In idealism East and West, there is the idea that the sense of separateness is intrinsic to the human condition. And that overcoming that sense is in some sense the goal of any real philosophy.

A human being is a part of the whole, called by us "Universe", a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest — a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. The striving to free oneself from this delusion is the one issue of true religion. Not to nourish the delusion but to try to overcome it is the way to reach the attainable measure of peace of mind. — Albert Einstein, letter of condolence

His (Kastrup's) "debate" with Maudlin left me a bit sour- — Manuel

Was that the Kurt Jaimungal episode, where Kastrup just refused to continue the interview because of what he perceived as the impertinance of Maudlin?
.

But telling him that as an issue of method, we are only going to look at physical substance, and just see how far that will take us - that would work. — Banno

Yes! That will show us that we have a clear and distinct idea of 4% of the Universe.

Rödl’s ‘science uberhaupt’ comes to mind.

And, Happy New Year

I want to note that the way the word "problem" is used in science means something yet to be discovered — Questioner

In this case, the problem is more of a categorial one. It is the missapplication of objective methods to a subject which evades objective specification.

I want to reiterate - that when science speaks of a "problem" they are referring to something that needs further research. — Questioner

Sufficient research has been done to establish that there is no place in the brain where the detailed, unified visual world we experience could be neurally encoded. The architecture of the visual system is now well mapped: high-resolution information is confined to a tiny foveal region, processing is massively distributed across specialized areas, and no stable, full-field representation exists. What remains unresolved is not a gap in empirical data but a conceptual gap between this well-understood neural machinery and the phenomenology of a coherent, stable visual world. In that sense, the issue is no longer “awaiting further research” in the usual scientific sense; it is an explanatory problem about how subjective experience arises at all.

In short, appealing to “further research” in this context amounts to what Karl Popper called the 'promissory notes' of materialism: the repeated assurance that a purely physical explanation will eventually emerge, even despite the empirical evidence.

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Happy New Year to all, I'm probably a time zone ahead of most others here, back in 2026! :party:

Happy New Year, regardless. :party:

Whereas yours is more of a clenched fist :lol:

Numbers are ideas, and ideas are not physical. Yet without math science couldn’t even get started.

By the way I'm not saying I agree with Kastrup, but I do think his kind of idealism at least has explanatory power that most other forms don't. I don't agree with him that physicalism is necessarily "baloney". — Janus

Well that covers all the bases, doesn’t it ;-)

Of course―nothing could be more obvious―that is precisely what is to be explained. — Janus

Why is to be explained? By what is it to be explained? As it happens, I wrote a Medium essay on precisely this topic, explaining how Buddhist philosophy shows that there is no need to posit a 'mind at large'. Gift link, from which

the Universe doesn’t exist outside consciousness, but neither does it not exist, so there is no need to posit any agency to explain its supposedly ‘continued’ existence.³ The continuity that science establishes is also a function of the subjective intellect, or, should we say, the inter-subjective intellect, as it is by nature shared by human beings across culture and history.

Incidentally, in respect of neurological modelling of first-person experience, take a look at The Neural Binding Problem, specifically The Subjective Unity of Perception. It acknowledges the hard problem of consciousness, saying that 'enough is known about the structure and function of the visual system to rule out any detailed neural representation that embodies the subjective experience'.

This is a challenge to physicalism about all non-physical items, but it's particularly stinging here because mathematical laws are supposed to be basic and explanatory. How does that square with a physicalist conception of what exists? — J

Really this is one of the central points of E A Burtt's book, although he tends to imply it rather than state it in such bald terms. There's a hidden metaphysical assumption behind the modern idea that the Universe is solely physical.

A good follow up from Burtt is Husserl, Crisis of the European Sciences. That said, it's an extremely dense and detailed book - one of those books to know about if not necessarily read in full. (I outlaid for a copy but have never read the whole thing.) Husserl too sees the pivotal importance of Galileo's 'mathematicization of nature' in modern thought, at the cost of forgetting the subject to whom science is meaningful. The wiki article.

For millennia, various traditions have been trying to accomplish this (i.e. 'divine union'). But the practitioners still answer to their individual names, and it's said the goal can't be achieved while alive. — Patterner

The discussion was the emergence of consciousness as the 'self-other' distinction basic to the emergence of organic life. It is also a basic theme in phenomenology.

The issue is not that he wants to engage in a critique of reason, but that his critique relies on a normatively binding use of reason to establish limits, while simultaneously denying reason any standing to make normatively binding claims about reality — Esse Quam Videri

I think your concerns about ‘the discarding of reason’ are perhaps overblown. Bitbol is not trying to establish normative limits on reality in the Kantian sense of legislating what can or cannot be the case tout court. Rather, he is diagnosing a performative incoherence in a specific epistemic stance —namely, the assumption that consciousness (I actually prefer ‘mind’) can be treated as a fully objective explanandum from inside the very practices that presuppose lived experience. Phenomenology, generally, is dealing with the philosophical conundrums that arise from 'objectification'.

Well, that is an impressive research program! Not questioning that, at all. There is an explosion of similar kinds of research under the heading 'consciousness studies'. One of the triggers was the 1996 publication of David Chalmer's essay Facing up to the Problem of Consciousness'. This was the paper that articulated the 'hard problem' of consciousness. So as not to get bogged down in too many digressions, it is worth recapitulating some of the key ideas and paragraphs from this paper.

One is the contrast between 'easy problems' and 'the problem of consciousness'. Chalmers says the 'easy problems' - problems which easily admit of a scientific explanation - are:

*the ability to discriminate, categorize, and react to environmental stimuli;
*the integration of information by a cognitive system;
*the reportability of mental states;
*the ability of a system to access its own internal states;
*the focus of attention;
*the deliberate control of behavior;
*the difference between wakefulness and sleep.

He says 'There is no real issue about whether these phenomena can be explained scientifically. All of them are straightforwardly vulnerable to explanation in terms of computational or neural mechanisms.'

But, he goes on:

The really hard problem of consciousness is the problem of experience. When we think and perceive, there is a whir of information-processing, but there is also a subjective aspect. As Nagel (1974) has put it, there is something it is like to be a conscious organism. This subjective aspect is experience. When we see, for example, we experience visual sensations: the felt quality of redness, the experience of dark and light, the quality of depth in a visual field. Other experiences go along with perception in different modalities: the sound of a clarinet, the smell of mothballs. Then there are bodily sensations, from pains to orgasms; mental images that are conjured up internally; the felt quality of emotion, and the experience of a stream of conscious thought. What unites all of these states is that there is something it is like to be in them. All of them are states of experience.

It is undeniable that some organisms are subjects of experience. But the question of how it is that these systems are subjects of experience is perplexing. Why is it that when our cognitive systems engage in visual and auditory information-processing, we have visual or auditory experience: the quality of deep blue, the sensation of middle C? How can we explain why there is something it is like to entertain a mental image, or to experience an emotion? It is widely agreed that experience arises from a physical basis, but we have no good explanation of why and how it so arises. Why should physical processing give rise to a rich inner life at all? It seems objectively unreasonable that it should, and yet it does.

If any problem qualifies as the problem of consciousness, it is this one. In this central sense of "consciousness", an organism is conscious if there is something it is like to be that organism, and a mental state is conscious if there is something it is like to be in that state.

I should note, I think 'the hard problem' is a polemical or rhetorical construct. It's purpose is only to point out that the first-person, experiential quality of experience can never be properly captured from a third-person perspective. So it's not a problem to be solved, in that sense, and (some have said) a misuse of the term 'problem' on those grounds (i.e. properly described, it is a mystery, not a problem.) But I'm bringing this in, because it serves to focus on what exactly is at issue in many of these discussions.

So – what would be Bitbol’s critique of this investigation? — Questioner

I can't speak for Michel Bitbol, but I will point out that phenomenology is usually found in these programs, for the reasons given above. Chalmers is not himself associated with phenomenology but many other researchers in the field are. This is in recognition of the criticism of phenomenology, that the third-person accounts of conscious experience must necessarily omit something of fundamental importance.

Key Concepts in the Phenomenological Approach to Consciousness Studies

Researchers often use several key "tools" or concepts derived from classical phenomenology (like that of Edmund Husserl or Maurice Merleau-Ponty):

Intentionality: The idea that consciousness is always "consciousness of something." Every mental act has an object (a thought, a feeling, or a physical thing).

The Epoché (Bracketing): The practice of setting aside "natural" assumptions about the external world to focus strictly on how a phenomenon presents itself to the mind.

Neurophenomenology: A modern sub-field (popularized by Francisco Varela) that seeks to "naturalize" phenomenology by using rigorous first-person descriptions to help scientists understand brain activity patterns.

So, the opposition here is not between 'phenomenology and science'. It's between 'phenomenology and reductive materialism', where 'reductive materialism' is the belief that the first-person nature of subjective experience is insignificant or secondary to the objective description. Daniel Dennett is the natural foil for these arguments, as he believes that first-person consciousness is essentially derivative from unconscious cellular processes.

Can Bitbol’s claims be tested? — Questioner

Not relevant. Falsifiability is a criterion used to distinguish empirical from non-empirical claims. Bitbol's arguments are not empirical arguments, but are based on reasoned inference from the apodictic nature of first-person experience.

Are you talking about something like Tegmark's mathematical universe? — T Clark

Nothing so exotic as that. Any mathematical expression of natural laws will serve as an example. F=ma for instance. If you measure the behaviour of matter it will behave according to that formula (within limits). But this relies on precise abstraction, measurement and quantification which are all intellectual acts. We look at the objects through the theory. Physical systems instantiate regularities;
scientific laws articulate those regularities in mathematical form. The laws themselves are not physical objects but ideal structures, grasped through intellectual acts of abstraction and measurement.
To treat laws as physical is to confuse what is described with the means of description.

Which is one of the themes in Burtt’s book. He’s making explicit the implicit metaphysics of modern science.

‘The promissory notes of materialism’

The Infancy Gospel of Thomas — Ciceronianus

not to be confused with the Nag Hammadi 'Gospel of Thomas'.

…
[2] The universe consists entirely of physical substances - matter and energy.
[3] These substances behave in accordance with scientific principles, laws.
[4] Scientific laws are mathematical in nature …
— T Clark

The question that jumps out at me is: are the mathematical laws themselves physical, and, if so, how? I don’t expect an answer to that, as there isn’t one, so far as I know. But it makes a point about an inherent contradiction in physicalism.

Another question is about your understanding of ‘formal and final causation’. These are of course part of Aristotelian philosophy, generally deprecated after Galileo, but are making something of a comeback in biological sciences. This is because of the somewhat obvious fact that organisms are generally goal-directed in their activities.

Plato would be right.

However, the very notion of the objective world described by the empirical sciences is itself a product of selective abstraction — what Bitbol calls the end-product of the procedure of objectification. Why? Because science methodically brackets out the subjective pole of observation so as to arrive at an intersubjective consensus about the observer-independent attributes of the object. But when this methodology is applied to the question of the nature of consciousness, it turns around and tries to explain conscious experience in terms of that consensus.

