Comments

  • First vs Third person: Where's the mystery?
    I wish you would say more about what you see as the critical difference between a so-called artificial intelligence and a living being, and what implications this has for consciousness — J

    I’m pretty much on board with Bernardo Kastrup’s diagnosis. He says, computers can model all kinds of metabolic processes in exquisite detail, but the computer model of kidney function doesn’t pass urine. It is a simulation, a likeness.

    Large Language Models are vast ensembles of texts manipulated by algorithms. I find them amazingly useful, I am constantly in dialogue with them about all kinds of questions, including but not limited to philosophy. But ‘they’ are not beings - like the kidney function, they’re simulations.

    This is the subject of an OP and related blog post on the issue which link to a good Philosophy Now OP in the issue.
    Reveal
    From which:

    The reason AI systems do not really reason, despite appearances, is, then, not a technical matter, so much as a philosophical one. It is because nothing really matters to them. They generate outputs that simulate understanding, but these outputs are not bound by an inner sense of value or purpose. This is why have been described as ‘stochastic parrots’.Their processes are indifferent to meaning in the human sense — to what it means to say something because it is true, or because it matters. They do not live in a world; they are not situated within an horizon of intelligibility or care. They do not seek understanding, nor are they transformed by what they express. In short, they lack intentionality — not merely in the technical sense, but in the fuller phenomenological sense: a directedness toward meaning, grounded in being.

    This is why machines cannot truly reason, and why their use of language — however fluent — remains confined to imitation without insight. Reason is not just a pattern of inference; it is an act of mind, shaped by actual concerns. The difference between human and machine intelligence is not merely one of scale or architecture — it is a difference in kind.

    Furthermore, and importantly, this is not a criticism, but a clarification. AI systems are enormously useful and may well reshape culture and civilisation. But it's essential to understand what they are — and what they are not — if we are to avoid confusion, delusion, and self-deception in using them.


    The seduction of AI is that, unlike us, it is not mortal. It is a kind of idealised entity, not subject to the vicissitudes of existence - and part of us wants to be like that, because then we would not be subject to illness and death. But it’s also an illusion, because such systems are not alive, either. This is one of the major dangers of AI in my view, because it is far less obvious than the danger of them actually taking over the world.
  • First vs Third person: Where's the mystery?
    If it's axiomatic, why are increasing numbers of not unintelligent people doubting it? — J

    ‘Forgetfulness of being’ seems symptomatic of the times.
  • Idealism Simplified
    it seems that people like Hegel and Descartes can't really acknowledge the wordless and indescribable aspects of existing. — ProtagoranSocratist

    Could you describe them for us?
  • First vs Third person: Where's the mystery?
    Why couldn't it be the case that everything you describe as pertaining to yourself, and other living beings, also pertain to devices? — J

    That devices are not subjects of experience is axiomatic, in my opinion. Some distinctions are axiomatic in the sense that they’re more fundamental than any argument you could give for them. The reality of first-person experience, the difference between subjects and objects, the fact that there’s something it’s like to be you—these aren’t conclusions arrived at through inference. That’s what apodictic means. An instance of Rödl’s ‘truths that have no opposite’.

    As for LLM’s, ask any of them whether they are subjects of experience and they will answer in the negative. You may choose to disregard it but then we’re pushing into conspiracy theory territory.
  • Idealism Simplified
    Which does not require any material scaffolding, but does not contradict any material evidence. The culmination of the Cartesian ego cogito. — Pantagruel

    :100:

    Plainly an echo of the scholastic doctrine of universals, but reformulated in terms of dialectic. When he says “intelligence is explicitly, and on its own part cognitive… it is a plain identity of subjective and objective,” he is restating the \ scholastic idea of the correspondence of thinking and being but now as a result of a dialectical self-movement rather than as a pre-given harmony originating in the mind of God.
  • First vs Third person: Where's the mystery?
    1. "What it's like" defies precise definition — J

    Thank you! I agree, the ‘what it is like to be…’ expression is really not very good. I think what Chalmer’s is really trying to speak of is, simply, being. Subjects of experience are beings, which are distinguishable from objects. That is at the heart of the issue. The question of the nature of being is the subject of Heidegger’s entire project (and phenomenology generally. Consider Sartre’s in-itself and for-itself). It could be argued that it is the central question of philosophy.

    As to whether I can, or should, explain what that means. I can’t prove to you that there’s something it’s like to be you. But I can ask: when you stub your toe, is there pain? Not just nociceptive signals and withdrawal reflexes—but pain, felt, experienced, awful? Even if I have minutely detailed knowledge of anatomy and physiology, that will neither embody nor convey the felt experience of pain. It will only describe it, but the description is not the described.

    Besides, you know you’re a being because you are one. You experience yourself ‘from the inside’ as it were, in the apodictic knowledge of one’s own existence that characterises all first-person consciousness. I can point to features that correlate with being (self-maintenance, privileged access, intentionality, capacity for suffering), but, like the pain example, none of these constitute the experience of being, as such. In fact the frustrating element of this whole debate, is that we can only speak meaningfully of being because we are beings - but ‘being’ as such is not an object of experience, so is never captured by a third-person description. That is the ‘problem of consciousness’ in nutshell.
  • First vs Third person: Where's the mystery?
    it seems difficult to see how any system, if it experiences at all, can experience anything but itself....How could a thing experience anything else besides itself? — noAxioms

    (I've been away so pardon this belated response.)

    There are many deep philosophical questions that are raised by this apparently simple rhetorical question. First and foremost, any biological entity - and not just rational, sentient beings such as ourselves - maintains a distinction between itself and the environment. it defines itself, if you like, in terms of the distinction between itself and the environment, even if non-consciously.

    That can be observed even in single-celled creatures which are enclosed by a membrane, which differentiates them from their environment. And all of the factors that impinge on such an organism, be they energetic, such as heat or cold, or chemical, such as nutrients or poisons - how are they not something other to or outside the organism? At every moment, therefore, they're 'experiencing something besides themselves, namely, the environment from which they are differentiated.

    So the question isn't 'how could a thing experience anything besides itself?' but rather: how could an organism NOT experience something besides itself? Any living system that experienced only itself, with no responsiveness to environmental factors, would immediately die, or rather, it would be completely indistinguishable from whatever environmental context it was in, which adds up to the same thing. Life itself, at least in the form of an embodied organism, depends on experiencing 'the other'.

    The real mystery isn't that we experience something beyond ourselves—that is essential to being a living organism. The actual question is how this relational, responsive engagement with the environment becomes conscious experience, how it acquires the subjective, phenomenal character of 'what it is like to be'.


    'The problem is, how could a mere physical system experience this awareness' (quoting Chalmers).

    But this just seems like another round of feedback. Is it awareness of the fact that one can monitor one’s own processes? That’s just monitoring of monitoring. There’s potential infinite regress to that line of thinking. So the key word here is perhaps the switching of ‘awareness’ to ‘experience’, but then why the level of indirection?

