when I look at your explanation in detail the term "reality" instead seems to refer to "our particular conception of reality", which is amounts to a rather humble claim, not really an attack at all. — goremand

How do you get outside the human conception of reality to see the world as it truly is? That is the probably the question underlying all philosophy. And one aim of the original post was for me to present idealism in a way that isn't understood to mean that the world is all in the mind or the product of the imagination. And it's not an attack on 'realism' per se. It's a criticism of the idea that the criterion for what is real, is what exists independently of the mind, which is a specific (and fallacious) form of realism.

:up: The times certainly are a'changing.

To use Kastrup as an example again, I am convinced that he substantively disagrees with mainstream physicalism. — goremand

As do I, for reasons I have given in the original post, and defended in numerous subsequent entries.

However, from my point of view, there is a significant difference in the two states. Namely, my identity has changed. In other words, my centre of perception has moved from one person to another. That means that my first person point of view is different, and my whole experience of the world is different, in the two scenarios. Therefore, for me the two scenarios and their respective states of the world are not identical. — bizso09

If, when you underwent this metamorphosis, you also inherited the memories of the new identity, then obviously you wouldn't know anything had happened. Peter would become Alexa, but as far as both are concerned, nothing has happened. If Peter becomes Alexa but retains Peter's memories, then Peter/Alexa would presumably suffer severe cognitive dissonance along the lines of 'who am I?!?' We are indeed differentiated only because our experiences, constitution, location and so on are unique to us. But the primitive sense of 'being a subject' is not unique to any individual. It's only the content associated with that sense which differs.

In conclusion, having both subjectivity and objectivity co-exist in the same world creates a logical contradiction. — bizso09

The claim that this creates a logical contradiction misunderstands the nature of subjectivity. Subjective and objective accounts are not commensurable in the way required to generate a formal contradiction. They operate in different domains of discourse. Objectivity concerns what can be described in third-person terms—facts that are invariant under changes in perspective. Subjectivity concerns the first-person experience, which is inherently tied to a particular point of view, for which perspective is an intrinsic characteristic.

I think that's near enough to a meaningful consensus. I don't know if I will repeat it, though. I'd like to find another tree to bark up.

But the word"empirical" has unnecessary baggage. — Banno

I myself didn't come up with the term 'empirical' nor how it is used in philosophical discourse. 'Empiricism is the philosophical view that all knowledge is based on experience, or that all rationally acceptable beliefs or propositions are justifiable or knowable only through experience.' Any fact of the matter, such as whether there is or is not gold in them thar hills, is an empirical matter which can be resolved by discovery.

The part on which it seems we disagree is that since not just any understanding will do, there is something else that places restrictions on the understanding we construct. — Banno

Admirable clarification. I think the existential factor that I wish to take into account can be stated in a couple of different ways. First, that reality includes the observer. Or put another way, reality is not something we're outside of, or apart from. The reason that is significant, is because the realist view neglects to consider this fact (hence 'subject forgetting himself'). Hence the ever-present implication that the proposition is one thing, the fact another. That has to be embedded in the 'self-other' framework, doesn't it. But that is such an ubiquitous factor in the mind, that we don't see it.

When we say that there is gold at Boorara, we are talking about gold and Boorara, not concept-of-gold and concept-of-Boorara. The very idea of a conceptual schema is problematic... — Banno

So: notice that this differentiation assumes a separation between the observer and the observed. We have the concept, it is in the mind, whereas the object is in the world. But that very distinction is a mental construct, it can only occur to a mind. Self and world, assertion and fact, as separable things. But we are not actually separate from or outside reality. Even Einstein, scientific realist, twigged this:

A human being is a part of the whole, called by us "Universe", a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest — a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. The striving to free oneself from this delusion is the one issue of true religion. Not to nourish the delusion but to try to overcome it is the way to reach the attainable measure of peace of mind.

There is an historical background to this. The advent of modernity, and with it modern philosophy, is inextricably bound up with individualism. I read recently that prior to Descartes, 'ideas' were not something that were not even understood to be the prerogative of the individual mind. But with modern liberalism and individualism, the individual becomes as it were the fulcrum of judgement. With that comes the awareness of separation from the world and others. Hence the 'cartesian anxiety' which 'refers to the notion that, since René Descartes posited his influential form of body-mind dualism, Western civilization has suffered from a longing for ontological certainty, or feeling that scientific methods, and especially the study of the world as a thing separate from ourselves, should be able to lead us to a firm and unchanging knowledge of ourselves and the world around us. The term is named after Descartes because of his well-known emphasis on "mind" as different from "body", "self" as different from "other". (Bernstein Beyond Objectivism and Relativism. This became a theme in the influential book The Embodied MInd, although I encountered it separately through my own discovery.) The key point is, it's a fact about the human condition, not a matter of propositional knowledge as such. That's why I think it is better explored by (not to say explained by) phenomenology and existentialism than analytical philosophy. But I know the response of analytical philosophers is, generally, 'tosh'.

