I would have thought you’d agree with:

Frege’s contention that the content of thought (<p>) can be entirely objective and independent of any particular subject.

Frege’s contention is that the content of thought (<p>) can be entirely objective and independent of any particular subject. Frege’s emphasis is on the idea that thoughts exist as abstract, objective entities in a “third realm,” independent of whether anyone thinks them. According to Frege, thoughts are, in principle, accessible to any rational being, and their validity does not depend on any individual subject’s act of thinking. Frege lays this out in a famous essay called ‘The Thought’ (in translation).

Without that background none of this makes a lot of sense.

It looks to me that Kant is saying that the I think must be able to accompany all my representations. I don't see Rödl's interpretation that <Every time p is thought, I think p is thought> — Leontiskos

Is the contention from both Kant and Rödl simply that any thought that <p> is necessarily entertained by a conscious subject? Meaning that the subject is implicit in any thought? Which is aimed at Frege’s contention that the object of thought can be entirely independent of any subject.

Incomprehension followed by profanities. True to form.

But it does more than that. Yes. there is an external reality, but no, we don’t see it as it is. That surely provides scope for philosophical analysis, doesn’t it?

I guess it's time to stop trying. — Janus

I'd agree with that. I've tried to field your many repetitive complaints in good faith for a lot of years, but it does become wearisome.

Is he an authroity? Must I agree with him? — Janus

Of course not. When I cite a source for support, it is to orient my arguments with respect to others, standard practice in debates.

You are simply wrong about this—you just don't want to admit it because it doesn't suit your narrative. — Janus

And you're what Kant describes as a transcendental realist. That is a term he uses to describe the philosophical position that treats objects of experience (phenomena) as if they exist independently of the mind and are exactly as they appear to us. In other words, a transcendental realist assumes that the world as we perceive it corresponds directly to the way the world truly is, independent of our cognitive faculties.

This is not part of 'my narrative' but a philosophical argument which you've never demonstrated a grasp of, then, having failed to understand it, at which you lob various ineffective responses. But, thanks for the target practice!

But you believe numbers are real and you believe the One Mind is real. — Janus

Hence the distinction between what exists and what is real. I said, I know it's a difficult distinction to make and that it's controversial, and that it's an heuristic rather than a theory as such, but I hope you can at least see what I'm getting at. (I think @Tom Storm does.)

For me Deacon makes too much of absentials — Janus

That's convenient for you. It happens to be central to his entire project of Incomplete Nature.

But it cannot explain the fact that we see precisely the same things in the same places at the same times. — Janus

That's because we don't. The most detailed analysis of objects is, of course, physics. And quantum physics is the most detailed form of physics. And here, it has been demonstrated that no two observations of quantum events are exactly the same for different observers. See A quantum experiment suggests there’s no such thing as objective reality. Why also I refer to Christian Fuchs and QBism - he says:

The very idea of science from the usual point of view is to take out everything to do with human subjectivity and see what remains. QBism says, if you take everything out of quantum theory to do with human subjectivity, then nothing remains.

And this is because there is an ineluctably subjective aspect to anything we perceive as real. Our minds construe the same things in the same ways because we are similar kinds of subjects, so we can arrive at inter-subjective agreement with respect to objects. Of course those objects exist, but the reality we impute to them originates with the mind, through identification, naming, apperception, etc.

existents are ideas in a universal mind in which we all participate. — Janus

That is very much the thrust of Bernardo Kastrup's analytical idealism, with which I'm definitely sympathetic (despite disagreement with some of his polemics). I think it's also implicit in neo-platonist philosophy. It's much nearer to what I believe to be the case, than the direct realism which holds that the world comprises individual subjects and particular objects that are all independently real.

It's more like a curse, I would argue. — Arcane Sandwich

There's no accounting for taste, especially in popular music. Some people like Neil Diamond.

We'll play AC/DC — Arcane Sandwich

'You're the Voice' would be preferable.

It is interesting that many of the folks are volunteers. I mean, that's positive. It increases the participation of the people in politics (in my opinion). — javi2541997

However, shouldn't be forgotten that voting is mandatory. When my son moved permanently to the US, he would regularly receive fine notices for not voting via our Australian address, until I pestered him to file the requisite forms and get taken off the electoral roll. Although I think mandatory voting is a good thing, overall, even though there's a certain kind of paradox to it (and Australia is not unique in that respect.)

