(I have to briefly sign back in - shhhh - to mention an article I've found interesting, about how Heisenberg re-purposed Aristotle's 'potentia' in respect to quantum physics Quantum mysteries dissolve if possibilities are realities:

In the... paper, three scientists argue that including “potential” things on the list of “real” things can avoid the counterintuitive conundrums that quantum physics poses. It is perhaps less of a full-blown interpretation than a new philosophical framework for contemplating those quantum mysteries. At its root, the new idea holds that the common conception of “reality” is too limited. By expanding the definition of reality, the quantum’s mysteries disappear. In particular, “real” should not be restricted to “actual” objects or events in spacetime. Reality ought also be assigned to certain possibilities, or “potential” realities, that have not yet become “actual.” These potential realities do not exist in spacetime, but nevertheless are “ontological” — that is, real components of existence.

“This new ontological picture requires that we expand our concept of ‘what is real’ to include an extraspatiotemporal domain of quantum possibility,” write Ruth Kastner, Stuart Kauffman and Michael Epperson.

Considering potential things to be real is not exactly a new idea, as it was a central aspect of the philosophy of Aristotle, 24 centuries ago. An acorn has the potential to become a tree; a tree has the potential to become a wooden table. Even applying this idea to quantum physics isn’t new. Werner Heisenberg, the quantum pioneer famous for his uncertainty principle, considered his quantum math to describe potential outcomes of measurements of which one would become the actual result. The quantum concept of a “probability wave,” describing the likelihood of different possible outcomes of a measurement, was a quantitative version of Aristotle’s potential, Heisenberg wrote in his well-known 1958 book Physics and Philosophy. “It introduced something standing in the middle between the idea of an event and the actual event, a strange kind of physical reality just in the middle between possibility and reality.”

On that note, I’ll be signing out for Christmas. My dear other has made it clear that festive time is not ideally spent arguing with my invisible friends. All the best to everyone here for the festive season :party: :pray: :hearts:

To put a finer point on it, when you say things like "there's an unconscious synthesis occurring" and "there is no agreed neural mechanism" you are presumably making a claim about the way things really are - not just about the way that they appear to you - and that you've actually grasped and confirmed something true about how the mind actually works. Would you agree with this, or do you see things differently? — Esse Quam Videri

I agree, with an important qualification. I wouldn’t claim that I personally possess privileged insight into “the way things truly are.” But I do think that clarifying what can and cannot meaningfully be meant by that phrase is one of philosophy’s central tasks.

The distinction you draw between (1) cognitive content being underdetermined by sensory input and structured by unconscious operations, and (2) the claim that the mind-independent world is wholly constructed, is a real one—and I resist the latter if it is taken in a literalistic sense. Saying that cognition involves unconscious synthesis is not to say that the world is an arbitrary mental fabrication. But then, where is the line drawn between 'world as experienced' and 'world as it is?'

In that sense, I am making claims about how things really are—but not from some point beyond! That is also why I bring in cognitive science, which has, for fairly obvious reasons, devoted a great deal of effort to understanding how the brain synthesises and constructs our experience-of-the-world.

Here is where I’ve found the opening sentence of Schopenhauer's World as Will and Idea instructive:

§ 1. “The world is my idea:”—this is a truth which holds good for everything that lives and knows, though man alone can bring it into reflective and abstract consciousness. If he really does this, he has attained to philosophical wisdom.

I should also point to one of the footnotes in the Mind- Created World, which is central to the overall argument. It is a quote from one of the Pali Buddhist suttas, to wit:

By and large, Kaccayana, this world is supported by a polarity, that of existence and non-existence. But when one sees the origination of the world as it actually is with right discernment, “non-existence” with reference to the world does not occur to one. When one sees the cessation of the world as it actually is with right discernment, “existence” with reference to the world does not occur to one.’ — Kaccāyanagotta Sutta

Here, the Buddha warns against reifying either “existence” or “non-existence” as ultimate categories (eternalism and nihilism, respectively). To see the origination and cessation of the world “as it actually is” is precisely to see through that polarity. The “world” in Buddhism is therefore not a metaphysical totality but the experienced world, whose character is structured by conditioned origination and attachment.


--------------

On that note, I’ll be signing out for Christmas. My dear other has made it clear that festive time is not ideally spent arguing with my invisible friends. All the best to everyone here for the festive season :party: :pray: :hearts:

Not at all. He doesn mention Kant, but he doesn't go into all the intricacies. That's one of the good things about that book - mercifully free of jargon and academic philosophy speak.

As you know, I am sympathetic with transcendental/epistemic idealists views. — boundless

Pinter’s book, Mnd and the Cosmic Order, is a cognitive science book, not a book about transcendental idealism.It definitely has a philosophical component, but it would be wrong to describe it as a philosophy text.

Or does some of that information, like mathematical principles, remain and if it remains, where (and when) does it remain? — Punshhh

That's a tricky thought-experiment! I don't actually devote a lot of time to 'what if nothing existed?' I take pretty much at face value what science tells us about cosmology and the formation of planets. I still feel as though the beginning of life and the engine of evolution is deeply mysterious.

