Do you think it is plausible that we could entertain reasons without that being correlated with neural processes? — Janus

What faculty other than reason might be deployed in pursuit of an answer to that question?

. Affect the chemistry of the brain and you affect mental processes too. — flannel jesus

And vice versa. If I say something that annoys you, it will affect your adrenal glands, even though nothing physical has passed between us. The entire effect is grounded in your interpretation of symbolic meaning.

I think the idea you’re reaching for is what John Vervaeke calls ‘participatory knowledge’, one of the ‘four p’s’ (the others being propositional, perspectival, and procedural.) Participatory knowledge is not just ‘knowing about’, but knowing through active engagement and absorption within specific contexts or environments. It shapes and is shaped by the interaction between world and subject and is constitutive of both identity and a sense of belonging. It is the knowing of being through being, so to speak. (summary).

Another source this brought to my mind was Eliade’s ‘The Sacred and the Profane’, which posits that the source of religion is re-creation of, and therefore participation in, the creation of the world, or the sacred order. Congregants become participants through liturgy and ritual.

Interesting, participatory knowing has also appeared in a thoroughly modern guise in the form of physicist John Wheeler’s ‘participatory universe’, in which observers play a central role in the manifestation of reality, ‘no phenomenon is a real phenomenon until it is an observed phenomenon’.

Contrast that with the attitude of scientific objectivity, which presumes a fundamental division between observer and observed. Which characterises the ‘society of the spectacle’ in which we’re all observers rather than participants, always ‘outside of’ or ‘apart from. ‘

What I mean is, why aren’t anyone doing something when he breaks constitutional laws and regulations? — Christoffer

There are dozens of current lawsuits against Trump’s executive actions. But legal cases take time, and Trump is a seasoned expert in throwing sand into the gears of lawsuits. Before the election, he managed to delay all of the actions against him until he was able to escape them altogether. I think real resistance is starting to manifest and is going to grow. There are multi-city demonstrations this weekend and meanwhile four Republicans joined a Democratic motion to limit Trump’s ability to impose tarrifs. And if Trump drives the economy into recession, which looks highly likely, then there will come a huge backlash. But so much damage has already been done.

Thanks, Josh. I do subscribe to Contrarian (unpaid), joined when Rubin left the Post.

You can have a whole neural complex and establish relationships between each neuron up to a very complex level, and yet you do not know whether you have constructed the experience. You can't even decompose an experience into neural processes. — JuanZu

Isn’t that due to the subjective unity of experience? That conscious experience has a quality of integration and intentionality that can’t be resolved to the actions of its constituents? That is a question for mereology.

well if physicalism is true, then at what point does matter go from just matter to matter with experience?" — flannel jesus

Have a look at From Physical Causation to Organisms of Meaning.

Clearly, the objects of our fears and desires do not cause behavior in the same way that forces and energy cause behavior in the physical realm. When my desire for the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow causes me to go on a search, the (nonexistent) pot of gold is not a causal property of the sort that is involved in natural laws. (Pylyshyn 1984, p. xii) — Excerpt

Where am I leaping? — Patterner

Towards determinism? That behaviour is determined by physical causes?

If so, then why don't people do anything about it? — Christoffer

How, though? He’s been empowered by the popular vote to do what he’s doing. The Republican voters still approve his actions overall. His campaign speeches were almost entirely negative, about how the country has been overrun by criminals and the economy a shambles, with the sinister authoritarian Project 2025 in the background, which is practically a blueprint for dictatorship. He’s a classical demagogue, who harnesses popular resentment to overturn the established order. They have been known since ancient times. So a large minority voted Trump in to do what he said he would do. When the s***t really hits the fan, the economy tanks, epidemics start to rage due to Kennedy’s utter incompetence, the international order falls to pieces, then MAGA faithful might turn. But it might be too late to restore the catastrophes wrought by this man.

