I do think the materialism/ idealism dichotomy is ultimately wrongheaded, — Janus

Might I suggest that this is another consequence of the Cartesian divide between mind and body?

Again, the definition of phenomena - the definition, not my idea of what it means - is 'what appears'. Nowadays there is a lazy tendency to describe everything and anything in terms of 'phenomena' but it's a misuse of the term. The 'phenomenal domain' is what appears to us through the senses and instruments. Mathematical theorems, however, are not phenomenal.

If I propose that the things are ideas, then I must imagine an unseen, unknowable entity―a "mind at large" to quote Kastrup, and that seems to bring in the inevitable ontological dualism involved in thinking there is a transcendent realm or reality over and above the one we know. — Janus

I address this in another Medium essay, Is there Mind at Large? This essay interogates Kastrup's expression and compares it with Berkeleyian idealism. But then it draws on Yogācāra Buddhism, the school colloquially known as 'mind-only', to argue that it is not necessary to posit any kind of super-mind or cosmic mind.

Although I also concede that if Kastrup simply means 'some mind' or 'mind in general', then I am in complete agreement with him. Why? I think the reification trap is associated with the tendency towards objectification, to try and consider anything real in terms of it being an object or an other. This is where Heidegger's criticism of onto-theology rings true.

The topic of things-in-themselves is just brutal. When I go down the rabbit hole, it's just total blindness. — Manuel

There's a lot of confusion caused by the question 'what is the "in itself"' - as if it is a mysterious thing, or a mysterious realm. Then the natural tendency is to try and work out what it is. As I've quoted a number of times already, "a more sympathetic reading is to see the concept of the “thing in itself” as a sort of placeholder in Kant's system; it both marks the limits of what we can know and expresses a sense of mystery that cannot be dissolved, the sense of mystery that underlies our unanswerable questions. Through both of these functions it serves to keep us humble."

Although I have also learned that Hegel replaced ding an sich with simply 'ansich' - the in itself. I am not the least perturbed by that idea, it is simply 'the world' (or object) as it is in itself. But to even designate it 'thing' is already to sow the seed of contradiction.

So is it the case that whenever this perspective is proposed, it invariably originated from a study of Eastern religious ideas? — Punshhh

No, I’m not suggesting that. The commonalities between German idealism and Eastern philosophy were a matter of convergent development. Schopenhuaer always insisted that he developed his main ideas and published the first edition of WWI before encountering the Upaniṣad, but he did say that he felt the common ground he found with them was due to a universal wisdom. That’s an idea I’m not averse to. (See Schopenhauer and Buddhism, Peter Abelson.) Kant never mentioned Eastern religions at all so far as I know, but there have been extensive comparisons of the Critique of Pure Reason and Buddhist Madhyamaka (‘Middle Way’) philosophy.

it seems we could never be certain about the ultimate or most basic constitution of physical things. — Janus

Right! Kant’s philosophy despite its enormous complexity and prolixity is really an acknowledgement of our limitations. He does manage to retain that Socratic sense of ‘knowing nothing’. Having that sense of not having it all worked out is a virtue. Better to know we don’t know, than to think we know something we don’t.

Have you encountered Alva Noë ‘Out of Our Heads’? ‘Noë’s contention is that you are not your brain – rather, that “consciousness is an achievement of the whole animal in its environmental context”.

Noë supports this contention with references to many fascinating experiments in neuroscience. But he claims that neuroscience isn’t getting anywhere in explaining consciousness because it views consciousness of reality as a representation of the world created and manipulated by the brain. Noë attacks brain-body dualism in part by attacking this representationalism.

Process is an important way of thinking for Noë. Thus, consciousness isn’t just what happens in the brain: brain activity is just part of an extended process that starts with the environment, involves the whole body and includes the brain. In this, the environment isn’t merely a source of stimulation, nor is it a model or representation built by and viewed by the brain. In Noë’s words, “the world is its own model.” To put it another way, the real object of perception is the physical environment, not some artifact of the brain/mind.

According to Noë, the brain facilitates the dynamic interactions between the brain, body, and world. Surfers apprehend the world through their familiarity and skills of surfing. Certain surprises that arise while riding a wave cause the surfer to intuitively act and stay on the board. The brain is responsible for this skill, but without the world, such an interaction between the world would not be possible.‘ (He says on these grounds that the thought-experiment of a brain-in-a-vat could never be possible.)

While I’m not completely persuaded by his book, the broader point attacking ‘mind inside head’ is compelling to me. It’s that sense of the separated ego confronting the world of objects and forces that needs to be relaxed. Noë’s approach is more in line with enactive or participatory epistemology and the merging of knowing with being.

Well, Schopenhauer and Kant have been compared with Eastern philosophy. Indeed in Bryan Magee’s excellent Schopenhauer’s Philosophy from which that is quoted, there’s a chapter on Schopenhauer and Buddhism. Schopenhauer, as is well known, read a translation of one of the Upaniṣads all his life. But it can’t be pushed too far as they never really had any contact with authentic practitioners in those traditions. Nevertheless the basic point that Magee makes stands - that insight into transcendental idealism does require a kind of fundamental shift in perspective, akin to a gestalt shift but in a more general way, and it’s not easy to come by.

reside within the brain/body? — Janus

'within' is an interesting concept in this context. It's a spatial metaphor in which brain/body is a container and the mind is something inside it. But from another perspective, the body exists 'within awareness'.

it's contradictory to use physical evidence to prove the non-physical. — Hanover

You’re right that “empirical proof of the non-physical” makes no sense - if by proof we mean showing a physical photograph. But philosophy has long understood that the human condition is metaxy — “in-between” the physical and the intelligible, the mortal and the divine. Plato, for example, describes the soul as dwelling in this in-betweenness.

