And - what do you mean? Reduced from what? The notion that there is something else - something more - accounting for our mental capacities - that human consciousness is a fundamental component of reality as opposed to a manifestation of natural processes, jerks humans out of all of nature, makes us something special that evidence and logic do not support. We are not "above and beyond" nature, but a part of it, just like everything else that exists. An anthropocentric understanding of consciousness to me is at best arrogant, and at worst narcissistic. — Questioner

When I criticise reductionism, I’m not denying biological continuity or evolution, neuroscientific correlation, or the legitimacy of physical explanations. I’m criticising a closure claim: the claim that first-person experience, meaning, and normativity are nothing over and above what can be captured in third-person physical description, such that once the latter is given, the former are thereby accounted for in principle. And that is the position you are maintaining.

This is why I returned to the passage from Leo Tolstoy that you quoted. When Tolstoy writes that “art is a human activity, consisting in this, that one man consciously, by means of certain external signs, hands on to others feelings he has lived through, and that other people are infected by these feelings, and also experience them,” the “feelings” he refers to are precisely what contemporary philosophy of mind discusses under the heading of qualia—the qualitative character of lived experience. (Incidentally I’m not claiming Tolstoy was doing philosophy of mind as such; I’m pointing out that what he calls “feelings” are what contemporary debates categorise as 'qualia'.)

Reductionism, in the relevant sense, claims that these qualities of experience are nothing but neurophysiological processes occurring in the brain and body, and that those processes fully account for the qualitative dimension of experience, such that nothing over and above the physical description is doing any explanatory work. Once the neural story is told, the experiential story is, in principle, complete. (This is, for instance, the philosophy of the late Daniel Dennett.)

What I am questioning is not whether neural processes are involved—clearly they are—but whether this “nothing-but” account is meaningful. The issue is whether a third-person account of causal mechanisms can exhaustively account for the first-person character of experience itself, rather than merely correlate with it. And I don't believe that, so far, you've recognised this distinction.

On Bitbol’s view (and others in the phenomenological tradition), it cannot be so reduced - not because consciousness is “outside nature,” but because the very intelligibility of physical description presupposes experiential and normative structures that are not themselves found in the empirical domain.

Let me go back to Edmund Husserl, who instigated modern phenomenology:

In contrast to the outlook of naturalism, Husserl believed all knowledge, all science, all rationality depended on conscious acts, acts which cannot be properly understood from within the natural outlook at all. Consciousness should not be viewed naturalistically as part of the world at all, since consciousness is precisely the reason why there was a world there for us in the first place. For Husserl it is not that consciousness creates the world in any ontological sense—this would be a subjective idealism, itself a consequence of a certain naturalising tendency whereby consciousness is cause and the world its effect—but rather that the world is opened up, made meaningful, or disclosed through consciousness. The world is inconceivable apart from consciousness. Treating consciousness as part of the world, reifying consciousness, is precisely to ignore consciousness’s foundational, disclosive role.

Now, I fully understand that if you're encountering this idea for the first time, then it might not be intuitively obvious. What you're arguing for is very much the accepted wisdom - science as the arbiter of reality and naturalism as the presumed epistemic framework. I think I understand it, but I dissent from it.

Apropos of 'capacities of sign, symbol and meaning'. One of the long-time posters here, Apokrisis, has introduced myself and many others to the emerging discipline of biosemiotics. This is, briefly, the application of semiotics to biological processes, from the cellular level upwards. One of the founders of this discipline, Howard Pattee, has this to say about the relationship of signs and matter:

The concept of Biosemiotics requires making a distinction between two categories, the material or physical world and the symbolic or semantic world. The problem is that there is no obvious way to connect the two categories. This is a classical philosophical problem on which there is no consensus even today. Biosemiotics recognizes that the philosophical matter-mind problem extends downward to the pattern recognition and control processes of the simplest living organisms where it can more easily be addressed as a scientific problem. In fact, how material structures serve as signals, instructions, and controls is inseparable from the problem of the origin and evolution of life. Biosemiotics was established as a necessary complement to the physical-chemical reductionist approach to life that cannot make this crucial categorical distinction necessary for describing semantic information. Matter as described by physics and chemistry has no intrinsic function or semantics. By contrast, biosemiotics recognizes that life begins with function and semantics.

