I further narrow it down to the thesis that everything that exists has a common ontological structure: a particular with intrinsic properties and extrinsic (relational) properties to other existents. This implies everything is the same kind of thing, which I label, "physical". — Relativist

I've said before, quantum physics demolishes such a Newtonian conception of reality. At the fundamental level, the properties of sub-atomic primitives are indeterminate until measured. But of course, that can be swept aside, because 'physicalism doesn't depend on physics'. It's more a kind of 'language game'.

Classical Newtonian physics was compatible with the Bible God, who creates a world, like a wind-up toy, and sets it on a straight & narrow path in a specific direction. But non-linear & probabilistic Quantum physics is more like the erratic & random ancient religions based on natural cycles. — Gnomon

Well, Tao of Physics (1974) is a cultural landmark, notwithstanding that it is written around many weak analogies. But it is a matter of fact that Neils Bohr, on being awarded Imperial Honors by the Danish Crown for his discoveries, had a familial coat-of-arms designed which had the Taost Ying-Yang symbol at its centre. He regarded the 'complementarity principle' as the most important philosophical discovery of his life.

I think the more salient point is the emergence of the 'division of mind and matter' that originates with Descartes and Galileo. The objective world comprising measurable properties (the 'primary qualities') is said to be the ground of reality as far as science is concerned, while how things appear is relegated to the mind of the observer. That is the 'cartesian division' which is still very influential in life and culture. Hence the belief that the Universe is devoid of meaning, as meaning has been subjectivised. So whatever meaning there is, is a matter for the individual. Faggin says in his introduction:

If we start from consciousness, free will, and creativity as irreducible properties of nature, the whole scientific conception of reality is overturned. In this new vision, the emotional and intuitive parts of life—ignored by materialism—return to play a central role. Aristotle said: “To educate the mind without educating the heart means not educating at all.” We cannot let physicalism and reductionism define human nature and leave consciousness out from the description of the universe. The physicalist and reductionist premises are perfect for describing the mechanical and symbolic-informational aspects of reality, but they are inadequate to explain its semantic aspects. If we insist that these assumptions describe all of reality, we eliminate a priori what distinguishes us from our machines and we erase our consciousness, our freedom and, above all, our humanity from the face of the universe. — Faggin, Federico. Irreducible: Consciousness, Life, Computers, and Human Nature (p. 14) Kindle Edition.

But I know from experience, many will respond, 'OK if consciousness is so important, where is it! Show it to me!'

Yājñavalkya says: "You tell me that I have to point out the Self (i.e. 'consciousness') as if it is a cow or a horse. Not possible! It is not an object like a horse or a cow. I cannot say, 'here is the Ātman; here is the Self'. It is not possible because you cannot see the seer of seeing. The seer can see that which is other than the Seer, or the act of seeing. An object outside the seer can be beheld by the seer. How can the seer see himself? How is it possible? You cannot see the seer of seeing. You cannot hear the hearer of hearing. You cannot think the Thinker of thinking. You cannot understand the Understander of understanding. That is Ātman." — Brihadaranyaka Upaniṣad

Whereas what you are doing is defining 'object' as 'mind-dependent' from the outset, so that no matter what we learn about the object through the process of inquiry this knowledge always only applies to a mind-dependent object by definition. You are deciding the ontological status of the object in advance of the inquiry, which just begs the question. — Esse Quam Videri

I don’t think I’m assigning an ontological status to objects. I’m not saying that objects depend for their existence on minds. I’m saying that objecthood — identity, determinacy, intelligibility — is a cognitive status, not an ontological primitive. That’s a claim about the conditions under which inquiry is possible, not a stipulation about what exists prior to inquiry. It is an epistemological rather than ontological argument.

From the mind-created world op:

I will concentrate less on arguments about the nature of the constituents of objective reality, and focus instead on understanding the mental processes that shape our judgment of what they comprise.

... there is no need for me to deny that the Universe is real independently of your mind or mine, or of any specific, individual mind. Put another way, it is empirically true that the Universe exists independently of any particular mind. But what we know of its existence is inextricably bound by and to the mind we have, and so, in that sense, reality is not straightforwardly objective. It is not solely constituted by objects and their relations. Reality has an inextricably mental aspect, which itself is never revealed in empirical analysis ¹. Whatever experience we have or knowledge we possess, it always occurs to a subject — a subject which only ever appears as us, as subject, not to us, as object.

So I'm not saying that objects don't exist in the absence of the observer, but that their ontological status is indeterminate.

This is an ontology. Noumena exist. The transcendental subject exists. However, their existence is inferred rather than experienced. If they didn't exist, then empirical experience itself would not be possible. — Esse Quam Videri

But what kind of existence do they have? You can't show them to me, only explain them to me. Anything that has to be explained is conceptual, not phenomenal.

In a previous exchange, I mentioned this passage from a review of a book on Husserl:

We can maintain that mathematical objects are mind-independent, self-subsistent and in every sense real, and we can also explain how we are cognitively related to them: they are invariants in our experience, given fulfillments of mathematical intentions. ...

We can evidently say, for example, that mathematical objects are mind-independent and unchanging, but now we always add that they are constituted in consciousness in this manner, or that they are constituted by consciousness as having this sense … . They are constituted in consciousness, nonarbitrarily, in such a way that it is unnecessary to their existence that there be expressions for them or that there ever be awareness of them.[/i[ (p. 13).
— — Phenomenology, Logic, and the Philosophy of Mathematics (review)

The reason I mention this again, is that it says, on the one hand, that mathematical objects are "mind-independent", but, on the other, that they are "constituted in consciousness, nonarbitrarily."

They are "mind independent" in that mathematical proofs are not dependent on any particular mind. But they are "constituted in consciousness" in that they can only be known by a rational intelligence. So here, I'm advocating a form of logical realism: that numbers, scientific laws, and logical principles are real in this same sense. They're not existent as phenomena, but are inherent in the way consciousness constitutes meaning, through rational inference and the like.

I don’t deny that noumena or transcendental conditions exist, (or rather: are real) but existence is not a single category. What exists phenomenally can be shown; what exists formally or logically can only be explained. Mathematical objects, logical laws, and transcendental conditions are real without being phenomenal — objective without being mind-independent in the sense of existing as items in the empirical world. That is the sense in which reality has an inherently mental aspect, without collapsing into subjectivism.

Again, even though dark matter is undetectable, the putative effects are detectable. A lot of people think it means there’s something really wrong with current physics, but then, those who defend the idea have considerable expertise, so I’m loath to pass judgement. Nevertheless it is, shall we say, portentous, that according to current science, 96% of the mass of the universe can’t be accounted for by known physics…. :yikes:

It might help for me to explain what my argument is against. I’m arguing against the scientistic view, swallowed wholesale by a great many intelligent people, that the vast universe which modern science has discovered is a greater reality within which h.sapiens appears as a mere blip, the metaphorical striking of a match. The habit of objectivity holds such sway with us that we overlook that the ‘vast universe’ itself knows nothing of its vastness, nor of anything else for that matter. I know perfectly well that the cosmological story of the ‘big bang’ and the evolutionary story of human evolution is basically true, even if subject to modification. But to view ourselves against that background is implicitly to view ourselves from outside of our lives, to loose sight of the significance of the fact that as intelligent subjects, we are in some vital sense the way that whole process has come to begin to understand itself. And that is not a thought that is novel to me. To view ourselves simply as a species, or as phenomena, is really an artifice. It is not actually a philosophy. I believe Immanuel Kant saw this also, which is why his arguments are writ large in my essay about the matter, even if I have by no means assimilated all of his writings.

I’ve accessed the original article via Apple News, and it’s an excellent piece of longform journalism. Sacks comes across as a fascinating if tortured kind of character. I particularly liked this paragraph:

He rejected what he called “pallid, abstract knowing,” and pushed medicine to engage more deeply with patients’ interiority and how it interacted with their diseases. Medical schools began creating programs in medical humanities and “narrative medicine,” and a new belief took hold: that an ill person has lost narrative coherence, and that doctors, if they attend to their patients’ private struggles, could help them reconstruct a new story of their lives. At Harvard Medical School, for a time, students were assigned to write a “book” about a patient. Stories of illness written by physicians (and by patients) began proliferating, to the point that the medical sociologist Arthur Frank noted, “ ‘Oliver Sacks’ now designates not only a specific physician author but also a . . . genre—a distinctively recognizable form of storytelling.”

I’d never read a lot of Sacks, although I have read the actual anecdote about the man who mistook his wife for a hat. It seems clear he was a ‘fabulist’ but then he’s that kind of mind, an obsessive writer who in in younger days filled journals in a couple of days. I don’t think much the worse of him for the fact that some of what he wrote was embellishment or exaggeration.

But again I think you are still "smuggling" an ontology into your premises - namely, the ontology of the Kantian transcendental subject. — Esse Quam Videri

I don't believe that the transcendental subject is a being in a sense other than the indexical. We can't single out the transcendental subject and say what it is. I don't think that Kant thought that the transcendental subject was something we could know.

What the mind doesn't know about the object is the object as it is in-itself. Therefore, the object as it is in-itself is in excess of the object as it is for-consciousness. Furthermore, the act of asking a question presupposes that what the mind doesn't yet know about the object (the in-itself) is knowable because, again, otherwise it wouldn't ask the question. Therefore, the act of asking a question about an object presupposes that the object as it is in-itself is knowable. — Esse Quam Videri

Certainly there may be many objects or kinds of thing that I don't understand. There might also be much more to an object than meets the eye, or is apparent from a cursory inspection. But nevertheless, at every stage of coming to know more about the object, the mind is surely forming ideas as to what it is, in terms of identity, likeness, attributes and so on. The “excess” disclosed in inquiry is not an object standing outside cognition, but the open-endedness of meaning itself. And notice I'm not saying there is nothing outside of or apart from the cognized object - that would be to assert its non-existence - but that, whatever we make of the object, is through that process of assimilation, whereby it becomes incorporated into the network that comprises the world of lived meanings (the 'lebenswelt'). Were it totally outside that, then we couldn't even cognize it.

I did want to circle back to the original issue for a moment, which was the claim that metaphysical realism is incoherent. The line of reasoning goes something like this: when the mind posits the existence of a mind-independent object (the in-itself) it is actually just generating yet another idea. Since ideas are mind-dependent, any knowledge of mind-independent objects just reduces to knowledge of mind-dependent ideas. Ergo, knowledge of the in-itself is a contradiction in terms.

But this argument already assumes an ontology in which the direct objects of the mind are ideas. In other words, it simply assumes idealism and then proceeds to deduce that realism is self-contradictory. This is illicit. Ontology cannot be the starting point for an argument against realism without begging the question. — Esse Quam Videri

My claim is not that cognition knows only ideas, but that “objecthood” itself is a cognitive status — not something that can be meaningfully ascribed prior to recognition. Take any object - the proverbial 'apple' or 'chair' or 'tree' familiar from philosophy lessons. If you and I see it, or I show it to you, what will you say? You will name it accordingly, presuming you are of sound mind etc. That process of recognition and naming is what I'm referring to. If you didn't know what the thing was, you could at least give a description of it in terms of something else - the kind of shape or colour or some other attributes. These too rely on your cognitive system.

You will notice that a large part of the essay draws from quite a recent book by Chales Pinter, Mind and the Cosmic Order. His theory is that cognition (and not only human cognition) naturally operates in terms of gestalts. Gestalts are the meaningful basic units of cogniton. And I'm claiming that this is fundamental to the cognitive process by which we know what exists. Cognition is as Kantian philosophy (including Schopenhauer) says: an active process whereby the mind constructs or builds a synthesis of the various sensory data that it receives into meaningful wholes.

Now, I'm not saying that the world is ontologically dependent on our cognitive acts, but that outside cognition, it means nothing to us. That is what I take the 'in-itself' to mean: that the object (or world) as it is, outside of or prior to our assimilation of it, has no identity. By identifying it as a meaningful whole, we can say it exists, or doesn't exist.

So I don't mean 'idea' in the sense of representative realism, that the idea represents a thing. There is the thing, here the idea of it. Rather that 'the apple' *is* idea. That is nearer to Schopenhauer's 'vorstellung'.

So the world that realism thinks is 'there anyway', is not really so - because 'there' is also a cognitive construction. Hence my point - any idea of an 'empty universe' or 'the world prior to the advent of humankind' still relies on an implied perspective, which is supplied by the mind as basic to sense-making. We can't think outside of that.

I only brought these up to answer your question. — Relativist

And I only wanted to make it clear that I don't think you have. But, sure, let's take them up elsewhere.

a natural (evolutionary) basis of morality, the nature of abstractions (including mathematics), a theory of truth. — Relativist

I don’t recognise the cogency of “evolutionary morality.” Evolutionary theory explains how biological traits are selected and propagated; it does not generate norms or obligations. Even Richard Dawkins has been explicit on this point: “survival of the fittest” is not, and must not be treated as, a moral maxim.

Likewise, I hold that mathematical entities such as numbers are real but not physical. They are not located in space-time, do not enter into causal relations, and are not products of evolutionary history, yet they retain objective necessity and normative force.

These are not peripheral disagreements but principled objections to the claim that physicalism explains morality, mathematics, or truth rather than redescribing them in ways that vitiate their real attributes.

I don't expect them to be recognised, however.

And after all these months of conversations, I'm still at a loss to understand what you think physicalism explains, other than in its role as a methodological assumption in science.

The being would have experiences... — Relativist

Wouldn't it have to be a subject, to be considered 'a being that has experiences'? Experiences are not standalone events. They are experiences for someone. If there is no subject, then at best there are internal state transitions, information processing, memory registration, and behavioral dispositions — none of which by themselves amount to experience in the first-person sense.

Isn't the whole point of the 'philosophical zombie' argument that there would be no objective way of determining whether it really was a subject, as distinct from merely emulating subjectivity? Thereby showing that subjective awareness is not something objectively discernable.

I'm in agreement with your 'both-and' type of attitude. The 'either-or' dilemma is something stamped firmly into Western consciousness, for mainly historical reasons, which seems to want to force everybody into one 'side' or another. Unpicking the history and psychodynamics behind that has been one of my major interests.

Not wanting to pre-empt Relativist's response, but given the current theoretical understanding of cosmology and physics, dark matter and dark energy are presumed to exist, due to the large-scale behavour of galaxies (the former) and the expansion of the Universe (the latter). So as far as dark matter is concerned, there is a 'detectable effect', first found by Franz Zwicky and elaborated by Vera Rubin. This is that galaxies don't rotate at a rate which is commensurable with their observable mass, so something undetectable must be an influence. Either there is some un-detectable matter, or something is the matter with the understanding of physics at galactic scales (the approach known as Modified Newtonian Dynamics). Jury is still out but the majority opinion seems to favour dark matter.

I had a look at your 'Right Stuff' essay. (As it happens, I wrote an undergrad term paper on Lucretius, under the able tutelage of one Professor Keith Campell, who's 'Philosophy of Matter' course was one of the very best units I completed, which was given a High Distinction :blush: )

The way I see it is that modern culture, generally, is still labouring in the shadow cast by René Descartes' dualism, which posited Mind and Matter as separate kinds. Ever since then, philosophy and culture have tended to vacillate between them, with the scientifically-inclined seeking knowledge through the analysis of physical matter and energy, and the spiritually-inclined seeking understanding through ideas and the nature of mind. So since then philosophy has tended to adopt either materialism (matter is everything), idealism (mind is everything) or dualism (it is both), across a range of forms.

(Then of course there's Darwinian biology, which occupied the cultural vacuum left by the retreat of theology to become more or less an article of secular faith. The motif of evolutionary development is nowadays a kind of 'theory of everything' - that what is simple and elementary becomes complex and sophisticated through the course of time by being better adapted. There's even a theory of 'quantum darwinism.')

I think that your essay is attempting to fashion a theory out of these ingredients.

Where I stand - I'm sceptical of the Cartesian division in the first place - both mind and matter are abstractions. It is more like an economic model than a scientific theory as such. In reality, organisms are both physical and cognitive in nature (and then, in h.sapiens, there's reason and symbolic imagination as well). I'm more drawn to modernised versions of Aristotelian 'matter-form' philosophy, because the Aristotelian idea of form as 'formative principle' is considerably more subtle than that of 'res cogitans' (thinking substance. You will notice that Terrence Deacon, whom we have both read, references Aristotle.)

As regards Faggin - I sense that the One resonates with the One of Plotinus' philosophy. He has taken ideas from a variety of sources, and also developed his own using metaphors from quantum physics and computing. But still see him as rather idiosyncratic. He's not going to get noticed much in the 'consciousness studies' ecosystem for that reason.

you have given me no reason to change my view. — Relativist

No, and I fully expect that nothing ever will. It’s not the kind of view which is amendable to falsification, as it is a metaphysical belief.

You will notice, incidentally, that I do not advance a ‘theory of mind’.

it makes a lot more sense to me to think of consciousness and its (intentional) objects as co-arising. — Ludwig V

Exactly what he would say. Phenomenology 101

As I said, feelings are the only thing problematic. — Relativist

You say 'feelings are the only thing problematic' as if that's a minor footnote, but feelings - qualia, first-person experience - is the whole point at issue! So, why keep saying I'm the one 'missing the point', when this is the point? The very thing you constantly minimize, deprecate, even while acknowledging that it can't be explained - central to the entire debate. 'Oh, that doesn't matter. It's only a minor detail.' Like, 'hey, nice dog you got there!' 'Yeah, shame it's dead' :rofl:

Good essay!

So, we don't do consciousness; consciousness does us — PoeticUniverse

Thanks! But I'd be very careful with interpretation. That essay took quite a lot of reading of Bitbol, and he's very careful in the way he expresses himself. The expression 'the primacy of consciousness' doesn't really imply that consciousness is causal. It's more that before anything can be given, there must be a subject to whom it is disclosed. The resemblance to Descartes is clear, although in a footnote I point out that Husserl and Bitbol break with the 'substance' idea of Descartes.

The problem isn’t that some mental states are hard to describe, or that brains are complicated. What’s at issue is something much simpler and deeper:

Every third-person account you appeal to is already framed from a first-person point of view.

A description of the brain is still a description to a conscious subject. Nothing in that description — however detailed or computable — entails that there is anything subjectively real arising from the material facts.

That’s the point physicalism doesn’t touch. It doesn’t matter how much complexity you add or how programmable the processes may be. A functional specification is not the same thing as the reality of existence — and existence is the philosopher’s concern, not the engineer’s abstraction.

So this isn’t a “Mary’s room” or communicability issue. It’s the basic fact that:
• third-person descriptions are always about objects
• consciousness is the condition for any object to appear

Until that is accounted for, saying physicalism “best explains all the facts” simply assumes what is in question. And as a software guy, you must recognise the impossibility of writing a true functional specification for the unconscious and preconscious dimensions of mind — without which consciousness would not be what it is. As Penrose notes, subjective understanding is not algorithmically compressible.

But since you continue to defer to your preferred “best explanation,” this will be my final word to you on the subject. At least we’ve made it clear where the difference lies.

I suppose Faggin's notion of Seity is another attempt to define Cosmic Consciousness in scientific and non-anthropomorphic terms. — Gnomon

Wait until you read it. I don’t think that term is used anywhere in the book. (I’d love to see a discussion between Faggin and Glattenfelder. They’re both kinds of ‘techno mystics’.)

I do not insist that every aspect of the natural world is discoverable through science. It may very well be that there are aspects of mental activity that are partly grounded in components of world that are otherwise undiscoverable. This is worst case, but it is more plausible than non-physical alternatives. — Relativist

I’m well aware. But I have also repeatedly shown why the treatment of mind or consciousness as an objective phenomenon (even if described as a process) is itself a problem. Notice in the Armstrong quote that the complaint is, why should consciousness not be regarded as amenable to the same methods that have been so successfully deployed in physics and chemistry? Why should it require ‘special treatment’? Your response is to concede that consciousness may indeed imply ‘something non-physical’ - but this also misses the crucial point of phenomenology. This is that consciousness in never something we are outside of or apart from. Until that basic fact of existence is understood we’ll continue to talk past one another.

Do you believe that "materialism" entails "nihilism" or vice verse? — 180 Proof

Notice that was given in the context of Buddhist ethics. There, materialism is designated nihilistic because it denies the efficacy of karma. But I feel that nihilism is widespread in today’s culture. It doesn’t necessarily presents as a dramatic, “sturm und drang” view of life but can manifest as ennui or anomie.

Materialist theory of mind does not entail reifying the process of consciousness- considering it a thing. — Relativist

That is exactly what this does. and when I posted it, you agreed with it.

last time I put in big works I got suspended :rofl: — Copernicus

Maybe you should give yourself a name you can live up to.

The OP is a big topic. You could put on a bit more work. See the How to Write an OP

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/7110/how-to-write-an-op

This seems trivially true — Relativist

Not when consciousness is treated as an object (per Materialist Theory of Mind) :brow:

It’s not about falsifying the third person perspective, but pointing out its implicit limitations.

If it's a process, then it isn't some "misleading name we give to the precondition for any ascription of existence or inexistence." — Relativist

Bitbol says it's 'misleading' precisely because it is reifying to designate 'consciousness' as an object of any kind, even an 'objective process'. To 'reify' is to 'make into a thing', when consicousness is not a thing or an object of any kind.

He's saying, before we can say anything about 'what exists', we must first be conscious. Or, put another way, consciousness is that in which and for which the experienced world arises. It is the pre-condition for any knowledge whatever.

After the quoted passage, he goes on:

from a third-person standpoint, nothing else than objects of perception and handling is to be taken seriously. Now, the behavioral or neurobiological correlates of consciousness are possible objects of perception and handling. They can be said to exist (if a subject is alive and awake) or not to exist (in other cases). Then, from this standpoint, saying that the neural correlate of consciousness (often taken as its “neural basis”) may exist or not exist, amounts to saying that consciousness itself may exist or not exist in the same sense.

So, here he's saying, that from the customary, 'third-person' perspective of naturalism and natural science, only 'objects of perception' are philosophically significant - what is objectively the case. So from this viewpoint, consciousness can be said to exist (or not exist) insofar as it can be described as correlate or product of such objectively-existing processes (the 'neural basis').

Other than the fact of one's own existence, what else can one infer? — Relativist

Basically, you're asking 'so what?' Which is what thought you'd say. But this kind of point is, basically, the division between Continental and English-speaking philosophy, in a nutshell. Phenomenology and the existentialism that grew out of it, are not concerned with scientific objectivism, but with lived existence and meaning, as providing the context within which the objective sciences need to be interpreted.

(I've recently had a Medium essay published in Philosophy Today, which you can access here, if you're interested. It's a brief intro to this philosopher, Michel Bitbol. )

By "idiosyncratic", do you mean peculiar or individualistic? — Gnomon

Not peculiar - I think Federico Faggin is highly intelligent and genuine. I did tackle that book - actually I think I have the Kindle edition, but I couldn't really follow the argument. He introduces a term, seity, ' a seity is defined as a self-conscious entity that can act with free will.' However not necessarily a conscious being. ...'A seity is a field in a pure state existing in a vaster reality than the physical world that contains the body. A seity exists even without a physical body.'

I couldn't really get my head around it.

The other thing is, because Faggin has come from a background outside philosophy, scholarship, cognitive science, etc, I don't think he's going to get a lot of attention from consciousness studies. So it's very hard to integrate his ideas, good though they may be, into the landscape, so to speak.

But don't let it put you off, there are many who will say Irreducible is a landmark book and they may well be right.

According to phenomenology, consciousness is no thing or property that may exist or not exist. “Consciousness” is the misleading name we give to the precondition for any ascription of existence or inexistence. What makes this remark obvious for phenomenologists and almost incomprehensible for physicalists, is that phenomenologists are settled in the first-person standpoint, whereas physicalist researchers explore everything from a third-person standpoint. From a first-person standpoint, anything that exists (thing or property) is given as a phenomenal content of consciousness. Therefore, consciousness de facto comes before any ascription of existence. — Michel Bitbol

@Relativist @Apustimelogist - interested in your reactions to this. (It's in a paper I'm writing an article about, 'The Roles Ascribed to Consciousness in Quantum Physics'). I think it goes to the heart of the disagreements or should I say the incommensurability of our respective viewpoints.

But it's all of a piece! Think Socrates. He was by no means 'a moraliser', but the 'idea of the good' and personal authenticity were at the centre of his questioning. Nobility of character was pre-requisite in Plato's Academy.

That seems a theme in the perennial philosophies, doesn't it? Although 'self reflection' is not the same as 'thinking about yourself' is it? I'm realising that this is actually what Husserl was getting at with the epochē, the suspension of judgement, the attentive awareness to what is.

Interestingly I once corresponded with Kelly Ross, founder and owner of friesian.com . A profound and erudite philosopher. He mentioned that his dear other is a scholar of East Asian Buddhism, and that she had published a book on the centrality of bringing to mind the Pure Land at the moment of dying. In Buddhist lore, your thoughts at the moment of dying are profoundly inflluential on the form of one's re-birth. It is something I'm very mindful of. I'm a member of HongWanJi, which is a Shinran-soshu school, although I only visit once or twice a year.

If so, say some more. — Tom Storm

As I said above, you have to 'be it to see it'. (I'm not being holier-than-thou, I'm far from being holy). But the understanding has soaked in that it's necessary to develop insight into one's own psychodynamic processes - which encompass your circumstances, culture, proclivities, the totality of your being (psuche or soul). A lot of the conflict about morality and belief is obviously grounded in attachment to symbolic meanings and slogans, 'the writhings and thickets of views'. A philosophical mind has to see through that.

That certainly sounds like the opposite of what I would preference. — Tom Storm

I know. I'm gloomily aware that had I been a Buddhist monk I would have been chucked out decades ago (although I still maintain a Buddhist faith.)

I found the Soren Brier paper: Peircean cosmogony's symbolic agapistic self-organization as an example of the influence of eastern philosophy on western thinking (quite a mouthful).

Charles S. Peirce developed a process philosophy featuring a non-theistic agapistic evolution from nothingness. It is an Eastern inspired alternative to the Western mechanical ontology of classical science also inspired by the American transcendentalists. Advaitism and Buddhism are the two most important Eastern philosophical traditions that encompass scientific knowledge and the idea of spontaneous evolutionary development. This article attempts to show how Peirce's non-mechanistic triadic semiotic process theory is suited better to embrace the quantum field view than mechanistic and information based views are with regard to a theory of the emergence of consciousness. — Abstract (Excerpt)

I'm pointing it out because the synthesis of 'Eastern' (principally Vedanta and Buddhism) and systems science/biosemiotics/biology is emerging as an alernative to both 'atheistic' materialism and 'theistic' creationism (in Buddhist terms, nihilism and eternalism.) The hegelian idea he mentions:

The view of Cosmogony and evolution of living systems that we are beginning to approach here is neither a Neo-Darwinian ‘blind watchmaker’ materialism nor a theistic creationist view. If these two cosmogonies are seen as Hegelian thesis and antithesis the non-dual evolutionary ontology may be called an aufhebung to a new level of synthesis — Søren Brier

Given your account here, do you think the debate about moral facts is something Buddhist teaching would generally bypass? — Tom Storm

Of course not. Morality (sila) was all of a piece with the rest of the path - the 'three legs of the tripod' are morality (sila), wisdom (panna) and meditation (samadhi). Early Buddhism was in modern terms ascetic, even if Buddhism rejects the extreme ascetic practices of other sects. It was in our terms extremely moralistic, the monastic code had hundreds of rules, some of which, if they were breached, would result in expulsion. The philosophical point, though, is the 'avoidance of the extremes' - of nihilism, on the one side (under which materialism falls), and 'eternalism' on the other (under which a lot of religion falls).

As for Westen culture, I'm of the view that there it is a still-unfolding dialectic between theism and atheism, materialism and idealism. The emerging synthesis will not be a melange of both extremes but something completely new. I read a fascinating paper by one Soren Brier, that Apokrisis sent me. It mentions the Hegelian 'Aufhebung' — a sublation that simultaneously negates and preserves both poles at a higher level. I can't find it again now. But a lot of the ideas coming out of 'consciousness studies' and east-west dialogue integrate these perspectives. As I mentioned, the landmark book The Embodied Mind incorporates many insights from Buddhist philosophy (Francisco Varela having been a Buddhist convert).

This Buddhist sutta (thread) concerns the questions of Vachagotta, a figure in the texts who is customarily associated with the posing of philosophical questions. (The often-quoted 'poison arrow parable' is given elsewhere in response to Vachagotta's questions.)

In this thread, Vachagotta poses a series of questions which could be considered 'foundational', relating to the fundamental nature of reality. Is the universe eternal, or is it not? (Each question is posed separately.) Are the soul and body the same or are they not? Does the Buddha cease to exist at death or does he not? Each question is answered in the negative. Exasperated, Vaccha asks, why does the Buddha dissociate himself from all these views?

"Because', answers the Buddha, 'the position that "the cosmos is eternal" is a thicket of views, a wilderness of views, a contortion of views, a writhing of views, a fetter of views. It is accompanied by suffering, distress, despair, and fever, and it does not lead to disenchantment, dispassion, cessation; to calm, direct knowledge, full Awakening, Unbinding.' (Translation: Thanissaro Bhikkhu)

So, asks Vachagotta '"Does Master Gotama have any position at all?"

"A 'position,' Vaccha, is something that a Tathagata has done away with. What a Tathagata sees is this: 'Such is form, such its origination, such its disappearance; such is feeling, such its origination, such its disappearance; such is perception...such are fabrications...such is consciousness, such its origination, such its disappearance.' Because of this, I say, a Tathagata — with the ending, fading away, cessation, renunciation, and relinquishment of all construings, all excogitations, all I-making and mine-making and obsessions with conceit — is, through lack of clinging/sustenance, released."

The dialogue then goes on to say that after his death the monk who's mind is thus released neither appears (i.e. is reborn) nor ceases to appear, nor both appears and doesn’t, neither appears nor doesn’t.

That all this is difficult to understand is also acknowledged in the text:

‘At this point, Master Gotama, I am befuddled; at this point, confused. The modicum of clarity coming to me from your earlier conversation is now obscured.”

