There are too many instances of people who've been visited by powerful realizations of one sort or another, and then draw mad conclusions about the meaning of it. — J

:100: There are many dangers.

Agree. My way of approaching these arguments — which, as you say, crop up in many places in the Critique — is to keep in mind Kant’s awareness of the danger of objectification. To designate mind, soul, or self as a substance (in the philosophical sense) is to treat it as a “that,” an object among objects. But that can’t be done, because it leads to a circularity or reflexivity — like the eye trying to see itself, or the hand trying to grasp itself. Much of Kant’s critique of metaphysics turns on this basic insight.

John Hick points out that, at the very least, claims about God may be "eschatologically verifiable" -- that is, we may find out when we die (or, of course, we'll cease to exist). — J

I hadn't noticed this passage previously, but there is something that comes to mind from philosophy of religion. This is that a spiritual conversion or awakening is oftentimes called a kind of death, in that the 'old man' dies and the aspirant is 'born again' (a motif not limited to Christianity). It is even found in Krishnamurti's entirely non-denominational idiom, in his sayings such as 'the old must cease for the new to be' and in his 'dying to the known'. These might sound like vague poetic gestures but in reality they're often vivid and life-changing realisations - apodictic, even, to those who undergo them.

The usefulness of John Hick's pluralistic approach (not highly regarded on this forum) is that he at least recognises that these kinds of awakenings or events can occur in the context of wildly different cultural registers. For example Buddhists would never describe such an experience in terms of union with God. But as Hick says"

The basic principle that we are aware of anything, not as it is in itself unobserved, but always and necessarily as it appears to beings with our particular cognitive equipment, was brilliantly stated by Aquinas when he said that ‘Things known are in the knower according to the mode of the knower’ (S.T., II/II, Q. 1, art. 2). And in the case of religious awareness, the mode of the knower differs significantly from religion to religion. And so my hypothesis is that the ultimate reality of which the religions speak, and which we [i.e. Christians] refer to as God, is being differently conceived, and therefore differently experienced, and therefore differently responded to in historical forms of life within the different religious traditions. — John Hick, Who or What is God?

---

we know, thanks to Kant, that space and time and all the categories are purely subjective or that intellectual intuition could be a reliable guide to the way things really are. — Janus

Correction: Kant does indeed call space and time forms of intuition — i.e. a priori conditions of sensibility that belong to the subject. In that sense they are “subjective” because they are not properties of things-in-themselves, but the way in which objects can appear to us.

But — and this is crucial — he also insists they are empirically real. Everything that can be given in experience must conform to these forms, and within experience space and time are objectively valid. That’s why he repeatedly says his position is transcendental idealism + empirical realism.

So: they are not “merely subjective” fictions or illusions. Rather, they are subjectively grounded, but objectively binding for any possible experience.

An idea which is enjoying a resurgence in much current philosophy of physics.

Kant’s critique of rational psychology comes in the Paralogisms of Pure Reason (A341–405 / B399–432). His main point is that from the necessary “I think” we cannot infer a knowledge of the soul as a substance. The unity of apperception is a formal condition of experience, not an intuition of an inner object; hence we can’t determine the subject of experience as if it were a thing among things.

You say physicalism “comprises a comprehensive metaphysics,” but I would challenge that. It seems to me that physicalism doesn’t so much seek to provide a metaphysic as to negate it.

Remember that “metaphysics” as a term originates with Aristotle: it referred to those writings placed after his Physics — his “first philosophy,” where he addressed questions that physics, by its nature, cannot. The role of metaphysics has always been to ask about the principles and presuppositions of physics itself: what it means for something to exist, what kinds of causation there are, what “being” means in the most general sense.

Physicalism, by contrast, insists that all there is to reality is what the natural sciences study. But that is not “first philosophy”; it is the refusal to consider a first philosophy (and I note this refusal is often made explicit in modern philosophy). It begins by adopting the methods and categories of physics as metaphysically basic — which is precisely the point under dispute. It begins with exclusion and abstraction: bracketing off the qualitative features of experience as ‘subjective,’ leaving only those precisely measurable properties which, not coincidentally, are exactly what our scientific instruments can register.

