Language shapes philosophy. — Astorre

I was very impressed by this post. It demonstrates things about language that most of us have to gesture at.

At the same time, your post manages to explain (no doubt only roughly) the ideas that permeate different languages. So a given language (in this case, English) seems to be able to explain the ideas implicit in the grammar of other languages. A given language may well have sufficient flexibility to articulate a range of philosophical ideas.

You may or may not have come across a theory on the boundary between philosophy and linguistics, known as the Whorf-Sapir hypothesis, which seems to be close to what you are getting at. See Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy - "Whorfianism" and Wikipedia - Linguistic determinism.

Moreover, the very linguistic distinction between the words "exist" and "to be" (in the sense of "бытийствовать"), "existence" and "being" points to a deeper conceptual cleavage. These words are not synonymous: language captures a distinction that remains, for now, unobvious. In further sections, we will endeavor to philosophically clarify whether this distinction is truly rooted in ontology or if it is merely a grammatical intuition. — Astorre

That's a very good question. I don't know how to answer it. So I shall watch what people say with great interest.

You may or may not have come across "Process Philosophy", often associate with Whitehead. Two more references in case you are interested. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy - Process Philosophy and Wikipedia - Process Philosophy

Could that pre-conscious era be described metaphorically as Gestation : the period between Conception and Birth? — Gnomon

It could. The question would be what impact would that have on how one thought about that process. I'm very suspicious of the idea that we, or the universe, are progressing anywhere - though I know full well that things are always in the process of change. Everything changes, except change itself.

Yet, the question remains : did cosmic Mind exist before the emergence of embodied personal Minds? Or, as some postulate, did our accidental (fortuitous) collective human minds merge into a Cosmic Mind? — Gnomon

I can't think of a Cosmic Mind except as a huge version of the collective mind that seems to emerge in crowds.

Personally, I am not inclined to worship a sentient world, or the implicit Inventor of a "mind-created world", nor to join a social group centered on a relationship with a Cosmos that doesn't communicate or correspond with me. I'm just exploring the wider world to satisfy my own philosophical curiosity. Am I missing some deeper meaning here? :smile: — Gnomon

I feel much the same - especially about worshipping anything. You may be missing a deeper meaning, but at least you are not pursuing chimeras.

For Galileo, how things appeared, on the other hand - color, taste, scent, and so on - were assigned to the mind of the individual. So here was a dualism of a completely different kind to what you're suggesting - between the measurable attributes of bodies, understood as objectively real, the same for all observers, as opposed to how they appeared, which was assigned to the individual mind, and so 'subjectivised'. This is the genesis of the 'Cartesian division' which has been subject to much commentary. — Wayfarer

My main point is to push back against the view that what we call science reveals reality, and replace it with the view that it is based on a "construction" of reality which is not, philosophically at least, any different from any other. (That's not quite right.) The historical changes were the result of a changed methodology - everything revolves around that; that was the hinge, if you like.
I'm not quite sure what you mean by the dualism of a completely different kind; all I was trying to do was to puncture a balloon - or undermine a claim to special status. I'm in pursuit of a more nuanced approach to reality vs appearance.

It was essential to leave out or subtract subjective appearances and the human mind -- as well as human intentions and purposes -- from the physical world in order to permit this powerful but austere spatiotemporal conception of objective physical reality to develop. — Mind and Cosmos, Pp 35-36

That's well expressed. This conception seems much less exceptional when it is spoken of as a conception and by implication one possibility among others. But then, no-one, I think, could say that it was not worth developing, even if there were downsides. On yet the other hand, it has morphed several times since then and seems in the process of morphing again.

Buddhism has always been aware of the way the mind creates (or constructs) our world. That is why there has been extensive consultation between contemporary Buddhist scholarship, psychologists, and neuroscience (see The Mind-Life Institute). But Buddhism doesn't rely on scientific apparatus to attain its insights - it relies on highly-trained awareness to discern these insights about the constructive activities of the mind – although, that said, neuroscientists have devoted resources to exploring the effects of meditation on the mind: — Wayfarer

Yes. I have a lot of time for the diagnosis that Buddhism proposes. But I get stuck on the idealism. I think there is a problem about the idea that the mind "constructs" the world; it's somewhat better when it is our world or the lived world. But that leaves the world simpliciter in the shadows, which seems wrong, somehow. I realize we can't simply say that the mind reveals the world, but I don't think it is really meaningful to say that the mind constructs the world, either. It's obviously not mean literally.

From the reactions to this OP, I'm realizing that it's a very difficult argument to present clearly. Broadly speaking, it's a transcendental argument—that is, it begins not with claims about what exists, but with an analysis of experience and cognition, and then asks: what must be the case for such experience to be possible? (This is why it is epistemological rather than ontological. — Wayfarer

Yes, it certainly is difficult. I think I have a sort of understanding what "transcendental" means or might mean. But I don't really understand the form of this analysis, except in a confused and intuitive way.

One of the key implications is that we are not passive observers of a pre-given world, but active participants in the constitution of the world as we know and live it. To grasp this, we have to reflect on the role our own minds play in shaping the structures of experience—our world of lived meanings. This is precisely where phenomenology enters the picture, since it offers a disciplined way of examining experience from within, rather than assuming it as something merely external or objective. Hence the requirement for a changed perspective, not simply the acquisition of some propositional knowledge. — Wayfarer

Yes, I take that. I don't say I altogether understand it, but there are things about it that make some sense. But how does this fit with Buddhism and meditation?

Where does the measure 'years' originate, if not through the human experience of the time taken for the Earth to rotate the Sun? — Wayfarer

There are lots of fascinating complications, starting with the obvious point that a year on Mars or Venus is different, and a year on the moon is different again and differently conceptualized; then one wonders how long a year would be on the sun. However, I take your point, in a way. Yet I also find myself reflecting that there must be something real - not constructed, but recognized - about the Earth's orbiting the sun, no matter how we conceptualize it.

what must be the case for such experience to be possible? — Wayfarer

I'm afraid I'm prone to afterthoughts. Our problem can be thought of as a kind of antinomy. Our language seems to me to point beyond itself, over and over again. Which seems to be impossible.
We learnt from Wittgenstein's discussion of ostensive definition that pointing is not self-explanatory; it has to be interpreted, and that requires a framework (Wittgenstein says that we need to know "where the word is stationed in the language"). What if it were the case that the existence of a mind-independent world to which we have some sort of access must be the case for our language (and perception, not to mention action) to be possible? Would it be possible for phenomenology that has "bracketed" the external world to recognize that?

So though we know that prior to the evolution of life there must have been a Universe with no intelligent beings in it, or that there are empty rooms with no inhabitants, or objects unseen by any eye. What their existence might be outside of any perspective is meaningless and unintelligible, as a matter of both fact and principle. — Wayfarer

I think that may be common ground. The issue may be what the implications are. I think we have also agreed that our knowledge of how the world was before evolution kicked in, or percipients or homo sapiens appeared is a matter of extrapolating or projecting what we know (present tense). I've suggested the format of these exercises is a counter-factual conditional. If there had been observers, this is what they would have observed. (Berkeley accepts counterfactuals as compatible with his idealism, so I am not presenting it in the way of refutation.)

But what we know of its existence is inextricably bound by and to the mind we have, and so, in that sense, reality is not straightforwardly objective. It is not solely constituted by objects and their relations. Reality has an inextricably mental aspect, which itself is never revealed in empirical analysis. — Wayfarer

This is where the distinction between Cambridge changes or relations and non-Cambridge changes or relations kicks in. For me, the "mental aspect" of reality is a Cambridge relation, that is, that the world before percipients and observers was constituted by objects and their relations.
There's an additional divergence between us. You have denied that the mental acts required to establish our perspective on reality need to be carried out by any particular people. I get the impression that the "noetic act" needs to exist, but its existence is independent of actual people. I just don't get that.

These aren’t speculative metaphysical questions — they are conditions of possibility for scientific knowledge itself. Ignore them, and you don’t avoid metaphysics — you fall into it unwittingly. 'No metaphysics' ends up becoming a particularly poor metaphysics. — Wayfarer

I can just about get my head around "conditions of the possibility of knowledge". I've never had a firm grip on what metaphysics is supposed to be. My philosophical education was most remiss about that.

I’m not denying the reality of the universe prior to observation — I’m saying that what it is, apart from any possible mode of perception, conception, or representation, is not something that science can tell us, because science already presupposes intelligibility, structure, and observation. That is Kant's 'in itself' - to which I add, it neither exists nor doesn't exist. Nothing can be said about it. — Wayfarer

That's all fine, until we get to the "it neither exists nor doesn't exist". It is true that nothing can be said about "unknown unknown", except that nothing can be said - or known - about them. Very little, but not nothing, can be said about "known unknowns". I would say, however, that we know that both exist.
In real life, we discover both kinds as we go along. The existence of these is one of the things that tells me that there is more to the world than what we think about it. But it's not a category - it's a process. We incorporate them into what we already know, and we know that it is very likely that we will come across more as we go on.

That’s the critical point: science gives us knowledge of appearances, not of reality unconditioned by perspective. When we forget this distinction, we turn methodological naturalism into a metaphysical doctrine — and mistake the limits of our mode of knowing for the limits of what is. — Wayfarer

Now, here's another point of divergence. In the 17th century, scientists foreswore the hidden realities of the (Aristotelian) scholastics. The function of science was to understand the realities that we actually experience - except those things that we experience that were not amenable to mathematical treatment - but that was treated as a marginal note. So science was about reality as it appears to us - so about appearances. This got confused by philosophers with their idea of appearances as curious phenomena that hid reality from us. So you remark about "knowledge of appearances" is ambiguous. For science, there is no distinction between appearance and reality. The idea that there are two distinct categories of - I'll call it existence - appearance and reality, is a philosophical invention. In reality, appearances are real and reality is what appears to us. So, the distinction between appearances and reality unconditioned by perspective is a chimera.
Yes, of course appearances are not reality because they are misleading. Truth is, sometimes they are and sometimes they aren't. Philosophy wants to forget the former, but we ought to remember it. This is important to us and to our discussion, because it is the misleading appearances that enable us to identify the limits of our mode of knowing.

Right, so we know that the cosmos was visible prior to the advent of percipients, otherwise there never would have been any percipients. — Janus

A neat point. I'm not sure how convincing it would be for a true idealist. I think you might find that they might argue that since the cosmos was not seen (and could not be seen) before percipients appeared, there is no proof that it was visible. We won't be impressed, of course.

