I don't know about that! Sheldrake has published many scientific papers - dozens, in fact. He was trained entirely within orthodox biology: BA & PhD in Biochemistry – Cambridge, Research Fellow at Clare College, Cambridge Royal Society Research Fellow; Worked at Harvard as a research fellow; Principal plant physiologist at ICRISAT (India) – an international agricultural research institute. During this period (roughly late 1960s–1970s), he published dozens of standard experimental papers, mainly on: Plant hormones (auxins); Plant development; Cellular differentiation; Transport mechanisms in plants. These appeared in fully mainstream journals such as: Nature; Journal of Experimental Botany, Planta Biochemical Journal.

Of course everything changed with his New Science of Life, 1981, and with it, the focus of his experimental work. That was the book which John Maddox reviewed harshly in Nature, saying it was 'heresy' and 'pseudo-science'. But, you know, Sheldrake didn't throw up his hands and walk away. He still has considerable presence in modern culture.

Michael Levin’s work is often said to be “non-standard” or “post-genomic,” but his research programme presupposes a kind of naturalised Platonism - not in a mystical sense, but in the straightforward biological sense that forms, patterns, and target morphologies have real causal powers.

Levin’s central claim—that cells cooperate toward an anatomically defined end-state—only makes sense if that end-state has some ontological status. The “target morphology” guiding regeneration and development is not encoded neuron-by-neuron or gene-by-gene; it is a structural attractor, a normative form. It is something like a real abstract—a pattern that exists as an organising principle even when no physical structure currently instantiates it. So he really has re-introduced the teleonomic element, life as goal-directed right through to the most basic levels. He's firmly anti-physicalist for all these reasons.

Levin appears in my story as Stephen Leavitt, although only by way of being mentioned, he doesn't have a walk-on role. But morphic resonance definitely comes into it. Which means what? Very simply - nature has memories. Not only in brains, but in nature herself. That is what Maddox screamed 'heresy' about. (Peirce's 'nature forms habits' seems to make a similar point. I met Rupert once, in the early 90's, he was brought out by a group I was associated with and gave a talk. He's hardly changed since, really.)

Plato and Aristotle differed significantly in their approach to reality, with Plato emphasizing an ideal, abstract realm of Forms as the ultimate reality, accessed through reason, and Aristotle focusing on the tangible, physical world as the primary reality, understood through empirical observation and the senses. — Gnomon

I think this is a serious oversimplification. Aristotle does not abandon Forms; his hylomorphism is still a form–based ontology—the difference is that Forms are no longer conceived as existing in a separate, self-subsisting realm, but as ontologically prior principles instantiated in matter. Matter, for Aristotle, has no actuality or determinate identity on its own; it exists only as pure potentiality until it receives form.

Moreover, intellect (nous) is precisely the faculty that apprehends forms, and thereby knows what particulars are. This is what differentiates rational from non-rational cognition—hence the classical definition of man as the rational animal. Sense perception alone never yields universality; it is nous that grasps form as such. In Aristotelian philosophy, this grasp of the Forms is what enables us to converse rationally, as reason converges on principles which are common to every rational intellect.

So Aristotle does not replace forms with brute physical particulars understood purely by the senses. Rather, he relocates form from a separate Platonic realm into the structure of being itself, while preserving its ontological and epistemic priority. If you look again at this post, what’s being argued in those three quoted passages is exactly this point: Aristotle’s realism remains fundamentally a formal realism, not a straightforward empiricism (although it is dismally apparent that this distinction is not being understood, with the attempt on my part to elucidate it being described as 'monomania'.)

Sure. Thanks for your comments.

From the passage above your post - why do you think the speaker says "It (physics) is screaming at us that observers really matter"? What is the point do you think he's making?

I don't accept that I misrepresented Janus' contributions, even though my description of them as naturalist empiricism was rejected. That is Janus' basic stance, whether he acknowledges it or not.

But I don't think this is an issue for physicalism, this is an issue for any kind of possible explanation. No theoretical framework can account for what it is like to feel something. A panpsychist or idealist is not going to be able to explain conscious experience anymore than a physicalist; panpsychism and idealism will also both have gaps in explaining how experiences emerge, such as the combination problem. The nature of explanation. — Apustimelogist

From my side, where the problem lies is that you don your physicalist spectacles and look at the whole discussion through them. Like a pair of polarising glasses that block out particular wavelengths, there are philosophical concepts that these spectacles won't let you see. Then you think that your inability to see them is somehow due to the nature of explanation, or the nature of the subject. That article I linked to is called 'the blind spot of science is the neglect of lived experience'. And really I don't think it even registered. It's like 'what "blind spot"?'

