Comments

  • The Mind-Created World
    I never said I don't care about the truth. — Janus

    You said:

    The truth doesn't matter to me, because it has no real impact on how I live my life. — Janus

    Done here.
  • Ukraine Crisis
    ↪RogueAI
    That’s what worries me. I said he’d betray Ukraine back in February. Rubio is now saying ‘both sides have to make sacrifices.’ As if Ukraine has not sacrificed enough already.
  • The Mind-Created World
    I notice you don't try to address any of the more telling points — Janus

    You said you don’t care abut the truth, makes no difference to your life, and it doesn’t matter to you what I think. You’re verging on trolling and I’d appreciate it if you desisted.

    For you, everything is either a matter for science, or a matter of subjective opinion. But when this is reflected back at you, you complain about it, even though it’s your frequently stated view.
  • The Mind-Created World
    ↪AmadeusD
    I am not arguing that it means that ‘the world is all in the mind’. It’s rather that, whatever judgements are made about the world, the mind provides the framework within which such judgements are meaningful. So though we know that prior to the evolution of life there must have been a Universe with no intelligent beings in it, or that there are empty rooms with no inhabitants, or objects unseen by any eye — the existence of all such supposedly unseen realities still relies on an implicit perspective. What their existence might be outside of any perspective is meaningless and unintelligible, as a matter of both fact and principle.

    Hence there is no need for me to deny that the Universe is real independently of your mind or mine, or of any specific, individual mind. Put another way, it is empirically true that the Universe exists independently of any particular mind. But 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. Whatever experience we have or knowledge we possess, it always occurs to a subject — a subject which only ever appears as us, as subject, not to us, as object.     — Wayfarer
  • Ukraine Crisis
    ↪RogueAI
    News is breaking that Trump is demanding that Ukraine relinquish the demand for NATO membership and recognize Russian occupation of the Crimea. I have no doubt he will sell out Ukraine to placate Putin. ‘Russia hoax? What Russia hoax?’ Putin can be well pleased with his American candidate.
  • The Mind-Created World
    you always seem to be pushing the idea that there is a certainly determinable truth — Janus

    :up:
  • The Mind-Created World
    Wayfarer says that because it is us thinking about the time before we existed that the time before we existed must be mind-dependent. On that stipulation everything we think about must be mind-dependent, as opposed to merely the way we think about it. He'll say that physicalism is incoherent because it is a concept we invented, and concepts are not physical, therefore physicalism cannot be true. I think that is tendentious nonsense. — Janus

    This mis-states my view. I am not saying that “because we think about a time before we existed, therefore that time must be mind -dependent.” That would indeed be a trivial claim. What I have argued is that the concept of “a time before we existed” is only ever available as a thought. The point isn’t that the past did not exist independently, but that whatever we say about it is mediated by concepts. That is very different to how it's been paraphrased above.

    Furthermore, a concept is not a physical thing — you can’t weigh it, touch it, or locate it in space. Yet concepts are indispensable to how we make sense of the world, including what is meant by 'physical' (which, incidentally, is something that is constantly being reviewed.) This doesn’t mean concepts are “unreal”; it means they belong to a different order of reality than the physical objects that they are describing. If physicalism ignores that, then it risks undermining its own claim to be coherent, since the doctrine itself is articulated in concepts. The 'standard model' of the atom is itself a mathematical construct, and whether there is any ultimately-existing point-particle which is material in nature is, shall we say, a contested question.

    the rise of science has caused us to become blind to something important in traditional "proper" philosophy, modernity has lost its way, "blind spot in science", physicalism could not possibly be a coherent position — Janus

    This is the subject of the book The Blind Spot of Science, by Adam Frank, Marcello Gleiser, and Evan Thompson.

    What the book says that science is blind to, is the role of the subject, or more broadly, subjectivity, in the way that it construes knowledge. A précis of some of the elements laid out in the introduction:

    1. The Bifurcation of Nature

    Claim: The world is divided into “real” external objects (light waves, particles, forces) and mere subjective appearances (color, warmth, taste, etc.).

    Blind spot: This division sidelines lived experience as illusory, even though it’s through experience that science arises in the first place. (This phrase is associated with Whitehead.)

    2. Reductionism

    Claim: The smallest entities (elementary particles) are most fundamental, and everything else can be explained by reducing it to them.