It turns out, that after the Laura Loomer meeting, Trump didn’t just fire the head and deputy head of the NSA. He fired four others as well.

These tarriffs have been dictated by Trump, with neither Congressional nor Senate contribution or approval. There can be no doubt that Trump is now a dictator.

Very good! (I’ll take it up a little later, it’s sleep time in my timezone.)

Well you skip the question about spontaneous generation of sentience, and just ask, why is it that this hunk of smushy pink wet matter has an experience? — flannel jesus

No, that’s not the question. You’re starting from the object. You’re viewing it from the outside. The ‘wet matter’ (to transpose to a Buddhist register) is not self. The capacity for experience is what is apodictic, that which cannot plausibly be denied.

Right - so what is it a matter of?

And the whole thread is about the hard problem. Patterner is proposing ‘property dualism’ as the solution.

And I agree with Wonderer1 above.

I still don’t think you’re thinking philosophically about it. I’m not preaching any kind of ID. I fully accept the scientific account, but it is a scientific account. It’s not a matter of facts, but one of meaning.

Go back to the OP

At the micro level, matter has various physical properties. Mass, charge, spin, color, whatever else we're aware of. These properties determine how particles combine and interact, which determine the physical objects, energy fields, and everything else we see all around us, and their macro characteristics. — Patterner

But already with the most rudimentary organisms, there are principles that are out of scope for physics and chemistry. Why? Consider this passage from Thomas Nagel, mentioned in the OP.

The scientific revolution of the 17th century, which has given rise to such extraordinary progress in the understanding of nature, depended on a crucial limiting step at the start: It depended on subtracting from the physical world as an object of study everything mental – consciousness, meaning, intention or purpose. The physical sciences as they have developed since then describe, with the aid of mathematics, the elements of which the material universe is composed, and the laws governing their behavior in space and time.

We ourselves, as physical organisms, are part of that universe, composed of the same basic elements as everything else, and recent advances in molecular biology have greatly increased our understanding of the physical and chemical basis of life. Since our mental lives evidently depend on our existence as physical organisms, especially on the functioning of our central nervous systems, it seems natural to think that the physical sciences can in principle provide the basis for an explanation of the mental aspects of reality as well — that physics can aspire finally to be a theory of everything.

However, I believe this possibility is ruled out by the conditions that have defined the physical sciences from the beginning. The physical sciences can describe organisms like ourselves as parts of the objective spatio-temporal order – our structure and behavior in space and time – but they cannot describe the subjective experiences of such organisms or how the world appears to their different particular points of view. There can be a purely physical description of the neurophysiological processes that give rise to an experience, and also of the physical behavior that is typically associated with it, but such a description, however complete, will leave out the subjective essence of the experience – how it is from the point of view of its subject — without which it would not be a conscious experience at all.

So the physical sciences, in spite of their extraordinary success in their own domain, necessarily leave an important aspect of nature unexplained. — Thomas Nagel, Core of Mind and Cosmos

Can you see how that relates to the ‘hard problem’? This ‘what it is like to be…’ begins to manifest with the most rudimentary forms of life and becomes progressively elaborated through evolutionary processes. But it retains an irreducibly first-person element or perspective, which is precisely what has been bracketed out in the analysis of physical and chemical processes.

Really hope not, but it’s disheartening that so many people can’t seem to grasp the danger of what is happening. Shouldn’t be forgotten that the only reason Trump was able to unilaterally declare these tarriffs is because he deemed trade deficits an emergency - which has no basis in economic theory. This allows him to bypass Congress, who in any case is mostly neutered by him. He’s dictating changes to the global economic order on the basis of his ‘gut’. One man. No training.

