Yes, you can see it, and report accordingly, as a rational sentient being.

I vote '1'. Just as Kant (and Husserl) say, 'transcendental' means 'necessary for thought but not accessible to it'. We're generally *not* self-conscious in that we take 'the world' to exist independently of us, not seeing the way in which the mind itself has constructed the framework within which that idea is meaningful. That kind of introspective self-awareness is hardly prized by our consumerist culture.

Some people are aware of it, some are not. — J

Those who are, possess a finer sense of self-awareness than those who don't. It's called 'discriminative wisdom'.

The “I think” accompanies all our thoughts, says Kant. — J

...whatever judgements are made about the world, the mind provides the framework within which such judgements are meaningful. So though we know that prior to the evolution of life there must have been a Universe with no intelligent beings in it, or that there are empty rooms with no inhabitants, or objects unseen by any eye — the existence of all such supposedly unseen realities still relies on an implicit perspective. — Wayfarer

That 'implicit perspective' is the same as what Rödl argues for, I suspect, although I'm still taking it in.

Give me a specific example of such behavior on my part. With quotes. — Arcane Sandwich

I did just that, but you're in such a hurry to reply that you didn't notice.

Then don't debate with me. No one's forcing you. — Arcane Sandwich

Sure thing. Hope you enjoy your time here, but might serve not to spread yourself too thin.

And I'm saying that you get it backwards or upside down, in pursuit of so-called anti-scientific certainty. — Arcane Sandwich

But without any supporting argument.

I'm beginning to form the view that you're too confused to debate with. You will jump in with an appeal to Mario Bunge, who you mention frequently, who is a textbook scientific materialist and ' professor of scientism', yet when those ideas are challenged, you will say, 'hey that's not me, that's him!' - even though you're the one who introduced him and appeared to argue for his position. What gives? You will say things that I find quite agreeable and then a couple of sentences later, say the very opposite. Maybe your screen name is well-chosen. :chin:

you won't find the feeling of "I'm hungry" anywhere, on your anatomy table. — Arcane Sandwich

No kidding. Anyone will know that corpses do not have appetites.

Why are you against the very concept ofcognitive neuroscience to begin with? That's the part that I can't seem to wrap my head around. Like, it's not that crazy as you make it sound, man. Bunge himself said that one of the cutting edge sciences of today is cognitive neuroscience. — Arcane Sandwich

I'm not opposing them. I'm saying they don't support the view that neural states are identical to the contents of thought or that the elements of consciousness can be reduced to the neurophysiology.

The point I've made, which indeed you haven't wrapped your head around, is that the world within which materialism is true, is one created by the brain/mind. I'm saying materialism gets it backwards or upside down, in pursuit of so-called scientific certainty.

I'm not Bunge. — Arcane Sandwich

But you did say:

my solution is better than yours, because my solution is technically Bunge's solution to the problem. If this is reduced to community terms, I prefer to agree with Bunge than with you on that point. — Arcane Sandwich

That is the view that I was critiquing, whether or not you later chose to defend it.

Hang on, you will say. What about those amazing devices which allow science to reconstruct images from neural data? Subject thinks 'yacht', and lo, a yacht appears on the monitor.
— Wayfarer

I've never heard of such a thing. I don't think that's possible, — Arcane Sandwich

Fluff. Let me lay it out for you. Bunge et al, the scientific materialists want to bring mind under the ambit of the neurosciences - firm, objective, and measurable. Thoughts are brain patterns - what could be more obvious? But their problem is, that try as you might, you will never find a thought in the neural data. It is just as Leibniz said - blow up a brain to the size of a mill and stroll through it. You will never find a thought inside it.

Hang on, you will say. What about those amazing devices which allow science to reconstruct images from neural data? Subject thinks 'yacht', and lo, a yacht appears on the monitor. But let's not forget that experts in neuroscience and information technology painstakinly construct and train these systems to recognise such correlations, which allows them to reconstruct the imagery that is display on the monitor. The expertise and rational abilities of the scientists is interpolated into the picture in order to produce those results. (Also see Do You Believe in God, or is That a Software Glitch.)

