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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Any questions, don't hesitate to ask.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Another gem from Collingwood (p46)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The point is, it's a glaring contradiction:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

:clap: Exemplary piece of philosophical analysis.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That's all I have on Collingwood.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rödl’s ‘science uberhaupt’ comes to mind.

And, Happy New Year

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

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

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

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

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

----

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

Happy New Year, regardless. :party:

Whereas yours is more of a clenched fist :lol:

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

By the way I'm not saying I agree with Kastrup, but I do think his kind of idealism at least has explanatory power that most other forms don't. I don't agree with him that physicalism is necessarily "baloney". — Janus

Well that covers all the bases, doesn’t it ;-)

Of course―nothing could be more obvious―that is precisely what is to be explained. — Janus

Why is to be explained? By what is it to be explained? As it happens, I wrote a Medium essay on precisely this topic, explaining how Buddhist philosophy shows that there is no need to posit a 'mind at large'. Gift link, from which

the Universe doesn’t exist outside consciousness, but neither does it not exist, so there is no need to posit any agency to explain its supposedly ‘continued’ existence.³ The continuity that science establishes is also a function of the subjective intellect, or, should we say, the inter-subjective intellect, as it is by nature shared by human beings across culture and history.

Incidentally, in respect of neurological modelling of first-person experience, take a look at The Neural Binding Problem, specifically The Subjective Unity of Perception. It acknowledges the hard problem of consciousness, saying that 'enough is known about the structure and function of the visual system to rule out any detailed neural representation that embodies the subjective experience'.

This is a challenge to physicalism about all non-physical items, but it's particularly stinging here because mathematical laws are supposed to be basic and explanatory. How does that square with a physicalist conception of what exists? — J

Really this is one of the central points of E A Burtt's book, although he tends to imply it rather than state it in such bald terms. There's a hidden metaphysical assumption behind the modern idea that the Universe is solely physical.

A good follow up from Burtt is Husserl, Crisis of the European Sciences. That said, it's an extremely dense and detailed book - one of those books to know about if not necessarily read in full. (I outlaid for a copy but have never read the whole thing.) Husserl too sees the pivotal importance of Galileo's 'mathematicization of nature' in modern thought, at the cost of forgetting the subject to whom science is meaningful. The wiki article.

For millennia, various traditions have been trying to accomplish this (i.e. 'divine union'). But the practitioners still answer to their individual names, and it's said the goal can't be achieved while alive. — Patterner

The discussion was the emergence of consciousness as the 'self-other' distinction basic to the emergence of organic life. It is also a basic theme in phenomenology.

The issue is not that he wants to engage in a critique of reason, but that his critique relies on a normatively binding use of reason to establish limits, while simultaneously denying reason any standing to make normatively binding claims about reality — Esse Quam Videri

I think your concerns about ‘the discarding of reason’ are perhaps overblown. Bitbol is not trying to establish normative limits on reality in the Kantian sense of legislating what can or cannot be the case tout court. Rather, he is diagnosing a performative incoherence in a specific epistemic stance —namely, the assumption that consciousness (I actually prefer ‘mind’) can be treated as a fully objective explanandum from inside the very practices that presuppose lived experience. Phenomenology, generally, is dealing with the philosophical conundrums that arise from 'objectification'.

Well, that is an impressive research program! Not questioning that, at all. There is an explosion of similar kinds of research under the heading 'consciousness studies'. One of the triggers was the 1996 publication of David Chalmer's essay Facing up to the Problem of Consciousness'. This was the paper that articulated the 'hard problem' of consciousness. So as not to get bogged down in too many digressions, it is worth recapitulating some of the key ideas and paragraphs from this paper.

One is the contrast between 'easy problems' and 'the problem of consciousness'. Chalmers says the 'easy problems' - problems which easily admit of a scientific explanation - are:

*the ability to discriminate, categorize, and react to environmental stimuli;
*the integration of information by a cognitive system;
*the reportability of mental states;
*the ability of a system to access its own internal states;
*the focus of attention;
*the deliberate control of behavior;
*the difference between wakefulness and sleep.