I'd say there is always more to be seen in the seeing of anything, more and finer detail and also different ways of seeing as per the different ways, for example, different species see things. — Janus

Oh, I don't mean to suggest that seeing is not more complicated than it might seem. One difficulty is that the borderline between seeing and understanding is, let me say, a bit moot. Arguable, you will have some description for what you see, which implies some level of understanding. If I see a smudge on the horizon on Monday, and it turns out on Tuesday, when the ship arrives in port that it is a Russian oil tanker, did I see the tanker on Monday, (but did not see that it was a Russian oil tanker) or did I see a smudge on Monday, which turned out to be a Russian oil tanker on Tuesday. I think seeing is achieved on contact, so to speak, whereas understanding is never complete.
That sets a simple context. Different ways of seeing are another complication. So, I'll just agree that there is not a sharp line between seeing and understanding, which does not mean that there is not a distinction to be made.

When the OP says "a world that is fully real and determinate independently of mind", what could 'determinate' mean in a world containing no perceivers? How could something be determined when there is no one there to determine it? Percipients do determine their objects. If they could not do that they could not survive. It seems to follow that things were determinable , just as they were visible and understandable, but obviously not seen, understood or determinate, prior to the advent of percipients. — Janus

I could pick at the wording. But I broadly agree. The issue arises in "Percipients do determine their objects". "Determine" and "determinate" are more complicated than they seem. An idealist would take "determine" in that sentence in the sense that a law-maker determines the law. A realist would take it in the sense that a scientist determines the level of pollution in a river.

You said nothing is changed by speaking of it, which is true, but your comment referenced something which wasn’t claiming anything was spoken. I got confused, is all. — Mww

I think that one cannot name something by merely thinking, because the name has to be shared to be meaningful. Hence I focused on the speaking rather than any preparatory thought..

I bring this up only to show, once again, what seems new, mostly isn’t. — Mww

Too true. Though I think some people would argue that Geach's version of the point was rather different from Kant's.

Yes! The origin of the word is a relation, and yet over time it gets thought of as a property. Elephants existing to me slowly becomes elephants existing period. — noAxioms

It may well be special because it is observed. But observing something doesn’t normally cause it to exist. So even if it is special because it is observed, it may exist for some other reason. You need to demonstrate that there is no other reason.

Yes! The origin of the word is a relation, and yet over time it gets thought of as a property. Elephants existing to me slowly becomes elephants existing period. That which stands out to an observer seems observer dependent. So I'm looking for a definition where yea, it stands out, but not necessarily to anything observing or caring about it. Still a relation though. — noAxioms

If it doesn’t stand out to anything observing or caring about it, it’s not a relation. It’s like claiming to be a parent when you don’t have a child.

That sounds pretty objective. A thing either is or it isn't, a property that is true or false. But then how does an existing elephant differ from the nonexisting elephant, in any way that matters to it? That's a hard question since most dismiss the question before thinking about it. — noAxioms

I’m glad we agree on something. However, to establish the difference (or similarity) between A and B, you have to identify A and B. Suppose that A is the existing elephant. Your problem is that you have no non-existing elephant to take the place of B. You might find a partial solution in Meinong’s work, but you might not find his arguments persuasive.
I need convincing that existence is binary, but I guess that’s a side-issue.

Well, it stands out to us, so it exists as a relation. There doesn't seem to be a test for the existence as a property. That's the problem with the word slowly changing meaning from its original definition. — noAxioms

I can see why you would see it like that. I maintain that the sense of a word now trumps the sense of a word 1,000 years ago.
However, Kant argued that “exists” is not a predicate, which means that existence is not a property. Many philosophers agree with him about that, even if they disagree with much else that he argued for.

Again, this topic is about ontology, not a completely different definition of the word that means genuine vs, counterfeit. — noAxioms

I’m afraid I have been lazy in not giving you the variety of examples that was really needed and left you with the impression that “real” is equivalent to “genuine” as opposed to “counterfeit”. It is true that “real” can be equivalent to “existing” as opposed to “non-existing” as in “imaginary” or “proposed” or “rumoured” or “mythical”. But consider “real property” which means land and similar property as opposed to, for example, intellectual property, stocks and bonds, good will, &c. or “real earnings” as opposed to earnings before allowing for inflation, real cars as opposed to toy cars, real ghosts as opposed to pretend ghosts, real anger as opposed to simulated anger, a real murderer as opposed to an actor of a murdere, a real flower as opposed to an artificial flower. I could go on.
In none of these examples is “real” opposed to “non-existing”. “Unreal”, by the way, is a whole other problem, and you will see from those examples that it is by no means always the opposite of “real”. “Real” is a protean word, capable of being applied to a wide variety of objects, and taking on various different meanings in these contexts, If you are still not convinced, you can find many other examples in dictionaries, which, remember, are compiled on the basis of actual uses and not on the basis of what anyone thinks they should mean.

Agree. I said that to show that it seems to be a valid mind-independent definition of existence, and an objective one this time, one that provides a test to pass or not. — noAxioms

Some reservations. Your formulation has the consequence of limiting existence to things that have causal relationships with each other – that is, physical things. Materialists or physicalists would, no doubt be happy with that. But no-one else will. Plato clearly takes it in that sense, (which justifies the formulation you have) but then rejects it precisely because it denies existence to anything that is not physical – he cites the virtues and the soul. (See Sophist 246 – 7.) It could be made to work in other contexts, I think. Still, it’s a step forward for me. But then, I’m not even looking for a single definition of “exists”. I think that, like “real”, it has different meanings in different contexts. The existence of numbers is not the same as the existence of trees, and the existence of sensations is different again.
The meaning of a word is given in the context of its use in the local structure (a.k.a. language game) in which it is used.

I do understand how difficult this point is, and I genuinely appreciate the seriousness and patience with which you’re engaging it—by now, most people would have thrown up their hands and walked away. But I still hold to the fundamentals of the argument. If there’s a shortcoming, it lies in my own inability to explain it more clearly. — Wayfarer

Well, if a difficult philosophical point is not worth spending time on, what is?
I could not persist unless you were prepared to persist with me - so I also appreciate your patience. Fact is, I have got a bit fed up with walking away from insoluble disagreements. It keeps everything at a shallow level.
That said, there will be a pause before I actually respond to this. The wheels have to be kept on what we like to call real life.

An afterthought. If christening the baby changes the baby herself, who did we christen, the baby before the act, or the baby after the act? The parents will be very interested in the answer.

As soon as you name a ‘world’ or a ‘thing’ or ‘an unknown object’ which you claim is unaffected by or separate from your thought of it, you are already bringing it within the ambit of thought. The realist always has something in mind when he or she speaks of ‘something unaffected by thought’. It’s a Chinese finger trap - you can’t even say it without undercutting the point. — Wayfarer

A tempting argument. But you beg the question, which is whether speaking of something affects it. An obvious question is, "In what way is it affected".
I maintain that naming something (most things) is a Cambridge change, that is, a change that does not affect the object itself. It will not surprise you that there is a good deal of debate about this. You might like to look at SEP - Change See especially sections 2 and 5. There is also a Wikipedia entry - Cambridge change
I can guarantee you that mentioning these entries will not change a syllable that is in them.

Yes, it is reasonable: but the point is, there was not! What I'm arguing against is the idea that our picture of the world, as we imagine it to be without any observer, still relies on perspective, on there being a viewpoint, which is implicit in the picture of the early universe before life evolved. It is an empirical fact that there is and was the universe before h.sapiens evolved and outside the conception of any human being. But empirical fact still relies on an implicit perspective, which we have tended to absolutize in such a way that we believe it to be 'the way things truly are'. — Wayfarer

Yes. This is very like the argument that Berkeley calls his Master Argument, because he says he will rely on that argument in favour of his idealism above all the others. There's no easy way to crack it. Suppose I protested to you that I do not imagine the dinosaurs without any observer. On the contrary, I imagine myself there as an observer. Does that help?
I'm not quite sure that I know what you mean by "absolutize". But I admit that retrospectively applying knowledge about how things are now to times before there were any sentient beings is a risk. What I'm doing is supposing that the absence of perceivers did not make a significant difference to the way things were. There's no evidence to the contrary (saving quantum physics and relativity), so is it not a reasonable inference?

And yet, the existence of this whole world remains ever dependent upon the first eye that opened, even if it were that of an insect. For such an eye is a necessary condition of the possibility of knowledge, and the whole world exists only in and for knowledge, and without it is not even thinkable. The world is entirely idea, and as such demands the knowing subject as the supporter of its existence.

What do you mean by "the whole world exists only in and for knowledge"? I certainly don't think that's true of the insensate world; it's not even true of people.
The world is not entirely idea. It has all sorts of other things in it.

Whatever we think of as 'existing' is already embedded in a complex of supporting ideas, concepts, practices, and so on. This is so, for anything we can know or identify as an existent. — Wayfarer

You seem to be claiming that the moon, for example, is "embedded in a complex of ideas, concepts and practices". That's true, in a way. But clearly false in another way. The ideas, concepts and practices that you are talking about are the ideas, concepts and practices of human beings about the moon. The moon, in fact, is an element, not a participant, in those activities; human beings are participants. But neither human beings nor moons are only or merely embedded in complexes of ideas, concepts and practices.

The necessary contradiction which at last presents itself to us here, finds its solution in the fact that, to use Kant’s phraseology, time, space, and causality do not belong to the thing-in-itself, but only to its phenomena, of which they are the form; which in my language means this: The objective world, the world as idea, is not the only side of the world, but merely its outward side; and it has an entirely different side—the side of its inmost nature—its kernel—the thing-in-itself…But the world as idea… only appears with the opening of the first eye. Without this medium of knowledge it cannot be, and therefore it was not before it. But without that eye, that is to say, outside of knowledge, there was also no before, no time.

One could say that idealists (the eye) mistake the reflection of the moon in a lake for the actual thing. They need to look up, or perhaps out. That is what the eye is designed to do.
Where are the embodied minds (a.k.a. people) in all this? Do our bodies only exist as an idea?
Idealism is all very well, and I don't think that an old-fashioned argument in refutation is available. It's a way of seeing things. The problem with it is that it ignores the message that ideas and concepts and practices quietly and persistently send - that there exists a world beyond them. Ideas are ideas of something that is usually not an idea. Ditto concepts. Our practices involve things that are not ideas.
OK, so you acknowledge that, in a way, with your talk of a kernel (which I'm taking as equivalent to Kant's noumena), you accept there is something that escapes ideas etc. But for you (and Kant) the excess escapes our knowledge. For me, it only means that there is always more to discover.

