The White House official web page has today launched a page that blames the Democrats for the Jan 6 2021 outrage. Nothing further need be said about it - except, perhaps, that Trump's ascendancy has utterly annihilated any claim to proper political legitimacy on the US Right.

For him (Husserl) a beyond of experience is not impossible but meaningless. — Joshs

But I'm a bit uncomfortable with the suggestion that this is a state of kind of dumb indolence. I was responding to @Tom Storm question about 'God, Brahman, The One'. In that context, I said that phenomenology was not overtly concerned with the question of the 'ultimate nature or ground'.

But here I have to acknowledge the way that Buddhism has influenced my attitude. Specifically the book Zen Mind Beginner's Mind. This is a Sōtō Zen text which stresses the 'ordinary mind' practice. Ordinary mind teachings suggest that enlightenment is not a distant, supernatural state to be achieved in a future life, but is found in the natural, unconditioned state of one’s own mind during everyday activities. But at the same time, this "ordinary" mind is not the habitual, reactive mind filled with habitual tendencies, judgment and grasping, but rather a state of "no-doing" or wu wei.

It is here that the parallel with epochē can be seen. As you probably know, there is scholarship on the parallels between epochē in Greek scepticism and Buddhist philosophy, originating in the encounter of Pyrrho of Elis with Buddhist traditions in Gandhāra. In both contexts, dogmatic views (dṛṣṭi) were seen as a source of disturbance or suffering. But this did not amount to scepticism in the modern, argumentative sense. The suspension involved was not a matter of withholding belief pending proof, but a practical discipline aimed at loosening attachment to reified ways of seeing, in order to transform one’s mode of experience. It was inextricably connected with meditative awareness, which in the Buddhist context, is the actual seeing of how 'dependent origination' conditions consciousness.

So the point is, behind all of this, there is considerable philosophical sophistication which can easily be misunderstood. Sōtō, in particular, is built around the writings of Master Dogen and his work the Shobogenzo, which is a classic of Buddhist philosophy and practice. Since the Kyoto School, there's been quite a bit of comparative literature on Heidegger and Dogen.

You start at X second and end at Y second to get a minute. It is a discrete measurement that is broken down into smaller discrete measurements in order. When we measure a minute, we have to watch for 60 seconds. — Philosophim

Of course, no contest. But the point is, the observer is watching, measuring, deciding on the units of measurement. The relationship between moments in time and points in space is made in awareness.

To clarify, time as an observable measurement only exists as a form of representation and can only be understood by a conscious subject. That doesn't mean that what is being represented does not exist independent of our ability to measure it. — Philosophim

I'm saying that in the case of time, that this is just what it means. We're not talking about rocks, trees and stars - but time itself. And the argument is that time has an inextricably subjective ground, that were there no subject, there would indeed be no time. Now obviously that's a big claim, but I've provided the bones of an argument for it in the OP. It can also be supported with inferential evidence from science itself.

What is the source of intelligibility of the empirical world? — boundless

Intelligibility is not something the world produces, but something that arises in the relation between a world and a mind capable of making sense of it. For a contemporary cognitive-science way of expressing this without metaphysical commitments, John Vervaeke’s notion of “relevance realisation” points in a similar direction: intelligibility emerges as an ongoing activity of sense-making enacted by cognitive agents in their engagement with the world.

I had never heard of Nagarjuna — T Clark

A major figure in Mahāyāna (East Asian and Tibetan) Buddhism. I am hesitant to bring Nāgārjuna into the debate, as the scholarship sorrounding his interpretation is difficult. This lecture might be a useful intro, from the Let's Talk Religion channel that I watch from time to time.

I didn’t intend what I said as any kind of endorsement of Trump’s actions.

