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Phenomenology

Assigned Reading

Readings for this week are tentative.

• Hubert Dreyfus, Being-in-the-World, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992 [29]
  • "Introduction, Why study Being and Time", 1-9
  • (Optional) "Chapter 1, Heidegger's Substantive Introduction", 10-29
  • The structure of the world, from Chapter 3: Worldiness, 91-107

Additional Resources and Readings

• Hubert Dreyfus, Being-in-the-World, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992 (the whole thing)
• Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology
• Martin Heidegger, On the Way to Language
• other Heidegger references
• Luciano Floridi (ed.), Philosophy of Computing and Information: 5 Questions, Automatic Press, 2008
  • Hubert Dreyfus, 79-88
• Hubert Dreyfus lectures at Berkeley on iTunes
  • Lecture 1 is a good place to start.
• For an alternative and influential view that emphasizes Husserl's anticipation of Heidegger:
  • Dagfinn Føllesdal, Husserl and Heidegger on the role of actions in the constitution of the world. In E. Saarinen, R. Hilpinen, I. Niiniluoto and M. Provence Hintikka, eds., Essays in Honour of Jaakko Hintikka, Dordrecht, Holland: Reidel, 1979, 365-378.
  • Take a course from Prof. Føllesdal.

Comments

Jeff Wear

Heidegger's Phenomenology – Vala Dormiani

Firstly, on a side note, I would like to point out that Heidegger's idea that “one cannot have a theory of what makes theory possible”, a potentially revolutionary postulation, is analoguos to Godel's incompleteness theorem in mathematical philosophy. Heidegger essentially argues that there cannot be a theory of everything and thus pokes a whole in the “theory tradition” that started with Plato. Godel's theory states than “any effectively generated theory capable of expressing elementary arithmetic cannot be both consistent and complete”. Godel is essentially saying that there is no axiom or formal system that can define “everything” in mathematics. I find it fascinating that Heidegger pokes a whole in the theory tradition, while Godel uses a theory to make a similar point within a specific field.

Heidegger's hermeneutics is unlike regular academic tradition and is obviously different from the hermeneutic ideas that preceded his postulations. As the reading suggests, his hermeneutics is a gray area and lives in the shadows, depending on context rather making definitive statements. His advocation for interpretive methods that take into account meaning and context are at odds with regular academic tradition. That is potentially why his study of all human activities is so revolutionary. It is almost a paradigm shift. This new paradigm is epitomized by how Heidegger redefines Descarte's famous explanation for how ideas in the mind can be true in the external world. “I think, therefore I am” becomes “I am therefore I think”.

It seams that Heidegger leaves people and ideas in his wake with his new paradigm. From western thinkers like Socrates and Descarte to old philosophers like Plato and Aristotle, none seem to meet his standards. Even his own mentor doesn't seam to make the grade. Heidegger directly contradicts his teacher Husserl by arguing that on the subject of intentionality, human behavior is often mindless rather than the Husserl argument that claims “mindfulness” for lack of a better word. I detect a slight bit of arrogance in Heidegger's work because he is often at complete odds with his predecessors and his primary goal seams to be the dispelling of traditional assumptions. This is epitomized by the dispelling of the 5 traditional assumptions (1 explicitness, 2 mental representation, 3 theoretical holism, 4 detachment and objectivity, 5 methodological individualism). I too am being arrogant by questioning Heidegger's motivation and methods. I do believe that his points are revolutionary but not indisputable. His dispelling of mental representation as the sign of intelligence (Hussrl's mindfulness falls into this category) has potentially huge ramification in computers by arguing that cognitivism is flawed and the information-processing model that is adopted in AI is incorrect. I have reservations about this point and believe that the information-processing model cannot be thrown out yet. I do agree with his dispelling of explicitness as nothing is context free and his view that detachment and objectivity is a flawed academic practice. Finally, in regards to methodological individualism, I struggle to understand how a cultural context can be determined without determining that context by using the activity of individual subjects. A prime example of this is the ethnography. An ethnography attempts to define a culture but does so by observing individuals within that culture.

After the Dreyfus reading, my inclination is that Dreyfus gives Heidegger too much praise. At the end of the introduction Dreyfus asks the readers to determine for themselves weather most of the praise is justifiable. Heidegger deserves credit for presenting the other side of the coin but his arguments are not indisputable. The Husserl “mindful” argument and cognitivism are still valid. However, Heidegger presents a more “common-sense” approach and a potentially new paradigm which is admirable.

Nathan Marrocco

I think we can still have a theory of everything. We might still be able to make claims like "the universe is a cellular automata" and that would be a "theory of everything."

I don't get Heidegger. I bet we can explain all of Heidegger's ideas using the rationalistic traditions linguistic distinctions. Lets look at the world from an "objected oriented programming" perspective, and assume that everything is an object. Humans, cars, the stuff in our heads, the stuff outside our heads--all objects(abstractions). Now lets look at Heidegger's ideas. Start with "Involvement."

