Some people could argue that it must follow, I am less confident about that. It seems to me that that leaves us stuck in a view in which all there is, are appearances all the way down. I don't agree with that. — Manuel

The idea of appearances all the way down is completely absurd. The essential task that philosophy brings one to is not the drawing of a line between appearance and reality, but to ground what it is in the world that intimates the Real, and first the Real has to be affirmed as something that is not nonsense. So what is it that is there, in our existence, that intimates the Real? This is a prohibited question in analytic thinking.

The rejected philosophical alternative lies with Husserl and his phenomenological reduction, which was taken up by post Heideggerians in the so called French theological turn. This is why I reject Strawson's materialism: his thesis includes a typical rigidly determined sense of the impossible that separates what we know (and he cites science for this) from what is not known, which is vast, by his estimate, and this is why he defends such a flexible or inclusive concept of materialism, to accommodate the radical distance between the known and what is not known. He does not take seriously the Husserlian claim that a true scientific approach to philosophy requires a thematic redirection toward the intuitive grounding for all scientific thinking; nor did Heidegger, Sartre, or anyone I have read, until Levinas and Michel Henry, Jean luc Marion, et al.

But as you say, this is an imposing philosophical task, reading Husserl. But as I see it, it is essential. The epoche is a method, not a thesis, whereby one removes from the perceptual act all but the essential givenness of the intuitive encounter. All schools are in abeyance in the attempt to approach the "pure phenomenological" that is IN the world prior to the "naturalistic attitude". Husserl holds this to be a method of discovery, not simply a thesis, and he claims this method is THE way philosophy should go. I think he was right. Not something I can convince another person to see. One has to "do" this, and it requires a turn away from science altogether. It is a new set of philosophical themes.

Having experience tells us something about the mental aspects of the physical, I don't see this as naive, it's simply follows from the logic of it. I hesitate to say "common sense", because I guess you'd say that's scientific reductionistic emptiness.

It's very hard to spell out what common sense is, but I think it's something people have. — Manuel

What is it that underlies common sense? I think you're right to say it is something people have, as if there is this unexamined intuition that is always already there, from which issues forth tacitly, assumptions about the Real of everydayness. Strawson calls it a sense. Why I call his position naive is his belief that this is as far as one can go. I think this sense can be isolated and analyzed. Heidegger does this, but he rejected Husserl's dramatic epoche. I thought it strange that you could read Heidegger and move toward Strawson because Heidegger examines the very thing Strawson indicates to be that which justifies his materialism, namely, that "feeling"; for Heidegger, that feeling or sense is the dynamic of the temporal structure of our existence (which he got from Kierkegaard, among others). Heidegger's dasein leaves Strawson's feeling rather in the dust.

I mean, if you continue to equate materialism with scientism, then that's fine - it's what most people take the term to mean. I don't think that term must follow. All I'm saying is that there is one fundamental stuff in the world, and that everything else is a variation of it. This doesn't reduce representations to neurons, nor does it deny that a novel can be more profound than quantum theory, nor that history is just meaningless events. I think it's pretty astonishing. — Manuel

Well, all of his ideas about where thinking leaves off prior to the abyss of not-knowing are from science. I think the very concept of material substance is from science, I mean, the term itself is a scientific one, and any give or take regarding its meaning is stuck with this. I know, he invites us to choose another, and he knows he teeters on idealism.

But as to fundamental stuff, one could go with Heidegger and Derrida and admit that the question that we encounter issues forth IN language: the question is the piety of thought says Heidegger, and when we reach the end of thought, it is thought's end, and not some impossible intuition.

Partly right, I say. Husserl had it right before him. This is, of course, very tough to defend.

Chomsky believes that people think, and that thinking - somehow, takes place in a brain. Not crazy. — Manuel

No, it's not crazy at all at this level of analysis. Nobody, from Kant through Derrida says so. But as a way to describe the foundation for knowledge relationships, it is so bad that it is instantly refutable. For when one thinks the word 'brain' and all that is a brain rushes to mind, all one can "get" is the phenomena, the stuff that the positing of a brain is supposed to take care of, explain. But the brain itself is just this kind of thing: a phenomenon! In order to posit something that can explain phenomena, one would have to step OUT of phenomena, but this stepping out would require some impossible distance, separation, pov that is not phenomenological at all. Simply. after now more than two hundred years of transcendental philosophy, NOT possible. And everyone knows this; obviously Strawson. As you said, he takes his inspiration from Moore's hand demonstration (like Diogenes who walks across the floor, thereby refuted Zeno); but this is just the analaytic school throwing up its hands and affirming, yes, it is impossible to escape the phenomenological nature of any assumption. So, after years of struggling with Kant (and the varieties of Kantians) they quit, and started with "best explanation" talk, and this has led them to a crisis of vacuity (as Strawson admits several times here) for if you just take philosophy down to verifiable/falsifiable standards, science then moves to the forefront meaningful thinking.
Strawson seems to address this in his contra-Ryle:

The way a colour-experience is experientially, for the subject of experience that has it, is part of its
essential nature—its ultimate reality—as a physical phenomenon. When we claim (with
Russell) that to have an experience is eo ipso to be acquainted with certain of the intrinsic
features of reality, we do not have to suppose that this acquaintance involves standing back
from the experience reflectively and examining it by means of a further, distinct experience. It
doesn’t. This picture is too cognitivist (or perhaps too German-Idealist).

And this is the extent of his argument. Simply and absurdly dismissive. His examples all from physics space/time, atoms and subatomic particles, energy/particle interconvertability, and he considers "that physics’s best account of the structure of reality is genuinely reality-representing in substantive ways, and that the term ‘materialist’ is in good order. I sail close to the wind in my use of the word ‘matter’, facing the charge of vacuousness and the charge (it is seen as a charge) that it may be hard to
distinguish my position from idealism"; so what he gives us is an idealism, with the many inclusions for the monist view he defends, of a unity that must be inclusive of both the assumption of non experiential "being" and experiential being. So what does the non experiential being amount to? No more than what science and common sense tell us: a kicking of a chair; a raising up of arms. He has never in the course of the paper exceeded Moore's Diogenes-like example (of course, as he promised). He has, at most, made clear that the assumption scientists make that there must be an outside to our inside, is a good one. Let's call this a defense of materialism.

It's rationalistic because it postulates a world out there, not a perception-dependent reality, like Berkeley who tries to use God to render himself consistent. But if experience comes from brains, and not our eyes, then there is no contradiction between "physical" and "idealism" in this rationalist sense. — Manuel

But again, there certainly is a difference. There is a reason why Heidegger wanted to be liberated from the history of bad metaphysics, and dropped terms like 'physical' and idealism'. I am the one challenging the physicalist model. Heidegger doesn't bother with this because in his world this belongs to an entirely improper orientation. I am simply doing a reductio on the assumption of materialism, underscoring that there is no epistemic way out, not of the interior of a brain, for the argument goes much, much further than this: Eve the idea of a brain itself is annihilated. This is where Rorty is coming from. He is not saying materialism is wrong. Rather, there is beyond what can be said, nothing to say (from Wittgenstein, whom he ranked as high as Heidegger).

Strawson's Real Materialism fairs no better, because BOTH inside and outside are nonsense terms. In his terms, he would allow his thinking to be called ‘experiential-and-non-experiential ?-ist’ But here, he is just buying into a scientific category.

He can be read in many ways. I surely agree that standard materialism would be an extremely tortured view to read into him. I think his observations about our being in relation to present-at-hand and essentially unconscious activity to be very interesting — Manuel

Heidegger is wrong in his notion of present at hand. If this is interesting to you, then it can be explored, but for now, let's say his accusation that Husserl is trying to "walk on water" with his intuitionism lacks insight.

This charge of being naive doesn't get old. It seems that a pre-requisite for being deep depends on being as obscure as humanly possible, for some reason. If you find Derrida useful, good. I find Russell useful, you might label Russell naive, as is frequently stated. — Manuel

I don't mean this to be insulting. I call it naive for the above reasons.

