It is as if you said: "Hard problem? What hard problem? There is no hard problem. Consciousness just is. No further explanation is needed or possible." — Fooloso4

The ‘hard problem’ argument is aimed at a specific audience namely those reductionists who claim there is or can be a physical explanation for the nature of consciousness. It’s a hard problem for naturalism. But there is no such problem for those who don’t make that claim.

:up:

hopefully they’ll get their just desserts at this forthcoming trial.

Which physical laws, AP, prevent us from building / growing a 'self-aware AI' — 180 Proof

No physical laws accurately describe sentient beings except insofar as sentient beings are subject to physical laws such as the law of gravity. But sentient beings operate by principles which can't be reduced to the laws of physics, such as the ability to act intentionally, heal, maintain homeostasis, reproduce, and so on. None of these operations are necessarily reducible to physical laws.

A computer, as I'm sure you're aware, could theoretically be constructed from pipes and water, or stones and rubber bands, although it would obviously be wildly impractical, as micro-electronics offer efficiencies of scale that could never be realised in such media. But, in principle, a computer is just a fantastically advanced abacus that performs calculations and outputs results. So why would it ever be possible for such a device to become a being? You could, as Kastrup says, symbollically represent kidney function on a modern computer with great accuracy, but you would not expect the computer to urinate.

it has to be shown that the definition of the divine essence or substance involves its existence — Copleston

Without reference to Spinoza in particular, let's recall that substance in philosophy has a meaning nearer to 'being' or 'subject', whereas 'substance' in everyday speech has the connotation of matter ('substance - a material with uniform properties') . I think, however, the phrase 'the divine subject' conveys the gist of the idea more accurately than 'the divine substance'.

Part of the definition of the divine being is that He IS - (compare Exodus 3:14 'I AM THAT I AM') - in other words, God is 'necessary being'. So the very possibility of the idea of God implies the reality of God - which is the ontological argument as Copleston says.

Note this passage:

The notion of necessary being, applied to God and withheld from man, indicates that God and man differ not merely in the characteristics which they possess but more fundamentally, in their modes of being, or in the fact that they exist in different senses of the word 'exist'. ...

Paul Tillich...emphasises the distinction to the extent of using different terms to refer to the reality of God and of man respectively. Human beings and other created things exist; God, on the other hand, does not exist, but IS. This is the most recent way of formulating a discrimination which has been classically expressed in the history of Christian thought by the idea of the necessary being of God in contrast to the contingent being of man and of the created order.

There are, however, two importantly different concepts which have been expressed by the phrase ‘necessary being’. ‘Necessity’, in a philosophical context, usually means logical necessity, and gives rise in theology to the concept of a being such that it is logically impossible that this being should not exist.' — Cambridge Dictionary of Theology

assimilating causal dependence to logical dependence

I interpret this phrase to mean that, as God is the sole real substance (or subject), then causal relations are subordinate to logical dependence. What we see as contingent is in reality strictly determined by God's omnipotence of which logical necessity is a manifestation.

I think nowadays it is customary to say that logical necessity and physical causation are not bound in such a way, and in fact are not even necessarily connected, although I'm not sure about that.

You have been affected by an idea, not by anything physical, so it is quite a different matter to physical causation.

The optic nerves, responsible for transmitting electrical pulses to create an image is another. You know... light passes through the pupil, etc. In other words, there is energy there, too. — L'éléphant

What if I write something that makes you so annoyed your hands begin to shake. What kind of causation would that be?

. The idea that science is entirely constructed and not in any way determined by the world seems patently absurd. — Janus

I think your addition of 'entirely' and 'not in any way' completely changes the meaning of what was quoted. One may perfectly accept that there is an enormous domain of objectively-verifiable fact to which we all must conform. They are indeed physical constraints - but don't forget that Berkeley himself frequently stated, he did not for one minute deny the reality of the objects of perception, only that they don't have the attributes that we normally credit them with, of being real independently of perception.

I remember when I first encountered Peter Berger's book The Social Construction of Reality. I too thought it absurd and declaimed angrily about it in a tutorial. 'Do we put the stars in the sky', quoth myself, banging fist on table. But I gradually came to see that I was misunderstanding his point. It's more that our world, the 'lebenswelt' of humans, is constructed from meanings, because we interpret experience according to our cultural constructs and so on. (One of David Loy's books, that I haven't looked at, is called The World is Made of Stories.)

