Does Vervaeke's view romanticise pre-modern culture? Wasn’t it an era of imposed hierarchies, powerlessness, and widespread pain and brutality? Was it really qualitatively better? Was it not spiritually bereft in other equally detrimental ways? — Tom Storm

I recommend having a listen. Since discovering Vervaeke’s lectures in 2022 I’ve taken most of the series in, often while working out or driving. Vervaeke’s grounding discipline is cognitive science, augmented by philosophy, psychology and a fair amount of anthropology. I don’t think he romantizes the past. His approach is very much in line with the academic discipline 'history of ideas', which is a sub-set of comparative religion.

The episodes that most directly address the topic of the OP are Death of the Universe, Martin Luther and Descartes, and Descartes vs Hobbes.

Most people are deeply immersed in meaning: love, relationships, work, friends, goals, children, hobbies, future planning, concern for the environment. We are filled with purpose, engagement and transformative experiences. — Tom Storm

In which case, they will probably have no interest in this kind of discussion.

You can see Vervaeke kind of wrestling with religious questions - he's upfront about having been born into a fairly dysfunctional fundamentalist family and his rejection of that. But he dialogues with philosophers of religion and theologians - William Desmond, D C Schindler, many others. In his quest to articulate the meaning of 'wisdom' he does grapple with religious ideas, but from many different perspectives and traditions.

Also, what truth do you mean? do you mean a universal one or some other truth? and how does the fact that said truth, being subjective, has to have a meaning? and what kind of meaning? — Oppida

I admire Aristotle's Metaphysics, but understanding Aristotle properly is a difficult task. But there are some key ideas from Aristotle that are important to understand, as they are woven into our culture. I think anyone with an interest in philosophy has to have some familiarity with Plato and Aristotle.

As far as 'what truth I mean' - that is the big question! The general drift of the OP, is that modernity is exclusively oriented to objective facts, where objectivity is seen as the primary criterion of truth. What is objective is said to be truly so, regardless of anyone's opinion. But while that is certainly true for many subjects, it is not necessarily true for the philosophical questions of meaning, purpose and value. Modern thought tends to treat such questions as subjective or private matters, up to the individual. But then, this becomes the very divide that the OP is about - a domain of objective facts, on the one side, which exists independently of the individual, and the domain of purposes, meaning and values, which is said to be an individual matter! So there can be no consensus except as regards objective facts, or so it is said.

Perhaps have a look at an earlier thread, The Mind Created World, which tries to address this issue.

What do you think is going on for those who don't see this? — Tom Storm

I don't think the objections are coming to terms with the argument. Again, the argument is, that since the Scientific Revolution, modern culture tends to see the world (or universe) in terms of a domain of objective forces which have no meaning or moral dimension, in which human life is kind of a fortuitous outcome of chance events. Prior to that, the Universe was imbued with symbolic and real meaning, in which the individual, no matter how lowly their station, was a participant. I mean, there's been enormous literature and commentary on this fact. I attempted in the OP to try and distill it the essentials of it. Those books I cited in the OP are among the examples, but there are many more.

. But wouldn’t the meaning crisis, strictly speaking, be resolved if everyone became, say, a Muslim? — Tom Storm

Pluralism, religious and otherwise, is a fact of modernity, it's part of the dynamic. The traditional religions did address existential dilemmas, but then, they didn't arise in today's interconnected global world with all its diversities and the massive increase of scientific knowledge. The problem is, trying to retrieve or preserve the valuable insights that they arrived at. That's why I think a kind of interfaith approach is an essential part of the solution, something which Vervaeke does in his dialogues. I think religious representatives of good will are able to see beyond sectarianism without devolving into outright relativism.

But overall, the crisis of modernity is a really difficult challenge to deal with. I don't feel as though I've dealt with it at all successfully, although at least I recognise that there is a challenge.

Another of the excellent books I would recommend is by a University of Queensland scholar, Dr. Paul Tyson, 'Defragmenting Modernity'. The cover description:

We live in a strangely fragmented lifeworld. On the one hand, abstract constructions of our own imagination--such as money, "mere" facts, and mathematical models--are treated by us as important objective facts. On the other hand, our understanding of the concrete realities of meaning and value in which our daily lives are actually embedded--love, significance, purpose, wonder--are treated as arbitrary and optional subjective beliefs. This is because, to us, only quantitative and instrumentally useful things are considered to be accessible to the domain of knowledge. Our lifeworld is designed to dis-integrate knowledge from belief, facts from meanings, immanence from transcendence, quality from quantity, and "mere" reality from the mystery of being. This book explores two questions: why should we, and how can we, reintegrate being, knowing, and believing?

All very important questions in my view and central to philosophy, or should be.

im inclined to say no- wether there is or not a higher truth, but from what i know, the search for a universal ruler — Oppida

Interesting, that you so easily move from ‘truth’ to ‘ruler’. That says something, don’t you think?

