What is it we are doing when we split an observer off from an observed, and then go on to declare the observed as lacking any form in itself? — Joshs

I don't think I suggested that. I am suggesting that the notion of 'formless matter' is meaningful. From the perspective of classical philosophy, 'formless matter' refers to matter that lacks a specific form or structure, awaiting the imposition of form to become a particular. In this sense, formless matter is a potentiality that can take on various forms through natural processes or external causes. From that perspective, clouds of interstellar gas could be considered formless matter in a metaphysical sense, as they are raw material that, under the right conditions (e.g., gravitational forces, fusion processes), can form stars, planets, or other celestial bodies. For that perspective, 'form' (morphe) refers not just to shape but to the organizing principle that gives a substance its identity.

As @frank points out, from a scientific perspective, interstellar gas and dust are not really formless, as they are subject to physical laws and composed of atoms which have regular structures. They are subject to processes of condensation, fusion, and gravitational collapse, enabling the formation of structures like stars or planets. In this sense, the term "formless" would not strictly apply, since even gas clouds have properties (mass, temperature, charge) and follow patterns like the formation of stars in nebulae. However, they could be seen as chaotic or unstructured compared to highly organized systems such as life-bearing planets and human artefacts.

If forms arise in the relationship between observer and observed, isn’t this also true of what supposedly lies outside of the experience of the observer? — Joshs

What do we suppose does lie outside all experience? Can that even be meaningfully discussed?

What I'm wrestling with are two senses of 'form'. There's the Aristotelian sense of morphe which informs matter. That is the classical view, which to all intents became absorbed into Christian theism. As such it's a kind of no-go for a lot of people, if it suggests anything like intelligent design or the 'divine intellect'.

Then there's the enactivist approach, which considers form as both an emergent principle, on the one hand, and also a cognitive function, where forms serve as gestalts, the unitary wholes which enable the mind to recognise particulars as part of a species.

As far as forms being emergent principles, there is still some resonance of the Aristotelian morphe in that, as it is preserved in the current lexicon as morphology and its derivatives. Both Terrence Deacon and Alice Juarrero acknowledge a revised Aristotelian element in their books.

As far as the 'observer and observed' are concerned, that's a whole other topic. I've started trying to draft an essay on it but it is wide and deep.

Might be worth asking how the electrical grid is maintained in the absence of humans. LLMs don’t have, you know, hands.

I'm not claiming that intentionality and personal experience can be comprehended or encapsulated in any purely physical account. — Janus

So electrochemical reactions do or don’t cause us to act?

Stimulation via the senses is achieved via electrochemical processes as I understand it. — Janus

Which are immediately interpreted by the mind. There are electro-chemical constituents to be sure, but then the question of intentionality and judgement comes to mind. Remember this whole discussion started with the sense in which decisions and ideas are 'caused by' neurophysiogical processes. The whole process of perception and action is 'of a piece' but you don't say that can be explained solely in terms of physical processes unless you're a philosophical materialist - which you say you're not, but then you keep falling back to a materialist account.

They are just two different explanatory paradigms which cannot be combined into a unified master paradigm as far as I can see, I admit it might turn out that I'm wrong about that of course. At present no such master paradigm seems to be on the horizon. — Janus

But the 'two competing explanatory paradigms', mental and material, just is the Cartesian division - mind and matter, self and other. It was phenomenology, and some of the ideas that arise from that, which seeks to transcend that division. The two books I'm currently reading, Deacon's Incomplete Nature, and Evan Thompson's Mind in Life, are mainly about that. So too many of John Vervaeke's lectures in Awakening from the Meaning Crisis.

Ah, ok. Makes sense!

