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

It depends what you mean by apodictic — sime

Subjectivity as a Fundamental Feature of the Whole of Reality

Whitehead, on the basis of his interpretation of the modern conceptual framework, derives the task of sketching a metaphysics in which nature does not bifurcate and in which there is no division of nature and mind and their respective knowledge fields of the material and the mental. Such a metaphysics requires not only a radical reconstruction of the concept of nature, but necessarily includes an equally radical reframing of subjectivity. For Whitehead assumes that it is precisely the modernist conception of subjectivity (and thereby objectivity) that has contributed decisively to the bifurcation of nature. His interpretation of modernity as a historical–discursive formation characterized by the bifurcation is therefore crucial to his radical reconstruction of the concept of nature.

Such a reformulation of the concept of nature includes for Whitehead not least the dissolution of the opposition nature/subjectivity or else nature/experience: instead of excluding the subject and experience from nature and thus opening the door to bifurcation, for Whitehead subjectivity is a fundamental feature of the whole of reality. According to the Philosophy of Organism, everything that exists feels; every atom and every flower feels. A statement, as Melanie Sehgal notes, “that sounds strange only against the background of a concept of experience implicitly oriented towards conscious, human perception, as it characterizes modern philosophy” (Sehgal 2016, 209f., my translation). Reality must be described as a hierarchy of consistently given, though varying, degrees of subjectivity. This is also the reason why Whitehead can state “that apart from the experiences of subjects there is nothing, nothing, nothing, bare nothingness” (Whitehead [1929] 1978, p. 167). If such a relocation of subjectivity into nature is linked to the goal of correcting the materialist–mechanistic conception of the ‘natural’ world as it derived from the bifurcation, subjectivity can also no longer be a “privilege of higher developed entities, let alone an ontological distinction of man” (Wiehl 2007, p. 30, my translation). On that note, Whitehead vehemently rejects modern anthropocentrism, which locates subjectivity outside of nature: “Pansubjectivism,” Reiner Wiehl elaborates, “thus means in Whitehead not only the implementation of the subject in nature and the natural sciences, but equally also a naturalization of subjectivity” — Source

Our experience of time depends on the flow of cosmic time that we measure through our experience of time, and only life can know life. Like the ouroboros, the serpent swallowing its own tail, we are in the universe and the universe is in us. This is the strange loop.

Merleau-Ponty puts his finger on the strange loop when he writes in Phenomenology of Perception: “The world is inseparable from the subject, but from a subject who is nothing but a project of the world; and the subject is inseparable from the world, but from a world that it itself projects.” This statement is meant to clear a path between two extremes. One is the idea that there is a world only for or in consciousness (idealism). The other is the idea that the world exists ready-made and comes presorted into kinds or categories apart from experience (realism). Instead of these two extremes, Merleau-Ponty proposes that each one of the two terms, the conscious subject and the world, makes the other one what it is, and thus they inseparably form a larger whole. In philosophical terms, their relationship is dialectical.

The world Merleau-Ponty is talking about is the life-world (lebenswel), the world we’re able to perceive, investigate, and act in. The subject projects the world because it brings forth the world as a space of meaning and relevance. But the subject can project the world only because the subject inheres in a body already oriented to and engaged with a world that surpasses it. The bodily subject is not just in the world but also of the world. The bodily subject is a project of the world, a way the world locally self-organizes and self-individuates to constitute a living being.

You may want to say that the universe—the whole cosmos or all of nature—subsumes the life-world, so the strange loop pertains only to us and our life-world, not to us and the universe altogether. But quarantining the strange loop this way won’t work. It’s true that our life-world is a minuscule part of an immensely vaster cosmos. The cosmos contains our life-world. But it’s also true that the life-world contains the universe. What we mean is that the universe is always disclosed to us from within the life-world. The life-world sets the horizon within which anything is observable, measurable, and thinkable. So the life-world and the universe themselves are caught up in a strange loop. — The Blind Spot, Evan Thompson, Marcello Gleiser, Adam Frank, Pp 198-9

Amid the tumult of mass firings, the Trump administration’s dismissal of workers who maintain America’s nuclear weapons delivered perhaps the greatest shock. These are people with highly sensitive jobs, the Energy Department would later acknowledge, who should have never been fired.

Almost all the workers were rehired in an embarrassing about-face, a prominent example of how the administration has had to reverse dismissals in multiple instances where its scattershot approach caused deeper damage to agencies than anticipated.

