The Human Question

When DD has us suppose that we create our own personal version/application of Conway's game of life, he has us start by stipulating the rules of transformation that function in this game like the laws of nature do in reality.  But we don't stipulate the rules of logic: rather, such rules are a condition for the very possibility of consistency in and meaningfulness of the rules of transformation.  If so, then there is no item, process or pattern that corresponds in any one-to-one way with these transcendental rules.  How then, might a Conway-creature be constructed that would come to discover these rules?  Trial and error?  That would seem to be the only bottom-up way of making such a discovery.  But that would at best give rise to a hunch.  But our knowledge of the rules of logic is not just a bunch of hunches, is it?  But if we are part of nature and nature is accurately represented by Conway's game of life, then we would not be able to attain mo...

allow for multiple modes of realization compared to mechanical push.  A desire-centric account of nature thus involves an openness to more possibilities. Even a concrete desire has multiple modes of lower-level realization. Even equilibrium has multiple profiles.  Desire therefore has an open-ended-ness to it that mechanical push might not have.

It's very Freudian to say that the person who denies a desire finds a way of satisfying it without admitting it to his or her self.  Well, isn't the materialistic atheist's insistence on the truth of determinism an unwitting sign of the longing for that Reality that cannot not be?

What if the human ability to reason about justice is to the brute sense of reward and punishment as is the human ability to reason about math is to the brute ability to distinguish the one from the many?

In the short term, they may seem to be opposed, but in the long term they tend to converge, and ultimately that convergence is not just a tendency but a necessity. Think here of the communion of saints or a secular analog: a community of rational beings whose highest goal and duration is open-ended.  Think also of what Saint Paul said (I don't know where) that all things would be revealed...eventually. The convergence of the apparent and the genuine good is like that of the rails of the track that seem to meet on the distant horizon.

DD quotes Ben Franklin's words after signing the Declaration of Independence: "Either we hang together or we hang separately." This expression very clearly distinguishes the consequences of cooperation from those of non-cooperation.  But it does not clearly lay out the precise motivation, which DD calls "Ben selfishness," for such cooperation. Does it mean that helping others is valued only inasmuch as it is instrumental to my one's own physical well-being?  Is there more than that going on here? Hard to say...

When discussing the origin of morality, DD mentions in passing how something analogous to morality can be found at the intra-cellular level.  This remark is almost a perfect inversion of the neo-Platonic understanding of the relationship between the higher and the lower. Taking his cue from earlier neo-Platonists, Aquinas says that the lowest part of the higher level touches the highest part of the lower level.  For example, the lowest form of reasoning ( ratiocinatio ) touches upon the highest form of sentient awareness.  This happens, explains Aquinas in true neo-Platonic form, because the higher reality is the source of the lower.  That's a paradigmatic example of a top/down ontology. DD proposes something quite different: millions of years ago, during the prokaryotic era, intra-genomic strife was resolved through behaviors that are mirrored today in morality.  For example, free-loaders were kept in check and even ostracized; others made sacrifices for th...

What type of crane would explain our ability to think of the objects of logic and mathematics? Our ability to ponder whether these truths are universally and necessarily true?  Our ability to see that even one of them  is  true always and everywhere?

(still under construction) Dennett does a wonderful job of pointing out how the desire that one's child prosper in the future corresponds neither to altruism (although, I might add, a theorist committed the existence of altruism might find what he's looking for in this example) nor to egoism (although, I might add, a theorist committed to the existence of egoism would find plenty of what he's looking for); nor does he think (if my memory serves me right) that the desire for this sort of thing is a mere conflation of the two sorts of desires  (i.e., altruistic and egoistic).  I heartily agree. I can't help but suspect, however, that there is something autobiographic in his choice of an example.  If so, this would be a case of personal experience overruling the tendency to ideology.  Unwitting autobiography or not, his example makes the laudable point that human motivations include cases that  fall outside of the prefabricated categories of egoism and altruism...

It is an evolution from the denial of the possibility of freedom to an openness to freedom. It is an evolution from mechanism to systems (the latter of which involves adaptive components, and that adaptation is not mechanistic). It is an evolution from a reduction to emergence, or something akin thereto. It is an evolution from zero-sum game to non-zero-sum games. It is an evolution  from social Darwinism to, if you will, social-justice Darwinism. The question is: is this change in our conception of life, human nature, and human action genuine progress?  If it is, then what conception of reality is being left behind?  What conception is being approached? Doesn't materialism, as a metaphysics, reject ideality?  Isn't that rejection antithetical to the objectivity of the common good?  And doesn't the rejection of a common good go hand in had with a Hobbesian individualism that regards justice as a merely useful construct? In other words, isn't it in ...

