Predictions work perfectly well. Recall that Kant’s theory of nebular formation (slightly modified by LaPlace) is still considered current science and that Kant used to lecture on scientific subjects. Even though we may only ever know things as they appear to us, those appearances are consistent across a vast range of empirical facts. But empirical observation doesn’t amount to metaphysical insight. That’s the crucial distinction. (Beware of taking the thread into Kant, however, it’s almost as notorious a derailer of threads as interpretations of quantum mechanics.)

The sky is blue only applies during daytime therefore in this scenario truth is context dependent.

1+1 = 2 is true in all circumstances because it’s a calculation performed on numerical values.

In this aspect we get some truths being changeable and some being constant. — invicta

What I think you've sensed is about the distinction between contingent and necessary facts. In philosophy, this is explained in terms of the difference between a priori and a posteriori facts - meaning things that can be known by reason along (like arithmetic facts) as distinct from things were are dependent on circumstances (like the colour of the daytime sky).

There is an enormous history of discussion of those distinctions, but a pivotal moment was David Hume's distinction of the two kinds. The textbook examples that Hume gave are such statements as 'all bachelors are unmarried', which is true by virtue of definition, that bachelors are unmarried men. An example of an a posteriori fact was that 'all swans are white', which was certainly true in Hume's time as no Europeans had yet set foot in Western Australia, where there are black swans. Hume went on to cast doubt on the logical status of the latter kind of facts, those being dependent on experience and custom, thereby undermining the status of causal relations which until then had always been assumed to be grounded in logic. This was a fork in the road for Western philosophy.

However this was later addressed in Kant's famous 'answer to Hume'. Very briefly (and literally thousands of volumes have been written about it) according to Kant, causality is not an empirical concept at all - that is, it is not derived from experience - but a necessary condition of experience. It is one of the categories of the understanding by which we make sense of experience. In other words, we do not derive our knowledge of causality from experience; rather, we bring our concept of causality to experience, which allows us to understand and interpret experience.

I interpret @Banno as coming from the 'plain language' school of analytical philosophy, which is not about any kind of abstract knowledge of truth, but only about what can meaningfully be said. This uses the famous last words of Wittgenstein's Tractatus ('That of which we cannot speak...') as a kind of firewall against many kinds of previously-contested metaphysical questions. That kind of 'deflationary' approach is typical of much of 20th century philosophy, particularly in the English-speaking world.

But I think there's a deeper, underlying issue. I think in traditional (pre-modern) culture, there was a larger conceptual place for the 'unconditioned' or 'non-contingent' category of truths, which over the transition to modernity has gradually been eroded away. I think it's because the idea of the unconditioned is associated with the God idea which is of course anathema (pardon the irony) to secular culture. That's why I mentioned the review of Lawrence Krauss. The writer's point about the 'anxiety over contingency' draws out the issue of the limits of empiricism and the attempt to avoid the implications of that.

In fact Krauss has been criticized by a number of other reviewers for his failure to grasp the limits of empiricism, or put another way, his attempt to use empirical science to make metaphysical statements (e.g. see David Albert's review in the NY Times which provoked a notorious hissy fit from Krauss.) But the article I linked to, gives a much fuller account of the meaning of 'intelligibility', as distinct from what it calls Krauss' 'animal extroversion' (which basically means taking naturalism as a metaphysic. Notice the reference to Bernard Lonergan a Canadian Catholic philosopher who is considered a representative modern exponent of metaphysics.)

Much more could be said, but that at least points in the direction I think the OP is trying to head.

I think that is a summary view developed over a long period of time which needs to be re-analysed (which I will come back to later.)

The salient points in the article and those which are particularly salient are the anxiety over contingency and the breakdown of what Lonergan means by rational grasp of the intelligible order.

The point which I think the OP wishes to convey is the distinction between necessary and contingent truths.

All scientific work presupposes an order.

Therefore the universe is intelligible. — Banno

Other way around Banno - it’s the fact that the world is at least in part intelligible that science can get a foothold. Intelligibility is a presupposition.

I’ll come back to this thread later but meanwhile an article from my reading list which you will find relevant

https://www.abc.net.au/religion/the-metaphysical-muddle-of-lawrence-krauss-why-science-cant-get-/10100010

There is consensus among brain researchers that the relationship between neuron activity and mental experiences is one that goes beyond casual correlation and has all the hallmarks of a causal relationship. — Jacques

There is not. What you’re describing is a philosophical attitude, not a scientific hypothesis, known as brain-mind identify theory. There are many cogent arguments against brain-mind identity but I’m not going to bother thrashing that particular dead horse any longer.

