I assume that by "non-sensical" you mean : from the perspective of Realism & Materialism. You may be correct, that many-if-not-most posters on TPF identify as materialists or physicalists, to the exclusion of psychological or metaphysical views. But not all. — Gnomon

No, I mean from the perspective of anyone who takes science seriously. (I am not a materialist.) It is nonsensical because it has been known since Galen (129-216 AD) treated gladiators that thinking depends on the brain. Any well-grounded theory of mind has to take that into account. So, we cannot divide extended reality from human mental reality.

So now, there are good empirical reasons to doubt*1 the evidence of the physical senses, and to apply the 6th sense of philosophical Reasoning. The "science" I'm referring to is Quantum Physics, not Spiritualism. — Gnomon

As one with a doctorate in theoretical physics, I do not think that the facts support the far-reaching quantum interpretations that astound people. Some come from confusing the particle model with real particles (for which there is no irrefutable evidence). Some come from inconsistently treating measuring processes classically instead of quantum mechanically. Some comes ignoring entanglement over large distances, or accepted but little discussed trans-temporal symmetry principles, and some come from ignoring the nonlinearity of interactions.

There is a tendency to think that because quantum theory and consciousness are both mysterious, they must be related. The theories I have read trying to do so have not stood up. The wave function does not collapse in the brain as von Neumann and Wigner proposed, but in measuring devices because interactions with them are nonlinear and do not support superposition. So, the collapse of the wave function has nothing to do with consciousness.

It's obvious that Minds are always Embodied ; unless you give credence to invisible intangible ghosts. — Gnomon

No, one need only give credence to logical analysis such as that by which Aristotle established the existence of an immaterial unmoved mover, described as "self-thinking thought."

Cartesian dualism was merely a compromise, intended to allow Science to proceed without interference from Religion — Gnomon

Have you read Hannam, The Genesis of Science: How the Christian Middle Ages Launched the Scientific Revolution? No one interfered with his physics, which btw was atrocious.

A more pertinent observation in the 21st century is that Mind is the Function of physical brains. — Gnomon

How does one observe this?

I'm not proposing a Triality, but merely that both space-occupying things, and thinking things, might be merely various products of evolutionary Causation. — Gnomon

As I explain in my January paper, for this to be so, mind must have physical effects.

The uncertainty principle presents a philosophical challenge to one of our basic assumptions about the nature of physical objects, namely, that physical variables have precise and definite objective existence. — Gnomon

This is a non-problem for Aristotelians who see that measured values do not exist befoe measuring operations.

You haven't established that thinking of mathematical concepts can occur without supervening on matter. — wonderer1

Maybe that is because I think that empirical knowledge is informed by physical action via a modification of our brain state. However, since the same thoughts supervene on astronomical motions, saying that they supervene on brain states is not at all helpful. Saying that brain states encode the information we become aware of is.

You seem to simply be considering a "subject" as a pure abstraction without recognizing the subject's supervenience on matter — wonderer1

No, I see subjects only in subject-object relations. There is no being a subject without having an intentional relation to an object known, willed, hoped for, etc. All of this is essentially intentional. Nothing about it demands physicality.

That the objects human subjects typically relate to are physical does not mean that all objects are physical and, if they are not physical, they will not be physically encoded. The essence of knowing is the union of the mind with its objects. The object informing the mind is, identically, the mind being informed by the object. Noting about this demands a physical substrate. So, what you are doing is generalizing from a single form of knowing, to all knowing. Clearly, there is no logical justification for this kind of induction.

Think about information. While it can be physically encoded, it is not physical. What computers process is not information in virtue of any physical property. Label a bit’s physical states a and b, and ask what the byte aababbab means? Reading left to right and interpreting a as 0, and b as 1, the byte means 00101101. Interpreting a as 1 and b as 0, it is 11010010. Reading right to left, it means 10110100 or 01001011. Thus, a, an arbitrary physical state, lacks intrinsic meaning.

Since information is not it's encoding, there is no contradiction in having intelligibility without a physical substrate.

Finally, your assumption that human intentionality supervenes on brain states is demonstrably false. Consider my seeing an apple. The same modification of my brain state encodes both my seeing an apple and my retinal state being modified. So, one neural state underpins two distinct conceptual states.

I'm not seeing how the fact that the object of thought need not be material is of much relevance. — wonderer1

It is relevant because it shows that matter is not essential to all objects of thought. Ask yourself how physical states can determine immaterial contents. For example, what kind of physical state can encode Goedel's concept of unprovability? Physical states interact physically, producing physical, not intentional results. So, how can a physical state interact with immaterial contents? It can't.

Instead, we have neural states encoding examples from which we can abstract concepts. Clearly, producing concepts is an intentional, not a physical operation.

The physical informs by developing intentional outputs. See this video on neural nets producing outputs that are about numerals in a visual field. Intentionality shows up at a relatively low level of neural network processing. — wonderer1

That does not happen. Neural nets only produce physical activation states. As with my computer example, the meaning or intentionality of these states is not intrinsic, but imposed by human interpreters.

Being a response to something, however complex that response may be, is not being about (in Brentano's sense) what is responded to. Believing that it is is an example of anthropomorphic thinking. Is a ringing bell about the bell puller's act? Of course not. It can, however, be used to infer that there is a bell puller acting.

Aristotle used no faith based premises to deduce that God was "self-thinking thought." Greek religion at the time was pantheism. — Dfpolis
I'll leave discussing Aristotle to Fooloso4. — wonderer1

As you will. Still, it rebuts your claim.

With a well informed perspective on the matter, a person understands that the physical effect of celestial objects on the functioning of our brains is generally so negligible that we are justified in ignoring it. It is disappointing to receive sophistry like this as a response. — wonderer1

My point exactly! Supervenience alone is worthless. You have to look at causality, which supervenience theory was designed to avoid. And why? Because there is no possible reduction of intentional effects to physical causes. Dennett recognized that explicitly in Consciousness Explained and Chalmers recognizes it in discussing the hard problem. I showed why it impossible in my January article.

Superveniences are a class of abstractions. — wonderer1

Yes. That does not make every abstraction an instance of supervenience.

To think that you have done a serious inspection while ignoring neuroscience is just fooling yourself. — wonderer1

That is rather gratuitous! Where have I ignored neuroscience? I find it useful, but limited. It is like a street lamp's light. The light being under it does not mean that's where you lost your keys. It is better to think about what you did with your keys.

Since philosophers were able to discuss this for millennia without the concept of supervenience, it can hardly be necessary. — Dfpolis
Fallacious appeal to tradition. — wonderer1

No, a counter-example to the claim of necessity.

Let's face it. When you needed supervenience to rebut my claim about astrology, it failed you. You had to abandon it, and bring in causality -- the very move it was designed to avoid.

No, because mind of God is not a human mind, but only analogous to our minds. God does not now in the same way as humans do. — Dfpolis
Do you recognize the special pleading? — wonderer1

It would be special pleading if I held a general principle that this violates. I hold no such principle. Since you have insufficient evidence to generalize from some minds on a peripheral planet to all minds, neither I am not violating a universal principle you have justified. I merely reject your hypothesis.

You didn't qualify "informed opinion". I certainly can and do have opinions informed by much that Aquinas didn't understand. Why try to change the subject to Aquinas' uninformed opinions? — wonderer1

Because, that is what a truth-seeker should do. I did not read the Churchlands, Dennett, Chalmers any number of other naturalists because I expected to agree with them, but because I hoped to find insights -- and I did. It always helps to see things from a perspective very different than your own.

I do not agree 100% with Aquinas. The paper I am writing is quite critical of his theory of knowledge. Still, I have not found any glaring errors of fact, and he is one of the great minds in philosophy -- well worth reading even if it is only to clarify your own position.

As for changing the subject, it was you who brought up the mind of God without researching it.

Responding to you is time-consuming and seems to provide little benefit to either of us or to anyone else. I need that time to work on my articles for publication. So, I have decided to spend it there.

With kind regards,
Dennis Polis

Great OP. Your paper also looks interesting. — Leontiskos

Thank you. As I said, I am revising one on how the agent intellect works. If you would like to read it, and possibly comment, message me with your email.

Why think a mind is something that can exist without an information processing substrate to supervene upon? I.e. why think that a belief that God is metaphysically possible is not faith based? — wonderer1

Because the essential requirement for thought is a subject and an object. The object of thought need not be material, as we can think mathematical concepts that do not involve matter. So, while content may be encoded in matter, that presents more of a problem (how does the physical inform the intentional?) than a solution.

Aristotle used no faith based premises to deduce that God was "self-thinking thought." Greek religion at the time was pantheism.

Supervene" is a pragmatic word for considering things from a more simplistic but useful view. — wonderer1

How is it useful to know that my thoughts supervene on celestial motions? If you take supervenience seriously, you have to take astrology seriously.