What if our first person description of the operation human reason reveals it as being inseparable from appetite, i.e., from the desire to know how things fit together, etc.? Could a machine engage in reasoning if it had no appetite? If yes, then if we could genetically engineer a human to reason as directed without appetite, would our use of it constitute slavery?  So what about computers whose reasoning we direct? A way out of these problems:  instead of saying that computers think, might it not be more reasonable for us to say that computers model reasoning?  Consider how computers model everything from weather patterns to nuclear explosions: we don't imagine that storms or explosions are occurring inside the computers, yet we are confident that the computers can tell us what the outcomes of those processes are likely to be.  Can't the same be the case for thinking? A computer can deliver the message "Socrates is rational" after receiving the inputs "S...

As a compatibilist, DD wants first to convince us that our actions are predetermined by antecedent conditions, and after having done that, convince us that this conviction is compatible with our day-to-day conviction that we can choose how we shall act.   Is there an analogous way of treating justice--that is, could one be a justice compatibilist?This position would maintain both a positivistic notion of justice that is somewhat counter-intuitive, yet also assert that this counterintuitive notion is compatible with important common sense convictions about justice. Here are two ways in which a positivist might go against common sense notions of justice.  The first way would be to argue that science undermines  the objectivity of justice, nevertheless, prudence dictates that we engage ourselves in day to day endeavors as if justice were objective, even though it isn't.  For it is objective in some qualified sense, etc. Another positivist might contradict the fo...

... distinguish moments (in the Husserlian sense) from each other?

sn't it the case that the source that generates these higher-level pattern is a rule which we don't see but understand? The visual pattern is just a map of the possibilities entailed in that rule. If so, the unity and beauty that we discover in emergent patterns is inchoate in the rule that determines them. And since that rule is not itself visible, the emergent pattern is a kind of tangible/visible "dance" by that which is intangible. I am tempted to say that emergence, inasmuch as it is a beautiful pattern, is in the eye of the beholder. But the beholder is taken by the beauty of that pattern only because the mind's eye is able to recognize the source of the pattern's unity.

This is not an anti-libertarian argument but merely a broadening of ontology so as to include living beings that are neither mechanisms nor free. We may be able to predict the operations of these beings on the basis of our observation of lower-level states of affairs, but that prediction is not a simple deduction.  That is, it is not the case that what appear to be irreducibly higher-level operations are in fact complex sets of lower-level processes, which, once discovered and adequately described can be deduced from other, antecedent processes following the same laws.  Rather, the prediction is based on a correlation between higher level operations and lower-level conditions. This deduction requires a previous induction of the correlation between the higher and lower-levels and the subsequent formulation of a law of correlation-- a kind of translation law-- from which the higher-level operation can be deduced.   But there is no deduction of the correlation itself. ...

If all that exists is observable from a third person perspective, then do representations really exist? We don't, after all, observe them as we do things in nature.  Instead, we correlate reports given to us by human subjects with physical processes observed going on inside and/or outside of the body of the one reporting experiences.  Absent such reports, the keenest observations of the correlating processes ("correlating" here relates to processes going inside and outside the human body) would not seem to be able to uncover representation or the like. That is, one who had zero knowledge of biology but Herculean knowledge (in the Dworkian sense of the word) of the physics of non-living things would be unable to recognize representation as such, nor would that person be able to recognize any other operation that we associate with the first-person perspective (e.g., perception, being reminded of x by y, etc.).  It would just look like a confusing mess.  OR the Herc...

When we praise them for doing something, we regard them as having a desire that, thanks to their training and initiative, "rightly" guides their actions. This sort of praise is not entirely unlike that which we reserve for humans: is that because we anthropomorphize our pets? Or is it because we recognize animal desire as having its own excellence? Or does the reason lie somewhere between those two: i.e., because domesticated animals actually do participate somewhat in our own distinctively human modus vivendi ? No matter what the answer to this question is, it is clear that we regard these and other animals as motivated by desire.  And there is something anti-reductive about this sort of regard. I propose that it might be better to attack reductionism by pointing to this sort of desire rather than by talking as if humans were exceptions to what is found elsewhere in the natural world.  For the latter approach can easily sound (or it may actually be) dualistic.  Tal...

