I agree with much of what you say about emergence, normativity, and the transformative power of sentient life. But I’m not convinced that temporal priority straightforwardly entails existential (or ontological) priority.

Yes, physics precedes brains in evolutionary history. But it doesn’t follow that physics is therefore more fundamental in every relevant sense. The categories you rightly emphasize — meaning, commitment, irreversibility as loss, anticipation of death — are not contained in nor entailed by physics as such. They arise only for sentient existence. Even something like the law of the excluded middle is recognisable only to a rational being, yet it is not itself a product of physical causation. And that distinction - between logical relations and physical causation - is surely central to this whole argument.

Physics, moreover, is articulated as theory within mind; it is, in that sense, an intellectual construction. The intelligibility of a “mind-independent world” is never accessed apart from cognition but is always mediated through it. Observations may constrain modelling, but the very notion of “constraint” is framed within the structures of experience.

So perhaps physics is temporally anterior to mind — but whether it is ontologically prior is another matter. And that, I think, is precisely the philosophical question still in play.

But, again, I'm now posting in the new platform - this version is due to be archived in a couple of days, so I encourage you to consider signing up over there to continue these discussions. This will be my last post here on the topic.

There is a lot of work, both academic and popular, on Plotinus-the-mystic, and comparisons with him and Hindu and Buddhist philosophy. There's actually a plausible link, as the Hellenistic world spanned what is now Egypt and the Swat Valley in modern Pakistan, a cultural centre of Hindu and Buddhist philosophy. According to legend, he tried to set off for that region, but his pilgrimage was thwarted by the assassination of the expeditionary General. (For expansive detail,see The Shape of Ancient Thought, Thomas McEvilly (2008)).

I hadn't given a lot of thought to how human conceptualization & compartmentalization of the non-self world came to be — Gnomon

This is the central point! But it's not a scientific matter. What I'm arguing against - and it's not this 'both/and' melange that you're continually pushing - is the understanding of humans as the product of impersonal physical causation and biological evolution. This is not to deny those factors, but to draw attention to the fact that they are still human theories. They describe the Universe from a human perspective — which is then bracketed out or forgotten, as the Universe is so large, and we're so minute. But that is only true from an outside perspective, as if we can view ourselves on the same plane as all of the other objects of scientific analysis. Which we can't.

Oh, and we have cuckoos down here, too - the koel, a medium sized black bird, and the channel bill, a large striped bird that flies in pairs with its mate. They arrive every spring and then leave back to New Guinea in late summer.

I was going to say that, but I thought better of it. Samadhi is out-of-scope for Western philosophy. It’s generally filed in the cabinet alongside religion. It's also not something that Michel Bitbol requires for his philosophical analysis.

On one side, we have the howling desert of meaninglessness and loss of ethics (and indeed of any sense of importance). — Ludwig V

You said it.

The only reason I pointed to Idealism in Context, was in response to your statement:

I don't recall that the Scholastics were particularly hot on factoring in the observer to their theories. — Ludwig V

I'm trying to show that in a very real sense, they were doing exactly that.

The page on scholastic philosophy I pointed to quoted Thomas Aquinas, to wit:

The perfection belonging to one thing is found in another. This is the perfection of a knower insofar as he knows; for something is known by a knower by reason of the fact that the thing known is, in some fashion, in the possession of the knower. Hence it is said in On The Soul ('D'Anima') that the soul is “in some manner, all things,” since its nature is such that it can know all things. In this way, it is possible for the perfection of the entire universe to exist in one thing.

So — the argument in Idealism in Context is that Aquinas represents a kind of 'participatory realism' - a sense of the union of the knower with the known, which is found scattered throughout the Perennial Philosophies (and not only Christian). The pre-moderns, therefore, had a sense of relatedness to the cosmic order - they were participants in it, not simply the accidental byproducts of an undirected physical process.

Then, the argument goes, the 'Scientific Revolution' introduces the idea of an impersonal, mind-independent Universe - where the separateness of knower and known, self and other, mind and world, is axiomatic. And that is more than just a philosophical argument - it is also a mode of existing.

This is what Berkeley is instinctively reacting against, by arguing that what we imagine we know of a 'mind-independent world' really amounts to Ideas that we acquire by the senses.

Anyway - as I'm now active on the new platform, I'm probably not going to be responding further here. Thanks for your comments and hopefully speak later.

I suppose what gave you that odd "object" idea i — Gnomon

What I'm trying to say is that you're 'taking an objective view' - treating consciousness as an objective phenomenon, from the outside so to speak. The point I'm laboring, obviously not successfully, is that we know consciousness by being it. Our own consciousness is the most fundamental fact of existence. You touch on that, in your response, only to immediately dismiss it again.

modern Cosmology indicates that the physical universe has existed for eons without any sign of internal Consciousness, right up until just an evolutionary blip ago — Gnomon

You know the essay I wrote on that, Mind Created World, acknowledges this right up front - but maintains that 'consciousness is fundamental' - not as some mysterious Ingredient X in the constitution of the Universe, but as the basic prerequisite for any grasp of the meaning of existence whatever. And therefore that the Universe known to exist by us prior to our existence in it, is still known through the forms of understanding that we bring to it. Kant 101.

