It's a reference to the idea that living beings are intrinsic to the Universe, and not simply the 'accidental outcome of the collocation of atoms' (Bertrand Russell's words.) Julian Huxley's scientific humanism was, it has been said, somewhat like Tielhard Du Chardin's but without the religious dimension, although his brother Alduous had a more mystical side (his The Perennial Philosophy is a perennial title). Whereas the standard materialist view is that life is kind of a cosmic fluke and mankind a parvenue (see for example Jacques Monod Chance and Necessity.)

The idea that evolution is a way in which the Universe comes to know itself can be said of any living beings but (as noted the other day) in humankind this has been made the subject of conscious reflection and exploration - not that it has often been explored in the past. Although there are, for some examples, in the Hermetic tradition, the idea of 'man as microcosm', or the mythology of Adam Kadmon, or the Vedic Hymn of the Cosmic Man (Alduous would have been much more aware of these myths than his brother!)

You even find the idea in Thomas Nagel's book Mind and Cosmos:

Nagel’s starting point 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’. Nagel’s surrounding argument is something of a sketch, but is entirely compatible with a Buddhist vision of reality as naturalism, including the possibility of insight into reality (under the topic of reason or cognition) and the possibility of apprehension of objective good (under the topic of value). His naturalism does this while fully conceding the explanatory power of physics, Darwinian evolution and neuroscience. Most Buddhists are what one might describe as intuitive non-materialists, but they have no way to integrate their intuition into the predominantly materialistic scientific world view. I see the value of Nagel’s philosophy in Mind and Cosmos as sketching an imaginative vision of reality that integrates the scientific world view into a larger one that includes reason, value and purpose, and simultaneously casts philosophical doubt on the completeness of the predominant materialism of the age. — The Universe is Waking Up

I found that Predictive Processing paper a couple of weeks ago, by chance. There's a scholar (might be mentioned therein) by the name of Andrew Brooks who has specialised in Kant on Cognitive Science, you can see one of his papers here and also various entries on the Stanford Encylopedia of Philosophy.

Psychologist George Kelly said what matters is not whether the universe exists, but what we can make of it. — Joshs

Yes, but it's a basic fact that postmodernism rejects meta-narratives, so that tends to consign a great deal of what has been made of it in the past to the wastepaper basket.

What we take to be a galaxy in a picture could turn out to be a new system or phenomena previously unknown in astronomy. So in these cases, we would not know what thing it is, outside of the very general comment of "being something seen by the James Webb telescope." — Manuel

Yes, take your point. I could also mention the dark matter/energy conundrum, very much a live issue in current cosmology, which posits that dark matter/energy, which can't even be detected. accounts for 96% of the total energy/mass of the Universe. But that's kind of tangential to the point I'm grappling with.

Is the mind-projection fallacy similar to the 'blind spot' so often evoked by Wayfarer? — Tom Storm

There's a discernable idealist tendency in a lot of recent physics. (I have many stock examples available on request.) But it's an inconvenient truth for materialism which has to explain it away, or reduce it, to something psychological, like projection or something.

The idea that we are 'the universe made conscious' is a theme in current culture. Julian Huxley, brother of Alduous, argued for a kind of evolutionary humanism:

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

I'm not familiar with Wayf's "blind spot" notion. — 180 Proof

It's not 'my notion'. Tom is referring to an article I linked from Aeon Magazine a couple of years ago, from which:

To put it bluntly, the claim that there’s nothing but physical reality is either false or empty. If ‘physical reality’ means reality as physics describes it, then the assertion that only physical phenomena exist is false. Why? Because physical science – including biology and computational neuroscience – doesn’t include an account of consciousness. This is not to say that consciousness is something unnatural or supernatural. The point is that physical science doesn’t include an account of experience; but we know that experience exists, so the claim that the only things that exist are what physical science tells us is false. On the other hand, if ‘physical reality’ means reality according to some future and complete physics, then the claim that there is nothing else but physical reality is empty, because we have no idea what such a future physics will look like, especially in relation to consciousness.

What can you give me by way of evidence? — Isaac

Only rational argument, which apparently doesn't cut it.

we exist as classical beings within, or at the level of, nature constituted by classical constaints; what difference does Wheeler's speculation make to our lives – striving for 'the good life' – philosophically or practically?
— 180 Proof — Tom Storm

I hadn't really noticed that question till this comment. And I say it makes an important difference.

Consider the widely-accepted paradigm, that life and mind are thrown up as a byproduct of essentially meaningless physical processes, or as emergent properties of those processes. This is the consensus view of scientific or secular culture. Concommitant with that view is determinism, the idea that humans are not conscious, rational agents, and that the choices they appear to make are not really within their control. (I'm not suggesting that you're saying this but that it is a widely-held attitude nonetheless.)