This characterization of dualism as relying on a point-like self is very useful to Dennett's argument.  For the dualist's insistence on the unity of the self is seen as relying on something that can't exist in space and time:  a point. But while he succeeds in characterizing dualism as positing a point-like and hence unreal self, he fails even to note holism as an alternative to reductionism and to dualism (and since holism dovetails well with hylemorphism, his arguments don't tell us anything about the merits/demerits of an Aristotelian approach to  animate nature).  But I haven't yet gone through all of Freedom Evolves ... so maybe he does later on.

Suppose we examined the brain at the nano level so that synapses seemed as large as planets: wouldn't simultaneity break down?  Wouldn't the lack of simultaneity make it seem completely implausible that we were located in the midst of neural circuitry?

at 2:17 quotes Benjamin Lippet re Freedom of the Will: worth noting That a 100 milliseconds before the ? can intervene so that the beam of light is not broken: free won't. Look at DD's apparent attack on FW via BL's experiment and LIST the assumptions that he needs to make in order for the experimental results to be regarded as cogent.

Dennett's reliance upon Benjamin Libet's experiment shows how pathetically ignorant he is of where freedom of the will is be found.  He thinks it's about acting for no reason; whereas it's acting  for  a reason, i.e., for a goal.  Moving a hand at an unassigned moment is one of the least suitable examples of the exercise of free will that could be conjured up.  For free will is an act of choosing between two alternatives that are intelligibly different.  Try as I may, I just can't see anything intelligible about the difference between moving my hand now and not moving my hand now. That sort of choice looks less like the product of typical deliberation than it looks like the attempt to act indeliberately, randomly.

1. The fact that freedom is an action that follows deliberation regarding the means, and that 2. these means are courses of action, and that ... 3. these courses of action are not co-present to the deliberator like two bales of hay: rather, they are invented, and that ... 4. this invention is the font of human creativity, and that... 5. the motivation for that this creativity is the desire is for a good that extends beyond this or that concrete realization toward which one may direct one's effort, and that... 6. freedom consists of how different alternative paths are directed toward an all-encompassing goal.

(When it comes to human and other animal behavior) in the mind of the positivist, desire is to physics as the phenomenal is to the noumenal.  But if desire doesn't really motivate our actions, then we might as well be zombies. Before we argue about free will, we need to talk about desire. If the positivist understanding of desire generaliter  misses the mark, then  the positivist understanding of free will does a fortiori .  But successfully undermining the positivist's attack on free will does not, of course, constitute a demonstration of its truth.

... can be described as the tangible evidence that the user is thinking of the intangible.

Is nature represented by the grid or is it represented by the grid plus the laws that control them? If it includes the laws, then nature includes what you cannot observe. If nature does not include the laws, i.e., if those laws are extrinsic to nature, then either there is nothing controlling nature and its apparent lawfulness is the result of a projection by you and me OR that which controls nature is supernatural (thinking here of Al Ghazali).

A good question to ask a reductive materialist.

...in that case it would be possible in principle to retrodict the past ad infinitum.  The present would either contain an infinite amount of information or the universe would be cyclical, albeit (methinks) in a manner analogous to the plot of the Lorenz attractor.

This is a nice way to try to avoid being cornered re the irreality of the self if you're a reductionist, for you can assert that a pattern obtains at the microscopic level that is not all that unlike the pattern found at the societal level.  No need for the one self that does it all: instead, you have many sub-selfs that compete for dominance or take turns guiding the whole. The problem with this is, however, that the voters/officials are all zombies.  None of them thinks about the whole as such.  And perhaps none of them thinks even about themselves (unless one is a panzoist).  None of them makes a comparison of alternatives. The more this proposed democracy seems like a zombocracy, the more consciousness will be seem to be epiphenomenal. Furthermore, if the oneness of the self is less real than the multiplicity of explanatory neural parts, then why can't each of these neural parts be conceived of as democracy as well?  And why not parts of these parts, et...

Some prescientific common sense beliefs are conditions for the possibility of doing science.  These beliefs may also, however, require the identity of the self, which in turn undermines the more radical versions of materialism. Our way to self identity is through what Husserl would called the "noema": the object of our intention.  In order for the object of study to be recognized as the same at different times and under different circumstances, that which recognized must likewise be the same.  Upon registering something today, I have to recognize that I saw the same thing yesterday.  Without that sort of recognition there is no science.