So the question isn’t whether the non-physical can be photographed, but whether our lived condition points to realities that are not exhaustible by physical descriptions. To reduce everything to “what can be photographed” is already to close off the very dimension that metaxy points towards. But on the other hand, these first-person reports may correspond to insights that are owed to this condition of 'liminality'.

I've only argued that paranormal experience doesn't offer proof of substance dualism. — Hanover

I take “substance dualism” to be implicitly Cartesian — res cogitans as a second kind of stuff. But I think that model is flawed, and Descartes himself could never explain how such purported substances interact. The deeper issue is how to conceive the non-physical at all. What if it isn’t another substance, nor any kind of objective “thing.” Maybe if there is a non-physical, it is a dimension of subject-hood which manifests only in, for and through subjects.

Which one are you? — Janus

I'd like to be Sam, but I won't insist.

This whole project of treating these stories as testimonial evidence is doomed from the start. — Srap Tasmaner

What other kinds of evidence could there be? The issue is about first-person reports of near-death experiences. The only third-person corroboration that is possible consists of trying to compare what the subject says, with things that other subjects in the environment saw (instruments, clothing, the positions of the furniture and so on.) It's not possible to corroborate it in any other way, as by its very nature, the material in question is experiential, undergone by a subject. So if they are not a source of real data, then ought all such testimonial evidence to have been disallowed from the outset, and no notice taken of it? It's not even a real subject?

My point here is that if we take the mind/body interaction problem seriously, we don't just shrug our shoulders and claim that ghosts exist as a seperate substance in a mysterious way, but we say instead that ghosts must be physical as well. — Hanover

Why must they? Only if you start with the axiom that the only kind of substance in the universe is physical do you arrive at that conclusion. But that’s not a demonstration, it’s a metaphysical presupposition. Even science admits that most of the universe is made of something “dark” we cannot observe directly. The real issue is whether physicalism should be granted by fiat, or whether phenomena themselves should be allowed to test its limits. Otherwise it’s like a prospector with a metal detector declaring that only metal exists, because metal is all she ever finds.

A philosophical challenge, as distinct from evidentiary matters, is what kind of worldview could accomodate near-death reports? Obviously, if you start with the premise that humans are solely physical, and that the mind is solely the activity of the physical brain, then the question is a non-starter. But then, cultures the world over have reported such experiences, along with narratives of other planes of existence, re-birth (and there is substantial corroborated evidence of children with past-life recall) and so on. Might it be that the physicalist worldview is deficient in some respect.

Suits me. Kudos for keeping the discussion going.

That’s a more reasonable framing, yes. I’d agree that phenomenological reflection is the method by which we clarify the conditions of experience, and that these conditions are not “observations” in the empirical sense. If you want to call them a “species of observation,” that’s OK — but the crucial point is that they are not observations of objects in the world but of the structural features of experience itself. They are self-reflective in a way that objective observation is not.

So when I say that “existence” or “objectivity” only have sense within experience, I’m not appealing to a particular empirical observation, but to precisely this kind of reflection. And that’s where the transcendental analysis differs from science: it’s not discovering new objects but clarifying the preconditions of there being any objects-for-us at all.

On the “non-physical” question, my point would be that the very category of “the physical” is itself mind-dependent in some basic way. That’s not to deny that there are physical objects — of course there are. But “the physical” as such is already a construct of our observational and conceptual framework: spatiotemporal, measurable, extended, resists our will. To point this out is not to dispute reality, but to draw attention to the inescapable role of the observer in what counts as physical in the first place. As I said in the extended version of the OP:

As for the nature of the physical, Charles Pinter (in Mind and the Cosmic Order) points out that it originates ‘with the sense that it acts in opposition to our will and constrains our actions’ — push it, and it resists, or lift it, and it is heavy. But then, ‘since sensation and thought don’t require overcoming any physical resistance, we consider them to be outside material reality’ — in other words, non-physical. However, contrary to the popular understanding, the so–called ‘immaterial’ acts of cognition are fundamental to any conception we can form of ‘the physical’, as physics itself is inextricably intertwined with mathematical concepts. But again, the primacy of mind has been deprecated because of having been relegated to the so–called ‘immaterial domain’, which does not objectively exist. To put it another way — our cognitive construction of the world is not itself amongst the objects of the natural sciences, and so is deprecated by physicalism, even though, in a fundamental sense, the physical sciences depend on it. This points towards the fundamental contradiction in the physicalist conception of the world. — The Mind Created World

But, overall, very good questions.

