• The Mind-Created World
    When it comes down to speculating about noumena or things in themselves there can be no discernible fact of the matter which could confirm or disconfirm any conjectures, so it comes down to what each of us might find to be the most useful and/or plausible way of thinking and talking about them.

    My beef is with the dogmatic "thought police" prescriptions about what we can and cannot coherently think and talk about. For me it makes no sense to say "of course things have their own existence independent of any mind in the empirical sense, but not in the transcendental sense'. I see this prescription as dogmatic because there can be no strictly determinable transcendental sense.     — Janus

    But the distinction isn’t a matter of “thought-police prescriptions.” It’s a matter of recognizing limits. The “transcendental sense” isn’t an extra layer of metaphysical speculation—it’s the recognition that our very categories of existence, objectivity, and independence only make sense within the framework of possible experience.

    When you say “of course things exist independently of any mind,” you’re already employing the categories of existence and independence. The transcendental point is simply: those categories have meaning only in relation to a subject. It’s not dogma, but an analysis of how thought works.

    So you’re right that there’s no empirical way to confirm or disconfirm claims about noumena—that’s precisely why Kant warns against treating them as if they were positive objects. The “transcendental sense” is not something determinable in the way empirical claims are; it’s the limit-condition that makes empirical determination possible at all.

    You keep calling it “dogma,” but it seems to me the real issue is that you’re not willing to admit that our knowledge has limits. The transcendental distinction isn’t a prescription about what we’re allowed to think so much a recognition that our categories of thought don’t reach beyond the conditions of possible experience.

    And I suspect the reason you push back so strongly is that you have an instinctive aversion to the very word transcendental—for you it smacks of “God talk,” which is why you keep insisting it must be dogmatic. But that’s really just your pre-existing conception of the question, not what’s actually at stake.

    Besides, calling Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason “dogmatic” is wildly unjust. Dogma is the very last thing Kant wanted to propagate. His whole project was precisely the opposite: to dismantle dogmatism by showing that speculative claims about the world-in-itself go beyond what reason can justify. What you keep dismissing as “dogma” is in fact Kant’s attempt to set clear limits, so that reason doesn’t mistake its own constructions for knowledge of things as they are in themselves.

    I don't see myself as one of the thought police on this forum. That honour goes to all of those who squeal every time the word 'transcendent' is so much as mentioned.
  • Evidence of Consciousness Surviving the Body
    The "meaning" is not different to the sounds, squiggles and neuronal events in anyway that suggests some inherent divide between physical and menta — Apustimelogist

    It is, though - plainly and obviously. Symbols convey nothing to animals, they have no impact on the structure of materials. You're not seeing a distinction which is fundamental to philosophy.

    There was a philosophical movement in the mid 20th century called 'brain-mind identity theory', but it fell out of favour in the subsequent decades and was replaced by non-reductive physicalism. Are you familiar with any of those discussions?
  • Philosophy in everyday life
    Did you pursue this line very much? — Tom Storm

    I contemplated it as a possible thesis subject, but in the end, I went with the American Transcendentalists (Emerson and Richard Bucke).
  • On emergence and consciousness
    being organic is not a requirement to have memory, nor to be a thing that attempts to cope with what's coming up. — noAxioms

    Examples?

    When it comes to consciousness, we may have a special case -- and I think that's the deeper subject of this discussion. Is there something about consciousness, and about being conscious, that calls into question this division between knowing and experiencing? We need consciousness to do any sort of seeing or knowing, including the strictest of scientific projects. A blind person can understand how the eye works, because understanding is not a true visual seeing, but a way of grasping intellectually. But can the blind person (from birth, we'd have to stipulate) know what the experience of seeing is? Probably not. — J

    Now you're getting it! And yes, that is the subject of the discussion. And here, I suppose you realise that you've restated a version of the well-known 'Mary's room' thought-experiment?

    We devise a powerful explanatory method that abstracts away consciousness while forgetting that the method remains fundamentally dependent on consciousness.
    — The Blind Spot - Adam Frank, Marcelo Gleiser, Evan Thompson

    Is this in fact a flaw? Does this dependence vitiate whatever explanation may result?     — J

    It's not a flaw, when it comes to the data of the objective sciences. The blind spot is blind with respect to the subject to whom the data means something, the subject, the observer. This, again, is what the whole argument is about!

    I have to paste this in, I beg the moderator's indulgence as it is entirely relevant to the subject being discussed. It is the exact point being made by the young and charismatic (as distinct from the older and careworn) David Chalmers:

  • Philosophy in everyday life
    ↪Astorre
    It was just life, at the time. As I said, in the 1960's there was much more of this in the air, so to speak - part of popular culture. I didn't really try to proselytize what I was seeking to understand, although I would try and convey what I thought was important about it.
  • Philosophy in everyday life
    ↪Astorre
    My initial interest in philosophy was linked to my interest in and belief in meditation and 'higher awareness'. I came of age in a period where there was popular interest in these ideas which were circulating in 60's culture. I had this idea that an insight could be attained which revealed something very deep and meaningful about life, which most people didn't understand or see. My role models and sources were popular teachers like Krishnamurti and Alan Watts, with his books on Vedanta and Zen Buddhism.