    Blind spot: This kind of reductionism assumes that wholes are nothing but their parts, ignoring emergent structures and relationships that can’t be captured at the micro-level.

    3. Objectivism

    Claim: Science offers a “God’s-eye view,” revealing reality exactly as it is, independent of human perspective.

    Blind spot: In practice, science is always done from within human contexts, perspectives, and methods—so the God’s-eye stance denies its own conditions of possibility.

    4. Physicalism

    Claim: Everything that exists is physical, and the list of physical facts exhausts all facts (chemical, biological, psychological, social).

    Blind spot: Treating this metaphysical thesis as self-evident erases the distinctiveness of meaning, mind, and culture, which don’t straightforwardly reduce to physics.

    5. Reification of Mathematical Entities

    Claim: Mathematics is the true language of nature, and mathematical structures are the universe’s real architecture.

    Blind spot: Elevating abstract models as if they are reality risks forgetting that they are human constructions grounded in lived experience.

    6. Experience as Epiphenomenal

    Claim: Consciousness is just a “user illusion,” like a desktop interface—useful but not fundamental.

    Blind spot: Reducing experience to an illusion undermines the fact that experience is the very condition by which anything—including science—appears at all.

    For those who don't think it is 'blah', details can be found here.
  • The Christian narrative
    ↪Banno
    I had in mind Aristotelian metaphysics, in particular. I realise that many subjects are now explored under that title, and that there is a revival of interest.
  • The Mind-Created World
    ↪Paine
    I wouldn't mind that. We all kind of left off, as it's a challenging book, but on the other hand, I thought we were actually making some headway. I'm willing, anyway.
  • The Christian narrative
    Metaphysics is about what is. Throw out metaphysics, there is no point speaking about the world in any scientific way.

    And it seems straightforward, but is considerably more difficult.     — Fire Ologist

    Even though I can see your point, I understand Banno's bafflement. You're saying it goes deeper than language, and I agree.

    I've mentioned before the book Thinking Being: Introduction to Metaphysics in the Classical Tradition. (bookmarked .pdf file). The introductory section on Parmenides, and the chapters on Plato and Aristotle, help to re-state the terminology of classical metaphysics in their original context.

    But the point is, modern analytical philosophers have a pretty jaundiced view of metaphysics. As far as they're concerned, it's archaic or superseded even while it deserves respect as part of the Western canon. That's a big part of their 'plain language' approach.

    I've tried to read up on contemporary modal metaphysics but found little sustenance in it. This is where Catholic and Orthodox philosophers are significant, as for them, philosophy is part of a living faith, a way-of-being. That's what I think you're trying to articulate. (There are also secular sources. Iris Murdoch's books on the Sovereignty of the Good and the metaphysics of morals for instance.)

    There's not a lot of point in many of these threads, because the theists will always look for reasons to believe, and the non-theists reasons not to. I'm nearer the former, but I do try and stay within the lanes of philosophy, rather than appeals to faith.

    (Another Catholic author and editor I very much admire was the late Stratford Caldicott. Poignant, as he had the same birth-year as myself, but died in 2014. Worth studying in my opinion.)
  • The Mind-Created World
    ↪Paine
    Please don't go to any trouble. Those passages you provided were on-point, but they are very dense and difficult, without the background in Hegel and Kant which Rödl has. It's only that, since this thread has been active (a couple of years now), I feel that its basic points are often been mis-interpreted (not saying by you.)
  • The Mind-Created World
    ↪Paine
    What do you see as the choices or sides that I'm making available?
  • Idealism in Context
    ↪Count Timothy von Icarus
    I've copied this passage you provided elsewhere because I would appreciate your perspective on the issue I've raised in the OP, specifically in two paragraphs after the heading The Matter with Matter.

    Reveal
    The earlier philosophy of St Thomas Aquinas, building on Aristotle, maintained that true knowledge arises from a real union between knower and known. As Aristotle put it, “the soul (psuchē) is, in a way, all things,”² meaning that the intellect becomes what it knows by receiving the form of the known object. Aquinas elaborated this with the principle that “the thing known is in the knower according to the mode of the knower.”³ In this view, to know something is not simply to construct a mental representation of it, but to participate in its form — to take into oneself, immaterially, the essence of what the thing is. (Here one may discern an echo of that inward unity — a kind of at-one-ness between subject and object — that contemplative traditions across cultures have long sought, not through discursive analysis but through direct insight.) Such noetic insight, unlike sensory knowledge, disengages the form of the particular from its individuating material conditions, allowing the intellect to apprehend it in its universality. This process — abstraction— is not merely a mental filtering but a form of participatory knowing: the intellect is conformed to the particular, and that conformity gives rise to true insight. Thus, knowledge is not an external mapping of the world but an assimilation, a union that bridges the gap between subject and object through shared intelligibility.

