If you believe that is wrong, then you would need to explain how those commonalities could explain the specific shared content of our perceptual experiences. You haven't done that. — Janus

I've already said many times that understanding human or even animal behavior cannot be achieved by physics. I've often said that the physical nature of the world is understood in terms of causes, and animal and human behavior in terms of reasons. — Janus

Right, it's an abstract entity, an idea, not an ontologically substantive being then. — Janus

so you haven't really answered the question. — Janus

You never fail to mention positivism, apparently in an attempt to discredit what I argue, rather than dealing with it point by point on its own terms — Janus

The argument that we all operate with similar mental structures cannot explain more than the common ways in which we perceive and experience, it cannot explain the common content of our experience. I've lost count of how many times that point has remained unaddressed or glossed over.

In any case we cannot understand those structures other than via science, and in vivo they are precognitive, part of the in itself, which would indicate that the in itself has structure, and so is not undifferentiated at all. Structure without differentiation is logically impossible.

If structure exists independently of any mind, then it exists independently of all minds, unless there is a collective mind, and we have, and could have, no evidence of such a thing. — Janus

...what was ominous in 2016 is dangerous in 2025, especially in Europe. Russian military aggression is more damaging, Russian sabotage across Europe more frequent, and Russian cyberattacks almost constant. In truth, it is Putin, not Zelensky, who started this conflict, Putin who has brought North Korean troops and Iranian drones to Europe, Putin who instructs his propagandists to talk about nuking London, Putin who keeps raising the stakes and scope of the war. Most Europeans live in this reality, not in the fictional world inhabited by Trump, and the contrast is making them think differently about Americans. According to pollsters, nearly three-quarters of French people now think that the U.S. is not an ally of France. A majority in Britain and a very large majority in Denmark, both historically pro-American countries, now have unfavorable views of the U.S. as well.

In reality, the Russians have said nothing publicly about leaving Ukrainian territory or stopping the war. In reality, they have spent the past decade building a cult of cruelty at home. Now they have exported that cult not just to Europe, not just to Africa, but to Washington too. This administration abruptly canceled billions of dollars of food aid and health-care programs for the poorest people on the planet, a vicious act that the president and vice president have not acknowledged but that millions of people can see. Their use of tariffs as random punishment, not for enemies but for allies, seems not just brutal but inexplicable.

And in the Oval Office, Trump and Vance behaved like imperial rulers chastising a subjugated colony, vocalizing the same disgust and disdain that Russian propagandists use when they talk about Ukraine. Europeans know, everyone knows, that if Trump and Vance can talk that way to the president of Ukraine, then they might eventually talk that way to their country’s leader next. — Anne Applebaum, The Atlantic

Consciousness in the Indian tradition is more than an experience of awareness. It is a fundamental principle which underlies all knowing and being … the cognitive structure does not generate consciousness; it simply reflects it; and in the process limits and embellishes it. In a fundamental sense, consciousness is the source of our awareness. In other words, consciousness is not merely awareness as manifest in different forms but it is also what makes awareness possible … It is the light which illuminates the things on which it shines. — K. Ramakrishna Rao

A sharply divided Supreme Court on Wednesday denied the Trump administration’s request to block a lower court order on foreign aid funding, clearing the way for the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development to restart nearly $2 billion in payments for work already done.

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justice Amy Coney Barrett joined the court’s three liberal justices in the 5-4 order, which was the high court’s first significant move on lawsuits related to President Donald Trump’s initiatives in his second term.

...Soon after the ruling, U.S. District Judge Amir H. Ali ordered the government to develop a schedule for restarting the payments.

Aid groups had argued that the Trump administration was flouting Ali’s order to pay its bills and hailed the high court’s decision as a sign that the president cannot ignore the law. — Supreme Court says judge can force Trump administration to pay foreign aid

. . . excitation of the one universal field of subjectivity.
— Wayfarer

Isn't this a religious-like flaw of begging the question or an infinite regress? — PoeticUniverse

Wayfarer and Count Timothy von Icarus may enjoy a recent piece written by James Ungureanu, "The Perfume of an Empty Vase: The Rise and Fall of Evidential Religion." — Leontiskos

Does Buddhism have a word for faith? Do they reject its content? — Gregory

But I don't buy the idea that Trump is simply an agent of Putin. — Ludwig V

are the purpose of koans to bring out faith? — Gregory

What is the value of the subjective field three centimetres in front of of you nose? — Banno