As I brought up the mereological fallacy, I'll provide an account from a review of Bennett and Hacker, PHilosophical Foundations of Neuroscience:

In Chapter 3 of Part I - “The Mereological Fallacy in Neuroscience” - Bennett and Hacker set out a critical framework that is the pivot of the book. They argue that for some neuroscientists, the brain does all manner of things: it believes (Crick); interprets (Edelman); knows (Blakemore); poses questions to itself (Young); makes decisions (Damasio); contains symbols (Gregory) and represents information (Marr). Implicit in these assertions is a philosophical mistake, insofar as it unreasonably inflates the conception of the 'brain' by assigning to it powers and activities that are normally reserved for sentient beings. It is the degree to which these assertions depart from the norms of linguistic practice that sends up a red flag. The reason for objection is this: it is one thing to suggest on empirical grounds correlations between a subjective, complex whole (say, the activity of deciding and some particular physical part of that capacity, say, neural firings) but there is considerable objection to concluding that the part just is the whole. These claims are not false; rather, they are devoid of sense.

Wittgenstein remarked that it is only of a human being that it makes sense to say “it has sensations; it sees, is blind; hears, is deaf; is conscious or unconscious.” (Philosophical Investigations, § 281). The question whether brains think “is a philosophical question, not a scientific one” (p. 71). To attribute such capacities to brains is to commit what Bennett and Hacker identify as “the mereological fallacy”, that is, the fallacy of attributing to parts of an animal attributes that are properties of the whole being. Moreover, merely replacing the mind by the brain leaves intact the misguided Cartesian conception of the relationship between the mind and behavior, merely replacing the ethereal by grey glutinous matter. The structure of the Cartesian explanatory system remains intact, and this leads to Bennett and Hacker's conclusion that contemporary cognitive neuroscientists are not nearly anti-Cartesian enough.

@Ludwig V might find that of interest.

If the mind is imposing a form on "clouds of interstellar matter," that lack it, why does it impose one form over any other? — Count Timothy von Icarus

Because 'cloud' is a familar cognitive trope. But do clouds possess form at all? I think in the strict sense that it is questionable. They fall under this description:

Clay, rocks, etc. are just bundles of external causes. — Count Timothy von Icarus

(That question is anticipated in the Parmenides, when Socrates asks if there are forms for hair, dirt and mud.)

In any case, the fact that forms are artefacts of the cognitive system, does not undermine their objective (or would that be transjective) reality. It doesn't say that they're solely the product of the mind, but that they arise in the relationship between observer and observed. Biological phenomenology such as enactivism sees such cognitive artifacts as co-arising as a consequence of the interaction between organism and environment. For the pre-moderns, obviously forms could have 'eternal reality in the mind of God' but that is generally not an option for modern philosophy, but we could plausibly say that the idea of forms arose from an intuitive grasp of this co-dependency.

It's not controversial that electrochemical processes cause us to decide to act. Do you really believe that when you decide to act or simply act that there have been no prior neural processes (that you have obviously not been aware of) which give rise to that decision or action? — Janus

They might be unconscious, but that doesn’t mean they’re reducible to, or explainable in terms of, electrochemical processes. That is precisely materialist philosophy of mind.

Obviously stimuli can affect your endocrines, adrenaline, and the like. But that is a matter of biological physiology, not electrochemical reactions as such. Electrochemical reactions are a lower level factor that response to higher-level influences, which in the case of humans can include responses to words, which is the basis of rational causation.

It's not controversial that electrochemical processes cause us to decide to act — Janus

Not for materialists, anyway. You’re actually arguing for materialist determinism when you say that, whether you’re aware of it or not. But then, I guess if your brain is configured to do that, you’ll have no choice, will you?

No, I'm not attributing agency in any other sense than action. In the kind of sense that the chemist speaks of chemical agents. — Janus

So how does it cause a decision to act? Do chemicals also ‘decide to act’? You’ve said many times that the material universe is devoid of intention.

I went to the shops because the neural activity which is experienced as realizing... — Janus

You’re attributing agency to neurophysiology. It’s what Hacker and Bennett call the ‘mereological fallacy’, the attribution to a part that which can only properly said of the whole.

In the early 90’s I was an Apple Education dealer. There were many conferences animated by excitement over the supposed immense potential of multimedia for education. They were heady times. Fast forward to all the hand-wringing about the corrosive effects of social media and online porn and the plummeting rates of literacy and numeracy amongst school age children. Technology is always a two-edged sword.

Interesting perspective. As a regular user, I’m finding ChatGPT - I’m now on the free tier, which is still an embarrassment of riches - incredibly useful, mainly for philosophy and reference, but all kinds of other ways too. My adult son who was initially wary is now finding ways to use it for his hospitality ventures. So my experience of it is benign, although I can easily see how it could be used for mischievous or malevolent purposes.