Yet late the night before Valentine’s Day, the Trump administration perfunctorily fired 17 percent of the National Nuclear Security Administration’s workforce, over the strenuous objections of senior nuclear officials.

The employees of the National Nuclear Security Administration are stewards of a sprawling government system that keeps 5,000 nuclear warheads secure and ready. They make sure radiation doesn’t leak, weapons don’t mistakenly detonate and plutonium doesn’t get into the wrong hands.

“The president said workers critical to national security would be exempt from the firings. But then there was an active decision to say these positions are not critical to national security,” said an official at the nuclear agency, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid reprisals. “It is so absurd I don’t even know what to say.”

The episode proved to be among the biggest blunders of Trump’s first weeks in office as he deployed the blunt instrument of the U.S. DOGE Service, overseen by billionaire White House adviser Elon Musk, to radically slash government payrolls. (Gift link) — DOGE Fires, then Recalls, Workers Essential to Maintenance of US Nuclear Weapons

A U.S. judge on Saturday declared President Donald Trump's firing of the head of a federal watchdog agency illegal in an early test of the scope of presidential power likely to be decided at the U.S. Supreme Court.

U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson in Washington had previously ruled Hampton Dellinger, the head of the Office of Special Counsel who is responsible for protecting whistleblowers, could remain in his post pending a ruling. — Reuters

In 2019, President Trump tried to extort President Zelinsky by withholding Congressionally-mandated military aid to Ukraine, which was attacked and invaded by Russia, to coerce him to say he was opening an investigation into the Bidens. Zelensky showed his mettle and resisted; Trump was impeached.

Fast forward to yesterday, Trump (who could not handle the job alone and needed the assistance of a henchman) again sought to bend President Zelensky to his will to extort Ukraine out of its natural resources (and afterTrump conceded key negotiation points to Russia BEFORE negotiations even began). And once again, Zelensky resisted. But without any congressional repercussions for Trump.

Instead, we are now an international pariah. — Andrew Wiesemann

I don't need a ride, I need ammo

You gotta look at the situation from the Grecoan Ideal... not yours. — DifferentiatingEgg

Sisyphus was, in fact, like Autolycus and Prometheus, a widely popular figure of folklore—the trickster, or master thief. Clearly, he is everlastingly punished in Hades as the penalty for cheating Death, but why he is set to roll a great stone incessantly is a puzzle to which no convincing answer has yet been given. It appears to belong with other Greek imaginings of the world of the dead as the scene of fruitless labours.

Erm... that's the Christian mythology of Sisyphus — DifferentiatingEgg

Do you see the distinction between this process of repeated contextual variation and a meta-proclamation of truth? — Joshs

Plato was clearly concerned not only with the state of his soul, but also with his relation to the universe at the deepest level. Plato’s metaphysics was not intended to produce merely a detached understanding of reality. His motivation in philosophy was in part to achieve a kind of understanding that would connect him (and therefore every human being) to the whole of reality – intelligibly and if possible satisfyingly. — Secular Philosophy and the Religious Temperament, Thomas Nagel

“The only way to restore rule of the people in America is to impeach judges,” Mr. Musk wrote this week on X, his social media platform, in one of multiple posts demanding that uncooperative federal judges be ousted from their lifetime seats on the bench.

“We must impeach to save democracy,” Mr. Musk said in another entry on X after a series of rulings slowed the Trump administration’s moves to halt congressionally approved spending and conduct mass firings of federal workers. He pointed to a purge of judges by the right-wing government in El Salvador as part of the successful effort to assert control over the government there. — NY Times

Hey! I found this book going on about organicism and new metaphors in biology. Thought it would be interesting for you. — substantivalism

The reverse of the positivist claim seems to be the case: the positivist program is the useful device but a richer conception is required to generate or understand science.

Unconditioned meaning foundational to perspective? — fdrake

It seems to me you're describing a psychological difference, — fdrake

I want to say "I love you all," but I'm not quite sure I believe that. But I wonder what would happen if I had faith that I could have faith in that? — DifferentiatingEgg

Right, which is to say that something can be verifiable even if it is not verifiable according to some particular metric. For example, a Buddhist claim can be verified, but not with a microscope. — Leontiskos

I'm not sure where Janus fits into this. — Leontiskos