Math formulas, equations and functions are descriptions of the physical world. Description is not physical objects. — Corvus

The sun is yellow. Yellow is not a physical object. But the light being emitted at 510 Terahertz is.

We know, or are aware of the mental objects. They don't exist like the physical objects in the external world. — Corvus

Even if that were true, it wouldn't contradict the existence of an objective correlate of the mental object. i.e. Just because numbers have a mental appearance, doesn't mean that numeracy isn't a physical reality. My go-to example is the use of Fibonacci-sequence timed laser pulses to stimulate atoms into a new phase state of matter. Nature is "resonant" to numerical properties....

No. it doesn't. Number can start from any number you decided to choose to start. Because numbers are the mental concept. There is no physical laws or principles on numbers. — Corvus

Numbers can be mental concepts. However anything natural can also exist as a mental concept. And numbers appear to inhere in the natural world, as evidenced by the existence of mathematizable relationships. So what basis is there for claiming numbers are, or numeracy is, exclusively mental?

No, numbers do not have causal efficacy. They are not efficient causes, in any sense of the term. — Arcane Sandwich

What about considering binary fission as exemplifying a kind of organic ontology. One parent cell is the efficient cause of two daughter cells. One is the cause, two are the effects.

Oh. When I asked if the problem driving contemporary populism was systemic, I was asking if it's actually a problem with democracy. — frank

And I think that it is a problem with the mechanisms of democracy for sure.

Does that mean the only solution to any problem is revolution? — frank

I don't think that revolution is the only or most logical means to address systemic problems; you don't have to replace a system to address a systemic problem, merely address it at a systemic level. Which is the sense in which I understand legislation to operate, defining governing norms.

I would say that "kicking ass" is indeed a different priority. lol.

Is the problem systemic? — frank

If you place any credence in critical theory, then all problems are systemic. I do, inasmuch as we are more than just accidentally responsible for the state of affairs within which we exist. There's no limit to what can be solved as long as the legislative power enacting the solution is respected. Which is the entire purpose of having a government, in nuce.

Engels argues as much, when he talks about the ability to completely optimize economic realities, if only we can produce with consciousness as human beings "not as dispersed atoms without consciousness of your species." Whereby you transcend the problems of all "artificial and untenable antitheses." (from his Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy)

Sure. So populism is essentially a symptom of the deficiencies of the existing system of governance.

So the underlying concrete problem is addressed by a coalition of billionaires who don't like to pay their workers. Does this make populism a corruption of reason? Or is Maga not a genuine form of populism?

Ok. What is the underlying "rationally and contextually situated request" of which MAGA has become the empty signifier? At least ostensibly, populism seems to be defined in terms of concrete problems, which is reasonable. But MAGA seems to never have been anything but an empty and meaningless abstraction.

Nicely constructed synopsis.

Kicking off 2025 with

One Hundred Years of Solitude
by Gabriel García Márquez

Also a History of Philosophy, Volume 1: The Project of a Genealogy of Postmetaphysical Thinking
by Jürgen Habermas

I'm very excited to read this first of a brand new 3 volume history of philosophy by Jurgen Habermas at age 94! Volume 2 just came into print; volume 3 out in a few months.

...the history of Western philosophy as a genealogy of post metaphysical thinking....Habermas situates Western philosophy in relation to traditions of thought founded in the major worldviews (Judaism, Buddhism, Confucianism and Taoism). So says the flyleaf.

Finished my last book of 2024, thus my year in review.
To my surprise and pleasure, the tales of Robert Louis Stevenson proved to be some of the most finely crafted literature I've yet encountered. I was also inspired by both the fiction and non-fiction of H.G. Wells, profound and prophetic.

FICTION
A Harlot High and Low by Honore de Balzac
Thuvia Maid of Mars (Barsoom #4) by Edgar Rice Burroughs
The Chessmen of Mars (Barsoom #5) by Edgar Rice Burroughs
The Master Mind of Mars (Barsoom #6) by Edgar Rice Burroughs
A Fighting Man of Mars (Barsoom #7) by Edgar Rice Burroughs
Swords of Mars (Barsoom #8) by Edgar Rice Burroughs
The Mucker (Mucker #1) by Edgar Rice Burroughs
Synthetic Men of Mars (Barsoom #9) by Edgar Rice Burroughs
Llana of Gathol (Barsoom #10) by Edgar Rice Burroughs
John Carter & the Giants of Mars and Skeleton Men of Jupiter by Edgar Rice Burroughs
A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe
Martin Chuzzlewit by Charles Dickens
Little Dorrit by Charles Dickens
The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas
The Woodlanders by Thomas Hardy
The Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy
The Arabian Nights by Daniel Heller-Roazen
Gray Lensman (Lensman #4) by E.E. Doc Smith
Second Stage Lensmen (Lensmen #5) by E.E. Doc Smith
Children of the Lens (Lensman #6) by E.E. Doc Smith
Humphry Clinker: An Authoritative Text Contemporary Responses Criticism by Tobias Smollett
The Merry Men and Other Tales and Fables by Robert Louis Stevenson
New Arabian Nights by Robert Louis Stevenson
Tales and Fantasies by Robert Louis Stevenson
The Sleeper Awakes (Penguin Classics) by H.G. Wells
In the Days of the Comet by H.G. Wells

