While it seems obvious that the embodied self is both a subject of experience and an object in the world, it is not clear how, or even whether, both of these senses of self can refer to the
same
...self. According to Husserl, the relation between these two senses of self is beset by the “paradox of human subjectivity.” Following Husserl’s lead, scholars have attempted to resolve the paradox of subjectivity. This paper categorizes the different formulations of the paradox according to the dimension each pertains to and considers the prospects of each proposed resolution. It will be shown that, contrary to the claims of the respective authors, their attempted resolutions do not really resolve the paradox, but instead rephrase it or push it to the next dimension. This suggests that there is something deeper at work than a mere misunderstanding. This paper does not aim to resolve the paradox but instead initiates a new approach to it. Instead of seeing the paradox as a misapprehension that needs to be removed, I dig deeper to reveal its roots in ordinary consciousness. Investigating the proposed resolutions will reveal the fundamental role of the natural attitude, and I will argue that already the general thesis of the natural attitude makes the decisive cut that leads to what Sartre calls a “fissure” in pre-reflective self-awareness. The phenomenological reduction deepens the cut into what Husserl calls the “split of the self,” which in turn engenders the paradox of subjectivity. The paradox’s roots in the structure of ordinary consciousness not only constitute a reason for its persistence, but also suggest a new way to further investigate the embodied self.
This article introduces the notion of shared intentional engagement and argues that the current debate around intersubjective interaction can profit from taking that notion into account. Shared ...intentional engagement holds between people when they relate together to the same meaningful entities. For instance, when people talk about something, they share intentional engagement as long as they don't talk past each other. But what if the entity talked about involves perceptual experience-is the quality of one's experiences not something that cannot be conveyed to others through language? Against this widespread idea, this article takes up philosophical arguments for the intersubjectivity of, on the one hand, language, and, on the other hand, phenomenal experience. It contents that language and phenomenal experience both exhibit shared structures that enable shared intentional engagement. It then considers an example for how this result matches well with empirical research on "pop out" experiences. Because shared intentional engagement is fundamental for all kinds of human interaction, it necessitates interdisciplinary investigations that are frequently hindered by the assumption that the phenomenal experiences of humans are hidden to others.
In this chapter, the philosopher Christoph Durt elaborates a novel view on AI and its relation to humans. He contends that AI is neither merely a tool, nor an artificial subject, nor necessarily a ...simulation of human intelligence. These misconceptions of AI have led to grave misunderstandings of the opportunities and dangers of AI. A more comprehensive concept of AI is needed to better understand the possibilities of responsible AI. The chapter shows the roots of the misconceptions in the Turing Test. The author argues that the simplicity of the setup of the Turing Test is deceptive, and that Turing was aware that the text exchanges can develop in much more intricate ways than usually thought. The Turing Test only seemingly avoids difficult philosophical questions by passing on the burden to an evaluator, who is part of the setup, and hides in plain sight his or her decisive contribution. Durt shows that, different from all previous technology, AI processes meaningful aspects of the world as experienced and understood by humans. He delineates a more comprehensive picture according to which AI integrates into the human lifeworld through its interrelations with humans and data.
Since the time of Galileo, philosophers widely agree on a distinction that has been known since Locke as the distinction between "primary" and "secondary" qualities. In spite of claiming that ...experiences or ideas of secondary qualities must be produced by configurations and movements of particles constituted of primary qualities, philosophers such as Descartes and Locke also claim that the connection between primary qualities and ideas of secondary qualities is inconceivable. The combination of the two claims I call the "paradox of the primary-secondary quality distinction." The philosophical disputes around the distinction usually ignore the paradox, and instead circle around different types of explanations of secondary qualities in terms of primary qualities: projectivism, eliminativism, physicalism, and dispositionalism. These contradict each other ontologically, but nevertheless they share a common origin: the view that the world is mathematical in itself. Edmund Husserl claims in the Crisis that this conception entails a misunderstanding and sets out to explain the confusion in the genesis of the mathematical concept of the world; a genesis he calls the "mathematization of nature." I analyze four different steps in the mathematization: generalization, idealization, formalization, and symbolization. The combination of these steps leads to, in Husserl's estimation, a confusion of "true being" with "a method." Husserl thinks that true being is experienced in the life-world, and that it can only be substructed, but never replaced with mathematizations. Contrary to what is often thought, Husserl's concept of the life-world is not simply a belated response to Heidegger, but Husserl's ultimate expression of his lifelong study of the relation of mathematics and experience. The result of the forgetting of original experience is, according to Husserl, the "crisis of the European sciences." The recovery of the experience that is the origin of the mathematization is for Husserl thus not only a way to avoid the philosophical misunderstanding of science, but also an answer to a profound crisis of meaning. Husserl's genealogy of the mathematization allows for a neat explanation for why the paradox seems unavoidable. Ideas of secondary qualities are not directly mathematizeable, and therefore it seems that they must be produced by primary qualities. Yet, the connection between them is inconceivable because mathematizations are compared to something radically different, namely experiential qualities. Whether we agree with Husserl's own account of life-worldly experience and crisis or not: his genealogy of the development of the paradox reveals the need to reconsider the role of experience in the scientific concept of the world.
PDF
