Numbers are not free-floating entities that minds find and interact with. — Real Gone Cat

‘Free floating’ is your description. You’re saying that because you think all real things can only be situated in time and space, so there’s no category available to you which maps against transcendentals such as number. But that’s not unique to you as the culture we’re in has a blind spot about it.

Should that neurologist be able to cause the exact same synapse pattern to fire an hour later, what do you think will happen? — Real Gone Cat

No. Read my argument again, especially the section on representational drift.

I remember reading Roger Scruton, who argued that an awareness of the transcendentals wasn't necessary in life, unless you wanted a full understanding of reality and of each other — Tom Storm

Unless, that is, you wanted to be a philosopher.

What is it that you would contrast mathematical elements to? What is it that completes the sentence "mathematical elements are real, not..."? — Banno

When I first noticed the reality of numbers, it was an epiphany. The idea suddenly occurred to me: everything material is composed of parts, and is temporally de-limited. But this doesn’t apply to numbers: numbers do not come into or go out of existence, and they’re not composed of parts (although later I realised that this strictly only appeals to primes, but even then, numbers are only ever composed of other numbers.) So I thought aha! This is why the ancients believed that numbers were of a higher order of reality than sensable objects. (That was the epiphany.)

At the time, I didn’t think much more about it, until I joined philosophy forums and started asking questions about it. Recently fooloso4 pointed to Jacob Klein’s book, Greek Mathematical Thought and the Origin of Algebra, from which I quote:

Neoplatonic mathematics is governed by a fundamental distiction which is indeed inherent in Greek science in general, but is here most strongly formulated. According to this distinction, one branch of mathematics participates in the contemplation of that which is in no way subject to change, or to becoming and passing away. This branch contemplates that which is always such as it is and which alone is capable of being known: for that which is known in the act of knowing, being a communicable and teachable possession, must be something that is once and for all fixed.

That was the exact intuition which I had had in that epiphany. In my view it is central to the tradition of Western philosophy, but it’s been abandoned. I trace that back to the conflict between scholastic realism and nominalism in the later medieval period. The significance of it is, that the ‘intelligible objects’ (universals, numbers, principles, and the like) belong to a higher order than do the objects of empirical discovery - they belong to the ‘intelligible domain’ (which is not some place.) With the loss of that intuition, then there is the loss of the vertical dimension, the qualitative dimension, and a real metaphysics. This is what I’ve been painstakingly researching the last 10-12 years. Hence my (somewhat unwilling) discovery of Augustine, Aquinas and neo-Thomist philosophy.

Sure mathematical forms and languages and many other things are socially constructed, but they’re not only socially constructed. There are elements of them that are real. (I think that’s the meaning of that saying ‘God made the integers, the rest is the work of man.’)

Notice that the use of mathematics to discover previously unknown facts bears a strong similarity to Kant’s ‘synthetic a priori’.

When I think of the number 3, is there a pattern of synapses that fire in my brain that correlate to that thought? — Real Gone Cat

An excellent question, and I think the answer is ‘no’. That is mistaking one level of explanation with another. Let me explain.

For every number there are many different kinds of symbols, and modes of representation. You can represent it in Latin or Arabic numerals, or in binary code. But in each case, the meaning remains exactly the same - it has to, otherwise you violate the law of identity, because in all situations, 3=3, no matter by what symbolic form it is represented. I recently read an article about something called ‘neural drift’ in mice. It concerns studies of how memories of stimuli are encoded in mouse brains. It was found that even for simple stimuli, the traces of the memory shift constantly around the brain ( ref.) So I don’t see how it’s feasible to propose any kind of literal correspondence between meaning statements and neural configurations.

The same can be said for propositions. Say I want to convey a formula to someone in another language. The translation has to be exact, but the language and syntax are completely different. Provided all of the technical terms have equivalent meaning and the translation is accurate, it can be translated without difficulty. Then send it via computer - the whole string has been translated once again, this time into binary. The recipient takes that formula and inscribes it on a metal plate to attach to a factory wall. The same information now exists in several languages, binary code, inscribed on metal. So all of the forms of the information are completely different, but the meaning remains the same. How could the meaning be physical?

What seems to be missing is a viable (albeit tentative) model of idealism. If all is mind - we need to explain why reality appears consistent over time. Why can't our minds change reality at will? How is it that all people appear to be seperate or discrete entities of consciousness? — Tom Storm

Reality appears consistent to some extent, because we’re embedded in a culture and language group that identifies things according to conventions. Also don’t underestimate how deep habits of cognition go. (That was the point I tried to make about the distinction between self and other stretching back into the fossil record, although it was completely misunderstood.) We have a certain core functionality that corresponds with a great deal of our affective and intellectual make-up, which is individuated at the top-most level by the experiences unique to each of us as persons while retaining a great deal in common with others on various levels. (Kastrup has a lot to say about all of this in Decoding Schopenhauer’s Metaphysics. ) So ‘the mind’ is not just your mind or mine, it is universal.

Why did Wittgenstein say that if a lion could speak we wouldn’t understand him? I think it’s because he is so far outside the form of consciousness that is familiar to humans. We could never understand ‘what it is like to be a lion’ (tip of the hat to Thomas Nagel).

numbers and so on have a reality that is not physical and yet not dependent on any individual mind. That's because they are constructed by communities of minds using language. — Banno

But they have also lead to the discovery of genuinely novel properties which were not in the possession of any community of minds, which is the subject of Wigner’s essay The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences.