This reciprocity, this antinomy, reflects the limits of our faculty of reason when it tries to grasp the world in itself. — Wayfarer

I accept that there are boundaries to our knowledge. But these boundaries, like boundaries everywhere are also opportunities to go further. Our knowledge is never complete, finished. Every answer we find generates more questions. We push at the boundaries of what we know and expand what we understand. From time to time, we find that simple expansion is not enough. We find phenomena that do not fit our ideas and concepts - and this is where the unknown and unthought reveals itself. But we don't stop there. We develop new, more comprehensive, ideas that enable us to understand the new anomalies and puzzles, or at least to extract from the data as much understanding as we can. Then, the boundary moves on.

The error is to mistake this picture for something that exists independently of any condition for its appearance—as if meaning and form could simply hover, unperceived, in the void. That, I believe, is the illusion of realism, and why the universe and the mind are truly 'co-arising'. — Wayfarer

The picture is one thing, the universe is another. Isn’t that obvious? There are some issues there, but that is something of a starting-point for sorting this out.
“Co-arising” could do with some cashing out, I think. There is a common sense account which says that the universe/world existed long before humans, so it seems absolutely clear that the universe arose first, and produced human beings later, so it seems absolutely clear that the mind arose later. But there is interaction between the two. What’s wrong with that?
True, meaning and form do not hover, unperceived, in the void. I’m not sure that I know exactly what you mean by “form”, but I’m clear that meaning arises from the interaction between universe and mind, but does not exist independently of the mind. If “form” means “how we think of things”, then, of course, it only arises when there are people to think.

I'm far from satisfied with this, but it will have to do for now.

Must the world be understood in order to be intelligible (able to be understood)? As an analogy, must something be seen in order to be counted as visible? — Janus

In answer to the second question, the short answer is no. In order to count something as visible it is only necessary to demonstrate that it is capable of being seen. However the best, and arguably only conclusive way to demonstrate that something is capable of being seen is to see it.
On the assumption that "intelligible" means "capable of being understood", is the analogy a good one? Showing that one understands something is a good way of showing that it is capable of being understood; that's a parallel with "visible". But there is also a difference. Seeing something can be completed - one can reach a point at which one has actuallly seen whatever it is. But understanding is (usually) incomplete - there is almost always further that one could go. Usually, we settle for an understanding that is adequate for the context and do not worry about whether our understanding is complete.
So the answer is (as it usually is with analogies) the parallel is partial. Yet it is somewhat strange that we also use "see" to describe understanding as well as vision. So perhaps there is more to be said.

So, I went through your OP carefully. I’m afraid that I do not come away with a general criterion for mind-independence. So I won’t be able to meet your challenge. A lot more could be said, so I don’t pretend that I’ve made a conclusive case here. All quotations are from your OP.

To say 'the universe exists' is actually to say 'this universe exists' and not the others. Why? Because we observe it.

I’m not clear what this means. Presumably, you mean that to say “the universe exists” is to say that the universe exists, but not to say that any of the others exist. Fair enough. I don’t see any implications for mind-dependence or not.

The word 'exists' has its origins to mean 'stands out' which often implies that there is something to which it stands out. Hence it stands out to humans of course, making the world all that is particularly relevant to humans. That makes any asserted existence seemingly pretty mind dependent.

Your etymology is not wrong. But arguments based on etymology are very weak because words can change their meaning over time. I don’t think “exists” any longer means “stands out” in any sense that is relevant to questions about mind-dependence or not.
For me, "exists" just means "There is/are.." as in "There is a moon" or "There are elephants".

I'm just noting that human biases tend to slap on the 'real' label to that which is perceived, and resists slapping that label on other things, making it dependent on that perception.

Well, it is true that if we perceive something, that something usually exists. That’s part of the meaning of “perceive”. But most often that something exists quite independently of the label and quite independently of the perception. So there is nothing to the point here. (When we think we see things that do not exist, we use different language – concepts like mistake, hallucination, delusion and illusion.)
Thinking of the word/concept “real” as like a label that you can slap on things can be a bit misleading. In many cases, you will find that something that is not real under one description is perfectly real under another description. The traditional example here is that a decoy duck is not a real duck, but it is a real decoy duck, a fake Rolex watch is a real fake Rolex watch, a mirage of trees and water is not real trees and water, but is a real mirage, and so on. That complicates the question of mind-independence considerably.

"Principle 1 (The Eleatic Principle) An entity is to be counted as real if and only if it is capable of participating in causal processes" This wording of the principle is almost mind independent except for the 'counted as' part, and I've seen it worded without that.

In principle, this is an interesting criterion, which could work, at least in standard scientific contexts. The original formulation in Plato’s Sophist) goes something like “Anything that exists is capable of affecting other things, and capable of being affected by other things.” But it works in favour of mind-independence of anything that it applies to. Your argument to adapt it to show the opposite is very weak, because you admit that there are different ways to formulate it. I;m afraid that in any case, phrases like “counted as” do not imply mind-dependence, at least as I understand it.

Colyvan quotes Keith Campbell in his paper, who notes a similar thing:
"This search for a criterion for the real must be understood as a search for a criterion for us to count something as real ...*

A criterion does not normally affect the independence or otherwise of what it is a criterion for. When they changed the criterion for a planet so that Pluto was no longer a planet, Pluto was totally unaffected.

There need not be, and probably cannot be, any critical mark of the real itself; the real is what is, period."

I agree with that. But that’s because philosophers use the word in a very peculiar way which generates all sorts of fake puzzles. Normal people know perfectly well what the critical marks are of real coins, real diamonds, etc. What philosophers seem unable to stomach is the fact that the criterion for “real” depends on what you are talking about.

Quantum mechanics also contributed to the demise of a nice neat singular classical reality. A third principle to consider is one that QM definitely brings into question.

For my money, the “neat singular classical reality” was always an illusion. Quantum Mechanics, in this respect, was knocking at an open door. But I don’t see anything that clarifies mind-dependence or not.
I’m afraid I must have missed something. I don’t find any third principle here. The question seems to get lost in a maze of interpretations and dramatically strange ideas. Maybe things will get sorted out in a few years. What is clear is that quantum mechanics is a huge raspberry to anyone who thinks that our thinking makes the world what it is.

While nobody would disagree that the mind plays a role in cognition—supplying the conceptual framework, perceptual integration, and interpretive acts by which we know—they would nevertheless retain an innate conviction that there exists, in the background, a world that is fully real and determinate independently of mind. This is what I see as the import of metaphysical realism and that is what I am seeking to challenge. — Wayfarer

You have noticed that I am cautious. That’s true (most of the time). So, with due caution, that looks like something I can accept. Apart from deleting the word “fully” in “fully real and determinate”. I don’t know what that commits me to and suspect it may be a bit rhetorical.

…. the very structure of the world, as intelligible and coherent, is constituted in and through the relation to mind. Not an individual mind, of course, but the noetic act—the perceiving, structuring, and meaning-bestowing – that makes any world appear in the first place. — Wayfarer

I’m clear that intelligibility is something that is constituted (“created”?) in the interaction between mind and world. However, our understanding of the world tells us that it has not changed in any radical way since we appeared and that many of the processes now going on must have been going on long before any sentient or intelligent creatures appeared. So is it not reasonable to infer that the world would have been intelligible if there had been anyone around to understand it? (Note that this is a counter-factual, not a blunt assertion.)
Coherence I’m less sure about. But I do understand that “order” is not really a mind-independent phenomenon. For this reason. If I have a pile of books, there will be an order in which they happen to be piled up. But there will be nothing special about that. There are many arrangements of them that can be called an order, and some that we would call disordered. But – how should I put it - nothing in the nature of the books has any special intellectual privilege in this.
I don't really understand what the "noetic act", just on its own like that, means. I have to reduce it to a large number of such acts done by almost everyone from time to time. So, for me, if there are no sentient or intelligent creatures about, there will be no noetic acts to create intelligibility.

(Relevant to note that the etymology of 'world' is from the old Dutch 'werold' meanig 'time of man'.) — Wayfarer

I love etymology and the history of words (and concepts). It is important in its way, and sometimes is relevant to philosophical understanding. But words change their meanings over time. So the relevance of etymology is always in need of demonstration. I’m afraid that, in this case, I don’t think that the etymology is particularly helpful.

But the claim I'm advancing would point out that what “it” was prior to its discovery is not just unknown, but indeterminate. The very notion of “an object that exists but is wholly outside any possible disclosure” is, I suggest, an imaginative construction. It is an extrapolation or projection. — Wayfarer

There is indeed something very odd about the concept of "an object that exists but is wholly outside any possible disclosure".
I’m hesitant about the word “possible” there. One does expect that any unknown unknowns can become known under the right conditions, except for some facts at quantum scale, which are a special case. The thing is, I wouldn’t want to make the existence of unknown unknowns conditional on their potential to be discovered. That would be verificationism and, as Wittgenstein says, truth-conditions are important, but they are not everything.
However, I have no problem with saying that anything that we might say about them is an extrapolation or projection, or, sometimes a purely imaginative construction. Extrapolations are not necessarily irrational, and the borderline between rational extrapolation and imaginative construction is very hard to discern. Perhaps only the outcome will tell us which is which.

I’m arguing that the world as a coherent totality is incomprehensible outside the structures of consciousness. It’s not that the mind projects onto a blank slate, nor that it merely filters a pre-existing reality, but rather that reality as it shows up at all is a co-arising: dependent on the mutual implication of mind and world. — Wayfarer

I’m all for co-arising of “reality as it shows up at all”. Reality is a different matter. Much of reality has not shown up yet. Yet it is true that we expect our ways of understanding the world as we know it to apply to the bits of the world that we do not yet understand or even know about. If perchance our current ways of understanding the world turn out not to yield what we expect, we work out new ways of understanding – in the process, we are prepared to abandon what seemed to be important parts of our existing understandings, extract whatever we can from the data and work out new ways of understanding it. So what it would take for us to acknowledge that we do not, and cannot ever, understand some new phenomenon, I cannot imagine. (I’m thinking of quantum physics and relativity, of course. But the Galileo/Newton revolution was, in its way, very dramatic indeed – it’s just that we’ve got used to it.

…. intelligibility is not something we add to a blank canvas but something that arises with, and through, the encounter of mind-and-world. — Wayfarer

Yes, what we know is “bound” to the mind. How else could it be known? But one of the things we know is that there is much that we don’t know; it is reasonable to think that what we don’t know is not “bound” to the mind.