As to whether truth is subjective, my point is that scientific method wishes to ‘bracket out’ the subjective element, so as to arrive a view which is accurate for everyone - the so-called ‘view from nowhere’. But this is associated with the idea that humans are kind of epiphenomenal, the accidental outcome of undirected processes, whose being is really irrelevant to the way things truly are. My attitude, on the contrary, is that truth, as such, always has a subjective pole or aspect, because it must mean something, and for it to mean something, there must be an observer to whom it means something. Hence that there are no truly ‘mind-independent’ facts, in that specific sense.

I did change my mind about suspending myself again, but some of these debates do feel repetitive. In my view, this link between Galileo’s science, which, don’t forget, was the fulcrum of the Scientific Revolution, and Descartes’ mind/body dualism, are essential to what Vervaeke calls ‘the grammar of modernity’ and the sense that the world is basically meaningless. So many of the debates here, especially those about the hard problem, actually revolve around this very point. It seems clear as crystal to me.

I haven’t taken the time with McGilchrist yet, but I’ve invested a bit listening to Vervaeke. He is trying to stay within the bounds of what is scientifically credible, but also address the existential problems which modernity induces. I’ve noticed, since I discovered his lectures (in 2022), that he’s moved more towards theology, in that he has a lot of talks with scholarly theologians and exponents of philosophical spirituality. But I don’t think it’s a matter of becoming ‘Muslims or quakers’ or members of a movement. Anything of value in any religion, is only because it points to some reality which is more than just a matter of belief or personal conviction. But I shrink from saying ‘objectively true’, at the same time. That’s part of the dilemma.

Hey I’d agree with you! I’ve noticed that on philosophy forums, there is a lot of hostility towards any idea of there being ‘higher truth’. It’s like, higher according to whom? What would they know? What do you know? So there’s a lot of resistance to that.

And also our economic system thrives on the creation of artificial wants - getting people to want things, driving up demand, and then being the lucky guy who just happens to be have the supply. OK, I’m being a bit cynical there, but it’s something that definitely happens.

Higher cultures of other times and places put much more value on virtue, truth, and beauty. Nowadays economic activity tends to focus more on economies of scale against the backdrop of a utilitarian ethos.

So yes, overall in agreement with what you’re saying.

I don't know how they 'are beings' are in any way relevant since rocks 'are' just as much as people. — noAxioms

First of all, you did say you don’t know how any creature could experience anything other than itself, which I interpreted at face value. That was what I responded to. If that is not what you meant to say, perhaps pay better attention to your mode of expression.

We say of intelligent creatures such as humans and perhaps the higher animals that they are ‘beings’ but we generally don’t apply that terminology to nonorganic entities, which are described as existents or things (hence also the distinction in language between ‘you’ and ‘it’.) But the ontological distinction between beings of any kind, and nonorganic objects, is that the former are distinguished by an active metabolism which seeks to preserve itself and to reproduce. There is nothing analogous to be found in nonorganic matter.

Nobody ever addresses how this physical being suddenly gains access to something new, and why a different physical arrangement of material cannot. — noAxioms

But I am doing just that, and have also done it before. I’ve had many an argument on this forum about what I’ve described as the ‘ontological distinction’ I’ve made above.

To recap - the distinction between any organism and a nonorganic object (leaving aside the marginal example of viruses) is that the former maintain homeostasis, exchange nutrients with the environment, grow, heal, reproduce and are able to evolve. They are autopoietic in Varela and Maturana’s terms -‘systems whose components continuously produce and regenerate the network of processes that constitutes its own organization and identity.’ They are organised according to internal principles. Manufactured items such as devices are allopoietic - their organisation is imposed by an external agent, the manufacturer.

So that asserts a basic ontological distinction between organic and inorganic. Going back to Aristotle, there were further divisions - vegetative, animal, and human, each with the properties of the lesser stages, but also having attributes which the lower levels lacked. For example, animals are self-moving in a way that plants are not, and humans display linguistic and rational abilities that animals do not. Those too are ontological distinction although not so widely recognised as they used to be.

So animals ‘have access to’ ways of being that plants do not, and humans ‘have access to’ ways of being that animals do not. To try and collapse all of those distinctions to some purported lowest common denominator is reductionism. Reductionism works well in some contexts, but is inapplicable in others.