A general observation on many of the comments being made in this thread:

the assumptions of 'the inborn realism which arises from the original disposition of the intellect' enter unawares into the way in which the statements of transcendental idealism are understood, so that these statements appear faulty in ways in which, properly understood, they are not. Such realistic assumptions so pervade our normal use of concepts that the claims of transcendental idealism disclose their own non-absurdity only after difficult consideration, whereas criticisms of them at first appear cogent which, on examination, are seen to rest on confusion. We have to raise almost impossibly deep levels of presupposition in our own thinking and imagination to the level of self-consciousness before we are able to achieve a critical awareness of all our realistic assumptions, and thus achieve an understanding of transcendental idealism which is untainted by them. This, of course, is one of the explanations for the almost unfathomably deep counterintuitiveness of transcendental idealism, and also for the general notion of 'depth' with which people associate Kantian and post-Kantian philosophy. Something akin to it is the reason for much of the prolonged, self-disciplined meditation involved in a number of Eastern religious practices. — Schopenhauer's Philosophy, Bryan Magee, p106, 'Subjects and Objects'

Can you give me an example of any truth which is determinable in any way other than by observation or logic, and also explain just how that truth can be determined? — Janus

Isn’t that exactly what the OP was about? The point of the transcendental argument is that there are truths not determined by observation or logic, but by clarifying the conditions that make either possible. That’s why I began the thread in the first place. Your two-years-worth of criticism don't illustrate any grasp of that.

You don't even attempt to back up your claim. — Janus

I say the OP stands on its own two feet. You can continue to say whatever you like, but unless you can come up with an actual criticism, I will feel no obligation to respond.

Of course there is a perspective involved in saying that the Universe is or is not independent of minds, but it doesn't follow that it is impossible that the universe be either independent or dependent on minds―we just don't know and may only speculate about it. — Janus

Right - that's what you're doing. You fall back on the 'it can't be determined, therefore a matter of opinion.'

Can you give me an example of any truth which is determinable in any way other than by observation or logic, and also explain just how that truth can be determined? — Janus

I think the logic of the original post is quite sound. Every time you take issue with it, you do so on the basis of an innaccurate paraphrase of it, before reverting to the argument that 'it can't be known, it can't be determined'.

I'm not going to try to address any purported implications of quantum mechanical experiments and results because I don't have the expertise — Janus

Very convenient. Remember that it was you that said:

It is an undeniable aspect of experience that people see the same things at the same time and place down to the smallest detail. — Janus

Regarding any individual experiment, all observers see the same result, though. — Janus

It doesn't require knowledge of mathematical physics to show that the sources I mentioned call this into question: it is not the case that 'people see the same things at the same time and place' and that 'all observers see the same result'. So if you're going to appeal to the facts, how about making sure you understand them first.

This is becoming very repetitive, you keep making the same objections, and I'm giving the same responses. If you honestly can't see the point of the OP, maybe find another one to comment on.

It follows then that it must be real independently of all minds unless you posit a hidden collective mind. Is that what you believe? — Janus

No. It's that when you imagine or conjecture a universe with no humans in it, that conjecture still requires an implicit perspective. To conjecture a universe, or an object, without already bringing to bear the framework of space and time would be impossible - you would be imagining nothing. All of your statements about the 'already existing objects' and 'previously existing universe' rely on that implied perspective which you're bringing to bear on it, without noticing that you're doing it.

Regarding any individual experiment, all observers see the same result, though. — Janus

But they don't. The claim that “we all see the same thing” doesn’t hold once you move beyond the classical scale. Wigner’s Friend (1961), a thought-experiment, implied how two observers could end up with irreconcilable results — one sees a definite measurement, the other only a superposition. And in 2019, Massimiliano Proietti and colleagues ran this with six entangled photons. The result: Wigner’s “reality” and the friend’s “reality” coexisted but could not be reconciled. That suggests there may be no single set of “objective facts” that all observers must agree on — which is precisely the point at issue here. Also Does Physical Reality Objectively Exist? Ethan Siegel (Medium, may require registration):

For relativity:

Space and time might be real, but they’re not objectively real; only real relative to each individual observer or measurer. — Ethan Siegel

For quantum physics:

To the best that we can tell, the real outcomes that arise in the Universe cannot be divorced from who is measuring them, and how. — Ethan Siegel

In any case why deny what science tells us, and then appeal to it when it suits you? — Janus

Ethan Siegel, for instance, is a well-known popular science communicator and writer. Mostly he just writes on straight-ahead physics, but that essay above is him looking at the philosophical question concerning whether physical reality objectively exists. And he suggests that both relativity theory and quantum theory suggest not.

So - I'm not disputing science. I'm questioning scientific realism, which is philosophical attitude, not a scientific theory. Or if you like, a meta-scientific theory.

I don't believe you have any real doubt that the everyday objects we encounter constantly have their own existence, which does not rely on our perceiving them. — Janus

From the OP: 'It is empirically true that the Universe [and 'the object'] exists independently of any particular mind. But what we know of its existence is inextricably bound by and to the mind we have, and so, in that sense, reality is not straightforwardly objective. It is not solely constituted by objects and their relations. Reality has an inextricably mental aspect, which itself is never revealed in empirical analysis.' Which is Kant's 'Copernican Revolution in Philosophy'.

This requires an exercise in looking at your spectacles, instead of simply through them.

PS - also I would never want to be accused of science denialism. I accept wholeheartedly the science of climate change, and the science of vaccination, things which are only denied by cranks and weirdos (and the current US administration.)

