I think we can get to some secular version of the sacred. — Jamal

Did you ever encounter Habermas' dialogues with Cardinal Ratzinger? I've never read the books but I've read a few articles about them - see Does Reason Know what it is Missing?, NY Times.

What secular reason is missing is self-awareness. It is “unenlightened about itself” in the sense that it has within itself no mechanism for questioning the products and conclusions of its formal, procedural entailments and experiments. “Postmetaphysical thinking,” Habermas contends, “cannot cope on its own with the defeatism concerning reason which we encounter today both in the postmodern radicalization of the ‘dialectic of the Enlightenment’ and in the naturalism founded on a naïve faith in science.”

I only meant 'bogus' in that it's not a bona fide quote. Einstein has many great philosophical quotes, and I'd have like that to be one of them, but it's not. But as I said, I fully accept the sentiment!

Skipping over a couple of hundred years of disenchantment, it occurs to me to ask: are people today enchanted by magic spells? — Jamal

You know, 'disenchantment' has it's own Wikipedia entry.

In social science, disenchantment (German: Entzauberung) is the cultural rationalization and devaluation of religion apparent in modern society. The term was borrowed from Friedrich Schiller by Max Weber to describe the character of a modernized, bureaucratic, secularized Western society. In Western society, according to Weber, scientific understanding is more highly valued than belief, and processes are oriented toward rational goals, as opposed to traditional society, in which "the world remains a great enchanted garden". — Wikipedia, Disenchantment

The article goes onto mention the Frankfurt School, which we've discussed recently.

There's a bogus, but profound, Einstein quote, 'either everything is a miracle, or nothing is'. I think there has to be an element of that feeling in life, otherwise, as Neitszche also glumly predicted, nihilism engulfs everything.

Spirituality our new saviour is now up for sale for £15.99 a month or a one off payment of £666 — invicta

There have been many multi-million dollar lawsuits over yoga terminology and acoutrements in the USA, with corporations copyrighting Sanskrit terms and then suing others who tried to use them.

But then, as Rumi said, 'there would be no fool's gold if there were no gold'.

Here's the current installment from the excellent Matt O'Dowd of PBS Spacetime on the reality of space and time (hey he's been working up to this title for a long while!) It is queued to a passage about Leibniz' view that space (and by implication time) are grounded, in some sense, in subjective perception rather than a truly mind-independent reality. Starts with 'Leibniz had another controversial idea...'

Leibniz felt that whatever it is that's out there that behaves like space only gains the subjective feeling of depth, breadth, height, and distance when our brains try to organise objects that are separated by an altogether more abstract property. — Matt O'Dowd

Although I would comment that it's not that it's abstract, simply that, because it is a fundamental constituent of conscious awareness, it's not something we can be aware of. It is, as Kant would later say, a pre-condition of conscious experience.

Is Universal Mind merely another name for God? — Art48

as T Clark mentions, there are similar ideas found in many forms of Eastern philosophy and religion. I think the underlying problem is that modern culture, of which you and I and everyone here are a part, is firmly grounded in individualism. It is, in philosophical language, egological - not the same as ego-centric, but 'tending to a perspective anchored in the perspective of the individual self'. Whereas Vedanta and Buddhism are not egological, but transcendental - they are grounded in meditative stillness and insight into the levels of consciousness (of which for example the chakras are the symbolic forms, as Jung would say). Hence the mythology of the 'higher self' or 'true nature' which is something that must be discovered by the aspirant, generally under the guidance of a teacher.

These movements are, of course, also part of modern culture nowadays, in the form of the multifarious spiritual teachings and schools that have appeared to fill this gap in the Western mindset. In fact, perhaps that's what you're actually appealing to, consciously or otherwise.

You're welcome. Those books were staples of my reading in the 1970's.

That kind of “non-sense” is what physicist Sabine Hossenfelder sarcastically calls “Existential Physics”. — Gnomon

Pondering what is 'before the beginning' is just the kind of question that Buddhism designates as unanswerable, of which in some versions, there are ten:

1. The world is eternal.
2. The world is not eternal.
3. The world is (spatially) infinite.
4. The world is not (spatially) infinite.
5. The being imbued with a life force [i.e. 'soul'] is identical with the body.
6. The being imbued with a life force is not identical with the body.
7. The Tathagata [i.e. the Buddha] exists after death.
8. The Tathagata does not exist after death.
9. The Tathagata both exists and does not exist after death.
10. The Tathagata neither exists nor does not exist after death.