I'm not sure it's established that there's anything "spontaneous" about it. And once you realize that, the rest of your question is just... chemistry. Literal chemistry. Like, if you want to understand how life forms came about from non life, that's a question for science, and you can take classes on chemistry, bio chemistry, maybe even early life chemistry. — flannel jesus

I was responding to a single sentence ‘ What "makes us conscious" is the (rare) arrangements of our constituent "particles" into generative cognitive systems embedded-enactive within eco-systems of other generative systems’. I’m asking, what causes that ‘rare arrangement’? That is actually a philosophical question rather than a scientific question. Naturalism always starts with nature herself. It doesn’t actually ask that kind of question, which is a philosophical, not a scientific question. I’m asking the question of ‘cause’ in a different sense than physical causation -perhaps in a more Aristotelian sense. To ascribe causation in that sense to bare chemistry is precisely to disregard the questions that give rise to ‘dual aspect’ type theories in the first place.

More importantly, what do you make of it? — jorndoe

That having made a great start on wrecking the Government, he’s now turned his attention to wrecking the economy.

Meanwhile, Trump has just summarily dismissed the Head and Deputy Head of the National Security Authority and US Cyber Command, Timothy Waugh and Wendy Noble, following an Oval Office meeting with notorious crank and conspiracy theory peddler, Laura Loomer (who thinks 911 was staged by the US Government.)

No reason was given.

What "makes us conscious" is the (rare) arrangements of our constituent "particles" into generative cognitive systems. — “180 Proof"

What property of matter is such that it spontaneously assembles itself into sentient life-forms.
— Wayfarer

I don't think that's the right question. — flannel jesus

Why not? What’s the matter with the question? Surely it’s germane to the subject.

Autopoiesis doesn’t explain the molecular steps of how life arose, but it does provide criteria for when a system becomes “alive.” In this way, it complements abiogenesis research by addressing the conceptual threshold between non-life and life.

What "makes us conscious" is the (rare) arrangements of our constituent "particles" into generative cognitive systems — 180 Proof

‘Arranged’ by what? What property of matter is such that it spontaneously assembles itself into sentient life-forms. Because

Those processes aren't in any individual particle at all. — flannel jesus

A huge question, but it boils down to whether there's anything at all that can properly be called "objective." — J

Objectivity is the criterion for natural science and many other disciplines. Philosophy is different in the sense that in this subject, we are what we seek to know. Continental philosophy recognises this in a way that current Anglo philosophy rarely does.

Good post and especially the citations which make your point well. One thing I would note, is that the background assumption behind all of it is still reductionist, in the sense that it is assumed that the fundamental constituents of beings exist on the micro level, and gradually combine to form greater levels of complexity. Still a shadow of atomism there - recall that the origin of atomism was the search for how the eternal and immutable could give rise to the perishable and changing. That eventually became combined with the principles of scientific laws, believed to be universally applicable (this is all pre-quantum, of course) as the basis for Enlightenment materialism. To my mind, this is still very much the background of Goff’s style of panpsychism. ‘We know that spin, mass, etc are fundamental, so if consciousness is fundamental, then it must be viewed on the same ontological level. Just as there are physical properties, so too there must be mental properties.’ Hence, dual properties.

I once (8 years ago, I’ve been at this far too long :roll: ) commented on a Philip Goff article and was surprised and delighted when he actually signed up to the Forum to rebut my argument. He only ever entered one post, but still…..

Anyway, what I said at the time was this, and I think it still follows:

I think his mistake is to believe that 'experience' is something that can be known in the third person. In other words, experience is not an object of cognition, in the way that an electron or particle or other object can be. We don't know experiences, we have experiences; so any experience has an inescapably first-person element, that is, it is undergone by a subject. So we can't objectify 'the nature of experience' in the way we can the objects and forces that are analysed by the natural sciences.

Now, in one sense we can be very clear about our own experiences - we certainly know what an unpleasant or pleasant experience is, and we know that some experiences have specific attributes, across a vast range of experiences. But in all cases, we know those things experientially - we know about those attributes, because they are the constituents of our experience, in a way very different from how we know and predict the behaviour of objects according to physical laws.

We can see others having experiences, and infer what they're experiencing, but again, we only know experience by experiencing. Experience is never a 'that' to us. — Wayfarer

Since writing that I’ve become a lot more familiar with phenomenology, which is explicitly about recognising the fundamentally first-person nature of experience (and therefore existence). But doesn’t add anything to the inventory of objective existents. It’s more a perspectival shift.

The difficulty is that the physical is contained within the mental, and only known or even conceivable within the mental. For "being" to mean anything at all (to have any content) if must be that which is given to thought. Hence, the Parmenidean adage "the same is for thinking as for being." — Count Timothy von Icarus

My thoughts also, as explained in the mind-created world.

I get what Sachs is saying here, but I think it might be a bit misleading — Count Timothy von Icarus

But he’s talking specifically about the translation of ouisia, and how the meaning of that seminal term - “being” - was lost in translation, starting from ancient philosophy. I’m not a Heidegger reader, but it’s a matter of general knowledge that the ‘forgetting of being’ was his central concern.

I'd urge anyone interested in supervenience and/or a reasonable version of physicalism to start with Kim. — J

‘Supervenience’ is, according to SEP, a philosophical term of art. It is deployed as defense against many criticisms of physicalism, as its meaning is vague enough to cover almost any eventuality. “Supervenience” has often functioned in philosophy of mind as a kind of magic word that promises metaphysical rigour but without any really explaining anything. Anyway let’s not get into supervenience in a thread on substance (but it is a kind of trigger word for yours truly.)

I personally feel like certain technologies with screens that provide boatloads of stimulation cause the brain to develop in a certain way such that sitting down and quieting the mind to a stage of silence becomes neigh impossible for a child who develops a need for the dopamine dump from being over stimulated. — DifferentiatingEgg

My thoughts also. I have a six yo grandson and his teachers are strongly suggesting he’s assessed for the condition. And he surely shows symptoms of it. I’m sure chronic overstimulation is a major factor, as he’s an avid consumer of animated media on a large-screen TV. He can’t sit still and be quiet. In many other ways he’s well-adjusted and a normal kid. It’s the culture we live in. I’m also affected by it.

But to be clear, Locke did believe in substances, but he just says he doesn't know what they are. They are obscure to our understanding. — Manuel

Thanks, interesting. Here you can see pre-figured Berkeley's rejection of 'material substance' altogether, can't you? Which I believe we discussed recently on my thread on that.

I think by the time Locke was writing, 'substance' has already been reconceptualised in material terms. The previously-mentioned IEP entry on Aristotle's Metaphysics says of the philosophical substantia that 'Locke explicitly analyzes it as an empty notion of an I-don’t-know-what; and soon after the word is laughed out of the vocabulary of serious philosophic endeavor.' But this is because, according to the article, the original translation as 'substantia' was in many respects a mistranslation. The author (Joe Sachs) remarks 'It is no wonder that the Metaphysics ceased to have any influence on living thinking: its heart had been cut out of it by its friends'.

And if our best current physics is not "ghostly" ("spooky" as Einstein protested), then I don't know what is. — Manuel

You might enjoy my recent essay on spooky action.

A perceptive OP mentioning Huawei's newly-established Research Park in China:

Built in just over three years, it consists of 104 individually designed buildings, with manicured lawns, connected by a Disney-like monorail, housing labs for up to 35,000 scientists, engineers and other workers, offering 100 cafes, plus fitness centers and other perks designed to attract the best Chinese and foreign technologists.

The Lianqiu Lake R. & D. campus is basically Huawei’s response to the U.S. attempt to choke it to death beginning in 2019 by restricting the export of U.S. technology, including semiconductors, to Huawei amid national security concerns. The ban inflicted massive losses on Huawei, but with the Chinese government’s help, the company sought to innovate its way around us. As South Korea’s Maeil Business Newspaper reported last year, it’s been doing just that: “Huawei surprised the world by introducing the ‘Mate 60’ series, a smartphone equipped with advanced semiconductors, last year despite U.S. sanctions.” Huawei followed with the world’s first triple-folding smartphone and unveiled its own mobile operating system, Hongmeng (Harmony), to compete with Apple’s and Google’s.