Anyway - I'm going to log out of this version of thephilosophyforum now that I'm active on the new platform. I've got too many spinning plates to look after. Ciao.

But I have never really understood what they are supposed to mean in the context of philosophy. For example, while it seems reasonable to say that the physical is, in some sense, the foundation of human existence, if is also reasonable to say that human beings are the foundation of what we mean by the physical. But, surely, that's not really a disagreement - it's just a rather bad pun on different meanings of "fundamental". — Ludwig V

But surely, whether and in what sense one is or isn't 'a physical being', is of the utmost import, isn't it? Setting aside religious convictions, it is a philosophical question of the first order.

I don't recall that the Scholastics were particularly hot on factoring in the observer to their theories. But perhaps I'm just wrong. — Ludwig V

But the ‘participatory ontology’ of Thomism served that role. See e.g. this reference. This was also the subject of the earlier thread, Idealism in Context

But the point of transformation from physical processing of incoming Information to extracting ideas, feelings, meanings, and qualia, remains a mystery : the Hard Problem. — Gnomon

But again, this is because of the way we've set out the question, appropriating terminology and observation and trying to meld them together into a 'theory'. But the reality of one's own existence is not theoretical on that sense, it is lived.

Incidentally 'theoria' in ancient philosophy meant something very different. It was the 'contemplation of first principles': In Book X (1177a12–18) Nichomachean Ethics, Aristotle describes the contemplative life:

“The activity of reason (nous), which is contemplative (theōrētikē), seems to be superior in seriousness and to aim at no end beyond itself, and to have its own proper pleasure.”

In keeping with Aristotelian ethics where "virtue is its own reward".

I suppose that to "experience experience" is what some call a "Mystical" Experience (direct unmediated engagement). — Gnomon

I suspect that what happens during long and arduous contemplation is precisely nothing. There is no 'mystical experience' to be had. In Zen Buddhist training, one is strictly admonished from either chasing 'spiritual experiences' or treasuring any that might happen (where they're called 'makyo', meaning literally 'the devil's cave'.)

I suspect what happens instead is that one starts to be become intimately and directly aware of one's own experience, in a way that one does not when constantly distracted, entertained and amused, as we all are.

Incidentally, regarding Terrence Deacon. I most admire Terrence Deacon, I think he's a real trail-blazer, although how big an impact he's having in mainstream academia, I'm not sure. But in any case, I don't think his 'constitutive absences' are at all compatible with a thoroughgoing physicalism (or naturalism for that matter.) The very title of his book could be parodied as 'Incomplete Naturalism.'

I'm not trying to assert the existence of something called 'pure consciousness'.

Go back to the quote from the OP:

Consciousness is not an object among objects, nor a property waiting to be discovered by neuroscience. It is not among the phenomena given to examination by sense–data or empirical observation. If we know what consciousness is, it is because we ourselves are conscious beings, not because it is something we encounter in the natural world.

What I'm saying, is that @Gnomon's analysis tends to make consciousness (or the mind or self) 'an object among objects'. Any 'theory of consciousness' will tend to do that, because theories themselves are grounded in the objective stance. But 'if we know what consciousness is', it is not because of objective analysis, but because we ourselves are conscious beings. And that knowledge, as Descartes said in his second meditation, is the indubitable reality of our own existence (cogito ergo sum). But then, Descartes also set in motion the classical 'mind-body' division, which underlies many of the arguments about 'whether consciousness can have a material basis'. In doing so, he set up the very division which Husserl sought to address in his many writings on Descartes.

Apropos of which, and not coincidentally, I've had another essay published by Philosophy Today about this very topic, called Descartes' Ghost ('friend' link).

This discussion carried on in the new platform

Not always. Of course we are always in a relationship of 'otherness' in respect of our regular social existence. But I think the contemplative aspect of philosophy is intended to foster awareness of consciousness as it is in itself. This is the meaning of the Sanskrit term 'nirvikalpa' which means 'without discriminative awareness'. It is true that this kind of insight is not discussed or recognised in much analytical philosophy. But I think the phenomenological school approaches it, with its practice of 'epochē' - which is not a term denoting a concept, but denoting a state of awareness, 'suspending judgement about what is not evident'.

In ordinary thought, we are constantly naming and so objectifying whatever we experience - 'this is X, it means Y' and so on. This happens at a subliminal level of awareness because we're enculturated to think this way. We constantly classify, divide and define - that is the work of discursive reason. So becoming aware of that process requires a metacognitive insight. In my view, that is an important task of philosophy.

We may say that there's 'the spiritual' and 'the physical', and that these somehow have to be re-united. But what I'm suggesting is more radical than that. We have to retrace our steps to where this 'mind-body' divide was made in the first place instead of trying to re-unite what perhaps ought not to have been divided in the first place. That's the subject of another essay on Michel Bitbol, Phenomenology Meets Buddhism.

As Bitbol argues in “Is Consciousness Primary?* consciousness is not an object among objects, nor a property waiting to be discovered by neuroscience. It is not among the phenomena given to examination by sense–data or empirical observation. If we know what consciousness is, it is because we ourselves are conscious beings, not because it is something we encounter in the natural world.

”Ontological primacy" is a bit of a mystery to me. — Ludwig V

What is fundamental or basic. That from which phenomena arise. Thought to be physical in the physicalist worldview.

You interpret him as 'arguing against the view that conscious experience derives from a material basis.' He doesn't say that put it in those terms. You interpret it in those terms because of the framework in which you interpret it.

Well as you started the thread with your mind already made up it’s not surprising that it end where it started.

Bitbol argues against the view that conscious experience derives from a material basis. — Gnomon

Cite anything from the original post that makes this claim.

What you're doing is trying to paraphrase what you think Bitbol is saying, but in doing that, you're also misrepresenting it. You're forcing it into a Procrustean bed.

'A Procrustean bed is a metaphor for an arbitrary, rigid standard to which conformity is forced, regardless of individual variations or natural differences. Originating from Greek mythology, where the bandit Procrustes stretched or cut guests to fit a bed, the term describes ruthlessly forcing people or ideas into a pre-set mold.'

The mold, in this case, is your idiosyncratic 'enformationism'.

. I would put it more strongly and say that the very idea of seeing without any perspective is meaningless. But I don't see that we cannot see the world as if there were no sentient beings in it. We can make reasonable adjustments based on our ability to distinguish facts from values and what we know of what the world was like before the first sentient life appeared. The status of mathematics in such a scenario is a not clear to me. — Ludwig V

Good! My point is, it is of course true that we can see the Universe as if there were no beings in it, and also that we know that h.sapiens, our species, has an evolutionary history of around 100k years. So I'm on board with the naturalist account of the matter.

But the status of the 'as if' is what is at issue. I maintain that scientific naturalism wants to 'absolutize' it, as if it enables us to see the universe as it truly would be, without an observer. Then it points to that as having ontological primacy and claims that humans are a product of that. Which is also what the OP is saying. We do this effortlessly and easily, because it's an intrinsic part of the worldview we're born into. And that is why it has become a blind spot. (Because even to see the universe as if there were no observers in it, doesn’t see it as it really would be with no observer.)

Also, regarding the status of mathematics: perhaps you could say it is used to track variance and invariance - what changes and what stays the same in the flux of experience.

I was questioning how the latter concept can be consistent with a denial of unchanging (either temporary or eternal) identity. — boundless

But is ‘identity’ being challenged? A Sanskrit term that you will know is ‘svabhava’ meaning ‘self-existent’ or ‘self-originated’. Something 'self-existent' would exist 'in its own right' - not being dependent on anything else. What can be said to conform to that description?

It's also important to understand what the Buddha dismissed as 'eternalism'. This was the belief that the self could be indefinitely reborn ad infinitum in favourable circumstances due to right discipline and ritual actions. Literally to 'live forever'. But that doesn't undercut the principle of identity or agency.

Remember Alan Watts' book The Supreme Identity? That was one formative book in my journey. I don't know how well it reads now, but I recall that the whole idea was the idea of seeing through the conditioned identity of ego, and how this is expressed in the different spiritual traditions.

if anatman is interpreted as denying essences or even essences with determinate defining characteristics, why do we observe regularities? — boundless

I don’t think this was what Buddhism is really about. Western metaphysics and Buddhism are orthogonal to each other in this respect. The Aristotelian 'essence' arose in a very different cultural context and against the backdrop of a very different question.

What about zazen which emphases that meditation is 'just sitting' and that this is all that is required to achieve it which would imply that no metaphysical beliefs are necessary? Of course you could say 'they assume that the practitioner would already have those beliefs in place' but it is how literally you choose to take their claim that just sitting is all that is required. It is not just meditation as whole school emphasises this sudden enlightenment approach. — unimportant

I think part of the problem is that we ourselves bring 'metaphysical beliefs' to the practice. We have ideas about what Buddhism means - often formed from our own cultural atttitudes to religion.

I was very much influenced by the well-known book Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, which was published late 60's by Shunryu Suzuki, who founded the San Francisco Zen Centre. It's a book that is well worth owning. But here's the thing: that commitment to 'just sitting without any idea of gain' (he says this constantly) requires a religious discipline! Sitting zazen is physically demanding, and maintaining that practice commitment day to day even more so.

So I realised after not very long that this idea many Westerners had (including myself) of a kind of 'instant enlightenment' which appears to come out of popular Zen books is misleading. Zen in its cultural context is a real discipline,

:up: I just discovered that. I might subscribe but am no longer earning so am very careful with subs.

Signed up no prob. Call me vain, but would like to update my user avatar, the control seems read-only.

The cosmological "fact" that human consciousness --- subjective experience of "material conditions" or abstract ideas --- is a latecomer in evolution, raises the question: what form did Fundamental Consciousness take "prior to humans"? If it was not Physical, was it Spiritual*1? Is "disembodied Consciousness" spiritual, as in Souls that exist before life and after death? Or was it simply Potential Platonic Form? Whatever that may be. — Gnomon

What form could it have, before it had form? :chin:

This is obviously a difficult and even a paradoxical question. The question is, how to think about it? The scientific attitude is fundamentally conditioned by the requirement of objectivity: it has to seek explanations in terms of what is observable or measurable, or what can be inferred on the basis of observational data. But, as your quote #3 notes, consciousness is the prior condition for any observation or empirical theory whatever. This is why it is described as a problem for scientific accounts, as it is not objective in the scientific sense. That is the 'hard problem of consciousness' in a nutshell.

