Being is not a thing. The exact thing that materialism denies.

Right. Agree with every word. But none of that makes the self (or the mind or the subject), an object of cognition, in any sense other than the metaphorical, i.e. 'the object of the debate'. The self is the 'unknown knower, the unseen seer.' Granted, that is from Vedanta, rather than from Kant, but it is in this precise respect that Kant and Vedanta are said to converge.

The mistake I'm arguing against is precisely the 'naturalisation of reason' i.e. regarding the rational subject (you and I) as the object of natural science.

.'...we may be surrounded by objects, but even while cognizing them, reason is the origin of something that is neither reducible to nor derives from them in any sense. In other words, reason generates a cognition, and a cognition regarding nature is above nature. In a cognition, reason transcends nature in one of two ways: by rising above our natural cognition and making, for example, universal and necessarily claims in theoretical and practical matters not determined b nature, or by assuming an impersonal objective perspective that remains irreducible to the individual I.'

The Powers of Pure Reason: Kant and the Idea of Cosmic Philosophy
Alfredo Ferrarin

Incidentally, précis of Kant's 'transcendental apperception' which might be relevant to the 'Apel' quotation.

• All experience is the succession of a variety of contents (pace David Hume).
• To be experienced at all, the successive data must be combined or held together in a unity in order to comprise a meaningful whole
• Unity of experience therefore implies a unity of self.
• The unity of self is as much an object of experience as anything is.
• Therefore, experience both of the self and its objects rests on acts of synthesis that, because they are the conditions of any experience, are not themselves experienced.
• These prior syntheses are made possible by the categories. Categories allow us to synthesize the self and the objects.

(I am dubious of the fourth premise, of the unity of self as being an 'object of experience'. I would categorise it as amongst the 'conditions of experience'.)

Why say the 'I' is never an object of cognition ? — plaque flag

Because it's not. Even the source you quote, David Hume, says that he never discerns a self, but only a stream of thoughts. Every object I can now perceive - let's see: computer monitor, speakers, pile of books, keyboard, desk upon which computer sits....all of those are objects of perception to me. But the self who is writing this post is not amongst them, he is that to whom they are objects.

that doesn't seem to support your argument. — Janus

Which argument doesn't it support? I've often, although very inelegantly, advanced an argument very like this:

From what he sees, therefore, he cannot judge whether what is happening in the brain he is observing is, or is not, the sort of event that he would call "mental" - Bertrand Russell. — Manuel

The way I tried to put it is that you could never see in neural data anything corresponding to a rational inference, because rational inference is internal to thought. (I remember having this argument with Mars Man, and I reckon you're one of the few who's been around long enough to know that reference!)

:100: :clap:

OK, I see. I went back through your posts on this thread, and you do acknowledge the difficulties of reductionism, so kudos for that, and I stand corrected.

But your first entry was this one:

I think what bothered me most about this particular iteration of the conflict is it's blatant circularity. The evidence that there is a hard problem of consciousness is that it consists of mental processes which can't be studied by science because of... the hard problem of consciousness. Of course, as I noted, all these arguments come down to this same contradiction. — T Clark

What the argument is claiming is that the subjective feeling of experience ('what it is like to be'...) eludes scientific description:

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. — Chalmers, Facing up to...

So, I don't see how that is a circular argument. It's an argument about the shortcomings of objective explanations in respect of subjective experience. The evidence for that is deductive, rather than empirical, but I don't see how it is circular.

To vastly oversimplify, chemistry doesn't make biology, it manifests as biology. — T Clark

But can biology be reduced to chemistry, or is there an attribute that biological organisms possess that non-organic chemistry does not? The no case is given below:

Chemical reactions in non-living systems are not controlled by a message … There is nothing in the physico-chemical world that remotely resembles reactions being determined by a sequence and codes between sequences' (that is characteristic of organic processes such as mitosis and reproduction) — What is Information? Marcello Barbieri

Didn't know where to post this, but a great New Yorker article on contemporary philosophy of mind. Mentiones Kristof Koch, David Chalmers, Thomas Nagel and Donald Hoffman among others.

Article author also has a book on same.