Certainly no one here drinks Fosters — Banno

Especially with the hundreds of beer varieties on offer at virtually every suburban bottleshop.

what is the AEC sounding out staff on their availability for? Is it something related to elections? — javi2541997

that's right - all the folks who man the voting booths and conduct the ballot, many of them volunteers. The latest it can be is May 2025 but it could be April or any time before then.

number does appear in the phenomenal world—we encounter great numbers of phenomena. — Janus

Because as a rational sentient being, you can number them.

Also what does it mean to say that number, laws etc are objects of nous? Does it simply mean that they are ideas? — Janus

The point about objects of intellectual cognition such as numbers, geometric and scientific principles and the like is that while they are ideas, they are the same for all who think. They're not the property of individual minds. See in this post 'Augustine on Intelligible Objects'.

If numbers, laws etc., and all other objects are ideas in the "One Mind" then surely, they exist as such. Do you believe they stand out for the "One Mind" ? If so then they must exist for that mind, no? — Janus

There are many difficult metaphysical questions involved in this enquiry. First, I don't believe, on the same grounds that I don't believe numbers exist, that the 'One Mind' exists. It is an expression, like a figure of speech, to convey the irreducibly mental side of whatever can be considered real. Put another way, whatever is real, is real for a mind. But that mind is never an object of experience, it is only ever the subject to whom experience occurs.

(From Eriugena, "things accessible to the senses and the intellect are said to exist, whereas anything that, “through the excellence of its nature,” transcends our faculties is said not to exist. According to this view, God, because of his transcendence, is said not to exist. He is described as “nothingness through excellence.” Likewise Paul Tillich 'to argue that God exists is to deny Him.')

I've started to explore the connection between the unknowable subject and Terrence Deacon's absentials. Absentials, as you will recall, are 'constitutive absences: A particular and precise missing element that is a critical defining attribute of 'ententional' phenomena, such as functions, thoughts, adaptations, purposes, and subjective experiences.'

I have often said to you that your position needs a universal mind or God in order to explain how we all experience the same world. But you always seem to pass this over and to be reluctant to posit such a mind. — Janus

Because it's a reification. To declare that such a mind exists is to make of it an object, one among others. The sense in which intelligible objects are reified into 'objects' parallels the sense in which God is reified into 'a being'. (Heidegger also makes a similar point in his distinction of seine and seiendes.)

As for how we experience the same world, I invariably reply that as we are members of the same species, language-group, culture and society, then there is a considerable stock of common experiences which we will draw on in interpreting what we see. But it's nevertheless true that different individuals all experience a unique instantiation of reality albeit converging around certain commonalities.

well, as I said, more's the pity that nuclear has been made subject to partisan politics. It's too big an issue, but I guess if Dutton looses, that will be the end of debate about it.

Splendidly put sir. They arise from our experience and interpretation of the world. See https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/955313 for an excerpt from the book I mentioned.

But what we don't often hear are the ideas Joshs has proposed in more detail. — Tom Storm

I've found a book on Husserl, phenomenology and mathematics. Tough going but I think my very simple grasp of philosophy of maths can co-exist peacefully with Husserl's.

Albanese would like to distance himself from the Greens, — Banno

Regardless, I noticed last night that Hanson-Young was talking up the necessity of supporting Albanese over the Coalition. The Greens are losing voters in spades, they need to shift more towards the centre. Wouldn't be surprised to see a Labor-Greens-Teal coalition.

Interesting perspective from Pyne, although I think it presumes that Dutton is playing a kind of three-dimensional chess strategy when I'm sure his attitude was a lot more simplistic than that.

Which is why I keep mentioning Thinking Being. This book has been put online, in reality it's out of print and when available was very expensive. The online unauthorised copy is a fully bookmarked .pdf. The chapters on Parmenides and Plato are well worth the effort of reading, they will set anyone straight on the origin of the platonic forms. (This book is highly recommended by John Vervaeke, that's how I found it.)

You never answer the question so often posed to you. How could something that does not exist in space and time be real? Real in what sense? — Janus

What do you mean, 'I never answer it'? I have >23k posts on this forum, and a significant proportion are devoted to just this question. I've said already in this thread:

My heuristic, and it is only that, is that numbers, laws, etc, are real but not existent as phenomena. They do not appear amongst phenomena, but can only be discerned by the intellect (nous). So they are, in the Platonic sense, but not the Kantian, noumenal objects, object of nous. Of course, we rely on them automatically, transparently, and continuously, in the operations of discursive thought, whenever we make inferences or judgements. But the elements of those judgements do not, themselves, exist in the way that tables and chairs and Banno's beloved crockery exists. Without them, though, we could not even converse, let alone pursue philosophy. — Wayfarer

So there's my answer to it, it was the substance of my first forum post. Criticize it all you like, but don't say I haven't tried to answer the question! Which is, a distinction between what is real, and what exists, where the latter is a small sub-section of the former.

