Do you acknowledge the fact that there are essential physical aspects to a functioning mind? There's clearly a dependency on a functioning brain: memory and personality can be impacted by disease and trauma. Birth defects that affect brain development have bearing on cognitive ability. Hormones affect our moods and our thinking. Each of our senses (our interface to the external world)are dependent on physical organs and on specialized area of the brain to interpret the input. I don't see any reason to think that mind can exist without a functioning brain, or something with analogous functionality. — Relativist

Yes — but it cuts both ways. These are all bottom-up causal factors — molecular, hormonal, endocrinal and so on. But psychosomatic medicine and neuroplasticity show the reality of top-down causation. Intentional acts are able to influence the physical configuration of the brain.

An Imaginary Piano

One striking example is Alvaro Pascual-Leone’s “piano practice” study at Harvard Medical School. For five days, one group of volunteers practiced a simple five-finger piano exercise physically, while another group only imagined practicing it in their heads. Using transcranial magnetic stimulation to map their brains, Pascual-Leone found that both groups exhibited comparable reorganization in the motor cortex. In other words, thought alone was sufficient to induce structural changes in the brain (Pascual-Leone et al. 1995).

So while the mind undeniably depends on the brain, the causal traffic is not one-way. The brain is also plastic and responsive to conscious direction. That reciprocity undermines the idea that mind is merely an epiphenomenon of physical processes.

Furthermore, it suggests a broader analogy between intentionality and material configuration. If we grant that intentional action can affect neural structure, and that psychosomatic states can influence the body (e.g., placebo effects, stress-related illness, healing responses), then where exactly should the line be drawn in respect of other living systems?

If ‘intentionality’ is understood not as fully conscious deliberation but as the basic capacity of an organism to act in response to stimuli — to regulate itself, seek nourishment, avoid harm — then this kind of ‘top-down’ dynamic might well be a defining feature of organic life in general. In that sense, human neuroplasticity is not an anomaly but a refined expression of a principle already implicit in life itself: organisms are not passive machines acted upon from below, but dynamic unities where form, function, and intentional response mutually shape material configuration.

Isn't his book Atheist's Guide to Reality? An excerpt from the NY Times review (2011):

The book expands the campaign of militant modern atheism, the offensive launched against religion by Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens. Rosenberg’s broadsides attack a wider horizon. Since atheism is thought to be territory already secured, the targets now in view are the Big Questions, questions about morality, purpose and consciousness that puzzle softheaded people who muddle over them. Science brings good news. The answers are now all in. This conviction that science can resolve all questions is known as “scientism” — a label typically used pejoratively (as by Wieseltier), but one Rosenberg seizes as a badge of honor.

The evangelical scientism of “The Atheist’s Guide” rests on three principal ideas. The facts of microphysics determine everything under the sun (beyond it, too); Darwinian natural selection explains human behavior; and brilliant work in the still-young brain sciences shows us as we really are. Physics, in other words, is “the whole truth about reality”; we should achieve “a thoroughly Darwinian understanding of humans”; and neuroscience makes the abandonment of illusions “inescapable.” Morality, purpose and the quaint conceit of an enduring self all have to go.

...Rosenberg’s cheerful Darwinizing is no more convincing than his imperialist physics, and his tales about the evolutionary origins of everything from our penchant for narratives to our supposed dispositions to be nice to one another are throwbacks to the sociobiology of an earlier era, unfettered by methodological cautions that students of human evolution have learned: much of Rosenberg’s book is evolutionary psychology on stilts.

Nonplussed to find you in such company, Tim :yikes:

So quantum and classical are not different except to the degree in which a confused everythingness has been boiled down to an exact somethingness. — apokrisis

by making an observation?

We are "thrown" into a a forgetfulness; this is our existence. — Constance

:clap: :pray:

it is not referring to a domain in the sense of a place.
— Wayfarer

Do some people think it is? A "place" without space and time? Hmm . . . — J

Scientists tend to be empiricists; they imagine the universe to be made up of things we can touch and taste and so on; things we can learn about through observation and experiment. The idea of something existing “outside of space and time” makes empiricists nervous: It sounds embarrassingly like the way religious believers talk about God, and God was banished from respectable scientific discourse a long time ago.

Platonism, as mathematician Brian Davies has put it, “has more in common with mystical religions than it does with modern science.” — What is Math? Smithsonian Magazine

how it can be the case that there is a N-teenth prime even if no one knows what it is, or has ever had the thought of it. — J

But the same can be said of the real numbers, generally. Do they exist prior to being discovered? My view is that they don't exist at all except for as intellectual acts, but at the same time, they are real for anyone who is capable of understanding them (and hence, discovered not invented.)

Many of the arguments about the reality of abstract objects revolve around the misconception that they are held by Platonism to exist in an 'ethereal realm', some 'place' that is 'other' to the domain of objects in space and time. But the expression 'the domain of natural numbers' is a figurative use of the term 'domain' - it is not referring to a domain in the sense of a place. But nevertheless, two and four are inside it, and the square root of one is not. It is real, even if not materially existent.

There is a vast domain of what used to be called such 'intelligible objects' - numbers, laws, principles, and many other things - but it's an 'ethereal place'. It is the domain of ideas that can only be grasped by a rational intelligence. But at least some of these are not generated or created but discovered by the mind. I think that's what Popper was driving at. Also Tyler Burge Frege on Knowing the Third Realm (which incidentally has some material on mental causation, or at least the relations of ideas.)

I've been forthcoming with what I believe and why I believe it. This affords you the opportunity to identify a flaw in my reasoning, or undercut something I believe. — Relativist

And I've been forthright in my criticism of physicalist philosophy of mind. Above, I mentioned some of them:

In addition to pointing out the so-called 'hard problem of consciousness' (which is the irreducibility of first-person experience) I've also argued along other lines, such as that information is not reducible to matter or energy (Norbert Wiener); that what exists and what is known to be real are not coterminous (C S Peirce); that the placebo effect and neuroplasticity as cases of top-down causation are inconsistent with neuro-physicalism; that constraints, forms, and intelligible structures (laws) play a real role, which physicalism as substance-ontology fails to recognise. — Wayfarer

All of these could be elaborated, but in the context of mental causation, I noted the objection:

How, for example, do you explain syllogistic logic, or for that matter general semantics, in terms of neural processing? Syllogistic logic and general semantics operate in a normative, rule-governed space ('the space of reasons'). To reduce that to neural processing is a category mistake. Neural firings may underlie thought, but they don’t explain validity, reference, or meaning. — Wayfarer

Perhaps this would be a cogent example to concentrate on, as it is proximate to this topic.

I do not insist the mind is necessarily 100% physical (I'm not dogmatic), but whatever else it might be seems unknowable - and therefore the possibilities I've seen discussed simply seem like speculative guesses. — Relativist

I haven't seen any indication that you will consider any alternatives. If they don't fit with physicalism, you will declare them speculative or 'requiring enormous assumptions', but I haven't seen anything by way of detail as to why.

When you issue a challenge, you have to expect responses. Critique isn’t negativity; it’s the lifeblood of philosophy. I've made my opposition to physicalism clear since Day One. Furthermore the idea that physicalism works 'for you' is beside the point (although then again, your screen name is 'relativist'). Why? Because it reduces it to a matter of opinion. 'Oh well, other people have different ideas, but I advocate physicalism'. But if there's a truth of the matter, than it's not a question of opinion.

And physicalism is all-or-nothing, I'm afraid. Physicalism is monistic: there is only matter, so if mind is anything other than matter, then it fails - you can't have a partial monism.

As far as this discussion is concerned, the topic is 'mental to mental causation'. But it might be useful to discuss the subject in relation to mental causation, generally. Physicalism must insist that 'mind is what brain does' and that intentional thought is nothing more than the configurations of neural matter, ultimately amenable to neuroscientific reduction. D M Armstrong is quite explicit about that. But that 1960's style of neural reductionism has gone almost completely out of fashion, save for amongst a certain clique of academics, because it faces insuperable logical problems. How, for example, do you explain syllogistic logic, or for that matter general semantics, in terms of neural processing? Syllogistic logic and general semantics operate in a normative, rule-governed space ('the space of reasons'). To reduce that to neural processing is a category mistake. Neural firings may underlie thought, but they don’t explain validity, reference, or meaning. Materialist theory of mind has moved on since Armstrong, but these kinds of objections remain, in fact it is because of them that physicalist philosophy has to keep re-defining its terms.

This strikes me as a conversation which might better be conducted in private.

There are too many instances of people who've been visited by powerful realizations of one sort or another, and then draw mad conclusions about the meaning of it. — J

:100: There are many dangers.

Agree. My way of approaching these arguments — which, as you say, crop up in many places in the Critique — is to keep in mind Kant’s awareness of the danger of objectification. To designate mind, soul, or self as a substance (in the philosophical sense) is to treat it as a “that,” an object among objects. But that can’t be done, because it leads to a circularity or reflexivity — like the eye trying to see itself, or the hand trying to grasp itself. Much of Kant’s critique of metaphysics turns on this basic insight.

