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.

But you notice, I presented an argument. I said, the analogy of stomach and enzymes is insufficient as an analogy for brain and thought, on the basis that, in the former, there is a clear and comprehensive account of how digestion works, in terms of organic chemistry, physiology and so on. But there's no way to extend that to the relationship between brain, mind, and thought (see the Explanatory Gap). There are many reasons why this is so, too many to try and squeeze into a forum post, but I gave at least one of them in my initial response. (Note that 'lumpen materialism' is not intended as an ad hominem, it is the description of an attitude.)

@Joshs and I have our differences, but I'm entirely on board with that quote he provided from and about Husserl. That Mario Bunge thinks Husserl is obscure is not an argument, but again, an attitude. He simply takes it for granted that anything that sounds like idealism is wrong, because any sensible person would think so. But Husserl is making a case. Tackle that case.

You're not doing your case any favour by citing cartoons.

Phenomenology is lumpen idealism. — Arcane Sandwich

If you could make lumps from air.... :rofl:

Can you show that this view was maintained unmodified into the Later period? And if not, how was it modified? — Banno

That's an essay question. I cribbed some of the lecture notes but never sat the exam. Regardless, hope the point is clear.

recent posts have relied on appeals to Aristotle and Plato as if they were authoritative — Banno

It's not that. I've explained I'm not Catholic (although I'm also not atheist), but that Thomas preserves an element of the philosophia perennis which has elsewhere been forgotten. Similar points are made by Max Horkheimer in The Eclipse of Reason, and he's no friend to theism.

I'm simply urging us to notice that "the distinction is discernible" no matter what terms we use, and that is what counts. On the important point -- pistis and dianoia as picking out two different areas on the conceptual map -- we agree. And when we examine the various relations between the objects of pistis and dianoia, we may find yet further agreement. So we shouldn't let logomachy get in the way! — J

I'm very pleased to hear that. And, I've learned a new word!

But not existing. There is gold in those hills, even if it remains unsaid (unbelieved, undoubted). — Banno

See this excerpt from some lecture notes on Wittgenstein:

Wittgenstein's statement “I am my world” occurs in the context of his discussion of the limits of the subject and its relationship to the world. Here, he is dealing with the nature of the self and its boundaries. The claim reflects the idea that the "self" is not an object in the world but rather the limit of the world—the perspective from which the world is experienced and represented.

This remark can be connected to Wittgenstein's earlier statement in the Tractatus (5.6): "The limits of my language mean the limits of my world." Language structures how we understand and engage with reality. The "world" in Wittgenstein's terms is the totality of facts, not things, and the "I" or "subject" cannot be a fact among these facts.

The self, as Wittgenstein understands it here, is a metaphysical subject, not a physical or psychological entity. This self is the necessary precondition for the world to appear but is not itself a part of the world.

This is entirely in keeping with the phenomenological analysis. Again, it does not call into question the empirical facts of existence. It is about the conditions within which they're meaningful. Can you not see this distinction, even after all this debate?

It's not as big of a deal as some folks suggest. — Arcane Sandwich

It would be an error to think of this as a difference in the way in which they exist, or as a difference in their being (whatever that is). — Banno

:chin:

Wayfarer sometimes says that there are only mental things, but when the problems with this are pointed out, he quickly retracts such a view. — Banno

This is your congenital misrepresentation of what I actually say, but no matter how many times I try and set it straight, you never get it.

What I say is that objects exist for a subject - for an observer, for a mind. The mind, observer or subject is not itself within the field of objective analysis, as per Husserl. When you conjecture a world before you were born, or before h.sapiens came to exist, this conjecture still contains an implicit perspective, within which the terms 'prior to' and 'before' are meaningful.