Henri Bergson famously proposed that life was distinguished by an elan vital, an internal, creative impulse. But, almost without saying, such an 'impulse' could in no way be identified by science - what, after all, would you be looking for? How would you even define it? So 'elan vital' and 'vitalism' are generally laughed at nowadays.

But I regard Bergson's idea of having at least metaphorical validity. Life and living things do in my view possess an irreducible quality, that is, something that resists explanation in physical or chemical terms. But that 'something' is again not a specific, measurable attribute. It is not objectively discernable. It is not really even 'a thing'. Hence the problem!

There's a philosopher of biology that I really like, Stephen L Talbott, who published a great series of articles in The New Atlantis over a period of years.They can be reviewed here. The last in the series, What do Organisms Mean?, directly addresses this question in terms of causation and agency.

Talbott notes that the singular differentiator of all life forms is the purposive nature of their activities - the fact that they display agency. And this goes right down to the most fundamental level, even the cellular level. And whereas physical causation - the kinds of causation described by physics and chemistry - can be given in completely non-intentional terms, the same cannot be said for the activities of organisms, which are intentional from the get-go:

We commonly explain occurrences by saying one thing happened because of — due to the cause of — something else. But we can invoke very different sorts of causes in this way. For example, there is the because of physical law (the ball rolled down the hill because of gravity) and the because of reason (he laughed at me because I made a mistake). The former hinges upon the kind of necessity we commonly associate with physical causation; the latter has to do with what makes sense within a context of meaning.

Any nuance of meaning coming from any part of the larger context can ground the because of reason. “I blushed because I saw a hint of suspicion in his eyes.” But I might not have blushed if his left hand had slightly shifted in its characteristic, reassuring way, or if a rebellious line from a novel I read in college had flashed through my mind, or if a certain painful experience in my childhood had been different. In a meaningful context, there are infinite possible ways for any detail, however remote, to be connected to, colored by, or transformed by any other detail. There is no sure way to wall off any part of the context from all the rest.

He goes on to say:

What distinguishes the language of biology from that of physics is its free and full use of the because of reason. Where the inanimate world lends itself in some regards to application of a “deadened,” skeletal language — a language that perhaps too easily invites us to think in terms of mechanisms — the organism requires us to recognize a full and rich drama of meaning.

So - I'm drawn to the idea, found in phenomenology, that the emergence of organic life is the rudimentary manifestation of intentionality. I don't know if it's meaningful to think about how it might exist in the abstract, because it is never encountered in the abstract. But whatever life or mind or consciousness is, it resists explanation in terms of lower level descriptions derived from physics and chemistry, as it has an intrinsic intentionality that non-organic matter does not possess.

On Purpose (Medium friend link.)

the category of physics without meaning is much larger than our socially embedded consensus reality. — ucarr

Size isn't everything :rofl:

when I use the word "existence," I mean all of the types of things that exist. Existence houses the total ontology. Sentient-based reality, nested within existence, houses a sub-set of ontology experienced; i e., irreversible selection going forward, intentions and, most importantly, meaning indexed to life/death. — ucarr

OK, I think I understand what you're saying. Let me paraphrase. There is the vast universe, which has been disclosed by scientific instruments, which is practically unthinkable in terms of size (who among us can really conceptualise thousands of light-years?) We, as sentient beings, are a small sub-set of that vast reality. It is for us that 'risk and possible death' are realities. For the vast mass of existence, there are no such 'stakes', as you put it. So that is what exists, whereas what is real, is what is real 'for us', the reality of sentient awareness to whom things matter. Hence:

sentience-based reality is contingent upon existence. Existence is the ground from which sentience-based reality emerges. — ucarr

I will observe that this analysis is basically realist in attitude. You are comparing sentient consciousness to the vast expanse of apparently-insentient matter and energy that comprises most of the visible Universe. As people say, we are 'mere blips' against this vast background, the allegorical flaring of a match in the dead of night. Which is how science sees it.

One of the difficulties of metaphysics in general is the fact that examinations of ontology require the examiner to internally model ontology, and it’s fundamentals. The problem is a problem of perspective because the examiner must try to access mind-independent reality within the presence of his own sentience, which is pervasively representational rather than fundamentally ontological. — ucarr

But this is just what I will call into question. First, this comparison, between the 'vast universe' and the minute phenomenon of sentient life, is made as if from a point of view outside both of them. Whereas we can never really see ourselves 'from the outside', so to speak. We're part of the picture.

Your expression 'fundamentally ontological' is important here. It is an attempt to see, to penetrate, what really exists, independently of a perspective, to see what exists as it really is, were there no observer to see it. Hence the distinction you make between 'persuasively representational' and 'fundamentally ontological', the latter being what exists independently of representation.

I think this distinction is erroneous, that we cannot see the Universe as if from outside any perspective or as if there were no sentient beings in it. The comparison you're making between existence and reality also demands a perspective - and perspective is something that only an observer can bring to the picture. We can't step outside appearance in the way you are proposing. This is the characteristic error of modernity. We are and must be part of the picture, we can't attain a perspective of ultimate objectivity or separateness.

//ps - also note that the word 'ontology' is derived from the Greek verb 'to be', and has a specific connotation on that account. Nowadays the word is used to denote the components of an information system or some other classificatory scheme, meaning 'the kinds of things that comprise that system'. But in classical use, ontology was specific to the understanding of the nature of being, which is different to the investigation of an inventory of existing things.//

[ Sorry didn’t mean to come across like that.

I see it as a simple matter - dogs are beings, capable of suffering and afraid of death. We ought to be mindful of that. I suppose you could then say, well why do you still eat animals? And I truly have no answer for that, beyond the difficulties of maintaining a vegetarian lifestyle.

On the contrary, for some of us, at least, metaphysical questions are pressing. They're not idle or abstract - they matter.

I do pause at the idea that the domains of mathematics are vast in any sense comparable to the domain of the phenomenal or the physica — Ludwig V

Of course that domain is not spatially vast, as number is not extended in space. But the domain of mathematics is vast in a different way, as it is something which has been explored and expanded by generations of mathematicians since the ancient of days, and seems to be inexhaustible.

By focusing on objects perceptible by the mind alone and by observing their nature, in particular their eternity and immutability, Augustine came to see that certain things that clearly exist, namely, the objects of the intelligible realm, cannot be corporeal. When he cries out in the midst of his vision of the divine nature, “Is truth nothing just because it is not diffused through space, either finite or infinite?” (FVP 13–14), he is acknowledging that it is the discovery of intelligible truth that first frees him to comprehend incorporeal reality. — Cambridge Companion to Augustine, The Divine Nature

(Although here I would prefer to say 'certain things that are clearly real'. Hence my point about the distinction between existents and reality.)

I wonder if you have any thoughts on the claim reality, an emanation from sentient presence indexes physics to the survivability of living organisms, and therefore, learning about the world is really learning about yourself within the world? — ucarr

OK I'll try and give you a brief account of my thoughts on the matter.

They all begin with a simple observation. When I first joined these forums, about 15 years ago, the first question I asked was about the reality of numbers and mathematical objects. I had had this minor epiiphany: the ancients believed that numbers were 'higher' than ordinary objects, because they didn't go into or out of existence, and because they're not composed of parts. This is very traditional philosophy, but it's largely forgotten in today's culture.

I began to explore the idea that numbers, mathematical rules, logical laws, and the like, are real, in that they're not arbitrary or made up. Arithmetic is constrained by rules and necessary truths.

I've learned since that this is a form of what is called 'logical realism', although the way I interpreted it was more in line with Christian Platonism. Early in the research, I found a description of Augustine on Intelligible Objects which made sense to me.

So - those kinds of 'intellgible objects' - numbers, logical laws, and the like - are real. But they're not existent in the sense that phenomenal objects are. They're not sense-objects, but can only be grasped by reason. Which is why we, as 'rational beings' are able to grasp them, in a way that non-rational animals cannot.

(I've also learned that this is highly unfashionable and even politically incorrect. Naturalism prefers to see us as part of nature - the attempt to differentiate ourselves from other animals is seen as a throwback to Christian paternalism.)

Anyway, the upshot is that 'what is real' far exceeds 'what exists', if 'what exists' is defined in terms of phenomenal existents, i.e. things we could encounter by sense or instruments. 'What is real' includes the vast domains of mathematics, for example, only a minute fraction of which is understandable, and only a small fraction of that is instantiated in phenomenal reality.

I've learned that this kind of distinction between reality and existence is not unique to me, although I do put my own particular interpretation on it. I did once try a thread on Reality, Being and Existence, but the advice I got was to read Heidegger's metaphysics. In any case, all of this is firmly in the ballpark of metaphysics, and it's a very difficult subject.

Does being itself exist, then, without a true other? — Astorre

I, for one, can see where you get that idea from. I too have been exploring it, although from a different perspective.

At one stage on my spiritual-philosophical path, I came up with the catchy term 'the illusion of otherness'. It was meant to convey a quality which is fundamental to our sense of felt existence - the idea that reality or Being is something that we're outside of, or 'other' to. This manifests as the sense of alienation or separateness which is the source of the pervading anxiety of life as the self is aware of its own eventual mortality whereby it is once again absorbed by what is other to it, in the form of death.

The over-arching theme was that, to overcome this 'illusion of otherness' was to experience that state of union with the All, which yogic and some mystical teachings point to. (It's not specifically Christian, in that such union in Christianity is always in terms of union with God, and I didn't necessarily understand it in theistic terms)

As life went on, and the effects of youthful optimism fell from my eyes, it turned out that transcending this 'illusion of otherness' and realising that unitive state was impossibly remote for an ordinary person such as myself. This is why, after all, most of the teachings about this state assume a kind of reclusive or ascetic way of life, practically the opposite of modern middle-class existence with all its many attachments and habits.

Later in life, I've come to look at the question from a more philosophical, and less mystical, perspective. I have been exploring an idea found in the pioneering book by Hans Jonas, The Phenomenon of Life: Towards a Philosophy of Biology. I won't try and summarise it, as it is a profound and weighty book. But one central idea in it, is that the appearance of even the most rudimentary life-forms is the appearance of intentionality as a mode of existence. Even a primitive organism has to navigate its environment, ward off threats, seek sustenance, and so on, even though they are not possessed of anything lilke sentient awareness. Likewise, here you see the most rudimentary sense of 'self-and-other', in that the organism has to maintain itself distinct from the environment. Its enclosing membrane comprises the boundary between it and the sorrounding nature. That is the ancient origin of the sense of 'otherness' that I had previously thought was a kind of illusion or false consciousness.