My take-home from listening recently to a book on Wittgenstein was that there is always something in our language game that cannot be reduced to or captured in rules. Perhaps that something more is the way desire directs our movement.  Desire is a condition for the possibility of having even implicit rules.  Explicit rules for human behavior cannot really move us to act: they only steer our desires. Perhaps "rules" signify whatever can be explained mechanistically, but Wittgenstein might add that such an explanation is never a complete one.  Just as to describe a machine in terms of its physics without saying what it is for is to fail to describe it as a machine, so too, one can never give a complete account of nature in merely mechanistic terms.

Elizabeth Anscombe criticizes Kant for ignoring the importance of a relevant description of human action.  She points out that he assumes coming up with a relevant description is non-problematic for moral philosophy.  But as a matter of fact, different persons will describe the same action differently according to whether or not they possess virtue.  That is, according to their ability to recognize the good in concrete situations. One could regard a particular bucket of sand as rather simple or as rather complex, based upon one's regard for the purpose of that bucket.  If you think someone scooped or filled it without much of a thought for how the granules are located with respect to each other, then one will find a simple description for the bucket.  In fact, one might find a mathematical equation that would prescind from the consideration of the exact location of each grain and not take into account the variations in the sizes of the granules.  If one t...

I am still going through some old  thoughts I may have posted a year or two ago. If one grants that thinking is higher or more complex than simply being an organism without perception, higher/more complex than perception, higher/more complex than reason.  If these are all on a continuum, then it would seem that there's another point beyond reason along this continuum.  But what would that be?  (smirk here)

Way back when I read Cosmos and Mind  and discovered that Sharon Street rejects "mind-independent" moral truths for the most interesting reason.  She says the moral theory is inconsistent with natural selection because there's no reason to think that natural selection would put us in touch with mind-independent truths. So she concludes that Darwinians, such as herself, must avoid giving an exalted status to these sorts of claims. Some thoughts on that: first of all, wouldn't one who arrives at such a conclusion (evolution is true, therefore ethics ain't as true as we thought) about moral claims arrive at a similar conclusion regarding causal claims?  How could one, therefore, claim to know the sort of necessary truths that characterize science.  How can Sean Carroll say with confidence that Laplace is right if natural solution provides no plausible scenario in which knowing math and science would be advantageous? I suppose one could always argue that such kn...

I am wondering if it's possible to find a connection between a mechanistic view of the brain, and the notion that one needs to have one central headquarters, as it were, while associating the notion that one does not need a central headquarters to one that is non-mechanistic inasmuch as each part acts for the sake of a common good, as if they "desired" the same goal. Of course, I would definitely have to defend the claim that mechanistic and central control view of consciousness go hand in hand.  After all, DD seems to think (at this point in my auditing/reading) that a no-central-headquarters approach is consistent with his version of materialism (which I take as being reductionist with a kind of semblance of higher/lower levels of explanation). One important objection to my common-good approach would be that I am using metaphor.  And an important reply to that objection would be that "mechanism" is itself a metaphor.  To suppose that it isn't is to suf...

Human perception is the awareness that there's more than what you see to what you can imagine.  It's the recognition that the parallel tracks that get closer and closer on the horizon could get closer and closer than your eyes could discern, that they might never touch as the distances between them approach zero.  It's thinking of what happens at infinity, which you cannot imagine, while imagining the track continue beyond what you can see. To perceive as a human is to take what you can see as the occasion to imagine more still because of your being drawn to what is beyond imagining. To perceive is to take the world as a sign of the infinite. A symbol is something we can see, taken as a sign of what we can imagine, taken as stretching toward that which is beyond imagining.

I think this is interesting, albeit ironic, point made by DD against materialists who--unlike him--embrace libertarianism.  (explain here) And this remark can be directed against dualism too, for the latter can be conceived of as rendering the self as point-like.  And, as a materialist he will point out that points don't exist. DD seems to think that there are only two alternatives: dualism and reductive materialism.  But he never gives a thought to the kind of holism that is so marvelously thematized by Alva Noe.  But it is such holism that makes a clearing for hylemorphism.

Eventually, after many generations, they would learn to cooperate... and they wouldn't even have to think about it!  What's interesting about human cooperation is not just that it's evolutionarily savy, but that we thematize it as such.