Biosemiotics recognizes this matter-symbol problem at all levels of life from natural languages down to the DNA. Cartesian dualism was one classical attempt to address this problem, but while this ontological dualism makes a clear distinction between mind and matter, it consigns the relation between them to metaphysical obscurity. Largely because of our knowledge of the physical details of genetic control, symbol manipulation, and brain function these two categories today appear only as an epistemological necessity, but a necessity that still needs a coherent explanation. Even in the most detailed physical description of matter there is no hint of any function or meaning.

The problem also poses an apparent paradox: All signs, symbols, and codes, all languages including formal mathematics are embodied as material physical structures and therefore must obey all the inexorable laws of physics. At the same time, the symbol vehicles like the bases in DNA, voltages representing bits in a computer, the text on this page, and the neuron firings in the brain do not appear to be limited by, or clearly related to, the very laws they must obey. Even the mathematical symbols that express these inexorable physical laws seem to be entirely free of these same laws. — Physics and Metaphysics of Biosemiology, Howard Pattee

This is a far cry, however, from describing the brain as 'matter in motion'.

A painting is merely matter, but a brain is "matter in motion" - involved in complex chemical processes, with capacities for sign, symbol, and meaning. — Questioner

The rules of 'matter in motion' are those of physics. To reduce a phenomenon to physics or chemistry, it is necessary to show that this phenomenon in question can be explained solely in terms of physics and chemistry. How can 'the capacities for sign, symbol and meaning' be reduced to, or explained in terms of, physics and chemistry? Where would you look in physics or chemistry for those explanations?

Besides the 'receiver of art' is not 'a brain'. The subject is not 'a brain'. This is an example of the mereological fallacy - the logical error of attributing properties or actions to a part of something (like the brain) that can only properly belong to the whole (the being).

Apropos of 'capacities of sign, symbol and meaning'. One of the long-time posters here, Apokrisis, has introduced myself and many others to the emerging discipline of biosemiotics. This is, briefly, the application of semiotics to biological processes, from the cellular level upwards. One of the founders of this discipline, Howard Pattee, has this to say about the relationship of signs and matter:

The concept of Biosemiotics requires making a distinction between two categories, the material or physical world and the symbolic or semantic world. The problem is that there is no obvious way to connect the two categories. This is a classical philosophical problem on which there is no consensus even today. Biosemiotics recognizes that the philosophical matter-mind problem extends downward to the pattern recognition and control processes of the simplest living organisms where it can more easily be addressed as a scientific problem. In fact, how material structures serve as signals, instructions, and controls is inseparable from the problem of the origin and evolution of life. Biosemiotics was established as a necessary complement to the physical-chemical reductionist approach to life that cannot make this crucial categorical distinction necessary for describing semantic information. Matter as described by physics and chemistry has no intrinsic function or semantics. By contrast, biosemiotics recognizes that life begins with function and semantics.

Biosemiotics recognizes this matter-symbol problem at all levels of life from natural languages down to the DNA. Cartesian dualism was one classical attempt to address this problem, but while this ontological dualism makes a clear distinction between mind and matter, it consigns the relation between them to metaphysical obscurity. Largely because of our knowledge of the physical details of genetic control, symbol manipulation, and brain function these two categories today appear only as an epistemological necessity, but a necessity that still needs a coherent explanation. Even in the most detailed physical description of matter there is no hint of any function or meaning.

The problem also poses an apparent paradox: All signs, symbols, and codes, all languages including formal mathematics are embodied as material physical structures and therefore must obey all the inexorable laws of physics. At the same time, the symbol vehicles like the bases in DNA, voltages representing bits in a computer, the text on this page, and the neuron firings in the brain do not appear to be limited by, or clearly related to, the very laws they must obey. Even the mathematical symbols that express these inexorable physical laws seem to be entirely free of these same laws. — Physics and Metaphysics of Biosemiology, Howard Pattee

This is a far cry, however, from describing the brain as 'matter in motion'.

And also a blistering NY Times editorial leading up to the fifth anniversary of the Day of Infamy, Jan 6th 2021 (gift link.)

Yeah probably a better word. All I’m trying to avoid is the taken-for-grantedness that seems to inhere in ‘that’s just how we do it.’