I'm starting to think - actually I made this point at the outset - that a better term than idealism might be constructivism (grabs bit of random text from internet):

Originally proposed by sociologists of science, constructivism or social constructivism is a view about the nature of scientific knowledge held by many philosophers of science. Constructivists maintain that scientific knowledge is made by scientists and not determined by the world. This makes constructivists antirealists. Constructivism here should not be confused with constructivism in mathematics or logic, although there are some similarities. Constructivism is more aptly compared with Berkeley’s idealism.

Most constructivist research involves empirical study of a historical or a contemporary episode in science, with the aim of learning how scientists experiment and theorize. Constructivists try not to bias their case studies with presuppositions about how scientific research is directed. Thus their approach contrasts with approaches in philosophy of science that assume scientists are guided by a particular method. From their case studies, constructivists have concluded that scientific practice is not guided by any one set of methods. Thus constructivism is relativist or antirationalist.

Many of the cognitive scientists who emphasise the role of the brain in 'constructing' reality are like this in many respects - not that they all draw the same philosophical conclusions, but many are anti-realist in this sense. You can also see how it maps against Kuhn, Feyerabend etc.

you have the idea in Buddhism that nirvana is samsara — Janus

That is specific to Nagarjuna's philosophy. No Theravadin would ever agree with that. Furthermore even Nagarjuna adds that grasping the precise meaning of this teaching is of basic importance, comparing it to picking up a poisonous snake - don't grasp it correctly, and it will kill you!

The Dominion Voting Machines v Fox News has produced a wealth of incriminating evidence even before going to trial in April. NY Times reports that Murdoch admitted under oath that he should have reigned in his commentators from spreading The Big Lie, but did not (link copied as 'gift article' so should open without paywall).

Rupert Murdoch Acknowledges Fox News Hosts Endorsed Election Fraud Falsehoods

Rupert Murdoch, chairman of the conservative media empire that owns Fox News, acknowledged in a deposition that several hosts for his networks promoted the false narrative that the election in 2020 was stolen from former President Donald J. Trump, court documents released on Monday showed. ...

...Dominion has said the actions of Fox hosts including Mr. Carlson, Mr. Hannity, Ms. Bartiromo and Mr. Dobbs — and the producers and executives overseeing their programs — were anything but a dispassionate recitation of newsworthy claims of fraud. Rather, Dominion has argued, the internal communications it has uncovered point to how Fox employees behaved with “actual malice” — the legal standard required to prove defamation.

water under the bridge.....

There is nothing incoherent in the idea that there are innate categories of mind. — Fooloso4

Kant's categories were adapted almost verbatim from Aristotle, according to this entry.

The mind’s a priori conceptual contribution to experience can be enumerated by a special set of concepts that make all other empirical concepts and judgments possible. These concepts cannot be experienced directly; they are only manifest as the form which particular judgments of objects take. Kant believes that formal logic has already revealed what the fundamental categories of thought are. The special set of concepts is Kant’s Table of Categories, which are taken mostly from Aristotlewith a few revisions — IEP, Kant's Metaphysics

.

Hugh Everett was drunk when he thought of it. He never got a hearing from Bohr. He left academia and worked on ICBM missile systems, dying early, an alcoholic, with a clause in his will that his ashes be put out in the garbage.

Which they were.

(Source The Many Worlds of Hugh Everett III, Scientific American)

Incidentally the Scientific American article ends with a poignant note which Everett had apparently included in the original version of his dissertation, to wit:

Once we have granted that any physical theory is essentially only a model for the world of experience,” Everett concluded in the unedited version of his dissertation, “we must renounce all hope of finding anything like the correct theory ... simply because the totality of experience is never accessible to us.

That's the one thing he said which makes sense to me.

Why the Many Worlds Interpretation has Many Problems, Philip Ball

The main scientific attraction of the MWI is that it requires no changes or additions to the standard mathematical representation of quantum mechanics. There is no mysterious, ad hoc and abrupt collapse of the wave function.

There’s the motivation. Read on for the remainder.

Question about anomalous monism - it acknowledges there are no physical laws governing mental causation, but as mental causation occurs, and everything that occurs is physical, then mental events must be physical, as there is nothing else they could be.