A scientist doing science is not going to worry about whether an atom of hydrogen is "really out there" or not. As you say, the working assumption is that, if we act as if the atom is mind-independent, we can learn what we need to learn about it. ...I'm suggesting that the particular brand of objectivity that we call scientific objectivity -- essentially an intersubjectivity, a faith in a shared point of view -- will be unchanged. — J

That couldn't be more wrong. Surely you know of the many controversies over the interpretation of quantum physics. The question of whether the objects of analysis really exist, or in what sense they exist, is central to that. Neils Bohr and Albert Einstein debated it over a period of four decades. Einstein was a convinced scientific realist, he believed that reality was fundamenally 'out there' and it was the scientists' job to discern it. Bohr, on the other hand, introduced ideas such as wave-particle complementarity to account for the fact that sub-atomic particles could act as wave structures in some contexts and particles in others. You can't say whether they're really waves or really particles - it depended on which experimental setup you ran.

The dependence on what is observed upon the choice of experimental arrangement made Einstein uhappy. It conflicts with the view that the universe exists "out there", independent of all acts on observation. In contrast Bohr stressed that we confront here an inescapable new feature of nature, to be welcomed because of the understanding it givs us. Bohr found himself forced to introduce the word “phenomenon”. In today's words Bohr’s point – and the central point of quantum theory – can be put into a single, simple sentence. "No elementary phenomenon is a phenomenon until it is a registered (observed ) phenomenon”. — John Wheeler, Law without Law

This is the basic stance of the 'Copenhagen Interpretation', named retrospectively by Werner Heisenberg to denote the philosophical views of quantum physics developed by Bohr, Heisenberg, andt the other Copenhagen figures who devised quantum theory. To this day, notable public intellectuals including Sir Roger Penrose are convinced quantum theory is wrong - you can find any number of video interviews with Sir Roger proclaiming this in no uncertain terms. Why? Because he's convinced that a proper theory 'should describe what the Universe is doing'. The indeterminate nature of sub-atomic particles, and the ontological status of the wave function described by the Schrodinger equation, remain outstanding questions in philosophy of science. Furthermore, what role, if any, mind or consciousness is assigned in all of this, is another central question. So all of this is far from settled, and is still right at the forefront of philosophy and science.

See my The Timeless Wave of Quantum Physics if interested.

Also Kumar, Manjit. Quantum: Einstein, Bohr and the Great Debate About the Nature of Reality. London: Icon Books, 2008.

Now suppose the object of scientific investigation is the phenomenon of consciousness; not the experience, but the fact. — J

Please notice the strong presumption of “mind-independence” in the way this is framed. The very word phenomenon means “what appears,” and appearance is always to a subject. As John Stuart Mill put it, facts are “permanent possibilities of sensation.” That’s not a weakness of our epistemic situation; it’s a structural condition of knowledge itself. We can’t disentangle this or parcel it neatly into independent boxes. If even in quantum physics the notion of an observer-independent reality is problematic, then this holds all the more for consciousness — which is even less tractable to purely objective analysis.

There is no determinable fact of the matter that that can be used to ascertain what makes sense and what doesn't as a universal rule. — Janus

"Not determinable” in what sense? If you mean not determinable by science, then of course — but that doesn’t reduce it to mere opinion. If you mean not determinable in principle, then I disagree: there is a fact of the matter about whether categories like “existence” or “mind-independence” are meaningful outside the bounds of cognition. That’s the point of the argument: It’s not about my opinion versus yours. Your implication always seems to be: can't be 'determined scientifically' therefore it's a matter of opinion.

I'm saying it seems most plausible to me that there is a reality outside any consciousness of it. — Janus

As said a number of times already, 'there is no need for me to deny that the Universe is real independently of your mind or mine, or of any specific, individual mind.'

It is an undeniable aspect of experience that people see the same things at the same time and place down to the smallest detail. It's easy to test. — Janus

At the macroscopic level it’s easy to say “we all see the same thing.” But at the quantum scale - which is the smallest detail you can expect - it’s not so clear cut. In the double-slit experiment, whether you get an interference pattern or not depends on whether an observation is made. And the 'Wigner’s friend' experiments show that two observers can have inconsistent but equally valid accounts of the same event. So the claim that everyone just “sees the same thing in the same way” doesn’t hold once you look deeper. On that level, which is the most fundamental level, it's the nature of the physical that is 'not determinable'. So you can't appeal to it.

Furthermore, the fact that “we all see the same thing” is not some metaphysical given — it’s because we are all members of the same species, with the same sensory and cognitive apparatus, and also because we inhabit a shared culture that trains us to interpret the world in broadly the same ways. That’s why we can agree that “this is a table” or “that’s red.” But how a bat, or an octopus, or a machine intelligence “perceives the world” is another matter entirely — and one we simply cannot know from the inside. So even the claim that “we all see the same thing” is already species- and culture-bound.

But, appreciate the questions.

Depends on who you ask ;-)

we'll pick it up elsewhere, it's not really connected to this topic.

Your argument is something like:

We derived our idea of existence from our cognitive experience, therefore nothing can exist apart from its being cognized.

The conclusion does not follow logically from the premise, so it is not a deductively valid argument. — Janus

That’s a very simplified gloss, and not my argument. I’m not claiming that “nothing exists apart from cognition.” I’m saying that any concept of existence only makes sense within the conditions of possible experience. (I'm not bound by Kant's argument, but I am trying to stay in his lane, so to speak.)