“Of course you’re befuddled, Vaccha. Of course you’re confused. Deep, Vaccha, is this dhamma, hard to see, hard to realise, tranquil, refined, beyond the scope of conjecture, subtle, to be experienced by the wise. For those with other views, other practices, other satisfactions, other aims, other teachers, it is difficult to know.”

This leads up to the parable of a fire - when it goes out, where does it ‘go’? North, east, west, south? Why, nowhere, of course, there is nothing to ‘go’. Once the fuel is exhausted, the fire is no more.

Aggi-Vachagotta sutta https://www.dhammatalks.org/suttas/MN/MN72.html

I’m not posting this to evangelise Buddhism (although undoubtedly it will interpreted that way by some), but to point out the distinctively Buddhist attitude towards questions that are elsewhere considered foundational to morality and philosophy. Why? Because nearly always these begin with the desire for certainty, ‘man’s desire to know’ (the very first line in The Metaphysics!)

European culture has for centuries ricocheted between the horns of the dilemma: God or atheism, mind or matter, idealism or materialism, science or religion. But maybe there is no resolution possible on the level at which the dilemma is posed. The Buddhist remedy is presented as the insight into the binding process that culminates in suffering/existence (‘ Such is form, such its origination, such its disappearance; such is feeling, such its origination, such its disappearance;… These expressions are all, of course, formulaic, as they are chanted rather than read; all Buddhist suttas were transmitted orally for centuries before being committed to writing.)

But the philosophical point is the necessity of direct insight into the causal factors that drive existence; not beliefs, not propositions, but insight (Jñāna). And that is a practice, a skill, a way-of-being, not the assertion of belief or of a philosophical absolute. But neither is it relativism, because the premise against which relativism reacted in the first place, has not been posited.

I have just begun to read a new book by Federico Faggin — Gnomon

oh yeah, I know Faggin. I read (actually, listened to) his autobiography, Silicon. I’ve looked at Irreducible a few times but I have mixed feelings about it, I think his approach is a bit too idiosyncratic.

By "proper" I am assuming one that allows for flourishing, solidarity - you might also include higher contemplation? — Tom Storm

Indeed. But one has to ‘see it to be it’, so to speak. No use holding forth on it otherwise.

One possible terminological consideration would be to cast the debate in terms of the contrast between 'contingent' with 'unconditional' rather than between 'relative' and 'absolute' (or 'foundational'.) The terms 'absolute' and 'foundation' have the unfortunate connotation of being fixed, solid, unmoveable, and, so, inflexible and indifferent to negotiation.

An expression I've heard in relation to this apparent dilemma is the 'Cartesian anxiety' - that either knowledge has an indubitable foundation, or else certainty falls away and we're left with mere conjecture. I think that's also a consequence of Christian monotheism and the 'jealous God'. And talk of 'the absolute' or a 'philosophical absolute' invariably sounds both ponderous and covertly theistic.

Interestingly, the 'cartesian anxiety' is a theme taken up in The Embodied Mind, where it is proposed that this anxiety is a strong motivating force in current culture. But they see it as a false dilemma which needs to be overcome. Very much an 'all or nothing' kind of mindset. Their analysis is too lengthy to summarise here, but it's one of the source texts for enactivism, a key theme of which is the transcending of the subject/object, self/world division.

Nevertheless I think there's a real gap in philosophical discourse where the unconditioned should be. If everything is contingent, then the best that can be hoped for is a kind of social consensus or inter-subjective agreement. But then, if we're part of a flawed culture, there's no reason that either will provide us with a proper moral foundation. We might still be subject to Descartes' 'evil daemon', meaning that what we've gone through life thinking is real and substantial might in the end be illusory. I think that's a legitimate cause of angst.

Discussed in another of Gnomon's threads, from which:



Do notice the title of this article: ‘Apart from the Experiences of Subjects There Is Nothing, Nothing, Nothing, Bare Nothingness’—Nature and Subjectivity in Alfred North Whitehead

Seems strangely familar :chin:

So he's re-stating one of the main ideas in mind-created world, i.e. the centrality of the subject. But he conceives of subjectivity on the level of 'actual occasions of experience', which I find an impossible idea to grasp.

But Whitehead, as you will well know, was vociferously critical of the 'bifurcation of nature' and the Cartesian division. Whitehead was really rather pantheistic in his sympathies, believing that the most primitive elements of being were 'actual occasions of experience' rather than the physical forces of atomistic materialism. Me, I've never quite been able to grasp his 'actual occasions of experience', but I certainly agree with his rejection of the bifurcation of nature.