All I'm suggesting is that, although exceptionalism has been all too often used by humans to justify maltreating everything else, it is also the basis for expecting better of them.
The exceptionalism that I'm opposed to is the exceptionalism that seeks to disown or set aside our animal nature, pretending that we are not animals. In a phrase, it is the idea that we have "dominion" over everything else. It has too often been interpreted as a licence for tyranny, when stewardship is called for. — Ludwig V

Really? Tell that to the Jain monks who conscientiously sweep the path they're walking along to avoid stepping on insects. Or the world's many vegetarians and vegans who decline animal products as sustenance (which doesn't include me). I think this is rather a stale caricature of Christian imperialism, even if historically accurate in some respects.

The exceptionalism I'm proposing is due to our existential condition: that we are endowed with the ability to sense meaning in a way that no other animal is able to do. There are, as a consequence, horizons of being open to us, that are not open to other animals. It's both a blessing and a curse, as consequently we have a sense of ourselves, and so also a sense of our own limitedness and finitude and the ability to lose what we cherish and also to act in ways which we ourselves know are sub-optimal. It's an unfortunate historical fact that our science-based society has swept away the symbolic forms in which that awareness was expressed. But then, it also suits a consumer society to have us believe that the pursuit and satiation of desires is an aim. Many before me have observed that the popular interpretation of the 'survival of the fittest' serve the industrial capitalist mindset very well.

None of which is to say that I don't accept that animals, like dogs, are sentient beings who feel a full range of emotions and experience joy, sadness and so on (I'm minding someone's cavoodle for a few weeks, and she's a delight). That they are demonstrably lacking the rational faculties of h.sapiens is not an expression of prejudice or bias, but a simple statement of fact, which seems inordinately difficult to accept for a lot of people.

Seems to me that logical nihilism undermines the idea of there being 'necessary truths'. But how can logical nihilism be supported by rational inference when it calls the basis of rational inference into question? If there are no unconditional facts to fall back on, is it not just meaningless verbiage?

All Things are Full of Gods - The Mysteries of Mind and Life, David Bentley Hart.

A list of the 5 levels would have been nice. — noAxioms

(Aquinas’ ‘five proofs’ and other exercises in scholastic metaphysics were never intended as polemical arguments to persuade unbelievers. They were intellectual exercises given in the context of a culture of belief, intended to provide edification for the faithful. In context where a majority believe that God is dead, these kinds of arguments will only invite hostility.)

Does this other cognitive mode happen to have a typically south-central Asian name? — Mww

It's made more explicit in them, but it's also there in the Western traditions. I often feel that in Asia there is not so much of a gap between the ancient and modern.

If the thing-in-itself is known to us as appearing objects, why is it said things-in-themselves are unknown to us?

If the thing-in-itself appears, it isn’t in-itself. It is isn’t in itself, and it is something that appears, then it must appear to us, which becomes phenomenon in us, which becomes an object of experience for us, and the entire transcendental aesthetic contradicts itself. — Mww

Check out this blog post.

Thanks. I see it's a rather delicate point. So I read that qualification as an admission, yes, there are real objects independent of our sensory grasp of them (so as not to give ground to complete solipsism or skepticism), but still, they are known by us as appearing objects under the categories etc etc. I still think there's a frequent tendency amongst those who encounter Kant to want to 'peek behind the curtain' so to speak, or penetrate the mystery of 'what really is'. But he's actually pointing out a kind of limit, or even limitation, of knowledge, which requires a certain humility to accept. A Kant primer says:

Kant's introduced the concept of the “thing in itself” to refer to reality as it is independent of our experience of it and unstructured by our cognitive constitution. The concept was harshly criticized in his own time and has been lambasted by generations of critics since. A standard objection to the notion is that Kant has no business positing it given his insistence that we can only know what lies within the limits of possible experience. But a more sympathetic reading is to see the concept of the “thing in itself” as a sort of placeholder in Kant's system; it both marks the limits of what we can know and expresses a sense of mystery that cannot be dissolved, the sense of mystery that underlies our unanswerable questions. Through both of these functions it serves to keep us humble. — Emrys Westacott

Note also that many or all of Kant's criticism of rationalism were directed at the philosophers of his day (Christian Wolff and others) who proposed various teleological, ontological and other 'proofs of the existence of God'. This kind of proof was what Kant said reason could not establish. It doesn't mean that he doesn't believe in God, but, as he said, he had to declare a limit to knowledge to make room for faith. (I personally think there is another cognitive mode altogether, connected with religious insight, but that is yet another transcendental can of worms altogether.)