What has actually happened is the cognitive science, not neuroscience as such, although incorporating aspects of neuroscience, has discovered that the brain/mind actually manufactures or constructs what we take to be the 'objective world', the world within which the firm and unyeilding statements of the natural sciences are meaningful. Of course, one of Bunge's nemeses, Arthur Schopenhauer, anticipated this long before either neuro- or cognitive science existed:

materialism is the attempt to explain what is immediately given us by what is given us indirectly. All that is objective, extended, active—that is to say, all that is material—is regarded by materialism as affording so solid a basis for its explanation, that a reduction of everything to this can leave nothing to be desired (especially if in ultimate analysis this reduction should resolve itself into action and reaction). But ...all this is given indirectly and in the highest degree determined, and is therefore merely a relatively present object, for it has passed through the machinery and manufactory of the brain, and has thus come under the forms of space, time and causality, by means of which it is first presented to us as extended in space and active in time. From such an indirectly given object, materialism seeks to explain what is immediately given, the Idea (in which alone the object that materialism starts with exists), and finally even the will from which all those fundamental forces, that manifest themselves, under the guidance of causes, and therefore according to law, are in truth to be explained. — WWI

Bolds added.

Fine, then, you might say. Let's detect the system in the brain which supplies this 'machinery and manufactory' so to show once and for all that it is a physical system. But neuroscience has been able to do no such thing! It has found that 'enough is known about the structure and function of the visual system to rule out any detailed neural representation that embodies the subjective experience.' This provides direct scientific validation of Chalmer's 'hard problem of consciousness', something which the same paper actually says.

So - what of numbers, universals, and the like? I say, along with the phenomenologists, that these are regular structures in consciousness, something like laws of thought. But you'll never trace them back to neural transactions, as such, as they possess a unitary and simple nature that is of a different order to the phenomena of neuroscience. This is why I will insist that numbers (etc) are real but not existent. They obtain and hold within a universe of discourse (wittgenstein's 'language game') - whereas Bunge's crude materialism wants to imagine them encoded in biochemical format, as kind of physical symbols, as oxymoronic conception as there has ever been.

It is biology, apparently. As in, it is the biology of the brain of a member of the human species. — Arcane Sandwich

If a species evolves to the point where it can recognise 'the law of the excluded middle', does that entail that 'the law of the included middle' can be understood as a product of biology?

If π is a brain process in your brain, and also a brain process in my brain, then it is two different things.

But if that were so, when I talk about π I am talking about a quite different thing to you, when you talk about π.

When we each talk about π, we are talking about the same thing.

Therefore π is not a brain process in your brain — Banno

It is largely the very peculiar kind of being that belongs to universals which has led many people to suppose that they are really mental. We can think of a universal, and our thinking then exists in a perfectly ordinary sense, like any other mental act. Suppose, for example, that we are thinking of whiteness. Then in one sense it may be said that whiteness is 'in our mind'. In the strict sense, it is not whiteness that is in our mind, but the act of thinking of whiteness. The connected ambiguity in the word 'idea' also causes confusion here. In one sense of this word, namely the sense in which it denotes the object of an act of thought, whiteness is an 'idea'. Hence, if the ambiguity is not guarded against, we may come to think that whiteness is an 'idea' in the other sense, i.e. an act of thought; and thus we come to think that whiteness is mental. But in so thinking, we rob it of its essential quality of universality. One man's act of thought is necessarily a different thing from another man's; one man's act of thought at one time is necessarily a different thing from the same man's act of thought at another time. Hence, if whiteness were the thought as opposed to its object, no two different men could think of it, and no one man could think of it twice. That which many different thoughts of whiteness have in common is their object, and this object is different from all of them. Thus universals are not thoughts, though when known they are the objects of thoughts. — Bertrand Russell, Problems of Philosophy - The World of Universals

Consider such a proposition as 'Edinburgh is north of London'. Here we have a relation between two places, and it seems plain that the relation subsists independently of our knowledge of it. When we come to know that Edinburgh is north of London, we come to know something which has to do only with Edinburgh and London: we do not cause the truth of the proposition by coming to know it, on the contrary we merely apprehend a fact which was there before we knew it. The part of the earth's surface where Edinburgh stands would be north of the part where London stands, even if there were no human being to know about north and south, and even if there were no minds at all in the universe. We may therefore now assume it to be true that nothing mental is presupposed in the fact that Edinburgh is north of London. But this fact involves the relation 'north of', which is a universal; and it would be impossible for the whole fact to involve nothing mental if the relation 'north of', which is a constituent part of the fact, did involve anything mental. Hence we must admit that the relation, like the terms it relates, is not dependent upon thought, but belongs to the independent world which thought apprehends but does not create.