    By contrast, the word objective, in its modern philosophical usage — “not dependent on the mind for existence” — entered the English lexicon only in the early 17th century, during the formative period of modern science, marked by the shift away from the philosophy of the medievals. This marks a profound shift in the way existence itself was understood. As noted, for medieval and pre-modern philosophy, the real is the intelligible, and to know what is real is to participate in a cosmos imbued with meaning, value, and purpose. But in the new, scientific outlook, to be real increasingly meant to be mind-independent — and knowledge of it was understood to be describable in purely quantitative, mechanical terms, independently of any observer. The implicit result is that reality–as–such is something we are apart from, outside of, separate to.


    One of the central flaws in Kant’s theory of knowledge is that he has blown up the bridge of action by which real beings manifest their natures to our cognitive receiving sets. He admits that things in themselves act on us, on our senses; but he insists that such action reveals nothing intelligible about these beings, nothing about their natures in themselves, only an unordered, unstructured sense manifold that we have to order and structure from within ourselves. — W. Norris Clarke - The One and the Many: A Contemporary Thomistic Metaphysics

    So what I'm arguing is that it wasn't Kant who 'blew up the bridge', but the developments in the early modern period to which Kant was responding. As is well known, Kant accepted the tenets of Newtonian science, and sought to present a philosophy that could accomodate this, while still 'making room for faith' (his expression).

    I suspect, but I don't yet know, that some of the modern analytical Thomists - I'm thinking Bernard Lonergan - might have explored this issue. Also a difficult book called Kant's Theory of Normativity, Konstantin Pollok (ref).
  • The Christian narrative
    Is your claim that if the dog we call Bee had a different DNA, it would be a different dog? — Banno

    Of course, but it would still be a dog, not an elephant or a cat. Surely the distinction between different canines can be accomodated by the Thomistic distinction between essence and accident.
  • The Christian narrative
    It just seems like a pointless field of study - trivial, redundant, not informative, not interesting in light of my perspective on the world. — Apustimelogist

    Yet, here you are :wink:
  • The Christian narrative
    Are you saying the essence of a my dog, Bee, is her DNA? — frank

    As I understand it, and Heaven forbid, were it to come to pass that your dog Bee was caught in some terrible calamity, such that her mortal form were utterly destroyed, provided what was left was not incinerated, then her identity could be definitively ascertained from her DNA, by comparing it with remnants left on her artifacts etc. So, yes, DNA is very much like the molecular counterpart of 'essence'.

    Banno and I have discussed this before, but a Platonist riddle is sometimes presented in school texts, in regard to the question of form and identity:

    A man (not a man)
    Throws a stone (not a stone)
    At a bird (not a bird)
    On a tree (not a tree)

    The solution is, a eunuch (not a man, because, you know...) throws piece of pumice (not a stone, because it floats) at a bat (has wings, but also fur) hanging from a reed (not a tree, because no branches.)

    I suppose it's a rhetorical exercise in appearance and reality.

    I think the undercurrent to all of this (and metaphysics generally) is indeed the search for definition, in the sense of the ability to see what is. When reduced to textbook examples for pedagogical purposes, it seems straightforward, but in real life, it's often considerably more difficult.
  • The Mind-Created World
    I conclude that your position is somewhere in platonist territory, and that you think that nominalism amounts to denying their existence. I don't agree with either conjunct — Ludwig V

    The decline of Platonist realism is well-established intellectual history. The constellations of attitudes which Lloyd Gerson designates 'Ur-Platonism' (the broader Platonist movement including but not limited to the Dialogues of Plato) is realist about universals (see Edward Feser Join the Ur-Platonist Alliance). But to say that, is to invite the question, 'if they're real, where do they exist?' The usual response is to say that they're the products of the human mind, and so of the h.sapiens brain, conditioned as it is by adaptive necessity and so on. This is the 'naturalised epistemology' route. The neo-traditionalist approach is that the ability to perceive universals and abstract relations is the hallmark of the rational intellect which differentiates humans as 'the rational animal'. It doesn't take issue with the facts of natural science, but differs with respect to the interpretation of meaning.