This was my first ever forum post, around 2008:

some Platonic realm — Tom Storm

I think there is confusion around the term 'platonic realm'. There is a domain of natural numbers, right? Where is it? Obviously a silly question; 'domain' is in this context a kind of metaphor, like a 'place' or 'realm', when there really is no such place or realm. Nevertheless the domain is a real one, in that it includes integers but not imaginary numbers. Go back to that essay What is Math I quoted right at the start of this thread. We read 'Scientists tend to be empiricists; they imagine the universe to be made up of things we can touch and taste and so on; things we can learn about through observation and experiment. The idea of something existing “outside of space and time” makes empiricists nervous.' And that, I reckon, is what is behind the myth of the 'platonic realm'. We try to imagine it as a literal domain or place, which doesn't make sense, but then, only things that exist in space and time are considered real. So the 'platonic realm' then becomes imagined as a kind of ghostly palace with ethereal models of ideal objects, when it is not that at all. It is a domain of 'objects' that can only be grasped by reason.

Any organism capable of sensation and movement, even an amoeba, constructs and interprets its world relative to norms of sensorimotor engagement with it. With Barad, Deleuze, Haraway and Rouse we are able to include the inanimate world as itself organized agentially (configurative assemblages) relative to itself, such that one part of the world interprets another by intra-affectiing with it. Expanding your conception of agency would allow you to avoid the charge of anthropocentrism. — Joshs

I contemplate the idea that the appearance of organic life is also the appearance of intentionality in rudimentary form, beginning with the physical division of organism and world, even if rudimentary organisms have no conscious sense of self. (I’m reading Mind and World at the moment.) But I see ontological distinctions or gradations between the organic and the inorganic, the sentient and insentient, and between rational and other sentient beings. I don’t believe in extending the idea of agency to the inorganic domain, as I’m not a materialist of any stripe, nouveau or traditional. (That’s why I can deal with biosemiosis, but not pansemiosis.)

The Buddhist view of the significance of human life is relevant to this discussion. In Buddhism, only in human form is release from saṃsāra possible. I suppose that might be considered anthropocentric but in other respects Buddhists have not sought ‘dominion over the whole Earth’ as the Semitic religions have encouraged. (See David Loy, Are Humans Special?)

If Wigner’s point is that the laws of nature are written in the language of mathematics, then that’s precisely what I’m trying to invalidate. It’s the human-constructed norms of nature that are written in the language of mathematics, not anything to do with nature ‘in itself’. — Joshs

But doesn’t that assume the very separation between mind and world that elsewhere you’re very keen to criticize? Humans are, after all, part of the very world which mathematics describes so effectively. While it’s true that ‘not everything that counts can be counted’, the human ability to intuit the quantifiable forms of nature seems, as Wigner says, tantamount to a miracle. (Plato has Socrates say it is something the soul learns before the descent into the material world.)

Applied mathematics has been extraordinarily effective because it enables us to connect mathematical with physical principles. Schopenhauer noted in passing that science ‘really teaches nothing more than the relation of one idea to another’ because, for him, the entire domain of phenomenal experience comprises ideas. He also says that science cannot get at the ‘inmost truth of things’, with which I also agree. But it nevertheless enables an enormous range of powers. That’s the sense in which Plato deems Dianoia (mathematical and geometrical knowledge) higher than sense perception, although not the highest form, which is noesis.

does that mean I can't trust anything science says? — Darkneos

You're asking a very big question in this OP, but not a question that science itself can answer, because it’s about judgement. Scientific methods delivered us the systems we interact with to read and write on this Forum, and it works fine. So in that sense you can trust it. But questions of meaning, philosophical questions about the nature of reality and so on, are not necessarily the kinds of issues that science itself can answer. Science assumes a mind-independent reality, but often overlooks the role of the mind in arriving at judgement of it.

But the evidence showing how theories can alter our perception... — Darkneos

Not our perception, our judgement - again a question of meaning. This shows up in physics, subject of the other thread you started: nobody disagrees that quantum theory works, but there's huge disagreement about what it means. The predictions are reliable, but what it's telling us about the nature of reality is another thing altogether.

I'm not sure what anti-realism is but I find it hard to fight against it.