Okay, trying to parse this – he’s saying that science can never explain the conscious experience because it focuses on the object rather than the subject? But scientists are subjects themselves?

Someone help me out here. What’s he saying? — Questioner

I've only just now noticed this earlier comment of yours, and I commend you for it.

The idea is that modern science assumes a strict division between the scientist/experimenter/subject and the object of analysis, such that the object exists the same for any and all observers, and the role and/or presence of the observer can be disregarded.

Yes, scientists are subjects themselves, but in the typically modern view of science, their presence is 'bracketed out' so as to derive an observation which will be the same for all observers. So the subjectivity of the scientist is ruled irrelevant.

The paradigmatic example is, of course, modern physics, which is where this whole approach got started, in the work of Galileo, who also introduced the idea of 'primary qualities'. These are those qualities which are amenable to precise qualitative measurement - mass, velocity, momentum, and so on. How the object appears is said to be explained in terms of 'secondary qualities' - color, taste, scent, and so on. This was then combined with the dualism of René Descartes with the distinction between matter (res extensa) and mind (res cogitans), to produce the characteristic paradigm of early modern science:

The modern mind-body problem arose out of the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, as a direct result of the concept of objective physical reality that drove that revolution. Galileo and Descartes made the crucial conceptual division by proposing that physical science should provide a mathematically precise quantitative description of an external reality extended in space and time, a description limited to spatiotemporal primary qualities such as shape, size, and motion, and to laws governing the relations among them. Subjective appearances, on the other hand -- how this physical world appears to human perception -- were assigned to the mind, and the secondary qualities like color, sound, and smell were to be analyzed relationally, in terms of the power of physical things, acting on the senses, to produce those appearances in the minds of observers. It was essential to leave out or subtract subjective appearances and the human mind -- as well as human intentions and purposes -- from the physical world in order to permit this powerful but austere spatiotemporal conception of objective physical reality to develop. — Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos, Pp 35-36

Who’s disconfirming the presence of experience? If that is the criterion for determining that consciousness is absolute, then he has made an error in his understanding of the present state of neuroscience, thus nullifying his conclusion. — Questioner

According to whom does the 'present state of neuroscience' accomodate the foundational role of first-person experience?

Reductive materialism is the view that the mind is 'nothing but' the activities of neural matter and that as knowledge of neuroscience develops, so too will the grasp of this correlation..Wayfarer

I wonder why this is so threatening to some people? — "

Because it's not true, yet a very large number of intelligent people seem to accept that it is. And because ideas have consequences.

I didn’t see that the article spoke of philosophical challenges, but rather the problem of reconciling the materialist view of consciousness with quantum mechanics – which was not touched on at all in the OP. — Questioner

Actually, in the Michel Bitbol paper that the article draws on, the last of the 'six arguments' is that from modern physics. He says that the context-dependent nature of the findings of quantum physics mitigates against the idea of a 'material substrate' which can be used as an explanation for consciousness.

Some philosophers who defend a “physicalist” view may be...saying something like this: “Consciousness is matter-based in a very general sense : it emerges from whatever physics describes as fundamental, be it a quantized field”. But the problem is not solved by this further flexibility. For, as I mentioned previously about the interpretation of quantum mechanics, modern physics cannot even be said to “describe” anything completely independently of the experimental and intellectual tools of investigation: it just affords a way of systematic prediction of what occurs if this investigation is carried out; and it establishes reproducible relations between these predictions. What is taken as objective by modern physics is no longer a conception of the ultimate stuff of which the world is made, but the very network of mathematical tools by which we can collectively anticipate the outcome of our most refined actions. — Michel Bitbol

This is implicit in 'the observer problem' in quantum physics, which undercuts the strict subject-object distinction which Galileo had introduced. Which is why strict scientific realists, like Sir Roger Penrose, say that quantum theory must be wrong or incomplete.

The (Adam Frank) article goes on to say that physics from the psi-epistemologist is no longer a description of the world in-and-of itself. Instead, it’s a description of the rules for our interaction with the world.

Rules? What rules? — Questioner

The Born Rule is a principle one.

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Do you think there is ever going to be a paradigm that does not have self and other? What does it mean to not have self-other? Will all minds and consciousnesses merge into one? — Patterner

I can only say that 'transcending the self-other distinction' is a recurring motif in mysticism and the perennial philosophies, generally. That is why 'Nirvāṇa without remainder' is said to be only possible on the far side of death.

What is your vision off the future? Will we no longer use the sciences that developed by ignoring consciousness? Will we not live in houses, not use electricity, not use propulsion systems and math to launch ships to Mars and beyond? — Patterner

I don't believe interstellar travel is at all feasible for terrestrial creatures such as ourselves. We might be able to send ultrasmall computers via laser energy, but we'll never send large metal and composite material vessels with living organisms in them. Mars is a possibility, but the idea of colonizing Mars is a Musk fever dream. (I'm writing a 'psi-phi' novel on this very theme at the moment, although constantly sidetracking myself with forum posts.)

The fact that our sense organs and brains are similarly constituted can explain how it is that we see things in similar ways, but it cannot explain just what we see. The content of perception, that is what is perceivable which animals also perceive in their different ways, is contributed by the world, whether that world is physical or mental. — Janus

I’m not claiming that perceptual convergence explains what ultimately exists; I’m claiming that any account of what exists has to start from the fact that the world is first given as a shared
field of perception, not as a metaphysical posit. And that there is no self-existence material substance in terms of which the nature of experience can be explained. No account that treats matter as a self-existent, third-person substance can explain experience, because experience is not one of the things that substance-description captures (which is, of course, stating the hard problem of consciousness again).