• I would argue that "involvement" is how objects interact with each other, the verb objects, or maybe interfaces between objects.
• Heidegger rejects that every human action stems from a desire to reach some goal, giving examples of basketball players preforming complex actions without thought. I would say that the thought is simply subconscious--a smaller object inside the human object preforming the complex physics calculations, which is, for design reasons, private, modular.
• "You cant separate subject and object." Maybe he just means you can move up and down a hierarchy of abstractions. At one level you have subject and object (human and car) and at a higher level they are part of the same object (highway). His other point here is that there is a lot more coupling between objects than we might think, even objects that seem unrelated.

I dont see how phenomenology is anti-reductionistic...

--Nate

Forest Peterson

It is understandable that since Heidegger does not believe the world can be formally represented that his literature on the topic is also equally informally represented. I get the “gist” of the five assumptions rejected, this seems to be the point, but am left wanting for a clearer representation. If the representation is not possible at some point, then as an engineer the next question becomes at what point is representation passing from possible to impossible.

The text by Dreyfus provides insight into the context of Heidegger’s “Being and Time,” though the representation of this is left implicit. While there cannot be a formal representation then there still must be a method to represent this. Is "being" and "time" representable at the individual level through random chance or are there other independent variables that are intangible. This implies that with insight, the intangible can be made tangible and the model made complete, though this is exactly what Heidegger rejects.

As a reader I appreciate Dreyfus for making explicit the five assumption that Heidegger rejects. The assumptions seem to fall into two or more categories but are not addressed specifically in these brackets. First, the "detachment and objectivity" condition is from the Greek philosophers attempts to find truth in elimination of presumptions. Through removal of the self from the discussion, personal prejudices and bias are removed from influencing logic. This condition appears different from the first three assumptions that are concerned with representation. The last assumption, "methodological individualism", is the process of decomposing a problem to the most basic components. As an analogy, Heidegger would view the problem holistically at the molecular structure and make no attempt to inspect the atomic and subatomic levels, assuming this to be an impossible task. The traditional assumption is to start at the subatomic level and work upwards, assuming inheritance properties.

“Being and Time” provides the argument that the problem should be approached with a holistic qualitative approach. How this manifests in practice with a discrete engineering problem is unclear.

Robert Graebert

Reading Dreyfus’s commentary I find two concepts the most compelling: Skillful coping and the Dasein in the world. The “being-in-the-world” really makes everything dependent on their context. Nothing has a purpose in itself taken outside its context and it is inseparable from it. For me it is so-far the best explanation why symbol systems are having problems reaching the breakthrough in terms of cognition.

Following Heidegger, you cannot continuously break-down structures and connections to get a full understanding of the world or the mind. And even when you do break it down to the smallest symbol or atom and put it all together, it will still be disconnected from the real world and will not capture the essence of the Dasein. And if it is not possible to represent and formalize the structure fully it can hardly be expressed in a computing model.

The skillful coping is interesting as it explains a lot of everyday observations about how even very complex activities can be handled with no conscience interference. The idea that these activities happen with no goal perspective is intriguing. I am however not yet fully convinced that we might not explore a level below the skilful coping. Stating that something is inseparable and has to be taken as whole is infuriating coming from an engineering background. Maybe there are underlying goals and drivers that can be explored.

Finally, having read the texts on language I find it striking what Gadamer is saying about every translation loosing context and in turn meaning when compared with the original. German is my first language and seeing the terms used by Heidegger and Gadamer in the translation is revealing. Although the terms are very specialized I get a better understanding of their meaning just looking at them in German when compared to the “pseudo-words” used in English. I do however prefer to reason about it in English. Go figure…

The Biological Basis for Action - Jeff Wear

Let us assume, as Heidegger would have us believe, that it is impossible to attain a completely objective perspective of either ourselves or the world in which we interact with each other and with objects. This does not preclude the pursuit of scientific knowledge regarding the content of our thoughts or the workings of our minds - in fact, of "trying to gain greater understanding of our own assumptions" (Winograd & Flores, 32), Heidegger says on pg. 194 of Being and Time that "if we see this circle as a vicious one and look out for ways of avoiding it, even if we just sense it as an inevitable imperfection, then the art of understanding has been misunderstood from the ground up." Why then, does Heidegger limit himself to a purely philosophical search for understanding, and completely disregard the insights of neuroscience? (Note: in the following discussion, I will use "Heidegger" and "Dreyfus" interchangeably; the latter attempts to explain the former, and whatever sins of omission the former has made are equally those of the latter if he has not added clarification).