As for the explanatory gap: it’s not a scientific theory, nor a temporary lack of evidence. It is the observation that third-person, objective description (the stock-in-trade of science) cannot in principle account for the first-person nature of existence — the fact that there is 'something it is like to be....' To say “withhold judgment” is fair enough; but to act as though physicalism is therefore the only “rational” option is to bury the the problem in the very premisses that it's exposing.

This is exactly what Thompson, Frank, and Gleiser call the blind spot of science: the inescapable fact that experience itself — the standpoint from which all science is done — cannot be brought into the picture by the very methods of objectification that make science possible. The point isn’t that it’s “subjective” in the narrow sense, but that it is constitutive: it is what allows there to be an “objective world” in the first place. So when you say you don’t see the issue, that’s not a neutral stance — it’s part of what the “blind spot” diagnosis itself explains. So if physicalism seems comprehensive to you, perhaps that’s because the very standpoint from which you judge it—lived experience itself—has already been screened out by the framework. You're not seeing what it is you don't see.

When you lump everything else under “enormous speculative guesses,” you’re effectively classifying any framework that doesn’t begin from physicalist premises as irrational. The whole sweep of philosophy other than physicalism! But that’s precisely what’s at issue. That’s why other traditions—Platonic, idealist, Buddhist, phenomenological —are vital: they provide principled accounts of experience and intelligibility, precisely what physicalism has excluded from its field of vision.

The measuring device, as I understand it, breaks that isolation at the moment of measurement. — JuanZu

In your determination to avoid attributing agency to the observer you assign it to the device, as if it were itself autonomous. But it’s just a projection, and one I think that is mistaken for the reasons I’ve already given.

I think the mistake here is to assume that because both the hand and the wood (or the device and the quantum system) are continuous in terms of atomic matter, the epistemological issue is resolved. But that’s just materialism talking. The real problem is not whether there is material continuity — nobody disputes that — but how interaction precipitates the measurement outcome. How does a physical process produce a determinate outcome, one that can be recorded and communicated as knowledge, from a cloud of mere possibilities?

That’s why this can’t be solved simply by saying “the device is natural.” Of course it is made of atoms, but what makes it a measuring device is not its material composition but its role as an artifact that embodies human purposes and generates observables. It’s precisely that interpretive element that material continuity by itself can’t account for.

Facts are usually taken to be determinable by either observation or logic. — Janus

Verificationism is a philosophical attitude, central to logical positivism, stating that a statement's meaning lies in its empirical verifiability; meaning a statement is only meaningful if it can be confirmed through sensory experience or if it's a tautology (true by definition). Accordingly statements from fields like metaphysics, ethics, and theology were often deemed otiose (empty of meaning) by verificationists, as they couldn't be empirically tested. While influential, the verifiability criterion eventually proved untenable, contributing to the decline of logical positivism.

If it possesses some kind of mental property and it is ours, it is like simply saying that it does not possess it and we possess it. — JuanZu

But notice the implicit dualism between “us” and “it.” The observer is one thing, the observed another. Yet, as Bohr insisted, what counts as a “phenomenon” in quantum mechanics is the indivisible whole of the system-plus-the-measuring-apparatus, with the observer entering only insofar as we need a shared, classical description to record and communicate the outcome. And let’s not forget: the measuring device itself would not exist had we not created it. Instruments are not natural objects but artifacts, designed precisely to extend and amplify observation.

That’s why the interpretive problem cannot be set aside as if it were merely empirical. Quantum physics itself compels us to confront issues that go beyond the subject–object split that empiricism presumes. The meaning of “measurement” remains a philosophical question, not one that can be settled by physics alone. The instrument is not simply out there in the same sense as a rock or a tree: it is an artifact, created to register and communicate particular observables. The attempt to 'naturalise the instrument' conceals rather than resolves the very interpretive questions that quantum physics forces on us.

You seem interested in exploring these possibilities, but I am not. — Relativist

I understand that you’re looking for a comprehensive alternative metaphysics. That’s a high bar — one that most philosophers don’t clear. My interest is less about constructing a new system and more about questioning the adequacy of physicalism and pointing out why it can't be understood as complete (or even completable!)