    So in that sense, right from the outset, I linked philosophy with the idea of spiritual awareness which implies a qualitative change in your way of being. Of course, though, I was to learn that it was much easier said than done - something that was to become clear in the years ahead.

    Regardless, that was the mindset that I took to my rather late entry to university, where I studied philosophy, anthropology and comparative religion among other subjects. My aim was to discern how this idea of enlightenment (in the Asian rather than European sense) had been framed in various cultures and philosophies.

    This culminated in an epiphany which of course is very hard to convey in words. But it had definite effects on my personality and way of being. Not that I 'became enlightened', which I was to learn is the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, but an awareness of a kind of compassionate energy that is at the centre of existence. That has always stayed with me at least to some extent, although often overgrown with weeds, to refer to the Biblical parable. But one (sometimes embarrasing) consequence that stayed with me, was the tendency to begin to shed a tear when considering something important or profound, even in the most quotidian of circumstances. I felt like the quinessential 'new age guy', except I learned that the 'gift of tears' really is a thing.

    So - did I find much of this in philosophy? Not as an academic subject. As I attended an Anglo university, the curriculum was, on the one hand, 'Oxbridge' (Cambridge and Oxford) and on the other, cultural marxism (the Department was controversially split between them during that period). A philosophy lecturer in the Oxbridge department counselled me that I wouldn't find what I sought in his deparment, and I majored in comparative religion (important to understand this is *not* 'Divinity' or 'Biblical Studies'.)

    At the time, the nearest thing I could find in Western culture to the enlightenment I was seeking was via the Gnostics. There had been a revival of interest in the subject, due to the discovery of the Nag Hammadi codex, a set of ancient scrolls that had been discovered in the desert by a shepherd (a suitably Gnostic re-introduction to the world!) Also the perennial philosophical texts of East and West. They contain these kinds of veins of authentic wisdom, often interspersed with historical sediments and base rock.

    So, as to whether this has all had consequences in daily life - yes, as outlined above. That has stayed with me. But also 'no' in that I came to the realisation that I was not capable of the kind of sagacious wisdom and detachment that those I had learned about exhibited. I was still very much, in Japanese Buddhist terminology, 'bombu: a foolish ordinary person inherently ignorant, deluded, and flawed by their passions and karmic shortcomings'.

    Nevertheless I should point out to you one important philosophical scholar, whom I discovered later in my search. That is Pierre Hadot. He is well-known for books such as Philosophy as a Way of Life. Also I am now subscribed to a number of podcasts and substacks, very much concerned with practical philosophy, often Stoic in orientation. There's a big audience for this material in the apocalyptic times we live in.

    So, yes, overall, philosophy in one form or another has become very much part of day-to-day life. That's what it must be about, to be meaningful.
  • Evidence of Consciousness Surviving the Body
    Carrol would say that the mental is nothing m9re than the physical. — Apustimelogist

    Apustimologist, I think this is exactly where the crux lies. You’re so sure that “mental = physical” that you don’t see how the distinction shows up right under our noses. Consider Terrence Deacon’s formulation:

    The meaning of a sentence is not the squiggles used to represent letters on a piece of paper or a screen. It is not the sounds these squiggles might prompt you to utter. It is not even the buzz of neuronal events that take place in your brain as you read them. What a sentence means, and what it refers to, lack the properties that something typically needs in order to make a difference in the world. The information conveyed by this sentence has no mass, no momentum, no electric charge, no solidity, and no clear extension in the space within you, around you, or anywhere. — Terrence Deacon, Incomplete Nature

    That distinction is the distinction between the physical and the mental. The squiggles, sounds, and neuronal events are physical. The meaning is not. Yet meaning is not nothing — it structures our cognition, action, and communication. It is essential to our way of being in the world.

    So when you say there’s “no evidence” for an ontological difference, you’re missing the point that that every act of reading, speaking, or thinking is already evidence. Information, significance, and intention aren’t physical, but they are nevertheless significant and fundamental to thought and speech.