He says 'There is no real issue about whether these phenomena can be explained scientifically. All of them are straightforwardly vulnerable to explanation in terms of computational or neural mechanisms.'

But, he goes on:

The really hard problem of consciousness is the problem of experience. When we think and perceive, there is a whir of information-processing, but there is also a subjective aspect. As Nagel (1974) has put it, there is something it is like to be a conscious organism. This subjective aspect is experience. When we see, for example, we experience visual sensations: the felt quality of redness, the experience of dark and light, the quality of depth in a visual field. Other experiences go along with perception in different modalities: the sound of a clarinet, the smell of mothballs. Then there are bodily sensations, from pains to orgasms; mental images that are conjured up internally; the felt quality of emotion, and the experience of a stream of conscious thought. What unites all of these states is that there is something it is like to be in them. All of them are states of experience.

It is undeniable that some organisms are subjects of experience. But the question of how it is that these systems are subjects of experience is perplexing. Why is it that when our cognitive systems engage in visual and auditory information-processing, we have visual or auditory experience: the quality of deep blue, the sensation of middle C? How can we explain why there is something it is like to entertain a mental image, or to experience an emotion? It is widely agreed that experience arises from a physical basis, but we have no good explanation of why and how it so arises. Why should physical processing give rise to a rich inner life at all? It seems objectively unreasonable that it should, and yet it does.

If any problem qualifies as the problem of consciousness, it is this one. In this central sense of "consciousness", an organism is conscious if there is something it is like to be that organism, and a mental state is conscious if there is something it is like to be in that state.

I should note, I think 'the hard problem' is a polemical or rhetorical construct. It's purpose is only to point out that the first-person, experiential quality of experience can never be properly captured from a third-person perspective. So it's not a problem to be solved, in that sense, and (some have said) a misuse of the term 'problem' on those grounds (i.e. properly described, it is a mystery, not a problem.) But I'm bringing this in, because it serves to focus on what exactly is at issue in many of these discussions.

So – what would be Bitbol’s critique of this investigation? — Questioner

I can't speak for Michel Bitbol, but I will point out that phenomenology is usually found in these programs, for the reasons given above. Chalmers is not himself associated with phenomenology but many other researchers in the field are. This is in recognition of the criticism of phenomenology, that the third-person accounts of conscious experience must necessarily omit something of fundamental importance.

Key Concepts in the Phenomenological Approach to Consciousness Studies

Researchers often use several key "tools" or concepts derived from classical phenomenology (like that of Edmund Husserl or Maurice Merleau-Ponty):

Intentionality: The idea that consciousness is always "consciousness of something." Every mental act has an object (a thought, a feeling, or a physical thing).

The Epoché (Bracketing): The practice of setting aside "natural" assumptions about the external world to focus strictly on how a phenomenon presents itself to the mind.

Neurophenomenology: A modern sub-field (popularized by Francisco Varela) that seeks to "naturalize" phenomenology by using rigorous first-person descriptions to help scientists understand brain activity patterns.

So, the opposition here is not between 'phenomenology and science'. It's between 'phenomenology and reductive materialism', where 'reductive materialism' is the belief that the first-person nature of subjective experience is insignificant or secondary to the objective description. Daniel Dennett is the natural foil for these arguments, as he believes that first-person consciousness is essentially derivative from unconscious cellular processes.

Can Bitbol’s claims be tested? — Questioner

Not relevant. Falsifiability is a criterion used to distinguish empirical from non-empirical claims. Bitbol's arguments are not empirical arguments, but are based on reasoned inference from the apodictic nature of first-person experience.

Are you talking about something like Tegmark's mathematical universe? — T Clark

Nothing so exotic as that. Any mathematical expression of natural laws will serve as an example. F=ma for instance. If you measure the behaviour of matter it will behave according to that formula (within limits). But this relies on precise abstraction, measurement and quantification which are all intellectual acts. We look at the objects through the theory. Physical systems instantiate regularities;
scientific laws articulate those regularities in mathematical form. The laws themselves are not physical objects but ideal structures, grasped through intellectual acts of abstraction and measurement.
To treat laws as physical is to confuse what is described with the means of description.

