I think ‘method’ is a rather simplistic notion, considering the complexities, but I also think that there is a scientific attitude, a characteristic way of approaching problems. I like this summary:

Modern science emerged in the seventeenth century with two fundamental ideas: planned experiments (Francis Bacon) and the mathematical representation of relations among phenomena (Galileo). This basic experimental-mathematical epistemology evolved until, in the first half of the twentieth century, it took a stringent form involving (1) a mathematical theory constituting scientific knowledge, (2) a formal operational correspondence between the theory and quantitative empirical measurements, and (3) predictions of future measurements based on the theory. The “truth” (validity) of the theory is judged based on the concordance between the predictions and the observations. While the epistemological details are subtle and require expertise relating to experimental protocol, mathematical modeling, and statistical analysis, the general notion of scientific knowledge is expressed in these three requirements.

Science is neither rationalism nor empiricism. It includes both in a particular way. In demanding quantitative predictions of future experience, science requires formulation of mathematical models whose relations can be tested against future observations. Prediction is a product of reason, but reason grounded in the empirical. Hans Reichenbach summarizes the connection: “Observation informs us about the past and the present, reason foretells the future.” — Edward Dougherty

Not all stories have two sides.

I was not sufficiently impressed by the OP to submit the few drafted comments I'd made, although now I've been co-opted, I might as well.

My first premise says intentions and teleology are essential to all forms of life. — ucarr

Agree that intentionality is a fundamenal characteristic of organisms, and can't be solely accounted for in terms of lower-level sciences such as physics and chemistry. Intentionality or 'aboutness' is one of the characteristics of all living organisms that can't be reduced to lower-level laws.

But disagree that the universe is machine-like or mechanistic, because machines are human artefacts and are assembled and operated by an external agent (namely, humans). Mechanism is one of the leftovers of Enlightenment materialism.

In a universe both eternal and mechanistic, probability plus evolution makes it inevitable life will appear.

If a universe has as one of its essential features the inevitability of life, then it has as concomitant essential features internalized intentions and teleology.

If a universe has, in addition to the above essential features, evolution, then it’s inevitable life will evolve therein. This state of affairs will lead logically to an ever, upwardly-evolving teleology that, after enough time, will resemble a cosmic teleology that can, with reason, be called a creator. — ucarr

Whether the Universe is eternal is moot and it is not a falsifiable hypothesis unless you have observable or inferential evidence of its ending. I’ve already said that I don’t think the machine analogy is apt.

Where I find fault with Sagan's view is in his appeals to science to argue metaphysical conclusions (as Richard Dawkins and his ilk are prone to do, although I vastly prefer Sagan to Dawkins.) But I'm not going to launch into yet another criticism of that. I'll let well-known TV scientist Brian Cox lay out the point:

The textbook critique of Descartes' dualism is that by dividing the world into mind and matter, he loses the capacity to explain how mind and matter interact. He cannot explain how it is that a mind manages to raise a hand, nor how a tipple renders a mind insensible. — Banno

The problem with Descartes' philosophy is not positing the division of mind and matter, but of treating mind (res cogitans) as though it were something objective. Then it becomes something like a mysterious ectoplasm or 'thinking stuff' and all of the associated problems of how 'it' relates to 'the physical'. But it's not an hypthesis, more like an heuristic model.

What has tended to happen is that due to this confusion in Descartes' model, scientifically culture generally has tended to divide off the mental and the physical, and then try to explain the former in terms of the latter. Thereby hangs the entire sorry story of materialist philosophy of mind.

I say it's controversial because it challenges realism, which is the ingrained tendency of the natural outlook — Quixodian

It calls this attitude into question:

From a phenomenological perspective, in everyday life, we see the objects of our experience such as physical objects, other people, and even ideas as simply real and straightforwardly existent. In other words, they are “just there.” We don’t question their existence; we view them as facts.

When we leave our house in the morning, we take the objects we see around us as simply real, factual things—this tree, neighboring buildings, cars, etcetera. This attitude or perspective, which is usually unrecognized as a perspective, Edmund Husserl terms the “natural attitude” or the “natural theoretical attitude.”

When Husserl uses the word “natural” to describe this attitude, he doesn’t mean that it is “good” (or bad), he means simply that this way of seeing reflects an “everyday” or “ordinary” way of being-in-the-world. When I see the world within this natural attitude, I am solely aware of what is factually present to me. My surrounding world, viewed naturally, is the familiar world, the domain of my everyday life. Why is this a problem?

