And the reason I'm impressed with that book is that I think it is one of the many in that emerging area of cognitivism and cognitive science, which provides support for a kind of scientifically-informed idealism, as distinct from the materialism which has hitherto tended to characterise scientific philosophy.

Presumably this sort of approach was born in the modern period. — Leontiskos

The passage that is being commented on was from the abstract of a book I mentioned, Charles Pinter, Mind and the Cosmic Order. It is of course difficult to convey the thrust of an entire book on the basis of an abstract of the introduction. The book's general abstract says 'tracing philosophical thought from Descartes through Kant to 20th-century physics, Pinter examines how cognition shapes our understanding of reality. He argues that the mind constructs the form and features of objects, suggesting that shape and structure arise in the observer rather than being inherent in objects themselves. Drawing on Gestalt psychology, Pinter contends that the meaningful connections we perceive are products of the mind's organizational processes.'

So the sense in which I question the reality of 'mind-independence' is that whatever we assert, about gold in Boorara or whatever, relies on this cognitive framework - that we can't stand outside of that faculty to see what is outside of or apart from it. So the world is not 'mind-independent' in that sense, but this doesn't mean, as Banno seems to think it must, that there can be no unknown facts.

Well, yes it was... that there are still facts even when no one is around. — Banno

Which neither you nor anyone would ever know, were we not around :rage:

By ‘creating reality’, I’m referring to the way the brain receives, organises and integrates cognitive data, along with memory and expectation, so as to generate the unified world–picture within which we situate and orient ourselves. And although the unified nature of our experience of this ‘world-picture’ seems simple and even self-evident, neuroscience has yet to understand or explain how the disparate elements of experience , memory, expectation and judgement, all come together to form a unified whole — even though this is plainly what we experience.

By investing the objective domain with a mind-independent status, as if it exists independently of any mind, we absolutize it. We designate it as truly existent, irrespective of and outside any knowledge of it. This gives rise to a kind of cognitive disorientation which underlies many current philosophical conundrums. — Wayfarer

we can still talk of truths. — Banno

That was never at issue, but please let's leave it there.

It is true that there is gold in Boorara. If all life disappeared from the universe, but everything else is undisturbed, then it would still be true that there would still gold in Boorara. — Banno

But as I said, that is the case for any empirical fact whatever. You're loosing sight of what 'mind independent' means if indeed you ever had sight of it.

The world wouldn't disappear if we disappeared. — L'éléphant

We might imagine that it would continue to exist, but whatever existence it possesses would be unrecognisable to human intelligence. I did mention Wittgenstein.

there truths when no one is around — Banno

Yours is basically the argument from the stone.

Because to Kant, even space and time are only appearances to us. — L'éléphant

The 'forms of intuition' - namely, space and time - and the world of appearances exist only in relation to the subject's cognitive faculties. If the thinking subject were removed, what we understand as the empirical world would also cease to exist because it is dependent the structures of human cognition.

If we remove the perceiver, then there's no object of experience, is there? — L'éléphant

Right.

There is gold in Boorara. If all life disappeared from the universe, but everything else is undisturbed... your hypothetical, not mine... by the definition you gave, there would still gold in Boorara. — Banno

The same can be said for any empirical fact whatever, but that is still not the point at issue.

Incidentally, the passage I quoted was the absract of Chapter 1 of Charles S. Pinter, Mind and the Cosmic Order, which is essentially about the convergence of cognitive science and philosophy in support of a thesis about the foundational role of cognition in the cosmic order.

The book’s argument begins with the British empiricists who raised our awareness of the fact that we have no direct contact with physical reality, but it is the mind that constructs the form and features of objects. It is shown that modern cognitive science brings this insight a step further by suggesting that shape and structure are not internal to objects, but arise in the observer. The author goes yet further by arguing that the meaningful connectedness between things — the hierarchical organization of all we perceive — is the result of the Gestalt nature of perception and thought, and exists only as a property of mind.

Imagine that all life has vanished from the universe, but everything else is undisturbed. — Banno

Right. Imagine it. There you are - that's the 'implicit perspective' that I'm referring to.

It's time for a change—it's time you started genuinely engaging with your interlocutors. You never know—you might learn something new. — Janus

That would depend on there being a valid objection.

Moving from the topic at hand — Banno

It is quite on-topic. You mentioned Einstein - Bergson's argument for the role of subjective awareness as an essential component of time is plainly similar to Kant's argument that time is 'a form of our intuition', rather than something possessing absolute or objective existence. It was in that respect that he disagreed with Einstein's scientific realism, so it's directly relevant.