The book I keep mentioning, Mind and the Cosmic Order, Charles Pinter, is really helpful on this question. He argues 'that the meaningful connectedness between things — the hierarchical organization of all we perceive — is the result of the Gestalt nature of perception and thought, and exists only as a property of mind. These insights give the first glimmerings of a new way of seeing the cosmos: not as a mineral wasteland but a place inhabited by creatures.' So it's not as if consciousness is a mysterious essence, but that emergence of organic life is the medium in which objects and structures become navigable and intelligible. That's why I continue to argue that mind is not an emergent phenomenon, an unexplained add-on to the doings of matter and energy but is intrinsic to the order of nature. Not as a consequence but as its ground.

What are your thoughts? — Esse Quam Videri

What I have in mind is something that’s been central to my thinking for a long time. The mind-created world essay (this thread sprouted from that one) grew out of an earlier attempt to articulate how contemporary cognitive science has converged—somewhat unexpectedly—with a broadly Kantian insight.

The basic point is that the world as experienced is not a passive imprint of a mind-independent reality (per John Locke and empiricism more generally). Rather, the mind (or brain) actively synthesises disparate sensory inputs with organising structures—categories, forms, constraints—at a level largely below conscious awareness. This synthetic activity gives rise to what Kant called the subjective unity of perception: the coherent, stable world that shows up for us at all. It is not too far-fetched to compare the h.sapiens forebrain as a remarkably sophisticated VR generator.

There’s good empirical support for this. Neuropsychological disorders— like visual agnosia—show that when this integrative synthesis breaks down, the “world” fragments in very specific ways. This is not a matter of losing access to an external object so much as losing the capacity to bind features into a unified perceptual field (Oliver Sacks books had a lot to say on this.)

It's also the case that neuroscience still lacks a clear account of how this synthesis is implemented. The so-called neural binding problem highlights precisely this gap: there is no agreed-upon neural locus or mechanism that explains how distributed processes are unified into a single phenomenal scene. That absence matters philosophically, because it undercuts the assumption that perceptual unity is simply “read off” from the world (ref).

Andrew Brook argues that this places Kant as almost 'the godfather of cognitive science' because the core Kantian insight, not that the world is unreal, but that objectivity itself is constituted through cognitive synthesis, which has become influential through constructivism in many different disciplines.

That’s the sense in which I say the “mind-independent world,” as commonly understood today, is not a brute given (per the Myth of the Given) but a construct—one grounded in real experience, certainly, but mediated by cognitive conditions and cultural factors we usually overlook, because they've become second nature, and hence, in some basic sense, unconscious, or at least sub-conscious.

What do you think "thickness" or "depth" of meaning are, if not either polysemy or ambiguity? — Janus

Polysemy is pretty close. I was thinking more in terms of the kinds of 'hinge words' which are central in various domains of discourse. Actually, given T Clark's examples above, one obvious instance is 'love', which has a huge range of meanings. I've been at more than one wedding reception where one of the speeches described the eight different Greek words for 'love', typically Eros (passionate/sexual), Philia (friendship/brotherly love), Storge (familial/natural affection), Agape (selfless/universal love), Ludus (playful/uncommitted), Mania (obsessive/mad love), Pragma (enduring/practical love), and Philautia (self-love) - which is an attempt to differentiate the many overlapping meanings in the one term.

What came to mind immediately for me were 'real' and 'to exist', as opposed to 'real' and 'fake'. — Janus

I think (J will correct me if I'm wrong) one of the motivations for this post was a discussion whether 'reality' and 'existence' and be differentiated, citing C S Peirce, who makes that distinction. Whereas in common discourse, they are naturally regarded as synonyms - that what is real is what exists and vice versa.

Thank you once again.

Hence “agent” and “patient” are necessarily in one sense the same, and in another sense “other” and unlike one another; and since “agent” and “patient” are identical in kind and like, but unlike in species, and it is contraries which have these characteristics, it is clear that contraries and their “intermediates” are capable of being affected and of acting reciprocally — Aristotle, On Coming to Be and Passing Away, 323b, Forster and Furley

This is what snagged Descartes, with his 'complete otherness' of res extensa and res cogitans, and why Cartesian philosophy engendered problems that Aristotelian philosophy does not.

Goes to the point of the sense in which the subject can be reflexivly self-aware. Surely the subject can form an image of itself - that is what I think constitutes ego, the subject's idea of itself - but the processes which Kant term 'synthetic' function below the level of ego - it was in that sense that Kant and Schopenhauer anticipated Freud.

Doesn’t Freud’s discovery of the unconscious (if indeed a discovery it was, as it had been anticipated previously) have some bearing on the question of self-knowledge? There is plenty of documentation of ‘Freud’s debt to Schopenhauer’ e.g. here. That aspect of the mind that is available to conscious introspection is according to Freud ‘the tip of an iceberg’, with the remainder of the body suspended beneath the surface.