This conclusion, however, is met by the difficulty that the relation 'north of' does not seem to exist in the same sense in which Edinburgh and London exist. If we ask 'Where and when does this relation exist?' the answer must be 'Nowhere and nowhen'. There is no place or time where we can find the relation 'north of'. It does not exist in Edinburgh any more than in London, for it relates the two and is neutral as between them. Nor can we say that it exists at any particular time. Now everything that can be apprehended by the senses or by introspection exists at some particular time. Hence the relation 'north of' is radically different from such things. It is neither in space nor in time, neither material nor mental; yet it is something.

The above also applies to number.

Thank you, appreciated. I’ve found some articles on the topic also.

Humans seem to have evolved to the point of both constructing and exploring mathematics. The counting numbers arise from observations and abilities to distinguish. In my opinion none of math exists in some Platonic realm independent of human brains. These are ideas, not physical objects. — jgill

Sure humans evolved, and so too the ability to count, speak, tell stories and much else besides. But that doesn't mean that Frege's 'metaphysical primitives' such as integers and logical principles, can be legitimately depicted as a result of evolution. The aim of evolutionary theory is to explain the origin of species, not an epistemology.

(Interestingly, in a parallel domain, the linguist Noam Chomsky co-authored a book, Why Only Us?, which looks at why h.sapiens alone possess language ability. 'They focus on the cognitive and computational mechanisms underlying language, particularly Chomsky’s concept of the "Merge" operation, which allows humans to generate infinite expressions from a finite set of elements. They critique simplistic Darwinian explanations for language evolution and emphasize the role of internal cognitive structures over external social or cultural factors. The book combines insights from linguistics, biology, and cognitive science to propose that language is a byproduct of a small genetic mutation rather than a gradual adaptation, challenging traditional narratives about its development' (from jacket description). In other words, an evolutionary leap that enabled a faculty that resulted in exponential differences from non-language-using primates.)

If you can count out seven things, do additions that result in or use seven, double and halve seven... what more is there that you are missing, that is needed before you can be said to have grasped seven?

I don't think there is anything more to grasping seven than being able to use it. Hence concepts are no more than being able to work with whatever is in question, and thinking of them as mental items in one's head is fraught with complications. — Banno

It would indeed be a complication, if that is what had been suggested. But Plato dismisses any such idea:

Is there such a thing as health? Of course there is. Can you see it? Of course not. This does not mean that the forms are occult entities floating ‘somewhere else’ in ‘another world,’ a ‘Platonic heaven.’ It simply says that the intelligible identities which are the reality, the whatness, of things are not themselves physical things to be perceived by the senses, but must be grasped by thought. — Thinking Being, Eric D Perl

Nor are concepts 'in the head' but more like rational principles. But the ability to count and infer is nevertheless indispensable to rational ability, and that is indubitably facilitated by the highly-developed hominid forebrain that we possess. That is what is at issue: the ontological status of such objects of reason (where 'object' is used metaphorically, e.g. 'the object of thought' ) and the ability of reason to grasp them. I don't see how it can be plausibly denied, as either denying it or advocating it relies on the very faculty which is subject of the discussion.

What do you "get out of" idealism that you don't get out of materialism? — Arcane Sandwich

Do you understand the difference between them? Not according to your personal philosophy, but what would be said in an encylopedia or what you would say if you were asked to explain it for an exam question. An objective explanation.

If you mean, materialism is a tendency at a certain point of the development of cultures, then sure. It is also true that it is a belief system that individuals can adopt and also leave.