But they're not things until they're cognised.
— Wayfarer
What could that mean? — Banno

Imagine that all life has vanished from the universe, but everything else is undisturbed. Matter is scattered about in space in the same way as it is now, there is sunlight, there are stars, planets and galaxies—but all of it is unseen. There is no human or animal eye to cast a glance at objects, hence nothing is discerned, recognized or even noticed. Objects in the unobserved universe have no shape, color or individual appearance, because shape and appearance are created by minds. Nor do they have features, because features correspond to categories of animal sensation. This is the way the early universe was before the emergence of life—and the way the present universe is outside the view of any observer.

If you want the most radical thesis on time check out The End of Time by Julian Barbour. I've been reading, and trying to understand, it, and it's doing my head in (in a good way). — Janus

I'm reading his 'the nature of time', which is a shorter account of his overall understanding. As I understand it, for Barbour, what we experience as the passage of time is tied to the way observers interact with the universe’s configurations. This makes time observer-dependent, rooted in human perception rather than a property of the universe itself.

You seem to be moving around a lot. Apologising for Bergson? — Banno

It's the same point that Kant was making, about how time has a subjective component, arising from the awareness of duration. What is it that connects the moments of a pendulum swing into a coherent series which we call 'an interval of time' other than that awareness?

Did he mean that there are great living philosophers but they are tucked away in departments other than philosophy, or that contemporary philosophers in general are not interested in mankind’s search for meaning? — Joshs

I think he thought that the Department, which was then under the professorship of one D M Armstrong, would not provide the kinds of answers I was seeking.

What I mean about the difficulty of contemporary analytic philosophy, is that it's often extremely dense, written by and for those who can draw on a great deal of specialised scholarship. Not all of it, but a lot of it. Still, I've learned quite a bit since I started on Forums, due to researching names and ideas that are mentioned here. (Including from you, who introduced me to Dan Zahavi, and who's writing I find generally pretty approachable and lucid.)

Einstein disagrees. — Banno

Quite. Subject of a current Aeon essay on the debate between Bergson and Einstein:

To examine the measurements involved in clock time, Bergson considers an oscillating pendulum, moving back and forth. At each moment, the pendulum occupies a different position in space, like the points on a line or the moving hands on a clockface. In the case of a clock, the current state – the current time – is what we call ‘now’. Each successive ‘now’ of the clock contains nothing of the past because each moment, each unit, is separate and distinct. But this is not how we experience time. Instead, we hold these separate moments together in our memory. We unify them. A physical clock measures a succession of moments, but only experiencing duration allows us to recognise these seemingly separate moments as a succession. Clocks don’t measure time; we do.

That the world is not seen is not that it ceases to exist or even to be invisible. — Janus

Apart from any conception of it, it neither exists nor doesn't exist. Both existence and non-existence are concepts.

And this is the bit where you say "quantum". — Banno

No, it's the bit where Kant says 'were I to remove the thinking subject, the whole world must vanish'.

I looked up the exact quote:

"Now space and time exist only in the subject as modes of perception. If we remove the subject, they vanish as well, as do all appearances. Nothing can remain that is not, in its own way, an object of experience." (Critique of Pure Reason, A42/B59)

So the gold at the new Boorara gold project near Kalgoorlie in Western Australia was there before it was discovered. It did not come into existence at the discovery. — Banno

So you still can't see how I can acknowledge that this is empirically true, yet still maintain that it is not a mind-independent fact?

And yet they do not doubt that there are things that provide that data. — Banno

No doubt. But they're not things until they're cognised.

You presume spirit and then see it everywhere — Banno

I never use the word.

it certainly does not follow that they have no existence outside of our measurements — Janus

That's precisely the point! Whatever 'particles' are, they are not defineable until they are measured. This is the whole conundrum of modern physics, in a nutshell. It's why Bohr said 'if you're not shocked by quantum mechanics, you can't have understood it.'