Streetlight, when he was around, alerted me to a book, a very advanced Kant studies book, Konstantin Polok - Kant's Theory of Normativity: Exploring the Space of Reason. I did acquire it, and read from it, but can't claim to have mastered it. But it shows how Kant adapted Aristotle's matter-form principle into 'transcendental hylomorphism'. 'Pollok argues that for Kant, human cognition is structured by a "matter-form" dichotomy where sensible data (matter) is ordered by a priori mental structures (form), such as the categories of understanding and forms of intuition. (ref).

I also learned that Kant adopted Aristotle's 'categories' with only minor changes.

So, yes, I think there's a great deal of continuity from Plato>Aristotle>Kant, while also considerable modifications.

That's a big question! 'Biosemiotics' about which I've learned a lot from this forum, sees living systems in terms of the interpretation of signs (which is what semiotics is). Whether any 'information' exists in that sense outside biological systems is moot, in my view, but it's a big question.

Information is not a metaphysically basic, because it is not ontologically autonomous. It does not exist in itself, but only as a specification of states, relations, or constraints within systems. To treat it to a metaphysical primitive alongside matter or energy is to reify something relational and semantic. Biological information is not a substance encoded in genes, but a system-relative way of describing how material differences constrain developmental and functional outcomes in organisms. So I’m not saying that the term ‘information’ doesn’t mean anything, but that the way it is sometimes used gives it a meaning it doesn’t really have.

Thanks! I notice your musings on that question above. The problem with 'information' is that, as a general term, it doesn't mean anything. It has to specify something or be about something to be a meaningful expression. Unlike, say, 'energy', which is 'the capacity to do work' and which is also defineable in particular contexts.

There's a well-known and often-quoted aphorism from Norbert Weiner:

The mechanical brain does not secrete thought 'as the liver does bile,' as the earlier materialists claimed, nor does it put it out in the form of energy, as the muscle puts out its activity. Information is information, not matter or energy. No materialism which does not admit this can survive at the present day. — Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine

So what we to do? Admit it! So if we admit that information is fundamental, like matter and energy, that goes some way to addressing this insight. But really not that far - as you grasp, designating something 'information' really doesn't get us that far.

Machines can interpret information and derive meaning from it. — hypericin

But can they? :chin: I've been interacting with AI since the day it came out - actually three weeks since the essay in the OP was published on Medium - and I think all of the ones I use (ChatGPT, Claude.ai and gemini.google would query that. I put the question to ChatGPT, which replied:

It depends what is meant by “interpret” and “derive meaning.” Machines certainly manipulate information and can model the patterns of meaningful discourse. But meaning in the strict sense involves intentionality, normativity, and understanding something as something.

My experience with AI systems strongly suggests they do not possess this. Whatever meaning appears is supplied by the human user in their engagement with the output, not generated in the system itself. But it's an amazingly realistic simulcrum, I'll give you that! And also, not a hill I would wish to die on, as it is another of those very divisive issues.

(I created another thread on that topic, https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/16095/artificial-intelligence-and-the-ground-of-reason/p1, which also has a link to a rather good Philosophy Now essay on the subject.)

Very good.

I often repeat this, but the translation of 'ousia' as 'substance' is misleading. In modern usage, substance suggests an objective existent, which is not what 'ousia' means. Ousia is closer to “being” or “what-it-is-to-be.” Once this is recognised, Aristotle no longer looks like a precursor to object-based realism, and the role of actuality — including the actuality of knowing — can’t be reduced to the cataloging of objects.

The IEP article on The Metaphysics has two sections on the translation of 'ousia', part of which is:

Boethius, in his commentaries on Aristotle ...always translated ousia as substantia, and his usage seems to have settled the matter. And so a word designed by the anti-Aristotelian Augustine to mean a low and empty sort of being turns up in our translations of the word whose meaning Aristotle took to be the highest and fullest sense of being. Descartes, in his Meditations, uses the word 'substance' only with his tongue in his cheek; Locke explicitly analyzes it as an empty notion of an I-don’t-know-what; and soon after the word is laughed out of the vocabulary of serious philosophic endeavor. It is no wonder that the Metaphysics ceased to have any influence on living thinking: its heart had been cut out of it by its friends. — IEP

Imagine if this passage, we said:

412a11, It is bodies especially which are thought to be substances subjects, and of these, especially natural bodies; for these are sources of the rest.

('The rest' incidentally being artifacts, parts and properties, relations, etc).

So, here, 'subject' is nearer in meaning to the original 'being', and it gives the whole phrase a subtly different meaning, with the caveat that 'subjects' is also not exactly right. But it is arguably nearer the mark that 'substance' (IEP explains where that translation originated.)

I take the 'soul as the form of the body' to mean the soul (psuche) is the principle of the body.

I scanned them. But they're artifacts, they're built by human designers, to emulate aspects of biology. Surely even you can spot the difference between that, and naturally-occuring organisms? Or does it suit you to try and obfuscate it? Maybe something you don't want to know?

"This self-organizing swarm was created in the lab of Radhika Nagpal...."

If you want to press a point, helps first to understand what point that is.