From the wiki page it means:

In analytic philosophy, anti-realism is the position that the truth of a statement rests on its demonstrability through internal logic mechanisms, such as the context principle or intuitionistic logic, in direct opposition to the realist notion that the truth of a statement rests on its correspondence to an external, independent reality. In anti-realism, this external reality is hypothetical and is not assumed — Darkneos

I agree. But you can be a philosophical 'anti-realist' and still be completely realistic when it comes to the practical affairs of life - making a living, paying bills, and so on. What the anti-realist is really point out is that how the world appears to us is in some important way the product of the mind-brain. We perceive but also interpret the sensory data, and those judgements are internal to the mind, such that we don't notice the role our mind plays in constructing what we take to be independently real.

I've found this video very insightful regarding this question. It's exploring basically the same question as you're asking.

I’m generally in agreement with everything you’ve said in this thread. But one of the thoughts it has triggered in me, is the role of language and, therefore, syntax and grammar, in conscious thought. Being able to think in words. Of course, I say that as a primarily verbal person, who has made a living as a technical writer and spends an inordinate of time writing on this forum. But engaging in this form of thought and activity, requires an understanding of not only the laws of grammar, but (hopefully) also those of correct inference. And that is something only intelligent subjects, or rational agents, properly possess. After all, today’s naturalism never tires of assuring us that the Universe as such does not display such a rational order, that it is something that us humans superimpose on it. And that is something that only a rational, conscious agent can do!

Mathematics arose from observing phenomena in the physical world — jgill

And, more than ‘observing’. Cats and dog are quite capable of ‘observing’ the things humans observe. But only h.sapiens can measure and quantify.

(I read somewhere in my incessant stream of internet content that the basics of physical geometry were invented - or discovered - by the Egyptians, as a consequence of having to re-create fence lines on the Nile delta after the annual flood season. This involved apportioning highly irregularly-shaped parcels of land so that each landowner ended up with the right quantity, even though the shapes of their allotments were completely different to the year before. But then, they did build the Pyramids…..)

thereby highlighting an intriguing link between physical causation and logical necessity, which today’s philosophy generally describes in terms of separate domains.

You mean, alternative mathematical systems that could produce similar results?

A big part of that paper is not that maths just happens to work, but that powerful predictions can arise from mathematical models that were not at all expected when the model was initially created, sometimes in subjects that seem remote from the one to which it was initially applied. So why is it that mathematical predictions so often anticipate unexpected empirical discoveries? He doesn’t attempt to explain why that is so, as much as just point it out.

I myself am a critic of ‘scientism’, the attempt to subordinate all knowledge to mathematical quantfication, but I don’t think that invalidates Wigner’s point.

Forgetting the role such presuppositions play leads to such confusions as Wigner’s famous paper on the ‘unreasonable effectiveness’ of mathematics in the natural sciences. — Joshs

Can you explain what about Wigner’s famous paper you think is confused?

It’s just a focus, and Rödl’s book is very focused. Otherwise, questions like ‘what is consciousness’ and ‘are animals conscious’ just become like hundreds of other topics on this forum.

Context! Sebastian Rödl's book is about human reason. The title is "Self-Consciousness and Reason: An Introduction to Absolute Idealism" (Google Books preview.) I don't think, from what I've read so far, that 'animal consciousness' is even considered in this book.

As far as animal intelligence is concerned, a rudimentary sense of 'self and other' would characterise any life whatever, even that of single-celled organisms, in that the hallmark of any organism is its ability to maintain separateness from the sorrounding environment. Minerals and inorganic matter, on the other hand, have no such separation and are altered by whatever energetic forces and chemical influences act on them from the sorrounding environment; they are not agents, in that sense. But I for one don't believe that insects, amoeba, reptiles, and fish engage in thought as such, as their behaviours can be explained solely in terms of stimulus and response. The higher animals - primates, canids, felines, whales, bears, birds - have a correspondingly greater or more elaborated sense of themselves, defending territories and mates, and many can recognise themselves in mirrors (see the mirror test.) But I think questions about 'whether animals think' really belong in the Rational Thinking Humans and Animals thread.

I bolded Kant's phrase, above, because it focuses on what we'd like to understand better -- just what the heck does it mean for consciousness to "accompany" something? Would we know it when it happened? As a thesis, can it be falsified by experience? — J

There's a word I've only become aware of recently 'ipseity'. It means 'having a sense of self'. It seems pretty straightforward that as far as self-aware beings are concerned, ipseity in the sense of the differentiation between self and other, me and not-me, is fundamental, as noted. In simple organisms, I think it operates without any conscious sense or self-awareness as such. Perhaps higher animals, and certainly in humans, the self becomes self-aware. But whether that sense constitutes an 'experience' is moot - I would say not. I would say it signifies the capacity for experience. Unconscious, anaesthetized or asleep, that sense of self falls into abeyance - there is no self-awareness, although in sleep the parasympathetic nervous system maintains a low level of self-awareness sufficient to rouse the subject if needed. In any case, when anaesthetised, (and leaving aside the perplexing cases of near death experience where subjects report seeing their body from the outside) there is no experience nor the capacity for it. But the conscious state is not so much an experience, as the medium of experience. //As per your #3//

You mean the one from the University of Canterbury?
— Wayfarer

Yep. — apokrisis

Actually that makes perfect sense to me, little as I know about physical cosmology.