So to address your question, perhaps it could be said that existence always entails that sense of otherness or separateness, as it is fundamental to the phenomenon of life. I still feel like the 'illusion of otherness' or separateness is always a kind of existential state or spiritual lack, and that transcending that sense of separateness is what the 'unitive vision' seeks. But note that this also entails dying, in some fundamental sense. From which perspective, embodied existence is itself a plight or a malaise. So I suppose this must always end up being a kind of religious intuition, although again not necessarily Christian.

Existence, being the larger realm, houses reality, the smaller realm. The two realms overlap in terms of the raw physics of existence. — ucarr

If you look into the subject in philosophy, it is a major topic in metaphysics and ontology. 'Existence and reality' are often paired with two more terms, 'being and truth', as subjects for elucidation. The relationships between all of these terms are very slippery, because, as one introduction noted, they are often used interchangeably, even by the same person, and the way they are used varies considerably from one philosopher to another.

Oxford Uniiversity runs an external course called Reality, Being and Existence: an Introduction to Metaphysics. (I once considered enrolling, although never did.) If you cast your eye down the course outline, you'll see it covers virtually the whole of philosophy.

So - cheers for at least putting up the idea for discussion. But it needs some reference points, other than just your internal reasoning and a single 'argument from analogy' for such a large topic. (This is why academic philosophers generally pick much more specialised subject matter for their speciality, as this kind of grand metaphysical project is a very difficult subject.)

Molecular evolution describes how inherited DNA and/or RNA change over evolutionary time, and the consequences of this for proteins and other components of cells and organisms. Molecular evolution is the basis of phylogenetic approaches to describing the tree of life. Molecular evolution overlaps with population genetics, especially on shorter timescales. Topics in molecular evolution include the origins of new genes, the genetic nature of complex traits, the genetic basis of adaptation and speciation, the evolution of development, and patterns and processes underlying genomic changes during evolution. — Wikipedia

Notice that it assumes the existence of DNA and RNA, and therefore organisms. It's not a theory of how DNA came into existence nor is it a theory of organic chemistry.

No physical instance is mathematically exact. But that doesn’t mean circularity is an invention. Natural processes exhibit stable radial symmetry that manifests as a circle. The ideal form is realized under material constraints. It is just these kinds of lawful structural regularities that make the natural world intelligible in the first place.

(It may look as though this conflicts with my defense of a “mind-created world,” but it doesn’t. There I was arguing that the world as world — as articulated into objects, meanings, and determinate forms — is inseparable from cognitive disclosure ( or incomprehensible outside comprehension). But that is not the same as saying that such forms are arbitrary or invented. That circular patterns occur in nature is not realistically in dispute. The question is whether the intelligible form “circle” that they instantiate is reducible to our conceptual activity, or whether their intelligibility belongs intrinsically to what we designate as real in the first place. It is that very resonance between the ideal concept and the natural forms that underwrite philosophical Platonism. Compare Argument from Equals, The Phaedo.)

circles had that ratio before any minds existed to notice it.
— Wayfarer

How do you know that?

I'd rather say circles didn't exist prior to minds arising. — Moliere

Molecules can evolve and react — L'éléphant

Molecules don't do that - organisms do that. Molecules are acted upon by external factors. But organisms react, adapt, maintain themselves and evolve. That's what makes them organic, as distinct from simply molecular.

Of course, the existence of DNA or something like it is, is required for that to happen. Quite how DNA appeared - not evolved, because evolution can't get started without it - is still and may forever be a mystery.

There is a trend in current biology to attribute forms of intelligence and/or agency to the cellular level of organic life. In other words, not only organisms, but also cells, seem able to act intentionally in pursuit of aims. A current article in New Scientist says:

It might sound outlandish, but biological simulations are indicating that those minuscule units of life (cells), which we usually think about as passive machines – cogs blindly governed by the laws of physics – have their own goals and display agency. Surprisingly, even simple networks of biomolecules appear to display some degree of a self

This makes me wonder if intelligence is not only the product of the brains of the higher animals, but might also be in some sense a causal factor in evolution. As the same article goes on to say:

Not only do these findings have implications for who or what we think of as agents – but they also suggest that agency itself could drive evolution.

The question is: what agent (queue spooky music) :yikes:

So when I say "being as knowable," I don't mean "being as already-known" or "being as constituted by a knower." I mean: being has the character of being able to be understood — it is the kind of thing that admits of intelligible structure. That's a claim about being, not a disguised claim about us — Esse Quam Videri

Whereas I see that as a claim about 'what exists'. I wouldn't use the term 'being' in that way. 'What exists' is external to us, and precedes us, plainly. I'm not disputing that.