I am suspecting that DD regards appeals to the first - person perspective as Cartesian mistakes. But what if talk of "us," and of "what we know" is properly understood in the first person?  That is, the first-person plural, of course. And what if this "we" perspective is equally embarrassing to his reductive materialism? That is, there is science only if there is something that we know.  Simply to admit that is to open the floodgates to discourse about intentionality.  The noema, as one and the same for many, is an embarrassment to reductive materialism.  A deep embarrassment, for materialism can only give us phenomenalism or try to avoid it by hand-waving about how inner objects represent outer ones. The emperor has no noema.

Trying to sort out Dennett's compatibilism: We might, at first glance, distinguish the two ways of regarding our free actions as the phenomenal and noumenal.  That is, it is obvious that I can engage in pursuit or avoidance, and this involves a kind of freedom; but my movements are determined in one of those two ways.  But on second thought, this is quite different from Kant's distinction, so perhaps these two terms are not that apt: for the noumenal is never really experienced, but is instead postulated as a condition for the possibility of experience, whereas science is a special sort of experience. Another comparison, that is in some ways more apt, is Hume's duality of perspectives.  There's the pre-philosophical acceptance of causality, the existence of the self, of free will, etc. and then there's the skeptical attitude of a philosopher.  The latter recognizes how unreal are the objects of our naive experience, but this recognition paralyzes.  We must e...

There is the law that is a command: do this; don't do that. Then there is the law that is a conditional: if you do this, such and such will happen; if you do that, another such and such will happen. Even those who break law 1 will be subject inexorably to some version of law 2.

"This is man's choice: either he conceives of himself as free from the whole universe and dependent only on God, or free from God and therefore the slave of every circumstance."

Let's apply it to mathematics.  Let's suppose that many different rational animals on different planets are capable of knowing the same mathematical truths, just as many different animals on our planet have independently evolved eyes for seeing light.  It would seem that just as the many seeing animals share in common a light-filled environment, so too the many calculating animals share the same (think Plato) mathematical environment in common.  Especially if what they know is the same.

I would ask them the following: Is the act of understanding the meaning of a statement the exercise of a force? Is it a chemical reaction?  Is it a movement?  Is it a physical state?  Is it a complex combination of all of the above?  Isn't an appeal to complexity...hand-waving? Similar questions could be asked about our focusing on a concrete goal while acting. Another question:  is the object of understanding within the one who knows?   A similar question could be asked of the object of the intention to act. I suppose that the reply to the last question would be that we know an inner representation.  But that's an incoherent cop-out, for we do not know the representation as a representation.  And our phenomenology of representation always involves remembering having been directly acquainted with the represented object.  I see a picture of my wife as a picture of  her only inasmuch as I recall having seen her.  So it would se...

To some, reasoning is the easy problem of consciousness (inasmuch as, in their opinion, we can easily use machines to perform deductions), and perception the hard problem (inasmuch as that is not easy for a machine to do the work of perception). But in our experience, reasoning is concomitant with desire, imagination, and perception.  In fact, it is interwoven with these.  Could the process of reasoning proceed in a human that had no desire? no perception?  no imagination?  Could any being without these characteristics reason as we reason?  Could it reason at all? Could these questions be turned back at one like myself, since I believe in immortality?  That is, if I am willing to argue that they are inseparable, then am I not arguing against immortality?  This objection would probably not apply to a Thomist, who thought consciousness post-mortem and pre-Resurrection was not a natural occurrence: reason is not naturally able to operate (unless ...

The lawfulness of higher order forms is either strictly deducible from the lawfulness of lower order ones or it is not.  If it is, then it either requires translation principles or it does not.  If it does not, the we have eliminative materialism.  If it does, then the higher forms are either subjective, something we read into lower order, or they are not.  If they are subjective, then once again we have eliminative materialism.  If the higher order is real but the causality is one way (bottom up) then the higher order is epiphenomenal.  If there is top down causality, then we have either hylemorphism or something else like it.  And of course, that top down causality may be either determined or not.  If it is determined, its behavior would be lawful, but that lawfulness would not, strictly speaking, be a more complex version of the lower level lawfulness.

I should look into him some time... (Benjamin Wiker's lecture convinced me of that). Another thing mentioned by Wiker is Privileged Planet.