I sincerely do not understand what is the actual difference between our Philosophies — Arcane Sandwich

But you've said a number of times that you advocate scientism and materialism. Scientism is the belief that science is the adjuticator of all knowledge, materialism the belief that only the physical is real, and everything is reducible to it. The Blind Spot is arguing against those beliefs. So you can't agree with both sides.

The Living Subject is like a dot. It is surrounded by a sea of Blind Spot — Arcane Sandwich

The blind spot is a well-known phenomenon which arises where the optic nerve attaches to the cornea. As a consequence there is a blind spot in the middle of your field of vision. It can be detected by gazing at a piece of paper with two crosses on it, and moving the paper back and forth in your field of vision. One of the crosses will become invisible at a certain point. That is the 'blind spot'.

The Blind Spot uses that as a metaphor for the exclusion of consideration of the subject from the scientific method. As a consequence of this methodical exclusion, there is an 'absolutisation of the objective' - the attitude that anything worth knowing, can be known by means of science. But this forgets that science is still a human undertaking, carried out by subjects, who make decisions as to what to study and to consider.

The Subject forgets about itself, ontologically speaking. It becomes "metaphorically blind". And thus you are now in the state of awareness that you are already familiar with: the state of awareness of ordinary life. — Arcane Sandwich

That is a fair description, but the point the article makes is the distorting influence of this on the modern world view. That 'state of awareness of ordinary life' is what Husserl calls 'the natural attitude'.

So, you're analysis is on point in some ways, but the recently-published book lays it out in much more detail including an historical account of how it developed in history and what the consequences are.

You remarked before, that whatever philosophy you have, should have the consequence of a more humane outlook. I agree wholeheartedly. But materialism cannot do that, because it fails to recognise the fundamental distinction between beings and things. As far as it is concerned, beings are simply complex things. The subject is simply an emergent phenomenon and is basically unreal. Whatever can't be subjected to objective analysis and measurement is relegated to secondary or derivative status. This is why materialist philosophers such as Daniel Dennett believe that the mind must be eliminated from scientific discourse, as there is no real objective way of accounting for its attributes (which is the 'hard problem of consciousness'.)

At that point of your own phenomenology journey, one becomes a materialism. Matter is just the brute fact that there is a physical world outside of your consciousness. The world just imposes itself upon you like that. And if one were to ask? What is the reason, for such a fact? — Arcane Sandwich

'First, there is a mountain. Then there is no mountain. Then there is' ~ Zen Koan. (Interpretation.)

This is not to say that the mind "emerges" from the brain, for that would be to speak nonsense. The mind is what the living brain of an organism does. It is more like an act than a series of processes, but that is what it is: a series of neuro-cognitive processes, which have a "one to one" mapping (1:1) to biochemical processes that the brain undergoes. — Arcane Sandwich

Language and the symbolic forms which characterise the cellular activities of organisms cannot be reduced solely to chemistry. That’s one implication of biosemiotics, hence why I mention it.

As soon as a stone forms, no matter how "rudiementary" (whatever that means, in absence of values), there is always something about the stone and other inorganic objects that cannot be so described. — Arcane Sandwich

What about a stone cannot be described in terms of its physical attributes and chemical composition? The distinction between stones and organisms is that organisms maintain homeostasis, they grow, evolve and seek sustenance. They distinguish themselves from their sorrounding environment by a membrane or enclosure. In what way do stones do anything analogous to that?

I think Aristotle got it wrong there — Arcane Sandwich

How?

The flame that burns the ball of cotton does not access what the cotton is as a thing-in-itself, it only accesses an appearance, in the way that cotton "presents itself", "makes itself manifest" to the flame. — Arcane Sandwich

What does 'access' mean? Fire doesn't 'access' anything, it is a chemical reaction.

I'm not a reductionist in that sense, and neither is Bunge. — Arcane Sandwich

Bunge's materialism was rooted in a rejection of dualism, idealism, and other metaphysical views that he considered unscientific. Scientism, in other words. Emergence is just a useful gap-filler to account for the many attributes of life and mind that are left out by physicalism.