Right, I could probably go along with that, provided we maintain the appropriate sense of wonderment ;-)

I don’t think intelligibility is the sort of thing that calls for explanation in the way empirical relations do. The intelligible relations within the world can be explained, but intelligibility as such is a condition of there being anything to explain at all. So the 'something' (italicized) in (2) is a problem because it is attempting to flatten the hierarchy of explanations, to put the explanans on the same level as the explanandum.

Actually, thinking further about that, one of the reasons this seems so inscrutable, is that reason itself is not visible, so to speak. It is another instance of the 'reflexive problem of consciousness' - the mind can't see itself reason. But that's precisely why reason is 'transcendental' in the Kantian sense. Hence also subject to the implicit animus towards 'the transcendental'.

physics is designed to exclude anything that doesn't fit its methodology. Nothing wrong with that, until you start claiming that the physical world is the only real world. — Ludwig V

What the 'explanatory gap' and 'hard problem' arguments are aimed at, is precisely that claim. That everything is reducible to or explainable in terms of the physical. That is the point at issue!

As a matter of fact, I agree that the world (the sensory domain) is intelligible in some fundamental sense. In the classical tradition, the 'necessary being' was always held to be God (even in Aristotle, before the absorption of Greek philosophy into theology). With the abandonment of classical theism, much of the dialogue, on the contrary, seems implicitly shaped by the requirement to avoid anything of the kind. Now, I'm certainly not here to evangalise 'belief in God' - but I feel some sense of the 'unconditioned ground of being' is necessary. I suppose that is an acknowledgement of what Sartre called the 'god-shaped hole'. The underlying factor is the loss of formal and final causation, which is the proper domain of logical necessity. But important to understand this doesn't posit 'a being' or even 'a God'. Much more in line with Tillich's 'beyond existence'.

A significant report: CHOKEHOLD: Donald Trump's War on Free Speech & the Need for Systemic Resistance (.pdf flle).

This Free Press report examines the Trump administration’s hostile relationship with dissent and free expression in 2025. It analyzes how President Trump and his political enablers have worked to undermine and chill the most basic freedoms protected under the First Amendment. While the U.S. government has made efforts throughout this nation’s history to censor people’s expression and association2 — be it the exercise of freedom of speech, religion, press, assembly, or the right to petition the government for redress — the Trump administration’s incessant attacks on even the most tentatively oppositional speech are uniquely aggressive, pervasive and escalating. — Introduction

Something I've gone to write in this thread, but haven't, is that the very wording of 'necessary things' is a problem to begin with. In my understanding, things must always be contingent, as they are compounded and temporally bound. In the classical tradition, this is why the ideas (forms, principles, eidos) were said to possess a higher degree of reality than 'things'. Here in a secular context, the traditional understanding is deprecated, but it might be worth recalling what exactly has been deprecated.

The question then is how to recreate that roadmap of the path to attainment as one who does not believe in any particular one? Can the same states still be achieved if one only takes them as allegories rather than realities? — unimportant

What is the roadmap a roadmap to? What is the goal? In Buddhism it is nibbana (in the Pali) - the cessation of suffering and the ending of repeated birth in the cycle of saṃsāra (understood to be beginningless. ) So - what 'benefits' are to be sought outside that framework? What draws you to Buddhism if you don't believe it to be true?

consciousness is intimately interconnected to the environment -

Information in > consciousness happens > information out

This represents a part of the causal cycle involved in the formation of consciousness – part of a continual loop of lived experience –

… world > body + brain > world > body + brain > world > body + brain …. and so on….

How does this happen? Short answer: By the electrochemical functioning of neurons. — Questioner

But here, you're singling out one layer in this complex and dynamic whole, and claiming that 'everything' is derived from that layer. That is, after all, exactly what reductionism does - it reduces (or tries to reduce) consciousness, intentionality, rational inference, and so on, to the level of the so-called 'hard sciences', where absolute certainty is thought to be obtainable, where everything can be made subject to so-called 'scientific method'. I'm not going to try and give a detailed account of what I think it wrong with that, other than registering it here.

give it time — Questioner

It’s not a matter of time, or more research. Consider this passage you yourself posted in another conversation:

If only the spectators or auditors are infected by the feelings which the author has felt, it is art.

To evoke in oneself a feeling one has once experienced, and having evoked it in oneself then, by means of movements, lines, colours, sounds, or forms expressed in words, so to transmit that feeling that others may experience the same feeling—this is the activity of art.

