Leibniz criticized mechanism because it excluded purpose (Aristotle's telos) from explanations. Nature is purposeful. Not always, not always in a good way, but it exhibits purpose--accomplishing an end. — Jackson

for wiw I agree with you.

What is the takeaway of this article? How can subjective things be measured? — TiredThinker

I read that article when it came out. I think it makes some very interesting points. Clearly the 'hard problem' criticism being discussed in other threads has made an impact. However where I part company with the article is here:

Human minds are, in this new view of science, a natural product of the evolution of mind and matter, which are just two aspects of the same thing. Human minds represent the most complex form of mind in this corner of our universe, as far as we know.

The problem with that is that it remains reductionist. It reduces mind to a biological phenomenon, as the theory of evolution is only ever a biological theory. So even if one tries to incorporate the so-called subjective perspective, it remains reductionist. As @Angelo Cannata also says.

In the original paper on Facing Up to the Hard Problem of Consciousness, Chalmers first describes the 'easy problems', which he says include

• 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

All of these phenomena are associated with the notion of consciousness. For example, one sometimes says that a mental state is conscious when it is verbally reportable, or when it is internally accessible. Sometimes a system is said to be conscious of some information when it has the ability to react on the basis of that information, or, more strongly, when it attends to that information, or when it can integrate that information and exploit it in the sophisticated control of behavior. We sometimes say that an action is conscious precisely when it is deliberate. Often, we say that an organism is conscious as another way of saying that it is awake.

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 says

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 ('What is it Like to be a Bat, 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.

----

"Because evolution has created it!" when asked, "Why is it we have sensations, thoughts, feelings associated with physical processes?".

How does one actually get the point across why this is not an acceptable answer as far as the hard problem is concerned? Can this be seen as answering it, or is it just inadvertently answering an easier problem? If so, how to explain how it isn't quite getting at the hard problem? — schopenhauer1

That passage from Chalmers mentions Nagel. And indeed, Nagel addresses the problem in more detail in his 2012 book Mind and Cosmos, where he says:

We ourselves, as physical organisms, are part of that universe [i.e. the one so successfully described by science], composed of the same basic elements as everything else, and recent advances in molecular biology have greatly increased our understanding of the physical and chemical basis of life. Since our mental lives evidently depend on our existence as physical organisms, especially on the functioning of our central nervous systems, it seems natural to think that the physical sciences can in principle provide the basis for an explanation of the mental aspects of reality as well — that physics can aspire finally to be a theory of everything.

However, I believe this possibility is ruled out by the conditions that have defined the physical sciences from the beginning. The physical sciences can describe organisms like ourselves as parts of the objective spatio-temporal order – our structure and behavior in space and time – but they cannot describe the subjective experiences of such organisms or how the world appears to their different particular points of view. There can be a purely physical description of the neurophysiological processes that give rise to an experience, and also of the physical behavior that is typically associated with it, but such a description, however complete, will leave out the subjective essence of the experience – how it is from the point of view of its subject — without which it would not be a conscious experience at all.

So the physical sciences, in spite of their extraordinary success in their own domain, necessarily leave an important aspect of nature unexplained. Further, since the mental arises through the development of animal organisms, the nature of those organisms cannot be fully understood through the physical sciences alone. Finally, since the long process of biological evolution is responsible for the existence of conscious organisms, and since a purely physical process cannot explain their existence, it follows that biological evolution must be more than just a physical process, and the theory of evolution, if it is to explain the existence of conscious life, must become more than just a physical theory. — Thomas Nagel

But, all that said, many will basically shrug it off. At which point, one smiles and walks away. :-)

The scuttlebutt is it's better than even odds MTG will lose the primary next week — 180 Proof

:pray:

From the passage:
I suggest that a theory of consciousness should take experience as fundamental. — Janus

Yes. As a general rule, what is the name of the philosophical outllook which has the tendency to take "experience", as distinct from, say, "matter", as fundamental?

//oh, wait. I suppose the answer is 'empiricism' but that is not what I had in mind. :sad: //

Surely Chalmers would be aware that we already have a first person science: phenomenology. — Janus

He doesn't mention it in the essay we're talking about. 'Phenomenology' only appears in the references. The salient passage is this

I suggest that a theory of consciousness should take experience as fundamental. We know that a theory of consciousness requires the addition of something fundamental to our ontology, as everything in physical theory is compatible with the absence of consciousness. We might add some entirely new nonphysical feature, from which experience can be derived, but it is hard to see what such a feature would be like. More likely, we will take experience itself as a fundamental feature of the world, alongside mass, charge, and space-time. If we take experience as fundamental, then we can go about the business of constructing a theory of experience.