For example I can usefully discuss the workings of logic gates without concerning myself with whether the logic gates are instantiated with transistors and resistors, or vacuum tubes, or relays. — wonderer1

That is abstraction, not subservience.

It simply isn't feasible for us to discuss the physical behavior of a whole brain at the level of particle physics. — wonderer1

True, but irrelevant to the philosophical question of how physicality and intentionality relate. To study that you need to inspect, not ignore, their relation.

So talking in terms of supervenient properties is simply a pragmatic necessity — wonderer1

Since philosophers were able to discuss this for millennia without the concept of supervenience, it can hardly be necessary.

The question is, will you be consistent and agree that the mind of a god has an isomorphic dependency? — wonderer1

No, because mind of God is not a human mind, but only analogous to our minds. God does not now in the same way as humans do. Aquinas discusses this at length. You may not agree with Aquinas, but unless you know his theory, you cannot have an informed opinion.

Furthermore, will you recognize that a god dependent on some sort of information processing substrate is not in itself an unmoved mover? — wonderer1

Sure. That is why it is "a god" and not God.

As far as we know nature has always behaved invariantly. We agree that nature's behavior is
not logically necessary, but that might not mean much more than that we are able to think counterfactually. — Janus

Quite likely, so let us think factually. Really, no matter how we think, we are not going to have exhaustive knowledge.

If you know an object then you must have an idea of what it is, and I would count that as being possible due to imagination, — Janus

It depends on what you mean by imagination. I know that it can act as it acts on me when I sense it. Say, it can scatter light, or make a strange sound. That action modifies my brain state, causing a presence we can be aware of as an "image." That is Aristotle's phantasm. We can also imagine things not so caused. If an image is not caused by an object, it cannot be our means of knowing an object, because it is not the dynamic presence of an object.

We have 'images' of things, of their patterns or forms, which enable us to recognize them. — Janus

Yes, or others of their kind. But, on the first encounter with a new type of thing, we have no such image.

Appearances are relational, the thing in itself is not; it is what the thing is apart from all its relations. — Janus

I agree with this statement. I don't think it is what Kant meant, but I am not a Kantian and so no expert. As I understand him, the mind adds forms of understanding, rather than basing concepts such as space, time and causality on reality.

If all thoughts are preceded by neural processes, then those prior thoughts would also have been. — Janus

Being preceded by is not the same as being determined by. My passing through a signal is preceded by the signal turning green, but determined by my decision to go. Yes, that decision is partially determined by neural processes, but in the end, it is determined by my valuation of various factors, and valuation is an act of the will.

For Spinoza there is no real separation between thought and neural process, it is not that thoughts are caused by neural processes, but that "thought" and "neural process" are the two ways we have of understanding the one thing. We are not aware of our neural processes, but we can become aware of our thoughts. — Janus

If you mean, as Spinoza did not, that thoughts and neural processes are two activities of a single person, I agree. But, being two ways of understanding, of of acting, does not explain the correlation of neural processes and the contents of awareness. We are aware of information encoded in neural processes. This cannot be an accident, and so calls for an explanation grounded in the relation of subject and object, for otherwise, our thoughts cannot put us in touch with reality.

Parallelism does not put us in touch with nature. It is a ridiculous theory because if true, it could never be justified. We would have no way of knowing what extended reality is actually doing to compare it with our thoughts and see that they are parallel. Extended reality could be doing not-A while we think it's doing A.

Further, since physics has no intentional effects, neural states need to inform mental states via an intentional operation. That is the subject of the paper I am finishing, should you care to see it.

Does our explicit awareness of our thoughts come as we think them or after the fact? My experience tells me that I do not decide what to think prior to thinking it, and that my explicit awareness or consciousness of what I have thought comes after having thought it, via the "echo" of memory, wherein I can "hear" my thought repeated as a "silent locution" in my "mind's ear". — Janus

Clearly, this is not completely true. I wanted to know how physical processes engender knowledge, so I decided to study authors who had written on cognition, such as Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Bucke, James, Stace, Suzuki, the Churchlands and Dennett. Clearly, I decided what to think about before I analyzed their arguments. As I read, my neural net activated related contents, giving me the means of testing what I read. Yet, even there, I valued some contents more and other contents less, and that valuation determined the amount of time I spent thinking about various points in light of various facts.

I certainly agree that we cannot understand contents until we have properly disposed contents to be aware of. But, I also see, that thinking, unlike processing, is impossible without awareness. Processing can lead to activation sequences, experienced as change of association, but it cannot judge that though the setting sun is associated with an orange, it is not an orange.

Churchland is clear that there is no neural structure corresponding to propositional knowledge. His conclusion is that there is no propositional knowledge; mine that there is more to thinking than neural structures. Dennett is clear that there can be no naturalist model of consciousness. His conclusion is that consciousness does not exist; mine that this falsifies the hypothesis of naturalism.

Yes, we use language to articulate our thoughts. Still, there is more to thought than language because we often find it difficult to find the right word to express our thoughts. If thought were fundamentally linguistic, this would never happen. Indeed, we would have little language indeed, because language grows in response to our need to express thoughts current language cannot.

I'm out of time at this moment so I'll have to address other points you made later. — Janus

As am I. Thank you for sharing your thoughts.

Mincing words. God is a premise that underlies your claim, which is not an argument, that: — Fooloso4

This warrant no further response

Why think a mind is something that can exist without an information processing substrate to supervene upon? — wonderer1

I almost agreed. The problem is "supervene" instead of "depend." "Supervene" is a weasel word used to avoid discussing causal relations. Like correlation, it avoids, rather than addresses the dynamics.

I have no problem saying that rational thought depends on the neural representation and processing of data. Aristotle and Aquinas both insisted that thought depended on physical representations (their phantasms).

I.e. why think that a belief that God is metaphysically possible is not faith based? — wonderer1

Because I have read Aristotle, who was not a member of any faith I know, as well as ibn Sina and Aquinas, who were. Their proofs are sound: based on true premises and valid logic.

One problem I see with the Laws metaphor is related to whether or not there are real physical properties of things. Does an electron have charge, spin, and mass, or do laws dictate the behaviors of things such that electrons having charge spin and mass is only an illusion. — wonderer1

When things act on us in a particular way, which is what an appearance is, it shows that they can act in that way. That gives us a partial knowledge of their operational capabilities, traditionally called their "essence."

My working hypothesis is that subatomic particles actually have properties that determine how they interact, and to add Laws on top would be overdetermination. — wonderer1

The difference between the laws and properties is that properties are possessed at each instance of time without reference to other instants, while the laws say how systems will evolve over the course of time.

The notion of Laws of Physics seems to fit better with the notion that we exist within a simulation rather than within a physical world. — wonderer1

I fail to see how.

They have been observed to be invariant, but it does not follow that they are necessary;
as implausible as it might sound there is no logical reason they might not change. — Janus

Yes, you are right. Logically, they could change. Physically (in other words from a scientific perspective), they do not change and are the basis for the concept of physical, vs. logical, necessity. For example, if you step off a cliff, it is physically, but not logically, necessary that you will fall.

Thus, physical necessity is based on how nature works, not on how we describe it. It was as physically necessary that you would fall in paleolithic times as it is in the era of general relativity. What this shows is that there is a difference between the laws of being, on which classical logic is based, and those of nature. So, the laws of nature are contingent, and thus require a sustaining cause.

I guess that's one way of framing it, but I doubt it is what Spinoza had in mind. — Janus

I am almost positive it was not. My point is that after Descartes, many Europeans developed materialistic thought patterns, not that they became materialists. Augustine was a dualist, but he would never have said that the soul is thinking stuff (res).

I agree there are different kinds of knowledge. In relation to knowledge as acquaintance, I'd say that we become acquainted with things by learning to understand them and I think this process of coming to understanding involves imagination. — Janus

I am asked "Do you know that strange object?" I say "Yes," because I have seen it, not because I understand it. That is not to say that I don't try to understand what I see, but that I know it with the first flash of awareness.

I understand abductive reasoning to be more about conjecturing. imagining possible hypotheses, then it is about justifying beliefs. — Janus

Perhaps. My correspondents often use "the best explanation" for justification.

As I understand him, Kant believes that empirical reality, appearances or phenomena are knowable. — Janus

As I understand Kant, he does not believe that phenomena are real. They are just how things appear (very like Plato's "shadows"). His noumena are real, but they are not accessible.

For me it's hard to escape the conclusion that the empirical is a manifestation of the in itself, and real as such, but it does not exhaust reality, only the reality available to us. — Janus

I think we agree. I would add that phenomena are the contingent forms of knowing. It is like Kant wants to know reality, but not employ the means of knowing reality. When we employ the means, which are phenomena, what we know is the ding an sich (thing in itself), but not exhaustively.