Art is a human activity, consisting in this, that one man consciously, by means of certain external signs, hands on to others feelings he has lived through, and that other people are infected by these feelings, and also experience them. ~ Tolstoy — Questioner

A materialist explanation of a work of art would be that it comprises these materials that make up the surface on which the paint is applied, that the various pigments comprise such and such chemical bases, that react together in such and such a way as to produce the various hues and shades that are visible to the observer.

Do you think that such an account, no matter how detailed, will ever satisfy the requirements given here by Tolstoy?

Do your own research and draw your conclusions.

Note that, however, even if one believes in those evidence, they still can't be considered evidence for the traditional Buddhist model of rebirth. — boundless

See this book by a Buddhist monk of German origin, which reviews both the traditional beliefs on re-birth and also current research.

Clearly, if one believe that 'Alice' or 'Bob' can become 'Joseph' or 'Mary' or even non-human animals in a future life, it seems that such a belief would weaken the importance of the personal relation between 'Alice' and 'Bob' with God. — boundless

As I said - the background culture and beliefs of Buddhism are vastly different to Semitic (Middle Eastern) religious culture.

Let me ask you, if a subject presents to a doctor complaining of a pain, how does the doctor measure the intensity of that pain? To my knowledge, there is only one way: by asking the subject, perhaps to rate the pain ('on a scale of 1 to 5...') or perhaps by observing behavioural cues such as grimaces or bodily movements. So

Neuroscientific investigation has a whole battery of tests to measure emotion. — Questioner

Neuroscience may have many tests to measure correlates of emotion, but emotion, like pain, can only be experienced first person. So whatever test performed would have to be validated against the subjects reports.

Are you familiar with the expression 'the explanatory gap' in philosophy?

"In Joseph Levine’s formulation, the explanatory gap names a specific failure of intelligibility rather than a dramatic metaphysical puzzle. Levine’s point is that even if we possessed a complete and correct physical account of the brain—covering all neural mechanisms, causal roles, and functional organization—it would still be unclear why those physical facts give rise to particular qualitative experiences. The gap appears when we move from physical or functional descriptions to phenomenal character: nothing in the physical story seems to explain why pain feels the way it does, or why color experience has its distinctive qualitative nature. Unlike later discussions of the “hard problem,” Levine does not claim that consciousness is therefore inexplicable in principle or non-physical; rather, he argues that current forms of physical explanation leave an unresolved conceptual gap between objective accounts and subjective experience, a gap that cannot be closed simply by adding more neuroscientific detail.' Joseph Levine, “Materialism and Qualia: The Explanatory Gap” (1983), Pacific Philosophical Quarterly.

You might be interested in reading the theory for yourself. — Philosophim

It starts with:

Knowledge does not capture the truth, but is a tool to arrive at the most reasonable assessment of reality for survival and desired goals. — Philosophim

Which is the target of Nagel’s criticism. But I guess if you don’t see that, there’s no point repeating it.

Well said.

I suppose I could add that one of the themes I've been exploring was suggested by John Vervaeke, with his 'participatory ontology'. That is the idea that 'the world' (or being or existenz) is something we're immersed in and part of, in a way that the modern sense of individuality tends to occlude. We each feel like little island-subjects confronting an indifferent world, whereas in the participatory ontology, we are not just spectators any more, but also participants. Religion obviously provided a means to that by the symbolic re-enactment of creation, but many of these mythical forms are no longer reconciliable with the discoveries of the natural sciences (although physicist John Wheeler's 'participatory universe' suggests something like it.)

That is all I have time to contribute at this moment, but I'll be interested to see what develops.

It is a question of - should you 'submit' and accept all these fantastical ideas in order to reach higher levels of attainment or can they be cut out while still getting to the destination. — unimportant

If you're asking 'is Buddhism is a religion', then the answer is definitely 'yes'. But the deeper point is, the cultural background and underlying belief systems are vastly different from the Middle-Eastern religions (Judaism, Christianity and Islam), to the extent where 'religion' itself means something different to what it is generally taken to mean in a Western culture.

Also, Buddhism is not a single phenomenon, any more than Christianity is. It is a constellation of religious and cultural movements that have developed over millenia in hugely divergent ways. However there are some core principles (I hesitate to say 'beliefs') that are found in all of the schools.