Agreed: that quantum indeterminacy is utterly useless to the libertarian argument... if quantum indeterminacy is resorted to as a cause of human freedom, or as the source of the non-determination of human actions.  For example, if my decision to eat yogurt rather than drink kefir tomorrow will be triggered by an unpredictable quantum event, well, then even if that action was unpredictable, it was not free simply in virtue of that unpredictability.  In fact, it might be more correct to say that it was determined by what happened at the quantum level, even though the determining event was itself unpredictable. On the other hand, we might point out how quantum indeterminacy undermines the assumption that determinism is universal.  It does that, but undermining the argument in support of the the contradictory position is not the same as finding support for one's own.  To find that supporting argument, one might look first at common sense -- so called folk psychology -...

Daniel Dennett discusses freedom (which might be called "phenomenal freedom" in contrast to "noumenal determinism") in terms of our ability to avoid something that is present or is approaching us. This is a natural way of characterizing things by someone who has spent very much time thinking about how our present capacities have originated from evolution, and precious little time reflecting on his own desires.  But he misses glaringly important features of human freedom by relying upon such a mediocre example to deflate what he thinks are over-inflated accounts of human freedom.   For liberty does not so much consist in our ability to avoid that which is heading menacingly toward us (e.g., angry bison, bad tenure review) as it is our ability to adhere to a goal that is not yet on our visible horizon and to invent new ways of attaining it (e.g., I wish to-teach, to-know science, to-be well-liked by my friends). Look at the incredibly diverse fields of mathematics: pr...

The word 'intentionality' appears in Daniel Dennett's Freedom Evolves only once: I think that pretty much says what's lacking in his philosophy: philosophy in the first person.  For all his talk about the "intentional stance," he never discusses what it's like for the intender to intend.  Instead, he replaces the first person ("I intend") with the third ("that thing over there can be interpreted as acting intentionally"). At this point in my auditing (reading via audible.com) his book I get the impression that he regards appeals to the first-person perspective as unreliable, illusory or ridiculous.  I may, however, be mistaken.  But in any case, if he does think (or did think) that the first-person approach is so ridiculous, then to be consistent he should also disavow the intentional stance. I need to look at his arguments more carefully, but the above states my present take...

I need to look at this book to be able to comment on Dennett's analysis of the statement "I could have made that putt": http://www.scribd.com/doc/94311155/Austin-John-L-Ifs-and-Cans-1956

While responding to the charge that memetics is useless because ideas are Lamarkian while genetics are Darwinian, DD makes a particularly pompous and defensive --- and shallow -- response (he makes it 25 minutes into part 2 of the audio version).  To show how off target the critics are, he points out that with ideas there is no distinction between the germ line and the somatic line; nor is there a distinction between genotype and phenotype.  That's supposed to show that memetics is quite unlamarkian.  But this reply seems embarrassingly counter-productive.  For Larmarkians, who were taken seriously prior to Mendel's discoveries, were in no need of such distinctions.  Theirs was a holistic account.  And in that way, it actually seems all the more appropo to look at memetics under a Lamarkian lens.  And it is all the more inappropriate to compare the transmission of ideas to neo-Darwinian genetics.

Dennett illustrates his compatibilist position by criticizing one of John Austin's analyses of ordinary language.   That analysis is of situation in which Austin attempts to putt, misses and exlaims (I suppose with a certain exasperation), "I could have made that putt!" These words indicate, Austin proposes, that the utterer thought that prior to attempting the putt there was a real possibility of succeeding.   From this common sense perspective, therefore, determinism is false. True to his compatibilist spirit, Dennett both disagrees and agrees with Austin.  First his disagreement: if Austin had sufficiently precise knowledge of all of the relevant measurable circumstances as they were just a moment before the putt was attempted, then he would see that these circumstances thus described excluded a successful putt. The failure was predetermined.  But Dennett goes on to find a way of looking at Austin's missed putt that allows him to say, without guile, that Austin ...

http://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/chalmers-dennett-and-the-hard-problem-of-consciousness/

"Insofar as he makes use of his healthy senses, man himself is the best and most exact scientific instrument possible. The greatest misfortune of modern physics is that its experiments have been set apart from man, as it were, physics refuses to recognize nature in anything not shown by artificial instruments, and even uses this as a measure of its accomplishments.”  ―  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe , quoted by John W. Keek in Disorientation and also quoted online at http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/tag/phenomenology

A new word invented by Peter Kreeft on page 46 of Disorientation.