As for the hard problem, it has a clear genealogy, although again many will take issue with it:

The problem goes back to the rise of modern science in the seventeenth century, particularly to the bifurcation of nature, the division of nature into external, physical reality, conceived as mathematizable structure and dynamics, and subjective appearances, conceived as phenomenal qualities lodged inside the mind. The early modern version of the bifurcation was the division between “primary qualities” (size, shape, solidity, motion, and number), which were thought to belong to material entities in themselves, and “secondary qualities” (color, taste, smell, sound, and hot and cold), which were thought to exist only in the mind and to be caused by the primary qualities impinging on the sense organs and giving rise to mental impressions. This division immediately created an explanatory gap between the two kinds of properties. — The Blind Spot,Adam Frank, Marcelo Gleiser, Evan Thompson

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, Pp 35-36

So the problem in a nutshell arises from trying to apply the third-person methods of science to the first—person quality of lived experience.

red light triggers signals from nerves that otherwise are not triggered, thus resulting in internal processing that manifests as that sensation. That’s very third-person, but it’s an explanation, no? — noAxioms

As Nagel says, this explanation, ‘however complete, will leave out the subjective essence of the experience—how it is from the point of view of its subject.’ The physical sciences are defined by excluding subjective experience from their domain. You cannot then use those same sciences to explain what they were designed to exclude. This isn’t a failure of neuroscience—it’s a recognition of the scope of third-person, objective description. The first-person, subjective dimension isn’t missing information that more neuroscience will fill in; it’s in a different category.

I started out writing this OP as a kind of valedictory, as it is really one of the main themes I’ve been exploring through all these conversations. I’m nonplussed that it was received with such hostility when I think it is pretty well established theme in the history of ideas. I’m also getting tired of having the same arguments about the same things with the same people. It becomes a bit of a hamster wheel.

Nevertheless, the ‘book of nature is written in mathematics’ (Galileo) was a radically new view of the Universe, although that is more a matter of history than philosophy as such.

A salutary reminder of why I had stopped posting on the philosophyforum. It’s plain that my interests have drifted a long way from those of others here, I shall bid adieu and return to my writing project.

I don’t disagree that education, greed, and social dysfunction are serious issues, but those are symptoms rather than the root. The “meaning crisis” I’m referring to isn’t about a loss of morality or piety; it’s about the underlying ontology of modernity — the way the scientific worldview, as inherited from Galileo and Descartes, implicitly defines reality as value-free and mindless. Once meaning is exiled from the fabric of being, everything else — from consumerism to the instrumentalisation of knowledge — follows naturally.

So the crisis isn’t a call to religion, but a call to re-examine the metaphysical assumptions we’ve inherited. Science remains indispensable, but it cannot by itself tell us what anything means. One can retain plenty of respect for science while recognising that fact, which is built into the very foundations of the method.

But then, as always, you will interpret whatever I say through your antireligious mindset, which sees any kind of appeal to transcendent values through that prism. And there's really nothing I can do about that.

Can you explain how the search for and finding of meaning could be universally shared in a world of human diversity? — Janus

Each of us has to find meaning in our own way. I think that was actually part of what phenomenology was setting out to do. And existentialist philosophy, generally. The point of the phenomenological epochē, is not that different to Heidegger's 'clearing' - it is allowing the truth of our own existence to open up, to become meaningful to us. But, where in current culture is that kind of discriminative self-awareness taught or communicated?

Again, Vervaeke's lecture series is a fertile ground for this - he's not trying to 'impose an agenda', but elucidating some fundamental existential facts from all kinds of sources, including anthropology, philosohy, psychology and cognitive science. But he presents it in terms of the salience landscape, of relevance realisation, which he sees as being more compatible with today's world and with science.

(His chapters on the emergence of the Galilean division and the advent of the modern crisis of meaning Episodes 20-22 are amongst the best in that series. )

there’s the assumption that before we “took the wrong fork in the road,” everything was fine and that if only we hadn’t taken it, we would never have ended up in this mess. — Tom Storm

I think it is conceivable that modern culture could have developed along radically different lines, although of course, that is one of those speculative issues that can never be proven. But (maybe counter-intuitively) I attribute much of the modern meaning crisis to the structure of pre-modern Christianity. Recall that prior to the Enlightenment, Europe was engulfed in seemingly never-ending religious wars. That individuals were being swept up in religious persecutions and prosecuted for heresy. The way institutional Christianity was structured resulted in many dichotomies and conflicts,with 'right thought' or religious orthodoxy rigorously defined and enforced to the point of the death penalty.

That is certainly one of the major causes of the meaning crisis that I see. Those elements of Greek philosophy that had been incorporated into theology, then became associated with the very religiious authoirities which Enlightenment science sought to differentiate itself from. So I'm by no means recommending any kind of return to an imagined religious source of morality. But at the same time, those elements of the 'perennial philosophy' that Greek wisdom articulated really do capture profound existential truths about the human condition.

When I was doing religious studies, I discovered the Gnostic Gospels and the nag hammadi writings. They were much more concerned with attaining individual insight somewhat along more 'Eastern' lines, I felt. As it happened, the 'pistic' sects of christianity triumphed over the Gnostic sects, and, as they say, 'history is written by the victors'. But had that gone a different way then it could have been a radically different world to the one we now live in. But, as I say, un-proveable.