Well, one should keep in mind, which Kantians don't usually bring up for some reason, is that he was a Newtonian. He took space and time to be the a-priori conditions of sensibility, as opposed to say, cognitive openness or a background of intelligibility, because he thought space and time were absolute as Newton showed. He then incorporated this into our subjective framework and denied the validity of these to things in themselves.

Today we know that Newton is only correct within a range of phenomena, but not others. We now speak of spacetime, due to Einstein.

I don't read into it much scripture. Again, you can label the world whatever, it's a monist postulate, not more. The idea that experience is physical was mind-boggling to me. But as he says clearly, his physicalism is not physicSalism. These are very different. — Manuel

You comments on Kant are unclear. Cognitive openness? Background of intelligibility? Both of these could be affirmed in the CPR. But you have something specific in mind.

Einstein's space/time presupposes the structures of conscious events that make theoretical physics possible. THIS is why physics cannot serve as a source for thinking about philosophical ontology.

The point about religion misses the mark. The mark was about the non arbitrariness of science and the arbitrarily of "feeling" something to be the case.

What something "really" is, is honorific. You can say I want the "real truth" or the "real deal", that doesn't mean there are two kinds of truth, the truth and the real truth nor the deal and the real deal.

You can ask, what constitutes this thing at a certain level. So in the case of neurons, you stay within biology. If you want to go to a "deeper" level (which can be somewhat misleading), you go to physics, not biology. But if we are not talking about neurons, and instead are speaking about people, we can speak in many different ways, not bound down to the sciences at all. — Manuel

No, that's not quite right. I put the term 'reality' in double inverted commas for a reason: Materialism's material IS what takes the place as the "real" substrata that underlies all things, and in doing so, it leads our thinking into thoughts about what is really "real" to a reductionist position delimited by the contextual possibilities of the term "materialism". You should see this. This is not some harmless, neutral idea that embraces all possible relevant disclosures. It carries serious baggage, as I said earlier. What baggage? The assumption that science is the cutting edge of discovery at the most basic level of analysis. That baggage. It is called, pejoratively, scientism.

If you say so. That's why I said I'm the odd one out. I could call myself a real materialist in Strawson's sense, or a "rationalistic idealist" in Chomsky's sense and not be committed at all to the ontology of current science. I don't believe in this notion of commitment, my thoughts could change depending on arguments and evidence. — Manuel

Rationalistic idealist?? You lost me. especially as to how one could waver between two things that are mutually exclusive. But then, I would have to have this explained to me.

Who says I have not read Heidegger? Why are you assuming this? Because I referenced Strawson, you assume I have not read him or Husserl? That's quite amusing. I used to be a Heideggerian, and I think he has interesting things to say, no doubt. Hegel I can't stand. I prefer Schopenhauer. I should read more Kierkegaard, but I have my own interests too.

I don't find Derrida is useful at all, in fact to me it's the opposite. But I am not going to pre-judge people who do find him useful because "they are what the read". You can tone it down a bit you know. — Manuel

The reason I assumed you didn't read Heidegger is simple: Heidegger undoes any construal of materialism. It simply seems impossible that after reading Being and Time, one could go on with any faith in anything that does not acknowledge the hermeneutical nature of epistemology. The OP is all about the failure to account for just this. Being and Time addresses this in spades.

You think my "you are what you read" was over the top? Apologies.

Derrida just takes Heidegger, as Rorty put it, to the full conclusion of his thoughts. After all, if language is essentially interpretative in laying out the conditions for revealing the world, then all eyes are on language, and Derrida rightly makes the case that this leads to a radical indeterminacy, for words are simply not stand alone in their references.
Look, I have read these guys (and I am by no means an expert, btw) and I can't see how one can move from a Heideggerian to what Strawson defends. Strawson seems naive, frankly, and I attribute this to his love affair with materialism. Not prejudging so much as, I don't see how you be serious.

It's not a standard of the scientific method, it's saying how much more the physical is compared to the view of the physical presented by people who call themselves "materialists", Dennett, Churchland and others. — Manuel

The scientific method insists on standards of confirmation that are not arbitrary. A "feeling" that something is the case as it is taken up by Strawson, is not like an intuition of logic or one of, say, Kant's apriori space. It has no content and there is nothing "there" to acknowledge and interpret. Rather, it is just a reification of common sense, a pretending really, that the feeling that assures one all is well ontologically. But nothing at all is "well". And the concept as an ontology is absurd and really no better than religious affirmation in scripture in which feelings are very strong indeed.

As to the "certain kind of feeling" comment, it's more or less true. You can keep on asking why questions infinitely, but beyond a point the question itself does not advance any further answers. So one is either content to give the best explanation we may have of a thing so far as we can tell, or we'll merely end up talking about terminology, which is not interesting.[
It depends on what questions you are asking and this changes entirely what the best explanation could be. Take the simple matter raised in the OP: what is the "best explanation" here, at the genuinely most basic epistemic connectivity is? A concept about how this is possible, this kind of connectivity, is fundamental to all other claims to what could be a foundational substratum to all things, i.e., an account of what "reality" is at the basic level of inquiry. IF one assumes materialism in this, THEN one is bound to the essential descriptive features of materialism, and there is nothing in materialism that can do this. One would have to redefine materialism for this, and I think Strawson wants to have all things subsumable under materialism as he often pulls back to say how "open" the idea is. But it is not open at all. It in fact closes theory. If you want openness, then Heidegger is your man.
— Manuel

The point of the essay was to show how much more "materialism" is, than what is commonly assumed. It includes everything there is, because we simply don't know enough to claim that there is something else which is not physical. — Manuel

But the term 'physical' equally says nothing. This comes down to a term having a descriptive capacity to explain the what is there, and what is there is indeterminacy at the basic level, not the physical or the material. These are terms simply borrowed from everyday talk, stand-in terms for general references. They are anti-analytic, as if inquiry found its terminal point. But there is only one terminal 'point' and this is openness itself; not the kind of scientific openness that looks to established paradigms in science for its clues to proceed, but existential openness that puts science, too, and its objectivity, in abeyance. All Strawson provides is a reification of "common" sense. But the world is not common at all.

We have not exhausted, at all, what the physical is. It's a monist claim. But if you dislike the name "materialism", you can call it "objective mentalism" or "critical idealism" or even "dialectical phenomenology", everything would be that one thing postulated by the term you use. And then you'd have to give a very good reason for justifying the introduction of another substance or ontology. Simply asserting the mind isn't matter is missing the point completely. — Manuel

I don't assert the mind is not matter. That would be assuming the term 'matter' has any sense outside it comfortable contextualities.
No, materialism comes with very specific baggage, and the point is one cannot simply declare it to be without any real meaning, then conclude all things are this. One is committed to science's paradigmatic limitations with this term and the trouble with this is, science cannot examine its own presuppositions, like the mind-body-epistemic problem. Attention must go exclusively issues raised by Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Husserl, so forth into Derrida and others.

I don't deny that Husserl has some useful things to say. He is not good at explaining them very well, admittedly, but if one wants to go through that monumental effort, there may well be some interesting ideas to be gained from him.

It's fine to prefer one school of thought over another, that's just the way we are. — Manuel

We are what we read, and there is such a thing as bad thinking. No doubt Husserl can be demanding. But the Cartesian Meditations are not so impenetrable at ll. But his IDEAS I and II really do lay out the details of his phenomenology.

But pls, it's not just a whatever floats your boat matter. Why not read Heidegger's Being and Time, just for the philosophical pleasure of coming to grips with the greatest philosopher of the past century?

For instance, by pointing out the … well, inconsistency … in someone engaging in arguments for the sake of - hence, with the intent of - preserving the status quo of physicalism which, as worldview, upholds the nonoccurrence of teloi (such as those which take the form of the very intents to uphold the worldview). — javra

For me the telos rests with what I see as simply without doubt, the most salient part of our existence, which is value. I've said it before, but it always bears repeating: value is by far the strangest thing in all there is. It is sui generis, this "ouch" at the touch of a flame and this falling in love, this happiness, and this what sets it apart from Wittgenstein's "states of affairs". The "Good" is what Witt called divinity, and of course, he knew all about the long historical philosophical narrative of this term, but it is, by my thinking, the true bedrock of foundational analysis. Wittgenstein famously turned on Russell, and Russell called him a mystic. Well, the world is, at the very heart of where the understanding can go, utterly indeterminate. Only value-meaning stands out in affirmation: nobody invented love, bliss, suffering, pain misery and all the thousand natural shocks. This the world "does to us", so to speak. And it is what we live and die for.