Is anybody actually supporting the view of something from nothing? — noAxioms

I have an intuition which is rather difficult to articulate, but which revolves around the sense that there is a kind of infinitely fruitful nothingness at the centre of being. That is an intuition which is found in different forms in many schools of the perennial philosophy and properly philosophical (as distinct from popular) mysticism.

There is a Christian form, which I've found articulated in a post on Aquinas vs Intelligent Design. The author describes Aquinas' distinction between creation as 'a species of change' whereby something changes into something else. This is what he says that the Greek philosophers meant by their maxim 'nothing comes from nothing'. But, he points out, divine creation is of a completely different order to what the Greek philosophers might imagine:

Aquinas argued that their (i.e. the Greek's) error was a failure to distinguish between "cause" in the sense of a natural change of some kind and "cause" in the sense of an ultimate bringing into being of something from no antecedent state whatsoever. Creatio non est mutatio says Aquinas: The act of creation is not some species of change.

The Greek natural philosophers were quite correct in saying that from nothing, nothing comes. But by “comes” they meant a change from one state to another, which requires some underlying material reality. It also requires some pre-existing possibility for that change, a possibility that resides in something.

Creation, on the other hand, is the radical causing of the whole existence of whatever exists. To be the complete cause of something’s existence is not the same as producing a change in something. It is not a matter of taking something and making it into something else, as if there were some primordial matter which God had to use to create the universe. Rather, Creation is the result of the divine agency being totally responsible for the production, all at once and completely, of the whole of the universe, with all it entities and all its operations, from absolutely nothing pre-existing.

Strictly speaking, points out Aquinas, the Creator does not create something out of nothing in the sense of taking some nothing and making something out of it. This is a conceptual mistake, for it treats nothing as a something. On the contrary, the Christian doctrine of creation ex nihilo claims that God made the universe without making it out of anything. In other words, anything left entirely to itself, completely separated from the cause of its existence, would not exist—it would be absolutely nothing. The ultimate cause of the existence of anything and everything is God who creates—not out of some nothing, but from nothing at all. — Aquinas vs Intelligent Design

This also gives the lie to lot of atheist polemics, which concieve of the "first cause" as a kind of super-engineer or movie director, responsible for the literal construction of every particular (cf John Haldane's quip that 'the Lord has an inordinate fondness for beetles'.) It is why, for example, Richard Dawkins insists that whatever designed the universe must be more complex than the universe itself. The trouble with this argument is that the scientifically-inclined are so thoroughly immersed in their own anthropocentric project of attempting to reverse-engineer the universe and the origin of life that they are not equipped for any kind of insight into, or intuitive feel for, what the pre-modern cultures understood by the 'divine source of existence'. It's not a scientific concept at all.

This is why it is fallacious to think of the 'divine source of being' as simply an addition to the set of all existents, something else that exists, which is what makes it seem an infinite regress. But it is mistaken to place the divine source of being on the same ontological level as particular beings or the phenomenal universe. In actuality, the source of existence is not something that exists. 'Existence' is what 'the transcendent' is transcendent in relation to. This is the substance of an arcane Medieval text, The Periphyseon, composed by the scholar-monk John Scottus Eriugena in the middle of what we now call the Dark Ages.

Eriugena [lists] “five ways of interpreting” the manner in which things may be said to exist or not to exist. According to the first mode, things accessible to the senses and the intellect are said to exist, whereas anything which, “through the excellence of its nature”, transcends our faculties are said not to exist. According to this classification, God, because of his transcendence is said not to exist. He is “nothingness through excellence” (nihil per excellentiam).

The second mode of being and non-being is seen in the “orders and differences of created natures” (I.444a), whereby, if one level of nature is said to exist, those orders above or below it, are said not to exist:

For an affirmation concerning the lower (order) is a negation concerning the higher, and so too a negation concerning the lower (order) is an affirmation concerning the higher. ...