Why does what minds do yield genuine understanding of what isn't mind? — Esse Quam Videri

When you ask why what minds do yields genuine understanding of what isn’t mind, I think that already presupposes a separation that may not be ultimate. As Ludwig said above:

We can also say, and should also say that we are part of the world and our intellectual (and practical) struggles with it are part of how it is. — Ludwig V

My suggestion isn’t that mind creates structure, nor that matter is “just an idea.” It’s that intelligibility isn’t something added from outside. What we call “the world” is always already given as structured, as determinate, as available to articulation. That isn’t an optional overlay — it’s the condition under which anything counts as something at all. (That “always already” is what I take the a priori to mean — not a mental imposition, but the prior intelligibility without which anything could appear as anything)

So when we say the world is intelligible, we’re not describing a fortuitous correspondence between two independently constituted domains (mind here, structured being there). We’re describing a more basic fact: that being and intelligibility are internally related. The fit isn’t something that needs to be explained after the fact; it’s built into what we mean by “world” in the first place.

Anyway, once again, thank you for your perceptive questions, but I am going to take a brief spell and return to my writing project (although experience shows me, I never end up staying away for too long.)

I don't see the Husserl passage that Joshs quoted in this post as being inimical to the way I interpret the meaning of Platonic realism.

I'm inclined to say that number (as an example) is a necessary and uniform structure within rational thought. When I ask what the sum of 1 + 3 is, the answer is constrainted by necessity to '4'. We are 'compelled by reason' to give that answer. But in what sense does '4' exist? This is the question sorrounding platonic realism which has generated centuries of argument. The implication is, if abstractions exist, in what sense do they exist?

A strong empiricist or reductionist naturalism inclines us to accept only those things that exist as phenomena as real - numbers and logical rules are, then, seen as being in the mind or the product of the mind, 'human inventions', and the like, 'projected' onto the world. But that belies the whole concept of mathematical necessity!

Numbers are not objects in space, but intelligible structures apprehended by reason. But nevertheless, the rules of mathematics are uniform and universal, they're not arbitrary or made up. There are imaginary numbers and imaginary number systems, but they are dependent on the ability of the mind to grasp the concept of number in the first place.

Where I see the resistance to Platonic realism is the suggestion that numbers arereal but not material.. As soon as you say that, you're into metaphysics, like it or not, and most don't. We have a hardwired tendency to believe that what is real must be 'out there somewhere', literally existing in time and space. For example, see below:

There was an article published in Smithsonian Magazine a few years ago, What is Math? which explored this topic. Some of the sceptics' sentiments expressed in that article really give the game away:

...scholars—especially those working in other branches of science—view Platonism with skepticism. Scientists tend to be empiricists; they imagine the universe to be made up of things we can touch and taste and so on; things we can learn about through observation and experiment. The idea of something existing “outside of space and time” makes empiricists nervous: It sounds embarrassingly like the way religious believers talk about God, and God was banished from respectable scientific discourse a long time ago.

Platonism, as mathematician Brian Davies has put it, “has more in common with mystical religions than it does with modern science.” The fear is that if mathematicians give Plato an inch, he’ll take a mile. If the truth of mathematical statements can be confirmed just by thinking about them, then why not ethical problems, or even religious questions? Why bother with empiricism at all?

Massimo Pigliucci, a philosopher at the City University of New York, was initially attracted to Platonism—but has since come to see it as problematic. If something doesn’t have a physical existence, he asks, then what kind of existence could it possibly have? “If one ‘goes Platonic’ with math,” writes Pigliucci, empiricism “goes out the window.” (If the proof of the Pythagorean theorem exists outside of space and time, why not the “golden rule,” or even the divinity of Jesus Christ?)

So the issue isn't whether the categories are universal. It's whether their universality reflects the structure of any possible experience for us, or the structure of being as knowable — Esse Quam Videri

‘Structure of being’ is an interesting choice of words. We ourselves are distinguished as ‘beings’. If by it, you mean the physical universe — electrons, galaxies, quantum fields — then calling it 'being' is already anthropomorphizing. Such entities are not beings in the sense humans are; they just exist (or subsist, or occur).

And if they're knowable, it's only because beings like us can render them intelligible. A universe without rational consciousness wouldn't be 'knowable' or 'unknowable'; those categories wouldn't apply. (This is what I take the 'in itself' to actually mean: not a mysterious shadowy 'something' lurking around behind the scenes, but the world or object outside any act of comprehension. The world as it would be without any intelligence in it - which is something we can't know.)

So 'the structure of being as knowable' already presupposes rational consciousness. You haven't escaped the circle — you've just disguised it by equivocating the term 'being'.

(This is also why I make frequent reference to Charles Pinter's 2022 book 'Mind and the Cosmic Order'. He shows in great detail how the mind structures experience through the formation of gestalts, meaningful wholes, which are the basic units of cognition (and not only human cognition). We 'pick out' specific 'things' and identify them as shapes and forms against backgrounds. Without this cognitive activity there would be no conscious awareness as such - that is what 'the world' is for us. The difficulty is becoming aware of these activities, as it is largely reflexive and unconscious.)

I want to suggest that we might do better by accepting that the issue here is set up on a model of "us" and the world. We can also say, and should also say that we are part of the world and our intellectual (and practical) struggles with it are part of how it is. There is no journey, or rather, there is no destination, because the journey is the destination — Ludwig V

:100:

How can something come from nothing please explain. — kindred

I'm not saying this as a Christian evangalist, because I'm not one - but this is precisely what 'Creation Ex Nihilo' means. It means, 'created from nothing'.

A Catholic scholar notes: 'The Greek natural philosophers were quite correct in saying that from nothing, nothing comes. But by “comes” they meant a change from one state to another, which requires some underlying material reality. It also requires some pre-existing possibility for that change, a possibility that resides in something.