The Buddha believed in reincarnation, and experiencing past lives and such. The text say he could levitate and there is much talk of 'devas' and such which are just like in a literal sense. — unimportant

The term in Buddhism is 'rebirth'. Why the difference? It is said there is no individual person, entity or soul that migrates from one life to another. The customary explanation is that the individual life is more like a process that will give rise to causes that then take form in a future life. That individual is neither the same individual but neither are they completely different.

Of course it is true that 'belief in rebirth' in any sense is culturally taboo in the West. There are two reasons for this. First, belief in reincarnation was declared anathema (forbidden) by the Second Council of Constantinople in 553 C.E. (in relation to Origen's idea that souls pre-existed in a spiritual realm before being born.)

The second reason is that it is incompatible with the scientific understanding which doesn't encompass any medium for the transmission of traits, behaviours etc between different lives. (There has been published research, however, on children who appear to recall past lives.)

So rebirth is a stumbling block for many Westerners approaching Buddhism. My advice is, put it aside. It's not necessary to 'believe in reincarnation' in order to engage with Buddhism.

Of course Buddhism was born in ancient India, where beliefs in devas and spirits and other realms of existence were part of the culture. The Secular West has dropped all this, or thinks it has, but I retain an open mind about them. I think 'secular Buddhism' a la Stephen Bachelor et al is a practicable path, but again, I'd keep an open mind about just where the division between sacred and secular is.

Speaking of divide, have a read of Facing the Great Divide, Bhikkhu Bodhi. He is a Buddhist monk of American origin and a scholar and translator of the Pali Buddhist texts. Another is Buddhism Is a Religion, David Brazier. Finally Beyond scientific materialism and religious belief, Weber, published on Bachelor's website. (A lot of reading, I know, but they're big questions!)

Any questions, don't hesitate to ask.

Actually, it occured to me after spending a few hours on Collingwood's Essay in Metaphysics yesterday, that I might fairly be accused of what he criticizes as 'pseudo-metaphysics'. The salient point is this:

There will also be something which I call pseudo-metaphysics. This will be a kind of thought in which questions are asked about what are in fact absolute presuppositions, but arising from the erroneous belief that they are relative presuppositions, and therefore, in their capacity as propositions, susceptible of truth and falsehood. Pseudo-metaphysics will ask such questions as this, where AP stands for any absolute presupposition: Is AP true? Upon what evidence is AP accepted? How can we demonstrate AP? What right have we to presuppose it if we can't? — Collingwood, Essay on Metaphysics

Now, I generally question the veracity of '[2] The universe consists entirely of physical substances - matter and energy'. So, in so doing, am I engaging in pseudo-metaphysics? I'm pretty sure that's how @Banno would see it.

Here is where I think Collingwood has helped me clarify what I am (and am not) doing. His point about metaphysics is that it is not primarily concerned with being qua being, in the traditional sense. Rather, each school of physical science operates against a background of absolute presuppositions that shape what counts as an admissible question or explanation within that science. 'Practical metaphysics', if you like, or even 'phenomenology of culture'.

Crucially, the effectiveness of such presuppositions does not depend on their being true—or even believed to be true—but simply on their being assumed. For that reason, trying to settle which scientific or metaphysical framework is “fundamentally right or wrong” by arguing for or against the truth of its presuppositions is misguided. What metaphysics can do, instead, is identify those presuppositions and examine the conundrums that arise when they are asked to do more work than they can sustain.

And that leads on to Thomas Kuhn and Michael Polanyi, who come along after Collingwood, with their 'paradigms' and 'tacit knowledge'. They're covering similar territory albeit from different perspectives.

In any case, I acknowledge that my habitual antagonism to philosophical materialism is probably a little misplaced in this context, given that I now have a better grasp of what Collingwood was up to. It's been a valuable learning experience.

