Sentences with phrase «conscious experiences which»

(2) Can we reduce to biology or hope to reduce to biology those subjective conscious experiences which we may ascribe to animals, and, if question (1) is answered in the affirmative, can we reduce them further to physics and chemistry?

In his letter of December 10, 1934 Brightman shares Hartshorne's worry, «that other selves are merely inferred but never given,» and goes on to present his own empiricist colors «I'd like to be able to make sense out of the idea of a literal participation in other selves... whenever I try, I find myself landed in contradiction, in epistemological chaos, and in unfaithfulness to experience...» Brightman's argument is that any «intuition» (for him a synonym for «experience»), «is exclusively a member of me,» but the object of that intuition is «always problematic and distinct from the conscious experience which refers to it.»

Not exact matches

Insofar as the experience of this self is unconscious, its immediacy and directness offer no exploitable advantage: one can hardly claim to be conscious of the essence of experience as exhibited immediately and directly in an experience of which one is not consciously aware.

Compare with James's view, quoted above, the following passage of Charles Hartshorne: «If it be asked how the individual can be aware of this infinite range if his experience is finite, the answer is that it is only the distinct or fully conscious aspect of human experience which is finite; while the faint, slightly conscious background embraces all past time» (Beyond Humanism.

Even if the analogy were sound, i.e., even if there were such awareness of the self, the real effect of distinguishing unconscious and conscious awareness is not to preserve the authority of the experience of the self to which the process thinker is appealing, but instead to underscore the philosophical weakness of the appeal to such privileged and direct experience.

I also believe that, in spite of Whitehead's reluctance to concede privileged status to human occasions of experience, the introduction of the wide range of conscious anticipation of the future which humanity represents in comparison to lesser types of existence also introduces justice as a characteristic of the specially human aim at harmonious beauty.

Introspectively, my position is verified by the shifting nature of conscious attention, with its structure of a central focal awareness surrounded by an horizon of indeterminate yet always accessible oblique experience, upon which the searchlight of attention may at any moment be turned.

As the living person draws upon a wider bodily experience, so the conscious ego, if there should be one at a particular moment, draws upon a vast ocean of unconscious feeling which sustains it.

Scattered widely throughout the history of mankind there have been «somewhat exceptional elements in our conscious experience... which may roughly be classed together as religious and moral intuitions.»

A decline of conscious attention, as in exhaustion, in which the figure - ground structure dissolves into a homogeneous field, illustrates that consciousness is derivative from a more complex experience, which I have located in the overwhelmingly nonconscious occasions in the «nonsocial» nexus.

Clergy and laity will then experience themselves first of all as brothers of the same religious mind and conviction which all have acquired through many sacrifices in a personal decision and in conscious opposition to the mentality of their surroundings.

If such an eventuality actually took place, experience «would... include in an undivided present the entire past history of the conscious person, not as instantaneity, not like a cluster of simultaneous parts, but as something continually present which would also be something continually moving» (CM 152).

The personality which develops throughout these cycles of transition is not a substantial «self» but rather a dynamic «nexus» or «pattern» that continually incorporates experiences while gradually expanding its conscious awareness of, and response to, the relational factors which constitute it.

, where Brightman explicitly rejects Kant's approach as non-empirical, and then characterizes his own method, using James» phrase, as «radical empiricism» which «will assume no source of information about the real, other than the experience of conscious persons» (23).

I mean to assert that my conscious experience, the experience constitutive of me as a conscious ego, is the experience of the actual entities constitutive of the personally ordered regnant society which dominates my brain and my whole animal organism.

I will put Cobb back on the defensive by saying that I fail to see how the model of an all - encompassing, regionally inclusive experience is compatible with the hiddenness of competing drives, aspirations and fears which psychoanalysis reveals in the» «depth» dimension of the psyche,» by which term I mean something broader than the unified experience of the analogue to the «soul,» namely, the restless depths of the complex societies which support the regnant nexus and which have a «life» of their own, which is in some instances incorporated into, melded into the conscious experience of the occasions in the regnant society, and sometimes is not.

Assuming that I make the identification, he poses a dilemma; either my experience does not have the unity, the togetherness required by a single experience (and this because my experience includes both the clear, conscious experience of the regnant society and the dim experience of other members of the nonsocial nexus); or, my experience is that of a super entity which inherits from the ego and from the other occasions of the nonsocial nexus, and, since inheritance requires contiguity, this latter alternative presupposes acceptance of a doctrine of regional inclusion.

My response to Cobb's first line of criticism, then, is that the presuppositions of his criticism entail a view of experience which is unreal, namely, that we have all kinds of focused, conscious experiences simultaneously.

The intuition that I, with my conscious experience, am an actual individual with the power of self - determination, to make decisions and to cause my body to do my bidding, is reconciled with the equally strong sense that my body is real, and that it exerts powerful causation upon me, in terms of the speculative hypothesis that all actual occasions are occasions of experience, so that interaction of body and mind is not the unintelligible interaction of unlikes (the unintelligibility of which has led philosophers to deny the distinct actuality either of the mind or of the body).

In this, as Lincoln discovered in the tragic days of the Civil War, we find a level of experience which does the seemingly impossible of making us firm in the right, «as God gives us to see the right,» but also humble because we are conscious that «the Almighty has his own purposes.»

The recreation of this proposal in the conscious, definite, and intellectual awareness of the beholder is called a «propositional feeling,» and it is this feeling which is aesthetic experience.

In personal existence, a center emerged in the conscious psyche that transcended such impersonal forces as passion and reason, which were operative therein, and experienced responsibility for their mutual relations.

Such action would be a clear instance of injustice even if the comatose patient has no conscious experience of the violation of his person (which is ultimately relevant).