The point is that if neural processes determine thought and action, which seems to me highly plausible, then there can be no libertarian free will, regardless of whether physics is deterministic or indeterministic. And we have no way of knowing which is true, in any case. — Janus

I find it entirely implausible that "neural processes [completely] determine thought and action.

I agree in my current paper that neural representation and processing is essential to conscious, rational thought. So, that is not the issue. The issue is whether neural processes are sufficient to explain experience. You can find many ways of showing they are not in my "The Hard Problem of Consciousness & the Fundamental Abstraction." So, I will not give them all here

Your argument only works if neural processes can be reduced to purely physical processes. If they have a partial dependence on intentional processes, our thoughts and actions would be partially determined by prior thoughts and not by prior physical states alone. This dependence must exist.

Physics has no intentional effects. Its dynamics only tells us how prior physical states evolve into later physical states. Since physical states lack intentionality (they are not about anything beyond themselves as knowing, hoping and willing are), we will never be able to reduce intentional operations to physical operations.

Similarly, the computational theory of mind fails because computations produce quantities, not intentions. Computational "logic" does not involve thought, but the manipulation of physical states representing 0 and 1.

This would not rebut your claim if consciousness were epiphenomenal. It is not. If it were, it would have no neural effects. If it had no neural effects we could not form the neural precursors of written or oral descriptions of consciousness, just as Galileo could not describe the moons of Jupiter if they could not modify his brain state. So, consciousness, and indeed all describable intentional states and operations, have neural effects.

In sum, physical operations cannot produce intentional effects, but intentional operations can produce physical effects. So, your premise is false.

... regardless of whether physics is deterministic or indeterministic. And we have no way of knowing which is true, in any case. — Janus

We have no way of proving a theory in a hypothetico-deductive science. We can show that there is no need to invoke indeterminism to explain present data.

Choices are made because we feel compelled to go one way or the other at the moments of decision, and we don't really know what determines that. — Janus

Of course we do. Biological (in a large sense) drives. There are situations that call for a response. We can respond automatically, or thoughtfully. If the thoughtful response is not the automatic response, our mind has taken control. How can you deny that thought makes the difference?

It is hard to believe that there is some non-physical entity which is the person, and which stands outside of the causal order of nature. — Janus

Exactly!!!!! You see how you framed this? (1) You assumed the person is a non-physcal entity. I deny that. (2) You assumed that events are not caused. I deny that. (3) You assumed that it is outside the order of nature. I deny that as well. This is framing the problem in terms of Cartesian concepts, even though you are not a Cartesian dualist. It is the conceptual space into which you have projected the problem, rather than the facts, that leads to your conclusion.

But I don't see myself as some entity outside of the greater nature that has produced that personal nature with its desires and thoughts. — Janus

Neither do I. We are natural beings, but natural beings who can act both physically and intentionally. Why would anyone want to deny that it is natural for humans to be intentional as well as physical?

My account of consciousness has no theological premises. — Dfpolis
You said:
The question is how do we know that there is an apple on the counter, because if we understand that, we can understand how we might know that there is a God. — Dfpolis — Fooloso4

Indeed. That is not a theological premise. A premise is a starting point, not a conclusion. I am happy to say that the most uncontroversial starting points can be used to deduce God's existence, but that does not make them theological in the sense of being faith-based.

Approximate descriptions" do not tell us how things must be, only approximately how they are. This is quite different from your claim that:
In the same way, the laws of nature, which are intentional realities, act on prior states produce final states. — Dfpolis — Fooloso4

You seem confused. I said the Laws of Physics are approximate descriptions of the actual Laws of Nature that guide the evolution of physical systems. It is the laws of nature that I said were intentional realities.

and:
God has a creative intent. It is manifest in the laws of nature which guide the transformation of the acorn's potential into an oak. — Dfpolis — Fooloso4

A conclusion, not a premise. The premise is that physics has found that systems develop in determinate ways.

If the dog attempts to reach the apple and attempts to reach it where it is and not elsewhere then its behavior indicates that she knows it is there. — Fooloso4

Only in behavioralist terms. It is not evidence that your dog is subjectively aware of what it is doing.

— Fooloso4

Theological mystification is the kind of thing philosophy attempts to clear up. — Fooloso4

My account of consciousness has no theological premises.

Descriptive laws of nature are descriptions. Those who think that the laws of nature are prescriptive do not deny the truth of the uniformities or regularities of the descriptions of the Regulatory Theory. You say as much:
we need to accept that the Laws of Physics are approximate descriptions of aspects of nature — Fooloso4

Yes, and we call those aspect "the Laws of Nature."

The problem is that there is no way to determine whether the so-called 'laws of nature' are merely descriptive of the invariant ways that nature manifests itself to us, or whether they stand as somehow real overarching metaphysical principles of nature. The latter idea seems to be hard to coherently articulate, just as Plato's forms are. — Janus

Is there a real difference? If they are invariant, they are necessary. It is irrational to suppose that processes have invariant ways of acting without there being a reason for their doing so that might justly be called a principle.

It is not hard to articulate the nature of the laws. As my committed intention to go to the store is about my arrival at the store, so the laws of nature are about the succession of states that they determine. Thus, they satisfy Brentano's definition of intentionality. So we can see that they are intentional realities. This does not mean that all physical systems have minds, but it does imply that there is a source of intentionality.

In my paper "Mind of Randomness in Evolution," I offer an independent argument for the intentional nature of the laws, based on the concept of logical propagators.

If the laws are intentional, then it is easy to see how human intentions can perturb them.

For Spinoza substance can take the various forms of matter and of mind, matter is the attribute or mode of extension and mind is the various attributes or modes of thought or affect. — Janus

That does not change the the potential nature of his substance -- which means that from an Aristotelian perspective, it is a kind of matter, though not the normal kind.

Knowledge results from interpreting what is experienced; and I count interpreting as one aspect of imagination. Peirce calls it abductive reasoning. — Janus

There are at least two kinds of knowledge: knowledge as acquaintance (Russell's "knowledge of things"), and propositional knowledge. Abductive reasoning is one of a number of ways to justify a belief, not knowledge in the strict sense.

Knowledge as acquaintance can justify propositional knowledge in the following way: I see that the same percept that elicits a category concept <A> also elicits a property concept <B>. That justifies the proposition: "This A is B," e.g. "This apple is red." If I see that any instance of <A> will also be able to elicit <B>, then "All A is B" is justified, e.g. "All humans are animals."

So, I don't take Kant to be saying that what we experience is not real, rather it is one limited aspect of the real. — Janus

We more or less agree, except that Kant believed that reality (noumena) is not knowable, because our mind adds content to it, such as the forms of space and time.

The "absolute' signifies what is real despite or in addition to what we or any cognitive being experiences — Janus

Only if you start by thinking plain old reality is only what we experience, which is not the common understanding. Let's say it adds emphasis.

We cannot experience what animals experience, for example, we cannot know how things appear to them, so there is an aspect of reality which is effectively closed off to us. — Janus

Yes, we can never be another subject or kind of subject. Whether animals experience or merely respond is a different question.

There are two objections to the idea of radical libertarian free will. First, if we accept that our actions and thoughts are determined by neural activity of which we have no awareness and over which we have no control, then libertarian free will is impossible. — Janus

Yes, not A precludes A. So what?

There is no reason to think that neural processes are completely determined by physics. If they were, consciousness would be epiphenomenal. If it were epiphenomenal, we could not speak of it any more than Galileo could speak of the moons of Jupiter if those moons did not modify his brain state. So, the very fact that we can speak of consciousness shows that it modifies our brain state, and that means that physics alone is inadequate to determine our brain state. This is because consciousness is intentional in Brentano's sense, and physics has no intentional effects.

Second when we choose, we do not choose to choose and choose to choose to choose and so on, but at a certain moment a choice arises, and we act or attend or whatever. — Janus

There is no reason to suppose that such a recess exists. What happens is that we attend to experience, and sometimes the data stream calls for a choice. So, we do not decide to make a choice, although we can choose not to decide and so drift. We are called upon to respond and must choose how. This can happen because what we value is threatened and that requires an action. Nor is our choice determined by some prior utility, because we are the source of value and decide what to value more and what less.

I think the motivation for questioning the existence of 'natural law' is because even though science assumes the regularities of nature designated as lawful, it can't explain them. — Wayfarer

Yes, they demand a metaphysical explanation just as the foundations of mathematics demand a meta-mathematical investigation.

it applies them. — Dfpolis
Nature does not "apply" its laws. — Fooloso4

I said the work on "self"-organization apples the laws, not nature.

How does my dog know that there is an apple on the counter? — Fooloso4

It doesn't. It behaves in response to it.

he question does not arise for my dog and does not ordinarily arise for human beings either who are not confused by philosophical conundrums. — Fooloso4

There is no need for you to participate in philosophical discussion. If you find it confusing, ignore it.