Trump is focused on what teams American transgender athletes can race on, and China is focused on transforming its factories with A.I. so it can outrace all [US] factories. Trump’s “Liberation Day” strategy is to double down on tariffs while gutting our national scientific institutions and work force that spur U.S. innovation. China’s liberation strategy is to open more research campuses and double down on A.I.-driven innovation to be permanently liberated from Trump’s tariffs. — Thomas Friedman, NY Times

....Some philosophers don’t see this, but that’s because they haven’t done their philosophizing in an orderly way, and haven’t carefully enough distinguished the mind from the body ~Descartes. — Mww

Which has a clear precedent in The Phaedo in the passages about the separation of soul from body.

I like Joe Sach's translation of the category of substance as "thinghoood," although this is perhaps confusing if one thinks of it in terms of the "particles" that were the self-subsistent, fundamental things of 19th century metaphysics. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I was going to quote a passage by Sachs in the OP, but it made it too long. But I'll include it here, as it is relevant to the translation of 'ousia' (from the IEP entry on Aristotle's Metaphysics):

My guess is, as universals became "names" some way to tie properties back to things had to be developed. The "names" come from us, but they have to have some cause in things, else we have no knowledge of them. No notion of participation or inherence could be called upon, so substrate has to expand beyond being mere potential (which would explain why substance and matter collapse towards meaning the same thing, when before they are almost opposites, a substance being what a thing is and matter its potential to be something else). — Count Timothy von Icarus

Spot on. I think you’ve identified something essential in showing how, once the participatory/inherence framework is lost (or becomes untenable), the explanatory burden shifts to "substance" in a different way. It has to account not only for what a thing is, but also why our concepts seem to refer to it at all.

That might explain why the substrate notion of substance—something like an inert bearer of properties—rises to prominence, while the richer Aristotelian idea of ousia as actualized form (not just potential matter) gets flattened out. The result is a metaphysical picture that looks more like proto-empiricism than classical realism (and indeed is the precursor to modern empiricism.)

And that also folds into the point about modern "thing ontology"—where what a thing is becomes identified with what it is made of, rather than what it does or means within a larger context.

My own longstanding view is that much of this equivocation around "substance" arises from the loss of a hierarchical ontology—the kind that underpinned the classical and medieval idea of the great chain of being. In that schema, being was analogical and graduated; different levels of being were possible and meaningful (as beautifully articulated by Eriugena). But with Scotus' doctrine of the univocity of being—the idea that "being " means the same whether said of God or a rock—this hierarchical distinction collapses. What results is a metaphysical "flattening," in which all beings are treated as ontologically equal (even if causally or epistemically different), and substance is increasingly thought of as inert substratum rather than act or form. It is precisely the loss of the vertical dimension, the axis of quality.

This contributes directly to the modern drift toward mechanistic and materialist metaphysics, where the rich account of form, finality, and analogy is replaced by homogenous "stuff" under mathematical laws.

A mental event doesn't cause motion by exerting force in space -- very good. But it "operates"? What is that? Isn't this a placeholder term for something we don't yet know how to talk about? The mind doesn't push on the body -- right. But it's "a way of being and acting"? Well . . . OK, but are we really saying anything, by saying this? — J

Excellent question. You're right to question "operates"—it is a placeholder. But that’s because our vocabulary is constrained by a model of causation that evolved to describe levers and collisions, not meaning and intention. To speak of "a way of being and acting" is to point to an integrated form of life, not a discrete event or causal vector.