This could be so, and is similar to Whitehead. — PoeticUniverse

The bit where you think you have the answer, but don't. — Banno

When are you going to wake up to the fact that I understand Kastrup's 'arguments' perfectly well, and yet do not agree, in fact find them nonsensical — Janus

Moreover, not only is Wittgenstein self-conscious about the contingency of our sense-making; he is also self-conscious about a problematical idealism that it seems to entail, where by ‘idealism’ is meant the view that what we make sense of is dependent on how we make sense of it[Editor’s note: this is not the objective idealism promoted by Essentia Foundation, which does entail the existence of states of affairs that are not contingent on human cognition].

what values does Kastrup set for each point in the subjective field? — Banno

In any case it is implausible that quantum mechanics has any determinable implications for the metaphysical realism vs idealism debate. — Janus

When are you going to wake up to the fact that I understand Kastrup's 'arguments' perfectly well, and yet do not agree, — Janus

There's a chasm here, that you apparently do not see. — Banno

Ah, the "the whole of existence is reducible to the patterns of excitation of the one universal field of subjectivity" thing. — Banno

The reasoning is easy enough to understand, it's the premises which are not believable. — Janus

Right, but Wittgenstein would agree with the positivists that traditional metaphysics, is meaningless in the sense that it has no referent. From the Tractatus: — Janus

6.41 The sense of the world must lie outside the world. In the world everything is as it is and happens as it does happen. In it there is no value—and if there were, it would be of no value.

If there is a value which is of value, it must lie outside all happening and being-so. For all happening and being-so is accidental.

What makes it non-accidental cannot lie in the world, for otherwise this would again be accidental.

It must lie outside the world.


6.42 Hence also there can be no ethical propositions.

Propositions cannot express anything higher.


6.421It is clear that ethics cannot be expressed.

Ethics is transcendental.

(Ethics and aesthetics are one.)

I tend to roughly equate the “actual occasion or event” of process metaphysics with the “quantum event” of modern physics and quantum field theory.. I also tend to equate the probabilistic (potentiali) nature of quantum physics with the introduction of a degree of freedom, creativity and novelty in nature. — prothero

saying that we cannot know anything about anything without the mind (well, duh!) and then concluding that therefore nothing exists without the mind. The epitome of tendentiously motivated thinking! — Janus

Under objective idealism, subjectivity is not individual or multiple, but unitary and universal: it’s the bottom level of reality, prior to spatiotemporal extension and consequent differentiation. The subjectivity in me is the same subjectivity in you. What differentiates us are merely the contents of this subjectivity as experienced by you, and by me. We differ only in experienced memories, perspectives and narratives of self, but not in the subjective field wherein all these memories, perspectives and narratives of self unfold as patterns of excitation; that is, as experiences.

As such, under objective idealism there is nothing outside subjectivity, for the whole of existence is reducible to the patterns of excitation of the one universal field of subjectivity. Therefore, all choices are determined by this one subject, as there are no agencies or forces external to it. Yet, all choices are indeed determined by the inherent, innate dispositions of the subject. In other words, all choices are determined by what subjectivity is. — Bernardo Kastrup

My view has always been that Wittgenstein had no interest in metaphysics as traditionally conceived and practiced. — Janus

How does one "verify" that Hannibal won the Battle of Cannae through a double envelopment, for instance? Or that the Germans started World War II with a false flag attack? Or that St. Augustine was a Maniche in his youth? Or that St. Thomas' studied in Paris? — Count Timothy von Icarus

Verificationism, also known as the verification principle or the verifiability criterion of meaning, is a doctrine in philosophy which asserts that a statement is meaningful only if it is either empirically verifiable (can be confirmed through the senses) or a tautology (true by virtue of its own meaning or its own logical form). Verificationism rejects statements of metaphysics, theology, ethics and aesthetics as meaningless in conveying truth value or factual content, though they may be meaningful in influencing emotions or behavior.

Verificationism was a central thesis of logical positivism, a movement in analytic philosophy that emerged in the 1920s by philosophers who sought to unify philosophy and science under a common naturalistic theory of knowledge. The verifiability criterion underwent various revisions throughout the 1920s to 1950s. However, by the 1960s, it was deemed to be irreparably untenable. Its abandonment would eventually precipitate the collapse of the broader logical positivist movement. — Wikipedia

To the question ‘What is your aim in philosophy?’, Wittgenstein replied, “To show the fly the way out of the fly-bottle.” By this he meant that the work of philosophy “consists essentially of elucidations” (4.112). This provokes the further question ‘Why then are the ideas of the Tractatus so obscure and controversial, as for instance in paragraph 6.522 quoted above, which says values “make themselves manifest”?’ A. C. Grayling, for instance, has complained:

“If it were true that value somehow just ‘manifested itself’, it would be puzzling why conflicts and disagreements should arise over ethical questions, or why people can passionately and sincerely hold views which are quite opposite to those held with equal passion and sincerity by others.”
– Wittgenstein: A Very Short Introduction

On the contrary, I don’t find the idea of different manifest values being held by different people at all puzzling. It is in the very nature or essence of values (as distinct from verifiable facts) that they are contentious. There is simply no objective truth to be had about a judgement of value. So it would be extremely odd if the values – be they moral, aesthetic, religious, or whatever – that manifest themselves to us as individuals were to be the same for everybody. In such a weird case they would cease to be ‘values’ as we understand them.

The declared aim of the Vienna Circle was to make philosophy either subservient to, or somehow akin to, the natural sciences. As Ray Monk says in his superb biography Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (1990), “the anti-metaphysical stance that united them [was] the basis for a kind of manifesto which was published under the title The Scientific View of the World: The Vienna Circle.” Yet as Wittgenstein himself protested again and again in the Tractatus, the propositions of natural science “have nothing to do with philosophy” (6.53); “Philosophy is not one of the natural sciences” (4.111); “It is not problems of natural science which have to be solved” (6.4312); “even if all possible scientific questions be answered, the problems of life have still not been touched at all” (6.52); “There is indeed the inexpressible. This shows itself; it is the mystical” (6.522). None of these sayings could possibly be interpreted as the views of a man who had renounced metaphysics. The Logical Positivists of the Vienna Circle had got Wittgenstein wrong, and in so doing had discredited themselves. — Wittgenstein, Tolstoy and the Folly of Logical Positivism, Stuart Greenstreet

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. — Wayfarer

It is very convenient to bifurcate nature and say one part is “real and objective” and the other is “merely subjective” but it shirks the real task of natural philosophy and speculative philosophy. — prothero

The important point here is that subjective experience need not involve, and can be detached from, consciousness. On the one hand, Whitehead catergorically insists that "apart from the experiences of subjects there is nothing, nothing, nothing, bare nothingness." But he also continually reminds us that most of this "experience of subjects" is nonconscious. — prothero

Trump is an agent of Putin

One of the reasons that the footage of US President Donald Trump’s clash with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was so compelling to Western audiences was the sheer unfamiliarity of such a scene.

Leaders routinely have arguments behind closed doors, but this one was very deliberately broadcast. The host not only inflamed US Vice President J.D. Vance’s provocations of the Ukrainian leader, but he made sure to keep the media in the room for the full 50-minute drama. As Trump said in the closing line: “This is going to be great television.”

But to Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, and anyone else familiar with Marxist-Leninist political management, it was instantly recognisable. This was a “struggle session”. That is, an orchestrated ritual humiliation of a political enemy, conducted in public, often with crowd participation. A common feature is that the target is denounced by people they thought were close to them.

The struggle session had its origins in the writings of Soviet leader Josef Stalin on the subject of criticism and self-criticism. It was later embraced by China’s Mao Zedong against suspected “class enemies”.

Mao’s youthful zealot Red Guards notoriously employed violence, torture and even murder in struggle sessions during the Cultural Revolution. The reformer Deng Xiaoping banned the struggle session.

But now Trump has introduced it to US foreign policy. Putin would have recognised and relished the performance in the Oval Office: the ritual, public humiliation of the man who has inspired millions in defying Putin and embarrassing his army. Conducted by Zelensky’s most important ally to date, the United States. But why would Trump do it? The world has long puzzled over his affinity for Putin, the former KGB colonel who seeks to neuter the US, dominate Europe and destroy the West. The attraction is inexplicable.

But the evidence now is incontrovertible: We should accept that Trump acts as an agent of Putin.... — Peter Hartcher, Sydney Morning Herald

Nothing is next. There is no next. That’s the point!
— Wayfarer
Do you mean that I'm caricaturing the situation and there are good reasons for saying that things are not so simple as I represent them? I wouldn't argue with that. But things do seem to be heading that way. — Ludwig V