And this would be Arthur Schopenhauer's criticism of Armstrong:

first have to explain how and why "lumpen materialism" is even a thing to begin with — Arcane Sandwich

Sure. There was a famous expression which circulated in Enlightenment Europe, that 'the brain secretes thought as the liver secretes bile', spoken by one Pierre Cabanis. That characterises a particular strain of enlightenment materialism which attempts to account for everything that exists in terms of the motions of bodies, which is basically what is described as physicalist reductionism. The expression 'lumpen materialism' an allusion to the Marxist 'lumpenproletariat' which is characterised by a kind of false consciousness. Materialism is similarily a kind of false consciousness, in that it assumes that the base level of existence can account for everything that exists. An expression can also be found in the writings of one D M Armstrong, one of the 'Australian Realists' you mentioned in another thread:

Let's say, for the sake of argument, that the three first-order translations, taken together, describe the conceptual territory covered by "exist" in loose talk. We can of course recommend drawing a line under this and saying, "Please use these three disambiguated terms. While there's nothing pre-ordained about them, they attach easily to three important conceptual areas that cover the field, we can use them to refer to and describe those areas, and they're reasonably familiar from previous usage." — J

I don't quite follow your argument. Again, I don't see what I'm arguing as exceptionally obtuse or difficult. The element of Platonism that I appeal to, is the rational faculty - that which grasps real ideas such as number, ratio, etc ('real' I use to distinguish such ideas from the momentary content of individual minds.) This is the basis on which I argue that numbers are real but not phenomenally existent.

Consider a number 7. I ask you: does it exist? Well, yes, you say, you just wrote it on this screen, there it is. But that's a symbol. What is denoted by the symbol is an intellectual act, namely, an act of counting. And that act is not an existent, in the sense that objects are existents. This is where the distinction can be made between the kinds of existence of numbers (etc) and sensory particulars. This distinction is 'Platonic' in that it mirrors the division between sensory (pistis, doxa) and mathematical (dianoia) knowledge in Plato's thought.

This is an heuristic, as I say, not a developed theory. It provides a conceptual framework for distinguishing the phenomenal (the domain of existents) from the noumenal (the intelligible domain). These two are intertwined in our thought, yet the distinction is discernible.

As Brennan explains in Thomistic Psychology, 'the process of knowledge is immediately concerned with the separation of form from matter, since a thing is known precisely because its form is received in the knower.’ Sense knowledge retains particularity, while intellectual knowledge universalizes. This is why, as Brennan notes, 'to understand is to free form completely from matter.’ In the same way, the reality of numbers, as universal forms, is grasped immaterially by the intellect. They are real but do not exist in the same way as physical objects.

That something is the brain as a res extensa, and as a physical body more generally, which is physically related to other physical bodies, some of them containing human brains just like yours, just like mine. And the brain is the object to which the predicate cogitans applies as well. One thing (the brain), two predicates (extena and cogitans). The brain is a thing, but the mind is not a thing, the mind is simply what the brain does, in the same sense that digestion is what your gut does. — Arcane Sandwich

'Mind is what brain does' is lumpen materialism. But while there is a plausible and comprehensive account of how the gut digests nutrients, along with many other basic functions of metabolism, there is no corresponding account for the relationship of brain and mind, of how and in what sense the brain produces mind, any more than how, or if, matter has produced life. As Liebniz said, if you could make the brain the size of a mill and walk through it, and nowhere in it would you find a thought. In order to even examine the brain and to begin to raise questions about how it does this, the very faculties which you wish to explain, namely, those of reasoned inference, must already be deployed in the pursuit of that question. And you can't see the elements of rational inference from the outside, so to speak. They are internal to thought. See this post.

Again, it is important to recognize that Peirce was a teacher and lecturer. He used language as needed to help his students understand from their cultural perspective at the time. This is another reason to study his entire works rather than snippets. — Mapping the Medium

It might be mentioned in passing that Peirce's academic career was pretty brief. He lectured at Johns Hopkins University from 1879 to 1884, during which time he taught logic, largely under the auspices of James Joseph Sylvester, a mathematician who supported Peirce's work. However, Peirce’s academic career was cut short when he was dismissed in 1884 due to personal controversies and his unconventional behavior, including a scandalous divorce and second marriage, which damaged his reputation in the academy. Thereafter he and wife Juliette moved to a rural property in Milford, Pennsylvania, where they lived in considerable isolation and poverty. During these years, Peirce faced periods of severe financial distress, and there is evidence that his health deteriorated due to inadequate nutrition and poor living conditions. 'Charles spent much of his last two decades unable to afford heat in winter and subsisting on old bread donated by the local baker. Unable to afford new stationery, he wrote on the verso side of old manuscripts.' (One of the reasons sorting and publishing his voluminous materials has taken more than a century thus far.)