Which is one of the themes in Burtt’s book. He’s making explicit the implicit metaphysics of modern science.

‘The promissory notes of materialism’

The Infancy Gospel of Thomas — Ciceronianus

not to be confused with the Nag Hammadi 'Gospel of Thomas'.

…
[2] The universe consists entirely of physical substances - matter and energy.
[3] These substances behave in accordance with scientific principles, laws.
[4] Scientific laws are mathematical in nature …
— T Clark

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

Another question is about your understanding of ‘formal and final causation’. These are of course part of Aristotelian philosophy, generally deprecated after Galileo, but are making something of a comeback in biological sciences. This is because of the somewhat obvious fact that organisms are generally goal-directed in their activities.

Plato would be right.

However, the very notion of the objective world described by the empirical sciences is itself a product of selective abstraction — what Bitbol calls the end-product of the procedure of objectification. Why? Because science methodically brackets out the subjective pole of observation so as to arrive at an intersubjective consensus about the observer-independent attributes of the object. But when this methodology is applied to the question of the nature of consciousness, it turns around and tries to explain conscious experience in terms of that consensus.

Okay, trying to parse this – he’s saying that science can never explain the conscious experience because it focuses on the object rather than the subject? But scientists are subjects themselves?

Someone help me out here. What’s he saying? — Questioner

I've only just now noticed this earlier comment of yours, and I commend you for it.

The idea is that modern science assumes a strict division between the scientist/experimenter/subject and the object of analysis, such that the object exists the same for any and all observers, and the role and/or presence of the observer can be disregarded.

Yes, scientists are subjects themselves, but in the typically modern view of science, their presence is 'bracketed out' so as to derive an observation which will be the same for all observers. So the subjectivity of the scientist is ruled irrelevant.

The paradigmatic example is, of course, modern physics, which is where this whole approach got started, in the work of Galileo, who also introduced the idea of 'primary qualities'. These are those qualities which are amenable to precise qualitative measurement - mass, velocity, momentum, and so on. How the object appears is said to be explained in terms of 'secondary qualities' - color, taste, scent, and so on. This was then combined with the dualism of René Descartes with the distinction between matter (res extensa) and mind (res cogitans), to produce the characteristic paradigm of early modern science:

The modern mind-body problem arose out of the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, as a direct result of the concept of objective physical reality that drove that revolution. Galileo and Descartes made the crucial conceptual division by proposing that physical science should provide a mathematically precise quantitative description of an external reality extended in space and time, a description limited to spatiotemporal primary qualities such as shape, size, and motion, and to laws governing the relations among them. Subjective appearances, on the other hand -- how this physical world appears to human perception -- were assigned to the mind, and the secondary qualities like color, sound, and smell were to be analyzed relationally, in terms of the power of physical things, acting on the senses, to produce those appearances in the minds of observers. It was essential to leave out or subtract subjective appearances and the human mind -- as well as human intentions and purposes -- from the physical world in order to permit this powerful but austere spatiotemporal conception of objective physical reality to develop. — Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos, Pp 35-36

Who’s disconfirming the presence of experience? If that is the criterion for determining that consciousness is absolute, then he has made an error in his understanding of the present state of neuroscience, thus nullifying his conclusion. — Questioner

According to whom does the 'present state of neuroscience' accomodate the foundational role of first-person experience?

Reductive materialism is the view that the mind is 'nothing but' the activities of neural matter and that as knowledge of neuroscience develops, so too will the grasp of this correlation..Wayfarer

I wonder why this is so threatening to some people? — "

Because it's not true, yet a very large number of intelligent people seem to accept that it is. And because ideas have consequences.

I didn’t see that the article spoke of philosophical challenges, but rather the problem of reconciling the materialist view of consciousness with quantum mechanics – which was not touched on at all in the OP. — Questioner

Actually, in the Michel Bitbol paper that the article draws on, the last of the 'six arguments' is that from modern physics. He says that the context-dependent nature of the findings of quantum physics mitigates against the idea of a 'material substrate' which can be used as an explanation for consciousness.

Some philosophers who defend a “physicalist” view may be...saying something like this: “Consciousness is matter-based in a very general sense : it emerges from whatever physics describes as fundamental, be it a quantized field”. But the problem is not solved by this further flexibility. For, as I mentioned previously about the interpretation of quantum mechanics, modern physics cannot even be said to “describe” anything completely independently of the experimental and intellectual tools of investigation: it just affords a way of systematic prediction of what occurs if this investigation is carried out; and it establishes reproducible relations between these predictions. What is taken as objective by modern physics is no longer a conception of the ultimate stuff of which the world is made, but the very network of mathematical tools by which we can collectively anticipate the outcome of our most refined actions. — Michel Bitbol

This is implicit in 'the observer problem' in quantum physics, which undercuts the strict subject-object distinction which Galileo had introduced. Which is why strict scientific realists, like Sir Roger Penrose, say that quantum theory must be wrong or incomplete.

The (Adam Frank) article goes on to say that physics from the psi-epistemologist is no longer a description of the world in-and-of itself. Instead, it’s a description of the rules for our interaction with the world.

Rules? What rules? — Questioner

The Born Rule is a principle one.

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Do you think there is ever going to be a paradigm that does not have self and other? What does it mean to not have self-other? Will all minds and consciousnesses merge into one? — Patterner

I can only say that 'transcending the self-other distinction' is a recurring motif in mysticism and the perennial philosophies, generally. That is why 'Nirvāṇa without remainder' is said to be only possible on the far side of death.

What is your vision off the future? Will we no longer use the sciences that developed by ignoring consciousness? Will we not live in houses, not use electricity, not use propulsion systems and math to launch ships to Mars and beyond? — Patterner

I don't believe interstellar travel is at all feasible for terrestrial creatures such as ourselves. We might be able to send ultrasmall computers via laser energy, but we'll never send large metal and composite material vessels with living organisms in them. Mars is a possibility, but the idea of colonizing Mars is a Musk fever dream. (I'm writing a 'psi-phi' novel on this very theme at the moment, although constantly sidetracking myself with forum posts.)

The fact that our sense organs and brains are similarly constituted can explain how it is that we see things in similar ways, but it cannot explain just what we see. The content of perception, that is what is perceivable which animals also perceive in their different ways, is contributed by the world, whether that world is physical or mental. — Janus

I’m not claiming that perceptual convergence explains what ultimately exists; I’m claiming that any account of what exists has to start from the fact that the world is first given as a shared
field of perception, not as a metaphysical posit. And that there is no self-existence material substance in terms of which the nature of experience can be explained. No account that treats matter as a self-existent, third-person substance can explain experience, because experience is not one of the things that substance-description captures (which is, of course, stating the hard problem of consciousness again).

I do not argue against the existence of any one thing that we can apprehend, either by sense or reflection. That the things I see with my eyes and touch with my hands do exist, really exist, I make not the least question. The only thing whose existence we deny is that which philosophers call ‘matter’ or ‘corporeal substance’. — Bishop Berkeley

And besides, we do now know what happens when you drill down on apparently solid matter to the most fundamental elements. I don't have to say again what has been discovered.

He (Hegel) would say the ultimate truth is the Absolute, which is a state of unity in which there is no thought because there are no divisions. — frank

That rings true to me, even though I can't claim to really understand it.

unconscious reality only has a third person perspective, — hypericin

From whence do the pre-sentient denizens of the cosmos derive 'a perspective'? Unlike our various panpsychist friends, I'm loath to admit they have any: consciousness is required for there to be any kind of perspective.

From phenomenology of biology, in particular Hans Jonas' book on that - the most rudimentary of organisms distinguishes 'self from other' in a way that no non-organic matter does. It is the very first thing that an organism must do to maintain itself against the relentless onslaught of entropy. That, I see, as the fundamental emergence of consciousness, on a very rudimentary level, although not of sentience, which comes later.