You dismiss the idea that the laws of nature are descriptive rather than prescriptive because it is problematic for the larger story of God you want to tell. — Fooloso4

No. I dismiss it because I am a physicist, and descriptions that do not describe reality are fictions.

This is not uncontroversial. — wonderer1

I know.

Each side takes a different stance on each of these issues, and to adopt either theory is to give up one or more strong beliefs about the nature of the world.

Not quite.

Since descriptions that are not grounded in reality are fictions, we need to accept that the Laws of Physics are approximate descriptions of aspects of nature. Otherwise, physics is a form of fiction. You can call these aspects of nature "regularities," but traditionally, they have been called "the Laws of Nature." The difference would be whether the "regularities" are essential or coincidental. If you say they are essential, then there is no operational difference between saying that there are always regularities in physical processes and saying that physical processes obey the laws of Nature. If you say that they are mere coincidences, they we have no reason to expect them to new observations. The fact that they do apply in general says that they are essential.

Some of these implications involve accidental truths, false existentials, the correspondence theory of truth, and the concept of free will. Perhaps the most important implication of each theory is whether the universe is a cosmic coincidence or driven by specific, eternal laws of nature. Each side takes a different stance on each of these issues, and to adopt either theory is to give up one or more strong beliefs about the nature of the world.

This is a non sequitur, as additional assumptions are required for such implications. I hold that there are laws that guide the time development of physical systems, and that we have approximate descriptions of them. I also see that physics is based on what I call the Fundamental Abstraction of natural science, which attends to the objects observed rather than the subject observing. Yet, these are inseparable, for all knowledge requires a knowing subject and known objects. By fixing on the object and prescinding from the subject, natural science is left bereft of the concepts and data required to explain subjective operations, including consciousness and willing. Thus, the experiential footprint from which the laws of physics are derived is mindless matter. We must expect, then, that extending the experiential foundation to subjective operations may lead to the refinement of our present physics. In other words, our understanding of mindless matter cannot be expected to apply unchanged to conscious beings.

I am not a dualist. I am simply pointing out that changing one form of substance ontology for another or calling it "relating" instead of "interacting" explains nothing. — Arne

Right! But, one makes an explanation possible, and the other does not. Abandoning dualism is only removing an obstacle, not an explanation.

The reason for this is that the solution lies in understanding the relation between the intentional and the physical, and that relation is not a form of interaction, which it must be if you start with a Cartesian conceptual space.

And I certainly look forward to your putting this centuries old issue to rest once and for all. — Arne

Thank you. Message me with your email and I will send you a draft of "How the Agent Intellect Works" to comment on. I will be submitting it for publication around the end of the month.

Wait, what kind of activity is not always a change? I think activity is always a change, whether it's change of place, or change of some quality. Activity as motion, necessarily implies change. — Metaphysician Undercover

Contemplating fixed content requires no change once it has begun.

I explained to you why becoming is incompatible with being, and this is directly from Aristotle. — Metaphysician Undercover

You told me what you think. You did not cite Aristotle and you did not lead me to reject being during change.

So it is impossible that becoming can be described by states of being at various stages, because this would require an infinity of stages for even the smallest degree of change. — Metaphysician Undercover

I already answered this. Describing is a mental act and there is not an actually infinite number of such acts, only a potentially infinite number.

This is exactly what Aristotle denies. — Metaphysician Undercover

Aristotle is giving dialectic advice, stating that the best starting point for arguing against nonsensical claims is a definition, not stating a metaphysical principle, in the quotation you cite.

A good representation of the law of identity is found in Metaphysics Bk7, Ch 6. — Metaphysician Undercover

To say that a thing is identical with its essence (which btw is false) is not to say anything about what happens over the course of time, which is what you are talking about. Essences only define what a being could do if it existed. So, as Aquinas saw, we need actual existence in addition to essences.

I haven't the vaguest idea of what "organic continuity" means. It's not Aristotelian and it seems that it is actually you who is making up your own laws. — Metaphysician Undercover

Organic continuity is continuity that maintains unity, as when an organism is transformed over the course of its life. For example, when a caterpillar, which is not a butterfly, becomes a butterfly.

As for Aristotle, I think he was a true genius, perhaps the most brilliant person in history. Still, he was a finite, historical human being -- not the final word on reality.

How would you account for the temporal continuity of changing inorganic things like rocks? — Metaphysician Undercover

By the operation of the same laws of nature that account for the physical processes of organisms.

Surely the rock remains the same rock, despite despite a change in location, or chipping and other changes which occur to it. — Metaphysician Undercover

When does a chip become a fracture into two rocks? It depends on how we define "the same rock." Rocks do not have the same kind of unity organisms do. Organisms have immanent (self-perfecting) activity. Rocks don't.

You seem to be incapable, or unwilling to grasp the fact that "becoming" is what occurs between points in time, — Metaphysician Undercover

I accept that, but there is also being at each point in the process.

This issue is fundamental to an understanding of Aristotle's metaphysics. — Metaphysician Undercover

Nonsense!

f understanding becoming was a matter of grasping "the intelligibility of the being in progress at each point in time", then "becoming" would be completely unintelligible as requiring understanding "the being in progress" at an infinite number of points in time, just to be able to understand even the most simple case of becoming. — Metaphysician Undercover

You are missing the point. Becoming is the actualization of a potency insofar as it is still in potency. What you are missing is that there is no bare potency. Potency is always an aspect of informed being.

This does not resolve the problem, nor is it Aristotle's recommendation. — Metaphysician Undercover

So you say.

So, saying that at t1 there was X type of being, and at t2 there was Y type of being, does not explain the intermediary change which occurred — Metaphysician Undercover

I agree. I did not say it did. I said the actualization of potential does.

If we say as you are proposing, that there is a limited number of actual stages — Metaphysician Undercover

I did not say that. I said the number of kinds was always finite.

we face an infinite regress — Metaphysician Undercover

A continuum is not a regress. There is typically one efficient cause, and one potential being actualized, for the whole transformation. What do you see as a regress?

Your mental ability to divide one process does not make it many processes, it just means that you cane use a different mental representation of one and the same process.

I — Metaphysician Undercover

I think the most famous is in "Categories" where he talks about the possibility of a sea battle tomorrow. — Metaphysician Undercover

You have to realize that the laws of logic are based on the laws of being. There cannot both be a sea battle and not be a sea battle, but given that there is not yet a reality to conform to, "there will be sea battle tomorrow" is neither true nor false. Since it is neither true nor false, the rules applying to truth and falsity do not apply.

If different people perceive the same changing thing in different ways, and the truth about a thing is according to how it is perceived, then the same thing is at the same time both "so and not so". — Metaphysician Undercover

Not quite. Conceiving the same reality in different ways is a form of equivocation. When we are using different meanings for the same (nominal) concept, the same formal proposition can be true and false, not because the reality is indeterminate, but because we are not thinking the same things about it.

However, in his Metaphysics the substance of a self-subsistent, separate thing, is equated with the thing's essence, following Plato's Timaeus. — Metaphysician Undercover

In Plato's theory, sensible things are like images in a mirror and have no more an essence than a reflection does.

That is your supposition not a fact. It ignores the work being done on self-organization. It is understandable that you want to put it aside. — Fooloso4

The work being done on "self"-organization does not falsify the existence of actual laws of nature. it applies them. It is on the basis of the laws discovered today that we explain the origin and evolution of the universe and the evolution of life. If you reject them, you reject the foundations of cosmology, physics and chemistry.

Is it not a fact that the laws we have discovered can explain past physical processes and predict future ones? Did they not predict yesterday's eclipse?

Human beings have the capacity to act intentionally. Just as we have the capacity to see and speak and think. And desire and want and move toward those things to obtain them. — Fooloso4

Agreed. That is not in question. The questions are: (1) how can intentional acts have physical effects? and (2) how can physical operations, such as sensing, elicit intentional states such as consciousness of what is sensed?

It may be that when you consider it you do so using Cartesian categories, but the capacity to act intentionally does not entail dualism. — Fooloso4

We agree, but when you start with a Cartesian conceptual space, answering (1) and (2) seems impossible. This leads many to become metaphysical naturalists and try to reduce intentional operations to physical operations.

Material works pretty well. — Fooloso4

No it does not, because "matter" does not mean potential, not actual, which hyle does. When we hear "matter" we think actual stuff.

Whatever your theory is of how we experience apples, there is little or no disagreement that there is an apple on the counter. We can see it. We can pick it up. We can eat it. — Fooloso4

I agree. The question is how do we know that there is an apple on the counter, because if we understand that, we can understand how we might know that there is a God. In that quest, understanding the identity of action and passion is essential.

Unlike the apple your theological claims, as you said: are
... based on reason applied to experience. — Dfpolis
A story about God is not sufficient evidence of God. — Fooloso4

Little Women is a story. Showing that electric charge is quantized requires reason applied to experience. They are not the same.