Scholar T R V Murti notes in his 1955 book, The Central Philosophy of Buddhism, that there are considerable similarities between this list and Kant's antinomies of reason, particularly the first four. (The book contains many comparisions of Buddhist philosophy and Kant, for which it is nowadays mainly criticized.) The Buddhist attitude towards such imponderables is expressed by the 'simile of the poisoned arrow', in which a wanderer is shot by a poisoned arrow, but rather than seeking to have it removed, wants to know who fired it, what it was made of, etc, and consequently dies as a result. The Buddha's teaching is to 'remove the arrow', i.e. overcome the cankers and cravings, rather than think about unanswerable questions such as these.

(This is frequently interpreted to say that Buddhism is 'anti-metaphysical', but that is only partially true, as Buddhism is certainly not positivist or naturalist in the modern sense, although consideration of that would take us far afield.)

Closer to home, there's another way of framing the whole problem of 'before the beginning'. I think, perhaps, the idea of trying to envisage God as being a literal first cause in a series of events is itself problematical, as it is in a way reductive. It's part of the 'God as supreme engineer' metaphor. But I don't know if a first cause is conceptually equivalent to the 'ground of being' in philosophical theology. It is more like the hypothesis that LaPlace had no need of. Karen Armstrong's 2009 book, The Case for God, laments that this tendency of early modern science to hypothesis God as standing behind science, as one of the causes of the decline of faith in God. Her view is that the basis of religious cosmologies resides in a fundamenal cognitive shift on the part of the believer, not in a theory of everything (review.)

One further remark - George Lemaître himself was a Catholic priest, but he never invoked his cosmological theories as any kind of argument for God. In fact by the 1950's, Pope Pius XII had started to mention Big Bang theory as a kind of affirmation of 'creation ex nihilo' - something which embarrased Lemaître, as he believed that his scientific work was a separate matter to his faith, and who prevailed upon the Pope's science adviser to, you know, cool it. Which the Pope did! He henceforth refrained from making such a connection in his speeches. A salutary lesson, I would have thought.

If you are interested in the Greek, the passage I quoted is here. — Paine

I can't read Greek. Sophisticated readers (such as yourself) will understand the use of the word 'substance' in philosophy as being different to normal usage, but it jars every time I read it. My point (and it's a pet peeve) is that the use of the word 'substance' to translate 'ousia' tends to skew the meaning of many of these passages, indeed the entire milieu. As Joe Sachs says, 'substance' is 'a word designed by the anti-Aristotelian Augustine to mean a low and empty sort of being [which] turns up in our translations of the word whose meaning Aristotle took to be the highest and fullest sense of being....' . The ealier reference to 'divine substance' is an example. I'm not sure what other word in the modern lexicon would do the job but perhaps 'principle' might.

These premises clearly give the conclusion that there is in nature some bodily substance other than the formations we know, prior to them all and more divine than they.

What 'bodily substance' he talking about? Endocrines?

'Substance' introduces the problem of reification - turning an idea into a thing.

I ran the question 'what is reification in philosophy' by the chatbot and it said:

The problem of reification in philosophy refers to the tendency to treat abstract concepts or mental constructs as if they were concrete objects with independent existence. It involves treating something that is abstract or conceptual as if it were a physical thing that exists independently of our thoughts or language.

Whereas I think intelligible objects are at once, only graspable by nous (mind) but at the same time, they're not mental constructs :rage:

If the potential of existence of rational beings is extinguished, would the potential of mathematics vanish as well? — jgill

No. My belief is that while the truths of reason can only be grasped by the mind, they're not the product of the mind. Hence Bertrand Russell: 'Thus universals are not thoughts, though when known they are the objects of thoughts.'

There's a deep issue here, which I keep running up against in these debates. I'm not well-read in philosophy and metaphysics and, at this stage in life, I'll acknowledge I'm unlikely ever to be, but I intuitively sense some really vital issue in all of this (running up and down the beach, waving arms and appearing to shout).