Chilling editorial from Vox on the latest moves at OpenAI and the change of status from Not for Profit.

Open AI is Dead

this week, the news broke that OpenAI will no longer be controlled by the nonprofit board. OpenAI is turning into a full-fledged for-profit benefit corporation. Oh, and CEO Sam Altman, who had previously emphasized that he didn’t have any equity in the company, will now get equity worth billions, in addition to ultimate control over OpenAI.

Here in Australia, abortion is still technically illegal in some states, but it's never enforced, and it's not nearly so much a matter of controversy as in the USA.

My view is that abortion is a matter of choice, but I can see why its use to avoid the consequences of casual sex is morally objectionable. Still, some of my relatives have had to have it, and I didn't (and wouldn't) speak out against it, as the circumstances demanded it, although I think it is a decision that has an ethical dimension.

(As it happens, my father was a renowned obstetrician and gynaecologist, and one of the generation of practitioners who introduced oral contraceptives to the world. He was very much involved in WHO efforts to promote contraception in developing nations in the 1960's, and was infuriated by the Catholic Church's opposition. We had many long dinner-table discussions about it. At the time, I was completely convinced by his opposition but I have since come to understand the philosophy behind the objection.)

We're able to impose form on it by way of analysis of the chemical composition, spectroscopic analysis, etc. But in another sense, there are vast clouds of interstellar matter that are formless.

Which brings to mind the Pinter analysis - that form is precisely what is brought to bear by cognition so as to navigate the environment.

There really isn't any such thing as the Formless. — frank

Cosmology shows there are enormous amounts of formless matter scattered throughout the Universe. And that's only the matter that can be seen!

I appreciate your response... — ucarr

You're welcome.

I chose not to continue with the conversation because I don’t understand a lot of what you’ve written. It seems you’ve picked up on some of the ideas swirling around the internet about the fusion of quantum physics and consciousness and are trying to fashion them into a coherent system of thought, but to be brutally honest they’re not working out. ‘Consciousness being non-local because of superposition’ ?? Honestly the expression 'nonsense on stilts' comes to mind.

One of my guiding principles is that the subject of philosophy is the human condition and the place of w/man in nature. Clearly that has to take into account scientific discoveries, but I question whether philosophy should allow itself to be defined in those terms. Philosophy as I understand it is very much a matter of stance and attitude. Certainly it must draw on and acknowledge whatever empirical science demonstrates, but philosophy considers very subtle questions, that are beyond the scope of science not because they're incredibly complicated, but because they're generally very simple questions with a lot of depth.

I think Carroll is correct about consciousness being fully within the capacity of physicalist science to replicate. — ucarr

I strongly object to that proposition, not for sentimental reasons, but because of an impossibility in principle which is inherent in the nature of scientific method.

This does not mean, as many here seem to conclude, being anti-science or science denialism. It’s a matter of one of the fundamental assumptions of science since Galileo, that the domain of science is what is objectively observable and measurable. That ought not to be a controversial statement. And the reason ‘consciousness’ (I prefer ‘mind’) is intractable within that framework, is because it is not objective. Sure we can be more or less objective in our judgements about the matter, but the basis of the difficulty is stated clearly by David Chalmers in his 1996 paper:

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 be a 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.

It is undeniable that some organisms are subjects of experience. But the question of how it is that these systems are subjects of experience is perplexing. Why is it that when our cognitive systems engage in visual and auditory information-processing, we have visual or auditory experience: the quality of deep blue, the sensation of middle C? How can we explain why there is something it is like to entertain a mental image, or to experience an emotion? It is widely agreed that experience arises from a physical basis, but we have no good explanation of why and how it so arises. Why should physical processing give rise to a rich inner life at all? It seems objectively unreasonable that it should, and yet it does. — Facing up to the Problem of Consciousness, David Chalmers

In line with what I said above, I think there's a very simple reason that this question is not scientifically tractable, but it's not a technical matter or something that requires advanced mathematics or sub-atomic physics to understand. When David Chalmers talks about 'what it is like to be...', he's referring to being. And being is not an object. This is something that Sean Carroll, despite his expert knowledge in physics, doesn't seem to grasp (whereas many of the specifically Continental philosophers and existentialists do.)

