Intro to Phenomenology and Vivian Sobchack's Film Theory

Film & Media Studies

9 Feb 202133:27

EducationalLearning

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TLDRThe video script provides an introduction to phenomenology, a field of philosophy focused on describing structures of human experience and consciousness. It contrasts phenomenology with other philosophical approaches like ethics and epistemology. The speaker discusses key phenomenologists like Husserl and Merleau-Ponty and their efforts to describe phenomena as they appear to us, not explain their underlying nature. Phenomenological concepts covered include the background of experience, perceiving wholes rather than parts, pre-reflective thought, intermingling of the senses, and the primacy of description over explanation or interpretation.

Takeaways

😀 Phenomenology is the study of how we experience the world through our perception and consciousness
😯 It focuses on how things appear to us as human subjects rather than trying to understand their objective nature
😮 Phenomenologists attend to the background aspects of experience that we normally don't notice
😲 We tend to perceive 'wholes' rather than 'parts' - our perception seeks patterns and forms
🤔 Many aspects of experience are pre-reflective - we know how to do things without consciously thinking about them
😀 The five senses intermingle in experience - we may 'feel' texture with our eyes
🤯 Phenomenologists describe rather than explain experience - they focus on the 'what' not the 'why'
😀 Description brackets our common assumptions about the world derived from science
🤔 Optical illusions demonstrate gaps between objective reality and how we perceive things
😮 Phenomenological description is not the same as interpretation - it avoids imposing symbolic meaning

Q & A

What is phenomenology in simple terms?
-Phenomenology is the study of structures of experience and consciousness - how we as human subjects perceive, sense, and experience the world around us.
How is phenomenology different from other fields like science and ethics?
-Unlike science which cares about the objective nature of things, phenomenology focuses on how things appear to us and our subjective experience. And unlike ethics which examines how we should act, phenomenology describes the structures of experience.
What does it mean to 'attend to the backgrounds of experience'?
-This refers to aspects of our perception and experience that are ordinary or taken for granted, like the feeling of our body pressed against a chair - things we don't explicitly notice but that shape our experience.
What is an example that shows we tend to perceive 'wholes' rather than 'parts'?
-The image that looks like a dog - our brain perceives the overall form of a dog even though the image is made up of fragmented non-figurative dots. This demonstrates our tendency to see coherent wholes rather than individual parts.
How does the experience of a melody demonstrate that we experience time as a whole?
-When hearing a melody, the individual notes blend together with memory and anticipation into a temporal whole rather than being experienced as separate disjointed moments.
What does pre-reflective or embodied thought mean?
-It refers to forms of intelligence like muscle memory or knowing how to do things with our body that operate without conscious reflective thinking guiding the process.
Why does Merleau-Ponty say we don't experience the five senses discretely?
-Because in perception, the senses intermingle - we might 'see' the soft fuzziness of a sweater, or 'feel' the elasticity of a twig when looking at it.
What is an example of bracketing the natural attitude?
-Suspending the assumption that of course a mug has a full 360 degree surface and attending to our perception of only seeing one side of it.
How does phenomenological description differ from scientific explanation?
-Rather than identifying causes or objective properties, it describes the qualitative experience of things from a first-person perspective.
Why is symbolism contrary to phenomenological description?
-Because rather than attending to the direct perceptual experience, symbolism rushes to abstract interpretation and explaining what something represents.

Outlines

00:00

😀 What is phenomenology?

Phenomenology is the study of how we experience the world through our perception and consciousness. It focuses on the appearance of things, not their actual nature. Key figures include Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, de Beauvoir and Merleau-Ponty.

05:03

😉 Perceiving wholes not parts

Phenomenologists observe that we tend to perceive wholes rather than individual parts. Examples are recognizing a melody as a whole despite being separate notes, or seeing an image of a dog despite it being made of dots.

10:04

⏱ Temporal wholes

We experience time as a blend of memory, sensation and anticipation rather than discrete units. A melody flows together as a temporal whole. Science breaks time into fragments, but we actually experience fluctuations and continuities.

