71 Quotes About Phenomenology

Contrary to what phenomenology—which is always phenomenology of perception—has tried to make us believe, contrary to what our desire cannot fail to be tempted into believing, the thing itself always escapes.

Our particular states of mind colour and frame the whole of our experiences. We live under the illusion that we all share the exact same world because *our language has evolved to pick out precisely the few aspects of our experiences that are common and shared, while ignoring those that are completely personal and idiosyncratic.*

All phenomena are subject to instantaneous transformation.

As Alfred North Whitehead would say, there are processes and events, not things and rules. And the mind is an event within a phenomenal process - nothing less and nothing more than that.

It is precisely the most subjective ideas which, being closest to nature and to the living being, deserve to be called the truest.

Was thinking about consciousness possible? Yet could the process that took place in the ocean be regarded as thought? Is a mountain a very large rock? Is a planet a huge mountain?

Information, a distinction between phenomenal states, is 'modus operandi' of consciousness. Mass-energy, space-time are epiphenomena of consciousness. It is consciousness that assigns measurement values to entangled quantum states (qubits-to-digits of qualia computing). Particles of matter are pixels (or voxels) on the screen of our perception. Reality is fundamentally experiential. If we assume consciousness is fundamental, most phenomena become much easier to explain.

Only by intertwining these two perspectives, the biological and the phenomenological, can we gain a fuller understanding of the immanent purposiveness of the organism and the deep continuity of life and mind.

There are three basic problems: how a mind can know the world of nature, how it is possible for one mind to know another, and how it is possible to know the contents of our own minds without resort to observation or evidence. It is a mistake, I shall urge, to suppose that these questions can be collapsed into two, or taken into isolation.