Episode 18: Does 'Consciousness' Exist? - Part Two

Weird Studies

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel

Society & Culture, Arts, Philosophy

4.8 • 688 Ratings

🗓️ 13 June 2018

⏱️ 61 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

JF and Phil finally get down to brass tacks with William James's essay "Does Consciousness Exist?" At the heart of this essay is the concept of what James calls "pure experience," the basic stuff of everything, only it isn't a stuff, but an irreducible multiplicity of everything that exists -- thoughts as well as things. We're used to thinking that thoughts and things belong to fundamentally different orders of being, but what if thoughts are things, too? For one thing, psychical phenomena (a great interest of James's) suddenly become a good deal more plausible. And the imaginal realm, where art and magic make their home, becomes a sovereign domain. REFERENCES William James, "Does 'Consciousness' Exist?" Steven Shaviro, The Universe of Things Jean-Paul Sartre, The Transcendence of the Ego William James, Essays in Psychical Research Weird Studies D&D episode Proust, À la Recherche du Temps Perdu The Venera 13 probe's photos of the surface of Venus Wallace Stevens, "A Postcard from the Volcano" Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Specter Vision Radio
0:03.3	Welcome to Weird Studies,
0:03.9	a lot.
0:15.4	Welcome to Weird Studies, an art and philosophy podcast with hosts Phil Ford and J.F. Martell.
0:21.9	For more episodes, and to support the podcast, go to weirdstudies.com. on William James's does consciousness exist?
0:52.4	Are you just, are you just trying to dodge this one?
0:56.7	You're just trying to get us.
0:57.5	I kind of am.
0:58.6	I'm kind of trying to avoid talking about this because I find it so baffling.
1:02.1	Okay, so maybe I should just take the bull by the motherfucking horns here.
1:09.4	Okay, one of my favorite lines in this is right at the beginning.
1:12.8	He says, to deny plumply, and I love that, to deny plumply, that consciousness exists
1:18.4	seems so absurd on the face of it for undeniably thoughts do exist, that I fear some readers
1:24.8	will follow me no farther. Let me then immediately explain that I mean
1:28.6	only to deny that the word stands for an entity, but to insist most emphatically that it does
1:34.1	stand for a function. There is, I mean, no Aboriginal stuff or quality of being, contrasted with
1:40.9	that of which material objects are made, out of which our thoughts of them are made.
1:45.4	But there is a function in experience which thoughts perform, and for the performance of which
1:50.4	this quality of being is invoked. Well, this is getting a little hard to read. That's the
1:54.8	sentence I read many times over. He says, that function is knowing. So he's saying basically,
2:00.1	there is actually only one thing.
2:02.4	We're very used to dividing the universe into two things, the subject side and the object side.
	...

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