Yes, but as I'm always wondering, does anyone give a shit about it? — Christoffer

One of the readers comments on that article was, the people who could do anything about it - mainly, Congress - don't give a shit. There are plenty of others who do, but they can't do anything other than write articles or organise protests.

But the judiciary is holding the line, against repeated attempts to breach it. Many of his executive orders are held up in the courts. All is not lost, but it's dire, for sure.

Consider electrons: each of them has a -1 electric charge. This intrinsic property is identical in every instantiated electron. The charge is real, but it doesn't exist independently of the electrons. The -1 charge is a universal. So is electron: every existing electron has identical intrinsic properties. They are distinguished by extrinsic properties - location, which objects they are bound to, etc. — Relativist

I’d suggest that the nature of the electron is itself still an open question, particularly in light of quantum mechanics. The whole point of wave-particle duality, superposition, and entanglement is that even at the level of fundamental physics, we're dealing with mathematical structures that aren't neatly reducible to classical particulars (hence the ongoing disputes over interpretations). We describe electrons using the language of field theory and probability amplitudes, not by pointing to discrete “things” with self-contained identities.

Astrophysicist Adam Frank said

When I was a young physics student I once asked a professor: ‘What’s an electron?’ His answer stunned me. ‘An electron,’ he said, ‘is that to which we attribute the properties of the electron.’

So when we say "all electrons have a charge of -1," we are already operating in a space of idealized structure and abstraction, not simply observing physical things. I'm saying, that what are described as universals are indispensable components of those rational operations. But we're not directly aware of them as they're not, as it were, inherent in the objects of analysis. (That's what is meant by 'the hand can't grasp itself'.)

So when we say that all electrons have a charge of -1, what is it that we're referring to? It’s not just a feature observable in any one case—it’s a lawlike regularity, expressed in abstract terms, that applies to any possible electron, because that's how an electron is defined. But in order to grasp that, we’re not just detecting physical properties—we’re accessing something through reason: namely, an intelligible structure that governs particulars. And whether, or in what sense, that can be designated physical is the point at issue.

We grasp the properties that objects have, and apply the way of abstraction to consider just the property. — Relativist

Right - which is the unique ability of h.sapiens, so far as we can tell, and the ability which underwrites language, maths and science. We can learn the concepts which enable atomic physics and many other things, but those rational abilities are not something explained by science, and certainly not by physics alone.

how do you account for instantiations of the universal? Is there an ontological relation between the universal and its instantiation? — Relativist

The -1 charge of a given electron is not “tied” to the universal of negative charge by some cord or hook. Rather, the electron is an instance of a kind, and its negative charge is an instantiation of a universal property. We can only think about this because we already operate with concepts that abstract from particular cases. But the concepts don’t cause or bind the particulars—they are inherent in the intelligible structure. The universal isn’t an entity over here, and the particular over there, waiting to be connected. Rather, the universal is the intelligible content of the particular, grasped by reason. We abstract it in thought, but that doesn’t mean it’s merely mental. It’s real in the particular, just not as a separable object - it is how the object appears to the rational intellect.

Well a Hodgkin-Huxley neuron is basically just physics. — Apustimelogist

Yes, a Hodgkin-Huxley neuron is described by physics. So are sound waves, but that doesn’t explain the experience of hearing music. Describing a system in physical terms doesn’t explain everything there is about that system—especially not its qualitative, representational, or rational aspects. Einstein said, 'A theory can be logically perfect and completely unassailable, yet still not represent reality. It would be like trying to understand a symphony by looking at the air pressure waves on a graph. All the information is there, but the music is missing.'

The point at issue isn’t whether neurons obey physical laws. Of course they do. The question is whether describing them physically is sufficient to explain how thought, reason, or consciousness arise. That’s not a scientific question—it’s a philosophical one. Which you continually assume has a physical answer, but for which you're presenting no argument whatever.

Just because we can model a neuron using physics doesn’t mean we've accounted for how neurons give rise to meaning, intentionality, or rational inference. Otherwise, you'd have to say a voltmeter has opinions.

but they instantiate principles which could never be predicted on the basis of physics alone
— Wayfarer

But so what? This is an epistemic or explanatory point. Its just about complexity. — Apustimelogist

It's not just about complexity, though. Organisms are fantastically complex, on the one hand - the processes of cellular mitosis, reproduction, evolution, and so on. But they're also simple, in that a single organism is a simple whole, which subordinates and synthesises all that complexity against the ends required to survive and procreate. Nothing in physcis either does that, or accounts for that.

I don't understand what is special — Apustimelogist

And what makes you think that's a philosophical argument? :brow: Your philosophical position is so baked-in that you can't comprehend how it can be questioned. I mean, no offence intended, but that's how you come across.

This doesn't preclude thinking ABOUT them conceptually. The concept is a mental object that corresponds (as in deflationary truth theory) to the universal. The triangle concept in my mind is distinct from the triangle concept in your mind, but both concepts correspond to the universal. — Relativist

mental objects are private and subjective, but so is a concept - but as I said above, there is (or can be) a correspondence between each of our "triangle" concepts and the universal that exists in multiple instantiations in the world. — Relativist

Thanks for the response. But I’d like to press on the key issue: in what sense do universals exist?

You claim that universals exist only in particulars. But if our concept of a universal corresponds to something real, as you say, then that universal must be real in some way that is not identical with any of its particular instances, nor reducible to the act of thinking about it. Otherwise, what exactly is it that our distinct concepts are about? What are they referring to?

You say the universal “exists in multiple instantiations in the world.” But that only accounts for the instances of a universal—not the universal as such. If triangularity, for example, is just the set of all actual triangular things, then:

* How can we grasp it prior to seeing all of those instances?

* How can we know it applies to any triangle, even those we’ve never encountered?

That’s why I argue that universals—if they are truly universal—must exist in a way not reducible to particulars. And that implies a mode of being not located in space-time, but accessible only to reason. That’s what I mean by transcendental: not supernatural, but ontologically prior to particulars, and necessary for coherent rational thought.

If Armstrong’s “immanent realism” holds that universals are just shared properties instantiated in the physical world, then it seems to fall short of explaining the universality we actually grasp in thought—where we reason about the form itself, not its tokens.

