:up: :up:

Merleau-Ponty gestures toward this alternative when he speaks of subject and world as co-arising, with meaning disclosed in their relation rather than deposited in one or the other. I’m not especially well read in him, but this passage captures the idea:

The world is inseparable from the subject, but from a subject who is nothing but a project of the world; and the subject is inseparable from the world, but from a world that it itself projects.
— From Phenomenology of Perception, Quoted in The Blind Spot Adam Frank, Marcelo Gleiser. Evan Thompson — Wayfarer

Entirely subjective I know, but this frame is wonderfully seductive to me.

I had never thought of 'ego' as being a poetic model, but it is, of course bound up with language, especially in the formulation of autobiographical narratives. — Jack Cummins

I mean it's a defunct idea and now used mainly in literary circles, not in psychology. These days psychology tends to talk of conscious and unconscious processes as interacting cognitive mechanisms, not separate layers of a psyche. Modern research explains identity, memory, and awareness through processes like executive control, attention, and memory systems, making notions of a layered “ego” or collective unconscious metaphorical and now a historical notion. I think some people like the old language because it was used so much in the 20th century by modernists and artists, giving it a powerful poetic legacy.

Actually, I disagree with this one, also. :grin: But, iirc, you disagree with my reason. I think DNA means something it is not. I think the codons mean amino acids, and the strings of codons mean proteins. And teams of molecules use that information to assemble the amino acids and proteins. Meaning without thinking or intelligence. — Patterner

Not sure what that means. I have no useful science expertise.

I can't imagine. I think three of his four premises are wrong, so they cannot lead to his conclusion. I think he needs another argument entirely to come to that conclusion. — Patterner

Ok. Philosophers also disagree. Remember it’s my probably inadequate arrangement of the argument which I am trying to fully understand. Whether it’s right or not, I couldn’t say.

How do you generally react to @Wayfarer contributions on this subject, which seems to lean towards Neoplatonism. He may have been the better candidate to run this OP. But I do find it fascinating stuff.

Would you, for instance, accept that physicalism is unable to account for consciousness?

The philosophical problem arises with the emergence of language and symbolic reason, where representation becomes normative rather than merely functional. Once we can make claims, give reasons, and distinguish truth from mere success, intentionality is no longer just a matter of reliable correlation with stimuli. It involves answerability to how things are in a much broader sense, including domains—logic, mathematics, counterfactual reasoning—where there may be no immediate adaptive payoff. That is the sense of intentionality that invites explanation. — Wayfarer

This is the nub of it, from what I can tell.

And I suppose one orthodox physicalist response is that intentionality emerges from a certain kind of organised complexity in the brain. When neural systems are arranged so that they can model the environment, correct their errors, and coordinate behaviour over time and across individuals, their internal states can function as representations. Intentionality, on this view, is not a basic feature of the world but a higher-level property that arises from the structure and dynamics of complex physical systems.

Would you say this summarises it?

In Dhammic religions, the context of spiritual efforts is different than what we are used to in the West (under the influence of Christianity).

Namely, in Dhammic religions, they basically don't care whether anyone believes them or not.
This isn't like in Christianity where people are expected to believe things and where religious/spiritual teachings are shoved down people's throats. In Dhammic religions, if you don't believe something they claim, they consider that your problem (and that you just have "too much dust in your eyes"). It's not something they feel responsible for fixing. — baker

Yes, I’m aware that they don’t care. But I don’t care that they don’t care. On this Western forum where we encourage quesions, I am simply asking one. I am not a Buddhist. I am not even convinced that a Westerner who attempts to escape Judeo‑Christianity to find refuge in Buddhism can achieve authenticity there. But that’s a personal bias I am happy to admit to.

It's short, but it's not reductionist. A monotheist has the above as a starting point, as the ground from which he makes his "philosophical" arguments. — baker

The point of Hart’s discourse on these matters is that he starts from reasoning and arrives at theism. Isn’t this why reason has been so assiduously employed by the Church over the centuries, to demonstrate the logical necessity of God?

Now, I happen to believe that, for the most part, behind all this, the atheist’s and the theist’s reasons for believing are much the same. Their accounts make sense to them for reasons informed by emotion and aesthetics. The reasoning is often post hoc.