Sure. — Manuel

So I've read it, and as I knew, because I have read enough analytic philosophy to know, it was nearly altogether empty of content. These philosophers write as if Kant, whose thoughts ruled philosophy for a hundred years and beyond (in one way or another) never existed. The mentality here comes from science and the "naturalism" that follows from this attitude,and attitude it is, for there is nowhere in this paper that ever exceeds Moore's axiomatic wave of the hands, as if from this, and the aimless talk about mental and non mental or experiential and non experiential physicality one finds grounds for affirming materialism, implicitly showing that all this amounts to is a "feel" (that is a quote) for the rectitude of scientific thinking at the most basic level. I mean, he hasn't even begun to think philosophically.

If you would like to argue about this, I am open to this, but I have to say that it is a typical approach in analytic discovery: there is no discovery, only an endless reference to what is commonly held in the naturalistic point of view, and he never gets beyond Moore's waving of his arms and declaring this to be ample proof that "there is waving of the arms" is true. Strawson relies simply on common sense. Kant, Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger, Jaspers, and on and on, never happened, as if science is now here and we can finally just adopt science's playing field as a place to play out arguments about ontology. Really? Materialism is NOT an empirical concept, but he tries to make it into one, all the while throwing incaveats about how to qualify materialism away from its being an absurd metaphysical ontology, which, if approached honestly, is just this: ask a simple question, what is the "material" of materialism? He says it is not unlike the question about the material a shirt or a lamp is made of. He sees it as a kind of attitudinal carry over from the common cases of affirming "what is it?" questions, and so, the "material" of materialism just refers us to another body of established thinking, like asking what a bank teller is refers us to talk about banks, money, and so on, so asking about material in his sense refers us to other contexts where material finds a comfortable place to settle; and this is simply the way of it with analytic philosophy: monumentally unenlightening!

Analytic thinking, from Russell to Quine and Strawson is just a lot of very well spoken and painfully elaborated vacuity.

Just look at this passage:

For (briefly) what we think of as real understanding of a natural phenomenon is always at
bottom just a certain kind of feeling, and it is always and necessarily relative to other things
one just takes for granted, finds intuitive, feels comfortable with. This is as true in science as
it is in common life. I feel I fully understand why this tower casts this shadow in this sunlight,
given what I take for granted about the world (I simply do not ask why light should do that, of
all things, when it hits stone).

This is a stunning example of what I am talking about: Materialism is....what?? Just at the comfortable end of....whatever? How does this serve as a litmus for any kind of affirmation according to the rigorous standards os the scientific method? Does the thesis of materialism really rest with what one is "comfortable" with in the mind set of the scientific attitude?

If one wants a true scientific approach to achieving a scientifically respectable philosophy, then Husserl is the place to go. Just read the first chapters of his Ideas I, and see.

Anyway, sorry for the tirade. I am thoroughly disenchanted with analytic philosophy, as you can tell.

I either think Galen Strawson's "real materialism" is correct, namely that everything is physical, including or especially experience, which makes the physical much, much richer than mainstream physicalism or I take Chomsky's view that "materialism" no longer has any meaning. — Manuel

I have strawson' paper here. Give me a bit to read it.

Muddled reasoning in the just expressed (maybe all too implicit) physicalist stance that intentions are all illusory on account of teleology in no way occurring, yes. Then again, I’m not a physicalist. — javra

Not clear as to why the notion of teleology helps this here. I mean, to me, it makes the matter complicated, as if now one has to reconcile the world with, not just impossible epistemological relationships, but an overarching logos that underlies all things.
Perhaps I am missing something?

I don't know if you can "meet" systems of neuronal activity, or any biological activity for that matter, at least if you have in mind anything that people have in mind when they meet other people, or animals even.

It's not as if the neuronal activity will say anything, given that neurons don't speak, nor will it feel emotions, given that neurons themselves have no emotions.

I've really only met and talked with family members that were people, not abstract systems of their biological makeup. So, I think you can go to sleep with ease, and everything continues as is. — Manuel

My uncle is not an abstract system, granted. This here is meant to test the plausibility of a physicalist/materialist ontology.
You have to take a radical step back. The thesis of physicalism and its reduced brain to sheer physicality, leads to one conclusion: None of this that we talk about is happening at all at the most basic level of analysis. Not even the "physicality" of physicalism. It is vicious circularity: If all that can be acknowledged is reducible to a physical condition, then the supposition itself is just some physical condition, and calling it 'some physical condition' is also reducible in the same way; and so on.
One would have to include in the concept of physicality an epistemic feature, allowing the brain to have knowledge of something other than itself, (and even this knowledge would be, without without this epistemic ability, just another localized physicality) but this is just pulling a knowledge relationship out of a hat. What "epistemic ability"?? How could this even be conceived, this "knowledge at a distance"? This acausal access between objects, like a brain and a sofa?

I don't think theyre are mutually exclusive, but rather compatible. The key then would be to establish why science and philosophy are not in opposition but actually referring to the same thing — Benj96

Compatible, but like knitting is compatible with geology; consistent, no contradictions arise, but simply because they are talking about different things. Heidegger does not oppose Einstein. His understanding of time in Being and Time just has nothing to do with him, not referring to the same thing. The one is grounded in quantitative measurements of compared observed phenomena, the other is an analysis of the structural features of the perceptual act.

Difficult to summarize something like this. One idea: From Husserl, Heidegger draws upon the insight that the act of cognition that apprehends something in the world is "pre-given" or predelineated, meaning what you see before you is a temporal whole, a unity that is always already conditioned by past and future, and so, the claim Heidegger makes is that the self and the world have to be viewed as a "unitary phenomenon". To me this phenomenological concept of time is just where thought needs to go, for it shows that when one meditates, or beholds the world in a thoughtless, accepting attitude, the disappearance of the past and the future in the perceptual moment is a reductive movement that liberates one from time itself; after all, time as singularity, asks, singularity of what? If the past and the future are just aspects of a unity, what unity could this be? Why, the original unity, out of which pragmatic abstractions like past, present and future issue. And this original unity is what has been called "nunc stans, or standing now, which is eternity. It is NOT that past, present and future simply disappear, but rather that they fail at the basic level of inquiry to hold up as foundational, as rock bottom certainties (axioms). Someone like Heidegger would say this analysis itself IS the rock bottomest that one can achieve. Buddhists and I, I argue, say the rock bottomest insight opens an intuition or revelation of a presentation of Being that is is that is a radically OTHER, considering that everything is absolutely other. My couch, e.g. But this goes on and on.

Now this gets complicated, and it always has to be said that I paraphrase others, I lift thinking from texts. I f you ask ME what I think, it is far less disciplined and far more interesting, because philosophy needs to be personal, and I am a just a middling, meddling philosopher, but I am good at synthesizing what I read into an interpretative "reading" of the world, which is NOT an academic, or shouldn't be, affair.

It does depend on what you read. If you read analytic philosophy, then this will not register as well as it really should. Analytic types want clarity over content, and so they dismiss whatever cannot be clearly stated (they desire respectability in an age of technological rigor). the trouble here is that the world at the level of basic questions is not clear at all like this. In fact, this imposing but unclear threshold position is hands down, THE most fascinating dimension of philosophical thinking.

Anyway, Kant through Derrida, then into the so called French theological turn; this is where the intriguing insights lie. One thing I try to emphasize: Philosophy actually has a single mission, I am happy to argue, and this is to replace popular, traditional religion. Alas, it will be a long time before this is accomplished; or maybe not. Things have a way of suddenly making themselves.

Right, so I'm a time waster, aren't I? — enqramot

Absolutely not! I, for one, don't come to this forum for conservation. I come to explain and argue, and in the process, I clarify what I think, to myself! Reading is one thing, writing is another, and the latter is where the real work lies.

To truly catch up with you I’d have to first spend a lot of time to study at least some of the key theories pertinent to this discussion, something I’m not currently prepared to do because of time restrictions and perceived lack of practical value of such knowledge. In particular, I’m yet to find out what in physicalist model makes knowledge connections impossible, so right now I cannot comment on that. To my common sense it doesn’t seem impossible but if there are existing arguments against it, first they need to be tackled, of course. — enqramot

You should have led with that.

The argument is alive and well in both disciplines. As science one wound imagine the the direct attempt to establish definitive proof thought (philosophy). — Benj96

Actually Benj96, the whole matter would rest with how willing you would be to go into this. Time, that is. Science and philosophy are completely different fields of inquiry. Science's "direct attempt to establish definitive proof of thought" is not what you think. After all, "direct" is arguably the most problematic term there is. But it opens up thought on the matter that is thematically unrelated to what science has to say.
The relation one has with the world in philosophy is about the presuppositions of science, not the usual assumptions, and these presuppositions are not in the usual sense, observable.

I'm not clear where you are going with this: can you elaborate. — Janus

When I take a hard, close look at the world, the first thing I encounter is myself. And when I reduce this encounter to its pure apprehension, dismissing the language and the familiar things that are usually there to take hold of things, and I try to witness the pure intuited event of being there, the singularity of things yields to an intriguing sense of "being"; and as weird as this sounds, it really does go like this, as if existence is affirmed, not in the trees, roads, furniture and so forth, but is within, as if the sense of reality is conferred upon things by my end of the perceptual encounter, not the thing encountered. It is quasi-Cartesian: the reduction takes me to the strongest proximity of what is most directly presented, and this is not the out thereness of things, but in the depths subjectivity.
In meditation, when perception is its purist, an "intuition" steps forward that is not negatable, as a thought or an "attached" feeling. It is the intuition of being itself, and as I try to understand what this is, I find there an affirmation of the self, not a negation, as if the whole point is to uncover just this.

Times context is the medium between that which causes (energy - in a timeless state travelling at speed C) and that which is caused (objects that have duration - exist in the realm of time).

Change itself has a Duality in that when it is understood not to experience time - it is cause (energy). And when it endures the experience of time it is "that which is changed - (matter).

These are the two polarities of change - one pole being causer (matterless/timeless), the other being physical - effect (matter with duration in time).

A relativistic spectrum. — Benj96

But benj96, that is an answer a scientist would give. How about a philosophical approach?

Well for me "causality" must (as all things must) be put in context.
Causality is temporal is it not? It relies on the passage of time: A becomes B becomes C. That is causality. — Benj96

But if causality needs a context, so does time.

But what about in the case where time doesn't exist? For example in a case where "change" is impossible?

For me the only instance in which change is not possible is offered by physics - the speed of light.

At the speed of light, no energy can interact with/change itself/impart information. Because to do so would demand that somehow that information travel faster than the cosmic speed limit "C". (the speed of light).

If two photons are hurtling along at the speed of light side by side, how does change occur between them when the information on both photons cannot reach eachother without exceeding the speed their currently travelling at?

Photons travelling at that maximum speed therefore cannot influence one another, time for a photon is dilated so much that all moments are instantaneous (past, present and future). In essence time does not pass (no change) at the speed of light nor distance.

It is only us (as objects) experiencing time (rate, because we are not travelling at C) that can observe the distance and time (speed) travelled by light.

That's relativity.

Because we are under the influence of change while light (energy at C) has no rate/is not. What does that mean for causality?

It means that light is not under the influence of causality because it is the source of causality. Change/ability to do Work/energy exerts change on the system around it (matter) but doesn't exert change on itself. Because when it does it is matter (E=mc2). — Benj96

Of course, physics. But when a physicist talks about causality or time, their observations look to the observable world and calculate its behaviors. Even abstract ideas like the ones you present above issue from empirical paradigms originally. But then, as the cosmologist reviews the theory and the data, she does this in a temporal event herself. and this is not going to be discovered through observation, because this concept of time is part of the structure of the perceptual moment itself.

What is required is a critique of the structure of time that is presupposed by an theories of a physicist's time.

Consciousness cannot be reduced to systems of neuronal activity. Physicalism claims that if you take a certain amount of non-conscious stuff, assemble it in a certain way, run some current through it, voila! consciousness. This is a fairy tale. — RogueAI

Yes, it is. The matter calls for a very different conception of what a brain is, what anything is, and what conscious events are, and this is not going to come from the scientific world. It will have to be affirmed in subjectivity. Perhaps here, the explanation will be discovered that consciousness is NOT a localized brain event. The logic of the argument I have been defending leads to only one conclusion: Either there is some magical acausal connection that intimates that out there to this Me in here; or the epistemic connectivity lies with a metaphysical unity of all things.
My thinking is that metaphysics is nonsense if conceived apart from finitude. Note how analytic philosophy takes Kant's insistence that only empirical truths can make sense about the world, and ends up with just this impossibility of knowing. But can finitude really be separated from infinity, that is, noumena? No. So brain events actually belong to metaphysics, and metaphysics is not some impossible beyond; rather, it is IN immanence!

The fact that everything in YOUR world is reduced to brain events doesn’t preclude independent existence of a parallel world that exists in another realm. All that it takes is flow of information between the two realms/worlds and there is no need to reduce everything to brain events. That assumes independent existence of unperceived objects, of course. The brain in this context would be a physical object from another realm, producing mental events, then sending them across realms to you. What are the flaws in this reasoning? — enqramot

But are you reading what I wrote? the assumption of a physicalist conception of the world as foundational provides NO epistemic extension so that other worlds is anything more than the one localized body of events. Knowledge connections, this is what is needs to be shown. How does the physicalist model of a brain manage to "get to anything out there"? And, as I said, even the concept of physicalism itself now to be understood with exactly this delimitation. How is it that when I am gazing at my uncle. the entire affair is not reducible to brain events?

What you want to do is play out the assumption that all things are physical under the assumption that all things are physical. Seems reasonable enough until you make the attempt to explain knowledge relationships. This is the foil! If you can't explain knowledge events in your foundational view of what the world really is at the basic level, then you have a foundational explanatory deficit that undermines all things, for before we can talk about all things, other worlds, or anything at all, we have to have a theory of justified belief that can such talk at all. It is quite simple.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but as far as I’m aware the word “experience” is not a part of the definition of the word “to exist”. So, to reach a conclusion that something doesn’t exist, you must do more than just demonstrate that it’s not a part of the “experience realm”. — enqramot

How is it that existence itself is not just a unique brain event; that when you ponder existence and other sweeping terms that are all inclusive. you are not just making a statement that entirely conceived within a brain matrix, and everything you can imagine is just this and nothing else.
You would have to have an independent theory of experience, then, apart from what science can observe and think about. Is this what you have, some experiential, acausal theory about how cognitive events "discover" the world? How would it be that this three and a half pound greyish "thing" produces ideas that are "about" something else? This is what is required, and of course, you can say that science is an experimental/theoretical work in progress that will one day unlock the secrets of epistemic relationships, but this will have to include a dramatic reconception of what it means for a thing to be physical; some new "law of epistemic connectivity" will have to be introduced, but note that physicalism does not have this at all! Scientists all believe the moon is out there, as are genetic sequences and fossils embedded in rock, and so on, and have no idea at all as to even WHAT an "epistemic principle" would even look like. And they don't care because this is simply not what they think about. Scientists are not philosophers.

Cannot be shown as of now but this might change in the future. In my view, to make assertions which go beyond speculation about a system you have to have total knowledge of the system. Say, chess is a system. So far the game of chess hasn’t been solved, but endgames including up to 7 (possibly 8) pieces have. So, within such a subsystem some definite assertions whether a given endgame is won, lost or a draw are possible, otherwise not. Your assertion belongs to the “not” category. — enqramot

But this misses the point. See the above.

Are you an expert in epistemic relations to make such bold statements? Maybe the current description needs updating? Maybe it’s flawed or incomplete. Btw, why would we want to restrict ourselves to purely physical model? What about coexistence of physical and non-physical elements including some kind of interface between them? — enqramot

You may not want to restrict yourself to this model, and I say very good. Because such a model doesn't work. I took a course in epistemology once, and I have read Kant through Derrida and a bit beyond. The current analytic philosophy community simply put the matter to rest by ignoring it. In S knows P, the traditional analysis of knowledge simply assumes P is the case, and long as you are justified in believing P, then you are good to go. But the devil is in the details: how can you extract P from the knowledge conditions that make knowing P possible? This is the issue here.

Once again, does the fact that they cannot be confirmed preclude their existence? If so, how? In what scope? — enqramot

The complaint of this rests solely with the epistemic deficits of physicalism. I do prefer the simple way of putting this: there is my uncle there, and here am I: how is it that HE gets IN HERE? If causality worked to explain knowledge, then, of course, science steps in explaining how light waves reflect, pass through air and space to meet the eye, and so on, but it should be striking, very striking, that brain chemistry is utterly alien to what ever is out there that is not brain chemistry.

Physicality doesn’t make it through to your world but may be necessary so that your world can be what it is. Camera doesn't know anything because the object "camera" doesn't support "knowing". But how can you be sure that a future version of "camera" won't acquire this function? Let's say you go to great lengths to convince yourself and others that a thing such as a conscious camera is impossible, only to see one walk past you one day. There is no contradiction between being "certain" that statement A is true and this same statement being false. One must always bear this in mind or one risks making a colossal error. — enqramot

The argument doesn't care about what the future holds. Either you can tell me what the essential epistemic connectivity is about or you cannot. Again, if you want to include something that physicalism COULD have then you have to make sense of this "could". Otherwise it is merely empty speculation.

What is and what is not your uncle is yet to be established so any too specific assertions are uncalled for at this early stage. You don’t see your uncle as he is but a heavily filtered version of him instead. If I hide my face behind a mask does it mean that my face no longer exists in your world? — enqramot

In order for it to be a heavily filtered version of him, it has to be first shown that it is possible to affirm anything at all of him. How would physicalism make this affirmation, GIVEN all that has been said above? (Pls don't just ignore all of this, and continue to say how outrageous it al sounds, The argument itself has to be dealt with.)

The essence of Buddhism seems to be that the kind of knowledge which can be acquired via study and reading can never constitute liberation because all it is doing is reinforcing the discursive, dualistic mind and egoic delusions. — Janus

I agree; although I would argue about the egoic delusions. I mean, that gets complicated as to the self being so disposable.

What is a brain? A physical object we are told is responsible for our awareness of the underlying reality. I cannot verify any of this, of course. But what is fundamentally wrong with physicalist theory? What is in it that you don't accept? What if your uncle's world is separate to yours and most objects are private to each pertinent world but some are shared across worlds. I'm repeating myself here but you haven't addressed it so far. Shared objects make limited interaction between worlds possible. What am I missing? Do you or do you not subscribe to the view that unperceived objects exist? Guess not if you don't accept physicalism. What (if anything) defies logic in such a view? We have remote transmission of data between worlds, conscious agents in both worlds. Your objections? — enqramot

The objection is not to say this is wrong, but that there is a deeper level of analysis that takes up the assumptions of what you say, the presuppositions that are in place that make it possible for you or me to talk about this kind of thing, or talk about anything. The supposition that my uncle is there in a world at all is in question, as well as even the supposition that the posited physical brain can be there ar all given the reduction of all affairs to brain events. This is a way to present a reductio ad absurdum on the premise that the physical brain is the sole foundation for experience. After all, if there is a strict correspondence between brain and mental events such that only brain can produce these, then the physicality itself of the brain is no longer tenable, since it, too, now, the knowledge of it, is just a brain event.

It's yet to be established beyond doubt that "the brain" is essentially different to "car fender" in this context. So far the supposed link between consciousness and "brain events", neurons etc. is just an operational hypothesis. Why transport of information, which in itself doesn't require consciousness, is controversial for you? You don't experience the whole uncle, but only information that he voluntarily shares with you (or is coerced to do so). What prevents external information from entering? — enqramot

But this is the assumption in place. It is there to test the soundness of the idea that consciousness and its knowledge experiences is produced by the brain according to the physical model.

You have to step back from objections like the above; way back. It is assuming all things are physical, and there is your brain and there is my uncle, and the rest; but on this assumption, things instantly fall apart. It says this: If the physicalist model of the world is true, then the brain is physical; and if the brain is physical, then all brain events are subject to this physicalist analysis, that is, the brain event in which I perform mathematics, or see a house or read computer data, and everything that is "known" are all physical brain events; but physical brain events cannot be shown to carry epistemic connectivity, that is, there is nothing in a physical description of relations between objects that can account for epistemic relations (hence the barn door example); hence, according to the physical model, brain events remain localized within the brain; but this means nothing can be confirmed outside of the brain, and therefore exterior events cannot be outside at all, and indeed, the axiom that affirms physicality itself is made untenable.

Something like that is the argument.

Why should things that are temporarily hidden from view be regarded as non-existent? Even if the aforementioned program doesn't have a function like "unhide()" and doesn't go beyond most rudimentary level of detail, our own reality might be different in this regard. — enqramot

"Things" did you say? What things? How does a physical brain affirm things, for the logic itself is reduced brain events, meaning is a brain event, I mean, intuitions, dogs, cats, religion, and the entire human dramatic unfolding are brain events only, according to thsi model. why? Because physicality is not epistemic, meaning looking closely at physical relations, there is nothing that place what is out there, in here. Does the circuitry in my computer through its camera "know" the world it "sees'? Look at the opacity test: is a brain opaque or transparent to the world? And even if it were some sort of mirrored organ, it would remain a 100 billion neurons of dense matrical events, and dense matrical events are not my uncle.

Since researching the nature of consciousness has potential to generate enough commercial interest to justify directing more resources/capital/brain power/time to it than I, as a single person, or collectively we, the users of this forum, would ever be able to devote to it, and despite that effort no noteworthy progress has been achieved, that just shows the scale of the problem and helps estimate likelihood that our efforts will culminate in actually solving the problem the OP (in this case you) has. — enqramot

See the above.

No. I probably think about Kant more than I ought. I mean that, like you, similar questions keep me awake at night. You can't do philosophy without a good night's sleep. So arithmetic it is. Nighty night! — Cuthbert

The tonnage of human suffering keeps me awake. I make a lousy Ubermensch.

A light wave in space, as idea or model, would be commonly thought to be underpinned by a chemical event in the brain. An actual light wave in space, it would commonly be thought, might trigger a chemical event in the brain if it were to enter the eye. In one sense the world "out there" is known and thought about only "in here", but it is assumed that it must be "out there" in order to provide the content to be thought about.

Of course we don't know that, and the fact that we cannot explain our situation in absolute terms, leads to the possibility of skepticism, idealism and anti-realism. I'd say we just don't know/ That said, I'd also say that the plausibility of the idea that science is about "some world out there" is bolstered by the observed technological success of science. But there's no denying that it is possible that it is all going on in consciousness, and that without consciousness nothing at all would exist.

I'm not sure what you mean by approaching the question "from a physicalist model pov". — Janus

I claim that the whole system of understanding is based on a lie, to put it dramatically. I am not arguing from the perspective of a categorical context of understanding, whether that would be knitting or genetics or economics, and so on; but from a "context" where one meets the impossibility of all things. This is an extraordinary event in a person's philosophical evolution and the primacy of science has all but cancelled it in a wave of assumptions grounded in, as you say, technology. Yes, it sounds like Heidegger's complaint, but the idea is here not the way he put it. I feel a bit like in Wittgenstein's corner in his argument with Russel, the latter (and subsequent analytic philosophy) taking the call for clarity, and away from nonsense, to be the essential idea of the Tractatus, while Witt insisting that he had it all wrong: it was that-which-one-passed-over-in silence that was essential. The physicalist model is the "clarity" of science's most basic assumptions, which is physicalism (not to argue distinctions here in what this could mean), and its broad acceptance has entirely eclipsed the true epistemic and ontological foundation of the world, which is indeterminacy. We don't know what it is to stand in the openness of our existence "free" of vast body of knowledge claims that are always already there "making the world" as Rorty put it, which is one way say why Kierkegaard thought the medieval mind was closer to God.