From my perspective, this is because of something they don't see. From their perspective, its because I'm seeing something that isn't there.

One of my now-standard quotations:

From a phenomenological perspective, in everyday life, we see the objects of our experience such as physical objects, other people, and even ideas as simply real and straightforwardly existent. In other words, they are “just there.” We don’t question their existence; we view them as facts.

When we leave our house in the morning, we take the objects we see around us as simply real, factual things—this tree, neighboring buildings, cars, etc. This attitude or perspective, which is usually unrecognized as a perspective, Edmund Husserl terms the “natural attitude” or the “natural theoretical attitude.”

When Husserl uses the word “natural” to describe this attitude, he doesn’t mean that it is “good” (or bad), he means simply that this way of seeing reflects an “everyday” or “ordinary” way of being-in-the-world. When I see the world within this natural attitude, I am solely aware of what is factually present to me. My surrounding world, viewed naturally, is the familiar world, the domain of my everyday life. Why is this a problem?

From a phenomenological perspective, this naturalizing attitude conceals a profound naïveté. Husserl claimed that “being” can never be collapsed entirely into being in the empirical world: any instance of actual being, he argued, is necessarily encountered upon a horizon that encompasses facticity but is larger than facticity. Indeed, the very sense of facts of consciousness as such, from a phenomenological perspective, depends on a wider horizon of consciousness that usually remains unexamined. — The Natural Attitude

Even though Husserl was critical of Kant, you can hear the echo of the Kantian point I keep making about the empirical and transcendental.

Analytical and academic philosophy is not generally existential in that sense. It is professional, cool, detached, impartial. Whereas my attitude is more like this:

Plato was clearly concerned not only with the state of his soul, but also with his relation to the universe at the deepest level. Plato’s metaphysics was not intended to produce merely a detached understanding of reality. His motivation in philosophy was in part to achieve a kind of understanding that would connect him (and therefore every human being) to the whole of reality – intelligibly and if possible satisfyingly. He even seems to have suffered from a version of the more characteristically Judaeo-Christian conviction that we are all miserable sinners, and to have hoped for some form of redemption from philosophy.

The desire for such completion, whether or not one thinks it can be met, is a manifestation of what I am calling 'the religious temperament'. One way in which that desire can be satisfied is through religious belief. Religion plays many roles in human life, but this is one of them. I want to discuss what remains of the desire, or the question, if one believes that a religious response is not available, and whether philosophy can respond to it in another way. — Thomas Nagel, Secular Philosophy and the Religious Temperament

South Korea is also an electronics and automotive manufacturing powerhouse.

My reading is, Soon had a very small majority in Parliament, and every move he tried was being blocked by the Opposition, so he basically tried to ride a tank over them, and failed.

When we say that there is gold at Boorara, we are talking about gold and Boorara, not concept-of-gold and concept-of-Boorara. — Banno

You will agree, though, that 'gold at Boorara' is shorthand for 'any empirical fact', right? All of your arguments contra idealism are question-begging, because they're pitched at the wrong level of meaning. You say that the idealist argument denies the reality of empirical fact when it does not. I am not disputing empirical facts.

But there is no reason to suppose that language makes a difference to the gold at Boorara. — Banno

Which you are referring to, and relating to me, who understand what you mean by it, as I already acknowledged.

Previously, you denied that you defend the position described in SEP as 'metaphysical realism'.

According to metaphysical realism, the world is as it is independent of how humans or other inquiring agents take it to be. The objects the world contains, together with their properties and the relations they enter into, fix the world’s nature and these objects [together with the properties they have and the relations they enter into] exist independently of our ability to discover they do.

Where do you disagree with that description? Because it seems to me to describe your view in a nutshell.

The fact that idealism is not well supported in academic philosophy neither surprises nor impresses me. It is contra the zeitgeist, to quote a well-known idealist.

Well, I'm following it in the NY Times, to which I'm a subcriber. (Incidentally, a hint: I had been a full-paying subscriber, I can't recall how much it was, but when the sub fell due about three months ago, I wanted to cancel due to trying to reduce my subscriptions bills. The algorithm then said 'hey, don't cancel, how about a year at A$2.00 per month!' Which I took, and well worth the money.)