The point about the Husserl quote was that:

Consciousness should not be viewed naturalistically as part of the world at all, since consciousness is precisely the reason why there was a world there for us in the first place. — Routledge Introduction to Phenomenology

That is much nearer what I mean. You're saying, there must be a reality outside any consciousness of it.

whatever cannot be determined by observation or logic is a matter of opinion. You tell me how it might otherwise be determined. — Janus

But that’s precisely the point: your criterion itself — “only what can be determined by observation or logic counts” — is not itself established by observation or logic. It’s a philosophical commitment, not a scientific observation. And that is what I mean by “dogmatism”: a framework that denies legitimacy to what it cannot assimilate, while never acknowledging that its own framework is not supported by its arguments.

I'm positing a real world beyond what appears, because I think all the evidence points to that. — Janus

But this “real world” you posit beyond appearances is itself nothing but conjecture. You say “all the evidence points to it,” but by definition the evidence only ever belongs to the realm of appearances. To project what the “real world” is behind appearances is less defensible than what you’re criticizing, because it claims the authority of evidence precisely where no evidence can reach. And I'm not positing that there is no reality beyond what we can experience: what I said was that 'what its existence might be outside of any perspective is meaningless and unintelligible.'

you're asking me to believe NDE testimony has been offered in a way that leads to no other conclusion than to admit that our physical laws as we know them have been violated. — Hanover

We demand physical evidence that there is anything that is not physical!!

The truth concerning what is neither empirically nor logically demonstrable is not strictly decidable and so is a matter of what each of us finds most plausible or in other words a matter of opinion...call it what you like. And of course a dogmatist won't want to accept that. — Janus

I'm saying that the argument in the OP is a logical argument. If arguments can only be decided by empirical means, then we're back at verificationism or positivism. You will also need to justify why you think the argument is dogmatic.

A canyon reveals fossil memory of the distant past. The Atlantic floor has wonder memory of the history of Earth's magnetic pole shifts. — noAxioms

I don't rate that as memory. A rational observer such as ourselves can intepret it, but it is not information that is conserved for the sake of maintaining homeostasis as memory is for an organism.

maybe that’s the price of debunking myths and sacred cows. — Tom Storm

We have plenty of our own.

So, to refer to things-in-themselves as "strictly transcendental human constructs" is again a particular way of framing, not an expression of any determinable fact of the matter. — Janus

Basically you're saying that it's subjective, a matter of opinion. 'It's OK if you see it that way, but I see it a different way'. It's not 'determinable' because it can't be validated empirically. Whatever is not determinable by science is a matter of personal preference.

I don't understand why you keep repeating this. — Janus

I keep repeating it, because you keep misrepresenting it. You say 'Science can study this and even model what the world might look like to different animals'. But you're still positing a real world beyond what appears, as if that is the criterion of realness, when it is the very point at issue. That's why I posted this:

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 at all, 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—this would be a subjective idealism, itself a consequence of a certain naturalising tendency whereby consciousness is cause and the world its effect—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. — Routledge Introduction to Phenomenology

So in "our world" our perception differentiates to create entities. — AmadeusD

I do agree, but I also think there is a danger in the word 'create' - even though I used it in the OP. I think 'construct' might actually have been a better choice, and besides, there is a school of thought 'radical constructivism' which is very similar in outlook to what I'm arguing for (info). But it is a semantic distinction.

There's a very simple metric which ought to be mentioned in this context. That is the idea of a 'metaphysics of quality'.

One popular source for that was Robert M. Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Enquiry into Values (and his subsequent Lila: An Enquiry into Morals.) Pirsig dissected the typical subject-object dualism that dominates Western thought, arguing that Quality—the immediate, pre-intellectual recognition of value or excellence—exists prior to, and gives rise to, the division between observer and observed. This Quality is not merely aesthetic preference or subjective judgment, but rather the dynamic source from which both the mental and physical arise. Pirsig suggests that when we realise Quality directly—whether in a well-crafted piece of work, a moment of understanding, or the proper maintenance of a motorcycle—we encounter reality in its most fundamental form, before it gets carved up by analytical thinking into separate categories of self and world. This metaphysical position attempts to bridge the gap between classical rationality and romantic intuition by showing how both emerge from a more primary encounter with value itself.

It is precisely this 'axis of quality' which has tended to collapse in (post)Enlightenment thought. This is the 'flattening of ontology' that John Vervaeke often references in his talks. His concept of "leveling up" refers to his argument for restoring an hierarchy of value as a response to what he sees as the meaning crisis in contemporary culture. Vervaeke contends that reductive materialism has created a "flat ontology" where everything is reduced to the same fundamental level—typically physical processes—thereby collapsing meaningful distinctions between different orders or levels of reality. In contrast, an hierarchical approach recognizes genuinely emergent levels of being, where higher-order phenomena like consciousness, meaning, and wisdom represent real ontological categories that cannot be fully captured or described in terms of lower levels. "Leveling up" involves cultivating practices and perspectives that allow individuals to access and participate in these higher orders of reality through what he calls "religio" (reconnection), moving from mere propositional knowledge through procedural and perspectival knowing toward participatory knowledge that transforms the knower. This hierarchical framework doesn't reject scientific understanding but embeds it within a richer ontology reflecting the existential context of human beings, who are capable of grasping meaning in a way that other creatures are not.

But this is invariably met with the objection, what do you mean by 'higher'? Higher, according to whom? (Just wait!) This is because any such values are generally expected to be matters of individual conscience - the individual being the arbiter of value on modern culture.

I think you're suggesting that the blind spot is methodologically structural, that it can't be overcome in terms of objective science. — J

Scientific objectivity has customarily been grounded in the notion of the 'mind-independent object' without taking into account the Kantian insight into the mind's constitution of the object. Phenomenology does take that into account. That is one of the main points of The Blind Spot of Science.