A one party state isn't of necessity repressive. — BC

Any examples come to mind? I can only think of China, Russia (and satellites) and Iran, but they’re definitely repressive.

if I had organized the January 6 attack on Congress, I'd be in solitary confinement in a federal prison. Trump, being the president at the time, has been able to escape a similar fate, so far — BC

So far.

(Note that Plaque Flag is taking one of his regular breaks from Forum participation.)

No, the USA not a one-party state. If it were, dissidents like Chomsky would have to seek asylum away from the country. As it is, he, like anyone, is free to say whatever he likes. Yes, all political parties in America are beholden to big business, but there are real differences between the Republican Party, currently corrupted by various influences including but not only that of Donald Trump, and the Democrats. Only one of those parties favours as a potential candidate a demagogue who attempted to subvert a presidential election. Only one of them is engaged in large-scale book bans and the attempts to curtail civil and voting rights. It’s important that that party is soundly defeated at the polls rather than being able to game the system to create a real one-party state.

See also The One: How an Ancient Idea Holds the Future of Physics

In The One, particle physicist Heinrich Päs presents a bold idea: fundamentally, everything in the universe is an aspect of one unified whole. The idea, called monism, has a rich three-thousand-year history: Plato believed that "all is one" before monism was rejected as irrational and suppressed as a heresy by the medieval Church. Nevertheless, monism persisted, inspiring Enlightenment science and Romantic poetry. Päs aims to show how monism could inspire physics today, how it could slice through the intellectual stagnation that has bogged down progress in modern physics and help the field achieve the grand theory of everything it has been chasing for decades.

Blending physics, philosophy, and the history of ideas, The One is an epic, mind-expanding journey through millennia of human thought and into the nature of reality itself.

A single observation of a thought without preceding brain activity is sufficient to say that mental experiences are not always caused by brain activity. However, as said, such a case has never been observed since brain scans have been available. — Jacques

However, as is well known, correlation is not causation. It is obviously the case that a functioning brain is a requirement for consciousness, but the sense in which the brain ‘produces’ or ‘creates’ consciousness is what is at issue and remains an open question. This is the subject of the David Chalmer’s paper, Facing Up to the Hard Problem of Consciousness and has been the subject under discussion in this thread for the last month.

Right. But it also applies to your contention of a causal connection between brain and mind, no less than any other causal relationship.

The mind can never possibly find the effect in the supposed cause, by the most accurate scrutiny and examination. (EHU 4.9) — Jaques, quoting David Hume An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding

But you’re the one who keeps insisting on the absolute indubitability of the causal relationship between the brain and the mind. Why is this instance of an inductive causal relationship immune to Hume’s criticism which you’re so happy to apply to anything else? (Quite aside from the fact that David Hume is hardly the last word in the topic of neuroscience and consciousness.)

Wittgenstein argues that our ordinary, everyday language already contains everything we need to understand the nature of our mental lives. He believes that philosophical problems arise when we try to look for hidden, underlying structures or entities that explain our experiences. In other words, he opposes the idea that there is a hidden realm of mental phenomena that exists beyond the ordinary use of language. — GPT4~ Pierre-Normand

Would he include in that the subconscious and the unconscious? (I realise, of course, that Wittgenstein was a philosopher, and that those are terms from psychology, however both the main protagonists of such concepts - Freud and Jung - would defend the claim that the unconscious and subconscious domains are empirically real facts about the human psyche.)

In psychoanalysis, both Freudian and Jungian, whilst the patient may express herself in words, the words convey symbolic meanings which the subject may not be able or willing to contemplate, due to repressed trauma, neuroses, absence of insight, and so on. In Jung’s work in particular there was in addition the symbolic domain which often implied meaning on the level of archetypes however Freud also sought to interpret the implicit meaning of subject’s dreams. And so on. So, should we regard Wittgenstein as antagonistic to these kinds of ideas? Is this part of what he had mind?

If you continue to find a contradiction between my two statements, you are welcome to point it out. — Jacques

The self-evident conflict stands despite your attempt to deny it. First you say that

The first one only says that thoughts are always preceded by a specific brain activity — Jacques

By which you are asserting a causal relation between the brain and thought. But the very next quote undermines causal relations, quoting Hume saying they are 'only a matter of custom'. Besides, the assertion that specific brain activities can be correlated with specific thoughts is also false. The brain, as I'm sure you know, is the most complex phenomenon known to science, with more neural connections than stars in the sky. So to demonstrate a 1:1 mapping between those activities and even very simple ideas and sensations, I don't think is tenable. You're advocating what is known as 'brain-mind identity theory' which has very few advocates in today's philosophy.

Another thing you might consider when quoting Hume is Kant's 'answer to Hume'. He said, very briefly, that causality is not an empirical concept but a necessary condition of experience. It is a category of the understanding that we use to organize our sense experience. In other words, we do not derive our knowledge of causality from experience; rather, we bring our concept of causality to experience, which allows us to understand and interpret it. And for that reason, Hume's point is something which is betrayed by the use of the word 'because' in any argument - even those of that he employed.

When WA says, "Maybe that lack is one of perspective but that perspective not something that we all have," he seems to be suggesting that the ability to adopt the right perspective or framework to understand these phenomena is not something that everyone possesses. He might be implying that while philosophy serves as an antidote to the lack of wisdom, it is not always easily accessible or comprehensible to everyone. In this sense, even if nothing is hidden, not everyone may be able to see or understand what is in plain sight due to their inability to adopt the correct perspective or framework for understanding. — GPT4

That’s what I was getting at.

The bot nailed it :yikes: (I’ll come back later, busy with domestic matters.)

As I also am inclined to do. Perhaps what I meant is, even though nothing is hidden, this is also not something that everyone can understand. Philosophy is an antidote to the lack of wisdom, but that lack is the want of something. Maybe that is lack is one of perspective but that perspective not something that we all have.

Did you even read the OP ? — plaque flag

Twice. Maybe I didn’t understand it.

So as a corollary - if nothing is hidden there is nothing in need of discovery? Sits rather uneasily alongside:

Our perversity and that of others may indefinitely postpone the settlement of opinion; it might even conceivably cause an arbitrary proposition to be universally accepted as long as the human race should last. — CS Peirce

Thanks, very interesting!

I’ve been on a Deleuze jag lately. — Joshs

None of those continentals - Deleuze, Badiou, Derrida, Lacan - have ever been part of my curriculum, and at this stage in life it's probably too late to begin. (I have discovered, however, a couple of secular critiques of naturalism from within English-speaking analytic philosophy, I'm going to make an effort to absorb them. Oh, and I am persisting with Evan Thompson's books.)

transcendence and Idealism rear their ugly heads — Joshs

that says a lot.

It was Christianity that offered salvation for all. Philosophy never made such promisses.

. But this doesn't address whether or not there actually is transcendent meaning or value — Tom Storm

And how to arbitrate that, hmmm? Peer-reviewed double-blind lab studies? Questionnaires and surveys?

The Debt Ceiling Debate Is About More Than Debt

WASHINGTON — Speaker Kevin McCarthy of California has repeatedly said that he and his fellow House Republicans are refusing to raise the nation’s borrowing limit, and risking economic catastrophe, to force a reckoning on America’s $31 trillion national debt.

“Without exaggeration, America’s debt is a ticking time bomb that will detonate unless we take serious, responsible action,” he said this week.

But the bill Mr. McCarthy introduced on Wednesday would only modestly change the nation’s debt trajectory. It also carries a second big objective that has little to do with debt: undercutting President Biden’s climate and clean energy agenda and increasing American production of fossil fuels.

The debate is nothing more than shameless extortionism by a Republican Party that has been unable to acheive its goals by legitimate electoral means. They're essentially holding the American and world economy hostage against a threat of collapsing the international economic order by refusing to endorse increasing the debt limit to meet obligations that the US Government has already incurred. It is in no way a good-faith negotiating tactic, but the exploitation of a quirk in the US system of governance to bludgeon the Administration into accepting Republican political ends. Biden is right to refuse to negotiate, on the same grounds as non negotiation with terrorists or blackmailers. But let's hope the GOP backs down before causing the mother of all economic disasters to make their point.

For the most part, "the world is purposeless, a brute fact, and all things are determined by and reducible to little billiard balls bouncing around in space and this necessarily reduces ethics, aesthetics, and even logic to illusions," is still the dominant viewpoint taught in schools. — Count Timothy von Icarus

The positing of the world without value or meaning is a consequence of the Galilean division between the 'primary qualities' as being the sole criteria for what is considered to be real, and the relegation of the remainder to the subjective, 'secondary' domain. In other words, the implicit division of the subjective and objective domain, an inevitable consequence of the philosophy of liberal individualism and the ascendent individual ego. Read Bertrand Russell's 'A Free Man's Worship', one of his early philosophical polemics and still a canonical statement of that outlook. The reason Eastern or eastern-inspired philosophies have a following is because they put back into the world what the Enlightenment abstracted away from it.

thoughts and feelings are seen as caused by brain activity. — Jacques

However

causality is based neither on logical necessity nor on inductive and deductive reasoning, but on custom or habit — Jacques

It doesn't make sense to attribute mental states like my memory of my grandmother or my belief that 2 + 2 = 4 to the whole of my body or a function.