Anyone with the slightest curiosity as to how the brain operates, versus merely what it is doing, must take serious issue with the following statement Dreyfus makes on pg. 93:

"Phenomenological examination" can only speak to our subjective, conscious experience. While it is certainly the case that much of our activity does not require the conscious manipulation of representations of components of that activity, we may not conclude, by any means, that subconscious systems do not make use of such representations. This possibility is in fact implicit in Dreyfus' own "negation" of the representational view:

How does the brain retrieve those responses in order to enact them, if not by making use of stored representations of those actions? The neuroscientific evidence for such representations - memories - stored as distributed patterns of neuronal activation, is nearly incontrovertible. Perhaps Heidegger does not mean to speak on the subject of whether the cerebellum learns and regulates motor activity through the use of representations, but whether processes undertaken by the "deliberate, analytic mind" (Dreyfus 93) are representational in nature, for instance the process Dreyfus terms "constant coping". To illustrate this process, Dreyfus uses the example of entering a room. He explains that:

I will not attempt to challenge Dreyfus' assertion that his "readiness" is not a "set of beliefs or rules" - even if subconscious cognitive systems do make use of such algorithms, they would not concern his focus with conscious apprehension. I instead here submit that his description of readiness is very closely approximated by neuroscientific ideas of representation. His use of the term "activated", for instance, is the exact term used to describe how the perceptual network of neurons corresponding to the incoming features of the room (visual, auditory, olfactory, etc.) light up; how this statistical pattern corresponding to the room induces other neurons, in patterns corresponding to impressions of chairs, to fire; and so on. The representation of the room is ad-hoc and fluid as changing inputs modulate the firing of the neurons, but is none the less in correspondence with the room, and it is precisely this representation, statistically similar to situations represented in the mind before, that activates in the mind and allows conscious Dreyfus to practice, the "skill" for dealing with chairs that he describes.

Perhaps these statistical patterns bear little resemblance to the discrete object representations that Dreyfus dismisses - perhaps he is more concerned with the idea that the conscious mind retrieves and atomically manipulates some conceptual representations than that the mind enacts sense and motor traces laid down in prior situations. But what I am concerned with here is that, although the discussion of "familiarity", "readiness", etc. implicitly rely on mental representations - the mind must store and recall its experience somehow - neither Heidegger nor Dreyfus explicitly acknowledge the necessity and use of such representations. We are not purely abstract consciousnesses.

Heidegger was a Taoist? - Mark Schar

Nate after class comment:

I feel like our authors are not rejecting the philosophy of the rationalistic tradition. They are pointing out its limitations: * we cant make it do what we thought it could. * its not whats actually happening in our brains. And in that respect its not useful for answering all questions. Instead he points out that a lot of the problems we are facing are interface problems. How do people transmit information between each other (human to human interface)? How are representations of objects connected to those objects they represent? (object to object interface) How does a blind man use a walking stick? Is he feeling the ground or is he feeling the stick?--that is an interface problem, regarding the interface between the blind man and the stick (human to machine interface).

Mark Schar after class

I've been thinking about Heidegger and the concept of "gestalt." I wonder if Heidegger would have embraced the concept? Both German, same time period. Maybe a good question for Hubert Dreyfus. Gestalt psychology embraces the holistic and rejects compartmentalizing or "structuralism." This seems like a Heidegger-friendly concept and a great like to design. Design is gestalt, in many ways.

Forest after class comment:

Professor Winograd’s question on the class comment begged the question of why would random chance be a component of Heidegger’s concepts. When writing the class comment not much though went into specifically why random chance, it was a though as a possible representation of the unknown unknowns. Several years ago I read some work by Einstein where if I recall correctly he stated “God does not roll the dice.”

I believe God does roll the dice, and often. Now it is not prudent for me to believe that my opinion is more relevant than Einstein, so it is only an intuition. The comment for randomness to represent the unknown unknowns, and impossible to know unknowns, possibly was derived from this prior reading. Obviously with the recent economic collapse, Einstein may have an edge.

Danijel after class reflection:

To me a most valuable experience was the process of cooperative cognition in the class, which proved (to me) that there realy is no »objective« reality and »subjective« observer somewhere outside, but an interaction of organized living structures unfolding the reality. It was a »dasein« experience.

But then, when I started to think about the class and represented my thoughts in words, the dasein experince dissapeared and my mind created objects with attributs and relations instead. So I assume this is how objects arise. In his thoughts Heidegger must have reached the origin that reflected objects into his mind to actually recognise the dasein principle.

Matt Garr after class reflection:

Thinking about hermeneutics and phenomenology over the past week, I have found that it provides a valuable context from which to understand debate, and to structure much of what we feel we know about social interaction. So many common sayings are based in concepts from hermeneutics. In military affairs, we feel that knowing one's enemy is important to predict his or her actions, as is protecting our own information from others who might better understand us and our intentions, if they can learn to think like us. Standing in someone else's shoes, and viewing the world through someone else's eyes are two metaphors we use to understand hermeneutics, without ever knowing about hermeneutics.

I especially liked the discussion of a lecture, and how information is not moved from one brain to another, rather it has to be incorporated into an existing soup of models, knowledge, and prejudices. This hermeneutic model of understanding is good to have simply to function better as a social being.