"...so there is something more here than just perspective. — Banno

But you will be completely at a loss to say what that 'something' is. (Whilst you're reaching for your hatchet, I sense the impending feeling of futility that invariably accompanies our exchanges.)

Certainly written in the right spirit! And, by the way, I did include a nice graphic of the hypothetical meadow in the original:



But don't forget, the hypothetical thought-experiment was:

Picture a tranquil mountain meadow. Butterflies flit back and forth amongst the buttercups and daisies, and off in the distance, a snow-capped mountain peak provides a picturesque backdrop. The melodious clunk of the cow-bells, the chirping of crickets, and the calling of birds provide the soundtrack to the vista, with not a human to be seen.

Now picture the same scene — but from no point of view. Imagine that you are perceiving such a scence from every possible point within it, and also around it. Then also subtract from all these perspectives, any sense of temporal continuity — any sense of memory of the moment just past, and expectation of the one about to come. Having done that, describe the same scene.

To which my hypothetical antagonist replies 'impossible, can't be done!' So had either one of us or both of us been there, then the thought-experiment would have been obviated (because the perspective would have been supplied). I suppose to make the same point rather tritely, had neither of us been there, then we would have no idea of whether a butterfly had, in fact, fluttered by.

So the point of the hypothetical is not that there are different perspectives, but that there must always be a perspective, even if we're contemplating a meadow (or anything else) unseen by human eye. I re-inforce the point a little further along, where I said:

But I am not arguing that it means that ‘the world is all in the mind’. It’s rather that, whatever judgements are made about the world, the mind provides the framework within which such judgements are meaningful. So though we know that prior to the evolution of life there must have been a Universe with no intelligent beings in it, or that there are empty rooms with no inhabitants, or objects unseen by any eye — the existence of all such supposedly unseen realities still relies on an implicit perspective. What their existence might be outside of any perspective is meaningless and unintelligible, as a matter of both fact and principle.

Actually, I had many of the objections you have previously raised in mind when I wrote that.

why think it is the scientific-physicalist-naturalist half that is especially problematic? — Leontiskos

Galileo's distinction of 'primary and secondary qualities' of matter refers to the distinction between the attributes measurable by instruments (mass, volume, etc) with the 'affections' such as color, taste and smell existing only in the mind of 'the animal' (i.e. observing organism).

From the SEP entry on Primary and Secondary Qualities in Early Modern Philosophy:

it is not necessary to conceive that a body have a color, taste, aroma, or make a sound; if we lacked senses, intellect and imagination might never think of them.

Thus, from the point of view of the subject in which they seem to inhere [these attributes] are nothing but empty names, rather they inhere only in the sensitive body [i.e. of the observer] … f one removes the animal [observer], then all these qualities are … annihilated. (Galileo 1623 [2008: 185])

Compare this with Thomas Nagel's summary of the origin of the modern mind-body problem:

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 spatio-temporal 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

So, when you ask, under this model, where in the world is the mind, the answer is obviously that it is within the observer. But also, as a corollary, it is nowhere to be found amongst those attributes which are taken to constitute the real objects of scientific analysis. So the mind is nowhere! In those terms, it is unreal or non-existent! All we can do is try to account for the way in which the primary objects of scientific analysis ( comprising matter-energy) must have combined in such a way as to account for the mind (which is of course subject to the 'facing up to the problem of consciousness' argument.) So this is where the axiom of 'the reality of mind-independent objects' has its origin, and it is precisely that which has been called into doubt by the 'observer problem' in quantum physics,

The point of my argument is that reality as experienced is obviously constituted in large part by the mind, which synthesises all of the data, including scientific data, and combines it into the unitified state of experience which is the referent of the term 'being'. It really isn't mysterious, but it's not objective. And, goes the reasoning, if it's not objective, then its not amenable to scientific method, so it can't be considered to be real in its own right. It has to be reducible to what can be explained by science. Hence:

Eliminative materialism (Dennett, Churchlands etc) claims that mind is illusory (notwithstanding the obvious self-contradiction that an illusion can only occur to a mind);
Panpsychism (Philip Goff et al) wants to imbue matter with mind, so as to maintain physicalism by giving it mental attributes.
Dualism of various kinds posits two separate kinds of substance, namely material and mental, although the whole notion of 'mental substance' seems oxymoronic.

I'm supporting a kind of hybrid of Kastrup's style of analytical idealism combined with enactive and phenomenological aspects.

