Sorry if this is muddy; it's hard to find the right way to express the problem. — J

I think there’s an inherent contradiction in the question you’re wanting to pose.

At issue was the discussion between Janus and myself, regarding ‘material conditions’ and in what sense the universe existed before human consciousness of it. (See the Merleau Ponty quotation in above).

The basic contention of phenomenology and also of transcendental idealism, is that the concept of ‘the world before humans existed’ is still a concept. So, on the empirical level, it is of course true that the universe pre-exists humans, there is abundant evidence of that. But the interpretation of the evidence into a coherent idea is still something that can only be done by a mind. Accordingly, we are not really seeing the world as it is (or would be) without any consciousness of it. Put another way, we are not seeing it as it is (or was) in itself, but as it appears to us. That does not make it an illusion, but it qualifies the sense in which it can be considered real.

Now I’ve been pressing this point in one form or another for years on this forum, and it often comes down to: ‘so, you’re saying “the mind is immaterial”? That is the question I was asked by Janus. It comes from the fact that I question scientific materialism as capable of providing a holistic account of the nature of existence. So if you question science, then you must believe that ‘the mind is immaterial’! And with that, goes the presumption that you probably believe in an afterlife:

You believe there is an afterlife, right? Why not be honest about what you believe and what your actual agenda is? — Janus

This is why I said that this question originates from the sense we all have (not unique to Janus), of the ‘real physical world described by science’, on the one hand, and the ‘mental picture of the world’, private and subjective, on the other. That is like a ‘master construct’, if you like, and very much a consequence of the Cartesian division between matter and mind. It is part of our ‘cultural grammar’, the subject-object division that lies at a deep level of our own self-understanding.

So I’m saying that the question comes out of ‘cultural conditioning’, and this is what happens when it is challenged.

let me see if I understand what you mean by "ineliminable" — J

it means, can't be eliminated from the reckoning. The salient point is again that in pursuit of objectivity, the presence or contribution of the subject is sought to be deprecated or 'bracketed out' so as to arrive at an ostensible 'view from nowhere', which is purportedly independent of any act of mind, existing 'in itself', so to speak.

We can imagine a world without any living things too, even though only a living thing can do any imagining at all. Unless one is a panpsychist, there was no consciousness in the early universe. — J

Of course we can imagine it. It can be modelled with high degrees of precision. But as I said in the mind-created world OP, that still requires or implies a perspective. If you take away all perspective, so that no point in the panorama is nearer or further, so that there is no scale, and then you take away all sense of duration, so that there are no units of time, and no distinction between past, present and future - then what remains to be imagined?

Hence Kant 'take away the thinking subject and the whole world must vanish'. Not because it has become suddenly non-existent, where previously it was existent, but because it is outside any conception of existence or non-existence. The mind provides that scale and perspective even to imagine a world with no concsious being in it. But we don't see it, of course, because we're looking through it, not at it. Hence the 'change of stance' that is required by phenomenology.

Hence:

Husserl argues that transcendental consciousness does not emerge at some point in the empirical history of the world along with living things. It doesnt precede the world either. Rather, it is co-determinative of history. Heidegger makes a similar argument about Being. — Joshs

“The world is inseparable from the subject, but from a subject who is nothing but a project of the world; and the subject is inseparable from the world, but from a world that it itself projects.” (Maurice Merleau-Ponty) This statement is meant to clear a path between two extremes. One is the idea that there is a world only for or in consciousness (idealism). The other is the idea that the world exists ready-made and comes pre-sorted into kinds or categories apart from experience (realism). Instead of these two extremes, Merleau-Ponty proposes that each one of the two terms, the conscious subject and the world, makes the other one what it is, and thus they inseparably form a larger whole. In philosophical terms, their relationship is dialectical.

The world Merleau-Ponty is talking about is the life-world, the world we’re able to perceive, investigate, and act in. The subject projects the world because it brings forth the world as a space of meaning and relevance. But the subject can project the world only because the subject inheres in a body already oriented to and engaged with a world that surpasses it. The bodily subject is not just in the world but also of the world. The bodily subject is a project of the world, a way the world locally self-organizes and self-individuates to constitute a living being — Excerpt from The Blind Spot - Adam Frank, Marcelo Gleiser, Evan Thompson

Is there a particular question you'd like to focus on from the OP? — bert1

Nothing in particular. Just the basic stance of phenomenology, as outlined in the various quotes and references and the questions that have come up.

So how would this influence the advance of a scientific understanding of mental processes? SOME paradigm is needed - that's foundational to knowledge, so It seems to me that it entails being open to new paradigms. — Relativist

Good question! The emerging paradigms of enactive or embodied cognition draw heavily on it. The key book in that genre is The Embodied Mind, Varela, Thompson and Rosch, revised edition, 2015. But phenomenology generally is nowadays considered in the social sciences and psychology (as per some links provided above.) Constructivism, which is related, is influential in philosophy, psychology and education, see constructivist.info for example. There's also QBism in quantum physics, which dovetails nicely with phenomenology. (The next in this series is Bitbol's philosophy of QM.)

