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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

consciousness is intimately interconnected to the environment -

Information in > consciousness happens > information out

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

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

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

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

give it time — Questioner

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

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

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

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

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

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

Do your own research and draw your conclusions.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It starts with:

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

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

Well said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Any questions, don't hesitate to ask.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Another gem from Collingwood (p46)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The point is, it's a glaring contradiction:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

:clap: Exemplary piece of philosophical analysis.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That's all I have on Collingwood.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rödl’s ‘science uberhaupt’ comes to mind.

And, Happy New Year

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

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

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

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

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

----

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

Happy New Year, regardless. :party:

Whereas yours is more of a clenched fist :lol:

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

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’