The scientific method is attempting to represent reality in a measurable and objectively repeatable way. Science in its fine print never claims it understands truth. It claims it has been unable to falsify a falsifiable hypothesis up until now. — Philosophim

Right - agree. But here we're discussing a philosophical distinction. This understanding of 'the mind's role in the pursuit of scientific understanding' is not itself a scientific matter, right? It's the kind of discussion you will find in philosophy of science, or in the writings of philosophers I gave in the original post. And I do think that philosophers are concerned with disclosing truth, in a broader and less specialised sense than science. Philosophical analyses do not necessarily comprise 'falsifiable hypotheses' in the sense that Popper meant it. They are intended to provide insight and self knowledge.

If we accept what Schopenhauer and Lao Tzu were saying, doesn't the inconsistency you've identified disappear? — T Clark

Yes. Few do.

The fact that we can say “one second has passed” already presupposes a standpoint from which distinct states are apprehended as belonging to a single, continuous temporal order.
— Wayfarer

I don't see that as a pre-supposition, but an observed reality. — Philosophim

It's a measured reality - and that is a world of difference. 'One second' is a unit of time. As are hours, minutes, days, months and years. But (to put it crudely) does time pass for the clock itself? I say not. Each 'tick' of a clock, each movement of the second hand, is a discrete event. It is the mind that synthesises these discrete events into periods and units of time. That's the point you're missing.

‘wax on, wax off’ ~ Karate Kid.

it seems to me that this position gives no explanation of their existence and their coming into being. — boundless

But as said, I have no reason to contest evolutionary theory or geological history. I’m not providing an alternative account of the evolutionary origins of our species. I suppose you could say that what is being questioned is the support that evolutionary theory provides for philosophical naturalism. Naturalism says, after all, that the mind is of a piece with all the other elements and attributes of humans and other species, and can be treated within the same explanatory matrix. That is what is being called into question here. Which is why I'm not contesting the empirical accounts.

If I measure 1 second forward, then one second later I have recorded and measured one second backwards. Again, follow the velocity of an object over time on a graph. If I set up a crash stunt, I have to measure the forces and time. Once the stunt is complete, I can see if the number of seconds that passed, did. To arrive at the point after the stunt is complete, time would have had to pass in the measure that noted, or else the current measure of time would be off. 1 minute past is what happened to be at the current time correct? Time is simply measured the change of one thing in relation to another thing. But to say time doesn't exist prior to consciousness is to claim there was no change prior to consciousness. An observer can observe and measure change, but an observer is not required for change to happen. — Philosophim

I don’t deny that physical change occurs independently of observers, nor that we can model and measure those changes using clocks, graphs, and equations. But this doesn’t yet give us temporal succession in the sense that’s at issue here.

Physics relates states to one another using a time parameter. What it does not supply by itself is the continuity that makes those states intelligible as a passage from earlier to later. A clock records discrete states; it does not experience their succession as a continuous series amounting duration. The fact that we can say “one second has passed” already presupposes a standpoint from which distinct states are apprehended as belonging to a single, continuous temporal order.

So the claim is not that change requires an observer, but that time as succession—as a unified before-and-after—does. Without such a standpoint, we still have physical processes, but not time understood as passage or duration.

What I am suggesting is that, in your examples, the role of the observer in supplying continuity and relational unity between discrete events goes unnoticed. This is not a personal oversight, but a consequence of how scientific abstraction works. Science deliberately brackets the experiencing subject in order to focus on those measurable attributes of change that can be recorded with precision by instruments. Once this abstraction has been made, the subject — as the individual scientist — can indeed be set aside, creating the impression that objects and interactions are being described as they are in themselves. But this methodological exclusion does not eliminate the subject’s role in making those measurements intelligible as a temporal succession in the first place.

(Something that is made explicit in quantum physics in the form of the “observer problem”. In Mind and Matter (1958), Erwin Schrödinger, drawing explicitly on Schopenhauer, argues that there is an important difference between measurement and observation. A measuring instrument, he notes, merely registers a value; the registration itself contains no meaning. Meaning arises only when the result is taken up by a conscious observer. In this sense, physical description presupposes, rather than replaces, the role of the observer in making the world intelligible. Schrödinger was well aware that such claims would invite charges of mysticism, but his underlying point is methodological rather than theological: physical theory, however powerful, cannot eliminate the standpoint from which its results acquire significance.)