...This mode illustrates Eriugena’s original way of dissolving the traditional Neoplatonic hierarchy of being into a dialectic of affirmation and negation: to assert one level is to deny the others. In other words, a particular level may be affirmed to be real by those on a lower or on the same level, but the one above it is thought not to be real in the same way. If humans are thought to exist in a certain way, then angels do not exist in that way. — SEP

I don't expect this will be understood, but that's part of the point. The point being, a proper consideration of the question requires a grasp of an hierarchical ontology, that is, that there are levels and degrees of being and reality, which is the basis of the ancient mythology of the 'scala naturae' (also known as the great chain of being). This is why, in some of the contemporary materials I'm encountering an heirarchical ontology based on a revised neoplatonism is being considered. Vervaeke says one of the hallmarks of the modern mindset is a 'flat ontology' in which only sense-able existents are considered to be real. But seeing past that sense of what is real requires a completely different kind of understanding, not the accumulation of ever more facts about the dynamics of the Singularity.

(An amusing anecdote. It will be recalled that Georges Lemaître was both a Catholic priest and a cosmologist, and one of the original proponents of what is now called the 'big bang' theory. By the 1950's, when this idea had become somewhat grudgingly accepted by the scientific community, Pope Pius XII ventured the notion that Lemaître's theory might provide some validation of the doctrine of creation ex nihilo. According to a source that I read, which I can't now find, Lemaître was embarrased by this, and prevailed upon the Pope's scientific advisor to request His Holiness desist from making such remarks in future. As Wikipedia puts it 'in relation to Catholic teaching on the origin of the Universe, Lemaître viewed his theory as neutral with neither a connection nor a contradiction of the Faith; as a devoted Catholic priest, Lemaître was opposed to mixing science with religion although he held that the two fields were not in conflict'. I which such reticence were more common amongst those who wish to utilise 'scientific reasoning' to base anti-religious polemics.)

I am saying it is the thing which excites our senses — Bob Ross

The persistent error I see with this, is the idea that the ding an sich is a 'thing behind the thing', that it's 'the real thing' as opposed to 'the apparent thing'. And the reason why I think that's an error is that it attempts to take a perspective from which you're able to compare them, which, according to Kant, you can never do.

@Mww - do you concur?

Deutsch says 'our perceptions are at the end of a long chain of physical processes'. He then starts on how to explain the apparently-inexplicable 'wavefunction collapse' by saying we don't really know how we know anything except indirectly. He says 'mathematical theorems are determined by physics' and that 'Physics is a theory of the reality of the world' - ergo the world is physical. So he's completely committed to physicalism as a paradigm. Which is more or less what I said - he's committed to MWI because it obviates the need for the 'wavefunction collapse' which seems mysterious ('woo' in your language) and so, what needs to be avoided. He then accuses Copenhagen etc of 'leading to solipsism'. I think I'll leave it there, and thanks for your feedback.

The point is that the many worlds interpretation wants to deny the wavefunction collapse to preserve scientific realism. To this end it starts from the premise that every possible measurement outcome really occurs, although in the world we are in, we only see one of them. Is that not the case?

I know. That MWI fantasy is the cost of keeping realism. :party:

I'll refer to Phillip Ball, The Many Problems of Many Worlds.

What the MWI really denies is the existence of facts at all. It replaces them with an experience of pseudo-facts (we think that this happened, even though that happened too). In so doing, it eliminates any coherent notion of what we can experience, or have experienced, or are experiencing right now. We might reasonably wonder if there is any value — any meaning — in what remains, and whether the sacrifice has been worth it.


Every scientific theory (at least, I cannot think of an exception) is a formulation for explaining why things in the world are the way we perceive them to be. This assumption that a theory must recover our perceived reality is generally so obvious that it is unspoken. The theories of evolution or plate tectonics don’t have to include some element that says “you are here, observing this stuff”; we can take that for granted.

In the end, if you say everything is true (i.e. every possible outcome has happened), you have said nothing.

But the MWI refuses to grant it. Sure, it claims to explain why it looks as though “you” are here observing that the electron spin is up, not down. But actually it is not returning us to this fundamental ground truth at all. Properly conceived, it is saying that there are neither facts nor a you who observes them.