My theory is that secular culture works very hard to normalise this attitude, and to discourage anything that calls it into question. And as a staunch defender of secular values and common-sense realism, you feel duty bound to follow suit. Fair comment?

You seem to me more in the business of looking for support for how you want things to be than you are coming to these questions with an open mind. — Janus

Quite the contrary, I post materials and ideas from many different sources in support of idealist points of view, and for more than ten years, your only response has been to shoot them down. I give considerable time to addressing your criticisms, often to the response that I've 'changed the subject' or 'not addressed the question'. Maybe we should call it quits, Janus, I'm quite happy to do that.

Ever since 1781, the meaning and significance of Kant’s “transcendental idealism” has been a subject of controversy. — Janus

I say it's controversial because it challenges realism, which is the ingrained tendency of the natural outlook. Plenty of people dispute the interpretation of that passage in Kant, but it supports the argument I made on that basis, and there are others who support that. Like with any of these questions, it's beyond adjutication.

The other passage quoted in support was that about the cosmologist Andrei Linde a couple of days back. It is about the role of the observer in the perception of time. It's really worth the listen to his Closer to Truth interview about the subject (although I guess now that I posted something about it, you will only watch it to work out what's wrong with it :-) )

:clap:

how do you explain the contingent existence of the space-time world, that appears to have a singular point of beginning into being? — Gnomon

I'm afraid that explaining the existence of the world is quite beyond my capacity. But do consider the Buddhist approach, which doesn't begin with the origin of everything, but with the origin of suffering (dukkha). What is it that drives us to continue to suffer? That's also a very deep question! But you can see how situating the question in those terms changes the terms of reference, so to speak.

Culturally, the West is in a situation where science apparently has displaced biblical religion as an account of the origin of the Universe. But then, the Biblical tradition had been an enormous stimulus to finding out the 'why' of existence, especially in combination with the Greek philosophical heritage. That framework provided the whole context for the emergence of science in the first place (for which see e.g. God's Philosophers, James Hannam). Without going into the whole vast question of the role of religion in the history of ideas, suffice to notice that Christian monotheism is one of the fundamental sources of today's culture.

But Buddhism operates outside that frame of reference as it originated and developed quite separately from it (although not without some influences. There is a myth of origin in Buddhism, but it is obscure and rarely referenced.) Regardless it is just as opposed to philosophical materialism as is Christianity, albeit on different grounds. In fact there is very deep and profound school in Buddhism called Yogācāra (or Vijñānavāda) which has many resemblances to the philosophy of Bishop Berkeley (although also significant differences). For a reasonably short, if dense, introduction, see What Is, and Isn't, Yogācāra, Dan Lusthaus. There's also a book I often mention on this forum, The Central Philosophy of Buddhism, T R V Murti, published 1955. It is nowadays criticized for its Euro-centrism and over-emphasis on Western philosophy but it draws many detailed parallels between Mahāyāna philosophy and Western philosophical idealism (including extensive commentary of the phenomenal/noumenal.)

You'll know that I am a big admirer of Charles Pinter's book, I've often sung its praises here. Seems to me it hasn't attracted the attention it deserves, because the author is not known in philosophy or cognitive science, which is a pity, because it's a great book.

Actually, there is far more of a vested – self-flattering – interest in im-materialism (i.e. spiritualism, idealism) than "materialism", as you say, which is much too impersonal and mechanical for any sort of emotional investment, or personal bias. — 180 Proof

Might be true if the concept of matter was coherent, which it isn't, or science could explain how matter gives rise to consciousness, which it can't.

In any case, the point was your reference to

As the Buddha teaches... — 180 Proof

because you were mis-quoting. The passage you're referring to about 'the candle being extinguished', was in a dialogue between the Buddha and a follower, about what happens to the Buddha's consciousness/mind after enlightenment. That's what cannot be speculated about. It's got nothing to do with Buddhist beliefs about the afterlife, so it's misleading in the context in which it was given.

I don't understand Kant to say that time and space are only the perfect forms of intuition, but that we cannot impute time and space, in the way that we understand them in relation to our perception beyond that context. — Janus

It's pretty clear what he says, and has already been quoted in this thread:

I understand by the transcendental idealism of all appearances the doctrine that they are all together to be regarded as mere representations and not things in themselves, and accordingly that space and time are only sensible forms of our intuition, but not determinations given for themselves or conditions of objects as things in themselves. — CPR, A369

Transcendental realism, according to this passage, is the view that objects in space and time exist independently of our experience of them, while transcendental idealism denies this.