The critique that “the world exists anyway” misses this crucial nuance. Of course, something is there. But to designate it as “the world,” or even as “something,” already presupposes the categories of thought—form, object, existence, and so on. The realist mistake, in my view, is to treat these categories as transparent labels for things that are "there anyway", failing to recognise the way the mind categorises and situates them, without which they would be unintelligible. — Wayfarer

If something is there, it must be part of the “world”. It certainly will be when we find out what it is. On the other hand, “form, object, existence and so on” are certainly not transparent labels (any more than “world” is, especially since recent developments in physics). Anyone who looks carefully can see that. (Philosophers don’t always look very carefully – they are too often in a hurry to get to some huge vista or other.)

Aristotle posits forms as intrinsic to particulars, but in a way that already implies a kind of noetic participation—form is what renders a thing intelligible, it is how we know what it *is*. — Wayfarer

Yes, form is what makes something intelligible. On the other hand, I think that Aristotle calls the form “what it is to be” something (a.k.a. essence) and believes that whatever it is is mind-independent and yet is required if things are to be intelligible.
I mostly agree with the rest of the paragraph.

…my position …. is that there is no world at all without mind—not as a subjective opinion, but as the condition for appearance, for disclosure, and for anything we might meaningfully call real. — Wayfarer

Well, yes. We can’t meaningfully call anything real if we don’t exist. That does not justify saying that there is “no world at all without mind”.

And finally, the reason this matters is so we do not lose sight of the subject—the observer—for whom all of this is meaningful in the first place. The scientific, objective view is essentially from the outside: in that picture, we appear as one species among countless others, clinging to a pale blue dot, infinitesimal against the vast panorama that scientific cosmology has revealed. But it is to us that this panorama is real and meaningful. So far as we know, we are the only beings capable of grasping the astounding vistas disclosed by science. Let’s not forget our role in that. — Wayfarer

I agree that the subject, the observer (and, sometimes, intervener) should not be lost sight of and that the vistas disclosed by science are astounding. You’ll think that I’m a bit of a heathen, but I’m just not convinced that scientific knowledge – and still less, physics - is the whole of knowledge or that science has a monopoly of astounding vistas.

For a whole boatload of -isms reflecting the confusion this nonsense brings, see the SEP article. — Mww

That sounds like my cup of tea. But which article exactly.

Riddle me this: do we seek to know a thing, or do we seek to know the cause of a sensation? — Mww

What if a thing is the cause of a sensation?

I know what a basketball is, but trust me when I say there isn’t and never was any such thing in my head. — Mww

I'm very glad to hear it.

on the other side of a very large coin, why we know things are not entirely dependent on our minds, is because it is not things we know, from which follows nothing of a thing is dependent on our minds. — Mww

It all depends on what you mean by "know".
Would that be a large coin in the sense of a coin worth a large sum of money?
In the old days, the largest coin in the UK was a penny. There were 240 pennies in one pound, so it made a sort of idiot sense.

Havin’ fun yet? — Mww

Well, most philosophy is fun, but some philosophy is more fun than the rest. Unless you are a professional. For a professional, the question is which philosophy gets you paid.

Cognitive disorientation: the empirical kind, a posteriori, and properly reduced, occurs when we say we know what a thing is but we don’t realize it is not the thing but always and only the representation of it, to which such knowledge expression relates. So yes, you, and everyone else, is a victim of it, but it isn’t an experience, as such. It is the mistake of conflating the occurrence of a cognitive method with the post hoc ergo propter hoc expression of its functional terminations.

Some folks like to quip….the universe doesn’t care what the human thinks about it, it is what it is. Compounded categorical errors aside, it is at least consistent to quip that human thought doesn’t care what the universe is. It remains the case that the universe, or, with respect to empirical knowledge, the objects contained in it, can never be comprehended as anything but that of which the human mode of intellectual determinations prescribes. Why these should be considered incompatible with each other, is beyond reason itself. — Mww

I'm a bit confused. Are you saying that the methods by which we come to know what something is aren't methods at all? That seems odd. How did you come to know that?

More seriously, thinking of what enables us to know what a thing is as a veil between us and what we seek to know is, for me, seriously disorienting. Why our methods of coming to know should be considered incompatible with knowing may well beyond reason as you say; but it is certainly beyond me.

I think what may lie at the bottom of this confusion is a binary approach, which cannot recognize that we can come to know something about things, but we never (or seldom) come to know everything about anything. The answer to one question usually generates another question. That's why we know that things are not entirely dependent on our minds.

An you do have the opportunity to act otherwise. Brains were evolved to make better choices, which wouldn't work at all if there were to choices available. Determinism shouldn't be confused with compulsion as it often is in these discussions. — noAxioms

Quite so. No-one except Nietzsche seems to have spotted the distinction between compulsion and determinism.

It isn't wild guessing since the rule needs to be consistent with what we do observe, and the opinions of most people don't meet that criteria, per the OP. — noAxioms

There's something we agree on. I'm offering you some observations that suggest, at tleast to me, that the question of mind-dependence is much more complicated than you seem prepared to recognize. What's wrong with that?
As to the OP, I'll have to get back to you.

The unicorn, as a specific case, should of course be 'I don't know'. So an educated estimate might be in order, which is not wild guess. — noAxioms

If unicorn-like creatures exist anywhere in the universe, their similarity to the unicorns we know and love is entirely coincidental and proves nothing. That argument is a side-issue. That pattern of argument can be used to prove the existence of anything that you can imagine. It makes the idea of distinguishing between what does and doesn't exist meaningless.

How about a 4 dimensional rock? That's not going to be part of 'the universe', so either you pick a rule that says it doesn't exist, or pick one that doesn't confine existence to 'the universe', or perhaps, 'the universe now'. Once we have a rule, we analyze it for mind dependence, and per my argument, anything that mentions 'the universe' is probably going to be mind dependent, unless one defines universe far more broadly with 'all that exists', in which case one is left wondering if we're part of that. — noAxioms

Three dimensions for space plus one for time, makes four dimensions. So all rocks are 4-dimensional. Perhaps you mean 5 dimensional? In which case, you'll have to ask someone else.
You have what, to me, is a very peculiar idea of what the universe is. For me, naively no doubt, the universe is everything that exists. I realize there's another definition around, but since I don't understand it, it would be foolish of me to use the word in that sense. Don't ask me for a definition of the world. If the world is not everything that exists, I have no idea what it is supposed to be. The world of fishing or chess - or the lived or phenomenal worlds - make a kind of sense to me. But none of those are whole worlds.

2 is 'part of the universe'. You probably put the moon and thermostat in the universe. I consider the universe to be sufficiently large to leave little probability of the absence of a unicorn anywhere. Hence same classification. 3 is trickier since it needs to relate to me, so perhaps the unicorn isn't close enough to do that. — noAxioms

I do put the moon and the thermostat in the universe. I'm less sure about unicorns. They are mythical creatures, so exist in our universe. But since they are mythical, they do not exist. It's complicated - either answer is justifiable.

As for mind-dependence, we call our universe 'the universe', making it privileged because we see it. That makes it a pretty observer dependent definition of existence. 3 is not observer dependent, but depends on causal relationships. Existence is thus only meaningful within structures that have them. — noAxioms

You may be suffering from delusions of grandeur. Mt. Everest's existence was not caused by the people who climb it or by the people who worship it and mathematical objects like numbers, it would seem, do not exist at all.

OK, so you don't have a physics background. Makes it harder to discuss relativity and quantum implications to this topic. — noAxioms

Indeed. If there are any. It seems to me that very little is agreed in those fields, so perhaps it is premature to think that any secure conclusions can be derived yet.
But it does seem fairly well established that making observations at quantum level does have a causal impact on what happens and both theories seem to have adopted Berkeley more or less wholesale.
Yet the observers live in the ordinary world. It's a conundrum.

I'm sorry this has taken so long. I hope this is not a disappointment to you. All these quotations come from the original post for the thread "The Mind-Created World". I read your essay, with profit. But I think the major issues are reasonably clearly identified here.

It’s rather that, whatever judgements are made about the world, the mind provides the framework within which such judgements are meaningful.

I can accept that. It doesn't mean that the objects that we make judgements about are mind-dependent. That would be confusing the framework with its contents.

What their existence might be outside of any perspective is meaningless and unintelligible, as a matter of both fact and principle.

Yes.

Reality has an inextricably mental aspect, which itself is never revealed in empirical analysis.

I suppose so. Mind you, I'm not happy with the term "Reality". It seems as if it means "Everything that's real". But some things can be unreal under one description and real under another. So reality and unreality are inextricably entwined, which make "Reality" a rather unhelpful term.
Similarly, the binary idea that things are either mind-dependent or not seems quite wrong to me. If one considers something like, say, a thermostat, we can see that it is mind-dependent in one way, but since it is made of raw materials that are mind-independent, it is hard to classify. Thermostats, unicorns and transfinite numbers are all mind-dependent, and mind-independent in different ways.

By ‘creating reality’, I’m referring to the way the brain receives, organises and integrates cognitive data, along with memory and expectation, so as to generate the unified world–picture within which we situate and orient ourselves.

Well, yes. It's an exciting time in neurology, no doubt about it. But let's not go overboard.
I wouldn't assume that we have a single unified world-picture. We might be working with several such pictures of different parts or aspects of the world. But does anyone think that creating a world-picture makes the objects in the picture mind-dependent? On the whole, the object of a picture does not depend on being in the picture for its existence. There are exceptions, but they are exceptional.
It is really quite extraordinary how the processes that reveal the world to us are represented by philosophers as concealing the world from us. What you are forgetting is that the world actually exists. Our "world-picture" is actually a picture of something. So, although it is not exactly wrong to say that our brain generates a picture, it is crucially important to remember that it is not conjured up from nothing but is the result of removing noise from the signals that we get from the world. (That's not a perfect way of describing what is going on, but it is better than thinking that the brain presents us with a fantasy.)
You had a video on your web-site. I watched it. A collection of scientists told me that I did not know reality accurately. Which is probably true. But they also told me that it was science that had revealed this truth to them. This was a case of what I think of as scientific exceptionalism. The idea that scientists are immune from the failings of ordinary human beings. Rubbish! Science gets things wrong, too.
Let's allow that we are presented with a world-picture by our brains. This world-picture is not perfect. Fortunately, we have a critical faculty and a feed-back system, so our brains are perfectly capable of identifying errors and recticying them. That applies to scientists and non-scientists alike.

But what we know of its existence is inextricably bound by and to the mind we have, and so, in that sense, reality is not straightforwardly objective.

Well, yes. What we know is "bound by and to the mind we have (are?)". It wouldn't be our knowledge if it were not so. But that doesn't show that the object of our knowledge is "inextricably bound by and to the mind". Indeed, one of the things we know is that many things are not bound to our minds at all.

The idea that things ‘go out of existence’ when not perceived, is simply their ‘imagined non-existence’. In reality, the supposed ‘unperceived object’ neither exists nor does not exist. Nothing whatever can be said about it.

... except, of course, that nothing can be said (or known) about it. But that's an annoying argument, so I won't press it. I think I understand what you mean about the idea that things go out of existence. "Neither exists nor does not exist" must be based on "What their existence might be outside of any perspective is meaningless and unintelligible" (?) There is indeed a certain puzzle about saying whether something that we do not know of at all exists or doesn't. The catch is that has literally nothing to do with the question whether it did or not.
Take an actual example. It does seem clear to me that in the centuries before Neptune was discovered, a) no-one knew of its existence, b) no-one knew that they didn't know of its existence and c) it existed. How do I know that? By working back from its discovery. Mind you, that does not mean that Herschel knew everything that was to know about Uranus; indeed, when he first saw it, he thought it was a comet, not a planet. So we could say he did not discover Uranus in March 1781, My sources don't tell me exactly when the new body was recognized as a planet, but it was a bit later, after detailed measurements had been collected; people other than Herschel were involved. Discovery is not necessarily a single event, and discovery of existence is not separate from discovery of information about the discovery. Bare existence is not something to be discovered or revealed - (i.e. existence is not a predicate). Perhaps that's what you are getting at?

We designate it as truly existent, irrespective of and outside any knowledge of it. This gives rise to a kind of cognitive disorientation which underlies many current philosophical conundrums.

Disorientation is a good way of characterizing philosophical problems. But I don't experience that here. Can you tell me more about it?

TWe mistake the form discovered by the mind as something that is there anyway, not seeing that the mind is the source of it. Kant 101, as I understand him. — Wayfarer

I can't comment on either Kant or Pinter. But it all depends what you mean by "form". I could be wrong, but I am under the impression that Aristotle and many others were quite happy to posit forms as existent in things whether or not anyone knew about it. Even Plato allowed that existing things "participated" in the relevant forms.

The reason why we do not attribute guilt to those who are considered 'not guilty' by reason of insanity it is because we do not think they have been able to act otherwise. Their mental state was too compromised. — boundless

Yes - "too compromised" means "not working as it should or normally does." If their mental state was normal, we would hold them responsible. Yet a deterministic account cannot point to any significant difference between those states. Compromised state and uncompromised state are all the same to it. So our judgement is made in a different framework or category. In practice, when people are behaving normally and their mental state is not compromised, we do not bother with the causal, deterministic level of explanation. We only pay attention to it when things have gone wrong, and those normal explanations don't apply.
Let me offer you this. It seems to me that there is no problem whatever in seeing rational action as entirely compatible with determinism, because calculating machines can perform calculations and yet we know that they are also behaving deterministically. But we only pay attention to the deterministic level of explanation when the machine is not functioning properly. When it is working properly, we have no doubt that it showed the result 4 because it was asked 2 + 2. We don't appeal to its causal states, because they cannot distinguish between correct and incorrect answers, so causal explanation wouldn't explain anything.
Okay, it's not freedom. But it is a step in the right direction. The key is the recognition that actions, as opposed to events, are explained in a different category from events.

Knowledge, you will agree, is mind-dependent. Outside of knowledge of the object, the object neither exists nor doesn't exist. This is elaborated in The Mind Created World, if you're interested in further discussing it. — Wayfarer

you can imagine that I'm not paticularly sympathetic - especially to the second sentence. However, I've read the first paragraph of your thread and will read further. We'll see.

No, I'm not also saying that. — noAxioms

Then I'm afraid I don't see what you are getting at.

It absolutely does apply. The justification given for its nonexistence gates whether the chosen stance is valid or not. It's the core point of this whole topic. — noAxioms

I'm afraid I'm lost again.

A quite simple model might say that both exist, the unicorns just being somewhere else where we don't see them. That example shows that there can be a single model that applies to both. Another is that unicorns don't exist, but moon does. That's likely more popular, but it isn't specified why the model declares unicorns to be nonexistent, so it's incomplete. — noAxioms

This doesn't help me at all.

I've never required us to know about them. This is a model, not proof of existence or not. The topic is not about epistemology. We can't know if the unicorns exist or not, and we certainly can't know if our chosen model is sound or not, but we can at least come up with a valid one. — noAxioms

I don't understand any of the above.

You got it backwards. The general rule is what I'm after. The unicorns end up on one side or the other depending on the rule chosen. Rule first, then assessment of unicorn or whatever. — noAxioms

A general rule would be good. But how can one work that out without looking at specific cases? Rule first is just wild guessing. You'll have to come back to assessment of specific cases after that. So why waste time?

OK. Sounds like the beginnings of a complex model. I would have probably classified moon, unicorn, and thermostat in the same category of either 2: Part of this universe, or 3, relational. — noAxioms

I don't understand how 2 or 3 applies to all three and I don't see how that classification tells me anything about their mind-indendence.

You compared my suggestion of a spacetime diagram to a picture of the same subject, presumably from some point of view. — noAxioms

That's not quite what I meant. I have no idea what spacetime would look like and even less idea what a picture of spacetime would look like. We seem to be agreed that what we actually have is a diagram, not a picture.

Are you saying that we can still 'believe' in free will even if all empirical evidence goes against it because, even if there is no free will, we can't be certain of it? To me that would be self-deception. — boundless

So far as I can see, and I may be wrong, many, if not most, philosophers are compatibilists and are trying to cash that out by re-conceptualizing the problem. To put is another way, the approach is that both traditional free will and traditional determinism are interpretations of the world. If they jointly produce absurdity, we need to think of both differently. Have a look at Wikipedia - Determinism

Without that conscious and unconscious process of data reception and synthesis, there would be no world to see. — Wayfarer

I don't understand why you say that. It we did not have the equipment, we would not be able to carry out the process, and so would be unable to see what would still be there.

But that knowledge is still grounded in our 'mind's eye', so to speak - even our knowledge of what it is. — Wayfarer

Of course our knowledge is "grounded in our mind's eye", but that doesn't mean that the things we know about (most of them) would vanish if our mind's eye or even the eye in our heads did not exist. Knowledge is not existence.

Realism neglects the role of the mind in this process. It takes the world as given, without considering the role the mind plays in its construction. That is the context in which the idea of mind dependence or independence is meaningful. — Wayfarer

I don't know what "realism" does. But I do not deny the role of the mind in the process of perceiving the world. I just deny that the world would cease to exist if our minds etc. ceased to exist.

Reality constantly smacks us in the face with a two-by-four with contradictions daily to what our mind wants to believe is true. — Philosophim

I like that. Yes, one of the ways that we can tell what the real world is, is by the way it smacks us in the face if we do not pay enough attention to it.

What we know is clear: There is a world independent of our own minds. — Philosophim

Basically, I do agree with you. I even agree with you that we usually have not grasped what we know accurately. But I think there are things in our world that are "mind-dependent" as well as those that are "mind-independent". The difference matters, because it maps the limits of what we can change. It would be a useful piece of philosophical work to chart the difference, if only we could set aside our hunger for grand generalizations.

But I said 'share the same ontology' without saying what that ontology is. I also somewhat misspoke, since a presentist would say the moon 'is' while the Theia event (where the moon is created) 'was', a different ontology. — noAxioms

Are you also saying that there is no connection between those two facts?

OK, so pick something that doesn't exist, and justify that. Or pick something that exists outside of experience, and justify that. That's what I'm looking for in this topic: Somebody who can come up with a consistent model of mind-independent existence. — noAxioms

I don't see that things that don't exist are relevant here. Mind-independence doesn't apply to them.
What if there cannot be a single model that applies to both unicorns and the moon?

But when pressed, it seems that everybody's limits of what exists or doesn't relies on things gleaned through observation. — noAxioms

How could we possibly know about things that exist independently of our minds without observation? The role of the senses is precisely to give us information about the world outside or beyond our minds.

You're missing the point. ... I'm not trying to-argue that unicorns exist (or don't). I'm trying to argue that your notion of what exists is a mind-dependent one. — noAxioms

I don't see why you would think that what I would say about the existence of unicorns can be generalized to everything that exists. The speculative argument does not bring anything into existence, so it is no ground for thinking that anything is mind-dependent. However, I do agree that notions and concepts and ideas are mind-dependent (mostly). But it does not follow that the objects of notions and concepts and ideas are necessarily mind-dependent. The moon is a case in point. We have an idea of something that exists quite independently of human beings.

Definition 4 totally discards truth value. 2 can have a truth value even if it's a relative truth. 2 boils down to [is a member of a preferred set, and members of other sets don't matter]. — noAxioms

You're right. I made the mistake of picking the criterion that seemed closest to what I think. I don't really think that there is a general definition of existence. What existence means depends on the kind of object your are talking about. So there is one criterion for the moon existing and a different one for unicorns existing; the criteria for thermostats are different again. The criteria for existence are truth-conditions, so are not themselves true or false.

Funny then that I find the picture less like reality and more like an abstract interpretation. — noAxioms

I'm a bit puzzled about what you mean by "the picture" here.

Bell's theorem (and not just 'theory') demonstrated the impossibility of local reality almost 60 years ago.
— noAxioms
↪Ludwig V
It was the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics which was awarded to the experimentalists who proved it. (I wrote an article on it for anyone interested). — Wayfarer

Thanks for that. I did look at it, and it was interesting. But I'm simply not competent to comment.

Of course, ethics is something external to physics. But I would like that my 'worldview' is something coherent, a stable unit. It is difficult to 'believe' to have free will half of the time becuase I have to assume it to have a coherent concept of moral responsibility and in the other half 'believe' that I have no free will. Cognitive dissonance is quite a risk. — boundless

This is a bit of a distraction. However, let me say that I think that most philosophers do actually decide to live with the dissonance. Perhaps they actually prefer the argument and would be disappointed if they couldn't have it.
Suppose you started with recognizing two facts. First, we sometimes act freely. Second that the world appears to be deterministic. The only problem is to develop an account of those two facts that recognizes both. Doing that will require rejecting the concepts that are taken for granted in formulating the problem. For example, free will is defined in opposition to determinism, so we need to get rid of that concept. It doesn't make any sense anyway. Determinism, on the other hand, is treated as if it was true. But if it is true, it is empirically true, and I don't see how we can possibly know that, so we need to think that through again.