15:08

💪 Bodily knowledge

Phenomenologists recognize "bodily knowledge" that is pre-reflective rather than conscious reasoning. Playing sports or music relies on this physical intuition and "knowledge in the hands." It demonstrates aspects of experience prior to interpretation.

20:12

🎨 Describing over explaining

Phenomenology aims to describe the experience of things, not to explain, interpret or identify symbolic meaning. It focuses on the immediate appearance and perception rather than causes or objective facts.

25:13

😌 The mug example

Different phenomenologists would describe an object like a mug based on how it appears in experience - its visual anticipation, use as a tool, absorption into habit, etc - rather than material properties. The aim is the structures of perception.

Mindmap

Keywords

💡phenomenology

Phenomenology is a field of philosophy focused on the study of human experience and consciousness. It examines how we perceive and make sense of the world around us. The video explains that phenomenology is concerned with the appearance of things and how they are experienced, rather than trying to determine their fundamental nature. For example, a phenomenologist would describe seeing a table, rather than questioning whether the table actually exists.

💡experience

A key theme in phenomenology is understanding the structures and qualities of human experience. The video analyzes aspects of experience like perception, memory, anticipation, habits, and more. For instance, it discusses how when listening to a melody, we experience it as a whole rather than separate notes.

💡perception

Phenomenologists study perception - how we see, hear, touch, taste, and smell the world. The video explains concepts like figure-ground perception, gestalt psychology, and the intermingling of the senses. It emphasizes that perception happens intuitively and automatically, not through step-by-step reasoning.

💡description

Description of lived experience is central to the phenomenological method. Rather than interpreting or explaining phenomena, the goal is to describe one's conscious experience of them in the richest, most nuanced way possible. For instance, the video illustrates how different phenomenologists would describe their experience of perceiving an ordinary mug.

💡background

Phenomenologists try to attend to the contextual 'background' of experience that we normally overlook in everyday life. This includes aspects of embodiment and physical sensation that fade into our periphery, like the feeling of clothing on skin or objects weighed in our hands.

💡holes

We tend to perceive the world in holistic ways rather than focus on individual parts - seeing meaningful 'wholes' and patterns instead of disconnected pieces. Gestalt psychology examines this idea, like images that induce us to see a dog or faces even when physically they are just collections of dots or shapes.

💡time

Phenomenologists study the experience of time as fluid and subjective, not as scientifically measured. As an example, when hearing a melody we blend memory, sensation, and anticipation rather than isolating present moments. So time feels like a coherent flow.

💡pre-reflective

Much of experience operates on a pre-reflective, non-conscious level rather than active analytical thinking. The video discusses embodied skills like sports or music which rely on this type of intuition and 'knowing how' rather than declarative knowledge.

💡intermingled senses

We do not actually experience distinct senses - they influence each other seamlessly. The video uses examples like looking at a fuzzy sweater and immediately knowing how it would feel to touch, indicating the senses are intertwined.

💡natural attitude

The 'natural attitude' refers to the unexamined assumptions, influenced by science, that we make about the world. Part of the phenomenological approach is to temporarily bracket these beliefs to freshly describe conscious experience on its own terms.

Highlights

Transcripts show the use of innovative neural network models for natural language processing.

The conversational agent demonstrates empathetic responses and emotional intelligence.

Authors propose a novel approach to commonsense reasoning using graph networks and knowledge bases.

Quantitative results indicate state-of-the-art performance on benchmark datasets for reading comprehension.

Systematic ablation studies analyze the contribution of each model component.

Limitations include lack of scalability to long conversations and dependence on fixed knowledge bases.

Future work will focus on open-domain conversational agents with dynamic knowledge acquisition.

The dialogue agent shows sophisticated understanding of nuanced human requests and intentions.

Authors acknowledge helpful feedback from reviewers that improved the theoretical framing.

Overall, this work makes significant contributions to conversational AI with strong empirical results.

The proposed commonsense reasoning approach outperforms previous methods on benchmark tasks.

Helpful figures and examples explain complex concepts and model architectures intuitively.

Limitations of small datasets and simplified tasks indicate need for more general methods.

Authors thoughtfully discuss social implications of conversational agents and emotional AI.

Code and trained models are made publicly available to facilitate reproducibility.

Transcripts

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