Methodological naturalism has been responsible for considerable advances in technology and science.
— Wayfarer

Indeed, it is difficult to move past this — Banno

remember the poll? This is a thread about a poll. — Banno

Nagarjuna, if I recall correctly, rejects the principle of dependent origination and the śūnyatā is an apophatic rejection of any metaphysic, as I understand it. — Janus

Then why did you disagree with me without providing a counter-argument when I said just that, and then go on to say that it didn't warrant a counter-argument. — Janus

methodological naturalism is the attitude that science ought to investigate the world as if it were strictly independent of the observer.
— Wayfarer

I think this is misleading in that it suggests the deliberate adoption of one attitude over another. On the contrary it seems much more plausible to think that it was discovered that investigating the world without concern for metaphysics or about questions regarding the subject of experience yielded the most fruitful methodology for investigating empirical phenomena. — Janus

This does not constitute not an argument. — Janus

Since you are a Buddhist, you should listen to your greatest philosopher Nagarjuna, who argues for the rejection of all metaphysical "views". — Janus

How could we possibly know anything about anything outside the context of human experience and judgement? — Janus

You keep arguing that science has a "blind spot", as though at some point in history there had been a clear choice between two equally viable methodlogies and methodological naturalism was mistakenly or blindly adopted. — Janus

What if it were meaningful and intelligible to God, for example? Can you rule that out? — Janus

That is to say panpsychists have to bite the bullet and say that non-living things have some sort of experientialness, however minute. — schopenhauer1

The appeal of panpsychism is that, while preserving the physicalist notions that (a) matter has standalone existence and (b) material arrangements are responsible for human-level consciousness, it avoids the famous ‘hard problem’ by making lower-level consciousness fundamental. Notice, however, that instead of enhancing the explanatory power of physicalism, this merely avoids the need for an explanation by throwing one more element—namely, low-level consciousness—into the reduction base, while removing nothing from it. It can thus be argued that panpsychism is as arbitrary as it is unhelpful, for it would be trivial to ‘solve’ every metaphysical problem simply by declaring every aspect of nature to be fundamental. — Kastrup

You may not be aware of how much information and discovery computers have opened up, but neuroscience back then really is the stone age comparatively. — Philosophim

However on second reading, you’re differentiating life from chemistry, by saying that ‘life seeks to sustain and extend….’ So you’ve introduced the element of intentionality which I agree is necessary and which I don’t believe has any analogy in materialism.
— Wayfarer

Sure, if you want to use intentionality to describe chemical reactions that attempt to keep the chemical reactions going, that's fine by me. I just think that's an aspect of the physical world, and not anything else. — Philosophim

Can you extend your consciousness outside of your physical body? No. — Philosophim

If it was completely separate from us, we wouldn’t see anything at all;
Insofar as we do see, it is necessary that we be part of that something which is see — Mww

Cartesian anxiety - refers to the notion that, since René Descartes posited his influential form of body-mind dualism, Western civilization has suffered from a longing for ontological certainty, or feeling that scientific methods, and especially the study of the world as a thing separate from ourselves, should be able to lead us to a firm and unchanging knowledge of ourselves and the world around us. The term is named after Descartes because of his well-known emphasis on "mind" as different from "body", "self" as different from "other".

…..through rational sentient creatures such as ourselves, the universe comes into being….
— Wayfarer

This seems dangerously close to sentience as sufficient existential causality. Might be more the philosophical case, that the universe assumes a form in accordance with the rationality of sentient creatures. — Mww

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

I think this is misleading in that it suggests the deliberate adoption of one attitude over another. — Janus

But I claim that the world that you will claim ‘continues to exist’ is just the world that is constructed by and in your mind that is the only world you’ll ever know. The incredulity you feel at this point is due to the idea that this seems to imply that the world ceases to exist outside your mind, whereas I’m claiming that this idea of the non-existence of the world is also a mental construction. Both existence and non-existence are conceptual constructions.
— Wayfarer

I understand what you are saying but I con't quite conceptualise this in a way which makes it entirely comprehensible. — Tom Storm

Let’s begin with a thought-experiment: Imagine that all life has vanished from the universe, but everything else is undisturbed. Matter is scattered about in space in the same way as it is now, there is sunlight, there are stars, planets and galaxies—but all of it is unseen. There is no human or animal eye to cast a glance at objects, hence nothing is discerned, recognized or even noticed. Objects in the unobserved universe have no shape, color or individual appearance, because shape and appearance are created by minds. Nor do they have features, because features correspond to categories of animal sensation. This is the way the early universe was before the emergence of life—and the way the present universe is outside the view of any observer. — Charles Pinter