I do not argue against the existence of any one thing that we can apprehend, either by sense or reflection. That the things I see with my eyes and touch with my hands do exist, really exist, I make not the least question. The only thing whose existence we deny is that which philosophers call ‘matter’ or ‘corporeal substance’. — Bishop Berkeley

And besides, we do now know what happens when you drill down on apparently solid matter to the most fundamental elements. I don't have to say again what has been discovered.

He (Hegel) would say the ultimate truth is the Absolute, which is a state of unity in which there is no thought because there are no divisions. — frank

That rings true to me, even though I can't claim to really understand it.

unconscious reality only has a third person perspective, — hypericin

From whence do the pre-sentient denizens of the cosmos derive 'a perspective'? Unlike our various panpsychist friends, I'm loath to admit they have any: consciousness is required for there to be any kind of perspective.

From phenomenology of biology, in particular Hans Jonas' book on that - the most rudimentary of organisms distinguishes 'self from other' in a way that no non-organic matter does. It is the very first thing that an organism must do to maintain itself against the relentless onslaught of entropy. That, I see, as the fundamental emergence of consciousness, on a very rudimentary level, although not of sentience, which comes later.

Unless there wasn't a time when consciousness didn't exist. If it is fundamental, a property of things, as, for example, mass and charge are, then it was always there — Patterner

My hesitation with this line of panpsychism is that it extends the concept of matter so as to include consciousness as an attribute, rather than questioning the object-centred metaphysics that made consciousness invisible in the first place. From a phenomenological standpoint, consciousness isn’t something that can be injected retrospectively into an already third-person model of reality. Any framework that begins by screening out subjectivity — as the physicalist model has done — will inevitably fail when it later tries to reintroduce it as a fundamental property alongside mass or charge.

That is why thinkers like Michel Bitbol press the need for a change of stance or attitude. This form of panpsychism still retains the self–other, subject–object paradigm that underlies naturalism; it simply enriches the inventory of properties without questioning the framing itself.

In that sense, even the question “what is consciousness?” is improper if it is posed within that same objectifying register. (It's what don't like about Anikka Harris and Galen Strawson, who are trying to rehabilitate physicalism, rather than seeing through it, mainly, I suspect, out of the fear of religion.)

As I've said on these forums many times an idealism that does not posit universal mind in some form is incoherent and cannot explain what is clear to us from everyday experience―that we live in a shared world. — Janus

But it can, though. We live in a shared world, because we have highly convergent minds, sensory systems, and languages. So we will converge on similar understandings of what is real, due to those shared elements. I mean, genetically, we're all identical, up until the top-most layer of differentiation.

There's a thought-experiment I will give to make this point. Imagine a sentient mountain. Mountains have lifespans of hundreds of millions of years. From the perspective of a sentient mountain, humans are far too ephemeral and small to even notice. Rivers, you will notice, because they'll be around long enough to carve out ravines in your sides. But humans are to a mountain as microbes are to humans.

Speaking of microbes, if there were rational sentient microbes then the scale of human existence would likely also be incomprehensible. Humans would be so vast, and their life-spans so long, they would seem like solar systems to humans.

So, there are shared worlds, on many levels. There's this human world, which is shared by the other billions of humans. But the fact that we inhabit a shared world says nothing about its ultimate nature, whether and in what sense it has a reality above and beyond the sensory and experiential data that we receive and interpret. Kastrup's criticism of materialism is that it posits something beyond and outside those experiential states which account for those states, as being somehow fundamental and ontologically prior to the mind which receives and interprets these data.

The appeal to a universal mind does not arise from idealism as such, but from the attempt to preserve the intuition that the world must exist in the same way when unobserved as when observed. But that intuition is inherited from realism, not established by argument. Once we recognise that any account of what the world is “in itself” already deploys the cognitive resources of the mind, the supposed need for a universal observer evaporates.

As Zen puts it, “Mind is no mind.” That seems to me exactly the point here — mind is not something we can turn into an object, whether individual or universal, even though experience is always for a mind. The mind is the ever-present subject, nowhere to be found.

For long stretches of time, during normatively stable periods within a science or a culture, there is but one or a handful of related accepted ways to model truth and error. — Joshs

There’s an anecdote I sometimes re-tell that bears on this point. It concerns the arrival of the Endeavour in Botany Bay during James Cook’s voyage in 1770. Joseph Banks noted in his journal that a group of Indigenous people camped on the shoreline, roughly a mile away, showed no reaction at all to the ship’s presence. It was only some hours later, when a small boat was launched and rowed toward the shore, that they began to respond.

The point is not that the ship was misinterpreted. It seems not to have been interpreted at all — until the small boat entered the space of possible interaction. Only then did it cross the threshold from ignored anomaly to meaningful presence, presumably because its scale and form bore at least some resemblance to a canoe. (That part is conjectural, of course, but the lack of any initial reaction was a recorded fact.)

There’s another anecdote, often attributed to the anthropologist Colin Turnbull, concerning a chieftain from a forest-dwelling group in central Africa who was taken by car to a mountain lookout. After some time, he knelt down and began pawing at the ground in front of him. According to the translator, this was because distant herds of savanna animals were being interpreted as small creatures nearby — the result of a lifetime spent in dense forest, where visual depth rarely extends beyond a few metres.

Taken together, these strike me as illustrations of what one might call cognitive relativity: the way an underlying cognitive framework conditions how visual phenomena are interpreted — or, in the first case, ignored altogether. On a far more sophisticated level, Einstein was making essentially the same point when he insisted that theory determines what can be observed — something Manjit Kumar discusses in Quantum, and which influenced Heisenberg early on. The claim isn’t that observation is subjective, but that intelligibility comes first: a framework has to be in place before anything can count as “what is observed.”