NON-FICTION
Introduction to Biosemiotics: The New Biological Synthesis by Marcello Barbieri
Civilization and Capitalism 15th-18th Century Vol. 1: The Structures of Everyday Life by Fernand Braudel
Scientific Realism: Selected Essays of Mario Bunge by Mario Bunge
Speculum Mentis by R.G. Collingwood
How We Think by John Dewey
The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy and Other Essays by John Dewey
Hermeneutics and the Study of History (Selected Works Vol 4) by Wilhelm Dilthey
Moral Education by Emile Durkheim
The Rules of Sociological Method: And Selected Texts on Sociology and its Method by Emile Durkheim
Outlines of Scepticism by Sextus Empiricus
The Revolt of the Masses by Jose Ortega y Gasset
History as a System and other Essays Toward a Philosophy of History by Jose Ortega y Gasset
Man and Crisis by Jose Ortega y Gasset
New Ways of Ontology by Nicolai Hartmann
Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments by Max Horkheimer
The Grammar of Systems: From Order to Chaos & Back by Patrick Hoverstadt
The Way Things Are by Lucretius
Economic & Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 by Karl Marx
Collingwood and the Crisis of Western Civilisation: Art Metaphysics and Dialectic by Richard Murphy
Philosophical Writings of Peirce by Charles Sanders Peirce
Collingwood and the reform of metaphysics: A study in the philosophy of mind by Lionel Rubinoff
Unto this Last; The Political Economy of Art; Essays on Political Economy by John Ruskin
The Construction of Social Reality by John Rogers Searle
Making the Social World: The Structure of Human Civilization by John Rogers Searle
NOOGENESIS: Computational Biology by Alex M. Vikoulov
A Modern Utopia by H.G. Wells
New Worlds for Old: A Plain Account of Modern Socialism by H.G. Wells
Quantum Mind and Social Science: Unifying Physical and Social Ontology by Alexander Wendt
Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology by Alfred North Whitehead
The Soul of Man Under Socialism by Oscar Wilde

It isn't "non locally real" it is "not locally real" - as in "locally non-real"

The title may be confusing some people unfortunately.

The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844
by Karl Marx, Fredrick Engels

The Three Musketeers
by Alexandre Dumas

Man and Crisis
by José Ortega y Gasset

John Carter and the Giants of Mars; The Skeleton Men of Jupiter
by Edgar Rice Burroughs

Can we ever know what "the good" is? If we accept that our knowledge is inevitably limited, then, in any given circumstance what one person thinks is good may not be what another person thinks is good. So at a bare minimum saying that we ought to do what is good endorses a moral relativism which can result in not doing the right, supposing that some people are better able to identify the good than others.....

I think the gap between the heights of human knowledge and values and the depths of the mass-mind has never been greater. There is an economic-power and awareness-morality schism that it seems to me will eventually result in some kind of catastrophe.

History as a System and other Essays Toward a Philosophy of History
by José Ortega y Gasset

The Way Things Are (De Rerum Natura)
by Lucretius,

And yet, I don't think we would want to say that the shape of the Earth or the nature of infectious diseases is just about cultural norms. To be sure, our understanding of these is bound up in and filtered through such norms, since education, science, etc. are social practices, and the findings of science can fit into a metaphysical framework. But presumably we'd like to say that there is a "fact of the matter" about the shape of the planet or germ theory, and that this has been what has driven the evolution of cultural norms on this topic. — Count Timothy von Icarus

And I would agree in general with this argument. Except to say that, at a fundamental level, there may indeed be "facts of the matter" which cultural norms - or metaphysical presuppositions - both proscribe and prescribe. So there may be things about reality - facts of the matter - that our presuppositions (of whatever kind) don't allow us to grasp. And also, yes, perhaps there are facts of the matter when it comes to incest-prohibitions, but these would be more like "genetic imperatives," for which there is no trivial translation into a moral vocabulary.

Descartes was right in saying the most self evident reality is"cogito" or "Ich denke" in Kant. All other reality is based on it. Indeed one cannot doubt one is thinking. In Kant, all experience is based on Ich denke, so it is the a priori precondition for possibility of all existence. — Corvus

My avatar agrees.

I didn't say it isn't real. I said that I could see what someone would mean by saying that gravity is more real than justice. — Michael

:up:
If we can agree that there can be degrees of reality then, for my part, that is the critical thing.

Well, one definition of "real" is "existing or occurring in the physical world; — Michael

Well that doesn't beg any questions.....

Ideas exist in the physical world (ta-da). Justice is an idea. Ergo justice is real.

Cogito — Corvus

ergo sum

Gravity
Kings
Justice

I could see what someone would mean by saying that gravity is "more real" than kings and that kings are "moral real" than justice.

There's an extensional component to "gravity" that "justice" doesn't have (unless Platonism is correct), and there's an intensional component to "kings" that "gravity" doesn't have. — Michael

Consciousness
Matter

Consciousness may not itself be more real than matter. But the state of affairs that includes both consciousness and matter is "more" than the state of affairs consisting of only matter. What else can that "more" be if not "more real"? Ideas are realized. Things become real that weren't before in a non-trivial, non-mechanistic way.

It's a question of cultural norms. Incest has historically been widely practiced to varying degrees, especially among ruling classes. Is morality a cultural phenomenon? Or is culture a moral phenomenon? You decide.

The Revolt of the Masses
by José Ortega y Gasset

The Soul of Man Under Socialism
by Oscar Wilde

:up:
This is fundamental to a philosopher like Collingwood, for example, and his notion of "absolute presuppositions," which are the epistemological cornerstone of his metaphysics.

There are also a ton of hits on TPF if you search "theory-laden".

Not quite sure what you mean by observation is theory laden either. — Corvus

As I said, it is a well-known concept; there is actually a wiki on it. I would start with that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory-ladenness

:up:

\ This basically says that observation is theory laden, so all thought is the product of its history of conceptualization (including observations). Fundamentally (observation is theory laden) it's a pretty basic concept. Collingwood expands upon it considerably.

Whatever the case, they all need observation by humans who record and monitor the process, and simulation and modelling wouldn't replace observation in science. — Corvus

Yes. Bearing in mind that

...the work of observing facts is really done by the senses with assistance from the intellect. What the positivists called ‘observing’ facts is really historical thinking, which is a complex process involving numerous presuppositions
~Essay in Metaphysics

At present, I'm not seeing how:

Our thoughts exemplify what they conceptualize
— Pantagruel

is inconsistent with:

...consciousness formats the boundaries of perceived things as a translation of things-in-themselves.
— ucarr — ucarr

I don't know that I said it was inconsistent, merely that your concept of "boundary administration" isn't gelling with me. Perspective might dictate that we perceive the same thing through different metaphors.

When you score a victory against your opposition, it has meaning and value. The circularity of you being you in isolation has no meaning or value. — ucarr

Which is why Collingwood's conception of logic-metaphysics is not just dialectical, but dialogical. Propositions only have meanings as answers to questions.

We are alive and real only because we can die. Consciousness divorced from death is a childish game. We grow up when we accept the strategic incompleteness of ourselves; it fends off death until the living project extends beyond the individual’s strategies for preserving its incompleteness. — ucarr

Consciousness can be construed as a species-collective property, which at the bare minimum distances (and possibly insulates) it from the individual notion of (ego-)death. Your statement reads as existential. I've been a determined existentialist in the past; I'm coming to see existentialism, however, as more of a very sophisticated kind of psychology.

But don't simulation or modelling at the end of the day need observation to be meaningful? Simulation and modelling unobserved by humans don't exist, therefore meaningless? — Corvus

Absolutely. Models don't exclude the modeler and the modeled, they unite them.

Instead, cogito-spacetime takes the place of cogito ergo sum. With consciousness now inducted into the physico_material realm of physics as the boundary administrator for the cognition of the physics of physico_material reality, this addition resolves the seeming inconsistency between QM and Newton. The seeming inconsistency between QM and Newton, plus Descartes' cogito ergo sum, operate as the wellsprings of the HPoC. — ucarr

I think conceptually this accords with R. G. Collingwood's elaboration of the Ontological Argument:

The distinction between processes that we can discover in the object, and processes which we can discover in our minds when we reflect on our thought about the object, is a distinction that we have no right to make here, because, as we learnt in reflecting upon the idea of nothing, we are here in a realm of thought in which there is no object, and in which therefore whatever necessarily happens in our minds when we think about a given concept is a process necessarily ascribed to the concept itself.
~Collingwood, The Nature of Metaphysical Study

Our thoughts exemplify what they conceptualize. This is why I don't quite gel with your notion of the "boundary administrator" role. I would say we are quantum-mechanical adjudicators of the quantum.

As regards its modus operandi, then, all analysis is metaphysical analysis; and, since analysis is what gives its scientific character to science, science and metaphysics are inextricably united, and stand or fall together.
~R.G. Collingwood, Essay on Metaphysics