As it happens, I've written an essay on that. It is based on critiquing Penrose's realist objections to quantum mechanics.

when it comes to the existence of any object, we will intuitively say, “well, the object is there, but we can’t know where it is, until we locate it or measure it. Isn’t that obvious?” But this is precisely what the pioneers of quantum physics called into question. And bear in mind, the objects in question had, up until then, been presumed to be the “fundamental building blocks of reality”! But in quantum physics, the answer to the question, “where is the object?” can only be given as an approximation, described by the wavefunction equation, ψ. There is no definite thing at a definite location until it hits the screen and leaves a mark —until that point, there is only a hazy range of possibilities. But as noted above, the act of observation seems to condense the hazy wave into a definite entity. This is the mysterious “wavefunction collapse”. What exists before, or apart from, that observation is the central mystery. It’s like Lewis Carroll’s Chesire Cat, which vanishes leaving only its grin.

do you see ways of practically handling the situation that is not based on ideas of a spiritual nature (karma, dharma, etc.)? — schopenhauer1

wouldn't call Buddhism spiritual. We can't help view it in those terms, or map it against them, because of our own cultural background and the pervasive use of that word. I do it myself! My experience with Buddhist meditation brought up a lot of 'samskaras' (mental tendencies) from my own Christian cultural background, but 'spiritual' carries connotations which aren't necessarily accurate to Buddhism.

The question at issue is 'existential anxiety' and the predicament implicit in the human condition, which divergent religions and philosophies claim to or attempt to ameliorate. So does 'handling the situation' mean - ameliorating that deep sense of anxiety?

It's not the existence of such "unseen realities" that relies on a perspective. — Banno

Epochē is withholding of judgement concerning that which is not evident. All of your supposed 'unseen realities' are the subject of conjecture and included in that category.

And here is, again, where I appeal to both physics and cognitive science. Physics has demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt that the purported fundamental constituents of material reality do not have a meaningful existence outside the act of measurement which specifies them.

Cognitive science understands that what we construe as objects comprise a synthesis of sensory data and judgement (per Kant), and we can't say anything about what they are outside that.

you already agreed that there is stuff you don't know — Banno

I am not arguing that it means that ‘the world is all in the mind’. It’s rather that, whatever judgements are made about the world, the mind provides the framework within which such judgements are meaningful. So though we know that prior to the evolution of life there must have been a Universe with no intelligent beings in it, or that there are empty rooms with no inhabitants, or objects unseen by any eye — the existence of all such supposedly unseen realities still relies on an implicit perspective. What their existence might be outside of any perspective is meaningless and unintelligible, as a matter of both fact and principle. — Wayfarer

Those are the ground on which I'm arguing against so-called mind-independent facts. Epochē, refraining from judgement about non-evident facts.

OK if you want to have another go... you said:

I maintain that there is stuff that is true even if we don't know, believe, or whatever, that it is true. — Banno

But the instant I ask the question 'what stuff do you mean?' or 'what do you have in mind?' then your argument is lost, because you've already begun to name it, indicate it, bring it within the ambit of experience. Which is why I've said 'neither exists nor does not exist', both of those being judgements.

It's noteworthy that NY Times reports many Trump voters are thrilled with Trump's radical choice of nominees. Why? Because, they'll 'drain the swamp' and 'shake things up'. And this, from a purportedly conservative political party! Trump is a radical - not a political radical, because his motives aren't inspired by any political vision whatever, but all in service of his ego. And the masses are falling for it in droves, up until the time that Government really does fall apart and all their benefits stop.

I do get that I'm a bit of a radical, but I try not to be too strident about it. Anyway, bear in mind, you can only successfully condescend down, and I don't think you're at sufficient altitude.

Then you go off on a mystical tangent, and try to drag physics along with you. For me that's an unjustified overextension. — Banno

Nowadays it's common knowledge, there are many reputable popular books on the subject (e.g.). I'm arguing that there are powerful trends within both physics and cognitive science that undermine scientific realism (and by implication, materialism and scientism.) You will often agree with me on the evils of those attitudes, but when it gets down to the philosophical analysis of them we seem to part company.

Oh of course. I've found current academic philosophers whom I think have philosophically profound things to say, and a genuine passion for saying it. But the demands of the profession are such that they have to withstand the scrutiny of their peers, which often makes them very difficult for the lay reader. (I find Lloyd Gerson like that, I very much like what I can understand, but his books are so dense with allusions and references to competing interpretations that they're a really hard slog.) On the other hand, there are some breakout popular philosophers who write from outside the halls of academia - Ryan Holliday, Jules Evans, Alain de Bouton and Bernardo Kastrup come to mind. They manage to combine erudition with popular appeal (lucky them!)

Indeed, the mind is not yours or mine. We are all part of a community of minds - biological, cultural and linguistic. Consciousness in that sense is collective. But whatever is real, is real for some mind, it has no stand-alone or intrinsic reality independently of mind - that's what I mean by anti-realism, i.e., no material particular possesses inherent reality. And I think modern physics has confirmed that intuition.

