This just sounds like Kant's noumena, phenomena dichotomy or the repetitive discussions of indirect versus direct realism.. Sure our worldview is strongly shaped by our culture, our language, our limited sense perception and the way in which our mind integrates and presents sense data to us. I just don't see how that makes a reality independent of human minds any less "real" or "existent". It is our limitation not a limitation on reality independent of our minds and thoughts.

It seems like a tautology to see our minds create our reality but begs the question of a reality independent of our minds.

This just sounds like Kant's noumena, phenomena dichotomy or the repetitive discussions of indirect versus direct realism.. Sure our worldview is strongly shaped by our culture, our language, our limited sense perception and the way in which our mind integrates and presents sense data to us. I just don't see how that makes a reality independent of human minds any less "real" or "existent". It is our limitation not a limitation on reality independent of our minds and thoughts.

It seems like a tautology to see our minds create our reality but begs the question of a reality independent of our minds. — prothero

You're correct that the distinction between how reality appears to us (phenomena) and a supposed reality in itself (noumena) is central to Kant, and I acknowledge that my argument certainly draws from that lineage.

However, dismissing it as "just" those things misses the specific nuance and also the validation from cognitive science that I'm emphasizing. It's not simply a philosophical rehashing; it's showing how our modern understanding of cognition lends empirical weight to these philosophical insights. In fact, scholars like Andrew Brook, who has written extensively on Kant and cognitive science, highlight these very connections between Kant's insights and current cognitive science. I'm intending to show how our modern understanding of cognition lends weight to these philosophical insights, going beyond a mere rehashing of past debates.

As to 'not being able to see' - the very act of seeing (or not seeing) draws on the mind's structuring capacities. The thought experiment of picturing a scene from "no point of view" highlights this: our attempts to describe even an unseen reality always, implicitly or explicitly, reintroduce a perspective. It's not merely that our minds are limited in grasping an already-structured external reality. It's that the structure itself (the segmentation into "objects," the experience of "color" or "sound") arises from the interaction between the world and the mind's organizing principles. This doesn't make what we regard as 'external reality' any less than real - rather, it's to point out that its reality-as-known or reality-as-intelligible is co-constituted by mind. Self and world are co-arising, neither exists in any absolute sense.

I get your objection, it's the one that everybody has: the world is there anyway, regardless of whether we're in it or see it or not. And we rely on that for our sense of orientation to the world, we are kind of reassured by it. But this is the philosophy of 'the subject who forgets himself', to put it in Schopenhauer's terms, an insight that has been subsequently elaborated by phenomenology and existentialism. Again, I'm not saying that the world exists in your or my mind: what I'm arguing is that what we understand as the world has an inextricably subjective element, which is provided by the observer, and outside of which, nothing can be said to exist or not exist.

So what form of idealism is being promoted? What does this form of idealism have to say about cosmology (14 billion year old universe, 5 billion year old solar system and all the time before advanced or organized minds existed?) Or even the process of evolution. I just can't see how the notion that everything is just minds and mental contents, survives the modern scientific view of the world we live in.? — prothero

The problem with 'idealism' is that there are different forms of it and under that names are included views that are incompatible with each others.

If we restrict to the 'strict' ontological idealism that I talked about before - that is everything is either 'minds' or 'mental contents' - then, of course, you have to posit something additional to what we observe 'in this world'. Berkeley, for instance, would probably respond that God's creative and sustaining activities are what guarantee the validity of scientific theories, at least from a phenomenological and practical level.

Other ontological idealists that are not so strict and affirm the existence of the material/physical world nevertheless accept the idea that the 'mental' is more independent from the 'material'. So, of course, something mental must have existed before the coming into being of life and mind as we know it.

But, anway, even if something like Democritus' atomism - i.e. reductionist materialisms - were true then scientific theories like evolution would be only provisionally true. After all, if at the ultimate level there are only the fundamental consitituents of matter and everything else - like cells, DNA, mountains, animals, humans etc - are reducible to those consituents, it seems evident to me that a theory like evolution would not be ultimately true, but only pragmatically/transactionally true. Why? Because under such reductionist models, there are, ultimately, no DNA, cells, humans, animals etc. So you can't take the theory of biological evolution as a literal picture of 'reality as it is'. You can still speak about its practical usefulness, its ability to make predictions and so on but you have to renounce to treat it as a correct depiction of 'what really happens'.
So, I guess that, ironically, the most strict forms of materialism - i.e. reductionist materialisms - actually have to treat these things in a similar way as they are treated by strict ontological idealism.

….not being able to say (?):

…seems like a tautology to see (say) our minds create…. — prothero

How can a metaphysical project, the theme of which is the set of necessary conditions for a theoretical method of empirical human knowledge, have contained in it as central to that theme, that which is systemically impossible to know anything about?

Given such thematic major premise, it follows as a matter of course that….

…..phenomena/noumena is a false dichotomy;
…..by definition, the mind cannot create reality;
…..a supposed reality in itself is a methodological, systemic, contradiction.

But then, times have changed, pick the predicates of one or of another, but to co-mingle them destroys both.

As to 'not being able to see' - the very act of seeing (or not seeing) draws on the mind's structuring capacities. The thought experiment of picturing a scene from "no point of view" highlights this: our attempts to describe even an unseen reality always, implicitly or explicitly, reintroduce a perspective. It's not merely that our minds are limited in grasping an already-structured external reality. It's that the structure itself (the segmentation into "objects," the experience of "color" or "sound") arises from the interaction between the world and the mind's organizing principles. This doesn't make what we regard as 'external reality' any less than real - rather, it's to point out that its reality-as-known or reality-as-intelligible is co-constituted by mind. Self and world are co-arising, neither exists in any absolute sense. — Wayfarer

I always have had trouble with philosophical skepticism (especially solipsism) and any form of absolute idealism, even to the point of refusing to seriously entertain the premise or spend considerable time or effort to follow the argument.

I would agree the division of the world into individual objects with inherent properties is a product of mind not of nature. There are no independent objects (everything arises from and is dependent upon) the larger world and environment and properties are really just relationships between events. In that sense the world as we imagine it to be and the way we talk about it are just products or our minds and sense perceptions. The post modernist critique of all our notions about truth and history being products or our language and culture have some validity.

I would also agree that our thoughts, feelings and perceptions are just as much a part of reality and nature as the atoms and fundamental physical forces that we create language and concepts to talk about. The warmth of the sunset and the red sky are as real as the infrared and wavelengths of light we use to talk about them. They are all part of nature, you can not pick and choose.

In the end it seems clear that there is a world, reality, universe which carries on with or without us and which is really quite oblivious to our conceptions and which will obliterate us (and thus our minds, perceptions and thoughts) if we get too carried away with the notion the we create reality as opposed to just living in it, temporarily and contingently :smile: .

In the end it seems clear that there is a world, reality, universe which carries on with or without us and which is really quite oblivious to our conceptions and which will obliterate us (and thus our minds, perceptions and thoughts) if we get too carried away with the notion the we create reality as opposed to just living in it, temporarily and contingently — prothero

It's not a matter of being carried away. It's an antidote to having been carried away by the belief...

...that Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the débris of a universe in ruins—all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built. — Bertrand Russell, A Free Man's Worship

The mistake is to situate, or confine, 'the soul' to that context to begin with. What if the entire spectacle were to exist in the soul, rather than vice versa?

We are accustomed nowadays to thinking of ourselves as 'the outcome' or 'the product of' material causation, the accidental byproducts of an entirely fortuitous chain of events. Historically, idealism arose as a criticism and protest against that, the observation that whilst physically h.sapiens is a mere blip in the vastness of cosmic time, nevertheless it is us who are aware of that vastness, we are the form in which it becomes aware of itself.

We are accustomed nowadays to thinking of ourselves as 'the outcome' or 'the product of' material causation, the accidental byproducts of an entirely fortuitous chain of events. Historically, idealism arose as a criticism and protest against that, the observation that whilst physically h.sapiens is a mere blip in the vastness of cosmic time, nevertheless it is us who are aware of that vastness, we are the form in which it becomes aware of itself. — Wayfarer

It should be pretty clear that I do not subscribe to Russell's view of our role in nature. Since my particular view of the divine is one of striving towards creativity, experience, novelty and complexity. That is not to say that there is not a "reality" separate from us or that we are the intended "result" of the divine which dwells within, merely that we (with all our thought, perception and experiences) are part of nature, not separate from the world in which we arise and on which we depend. To separate the world into primary and secondary qualities like Locke is to make an artificial bifurcation of nature. To think that our mathematical models are nature is to commit a fallacy of misplaced concreteness and to think that space and time are separate from process and events is the fallacy of simple location.

I don't really see idealism as the proper solution to eliminative materialism (scientific materialism) although it does get one thinking along a better trajectory.

It should be pretty clear that I do not subscribe to Russell's view of our role in nature. — prothero

I didn't think that you would. My point was that the view that Russell expresses in that essay, is what Kant's form of idealism was a remedy for.

I've read a little of Whitehead 'science in the modern world' and other snippets. I'm generally on board with it, but struggle with his 'actual occasions' and pan-experientialism.

Well, for Whitehead "actual occasions" (drops of experience) are the final actualities of which reality is composed. Apart from them there is vast nothingness. As for panexperientialism, panpsychism is becoming a respectable view in the philosophy of mind and consciousness and the view that Whiteheads events (which create time and space) have both a experiential and a physical aspect fits into that quite well. Whitehead is well worth more of your time,, I think. Not contrary to Buddhist philosophy just different concepts and language. The divine dwells within the processes of nature.

:ok:

I always have had trouble with philosophical skepticism (especially solipsism) and any form of absolute idealism, even to the point of refusing to seriously entertain the premise or spend considerable time or effort to follow the argument. — prothero

Incidentally, I don't regard the view I'm arguing for as necessarily skeptical, in the sense that I don't take issue with established scientific hypotheses. I'm not claiming that scientific knowledge is illusory or fallacious. The principle I'm arguing against, is the idea that mind-independence is a criterion of what can be considered real, in regards to objects of perception and cognition. The problem with it is that perception of objects is itself contingent upon our perceptual and cognitive faculties, and in that important sense, objects are not 'mind-independent', even if, in another sense, they exist independently of us.

This was the philosophical point behind the famous Bohr-Einstein debates that occupied them for decades. While there are many complexities in those debates, the fundamental point was Einstein's insistence of the mind-independence of the objects of physics, 'otherwise', he said, 'I don't know what physics is meant to be about'. Bohr, on the other hand, wasn't being a solipsist or skeptic. His point was more nuanced: the conditions under which sub-atomic phenomena appear are not separable from the means of observation and measurement. As he put it, “Physics is not about how the world is, it is about what we can say about the world.” This reflects a kind of epistemological modesty, not a sweeping skepticism.

As regards absolute idealism - we had a thread at the beginning of this year on a current German philosopher, very much in the lineage of German idealism, Sebastian Rödl, Professor of Practical Philosophy at Leipzig University and an advocate of absolute idealism, associated with G W Hegel:

“According to Hegel, being is ultimately comprehensible only as an all-inclusive whole (das Absolute). Hegel asserted that in order for the thinking subject (human reason or consciousness) to be able to know its object (the world) at all, there must be in some sense an identity of thought and being.”

His book is Self-Consciousness and Objectivity: an Introduction to Absolute Idealism. And it was one tough read. We got through the first few sections, but discussion petered out, as his focus was so intense and specific.

Does anybody really support mind-independent reality? The question in the opening post?
"does the moon still exist when not being observed?" part of the Einstein/Bohr debate
The answer as lawyers would say "it depends" on how one defines the meaning of the words and concepts.

Is the reality that we observe and experience, Mind independent, probably not. For our experience of the word is filtered through our senses and organized into patterns by our brains. Our picture or representation of reality is good enough for our survival and our procreation which evolutionarily is all that is required. Other creatures can see wavelengths we can not and hear frequencies we can not because such capabilities enhance their survival and procreation. Their picture of the world is different from ours so one could say they experience a reality different from ours, but probably better stated they experience "reality" in a different way (avoiding a certain ambiguity of language)..

All of this is pretty basic science and physiology of perception along with neuroscience and cognition. Arguing whether our experience of the world is direct or indirect,, mind independent or mind created in some ways seems beside the point, as long as you understand cognition and perception.

What is the nature of reality apart from us or apart from our mind and experience. That seems like the question of noumena versus phenomena and arguments rage about to what degree our experienced reality corresponds to any external reality. Kant would argue we can know very little about the noumena. Modern science especially with the aid of instruments and technology would seem to argue we can know quite a lot, and our ability to manipulate and alter the world would seem to agree.

Do our mathematical formulas, and concepts like electrons, bosons, muons and fundamental forces really reveal "reality, the noumena" to us as it is? Yes and No, the only conceivable disagreement being to what extent. To think that our language, models and formulas are completely accurate representations is the fallacy of misplaced concreteness (A.N.W.) To deny that there is any reality apart from our experience or perception of it seems well silly, foolish and dangerous and no one actually lives as though it were true.

QM would seem to argue that there are no particles with specific properties (position, momentum, etc.) there are only fields with fuzzy distributions of energy which condense under conditions of interaction, measurement and observation. Of course the world is a continuous process of interactions and observations so reality is not so fuzzy as all that on a macro scale.