I recall you’ve previously said that Armstrong doesn’t define universals or laws in purely physical terms. So in effect, what’s being presented here is a metaphysical theory dressed in the language of scientific realism—but it’s not empirical and it’s not testable. In that respect, it looks increasingly like a philosophical commitment to the principle of philosophical naturalism, but not science proper.

But I'll also add, this is because modern philosophy, generally, doesn't provide a conceptual space against which the 'transcendental' can be mapped. After all the keynote of the modern era is the secularisation and 'scientism' of philosophy. So they're averse to anything other than the natural domain, natural sciences, and so on, as it re-opens a question which they would rather believe has been closed.

Or when we consider philosophical questions.

But why should we presume that there is such a thing as the form of the table—that what something really is must be explained in terms of its purpose or essence? Isn't that just importing a metaphysical picture shaped by our cognitive preferences, not by necessity? — Banno

But our umwelt is also shaped by our cognitive faculties (which are not preferences, by the way. We don't get to choose them.)

There discussions amongst Aristotelians are irrelevant if Aristotelianism is misguided. — Banno

Which you will always say, and I will always dispute, so let's leave it there.

But in so doing, I'm only appealing to what was universally considered to be the substance of philosophy, up until the advent of the modern period. And also while fully conscious that some aspects of Aristotle are outmoded, superseded and not at all commensurable with today's science. But not all of them. I say that fully acknowledging my own limited education in the classical texts, but I still think there are elements that remain relevant. (I stumbled upon a 'bibliography of contemporary hylomorphism' (.pdf) Can't say I know much of what's on it, but it's describing a subject far from a dead philosophy.)

But there are aspects of Aristotelianism, or Platonism construed more broadly, that I don't believe are superseded - mostly just rejected, neglected and forgotten. As a consequence, I don't think the meaning of the Platonic forms (or their interpretation by Aristotle) are at all likely to be understood in this milieu.

For instance, this abstract of one of the entries in the above:

Barnes, Gordon P. “The Paradoxes of Hylomorphism.” Review of Metaphysics 56.3 (2003): 501–523.
Identifies a paradox at the heart of several recent critiques of hylomorphism. The paradox is that there are compelling reasons to think that the distinction between form and matter is mind-independent and real, and there are also compelling reasons to think that the distinction is mind-dependent and one of mere reason.

Who says reason is 'mere'? :chin: But regardless, directly relevant to many of the debates I'm having hereabouts.

On Sept. 9, 2024, the F.B.I.’s criminal investigative division reported that “as the use of cryptocurrency in the global financial system continues to grow, so too does its use by criminal actors.” The exploitation of cryptocurrency, according to the F.B.I., “was most pervasive in investment scams, where losses accounted for almost 71 percent of all losses related to cryptocurrency.”

Seven days later, Donald Trump declared on X: “Crypto is one of those things we have to do. Whether we like it or not, I have to do it.” In the same post, a month and a half before the election, he promoted his new venture World Liberty Financial Inc.

Back in the White House, Trump has discovered that what he criticized as “not money” six years ago could now serve as an ideal way to profit from his presidency. Estimates of the value of his crypto assets vary widely, from $2.9 billion by Fortune to $6.2 billion by Forbes, although Forbes acknowledged the figure is “a dubious estimate given it’s based on supply not yet on the market.” And as Trump said, it’s not, strictly speaking, money.

Eswar Prasad, a professor of economics at Cornell and the author of “The Future of Money: How the Digital Revolution Is Transforming Currencies and Finance,” who has written extensively about digital currencies, contended in an email:

It is quite remarkable for any government official, let alone the leader of the free world, to create and promote a vehicle for rampant speculation and to directly profit from it. Trump seems to show scarce restraint in his willingness to use the levers of power to enrich his family and close associates with little accountability or transparency.

Trump’s release of two meme coins, $Trump and $Melania, Prasad continued, “take conflicts of interest to an altogether new level, especially given Trump’s official position and his control of the entire financial regulatory apparatus.”

On a broader scale, Prasad wrote:

These actions highlight the Trump family’s all-out embrace of different aspects of crypto, from the creation to the securitization of crypto-related assets. From the mining of Bitcoin to issuance of their own meme coins and stablecoins, there is no corner of this industry that Trump seems to want to leave unexploited as an opportunity for personal profit.

Lawrence Lessig, a law professor at Harvard, cited as a key example of Trump’s profiteering the president’s announcement on April 23 that the top “220 Special $TRUMP Meme Coin Holders will be Invited to an unforgettable Gala DINNER with the President on May 22, 2025.”

As a special enticement to stock up on the coins, Trump added:

FOR THE TOP 25 COIN HOLDERS, YOU are Invited to an Exclusive Reception before Dinner with YOUR FAVORITE PRESIDENT! PLUS, We have separately arranged for a Special VIP Tour for you — so make sure you stay in town! — NY Times, Who’s the Greatest Grifter of Them All

Well worth reading the rest of that article (via gift link supplied). The blatant corruption of the office of the Presidency is absolutely staggering. But then, in another article, we are invited to recall James Comer and the so-called House Oversight Committee, who spent the greater part of 2023-24 investigating the alleged corruption of the Biden family's connection to Hunter Biden's business interests. All of which blew up in Comer's face, as witness after witness repudiated the premisses of the investigation, with one being jailed for perjury and another fleeing the country. But, any interest in investigating Trump's flagrant conflicts of interest in his crypto ventures, or his sons peddling Trump Inc business interests all over the world? Not on your nellie!

Most of the materialism on this forum has a simple origin. It begins with Descartes' division of the world into res cogitans (thinking thing) and res extensa (matter). This becomes a major part of the 'new sciences' developed by Newton, Galileo, Boyle, et al in the beginning of the modern period. But 'res cogitans' is inherently problematical - what is it, where is it, and how does it affect or intervene with the physical order? Descartes himself couldn't answer these questions. So essentially it becomes shunted aside, in favour of exploration of the so-called purely physical, the objects of the hard sciences, definite, measurable, and with inummerable applications in technology. Why question that? How could it be considered that res cogitans was anything other than a ghost in the machine?