The problem is semantic. What is this 'I' ? — plaque flag

It's well known that Augustine articulated a similar argument to Descartes':

But who will doubt that he lives, remembers, understands, wills, thinks, knows, and judges? For even if he doubts, he lives. If he doubts where his doubs come from, he remembers. If he doubts, he understands that he doubts. If he doubts, he wants to be certain. If he doubts, he thinks. If he doubts, he knows that he does not know. If he doubts, he judges that he ougth not rashly to give assent. So whoever acquires a doubt from any source ought not to doubt any of these things whose non-existence would mean that he could not entertain doubt about anything. — Augustine, On the Trinity 10.10.14

I agree that the argument is apodictic, that it can't be plausibly denied. But when you ask 'what is this "I"?, if you're seeking an objective response to that question, there won't be one, as the self is never an object of cognition (save for in a metaphorical sense of being an 'object of enquiry'. I take that as the meaning of the 'transcendental ego' in Kant and Husserl.)

It may be of interest that Husserl criticises Descartes on similar grounds, by rendering the ego in naturalistic terms as something existent, 'a little tag-end of the world' : "naturalising consciousness as just another region of the world, as indeed contemporary programmes in the philosophy of mind deliberately seek to do. True phenomenology will grasp the original givenness of consciousness precisely as modes of self-givenness rather than as entities in any naturalistic sense" (Routledge intro. to phenomenology p139)

I don't understand where you are coming from because it seems incredulous to me that you don't recognize the difference in kind and not just degree between the sensation of red, or seeing an apple, versus the physiological correlates such as electromagnetic frequencies, optic anatomy, neural anatomy, and the like. — schopenhauer1

Agree. I listened to a Q&A with Bernardo Kastrup where he says one of the common objections to his 'analytic idealism' is actually based on the fact that the questioner can't see the point of the 'hard problem of consciousness' argument. They can't grasp why a precise objective description cannot but omit the ontic dimension of felt experience. There are quite a few worthy contributors to this forum who are dismissive of the argument on those grounds.

Is social science a "science" just because it uses data? Perhaps. But is there some aspects that make it different than say physics? — schopenhauer1

I know you said you didn’t want to digress, but consider the idea that physics is concerned with objects the behavior of which can be minutely described in objective terms. That is the sense in which physics (and so, physicalism) are considered paradigmatic for science generally. But the social sciences are not concerned with objects, but the behaviors of subjects which introduces a dimension that defies physical reductionism.

Do you have a reference for that? — Janus

It was a long time ago. I checked with ChatGPT and it returned this.

cuts both ways, you know ;-)

With regard to the ridiculous charade of the Jan 6 indictement as being an 'assault on free speech':

Remember that we are not seeing Republicans arrested for wearing their Make America Great Again hats or their Don’t Tread on Me bumper stickers, both fine examples of free speech. The key difference is this: Speech that leads to crime has never been protected from prosecution. Wearing a Second Amendment shirt is not a crime, but conspiring to commit murder is a crime, separate from the murder itself. Lying to masses of Americans that their right to vote was taken away and encouraging them to take it back by any means — as Trump is accused of doing — can, based on evidence beyond a reasonable doubt, constitute a crime.

To suggest that special counsel Jack Smith’s latest indictment on the Jan. 6 assault is just an attack on free speech, as some Republican partisans are claiming, is itself an attack on the rule of law. If a private citizen had organized the events on Jan. 6, there is little doubt that they would have been arrested and prosecuted. The Trump supporters who stormed the Capitol should not be held to a higher standard than the former president. If we decide that presidents should never be charged with crimes after they leave office for actions committed while in office, we are no longer a democracy. — No, fellow Republicans, the Justice Department is not biased against us

I think you continue to misunderstand where I am coming from. — Janus

I think you make your position abundantly clear.

I think your commitment to science as an arbiter of truth reflects your cultural conditioning, and it has many philosophical implications.

I don't believe that story because even animals can see and respond to things they have never encountered — Janus

Another story in the same class was about kittens raised in an environment with only vertical barriers. When after some weeks they were introduced to horizontal barriers, they walked into them, at least until they acquired the new behaviour necessary.