***

If we say that the organisms and animals that have been preserved as fossils ... in fact did not exist at all, then we are simply contradicting ourselves. — Janus

Which is why he makes this point:

the claims of transcendental idealism disclose their own non-absurdity only after difficult consideration — Bryan Magee

So I acknowledge that it *seems* absurd, right? But it's not a claim that fossils, or the past, or anything else, literally cease to exist if unperceived. The 'conditions of the experience of perception' are the same whether concerning an ancient fossil, or the computer you're viewing this on. Hence the question I asked earlier in this thread, where to draw the line?

Magee's text goes on:

Since all imaginable characteristics of objects depend on the modes in which they are apprehended by perceiving subjects, then without at least tacitly assumed presuppositions relating to the former (subject) no sense can be given to terms purporting to denote the latter (object). In short, it is impossible to talk about material objects at all, and therefore even so much as to assert their existence, without the use of words the conditions of whose intelligibility derive from the experience of perceiving subjects. Again, then, and for a reason that goes deeper than those which had been given the last time this point was made, transcendental realism cannot be stated*. It is 'the philosophy of the subject who forgets to take account of himself'. But 'just as there can be no object without a subject, so there can be no subject without an object, in other words, no knower without something different from this that is known.... For consciousness consists in knowing, but knowing requires a knower and a known. — Bryan Magee, Schopenhauer's Philosophy

*Kant calls transcendental realism the “common prejudice” (A740/B768) and describes it as a “common but fallacious presupposition” (A536/B564). Transcendental realism is the commonsense pre-theoretic view that objects in space and time are “things in themselves”, which Kant, of course, denies (SEP).

I sense your objections are based on what Kant is calling 'transcendental realism - the natural, common sense point of view. I really do get it, I'm sympathetic.

There's a vested interest in materialism being right, science being the arbiter of reality, and death being the end. Nothing which questions that will go unchallenged because the stakes are imponderably large.

As the Buddha teaches, it makes no sense – wastes time and effort – to wonder or fixate on where the flame goes when a candle blows/burns-out. — 180 Proof

The 'flame going out' is a reference to Nirvāṇa, the ending of that process, but until it is realised, the Buddha taught that beings will wander endlessly in saṃsāra. Accordingly Buddhism has elaborate doctrines of the afterlife, at least some of which have seeped into popular culture, such as the Tibetan Book of the Dead, and it is certainly mistaken to claim that Buddhism does not accept there being a life beyond this one. (An contemporary example would be A Guided Tour of Hell, by Sam Bercholz, who founded the large Buddhist publishing house Shambhala, and whose NDE following heart surgery forms the basis of that book.)

How could we possibly know whether they exist absent us? Well, the fossil record tells us they did, and if the Universe is older than the human race then it follows that it existed prioir to us and our points of view. — Janus

I introduce quotations from other sources to illustrate that the point being made is not idiosyncratic or peculiar to myself. And here's another, which I refer to from time to time, that addresses the above argument.

Everyone knows that the earth, anda fortiori the universe, existed for a long time before there were any living beings, and therefore any perceiving subjects. But according to Kant ... that is impossible.'

Schopenhauer's defence of Kant on this score was (that) the objector has not understood to the very bottom the Kantian demonstration that time is one of the forms of our sensibility. The earth, say, as it was before there was life, is a field of empirical enquiry in which we have come to know a great deal; its reality is no more being denied than is the reality of perceived objects in the same room.

The point is, the whole of the empirical world in space and time is the creation of our understanding, which apprehends all the objects of empirical knowledge within it as being in some part of that space and at some part of that time: and this is as true of the earth before there was life as it is of the pen I am now holding a few inches in front of my face and seeing slightly out of focus as it moves across the paper.

This, incidentally, illustrates a difficulty in the way of understanding which transcendental idealism has permanently to contend with: the assumptions of 'the inborn realism which arises from the original disposition of the intellect' enter unawares into the way in which the statements of transcendental idealism are understood.