That's why I keep stressing the point that one can be an empirical realist but also an idealist. I'm not saying the world is 'all in the mind' that idealism is often taken to entail.

Is this more an academia problem? — Count Timothy von Icarus

It’s a cultural issue. That excerpt basically says that academic philosophy is no longer concerned with deep philosophy, but with the minutia of technicalities. Myself, I got drawn to philosophy for what would generally be considered the wrong reasons - something like ‘mankind’s search for meaning’. When I actually enrolled in undergraduate philosophy, I was taken aside by a kindly lecturer, David Stove, who said ‘I can sense what you’re looking for, son, but you won’t find it here’ after which I majored in comparative religion (although I never looked like having any kind of academic career). That was nearer my interests in some respects. Over the ensuing decades I have learned to discern certain threads in the tapestry of philosophy which I continue to pursue but I admit my overall orientation is not academic.

I think @javra is making a solid point. Nietszche foresaw the upsurge of nihilism due to the death of God - which was not, according to David Bentley Hart, a paean to the triumph of atheism, as a Dawkins would have it, but a lament over the loss of the foundational values tied to belief in God.

I also agree that antinatalism is an obviously nihilistic attitude. It’s basically ‘it would have been much better never to have been born.’ The fact is, we have! We have discussed many times the sense in which soteriological paths seek to transcend the inevitable suffering of existence, but antinatalism and nihilist philosophers seem have no belief in or interest in it. It seems to me they turn their back on the prospect of any genuine remediation.

I’ve been listening the last two years to John Vervaeke’s Awakening from the Meaning Crisis. Vervaeke is professor of Cognitive Science at University of Toronto. It’s a series of 50 lectures on the basis of the sense of meaninglessness that afflicts many humans in today’s world, tracing it right back through the history of culture and civilisation, whilst still trying to stay within the bounds of natural science. I recommend a listen.

The missing foghorn between your ships passing in the night is that Banno thinks that idealism entails solipsism, unless I have misunderstood. — bert1

:ok:

For the "world" yes but for the Universe, no—as far as I know this is not correct for Heidegger at least (who I studied extensively at one time).I believe that Heidegger acknowledges the existence of the extra-human universe, but that is not what he is concerned with when he deals with being (being-in-the-world) or Dasein. — Janus

But one may be an empirical, without being a metaphysical, realist.

Check out Is Reality Real?

1) Why would you pursue romantic love and familial life in the first place and not just enlightenment? — schopenhauer1

Yeah, well, life doesn't come at you pre-divided into neat paths. Usually it's a mix of conscious motivations, circumstances, accident and planning. But to get back to the main point, the consequence of the kind of self-awareness that humans possess, doesn't necessarily entail endless suffering, although it can.

When is it subjective? If the construction of our eyes is such that the cones carry the photo pigment and communicates with the brain when light waves enter, which causes us to see colors, then how is that subjective? — L'éléphant

It is subjective in that there is a subject to whom the colour appears. As to whether that is erroneous in principle is another question, and besides, colour perception is only a very narrow and specialised instance of perception generally - we perceive a good many things other than colours.

But other than that, the question you're touching on is the age-old one of reality and appearance - whether the world is as it appears, or different, how so, why, and so on. A good deal of philosophy (and nowadays even a lot of science) is concerned with such questions.

I maintain that there is stuff that is true even if we don't know, believe, or whatever, that it is true. — Banno

Plainly - I don't even know most of the people in my street. But that's not the point. The point is the overlooking of the fact that even so-called objective knowledge is the possession of subjects, the significance of which is not generally not considered, and who are explicitly left out of the account by metaphysical realism. Metaphysical realism insists that there are objects that are just so, the same for all observers, and that these are fundamental. Whereas the 'antirealist' is saying that how we categorise and sense these objects and interpret their meaning, is just as fundamental as the objects themselves. Constructivism may not be the whole story, but it's inextricably part of it. Realism will generally insist that 'the world' is just so, and would be just so, whether there was anyone in it or not. But as I keep saying, even that relies on an implicit perspective.

So my argument against mind independence *is not* that the entire cosmos is dependent on the existence of my mind, which is how you appear to be interpreting it.

Anyway I have to sign out for a few hours, back tomorrow.