So while Bitbol’s answer to the question “Is Consciousness Primary” is “yes”, he’s not thereby positing an ontological dependence between mind and world, only a methodological dependence (as others on the thread have also noticed). He’s willing to say what he thinks the ontological relationship between mind and world is not, but he entirely refrains from proposing any positive account of that relationship. — Esse Quam Videri

I see what you mean about possible tendentiousness on my part, but I don't know if it is warranted; I don't think I'm reading something into Bitbol that he doesn't say.

But notice Bitbol says that consciousness has existential and methodological primacy - not ontological primacy. He's not positing a 'cosmic mind' or 'universal consciousness' that is temporally prior to matter. He says what is required is a change of stance:

In line with Francisco Varela, I will rather advocate a radical change of stance regarding objectivity and subjectivity.

In my opinion, this results from a refusal to move from phenomenological critique to a positive, critically grounded account of being and truth. It mistakes the dissolution of bad metaphysics for the end of metaphysics itself. — Esse Quam Videri

That is a profound observation, and it exposes a very deep question. This is also why Bitbol finds the Buddhist philosophy of Nāgārjuna congenial (subject of the third essay). As noted in the preamble, Bitbol has studied Sanskrit so as to have a better grasp of Buddhist principles, and Buddhism is an essential component of the Embodied Mind book mentioned above.

So, to really unpack that would require a deep dive into Buddhist philosophy. Suffice to say, Buddhism has never posited a creator God nor ultimate substance (in the philosophical sense of that term). This leads many critics (for example the Buddha's Brahmin opponents) to accuse Buddhism of nihilism. But the Buddha doesn't say that 'nothing exists' or that 'everything is unreal'.

Nāgārjuna’s analysis is subtler: it is the rejection of the inherent existence (svabhāva) of particulars, not of their existence tout courte. Phenomena are real, but relationally and dependently — not as self-grounding entities possessing inherent reality. In that sense, Madhyamaka doesn’t abolish metaphysics so much as reframe it, replacing substance-based ontology with an analysis of conditions, relations, and modes of appearing. A key point is that there is nothing to grasp or posit as a first principle or ultimate cause. The causality Buddhism is concerned with is the cause of dukkha — the suffering and unsatisfactoriness of existence. And Buddhism refrains from positing views of what is ultimately real, as it has to be seen and understood, rather than posited, which leads to 'dogmatic views'. Nāgārjuna is well known for saying that he has no doctrine of his own.

consciousness may be considered as the function of neural processes arising from the material of the brain — Questioner

The linked paper provides six detailed arguments against the materialist view.

The following passage from your OP describes the metaphysical positions — T Clark

I don't think the passage you're citing does present a 'metaphysical position'. Looking at it part by part:

'For Bitbol, phenomenology is the real starting point in the quest to understand consciousness, because it reveals something that scientific objectification systematically brackets out or ignores — namely the observer, the scientist, the one who makes observations, draws conclusions, and decides on the questions to be asked.'

I don’t see that passage as advancing a metaphysical position. It doesn’t make claims about what exists in itself, but about what scientific objectification leaves out by design. That’s a methodological and epistemological point about the conditions under which scientific knowledge is produced, not a thesis about the ultimate nature of reality.

'Yet the point runs deeper than methodological oversight. Scientific objectivity does not merely forget the observer; it presupposes the observer as the one for whom objects appear, measurements make sense, and evidence is meaningful in the first place. Before there can be data, models, or theories, there must be a lived field of experience in which anything like a “fact” can show up at all.'

Again - no metaphysics here. It is a fact that there must be an observer for whom the facts of observation and measurement show up. To say that 'facts require an observer' is not to say that reality depends on minds, but that facts are not the same as un-interpreted events.

Analogously, the distinction is made between 'data' and 'information'. The data are the recorded events or observations, but they are not considered information until they are assimilated and understood.

Bitbol wrote consciousness is “not a something, but not a nothing either.” Does that mean consciousness does not exist, isn’t real? — T Clark

Isn't that what this point is about?

On the one hand, consciousness cannot be treated as an object — something manipulable, measurable, or existing independently of the subject. This is because objects are by definition other to us, and are given only through the sense-data profiles which... are open to correction by further experience.

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. — Wayfarer

Put another way, the fact that T.Clark is able to know or sense anything, is because you are a sentient being and the subject of experience. But subjectivity is not a possible object of perception, as it is that to which or whom experience occurs. I think the fact you're having such difficulty grasping that distinction kind of reinforces the point at issue ;-)

This is one of my big problems with your presentation of what Bitbol believes--As I understand it, it is exactly a metaphysical claim. A valid and useful one, but still metaphysics. — T Clark

What 'metaphysical claim' do you think is being made?