Really? — 180 Proof

Yes, really, 180. All machines, all systems, computers, and devices are allopoeitic, their organising principles are imposed from the outside by those who manufacture and program them. Organisms are autopoeitic, self-organizing. Chalk and cheese. Systems can be made to self-organise in a way analogous to organisms, but, you know, these are not naturally occuring.

I apologize if I've read too much into your critique. Hopefully the discussion has proved interesting nonetheless. — Esse Quam Videri

Very much so. You're plainly an expert interlocutor, and I value your contributions.

I think you’re rather over-dramatising my view. My argument isn’t against realism as such, nor against inquiry into it. It’s against the presumption that reality is exhausted by the objective domain. Scientific realism, insofar as it ‘brackets’ the subject as a methodological step, turns that bracketing into an ontological claim, that all that can be known, can be made subject to scientific analysis. That is precisely where methodological morphs into metaphysical naturalism. My point is that objectivity itself presupposes reflexive awareness, which itself cannot be captured within the scope of objective analysis (‘facing up to the problem of consciousness’). That marks a principled limit, not a failure of inquiry. And I do think an acute sense of the unknowable is not just mysticism, it’s also realism in a different register. Humans are not all-knowing as a matter of principle, not just because of the limitless subject matter of scientific enquiry. Discursive knowledge doesn’t just have limits, it also has limitations.

I will add, I’m in no way ‘anti-science’ in the sense that a lot of those on both the far left and far right are. I’m fully cognizant of the benefits of science, I’m not an anti-vaxxer or climate change denialist (and I know people who are.) What I’m protesting is viewing philosophical questions through scientific perspectives. An example we’ve been debating is D M Armstrong (‘Materialist Theory of Mind’) who believes that philosophy should be fully integrated with or even subordinated to scientific standards of enquiry. Again this is where Kant is invaluable as he was confronting just these kinds of questions.

When form enters the mind it is still bound to the matter of the organism, but in a different mode of existence — Esse Quam Videri

I’m not highly educated in Aristotle and Thomist philosophy, but the way hylomorphic dualism is understood in that philosophy impresses me. That ‘different mode of existence’ is insight into the intelligible domain:

…if the proper knowledge of the senses is of accidents, through forms that are individualized, the proper knowledge of intellect is of essences, through forms that are universalized. Intellectual knowledge is analogous to sense knowledge inasmuch as it demands the reception of the form of the thing which is known. But it differs from sense knowledge so far forth as it consists in the apprehension of things, not in their individuality, but in their universality. — Thomistic Psychology, A Philosophical Analysis of the Nature of Man, by Robert E. Brennan, O.P., Macmillan Co., 1941.

The point I want to make is that this was a ‘participatory ontology’. Man was not yet outside nature, the ‘accidental byproduct of the collocation of atoms’ in Russell’s phrase. But I’m not proposing a reactionary critique of modernism. It’s a matter of understanding the tectonic shifts in the meaning of Being that have occurred over this period of history.

[ I don’t accept the metaphor of the biological machine. Organisms are self organizing in a way no machine can be. Aside from that, I see your point.

A thought-experiment i started a thread with, on this very same topic.

There is a sentry in a watchtower, looking through a telescope. The watchtower stands on top of a headland which forms the northern entrance to a harbour. The sentry’s job is to keep a lookout.

When the sentry sees a ship on the horizon, he sends a signal about the impending arrival. The signal is sent via a code - a semaphore, comprising a set of flags.

One flag is for the number of masts the ship has, which provides an indication of the class, and size, of the vessel; another indicates its nationality; and the third indicates its expected time of arrival - before or after noon.

When he has made this identification he hoists his flags, and then tugs on a rope which sounds a steam-horn. The horn alerts the shipping clerk who resides in an office on the dockside about a mile away. He comes out of his office and looks at the flags through his telescope. Then he writes down what they tell him - three-masted ship is on the horizon; Greek; arriving this afternoon.

He goes back inside and transmits this piece of information to the harbourmaster’s cottage via Morse code, where it is written in a log-book by another shipping clerk, under ‘Arrivals’.

In this transaction, a single item of information has been relayed by various means. First, by semaphore; second, by Morse code; and finally, in writing. The physical forms and the nature of the symbolic code is completely different in each step: the flags are visual, the morse code auditory, the log book entry written text. But the same information is represented in each step of the sequence.

The question I want to explore is: in such a case, what stays the same, and what changes?

It was an epic thread, but my view is that the physical form changes, while the meaning stays the same, which says something important about the nature of information.

I am intrinsically conscious of my conscious acts - otherwise they wouldn’t be conscious acts. — Esse Quam Videri

Not an impasse but a misunderstanding.

Of course I am aware of my seeing, and I know that I am knowing, but that is not the point at issue.

The point is categorical, not psychological. There is a difference between reflexive awareness and object-awareness. By way of analogy: just as the eye is present in every act of seeing without ever appearing as a seen thing, subjective consciousness is present in every experience without itself appearing as an object of experience.

This is precisely what “transcendental” means in both Kant and Husserl: that which makes experience possible without itself being given in experience. Accordingly, the way the mind constructs or constitutes the world cannot itself appear as an item within experience, because it is the condition of experience as such.