I'll refer to Steve Talbott, a philosopher of biology with whom I became acquainted through his essays in The New Atlantis. He tackles this problem in an essay (or book chapter), From Physical Causes to Organisms of Meaning:

We commonly explain occurrences by saying one thing happened because of — due to the cause of — something else. But we can invoke very different sorts of causes in this way. For example, there is the because of physical law (The ball rolled down the hill because of gravity) and the because of reason (He laughed at me because I made a mistake). The former hinges upon the kind of necessity we commonly associate with physical causation; the latter has to do with what makes sense within a context of meaning.

'Within a context of meaning' is the key term. Physics per se negates or brackets out context so as to arrive at an exact formulation describing the motions of bodies universally (regardless of context). That is why physicalism posits that the universe as 'devoid of inherent meaning' - it has set it aside or bracketed out context and meaning so as to arrive at the putative 'view from nowhere' which seeks explanations solely in terms of mechanical causes (which has been undermined by the 'observer problem' which is precisely one of context and meaning, but we'll leave that aside here.)

(Galiliean) science was born from the decision to objectify, namely to select the elements of experience that are invariant across persons and situations. Its aim is to formulate universal truths, namely truths that can be accepted by anyone irrespective of one’s situation. Therefrom, the kind of truths science can reach is quite peculiar : they take the form of universal and necessary connections between phenomena (the so-called scientific laws). — Michel Bitbol, On the Radical Self-Referentiality of Consciousness

And, as Wittgenstein observes (TLP 6.371), 'At the basis of the whole modern view of the world lies the illusion that the so-called laws of nature are the explanations of natural phenomena.'

That's the issue in a nutshell. But this 'separation' hasn't yet occured in Aristotle, for whom final causation provides another level of causal relationship, and precisely in the context of meaning-making In Aristotle’s schema, final causes are not mystical but intelligible—explanations in terms of ends, purposes, or functions. The question “What is it for?” is a valid form of causation, but that’s precisely what modern physics has trained itself not to ask.

What I’m proposing is that reasons operate as causes, not by exerting force, but by shaping intentionality within a context of meaning. This kind of causation isn’t mechanical but rational: it explains action by appeal to what makes sense to an agent, not what impinges on a body.

Hence the category mistake implied by wondering how res cogitans can, say, 'make my arm move'. It puts the mind on the same level as the objects of physics - reduces it, in other words.

what is deemed to be good and what is good are not the same thing, and anyone who has ever regretted anything has experienced this fact. They might apologize as follows, "It seemed like a good idea at the time..." — Leontiskos

Which a Christian would probably attribute to the unreliability of human reason, tainted as it is by sin, would they not? But then, from the Christian point of view, what is good is not really a matter of choice, is it?

When you speak of principle it reminds me a little of Hegel for whom the spirit is an active principle or process of reality as opposed to the concept of substance as something immobile and static, codified and subsistent by itself. — JuanZu

Totally. But then, Hegel was a representative of the grand tradition of philosophy. That 'active principle' is again reminiscent of the original Aristotelian insight, which hardened into dogmatic scholasticism. Perhaps Hegel was re-capturing the spirit of the original! I'm sure he would have liked to think so.

The question is: if it is no longer dualism of substances what is the ontology that best suits this difference between the mental and the physical? — JuanZu

Well, there's the million dollar question. Probably another whole thread, I think. I posted this one as a kind of reference topic, as the subject of 'substance' and 'substance dualism' comes up all the time, but without awareness of these double meanings.

:cheer:

Despite Musk ploughing $140 million into the vote for the Wisconsin Supreme Court and even handing out $1 million dollar checks to a couple of voters (what? me? corrupting the process?), the liberal candidate, Susan Crawford, will win (taking over the seat vacated by the retiring liberal judge.)

Crawford and her Democratic allies also worked to turn the election into a referendum on Trump ally Elon Musk, who poured millions of his personal fortune into the race. It quickly became the most expensive judicial contest in US history.

