It might be that science is just not set up to answer questions like "what is it like". Myself, I don't think that question has an answer at all. The only way to know what it is like is to experience it. — Ludwig V

As an idealist, I agree.

The irony is that certainty is never obtained in the hard sciences. No scientific theory can ever be proven to be true. While many people fail to understand this fact, it may be that many, or even most, scientists do not fail to understand it. — Janus

Sure. But we don't say, "Well, we can't prove the combustion engine works the way we think it does for the reasons we think it does, so there's no point in making any. After all, what reason do we have to think the next one we make will work?

On the other hand it is possible, although it can never be proven, that the former exist only because of the latter. — Janus

We certainly are not aware of the existence of the former without the latter.

What the 'explanatory gap' and 'hard problem' arguments are aimed at, is precisely that claim. That everything is reducible to or explainable in terms of the physical. That is the point at issue! — Wayfarer

They make clear that everything is not reducible to or explainable in terms of the physical.

Sure. But we don't say, "Well, we can't prove the combustion engine works the way we think it does for the reasons we think it does, so there's no point in making any. After all, what reason do we have to think the next one we make will work? — Patterner

The internal combustion engine is well understood. The understanding of its workings were not the kind of thing I had in mind when I spoke of scientific theories.

We certainly are not aware of the existence of the former without the latter. — Patterner

We are in vivo, and until modern times always were altogether, unaware of neural activity. We don't directly perceive neural activity giving rise to consciousness, we correlate the two on the basis of neural imaging and first person reportage.

When it comes to your example, the internal combustion engine, we do directly see the combustion of the fuel giving rise to motion.

They make clear that everything is not reducible to or explainable in terms of the physical. — Patterner

I think it is undeniably true that most of human life cannot be explained in terms of physics. On the other hand physics certainly seems to be the basis of chemistry and chemistry the basis of life and life the basis of consciousness, and even if this is so it still doesn't follow that emergent systems can necessarily be understood comprehensively in terms of the systems they emerge from. Try understanding poetry, art or music in terms of physics, or even biology, and see how far you get.

A materialist explanation of a work of art would be that it comprises these materials that make up the surface on which the paint is applied, that the various pigments comprise such and such chemical bases, that react together in such and such a way as to produce the various hues and shades that are visible to the observer.

Do you think that such an account, no matter how detailed, will ever satisfy the requirements given here by Tolstoy? — Wayfarer

This interpretation misses a key point - it neglects the artist and the receiver of art, on who Tolstoy's focus was. A painting is merely matter, but a brain is "matter in motion" - involved in complex chemical processes, with capacities for sign, symbol, and meaning.

A painting is merely matter, but a brain is "matter in motion" - involved in complex chemical processes, with capacities for sign, symbol, and meaning. — Questioner

The rules of 'matter in motion' are those of physics. To reduce a phenomenon to physics or chemistry, it is necessary to show that this phenomenon in question can be explained solely in terms of physics and chemistry. How can 'the capacities for sign, symbol and meaning' be reduced to, or explained in terms of, physics and chemistry? Where would you look in physics or chemistry for those explanations?

Besides the 'receiver of art' is not 'a brain'. The subject is not 'a brain'. This is an example of the mereological fallacy - the logical error of attributing properties or actions to a part of something (like the brain) that can only properly belong to the whole (the being).

Apropos of 'capacities of sign, symbol and meaning'. One of the long-time posters here, Apokrisis, has introduced myself and many others to the emerging discipline of biosemiotics. This is, briefly, the application of semiotics to biological processes, from the cellular level upwards. One of the founders of this discipline, Howard Pattee, has this to say about the relationship of signs and matter:

The concept of Biosemiotics requires making a distinction between two categories, the material or physical world and the symbolic or semantic world. The problem is that there is no obvious way to connect the two categories. This is a classical philosophical problem on which there is no consensus even today. Biosemiotics recognizes that the philosophical matter-mind problem extends downward to the pattern recognition and control processes of the simplest living organisms where it can more easily be addressed as a scientific problem. In fact, how material structures serve as signals, instructions, and controls is inseparable from the problem of the origin and evolution of life. Biosemiotics was established as a necessary complement to the physical-chemical reductionist approach to life that cannot make this crucial categorical distinction necessary for describing semantic information. Matter as described by physics and chemistry has no intrinsic function or semantics. By contrast, biosemiotics recognizes that life begins with function and semantics.