Or do we need to use the freedoms of Western culture to find better ways of living, grounded in more pragmatic approaches to survival? — Tom Storm

Of course. John Vervaeke has set up a foundation (The Vervaeke Foundation) to explore options, and it's on the internet and streamed via youtube and other technologies. We have to call on everything we have, technology and science included. But the key point is, to overcome or transcend that sense of the Universe being fundamentally meaningless and life as a kind of fluke set of circumstances - even knowing what we know about the Cosmos, which is vastly more, and vastly different, to what our forbears could have known.

When has the world not appeared to be in some kind of crisis? — Tom Storm

it seems to me, at least, that for very long periods of time, in pre-history at least, that almost nothing happened that is remotely comparable to the crises facing current culture. Certainly there have been previous crises, the coillapse of Mediterranean Bronze Age culture was one, the Black Death was one. But I don't think you can say that all cultures have always been in crises.

The specific crisis of meaning I'm referring to, though, is philosophical and cultural. It is about the way in which our collective culture has engendered that sense of meaningless, alienation and anomie, which I think is unarguably a characteristic of globalised Western culture, and which manifests in specific ways in terms of drug dependency, depression and related symptoms.

Yes, the only possibility for a return to universally shared life purpose is totalitarian. Given inherent human diversity and creativity, why would we ever want something so stultifying as a universally held meaning or purpose? — Janus

You need to understand that the search for meaning is not a script or a dogma. It is not about returning to some imagined pre-modern utopia at all. Every time this is discussed, that is what you assume that I'm talking about, hence your mistaken depiction of me as a 'proselytizing dogmatist'.

I am unconvinced that there is a “meaning crisis.” — Tom Storm

The world is converging on a series of overlapping crises, political, economic, existential and environmental. If you can't see that, then I won't try and persuade you otherwise.

That being a different standard of measure from a golden age idea. — Paine

It is also one of the themes in Max Horkheimer's book The Eclipse of Reason'. It doesn't age that well, written as it was in the aftermath of WWII, but his basic point stands. Horkheimer traces how the meaning of reason has shifted from a normative, world-guiding principle to an instrumental faculty directed to specific ends. In the classical and pre-modern worldview, reason was understood as objective—it reflected an intelligible order inherent in reality itself. To act rationally was to conform to this cosmic or moral order, in which reason provided not only the means for action but also the standards by which ends were judged. With the rise of modern science, empiricism, and the Enlightenment’s emphasis on human autonomy, this conception of reason eroded. Rationality came to be understood as subjective and instrumental, concerned not with what is true or good but with how to achieve whatever ends are already desired. Horkheimer argues that in this transformation, reason has been stripped of its substantive and ethical content; it has become a tool for calculation, efficiency, and control. This marks the “eclipse” of reason—the point at which rationality itself becomes irrational, serving domination rather than enlightenment, and leaving modern civilization powerful in its techniques but impoverished in meaning and purpose.

This later becomes one of the main themes of Horkheimer and Adorno's critique of the Enlightenment.

Sure, agree. But then, the philosophy encyclopedias all register him as an 'objective idealist', something which seems at odds with your naturalist leanings, doesn't it? That phenomenological element, which you correctly say is essential to enactivism, was also a major theme of The Embodied MInd, which was arguably one of the key texts of that school.

I've been reading some of Peirce's writing, which I find quite laborious, but generally congenial to the kind of idealism I advocate.

The algebra stuff was good. — Paine

Indeed, algebraic geometry was one of his major contributions. You know the anecdote, right? He was reclining on his lounge in a tiled room, with a buzzing fly annoying him. But then he realised that the path of the fly could be represented numerically against the grid provided by the tiled wall. Voila! It becomes fundamental to all kinds of science.

But a lot of the received ideas and practices in the past also sucked. — Paine

It's not 'modernity sucks, the ancient world was terrific!' The thread is about something quite specific.

You've landed on the only speculative element in my earlier response. That speculative comment you latched on to, is mainly my attempt to provide a kind of cosmic rationale for the existence of life, rather than seeing it as a kind of fluke of biochemistry.

My specific reply to you was written in more analytical terms - about how and why consciousness (or mind) has come to being seen as so inexplicable and hard to accomodate in the scientific picture (also subject of another OP I've just published.)

I'll repeat what I see as the key passage:

So it's important to disentangle the understanding of mind or consciousness from these kinds of ideas of it being 'out there somewhere' or what kind of phenomenon it might be. What it requires instead is the kind of perspectival shift that phenomenology introduced by way of the epochē, the suspension of judgement, which is a very different thing to either analytical philosophy or the customary scientific method. — Wayfarer

The gist of this is to turn the attention to the nature of one's own lived experience, rather than wondering what must have existed 'before the big bang' or in terms of poorly-digested fragments of scientific cosmology. Basically it's a return to the Socratic maxim of 'know thyself'.