John Hick points out that, at the very least, claims about God may be "eschatologically verifiable" -- that is, we may find out when we die (or, of course, we'll cease to exist). — J

I hadn't noticed this passage previously, but there is something that comes to mind from philosophy of religion. This is that a spiritual conversion or awakening is oftentimes called a kind of death, in that the 'old man' dies and the aspirant is 'born again' (a motif not limited to Christianity). It is even found in Krishnamurti's entirely non-denominational idiom, in his sayings such as 'the old must cease for the new to be' and in his 'dying to the known'. These might sound like vague poetic gestures but in reality they're often vivid and life-changing realisations - apodictic, even, to those who undergo them.

The usefulness of John Hick's pluralistic approach (not highly regarded on this forum) is that he at least recognises that these kinds of awakenings or events can occur in the context of wildly different cultural registers. For example Buddhists would never describe such an experience in terms of union with God. But as Hick says"

The basic principle that we are aware of anything, not as it is in itself unobserved, but always and necessarily as it appears to beings with our particular cognitive equipment, was brilliantly stated by Aquinas when he said that ‘Things known are in the knower according to the mode of the knower’ (S.T., II/II, Q. 1, art. 2). And in the case of religious awareness, the mode of the knower differs significantly from religion to religion. And so my hypothesis is that the ultimate reality of which the religions speak, and which we [i.e. Christians] refer to as God, is being differently conceived, and therefore differently experienced, and therefore differently responded to in historical forms of life within the different religious traditions. — John Hick, Who or What is God?

---

we know, thanks to Kant, that space and time and all the categories are purely subjective or that intellectual intuition could be a reliable guide to the way things really are. — Janus

Correction: Kant does indeed call space and time forms of intuition — i.e. a priori conditions of sensibility that belong to the subject. In that sense they are “subjective” because they are not properties of things-in-themselves, but the way in which objects can appear to us.

But — and this is crucial — he also insists they are empirically real. Everything that can be given in experience must conform to these forms, and within experience space and time are objectively valid. That’s why he repeatedly says his position is transcendental idealism + empirical realism.

So: they are not “merely subjective” fictions or illusions. Rather, they are subjectively grounded, but objectively binding for any possible experience.

An idea which is enjoying a resurgence in much current philosophy of physics.

Kant’s critique of rational psychology comes in the Paralogisms of Pure Reason (A341–405 / B399–432). His main point is that from the necessary “I think” we cannot infer a knowledge of the soul as a substance. The unity of apperception is a formal condition of experience, not an intuition of an inner object; hence we can’t determine the subject of experience as if it were a thing among things.

You say physicalism “comprises a comprehensive metaphysics,” but I would challenge that. It seems to me that physicalism doesn’t so much seek to provide a metaphysic as to negate it.

Remember that “metaphysics” as a term originates with Aristotle: it referred to those writings placed after his Physics — his “first philosophy,” where he addressed questions that physics, by its nature, cannot. The role of metaphysics has always been to ask about the principles and presuppositions of physics itself: what it means for something to exist, what kinds of causation there are, what “being” means in the most general sense.

Physicalism, by contrast, insists that all there is to reality is what the natural sciences study. But that is not “first philosophy”; it is the refusal to consider a first philosophy (and I note this refusal is often made explicit in modern philosophy). It begins by adopting the methods and categories of physics as metaphysically basic — which is precisely the point under dispute. It begins with exclusion and abstraction: bracketing off the qualitative features of experience as ‘subjective,’ leaving only those precisely measurable properties which, not coincidentally, are exactly what our scientific instruments can register.

As for the explanatory gap: it’s not a scientific theory, nor a temporary lack of evidence. It is the observation that third-person, objective description (the stock-in-trade of science) cannot in principle account for the first-person nature of existence — the fact that there is 'something it is like to be....' To say “withhold judgment” is fair enough; but to act as though physicalism is therefore the only “rational” option is to bury the the problem in the very premisses that it's exposing.

This is exactly what Thompson, Frank, and Gleiser call the blind spot of science: the inescapable fact that experience itself — the standpoint from which all science is done — cannot be brought into the picture by the very methods of objectification that make science possible. The point isn’t that it’s “subjective” in the narrow sense, but that it is constitutive: it is what allows there to be an “objective world” in the first place. So when you say you don’t see the issue, that’s not a neutral stance — it’s part of what the “blind spot” diagnosis itself explains. So if physicalism seems comprehensive to you, perhaps that’s because the very standpoint from which you judge it—lived experience itself—has already been screened out by the framework. You're not seeing what it is you don't see.

When you lump everything else under “enormous speculative guesses,” you’re effectively classifying any framework that doesn’t begin from physicalist premises as irrational. The whole sweep of philosophy other than physicalism! But that’s precisely what’s at issue. That’s why other traditions—Platonic, idealist, Buddhist, phenomenological —are vital: they provide principled accounts of experience and intelligibility, precisely what physicalism has excluded from its field of vision.

The measuring device, as I understand it, breaks that isolation at the moment of measurement. — JuanZu

In your determination to avoid attributing agency to the observer you assign it to the device, as if it were itself autonomous. But it’s just a projection, and one I think that is mistaken for the reasons I’ve already given.

I think the mistake here is to assume that because both the hand and the wood (or the device and the quantum system) are continuous in terms of atomic matter, the epistemological issue is resolved. But that’s just materialism talking. The real problem is not whether there is material continuity — nobody disputes that — but how interaction precipitates the measurement outcome. How does a physical process produce a determinate outcome, one that can be recorded and communicated as knowledge, from a cloud of mere possibilities?

That’s why this can’t be solved simply by saying “the device is natural.” Of course it is made of atoms, but what makes it a measuring device is not its material composition but its role as an artifact that embodies human purposes and generates observables. It’s precisely that interpretive element that material continuity by itself can’t account for.

Facts are usually taken to be determinable by either observation or logic. — Janus

Verificationism is a philosophical attitude, central to logical positivism, stating that a statement's meaning lies in its empirical verifiability; meaning a statement is only meaningful if it can be confirmed through sensory experience or if it's a tautology (true by definition). Accordingly statements from fields like metaphysics, ethics, and theology were often deemed otiose (empty of meaning) by verificationists, as they couldn't be empirically tested. While influential, the verifiability criterion eventually proved untenable, contributing to the decline of logical positivism.

If it possesses some kind of mental property and it is ours, it is like simply saying that it does not possess it and we possess it. — JuanZu

But notice the implicit dualism between “us” and “it.” The observer is one thing, the observed another. Yet, as Bohr insisted, what counts as a “phenomenon” in quantum mechanics is the indivisible whole of the system-plus-the-measuring-apparatus, with the observer entering only insofar as we need a shared, classical description to record and communicate the outcome. And let’s not forget: the measuring device itself would not exist had we not created it. Instruments are not natural objects but artifacts, designed precisely to extend and amplify observation.

That’s why the interpretive problem cannot be set aside as if it were merely empirical. Quantum physics itself compels us to confront issues that go beyond the subject–object split that empiricism presumes. The meaning of “measurement” remains a philosophical question, not one that can be settled by physics alone. The instrument is not simply out there in the same sense as a rock or a tree: it is an artifact, created to register and communicate particular observables. The attempt to 'naturalise the instrument' conceals rather than resolves the very interpretive questions that quantum physics forces on us.

You seem interested in exploring these possibilities, but I am not. — Relativist

I understand that you’re looking for a comprehensive alternative metaphysics. That’s a high bar — one that most philosophers don’t clear. My interest is less about constructing a new system and more about questioning the adequacy of physicalism and pointing out why it can't be understood as complete (or even completable!)

Besides, it is common practice in philosophy to show the way in which a framework is inadequate without immediately offering a replacement. Kant didn’t resolve every metaphysical puzzle; he set limits. Chalmers doesn’t provide a worked-out metaphysics of consciousness, but his argument still shifted the debate. Plato's dialogues contain many more questions than answers. For that matter, philosophy may be better understood in terms of asking questions than providing answers.

In addition to pointing out the so-called 'hard problem of consciousness' (which is the irreducibility of firrst-person experience) I've also argued along other lines, such as that information is not reducible to matter or energy (Norbert Wiener); that what exists and what is known to be real are not coterminous (C S Peirce); that the placebo effect and neuroplasticity as cases of top-down causation are inconsistent with neuro-physicalism; that constraints, forms, and intelligible structures (laws) play a real role, which physicalism as substance-ontology fails to recognise. I often raise these with various physicalist interlocutors. Anyway we went through it all in in this thread.

what is it that needs to be renounced? Language itself, which has a strong hold in ordinary experience — Constance

The Sanskit 'muni', translated as 'sage', literally means 'silent' (one of the traditional epiphets of the Buddha was 'Sakyamuni', 'sage of the Sakyas'.) But, of course, this is a distant ideal, unless one joins a silent monastic order. The Abhidhamma, which you mention, was one of the 'three baskets' of Buddhist texts and it was addressed to monks. It was not until Mahasi Sayadaw and the evangelical activities of the 'forest Thai' tradition that it was thought that meditation (sati, mindfulness) would have any relevance for ordinary people (although the Beatles relationship with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi was also a big factor. See Most Buddhists Don't Meditate]. Even now, it is understood in Buddhism that meditation is one of 'three legs of the tripod', the others being sila (moral comportment) and panna (wisdom). But in modern culture, meditation has attained a kind of symbolic status as the way to connect with 'eastern wisdom'. It is said that Husserl was very impressed with abhidhamma.

One has to give up being a person, yet maintaining one's personhood at the same time, for this boundness of being a self is the structure that makes agency possible. — Constance

A very significant insight. Recall the gospel teaching 'he who saves his own life will lose it, he who loses it for My sake will be saved'. The 'eastern' interpretation of that is precisely the overcoming (actually the death) of one's sense of egoic consciousness. Again a distant ideal, although in the religious context is is at least recognised. But in practice, the way it manifests is in self-giving.

I always wondered why people seem to miss this point. — boundless

Simple - because, for them, the only reality is matter-energy in space-time. The mind in which all this is held together to form a coherent whole is neglected or ignored.

My own thought experiment is of thinking about how life would have been if I had not existed. — Jack Cummins

non cogito ergo non sum

For example; I have come to realise that extremely inprobable events and coincidences happen all the time. — Punshhh

The story of Jung and the scarab beetle is one of the most famous examples he used to illustrate his concept of synchronicity.

Once Carl Jung was treating a young woman who was a very difficult patient. She was highly educated and deeply rational, so much so that she had "sealed herself" off from emotional or psychological progress. Jung felt he was at an impasse with her, as she was resistant to his therapeutic attempts to get her to a "more human understanding." He hoped that something "unexpected and irrational" would happen to break through her intellectual defenses.

One day, she was in his office telling him about a dream she had the previous night. In the dream, she was given a piece of jewelry in the shape of a golden scarab beetle. As she was recounting this dream, Jung heard a gentle tapping sound on the window behind him. He turned around and saw a large flying insect tapping against the pane, seemingly trying to get into the dark room.

Jung opened the window and caught the insect as it flew in. He was astonished to discover that it was a scarabaeid beetle, a common rose-chafer, whose golden-green color was the closest thing in that region to a "golden scarab."

Jung handed the beetle to his patient and said, "Here is your scarab."

The event had a profound effect on the woman. Her rigid, rational worldview was shattered by the coincidence of her dream and the appearance of the real beetle. Jung noted that this "broke the ice of her intellectual resistance," and the treatment was able to proceed with satisfactory results.

You're conflating law realism with physicalism — Relativist

From our previous discussions, I presumed you had D M Armstrong in mind, who is an avowed physicalist. Are the 'law realists' who are not physicalist? (Coming to think of it there would be.)

I’d say that “law realism” really just smuggles Platonism back in through the side door. It appeals to universals to ground necessity, but universals are not observable particulars — they are grasped only by reason. That makes them, in effect, intelligible structures postulated to explain phenomena, which is a Platonic move, whether admitted or not. Kant on the other hand accepted that these lawful relations are indispensable for science, but located them in the activity of the mind as a priori conditions of experience. They were not ‘in re’ but ‘in intellectus’

The difficulty is that law realists won’t acknowledge it, because it thinks mind itself is simply the product of those same physical processes which it situates ‘in things’. But that is circular: the only way we ever know about universals or laws is through the activity of reason, the mind’s ability to discern likeness within diversity and to infer necessity where the senses show only succession. To explain mind as product of the very processes whose necessity it is positing is to fall into a circularity. The scientific realist appeal to universals already presupposes rational relations that cannot be explained away as a physical mechanism, and it’s here that the Platonic and Kantian implications reassert themselves.

the Law Realists — Relativist

Such as?

You really need to have a look at Alicia Juarrero Dynamics in Action. The book starts with the question ‘what is the difference between a wink and a blink?’ and then proceeds to review ‘action theory’ in the context of that question. (I’ll add that I haven’t finished the book nor really assimilated it yet but it seems directly relevant.) Also see https://www.meaningcrisis.co/episode-6-aristotle-kant-and-evolution/

I recognise that, it's David Bentley Hart's latest All Things are Full of Gods. And he states exactly what I was about to write, which is the vexed relationship between logical necessity and physical causation. I've been drafting some material on this question, which I'll present below.,

Once again, I'll situate this historically. Pre David Hume, there was an assumption that the world was intelligible — that is, there was an intrinsic link between the order of nature and the order of reason. Causes were understood in terms of formal and final causes, which often carried logical or conceptual necessity. For example, water flows downhill because that is part of its nature — a blend of formal and final causation. More from Hart:

In the pre-modern vision of things, the cosmos had been seen as an inherently purposive structure of diverse but integrally inseparable rational relations — for instance, the Aristotelian aitia, which are conventionally translated as “causes,” but which are nothing like the uniform material “causes” of the mechanistic philosophy. And so the natural order was seen as a reality already akin to intellect. Hence the mind, rather than an anomalous tenant of an alien universe, was instead the most concentrated and luminous expression of nature’s deepest essence. This is why it could pass with such wanton liberty through the “veil of Isis” and ever deeper into nature’s inner mysteries.

David Hume broke this supposed relationship. He argued that causation is not something we can deduce from reason alone — it's only ever inferred from constant conjunctions: "We see A followed by B, and infer causation." Hence, causation is not logically necessary but contingent and habitual.

All reasonings concerning matter of fact seem to be founded on the relation of cause and effect. But... the connection between cause and effect is not a product of reasoning, but of custom. — An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding

This cleaved the empirical from the rational, leading to the so-called Humean bifurcation: facts (contingent, empirical) vs. norms/logical truths (necessary, conceptual). And that is still writ large in so many of the dialogues on this forum. Many of the contributors I will talk to here - Apustimologist, Relativist, Philosophim, to name a few - assume that, as the brain is physical, and the brain is the source of throught, then thought too has a physical basis. In fact they can't even conceive of there being an alternative to that, it is so firmly a tenet of modern culture.

I think one way to address this rupture is through what John Vervaeke calls relevance realization — a contemporary cognitive science account that begins to heal the divide Hume opened between logical structure and physical causality.

Vervaeke argues that cognition — especially human intelligence — is not a matter of brute computation or mechanistic stimulus-response. Rather, it's grounded in our dynamic ability to interpret what is relevant in a given situation, from among an almost infinite range of possible inputs, actions, and interpretations. This isn’t something that can be fully formalized or predicted — it’s emergent, self-organizing, and constrained by the organism's goals, embodiment, and interaction with the world.

In this light, cognition is not just caused — it's structured. That is, our awareness of the world is shaped by a salience landscape, a kind of lived topography of what stands out, what matters, and what calls for action. And this is not imposed on a passive agent; it is co-constituted by organism and environment ('co-arising'). The world does not merely act on us through physical causes — it is disclosed to us through a structure of intelligibility that is tied to our biological, emotional, and social existence.

What’s significant here is that this structure of salience and relevance is normative and existential in character — it allows for truth and error, insight and illusion, precisely because it is not just reducible to efficient causes. Vervaeke’s insight is that intelligence is the capacity to realize what is relevant — and this is not simply a logical deduction nor a chain of physical causes, but an enacted form of knowing by being, to borrow Hart’s phrase.

This begins to undo the Humean bifurcation. Relevance realization is causal — grounded in the biological dynamics of neural networks, evolution, and interaction — but it also has logical structure, in the sense that it underwrites all higher-order cognition, including our grasp of concepts, categories, language, and truth itself. But the normative aspect recognises that for us, as intelligent rational agents, the fact that things matter cannot be captured in reductionist or physical terms.

In a way, it returns us to something like the Aristotelian sense of logos as both reason and structure — where mind is not a ghost in the machine, but the expression of nature’s capacity for self-disclosure. The very idea of a "veil of Isis" only makes sense if there is something behind the veil that is able to be seen — and something within us that is capable of seeing it. That is the intuition the pre-modern world preserved — and one that Vervaeke’s work is attempting to recover in post-cognitive-scientific terms.

It doesn’t mean reverting to pre-scientific metaphysics, but it does mean questioning the flattening effect of a purely mechanistic view of causality. In a salience-structured world, causation isn't just physical interaction — it’s also the enactment of meaning. And meaning, far from being a subjective gloss on an indifferent universe, becomes a central feature of how the world comes into presence at all.

In the one paper I’ve read about Frege, he describes logic as ‘the laws of thought’. ‘Frege on Knowing the Third Realm’, Tyler Burge. The thing is, logic connects thoughts by way of necessity. Causation itself is physical.

couldn't believe my eyes when Trump started doing whatever he wanted and neither the Senate nor the court stopped him. The system of checks and balances stopped working? How did it happen that he can do almost whatever he wants? Isn't that a decline? — Astorre

Indeed. I'm in Australia, and here, most people - a huge majority, in fact - are shocked, frightened and appalled by what's happening in America under Trump. There's some degree of cynicism about the US here, but probably much less than other places - my parents (who lived through WWII, one of my father's brothers died in the Pacific Theatre) never ceased to say that 'MacArthur saved us from invasion from the Japanese'. So in my household, America was always the 'light on the hill'. My mother wept bitter tears when Kennedy was assasinated (I was ten). So I've been extremely dissappointed by the Trump phenomenon, ever since it started - it is the victory (for now), of greed, of hatred and cynicism. Anyway this isn't the Trump thread but as the topic came up....

Hey no apologies necessary, it’s only that ‘landslide victory’ is yet another Trump exaggeration so should be called out.

He (Trump) won by a large margin. — Astorre

Not that large:

• 2024: Trump won the popular vote with a lead of about 1.5% over Kamala Harris. This was the first time he won the national popular vote in a presidential election.
• 2020: Joe Biden won the popular vote by 4.5% over Trump.
• 2016: Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by 2.1% over Trump, despite losing the Electoral College.
• 2012: Barack Obama won by 3.9% over Mitt Romney.
• 2008: Barack Obama won by 7.3% over John McCain.

As in, Berkeley is logically consistent and Kant allows a distinction between the unknowable noumena (the ontologically real) and the phenomena (the mentally known). Those folks aren't muddling epistemology with ontology. — Hanover

:up:

Why not say that there is something mental in the measuring device? — JuanZu

Sure - as I already said, it’s a product of our design. In other words whatever ‘mentality’ it possesses is ours.

I believe Timothy has addressed this adequately in his subsequent post.

To know anything in total one must know everything, which is impossible. This leads to a limited sort of fallibilism. — Count Timothy von Icarus

We don't see things as they are in themselves, one might say.

That may be part of the reason we find QM so hard to understand, we don't have the type of intuitions that would help up make sense of the phenomena. — Manuel

I think there are interpretations that make sense of quantum physics Ruth Kastner's transactional interpretation, and The Timeless Wave (especially the section on QBism)

To me, that sounds like the ghost in the machine — JuanZu

I know! That conditions your approach to the issue, where it is something to be avoided at all costs. But that is a consequence of the very 'Cartesian division' that this thread is about. If there is a ghost, it is the ghost of the dualism that radically separates mind and body, matter and meaning, and then seeks what is real only in the measurable.

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

For me, if there is no Ghost in the machine the answer no longer lies in how the machine resembles us, but in how we resemble the machine. — JuanZu

And that is the cost — the de-humanisation is the legacy of this division. When you say “the machine provokes a response in us,” you’re still trying to frame the matter purely in terms of physical causation. But signs are not physical things. They are relations, interpretations, meanings — irreducible to mechanism, yet not “ghostly” either. This is precisely the false dichotomy that the ghost of Descartes has saddled us with. The irony is that by trying to exorcise the ghost, we remain haunted by it. The world this ghost inhabits is one in which the entire cosmos is stripped of interiority and meaning, and we ourselves are left as the orphaned offspring of blind physical causes that somehow, against all odds, have given rise to mind.

Nagel describes how the scientific revolution created this austere conception of objectivity by stripping away appearances, meaning, and intention. But there are many emerging alternatives. Biosemiotics, for example, begins from the insight that living systems are already engaged in the interpretation of signs, not merely pushed around by causes. Phenomenology and existentialism seek to restore the first-person perspective that the cartesian divide occludes. Enactivism, likewise, emphasises that cognition is not something injected into an otherwise meaningless world, but a mode of sense-making that arises through our embodied engagement with it. Both perspectives see through the ghost by refusing the dualism itself: the world is neither “mere matter” devoid of meaning, nor a projection of a private subjectivity, but a field of ongoing interactions where significance is intrinsic to life and mind.

The point isn’t that instruments are “out of this world,” but that they’re not just neutral parts of nature either. They’re artifacts manufactures to register specific events in a communicable and repeatable manner. That means they embody our intentions, and precisely there the epistemic cut reappears — between what simply happens in nature and what is meaningful as information. There's a really fundamental ontological divide there which you can't simply paper over by declaring instruments 'natural'.

Once we naturalise the measuring device, it becomes something external to subjectivity. — JuanZu

Unfortunately for that argument, devices are not naturally-occurring phenomena.They embody our intentions.

I take your point that we should not confuse subjectivity with the role of the measuring apparatus. Of course it is the detector, not personal awareness, that interacts with the system. But the question that persists — and this is what makes the problem metaphysical — is: why does the interaction only count as a measurement when it enters the domain of observables, that is, when it becomes information available to us?

In other words, the physics itself says that quantum systems evolve continuously according to the Schrödinger equation until a “measurement” occurs. We can naturalise the apparatus, but we have still not eliminated the conceptual distinction between interaction in general and the interaction that produces definite outcomes. This is why Copenhagen does not simply dissolve into realism: the transition from indeterminate states to determinate observations remains stubbornly tied to the framework of knowledge, including the observer - not just to physical process. That is the sense in which it transgresses objectivity.

That’s what I was getting at by mentioning Berkeley and d’Espagnat. Not that the ‘mind causes reality’ in a gross sense, but that the very structure of quantum theory reopens the question of how far reality can be described apart from the conditions of observation. That’s why Berkeley often crops up in these conversations: he represents one pole in the dialectic, so to speak. After all there’s plainly a resonance between Bohr’s ‘no phenomenon is a real phenomenon until it is observed’ and ‘esse est percipe’. It is what caused Einstein to ask ‘does the moon not continue to exist when nobody is looking?’.

Mind you Bohr himself strenuously resisted any idea of subjectivity in the obvious sense. He didn’t say that consciousness collapses the wavefunction (that was Wigner, later, but even he then later abandoned the idea); Rather, Bohr insisted that what counts as a “phenomenon” in quantum mechanics is the indivisible whole of the system-plus-the-measuring-apparatus. The observer enters only insofar as we need a shared, classical description to record and communicate the outcome. But this is precisely what raises the philosophical tension: even while Bohr denied the role of subjectivity, his insistence that physics can only speak in terms of observables leaves open the question of how far quantum theory describes nature as it is, apart from the conditions of our access to it. In other words it calls the ideal of complete objectivity into question.

Thank you.

I don't know Scholastic philosophy very deeply, but I thought that the concept of intelligibility meant that we can know what is real in the physical world as well. — J

Nor do I, but the theme I'm exploring is more like a current in the history of ideas, which shows up in Scholastic philosophy. But what was 'real' to the scholastics, was not the physical world as such. When we say “physical world,” we usually mean what modern physics investigates—matter, energy, and their interactions. But for St. Thomas, there was no such concept as a self-subsisting “physical” realm. The world was composed of created beings, each a union of form and matter, whose being itself is dependent on God as ipsum esse subsistens (being itself). In that sense, he would not have recognized “the physical world” in the sense we do today.

Summa Theologiae I, q. 85, a. 1 (On whether our intellect can know material things)

“The intellect does not know matter except as it is under form.”
(intellectus non cognoscit materiam nisi secundum quod est sub forma)

Sensible Form and Intelligible Form:



The Cultural Impact of Empiricism



How this relates to 'Idealism in Context'

The thesis is that the medievals operated within a participatory ontology — a “knowing by being,” where intelligibility arises through the interplay of form and matter, and ultimately through participation in God’s act of being. In this framework, “matter alone” was unintelligible; as Aquinas put it, “prime matter cannot be known in itself, but only through form” (per Eric Perl).

This was increasingly challenged by the emerging paradigm of modernity, which sought to secure knowledge through objectivity — facts conceived as mind-independent, accessible to a detached observer. The sense of separateness entailed by this paradigm was alien to the scholastic worldview.

Idealism arises in early modern philosophy as a reaction against this development. There are of course caveats: Berkeley converges with Aquinas in rejecting the idea of an unknowable material substrate, yet diverges in rejecting universals. Kant, meanwhile, re-interprets hylomorphism in transcendental terms, shifting form and matter into the structures of cognition. But in their different ways, both Berkeley and Kant resisted the notion of a self-subsistent physical domain, independent of mind altogether.

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The lived realization you talk about refers to Husserl's epoche. — Constance

Quite. There is also a geneological relation between Buddhism and Pyrrhonic scepticism, purportedly owing to Pyrrho of Elis travelling to Gandhara (today's Kandahar in Afghanistan, but then a Buddhist cultural centre) and sitting with the Buddhist philosophers. See Epochē and Śūnyatā.

To really do this, I am convinced one has to leave standard relations with the world behind, a monumental task. — Constance

Renunciation, in a word.

The tree is still a tree, the clock a clock — Constance

'First, there is a mountain; then there is no mountain; then there is' ~ Dogen Zen-ji

'If one takes the everyday representation as the sole standard of all things, then philosophy is always something deranged' ~ Martin Heidegger, 'What is a Thing?'

I have zero idea what you’re talking about.

But I did google ‘’life in North Korea’ from which:

Forced Labor:
Many North Koreans, including children, are forced to work on farms, in factories, and in political prison camps.
Food Insecurity:
Millions suffer from malnutrition and lack of adequate food, with prisoners sometimes eating insects and rats to survive.
Infrastructure:
Basic infrastructure, such as electricity and clean water, is underdeveloped, making daily tasks like washing and hygiene challenging.
Limited Information:
Access to the internet is restricted, and state-controlled TV channels are the only source of media.