Creation, on the other hand, is the radical causing of the whole existence of whatever exists. To be the complete cause of something’s existence is not the same as producing a change in something. It is not a matter of taking something and making it into something else, as if there were some primordial matter which God had to use to create the universe. Rather, Creation is the result of the divine agency being totally responsible for the production, all at once and completely, of the whole of the universe, with all it entities and all its operations, from absolutely nothing pre-existing' (from Catholic Answers).

Creation from nothing might sound preposterous - but stop and consider what the cosmology of the so-called 'Big Bang' implies. It is that the entire vast universe 'exploded' into existence from a single infinitely hot and dense point, 'the singularity'. It would be a mistake to try and envisage that as 'an explosion', however, as there is no 'outside' from which to envisage it. Everything we know exists, is 'inside' that event; there was no space into which it could have 'exploded'.

But the resonance between this idea, and creation from nothing, seems clear. And indeed, Pope Pius X11 said, in 1951, that:

it seems that the science of today, by going back in one leap millions of centuries, has succeeded in being a witness to that primordial Fiat Lux ('Let there be Light') when, out of nothing, there burst forth with matter a sea of light and radiation [... Thus modern science has confirmed] with the concreteness of physical proofs the contingency of the universe and the well-founded deduction that about that time the cosmos issued from the hand of the Creator.

However, get this: Georges Lemaître, a Catholic priest and scientist, and the discoverer of the 'Big Bang' cosmology (although it wasn't called that at the time) 'was reportedly horrified by that intervention and was later able, with the assistance of Father Daniel O'Connell, the director of the Vatican Observatory, to convince the Pope not make any further public statements on religious or philosophical interpretations of matters concerning physical cosmology.' He felt it was wrong to try and support the articles of faith with reference to science (and vice versa). Wikipedia

Kant makes the conditions of intelligibility primarily conditions of appearance; the realist alternative treats them as conditions of judgment and truth, and therefore as answerable to reality rather than merely imposed upon it. — Esse Quam Videri

I’m struggling to see a real distinction here, though. I don’t see Kant’s categories as being ‘subjective’ in the sense implied here, in that they don’t pertain to a particular subject, but are the necessary constituents of judgement for any subject. Likewise, I don't see the categories of understanding as 'imposed', as if 'the world' is one domain, and they another. They are, rather, the inevitable grounds of comprehension.

Thank you for those references, they’re very helpful. I particularly resonate with the closing sentence:

What was concealed from Galileo was the practical activities of the life-world making possible the abstractions of modern science.

:clap:

I feel you have made the systematic mistake of transposing a limitation of minds onto a feature of the world. That a mind must apprehend the world by mind does not imply the world is mind dependent. — hypericin

I'll refer back to Joshs' response immediately after your comment.

I find it hard to believe that they would be stupid enough not to allow that there is a semantic overlay to neural processes — Janus

Their materialism is monistic: there is only one real substance, and that is matter (nowadays matter-energy.) Everything arises from matter and returns to it, and has no reality independently of it. Whenever I point this out of, say, Daniel Dennett, you say, he couldn’t believe that, he couldn’t be so stupid. But he really did say it. A characteristic snippet from Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, speaking of the metabolic processes of organic molecules:

An impersonal, unreflective, robotic, mindless little scrap of molecular machinery is the ultimate basis of all the agency, and hence meaning, and hence consciousness, in the universe.

It’s not a straw man depiction. Materialism is materialism, and it’s not hard to discern its genealogy in the recent history of Western culture.

I believe in a single substance, the mother of all forces, which engenders the life and consciousness of everything, visible and invisible. I believe in a single Lord, biology, the unique son of the substance of the world, born from the mother substance after centuries of random shuffling of material: the encapsulated reflection of the great material sea, the epiphenomenal light of primordial darkness, the false reflection of the real world, consubstantial with the mother-substance. It is he who has descended from the shadows of the mother-substance, he who has taken on flesh from matter, he who plays at the illusion of thought from flesh, he who has become the Human Brain. I acknowledge a single method for the elimination of error, thus ultimately eliminating myself and returning to the mother substance. Amen. — Gagdad Bob

But π is not a physical object in the world. It is a concept that arises when a rational agent defines “circle,” “diameter,” and “ratio” within a particular symbolic framework. Without those conceptual operations, there is no "π "only physical shapes. The claim that π “was there anyway” quietly smuggles in human abstraction and treats it as mind-independent reality. — Tom Storm

The symbol is a human invention. But the value isn’t created by the naming of it, any more than Mt Everest came into existence by being christened.

As for the ‘physical shape’ - a circle is not just a shape. A circle is defined by a bounded space with each point equidistant from the centre. Does this purported ‘physical shape’ have a determinate ratio between their circumference and diameter?

If they do, then that ratio is π, whether anyone has conceptualized it or not. The mathematical relationship exists in the physical structure itself.

If no — then it needs to be explained why circular objects behave as if that ratio constrains them. Why do soap bubbles, planetary orbits, ripples in water all exhibit this same ratio? Is that just coincidence?

Abstraction is not imposed on an otherwise formless reality. It abstracts from. (The fact that mathematical abstractions are reified and treated as real in their own right is another matter.)