(Descartes) is arguing for causation! — L'éléphant

That passage is taken from Meditations on First Philosophy, in the context of one of his proofs of the existence of God. It is associated with Descartes' 'ontological proof', that because we can conceive of a perfect being, then such a being must perforce be real. The passage I had in mind was the later one where he calls received wisdom into doubt:

Several years have now elapsed since I first became aware that I had accepted, even from my youth, many false opinions for true, and that consequently what I afterward based on such principles was highly doubtful; and from that time I was convinced of the necessity of undertaking once in my life to rid myself of all the opinions I had adopted, and of commencing anew the work of building from the foundation..."

which is the passage immediately preceeding his famous Cogito.

That these processes are also voluntarily as well as involuntarily interruptable, Wayfarer, demonstrates that the "reality (that) cannot be plausibly denied" is primarily virtual. :sparkle: — 180 Proof

Indeed. ‘Mind-created’, one might say.

I've noticed in the last few days chatter about the ructions in the Republican circus caucus that Kevin McCarthy, who might be about to be rolled, has taken to referring to himself as 'the adult in the room':

Gaetz keeps pressure on ahead of move to oust McCarthy


McCarthy has brushed Gaetz’s threat aside. “If somebody wants to remove [me] because I want to be the adult in the room, go ahead and try,” McCarthy said on Saturday, adding: “If I have to risk my job for standing up for the American public, I will do that.” — Politico

The expression, 'the adult in the room', came into popular use when Trump hired John F Kelly as Chief of Staff, with commentators designating him in those terms because it was hoped he could keep Trump's childish impetuosity in check.

Now, however, McCarthy seems to think it's a boast! As if 'being an adult' is something the brag about. But then, I guess with the company he's keeping, it kind of makes sense, sad though that may be.

Which a beam of light will complete in 333 nanoseconds, I'm told.

Top that, Usain Bolt :brow:

For me the answer "it causes vibration, but only makes a sound when an ear listens to it" is apt here. As for me I understand things to exist independent of minds (as you said), but there is a dimension to reality that can only be framed within the context of an observer (sound/noise vs simple vibrations). — Benj96

Thanks! My thoughts also.

On my view there is clearly a cleavage between the scientific paradigm and post-Kantian philosophy, and it does revolve around this question of realism, but I tend to see more problems with the post-Kantian approach than with the scientific approach. Granted, there are problems with both, as both seem to provide only a partial account. In any case, why think it is the scientific-physicalist-naturalist half that is especially problematic? — Leontiskos

To put it in blunt vernacular terms, it is the assessment of life in general, and human life in particular, as being basically the product of mindless laws and forces. Bertrand Russell's 'man is but the outcome of the accidental collocation of atoms'. Jaques Monod's 'Chance and Necessity'. The instrumentalisation of reason. As you can see, I'm not seeking a theistic alternative but questioning it along more Berkeleyian lines (although, unlike Berkeley, I am a Platonic realist, as laid out in another essay, The Ligatures of Reason.)

A recent scientific metaphor along these lines was Hoffman's Interface Theory of Perception*1. That proposal was described in a book entitled The Case Against Reality. It postulated that natural evolution created big-brained animals with the latent ability to "see" what is not before their eyes, by means of imagination. — Gnomon

We had a long thread on Hoffman recently. The question I always have for Hoffman is how science escapes the apparently illusory nature of perception. I think his book, The Case Against Reality, is misnamed - it should be called The Case Against Empirical Realism. Because then it provides an escape hatch for rational insight.

I think it's an interesting point. Can religion explain the love that motivates a poet to write a sonnet? — praxis

It depends on what is meant by religion. Plainly fundamentalist religion won't have anything useful to contribute other than trying to squeeze everyone into its procrustean bed. But the romantic poets - Wordsworth, Coleridge, William Blake and others - weren't anything like religious fundamentalists. I suppose they could be 'spiritual but not religious' although even that is probably not quite right. They have an intuitive sense of a kind of 'higher sensibility' (as they would have called it), awareness of which is often absent from "religion" as such, but also absent in the likes of Dawkins/Dennett.

You cherry-picked one sentence from 'Just because science can't in practice explain things like the love that motivates a poet to write a sonnet, that doesn't mean that religion can. It's a simple and logical fallacy to say, 'If science can't do something, therefore religion can'. Plainly the polemical point has nothing to do with poetry or romanticism, but more of the Dawkins sledging of science v religion.

I would think that Dawkins would say that science renders God superfluous. — Tom Storm

That's what I should have said at the outset. Happy now, @praxis?

As an aside - I don't know if I've mentioned that the article that lead me to forums was Terry Eagleton's review of The God Delusion - Lunging, Flailing, Mispunching. That lead me to the Richard Dawkins forum, which was the first I joined, I think in 2008 or 9. (Eagleton is a leftie university lecturer, no religious apologist, although he oddly adopted a pose rather like that in the late noughties.)