    I thought you believed that our concepts and perceptions were all constructs. — Ludwig V

    One of the central questions of philosophy is what, if anything, exists sui generis—independent of construction—and what relation our mental constructs bear to it.
  • The Mind-Created World
    ↪Paine
    The Ted Kaczynski archive?

    ↪J
    I offer this far more simple excerpt from the Nishijima-roshi, a Sōtō Zen priest who died in 2012, in respect of the real and the existent:

    The Universe is, according to philosophers who base their beliefs on idealism, a place of the spirit. Other philosophers whose beliefs are based on a materialistic view, say that the Universe is composed of the matter we see in front of our eyes. Buddhist philosophy takes a view which is neither idealistic nor materialistic; Buddhists do not believe that the Universe is composed of only matter. They believe that there is something else other than matter. But there is a difficulty here; if we use a concept like spirit to describe that something else other than matter, people are prone to interpret Buddhism as some form of spiritualistic religion and think that Buddhists must therefore believe in the actual existence of spirit.

    So it becomes very important to understand the Buddhist view of the concept spirit. I am careful to refer to spirit as a concept here because in fact Buddhism does not believe in the actual existence of spirit. So what is this something else other than matter which exists in this Universe? If we think that there is a something which actually exists other than matter, our understanding will not be correct; nothing physical exists outside of matter.

    Buddhists believe in the existence of the Universe. Some people explain the Universe as a universe based on matter. But there also exists something which we call value or meaning. A Universe consisting only of matter leaves no room for value or meaning in civilizations and cultures. Matter alone has no value. We can say that the Universe is constructed with matter, but we must also say that matter works for some purpose.

    So in our understanding of the Universe we should recognize the existence of something other than matter. We can call that something spirit, but if we do we should remember that in Buddhism, the word spirit is a figurative expression for value or meaning. We do not say that spirit exists in reality; we use the concept only figuratively.     — Gudo Nishijima-roshi, Three Philosophies and One Reality

    Compare with Terrence Deacon’s absential:

    Absential: The paradoxical intrinsic property of existing with respect to something missing, separate, and possibly nonexistent. Although this property is irrelevant when it comes to inanimate things, it is a defining property of life and mind; described as a constitutive absence.

    Constitutive absence: A particular and precise missing something that is a critical defining attribute of 'ententional' phenomena, such as functions, thoughts, adaptations, purposes, and subjective experiences.

    Also Wittgenstein's aphorism:

    The sense of the world must lie outside the world. In the world everything is as it is and happens as it does happen. In it there is no value—and if there were, it would be of no value.
  • Idealism in Context
    ↪RussellA
    Ah, the promissory notes of materialism. Just don’t try to cash them.
  • Idealism in Context
    Even in fee will, the present has been determined. — RussellA

    What is a table to you, is a meal to a termite, and a landing place to a bird.

    A table is an object, not a relation. — RussellA

    Without wanting to wade into the endless quantum quandries, I really do not see how determinism can survive the uncertainty principle, nor the unpredictability of the quantum leap. This is what Einstein complained about, when he said 'God does not play dice'. But it seems irrefutable nowadays, that at a fundamental level, physical reality is not fully determined. The LaPlace Daemon model of inexorable past events determining a certain course has long gone.
  • The Christian narrative
    Apologies to all for the digression. It wasn’t my intention.
  • The Christian narrative
    The term "essence" has been used in very different ways throughout the history of philosophy. Locke's real/nominal essences are very different from what Hegel has in mind and both are very different from what modern analytics have in mind, with their "sets of properties"/bundle theories, which is wholly at odds with how the Islamic and Scholastic thinkers thought of essences. — Count Timothy von Icarus

    Not only different cultures, but also different forms, levels or states of consciousness. Something the Scholastics and Islamists will understand that the analytics will not.

    A lot of fuss about very little here. I think I triggered it, by trying to point out that the word 'essence' is obviously a form of the Latin 'esse', 'to be'. So it denotes the essential qualities of a particular, what makes it what it is.

    Apropos of which Max Delbrück, a physicist turned biologist, famously argued that Aristotle, in his biological writings, had anticipated the core principle of DNA: that a living being's development is guided by an inherent "form" or plan. Delbrück saw Aristotle's concept of the soul (psuche) as the form (morphe) that shapes and directs matter, mirroring the way DNA encodes the blueprint for an organism's development. He even humorously suggested that Aristotle deserved a Nobel Prize in biology for this insight (however Nobel prizes are never awarded posthumously, much less to someone who died more than two millenia ago.) Delbrück highlighted that it's the formal aspect of DNA, the information it carries, rather than the physical material of DNA itself, that is crucial for inheritance and development. This aligns with Aristotle's view that the soul (form) is distinct from the physical body. Also, presumably, one of the reasons that Aristotle's hylomorphism is still very much a live option in contemporary philosophy.

    Aristotle, in his writings on embryology and reproduction, emphasized the role of "form" or "entelechy" as the principle that shapes and guides the development of living things. He saw semen as carrying this form, which directs the development of the offspring.

    What has this to do with essence? It's that the same philosophical heritage that gave rise to 'essence' and 'substance', also gave rise to the scientific disciplines that discovered DNA. And I don't think this is coincidental.
  • The Musk Plutocracy
    I wasn’t able to find the David Pakman commentary — T Clark

    He has a YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/@thedavidpakmanshow . I much prefer Brian Tyler Cohen and Glenn Kirshner, although it should be acknowledged that the anti-MAGA media is feeling extremely discouraged at this time. The bad guys really are winning, or so it seems.
  • The Mind-Created World
    ↪J
    Right — and that’s why I found the Rödl passage interesting. He’s saying that logical principles don’t ground experience, but they also can’t be treated as a mind-independent reality separate from it. That’s why empirical knowledge remains incomplete if we treat it on its own. My point about the existence–reality distinction is very much in that spirit: we shouldn’t collapse reality into empirical existence, but we also shouldn’t reify reality as if it were some external substrate “out there".
  • Idealism in Context
    If one were to put it this way: instead of consciousness arising from matter, matter arises within consciousness. — Tom Storm

    I'm trying to stick with epistemological idealism: matter arises within consciousness, because consciousness is a necessary pre-requisite to knowledge. Whatever we know, is disclosed through consciousness. This is, I hope, also consistent with the phenomenological attitude of attention to the fundamental characteristics of lived experience. As Husserl says, 'the world is disclosed by consciousness' - not that 'consciousness' is some kind of magic ingredient.

    In other words, reality is pure consciousness. — Tom Storm

    On face value, this collapses all manner of important distinctions. You might encounter such a statement in for example, Advaita Vedanta, but there it situated within a framework which stipulates the context and meaning. In another context it might mean something very different.

    Kant is a kind of dualist with his phenomena/noumena distinction. — Tom Storm

    He is! Perhaps @Mww can check in here, but I often refer to this passage:

    The transcendental idealist... can be an empirical realist, hence, as he is called, a dualist, i.e., he can concede the existence of matter without going beyond mere self-consciousness and assuming something more than the certainty of representations in me, hence the cogito ergo sum. For because he allows this matter and even its inner possibility to be valid only for appearance– which, separated from our sensibility, is nothing – matter for him is only a species of representations (intuition), which are called external, not as if they related to objects that are external in themselves but because they relate perceptions to space, where all things are external to one another, but that space itself is in us. (A370) — A370

    My belief about the in-itself is that it has caused a great deal of baseless speculation, even by many learned expositors of Kant's philosophy. I interpret it very simply - it is simply the world (object, thing) as it is in itself outside all cognition and perception of it. As soon as the thought arises, well, what could that be? - the point is already lost! We're then trying to 'make something out of it'. But, we don't know! Very simple.
  • Donald Trump (All Trump Conversations Here)
    You guys should read more Wall Street Journal and less of whatever it is you're reading. — frank

    Washington Post, NY Times, Australian Broadcasting Commission, CNN, etc. Occasional stories from Wall Street Journal through Apple News. The ‘important stuff’ I see Trump doing is undermining democratic norms, attacking science, public education, public health and public broadcasting. Deprecating the power of Congress and attacking the Judiciary. Preparing to betray Ukraine out of his infatuation with strong-man Putin.
  • The Mind-Created World
    ↪Paine
    The title of that very difficult book is Self-Consciousness and Objectivity: An Introduction to Absolute Idealism. Do you think the absolute idealism of the title is something he is trying to advocate and explain? Or as something he wishes to rebut?

    ↪Apustimelogist
    Sorry, it was a bad choice of words on my part, I was irritated. To say it more philosophically: I read your responses to this OP as specious because I don’t think they demonstrate any grasp of the point being made. It is one thing to rebut an argument by showing faults with it, but not seeing the point of an argument is not a rebuttal, and nothing you’ve said indicates that you see the point of the argument.
  • The Mind-Created World
    why I think Wayfarer's crusade is largely vacuous and pointless. — Apustimelogist

    Whereas from my perspective that is a fair description of your responses to it, but let’s not get involved in mudslinging.

    I think that only things that are created and maintained in existence by the mind are mind-dependent. That makes for quite a short list. — Ludwig V

    That would be the mainstream understanding. The point of philosophical analysis is to see through it.
  • Ukraine Crisis
    From the day-after headlines, it seems pretty clear that Trump is going to back Putin and sell Ukraine out. Reports are circulating that Putin’s conditions for a ceasefire requiring the surrendering of territory including regions not yet under Russia’s control. I suspect Trump is going to press Putin’s case in these follow-up calls with Zelenskyy and NATO, and then accuse Ukraine of being uncooperative when they won’t go along with the terms. Marjorie Taylor Greene is already Trumpeting the view that Ukraine is the real culprit in all of this. The betrayal begins.
  • The Mind-Created World
    ↪Paine
    Can you unpack what Rödl means here by the incomprehensibility of the judgment of experience? Is he pointing to the problem of grounding causal necessity in logical necessity? And how do you see this bearing on our discussion? What do you mean by ‘the ground being sought by either lexicon’?
  • The Mind-Created World
    What, exactly, is their ontological standing? Are we talking platonism here? — Ludwig V

    The fact that the theoretical constructs are an essential constituent of what is considered real, while they're not themselves existent in the way that the objects of the theory are.
  • Idealism in Context
    So if someone says 'there is nothing except consciousness" what is your view of this? — Tom Storm

    My response would be 'what do you mean?' It might be a meaningful expression, but that would depend on whether it was being said by someone who actually understood it.
  • Idealism in Context
    I’m still not entirely clear on the exact difference between Kant’s transcendental idealism and classical idealism. Kant isn’t really saying that everything is consciousness, is he? He’s saying that there is something out there (we can't apprehend), and we shape our experience of it through our cognitive apparatus and this we experience as phenomena/reality. Which sounds similar to some of the perspectives you have offered. Thoughts? — Tom Storm

    I'm attempting to portray Kant's form of idealism. The term 'classical ideaiism' is a little misleading, because idealism itself is a modern idea - that's one of the points of the OP. The term only comes into use in the early modern period.

    The meaning of the expression 'everything is in consciousness' is elusive. It is often taken to mean that its adherents say the world is all in the mind of the perceiver - everything is in my consciousness. But that leads to problems of solipsism. I think it's the incorrect perspective - we're trying to stand apart from 'the world' and 'the observer' as if seeing them from some point outside both. But we can't do that.

    I really got the sense of what it means for 'mind to create world' through meditation - seeing that process unfolding moment to moment. This process of world-creation is actually going on, all the time - it is what consciousness is doing every second. Becoming directly aware of that world-making process is key. As I've mentioned, I learned about Kant from a scholarly book comparing Buddhist and Kantian philosophy (ref). At the same time this process is happening, there is a vastness beyond that process. I learned about that from Krishnamurti.

    Well said, except a minor quibble, — Mww

    Thanks, it was carelessly expressed on my part.

    I agree that it it seems plain that Edinburgh and London exist in different places independently of our knowledge of them.

    The concept "relation" certainly exists in our mind, in that I know that Edinburgh is to the north of London.

    But is it the case that relations exist independently of the mind?     — RussellA

    I see you’re taking a deflationary approach by treating relations as a matter of linguistic convention. But this, I think, misses Russell’s central claim in The World of Universals.

    The relation “north of” isn’t just a word we happen to use; it’s something our words pick out. If London had never been discovered, or if nobody ever thought about Edinburgh, the fact that one is north of the other would still obtain. Coordinates make this more explicit, but they don’t abolish the relation — they presuppose it. A system of latitude and longitude is itself a network of relations.

    The point is that universals are not “in the mind” — not mere thoughts or conventions. But nor are they independent existents like Edinburgh or London. They are real in the noetic sense: they are what is apprehended in thought. As Russell says, they are not thoughts, though when they are known they are objects of thought. That’s why Russell calls universals real — they aren’t “in the mind,” but only minds can apprehend them. Relations may be expressed in language, but they aren’t created by language — they’re the logical structure that language captures. Again the 'world-building' activity of the mind is always going on, but we don't notice that. We're looking through it, practicing philosophy and meditation is learning to look at it.

    In B276 of his Critique of Pure Reason, in his Refutation of Idealism, he attempts the proof of his theorem "The mere, but empirically determined, consciousness of my own existence proves the existence of objects in space outside me." — RussellA

    Indeed - which was directed at Berkeley's idealism. As I mentioned in the OP, after the first edition of CPR, critics said Kant was just recycling Berkeley's idealism, which annoyed him considerably. So he included his 'refutation of idealism' in the B edition, as you say, arguing that the determination of one's own existence in time relies on the perception of something persistent outside of oneself. This challenges what he calls "problematic idealism," of Berkeley's type, which casts doubt on the existence of external objects.
  • Idealism in Context
    ↪Tom Storm
    Agree. I might mention the interview where I first read it. It’s a good intro to Bernardo Kastrup, and he’s definitely worth knowing about.
  • Idealism in Context
    ↪Tom Storm
    I agree. I like that image of Kastrup that ‘tears are what sorrow looks like from the outside’ (but then, it’s such a sensitive new-age analogy….)
  • Idealism in Context
    ↪RussellA
    Kastrup, as you know, wrote a book on Schopenhauer (Decoding Schopenhauer’s Metaphysics) which I found very good, and Schopenhauer saw himself (rightly or not) as Kant’s successor. Now you mention it, I don’t recall Kastrup saying much about Kant, but I think Kant, Schopenhauer, and Kastrup could comfortably fit under one umbrella, so to speak.

    //although they might elbow each other from time to time :rofl: //
  • Idealism in Context
    ↪RussellA
    A simplistic dichotomy, and simplistic analyses never apply to Kant. The actual distinction Kant makes is between empirical realism and transcendental idealism, which he sees as complementary and not conflicting.

    For Kant, empirical realism means that objects of experience - the phenomena we encounter in space and time - are real within the empirical domain. When we perceive a tree or a rock, these objects have objective reality as appearances.

    Transcendental idealism, on the other hand, holds that space, time, and the categories of understanding are not features of things as they exist independently of our cognitive faculties, but rather are the forms through which experience is structured or articulated.

    Kant sees these as working together rather than in tension: we can be realists about the empirical world precisely because we understand or have insight into the transcendental conditions of experience. The empirical reality of objects is grounded in the fact that they conform to the universal and necessary structures of cognition (space, time, causality, and so forth).

    This allows Kant to avoid both the skeptical problems he saw in Hume’s empiricism and what he considered the dogmatic excesses of rationalist metaphysics (e.g. Berkeley). We can have genuine knowledge of objects, but only as they appear to us under the conditions that make experience possible, not as they might exist independently of those conditions.

    On the second point, you’re correct.
  • To What Extent is Panpsychism an Illusion?
    ↪MoK
    ↪Patterner

    The “unity of experience” isn’t just a special riddle for consciousness—it’s mirrored by the unity of life itself. Just as an organism isn’t literally built by stitching cells together but emerges as a whole with its own integrity, consciousness may be the subjective expression of this same principle of organismic unity.

    In philosophy the question of the subjective unity of experience was considered by Kant, but the unity of organisms goes back to Aristotle. It is also a major focus of enactivism and phenomenology.
  • On emergence and consciousness
    My own view is that a naturalistic account of the strong emergence of mental properties, (that incorporates concepts from ethology and anthropology), including consciousness, can be consistent with a form of non-reductive physicalism or Aristotelian monism (i.e. hylomorphism) that excludes the conceivability of p-zombies and hence does away with the hard problem — Pierre-Normand

    So, more of a Frankenstein than a zombie, then. :wink:
  • Donald Trump (All Trump Conversations Here)
    ↪Banno
    I was referring more to the event - pomp, pageantry and nothing of consequence.
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