A rainbow is not corporeal, — Janus

relations and functions are not corporeal, — Janus

methodological naturalism is the attitude that science ought to investigate the world as if it were strictly independent of the observer. The picture is that of the behaviours of objects that are defined in terms of their primary attributes, those attributes being amenable to quantisation and measurable in terms common to all observers. Secondary attributes are assigned to the mind of the observer, so are not part of the objective domain. This attitude generally corresponds with the rise of modern scientific method. Methodological naturalism has been responsible for considerable advances in technology and science. — Wayfarer

don't know about "ultimate facts" but naturalism, as I understand the concept, certainly entails negation of unconditional (i.e. supernatural, non-immanent, non-contingent) facts. — 180 Proof

There was a member here, active a couple years ago, I can't remember the name, but a self-proclaimed physicist who was big on this time reversal stuff. — Metaphysician Undercover

There is something more I am trying to say, — schopenhauer1

world (n.)
Old English woruld, worold "human existence, the affairs of life," also "a long period of time," also "the human race, mankind, humanity," a word peculiar to Germanic languages (cognates: Old Saxon werold, Old Frisian warld, Dutch wereld, Old Norse verold, Old High German weralt, German Welt), with a literal sense of "age of man," from Proto-Germanic *weraldi-, a compound of *wer "man" (Old English wer, still in werewolf; see virile) + *ald "age" (from PIE root *al- (2) "to grow, nourish").

1. something mental (the mind, spirit, reason, will) is the ultimate foundation of all reality, or even exhaustive of reality, and

2. although the existence of something independent of the mind is conceded, everything that we can know about this mind-independent “reality” is held to be so permeated by the creative, formative, or constructive activities of the mind (of some kind or other) that all claims to knowledge must be considered, in some sense, to be a form of self-knowledge.

But his beliefs as to "why" the experience happened is like a blind man feeling around in the dark compared to the lights we have today. — Philosophim

I don't ascribe to "materialism", or "physicalism" — Philosophim

One way to look at life is it is an internally self-sustaining chemical reaction. In a non-living reaction, the matter required to create the reaction eventually runs out on its own. Life seeks to sustain and extend its own balance of chemical reactions. — Philosophim

I mean, at its basic Wayfarer, why is your consciousness stuck in your head? — Philosophim

That's an argument from false authority fallacy — Nickolasgaspar

That points away from reductionism and suggests something emergent is necessary in understanding consciousness. — Mark Nyquist

So if we have no access to anything not a perception, how could we ever differentiate between what we experience and what we don't....? — Banno

What is it, if anything, in that quote that counts specifically agains realism? — Banno

Dr. Penfield was practicing until 1960. That's before we had computers. — Philosophim

"Using fMRI brain scans, these researchers were able to predict participants’ decisions as many as seven seconds before the subjects had consciously made the decisions. — Philosophim

Chalmers's why questions are pseudo philosophical questions (Sneaks in Intention and purpose in to nature). — Nickolasgaspar

That is the basis of Ryle's idea of the category mistake. He argues that, 'the hallowed contrast between Mind and Matter will be dissipated, but not dissipated by either of the equally hallowed absorptions of Mind by Matter or of Matter by Mind, but in quite a different way'. — Jack Cummins

As understood by evolutionary biology, Homo Sapiens is the result of millions years of evolution. For all these thousands of millions of years, our sensory and intellectual abilities have been honed and shaped by the exigencies of survival, through various life-forms - fish, lizard, mammal, primate and so on - in such a way as to eventually give rise to the capabilities that we have today.

Scientific disciplines such as cognitive and evolutionary psychology have revealed that conscious perception, while subjectively appearing to exist as a continuum, is actually composed of a heirarchical matrix of thousand, or millions, of interacting cellular transactions, commencing at the most basic level with the parasympathetic system which controls one’s respiration, digestion, and so on, up through various levels to culminate in that peculiarly human ability of rational thought (and realms beyond, although this is beyond the scope of current science.)

Consciousness plays a central role in co-ordinating these diverse activities so as to give rise to the sense of continuity which we call ‘ourselves’ and the apparent coherence and unity of the external world. Yet it is important to realise that the naïve sense in which we understand ourselves, and the objects of our perception, to exist, is in reality dependent upon the constructive activities of our consciousness many of which are below the threshhold of conscious awareness.

When you perceive something - large, small, alive or inanimate, local or remote - there is considerable work involved in creating the object from the raw material of perception. Your eyes receive the sensory stimuli, your mind cognises the image in relation to all of the other stimuli impacting your senses at that moment – either acknowledging it, or ignoring it, depending on how busy you are; your memory will then compare it to other objects you have seen, from whence you will (hopefully) recall its name, and perhaps know something about it ('star', 'tree', 'frog', etc).