You consistently explain the authority of intelligibility (i.e. why contradiction matters, why better reasoning should be preferred) in terms of motivation: survival, comfort, social pressure, or desired outcomes. That explains very well why people care about intelligibility. But my question has been about something slightly different: why incoherence counts as error rather than merely inconvenience, even when nothing practical is at stake. — Esse Quam Videri

It seems to me that @Philosophim's analysis is implicitly Darwinian in character in assuming that the ground for the faculty of reason is successful adaptation to the environment. Take for example this paragraph:

Think about a bacterium. Its a purely reactionary chemical construct. It does not think intelligibly. Its an enclosed chemical reaction reacting to the environment around it. Intelligibility is not necessary to itself or most of life in general. It is only important and useful to us because we have the capacity to use it to understand and live the way we want to most successfully. — Philosophim

There are two things to say about that. The first is that it is true that bacterium and other single-celled organisms do not think 'intelligibly'. It seems to me that language and symbolic representation are essential to whatever we call 'intelligibility' (hence mainly restricted to h.sapiens notwithstanding the rudimentary reasoning abilities shown by some other species). However, science has shown that bacteria can learn - which is something no inorganic product does. Minerals simply react, whereas any form of organic life seeks to maintain itself in distinction from the environment. (This goes to @Joshs 'enactivist' view as it is a fundamental point in phenomenology of biology.)

The second and more relevant point is the belief that rationality is something that can be understood purely in terms of successful adaptation. Which is understandable to the extent that in today's cultural landscape evolutionary biology is the default 'theory of everything' when it comes to human capabilities. But notice the implication that in this view, reason is valued because it is useful or practical, not for its own sake.

An essay that comes to mind is Thomas Nagel's Evolutionary Naturalism and the Fear of Religion (<link>). In that essay, he invokes 'the soveriegnty of reason', ostensibly one of the hallmarks of Enlightenment philosophy, where it was intended to displace the sovereignty of imperial power (i.e. the aristocracy) on the one hand, and of religious revelation on the other. Nagel notes that rationalism has a "religious flavor" because it suggests a "natural sympathy" between the human mind and the deepest truths of the universe (Galileo's 'il lume naturale'). However, he then defers to "the sovereignty of reason" to argue that reason must be its own final authority, independent of both religious belief and the "fear of religion" that he says drives the huge popularity of naturalistic accounts (hence the title of the essay!)

Nagel criticizes a book by Robert Nozick, The Nature of Rationality, which attempts an evolutionary explanation of reason, similar to what is being discussed here. He cites Nozick’s proposal that reason is a "dependent variable" shaped by evolutionary facts, where reality selects for what seems "evident" to us. Nagel finds this problematic because it suggests that what we find self-evident might only be a contingent adaptation to approximately true facts rather than a grasp of necessary truths. Nagel argues that such an explanation is "necessarily incomplete" because it cannot underwrite our use of reason. He contends that we must be justified in trusting reason "simply in itself" before we can accept any evolutionary story about its origins. '

In other words, when asked to justify a rational proposition, such as 'if all humans are mortal and Socrates is a human, then Socrates is mortal,' then we ought not to have to invoke an external reason (such as evolutionary adaptation) in defence of that justification. There are, says Nagel, 'thoughts we cannot get outside of' - we can't justify them with reference to something else. And the insights of reason are exemplars of such thoughts.

The only form that genuine reasoning can take consists in seeing the validity of the arguments, in virtue of what they say. As soon as one tries to step outside of such thoughts, one loses contact with their true content. And one cannot be outside and inside them at the same time: If one thinks in logic, one cannot simultaneously regard those thoughts as mere psychological dispositions, however caused or however biologically grounded. If one decides that some of one's psychological dispositions are, as a contingent matter of fact, reliable methods of reaching the truth (as one may with perception, for example), then in doing so one must rely on other thoughts that one actually thinks, without regarding them as mere dispositions. One cannot embed all one's reasoning in a psychological theory, including the reasonings that have led to that psychological theory. The epistemological buck must stop somewhere. By this I mean not that there must be some premises that are forever unrevisable but, rather, that in any process of reasoning or argument there must be some thoughts that one simply thinks from the inside--rather than thinking of them as biologically programmed dispositions. — Thomas Nagel

I think that is the nub of the debate between Esse and Philosophim.

Yes. Rather a beautiful piece, for a hymn. (Incidentally, Acane Sandwich was banned after a brief but frenetic membership around a year ago.)