Biosemiotics recognizes this matter-symbol problem at all levels of life from natural languages down to the DNA. Cartesian dualism was one classical attempt to address this problem, but while this ontological dualism makes a clear distinction between mind and matter, it consigns the relation between them to metaphysical obscurity. Largely because of our knowledge of the physical details of genetic control, symbol manipulation, and brain function these two categories today appear only as an epistemological necessity, but a necessity that still needs a coherent explanation. Even in the most detailed physical description of matter there is no hint of any function or meaning.

The problem also poses an apparent paradox: All signs, symbols, and codes, all languages including formal mathematics are embodied as material physical structures and therefore must obey all the inexorable laws of physics. At the same time, the symbol vehicles like the bases in DNA, voltages representing bits in a computer, the text on this page, and the neuron firings in the brain do not appear to be limited by, or clearly related to, the very laws they must obey. Even the mathematical symbols that express these inexorable physical laws seem to be entirely free of these same laws. — Physics and Metaphysics of Biosemiology, Howard Pattee

This is a far cry, however, from describing the brain as 'matter in motion'.

Apropos of 'capacities of sign, symbol and meaning'. One of the long-time posters here, Apokrisis, has introduced myself and many others to the emerging discipline of biosemiotics. This is, briefly, the application of semiotics to biological processes, from the cellular level upwards. One of the founders of this discipline, Howard Pattee, has this to say about the relationship of signs and matter:

The concept of Biosemiotics requires making a distinction between two categories, the material or physical world and the symbolic or semantic world. The problem is that there is no obvious way to connect the two categories. This is a classical philosophical problem on which there is no consensus even today. Biosemiotics recognizes that the philosophical matter-mind problem extends downward to the pattern recognition and control processes of the simplest living organisms where it can more easily be addressed as a scientific problem. In fact, how material structures serve as signals, instructions, and controls is inseparable from the problem of the origin and evolution of life. Biosemiotics was established as a necessary complement to the physical-chemical reductionist approach to life that cannot make this crucial categorical distinction necessary for describing semantic information. Matter as described by physics and chemistry has no intrinsic function or semantics. By contrast, biosemiotics recognizes that life begins with function and semantics.

Biosemiotics recognizes this matter-symbol problem at all levels of life from natural languages down to the DNA. Cartesian dualism was one classical attempt to address this problem, but while this ontological dualism makes a clear distinction between mind and matter, it consigns the relation between them to metaphysical obscurity. Largely because of our knowledge of the physical details of genetic control, symbol manipulation, and brain function these two categories today appear only as an epistemological necessity, but a necessity that still needs a coherent explanation. Even in the most detailed physical description of matter there is no hint of any function or meaning.

The problem also poses an apparent paradox: All signs, symbols, and codes, all languages including formal mathematics are embodied as material physical structures and therefore must obey all the inexorable laws of physics. At the same time, the symbol vehicles like the bases in DNA, voltages representing bits in a computer, the text on this page, and the neuron firings in the brain do not appear to be limited by, or clearly related to, the very laws they must obey. Even the mathematical symbols that express these inexorable physical laws seem to be entirely free of these same laws. — Physics and Metaphysics of Biosemiology, Howard Pattee

This is a far cry, however, from describing the brain as 'matter in motion'.

But here, you're singling out one layer in this complex and dynamic whole, and claiming that 'everything' is derived from that layer. That is, after all, exactly what reductionism does - it reduces (or tries to reduce) consciousness, intentionality, rational inference, and so on, to the level of the so-called 'hard sciences', where absolute certainty is thought to be obtainable, where everything can be made subject to so-called 'scientific method'. I'm not going to try and give a detailed account of what I think it wrong with that, other than registering it here. — Wayfarer

Thank you for that. I respectfully hold a different point-of-view on the matter (pun intended).

"Reduce" is a funny word. I rather think of the functioning of the brain as a grand, astonishing, glorious, stupendous culmination of the evolutionary process. I am blown away when I think of it, as much as I am blown away when I gaze upon a star-studded night sky. I sense the bigness of it all, not the smallness. I can affirm the reverence that should be accorded life, even while understanding its source.

And - what do you mean? Reduced from what? The notion that there is something else - something more - accounting for our mental capacities - that human consciousness is a fundamental component of reality as opposed to a manifestation of natural processes, jerks humans out of all of nature, makes us something special that evidence and logic do not support. We are not "above and beyond" nature, but a part of it, just like everything else that exists. An anthropocentric understanding of consciousness to me is at best arrogant, and at worst narcissistic.

And - what do you mean? Reduced from what? The notion that there is something else - something more - accounting for our mental capacities - that human consciousness is a fundamental component of reality as opposed to a manifestation of natural processes, jerks humans out of all of nature, makes us something special that evidence and logic do not support. We are not "above and beyond" nature, but a part of it, just like everything else that exists. An anthropocentric understanding of consciousness to me is at best arrogant, and at worst narcissistic. — Questioner

When I criticise reductionism, I’m not denying biological continuity or evolution, neuroscientific correlation, or the legitimacy of physical explanations. I’m criticising a closure claim: the claim that first-person experience, meaning, and normativity are nothing over and above what can be captured in third-person physical description, such that once the latter is given, the former are thereby accounted for in principle. And that is the position you are maintaining.

This is why I returned to the passage from Leo Tolstoy that you quoted. When Tolstoy writes that “art is a human activity, consisting in this, that one man consciously, by means of certain external signs, hands on to others feelings he has lived through, and that other people are infected by these feelings, and also experience them,” the “feelings” he refers to are precisely what contemporary philosophy of mind discusses under the heading of qualia—the qualitative character of lived experience. (Incidentally I’m not claiming Tolstoy was doing philosophy of mind as such; I’m pointing out that what he calls “feelings” are what contemporary debates categorise as 'qualia'.)

Reductionism, in the relevant sense, claims that these qualities of experience are nothing but neurophysiological processes occurring in the brain and body, and that those processes fully account for the qualitative dimension of experience, such that nothing over and above the physical description is doing any explanatory work. Once the neural story is told, the experiential story is, in principle, complete. (This is, for instance, the philosophy of the late Daniel Dennett.)

What I am questioning is not whether neural processes are involved—clearly they are—but whether this “nothing-but” account is meaningful. The issue is whether a third-person account of causal mechanisms can exhaustively account for the first-person character of experience itself, rather than merely correlate with it. And I don't believe that, so far, you've recognised this distinction.

On Bitbol’s view (and others in the phenomenological tradition), it cannot be so reduced - not because consciousness is “outside nature,” but because the very intelligibility of physical description presupposes experiential and normative structures that are not themselves found in the empirical domain.

Let me go back to Edmund Husserl, who instigated modern phenomenology:

In contrast to the outlook of naturalism, Husserl believed all knowledge, all science, all rationality depended on conscious acts, acts which cannot be properly understood from within the natural outlook at all. Consciousness should not be viewed naturalistically as part of the world at all, since consciousness is precisely the reason why there was a world there for us in the first place. For Husserl it is not that consciousness creates the world in any ontological sense—this would be a subjective idealism, itself a consequence of a certain naturalising tendency whereby consciousness is cause and the world its effect—but rather that the world is opened up, made meaningful, or disclosed through consciousness. The world is inconceivable apart from consciousness. Treating consciousness as part of the world, reifying consciousness, is precisely to ignore consciousness’s foundational, disclosive role.