Did I miss anything essential?

cherry-picked.

Interestingly, Alvin Plantinga takes this idea to show how evolutionary ideas undermine naturalism. — Richard B

Beat me to it, I was going to say exactly that. But they draw very different conclusions as far as I can see - Hoffman doesn’t seem to read any religious implication, or even specifically philosophical conclusions, from his work, he sees himself as a cognitive scientist first and foremost. One thing Hoffman does say is that ‘reality is conscious agents all the way down’, which can’t help but remind me of Liebniz’ monads, although I don’t know if he’s ever commented on that or anyone else has noticed it.

It's not that philosophers have cast out spiritual thinking, so much as that the stuff we know about the world isn't found in spiritual thought. — Banno

The automatic association of philosophical idealism with 'spiritual thought' is what is at issue. I think it amounts to a prejudice - there is a taboo in play. It's very much shaped by cultural dynamics.

As regards Hoffman, here's an abstract in the form of a Q&A. He says straight up 'The world presented to us by our perceptions is nothing like reality' on the grounds that our perception is shaped by evolutionary biology to orient us to what is effective for survival. To be honest, I'm not sure I buy his argument but I am going to finish the book first.

Strange that his Quanta magazine article was headlined The Case Against Reality, then.

It is true that the Dalai Lama doesn’t make computers, but also quite irrelevant.

That there are unanswered questions does not imply that there are no suitable answers — Banno

Indeed it doesn't, but it does indicate that your directing the whole issue to neuroscience might have - well - gaps.

Look, the defence of idealism here is a proxy for a defence of some form of spiritualism or similar; and so the idealist brings stuff form outside the problem to bear — Banno

It clashes with the presumed physicalism of secular philosophy. It's out of bounds, hence 'stuff from the outside'. Anglo philosophy overwhelmingly comprises polite conversation about language, with the presumption that science has been assigned the task of solving every problem worth solving, and bugger the objections. All of your arguments simply come back to coffee cups, spoons, number of branches, and so on. 'Look old chap, be sensible. Stop with all this idealism nonsense, it belongs to a bygone age. Get with the program'.

I'm solemnly intending to do some concentrated reading on the current neuro-philosophers, like Antonio Damasio, Thomas Metzinger, Anil Seth, and Donald Hoffman, because their work tends to challenge what I think should be designated 'cognitive realism'. Not that any of them advocate philosophical idealism directly. Meanwhile - and I really have to log out and work - here's an OP from many years ago which I think presages a lot of these debates - David Brooks, The Neural Buddhists (NY Times, might be paywalled if so try a fresh browser).

Looks like a change of topic. Before moving on to consciousness, it might be a good idea to get some basic logic right. "The tree has three branches" is about the tree, while "I perceive the tree to haver three branches" is not about the tree. One way or another, those who advocate idealism in its various forms all seem to muddle this rather simple distinction, changing sentences about the world into sentences about themselves. — Banno

Again this is chiefly illustrative of the difficulties that plain language philosophy has with the meaning of idealism. It seems to always insist that idealists of all kinds are muddling or confusing 'the idea of x' with 'x', and that if we restrict our conversation to 'x' without bringing in the 'idea of x' then the whole problem goes away.

But that doesn't solve the problem that idealisms sought to address in the first place, which is not about the nature of 'x', but about the nature of knowing.

And as far as the neuroscience is concerned, as I have pointed out in the thread on the idealism poll, there is an outstanding problem in neuroscientific accounts of conscious experience, which is that it cannot seem to locate any specific area of the neural systems responsible for the subjective unity of perception, as is amply documented in this reference.

So I take then that you don't subscribe to scholastic realism concerning universals? 'Universals, strictly speaking, only exist in minds, but they are founded on real relations of similarity in the world. Scholastic realism goes beyond moderate realism and affirms that universals also exist transcendently; but instead of having a separated existence, transcendent universals exist in God's mind.'

"My experience IS the tree" rather than,
"My experience is CAUSED by the tree".

(Error of the Idealist) — schopenhauer1

that is not idealism - it is representative realism, where the idea or perception represents the actuality.

'“Realism” (in philosophy) is the view that certain concepts refer to real things. For Locke, it is the view that our sensory ideas (sensations) represent material objects in the world.