The modern mind-body problem arose out of the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, as a direct result of the concept of objective physical reality that drove that revolution. Galileo and Descartes made the crucial conceptual division by proposing that physical science should provide a mathematically precise quantitative description of an external reality extended in space and time, a description limited to spatiotemporal primary qualities such as shape, size, and motion, and to laws governing the relations among them. Subjective appearances, on the other hand -- how this physical world appears to human perception -- were assigned to the mind, and the secondary qualities like color, sound, and smell were to be analyzed relationally, in terms of the power of physical things, acting on the senses, to produce those appearances in the minds of observers. It was essential to leave out or subtract subjective appearances and the human mind -- as well as human intentions and purposes -- from the physical world in order to permit this powerful but austere spatiotemporal conception of objective physical reality to develop. — Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False, p33

Does this mean existent, but not in a material way? — noAxioms

That's exactly what it means, and I spelled it out in my response to him.

Despite there no single tiny bit having been found that doesn't operate under said physical principles. — noAxioms

Come on. When you study neuroscience, how much physics are you required to understand? Sure, the brain and other biological structures don't operate in defiance of physics but they instantiate principles which could never be predicted on the basis of physics alone. In biology itself, there is massive disagreement as to whether reductionism ('it's all physics plus chemistry') is adequate to account for the existence of even algae. One of the founders of the neo-darwinian synthesis, Ernst Mayr, certainly no starry-eyed idealist, said ' The discovery of the genetic code was a breakthrough of the first order. It showed why organisms are fundamentally different from any kind of nonliving material. There is nothing in the inanimate world that has a genetic program which stores information with a history of three thousand million years!’

I don't understand why people find that miraculous or interesting. — Apustimelogist

In that case, there's nothing further to discuss. Philosophy begins in wondering about what is usually taken for granted.

Can that be done without going in circles? — J

Well, saṃsāra literally means 'cyclic existence'. Liberation from that is the ultimate aim of Indian religious systems (which I why I don't think 'mokṣa' can be understood apart from it.) It is alien to the middle-Eastern religions which hold to a linear understanding of history. (Hence the doctrines of the dead awaiting judgement in some distant future time, which I could never make sense of.)

(This brings to mind another of the watershed books I read back in the day, The Heretical Imperative, by sociologist Peter Berger. Very briefly, he argues that the original idea of 'heresy' was 'having an opinion' - that the whole principle of religion was that salvation was something done to you or given to you, in which you had no say. 'Heretics' were those of different views or who promoted 'opinions'. But now, he says, in a pluralistic world awash with competing ideas, it's necessary to make a judgement about which path - hence the book title. And, he says, the biggest decision is what he described as 'Jerusalem or Benares' - the choice between Biblical and Vedic religions.)

The ontological status of a concept is that it is nothing more than a mental "object". — Relativist

What is a 'mental object' in the first place? Consider a very basic one, namely equals ('='). Any child with a modicum of education will understand that symbol by age of 5 or 6. But there is no such physical object, is a pure concept, which can be grasped only by reason. You can form a mental image of the equals symbol, but neither the image nor the symbol is itself the concept 'equals'.

It seems that you're defining as "real" : all the mental objects that are physically possible, irrespective of whether it exists, has existed, or will exist. If that's the extent of it, it's semantics. But I suspect you think it's something more than semantics. — Relativist

The way I put it is that what Greek philosophy describes as universals are ubiquitous constituents of rational thought. I know that D M Armstrong, who you refer to, also defended the idea of universals, but on a materialist basis. Whereas I'm arguing that universals are reals that can only be grasped by reason ('equals' being one example.)

It is largely the very peculiar kind of being that belongs to universals which has led many people to suppose that they are really mental. We can think of a universal, and our thinking then exists in a perfectly ordinary sense, like any other mental act. Suppose, for example, that we are thinking of whiteness. Then in one sense it may be said that whiteness is 'in our mind'. ...In the strict sense, it is not whiteness that is in our mind, but the act of thinking of whiteness. The connected ambiguity in the word 'idea', which we noted at the same time, also causes confusion here. In one sense of this word, namely the sense in which it denotes the object of an act of thought, whiteness is an 'idea'. Hence, if the ambiguity is not guarded against, we may come to think that whiteness is an 'idea' in the other sense, i.e. an act of thought; and thus we come to think that whiteness is mental. But in so thinking, we rob it of its essential quality of universality. One man's act of thought is necessarily a different thing from another man's; one man's act of thought at one time is necessarily a different thing from the same man's act of thought at another time. Hence, if whiteness were the thought as opposed to its object, no two different men could think of it, and no one man could think of it twice. That which many different thoughts of whiteness have in common is their object, and this object is different from all of them. Thus universals are not thoughts, though when known they are the objects of thoughts. — Bertrand Russell, Problems of Philosophy - The World of Universals

Also:

Consider that when you think about triangularity, as you might when proving a geometrical theorem, it is necessarily perfect triangularity that you are contemplating, not some mere approximation of it. Triangularity as your intellect grasps it is entirely determinate or exact; for example, what you grasp is the notion of a closed plane figure with three perfectly straight sides, rather than that of something which may or may not have straight sides or which may or may not be closed. Of course, your mental image of a triangle might not be exact, but rather indeterminate and fuzzy. But to grasp something with the intellect is not the same as to form a mental image of it. For any mental image of a triangle is necessarily going to be of an isosceles triangle specifically, or of a scalene one, or an equilateral one; but the concept of triangularity that your intellect grasps applies to all triangles alike. Any mental image of a triangle is going to have certain features, such as a particular color, that are no part of the concept of triangularity in general. A mental image is something private and subjective, while the concept of triangularity is objective and grasped by many minds at once. — Edward Feser

Bolds added. So my argument is, that the coherence of reason depends on universal judgements which are not themselves found in the objective world - they're transcendental in nature. But that, due to the overwhelmingly nominalist and empiricist cast of modern thought, their reality cannot be admitted, as to do so undermines the materialism that it erroneously upholds. However, this also means that materialist arguments are inevitably circular and self-defeating, as they must rely on such non-material principles to even establish the meaning of 'material' and 'physical'. It is a hand that cannot grasp itself.

But mathematical structures are effectively tautologies so I don't see any reason for them to be meaningfully instantiated in some realm of their own or something like that where they magically affect the rest of reality. — Apustimelogist

But then, what's your account of the 'unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences' (Eugene Wigner). If they were purely tautological, how could they be exploited to discover things that otherwise would never have been known? The example I often give is Dirac's discovery of anti-particles, which was predicted solely on the basis of mathematics, with no empirical evidence forthcoming till much later. How could tautological statements yield genuinely new observations? Not to forget the many predictions arising from Einstein's theories that took decades to empirically validate ('Einstein Proved Right Again').

But there is overwhelming evidence that physical structures like brains are sufficient for all our reasoning, including mathematical. Why do you need to invoke anything else? — Apustimelogist

What 'overwhelming evidence' is there that the brain is a 'physical structure'? A building is a 'physical structure', as is a machine. Both structures can be accounted for wholly and solely in terms of physical and chemical principles. But even very rudimentary organisms already instantiate order on a different level to that of the physical. Sure, the reductionist view is that living tissue is 'nothing but' physical matter, but that is highly contested and besides not in itself an empirical argument. But when we get to the human brain, which is the most complex naturally-occuring phenomenon known to science, I see no reason to believe that it can be described in terms of, or limited to, physical principles, nor to describe the brain as a physical object. It is an embodied organ, embedded in a body, culture and environment (subject of disciplines such as neuro-anthropology which by no means default to materialism as an explanatory paradigm.)

For the nature of mathematics, there is no reason to believe that this is grounded in or determined by any physical laws or relationships. You simply assume that on the basis of the inborn materialism of the culture we're sorrounded by, but there are plenty who will take issue (see What is Math? Smithsonian Magazine.)

I read Wayfarer as giving a context, as you suggest: In his formulation, "real" is stipulated to mean "as opposed to illusory or misleading". But I think he's doing a little more than that, as well. His stipulation is meant to appeal to an originating situation in which the question first came up. His stipulation for "real" isn't arbitrary -- in a way, it's ameliorative, in that he's suggesting we ought to adopt it as being philosophically clear and useful. — J

I wouldn't have put it like that, but it is close to what I mean. I find the Greek origins of metaphysics quite intelligible (although not entirely). I agree that in the subsequent centuries, it became ossified and dogmatised and often meaningless. But I don't agree with the predominant view amongst analytic philosophers and positivists that metaphysics is a subject empty of meaning. That itself becomes poor metaphysics.

So allusions to chairs or the proverbial 'apple' or 'tree' as possessed of an indubitable reality, such that only a 'metaphysician' (is there such an occupation?) would call their existence into question, is what I said - a bad textbook example, drawn from centuries of pedagogy, 'metaphysicians will cast doubt on things that all of us know are quite real'. It is true that metaphysics calls into question what we assume about the nature of the real but it does so in quite a disciplined and meaningful way, when in the hands of contemporary Aristotelian philosophy, for example.

One elephant-in-the-room question I feel obliged to ask, is, to those for whom political liberalism is the problem, does Donald Trump's form of conservatism represent a solution? Because it seems to me that at least some of those who he's sorrounded himself with - I'm thinking Russell Vought, in particular, Head of Office of Management and Budget, and chief architect of the notorious Project 2025 - are very much grounded in anti-liberal ideology. Here's another Damon Linker piece, on Vought, in the NY Times.

Conservatives have railed against the growth of the federal government that started in the Progressive Era, and especially the exponential expansion of what’s come to be called the administrative state — the numerous departments and regulatory agencies of the executive branch.

Mr. Vought has harshly criticized this progressive vision of the federal government’s role in American life, which has been driven by numerous developments in political culture. Congress passed laws that sometimes amounted to vague statements of intent, leaving judgment calls to the career civil servants who staff the regulatory bureaucracies. The courts adopted a deferential stance toward those bureaucracies, and presidents often opted not to exercise adequate guidance over the bureaucracies they nominally oversee and run.

For Mr. Vought and like-minded conservatives, the results of these developments place the country in a “post-constitutional moment” in which we’ve grown accustomed to being ruled by an unelected and unaccountable “fourth branch” of government.

This “fourth branch” stands above and apart from the separation of powers, imposing its own agenda and defending its own distinct interests, and it is this — “the woke and weaponized bureaucracy,” as Mr. Vought has called it — that he has promised to dismantle. As he wrote in his contribution to Project 2025, “nothing less than the survival of self-governance in America is at stake.” ...

In Mr. Vought’s view, along with other conservatives who embrace the theory of the “unitary executive,” the idea of extra-political independence is “not something that the Constitution understands.” The president heads the executive branch; these departments and agencies reside within it; that puts the president in charge of them, empowered by the voters who elected him. In short, he is their boss, and they must do as he wishes. The idea that they can operate independently of such oversight and accountability is incompatible with self-government.

The second area of reform Mr. Vought highlights involves the president reasserting the constitutional power to impound, or claw back, funds appropriated by Congress. Until 1974, presidents enjoyed broad (though not unlimited) impoundment powers based on the presumption that Congress sets a ceiling but not a floor for federal spending. But with the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974, passed in response to Richard Nixon’s supposed abuse of the impoundment power, Congress acted to remove this power from the presidency. ...

I do from time to time read conservative media outlets, and while I agree with some of what I read, overall I find American political conservatism, at this point in history at least, quite a toxic culture. Likewise their attraction to Erdogan and Putin, I strongly suspect on the grounds of their hostility to gender equality and gay rights among other factors. And so on. If so, I have to say, in spite of my philosophical agreement with many of the criticisms of liberalism (especially its underlying scientism), that if this is representative, then the remedy is worse than the disease. It would make me, were I an American voter, a Democrat for sure.

Or is there another vein of 'principled conservatism', and, if so, who represents it?

The wile of the metaphysician consists in asking 'Is it a real table?' (a kind of object which has no obvious way of being phoney) and not specifying or limiting what may be wrong with it, so that I feel at a loss 'how to prove' it is a real one. — Austin

Bearing in mind, 'table' in this case is a stand-in for 'the object' or any object whatever. And the origin of the question was, how we know that an object really is what it seems to be? You might excavate an object from an archeological dig, without really being able to tell what it is, but then find other evidence supporting the fact that it was used as a table, so, really was a table. So Austin here is just taking bad textbook examples ('take any object') as the basis for a caricature. That's why it's a badly-worded question.

Bear in mind that 'falsifiability' is not a be-all and end-all in philosophical terms. It was articulated by Karl Popper as a way to differentiate empirical theories from those of other kinds. It can have no bearing, for instance, on rationalist type of arguments, but then, it was never intended to provide criteria for assessing arguments of those kinds.

Besides that, this is not a particularly useful original post. It is a grab-bag of so-called philosophical positions or views, with a brief comment after each. You're not really presenting any contender for serious consideration or indicating any way to explore the question other than whether its 'falsifiable' which is not a suitable criterion for many of these ideas, as explained.

It sounds like equivocation — Relativist

I agree that this could sound like equivocation if you assume that existence and reality are synonymous. But again that begs the question of the reality of abstracta, which is the point at issue. To say something is “real” without existing in the spatiotemporal, empirical sense is precisely the point when discussing abstracta, mathematical truths, or modal possibilities. These are not “things” in the physical world, but they constrain what can be true of that world - hence their designation 'laws'/ The very framework of physics, for example, depends on mathematical structures that don't exist materially.

The power of abstraction is present irrespective of the metaphysical interpretations we make of the process. — Relativist

The capacity for abstraction is one thing, but the ontological status of what is abstracted - logical laws, symmetries etc - is the point at issue. If we’re to be strict materialists, then where do these structures reside? All in the mind? Just cognitive conveniences? or are they revealing something deeper about reality? That’s the live question, not the utility of abstraction per se.

It only seems to apply to abstractions that describe non-actual possible existents- a small subset of all mathematical abstractions. — Relativist

That is also not relevant to the fact that the ability to see via mathematical abstraction is so instrumental in the progress of science itself.

Bottom line here: the physicalist theory must be supported by some kind of 'brain-mind' identity. Why? Because it is necessary for them to argue that reason itself is somehow physical in nature. Whereas the non-materialist can simply say, look, reason comprises wholly and solely the relationship of ideas. These can be instantiated or realised in many different forms and many different media, so how can they be regarded a physical? The only fallback against that is to try and show that ideas are somehow identical with neural structures - as indeed D M Armstrong and other materialists insist.

but in recognizing that the mind plays an indispensable role in how the world appears and makes sense to us.
— Wayfarer
Now this I buy. Is this what you mean by "structuring? But of course this presupposes a - the - entire world. — tim wood

I commented on the convergence of cognitive science, phenomenology, and philosophical idealism. What they're converging on, is some form of Kant's 'copernican revolution in philosophy' - that 'things conform to thoughts, not thoughts to things.'

The reason we find that preposterous, is because 'everyone knows' that the Universe and the earth are far older than h.sapiens, and that we have evolved within that pre-existent reality, which we now seek to understand and adapt to by all means including science.

But it's important to see that even the purportedly mind-independent nature of the world 'before man existed' is still constituted in our grasp of that world. If that seems absurd it is only because we have a mental image of 'self in the world' - as if from a perspective outside of both world and subject. That is the way scientific culture has trained us to imagine it, but in what does that understanding inhere, if not in the mind?

Again, I'll turn to a passage from the great Arthur Schopenhauer, who articulated this paradox with clarity. (Notice that he is fully cognizant of the general idea of evolutionary development, although he published 60-odd years before the Origin of Species. There's no hint of theism or theistic argument.)

the law of causality and the treatment and investigation of nature which is based upon it, lead us necessarily to the conclusion that, in time, each more highly organised state of matter has succeeded a cruder state: so that the lower animals existed before men, fishes before land animals, plants before fishes, and the unorganised before all that is organised; that, consequently, the original mass had to pass through a long series of changes before the first eye could be opened. And yet, the existence of this whole world remains ever dependent upon the first eye that opened, even if it were that of an insect. For such an eye is a necessary condition of the possibility of knowledge, and the whole world exists only in and for knowledge, and without it is not even thinkable. The world is entirely idea, and as such demands the knowing subject as the supporter of its existence. This long course of time itself, filled with innumerable changes, through which matter rose from form to form till at last the first percipient creature appeared,—this whole time itself is only thinkable in the identity of a consciousness whose succession of ideas, whose form of knowing it is, and apart from which, it loses all meaning and is nothing at all. — Arthur Schopenhauer, World as Will and Representation

It seems paradoxical, and in the next paragraph, Schopenhauer acknowledges this:

Thus we see, on the one hand, the existence of the whole world necessarily dependent upon the first conscious being, however undeveloped it may be; on the other hand, this conscious being just as necessarily entirely dependent upon a long chain of causes and effects which have preceded it, and in which it itself appears as a small link. These two contradictory points of view, to each of which we are led with the same necessity, we might again call an antinomy in our faculty of knowledge… The necessary contradiction which at last presents itself to us here, finds its solution in the fact that, to use Kant’s phraseology, time, space, and causality do not belong to the thing-in-itself, but only to its phenomena, of which they are the form; which in my language means this: The objective world, the world as idea, is not the only side of the world, but merely its outward side; and it has an entirely different side—the side of its inmost nature—its kernel—the thing-in-itself… But the world as idea… only appears with the opening of the first eye. Without this medium of knowledge it cannot be, and therefore it was not before it. But without that eye, that is to say, outside of knowledge, there was also no before, no time. Thus time has no beginning, but all beginning is in time.

The mistake we make is to understand ourselves as a result of an unguided and unintended process of change, as if the mind is a latecomer to the grand spectacle, somehow thrown up by it, by means as yet unknown, without seeing that in another sense, the mind is the means by which the whole process is coming to understand itself. Even Julian Huxley, no friend of theism or idealist philosophy, for that matter, came to a similar realisation:

Man is that part of reality in which and through which the cosmic process has become conscious and has begun to comprehend itself. His supreme task is to increase that conscious comprehension and to apply it as fully as possible to guide the course of events. In other words, his role is to discover his destiny as an agent of the evolutionary process, in order to fulfill it more adequately. — Julian Huxley

(Although personally I'm more drawn to the philosophical attitude of his brother, Alduous.)

They don't exist, but they're real. That's the point! In the classical vision the rational soul straddles this realm between the phenomenal and the noumenal. It's not an 'unparsimious assumption' but an insight into the nature of a rational mind.

More evidence of that, is the undeniable fact that man (sorry about the non PC terminology) has the ability to 'peer into the possible' and retrieve from it, many things previously thought impossible. The whole progress of modern science and technology is testimony to that - at the same time that the Armstrongs of this world deny the very basis on which this has been accomplished (as 'the possible' by very definition, does not comprise 'things that exist' but 'things that might exist'!)

In (a) new paper, three scientists argue that including “potential” things on the list of “real” things can avoid the counterintuitive conundrums that quantum physics poses. It is perhaps less of a full-blown interpretation than a new philosophical framework for contemplating those quantum mysteries. At its root, the new idea holds that the common conception of “reality” is too limited. By expanding the definition of reality, the quantum’s mysteries disappear. In particular, “real” should not be restricted to “actual” objects or events in spacetime. Reality ought also be assigned to certain possibilities, or “potential” realities, that have not yet become “actual.” These potential realities do not exist in spacetime, but nevertheless are “ontological” — that is, real components of existence.

“This new ontological picture requires that we expand our concept of ‘what is real’ to include an extraspatiotemporal domain of quantum possibility,” write Ruth Kastner, Stuart Kauffman and Michael Epperson.

Considering potential things to be real is not exactly a new idea, as it was a central aspect of the philosophy of Aristotle, 24 centuries ago. An acorn has the potential to become a tree; a tree has the potential to become a wooden table. Even applying this idea to quantum physics isn’t new. Werner Heisenberg, the quantum pioneer famous for his uncertainty principle, considered his quantum math to describe potential outcomes of measurements of which one would become the actual result. The quantum concept of a “probability wave,” describing the likelihood of different possible outcomes of a measurement, was a quantitative version of Aristotle’s potential, Heisenberg wrote in his well-known 1958 book Physics and Philosophy. — Quantum Mysteries Dissolved

A fascinating and difficult issue. If philosophy is understood as an ideal form of rationalism, then I do think it "stops at the door" of spiritual or religious forms of life. But you're pointing out that it doesn't have to be understood that way. Philosophy might be a doorway to a higher, non- or super-rational truth. But on this construal, it raises the problem of elitism, just as you say. Or, if "elitism" is a bit worn-out as a term, we could say "privileged access." — J

When I say that philosophy ‘drops you at the border,’ I mean that aspect of philosophy which points beyond the bounds of reason — not into the irrational, but into the supra-rational. This is the realm that confounds reason, not by denying it, but by exceeding it. You find this implicitly in Neoplatonism, and explicitly among the mystics. That’s why in classical and ancient thought, the line between philosophy and religion was so often porous: philosophy led you to the threshold, but what lay beyond it required something other than reason alone. (I think calling it faith is often dismissive, 'oh, you mean belief without evidence', when, for the aspirant, it may comprise an insight into something that is abundantly evident to them.)

I think that sense is better preserved in the Catholic and Orthodox worlds which still held to an hierarchical ontology, within which the sense of there being a 'higher truth' remains meaningful. Less so in Reformation theology, which swept away the whole superstructure which mediated between, and mirrored, the great chain of being. Hence the origin of today's 'flat ontology'.

It certainly offends most Christian ears that access to the highest and most God-like realities is limited to a few who have walked the difficult path of philosophical knowledge. But this possibility is surely there as far back as the Gospels -- only it's not the intellectual or rational path that is difficult, but the ethical one. When Jesus (in one of his rare moments of humor) tells the rich young man who's done everything right that there's "just one more thing" he has to do -- give all his riches to the poor and join the Jesus followers -- he's making it clear that the kind of "salvation" the young man wants is not for everyone, but only for those who are really willing to go all the way in their lives, not their thoughts. That can't be very many, then or now. — J

This brings up a lot of difficult issues for me. When I was a (mature-age) undergrad, I was persuaded of the reality of spiritual enlightenment, mainly under the sway of popular literature about the subject (all the usual sources, D T Suzuki and Alan Watts). Also that the gnostics had a similar conviction and that this had been suppressed by the 'church triumphant' in early Christianity. I read up on the gnostic gospels. Also read a book on the persecution of the Cathars of Languedoc, which launched the Inquisition, reinforcing my suspicion of ecclesiastical religion. But despite earnest efforts I never made much headway with the 'path of seeing' - more like fragmentary glimpses briefly illumined by lightning, so to speak (although leaving an enduring trace). So, like a lot of people, I find at this stage of life the prospect of realising such higher states impossibly remote (even if in another sense nearby). I'm very much wrestling with that. I can sense the appeal of 'salvation by faith' although it's impossible to will myself to believe it.

To assume a more academic and less personal tone, the 'flattening' of ontology that characterises modernity intersects with 'salvation by faith alone' and the emphasis on individualism that commenced with Descartes' cogito, that 'my own existence is the only thing I can know for sure'. This has lead to a kind of hyper-pluralised and individualised form of Christianity we see today, where salvation is often equated to a state of individual enthusiasm (and a well-adjusted bourgeois existence).

I find myself again at least philosophically more drawn to the Catholic philosophers:

Our minds do not—contrary to many views currently popular—create truth. Rather, they must be conformed to the truth of things given in creation. And such conformity is possible only as the moral virtues become deeply embedded in our character, a slow and halting process. We have, he writes on one occasion, “lost the awareness of the close bond that links the knowing of truth to the condition of purity.” That is, in order to know the truth we must become persons of a certain sort. The full transformation of character that we need will, in fact, finally require the virtues of faith, hope, and love. And this transformation will not necessarily—perhaps not often—be experienced by us as easy or painless. Hence the transformation of self that we must—by God’s grace—undergo “perhaps resembles passing through something akin to dying.” — Obituary for Josef Pieper, Thomistic Philosopher

Amen to that.

I question Wayfarer's distinguishing between "existing" and "real". As a physicalist (more or less), I'd simply say that abstractions do not exist as independent entities in the world. We apply the "way of abstraction" - by considering several objects with some feature(s) in common, and mentally ignore all the other features. This process enables us to consider properties independently of the objects that possess these properties - even though those properties don't actually have independent existence; rather: they have immanent existence (they exist within objects). Example: we can consider several groups of objects, each of which has 3 members - and from this, we abstract "3". 3 is a property possessed by each of these groups. — Relativist

Thanks for your comments. Needless to say, I will take issue.

First, I think this begs the question. You assume that to be real is to be an independent entity—or at least fo be some thing with “immanent existence” within particulars. But that’s the point at issue. For the physicalist, then of course abstractions like numbers can’t exist independently. But the philosophical question is whether that assumption is warranted and simply asserting it doesn’t settle it.

Second, the idea that numbers are just features abstracted from collections—say, that we form the concept of “3” by noticing trios in the world—follows a broadly nominalist and empiricist line (like J S Mill). But this has its own problems. For one, to even perform the act of abstraction, we already need the concept of number. We don’t derive the idea of “three” from objects; rather, we recognize objects as “three” because we already grasp the concept a priori. In that sense, the number is not a mere feature of things, but something we bring to experience through rational apprehension. (Try explaining 'the concept of prime' to a dog!)

Third, the truths of mathematics don’t seem to be empirical at all. The fact that 3 + 2 = 5 holds independently of any particular instance—it would be true even if there were no physical groups of five objects anywhere. This suggests that mathematical truths are not dependent on the world, but structure our ability to make sense of it. Mathematical physics sees the world through the prism of theory, hence is able to discern things about it which could never be seen by an eye not so trained. That’s a very different kind of reality than physical immanence, and it’s part of what motivates mathematical Platonism.

It's said by Hoffman that we evolved to have this particular UI - that must mean there's a pre-UI context in which evolution can happen. What is that pre-UI context if not reality itself (or some emergent facet of reality)? — flannel jesus

Perhaps ‘reality itself’ is what Kant means by the ‘in itself’.

Interesting that in Albo’s courtyard media address today, he singled her out as the kind of independent he would call, when he had a question about veteran’s affairs. She’s a rough diamond, but in the vernacular, also fair dinkum.

Also - it’s super cheesy, but I can’t stop watching:

Speaking of Paganini + guitar, have a listen to Lucas Imbiriba. I love his passion!

probably right on both counts.

Trump said this morning (Australia time) that he congratulated Albanese whom he regards as 'a friend' - which vindicates Albanese's scrupulous attempt to avoid ever saying anything that could be interpreted as hostile to Trump (who has an planet-sized ego and a tissue-thin hide.) Media criticized Albanese when, during the second debate, he said he trusted the US president 100% - but if he'd demurred or qualified it in any way, you can bet it would have been heard. (Oh, and Trump said he didn't even know the name of who Albanese was running against, another great morale boost for the vanquished.)

So you have the notion — schopenhauer1

So long as it remains notional, it is impotent. It requires an engagement beyond the word-processing department, so to speak.

Is mathematics abstract? That makes it sound like it's all mental concepts instead of anything objective, but I don't think you're using 'abstract' in that way here. — noAxioms

The other point is that mathematics seems to be ‘true’ in a way that goes beyond the objective. We usually think of ‘objective’ as meaning something inherent in the object, or at least independent of our perception. But mathematics is often the means by which we define what’s objective in the first place—so in that sense, it seems to transcend the domain of the objective rather than just belong to it.

I’m not using ‘abstract’ to mean just 'mental' or 'subjective'—mathematical truths don’t seem to depend on individual minds. But it’s not clear that they’re part of the natural world either. That leaves a kind of philosophical gap: we trust mathematics to describe the real, but we’re not sure where mathematical truths themselves fit into our picture of reality.

These are by nature very hard arguments to adjuticate but I'm comfortable with the classical or Aristotelian understanding of them being transcendent truths - see this account of Aristotelian realism in mathematics, from which:

The scholastics, the Aristotelian Catholic philosophers of the Middle Ages, were so impressed with the mind’s grasp of necessary truths as to conclude that the intellect was immaterial and immortal. If today’s naturalists do not wish to agree with that, there is a challenge for them.

It would be nice if science worked that way, but it can't get around the fact we all exist in private worlds and other minds are essentially black boxes. — RogueAI

Empathy is a sure antidote to solipsism. True, you don't literally experience the other's mind, but it's as close as we can get. The idea that 'consciousness is mine alone' is really characteristic of the individualism of modernity. And a flaw, if I might say.

Generally physicalists oppose platonism due to the fact that it posits an irreducible non-physical reality.
I'll let wayfarer comment on that since I don't know Platonism enough to know what they assert. — noAxioms

It's actually a very simple idea: that natural numbers (and other such intelligible objects) are real, but not materially existent. Which, of course, is anathema to materialism, which must insist that anything that exists is matter (or matter-energy). You can say it in a sentence or two, but it is the subject of thousands of volumes of argument. (Incidentally I'm not any kind of authority on Platonic scholarship but I regard this salient point as a matter of common knowledge.)

Mathematics, logic and so on seem 'transcendental' with respect of the world (at least if we assume that the worlds are at least partly intelligible). — boundless

A safe assumption, seeing as how we've been able to successfully exploit those principles through the application of mathematics. (I'd say a bit more about 'conceptualism' but I don't think this is the thread for it.)

It depends what you call philosophy and what you call religion. Boethius (and many others in his time) certainly thought that philosophy could provide consolation. How would you classify his attempt? Ancient philosophers seem mostly to have been confident that philosophy can help us to cope with suffering. But since the scientific revolution, that project seems to have been more or less abandoned and so left to religion (where humanism would count as a religion). — Ludwig V

Very thoughtful observation. In the pre-modern world, philosophy and religion had a kind of common boundary, you might say, and quite a porous one, at that. I've sometimes thought that the role of philosophy is to 'drop you at the border', so to speak - after that, you're on your own! That, anyway, was very much the ethos of (neo)Platonism with its emphasis on contemplative illumination.

But this is where naturalism hems us in, so to speak. Insofar as we are simply another species, thrown up by the blind watchmaker, then the best we can do is one or another form of stoicism, soldiering on, coping, perhaps in the manner of Camus' Sisyphus ('It's hell, but lets keep smiling.') Or do whatever we can to ameliorate suffering and prolong life by whatever scientific means possible.

But all of the classical philosophies held to there being a higher truth, with philosophy being the manner of ascent to it. And in ascending to it, not simply ameliorate suffering, but to rise above it, to transcend it, to a realm of no-more-suffering.

I'm gloomily contemplating the idea that one of the underlying cultural problems around all of this was, in fact, created by Christian culture itself, in that the way it developed inadvertantly demolished the idea of the 'scala natura' and the idea of higher truth, that being deemed elitist and in contradiction of the universal salvation offered to all who would believe. In that way, it negates philosophy in favour of mere Christianity - leave your intellect at the door please. (Perhaps why Immanuel Kant, required to lead a formal procession of his students to Church on Sundays, would stop outside.)

The bodhisattva deserves to be released from the wheel of dharma -- that would be just. But they choose to show mercy on unenlightened beings by returning to help them. — J

There are two ways in which someone can take rebirth after death: rebirth under the sway of karma and destructive emotions and rebirth through the power of compassion and prayer. Regarding the first, due to ignorance negative and positive karma are created and their imprints remain on the consciousness. These are reactivated through craving and grasping, propelling us into the next life. We then take rebirth involuntarily in higher or lower realms. This is the way ordinary beings circle incessantly through existence like the turning of a wheel. Even under such circumstances ordinary beings can engage diligently with a positive aspiration in virtuous practices in their day-to-day lives. They familiarise themselves with virtue that at the time of death can be reactivated providing the means for them to take rebirth in a higher realm of existence. On the other hand, superior Bodhisattvas, who have attained the path of seeing, are not reborn through the force of their karma and destructive emotions, but due to the power of their compassion for sentient beings and based on their prayers to benefit others. They are able to choose their place and time of birth as well as their future parents. Such a rebirth, which is solely for the benefit of others, is rebirth through the force of compassion and prayer. — H H The Dalai Lama, How Rebirth Takes Place

As above you appear to agree that there is a reality, then I'm at a loss trying to understand just what your point is. Maybe you mean subjective or experiential reality? That we might call affective reality? These being the reality of how we feel about something? Which of course is not any part at all of the object experienced. If indeed we may say that we experience objects. Thus without some waypoints in the way of preliminary understandings, we sail into confusion. — tim wood

First, Donald Hoffman - his theory of cognition is given in his book The Case Against Reality: How Evolution hid the Truth from our Eyes. The post of mine you quoted was my description of the theory in that book. From the book description:

Do we see the world as it truly is? In The Case Against Reality, pioneering cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman says - No, we see what we need in order to survive. Our visual perceptions are not a window onto reality, Hoffman shows us, but instead are interfaces constructed by natural selection. The objects we see around us are not unlike the file icons on our computer desktops- while shaped like a small folder on our screens, the files themselves are made of a series of ones and zeros too complex for most of us to understand. In a similar way, Hoffman argues, evolution has shaped our perceptions into simplistic illusions to help us navigate the world around us.

I have the book but there are some aspects of it I don't understand. I was initally attracted to Hoffman's ideas because of their apparent convergence with the kinds of idealist philosophy that I'm drawn to. But I have doubts about the philosophical merits of Hoffman's argument in some respects (even if in agreement in others).

Whitehead, who taught at Harvard University from the 1920s, argued that science relies on a faith in the order of nature that can’t be justified by logic." Exactly so! Per Collingwood it is the absolute presupposition (AP) that nature is the creation of the Christian God and therefore perfect, and therefore a fit subject for scientific inquiry - which it was not for ancient science. But to say it cannot be justified by logic is at very best misleading, and on plain understanding, wrong. — tim wood

This is a large subject in its own right, but I wouldn’t interpret Whitehead’s or Collingwood’s positions as arguments for divine creation per se. Rather, both are pointing to a more subtle and important issue: that science rests on presuppositions—such as the uniformity and intelligibility of nature—that it cannot establish from within empirical method. Whitehead’s term for this is “faith in the order of nature,” and Collingwood, similarly, uses the idea of “absolute presuppositions”—not to promote theology, but to expose the philosophical scaffolding science quietly relies on.

In other words, their concern is with the limits of empiricism, not with the promotion of theism. That said, both thinkers were also historically conscious: they understood that the emergence of modern science was neither philosophically or culturally neutral, but shaped by a preceding worldview in which the cosmos was understood as rationally ordered—whether by divine decree or metaphysical structure. But in no way were they proposing any kind of 'God of the gaps' argument. It's rather that 'naturalism assumes nature', but when it then takes the further step of attempting to explain nature that it ventures (or blunders!) into the territory of metaphysics.

As above you appear to agree that there is a reality, then I'm at a loss trying to understand just what your point is. Maybe you mean subjective or experiential reality? That we might call affective reality? These being the reality of how we feel about something? Which of course is not any part at all of the object experienced. — tim wood

Better, easier, simpler, more to the point for you to develop in a few well-crafted sentences of your own your own thinking. — tim wood

I think what this touches on—whether through Hoffman’s meta-cognitive theories, or through earlier thinkers like Whitehead—is a broader shift that's now underway in both philosophy and the cognitive sciences: a convergence around the idea that experience isn't just a passive reflection of an already-existent material world, but the active structuring of it. This is where cognitive science (especially its enactive and embodied cognitive science), phenomenology, and forms of idealism converge: not in denying the world, but in recognizing that the mind plays an indispensable role in how the world appears and makes sense to us. (I've tried to explore this in a bit more depth in The Mind Created World).

As for “existence is experienced”—it is precisely the experiential dimension of existence, 'reality as lived', that modern natural philosophy has tended to bracket out or exclude. That is the background of David Chalmers’ Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness, and a key motivator of Hoffman’s book. That’s also why I brought in Pierre Hadot: the original conception of philosophy wasn’t theoretical but lived. We ourselves have to see the way the mind constructs our world. It may become an abstraction when we talk about it (theory) —but what it points to is something actually happening, moment by moment, in our own awareness (practise). A large part of philosophy is the cultivation of that awareness.

Accordingly, in classical philosophy, theoria and praxis weren’t opposed, but deeply connected. Theoria meant contemplative insight—the act of “seeing” reality—and praxis was the way of life that arose out of that seeing. So even talking about these things wasn’t 'just theory' in our modern sense, but part of a process of gaining and deepening insight.

As do I.

Incidentally, if you don't know Donald Hoffman is, here's a TED talk where he lays out his basic idea, Do We See Reality as it Is?

That's the debate between Aristotle and Plato in a nutshell: Plato has it that the ideas are real quite apart from any instance of them, Aristotle that they are only real as manifested in concrete particulars.

But such principles as the law of the excluded middle would presumably obtain in any world. That is what 'true in all possible worlds' means - although that is not highly regarded nowadays, because, as we've been seeing, we're prepared to entertain the idea of 'other universes' where such principles may not hold at all, But the question I have about that is, how could a world exist, if such principles didn't hold? In a sense, such principles are like constraints.

In any case, the specific point of the Eric Perl quote is to show that the idea of a 'separate realm' is not referring to a literal place. 'They are thus ‘separate’ in that they are not additional members of the world of sensible things, but are known by a different mode of awareness.’