One of my pinned articles is from the Smithsonian Magazine, on the topic What is Math? I provide the following excerpt because I believe it makes a profound point in respect of this debate. It starts with an emeritus Professor who defends Platonism. Then there’s a couple of rejoinders from sceptics. And I think it spells out why there is such controversy and pushback against platonism.

“I believe that the only way to make sense of mathematics is to believe that there are objective mathematical facts, and that they are discovered by mathematicians,” says James Robert Brown, a philosopher of science recently retired from the University of Toronto. “Working mathematicians overwhelmingly are Platonists. They don't always call themselves Platonists, but if you ask them relevant questions, it’s always the Platonistic answer that they give you.”

Other scholars—especially those working in other branches of science—view Platonism with skepticism. Scientists tend to be empiricists; they imagine the universe to be made up of things we can touch and taste and so on; things we can learn about through observation and experiment. The idea of something existing “outside of space and time” makes empiricists nervous: It sounds embarrassingly like the way religious believers talk about God, and God was banished from respectable scientific discourse a long time ago.

Platonism, as mathematician Brian Davies has put it, “has more in common with mystical religions than it does with modern science.” The fear is that if mathematicians give Plato an inch, he’ll take a mile. If the truth of mathematical statements can be confirmed just by thinking about them, then why not ethical problems, or even religious questions? Why bother with empiricism at all?

Massimo Pigliucci, a philosopher at the City University of New York, was initially attracted to Platonism—but has since come to see it as problematic. If something doesn’t have a physical existence, he asks, then what kind of existence could it possibly have? “If one ‘goes Platonic’ with math,” writes Pigliucci, empiricism “goes out the window.” (If the proof of the Pythagorean theorem exists outside of space and time, why not the “golden rule,” or even the divinity of Jesus Christ?)

Please try and see the unintended irony of these objections. After all, mathematical physics is the crown jewel of modern science. Many eminent physicists and mathematicians have Platonist leanings (Roger Penrose an eminent example). But you can’t admit that Platonism might be true, on the grounds that it ‘sounds religious’ - you’re admitting the reality of something, i.e., numbers, that you can’t interact with via the senses. And if you don’t concur with the consensus view of physicalism or naturalism or materialism, then it obliges you to admit non-material realities, which is a no-go in secular culture.

So it seems to me that the notion of our minds constructing the objects of reality out of those physical properties is entirely consistent with physicalism. Wayfarer seemed to disagree, but I couldn't get him to explain why. End of discussion it seems. Unfortunate. — Isaac

I will try again. The problem that ‘what is physical’ is very much a matter of definition. It is something that constantly changes and evolves. And need I say where definitions originate? Have you heard of Hempel’s dilemma?

As I’ve said a number of times already, I’m not questioning realism, I’m questioning the reality of matter. (I’ll qualify that by saying the intrinsic or inherent reality of matter. I don’t doubt if I get hit by a rock that it will hurt or that one ought not to step in front of buses. As the Muslims say ‘trust in Allah, but tether your camel first’. But that still does not privilege matter with being the fundamental ground of reality.)

The SEP article on idealism says that ‘ the idealist, rather than being anti-realist, is in fact … a realist concerning elements more usually dismissed from reality.’And that’s what I’m arguing. Why? Because I claim that numbers, scientific principles, lexical and logical laws, and much more, are real. Furthermore, that they exist independently of any particular mind, your mind or mine - but that they can only be grasped by a mind. So they’re real, but they’re not material in nature. They are what Augustine described as ‘intelligible objects’. (This is the subject of platonic realism in Mathematics among other things.) So that’s what I’m arguing against materialism. Furthermore that due to the faculty of reason, these elements are just as intrinsic to the world as material objects - or even more so, because it is in virtue of them that we are able to classify, analyse, comprehend and understand the physical world. They are constituents of the human life-world, and they’re neither physical nor derivable from the principles of physicalism, but it is by virtue of our possession of them, that rational thought is possible (which I think is the basic view of classical philosophical rationalism, very much the precursor to philosophical idealism..)

When we say the mind is a ‘product of matter’ presumably we mean by that the ‘product of’ the brain’, and the brain is an evolved organ. But my understanding is that science really has no handle on how the apparently physical brain - and I question whether the embodied brain is really just a physical organ - ‘produces’ or ‘generates’ the mind. It might analogously be better thought of as a receiver than a generator (although who is transmitting what is then a big question.)

The classical philosophical idea of mind was ‘nous’, which is translated as ‘intellect’ but which has a very different meaning to intellect in today’s lexicon. ‘Nous’ was ‘the faculty which comprehends the real.’ And in those times, it was not assumed that everyone knew what is real, by virtue of basic education. It took something more than that.

There was nothing in that account that ran contrary to materialism. — Banno

Except for this

I don't think idealism is opposed to realism. I think it's opposed to the notion of the 'mind-independent reality of the objects of the physical sciences.' Materialism is just the belief that the objects of the physical sciences have an intrinsic or inherent reality, independent of your or my or anyone else's observation of them, and the corollary that the mind is the product or output of those essentially unconcious and undirected material entities — Wayfarer

Which you didn’t respond to adequately in my opinion.