-- and yes, it takes time and effort to understand Aristotle.

I don't read Spinoza's idea of substance as an idea of "stuff" in any sense. His way of thinking is not materialist or idealist in my view but, if anything (neutral) monist as he understands both matter (extensa) and mind (cogitans) as attributes of something more fundamental ("substance", "nature" or "god"). These attributes are also understood as just the two attributes out of infinitely many, that we can apprehend. — Janus

But isn't this just saying that the one substance has the potential to be any of the things we experience? And what has the potential to take on various forms is matter. In my mind, that makes his substance a kind of matter, not in the Cartesian sense of being extended, but in the Aristotelian sense of having the potential to be formed -- which is what taking a new "mode" is.

I don't know what you mean by saying that beginning with what we can imagine is unsound. All thought begins with what we can imagine. — Janus

Many thoughts begin with imagination. Knowledge begins with experience.

Also, we don't "end with reality"; what could that mean? — Janus

The notion of reality comes from experience. You can try to extend it to mean something other than what we experience, as Kant tries to do, but there is no justification for that. So, to say "what we experience is not real" is an abuse of language, as "real" means like the things we experience.

The things we experience are present to us because of the identity of action and passion. A acting on B is identically B being acted upon by A. Thus, an apple modifying/informing my neural state is my neural state being modified by an apple. The result is a kind of shared existence.

When we start with sensory experience, we start with the shared existence of some aspect of reality. Even a delusion is an aspect of reality, namely some neural malfunction. So, if we stick with experience based premises and proceed with valid logic, the results will apply to reality.

We are able to imagine that there could be, or ought ot be, an absolute reality, but we cannot say what that is. — Janus

I see no difference between "absolute" reality and plain old reality. The term "absolute" adds no definable information here. We certainly do not have omniscience, but omniscience is a ridiculous standard for human knowledge. Instead, we have projections of reality -- and that in two ways. The first is dynamic: objects project their power into us by the identity of action and passion.

The second is information theoretic. Mathematically, a projection is a dimensionally diminished map. For example, one projection of a house is the front elevation. It tells us about the house, but leaves much information behind. So, we add side and rear elevations, floor plans, etc. Each adds to our knowledge of the house, but no finite number of projections will exhaust what we can learn of it.

So it is with human knowledge. When we sense an object, we learn that, of all the ways it could act, it can act in the way it is acting on us. We know something of what it is, but very little. When we experience it in different ways, say using a microscope or x-rays, we learn more, for each experience gives us a new projection. A more classical way of saying this is that objects have many notes of intelligibility, many aspects that can be known, and new experiences actualize new notes of intelligibility.

So, we can say what reality is, but not completely -- it is something that can act on us in the way it does act on us. As a result, human knowledge is about how reality interacts with humans. We have to remain open to the possibility that it can do much more than that.

"Appearances" as I used it just denotes that we know things only as they appear. — Janus

But, they can only "appear" as they act -- and those actions flow out of their Aristotelian form (eidos) which is their "first actuality" or intrinsic operational capability. That means that sensory experience is inseparable from reality. Things appear to us because appearance is exactly objective reality informing us.

I have not said that what we see depends on us in any intentional sense, but it does depend on our nature, on how we are constituted, and over that we have no control, which means that our nature does not depend on us in any intentional sense. — Janus

I agree with most of this. Knowing is a subject-object relation, and so determined by the nature of both subject and object. But it is absurd to imagine that we could know without subject limitations, so that our knowledge, or any knowledge, is subject-free.

Still, I do think that, to a degree, we can form our nature. Intentions lead to repeated actions and repeated actions lead to habits that are incarnated in neural net structures -- changing our nature.

I'm not sure what you mean "how we receive it" depending on us. — Janus

I mean that the physical basis of red in an apple may be an absorption spectrum, but how we receive red is by experiencing a certain quale -- a contingent form of awareness.

Perhaps how we interpret things depends on us to some degree, on culture, on genetics; is that what you mean? — Janus

That comes later, in judgement. First, we experience without classifying, then we make classifying judgements, projecting experience into our conceptual space. That space reflects past experience including culture. I see an elephant. Is it an African elephant or a sign of intoxication?

I don't agree if you mean it depends on us in some libertarian free will sense. We cannot even decide what we will be convinced by; we are either convinced or not. — Janus

That is not what I meant, but I do not agree. We can and do decide what to attend to. And it is what we choose to attend to that sways us.

The development of self-organizing matter gives rise to the development of organisms. No dualism. — Fooloso4

Putting aside that matter does not organize itself (the laws of nature do), this does nothing to explain human intentional acts, such as awareness of contents. When that is considered, it is still done so using Cartesian categories. That is where dualism comes in. Even if thinking stuff is rejected, no other way of framing the problem is considered.

This is still misleading. What you said was:
(hyle = timber, poorly as translated "matter") — Dfpolis — Fooloso4

Yes, and the context was an explanation of Aristotle's technical terms. As you see, I am happy to answer questions if my are explanations inadequate.

That out of which an acorn comes to be is not timber. Timber comes to be out of a tree. An oak comes to be out of an acorn. Translating hyle as 'timber' is at least if not more problematic than matter. — Fooloso4

Quite right. That is why I often do not translate it. It is a technical term with no good English equivalent.

We have not experience of the arche or source or beginning, only conjecture, only likely stories. — Fooloso4

Not quite. We experience everything through its action on us. When we see a red apple it is because it has acted to scatter red light into our eyes, and sufficient light triggers a neuron and so on until the action has changed our brain state. The apple informing our brain state is, identically, our brain state being informed by the apple. This identity is the basis of knowledge.

The same thing (hypothetically) happens if God acts to keep us in existence -- we would be acted upon in a potentially informative way. So examining the dynamics of our existence may lead to knowledge of God. That is the framework for Aristotle's and Aquinas's arguments. This is not the place to give them, but I suggest that you be open to the possibility that there is more than a story here.

This is a dualism of God and world. — Fooloso4

I hold that God is radically different, but inseparable, from the world. Still, that is not the kind of dualism we are discussing. The dualism we are discussing has one kind of thing doing physical acts and a separate kind of thing doing mental acts.

it is as you say an accident, and therefore not a universal — Metaphysician Undercover

All ideas, being actions (humans thinking of something) inhere in the persons thinking them, and are therefore accidents in the sense of predicables. This is true whether we are thinking of singulars or universals.

Would you agree with me that this sort of idea is better represented as an activity, a thinking activity, always changing according to the evolving circumstances as physical activities are carried out? — Metaphysician Undercover

Yes, it is an activity, and it can change but it is not always changing.

And would you agree that although habit plays an important role in this sort of thinking activity, there are many ideas which stretch beyond habit, freely willed ideas, which contribute to creativity? — Metaphysician Undercover

Yes.

There is no middle ground between being the completed thing and not yet being the completed thing (an entelecheia). — Dfpolis
There is always a middle ground, it's called "becoming", and becoming is fundamentally incompatible with being, as explained by Aristotle. — Metaphysician Undercover

Becoming x has ceases when x complete.

Becoming is not incompatible with being. At each stage, what is becoming is what it is. For example, the developing human may be a zygote or a fetus. Let's face it, Aristotle's account of becoming is a simplified model. Most organisms continue to develop. So, there is no one entelechy.

You can see that this leads to an infinite regress of different beings at each conceivable moment of passing time in the duration of change. — Metaphysician Undercover

The Aristotelian answer to this is that this infinity is potential, not actual. It is not that we have different being, but a different kind of being. "Kind" is a conceptual reality, based on the intelligibility of the being in progress at each point in time. That intelligibility does not become an actual "kind" unless the agent intellect actualizes it, and forms a universal concept by prescinding from individuating notes of intelligibility. So, while we have an infinite number of potential kinds, we only have as many actual kinds as the agent intellect is able to generate.

So Aristotle concluded that "becoming" is incompatible with the logical terms of being and not-being. — Metaphysician Undercover

Give me the text and citation.

His solution was to allow that the law of excluded middle be violated — Metaphysician Undercover

Citation? His solution was to point out an equivocation.

The potential of activity cannot be described in terms of being and not being, due to the problem of infinite regress outlined by Aristotle, and there must always be something in between any two distinct states of being, which cannot be described as a state of being, because it is change, becoming. — Metaphysician Undercover

Nonsense. Aristotle did not say what you claim. There is no middle ground between being and non-being. Every potential is grounded in actual being. New forms of being come from old forms of being, not from non-being absolutely considered. In other words, the non-being of a potential being is not absolute non-being, so the new being comes from something, rather than from nothing.

The law of identity allows that the very same thing is changing as time passes — Metaphysician Undercover

Citation? The Law of Identity is "Whatever is, is and whatever is not, is not." So, you are making up your own law. Please state what you think it is.