I’m not endorsing out-and-out relativism here — I think there are real constraints and non-negotiable elements in experience. But these examples are a useful reminder to keep an open mind about the limits imposed by our own frameworks. It is especially relevant in discussions of phenomenology, which is very sensitive to the way that the implicit metaphysics of day-to-day culture shape our attitudes to experience.

You can hear them scream! — Patterner

Unless yours is the hand holding one end, in which case the shriek will be yours.

I can't help but remind myself that the 'puzzlement/wonder' it creates is a motivator for trying to go beyond that. So, as a way to solve the antinomy, I propose that we need to accept both stories and reconcile them. Yes, our consciousness is contingent, is ontologically dependent etc and it can't be the ground of 'intelligibility' of ourselves and the 'external world' (and also the 'empirical world', at the end of the day). But at the same time, I take seriously the other 'side' of the antinomy and I also affirm that intelligibility seems to be grounded in consciousness. However, in order to get a 'coherent story' that includes both insights, I acknowledge that I have to posit a consciousness of some sort that can truly be regarded as the ground of intelligibility. — boundless

I hear you! Obviously this is a deep and difficult question, but again, my orientation is shaped by my reading of Buddhist philosophy. You will recall that there is an unequivocal statement in the Pali texts, to wit, 'there is, monks, an unborn, unmade, unfabricated', and that if there were not, there would be no possibility of escape from the born, the made, the fabricated (reference). 'There is!' Of course, what that means - what precisely is the unborn, unconditioned - is beyond discursive reason. Probably also out of scope of naturalism, which puts it out-of-bounds for most here.

Nagarjuna goes beyond phenomenologists. — boundless

He does indeed. I'm also reading some of Bitbol's essays on Buddhism and he acknowledges this. That will be the subject of the third essay (if the next two are accepted by Philosophy Today.)

It invites the question: are these claims about the way things really are? I think this is a tender point for Bitbol. He wants to gatekeep the bounds of reason, but in order to do this he needs to grant reason a level of authority that he also seemingly wants to deny to it. If reason has the power to say what is unconditionally the case when engaging in critique, then how can we deny it that same power when it comes to ontology?...Does my critique of Bitbol hit the mark? — Esse Quam Videri

What exactly is he discerning in this essay? Bitbol is not claiming that he can determine what reality is like independently of experience. Notice at the outset, he says 'no alternative metaphysical view is advanced.' He is claiming that reason can notice when it has overstepped its bounds by mistaking the conditions of experience for objects within experience. That critique does not establish an alternative ontology - it is ameliorative rather than constructive. The aim is only to show the mistake inherent in trying to treat the issue of the nature of consciousness in objective terms, as the subject matter is categorically different. I don't think he's challenging naturalism when it comes to its legitimate subjects of interest, but its missapplication in philosophy of mind. All of which was anticipated by Husserl in his transcendentalist phase.

Nāgārjuna isn't really proposing a philosophy in the modern sense of the word, but rather something more like a path of liberation from philosophy (in the modern sense of the word). — Esse Quam Videri

There's a Buddhist metaphor that comes to mind. This is that the Buddha's teaching is like the stick used to stir a fire to help get it burning. But when the fire is burning, the stick is tossed in. There's another simile, the 'simile of the raft'. This compares the dharma to a raft 'bound together from fragments of sticks and grasses' (hence, nothing high-falutin') which is used to 'cross over the river' but which is discarded when the crossing is accomplished (Alagaddupama Sutta.) This has been compared to Wittgenstein's 'ladder' metaphor, that philosophy is like a ladder that is discarded after having been climbed.

But what is that rock, really? Objectively, it does not appear as you see it. In reality, it, and all of reality, outside of human perception, it is a conglomeration of colourless particles and waves, a haze and maze of uncertainty that turns into certainty only when you observe it. (I have heard it described as wavelength collapse, but I don't know enough about it to comment.) — Questioner

I read your posts, generally, as common-sense realism. We're evolved hominids, the universe is governed by the laws of physics, mind arises from brain, in line with the principles of evolutionary biology, and so on. Things that everyone knows, or thinks they do. But it is just that common-sense realism which is being challenged here. Granted, it takes some background reading to get the drift of these challenges, but suffice to say, many popular claims about what science has established and understands in respect to the nature of consciousness are subject to criticism - not on empirical grounds, but on philosophical grounds, i.e. what they mean.

Reductive materialism is the view that the mind is 'nothing but' the activities of neural matter and that as knowledge of neuroscience develops, so too will the grasp of this correlation. That neural reductionist view is propounded by a group of influential scholars and academics and is also associated with the 'new atheist' writings of popular intellectuals such as Richard Dawkins. By this means, it is hoped to reduce the understanding of consciousness or mind, to the network of physical causation by which other natural phenomena are explained.

The phenomenological critique is not that neuroscientific or evolutionary accounts are factually mistaken, but that the reduction of the nature of mind to physical causation is an extra step that is not warranted by the evidence. But those arguments are lengthy and difficult to summarise in a forum post. Perhaps a good starting point would be this essay Minding Matter, Adam Frank, who is a professor of astronomy. It actually discusses in some detail, but in a reader-friendly way, the philosophical challenges that 'wavelength collapse' pose for reductionist materialism. But there are many other such arguments, including those discussed by Michel Bitbol in the essay that this OP is based on.