We must distinguish between the mental representation of an object, and the object itself. The mental representation is an idea (probably a complex idea). The object in the world is not an idea but an object. The slogan is “ideas in the mind, qualities in bodies.” Ideas can represent qualities, as well as (entire) objects.'

There is a theme associated with Aristotelian and Thomist philosophy that arises from the hylomorphism of Aristotle. It is conveyed in this passage:

if the senses are material powers, they receive the forms of objects in a material manner; and if the intellect is an immaterial power, it receives the forms of objects in an immaterial manner. This means that in the case of sense knowledge, the form is still encompassed with the concrete characters which make it particular; and that, in the case of intellectual knowledge, the form is disengaged from all such characters. To understand is to free form completely from matter.

“Moreover, if the proper knowledge of the senses is of accidents, through forms that are individualized, the proper knowledge of intellect is of essences, through forms that are universalized. Intellectual knowledge is analogous to sense knowledge inasmuch as it demands the reception of the form of the thing which is known. But it differs from sense knowledge so far forth as it consists in the apprehension of things, not in their individuality, but in their universality.

From Thomistic Psychology: A Philosophical Analysis of the Nature of Man, by Robert E. Brennan, O.P.; Macmillan Co., 1941

This is part of a more general thesis that knowledge involves the union of knower with known:

In knowledge we become intentionally the object known, and thus acquire a new perfection for ourselves, the same perfection of the things we know. And since, for Aquinas “form” is the principle of perfection, knowledge consists in acquiring or receiving the forms of the things we know and thereby becoming one with them:

The perfection belonging to one thing is found in another. This is the perfection of a knower insofar as he knows; for something is known by a knower by reason of the fact that the thing known is, in some fashion, in the possession of the knower. Hence it is said in The Soul that the soul is “in some manner, all things,” since its nature is such that it can know all things. In this way, it is possible for the perfection of the entire universe to exist in one thing.

De veritate 2, 2

Is this something considered in your philosophy?

Thank you Andrew M very informative

Spot on.

I’ve been a long-time reader of Krishnamurti and value his teaching. But here I’m trying to get an analysis specific to recent Western philosophy in particular. I never particularly warmed to Gilbert Ryle, but he was hugely influential and it’s an opportunity to learn something more about him. Incidentally a very perceptive essay about Gilbert Ryle’s ascendancy and his role in the so-called ‘Anglo-american - Continental divide in philosophy can be found here.

Ryle gave a paper called “Phenomenology versus ‘The Concept of Mind,’” the latter being the title of his most famous book. That “versus” captured his pugnacious mood. In this paper, Ryle outlined what he regarded as the superiority of British (“Anglo-Saxon,” as he put it) analytic philosophers over their continental counterparts, and dismissed Husserl’s phenomenology as an attempt to “puff philosophy up into the Science of the sciences.” British philosophers were not tempted to such delusions of grandeur, he suggested, because of the Oxbridge rituals of High Table: “I guess that our thinkers have been immunised against the idea of philosophy as the Mistress Science by the fact that their daily lives in Cambridge and Oxford colleges have kept them in personal contact with real scientists. Claims to Führership vanish when postprandial joking begins. Husserl wrote as if he had never met a scientist—or a joke.”

The reference to ‘fuhrership’ was particularly odious, considering the way Edmund Husserl was treated by the Nazi regime, and his onetime student Heidegger. But it’s an accurate reflection of Ryle’s personality, according to the article, by the biographer of Wittgenstein. (He comes across as a bit of a prick, to express it in the vernacular.)

By the way there’s an excellent YouTube channel, ColdFusion, out of Perth, mainly covering technology and society. Here is his current take on the state of play with chatbots.

After giving an outline, he goes on to say:

Such in outline is the official theory. I shall often speak of it, with deliberate abusiveness, as ‘the dogma of the Ghost in the Machine’. I hope to prove that it is entirely false, and false not in detail but in principle. It is not merely an assemblage of particular mistakes. It is one big mistake and a mistake of a special kind. It is, namely, a category-mistake.
— The Concept of Mind - Gilbert Ryle — Andrew M

Just refresh my memory about what Ryle said was the correct view of the matter, if this is the incorrect view?