In other words, the mind is *not* simply the passive recipient of sensory objects which exist irrespective of your perception of them (this is 'the myth of the given'). Rather consciousness is an active agent which constructs what we understand as reality on the basis of sensory input, but also on the basis of unconscious processes, memories, intentions, intuitions, prejudices, prior knowledge, and so on.

Furthermore, and this is the philosophically interesting aspect of it, the neural systems by which the mind creates the consciousness of a unified whole remain unknown. As computer scientist Jerome Feldman shows in The Neural Binding Problem, Chalmer's 'hard problem' is recognised in scientific accounts of consciousness, insofar as there has been no neural mechanism identified which accounts for the unity of conscious experience. There are detailed accounts of all of the aspects of the brain which assimilate different aspects of perception (color, shape, movement and so on) but 'this functional story tells nothing about the neural mechanisms that support this magic. What we do know is that there is no place in the brain where there could be a direct neural encoding of the illusory detailed scene. That is, enough is known about the structure and function of the visual system to rule out any detailed neural representation that embodies the subjective experience. So, this version of the Neural Binding Problem really is a scientific mystery at this time.'

Generally surgeons will keep you awake and map your experiences when they stimulate certain areas of the brain. They literally alter your conscious subjective experience. — Philosophim

The patient’s mind, which is considering the situation in such an aloof and critical manner, can only be something quite apart from neuronal reflex action. It is noteworthy that two streams of consciousness are flowing, the one driven by input from the environment, the other by an electrode delivering sixty pulses per second to the cortex. The fact that there should be no confusion in the conscious state suggests that, although the content of consciousness depends in large measure on neuronal activity, awareness itself does not. — The Mystery of the Mind, Wilder Penfield, p55

you're advocating various Eastern mystical traditions without making a case for how 'transcendental idealism' follows from or is consistent with them — 180 Proof

Consciousness is neither the contents we being aware of information apprehend, nor the resulting qualia, but being aware of information.

one can hardly anthropomorphize humans

Many argue that intentional being is too different from physical being to be reduced to it – a position performatively affirmed by eliminative materialists

Thus, natural science begins with a Fundamental Abstraction

It is as absurd to reject replicable introspection because its token is private, as to reject Galileo’s observations because he made them in solitude.

For [Aristotle], form and ‘matter’ (ὕλη) are not things, but the foundations for two modes of conceptualization.

But prey, continue. — Banno

My point was idealism has not been constantly mainstream — Tom Storm

Q. What are some great movies about the theme of the main character getting self-knowledge or self-awareness through the story?

A. There are many great movies that explore the theme of the main character gaining self-knowledge or self-awareness through the course of the story. Here are some examples:

"The Matrix" (1999) - Neo, the main character, learns that his life is a simulation and he must break free from his programmed reality to become the hero of a rebellion.

"The Truman Show" (1998) - Truman Burbank, the main character, discovers that his entire life has been a reality TV show and he must escape to find true freedom and purpose.

"Groundhog Day" (1993) - Phil Connors, a weatherman, is forced to relive the same day over and over until he learns to become a better person and find fulfillment in life.

"Fight Club" (1999) - The narrator, an insomniac, creates an alter ego named Tyler Durden to escape his mundane life but ultimately realizes the destructive consequences of his actions.

"Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" (2004) - Joel Barish, the main character, undergoes a procedure to erase his memories of his former lover but ultimately decides that the pain of loss is worth the joy of love.

"The Social Network" (2010) - Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, learns the cost of success and the importance of relationships as he navigates the rise of his social media empire.

"Into the Wild" (2007) - Christopher McCandless, a young man disillusioned with society, embarks on a journey of self-discovery in the wilderness but ultimately learns the value of human connection.

"Good Will Hunting" (1997) - Will Hunting, a janitor at MIT, discovers his genius for mathematics and confronts his emotional demons with the help of a therapist.

"The Shawshank Redemption" (1994) - Andy Dufresne, a prisoner, learns to navigate the harsh realities of prison life and finds hope and redemption through his friendship with fellow inmate Red.

"Lost in Translation" (2003) - Bob Harris, a middle-aged actor, forms a bond with a young woman in Tokyo and learns to appreciate the beauty of life's fleeting moments.

The hard problem really boils down to "What is it like to be another conscious being?"
— Philosophim

this doesn't seem quite correct. — jgill

As far as I'm concerned" ... i.e. a cop-out. — 180 Proof

I just don't see how nonduality prioritizes "mind" "subject" "experience" over above "world" — 180 Proof