And also this:

But mind is part of the world. — Banno

Where in the world do you see a mind? You see beings with minds, or that loose their mind, or whose minds are clear or confused. But mind is not part of the world, As Husserl put it, 'Consciousness is not a thing among things, it is the horizon that contains everything.'

But what answer do we get when we ask what that "first-person nature of the subject" is? — Banno

That is the subject of 'facing up to the hard problem of consciousness'. You may think that insignificant, but it's one of the papers that got the whole modern philosophy of consciousness movement started. Probably not your cup of tea though.

I suspect I introduced it to you. — Banno

I found it through Google. Franklin acknowledges that there are some 'Gems' but pointedly excludes Kant from susceptibility. And he acknowledges that there is a genuine philosophical issue at the bottom of it, which I think he subtly suggest that Stove doesn't see.

It is obvious that we can posit a possible world without a mind. — Banno

There’s a mind entering this picture in the very act of positing it. Of course you can imagine a world with no mind in it, but that still relies on a perspective. It's the conceit of naturalism to think otherwise.

It would be misguided to deny before the fact that science has much to say about consciousness. — Banno

If there is to be a science of consciousness it has to take into account the first-person nature of the subject - which is exactly what phenomenology set out to do. (Oh that's right, phenomenology's on your no-go list.)

All of the 'articles' on the pomo generator are machine-generated. :lol:

It's Stove's Gem, again, this time with a twist of lemon. — Banno

You should take the time to read Jim Franklin's criticism of Stove's Gem.

The view I have only sounds trite because of the necessity of having to explain it in simple terms. The key term as I tried to explain previously is mind independence.

Fitch’s Paradox of Knowability — Banno

Draws a wide net. And too much symbolic code. Pass on that.

I think that your concern is that idealism rejects the possibility of uknown actual objects, on the grounds that if they are not being observed, then they can't be said to exist. Berkeley solves this problem by introducing God as the ultimate and eternal knower of things.

But I think the difficulty is based on the 'imagined non-existence' of the world - the belief that idealism is saying that if all observers were not to exist, then the universe also would not exist. It is rather like G E Moore's musing that, once all of the passengers are seated, the train wheels would cease to exist on account of them being invisible from the inside of the train.

It sounds like it follows, but again, the mistake is that all of what is understood as both existence and non-existence are themselves mental constructs. This is the point where Kant, Schopenhauer, and Buddhist philosophy all seems to converge. We can't see what would, or would not, exist, in the absence of a mind to make such judgements. But I think that is all for today, life away from the screen is making demands. Thanks for your challenging comments.

The point is the characterisation that a realist will say there are things that are true yet not known, while an idealist will deny this. — Banno

Could you find a reference in support of that? I think that signifies a basic misunderstanding on your part although I'm willing to be corrected. (I think that you are mistaking idealism for solipsism in saying that.)

But mind is part of the world. — Banno

That anything is 'part of' something is a judgement, obviously. The mind is never known as an object of cognition, plainly. Otherwise you would never be able to entertain the argument about whether machines are sentient.

I'm currently midway through an interesting current title, Mind and the Cosmic Order, by Charles Pinter. It's not a philosophy text, although it has many philosophical implications (the author is an emeritus professor of mathematics). The subtitle is 'How the Mind Creates the Features & Structure of All Things', but it's based on neuroscience and maths, not philosophy per se. Pinter says 'my interest has turned to the specific problems involved in modeling structures arising in neuroscience. I am interested in perceptual mechanisms and especially the process of perceptual learning. I have worked on the theoretical aspects of training neural networks.' His theory is that the world as such has no features or objects as such, but that these are all projected onto it by the mind as a consequence of evolutionary development. All kinds of sentient beings see Gestalts, which are functional wholes, but there are no gestalts anywhere outside of perception:

"For complex objects, their Gestalt unity is a creation of the mind and is not an aspect of the underlying matter: Their global character is the way they appear to observers. Their wholeness rests on a material substrate but is not material—it exists only in perception."

Pinter, Charles. Mind and the Cosmic Order (p. 123). Springer International Publishing. Kindle Edition.

He actually gets near to a form of dualism

'It may be concluded that there are two forms of existence: One is the purely material: Its properties are fully accounted for by the addition of simples. The other form of existence is the one given to observers. They perceive in Gestalt wholes, and see an entirely different world, rich and complex. The realm of compound wholes is just as real as the realm of simples, but it is not physical. It has the same material content as the physical world, but presents itself differently.'

Pinter, Charles. Mind and the Cosmic Order (p. 125). Springer International Publishing. Kindle Edition.

'Common sense leads us to assume that we see in Gestalts because the world itself is constituted of whole objects and scenes, but this is incorrect. The reason events of the world appear holistic to animals is that animals perceive them in Gestalts. The atoms of a teacup do not collude together to form a teacup: The object is a teacup because it is constituted that way from a perspective outside of itself.'

Pinter, Charles. Mind and the Cosmic Order (p. 3). Springer International Publishing. Kindle Edition.

(Managed to bring cups into it ;-) )

I've argued for several years that the mooted distinction between an internal and an external world is misguided. — Banno

And the reason I think it's fundamental is because it is the very condition of individual existence - even of the existence of the very simplest lifeforms. The very most basic thing that any life form has, is a sense of itself in the environment - the ability to avoid harm, seek nourishment, find conditions suitable for growth and so on. These capacities have been observed in even single-celled organisms. And in developmental psychology, one of the primary divisions that is formed in early infanthood is the ability to differentiate the self from the world, a sense which is almost entirely absent in newborns.

The net result of all of this is that the sense of self and other, mine and not mine, what is internal to me and what is in the world, is very deeply rooted in the psyche (or soul). It's a fundamental condition of existence. And my intuition is, that this is also fundamental to the Gordian knot that a transcendental philosophy has to untie. It's a deep and difficult topic and one rarely encountered in today's philosophy.

I don't think a conspiracy of anti-idealist sentiment will cut it. — Banno

It's not a conspiracy so much as a cultural artefact. I enrolled in formal philosophy, as you know, under David Stove and others - they told me philosophy, as it is now taught and understood, is not what interests me. Which is true! And that's because it's become an academic parlour game, a technical subject of specialists who talk mainly to themselves. I have no time for many of the 20th c analytical philosophers, if I thought that constituted philosophy I'd have no interest in the subject.

I'm with Pierre Hadot and Lloyd Gerson, and the others of that ilk, who say that modern analytic philosophy radically departs from the real concerns of philosophy. I'm gradually getting through Gerson's last, Platonism and Naturalism: The Possibility of Philosophy.'Gerson contends that Platonism identifies philosophy with a distinct subject matter, namely, the intelligible world, and seeks to show that the Naturalist rejection of Platonism entails the elimination of a distinct subject matter for philosophy. Thus, the possibility of philosophy depends on the truth of Platonism.' And the reason for all this is that philosophy has a spiritual facet - it's not the same as religion, but shares a common border, if you like. And because of secular culture's fear of religion, it can't be tolerated.

What seems odd to me is that I entirely agree with what you have said above, and yet I would, casually, count myself as a realist. — Banno

I don't think idealism is opposed to realism. I think it's opposed to the notion of the 'mind-independent reality of the objects of the physical sciences.' Materialism is just the belief that the objects of the physical sciences have an intrinsic or inherent reality, independent of your or my or anyone else's observation of them, and the corollary that the mind is the product or output of those essentially unconcious and undirected material entities, as expressed by Daniel Dennett thus:

Love it or hate it, phenomena like this [i.e. organic molecules] exhibit the heart of the power of the Darwinian idea. An impersonal, unreflective, robotic, mindless little scrap of molecular machinery is the ultimate basis of all the agency, and hence meaning, and hence consciousness, in the universe. — Daniel Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life

ever encountered the pomo generator? (Hint: after scanning the content, hit refresh, it will auto-generate a new article.)

So let's take an example. Is there a teapot in orbit around Jupiter (an example from Russell)? We cannot be certain if there is or is not such a teapot. It seems unlikely, but we have not yet inspected every item in orbit around Jupiter. — Banno

An idealist might just as easily say that it's a meaningless statement, a trifling hypothetical that's not worth debating.

Mind is somehow intrinsic to reality. — Banno

This is true, and I think it's also why h. sapiens are designated 'beings'. But it's important to grasp that in saying that, you're not necessarily positing mind as an objective constituent of reality, in the sense that atoms or quantum fields might be.

An idealist will claim that there cannot be unknown truths. — Banno

That's a novel line of argument, I've never encountered that before.

The fact that not many philosophers currently endorse idealism may be nothing other than an indication of the current stagnation of the subject of philosophy in the academy. Before about the first world war, idealism in various forms was the dominant school of philosophy.

The way I see it, the fact that science, which assumes materialism, has itself proved that the world as we experience it is a mental construction, does seem to deal quite a blow to materialism. — Hello Human

Don’t confuse science and materialism. Science assumes materialism for practical reasons, it’s when it becomes a philosophical ideology that it is problematical. There are many scientists who don’t hold to it.

At risk of being insulted again, I would aver that what idealism calls into question is the mind independent nature of matter.

The universe is either deterministic or non-deterministic, order or chaos respectively. — punos

Is it that black and white? After all if absolutely everything was chaos, then nothing could exist, as existence requires order. But if everything was determined, then nothing new could occur. So it’s not a one or the other situation, there is both chaos and order.

Are there any strong arguments for free will? — TiredThinker

Only that if there’s no free will, there’s nothing to discuss, because the outcome of any discussion is already predetermined, so it’s not worth having.

Further down the SEP entry:

the idealist, rather than being anti-realist, is in fact … a realist concerning elements more usually dismissed from reality. (Dunham, Grant, & Watson 2011: 4)

:up:

The second is nearer to my sense of what idealism means, but neither of them really capture my sense of it. The paragraph down the page a little quoting A C Ewing is perhaps nearer to how I see it.

I'll have another attempt at answering your question:

Whence the data that the senses are processing? Where does the data originate? — Banno

I understand that humans are sentient beings situated in the world, and that sense data originate with objects (and other subjects) in that world. But to refer back to one of the earlier passages, 'Raw sensations do not yet give us experiences of objects. The sensations have to be ordered by our forms of sensory intuition (space and time) and our forms of conceptual understanding (the categories, prime among which is causality); only then do we experience a single, ordered, integrated reality consisting of interconnected objects.' That is very similar in content to the paragraph following your quoted passages in the SEP article.