As I see it, conscious experience is not a metaphysical entity, it exists in the world of apples and pogo sticks--an object among objects. — T Clark

There's a categorical distinction you seem to be missing. Where in the world of apples and pogo sticks is your experience? You can't locate it in some place, or distinguish it as an object. Your awareness of the fact of your own existence is categorically different to your awareness of the objects of perception. You could be in a sensory deprivation tank, or under the influence of a powerful sedative that blocks out all sensory perception, and provided you were conscious, you would know that you were conscious. That awareness would not be dependent on anything external.

Incidentally the article on which the OP was based can be found here Is Consciousness Primary? (.pdf) A representative passage:

Any objective descriptions arises, in history and on a dayto-day basis as well, as an invariant structural focus for subjects endowed with conscious experience (Bitbol, 2002).

Now, the problem is that the very success of this procedure of extracting invariants yields a sort of amnesia. The creators of objective knowledge become so impressed by its efficacy that they tend to forget or to minimize that conscious experience is its starting point and its permanent requirement. They tend to forget or to minimize the long historical process by which contents of experience have been carefully selected, differenciated, and impoverished, so as to discard their personal or parochial components and to distillate their universal fraction as a structure. They finally turn the whole procedure upside down, by claiming that experience can be explained by one of its structural residues. Husserl severely criticized this forgetfulness and this inversion of priorities, that he saw as the major cause of what he called the “crisis” of modern science (Husserl, 1970). According to him, it is in principle absurd to think that one can account for subjective conscious experience by way of certain objects of science, since objectivity has sprung precisely from what he calls the “life-world” of conscious experience. — Michel Bitbol, Is Consciousness Primary?

You believe there is an afterlife, right? Why not be honest about what you believe and what your actual agenda is? — Janus

And you say I'm putting words in your mouth :rofl:

This summary of phenomenology is general enough to accommodate the different varieties offered by the likes of Husserl, Scheler, Henry, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty (but not Heidegger). Having said that, I think Bitbol’s interpretation of phenomenology owes more to Michel Henry than to Husserl. — Joshs

Thank you, I value your opinion.

This is, as said, an introduction - as much for me as for the reader, as I'm exploring the subject by researching and writing about it. As it happens, I first encountered Bitbol on this forum, some time back, when he was mentioned by @Pierre-Normand. I've subsequently read and listened to quite few of his talks. I find him a marvellously congenial presence. I was also introduced to Dan Zahavi, by you, as it happens. Overall I'm very much taken by their philosophical stance. Oh, and am also reading Michel Henry. His 'Barbarism' is quite an accurate diagnosis of eliminative materialism.

Here was the original exchange. If you wish to recapitulate it, perhaps it belongs in that thread.

And indeed
"...so there is something more here than just perspective. Something explains this agreement. Sure, there are minds that make the sentences, and sing the songs, but there is more than just mind here".

There is something more than just perspective, but without perspective, there is no thing.

as predicted you didn't answer the question I posed re whether you believe that immaterial or disembodied consciousness is possible. — Janus

I see it like this: you are still very much under the sway of post-Cartesian dualism. Accordingly you habitually interpret what I write, and what Bitbol is saying, against that perspective. The world, for you, remains divided between res extensa, measurable by science, and res cogitans, thinking substance. Bitbol doesn't make any metaphysical posits about 'immaterial mind' or anything of the kind. But you will think that to question one is to assert the other. Hence the assertion of an 'immaterial or disembodied consciousness', which is the only possibility this schema allows. Whereas, the point of phenomenology is to call this apparent division into question at its very root. But again, you will say this is a dodge or a non-answering of the question.

this was the point of our walk through the mountains toward the sea — Banno

A conversation which clearly indicated that you didn't grasp the point with which you intended to take issue.

What are 'material conditions' and why are they significant?

Not so much begin with it, as remember that it has been forgotten, and why. Phenomenology is ameliorative of that, but I do know that most Anglo philosophers still have a blind spot about it.

Why thank you. But there is no 'one correct view' being promulgated here. One of Bitbol's video talks I reviewed was about the idea that Buddhist 'middle-way' philosophy was precisely the rejection of views. I might get back to that.

Bitbol moves backwards to Descartes. — Banno

Descartes is undoubtedly an influence (although I will also mention that this is another example of your 'presentism', that virtually all philosophy before about ten minutes ago has been superseded.) But there's a footnote in the Medium edition, to wit:

This idea has an obvious ancestry in Descartes’ cogito ergo sum, (‘I think therefore I am’) although phenomenology breaks with the Cartesian substance model of mind. Husserl retains the insight that the existence of consciousness is indubitable in the moment of its appearance, but without positing a thinking thing (res cogitans). Bitbol adopts this Husserlian reading rather than the outright dualism of Descartes.

Also notice the reference to Wittgenstein:

Bitbol opens his essay with one of the most disarming lines in the philosophy of mind: sensation is “not a something, but not a nothing either”. This deliberate paradox, borrowed from Wittgenstein, is not a rhetorical flourish but the key to Bitbol’s approach. On the one hand, consciousness cannot be treated as an object — something manipulable, measurable, or existing independently of the subject. This is because objects are by definition other to us, and are given only through the sense-data profiles which, as we have seen, are open to correction by further experience.

