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— Chad Engelland's introduction to phenomenology

Try this activity. Stand in the middle of a busy square and stare intently upward at something, a circling bird perhaps. Your gaze will be contagious, as others will spontaneously clue into your attention, which is made available thanks to your bodily behavior: “What is it? What do you see?” People will not have to infer that you are looking up earnestly; they’ll see that. Precisely because experience takes place in the world thanks to our flesh, our experience is not private but is available to those about us.

This appeal to mind-reading, however, does not quite fit the phenomenological facts. A careful attention to experience reveals that meaning does not lurk hidden behind the body but is instead made manifest in and through the movement of the body. That is, infants learn to speak not thanks to skills of inference but thanks to the natural manifestation of flesh. The meaning is not hidden behind the body; the meaning is embodied in movement toward or away from items of interest. Infants learn speech thanks to “body-reading,” not mind-reading.

Psychologists point to something called “mind-reading” to explain the prelinguistic bridge from self to other. Infants read the minds of those about them and thereby come to understand the meaning of overheard words: ball, cat, mom, and so on. Psychologists don’t intend any magical faculty, a kind of sixth sense that gives us a conduit to the hidden thoughts of others. Instead, they mean that outward behavior occasions inferences to hidden mental states. The language user might point to an item while saying “ball” and the infant can thus infer that the bodily bearing indicates the item from the world the word means.

الجَسَد: جِسمُ الإنسانِ ولا يُقالُ لغيرِ الإنسانِ مِن الأجسامِ المغتَذِية كالحَيواناتِ والنّباتات. وقد يُقال للملائكةِ والجنّ جَسَد؛ وكلُّ خَلقٍ لا يأكل ولا يشربُ مِن نحو الملائكة والجنّ ممّا يَعقل، فهو جسد. والروحُ إذا حَلّت في بَدَنِ إنسانٍ فقد تجسّدَت، ولا يقال لها: تجسّمت. الجِسم: جِسمُ الشيءِ حَجمُه، والجِسم هو كلُّ ما لَه طولٌ وعَرضٌ وعُمق. والجِسم في اصطلاحِ الحُكَماء هو الجوهرُ القابلُ للأبعادِ الثلاثة.

As a gift to its language, the German tongue has two words for the body, Leib and Körper. One names a living, experiencing, and expressive body, and the other an inert physical thing. It is a shortcoming of the English language that we don’t have the same distinction, and we accordingly must call both living and nonliving bodies “bodies.” What comes closest to Leib, the living body, is the English word flesh, a word that is deeply evocative, suggesting something visceral or carnal. — Chad Engelland

أَنتِ النَعيمُ لِقَلبي وَالعَذابُ لَهُ فَما أَمَرُّكِ فِي قَلبي وَأَحلاكِ عِندِي رَسائِلُ شَوقٍ لَستُ أَذكُرُها لَولا الرَقيبُ لَقَد بَلَّغتُها فاكِ

اويلي هاي جانت بالأدب مال الخامس لو الرابع... بوكتها جنت داستوعب ليش اسمه "الشريف الرضي" وليش ديوزع "رسائل شوق"

يا ظَبيَةَ البانِ تَرعىٰ فِي خَمائِلِهِ لِيَهنَكِ اليَومَ أَنَّ القَلبَ مَرعاكِ كَأَنَّ طَرفَكِ يَومَ الجِزعِ يُخبِرُنا بِما طَوىٰ عَنكِ مِن أَسماءِ قَتلاكِ أَنتِ النَعيمُ لِقَلبي وَالعَذابُ لَهُ فَما أَمَرُّكِ فِي قَلبي وَأَحلاكِ عِندِي رَسائِلُ شَوقٍ لَستُ أَذكُرُها لَولا الرَقيبُ لَقَد بَلَّغتُها فاكِ هامَت بِكِ العَينُ لَم تَتبَع سِواكِ هَوًىٰ مَن عَلَّمَ البَينَ أَنَّ القَلبَ يَهواكِ

People do not resort to alternative medicine because they are stupid or irrational, but because they are desperate and hopeless. No amount of logic & education can convince a drowning man to stop paddling & flailing his limbs vainly even though he knows he can't swim.

Alternative medicine thrives where modern medicine fails (to meet the patient's expectations). It lives off like a parasite, feasting on the stubborn, false hope of desperate patients.

My main problem with Hume & Kant's idealism (the idea that we are in a profound estrangement from reality) and their modern editions that are based on neuroscience and psychology, is how these philosophies reach the conclusion that "we can never perceive reality." How do you know real objects even exist if you can't perceive them at all? If this was the case then we wouldn't even have had the concept nor the argument of (reality vs. appearance). These systems of thoughts have a major flaw: in order to divide the world into the world of phenomena (which is perceptible by humans), and the real world (which is inaccessible to humans), one has to assume an extra-human perspective; one has to take off his human eyes and replace them with God-like eyes. These philosophies sound as if they were written from the perspective of an alien, or a god. Because, in the end, what lies beyond the perception of humans, would not concern humans. They wouldn't even know that such things exist.

The words above were based on the 'Phenomenology' book from 'MIT Essential Knowledge Series'

When the brain and nervous system are in operation, they give us a world of things. Only when we ignore our own operative point of view can it seem—to whom? one wonders—that the brain and nervous system are opaque obstacles to the world of things. In identifying ourselves with our brains, we make Hume’s mistake; we privatize appearances and migrate them indoors, into the folds of our gray matter. In doing so, we implicitly isolate ourselves from each other and from a joint world of truth. By contrast, phenomenologists recover the publicness of appearances; in doing so, they likewise demonstrate that experience takes place not in our skulls but instead out there with others among things. The experiential body opens a field of presence and absence in which language can arise and give voice to truth.

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Where are you in experience? You are not still another domino in the series: light, object, configured energy, rods and cones, nerve stimuli, brain, you. You are rather the enfleshed observer who sees the object [you are the result of the combination of all these factors; the knot that's made up of many threads] The physiology functions as a background condition for your experience, but not in such a way that you are derivable from or identical to that background. We crave a picture injecting ourselves into the process; we want to see ourselves layered on top of the biology, as yet another cog in the machine. But in fact the problem with the picture is that it leaves out precisely what we want pictured, the presence of a point of view. The simple truth is that the only way to conceive of a point of view is to occupy one.

How should we think of the brain and nervous system in light of the fact that ambient energy conveys appearances to us? Sokolowski suggests that the brain and nervous system can be thought of as similar to an ordinary glass lens that you can either look through or look at: it can be the transparent means for us to allow the world to be present to us; it can also be something that we make into an object in its own right, noting its physical properties. You need your brain to receive the energy of an object's appearance, but the appearance is not the brain and neither are you. And you are able to see the object thanks to the light, thanks to your brain, but not in such a way that the light or your brain stands in between you and the object. The object appears thanks to this transparently functioning means of transmitting the appearance, in the way you might see the object through a pair of glasses.

The phenomenologist Robert Sokolowski argues that sense perception is not a matter of brute impacts on our sensory receptors. Rather, the energy that our senses tap into is ambient energy: the light scattered by a perceptible thing is not some random chaotic energy. Rather, it is configured by the very shape and texture of the thing that reflected it. Configured energy bears the appearance of a thing, the way it looks.

In reality, appearances bond us to what appears rather than stand between us and what appears; they belong to the very being of the thing that appears. This explains why, most of the time, we all share the same perceptions: we all see the same objects and perceive them in almost the same way. It never happens that you see a truck, and the guy next to you says it's a chair (unless one of you is high).