So it is that ordering and categorising which creates the life-world which is the world in which we dwell, which is synthesised by the observing mind, comprising sensory data combined with the structures of conceptual understanding (and much else besides, language, culture, and so on).

I think I understand the intuitive objection to that, which is the strong sense we have of the distinction between what is 'inside' and what is 'external' to us, and that what is external is real, while what is internal is 'only' subjective. The question is, where does that division exist? To which I would respond, that is also internal to the observing mind, it is one of the fundamental parameters of being conscious where it appears as the distinction between self and other, and self and world. (That is something that is made much more explicit in some forms of Buddhist philosophy but note also the resemblance to the idea of the 'epistemic cut' which comes up in quite a few of Apokrisis' discussions.

By the way, the topic I said was too complex, was Kant's criticism of Berkeley's idealism which can be found here.)

Hope that is helpful.

Divine law appears to be what religious people imagine it to be and I think it is important to have such an imagined notion of goodness because it would bring out the best in us. — Athena

"notice the element of judgement - which is something characteristic of humans." Would not the judgment depend on our own individual nervous system and hormonal condition at the moment and our age and what we have learned and experienced? — Athena

You see how these two are linked. What you're getting at here is the question of moral realism - are there standards and mores that are universal in scope, or are all such ideas social constructs or a matter of individual predeliction?

Secular cultures tend to instinctively reject, or at least call into question, any idea of 'Divine Law'. So as an alternative to that it seeks biological reasons, or evolutionary reasons, or at any rate something that can be grounded scientifically as distinct from in what is thought of as religious lore.

Which is quite reasonable - as far as it goes. But as you're asking fundamental questions, it would be worth taking a wider view. What, after all, is 'the phenomenon of man'? I suppose that's a kind of 'why are we here?' question. There's no easy answers to such big questions, but it's worth calling out the fact that the general consensus in scientific cultures is the belief that life is a game of chance (oh, and the ability to adapt and survive, which generally translates into 'success'). In the presumed absence of a 'higher power', life is something that seemingly just happened. And that has consequences of its own. One of the common responses is that we 'create our own meaning'. In other words, the answer to the question 'why are we here?' is 'it's up to you'. But then, if there are no templates or patterns around which to base a response - and there's precious few in consumer culture - then it's a much bigger question than it looks.

So - it might be something more than 'individual nervous system and hormonal condition at the moment and our age and what we have learned and experienced'. It's where such questions as natural law, human rights, and many other large topics intersect. (I'm not trying to give answers here, just teasing out the question.)

It's something I don't want to get into an argument about. I probably should not have made that remark.

Whence the data that the senses are processing? — Banno

It's true that idealism is not solipsism. This was the basis of Kant's critique of Berkeley. Probably a bit too technical to go into.

Sorry but I detest Nietszche. I know I don't understand him well but nothing I've seen makes me want to understand him any better.

The idealist sees his or her mind as fundamental to reality. Nothing is greater than their own mind. — Real Gone Cat

Mature idealism speaks in terms of 'mind'. Not 'my mind' or 'your mind'. Take a look at this blog. The author name is Peter Saas, I know nothing about him except what's on his blog, but he seems to know an awful lot of stuff - far more than myself. He has a panoramic view of the whole subject drawn from ancient, modern, and Eastern sources. A snippet:

Kant was deeply disturbed by Hume’s attack on causality. His respect for the physical science developed by Copernicus, Galileo and Newton was so great that he simply could not stomach Hume’s dismissal of causal laws. Where Hume went wrong, according to Kant, was in his assumption that causality, if it exists at all, must be a feature of external reality, in other words, that causal connections must be connections between real objects, independent of our consciousness. But, as Kant argued, such external objects are “nothing to us”. Objects become something for us, i.e. they become accessible to us as experienceable and knowable objects, only if they conform to our forms of cognition, and causality is one such form. Raw sensations do not yet give us experiences of objects. The sensations have to be ordered by our forms of sensory intuition (space and time) and our forms of conceptual understanding (the categories, prime among which is causality); only then do we experience a single, ordered, integrated reality consisting of interconnected objects. Hence Kant’s Idealism: the world to be known by us is not an “external world” outside of consciousness, but a construction within consciousness, an ordering of sensory material by means of cognitive forms such as time, space and causality.

---

It's just possible that your mind is not the pinnacle of creation. Maybe subjective experience is actually the result of your brain's limitations! Limitations imposed by our faulty means of interfacing with external reality (i.e, the senses), and limitations imposed by our faulty cognitive abilities. Subjective experience is just our brains trying to make sense of it all. On the scale of paramecium to omniscience, we're much closer to the paramecium. — Real Gone Cat

We know what a paramecium is, but a paramecium has zero concept of what we are.

The physicalist sees his or her mind as just one of many products of a greater reality. They know that if all human minds cease to exist tomorrow, the Earth will go on circling the Sun.