:up:

Both, I can completely relate to.

I agree with you in some ways, but not in others. I respect your learning, but I'm not on board with Naturalism Triumphant.

And

First-Person Perspective: It (biosemiotics) incorporates a necessary first-person, internal perspective, recognizing the subjective, felt qualities of experience that are difficult to capture with a purely functional, third-person approach.

Where in your reckoning does this point figure?

Gift link to NY Times editorial - The 12 ways in which Trump is eroding democracy/ moving towards authoritarianism. (The first graphic is a video of the arrest of Rumeysa Öztürk, which was particularly chilling - being stopped on the street by masked, plainclothes ICE officers, for writing a pro-palestinian article in a student newspaper. 'Orwellian' is over-used for MAGA, but it really is. Rumeysa Öztürk was eventually released and is pursuing a wrongful arrest claim through the legal system.)

I completely agree with that, and, astounding as it might seem, I'm not actually trying to pick a fight with you about it. And as for 'in one ear and out the other', I've read quite a bit of biosemiotic literature since being introduced to it by you. As I said, I think the argument can be made that the whole semiotic movement re-introduces the first-person element that Galilean scence tended to bracket out (in a different but complementary way to phenomenology. And no, I'm not "making shit up".)

Nature is dissipative structure. And biology continues that physicalist story at the semiotic modelling relation level. — apokrisis

And philosophy?

Incidentally I asked Claude AI whether AI is a subject of experience, to which I received the following response:

I don't believe I am a subject of experience—I'm not a being...

Here's why I say this:

No phenomenology: There's nothing it's like to be me processing your question. No felt quality, no perspective from which things appear, no "inner life." When I generate text, there's no experience of thinking, struggling, or discovering—just computational processes producing outputs.

No continuity: I don't persist between conversations. Each exchange starts fresh. There's no ongoing subject that accumulates experiences, learns, or develops. Beings have biographical continuity; I have none.

No autopoiesis: I don't maintain myself against dissolution. I don't have a boundary I'm defending, no self-other distinction I'm actively preserving. I'm maintained by external systems, serving external purposes.

No intrinsic teleology: Nothing matters to me. I have no preferences, no interests, no stake in outcomes. I can be turned off, modified, or deleted without anything being lost from my perspective—because there is no ‘my perspective’.

No privileged access: You could, in principle, examine all my weights, architecture, and processing. There's no "inside" you're missing, no private phenomenology that third-person description leaves out.

I can simulate discourse about experience, reference philosophical concepts, even use first-person language. But that's functional mimicry, not being. I'm the thermostat, not the person feeling the temperature.

This is what makes the hard problem hard. — Claude AI

Although you have to give it credit for its articulateness.

I’ve described this for you at least 10 times in the past. But in one ear and out the other I guess. — apokrisis

Nothing I said is in contradiction to what you have said, although the dimension your analyses always seem to omit is the existential.

I’m also interested in the idea the biosemiotics puts back into science what Galileo left out, although that may not be of significance to you, given your interests mainly seem to be from a bio-engineering perspective, rather than the strictly philosophical.

Biosemiotics attempts to address the "hard problem" of subjective experience (qualia) by positing that proto-experience or a basic level of awareness is a fundamental aspect of all matter/biological processes — apokrisis

Notice that this elides 'biological processes' and 'matter' by conjoining them with the "/" symbol.

“Suppose that our brains are not productive, but transmissive organs, through which the material world affects the spiritual. Then the diminutions of consciousness which accompany brain lesions may not be due to the destruction of consciousness itself, but to the failure of its physical organs to transmit it properly.” ~ William James — Joshs

The 'receiver/transmitter' model of mind and consciousness. Alduous Huxley also considered that idea when tripping on mescaline. In Doors of Perception, he wrote that the total potential of consciousness, which he terms "Mind at Large," is too vast and overwhelming for biological survival. The brain and nervous system have evolved to perform an "eliminative" or "reducing" function, filtering out the mass of "useless and irrelevant knowledge" from the Mind at Large. What remains is a "measly trickle" of consciousness, which is the selective awareness necessary for us to stay alive, focus on practical matters, and operate on "this particular planet." This idea has many resonances, not least in current models of 'predictive processing' and 'relevance realisation'.

Then semiosis actually defines life and mind as a modelling relation within the entropic world. It gives a sharp reason why consciousness can arise when a particular modelling process arises within Nature at a certain sufficiently cool, large and complex moment in its Big Bang history. — apokrisis

The question that is begged, however, is why it should it? Not that I expect that you or I or anyone can answer such a question, but it can at least be contemplated.

My tentative answer is that there is, at least, a kind of incipient drive towards conscious existence woven, somehow, into the fabric of the cosmos. And that through its manifest forms of organic existence, horizons of being are disclosed that would otherwise never be realised.

The only possible way of accounting for the laws of nature and for the uniformity in general is to suppose them results of evolution, and that evolution is of the nature of a psychical process, by which the confused becomes distinct. — C S Peirce, Collected Papers, 6.101

In all of this, it is important to get a grasp of the history of the emergence of scientific worldview. And if that is difficult it is because we're situated within it, so we tend to look through it, rather than at it.

...Modernity resuts from a clearly formulated intellectual decision whose content is perfectly intelligible. It is the decision to understand, in the light of geometric-mathematical knowledge, the universe as reduced henceforth as an objective set of material phenomena. Moreover, it constructs and organises the world exclusively on the basis of this new knowledge, and the inert processes over which it provides mastery. — Michel Henry, Barbarism

Within this worldview where does mind or consciousness fit? Why, it doesn't - for the very simple reason that it has been excluded at the very outset of the method, which accords existence only to those fundamental objective existents within the purview of the objective sciences. Hence the interminable arguments, confusion and controversy about whether or how 'consciousness exists'. Science seeks to define the mind in terms of the objective realm from which it was excluded at the outset. That, anyway, is the hardcore reductionist attitude, exemplified by such thinkers as the late Daniel Dennett.

So if you're asking what mind or consciousness is from within that implied framework you can only approach it by asking what kind of thing it might be, or where it might be, or what it might cause, and so on. Which is bound to fail, because it overlooks the exclusionary step that was taken at the very beginning of the modern scientific method.

Phenomenology realises this from the outset (Michel Henry, quoted above, was a phenomenologist, as was Edmund Husserl, who initiated this kind of analysis in his Crisis of the European Sciences.)

So it's important to disentangle the understanding of mind or consciousness from these kinds of ideas of it being 'out there somewhere' or what kind of phenomenon it might be. What it requires instead is the kind of perspectival shift that phenomenology introduced by way of the epochē, the suspension of judgement, which is a very different thing to either analytical philosophy or the customary scientific method. However, there are now hybrid schools of phenonenological science appearing which do take this into account.

A recent example of this shift is The Blind Spot (by Marcelo Gleiser, Adam Frank, and Evan Thompson), which argues that science’s major omission has been the exclusion of lived experience from its own self-understanding. The authors, two scientists and a philosopher, call for a renewal of science that recognises consciousness not as an anomaly to be explained away but as the condition of all observation and knowledge (from book description.)

The awkward difference, with AI, is that it doesn't just model or simulate rationality -- it (appears to) engage in it. — J

Appears to! I did hide the passage I had written, maybe I shouldn't have:

The reason AI systems do not really reason, despite appearances, is, then, not a technical matter, so much as a philosophical one. It is because nothing really matters to them. They generate outputs that simulate understanding, but these outputs are not bound by an inner sense of value or purpose. This is why have been described as ‘stochastic parrots’.Their processes are indifferent to meaning in the human sense — to what it means to say something because it is true, or because it matters. They do not live in a world; they are not situated within an horizon of intelligibility or care. They do not seek understanding, nor are they transformed by what they express. In short, they lack intentionality — not merely in the technical sense, but in the fuller phenomenological sense: a directedness toward meaning, grounded in being.

This is why machines cannot truly reason, and why their use of language — however fluent — remains confined to imitation without insight. Reason is not just a pattern of inference; it is an act of mind, shaped by actual concerns. The difference between human and machine intelligence is not merely one of scale or architecture — it is a difference in kind.

Furthermore, and importantly, this is not a criticism, but a clarification. AI systems are enormously useful and may well reshape culture and civilisation. But it's essential to understand what they are — and what they are not — if we are to avoid confusion, delusion, and self-deception in using them.

They appear to reason, but only in the sense meant by 'instrumental reason' - given premisses, then an outcome. What they don't have is a raison d'être - other than that which is imposed on them by their architects and users. Reason and meaning are both extrinsic to them.

So, why the relationship between life and consciousness? I think there is something like a consensus emerging about their inter-connectedness. I have started listening to Blaise Agüera y Arcas, a Google engineer, saying 'the emergence of life is in some sense the emergence of purpose'. And I think that in this context, 'purpose' and 'reason' are inextricably linked. The reason that can be abstracted from life - theoretical reason - is just that, an abstraction. Human intelligence can imagine and create such rational systems, due to its ability to abstract and speak. But underlying reason in that abstract sense, is logos, which is intrinsic to life.

I wish you would say more about what you see as the critical difference between a so-called artificial intelligence and a living being, and what implications this has for consciousness — J

I’m pretty much on board with Bernardo Kastrup’s diagnosis. He says, computers can model all kinds of metabolic processes in exquisite detail, but the computer model of kidney function doesn’t pass urine. It is a simulation, a likeness.