Anyway - their analysis is that it definitely is a political crisis, and it's causing severe anxiety in the Western alliance, due to the volatility of the region and the nefarious Mr Kim. On the other hand, up until the 1980's, S. Korea had a long history of periods of marshall law and military government, so it's not totally unprecedented. The feeling today seems to be that Yoon severely overplayed his hand, and the opposition parties stood firm and were supported by the electorate, and Yoon will likely loose power as a consequence. But considering all the other hair-trigger situations going on the in the world right now, it's a worrying development.

But do you not make a distinction between disagreements about how the world ought to be conceptualized and disagreements about how the world actually is? When people speak of mind-independent objects is believe I understand and agree with their meaning, even if I realize their conceptualization of reality is not the be-all end-all. — goremand

That is a very perceptive question, and the precise point at issue in another current thread on metaphysical realism and anti-realism (there's a lot of crossover between the two threads). As I'm generally advocating an idealist approach, then I'm in the anti-realist camp, although the term bothers me, because I am still acutely aware of many real things that have to be dealt with on a daily basis. ('Life is like a movie, but with actual pain'.)

My spontaneous response is that I think classical philosophy had the insight that we do not, by default, know what anything actually is. If you go back to Parmenides, his fragmentary prose-poem says outright that most human beings are ensnared in an illusory domain where they entertain opinions about unreal things. And come to think of it, in today's hyper-connected and social-media-dominated world, that really doesn't seem so far-fetched. Wisdom is not being deluded, but then, delusion is ubiquitous. Not necessarily to the point of gross delusion and actual mental illness, but in the middle of the bell curve of normality. So we tend to look to science and objective judgement as the arbiter of what is real and the antidote to delusion, but the problem with that is that science is largely quantitative and arms-length. Actual life is too close to bring such an approach to bear. But the effect of that belief is to form the notion that reality is what already exists, and we gradually expand and enhance our knowledge of it. That is what is generally understood by realism. So in that context, 'mind-independent' means objective, not a matter of opinion, the criterion of what is actually so. I copied some scrapbook lecture notes on Heidegger above which address this point.

'Heidegger argues that scientific objectivity is grounded in a specific metaphysical framework: the Cartesian subject-object dichotomy. This framework presumes that the world is composed of objects existing independently of the observer, available for detached study and measurement. Consequently it overlooks the more fundamental ways in which humans encounter the world as being-in-the-world (Dasein). Scientific objectivity reduces things to mere "present-at-hand" (Vorhandenheit), stripping away their richer modes of existence as they are experienced in the lifeworld.

Heidegger’s overarching concern is that science forgets or obscures the question of Being (Sein). By focusing only on what can be measured or quantified, science neglects the broader ontological context in which things appear as meaningful. This leads to an impoverished understanding of reality, where the richness of Being is replaced by a narrow focus on instrumental utility or efficiency.'

I've only read a little of Heidegger, but that diagosis makes perfect sense to me.

Although I know very little about medieval philosophy, I get the impression that the debate between Realism and Nominalism would be pertinent to the topic of a Mind-Created World vs whatever the alternative might be : a Self-Existent Material World? — Gnomon

In Aristotelian philosophy, the mind is united with the forms of particulars by the understanding. That prevents the sense of separateness or 'otherness' that haunts modern culture. That's a big topic.

So the claim is that when all life dies out there will be gold in Boorara but no truths or falsehoods because there will be no propositions. — Michael

'Gold in Boorara' is just shorthand for 'any empirical fact'. And the assertion of any empirical fact, even one that would be so in the absence of any mind, is dependent on many factors, linguistic, geographic, etc. Given that one is in possession of this manifold, then you can be sure that there must be many facts of which nobody is aware, or ever will be aware. Lasseter's Reef may well be out there somewhere. We know of vast areas of space and enormous periods of time in which there were no humans, so no human minds. Those are objective discoveries, no less certain than that there is gold in Boorara. But I still maintain that asserting those fact absent any perceiving mind still relies on an implicit perspective. Humans have the intellectual facility to measure and depict such facts, and to communicate them to others. When you talk of undiscovered gold and unseen planets, I will know what you mean because we share a common framework of understanding, language, concepts etc. But to really know the world as it would be without that conceptual framework is impossible, as it would mean abandoning or standing outside of conscious thought and language altogether. So 'the argument from unknown facts' is really an example of what Schopenhauer calls 'the subject forgetting himself':

Since all imaginable characteristics of objects depend on the modes in which they are apprehended by perceiving subjects, then without at least tacitly assumed presuppositions possessed by the subject, no sense can be given to terms purporting to denote the object. In short, it is impossible to talk about material objects at all, and therefore even so much as to assert their existence, without the use of words the conditions of whose intelligibility derive from the experience of perceiving subjects — Magee, Schopenhauer's Philosophy

Perusing the SEP entry that has been mentioned, Challenges to Metaphysical Realism, there are many convergences between this general style of argument and Hilary Putnam's 'conceptual relativism'. I'll do some more reading on that.