Unless there wasn't a time when consciousness didn't exist. If it is fundamental, a property of things, as, for example, mass and charge are, then it was always there — Patterner

My hesitation with this line of panpsychism is that it extends the concept of matter so as to include consciousness as an attribute, rather than questioning the object-centred metaphysics that made consciousness invisible in the first place. From a phenomenological standpoint, consciousness isn’t something that can be injected retrospectively into an already third-person model of reality. Any framework that begins by screening out subjectivity — as the physicalist model has done — will inevitably fail when it later tries to reintroduce it as a fundamental property alongside mass or charge.

That is why thinkers like Michel Bitbol press the need for a change of stance or attitude. This form of panpsychism still retains the self–other, subject–object paradigm that underlies naturalism; it simply enriches the inventory of properties without questioning the framing itself.

In that sense, even the question “what is consciousness?” is improper if it is posed within that same objectifying register. (It's what don't like about Anikka Harris and Galen Strawson, who are trying to rehabilitate physicalism, rather than seeing through it, mainly, I suspect, out of the fear of religion.)

As I've said on these forums many times an idealism that does not posit universal mind in some form is incoherent and cannot explain what is clear to us from everyday experience―that we live in a shared world. — Janus

But it can, though. We live in a shared world, because we have highly convergent minds, sensory systems, and languages. So we will converge on similar understandings of what is real, due to those shared elements. I mean, genetically, we're all identical, up until the top-most layer of differentiation.

There's a thought-experiment I will give to make this point. Imagine a sentient mountain. Mountains have lifespans of hundreds of millions of years. From the perspective of a sentient mountain, humans are far too ephemeral and small to even notice. Rivers, you will notice, because they'll be around long enough to carve out ravines in your sides. But humans are to a mountain as microbes are to humans.

Speaking of microbes, if there were rational sentient microbes then the scale of human existence would likely also be incomprehensible. Humans would be so vast, and their life-spans so long, they would seem like solar systems to humans.

So, there are shared worlds, on many levels. There's this human world, which is shared by the other billions of humans. But the fact that we inhabit a shared world says nothing about its ultimate nature, whether and in what sense it has a reality above and beyond the sensory and experiential data that we receive and interpret. Kastrup's criticism of materialism is that it posits something beyond and outside those experiential states which account for those states, as being somehow fundamental and ontologically prior to the mind which receives and interprets these data.

The appeal to a universal mind does not arise from idealism as such, but from the attempt to preserve the intuition that the world must exist in the same way when unobserved as when observed. But that intuition is inherited from realism, not established by argument. Once we recognise that any account of what the world is “in itself” already deploys the cognitive resources of the mind, the supposed need for a universal observer evaporates.

As Zen puts it, “Mind is no mind.” That seems to me exactly the point here — mind is not something we can turn into an object, whether individual or universal, even though experience is always for a mind. The mind is the ever-present subject, nowhere to be found.

For long stretches of time, during normatively stable periods within a science or a culture, there is but one or a handful of related accepted ways to model truth and error. — Joshs

There’s an anecdote I sometimes re-tell that bears on this point. It concerns the arrival of the Endeavour in Botany Bay during James Cook’s voyage in 1770. Joseph Banks noted in his journal that a group of Indigenous people camped on the shoreline, roughly a mile away, showed no reaction at all to the ship’s presence. It was only some hours later, when a small boat was launched and rowed toward the shore, that they began to respond.

The point is not that the ship was misinterpreted. It seems not to have been interpreted at all — until the small boat entered the space of possible interaction. Only then did it cross the threshold from ignored anomaly to meaningful presence, presumably because its scale and form bore at least some resemblance to a canoe. (That part is conjectural, of course, but the lack of any initial reaction was a recorded fact.)

There’s another anecdote, often attributed to the anthropologist Colin Turnbull, concerning a chieftain from a forest-dwelling group in central Africa who was taken by car to a mountain lookout. After some time, he knelt down and began pawing at the ground in front of him. According to the translator, this was because distant herds of savanna animals were being interpreted as small creatures nearby — the result of a lifetime spent in dense forest, where visual depth rarely extends beyond a few metres.