We are therefore not normally aware of the mind’s world-constituting activity. Becoming aware of it requires a reflective shift that is conceptually and phenomenologically difficult—precisely because it concerns the enabling conditions of experience, not one more experience among others. It is that which makes self-knowledge so difficult.

I think you’re still attributing to me a denial of self-awareness, which I haven’t made. Unless that distinction is accepted, we’re talking past one another.

But, do forms exist in the world? If they are only grasped by intellect, in what sense do they exist?
— Wayfarer

Recall that in the Aristotelian tradition material substance is a compound of matter, form and existence. Form is what actualizes matter and doesn’t exist independently of matter. So yes, in that tradition, forms exist in the world in a mind-independent way as immanent to material substance - not in the mind of God, nor in a Platonic “third-realm” — Esse Quam Videri

Forms are real in Aristotle’s sense, but their reality is not the reality of an object of perception. Their mode of being is inseparable from intelligibility itself. And if that is the case, how could they 'exist in the world in a mind-independent way'? In Aristotle, form is real, but its reality is not the reality of an object. Since form exists only as intelligible principle of actualiszation, saying that it exists “in a mind-independent way” already presumes a notion of existence I think is foreign to Aristotle. Aristotle rejects a separate transcendent 'realm of Forms', but that doesn’t entail that forms are what we would understand as phenomenal existents. Their mode of being is formal and intelligible, not material. So while forms are in particulars, they do not exist in the same sense that way that particulars do.

I don’t agree with the idea that the subject is forever hidden behind a veil of representation — Esse Quam Videri

I didn't say that. I said, the subject is not an object, except to another subject. When i look at you, I see another subject as object, although the fact that we use personal pronouns acknowledges the fact that you are another subject, and not an object. First-person subjectivity is real, but it is not something that can appear to itself as an object. That’s a categorical point, not a skeptical one.

I would argue that consciousness is intrinsically reflexive such that we can experience our experiencing, understand our understanding, reason about our reasoning, etc. — Esse Quam Videri

We can obviously think about our own thinking, but it remains the fact that although we can see our eye in the mirror, we cannot see our own act of seeing. Also a categorical distinction.

Yes, form can only be grasped by nous - the very same forms that also exist in the world independently of nous. — Esse Quam Videri

But, do forms exist in the world? If they are only grasped by intellect, in what sense do they exist? That is a very large question, of course, and one that I by no means expect to be able to resolve. But if they are intelligible objects, then their existence is by definition intelligible.

In the pre-modern tradition this was expressed by saying that forms exist “in the divine intellect.” That wasn’t meant as a theological add-on, but as a way of saying that intelligibility has a transcendental ground. The intellect's grasp of an intelligible is what makes objectivity possible. They were said to be 'truly so', in a way that overflows even the objective reality, in that they were the form that the particular strived to become.

The late medieval rejection of transcendentals marks a decisive shift: intelligibility is no longer treated as foundational, but is increasingly reduced to what can be abstracted from empirical particulars (which is nominalism). That shift ultimately culminates in modern empiricism and the contemporary “immanent frame” (Charles Taylor).

The critique presented in the “mind-created world” is not an attempt to revive the doctrine of the divine intellect, but to show that mind can still be understood as foundational even within the immanent frame, once we abandon the assumption that reality can be grasped solely in terms of objects.

AI systems can be fully described and specified in terms of information science. They are not in the least conscious. A microbe has a higher degree of consciousness than does a multi-billion dollar data processing centre running the most up-to-date AI system. At the same time, because of the enormous amounts of information they have absorbed, and the ability they have to cross reference and infer meanings, they very well emulate what conscious beings such as ourselves might say.

One of the things that comes to my mind is a discussion I read years ago about 'thick terms' in philosophy. Most of those are those terms with great depth of meaning, such as the examples you provide - goodness, existence, reality, consciousness, mind, and so on. Looking it up, it was Bernard Williams, another philosopher I believe you have mentioned. Thick terms are both descriptive and evaluative (or normative). He situated the discussion in the context of the fact/value distinction, and whether the descriptive and evaluative aspects of the terms can be separated. (Examples included courageous, brutal, kind, etc).

Seems to me that Sider is doing something different - he is trying to come up with a kind of meta-philosophical framework against which the incommensurability of divergent explanatory paradigms can be interpreted. It is, tongue-in-cheek, post Tower of Babel - a situation where the fragmentation of discourse has become all-pervading. We need a kind of Rosetta Stone to enable analytic philosophers to make sense of what existentialists are saying.

Do you think that’s what it is about?

There is something I'll add, as a long-time forum habitué. There is an unspoken prohibition in much of modern philosophy against expressions and ideas that can be associated with religion, even if tenuously.

When I did undergrad philosophy, I formed the view that a great deal of modern English-language philosophy is deliberately couched in terms which exclude anything associated with classical metaphysics. That reached its sharpest expression with logical positivism (in which I did a unit), but it also animates many of the debates here.

There's also the matter of temperament. Some are temperamentally drawn to religious ideas, others are temperamentally averse to them.

So there are several dynamics at play in many of these debates, often revolving around unstated premises and beliefs.

I've got two of Thomas Nagel's essays online which are relevant, Secular Philosophy and the Religious Temperament and Evolutionary Naturalism and the Fear of Religion. Thomas Nagel is important, because he's no religious apologist, indeed he says he is atheist with no 'sensus divinatus', and he's well regarded in analytic philosophy. (Although since his 2012 Mind and Cosmos, he is routinely accused of giving 'aid and comfort to creationists', but to me that just signifies the close-mindedness of his detractors,)

↪180 Proof asserts that Formal (mathematical) Logic is the arbiter of true/false questions. — Gnomon

I'm not interested in being drawn into comments about debates with 180proof. From time to time I may respond to his comments directed at me.

As for AI - I recommend spending some time with one of the AI systems, they're freely available. Claude.ai is as good as any. Their model is such that they are time-limited - they will limit the number of responses unless you sign up for a subscription. But you will find them vastly superior to random search results generated by Google (a fact that Google itself is well aware of.) I think you would be surprised by the depth and nuance of the responses they're capable of giving.

How else do we know "what is true"? — Gnomon

Notice that in the context of science, this is usually limited to a specific question or subject matter, but can also then be expanded to include general theories and hypotheses. Philosophical questions are much more open-ended and often not nearly so specific. That is the subject of another thread, The Predicament of Modernity.

The Galilean division. This marks a major turning point in the history of ideas. In seeking to render nature mathematically intelligible, Galileo distinguished between primary and secondary qualities: the former—extension, shape, motion, and number—belong to objects themselves and are therefore measurable; the latter—colour, taste, sound, and all that pertains to sense or value—were deemed to exist only in the perceiving mind. This move, later assumed by the British Empiricists, established the framework of modern science but also quietly redefined reality as whatever could be expressed in quantitative terms. The world thus became a domain of pure objectivity, stripped of meaning, while meaning itself was relegated to the interior realm of subjective experience.

That accounts for a lot of what is going on here.

Meaning requires a Me. A digital computer has no self-concept to serve as the Subject to interpret incoming data relative to Self-interest. Does AI know itself? — Gnomon

I tossed this to Claude. Read on if you wish.

So we have three things:

*A subject
*An object
*A relation between subject and object — Esse Quam Videri

But surely this construction is made from a perspective outside all three of them! Look, you say, on the one side, the proverbial chair, on the other, the subject, and between them, the act of cognition. But that observation can only be made from third person perspective. Which is fine, as far as it goes, but it is, again, an abstraction. The subject whom you are here designating an object, is only object from a third-person or external perspective. So the entire construction still remains 'vorstellung', representation, in Schopenhauer's terms.

This line of thought has been greatly elaborated by later phenomenology and existentialism.

what I am skeptical of is the notion that the entirety of the contents of the lebenswelt exists only in the mind. — Esse Quam Videri

Recall a key claim from the mind-created world OP:

it is empirically true that the Universe exists independently of any particular mind.

So I am acknowledging the empirical facts of the matter. I say at the outset that the claim is not that 'the world is all in the mind' in a naive sense. But that

what we know of its existence is inextricably bound by and to the mind we have, and so, in that sense, reality is not straightforwardly objective. It is not solely constituted by objects and their relations. Reality has an inextricably mental aspect, which itself is never revealed in empirical analysis.

This is the fulcrum of the entire argument, and where it is most indebted to Kant. I'm not saying that 'the object' ceases to exist sans observer, but that it neither exists, nor doesn't exist. Either claim rests on an inherent notion of what it means for something to exist. ('Neither existent nor non-existent' is what I take the 'in-itself' to denote.)

The natural sciences will proceed entirely in terms of what is objectively so, with no regard for this point. The discoveries of quantum physics, however, have obliged science to reckon with 'the observer' - which is the impact of 'the observer problem'.

A great deal of the dialectic of modern philosophy has vacillated between 'the object alone is real', materialism, and 'the subject alone is real', Berkelian idealism. Kant threads the needle between those two extremes. He doesn't deny the empirical reality of the objective domain but notes that the mind provides the context within which the sense of the objective world is intelligible:

If we take away the subject or even only the subjective constitution of the senses in general, then not only the nature and relations of objects in space and time, but even space and time themselves would disappear, and as appearances they cannot exist in themselves, but only in us. — COPR, B59

As Paul Davies notes (The Goldilocks Enigma, p. 271), cosmologist Andrei Linde argues—on the basis of quantum cosmology—that time disappears when the universe is treated as a whole, and can only be recovered by partitioning the universe into an observer-with-a-clock and the rest. In that precise sense, the observer plays a constitutive role: without it, the universe is “dead,” i.e. non-temporal. Linde develops the technical basis of this claim in Inflation, Quantum Cosmology and the Anthropic Principle (hep-th/0211048), while expressing its philosophical implications more explicitly in talks and interviews (including this Closer to Truth interview with Robert Lawrence Kuhn).