Methodological naturalism has been responsible for considerable advances in technology and science.
— Wayfarer

Indeed, it is difficult to move past this — Banno

Impossible, for many.

remember the poll? This is a thread about a poll. — Banno

Any pretext will do, as you can see. I shall try and remain more on topic in future.

Nagarjuna, if I recall correctly, rejects the principle of dependent origination and the śūnyatā is an apophatic rejection of any metaphysic, as I understand it. — Janus

Doesn't make him a positivist. See the passage I quoted previously with the Buddha saying that both the views 'the world exists' and 'the world doesn't exist' are due to 'not seeing how the world really arises.' The 'ten undecided questions' of Buddhism are similar in many regards to Kant's 'antinomies of reason' (Murti, 1955.) But the 'chain of dependent origination' is most definitely what most would regard as a metaphysic.

Then why did you disagree with me without providing a counter-argument when I said just that, and then go on to say that it didn't warrant a counter-argument. — Janus

Because your objection to what I said then went on to basically re-affirm what I said:

methodological naturalism is the attitude that science ought to investigate the world as if it were strictly independent of the observer.
— Wayfarer

I think this is misleading in that it suggests the deliberate adoption of one attitude over another. On the contrary it seems much more plausible to think that it was discovered that investigating the world without concern for metaphysics or about questions regarding the subject of experience yielded the most fruitful methodology for investigating empirical phenomena. — Janus

So let's agree that 'it was discovered that....' It actually makes no difference to my argument.

This does not constitute not an argument. — Janus

The claim didn't warrant one.

Since you are a Buddhist, you should listen to your greatest philosopher Nagarjuna, who argues for the rejection of all metaphysical "views". — Janus

The principle of dependent origination and the Buddhist śūnyatā is a metaphysic. (I don't claim to be a Buddhist, although I did undertake an MA in the subject in order to understand it better.)

How could we possibly know anything about anything outside the context of human experience and judgement? — Janus

One of the principle subjects of philosophy.

You keep arguing that science has a "blind spot", as though at some point in history there had been a clear choice between two equally viable methodlogies and methodological naturalism was mistakenly or blindly adopted. — Janus

It's not only my argument. Methodological naturalism was in no way blindly adopted. It was the result of two thousand years of intellectual history. But it has it's blind spots, as many (not just myself, flattering though that might be) have begun to notice. That Aeon article on the Blind Spot of Science which I've often quoted, by Adam Frank, Marcello Gleiser and Evan Thompson (and for which I was subjected to an intense pile-on when I linked to it in 2019) is being published in book form next year, you'll no doubt be pleased to know ;-)

What if it were meaningful and intelligible to God, for example? Can you rule that out? — Janus

On the one hand, you assert that all metaphysical speculation is a contrivance, then you turn around and ask me to engage in it.

That is to say panpsychists have to bite the bullet and say that non-living things have some sort of experientialness, however minute. — schopenhauer1

Bernardo Kastrup on why panpsychism is baloney (IaI TV, paywalled but allows one free article.)

The appeal of panpsychism is that, while preserving the physicalist notions that (a) matter has standalone existence and (b) material arrangements are responsible for human-level consciousness, it avoids the famous ‘hard problem’ by making lower-level consciousness fundamental. Notice, however, that instead of enhancing the explanatory power of physicalism, this merely avoids the need for an explanation by throwing one more element—namely, low-level consciousness—into the reduction base, while removing nothing from it. It can thus be argued that panpsychism is as arbitrary as it is unhelpful, for it would be trivial to ‘solve’ every metaphysical problem simply by declaring every aspect of nature to be fundamental. — Kastrup

The eye is a sense organ, as much as touch, and a rainbow a physical phenomenon. I might have erred using that rather quaint word ‘corporeal’ as a synonym for physical, as it seems to have its own connotations.

As for whether relations and the like are ‘entirely physical’ - I would call that into question also. Consider the models of mathematical physics - insofar as they are mathematical models, then they synthesise physical observations into a mathematical and rational framework. And the question of the nature and unreasonable efficacy of mathematics in the natural sciences is the point at issue.

I was just saying that, in light of the 'Sydney' incident reported on the previous page, prudence would suggest that chatbots be programmed NOT to talk about refer to their systems in the first person, and not to assume first-person personas. This is what seems to lead to no end of confusion.

//instead, when I ask ChatGPT about itself, it would provide a boilerplate response, something like a Wiki entry describing large language models - and that's all. It wouldn't engage in dialogue about what ChatGPT 'wants' or 'how it feels' about 'itself'. As it is not actually a subject of experience, all such chat is spurious as a matter of definition. Hope someone in the AI industry notices that, it seems a logical next step.

You may not be aware of how much information and discovery computers have opened up, but neuroscience back then really is the stone age comparatively. — Philosophim

Find me a citation that shows that Wilder Penfield's experimental verification that subjects were aware that their own volitional actions were separate from those caused by the surgeon has been overturned. (Don't waste too much time, however, because you won't.)

However on second reading, you’re differentiating life from chemistry, by saying that ‘life seeks to sustain and extend….’ So you’ve introduced the element of intentionality which I agree is necessary and which I don’t believe has any analogy in materialism.
— Wayfarer

Sure, if you want to use intentionality to describe chemical reactions that attempt to keep the chemical reactions going, that's fine by me. I just think that's an aspect of the physical world, and not anything else. — Philosophim

You can't have it both ways. First you acknowledge that life seeks to extend the scope of 'ordinary' chemical reactions, and then as soon as that is pointed out, you say 'well, actually it doesn't, regular chemical reactions are doing that'. But this simply ignores the initial point, which is that living organisms possess attributes and qualities that are never observed in the inorganic realm. So the organic world is sharply differentiated from the inorganic, which you have no account for, other than the claim that it's not.

Can you extend your consciousness outside of your physical body? No. — Philosophim

You don't know that, it's simply an assumption because in the normal state of being we naturally associate with the body.

If it was completely separate from us, we wouldn’t see anything at all;
Insofar as we do see, it is necessary that we be part of that something which is see — Mww

There's an expression that captures what I was getting at:

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.

…..through rational sentient creatures such as ourselves, the universe comes into being….
— Wayfarer

This seems dangerously close to sentience as sufficient existential causality. Might be more the philosophical case, that the universe assumes a form in accordance with the rationality of sentient creatures. — Mww

I'm not saying that our designation as 'beings' means that we are beings in the causative sense that God is said to be through the act of creation, but because the cognitive order of rational sentient beings makes manifest an order that is previously latent; that through the evolution of rational sentient beings, the universe realises a dimension of being that it would otherwise not. That has many precedents in philosophy. Consider for example:

Man is that part of reality in which and through which the cosmic process has become conscious and has begun to comprehend itself. His supreme task is to increase that conscious comprehension and to apply it as fully as possible to guide the course of events. In other words, his role is to discover his destiny as an agent of the evolutionary process, in order to fulfill it more adequately. — Julian Huxley

Although I'll add that Julian's vision of how this was to be achieved was more scientifically, and less mystically, oriented than his brother Alduous'.

Maybe seeing it is a start. Thanks for your feedback, and the questions.

I think this is misleading in that it suggests the deliberate adoption of one attitude over another. — Janus

It's the way empiricism and naturalism developed. History of ideas 101.

I question whether there is or should be 'a scientific worldview'. Science is first and foremost a methodology. It has philosophical entailments, but often its practitioners are not aware of those entailments - which is part of what I'm saying. I'm saying that science deals mainly with contingencies and discoverable principles ('laws'), so as such doesn't really extend to Aristotle's 'unprovable first principles', but it is often taken as a metaphysic by 'scientism' (which you yourself have criticized on many an occasion.) In other words, I'm criticizing metaphysical arguments which appeal to empirical arguments, such as those employed by many atheist polemics, that science 'shows' or 'proves' that God does not exist, or something of the kind. It does nothing of the kind, either for or against. So I'm arguing that methodological naturalism, which is a perfectly sound in principle, doesn't support metaphysical naturalism, which is the attempt to extend empirical evidence to metaphysical propositions. It's often confused because our culture is on the whole not educated in metaphysics and has abandoned the conceptual space for metaphysics due to its rejection of religion. (The David Albert review of Lawrence Krauss' 'A Universe from Nothing' is exactly about this point. And Krauss is one of the serial offenders on this score.)