Happy New Year to you also, :party: and thanks for the kind words.

1) There is no ontologically significant difference between science and phenomenology. — Arcane Sandwich

That's an assertion not an argument. How would you justify that? And what do you mean by 'ontologically significant'?

It might help to use this previously-quoted passage as a reference:

In contrast to the outlook of naturalism, Husserl believed all knowledge, all science, all rationality depended on conscious acts, acts which cannot be properly understood from within the natural outlook at all. Consciousness should not be viewed naturalistically as part of the world, since consciousness is precisely the reason why there was a world there for us in the first place. For Husserl it is not that consciousness creates the world in any ontological sense… but rather that the world is opened up, made meaningful, or disclosed through consciousness. 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. For this reason, all natural science is naive about its point of departure, for Husserl. Since consciousness is presupposed in all science and knowledge, then the proper approach to the study of consciousness itself must be a transcendental one  -  one which… focuses on the conditions for the possibility of knowledge. — Source

the three translations of "is" in first order logic - predication, equivalence and quantification. — Banno

Only that the sense of 'is' implicit in 'A=A' seems of a different order to that conveyed in 'The cat is on the mat' or 'that apple is red'. In mathematics, "is" (or the equals sign) denotes a relationship of equivalence or identity with absolute precision (e.g., A=A) reflecting the necessary and universal nature of mathematical truths, which are immune to the vagaries of empirical or contextual variation.
Such expressions are intelligible objects belonging to the domain of the noumenal.

In natural language, "is" has a broader and often less precise function. It can indicate:
Predication: "The apple is red."
Existence: "The cat is on the mat."
Identity: "Hesperus is Phosphorus."

These uses depend are context-dependent, and the precision of "is" in natural language is correspondingly far less than in mathematics. Empirical judgements are always in some sense approximations.

The apodictic nature of mathematics—its reliance on axioms, proofs, and logical necessity—was seen as a model for how scientific knowledge should be pursued.

(For that matter, isn't a large part of the astonishing success of science since Galileo owed to the way in which science learned to harness empirical observations to mathematical logic, through the quantification of primary qualities?)

Polysemy of 'being' - At the beginning of the Metaphysics. Aristotle’s recognises that "being" is said in many ways. Disambiguating and differentiating these meanings becomes foundational to his metaphysics and has had a major influence on the Western philosophical tradition.

The fact that this nuanced understanding of "being" is often overlooked today, except in the formalized context of analytic modal metaphysics, is a significant commentary on the state of contemporary philosophy.

In the Metaphysics, Aristotle identifies multiple senses of "being," which include:
* Substance (ousia): The primary sense of being, referring to what a thing fundamentally is.
* Qualitative Attributes: Being in the sense of having certain properties (e.g., "the apple is red").
* Existence: Being in the sense of "being there" or existing in time and space (e.g. "the apple is on the table")
* Potentiality and Actuality: Being as a dynamic process, involving what something can become versus what it is. (Heisenberg, in his interpretation of quantum mechanics, recognized Aristotle's concept of 'potentia' as a useful way to describe the indeterminate states of subatomic particles before measurement.)

Regardless the general point holds - that Confucian values were sometimes parodied in Taoist literature as representing social custom rather that the original Way.

Confucian values, particularly those emphasizing ritual (li), hierarchy, and moral propriety, were often parodied or critiqued in Taoist literature as representing an overly rigid adherence to social customs rather than a genuine alignment with the Dao (the Way). Taoist texts like the Zhuangzi frequently critique Confucianism for prioritizing artificial constructs and conventions over natural spontaneity (ziran), which is central to Taoist philosophy.

For instance, the Zhuangzi includes numerous anecdotes and dialogues that mock Confucian moralism, presenting Confucians as being overly preoccupied with external forms and neglectful of the deeper, effortless flow of the Way. The critique, however, was not a crude rejection of Confucian values but a deeper commentary on the limits of human contrivance and the importance of returning to simplicity and harmony with nature, the ‘uncarved block’.

