• The Mind-Created World
    "Noumena" for Kant is analogous to "matter" for Aristotle. They are strictly conceptual, not referring to any independent thing as people are inclined to believe.Metaphysician Undercover

    A20/B34 (in the Transcendental Aesthetic): Kant says that in appearances there is “that which corresponds to sensation (the matter)” and “that which allows the manifold of appearance to be ordered in certain relations (the form).”

    Here he is explicit: sensation provides the matter of appearances, while space and time are the form in which that matter is ordered.

    This is Kant’s way of transposing the Aristotelian hylē–morphē distinction into the transcendental register: not about substances in the world, but about the conditions under which appearances are given to us. Konstantin Pollok has even described Kant’s position as “transcendental hylomorphism,” where the form/matter schema of Aristotelian philosophy is reworked at the transcendental level (ref).
  • The Mind-Created World
    Yes. That's the pun-ch line :rofl:
  • Ukraine Crisis
    Meanwhile, Sergei Lavrov is saying that Zelenskyy is making any progress towards peace impossible. I'll fill in the blanks: 'The Ukrainians keep insisting that they own their own country. They won't agree that they should surrender to us and that Zelenskyy should resign. Therefore, we have no choice but to keep fighting.'
  • On emergence and consciousness
    That is the subject of the David Chalmers paper being discussed.

    Speaking of whom, a very young Chalmers laying it out, in an interview I’m guessing in the first half of the 90’s.

    https://youtube.com/shorts/-jEp6BqVOZ8?si=JQk66I3HXlbtXHtB

    Notice the explicit Cartesian allusion in the first few sentences. Turns out that ‘know thyself’ is actually a lot harder than stellar chemistry! Who’d have thought?
  • Evidence of Consciousness Surviving the Body
    What seems crucial here is not so much what is said, but what’s left unsaid. By framing NDE testimony within Wittgensteinian grammar and JTB-style analysis, the discussion is kept in epistemological and analytical territory. That’s careful and deliberate. But perhaps the unsaid premise is the one that gives the whole topic its charge: if NDEs are veridical, then the standard mind–brain equivalence is challenged - along with the assumption that humans are wholly or simply physical. That is what makes the discussion so charged in my view.

    I can see why you would want to avoid religious overtones, but the metaphysical implications can’t simply be wished away. They’re the silent partner in the argument. I mean, can we imagine Wittgenstein entertaining these hypotheses?
  • The Mind-Created World
    chitta chattaPunshhh

    This is a 'yogic pun', of course. In Eastern philosophy 'citta' is variously translated as 'mind', 'heart', or 'being'. According to the classical texts of yoga, the citta (mind-stream) is continuously disturbed or polluted by sense-impressions, cravings, longings, memories of past traumas and so on, which manifest as 'vritti', thought-forms or disturbances. The yogic aspirant aims for the stilling of these vritti, hence the long and arduous periods of 'dhyana' (meditation) and entering states of inner stillness (samadhi). A higher state of samadhi is called 'nirvikalpa', where 'nir-' means ' negation of' and 'vikalpa' are 'discriminative ideas'. So, the negation of thought-forms and inner stillness. Very far from my normal busy mind.
  • On emergence and consciousness
    Would you agree that the hard problem is also a problem of how consciousness emerges, and why it does so?J

    Even that has an implicit assumption - that consciousness is 'something that emerges', while 'emergence' is only one of several approaches.

    The problem Chalmers describes is the relationship of third-person, objective descriptions of physical processes with first-person experience. It's the same problem as the explanatory gap problem - the physiology of pain does not capture the experience of pain. Of course, none of this is 'a problem' at all, except for those who try to insist that the third-person, objective account of experience leaves no explanatory gap. In that sense, the 'hard problem' is nearer to a rhetorical argument than a theory about physiology. It’s an argument against ‘scientism’.

    The eye can see itself, actually, by using scientific technology -- in fact, such technology allows us to see, and explain, the eye much better than we can do as mere experiencers and observers.J

    I wear specs and of course the optometrist has instruments and expertise to examine my eyes and prescribe the necessary lenses. But she doesn’t see my seeing. She presents charts and asks me to describe what I see. And then, she has expertise to interpret those results, but even if I saw those results I wouldn’t have the expertise to interpret them. This is an exact analogy for the issue Chalmers describes.

    There's a parallel there with what Heidegger called the "forgetfulness of being" - the way that Being itself (the fact that things are, rather than what they are) tends to remain hidden or taken for granted in our everyday engagement with the world.

    In scientific analysis, we focus exclusively on properties, structures, functions, causal relations - but the sheer fact of being, existence as such, doesn't appear as an object of investigation. It's presupposed but never thematized. Similarly, in studying consciousness, we analyze neural correlates, cognitive functions, behavioral outputs - all the what of consciousness - but the that of experience, the bare fact that there's something it's like to be conscious, remains curiously absent from the scientific picture. And attempts to point it out are vigorously resisted, or dismissed as sophistry or confusion. I've seen that happen on this forum dozens of times.

    This forgetfulness isn't a failure of science but perhaps an inevitable consequence of its method. The third-person stance that makes science so powerful necessarily brackets the first-person dimension - not just of human experience, but of existence itself. When we adopt the scientific attitude, we're looking at beings as objects of study rather than relating to them as fellow existents (although of course we can do both.) So the "hard problem" might be seen as a specific instance of this more fundamental forgetfulness - not just about consciousness, but about the being-dimension of reality that always already underlies any scientific investigation but never shows up within the objective data.

    >See It is Never Known but Is the Knower (.pdf), Michel Bitbol
  • On emergence and consciousness
    I was contrasting organisms with atoms. I believe that only organisms are capable of experience, not atoms. So, no, an atom does none of those things.
  • The Mind-Created World
    But that is just to restate the blind spot. To say “the subject is irrelevant to science” is precisely the forgetting I am talking about. Science can only operate because there are subjects who perceive, measure, theorize, and draw conclusions. When it presents its findings as “the way the world is in itself,” it effaces the constitutive role of the subject in making any of those findings meaningful in the first place.

    Scientific realism, as you describe it, is not incoherent—it’s indispensable within its proper scope. What’s incoherent is to extend it into a metaphysical claim: that the world is the way science describes it independently of the perspective through which such descriptions become possible. That is the leap from method to ontology, and that is exactly what the “blind spot of science” critique is about.

    I don't question that the predicates you mention can meaningfully apply to what is independent from human perception―to me questioning that is a nonsense. It's not a blind spot, I understand your argument, and I simply disagree with it.Janus

    But you’ve just restated the issue in another guise. To say the predicates of sameness, objectivity, and existence “can meaningfully apply” to what is independent of perception is exactly the move that the blind spot critique is drawing attention to. Of course it feels like nonsense to you to question that—because you’re presupposing the very standpoint I’m asking us to examine!

    The point is not that your position is inconsistent. It’s perfectly consistent within the realist frame. The point is that this frame cannot account for its own conditions of possibility—namely, the constituting role of the subject. That is what Kant meant when he said that if you remove the subject, the world of appearances vanishes. It doesn’t mean reality is “just in the mind,” but that our very talk of “existence” and “objectivity” already presupposes the subject’s framework.

    So when you say you “understand the argument and disagree,” that is precisely what the blind spot looks like from inside it. I don’t think it’s dogmatic to point out the conditions that make any interpretation possible. You and I can only disagree because there is already a subjectivity through which concepts like “existence,” “sameness,” and “objectivity” have meaning. That’s not my dogma; it’s the very ground on which both of us are standing when we argue.
  • The Mind-Created World
    He is talking about Noumena negatively because we have no sense of other-than space and time. That is the point. He cannot even 'point to' noumena only flit around it as a kind of negative limitation on human 'sensibility' (which is all we have).I like sushi

    :up:
  • The Mind-Created World
    You are presenting a strawman of science―it deals with the world as perceived by us, no reasonable scientists would deny that.Janus

    It’s not a strawman at all. The Blind Spot of Science article in Aeon (and the later book by Frank, Gleiser, and Thompson) addresses mainstream science, the assumptions of physicalism and objectivism, which you will also argue in favour of in other contexts. The point is not that individual scientists are naïve realists who think the eyes are passive “windows,” but that the methodological outlook of modern science brackets the constituting role of the subject, and then forgets that it has done so. Of course that attitude is contested, but it remains the default for many. So declaring that many scientists hold to scientific realism is hardly a 'straw man' :rofl: .

    Apart from perceptions and judgements, the world would be the same without any observer.Janus

    Precisely the point at issue! What world are you referring to? The moment you speak of “the world apart from perceptions and judgments,” you are already invoking the categories of thought and perception through which such a world is conceived. You have a world in mind, so to speak. To say it “would be the same” is to assume what is in question—namely, that the predicates of sameness, objectivity, and existence can meaningfully apply outside the framework of an observer. That’s exactly the blind spot. To which your response is invariably: 'what "blind spot"? I don't see any "blind spot"!'
  • On emergence and consciousness
    Of course they're memory-less, since atoms don't have memories.Patterner

    The whole essence of anything organic is memory. It stores memories of what happened so as to better cope with what's coming up.
  • The Mind-Created World
    if you insist that the category of existence can only pertain to the things we perceive then we can say that things as they are unperceived do not exist.Janus

    I’m not claiming that the thing-in-itself is some ghostly half-real entity. My point is that existence and non-existence are categories that only make sense within experience, within a perspective. When you try to apply them outside that framework—i.e., to the 'unperceived in itself'—they lose their meaning. Saying 'it neither exists nor does not exist' is shorthand for saying: the category of existence simply doesn’t apply there. That’s not a contradiction but a recognition of a boundary or limit to knowledge.

    Kant’s remark in the Transcendental Aesthetic that if we “take away the thinking subject the whole world of appearances would vanish” is often misconstrued. It doesn’t mean the world literally ceases to be, but that the world as knowable is always ordered through the framework of an observer. The realist assumption—that the world would be just the same even if there were no observer—forgets this constituting role of the mind - which is precisely the point of the 'blind spot of science', which regards the world it studies as if it were simply there in itself, while forgetting that the very concepts of objectivity and existence already presuppose the standpoint of an observer.
  • The Mind-Created World
    In Buddhism this whole world of appearances is nothing but maya.Punshhh

    Actually Māyā is Hindu terminology. The Buddhist term is saṃsāra, ‘cyclical existence’. It’s idea of the illusory nature of experience is more that we wrongly attribute significance to things we’re attached to - not that the world is illusory per se, but we evaluate it wrongly.
  • Idealism in Context
    He says that there cannot be such existents, that they are neither existent nor non-existent.Janus

    Context:

    I am not arguing that… ‘the world is all in the mind’. It’s rather that, whatever judgements are made about the world, the mind provides the framework within which such judgements are meaningful. So though we know that prior to the evolution of life there must have been a Universe with no intelligent beings in it, or that there are empty rooms with no inhabitants, or objects unseen by any eye — the existence of all such supposedly unseen realities still relies on an implicit perspective. What their existence might be outside of any perspective is meaningless and unintelligible, as a matter of both fact and principle.Wayfarer
  • On emergence and consciousness
    This is a different problem from "What is it like to be conscious?" The latter problem is associated with Nagel, not Chalmers.J

    No it isn’t. He quotes Nagel in support of his definition;

    The really hard problem of consciousness is the problem of experience. When we think and perceive, there is a whir of information-processing, but there is also a subjective aspect. As Nagel (1974) has put it, there is something it is like to bea conscious organism. This subjective aspect is experience. When we see, for example, we experience visual sensations: the felt quality of redness, the experience of dark and light, the quality of depth in a visual field. Other experiences go along with perception in different modalities: the sound of a clarinet, the smell of mothballs. Then there are bodily sensations, from pains to orgasms; mental images that are conjured up internally; the felt quality of emotion, and the experience of a stream of conscious thought. What unites all of these states is that there is something it is like to be in them. All of them are states of experience.


    Again, the problem is to say how "what it's like" consciousness arises from brain processes, not to give a description of consciousness itself.J

    The two are inseparable. You need to specify something if you are to describe it.

    why does that mean we can't seek an explanation for it?J

    Because of recursion: you’re trying to explain that which is doing the explaining. ‘The eye cannot see itself’.
  • On emergence and consciousness
    If mind can be an object for the cognitive sciences, what does this mean? How does the attitude or program of cognitive science allow an escape from what you call "the indubitable fact that we are that which we seek to know"? Perhaps the answer lies in a discrimination between 1st and 3rd person perspectives, but what do you think? When a scientist studies consciousness, what are they doing differently from our everyday experience of being conscious?J

    Going back to Chalmer's Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness, he makes the distinction between what he calls easy problems of consciousness and the hard problem. The 'easy problems' are a catalog of just those kind of mental phenomena which are the subject of cognitive science, for instance

    • the ability to discriminate, categorize, and react to environmental stimuli;
    • the integration of information by a cognitive system;
    • the reportability of mental states; ...
    (Partial list)

    As is well known, he says the really hard problem is 'what it is like to be...' By that he means the experiential dimension of life, the 'subjective aspect' as he calls it. Which, I think, is really a roundabout way of describing 'being' as such. That is what cannot be described in objective terms - well, not really. I can say to you 'I feel sick', but you will only know what the means, because you yourself know 'what it is like.' The state, like sentient existence itself, is irreducibly first-person. But the first person is just what the objective sciences seeks to bracket out. There’s the issue in a nutshell. Phenomenology realizes this from the outset.

    As for psychology, there’s a reason why it’s often called ‘soft science’. Cognitive perhaps less so, because many of its objects are objectively quantifiable.

    That some awareness is an indubitable fact does not entail that it can't be explained in other terms. Yet you seem to imply that this must be so. Why? Aren't we confusing the experience, the phenomenology, with that which is experienced?J

    Simply because there has to be an observer, a subject to whom the experience occurs, for there to be anything to analyse! One of my stock quotes, from Routledge Phenomenology, is right on point here:

    In contrast to the outlook of naturalism, Husserl believed all knowledge, all science, all rationality depended on conscious acts, acts which cannot be properly understood from within the natural outlook at all. Consciousness should not be viewed naturalistically as part of the world at all, since consciousness is precisely the reason why there was a world there for us in the first place. For Husserl it is not that consciousness creates the world in any ontological sense—this would be a subjective idealism, itself a consequence of a certain naturalising tendency whereby consciousness is cause and the world its effect—but rather that the world is opened up, made meaningful, or disclosed through consciousness. The world is inconceivable apart from consciousness. Treating consciousness as part of the world, reifying consciousness, is precisely to ignore consciousness’s foundational, disclosive role.

    Continental philosophy, generally, seems to understand this in a way that Anglo philosophy really struggles with. Perhaps physicalism functions as a kind of shield. By insisting that only what is scientifically observable really matters, it allows one to preserve that sense of separateness that science relies on in the first place. In that way the ‘egological’ perspective shelters behind it — a defensive move, more than a philosophical one. This is also why psychology is really existential rather than strictly scientific. Science begins from the standpoint of separation, the stance of standing outside or apart from. But psychology, at least when it’s true to its subject, has to begin from within: from the lived situation of the self. It can’t hide behind the shield of objectivity, because what it investigates is the very ground of experience itself. Hence, 'we are what we seek to know'.

    (There is another mode of self-transcendence, the noetic rather than the scientific but can’t go into that here.)
  • Currently Reading
    Waking, Dreamimg, Being - Evan Thompson
  • The Mind-Created World

    ‘Anyone who denies the law of non-contradiction should be beaten and burned until he admits that to be beaten is not the same as not to be beaten, and to be burned is not the same as not to be burned.’

    [However]

    Philosophers in the Mahayana traditions hold some things to be ineffable; but they also explain why they are ineffable… Now, you can’t explain why something is ineffable without talking about it. That’s a plain contradiction: talking of the ineffable.

    Embarrassing as this predicament might appear, Nāgārjuna is far from being the only one stuck in it. The great lodestar of the German Enlightenment, Immanuel Kant, said that there are things one cannot experience (noumena), and that we cannot talk about such things. He also explained why this is so: our concepts apply only to things we can experience. Clearly, he is in the same fix as Nagarjuna. So are two of the greatest 20th-century Western philosophers. Ludwig Wittgenstein claimed that many things can be shown but not said, and wrote a whole book (the Tractatus), explaining what and why. Martin Heidegger made himself famous by asking what Being is, and then spent much of the rest of his life explaining why you can’t even ask this question.
    Beyond True and False, Graham Priest
  • The Joy of the Knife: The Nietzschean Glorification of Crime
    Did you have Luigi Mangione in mind by any chance? He that shot a healthcare CEO in the back, on the street, at point blank range, and has become a cult figure in the US and beyond due to the perceived injustices of the US health insurance scheme.
  • Idealism in Context
    If Kant's 'idealism' asserted that appearances are mere mental contents then, it would be subjective idealism. However, Kant also asserts that there is 'something' about phenomena that it is not 'mental'. However, we are left with no clue on how that 'something' is related to appearances.boundless

    Don't forget that the categories of the understanding and our sensory abilities are factors that we all share. They're not particular to individuals, although individuals 'instantiate' those capacities. I have just responded in the mind-created world discussion to further points along these lines.
  • Why not AI?
    There’s not a blanket ban on your using AI but we’re not allowed to use it to write posts for us. You can use it to refine your arguments, ideas and prose but it’s important that what you write is in your own voice.
  • The Mind-Created World
    To use the empirical sciences—phenomena—to say things about the noumenal nature of things is simply off-limits.Count Timothy von Icarus

    But isn’t it you who is here saying things about the noumenal or thing-in-itself? If there’s a fault in the expression Ding an sich, it lies in the “Ding”: as soon as we call it a “thing,” it’s already objectified, named, made into some thing—even if we then say it’s unknowable. We’re simultaneously thinking it and not thinking it.

    So there is no “noumenal nature” as if it were an object awaiting description. To treat it that way risks projecting it as the first link in a causal chain—an “uncaused cause” - which is where Kant says it becomes dogmatic metaphysics.

    For, it was hardly a novel thought that the properties of the mind and of man's senses/body affect how the world appears.Count Timothy von Icarus

    Agree! I see Kant as continuous with many aspects of the previous tradition. He adopted Aristotle’s categories almost unchanged, and his habilitation thesis was on Plato’s Ideas, although that was before his “critical period.” But meanwhile, there had been the scientific revolution, and the abandonment of the geocentric universe with its crystal spheres. Kant is continuous with the older tradition, but he is also responding to a radically altered intellectual landscape in a way that his immediate predecessors were not.

    I think this might lead towards the parallel charge of Kant as leading towards skepticism, that his world bottoms out in nothingCount Timothy von Icarus

    Nāgārjuna likewise is accused by his Brahmin critics of nihilism (as was the Buddha). But no-thing-ness—the Buddhist emptiness—is not nothing, not a nihilistic void as it is sometimes called. That idea of “The Void” evokes all kinds of existential terrors (or at least uneasiness, which I can hear you expressing!). It was a common rendering among 18th-century translators of Buddhism, and later echoed by Nietzsche and other European philosophers (Nietzsche called Buddhism “the cry of an exhausted civilization”).

    In the OP, I footnoted a passage from the Kaccāyanagotta Sutta which goes to the heart of this apparent impasse:

    By and large, Kaccāyana, this world is supported by a polarity, that of existence and non-existence. But when one sees the origination of the world as it actually is with right discernment, "non-existence" with reference to the world does not occur to one. When one sees the cessation of the world as it actually is with right discernment, "existence" with reference to the world does not occur to one. — Kaccāyanagotta Sutta

    The import for the “mind-created world” argument is that the world (object, thing) outside perception neither exists nor does not exist. To say “nothing can be said about it” is not to claim “it is something that does not exist.” Rather, it neither exists nor doesn’t exist; in fact, there is no “it.”

    In broader philosophical terms, to speak of “the unconditioned,” “absolute,” or “unborn” is to gesture towards what is not any specific thing at all and is beyond the scope of discursive thought. This is not unlike what we find in Neoplatonism: the One of Plotinus cannot be an object of thought, or an object at all, since it transcends the distinction of self and world. The famous expression of the One as “beyond Being” means, in my interpretation, beyond the polarity of existence and non-existence—beyond anything of which something determinate can be said.

    And you can see how this leads back to Kant and the limits of discursive reason: the Ding an sich is not a hidden object, but a marker of the boundary of thought itself, reminding us that whatever lies “beyond” cannot be spoken of in terms of existence or non-existence. And as language relies on those very distinctions to gain traction in the world of experience, it is in that sense beyond speech.
  • The Mind-Created World
    Sorry, but I don’t understand what you mean.
  • The Mind-Created World
    I do understand that my approach can be difficult to understand. Like many others here, I've been reading this philosophical project for a lot of years. To me it doesn't seem idiosyncratic, but I can see how it appears that way to others, but I'm still confident that the essay on which this post is based is coherent and can stand up to scrutiny.

    I am not arguing that it (the essay) means that ‘the world is all in the mind’. It’s rather that, whatever judgements are made about the world, the mind provides the framework within which such judgements are meaningful. So though we know that prior to the evolution of life there must have been a Universe with no intelligent beings in it, or that there are empty rooms with no inhabitants, or objects unseen by any eye — the existence of all such supposedly unseen realities still relies on an implicit perspective. What their existence might be outside of any perspective is meaningless and unintelligible, as a matter of both fact and principle.

    That is what I take as the meaning of the 'in-itself'.
  • The Mind-Created World
    If differentiation is literally just things existing aside from one another (at all), then our perception does logically require selection into categories of those thingsAmadeusD

    In the longer version of the original post (linked from it), there are references to a book called Mind and the Cosmic Order, Charles Pinter, an essay in the philosophy of cognitive science. He starts by saying:

    Imagine that all life has vanished from the universe, but everything else is undisturbed. Matter is scattered about in space in the same way as it is now, there is sunlight, there are stars, planets and galaxies — but all of it is unseen. There is no human or animal eye to cast a glance at objects, hence nothing is discerned, recognized or even noticed. Objects in the unobserved universe have no shape, color or individual appearance, because shape and appearance are created by minds. Nor do they have features, because features correspond to categories of animal sensation. This is the way the early universe was before the emergence of life — and the way the present universe is outside the view of any observer.

    Pinter goes on to argue that what the observer brings to the picture is ‘the picture’. He says that when we gaze out at our surroundings, we don’t see featureless space. Instead, our perception registers distinct entities, arrayed in spatial relationship with each other. We recognize these entities, can identify and name them. This act of apperception interprets the world as a collection of distinct items. Without the instinctive ability to make these distinctions, comprehension would be impossible and we couldn’t think or act.

    Many will insist that those shapes, features and appearances were there all along - but that is not really the point. Certainly what we cognise was there all along, but it is not until they are re-cognized that they become meaningful to us (and for other animals likewise - Pinter by no means confines this to humans).
  • The Mind-Created World
    Do. But bear in mind, that I'm making these comments in the context of the original post, which is not directly about Kant and German idealism. It says only that it 'draws on insights from philosophical idealism which have been validated in some respects by cognitive science'.
  • The Mind-Created World
    Which permits the thinking about the soul excluded in your previous argument.Paine

    The basic idea is that the self or soul is unknowable. We ourselves are, in reality, the in-itself. That, I understand to be the wedge that Hegel used to build his dialectic (although I don't want to venture too far in that direction as my knowledge of Hegel and the other later idealists is cursory.)
  • The Mind-Created World
    He says
    The ‘I think’ must be able to accompany all my representations; for otherwise something would be represented in me that could not be thought at all. That representation that can be given prior to all thought is called intuition. All manifold of intuition has, therefore, a necessary relation to the ‘I think’ in the same subject in which this manifold is found. — (B132)

    It might be better to say that the 'I think' is 'the condition of the possibility of experienceable objects'. And that conforms with the passage you quoted earlier:

    The unity of consciousness, which grounds the categories, is here taken for an intuition of the subject as an object, and the category of substance is applied to it. But this unity is only the unity of thinking, through which no object is givenCPR, Kant, B421

    Here Kant warns against mistaking the unity of apperception itself (a formal, transcendental condition) for an intuition of a subject (as if the self were some object among objects). The “unity of thinking” grounds the possibility of objects as given in experience, but is not itself an object of intuition.

    I concede the way that I put it (i.e. that there being a subject or observer...) is not strictly correct if that is taken to imply that 'the observer' is an existing thing.
  • The Mind-Created World
    Strictly speaking, Kant is saying that the "I" cannot be experienced as "real" the way other things in life can be.Paine

    The way I put it is that the 'I' or self cannot be said to exist in the same sense that the objects of cognition exist. There being an observer (a subject of experience) is the condition of existence of objects of cognition. Hence the 'transcendental unity of apperception' in Kant, or the transcendental ego of Husserl, or Schopenhauer's 'no object without a subject'.
  • Ukraine Crisis
    I have covered a lot of diplomatic negotiations since becoming a journalist in 1978, but I have never seen one when where one of the leaders — in this case Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky — felt the need to thank our president about 15 times in the roughly four and a half minutes he addressed him with the press in the room. Not to mention the flattery that our other European allies felt they needed to heap on him as well.

    When our allies have to devote this much energy just to keep the peace with our president, before they even begin to figure out how to make peace with Vladimir Putin; when they have to constantly look over their shoulder to make sure that Trump is not shooting them in the back with a social media post, before Putin shoots them in the front with a missile; and when our president doesn’t understand that when Putin says to Ukraine, in effect “Marry me or I’ll kill you,” that Zelensky needs more than just an American marriage counselor, it all leads me to ask: How is this ever going to work? ....

    Putin’s punishment for this war should be that he and his people have to forever look to the West and see a Ukraine, even if it is a smaller Ukraine, that is a thriving Slavic, free-market democracy, compared with Putin’s declining Slavic, authoritarian kleptocracy.

    But how will Trump ever learn that truth when he basically gutted the National Security Council staff and shrank and neutered the State Department, when he fired the head of the National Security Agency and his deputy on the advice of a conspiracy buffoon, Laura Loomer, and when he appointed a Putin fan girl, Tulsi Gabbard, to be his director of national intelligence? ...

    Who will tell him the truth? No one.

    No one but the wild earth of Ukraine. In the trenches in the Donbas, there is truth. In the 20,000 Ukrainian children that Kyiv says Putin has abducted, there is truth. In the roughly 1.4 million Russian and Ukrainian soldiers killed and wounded as a result of Putin’s fevered dreams of restoring Ukraine to Mother Russia, there is truth. In the Ukrainian civilians killed by Russian drones at the same time that Trump was laying out the red carpet for Putin in Alaska, there is truth.

    And the longer Trump ignores those truths, the more he builds his peace strategy — not on expertise but on his hugely inflated self-regard and his un-American anti-Westernism — the more this will become his war. And if Putin wins it and Ukraine loses it, Trump and his reputation will suffer irreparable damage — now and forever.
    Thomas Friedman, NY Times (Gift Link)
  • Strong Natural Theism: An Alternative to Mainstream Religion
    What happened to that document you posted the other day? The OP seems to have dissappeared - I went back to review it after making an initial comment and couldn't find it.
  • The Mind-Created World
    Of course, Kant knew nothng of Buddhism but they share some common ground. Kant's statement that the 'I' cannot be made an object of thought is an insight fundamental to Indian philosophy generally.
  • The Mind-Created World
    What is the evidence that supports that they (phenomena) are appearances?Count Timothy von Icarus

    Isn’t that utterly simple? Going back to the original post: the contention is, simply, that “the world” (object, thing) is not simply given but is constructed by the mind/brain. That’s what the brain does! In humans, the brain is an enormously complex organ which absorbs a very large proportion of the organism's metabolic energy. What’s it doing with all that power? Why, it’s creating a world! A very different world to that of cheetahs, otters, butterflies and divas, but a world nonetheless

    This is Kant’s basic point - not that Kant has the last word on all the implications, not that Kant is correct in every detail. But his ‘Copernican revolution in philosophy’ is the factor which was a fundamental turning point in modern philosophy. It was arguably the origin of all such later developments as phenomenology and constructivism, and why Kant has been (rightly) designated the ‘godfather of cognitive science’. Hence also the amount of content devoted to cognitive science in the original post and the implied convergence of Pinter's 'gestalts' with the 'ideas' of classical philosophy.

    In respect of the in-itself, Emrys Westacott puts it like this:

    Kant's introduced the concept of the “thing in itself” to refer to reality as it is independent of our experience of it and unstructured by our cognitive constitution. The concept was harshly criticized in his own time and has been lambasted by generations of critics since. A standard objection to the notion is that Kant has no business positing it given his insistence that we can only know what lies within the limits of possible experience. But a more sympathetic reading is to see the concept of the “thing in itself” as a sort of placeholder in Kant's system; it both marks the limits of what we can know and expresses a sense of mystery that cannot be dissolved, the sense of mystery that underlies our unanswerable questions. Through both of these functions it serves to keep us humble.The Continuing Relevance of Immanuel Kant

    Kant, by his own admission, knows absolutely nothing about other people in-themselves. Any appeal to shared biology or culture is an appeal to the phenomenal to explain a noumenal connection by which discrete phenomenal perspectives are the same.Count Timothy von Icarus

    But he knows how we appear! And we appear to have uniform abilities and faculties across populations, although of course with outliers and exceptional cases and those with anomalous skills. This charge of solipsism is often levelled at the kind of phenomenological idealism I'm advocating - but the response is, we are members of the same species language, and culture. Cultural worlds are vastly different, its inhabitants see things in completely different ways to what we regard as 'normal'. Again this is because we as a species and a cultural type construe the world in characteristic ways.

    (When I did a unit in cognitive science, there were many examples of culturally-determined behaviours in response to situations. One I recall was an individual from a forest tribe in Africa, who was taken to a mountain lookout by an anthropologist, from where there was a vista of sweeping plains dotted with herd animals. The forest-dweller seemed to be looking at the view, but after a short time, he squatted and started drawing his fingers through the dirt in front of him. The translator explained that he was trying to 'touch the insects' - the insects being the distant herd animals. As this individual had lived his whole life in a forest, his sensory horizon could not encompass the idea of a 'distant view'.)

    There's an enormous range of analogous data from anthropology, ethnology etc. The inhabitants of other cultures live in very different worlds to our own. Of course, it's all the same planet, but a world is more than a planet. It’s the structured field of meaning and perception we share through our faculties, language and culture - and that’s exactly what Kant was intuiting. That, I contend, is also the source of the later phenomenological concepts of 'lebenswelt' and 'umwelt' (also mentioned in the original post.)

    And don’t forget that Kant, typical of academics of his day, also lectured in geography, anthropology, pedagogy, logic, physics, and mathematics — as well as philosophy.

    Pace Kant, this is not what past metaphysicians thought they had. The category is itself modern.Count Timothy von Icarus

    Which is the point I'm driving at in Idealism in Context. That is about the decline of the 'participatory ontology' that characterised scholastic realism via the absorption of Aristotle's hylomorphism.

    Thomist critics like Maritain would say that Kant misses the “intuition of being” — a direct grasp of existence itself that grounds metaphysics. Without that, they argue, Kant seals us off from reality - something other critics also point out. There’s force in that critique. But even granting it, Kant’s basic insight remains: the world of experience is constituted through the mind’s forms and categories, not simply received as a mirror of things-in-themselves.

    I've even seen Kant read as Shankara or Nagarjuna. But these seem like a stretch to me. Doctrines like emptiness would suggest that the things-in-themselves are simply a sort of error (but of course, readings of Kant do dispense with noumena, I just don't think he does).Count Timothy von Icarus

    I've mentioned before I first read Kant via T R V Murti, The Central Philosophy of Buddhism (c 1955). This book is nowadays criticized by more current Buddhologists as being overly Euro-centric and too influenced by European idealism, but his comparison of Kant and Nāgārjuna really connected a lot of dots for me. Apropos of which:

    Descartes mistake is to treat the cogito as if it delivered a determinate object — a existent entity. But Kant’s point in B421 is that this is a category mistake. The “I think” is the condition of experience of objects; it cannot itself be grasped as an object under the categories. That’s why Kant says the 'I' is not an appearance, not a noumenon, and not a substance — it’s simply the formal unity of apperception, which we can never convert into a determinate object without confusion. But Kant is also justly circumspect about the real nature of the self.

    As Nāgārjuna has been mentioned, there's a short verse in the early Buddhist texts in which the Buddha is asked whether the self exists by 'the wanderer Vachagotta' (this character representing the type of seeker who asks philosophical or metaphysical questions.) Asked 'does the self exist?' and 'does the self not exist?', the Buddha declines to answer both questions, instead maintaining a 'noble silence'. Asked later by his attendant, Ananda, why he didn't answer, he replies that both answers would be misleading - saying 'yes' would 'side with the eternalists', those ascetics who maintain there is a permanently existing self, and 'no' would only confuse the questioner, as he would wonder where his self had gone (ref.) This is one of the origins of madhyamaka ('middle way') philosophy of later Buddhism, which designates the two views of 'existing' or 'not existing' as the errors of eternalism and nihilism, respectively. (Most commentators agree that contemporary culture tends towards the latter.)
  • The Mind-Created World
    Sure, our brains differ, and language use varies, but within bounds. What Kant is pointing to are the universal structures that make a shared, law-governed world possible in the first place — space, time, and the categories of the understanding. Without those a priori forms, no amount of neural regularity or linguistic convention would secure the very notion of “objectivity.”
  • The Mind-Created World
    It seems to me you’re wanting the 'in itself' to carry explanatory power — to be the hidden cause or ground of appearances — and then faulting Kant for not providing an explanation of how that could be. But that’s exactly what he bars: categories like causality or potency/act only apply within the domain of appearance. The in-itself isn’t an explanatory posit or cause, but a limiting concept marking the boundary where explanation ceases to apply. When Kant says “there must be something corresponding to sensibility as receptivity,” he isn’t smuggling in a cause; he’s pointing out that appearances can’t be appearances of nothing — but beyond that, no determinate claim is possible.

    I suspect you're reacting to a sense of a ‘God-shaped hole’ - an expectation that the noumenal ought to be, in fact, the numinous (which despite the apparent verbal similarity is an entirely different concept.)

    As far as subjectivism is concerned, Kant was indeed concerned to avoid the charge of “subjective idealism,” but that’s why the Critique insists that the forms of sensibility and categories of understanding are not personal idiosyncrasies but universal structures of human cognition. They’re what make possible a shared, lawful, and communicable world in the first place. He says that objectivity itself arises from these common faculties. So while later critics argued about how secure this deduction was, Kant’s own position was clear — the phenomenal world is not appearing within a self-enclosing solipsism, but is the necessary correlate of common cognitive structures
  • The Mind-Created World
    The point isn’t that Kant makes positive claims about the noumenon. It’s that he shows where our concepts lose their foothold — not stipulatively, but by analysis of what experience itself presupposes. If one rejects the empirical/transcendental distinction, then of course it looks like dogma. But that’s just to reject the very move Kant’s philosophy makes.