You've often said you have devoted time to reading Heidegger. Would you agree with this synopsis of his views on objectivity?

"Heidegger argues that scientific objectivity is grounded in a specific metaphysical framework: the Cartesian subject-object dichotomy. This framework presumes that the world is composed of objects existing independently of the observer, available for detached study and measurement. Consequently it overlooks the more fundamental ways in which humans encounter the world as being-in-the-world (Dasein). Scientific objectivity reduces things to mere "present-at-hand" (Vorhandenheit), stripping away their richer modes of existence as they are experienced in the lifeworld.

Heidegger’s overarching concern is that science forgets or obscures the question of Being (Sein). By focusing only on what can be measured or quantified, science neglects the broader ontological context in which things appear as meaningful. This leads to an impoverished understanding of reality, where the richness of Being is replaced by a narrow focus on instrumental utility or efficiency."

I did start on that a couple of weeks ago, although didn't watch the whole edition. (I subscribe to Kurt Jaimungal.) I will attempt it again, now you've mentioned it. Besides, I don't know how 'mystical' I need physics to be, to make my basic point, which is, again, that whatever we designate as real or reality has an inextricably subjective pole. To which the usual response is: oh yeah, where is that?

He says, just after that section, that 'this' (meaning, his take) 'takes the human mind out of the picture'. I still say this is an oxymoronic proposition. But let's leave it, it's invariably a rabbit-hole. (Although I should mention I recently published a Medium essay on the topic, I don't know if I mentioned it to you - The Timeless Wave. I don't think it is really 'mystical' although it does consider the idea of what is outside space-time.)

that would be preferable, not that it's important.

And waiving the word "quantum" doesn't help your case... — Banno

'Waving'. You can't waive physics, it's supposed to be the arbiter here.

Where we seem to disagree is that you seem to think we can only meaningfully speak from the "for us" perspective, whereas I think we can bracket that and speak meaningfully from a context that conceptually excludes us. — Janus

Well, that's where we differ, and I think also where you differ from phenomnology. I agree we can see the world as if there is nobody in it, for specific purposes, but when that is taken to be a true account of the nature of being, then it goes too far.

I don't believe that we carve up the world arbitrarily but that the ways we carve it up are constrained both by the nature of our sense organs and the nature of the world we are sensing. — Janus

It's not arbitrary, but it is contingent, both on what there is to see, but also on how we see it.

You want to say that all truth is constructed, but that we can't make claims about what it is constructed from. — Banno

Fair. In Buddhist philosophy, it is not constructed from an underlying something. That's one of the meanings of emptiness (śūnyatā). Chögyam Trungpa — 'The bad news is you're falling through the air, nothing to hang on to, no parachute. The good news is, there's no ground.' And that's why I often point out (much to your annoyance) that much the same can be said in modern physics, which doesn't tell us about what nature is, but only how nature responds to our methods of questioning.

Yes, only minds can know things. However, it doesn't seem to be a necessary truth that there can be knowledge without minds. The opposite - that there can't be any knoweldge without any minds - seems to be a necessary truth. By contrast, it does seem to be a necessary truth that if something exists, then it is true that it exists. It's that apparent self-evident truth of reason that seems inconsistent with the conclusion that truth depends on minds. And so it is that apparent self-evident truth of reason that ideally needs to be debunked, for otherwise the thesis that truth depends on minds at least appears to be false — Clearbury

I'm having trouble parsing this one.

Metaphysical idealism doesn't disagree that we sometimes have to check if our knowledge or beliefs are right. It doesn’t deny the existence of errors or things we don’t yet know. It only reframes how we think about truth and reality and about the context within which these are understood.

Whereas in the metaphysical realist view, truth is a matter of ever-better approximations of already-existing facts in a mind-independent reality. Idealism (or constructivism), on the other hand, recognizes that truth is always mediated by mind. It isn’t about discovering a pre-formed reality out there, but about achieving coherence and intelligibility within the shared framework of understanding. It doesn’t deny objective truth but re-locates it within the dynamic interplay of subjective, intersubjective and objective.