I was aware of that, but again, if Trump actually seized Greenland by military force, it would be a far bigger deal than extracting Maduro from Venezuela. (Which, according to reports, is now undergoing a massive crackdown by the military and intelligence communities. )

To get rid of the remnants of physicalism, we need to stop talking about the mind, body and world in terms of objects which interact , even objects that exist only very briefly. — Joshs

I can't help be reminded of Buddhist abhidharma in this description. From Merleau Ponty and Buddhism, Gereon Kopf, Jin Y. Park:



This is why Buddhism is mentioned so frequently in connection with enactivism and embodied cognition. (Although the convergences shouldn't be overstated - the book also says that Buddhism is soteriological in a way that phenomenology is not. But again this is where Michel Bitbol is particularly insightful, he's been a participant in the MindLife Conference which explores parallels between science, philosophy and Buddhism.)

But what is the transcendent ground of being; God, Brahman, the One, or all of the above? And how could we ever know that such a foundation exists? It is one thing to adopt a phenomenological perspective and seemingly dissolve the mind–body distinction; it is quite another to posit a principle that underlies everything. What if there is no ultimate ground? — Tom Storm

Phenomenology was not originally concerned with spiritual or theological matters as such. Its primary task was methodological: clarifying the structures of experience and the grounds of meaning, objectivity, and being. That said, there are certainly existentialist thinkers—Søren Kierkegaard, Gabriel Marcel, Emmanuel Levinas—who engage seriously with questions of transcendence. But they do so in a way that is fully aware of the postmodern situation: the loss of metaphysical guarantees and the rejection of intellectual abstraction as a genuine mode of existence.

In these thinkers, transcendence is not treated as an 'ultimate ground' or cosmic substrate, but as an irreducible implication of lived experience.

It’s also worth recalling the original meaning of the phenomenological epochē, as articulated by Husserl: the suspension of judgement with respect to what is not evident (which it has in common with ancient scepticism.) This suspension does not amount to a denial of the transcendent, nor does it imply that there is no ultimate ground. Rather, it refuses to speculate.

In that sense, phenomenology neither asserts nor rules out a “beyond”; it simply declines to turn what exceeds experience into a theoretical object. There’s something quite Buddhist about this also: a refusal to indulge metaphysical speculation, paired with an insistence on attending carefully to the nature of existence/experience moment-by-moment.

All that said, Maduro was responsible for a huge amount of suffering and economic degradation. Venezuelans have been reduced to living in poverty while he and his cronies squirrelled away the wealth of the nation in their private accounts. His wife owns entire neighborhoods in Caracas according to reports.

The other thing is, the extraction and incarceration of Maduro hardly provides a template for Trump’s other stated aims of ‘taking Greenland’ or ‘overthrowing the Colombian government’. Those are very different in size and scope. The extraction was very specific with a clear outcome and a limited theatre of operations. Occupations and regime changes are far more expansive and open-ended. One hopes that Trump’s musings on those ideas are just braggadocio.

True.

Assuming that they were right and that 'Nirvana without remaineder' de facto coincides with oblivion, there is no 'transcendent' goal there. — boundless

There is a Mahāyāna sutra that explicitly rejects that idea. It would be a form of nihilism.

Venezuela is among the wealthiest in the world in that regard. — Christoffer

Everything I'm reading is that while Venezuela has huge oil reserves, it is uniformly said to be 'heavy, sulfurous and hard to refine'. And the world is not actually short of oil at the moment.

I think the credible motivation is that there was some real Maduro hawks in the Administration - notably Marco Rubio himself - and Trump was infuriated by Maduro's dancing around on television like nobody could touch him. 'That'll learn him'. I can hear him saying it.