At a victory rally in Madison Tuesday night, Crawford thanked supporters, saying their votes helped send a message to the country.

“Today, Wisconsinites fended off an unprecedented attack on our democracy, our fair elections and our supreme court. And Wisconsinites stood up and said loudly that justice does not have a price – our courts are not for sale,” she said. — CNN

The election was seen as a litmus test for the Trump/Musk power duopoly. Wisconsin is a real bellwether state.

The central mistake of that hypothesis is the inaccurate equation of pleasure with happiness. As I've attempted to demonstrate earlier, pleasure is simple and fleeting; happiness is sustained and complex. — Vera Mont

:100:

I think that’s why Taoism felt so familiar to me when I came across it. — T Clark

Sure, totally get that. Taoism is after all non-dualist in some fundamental way (even if the term is generally more associated with Indian rather than Chinese philosophy.)

In mathematics, a theory has substance when it is deemed important or significant in some way by a community of scholars. — jgill

Right. That's more in keeping with the traditional use of the term. 'Substantial', as are 'men of substance' or 'matters of substance'. //And what's interesting about that is the connection with meaning (as in "import" or "significance"), which is absent from the normal meaning of "substance".

From https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind%E2%80%93body_dualism#Arguments_against_dualism

...the question of how the interaction takes place, where in dualism "the mind" is assumed to be non-physical and by definition outside of the realm of science. The mechanism which explains the connection between the mental and the physical would therefore be a philosophical proposition as compared to a scientific theory. For example, compare such a mechanism to a physical mechanism that is well understood. Take a very simple causal relation, such as when a cue ball strikes an eight ball and causes it to go into the pocket. What happens in this case is that the cue ball has a certain amount of momentum as its mass moves across the pool table with a certain velocity, and then that momentum is transferred to the eight ball, which then heads toward the pocket. Compare this to the situation in the brain, where one wants to say that a decision causes some neurons to fire and thus causes a body to move across the room. The intention to "cross the room now" is a mental event and, as such, it does not have physical properties such as force. If it has no force, then it would seem that it could not possibly cause any neuron to fire. However, with Dualism, an explanation is required of how something without any physical properties has physical effects.

That’s exactly the kind of confusion I was pointing to in the OP. This kind of criticism of dualism misunderstands the category that mental causation belongs to. It assumes causation must be modeled on physical causation—like billiard balls transferring momentum—so it looks for some kind of “mental force” that pushes the body in an analogous way. But that’s already a misstep.

A mental event—like the intention to cross the room—isn’t analogous to a physical force in that sense. It doesn’t cause motion by exerting force in space. Rather, it operates at the level of intentionality and subjective orientation. Treating mental events as if they must function like physical ones is a category mistake (as Ryle points out). The mind isn’t a ghostly thing pushing on the body; it’s a way of being and acting in the world not reducible to physical mechanisms (and so not describable in purely physical terms).

To clarify further, I’d refer back to the Aristotelian concept of psuchē—often translated as “soul,” but better understood as the form or organising principle of the body. (“The soul is the form of the body,” in Aristotle’s famous phrase.) On this view, what we now call “mental events” are inherently intentional in a way that physical forces are not.

This sidesteps the Cartesian problem entirely. The psuchē isn’t a ghost in the machine—it’s what makes the organism a living being in the first place. Mental activity, from this perspective, doesn’t stand out as a causal anomaly in a mechanical world, but emerges as the mode of intelligibility appropriate to beings like us.

That is a succinct illustration of the sense in which hylomorphic differs from Cartesian dualism, and one of the reasons for the so-called 'revival of Aristotelianism' in the biological sciences.

Whereas ouisia - being - I instead address via the term "essence". — javra

Good choice. I didn't really notice, until composing this post, the interchangeability of 'essence' and 'substance', but I think the former is far less prone to equivocation. We still use 'essence' (as in, 'the essence of the matter') in a way that is more in line with the earlier use.

I struggle with imagining the world in the terms of scholastic science, including substance has described in your OP. — T Clark

I'm not that conversant with the intricacies of scholastic philosophy. And I don't think that there's any 'going back' to an earlier time. What interests me is the point about how we (unconsciously?) depict substance in objective terms, which in my view renders it oxymoronic (e.g. as 'thinking stuff'). Something very important has been lost in translation, as it were.

hmmm. I can see the sense of that. It's pretty much in line with the original meaning.

It's less inconsistent and more parsimonious, it seems to me, to conceive of "physical" and "mental" as two properties – ways of describing / modeling – substance than positing them as "two substances" — 180 Proof

However this begs the question 'properties of what', doesn't it? Some kind of reality that is neither physical nor mental, but exhibits both properties? So whatever that 'substance' is, is neither physical nor mental in nature. I think I can probably go along with some form of that.

The Wiki article you linked is also quite a good source.

Very good and right on point!

That ‘only one subject’ rings truer to me. It’s not exactly right but conveys a dimension of meaning that ‘substance’ tends to occlude.

I think you will like it. He's not well known in academic philosophy circles as he's come from outside the ivory tower, but I think he's the real deal.

I also noticed your explication of substance/essence above. It's an important topic. I tried to introduce the topic of what substance means in philosophy as distinct from everyday use earlier in the thread. I think I'll write an OP on it.

On a physical level of understanding, all quanta themselves emerge from the quantum vacuum state — javra

There’s an author you might find interesting if you haven’t encountered him, Federico Faggin. He’s a notable Silicon Valley pioneer who had a profound experience of spiritual awakening in his 30’s and has gone on to devote his life to consciousness studies. His recent book is Irreducible:Consciousness, Life and the Physics of the Self. I am currently reading it, although it’s not an easy read. In any case, the whole thrust of the book is (as I understand it) the quantum nature of consciousness. He presents the idea of ‘seity’ - the individual, conscious subject as a unique center of experience that cannot be reduced to anything more fundamental. The term is derived from the Latin se, meaning “self” or “itself,” and is meant to emphasize irreducible individuality and interiority. In some respects it is quite Liebnizian, although without Liebniz’ ‘pre-established harmony’. A seity is not an organism, but it is what the organism expresses. It’s also close in some ways to the Greek ‘psuche’.

Could I ask, have you spent any time interacting with any of the new AI systems? ChatGPT or Gemini or Claude or one of the others? I think whether you like them or are apprehensive about them, there are some insights to be gleaned from actually using them.

For interest's sake, I used your OP as a prompt for ChatGPT4, which provided this response.

:up:

What I was driving at, is expressed by Michel Bitbol in another passage from the source quoted above:

...science was born from the decision to objectify, namely to select the elements of experience that are invariant across persons and situations. Its aim is to formulate universal truths, namely truths that can be accepted by anyone irrespective of one’s situation. Therefrom, the kind of truths science can reach is quite peculiar : they take the form of universal and necessary connections between phenomena (the so-called scientific laws). This epistemological remark has devastating consequences. It means that in virtue of the very methodological presupposition on which it is based, science has and can have nothing to say about the mere fact that there are phenomena (namely appearances) for anybody, let alone about the qualitative content of these phenomena. — Michel Bitbol

we know what the meaning is, because we put it there, and it's only to us that there is meaning. — Patterner

Not only did we 'put it there', but we enabled the worldview which allows us to think that the universe as a whole is devoid of it.

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When we use a word for “consciousness”, we are... automatically led astray, because conscious experience is not something over there to be meant in any way. Once again consciousness is plainly here ; this “here” that submerges us ; this “here” that is presupposed by any location in space. Trying to mean consciousness is self-defeating, since what is allegedly meant is nothing beyond the very act of meaning it. It is radically self-referring. — On the radical self-referentiality of consciousness, Michel Bitbol