Is it not surprising and disappointing that we still don't have words or phrases for such common things, and can only say things like "mythical creatures (Pegasus, the Gorgons, etc.) exist and not in the way that horses exist"? — Patterner

It may be that I/we are stretching the language. There's not a lot of popular interest in the modes of existence - even, I suspect, among philosophers.

What if Y doesn't happen in the future? An uncountable number of things had been "sure bets" never happened. How can Y be real in the sense that either X or Z are real? — Patterner

Yes, it is tempting to treat the future differently from the present or past. Perhaps the ground is that the the future is undetermined while the present and past are determinate and can't change. But one needs to show that this is quite different from the generalized uncertainty that would point out that our belief in X or Z is also defeasible. The determinism, whether logical or causal, will chip in to demolish us completely.

Yes, that's an ontological claim, and of mind-independence. That part is easy, and quite common. The challenge is with where it ends. My topic is about if your opinion is self-consistent, because few think about it further than opinions about what is seen. This is why the moon doesn't matter. — noAxioms

I think I understand that. So "unicorn" is not an irrelevant example. I like it just because it is not straightforward, but requires some thought. That's much more instructive than the moon.

Poorly worded on my part. Typical claim is that "I know the moon exists due to empirical evidence". It's an epistemic claim about ontology, but not directly an ontic claim. — noAxioms

OK.

That's a description of how it was created and already assumes the moon shares the same ontology as those solar system events long ago. — noAxioms

Well, yes. It is an object in the solar system, so it seems a reasonable assumption. Any question about that is pretty much incomprehensible to me.

Imagining something presumably isn't what makes it not real. Again, I'm not talking about the concept of something, but about the thing itself. I have a imagined image of the moon, what it's like up there, which doesn't make the moon nonexistent. — noAxioms

You are right. It is curious that we talk of the imaginary friends that some small children have, meaning that they do not exist. Yet it is perfectly possible to imagine something that is real - such as a friend who is absent. My grounds are precisely the ones that you were reaching for - improbability or impossibility. Those grounds are defeasible, but the implausibility of the idea means that it would not be easy to convince me of the opposite - especially in this age of deep fakes!

As to the distinction between "exists" and "is real", I had assumed that anything that exists is real — Ludwig V
Contradicting your prior quote: "For me, unicorns exist, all right. But they are not real creatures.". — noAxioms

Sorry. I meant to explain that.
My model for "real" relies on the common use of the word, in which something that is unreal under one description will (normally) be real under another. This contradicts the common assumption that "real" and "unreal" are exclusive, which neglects the fact that many things we would describe as unreal do in fact exist and are real under a different description. Hence "A forged banknote is not a real banknote, but it is a real forgery."

As I was writing, I realized that unicorns and mythical creatures and 7-winged birds are imaginary creatures and "unicorns are real mythical creatures" and "7-winged birds are real imaginary creatures" seemed malapropisms. But unicorns and 7-winged birds do not, to put it this way, have the same mode of existence as forged bank-notes and industrial diamonds.

Different definition of 'real' there. We're discussing ontology, not 'being genuine'. — noAxioms

True. I get a bit confused by "mind-indendent reality", which, pretty clearly is about existence.

I've seen whole topics devoted to the latter: "My signature is not mine since it was made by a pen, not by me". Games like that. — noAxioms

If I write something like that, you can be pretty sure it is a joke.

To be a unicorn, all it needs to be sort of horsey-like with a single horn on its head. There's no requirement to correspond exactly to the human myth .... I don't like the unicorn example because it is so improbably that there is not a planet in the infinite universe somewhere that has produced them. ..... — noAxioms

You did cite unicorns in your earlier post. It is true that my disbelief in them is defeasible. (Most claims about non-existence are.) But your argument is wildly speculative and does not even begin to convince me. Until there is better evidence, I shall continue to classify them as mythical and claim they don't exist, except in the way that mythical creatures (Pegasus, the Gorgons, etc.) exist and not in the way that horses exist.

So again, just because there's a myth about it, why does that preclude the reality of one? It's like you're saying that the myth causes its noexistence. — noAxioms

I see your point. Compare "imaginary". My reply is the same.

There are many definitions, rarely clarified when the word is used. Some examples:- ..... There are other definitions, but that's a taste. Your intuitions seem to lean heavily towards 2p . I favor the relational definition most often since it is far more compatible with quantum mechanics. I've been exploring the 4th one. — noAxioms

Thinking about it, I'm really not content to say that past events and future events don't exist. It makes sense to say that all events, past, future and present exist, but in different modes. "X event happend in the past", "Y event will happen in the future", and "Z event is happening now" are all true and all those events are real, hence exist. So I don't accept 2p.
I've worked with 4) most of the time, though I would resist the apparent arbitrariess of "whatever we designate" and substitute "whateven the language we are involved in specifies". But I would insist on the truth value. I've talked about different modes of existence in this post. That reflects the effect of context on the meaning of "exist" .

Reality is an interpretation of empirical data. I want to say this is a mind-dependent definition, but it might be too hasty. The apple exists not because it is observed, but its observation suggests an interpretation of reality that includes that apple. Fair enough, but it doesn't say how the interpretation deals with things not observed, and this topic is mostly about that. — noAxioms

I don't think you've got that quite right. Surely, the data are also part of reality? Also, on the face of it, it looks as if you are saying that reality is not (directly) observed, so your problem disappears. I'm not sure about reality, but I'm pretty sure that what counts as real depends on the context. "Real money", "Real food", "Real champagne" all have different definitions.

A recent Nobel prize in physics was given for proving this again, despite Bell doing it in the 60's. — noAxioms

That's odd. There must be a story about that.

Edit. Text deleted here.

Proving that reality is not locally real means that at most one of the two above principles is true. An example that rejects both principles is objective collapse interpretations. — noAxioms

Thanks very much for that. It was very helpful.

This is all quite relevant to the topic, because under most interpretations, the moon is not objectively real, but only real to that which as measured it, which usually means anything that has in any way interacted with it by say receiving a photon emitted by the moon. — noAxioms

Yes, I've gathered that modern physics seems to have become something that Bishop Berkeley would have approved of, - apart from the refusal to include God. But there also seems to be very little consensus.

I'll venture on one ignorant comment. If you try to define space and time or space-time without any physical objects, you are bound to run in to trouble. At least, it seems obvious to me that those dimensions only have meaning in a universe that includes some actual objects. But then, so far as I can see, a space-time diagram is a method for plotting physical objects, like a map, rather than a description of reality, like a picture.

Well the fact that you reacted to a comment 500 posts means you've been paying attention to this topic, and I must thank you for that and for your contribution. — noAxioms

It's an excellent topic.

I don't think my criteria matter at all. It's something that should be explicitly specified by anybody that claims it (sc. mind-independent existence), so it might vary from one view to the next. — noAxioms

It might well. The variations will be very instructive.

Since I consider ontology to be a mental categorization, there's nothing mind independent about it. I'm not asserting that the others are wrong, but I'm trying to explore the consistency of such a view. — noAxioms

If I believe that the moon is exists independently of what I, or anyone else, thinks about it, is that an ontological claim? If so, the mere fact that we categorize or classify something in some way, in my view, is no ground for claiming that it is mind-dependent, though the classification obviously is.

"The moon is real because of empirical evidence". Presumably the moon's existence (relative to this planet) is not dependent on humans (or any life forms) observing it, and yet it's existence is justified by observation. I challenge that logic, but to do so, I need to find somebody who supports it. — noAxioms

I would not dream of claiming that the moon is real because of empirical evidence, because that is not true. The moon exists because of complex events in the solar system, some billions of years ago. We know it exists because of empirical evidence, but that is an entirely different matter.

OK, so you draw a distinction between 'exists' and 'is real'. As a mythical creature, it is a common referent. People know what you're talking about, but it seems no more than a concept of a thing, not a thing in itself. I am not talking about the concept of anything, but about the actual thing, so perhaps I should say 'is it real?', or better, come up with an example that is not a common referent such as a bird with 7 wings, all left ones. That at least eliminates it existing as mythology. But instead let's just assume I'm talking about a unicorn and not the concept or myth of one — noAxioms

I don't quite see your point. We can agree that your birds do not exist. But, since you have imagined them, they are imaginary birds, and consequently not real birds, and not real. They don't seem at all problematic. That makes them different from mythical creatures. Mythical creatures such as unicorns have an additional feature. Why would we ignore that?
As to the distinction between "exists" and "is real", I had assumed that anything that exists is real. A forged banknote is not a real banknote, but it is a real forgery. The reality of the banknote depends, so to speak on how you classify it. The difference is that there is no classification under which I can say that a unicorn exists. That's a difference in meaning between "forged" and "mythical".

Your definition of 'exists' seems to be confined to 'exists at some preferred moment in time', which implies presentism, and only membership in this universe. I consider a live T-Rex to exist since I consider 75 MY prior to my presence to be part of our universe. The notion of 'cease to exist' makes like sense to me. I also don't confine existence to our universe which is why I call it 'our' universe instead of 'the' universe. I find presentism to be a heavily mind dependent view. Just saying... — noAxioms

I must confess that I don't have a firm view of about presentism and eternalism. We seem to have a difference in our understand of "exist". I wouldn't dream of saying that dinosaurs exist in the sense of being alive. I accept that dinosaurs exist in the sense that their remains are still to be found in various places. On the other hand, I do maintain that they did not exist before they evolved in the Triassic period.

The bottom line should be an answer to my question. Do real unicorns (not the myth) exist or not, and how might that answer be justified? Perhaps unicorns are again a bad example of mind-independence because they presumably implement mental processes of their own. Perhaps we should discuss some questionable inanimate entity. — noAxioms

The bottom line, then, is that the answer depends on your definition of "exist" and "real".

So an alien-made device on a planet out of our access cannot be called a thermostat by us? How about the temperature regulatory systems that the first warm-blooded animals evolved? Both those are sans-human-context. — noAxioms

Yes, that's true. I wouldn't hesitate to call either of those cases thermostats, because in each case, they are part of a living system or part of a living being. On the other hand, if we found an inanimate system that included a feedback loop that tended to maintain itself in a steady state, I would hesitate to call it a thermostat, but probably come down on the side of doing so, on the grounds that it is at least analogous to what we now call a thermostat.

Reality is an interpretation of empirical data. That's what I'm calling an interpretation here. People interpret that data differently, so there's all these different opinions of what is real. If being real is no more than an ideal (a mental designation), then there's no truth to the matter. — noAxioms

"Real" is more complicated that "red" or "large". Many, if not all, objects can be classified in several ways, according to context and point of view. Things can be real under one designation and not real under another. As to reality as philosophers debate it, I don't really understand what they are talking about - unless they mean real things in general. But since what is real depends on how it is described, that doesn't mean very much to me. "Real" does not mean "Ideal". On the contrary, the real is quite often opposed to the ideal.

Yes, local realism has been falsified. — noAxioms

Could you please enlighten me - What is "local realism"?

Having said that, and having floated the idea that ontology is a mental designation, it would seem to follow that presentism and eternalism are the same thing, just interpreted differently, an abstract different choice without any truth behind it. I hadn't realized that until now. — noAxioms

I must confess, when I've come across that argument, I haven't found it particularly interesting. So I'm not disappointed by that conclusion.

As first responder herein, I admitted to unabashedly supporting mind-independent reality, which makes explicit something that is, and is necessarily, regardless of what I think about it. — Mww

I agree. The interesting part is which items qualify as mind-independent and under what criteria.

But is 'temperature' a property of things outside our conceptual categories or is a concept we introduced to make sense of our experience? — boundless

I'm a bit puzzled by this. Why can't it be both?

Perhaps 'understood in its own terms' was what I meant. — Wayfarer

I think it helps. I don't think there is much missing in the physical explanation of a rainbow. A rainbow, understood as we perceive it and conceive of it, is one lange-game or practice. However, the same - what shall I call it? --phenomenon understood in physical terms, is another.

The same, I would say, applies to colours and sounds.

the question of this topic is not about the moon, but about the unicorn. If the unicorn exists, why? If it doesn't, why? Most say it doesn't, due to lack of empirical evidence, but if empirical evidence is a mind-dependent criteria. Sans mind, there is no empirical evidence to be considered.
— noAxioms
Here we are 500 posts in, and I don't think this has been answered. Lack of it is why I suggests that nobody really supports mind independent existence. — noAxioms

Well, I guess that's an opening for me to chip in. I do have a problem, however, that I haven't got my head around what the criteria are for mind-independent existence. But I can explain what I understand about unicorns. Perhaps that will help.

But first, can I ask whether you say that there is no question about the moon because there is no question whether it exists independent of any mind? If so, your general question is already answered, and we are dealing with the much more interesting question which things exist independent of any mind and which don't. A lot depends here on what "independently of any mind" means. I'm relying on my intuitions here. Perhaps we'll get a definition later.

For me, unicorns exist, all right. But they are not real creatures. They are mythical creatures. So I say that their existence is the existence of myths. Can we say that they are real mythical creatures? That sounds odd because "real" and "mythical" pull in opposite directions. We might say that they are really mythical creatures, contradicting anyone who might claim that they are real.

Myths are a complicated concept. Their existence does not depend on any specific minds, but does depend on the circulation of stories which cannot be tracked back to any specific people. If those stories stopped circulating and got forgotten, those myths would cease to exist and, although it seems odd to say so, unicorns would also cease to exist. Yet it would remain true that the myths and unicorns existed at some time, and that gives a sense to our feeling that even forgotten myths exist in the way that forgotten things continue to exist. So, in that sense, they are mind-independent, but in another sense, they are not.

The bottom line, is that, in the case of unicorns, our intuitions pull in opposite directions. Unicorns don't fit our, perhaps naive, common sense.

If I may add a comment on thermostats. We made them to meet certain purposes in our lives. In that sense, they are mind-dependent. And yet, there is a physical object that, we would like to say, exists independently of our minds. I would say that what exists indendently of our minds is a physical object shorn of its place in our lives. Without that context, it is misleading to call it a thermostat. But we can easily provide another description of it as a physical object. In that sense, it exists independently of our minds. One might add that the components of the thermostat all exist independently of our minds. It is their arrangement into the causal cycle, that makes those objects a thermostat.

I should have summarized the last pargraph. A thermostat qua thermostat is mind-dependent but qua physical object it is mind-independent.

Big 'if'. If mind (or life, or intelligence) is truly not reducible, then it's also not really explainable in other terms. — Wayfarer

Perhaps we should resist the equation of explaining something with reducing it. Physics can only explain things in certain terms. We live with things in different terms. But it's a matter of point of view - context and use - not a metaphysical problem - unless we choose to make it so.

I'm no expert, either. But somehow you are presenting the issues in a way I can get my head around.

But my current philosophy/physics book, by James B. Glattfelder*1 inadvertently raised an economic issue that also has political-philosophical significance. — Gnomon

There are definitely strange things going on in physics. I don't pretend to understand them, or even like them, but I suspect it will look very different in the future and our current obsessions will begin to seem as antiquated as Aristotle.

*4. The feudal system — Gnomon

The feudal system was developed in a much simpler society, in which money played a much smaller part than it does in ours. It was more concerned to regulate brute power rather than financial power. The development of international (in fact global) trade and of technology changed all that. I don't think there's any going back, though now that inheritance of money or at least the advantages gained for children through money is so much more important than it was does re-introduce an important element of the feudal system.

Money equals power; Power makes Law; Law makes Government

That's not wrong. Money equals control of resources in a functioning political system. One of the primary duties of a government is to ensure that is maintained. However, money is also a power base that is an alternative to the vote, and is perfectly capable of subverting it. That's why distribution of financial resources is not just an ethical question, but a political one.

There is a myth about democracy which sees it as both good and natural. With this myth comes ideas which say that non-democratic rule in Russia or China or the United States is an aberration, and that any deviation from pure democracy must be bad. Historically speaking, these are not aberrations at all. In fact democracy is historically recognized to be a rather dubious form of government, which is why even before the constitutional convention we had significant checks on democratic forms. — Leontiskos

You are quite right about the myth of democracy. It has been incredibly damaging and arguable led us to the crisis that we are now facing.
The traditional objection that democracy leads to anarchy is not wrong, and for a democracy to survive, there need to be checks and balances on the power of the vote. There's nothing special about that. An unchecked oligarchy or monarchy is also very likely to break down - especially if it forgets the ultimate power of the people. No regime can survive unless it has at least popular acquiescence. (French revolution, Russian revolution, American independence).
There's no doubt that democracy is fragile. But it is not unnatural. There have been democracies from time to time for a very long time. They come, they go. But then, so do authoritatrian regimes.

One of Aristotle's many contributions is that the goodness or badness of any particular regime must always be judged relative to where it began. This is true regardless of one's regime hierarchy. — Leontiskos

That I disagree with - although I don't know why Aristotle thought that, so I could be persuaded. I think the outcomes are what matters. After all, almost every regime is based on pure force. Though if you start with a selfish dictatorship, it does seem unlikely that the regime will turn into a benevolent government any time soon.
However, I remain convinced that a regime that gives equal consideration to the needs and wants of all its people and does not inappropriately discriminate between its citizens is ethically preferable to one that is founded on false ideas of differences between people.

Even if someone thought that democracy was the greatest thing since sliced bread, it would nevertheless remain true that the Soviet Union cannot be expected to shift from communism to democracy in the blink of an eye, and that the fall of the Berlin wall is not necessarily teleologically oriented towards a democratic regime. — Leontiskos

That optimism is a major cause of our problems now. That's why I think that revolution is, of itself, a Bad Idea. Reform is more likely to succeed.

Well the notion of in extremis is a central part of ethics, and I don't see why one couldn't be ethically prepared to accept conscription while at the same time being ethically unprepared to accept the conscription of children. — Leontiskos

I don't disagree with that. The problems with conscription are partly ethical and partly practical. So conscription even of adults is a step over the line. Conscription of children is worse than conscription of adults. All I'm saying is that in time of war, ethics often comes under pressure and people often step over the line rather than lose. Perhaps they may justify it as the lesser of two evils - and others may well disagree.

I guess conscription is different if we think it is okay to conscript children, but I don't think that. It seems as though conscription also entails adulthood. — Leontiskos

I don't think conscription is OK. Period. Nobody likes it, not even the army. If you have to force someone to join the army (or navy, air force, whatever) they are somewhat unlikely to make good soldiers, beyond getting lined up to be shot at. But it is a fact of life.
I think my point was that if you are prepared to conscript soldiers, you have already abandoned ethical thinking beyond your own survival. Questions of adulthood or not have been set aside.

strategic tolerance is motivated also by a perceived common ideological enemy: Christianity and Capitalism can ally against Communism, progressive socialism and conservative nationalism can ally against Capitalism, etc. — neomac

Yes. Good point. Thank you.

I just see some moves made in politics as being about gaining immediate votes rather than creating a better system. — I like sushi

Yes, indeed. I suspect that motive is very much present in this case.

It was one time where Labour and The Conservatives joined forces as it was mutually benefical for them to keep the current system. — I like sushi

Yes. Getting those in power to vote for something that will make their lives more difficult is not easy. IMO, In 2010 the Libdems, once they were in coalition, realized that they might one day get power without PR. They accepted a feeble compromise rather than put their power-sharing deal on the line.

Here again we find the issue tha both Popper and Berlin talked about, — I like sushi

Yes. They both make a lot of sense to me.

Would be better return to 1969 where the minimum age was 21 imo. — I like sushi

One reason I didn't much like that reform was precisely because of the slippery slope. But that works both ways. I don't see a good reason for not raising the age of majority to 25, for all the reasons that you give for not reducing it to 16. Impossible in practice, I know. On the other hand, I don't think it matters very much, so long as there is consensus, or at least acquiescence, and the system works reasonably well.

Infants do not question or ask, they simply live according to their biological requirements and remain largely passive. — I like sushi

Infants don't have a lot of power. But they don't hesitate to use what they do have, in my experience. Children are always pushing at the boundaries. Just like adults.

The argument that military service entails adulthood is very strong. — Leontiskos

Yes, it is, if you are thinking of volunteering. It's a life-and-death decision. Conscription is different. There's an ambivalence here between the soldiers as heroic defenders laying their lives on the line and soldiers as cannon-fodder.

Is true coexistence between ideologies even possible when they’re wired to see each other as threats to their own legitimacy? Maybe the real obstacle isn’t just disagreement—but the fact that many ideologies survive by creating an ‘us vs. them’ narrative. If you’re only making room for another worldview because you think yours will still win, is that coexistence... or just strategic tolerance? — Alonsoaceves

Insofar as recognition of another ideology as disagreeing with oneself means recognizing (often at the same time as denying) that the other side are also human beings. In a rational world, that should be a basis for working out how to co-exist. But I realize that's somewhat idealistic.
That little word "true" makes this a bit complicated. But I don't see why strategic tolerance can't count as co-existence, though I would have to agree that it is unstable. I think the best way to think about this is by analysis of actual examples.
The conflict between capitalism (USA & co.) and communism (USSR & co.) was complicated. There was an element of strategic tolerance in that neither party really wanted an all-out war. But there was endless competition between them in other ways. A complication is that, IMO, the conflict was not purely ideological but was also an old-fashioned competition between what used to be called Great Powers. Paradoxically, it kept some sort of peace for quite a while.
There's a rich variety of examples if one thinks about inter-religious conflict. There are all sorts of disagreement and conflict between the religions and churches within the religions. But they are, as a matter of fact, co-existing. The co-operation between religions in Jerusalem is an interesting case study. Sometimes, one finds movements that explicitly aim to develop peaceful co-existence, often on the basis that all religions face competition from secularism and there's a feeling that co-operation would be a more helpful strategy.

Policy wise I don't think so. Voting exams are bad news. — fdrake

Yes. I know. But I thought it was a theoretical discussion.

It is unreasonable to assume something when there is plenty of hard scientific evidence showing how adolescent brains are far less risk averse, immature in term of planning, managing emotions and delay gratification. — I like sushi

I didn't suggest assuming anything. On the contrary, I suggested evaluating the information and making a decision on that basis. I'm also suggesting that If you are so worried about 16-year-olds voting on the wrong criteria, you look at all the other voters who do the same thing.

"Yesterday I didn't know there was a curriculum, and today I'm writing it". — Banno

Do you mean that someone will have to write these tests of competence - with the issue that a miracle of dispassionate objectivity would be needed? The history of tests of voter competence is, how shall I put it, compromised.

Someone who's 14 is not expected to analyse literature, write a discursive essay, or read and interpret a graph though. — fdrake

Is that because they can't, or because we don't ask them to?

I'm not saying that you ought to be able to do these things to vote — fdrake

Wouldn't it make more sense to test for what you are looking for. Awareness and balanced judgement of public affairs. Such tests as these can't give us what we want. They can't provide an objective, impartial, accurate qualification for voting. It has to be fully automatic and undoubtedly will be rough and ready.

As for senile dementia, I see no reason they should still be able to vote. — I like sushi

That seems reasonable. But once you have set that criterion, doesn't elementary justice mean that it should be applied to voters of all ages?

There is a big difference between 16 and 18 yrs of age. — I like sushi

Sure. But the question is whether that difference makes a difference. Given that the system is very rough and ready, it doesn't seem unreasonable to me to think that it does not. Intellectually, we're on a slippery slope and political views are, of course, in play.

The prefrontal cortex needs to develop. This is not something we can simply dismiss. — I like sushi

If I've got it right, the prefrontal cortex doesn't stop developing until around 25. So that ship sailed long, long ago.

Yes, it is true that younger people are more prone to impulsive behaviour. But older people are prone to rigid views that have become inappropriate.
Perhaps then we should not simply dismiss the mental decay that sets in later on in life. Where would you put your cut-off?

The difficulty is that, if you are interested in the competence of people, there is no age at which everybody becomes competent. It is a gradual process. I'm sure that there are 16/17 year olds who are not well qualified to decide on the next Government as well as some that are. The same is true of the loss of competence at the other end of life. I agree also with the remark "The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter."

If you are going to assess the competence of voters, then you should assess all voters, of any age - and, preferably, convince them that your assessment is correct. Good luck with that.

Democracy may not the best way to select the people who are to govern. But it is the best way of ensuring that those who cannot govern (that is, at least keep the peace) are, in the end, thrown out. Popper, in "The Open Society" is very keen on this point. He's not wrong. An election is much less damaging than a revolution.

Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.… — "Churchill

Enough said, I think.

Let them vote it'll be good for them. — fdrake

Quite. I can't see that they will wreck the overall result.
But what shall we say when the 14 year olds start complaining?

If we create a poltical body that is increasingly dependent upon the short-term whim of inexperienced minds - who are biologically driven by a myopic perspective - then I fear for the long-term future. — I like sushi

That's been the classic arguments against democracy since the Athenian expedition to Sicily 415-413 BCE. Plato builds a political philosophy around it.
The classic reply is the Latin proverb "The voice of the people is the voice of God". This means that if you create a political body that is increasingly dependent on the short-tem interests of a small group - who are driven primarily by their own short-term interests at the expense of everyone else - then you should fear for the long-term future.
I'm sure you know who I'm looking at. I leave it to you to work out which is closer to our situation.

BTW. I've always seen "vox populi, vox dei" attributed to Cardinal Bellarmine. But apparently it is much older than that. Wikipedia cites a letter from Alcuin of York to Charlemagne in 798 CE as "an early reference".

Either way, our intuitions will lead us on more than our knowledge. When they meet each other then we have a period of relative harmony and peace (like now). — I like sushi

Yes. People do seem to focus on the fact that there has not been a world war since 1944. Whether it is appropriate, on that ground, to call the last 80 years a period of relative harmony and peace is not obvious to me. But I do agree that we seem to be in a particularly critical and unstable time. We live interesting times, unfortunately.

Sure. We learn where to use the syllogism, and where not to. We might do much the same with Ramsey's idea. We are not obligated to shoe-horn. — Banno

OK.

Again, I'm not seeing a substantive point if disagreement. — Banno

I agree it's not going to change the world.

The betting structure shows gives us a way of understanding what a belief and preference amount to, using just behaviour. — Banno

This reminds me of the Aristotle's practical syllogism, which is supposed to give a structure that applies to all actions whatever. In a way, it does, in the sense that you can shoe-horn actions into the formula. The same applies to Aristotle's syllogism, which was thought, for a long time, to give the structure of all arguments. What in fact happened was that arguments were shoe-horned into that structure, which was not particularly helpful. What tells you that the betting structure applies to all actions? The fact that you can shoe-horn things into the structure is not enough.

Better entails worst and best, in itself, by definition, in every appropriate use. We need that to be the case, to use “better” at all. — Fire Ologist

I'm interested in the limitation. Can you give me an example of an inappropriate use? Do you mean that in the inappropriate uses, better does not entail worst and best?
My problem is that although what you say applies, in a sense, to many cases, whether it applies to all cases is not clear to me, so your inappropriate uses might be rather interesting.

So good philosophy can completely forego the devotion to “ identifying and clarifying consistent/inconsistent and coherent/incoherent relations internal to systems/models”? — Fire Ologist

"Consistent" and "Coherent" only apply to a number of elements that relate to each other - that is, to a system. "Inconsistent" and "incoherent" mean "not systematic".

Ramsey offers a minimal account of the nature of belief, while the Bayesian account assigns a value to a belief without specifying what that belief might be. Ramsey gives an account of belief’s nature; Bayesianism gives a rule for belief’s revision. — Banno

You put the difference very neatly. Only, I didn't intend it as a criticism, but as an analysis.
BTW, yes, I had thought of Ryle when Ramsey first came up. I shall take the opportunity to say, because it needs to be said as often as possible, that Ryle is not a behaviourists the sense that Watson and Skinner are. (I can't say whether that's true for Ramsey, since I haven't read the texts). He has a "thick" conception of what action is, whereas Watson and Skinner have a "thin" conception. To put it another way, where Watson and Skinner think of the brain as a telepone exchange - a switching mechanism - Ryle and (I guess) Ramsey think of the mind as what enables us to act rationally.

Got it: — Moliere

Well done! I found a copy of the chapter on some obscure web-site, but couldn't find any attribution - which was a little frustrating.

You notice, I hope, that Kant's account of the incident is entirely true to life. But he considers his "victim" as a person like him. He doesn't consider how much a peasant would stake, given that they have virtually no money.

I'll bet the same against you, on the odds that it doesn't -- given I have nothing and I could win on the bluff I might as well. — Moliere

Yes. You see how your thinking is conditioned by risk and reward in relation to your resources. Yes, of course, it is a non-standard, even contrarian, decision, but nonetheless, the amount you will bet is not an index of your belief, but the result of several interacting factors. To fnd the strength of belief, you have to work through all those factors.

I distrust betting on the whole. It's a test of who is right and who is wrong -- so I can persuade a person to bet against that the LNC* is false in at least one circumstance, and then provide the argument from the liar's sentence (which will certainly not persuade), and we'd be right back doing philosophy again rather than betting. — Moliere

I like the twist that events will take you back to philosophy, because there has to be agreement on the outcome.

That's what I meant to imply by the 1 million dollar buy in before. — Moliere

I'm sorry. I don't remember what the buy-in was.

The philosophical move is from the action representing the belief to the action constituting the belief. — Banno

I'm sorry. I don't see what you are getting at.

So, bets, promises, posts on one hand and paying up, following through, and reading on the other. — Moliere

I can see the link between the two. But I don't see how that fits with what @Banno says.

I don't think Zizek is denying the possibility of changing views. He just remarks how painful it can often be and how often that this change can hardly come by our own intellectual initiative. — neomac

That's a rather charitable interpretation of "forced".
It's an interesting issue. On the one hand, it seems ideologically loaded and it is hard to believe that anyone would voluntarily leave one's own ideology. Hence the labelling that goes on. On the other hand, it is possible that there is empirical evidence that the separation of ideologies may be less radical than it seems at first sight. It will depend heavily on interpretation.

I don't think however that any of such considerations clarify the nature of ideological thinking and how it epistemically compels us. — neomac

Perhaps I just don't understand the situation very well.

The betting structure shows gives us a way of understanding what a belief and preference amount to, using just behaviour. — Banno

Well, gambling was important in the development of probability theory from the beginning. So it's no surprise that it crops up here. More than that, it's true that people do sometimes challenge a claim that they disagree with by suggesting the proposer puts their money where their mouth is. But I'm irritated that, in this context, people talk as if the size of the bet is somehow an index of the strength of the belief. Outside of artificial situations in labs, that's just not the case. A bet is a balance between risk and reward assessed in the context of the degree of confidence and in the wider context of the bet.
Of course, if you use a bet as a model for all behaviour under uncertainty, the scope of the theory is extended. But it seems at least possible that there are limits to that scope. Insurance is like a bet in some ways, but quite different in other ways. Is it helpful to think of a decision to buy a particular car or house as a bet? And so on.

This needs a good example. I'll work on it. — Banno

I'll look forward to that.