As for the Venezuelan government, it's been practically eviscerated by decades of corruption and mismanagement. I wouldn't be surprised if, in fact, nothing much happens. I don't think anyone on either side has much of a clue, let alone a plan.

Rubio was visibly infuriated when a reporter kept pressing him on what it means that all the other enablers around Maduro are still in place. Trump might have been wanting to cut the head off the snake, but what if the snake is a Medusa?

At her swearing in Rodrigues was flanked by Diosdado Cabello (who controls the intelligence services and the party apparatus) and Vladimir Padrino López (who commands the military). And what about the generals? Presumably they've been kept compliant with their share of the looted national wealth. Be interesting to see how they react if that is seriously threatened.

For Husserl and Heidegger, the mistake lies in taking “the physical world” as something already fully constituted as neutral, objective, and affectless, and then asking how consciousness gets added to it. That picture is a theoretical abstraction derived from scientific practice, not a description of the world as it is originally given. The world is first encountered as meaningful, relevant, and affectively structured. Neutral objectivity is a derivative achievement, produced by bracketing relevance, concern, and involvement, not the metaphysical ground floor. — Joshs

I think this is the key, and that it can be situated historically. This is why Husserl's book The Crisis of the European Sciences is important. He says this is all implicated in 'the scientific worldview' that characterises modernity. Not only is it a different worldview, it is also a different sense of the nature of reality, which insinuates itself into all aspects of culture. This is also very central to Bitbol's work.

His line of argument is that there are three eyes, or modes of knowledge: the sensory or empirical mode, rational thinking and contemplation. — Jack Cummins

I'm pretty sure Wilber was drawing on the traditionalist concept of the 'eye of reason'. The 'eye of reason' is what enables us to see 'the ideas' or 'forms'. Often referred to as the "eye of the soul" or omma tēs psychēs it is a metaphor used to describe our ability to understand higher (that is, rational) truths.

Plato argued that just as our physical eyes need light (from the sun) to see material objects, our minds need truth (from the "Form of the Good") to 'see Ideas'. The 'eye of the flesh' sees changing, decaying things (i.e, material particulars). The Eye of Reason (Nous) "sees" eternal, unchanging realities (like the mathematical concept of a Circle or the Idea of Justice). This is why, when you grasp an idea, you say "I see".

In ancient Greek, Nous is often translated as "intellect" or "mind." However, it isn't just "thinking" in the sense of calculating or arguing. Instead, Nous is the capacity for direct intuition.

Acording to Plato there are different levels of knowing. Dianoia is "step-by-step" reasoning (like solving a math equation and mathematical knowledge generally).

Nous and noesis - this is the "Aha!" moment where you suddenly grasp the underlying principle or the "essence" of the thing itself. It is described as a "touching" or "seeing" of the truth.

For Platonists, the "Ideas" (or Forms) are the perfect blueprints of reality. We cannot see "Beauty" herself with our eyes—we only see beautiful people or paintings. But through refining insight and philosophical training, the philosopher is able to metaphorically "gaze upon" beauty herself.

The eye of reason is the tool the soul uses to "look past" the physical version and contemplate the perfect version that exists in the realm of the Intellect.

if happiness [εὐδαιμονία, eudomonia] consists in activity in accordance with virtue, it is reasonable that it should be activity in accordance with the highest virtue; and this will be the virtue of the best part of us. Whether then this be the Intellect [νοῦς, nous], or whatever else it be that is thought to rule and lead us by nature, and to have cognizance of what is noble and divine, either as being itself also actually divine, or as being relatively the divinest part of us, it is the activity of this part of us in accordance with the virtue proper to it that will constitute perfect happiness; and it has been stated already* that this activity is the activity of contemplation [θεωρητική, theoria]. — Nichomachean Ethics, Aristotle

The other point that might be mentioned is that today's scientific rationalism is very different to classical rationalism. It always seeks grounding in empirical (experimental or observational) evidence, whereas classical rationalism was more of a purely intellectual nature.