    (That quote is from the introduction to Terrence Deacon's book, Incomplete Nature. The remainder of the book is devoted to understanding how it is that these 'absentials' - factors which are not present, but nevertheless meaningful - came to be. Deacon is a biological anthropologist and neuroscientist.)
  • Knowing what it's like to be conscious
    ↪flannel jesus
    No not only humans, although I'll never know what it's like to be a bat.
  • Wisdom: Cultivation, Context, and Challenges
    'The root for wise traces back to the Proto-Germanic wis-, meaning "to see" or "to know". This Germanic origin is seen in words like the Latin sapientia ("wisdom") and the Greek sophia ("wisdom"), both connecting to discerning or tasting meaning.' In Sanskrit, 'vidya' is 'wisdom' or 'true knowledge' (more often encountered in the negative i.e. 'avidya', signifies lack or absence of wisdom). Also from the root 'vid', meaning 'to know' or 'to see'.

    do we agree with contemporary thinkers like John Vervaeke that we “suffer a wisdom famine in the West”? — Tom Storm

    Sure. The Enlightement casts a shadow. I'm overall in agreement with Vervaeke's diagnosis, although bearing in mind it is presented via a series of 52 hour-long lectures, staring with the neolithic, so it's very hard to summarise. But I think his syncretic approach of trying to integrate insights from cognitive science, evolutionary theory, philosophy and spirituality is right on the mark.
  • Knowing what it's like to be conscious
    another 'hard problem of consciousness' thread? That discussion was with me, and that is what was being discussed. If I will still a mod I'd merge it, this topic sprouts endless threads.

    As for others, it's a safe bet that they are beings just as I am - that everyone is 'me' but from their own unique perspective. Hence the maxim to 'treat others as you yourself would be treated'.
  • Donald Trump (All Trump Conversations Here)
    ↪Mikie
    It's only that I see the Democrats being written off everywhere, 'bleeding voters', 'dire poll ratings'. And this, as the United States are quite visibly barrelling towards being a one-party State. The moves in Texas this week to tilt the electoral map, Trump's constant use of bogus 'emergencies', and many other factors - I think it's possible that there won't even be a 2028 Election. So the narrative of the Democrats being hopeless plays right into that.
  • Idealism in Context
    "Esse est percipi" may be translated as "to be is to be perceived". Are the relations we perceive perceived only in the mind or perceived of the world through the senses?

    Do relations exist in the mind, the world or both?     — RussellA

    There are some good instincts in what you’ve written, but I think a few key distinctions are blurred.

    First, the direct vs. indirect realism debate is more nuanced than the picture you’ve set out. Hardly anyone today would defend the crude “objects exist only in the mind” version of indirect realism, or the equally naïve “mind is a passive window” version of direct realism. Contemporary debates are about representationalism, disjunctivism, and enactivism, which all handle the mind–world relation in subtler ways.

    Second, the issue of relations is an old and thorny one (it goes back to Plato). But to ask “where are relations located?” may itself be a category mistake. Spatial relations, for instance, are not “in” object A, or “in” object B, or floating in a third place in between. They are structural features of how we understand and measure A and B. So the “overpopulation” worry—that there are too many relations to count as real entities—may dissolve once we stop treating relations as if they were objects alongside atoms and tables. They're on a different plane altogether.

    Third, your latitude/longitude and red examples are on the right track, but I think they show how conceptual frameworks structure our understanding of the world, not that relations exist “only in the mind.” Latitude and longitude are conventions, but they reliably map onto real features of the Earth. Color doesn’t exist “in the world” in the same way as a wavelength does, but it is also not merely mental — it’s a mind–world hybrid. This is where Kant’s distinction between empirical realism and transcendental idealism is useful: empirically, we can say “the world is real,” but transcendentally, its knowability always presupposes the forms of our sensibility and understanding.

    So you’re right to notice that “relations” aren’t as straightforward as they seem, but I’d caution against setting it up as “either in the mind or in the world.” They belong to the very interface where mind and world meet.

    Truth, it is said, consists in the agreement of cognition with its object. In consequence of this mere nominal definition, my cognition, to count as true, is supposed to agree with its object. Now I can compare the object with my cognition, however, only by cognizing it. Hence my cognition is supposed to confirm itself, which is far short of being sufficient for truth. For since the object is outside me, the cognition in me, all I can ever pass judgement on is whether my cognition of the object agrees with my cognition of the object. — Kant, 1801. The Jasche Logic, in Lectures on Logic
  • Evidence of Consciousness Surviving the Body
    Why must it be physical? this assumes from the outset that everything real must be made of particles or fields described by physics. But that is precisely the point in dispute.

    Consider an analogy: in modern physics, atoms aren’t little billiard balls but excitations of fields. Yet fields themselves are puzzling entities—mathematically precise but ontologically unclear. No one thinks an electromagnetic field is a “blob of energy floating around.” It’s astructuring principle that manifests in predictable patterns, even if its “substance” is elusive.

    Why not imagine psyche in analogous terms? Aristotle’s psuche was never conceived as a stuff or fluid but as an organising principle of the living body. Just as magnetic fields arrange iron filings, so too psyche might be conceived as a field-like effect that accounts for form, persistence, and perhaps memory.