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.⁴ 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. — Wayfarer

So, that is very different from Descartes' 'res cogitans', the 'thinking thing', which I think Husserl recognised as an oxymoron. But even so, Husserl, and all phenomenology, recognise Descartes' role as a precursor of phenomenology, in recognising the apodictic nature of consciousness.

So Bitbol is not saying that 'things are derived from consciousness', which is what you seem to think he is saying.

It rests consciousness on the distinction between "inner" and "outer "- the homunculus arrises! — Banno

I think you're misreading it, but I won't press the point.

I'm a beginner with Bitbol and much of phenomenology. But it resonates with me on several fronts. I agree that Bitbol is rather neo-Kantian, the first thing I learned from was his lecture on Neils Bohr Bohr's Complementarity and Kant's Epistemology. I've got another draft on his philosophy of science, which I hope will also be published by Philosophy Today.

This is very much a starting point - not a 'manifesto', not a 'system', so much as a reminder. It's very much connected with Heidegger's 'forgetting of being' - we become fixated by and with the objects of perception, the 'objective world' and consequently forget the matrix of being within which everything arises. But then as soon as you begin to say what that is, the point is already lost.

Bitbol does not seem to delve as deeply into Being or the essence of experience, and he appears to recognize epistemic limits more explicitly. Do you think this is accurate, and what is the significance of this for philosophy? — Tom Storm

As said, he's not a system-builder creating some grand all-encompassing scheme. It's more a matter of paying attention to the here-and-now.

I also have an essay planned on his dialogues with Buddhism, and the connection between the phenomenological epochē and Buddhist śūnyatā. (There's an historical connection, too, between Pyrrho of Elis, and the Madhyamaka Buddhists of Gandhara.)

Hope Christmas was enjoyable. — Banno

Sort of. Our families are now far-flung and there's not many at the table. But, thanks, and same to you.

Banno of course would point out that this is muddled, that we are inherently social beasties, and that our place in the world is not that of a homunculus siting inside a head looking out, but of a being already and always embedded in a world that includes others... and so on. — Banno

And, not really sure how that cuts against the quoted passage. Phenomenology is most definitely not invoking any kind of homonculus. The key books that I've at least partially absorbed are Husserl's Philosophy as a Rigourous Science, and the Crisis of the European Sciences. The emphasis on the reality of the living subject is precisely to ameliorate the sense of pervasive abstraction that arose out of Cartesian dualism.

disembodied ("immaterial") consciousness doesn't make any sense – is just wishful / magical thinking. — 180 Proof

Nothing in the OP, or anything I've said about it, suggests an 'immaterial consciousness', although the fact that it will always be so construed by yourself and Janus is philosophically signficant.

On the other hand we can certainly imagine that material conditions were present prior to the advent of consciousness or least prior to consciousness as we understand it. All our scientific evidence points to that conclusion. — Janus

Indeed it does, but outside that imaginative act what remains?

The point of Bitbol's line of criticism, is that both the subject and the objects of scientific analysis are reduced to abstractions in day-to-day thought. But these abstractions are then imbued with an ostensibly fundamental reality - the subject 'bracketed out' of the proceedings, the objective domain taken to be truly existent. But it should be acknowledged, the 'co-arising' of the subjective and objective is very much part of the phenomenological perspective.

I don’t deny the veracity of scientific reconstructions of a pre-conscious world. Bitbol’s point is subtler: such reconstructions are abstractions constituted within present experience, and it is a further step — one that often goes unnoticed — to treat those abstractions as ontologically fundamental while bracketing out the very subjectivity that makes them intelligible. The question isn’t “Did the world exist before consciousness?” but “What does it mean to assert existence independently of the conditions under which existence is ascribed at all?”

Closely related to this is the further assumption that consciousness is the product of those inferred facts — facts which, as facts, already exist within consciousness. There's a subtle but pervasiveness inversion going on here.

Phenomenology has a role in understanding mental illness by taking proper account of the first-person experiences of subjects. Some references:

Phenomenology as a resource for translational research in mental health

Phenomenology as a resource in mental health

The phenomenological nature of schizophrenia and disorder of selfhood

I am a retired high school biology teacher, and one of the many things that I told my students is the traits and characteristics associated with our physical structure - including neurological circuits - survived in us because it gave us some kind of advantage in the environment in which we were living. — Questioner

Well, hate to come across as unfriendly, but I think this is a mistake, and a mistake that characterises a lot of shoddy thinking in modern culture.

Evolutionary biology is many things, but a philosophical epistemology it is not. It is a biological theory about the evolution of species. As such, it explains many things about h.sapiens biological descent and attributes. Many basic elements of the anatomy such as the basic layout of limbs and ears, can be traced back to a proto-fish species that flourished hundreds of millions of years ago (‘Your Inner Fish’, Neil Shubin.)