The One is often said to be beyond good and evil — Art48

'Beyond the vicissitudes' is preferable. On the plane of born existence, all goods have their opposite - pleasure and pain, life and death, good and bad. But the One is said to be 'the good that has no opposite.' Paired with that is the doctrine of 'evil as the privation of the good': evil has no inherent reality but is the consequence of privation of the Good. Realising the 'good that has no opposite' is, in philosophical spirituality, the end of the search.

Often. He attributes that quote to him.

As for your other comments - perhaps look at the original post if you haven’t already rather than the passage in isolation?

Regarding the pre-existence of the world I discuss that in the Mind Created World.(I will come back later it’s late in my time zone.)

A crib sheet of the major points of Husserl’s Crlsis of the European Sciences from Part 1.2:

1. Galileo’s mathematization of nature - The founding moment where nature becomes idealized as a mathematical manifold, creating a “garb of ideas” that we mistake for nature itself
2. The split between primary and secondary qualities - Mathematical properties are treated as the “true” nature of things, while experiential qualities become merely subjective
3. The dualism of res extensa and res cogitans (Descartes) - Reality splits into extended substance (objective world) and thinking substance (subjective mind)
4. The paradox of subjectivity - The knowing subject who constructs this objective science cannot find itself within the objective world it has created
5. The failure of rationalism and empiricism - Both traditions attempt to resolve this but remain trapped within objectivism
6. The crisis proper - Science becomes increasingly successful technically but loses meaning for human life; it cannot answer questions about the meaning of human existence

This was developed in diverse ways by his successors but those central points remained influential.

I don't consider myself expert in Husserl, but no, I don't think his 'eidectic seeing' amounts to any kind of mysticism. It's concerned with grasping the essential features of particulars, so as to see what they truly are. The Platonist heritage is straightforward, although Husserl didn't endorse any idea of a 'platonic realm'.

I have noticed a taboo on this forum around transcendence — Punshhh

Totally with you there. Many will insist that 'immanent' is OK, but 'transcendent' is not, without realising that they are actually a pair - transcendent is to immanent as hills are to valleys.

Drug smuggling is a pretext for striking Venezuela, as it is a minority player in that business. And besides Trump pardoned a genuine large-scale cocaine trafficker only a couple of weeks ago.

The interesting question is whether and how the US is going to put Venezuela under colonial administration which is presumably what ‘running the place’ will require.

And this is what Kastrup says? Or what Kastrup says Schopenhauer says? — Mww

Difficult to say without referring to the book.

I asked my friend Chuck about where Schopenhauer differs with Kant on knowledge of the self. The response:

“For Immanuel Kant, the self appears in two fundamentally different ways:

1. Empirical self:
• The self as it appears in inner sense
• A sequence of mental states in time
• Fully phenomenal, subject to causality


2. Transcendental self (the “I think”)
• The condition of the unity of experience
• Not an object, not knowable, not describable
• A necessary function, not a thing

Kant insists that we have no knowledge whatsoever of the self as it is in itself. Even inner sense gives us only appearances. The noumenal self is strictly unknowable.

This is where Schopenhauer parts company. Schopenhauer’s core claim: we know ourselves twice

For Schopenhauer, the self is given in two irreducibly different ways:

(a) As representation

• I know myself as an object in the world
• As a body in space, with mental states in time
• Governed by causality, like everything else

This much Schopenhauer accepts straight from Kant.

(b) As will

• I know myself immediately as willing
• Not by observation, inference, or representation
• But through lived striving, desire, effort, pain

This second access is non-representational. It is not knowledge of something, but by being something.”

Much of this is elaborated by later phenomenology and existentialism (particularly Sartre).