Are there things that are true, yet not believed, known, understood or standing in any relation to people or minds?

I think there are. — Banno

You think.

it seems true that 2 + 2 = 4 even if there are no minds. — Clearbury

It is, regardless, something only knowable to a mind.

Banno is simply advocating naive realism and argumentum ad lapidem.

Hey Sam



Looks a very substantial debate on the subject. Consolation prize :party:

Much of this can be dissolved if you acknowledge that time itself is not entirely objective, that it entails the subjective awareness of duration. Indeed there was a time before there were human minds, and there may be a time in the far future when h.sapiens is extinct. But 'before' and 'after' are also mental constructions in some basic sense.

To measure something – such as volume, length, pressure, weight, speed or temperature – we need to stipulate the unit of measurement in terms of a standard. For example, the standard metre was once stipulated to be the length of a particular 100-centimetre-long platinum bar kept in Paris. It is now defined by an atomic clock measuring the length of a path of light travelling in a vacuum over an extremely short time interval. In both cases, the standard metre is a measurement of length that itself has a length. The standard unit exemplifies the property it measures.

In Time and Free Will, Bergson argued that this procedure would not work for duration. For duration to be measured by a clock, the clock itself must have duration. It must exemplify the property it is supposed to measure. To examine the measurements involved in clock time, Bergson considers an oscillating pendulum, moving back and forth. At each moment, the pendulum occupies a different position in space, like the points on a line or the moving hands on a clockface. In the case of a clock, the current state – the current time – is what we call ‘now’.Each successive ‘now’ of the clock contains nothing of the past because each moment, each unit, is separate and distinct. But this is not how we experience time. Instead, we hold these separate moments together in our memory. We unify them. A physical clock measures a succession of moments, but only experiencing duration allows us to recognise these seemingly separate moments as a succession. Clocks don’t measure time; we do. This is why Bergson believed that clock time presupposes lived time. — Bergson-Einstein Debate, Evan Thompson

My bolds. This is why time has a subjective element. So arguing about what will be true in the absence of any mind, is a fatuous exercise. Nobody knows anything about what will be true in the absence of any mind. Sure, we can model it, and we can objectively examine the universe as if it existed absent any mind. But there is always an implicit perspective in that model, provided by the mind of the scientists and the community of minds who understand it. But that is 'transcendent' in Kant and Husserl's sense, i.e. constituting experience whilst not given in it (and as a rule bracketed out by realist dogma to boot.)

Theistic philosophy doesn't face this problem for pretty much the same reason that Berkeley is able to call on God to witness 'the tree in the quad'. But as analytic philosophy is generally non- or a-theistic in orientation it has no such proviso and will always end up facing the same conundrum.

I have no objection to there being a shared reality, in fact, I think consciousness is collective in nature, even though each of us only ever experiences it in the first person. — Wayfarer

But isn't that a form of metaphysical realism? And is this "collective consciousness" how you conceptualize reality? If so, what does it signify? Is it like Bernardo Kastrups "Cosmic Mind"? — goremand

Stanford Encyc's description of metaphysical realism: 'According to metaphysical realism, the world is as it is independent of how humans or other inquiring agents take it to be. The objects the world contains, together with their properties and the relations they enter into, fix the world’s nature and these objects [together with the properties they have and the relations they enter into] exist independently of our ability to discover they do.'

My take on collective consciousness more akin to Hegel's 'geist', which describes the way geist (usually translated as mind or spirit) manifests collectively in culture, history, and shared institutions. While consciousness is realised individually, Hegel argues that this individuality is always part of a larger, evolving reality as an expression of geist (indeed the lovely word 'zeitgeist', spirit of the times, is something from Hegel that has filtered through to popular culture.) Unlike metaphysical realism, this view sees reality (or Being) as inseparable from the processes of mind and meaning. And yes, it is convergent in some respect with Kastrup. I've listened to and read quite a bit of Kastrup.