(Dawkins) doesn't ignore or downplay the qualitative, subjective, or personal aspects of human experience, which cannot always be easily studied using the scientific method. — praxis

He rarely says anything about it. Mostly he just bangs the drum about the Wonders of Science.

Speaking in Iowa (at a rally) about electric cars, Trump declared he’d rather be electrocuted than eaten by a shark if he was in a shipwreck caused by an electric boat engine—clearly bewildering the audience, which was largely mum. “If I’m sitting down and that boat’s going down and I’m on top of a battery, and the water starts flooding in, I’m getting concerned,” Trump said. “But then I look 10 yards to my left and there’s a shark over there. So I have a choice of electrocution or a shark—you know what I’m going to take? Electrocution. I will take electrocution every single time. Do we agree?” — TheDailyBeast

What do you say, Dr Freud? Possible signs of anxiety poking through the facade, eh?

Could consciousness be a form of energy like the rest? — Benj96

I don't see how, because energy operates according to physical laws, it has no capacity for self-determination or any innate direction. As soon as living organisms appear, they act intentionally, in that they seek to maintain themselves, maintain homeostasis, grow, heal and reproduce. And they remember. Energy, as such, displays none of these attributes or capacities, and there's no reason to believe that it 'feels like' anything to be it.

So either energy carries an inherent conscious currency/property, or matter does. Or they do when they interact in complex or specific ways. — Benj96

The mechanical brain does not secrete thought "as the liver does bile," as the earlier materialists claimed, nor does it put it out in the form of energy, as the muscle puts out its activity. Information is information, not matter or energy. No materialism which does not admit this can survive at the present day. — Norbert Wiener, Computing Machines and the Nervous System. p. 132

(Bolds added.)

It's dishonest for anyone to do this. For a moderator of a philosophy forum to do this can lead to the degeneration of the integrity of the forum, I fear. — praxis

Scientism is, according to Wikipedia, 'the opinion that science and the scientific method are the best or only way to render truth about the world and reality.' Dawkins and Dennett both disavow it, because they realise it casts them in a negative light, but it is indisputable that this is what they both propogate. Daniel Dennett is a veritable Professor of Scientism but because of his own massive cognitive blind spot in this matter - the same blind spot that prevents him from recognising that humans are beings as distinct from moist robots - he's completely unable to see it. His first book, Consciousness Explained, was parodied by several of his peers as Consciousness Ignored. Galen Strawson said he should be sued under Trade Practices for false advertising (i.e. claiming to have explained something he hadn't.)

What I originally said was 'science disproves God or some such', it was a colloquial expression of his attitude. Picking a bunch of random material from the bona fide quotations on Wikiquote, we get:

Just because science can't in practice explain things like the love that motivates a poet to write a sonnet, that doesn't mean that religion can. It's a simple and logical fallacy to say, 'If science can't do something, therefore religion can'.....Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence......Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence.I think a case can be made that faith is one of the world's great evils, comparable to the smallpox virus but harder to eradicate.... A universe with a supernatural presence would be a fundamentally and qualitatively different kind of universe from one without. The difference is, inescapably, a scientific difference. Religions make existence claims, and this means scientific claims.....Revealed faith is not harmless nonsense, it can be lethally dangerous nonsense.....evidence is the only good reason to believe anything..... — Richard Dawkins

Examples could be multiplied indefinitely

As for your fit of pique, get over it. I haven't said anything the least 'intellectually dishonest' in any of the above, and that is the end of it as far as I'm concerned.

I don't mean to be uselessly confrontational. It's that you're introducing conceptualizations from a philosophical-spiritual tradition in which formally joining a lineage of teachers and submitting to one in particular is essential. — baker

Well, it is a bit confrontational. First you don't know that I don't recognize a guru. Secondly, I don't see any purpose to be served if I were to incorporate such an affiliation in this essay or in my further comments on the subject. Would I 'appeal to the authority of the Guru' in order to ground the argument? I frequently acknowledge that I draw on Buddhist philosophy, and I will sometimes say that I also have a Buddhist practice, and try to observe the appropriate demeanour. But the context is that we're living in is a secular, pluralist, modern culture, not in ancient culture, and we need to be able to absorb these ideas without overt reliance on a lineage in order to validate whatever it is we write or say. I would like to make a case that stands on its own merits, in philosophical terms.

//oh, and I’ll say something else. One of the books that had foundational influence on me was Alan Watts The Book: On the Taboo against Knowing Who you Are, when I was aged about 20. I don’t know how well it reads now - but I think his intuition of the kind of knowledge he was speaking of being ‘taboo’ is right on the mark. And I wonder if in saying what you’re saying, you’d rather see it observed.

Mind must be unitary and transcend – be independent of – the world; — 180 Proof

Thanks for your feedback!

First point - when you say 'the world' here you refer to 'the totality of experience', right? It's not as if any of us 'experience the world' as ' experiencing the entire world'. 'The world' is really shorthand for the sum total of sensory experience, apperception, feeling, knowing and so forth

A point that has bearing on this is the subjective unity of consciousness. When one experiences a noise and, say, a pain, one is not conscious of the noise and then, separately, of the pain. One is conscious of the noise and pain together, as aspects of a single moment of being. That, I think, is at the basis of Kant's 'transcendental unity of apperception', the faculty which draws together and synthesises all the disparate elements of experience into a unified whole. Kant's "transcendental unity of apperception" refers to that unifying self-awareness that underlies all experience. All our representations (sensations, perceptions, concepts, etc.) must be brought together and unified by a single self-awareness. This isn't simply the empirical consciousness of any particular experience (e.g., seeing a tree, feeling pain, thinking about an abstract idea), but a more fundamental, a priori consciousness that makes any coherent experience possible in the first place.

The unity of apperception is "transcendental" because it's a precondition for our knowledge of objects. Without this unifying self-awareness, we'd have a jumble of unrelated perceptions and not the coherent experience of an objective world. In essence, for us to recognize diverse representations as belonging to one and the same object, there must be a unity in the consciousness of these representations. (But Kant couldn’t say, and we can’t say, what that is, as it’s not anything objectively perceptible
see this paper about the 'neural binding problem' which is intimately associated with the 'subjective unity of perception'.)

So, yes, so this is an argument that the mind is both unitary and transcendental.

what is implied is alien to individual minds which are immanent to – entangled with, inseparable from – the world; — 180 Proof

You really think so? Even in The Phaedo, there is a section on disentangling the mind - actually the soul - from the world, from outward stimuli, from entanglements. This is where philosophy is said to be 'practising for death'. That is the meaning of detachment, of purity of heart. There are volumes of literature on this theme from across different cultures and historical periods.

(3), though the world populated by individual minds (subjects) exists, only Mind is real – exists even when the world of individual minds (subjects) does not exist (i.e. before the world was created and after the world dissipates); — 180 Proof

I haven't asserted that 'the mind exists' when 'the world of subjects does not exist'. What I said was 'The idea that things ‘go out of existence’ when not perceived, is simply their ‘imagined non-existence’. In reality, the supposed ‘unperceived object’ neither exists nor does not exist. Nothing whatever can be said about it.' This is why it's not necessary for me to assert the kind of God that Berkeley appeals to, in order to account for the world in the absence of observers. It is more in line with Buddhist philosophy (hence the quotation from the Buddhist texts in this earlier post.)

'Corrobarable evidence' of mind is not required as, in line with Descartes' 'cogito ergo sum', the reality of first-person consciousness is apodictic, cannot plausibly be denied.

thank you for starting this thread and writing the OP as you have done. — L'éléphant

You're welcome and thank you.

Descartes, for one, never claimed that humans are being deceived. — L'éléphant

Well, he kinda did. At the beginning of his meditations, he said something along the lines that he had hitherto held many false opinions purely because he'd swallowed the accepted wisdom. This is why he had to go back to square one, as it were, and put aside everything he thought he had known, starting with the self-evident 'cogito ergo sum'.

Can you list 3 ways in which it might benefit us, in real, daily-job terms? — baker

I've never experienced any material benefit from my study of the subject. And I envy those who do - I'm aware of freelance writers and academics who've made a career out of these subjects. There are plenty who would tell me I've wasted a lot of my life chasing rainbows. I hope they're not right, but then, look at the icon I've picked. I might have succeeded at it, had the circumstances been different, but as it is, whatever I do here and on Medium is about it.

But I will say that I have experienced a definite shift in my overall orientation and equanamity in life. It's not as my younger self would have hoped a kind of be-all and end-all state but it's still something.

I said earlier on in this thread, that I often feel that what is taken as normality in our culture is actually a kind of false consciousness. I looked into that saying, 'false consciousness', it originated with Marx, about workers who falsely allow themselves to be lulled into a sense of security by identifying with their work, although I think it has also been adopted by existentialism. So a big part of what I've learned through this discipline is to be less bogus (or more 'fair dinkum' in the local vernacular), so as not to be so immersed in the false consciousness of materialist culture.

It’s a valid paraphrase of what Dawkins and Dennett are on about. Not my problem if you can’t see it.

But they do overlap in some instances, like people claiming the Bible says the earth is flat — Isaiasb

That is not an overlap, it's a contradiction, and 'flat earthism' is pretty poor choice, as there are actuallly people who believe it, and will insist on it despite all available evidence. It is that kind of thinking which gives religion a bad name. More to the point are those who are both scientifically literate and religious, like Georges LeMaitre, who discovered what is now called 'big bang cosmology'.

all I know Dawkins or Harris has made the claim that "science disproves God" and I just can't find it. — praxis

Just peruse the wikiquotes page for Richard Dawkins quotes. There are plenty of examples. He might not use the exact phrase but throughout his popular writing career has held up science as an example of rational thinking and religion as no more than bigotry and superstion, and it's not the least intellectually dishonest to say that. :brow:

The fact that contradictions exist to our model, show us that there is a model, or viewpoint of the world that we have, and something else that we have to model around. — Philosophim

As I acknowledged, the process of creating models and testing them is already well-known - it's the scientific method. In such cases, you do have an hypothesis or theoretical model which accounts for some aspect of the whole, and you frame an explanatory hypothesis which does or doesn't not account for the observed or experimental facts. Your example of reaction to a bad apple is a simple illustration. In this way we progressively refine our models, hopefully converging on a more and more general and truthful understanding. On a higher level, it's the kind of process described in Structure of Scientific Revolutions. But I don't think that is what I'm driving at.

To say we can know something outside of the very means we use to have knowledge, is impossible. — Philosophim

That's actually closer to the point. One of the sources I draw on is Mahāyāna Buddhist philosophy. There is a word in that tradition that describes 'the ability to discern reality' or to 'see things as they truly are' (yathābhūtaṃ). But this kind of insight is also understood to be unusual - it is not possessed by ordinary people (in which category I include myself.) But the key point I take to be insight into the nature of knowing and of existence. It is different to scientific knowledge (although not incompatible with it) because it is existential - it is concerned with questions of meaning and value right at the outset.

The principle at stake is scientific but philosophical as I say at the outset:

Physicalism and naturalism are the assumed consensus of modern culture, very much the product of the European Enlightenment with its emphasis on pragmatic science and instrumental reason. Accordingly this essay will go against the grain of the mainstream consensus and even against what many will presume to be common sense. — Wayfarer

So it's probably best to try articulate the differences between us based on this argument - what you agree or disagree with about that, and why I might put up an idealist argument against it.

The evidence of this reality is that the senses show us the sun rising and setting, when logic has demonstrated that in reality the earth is spinning. — Metaphysician Undercover

Hate to butt in but it wasn't logic that demonstrated it, so much as the empirical science of Kepler and Galileo et al. And it wasn't until scientists broke with the Grand Tradition represented by Aristotelian science, that they were able to discover this (and it was a hell of a fight when they did, as you may recall.)

It's a fact that the term 'idealism' is itself a product of the modern period - first came into use with Leibniz, I think. Plato would not have known the word. We can retrospectively assess Platonism as idealist but it needs careful interpretation.

A lot has been written about the disgraceful shit-show which is the MAGA Caucus Circus but this particular OP from TheDailyBeast puts its finger on something vital - that when it all came down to passing the desparate, last-minute stop gap bill, the one thing the MAGA couldn't budge on, simply had to have, was suspension of aid to Ukraine.

At the critical moment at which they had one last chance to avert a government shutdown, when Republicans in the House were forced to abandon all of their legislative priorities but one, the one they chose to ditch was the vital U.S. aid to Ukraine. In so doing, they sent the world an unmistakable signal once again that the first and guiding loyalty of Donald Trump’s GOP is as it always has been to the Kremlin.

Or a big, sloppy kiss on Putin's lips, as another commentator has it.


https://apple.news/AOHknXYmMRkiQ1mKqbwaevQ

Biden's saying that this clusterf*ck is the last gasp of the MAGA insurrection. As always, malevolence and hypocrisy hamstrung by complete ineptitude. Let's all sincerely hope he's right.

Agree, the implications of the term 'create' are especially significant in this context. I could have equally called the essay 'the mind-made world', I guess.

There is no such thing as the perceived world. A world, or the world, is something created by the mind. — Metaphysician Undercover

Ouch. Philosophical idealism is saying something like that, but it has to be worded carefully, lest it fall into mere fictionalism or fantasy. I'm not denying the reality of the sensory domain, but drawing attention to the role of the mind/brain in weaving it into a coherent whole.

My idea about the world is Evolutionary nature rather than either Physicalism or Idealism. I will think, build my points on that idea, and return to compare with your views. — Corvus

:up: Indeed the essay is tagged 'Philosophy of Mind'. (Note that I myself never dispute the empirical facts of (for example) evolution, but will often call into question the supposed implications.)

What is absolutely fascinating that despite this nonlocality, quantum field theory is demonstrably and strictly causal, i.e., contrary to some fictionalized accounts or even some misguided popular science explanations, quantum entanglement cannot be used to circumvent the relativistic speed limit or create a time machine ~ Victor Toth.

Although, interestingly, entanglement IS being mooted for creating secure transaction systems that would be theoretically impenetrable even to quantum computers, should one ever be built. This is the basis of 'quantum key distribution'. QKD enables two parties to generate a shared, secret random key. The fundamental principle of QKD is that it's impossible to measure a quantum system without disturbing it. Therefore, any eavesdropper trying to intercept the key will necessarily introduce detectable anomalies. If the key is intercepted, it will be known, and the key can be discarded. Thus, even a quantum computer, which poses threats to traditional encryption methods, can't crack a quantum key if the QKD process is implemented correctly. China's Mucius satellite test was used to establish a secure quantum communication link between China and Austria, spanning a distance of 7,600 kilometers, in 2017 (see story).

how else may entanglement be explained within our current framework of spacetime? It can't, which seems to indicate that spacetime and entanglement are merely human constructs that account for data collection. — Richard Townsend

I agree with the gist, I think, except for the qualification 'merely' - what's the Feynman quote, 'nothing is "mere"'? But overall I agree that there is an inextricably subjective element in the observations. This conforms with QBism (Quantum Baynsianism) as I understand it.

Q: Treating quantum mechanics as a single-user theory resolves a lot of the paradoxes, like spooky action at a distance.

A: Yes, but in a way that a lot of people find troubling. The usual story of Bell’s theorem is that it tells us the world must be nonlocal. That there really is spooky action at a distance. So they solved one mystery by adding a pretty damn big mystery! What is this non-locality? Give me a full theory of it. My fellow QBists and I instead think that what Bell’s theorem really indicates is that the outcomes of measurements are experiences, not revelations of something that’s already there. Of course others think that we gave up on science as a discipline, because we talk about subjective degrees of belief. But we think it solves all of the foundational conundrums. — Chris Fuchs, Quanta Magazine Interview

It's true, but nothing of what you've said so far indicates that you've taken any of it in. If you can find a question about the actual content, rather than simply general observations about your view of what idealism means, I would be happy to try and respond.

A world. There's a difference.

I don't know where that "empriricist objection" is quoted from, but it is the lamest. most hand-wavy of objections. — Janus

My thoughts exactly. I did link to that essay, What is Math, which gives to context for the quote.

The only creation is the model, not the world itself. The mistake is thinking our models ARE the world. They are merely the way we understand it. — Philosophim

Thank you for the courteous response. At back of your critique is the assumption that ‘the real world’ is what is internalised or modelled by the brain or the mind. The real world exists independently of our model of it, which can be better or worse, depending on how knowledgeable we are or the quality of the signals we receive.

But the problem is, how do you distinguish the model from the world? How can you, on the one hand, look at 'the model', and, on the other 'the real world'? That already assumes a perspective outside the model - that you're able to compare one with the other. But if your experience-of-the-world IS the model, and you're inside it, then how do you step outside it to compare it with the world itself?

In science, you develop a hypothesis, then you test against it. Your experimental results and observations will tend to confirm or overturn it. That's philosophy of science 101. But the question we're considering is a question of a different order, because it concerns the nature of experience itself, not a specific question about a particular subject. That's what distinguishes it as a philosophical question, not a scientific one.

There's an anecdote from the realm of quantum physics. It is re-told by Werner Heisenberg in his book Physics and Beyond and concerns a visit to Copenhagen by members of the Vienna Circle who were addressed by Neils Bohr. At the end of the lecture he asked if there were any questions, and was nonplussed to recieve only polite applause. He was dismayed by this, and said that if the audience was not shocked by quantum physics, then they could not have understood it. And what I'm suggesting is a similarly radical. It should be considered shocking. But it's also suggested by a great deal of current science. (Ironic that science ends up torpedoeing materialism, but there it is.)

Even with all the justification, your own mind created evidence, logic and justification without the external reference would be still illusive and deceptive. How do you prove it is real, and doubtless knowledge? — Corvus

That's the question of all philosophy, and I'm not claiming any kind of omniscience or ultimate answers. The main point of 'the mind-created world' is against the assumed consensus that the mind is the result of a material, physical or mindless process. This attitude is deeply embedded in modern culture, the 'evolutionary-materialist' view of the mind. This is the view that living beings are essentially physical and that the mind, therefore, is simply the output of physical processes that can be understood solely through evolutionary biology and through the understanding neural and biological processes. This attitude is grounded in the primacy of the objective sciences and the view that scientific analysis is the arbiter of what is real. It is generally empiricist in attitude, tending towards varieties of positivism.

So the mind-created world is pointing out the priority of conscious experience as the primary datum of reality. In so doing, I'm aligning with the mainstream of idealist philosophy both Eastern and Western, also drawing on phenomenology and existentialism. I'm arguing that even the so-called 'hard sciences' have an irreducibly subjective aspect or component, which, for practical purposes, is screened out or ignored, but which, in reality is essential to any kind of science.

An essential point is that the accepted materialist consensus creates a kind of false consciousness - it generates a false idea of the nature of being, which is very easy to swallow, because it is the mainstream consensus. But it is changing very rapidly, in part because of much greater insight and sophistication within science itself.

I'm not sure what you mean by 'extreme idealism', but give these modern editions of Berkeley a squiz. He's surprisingly persuasive.

it doesn't seem to follow that mathematics is embedded in nature at all, but rather that it is embedded in the human understanding of nature. — Janus

I agree that 'embedded in nature' is a poor way of expressing it, but the predictive capacities of mathematics and the way that it enables genuine discovery can't be disputed. That Peirce ref is here.

A useful current reference to the whole topic is here, What is Math? from the Smithsonian Magazine. The Platonist view (i.e. 'numbers are real) is represented here:

I believe that the only way to make sense of mathematics is to believe that there are objective mathematical facts, and that they are discovered by mathematicians,” says James Robert Brown, a philosopher of science recently retired from the University of Toronto. “Working mathematicians overwhelmingly are Platonists. They don't always call themselves Platonists, but if you ask them relevant questions, it’s always the Platonistic answer that they give you.”

The empiricist objection is that

'Scientists tend to be empiricists; they imagine the universe to be made up of things we can touch and taste and so on; things we can learn about through observation and experiment. The idea of something existing “outside of space and time” makes empiricists nervous: It sounds embarrassingly like the way religious believers talk about God, and God was banished from respectable scientific discourse a long time ago.

Platonism, as mathematician Brian Davies has put it, “has more in common with mystical religions than it does with modern science.” The fear is that if mathematicians give Plato an inch, he’ll take a mile. If the truth of mathematical statements can be confirmed just by thinking about them, then why not ethical problems, or even religious questions? Why bother with empiricism at all?'

My belief has always been that numbers are real but not physical. Of course, that contravenes physicalism, for which everything must be reducible to the physical, so it can't cope with that idea. It has to reject it. So I think those comments are revealing of the real philosophical issue at stake: that mathematical realism, the idea that numbers and mathematical relations are real but not physical can't be allowed to stand.

I haven’t misrepresented his views.

But I am tempted by the possibility of mathematics being reified at the quantum levels. — jgill

I've always been somewhat intrigued by this:

Nicholson showed that the angular momentum of a rotating electron ring could only be h/2π or 2(h/2π) or 3(h/2π) or 4(h/2π) … all the way to n(h/2π) where n is an integer, a whole number. For Bohr it was the missing clue that underpinned his stationary states. Only those orbits were permitted in which the angular momentum of the electron was an integer n multiplied by h and then divided by 2π. Letting n=1, 2, 3 and so on generated the stationary states of the atom in which an electron did not emit radiation and could therefore orbit the nucleus indefinitely. All other orbits, the non-stationary states, were forbidden. Inside an atom, angular momentum was quantised. It could only have the values L=nh/2π and no others. — Kumar, Manjit. Quantum (pp. 98-99). Icon Books. Kindle Edition.

Only multiples of integers allowable!

What I find to be the crucial aspect of understanding the essential nature of "perspective", is to consider the temporal perspective of the human experience of being at the present, now — Metaphysician Undercover

One of the thought-experiments I sometimes consider is imagine having the perspective of a mountain (were a mountain to have senses). As the lifespan of a mountain is hundreds of millions of years, you wouldn't even notice humans and animals, as their appearances and dissappearances would be so ephemeral so as to be beneath your threshold of awareness. Rivers, you'd notice, because they'd stay around long enough to actually carve into you. But people and animals would be ephemera. At the other end of the scale, from the perspective of micro-organisms, humans and animals would be like solar systems or entire worlds.

Have you even read what Dawkins has to say? — wonderer1

It is exactly what he said: 'Intelligent, creative, complex, statistically improbable things come late into the universe, as the product of evolution or some other process of gradual escalation from simple beginnings. They come late into the universe and therefore cannot be responsible for designing it.' But I'm done debating Dawkins, I shouldn't have brought him up - I reference him only as an exemplar of what used to be called 'new atheism', although it's no longer new, and hardly mentioned on this forum.

This is an equation belonging to quantum physics and relativity theory, not pure math. — Janus

Nevertheless it could never have been discovered without mathematics.

For Aristotle, universals are real in the sense that they genuinely exist as aspects or features of particular things (hence, 'moderate realism'.) They are not mere names or linguistic conventions as some nominalists would later argue. In Aristotelian realism, when we recognize a universal like "redness" or "humanity," we are recognizing something real but this universal only exists as it is instantiated in particular objects (like a red apple or a specific human being). So, while universals don't have independent existence outside of particulars as they do in Platonic realism, they are nevertheless genuinely real aspects of the empirical world in Aristotelian realism. There's a nice essay about Aristotelian philosophy of maths on Aeon.

The view I'm developing is that numbers and universals and the like are real, but not manifest or existent. They are implicit in reality and are manifest or instantiated by particulars. It's reasonably close to Scholastic realism. As I understand it, C S Peirce held a similar view, and was opposed to nominalism. 'Peirce understood nominalism in the broad anti-realist sense usually attributed to William of Ockham, as the view that reality consists exclusively of concrete particulars and that universality and generality have to do only with names and their significations. This view relegates properties, abstract entities, kinds, relations, laws of nature, and so on, to a conceptual existence at most. Peirce believed nominalism (including what he referred to as "the daughters of nominalism": sensationalism, phenomenalism, individualism, and materialism) to be seriously flawed and a great threat to the advancement of science and civilization. His alternative was a nuanced realism that distinguished reality from existence and that could admit general and abstract entities as reals without attributing to them direct (efficient) causal powers. Peirce held that these non-existent reals could influence the course of events by means of final causation (conceived somewhat after Aristotle's conception), and that to banish them from ontology, as nominalists require, is virtually to eliminate the ground for scientific prediction as well as to underwrite a skeptical ethos unsupportive of moral agency.'

All true. And I also remind myself that the prosecutors and judges in the case have access to far more detailed information that what is published in the media. Anyway, apparently it's kicking off Monday - sooner it proceeds the better.

What is the difference between a universal concept and a generic concept? — Janus

Good question. In the context of Aristotle's philosophy, as well as in biological classification and other systems of categorization, a "genus" is a class or group that includes different species. Note however its ultimate source in Aristotle. That's where the concept of 'genera' and 'generic' originated.

Can you give me an example of pure math being used to discover anything about nature? — Janus

See this post about Dirac's predictions of positrons.

Do you think any discoveries about nature are about nature as it is in itself or merely as it appears to us? — Janus

I'm incllined to agree with Bohr's aphorism 'It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how Nature is. Physics concerns what we say about Nature.' Also Heisenberg's 'What we observe is not nature in itself but nature exposed to our method of questioning.'

Yeah, I get that. I understand this was Frege's criticism of Husserl. But I'm developing the argument that what scholastic realists designated universals were actually structures in consciousness.

It is no different than saying that "tree" is a generic concept, abstracted from actual trees. — Janus

As an abstract concept, it's a universal. More to the point, per my earlier posts in this thread, is that mathematics can be used to make discoveries hitherto unknown about nature herself, thereby demonstrating that they are something more than simply 'mental constructs'.

I hope Trump looses! But I think the election fraud and subversion cases are far more important and substantial.

arguing against your Platonic notion of numbers. — Janus

My only argument is that numbers are real but not material. It's quite compatible with Husserl's attitude as far as I can tell.

As you say, the products of mathematical science work well. I would add that they work precisely, accurately in the sense dictated by the demands of formal logic. — Joshs

I thought that's what I was arguing for :chin:

Incidentally, I haven't attempted Husserl Philosophy of Arithmetic as it seems a very challenging read. But is this thumbnail sketch of Husserl's philosophy of math any good?

"Husserl was interested in the psychological origin of number concepts. He explored how individuals move from concrete individual experiences to abstract generalizations that constitute numerical understanding. For Husserl, numbers aren't just abstract entities; they have their roots in our lived experiences and acts of grouping and collecting.

Husserl examined the act of counting as foundational to the concept of number. Counting isn't just an external action but involves internal acts of consciousness, where one recognizes and groups objects together as units. This grouping then forms the basis for the abstract notion of number.

Collective Combination (Kollektiv-Vereinigung): This is a key term in Husserl's analysis. It refers to the act of consciousness by which we perceive a group of objects as a singular totality. For instance, seeing a group of five apples not just as individual apples but as a collective "five." This act of collective combination is essential for the emergence of numerical concepts in consciousness.

Criticism of Psychologism: While Husserl was interested in the psychological origin of mathematical concepts, he argued against the idea that the validity and truth of mathematical principles were dependent on psychological processes. This distinction paved the way for his development of a rigorous phenomenological method that sought to distinguish between subjective acts of consciousness and the objective structures they intend.

Husserl was deeply interested in how consciousness constitutes mathematical objects and how these acts of constitution relate to the objective validity of mathematical truths."