Where is the mystery? — Apustimelogist

The mystery lies precisely in the fact that every scientific explanation presupposes symbolic mediation — concepts, meanings, language — which themselves are not physical properties. The ink marks, sounds, or neural firings are physical events; the meaning they convey is not. That irreducible distinction is what Howard Pattee called the “epistemic cut" which arises precisely with the beginning of organic life and the implicit distinction between self and other, subject and object.

We don’t notice this because we’re always looking through the symbolic, not at it. That’s why meaning is so hard to make the object of analysis — and why newer sciences like biosemiotics and phenomenology are needed. They still fall under the umbrella of science, but they’re worlds away from the hard-edged materialism of earlier generations, precisely because that old framework has proven untenable.

One thing I notice in your posts is the taken-for-granted-ness of many of your responses, and the many arguments you “don’t see the point of.” Since antiquity it has been said that wisdom begins in wonder, and it strikes me that this dimension is absent from your replies, which read more as “business as usual.” No offense intended — it’s just that philosophy, at least for me, is about keeping that sense of wonder alive.

Then I respond that everything we say is from within the empirical context. So, what are we disagreeing about? — Janus

The objection:

‘Surely “the world” is what is there all along, what is there anyway, regardless of whether you perceive it or not! Science has shown that h. sapiens only evolved in the last hundred thousand years or so, and we know Planet Earth is billions of years older than that! So how can you say that the mind ‘‘creates the world”’? — Questioner

The response

As already stated, I am not disputing the scientific account, but attempting to reveal an underlying assumption that gives rise to a distorted view of what this means. What I’m calling attention to is the tendency totake for granted the reality of the world as it appears to us, without taking into account the role the mind plays in its constitution. This oversight imbues the phenomenal world — the world as it appears to us — with a kind of inherent reality that it doesn’t possess. This in turn leads to the over-valuation of objectivity as the sole criterion for truth. — Wayfarer

It's this taken-for-grantedness that is the main target.

The limits of human cognition does not define or determine the limits of what exists. — Janus

But the whole point of the essay is what we know of what exists. When I say the world “relies on an implicit perspective,” I mean the world-as-known. To speak of what lies entirely outside that perspective is already speculative. Better to call it “purported” or “imagined” existence.

I would say it is something before it "enters the mind" otherwise there would be nothing there to be perceived. — Janus

To call it “something” already applies a category it doesn’t yet have. That’s why I said: it is not some-thing. But I'm also not saying it is simply non-existent. This is what you keep insisting is 'nonsensical', but when the context is understood, it is really quite straightforward: it is neither a “thing” nor “nothing,” but precisely what lies beyond the scope of those categories.

The bifurcation is yours―between the empirical and the transcendental. If all we know is the empirical world, and everything that has evolved out of that experience, and attempting to understand that experience―maths, geometry, scince, music, poetry, literature―then we can say nothing about the transcendental other than that it is an idea of the possibility of something beyond. — Janus

There is no division between the empirical and the world as it is in itself. The world known by empiricism is simply the universe as it appears to us. To speak of “the world in itself” is not to posit a separate domain, but to point to the condition that makes the empirical world possible in the first place.

The point being that a lot of modern thought tends to forget that empirical knowledge is contingent in this way, which is to accord science an authority it doesn't really have.

, Are there structural or even transcendental arguments that show [consciousness] must remain [mysterious]? McGinn thinks so. — J

McGinn thinks it's an intractable scientific problem, that it's so complex we can't feasibly tackle it. Marcel was an existentialist, he didn't understand it as a problem to be solved but a reality to be accepted.

Buddhism has 'theories of consciousness', beginning with abhidharma, and elaborated over subsequent millenia. But the aim was never to 'explain consciousness'. It was to address the cause of suffering, dukkha, and its ending. Buddhism was always phenomenological, right from the outset. It never posited that the self and world were separated in the way that modern science does. In translations of the early Buddhist texts, the expression 'self and world' is often encountered, as they are understood to be co-arising, in modern parlance. (This is where there are convergences between modern phenomenology and Buddhism, e.g. Merleau Ponty and Buddhism)

Without the intellect setting out borders and providing explanations, there is just emotion. It doesn't belong to anybody. It's just there. Does that make sense? — frank

It does. It's an argument against solipsism. Solipsism takes as its starting point the claim that ‘my consciousness is the only thing I am indubitably certain of.’ But this claim depends on the sense of mine—of ownership—which is itself a mental construct rather than a self-evident given. What is indubitable is consciousness as such, not its appropriation as ‘my’ consciousness. If the ‘mine’ is deconstructed, then solipsism evaporates, because the certainty lies only in consciousness, not in its supposed exclusivity to a solitary self.

Descartes could have more accurately said cogitatio est, ergo esse est — 'thinking is, therefore being is.' What is indubitable is the occurrence of thought, not the existence of an enduring ego.

Although, that said, I think the nature of mind is mysterious, but not in the way Chalmers, or McGinn, are suggesting. It's not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be faced.

A genuine problem is subject to an appropriate technique by which it can be attacked and reduced. A mystery, by contrast, transcends any conceivable technique; it is not reducible, because it is a situation in which the inquirer is him- or herself a participant. — Paraphrased from Marcel’s The Mystery of Being

Which I think is much nearer the mark.

I think Wayfarer sees Chalmers as being closer to the New Mysterian position of McGinn and others. — J

Never took to Colin McGinn, although enjoyed his scathing review of Paula Churchlands materialist baloney. Besides, 'New Mysterian' sounds like a band name. I simply reference the original paper (Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness) as a stepping-off point. Chalmers wants to redefine science to accomodate the first-person perspective.

One reaction this provoked was Daniel Dennett’s essay The Fantasy of First-Person Science. Dennett argued that the very idea of a “science” based on private, first-person data is incoherent (ridiculous, even!) Science, in his view, can only proceed on the basis of what is publicly observable and intersubjectively testable. Strictly objective, right? He was wary of granting privileged epistemic authority to introspection, which he regarded as unreliable and uncheckable. To resolve this, he proposed “heterophenomenology,” a method in which the researcher treats subjects’ reports of their experiences not as direct windows onto consciousness, but as neutral data to be interpreted. If a subject says “I see a red afterimage,” the scientific claim is not that an afterimage exists as described, but simply that the subject reported seeing one, a fact which can be combined with other behavioural and neurological evidence. For Dennett, this move rescues science from what he saw as the illusion that first-person testimony could form a scientific foundation.

Dan Zahavi responded in Killing the Straw Man that Dennett’s picture of phenomenology is based on a fundamental misunderstanding. Dennett assumes that phenomenology is a species of naïve introspection, committed to the incorrigibility of private reports and the construction of a “first-person science” in that sense. Zahavi insists that this is precisely not what phenomenology is. For Husserl and those who followed him, phenomenology is not a catalogue of inner episodes, but a disciplined investigation of the structures of experience itself—intentionality, temporality, embodiment, and above all, intersubjectivity. Phenomenologists have long recognised that introspection can be fallible and misleading; their project is not to defend subjective reports as infallible data, but to uncover the fundamental patterns through which experience arises, which are themselves shared and already presupposed in any science. In that light, Zahavi argues, Dennett is fighting an enemy that doesn’t exist. His “heterophenomenology” might be a corrective to old-fashioned Willhelm Wundt-style introspective psychology, but it is not a correction of phenomenology, which never claimed what he attributes to it.

It’s a worthy aspiration although one I haven’t necessarily mastered.

I wasn't taking issue with ontic structural realism.

Another disgraceful illustration of corruption in Trump's America




This is a gift link to a New York Times exposé of the way that those who were tasked with prosecuting the January 6 Rioters were treated after Trump regained power. Summarily sacked, dismissed, demoted, walked out of offices. Some excerpts.

[Michael]Gordon was heading up on this steaming late July day in Tampa, Fla., to collect his things and say goodbye. Three weeks earlier, and just two days after receiving yet another outstanding performance review, he had been interviewing a witness online when a grim-faced colleague interrupted to hand him a letter. It said he was being “removed from federal service effective immediately” — as in, now.

Although the brief letter, signed by Attorney General Pam Bondi, provided no justification, Mr. Gordon knew the likely reason: Jan. 6, 2021.

He was being fired for successfully prosecuting people who had stormed the United States Capitol that day — assaulting police officers, vandalizing a national landmark and disrupting that sacrosanct moment in a democracy, the transfer of presidential power.

He was being fired for doing his job.

The letter did more than inform Mr. Gordon, a 47-year-old father of two, that he was unemployed. It confirmed for him his view that the Justice Department he had been honored to work for was now helping to whitewash a traumatic event in American history, supporting President Trump’s reframing of its violence as patriotic — and those who had prosecuted rioters in the name of justice as villains, perhaps even traitors. ...

By tradition, the [Justice] department long steered clear of White House intervention. Now, to remedy what the president has deemed the past weaponization of Justice, it has been deployed as a weapon for his score-settling and political crusades. To that end, it has sought to investigate and perhaps prosecute those who once investigated and prosecuted Mr. Trump and his allies, from the former special counsel, Jack Smith, to New York’s attorney general, Letitia James, to former President Barack Obama.

The template for that transformation was Jan. 6 — the pardons and then the purge.

To date, the Justice Department has fired or demoted more than two dozen prosecutors who were assigned to hold the rioters accountable — roughly a quarter of the complement. Some were junior prosecutors, like Sara Levine, who had secured a guilty plea from a rioter who had grabbed a police officer. Others were veterans, including Greg Rosen, who had led the department’s Jan. 6 task force. Scores more prosecutors, involved in these and other cases, have left, either in fear of where the ax might next fall or out of sheer disgust.

...The Justice Department declined to comment for this article, but a White House spokesman, Harrison Fields, described the agency during the Biden administration as “a cabal of anti-Trump sycophants” engaged in a “relentless pursuit to throw the book at President Trump and his allies.” By “uprooting the foot soldiers,” Mr. Fields added, Mr. Trump’s attorney general, Ms. Bondi, “is restoring the integrity of the department.”

I've started on a book called Dynamics in Action, Alicia Juarrero - one of the many books I've learned about here. She makes it freely available on her website.

What is the difference between a wink and a blink? The answer is important not only to philosophers of mind, for significant moral and legal consequences rest on the distinction between voluntary and involuntary behavior. However, "action theory" the branch of philosophy that has traditionally articulated the boundaries between action and non-action, and between voluntary and involuntary behavior has been unable to account for the difference.

Alicia Juarrero argues that a mistaken, 350-year-old model of cause and explanation one that takes all causes to be of the push-pull, efficient cause sort, and all explanation to be prooflike, underlies contemporary theories of action. Juarrero then proposes a new framework for conceptualizing causes based on complex adaptive systems. Thinking of causes as dynamical constraints makes bottom-up and top-down causal relations, including those involving intentional causes, suddenly tractable. A different logic for explaining actions - as historical narrative, not inference - follows if one adopts this novel approach to long-standing questions of action and responsibility. — Dynamics in Action

It mentions another volume, Mental Causation, but mainly to show what's wrong with it.

Must say, finding it a slog, but then, she does take to task many of the principles of 'action theory' which is a large topic in analytic philosophy.

Whether it's about the specific kind of causation you have in mind, i don't know, but I also don't know if there is such a book.

It can all be explained in terms of physical events and brain activity. I don't see that as contoversial. — Apustimelogist

But it can't. Any explanation relies on symbolic language, obviously. You're using words to describe the process, but you can't see the words for the trees :rofl:

I don't see what else is going on. — Apustimelogist

You don't say! You keep telling me that you don't 'see the point' of what I'm trying to explain. I think I'll give up.

The distinction between the physical and the semantic is not a matter of taste, it’s a matter of fact. The ink marks on a page, or the neural firings in a brain, are physical events. The meaning those marks or firings convey is not reducible to those events. That’s why the same sentence can be written in English, Greek, or Sanskrit, with different marks and sounds but carry the same meaning. So the meaning and the physical form are different things.

Philosophers across traditions have recognised this as a basic divide — Aristotle with form vs matter, Kant with concept vs intuition, Peirce with sign vs object, and so on. It's not a distinction that can be denied. Hence my question!

Whose limits, and justified by appealing to what exactly? — Janus

Ours — the limits of human cognition. And justified by what? By the recognition that our categories of thought (existence, objectivity, causality, etc.) are the very means by which the world is knowable to us. To apply them beyond possible experience - to imagine a world as it would be outside any cognition of it - is to use them outside the domain in which they have sense. That’s the force of the transcendental distinction: not a ban on thinking, but a clarification of what kind of thinking makes sense.

What has never entered your mind is not anything, obviously. And when it has entered your mind, it has done so via the senses, and has been interpreted by your intellect. What is outside that, neither exists nor does not exist. It is not yet anything, but that doesn't mean it's nothing. This is not dogma.

You even agree that it makes sense to say that things existed prior to humans. Then you go on to say it makes sense in an empirical context, but not in a transcendental context. I don't accept that bifurcation. — Janus

It is not a 'bifurcation'. That term is usually associated with A N Whitehead and is a different matter. In fact, the division is between the world as known to us, and what you think it must be, beyond that.

It's dogma, pure and simple, but I can't make you see that, you have to come to that realization yourself. — Janus

I’m not laying down a stricture about what others may or may not think. I’m pointing out that when we use concepts like “existence” or “independence,” we are already relying on the framework of experience that gives those concepts their sense. That isn’t dogma — it’s analysis. To ignore that is not to be “freer” in one’s thinking, but simply to overlook the conditions that make thought coherent in the first place.

I don't so much object to the word 'transcendental' because we can only really reflect on what we experience and on what we can imagine.... — Janus

I don’t disagree except I’d stress that the “natural attitude” you invoke is exactly what phenomenology and Kantian critique are meant to interrogate. Yes, we all tacitly assume that the objects we encounter exist “anyway” and independently of perception. But to take that assumption as foundational is precisely to overlook the constitutive role played by the observer.

You’re right that phenomenalism explains nothing; but the transcendental approach is not phenomenalism. It’s not saying “objects are only in the mind,” but that our very idea of an “independent existence” is already framed by the categories through which we think. That’s why Kant speaks of “the transcendental” not as another realm to imagine, but as the condition that makes imagining and experience possible at all.

So I’d put it like this: you’re right that “it doesn’t really matter” whether we speculate about God or noumena. But it does matter whether we recognize the limits of our categories, because that recognition is the difference between naïve realism (taking the natural attitude as ultimate) and critical philosophy (understanding it as a conditioned and contingent reaiity).

Science consists in investigation and analysis of the nature of the phenomena we experience. Phenomenology='What is the nature of experience ' and science= 'what is the nature of the things we experience'. — Janus

Do you see the difference? Don't you think it's very significant? This is the subject of this quote, which I've posted quite a few times already, about Husserl's criticism of naturalism, from the Routledge Introduction to Phenomenology:

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 at all, 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—this would be a subjective idealism, itself a consequence of a certain naturalising tendency whereby consciousness is cause and the world its effect—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.

Why do you think Husserl says that conscious acta cannot be properly understood from with the natural outlook? Do you agree? Do you think it's significant?

Of course I admit that our knowledge has limits, but I'm not a fan of pre-determining those limits. Of course we can talk about limits in tautologous way―once we conceive of objects as being "appearances for us" and "things in themselves" it is true by mere definition that if we define 'in itself' as what lies beyond 'how it appears' then we cannot have cognitive access to the in itself. But it doesn't follow logically that speculative talk about what it might be is meaningless. — Janus

But it is likely to be dogmatic.

Have you ever studied philosophy, as distinct from popular science? By 'studied', I mean, done a course in the subject and submitted a term paper in it.