Cults indoctrinate by sending out propaganda with their embedded beliefs. Capitalist society does just the same with the media industry and all the tropes of earn as much money as possible (far beyond is necessary for a comfortable life) and you will have all the trappings of success. The fast car, the big house, the perfect family, the perfect woman/husband.

Even if not everyone tries to be the next Gordon Gecko/Wolf of Wall Street, the message is still instilled that more money = better. Just like not every woman tries to be a supermodel, just seeing what is put on a pedestal in society instils beliefs in what the lay person should aspire to.

Why are millions/billions on anti-depressants because they hate their life and so much money poured into this? To keep the worker bees productive. Also all the science is bent on 'disease' models where things 'just happen' without there being a root cause. I would propose this is just propaganda to cover up that the root cause is the rotten capitalist society that it must protect at all costs. Science will only observe what it has been funded to, which is decided by politics, so it will be biased only for particular results. — unimportant

I think the more sinister element of capitalism is the banality of most people’s ambition which they don’t seem to mind; forget Gecko and supermodels. For most people it involves ceaseless spending to participate in the conventions - a house, children, vacations, transportation, healthcare, always having to spend and spend more just to have the basics. Often treading water to stay afloat. And they may even consider themselves fortunate.

I don’t think it’s a cult. It’s a dominant worldview that operates differently. A cult functions through exclusion and authoritarian control over behaviour and member's interactions. Capitalism is open, even if constraining, and it doesn’t seek to limit people’s choices directly. It does so indirectly as a by-product, through the blunt mechanism of a user-pays society.

Not sure I believe in the idea of ego except as a poetic way to organise different aspects of self. Personally I doubt it adds anything to our knowledge of personality and it probably promotes a lot of nonsense. Modern psychology doesn’t seem to use the term.

This isn't like in Christianity where people are expected to believe things and where religious/spiritual teachings are shoved down people's throats. In Dhammic religions, if you don't believe something they claim, they consider that your problem (and that you just have "too much dust in your eyes"). It's not something they feel responsible for fixing. — baker

Sure; that’s a much better way to deal with skepticism and/or the real world, for that matter. You could almost be describing Scientology. But the question remains even if they ignore it.

Hart’s point, as I read him, isn’t that natural processes couldn’t in principle produce intentional states, but that any attempt to explain reason, truth, or meaning already presupposes intelligibility and normativity. Scientific explanation itself depends on distinctions between true and false, valid and invalid, better and worse reasons. Those norms aren’t themselves causal properties, and so can’t coherently be treated as merely derivative features of otherwise non-intelligible processes.

So, on my reading of Hart, the pressure point isn’t really consciousness or even intentionality as a psychological phenomenon, but the status of normativity as such. The claim is that intelligibility has to belong to being itself, not merely to our ways of coping with it, otherwise explanation undermines the very standards it relies on. — Esse Quam Videri

Interesting points, let me think on this. :up:

Premise 1 is the one I think is flawed. Natural and physical are not synonyms. Anything in this universe is natural. It can't be otherwise. If there is something non-physical in this universe, then it is natural, and can be part of the explanation of some things. — Patterner

Hmm... I've generally thought that naturalism and physicalism were more or less interchangeable, both having superseded materialism. I suppose Hart might say that God is supernatural. But I can see how what is natural may not be physical. Does science have a view about the existence of non‑physical objects? How would you change that premise to retain the thrust of the argument? It's my approximation of Hart’s argument.

That said, Hart’s argument isn’t a knock-down proof that intentionality cannot arise via natural processes. I understand it to be a transcendental claim: any explanation that treats truth, validity, and correctness as derivative byproducts of non-normative processes already presupposes those norms in the act of explanation itself. Scientific explanation depends on truth-apt judgments, valid inference, and reasons that count as better or worse.

The conclusion Hart draws is not that science fails, but that intelligibility cannot be ontologically secondary or merely instrumental. It has to belong to reality itself in some fundamental way. That’s where the metaphysical move comes in. — Esse Quam Videri

Nice. Yes, that's pretty close to my understanding of Hart.

Of course, Husserl is in no way re-stating classical metaphysics, and I’m not trying to equate the two. But I do think his analysis recovers—within a radically different methodological framework—an earlier insight that was obscured once intelligibles came to be treated as existents. The decisive error is not realism as such, but reification: the assumption that universals must be objects of some kind—typically “abstract objects”—prompting questions like do they exist? and what sort of things are they?