Now, I fully understand that if you're encountering this idea for the first time, then it might not be intuitively obvious. What you're arguing for is very much the accepted wisdom - science as the arbiter of reality and naturalism as the presumed epistemic framework. I think I understand it, but I dissent from it.

The internal combustion engine is well understood. The understanding of its workings were not the kind of thing I had in mind when I spoke of scientific theories. — Janus

You said "certainty is never obtained in the hard sciences." I would think that includes everything involved in the internal combustion engine. And it's true. Just because gravity works the way it does, and has every moment we are aware of, doesn't mean we have scientific proof that it will work that way tomorrow.

I think it is undeniably true that most of human life cannot be explained in terms of physics. On the other hand physics certainly seems to be the basis of chemistry and chemistry the basis of life and life the basis of consciousness, and even if this is so it still doesn't follow that emergent systems can necessarily be understood comprehensively in terms of the systems they emerge from. Try understanding poetry, art or music in terms of physics, or even biology, and see how far you get. — Janus

That's because those things, and most of human life, only exist because of consciousness. What emergent system that doesn't involve consciousness can't be explained in terms of physics?

You said "certainty is never obtained in the hard sciences." I would think that includes everything involved in the internal combustion engine. — Patterner

I don't think so. The working of the engine can be observed directly―transparent models have been constructed. It's like saying that we don't really know how clocks work―we do know.

What emergent system that doesn't involve consciousness can't be explained in terms of physics? — Patterner

Biology cannot adequately be explained in terms of physics.

What I’m saying is that there is a way of stepping out of this dualistic thought process. To develop a sense of things which can become like an alternative approach, or perspective on an issue. Over time, it becomes like a reference system, but not dualistically based, but intuitive/feeling based.
— Punshhh

I agree with that and I think we are always already not in that dualistic mode most of the time; we just may not have learnt how to attend to that intuitive mode, because the analytic dualistic mind demands a kind of spolighted precision which doesn't belong to that intuitive mode, and confusion and aporia follow.

Yes, although what Wayfarer and myself are doing here is taking a step back from the analytic dualistic thought processes and treating the subject as something external, or orthogonal to it. Or in other words somehow independent of the nature of the experience, while also essential for the experience. An onlooker, who is required to witness it, for it to have occurred. Both transcendent of and in the middle of (essential to) the experience, simultaneously.
This next bit is what I think, I can’t speak for Wayfarer on this.
So the meaning, or intimate nature of the experience is shaped by the transcendent nature of the subject. An identical experience (empirically) is different and unique dependent on the transcendental state of the subject. That the subject is in essence all subjects (an archetypal being, entirely transcendent),simultaneously, while having a unique perspective in the presence of the experience. And is uniquely necessary for that experience to occur.

Your thinking seems to align with my own, insofar as it resonates more with the Vedic tradition than the Buddhist. Having said that I can't claim to be committed to, or convinced of, any idealist model, but if I had to choose it would be a model that posits a universal or collective mind.

However, I don't take the subject to be transcendent or transcendental. I tend not to think of universal mind (if it is real or even just as an idea) as being subject to anything. The subject is the other to the object, and both arise due to the dualistic nature of our thinking, in my view. And I would say that is as much the case under a naturalistic, even materialistic, model as it is under an idealist model.

I'm sorry. I didn't mean to imply that consciousness isn't fundamental in some sense. I was just asking in what sense you think it is fundamental. Obviously, you don't mean in the sense that it is the causal origin of the world. — Ludwig V

You might be disappointed by what I say now: I am a panentheist, so obviously, I regard the (Divine) Consciousness as ontologically fundamental (incidentally, I believe that 'classical theism' is a form of panentheism but honestly I'm unclear if my views are truly compatible with 'classical theism'). However, I do not believe that 'consciousness' is fundamental if by 'consciousness' we mean the consciousness of (finite) sentient beings.

