A lot of scientific effort goes into eliminating the possibility that something about the bodies, or environment, or unwanted product of equipment, of experimenters is influencing outcomes. — mcdoodle

That’s not really the point of the lecture, though. It’s about the fact that science is conducted by humans, who are subjects of experience, who are attempting to arrive at the purported ‘view from nowhere’ which is believed to be something approaching complete objectivity. But that doesn’t mean science is ‘getting it wrong’, either. It’s a philosophical observation about interpreting the meaning of scientific observations. It doesn’t invalidate those observations. (It’s related to an Aeon essay I posted ages ago, The Blind Spot of Science, which likewise was interpreted as an attack on science, which it wasn’t.)

Yes fair point. That pertains to objective understanding of reported sensations, experience, and so on. But without the ability of subjects to report on those phenomena, there would be no data, so it's something like 'objective knowledge of subjective reports'. But the subject of experience as such is not objectively perceptible. What I had in mind was more like what Michel Bitbol says in this talk:

What is unseen in objective science? The first item that is unseen is my, your, own bodies – not the body as an object for anatomy, of course, but my body while it stands in front of any object whatsoever. If I am a scientist, I have a body. I go back and forth in the laboratory doing gestures, shaping chunks of matter, making instruments, in workshops essentially like this studio. But scientists dream of bypassing their bodies. When they build their theories, scientists act as if they were pure, point-like gazes from which they can enjoy the show put on by the world. This assumption extends to the scientists’ instruments as well, which are usually subtracted or forgotten in the ultimate outcome of their work. Science wants to understand ‘the world out there’; scientists no longer care about the instruments once they have used them to obtain whatever knowledge they’re after. — Michel Bitbol

That also extends to the axioms, theories, bodies of knowledge which comprise the basis on which objective analysis is conducted. That too is dependent on decisions and choices - on what to study, what to include or exclude and so on. And of course many of those elements might also be subject to modification as a consequence of experiment and experience. But the point remains that the subject who is conducting all of this work, the scientist who's theory it is, is generally not considered as a part of the object of analysis. (Isn't something like that exactly the conundrum that was thrown up by the observer problem in quantum physics?)

Thank you for your answers, I shall think them over.

I look at biology as a technology that we mostly fail to reverse engineer, if only, because we do not have access to its design documents. — Tarskian

Rather hubristic, isn’t it?

Actually I want to go back to something you said at the beginning - that religion is ‘built into our firmware. When pressed, you said:

Whenever a behavior is universal throughout history and throughout the world, it can only be biological. Otherwise, there would be or have been numerous societies in the past and/or throughout the world that did not have it. — Tarskian

But what if you believe that, because the only explanatory paradigm you accept is the biological? (Presumably because it’s scientific.) I agree that religious experiences or visions have occurred to h.sapiens throughout history, which is certainly supported by anthropological and archeological evidence. But why should that be ‘biological’ in origin? Might that be because the only kind of theoretical basis that science accepts for human faculties and abilities is that provided by evolutionary biology?

There obviously many features of h.sapiens that are biological in origin - practically everything about human physiology and anatomy can be understood through the lens of evolutionary biology. But why should a particular kind of experience be regarded as being attributable to biology? Sure, the experience of birth, disease and death are common to all species, therefore biological. But what about the religious experience, in particular, can be understood through that perspective?

Thank you, I shall follow your advice.

An entry on Mellassioux says:

Correlationism is thus not the thesis that we must relate to something in order to know it, but rather that what we know of anything is true only for us. In this regard, correlationism is a form of scepticism for it asserts that whether or not things-in-themselves are this way is something we can never know because we can only ever know things as they appear to us, not as they are in themselves. For example, for the correlationist there is no answer to the question of whether carbon atoms exist apart from us and whether they decay at such and such a rate because we only ever know appearances. This is Meillassoux’s support for scientific realism. For the correlationist we are never able to get out of the correlation between thought and being to determine whether or not carbon itself has these properties or whether it is thought that bestows these properties, which is sometimes the view of scientific functionalism. Meillassoux calls this unsurpassable relation the correlationist circle.

I think I can spot a weakness in that argument. My view that we know things as they appear, not to us as individuals, but to us as a species, a language-group, a culture, and so on. To say that we know things only as they appear ‘to us’ is indeed to fall into scepticism and relativism. But I don’t deny the domain of empirically-verifiable facts that will be verifiable by any other observer given the appropriate conditions and controls. In that sense, I’m a scientific realist. However, scientific realism always pertains to the objective domain, that which can be made an object of analysis, measurement and observation. And the subject who performs that measurement is not part of that outside that scope. I don’t know if Meillassoux addresses that idea (which is discussed in many papers by another Frenchman, Michel Bitbol. Incidentally, all of these names are people I’ve only learned about through participation in this forum, so that says something.)

I think I might be able to tackle After Finitude, but I’m put off by not knowing anything about Badou and being a bit scared by Cantor. But, you know, live and learn.

You'd get something out of reading it I think. — fdrake

Although the book is written with clarity and consistency, it presupposes a familiarity not only with dogmatic metaphysics, post-Kantian critical philosophy, phenomenology and post-Heideggerian philosophy, but also and above all with Alain Badiou's materialist ontology, and more specifically, with his ontological re-formulation of post-Cantorean set theory, as well as his conception of the event as what exceeds the grasp of an ontology of being qua being

I think the price of entry is a little steep :yikes: .

Serves me right for bringing it up.

Odd as it may seem, I kind of agree. The caveat is that about 99% of people will say, ‘oh, you mean God designed it’. The reason being that, in the case of human-created design, there’s an obvious agency involved, namely, humans. But DNA, so far as we know, came into being without an agent - although, of course, intelligent design advocates will say that the agent is a higher intelligence. To lay my cards on the table, I don’t argue for intelligent design, but I’m at least open to some of those arguments.

It’s true that computers provide a metaphor for mental functions. In fact, that was the presiding metaphor for a school of thought in cog sci called functionalism. Functionalism is the view that mental states are defined by their functional roles—how they interact with other mental states, sensory inputs, and behavioral outputs—rather than by their internal physical or biological makeup. This perspective is analogous to how a computer operates, where what matters is the function of the software rather than the specific hardware it runs on. (Myself, I run on Idealist OS :-) )

In this case however we’re considering more than mental functions. That life seems designed is news to nobody, really. it was the basis of the watchmaker argument of Bishop Paley, and the subject of deconstruction in any number of books by Richard Dawkins.

So let’s get clear on what you mean by ‘designed’. Where do you think your idea fits into that overall set of ideas, or does it not?

But they’re not designed - not unless you’re defending an intelligent designer. Are you?

Biology is a natural technology — Tarskian

Not so. Technology, derived from the Greek ‘techne,’ means something made by art, craftsmanship, or human intervention. Biology, on the other hand, pertains to natural processes and organisms that arise without human fabrication (or any fabrication so far as we can tell.) While technology can mimic or be inspired by biological systems (biomimicry), it remains fundamentally different because it is a product of intentional design and manipulation by humans. In contrast, biological systems evolve through natural selection and other processes intrinsic to life itself.

To equate biology with technology is to overlook the essential distinction between naturally occurring phenomena and human-engineered artifacts. Biology operates through mechanisms and principles that are not designed or created by humans, whereas technology is inherently a product of human creativity and engineering. It’s important to have conceptual clarity in respect of such fundamental terms.

Well, supposing that the world can be adequately described with mathematics, there would be a big difference between the mathematical entities consistent with "triangle" and those consistent with "any being having a first person subjective experience of a triangle or triangularity," right? — Count Timothy von Icarus

I think you’re conflating, or confusing, several separate points. My question about the triangle was simply ‘is it a physical object?’ - to which I say the answer is ‘plainly not’. ‘Physical things’ include - well, pretty well anything you can lay your hands, or eyes on. But geometric forms, numbers, rules, principles, and the like, are not physically existent in the same sense that physical objects are. They are what were called in classical philosophy ‘intelligible objects’. It is germane to the discussion ‘what is an object’, insofar as it requires consideration of whether such entities are or are not objects.

Whether the world can be adequately described with mathematics is a different question.

But neither of those points are directly entailed by my post about the sense in which knowledge implies or requires an observing intelligence. They can be connected to that, but at this point I haven’t tried to connect them.

So, the technology is clearly of non-human origin. — Tarskian

What technology are you referring to? I thought we were discussing biology.

Something that has a shape and measurement is a physical thing.

↪Wayfarer It (triangle) is finite and complete. — L'éléphant

But is it a physical thing? Certainly the picture of a triangle is physical, but the definition is a concept.

We call a triangle a mathematical object. — L'éléphant

But it's not a physical thing. It's an idea.

Designed by whom or what?

since I am trying to find object in the absence of language.
— noAxioms

Dinosaurs. — fdrake

Quinton Meillassoux introduced the concept of the "arche-fossil" in his book *After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency*. The term refers to objects or evidence, such as fossils, that indicate the existence of objects prior to human consciousness. Meillassoux uses this concept to challenge the correlationist position, which holds that we can only know the correlation between thought and being, rather than being itself independently of thought. The arche-fossil serves as the linch-pin for Meillassoux to assert that there is a reality independent of human perception and cognition. He argues that such objects, which existed long before humans and consciousness, demonstrate that the universe has a history that is not contingent on human observation. This challenges the idea that being is always tied to our experience.

A counter-argument to that, is that any meaningful conception of existence just is a human conception. That while it is empirically the case that dinosaurs and many other things pre-dated the evolution of h. Sapiens, the statement that ‘dinosaurs existed’ is only meaningful within the conceptual framework provided by an observing mind - with 'prior to' being part of that framework. Transcendental idealism, a target of Mellaissoux’ critique, holds that while we can have reliable empirical knowledge of phenomena (the world as we experience it), the world as it might be in the absence of any observation is unknowable as a matter of definition. Meaning that our understanding of existence, including the existence of dinosaurs, is implicitly dependent on the human conceptual framework. This doesn't mean that dinosaurs didn't exist or that an unbeheld object ceases to exist, which is another mental construction (namely, its imagined non-existence). It doesn't over-rule or invalidate empirical observation, but it serves to remind that empirical observations are made by humans. Whereas the speculative realism of Mellaissoux seems to want to 'reach beyond' human cognition.

sucrose counts as an object for amylase, and populations of amylase enzymes count as an object for the evolution of digestive systems. You might want to call those physical... — fdrake

I think this is where biosemiosis becomes relevant, isn't it? Biosemiotics provides a framework to understand such interactions not just as physical processes but involving the interpretation of signs and the generation of meaning within biological contexts. In this example, sucrose can be seen as a 'sign' that the amylase enzyme 'interprets' and acts upon. The amylase enzyme breaks down sucrose, 'recognizing it' as a specific substrate. This interaction involves a signaling process where the presence of sucrose triggers a specific biochemical response in the enzyme.

Fair point. But, it does add that ‘most people do not know’ it. And I’m still questioning the sense of it being identified as a ‘biological drive’. Humans are biologically the same everywhere, but culturally and intellectually they’re vastly different.

Sigh. It seems there’s no shortage of perplexities in metaphysics. It’s no wonder that it was ditched.

If that’s so, you should be able to provide a citation.

So why bring Islam into it? why not just stick to biology?

The term "fitrah" in Islam refers to all behavior that is innate. So, where else does it come from, if not from our biological firmware? — Tarskian

Do Muslims believe that it’s biological firmware? Or doesn’t it matter whether they believe it?

Do you think Muslims would agree that ‘fitrah’ is a biological drive?

[Edit: To them] The idea that the world is not intelligible seems not just wrong but disconcertingly so. — Fooloso4

Couldn’t classical philosophy ascribe the unintelligibility of the world to the treachery of the senses? It wouldn’t have regarded ‘the world’ as possessing intrinsic intelligibility in the first place, would it?

But then again, this does not invalidate the observation that every stomach consists of atoms at some deeper level of observation detail. — Tarskian

It doesn’t need to be invalidated. It’s simply irrelevant, even if it is the case.

Whenever a behavior is universal throughout history and throughout the world, it can only be biological. — Tarskian

I don’t know about that. Language has a biological component, insofar as spoken language requires the unique physiology of h. Sapiens. But I don’t know if on that basis you could say that language is biological feature, or that studying it through the perspective biology would be more suitable than through, say, linguistics or anthropology.

Could the essence not be a result of our evolutionary make up. — Gingethinkerrr

Don’t loose sight of the fact that evolutionary biology is a theory of the origin of species. It’s not necessarily a theory of the origin of everything about human nature, although it’s often assumed to be.

Therefore, the need eventually arose for religious scripture to appear which contains a copy in human language of the biologically preprogrammed rules that humans should not break and that government should never overrule. — Tarskian

I looked up that link provided, about ‘fitra’. It starts:

Fitra or fitrah (Arabic: فِطْرَة; ALA-LC: fiṭrah) is an Arabic word that means 'original disposition', 'natural constitution' or 'innate nature'. The concept somewhat resembles natural order in philosophy, although there are considerable differences as well. In Islam, fitra is the innate human nature that recognizes the oneness of God (tawhid). It may entail either the state of purity and innocence in which Muslims believe all humans to be born, or the ability to choose or reject God's guidance.

But why do you think that maps against biology? There’s nothing in biological theory that seems to correspond with that - it’s much more a religious idea, perhaps comparable to the ‘Buddha-nature’ of East Asian Buddhism.

There's so much to say on this topic but am limiting myself to only analyzing the reasons people take drugs. I find it an edifying discussion. — Shawn

Might also be useful to recognise the distinction between narcotics and hallucinogens. They’re very different. I don’t know where cannabis fits in the scheme.

One abused donkey left the ship, joined up with a herd of elk and found happiness at last — BC

The version I read, he wasn’t an abuse victim, he’d been hiking with his family in California and something frightened him and he ran away. They said they were thrilled to see that he’d been found (although it seems far from certain it’s the same donkey.)

I don't remember him (Deacon) positing that anything beyond the physical world exists, any transcendent reality. — Janus

I started on Deacon in earnest in January this year but stalled at around chapters 5 or 6. I see him more as trying to extend the scope of naturalism beyond physical reductionism.

Indeed, but in my view much of the ‘Christianity’ that is professed by Americans is bogus, like the ‘prosperity gospel’ nonsense that proclaims that the faithful will be rewarded with material riches. So in that mindset, religion and materialism are combined, which I’m sure is not in keeping with the intent of the Gospels. A lot of American Christianity seems an earnest parody to me.

We’re loosing sight of the OP. The question was ‘what is purpose, how does it arise’. My argument is that in ‘modern’ vision of the Cosmos, described by classical physics and Galilean science, purpose can only be understood in terms of intentional agents or agencies. The laws that ‘govern’ the cosmos, and also evolution, are devoid of intentionality and purpose. So it was presumed that the Cosmos and everything in it arises as a consequence of the ‘accidental collocation of atoms’ (Bertrand Russell’s term.)

I’ve been trying to point to more recent ‘philosophies of biology’ e.g. Terrence Deacon, Alice Juarrero, Steve Talbott, which question that form of materialism. One of the grounds on which it is questioned is the intentional nature of all organic life, which displays behaviours that can’t be explained in bald reductionist terms. I agree that these are not materialist or physicalist but they’re also not typical, although they’re becoming influential. But I take the fact that they exist to be evidence of the waning of materialism, which is welcome. (It’s also interesting that Brentano’s work on ‘intentionality’ was the original inspiration for phenomenology which is similarly opposed to reductionism.)

One kind would consist in the claim that everything can be explained in terms of physics. I find that claim ridiculous, because everything obviously cannot be explained in terms of physics. — Janus

A recent survey of academic philosophers shows that slightly more than 50% ‘accept or lean towards’ physicalism, presumably they don’t. (Another survey shows that around 66% ‘lean towards’ atheism. So the majority of academic philosophers ‘lean towards’ physicalism and atheism. No surprises there.)

As i see it a far bigger problem in today's world is materialism in the form of consumerism—the desire to acquire ever more and more possessions, the identification of the personal identity, of its worth, with material wealth. — Janus

They’re plainly related. It’s logical for a social philosophy that recognises nothing other than the physical.

*

Arche-fossils, you mean?

The difference between what you might say in a fight is different from the problems that belong to an idea as that idea.

That is what I think is at stake in the passage I quoted. — Paine

Thanks for that elaboration, but I’d like to return to the interpretation of the passage you quoted previously.

I was rather thinking that ‘what is at stake’ in that dialogue is the reality of the Ideas, and consequently what the implications would be if they are found not to be real. Denial is what ‘naturalism’, which you say is ‘hard to define’, is inclined towards, isn’t it? The denial of the reality of the ideas? I had thought that in the passage, that ‘the friends of the forms’ were defending the forms. The ‘earth-born’ represent those who are unable to reconcile the distinction between ‘being’ - what truly is - and ‘becoming’, the world of change, growth and decay, and so are calling ideas into question. (And indeed there are many ‘perplexities’ involved as has been mentioned already, as the reality of change and decay seems undeniable. It is not as if admitting the reality of the ideas is a simple matter.)

Consider this passage in particular:

And you say our communion with becoming is through the body, by means of sense perception, while it is by means of reasoning through the soul that we commune with actual being, which you say is always just the same as it is, while becoming is always changing. — Sophist, 248A, translated by Horan

I can’t help but be struck by the resemblance to a passage I’ve often quoted in the past here in respect of Aquinas:

….if the proper knowledge of the senses is of accidents, through forms that are individualized, the proper knowledge of intellect is of essences, through forms that are universalized. Intellectual knowledge is analogous to sense knowledge inasmuch as it demands the reception of the form of the thing which is known. But it differs from sense knowledge so far forth as it consists in the apprehension of things, not in their individuality, but in their universality.

Can you see the resemblance in those two passages? The differentiation between ‘sense perception’ and ‘ideas grasped by reason’? That in the platonic vision, the faculty of reason is able to grasp what is ‘always the case’? I know my attempt here might be a bit simplistic but I’m trying to get a handle on the big underlying issue as I see it.

I would say there is no physical basis. As someone remarked in a philosophical essay I once read, ‘there’s no such thing as a thing.’ Things or objects are designated as such by a subject for a purpose. But there is no ultimately-existing, discrete, and completely definable thing. No such thing.

That something is not explainable in physical terms does not entail that it is anything over and above its physical constitution, the relations between its parts and the global and local constraints it is subject to. — Janus

But such constraints are not considered in reductionism.

reject physicalism on this basis is to be working from and reacting to outmoded mechanistic conceptions of physicality. — Janus

Mechanistic materialism still prevails in or underlies many naturalistic accounts.

Of course, but in times past global and environmental conditions were thought to be given by God or determined by karma or some imagined supernatural principle. Are you now appealing to those kinds of ideas, and if not, just what are you appealing to? — Janus

I’m not ‘appealing to’ anything. The physicalist paradigm is just exactly that everything is ultimately reducible to the laws of physics. But it’s clear that these are abstractions that don’t describe the complexities of organic life.

That Talbot essay is really worth the effort.

It is also worth mentioning:

Terrence Deacon's concept of "ententionality," introduced in "Incomplete Nature," seeks to describe the unique properties and attributes of organisms and their goal-directed behaviors, which he believes are inadequately explained by traditional physical and intentional frameworks. Ententionality combines "intentionality" with "entelechy" (Aristotle's term for realizing potential), emphasizing that organisms inherently pursue goals and maintain themselves through a dynamic process of self-organization and adaptation. This idea highlights the complex interplay between biological structures and functions that give rise to purposeful behavior and consciousness, suggesting that life inherently possesses a form of directedness that goes beyond mere mechanistic explanations. — ChatGPT

I have a question or two about this. By "reducible to" do you mean 'explainable in terms of' or 'has its origin in'? Do you count global or environmental conditions as physical interactions? Do you claim there is "something more" metaphysically speaking than the physical world with its global and local conditions and interactions? If you do want to claim that, then what could that "something more" be in your opinion? — Janus

‘Physical reductionism’ is generally taken to mean ‘explainable in terms of the laws of physics and chemistry.’ It is the kind of attitude which says that living organisms are ‘nothing but’ colllections of atoms or ‘nothing but’ the vehicles by which genes propagate. In practical terms, the desired reduction base is something that can, at least in theory, be explained and predicted in those terms.

‘Global and environmental conditions’ were not, in times past, considered to be physical interactions, or considered as part of the reduction base. That is what might be called a holistic approach which is the opposite to reductionism.

The ‘law of physics’ are context-free. They don’t need to take into account environmental factors but rather describe the behaviour of ideal objects under specified conditions. This is what makes them universal - the behaviour of a body with specific physical attributes will predictably act in accordance with physical laws under said conditions - like, the apple will fall at a given rate, provided nobody catches it, or the wind doesn’t blow and alter its path, or it isn’t in zero-gravity environments.

The ‘something more’ that biology has to consider is precisely the environment and the constant interaction of organisms with each other and their environment. That is where ‘physicalist reductionism’ has been found wanting, and why biosemiotics and systems science have gained traction in biology: living beings are far more ‘language-like’ than ‘machine like’, right down to the most fundamental levels of cellular biology.

Accordingly, I think it’s a mistake to try and conceive of the ‘something more ‘ - the aspects of organisms that can’t be reduced to the chemical and physical - as any kind of ‘something’. That leads to the misconception of an elan vital or spooky ethereal substance - in other words it’s a reification. As you know, I’ve often commented that I think one of the consequences of Cartesian dualism is exactly that kind of reification, by treating mind as a ‘thinking thing’, more or less on a similar plane to physical things, but of a different kind.

Whereas the dynamic systems theory approach of e.g. Terrence Deacon and Alice Juarrrero and others speaks in terms of the interaction of ‘bottom-up’, physical reactions with ‘top-down’, causal constraints. Those latter kinds of factors are precisely what reductionism fails to consider.

See From Physical Causes to Organisms of Meaning, Steve Talbott.

This post could benefit from a clearer thesis, more structured argumentation, and substantial references to support its claims. As it is, it’s a grab bag of ideas and catch-phrases. Each historical and cultural point should be connected with well-defined arguments and evidence. The analogies and comparisons need deeper exploration and should be grounded in specific examples and references to provide credibility and coherence. It also combines purportedly factual statements with opinions, and switches tone between formal and casual. The comparison between a popular rock band and one of the giants of classical music is interesting but is not sufficiently developed to make a compelling point. And any clear statement of what ‘the Enlightenment’ means, and why and in what way its effects are pernicious or beneficial, is not made clear. But then, that would require a thesis, not a post.

I’m not going to enlighten you — EdwardC

Plainly.

Homeostasis is a state where a human being is in a stable state functioning. This state is commonly known as 'sobriety.' — Shawn

Homeostasis is a technical term from biology. ‘Stasis’ is a more accurate description of the normal state. Which leads us to the etymological root of ‘ecstacy’, that is based on the same root word:

ecstacy: late Middle English: from Old French extasie, via late Latin from Greek ekstasis ‘standing outside oneself’, based on ek- ‘out’ + histanai ‘to place’.

But then apart from the etymology, the meaning is:

1. an overwhelming feeling of great happiness or joyful excitement.
"there was a look of ecstasy on his face"
Similar:
rapture
bliss
elation
euphoria
…
Opposite:
misery
2. an emotional or religious frenzy or trance-like state, originally one involving an experience of mystic self-transcendence.

So perhaps the interesting philosophical question would be, why would being ‘outside oneself’ result in ‘great happiness or joyful excitement’? And, do intoxicants or hallucinogens genuinely induce such states?