Such realistic assumptions so pervade our normal use of concepts that the claims of transcendental idealism disclose their own non-absurdity only after difficult consideration, whereas criticisms of them at first appear cogent which on examination are seen to rest on confusion. We have to raise almost impossibly deep levels of presupposition in our own thinking and imagination to the level of self-consciousness before we are able to achieve a critical awareness of all our realistic assumptions, and thus achieve an understanding of transcendental idealism which is untainted by them. — Bryan Magee, Schopenhauer's Philosophy, Pp 106-107

Bolds added.

the fossil record tells us they did — Janus

'(Philosopher Edmund) 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.' — Quixodian

An analyst notes: “It (the indictment) puts Republicans who are defending Trump in the stance of opposing democracy. The indictment outlines fundamental threats to democracy on the part of Trump, and so it really puts the GOP in a very difficult political stance."

No kidding. Trump moans that 'this should never happen in America' - who can forget the hundreds of Trump rallies with the Lock Her Up chants and placards with pictures of Hillary Clinton in the lead up the 2016 election?

Hypocrisy, thy name is GOP.

Berkeley's bold assertion, "esse est percipi", did not make sense, without some qualification. — Gnomon

In Berkeley's case, the only qualification required is that God sustains the Universe in existence, although personally I have no need of that hypothesis. Pleased you reprinted the well-known Berkeley Limerick, no thread on Berkeley would be complete without it.

Science tells us the Universe began about 13.8 billion years ago, and life began on Earth about 3.8 billion years ago. — RussellA

Current science, always subject to revision - there have been murmurings about it possibly being twice as old, suggested by JWST data. That is in the scope of empirical facts.

But that is not the point. Review again: 'The passage of time is not absolute; it always involves a change of one physical system relative to another, for example, how many times the hands of the clock go around relative to the rotation of the Earth. When it comes to the Universe as a whole, time looses its meaning, for there is nothing else relative to which the universe may be said to change.' Absent an observer, how can there be measurement? 'A year' is defined by man, as the period of time of the Earth's orbit around the sun. When you confidently state that Konisberg exists, roses, water drops, camels, and the whole inventory of the encyclopedia exist - of course all of these things exist. That too is a matter of empirical fact. But 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. As mentioned in another thread yesterday on a similar point '(Philosopher Edmund) 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.'

The sad fact is that you now have a dominant faction of one of the two American political parties actively scheming to overturn democracy in support of a criminal defendant.

Trump remains the party’s central figure. Each time GOP voters and leaders have had the opportunity to move away from him—whether in the shock immediately after January 6, or the widespread disappointment over the poor performance of his handpicked candidates during the 2022 election—the party has sped past the off-ramp. ...

Polls now show Trump leading in the 2024 GOP presidential race by one of the biggest margins ever recorded for a primary candidate in either party. The Republican majority in the House of Representatives has been exploring ways to expunge his two impeachments and/or block the investigations he faces. Even the other candidates ostensibly running against him for the 2024 GOP nomination have almost uniformly condemned the indictments against him, rather than his underlying behavior. Prominent conservatives have argued that Trump cannot receive a fair trial in any Democratic-leaning jurisdiction. ...

All of these actions measure how much of the GOP is now willing to accept Trump’s repeated assaults on the basic structures of American democracy. — The Atlantic

We can only hope that these conspiracists are resoundingly beaten at the next election. The legal system is holding up its end, now it's up to the electorate.

Also, we have individual intelligences, so my intelligence could not make the world for you and vice versa; and yet we see the same things. — Janus

Bernardo Kastrup suggests that if the entire universe is mind, the presence of dissociative personalities creating individual consciousnesses answers questions that defeat other ontologies. In this view, each of us is a dissociated alter, and just like conventional alters are, we can be aware of and interact with each other without mentally overlapping or seeing into each other’s minds (drawing on studies of dissociative personality disorders which provide a kind of limited example of the principle).

Kastrup proposes our individual experiences in the physical world aren’t an issue because they’re not what they seem: they’re merely “patterns of self-excitation of cosmic consciousness.” That’s to say there is no physical world as such, but rather “It is the variety and dynamics of excitations across the underlying ‘medium’ that lead to different experiential qualities.” Within that, it is natural that we see the same things, particularly because we operate at more or less the same level of adaption.

If you and I and everyone else we might ask see an orange on the table, how could our similar cognitive setups explain the fact that we all see a table with an orange on it rather than some else altogether? — Janus

What do you think idealism is saying? Why do you think that idealism would suggest anything other than that? It's not saying that 'the world is all in your mind'. What I take it to be saying is that the fundamental ground of reality is experiential in nature, it doesn't comprise the objects or physical properties posited by physicalism which are said to exist completely independently of experience (yet at the same time, somehow mysteriously give rise to experience). But as Bernardo Kastrup frequently points out, that doesn't actually change anything about what science observes, or what we observe, day to day.