Read differently, intelligibility does not concern objects at all, but a necessary structure of reason—necessary, objective, and invariant, yet accessible only in and through acts of understanding. In this sense, its being is inseparable from its givenness to reason, without collapsing into subjectivity or projection. Put that way, the position seems very close to Husserl’s own, once the misleading connotations of “constitution” as fabrication or projection are set aside.

This way of reading the terrain is also suggested by John Vervaeke, who has pointed to Thinking Being by Eric Perl as a model of participatory knowing (which is where I encountered it). Perl’s account makes explicit what is often missed in these debates: intelligibility is neither an object standing over against the mind nor a mere effect of cognition, but something disclosed in the act of knowing itself—where thinking and what is thought, knower and known, are formally united.

The only spectre that has to be slain here is the 'ghost in the machine'. — Wayfarer

I found this particularly interesting and your account of a necessary structure of reason makes sense.

But these “structures” are not objects, not inventions, and not projections. They are invariant relations disclosed through acts of understanding. — Wayfarer

That’s good, and it’s a useful refinement of what I’ve usually read.

For the Greeks and medievals, nous was not sharply separated from world; knowing was a kind of participation, not representation or “justified true belief”; form was something shared, not “in the mind”; and the order of the world was already meaningful, already articulate. — Wayfarer

Another useful breakdown.

I need a table that contrasts modern conceptions with classical or Neoplatonist ones, and maybe a third column for phenomenology, though there are various descriptions.

Do you think morality (at its best) could also be understood as a form of participation?

The image that comes to mind is being lost in a dense forest during a storm, when a flash of lightning briefly illuminates a magnificent structure on a distant hill. You can no longer see it, but you can’t forget that you did see it, and everything since has been an attempt to find a way toward it. — Wayfarer

I like this and it resonates.

Personally I like to think of death as being liberation for all―either in eternity or oblivion―the idea of rebirth makes little sense to me. It seems to be, if anything, to be motivated by attachment to the self. — Janus

Ditto.

the idea of liberating all beings is aspirational — Janus

Indeed. Can it be demonstrated that a single person has achieved this end? How would we even do that? How do we even know it is a plausible possibility?

Not expertise, just reading. — Wayfarer

Hmmm, well, isn’t expertise largely built from wide reading and remembering the right bits? For an average person like me, who often struggles to get through a paragraph, the amount of reading and comprehension required to actually make use of that knowledge is prodigious. I mean, I'd like to make use of Lloyd Gerson, but it's impossible.

Can you see why Hart rejects naturalism? Kantians and post-Kantians look at the idea of a clockwork universe made up of little universal bits with assigned mathematical attributes interacting on the basis of a pre—assigned causal logic, and the say, sure, the universe looks that way becuase we set it up on the basis of these pre-suppositions. — Joshs

Yep, I understand this part of his argument. I've even heard Chomsky talk about the idea of materialism as being incoherent for similar reasons, sans the theistic solutions.

Hart says the same thing, but rather than arguing that we need to investigate how the subject imposes these schemes, or how they arise and change historically through subject-object interaction, he says we need to open our eyes to how the universe is put together, not as components of a giant, ethically neutral machine or clock (naturalism), but as a moral system whose every component has a vital moral role to play in its purposes. — Joshs

Yes, well, Hart argues that mind, language, and life share attributes and are aspects of the Great Mind (God), who makes all of this meaningful. A Neoplatonist would say that, right? It seems to me that he touches upon a lot of post-modern ideas aroudn language and meaning but resolves them instead with classical foundationalism.

Aboutness is a feature of mind, but the object is not. Obviously the object cannot be derived from the physical processes that give the mind its ability to identify objects.

Therefore, P4 is false! :nerd: — jkop

I'll let you comment on this one, since I'm trying to understand Hart not criticise the argument.

This requires a pretty high level of expertise to get fully across, doesn't it?

Also: intelligibility is the property of being understandable, at least in principle, by an intellect. So, arguably, anything in order to be 'intelligible' should require the possibility of the existence of an intellect.

So if physical reality is intelligible, the potential existence of an intellect is requied from an essential feature of physical reality. This would be indeed an odd thing to say in naturalistic views. — boundless

Yes, that's my read too.

Yes, I knew people like this in the late 1970s (I was a kid). They were Christian socialists who located their ideas in teh pre-enlightenment period. There are folk like these left in the Catholic Church in Melbourne where I live. They dislike Rome and find the conservative tradition of the church today to be anathema.