    Instead of experience of the monitoring of internal processes, why can’t it be experience of internal processes, and how is that any different than awareness of internal processes or monitoring of internal processes? When is ‘experience’ the more appropriate term, and why is a physical system necessarily incapable of accommodating that use?     — noAxioms

    The question here is what physical systems are subjects of experience? A motor vehicle, for example, has many instruments which monitor its internal processes - engine temperature, oil levels, fuel, and so on - but you're not going to say that the car experiences overheating or experiences a fuel shortage. Such dials and monitors can be said to be analogous for 'awareness', but surely you're not going to say that the vehicle is aware, are you? There is 'nothing it is like' to be a car, because a car is a device, an artifact - not a being, like a man, or a bat.
  • Deep ecology and Genesis: a "Fusion of Horizons"
    ↪Colo Millz
    Quite. I'm not that well-read in either Adorno or Horkheimer, and not all of his 'Eclipse of Reason' has aged well, but the basic drift is something I thoroughly agree with. It is obviously related to his and Adorno's 'instrumentalisation of reason' which is developed at length in Dialectics of the Enlightenment. Which is ironic, in a way, because that is one of the key texts of the 'cultural Marxism' which conservatives like to rail against, whereas I would have thought it an idea that traditional conservatism (not the warped maga version) could get behind.
  • Deep ecology and Genesis: a "Fusion of Horizons"
    In Gadamer's dialogical reasoning Caputo purifies theology from triumphalism and anthropocentrism, but Genesis rescues Caputo’s view from nihilism by affirming that our animality is beloved and called. Humanity is both animal and imago Dei: the creature through whom matter becomes self-aware, responsible, and capable of love. Evolution tells the story of our becoming; Genesis names the meaning of that story. Caputo shows what we are; Genesis shows what we are for. — Colo Millz

    Splendid OP, and encapsulates many themes I have contemplated for years.

    I'm very critical of neo-darwinian, reductive humanism - the ubiquitous notion that evolutionary biology 'proves' or 'shows' that we are 'just animals'. i think it sets the bar too low.

    I also think there's a hidden premise in this very popular idea, which is that, for secular culture, nature is a symbol of purity and 'the unspoiled'. Hence reverence for the environment and first nations peoples - all very worthy ideals, I hasten to add, and nothing whatever the matter with them. But the implication is that to recognise a fundamental distinction between humans and animals is a symptom of alientation or separateness from nature, 'human arrogance', exemplified in the environmental and cultural destruction wrought by industrial culture.

    But this also ignores the existential gulf that undeniably exists between h.sapiens and other species. it is really an updated take on Rousseau. But the distinction or existential separation is real - by virtue of language, meaning-making, science, and spirituality (which naturalism tends to routinely deprecate).

    Reveal
    In traditional theology and metaphysics, the natural was largely conceived as the evil, and the spiritual or supernatural as the good. In popular Darwinism, the good is the well-adapted, and the value of that to which the organism adapts itself is unquestioned or is measured only in terms of further adaptation. However, being well adapted to one’s surroundings is tantamount to being capable of coping successfully with them, of mastering the forces that beset one. Thus the theoretical denial of the spirit’s antagonism to nature–even as implied in the doctrine of interrelation between the various forms of organic life, including man–frequently amounts in practice to subscribing to the principle of man’s continuous and thoroughgoing domination of nature. Regarding reason as a natural organ does not divest it of the trend to domination or invest it with greater potentialities for reconciliation. On the contrary, the abdication of the spirit in popular Darwinism entails the rejection of any elements of the mind that transcend the function of adaptation and consequently are not instruments of self-preservation. Reason disavows its own primacy and professes to be a mere servant of natural selection. On the surface, this new empirical reason seems more humble toward nature than the reason of the metaphysical tradition. Actually, however, it is arrogant, practical mind riding roughshod over the ‘useless spiritual,’ and dismissing any view of nature in which the latter is taken to be more than a stimulus to human activity. The effects of this view are not confined to modern philosophy. — Max Horkheimer, The Eclipse of Reason


    However the Biblical Genesis narrative is not the only symbolic framework within which to express the spiritual dimension of human existence. For example, consider Buddhist lore, from a very different cultural framework. Within Buddhism, there are six realms of existence, of which the human is one. But the human realm is unique in that it is only in human form that Nirvāṇa can be attained, as only humans have the intelligence to hear and respond to the teaching (ref). That, of course, ought not to be taken as gospel - but both the Genesis narrative, and the Buddhist mythology, convey something which I think is essential to the human condition, that is, the possibility of reality beyond it.
  • Is there a purpose to philosophy?
    ↪T Clark
    very good :up:
  • References for discussion of mental-to-mental causation?
    ↪apokrisis
    You're the one who brought in Buddhist dependent origination, I thought it worth saying what it means.
  • References for discussion of mental-to-mental causation?
    Or maybe that is my mistake as I have enjoyed all the benefits of a progressive and pragmatic social order. I feel no urge to go back to the certainties of life as lived in previous centuries. — apokrisis

    I think it's more likely that you can't see what anything in religions mean, except for in the social sense, of how they help society hang together. Of course the religious will say that there's another dimension altogether, which is symbolised (and dogmatized) in various forms and lexicons. But if you can't see that there's anything real to be conveyed then it's all equivocation and waffle as far as you're concerned.
  • References for discussion of mental-to-mental causation?
    There is a boundary between philosophy as making rational sense of the world and philosophy as making shit up. — apokrisis

    You can't even discuss it without becoming antagonistic, never mind that I have endeavoured to maintain a civil discourse throughout our debates.
  • References for discussion of mental-to-mental causation?
    You can’t give a straight answer so only give me crooked ones. — apokrisis

    I answer your challenges to the best of my ability, but not always to your liking. I’ve been here for a decade and I know where the boundary lines are in terms of philosophical commitments, that anything that could be considered religious is outside that boundary. Especially when it comes to you. Make no mistake, I’ve learned a lot from your posts, but about science, not about philosophy, which is mainly of instrumental value to pragmatism. (Incidentally, here is a report about Stevenson’s activities.)
  • References for discussion of mental-to-mental causation?
    Are you confessing finally to just being an epistemic idealist? And modern Buddhism is only that too? If so, great. Just be brave enough to come out and say it. And then be consistent in that position in your posting. — apokrisis

    It’s an acknowledgement, not a confession. I don’t regard epistemic idealism as a sin, even if I have many (and one thing I did retain from my upbringing is a Christian conscience.) The mind created world OP is epistemic idealism, largely based on my reading of T R V Murti ‘The Central Philosophy of Buddhism’, which compared Buddhist Madhyamaka (Middle Way) philosophy with Kant’s idealism (something that has been criticised but which I think still holds.) I’ve also been reading recently from Evan Thompson and Hans Jonas on the phenomenology of biology, which holds promise.

    So I do argue that the common concept of ‘mind independence’ i.e. that the bedrock of reality comprises mind-independent objects, is oxymoronic, as objects can only be known cognitively (in line with Kant’s ‘Copernican Revolution in philosophy, that things conform to thoughts, not vice versa. ) That is why there are references to all those sources in that OP, and I dispute that it is either equivocal or vague. But that is really all I have time for now.
  • References for discussion of mental-to-mental causation?
    So in what sense is that now any different from what the biologist would say? — apokrisis

    Biology is not an existential discipline. It isn’t concerned with existence as lived. I could know all there is to know about you, biologically, and yet still not understand you as a person. As for what it means to me - obviously I can’t claim to know that the cycle of life and death is real but I think there are strong grounds for believing it to be. (We’ve discussed Stevenson’s interviews with children with past life recall many times on this forum, it is universally scorned, but I think it is meaningful data. He has almost 3000 cases gathered over three decades.) My fear is that there is truth in the idea that future births are the consequence of one’s actions in this life, as I have done plenty to regret. Hence the saying in Buddhism of the ‘fortunate human birth’ - as that is the only form of life in which one is able to hear the teachings and enact them.

    I’m neither vague nor deflecting on the question of the meaning of ‘Nirvāṇa’. On one hand, I obviously don’t know in the first-person sense, otherwise you would be interacting with a Buddha, which I assure you is not the case. On the other hand there is voluminous literature and iconography that goes back for millenia which communicate something of the meaning of the term. And one can have glimpses of it. None of this is scientific, but then, this is a philosophy forum, not a science forum. It’s also not necessarily in conflict with science, but it is in conflict with both Christian dogma, and philosophical materialism (as there is no medium identified by which memory can be transmitted other than the physical.)
  • References for discussion of mental-to-mental causation?
    But do you really expect to die a man and come back as a monkey, frog or amoeba? — apokrisis

    That’s rather a cartoon version of what is implied by this belief system, but then, that’s something I’ve come to expect. Yes, I do believe that death is not the end of life. It certainly is for the individual that I am. But the causes that gave rise to this life will give rise to another (something which gives me no joy). But then, nearly everything you write about what you consider religion is coloured by your distaste for it.

    There was a Buddhist Studies scholar, Paul Williams, who wrote well known textbooks on Buddhism. About ten years ago, he renounced his acceptance of Buddhism, and his conversion (or reversion) to Catholicism. On the grounds that he might be ‘reborn as a cockroach’. At the time, I discussed that with Buddhist acquaintances. They were certainly not scornful of his conversion - ‘good luck to him’, was the sentiment - but they felt that the fear was completely irrational. Nobody ‘comes back as a cockroach’. It is true that in traditional Buddhist lore, the animal realm was one of the six domains in which beings take birth, but there is nothing like that kind of belief.

    But then once you start breaking out this "self" as some kind of ontological essence or substantial being – a spirit stuff – then you have crossed a line and now need to provide a new justification for what you have started claiming. — apokrisis

    Hence Nishijma saying that there is no such thing!

    Both world and self are products of a modelling relation embodied in the structure of an organism. — apokrisis


    The world is inseparable from the subject, but from a subject which is nothing but a project of the world, and the subject is inseparable from the world, but from a world which the subject itself projects — Maurice Merleau Ponty
  • References for discussion of mental-to-mental causation?
    But this means YOUR reasons to reject it do not falsify MY beliefs. And vice versa: my reasons to reject your position are epistemically contingent upon my background beliefs. The difference is that I recognize this contingency - and that's why I can respect your position. You overlook this contingency, and hence you conflate your subjective basis for rejecting physicalism with an objective falsification. — Relativist

    But this is precisely the meaning of 'relativism'. It is 'what is right for me' and 'what is right for you.' You have your reasons, and I mine. It is kind of obligatory in a pluralist culture but it needs to be seen for what it is.

    Furthermore, my arguments against physicalism have been mainly metacognitive (based on arguments from the structure of cognition) and transcendental (in a neo-kantian sense) rather than objective.

    What categories should I have used when explaining how "I made sense" of the meaning of "physical"- after you indicated I'd "left the meaning of 'physical' indeterminate"? I referenced categories of hypothetical objects that many take for granted:

    -supernatural/spiritual objects- a common belief about God and angels
    -abstract objects - a common belief of platonists     — Relativist

    Are persons objects? When you interact with your loved ones, are you interacting with objects? Persons can be treated as objects for some purposes — demographics, epidemiology, or even grammar — but ordinarily we relate to them as beings, with an “I–Thou” relation rather than an “I–It.” If divine beings are real, they would be real in the same way — as beings, not as objects.

    The very division between “natural” and “supernatural” is a historical artifact. The Royal Society’s 1660s charter explicitly forbade research into “metaphysik,” consigning questions about spirit, angels, and the divine to the Church. Science defined itself by excluding those domains, and physicalism inherits that exclusion. So when you define “physical” in contrast with “spiritual/supernatural objects,” you are already working within that modern boundary — one which is itself the result of a particular history, not an inevitable metaphysical truth. Our sense of what is real is often defined within the bounds of what is scientifically verifiable in principle. That’s why we tend to assume that if something is to be considered real, it must be an object. But that’s very much a feature of our culture, shaped by the scientific revolution. Other philosophical traditions don’t take objectivity as the sole criterion.

    As for abstract objects - I'm trying to find time to research and write on it. But the very short version, is that abstract objects - number, say - are not really objects as such, except in the metaphorical sense of being 'an object of thought'. But really there is no such thing as number.The confusion about the nature of abstracta goes back in intellectual history to the erasure of the 'scala naturae', the so-called 'Great Chain of Being'. Within this schema, there is room for different levels of existence. Intelligible objects, such as number, exist on a different level to material objects (Plato's 'dianoia' being one division on the Divided LIne). My heuristic is that they don't exist, but they're real, in that they're the same for any rational intellect. So I reject the simplistic idea that Platonism says that 'numbers exist in some ethereal domain'. There is no such 'domain' - and yet, there is a domain of natural numbers, right? 2 and 4 are in it, and the square root of minus 1 is outside it. But 'inside' and 'outside' here are metaphorical. The key point being that again, it extends the scope of what can be considered real beyond empiricism (hence the suspicion of Platonism).

    I referenced this model when referring to immanent universals, and pointed out that quantum fields fit the model. The ontology hangs together quite consistenly, and if you don't see that - then you were premature in dropping the topic. There's nothing vague about the ontology itself, so any perceived vagueness could be cleared up. No one's compelling you to pursue it further, but recognize the folly of trying to falsify something you don't understand. — Relativist

    Oh, please. I gave reference to an article on it. There is plenty that is 'vague about the ontology', which can be summed up in one word: uncertainty. This is based on three of the better popular books written about the subject:

    • Kumar, Manjit. Quantum: Einstein, Bohr, and the Great Debate about the Nature of Reality. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2008.
    • Lindley, David. Uncertainty: Einstein, Heisenberg, Bohr, and the Struggle for the Soul of Science. New York: Anchor Books, 2007.
    • Becker, Adam. What Is Real? The Unfinished Quest for the Meaning of Quantum Physics. New York: Basic Books, 2018.

    I've asked you this rhetorically before: why do these books have the sub-titles they do? Why 'the great debate about the nature of reality'? Why 'the struggle for the soul of science'? Why 'the unfinished quest'? You don't seem to grasp the enormity of the philosophical questions. In your mind, it's a nice, neat system, where 'states of affairs' can be used to label the shifting sands of scientific speculation for the purposes of argument. When the Vienna Circle members visited Niels Bohr in Copenhagen, he gave them a lecture on quantum physics. At the end, they politely applauded, but he was nonplussed when none of them asked any questions. This is when he said 'if you're not shocked by quantum physics, then you could not have understood it'.

    Naturalism is a metaphysical system that assumes as a first principle that the natural world comprises the totality of reality. — Relativist

    Where 'the natural world' is what can be detected by the senses (augmented by instruments) or hypothesised on the mathematical analysis of such data. But already, this excludes the observer.

    Philosophy in general is the most systematic form of self-consciousness. It consists in bringing to consciousness for analysis and evaluation everything that in ordinary life is invisible because it underlies and pervades what we are consciously doing. Language, thought, consciousness itself become the explicit objects of philosophical attention instead of just serving as the medium for our lives. — Thomas Nagel, Secular Philosophy and the Religious Temperament

    Much of which is excluded by your definition.

    Household duties call, I will be back some other time.
  • References for discussion of mental-to-mental causation?
    So where does value come from in this telling? Is it on the side of the epistemic relation between an organism and its world, or is it something more - an ontological level break between the realm of matter and the realm of ideas? — apokrisis

    The Buddhist goal is nibbana (Nirvāṇa), liberation from the cycle of re-birth. Everything in the Buddhist world is calbrated against that. It is the subject of the eightfold path and Four Truths.

    But here is where Nishijima's Mahāyāna background is philosophically significant. Early Buddhism was dualistic in that worldly existence was to be shunned. It was a strictly renunciate religion. Mahāyāna was a later development in Buddhist history, associated with the figure of Nāgārjuna (although its precise origins are a bit of a mystery.) But for Mahāyāna, Nirvāṇa is not a separate realm to Saṃsāra, and there are not two separate realms (Theravada Buddhism doesn't accept this.) In Mahāyāna, 'Nirvāṇa is Saṃsāra released, and Saṃsāra is Nirvāṇa grasped'. The Bodhisattva doesn't leave the world behind, but is voluntarily born out of compassion, not out of the compulsion and grasping that drives the cycle for other beings.

    This is why, in Buddhist iconography, in the graphic illustration of the 'wheel of life and death', the Buddha is depicted as outside all of the 'six realms', but in some representations, also inside each of them.

    Also I would call attention to this phrase 'epistemic relation of self and world.' One point I noticed in Buddhist Studies, is the expression 'self-and-world' is frequently encountered in the Pali Buddhist texts as a kind of single unit of meaning ('self-and-world') This is understood as 'co-arising' or 'co-dependent', actually, one of the sources of the ideas in The Embodied Mind, as Franscisco Varela absorbed this from Buddhism. That is due, as noted above, to the phenomenological aspect of Buddhism, which never looses sight the relationship between experience and being (also why The Embodied Mind presents a kind of hybrid of Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology and Buddhist praxis.)

    We talk as if value and meaning are separate from material being and yet share the same Universe, but that separateness is then just a figure of speech? — apokrisis

    Nishijima is not equivocating so much as refusing both horns of a dilemma which is forced on us by the dualism of mind and matter. Value and meaning are real, but not due to there being a 'non-material substance'. That’s why Nishijima calls “spirit” a figure of speech - to stop us turning it into a metaphysical theory. This is why I keep returning to the 'Cartesian Division'. You yourself might not hold to it, but you can't deny that it is a major current in today's culture - the separation of mind (res cogitans) and matter (res extensa), which results in the reification of mind as a kind of 'thinking substance'. ('Reification' comes directly from the root 'res'.) So 'spirit' is not any kind of object, thing or substance so much as a figurative way of referring to the source of value and meaning. What is that source? I think that here, a deep sense of not knowing the answer to that question is required. It's not something inside of our conceptual nets. Hence Wittgenstein, 'the sense of the world lies outside the world'.
  • Is there a purpose to philosophy?
    ↪Darkneos
    Well, can't be helped. There's an old cartoon, some guy typing away on his monitor, saying 'can't come to bed yet, dear, someone on the Internet is wrong about something.' As an old forum habitué that was a little too close to home ;-)
  • Is there a purpose to philosophy?
    ↪Darkneos
    Fair enough. But I did notice that the thread was 6 years old. He might well have moved on.
  • Is there a purpose to philosophy?
    ↪Darkneos
    Completely different thread. But really, if you’re going to debate Quora threads why not do it on Quora? Do you expect the contributors here to weave between here and there just because there’s some question you want answered?
  • References for discussion of mental-to-mental causation?
    In logic, the corollary of that is that value alone has no matter. And that is absolutist talk, matey! — apokrisis

    I'm surprised you say that. What, then, of the corrollary I noted from Wittgenstein? Him also?

    I think it maps perfectly well against the 'cartesian division' that I already noted - the fact that according to early modern science, 'physical science should provide a mathematically precise quantitative description of an external reality extended in space and time, a description limited to spatiotemporal primary qualities such as shape, size, and motion, and to laws governing the relations among them. Subjective appearances, on the other hand -- how this physical world appears to human perception -- were assigned to the mind, and the secondary qualities like color, sound, and smell were to be analyzed relationally, in terms of the power of physical things, acting on the senses, to produce those appearances in the minds of observers.' I'm not saying that your pansemiotic metaphysics adheres to that, but I think it's a fair characterisation of the mainstream scientific worldview, at least until quite recently. The objective sciences deal with quantitative measurement, whereas values are qualitative judgements. That is the origin of Hume’s is-ought problem. It could quite easily be argued that the whole point of biosemiotic philosophy was to ameliorate this division. This ought not to be controversial.

    When you call something good, or beautiful, or divine, or whatever, the question becomes, well what is the shape of that? What does that look like in practice? — apokrisis

    In pre-modern philosophy that is the subject explored by Pierre Hadot. But let’s not lose sight of the thread - it was you that introduced the Buddhist chain of dependent origination to the conversation, in association with several other schools of thought. I sought to elaborate on that, in respect of the claim that life and mind can be completely understood in thermodynamic terms. So I pointed out that Buddhist philosophy would not agree with that; that human existence cannot be regarded solely in those terms. But that as to why not, it is not through positing some ‘non-physical existent’. I realise it’s a subtle and difficult point to get across, but it was not made idly, it can be supported with reference to sources, hence the mention of Nishijima, who was no ‘idealist absolutist’.
  • References for discussion of mental-to-mental causation?
    This runs into a problem when science tells us matter is shaped by a thermodynamic purpose. The Big Bang could happen as it was a grand carving out of the very Heat Sink it was throwing itself headlong into. The Universe expands so it can cool, and cools so it can expand. — apokrisis

    I can't help but notice the teleological implications in this expression - purpose, 'throwing itself ' 'so it can...'. All intentional language. Maybe that's what came back into physicalism with semiotics, but it sounds idealist to me.

    perhaps instead penalised by coming back in the next life to try over from the level of a bug or mushroom. — apokrisis

    In Buddhist lore, there is no God handing out penalties. Everything that befalls one is one's own doing - that's what karma means. But it also says those who behave like animals may indeed end up being one.

    Can't a sorry old pragmatist like me not have values and meaning without all the claptrap? — apokrisis

    I'm sorry you thought my post was 'claptrap'. I intended it as a sincere attempt to make a serious philosophical point.
  • References for discussion of mental-to-mental causation?
    ↪Relativist
    Although you charge me with vagueness, I can’t help noticing that physicalism itself is equally vague, if not more so. When it defines “physical” as “whatever physics will someday describe,” or as a “state of affairs” (which in practice means “whatever happens to be the case”), how is that not vague? My point all along has been that consciousness and experience are foundational: they are the ground of all science and philosophy. If that doesn’t fit into the the physicalist frame, that may say more about the limits of the frame. These are nearer to metacognitive arguments—about the conditions that make science and philosophy possible in the first place—than to statements of purported facts, which is the only kind your framework recognises.
  • Is there a purpose to philosophy?
    ↪Darkneos
    I thought it a good post - suitable for answering the question from a novice, 'what is philosophy all about?' Gave it an upvote.
  • References for discussion of mental-to-mental causation?
    ↪Relativist
    If you're not interested in discussing it further, I'm ok with that. :up:
  • References for discussion of mental-to-mental causation?
    ↪Relativist
    Although, speaking of 'atomic facts', and as Buddhist philosophy has now been introduced, Buddhism has a psycho-philosophical schema, known as abhidamma (sanskrit abhidarma) comprising a voluminous account of the atomic facts ('dhammas') of existence. It is a confusing aspect of Buddhism, that the term 'dhamma' (dharma) means both the overall teaching of Buddhism, and also the minutae of experience. But this is due to the inherently phenomenological nature of Buddhist philosophy, in that a 'dhamma' is a 'momentary atom of experience', rather than an enduring particle of matter. Abhidhamma nevertheless gave rise to an elaborate theory of 'Buddhist atomism' in the early period, even down to the purported, minute temporal duration of each moment. This comprises a detailed scholastic catalogue of the types of 'moments of experience' that arise according to the various causes and conditions as explained in the 'chain of dependent origination' (noted above. Scholars have noted similarities with A.N. Whitehead's process philosophy, although the convergences ought not to be over-stressed.)
  • References for discussion of mental-to-mental causation?
    I understand that - what is physical is defined in contrast with or distinct from what is supernatural or spiritual. That's a part of my point - it is an aspect of the 'Cartesian division' which I've already referred to. I'm trying to explain what is wrong with the expresssion 'spiritual/supernatural objects...'
    — Wayfarer

    Why does it matter, if it's a category that maps to an empty set?     — Relativist

    The argument is that the reference to "spiritual/supernatural objects" is a category error. That by declaring the 'spiritual or supernatural' to consist of 'objects' you are making it an empty set.

    Of course it sounds vague when what you want is something very specific, determinable by scientific enquiry, an 'atomic fact'. Questions of this kind are always elusive, that's why the positivists wanted to declare them all meaningless as a matter of principle. They're difficult in a way different to technical and scientific questions.

    The only thing being "transformed" is the mind of the person, not the external world. — Relativist

    There, again, is your belief that the world is a certain way, that it has a determinate existence external to your cognition of it. But this is just what has been called into question by both cognitive science and quantum physics.

    you seem to be latching onto the "consciousness causes collapse" interpretation of QM — Relativist

    The linked article says it postulates that 'consciousness is the main mechanism behind the process of measurement'. I say that too is a categorical error - consciousness is not a mechanism nor one cause in a sequence of events. The way I put it is that the act of observation or measurement is ineliminable - cannot be eliminated - in the derivation of an observational outcome. This is why quantum physics calls objectivity into question - not because consciousness is 'a factor' or 'a mechanism'.

    I'm essentially arguing that quantum mechanics shows us the limits of the subject/object distinction that classical physics assumed. This is closer to what philosophers like Bohr and Heisenberg were getting at - that the measurement problem isn't a technical issue to be solved but a conceptual lesson about the nature of physical knowledge itself. Hence that Bohr aphorism I already quoted. Here's another one: 'In our description of nature, the purpose is not to disclose the real essence of the phenomena but only to track down, so far as it is possible, relations between the manifold aspects of our experience.' Do you see the Kantian implications of this statement? That we do not see the phenomenon 'in itself', as it is, independently of our observation of it. We're involved in producing the outcome. Whereas in classical physics, we're at arms length from the outcome, we can maintain that sense of separateness which objectivity requires. But that sense of scientific detachment and objectivity, is also very much a cultural artifact, typical of a very specific period in history and culture. It is also where objectivist physicalism is located.

    The fact that you will invariably interpret this as being a causal sequence where consciousness is one thing, the effect another, is the same issue as treating the spiritual or supernatural as 'an object'. As I said, requires perspectival shift to see why.

    You've provided no reason to think this is a false distinction — Relativist

    I just have! I'm trying to convey a difficult point about the nature and limitations of objective thought, but everything I'm saying is interpolated into an idiom within which only what is considered objective is admissable. Consequently, we're 'talking past' one another. Much of analytical philosophy is propositional in nature - propositions built around a lexicon of states-of-affairs, properties, and the like (hence the interminable and circular threads on 'jtb'). Participatory and perspectival knowing are different to that. They're more characteristic of tradional philosophies, in existential and spiritual practices, ways-of-being in the world.

    I'll hasten to add, I'm no exemplar of the philosophic sage who has mastered such 'ways of being' and what they entail. By no means. But I at least recognise them.

    So life and mind are fully part of Nature and entrained to its thermodynamic constraints. — apokrisis

    You did mention

    Paticcasamuppada as your Buddhist mates would say. — apokrisis

    Let's unpack that, for those unfamiliar with the terminology. Paṭiccasamuppāda (Pali Buddhism) and Pratītyasamutpāda (Sanskrit Buddhism) refers to the 'chain of dependent co-arising'. It is a causal chain, comprising 12 steps (nidanas) the details of which are too voluminous to summarize here. It is casually expressed as 'This being, that becomes; this ceasing, that fades away'. It begins with 'avidya', meaning ignorance (literally 'not seeing') and unfolds through this 12-step sequence comprising in part mental formations, name and form, feelings, cravings, and so on (wikipedia entry.) It is represented iconographically as the Bhavachakra, the 'wheel of life and death'. There is also a reverse formulation, with the negation of each of the 12 links, culminating in nibbana which is release from the wheel of life and death.

    Within this lexion, materialism or physicalism are designated ucchedavāda (nihilist) the view that the subject is nothing other than the body, and that death is annihilation. At the opposite extreme is sassatavāda, the view that there is an eternal I or self that is reborn in perpetuity. In the Buddha's culture, there was widespread (though not universal) belief in reincarnation, so the 'eternalists' were those who believed that by virtuous practices, they could secure an un-ending sequence of propitious re-births in the future. (I'm inclined to think that this also describes populist Christian views of Heaven.)

    So implicity within all of this, there is a beyond life-and-death. But it would be a mistake to conceive of it as 'something that exists'. A Sōtō Zen master, for whom I have great respect, put it like this:

    Buddhists believe in the Universe. The Universe is, according to philosophers who base their beliefs on idealism, a place of the spirit. Other philosophers whose beliefs are based on a materialistic view, say that the Universe is composed of the matter we see in front of our eyes. Buddhist philosophy takes a view which is neither idealistic nor materialistic; Buddhists do not believe that the Universe is composed of only matter. They believe that there is something else other than matter. But there is a difficulty here; if we use a concept like spirit to describe that something else other than matter, people are prone to interpret Buddhism as some form of spiritualistic religion and think that Buddhists must therefore believe in the actual existence of spirit. So it becomes very important to understand the Buddhist view of the concept spirit.

    I am careful to refer to spirit as a concept here because in fact Buddhism does not believe in the actual existence of spirit. So what is this something else other than matter which exists in this Universe? If we think that there is a something which actually exists other than matter, our understanding will not be correct; nothing physical exists outside of matter.

    Buddhists believe in the existence of the Universe. Some people explain the Universe as a universe based on matter. But there also exists something which we call value or meaning. A Universe consisting only of matter leaves no room for value or meaning in civilizations and cultures. Matter alone has no value. We can say that the Universe is constructed with matter, but we must also say that matter works for some purpose.

    So in our understanding of the Universe we should recognize the existence of something other than matter. We can call that something spirit, but if we do we should remember that in Buddhism, the word spirit is a figurative expression for value or meaning. We do not say that spirit exists in reality; we use the concept only figuratively.     — Nishijima-Roshi, Three Philosophies and One Reality

    I'm struck by the similarity to one of the aphorisms at the end of Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus:

    The sense of the world must lie outside the world. In the world everything is as it is and happens as it does happen. In it there is no value—and if there were, it would be of no value.

    If there is a value which is of value, it must lie outside all happening and being-so. For all happening and being-so is accidental.

    What makes it non-accidental cannot lie in the world, for otherwise this would again be accidental.

    It must lie outside the world.     — 6.41

    But what could lie outside the world? From our viewpoint, nothing. But that is not the 'nothing' of nihilism. It is 'that of which we cannot speak'.

    But semiosis happily puts human values back in the actual world. — apokrisis

    I grant that, it has a lot in common with phenomologists and existentialists, and I've learned and am learning a lot from it. It's a big improvement on lumpen materialism. But as you will often acknowledge, it envisages no end to the existence apart from its physical dissolution.
  • References for discussion of mental-to-mental causation?
    I respect that your noetic structure differs from mine, and would not suggest this means you're objectively wrong. — Relativist

    Fair enough, mistake on my part. However I don’t take issue with physicalism because you hold it, but because I believe it’s a mistaken philosophical view. I believe I’ve given you many grounds on which I and others believe physicalism to be a mistaken philosophical view, but that you don’t recognize the arguments.
  • References for discussion of mental-to-mental causation?
    Folk like Pattee who directly tackle the symbol grounding issue and show how biology works. — apokrisis

    The concept of Biosemiotics requires making a distinction between two categories, the material or physical world and the symbolic or semantic world. The problem is that there is no obvious way to connect the two categories. ...I have not solved this problem… All I can do is set up the problem clearly by specifying the minimum logical and physical conditions necessary. — Howard Pattee, Physics and Metaphysics of Biosemiosis

    The story of how epistemic creatures could arise as Nature’s way of accelerating its entropy flow. — apokrisis

    Nihilism.


    Then watch this short video by cosmologist Sean Carroll... — Relativist

    There's an anecdote I sometimes tell. During the 1950's the then Pope Pius XXIV said:

    Indeed, it seems that the science of today, by going back in one leap millions of centuries, has succeeded in being a witness to that primordial Fiat Lux, when, out of nothing, there burst forth with matter a sea of light and radiation [... Thus modern science has confirmed] with the concreteness of physical proofs the contingency of the universe and the well-founded deduction that about that time the cosmos issued from the hand of the Creator.

    Lemaître was reportedly horrified by that intervention and was later able, with the assistance of Father Daniel O’Connell, the director of the Vatican Observatory, to convince the Pope not make any further public statements on religious or philosophical interpretations of matters concerning physical cosmology.

    According to the theoretical physicist and Nobel laureate Paul Dirac,

    Once when I was talking with Lemaître about [his cosmological theory] and feeling stimulated by the grandeur of the picture that he has given us, I told him that I thought cosmology was the branch of science that lies closest to religion. However Lemaître did not agree with me. After thinking it over he suggested psychology as lying closest to religion.     — Wikipedia

    What impressed me about this was the fact that Lemaître was, as you will know, a Catholic priest, and yet he was horrified by the Pope's suggestion that his cosmological theory had anything to say about the articles of the faith. He would obviously have no time for the endless debates about the matter that occupy the Internet. That, and that he had the temerity to have the Pope advised to stop saying something, and that the Pope complied, signifying his respect for scientific opinion.
  • References for discussion of mental-to-mental causation?
    The term, "subjectively real" seems problematic. The "contents" of my mind (my mental states) are objectively real - but known only to me. If I'm interpreting you correctly, you are simply suggesting the converse of objectivism. — Relativist

    I think this interpretation is really a symptom of the old Cartesian division between mind and world, self and other. We inherit, both innately and culturally, the sense of being a private self “inside” the body facing an “external” world of objects. Within that picture, “subjective” ends up meaning personal, private, even arbitrary, while “objective” means whatever any observer can check third-person.

    But what I mean by “subjective” is not the merely personal. It refers to the structures of experience through which reality is disclosed to consciousness — what phenomenology calls ipseity, or subject-hood. Every sentient being is a subject of experience in this sense. The personal is what’s idiosyncratic to me alone, but subjectivity is foundational and shared. Without it, there could be no experience of reality at all. But we tend not see it, because it is the assumed endogenous background to everything we say and do.

    And you keep leaning on semiotics and believing it is leading you to idealism. You see it as a sword to smite materialism. — apokrisis

    There’s no need to cast this in terms of “swords” and “smite.” I appreciate that you pointed me toward biosemiotics in the first place; thanks to your contributions, I’ve read a bit, including Marcello Barbieri’s Short History of Biosemiotics. What stood out to me is that biosemiotics is not a monolithic discipline. Barbieri distinguishes between at least three schools—Copenhagen, Tartu, and Code biology—each of which interprets the relation between symbols and physics differently. Hoffmeyer emphasizes semiosis as an emergent property of life, Barbieri stresses codes as rules not derivable from physics alone.

    That’s why I don’t see semiotics as simply a “sword for idealism.” What it shows is that meaning, coding, and interpretation can’t be captured by physical causation on its own. That opens a space where physicalism doesn’t have the last word, and where the epistemic/ontological split really matters. And phenomenological biology is also significant, with the way that it identifies the emergence of intentional actions in biology as the ground of 'ipseity' or what becomes fully developed in h.sapiens as the sense of self. All of that kind of thinking can be understood as naturalist without necessarily being physicalist. That is the province of enactivism or embodied cognition, which I'm sure you're familiar with, and which I think has at least an idealist element in it, in recognising the ineliminable role of the subject.
  • Hate speech - a rhetorical pickaxe
    PRESS RELEASE: FOR IMMEDIATE PUBLICATION

    Department of Educational Standards and Community Safety

    Administration Announces Removal of Voltaire Materials from Public Institutions, Citing Harmful Content.

    Following a comprehensive review by the Committee on Safe Learning Environments, the Administration today announced the immediate removal of all works by and about François-Marie Arouet, generally known as Voltaire, from public school curricula and library collections. The 18th-century author's writings have been deemed inconsistent with current community values and potentially harmful to social cohesion. "While we respect historical context, we cannot ignore the clear pattern of inflammatory rhetoric that permeates Voltaire's work," stated Dr. Patricia Mooreland, Director of Content Standards. "His persistent attacks on established institutions, combined with his documented use of divisive language regarding religious communities, creates an environment that is simply incompatible with our commitment to inclusive education."

    The decision affects approximately 847 titles across the district's 23 branches, including "Candide," "Letters on the English," and various biographical works. Parents and educators have been provided with a curated list of alternative Enlightenment-era materials that promote critical thinking without the "needlessly provocative elements" found in Voltaire's corpus. School Superintendent Janet Brightwater emphasized that this action reflects the Administration's dedication to fostering learning environments where all students can feel safe and valued. "Education should challenge young minds," Brightwater noted, "but not at the expense of community harmony or respect for Christian beliefs. We remain committed to teaching the Enlightenment period through more constructive voices who advanced human knowledge without resorting to satirical attacks that could normalize intolerance."


    (AI was utilised in the preparation of this post.)
  • Hate speech - a rhetorical pickaxe
    President Trump remembered the conservative activist Charlie Kirk as a “martyr” on Sunday in remarks at his memorial in Arizona, but he pivoted swiftly to blunt politics by saying that he hated his political opponents and that they “cheated like dogs.”

    Striking a far different tone from that of Mr. Kirk’s widow, Erika, who spoke immediately before him, Mr. Trump said he disagreed with Mr. Kirk’s view of wanting the best for one’s opponent.

    “I hate my opponent and I don’t want the best for them,” he said.     — at Kirk Memorial
  • Idealism in Context
    Only absolute reality cannot be granted to it (time) according to what has been adduced above. It is nothing except the form of our inner intuition. — CPR A36/B53

    Think of a melody. Each note has its own distinct individuality while blending with the other notes and silences that come before and after. As we listen, past notes linger in the present ones, and (especially if we’ve heard the song before) future notes may already seem to sound in the ones we’re hearing now. Music is not just a series of discrete notes. We experience it as something inherently durational.

    Bergson insisted that duration proper cannot be measured. To measure something – such as volume, length, pressure, weight, speed or temperature – we need to stipulate the unit of measurement in terms of a standard. For example, the standard metre was once stipulated to be the length of a particular 100-centimetre-long platinum bar kept in Paris. It is now defined by an atomic clock measuring the length of a path of light travelling in a vacuum over an extremely short time interval. In both cases, the standard metre is a measurement of length that itself has a length. The standard unit exemplifies the property it measures.

    In Time and Free Will, Bergson argued that this procedure would not work for duration. For duration to be measured by a clock, the clock itself must have duration. It must exemplify the property it is supposed to measure. To examine the measurements involved in clock time, Bergson considers an oscillating pendulum, moving back and forth. At each moment, the pendulum occupies a different position in space, like the points on a line or the moving hands on a clockface. In the case of a clock, the current state – the current time – is what we call ‘now’. Each successive ‘now’ of the clock contains nothing of the past because each moment, each unit, is separate and distinct. But this is not how we experience time. Instead, we hold these separate moments together in our memory. We unify them. A physical clock measures a succession of moments, but only experiencing duration allows us to recognise these seemingly separate moments as a succession. Clocks don’t measure time; we do.     — Who Won when Einstein Debated Bergson?
  • References for discussion of mental-to-mental causation?
    Idealism is fatuous as it imagines the world made perfect under a set of guiding values like good, truth, beauty, the divine. — apokrisis

    Ever read Schopenhauer? Yours is the man-in-the-street version of idealism, which is 'the hope that everything will turn out for the best'. Idealism properly understood is the mainstream of Western philosophy, beginning with Plato. It understands mind as fundamental to existence, not as a material constituent but as the faculty through which and by which whatever we are to know is disclosed. Your attitude embodies just the false dichotomy that Vervaeke is describing, between 'pragmatist physicalism and unrealistic idealism'. In reality, idealist philosophy is perfectly capable of both realism and pragmatism, where that is called for, but it also sees something beyond the physical.

    The caricature of idealism as 'placeless notions of perfection' is simply false. Schopenhauer, for example, was not an optimist but a pessimist, yet still an idealist in the sense that the world is representation, grounded in will. Likewise, Kant’s transcendental idealism or Hegel’s absolute idealism were not about escaping into Never-Never Land but about showing that reality is only intelligible because it is already structured by reason.

    Pragmatism doesn’t escape this. William James and C S Peirce both recognised that our practices of inquiry are already shot through with values—truth, coherence, what works. That’s why the supposed fact–value dichotomy is broken: there are no 'brute facts' apart from a horizon of meaning in which they matter. In fact, Peirce himself appears in encyclopaedia entries under the heading of "objective idealism" — a fact you always reject because it doesn’t suit the physicalist attitude you want to buttress with selective borrowings from his philosophy.

    So what you’re doing is just restating the very dichotomy Vervaeke critiques. You’re setting up 'pragmatism vs. idealism' as if they were exclusive alternatives, whereas the real point is that the framework of such dichotomies is what constrains thought in the first place. They are poles in a dialectic, not exclusive and exhaustive truth-claims.
  • References for discussion of mental-to-mental causation?
    For anyone interested, current email update from John Vervaeke. It discusses some of the themes we’ve been looking at in this and other threads.

    Why Our Modern Worldview Limits Your Understanding of Reality

    Reveal
    The dominant framework of the Middle Ages divided reality between the natural (governed by space, time, and causality) and the supernatural (a domain populated by God, angels, demons, and metaphysical powers transcending the material world).

    But the Enlightenment rejected this dichotomy because they claimed it undermined their attempts to do science (make sense of the world), conduct ethics, and practice politics.

    They proposed that the natural is all there is—but they didn’t realize that they merely traded one distorting framework for another (which now silently constrains how we understand ourselves and the world).

    Let me explain:

    When the Enlightenment rejected the supernatural/natural dichotomy, they treated the supernatural not as false in a specific way, but as ontologically irrelevant—as a category that had lost its ability to do explanatory work. In other words, not real.

    From two realms, one was chosen: the natural.

    But the postmodernists saw a fundamental flaw in this rejection:

    The Enlightenment framework simply replaced that dichotomy with a whole gridlocked grammar of its own dichotomies.

    The supernatural/natural was replaced with subjective-objective, fact-value, is-ought, theory-data, measurement-meaning, analytic-synthetic.

    What the postmodern critique reveals is this:

    How can you reject the supernatural/natural dichotomy while running yourself on the basis of all these unquestionable dichotomies that you assert as intrinsically and necessarily so?

    The problem with these dichotomies is that they constrain us to experience the world in a particular way.

    They become the unexamined structure through which we interpret experience, including our understanding of religion.

    Take for example Stephen Jay Gould's notion of "Non-Overlapping Magisteria" (NOMA):
    Gould claimed he had solved the problem of the relationship between religion and science.

    His proposal:
    Science is about facts; religion is about values. Since the two occupy entirely distinct domains, they cannot conflict. They can't possibly challenge each other.

    Isn't that wonderful?

    But Gould is only presupposing—not justifying, not even explicitly referencing:
    He’s invoking the fact/value dichotomy as if it were a given.

    He's just seeing looking through this dichotomy.

    And there are profound problems with this supposed clarity:

    If the world is so cleanly divided how is it that nowadays ideas emerge (like Richard Dawkins’ claim) that every cell is a map of its environment, running on the same patterns and principles?

    What he's pointing to is the ancient idea of microcosm and macrocosm—that the structure of the world is mirrored in the structure of the self.

    This challenges the idea that the self is somehow sealed off from the world in subjective isolation. It suggests a profound fit between organism and world.

    Or consider Karl Friston’s proposal that you are a model of the world:

    Your cognition is not merely representational, but enactive. Your brain and body do not passively mirror reality; they are dynamically coupled to it.

    So how is this coming to the fore in a world divided, according to all these dichotomies?

    This question points to the problem that arises when dichotomies are taken to be features of your worldview—as if they disclose the very structure of reality and the limits of what can be known.

    One of the most prominent is the fact-value split—and it leads to what William Desmond called “default atheism.”

    For 28 years, cognitive scientist Dr. John Vervaeke has given his life to pioneering the scientific study of wisdom and transformation. His discoveries blend ancient and modern ways of knowing—bringing together philosophy, neuroscience, psychology, anthropology, information processing, linguistics, and studies of religion.

    His Awakening From the Meaning Crisis series has earned him global notoriety and his academic work has gained the respect of the scholarly and scientific community. His lectures and discussions have been viewed by millions.

    This cognitive explanation of meaning-making has attracted leaders in many disciplines to the work. His teachings have served as a clarion call, around which practices are being honed and communities are being built that are having a proven ability to bring transformation and meaning to many.     — About John Vervaeke



    Ontic Structural Realism as now the fact of metaphysics catching up with the physics — apokrisis

    From what I’ve read, ontic structural realism is the attempt to rescue scientism from the wreckage of materialism. It has no interest in the nature and plights of existence as lived, but only in the abstract representation of physical forces. It’s like the Vienna Circle 2.0.
  • The Mind-Created World
    ↪Gnomon
    In Western metaphysics, ‘creation’ has a specific status, reserved for the Creator (‘creature’ meaning ‘created being’). It is of course used more broadly nowadays, for all manner of creative work, but it still retains some overtones, in the philosophical context. But I’m not going to retroactively update it. Besides, ‘mind-constructed world’ just doesn’t have a ring to it.
  • Donald Trump (All Trump Conversations Here)
    Trump is going full totalitarian mode now. The latest outrage is the firing of Erik S. Siebert, a DA who had been told to rake up incriminating evidence on James Comey (previously FBI director), Letitia James (the NY DA who had successfully brought mortgage fraud charges against Trump) and Senator Adam Schiff (Manager of the first Trump impeachment). Apparently Siebert had concluded there was insufficient evidence to bring charges. Trump had Siebert fired, then blasted Pam Bondi in a public social media post, insisting that DOJ find a way to bring charges, more or less 'come hell or high water'. (He's now drafted another lackey, er, lucky attorney to do his dirty work.)

    Such White House interference in Dept Justice actions is, of course, almost completely unprecedented and highly irregular to say the least. Trump complained that the two impeachments and five indictments brought against him were all 'based on nothing', so in his (twisted) mind, filing false charges against perceived adversaries is no different (and as usual never mind the actual facts). NY Times coverage (gift link). Rachel Maddow comment.
  • References for discussion of mental-to-mental causation?
    So two guys who ran the risks of heresy charges and book bans unless they made a show of still being good Catholics. Their moves towards materialist explanations had to be publicly renounced — apokrisis

    It is true that Descartes had to forego the publication of some of his works for fear of religious persecution, and that the trial of Galileo was arguably the marker of the ‘scientific revolution’. But I don’t think that the ‘Cartesian division’ that I referred to was solely a result of those political pressures. Another major impetus was epistemological, with Galileo’s recognition of the importance of the Platonic dianoia and with his identification of the so-called ‘primary attributes’ of bodies - those attributes being just the ones ideally suited to his new physics. Obviously a contestable argument, but this division is where the pervasive notion of the ‘purposelessness’ of matter (and hence the Cosmos) originated. Meaning, purpose and intentionality was 'subjectivized' with the external world being conceived in purely mechanical and quantitative terms.

    The modern mind-body problem arose out of the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, as a direct result of the concept of objective physical reality that drove that revolution. Galileo and Descartes made the crucial conceptual division by proposing that physical science should provide a mathematically precise quantitative description of an external reality extended in space and time, a description limited to spatiotemporal primary qualities such as shape, size, and motion, and to laws governing the relations among them. Subjective appearances, on the other hand -- how this physical world appears to human perception -- were assigned to the mind, and the secondary qualities like color, sound, and smell were to be analyzed relationally, in terms of the power of physical things, acting on the senses, to produce those appearances in the minds of observers. It was essential to leave out or subtract subjective appearances and the human mind -- as well as human intentions and purposes -- from the physical world in order to permit this powerful but austere spatiotemporal conception of objective physical reality to develop. — Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos, Pp 35-36

    But you’re spot on in saying that the fear of religion was a factor. And it remains a motivation for the continual re-definition of physicalist explanations in light of the implausibllty of lumpen materialism, whilst trying to avoid the hazards of anything that sounds 'spiritual'.

    I brought up the "spiritual/supernatural" because there are common beliefs about it, and my purpose was to explain what it means to be physical. — Relativist

    I understand that - what is physical is defined in contrast with or distinct from what is supernatural or spiritual. That's a part of my point - it is an aspect of the 'Cartesian division' which I've already referred to. I'm trying to explain what is wrong with the expresssion 'spiritual/supernatural objects' by saying that terminology comes from a kind of conceptual confusion which can be traced back to Descartes' 'res cogitans' ('thinking thing'). The attempt to objectify or think of 'the spiritual' (whatever it may or may not be) in such objective terms is a category error (which Gilbert Ryle also said in Concept of Mind, in relation to Descartes.) There is no objective existent which corresponds with 'spirit' because (again whether it is real or not) it transcends the subject-object division. (Which is why mystical practices are aimed at deprecating the sense of 'otherness' or self-identification which characterises egoic existence.)

    How does our "participation" in existence differ from the participation of the sun? — Relativist

    The sun, to our knowledge, is not a rational sentient being, as are we.

    The idea of participatory ontology is part of cognitive scientist John Vervaeke's roadmap. There are four ways of knowing: propositional, perspectival, procedural and participatory (ref.)Participatory knowledge is the knowledge of what it’s like to occupy a role in your environment or relationships. Vervaeke considers this to be the most profound of the four types of knowledge. It involves being in a deep, transformative relationship with the world, participating fully in something that is wider than you.

    It is not just knowing about, but knowing through active engagement and transformation within specific contexts or environments. It shapes and is shaped by the interaction between the person and the world, influencing one’s identity and sense of belonging.

    This kind of knowledge is experiential and co-creative, often seen in the dynamics of relationships, culture, and community participation.

    A large part of Vervaeke's analysis is how our immersion in propositional knowiedge, at the expence of other forms of knowing, results in just that sense of separateness and division, which, I would argue, philosophy proper is aimed at ameliorating (for which see Pierre Hadot's writings on philosophy as a way of life).

    Of course, this is all light years away from David Armstrong's physicalism. I know, he was Head of Department where I studied undergrad philosophy. (Can't speak highly enough however of Associate Prof, Keith Campbell, who's 'Philosophy of Matter' course was a highlight of my degree studies.)

    I gather that you're challenging the direction it took, but swimming against the current is extremely challenging. — Relativist

    You're telling me! :rofl:

    Referring to this as "observer dependency" implies there's something special in the relation between a human observer and the quantum system being measured. The more objective description is "entanglement" - which occurs when a quantum system interacts with a classical object. — Relativist

    The 2022 Physics Nobel was about this. Indeed, “observer dependency” could be rephrased more precisely as “measurement-dependency” or “interaction-dependency” - but it still marks a break from naïve objectivism (where objects are assumed to have definite properties regardless of measurement).

    The Nobel presentations also did not try to “resolve” what “real” means in the sense of ontology. The experimental results deepen the mystery, and many interpretations still vie for supremacy.

    And then, there's the all-too-obvious point that all such measuring devices and instruments are extensions of human sensory abilities. 'The apparatus has no meaning unless the human observer understands it and interprets its reading,' as Schrödinger put it.

    the concept of each universal has something to do with the world outside ourselves - does it not? I claim that the universal "90 degrees" that I conceptualize is exhibited in the walls of my room. The abstraction is distinct from the walls that exhibit it, but it describes an aspect of the walls- and this same as aspect is exhibited in many places. — Relativist

    Of course it does. But again I'm trying to draw attention to the implied understanding in your framing of the issue, of the separateness of mind and world. Universals, in the medieval account, are the way in which the intelligible features of the world are absorbed by intellect. As I put it in Idealism in Context:

    Aquinas, building on Aristotle, maintained that true knowledge arises from a real union between knower and known. As Aristotle put it, “the soul (psuchē) is, in a way, all things,” meaning that the intellect becomes what it knows by receiving the form of the known object. Aquinas elaborated this with the principle that “the thing known is in the knower according to the mode of the knower.” In this view, to know something is not simply to construct a mental representation of it, but to participate in its form — to take into oneself, immaterially, the essence of what the thing is. (Here one may discern an echo of that inward unity — a kind of at-one-ness between subject and object — that contemplative traditions across cultures have long sought, not through discursive analysis but through direct insight.) Such noetic insight, unlike sensory knowledge, disengages the form of the particular from its individuating material conditions, allowing the intellect to apprehend it in its universality. This process — abstraction— is not merely a mental filtering but a form of participatory knowing: the intellect is conformed to the particular, and that conformity gives rise to true insight. Thus, knowledge is not an external mapping of the world but an assimilation, a union that bridges the gap between subject and object through shared intelligibility.

    So, participatory knowledge, again. The way in which this type of realism fell out of favour, to be replaced by nominalism and empiricism, is the subject of a fascinating book, The Theological Origins of Modernity, M A Gillespie. And that's also related to epochal changes in consciousness.

    I know there's a lot to take on in all of this, but your questioning is causing me to recap what I've been studying. I know it's very different to the Anglo analytic philosophy.

    Quantum fields fit the state-of-affairs model: they are particulars with properties and relations to other quantum fields. — Relativist

    That’s precisely the issue: the category “states of affairs” is elastic enough to accommodate whatever physics happens to throw up. It’s not doing explanatory work so much as retrofitting itself to whatever the latest theory says exists.
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