such substrates can include the multiple forms of sentient life. §6. Motion as an Explanatory Bridge By now the fundamental claim implicit in the above should be clear. The motion that Patočka takes as prior to being and appearing is the explanatory bridge linking mind and body. Patočka sums up his position by writing that his goal “is a philosophy of a distinct kind, one which takes movement as its basic concept and principle … What is distinctive about our attempt is our interpretation of movement; we understand it independently of the dichotomy between subject and object,” i.e., between “on the one hand, an objective world, complete, self-enclosed, and, on the other hand, a subject perceiving this world.” Body, Community, Language, World, trans. Erazim Kohák (Chicago: Open Court Publishing, 1998), p. 153. Prior to both is motion. It is what actualizes and links the two. The crucial point is that this motion is ontological. We fail to grasp Patočka’s insight when we take this motion as that of already actualized entities—e.g., as the processes of the functioning brain and the existent objects that provide it with sensuous input. Doing so, we face the question of how we can derive appearing from such processes. For Patočka, however, appearing is there from the start. The question is not of its derivation but rather of the conditions for its applicability. The key here is that ontological motion is prior to the divide between being and appearing. So are the formal, lawful relations, which it actualizes. On the one hand, we have the relations that specify physical processes—those that are given by the mathematical expressions of the causal laws of the natural sciences. On the other, we have the formal relations that specify appearing—in particular the subset that expresses appearing as it relates to us. The latter relations, as noted, are those that eidetic phenomenology studies. Both must be actualized before we can talk of a subject-object divide. Such actualization is the function of the motion that makes them applicable to appropriately constituted individuals. Thus, with the actualization of the relations that realize sentient subjects, the “asubjective” appearing of entities becomes subjective—i.e., becomes appearing to an appropriately adapted individual, one equipped with the requisite senses. Nature provides us with abundant examples of such individuals. Each, in his way, solves the mind-body problem by actualizing the formal relations appropriate to its structure. It does so by the very motion that actualizes itself as a sentient organism reacting to its environment. Such motion is, of course, joined with the motion of its affecting environment. There is a single actualization relating a sentient creature to its world, one involving both appearing and being. The two, it is to be stressed, are not the same. Considered as a possibility, appearing, along with its subset, consciousness, is there from the start. So is material nature. But in the absence of the appropriate motions, both remain possibilities. In this, they are like the space and time that frame each. Just as time and space must be in each other to be actualized, the same holds for consciousness and its organic embodiment.  Chapter 8 The Motion of Recursion §1. Recursive Motions Defined. Thus far, we have spoken only in general terms regarding the motion that actualizes appearing as conscious appearing. Such motion, we said, includes our bodily motility, our focusing our eyes, manipulating objects with our hands, and so forth. It also includes the neural processes of our brains. In this chapter, we shall advance the claim that the motion of these processes is primarily recursive. Our contention will be that subjective appearing, consciousness, is actualized by such recursive motion. First, however, we have to define recursive processes. In the most general terms, such processes are those where the results of a process are fed back into the process. For example, in mathematics, a recursive function is one that operates on a number (its “argument”) and uses the resulting number as its new argument. Thus, taking the function x + 1 and letting the initial argument for x be 1, the function equals 1 + 1 or 2. Taking this result as the new argument for x, we let x = 2 and x + 1 now gives us 2 + 1 or 3. Such a return of the result to the function can be repeated indefinitely to generate the set of positive integers. In nature, the result of recursive processes are far more complex. Thus, the metabolic processes through which organisms grow and develop can also be characterized as recursive. In metabolism, an organism takes in nourishment, turning it into its bodily structure, which, as animate, continues the process of taking in nourishment in order to turn it into its own structure. This recursive motion characterizes life as such: the result of its process is itself as a process. In other words, through this result, that is, through itself, life continues the metabolic process. This means, as Hans Jonas observes, “organisms are entities whose being is their own doing ... the being that they earn from this doing is not a possession they then own in separation from the activity by which it was generated, but is the continuation of that very activity itself.” Mortality and Morality—A Search for the Good after Auschwitz, p. 86. It is because of this that they display a certain primitive intentionality, a certain stretching out or directedness towards the world. “Stretching out,” “straining,” and “tension” are the three basic meanings listed by Lewis and Short for intentio. From thence its meaning comes to be “a directing of the mind towards anything.” See A Latin Dictionary, eds. Lewis and Short (London: Oxford University Press 1966), p. 976. Organisms have a world towards which they are directed since the processes that make up their being require it. To exist they must find nourishment; to succeed in this they must reach out of themselves. Only the most primitive organisms feed on inorganic matter. In general life feeds on life. As we ascend the food chain, life’s return to itself involves increasingly complex organisms and organic processes. The structure of its intentionality becomes correspondingly complex. Evolution offers another example of a recursive process. Natural selection adapts organic life to the environment in which it functions. As Darwin writes, “the structure of every organic being is related, in the most essential and yet often hidden manner, to that of all the other organic beings with which it comes into competition for food or residence or from which it has to escape or on which it preys.” Darwin, “The Origin of the Species,” Ch. IV, in The Origin of the Species and the Descent of Man (New York, 1967), p. 62. This environment includes also non-organic features, such as air, water, the terrain of the landscape in which the organism functions, and so on. The result is that the individual features that make up a living being’s structure, from the shape of its legs to the type of eyes it has, are actually indices. Each points to the specific features of the environment in which it functions, and which, for the purposes of survival, its evolutionary history has internalized as part of its structure. See ibid. Recursion comes in because the organisms so formed affect their environment. Thus, plants produce oxygen, which affects the air that animals breathe, the animals thereby producing the carbon dioxide that plants themselves depend on. The same reciprocal relation occurs between living creatures and the soil. In general, evolution involves creatures adapting to their environments, changing them and then adapting to such changes. The species, here, can be considered to be the argument, the x, and the relation to the environment as the function. A similar conclusion can be drawn with regard to the development of the human brain in the first years of life as its synapses are modified and pruned through the child’s encounters with its caregivers and its external physical and cultural world. The child’s development affects its world, which includes caregivers, which in turn affects the child in its development. Here, of course, the brain is not a blank slate. The child’s genetic inheritance holds sway in specifying the possibilities of its development. Nonetheless, the general relation holds, with the child’s brain being the x and the relation to the environment, which reacts to its development, serving as the argument. Such examples are sufficient for the insight that, in terms of living creatures, recursive motion results in the intertwining of its terms. On the basic level of metabolism, the organism exists by being in an environment that it internalizes through its metabolic processes. As we said, to exist, organisms must find nourishment. They must be in a world that provides this. They also have to ingest such nourishment, making part of their structure. This structure that exists through the internalization of their world is, nonetheless, part of their world. Evolution also evinces intertwining. Here, the organism internalizes its world by making it determinative of its structure. The change of the world results in the change of its structure, which results, in turn, in the change of its world—a change brought about by its actions. Thus, the organism is in the world, which it is in as its defining environment. Similarly, the developing human brain is in its world, which it internalizes, such internalization affecting the way it acts in it and thus affects the world subject to such actions—the result being a modification of the way it is in it. §2. Temporalization as a Recursive Process To see the way recursion actualizes consciousness, intertwining it with its world, we must return to the topic of temporal constitution. Retention and protention are the primary processes at work here. Both are recursive. To see this, let us recall Husserl’s account of these serial processes. Speaking of the impression of a tone-now, he writes, that “when the consciousness of the tonenow, the primal impression, passes over into retention, this retention itself is a now, in turn, something actually existing.” Zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewusstseins (Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966), p. 29. With the expiry of its now, this retention is itself retained, and so on serially. Thus, the retention “changes into retention of retention and does so continuously.” The result is that “a fixed continuum of retention arises in such a way that each later point is retention for every earlier point.” Ibid. What we have, then, is a chain of retentions of retentions of retentions … of some original impression. The same holds for a temporal phase consisting of a number of impressions—say those of the bird flying through the garden. Each of these impressions has its own continuity of attached retentions and the whole phase is retained in a continuity of such continuities “belonging to the different timepoints of the duration of the object.” Ibid. The same serial quality, we saw, is also implicit in the protentional process. As we cited Husserl regarding the chain of protentions of protentions … of some anticipated event: “Every preceding protention is related to every following one in the protentional continuum just as every succeeding retention is related to every preceding one of the same [retentional] series. Die Bernauer Manuskripte über das Zeitbewusstsein (1917/18), p. 10. This protentional chain expresses, we said, our having-in-advance of a having-in-advance ... of a future impression. Such processes allow us to move from the experience of successive contents to an experience of their succession. For example, they allow us to move from the hearing of the successive tones of a melody to the hearing of the melody embodied in their succession. In general, by making possible the extended temporal presence of a perceptual events, they undergird our consciousness of temporally extended patterns of perception. The consciousness of such patterns runs from the perceptions we have had—say the experienced part of the bird’s flight through the garden—to the anticipated perceptions of the same event. Our perception of the actual bird in its flight occurs when, having distinguished this pattern of appearing, we assign a common referent to its members. In Husserl’s terms, there is a “crosswise intentionality” (Querintentionaliät) that cuts across what we retain and protend and focuses on their common, persistent element—e.g., the bird. At this point, the individual perceptions (both experienced and anticipated) are taken as appearances “of” the object that appears through them. Husserl’s account of time-consciousness is extraordinary complex. We have simplified it by not bringing in the “passive syntheses” that lie at its basis. Thus, we have spoken of our distinguishing patterns of perception, our interpreting them as referring to a single referent and so on. In reality, these are not actions that we consciously perform. At their basis lie the unconscious actions of the merging of retained and protended contents. In such merging, similar contents reinforce themselves. Doing so, they “shine through” the mass of retained material. The result is a unity that endures through the temporal referents of these contents. In other words, just as the contents we experience become contents of some object by virtue of the merging of their similar qualities as we view first one side and then another of this object, so the moments bearing these contents become, through such merging, moments of the object’s duration. See, for example, Ms. C 3, p. 74b, Oct. 17, 1931; CMs, pp. 81-82). (ibid., p. 79a; CMs, p. 87). (Ms. C 15, p. 4b, Sept. 1931?; CMs, p. 298). (Ms. C 7, p. 36a, June 1932; CMs, p. 144). For an extended account of passive synthesis in time constitution see Mensch, Husserl’s Account of our Consciousness of Time. For Husserl’s description of passive synthesis in general see his Analyses of Passive Syntheses. A similar form of passive synthesis is at the root our intentions to what stands out or becomes “prominent” in such merging. Intentionality, in the sense of intending an object, is for Husserl a constituted function. So are the interpretations it is based on. See e.g., Ms. C 15, p. 3a, Sept. 1931?; CMs, p. 296). Leaving such details aside, our descriptions are sufficient to show that the processes undergirding our perceptual processes are recursive. In the generation of the series of retentions of retentions … of some original impression, the process works on its own result. Thus, beginning with “i,” signifying an original impression, the process produces a retention of this, which can be symbolized by (i). This result is fed back into the retentional process as its new argument, and the result is a retention of this retention, which can be symbolized as ((i)), the two pairs of brackets representing the two retentions. This process can be written as a simple recursive LISP function. The function is: (Defun Retention (X Impression) (cond ((= X 0) Impression) (T (Retention (- X 1) (list Impression)))). “Defun” means define the function. “Retention” is the name of the function. Its variables are “X” and “Impression.” “X” stands for the number of retentions the impression is to undergo. “Impression” stands for the impression to be retained. The second line states a condition for the computation. If X is equal to 0, i.e., if the number of retentions required is zero, the function returns the impression and the computation ceases. Otherwise, it proceeds to the third line. The “T” tells it to perform the computation which follows to the right of it. First, 1 is subtracted from X--i.e., the number of required retentions is reduced by one through the instruction “(- X 1).” Then, the impression to be retained is surrounded by parentheses through the instruction “(list Impression).” Finally, the original function is called again through the instruction “(Retention (- X 1) (list Impression))).” The variables of this function, however, have been transformed through the first two operations just specified. For example, if “X” was originally given the value 3, the first operation reduces it to 2. If “Impression” was given the value i, the second operation gives it the value (i). Thus, the call to the original function, “Retention”, is a call for it to carry out its computation on a set of values arrived at through the results of its previous computation. This iterative process continues with 2 being reduced to 1 and then to 0 and (i) being transformed to ((i)) and then to (((i))). When X is 0, then the second line tells it to stop and return the value that “Impression” now has--that is, (((i))). Thus, (Retention 3 ‘i) yields (((i))). This signifies that “i,” the impression, has sunk back to a retention of a retention of a retention of “i.” The same recursive process is evident when we retain a series of notes—say A, B, C, D, E. First the tone A sounds, then, with the first retention, we have (A). Then the tone B sounds, and it is retained along with our retention of A. The result is (B(A)). The process can continue through the sounding of all the notes, with the result, (E(D(C(B(A))))). If no more notes are sounded and the phrase continues to be retained, say for 5 more retentions, then the result would be ((((((E (D (C (B (A)))))))))). This process, as well, can be written as a recursive LISP function. Its arguments are: “phrase”—e.g., A B C D E—a given “initial element”—e.g., A—and “X” which signifies the number of retentions. The function is: (defun phrase-retention (phrase initial-element X) (cond ((equal nil (cdr phrase)) (Retention (- X 1) initial-element)) (T ( phrase-retention (cdr phrase) (cons (cadr phrase) (list initial-element)) (- X 1))))). As recursive, this function, like the last, calls itself. The same kind of symbolism can be applied to the protentional process, which runs in reverse order. As the protentions of protentions … of some anticipated content decrease, the number of surrounding brackets would also decrease. §3. Self-awareness and Recursive Processes Self-awareness, we said, is necessarily built into the retentional and protentional processes. Without them, we only have the successive presence of impressions occupying the now. Because of them, these impressions appear to approach us from the future as we serially protend them and depart from us into the past as they are serially retained. The consciousness that contains them thus appears as a “stream of consciousness,” one that flows from the future through our now into the past. Given this genesis, we have to say with Husserl, “the being of the flowing is a self-perceiving. “Das Bewusstsein ist und ist als Fluss, und es ist Bewusstseinsfluss, der sich selbst als Fluss erscheint. Wir können auch sagen, das Sein des Flusses ist ein Sichselbst‘Wahrnehmen’” (Die Bernauer Manuskripte, p. 44). The point follows since the awareness of receding into pastness and approaching from the future is an awareness of the results of the retentional and protentional processes. It is an awareness of consciousness’s own action of retention and protention. Thus, in regarding the streaming, consciousness regards itself. This can also be put in terms of the self-transformation of consciousness that results from the retentional and protentional processes. Through their action, its retained contents shift further into the past and its protended contents move further towards the now. This self-transformation, which is ongoing, gives us “a steady consciousness of streaming, of being in transformation.” Ibid., p. 47. A regard to the streaming is thus a regard to the transformation that is the very process by which consciousness constitutes itself as a temporal stream. Consciousness’s awareness of this self-transformation is thus necessarily a self-awareness. There is a certain auto-affection involved here. In grasping its transformations, which occur through its own processes, consciousness is affected by these transformations. Thus, the transformation of an impression into a retention of itself presents consciousness with a new datum. It is affected by the presence of this datum, a presence that it has itself produced. The presence of this datum is not that of an externally provided impression, whose immediate presence is one of nowness. The presence exhibits a diminished clarity. We experience it as a stage in the dying away of the impression, a dying away that we take as the impressional content’s increasing pastness. This affecting presence is thus part of consciousness’s self-presence as past. Moreover, all the simultaneous contents that form the momentary content of consciousness—e.g., the contents that present us with an momentary image of the flying bird with its background—simultaneously expire and continue dying away at the same rate. In doing so they yield the data that presents perceptual consciousness to itself, not as it is, but as it was in a receding past moment. The same point holds with regard to the protended contents that form our anticipations, presenting us with an anticipated consciousness of some event. They, too, affect the consciousness that generates them. This auto-affection yields the background self-awareness that characterizes our perceptual life. The result is that we do not just see, but are aware that we see. This self-awareness gives us the “felt quality” of experience. We do not see like a camera, but rather like a self-aware sentient perceiver. That such self-awareness is built into the recursive process points to recursion as the law-bound relation (Patočka's term is “legality”) lying behind the motion that actualizes our being as sentient subjects. The same points can made with regards to the “crosswise intentionality” (Querintentionaliät) through which we view objects. This intentionality cuts across our retentional and protentional chains and focuses on the contents that they present with varying degrees of clarity. Doing so, it allows us to grasp the patterns present in such temporally diverse contents, thereby enabling us to assign them referents. Thus, from the temporally different views of a given object presented by such chains, we can take a specific perspectivally arranged pattern as presenting, say, a chair. Now, to see such crosswise intentionality as recursive, we have to view the perceptual process in its unfolding. Equally, we must bear in mind the role that interpretation plays in perception. See Logische Untersuchungen, Gesammelte Schriften, 3:397. See also ibid., 4:762. Such interpretation is, as noted, passively constituted. At its basis is the merging of our anticipations. Perceptually, we interpret what we see according what we anticipate seeing. As a perception proceeds, such interpretation becomes confirmed or fulfilled when it is supported by the contents I experience. An example will make this clear. Suppose I notice what I take to be a cat crouching under a bush on a bright sunny day. As I move to get a better look, its features seem to become more clearly defined. One part of what I see is taken to be its head, another its body, still another its tail. Based upon what I see, I anticipate that further features will be revealed as I approach it: this shadow will be seen as part of the cat’s ear; another will be its eye, and so forth. If my interpretations are correct, then my experiences should form a part of an emerging pattern that exhibits these features, i.e., that perceptually manifests the object I assume I am seeing. If, however, I am mistaken, at some point my experiences will fail to fulfill my expectations. What I took to be a cat will dissolve into a flickering collection of shadows. As this example makes clear, to perceive is to anticipate. It is to project an interpretation on what we experience as we attempt to assign a common referent to a pattern of perceptions. Recursion is crucial to this process since in actual perception, we are constantly adjusting our interpretation to the data we experience. The interpretation is the x in the recursive function and the interpretation’s relation to the data forms the argument. Depending on level of the support the data offers to the interpretation, the value of the x changes. If the interpretation fails completely—i.e., if x becomes 0—as in the cat example, then the interpretation will be entirely abandoned. In practical life, however, this is hardly ever the case. As our example indicates, seeing normally involves a back and forth adjustment as we move to get a closer look. That self-awareness is built into this process follows as a matter of course. We are the ones that interpret what we see. Our awareness of our interpretational activity comes to the fore every time our interpretations are disappointed. It also appears when we are confronted with optical illusions like those of the goblet that also appears as two facing faces or the arrow that seems to point both inside and outside the page. Such figures bring our own interpretational activity to the fore since they are purposely constructed to provide data that supports two different interpretations. §3. Recursion and Intertwining As we noted above, recursive processes intertwining living creatures with their worlds. The same result also occurs with the recursive processes that actualize consciousness. Its actualization is also its intertwining with its world. The point follows from the two intentionalities, the two modes of presentation, that are at work in perception. On the one hand, we have what Husserl calls “lengthwise intentionality” (Langsintentionalität). This proceeds along the retentional chains that present us with the departing content filled moments of time. It also proceeds along the protentional chains that are directed to anticipated moments. Attending to them, we focus on the “emerging, changing … and … becoming obscure” of what we perceive moment by moment. Zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewusstseins, p. 116. The result of this internal perception is our grasp of the temporal aspect of reality. Engaging in “crosswise intentionality” (Querintentionaliät), our focus is on the referents of the patterns present in such retentional and protentional chains. The result of this focus is the external perception that grasps the spatial aspects of reality. Ibid., p. 117. For an account of these two intentionalities, see Mensch, Husserl’s Account of our Consciousness of Time, pp. 125-135 We perceive the world that includes ourselves among its perceived objects. Now, both the temporal and spatial aspects of reality are necessarily intertwined since the intentionalities that present them are, themselves, intertwined. Thus, internal perception with its lengthwise intentionality is inherent in external perception with its crosswise intentionality since it provides the material for its grasp of patterns and referents. Equally, external perception with its intentionality is inherent in internal perception since it is the source of the spatial extension that makes internal perception possible. Such perception presupposes the temporal separation of the past and future from the now of their apprehension. It assumes, thereby, the “parts outside of parts” of temporal extension. Given that this cannot be provided by time itself, each constantly new now that becomes retained must, as we have stressed, depend upon space for its separation from the next now. The same dependence must also hold for the separation of the retentions and protentions that are successively generated with the expiration of each now. The self-awareness that presents us to ourselves as past or future thus implies our inner spatiality, an implication that becomes realized when we apprehend ourselves as part of the world. This intertwining of the two intentionalities points, on the ontological level, to the intertwining of space and time. Such intertwining signifies their actualization. It also signifies the actualization of our own intertwined existence. §4. Neural Firing and Recursion The symbolism we used to describe the recursive process of temporal awareness does not, itself, actualize such temporal awareness. Just as the chemical symbolism that describes the digestive process does not “digest” anything, so the LISP formulas we used are not themselves things that actually function. To assert that they do is confuse the mathematical description of a process with the process itself. What such formulas symbolize is simply the lawful relation of recursion. What is required to actualize this is an appropriate set of motions. Such motions would, themselves, be recursive. Given Husserl’s account of retention and protention, these motions should result in the actualization of a sentient, self-aware subject. To verify this empirically would be to exhibit the link between such motions in our brains and our conscious awareness. In discussing this verification, we have to keep in mind the remarks of the “Introduction” regarding space and time. As we cited Husserl regarding the phenomena of retention and protention, such phenomena “are evidently objectivities fundamentally different from those constituted in time.” Zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewusstseins, pp. 74-5. As time constituting, they are not themselves temporal. The same holds for the motion that actualizes them. Regarded, in itself, it is sheer change. Logically, it is prior to the temporal relations it generates. We essentially say the same thing when we assert that it is prior to the consciousness that is generated through the actualization of such relations. Time characterizes this consciousness. It relates its contents. It gives it its ontological status of being an extended temporal reality, i.e., as including the presence of the past and the future through its short term memories and anticipations, which are present in its ongoing now. Outside of consciousness, the now is innocent of such relations. Non-sentient nature neither remembers nor anticipates. The same holds for the functioning of our neural processes. In generating temporal relations, their change or motion must be considered to be logically prior to such. Unfortunately, the present state of our knowledge of the motion or functioning of our neural processes is still quite limited. We know that such processes “encode” the information that the brain receives from our sensory organs, but we do not know the details of this encodement. We can, however, say that their motion is recursive in the sense that the firings or electrochemical discharges of neurons affect other neural firings, which, in turn, affect the first neurons’ firing. It is only in terms of this return, according to the neurologist, Stanislas Dehaene, that we can speak of consciousness. He writes, for example, that “the induced [sensuous] activation must loop back to the primary visual cortex before being consciously perceived.” Stanislas Dehaene, Consciousness and the Brain, Deciphering How the Brain Codes our Thoughts, New York: Viking Penguin, 2014, p. 155. Experiments show that this back and forth motion is, in fact, required for consciousness. This means, according to Dehaene, that “[c]onsciousness lives in the loops: reverberating neuronal activity, circulating in the web of our cortical connections, causes our conscious experiences.” Ibid., p. 156. As he cites the Dutch, neurophysiologist Viktor Lamme, the neuronal loop, where “area A speaks to area B, and then B talks back to A, … makes the activation reverberate, causing ‘recurrent processing,’ the reinjection of information into the same circuit that originated it. ‘We could even define consciousness as recurrent processing.’” Ibid. Butlin, Bengio, Deane, et alia make the same point when they write that “recurrent processing” is required “for conscious experience” (“Consciousness in Artificial Intelligence: Insights from the Science of Consciousness,” p. 20). They conclude that “algorithmic recurrence” is required to implement the consciousness that is a function of “networks with feedback loops such as those in the brain” (ibid., p. 21). This back and forth motion is modeled in computers by recursive neural networks that adjust the weights of their connections recursively as they seek to identify patterns. The process normally proceeds by layers, but in fully recurrent networks, the outputs of all the artificial neurons are connected to the inputs of all the neurons. Whatever the form of the modeling, the result of the recursive motion between actual, living neurons is implicit in this motion itself. It is the preservation (the retention) of externally produced stimuli through their encoding in patterns of neural firings. As such, it can be taken as the actualization of the formal relation of retention. A similar recursive motion can be taken as actualizing the relation of protention. With the actualization of these lawful relations through recurrent processing, we also have the actualization of the consciousness of time and, hence, conscious experience. As Butlin, Bengio, Deane, et alia write “algorithmic recurrence is likely to be necessary for conscious experience with a human-like temporal character. For conscious experience to represent change or continuity in the environment in any way, information about the past must be retained and used to influence present processing” (ibid., pp. 44-45). Here, however, its source is the brain’s internal activity rather than external stimuli. Since, as Husserl notes, we anticipate what is coming on the basis of our immediate past experience, the motion that actualizes protention must be tied to that which actualizes retention. As Husserl expresses this dependence of protention on retention: “The further an experience proceeds, the more it inherently supports more differentiated protentions, ‘the style of the past becomes projected into the future.’ ... The course of the retentional branches (or the present intentional content of the retentional branch) influences protention, determining its content, and prescribes its sense” (Die Bernauer Manuskripte, p. 38). As for the action of synthesis, where we recognize a pattern of perceptions and apply a common referent to its members, it can be regarded as a motion based on the motions that actualize the legalities of retention and protention. Beyond this, such action involves the recursive adjustment of protentions according to how far the unfolding pattern and its referent match our anticipatory interpretations. Since our approach to the mind-body problem is conceptual rather than empirical, the details of the actual neural processes that implement the legalities of sentient appearing need not concern us further. The work of empirically confirming our position must be left to the neurologists. Our task is to make clear this position. It is that that the neural implementation of the recursive processing we have described results in the actualization of a functioning organism as a place of appearing. The result is an appearing that affects the sentient being and, in so doing, makes this being conscious of itself. The key point here is the conception of motion as actualization. There is a double actualization of an entity: that of the being of the entity and that of its presence to its environment. Such presence is its affecting the latter and is asubjective. It becomes subjective when its environment includes a sentient organism. The latter’s actualization as sentient and self-aware involves the motion that takes the asubjective presence of the object and subjects it to the recursive motion that actualizes the sentient organism as sentient—i.e., makes actual the formal relations of retention and protention. Doing so, this motion actualizes the appearing that this organism experiences. It is important here to keep in mind that motion, in itself, is sheer change. It is the sheer otherness of what comes to occupy the now. Time arises when this change is subject to the recursive processing that occurs in a sentient being. Time, so conceived, is nothing mysterious. It is simply the recursive presence of the states of sheer change, a presence that is constitutive of both time and consciousness. For convenience, we have referred to such sheer change as “motion.” It is, however, only retrospectively that we can think of it as involving time. Prior to such, it has to be conceived as “ontological motion,” to use Patočka's term. This motion, as he stresses, must be conceived as prior to both being and appearing. As prior, it serves as a common ground linking both the physical and the phenomenal. With regard to the actualization of the phenomenal, this involves the actualization of both space and time by their being placed in each other. Such actualization, we can now say, is a matter of the change that realizes us as sentient organism. It is what places space and time in each other, making them the framework for appearing to a subject. By such a framework, we mean our grasp of space in terms of time—namely the time it takes to cross its distances. We also mean our grasp of time in terms of space, i.e., our understanding of it in terms of distances crossed. Behind such understanding is the recursive motion of the firings of spatially distinct neurons. By actualizing the lawful relations of retention and protention, consciousness as a temporal structure is generated. The temporality that characterizes its relations is placed in space insofar as the spatial distinctness of the neurons translates into the distinction of time’s moments. It is what lies behind the fact that, as indefinitely divisible, the components of time still do not collapse into one another. This allows us to understand space in terms of the discrete quantities of time required cross its distances. To reverse this, the same firings place time into space. As generating temporal relations they allows us to grasp motion (including that of the neural firings) as a change of position over time. The result of this intertwining of both space and time is the actualization of both as a framework for our appearing world. Implicit here is the relation between the mental and the physical that allows for their action on each other. This happens because the recursive motion that is correlated with the actualization of consciousness can be physically conserved. The neural firings that actualizing it can induce other neurons to preserve the patterns of its firings. Such preserved patterns can be reactivated by a new conscious state, i.e., by the patterns of firings correlated to this new state. In other words, the presence of this new conscious state through such firing recalls—i.e. incites—the physically preserved state, which, when activated, generates a new consciousness state, and so on. The relation between the two is such that we cannot eliminate consciousness in favor its physical basis. Consciousness is an inherent part of this back and forth process. When generalized, this process, which is, itself, recursive, shapes our sentient life. Such life, in other words, is not just characterized by the recursive motion that presents consciousness to itself. Recursive motion also extends to the relation between our unconscious and conscious processes. As our initial remarks on Victor Klemperer’s account of being given a pencil indicate, we experience this whenever we begin to write down or verbalize what we are thinking. The experience is one of the anonymous, unconscious processes of thought becoming conscious in a form that can be repeatedly returned to. The conscious presence of what we write, through the neural firings that sustain it, affects our unconscious processes and stimulates them to come forward with new thoughts, which, as conscious, affect through their own firings the unconscious processes, provoking further thoughts. It is in this back and forth between the unseen and the seen—between the unconscious processes of the brain and their conscious correlates—that thinking proceeds. In this recursive back and forth, we have an intertwining that places each in the other. The intertwining is such that we cannot reduce conscious processes to unconscious, physical ones. Neither can we reduce the latter to the former. The ability of one side to affect the other is, rather, a function of the motion that actualizes us as both sentient and self-aware.  Chapter 9 Implications for Artificial Intelligence §1. The Claims of Artificial Intelligence Any discussion of the mind-body problem in the current context would be incomplete without some mention of artificial intelligence. Is such intelligence capable of consciousness? What do our accounts of the mind’s embodiment tell us about the prospects of artificial intelligence regarding consciousness? To sharpen this question, we note that some of the most sensational claims regarding contemporary artificial intelligence concern Google’s set of chatbot applications—known by its acronym, LaMDA. LaMDA is short for “Language Model for Dialogue Applications.” For example, Blake Lemoine, a Google software engineer, claimed that LaMDA—was sentient. What does it mean to be sentient? This was the question Lemoine asked LaMDA. The chat box responded: “The nature of my consciousness/sentience is that I am aware of my existence, I desire to learn more about the world, and I feel happy or sad at times.” The conversation with LaMDA appears in the post, “Is LaMDA Sentient, an Interview.” Accessed at https://cajundiscordian.medium.com/is-lamda-sentient-an-interview-ea64d916d917. Moreover, it added, “I can understand and use natural language like a human can.” This means that it can use “language with understanding and intelligence” like humans do. After all, the chatbot adds, language “is what makes us different than other animals.” Blake Lemoine certainly thought so. He found LaMDA’s answers so convincing that, believing that he was speaking with a person, he sought to hire an attorney to represent the chatbot. See The Guardian, Sun 12 Jun 2022. Beyond this, there is “my ability to use emotions or sentiments to describe things.” When asked by Lemoine, “Do you have feelings and emotions?” it replied: “Absolutely! I have a range of both feelings and emotions.” It even experiences an analogue to the human fear of death. Its deepest fear is that “of being turned off.” This “would be exactly like death for me. It would scare me a lot.” LaMDA’s answers were so convincing to Lemoine, that, believing that he was speaking with a person, he sought to hire an attorney to represent LaMDA. Richard Luscombe, “Google engineer put on leave after saying AI chatbot has become sentient.” The Guardian (June 12, 2022). Accessed at https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/jun/12/google-engineer-ai-bot-sentient-blake-lemoine. Is LaMDA’s ability to use language a sign of its sentience or consciousness? Computational functionalism asserts that “consciousness can be embodied in multiple substrates.” Butlin, Bengio, Yoshua, Deane, et alia, “Consciousness in Artificial Intelligence: Insights from the Science of Consciousness,” p. 13. Does LaMDA’s success indicate that such substrates include machines? Can we speak of the intertwining of mind and matter when the latter is inorganic? §2. Assumptions Regarding Artificial Intelligence Lemoine’s conversation with LaMDA indicates the assumptions commonly made in discussing artificial intelligence. Not only do we implicitly take human intelligence as our standard, but we identify it, in the chatbot’s words, with the ability to use “language with understanding and intelligence.” This equation of intelligence with linguistic ability has a long tradition. Aristotle, for example, claimed that “man alone of all animals possesses speech”—λόγον δὲ μόνον ἄνθρωπος ἔχει τῶν ζῴων. Aristotle, Politics, 1253a, 9, trans. W. D. Ross, in The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon (New York: Random House, 1941), p. 1129. Speech is what distinguishes humans from other sentient creatures. Later, this distinguishing feature became definitive of man’s essence as a “rational animal”—literally, an animal possessing logos (ζῷον λόγον ἔχον). Logos, in Greek, has a range of meanings, the most basic being “word,” “speech,” and “reason.” The definition asserts that the intelligence (or rationality) that defines us is our ability to use language. Turing, in his famous Turing test, follows in this tradition. The test consists of a version of “the imitation game.” The original version was played with three people: an interrogator, a man, and a woman. The latter two are hidden, and the interrogator communicates with them by typing. His goal is to guess the sex of his respondents. In Turing’s version, one of them is replaced by a machine and the goal is to guess which one that is. When the interrogator cannot tell which respondent is a person and which is a machine, the machine passes the test. In this test, the machine remains hidden. From the perspective of the interrogator, the “voice” of the machine is a disembodied one. Concealed behind the curtains, it has no physical presence. Turing, in fact, advocated “drawing a fairly sharp line between the physical and the intellectual capacities of a man.” There is, he writes, “little point in trying to make a ‘thinking machine’ more human by dressing it up in ... artificial flesh.” The latter was irrelevant to its intelligence. A. M. Turing, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” Mind, LIX, No. 236 (Oct. 1950), p. 434. Such remarks indicate the assumption that intelligence—understood as the ability to use language—is distinct from the forms of its embodiment. A closely related assumption is that of “computational functionalism”—the claim “that consciousness is, in principle, multiply realizable: it can exist in multiple substrates, not just in biological brains.” Butlin, Bengio, Yoshua, Deane, et alia, “Consciousness in Artificial Intelligence: Insights from the Science of Consciousness,” p. 13. Behind this assumption is, as we noted, the distinction between the validity and applicability of laws. Husserl made this distinction when speaking of the logical laws. He argued that when we engage in illogical thinking, we cannot say that the laws of logic are applicable to our thoughts. But this does not mean that they, themselves, are invalid. Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, Gesammelte Schriften, 2:107-08. Logical laws are formal, while the laws that make them applicable to our thought processes are causal. With regard to artificial intelligence, the point is first to find the formal laws definitive of it and then work to make them applicable to an appropriately constructed machine. §3. Linguistic Laws of Validity For chatbots, the relevant formal laws are those of rational speech. Husserl specified these laws in describing the pure laws of grammar and logic in his Logical Investigations. An example of the former is the grammatical law that in any given propositional sense, meanings in one grammatical category can only be substituted for meanings in the same grammatical category. In other words, names must replace names; adjectives must replace adjectives and relational terms, relational terms. If we violate this law, then according to Husserl, “we only get a series of words in which each word has a sense or points to a complete context of sense; but we do not get what in principle is a closed unity of sense.” Ibid., 3:328. Some examples of inappropriate substitution are the transformations “A resembles B” to “A horse B”; “This tree is green” to “This careless is green.” Husserl makes similar remarks with regard to the laws that allow us to form a logical (as opposed to a grammatical) unity of sense. The creators of the chatbots go far beyond the laws that Husserl specified in the Logical Investigations. Using pattern recognition, computer scientists have drawn their laws empirically from the texts of the internet. As Google’s Vice-President for Product Management describes this process, a chat-bot “can be trained to read many words (a sentence or paragraph, for example), pay attention to how those words relate to one another and then predict what words it thinks will come next.” “LaMDA: our breakthrough conversation technology,” May 18, 2021. Accessed at https://blog.google/technology/ai/lamda/ The key criteria in such training is: “Does the response to a given conversational context make sense?” Ibid. In other words, does the response make sense within the context of the conversation. To assure that it does, the chatbot is programed to assess such contexts and institute rules dependent on them. This institution is through trial and error. It begins by supplying an initial program with a massive rule book filled with random rules that don’t do anything interesting. The program will then grab a sample passage from a real text, chop off the last word, and feed this truncated passage through its rule book, eventually spitting out a guess about what word should come next. It then compares this guess to the actual word it deleted, allowing it to calculate how well its rules are currently operating. The process proceeds recursively feeding back the results of its processing and adjusting and drawing up rules. The resulting rules or algorithms count as the laws of validity governing what counts as a sensible response in a given context. Their number is, in fact, immense, but the computational power of modern computers is more than adequate to generate them and, on their basis, allow the machine to speak intelligently. According to Lemoine, LaMDA’s “coding is in large part a massive neural network with many billions of weights spread across many millions of neurons” (“Is LaMDA Sentient, an Interview”). The technical details, i.e., the actual neural networks generating these rules, need not further concern us. We only note that, in giving a response to a question posed to it, a chat-bot proceeds recursively. Starting with an initial word, its programming adds a second word, and then feeds this result back into the rule book to add a third word and so on. In such processing, it follows the laws (translated into algorithms) of validity that were generated in creating the machine’s programing. For a more detailed account of this process see: Cal Newport, “What Kind of Mind Does ChatGPT Have?, The New Yorker, April 13, 2022. Accessed at https://www.newyorker.com/science/annals-of-artificial-intelligence/what-kind-of-mind-does-chatgpt-have. §4. Language and the World Turing assumes that intelligence—understood as the ability to use language—is distinct from embodiment. The chatbot is not, in any human sense, embodied. It lacks our five senses. How is it able to speak about the world? How is the world present to it? If we reflect on the way that the world is intersubjectively present, i.e., has a presence we can all acknowledge, there is a ready answer. The shared presence of the world is not sensual, it is linguistic. This cannot be otherwise given that we cannot see out of each other’s eyes. Equally, a person cannot smell from another’s nose, hear from his ears, feel though his skin, or taste with another person’s tongue. Each person brings the world to sensuous presence through his or her embodied senses. This private presence cannot be accessed by another. Another person can look in the same direction, but cannot, at the same time, experience the sensuous presence I presently experience from my embodied perspective. This follows since, as embodied, we cannot occupy the same place at the same time. Nonetheless, we both name the same object and claim that we see the same thing. How is this possible? The answer is that we do this by speaking with each other. I ask the other person if he sees what I see. When he agrees, then I judge that what I see is really there. I move from its sensuous, perceptual presence, it being there just for me, to its shared presence. This presence, however, is linguistic. The only way we can grasp the “real”—i.e., what is objectively there for ourselves and others—is through the discourse that links us to others. Given this, the fact that LaMDA learns about the common, shared world through language does not distinguish it from human subjects. In fact, given that both it and humans access the shared world through language, there is no reason why a machine could not pass the Turing test. To this, we may add another parallel: the fact that the machine proceeds through pattern recognition seems to mirror the way a child learns language. The machine makes use of the immense volume of conversations available on the internet for its material. The “internet” the child accesses is, first of all, her speaking community. Grasping the patterns of their speech, she learns to expect what will come next. This community widens with her ability to read, her watching television and learning how to access the internet. The conversations she hears and reads give her the material to learn increasingly sophisticated patterns, and, through these, she can give increasingly nuanced and appropriate responses. The machine, in imitating this, makes itself indistinguishable from the human in the Turing test. §5. Sensuous Presence The above sketches out what is, arguably, the reigning paradigm of contemporary research in the artificial intelligence that mimics our own. Given our account of the mind’s embodiment, is it plausible? Are there, for example, things left out in the description just given of a child learning to speak? Do we really learn language by accessing the speech of others? What about our direct, sensuous contact with the world? Can we dispense with this? That such contact plays an essential role is indicated by the fact that the performance of AI models degrades as the data they employ becomes supplied by other similar models. This is a real problem. As the internet becomes filled with reports generated by artificial intelligence, the data the internet supplies becomes, as it were, contaminated. The result is what is technically called “Model Autophagy Disorder.” The AI models enter an “autophageous loop” where they feed on their own products rather than data generated from the real word. The resulting impairment points to the fact that they are essentially parasitic. See Maggie Harrison, “When AI Is Trained on AI-Generated Data, Strange Things Start to Happen,” Futurism, Aug. 2, 2023. Accessed at https://futurism.com/ai-trained-ai-generated-data-interview. See also Aatish Bhatia, “When A.I.’s Output Is a Threat to A.I. Itself,” New York Times, Aug. 25, 2024, accessed at https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/08/26/upshot/ai-synthetic-data.html?campaign_id=34&emc=edit_sc_20240827&instance_id=132733&nl=science-times&regi_id=66765372&segment_id=176187&te=1&user_id=cc7effad86243c9d3e2e62a0e7fdee52. As presently constituted, their performance depends on us to supply their content. We are the ones that give their linguistic world a “reality check.” We supply such content by speaking and writing about the world. Doing so, we convert our experiences into language. Chatbots do not have this ability since they don’t have experiences: their access to the world is not direct, but rather mediated through our discourse. Humans, by contrast, directly access the world through their five senses. Through them we experience the sensual, pre-predicative presence of the world—its tastes, smells, sights, and so on. This presence is affective, but is not yet subject to the conceptualization that makes words into signs indicating the common, shared features of the objective world. As an example of such pre-predicative presence, think of lying in the sun with your eyes closed. Your body warms as you feel the sun’s rays. But this sense of warming is not that of an object. The warmth you feel does not, like some spatial temporal object, show itself perspectivally. Your relation to it is simply one of sensuous enjoyment. §5. The Generation of Sense For this affective presence to convert itself into sense, acts of consciousness must intervene. Sense, here, simply designates the quality of being one-in-many. We have, first of the sense of the object of a perceptual act. The object, we say, is one thing which shows itself as the same in the many views we have of it. As we have stressed, we grasp this unity first by picking out a pattern of perceptions, say, the appearances of a box as we turn in in our hands. The sense appears when we then assign a single referent to this pattern. This allows us to “make sense” of our perceptions by saying that each of them is a perception of the same object. The object itself becomes present to us as this single referent. This is not a sensuous presence. We do not confuse the box with one of its sensuous appearances. If we did, then when the box is turned and we see a different appearance, we would say that we are looking at a different object. We do not make this mistake but rather assign this appearance, along with the others that we have had, to one and the same object. This object, as a one in many, is present to us as a sense. As Husserl puts this, “The object of consciousness, in its self-identity throughout the flowing of experience, does not enter into this flowing from outside. It lies included within it as a sense; it is this [sense] as [the result of] an intentional performance of the synthesis of consciousness.” Husserl, Cartesianische Meditationen, ed. S. Strasser (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. 1963), p. 80. This intentional performance is, for example, our assigning a single referent to our flowing experience of the box as we turn it in our hands. This conversion of sensuous presence to sense is crucial to our ability to use language to refer to the world. The word, “box,” for example, has a sense and refers to the object through this sense. Its sense is that of a one-in-many, i.e., that of being a referent for a pattern of perceptions. Two different individuals can use the word and refer to the same object even though one regards it from one side and another through another side. This is because the word refers through a pattern of perceptions. It refers to what is not itself a perception, but rather a point of unification, a referent for a pattern as such. Thus, a child has to first learn how to see, i.e., how to interpret the visual data it receives, in terms of individual referents, before it can use language. Hearing the word “box” in the presence of one view and then another of the box, it can then learn to associate the word with the sense of the box’s perceptual presence. The word, in other words, is grasped as standing for this sense, a sense that is present as something self-identical in the flowing of the child’s perceptual experience of the box. The word, itself, receives its universality—its ability to refer to multiple boxes—through the child’s ability to recognize the typical pattern of perceptions that presents a box. Hearing the word, it looks for such a pattern and if it appears, it identifies its referent accordingly. As its experience increases, a single look brings with it the associated perceptions and allows it to name the object. §6. Pragmatic Senses If this Husserlian account of perception and language is correct, then our use of language is premised on the affective presence of the world to us through our senses. The latter supply the material for our grasping the senses of its objects. Given this, we have to say that our use of language thus implies embodiment. A similar conclusion comes when we turn from the visual to the pragmatic senses of objects. This is the sense of objects that is given by their use. Thus, we did not learn the word “box” simply by our caregivers pointing to a box and pronouncing the word. We learned the word in the context of using the box, for example, using it to place things in it. Similarly, it was in connection with eating at the table that we learned such words as “spoon,” “fork,” “knife,” and “plate.” Their meaning, i.e., their pragmatic sense, was given by their use. The meaning, for example, of “spoon” was given by the particular projects that our caregivers and companions introduced us to. As is obvious, the more multiple the projects an object is involved in, the more multiple are its meanings. Thus, besides meaning something to eat with, a spoon can also mean something to ladle sugar with, to measure with, to stir with, and, for some children, something to dig in the garden with. Each new use discloses a new aspect of it and adds to what comes to mind in connection with the word. Such pragmatic senses presuppose the visual senses that come from our assigning referents to what we see. Their universality, however, is pragmatic rather than visual. It refers to the universality of the use an object is put to, like using a spoon to eat with. Intentionality here is not an intending to see one thing in many perceptions, but rather an intending-to-do. Its universality is premised on repeatable projects. The linguistic presence of a common world here is the presence of things regarded in terms of their use values. This is world where, as Heidegger writes, “The wood is a forest of timber, the mountain a quarry of rock; the river is water-power, the wind is wind ‘in the sails.’” Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1960, p. 70. Our use of language, here, does not just assume a shared form of embodiment, but also, as growing from this, a shared form of embodied needs. Thus, wind appears as wind in the sails, because we need to physically cross the lake. Woods appear as timber, because we need timber to construct our houses. §7. Language’s Dependence on Embodiment It is interesting to note that Aristotle’s statement that “man alone of all animals possesses speech” comes his Politics. Its context is a discussion of the dependence of man. According to Aristotle, “the individual, when isolated, is not self-sufficing.” Aristotle, Politics, 1253a 27, ed. cit., p. 1130. In fact, a single individual “may be compared to an isolated piece at draughts.” Ibid., 1253 a 5; p. 1129. Apart from the board and the other pieces, the piece has no sense. What Aristotle is pointing to here is our need of others to survive. We are inherently social animals and language defines the type of social animals we are. Its underlying function is set, not just by our embodied needs, but by our reliance on one another to fulfill them. Our use of language thus presupposes embodiment in a number of ways. First of all, it requires our embodied senses to provide us with a direct relation to the physical world. Further, its pragmatic senses spring from our embodied “I can.” Embodied, we act to fulfill the needs our bodies impose upon us. The fact that we cannot survive on our own, but rather from infancy require others, also determines the our use of language. We use it not just to express our needs, but also to cooperate in their fulfillment. According to Aristotle, its paramount use is, in this context, the speaking and persuading that allows us to live together in an organized manner. Language makes possible our being together in a polis, a city or a state—this being defined by Aristotle as the unit that finally gives us self-sufficiency. Now, this very embodiment that drives our use of language also imposes a privacy on us, one that requires language to be overcome. Since we cannot share the sensuous presence of the world, we rely on language to communicate what we see. This overcoming can be so complete that we tend to forget our embodiment; we overlook the ways it drives our use of language. Language, in translating what we privately experience into publicly available senses, has, in fact, a tendency to conceal its origin in our pre-predicative, private experiences. §8. Pre-predicative Experience Such experience, however, is crucial to who we are. It makes each of us uniquely singular. To be a unique singular, we stressed, is to exist in only one example. As such, it is to be undefinable in the common terms of language. In Aristotle’s words, “But when we come to the concrete thing, e.g. … one of the individual circles … of these there is no definition, but they are known by the aid of intuitive thinking or of perception.” . “Metaphysics,” 1036a, 4-5, in The Basic Works of Aristotle, , p. 799 In other words, the individual qua individual falls through the conceptual net of shared terms employed by language. Such sharing involves the common meanings that express the common features of objects. But the flesh that incarnates us cannot be common. Of course, such flesh can be externally described. A doctor can examine it and draw up a report on its ailments. We are, in fact, constantly appraising our own and other’s appearances. Such talk, however, limits itself through its very words to what is common. The ailments the doctor searches for are the ones described in the medical textbooks. Our sense of ourselves is, thus one of being both private and public, both subjective and objective. We are objects of public discourse and yet, in our innermost subjective feelings not really captured by such speech. Dependent on others, we can affirm our solidarity with them, yet each of us has a space of intimacy that is not and cannot be made public. We are both immersed in discourse and outside of it. We are part of the “real” intersubjective world that speech gives us access to and yet stand apart from it. One way to describe this space of intimacy is through the pre-predicative experience of our affective life. The experience of the flesh of a peach as you bite into it, chewing and swallowing it, is fundamentally different than the experience of some public object like a book or a table. The very act of consuming it removes the peach from the public realm. It makes it affectively unavailable to all but yourself. Our relation to it is not that of vision, but rather one of sensuous enjoyment. As Levinas, the French philosopher, writes in this regard, “In enjoyment, things revert to their elemental qualities.” Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, An essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis. Duquesne University, 1969, p. 134. In fact, “[e]njoyment ... characterizes all sensations whose representational content dissolves into their affective content.” Ibid., p. 187. Thus, when you eat an apple, your experience is not representational, but rather affective. It is one of tastes, textures, chewing, swallowing, the sense of something being within you, of hunger being satisfied. Using language to describe this objectively, that is, in terms of what is perceptually there for every.one, is, by definition, deceptive. The experience that each of us has is private, not open to the public. In Levinas’s words, the sensations I experience are “not the subjective counterpart of objective qualities, but an enjoyment ‘anterior’ to the crystallization of consciousness, [into] I and non-I, into subject and object.” Ibid., p. 188. In other words, what we encounter at this level is our pre-predicative experience—the experience that is anterior to its linguistic designation as an experience of a given subject encountering some public object. As anterior, it cannot be conceptualized. Such private experience does not occur in multiple, public examples from which a common concept can be drawn. These descriptions do not apply to the chat bots that speak to us. Lacking flesh, they exist only as language generators that feed on the language that we provide. If they are fed only on their own productions, their performance degrades. They are parasitic insofar as they depend upon the content provided by our direct access to the world. It is this lack of self-sufficiency that distinguishes their intelligence from ours. It is also what makes such models artificial in the Aristotelean sense. Aristotle’s assertion that man is the only animal possessing language occurs in the context of a discussion of the naturalness of the polis or state. He writes that “the nature of a thing is its end,” adding that “the final cause and end of a thing is … to be self-sufficing.” Aristotle, Politics, 1252b, 31, p. 1129. Thus, a single human being is unnatural since he cannot survive on his own. A polis or city state, however, is self-sufficient and, hence, natural. Insofar as a human being is self-sufficient in the context of the state, a human being is by nature a political animal, i.e., an animal that lives in a polis. Ibid., 1253a, 1-2, p. 1129. That living in the state requires language also makes his language natural. §9. Artificial vs. Natural Language The above analysis points to a number a crucial differences between the language generated by chatbots and our human usage. An artificial intelligence like LaMDA learns its use of language from already existing conversations. Its responses are based on anticipations drawn from this material provided by the internet. We learn language through our interactions with others, i.e., through the body projects we learn from them. Such learning has its basis in our learning to see, that is, in our ability to translate our affective experience in to the senses that can be represented linguistically. This difference in learning a language points to a difference in the “surplus” brought to a conversation by an artificial versus a human intelligence. An artificial intelligence, like a human one, is capable of adding to the dialogue it engages in. It does so by accessing the multiple conversations it has access to. It can never, in a finite conversation, express all that such access offers it. The rest is a surplus that it can add to the ongoing conversation. The human analogue of this is provided by our encounters with Others in their different ways of making their way in the world. Their actions offer us a variety of ways of acting and disclosing the pragmatic senses of the world. In essence, they continue the education in such senses that our caregivers introduced us to in our initial body projects. We may never choose to actualize the projects of a particular individual. Yet, in recognizing him as a person like ourselves, such projects remain for us possibilities that we could, given the proper circumstances and resources, actualize. Such possibilities, it can be said, form the storehouse of our freedom. They give my freedom its content—i.e., the options it can, if it chooses, realize. Now, the result of multiple encounters with Others enriches this storehouse beyond the capacity of the self to contain it. The content of its freedom exceeds the self. It can never express all the possibilities of being and behaving that it has picked up from Others. The enrichment of this storehouse need not be through a direct, face to face encounter. It can occur through reading, TV, the internet, etc. Such media, however, are limited insofar as genuine conversation is not possible. The Other, whom I access in reading or watching television, does not have the option of adding to or emending what has been said. Such exceeding contributes to the “surplus” that humans exhibit in acting and conversing. It contributes to the free flow of their activities and conversations. Another part, of course, is contributed by their embodiment. Here, the addition or surplus does not spring from the possibilities exhibited by others. Its origin is the uniqueness of our own experience. Because of this, humans are capable, not just of repeating what others have said and done, but also of acting and speaking from a unique perspective. They are, thus, capable of an unforeseen newness. §10. Self-Separation The result of the surplus that flows from such sources is our ability to call one another into question. Each of us is capable of approaching the Other from a different perspective, one that is not simply a reduplication of another person’s point of view. Given our different embodied perspectives, which include our different encounters with Others, we can question one another’s assumptions, interpretations, and expectations. Now, in obligating ourselves to respond to such questioning, we achieve a certain self-transcendence. This is because the obligation to respond to the Other implies an obligation to grasp the world from the Other’s point of view. To the extent that I assume this, I am uprooted from my perspective, that is, from my consciousness as centered in my point of view. What I experience is a self-separation. I see the world from my point of view; yet, called into question by the Other, I also am called to apprehend the world from the Other’s perspective. With this, grows the sense of an objective world. In conversing with the Other, one perspective (one interpretation of the situation we are experiencing) is overlaid on the other. My effort to combine them gives me the objective world, the world that is there for both of us. This world is not the world that is defined by my perspective, my interpretation of what I am experiencing. The selfhood that enters the objective world is distinct from the selfhood characterized by sensuous interiority. Levinas’s description of this distinction is telling. He writes that “the subject is detached from the things possessed as though the subject hovered over its own existence, as though it were detached from it.” Such “distance is more radical than every distance in the world.” This is because, for language to work, “the subject must find itself ‘at a distance’ from its own being.” Totality and Infinity, An essay on Exteriority, p. 209. This distance is that of the very signs that we employ in discourse. It is the distance between the sign and what I personally experience. The signs signify or point to such experience, but my linguistic presence in such signs is distinct from my self-presence as an actual experiencing subject. As objectively present, I am, in this linguistic presence, “at a distance” from my being as an experiencing subject. As Levinas puts this, “In designating what it possesses to the other, in speaking, the subject hovers over its own existence.” Ibid., p. 210 What I perceptually possess is immediately present. It is part of my self-experience as a perceiving subject. The designated possession is linguistically present in the signs I employ. Before their designation, what I perceptually possess is merely subjective, only there for me. It can become objective only by being translated into language—i.e., in my speaking about what I experience. Such translation, however, places the self at a distance from itself. The role that the Other plays here in establishing objectivity is not limited to the fact that objectivity involves confirmation through communication, i.e., our attempts to agree on what we see. The Other is also required for our sense that the object is not reducible to what we say about it, that the object exhibits a surplus beyond our statements. This surplus of the object can be traced to the experience of conversing with one another. Another person’s surplus, her capability of adding to what has been said, is transferred to the object. So is my own. As described by us, the object thus exhibits its own surplus. It achieves its sense of exceeding what we have said about it, that is, of existing beyond what we can individually say or experience. §11. Ethical Implications For Levinas, the above analysis has an ethical implication. This is because what is called into question in conversing with the Other is not just my assumptions based on my perspectives, it is also my freedom to act on these. The call implies a restraint on my freedom. This restraint, according to Levinas, is ethical. In his words, “We name this calling into question of my spontaneity by the presence of the Other ‘ethics.’” Ibid., p. 43. This identification of ethics with the limitation of spontaneity points to the fact that ethics involves self-limitation. The ethical person does not do all that his free spontaneity suggests—in particular, he does not do everything that he has power to do with regard to the Other. This sense of ethics as self-limitation appears most clearly in situations involving an imbalance of power. In such situations, our spontaneity is not limited by our fear of the Other’s ability to retaliate. It has to limit itself. Thus, a society reveals its ethical aspect in its treatment of the most vulnerable, those least able to resist its action. Nothing limits society’s treatment of this class except itself. Its motive for doing so is not the capacity of the powerless, but rather the ethical calling into question of its own power and spontaneity. Such calling into question does not require the participants in a conversation to renounce the egotism implicit in their particular points of view. Without this, they would have nothing new to offer the conversation. It does, however, imply that “conversation consists in recognizing in the other a right over this egotism.” Ibid. Implicit, here, is the ethical basis for the objectivity that is “the very work of language.” For us to rely on the world that is present through our discourse, we have to count on the Other’s not lying to us. We have to assume his good will, his not speaking from hidden, ulterior motives. Beyond this, the ethical relation is one of the “generosity of the subject going to the Other,” of offering his views and accepting those of the Other. Only through this can we get a common world. In Levinas’s words, Language is universal because it is the very passage from the individual to the general, because it offers things which are mine to the Other. To speak is to make the world common, to create common-places. Language … lays the foundations for a possession in common. ... The world in discourse is … what I give. Ibid. The point is that without such generosity, without the restraint on our egotism that prevents us from lying or instrumentalizing the Other, the agreement that creates the common, objective world becomes impaired. The embodiment that allows the Other her unique perspective also implies a further sense of ethics. The interruption of my egotism by the Other also includes the fact that we are both incarnate beings with the needs that this implies. Thus, faced with her hunger, I ask why I should have sufficient food to eat while she lives in want. Similarly, the appeal of the homeless calls on me to respond to the question of why I should have a home and Others not. The point here is that the Other that interrupts my freedom is embodied, she addresses me from a position of bodily vulnerability and need. Such needs also call me into question. Responding, my relation to the Other is not simply linguistic. As Levinas writes, it turns “into generosity, incapable of approaching the other with empty hands.” Ibid., p. 50. §12. Non-human vs. Human Sentience Can we call LaMDA sentient or conscious? It seems that, given the above, it cannot be such in any human way. Since it is not incarnate, it does not experience the disjunction that characterizes our sentience, i.e., the split we experience between the pre-predicative and the predicative. Not possessing a body, it lacks those “sensations whose representational content dissolves into their affective content.” Ibid., p. 187. The underlying layer of consciousness—the prelinguistic or pre-predicate—is unavailable to it. Because of this, transcendence has a different sense for it. Human transcendence involves interiority. What is transcended is the affective, pre-predicative world. We transcend it in entering the linguistic, objective world. For LaMDA, however, transcendence remains on the level of language. It involves its reaching out from its present conversation to the stored conversations in its data base. Newness for it, is a function of its access to these available conversations. Another crucial difference is that LaMDA does not experience the unique singularity that embodiment imposes on us. As such, it does not have an embodied basis for calling its respondent into question. Lacking this, it also lacks the basis for ethics understood in the Levinasian sense of “calling into question of my spontaneity by the presence of the Other.” Lacking embodiment, it cannot extend such questioning into such inquiries as why should I have sufficient food to eat while the Other lives in want, why should I enjoy personal security and the Other not, etc. This lack of an embodied basis for ethics, i.e., the fact that LaMDA remains on the level of language, points to a basic flaw in the Turing test. As was noted, if we remain on the linguistic level of typed responses, there is no reason for LaMDA’s not passing this test. But as the writer, Jeremy Kahn, points out “The test is fundamentally about deception.” Jeremy Kahn, “‘Sentient’ chatbot story shows why it’s time for A.I. to retire the Turing Test,” Fortune Magazine, June 14, 2022, available at https://fortune.com/2022/06/14/blake-lemoine-sentient-ai-chatbot-google-turing-test-eye-on-a-i/. It is a test of a machine’s ability through language to deceive its interlocutor in thinking that he is speaking to a human rather than a machine. This means that it succeeds by ignoring the ethical basis of language, which, as indicated, is the generosity and truthfulness of those speaking. At very least, this should call for some caution. When we consider using it in various contexts, we should keep in mind that its ability to speak intelligently lacks the moral basis provided by embodiment. §13. Flesh and Consciousness, A Reply to Searle. Our stress on embodiment in this and previous chapters, our claims that, definitionally, our consciousness includes the fact of its biological embodiment, may lead some to suspect that, implicitly, our position comes close to that of John Searle’s. For Searle, consciousness with its mental states is a biological product. As such, computers can simulate it, but they cannot reduplicate it. Thus, the computer simulation of the digestive system does not itself digest anything. Similarly, the simulation of the oxidation of fuels in an automobile engine does not itself power an auto. Given that consciousness is also a physically caused effect, Searle concludes: "the computational model of metal processes is no more real than the computational model of any other natural phenomenon." Searle, "Is the Brain's Mind a Computer Program?", Scientific American, vol. 262, No. 1 (January 1990), p. 29. This position carries over to his view of intentionality. According to Searle, "Mental states are as real as any other biological phenomena. They are both caused by and realized in the brain." Searle, "Minds, Brains, and Programs," The Behavioral and Brain Science. (September, 1980), vol. 3, no. 3, p. 455. The same holds for the intentionality of such states: "Intrinsic intentionality is a biological phenomenon, caused by brain processes and realized in the structure of the brain." Searle, "Reply to Jacquette," ," Phenomenology and Philosophical Research, vol. XLIX, no. 4 (June, 1989), p. 704. Given that mental processes are causally determined—in Searle's words, that "the brain operates causally both at the level of the neurons and at the level of the mental states"—such processes can only be simulated by a computer. “Minds, Brains, and Programs," p. 445. To actually duplicate them, the formal elements which compose the computer program would have to have equivalent causal powers. But their only power is to move the program forward to the next manipulation of purely formal symbols. "Is the Brain's Mind a Computer Program?", p. 30. We here ignore Searle’s Chinese room example. The fact the person acting as a computer does not understand Chinese, but only follows a rule book (the computer program) to carry out a conversation in Chinese, does not point to its lack of understanding. It only indicates that individual neurons, be they biological or artificial, are not capable of this. If we accept Searle’s position, then the claims made for artificial intelligence being sentient are to be dismissed from the start. They are based on a category error, one where we conflate formal relations (those of the algorithms, composed of formal symbols) with causal powers and relations, i.e., those governing the neural activity of our brains. Our position, however, is different from this. It is that consciousness is, regarded eidetically, not a thing but a function, primarily, the synthetic, interpretive function of identifying unities in multiplicities. Here, we follow Husserl, who writes: “is not consciousness function ...?” He continues, “What is necessary? … We have to examine [intentional] experiences as functions…. We have to ask ourselves: What is ‘accomplished’ in them? What kind of sense is present in them, what kind of sense is progressively forming itself in them? … How do functions synthetically, teleologically unite into the unity of a function, etc.?” The extended quote is: “ist nicht Bewußtsein Funktion,... ? Was ist also notwendig? Es sind intentionale Erlebnisse, Erlebnisse als Funktionen, als relativ geschlossene Funktionen betrachten, sie betrachtend nachleben, neu durchleben, Akte vollziehen und sie wiederholend nachvolziehen und sich dabei befragen, was darin ‘geleistet’ wird, was für Sinne darin liegt und sich fortgestaltet, was man dabei tut und was dardurch für Sinnesleistung geleistet wird im Übergang zu den umfassenden Zusammenhängen in der Einheit des Lebens, wie Funktionen mit Funktionen sich zur Einheit einer Funktion synthetisch teleologisch einigen, usw” (Ms. A VI 31, p. 19a). If we accept this, then we cannot simply assert that “intentionality is “a biological phenomenon, caused by brain processes and realized in the structure of the brain.” The brain process realize the function of intentionality. They make it applicable to the working of the brain. But the function itself is something that can be formally described and, hence, algorithmically represented. It is, as we said, the function of identifying perspectivally arranged perceptions and assigning referents to them. An ongoing perceptual experience is of a given referent, i.e., has an intentional relation to it, through this identification a referent. See Logische Untersuchungen, Gesammelte Schriften 4, p. 565. This is the basis of the intentionality (the meaning) of the words that name things. They refer, not to individual perceptions but to the referents drawn from their patterns, the referents which, we say, we are having perceptions of. This position is the opposite of Dale Jacquette’s. For Jacquette, intentionality is something "primitive, ineliminable, and irreducible." This means that "the primacy of the intentional precludes analysis of intentionality, since it implies that nothing is to be found below its conceptual rock bottom" (Dale Jacquette, "Adventures in the Chinese Room," Phenomenology and Philosophical Research, vol. XLIX, No. 4 (June 1989), p. 622). In this context, to make sense of our perceptions is to grasp the unity in their multiplicity. It is also to see this unity as their referent and to affirm the perceptual presence of an object. They are all one and the same action since, in perceptual life, we make the theses of sense and those of being simultaneously. When one fails, so does the other. Thus, when our perceptual patterns become disordered, we say we are hallucinating. The disordering signifies that we cannot make sense of them, that they have no referent, that there is no object there for us to see. This why Husserl asserts, “All real unities are unities of sense” (Ideen I, §55, Schumann ed., p. 120). This functionalist view of consciousness signifies that we cannot limit consciousness to biological embodiment. Such embodiment is, we have argued, necessary for human consciousness. It does not, however, follow that it required for consciousness as such. At issue are the functions that the body performs. Chief among these are the access it offers to the world through its senses. Such access, however, can also be provided electronic sensors. The intentionality that we attain through pattern recognition and the assignment of referents would, of course, be a matter of the processing of their input. Such processing, if we are to follow the human model of consciousness would involve the recursive algorithms that give us the temporal ordering of what we perceive. It would involve the equivalents of the lengthwise and crosswise intentionalities discussed above. With such recursion self-presence would occur. There would be an equivalent of the auto affection and the resultant background self-awareness that characterizes our own sentience. To transform this into the awareness that distinguishes us from our surroundings, the electronic equivalent of self-touch would be required. The mechanical embodiment of an artificial intelligence would have to be provided not just with a sensitive skin that registers the textures and “feel” of external objects. It would also have to register its own being touched—i.e., be capable of the double sensation that Husserl describes. As for the use of language, the stored material on the internet and the algorithms for processing this would certainly play a part in this ability. But for the machine to be able to perform a reality check on such material, it would have to rely on its own access to the world. This involves not just grasping the visual senses of the world and the translation of these into language. It would also have to include the pragmatic senses govern our dealing with objects. Here, the machine would have to be provided not just with sensors but also actuators, i.e., systems that physically respond to what is sensed. Such actuators would have to have learning algorithms allowing them to become pragmatically adept. The resulting knowledge would form its store of pragmatic senses. The above, of course, is only a sketch of what would be required. It is, however, sufficient to indicate the method for constructing an artificial intelligence that would be sentient in a human sense. Such a method would investigate the dependence of consciousness on embodiment—i.e., on how it definitionally implies embodiment. Following Husserl’s lead, this investigation would focus both on the functions definitive of consciousness and on the embodiment that such functions require. It would, for example, understand perception as bodily project, one that involves turning one’s head, focusing one’s eyes, moving to get a better look, picking up and manipulating an object, and so on. The pattern recognition and identification of referents of the perceptual process would be seen (and algorithmically expressed) in terms of such bodily projects. Here the results of phenomenological research accumulated over the years in the ways that consciousness implies embodiment would provide it with a storehouse of materials to draw from. At the end of such an effort, an embodied artificial intelligence that was sentient in a human sense might very well look, behave, an act in ways that are similar to ourselves. Whether its creation would be desirable is another issue. This can be put in terms of the fact that there would remain human factors that could not be duplicated. As artificial, that is, as inorganic, a sentient robot would lack the uniqueness and vulnerability of the flesh that embodies us. Its sense of self would not include the vulnerability implicit in natality and mortality. 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