This causes me to pose a question: Why would some early Buddhists reject the idea of atman in favor of pudgala and reconcile the pudgala with anatta? — Dermot Griffin

I too discovered that school when researching Buddhism, there's a good IEP entry on the Pudgalavada here. That article notes that it was prominent in Indian Buddhism, but never really took root in other Buddhist cultures and died out with the extinction of Buddhism in its motherland.

On the other hand, the Buddha-nature teachings of Mahāyāna Buddhism seem to come close to 'ātman' views, in respect of there being a true self. But its exponents strenuously claim that buddha-nature - the potentiality of beings for enlightment - is categorically different to ātman as it is devoid of an inherently-existing self or substrate (See here.)

There's controversy over whether Buddhism (especially Nāgārjuna) is nihilistic. I don't think it is, but from my interactions with Buddhists (I was a member and moderator of Dharmawheel forum for a few years) I think there's a potentially nihilistic intepretation that Buddhists can easily fall into. The problem is that if they do, it's very hard to persuade them that it matters, as nothing does. This is related to the problem of spiritual bypassing, in my view.

My view is that 'the unknowability of the self' as spelled out by the passage I quoted above, should really be taken seriously. I think it could be argued that the Buddha took it more seriously than the Brahmins, which is what leads to his famously apophatic approach to the nature of the self.

But the ultimate constituents of objects are described by physics, which, since the advent of qm, has undermined their mind independent status. (Google ‘The Mental Universe’, Richard Conn Henry.)

I don’t see how that is relevant. Cats and dogs are sentient beings and are minds quite near to ours in evolutionary terms. But at the same time, they inhabit vastly different ‘meaning worlds’. If there were beings that saw using a completely different frequencies of light how could you say that they see the same things as humans?

This cannot explain how it is that other species see the same things we do — Janus

Yes, but you will still never know what it's like to be a bat.

I am not a Hindu, but when I read up on various ideas in Hinduism it seems to me that the self in Hindu thought is both physical and metaphysical; Perhaps I am completely misunderstanding this and, if I am, someone enlighten me. — Dermot Griffin

A translation of one of the Upaniṣads can be found here. It includes a dialogue between the sage Yājñavalkya and a questioner.

Yājñavalkya says: "You tell me that I have to point out the Self ( ātman) as if it is a cow or a horse. Not possible! It is not an object like a horse or a cow. I cannot say, 'here is the ātman; here is the Self'. It is not possible because you cannot see the seer of seeing. The seer can see that which is other than the Seer, or the act of seeing. An object outside the seer can be beheld by the seer. How can the seer see himself? How is it possible? You cannot see the seer of seeing. You cannot hear the hearer of hearing. You cannot think the Thinker of thinking. You cannot understand the Understander of understanding. That is the ātman."

Nobody can know the ātman inasmuch as the ātman is the Knower of all things. So, no question regarding the ātman can be put, such as "What is the ātman?' 'Show it to me', etc. You cannot show the ātman because the Shower is the ātman; the Experiencer is the ātman; the Seer is the ātman; the Functioner in every respect through the senses or the mind or the intellect is the ātman. As the basic Residue of Reality in every individual is the ātman, how can we go behind It and say, 'This is the ātman?' Therefore, the question is impertinent and inadmissible. The reason is clear. It is the Self. It is not an object.

I think this is a profound point which has no direct counterpart in Greek or later Western philosophy, as far as I can discern.

As I understand it through classical Buddhist thinkers such as Buddhaghosa, Siddhartha Gautama’s overall point was to promote the idea that there is no permanent unchanging self and not “You do not exist.” So non-self is akin to David Hume’s bundle theory, that is to say, what we conceive as “me, myself, and I” is really just a collection of attributes that make up who we are (i.e. our physical traits, hobbies, interests, etc). — Dermot Griffin

:ok:

When asked directly as to whether the self exists or not, the Buddha declines to answer. This non-answer is understood to be the origin of Madhyamaka (Middle Way) philosophy which was greatly elaborated by Nāgārjuna and Mahāyāna Buddhism.

Being a theist, the only real conundrum I see with Buddhism is that it has no emphasis on a creator god. — Dermot Griffin

Correct. Have a read of Buddhism and the God Idea, for a Theravada account. However, there are many points of convergence between Mahāyāna Buddhism and Christian mysticism, which have been explored in depth by e.g. D T Suzuki, Thomas Merton, and Alan Watts, to name only a few.