I think he's trying to convey precisely the same point as Kant.

As for the unknowable nature of the in-itself. Kant has been criticized for this suggestion from the time it was made, but I don't think it's nearly so radical as it is often depicted. I'd endorse this:

Bottom line is we don’t know how we know stuff, but we’re at a complete loss if we then say we really don’t know anything. — Mww

I will happily concede that some readings of Kant seem to leave us completely separated from an unknowable reality. But on the other hand, a sense of the 'unknowability of existence' is a fundamental philosophical virtue in my book.

A form existing in a mind-independent way (esse naturale) is always potentially intelligible. When the intellect grasps the form it becomes actually intelligible (esse intentionale). However, it is still one-and-the-same form now instantiated in two different ways. — Esse Quam Videri

It is nevertheless the case that the form can only be grasped by nous. That is what rationality enables, it is the faculty that makes us 'the rational animal'. The philosophical question is, in what sense do forms exist? Again, they're not phenomenal existents (unless you accept the D M Armstrong definition which equates forms with attributes of particulars, which I don't.) They are, as per the classical tradition, intelligibles - not dependent on the mind, but only perceptible to the intellect.

What do the characteristics of objecthood apply to if not to an object? I think we can (probably) both agree that objecthood must apply to an object, but notice that so far we have said nothing about whether the object is or is not dependent on the mind. In my opinion, this is as it should be. The question of whether a given object is mind-independent is a question that should be asked about specific objects, it’s not something to be settled ahead of time when inquiring into the nature of objects in general. If we stipulate that the characteristics of objecthood apply only to mind-dependent objects from the outset, then we’ve simply ruled out realism by fiat. This is fine - there’s nothing wrong with building one’s philosophy on top of such assumptions, but it doesn’t constitute an argument against realism. — Esse Quam Videri

I’m not claiming that objects are mind-dependent entities. I’m claiming that objecthood is not a property that pre-existing things have independently of cognition. The object is the result of apperceptive synthesis. Your objection presupposes that objects are already there as objects prior to that synthesis, which is exactly the assumption I’m questioning. Otherwise you'd have the absurd situation of differentiating objects from 'things which aren't objects' independently of any act of identification or synthesis. The whole point of the argument is to protest the notion that we're passive recipients of an already-existing world. In reality we are cognitive agents who's mind is always actively constructing our experienced world - the lebenswelt, the world of lived meanings.

From a classical realist perspective this makes sense because in all cases the mind is grasping form. You’ll recall that in the Aristotelian tradition substance is interpreted as a metaphysical compound of matter, form (and later also existence). — Esse Quam Videri

I agree that for Aristotle the intellect grasps form, not representations. But for Aristotle, that is precisely why the form is not mind-independent in the empiricist sense. In knowing, the intellect becomes the form; the form exists as intelligible only in being apprehended. So while the thing may exist independently as a composite of matter and form, objecthood and intelligibility are not properties it has apart from cognition. That is why Aristotle does not treat knowledge as the passive reception of a ready-made object, but as the actualisation of form in νοῦς.

The point of the 'idealism in context' argument, is that idealism arose because of the loss of the sense of 'participatory knowing' that is found in Aristotelian Thomism, which preserved the sense of the 'union of knower and known' that later empiricism replaces with a spectator theory of knowledge, the sense of being apart from or outside of reality. And that is more than just an epistemological difference, it's a profound existential re-orientation.

This post. You’re treating “the experiment” or “the state of affairs” as the object that perdures, so objecthood on this context is not in question. But, as you already acknowledged, the 'true ontology' is unknown. What this means is that there is not some 'actual state of affairs' or 'object with determinate properties' at the fundamental level. And this is something broadly acknowledged about quantum theory. It is why Roger Penrose is always saying that it must be false or incomplete - because, he says, it should - again, stipulative - provide a true description of what is really there, prior to any act of measurement.

I'm not going to continue to argue this point, which is simply this: that 'the thesis that everything that exists has a common ontological structure: a particular with intrinsic properties' cannot be sustained on the basis of physics.

----------------

After this post, I'll be offline a couple of days.

You can’t stipulate your way out of the uncertainty principle.

I further narrow it down to the thesis that everything that exists has a common ontological structure: a particular with intrinsic properties — Relativist

However

The true ontology is unknown, — Relativist

It's one of those ideas that kind of straddles philosophy and science, that we can say.

Depending on how you look at it :rofl:

The title of this thread was intentionally chosen to evoke some relationship between the Universe, as a whole system, and human consciousness as a part (and maybe participant) in that system. In Federico Faggin's book Irreducible, he tends to use Plotinus' notion of The One (ultimate source of reality) instead of the Platonic notion of Cosmos (the universe conceived as a beautiful, harmonious, and well-ordered system). But some people prefer the religious term “God” in their discussions of Ontology (what we can know about our existence). — Gnomon

I appreciate the careful thought you've put into this post. But it has to be acknowledged that in these discussions, we're touching on deep questions of philosophy which have occupied great minds for millenia. And also we're in an unprecedented cultural situation where knowledge of these ideas has been widely (almost indiscriminately!) circulated first through mass media and now through interactive media. So it is possible for us all to pick up fragments of these ideas and combine them in various ways. It's a complete melting-pot. But then there's also the element of crisis, a civillisational, environment and political.