You know that analytic philosophy has its roots in critique of Hegel and Kant, — Banno

I think 'rejection' would be more like it. I think the European philosophers' (existentialism, phenomenology) is more of a critique. The latter drew explicitly on Kant, while also critiquing him. But then, I'm also sympathetic to the //criticism of the// daunting verbosity of idealism, especially German.

But there something I would like to spell out. I’m not saying the world is 'all in the mind', but rather that the world as we experience and understand it is always mediated by the structures of the mind. Kant’s insight was that we can be empirical realists, recognizing a shared and objective reality in the phenomenal world, and fully cognisant of natural science, while also being transcendental idealists, acknowledging that reality-as-we-know-it is inextricably bound up with the mind’s conditions of knowledge. The mind doesn’t invent the world but provides the framework within which it appears intelligibly to us. //and I think that is actually a gesture of intellectual humility, incongruous though that might seem.//

Seems to me the European philosophers understand that in a way that the Anglo philosophers don't. I hope in saying that we can agree on what we disagree about.

I think 'ignore' would be more appropriate, but I'll let it go.

Yes, me too. He's definitely on my current list.

I think what you say is more similar to logical positivists who are more stringent that meaning in scientific theories is tied to observability. — Apustimelogist

I've noticed some similarity with my position and positivism, but I hate positivism. They have no spirit, they're all logic-chopping automatons. It was when Neils Bohr lectured the Vienna Circle and none of them asked any questions, that he exclaimed 'if you're not shocked by quantum physics, then you can't have understood (the lecture).'

You know, everything we know is true, some stuff we think we know is actually false, in which case we are mistaken about knowing it, there are truths we don't know, the usual stuff. — Banno

I've addressed those objections.

My take: ordinary language philosophy rejected idealism, thereafter concerning itself wholly with what can be meaningfully said. Did I miss anything?

By the way - have you encountered Jerrold Katz?

Jerrold J. Katz offers a radical reappraisal of the "linguistic turn" in twentieth-century philosophy. He shows that the naturalism that emerged to become the dominant philosophical position was never adequately proved. Katz critiques the major arguments for contemporary naturalism and develops a new conception of the naturalistic fallacy. This conception, inspired by Moore, explains why attempts to naturalize linguistics and logic, and perhaps ethics, will fail. He offers a Platonist view of such disciplines, justifying it as the best explanation of their autonomy, their objectivity, and their normativity. — Metaphysics of Meaning

I tried it, but I'm not familiar enough with what he's criticizing to make much headway.

It is the thesis that truth requires mind that seems to face a problem, for that theory entails that if no minds exist, there are no truths (yet it seems metaphysically for there to be no minds yet for there to be truths, for something can exist and not be a mind, and under such circumstances it would be true that it exists. — Clearbury

Thanks, that helps me understand what you're driving at. The problem is, I think it is far from clear what 'mind' is. I think we instinctively believe that minds are the attributes of persons, which is a reasonable thing to believe. It's certainly the naturalist view.

...self-subsistent truths floating independently of any minds. — Leontiskos

I take Banno to be advocating metaphysical realism as defined in SEP (article previously cited in this thread). I don't think it's a pejorative description, even though I don't agree with it. It's probably held by the majority of people.

To some extent, we're all Platonists, considering that Plato is foundational to the culture. But the point which I would make is that truth statements (including true propositions) can only be known by minds. They're not the product of your or my mind but can only be grasped by a mind. Our minds are held together on the level of meaning by grasp of intelligible ideas - the 'ligatures of reason'. But they're not materially existent, so they can't be 'free floating' in the way that asteroids are. They're part of our 'meaning-world' through which asteroids and the like are interpreted.

I *think* we more or less understand each other, no?

You cite Schopenhauer and Berkeley. Are you agreeing with them in toto? — Leontiskos

Schopenhauer, more than Berkeley. Where I part company with Berkeley, is his dismissal of universals - his nominalism, in short. I think it leaves many gaps in his philosophy. But whenever I read his dialogues, I'm reminded of how ingenious a philosopher he was.

Schopenhaeur likewise - I'm almost totally on-board with his 'world as Idea', but the major issue I see with his philosophy of will is that, if will is 'irrational and blind', then how come the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences? I think Schopenhauer has blind spots of his own, much of them attributable to his hatred of Christianity. But he's still brilliant in my view - 'the last great philosopher', I'm sometimes inclined to say.