Quite right Bylaw! Intuition is the great instinct that propagates the life it imbues. Intuition ought never be ignored but rather, enriched with reason, to amalgamate the "whole". — Benj96

I knew a philosopher once whose least favorite word was 'intuition', because people take this to mean some kind of non propositional knowledge, a yielding of something quasi magical from the world itself, like writing on stones tablets from a mountain top. The way this goes is, take any given intuition, and tell me what it is. The meaning of the intuition is now understood, but only when it is set in a context of spoken possibilities. Outside of this context, that is, any context of what language can say, there is, you know, nothing to say. So all intuitions are propositional in their nature, and not mysterious emanations with some stand alone meaning.
Consider a very strong intuition like causality: It is impossible to imagine an object moving by itself. We don't give this much thought, but it is about as close as one can get to an absolute (putting ethics and value aside) and it is a very curious thing to me because it is about actual things and not abstract logic (I think Wittgenstein claimed that the intuition was essentially logical, but I'd have to find that). But what IS causality? Say what you will, but it is the language doing the saying. Apart from this, there is nothing to say.

Language is certainly more fundamental than culture. Knowledge does not require language, however, so the fundamental attachment must go deeper than culture or language. — praxis

I don't think language is historically more fundamental than culture, but is it even analytically more fundamental? For the analysis of a particle of language has to refer back to the contexts in which meanings are generated, and these are the historical institutions that were early on in play in the generation of symbolic thinking. This is one fundamental difference between Heidegger and Kant, that latter dealing with logical abstractions of language, the former dealings with all of these as of-a-piece. Dewey idea of a "consummatory event" is similar: the aesthetic and the cognitive and the meanings in solving problems issue from "an experience", a foundational original.

Yes, I think there is something to be said for the idea of anamnesis; the process seems to consist more in unlearning that it does in learning. The drive to knowledge can become more acquisitive than inquisitive. I don't think of anamnesis as knowledge remembered that was previously known in another realm of the soul, but as reconnecting with the forgotten inherent wisdom of the body. — Janus

Well put, I think. And, in the nostalgia, it is no longer recollection, for the experience itself is occurrent. As I remember, as Wordsworth put it, childhood's "clouds of glory" what was intimated then is intimated now, and the recollective way of summoning it is incidental. But in those years prior to reflection, we had no knowledge of what was happening, no contexts for discussion, so was there an agency at all, there to experience? Yes, I would say, but agency then was vague: who was it that was so content if the matter of "who" is something augmentative, constructed out of historical acquisition? An infantile affectivity lacks identity.
Forgotten inherent wisdom of the body?

I feel that descriptions such as: internal, external, real, imaginary etc. are purely arbitrary and used to make sense of the surrounding ocean of information. Both "external" and "internal" events are processed in the brain in a similar way. — enqramot

But I want to point out that it is not that internal, external, real and the rest are obviated by the subsuming internal events of the brain that process all things equally; I mean fine, but it goes further: for even brain processes are not "really" brain processes, because it took a brain process to produce this very notion of brain processes. Nothing at all survives the physicalist model, even the physicalist model.

Does the Earth disappear the moment the last conscious being cease to exist? In what sense does it exist if there's noone left to perceive it? Yet, should conscious beings reappear later on, they'd be able to "see" the Earth in the same place it used to be. Or not? Let's suppose the real uncle exists. How does he get into your world? I don't see how that could happen — enqramot

He doesn't, which is the point I am making. The only thing that gets "in" a world is what is "in" the world, and even this doesn't really happen. Events in this world never get out, nor does anything get in. Certainly, things occur, but to say even this itself is a neuronal event, and so neuronal events in an exchange between neuronal events working in vastly complex arrays of chemical exchanges in which understanding occurs, syntax and semantical phenomena: there is no way out, and to say there is, one would have simply say what it is. Is it the causal relations between the inner and the outer? But how can one affirm such a thing independently of just these causal relations confined to the brain? And how does a causal relation establish an epistemic one? Does a dented car fender "know" the offending guard rail? Dented fenders are not brains, of course, but how is it that a brain's complexity qua complexity make for an epistemic connection; I mean, "something out" there still has to make it 'in here".

Let's imagine we live in a simulation. With sufficient level of detail, how would you distinguish it from reality? And if we accept the virtual nature of reality, we sort of bypass the question: "How does consciousness arise from matter?". — enqramot

I am reminded of Zizek, who defends Hegel and borrowing from someone else, likens our inability to grasp where Geist is going in future rational possibilities to a program in which there are trees and clouds, but there is nothing in the program that allows for any detail beyond the beyond the distant visage. There simply does not exist, in this world, any interior to the trees or sun that illuminates the clouds and the like. Such things are therefore "impossible" in this world. It is like this here: What stands before me, this visage of my uncle, is just a brain event, and every thought in my head that asks questions like, what brought him here, how did he get here? and so on, are not anything but a program. there are no events. Events are just the way we interpret affairs before us; but there is no "before us" or near or far, or anything at all. Even the thought experiment questioning my uncle's existence is just patterns of complexity in the brain. Nothing at all, and this means everything conceivable, survives this model.

This may sound odd, but keep in mind, I am only following the course put before me. If consciousness truly is a exclusively a manifestation of brain events, then all of the above is true.

quote="enqramot;754072"]The difference between "know" and know, know being reserved for conscious beings. No, my computer had to concede defeat and withdraw in shame. The question of consciousness is not an easy question. Correct me if I'm wrong, but as far as I'm aware, the contemporary science has no clue about the nature of consciousness. So how likely are we to solve it in this forum?[/quote]

Contemporary science? But what do they have to do with philosophy? You call Neil De Grasse Tyson, and talk like this, and he will simply give you a condescending sneer.

But then, there certainly is a way to go. First, do you accept that when you observe something, you actually are observing it, and this is not reducible in the way the model indicates?

I wonder what is, for you, the most important philosophical question? — Janus

Consider that there is impossible to talk about the relationship between an agency of perception and that which is perceived, not simply because it is really difficult to talk about how knowledge relationships work, as if this awaits some future quantum discovery about the behavior of things in particle physics; but because on the physical model, the world itself, the totality of all that can possibly exist, is reduced to the behavior of a hundred billion neurons or so; and these neurons are reducible to an impossibility, because the only way to affirm that they exist is through neuronal events themselves. Pure question begging.

This doesn't seem to make an impression on people, which was to be expected (such are the priorities of clarity over content); but consider Wittgenstein's example (Lecture on Ethics): Let's borrow Wittgenstein's example from his Lecture on Ethics. My Uncle's head, suddenly right before my eyes, turns into a lion's head, just like that, and there you are, or anyone, and it would be miraculous and disturbing and wondrous; but how long would this stay a miracle? The search would begin to understand it, and in this process, the miracle vanishes, and becomes a research project with all of the usual assumptions and paradigms attending, and if nothing conclusive is produced, we would have one of Thomas Kuhn's anomalies, and regular science would have amend a paradigm or two, and regularities would be sought after to establish principles at work, and so forth.

Here, it is far worse. The world is not the world, and there are no scientific resources that can bend the situation to the insistence of a paradigm, or even an anomaly against a paradigm's principle, for paradigms are just more grey matter at work. We want to say the connections are easy to identify, for example, the portions of the electromagnetic spectrum are reflected while others are absorbed by the surface of my uncle's presence, and these pass across space to the eye, which receives them, and rods and cones around the retina condition the light and the retina delivers signals to the brain and so on, and hence, the scientific grasp of sight that in part affirms my uncle has its explanatory basis.

But then, one has to ask the astoundingly easy question: how is a light wave in space anything like a chemical event in the brain? Or for that matter, how are words and meanings that are brain events, anything at all like the world "out there"? And this kind of explanatory breakdown applies across the board to every possible faculty of access. And it is so obvious one has to wonder how the assumption that science is about some world out there has any regard at all.

This has, of course, in philosophy, a long history, which is idealism, which goes back to Kant, Berkeley, but really Kant was the one to put this complex thesis out there with amazing clarity and comprehensiveness. But since scientists don't read Kant, and so many in this forum have a scientific background, one way to show that the idea is plausible and important is to approach it from a physicalist model pov. As I see it, this really is a far more efficient and effective way to talk about this.

Not the most important philosophical issue. The second most. the most important is, by far, ethics and metaethics.

Perhaps for the same reason that when you read this post you are not merely inspecting marks on a screen. Your uncle means something to you. Hopefully more than this post.

But is this 'meaning something' anything but a bunch of electrical impulses in your own neurons?

Ach, you'll never be satisfied. It's not just you. Personally I do complicated mental arithmetic and eventually drop off. — Cuthbert

I don't have an Uncle Sidney, so put your concerns to rest.

Yes, I understand. But the world is not mathematics, is it? The dropping off place for you, in philosophy has JUST BEGUN with this little scenario. You mean, you have no interest at all in the epistemic conditions that make knowledge of the world possible....here, in a philosophy forum???

Then you'll just have to do that, I guess. How is not my problem; I sleep very well in my physicalist model. Except for the bladder in the middle night thing, but that, too, is insoluble short of death. — Vera Mont

?? Well, it is a rather flippant pov to say this. It is your problem because it is a philosophical problem, and this is a philosophy club.

Take your pick. We could follow Quine, Davidson , Wittgenstein , Putnam, Rorty or Nietzsche out of the trap of physicalism. We could embrace a Gadamerian hermeneutics , a phenomenological approach, poststructuralism. We could follow the work of neuroscientists influenced by Peirce, or those adopting enactivism. Lots of options here. — Joshs

But none are suitable to the issue at hand. Very helpful, but they miss the mark. Sorry for the long response, but you asked a big question, and I'm no professional philosopher.

I have my limitations. I know Quine is a naturalist, and he declared himself just this, "Philosophically i am bound to Dewey by naturalism....With Dewey I hold that knowledge, mind, and meaning are part of the same world...that they are bound to be studied to the same empirical spirit that animates natural science." And I read his Indeterminacy of Translation paper, his Two Dogmas. Rorty seems to follow in suit: He is unyielding in his insistence that the truth is made not discovered,

I have always been suspicious of this pragmatist's naturalism, for on the one hand, there is a commitment a pragmatic theory of knowledge at work, and this to me is right and it leads into a pragmatic phenomenology. Rorty asked, famously, how does anything out there get in here? And by this, I take him to mean he wants his cake and eat it, too: He rejects "scientism" whereby the philosophical foundation of being is something scientists and naive physicalism have a theory about in their empirical grounding; yet, because science is not philosophy, it takes the latter to get to this grounding, which is pragmatism. But if the grounding lies in a pragmatic analysis of out relations with the world, then the answer to the question in OP cannot be anything close to naturalism; naturalism is just a default term for "what works", and my uncle whose existence is being questioned and examined here is NOT a "what works" manifestation. I read somewhere that Putnam argued against Rorty on this, Rorty, he claimed, defending a kind of pragmatic solipsism, could not allow Putnam's wife to be simply Putnam's wife. This goes to the point I raised here. Jumping to the chase, as I see it, is impossible to argue that a brain thing can "know" anything, and it is not because pragmatic avenues of discussing knowledge don't allow. It is really a simple matter of discovering any path at all. By Rorty's standard, it is not even brain events Putnam is really witnessing; obviously, this kind of talk itself is brain events, so one event to another cannot generate what a brain event is, for that would be the worst kind of circular thinking. Rorty liked Wittgenstein and Heidegger because the latter accepted an "open hermeneuticist" position and the early former held that, like Quine, the best we can do with Metaphysics was say mass, take up the rituals, and so on, and all rejected traditional metaphysics, or, any metaphysics.

I have no use for Nietzsche, for his rejection of metaphysics ended up with a kind of eulogy of the Hemmingway hero, living a life of stylish aficionado (like those opponents of Socrates who were men of bearing and substance who lived with spirit, who the miscreant Socrates would antagonize). Nietzsche adored the gladiatorial! And poststructuralists, like Derrida? His deconstruction is helpful in finding the bottom of things, like a zen master's fan flying across the room at the reader, the world is under erasure at the level of basic questions, and when no center is even thinkable, one can no longer conceive at this level of inquiry. We are foundationally adrift. But the question is, what is there to be discovered AS being adrift? Rorty would say nothing at all, and he takes his cue from Heidegger, who thought poetry broke beyond the bonds of mundanity into new territory, and dropped philosophy to teach literature. But they were, both of them, too wedded to language to give it up.

The matter to me turns on value, and I always come back to early Wittgenstein for support on this. Russell called him a mystic for thinking that the Tractatus' whole point didn't rest with the stand it took against nonsense statements, but rather with that which could not be said, and I think he is just being Kantian about this, not so much with value (and Kant, though I haven't read much into the Critique of Practical Reason, but I have read the CPR and the Metaphysics of Moral, and others, seems to have no grasp of the true metaethical foundation of ethics) but the denial that metaphysics can be talked about, yet insisting that that which had to be passed over in silence was not literally nothing. The good, Witt said in Culture and Value, is divinity, and by the good, he meant the value of value, and this goes to the true mystery of our existence: the Good of good; the bad of bad. So Dewey, Rorty and Quine were naturalists in their own way, and believed that any notion of noumena or talk about non propositional knowledge was simply off the table, leaving them in disingenuous position, as I see it.

But then there is Buber, Husserl and Fink, Levinas, Jean luc Marion, Michel Henry and Meister Eckhart, pseudo Dionysius, many others across history have had intimations of a different sort entirely. When Meister Eckhart prays to God to be rid of God, he trrying to shake off the presumptions that rule his mind implicitly, tacitly always, already. Of course, he had, I presume, never heard of Buddhism.

At any rate, the trouble with these philosophers you call upon to answer the odd question of this OP, is that they are ensconced in a world of thought. It is said (by Rorty and others) that Derrida takes Heidegger to the conclusions he began; hermeneutics (and I haven't read Gadamer) leads to only one place, and that is to bedrock indeterminacy for knowing the world, and he didn't pursue (though, reading Khora and then Caputo's defense of an apophatic approach through Derrida) the possibilities of radical departure of the East.

And the riddle of the missing uncle? As I see it, one has to reconceive the relation between brain and the world. It is meant to take a very obvious epistemic disconnect in the very popular scientifically based concept of physicalist reductionism, and bring out a glaring fault. So much talk in these posts that simply assume conscious thought and feeling is produced by the brain. Well, what is a brain if not, and this is to use science's own paradigm and not even touching upon philosophy at all, if not the product of the brain events that produce experience, and the brain is not supposed to be the product of anything. It is supposed to be a brain.

No, it evidently cannot be explained to you in any terms that you accept. The problem(s) of Sydney, Henry, the barn and the car are intractable and insoluble. — Vera Mont

But my being me has nothing to do with it. The matter presented as an objective and arguable problem. I mean, if you really think my uncle is unproblematically there in some way, you have to first take on the epistemic obstacle of describing the relation between brains and what brains encounter such that the former know the latter.
As to the intractability, it is not as if the matter stands the way it is; it is a matter of "parts". What is needed is an understanding of the epistemic requirements for knowledge, and an account of how the brain/Uncle Sidney relationship could make this possible. One is reluctant to make a radical move, I know; but then: this IS a radical problem, so the solution has to be commensurately radical.

No way out of this. Put simply, the physicalist model has to be discarded, or amended. How can this be done?

I look forward to your future musings. — Benj96

As I do your insightful thoughts.

It's not different, just a little more holistic, as I attempted to reunify the uncle's electrical impulses with the brain and body in which it takes place, and which it appeared you had overlooked in describing him. — Vera Mont

But it wasn't overlooked. Saying something is an electrical impulse itself is subject to the same issue being raised, so the question is clearly begged:

I'm sure that's true; you seem to know Henry and I don't. — Vera Mont

The particular traits of Henry are outside the discussion. It could be my cat or interstellar phenomena. If Sidney is, to put it plainly, nothing but a bunch of brain manufactured events, then everything is, because the matter turns to therelationship, not the incidental features.

That depends on how Sydney has offended you. — Vera Mont

No, it's not this. Sydney has not offended me. This "offending" is not about the violence, but about the question: Given that the causal relationship is the relational characterization in both cases, the car fender vis a vis the guard rail, and my uncle vis a vis my brain events, then causality itself has to be explained as to its ability to "deliver" my uncle to me.

It seems there are 2 versions of your uncle. 1) The real uncle - some kind of entity producing impulses, sending various kinds of information etc 2) an instance of your uncle that your brain manufactures and then customizes, i. e. interpretes those impulses (or signals) and based on them creates a coherent set of rules that it tags/labels as "uncle Sidney". So, while not being "in your brain", your uncle can still sort of send a copy of himself to your brain for further processing, not unlike a computer virus replicating itself. Now, let's say, another person who knows your uncle created another copy of him in his brain. His customized copy will be different to yours. He might say "What an awful person, this Sidney. Full of himself, patronizing, unkind, not listening.", whereas your opinion might be quite different. Are we talking about the same person? Yes, the core is identical, it's the interpretation that makes the difference. Like god flavour vs devil flavour. Another comparison that springs to mind is a dream being influenced by sensory perception, e.g. sound of the alarm clock being interpreted in dream world as dog barking etc. So, again, the original impuls, and an interpreted copy. — enqramot

But how do you escape the final description of all you say above being brain events only, even, and this is important, the reference to something being a brain event? Talk about my "real" uncle: is such a thing even possible to imagine in good analytically grounded conscience?

It may seem absurd in case of a barn door, but isn't so absurd in case of a computer. In a way, it does "know" certain things and acts upon them. It doesn't make a computer conscious, of course. Sensor-based input can be built into computer systems. This works very much like unconscious part of our brain, for example, when goose bumps appear as an automatic reaction to lowering the temperature. Fully automatic reaction, something in you "knows" how to react. — enqramot

The barn door: The complexity of your computer is not at issue, for first you have to explain the fundamentals: at best, at the level of basic questions (the most basic, which is what philosophy is about) the best you are ever going to get is a causal connection between your computer and and the wind howling through its receptors. It could be AI of the highest order, and you would still be routed to this question: how do causal explanations suffice for knowledge claims? Barn doors and howling winds have exactly this same causality "between" them.

I don't see how this assumption could be proven or disproven. What if he IS reducible? How can you be sure? Have you seen Cast Away movie with Tom Hanks? His only companion on a desert island was a volleyball that (whom?) he called Wilson. He's reduced to tears when Wilson the volleyball floats away during a storm. Modern, much improved upon, version of Wilson would be lamda the word processor (chatbot), a machine that fooled a supposed senior software engineer doubling up as a priest to believe that it's sentient (maybe he wasn't really fooled, maybe he did it for money, I don't know - he lost his job anyway). So, as you can see, creative interpretation can go a long way. Maybe you add something to your uncle, something that isn't there. — enqramot

It is not a matter of "what if he is reducible." You are facing here an ineluctable situation, for, as you and I will agree, there are brains and uncles and there is a world. I simply ask, how does the the latter get into the former?

It's just one story among a multitude of other imaginable stories. At another level Uncle Sidmey is just electrons, protons and neutrons, doing what they habitually do. Or multitudes of twelve kinds of quarks. Or a perturbation in a quantum field. Or chemical elements interacting, combining and separating. Or tissues, muscles, tendons, ligaments and nerves. Or person; a member of your society who shares the same basic conditioning and set of presuppositions about human life that you and I do. Or he's your beloved (or not so beloved) uncle. And so on... — Janus

Yes, as I see it, this is poignantly true. So then, how do I establish a reasonable idea that can make Sidney a person, apart from me, over there, and so on, NOT reducible to any of the above, given that the above are all true? I am concerned that Sydney got lost in the rigorous analysis and no one noticed. So, I am noticing.
This is, in my thoughts, the second most important philosophical question there is.

How is an uncle different from a barn door? Sounds like something the Mad Hatter might ask.
I'm more intrigues by why you'd want to go to Wonderland, if it disturbs you so? — Vera Mont

Rorty put it nicely: How is it that my relation (my brain's) to my uncle any different from a dented car fender and the offending guard rail? The qualitative complexities of the brain that leap to mind to explain this MUST be resolved into an epistemic connection. Mere causal connectivity does not establish a knowledge relationship.

I had a colleague who used to work as a mortuary technician - preparing bodies for autopsy. It got to be that he was unable to look at people or experience them in ways that was stable and orientated to the present. He could only 'see' what was underneath - organs, tissue, bones, blood... it made intimacy and connection very difficult. So he quit his job in the morgue and took up gardening. :wink: — Tom Storm

I find that fascinating. My daughter is an illustrator and she had this morbid curiosity about working in a mortuary, a kind of "goth" obsession of a Halloweensih pov on such things. Anyway, she applied, didn't get the job, and I was relieved, because she could have either gotten desensitized to the idea of dead people, to put it bluntly, or over sensitized. Doctors in general, surgeons esp., have to be a bit sociopathic, I've read, to have the requisite grace under pressure dealing with such things.

In a similar vein, for me, the more I think philosophically, especially reading the phenomenologists, the more I am "sensitized" to being an existing human being, for the questions that have been thrown aside in the advent of modernism have never at all been resolved. Human existence is still the same impossible mystery it has always been. But now, simply ignored.

All this neuronal activity takes place in a unique container of specialized cells that are all busy replicating, dying, doing all kinds of work to process elements from the environment into materials to maintain the edifice which is "Sydney", the sum of all those cellular activities, interstitial fluids and structural elements and containing membranes in which it takes place, one of whose various designations is "uncle to Canstance".
Yeah, that seems pretty exclusive. But why is it a problem? — Vera Mont

It is a problem because your foundational explanatory setting is in no better position to be defended than my uncle. I'm sorry, neuronal activity did you say? But what is this, as I have problematized my Uncle, that is any different? You could have a phd in brain science, and the best you will ever get in the basic philosophical analysis regarding all of the terms of your analytic is more of the same reductive analysis: the very thoughts used to construct the rationalization of Henry's distance from neuronal events are themselves "distant".

The whole brain cannot self reflect on the whole brain as there is no neural networks available to make computations while the others remain static and observed. It can only compartmentalise portions of itself but I suspect these portions can be quite large. Mathematically it doesn't take many neurons to exponentially increase their computational ability. Like factorials in maths. — Benj96

But the thinking cannot go this way. How is it that the whole brain can "compartmentalize portions of itself"? What is, in the simple conditions I have laid out, mathematics? That is, if my uncle is not my uncle because there is epistemic avenue of access to something that is remote from systemic assignment possibilities, then why is it that mathematics can escape this fate? How can you, in other words, make mathematics non reducible to neuronal networks itself, or, speaking generally, how is it that anything is what it is called and familiarly talked about remain what it is if this very thinking itself is confined to something that is itself thought?

As Jim Morrison says (in a different context) " words got me the wound and will get me well if you believe it". Animals have no language and no need of liberation, so it seems that language creates both the need, and the means, for liberation. Language provides the technics, makes the technics communicable, but the act of liberation is a going beyond the limitations of language, a stepping outside of it. — Janus

I want to say language sits comfortably along side of anything at all, like my cat does when I am not thinking about it and it is just there. SUre, there is language attending implicitly in the comfortable absence of explicit thought, but my cat could suddenly reveal herself as an avatar of God, and language could still be there attending to the spectacle.

On the other hand: In my best meditations, when things settle into an odd intimation of something just there, beneath the skin of the familiar, and there is something there, in the givenness of things, that appears just on the horizon of things, and I give this its breadth and depth as I can, I do feel the world receding and the revelatory event issues from within, as if to fill all things. It is a very strange business, I have to admit, which is why I feel the need to step into this discussion. Language does yield in that identities of things weaken, and something steps forward. And it is like going home, but this is revealed as within subjectivity, as if, as the Buddhists' say, one already is the Buddha, and it is a matter of discovering this.