I would take that remark seriously if you demonstrated any grasp of the point I'm making. — Banno

You appear to believe that I must insist that nothing can exist outside my knowledge of it, that, according to what I'm saying, there can be nothing new, or nothing I'm mistaken about, on those grounds. But that is not entailed by the kind of antirealist argument that I'm advocating. I am criticizing mind-independence as the criterion for what is real - what is said to exist outside of or apart from any experience. That is what I take realism to be defending.

As per the OP

1. There exist objects that are mind-independent

2. We can grasp the features of objects external to our mind

3. We can justify our knowledge of objects external to our minds — Sirius

I have no dog in this fight — schopenhauer1

I was responding to the point of yours that I quoted, about how to reconcile the apparent unworldliness of the desire for transcendence, with the actuality of life as living individuals with attachments to significant others.

It is a paradox. — L'éléphant

No kidding. Just the kind of thing that will trip up your average "realist".

Deleted for excessive sarcasm. (I'm trying to avoid it.)

The point I'm trying to make is that there is a kind of 'dual perspective' at work in understanding this question, which is deep question. There's common sense realism, in which we are just individual subjects in a vast world. But there's also the philosophical understanding of the role of the mind in constructing the world. It doesn't mean literally constructing the physical earth, but the 'meaning-world' which provides the framework for judgements about what is real.

My take is that when Wittgenstein refers to the world he is referring to the world of human experience and judgement. He's not referring to the extra-human Universe. — Janus

But again - how do you see the 'extra human universe'? Even if you're an astrophysicist aware of the vastness of the Universe, you are providing the perspective within which that is meaningful. That is also a feature of the 'umwelt' or 'lebenswelt' of phenomenology. Wittgenstein’s remark that "the subject is a limit of the world" (Tractatus, 5.632) aligns with the idea that the Umwelt represents the horizon of what a subject can perceive and engage with. The subject does not appear in the world as an object but constitutes the horizon or boundary within which the world appears.

Similarly, in phenomenology (e.g., Heidegger or Merleau-Ponty), the world is not an objective domain "out there" but is always encountered through the structures of embodied, situated being.

He stepped beyond the solipsism that traps you. — Banno

I would take that remark seriously if you demonstrated any grasp of the point I'm making. There is no way that I support, suggest or endorse any form of solipsism.

What was the significance of the remark Wittgenstein made 'I am my world?'

For Wittgenstein, the "world" is understood as a logical space in which facts exist, defined by the relationships between elements. When he says "I am my world," he is not referring to a literal equivalence but rather to the philosophical idea that the boundaries of a person's experience and understanding constitute their subjective world. Here he distinguishes between the "subject" as a metaphysical entity and the "self" as a part of the world. The subject, in his view, is not a thing in the world but rather a limit of the world. As he writes in Tractatus 5.632, "The subject does not belong to the world: rather, it is a limit of the world." The world, in this sense, is shaped and defined by the subject's perspective and capacities for representation. This remark resonates with a solipsistic tendency in his early thought—the idea that one's experience is fundamentally bounded by one's own perspective. However, his solipsism is nuanced: he does not claim that the external world does not exist but that it is only knowable through the structures and limits of the subject's representational capacities.

Which pretty much what I mean by it, also. (I refer to Wittgenstein because I know you're familiar with his writing.)

The realist view that most take (usually unawares) is a perspective outside perspective: seeing oneself as an individual in 'the vast universe'. But where does that perspective exist, if not in the mind?

But you know that this is mostly crap. Realism/idealism is a false opposition. — Banno

No it isn't, although I know from long experience it is not a distinction that makes sense to you. Which is why you keep rabbiting on about cups and saucers. That's where the simplistic shite is.

But again, resolving a bad case of Cartesian anxiety is probably not on anyone's agenda, philosophically -- if by "resolving" we mean actually finding certainty of the sort Descartes longed for. — J

There's a section of The Embodied Mind, Thompson et al, named after it. It's not a matter of resolving it in the sense of providing the longed-for certainty, but critiquing the conceptual and cognitive framework which gave rise to it.

There is no one obviously correct story. — J

No 'meta-narratives'. I get that. Although one little-known book I read about five years does a great job explicating it, Defragmenting Modernity, Paul Tyson.

Science relies for its practice on no particular metaphysical beliefs. — Janus

If you're familiar with philosophy of science, E A Burtt's Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science, in particular, you will see that this is completely mistaken. The 'metaphysical belief' in question being early modern science's division of primary and secondary attributes, overlaid on the Cartesian separation of mind and matter. It's metaphysical through and through, but then 'metaphysics' is consigned to terra incognito, so the way in which it is metaphysical becomes one of the things we're enjoined to ignore.