But plenty of organisms survived for billions of years without love or hate, language or tool-making, and many of the other abilities that characterise h.sapiens . The trope that whatever characteristics we possess must have contributed to our survival, is an attempt to reduce those abilities to a kind of lowest common denominator with other species. Whereas it is clear in all kinds of ways that though we’re descended from common ancestor species, we diverge from them in ways much more significant than the biological.

Culturally, evolutionary explanations have occupied the void left by the abandonment of biblical creation myths (to which I do not at all subscribe) as a creation story. Many critics have noticed that ‘social Darwinism’ and ‘survival of the fittest’ (a term not coined by Darwin, but later endorsed by him) can be used to justify liberal political structures and economic theories, to say nothing of eugenics. (One of Darwin’s cousins, Francis Galton, was founder of and advocate for eugenics.)

It might interest you to know that a current professor of cognitive science, one Donald Hoffman, has published a book The Case Against Reality, which claims that h.sapiens don’t see reality as it is because perception is adapted to survival, not to truth. This is the ‘fitness beats truth’ theory. A Christian philosopher, Alvin Plantinga, argues along similar lines to a different conclusion - that if rational insight is the consequence of evolutionary adaptation, then we have no reason to presume it must be true.

I’m not an advocate for either argument, but the fact that they exist highlights the deep philosophical issues that this throws up. Evolutionary psychology is a legit scientific discipline with important things to teach but I don’t think it ought to be viewed as an adjudicator for philosophical questions.

Energy is a beauty and a brilliance, — PoeticUniverse

Energy per se is devoid of intelligence. What you’re seeing is the projection of your own mind.

Energy is considered a real thing even though it's knowable only in its effects, not in its material substance. — Gnomon

Nope. Not the point. The profound point is that there are real degrees of reality.

(I have to briefly sign back in - shhhh - to mention an article I've found interesting, about how Heisenberg re-purposed Aristotle's 'potentia' in respect to quantum physics Quantum mysteries dissolve if possibilities are realities:

In the... paper, three scientists argue that including “potential” things on the list of “real” things can avoid the counterintuitive conundrums that quantum physics poses. It is perhaps less of a full-blown interpretation than a new philosophical framework for contemplating those quantum mysteries. At its root, the new idea holds that the common conception of “reality” is too limited. By expanding the definition of reality, the quantum’s mysteries disappear. In particular, “real” should not be restricted to “actual” objects or events in spacetime. Reality ought also be assigned to certain possibilities, or “potential” realities, that have not yet become “actual.” These potential realities do not exist in spacetime, but nevertheless are “ontological” — that is, real components of existence.

“This new ontological picture requires that we expand our concept of ‘what is real’ to include an extraspatiotemporal domain of quantum possibility,” write Ruth Kastner, Stuart Kauffman and Michael Epperson.

Considering potential things to be real is not exactly a new idea, as it was a central aspect of the philosophy of Aristotle, 24 centuries ago. An acorn has the potential to become a tree; a tree has the potential to become a wooden table. Even applying this idea to quantum physics isn’t new. Werner Heisenberg, the quantum pioneer famous for his uncertainty principle, considered his quantum math to describe potential outcomes of measurements of which one would become the actual result. The quantum concept of a “probability wave,” describing the likelihood of different possible outcomes of a measurement, was a quantitative version of Aristotle’s potential, Heisenberg wrote in his well-known 1958 book Physics and Philosophy. “It introduced something standing in the middle between the idea of an event and the actual event, a strange kind of physical reality just in the middle between possibility and reality.”

On that note, I’ll be signing out for Christmas. My dear other has made it clear that festive time is not ideally spent arguing with my invisible friends. All the best to everyone here for the festive season :party: :pray: :hearts:

To put a finer point on it, when you say things like "there's an unconscious synthesis occurring" and "there is no agreed neural mechanism" you are presumably making a claim about the way things really are - not just about the way that they appear to you - and that you've actually grasped and confirmed something true about how the mind actually works. Would you agree with this, or do you see things differently? — Esse Quam Videri

I agree, with an important qualification. I wouldn’t claim that I personally possess privileged insight into “the way things truly are.” But I do think that clarifying what can and cannot meaningfully be meant by that phrase is one of philosophy’s central tasks.

The distinction you draw between (1) cognitive content being underdetermined by sensory input and structured by unconscious operations, and (2) the claim that the mind-independent world is wholly constructed, is a real one—and I resist the latter if it is taken in a literalistic sense. Saying that cognition involves unconscious synthesis is not to say that the world is an arbitrary mental fabrication. But then, where is the line drawn between 'world as experienced' and 'world as it is?'

In that sense, I am making claims about how things really are—but not from some point beyond! That is also why I bring in cognitive science, which has, for fairly obvious reasons, devoted a great deal of effort to understanding how the brain synthesises and constructs our experience-of-the-world.