    This is roughly the metaphor behind Rupert Sheldrake’s “morphic fields”—a controversial hypothesis, yes, but one that at least shows how the psyche might be conceived without assuming it must be particle-based. Ian Stevenson’s work on children’s past-life recall provides data that challenge the default assumption that consciousness ends with brain-death (see report).

    Carroll says: everything we know about quantum field theory rules this out. But that simply restates his physicalist presupposition: psyche must be physical, because everything is physical. That is circular. The real question is whether that underlying assumption is itself adequate to the evidence. And perhaps that will require more than ad-hoc adjustments to the presumption that everything is physical.

    @180 Proof - save the eye-roll emojis. Seen them all before.
  • On emergence and consciousness
    Chalmers is asking why, not what. — J

    The what and why are all part of the same question.


    Would you say that, because you are alive, you are unable to know what life is? . — J

    Must the answer to the question ‘what is life?’ be only given in biological terms? For that matter, the question of the nature of life, even for biology, still eludes precise definition, even taking into account today’s vastly expanded knowledge of molecular biology. We know what living things are (although viruses are, of course, liminal examples), but there's no empirically verifiable answer to what life is, in the same way, and possibly for the same reasons, there's no clear-cut answer to what mind is.

    Chalmers explains what the hard problem is. "What is the relationship" doesn't really get it -- Chalmers is asking why, not what. — J

    The link doesn’t work, but I’ve already provided the reference and the passage, where Chalmers says that the problem is that no objective, third person account of the workings of the mind capture the lived nature of experience. He says it, black and white.

    Chalmers has, of course, gone on to write an enormous amount in consciousness studies, he’s one of the pivotal figures in it, but the conceptions of what a scientific account of consciousness must be has changed tremendously in the period since that original paper came out. The avenue I’m pursuing is phenomenology of life and mind, through Evan Thompson’s books.

    On the theme of the difficulty science has in accounting for the first-person nature of consciousness, another of his books (co-authored) is highly relevant to this discussion, namely, the Blind Spot of Science and the Neglect of Lived Experience. It says

    “Despite the amazing, nonstop advances in physics, biology, and neuroscience, no fundamental progress on bridging the chasm between consciousness and physical models has been made in science since the bifurcation of nature that began with the rise of modern science. Although physical and biological models are increasingly sophisticated and informed by increasing amounts of data, the chasm remains. The problem that Huxley and Tyndall highlighted in the nineteenth century is the same one that philosophers Thomas Nagel and David Chalmers identified in the twentieth century and persists today.33 Indeed, it is hard to see how any advance in understanding physical processes, described in completely objective terms at whatever scale or level, will allow us to bridge this chasm. This situation should lead us to suspect that the hard problem of consciousness is built into blind-spot metaphysics, and not solvable in its terms.

    ... [the blind spot] arises when we mistake a method for the intrinsic structure of reality. We devise a powerful explanatory method that abstracts away consciousness while forgetting that the method remains fundamentally dependent on consciousness.     — The Blind Spot - Adam Frank, Marcelo Gleiser, Evan Thompson

    But you can also see what she sees, namely the eye itself. And thus for consciousness. — J

    But that's precisely the problem. I can see an image of the eye, but I cannot see the act of seeing the image. That is the whole point, which I can't help but feel you're missing. And there's even robust scientific validation of this. This is the neural binding problem - the fact that no neural system has been identified which accounts for the subjective unity of experience. See this reference.
  • Donald Trump (All Trump Conversations Here)
    It also tells us something about the Democratic Party, — Mikie

    Yeah, too many regular people in the Democratic Party. You know, people who go out and organise neighborhood events and waste time on community activism and grassroots stuff. Everyone knows they really need a charismatic huckster who can flood the airwaves. Poor fools, they should get with the times.
  • Donald Trump (All Trump Conversations Here)
    Look at the classified documents the FBI found stashed in John Bolton's bathroom!
    1686341631881.jpg
    No....wait.....
  • The Mind-Created World
    "Noumena" for Kant is analogous to "matter" for Aristotle. They are strictly conceptual, not referring to any independent thing as people are inclined to believe. — Metaphysician Undercover

    A20/B34 (in the Transcendental Aesthetic): Kant says that in appearances there is “that which corresponds to sensation (the matter)” and “that which allows the manifold of appearance to be ordered in certain relations (the form).”

    Here he is explicit: sensation provides the matter of appearances, while space and time are the form in which that matter is ordered.

    This is Kant’s way of transposing the Aristotelian hylē–morphē distinction into the transcendental register: not about substances in the world, but about the conditions under which appearances are given to us. Konstantin Pollok has even described Kant’s position as “transcendental hylomorphism,” where the form/matter schema of Aristotelian philosophy is reworked at the transcendental level (ref).
  • The Mind-Created World
    ↪Punshhh
    Yes. That's the pun-ch line :rofl:
  • Ukraine Crisis
    ↪jorndoe
    Meanwhile, Sergei Lavrov is saying that Zelenskyy is making any progress towards peace impossible. I'll fill in the blanks: 'The Ukrainians keep insisting that they own their own country. They won't agree that they should surrender to us and that Zelenskyy should resign. Therefore, we have no choice but to keep fighting.'
  • On emergence and consciousness
    ↪Apustimelogist
    That is the subject of the David Chalmers paper being discussed.