Wheeler's ideas can be interpreted as meditations on the way that what is latent or unmanifested - what is indeterminate - becomes manifest or realised - made real - through human agency. It is a philosophical idea that was also suggested by the discoveries of quantum physics in the early 20th century. So this suggests that we're not simply the accidental by-products of a meaningless process, as per Jacques Monod or Richard Dawkins. Maybe a more apt metaphor is that the universe discovers itself through the agency of rational sentient beings, and that this is one of the ways that it is becoming understood.

We present and defend a solution to the meta-problem....

..by removing it almost completely from the lexicon of philosophy as such and discussing it as far as possible through the metaphors of science and engineering, especially useful for the elimination of anything that seems mysterious.

What you've not answered is why we shouldn't assume that the philosophers providing these alternative accounts have any fewer (if different) unexamined preconceptions. — Isaac

In philosophy there is space for 'the unconditioned', although I will grant you that most of today's academic philosophy show no grasp of the idea nor any interest in it. (It may be there in Heidegger somewhere, although I've not studied him in depth.) There is also the fundamental philosophical maxim, 'know thyself' with the concommitant emphasis on self-awareness. And again, the reason that philosophy is different to natural science, is that in this discipline 'we are that which we seek to know'. So it must be of a different order to a methodology that is primarily oriented to the objective domain, although by no means incompatible with it on those grounds.

But then by the same token, so do the replacement philosophies. — Isaac

Do you see how that is reductionist? You're willing to accept such criticisms, but only on the basis that those criticizing don't know any better or any different. So you're still operating within the science paradigm. Philosophy is a different way of thinking or being. A comment on Jurgen Habermas' critique of post-Enlightement philosophy is relevant:

What secular reason is missing is self-awareness. It is “unenlightened about itself” in the sense that it has within itself no mechanism for questioning the products and conclusions of its formal, procedural entailments and experiments. “Postmetaphysical thinking,” Habermas contends, “cannot cope on its own with the defeatism concerning reason which we encounter today both in the postmodern radicalization of the ‘dialectic of the Enlightenment’ and in the naturalism founded on a naïve faith in science.”

Postmodernism announces (loudly and often) that a supposedly neutral, objective rationality is always a construct informed by interests it neither acknowledges nor knows nor can know. Meanwhile science goes its merry way endlessly inventing and proliferating technological marvels without having the slightest idea of why. The “naive faith” Habermas criticizes is not a faith in what science can do — it can do anything — but a faith in science’s ability to provide reasons, aside from the reason of its own keeping on going, for doing it and for declining to do it in a particular direction because to do so would be wrong. — Does Reason Know what it is Missing?

The sciences continually revise the terms and inferential relations through which we understand the world, which aspects of the world are salient and significant within that understanding, and how those aspects of the world matter to our overall understanding. — Joshs

'Quantum physics is a law of thought' ~ Chris Fuchs

What is it about the mind of a scientist that shackles them in chains so unbreakable, yet as gossamer in the hands of the philosopher? — Isaac

I'll have a go at that. First, it's by no means 'all scientists' - you can't stereotype scientists. But the classical paradigm of science from the time of Galileo until recently presupposes the division between subject and object - the scientist as detached observer, an all-seeing eye, in a world of objects theoretically intelligible in terms of their primary attributes, describable in terms of Cartesian algebraic geometery.

In terms of engineering and science, such a stance is pragmatically justified. But it has existential implications which are not disclosed by its own methods - because scientists are also humans, and science a human enterprise. And a consequence of this stance is described in the often-quoted expression of 'cartesian anxiety', which

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.

There's been an enormous shift in science in the 20th century, due to the belated understanding of these issues, which you might call 'meta-scientific'. That's what the article pinned to my profile page, The Blind Spot of Science, addresses, drawing on phenomenological analysis.

whether it is meaningful to speak of what exists in the absence of an observing mind.
— Wayfarer

Put a check mark in the not-even-a-chance column for me. Although, if I’m being metaphysically honest, I’d substitute rational intelligence for mind.

Oh....I like your Pinter stuff. — Mww

Glad you noticed it. My comments on it got a bit of attention from Joshs, but seemed to go by most people. Good book, in my opinion.

'Nous' is the word I think is missing from today's philosophical discourse.

OP on how Joe Manchin has single-handedly torpedoed Biden's attempts to tackle climate change.

Over the past year, Mr. Manchin has taken more money from the oil and gas industry than any other member of Congress — including every Republican — according to federal filings. A Times investigation found that he also personally profited from coal, making roughly $5 million between 2010 and 2020 — about three times his Senate salary. Coal has made Mr. Manchin a millionaire, even as it has poisoned the air his own constituents in West Virginia breathe.