The collective nature of consciousness shows up in the way humans as a species and culture, inhabit similar (although never identical) meaning-worlds. Our senses are overall similarly adapted and we operate in a framework of shared meanings. That is what makes inter-subjective agreement and scientific discourse viable. Hence philosophical idealism is not incompatible with science but it's also not limited to what can be objectively established by science. The SEP entry on idealism says 'the idealist, rather than being anti-realist, is in fact … a realist concerning elements more usually dismissed from reality.' That includes the reality of numbers and universals in my view (although that is not something explored in the original post.)

Is this a Buddhist take on it? — frank

It is.

Well it's impossible to give you a specific example of pre-conceptual reality, because that itself would involve conceptualization. — goremand

Bingo. You win the lucky door prize. I have no objection to there being a shared reality, in fact, I think consciousness is collective in nature, even though each of us only ever experiences it in the first person.

If the world is mind-created, why is there so much misery in the world? — frank

Because of ignorance, of not seeing what is real, and being attached to what is unreal. And that goes for me as much as anyone else.

:up: My thoughts also.

Australia has just passed legistlation to ban selected social media apps (FB, TikTok, Snapchat and a few others, Youtube exempt - documentary was incorrect about that), to those under 16. While there's a lot of community support, there are many open questions around how it will be enforced by next November, when it comes into law. Good mini-documentary here by an Australian content producer.

You asked me to comment on the MP passage, I did that and you didn't respond. Do you have a point of issue with my answer. If so, do tell. — Janus

OK. You said:

To say that nebulae or dinosaurs existed prior to humans is only to say what we would have experienced had we been there. I don't see that as a problem for realism. — Janus

It is not at all what Merleau Ponty said or meant. It wouldn't even be worth stating, it would just be common sense. And how does that square with:

Laplace’s nebula is not behind us, at our origin, but rather out in front of us in the cultural world. — Phenomenology of Perception, p456

A commentary on that passage is that:

Merleau-Ponty is not denying that there is a perfectly legitimate sense in which we can say that the world existed before human consciousness. Indeed, he refers to the “valid signification” of this statement. He is making a point at a different level, the level of meaning. The meanings of terms in scientific statements, including mathematical equations, depend on the life-world, as our parable of temperature and our discussion of the dependence of clock time on lived time illustrate. Furthermore, the universe does not come ready-made and presorted into kinds of entities, such as nebulae, independent of investigating scientists who find it useful to conceptualize and categorize things that way given their perceptual capacities, observational tools, and explanatory purposes in the life-world and the scientific workshop. The very idea of a nebula, a distinct body of interstellar clouds, reflects our human and scientific way of perceptually and conceptually sorting astronomical phenomena. This is what Merleau-Ponty means when he says that he cannot understand what a nebula that could not be seen by anyone might be. Nothing intrinsically bears the identity “nebula” within it. That identity depends on a conceptual system that informs (and is informed by) observation. Nevertheless, Merleau-Ponty’s last sentence is exaggerated. Given the “conceptual system of astrophysics and general relativity theory, Laplace’s nebula is behind us in cosmic time. But it is not just behind us. It is also out in front of us in the cultural world, because the very idea of a nebula is a human category. The universe contains the life-world, but the life-world contains the universe.

Do you at least see some convergence between this line of argument, and that of the original post?

As a classical theist I don't think things do exist in the absence of any minds (and particularly in the absence of the mind of God). I think the truth of creation is bound up in its intelligibility, which flows from its creator. — Leontiskos

I do understand that. The perplexity for naturalism is that the criterion for what is real is what exists independently of any mind. This is the source of many endless circular discussions on this Forum. I think, maybe, the problem is the naturalist assumption that the world is inherently intelligible, when it's actually not, because the principle of intelligibility is not internal to it.