Another gem from Collingwood (p46)

it is a special characteristic af modern European civilization that metaphysics is habitually frowned upan and the existence of absolute presuppositions denied. This habit is neurotic. It is an attempt to overcome a superstitious dread by denying that there is any cause for it. If this neurosis ever achieves its astensible object, the eradication of metaphysics from the Eurapean mind, the eradication af science and civilization will be accomplished at the same time. If a sufficient number of Europeans want to destroy science and thus accomplish the suicide of civilization, nothing I can do will stop them; but at present, in England, they have not the power to prevent me from warning those who neither share nor suspect their design.

As a defender of phenomenology and/or idealism, one point I have to continually re-state is that I don't think this means 'the world is all in the mind' (and that this is what it is often interpreted to mean.) There is a real, external, material world which is described by science. But the mind/observer is not 'out there' as a phenomenal existent among others, and can't be derived from or explained in terms of external phenomenal existents. This means that our grasp of reality, even while objective (or, better, inter-subjective), is still always that of a subject. In that sense, there is no 'mind-independent reality'. But this doesn't mean that the world is dependent on your or my mind. Just that it can never be truly or absolutely objective.

Put another way, I am not saying the world depends on minds. I’m saying that the distinction between mind-independent and mind-dependent is itself a distinction drawn from within experience, and cannot be used to step outside experience altogether.

Where this falls foul of empiricism is the belief that the world is strictly mind-independent, that it exists as it is independently of the mind. Whereas the counter to that is that reality is not something we're outside of or separate from, so this presumed division between mind and world doesn't ultimately hold. (This last is especially suggested by non-dualism, which is more characteristic of Asian than European philosophy.)

No doubt this is another example of not truly understanding you. — Banno

No, I think we're operating in different registers. What you're saying is quite true about domains of discourse. But I'm extending that to a further argument about epistemology and about the inherent contradictions of physicalism.

There is only a contradiction because you don’t accept the possibility that mental processes can be understood in terms of physical, chemical, biological, and neurological processes. — T Clark

I’m not denying that acts of reasoning are reliably correlated with physical, biological, and neurological processes. I’m denying that logical relations themselves—validity, necessity, entailment—can be reduced to physical causation. Actually it's very much the kind of point that Collingwood is pressing in his Essay on Metaphysics. And, for that matter, to attempt to reduce normative argument to physical causation would require invoking the very normativity that the argument seeks to explain! Whenever you engage in reasoned inference - because of x, then y - you are appealing only to the relations of ideas, not to anything physical as such.

The point is, it's a glaring contradiction:

[1] We live in an ordered universe that can be understood by humans.
[2] The universe consists entirely of physical substances - matter and energy.
[3] These substances behave in accordance with scientific principles, laws.
[4] Scientific laws are mathematical in nature.

If reality is wholly physical, why is it necessarily and lawfully answerable to non-physical mathematical reasoning, and why does that reasoning carry binding normative force?

From Collingwood's perspective, there is an absolute presupposition:

That reality is mathematically intelligible in a binding, law-governed way.

But physics cannot justify that presupposition. Formal logic cannot adjudicate it. Calling it a “different game” does not remove its necessity.

Yes, I found it pretty hard to watch. I've tried to take a bit of what Maudlin says, but he's not my favourite in that space. I prefer Philip Ball.

As for Kastrup, looking back on it, I hardly spent any time on him in 2025, unlike the two years prior. I got a bit tired of his schtick, in a way. Not that I don't like him.

The question that jumps out at me is: are the mathematical laws themselves physical, and, if so, how? I don’t expect an answer to that, as there isn’t one, so far as I know. But it makes a point about an inherent contradiction in physicalism.
— Wayfarer

In formal logic, there is a difference between the domain of discourse - the a's, b's and c's that make up the content being discussed - and the logical connectives - the ^'s, ∃'s and =.

In physics, the content, the a's, b's and c's, are all of them physical. The connectives, including the mathematics, are not physical.

No presumption is made that 4+4=8 is physical. — Banno

Not in formal logic. But surely the many fervent disagreements sorrounding the ontological status of numbers and scientific laws indicate that there is an issue there, beyond the strictures of formal logic. Specifically, the question of, if everything is indeed reducible to the physical, what of the nature of the mathematical reasoning that underpins physics? Why did Eugene Wigner's essay on The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences become such a celebrated essay in modern philosophy of physics?

:clap: Exemplary piece of philosophical analysis.

Those who disagree with you have not truly understood. — Banno

I haven't said that, either. I will deal with any cogent disagreements, but not those which betray a failure to grasp the point at issue. (If you would like to take this up again in the thread in which it started, please do. It is still active.)

Or perhaps what you have had to say is not so coherent as you suppose? — Banno

If I had believed that the criticisms you offered had truly understood what was being proposed, I might be inclined to so believe. But, no.

Meanwhile I've downloaded Collingwood's Essay on Metaphysics and am pleased to report that it is quite an easy read, written in an admirably clear and brief style. How's this for a pungent analogy:

In unscientific thinking our thoughts are coagulated into knots and tangles; we fish up a thought out of our minds like an anchor foul of its own cable, hanging upside-down and draped in seaweed with shellfish sticking to it, and dump the whole thing on deck quite pleased with ourselves for having got it up at all. Thinking scientifically means disentangling all this mess, and reducing a knot of thoughts in which everything sticks together anyhow to a system or series of thoughts in which thinking the thoughts is at the same time thinking the connexions between them. — R G Collingwood, An Essay on Metaphysics, Pp22-23

This, in the context of explaining what he means by the presuppositions of thinking.

That the universe is made up of only physical substances might be falsified by presenting a ghost - perhaps Wayfarer thinks this is what he is doing — Banno

It is what Banno thinks that Wayfarer thinks he is doing, which he is not doing, but which conviction no amount of patient explanation will ever suffice to overturn.

Anyway - going back to Collingwood - I've only read bits and pieces here and there, but the feeling I get is that Collingwood was a philosopher for whom I have considerably more sympathy than Glibert Ryle, who replaced him upon the former's early death. There's a rather good magazine article on this topic which I've pointed to previously.

Other than that, Collngwood's ideas are a precursor to later philosophy of science e.g. Kuhn and Polanyi, in particular, although with Collngwood's background in archeology, he took a more historical approach to the topic. He has a much broader view of philosophy than did Ryle or Ayer, who were contemporaries. He tended towards idealism but resisted being characterised as such.

That's all I have on Collingwood.

//ps// Oh, and that his critique is very similar to that of A N Whitehead's Science and the Modern World.//

In idealism East and West, there is the idea that the sense of separateness is intrinsic to the human condition. And that overcoming that sense is in some sense the goal of any real philosophy.

A human being is a part of the whole, called by us "Universe", a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest — a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. The striving to free oneself from this delusion is the one issue of true religion. Not to nourish the delusion but to try to overcome it is the way to reach the attainable measure of peace of mind. — Albert Einstein, letter of condolence

His (Kastrup's) "debate" with Maudlin left me a bit sour- — Manuel

Was that the Kurt Jaimungal episode, where Kastrup just refused to continue the interview because of what he perceived as the impertinance of Maudlin?
.

But telling him that as an issue of method, we are only going to look at physical substance, and just see how far that will take us - that would work. — Banno

Yes! That will show us that we have a clear and distinct idea of 4% of the Universe.

Rödl’s ‘science uberhaupt’ comes to mind.

And, Happy New Year

I want to note that the way the word "problem" is used in science means something yet to be discovered — Questioner

In this case, the problem is more of a categorial one. It is the missapplication of objective methods to a subject which evades objective specification.

I want to reiterate - that when science speaks of a "problem" they are referring to something that needs further research. — Questioner

Sufficient research has been done to establish that there is no place in the brain where the detailed, unified visual world we experience could be neurally encoded. The architecture of the visual system is now well mapped: high-resolution information is confined to a tiny foveal region, processing is massively distributed across specialized areas, and no stable, full-field representation exists. What remains unresolved is not a gap in empirical data but a conceptual gap between this well-understood neural machinery and the phenomenology of a coherent, stable visual world. In that sense, the issue is no longer “awaiting further research” in the usual scientific sense; it is an explanatory problem about how subjective experience arises at all.

In short, appealing to “further research” in this context amounts to what Karl Popper called the 'promissory notes' of materialism: the repeated assurance that a purely physical explanation will eventually emerge, even despite the empirical evidence.

----

Happy New Year to all, I'm probably a time zone ahead of most others here, back in 2026! :party:

Happy New Year, regardless. :party:

Whereas yours is more of a clenched fist :lol:

Numbers are ideas, and ideas are not physical. Yet without math science couldn’t even get started.