Here is where I’ve found the opening sentence of Schopenhauer's World as Will and Idea instructive:

§ 1. “The world is my idea:”—this is a truth which holds good for everything that lives and knows, though man alone can bring it into reflective and abstract consciousness. If he really does this, he has attained to philosophical wisdom.

I should also point to one of the footnotes in the Mind- Created World, which is central to the overall argument. It is a quote from one of the Pali Buddhist suttas, to wit:

By and large, Kaccayana, this world is supported by a polarity, that of existence and non-existence. But when one sees the origination of the world as it actually is with right discernment, “non-existence” with reference to the world does not occur to one. When one sees the cessation of the world as it actually is with right discernment, “existence” with reference to the world does not occur to one.’ — Kaccāyanagotta Sutta

Here, the Buddha warns against reifying either “existence” or “non-existence” as ultimate categories (eternalism and nihilism, respectively). To see the origination and cessation of the world “as it actually is” is precisely to see through that polarity. The “world” in Buddhism is therefore not a metaphysical totality but the experienced world, whose character is structured by conditioned origination and attachment.


--------------

On that note, I’ll be signing out for Christmas. My dear other has made it clear that festive time is not ideally spent arguing with my invisible friends. All the best to everyone here for the festive season :party: :pray: :hearts:

Not at all. He doesn mention Kant, but he doesn't go into all the intricacies. That's one of the good things about that book - mercifully free of jargon and academic philosophy speak.

As you know, I am sympathetic with transcendental/epistemic idealists views. — boundless

Pinter’s book, Mnd and the Cosmic Order, is a cognitive science book, not a book about transcendental idealism.It definitely has a philosophical component, but it would be wrong to describe it as a philosophy text.

Or does some of that information, like mathematical principles, remain and if it remains, where (and when) does it remain? — Punshhh

That's a tricky thought-experiment! I don't actually devote a lot of time to 'what if nothing existed?' I take pretty much at face value what science tells us about cosmology and the formation of planets. I still feel as though the beginning of life and the engine of evolution is deeply mysterious.

The book I keep mentioning, Mind and the Cosmic Order, Charles Pinter, is really helpful on this question. He argues 'that the meaningful connectedness between things — the hierarchical organization of all we perceive — is the result of the Gestalt nature of perception and thought, and exists only as a property of mind. These insights give the first glimmerings of a new way of seeing the cosmos: not as a mineral wasteland but a place inhabited by creatures.' So it's not as if consciousness is a mysterious essence, but that emergence of organic life is the medium in which objects and structures become navigable and intelligible. That's why I continue to argue that mind is not an emergent phenomenon, an unexplained add-on to the doings of matter and energy but is intrinsic to the order of nature. Not as a consequence but as its ground.

What are your thoughts? — Esse Quam Videri

What I have in mind is something that’s been central to my thinking for a long time. The mind-created world essay (this thread sprouted from that one) grew out of an earlier attempt to articulate how contemporary cognitive science has converged—somewhat unexpectedly—with a broadly Kantian insight.

The basic point is that the world as experienced is not a passive imprint of a mind-independent reality (per John Locke and empiricism more generally). Rather, the mind (or brain) actively synthesises disparate sensory inputs with organising structures—categories, forms, constraints—at a level largely below conscious awareness. This synthetic activity gives rise to what Kant called the subjective unity of perception: the coherent, stable world that shows up for us at all. It is not too far-fetched to compare the h.sapiens forebrain as a remarkably sophisticated VR generator.

There’s good empirical support for this. Neuropsychological disorders— like visual agnosia—show that when this integrative synthesis breaks down, the “world” fragments in very specific ways. This is not a matter of losing access to an external object so much as losing the capacity to bind features into a unified perceptual field (Oliver Sacks books had a lot to say on this.)

It's also the case that neuroscience still lacks a clear account of how this synthesis is implemented. The so-called neural binding problem highlights precisely this gap: there is no agreed-upon neural locus or mechanism that explains how distributed processes are unified into a single phenomenal scene. That absence matters philosophically, because it undercuts the assumption that perceptual unity is simply “read off” from the world (ref).

Andrew Brook argues that this places Kant as almost 'the godfather of cognitive science' because the core Kantian insight, not that the world is unreal, but that objectivity itself is constituted through cognitive synthesis, which has become influential through constructivism in many different disciplines.

That’s the sense in which I say the “mind-independent world,” as commonly understood today, is not a brute given (per the Myth of the Given) but a construct—one grounded in real experience, certainly, but mediated by cognitive conditions and cultural factors we usually overlook, because they've become second nature, and hence, in some basic sense, unconscious, or at least sub-conscious.

What do you think "thickness" or "depth" of meaning are, if not either polysemy or ambiguity? — Janus

Polysemy is pretty close. I was thinking more in terms of the kinds of 'hinge words' which are central in various domains of discourse. Actually, given T Clark's examples above, one obvious instance is 'love', which has a huge range of meanings. I've been at more than one wedding reception where one of the speeches described the eight different Greek words for 'love', typically Eros (passionate/sexual), Philia (friendship/brotherly love), Storge (familial/natural affection), Agape (selfless/universal love), Ludus (playful/uncommitted), Mania (obsessive/mad love), Pragma (enduring/practical love), and Philautia (self-love) - which is an attempt to differentiate the many overlapping meanings in the one term.