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!
— Wayfarer
Well, that's a good point. But doesn't idealism fall into the same trap in reverse? — Ludwig V

There’s a difficult point at issue here so bear with me. It is often said that ‘materialism says that everything is physical, and idealism that everything is mind or mental.’ That they are therefore structurally similar albeit constructed around different ontological elements. That dualism is exactly what phenomenology seeks to avoid. From the OP:

But if consciousness is not a “something,” it is also not a “nothing.” It is neither a useful fiction, nor a byproduct of neural processes, nor a ghostly residue awaiting physical explanation. Instead, says Bitbol, it is the self-evidential medium within which all knowledge about objects, laws, and physical reality arise (here the convergence with Kant is manifest). Any attempt to treat consciousness as derivative — as some thing that “comes from” matter — therefore reverses the real order of dependence. The world of objects may be doubted, corrected, or revised; but the presence of experience itself, here and now, cannot be disconfirmed. — Wayfarer

Also notice here the convergence with Descartes’ cogito ergo sum - with the caveat that Husserl, the founder of phenomenology, thought that even though Descartes original insight was true, his tendency to ‘objectify’ the mind as ‘res cogitans’ (‘thinking thing’) introduces a fatal category error that was to plague post-Cartesian philosophy. Something which Kant, and later Husserl, took great pains to untangle. (Husserl published a book ‘Cartesian Meditations’.)

If instead we claim that the phrase ‘physical world’ is not describing a world that is real in the sense of being real independent of our conscious interaction with it, then we are doing phenomenology. This dissolves the dualism of the hard problem by showing there to be a single underlying process of experiencing accounting for the historical decision to bifurcate the world into concepts like ‘physically real’ and ‘real in other ways’. — Joshs

Sure, agree. I hope all of that is made clear in the original post.

Thank you :pray: I’m still trying to come to grips with the epochē and need to read some more. Whatever grip I have of the idea comes from its similarity to Buddhist mindfulness/emptiness practices - as noted in the OP, Husserl wrote glowingly of abhidharma. And there are many convergences between phenomenology and Buddhism, generally. I am planning to write a third essay on Bitbol and Madhyamaka Buddhism (following the next on his philosophy of science, which is in the approvals queue at Philosophy Today,)

But I don’t really get Husserl’s ‘eidetic vision’ and the ‘grasping of essences’. From reading around a little, I don’t think this aspect of Husserl’s endeavour really took root, many of his successors criticised it or sought to embellish or vary it. As for Michel Bitbol, though, I haven’t encountered anything yet which speaks in those terms.

But one takeaway is that both phenomenology and Buddhism are very much concerned with philosophy as lived, as it informs day to day or moment to moment existence.

if Kastrup says Schopenhauer says we know something of the noumena because we are instances of it, he is in utter and complete conflict with Kant, who was the originator of the modern version of both noumena and ding an sich, and possibly in some conflict with Schopenhauer in that the latter only concerns himself with the fact Kant disavows any possible knowledge of the thing-in-itself, which Schopenhauer argues we certainly do, iff the thing-in-itself is represented as will, which has nothing to do with noumena in the Kantian sense at all. — Mww

I don’t think he does. I have Kastrup’s book Decoding Schopenhauer’s Metaphysics, and he’s very careful not to misrepresent. Kastrup isn’t saying that Schopenhauer overturns Kant by gaining theoretical knowledge of noumena. Schopenhauer accepts Kant’s critique of object-knowledge, but not Kant’s assumption that all knowledge must be objectifying. Will is not a noumenon in the Kantian sense, nor an object behind appearances, but what is disclosed in immediate self-awareness prior to representation. The conflict with Kant is therefore deliberate and principled, not a confusion — and Kastrup’s reading tracks this distinction rather carefully.

Whilst I respect the sentiment, the phenomenological stance is not really reliant on such concepts as soul or spirit, or at least it doesn't use that terminology. It is critical of naturalism, but from a philosophical perspective. The 'primacy of consciousness' doesn't equate to acceptance of the Vedantic 'ātman' - it is grounded in the recognition that 'the world is inconceivable apart from consciousness' because it is disclosed through consciousness (per the above quote). That doesn't falsify such ideas, but it tries to express them more within the rubric of philosophy.

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?