I think the central issue of the mind-body problem is that we take experience as some kind of special ontological primitive when I can't even articulate what that means — Apustimelogist

No! You can't articulate what it means, because of the physicalist framing of the issues. The school of phenomenology, initiated by Edmund Husserl, is precisely about the recognition of the primacy of experience. But I suspect as you read about it, you would auto-translate it into the physicalist framework, thereby missing the point again. You really should read some existentialism.

No other account can do better in principle — Apustimelogist

Here, you're falling back on scepticism - 'nobody really knows anything'.

The idealist and physicalist accounts are not two versions of the same kind of philosophy, one with mind as fundamental, the other with physical fundamentals. Not at all. Surely nobody can describe the feeling of pain such that another on hearing that description will know that particular pain, but everyone knows what pain is, because they suffer it. That is the 'explanatory gap' in a nutshell.

Actually I should clarify what I said above about Sheldrake - morphic resonance is Sheldrake’s controversial idea. The morphogenetic field is a related but different idea which is part of mainstream biology. Nevertheless Sheldrake is enamoured of Levin’s work for its holistic and non-reductionist approach.

Newsflash - just heard Sheldrake say that ‘Michael Levin and I both think that biological development comes about through morphogenetic fields.’

Just remember, this was the very concept that the erstwhile editor of Nature, John Maddox, said, in a hostile review, made Sheldrake’s book A New Science of Life (1981) “fit for burning”. He described the book, which proposed the concept of morphic resonance to explain biological and physical phenomena, as an "infuriating tract" and an "exercise in pseudo-science.”

The times, they are a’ changin’.

Constructive disagreement is the lifeblood of philosophy.

You might be interested in the fascinating work of the biologist Michael Levin, who posits a kind of platonic space at work in nature — Janus

You bet! I've been taking in his lectures the last few months. He has a role in the story I'm writing (under an alias, of course.)

Problem-Solving Without Explicit Instructions: Levin argues that biological systems—from cells to tissues to organisms—don't follow rigid, pre-programmed instructions but instead solve problems by navigating toward goals in this abstract space. — Janus

Which is intelligence in action. Dovetails very nicely with Evan Thompson's phenomenology.

I've been listening to all these guys, often while working out. (YouTube is now the very last subscription I'd cancel.. well, along with Chuck, which is my name for ChatGPT.)

I present such an alternative view as counterpoint to your seeming presupposition that the view you favour is the only one which is not self-refuting. — Janus

It was not a presupposition. Remember, this went back to three passages I provided, from Gerson, Feser and Russell, in support of the general idea of 'Aristotelian realism'. Aristotelian realism upholds the reality of universals, which are 'intelligible objects', of which the triangle, and other geometric forms, are examples. I do defend Aristotelian or scholastic or (some forms of) Platonic realism, in that I believe that there are real intelligibles, that are not the product of the mind, but can only be grasped by the mind. Insofar as there are 'immaterial things' then these are those with the caveat that they're not things but intellectual acts that are common to all rational minds (my 'doctrine of universals' in a nutshell.)

Your response:

The idea of a perfect geometrical figure can be understood to be simply an abstraction away from the inevitable imperfections in any geometrical physical construction — Janus

The 'abstraction away' from the sensory impression of a triangle is the kind of argument that empiricists appeal to. I only mentioned John Stuart Mill as an eminent example of that.

Mill’s view in A System of Logic is precisely:

• Numbers arise from collections of concrete objects
• Geometry arises from idealizing sensory experience
• Universals are formed by abstracting common features
• Necessity is a product of psychological expectation hardened into habit

It is very close to the kinds of arguments you often articulate. If that is offensive, I didn't mean it to be, so, sorry for that. It was an effort to contextualise the kinds of arguments we're presenting - Neo-Aristotelian vs Empirical.

If you had read what I wrote closely you would see that I was referring to something else, namely the attitude that we ought to argue only on the grounds of what nature presents to us, not on traditional or scriptural authority or personal intuitions, which might purport to pertain to something beyond nature. — Janus

So what you really meant by 'the natural attitude' was actually 'naturalism'. You frequently appeal to naturalism and/or natural science is the 'court of appeal' for normative claims. Again, this is not meant as a pejorative or personal criticism, it is demonstrably what you're saying. I might have misinterpreted it, because the expression 'the natural state' is associated with Husserl's critique of naturalism.

His criticism of the 'natural attitude' is of the kind of taken-for-grantedness of the domain of empirical experience, which looses sight of the framing assumptions which natural science brings to experience. As one of the modern Buddhist scholars I follow, David Loy, put it in respect of secular culture, 'The main problem with our usual understanding of secularity is that it is taken-for-granted, so we are not aware that it is a worldview. It is an ideology that pretends to be the everyday world we live in. Most of us assume that it is simply the way the world really is, once superstitious beliefs about it have been removed.”

And this, in turn, is because of the association of transcendentals with religious commitments, something which intertwined with the history in our culture. I've published an essay on it on Medium (although it's a complex argument.)

I can reasonably say that the ability to grasp a triangle as a plane bounded by three intersecting straight lines just is a matter of abstracting away from a recognized pattern and stating it as a specification or rule — Janus

Of course you can. Saying that it is an appeal to empiricism is not a personal insult. It's a common philosophical attitude, and you're appealing to it.

Nothing I have said relies upon or implies that "comparing ideas, considering arguments, making a case in your mind" can be usefully explained in terms of brain activity. — Janus

Except for

I see no reason why the conscious experience of anything, even of a thought itself, could not be a neural process which we do not consciously experience as such. — Janus

Whether or not it would be reasonable to say that they have pre-linguistic concepts of patterns would be a matter of whether you believe concepts are embodied in neural patterns or not. — Janus

The so-called "natural attitude"... — Janus

I took this to be a reference to Husserl, as he is associated with that expression. The reason I cited him is not 'an argument from authority'. It is more along the lines of citing a well-known philosopher, so as to establish the point at issue is not a personal idisyncratic expression.

The only thing in cognitive sciences that is in principle not amenable to the kind of explanation a physicalist might like is experience / "qualia". — Apustimelogist

Paraphrased: 'The only thing not amenable to explanation in physicalist terms is the question of the nature of being'.

If experience or “qualia” is in principle not amenable to physical explanation, then what is not explained is not a local feature or particular function of cognition but the very faculty for which there is any appearance to consider at all. Physical explanation works within, and assumes as real, the sensory domain; experience (consciousness, the subject, mind) is that for which these appearances hang together as a meaningful world. So this isn’t a small leftover problem — it marks a boundary to what physicalist explanation, by its own lights, can reach.

A second point is that physicalist explanation will typically not even see this boundary, because it has already excluded the subjective ground of experience from what counts as explanatorily relevant in the first place. That is precisely why this has been called the “blind spot of science” — the systematic neglect of lived experience as a condition of intelligibility rather than a phenomenon to be explained. (As discussed in this article.)

This is why Chalmer's called his essay 'facing up to'!

I do endeavour to address your arguments with courtesy, reciprocation would be appreciated.

Of course, your mental image of a triangle might not be exact, but rather indeterminate and fuzzy. But to grasp something with the intellect is not the same as to form a mental image of it.
— Edward Feser

The idea of a perfect geometrical figure can be understood to be simply an abstraction away from the inevitable imperfections in any geometrical physical construction. — Janus

That is the John Stuart Mill argument, standard empiricism, 'all knowledge comes from experience'. Against that, is the fact that rational thought is the capacity to grasp 'a triangle is a plane bounded by three interesecting straight lines'. A non-rational animal, a dog or a chimp, can be conditioned to respond to a triangular shape, but it will never grasp the idea of a triangle

I see no reason why... — Janus

Whenever you say that, you are comparing ideas, considering arguments, making a case in your mind. Of course that entails brain activity, but to try and explain it in terms of brain activity is another matter entirely.

Secondly, the thrust of Aristotle's argument is this: that material configurations, neural states, circuits, and the like, are always particular and specific, whereas ideas are by their nature general (universal in his lexicon.) We understand what a geometric form is in general, such that we can recognise it whereever it is encountered, or even merely considered. So it can't be identified with a particular configuration of matter, a neural configuration, circuit or switch. (That is Gerson's gloss on Aristotle's argument.)

The so-called "natural attitude" just consists in the refusal to submit one's thinking, experience and understanding to any dogma, and the "interpretive/ methodological" application "to science, historiography, law, pedagogy religion, etc." is simply the extension of that free-mindedness to the human disciplines. — Janus

Not so. The 'natural attitude' is a specific reference to Husserl's criticism of naturalism. 'Husserl’s insight is that we live our lives in what he terms a “captivation-in-an-acceptedness;” that is to say, we live our lives in an unquestioning sort of way by being wholly taken up in the unbroken belief-performance of our customary life in the world. We take for granted our bodies, the culture, gravity, our everyday language, logic and a myriad other facets of our existence' (IEP). We take the reality of the world at face value - really it's not that different from naive, or even scientific, realism.

Besides, your own entries are shot through with plenty of dogma, first and foremost that science is the only court of appeal for normative judgement in any matters whatever. Anything you deem cannot be adjuticated scientifically, you declare 'indeterminable', because you can't see any other criteria, including logical criteria, by which it could be decided. So if an argument is advanced that doesn't fit within this procrustean bed - why, then, it must be dogma!

From New Scientist:

The physicist who argues that there are no objective laws of physics

Daniele Oriti’s pursuit of a theory of quantum gravity has led him to the startling conclusion that the laws of nature don’t exist independently of us – a perspective shift that could yield fresh breakthroughs.

Thomas Lewton: What do people get wrong about the nature of reality?

Daniele Oriti: At the risk of seeming provocative, most scientists – and anybody who hasn’t really thought about the issue – maintain a position that philosophers call “naive realism”. This is the idea that there is a world out there that is entirely independent from us, not just in its existence but also in its properties: independent from the minds apprehending it, or from our theories about it. It’s made of things that are similarly independently defined, with intrinsic properties, which follow patterns that are also independent of us – even if we may not know about them.

I have been guilty of that position too. As a physics student, you want to understand the world. You build models, you revise them and you think that you are getting closer to the actual story. That’s the picture, and it’s very naive.

Why is that kind of thinking so naive?

First of all, it is naive on conceptual, philosophical grounds. But I would also say that modern science, particularly quantum mechanics, blurs this picture. One of the main lessons of quantum mechanics is that the distinction between us and the world isn’t really there, not sharply anyway. It tells us the properties of a particle are encoded in a probabilistic entity we call a 'wave function', which tells us the likelihood of it appearing here or there, for instance – but that the particle cannot be attributed definite properties until it is observed. It’s screaming at us that observers really matter.

....I’m still inclined to think that physical laws are really epistemic in nature, so something that exists primarily in our minds.

That’s because, from a philosophical standpoint, what we identify as a “law of nature” always has some component of our models of the world, selected because of some epistemic virtue we favour. The further claim that the law is somehow “out there” seems gratuitous to me. And, as I’ve already said, I think quantum mechanics challenges the idea of a separation between the “world” and “us”.

article pdf | Daniele Oriti on Google Scholar

The only thing I'm opposing, is the application of scientific method to philosophical problems.
— Wayfarer
"Problems" such as? — 180 Proof

Questions of meaning, purpose, value, aesthetics. The scientific method is undoubtedly successful in respect of understanding objective processes and relations. No question at all. That is the context within which physicalism is meaningful and effective. I don't dispute that it is, but physicalism is the attempt to apply the same mindset to philosophy. I've said before that physicalism is really no different to 'metaphysical naturalism' - the attempt to ground metaphysical arguments on naturalistic assumptions.

When we identify something, we identify a gestalt, not an assembly of simples. This is a basic fact of cognition.

A gestalt has properties that no list of constituent parts captures: unity, salience, meaning, intentional relevance.
— Wayfarer

And this is just a certain level of explanation in the realm of psychology, where these concepts may have some utility whether on a formal or informal basis, or fundamentally inaccurate/accurate. But that doesn't invalidate the possibility or validity of explanations from the view of neurons as units of information-processing. — Apustimelogist

Not so. Charles Pinter's book is cognitive science, not psychology. When you say it's psychology, it shifts the whole meaning. But his argument is that when you appeal to atomic structures. neurons, brains, or other elemental entities, your thinking is always operating in terms of gestalts, which are perceived meaningful wholes that exist inside the world of lived meanings. Take the time to look through the chapter abstracts. Pinter's book is thoroughly scientifically informed but not reductionist.

It seems that I am actually advocating for the complete opposite of what you think I am - usign the full range of conceptual tools and explanations to alk about things. — Apustimelogist

Using the full range, but generally deferring to the reductionist, 'bottom-up' ontology, wherein the material substrate is the causal explanation for the higher-level features of experience. This comes across all the time in your posts.

I appreciate that you take a lot of time to respond to my objections and I read your posts as being earnest and sincere. But can I ask — have you ever dipped into philosophy of science at all? I’m thinking of people like Kuhn or Polanyi. The reason I ask is that a lot of what I’m advocating here about cognition and objectivity comes from that tradition, where the idea of a completely neutral objective science is challenged on scientific and philosophical grounds. It might clarify where I’m coming from, even if you end up disagreeing. It may not only be 'Colorless green ideas sleeping furiously' ;-)

in other words, "the mind" is mind-dependent. — 180 Proof

The subjective reality of existence is ineliminable. Cogito ergo sum.

I take your point. My concern was more existential than transcendental: how, in the wake of the collapse of shared cosmic narratives, lived significance is actually sustained or whether it decays into nihilism. In that sense, I wasn’t claiming that meaning is constructed from nothing, but that historically we now inhabit conditions where the background structures that once stabilized meaning have broken down and is often experienced as “nothing matters.”

I engage in mental activities; I experience qualia. — Relativist

The mind - neither mine, nor yours, nor anyone else's should they be in this room - is not an objective existent.
— Wayfarer
However I am an objective existent. I engage in mental activities; I experience qualia. As I suggested, and you did not dispute: "the mind" is conceptually that aspect of myself that engages in mental activities. You have not reconciled the fact that I am an objective existent with your claim that "the mind" is not.

it is categorically, or ontologically, of a different order to existent things.
— Wayfarer
This is vague. Describe these various ontological categories. — Relativist

You’re eliding two very senses of “I” without noticing it.

Yes — as a human organism, you are an objective existent. Your body, your brain, your behaviour are all perfectly legitimate objects of third-person description. No one disputes that.

But the “I” that is the subject of experience — the subject to whom qualia appear, the one that is doing the thinking right now — is not itself an object within the field of objects. It is the condition for there being a field of objects at all. You never encounter this “I” as a thing in the world in the way you encounter tables, neurons, or even brain scans. It is always on the experiencing side of the relation.

So when you say:

"I am an objective existent. I engage in mental activities; I experience qualia."

you are illicitly fusing:

The organism that can be studied objectively, and

The subjectivity in virtue of which anything is experienced at all.

Those are not the same ontological role. The first is an object in experience; the second is what makes experience possible in the first place.

That is what I mean by saying that the mind (or the subject) is “of a different ontological order.” It is more basic than the objective/subjective split itself.

If you insist on treating the subject as just another object, you erase the very distinction that makes the word “experience” intelligible. But, as I already predicted, this is something you won't notice or acknowledge. It is the blind spot of physicalism.

A world without truth could not be, as there would be no actuality. Of course it is something each must realize by themselves, which is the task of philosophy.

And furthermore the statement ‘there is no truth’ is self contradicting: if it is true then there is a truth. If it is not it is false.

Best to avoid categorical statements of this kind.

I grant, the steam of images that comes out of our devices is endlessly fascinating. I can't argue with that. But on the other hand, it's also a window into all kinds of conversations, ideas, images, concepts, and information which otherwise we would never have. it can be a problem but it's not necessarily a problem (although human beings seem to be able to make a problem out of anything.)

Going back to the title of your thread - positivism is rather passé terminology. Positivism as a formal philosophical movement went out of fashion in the 60's. Positivism as an undercurrent in culture is however very much alive. It is simply the idea that only those things that are ascertainable by science, and mathematical theories that can be justified on those things, constitute real knowledge. It is certainly the presumption of many here, even though if called out they'll deny it.

But what it means, is that there is no basis for philosophical, ethical or aesthetic judgements, other than either the scientific or objective, on the one side, or personal conviction or the subjective, on the other. This is a direct consequence of the predicament of modernity that I wrote another thread about. So the bigger existential question is, surely, what makes life worth living, what is meaningful? This is the ontological or existential crisis you're referring to.

An article I often refer to, published when I was first posting to forums, comes to mind. It is a review of Jürgen Habermas' dialogues on religion with the then Cardinal Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI). This review is called Does Reason Know what it is Missing?. It's basically about the respective roles of reason and religion in a secular culture. I'll quote an excerpt:

What secular reason is missing is self-awareness. It is “unenlightened about itself” in the sense that it has within itself no mechanism for questioning the products and conclusions of its formal, procedural entailments and experiments. “Postmetaphysical thinking,” Habermas contends, “cannot cope on its own with the defeatism concerning reason which we encounter today both in the postmodern radicalization of the ‘dialectic of the Enlightenment’ and in the naturalism founded on a naïve faith in science.”

Postmodernism announces (loudly and often) that a supposedly neutral, objective rationality is always a construct informed by interests it neither acknowledges nor knows nor can know. Meanwhile science goes its merry way endlessly inventing and proliferating technological marvels without having the slightest idea of why. The “naive faith” Habermas criticizes is not a faith in what science can do — it can do anything — but a faith in science’s ability to provide reasons, aside from the reason of its own keeping on going, for doing it and for declining to do it in a particular direction because to do so would be wrong.

The counterpart of science in the political world is the modern Liberal state, which, Habermas reminds us, maintains “a neutrality . . . towards world views,” that is, toward comprehensive visions (like religious visions) of what life means, where it is going and what we should be doing to help it get there. The problem is that a political structure that welcomes all worldviews into the marketplace of ideas, but holds itself aloof from any and all of them, will have no basis for judging the outcomes its procedures yield. Worldviews bring with them substantive long-term goals that serve as a check against local desires. Worldviews furnish those who live within them with reasons that are more than merely prudential or strategic for acting in one way rather than another.

The Liberal state, resting on a base of procedural rationality, delivers no such goals or reasons and thus suffers, Habermas says, from a “motivational weakness”; it cannot inspire its citizens to virtuous (as opposed to self-interested) acts because it has lost “its grip on the images, preserved by religion, of the moral whole” and is unable to formulate “collectively binding ideals.”

The review goes on to be critical of Habermas in some respects, but I call this particular passage out, because it's a pretty pithy expression of what many people are feeling in the modern world. We're all of us wrestling with a crisis of meaning, but philosophers, at least, are prepared to acknowledge it, and try to face up to it. Which is something!

This phase of Habermas' thought - he has a massive corpus - is associated with the phrase 'post-secular'. I think that's an interesting phrase.

You assert the mind is not an object, and therefore "not in the frame". And yet, it is a fact that I exist, I am an observer, a subject, and I engage in mental activities. "The mind" is conceptually that aspect of myself that engages in mental activities. Reconcile this. — Relativist

It's not difficult! Everything around me now - a partial catalogue is monitor, powerbook, keyboard, iphone, speakers, desk, bookshelf, books, windows - every single one of those is an objective existent. The mind - neither mine, nor yours, nor anyone else's should they be in this room - is not an objective existent. It is that to which these objects of the sense appear. So it is categorically, or ontologically, of a different order to existent things. You won't notice this, because naturalism methodically brackets out the role of the mind, even though the mind is foundational to all of existence as we know it. Armstrong, for instance, wishes to treat mind as another among the objects of physics and chemistry - he says this, it's no 'straw man argument' - and then complains, why does the mind deserve special treatment? Why, if physics and chemistry have such enormous purchase in the objective domain, should the mind be exempted from these powerful methods that science has developed? And the answer is: it is not an object. So the methods of science, which are so powerful in so many respects, has no purchase here.

And the thing is, you acknowledge this. You've said in many places, yes, physicalism can't account for the nature of mind. As if this is kind of a last wrinkle that might have to be ironed out, a final puzzling anomaly that will "one day" be solved. But no - it's an intractable problem, because it's not an objective question.

If you could grasp this point, about 99% of what separates our views would be evident.

I too see the limitations of the Cartesian/Newtonian worldview, something I was alerted to by first reading The Tao of Physics in the 1970's. That book has its flaws and critics, but it is also not without its strengths. I think some grasp of Capra's kind of counter-cultural hippie physics is essential in the modern world.

I too have always been critical of positivism. But I have not found the remedy in post-modernism or the other trends you point to, and don't identify with any of those 10 groups.

You can be both logical and factual, without being positivist or dogmatic. There are some fantastically interesting and fruitful new syntheses of science, philosophy and, yes, wisdom, circulating on the internet alongside all of the mediocrity and confusion. There's never been a better time to be alive.

Here's an anecdote I like. I'm quite interested in paleontology. In that discipline, specialists can age remains by analysis of the stone-tool flaking methods that they used when they dig down into caves. Different epochs had different types of flaking methods. The point is, those epochs might have lasted hundreds of thousands of years! And what changed in that time? The way stone tools were flaked. How many lives did our hominim ancestors live, where nothing whatever changed, for literally thousands of generations? And now everything is changing about every ten minutes. It can be confronting and confusing, but it is also unbelievably dynamic, with untold opportunities. Sure beats the hell out of skinning game with flint axes.

In a philosophical register the absolutely crucial thing is to understand why life matters. Neitszche and Heidegger both foresaw the upsurge of nihilism, which is basically 'nothing matters'. People who think nothing matters often do appalling things - because it doesn't matter. So we have to find a way for life to matter for us. Having a family often does that, as your children's wellbeing will matter, but of course it's not limited to that. A sense of wonderment, and of gratitude, also helps.

Our 'cosmic context' also matters. This is what religion provided: a cosmic story that you were part of. (This is why Star Wars and superhero movies are so huge.) But, seriously, philosophy needs to imbue a sense of connectedness to the Cosmos, and preferably also an awareness of the sacred, although that is something we tend to shy away from nowadays.

There is no 'method' in any of this - no template, no ready-made plan. But there are many possibilities.

I've been away for a time.

By way of explaining how we differ, I wonder if you can elaborate on how you think the capacities of our mind you've referred to in our past exchanges came to be if not through our interaction with the rest of the world? — Ciceronianus

And I'll be away until Monday next (I've responded to this comment due to monitoring the discussion.) :chin:

The interaction is not something I deny. Look at the paragraph under the heading All in the Mind?

That comment of Janus was in response to a gloss of the Platonist scholar Lloyd Gerson, which in turn was a gloss on Aristotle 'D'Anima' ('On the Soul'). It is a very specific argument, that it is the ability of intellect (nous) to grasp forms (universals) that makes communication possible, in that they provide us with a stock of general concepts, which materialism denies (as materialism is generally nominalist.)

Anyway, I'm offsite until 1 December I have some other writing to work on. Chat then.

I haven't found a single thing to "save" myself, but helping and uplifting others is a whole new world to me now. Being good for society is interesting. Since I can't help myself, I'll help others. — GreekSkeptic

Stick with that! Can't go wrong with it, unless you put unrealistic expectations on it (like seeing to gain from it.)

You can defeat this only by providing an alternative that better explains the facts. — 180 Proof

Well spotted, 180! And the only fact that the physicalist doesn't come to terms with, is the reality of her own existenz. But, I get it, people need something to hang on to.

There's nothing in what I say that is 'anti-science' or 'opposed to science'. The only thing I'm opposing, is the application of scientific method to philosophical problems.

Why can't our individual worlds all share in the public world? — Ludwig V

I'm reminded of a powerful quote I read in novelist John Fowles ('The Magus') excursion into philosophy, The Aristos. I read that book in my 20's and have never looked at it since, but it contains a compendium of quotes from Heraclitus, one of which was:

There is but one world common for those who are awake, but when men are asleep, each turns away into a world of his own — Heraclitus

Interpretation: Awake = awake to the Logos, the shared reality, the unity-in-difference of nature.
Sleeping = enclosed in private illusion, a subjective world made of projections and habits.

It is a classical 'axial age' declaration that might easily have been found in the Upaniṣads or the early Buddhist texts.

But is is nothing like 'scientific objectivity', even though that is arguably descended from it. It is more thorough-going, pertaining to the entire life of the individual, not simply to the exercise of rational powers in respect of a specific scientific question.

So the reason our individual worlds do not automatically converge on the public world is that our ordinary state is one of confinement within a narrow, self-referential viewpoint (described in phenomenology as the egological or natural state). Awakening, for Heraclitus, means breaking out of that confinement and aligning oneself with the deeper order that is common to all (although in his case, that consisted of severe asceticism and seclusion from society.)

It's odd that you rule out the possibility I'm right. — Relativist

It's not a personal issue. It is physicalism that I'm critical of, not you in particular. See response above.

The physicalist wants to claim that when you zoom-in on the world and un-mix the convoluted causal structures, then you will find that everything is grounded in more fundamental events or structures describable and predictable by physics, and you will find no additional stuff behaving according to different principles. — Apustimelogist

I well aware of physicalist claims, and that is a good description of it.

One of Charles Pinter's central arguments in Mind and the Cosmic Order is that science explains the world by decomposing it into simples—the smallest, causally interacting constituents: particles, fields, molecules, neurons. (This can be traced back to atoms and atomism, although the idea of a physical atom has since been displaced.) This method has delivered enormous explanatory power , but it also commits us to a very specific kind of explanation: one where wholes are derivative, and the only truly fundamental realities are the constituents and their interactions.

Charles Pinter highlights fundamental issue with this attitude. Organisms don’t perceive the world in terms of simples. The human and animal sensorium (the manifold of sensory impressions which constitute 'things' for animals and humans) works in terms of gestalts—unified, meaningful wholes: faces, trajectories, melodies, intentions, beings, and so on. These are not assembled bottom-up from atomic sensory “bits”; rather, they are the primary mode in which the world is disclosed to a subject. When we identify something, we identify a gestalt, not an assembly of simples. This is a basic fact of cognition.

A gestalt has properties that no list of constituent parts captures: unity, salience, meaning, intentional relevance. A melody is not found in the individual notes; a face is not found in the luminosity patches; a perceived threat is not found in isolated pixels or shapes. These features belong to the organization of the whole, not to the micro-level items. They, more than atomic simples, are the basic constituents of the 'life-world', the world of lived meaning. And Pinter demonstrates this is so, not just for humans, but even for insects.

The tension is this:

* Science’s ontology is formulated in terms of simples.

* Mind and perception operate in terms of gestalts.

(Hence you can see why I'm not appealing to 'non-physical substances'.)

A physicalist can say that gestalts somehow “emerge” from simples, but the challenge is to show how the features distinctive of gestalts—coherence, meaningfulness, aboutness—follow as a matter of explanation from the properties of the physical parts. Simply asserting neural correlates doesn’t do the philosophical work, because correlates explain when something occurs, not why its distinctive features exist at all.

The point is that the reductive strategy that works for chemistry or planetary motion is not obviously suited to phenomena whose defining characteristics are holistic, structured, and inherently perspectival. If explanation bottoms out in simples, yet consciousness and cognition are inherently gestalt-like, then either:

* the reductive framework is incomplete, or

* gestalts possess explanatory features not captured by simples, or

* a richer conception of nature is needed, in which organization, form, and perspective are not treated as secondary or derivative

This isn’t an argument against physics. It’s an argument that a scientific metaphysics based solely on simples faces a structural mismatch with the phenomena of mind, whose basic units are wholes rather than parts.

So while it may be true that 'we don't know the intrinsic nature of anything' that is far from the only problem with physicalism. As an explanatory paradigm, it methodically excludes the basis of meaning in cognition.

All description and explanation occurs in some kind of context where there are limitations or constraints, ultimately shaped by how brains process and use information. — Apustimelogist

Here, you're committing the 'mereological fallacy'. This is central to an infliuential book, The Philosophical Foundations of Neurosciences, Hacker and Bennett (philosopher and neuroscientist, respectively):

In Chap 3 of Part I - “The Mereological Fallacy in Neuroscience” - Bennett and Hacker set out a critical framework that is the pivot of the book. They argue that for some neuroscientists, the brain does all manner of things: it believes (Crick); interprets (Edelman); knows (Blakemore); poses questions to itself (Young); makes decisions (Damasio); contains symbols (Gregory) and represents information (Marr). Implicit in these assertions is a philosophical mistake, insofar as it unreasonably inflates the conception of the 'brain' by assigning to it powers and activities that are normally reserved for sentient beings. It is the degree to which these assertions depart from the norms of linguistic practice that sends up a red flag. The reason for objection is this: it is one thing to suggest on empirical grounds correlations between a subjective, complex whole (say, the activity of deciding and some particular physical part of that capacity, say, neural firings) but there is considerable objection to concluding that the part just is the whole. These claims are not false; rather, they are devoid of sense.