What came to mind immediately for me were 'real' and 'to exist', as opposed to 'real' and 'fake'. — Janus

I think (J will correct me if I'm wrong) one of the motivations for this post was a discussion whether 'reality' and 'existence' and be differentiated, citing C S Peirce, who makes that distinction. Whereas in common discourse, they are naturally regarded as synonyms - that what is real is what exists and vice versa.

Thank you once again.

Hence “agent” and “patient” are necessarily in one sense the same, and in another sense “other” and unlike one another; and since “agent” and “patient” are identical in kind and like, but unlike in species, and it is contraries which have these characteristics, it is clear that contraries and their “intermediates” are capable of being affected and of acting reciprocally — Aristotle, On Coming to Be and Passing Away, 323b, Forster and Furley

This is what snagged Descartes, with his 'complete otherness' of res extensa and res cogitans, and why Cartesian philosophy engendered problems that Aristotelian philosophy does not.

Goes to the point of the sense in which the subject can be reflexivly self-aware. Surely the subject can form an image of itself - that is what I think constitutes ego, the subject's idea of itself - but the processes which Kant term 'synthetic' function below the level of ego - it was in that sense that Kant and Schopenhauer anticipated Freud.

Doesn’t Freud’s discovery of the unconscious (if indeed a discovery it was, as it had been anticipated previously) have some bearing on the question of self-knowledge? There is plenty of documentation of ‘Freud’s debt to Schopenhauer’ e.g. here. That aspect of the mind that is available to conscious introspection is according to Freud ‘the tip of an iceberg’, with the remainder of the body suspended beneath the surface.

Streetlight, when he was around, alerted me to a book, a very advanced Kant studies book, Konstantin Polok - Kant's Theory of Normativity: Exploring the Space of Reason. I did acquire it, and read from it, but can't claim to have mastered it. But it shows how Kant adapted Aristotle's matter-form principle into 'transcendental hylomorphism'. 'Pollok argues that for Kant, human cognition is structured by a "matter-form" dichotomy where sensible data (matter) is ordered by a priori mental structures (form), such as the categories of understanding and forms of intuition. (ref).

I also learned that Kant adopted Aristotle's 'categories' with only minor changes.

So, yes, I think there's a great deal of continuity from Plato>Aristotle>Kant, while also considerable modifications.

That's a big question! 'Biosemiotics' about which I've learned a lot from this forum, sees living systems in terms of the interpretation of signs (which is what semiotics is). Whether any 'information' exists in that sense outside biological systems is moot, in my view, but it's a big question.

Information is not a metaphysically basic, because it is not ontologically autonomous. It does not exist in itself, but only as a specification of states, relations, or constraints within systems. To treat it to a metaphysical primitive alongside matter or energy is to reify something relational and semantic. Biological information is not a substance encoded in genes, but a system-relative way of describing how material differences constrain developmental and functional outcomes in organisms. So I’m not saying that the term ‘information’ doesn’t mean anything, but that the way it is sometimes used gives it a meaning it doesn’t really have.

Thanks! I notice your musings on that question above. The problem with 'information' is that, as a general term, it doesn't mean anything. It has to specify something or be about something to be a meaningful expression. Unlike, say, 'energy', which is 'the capacity to do work' and which is also defineable in particular contexts.

There's a well-known and often-quoted aphorism from Norbert Weiner:

The mechanical brain does not secrete thought 'as the liver does bile,' as the earlier materialists claimed, nor does it put it out in the form of energy, as the muscle puts out its activity. Information is information, not matter or energy. No materialism which does not admit this can survive at the present day. — Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine

So what we to do? Admit it! So if we admit that information is fundamental, like matter and energy, that goes some way to addressing this insight. But really not that far - as you grasp, designating something 'information' really doesn't get us that far.

Machines can interpret information and derive meaning from it. — hypericin

But can they? :chin: I've been interacting with AI since the day it came out - actually three weeks since the essay in the OP was published on Medium - and I think all of the ones I use (ChatGPT, Claude.ai and gemini.google would query that. I put the question to ChatGPT, which replied:

It depends what is meant by “interpret” and “derive meaning.” Machines certainly manipulate information and can model the patterns of meaningful discourse. But meaning in the strict sense involves intentionality, normativity, and understanding something as something.

My experience with AI systems strongly suggests they do not possess this. Whatever meaning appears is supplied by the human user in their engagement with the output, not generated in the system itself. But it's an amazingly realistic simulcrum, I'll give you that! And also, not a hill I would wish to die on, as it is another of those very divisive issues.

(I created another thread on that topic, https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/16095/artificial-intelligence-and-the-ground-of-reason/p1, which also has a link to a rather good Philosophy Now essay on the subject.)