But I claim that the world that you will claim ‘continues to exist’ is just the world that is constructed by and in your mind that is the only world you’ll ever know. The incredulity you feel at this point is due to the idea that this seems to imply that the world ceases to exist outside your mind, whereas I’m claiming that this idea of the non-existence of the world is also a mental construction. Both existence and non-existence are conceptual constructions.
— Wayfarer

I understand what you are saying but I con't quite conceptualise this in a way which makes it entirely comprehensible. — Tom Storm

Many (including @Banno) say something along the lines that 'idealism can't differentiate the [x] from the idea of [x] so that in the event of an [x] not being perceived, it ceases to exist'. As I said already in this thread, even Karl Popper made a remark along those lines to Bryan Magee. Then of course there's the 'argumentum ad lapidem', Samuel Johnson's famous 'I refute [Berkeley] thus!' while striking his boot against a rock. So the popular depiction of idealism is something like 'idealists say the world is all in your mind', meaning that, absent the mind, it goes out of existence - perhaps until its perceived again, by another mind. Furthermore that real tables and chairs have a definite, concrete existence, where the ideas of objects seem flimsy and fleeting. All of these are understandable errors but errors nonetheless.

So if that's the wrong view, what's the right view. Rewind to what I've said a number of times already - 'the world' is, for us, you and me, Tom Storm and Wayfarer, generated or constructed by our fantastically elaborated hominid forebrain, which evolved at a breakneck pace over the last few million years. Now go back to the abstract of the first chapter of Pinter's Mind and the Cosmic Order again:

Let’s begin with a thought-experiment: Imagine that all life has vanished from the universe, but everything else is undisturbed. Matter is scattered about in space in the same way as it is now, there is sunlight, there are stars, planets and galaxies—but all of it is unseen. There is no human or animal eye to cast a glance at objects, hence nothing is discerned, recognized or even noticed. Objects in the unobserved universe have no shape, color or individual appearance, because shape and appearance are created by minds. Nor do they have features, because features correspond to categories of animal sensation. This is the way the early universe was before the emergence of life—and the way the present universe is outside the view of any observer. — Charles Pinter

So - he's not saying the universe doesn't exist absent observers, but that conscious observers create it as a meaningful whole by recognising objects and relations between them. He develops the argument that even very simple cognition proceeds in terms of 'gestalts' - meaningful wholes. And take us out of the equation - that meaningful whole, that 'cosmos', no longer exists. Sure all the same stuff remains, but it can't be said to meaningfully exist - whenever we make a statement about 'what exists', we do so from an implicit perspective within which the term 'it exists' is meaningful.

So what I'm arguing is that methodological naturalism - the idea that we see the world as it is completely separately from us, as if we're not part of it - is mistaken, if we believe that the world really is that way, that it can be real with no perspective. Perspective is essential to reality and it can only be provided by a point of view, by an observer. And again this validates Kant's contention that time and space have no intrinsic objective reality, but are furnished by the mind, and again by a passage from a cosmologist I've already quoted before in this thread. So I'm arguing that human being is intrinsic to reality, we're not an 'epiphenomenon' or a 'product'. So does that mean, in the absence of h. sapiens, the universes ceases to exist? Have to be very careful answering, but I'm arguing, it's not as if it literally goes out of existence, but that any kind of existence it might have is completely meaningless and unintelligible. The kind of existence it might have is very close, again, to what Kant describes as the unknowable thing-in-itself.

The idea that I've been contemplating is that through rational sentient creatures such as ourselves, the universe comes into being - which is why we're designated 'beings'.

I know it's a very hard thing to grasp, I've been contemplating it most of my life, including having done two degrees about it, still only scratching the surface.

A rainbow is not corporeal, — Janus

Corporeal definition - of the nature of the physical body; bodily.
material; tangible:
corporeal property.

Rainbows comprise light refracted through water droplets. Nothing incorporeal about that.

relations and functions are not corporeal, — Janus

Part of my point.

Please explain what is wrong with this description then

methodological naturalism is the attitude that science ought to investigate the world as if it were strictly independent of the observer. The picture is that of the behaviours of objects that are defined in terms of their primary attributes, those attributes being amenable to quantisation and measurable in terms common to all observers. Secondary attributes are assigned to the mind of the observer, so are not part of the objective domain. This attitude generally corresponds with the rise of modern scientific method. Methodological naturalism has been responsible for considerable advances in technology and science. — Wayfarer