What’s frustrating is the obduracy of both parties on this matter. — Mikie

That’s where I part company. I put the blame wholly and solely on the Republican Party. Using the debt ceiling vote as leverage for political purposes is immoral from the get-go. Blaming the Democrats for what is happening is like blaming the bank staff for the hold-up.

Physicalism is a paradigm for generating conjectures or models and not a theoretical explanation of phenomena. — 180 Proof

Right. Agree. And not incompatible with:

In terms of science, I think that science proper is the acquiring of how entities relate to each other and not what they fundamentally are…. — Bob Ross

Although I will also observe that yours is not a physicalist account of physicalism.

How so? Got an alternative definition?

However, I'd suggest some study of evolutionary psychology and game theory *might* disabuse you of the belief that understanding of the nature of love, justice, wisdom, and courage are hardly affected by knowledge of science. — wonderer1

Sure, they contribute to it, they might re-frame it. But I think as a matter of principle that philosophy demands a kind of insight that relies on qualities of character and reason, not on contingent facts. // oh, and you're welcome. //

I have noticed your difficulties keeping up.

I will explain. The idea that life can be explained with reference only to the laws of physics is physicalism, right? Newtonian laws being an example of 'laws of physics'. So to oppose physicalism, is to argue that life cannot be so derived. The quotation provided is from Ernst Mayr, whom I believe is an authority in the field of biology, disputing physicalist reductionism, saying that organisms are fundamentally (I would say, ontologically) different to non-living matter. It's tangential to the OP, but not completely.

Not capable of initiating anything.

Ernst Mayr, one of the architects of the modern synthesis, has been one of the most outspoken supporters of the view that life is fundamentally different from inanimate matter. In The growth of biological thought [15], p. 124, he made this point in no uncertain terms: ‘… The discovery of the genetic code was a breakthrough of the first order. It showed why organisms are fundamentally different from any kind of nonliving material. There is nothing in the inanimate world that has a genetic program which stores information with a history of three thousand million years!’

Can you provide additional reasoning for why you think "philosophy should provide the ability to explore the matter directly without needing to rely on neuroscientific research." — wonderer1

Because philosophy, the 'love of wisdom', or better still 'love~wisdom' ought not to have to rely on the findings of contingent science. Certainly, any philosophy has to be able to deal with empirical discoveries, and certainly the background worldview of the ancients was hardly scientifically informed by today's standards - but if you consider the main subjects of interest in the Platonic dialogues, many of them - the nature of love, of justice, of wisdom, of courage - are hardly affected by that.

He talks about evolution as if it is a physical thing, and we've evolved a "dashboard of perception" to navigate the world. But idealism posits the existence of only mind and thought. — RogueAI

Yes, but not just your mind and your thought.

. Anthropocentric antirealism (contra Mediocrity Principle) — 180 Proof

The 'mediocracy principle' only exists in the minds of those who propose it.

The question we can ask of this scenario is why did a great mind splinter off and develop dissociated alters over time (as we understand time) is consciousness engaged in an act of getting to know itself? — Tom Storm

Nagel’s starting point (in Mind and Cosmos) is not simply that he finds materialism partial or unconvincing, but that he himself has a metaphysical view or vision of reality that just cannot be accommodated within materialism. This vision is that the appearance of conscious beings in the universe is somehow what it is all for; that ‘Each of our lives is a part of the lengthy process of the universe gradually waking up and becoming aware of itself’. — Dhivan Thomas Jones - The Universe is Waking Up

The reason that I'm not a physicalist is that matter does not act. It is only acted upon. (Interesting etymological fact: the word 'matter' is derived from the same root as 'mother'.) The laws of physics, which for moderns occupy the role once accorded to 'the inexorable laws of fate' (according to Whitehead) can in no way account for the origin or significance of life (which is why eliminative materialism, for instance, has such an absurdly truncated view of the nature of being).

The importance of individuation, and how we individuate, is I think key to understanding the so-called wave function collapse of quantum physics — Metaphysician Undercover

:chin:

The process of objectification goes deeper than cultural conditioning — wonderer1

Of course. The Charles Pinter book incorporates a great deal of neuroscience, as do Donald Hoffman's books challenging scientific realism, and which are generally said to support a kind of philosophical idealism or constructivism. On the other hand, I think philosophy should provide the ability to explore the matter directly without needing to rely on neuroscientific research. After all, Socrates was recommended to 'know thyself' by the Oracle of Delphi, and I don't know if his endeavours were hampered by the absence of modern neuroscience.

Another thing to bear in mind are the discoveries of neuroplasticity and how neural configurations can be changed 'top-down' so to speak. Neuroplasticity has shown that mental activity influences brain structure, that engaging in specific mental activities, such as learning a new skill or practicing a particular cognitive task, can lead to structural changes in the brain. For example, studies have shown that individuals who learn to juggle experience an increase in gray matter volume in areas involved in motor control. Another fascinating study showed that subjects who learned to practice piano in their minds (i.e. no actual piano!) showed neurological changes similar to those who practiced with a piano (ref).

I suppose cultural conditioning might also affect neural configurations and not necessarily in a good way. After all hardly a week goes by without stories of epidemics of depression and anxiety in teens caused by exposure to social media. It's quite possible that many cultural memes that are held by many people are neither grounded in reality nor beneficial.

I was interested to notice that 38% of the respondents accepted the reality of abstract objects (platonic realism). If that is included in the results for 'realism', then.....

My critique is of Sartwell, not of you. — Banno

Yes, point taken. As I said, on second reading, it wasn't a terribly impressive essay, but what I got from it was a better sense of where the ordinary language philosophers fit in the scheme of things - something which I hadn't really appreciated up until now.

I often reflect on the 180 degree difference between what realism meant in traditional philosophy - realism concerning universals - and what it means now - realism concerning objects of experience.

On the other hand, as an electrical engineer, it seems rather ludicrous to think that we are having a discussion via the internet, yet there is no external reality. — wonderer1

It's not nearly so black-and-white. It's not a question of whether things exist or don't exist, or whether they're all 'in the mind' (and if so who's mind). It's much more subtle than that. The reality is a continuum that includes both object and subject.

We're very much conditioned to be oriented with respect to the objective domain - the process of 'objectification'. It's woven into the fabric of the culture. If you read some of the idealist philosophers - Berkeley and Schopenhauer, for example - you will see they are quite sane and sober individuals.

I am proudly dissident from the mainstream (although I think 'anti-realism' is an unsatisfactory description.)

Recommend it. Not a philosophy text per se but with many interesting philosophical implications.

Something that occurs to me in respect of this argument: when people say they're 'sceptics' in this day and age, you can bet your boots they generally mean 'scientific sceptics', i.e. they will question anything for which there isn't or may not be scientific evidence. Yet 'scientific scepticism' generally starts with the firm belief that the 'sensory domain' (a.k.a. 'the natural realm') is inherently real. They're never sceptical about the obvious reality of the sensory domain in a manner that is very different to ancient scepticism, which would call the reality of the sensible world into question. I think that's because the juggernaut of modern Western culture has demolished all the alternatives. The world of the ancients had another dimension - nowadays politely described as 'mythological' - which embodied a dimension of depth. Whereas, as one of the Vienna Circle positivists put it, 'in science there are no depths - there's surface everywhere' ~ Rudolf Carnap.

'Ordinary language' philosophy is not, so far as I understand, a form of linguistics. Ordinary language philosophy wants to illuminate philosophical problems and concepts by examining how language is used in everyday situations, in order to promote clarity and dissolve misunderstandings that may arise from philosophical speculation and abstraction - hence its rejection of for instance idealism and metaphysics. But you can have analytic philosophers that explore metaphysical questions - such as those I mentioned.

//although when I read that essay again, it tends to merge them. In re-reading that essay, I'm less impressed, in light of the criticisms offered above, although still learned a few things from it.

But your approach would also fit ↪Wayfarer's love-hate relationship with analytic approaches. — Banno

'Analytic' is a method, not a philosophical stance per se. As you know, I frequently cite Thomas Nagel, as he's regarded an exemplary analytic philosopher and is one who expresses what I consider an important philosophical critique of scientific materialism. I believe there are many others who follow an analytic method in defense of the kinds of philosophical views that I'm supportive of (Richard Swinburne and Jerrod Katz come to mind, although I haven't read either of them yet.) Whereas the 'ordinary language' philosophers tend to have some characteristic meta-philosophical attitudes.

Republicans want to spend more for the military, and cut more elsewhere.

I watched a US 60 Minutes segment last night, about rorting and gouging in the US Defense Establishment (below for anyone interested). One of the interview subjects had been a top contract negotiator for the Pentagon and widely despised by the aero-space industry for calling out their predatory and monopolistic pricing practices. One example was a part that was generally available on the open market for $350 odd bucks, for which the Pentagon was routinely paying 10 grand. But the clincher was an episode during the Iraq war. It was discovered that one of their helicopter models needed an urgent parts replacement or could literally fall out of the sky. The supplier of said part immediately put an enormous premium on the thousands of units that would have to be supplied. The procurement teams said words to the effect of 'we're not paying that!' To which the response came, 'well, let them crash, then.' They paid. Obviously the Freedom Caucus guys have taken a leaf from their book. So all these extra billions that the GOP wants for 'defense' will simply line the pockets of lobbyists and military-industrial executives. It is all entirely corrupt.

How it appears to me might be different from how it appears to you. How it appears might be different under different conditions. Are we talking about the same object or different objects when there is a difference in appearance? — Fooloso4

That’s the whole point - you can't get outside the appearance to see it as it 'truly is'. But it's a more subtle question that whether an object really exists or is 'only in the mind'. My view is that it really exists, but that the very notion of existence always implies an observer for whom it exists, in line with the 'Copenhagen interpretation' of physics (and with Schopenhauer's philosophy). And that furthermore, the observer is not, as it were, in the frame.

I think the central issue here is in how we separate objects from their environment. — Metaphysician Undercover

Thoughts? — wonderer1

The mind-independent world is not naturally divided into individual parts: At the most fundamental level, we can say that external reality is a continuous flow of ongoing cosmic process. Consequently, facts or events in the sense of individual happenings do not exist in the universe at large. When you speak of a fact or event, you mean something bounded that has been lifted out of the flow of continuous activity. Since a fact must be very precisely extruded from the background, this requires that the observer who lifts it out have a purpose—a motive for undertaking to extract this one particular thing. In a universe without an observer having a purpose, you cannot have facts. As you may judge from this, a fact is something far more complex than it appears to be at first sight. In order for a fact to exist, it must be preceded by a segmentation of the world into separate things, and requires a brain that is able to extract it from the background in which it is immersed. — Pinter, Charles. Mind and the Cosmic Order (p92)

It seems to me that at back of modern physicalism/materialism was the conviction that what can be specified in terms of those primary qualities are the only objective existents, while everything else belongs to the subjective realm of appearances. Which brings us back to:

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, Pp35-36

which in turn gave rise to the 'Cartesian anxiety'

Cartesian anxiety refers to the notion that, since René Descartes posited his influential form of body-mind dualism, Western civilization has suffered from a longing for ontological certainty, or feeling that scientific methods, and especially the study of the world as a thing separate from ourselves, should be able to lead us to a firm and unchanging knowledge of ourselves and the world around us. The term is named after Descartes because of his well-known emphasis on "mind" as different from "body", "self" as different from "other".

Richard J. Bernstein coined the term in his 1983 book Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics, and Praxis.

Phenomenology seeks to remedy this condition by returning attention to the primacy of being - the reality of lived experience - *not* as something to analyse through science or metaphysics but through attention to 'what is’ - ‘dasein’.

(Things are falling into place…..)

Ron DeSantis - There could be a charming, easy-going lad hibernating under all that permafrost, a Republican Mister Rogers who wants to be your friend and neighbor. But reporters must rely on what they’ve seen and heard during his stint in Congress and over the four years he’s occupied the Florida governorship. He looks and acts like the guy who would confiscate the ball kicked accidentally onto his lawn by kids playing on the sidewalk. Aloof and distant, as if nursing some eternal grudge, DeSantis seems as tightly wound as a fishing reel and a better candidate for residence on a desert island than the White House. — Politico

Maybe Elon should invite him on a rocket launch next.

(It’s probably that sense of harbouring a grudge that makes him most like Trump. (He would resent that.))

Guns are often justified for 'self protection', but:

I was going to say something about that, but thought it might muddy the waters. But yes, that is what I had in mind.

What I'm arguing is that 'how the object appears' is dependent on the observer. 'What it is' can be specified in the case of physical objects, in terms of its quantifiable attributes, which appear to be observer-independent, but may better be thought of as 'measurably consistent for any observer' (since their observer-independent nature has been called into question by quantum physics.)

as per the quote provided by Tom Storm:

Ultimately, what we call “reality” is so deeply suffused with mind- and language-dependent structures that it is altogether impossible to make a neat distinction between those parts of our beliefs that reflect the world “in itself” and those parts of our beliefs that simply express “our conceptual contribution.” The very idea that our cognition should be nothing but a re-presentation of something mind-independent consequently has to be abandoned. — Dan Zahavi (quoting Hillary Putham)

Zahavi is a phenomenologist, and this, (along with 'enactivism' and 'embodied cognition') brings home the fundamental importance of the subject as subject - not as an object of analysis by biological or neurological sciences, but as a subject who brings a perspective to the world. By contrast, many forns of naturalism presumes that 'the world' exists just as it is, whether observed or not, outside of any perspective (which, I think, is Sellars’ ‘myth of the given’). That is the conceit of naturalism, with it's appeal to common sense and the implicit reliance on what 'everyone knows must be true'.

Hosting Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, in a Twitter audio event on Wednesday to announce his presidential run was supposed to be a triumphant moment for Elon Musk, the owner of Twitter.

Instead, the event began with more than 20 minutes of technical glitches, hot mic moments and drowned-out and half-said conversations before the livestream abruptly cut out. Minutes later, the livestream was restarted as hundreds of thousands of listeners tried to tune in. Mr. DeSantis had not said a word at that point.

“That was insane, sorry,” Mr. Musk said. — NY Times, Elon Musk’s Event With Ron DeSantis Exposes Twitter’s Weaknesses

These two really deserve each other. :lol:

I can hold that thing and bring it to you, but cannot hold what appears in your experience. — Fooloso4

But the object is what appears in experience - what you and I see, touch, hold, carry, and so on. Hence it is designated a 'phenomenal object' existing in both your experience and mine. The question is the sense in which the object exists apart from or outside of that. I think what you're wanting to say is that the object persists in the absence of any observer, which is what I am saying is a presumption. How do you differentiate between the object as it is in itself, and as it appears to us? That is the question.

Distance between Moon and Earth is in our heads...? :chin: — jorndoe

take the time to watch Andrei Linde, above.

The things shown and their appearance in your experience are not the same. The phenomenal experience is of the thing shown. — Fooloso4

How do you differentiate between the thing shown and the thing as it is in itself?

Some old guys doing it - Donald Fagen, Michael McDonald, Boz Skaggs

He’s an amazing talent, that’s for sure.

:lol: :lol:

A stone carried along in a river will either continue on downstream or get stuck if it bumps up against some other object or objects depending on its shape. — Fooloso4

The stone either moves along with the current or not. This happens whether we observe it or not. — Fooloso4

I've thought some more about this. The same principle applies to all phenomenal experiences whatever. Stones move, mountains form, things get taken from the fridge. Philosophical idealism plainly has to be able to account for the fact that things appear to exist in our absence and without our knowledge. The basis of the idealist argument is all such phenomena still occur within experience - including the objective evidence of the age or location of the object. If you show the same things to to me, then they will also appear in my experience, and I can validate what they are along with any number of people (although not necessarily with other kinds of intelligences, which I'll leave aside). That is inter-subjective agreement, and a highly effective heuristic.

Now the philosophical problem is that you can't therefore say with absolute certainty that there is something beyond that experience, beyond the phenomena, which is the source of, and independent of, your experience of it. Materialism accounts for that, by saying that there is something called matter that is the cause of all these experiences, that exists independently . But what matter is, as distinct from what it appears to be, is the point at issue! If we break anything down - the stone or whatever - the we see the fragments it breaks into, but these too appear within experience. We can assume that all those things exist outside experience - when nobody is looking - but it will only ever be an assumption drawn from experience. This, as one of the sources I noted above mentions, can also be regarded as a strict form of empiricism (namely, phenomenalism, of which Berkeley is an example.)

But as we're talking about the real existence of material objects, then plainly the arbiter of that claim must be physics. And that is precisely where the assumption of an independently-existing domain of real objects has been challenged (torpedoed, many would say). Why was Albert Einstein obliged to ask Abraham Pais, 'does the moon continue to exist when nobody's looking at it?' Of course, he believed it did and it was a kind of rhetorical question - but what compelled him to have to ask it? (There's a very big story behind that.)

It is not coincidence that in all traditional metaphysics you see the theme: The truth that is spoken is no longer the truth. — TheMadMan

Would make for a very sparsely populated philosophy forum, however.

This is worth a watch. At 6:30 he addresses the pre-existence of the Universe.

Two weeks after mass shootings shook their country, Serbians have surrendered more than 15,000 weapons, more than 2,500 explosive devices, and hundreds of thousands of rounds of ammunition, as part of a month-long amnesty announced by the government. — CNN

Something similar happened in Australia in 1996 after the Port Arthur Massacre.

Other countries respond to mass shootings in a way that the USA never does - because of the dogma about the right of gun ownership being equated with freedom.

Ideas have consequences.

I'll put it this way: there can be matter without mind but not mind without matter. — Fooloso4

But then, one of the factors that has undermined materialism in the 20th Century is that science has not really been able to arrive at a definitive account of matter. And that furthermore, the attempt to do so opened the whole can of worms that is quantum theory and its related 'observer problem'. As is well known, even early in the last century James Jeans and Arthur Eddington interpreted these discoveries as more supportive of the primacy of mind - you know, 'the stuff of the world is mind-stuff', and 'the world seems more like a great mind than a great machine'. Werner Heisenberg argued that the implications of quantum physics were more suggestive of Plato than Democritus. And so on. As I said, a can of worms, although Bernardo Kastrup has quite a bit to say on it - see his Physics is pointing inexorably towards mind (which incidentally takes a shot at the much touted 'information realism')

Thank you. I see that question as the basic issue in this debate.


I have a reference which is originally from an essay about Buddhist philosophy but which provides, I think, a useful summary of the background of the debate between idealism and materialism (with some comments added in parentheses).

The Term 'Idealism'

The term "Idealism" came into vogue roughly during the time of Kant (though it was used earlier by others, such as Leibniz) to label one of two trends that had emerged in reaction to Cartesian philosophy. Descartes had argued that there were two basic yet separate substances in the universe: Extension (the material world of things in space) and Thought (the world of mind and ideas). Subsequently opposing camps took one or the other substance as their metaphysical foundation, treating one as the primary substance while reducing the other to derivative status. Materialists argued that only matter was ultimately real, so that thought and consciousness derived from physical entities (chemistry, brain states, etc.). Idealists countered that the mind and its ideas were ultimately real, and that the physical world derived from mind (e.g., the mind of God, Berkeley's esse est percipi, or from ideal prototypes, etc.). Materialists gravitated toward mechanical, physical explanations for why and how things existed, while Idealists tended to look for purposes - moral as well as rational - to explain existence. Idealism meant "idea-ism," frequently in the sense Plato's notion of "ideas" (eidos) was understood at the time, namely ideal types that transcended the physical, sensory world and provided the form (eidos) that gave matter meaning and purpose. As materialism, buttressed by advances in materialistic science, gained wider acceptance, those inclined toward spiritual and theological aims turned increasingly toward idealism as a countermeasure. Before long there were many types of materialism and idealism.

Idealism, in its broadest sense, came to encompass everything that was not materialism, which included so many different types of positions that the term lost any hope of univocality. Most forms of theistic and theological thought were, by this definition, types of idealism, even if they accepted matter as real, since they also asserted something as more real than matter, either as the creator of matter (in monotheism) or as the reality behind matter (in pantheism). Extreme empiricists who only accepted their own experience and sensations as real were also idealists (Berkeley being a notable example). Thus the term "idealism" united monotheists, pantheists and atheists. At one extreme were various forms of metaphysical idealism which posited a mind (or minds) as the only ultimate reality. The physical world was either an unreal illusion or not as real as the mind that created it. To avoid solipsism (which is a subjectivized version of metaphysical idealism) metaphysical idealists posited an overarching mind that envisions and creates the universe. (This is the 'mind-at-large' posited by Bernardo Kastrup.)

A more limited type of idealism is epistemological idealism, which argues that since knowledge of the world only exists in the mental realm, we cannot know actual physical objects as they truly are, but only as they appear in our mental representations of them. (This is near to how I (Wayfarer) understand it.) Epistemological idealists could be ontological materialists, accepting that matter exists substantially; they could even accept that mental states derived at least in part from material processes. What they denied was that matter could be known in itself directly, without the mediation of mental representations. Though unknowable in itself, matter's existence and properties could be known through inference based on certain consistencies in the way material things are represented in perception.

Transcendental idealism contends that not only matter but also the self remains transcendental in an act of cognition. Kant and Husserl, who were both transcendental idealists, defined "transcendental" as "that which constitutes experience but is not itself given in experience." A mundane example would be the eye, which is the condition for seeing even though the eye does not see itself (a philosophical axiom of the Upanisads. This is also the reasoning behind the argument about the 'blind spot' of science). By applying vision, and drawing inferences from it, one can come to know the role eyes play in seeing, even though one never sees one's own eyes. Similarly, things in themselves and the transcendental self could be known if the proper methods were applied for uncovering the conditions that constitute experience, even though such conditions do not themselves appear in experience.

Even here, where epistemological issues are at the forefront, it is actually ontological concerns, viz. the ontological status of self and objects, that is really at stake. Western philosophy rarely escapes that ontological tilt. Those who accepted that both the self and its objects were unknowable except through reason, and that such reason(s) was their cause and purpose for existing - thus epistemologically and ontologically grounding everything in the mind and its ideas - were labeled Absolute Idealists (e.g., Schelling, Hegel, Bradley), since only such ideas are absolute while all else is relative to them. — Dan Lusthaus

(The essay then goes on to differentiate Western and Indian philosophy, which is based more on epistemology, but which is not directly relevant to the above.)

I am not a connoisseur or anything (I don't even know who Steely Dan is), but wow! — SophistiCat

Here's the original (oh, and I'm a Steely Dan tragic.)

And the counter-argument is that because things are different they interact in different ways. We can observe this and describe this but these interactions occur whether we identify them or not. — Fooloso4

Do you think the mind is a product of such physical interactions?

[crossed-fingers emoji]

Something you could point at which purportedly ‘falsifies idealism’.

I had in mind something like dharma - which is at once ‘purpose’, ‘law’ and ‘duty’. If described as ‘cosmic’, it is on the basis that human beings are microcosms - the universe in miniature. So individuals realising their purpose - if they do it truly, in accordance with moral principles - just is a way in which the cosmos realises its purpose.

House Freedom Caucus members, such as Rep. Ralph Norman (R-S.C.), warn they won’t accept anything less than the House-passed bill [which Democrats have said repeatedly is DOA].

That leaves McCarthy with strikingly little room to maneuver.

The House bill cut discretionary spending to fiscal 2022 levels and then caps domestic discretionary spending to 1 percent growth over the next decade. It also expands work requirements for federal social aid programs and rescinds $30 billion in unspent COVID funding.

House Republicans are also pushing for energy permitting reform, measures to secure the U.S.-Mexico border and to block Biden’s plan to forgive $400 billion in student debt relief.

Biden is holding fast against many of the Republican demands, which Democrats warn would hurt American families across the nation by cutting an array of federal programs, expecting McCarthy will back down. l. — The Hill

Still reckon, depending on the outcome, it's quite possible that McCartney will loose his gavel over it. Those Freedom Caucus types are ruthless ideologues.

It might be something engrained in life. It might be like 'fulfilling your destiny' or carrying out the role you have in the grand scheme, even if it appears insignificant to others.