The only difference between our philosophies, as far as I can see, is some sort of Aesthetic difference, and only that. — Arcane Sandwich

Chalk and cheese :-)

I'm just trying to convey my intuition on how the problem can be thought about, without resorting to "all in the head", and without resorting to mystical Platonic essences... — hypericin

There's a very good book that can be found online Thinking Being: An Introduction to Metaphysics in the Classical Tradition, Eric S Perl. The explanation of the origin of the Forms is highly illuminating. They're not what nearly everyone says they are.

Firstly, in QM the so-called "observer problem" is not recognized uncontroversially as entailing that human consciousness is paradigmatically the observer. — Janus

Agree. The essay puts it as follows:

Today, interpretations of quantum mechanics disagree about what matter is, and what our role is with respect to it. These differences concern the so-called ‘measurement problem’: how the wave function of the electron reduces from a superposition of several states to a single state upon observation. For several schools of thought, quantum physics doesn’t give us access to the way the world fundamentally is in itself. Rather, it only lets us grasp how matter behaves in relation to our interactions with it.

According to the so-called Copenhagen interpretation of Niels Bohr, for example, the wave function has no reality outside of the interaction between the electron and the measurement device. Other approaches, such as the ‘many worlds’ and ‘hidden variables’ interpretations, seek to preserve an observer-independent status for the wave function. But this comes at the cost of adding features such as unobservable parallel universes. A relatively new interpretation known as Quantum-Bayesianism (QBism) – which combines quantum information theory and Bayesian probability theory – takes a different tack; it interprets the irreducible probabilities of a quantum state not as an element of reality, but as the degrees of belief an agent has about the outcome of a measurement. In other words, making a measurement is like making a bet on the world’s behaviour, and once the measurement is made, updating one’s knowledge. Advocates of this interpretation sometimes describe it as ‘participatory realism’, because human agency is woven into the process of doing physics as a means of gaining knowledge about the world. From this viewpoint, the equations of quantum physics don’t refer just to the observed atom but also to the observer and the atom taken as a whole in a kind of ‘observer-participancy’.

Participatory realism is controversial. But it’s precisely this plurality of interpretations, with a variety of philosophical implications, that undermines the sober certainty of the materialist and reductionist position on nature. In short, there’s still no simple way to remove our experience as scientists from the characterisation of the physical world. — The Blind Spot

Put another way, the very fact of the controversy counts against a materialist explanation.

. To reify is to commit the fallacy of treating a non-thing as if it were a thing. It is even worse if one believes that consciousness is indeed a real thing, such as the Cartesian res cogitans. Technically speaking, Descartes was speaking nonsense on that point. Literally. Consciousness is not a res to begin with, it is not a "thing". It is, instead, a series of physical processes occurring in the brain of every living creature on this planet that is endowed with a central nervous system. — Arcane Sandwich

Let's unpack that, there are elements I can go along with, others not so much.

That is indeed what reification means, and I agree that 'res cogitans', the 'thinking thing' is a highly problematic expression in some ways. Husserl himself says as much in Crisis of the European Sciences, where he says that, despite Descartes' genius in recognising the apodictic nature of conscious experience, he then makes the mistake of treating it in a quasi-objective way, 'a little tag end of the world', is how he puts it. Nevertheless Husserl recognises Descartes' genius as do I, so it is not simply a mistake. I think of Descartes' dualism of extensia and cogitans as more like a conceptual or economic model, than a scientific hypothesis in the modern sense.

The point I completely disagree with, however, is that consciousness is a physical process. What does it mean to say that? If it's physical, it ought to be describable, without residue, in terms of the principles of physics and chemistry. But I'm of the school of thought that as soon as living organisms form, no matter how rudimentary, there is already something about them that cannot be so described. It is not an element, a literal elan vital, some mysterious thing or substance, which is reification again. It is more like what Aristotle said in the first place - that they posses an organising principle. (I mean, look at the etymological link between 'organ', 'organic', and 'organisation'.) That manifests in the way that all of the components of organisms are self-organising in such a way as to form a single unified being. As Aristotle put it, organisms possess an intrinsic organisational purpose (as distinct from artifacts, who's purposes are extrinsic.) Stem cells, as is well known, are undifferentiated - which is what makes them so useful for medical purposes - but depending on where in the body they begin to develop, they acquire the specialised characteristics that make them liver cells or eye cells or what have you. That resists reduction to physical principles, although that is still a controversial matter. So I object to the way that you assume that life is known to be physical, as it if it is something already known to science, when in fact it is not. I know that many scientists and philosophers assume that it is so, but that is among the assumptions that I question, and that those I cite are inclined to reject. Not just because 'Aristotle says so' - there are many elements of his science that are completely superseded. But he was right about the model of self-organisation that distinguished organisms from minerals etc. That is something that has been picked up and refined by philosophy of biology.

That, is what I call "the Absolute", in the Hegelian sense. It just so happens that I don't believe in Dialectical Synthesis. Instead, I utilize "Dialectical Analysis", if you will, to achieve a sort of reverse-engineering of language itself, and that reveals many things, including the Nature of consciousness. It is a "situated phenomenology", if you will. And that grants it more dignity than pure, non-existential phenomenology. — Arcane Sandwich

Sorry, not buying. I've learning things here including about an emerging discipline called biosemiotics. As far as 'situated phenomenology' is concerned, one of the key texts is The Embodied Mind, Varela, Thompson and Rosch, which as the title says, is about embodied cognition. Evan Thompson is one of the co-authors of that book and the OP we're discussing.

I couldn’t make sense of your comparison.

Look at the passage above your post, specifically:

The world is inconceivable apart from consciousness. Treating consciousness as part of the world, reifying consciousness, is precisely to ignore consciousness's foundational, disclosive role. — Source

Agree or disagree with that proposition? Why?

The difference in ontological stance between the natural sciences and phenomenology is that science is solely concerned with the objectively measurable. It doesn’t take into account the role of the observer in (for example) deciding what to observe or measure, what hypotheses to pursue and what not to, and so on.

This was made unavoidably obvious by the observer or measurement problem in quantum physics. Although that is a special case of a far wider issue, which is also a subject in philosophy of science.

I don't think there is anything more to grasping seven than being able to use it. Hence concepts are no more than being able to work with whatever is in question, and thinking of them as mental items in one's head is fraught with complications. — Banno

This is something h.sapiens can do that no other creature can do. If there’s anything problematic it is the inability to see the significance of that.

I don't get that. — Banno

We’re talking about the faculty of reason. I think we take it for granted without noticing how significant it is. Consider what it enables.

Very important work - pleased there’s someone else reading it.

I like the article, since it is saying just what I have been. It's the middle ground between Platonism and nominalism — Janus

Indeed. But also note

Aristotelian realism stands in a difficult relationship with naturalism, the project of showing that all of the world and human knowledge can be explained in terms of physics, biology and neuroscience. If mathematical properties are realised in the physical world and capable of being perceived, then mathematics can seem no more inexplicable than colour perception, which surely can be explained in naturalist terms. On the other hand, Aristotelians agree with Platonists that the mathematical grasp of necessities is mysterious. What is necessary is true in all possible worlds, but how can perception see into other possible worlds? The scholastics, the Aristotelian Catholic philosophers of the Middle Ages, were so impressed with the mind’s grasp of necessary truths as to conclude that the intellect was immaterial and immortal. If today’s naturalists do not wish to agree with that, there is a challenge for them. ‘Don’t tell me, show me’: build an artificial intelligence system that imitates genuine mathematical insight. There seem to be no promising plans on the drawing board.

The concept "seven" just is being able to buy seven apples, adding three and four, taking nine from sixteen. There is not a something in addition to these that is the concept of seven. — Banno

As I understand platonism, neither would it. This would be a reification, objectification of the act of act of counting. But it doesn't vitiate the fact that the number is independent of any particular mind, but can only be grasped by a mind.

Wayfarer offers the Aristotelian account as paradigmatic, which we might come back to later. — Banno

You and others might find this essay interesting Aristotle was Right After All, James Franklin. (I don't agree with his depiction of the 'other world' of Platonic forms, but it is still pretty much on topic for this thread.)

You're reading it, right? — J

Yes, but I'm finding it a real hard slog to maintain focus. I figure that as he has to penetrate the habitual cynicism of the current philosophical profession, he needs the equivalent of a depleted uranium ordnance. (After all as Banno never tires of pointing out, any form of idealism is very much a minority report in the profession.) My problem is I can kind of intuitively grasp the point he's aiming at, without having to do all the hard work of traversing the terrain. But as you're reading it, I will try and persist, I'm nearly up to the end of Chapter One.

I'm not an admirer of object-oriented ontology, (which I suspect was a catchphrase swiped from information technology.)

That distinction it makes between real and sensual seems to me a form of the distinction between the manifest and scientific images - that there's the real object which science discerns, then how it appears to us on a sensory level. It's another version of the age-old 'appearance reality' divide. (I have an offsite essay called 'The Objective Stance' which I'm sure you wouldn't agree with.) I parse the distinction, if there is one, in a completely different way, but that would take us far afield of this topic, so let's leave it there for now.

Usually this is phrased in terms of materiality: the intellect can know all material things and must therefore be immaterial. — Leontiskos

I’ve become very interested in (although not very knowledgeable about) the idea of the ‘divine intellect’ in Aristotle and Platonism generally. The basic thrust is that the power of reason is what distinguishes the human from other animals - hence man as the ‘rational animal’. It preserves the tripartite distinction in Plato's diaogues of the rational element of the soul as being the highest part.

In Aristotle, that is expressed in hylomorphism. The material senses receive the material form - in other words, sense-data. But only intellect (nous) knows what a thing is. (I believe this is all from D’Anima III.) In this way, the intellect ‘becomes all things’. And the reason it can do that, is because of its immaterial nature. Lloyd Gerson paraphrases it as follows:

Aristotle, in De Anima, argued that thinking in general (which includes knowledge as one kind of thinking) cannot be a property of a body; it cannot, as he put it, 'be blended with a body'. This is because in thinking, the intelligible object or form is present in the intellect, and thinking itself is the identification of the intellect with this intelligible. Among other things, this means that you could not think if materialism is true… . Thinking is not something that is, in principle, like sensing or perceiving; this is because thinking is a universalising activity. This is what this means: when you think, you see - mentally see - a form which could not, in principle, be identical with a particular - including a particular neurological element, a circuit, or a state of a circuit, or a synapse, and so on. This is so because the object of thinking is universal, or the mind is operating universally.

….the fact that in thinking, your mind is identical with the form that it thinks, means (for Aristotle and for all Platonists) that since the form 'thought' is detached from matter, 'mind' is immaterial too. — Platonism vs Naturalism, Lloyd Gerson

(See also The Unity of Intellect in Aristotle's D'Anima.)

This is preserved in Aquinas' epistemology, as I understand it. And behind that, is a mysterious doctrine called 'the unity of knower and known'. If you search on that phrase, you will find many recondite scholarly papers mostly about either Thomism or medieval Islamic scholasticism. And I believe Rödl is articulating a similar theme. The underlying rationale is that of 'participatory knowing' and 'divine union' which have long since fallen out of favour in Western culture.

I see that Tao as being one of the seminal forms of expression of 'the unconditioned' - not actually a hard case to make, considering many of the passages that have been quoted already. But what, then, is 'the unconditioned'? It is an exceedingly hard concept to frame, because by its nature it exceeds the grasp of discursive reason. That's why 'the tao that can be named is not the real Tao'. So what is the real Tao? will be the next question. To which the answer cannot be given propositionally, as it were. It is embodied in the practice and culture of Taoism, the Way. It is a way of life, embedded in a distinct cultural form. One of course may find the Taoist texts edifying and they may provide valulable insights, and there is nothing the matter with that at all. But the essence of it is beyond discursive ideation. 'Man cannot know the truth', said Yeats 'but he can embody it.'

So, you say mathematical proofs are empirical? I think you're on shaky ground there but I now know better than to argue with you about such things, so I'll leave it there.

You certainly sound a highly imaginative and interesting writer! I am not qualified to comment on the intricacies of Taoist principles, as I mentioned at the outset, although I've always admired it.

Primeness, evenness and oddness can be observed in the ways that groups of objects can and cannort be divided up. — Janus

However, one has to grasp the concept to make such distinctions, so it is not something that can be ascertained by observation alone. It is deduced.

Why did you mention the Stoics there, and why did you not mention Epicurus? He was not a Stoic. — Arcane Sandwich

I beg your pardon, it was a mistake. Interesting further points there on Hegel, with whom I am not well acquainted.

Those who regard an appeal to reason as illegitimate on that ground are wrong, I think, but so are those who want to say that the ancients nailed down the meaning of all our key philosophical terms. — J

Of course - but there's another 'sub-theme' here which is deeply connected to this whole debate. That is the belief in the pre-modern world that the Cosmos was animated by reason. The Logos was in some sense the reason for everything, and in that view, everything existed for a reason (also the belief behind the principle of sufficient reason.) Aristotle's fourfold causation was an expression of this. Over the course of history, though, as Greek philosophy became incorporated into Christian theology, the logos became identified simply with 'God's word' and finally with the Bible simpliciter. The idea of natural or scientific law itself is called into question, or said to be human inventions superimposed on an indifferent universe. Mathematical Platonism is intrinsically connected to this issue, as it seems to suggest that the Universe is itself mathematical, which empiricism generally will reject as a matter of course.

The reduction of reason to a consequence of natural selection is a whole other set of arguments, including Platinga's EAAN, Lewis/Rapport's 'argument from reason' and Nagel's 'Evolutionary Naturalism and the Fear of Religion'.

If numbers are just abstractions, how do you distinguish "3" from "The second even prime". The first "exists", the second doesn't. What distinguishes these two abstractions?

Second, how do you account for numeric laws? If numbers were all in the head, how are laws discovered that were most certainly not in anyone's head until they were discovered? — hypericin

:clap:

It seems to me that on the topic of the impossibility of permanently satisfying desire, there is an important parallel with the philosophy of Epicurus. This is because Epicurus established a distinction between what he called "mobile pleasures" and "static pleasures". — Arcane Sandwich

No doubt. There are very many resonances between Tao, early Buddhism and Stoicism, albeit Taoism and Buddhism both had beliefs in immortality in various forms, which the Stoics did not.

The problem is that desire simply can't be satisfied. On the practical side, it just doesn’t work. Yes, many individual desires can be achieved. But as soon as you get one thing that you desire, another pops up. — Patterner

Also what Arthur Schopenhauer says, but when he says it, he's a miserable pessimist. When a Taoist master says it, it is Eastern wisdom.

Heed Bernie's warning

Aristotle is basically saying that the study of animals requires a study of the vegetative part of the soul and the motion-causing part of the soul, but not the intellectual part of the soul, because a study of the intellectual part of the soul would implicate the objects of intellect, which would include everything — Leontiskos

That sounds like a hard problem ;-)

And very interesting contemporary philosophers like Kimhi and Rödl are using Aristotle in new ways. — J

I'm following your other thread on Rödl and also reading the text.

So what is that you need from me specifically in philosophical terms — Arcane Sandwich

I don't need or expect anything from anyone. We're here to discuss ideas, and these discussions do push buttons from time to time.

You just described my attitude as "lumpen materialist". — Arcane Sandwich

I apologize, it was careless of me to use that term and I will not do so again. But then, as I explained, the view that 'mind is to brain as digestion is to the stomach' is a materialist attitude. Mario Bunge, whom you introduced into the conversation, is an avowed materialist. And the kinds of criticisms of phenomenology of his which you've referenced so far, hardly amount to arguments, so much as declarations.

It's not either realism or idealism, We construct the facts, from the world. — Banno

Agree! I've said this many times - that self and world co-arise. There is not one without the other. But that is much nearer to phenomenology and transcendental idealism than it is to direct realism. And it's also very near to Buddhist philosophy.

What is "medieval" to me -- and this has nothing to do with Thomism as such -- is the appeals to authority. — J

But notice that nowadays even reason is relativised; it is social convention, it is a useful tool, it has nothing to do with the way the world is. To even appeal to reason is nowadays covertly regarded as an appeal to authority.