    Speaking of whom, a very young Chalmers laying it out, in an interview I’m guessing in the first half of the 90’s.

    https://youtube.com/shorts/-jEp6BqVOZ8?si=JQk66I3HXlbtXHtB

    Notice the explicit Cartesian allusion in the first few sentences. Turns out that ‘know thyself’ is actually a lot harder than stellar chemistry! Who’d have thought?
  • Evidence of Consciousness Surviving the Body
    ↪180 Proof
    :up:
  • Evidence of Consciousness Surviving the Body
    What seems crucial here is not so much what is said, but what’s left unsaid. By framing NDE testimony within Wittgensteinian grammar and JTB-style analysis, the discussion is kept in epistemological and analytical territory. That’s careful and deliberate. But perhaps the unsaid premise is the one that gives the whole topic its charge: if NDEs are veridical, then the standard mind–brain equivalence is challenged - along with the assumption that humans are wholly or simply physical. That is what makes the discussion so charged in my view.

    I can see why you would want to avoid religious overtones, but the metaphysical implications can’t simply be wished away. They’re the silent partner in the argument. I mean, can we imagine Wittgenstein entertaining these hypotheses?
  • The Mind-Created World
    chitta chatta — Punshhh

    This is a 'yogic pun', of course. In Eastern philosophy 'citta' is variously translated as 'mind', 'heart', or 'being'. According to the classical texts of yoga, the citta (mind-stream) is continuously disturbed or polluted by sense-impressions, cravings, longings, memories of past traumas and so on, which manifest as 'vritti', thought-forms or disturbances. The yogic aspirant aims for the stilling of these vritti, hence the long and arduous periods of 'dhyana' (meditation) and entering states of inner stillness (samadhi). A higher state of samadhi is called 'nirvikalpa', where 'nir-' means ' negation of' and 'vikalpa' are 'discriminative ideas'. So, the negation of thought-forms and inner stillness. Very far from my normal busy mind.
  • On emergence and consciousness
    Would you agree that the hard problem is also a problem of how consciousness emerges, and why it does so? — J

    Even that has an implicit assumption - that consciousness is 'something that emerges', while 'emergence' is only one of several approaches.

    The problem Chalmers describes is the relationship of third-person, objective descriptions of physical processes with first-person experience. It's the same problem as the explanatory gap problem - the physiology of pain does not capture the experience of pain. Of course, none of this is 'a problem' at all, except for those who try to insist that the third-person, objective account of experience leaves no explanatory gap. In that sense, the 'hard problem' is nearer to a rhetorical argument than a theory about physiology. It’s an argument against ‘scientism’.

    The eye can see itself, actually, by using scientific technology -- in fact, such technology allows us to see, and explain, the eye much better than we can do as mere experiencers and observers. — J

    I wear specs and of course the optometrist has instruments and expertise to examine my eyes and prescribe the necessary lenses. But she doesn’t see my seeing. She presents charts and asks me to describe what I see. And then, she has expertise to interpret those results, but even if I saw those results I wouldn’t have the expertise to interpret them. This is an exact analogy for the issue Chalmers describes.

    There's a parallel there with what Heidegger called the "forgetfulness of being" - the way that Being itself (the fact that things are, rather than what they are) tends to remain hidden or taken for granted in our everyday engagement with the world.

    In scientific analysis, we focus exclusively on properties, structures, functions, causal relations - but the sheer fact of being, existence as such, doesn't appear as an object of investigation. It's presupposed but never thematized. Similarly, in studying consciousness, we analyze neural correlates, cognitive functions, behavioral outputs - all the what of consciousness - but the that of experience, the bare fact that there's something it's like to be conscious, remains curiously absent from the scientific picture. And attempts to point it out are vigorously resisted, or dismissed as sophistry or confusion. I've seen that happen on this forum dozens of times.

    This forgetfulness isn't a failure of science but perhaps an inevitable consequence of its method. The third-person stance that makes science so powerful necessarily brackets the first-person dimension - not just of human experience, but of existence itself. When we adopt the scientific attitude, we're looking at beings as objects of study rather than relating to them as fellow existents (although of course we can do both.) So the "hard problem" might be seen as a specific instance of this more fundamental forgetfulness - not just about consciousness, but about the being-dimension of reality that always already underlies any scientific investigation but never shows up within the objective data.