It's the difference between hubris and humility. — Real Gone Cat

That's the exact opposite of the reality of the situation. The physicalist takes her own meagre sense-knowledge - 'science' - as the gold standard for what can be judged to be real. Because post-Enlightenment science is completely extroverted and 'objectified', it has no comprehension of the role of the observing mind in the constitution of science itself - at least, it didn't, until quantum physics came along and punched it in the nose. That's why a lot of modern physicists since James Jeans and Arthur Eddington have displayed an idealist streak in their popular writings. Everyone knows 'scientific materialism', but there is also such a thing as 'scientific idealism' - see Reality is just a State of Mind, Bernard D'Espagnat.

As said, from the data provided by the senses, co-ordinated by the mind, the limbic system, and the other sub-systems that comprise the human - which is quite in keeping with Platonic (objective) Aristotelian (hylomorphic) and Kantian (transcendental) forms of idealism. Your mind is continually synthesising, combining and judging, and that activity is what constitutes your reality, or should we say, your being. The task of philosophy is understanding that, as Schopenhauer says in the opening paragraph of World as Will and Idea.

So, If I understand well, idealism is the view that the nature of reality as we know it is all grounded in the human mind? — Hello Human

Indeed. And I think it can be supported with reference to science.

According to evolutionary biology, H. Sapiens evolved through tens or hundreds of millions of years. Through this process our sensory and intellectual abilities have been honed and shaped by the exigencies of survival, through billions of lifetimes in various life-forms - fish, lizard, mammal, primate and finally hominid - in such a way as to eventually give rise to the capabilities that we have today.

Cognitive and evolutionary psychology have revealed that conscious perception, while subjectively appearing to exist as a steady continuum, is actually composed of a heirarchical matrix of millions of interacting cellular transactions, commencing at the most basic level with the parasympathetic system which controls one’s respiration, digestion, and so on, up through various levels to culminate in that peculiarly human ability of rational thought (and beyond, although that is beyond the scope of natural science.)

Consciousness plays a central role in co-ordinating these diverse activities so as to give rise to the sense of continuity which we call ‘ourselves’ - and also the apparent coherence and reality of the 'external world'. Yet it is important to realise that the naïve sense in which we understand ourselves, and the objects of our perception, to exist, is dependent upon the constructive activities of the mind the bulk of which are completely unknown to us (as demonstrated by Kant in his famous Critiques).

When you perceive something - large, small, alive or inanimate, local or remote - there is a considerable amount of work involved in ‘creating’ an object from the raw material of perception. Your eyes receive the lightwaves reflected or emanated from it, your mind organises the image with regards to all of the other stimuli impacting your senses at that moment – either acknowledging it, or ignoring it, depending on how busy you are; your memory will then compare it to other objects you have seen, from whence you will recall its name, and know something about it ('star', 'tree', 'frog', etc. These are gestalts, organised conceptual wholes, which the mind synthesises from sense data through the process of apperception.)

In other words, your consciousness is not the passive recipient of sensory objects which exist irrespective of your perception of them - the fabled 'tabula rasa' or blank slate of the British empiricists. Instead, consciousness is an active agent which constructs reality - partially on the basis of sensory input, but also on the basis of unconscious processes, memories, intentions, and so on. And in the case of h. sapiens, also through the faculty of reason, which exists in only rudimentary form in other species, as well as through intuition, which together provide the unique ability of self-awareness, by which the being can become aware of the way in which the mind creates its world, which is one of the fundamental principles of Buddhism.

This is why I believe that a thoroughly scientifically-aware form of idealism is the philosophy of the future. Materialism in its classical sense - the idea that the Universe consists of inanimate lumps of matter and undirected energy which somehow give rise to life - will be consigned to history.

Again, appeals to empiricism are perfectly warranted. It's a very convincing form of evidence. — Isaac

But you've already agreed in respect of the issue at hand that there can be no evidence for materialist theories of mind:

It's just a model I find most convincing, that's all. Just like Catholics and God. — Isaac

the fact that we can't provide proofs doesn't preclude its reasonableness as a model. — Isaac

There’s a certain duplicity here, coming from someone who makes constant appeals to empiricism.

It's perfectly possible to believe that mental events are caused entirely by physical matter and yet also believe that they will never be understood that way. This is, in fact, my personal position. — Isaac

So how is a causal explanation that can't be understood anything other than an article of faith? 'Well, we'll never really know how it works, but even so, we must believe it.' It's like a Catholic talking about transubstantiation. ;-)

(Although perhaps this view is similar to mysterians, who claim that 'although we know that the conscious mind is nothing more than the brain, it is simply beyond the conceptual apparatus of human beings to understand how this can be the case.')

If I were to claim "It is true that my thoughts are just neural states" then I agree with the analysis. I cannot say such a thing without recursion because the means by which I've determined it to be true must itself be nothing but a set of neural states and there's no reason to believe they yield 'truth'. In fact, the very concept of 'truth' would be meaningless since a 'true' state of affairs would just be a state of affairs which elicited a particular neural state (the state of something seeming to be true). — Isaac

:up:

But his recursion affects reason no less. If I say that my thoughts are just logical relations, I must have used a logical relation to arrive at that conclusion and it is the logical relation of facts which lead me to believe it is true. But if 'truth' is just those facts which seem to result from a logical relation, then I've no ground on which to claim that logical relations lead to truth. The argument is no less self-immunised. — Isaac

But notice the sleight-of-hand. The reason that describing thought as neural states robs it of explanatory power, is because in doing so you are appealing to something other than logic. You're implicitly appealing to a physical (in this case neurophysiological) cause. But the reason this particular appeal is recursive, is because it is attempting to explain the very faculty which is itself the source of explanations, namely, reasoned inference. The theorist has to appeal to reason to establish the axiom that 'thought is a neurological product' - but in so doing she must always be using the very faculty which she is proposing to explain. Hence the circularity. But it doesn't follow that reason itself is subject to the same criticism because reason is the court of appeal for any and all claims.