It's happened before as a result of global warming, and the conveyor is slowing as we speak.
— frank

Let's hope.
— Quixodian

What? It would be beyond catastrophic if it happened again. — frank

Well, you seemed confident! And one would have thought a global cooling event could at least serve as a counterweight to catastropic heating.

I think all the evidence points to the fact that the only world we share is the publicly accessible empirical world. — Janus

There's an anecdote I often share, re-told in Frank Moorehouse's account of Cook's discovery of Australia. According to Joseph Bank's scientific logs of the first encounter, the Endeavour sailed in to Botany Bay and dropped anchor about a league (little more than a mile) from an indigenous group mending nets and fishing on a sandbank. They were in clear sight and the crew could make out individual details through telescopes. But the indigenes showed no response whatever to the appearance of the ship. It wasn't until a small boat was lowered and rowed towards the shore, some hours later, and began to pull away from the Endeavour, that they started to show any signs of recognising the newcomers, gesticulating with spears and running back and forth on the shore. My hunch is that they didn't ignore the Endeavour, but that they didn't actually see it. It was too remote an object from their life experience for them to actually recognise it.

A second anecdote I learned in cog sci was that of a Pygmy chieftan who was taken by car to a mountain lookout with sweeping views over an African plain. The anthropologists were puzzled by his behaviour, as he began to stoop down and make clutching motions in front of him. After much back-and-forth with an interpreter, it turned out that he was trying to pick up the distant animals on the plains below. He had spent his entire life in dense forest where he only ever saw things at a range of a few meters, so he thought the animals below were small insects at his feet.

The moral is, we see what we're culturally conditoned to see. We all have a consensus worldview, nowadays highly diverse and fractured, of course, due to the enormous variety of information and imagery we're now presented with. But even in that context, our understanding is conditioned by cultural consensus.

It's happened before as a result of global warming, and the conveyor is slowing as we speak. — frank

Let's hope.

'The Many live each in their own private world, whilst those who are awake have but one world in common' ~ Heraclitus (quoted in John Fowles, The Aristos)

That would send the climate into a deep cold spell. — frank

No sign of that actually occuring, though. It's a theoretical possibility, but the evidence doesn't support it.

Again to quote Cassirer (sorry but it is what I'm currently reading): We experience ourselves as having an influence...[an] essential, constitutive aspect in all our "consciousness of reality." — Pantagruel

There is an awareness in contemporary philosophy that h. sapiens is 'the universe become self-aware'. One of its proponents was Julian Huxley, a passionate advocate of a scientifically-informed secular humanism.

Man is that part of reality in which and through which the cosmic process has become conscious and has begun to comprehend itself. His supreme task is to increase that conscious comprehension and to apply it as fully as possible to guide the course of events. In other words, his role is to discover his destiny as an agent of the evolutionary process, in order to fulfill it more adequately. — Julian Huxley, Evolution and Meaning

But then, if it's also true that

there are prescientific ways of thinking and seeing and being that science occludes. Questions and problems of life that science does not address. — Fooloso4

Then it would not be wise to restrict the scope of knowledge to science alone, as Huxley was inclined to do (but then, his brother, Alduous, author of The Perennial Philosophy, had a broader outlook).

Aristotle probably had nothing like the modern concept of Electrons or Galaxies, but he saw a need to distinguish Potential existence from Actual being. — Gnomon

I'm sure we discussed this article before Quantum mysteries dissolve if possibilities are realities -'“This new ontological picture requires that we expand our concept of ‘what is real’ to include an extraspatiotemporal domain of quantum possibility”. Notes that Heisenberg (Platonist that he was) endorses the Aristotelian concept of potentia.

The Republican blindness and mendacity on this issue is truly depressing, but then, I hope that they're heading for a shellacking next year and won't be able to spike the wheels.

Meanwhile, there's been a flurry of articles the last few days about the economic and fiscal reality of actually transitioning to green energy, especially in the UK, where transitioning the power grid is going to cost huge money. See Europe blinks in its commitment to a great green transition (WaPo, gift article).

indirect realism says those same brains and eyes are mere appearance. — plaque flag

Only when considered as objects - when you look at the brain as a neuroscientist or eyes as an ophthalmologist, then you’re viewing them as objects. But in the act of seeing, the eyes and the central nervous system are not objects but integral constituents.