I will add, I've learned a ton of stuff about all manner of subjects since joining this forum, and including Husserl and Heidegger, about whom I knew next to nothing when I joined. I would like to think my overall approach is maybe nearer to a kind of phenonenology than to idealism per se.

But you can't split them. You're trying to divide or separate knowledge from what is real. I say it's because you're taking a view above or outside both the subject (you) and the object (world) - or trying to (cf Nagel's 'view from nowhere').

I recall the name of that recent textbook on classic metaphysic - Knowing Being. I think the thrust of it is - and here I'm on both shaky ground and deep water, to mix metaphors - is that only what is real can be a valid object of knowledge. And that what is real is not a physical object per se, but that which is grasped by reason. Physical objects are always contingent or dependent, and knowledge of them likewise. They're not actually mind-independent, because knowledge of them is dependent on our senses and minds (which is where Kant comes into the picture). But that metaphysic is a very different perspective to today's empirical realism.

In that case you would claim that <existence cannot be meaningfully affirmed or denied without the involvement of mind>, which does not seem like something you would say. — Leontiskos

But I am saying that. I'm arguing that things are mind-independent in an empirical sense, but in another sense, in that there must be a subject who recognises 'gold', etc, for any claim about it to be meaningful.

Go back to here:

As a classical theist I don't think things do exist in the absence of any minds (and particularly in the absence of the mind of God). I think the truth of creation is bound up in its intelligibility, which flows from its creator.

The atheist perhaps wants to say that truth emerges with the emergence of minds and disappears with the disappearance of minds, such that mind is accidental vis-a-vis the natural, as is truth. — Leontiskos

Overall, this resonates with me, with the caveat that I think classical theism is not well understood or favoured. But it is true about naturalism - not that many here tend to consciously defend that view, but it's the assumed background to debate. The human mind is an evolved capacity reliant on the physical brain and evolution. That is the assumed background of scientific realism.

So my line of attack on that is not an appeal to theism, but varieties of transcendental arguments along the lines of Kantian and phenomenological - about the irreducibility of reason etc.

It strikes me as uncontroversial that existence cannot "be meaningfully affirmed or denied without the involvement of mind." — Leontiskos

That I take as the point at issue.

And here, we are discussing the reality of unseen objects, against the claim you made above.

I can't see how you could intelligibly disagree. — Banno

Argumentum ex auro.

That passage, incidentally, was the abstract of the first chapter of an entire book. In itself it doesn't stack up to much of an argument. Pinter develops this argument:

Objects in the unobserved universe have no shape, color or individual appearance, because shape and appearance are created by minds.

Over the subsequent chapters, with respect to how the sensory apparatus of animals, up to and including humans, have developed in response to the requirements of adaptation.

Now you come along at the end of that entire hundred million year process, knowing as you do about what 'gold' is, and where Boorara is, and much else besides. But your knowledge of that, and our discussion of it, is still dependent on those fundamental sensory operations that can make such distinctions and, yes, find and identify gold. Recall from the very outset of my presentation on this question, '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.' Because 'existence' is a manifold, comprising numerous elements, including those brought to bear by the subject.

One need not say that truth exists where there are no minds in order to say that a ball continues to roll when you look away from it. — Leontiskos

This is the same point we debated in the mind-created world thread, about the objective properties of boulders. It's another version of 'when a tree falls in the forest and nobody is around, does it make a sound?'

The way I approach it is by asking: 'which ball (or tree) do you mean'? The point being that even to consider the reality of the unseen object brings the mind to bear on the question. That's the sense in which the supposedly unseen object is 'mind-dependent'. We can't really know whether an unseen object exists or not, but don't loose sight of why the question matters. Recall we're discussing the question of knowing what is real. One could argue that the whole question of the existence of unseen or unknown objects is a red herring. The very act of raising the question is already embedded in a mind-mediated framework, and it is this framework that gives the question its meaning.

Which is why the existence of unseen objects—like the ball rolling after you look away—is a red herring. The key issue is not whether unseen objects exist but whether their existence can be meaningfully affirmed or denied without the involvement of mind. That is where metaphysical realism and idealism differ. The former assumes that unseen objects exist in a way that is entirely independent of any observer or consciousness - although that is a presumption. Idealism emphasizes that to consider or speak of existence, we must already bring mind to bear on it. There is no meaningful way to discuss the reality of the unseen object without that framework. That is the sense in which it is not 'mind-independent' - not that it stops rolling, or doesn't exist, or whatever, when it's not being looked at.