The experience depends on the brain, but the brain depends on the experience, but temporal order isn't an issue because time doesn't exist before the experience. So the appallingly offensive bootstrapping is perhaps permissible. I don't buy it, but you need to grasp the argument before dismissing it. — bert1

It has some support in physics.

The notion of evolution is not applicable to the universe as a whole since there is no external observer with respect to the universe, and there is no external clock that does not belong to the universe. However, we do not actually ask why the universe as a whole is evolving. We are just trying to understand our own experimental data. Thus, a more precisely formulated question is why do we see the universe evolving in time in a given way. In order to answer this question one should first divide the universe into two main pieces: i) an observer with his clock and other measuring devices and ii) the rest of the universe. Then it can be shown that the wave function of the rest of the universe does depend on the state of the clock of the observer, i.e. on his ‘time’. This time dependence in some sense is ‘objective’: the results obtained by different (macroscopic) observers living in the same quantum state of the universe and using sufficiently good (macroscopic) measuring apparatus agree with each other.

Thus we see that without introducing an observer, we have a dead universe, which does not evolve in time. This example demonstrates an unusually important role played by the concept of an observer in quantum cosmology. John Wheeler underscored the complexity of the situation, replacing the word observer by the word participant, and introducing such terms as a ‘self-observing universe’. — Andrei Linde, Inflation, Quantum Cosmology and the Anthropic Principle

If consciousness is not there from the beginning — Patterner

The problem is that 'there' is implicitly objectifying. It is locative. You're already orienting the discussion in terms of space-time by using it.

So there are necessary truths, sentences and such. Are there necessary individuals? — Banno

Individuals - the person, the ego, individual self - are contingent as a matter of necessity. Interesting that the term 'individual' used to denote the person only becomes current in the 17th century. 'In the Middle Ages, you wouldn't call a person an individual. Instead, the term was used to describe things that were units of a whole. For example, the Holy Trinity was described as "individual" because its three parts could not be separated. To be "individual" meant to be unified with others, not separate from them.' The meaning was practically reversed in the Enlightenment.

‘There are no necessary truths’ is self contradictory, because if it is true then it is necessarily so.

Right! I was going to add that the salient point of the Schopenhauer passage is the ‘co-arising of mind and world’ which becomes central in later phenomenology.

Just note that this (Schopenhauer) not any kind of phenomenology. It makes the thread a little confusing if you smash up differing philosophical approaches. — frank

Beg to differ. Schop as one of Kant’s principle interpreters is very much part of the phenomenological lineage. Not that any of them endorse him wholesale but this passage in particular is highly relevant.

But it would not be that particular music — Questioner

It would not be the same rendition, but it would be the same piece. Claire de Lune retains its identity whether played on piano, guitar, or a singing birthday card.

This is the tip of a very large iceberg for your ‘mind=brain’ materialism: how something like a composition, a sentence, a formula can retain its identity across different versions and even different media. ‘The same and yet different’.

Very perceptive as always. I will respond when time permits.

However, we need to ask ourselves which 'consciousness' is foundational. — boundless

But that question is still being asked from an external perspective i.e. treating consciousness as a phenomenon, something that exists or may not exist. I think you're actually conflating two perspectives, that of regarding consciousness as an attribute of sentient beings, as you would from an evolutionary perspective, and then the transcendental insight that consciousness is the horizon within which the nature of being is intelligible in the first place. That excerpt from Schopenhauer does address this. He acknowledges that life evolves from matter, that higher organisms evolve from earlier forms:

"On the other hand, the law of causality and the treatment and investigation of nature which is based upon it, lead us necessarily to the conclusion that, in time, each more highly organised state of matter has succeeded a cruder state: so that the lower animals existed before men, fishes before land animals, plants before fishes, and the unorganised before all that is organised; that, consequently, the original mass had to pass through a long series of changes before the first eye could be opened."

"And yet", he goes on, "the existence of this whole world remains ever dependent upon the first eye that opened, even if it were that of an insect. For such an eye is a necessary condition of the possibility of knowledge, and the whole world exists only in and for knowledge, and without it is not even thinkable. The world is entirely idea, and as such demands the knowing subject as the supporter of its existence." Of course that goes against the grain of 'the inborn realism which arises from the original disposition of the intellect'. I've had many long (and mainly fruitless) arguments about this point on the forum, contested by those who are adamant that the world is there, external, outside of us, and ideas internal, in the mind, subjective. This long course of time itself, filled with innumerable changes, through which matter rose from form to form till at last the first percipient creature appeared,—this whole time itself is only thinkable in the identity of a consciousness whose succession of ideas, whose form of knowing it is, and apart from which, it loses all meaning and is nothing at all."

At this point, 99% of people will object: “But we know that the world existed before there were any sentient beings.” My reply is that “before” is a mental construct. Fossils are not mental constructs, nor is the geological record. But pastness is not something contained in those rocks. It is a form under which they are understood. Outside that form—outside a temporal framework supplied by consciousness—the fossils do not say “earlier,” “later,” or “before” at all. They simply are.

The record constrains what can coherently be said, but it does not interpret itself. And without that interpretive framework, the notion of a world that “existed before” anything capable of experience is not false so much as unintelligible.

The earth, say, as it was before there was life, is a field of empirical enquiry in which we have come to know a great deal; its reality is no more being denied than is the reality of perceived objects in the same room. The point is, the whole of the empirical world in space and time is the creation of our understanding, which apprehends all the objects of empirical knowledge within it as being in some part of that space and at some part of that time: and this is as true of the earth before there was life as it is of the pen I am now holding a few inches in front of my face and seeing slightly out of focus as it moves across the paper. — Bryan Magee, Schopenhauer's Philosophy

The problem is that we have all reasonable evidences to conclude that we aren't necessary for the existence of the 'world'. — boundless

Do you recall that that blog post about Schopenhauer that you posted - how time began with the first eye that opened?

