Joe Jeffrey (17 Mar 96) calls "rubbish" my proposal that the world- in-common be relinquished. "If there is no shared world," Joe asks, "to whom, Sir, are you addressing yourself?" (See also Jonathan Shear, 23 Mar 96.) Joe seems to have forgotten his Leibniz.
If there are many parallel worlds, and a mechanism for keeping them coherent, then it will be *as if* there is a shared world. God powers the coherence in Leibniz' conception (like the conductor and score keep the individual instruments of an orchestra coherent), whereas in my conception quantum reality does the job. Brains conserve real symmetries (under Yasue's (1988) principle of least neural action), and brains conserving the same real symmetries will be coherent, so that the parallel worlds hoisted by those brains will be indiscernable from a world in common. There is no shared world, Sir, and I am addressing all you monads hoisting coherent worlds in parallel. (Halloo...)
To take parallel worlds as a world-in-common is to be ensnared in a form of *maya*.
Joe insists he is no friend of qualia, and save for the issue of relinquishing the world in common, we agree on much, but it is not clear that he has entirely rooted out dualistic commitments. Cf. our different senses of "experience." For me "experience" signifies the facticity of our always finding ourselves already amidst some world or other. There is nothing mental or conscious about "experience." (Ex-perience originally meant to try out, as in experiment, and only later became subjectivized.) The fact is we always find ourselves already thrown in the world. Joe, who accepts "the ordinary concept of experience as it is used all the time" [as if convention is finally going to get us out of the mess!], thinks of "experience" as "interior events (as long as we don't take 'interior' literally)." Well, if he doesn't take "interior" literally, then his is not the ordinary concept of experience and Joe owes us an unliteral account of "interior." The ordinary concept of experience as it is used all the time embraces a duality of interior experience and exterior world. Experience is not interior for me, it's thrownness-in-the-world, so there is no duality.
Now Roland Cook (13 Mar 96) thinks I just don't get it: "Globus and many others, it appears to me, apparently do not know what conscious experience 'is'." You tell us, Roland, what conscious experience "is." For my part, whenever I try to find conscious experience, all I find is that I am always already encountering a world.
I want to turn to Shaun Gallagher's very thoughtful comments (13 Mar 96). Shaun correctly observes that Heidegger's thrownness is more than just always finding oneself already in some world circumstance, "but as experiencing it [the circumstance] always from some particular disposition and always in some mood..." That is, we are *situated* as we encounter the world. The brain is self- tuning (Globus, 1995) and world thrownness unfolds out of the interaction between the brain's continually fluctuating attunement, the flux of sensory input, and memory. The situatedness of our world thrownness has to do with the attunement.
Shaun continues: "So, he [Globus] says, qualia are really qualities of the world. But if worlds are produced by individual brains, aren't the qualities of my world simply the qualia that I experience?" This phrasing easily leads to confusion. I like to keep a sharp terminological distinction between alleged qualia, which are of the mind, and qualities, which are of the world. 'Qualia' carries so much dualistic connotation, that we best avoid the term rather than shift it to the world. So on my usage, qualia are not qualities of the world. That's why I keep saying "forget qualia!" and arguing that it is world qualities which are problematic.
Shaun captures my point beautifully in relation to phantom limbs and pain: "...perhaps I would ask my physician to help my brain create a different world (one without a phantom or pain)." Exactimundo! I don't want the doc to get rid of my mental sensations of pain but the pain in my neck, so that my bodily world is different, to wit, a world without a painful neck. Pain as a mental event is nowhere to be found.
Though not indefatigable, let me say once again that language forces us to think in categories that include mental events. Common sense says there is a "consciousness" and a physical world-in- common, and this understanding is pervasive and tenacious. Ain't easy, Joe, to let go of all this!
There is a methodological device, though, which helps keep one on track, along the lines of Husserl's "epoche" [shd be a little bar over the last e]. In his "Cartesian meditations," Husserl doesn't want to take anything for granted; he wants to get to the undoubtable (which of course for Descartes turns out to be that he doubts). Mere beliefs are mercilessly rooted out. Now, the reality of the everyday (quotidian) world is something we take for granted. But Descartes musing by his fire had seen that the dream world can be so authentic as to be indiscernable from the wake world. The dream life and the wake life are at parity (Globus, 1987). At this very instant I can doubt the reality of the world because I just might be dreaming typing these words.
So Husserl says: Let's "bracket" this belief in the reality of the external world. We note how we live out the belief in the conduct of our lives, but we don't take the seeming reality of the world into our philosophical foundations. The phenomenological epoche, then, brackets the reality of the external world. (Husserl remains a staunch realist re the external world; bracketing the belief is a methodological innovation. The belief is fully justified, he thinks.)
I recommend the attitude of the epoche in discussing the ontology of the world. Let the true nature of the quotidian world's "reality" come out of the discussion, instead of there being a tacit presupposition that the world is out there in common just as it seems.
Gordon Globus
GGlobus@orion.oac.uci.edu
Globus, G. (1987). "Dream Life, Wake Life." Albany: State U. of N.Y. Press.
Globus, G. (1995). "The Postmodern Brain." Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Husserl. E. (1960). "Cartesian Meditations." The Hague: Martins Nijhoff.
Yasue, K., M. Jibu, T. Misawa and J.-C. Zambrini (1988). "Stochastic Neurodynamics." Ann. Inst. Stat. Math. 40: 41-59.
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