(This is also represented by constructive empiricism, as advocated by Bas Van Fraassen, who argues that scientific theories do not assert the reality of unobservable entities but only their usefulness in explaining phenomena. Similarly, the status of unseen objects may be pragmatically assumed but cannot escape the fact that they are understood within the context of thought. It is a non-dogmatic attitude. )

You've often said you have devoted time to reading Heidegger. Would you agree with this synopsis of his views on objectivity?

"Heidegger argues that scientific objectivity is grounded in a specific metaphysical framework: the Cartesian subject-object dichotomy. This framework presumes that the world is composed of objects existing independently of the observer, available for detached study and measurement. Consequently it overlooks the more fundamental ways in which humans encounter the world as being-in-the-world (Dasein). Scientific objectivity reduces things to mere "present-at-hand" (Vorhandenheit), stripping away their richer modes of existence as they are experienced in the lifeworld.

Heidegger’s overarching concern is that science forgets or obscures the question of Being (Sein). By focusing only on what can be measured or quantified, science neglects the broader ontological context in which things appear as meaningful. This leads to an impoverished understanding of reality, where the richness of Being is replaced by a narrow focus on instrumental utility or efficiency."

I did start on that a couple of weeks ago, although didn't watch the whole edition. (I subscribe to Kurt Jaimungal.) I will attempt it again, now you've mentioned it. Besides, I don't know how 'mystical' I need physics to be, to make my basic point, which is, again, that whatever we designate as real or reality has an inextricably subjective pole. To which the usual response is: oh yeah, where is that?

He says, just after that section, that 'this' (meaning, his take) 'takes the human mind out of the picture'. I still say this is an oxymoronic proposition. But let's leave it, it's invariably a rabbit-hole. (Although I should mention I recently published a Medium essay on the topic, I don't know if I mentioned it to you - The Timeless Wave. I don't think it is really 'mystical' although it does consider the idea of what is outside space-time.)

that would be preferable, not that it's important.

And waiving the word "quantum" doesn't help your case... — Banno

'Waving'. You can't waive physics, it's supposed to be the arbiter here.

Where we seem to disagree is that you seem to think we can only meaningfully speak from the "for us" perspective, whereas I think we can bracket that and speak meaningfully from a context that conceptually excludes us. — Janus

Well, that's where we differ, and I think also where you differ from phenomnology. I agree we can see the world as if there is nobody in it, for specific purposes, but when that is taken to be a true account of the nature of being, then it goes too far.

I don't believe that we carve up the world arbitrarily but that the ways we carve it up are constrained both by the nature of our sense organs and the nature of the world we are sensing. — Janus

It's not arbitrary, but it is contingent, both on what there is to see, but also on how we see it.

You want to say that all truth is constructed, but that we can't make claims about what it is constructed from. — Banno

Fair. In Buddhist philosophy, it is not constructed from an underlying something. That's one of the meanings of emptiness (śūnyatā). Chögyam Trungpa — 'The bad news is you're falling through the air, nothing to hang on to, no parachute. The good news is, there's no ground.' And that's why I often point out (much to your annoyance) that much the same can be said in modern physics, which doesn't tell us about what nature is, but only how nature responds to our methods of questioning.

Yes, only minds can know things. However, it doesn't seem to be a necessary truth that there can be knowledge without minds. The opposite - that there can't be any knoweldge without any minds - seems to be a necessary truth. By contrast, it does seem to be a necessary truth that if something exists, then it is true that it exists. It's that apparent self-evident truth of reason that seems inconsistent with the conclusion that truth depends on minds. And so it is that apparent self-evident truth of reason that ideally needs to be debunked, for otherwise the thesis that truth depends on minds at least appears to be false — Clearbury

I'm having trouble parsing this one.

Metaphysical idealism doesn't disagree that we sometimes have to check if our knowledge or beliefs are right. It doesn’t deny the existence of errors or things we don’t yet know. It only reframes how we think about truth and reality and about the context within which these are understood.

Whereas in the metaphysical realist view, truth is a matter of ever-better approximations of already-existing facts in a mind-independent reality. Idealism (or constructivism), on the other hand, recognizes that truth is always mediated by mind. It isn’t about discovering a pre-formed reality out there, but about achieving coherence and intelligibility within the shared framework of understanding. It doesn’t deny objective truth but re-locates it within the dynamic interplay of subjective, intersubjective and objective.

Are there things that are true, yet not believed, known, understood or standing in any relation to people or minds?

I think there are. — Banno

You think.

it seems true that 2 + 2 = 4 even if there are no minds. — Clearbury

It is, regardless, something only knowable to a mind.

Banno is simply advocating naive realism and argumentum ad lapidem.

Hey Sam



Looks a very substantial debate on the subject. Consolation prize :party:

Much of this can be dissolved if you acknowledge that time itself is not entirely objective, that it entails the subjective awareness of duration. Indeed there was a time before there were human minds, and there may be a time in the far future when h.sapiens is extinct. But 'before' and 'after' are also mental constructions in some basic sense.

To measure something – such as volume, length, pressure, weight, speed or temperature – we need to stipulate the unit of measurement in terms of a standard. For example, the standard metre was once stipulated to be the length of a particular 100-centimetre-long platinum bar kept in Paris. It is now defined by an atomic clock measuring the length of a path of light travelling in a vacuum over an extremely short time interval. In both cases, the standard metre is a measurement of length that itself has a length. The standard unit exemplifies the property it measures.

In Time and Free Will, Bergson argued that this procedure would not work for duration. For duration to be measured by a clock, the clock itself must have duration. It must exemplify the property it is supposed to measure. 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. This is why Bergson believed that clock time presupposes lived time. — Bergson-Einstein Debate, Evan Thompson

My bolds. This is why time has a subjective element. So arguing about what will be true in the absence of any mind, is a fatuous exercise. Nobody knows anything about what will be true in the absence of any mind. Sure, we can model it, and we can objectively examine the universe as if it existed absent any mind. But there is always an implicit perspective in that model, provided by the mind of the scientists and the community of minds who understand it. But that is 'transcendent' in Kant and Husserl's sense, i.e. constituting experience whilst not given in it (and as a rule bracketed out by realist dogma to boot.)

Theistic philosophy doesn't face this problem for pretty much the same reason that Berkeley is able to call on God to witness 'the tree in the quad'. But as analytic philosophy is generally non- or a-theistic in orientation it has no such proviso and will always end up facing the same conundrum.

I have no objection to there being a shared reality, in fact, I think consciousness is collective in nature, even though each of us only ever experiences it in the first person. — Wayfarer

But isn't that a form of metaphysical realism? And is this "collective consciousness" how you conceptualize reality? If so, what does it signify? Is it like Bernardo Kastrups "Cosmic Mind"? — goremand

Stanford Encyc's description of metaphysical realism: 'According to metaphysical realism, the world is as it is independent of how humans or other inquiring agents take it to be. The objects the world contains, together with their properties and the relations they enter into, fix the world’s nature and these objects [together with the properties they have and the relations they enter into] exist independently of our ability to discover they do.'

My take on collective consciousness more akin to Hegel's 'geist', which describes the way geist (usually translated as mind or spirit) manifests collectively in culture, history, and shared institutions. While consciousness is realised individually, Hegel argues that this individuality is always part of a larger, evolving reality as an expression of geist (indeed the lovely word 'zeitgeist', spirit of the times, is something from Hegel that has filtered through to popular culture.) Unlike metaphysical realism, this view sees reality (or Being) as inseparable from the processes of mind and meaning. And yes, it is convergent in some respect with Kastrup. I've listened to and read quite a bit of Kastrup.

The collective nature of consciousness shows up in the way humans as a species and culture, inhabit similar (although never identical) meaning-worlds. Our senses are overall similarly adapted and we operate in a framework of shared meanings. That is what makes inter-subjective agreement and scientific discourse viable. Hence philosophical idealism is not incompatible with science but it's also not limited to what can be objectively established by science. The SEP entry on idealism says 'the idealist, rather than being anti-realist, is in fact … a realist concerning elements more usually dismissed from reality.' That includes the reality of numbers and universals in my view (although that is not something explored in the original post.)

Is this a Buddhist take on it? — frank

It is.

Well it's impossible to give you a specific example of pre-conceptual reality, because that itself would involve conceptualization. — goremand

Bingo. You win the lucky door prize. I have no objection to there being a shared reality, in fact, I think consciousness is collective in nature, even though each of us only ever experiences it in the first person.

If the world is mind-created, why is there so much misery in the world? — frank

Because of ignorance, of not seeing what is real, and being attached to what is unreal. And that goes for me as much as anyone else.

:up: My thoughts also.

Australia has just passed legistlation to ban selected social media apps (FB, TikTok, Snapchat and a few others, Youtube exempt - documentary was incorrect about that), to those under 16. While there's a lot of community support, there are many open questions around how it will be enforced by next November, when it comes into law. Good mini-documentary here by an Australian content producer.