Besides, it is common practice in philosophy to show the way in which a framework is inadequate without immediately offering a replacement. Kant didn’t resolve every metaphysical puzzle; he set limits. Chalmers doesn’t provide a worked-out metaphysics of consciousness, but his argument still shifted the debate. Plato's dialogues contain many more questions than answers. For that matter, philosophy may be better understood in terms of asking questions than providing answers.

In addition to pointing out the so-called 'hard problem of consciousness' (which is the irreducibility of firrst-person experience) I've also argued along other lines, such as that information is not reducible to matter or energy (Norbert Wiener); that what exists and what is known to be real are not coterminous (C S Peirce); that the placebo effect and neuroplasticity as cases of top-down causation are inconsistent with neuro-physicalism; that constraints, forms, and intelligible structures (laws) play a real role, which physicalism as substance-ontology fails to recognise. I often raise these with various physicalist interlocutors. Anyway we went through it all in in this thread.

what is it that needs to be renounced? Language itself, which has a strong hold in ordinary experience — Constance

The Sanskit 'muni', translated as 'sage', literally means 'silent' (one of the traditional epiphets of the Buddha was 'Sakyamuni', 'sage of the Sakyas'.) But, of course, this is a distant ideal, unless one joins a silent monastic order. The Abhidhamma, which you mention, was one of the 'three baskets' of Buddhist texts and it was addressed to monks. It was not until Mahasi Sayadaw and the evangelical activities of the 'forest Thai' tradition that it was thought that meditation (sati, mindfulness) would have any relevance for ordinary people (although the Beatles relationship with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi was also a big factor. See Most Buddhists Don't Meditate]. Even now, it is understood in Buddhism that meditation is one of 'three legs of the tripod', the others being sila (moral comportment) and panna (wisdom). But in modern culture, meditation has attained a kind of symbolic status as the way to connect with 'eastern wisdom'. It is said that Husserl was very impressed with abhidhamma.

One has to give up being a person, yet maintaining one's personhood at the same time, for this boundness of being a self is the structure that makes agency possible. — Constance

A very significant insight. Recall the gospel teaching 'he who saves his own life will lose it, he who loses it for My sake will be saved'. The 'eastern' interpretation of that is precisely the overcoming (actually the death) of one's sense of egoic consciousness. Again a distant ideal, although in the religious context is is at least recognised. But in practice, the way it manifests is in self-giving.

I always wondered why people seem to miss this point. — boundless

Simple - because, for them, the only reality is matter-energy in space-time. The mind in which all this is held together to form a coherent whole is neglected or ignored.

My own thought experiment is of thinking about how life would have been if I had not existed. — Jack Cummins

non cogito ergo non sum

For example; I have come to realise that extremely inprobable events and coincidences happen all the time. — Punshhh

The story of Jung and the scarab beetle is one of the most famous examples he used to illustrate his concept of synchronicity.

Once Carl Jung was treating a young woman who was a very difficult patient. She was highly educated and deeply rational, so much so that she had "sealed herself" off from emotional or psychological progress. Jung felt he was at an impasse with her, as she was resistant to his therapeutic attempts to get her to a "more human understanding." He hoped that something "unexpected and irrational" would happen to break through her intellectual defenses.

One day, she was in his office telling him about a dream she had the previous night. In the dream, she was given a piece of jewelry in the shape of a golden scarab beetle. As she was recounting this dream, Jung heard a gentle tapping sound on the window behind him. He turned around and saw a large flying insect tapping against the pane, seemingly trying to get into the dark room.

Jung opened the window and caught the insect as it flew in. He was astonished to discover that it was a scarabaeid beetle, a common rose-chafer, whose golden-green color was the closest thing in that region to a "golden scarab."

Jung handed the beetle to his patient and said, "Here is your scarab."

The event had a profound effect on the woman. Her rigid, rational worldview was shattered by the coincidence of her dream and the appearance of the real beetle. Jung noted that this "broke the ice of her intellectual resistance," and the treatment was able to proceed with satisfactory results.

You're conflating law realism with physicalism — Relativist

From our previous discussions, I presumed you had D M Armstrong in mind, who is an avowed physicalist. Are the 'law realists' who are not physicalist? (Coming to think of it there would be.)

I’d say that “law realism” really just smuggles Platonism back in through the side door. It appeals to universals to ground necessity, but universals are not observable particulars — they are grasped only by reason. That makes them, in effect, intelligible structures postulated to explain phenomena, which is a Platonic move, whether admitted or not. Kant on the other hand accepted that these lawful relations are indispensable for science, but located them in the activity of the mind as a priori conditions of experience. They were not ‘in re’ but ‘in intellectus’

The difficulty is that law realists won’t acknowledge it, because it thinks mind itself is simply the product of those same physical processes which it situates ‘in things’. But that is circular: the only way we ever know about universals or laws is through the activity of reason, the mind’s ability to discern likeness within diversity and to infer necessity where the senses show only succession. To explain mind as product of the very processes whose necessity it is positing is to fall into a circularity. The scientific realist appeal to universals already presupposes rational relations that cannot be explained away as a physical mechanism, and it’s here that the Platonic and Kantian implications reassert themselves.

the Law Realists — Relativist

Such as?

You really need to have a look at Alicia Juarrero Dynamics in Action. The book starts with the question ‘what is the difference between a wink and a blink?’ and then proceeds to review ‘action theory’ in the context of that question. (I’ll add that I haven’t finished the book nor really assimilated it yet but it seems directly relevant.) Also see https://www.meaningcrisis.co/episode-6-aristotle-kant-and-evolution/

I recognise that, it's David Bentley Hart's latest All Things are Full of Gods. And he states exactly what I was about to write, which is the vexed relationship between logical necessity and physical causation. I've been drafting some material on this question, which I'll present below.,

Once again, I'll situate this historically. Pre David Hume, there was an assumption that the world was intelligible — that is, there was an intrinsic link between the order of nature and the order of reason. Causes were understood in terms of formal and final causes, which often carried logical or conceptual necessity. For example, water flows downhill because that is part of its nature — a blend of formal and final causation. More from Hart:

In the pre-modern vision of things, the cosmos had been seen as an inherently purposive structure of diverse but integrally inseparable rational relations — for instance, the Aristotelian aitia, which are conventionally translated as “causes,” but which are nothing like the uniform material “causes” of the mechanistic philosophy. And so the natural order was seen as a reality already akin to intellect. Hence the mind, rather than an anomalous tenant of an alien universe, was instead the most concentrated and luminous expression of nature’s deepest essence. This is why it could pass with such wanton liberty through the “veil of Isis” and ever deeper into nature’s inner mysteries.

David Hume broke this supposed relationship. He argued that causation is not something we can deduce from reason alone — it's only ever inferred from constant conjunctions: "We see A followed by B, and infer causation." Hence, causation is not logically necessary but contingent and habitual.

All reasonings concerning matter of fact seem to be founded on the relation of cause and effect. But... the connection between cause and effect is not a product of reasoning, but of custom. — An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding

This cleaved the empirical from the rational, leading to the so-called Humean bifurcation: facts (contingent, empirical) vs. norms/logical truths (necessary, conceptual). And that is still writ large in so many of the dialogues on this forum. Many of the contributors I will talk to here - Apustimologist, Relativist, Philosophim, to name a few - assume that, as the brain is physical, and the brain is the source of throught, then thought too has a physical basis. In fact they can't even conceive of there being an alternative to that, it is so firmly a tenet of modern culture.

I think one way to address this rupture is through what John Vervaeke calls relevance realization — a contemporary cognitive science account that begins to heal the divide Hume opened between logical structure and physical causality.

Vervaeke argues that cognition — especially human intelligence — is not a matter of brute computation or mechanistic stimulus-response. Rather, it's grounded in our dynamic ability to interpret what is relevant in a given situation, from among an almost infinite range of possible inputs, actions, and interpretations. This isn’t something that can be fully formalized or predicted — it’s emergent, self-organizing, and constrained by the organism's goals, embodiment, and interaction with the world.

In this light, cognition is not just caused — it's structured. That is, our awareness of the world is shaped by a salience landscape, a kind of lived topography of what stands out, what matters, and what calls for action. And this is not imposed on a passive agent; it is co-constituted by organism and environment ('co-arising'). The world does not merely act on us through physical causes — it is disclosed to us through a structure of intelligibility that is tied to our biological, emotional, and social existence.

What’s significant here is that this structure of salience and relevance is normative and existential in character — it allows for truth and error, insight and illusion, precisely because it is not just reducible to efficient causes. Vervaeke’s insight is that intelligence is the capacity to realize what is relevant — and this is not simply a logical deduction nor a chain of physical causes, but an enacted form of knowing by being, to borrow Hart’s phrase.

This begins to undo the Humean bifurcation. Relevance realization is causal — grounded in the biological dynamics of neural networks, evolution, and interaction — but it also has logical structure, in the sense that it underwrites all higher-order cognition, including our grasp of concepts, categories, language, and truth itself. But the normative aspect recognises that for us, as intelligent rational agents, the fact that things matter cannot be captured in reductionist or physical terms.

In a way, it returns us to something like the Aristotelian sense of logos as both reason and structure — where mind is not a ghost in the machine, but the expression of nature’s capacity for self-disclosure. The very idea of a "veil of Isis" only makes sense if there is something behind the veil that is able to be seen — and something within us that is capable of seeing it. That is the intuition the pre-modern world preserved — and one that Vervaeke’s work is attempting to recover in post-cognitive-scientific terms.

It doesn’t mean reverting to pre-scientific metaphysics, but it does mean questioning the flattening effect of a purely mechanistic view of causality. In a salience-structured world, causation isn't just physical interaction — it’s also the enactment of meaning. And meaning, far from being a subjective gloss on an indifferent universe, becomes a central feature of how the world comes into presence at all.

In the one paper I’ve read about Frege, he describes logic as ‘the laws of thought’. ‘Frege on Knowing the Third Realm’, Tyler Burge. The thing is, logic connects thoughts by way of necessity. Causation itself is physical.

couldn't believe my eyes when Trump started doing whatever he wanted and neither the Senate nor the court stopped him. The system of checks and balances stopped working? How did it happen that he can do almost whatever he wants? Isn't that a decline? — Astorre

Indeed. I'm in Australia, and here, most people - a huge majority, in fact - are shocked, frightened and appalled by what's happening in America under Trump. There's some degree of cynicism about the US here, but probably much less than other places - my parents (who lived through WWII, one of my father's brothers died in the Pacific Theatre) never ceased to say that 'MacArthur saved us from invasion from the Japanese'. So in my household, America was always the 'light on the hill'. My mother wept bitter tears when Kennedy was assasinated (I was ten). So I've been extremely dissappointed by the Trump phenomenon, ever since it started - it is the victory (for now), of greed, of hatred and cynicism. Anyway this isn't the Trump thread but as the topic came up....

Hey no apologies necessary, it’s only that ‘landslide victory’ is yet another Trump exaggeration so should be called out.

He (Trump) won by a large margin. — Astorre

Not that large:

• 2024: Trump won the popular vote with a lead of about 1.5% over Kamala Harris. This was the first time he won the national popular vote in a presidential election.
• 2020: Joe Biden won the popular vote by 4.5% over Trump.
• 2016: Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by 2.1% over Trump, despite losing the Electoral College.
• 2012: Barack Obama won by 3.9% over Mitt Romney.
• 2008: Barack Obama won by 7.3% over John McCain.

As in, Berkeley is logically consistent and Kant allows a distinction between the unknowable noumena (the ontologically real) and the phenomena (the mentally known). Those folks aren't muddling epistemology with ontology. — Hanover

:up:

Why not say that there is something mental in the measuring device? — JuanZu

Sure - as I already said, it’s a product of our design. In other words whatever ‘mentality’ it possesses is ours.

I believe Timothy has addressed this adequately in his subsequent post.

To know anything in total one must know everything, which is impossible. This leads to a limited sort of fallibilism. — Count Timothy von Icarus

We don't see things as they are in themselves, one might say.

That may be part of the reason we find QM so hard to understand, we don't have the type of intuitions that would help up make sense of the phenomena. — Manuel

I think there are interpretations that make sense of quantum physics Ruth Kastner's transactional interpretation, and The Timeless Wave (especially the section on QBism)

To me, that sounds like the ghost in the machine — JuanZu

I know! That conditions your approach to the issue, where it is something to be avoided at all costs. But that is a consequence of the very 'Cartesian division' that this thread is about. If there is a ghost, it is the ghost of the dualism that radically separates mind and body, matter and meaning, and then seeks what is real only in the measurable.

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

For me, if there is no Ghost in the machine the answer no longer lies in how the machine resembles us, but in how we resemble the machine. — JuanZu

And that is the cost — the de-humanisation is the legacy of this division. When you say “the machine provokes a response in us,” you’re still trying to frame the matter purely in terms of physical causation. But signs are not physical things. They are relations, interpretations, meanings — irreducible to mechanism, yet not “ghostly” either. This is precisely the false dichotomy that the ghost of Descartes has saddled us with. The irony is that by trying to exorcise the ghost, we remain haunted by it. The world this ghost inhabits is one in which the entire cosmos is stripped of interiority and meaning, and we ourselves are left as the orphaned offspring of blind physical causes that somehow, against all odds, have given rise to mind.

Nagel describes how the scientific revolution created this austere conception of objectivity by stripping away appearances, meaning, and intention. But there are many emerging alternatives. Biosemiotics, for example, begins from the insight that living systems are already engaged in the interpretation of signs, not merely pushed around by causes. Phenomenology and existentialism seek to restore the first-person perspective that the cartesian divide occludes. Enactivism, likewise, emphasises that cognition is not something injected into an otherwise meaningless world, but a mode of sense-making that arises through our embodied engagement with it. Both perspectives see through the ghost by refusing the dualism itself: the world is neither “mere matter” devoid of meaning, nor a projection of a private subjectivity, but a field of ongoing interactions where significance is intrinsic to life and mind.

The point isn’t that instruments are “out of this world,” but that they’re not just neutral parts of nature either. They’re artifacts manufactures to register specific events in a communicable and repeatable manner. That means they embody our intentions, and precisely there the epistemic cut reappears — between what simply happens in nature and what is meaningful as information. There's a really fundamental ontological divide there which you can't simply paper over by declaring instruments 'natural'.

Once we naturalise the measuring device, it becomes something external to subjectivity. — JuanZu

Unfortunately for that argument, devices are not naturally-occurring phenomena.They embody our intentions.

I take your point that we should not confuse subjectivity with the role of the measuring apparatus. Of course it is the detector, not personal awareness, that interacts with the system. But the question that persists — and this is what makes the problem metaphysical — is: why does the interaction only count as a measurement when it enters the domain of observables, that is, when it becomes information available to us?

In other words, the physics itself says that quantum systems evolve continuously according to the Schrödinger equation until a “measurement” occurs. We can naturalise the apparatus, but we have still not eliminated the conceptual distinction between interaction in general and the interaction that produces definite outcomes. This is why Copenhagen does not simply dissolve into realism: the transition from indeterminate states to determinate observations remains stubbornly tied to the framework of knowledge, including the observer - not just to physical process. That is the sense in which it transgresses objectivity.

That’s what I was getting at by mentioning Berkeley and d’Espagnat. Not that the ‘mind causes reality’ in a gross sense, but that the very structure of quantum theory reopens the question of how far reality can be described apart from the conditions of observation. That’s why Berkeley often crops up in these conversations: he represents one pole in the dialectic, so to speak. After all there’s plainly a resonance between Bohr’s ‘no phenomenon is a real phenomenon until it is observed’ and ‘esse est percipe’. It is what caused Einstein to ask ‘does the moon not continue to exist when nobody is looking?’.

Mind you Bohr himself strenuously resisted any idea of subjectivity in the obvious sense. He didn’t say that consciousness collapses the wavefunction (that was Wigner, later, but even he then later abandoned the idea); Rather, Bohr insisted that what counts as a “phenomenon” in quantum mechanics is the indivisible whole of the system-plus-the-measuring-apparatus. The observer enters only insofar as we need a shared, classical description to record and communicate the outcome. But this is precisely what raises the philosophical tension: even while Bohr denied the role of subjectivity, his insistence that physics can only speak in terms of observables leaves open the question of how far quantum theory describes nature as it is, apart from the conditions of our access to it. In other words it calls the ideal of complete objectivity into question.