Do you call these sorts of position 'nostalgia projects' or is that too reductive?

Indeed. :up:

Possibly. I think he takes the Gospels as a proto-radical Marxism.

I think the argument goes something like this. Care to criticise how it's laid out?

Premise 1: Naturalism explains everything in terms of physical causes and effects.
Premise 2: Physical causes and effects, by themselves, have no meaning or “aboutness.”
Premise 3: Human thoughts, beliefs, and concepts are intentional—they are about things and can be true or false.
Premise 4: Intentionality (aboutness, meaning, truth) cannot be reduced to or derived from purely physical processes.
Conclusion: Therefore, naturalism cannot fully explain intentionality; the intelligibility of thought points beyond purely naturalistic causes.

Premise 4 would be the most controversial one. It's actually this premise I want elaboration on. It’s interesting because, instead of obsessing over consciousness, this argument treats a single attribute as foundational to a rather complex argument.

Sure, that’s why I think of it as a heuristic, with limitations. And let’s face it: any little maxim that tries to universalise is probably doomed, if only by its blandness.

You tell me.

By default, a theist starts off with:
There is God.
God created man.
Man has the characteristics and abilities as given to him by God.
Naturalism is wrong because God exists and man is created in the image of God. — baker

No that’s a reductionist account, Hart arrives there via philosophical arguments not dogma. He is a Neoplatonist.

I think that the deepest difficulty for strict naturalism is not whether evolution can produce reliable cognition—it clearly can—but whether it can account for normativity. — Esse Quam Videri

Do we know this? Isn’t the question of consciousness still a contested space? But yes on the normativity issue.

So from my perspective, the core issue can be stated simply:

What must reality be like for beings like us to be normatively bound by truth, necessity, and correctness at all?

Once that question is in view, the debate is no longer about science versus theology per se, or about evolutionary psychology, but about whether intelligibility is intrinsic to being or merely a contingent feature of how certain organisms cope with their environments. — Esse Quam Videri

Nice work. Yes, I think this touches on some key points.

But I’m still looking for a statement of Hart’s reasoning I can follow. Some of CS Lewis’ essays seem to come close but that old polemicist irritates me.

Is there a substantive argument that attempts to demonstrate why intentionality and subjectivity can’t originate via naturalism?

Imagine the sense of privilege that can be evoked by the mere speculation that human cognition might have an element of something that is supernatural or connected to god or spirits or anything but the natural world. It serves the interest of theists, mystics or the like. Hence their recurring misrepresentations of naturalism as explanation of survival rather than truth. — jkop

This is an entirely different subject. Again, I'm not much interested in how the argument might be used by some, nor in refutations of it. Hart would openly mock idea that evolution or complexity produces consciousness. He is a trenchant critic of emergence and is deeply read in neuroscience and the philosophy of mind.

I’m still trying to understand his specific argument, but I fear I may need to buy his book and attempt to negotiate his baroque prose. Life is too short.

Hart is a theological Platonist retrieving classical participation, Schelling is a speculative post-Kantian rethinking intelligibility as dynamic and self-grounding. — Joshs

Yes, he identifies as a neoplatonist.

The post-liberal politics of Victor Orban, J.D. Vance and Marco Rubio draw from the classical metaphysical thinking of John Millbank and David Bentley Hart, — Joshs

Interesting. Although Hart identifies as a socialist, he mocks MAGA and openly disparages evangelicals which he calls a heretical. He writes amusingly about how much he dislikes all forms of conservative politics (even if he supports a form of Christian nostalgia). He can be quite a bitch.

Nietzsche meant when he said we hadn’t got rid of God because we can’t get rid of grammar, — Wayfarer

Ha! This is exactly what I was saying about this to a friend yesterday. I always paraphrase it as, “If you believe in grammar, you’re a theist.”

Nice. I guess one could go onto argue that language already presupposes access to logical form, universals, truth, and intentionality. You can’t build those out of non-rational processes without bringing them in.

I note that Hart's position has a relationship to Plantinga’s Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism (EAAN).

I don't have enough expertise to thoroughly assess this but I find it an engaging idea. One can see how one might go on to argue that reality is intelligible only because it is already configured in terms of mind and language, which are inseparable from one another.