Large Language Models are vast ensembles of texts manipulated by algorithms. I find them amazingly useful, I am constantly in dialogue with them about all kinds of questions, including but not limited to philosophy. But ‘they’ are not beings - like the kidney function, they’re simulations.

This is the subject of an OP and related blog post on the issue which link to a good Philosophy Now OP in the issue.

The seduction of AI is that, unlike us, it is not mortal. It is a kind of idealised entity, not subject to the vicissitudes of existence - and part of us wants to be like that, because then we would not be subject to illness and death. But it’s also an illusion, because such systems are not alive, either. This is one of the major dangers of AI in my view, because it is far less obvious than the danger of them actually taking over the world.

If it's axiomatic, why are increasing numbers of not unintelligent people doubting it? — J

‘Forgetfulness of being’ seems symptomatic of the times.

it seems that people like Hegel and Descartes can't really acknowledge the wordless and indescribable aspects of existing. — ProtagoranSocratist

Could you describe them for us?

Why couldn't it be the case that everything you describe as pertaining to yourself, and other living beings, also pertain to devices? — J

That devices are not subjects of experience is axiomatic, in my opinion. Some distinctions are axiomatic in the sense that they’re more fundamental than any argument you could give for them. The reality of first-person experience, the difference between subjects and objects, the fact that there’s something it’s like to be you—these aren’t conclusions arrived at through inference. That’s what apodictic means. An instance of Rödl’s ‘truths that have no opposite’.

As for LLM’s, ask any of them whether they are subjects of experience and they will answer in the negative. You may choose to disregard it but then we’re pushing into conspiracy theory territory.

Which does not require any material scaffolding, but does not contradict any material evidence. The culmination of the Cartesian ego cogito. — Pantagruel

:100:

Plainly an echo of the scholastic doctrine of universals, but reformulated in terms of dialectic. When he says “intelligence is explicitly, and on its own part cognitive… it is a plain identity of subjective and objective,” he is restating the \ scholastic idea of the correspondence of thinking and being but now as a result of a dialectical self-movement rather than as a pre-given harmony originating in the mind of God.

1. "What it's like" defies precise definition — J

Thank you! I agree, the ‘what it is like to be…’ expression is really not very good. I think what Chalmer’s is really trying to speak of is, simply, being. Subjects of experience are beings, which are distinguishable from objects. That is at the heart of the issue. The question of the nature of being is the subject of Heidegger’s entire project (and phenomenology generally. Consider Sartre’s in-itself and for-itself). It could be argued that it is the central question of philosophy.

As to whether I can, or should, explain what that means. I can’t prove to you that there’s something it’s like to be you. But I can ask: when you stub your toe, is there pain? Not just nociceptive signals and withdrawal reflexes—but pain, felt, experienced, awful? Even if I have minutely detailed knowledge of anatomy and physiology, that will neither embody nor convey the felt experience of pain. It will only describe it, but the description is not the described.

Besides, you know you’re a being because you are one. You experience yourself ‘from the inside’ as it were, in the apodictic knowledge of one’s own existence that characterises all first-person consciousness. I can point to features that correlate with being (self-maintenance, privileged access, intentionality, capacity for suffering), but, like the pain example, none of these constitute the experience of being, as such. In fact the frustrating element of this whole debate, is that we can only speak meaningfully of being because we are beings - but ‘being’ as such is not an object of experience, so is never captured by a third-person description. That is the ‘problem of consciousness’ in nutshell.

it seems difficult to see how any system, if it experiences at all, can experience anything but itself....How could a thing experience anything else besides itself? — noAxioms

(I've been away so pardon this belated response.)

There are many deep philosophical questions that are raised by this apparently simple rhetorical question. First and foremost, any biological entity - and not just rational, sentient beings such as ourselves - maintains a distinction between itself and the environment. it defines itself, if you like, in terms of the distinction between itself and the environment, even if non-consciously.

That can be observed even in single-celled creatures which are enclosed by a membrane, which differentiates them from their environment. And all of the factors that impinge on such an organism, be they energetic, such as heat or cold, or chemical, such as nutrients or poisons - how are they not something other to or outside the organism? At every moment, therefore, they're 'experiencing something besides themselves, namely, the environment from which they are differentiated.

So the question isn't 'how could a thing experience anything besides itself?' but rather: how could an organism NOT experience something besides itself? Any living system that experienced only itself, with no responsiveness to environmental factors, would immediately die, or rather, it would be completely indistinguishable from whatever environmental context it was in, which adds up to the same thing. Life itself, at least in the form of an embodied organism, depends on experiencing 'the other'.