- No further comment.

:pray:

When Carroll claims there’s nothing special about consciousness, I think he’s saying the human individual is not unique and that with sufficient technology, perfect and complete replicas of human individuals are possible — ucarr

I think that Sean Carroll perfectly exemplifies what Thompson, Gleiser and Frank designate the blind spot of science. This is, according to them, is the exclusion of the subject from scientific reckoning. First spelled out in a 2019 Aeon essay, and now a book, the authors argue that the experience of the objects of analysis is indispensable to the understanding of them. They say that since the Enlightenment, humanity has looked to science to tell us who we are, where we come from, and where we're going, but we've gotten stuck thinking we can know the universe from outside our position in it; but that when we try to understand reality only through external objects projected from this perspective we lose sight of reality as experienced. This is what lies behind the subject-object divide in the thread title. The book goes into great detail on the origin of this 'cartesian divide' and its historical precedents and consequences.

So, why would Sean Carroll not see that? In what he says about consciousness as 'a way of speaking about physical things', he doesn't see that he or anyone else is only able to engage in those speech acts because we're conscious. Of course 'consciousness' is not an object as such, rather it is the ground of the awareness which allows us to say anything whatever (as Descartes affirmed). But there is nothing objective about it, save for the fact that we can infer that it is something that others share with us. If that seems like philosophy 101, it is, but Carroll doesn't see it.

What is this thing that Bob paid for? We could call it form. In the world of art, form goes hand in hand with its brother: content. Form is actual shapes molded into the clay. — frank

One reference point that comes to my mind is Aristotle's form (morphe) and substance (hyle). Now there's a complicating factor here, because 'hyle' - derived from the word for timber - has a different meaning to 'substance' as that is used in translations of Aristotle's metaphysics. 'Hyle' refers to the underlying potentiality or material aspect of a particular, while morphe (form) refers to the actualizing structure or organization. Hyle, in this case, is more about potential than about an actual material substance with uniform properties like timber or lumber. It is what is capable of taking on form, a kind of indeterminate potentiality that becomes something specific when combined with morphe.

In Greek philosophy, I think the form would be presumed to be the work of a mind, e.g,. Plato's demiurge in the Timaeus. In Aristotle’s biology there is a kind of proto-concept of self-organization. For Aristotle, natural things have an internal telos or goal-directedness—an internal principle of motion and rest. While Aristotle didn’t propose self-organization in the modern sense, he did argue that living organisms have an inherent purpose and organization that arises from their nature, not from the imposition of an external mind.

I don't think the Greeks shared the conception of self-organisation that is associated with modern biological theory.

So a formless lump of clay would be, in this scheme, merely a potential something, it would have no identity. Bob has paid for a lump of clay, let's hope at the market rate.

However, form and content has a slightly different meaning to form and substance. 'In art and art criticism, form and content are considered distinct aspects of a work of art. The term form refers to the work's composition, techniques and media used, and how the elements of design are implemented. It mainly focuses on the physical aspects of the artwork, such as medium, color, value, space, etc., rather than on what it communicates. Content, on the other hand, refers to a work's subject matter, i.e., its meaning' ~ Wikipedia. Form and content is a more characteristically modern expression, although the lineage of the idea might be traced back to the earlier form and substance. But even in that case, a lump of clay really has no form, and so, no meaningful content, other than as raw material. Again, it looks like Bob has been ripped off.

That’s a book, not an argument. A synopsis would be preferable.

Do tell!

it’s the precise nature of the causal relationship that is at issue. Physicalism says it must be bottom-up, but the placebo effect mitigates against that.

The reason I went to the shops was to buy milk. The cause of my going to the shops was neural activity. — Janus

Without wanting to nit pick, I don’t think that’s quite right. The stock example I’ve always read is, the answer to ‘why is the kettle boiling?’ can be either ‘to make tea’ or ‘because it’s been heated to the appropriate temperature.’ Both answers are of course correct, but the former is teleological - what is the water boiling for? - while the latter refers to the preceding cause of the water boiling. Generally speaking science since Galileo has attempted to avoid teleological explanations, preferring explanations in terms of preceding causes.