Thank you.

I don't know Scholastic philosophy very deeply, but I thought that the concept of intelligibility meant that we can know what is real in the physical world as well. — J

Nor do I, but the theme I'm exploring is more like a current in the history of ideas, which shows up in Scholastic philosophy. But what was 'real' to the scholastics, was not the physical world as such. When we say “physical world,” we usually mean what modern physics investigates—matter, energy, and their interactions. But for St. Thomas, there was no such concept as a self-subsisting “physical” realm. The world was composed of created beings, each a union of form and matter, whose being itself is dependent on God as ipsum esse subsistens (being itself). In that sense, he would not have recognized “the physical world” in the sense we do today.

Summa Theologiae I, q. 85, a. 1 (On whether our intellect can know material things)

“The intellect does not know matter except as it is under form.”
(intellectus non cognoscit materiam nisi secundum quod est sub forma)

Sensible Form and Intelligible Form:



The Cultural Impact of Empiricism



How this relates to 'Idealism in Context'

The thesis is that the medievals operated within a participatory ontology — a “knowing by being,” where intelligibility arises through the interplay of form and matter, and ultimately through participation in God’s act of being. In this framework, “matter alone” was unintelligible; as Aquinas put it, “prime matter cannot be known in itself, but only through form” (per Eric Perl).

This was increasingly challenged by the emerging paradigm of modernity, which sought to secure knowledge through objectivity — facts conceived as mind-independent, accessible to a detached observer. The sense of separateness entailed by this paradigm was alien to the scholastic worldview.

Idealism arises in early modern philosophy as a reaction against this development. There are of course caveats: Berkeley converges with Aquinas in rejecting the idea of an unknowable material substrate, yet diverges in rejecting universals. Kant, meanwhile, re-interprets hylomorphism in transcendental terms, shifting form and matter into the structures of cognition. But in their different ways, both Berkeley and Kant resisted the notion of a self-subsistent physical domain, independent of mind altogether.

---------------

The lived realization you talk about refers to Husserl's epoche. — Constance

Quite. There is also a geneological relation between Buddhism and Pyrrhonic scepticism, purportedly owing to Pyrrho of Elis travelling to Gandhara (today's Kandahar in Afghanistan, but then a Buddhist cultural centre) and sitting with the Buddhist philosophers. See Epochē and Śūnyatā.

To really do this, I am convinced one has to leave standard relations with the world behind, a monumental task. — Constance

Renunciation, in a word.

The tree is still a tree, the clock a clock — Constance

'First, there is a mountain; then there is no mountain; then there is' ~ Dogen Zen-ji

'If one takes the everyday representation as the sole standard of all things, then philosophy is always something deranged' ~ Martin Heidegger, 'What is a Thing?'

I have zero idea what you’re talking about.

But I did google ‘’life in North Korea’ from which:

Forced Labor:
Many North Koreans, including children, are forced to work on farms, in factories, and in political prison camps.
Food Insecurity:
Millions suffer from malnutrition and lack of adequate food, with prisoners sometimes eating insects and rats to survive.
Infrastructure:
Basic infrastructure, such as electricity and clean water, is underdeveloped, making daily tasks like washing and hygiene challenging.
Limited Information:
Access to the internet is restricted, and state-controlled TV channels are the only source of media.

According to many reliable sources, life in the Hermit Kingdom is a dystopian nightmare where you can be sent to a prison camp for expressing dissent. It has poor living standards. frequent shortages of food and no freedom of travel. I think it can be assumed that very few. other than the privileged elite, would want to live under such a regime.

What if we assume that they themselves simply like being who they are? — Astorre

Why would we assume that? They are given no choice at all in the matter. It’s a complete totalitarian dictatorship with an appalling human rights record under the thumb of a dangerous megalomaniac who has nuclear weapons. I see nothing good about it whatever.

the issue here is that the evidence is too sparse for most people to take it seriously as a falsification of the most successful paradigms of knowledge in human history. — Apustimelogist

:chin: What knowledge would the veracity of near-death experience falsify?



What’s an NPC?

