So even if we grant for the sake of argument that Δ-temperature is itself physical, what is in question is the cause. — Leontiskos

I think the onus is on you to show why it's in question.

I don't suspect an abacus is a conscious unit. While I suspect consciousness is everywhere, in all things, I don't think everything that humans view as physical units necessarily are conscious units. I think the unit must be processing information in order to be a conscious unit. — Patterner

An abacus can be used to process information - it's a primitive computer. There's no real difference in principle between the abacus and a computer. The difference is one of scale. The NVidia chips that drive AI have billions of transistors embedded in a patch of silicon. You could in principle reproduce that technology with the abacus, although it would probably be the size of a city, and it would take long periods of time to derive a result. But in principle, it's the same process.

You possess something that instruments don’t, namely, organic unity.
— Wayfarer

Is "organic unity" not a collection of material components? Because as far as I'm aware, organic matter is matter. — Michael

Organisms operate by different principles to non-organic matter. They grow, heal, maintain homeostasis, and reproduce. None of those behaviours can be observed in matter (crystals grow, but they don't exhibit any of the other characteristics.) None of the parts of inorganic aggregates are functionally related to the other parts, wheres the cells in a multicellular organism are differentiated in accordance with their functions in the various organs, as optic cells, kidney cells, etc. When they begin as stem cells, they are able to assume any of those functions depending on where in the organism they're located (hence the effectiveness of stem cell therapy).

Are you claiming that a temperature reduction is physical? — Leontiskos

Yes. How is it not? It is measurable with a physical instrument, and observable in the effects it has on matter.

I think this is a central point, and I would just say that causation is not physical. I am surprised to see that there are a lot of claims within this thread which presuppose that causation is physical.....When one billiard ball collides with another and causes it to move, our talk of "cause" is not talk of something that is physically instantiated — Leontiskos

How is it not? How did the fall in temperature not cause the water to freeze, or the corrosion of the main support beam not cause the bridge to fall? If causation is not physical, what is it?

From a reader review of Tam Hunt’s (author of cited article) book:

Hunt jumps straight into the middle of the sensationalistic "culture war" between scientific atheism and religious creationism, not to side with either form of fundamentalism, but to carve out a more nuanced third way forward. This third way entails retrieving the insights garnered by marginalized figures in the history of science and philosophy (marginalized by mainstream academics, at least), like Alfred North Whitehead and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Both these thinkers offered a richly articulated alternative interpretation of 20th century physics and biology that not only reveals a lack of contradiction between scientific findings and an enchanted or ensouled cosmology, but a positive convergence. Hunt successfully draws on their contributions, as well as contemporary scientists like Eva Jablonka, Stu Kauffman, and the late Lynn Margulis, to combat the triumphalist version of scientific materialism still being proffered to the public by the likes of Lawrence Krauss and Richard Dawkins.

Sounds like my kind of writer

Beats listening to Trump!s lies. I’d trust any mainstream journo over that.

The absurdity of this investigation is underlined, too, by the fact that Mr. Obama is almost certainly immune from prosecution — thanks to Mr. Trump and the Supreme Court. In its decision last year in Trump v. United States, the court held that there was a presumption that former presidents could not be prosecuted for any “official” conduct during their time in office. The preparation and dissemination of intelligence findings are certainly official functions of the presidency, and accordingly, they would be off limits as the bases for any criminal charges. — NY Times

Not that facts ever matter to MAGA.

It's still a world. Nothing names it that, lacking information processing to give meaning, but that property (worldness) seems to be an example a feature of the thing in itself. — noAxioms

Nope. I dispute that. To say what it is, to name it, you have to bring it to mind. If you are considering what it would be, sans any observer, you're still bringing it to mind. And as soon as you say 'seems to be', already you're talking of what appears to be the case.

It is a matter of what the electronic switches are conscious of. — Patterner

What might an abacus be conscious of?

But floops are none of them flops, and that does not tell us what floops and flops are. So saying consciousness consists entirely of floops gets us nowhere. — Banno

So I take it that you're not seeing the point of the argument, then.

If "qualia" is a collective noun for "red", "loud" and so on, then I've no great problem with it. — Banno

The meaning of qualia is the quality of experience - what it like, as the literature has it. The experienced sensation of it. And the whole point of the so-called problem of consciousness is that they are fundamentally subjective, therefore eluding objective or physical description. The so-called ‘privacy’ of sensation owes itself to that - there can be no ‘third party’, publicly available instance of a sensation, as it is something only a subject can experience. Why this has provoked so much debate has nothing much to do with the fact of the matter, but with what it shows up about the limitations of the objective sciences - namely, that there is no room in it for what makes us human, which is really the rhetorical point of the whole ‘hard problem consciousness’ argument.

MU, this is going to be my last word on the topic. You're confusing distinct Aristotelian categories by treating formal and final cause as though they must be opposed. In Aristotle’s account—especially as taken up by Aquinas—the form of a thing is its principle of organization and development, and it is inherently purposive. That’s why formal cause and final cause are not separate domains in living beings: a plant’s form includes its telos to grow, reproduce, and flourish.

As for O’Callaghan, his description of internal teleology clearly includes non-conscious natural purposiveness—such as organs functioning for the sake of the organism—not just the deliberate intention of agents. That’s why Aquinas can say even non-rational beings “act for an end.” He’s not talking about conscious volition, but about nature acting according to its form, which is exactly what top-down causation refers to in this context.

So no, what I’m describing is not determinist, nor external imposition, nor a confusion of causes. It’s classical metaphysics. I think we've hit the point where clarification isn't really advancing, so I’ll leave it there.

I think we’re talking past each other at this point. My view, following O’Callaghan (and by extension, Aquinas and Aristotle), is that top-down causation refers to the way the form or structure of a whole gives meaning and function to its parts—not as external coercion, but as internal teleology. That’s distinct from bottom-up causation, which builds from autonomous parts upward. Your framing treats top-down as necessarily determinist or imposed, which misrepresents the whole issue. I don’t think there’s much value in continuing this, as the conversation is getting buried in long and speculative detours. So I’ll leave it there. No hard feelings.

I've pointed out a few times that you keep searching when you probably ought stop... — Banno

It's more likely I'm seeing something that you don't. But that your eyes have to adjust.

I will say this, Banno, you're expert at dragging the carkeys back under the streetlight. :wink:

Right. So, would the rules of the game be somewhat analogous to a form in the Platonic sense?

"Imagine what we'll know about brains in 100 years!" the physicalist urges us. "Why, we'll be able to 'read off' any thought you have by analyzing the neuronal activity." — J

There are very impressive displays of this kind of ability in current technology. Subjects imagine a yacht, and, hey presto, the system displays a yacht uncannily like what the subject has imagined (well, according to the subject.) But then, those systems are 'trained' for hundreds of hours on particular subjects, and 'learn' to associate patterns with images. In other words, a lot of technology and scientific expertise is interpolated between the subject and the display. So I question the sense that this can all be accounted for in physical terms, as the scientific expertise that is used to engineer these systems are also the subject of the experiment. The 'images' aren't simply 'there' in the brain, waiting to be seen, like a astronomical object: they're constructed using the very faculties that the science is seeking to explain. So there's a problem of recursivity.

A possible reply to this is that "ineffable" may be one of Chalmers' "temporary" obstacles, as opposed to a permanent one like biological composition — J

Another of Karl Popper's promissory notes, I'm afraid. But it's informative, and slightly scary, the ease with which it is assumed that consciousness (and therefore, life, and being) can be or might be conjured up out of man-made devices. I strongly suspect there's a much deeper issue here than is apparent. (Incidentally, I've mentioned a video presentation a few times recently, actually presented in a conference organised by Sana.ai, How the Universe Thinks without a Brain, Claire L. Evans. Quite a deep consideration of some of these issues.)

If you have no players or field, you have no existent football game. A football game is a game that comprises players and a field. You cannot have a football game apart from these. — Philosophim

Expert chess players are able to play with no physical board. Grand masters, for instance, will play against 10 opponents simultaneously, sometimes while blindfolded, and still consistently win. What about that situation is 'physical'?


Magnus Carlsen plays against 10 people while blindfolded.

This matters because I would put the "biology challenge" a little differently myself. I would suggest that the biggest unanswered question here is whether only living things can be conscious. — J

Gets my vote. I think the insuperable obstacle to such an idea is that the nature of life and of mind are inneffable, and, as such, it can't be defined. So you can't even know what it is that you're trying to synthesise. My friendly LLM suggested the following argument:

The Ineffability Argument Against LLM Consciousness

Premise 1: A defining feature of consciousness is the presence of qualitative experience — so-called qualia — which are irreducibly first-personal and, at least in part, ineffable.

Premise 2: What is ineffable cannot be exhaustively represented in language, computation, or any system of explicit specification.

Premise 3: LLMs (and any system based purely on computation or symbol manipulation) operate entirely by processing and generating explicitly specifiable structures — namely, language tokens and probabilistic relationships between them.

Conclusion: Therefore, LLMs cannot instantiate or reproduce consciousness, because they lack access to the ineffable dimension that characterizes subjective experience. — ChatGPT4o

In the case of living beings, where individual beings, are each observed to have one's own internal purpose (obvious in human intent), the causation here can only be accounted for as a bottom-up form of causation. — Metaphysician Undercover

Top-down causation doesn't mean external coercion or denial of agency—quite the opposite. It refers to the way the organization or unity of a system constrains and enables the behaviour of its parts from within (hence organism, organic, and organisation.) In O’Callaghan’s essay, it’s the Humpty Dumpty model: the organism is not built out of self-standing parts that can function on their own and just happen to join up; rather, the parts are what they are because of their roles in the whole. You can’t reassemble life from pieces. The individual’s capacity for intentional action—say, to enlist in an army—is already shaped by the larger context: language, culture, history, embodiment. There has to be an army to join, otherwise it's just a mob. These are not external impositions, but the structured conditions that make intentionality possible in the first place.

Bottom-up causation, by contrast, is the Frankenstein model: assemble a bunch of pieces, energise them with a force, and voila! a system emerges from their interactions. But as O’Callaghan points out, that’s not how living systems work—not even armies. The army doesn’t simply “emerge” from a collection of atomistic agents exercising unconditioned will. Rather, each agent is already a self-organizing being whose actions are meaningful within the constraints of larger wholes—biological, social, symbolic—which are not imposed externally, but are intrinsic to what agency even is. But the external structure of the army - ranks, divisions, formations - are constraints that determine how individual members are to behave.

So invoking top-down causation isn’t a denial of free will—it’s an attempt to explain how form, meaning, and function arise in organisms, including human beings. You don’t have to be a physicalist to see that.

One of the strengths of Aquinas’ philosophy, and a point O’Callaghan emphasizes, is that God doesn't need to control or micromanage natural beings in order for their actions to be meaningful or purposeful. Instead, God creates beings with their own natures—internal principles of motion, action, and teleology. This means that organisms act from within themselves; they are genuine agents, not mere instruments or puppets. Their purposes are real and intelligible because they arise from their God-given form or nature, not from external control.

In this view, natural causes are sufficient within their own order, which is precisely what makes natural science possible (and also why Aquinas saw no inherent conflict between religion and science). One can study organisms, physical systems, or even human agents without needing to invoke divine intervention at every step (which is why, incidentally, Thomist philosophers don't generally endorse 'Intelligent Design' ideas.) This the basis for Aquinas’ fifth way, where he says that even non-intelligent beings act toward ends—not because God is directing them, but because their nature is structured in such a way that they are inclined toward those ends. The teleology is internal, not imposed from the outside.

You might want to give it a read and judge for yourself. — NOS4A2

I have no reason to doubt the media reports on it. As for you, you want to believe it, as one who has spent the last 8 years defending and supporting Trump.

There is if there are reasons to believe that I am conscious and that I am a collection of material components. — Michael

Perhaps you’re something other than a collection of material components. You possess something that instruments don’t, namely, organic unity.

The idea that there is such a thing as Mental to Mental Causation is an overliberal use of the term 'Causation'. — I like sushi

What is an example of such an idea? Who holds that there is such a thing?

As for mental causation, what if I were to write something that caused you to become agitated? Would that not constitute an example of mental causation that has physical consequences such as increasing your pulse?

I'm sorry this has taken so long. I hope this is not a disappointment to you. — Ludwig V

Not at all! I very much appreciate the careful and constructive comments on The Mind-Created World. They show genuine engagement, and I welcome the thoughtful critiques. However, I've posted my response in that thread.

From here.

Again, thanks for your comments on the OP. Here I would like to clarify the key points where my claim goes further than a cautiously realist reading would allow.

The main divergence lies in what we take for granted about the independence of the world “as it is”—that is, the world assumed to exist apart from all modes of disclosure, experience, or intelligibility. While nobody would disagree that the mind plays a role in cognition—supplying the conceptual framework, perceptual integration, and interpretive acts by which we know—they would nevertheless retain an innate conviction that there exists, in the background, a world that is fully real and determinate independently of mind. This is what I see as the import of metaphysical realism and that is what I am seeking to challenge.

My position is closer to what might be called a phenomenological form of idealism: it asserts that there is no reality outside of some perspective, not in a merely epistemological sense (i.e., that we only know from a point of view), but in a deeper sense—namely, that the very structure of the world, as intelligible and coherent, is constituted in and through the relation to mind. Not an individual mind, of course, but the noetic act—the perceiving, structuring, and meaning-bestowing – that makes any world appear in the first place. (Relevant to note that the etymology of 'world' is from the old Dutch 'werold' meaning 'time of man'.)

To make this clearer, consider the example you cite of Neptune’s pre-discovery existence. The realist insists: “It existed all along—we simply didn’t know it.” But the claim I'm advancing would point out that what “it” was prior to its discovery is not just unknown, but indeterminate. The very notion of “an object that exists but is wholly outside any possible disclosure” is, I suggest, an imaginative construction. It is an extrapolation or projection. The fact that it might be accurate doesn't undercut that.

I'm not arguing for solipsism or Berkeley's idealism. I’m not saying “nothing exists unless I think it.” Rather, I’m arguing that the world as a coherent totality is incomprehensible outside the structures of consciousness. It’s not that the mind projects onto a blank slate, nor that it merely filters a pre-existing reality, but rather that reality as it shows up at all is a co-arising: dependent on the mutual implication of mind and world. (This is the aspect that is specifically phenomenological.)

This is why, when I write that “what we know of its existence is bound by and to the mind,” I do not mean this as a mere limitation of our faculties, but as a disclosure of something fundamental: that intelligibility is not something we add to a blank canvas but something that arises with, and through, the encounter of mind-and-world.

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

Regarding “form”: Aristotle posits forms as intrinsic to particulars, but in a way that already implies a kind of noetic participation—form is what renders a thing intelligible, it is how we know what it *is*. I agree with that, but add a post-Kantian refinement: the intelligible world is not merely a cross-section or partial view of some greater reality—it is the only world we encounter. To speak of things as intelligible independently of any mind is, I believe, to risk incoherence. Intelligibility is not something that can be separated off from consciousness and remain intact. As our empirical knowledge of the universe expands, it becomes incorporated into the intelligible body of knowledge that consitutes science.

So in sum: my position is not that mind is just one actor among others in an otherwise mind-independent world. It is that there is no world at all without mind—not as a subjective opinion, but as the condition for appearance, for disclosure, and for anything we might meaningfully call real.

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

If so, then it is not an "objective (mind-independent) process"; otherwise, "thrown into question" is only subjective (i.e. a mere interpretation). Scientific realism (à la Deutsch)** – contra "shut up and calculate" instrumentalism / positivism – makes more sense (and is more parsimonious) to me. — 180 Proof

For Deutsch, the wavefunction never collapses; instead, all possible outcomes of a quantum event occur in a vast, branching multiverse. This preserves the universality of quantum laws and avoids the ambiguities associated with observation or measurement. But at what cost? Many physicists and philosophers question it, not least because it postulates an infinite proliferation of unobservable worlds. The deeper irony is that while Deutsch defends objectivity, the very proliferation of interpretations — none of which can be empirically distinguished — suggests, as I already said, that the concept of objectivity itself is under philosophical pressure, not from mysticism or “woo,” but from within the context of scientific theory. (Not to mention the intrinsic ridiculousness of the many-worlds theory being 'parsimonious' :lol: )

I believe that when we consider the way that internal teleology is 'given' to beings, it is necessary to conclude that this is a bottom-up process of creation rather than top-down. — Metaphysician Undercover

But you've cherry-picked that quote. O'Callaghan then distinguishes between 'creating' and 'making'. He says making 'presupposes something already existing upon which the maker acts'. That is the model for human artifacts. By contrast, 'God in creating all that is in every aspect in which it is, including the causal powers and efficacy of agents that respond actively or passively to other created agents, presupposes nothing other than God’s own being, power, knowledge, and goodness.' And that is nothing if not top-down!

Because, so far as we know, consciousness is an attribute of sentient beings. And there’s no reason to believe that any collection of material components has ever been conscious. Computer systems are not beings, as such, even if they are able to simulate human thought.

I think the belief that they can be, signifies a deep misunderstanding of the nature of being (sorry for being blunt).

He thinks it will become less plausible at that point to deny they're conscious. — RogueAI

I question whether computer systems possess any element of consciousness whatever. Organic life, for instance, is organic on every level, right down to the cellular; mitosis, respiration, digestion, and so on, are organic functions. Whereas there’s nothing organic about microprocessors, they are wholly and solely information processors. I have no doubt that they can generate philosophically rich text, as I have daily philosophical dialogues with them - but they’re still simulations of thought, something which they themselves will reinforce if prompted. As Bernardo Kastrup says, you can create an extremely detailed simulation of kidney function on a computer, but you wouldn’t expect it to urinate.

Good essay and very carefully composed. Overall, I find it congenial, although I’m not as disposed to consider the theological elements. But this concluding thought is not at all remote from the thrust of the OP:

What I have argued here does not prove that evolutionary history is teleological and has a purpose, much less a divinely intended purpose. But what it does prove is that the random variation of traits that result in survival advantages does not rule out evolution having a teleological end or purpose. Evolutionary science is and should be neutral with respect to the question of whether the process of evolution has a teleology. If an evolutionary biologist claims that evolution has no purpose because of the role of random variation within it, that is not a scientific statement of evolutionary biology.

(Although I would add, I'm more focussed on these relatively new areas of embodied cognition/enactivism and less so on theological or scholastic arguments, although, that said, I don't feel any conflict between the OP and O'Callaghan's essay.)

I’ll pass on your regards.

So what god wills, god thinks, and what god thinks, god wills. Hence he cannot think what he does not will, nor will what he does not think. — Banno

I think the issue here, is that what classical texts mean by 'thinks' is not what we normally intend by it. I read in The Embodied Mind, that prior to Descartes, 'ideas' were not understood as the property of individual minds:

Prior to Descartes, the term "idea" was used only for the contents of the mind of God; Descartes was one of the first to take this term and apply it to the workings of the human mind.. This linguistic and conceptual shift if just one aspect of what Richard Rorty describes as the "invention of the mind as the mirror of nature".

So when a medieval thinker says “God thinks,” this doesn’t imply that God has something like private mental episodes or shifting representations. Instead, it refers to the divine knowing of eternal truths—or what might classically be called the Forms, which the rational intellect can have some insight into.

In that context, “what God thinks, God wills” isn’t a statement about psychology or decision-making, but a metaphysical expression of divine simplicity: God’s knowing and willing are not separate faculties or processes but identical in the unity of divine being.

Shame you can't lower yourselves to our level, but I suppose we'll have to get by, somehow.

In this case, “is” doesn’t mean numerical identity (as in "Clark Kent is Superman") but rather participation in a common essence.

The Father is God, the Son is God, the Spirit is God — but they’re not each other. So “is” here is not transitive, and trying to make it so leads to either contradiction or heresy, depending on your preference.

To hark back to an infamous episode of American presidential politics, 'it depends on what the meaning of "is" is'. As I understand it, predication in Aquinas is allegorical, rather than literal. This is connected to the 'analogical form of knowing' which was later undermined by Duns Scotus (and according to Radical Orthodoxy, a major part of the decline of the West.)

I've read that it looks like a contradiction if you assume “is” means numerical identity. In Trinitarian theology, “is God” means shares the same divine essence, not is numerically identical.

How so? Could you unpack that for me?

A visiting theologian once presented this diagrammatic representation of the Trinity which I, at least, found useful in understanding the idea:

we know that we can map the conceptual content of the brain to the synchronous activity of different neural centers. This is statistically so. — Ulthien

You’re not seeing the point. No depiction of pain, no matter how extraordinarily detailed, is pain. Pain is an experience, and experiences are undergone by subjects. Large Language Models are not subjects of experience. This is the ‘explanatory gap’ also known as the hard problem of consciousness.

Why, thanks! Will read carefully.

I think the realist position (and not just the direct realist position) is that there would still be the world (quantum definition of the word), relative to something measuring it (a rock say), but yea, all that synthesis that the human mind does is absent, so it would be far more 'the world in itself' and not as we think of it. Time for instance would not be something that flows. Rocks have no need to create that fabrication. — noAxioms

:100: The universe that most believe would be there in the absence of any observer would not have any form, as form is discovered by the mind (per Charles Pinter, Mind and the Cosmic Order). The world 'in itself' is formless and therefore meaningless. We mistake the form discovered by the mind as something that is there anyway, not seeing that the mind is the source of it. Kant 101, as I understand him.

The general consensus in this thread is that Sabine got it wrong.

addendum:

AI systems like ChatGPT are not beings in the philosophical sense of entities with a mode of existence, let alone lived experience. They have no interiority, no standpoint, no world—they are tools that process inputs and produce outputs based on statistical associations. They're not subjects of experience.

To borrow from Heidegger: ChatGPT is not a Dasein—a being that is concerned with its own being. It has no care, no embodiment, no finitude, no concerned involvement with the world. Without these, there is no horizon in which pain—or joy, or meaning—could arise. — ChatGPT