So there's a lot going on here.

Federico Fagin

Fagin, as I said, I respect. Actually I saw him speak at the last Science and Nonduality conference I went to, in 2013, in San Jose. (I did know the way there, fortunately.) He's an open sort of fellow, doesn't come across at all pretentious. This book of his, I'm sure, has been many decades in incubation, he too has gathered all these bits and pieces from world wisdom literature, and combined them with his particular philosophical outlook. That is informed both by his background as a phycisist, inventor and technologist, and also by the overwhelming spiritual awakening he had at Lake Tahoe many years ago.

But a problem I detect with it is that he hasn't been obliged to defend his thesis, which he would have done, had he come up through higher education. I've discussing the book with ChatGPT, who observed that, had his work been presented as a thesis, he would have had to have fielded questions such as:

“This is no longer physics but philosophy — please indicate the grounds for the shift.”
“You are making an ontological claim here. On what basis?”
“Is this inference licensed by the formalism, or is it a metaphysical choice?”

All these questions would oblige Fagin to justify some of the assertions he makes. And he well might be able to answer them - but they have never been asked. So he comes across as something of a maveric or a dark horse. So though he draws on many sources, it is difficult to map his ideas against those of his possible peers in consciousness studies. I don't think his writing is in the least harmful or pernicious, and I overwhelmingly agree with at least the aim of his project, but I don't think it's going to get a lot of traction for these reasons. The fact that it was published by Kastrup's Essential Foundation is not also necessarily a point in its favour. But all that said, I still think Irreducible is an important and serious book, and it's not my aim to dissuade you or anyone from reading it.


Non-dualism in Culture and Society

Getting back to that point about the 'melting pot' - one of Kastrup's frequent interlocutors is Swami Sarvapriyananda of the New York Vedanta Society. That organisation was founded by Swami Vivekananda in the 19th century, as part of Vivekananda's whistle-stop tour of the USA after the World Parliament of Religions (1889 from memory). So it's a venerable institution, and the Swami is an erudite and learned speaker (indeed I recommend his online lectures.)

But notice the context of Advaita Vedanta: it is an orthodox school of Hinduism, which observes the strict and traditional code of ethics (not that the Swami exaggerates that in his talks). These are the 'restraints and observances' common to yogic schools:

• Yama (moral discipline)
• Niyama (observances)
• Asana (physical postures)
• Pranayama (breathing techniques)
• Pratyahara (sense withdrawal)
• Dharana (concentration)
• Dhyana (absorption or meditation)
  Samadhi (enlightenment or bliss)

That is "cultural context" (although Advaita, in particular, tends to be among the more radical of the orthodox Hindu schools). It is in that context that the principles of Advaita (non-dualism) are conveyed to students (chela). The meaning of Upaniṣads, the core texts of Vedanta, is 'sitting closely' - the idea being that these teachings are conveyed teacher-to-student in a religious context around a strick ethical discipline. Which is why I suspect much of the popular literature on nondualism fails as it doesn't embody the existential transformation which the genuine teaching entails (there's a British Vedanta teacher who has written extensively on this, see https://www.advaita-vision.org/traditional-versus-neo-advaita/)

I'm not trying to be moralistic in saying this, as I myself am not a celibate vegetarian yogi. But I mention it, because this background is often not conveyed in philosophical discussions of non-dualism. (I think Bernardo Kastrup would probably appreciate that point, but again, it doesn't necessarily come across in his dialogues with the Swami.)

Metaphysical Realism

Another difficult subject. Suffice to say, I think it's the understanding, taken as obvious by a lot of our contemporaries, that science is the arbiter of what is truly the case. But scientific method embodies certain characteristic attitudes and procedures which are problematic in a philosophical context. First and foremost is the implicit acceptance of empirical experience or sense-data, subjected to mathematical analysis and extrapolation, as the sole source of valid insight. There's an implicit acceptance that the sensory experience of the world conveys what is truly the case, so long as it is interpreted correctly in light of scientific standards of evidence. But as I often say, I think the discovery of the uncertainty principle by Werner Heisenberg 100 years ago, holes that kind of scientific realism below the waterline. Learning how to think about and cope with that is one of the chalenges we face.

You’re treating the wavefunction as if it were the state of an object with determinate properties, and then explaining measurement as a change in those properties. Basically declaring that the experiment itself is an object. But the fundamental object in question remains undetermined. The formal role of the wavefunction doesn’t, by itself, supply a foundational ontology.

a particular with intrinsic properties and extrinsic (relational) properties to other existents. — Relativist

If you mean this is the model, then it is falsified by physics. So this:

At exactly one point in your path, a distance relation of 5km emerged — Relativist

Is post measurement. The point at issue is what exists prior to the act of measurement. Prior to measurement there’s no determinate object with intrinsic properties.

With what model?

thanks for that clear-sighted analysis :clap: