In a valuable response which deserves partial repetition and comment Gordon writes:
In trying to appreciate why the issue I raised evoked such a strong response--Keith compares me to creationists while Paul places me back with Epicurus!--I realized that I had not reaffirmed a methodological principle I mentioned in previous posts, Husserl's *epoche*. Under the *epoche*, one suspends one's belief in the reality of the world there before us.
[snip]
In responding I'd like to say that my "intention" was to provoke rather than ridicule... Also in what was a too hastily written post I was _contrasting_ Gordon with Epicurus, not equating them. The problem seems to begin with the Husserlian bracketing of the natural attitude. I am no phenomenologist but isn't the critique of Husserl's phenomenological approach that it reduces its objects to an intentional transparency? "All consciousness is consciousness _of_ something". The perceptive field is organised as a function of a situated intentional consciousness that is open to the world. The problem is that this bracketing is achieved by a transcendental ego that's always already there...prior to distinctions between subject/object. This has been the subject of much complex philosophising (Heidegger/Merleau-Ponty/Deleuz...to name a few) and I won't attempt to deal with it here (not that I would be capable of it). Let's return to Gordon's post: He states that "what actually happens" is that there is radiation that impinges_on_ the retina - (doesn't this imly a distinction inside/outside the body?). As a consequence of this radiation, brain activity takes place and we find ourselves in a world with a red tomato... "that's the puzzle". So the brain "generates" the world. In making the distinction inside/outside as I, (and Gordon) have effectively done, there is no requirement to have "objects" outside _with coloured surfaces_. It is accepted, since Newton at least, that radiation has no colour and what is outside the brain are subjects or subjectivities that, in perception, we see as "objects".
The physiologist follows the electromagnetic radiation from the outside to the eye and on inwards...Visual sensation is in our heads. The excentric conception that puts the image outside our head (Bergson) is an obvious absurdity, that violates the elementary principle of information: one can't read a letter before receiving it. Obviously, the physiologist doesn't understand, nor can understand, given the objectivist method of science, and he deludes himself if he thinks that in speaking of integration, chronaxie, of scanning or gestalt - he can understand the transformation of neuronal action into a conscious field of vision. But there's no reason to dispute the localisation of the field of vision in the head.. One can admit with phenomenology that it is consciousness that gives meaning to the very notion of 'world'. But that doesn't require that one invert the schema of localisation or dissolve the distinction _Brain in a world_. The paradox is that the brain's in the world which is _in_ you. The brain (a la Revonsuo, "Virtual reality as a metaphor of consciousness) is producing what _appears_ as an "out of the brain experience". Even Maturana recognises a milieu that "perturbes" the closed dynamics of the nervous system (which is coupled to the relational dynamics of the organism at the neuronal side of the sensor/affector surfaces. A leibnizian theoretical biology. Gordon does not accept this because he 'as a transcendental subject' has dissolved the distinction organism/milieu. Paradoxically the 'wide-openness' is in our brains but not our brains as the objects of science. An inobjectifiable brain. (Leibniz, Whitehead, Ruyer, Deleuze/Guattari..add a name.
The penultimate paragraph is a gloss on Raymond Ruyer, Paradoxes de la Conscience et Limites de L'Automatisme (Albin Michel, 1966, p.64). Ruyer developed a brilliant metabiology. Unfortunately none of his work is translated and his profound ideas remain virtually unknown.
PS what are the four known 'physical forces' that have been distinguished by intersubjective scientific validation!?
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