This tension reflects the philosophical divergence between Confucianism’s focus on cultivating virtue through societal roles and rituals and Taoism’s emphasis on non-action (wu wei) and living in accordance with the natural order. — Class Lecture Notes

It was a single sentence. I’m sure there were many things it doesn’t include.

The customary explanation is that Confucius (Kung Futzu) represents social propriety and custom while the ‘true man of the Way’ is basically unbound by such niceties.

Personal predilection. The first non-dualism I encountered was Advaita. I felt I couldn’t form as clear an idea of the subtleties of Tao although it has my utmost respect.I did actually pass Sanskrit 101 although I can’t read a word now.

The words "exist" and "existence" cause nothing but trouble, because they call like Sirens to philosophers, inviting us to argue about which use of the word is correct. "My use is correct!" says one group, "because when I use it, I mean concept A." "No, my use is correct!" says another group, "because when I use it, I mean concept B." "Well, Plato used it for concept A." "Well, Kant used it for concept B." — J

I've had years of dispute on this forum about the meaning of the term 'ontology'. At one point in the past, etymologyonline.com had the etymology of the word derived from the present participle of the Greek verb 'to be' - which is, of course, 'I AM'. (Regrettably that detail is now no longer extant at the source.) I seized on that detail to argue for the distinction between ontology qua probing the nature of being, and natural science, qua probing the nature of what exists. I used this as a kind of wedge to distinguish 'being' from 'existence', which I think is a fundamental but generally forgotten or neglected distinction (although C S Peirce recognised it, as he held to a form of scholastic realism and insisted that universals are real.)

One of the previous mods, also a very active contributor, disagreed violently with me about this (although he had a tendency towards violent disagreement with many people which eventually led to his being banned.) Anyway, he posted a link to an article which is apparently a classic in respect of that question, The Greek Verb to Be and the Problem of Being , Charles Kahn, which I've read very carefully a number of times. And I think it supports my general contention about this distinction. Which leads to:

Existence, in my philosophy, is what has a spatiotemporal location — Arcane Sandwich

The generally Platonist objection to that would be, what, then, of numbers, logical and scientific principles, and so on and so forth? In what sense to these exist? That has been the subject of this thread the last couple of weeks, and I think it's by no means settled.

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.

Very good, I can see we have much in common.

My understanding is that the concept of Gnosis is essentially the same concept of The Way, just filtered through an early Western/Christian lens. — MrLiminal

Well, yes and no. Gnosticism in the historical context was a tendency within axial religions, which manifested in early Christianity as the 'grnostic sects', usually considered heretical. But in a more general sense, 'gnosis' is indeed esoteric spiritual knowledge or insight.

(By the way, take at look at the Help article, How to Quote, for some tips and tricks around quoting on the Forum.)

I think it's worth unpacking what you mean by 'understand' in this context. As I said there's a real sense in which we don't understand quantum physics - which is why there are endless disputes about what it means - yet the principles it has enabled is responsible for an enormous proportion of today's technology and economy.

So, what do you mean by 'understand'? I think you mean 'perceive a clearly discernable causal sequence.' The principles that drive internal combustion engines, for example, are like that. And generally speaking you could say that the behaviours describable in terms of classical physics, chemistry, and other such 'hard sciences', are also clearly understandable from a cause-and-effect sequence. But in what you're describing as 'magic', the causal chain cannot be so easily discerned. We can't see why the spell causes the illness or the cure, or has the effect the practitioner claims it does. So we say we don't understand that, because we can't see how it works (even if in the practitioner's mind, the cause-and-effect relationship is perfectly intelligible.)

religion is more focused on how the strings of the system can be pulled and then inventing reasons for why some of those things kinda work — MrLiminal

Your analogy breaks down here, in that religions are not primarily concerned with producing effects or outcomes, in that same narrow or limited sense. There might often be cross-over, in that in traditional cultures magic and religious rituals were often intertwined, but religions also have an altogether different role, that of situating humankind in a cosmically-meaningful narrative framework. That is not necessarily magical or magical thinking, although atheists might often say that.

I'm less familiar with the Hindu sources but I have dabbled in some Buddhist thought as well, though not to any great degree. Can you elaborate on what makes them more accessible? — MrLiminal

I will say something about my background. I came of age in the 60's, there was an influx of interest in Eastern culture and ideas. I got various popular eastern books about then, notably including Alan Watts. I took it seriously - I believed that there really is such a thing as enlightenment, in the Eastern sense, which is not the same as believing in God, although with some crossover. (Amusing line in a recent streaming series I watched, the female lead tells a young girl she's adopted 'meditation is what you do so you don't have to go to Church'.) I went to University late, as a mature-age student, and designed my curriculum around those pursuits - philosophy, comparative religion and anthropology being central to it (psychology rather less so). I majored in Comparative Religion, which is a fantastic subject in my opinion (and not at all to be confused with 'divinity' or 'biblical studies'.)

At the end of that, I thought that (and I still think that) Buddhism has the best overall product offering, so to speak. I'm not going to launch into a conversion pitch, but I will mention one very impactful book, Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, Shunryu Suzuki. It was a published set of Dharma talks by the Japanese Sōtō Zen Roshi (teacher) who founded the San Francisco Zen Centre in the late 1960's. Sōtō Zen in particular is extremely direct and philosophically profound.

As for gnosticism - there's a parallel term in Buddhism, 'Jñāna', which is from the same indo-European root as 'gnosis'. It's always been an element of Buddhist and Hindu teachings. It means 'saving insight' - basically, enlightenment, in that Eastern sense. And though it's something I never have and probably never will attain, I believe there is abundant textual evidence that it is real.

Please be charitable to my intellect, I'm not very smart. — Arcane Sandwich

Pardon me, but I think that's rather disingenuous, considering the erudition you have shown in your (let's see) 190-odd comments since joining the other day. I think you're whip smart. I'm just saying, I find Chinese culture and language remote and incomprehensible from my Anglo upbringing. Whereas Indian languages, notably Sanskrit and Pali (the formal language of early Buddhism) are Indo-european languages. You can trace the connections between ancient Greek, Indian and Persian cultures (did you know the name 'Iran' is a version of 'Aryan'?) And Indian philosophies, notably Mahāyāna Buddhism and Advaita Vedanta, have had huge cultural impact on the West since about the mid-19th Century. So overall, I have found the Indian sources (including those filtered through Chinese and Japanese culture, like Zen), more approachable than the Chinese. (It's not like that for everyone. I know a New Zealand guy who learned classical Chinese and wrote a doctorate on Chinese Buddhist texts, in Chinese. I'm in awe of his achievements but I could never emulate that.)

I'm very interested in non-dualism, but I've found the versions derived from Hindu and Buddhist sources rather more intelligible than the Tao, as the Tao is so quintessentially Chinese in character. I studied various Taoist texts in undergrad comparative religion, and they're edifying, illuminating, and, in the case of Chuang Tzu, also often hilarious. I recall a particular translation of a collection of a Taoist physician's notebooks that originating early in the Common Era that had vivid descriptions of day-to-day life in that culture. But I always had the feeling that to really penetrate 'the Way' would take much deeper engagement with Chinese language and culture than I was equipped for. One of the reasons being that there are great differences between English translations of Tao Te Ching, so plainly there must be things, if not lost in translation, being interpolated into it.

As far as 'being part of the larger whole', perhaps that is something that many traditional cultures afforded more so than in today's world, which if fragmented and individualised, and with a powerful undercurrent of nihilism. But I'm sure that if you incorporate Taoist disciplines and ways into your life, then they can become a support for that sense. It is after all an immensely durable cultural form which has existed continuously since the dawn of civlization.

I think it's a vague way of approaching the issue, — Patterner

It's not vague. As David Chalmers says, 'It is undeniable that some organisms are subjects of experience.' And subjects of experience are generally referred to as 'beings', while minerals are not. Chalmers goes on to sketch what would be required for a satisfactory theory of consciousness, but in my view he doesn't wrestle with the question of ipseity, the nature of subjective awareness as such. That is more a topic of consideration in Evan Thompson's Mind in Life. But the question of the nature of being is the subject of philosophy.

Glad someone noticed!

What frustrates me is the way science and religion so often approach similar truths but refuse to work together because of their ideological differences. — MrLiminal

I can't think of many cases where 'science' and 'religion' refuse to work together. I can think of isolated cases - Jehovah's Witnesses who refuse blood transfusions on ideological grounds, for instance. Catholic prohibitions against birth control and stem-cell research. But the Richard Dawkins view of science and religion being in eternal conflict is very much a sociological and historical phenomenon which has not much to do with either.

From the Wikipedia entry on 'the conflict thesis':

Before the 19th century, no one had pitted "science" against "religion" or vice versa in writing.[14] The relationship between religion and science became an actual formal topic of discourse in the 19th century.[14] More specifically, it was around the mid-19th century that discussion of "science and religion" first emerged[15][16] because before this time, the term science still included moral and metaphysical dimensions, was not inherently linked to the scientific method, and the term scientist did not emerge until 1834.[17][18] The scientist John William Draper (1811–1882) and the writer Andrew Dickson White (1832–1918) were the most influential exponents of the conflict thesis between religion and science. Draper had been the speaker in the British Association meeting of 1860 which led to the famous confrontation between Bishop Samuel Wilberforce and Thomas Henry Huxley over Darwinism, and in America "the religious controversy over biological evolution reached its most critical stages in the late 1870s".[19] In the early 1870s, the American science-popularizer Edward Livingston Youmans invited Draper to write a History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science (1874), a book replying to contemporary issues in Roman Catholicism, such as the doctrine of papal infallibility, and mostly criticizing what he claimed to be anti-intellectualism in the Catholic tradition,[20] but also making criticisms of Islam and of Protestantism.[21]

This is obviously very much amplified by the creationism-evolution debate, especially in Protestant America. There are still debates on the forum about intelligent design.

I think if it were possible to perfectly fuse religion, science and the arts in such a way that we could intuit things beyond our understanding and then make it into something understandable and beautiful would be the pinnacle of human achievement. — MrLiminal

That would be a description of some aspects of the classical cultures of the pre-modern world, especially ancient India and China. Also consider the sacred architecture of Europe.

I think overall you'd benefit from reading more of the history of culture and the history of ideas. There are discernable themes that emerge from such studies. In particular, the philosophical consequences of the Scientific Revolution. That's where the fault lines of the religion v science really emerge. It's much more than a philosophical question, although it involves many of them.

Indeed. I’ve discovered your site via your profile and will continue to delve ;-)

The essay on which the OP was based makes extensive reference to a recent cognitive science-philosophy book, Mind and the Cosmic Order, Charles Pinter. It is representative of a kind of genre which explores how the brain receives, organises and integrates sensory data to construct its world-picture. That’s where the convergence lies. Also subject of this video.

You can stipulate something like 'to exist is to stand out for a percipient' and of course on that definition nothing can exist absent percipients, which is basically what you are doing insisting: on your stipulated definition being the only "true" one. But that is a trivial tautology, and it is also not in accordance with the common usage of 'exist'. So, in Wittgenstein's terms, you are taking language on holiday. — Janus

As you mention Wittgenstein you might be interested in this snippet:

"Understanding a sentence," Wittgenstein says in Philosophical Investigations, "is more akin to understanding a theme in music than one may think." Understanding a sentence, too, requires participation in the form of life, the "language-game," to which it belongs. The reason computers have no understanding of the sentences they process is not that they lack sufficient neuronal complexity, but that they are not, and cannot be, participants in the culture to which the sentences belong. A sentence does not acquire meaning through the correlation, one to one, of its words with objects in the world; it acquires meaning through the use that is made of it in the communal life of human beings.

All this may sound trivially true. Wittgenstein himself described his work as a "synopsis of trivialities." — Wittgenstein's Forgotten Lesson

'participants in the culture to which the sentences belong. A sentence does not acquire meaning through the correlation, one to one, of its words with objects in the world; it acquires meaning through the use that is made of it in the communal life of human beings.' Quite in keeping with the theme of the original post, I would have thought.

Say you're building a model of a farmyard that includes a duck. Your model duck should look like a duck, waddle like a duck, quack like a duck, and so on. The important thing is that for each way a duck behaves that you're interested in, your model duck has a correlating behavior. — Srap Tasmaner

Like this, you mean?

Much as I've enjoyed building models over the years, I'm a little uncomfortable that the approach I'm describing has a sort of blindness. Whenever a question is raised about what something is, it is immediately rewritten as a question about how that thing behaves, so that we can get started modelling that bundle of behavior. — Srap Tasmaner

Like this, you mean?

Can you see the convergence between cognitive science and idealism?

I don't buy the kinds of arguments like Wayfarer makes; — Janus

Just as well I’m not selling, then.

I agree Husserl, and German philosophy generally, is exceedingly verbose and often obtuse. That's why I admit to relying on secondary sources and synoptic accounts, although I own and have read fair amounts of the Crisis of the Western Sciences.

Phenomenology really came alive for me through the book The Embodied Mind, Varela, Thompson and Rosch. (Thompson is one of the authors of the Blind Spot.) Also Francisco Varela's interest in Buddhist abhidharma (philosophical psychology) really impacted me as I have an MA in Buddhist Studies and practiced vipassana for a long while. So the convergence between phenomenology and Buddhism is now a kind of genre in its own right. Another great exponent is the French philosopher of science, Michel Bitbol, whom I learned about here on this forum. I love his style.

I would only add that the article itself does not claim to represent transcendental idealism but phenomenology. I am responsible for any equivocation between the two.

Completely!

Do you agree with the argument that science has a blind spot? You gave the kind of objections that a Burge might give, but then you say you don’t agree with Burge on that score. So do I take it that you are in agreement with the authors?

Allow me to quote Meillassoux at this point — Arcane Sandwich

I'm keeping away from him, and from 'speculative realism' generally. There's a considerable body of work there but still within the generally physicalist-naturalist ambit, and I'm defending an idealist philosophy. Bernardo Kastrup is more my cup of tea. And philosophical cognitive scientist John Vervaeke, who's not an idealist philosopher, but is doing fantastic work on history of ideas.

Those things are still there when I go to sleep, and they are the same things that I find in the morning when I wake up. — Arcane Sandwich

You are in good company.

in practice it is surprisingly difficult to get transcendental idealism taken seriously, even by many good philosophers. Once, in Karl Popper's living-room, I asked him why he rejected it, whereupon he banged his hand against the radiator by which we were standing and said: 'When I come downstairs in the morning I take it for granted that this radiator has been here all night'‚ a reaction not above the level of Dr Johnson's to Berkeleianism — Bryan Magee, Schopenhauer's Philosophy

The reaction of Johnson to Berkeley is the (in)famous Argument from the Stone.

Magee goes on:

Some of the best of empiricist philosophers have regarded transcendental idealism as so feeble that they have spoken patronizingly of Kant for putting it forward‚ from James Mill's notorious remark about his seeing very well what 'the poor man would be at', to passages in P. F. Strawson's The Bounds of Sense in which the author calls transcendental idealism names without bothering to argue seriously against it, and toys playfully with the question whether Kant was perhaps having us all on in putting it forward. ...Strawson appears from the outset to take it as having been already agreed between himself and his readers that transcendental idealism is some sort of risible fantasy, and therefore that Kant's constructive metaphysics will merit our attention only on condition that it can be shown to be logically independent of [it].

That would describe the attitude of most of the contributors here, with some illustrious exceptions (including the one directly above this post).

I'd recommend Quentin Meillassoux's book — Arcane Sandwich

He’s been discussed here, I’ve taken a look. Mine is the kind of argument he has in his sights.

There are things that exist outside of my brain. — Arcane Sandwich

That statement is made from a point of view outside both, which takes the brain as one object among others.

Those things are still there when I go to sleep, and they are the same things that I find in the morning when I wake up. — Arcane Sandwich

Yet amazing as it may seem, that is not an argument against transcendental idealism. There’s an anecdote that Bryan Magee tells about Karl Popper on this point, I’ll find it later.

I will clarify that while I acknowledge the reality of empirical and so mind independent facts, reality as a whole is not mind independent, even though we can putatively imagine it as if it were.

The argument is about whether things exist without minds. I say not, Banno references a gold discovery at a particular place as an example of a putatively mind-independent fact. This argument is interminable.

Better start digging, then!