But that does sound like a rehash of behaviourism. — Andrew4Handel

It's not behaviourism but on re-reading your OP, I'm inclined to agree with it. You are indeed referring to the explanatory gap.

Manifest (verb) 'to make evident or certain by showing or displaying.' It is still reductionist, and if it's not, then what does it actually say?

To try and be clear, what I'm arguing is that such mental acts as reasoned inference comprise the relationship between ideas, between premisses and conclusions (and not only formal reason, but judgements of meaning, generally, as per this citation). The reductionist wants to say of such mental acts that they are actually neural processes, and that they are real via this grounding in their material constituents; that they exist as physical constituents in the brain, to which we assign meaning. But I'm arguing that it is the assigning of meaning that is fundamental. Even what we regard as a physical explanation has to be grounded in meaningful claims regarding what reasoning or thought is or is not.

It's not that *I* don't know what you mean, it's that I think *you* don't know what you mean. You say:

Meaning and thought can be seen as manifestations of mental processes, which can be seen as manifestations of biological, neurological processes. I don't see that as reductionism. — T Clark

But that is the textbook definition of reductionism, to wit:

Neuro-reductionism is the argument that the mind can be "reduced" (made equivalent) to the brain. This sees the brain as identical to its thoughts and feelings. In neuro-reductionism, as neuroscientists study the brain, they gain an understanding of the mind.

So I'm suggesting that if you don't see it as reductionism, then maybe that's because you don't understand what 'reductionism' means, or what the criticisms of it are.

Let me explain: an idea cannot be a cause already because an idea is a representation, an imagination or a fiction. — Jacques

That is not the kind of idea that is being discussed. Notice the example given was one of the laws of motion. We are able to discern constraints and causes that act on the physical level, such as laws of nature, but are those laws themselves physical in nature? There is a distinction made in Talbott's example between the because of reason and the because of physical causation. To equate the two kinds is to deny the efficacy of reason, as your argument is then already determined by the disposition of your neurons.

personal experience/consciousness is instrinsically dependent on judgement and the discernment of meaning
— Wayfarer

I'm not sure, but I don't think this is true. — T Clark

That itself is a judgement.

I don't see that as reductionism. — T Clark

And not seeing it, doesn't mean that it isn't so.

I was going to mention Talbott on another thread about teleology, but it wasn’t very well formed. Talbott is no crank but of course, to challenge the mainstream is to run the risk of being so categorised, as was seen with Thomas Nagel's Mind and Cosmos. There’s an implicit consensus surrounding these questions strongly endorsing physicalism. Talbot's orientation, he says, is inspired by Goethe and Owen Barfield, among others, but he has no allegiance to Christian philosophy or intelligent design.

Later in this essay, he makes this point:

this entire discussion of ideas and meaning in the world brings us face to face with a haunting specter we need to exorcise once for all: the specter of vitalism. The accusation of vitalism seems inevitably to arise whenever someone points to the being of the organism as a maker of meaning. This is owing to a legacy of dualism that makes it almost impossible for people today to imagine idea, meaning, and thought as anything other than ghostly epiphenomena within human skulls. So the suggestion that ideas and meaning are “out there” in the world of cells and organisms immediately provokes the assumption that one is really talking about some special sort of physical causation rather than about a content of thought intrinsic to organic phenomena. That is, ideas and meanings are taken to imply a vital force or energy or substance somehow distinct from the forces, energies, and substances referenced in our formulations of physical law. Such an entity or power would indeed be a spectral addition to the world — an addition for which no one has ever managed to identify a physical basis.

But ideas, meanings, and thoughts are not material things, and they are not forces. Nor need they be to have their place in the world. After all, when we discover ideal mathematical relationships “governing” phenomena, we do not worry about how mathematical concepts can knock billiard balls around. If we did, we would have made our equations into occult or vital causes. But instead we simply recognize that, whatever else we might say about them, physical processes exhibit a conceptual or thought-like character. And so, too: the meanings that give expression to the because of reason do not knock biomolecules around, but — like mathematical relations — are discovered in the patterns we see. The thought-relations we discover in the world, whether in the mathematical demonstrations of the physicist or the various living forms of the biologist, need to be genuinely and faithfully and reproducibly observed, but must not be turned into mystical forces.