I read an analogy, recently - imagine you’re one of millions of displaced people after a war. You find a large bulletin board in the city you used to live in, with photographs of faces on it. One of them is your mother. You know this with complete certainty - but in the circumstances, with all of the civilian bureaucracies destroyed, no records anywhere - you can’t prove it.

:100: MAGA plays that card very well.

‘Wanting a dictatorship’ is surely the abdication of freedom. And even if I agreed that sexual and identity politics has been taken too far in western culture, abandoning democracy is not a solution. It would be a case of the cure being worse than the disease.

Is the West prepared to coexist with ideological and civilizational alternatives that do not necessarily aspire to Western liberalism? — Astorre

Sure - provided they’re not imposed, but chosen by democratic means. The big parade in China today starred Xi Jin Pin, Modi, Putin and Kim Jong Un - only one of whom is a democratically-elected leader. Russia and China are both authoritarian dictatorships, as is North Korea. I don’t see them as any kind of alternative.

Of course it is also true, and tragic, that America of all nations is now hurtling towards totalitarianism, but that is not the fault of Western Liberalism except insofar as it has thus far been able to prevent it.

It seems quite possible to me that China will eclipse the USA as the dominant world hegemon in the near future but that gives me no joy.

+1 :up:

It is rather consumerist neoliberalism that educates us in vice, and so deprives us of liberty. That is, you don't automatically become self-determining and self-governing by turning 18 and avoiding severe misfortune. It is rather, considerable work, and involves a sort of habit formation and training — Count Timothy von Icarus

Totally. And I'm not holding myself up as an exemplar of one who has managed to accomplish that - in fact I'm rather driven by the gloomy awareness of the extent to which I am susceptible to being corrupted by the culture I've been born into. The 'inability to step outside the frame' is what I mean by learning to look at your spectacles and not just through them.

Incidentally as I introduced Vervaeke to the conversation, I will do him the courtesy of providing his statement of the problem in the introduction to the series:

We are in the midst of a mental health crisis. There are increases in anxiety disorders, depression, despair, suicide rates are going up in North America, parts of Europe, other parts of the world. And that mental health crisis is itself due to and engaged with crises in the environment and the political system. And those in turn are immeshed within a deeper cultural historical crisis. I called the meaning crisis. So the meaning crisis expresses itself and many people are giving voice to this in many different ways, is this increasing sense of bullshit. Bullshit is on the increase. It's more and more pervasive throughout our lives and there's this sense of drowning in this old ocean of bullshit. And we have to understand why is this the case and what can we do about it? So today there is an increase of people feeling very disconnected from themselves, from each other, from the world, from a viable and foreseeable future.

Let's discuss this. Let's work on it together. Let's rationally reflect on it. What can we do about the meaning crisis? These problems are deep problems that we're facing. Many people are talking about the meaning crisis, but what I want to argue is that these problems are deeper than just social media problems, political problems, even economic problems. They're deeply historical, cultural, cognitive problems, and we need to, we need to penetrate into them carefully and rigorously. Getting out of this problem is going to be tremendously difficult. It's going to require significant transformations in our cognition, our culture, our communities, and in order to move forward in such a difficult manner, we have to reach more deeply into our past to salvage the resources we can for such an amazing challenge.

I'll be talking about a lot of people who have spoken in in ways that will provide us the resources we need. We'll talk about ancient figures like Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, Jesus of Nazareth, Siddhartha, Gautama, the Buddha, but we'll also talk about modern pivotal figures. We'll talk about people like Carl Jung. We'll talk about Nietzsche. We'll talk about Heidegger. We'll talk about current work being done by psychologists, cognitive scientists, neuroscientists. We're going to cover a broad range of topics. We're going to talk about shamanism and altered States of consciousness related a modern things like psychedelic experience, mystical experience. But we'll also talk about existentialism, nihilism. We'll talk about AI, artificial intelligence. What's that telling us? But also what can our evolutionary past tell us about how we wrestle with the meaning crisis. So this is a complex and difficult problem. There are no easy answers. We need to go through this very carefully and rigorously. We got to get clear about what the problem is and clear about what our answer could be. So I want to bring all of this together in a coherent and clear fashion so that we together can discover how to awaken from the meaning crisis. — Awakening from the Meaning Crisis (YouTube)