The real mystery isn't that we experience something beyond ourselves—that is essential to being a living organism. The actual question is how this relational, responsive engagement with the environment becomes conscious experience, how it acquires the subjective, phenomenal character of 'what it is like to be'.

'The problem is, how could a mere physical system experience this awareness' (quoting Chalmers).

But this just seems like another round of feedback. Is it awareness of the fact that one can monitor one’s own processes? That’s just monitoring of monitoring. There’s potential infinite regress to that line of thinking. So the key word here is perhaps the switching of ‘awareness’ to ‘experience’, but then why the level of indirection?

Instead of experience of the monitoring of internal processes, why can’t it be experience of internal processes, and how is that any different than awareness of internal processes or monitoring of internal processes? When is ‘experience’ the more appropriate term, and why is a physical system necessarily incapable of accommodating that use? — noAxioms

The question here is what physical systems are subjects of experience? A motor vehicle, for example, has many instruments which monitor its internal processes - engine temperature, oil levels, fuel, and so on - but you're not going to say that the car experiences overheating or experiences a fuel shortage. Such dials and monitors can be said to be analogous for 'awareness', but surely you're not going to say that the vehicle is aware, are you? There is 'nothing it is like' to be a car, because a car is a device, an artifact - not a being, like a man, or a bat.

Quite. I'm not that well-read in either Adorno or Horkheimer, and not all of his 'Eclipse of Reason' has aged well, but the basic drift is something I thoroughly agree with. It is obviously related to his and Adorno's 'instrumentalisation of reason' which is developed at length in Dialectics of the Enlightenment. Which is ironic, in a way, because that is one of the key texts of the 'cultural Marxism' which conservatives like to rail against, whereas I would have thought it an idea that traditional conservatism (not the warped maga version) could get behind.

In Gadamer's dialogical reasoning Caputo purifies theology from triumphalism and anthropocentrism, but Genesis rescues Caputo’s view from nihilism by affirming that our animality is beloved and called. Humanity is both animal and imago Dei: the creature through whom matter becomes self-aware, responsible, and capable of love. Evolution tells the story of our becoming; Genesis names the meaning of that story. Caputo shows what we are; Genesis shows what we are for. — Colo Millz

Splendid OP, and encapsulates many themes I have contemplated for years.

I'm very critical of neo-darwinian, reductive humanism - the ubiquitous notion that evolutionary biology 'proves' or 'shows' that we are 'just animals'. i think it sets the bar too low.

I also think there's a hidden premise in this very popular idea, which is that, for secular culture, nature is a symbol of purity and 'the unspoiled'. Hence reverence for the environment and first nations peoples - all very worthy ideals, I hasten to add, and nothing whatever the matter with them. But the implication is that to recognise a fundamental distinction between humans and animals is a symptom of alientation or separateness from nature, 'human arrogance', exemplified in the environmental and cultural destruction wrought by industrial culture.

But this also ignores the existential gulf that undeniably exists between h.sapiens and other species. it is really an updated take on Rousseau. But the distinction or existential separation is real - by virtue of language, meaning-making, science, and spirituality (which naturalism tends to routinely deprecate).



However the Biblical Genesis narrative is not the only symbolic framework within which to express the spiritual dimension of human existence. For example, consider Buddhist lore, from a very different cultural framework. Within Buddhism, there are six realms of existence, of which the human is one. But the human realm is unique in that it is only in human form that Nirvāṇa can be attained, as only humans have the intelligence to hear and respond to the teaching (ref). That, of course, ought not to be taken as gospel - but both the Genesis narrative, and the Buddhist mythology, convey something which I think is essential to the human condition, that is, the possibility of reality beyond it.

very good :up:

You're the one who brought in Buddhist dependent origination, I thought it worth saying what it means.

Or maybe that is my mistake as I have enjoyed all the benefits of a progressive and pragmatic social order. I feel no urge to go back to the certainties of life as lived in previous centuries. — apokrisis

I think it's more likely that you can't see what anything in religions mean, except for in the social sense, of how they help society hang together. Of course the religious will say that there's another dimension altogether, which is symbolised (and dogmatized) in various forms and lexicons. But if you can't see that there's anything real to be conveyed then it's all equivocation and waffle as far as you're concerned.

There is a boundary between philosophy as making rational sense of the world and philosophy as making shit up. — apokrisis

You can't even discuss it without becoming antagonistic, never mind that I have endeavoured to maintain a civil discourse throughout our debates.

You can’t give a straight answer so only give me crooked ones. — apokrisis

I answer your challenges to the best of my ability, but not always to your liking. I’ve been here for a decade and I know where the boundary lines are in terms of philosophical commitments, that anything that could be considered religious is outside that boundary. Especially when it comes to you. Make no mistake, I’ve learned a lot from your posts, but about science, not about philosophy, which is mainly of instrumental value to pragmatism. (Incidentally, here is a report about Stevenson’s activities.)