You asked me to comment on the MP passage, I did that and you didn't respond. Do you have a point of issue with my answer. If so, do tell. — Janus

OK. You said:

To say that nebulae or dinosaurs existed prior to humans is only to say what we would have experienced had we been there. I don't see that as a problem for realism. — Janus

It is not at all what Merleau Ponty said or meant. It wouldn't even be worth stating, it would just be common sense. And how does that square with:

Laplace’s nebula is not behind us, at our origin, but rather out in front of us in the cultural world. — Phenomenology of Perception, p456

A commentary on that passage is that:

Merleau-Ponty is not denying that there is a perfectly legitimate sense in which we can say that the world existed before human consciousness. Indeed, he refers to the “valid signification” of this statement. He is making a point at a different level, the level of meaning. The meanings of terms in scientific statements, including mathematical equations, depend on the life-world, as our parable of temperature and our discussion of the dependence of clock time on lived time illustrate. Furthermore, the universe does not come ready-made and presorted into kinds of entities, such as nebulae, independent of investigating scientists who find it useful to conceptualize and categorize things that way given their perceptual capacities, observational tools, and explanatory purposes in the life-world and the scientific workshop. The very idea of a nebula, a distinct body of interstellar clouds, reflects our human and scientific way of perceptually and conceptually sorting astronomical phenomena. This is what Merleau-Ponty means when he says that he cannot understand what a nebula that could not be seen by anyone might be. Nothing intrinsically bears the identity “nebula” within it. That identity depends on a conceptual system that informs (and is informed by) observation. Nevertheless, Merleau-Ponty’s last sentence is exaggerated. Given the “conceptual system of astrophysics and general relativity theory, Laplace’s nebula is behind us in cosmic time. But it is not just behind us. It is also out in front of us in the cultural world, because the very idea of a nebula is a human category. The universe contains the life-world, but the life-world contains the universe.

Do you at least see some convergence between this line of argument, and that of the original post?

As a classical theist I don't think things do exist in the absence of any minds (and particularly in the absence of the mind of God). I think the truth of creation is bound up in its intelligibility, which flows from its creator. — Leontiskos

I do understand that. The perplexity for naturalism is that the criterion for what is real is what exists independently of any mind. This is the source of many endless circular discussions on this Forum. I think, maybe, the problem is the naturalist assumption that the world is inherently intelligible, when it's actually not, because the principle of intelligibility is not internal to it.

From a phenomenological perspective, in everyday life, we see the objects of our experience such as physical objects, other people, and even ideas as simply real and straightforwardly existent. In other words, they are “just there.” We don’t question their existence; we view them as facts.

When we leave our house in the morning, we take the objects we see around us as simply real, factual things—this tree, neighboring buildings, cars, etc. This attitude or perspective, which is usually unrecognized as a perspective, Edmund Husserl terms the “natural attitude” or the “natural theoretical attitude.”

When Husserl uses the word “natural” to describe this attitude, he doesn’t mean that it is “good” (or bad), he means simply that this way of seeing reflects an “everyday” or “ordinary” way of being-in-the-world. When I see the world within this natural attitude, I am solely aware of what is factually present to me. My surrounding world, viewed naturally, is the familiar world, the domain of my everyday life. Why is this a problem?

From a phenomenological perspective, this naturalizing attitude conceals a profound naïveté. Husserl claimed that “being” can never be collapsed entirely into being in the empirical world: any instance of actual being, he argued, is necessarily encountered upon a horizon that encompasses facticity but is larger than facticity. Indeed, the very sense of facts of consciousness as such, from a phenomenological perspective, depends on a wider horizon of consciousness that usually remains unexamined. Any individual object, Husserl wrote:

“Is not merely an individual object as such, a ‘This here,’ an object never repeatable; as qualified ‘in itself‘ thus and so, it has its own specific character, its stock of essential predictables which must belong to it … if other, secondary, relative determinations can belong to it.”

Hence, any individual object necessarily belongs to multiple “essential species,” or essential structures of consciousness, and “everything belonging to the essence of the individuum another individuum can have too…” — The Natural Attitude

This aspect of Husserl influenced Heidegger, even though the latter criticized some aspects of his mentor's philosophy. Husserl emphasized that all instances of being are encountered within a broader horizon of meaning, one that includes but surpasses the empirical. This horizon reflects the structures of consciousness, which condition how any entity can appear as meaningful. For Husserl, facticity (the empirical givenness of things) is always embedded within a context shaped by the transcendental structures of consciousness. (This is exactly what I meant in the OP, where I said that every statement about what exists contains an ineluctably subjective element that is not available to empirical observation.)

Heidegger took this idea further by situating the horizon of meaning in Dasein's existential structure—the way human beings are always already engaged with the world and interpreting it. Heidegger reinterpreted this in existential terms, arguing that Dasein is not just a passive observer but an active participant in the disclosure of Being. Heidegger’s notion of “Being-in-the-world” builds on Husserl’s insight that Being is never encountered in isolation but always within a lived context.

After reading many thousands of your words I am still not clear what you think the point at issue is — Janus

Plainly.