You can only imagine the looming shitfight when the Georgia indictments come down and Resident Trump has a full dance card. Already it turns out some of his lawyers in one case are also witnesses in other cases. Him lobbing insults and threats over social media and trying to whip up a storm amongst the faithful. And meanwhile the US Government shut down by MAGA ideologues in the lead up to the election year. Grab popcorn and survival equipment, you’ll need both.

No, this one..

Listened to a long interview the other day (which I'm beginning to prefer to reading, as I can listen whilst driving or working out.) Seems a sane sort of fellow. David Albert another along similar lines.

Is it impossible for a brain to be trained to run two personalities? — plaque flag

Some of the studies on dissociative personality disorder showed that the brain of subject who had a blind alter did not show any effects associated with visual stimulation when the blind alter personality was tested.

1. Subjectivity is the being of the world from/for a certain perspective. — plaque flag

:up:

'In contrast to the outlook of naturalism, Husserl believed all knowledge, all science, all rationality depended on conscious acts, acts which cannot be properly understood from within the natural outlook at all. Consciousness should not be viewed naturalistically as part of the world at all, since consciousness is precisely the reason why there was a world there for us in the first place.' (Quoted the other day.)

2. The world is only given perspectively. — plaque flag

:up:

existence itself implies and requires a perspective. Things don't exist from no point of view, they exist within a context, and the mind provides that context. But we don't notice that, because we're looking from it, not at it. — Quixodian

(from another thread)

3. All entities exist interdependently in the same semantic-inferential-causal nexus. — plaque flag

True, but what this nexus is, is very much the question at issue.

Notice that Husserl was critical of naturalism, something that often seems overlooked. Not from the perspective of 'belief in the supernatural' but from a realisation of the conditioned nature of cognition.

A related point. One of the challenges to dualism is, 'if you say "the mind" is separate from the things of the phenomenal domain, then what is it?', looking for some kind of objective definition. But "the mind" does not appear to us, it appears as us.

The latter. In some ways it's a very simple problem, in the sense that the solution to it is holistic or a matter of a change of perspective. But the details have been bedevilling us for centuries. Bottom line: is 'mind' something that is ultimately reducible to, or explainable in terms of, lower-level laws such as physics and chemistry, or is it somehow real independently of those?

Dualists seem to want to create an extra world for every sentient creature, but then they go on to reason about entities that exist in this extra world, proving that this extra world is just a little glovebox in our world. — plaque flag

You're not progressing your argument by obfuscating and trivialising. I don't think you're clear about what is actually being called into question, and why it matters. What is called into question in 'facing up to the problem of consciousness' is the applicability of the natural sciences to the nature of experience.

To make it clearer, consider Daniel Dennett's response to Chalmers:

In Consciousness Explained, I described a method, heterophenomenology, which was explicitly designed to be 'the neutral path leading from objective physical science and its insistence on the third-person point of view, to a method of phenomenological description that can (in principle) do justice to the most private and ineffable subjective experiences, while never abandoning the methodological principles of science. — Daniel Dennett, The Fantasy of First-Person Science

I refer to Dennett as a canonical materialist, ergo, not a straw man.

I'm afraid this is trivially true. — plaque flag

But it's more than trivially true in respect of the question posed in the thread, the question being, what does the ground of experience really comprise? Are beings concatenations of atoms behaving in accordance with the laws of physics, or something other than that? And if 'other', then what is that?

Or must I be infallibly omniscient for it to count ? — plaque flag

It's not a question of being fallible or infallible. The difficulty is that the experiential dimension is not included in any description. Skilled writers can describe an experience or evoke it, but conveying anything of it will rely on the fact that the reader is also a subject of experience. 'Ah, I know how that feels', 'that must have been an amazing experience'. But there's no way you could capture an experience in a description. There is an experiential dimension to existence, which is never captured by the descriptive process. That's the hard problem in a nutshell.

The fundamental condition of existence is alterity.
— Quixodian

It is a classic theme. Derrida tried to make difference god.

Is Reality is a self-differentiating self-perceiving self-thinking godstuff ? Maybe kinda sorta ? — plaque flag

That way of expressing it came to me as a consequence of listening to one of Kastrup's talks, along the lines that the appearance of living organisms is also the initial appearance of 'otherness'. The very first thing that any proto-organism has to do is enact the boundary between itself and the environment. If there were no boundary, it is simply subject to whatever chemical and physical influences act on it - it would dissolve or break up. Whereas an organism has to maintain itself (which is homeostasis), seek nutrition, avoid threats, and replicate. That is the origin of the self-other divide.

They perform the experiment, then cluster around the computer screen to read the result - they all agree they see the same thing. The experiment is replicated numerous times, with the same result. How is this "dependence" upon a particular "embodied" scientist? — jgill

But that is precisely what has been called into question by experiments that confirm the observer-dependency of results in quantum mechanics, which challenge the principle that all observers see the same facts. Objective Reality Doesn't Exist, Quantum Experiment Shows.

Are you saying there is a hard problem of biology too? — T Clark

The idea that life evolved naturally on the primitive Earth suggests that the first cells came into being by spontaneous chemical reactions, and this is equivalent to saying that there is no fundamental divide between life and matter. This is the chemical paradigm, a view that is very popular today and that is often considered in agreement with the Darwinian paradigm, but this is not the case. The reason is that natural selection, the cornerstone of Darwinian evolution, does not exist in inanimate matter. In the 1950s and 1960s, furthermore, molecular biology uncovered two fundamental components of life—biological information and the genetic code—that are totally absent in the inorganic world, which means that information is present only in living systems, that chemistry alone is not enough and that a deep divide does exist between life and matter. — Marcello Barbieri, What is Information?

The physical sciences can describe organisms… as parts of the objective spatio-temporal order – [their] structure and behavior in space and time – but they cannot describe the subjective experiences of such organisms or how the world appears to their different particular points of view. There can be a purely physical description of the neurophysiological processes that give rise to an experience, and also of the physical behavior that is typically associated with it, but such a description, however complete, will leave out the subjective essence of the experience – how it is from the point of view of its subject — without which it would not be a conscious experience at all. — Thomas Nagel

they (idealists) still have the problem of explaining what empirical criteria can be used to determine what is or isn't conscious. — Count Timothy von Icarus

The divide between organisms and minerals is pretty clear, is it not (leaving aside viruses and prions which seem to straddle it.)

Thought is at least correlated with that physical phenomenon, so it's not like you can completely disconnect it. — schopenhauer1

Kastrup's answer is that the physical process is what the thought looks like from across the dissociative boundary, when viewed from the outside. Just as 'sadness' appears as tears and facial contortions to an observer, but is a subjective reality to those undergoing it. So it's not as if there's physical sadness and mental sadness.

Are we pieces of matter that learned to think? Or ideas that learned to enrobe themselves in matter? Is one of those options inherently less improbable than the other? — Pantagruel

Nice way of summarising it. I vote (2).

But you appeal explicitly to biological criteria:

At an abstract level, organisms adapt to different types of information in their environments, producing forms that are specialized in various ways to interact with that information. — Pantagruel

Whereas we’re discussing the metaphysical implications of science. Do you see any difference between the biological adaptations of animals and intellectual interpretation, or do you see the latter as on a continuum with the former? Are such conjectures a form of or in service of adaptation?

The whole monism/dualism question leads to a category error. Is everything derived from physical matter? Assuming yes, — Mark Nyquist

Big assumption, and also question-begging. I would almost agree with the remainder apart from the appeal to biology. Or maybe you could say that the ability to perceive causal relations has imposed reason upon us - posed us questions that only we, amongst other denizens of the biological realm - can ask and be aware of asking. But is that still determined by biology alone?

Excellent! Glad we agree. I see that as being a more expansive definition of scientific method than it’s cookie-cutter image.

At an abstract level, organisms adapt to different types of information in their environments, producing forms that are specialized in various ways to interact with that information. — Pantagruel

Yeah but that’s biology. The parameters of what we’re discussing are no longer determined by that, and I think rationalising science, or any other human activities, in those terms is inherently reductionist. And there are better things than simply being well-adapted.