Understanding that the mind/consciousness is the function of the structure (the brain) dispels any notion of Cartesian dualism. — Questioner

Yes. That is plain materialism.

Function cannot be separated from operating structure, no more than the music played by a piano can be separated from the piano. — Questioner

Of course it can. It can be played on another instrument, recorded, or transcribed into notation. In every case the music stays the same while the material form is different.

Pretty well how I see it also.

Wayfarer is saying the goldfish doesn’t realise there’s water there, it can’t see the water and takes it for granted. While you are saying, I know the water is there, but it’s no big deal. — Punshhh

Notice that the term 'immaterial' came up a couple of times, first in this post of 180's and then shortly after by Janus (they seem to be in furious agreement).

What I'm saying is that this is the false dilemma of Cartesian dualism, which divides the world into 'the physical' (res extensa) and the mental (res cogitans). But this is much larger that 'the philosophy of Descartes', as it is woven into the cultural grammar of modernity - we naturally tend to 'carve up' reality along those lines. So the implication is, if something is not physical, then it must be res cogitans - hence 'the immaterial mind'.

Yes, I know what you mean.

I'm actually looking at The Idea of the World again as I write this - I bought the Kindle edition a year ago. The chapter I'm reading on the dissociative boundary is footnoted to many empirical studies of the phenomenon.

Here's a sample of his reasoning:

(An) objection is this: nature unfolds according to patterns and regularities—the ‘laws of nature’—independent of our personal volition. Human beings cannot change these laws. But if nature is in consciousness, should that not be possible by a mere act of imagination?

... Notice that the implicit assumption here is that all mental activity is acquiescent to volition, which is patently false even in our own personal psyche. After all, by and large we cannot control our dreams, nightmares, emotions, and even many of our thoughts. They come, develop and go on their own terms. At a pathological level, schizophrenics cannot control their visions and people suffering from obsessive-compulsive disorder are constantly at the mercy of oppressive thoughts. There are numerous examples of conscious activity that escapes the control of volition. Often, we do not even recognize this activity as our own; that is, we do not identify with it. It unfolds as autonomous, seemingly external phenomena, such as dreams and schizophrenic hallucinations. Yet, all this activity is unquestionably within consciousness. We perceive it as separate from ourselves because the segment of our psyche that gives rise to this activity is dissociated from the ego, the segment with which we do identify.

So that there is activity in universal consciousness that we do not identify with and cannot control is entirely consistent with idealism. This activity is simply dissociated from our ego and its sense of volition. — Kastrup, Bernardo. The Idea of the World: A Multi-Disciplinary Argument for the Mental Nature of Reality (pp. 136-137). (Function). Kindle Edition.

I don’t recall Kastrup inferring from his ontology that there is any sense of an overall plan for life. I know he isn’t arguing against one either; it seems to be bracketed for him. One imagines him eventually getting caught up (hijacked?) in one or other religious perspectives. — Tom Storm

Caution needed here. I think Kastrup's natural tendency is much more convergent with the Hindu mokṣa than Christan eschatology, Are Vedantic or Buddhist perspectives 'religious'? Well, in a way, but they're also very different to the Biblical sense of religion. They're much more concerned with insight into the nature of mind and maybe much nearer to elements of gnositicism than to straight-ahead Christianity. But a large part of our cultural conditioning is to put all of them under the umbrella term 'religion', against which there is considerable animus, as you can see from any number of antireligious polemics on this forum.

If everything we encounter is mental in nature, then in what sense are some things “alive” and others not? Under Kastrup’s account, are all entities manifestations of mind equally, or does “life” mark a further distinction beyond mere consciousness? — Tom Storm

In Kastrup’s analytic idealism, everything is mental in origin but not everything is a subject of experience. Non-living objects are the extrinsic appearances of mental processes that are not dissociated into bounded experiential perspectives, whereas living organisms correspond to dissociated, self-maintaining mental processes and therefore possess an inner life. “Life” does not mark a higher degree of consciousness, but a structural distinction: the emergence of a private point of view within mind-at-large. Tables and rocks exist as stable appearances of mental activity, governed by lawful regularities, but there is 'nothing it is like to be a table'. This distinction — between mentality as ontological ground and subjectivity as a special mode of organization — is developed most systematically in The Idea of the World.

A natural follow-up question is: if non-living objects are the extrinsic appearances of mental processes, whose mental processes are these? This is where Kastrup leans heavily on mind-at-large, a move that has clear affinities with Advaita Vedānta (he has many dialogues with Swami Sarvapriyananda) and with Berkeley, whom he occasionally acknowledges. But it’s also worth noting that if one tries to conceive of “the world” — a rock, a tree, anything at all — as existing in the total absence of mental processes, one quickly runs into an insoluble conundrum (per Schopenhauer, also the subject of one of Kastrup's books, Decoding Schopenhauer's Metaphysics).

I’ve been critical of Kastrup’s notion of mind-at-large, but I’ve come to see it less as a posit of a cosmic intelligence and more as a way of marking the unavoidable fact that existence always appears within the horizon of consciousness. In that sense, the world exists in and for mind, where “mind” does not name a single metaphysical super-entity so much as the condition that anything be manifest at all — that is, any mind.

