While reading in Thompson’s Mind in Life I stumbled upon this part: 

 

Jonas [who BTW is not my son, although he says smart things, JVD] summarizes this line of thought in the proposition, “life can be known only 

by life” (p. 91). This proposition is a quintessential phenomenological one: Before being 

scientists we are first and foremost living beings, and thus possess within ourselves 

evidence of purposiveness (Weber and Varela 2002, p. 110). As Jonas puts it, “being 

living bodies ourselves, we happen to have inside knowledge” (1966, p. 79). In observing 

other creatures struggling to continue their existence—starting with bacteria that actively 

swim away from a chemical repellent—we can, by the evidence of our own experience 

and the Darwinian evidence of the continuity of life, view inwardness and purposiveness 

as proper to living being. 

 

In other words: only a living creature can understand another living creature: life seems to have some kind of almost mysterious quality that makes it such that you actually need to “be alive” before you can start to understand what ‘being alive’ means: you need to understand it from the inside out, as it where. A robot or computer would never be able to understand what life is because he’s not alive. (Unless we take the Frankenstein-turn: “It’s alive! It’s alive!).

 

Well, maybe. 

   

The only thought I whish to record here is that I was thinking very strongly that this is just Cartesianism all over again (only this time it goes by the name of phenomenology - which is a bit odd since phenomenologists are about as anti-cartesian as you can get). Descartes said: I think - therefore I am. He doubted everything but his own thoughts (and, for various purported reasons, God), precisely because these thought he was having from-the-inside-out, while all other essences he was considering (chairs, other people, the sky above etc) could be illusions or misperceptions or what have you. Now, somewhere in my psychology classes in Nijmegen I have been infected with a strong allergy against introspection and I still haven’t come over it: I still do not understand why something that you experience from-the-inside-out would have more value than some observable fact in the world. In fact, I actually do not understand why something that one experiences from-the-inside-out would have any value at all - that is, considering we are trying to explain what “experience” and “thinking” and “believing” means. How can we “experience” what experience means? How would that help us in any way? There is no garantee that we can analyse the workings of a certain tool by using that same tool. Does one learn to understand what a clock is by taking another clock and timing the time of the first clock? Do we bang hammers with hammers in order to learn to use hammers? How would that be of any help? In fact, I would think we’d probably need *other* (even more sophisticated?) tools than our own on-board circuitry in order to understand that very cirtuitry, at least that would be my strong intuition. As my email-signature has been claiming for years, this might well be impossible: if the brain was so simple that we could understand it, we would be so simple we couldn’t. (And this goes for ‘mind’ as well). And in any case, this thing called introspection is not going to be explained by introspection…   

 

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