If the "identity" of a thing is a description which is supposed to correspond, then at each passing moment, a thing which consists of moving parts, must have a new identity, i.e. be a new thing at each passing moment. — Metaphysician Undercover

No, the self-identity of a changing being is based on organic continuity. I do not have the same description I did when I was conceived, but I have organically developed developed from that zygote into the person I am today.

So Aristotle was very intuitive to clarify the law of identity to account for this reality of observed temporal continuity, that a thing maintains its identity as the thing it is, despite changes to its form, as time passes. — Metaphysician Undercover

Where did he do so?

No specific description forms the identity of a thing. — Metaphysician Undercover

We agree on this. Aristotle contributes his distinction between substantial and accidental changes to the discussion. Still, he seems to have stuck with Plato's notion of static universal forms, even though he rejected Platonic Ideas.

The infinite regress demonstrated by Aristotle, and explained above, is a very significant ontological problem. — Metaphysician Undercover

No, it is not. As I explained earlier, to have actual "kinds" requires a mental act.

This is why we cannot accurately account for the nature of reality by simply assuming one substance. — Metaphysician Undercover

Neither Aristotle nor I assume one substance. He defines each ostensible unity (each tode ti = this something) to be a substance (ousia).

So we must accept that there is something other, which is incompatible with this one substance existing in distinct states. — Metaphysician Undercover

This does not follow. In Aristotle's view I am the same substance I was the moment I qualified as a rational animal. What need is there for another substance?

Again, you are adhering to Aristotle's "primary substance", and conveniently ignoring his "secondary substance", in your definition of substance — Metaphysician Undercover

That is because secondary substances (species and genera) are derivative on primary substances. They only exist in our minds because primary substances act on our senses to form phantasms (neural states) from which we abstract species concepts.

So concepts are very real occurrences of "non-substance". — Metaphysician Undercover

Yep, they're accidents. Still accidental being is a type of being, not non-being.

But now we have a problem with your definition of "substance", as "this something". — Metaphysician Undercover

It is Aristotle's definition. I just accepted it.

Every time we point to a "this something", we find that it is engaged in change, activity, so it is also non-substance at the very same time. — Metaphysician Undercover

Not by Aristotle's definition. He knows that things undergo accidental changes and remain the same substance. Read De Generatione et Corruptione. I have lost a lot of hair, but I am still a human and will be until I die.

Any instance of substance, a thing, also consists of active becoming or change, and by your exclusionary definition of "substance", this must be "non-substance" — Metaphysician Undercover

Yes, but most of these changes do not break the thing's organic continuity. It is the same unity, the same "this," and so the same substance.

There is necessarily an actuality which is before, that's what Aristotle's so-called cosmological argument demonstrates. — Metaphysician Undercover

Yes, there is, but it is not the actuality of a potentially living body. It is an actual efficient cause.

This is "the soul", the actuality which is necessarily prior to the actual living body. — Metaphysician Undercover

No. As I just said, it is the actuality of the efficient cause, not of the potentially living body, which it must be to satisfy the definition of psyche.

Spinoza, as I read him, treats substance as being or true reality, not as "stuff". — Janus

Yes, classically, substance/ousia refers to true reality. What I mean is that for Spinoza, there is one substance, and what we see as things are its "modes." Another way of saying this is that the things of experience are "made of" his one substance. That makes it a kind of stuff. So, while his language is not materialistic, his way of thinking about reality is.

We are dialectically capable of imagining that there is a reality beyond or in addition to how things appear to us. This comes with the realization that things do not depend in us for their existence, although their appearances obviously do depend on us as well as the objects which appear to us. — Janus

Beginning with what we can imagine and ending with reality is fundamentally unsound.

Also, "appearances" is poorly defined here. It can mean what we see, or how we see it. What we see does not depend on us in the way you seem to be thinking -- or at least you need to be more specific about what you mean. How we receive it, the qualia of perception, does depend on us.

Contemporary philosophers of science, or at least the ones I think are worth reading, are much more likely to talk about self-organizing matter and systems than extended stuff. — Fooloso4

Thinking of matter in a different in terms of self-organization and systems (rather than extension) neither rejects nor replaces the dualist conceptual space.

The material of an acorn or an oak is not timber or wood. If it were our buildings would have some very odd features. — Fooloso4

No one said it was. Aristotle took an existing word, hyle, an gave it a new meaning, namely that "out of which" something comes to be.

A great deal hinges on this for you, but it is an assertion without sufficient evidence. — Fooloso4

It is based on reason applied to experience. It is just not what I am arguing in this thread.

So, you are an ontological and epistemological dualist. — Fooloso4

You have provided no arguments to support this strange claim.

Since each sense of "form" is actual, we need to resolve how primary and secondary substance interact with each other. — Metaphysician Undercover

To continue: Primary substances are the things from which we abstract the concepts of species and genera. This is done by sensation and the actualization of selected notes of intelligibility by the agent intellect.

You have no grounds for this statement because "becoming" is incompatible with the states of being and not being. — Metaphysician Undercover

Please read Aristotle's Physics I, where he explains the relation between these concepts.

By Aristotle's principles, "becoming" violates the law of excluded middle — Metaphysician Undercover

No, it does not. There is no middle ground between being the completed thing and not yet being the completed thing (an entelecheia).

Hegel's principles, "becoming" encompasses bot[h] being and not being. — Metaphysician Undercover

Hegel was confused. He seemed not to understand potentiality and the definition of change.

So we really cannot say with any amount of certainty whether becoming truly overlaps the being of a thing or not. — Metaphysician Undercover

Yes, we can. What we may not be able to say is where the line is. For example, when is a fetus a human being? Still, wherever the line is, before that, we have becoming and from that point on we have the being.

I would say that since a thing is always changing, and maintains its identity as the same thing, despite undergoing change, according to the law of identity, we must conclude that the being and the becoming of the very same thing, do co-exist. — Metaphysician Undercover

First, we are not completely identical at different times, so the law of identity does not apply. Second, we are the same being because of our dynamic continuity, not because of the same stuff or the exact same form. Third, being and becoming do co-exist, but not with respect to the same terminus. When I was 10 years old, I was becoming 11, not 10.

By the law of identity it is still the same thing — Metaphysician Undercover

Again, no, that is not the reason. My 10 year old self was not identical to my 11 year old self.

Clearly, the becoming of a thing must overlap the being of the thing, and this is why there cannot be a clearly and distinctly defined "point in time" at which the not-being of the thing is replaced with the being of the thing. — Metaphysician Undercover

I agree that applying our concepts can be fuzzy. This results from our concepts not being as clear as we would like, and perceptions being inadequate to determining sharp lines. These are epistemological, not ontological problems.

It appears like you are just manipulating your use of "substance" to suit your purpose — Metaphysician Undercover

No, I am applying the term in the different ways it was applied historically. Aristotle and Aquinas define a substance as "this something" (an ostensible unity). Descartes and the modern tradition see substance as a kind of stuff things are made of (an analogue of matter). These are radically different concepts.

if you do not want to call the immaterial form which precedes in time the material form, a "substance", because "substance" implies matter to you, then we can proceed on those terms. — Metaphysician Undercover

You misunderstand. I am objecting on Aristotelian grounds. Concepts are not substances because they inhere in people, who are instances of "this something," i.e. substances.

Still we must account for the reality of that immaterial actuality. — Metaphysician Undercover

Concepts are real because they are acts of real people, e.g. the concept <apple> is people thinking of apples.

By my translation, "soul" is defined as the first actuality of a body having life potentially in it. This means soul is prior to life. — Metaphysician Undercover

No, it absolutely does not. Living, and the actuality of being alive, are one and the same. There is no actuality of a potentially living body before there is an actual living being.

Because explaining how mind "relates" to entities not having the characteristics of mind is so much easier than explaining how mind "interacts" with entities not having the characteristics of mind? — Arne

No. Because if you start with the false premise that the human mind and body are two things, you miss the fact that one thing, a human being, can act both physically and intentionally. By seeing human unity, the question of how res cogitans and res extensa interact never arises to distract us from the issue of how human beings interact with intelligible objects.

We still need to explain how knowledge, which is not neurally encoded information, but consciousness of neurally encoded information, arises. That problem is solvable and I shall publish a solution shortly.

You are misrepresenting what Wayfarer said. Ideas exist only in minds, not as particular substances, even though they may be about particulars. — Dfpolis
Well, this is what is being debated, whether or not some ideas actually exist in some minds as particulars. — Metaphysician Undercover

We are debating the truth of the claim, not what Wafarer said, which we call all read for our selves.

If you think ideas exist as particulars, then you need to define "particulars," because what I see is particular humans thinking ideas. The dependence on humans makes an idea an accident in the sense of a predicable, not a "this something" (tode ti), as humans are.

if I have a plan to put some particular pieces of lumber together with some particular nails that I have, in a very particular way, this is also a very particular idea. — Metaphysician Undercover

No it is an idea about particulars. If I am thinking of the universal identity of action and passion that is as particular an idea as the one you offer, because it is me thinking it at a specific time. Still it is about a universal fact: all actions are identical with their correlative passions.

By Aristotle's Metaphysics, it is the mathematician's mind which actualizes mathematical objects, therefore they have actual existence within the mind. — Metaphysician Undercover

The universal ideas are in the mind, but they are not objects because objects are particular instances. The particular quantities (mathematical objects) in reality are actualized by the operations I mentioned.

suggest you speak to some mathematicians on this forum. There are many here who insist that "2+2=4" means that "2+2" is the same as "4", by the law of indentity. — Metaphysician Undercover

Then they are not very good mathematicians. I took courses in abstract mathematics, and addition is not identity. Mathematicians have a different notion of identity than philosophers, and say that x=x is true by their principle of identity.

Notice that under this axiom. for two sets to be equal, they must be the same. This axiom supports the claim that if two things are equal they are therefore the same. — Metaphysician Undercover

No. It is defining "set equality," not equality in general, because quantities are not sets, but can be equal.

we need to resolve how primary and secondary substance interact with each other. — Metaphysician Undercover

They don't. Primary substances are real, secondary substances are abstractions. Only agents can act and so interact.

-- more later

AFAIK, Aristotle posited a potentially infinite number of substances in that he thought that the primary substances are individual objects. — Janus

He did not posit, but recognized, that individual things were the basis of our concept of reality. That is why he said that ousia is tode ti (=this something). Ousia (translated "substance") meant true reality, not a kind of stuff, in Greek. Aristotle's word for the stuff things are made out of was hyle (=timber and poorly translated as "matter"). Spinoza used the same Latin word, substantia, but with a different definition in his writings.

Where do you think our concept of reality comes from?

I've read up on it, to some extent. The paper you linked is highly specific, however. — Wayfarer

Yes, it is. But, it is a critical datum that species are not eternal and unchanging, but evolve. It means that particulars do not instantiate Platonic Ideas or universal Exemplars in the mind of God. God intends to create whatever He creates, and He creates particulars. So, there is nothing "ungodly" in not conforming to a universal norm.

This is a misrepresentation. The idea, as design or form in the mind of the artist exists as the idea of a particular, not of a universal. — Metaphysician Undercover

You are misrepresenting what Wayfarer said. Ideas exist only in minds, not as particular substances, even though they may be about particulars.

The law of identity is a general law, but it applies to particulars just like any inductive law. — Metaphysician Undercover

The law of classical logic are abstractions, not inductions generalizing experience. If they were inductions, any new case might violate them, as happened with Newton's laws of motion, which were inductions based on a limited range of experience.

It states something about all particulars which differentiates a particular from a universal. — Metaphysician Undercover

No, it is not limited to particulars. Universal concepts are equally self-identical.

in order to prevent the sophistry which follows from failing to maintain this difference, such as the tendency to allow that mathematical objects, like numbers, have the same type of existence as material objects. — Metaphysician Undercover

What prevents mathematical objects from being physical is that they require a counting or a measuring operation to become actual, while bodies need not be observed to exist. So, mathematical objects are mental existents with a foundation in reality, not realities simplicitur.

When two things are of the same type, people commonly say that they are the "same". However, they are not "the same" by the law of identity, because that would imply that they are one thing, not two. — Metaphysician Undercover

Good! What makes them the "same" is that they can elicit the identical (universal) idea. They need not be equal. 1 kg of sugar is the same kind of thing as 5 kg of sugar, but they are not equal.

Therefore whenever someone argues that two things which are equal, such as what is represented by the left side and what is represented by the right side of a mathematical equation, are "the same" because they are equal, they violate the law of identity. — Metaphysician Undercover

Nonsense! They are saying nothing about the law of identity. You are equivocating on "the same." It has one meaning in identity, and a different meaning in equality.

Under Aristotelian principles, all instances of "form" are actual. — Metaphysician Undercover

Yes, but not in the same way. An actual idea is an ens rationis. An actual artifact is an ens reale.

This is how the interaction problem is resolved by Aristotle, by making forms actual. — Metaphysician Undercover

No, he never has an interaction problem because one substance, a human being, cannot interact with itself. The interaction problem arises when you deny that we are one substance and make us two: res cogitans and res extensa.

And there is interaction between the prior intent, and the instantiation, it's called "becoming". — Metaphysician Undercover

Becoming cannot be an interaction with the product of becoming, because they do not co-exist. Once an artifact exists, its becoming has ceased. Aristotle defines change/becoming as "the actualization of a potential insofar as it is still in potency." Once the potency is actualized, it is no longer in potency, and so there is no change/becoming with respect to it.

Becoming requires a period of time within which the two interact, as an artist interacts with one's work, with the intent to perfect it. — Metaphysician Undercover

Yes, but while it is being perfected, it is not the finished (formed) product. When it reaches the intended form, it is perfected and no longer becoming. So, the imposition of mental form and the existence of the finished physical form are never concurrent. They are temporally adjacent. If Tf is the finishing time, then the becoming time is <Tf, and Tf is not included in <Tf.

The accidents are attributable to the matter's prior form. — Metaphysician Undercover

Okay, if you mean departures from the artist's intent, not if you mean predicables.

they are causal in the sense of "material cause" — Metaphysician Undercover

Yes, because the matter is not completely suitable. So?

If the form of the intended object and the form of the material object created, are not the same form, then there is necessarily a gap between the two, a lack of formal continuity which must be explained. — Metaphysician Undercover

Okay. The plan was not executed perfectly for some reason. Maybe bad material, maybe a failure on the part of the artisan who is the efficient cause.

But it requires either that the form of the object of intent is the very same form as the form of the created material object, or that they are distinct, and that there is interaction between the two during the process of becoming. Either way is dualist. — Metaphysician Undercover

If you mean that there are two kinds of form, one the mental plan and the other the actuality of the product, I agree. If you mean that there are two substances in the product, which is what "dualism" usually means, I disagree.

There is certainly an interaction between the efficient case and the matter in the production of a product, but that is not the kind of interaction considered in "interactionism." It proposes an interaction between body and soul.

Denying that the "form" which is called the object of intent, as plan or design, is actual, as you are doing, is not Aristotelian. — Metaphysician Undercover

I am not denying that. I am denying that the actual plan is the actuality of the finished product, however prefect it may be. The product is made according to the plan. It is not the plan, because it is a different sort of thing.

Anytime a plant or animal selects from possibilities, for a purpose, there must be intention involved. — Metaphysician Undercover

I agree. The problem is that there is no evidence that organisms other than humans make such choices.

To say that intention necessarily involves "mind" makes mind prior to the material body of living beings. — Metaphysician Undercover

Of course.

But the soul is demonstrated to be prior to the body, while the intellect is posterior as dependent on the body. — Metaphysician Undercover

You seem not to have read De Anima. Psyche is defined as the first actuality of a potentially living body. It cannot exist before there is an actual living body. The agent intellect is "divine" and separable, while the passive intellect is "perishable" and so physical.

However, the soul is actual, and acts with purpose or final cause. Therefore "intent" or "final cause" does not necessarily imply "mind" or "intellect". — Metaphysician Undercover

You forget that the prime mover is "self-thinking thought." Thus, Aristotle sees thought as the ultimate source of all change/motion.

"intention" means simply to act with purpose — Metaphysician Undercover

And having a purpose is an act of will. There is no concept of purpose in physics. It only occurs when we discuss psychology.

renders all the purposeful acts of all the creatures which have no mind, as unintelligible because then you have purpose without intent. Purpose without intent cannot be understood as it makes this sort of "purpose" a sort random chance selection, which cannot be "purpose". — Metaphysician Undercover

Thank you. That is why we need God to complete the quest for explanations, as Aristotle saw.

Substituting one form of "substance" ontology for another does eliminate the issue? — Arne

Interaction requires two or more things to interact. If we are one thing, which seems pretty obvious, this mis-states the question, and bad questions lead to bad answers. We can ask what is the relation between intentional and physical actions without assuming that that relation is an interaction. That is a sensible question and has sensible answers involving the origin and nature of such relations, not interactions.

Do you think a mindless universe is possible? — RogueAI

If you mean biological minds, then, yes, I think a mindless universe is possible and that this was such a universe for a long time. On the other hand, the laws of nature (not to be confused with their approximate descriptions, the laws of physics) are intentional in Franz Brentano's sense, for they are about the succession of physical states they lead to, just as by intention to go to the store is about my arriving at the store. Intentions imply a source of intention, namely a Mind. So, I think a lawful universe entails an intending Mind.