The point is why bother saying that the mind is immaterial? — Janus

You're the one who made the suggestion in the first place:

The OP says that consciousness is primary against, presumably, the idea that the material is primary. If consciousness is not, according to you, material, or at least a function of, or dependent on, the material, then the implication would be that it is immaterial, and that disembodied consciousness is possible. — Janus

And then:

you didn't answer the question I posed re whether you believe that immaterial or disembodied consciousness is possible. — Janus

You're still seeing the debate through the apparent dichotomy of material/immaterial.

If we are so 'constrained' by our own perspective and we can't make statements about the 'things in themselves' - i.e. metaphysical statements - the problem I notice is that the apparent intelligibility of the world as we experience it remains unexplained. — boundless

I think you’re right that phenomenology alone doesn’t “explain” why the world is intelligible — but Bitbol’s point is that intelligibility isn’t the kind of thing that needs explaining by appeal to a reality-in-itself. The mistake, as he sees it, is assuming that intelligibility must belong either to the subject or to the world as such. His refusal to choose among those options isn’t skepticism, but a refusal to reintroduce a metaphysical comparison that phenomenological suspension has already shown to be unwarranted. Intelligibility is a characteristic of being-in-the-world. In fact, I wonder if the demand to “explain intelligibility” is itself a mistake — as if we want to explain explanation. Maybe that's an antinomy of reason! Bitbol’s refusal to supply such an explanation isn’t evasion, but critical in the Kantian sense.

But then, even given that scientific objectivity is not the be-all and end-all, there's still an enormous range of things it can accomplish. I don't think Bitbol is throwing that away or belittling it - just reminding us of the underlying assumptions which are so easily forgotten in our bedazzlement with what science can do. And also a reminder of the limits of objectivity.

We, as conscious beings, may face an insurmountable barrier in explaining consciousness itself. But from this apparent epistemic barrier it cannot be concluded that consciousness has no naturalistic explanation. Just that we might never get to it. — hypericin

You do wonder how different a 'naturalistic explanation that might never be grasped' is from a 'metaphysical postulate'.

My point was simply that Energy is not a tangible material substance, but a postulated immaterial causal force (similar to electric potential) that can have detectable (actual) effects in the real world : similar to the spiritual belief in ghosts. — Gnomon

The comparison to a 'spiritual belief' misses the mark because energy is a strictly defined physical property, not a metaphysical posit. While it isn't a 'tangible substance' like a rock, it is inextricably linked to matter via e=mc². It has measurable physical effects, including gravity.

Furthermore, the discovery of quanta proved that energy isn't just a 'postulated force'—it exists in discrete, countable units (which is what 'quantum' means!) We don't just 'believe' in energy; we calculate it to ten decimal places to make your smartphone function.

But your Point is that reality is a simultaneous multi-level phenomenon??? — Gnomon

There are degrees of reality. Take a look at the Wiki article on The Analogy of the Divided Line from the Republic. The 'higher' knowledge comprises facts that can only be grasped by reason. They're not phenomenally existent as are material particulars.

Getting back to the paper I mentioned, which mentions Heiseberg's invocation of Aristotle's 'res potentia'. Heisenberg revives the Aristotelian concept of potentia (or dynamis), suggesting it is the most accurate philosophical description of what a quantum state really is.

Heisenberg’s treatment can be summarized as follows:

1. The "Middle Ground" of Reality

Heisenberg contends that a quantum wave function (the mathematical description of a particle) does not represent a "thing" in the traditional sense, but rather a tendency for something to occur. It's a probability distribution, meaning that the answer to the question 'does the particle exist' is not an unequivocal 'yes' or 'no' but a range of probabilities that it does. (This is what scientific realists such as Penrose can't accept.)

• Classical View: An object is either here or there.
• Heisenberg's "Potentia": In quantum mechanics, a particle exists in a state that is "something standing in the middle between the idea of an event and the actual event."
• Ontological Status: He describes this as a "strange kind of physical reality" that is more than a mere possibility (an idea) but less than a hard fact (an actuality). And this is an objective tendency inherent in nature, not just a result of incomplete knowledge of some pre-existing state of affairs.

2. The Transition from Potential to Actual
Heisenberg uses Aristotle’s distinction between potentiality and actuality to explain the "measurement problem" (often called the collapse of the wave function). He breaks down a physical experiment into three distinct phases:

• Preparation (Translation): We translate a classical setup (like a particle accelerator) into a mathematical probability function. This function represents the potentia—the list of all things that could happen.
• Evolution: The system evolves according to quantum laws. During this time, the system remains in a state of potentiality. There is no "actual" position or velocity, only a shifting distribution of possible outcomes.
• Measurement (The Act): When an observation is made, the "transition from the 'possible' to the 'actual' takes place." The interaction with the measuring device forces the potentia to manifest as a single, concrete event. An outcome is 'actualised' or 'manifested'.

3. Energy as Primary Matter

Here is where energy enters Heisenberg's picture, where he links the modern concept of energy to Aristotle’s concept of matter (hyle, the 'raw material' of the Universe.)

In Aristotle’s view, 'matter' wasn't a collection of tiny bricks (atoms, per Democritus); it was a 'substratum' that lacked specific form but had the potential to become any form.

Heisenberg argues that energy is the modern equivalent of this primary matter. Energy itself is not any particular thing, but it can be actualized into different forms—such as an electron, a proton, or a photon—depending on the physical conditions, and thence into the elements of the periodic table, and the whole three-ring circus of existence.

Whereas, philosophy straddles first and second order ontologies. It is about the real world, but a world that includes subjectivity and perspectives, and itself constructs perspectives upon that subjective-inclusive world. As such, there can never be a single philosophical "book of the world". — hypericin

:clap:

Yes, because "subjectivity" (like e.g. humanity or infinity) is merely an abstraction — 180 Proof

However, the subject is not.