We can be aware in a general way of the role of our eyes in mediating visual experience, but we have no awareness of the work of the brain or of the process by which its work is translated into our conscious experience.

It is therefore possible and even probable that they experience sensations and memory, that is to say, conscious phenomena, but surely not in the sense of human experience which is connected with a concept of one's own self.

Because the identity by which I am constituted is primarily a unity of conscious experience, this sharp division of myself from all others is real.

He [Descartes] also laid down the principle that those substances which are the subjects enjoying conscious experiences provide the primary data for philosophy, namely, themselves as in the enjoyment of such experience.

It refers to those «somewhat exceptional elements in our conscious experience — those elements which may roughly be classed» as religious intuitions (PR 343).

Now, to speak of conscious human experience in Whiteheadian categories is to speak of a regnant nexus of actual occasions which are enjoying rich supplemental phases.

By approaching the question of mind and nature in this way Whitehead is able to provide us with an aesthetically rich understanding of nature, which at the same time preserves a necessary role for reason and the search for truth as an indispensable element in the determination of conscious experience, the enhancement of our aesthetic sensibilities, and the general advancement of civilization as such.

Basically, his solution takes the form of distinguishing two different levels of human experience, or of more or less conscious thinking about experience, on only the deeper of which is there an experience of God that is both direct and universal.

A person is essentially one who is aware of relationships — who is conscious of self as over against not - self — and it is the experience of dependence which provides this awareness.

We can grasp the massiveness and complexity of what is present in our unconscious experience in relation to the relative simplicity and superficiality of our consciousness by considering what we, in fact, are experiencing in each occasion in comparison with that which we can bring into focus with some conscious clarity.

The psychic processes, which were the content of conscious and unconscious experience, became for them also the objects of awareness, and these were, to an astonishing degree, thereby subjected to conscious control.

Popper indeed believes that the reduction of chemistry to physics, of biology to chemistry, of animal conscious or subconscious experience to biology, and of consciousness itself and the creativeness of the human mind to animal experience, are all problems the complete success of which seems most unlikely if not impossible.

«We can only discuss experiences which have entered into conscious analysis» (PR 179/273).

This experience «can be used to include not only human and amoebic experience, conscious or non-conscious as the case may be, but also non-conscious taking account of the environment which characterizes molecular, atomic and quantum events as well» (LL 131).

Such «religious intuitions» are the «somewhat exceptional elements of our conscious experience» that Whitehead seeks to elucidate as evidence for God's consequent experience of the world.9 Only a living person experiencing a whole series of divine aims, sensitive to the way in which these shift, grow, and develop in response to our changing circumstances can become aware of their source as dynamic and personal, meeting our needs and concerns.10 Jesus, full of the Spirit, knew God personally in this intimate way, until these aims were taken from him in the hour of his deepest need, when he experienced being forsaken by God on the cross.

In terms of the above discussion of what is truly primary in human experience, we are now in a position to understand a statement in which Whitehead summarizes how the «more concrete fact» from which science abstracts should be conceived: «The emotional appetitive elements in our conscious experience are those which most closely resemble the basic elements of all physical experience» (PR 248).

It is not true that liturgical worship entirely fails to speak to the strictly conscious levels of human experience; it does indeed speak to these, but it has richer connotations and implications; and it is these which do most of the «work» in liturgical as distinguished from didactic or other types of Christian worship.

Indeed one might say that liturgical worship by and large speaks not so much to the conscious attention of its participants as to those profound and almost unconsciously experienced areas of human life where men live in terms of feeling - tone, of unutterable emotion, and of profound subconscious relationships, with an almost intuitive awareness of the «more» which is deep down in the structure of reality.

Brooks is asking for the strongest instances of structural complexity, which will clearly introduce it into the conscious mind; not, perhaps, as an object of contemplation, but as an effective agent within the experience, whose stresses are definitely felt.

In other words, these biblical stories, which are not self - conscious literary creations but genuine emergents from the experience of a religious community — these stories are attempts to express an understanding of the relation in which God actually stands to human life, and they are true in any really important sense only if that understanding is correct.

Given his panpsychism or «psychicalism,» Hartshorne holds that the ultimate units of reality are, in the broadest sense, feelings, or that feeling is a «cosmic variable» which can range from the most primitive, unconscious aesthetic reactions of subatomic particles to their environment to the most elaborate conscious experiences of God's.

It is these occasions of which we have immediate knowledge; or more accurately, the experiences we speak of as ours (both conscious and unconscious) are these occasions.

Atman was not the conscious ego of axial man nor the teeming unconscious experience out of which this arose.

The point being stressed here is that conscious experience is a radically new emergent in the evolutionary process, and required and still requires an extremely complex, even awe - inspiring set of conditions; and yet it emerged and still emerges out of entities which are not totally different in kind.

Above all, public worship is the experience of sharing with our fellow - Christians in an action that is distinctively Christian and which, by our very presence there, is to become (like all prayer) an intentional, attentive, and conscious openness to the presence and action of God himself.

The reconstruction of the context which is screened out in conscious experience, the interpretation of the world in terms of unity, the attention paid to the coherence and solidarity of the world (cf. PR 7/10, 11/17, 15f.

If a man in despair is as he thinks conscious of his despair, does not talk about it meaninglessly as of something which befell him (pretty much as when a man who suffers from vertigo talks with nervous self - deception about a weight upon his head or about its being like something falling upon him, etc., this weight and this pressure being in fact not something external but an inverse reflection from an inward experience), and if by himself and by himself only he would abolish the despair, then by all the labor he expends he is only laboring himself deeper into a deeper despair.