Yet we know perception is flawed. Illusions exist. We can resolve that recursion quite adequately for our needs by coming to a collective decision about what is real (and hence what is an illusion). — Isaac

Using reason.

Why can intentionality no be constituted of neurons and exchanges of ions across synapses? Why must it be constituted of something else? — Isaac

For the reasons we have been discussing.

When I show you an empirical proof, you take it to be proof, you agree. As does virtually everyone. — Isaac

Except for all the thousands of issues for which there is a range of different interpretations, huge controversies raging, threatened paradigms, etc etc.

It's you and Wayfarer who want to add some religious belief — Isaac

What religious belief? Haven't said anything about religion in this entire thread.

I shall check out the Jesus Project. — Tom Storm

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcus_Borg . Particularly cool scholarly member of that school.

matter which has no spatial extension — Metaphysician Undercover

Any examples of that you could show us?

No, I mean that the objective-subjective distinction does not help. — Banno

I think if you frame it properly, it's very important. I found a current analytical philosophy book that talked about this, I'll try and remember it.

Are you claiming that LaMDA does not have a subjective life, but that you do, and yet that this mooted subjective life is not observable by anyone but the subject? — Banno

I know you asked that to someone else, but I'd like to offer a response.

Empirically speaking, the only instances of conscious life that can be observed are living organisms, which exhibit conscious activity in various degrees, with simple animals being at the lower end of the scale and higher animals and h. sapiens at the higher end.

It's still an open problem what makes a living being alive and what the nature of mind or of life really is. But I think it's perfectly reasonable to assert that computer systems don't possess those attributes at all. They don't display functional autonomy and homeostasis, for example.

I don't think it's a leap to claim that the only subjects of experience that we know of in natural terms are organisms, and that computers are not organisms. We don't know exactly what makes a living being alive, but whatever that is, computers do not possess it. So the insistence that this is something that has to be proved is a fatuous claim, because there's no reason to believe that there is anything to prove. That's why I said the burden of proof is on those who claim that computers are actual subjects of experience.

I also note in reference to the subject of this OP that experts in AI are universal in dismissing Blake Lemoine's claim, that his employer has repeatedly suggested that he undergo a psychiatric examination and suspended his employment, and that the only place where his purported evidence can be viewed is on his own blog.

So enough arm-waving already.

Heidegger's inspiration. Haven't read enough of him. — ZzzoneiroCosm

I am meaning to get around to his intro to metaphysics. I've not tackled Being and Time and not sure if I want to make the investment. Besides I can't quite forgive him his enrollment in the Nazi Party.

subjectivity is not open to our inspection — Banno

Oh, you mean it's not objective! So that's it. No wonder, then.

Curious to me that those who have no use for the word 'subjectivity' prefer not to draw a line between creatures and machines. Thoughts? — ZzzoneiroCosm

There's an expression you encounter in philosophy, 'forgetfulness of being'. The fact that the distinction can't be made between humans and devices (and also between humans and animals) betokens that forgetfulness, in my opinion. It's reminiscent of the Platonic 'anamnesis' (which means 'unforgetting', meaning we're generally in a state of 'amnesis', amnesia, due to forgetfulness). I think it's because we're so utterly absorbed in the phenomenal domain that we forget our real nature and then fiercely resist being reminded about it. (Bracing for flak :yikes: )

Two books:

You are not a Gadget, Jaron Lanier

Devices of the Soul, Steve Talbott.

'Primary' as in most fundamental is a different meaning to 'primary' as in most important. We're talking here about the causes of our mental events. Materialism is saying that those causes are material. Unless idealism is saying that those causes are not material, then it is not saying anything incompatible with materialism. — Isaac

Idealism, as I interpret it, is definitely saying that. To say that the cause of mental events - the cause of thought or of a chain of reasoned inference - can be understood in molecular terms, undermines the efficacy of reason. Why? When you say you believe something because of some reason, you're not pointing to a physical, causal chain, but to a rational inference based on 'if-then' statements.

To quote an analysis by a current philosopher 'The only form that genuine reasoning can take consists in seeing the validity of the arguments, in virtue of what they say. As soon as one tries to step outside of such thoughts (e.g. by describing them in terms of molecular properties) one loses contact with their true content. And one cannot be outside and inside them at the same time: If one thinks in logic, one cannot simultaneously regard those thoughts as mere psychological dispositions (or neurophysical activities), however caused or however biologically grounded. If one decides that some of one's psychological dispositions are, as a contingent matter of fact, reliable methods of reaching the truth (as one may with perception, for example), then in doing so one must rely on other thoughts that one actually thinks, without regarding them as mere dispositions. One cannot embed all one's reasoning in a psychological theory, including the reasonings that have led to that psychological theory. The epistemological buck must stop somewhere.'

My wife is made of nothing but molecules. That doesn't have any bearing on how important she is. — Isaac

I submit your wife (and you, and I, and everyone else) are constituted by intentional acts. Living creatures are intentional from the outset. The problem is, if you say that what the mind is nothing but the activities of neurons and exchanges of ions across synapses, then you're excluding intentionality from the picture as a matter of course - which is very much the point at issue in this whole debate.

Contrary to the image you may have of me, I have no issue with the limits of empirical research in explaining human mental events. What I take issue with is the idea that some other form of enquiry would do any better. — Isaac

I don't have an image of you but I notice that your arguments generally assume a kind of positivist attitude. Please don't take that as an ad hominem or a pejorative, this is a philosophy forum, and here we're discussing philosophical ideas. Your attitude, which is generally positivist and presumptively materialist ('presumptively' because you regard other kinds of explanations as speculative and unprovable, as you say in your own words) is characteristic of a lot of people. And I appreciate your line of questioning, as it has really made me think about my arguments, but I stand by them.

There's nothing contrary about claiming the 'primacy' of the mind over the 'independence' of the source of what we know. Primacy and dependence are, again, two different properties. — Isaac

But what is dependency dependent upon, if not the primary? They’re defined in relation to each other.

One might be a staunch materialist and still believe in the primacy of mind or experience. — Isaac

I don't think so. They're contradictory views. 'Materialism, also called physicalism, in philosophy, the view that all facts (including facts about the human mind and will and the course of human history) are causally dependent upon physical processes, or reducible to them'.

But in neither case is it 'forgotten' that the mind of this 'third-person' is a mind — Isaac

I don't know about that, either. Dennett's eliminative materialism holds that the understanding of the mind as an intentional agent is mistaken. Of course he can't claim that the mind simply doesn't exist, but he does claim it can be wholly understood in terms of unconscious neural processes, something which he calls 'unconscious competence'.

how are you linking standards of evidence to the ability of a mind to comprehend itself? — Isaac

Self-knowledge, having insight into your own mind, is not a matter for empirical research. What are the standards of evidence when you have a cathartic insight into your own behaviour or character? You can't necessarily prove its validity to anyone else, although others might notice a change about you, but that wouldn't make it any less real.

One talks about the constituents of that which causes our mental experiences, the other about how we come to know of it. Two different questions entirely. — Isaac

Ontological and epistemological, respectively - but they're not entirely different. The gist of it is that materialism claims that matter, or matter-energy, or whatever it turns out to be, has a kind of mind-independent or inherent reality which is the source or ground of everything that we see and know, whereas idealism stresses the primacy of mind or experience.

That is the subject of the article I mentioned above - the 'blind spot of science' - which criticizes...

...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. The scientific task becomes about figuring out how to reduce them to something physical, such as the behaviour of neural networks, the architecture of computational systems, or some measure of information.

This framework faces two intractable problems. The first concerns scientific objectivism. We never encounter physical reality outside of our observations of it. Elementary particles, time, genes and the brain are manifest to us only through our measurements, models and manipulations. Their presence is always based on scientific investigations, which occur only in the field of our experience.

This doesn’t mean that scientific knowledge is arbitrary, or a mere projection of our own minds. On the contrary, some models and methods of investigation work much better than others, and we can test this. But these tests never give us nature as it is in itself, outside our ways of seeing and acting on things. Experience is just as fundamental to scientific knowledge as the physical reality it reveals.

The second problem concerns physicalism. According to the most reductive version of physicalism, science tells us that everything, including life, the mind and consciousness, can be reduced to the behaviour of the smallest material constituents. You’re nothing but your neurons, and your neurons are nothing but little bits of matter. Here, life and the mind are gone, and only lifeless matter exists.

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.

Sorry for the lengthy quote, but it explains it in the most succint terms I'm aware of.

Can you provide an example from philosophical naturalism where this is 'forgotten'? — Isaac

Daniel Dennett's form of 'eliminative materialism', for example:

What, then, is the relation between the standard ‘third-person’ objective methodologies for studying meteors or magnets (or human metabolism or bone density), and the methodologies for studying human consciousness? Can the standard methods be extended in such a way as to do justice to the phenomena of human consciousness? Or do we have to find some quite radical or revolutionary alternative science? I have defended the hypothesis that there is a straightforward, conservative extension of objective science that handsomely covers the ground — all the ground — of human consciousness, doing justice to all the data without ever having to abandon the rules and constraints of the experimental method that have worked so well in the rest of science. — Daniel Dennett, Whose on First?

Whereas Dennett's critics claim that there's no way to reproduce the reality of first-person experience in third-person terms. That is the basic argument behind Chalmer's 'Facing up to the Hard Problem of Consciousness'.

Does non-empirical analysis take place somewhere other than the mind — Isaac

It has different standards of evidence. Empiricism only considers what can be objectively validated in a third-person sense. Take for example empirical studies of mindfulness meditation, of which there have been many. Such studies will attempt to validate or measure the relationship between such practices and objective reports of symptoms or effects in subjects, generally with a sufficiently large number of subjects to generate a large data set. But that kind of analysis is different to the first-person practice of mindfulness meditation.

The broader point is that self-awareness of the kind that is the subject of (say) Husserl's epoché is of a different order to any form of objective study.