Taken together, these strike me as illustrations of what one might call cognitive relativity: the way an underlying cognitive framework conditions how visual phenomena are interpreted — or, in the first case, ignored altogether. On a far more sophisticated level, Einstein was making essentially the same point when he insisted that theory determines what can be observed — something Manjit Kumar discusses in Quantum, and which influenced Heisenberg early on. The claim isn’t that observation is subjective, but that intelligibility comes first: a framework has to be in place before anything can count as “what is observed.”

I’m not endorsing out-and-out relativism here — I think there are real constraints and non-negotiable elements in experience. But these examples are a useful reminder to keep an open mind about the limits imposed by our own frameworks. It is especially relevant in discussions of phenomenology, which is very sensitive to the way that the implicit metaphysics of day-to-day culture shape our attitudes to experience.

You can hear them scream! — Patterner

Unless yours is the hand holding one end, in which case the shriek will be yours.

I can't help but remind myself that the 'puzzlement/wonder' it creates is a motivator for trying to go beyond that. So, as a way to solve the antinomy, I propose that we need to accept both stories and reconcile them. Yes, our consciousness is contingent, is ontologically dependent etc and it can't be the ground of 'intelligibility' of ourselves and the 'external world' (and also the 'empirical world', at the end of the day). But at the same time, I take seriously the other 'side' of the antinomy and I also affirm that intelligibility seems to be grounded in consciousness. However, in order to get a 'coherent story' that includes both insights, I acknowledge that I have to posit a consciousness of some sort that can truly be regarded as the ground of intelligibility. — boundless

I hear you! Obviously this is a deep and difficult question, but again, my orientation is shaped by my reading of Buddhist philosophy. You will recall that there is an unequivocal statement in the Pali texts, to wit, 'there is, monks, an unborn, unmade, unfabricated', and that if there were not, there would be no possibility of escape from the born, the made, the fabricated (reference). 'There is!' Of course, what that means - what precisely is the unborn, unconditioned - is beyond discursive reason. Probably also out of scope of naturalism, which puts it out-of-bounds for most here.

Nagarjuna goes beyond phenomenologists. — boundless

He does indeed. I'm also reading some of Bitbol's essays on Buddhism and he acknowledges this. That will be the subject of the third essay (if the next two are accepted by Philosophy Today.)

It invites the question: are these claims about the way things really are? I think this is a tender point for Bitbol. He wants to gatekeep the bounds of reason, but in order to do this he needs to grant reason a level of authority that he also seemingly wants to deny to it. If reason has the power to say what is unconditionally the case when engaging in critique, then how can we deny it that same power when it comes to ontology?...Does my critique of Bitbol hit the mark? — Esse Quam Videri

What exactly is he discerning in this essay? Bitbol is not claiming that he can determine what reality is like independently of experience. Notice at the outset, he says 'no alternative metaphysical view is advanced.' He is claiming that reason can notice when it has overstepped its bounds by mistaking the conditions of experience for objects within experience. That critique does not establish an alternative ontology - it is ameliorative rather than constructive. The aim is only to show the mistake inherent in trying to treat the issue of the nature of consciousness in objective terms, as the subject matter is categorically different. I don't think he's challenging naturalism when it comes to its legitimate subjects of interest, but its missapplication in philosophy of mind. All of which was anticipated by Husserl in his transcendentalist phase.

Nāgārjuna isn't really proposing a philosophy in the modern sense of the word, but rather something more like a path of liberation from philosophy (in the modern sense of the word). — Esse Quam Videri

There's a Buddhist metaphor that comes to mind. This is that the Buddha's teaching is like the stick used to stir a fire to help get it burning. But when the fire is burning, the stick is tossed in. There's another simile, the 'simile of the raft'. This compares the dharma to a raft 'bound together from fragments of sticks and grasses' (hence, nothing high-falutin') which is used to 'cross over the river' but which is discarded when the crossing is accomplished (Alagaddupama Sutta.) This has been compared to Wittgenstein's 'ladder' metaphor, that philosophy is like a ladder that is discarded after having been climbed.