Why do I accept the view that there is such an 'ontologically fundamental Consciousness'? There are various reasons but IMO the most pertinent here are the following:

• Laws of reasons and mathematical truths seems to be (1) conceptual and (2) timeless and not contingent. If they are conceptual, they cannot exist outside a 'mind'. If, however, we accept also (2), this leads to accept that there must be a timeless, non-contingent Mind.
• The physical world seems intelligible, which seems totally ungaranteed if the 'physical' was totally independent from consciousness. Also, such an intelligibility, IMO makes sense only in reference to an Intellect, at least at a potential way (i.e. intelligibility means that it can be understood). To me this is a clue that such an Intellect exists and is the reason why the physical world is intelligible. I find the 'Kantian' views lacking here. To me they seem that they can't give an account of why the 'mind' can 'order' experience if there is no intelligible structure in the 'outside world'.

So you accept that they do work. But if they work, they provide an explanation - that's what conceptual structures do, isn't it? — Ludwig V

No, merely stating and observing they work isn't an explanation. They could for instance work by pure 'luck'. Think for instance, about the problem of induction.

I don't understand the first alternative. If the world has an intelligible structure, then there is an explanation why things are the way they are. — Ludwig V

If intelligibility is a fundamental property of being, we might ask ourselves if there is a reason why it must be so. Again, merely stating that "intelligibility is a fundamental property of being" is an assertion but not an explanation.

As to the second, it happens all the time that we think we have an account of the world and it turns out to be wrong. We just set to work to devise another, better, one. — Ludwig V

What gives you a guarantee that the 'better' account isn't also illusory if there is no intelligibility?

Your thinking seems to align with my own, insofar as it resonates more with the Vedic tradition than the Buddhist.

Then we can presumably view the subject as transcendent to the extent that it extends to having a presence in the material world, to emotions, or feelings, to mind, to soul and to spirit. In this sense of having a presence in each of these spheres the subject is transcendent of each sphere by having a presence and reference (in their being) in the others.

So I view the subject as orthogonal to the stratification of these layers of being. Reaching across the spectrum.

As for a universal mind, I see it more as a collective mind within the kingdoms of nature. For example a person is a collection of individual cells. A civilisation, or world, is a collection of people, or organisms. It helps to, if tenuously, to regard the planet as a being, with people as equivalent to the cells in the person of the world. This principle can be extended.

Whilst I respect the sentiment, the phenomenological stance is not really reliant on such concepts as soul or spirit, or at least it doesn't use that terminology. It is critical of naturalism, but from a philosophical perspective. The 'primacy of consciousness' doesn't equate to acceptance of the Vedantic 'ātman' - it is grounded in the recognition that 'the world is inconceivable apart from consciousness' because it is disclosed through consciousness (per the above quote). That doesn't falsify such ideas, but it tries to express them more within the rubric of philosophy.

You might be disappointed by what I say now: I am a panentheist, so obviously, I regard the (Divine) Consciousness as ontologically fundamental — boundless

I'm not disappointed at all. Many people have beliefs of this kind that I do not share. You, in your turn, may be disappointed to learn that I have never been able to sign up to any doctrine of this kind - mostly because I find it too hard to make sense of them. For purposes of classification, I call myself an agnostic. I think we can co-exist.

No, merely stating and observing they work isn't an explanation. They could for instance work by pure 'luck'. — boundless

I don't understand what you are asking for.

The physical world seems intelligible, which seems totally ungaranteed if
the 'physical' was totally independent from consciousness. — boundless

"The physical world seems intelligible" means, to me, that we can understand the physical world. You use the word "seems" which suggests that you think that might not be the case. I agree that we do not understand it completely. Is that what you mean? I can't see what it might mean to say that our partial understanding is an complete illusion, as opposed to partly wrong.
Conscious beings evolved in the physical world, and evolved the means for understanding that world. If those means had failed to understand the physical world, our species would likely have died out long ago. No?

What gives you a guarantee that the 'better' account isn't also illusory if there is no intelligibility? — boundless

There is no guarantee. In fact, past experience supports the idea that any given account will be superseded in due course. I see no reason to suppose that there will ever be a final, complete account. The thing is, each account generates new questions.

Yes, what it is like cannot be subject to ontological analysis, even though we may be able to give inadequate verbal descriptions of it. The descriptions, if they are to be intelligible, are always in terms of sense objects and bodily states, sensations and feelings. — Janus

I'm always fascinated by the fact that a question that seems, on the face of it, to have a perfectly straightforward answer manages to persuade us that it has no proper answer at all. The descriptions are gestures towards what escapes description. But if the description is not the real thing, it cannot substitute for the real thing in our experience.

What the 'explanatory gap' and 'hard problem' arguments are aimed at, is precisely that claim. That everything is reducible to or explainable in terms of the physical. That is the point at issue! — Wayfarer

Well, that's a good point. But doesn't idealism fall into the same trap in reverse? The solution, if there is a solution, is to understand the two apparent foes in their relation to each other.
Here's an attempt. (I'm channelling Ryle here, but I'm sure that won't prejudice you.)
An accountant knows everything that goes on in the library - it all shows up in the accounts, one way or another. So every book registers in the accounts. But all the accountant (qua accountant) knows is how much the books cost, how much the shelving for the books costs, etc. What accountants don't know is anything about what is in the books - the stories. You have to read them to know that. (There's a by-way here about the meaning of "in" the books. What's in the books, you might say, is paper and ink or maybe words and pictures. Where is the story? Well, it is not outside the book, that's for sure.) You could say that the accounts include everything that goes on in the library, but miss the point of the library, which is what the stories and ideas in the books. That does not mean that the accounts are irrelevant. On the contrary, they are essential if the library is to function properly.
We could tell a similar story about all the other people involved in the library, both inside it and outside it. The whole story needs all these points of view if the institution is to be understood properly.

The 'primacy of consciousness' doesn't equate to acceptance of the Vedantic 'ātman' - it is grounded in the recognition that 'the world is inconceivable apart from consciousness'

Yes, I was thinking of that as I was writing, my comment was more of an aside to Janus. I struggle to limit the subject to these binary terms, ie, the world and consciousness, without looking more closely at how consciousness manifests in humanity and it’s theological implications.

Biology cannot adequately be explained in terms of physics. — Janus

How do you mean? Any particular aspects of biology?

physics is designed to exclude anything that doesn't fit its methodology. Nothing wrong with that, until you start claiming that the physical world is the only real world.
— Ludwig V

What the 'explanatory gap' and 'hard problem' arguments are aimed at, is precisely that claim. That everything is reducible to or explainable in terms of the physical. That is the point at issue! — Wayfarer

But this makes it sound as though there is more than one real world; that physics effectively captures the reality of an aspect of it (the physical) and we need another explanation alongside of it for something like consciousness. This is dualism, a reification of the hard problem. If instead we claim that the phrase ‘physical world’ is not describing a world that is real in the sense of being real independent of our conscious interaction with it, then we are doing phenomenology. This dissolves the dualism of the hard problem by showing there to be a single underlying process of experiencing accounting for the historical decision to bifurcate the world into concepts like ‘physically real’ and ‘real in other ways’.

This concludes the brief introduction to Michel Bitbol’s phenomenology. — Wayfarer

I enjoyed reading introduction, and I think your defend these ideas well. Inspires me to give Bitbol a serious look. But I wonder, when you consider Husserl's reduction, where do your thoughts lie regarding its direction, the things that turn up when "the world" is suspended? And perhaps, do you think phenomenology provides a view of that metaphysics, the finality that is disclosed when one gets to the uncanny bottom of things, that is more penetrating that what Buddhist metaphysics has to say? What I have in mind is the primacy of liberation, as opposed to the busy work of words.