    >See It is Never Known but Is the Knower (.pdf), Michel Bitbol
  • On emergence and consciousness
    ↪Patterner
    I was contrasting organisms with atoms. I believe that only organisms are capable of experience, not atoms. So, no, an atom does none of those things.
  • The Mind-Created World
    ↪Janus
    But that is just to restate the blind spot. To say “the subject is irrelevant to science” is precisely the forgetting I am talking about. Science can only operate because there are subjects who perceive, measure, theorize, and draw conclusions. When it presents its findings as “the way the world is in itself,” it effaces the constitutive role of the subject in making any of those findings meaningful in the first place.

    Scientific realism, as you describe it, is not incoherent—it’s indispensable within its proper scope. What’s incoherent is to extend it into a metaphysical claim: that the world is the way science describes it independently of the perspective through which such descriptions become possible. That is the leap from method to ontology, and that is exactly what the “blind spot of science” critique is about.

    I don't question that the predicates you mention can meaningfully apply to what is independent from human perception―to me questioning that is a nonsense. It's not a blind spot, I understand your argument, and I simply disagree with it. — Janus

    But you’ve just restated the issue in another guise. To say the predicates of sameness, objectivity, and existence “can meaningfully apply” to what is independent of perception is exactly the move that the blind spot critique is drawing attention to. Of course it feels like nonsense to you to question that—because you’re presupposing the very standpoint I’m asking us to examine!

    The point is not that your position is inconsistent. It’s perfectly consistent within the realist frame. The point is that this frame cannot account for its own conditions of possibility—namely, the constituting role of the subject. That is what Kant meant when he said that if you remove the subject, the world of appearances vanishes. It doesn’t mean reality is “just in the mind,” but that our very talk of “existence” and “objectivity” already presupposes the subject’s framework.

    So when you say you “understand the argument and disagree,” that is precisely what the blind spot looks like from inside it. I don’t think it’s dogmatic to point out the conditions that make any interpretation possible. You and I can only disagree because there is already a subjectivity through which concepts like “existence,” “sameness,” and “objectivity” have meaning. That’s not my dogma; it’s the very ground on which both of us are standing when we argue.
  • The Mind-Created World
    He is talking about Noumena negatively because we have no sense of other-than space and time. That is the point. He cannot even 'point to' noumena only flit around it as a kind of negative limitation on human 'sensibility' (which is all we have). — I like sushi

    :up:
  • The Mind-Created World
    You are presenting a strawman of science―it deals with the world as perceived by us, no reasonable scientists would deny that. — Janus

    It’s not a strawman at all. The Blind Spot of Science article in Aeon (and the later book by Frank, Gleiser, and Thompson) addresses mainstream science, the assumptions of physicalism and objectivism, which you will also argue in favour of in other contexts. The point is not that individual scientists are naïve realists who think the eyes are passive “windows,” but that the methodological outlook of modern science brackets the constituting role of the subject, and then forgets that it has done so. Of course that attitude is contested, but it remains the default for many. So declaring that many scientists hold to scientific realism is hardly a 'straw man' :rofl: .

    Apart from perceptions and judgements, the world would be the same without any observer. — Janus

    Precisely the point at issue! What world are you referring to? The moment you speak of “the world apart from perceptions and judgments,” you are already invoking the categories of thought and perception through which such a world is conceived. You have a world in mind, so to speak. To say it “would be the same” is to assume what is in question—namely, that the predicates of sameness, objectivity, and existence can meaningfully apply outside the framework of an observer. That’s exactly the blind spot. To which your response is invariably: 'what "blind spot"? I don't see any "blind spot"!'
  • On emergence and consciousness
    Of course they're memory-less, since atoms don't have memories. — Patterner

    The whole essence of anything organic is memory. It stores memories of what happened so as to better cope with what's coming up.
  • The Mind-Created World
    if you insist that the category of existence can only pertain to the things we perceive then we can say that things as they are unperceived do not exist. — Janus

    I’m not claiming that the thing-in-itself is some ghostly half-real entity. My point is that existence and non-existence are categories that only make sense within experience, within a perspective. When you try to apply them outside that framework—i.e., to the 'unperceived in itself'—they lose their meaning. Saying 'it neither exists nor does not exist' is shorthand for saying: the category of existence simply doesn’t apply there. That’s not a contradiction but a recognition of a boundary or limit to knowledge.