Has your view of idealism changed much in the past 2 or 3 years? — Tom Storm

Some elements of it I've had for a long time, but I keep seeing new implications.

To clarify - are we not talking about two distinct accounts of idealism here? — Tom Storm

I think it's developed through the kind of dialectical process over many years of discussion and analysis, although I think that Kant was the watershed.

Also do you have a brief take how a Vedanta conception of reality might fit into this schema? — Tom Storm

Buddhism and Vedanta are traditionally opponents in this respect, in that Vedanta posits something analogous to Kastrup's 'mind at large', whereas Buddhism does not.

I'm more inclined to the Buddhist analysis although the subtleties are hard to understand and to present. But I think it is something along these lines: that what we need to grasp is that all we know of existence — whether of an immediate object or the Universe at large — is a function of our world-making intelligence, the activity of the sophisticated hominid forebrain which sets us apart from other species. That’s what ‘empirical reality’ consists of. After all, the definition of ‘empirical’ is ‘based on, concerned with, or verifiable by observation or experience.’ So, asking of the Universe ‘How does it exist outside our observation or experience of it?’ is an unanswerable question. But there is no need to posit a ‘mind at large’ to account for it, because there’s nothing to account for. Put another way: 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. This is the ground of one of those paradoxical sayings of the Buddha - '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.' ¹ And I think that is because, right from the outset, the Buddha understood the real sense in which 'mind creates world'.

This is the sense in which Buddhist philosophy is said to be opposed to speculative metaphysics. Any attempt to name or to posit what it is that exists apart from or outside the organs of cognition and understanding is bound to culminate something like one of Kant's antinomies of reason (explicated in T R V Murti 'Central Philosophy of Buddhism'). We have to thoroughly realise that we really don't know (there's a Korean Son (Zen) school that is based on 'only don't know')

But this is also part of the background of The Embodied Mind, by Varela and Thompson et al, which brings together elements of Buddhist philosophy and phenomenology. I know it's kind of baffling to think about, that's where I think some element of Zen practice is kind of essential for it.

Now it is on all hands agreed, that nothing abstract or general can be made really to exist, whence it should seem to follow, that it cannot have so much as an ideal existence in the understanding. (Works 2:125)" — Berkeley

This is the major weakness in Berkeley, as he is a nominalist, i.e. denies the reality of universals.

George Berkeley … is important in philosophy through his denial of the existence of matter—a denial which he supported by a number of ingenious arguments. He maintained that material objects only exist through being perceived. To the objection that, in that case, a tree, for instance, would cease to exist if no one was looking at it, he replied that God always perceives everything; if there were no God, what we take to be material objects would have a jerky life, suddenly leaping into being when we look at them; but as it is, owing to God’s perceptions, trees and rocks and stones have an existence as continuous as common sense supposes. This is, in his opinion, a weighty argument for the existence of God.

Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy (1945), III, I., Ch. XVI: "Berkeley", p. 647

@Tom Storm 'what we take to be material objects would have a jerky life, suddenly leaping into being when we look at them' - this illustrates one of the fundamental misconceptions of idealism in my view. This has to do with the idea that, when it is stated that 'the object exists in dependence on mind', that, in the absence of a mind, it literally ceases to be, or goes out of existence. There was a similar argument, or sentiment, expressed by G E Moore, when he said that, when the passengers are all seated in the train, the wheels must dissappear, as they are no longer perceived.

I want to make a couple of points about this. The first is a reference to the Copenhagen Intepretation of quantum physics. According to it, the object of analysis of an experiment does not exist until it is measured or observed ('no phenomena is a phenomena until it is an observed phenomena' ~ Neils Bohr.) But a corollary of this was that it was incorrect to say that the object did not exist until it was observed. Rather, nothing could be said about it, until it was observed. (Positivism was to exploit that for their own ends.) What I would rather say, is that the kind of existence it had was indeterminate, prior to the observation of it. And this is supported by the principle of the wave function, which after all is a distribution of possibilities: if you ask, 'where is the (x) before the measurement', the answer is the wave function, i.e. a possibility distribution. 'It' neither exists nor doesn't exist prior to measurement - all it is, is a tendency to exist.