Physics isn’t in conflict with the existence of life and mind. It was the entropic move needed to make possible the informational counter-move. — apokrisis

So might I enquire where consciousness/awareness enters the picture as you see it? Causal or consequential?

This is the fractal distribution of matter and energy that best characterises Nature. We see it in the Cosmic Web. It is the new "better" explanation for dark energy — apokrisis

You mean the one from the University of Canterbury? Dark Energy May Not Exist

The design develops from within due to the way Being has to grow into a realm that can lawfully persist. — apokrisis

Would that comprise an 'overall increase of intelligibility'? Does that sound Hegelian? (Then again Peirce professed affinities with Hegel.)

So organisms arose when they stumbled across the further trick of encoding information using genes, neurons, words and numbers. — apokrisis

Don't they have to exist before they can stumble across anything?

n principle, life and mind just are expressions of the generalised cosmic desire to optimise dissipation. — apokrisis

Likewise, 'desire' can't help but sound teleological or anthropomorphic. Perhaps 'tendency' might be preferable.

For that matter, the capitalised Being above - does that refer to or distinguish living beings in particular? What is the capitalisation intended to signify?

there are thinking things that do not have a sense of self — Philosophim

Any examples come to mind?

I know nothing of those other guys, so, there is that… — Mww

Sebastian Rödl is Professor of Practical Philosophy at Leipzig University and an advocate of absolute idealism, associated with G W Hegel:

“According to Hegel, being is ultimately comprehensible only as an all-inclusive whole (das Absolute). Hegel asserted that in order for the thinking subject (human reason or consciousness) to be able to know its object (the world) at all, there must be in some sense an identity of thought and being.”

Perhaps Rödl could be seen as resuscitating German idealism.

It's almost like a phase shift, a new way of conceiving something that had always seemed obvious. Both Kimhi and Rödl are asking us to rethink what we thought we knew. — J

I probably should not leap into this breech, but I think I understand the meta-philosophical reason for this. I think it's linked to something which John Vervaeke calls 'participatory knowing':

Participatory Knowledge

Participatory knowledge is the knowledge of what it’s like to play a certain role in your environment or in relationships.

Vervaeke considers this to be the most profound of the four types of knowledge. It involves being in a deep, transformative relationship with the world, participating fully in something that is wider than you.

It is not just knowing about, but knowing through active engagement and transformation within specific contexts or environments. It shapes and is shaped by the interaction between the person and the world, influencing one’s identity and sense of belonging.

This kind of knowledge is experiential and co-creative, often seen in the dynamics of relationships, culture, and community participation.

With the advent of liberal individualism, the individual becomes 'atomised' and knowledge becomes increasingly propositional and procedural. The participatory nature of 'know-how' (Kant's 'practical reason?' Aristotle's 'phronesis'?) becomes occluded or reduced to the propositional. The existential dimension is obscured, an insight which is associated more with continental than analytic philosophy.

Oh. Well Jim Franklin is indeed a UNSW philosopher, so an easy misidentification to make.

Jim Franklin was a customer of Campus Computers at Usyd in the late 1980’s, when I was manager there. He was then quite a gnomic figure back then with long hair and beard. (I went to a book launch of his in 2023 and made the acquaintance of a nice academic with whom I corresponded for a few months thereafter. Franklin didn’t remember me although I wouldn’t have expected him to. See also his criticism of Stove’s Gem, which I think is quite applicable to many debates you and I have had.)

Yes, agree! I didn’t read it carefully enough. I read one, and then four, but now you mention it, 3 hits the nail on the head.

Philosophy in Australia is not that simple. — Banno

Thanks for the link, will read with interest. As I’ve often mentioned, Armstrong was HoD when I was an undergrad, and as an aspiring counter-cultural philosopher, I was duty bound to reject Materialist Theory of Mind on the basis of the title alone. Of course he was an erudite and persuasive fellow, but I’ve formed the view that the variety of materialism he advocated was basically a form of Christian heresy, based on re-interpreting the Aristotelian universals as scientific laws.

Keith Campbell, on the other hand, I liked a lot. His Philosophy of Matter unit was the best individual course I did in philosophy. Got an HD for an essay on Lucretius. :cool: