Hi Richard, and welcome to the Forum. Excellent first post - but tell me this. Once upon a time, I considered, but never enrolled in, a Project Management training course. I didn’t go ahead, but I did learn there is a document or collection called the Project Management BoK - meaning ‘book of knowledge’. I never went on to study it, but you would think science has, at least, something corresponding - a kind of core set of methods, techniques, attitudes, and, yes, even ‘how-to’ knowledge, that was to some extent passed on, like guild knowledge. No?

No. I mean they’re used to smooth over annoying inconsistencies in current models. Like I said, Everett devised many worlds to avoid the spooky implication that the measurement problem was mind-dependent. Hidden variables theories to make spooky action-at-a-distance go away. The multiverse is routinely invoked to explain away the anthropic cosmological principle. And so on. Examples could be multiplied.

What if they solve problems of cognitive dissonance? You know, are used to keep challenged paradigms immune from criticism? Multiverse arguments and ‘hidden variables’ and the like give you a lot of metaphysical elbow-room.

In some sense, spirit is a self-modification of nature — plaque flag

The fundamental condition of existence is alterity. (c)

The optimist view is Trump hasn’t had enough time to COMPLETELY destroy the Republican Party, But, you know, give him enough rope….

The wheels of justice turn slow but sure :cool:

Trump might not get the Republican nomination, but then go as an independent, which will be absolute poison for the actual Republican nominee. — ssu

:pray:


Let’s not forget Trump’s clinching of the Republican nomination was nearly derailed at the 2016 Republican Convention. I’m certain there would be enough never- and anti-Trumpists to shoot him down in 2024 - even if he does make it as far as the Convention.

I think DeSantis is going to fizzle. Like someone said, he’s the kinda guy who’d confiscate the neighbors’ kid’s soccer ball if it landed on his lawn

There was apparently a precursor to the steam engine in the first century AD. — Janus

Not to forget the Antikythera Machine! (Actually saw the original in Athens last September,)

I'd agree with everything except the last part. — schopenhauer1

Sorry - what part don’t you agree with? If it’s that you can’t map thought content with neural data, I would have thought that was a clear implication of the rest of the argument.

but I do agree that mathematics played a part, particularly in physics and chemistry. — Janus

I had thought that Descartes’ discovery of algebraic geometry - the idea of dimensional co-ordinates - was of absolutely fundamental importance in the ‘new sciences’. That, allied with Galileo’s mathematicization of nature, and the discovery of universal laws of motion, all of which preceded the mechanised harnessing of fossil fuels (although that no doubt was an enormous economic factor.)

Bearing in mind we all routinely do things that would have been thought ‘excluded from reality’ by our forbears.

Agree with the sentiment. It is perfectly reflected in those articles you sometimes see ‘scientists puzzled over why consciousness exists’, ostensibly because it seems to serve no evolutionary purpose.

the lack of Trump supporters here is a mark of quality. — RogueAI

:100:

Still reckon Trump will never get the Republcan nomination, polling data notwithstanding.

Useful summary and review here.

Actually it was tongue-in-cheek, I read somewhere recently that Team Trump can't stand her (probably because she's too much like him). He'd want someone who was going to more of a hand-puppet.

This muddling of the two is where the hidden dualism comes into play. It is this constant category error that trips people up into not understanding any "hard problem". It leads to blind scientism, and a constant not "getting" the problems that arise from philosophy of mind. — schopenhauer1

:clap:

Brain processes, like ink marks, sound waves, the motion of water molecules, electrical current, and any other physical phenomenon you can think of, seem clearly devoid of any inherent meaning. By themselves they are simply meaningless patterns of electrochemical activity. Yet our thoughts do have inherent meaning – that’s how they are able to impart meaning to otherwise meaningless ink marks, sound waves, etc. In that case, though, it seems that our thoughts cannot possibly be identified with any physical processes in the brain. In short: Thoughts and the like possess inherent meaning or intentionality; brain processes, like ink marks, sound waves, and the like, are utterly devoid of any inherent meaning or intentionality; so thoughts and the like cannot possibly be identified with brain processes. — Ed Feser

Kari Lake!

Can’t relative self-similarity over time do the job of providing a perspectival point of view, a way continuing to be the same differently? — Joshs

I suppose, but it seems a bit contrived.

I'll go back to where this started:

Even Husserl recognized that the ego is nothing but an empty zero point of activity, harboring no intrinsic a priori content. This empty ego is not a person, or a human, or a subject. — Joshs

What is 'an empty ego'? Seems something like 'an unclenched fist' - which of course is no longer a fist, but a hand. But so long as one is a conscious being, there is an element of self-awareness, isn't there? That is what differentiates 'beings' from rocks and logs. As to whether there is a priori content - a human being has considerable potential ability to understand language, reason, and so on, whether or not that is activated by his/her environment or education. Within that there are recognisable structures (like Chomsky's universal grammar).

A crude ontology takes the frequent practically justified 'transparency' of the subject to an extreme that thinks it can keep familiar worldly objects without the subject that helps constitute them. — plaque flag

Right. That's what I think is the basic subject of discussion in Thomas Nagel's book The View from Nowhere - the attempt of naturalism to attain a completely non-subjective point of view by restricting the scope of science solely to the consideration of objective domain and its purely qualitative attributes.

The meaningrich lifeworld in which the project of natural science makes sense depends on the embodied social-cultural 'timebinding' subject — plaque flag

Right again - we're seeing that in, for instance, biosemiosis which is much more aware of those kinds of contextual factors.

For Husserl there is a subject pole and an object pole for every act. — Joshs

I get that, and often refer to it, but I think to deny the reality of agency is a slippery slope towards nihilism. I mean, given that there may be no 'ultimately defineable' subjects or objects, there are still subjects and objects.

Objectivity as unbiasedness (perhaps you'll agree) is not a problem. — plaque flag

But that's the distinction I tried to draw in another thread between the objectivity of science, and the detachment of a Meister Eckhardt. There are many confused debates here about the ultimate anchors for objectivity, which would imply the necessity of an ultimate or unchanging object. In the absence of that seems to threaten total relativism and subjectivism. That is where the transcendental has to be distinguished from the objective.

In other words, if a theoretical model can not be efficiently simulated via quantum computer then it cannot be efficiently realized in the real world. — Pantagruel

But the point of the critiques of speculative physics and cosmology is that they might never be testable at all. As Ellis and Silk put it:

Faced with difficulties in applying fundamental theories to the observed Universe, some researchers called for a change in how theoretical physics is done. They began to argue — explicitly — that if a theory is sufficiently elegant and explanatory, it need not be tested experimentally, breaking with centuries of philosophical tradition of defining scientific knowledge as empirical. We disagree. As the philosopher of science Karl Popper argued: a theory must be falsifiable to be scientific.

Chief among the 'elegance will suffice' advocates are some string theorists. Because string theory is supposedly the 'only game in town' capable of unifying the four fundamental forces, they believe that it must contain a grain of truth even though it relies on extra dimensions that we can never observe. Some cosmologists, too, are seeking to abandon experimental verification of grand hypotheses that invoke imperceptible domains such as the kaleidoscopic multiverse (comprising myriad universes), the 'many worlds' version of quantum reality (in which observations spawn parallel branches of reality) and pre-Big Bang concepts.

These unprovable hypotheses are quite different from those that relate directly to the real world and that are testable through observations — such as the standard model of particle physics and the existence of dark matter and dark energy. As we see it, theoretical physics risks becoming a no-man's-land between mathematics, physics and philosophy that does not truly meet the requirements of any. — Scientific Method - Defend the Integrity of Physics

I've often noticed how easily multi-verse and many-worlds speculations (granted that these are different but often conflated) provide metaphorical elbow-room for speculative rationalisation of scientific-sounding claims.

For instance, In the Copenhagen interpretation of physics, the wave-function collapse is considered a fundamental and irreducible aspect of quantum reality, where the act of measurement causes the system to "choose" one of its possible states, leading to the observed outcome. The Everett interpretation of quantum physics offers an alternative interpretation of quantum mechanics in which wave-function collapse doesn't occur. It dissolves this conundrum by saying that what appears as wave-function collapse in the Copenhagen interpretation is actually the result of the quantum system branching into multiple parallel universes, each corresponding to a different outcome. But then, the many-worlds interpretation itself may not be amenable to empirical falsification, and the requirement of multiple universes seems at the least highly unparsimonious. The idea may fairly be regarded as a metaphysical rather than a scientific theory (Philip Ball's critique is often cited.)

There are many of these interpretive problems thrown up by current science.

Aristotle sums up the ancient position on knowledge when he says that all men naturally desire knowledge. Bacon marks the position of modern philosophy when he declares that knowledge is power. — Fooloso4

Aristotle, and Greek philosophy generally, also differentiated different kinds of knowledge, did they not? Phronesis, techne, episteme, and so forth - which had different attributes and spheres. Many of those distinctions seem to have become blurred. And Bacon's re-definition of knowledge as power easily morphs into knowledge as instrumental utility, thenceforth the entire 'instrumentalisation of reason' trend criticized by the Frankfurt School.

My answer to the question would be framed in terms of my quest to understand the dominance of scientific materialism in modern culture. That is of course a meta-philosophical quest, a ‘philosophy of philosophy’, rather than something within philosophy itself. Some of the relevant books I have read about it are Theological Origins of Modernity, Michael Allen Gillespie, and (parts of) A Secular Age, Charles Taylor. It’s a dialectical process which has taken centuries to unfold and is still unfolding.

But the bone of contention is ‘is it science’?

I feel as thought what I’m attempting to say is considerably simpler than what you’re taking it for. Never mind, it’s good to thrash these things out.

Hence the requirement for the vertical dimension, the qualitative domain.

I don't see materialism as a bogeyman as you apparently do — Janus

The issue is that materialism only considers objects and their quantitative attributes to be real, not to put too fine a point on it. It says that intelligent agents such as ourselves can be explained and understood solely in those terms, and that the qualitative domain - the felt quality of existence - has no intrinsic reality apart from that. That is the source of what John Vervaeke and Gregg Henriques are describing as ‘the meaning crisis’ of modern societies.

It’s appropriate that Trump is being indicted and very likely he will be convicted. But it’s also likely that he will continue to dominate the political discourse in the US, and will have a huge impact on the 2024 Presidential election, even if he doesn’t win. But the fact that he might win, which is suggested by a lot of polling data, is deeply troubling. It seems that a significant proportion of the electorate, amounting to many tens of millions of people, actually believe Trump’s lies. Polling has his support close to Biden’s and streets ahead of the (admittedly very weak) Republican alternatives.

It also seems obvious that were Trump to win, he would be able to finish the job of overturning American democracy, persecuting his opponents and gutting the bureaucracy. It is clear that the reason he admires Kim Jong Un and Vladimir Putin is because they are the kinds of leaders he wants to be. He wants to be able to jail or execute those who oppose him. But what’s really scary is that, in all this, he is getting millions of Americans to help him overthrow the Constitution, all the while believing that they’re actually protecting it. So the Trump nightmare is still not over, and might not be over even when he’s a convicted felon. It’s deeply disappointing, and deeply troubling.

Even Husserl recognized that the ego is nothing but an empty zero point of activity, harboring no intrinsic a priori content. This empty ego is not a person, or a human, or a subject. — Joshs

So are there subjects of experience?

Thoughts ? — plaque flag

There's a word for 'embodied subjects' that applies to all sentient organisms, and by which we ourselves are routinely described - that is, 'being'. That's why I will often say (usually to much derision) that the nature of being is the proper study of ontology, and that it should be distinguished from the objective analysis of whatever exists. So, given that,

Any ontology that doesn't bother to make sense of these fails by the sin of omission. — plaque flag

I agree! I got into a big argument with a former mod about this, and my claim (which I've since abandoned) that the term 'ontology' was derived from the first-person participle of the verb 'to be' (the English equivalent of which is 'I am'.) But it is nevertheless the case that the word 'ontology' is derived from the Greek verb 'to be'. He posted an apparently classic article, The Greek Verb to Be and the Problem of Being, by Charles Kahn, which canvasses many of these issues.

I also think that there is a scientific attitude, a characteristic way of approaching problems.
— Quixodian

I agree with you. But I think a similar attitude can exist in philosophy, and that what we call science is an offshoot of this. The difference being that scientists’ ontology is naturalism. — Mikie

And an emphasis on quantification, objectivity, and replicability. Naturalism is a theoretical posit intended to differentiate science from traditional metaphysics which is associated with religion. An barrier that remains in place, if only implicitly, in this day.

While string theory has been highly productive.... — Pantagruel

Producing what, exactly? Other than research grants and tenures for academics, I mean.

Interesting bit of terminology - advocates for string theory and related multi-verse conjectures are often scornful of the insistence that speculative science ought to be subject in principle to validation or falsification by observation or experiment. They devised a slang word for those insisting on such criteria - the popperazi :grin:

The modern philosophers gave themselves a task not entertained by the ancients, to master nature. — Fooloso4

Is that the task of the philosopher, or of the engineer, technologist and scientist? I would have thought the philosophers would have plenty on their hands figuring out a meaningful narrative in the midst of constant upheavel.

Certainly there had been scientific and technological advances, but nothing on the scope of the scientific revolution. — Fooloso4

I really don't know how you can say that. Our entire worldview is going through revolutionary changes with incredible speed. The world is literally changing before our eyes.

Splendid post and very much on point. (You also just got a new follower on Medium ;-) )

Another book that would qualify for your list is The One: How an Ancient Idea Holds the Future of Physics, Heinrich Pas - a novel presentation of philosophical monism.

There's an enormous thirst for penetrating metaphysical and philosophical analysis. Quite apart from the fact that all of us here spend some time each day discussing it on this very forum, there's a huge and ever-growing list of web portals and organisations about ideas: aeon.co, scienceandnonduality.com, bigthink.com, closertotruth.com, and iai.tv come to mind, without even having to think about it. The latter hosts numerous livestreamed panel conversations with philosophers, scientists and technologists. Youtube has millions of streamed sessions and presentations on metaphysical topics. As John Haldane put it in response to Stephen Hawking's put-down of philosophy as not being able to keep up with physics, philosophy lives!

Hey Sam, a recent long interview with Pim Von Lommel https://youtu.be/NVsBFOB7H44

The scientific image (and arguably the philosophical image) is intentionally independent of any contingent human being. That's it's job. To be the truth, not just your truth or mine. — plaque flag

The issue with the (modern) scientific image is the assumption of separation between observer and observed. That itself is not a product of science but a consequence of the tendency towards modern individualism which was a defining feature of the culture gave rise to science. But the way that it showed up in modern science, was that the subject was excluded by the process of separating primary and secondary attributes - the primary being just those attributes measurable by the sciences, the secondary being associated with qualitative perception. That was the modern scientific equivalent of the 'self-abnegation' of the sage or mystic but with the cardinal difference that the latter maintained the qualitative dimension, whereas in the scientist, the qualitative dimension was equated with the (merely) subjective, and the separation of subject and object was the basic stance (leading to the state of 'cartesian anxiety').

So when you say 'the truth, not just yours or mine', that's what I mean when I refer to THE mind, not your or my mind. You and I are examples or instantiations of the cultural- and species mind. Individuation is an attribute of only the very topmost level of that mind. But that is the mind which the world is not independent of or apart from - not your mind or mine, but THE mind. It's almost like 'mind at large' but it's important not to objectify or reify it.

I am made of ghosts and mud — plaque flag

And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul — Gen2:7

You did mention in another thread you’ve been reading Husserl, right? Your penultimate paragraph is phenomenological through and through, in its guise as embodied cognition.

It seems to me that we living human beings now, when we think of the time before human cognition, can only project the-world-for-us in a way that doesn't exactly make sense. — plaque flag

That’s getting close to what I’ve been trying to say. It’s the tendency to forget that ‘scientific realism’ still relies on an implicitly human perspective. (Which is very much something Husserl was saying, isn’t it?)

So my argument is not that the universe doesn’t exist sans perspective, but that any meaningful sense of existence entails a perspective, so it’s a mistake to take it as an invariant truth, as a truly ‘observer-independent reality’. That is the assumption of naturalism, not a metaphysical principle.

I should add many of the arguments sorrounding speculative physics demonstrate the significance of at least considering falsifiability a bedrock requirement for a hypothesis to be considered scientific. See The Fight for the Soul of Science:

The crisis, as Ellis and Silk tell it, is the wildly speculative nature of modern physics theories, which they say reflects a dangerous departure from the scientific method. Many of today’s theorists — chief among them the proponents of string theory and the multiverse hypothesis — appear convinced of their ideas on the grounds that they are beautiful or logically compelling, despite the impossibility of testing them. Ellis and Silk accused these theorists of “moving the goalposts” of science and blurring the line between physics and pseudoscience. “The imprimatur of science should be awarded only to a theory that is testable,” Ellis and Silk wrote, thereby disqualifying most of the leading theories of the past 40 years. “Only then can we defend science from attack.”

Another great read along these lines was Jim Baggott’s Farewell to Reality, also scathingly critical of string fantasy theory.

I think ‘method’ is a rather simplistic notion, considering the complexities, but I also think that there is a scientific attitude, a characteristic way of approaching problems. I like this summary:

Modern science emerged in the seventeenth century with two fundamental ideas: planned experiments (Francis Bacon) and the mathematical representation of relations among phenomena (Galileo). This basic experimental-mathematical epistemology evolved until, in the first half of the twentieth century, it took a stringent form involving (1) a mathematical theory constituting scientific knowledge, (2) a formal operational correspondence between the theory and quantitative empirical measurements, and (3) predictions of future measurements based on the theory. The “truth” (validity) of the theory is judged based on the concordance between the predictions and the observations. While the epistemological details are subtle and require expertise relating to experimental protocol, mathematical modeling, and statistical analysis, the general notion of scientific knowledge is expressed in these three requirements.

Science is neither rationalism nor empiricism. It includes both in a particular way. In demanding quantitative predictions of future experience, science requires formulation of mathematical models whose relations can be tested against future observations. Prediction is a product of reason, but reason grounded in the empirical. Hans Reichenbach summarizes the connection: “Observation informs us about the past and the present, reason foretells the future.” — Edward Dougherty

Not all stories have two sides.

I was not sufficiently impressed by the OP to submit the few drafted comments I'd made, although now I've been co-opted, I might as well.

My first premise says intentions and teleology are essential to all forms of life. — ucarr

Agree that intentionality is a fundamenal characteristic of organisms, and can't be solely accounted for in terms of lower-level sciences such as physics and chemistry. Intentionality or 'aboutness' is one of the characteristics of all living organisms that can't be reduced to lower-level laws.

But disagree that the universe is machine-like or mechanistic, because machines are human artefacts and are assembled and operated by an external agent (namely, humans). Mechanism is one of the leftovers of Enlightenment materialism.

In a universe both eternal and mechanistic, probability plus evolution makes it inevitable life will appear.

If a universe has as one of its essential features the inevitability of life, then it has as concomitant essential features internalized intentions and teleology.

If a universe has, in addition to the above essential features, evolution, then it’s inevitable life will evolve therein. This state of affairs will lead logically to an ever, upwardly-evolving teleology that, after enough time, will resemble a cosmic teleology that can, with reason, be called a creator. — ucarr

Whether the Universe is eternal is moot and it is not a falsifiable hypothesis unless you have observable or inferential evidence of its ending. I’ve already said that I don’t think the machine analogy is apt.

Where I find fault with Sagan's view is in his appeals to science to argue metaphysical conclusions (as Richard Dawkins and his ilk are prone to do, although I vastly prefer Sagan to Dawkins.) But I'm not going to launch into yet another criticism of that. I'll let well-known TV scientist Brian Cox lay out the point:

The textbook critique of Descartes' dualism is that by dividing the world into mind and matter, he loses the capacity to explain how mind and matter interact. He cannot explain how it is that a mind manages to raise a hand, nor how a tipple renders a mind insensible. — Banno

The problem with Descartes' philosophy is not positing the division of mind and matter, but of treating mind (res cogitans) as though it were something objective. Then it becomes something like a mysterious ectoplasm or 'thinking stuff' and all of the associated problems of how 'it' relates to 'the physical'. But it's not an hypthesis, more like an heuristic model.

What has tended to happen is that due to this confusion in Descartes' model, scientifically culture generally has tended to divide off the mental and the physical, and then try to explain the former in terms of the latter. Thereby hangs the entire sorry story of materialist philosophy of mind.

I say it's controversial because it challenges realism, which is the ingrained tendency of the natural outlook — Quixodian

It calls this attitude into question:

From a phenomenological perspective, in everyday life, we see the objects of our experience such as physical objects, other people, and even ideas as simply real and straightforwardly existent. In other words, they are “just there.” We don’t question their existence; we view them as facts.

When we leave our house in the morning, we take the objects we see around us as simply real, factual things—this tree, neighboring buildings, cars, etcetera. This attitude or perspective, which is usually unrecognized as a perspective, Edmund Husserl terms the “natural attitude” or the “natural theoretical attitude.”

When Husserl uses the word “natural” to describe this attitude, he doesn’t mean that it is “good” (or bad), he means simply that this way of seeing reflects an “everyday” or “ordinary” way of being-in-the-world. When I see the world within this natural attitude, I am solely aware of what is factually present to me. My surrounding world, viewed naturally, is the familiar world, the domain of my everyday life. Why is this a problem?

My theory is that secular culture works very hard to normalise this attitude, and to discourage anything that calls it into question. And as a staunch defender of secular values and common-sense realism, you feel duty bound to follow suit. Fair comment?