The damage to the financial industry is much more than getting their money back. Are you really saying "No harm done"? — L'éléphant

Not at all. But reading that article - as I said, a long read - one of the points that Lewis made was that it might have been possible for FTX to have recovered the supposedly missing funds by itself:

On May 7, 2024, John Ray, FTX’s new CEO, revealed to the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware that, against the $8.7 billion in missing customer deposits, FTX was now sitting on something like $14.5 to $16.3 billion. Whatever the exact sum, it was enough to repay all depositors and various other creditors at least 118 cents on the dollar — that is, everyone who imagined they had lost money back in November 2022 would get their money back, with interest. After paying off FTX’s debts — and paying themselves at least half a billion dollars — Ray and his team will likely still be sitting on billions of dollars. How many billions of dollars is still an open question, but very few of these dollars can be the result of Ray’s various lawsuits to claw back money paid out by FTX in good times. The money came almost entirely from a fire sale of the contents of Sam Bankman-Fried’s dragon’s lair.

The success of the bankruptcy clearly surprised, and maybe even alarmed, the lawyers running it. Months after Sam Bankman-Fried handed him the company, Ray had been keen to stress how little of value he’d been given. More than a little bizarrely, he talked down the value of the assets he was meant to dispose of to repay creditors. Ray called the 20 percent stake Sam had acquired in Anthropic “worthless.” The giant pile of Solana tokens Sam had acquired for pennies were “shitcoins” whose value had been falsely inflated by Sam’s purchases. The Anthropic stake has wound up being worth billions. The Solana token, even without Alameda Research around to prop it up, popped back up from roughly $10 at the end of 2022 to $150 a year and a half later. To this day, Ray hasn’t spoken to Sam Bankman-Fried. It’s hard not to wonder, if they had simply called Sam, what else the lawyers running the FTX bankruptcy might have learned about the contents of his lair. Also, how much more money would be on hand if, for their first 18 months on the job, the bankruptcy lawyers had simply not shown up for work.

It's nuanced tale, of competing judgements about what SBF was really up to. Lewis doesn't try to absolve him of guilt, but he does call into question whether SBF was conniving or delusional.

(Incidentally, Caroline Ellison has just now been sentenced to two years for her role in the scheme.)

See this reference, under the question 'Whether it can be demonstrated that God exists'.

It would be useful in future if you provided a link or reference for further context for weighty questions such as these.

I note that this is mentioned as the second objection to the proposition. The answer is given below as:

Reply Obj. 2: When the existence of a cause is demonstrated from an effect, this effect takes the place of the definition of the cause in proof of the cause’s existence. This is especially the case in regard to God, because, in order to prove the existence of anything, it is necessary to accept as a middle term the meaning of the word, and not its essence, for the question of its essence follows on the question of its existence. Now the names given to God are derived from His effects; consequently, in demonstrating the existence of God from His effects, we may take for the middle term the meaning of the word God.

Quite!

I found this note on the Wikipedia entry on Pragmatism:

Joseph Margolis in Historied Thought, Constructed World (California, 1995) makes a distinction between "existence" and "reality". He suggests using the term "exists" only for those things which adequately exhibit Peirce's Secondness: things which offer brute physical resistance to our movements. In this way, such things which affect us, like numbers, may be said to be "real", although they do not "exist". Margolis suggests that God, in such a linguistic usage, might very well be "real", causing believers to act in such and such a way, but might not "exist".

Close to what I believe, although I think the number is indeed embedded in the fabric of the cosmos, so that it is ontologically greater than merely 'something that affects us'.

I have no idea what you mean unless you are thinking of counting as an act. — Janus

Yes, I’m exploring that way of thinking about it. It’s often said that numbers are abstract or intelligible objects, but I’ve long felt that ‘object’ is the wrong word, a reification (thingifying). But number as the representation of the act of counting and other mathematical operations makes sense to me. It is also linked to the active sense of being, which is what I mean by ‘being is a verb’. (I sense some connection here with Aquinas on the dynamic nature of being but I won’t take that up right now.)