    Kant’s remark in the Transcendental Aesthetic that if we “take away the thinking subject the whole world of appearances would vanish” is often misconstrued. It doesn’t mean the world literally ceases to be, but that the world as knowable is always ordered through the framework of an observer. The realist assumption—that the world would be just the same even if there were no observer—forgets this constituting role of the mind - which is precisely the point of the 'blind spot of science', which regards the world it studies as if it were simply there in itself, while forgetting that the very concepts of objectivity and existence already presuppose the standpoint of an observer.
  • The Mind-Created World
    In Buddhism this whole world of appearances is nothing but maya. — Punshhh

    Actually Māyā is Hindu terminology. The Buddhist term is saṃsāra, ‘cyclical existence’. It’s idea of the illusory nature of experience is more that we wrongly attribute significance to things we’re attached to - not that the world is illusory per se, but we evaluate it wrongly.
  • Idealism in Context
    He says that there cannot be such existents, that they are neither existent nor non-existent. — Janus

    Context:

    I am not arguing 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
  • On emergence and consciousness
    This is a different problem from "What is it like to be conscious?" The latter problem is associated with Nagel, not Chalmers. — J

    No it isn’t. He quotes Nagel in support of his definition;

    The really hard problem of consciousness is the problem of experience. When we think and perceive, there is a whir of information-processing, but there is also a subjective aspect. As Nagel (1974) has put it, there is something it is like to bea conscious organism. This subjective aspect is experience. When we see, for example, we experience visual sensations: the felt quality of redness, the experience of dark and light, the quality of depth in a visual field. Other experiences go along with perception in different modalities: the sound of a clarinet, the smell of mothballs. Then there are bodily sensations, from pains to orgasms; mental images that are conjured up internally; the felt quality of emotion, and the experience of a stream of conscious thought. What unites all of these states is that there is something it is like to be in them. All of them are states of experience.


    Again, the problem is to say how "what it's like" consciousness arises from brain processes, not to give a description of consciousness itself. — J

    The two are inseparable. You need to specify something if you are to describe it.

    why does that mean we can't seek an explanation for it? — J

    Because of recursion: you’re trying to explain that which is doing the explaining. ‘The eye cannot see itself’.
  • On emergence and consciousness
    If mind can be an object for the cognitive sciences, what does this mean? How does the attitude or program of cognitive science allow an escape from what you call "the indubitable fact that we are that which we seek to know"? Perhaps the answer lies in a discrimination between 1st and 3rd person perspectives, but what do you think? When a scientist studies consciousness, what are they doing differently from our everyday experience of being conscious? — J

    Going back to Chalmer's Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness, he makes the distinction between what he calls easy problems of consciousness and the hard problem. The 'easy problems' are a catalog of just those kind of mental phenomena which are the subject of cognitive science, for instance

    • the ability to discriminate, categorize, and react to environmental stimuli;
    • the integration of information by a cognitive system;
    • the reportability of mental states; ...
    (Partial list)

    As is well known, he says the really hard problem is 'what it is like to be...' By that he means the experiential dimension of life, the 'subjective aspect' as he calls it. Which, I think, is really a roundabout way of describing 'being' as such. That is what cannot be described in objective terms - well, not really. I can say to you 'I feel sick', but you will only know what the means, because you yourself know 'what it is like.' The state, like sentient existence itself, is irreducibly first-person. But the first person is just what the objective sciences seeks to bracket out. There’s the issue in a nutshell. Phenomenology realizes this from the outset.

    As for psychology, there’s a reason why it’s often called ‘soft science’. Cognitive perhaps less so, because many of its objects are objectively quantifiable.

    That some awareness is an indubitable fact does not entail that it can't be explained in other terms. Yet you seem to imply that this must be so. Why? Aren't we confusing the experience, the phenomenology, with that which is experienced? — J

    Simply because there has to be an observer, a subject to whom the experience occurs, for there to be anything to analyse! One of my stock quotes, from Routledge Phenomenology, is right on point here:

    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.

    Continental philosophy, generally, seems to understand this in a way that Anglo philosophy really struggles with. Perhaps physicalism functions as a kind of shield. By insisting that only what is scientifically observable really matters, it allows one to preserve that sense of separateness that science relies on in the first place. In that way the ‘egological’ perspective shelters behind it — a defensive move, more than a philosophical one. This is also why psychology is really existential rather than strictly scientific. Science begins from the standpoint of separation, the stance of standing outside or apart from. But psychology, at least when it’s true to its subject, has to begin from within: from the lived situation of the self. It can’t hide behind the shield of objectivity, because what it investigates is the very ground of experience itself. Hence, 'we are what we seek to know'.

    (There is another mode of self-transcendence, the noetic rather than the scientific but can’t go into that here.)
  • Currently Reading
    Waking, Dreamimg, Being - Evan Thompson
  • The Mind-Created World

    ‘Anyone who denies the law of non-contradiction should be beaten and burned until he admits that to be beaten is not the same as not to be beaten, and to be burned is not the same as not to be burned.’

    [However]

    Philosophers in the Mahayana traditions hold some things to be ineffable; but they also explain why they are ineffable… Now, you can’t explain why something is ineffable without talking about it. That’s a plain contradiction: talking of the ineffable.