From a phenomenological perspective, in everyday life, we see the objects of our experience such as physical objects, other people, and even ideas as simply real and straightforwardly existent. In other words, they are “just there.” We don’t question their existence; we view them as facts.

When we leave our house in the morning, we take the objects we see around us as simply real, factual things—this tree, neighboring buildings, cars, etc. This attitude or perspective, which is usually unrecognized as a perspective, Edmund Husserl terms the “natural attitude” or the “natural theoretical attitude.”

When Husserl uses the word “natural” to describe this attitude, he doesn’t mean that it is “good” (or bad), he means simply that this way of seeing reflects an “everyday” or “ordinary” way of being-in-the-world. When I see the world within this natural attitude, I am solely aware of what is factually present to me. My surrounding world, viewed naturally, is the familiar world, the domain of my everyday life. Why is this a problem?

From a phenomenological perspective, this naturalizing attitude conceals a profound naïveté. Husserl claimed that “being” can never be collapsed entirely into being in the empirical world: any instance of actual being, he argued, is necessarily encountered upon a horizon that encompasses facticity but is larger than facticity. Indeed, the very sense of facts of consciousness as such, from a phenomenological perspective, depends on a wider horizon of consciousness that usually remains unexamined. Any individual object, Husserl wrote:

“Is not merely an individual object as such, a ‘This here,’ an object never repeatable; as qualified ‘in itself‘ thus and so, it has its own specific character, its stock of essential predictables which must belong to it … if other, secondary, relative determinations can belong to it.”

Hence, any individual object necessarily belongs to multiple “essential species,” or essential structures of consciousness, and “everything belonging to the essence of the individuum another individuum can have too…” — The Natural Attitude

This aspect of Husserl influenced Heidegger, even though the latter criticized some aspects of his mentor's philosophy. Husserl emphasized that all instances of being are encountered within a broader horizon of meaning, one that includes but surpasses the empirical. This horizon reflects the structures of consciousness, which condition how any entity can appear as meaningful. For Husserl, facticity (the empirical givenness of things) is always embedded within a context shaped by the transcendental structures of consciousness. (This is exactly what I meant in the OP, where I said that every statement about what exists contains an ineluctably subjective element that is not available to empirical observation.)

Heidegger took this idea further by situating the horizon of meaning in Dasein's existential structure—the way human beings are always already engaged with the world and interpreting it. Heidegger reinterpreted this in existential terms, arguing that Dasein is not just a passive observer but an active participant in the disclosure of Being. Heidegger’s notion of “Being-in-the-world” builds on Husserl’s insight that Being is never encountered in isolation but always within a lived context.

After reading many thousands of your words I am still not clear what you think the point at issue is — Janus

Plainly.

After reading many thousands of your words I am still not clear what you think the point at issue is if it is not whether or not this life is all there is. — Janus

OK. Well, a few pages back you said

I have no doubt I've read more Kant, Hegel, Heidegger and Merleau Ponty than you. — Janus

I will draw upon your expertise in these matters to comment on the following passage from Merleau Ponty which seems close to the point that I'm pressing:

For what exactly is meant by saying that the world existed prior to human consciousnesses? It might be meant that the earth emerged from a primitive nebula where the conditions for life had not been brought together. But each one of these words, just like each equation in physics, presupposes our pre-scientific experience of the world, and this reference to the lived world contributes to constituting the valid signification of the statement. Nothing will ever lead me to understand what a nebula, which could not be seen by anyone, might be. Laplace’s nebula is not behind us, at our origin, but rather out in front of us in the cultural world. — Phenomenology of Perception, p456

.

Even though I agree that this is perfectly evident, it is still not the point at issue, but after 12 months and many thousands of words, I am no longer going to beat a dead horse.

As Peirce said: " "Let us not pretend to doubt in philosophy what we do not doubt in our hearts". — Janus

Notice the C S Peirce quotation at the top of the Medium version of the original post:

…to decide what our sentiments ought to be towards things in general without taking any account of human experience of life, would be most foolish’ — C S Peirce, Philosophy in Light of the Logic of Relatives.

My question is, do you not believe there is some component of the world/reality that, even if it is not captured in some particular concept, is still singular and shared across all these "constructed worlds"? — goremand

For example?

why are the use of concepts necessary for perception? — goremand

Growing up, I loved the Time Life books on evolution and biology. In one of them, they showed an experiment in which a bird-like shape was flown above a nest of young geese. When towed in one orientation, with an apparently long neck and short tail, the goslings wouldn't respond to it as it looked goose-like. But turn it around, to it appeared to have a short neck and a long tail, and they'd all duck for cover, as it looked like a goshawk. I think that amounts to a kind of illustration, doesn't it? Goose-gestalt vs goshawk gestalt, in Pinter's terms. An illustration of the idea of a 'meaning-world'.

seem to be real — Janus

Seems, being the key word.

The OP criticises metaphysical realism defined as follows: 'According to metaphysical realism, the world is as it is independent of how humans or other inquiring agents take it to be. The objects the world contains, together with their properties and the relations they enter into, fix the world’s nature and these objects [together with the properties they have and the relations they enter into] exist independently of our ability to discover they do.' - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

I won't re-state all of the points made in the original post and associated Medium essay. But in respect of animal cognition and the ideas of 'umwelt' and 'lebenswelt', and indeed in phenomenology generally, the key idea is that the world and the observing creature, be that human or animal, are co-arising. The kind of world the creature perceives is inextricably intertwined with its cognitive system, largely determined by evolutionary adaptation. Over and above that, humans are the 'symbolic species' , able to reflect on and analyse themselves, their environment, and their own cognition of it, through meta-cognitive awareness (awareness of awareness) which provides dimensions of understanding generally not available to other species. But for both animals and humans, the world is not an objective given but a relational construct shaped by the interaction between the observer and the observed. This is the basis of the phenomenological critique of realism/naturalism, which assumes the world exists independently of the way it is perceived and that the role of science is only ever to expand and make more comprehensive the knowledge of that already-existing world.

The original post draws considerably on a largely unsung book called Mind and the Cosmic Order, by Charles S. Pinter. Pinter was a mathematics emeritus who published that book at the end of his very long life. The book's sub-title is 'How the Mind Creates the Features & Structure of All Things, and Why this Insight Transforms Physics'. He lays out his case in great detail, drawing on cognitive science, philosophy and physics.

The book’s argument begins with the British empiricists who raised our awareness of the fact that we have no direct contact with physical reality, but it is the mind that constructs the form and features of objects. It is shown that modern cognitive science brings this insight a step further by suggesting that shape and structure are not internal to objects, but arise in the observer. The author goes yet further by arguing 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. — Abstract

(I say it's an 'unsung', because Pinter's other publications are all in mathematics - some of our mathematical contributors knew of his books in that discipline. But as he's not recognised in cognitive science or philosophy, his last book wasn't reviewed in the usual media, and went largely un-noticed by the profession. Which is a pity, because it's a very insightful book. Details can be found here.)

An interesting point: the word 'world' is derived from an old Dutch word 'werold' meaning 'time of man' (ref). The implication is that 'world' and 'planet' are not synonyms. A world is lived, it is inhabited. In that sense, there can't be 'unseen worlds', even though there may be trillions of unseen planets. For it to be a world, the planet must have inhabitants, beings (see blog post, Schopenhauer: How Time Began with the First Eye Opening.)

Thanks for dropping by. Perhaps you might glance at the OP.

So next absolutely loyal sycophant yes-man Trump wants to head (read demolish) an US institution is Kash Patel to head the FBI. — ssu

John Bolton, who has become embarrasingly sensible post-Trump. says he is Trump's Lavretia Beria. The one consolation is that Beria was executed by firing squad.