Thanks. As I said, I’m not trying to debunk the argument. I’m trying to get a better account of it. What you’re doing is reading over my very elementary summary of the argument, and I’m not surprised that my version is wonky.

What I'm hoping is for someone to restate the argument properly and then supply some further reasoning in support of it. I’m looking for a clearer philosophical account of why some philosophers reason that intelligibility and intentionality cannot be accounted for under naturalism. I don’t want to have to buy Hart’s book. :wink:

Which part do you question? — Patterner

I have no expertise in metaphysics or ontology, but my sympathies have led me toward simple-minded anti-foundationalism. Exploring this is for another thread. What I really want here is a clear account of this argument at its most articulate. I’m not interested in debunking it or making a counter-argument; I'm just hoping to understand it better.

Say some more, I’m not sure I follow. But if you’re saying that the GR is culturally located, then that’s probably true. Although I suspect there are versions of this that cross cultures and have a similar deflationary expression. Didn’t Buddha say something like, "Don’t be a cunt"? :wink:

I think the argument is meant to be something like this:

P 1: Naturalism explains everything solely in terms of physical causes, laws of nature, and emergent phenomena.

P 2: Intelligibility (the fact that the universe can be understood or grasped conceptually) cannot be reduced to physical causes or emergent processes.

P 3: Any naturalistic account that relies only on physical mechanisms cannot explain the conceptual, law-directed, and rational features that make understanding possible.

P 4: If a phenomenon cannot be fully explained by physical/natural mechanisms, naturalism is inadequate to account for it.

Conclusion: Therefore, naturalism cannot fully explain the intelligibility of the universe.

Someone with better philosophical insight and who agrees or better understands with this argument could improve on this account.

Hart is a metaphysical realist of a classical persuasion. That means that he thinks reality is objectively real, intrinsically intelligible, value-laden, purposive, and metaphysically grounded in God. Human reason isn’t a matter of trial and error representations we place over things, reason is formed by the world’s own intelligible structures acting directly on the mind. In other words, the mind is inclined naturally to grasp the truth of the world. This is a very different from Kant, who argued that categories of human reason are purely subjective in origin, not given to us directly by way by the truths of a divinely ordered purposeful world. Postmodernists
believe that reality originates neither in the world as already ordered in itself, nor from subjectively given categories of reason imposing themselves on the world, but from an inseparable interaction between us and the world. — Joshs

Yes, that seems to be right. My sympathies these days are with the latter.

Can you sketch out the argument being suggested that naturalism can't explain intelligibility and intentionality? How are they (Hart) arriving there?

Naturalism does not assume that we never navigate reality, only experience. On the contrary! The experience is the navigation of reality. That should dissolve the argument (if there ever was one). — jkop

I’m not sure I follow this. The claim that experience constitutes reality is what Hart is arguing, but he sees no reason why naturalism can support this. I don’t have the premises laid out; I’m hoping someone familiar with the argument can supply them. All I can find is Hart stating what I’ve already summarized earlier.

We are living, thinking expressions of the principles of the universe. I think it wouldn't make sense if an entity with whatever minimal degree of mental ability that tried to understand the principles of the universe from which it grew couldn't recognize them. We evolved to recognize patterns — Patterner

I’m certainly aware that this is a commonly held view. I don’t know whether it’s correct.

The universe has order, regularities, patterns. If it did not, it would not exist. — Patterner

Certainly our experience of the world suggests patterns, but it’s unclear to me how these reflect the universe itself versus how we function as observers, our cognitive apparatus. That, however, may be a separate matter.

Hart seems to argue that the problem with naturalism is that even if the universe produces conscious beings, it doesn’t explain why they can understand the world. Physical processes create neurons and behavior, but not meaning, truth, or reference. That our minds can grasp concepts and form true beliefs points, Hart argues, beyond mere material causes.

I was hoping someone could unpack this and elaborate.

Most people understand the Golden Rule means to treat others well, and fairly.

It presumes that most people want to be treated well, and fairly.

"Treat others as you would want to be treated." — Questioner

I think that’s the right point. The reality, however, is that ethics is complex, and the Golden Rule is a simplification or, perhaps a heuristic.

I do know that almost all people, most of the time, do not want to be lied to, assaulted, robbed, or killed, and want to make choices and be free to go about their daily lives. The Golden Rule can readily be understood as representing this perspective.