My bolds. In a similar vein:

the mathematical relations we apprehend in the physical world are neither forces nor physical things; they are purely conceptual. Yet we can reasonably say that such relations — for example, those given by the equation F=Gm1m2/r2, representing Newton’s law of universal gravitation — in some sense govern material reality. The relations tell us, within the range of their practical applicability, something about the form of physical interactions. We do not try to make an additional, vital force out of the fact that a mathematical idea, as a principle of form, is “binding” upon an actual force.

Steve Talbott, whom I quoted, is a philosopher of biology. That section I quoted was extracted from a chapter called 'From Physical Causes to Organisms of Meaning'. Most of his writing is on the question of meaning, purpose and intentionality in the context of biology. He has a great series of essays on The New Atlantis which I recommend.

:lol:

I've never understood why people think there is any contradiction between believing that phenomenal consciousness is a mental, neurological, process that manifests itself as personal experience. — T Clark

I think it's because personal experience/consciousness is instrinsically dependent on judgement and the discernment of meaning, while the kinds of causal relationships posited by neurological sciences are physical, i.e. describable in terms of physical causes and effects.

This is from a chapter on the connection of physical causation and the discernment of meaning:

We commonly explain occurrences by saying one thing happened because of — due to the cause of — something else. But we can invoke very different sorts of causes in this way. For example, there is the because of physical law (The ball rolled down the hill because of gravity) and the because of reason (He laughed at me because I made a mistake). The former hinges upon the kind of necessity we commonly associate with physical causation; the latter has to do with what makes sense within a context of meaning.

Any nuance of meaning coming from any part of the larger context can ground the because of reason. “I blushed because I saw a hint of suspicion in his eyes”. But I might not have blushed if his left hand had slightly shifted in its characteristic, reassuring way, or if a rebellious line from a novel I read in college had flashed through my mind, or if a certain painful experience in my childhood had been different. In a meaningful context, there are infinite possible ways for any detail, however remote, to be connected to, colored by, or transformed by any other detail. There is no sure way to wall off any part of the context from all the rest.

The Canadian cognitive scientist and philosopher, Zenon Pylyshyn, once neatly captured the distinctiveness of the because of reason this way:

"Clearly, the objects of our fears and desires do not cause behavior in the same way that forces and energy cause behavior in the physical realm. When my desire for the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow causes me to go on a search, the (nonexistent) pot of gold is not a causal property of the sort that is involved in natural laws."

The because of reason does not refer to mere “logic” or “rational intellectuality”. Nor need it imply conscious ratiocination. It is constellated from the entire realm of possible meaning, including such things as our desire for pots of gold or our subconscious urges toward violence. I will therefore refer interchangeably to the because of reason and the because of meaning, by both of which I refer to all the semantic relations and connotations, all the significances, that weave together and produce the coherent tapestry of a life, or of any other expression of meaning, such as a profound text — say, Aeschylus’ Agamemnon or Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, or, for that matter, the text of a biological description. — Stephen L. Talbott

This touches upon a point I've been debating ever since joining forums - of reason understood as 'the relations of ideas'. The tendency of reductionism is to conflate the two kinds of causation, physical and logical: which is what we do when we say that 'the brain' acts in a particular way, and so 'produces' thought, because of physical causation. The 'because' of reasons - the 'space of reasons', it has been called - can't be explained in those terms, because it belongs to a different level of explanation.

The interactions between the humans and the aliens are very interesting. — T Clark

But only to the humans, one presumes ;-)

Late to this thread. I'm a boomer, sixties guy, became emamoured of the popular books on Eastern philosophy in my youth. At uni pursued a mainly self-defined curriculum on the theme of spiritual enlightenment comprising comparative religion, two years of philosophy, psychology, anthropology and history. Became interested in the theme of the perennial philosophies (and was in grad tutorials with an author who was to publish extensively in that area.) I formed the view that philosophy in Western culture had become disconnected from the mainstream, which I subsequently identified as platonism (in the broader sense). I did an MA in Buddhist Studies much later, around ten years ago, and more or less on impulse. I have been criticized, probably rightly, for tilting at windmills. Some of the main themes I explore on the forum is realism about universals, 'constructivism' in philosophy (which overlaps with idealism but draws more on cognitive science), and general criticism of materialism, scientism and naturalism, which I see as the implicit mainstream philosophy of popular culture.