It says that our unique experience as individuals is not simply a bit imperfect, a bit unreliable and fuzzy, but is a complete illusion. If we really pursue that idea, rather than pretending that it gives us quantum siblings, we find ourselves unable to say anything about anything that can be considered a meaningful truth. We are not just suspended in language; we have denied language any agency. The MWI — if taken seriously — is unthinkable.

Its implications undermine a scientific description of the world far more seriously than do those of any of its rivals. The MWI tells you not to trust empiricism at all: Rather than imposing the observer on the scene, it destroys any credible account of what an observer can possibly be. Some Everettians insist that this is not a problem and that you should not be troubled by it. Perhaps you are not, but I am. — Phillip Ball

As I understand it - and I think I do understand it - the entire genesis of Everett's theory was the simple question: what if the wavefunction collapse doesn't occur? What would that entail?

According to an article in Scientific American, The Many Worlds of Hugh Everett (referring to a biography of him by that name).

Everett’s scientific journey began one night in 1954, he recounted two decades later, “after a slosh or two of sherry.” (Incidentally, he died an alcoholic and left instructions that his ashes be put our with the trash) He and his Princeton classmate Charles Misner and a visitor named Aage Petersen (then an assistant to Niels Bohr) were thinking up “ridiculous things about the implications of quantum mechanics.” During this session Everett had the basic idea behind the many-worlds theory, and in the weeks that followed he began developing it into a dissertation. ....

Everett addressed the measurement problem by merging the microscopic and macroscopic worlds. He made the observer an integral part of the system observed, introducing a universal wave function that links observers and objects as parts of a single quantum system. He described the macroscopic world quantum mechanically and thought of large objects as existing in quantum superpositions as well. Breaking with Bohr and Heisenberg, he dispensed with the need for the discontinuity of a wave-function collapse.

Everett’s radical new idea was to ask, What if the continuous evolution of a wave function is not interrupted by acts of measurement? What if the Schrödinger equation always applies and applies to everything—objects and observers alike? What if no elements of superpositions are ever banished from reality? What would such a world appear like to us?

Everett saw that under those assumptions, the wave function of an observer would, in effect, bifurcate at each interaction of the observer with a superposed object.

And what problem does this daring adventure in fantasy purportedly solve? Why, that would be the metaphysical issue implied by the so-called 'wavefunction collapse'. At the expense of avoiding the apparent 'woo factor' involved in the measurement problem, we simply declare that it doesn't. At a considerable cost.

I wonder what David Deutsche's (probably unconscious) metaphysical commitments are, such that he views anyone who questions MWI with about the same scorn Richard Dawkins saves for creationists. Of course, I know he's one of the Smartest People in the World, but still, I can't help but think that something is seriously amiss here.

Why thanks, kind of.

other entanglements. — Tom Storm

Your reading will instantly affect my state ;-)

I've published a Medium essay The Timeless Wave, on the philosophical interpretations of the double-slit experiment. (May require registration on medium but can be accessed for free thereafter.) I expect there will be disagreements but must say I'm happy with the quality of the prose.

@Tom Storm @Banno

Given enough monkeys with typewriters. — Metaphysician Undercover

...you'll get a Philosophy Forum :lol:

You're asserted the irrationality of the view, but have not explained how a theory with such explanatory power is irrational. Only that you find it distasteful, which is not rational grounds for rejecting a theory. — noAxioms

What ‘explanatory power’? In a Scientific American cover story on the Multiverse, we read the following:

Fundamental constants are finely tuned for life. A remarkable fact about our universe is that physical constants have just the right values needed to allow for complex structures, including living things. Steven Weinberg, Martin Rees, Leonard Susskind and others contend that an exotic multiverse provides a tidy explanation for this apparent coincidence: if all possible values occur in a large enough collection of universes, then viable ones for life will surely be found somewhere. This reasoning has been applied, in particular, to explaining the density of the dark energy that is speeding up the expansion of the universe today. — DOES THE MULTIVERSE REALLY EXIST? (cover story). By: Ellis, George F. R. Scientific American. Aug 2011, Vol. 305 Issue 2, p38-43. 6p.