As Upton Sinclair put it: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."

NY Times

Ha, so you were more correct about Hoffman than I. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Hey, big of you to say so! You know that Hoffman is one of the academic advisors on the board of Kastrup's 'Essentia Foundation'?

In my view, they represent the mainstream of philosophy more than analytical philosophy in the English-speaking world. I've recently finished Kastrup's book on Schopenhauer, and shows there are many convergences between them.

It's a mathematical model that has finite conscious agents as its ontological primitive. — Count Timothy von Icarus

'Monadology' comes to mind here.

they're going to end up converting me. — Count Timothy von Icarus

'Through the looking glass', I call it. ;-)

By transcends biological do you mean metacognitive capacities? — Tom Storm

Yes - humans know that they know. They ask how they know and what they know, and wonder who or what they are. 'Wisdom begins in wonder'. No coincidence that we're designated 'sapiens' on that account, sapience meaning 'wisdom' or 'sound judgement'. Although I think a better designation for modern humanity is homo faber- man who makes. There is no criteria for wisdom in today's public square, it's all simply a contest of ideas and the instrumentalisation of reason.

Pinter does broach something like a cosmic philosophy in the final chapter, Mind, Life and Universe. He mentions biosemiotics, although without using that term, and many recent discoveries in genetics. Then:

Could the universe not contain two tiers of reality, one material and the other experiential? If that were the case, then we would have to conclude that the cosmic function of life is to be the vehicle of experiential existence, and to be the repository of Gestalt multiplicity whose purpose is to bring into existence newly minted and highly complex organized structures. While the material aspect of the universe evolves in one way (by cooling down and dissipating information), the experiential aspect evolves in the direction of producing ever more intricate hierarchical productions. — Pinter, Charles. Mind and the Cosmic Order (p. 156).

After some discussion of the implications of quantum physics, the book ends with:

It would appear, from this, that reality is not limited to the physical. On a par with space and time—with matter and energy—the universe must include an organizing force which acts to create unified hierarchical structures. These are not composed of matter, but subsist on something nonmaterial that we interpret as mind. In order for physical science to advance to the next level, it is necessary to overcome a biological force that compels us to perceive the external world in the forms which our collective mind has created. Classical physics is an elegant description of the universe as it is laid out in our mental model of reality, and is a huge achievement. It may appear that it is impossible to go further, because that would be seeking what the philosopher Thomas Nagel called a view from nowhere. However, that is unwarranted pessimism. One might begin by examining the evidence for the existence in the universe of a nonmaterial mindlike effect that assigns form and structure to matter. The most obvious place to begin this search is in the phenomenon of life. — Pinter, Charles. Mind and the Cosmic Order (p. 160).

I think that this 'organising force' is similar to what the Greeks called 'logos'. However what I don't think Pinter sees, is that (as Schopenhauer says), only in humans can this become the subject of knowledge, even if all other creatures are formed by it or from it.

For example gods can be imagined to exist. — Janus

This is where apophatic theology comes in, for example, Eriugena, Tillich, Whalon. God does not exist in the sense that individual beings do - but as our empirical culture can only conceive of what exists in those terms, then it can't be understood in terms of a different 'mode of being'.

Aren’t you just mixing up epistemology with ontology? — apokrisis

They're intimately linked.

Once upon a time there was a wave function, which was said to completely describe the state of a physical system out in the world. The shape of the wave function encodes the probabilities for the outcomes of any measurements an observer might perform on it, but the wave function belonged to nature itself, an objective description of an objective reality.

Then Fuchs came along. Along with the researchers Carlton Caves and Rüdiger Schack, he interpreted the wave function’s probabilities as Bayesian probabilities — that is, as subjective degrees of belief about the system. Bayesian probabilities could be thought of as gambling attitudes for placing bets on measurement outcomes, attitudes that are updated as new data come to light. In other words, Fuchs argued, the wave function does not describe the world — it describes the observer. “Quantum mechanics,” he says, “is a law of thought.” — A Private View of Quantum Reality

--

They don’t need an epistemology - some encoded blueprint or instruction set. — apokrisis

Quite. Which is why I'm highly sceptical of the 'pan-semiosis' ploy. Life and mind are one thing, rivers and sand dunes something else.

Fair point, in the sense that there are kinds of things that are difficult to define. I’ll have a think about that.

The Heisenberg article explicitly states '“This new ontological picture requires that we expand our concept of ‘what is real’.”

As for 'describing the nature of things we already use words for' - surely not. Mathematical physics has necessitated the development of both new forms of mathematics, and the coining of new words ('spin', 'color', 'charm') to describe new discoveries.

The point about physics that it is purportedly concerned with fundamental particles, so the question as to what role the observer has in determining the outcome of the experiment is philosophically significant. The fact that it was so, was the main point of dispute between Bohr and Einstein. It certainly has an impact on how we think about the nature of reality - so many of the books on physics have sub-titles that refer to that (‘Einstein, Bohr, and the Great Debate about the Nature of Reality’, for instance.)

Hey thanks for clearing that up, then.

I've launched a new thread on this question.

It seems to me that [maths] feeds into the illusion of a separation by treating extension and duration objectively, when they properly belong to the a priori structure of the mind. — Merkwurdichliebe

But obviously they have objective consequences. Almost all modern technology - no, not 'almost' - relies on the predictive and descriptive accuracy of mathematics, including the devices that are mediating this very dialogue. In Wigner's classic paper on the Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics, the word 'miracle' occurs twelve times, along with the observation that

The miracle of the appropriateness of the language of mathematics for the formulation of the laws of physics is a wonderful gift which we neither understand nor deserve. — Wigner

There are interminable arguments in philosophy of mathematics as to whether maths is invented or discovered, whether it's in the mind of humans or is something real in the world. But I'm saying the regularities and rational relationships inhere within the conscious experience-of-the-world - so it's neither 'in the mind' nor 'in the world', and that this indicates a deep philosophical issue.

if we want to say it is a hidden state at all, then it seems contradictory to say that it is "really" a chair, since we have already acknowledged that we think it is "really" a hidden state, and a chair cannot be anything but a familiar object. — Janus

Its nature is indeterminate. And so it can't be said to exist, because what exists is determinate (i.e. it is 'this' or 'that'.)

I should mention that mindfulness awareness is not quite what Hussel or Merleau-Ponty had in mind — Joshs

I’m aware of that but it is discussed in The Embodied Mind, which draws on cognitive science, phenomenology and Buddhist abhidharma. So they talk about it.

All awareness is self-transformation, it is about something other than itself even when reflecting back on ‘itself’. — Joshs

I don’t think that should be taken as axiomatic. ‘Consciousness without an object’ is part of the lexicon of Eastern philosophies (and of American mathematician and Vedantist philosopher Franklin Mereill-Wolff (ref)

He is attempting to explain mental features such as gestalt perception as evolutionarily formed products of simple mechanisms of material reality — Joshs

Seems like a perfectly sound conjecture to me. And has the advantage of being at least compatible with evolutionary theory. What Pinter *doesn't* get into, in my opinion, is the sense in which h. sapiens transcends the biological, but as I said, that kind of subject is out of scope for the book.

Phenomenology dumps Pinter’s rule-based material and mental realities in favor of a united reality that is relationally relative through and through. This is what I mean by rebuilding the building. — Joshs

That's why you end up with the kind of relativism which I don't subscribe to. In that respect I'm probably a lot closer to Kant and neo-Kantians than to a lot of current phenomenology.

Pinter is closer to Dennett than you might think, — Joshs

I don't see it. He doesn't agree with materialist philosophy of mind. Dennett explicitly says that the mind is reducible to physical and chemical laws, while Pinter says:

The mystery is that in an age when physics has carried us into such a fantastic and unimaginable reality, we still balk at the idea that there are mental phenomena which do not follow the rules of classical physics. Why is it so hard to accept that in a universe in which space-time bends and curves, where particles of matter weave in and out of existence, and space itself is particulate—why would it be strange to accept that the mind of living animals is something complex whose laws are not the same ones that have been familiar to us for centuries?

I interpret this to mean that doesn't agree that the laws which govern the mind are continuous with physical and chemical laws.

Obviously our reading of Charles Pinter is very different, but I appreciate you have at least acknowledged this book, as it seems an important book to me. The fact that he's not a philosopher works in his favour in my view.

It's occured to me that you could say that the way the world exists in the absence of an observer is indeterminate. Whereas the realist picture is that the vast Universe exists before anyone is around to observe it, what that view doesn't understand is that to the extent this is a picture, even a scientifically-informed picture, the mind is implicitly the author of that (or any) picture or theory or measurement. It is the work of the 'unseen seer'.

Furthermore that the ground for the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences, is that mathematics conforms to formal structures within conscious experience and so overcomes the perceived separation between observer and observed that seems to be a basic fact of existence, but is actually not.

It seems to me phenomenalism is unarguably true. — Art48

How are maths and logic accomodated by this theory?

I think phenomenalism is basically an arcane textbook entry in the history of philosophy. It has, at best, one part of the elephant, but there are many fundamental elements of knowledge it can't account for.

Is phenominalism different from phenomenology? — Gregory

Yes. The former is a minor strand in empirical philosophy, the latter is a major philosphical school in its own right.

Ladies and gentlemen: the elephant is no longer in the room.

I hope you’re right but there’s a lot going against it. Even if everyone was in agreement it would still be very hard.

The hidden state or better, processes, that cause us to see the cup are the whole set of conditions: environment, distance, position, cup, lighting and our visual systems ( have I forgotten anything?). — Janus

The question can't be answered from the level on which it posed. Which is why it

signifies nothing. — Banno

WASHINGTON — President Biden bowed to political reality on Friday, conceding that he had been unable to persuade a holdout coal-state Democrat, or any Republicans in the Senate, to back legislation that had been his greatest hope to confront the climate crisis.

Ending more than a year of fruitless negotiations over a proposal to push the nation’s electricity and transportation sectors away from fossil fuels, Mr. Biden said Friday he was instead prepared to “take strong executive action to meet this moment.”

Even for a president who has prided himself on compromise and the art of the possible, it was a marked retreat, one driven by the economic and political challenges of rampant inflation.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/15/climate/biden-inflation-climate-manchin.html

In hindsight, about ten years from now, this will be recognised as one of those watershed moments when the battle was lost.

If the world is ‘material’ because of the way it responds to our interactions with it, why can’t we study our mind the same way, by reflecting on it ? — Joshs

In one sense, we obviously do, but go back to the origins of phenomenology (speaking of which, the first entry in Pinter's voluminous bibliography is 'Bayne T, Montague M (2011) Cognitive Phenomenology'). As you well know, Husserl critiqued Galileo's depiction of the world in terms of a formal, mathematical structure, and its division into the domain of primary and secondary attributes. The paradigmatic approach of modern science drawn from Galileo and Descartes is to presume the complete separation of the subjective and objective domains. And it holds for any and all kinds of objects. That is why mathematical physics has been paradigmatic for science generally, and why scientific materialism wishes to apply its methodology and mathematical certainty to every domain of knowledge. But that attitude failed completely in the earliest attempts at formulating a scientific approach to psychology, namely in the introspective, first-person reporting of experience by Wilhelm Wundt, which was predictably chaotic and formless and completely unrepeatable.

Husserl's epoché is intended to step out of that dilemma by short-circuiting the sense of division between subject and object, world and self. That's why the embodied cognition (Varela and Thompson) has been able to so fruitfully explore the resonances between phenomenological method and Buddhist philosophical psychology (abhidharma). This is because the Buddhist attitude, similarly, is not grounded in the sense of separation of self and world (in the early Buddhist texts, you frequently encounter the term 'self-and-world' as a designation of the nature of experience, which are said to be 'co-arising', an expression you also find in phenomenology.) The momentary 'dharmas' of the abhidharma are not constituents of objects (as were the material atoms), but moments of lived experience. In that sense, abhidharma is inherently non-dualist in a way that modern scientific method couldn't be.

So, 'studying the mind' is different to studying (say) the motions of the planets or of solid bodies or the tides or movements of animals, for the obvious reason that in this case, we are what we seek to know. We can't stand aside from our own mind and treat it as an object of instrospection (as Wundt tried to do). It requires a very different stance or attitude - something which is pioneered in some of those very enactive/embodied cognition approaches you frequently bring up. It is the domain of 'mindfulness-awareness'.

That essay I have pinned to my profile (co-authored by Evan Thompson) on 'the Bind Spot of Science' is about exactly this point:

Behind the Blind Spot sits the belief that physical reality has absolute primacy in human knowledge, a view that can be called scientific materialism. In philosophical terms, it combines scientific objectivism (science tells us about the real, mind-independent world) and physicalism (science tells us that physical reality is all there is). Elementary particles, moments in time, genes, the brain – all these things are assumed to be fundamentally real. By contrast, experience, awareness and consciousness are taken to be secondary.

What’s missing here is a recognition that the we don't just model the world, we continuously rebuild it. — Joshs

Pinter doesn't miss that - he comments extensively on the implications of the 'neural binding problem'. The whole point of his book is that we (and all creatures) are constantly engaged in that process. That is how cognition works, but we mistakenly identify what is going on in our own minds with what is 'out there'.

We probe the world and it responds in certain ways based on the nature of our actions and perceptual dispositions. — Joshs

Indeed we do. And because of quantum physics, we have come to realise the role the mind plays in constructing the outcome.

Recent biological models accommodate a relentlessly interactively self-transforming impetus within ecosystems, within organisms, within cells and within dna environments. — Joshs

Indeed, as I mentioned, Pinter provides a voluminous biography which references many of these texts. He's very much part of those developments, not at all an antagonist of it.

And what is the difference between phenomena such that only some are amenable to objective study while others are not? What makes physics a formal system and science of mind a non-formal system? — Joshs

It's conceptually more simple to analyse the motions of bodies because they can be wholly described in terms of simple measurements and the addition of same - the 'addition of simples'. Science of mind is different in principle, because it's first-person (there's been some debate about the validity of the notion of first-person science between Chalmers and Dennett, with the latter predictably ridiculing the very notion.)

For instance, he argues “Physical motion is real but altogether different from the moving window we perceive.” How would he know? Different by what standards? I — Joshs

The rest of that passage is quoted here:

Moreover, the brain has a specialized module to create the sensation of motion, and when we have the experience of moving—or watching something move—the awareness of motion is based on a sensation of visual flow induced in conscious awareness by the brain. What living beings perceive as motion is an artifact created by the mind. Physical motion is real but altogether different from the moving window we perceive.

This is validated with reference to the neural binding problem mentioned above. To quote from it again:

There is a plausible functional story for the stable world illusion. First of all, we do have a (top-down) sense of the space around us that we cannot currently see, based on memory and other sense data—primarily hearing, touch, and smell. Also, since we are heavily visual, it is adaptive to use vision as broadly as possible. Our illusion of a full field, high resolution image depends on peripheral vision—to see this, just block part of your peripheral field with one hand. Immediately, you lose the illusion that you are seeing the blocked sector. When we also consider change blindness, a simple and plausible story emerges. Our visual system (somehow) relies on the fact that the periphery is very sensitive to change. As long as no change is detected it is safe to assume that nothing is significantly altered in the parts of the visual field not currently attended.

But this functional story tells nothing about the neural mechanisms that support this magic. What we do know is that there is no place in the brain where there could be a direct neural encoding of the illusory detailed scene (Kaas and Collins 2003). That is, enough is known about the structure and function of the visual system to rule out any detailed neural representation that embodies the subjective experience. — Jerome S. Feldman

That's the point that Pinter makes about 'figments' - that qualia, and indeed not only qualia, but the 'subjective unity of perception', cannot be detected as objectively existent. Yet, they're real, and to deny it, leads to Dennett's absurd 'eliminativism'.

I would ask the question, in what sense can motion, space and time be considered to exist outside any perspective or point-of-view? When we perceive 'the passage of time', what is it that is aware of duration, the period between two moments? When we perceive space, what is aware of what is nearer, and what is further away? Those elements are furnished by the mind (which is in line with Kant's metaphysic of time and space). In other words, time and space do not have completely 'observer-independent' status. They're reliant on perspective. But take them out of the picture, and what can be said to exist?

In short, I don't think Pinter's book is incompatible with phenomenological philosophy and psychology.

Only the very ignorant use wiki. — Jackson

Wikipedia is a perfectly respectable source of information, I have contributed to it, and I donate monthly. Speaking of ‘ignorance’, did you manage to validate your spurious claim about Aristotle?

The United States and Europe could have done much to prevent this conflict — Tzeentch

So no matter what Putin does, the fault is with the West?

So do you think Putin's war is justified? That Ukraine should just give up the fight and allow Russia to annex their country? What do you reckon would be the best outcome of this catastrophe?

I only comment in this thread to register my sense of outrage at what is being done by Putin. That is all. As to what can be done, none of the options are easy. No doubt there's going to be much more suffering, a lot of economic disruption and even starvation, but the world has to stay the course, Putin cannot be allowed to claim victory. The best outcome would be the collapse of his regime and the emergence of a better regime in Russia, but I'm not holding out a lot of hope. That's all I have to say on it.

Cruise missiles fired from a nuclear submarine directly into a residential area. It is as Zelensky says state terrorism, no question.

Yeah this thread is a real trolling magnet. Strange how the internet brings out the worst, I’m gong to stick to obscure philosophical arguments in future.

Because Putin has no warrant, no mandate, no cause whatever. He’s acting completely outside international law, he’s responsible for the deaths of millions, and to negotiate with him is to cave into terrorism. If someone broke into your house and shot most of your family dead, would you offer him concessions to leave?

:up: my hope, and belief, also.

I think this is a mangled version of the well-known elephant analogy, in which a group of blind men are told to go and touch an elephant and report on what kind of beast it is. One touches the tail and reports an animal with bristles, another the trunk and reports a long, thin beast. And so on. Of course the moral of the story is that none of them can see the whole elephant, because they're, you know, blind, whereas by implication the [prophet/sage/philosopher] who sets them the task can see 'the whole elephant'. The wiki entry is here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_men_and_an_elephant

. I believe Aristotle originated that phrase (don't remember where). He tells the story of two philosophers standing before an elephant. — Jackson

I'd be very interested if you can produce any reference for that, I think it's bogus.

Don't know why you're giving oxygen to Russian propaganda. The story of day is surely the residential apartments and offices in the non-combatant city of Vinnytsia, destroyed by a Russian Cruise missle launched from a nuclear submarine.



Zelensky says that Russia must be formally designated a terrorist state, and he has good grounds for saying that. Of course it's impossible for NATO or the West to join the fight, on pain of nuclear armageddon, although exploiting that fear (along with the economic pain and mass starvation) is all part of the Putin playbook.

First let me say I really appreciate the care you've taken to raise those points.

I don't think Pinter juxtaposes a real, physical world, with a world of appearances. It's not as if the real thing is hiding behind the sensory depiction of it. The first words in the book are:

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. — Pinter, Charles. Mind and the Cosmic Order p1

He doesn't go on to say much about the world as it is in the absence of any observer, because (I think) in his view, there's nothing to be said about it.

Furthermore he says, as I previously put it, that the mind operates by different laws to physics, which are not derivable from it:

The mystery is that in an age when physics has carried us into such a fantastic and unimaginable reality, we still balk at the idea that there are mental phenomena which do not follow the rules of classical physics. Why is it so hard to accept that in a universe in which space-time bends and curves, where particles of matter weave in and out of existence, and space itself is particulate—why would it be strange to accept that the mind of living animals is something complex whose laws are not the same ones that have been familiar to us for centuries?

'the same ones' referring to the laws of physics. So he's not arguing for any normative role for science or that the understanding of the mind is derived from or dependent on physical laws. Where he appeals to science, is what cognitive neuroscience has discovered about the way the sentient mind organises cognitions into gestalts.

There's a section heading Materialism and Objectivity, which is where he explicitly mentions Kant and noumena, and the requirement of scientifically objective statements to be utterly devoid of any subjective sense, which, he says, results in:

The “zombie universe” of objective science [which] is exactly the mind-independent universe discussed in Chapter 2: It is the residue after all sensable qualities of objects have been taken away, leaving objects with no color, appearance, feel, weight or any other discernible features.

So he's not suggesting that the "zombie universe" is real, and its depiction in the sensory systems of animals is an illusion. Rather he says that what we instinctively take to be an external reality, is really the 'manufactory of the brain' (in Schopenhauer's exact words.)

our representational filters prevent us from seeing the world as it is. — Joshs

From a Buddhist (and even, possibly, even a neo-Kantian) perspective there is no 'world as it truly is', because 'the world' is itself a composite of conditioned factors continually arising and ceasing. Real being is something which it lacks. Seeing through the apparently solid reality of 'the world', is 'seeing things as they are' - but that can be a disillusioning realisation:

For Trungpa, a truly spiritual journey toward basic sanity has to begin with a sense of hopelessness — the recognition of the complete and utter hopelessness of our current situation. He assured his readers that they are required to undertake a major process of disillusionment in order to relinquish their belief in the existence of an external panacea that can eliminate their suffering and pain. We have to learn to live with our pain instead of hoping for something that will cause all of our hesitations, confusions, insanity, and pain to disappear. This theme is elaborated in [the book] Illusion’s Game:

Creating this kind of hope is one of the most prominent features of spiritual materialism… There are so many promises involved. So much hope is planted in your heart. This is playing on your weakness. It creates further confusion with regard to pain. You forget about the pain altogether and get involved in looking for something other than pain. And this itself is pain… That is what we will go through unless we understand that the basic requirement for treading the spiritual path is hopelessness (Illusion’s Game, pP. 61-62.) — Traleg Kyagbon Rinpoche

'Hopelessness' in the sense of abandoning hope of some ultimate gain or reward to be had.

Anyway, that's all a digression, although I've mentioned before I first encountered Kant through T R V Murti's book on Buddhist philosophy so that's obviously left an imprint.

The subjects which are *not* dealt with in Pinter's book are the nature of reason and the role of creativity, and many other such grand topics, but then part of the appeal is its simplicity and the fact it has specific focus. But he devotes quite a lot of the book to criticising what I think of as scientism (although he doesn't use that word either).

Interesting, but I wouldn’t judge Pinter’s book on the few excerpts I have provided alone. He doesn’t say anything about Wigner’s essay (although he does mention him a couple of times.) That is my own conjecture. I’m not looking for a transcendental basis for scientific truth so much as trying to understand what ‘transcendent’ and ‘transcendental’ mean. I certainly don’t want to posit physics as ‘normatively determinative’, and I don’t think Pinter does that, either.

Another snippet:

Sensations, beliefs, imaginings and feelings are often referred to as figments, that is, creations of the mind. A mental image is taken to be something less than real: For one thing, it has no material substance and is impossible to detect except in the mind of the perceiver. It is true that sensations are caused by electrochemical events in a brain, but when experienced by a living mind, sensations are decisively different in kind from electrons in motion. They are indeed “figments” because they exist nowhere except in awareness. As a matter of fact, they exist only as claims made by sentient beings, with no material evidence to back up those claims. Indeed, brain scans reveal electrical activity, but do not display sensations or inner experience. — Mind and the Cosmic Order

Why this appeals to me, is that I’ve always argued that reason is the relationship of ideas. Nothing physical comes into it, indeed, we can’t even form a notion of ‘physical’ without employing reason. So whereas physicalism wants to claim that reason is derived from or supervenes on or can be reduced to neurological data, what he is saying is that is real on a different plane altogether. And that lends support to one of the basic themes I’ve been working on since joined here: that existence and reality are not the same thing.

(I should add, Pinter also says that all the basic concepts of physics like velocity, mass, etc, are ultimately derived from the embodied experience of resistance, lifting, movement, and so on. In that sense they’re ultimately visceral in origin.)

. That's why we can all see them as a teacup. — Isaac

We see them as teacups, because our culture drinks tea. Another culture might have similarly-shaped object that is called by a different name and is used for another purpose. So its identity is not intrinsic, but imputed to it by us. The teacup obviously has no sense of its own identity, being an inanimate object.

And yet I couldn't just walk into a physics department and propose my own version of what's happening at a quantum scale, could I? — Isaac

The scientific method is after all founded on the reliable notions of observation, measurement and repeatability. A fact, as established by a measurement, should be objective, such that all observers can agree with it.

But in a paper recently published in Science Advances, we show that, in the micro-world of atoms and particles that is governed by the strange rules of quantum mechanics, two different observers are entitled to their own facts. In other words, according to our best theory of the building blocks of nature itself, facts can actually be subjective. — Objective Reality Doesn't Exist, Quantum Experiment Shows

The results are somewhat constrained, but not completely. And that is why the question of the interpretation of physics is still very much an unsolved issue.

By the 'constituents of rational thought' I'm referring to such things as the rules of logic and arithmetic, and so on. Not just any random thought that pops into your head.

In doing so , haven’t you swapped out intrinsic features of an external world for intrinsic features of an internal conceptual world? — Joshs

Notice in your own question the assumption of there really being an internal and external world.

The question I'm grappling with is related to the question of how causal relationships obtain, as discussed in the thread 'Logical Necessity and Physical Causation.' Chris Fuchs makes a remark that quantum physics is 'a law of thought'. That is actually Kantian in spirit, because in Kant, causal necessity itself is an a priori necessity, that is, it is grounded in the operations of reason.

Pinter again:

It appears that nobody today—not psychologists, not philosophers, not thinking laymen—are fully aware of how “magical” it is to see in Gestalt wholes. It gives us knowledge of many things in the same moment, all bound together in one act of conscious awareness. It presents us with an almost godlike overview of wide, stretched-out vistas. Gestalt vision can bring us a view of a whole vast landscape of rivers, villages and distant mountains, all in a single glance. Actually, it does far more than that: A Gestalt picture does not merely bind separate objects together, but creates an entirely new complex entity which did not exist before. It creates a new world of hierarchically structured new objects—a world which could not exist without Gestalt perception.

Pinter, Charles. Mind and the Cosmic Order (p. 33). Springer International Publishing. Kindle Edition.

He notes that this ability to subjectively perceive a unified vista is also the subject of the well-known neural binding problem. He too brings in QBism:

The scheme presented in this book provides a foundation for quantum bayesianism. As explained in the previous chapters, there is a radical divide between the physical world removed from observation—that is, the universe outside the range of any observer—and the aspects of reality created by the minds of living observers. It has been argued that it is the mind that divides reality into distinct, separate objects and creates the shapes and structure of solids. The mind organizes phenomena into complex and comprehensive wholes, and by doing this creates most of the reality that we perceive. In addition to this, the mind lures every individual into believing that what is perceived is present in the external world with the very features and qualities that our brain has assigned to it. Our biologically-designed model of reality is thus superposed on the physical stuff of the world and structures it. It is with this reality that we interact.

Pinter, Charles. Mind and the Cosmic Order (pp. 158-160). Springer International Publishing. Kindle Edition.

So 'external objects' are still constructions - vorstellung in Schopenhauer's logic - within this 'mind-made world'. The mistake that is always made in respect to dualism is to ask how the mind could exist, or what it could be. This invariably seeks to locate the mind with respect to the objective domain, as some purported force or agency on a par with the physical - the so-called ghost in the machine. But the mind is what organises the objective domain into meaningful wholes ('gestalts') and their relationships. So it is not anywhere 'in' the objective domain or even objectively existent (which is why eliminativism seeks to exclude it, not noticing the role that it has in formulating even its own science, as per this paragraph in Schopenhauer.)

Isn’t math a form of logic, and isnt logic a pragmatic construction? — Joshs

You still have its 'unreasonable effectiveness' to consider. Again that is discussed in the other thread I mentioned.