His confirmations hearing will be the acid test for whether the democracy will survive.

Reality boils down to the self/other binary. It is the essential platform supporting all empirical experience and abstract thought. — ucarr

Well, it's a bit glib. There's a classic Python sketch, now unfortunately paywalled, where Cleese says 'this week, we'll learn to play the flute. You blow in this end, here, and you move your fingers around on the bottom half, there. Next week, we'll show you how to create peace between Russia and China, and how to build a box girder bridge.'

Yes, self-and-other are the fundamental dynamic underneath all living things. The first thing an organism has to do is NOT succumb to physical laws. Otherwise, it's the same as all the dumb stuff around it. It has one scintilla of smartness - 'no, this is ME. I am going to STAY like this', Voila, a living thing. But there's a lot in that.

The other explanation is that this is all going on in a universal mind we and the animals are all connected to. I don't deny that possibility, but it seems to me by far the least plausible explanation. And it seems you don't want to even posit that, which makes your position seem to be completely lacking in explanatory potential. — Janus

Hey, that would require knowing the One Mind. And I don't claim to know the One Mind. I'm just tracking the footprints.

And I keep replying that we are attributing walls, trees and brick walls to animals' cognition, WALLS, TREES and BRICK are concepts, not mind-independent things. — Manuel

Totally :100:

Those are not citations. They are your homespun truisms on realism. Earlier I mentioned the phenomenological ideas of lebesnwelt and umwelt. Meaning, roughly, 'meaning world' and 'living world'. The meaning-worlds of different species are vastly different to our own. And for that matter, the meaning worlds of different cultures are vastly different to the meaning-world of this culture. But I don't agree that there is 'mind-independent substratum' behind all of those different meaning-worlds.

f you agree there are external objects that are real independently of human perception and that their characteristics determine what we see — Janus

But I don't agree and it's not what I said. I said there are external objects, but

What their existence might be outside of any perspective is meaningless and unintelligible, as a matter of both fact and principle. — Wayfarer

And that is definitely all out of me for the time being.

So, Biden pardons Hunter. Me, I think it was perfectly justifiable, but what's the bet that within a New York minute, you know who will be citing it in support of pardons for January 6th felons.

Citations, please.

The example I gave was the surface of a table... — Janus

But I don't deny the fact that there are real objects external to us. I will try one more time:

There is no need for me to deny that the Universe (or the table) 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. — Wayfarer

So I'm not denying that there are objective facts (and therefore the existence of objects). What I said was

By investing the objective domain with a mind-independent status, as if it exists independently of any mind, we absolutize it. — Wayfarer

And 'absolutizing it' amounts to metaphysical realism:

'Metaphysical realism is the idea that the existence and nature of things in the world are independent of how they are perceived or thought about. It's also known as "external" realism.'

That's what I think you're defending, and I'm criticizing. And that criticism is in line with:

Husserl believed all knowledge, all science, all rationality depended on conscious acts, acts which cannot be properly understood from within the natural outlook at all. Consciousness should not be viewed naturalistically as part of the world at all, since consciousness is precisely the reason why there was a world there for us in the first place. — Routledge Introduction to Phenomenology, p139

Furthermore I've pointed to the fact that physics itself has not arrived at an unambiguously objective entity at the most fundamental level. The experiments I referred to previously are about that very point.

So please stop telling me I'm not addressing the question or evading the issue. I'm really not. I know it's a contentious issue and a difficult problem - not a simple point! - but I'm not being evasive about it.

You simply cannot address the objections I make to your position. — Janus

I do address them, and you object to my objections. I'm not lecturing you, just making my case. You don't like, fine. You can't say I don't make an effort.

The only remaining issue then, would be if matter came before mental properties, or if mental properties came before material ones. — Manuel

I think it's rather deeper than that, but I'll leave it at that.

What I do is separate "mind" from "soul", in the way described by Aristotle. Soul is the base, so that all the potencies, capacities, or powers of the various life forms (self-nourishment, self-movement, sensation, and even intellection), are properties of the soul. This allows that mind, or intellect, in the human form, as a power of the soul, can come into existence through the process of evolution. But soul itself is prior. — Metaphysician Undercover

I could go along with that. I always find the translation of 'On the Soul' as 'D'Anima' very suggestive of that - an 'animating principle.

The things we perceive are not ideas. — Janus

We say 'the things we perceive are not ideas' because we instinctively think of ourselves as separate from the world. We see the apple or chair and think the 'idea' of it is something that occurs internally in the mind, distinct from the external object itself. This is the outlook of John Locke's representative realism: external objects cause ideas in our minds, and perception is the mental awareness of those ideas.

But Kant and Schopenhauer challenge this. For Kant, the object as perceived is not the thing-in-itself but a phenomenon—what appears is a product of the mind’s structuring activity. The 'idea' is not something separate from the act of perception; the perceived object is itself the idea, or more precisely, a phenomenon shaped by mind.

Schopenhauer takes this further, describing all perceived objects as representations (Vorstellungen), inseparable from the perceiving subject. Thus, the apple or chair is not a separate 'thing' causing an internal idea; it is a perceived idea, always within the phenomenal realm. This dissolves the divide between external objects and internal ideas that representative realism assumes.

Those kinds of themes are greatly expanded and explored in later phenomenology and existentialism.

there's not much of a difference. — Manuel

On the contrary, it's a difference that makes a difference!

I just don't see why I have any reason to deny that experience comes from modified physical (world, immaterial, neutral, whatever you want to call it) stuff. — Manuel

Because it's materialism, and I reject materialism.

Your own words:

If it signifies anything it signifies something that is not an idea. — Janus

I'm using the word 'idea' in the philosophical sense that anything that we recognise and perceive is 'idea', something we can form a concept of. So if you perceived something but have no idea what it is, then how could you know it was material in nature? In order for to be recognisable at all, it has to have some form.

Why can't mind be a specific configuration of matter? Is there a principle in nature that prevents mind from arising from certain combinations of matter? Not that I know of. — Manuel

I’ve been reading Hans Jonas and Evan Thompson on the phenomenology of biology. They’re dense and complex, so I wouldn’t claim mastery, but one idea stands out: life and mind might be isometric—that is, wherever there’s life, there’s also something like mind, even if it’s not conscious or sentient in the way we think of it. This is because organisms, by their nature, maintain themselves and distinguish themselves from their surroundings; without this, they’d just be subject to the same physical and chemical forces as everything else. This is evident even in the most rudimentary forms of organic life - they're in some basic sense, intentional, in a way that, crystals, say, cannot be.

Which raises an interesting possibility: could this self-maintenance be the earliest appearance of mind, even if in a rudimentary form? If so, then complex minds in higher organisms wouldn’t just be the product of matter—mind could also be understood as a causal factor. The fact that mind is not something that can be identified on the molecular level is not an argument against it - as everyone knows, identifying the physical correlates of consciousness is, famously, a very hard problem ;-) .

Speaking of symbols, the one chosen to represent UWF, Ψ , is called "psi". — Gnomon

That is the symbol for the wave-function equation. I go into that in an essay I've published on Medium, The Timeless Wave.

About the 'miracle required' cartoon, that was in respect of 'the proposal that DNA kind of just spontaneously ravelled itself into existence, which a lot of people seem to take for granted, is far-fetched.' But I don't mean to imply or support a kind of inventor or tinkerer God.

You should read God does not Exist (and no, it's not an atheist polemic, it's by an Episcopal Bishop, but very much in acccord with the ancient 'Negative Way'.) It suggests something I've been mulling over, that God and the soul are very much what Terrence Deacon means by 'absentials'. They're not something that exists but they may nevertheless be real.