The second point, related, as that we have a flawed understanding of the meaning of 'to exist'. When we imagine the train wheels dissappearing, that is simply their imagined non-existence. We are attempting to assume a perspective from which we can envisage or see them outside any conception of them - which, of course, we cannot actually do. We can safely assume, or behave as if, they possess 'object permanence', which for the purposes of naturalism, they do. But what naturalism does not see, is the role of the observing mind in constituting the object - and that applies to any object whatever. And this is the main contribution of all forms of idealism - to throw into relief the role of the observer in the constitution of what we take to be real independently of any act of perception.

Compare with this passage on Husserl's critique of naturalism:

In contrast to the outlook of naturalism, Husserl believed all knowledge, all science, all rationality depended on conscious acts, acts which cannot be properly understood from within the natural outlook at all. Consciousness should not be viewed naturalistically as part of the world at all, since consciousness is precisely the reason why there was a world there for us in the first place. For Husserl it is not that consciousness creates the world in any ontological sense—this would be a subjective idealism, itself a consequence of a certain naturalising tendency whereby consciousness is cause and the world its effect—but rather that the world is opened up, made meaningful, or disclosed through consciousness. The world is inconceivable apart from consciousness. Treating consciousness as part of the world, reifying consciousness, is precisely to ignore consciousness’s foundational, disclosive role. For this reason, all natural science is naive about its point of departure, for Husserl. Since consciousness is presupposed in all science and knowledge, then the proper approach to the study of consciousness itself must be a transcendental one—one which, in Kantian terms, focuses on the conditions for the possibility of knowledge... — Routledge Introduction to Phenomenology, p144

The whole point of idealist philosophy is to come to understand the constitutive role of the mind in the generation of experience. And you can actually see that awareness growing in modern cultural discourse, with phenomenology being one of the key tributaries of it. But Berkeley, Kant, and Schopenhauer are all significant precursors to it (god bless 'em).

There's zero purpose trying to reason with Trump supporters.

As an Indirect Realist, yes. I believe that space and time existed independently of the human mind for at least the 10 billion years before life began on Earth. — RussellA

But Kant does not, and was not 'an indirect realist' in the sense you're indicating, although you're actually articulating scientific realism, I think.

There's a passage I will often refer to, from a book by Paul Davies, the popular science author, which illustrates the role that the mind plays in the construction of the universe.

The problem of including the observer in our description of physical reality arises most insistently when it comes to the subject of quantum cosmology - the application of quantum mechanics to the universe as a whole - because, by definition, 'the universe' must include any observers.

Andrei Linde has given a deep reason for why observers enter into quantum cosmology in a fundamental way. It has to do with the nature of time. The passage of time is not absolute; it always involves a change of one physical system relative to another, for example, how many times the hands of the clock go around relative to the rotation of the Earth. When it comes to the Universe as a whole, time looses its meaning, for there is nothing else relative to which the universe may be said to change. This 'vanishing' of time for the entire universe becomes very explicit in quantum cosmology, where the time variable simply drops out of the quantum description. It may readily be restored by considering the Universe to be separated into two subsystems: an observer with a clock, and the rest of the Universe.

So the observer plays an absolutely crucial role in this respect. Linde expresses it graphically: 'thus we see that without introducing an observer, we have a dead universe, which does not evolve in time', and, 'we are together, the Universe and us. The moment you say the Universe exists without any observers, I cannot make any sense out of that. I cannot imagine a consistent theory of everything that ignores consciousness...in the absence of observers, our universe is dead'. — Paul Davies, The Goldilocks Enigma: Why is the Universe Just Right for Life, p 271

Since such self-consciousness was not allowed in the objective/reductive scientific method, they turned to Eastern philosophy (e.g. Buddhism) for ways to account for the meddling man-in-the-middle. — Gnomon

That's where Frithjof Capra hit the jackpot with the Tao of Physics.

All minds take-in sensory information from the environment, then process & code the data into "cognitive" mental representations, that are meaningful to the observing Self. — Gnomon

Bingo. And without that observing self, which is never amongst the objects being observed, nothing whatsoever exists.

I was just venting — T Clark

More or less what I do in this thread. Plus expressing a sense of exasperation and bafflement.

Kant (1724 to 1804) unfortunately didn't have the advantage of Darwin's book On the Origin of Species 1859, so couldn't include the theory of evolution in his philosophy. — RussellA

How would that have mattered?

Do you think space and time are real independently of the mind?

I have two American grand-children. And I do have expectations that America is better than what Trump wanted to make it.

Devon Archer's testimony bursts GOP's hype balloon

Special Counsel Jack Smith said in a statement that the insurrection on January 6 was an “unprecedented assault” on democracy.