Now you have opened the door to the world of pain that is reality in philosophy. The meaning of "real" depends heavily on the context of its use. — Ludwig V

My intuition is that numbers are real but not existent in the same sense that objects are. The deep issue is that in modern philosophy, ‘what is real’ and ‘what exists’ are generally understood to be synonymous. Whereas I believe ‘what exists’ is a subset of ‘what is real’, which includes potentiality, possibility, logical laws and mathematical principles, and much else besides. (C S Pierce has a similar view and has writings on the distinction between reality and existence.)

But this is why, when you say ‘number is real’, the difficult question comes up ‘what do you mean by “real” or “exists”?’ The analogy of the divided line in the Republic addresses this. Plato says there are different kinds or levels of knowing with different kinds of objects - pistis, doxa, dianoia and noesis. But this is precisely what has been lost in the transition to modernity. Dianoia - mathematical and geometrical knowledge - was retained, through Galileo’s Platonism, but noesis was rejected, along with realism concerning universals. And the other background issue is that the idea of the hierarchy of being and knowing had become integrated with the ‘medieval synthesis’, Ptolemaic cosmology and geocentricity, so that when this collapsed, the ‘great chain of being’ collapsed with it. And it was that metaphysics which had allowed for ‘degrees of reality’. Without it mankind is confined to a kind of single dimension of reality, that of objects and forces, the isolated Cartesian ego exploring and manipulating a world of objects through abstract geometry - modern materialism, in a nutshell.

Looking back, the original clarity looks like an inheritance from Plato. But perhaps that's just me. — Ludwig V

Not at all, a priori/a posteriori was Kant’s summary of a fundamental philosophical distinction, later called into question by Quine in his Two Dogmas of Empiricism. But I still think it’s a valid distinction, in fact I recall it being one of the first things I was taught as an undergraduate, in the class on Hume.

Even if we grant him the reality of abstract objects, which is true in a sense, it would be hard to grasp what that phrase means. — Ludwig V

When Frege says that 'thought contents' are real 'in the same way' as a pencil, he means, well, real. (He distinguishes 'thought content' as numbers and logical laws from casual thought.) So he's granting reality to abstract objects, which nowadays is controversial. As regards the empiricist rejection of Platonic realism, it's sadly typical, I'm afraid. The simple reason is - and it is simple - that if number is real but not material, then it's a defeater for materialism - and we can't allow that :rage:

Mathematical platonism has considerable philosophical significance. If the view is true, it will put great pressure on the physicalist idea that reality is exhausted by the physical. For platonism entails that reality extends far beyond the physical world and includes objects that aren’t part of the causal and spatiotemporal order studied by the physical sciences. Mathematical platonism, if true, will also put great pressure on many naturalistic theories of knowledge. For there is little doubt that we possess mathematical knowledge. The truth of mathematical platonism would therefore establish that we have knowledge of abstract (and thus causally inefficacious) objects. This would be an important discovery, which many naturalistic theories of knowledge would struggle to accommodate. — SEP

This is an old thread, but I thought better to post this here than start a new one. Sam Bankman-Fried: A Personal Verdict (Washington Post gift link) by Michael Lewis who had written a book on him. (Also author of the Big Short.)

It’s a long read which I won’t try to summarise, other than to note that all of the investors in FTX got their funds back, which was announced in May this year. Which, I think, tends to throw the very long sentence that SBF received into some question. Lewis doesn’t say it outright, but he seems to suggest it. He says in conclusion ‘I think the truth is closer to “young person with an intellectually defensible but socially unacceptable moral code makes a huge mistake in trying to live by it” than “criminal on the loose in the financial system.” ‘ And the fact that none of the investors lost their money - although they did fail to realise Bitcoin gains they might have made - makes me feel a bit uneasy about it.

Well, ‘being’ is a verb.

I think of number as an act rather than an entity.

1.We should recognize (and I do mean recognize) that discovering Neptune is different from Pythagoras' discovery of his theorem or the discovery of the irrationality of pi or sqrt2. — Ludwig V

Traditionally, this was regarded as a distinction between a posteriori (learned through observation) and a priori (established through deduction), although this distinction has become far less clear-cut than it was in Kant's day.