Wittgenstein remarked that it is only of a human being that it makes sense to say “it has sensations; it sees, is blind; hears, is deaf; is conscious or unconscious.” (Philosophical Investigations, § 281). The question whether brains think “is a philosophical question, not a scientific one” (p. 71). To attribute such capacities to brains is to commit what Bennett and Hacker identify as “the mereological fallacy”, that is, the fallacy of attributing to parts of an animal attributes that are properties of the whole being. Moreover, merely replacing the mind by the brain leaves intact the misguided Cartesian conception of the relationship between the mind and behavior, merely replacing the ethereal by grey glutinous matter.

You see, I think your approach is undermined by this reductionism, the conviction that basic physical level is the only real one, to the extent that you can't even consider any alternative. You simply assume that philosophy must defer to physics, as if that can't even be in question.

Pinter, Charles C. Mind and the Cosmic Order: How the Mind Creates the Features & Structure of All Things, and Why This Insight Transforms Physics. Cham (Switzerland): Springer, 2020

Say what you will about Mamdani. but he must a world class ass kisser.

I do see your point and there is a sense in which the brain is a physical organ which can be physically damaged, But in context the implication was that it is ‘just another physical thing’ which is what I’m calling into question. And I think you would find the physicalist would not allow that the mind and brain are conceptually seperable as that would imply dualism,

As always :wink:

The inexicability of qualia is not specifically anything to do with physics — Apustimelogist

Need I point out that this is not the Physics Forum?

The most fundamental problem in metaphysics is whether metaphysics exists" — Ludwig V

Well asked. :up:

Yes, I'm aware that you believe the mind is not physical, and therefore not on par with physics and chemistry. But the extent of what you told me you believe about mind is just this negative (supposed) fact: it's not physical. — Relativist

You keep telling me what I'm not grasping, so I'll return the favour. The reason that the mind is not an object like those of physics or chemistry is because it is what we are. Cogito ergo sum, as Descartes correctly observed, is the one indubitable fact of existence. The mind (observer, subject, consciousness) is the one utterly indbuitable fact of existence because it is that to whom all experience occurs. So, of course it's not in the frame, part of the picture, nor a 'mysterious entity' nor 'non-physical thing'. Now the entire phenomenological, idealist, Indian, and most contiental philosophy understands this in a way that Anglo physicalism cannot.

And for you, that's just an inconvenient detail, somethingt that doesn't fit with your otherwise 'best explanation for all the facts'. Whereas, to me, that invalidates the entire point of philosophy, as it excludes the very subject to whom philosophy is meaningful.

Martin Heidegger is a difficult philosopher and one who's books I have not read in full, But he does point to what he calls the 'forgetfulness of Being', saying that this is a deficiency or an absence at the centre of modern philosophy. And that this is not a matter of propostiional knowledge, but an fact about existence (therefore, 'existential'.)

I mostly agree with it — Relativist

(Armstrong quote) Do you know why I would not agree? I’ll recap - because it treats ‘mind’ as being on par with ‘the objects of physics and chemistry’. Do you know why I fault that?

I embrace physicalism (generally, not just as a theory of mind) as an Inference to Best Explanation for all facts. — Relativist

Except for the nature of mind and the felt nature of experience, right? You’ve acknowledged that in various places as I understand it.

You aren't even in position to justifiably disagree, because you don't embrace any particular theory of mind (much less, a metaphysical theory). — Relativist

That is a virtue as far as I’m concerned.

I may not be an idealist, but I've come to terms with 'existence' being an ideal, which is awfully dang close to being an idealist I guess. — noAxioms

Keep coming! You're getting close!

Very different subject matter but a well - regarded book. Out of print, I Iuckily found an online copy - it ought to download properly book-marked, which helps in navigating it.

I think most people don't take that view, even people who think of the world as fundamentally physical. — Apustimelogist

What about the boxed quote above in support of materialist theory of mind. Do you think it is basically correct? Or if not what’s wrong with it?

And, you haven't countered the argument I put to you, only re-stated your conviction that 'whatever exists must be physical'.

For what it's worth, I don't think the language used in the OP is idiosyncatic or the words have been misused in any way. As noted above, I dropped the text into gemini and it had no trouble interpreting it and summarizing it with 100% accuracy.