But what is that rock, really? Objectively, it does not appear as you see it. In reality, it, and all of reality, outside of human perception, it is a conglomeration of colourless particles and waves, a haze and maze of uncertainty that turns into certainty only when you observe it. (I have heard it described as wavelength collapse, but I don't know enough about it to comment.) — Questioner

I read your posts, generally, as common-sense realism. We're evolved hominids, the universe is governed by the laws of physics, mind arises from brain, in line with the principles of evolutionary biology, and so on. Things that everyone knows, or thinks they do. But it is just that common-sense realism which is being challenged here. Granted, it takes some background reading to get the drift of these challenges, but suffice to say, many popular claims about what science has established and understands in respect to the nature of consciousness are subject to criticism - not on empirical grounds, but on philosophical grounds, i.e. what they mean.

Reductive materialism is the view that the mind is 'nothing but' the activities of neural matter and that as knowledge of neuroscience develops, so too will the grasp of this correlation. That neural reductionist view is propounded by a group of influential scholars and academics and is also associated with the 'new atheist' writings of popular intellectuals such as Richard Dawkins. By this means, it is hoped to reduce the understanding of consciousness or mind, to the network of physical causation by which other natural phenomena are explained.

The phenomenological critique is not that neuroscientific or evolutionary accounts are factually mistaken, but that the reduction of the nature of mind to physical causation is an extra step that is not warranted by the evidence. But those arguments are lengthy and difficult to summarise in a forum post. Perhaps a good starting point would be this essay Minding Matter, Adam Frank, who is a professor of astronomy. It actually discusses in some detail, but in a reader-friendly way, the philosophical challenges that 'wavelength collapse' pose for reductionist materialism. But there are many other such arguments, including those discussed by Michel Bitbol in the essay that this OP is based on.

The experience depends on the brain, but the brain depends on the experience, but temporal order isn't an issue because time doesn't exist before the experience. So the appallingly offensive bootstrapping is perhaps permissible. I don't buy it, but you need to grasp the argument before dismissing it. — bert1

It has some support in physics.

The notion of evolution is not applicable to the universe as a whole since there is no external observer with respect to the universe, and there is no external clock that does not belong to the universe. However, we do not actually ask why the universe as a whole is evolving. We are just trying to understand our own experimental data. Thus, a more precisely formulated question is why do we see the universe evolving in time in a given way. In order to answer this question one should first divide the universe into two main pieces: i) an observer with his clock and other measuring devices and ii) the rest of the universe. Then it can be shown that the wave function of the rest of the universe does depend on the state of the clock of the observer, i.e. on his ‘time’. This time dependence in some sense is ‘objective’: the results obtained by different (macroscopic) observers living in the same quantum state of the universe and using sufficiently good (macroscopic) measuring apparatus agree with each other.

Thus we see that without introducing an observer, we have a dead universe, which does not evolve in time. This example demonstrates an unusually important role played by the concept of an observer in quantum cosmology. John Wheeler underscored the complexity of the situation, replacing the word observer by the word participant, and introducing such terms as a ‘self-observing universe’. — Andrei Linde, Inflation, Quantum Cosmology and the Anthropic Principle

If consciousness is not there from the beginning — Patterner

The problem is that 'there' is implicitly objectifying. It is locative. You're already orienting the discussion in terms of space-time by using it.

So there are necessary truths, sentences and such. Are there necessary individuals? — Banno

Individuals - the person, the ego, individual self - are contingent as a matter of necessity. Interesting that the term 'individual' used to denote the person only becomes current in the 17th century. 'In the Middle Ages, you wouldn't call a person an individual. Instead, the term was used to describe things that were units of a whole. For example, the Holy Trinity was described as "individual" because its three parts could not be separated. To be "individual" meant to be unified with others, not separate from them.' The meaning was practically reversed in the Enlightenment.

‘There are no necessary truths’ is self contradictory, because if it is true then it is necessarily so.

Right! I was going to add that the salient point of the Schopenhauer passage is the ‘co-arising of mind and world’ which becomes central in later phenomenology.