By the way, in my earlier reply to you about Nancy Cartwright and Karen Armstrong, it shouldn't be taken to imply that either of them would support or argue for Stephen Meyer's types of arguments. Armstrong has written a book (which I haven't read) on religious fundamentalism. But I suspect she would say that Stephen Meyer illustrates just the kind of mistake she accuses the early modern scientists of making, by trying to use scientific arguments in support of belief in God, which really belongs to an altogether different register, so to speak. For a good primer on Cartwright, see No God, No Laws (pdf). For a sympathetic review of Armstrong's Case for God, see In Defense of the True God, Alain de Botton.

Meaning, you can't have any idea of it. :wink:

What sort of thing is the world as it is? — Banno

I've often said before that there is a convergence between cognitive science and idealism (or constructivism) insofar as the former recognises the centrality of the mind in the construction of understanding. So it differs from empiricism in recognising that the mind is not tabula rasa, and reality not something that exists just so, independently of it. But ultimately, the question you're asking is a very deep question indeed. Isn't that the subject matter of the Parmenides, and much of the philosophy that followed it? It's easy to make glib statements about it, but it's really not so easy.

Seeing things in the same way and seeing the same things are not the same. We can see the same things in different ways. — Janus

But the point is, physics itself, which one would expect to have the most definitive answer to that in the general sense, cannot arrive at a conclusion as to whether there is any fundamental thing which is the same for all observers.

You defer to science as the arbiter of reality, saying that anything that can't be known by science is a matter for faith. Yet the observer problem or measurement problem has long since undermined the ideal of absolute objectivity. This has been known for a century, since the famous Fifth Solvay Conference. It is the nub of the debate between the realist Einstein, who upheld just the kind of realism you're appealing to, and the discoverers of quantum mechanics, Bohr, Heisenberg and others. Their view was considerably more nuanced. 'Physics does not show us nature as it is in itself but nature exposed to our method of questioning'.

The most plausible explanation I can think of is that there is something there independent of the human that we are all seeing — Janus

A number of others have already addressed that - we're equipped with the same senses and inhabit a world of shared definitions, so we tend to see things the same way. But not always. People can reach radically different conclusions when presented with the same evidence.

I tried to explain before the distinction between empirical and metaphysical realism, which you dismissed as 'wordplay'. It really isn't.

It appears she (Nancy Cartwright) suggests there may be a greater disconnect between laws of physics and true laws of nature, than is commonly believed. Is that correct? — Relativist

She questions the very idea of there being natural laws in the sense of universally proscriptive or determinative principles. Why? Because what we call "laws" in physics are more like descriptions of observed regularities rather than prescriptions for what must happen. These laws are derived from idealized, abstracted, and isolated conditions—they describe how ideal objects behave in ideal circumstances. However, in the real world, there are countless extraneous factors and complexities that interfere with and influence outcomes, making reality far less tractable than the clean, quantitative descriptions provided by physics. Which is not to say that they don't work, but to question their universal status, as their universality is very specific in scope.

For that matter, I still stay that much of modern materialism can be seen as a descendant of the tendency in early modern science to reify natural laws as intrinsic features of the physical world. As Karen Armstrong notes in The Case for God, early modern thinkers took Newton's laws and similar discoveries as literal evidence of divine handiwork, turning what began as metaphysics into mechanistic descriptions in a clockwork universe. Much modern naturalism carries forward this approach, treating laws as real entities immanent in nature and universal regularities as the bedrock of reality, sans the God who purportedly put them there, who has become a ghost in his own machine.

However, this perspective inherits the same pitfalls that Nancy Cartwright critiques: it assumes that the abstractions of physics—idealized and purified of real-world complexity—correspond directly to the way the world is, rather than the way specific aspects of it are modeled under controlled conditions. The result is a metaphysical framework that continues to conflate the descriptive utility of scientific laws with their ontological status as supposedly fundamental truths about reality - however, with the distinct disadvantage of providing no conceptual space for the mind at all, save by way of some kind of ad-hoc epiphenomenon.