    Embarrassing as this predicament might appear, Nāgārjuna is far from being the only one stuck in it. The great lodestar of the German Enlightenment, Immanuel Kant, said that there are things one cannot experience (noumena), and that we cannot talk about such things. He also explained why this is so: our concepts apply only to things we can experience. Clearly, he is in the same fix as Nagarjuna. So are two of the greatest 20th-century Western philosophers. Ludwig Wittgenstein claimed that many things can be shown but not said, and wrote a whole book (the Tractatus), explaining what and why. Martin Heidegger made himself famous by asking what Being is, and then spent much of the rest of his life explaining why you can’t even ask this question.     — Beyond True and False, Graham Priest
  • The Joy of the Knife: The Nietzschean Glorification of Crime
    Did you have Luigi Mangione in mind by any chance? He that shot a healthcare CEO in the back, on the street, at point blank range, and has become a cult figure in the US and beyond due to the perceived injustices of the US health insurance scheme.
  • Idealism in Context
    If Kant's 'idealism' asserted that appearances are mere mental contents then, it would be subjective idealism. However, Kant also asserts that there is 'something' about phenomena that it is not 'mental'. However, we are left with no clue on how that 'something' is related to appearances. — boundless

    Don't forget that the categories of the understanding and our sensory abilities are factors that we all share. They're not particular to individuals, although individuals 'instantiate' those capacities. I have just responded in the mind-created world discussion to further points along these lines.
  • Why not AI?
    ↪Athena
    There’s not a blanket ban on your using AI but we’re not allowed to use it to write posts for us. You can use it to refine your arguments, ideas and prose but it’s important that what you write is in your own voice.
  • The Mind-Created World
    To use the empirical sciences—phenomena—to say things about the noumenal nature of things is simply off-limits. — Count Timothy von Icarus

    But isn’t it you who is here saying things about the noumenal or thing-in-itself? If there’s a fault in the expression Ding an sich, it lies in the “Ding”: as soon as we call it a “thing,” it’s already objectified, named, made into some thing—even if we then say it’s unknowable. We’re simultaneously thinking it and not thinking it.

    So there is no “noumenal nature” as if it were an object awaiting description. To treat it that way risks projecting it as the first link in a causal chain—an “uncaused cause” - which is where Kant says it becomes dogmatic metaphysics.

    For, it was hardly a novel thought that the properties of the mind and of man's senses/body affect how the world appears. — Count Timothy von Icarus

    Agree! I see Kant as continuous with many aspects of the previous tradition. He adopted Aristotle’s categories almost unchanged, and his habilitation thesis was on Plato’s Ideas, although that was before his “critical period.” But meanwhile, there had been the scientific revolution, and the abandonment of the geocentric universe with its crystal spheres. Kant is continuous with the older tradition, but he is also responding to a radically altered intellectual landscape in a way that his immediate predecessors were not.

    I think this might lead towards the parallel charge of Kant as leading towards skepticism, that his world bottoms out in nothing — Count Timothy von Icarus

    Nāgārjuna likewise is accused by his Brahmin critics of nihilism (as was the Buddha). But no-thing-ness—the Buddhist emptiness—is not nothing, not a nihilistic void as it is sometimes called. That idea of “The Void” evokes all kinds of existential terrors (or at least uneasiness, which I can hear you expressing!). It was a common rendering among 18th-century translators of Buddhism, and later echoed by Nietzsche and other European philosophers (Nietzsche called Buddhism “the cry of an exhausted civilization”).

    In the OP, I footnoted a passage from the Kaccāyanagotta Sutta which goes to the heart of this apparent impasse:

    By and large, Kaccāyana, this world is supported by a polarity, that of existence and non-existence. But when one sees the origination of the world as it actually is with right discernment, "non-existence" with reference to the world does not occur to one. When one sees the cessation of the world as it actually is with right discernment, "existence" with reference to the world does not occur to one. — Kaccāyanagotta Sutta

    The import for the “mind-created world” argument is that the world (object, thing) outside perception neither exists nor does not exist. To say “nothing can be said about it” is not to claim “it is something that does not exist.” Rather, it neither exists nor doesn’t exist; in fact, there is no “it.”

    In broader philosophical terms, to speak of “the unconditioned,” “absolute,” or “unborn” is to gesture towards what is not any specific thing at all and is beyond the scope of discursive thought. This is not unlike what we find in Neoplatonism: the One of Plotinus cannot be an object of thought, or an object at all, since it transcends the distinction of self and world. The famous expression of the One as “beyond Being” means, in my interpretation, beyond the polarity of existence and non-existence—beyond anything of which something determinate can be said.

    And you can see how this leads back to Kant and the limits of discursive reason: the Ding an sich is not a hidden object, but a marker of the boundary of thought itself, reminding us that whatever lies “beyond” cannot be spoken of in terms of existence or non-existence. And as language relies on those very distinctions to gain traction in the world of experience, it is in that sense beyond speech.
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