Where there is a fundamental property, there are fundamental laws. A nonreductive theory of experience will add new principles to the furniture of the basic laws of nature. These basic principles will ultimately carry the explanatory burden in a theory of consciousness. Just as we explain familiar high-level phenomena involving mass in terms of more basic principles involving mass and other entities, we might explain familiar phenomena involving experience in terms of more basic principles involving experience and other entities.

In particular, a nonreductive theory of experience will specify basic principles telling us how experience depends on physical features of the world. These psychophysical principles will not interfere with physical laws, as it seems that physical laws already form a closed system. Rather, they will be a supplement to a physical theory. A physical theory gives a theory of physical processes, and a psychophysical theory tells us how those processes give rise to experience. We know that experience depends on physical processes, but we also know that this dependence cannot be derived from physical laws alone. The new basic principles postulated by a nonreductive theory give us the extra ingredient that we need to build an explanatory bridge.

Of course, by taking experience as fundamental, there is a sense in which this approach does not tell us why there is experience in the first place. But this is the same for any fundamental theory. Nothing in physics tells us why there is matter in the first place, but we do not count this against theories of matter. Certain features of the world need to be taken as fundamental by any scientific theory. A theory of matter can still explain all sorts of facts about matter, by showing how they are consequences of the basic laws. The same goes for a theory of experience.

This position qualifies as a variety of dualism, as it postulates basic properties over and above the properties invoked by physics. But it is an innocent version of dualism, entirely compatible with the scientific view of the world. Nothing in this approach contradicts anything in physical theory; we simply need to add further bridging principles to explain how experience arises from physical processes. There is nothing particularly spiritual or mystical about this theory - its overall shape is like that of a physical theory, with a few fundamental entities connected by fundamental laws. It expands the ontology slightly, to be sure, but Maxwell did the same thing. Indeed, the overall structure of this position is entirely naturalistic, allowing that ultimately the universe comes down to a network of basic entities obeying simple laws, and allowing that there may ultimately be a theory of consciousness cast in terms of such laws. If the position is to have a name, a good choice might be naturalistic dualism.

Although the question this flags for me is, if these fundamental laws need to capture intentionality, then already they're significantly different from the kinds of laws we're familiar with from post-Galilean science.

And also, as you're presumably familiar with Husserl's criticism of naturalism, I think he would call into question the sense in which such a description could be 'entirely naturalistic'. But I suppose, in the Anglosphere in particular, if you stray from the 'entirely naturalistic', then you're already going out of bounds.

he says that a new kind of way of doing science will likely be needed; whatever we might think he has in mind with that. — Janus

He calls it a first person science, which Dennett dismisses as a fantasy. But it must be something very like phenomenology.

? Well...isn't there something called "quantum mechanics" that requires a different approach to particle physics? (not to mention reality itself) — GLEN willows

As has been observed in popular literature, there's a meme that 'hey, consciousness is mysterious, and quantum mechanics is mysterious, so maybe there's a connection! :yikes: '

But seriously - the problem with the Churchlands and Daniel Dennett is actually simple. It's just a matter of perspective. The point of David Chalmer's famous paper Facing Up to the Hard Problem of Consciousness, is the impossibility of accounting for the first-person reality of experience in third-person, objective terms.

Science generally deals with what is objectively the case, right? What can be measured and predicted according to mathematically-structured hypotheses. So, ask yourself, why is this approach also called 'physicalism'? Isn't it because physics provides the ideal paradigm, in that the objects of physics can be described wholly in terms of measurable, physical quantities, such as velocity, mass, vector, and so on. This is why many of the other areas of science are said to have 'physics envy' - they want to be able to deal with things that are perfectly predictable, like those of physics.

If that breaks down at the quantum level, it's relevance to this argument might only be that physics itself doesn't go 'all the way down'. But the main point is actually a lot more simple than that - it is that humans are subjects of experience, not simply objects of scientific analysis. They're out of scope for objective sciences for that reason. But for some reason, that is just unacceptable to some people - if it can't be made an object of scientific analysis, then it can't be considered real. And that is the exact reason they're called 'eliminativists'.

In principle, a complete material rendering of this process of a body with a brain walking in the world can be given, but such rendering will never be able to explain the intrinsic matter features which can only be felt on the inside. — Hillary

:up: (Although your 'in principle' assumes that science can perfectly reproduce a living being de novo, which so far is not even close to happening.)

The rules of valid inference cannot be deduced from empirical observation alone, although observation can validate or falsify some inferences. But this is an argument against physicalism: because logical necessity is different to physical causation, then how can it be argued that the mind is causally dependent on physical causes? That was why I originally started this thread. It's related to 'the argument from reason'.

And the distinction between valid and sound inferences is completely lost on you (or are you just disingenuously obfuscating the distinction under the label "rational" make a quixotic point)? Intelligible demonstrations – historical, juridical, clinical, technical, scientific – about matters of fact require soundness. Otherwise, mere validity suffices. — 180 Proof

Perfectly correct, but not germane to the point.

"Eliminativists" argue that folk psychological concepts (e.g. "consciousness", "qualia", "intention", etc) occult more than elucidate and therefore are useless in formulating explanatory models of (meta)cognition which in no way "obliges them to deny" subjectivity, or first-person phenomenal awareness. — 180 Proof

Refer to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article, and Thomas Nagel's comment. What is being 'eliminated' by eliminative materialism, is the idea of there being a first-person point of view which cannot be completely explained without residue.

Just to be unequivocal, Dennett himself says it:

What, then, is the relation between the standard ‘third-person’ objective methodologies for studying meteors or magnets (or human metabolism or bone density), and the methodologies for studying human consciousness? Can the standard methods be extended in such a way as to do justice to the phenomena of human consciousness? Or do we have to find some quite radical or revolutionary alternative science? I have defended the hypothesis that there is a straightforward, conservative extension of objective science that handsomely covers the ground — all the ground — of human consciousness, doing justice to all the data without ever having to abandon the rules and constraints of the experimental method that have worked so well in the rest of science. — Daniel Dennett

So, I understand quite clearly what eliminative materialism proposes, and I stand by my argument against it.

Something you're not capable of seeing, apparently.

Again, inference from observations is the way we know almost everything. When I'm reading about some scientific finding, I often say to myself "How did they get that conclusion from that data?" I assume that they know what they are talking about. Is that the problem? — T Clark

Not at all! It is of course perfectly valid across all kinds of subjects. But think about the subject of this particular claim - that consciousness - let's say thought - can be wholly explained in neuroscientific terms. Among the things that are purportedly being explained, then, is the very process of rational inference which is used to draw inferences from data. In other words, the process of reasoning itself. That's what makes this claim different from other scientific claims.

The Churchlands - they are a married couple - Daniel Dennett, and other philosophers of that school generally hold to a materialist theory of mind. This is that mind is what the brain does, so that if you sufficiently understand neural science, then you will understand the nature of thinking.

“My brain and I are inseparable.” For Churchland, “I equal my brain” and “brain equals me.” On its own, the former equation is hardly an existential challenge. The brain’s central role in selfhood is well known. (A loose screw affects both you and your brain.) But flip the equation—“brain equals me”—and a whole new cosmology is provoked. The implication is that I am definable, accessible, even divisible. The seeming solidity of me comes from a place, the brain—and what is the brain? The mental image Churchland conjures is that of a thicket of neurons and specialized regions of activity, all of them subject to pervasive unconscious actions and designs. Far from an ethereal soul or some intangible essence, then, selfhood means that I am the end result of innumerable processes occurring inside a pale pink, three-pound sack of meat. No spirit, no soul, no opaque differentiation between mind and brain. Put another way, I am just a brain.

Of course, many, probably even most, philosophers take issue with this attitude - I could provide yet more quotes, but I'm trying to keep it short and snarky. Suffice to say, the particular argument that I am trying to marshall, is that reason comprises the relation of ideas - all the way down! In other words, you can't deduce the primitive articles of reason, such as the rules of valid inference, from neuroscience. And you can't see them from the outside - you won't literally see the operations of reason in neural data - you have to make inferences about how neural systems instantiate reason, in order to explain how reason is the product of such operations*. And, I say, there's an unavoidable circularity involved in doing that, because in this case, the mind is both the object of analysis, and the analysing subject. So it's not the same as other branches of science - whereas the whole point of Churchlands' argument is that it has to be same, and any conceptual difference has to be eliminated.

----

* That is where the article about 'representational drift' in mice is relevant: the neural areas involved in mice reacting to smells keep drifting throughout the rodent brain, in a way that can't be predicted or understood by the models. So, if something that simple defies neurological explanation, then how to account for such abstractions as reason in the human brain?

. It is possible to study consciousness objectively just like it is possible to look at eyes, think about minds, etc — T Clark

Right. Which is optometry, psychology, and cognitive science. Not philosophy per se.

Eliminative materialism (or eliminativism) is the radical claim that our ordinary, common-sense understanding of the mind is deeply wrong and that some or all of the mental states posited by common-sense do not actually exist and have no role to play in a mature science of the mind. Descartes famously challenged much of what we take for granted, but he insisted that, for the most part, we can be confident about the content of our own minds. Eliminative materialists go further than Descartes on this point, since they challenge the existence of various mental states that Descartes took for granted. — SEP, Eliminative Materialists

The reason they assert that the first-person nature of consciousness 'occults more than elucidates' is because it cannot be accomodated by third-person description as a matter of principle. As scientific method relies on third-person description, it therefore can't be accomodated, and so is to be eliminated.

Dennett asks us to turn our backs on what is glaringly obvious—that in consciousness we are immediately aware of real subjective experiences of color, flavor, sound, touch, etc. that cannot be fully described in neural terms even though they have a neural cause (or perhaps have neural as well as experiential aspects). And he asks us to do this because the reality of such phenomena is incompatible with the scientific materialism that in his view sets the outer bounds of reality. He is, in Aristotle’s words, “maintaining a thesis at all costs.” — Thomas Nagel

Very simple. No point trying to obfuscate.

Mind is patterns in the physical (matter & energy), but then patterns are substrate-independent (punchcards, logic gates, cellphone radio signals, can all encode the same info). Doesn't that imply the mind is, at a minimum, quasi-independent of matter & energy. — Agent Smith

One aspect of the mind that philosophers have traditionally considered particularly difficult to account for in materialist terms is intentionality, which is that feature of a mental state in virtue of which it means, is about, represents,points to, or is directed at something, usually something beyond itself. Your thought about your car, for example, is about your car – it means or represents your car, and thus “points to” or is “directed at” your car. In this way it is like the word “car,” which is about, or represents, cars in general. Notice, though, that considered merely as a set of ink marks or (if spoken) sound waves, “car” doesn’t represent or mean anything at all; it is, by itself anyway, nothing but a meaningless pattern of ink marks or sound waves, and acquires whatever meaning it has from language users like us, who, with our capacity for thought, are able to impart meaning to physical shapes, sounds, and the like.

Now the puzzle intentionality poses for materialism can be summarized this way: Brain processes, like ink marks, sound waves, the motion of water molecules, electrical current, and any other physical phenomenon you can think of, seem clearly devoid of any inherent meaning. By themselves they are simply meaningless patterns of electrochemical activity. Yet our thoughts do have inherent meaning – that’s how they are able to impart it to otherwise meaningless ink marks, sound waves, etc. In that case, though, it seems that our thoughts cannot possibly be identified with any physical processes in the brain. In short: Thoughts and the like possess inherent meaning or intentionality; brain processes, like ink marks, sound waves, and the like, are utterly devoid of any inherent meaning or intentionality; so thoughts and the like cannot possibly be identified with brain processes. — Ed Feser

If you can explain "the faculty that provides the capacity to explain" from your armchair (using that very capacity), why can the Churchland's not do so from their lab (also using that very capacity)? — Isaac

There's something they're not acknowledging, because of the blind spot of science. Because in a lab situation, you're concerned with objective and measurable phenomena. First person consciousness is not objective, it is 'what observes'. That is why Churchlands, Dennett, et al, are called 'eliminativists' - it is the first-person nature of consciousness which they are obliged to deny. Hence, the blind spot.

You said it right here... — Isaac

And I stand by it. If the claim is

eventually consciousness and qualia will eventually be explained with neuroscience — GLEN willows

Then part of what will be explained is the faculty that provides the capacity to explain.

And yes, they probably owe their origins to the vestigial traces of Christianity. — Tom Storm

Indeed they do. Without that, we'd be living in a very different world, and there's no certainty that it would be a better one.

No, the point was that you claimed judgement about 'judgement' was begging the question, then perfomatively contradicted yourself by making judgements about 'judgement'. — Isaac

That's not what I said. I said

‘Rational inference’, which neuroscientists, materialists, and everyone else rely on whenever they use the word ‘because’, neither has, nor requires, a scientific grounding. — Wayfarer

You did so from your armchair, I do so by studying people in more controlled situations and examining brain images. — Isaac

And what I'm saying is that, in order to do that, you need to employ judgement. You have to judge what the data means, and so on. So if you're claiming to explain the entire cognitive function of man - which is the claim that is at stake - then you are employing the very faculty which you're attempting to explain.

Of course, if you're merely conducting neuroscientific research, then you're not doing that. But that is not what is at issue.

...all statements about the nature of judgement, presumably arrived at using judgement — Isaac

and without reference to neuroscience, which is the point.

Are you jealous of my fMRI? — Isaac

Do you believe in God, or is that a software glitch?

I'm not saying you are wrong. But how does someone outside that world, like me, tell the difference between the two? — Tom Storm

By applying analytical skills. The passage I quoted from Russell was one of his famous early essays, published turn of the century. It’s a very vivid statement of a certain cultural moment. You could write an analysis of it in an English class, or a history class. The tutor would say - what is Russell saying? Why does he say the world is ‘devoid of meaning’? What role does he think science plays in it? Why do you think he capitalises ‘Science’?’ And so on.

Nihilism really is the belief that nothing is real, and/or that nothing means anything. It doesn’t really matter what *you* think it means, that is the meaning. I’m saying that it is a bleak kind of emotional and philosophical disposition, that it drains the world of meaning. That is an objective claim. I might be wrong, but if you want to show that I’m wrong, then you need to say something about what these ideas mean, not just how you react to them or how they make you feel.

Another anecdote - I got into University after a dismal school career, as a ‘mature age student’ - a convention they no longer have. The subject of the examination, taken with pencil and paper, in an exam room, was a comprehension test on a passage from another of Russell’s essays, ‘Mysticism and Logic’. Right up my street, I thought, and indeed, I passed the exam, and went on to study just these kinds of subjects. Not that it’s provided any obvious benefits. But I’d like to think I know what it meant, and I guess, in some way, I have the credential to prove it. ;-)

Yeah I always thought that. Years ago when I drove a cab, I picked up this dude from a conference, who struck me as a cool Californian guy, and casually dropped Alan Watts’ name. ‘He died an alcoholic’, he said.

Conversation went nowhere after that.

Still, Watts was a perceptive philosopher, which is more than you can say for……never mind…..

The next master stroke of Putin is to revive the Russian car manufacturing industry and the much-ridiculed Moskvich sedan. Lessons in how to re-animated a corpse.

The philosophical argument is simply this. ‘Rational inference’, which neuroscientists, materialists, and everyone else rely on whenever they use the word ‘because’, neither has, nor requires, a scientific grounding. Rational inference depends wholly and solely on the relations of ideas - ‘is’, ‘is not’, ‘is greater than’, ‘is the same as’, and so on. Judgements based on those simple elements are intrinsic to any rational claim about anything whatever, including the claim that thought can be explained in physical terms. Yet those very same elements of thought are not the object of scientific analysis, because they precede scientific analysis - in order to engage in scientific analysis, such judgements are needed in the first place. You can't step outside the process of judgement to show what judgement is in a completely objective sense; you need to use it in order to show it. So it's not objective, or rather, any claim to 'explain' what judgement is must beg the question, because it must assume what it is setting out to prove.

A practical example. Consider a neurological expert who claims that data shows that some area within the brain performs a function. You won’t see anything like ‘a function’ when you look at the data, which presumably consists of graphical images of neural activity and so on. You must take the experts word for it that this data means such-and-such. That ‘meaning’ is always internal to the act of judgement - you won’t see that in the data, not unless you are likewise trained in the interpretation of what the data means.

See also this article on the neurology of mice.

Schoonover, Fink, and their colleagues from Columbia University allowed mice to sniff the same odors over several days and weeks, and recorded the activity of neurons in the rodents’ piriform cortex—a brain region involved in identifying smells. At a given moment, each odor caused a distinctive group of neurons in this region to fire. But as time went on, the makeup of these groups slowly changed. Some neurons stopped responding to the smells; others started. After a month, each group was almost completely different. Put it this way: The neurons that represented the smell of an apple in May and those that represented the same smell in June were as different from each other as those that represent the smells of apples and grass at any one time.

This is, of course, just one study, of one brain region, in mice. But other scientists have shown that the same phenomenon, called representational drift, occurs in a variety of brain regions besides the piriform cortex. Its existence is clear; everything else is a mystery. Schoonover and Fink told me that they don’t know why it happens, what it means, how the brain copes, or how much of the brain behaves in this way. How can animals possibly make any lasting sense of the world if their neural responses to that world are constantly in flux? If such flux is common, “there must be mechanisms in the brain that are undiscovered and even unimagined that allow it to keep up,” Schoonover said. “Scientists are meant to know what’s going on, but in this particular case, we are deeply confused. We expect it to take many years to iron out.”

That's mice, right? With smells. So good luck with working out the neurology of Justice, or Truth, or Beauty!

could it not the case that people seek and grab hold of belief systems like drowning people cling onto driftwood in the ocean? — Tom Storm

‘To have faith is to trust yourself to the water. When you swim you don’t grab hold of the water, because if you do, you will sink and drown. Instead, you relax and float’ ~ Alan Watts.

There is ‘clinging to belief’ on the one hand, and there is ‘letting go, and letting God’ on the other. But this place usually only sees the former.

The point is if your kid asks how that instrument (sax) works — GLEN willows

Neuroscientists, and neuroseurgons, need to understand the workings of the brain, but that tells us nothing about the problems of philosophy. So, yes, I've heard of the Churchlands, and I agree with their numerous critics. Over and out.

I suspect that here you fail to understand in the same way that you say I don't understand — Tom Storm

No. There's a real difference between nihilism and idealism. So equating the passage from Bertrand Russell's A Free Man's Worship with Bernardo Kastrup's analytical idealism only conveys that there is a real difference that you're not seeing.

describing a Beethoven piece as a "variation of wave pressure" is correct right? It's just a different way of describing the same phenomenon — GLEN willows

But it's pointless. That's the point! But if you don't see the point, then there's no point.

"eventually consciousness and qualia will eventually be explained with neuroscience" — GLEN willows

How about grammar? Syntax? Semantics? Do you think they will be explained in terms of neuroscience?

Actually one of the well-worn Einstein sayings comes to mind here - '“It would be possible to describe everything scientifically, but it would make no sense; it would be without meaning, as if you described a Beethoven symphony as a variation of wave pressure.”


It's also worth noting that the *only* time you read the word 'qualia' is in connection to this particular clique of American academic philosophers, of whom the Churchlands comprise about half.

The spiritual life and nihilism both invite equal acts of creative vision and personal transformation galvanized by uncertainty. — Tom Storm

The point is, for the nihilist, it doesn't make any difference. Put another way, for the nihilist, 'creative vision and personal transformation' are empty words, meaning nothing. And if that's not the case, why, they're not nihilist!

But how different in the end is Russell's world depicted here, to that of an idealist along the lines of, say, Bernardo Kastrup? — Tom Storm

Very different indeed, although I sense it is probably not useful to try and explain why.

Can you say something more about your understanding of belief in this 'not such and open-and-shut case' context? — Tom Storm

any comment on the Russell passage I quoted?

Such, in outline, but even more purposeless, more void of meaning, is the world which Science presents for our belief. Amid such a world, if anywhere, our ideals henceforward must find a home. — Bertrand Russell, A Free Man's Worship

Do you think this is true? What are the implications?

No, I don't think so. It's not a 'ready-to-wear belief system' that I'm referring to - that is something of a caricature. There will be those who can simply accept articles of faith and seem to be happy with that, but spiritual life often involves great doubt, great struggle and uncertainty. And as far as meaning is concerned, it is not simply an individual matter, something we only create. It's also given to us, or impressed on us.

I started out not wanting to accept anything on faith. That was the whole point of the 'spiritual experiences' that I thought I had had, or could have. The aim of meditative practice was to realise those states for oneself. But as life went on, it became apparent that such states are very elusive. And besides, in Zen Buddhism, there is the admonition never to seek out experiences or to attach importance to them. So I'm re-evaluating what it means to believe, and starting to see that it's not such a open-and-shut matter.

Replied in another thread.

Wayfarer
Interested in your thoughts on the link between so-called "Enlightenment", Nausea, madness... — ZzzoneiroCosm

Let's say that Christianity is founded on an unequivocal 'is' - the belief that God exists. Christian culture absorbed (some would say appropriated) all that was noble in the so-called 'pagan philosophies' under the umbrella of the 'Church Triumphant', belief in which was compulsory, and questioning of which could be fatal. This unequivocal dogmatism then over centuries engendered its opposite - militant atheism. The 'death of God' also becomes associated with the dissolution of all certainty, the advent of nihilism, which Neitszche foretold. Doesn't the sense of nausea originate with that sense of the unreality of everything? That we're 'thrown' into a meaningless cosmos, from which we alone are obliged to create meaning where really there is none.

For countless ages the hot nebula whirled aimlessly through space. At length it began to take shape, the central mass threw off planets, the planets cooled, boiling seas and burning mountains heaved and tossed, from black masses of cloud hot sheets of rain deluged the barely solid crust. And now the first germ of life grew in the depths of the ocean, and developed rapidly in the fructifying warmth into vast forest trees, huge ferns springing from the damp mould, sea monsters breeding, fighting, devouring, and passing away. And from the monsters, as the play unfolded itself, Man was born, with the power of thought, the knowledge of good and evil, and the cruel thirst for worship. And Man saw that all is passing in this mad, monstrous world, that all is struggling to snatch, at any cost, a few brief moments of life before Death's inexorable decree. And Man said: `There is a hidden purpose, could we but fathom it, and the purpose is good; for we must reverence something, and in the visible world there is nothing worthy of reverence.' And Man stood aside from the struggle, resolving that God intended harmony to come out of chaos by human efforts. And when he followed the instincts which God had transmitted to him from his ancestry of beasts of prey, he called it Sin, and asked God to forgive him. But he doubted whether he could be justly forgiven, until he invented a divine Plan by which God's wrath was to have been appeased. And seeing the present was bad, he made it yet worse, that thereby the future might be better. And he gave God thanks for the strength that enabled him to forgo even the joys that were possible. And God smiled; and when he saw that Man had become perfect in renunciation and worship, he sent another sun through the sky, which crashed into Man's sun; and all returned again to nebula.

"`Yes,' he murmured, `it was a good play; I will have it performed again.'"

Such, in outline, but even more purposeless, more void of meaning, is the world which Science presents for our belief. Amid such a world, if anywhere, our ideals henceforward must find a home. That Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man's achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins--all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul's habitation henceforth be safely built. — Bertrand Russell, A Free Man's Worship

If I lived in the US, I might also, considering the obnoxious nature of a lot of American civil religion, specifically Conservative evangelicalism.

BUT, that said, if the alternative to religious philosophy is nihilism or materialism, then I'll always pick the former.

This line made me curious to ask if you've had a look at Religion and Nothingness by Nishitani, hailing from the Kyoto school. — ZzzoneiroCosm

I encountered the Kyoto School during Buddhist Studies. They sure are difficult scholars to read, as they were all steeped in classical Japanese thought and also highly educated in Western philosophy. At the time I tried to read that book, I found it very hard to fathom, but maybe I would do better this time (that was many years ago).

Ever encountered the 'freedom from religion foundation'? https://ffrf.org/ First line of their charter: 'The history of Western civilization shows us that most social and moral progress has been brought about by persons free from religion.'

Originally, 'secular' referred to an order of time, and then to a calendar. The 'secular order' was maintained for the purposes of mundane (worldly) affairs - keeping the trains running on time, you might say. It was distinguished from the liturgical calendar which maintained the holidays (holy days) and their associated religious observances.

I certainly get the point of the 'secular state', if the alternative is officially-mandated belief. The point of the secular state is to provide a framework within which you can practice any religion or none, but there's a vocal minority who will always take that to mean that none is better than any.

I haven't heard of anything like that? Was it in the US? Australia? — T Clark

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/dec/01/santa-monica-nativity-scene-atheist

there are many other examples (although admittedly, the Santa Monica example was not as simple as a shop-window display.)

Separation of church and state doesn't mean we exclude religious values, it means we exclude religious institutions from government. — T Clark

that is true, but when it comes to well-funded lobby groups taking legal action to prohibit displays of religious iconography in store windows then it amounts to rather more than that in practice.