The prosecutor spoke following the indictment of former President Donald Trump in relation to his attempts to overturn the 2020 election.

Mr Smith said the indictment “sets forth the crimes charged in detail. I encourage everyone to read it in full”.

“The attack on our nation's capitol on January 6, 2021, was an unprecedented assault on the seat of American democracy,” he added. “As described in the indictment, it was fueled by lies. Lies by the defendant targeted at obstructing a bedrock function of the US government – the nation's process of collecting, counting and certifying the results of the presidential election.”

“The men and women of law enforcement who defended the US Capitol on January 6 are heroes. They are patriots and they're the very best of us,” the special counsel said. “They did not just defend a building or the people sheltering in it, they put their lives on the line to defend who we are as a country and as a people.”

How Trump can even be considered a Presidential candidate beggars belief.

It's depressing, just how labyrinthine German philosophy became after Kant. You could assemble a roomful of renowned experts in the philosophy of Kant and Hegel, and they would all differ vociferously on what it all meant (and take hours and hours of labourious arguments to do so). No wonder Russell and Moore had no trouble dispatching it.

A lot of the difficulties stem from trying to work out what Kant meant by that 'unknown something'. I still see that in online discussions about Kant (and I know Kant is an exceedingly difficult philosopher to understand.) There's this impulse to peek behind the curtain, so to speak, to understand what the dickens is the ding an sich. As if by understanding what it really is, we will have dispelled the mystery of existence.

But Kant only introduced the concept of the “thing in itself” to refer to the world as it is independently of our experience of it and unstructured by our cognitive constitution. A standard objection to the notion is that Kant has no business positing it given his insistence that we can only know what lies within the limits of possible experience. But a more sympathetic reading is to see the concept of the “thing in itself” as a sort of placeholder in Kant's system; it both marks the limits of what we can know and expresses a sense of mystery that cannot be dissolved, the sense of mystery that underlies our unanswerable questions. Through both of these functions it serves to keep us humble (Emrys Westacott). And I think if it is understood in that spirit, it is still a perfectly understandable principle. "We do not see things as they truly are, but only as they appear to us".

:pray:

Kant is not an Idealist. In the Prolegomena Kant wants to distinguish his view from Berkeley's Idealism. — RussellA

Kant called himself a 'transcendental idealist' and 'empirical realist', saying that the two perspectives were not in conflict:

I understand by the transcendental idealism of all appearances the doctrine that they are all together to be regarded as mere representations and not things in themselves, and accordingly that space and time are only sensible forms of our intuition, but not determinations given for themselves or conditions of objects as things in themselves. (This is Kant's doctrine - Q). To this idealism is opposed transcendental realism, which regards space and time as something given in themselves (independent of our sensiblity). The transcendental realist therefore represents outer appearances (if their reality is conceded) as things in themselves, which would exist independently of us and our sensibility and thus would also be outside us according to pure concepts of the understanding. — CPR, A369

Having distinguished between transcendental idealism and transcendental realism, Kant then goes on to introduce the concept of empirical realism:

The transcendental idealist, on the contrary, can be an empirical realist, hence, as he is called, a dualist, i.e., he can concede the existence of matter without going beyond mere self-consciousness and assuming something more than the certainty of representations in me, hence the cogito ergo sum. For because he allows this matter and even its inner possibility to be valid only for appearance– which, separated from our sensibility, is nothing – matter for him is only a species of representations (intuition), which are call external, not as if they related to objects that are external in themselves but because they relate perceptions to space, where all things are external to one another, but that space itself is in us. — A370

That concluding phrase ('that space itself is in us') should torpedo any suggestion that Kant was a realist tout courte.

He differentiated himself from Berkeley's idealism only after critics of the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason accused him of setting forth the same basic doctrine. That was the source of his 'refutaton of idealism' which is discussed in SEP here.

ChatGPT's comment that Kant's things-in-themselves are entirely beyond our capacity to experience or comprehend is incorrect for the same reason — RussellA

I never would regard ChatGPT as an authoritative source. What it does very well is paraphrase and summarise, and I believe it did so adequately in this case. That things are not percieved as they are in themselves is fundamental in the Critique.

Do you think that the entire world is mind-dependent, or just certain of its features? — charles ferraro

Where would the line be drawn?

I think the situation is that Trump and Fox and other media have created a separate reality which is disconnected from the facts. It is Guy Debord’s ‘Society of the Spectacle’ made flesh. Trump has created a structure where for those under his spell, facts are what he says they are.