A lot of this stems from what A.N.W would call the artificial bifurcation of nature. Where we designate our ideas about external reality as the real and all of our experiences and thoughts as mere physic additions (primary and secondary qualities). We cannot and should not remove ourselves from our picture of the world. Our minds, experiences and thoughts are as much a part of nature (maybe more so) than our conceptions of electrons and electromagnetic radiation.

Kant would argue we can know very little about the noumena. Modern science especially with the aid of instruments and technology would seem to argue we can know quite a lot, and our ability to manipulate and alter the world would seem to agree. — prothero

You are seeing the point I’m making, which is good. Yes, cognitive science illustrates the sense in which the brain constructs the world by synthesising perceptual data with the categories of the understanding - that is the broadly Kantian point. I refer in the OP to an important but largely unheralded book Mind and the Cosmic Order, Charles Pinter, which is, of course, a much more current work than Kant (although he does mention Kant), drawing on cognitive science and evolutionary theory. (It’s unheralded because Pinter was a maths professor emeritus, who published this book in the last years of his life, and it didn’t receive much attention from the academy, which is a shame, because it’s a very insightful piece of work (ref)

As for ‘knowing very little about noumena’ — two points. The noumenal and the in-itself are not the same, although the distinction is not very well drawn. Noumenal originally meant ‘object of mind (nous)’, but Kant uses the term to denote something like the object as it must be thought independently of the conditions of sensibility — that is, as intelligible rather than sensible. The Ding an sich means the object as it is in itself, distinct from how it appears or is presented to the senses.

My interpretation is that the in itself simply refers to ‘the object’ (where this is any object including the world as a whole) unperceived and unknown. Where this can be mapped against philosophy of physics, is in relation to something like Wheeler’s ‘it from bit’, and Bohr’s ‘no phenomenon is a real phenomenon until it is registered’. So the question as to what are the objects of sub-atomic physics aside from how they show up when registered or measured, is precisely the question of ‘what they really are in themselves’ as distinct from ‘how they appear’. And that, I believe, is still an open question - otherwise there wouldn’t be the interminable disputes about interpretation of the theory! (From my readings, the interpretation I’m most drawn to is Quantum Baynsianism, or QBism.)

It is also why Einstein asked the rhetorical question about the moon still being there. Of course it is, was the implication, but the point was, he had to ask the question! And that was because his colleague’s work had called the objectivity of the so-called fundamental constituents of nature into question. Einstein was a staunch scientific realist, the main point of which is that the objects of physics are mind-independent. It was the suggestion that they are not that he couldn’t accept.

As for Whitehead’s bifurcation of nature - of course I agree that he is also diagnosing the same issue. Another of the books I’ve read on it is Nature Loves to Hide, Shimon Malin, a philosopher of physics (also a physicist) which draws considerably on Whitehead and process philosophy, but situates it more broadly within the Neoplatonic tradition.

Arguing whether our experience of the world is direct or indirect, mind independent or mind created in some ways seems beside the point, as long as you understand cognition and perception. — prothero

Having insight into that IS the point! The whole point of a critical philosophy, in fact. Overlooking or not understanding the role of the observing mind in the construction of reality is what comprises the ‘blind spot of science’ (yet another book, but I’ve already cited enough in this post.)

What is the nature of reality apart from us or apart from our mind and experience? — prothero

I've been reading a presentation of Whitehead's bifurcation of nature, from which:

One of the most decisive systematic–historical reasons for the inconsistency within the concept of nature and the concomitant exclusion of subjectivity, experience, and history from nature is, according to Whitehead, the abstract, binary distinction between primary and secondary qualities of the 17th century physical notion of matter based on the substance–quality scheme. Quantitative, measurable properties, such as extension, number, size, shape, weight, and movement, are for Galileo via Descartes through to Locke real, i.e., primary qualities of the thing itself. They are conceived as inherent to things as well as independent of perception. In contrast, secondary qualities, such as colors, scents, sound, taste, as well as inner states, feelings, and sensations, are understood to be located in subjective perception, in the mind, and are considered to be dependent on the primary qualities. They only appear to the subject to be real qualities of the objects themselves. In modernity, then, the subject—which, by the way, theoretically as well as practically, cannot be justifiably defined as naturally human—has to endow the ‘dull nature’ with qualities and values, with meaning. — Nature and Subjectivity in Alfred North Whitehead

This is the very point at issue. What I'm arguing in 'the mind-created world', is that this attitude, which Whitehead sees as the fundamental flaw in modern philosophy, is based on a false notion of mind independence (‘the exclusion of subjectivity’). I'm not presenting the same argument as Whitehead's, but I'm talking about the same problem.