Very good.

I often repeat this, but the translation of 'ousia' as 'substance' is misleading. In modern usage, substance suggests an objective existent, which is not what 'ousia' means. Ousia is closer to “being” or “what-it-is-to-be.” Once this is recognised, Aristotle no longer looks like a precursor to object-based realism, and the role of actuality — including the actuality of knowing — can’t be reduced to the cataloging of objects.

The IEP article on The Metaphysics has two sections on the translation of 'ousia', part of which is:

Boethius, in his commentaries on Aristotle ...always translated ousia as substantia, and his usage seems to have settled the matter. And so a word designed by the anti-Aristotelian Augustine to mean a low and empty sort of being turns up in our translations of the word whose meaning Aristotle took to be the highest and fullest sense of being. Descartes, in his Meditations, uses the word 'substance' only with his tongue in his cheek; Locke explicitly analyzes it as an empty notion of an I-don’t-know-what; and soon after the word is laughed out of the vocabulary of serious philosophic endeavor. It is no wonder that the Metaphysics ceased to have any influence on living thinking: its heart had been cut out of it by its friends. — IEP

Imagine if this passage, we said:

412a11, It is bodies especially which are thought to be substances subjects, and of these, especially natural bodies; for these are sources of the rest.

('The rest' incidentally being artifacts, parts and properties, relations, etc).

So, here, 'subject' is nearer in meaning to the original 'being', and it gives the whole phrase a subtly different meaning, with the caveat that 'subjects' is also not exactly right. But it is arguably nearer the mark that 'substance' (IEP explains where that translation originated.)

I take the 'soul as the form of the body' to mean the soul (psuche) is the principle of the body.

I scanned them. But they're artifacts, they're built by human designers, to emulate aspects of biology. Surely even you can spot the difference between that, and naturally-occuring organisms? Or does it suit you to try and obfuscate it? Maybe something you don't want to know?

"This self-organizing swarm was created in the lab of Radhika Nagpal...."

If you want to press a point, helps first to understand what point that is.

Really? — 180 Proof

Yes, really, 180. All machines, all systems, computers, and devices are allopoeitic, their organising principles are imposed from the outside by those who manufacture and program them. Organisms are autopoeitic, self-organizing. Chalk and cheese. Systems can be made to self-organise in a way analogous to organisms, but, you know, these are not naturally occuring.

I apologize if I've read too much into your critique. Hopefully the discussion has proved interesting nonetheless. — Esse Quam Videri

Very much so. You're plainly an expert interlocutor, and I value your contributions.

I think you’re rather over-dramatising my view. My argument isn’t against realism as such, nor against inquiry into it. It’s against the presumption that reality is exhausted by the objective domain. Scientific realism, insofar as it ‘brackets’ the subject as a methodological step, turns that bracketing into an ontological claim, that all that can be known, can be made subject to scientific analysis. That is precisely where methodological morphs into metaphysical naturalism. My point is that objectivity itself presupposes reflexive awareness, which itself cannot be captured within the scope of objective analysis (‘facing up to the problem of consciousness’). That marks a principled limit, not a failure of inquiry. And I do think an acute sense of the unknowable is not just mysticism, it’s also realism in a different register. Humans are not all-knowing as a matter of principle, not just because of the limitless subject matter of scientific enquiry. Discursive knowledge doesn’t just have limits, it also has limitations.

I will add, I’m in no way ‘anti-science’ in the sense that a lot of those on both the far left and far right are. I’m fully cognizant of the benefits of science, I’m not an anti-vaxxer or climate change denialist (and I know people who are.) What I’m protesting is viewing philosophical questions through scientific perspectives. An example we’ve been debating is D M Armstrong (‘Materialist Theory of Mind’) who believes that philosophy should be fully integrated with or even subordinated to scientific standards of enquiry. Again this is where Kant is invaluable as he was confronting just these kinds of questions.

When form enters the mind it is still bound to the matter of the organism, but in a different mode of existence — Esse Quam Videri

I’m not highly educated in Aristotle and Thomist philosophy, but the way hylomorphic dualism is understood in that philosophy impresses me. That ‘different mode of existence’ is insight into the intelligible domain:

…if the proper knowledge of the senses is of accidents, through forms that are individualized, the proper knowledge of intellect is of essences, through forms that are universalized. Intellectual knowledge is analogous to sense knowledge inasmuch as it demands the reception of the form of the thing which is known. But it differs from sense knowledge so far forth as it consists in the apprehension of things, not in their individuality, but in their universality. — Thomistic Psychology, A Philosophical Analysis of the Nature of Man, by Robert E. Brennan, O.P., Macmillan Co., 1941.

The point I want to make is that this was a ‘participatory ontology’. Man was not yet outside nature, the ‘accidental byproduct of the collocation of atoms’ in Russell’s phrase. But I’m not proposing a reactionary critique of modernism. It’s a matter of understanding the tectonic shifts in the meaning of Being that have occurred over this period of history.