So the possibility of infinite universes is a 'tidier explanation' than a higher intelligence. Just who is finding what 'distasteful', I wonder. (Oh, and note the call out to 'dark matter', the existence of which is also a matter of conjecture.)

In any case, I am by no means a William Lane Craig admirer, although there are Christian philosophers I do admire, including David Bentley Hart and Keith Ward.

overall I agree, although I have my doubts about him.

He was released in June and returned to Australia. He’s hoping for a presidential pardon for the crime he pleaded guilty to in order to be freed.

My thoughts too. The whole idea of ‘other universes’ says precisely nothing more than that anything might happen. Which is basically irrational.

Your assertion notwithstanding, how does the weak anthropic principle (or the strong for that matter) not explain why they are as they are? If they were not as they are, there'd be no observers to glean the suboptimal choice of laws. — noAxioms

All I take from the 'anthropic principle' is that the evolutionary sequence which we understand from science doesn't begin with the beginning of life on earth, but can be traced back to the origin of the universe. And that given everything now known about the nature of the physical universe, it would have been far more likely that it would not have given rise to complex matter and organic life, and that there's no reason why it should have. So it's not a matter of chance or happenstance. That is by no means a proof of God or anything else, but it is a good reason not to look to science for an alternative, as science treats the 'laws of nature' as given, which indeed they are.

The weak anthropic principle does a fair task of explaining why physical laws are like this. — noAxioms

There is no explanation for physical laws, generally. Physical laws can serve as the basis for the explanations for all manner of things, but why they are as they are is not something explained by science.

Yeah, probably! I was aware of that episode, but it didn’t occur to me that this was the episode he was referring to. Thanks for that.

John Vervaeke dialogue with Evan Thompson on The Blind Spot. He says it’s Part 2, although part 1 doesn’t seem to be published yet. In any case, the essay at the head of this thread is sufficient intro to the general gist of the blind spot. Here the discussion is the impact of ‘blind spot metaphysics’ on biology. The conversation starts with a clear differentiation of organism and mechanism, the meaning of ‘autonomy’ in respect of organic life, and I really like that it moves on to the sense in which agency is instantiated even in very rudimentary forms of life such as bacteria.

I wish :love:

I will try to bring this topic back to something everyone can validate on his/her own. — Carlo Roosen

Regrettably there’s no ‘dummies guide’ to transcendental idealism.

The issue boils down to a problem to a realist: How does one explain the reality of whatever one asserts to be real? Shorter but less rigorous version: Why is there something and not nothing? Positing a creator doesn't solve the problem; it only regresses it. — noAxioms

I think you would only say that if you put the creator on the same ontological level as the created. But according to classical theology, the creator is not a temporally first event in a sequence of events, or an entity that pre-exists other entities, but is of an altogether different nature. So a creator is not simply another instance of the kind of beings that you're seeking to account for. This was something explicit in classical theology up until the late medieval period. For example, Aquinas advocated 'analogical' knowledge of the Creator, meaning that what we say of the Creator is only true by way of analogy.

You're on the right track with your musings about the nature of number, as they are ontologically distinguishable from temporal objects. As you say, they don't begin and end in time, and they're not composed from particles. The way I view it is that numbers are real but not existent. They're not things in the sense that tables and chairs are, but you and I both know what they are, and we need some degree of numerical literacy to successfully navigate the world. But in the common lexicon, there isn't a word which expresses the different ways in which such items as numbers, logical principles, and phenomenal objects exist. That sense of the reality of abstract objects was very much stock-in-trade for scholastic realists such as Aquinas. But modern thought tends to 'flatten' these gradations in the nature of being, such that only what exists is considered real, with number and the like being relegated to the inter-subjective domain.

I think it is perhaps discussed in modal metaphysics although I've never been able to get my head around contemporary modal metaphysics.

Go back to baiting theists, mate. That about exhausts your repertoire.

I might, but I’m carefully drafting an essay on the philosophical implications of the double-slit experiment and it’s very time consuming.

Many philosophers have been struggling with this, but this is really all there is to it, I believe. — Carlo Roosen

Philosophy Forum Contributor Proves Kant Wrong In Single Post!

This is from a book I've recently published. A link to it is available in my profile if anyone is interested. — Vivek

A self-published Amazon title with a one-sentence description and no customer feedback. Reported to moderators as self-promotion in accordance with site guidelines against "Advertisers, spammers, self-promoters".

How ethical issues are related to the origin of the universe? — MoK

For the Christian, the fact that we are created 'imago dei' and return to the source of being at the time of death is fundamental to their faith. Life is regulated according to that belief, and according to the Biblical maxims and commandments. Whereas naturalism sees h.sapiens as the consequence of physical evolutionary processes that happen to have given rise to this particular species. They are very different attitudes and outlooks.

Nonsense on stilts. It's like the schoolyard 'yeah prove it!' said to every question, and it doesn't rise to the level of philosophy.

Interesting fact: St Augustine anticipated Descartes' Cogito by several millenia:

But who will doubt that he lives, remembers, understands, wills, thinks, knows, and judges? For even if he doubts, he lives. If he doubts where his doubs come from, he remembers. If he doubts, he understands that he doubts. If he doubts, he wants to be certain. If he doubts, he thinks. If he doubts, he knows that he does not know. If he doubts, he judges that he ougth not rashly to give assent. So whoever acquires a doubt from any source ought not to doubt any of these things whose non-existence would mean that he could not entertain doubt about anything. — Augustine, On the Trinity 10.10.14 quoted in Richard Sorabji, Self, 2006, p.219

How can you know that you exist at all? — Bob Ross

You have to exist to question it!

:pray: Thanks for noticing!

4.1122 Darwin’s theory has no more to do with philosophy than any other hypothesis in natural science. — Shawn

:100: :clap: Already I like him more.

I think origin of the word 'therapy' was associated with a religious sect in the ancient world called the Therapeutae. According to the Wiki entry, 'the term therapeutes means one who is attendant to the gods although the term, and the related adjective therapeutikos carry in later texts the meaning of attending to heal, or treating in a spiritual or medical sense. (The same article carries the suggestion that the term itself was a corruption of the Buddhist 'theravada', which had been carried to Alexandria via Silk Road trade.) 'Catharsis' is of a similar vintage, and carries a similar meaning, namely, purification, and is nowadays taken to mean the expurgation of repressed or forgotten memories resulting in a 'cathartic experience' (it was originally associated with the dramatic arts.)

So I take it the malady which Wittgenstein sought to cure was more than simple confusion or befuddlement, it was more like a state or a condition of ignorance. Wittgenstein was not overtly religious, but he has a quasi-mystical side (see John Cottingham Wittgenstein's Philosophy of Religion). Unfortunately the term 'religion' carries a lot of cultural baggage which 20th century philosophy doesn't want anything to do with, but the idea of ignorance as a kind of deep cognitive error definitely has resemblances to some spiritual philosophies. For example the concluding remarks about his words being a ladder which ought to be discarded after having served their purpose has a direct resemblance to the Buddhist 'parable of the raft' and the 'finger pointing to the moon' (hence scholarly comparisions to Wittgenstein and Zen Buddhism.) Indeed there's a strong hint of apophaticism in his concluding remark, albeit in his case, devoid of the symbolic context in which that kind of 'negative way' was presented in its earlier historical forms.

So I think he means therapy in an existential sense, of freeing oneself from confusion in a deeper sense than the simply linguistic, although I suppose that will be a contentious argument.

Interesting that arguments over whether the Universe has an origin in time is one of Kant’s ‘antinomies of reason’ (insoluble questions) and also a question declared unanswerable in Buddhism. It’s kind of a shame that so many important ethical issues are believed to hinge on such a question.

Hey I've just been using the voice-enabled version of ChatGPT4 free tier. Fantastic! All the intonations and responses feel so utterly natural.

I'm getting help on drafting an essay as a continuation of the dialogue on Penrose and scientific realism. I've also sought input on physics stackexchange and physicsforum.com, although it's strictly a philosophical essay, not a physics theory, in support of the argument that ψ is a real abstraction, and that as a consequence, physical objects are not entirely determinate in nature. One of the implications being that Penrose's deprecation of quantum theory is incorrect and that QBism is on the right track.