Did he construct his distinction between present-at-hand and ready-to-hand or create it? — Ludwig V

I know that 'ready to hand' would suggest Heidegger but it wasn't really meant as an allusion to him. It's closer to something Frege said:

Frege believed that number is real in the sense that it is quite independent of thought: 'thought content exists independently of thinking "in the same way", he says "that a pencil exists independently of grasping it. Thought contents are true and bear their relations to one another (and presumably to what they are about) independently of anyone's thinking these thought contents - "just as a planet, even before anyone saw it, was in interaction with other planets." '

...in The Basic Laws of Arithmetic he says that 'the laws of truth are authoritative because of their timelessness: "[the laws of truth] are boundary stones set in an eternal foundation, which our thought can overflow, but never displace. It is because of this, that they authority for our thought if it would attain to truth." — Frege on Knowing the Third Realm, Tyler Burge

The fact that impresses me is the discovery of scientific and mathematical principles that are true, independently of any grasp of them. So they're mind-independent, on the one hand, because they're true for anyone who can grasp them. But at the same time, they're only perceptible to reason (which I will continue to insist is not available to animals in anything but the most rudimentary form.)

So such principles are in some basic sense 'structures of rational thought'. They pertain to and arise from what has been known in some schools as 'the formal realm', the domain of laws and principles (hence Frege's 'third realm'.) The difficulty this presents for moderns, though, is that this 'realm' is not an actual place or location, it's real in the same sense that the 'domain of natural numbers' is real while not materially existent. Whereas empiricism usually continues to insist on the reality of the mind-independent physical object, which I regard as an oxymoronic construction.

//

Frege held that both the thought contents that constitute the proof-structure of
mathematics and the subject matter of these thought contents (extensions, func-
tions) exist. He also thought that these entities are non-spatial, non-temporal,
causally inert, and independent for their existence and natures from any person's
thinking them or thinking about them. Frege proposed a picturesque metaphor of
thought contents as existing in a "third realm". This "realm" counted as "third"
because it was comparable to but different from the realm of physical objects and
the realm of mental entities. I think that Frege held, in the main body of his career,
that not only thought contents, but numbers and functions were members of this
third realm. — ibid

Compare with:

(Many) scholars—especially those working in other branches of science—view Platonism with skepticism. Scientists tend to be empiricists; they imagine the universe to be made up of things we can touch and taste and so on; things we can learn about through observation and experiment. The idea of something existing “outside of space and time” makes empiricists nervous: It sounds embarrassingly like the way religious believers talk about God, and God was banished from respectable scientific discourse a long time ago.

Platonism, as mathematician Brian Davies has put it, “has more in common with mystical religions than it does with modern science.” The fear is that if mathematicians give Plato an inch, he’ll take a mile. If the truth of mathematical statements can be confirmed just by thinking about them, then why not ethical problems, or even religious questions? Why bother with empiricism at all? — What is Math? Smithsonian Institute

Well, there's a good answer to that - someone has to build and maintain all the things we rely on. But they shouldn't have the last word.//

I thought that as well, but isn’t a syllogism a logical construct in propositional form, which we create? — Mww

Construct, I think, rather than 'create', out of materials ready to hand, so to speak.

Could it be that the biggest problem for indirect realists, is being called indirect realists? — Mww

:100:

Isn’t the ‘order of reasons’ simply what it says? Something which any valid syllogism will exemplify? The book from which the Nagel essay is taken, is The Last Word (review), a defense of reasoned argument against relativism and subjectivism. They will insist that everything is perspectival, or that facts depend on parochial rather than universal considerations. Nagel spends considerable time illustrating that these styles of argument are necessarily self-defeating, as they provide no grounds for thinking anything true.

As for the ground of reason, obviously a deep question, but I will generally argue that the ‘furniture of reason’, the basic laws of thought, are discovered and not invented.

That passage from Kant is also polemical, namely against the ‘ridiculous despotism of the schools’, meaning scholastic philosophy with its rigid adherence to dogma under the banner of revelation trumping reason.