Spinoza's idea of substance was very different than Aristotle's. Not sure about Aquinas' since I am little familiar with his writings. — Janus

Yes, but they agreed that we did not need two substances.

With your background and interests, I presume you hold to realism concerning universals. Am I right in that? — Wayfarer

I am a moderate realist. That means I think universals do not have a separate existence, but do have a foundation in reality.

Do you see what I'm getting at? Is this a topic for discussion in the sources you're aware of? — Wayfarer

Yes. There are volumes on this. I discussed my position on universals (with references) in light of the fact that species are not static but but evolve, in "Metaphysics and Evolution: Response to Critics," pp 849-857. The basic idea is that each instance of a universal has the objective potential to elicit the same idea. It is this objective potential or intelligibility that is the basis in reality for our universal concepts. As populations evolve, the kinds of ideas their members can elicit shift and, so new species concepts are called for.

You can Google "the problem of universals".

These must be one and the same form, or else we have the so-called interaction problem. — Metaphysician Undercover

No. You cannot have an interaction between a prior intention and its instantiation anymore than a line can interact with its terminal point. First, the intention to create terminates once the object is created, and second, a form as plan is not a form as actuality. If they were, we would have an actuality whenever we had a plan.

f there is a gap between the form as desired end, and the form as individual object (outcome), there is no causation between the two, and the telos or end is not causal. — Metaphysician Undercover

True, but that continuity does not make a plan the same as an actuality.

The difference is attributed to accidents, and the accidents are the influence of the matter which is chosen by the artist. — Metaphysician Undercover

We must not confuse accidents as unplanned outcomes with metaphysical accidents, which are notes of intelligibility that inhere in, and can be predicated of, the the whole. It is not unplanned accidents that make a thing actual, but the efficient cause implementing the plan. Accidents inhering in a being cannot be prior to that being. Matter as potential is prior, but once we have an actuality, all accidents belong to that actuality or form. For a human artisan, the actuality may depart from the plan because of the stuff used, but that is not the reason a plan is not an actuality.

Now the question is whether the influence of matter, and the resulting accidents, renders the form of the individual as a distinct form, or is it just a change of form, allowing the form to maintain its identity as the same form, in the way that a changing object maintains its identity as the same object, by the law of identity. — Metaphysician Undercover

Again, if plans were identically actual beings, every time we made a plan, we would automatically make a reality. That would make cars and houses much cheaper.

if we do not allow that the form in the artist's mind, and the form of the artist's finished work, are one and the same form, there is a gap between the two which produces an interaction problem. — Metaphysician Undercover

Again, no. The mental form part of the process of execution. There is no gap because that process terminates in the executed reality. If there were a gap, it would mean that were were finished making the thing before it became actual, a contradiction.

The problem here is that physics does not deal with telos, ends, and intention, but metaphysics does. — Metaphysician Undercover

It does deal with ends, it just calls them "final states"; however, it does not deal with them as intentional.

Physics cannot give an explanation for this, but metaphysics can. — Metaphysician Undercover

They both explain, but at different levels. Each level involves a different degree of abstraction, and so the explanations are complementary, not contradictory or even competitive.

What I am saying is that the oak tree has creative intent when it produces the acorn. — Metaphysician Undercover

But, it cannot, because it has no mind. God has a creative intent. It is manifest in the laws of nature which guide the transformation of the acorn's potential into an oak.[quote="Metaphysician

Undercover;844673"]at this point we might be inclined to turn to God.[/quote]
We have to turn to God immediately because oaks do not have minds, and we need a mind as a source of intentionality.

Spinoza already solved this Cartesian puzzle. There are not two substances, extensa and cogitans, but one substance seen under two attributes. This renders the interaction problem moot. — Janus

He was anticipated by Aristotle, Aquinas and others in the Aristotelian tradition.

(BTW, I'm leaning towards Platon. And I'm a pro-Socrates. Although I have never alalyzed or examined them from a "dualistic" point of view.) — Alkis Piskas

Why take one human and divide her into two separate parts?

Well, chatGPT can almost pass the Turing test, but as Turing said, his test is just a game. It does not prove that machines have consciousness, just that they can fool people.

The problem is that natural science is based on a third person perspective and the resulting data, while being conscious is only experienced from a first person perspective. Because of this, there is no way to use natural science deduce consciousness as the effect of some physical process. At best, we would have a correlation, as we do between certain types of brain states and types of qualia.

Anything a computer does, including outputting "I am conscious," can be explained physically, i.e. in terms the third person perspective. If a device were to behave in way that we could not so explain, it would not be a computer, because we know what they do and how they do it.

You could not design such a device using physics or math because physics does not predict mental effects and computations produce quantities, not ideas. It is only when we look at the results that ideas are formed.

If some device were conscious, we could never it know for sure. We only know other people are conscious by analogy -- they are structured and act like we do, so they must be like us. A device would not be structured like us, and so we could not understanding it from a first person perspective. So, how we could we know it is conscious?

Well, the sperm is not a potential human body. It needs to be united, combined with other organic stuff for an embryo to be created. Same thing with seeds and plants. — Alkis Piskas

Of course, more is required. Still acorns grow into mature oaks, not pines or oats.

But even if sperm is potentially a human body, i.e. the same thing in different development stages, they are both matter. Their relation could not be considered as soul and body or mind and body, a relation from which the subject of dualism arises. Am I right? — Alkis Piskas

The problem is that there are two traditions about souls. One is dualistic, and followed by Plato, Augustine and Descartes. The other is non-dualistic, and followed by Aristotle and Aquinas. In De Anima II, Aristotle argues against the idea of a separate soul, and concludes, essentially, that "to have a soul" and "to be alive" mean the same thing. He formulates this by defining the psyche (soul) as "the first actuality of a potentially living body." "First actuality" is being operational, which, for organisms, is being alive. Under this definition, every living thing has a soul, but not in the dualistic sense. Aristotle's psyche carries no mental implications, except in humans because human life involves thinking.

Since to have a soul is to be a living being, there is no separate addition to visible a human being (which is a tode ti = "this something" -- Aristotle's definition of a substance). In other words, one substance performs both physical and mental acts. Aristotle held that our ability to think (nous = intellect), was uniquely human, but not separate.

Still, not separate in life does not exclude separability at death, and Aristotle seemed to believe that the active or agent intellect was separable. Aquinas certainly did.

BTW, nice handling of the ancient Greek language ... — Alkis Piskas

Thank you.

when a thing comes into existence it necessarily has a cause of being the thing it is, and not something else. — Metaphysician Undercover

Indeed it does, but a being's own form/actuality cannot be a prior cause because nothing is actual until it exists. What is prior is a being's matter, its efficient cause, and its telos or end. Thus, the efficient cause, working on specific matter for a specific end produces a specific form or actuality.

To defend your position, you need to explain how a thing can be actual before it is. I think you are confusing two meanings of "form." An artisan has a "form" in mind before she produces her work, but that "form" is not the "form" (actuality) of the finished product, but her intention, i.e. an end (final cause). In the same way, the laws of nature, which are intentional realities, act on prior states produce final states.

since potential encompasses many possibilities, it cannot be restricted by one specific thing, such as your statement, "an oak tree". — Metaphysician Undercover

You are confusing the hyle of artificial processes, where the clay or wood can become many things, with that of natural processes, which is determinate. (See my hyle paper.) An acorn has a determinate potential. It will never sprout into a pine or a stalk of wheat.

So your statement "to be an oak tree" does not represent the matter of the acorn, it represents the form of the acorn, as that which restricts the matter to specific possibilities. — Metaphysician Undercover

No, an acorn is not an actual (operational) oak tree, but a potential one. If you never saw one spout and did not know where it came from, you would not know that its end is to become an oak tree.

So it is very clear that the form of the acorn "a kind of nut", which restricts the potential (matter) of the acorn so that the possibilities for what it may become are limited, pre-exists the material existence of the acorn. — Metaphysician Undercover

Every creature has a prior creative intention in the mind of God. But, that is a metaphysical, not a physical, explanation. Physically, the form of an acorn is the foundation for the form of the oak into which it may sprout, but, being the foundation for a form is not being the form. It is being a potential.

This pre-existence of the form of the acorn, as prior in time to the acorn, therefore separate from the acorn, is what we need to deal with as implying the requirement for dualism. — Metaphysician Undercover

This is confused. What is ontologically, not temporally, prior is God's creative intent. But, God is simple, having no intrinsic diversity. What allows us to speak of distinct "exemplar" ideas in God is the fact that ideas are relational -- relating God, Who is simple, to creation, which is not. So, the Divine exemplars are diversified by terminating in diverse creatures, not by any diversity in the mind of God. Thus, without actual, existing creatures, there are no distinct exemplars. Since exemplars are inseparable from the actuality of the exemplified creatures, there is no dualism.