No, again it’s that ‘substance’ is a misleading translation of ‘ousia’, (as per Joe Sachs’ comment earlier in the thread). It’s not that ‘ouisua’ suggest a material thing, but that ‘substance’ does. If in the quotation we’re considering, the term used for ‘ouisua’ was ‘being’ or ‘principle’ I think it would convey the meaning much more effectively.

It’s the use of the word ‘substance’ especially when said to ‘immaterial substance’ . That’s what I say is oxymoronic. But then, ‘substance’ is not the word that Aristotle would have used. (Actually wasn’t it in this context where the word ‘dunamis’ was used?)

Further, accordingly, these substances must be without matter — Metaphysics, 1071b12–22, translated by C.D.C Reeve

There’s that oxymoronic term again.

If humanity were to vanish and the potential of rational beings extinguished, so would go the potentials of mathematics - or not? — jgill

Any rational sentient beings would presumably make some of the same discoveries. That’s the meaning of ‘true in all possible worlds.’

The Muslims invented it but Old Nick sure knows how to bend it to his ends.

‘God created the integers. All else is the work of man.’ Leopold Kronicker.

I had rather thought if the phrase used ‘principle’ instead of ‘substance’ it might remain defensible.

I thought it might have a metaphysical interpretation but perhaps not.

Thereby providing justification for all those who say that Aristotle should be relegated to history with the geocentric universe and the crystalline spheres.

These premises clearly give the conclusion that there is in nature some bodily substance other than the formations we know, prior to them all and more divine than they. (269a 30)
— Fooloso4

A bodily substance is not immaterial. — Dfpolis

Wouldn’t the claim of the existence of such a bodily substance be an empirical claim? If it’s a substance, then either it can be detected by scientific means, or it can be declared a false hypothesis.

I don’t see how that follows, sorry. — noAxioms

That’s quite alright. Thanks for your feedback.

Gee you have an interesting reading list! On mine is a book I might have mentioned previously, Mind and the Cosmic Order: How the Mind Creates the Features & Structure of All Things, and Why this Insight Transforms Physics, by Charles Pinter. That book condensed many of my ideas about the foundational role of the mind. It’s more about neurological modelling than philosophy as such but it has profound philosophical implications, I feel. (It went a bit under the radar, because Pinter is a maths emeritus, not a philosopher, and I don't think it got much notice in academia, but I thought it an important book.)

The axioms define the numbers, just as, in a universe with different constants, an electron would not be an electron and would behave differently. — Count Timothy von Icarus

You’re familiar with books such as ‘Just Six Numbers’ by Martin Rees? (Achingly dull read, I found.) It's about the fundamental physical constraints which must exist at a foundational level if the universe is even going to form matter. So I don't know if it's feasible that there could be an alternative, there's something about necessity woven into the fabric of the cosmos, seems to me. These ratios and values have to be a certain way, otherwise stars would not form.

As for information - I think the difference we have is roughly like the difference between pan- and biosemiosis. Pansemiosis proposes that all things, living and non-living, possess a form of semiotic or sign-making capacity, that everything in the universe, including animals, plants, rocks, and even inanimate objects, can be interpreted in terms of signs. Biosemiosis limits the scope of semiotics to living processes. It's an area of disagreement, but the latter seems more feasible to me.

Mathematical Platonism requires a different, spiritual, mechanism that has not been observed or experienced — Dfpolis

Is that really so? The IEP article I've referred to on the Indispensability Argument for Mathematics says:

Some philosophers, called rationalists, claim that we have a special, non-sensory capacity for understanding mathematical truths, a rational insight arising from pure thought. But, the rationalist’s claims appear incompatible with an understanding of human beings as physical creatures whose capacities for learning are exhausted by our physical bodies.

Another essay says

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 [i.e. number] existing “outside of space and time” makes empiricists nervous.

I interpreted these objections as simply a reference to rational thought itself. How do we know the proofs of mathematics? Through pure reason, I was always taught. Why it can't be explained in other terms, is because it the source of explanation, not something itself in need of further explanation, so in that sense, not able to be reduced. I think that's what drives many of the objections - the faculty of reason transcends empiricist explanatory paradigms. As the first passage says, it's challenge to physicalism.

I agree that the depiction of Platonism as holding there is a kind of 'ethereal realm' of abstract objects - the 'Platonic heaven' - is a dubious concept, and that the Aristotelian view is more realistic. But I still believe that Aristotle insists on the reality of universals - that they're more than simply mental constructions or names. As James Franklin says:

Aristotelians agree with Platonists that the mathematical grasp of necessities is mysterious. What is necessary is true in all possible worlds, but how can perception see into other possible worlds? The scholastics, the Aristotelian Catholic philosophers of the Middle Ages, were so impressed with the mind’s grasp of necessary truths as to conclude that the intellect was immaterial and immortal. If today’s naturalists do not wish to agree with that, there is a challenge for them. ‘Don’t tell me, show me’: build an artificial intelligence system that imitates genuine mathematical insight. There seem to be no promising plans on the drawing board.

Plato's view that there are actual numbers in nature, which is what I was talking about, is naive for the reasons I gave. — Dfpolis

I don't know if that is Plato's view. From everything I read, the basic tenet of mathematical Platonism is that numbers are real independently of any mind. They have a reality which is analogous to, but different from, material objects.

[Platonism is] the view that mathematics describes a non-sensual reality, which exists independently both of the acts and [of] the dispositions of the human mind and is only perceived, and probably perceived very incompletely, by the human mind. — Godel

From here

since the moon had been measured, it cannot suddenly jump into a nonexistent state. It's not a solution to the moon's wave function, or at least not one with a probability of zero to more digits than you can imagine. That's what I mean by the moon still being there when nobody looks at it. The moon has been measured and cannot be unmeasured. — noAxioms

I think there's a deeper underlying issue. Despite your professed scepticism about scientific realism, I think your philosophical framework is still committed to a form of realism. This is an opportunity to explore the implications of that.

It is often said by way of objection to philosophical idealism, that idealism must mean that things go into or pass out of existence depending on whether they're being observed. After all that appears to be the implication of Berkeley's 'esse est percipe' - 'to be is to be perceived'.

But I don't think this is what philosophical idealism means - not, at least, as I understand it. This has to do with the nature of the objects of perception. Realism posits that the existence of those objects is independent of our perception or experience. They exist just so - in the case of the moon for billions of years. So it is preposterous to claim that they could cease to exist simply because nobody is looking at them. Yet this is what idealism seems to claim.

And I think this was the point of Einstein's rhetorical question. Realism expects that all such objects are really existent, independently of any mind or anyone's perception. That is, after all, the very definition of realism. This is the gist of Einstein's well-known declaration that he 'cannot seriously believe in [the quantum theory] because it cannot be reconciled with the idea that physics should represent a reality in time and space, free from spooky actions at a distance.'

But an alternative is to acknowledge that the existence of sensable objects is contingent and not absolute. This not to assert that objects exist in any absolute sense, on the one hand, but neither is it to claim that they cease to exist when they're not observed, on the other. It is to acknowledge that judgement concerning the reality of objects is a function of human sensory perception and reason, and that it is therefore not absolute. From the human point of view, all such objects exist - you'd better believe it! - but their existence is contingent and not absolute.

So this attitude does call realism into question but without falling into a caricature of idealism that it is easily taken to imply. I think it teaches us to respect that science is a human undertaking and that it's not a revelation of what is truly the case independently of any observer.

Or, put another way, that physics alone cannot constitute the totality of our experience.

Kant erased us from the picture — Antony Nickles

how so?

Basically you're asking, How is it that all humans are homo sapiens yet with such a diversity of appearance?

I think I cried when I had my first religious/spiritual experience as an atheist that’s how strong and magnificent it was to my non-believing eyes. ... — invicta

I hear you.

What if the purely "mechanical" act of measurement produces a numerical result that goes automatically into a computer file and is never "observed" as it sits there and rots? — jgill

As I said - through inductive reasoning, we can expect that the measurement is taken, that the data exists on that system unobserved. But you won't empirically verify that inductive step without observing the result. And isn't this very much at the heart of the whole issue? The realist attitude is, well all these processes simply occur, whether we're observing or not. But if that were so, then we wouldn't even be having this discussion!

Just noticed the mechanic... :lol:

It's significant that empiricist discussions of the nature of number tend to question how it is that humans even have a faculty that knows mathematical facts, because such facts are not, by definiton, empirical (discussed in e.g. The Indispensability Argument in Philosophy of Math)

Yet, to find the numbers, we have to measure nature, not intuit them mystically, as Plato believed — Dfpolis

You're not even allowing for pure mathematics. Also for the role that mathematics has had in disclosing things about nature that we could never, ever deduce through observation alone. And I humbly suggest that it is your depiction of Platonism that is 'naive'.

First, I need to comment again on the translation of 'being' by 'substance' in Aristotle, which Joe Sachs criticizes here. Sachs says in reference to this mis-translation 'It is no wonder that the Metaphysics ceased to have any influence on living thinking: its heart had been cut out of it by its friends'.

So imagine if the passage you quoted above put 'being' in the place of 'substance'. It is not entirely accurate, but I think it conveys something which has been lost in the usual discussion of 'substance':

But the universal too seems to some people to be most of all a cause, and the universal most of all a starting-point. So let us turn to that too. For it seems impossible for any of the things said [of something] universally to be substance [a] being. For first the substance being of each thing is special to it, in that it does not belong to anything else. A universal, by contrast, is something common, since that thing is said to be a universal which naturally belongs to many things. Of which, then, will it be the substance being? For it is either the substance being of none or of all. And it cannot be the substance being of all. — Metaphysics, 1038b9, translated by CDC Reeve

I think the discussion of substance tends to slant the discussion, because it's natural to reify substance as something objectively existent (or more likely non-existent) and that this is at the basis of the difference between the Platonic and Aristotelian doctrine of forms.

I believe that Plato's doctrine of ideas requires an understanding that the 'ideas' or 'forms' are real in a different sense to the reality of phenomena. Betrand Russell says that universals don't exist in the sense that horses, men, tables and chairs do, but that they're nevertheless real - they 'subsist'.

Suppose, for example, that we are thinking of whiteness. Then in one sense it may be said that whiteness is 'in our mind'. ... In the strict sense, it is not whiteness that is in our mind, but the act of thinking of whiteness. The connected ambiguity in the word 'idea', which we noted at the same time, also causes confusion here. In one sense of this word, namely the sense in which it denotes the object of an act of thought, whiteness is an 'idea'. Hence, if the ambiguity is not guarded against, we may come to think that whiteness is an 'idea' in the other sense, i.e. an act of thought; and thus we come to think that whiteness is mental. But in so thinking, we rob it of its essential quality of universality. One man's act of thought is necessarily a different thing from another man's; one man's act of thought at one time is necessarily a different thing from the same man's act of thought at another time. Hence, if whiteness were the thought as opposed to its object, no two different men could think of it, and no one man could think of it twice. That which many different thoughts of whiteness have in common is their object, and this object is different from all of them. Thus universals are not thoughts, though when known they are the objects of thoughts. — Betrand Russell

I've bolded the significant point, which I think resolves many of these issues. So the 'idea of a man' is just that - but it doesn't exist, not in some 'ethereal realm' or 'Platonic heaven' - not that Plato himself is clear about that, but it became manifest in later (ancient and medieval) philosophy. I think the key idea is that of the intelligible object - something which is real, but only perceptible by reason, not by the senses. The idea or form is what is manifested in the physical form of man. Hence the simile in this post.

And that - realism regarding universals - is what was lost from the Western tradition with the ascendancy of nominalism over scholastic realism. That's why there can't be any conception that universals exist in a different sense to particulars - because that is an aspect of the conceptual space that is no longer available to us (cf. dfpolis 'post-Cartesian conceptual space')

Anyway, carry on.

//I should add that it's much easier to concieve of an idea of a form as 'the being of all' than it is as 'the substance of all' i.e. the individual is an instantiation of a singular idea. Every man exemplifies 'the idea of man'. I don't see how this presents great conceptual difficulties.

Not 'mind' in the sense of 'conscious mind'. It is purely cellular and organic in nature, but it still can be conceptualised in terms of interpretation of signs, hence, biosemiosis. (Don't want to introduce that as a subject of discussion however, just footnote.)

a riverbed wouldn't store information of the passage of water, but then its physical state, which seems identical to the total information that can be taken from it, is somehow different? — Count Timothy von Icarus

Tree rings contain evidence of forest fires, ice-cores atmospheric records. I'm not disputing that. But I'm saying that the mere existence of those data don't constitute information about anything until they're interpreted. The contrast to living organisms is that in them, information is dynamically interpreted by cellular processes moment by moment, it's intrinsic to any organic process.

Having information rest solely in the minds of observers seems at risk of becoming subjective idealism. The information has to correspond to and emerge from external state differences or else how can we discuss incorrect interpretations of any signal? — Count Timothy von Icarus

I think you're referring to a rather simplistic conception of idealism, of the variety that Samuel Johnson attempted to refute by kicking the stone. I favour a form of objective idealism. It's not that 'the world exists in my mind', but that what we understand as reality entails an ineliminable subjective aspect, without which nothing would make any sense. And we supply that. The mind is continually interpreting and integrating information about the world so as to make it intelligible - and not only intelligible, but navigable - for us. That order is at once 'the order of perceptions' and 'the order of the world' - in very much a Kantian sense.

All due respect, I think the error you're making is that of metaphysical naturalism - the assumption that the world would exist, just as it seems to now, were no humans present within it. But even that apparently empty world is still organised around an implicit perspective. Take that away and you can't imagine anything whatever.

So, what kind of existence is mathematical existence? — Dfpolis

Mathematical platonism says that intelligibles such as number are real even if not existent, being the same for all who think. Mathematical ratios and relationships are deeply embedded in the fabric of the cosmos, hence the 'unreasonable efficacy of mathematics in the natural sciences'.

Thanks again for those passages. The point that I'm disputing is this:

. So a material object is a combination of form and matter, and that form is proper and unique to the particular object, complete with accidents. — Metaphysician Undercover

I don't think that each particular is an instance of a unique form (and as an aside I don't recall in anything I've read from Aristotle, which is not much, any reference to 'material objects' - rather the arguments are usually couched in terms of 'particulars', meaning, 'particular beings'.) But the salient point of the dispute is, is each individual an instance of a unique form? I say not, that the form 'man' is common to all men, that is why it is a universal.

The far side of the moon is still there when nobody looks at it since looking at it isn’t what makes it there — noAxioms

You do recall the anecdote that Einstein once exclaimed, when walking with one of his friends, 'surely the moon still exists when no-one is looking at it!' This was in relation to the very assumption you're making, and he said it because of the challenge that quantum mechanics poses to scientific realism. In fact it's what this whole debate is about. When it comes to the denizens of quantum physics - purportedly the most fundamental constituents of physical existence - Bohr said 'no elementary phenomenon is a phenomenon until it is observed'.

you can just call your local quantum mechanic. — Andrew M

Who could be anywhere :lol:

Computers certainly operate on information. — hypericin

Computers and libraries are human inventions. Whatever order they have originated from that.

The entire quantum subject would be better served if "observer" were eliminated everywhere and replaced by "measurement". — jgill

Can't have one without the other though. People often say, well measurement is any form of registration on any instrument, but we would never know that, save by checking. Long story short, science is an inextricably human undertaking, we can't perceive reality 'as it is in itself' as if were apart from our act of observing it. That's true all the time, but in quantum physics it becomes impossible to avoid.

namely, an intellect :lol:

I remember us recently discussing Adorno and Horkheimer's critique of the 'instrumentalisation of reason'. Pinker's notion of reason falls squarely into that definition. I've never bought Pinker's obvious scientism, but on the other hand, I don't think it's bad to have enthusiasts for the idea of progress. I actually believe in the ideal of progress, of trying to improve economic and social life through technology and planning. But then, Pinker isn't really representing all the Enlightenment values he claims as his own - only the aspects of it that are adopted by MBA courses and hawkish economic rationalists, as per this review. (Conflict of interest disclosure: Steve Pinker's The Blank Slate was the last Christmas gift I received from my dear departed mother, many years ago.)