Why not? And why does it matter to the discussion about the criterion of demarcation between why and how? There is a point in case it is a complex phenomenon studied by epistemology, psychology and cognitive sciences. They dissect the acts of mind into various layers and modules, is that surprising? My argument was - there is no demarcation between humanities and sciences. Because they share the methodology by which we understand anything whatsoever. — Johnnie

But they don’t. How interactions between physical objects and forces is observed and understood is completely different to what makes a valid syllogism. The nature of the methods used in science is not itself a scientific but a philosophical. Historians and philosophers are not scientists, and none the worse for not being so.

Of course physics isn't concerned with explaining abstract reasoning. Complex phenomena are by definition a result of simpler things combining — Johnnie

But is ‘abstract reasoning’ among those ‘complex phenomena’ that are ‘a result’ of simpler things combining?

. My point was that we can make a distinction between 'provisional' and 'ultimate' truths without any kind of 'explanation' on the reason why we tend to perceive the way we perceive. — boundless

Of course I agree with you, but then that is a distinction that we both discovered through Buddhist philosophy, whereas most folks on this forum (and I know this from experience!) will treat that with utmost suspicion. I think I’m going to try and write up something on this topic.

As I’ve mentioned many times, I majored in Comparative Religion as a mature-age student (i.e. in my late 20’s). I was and am still interested in religious concepts of enlightenment (*not* in the sense of ‘the Enllightenment.) During those studies, I considered the idea that there was a very much more ‘Eastern’ oriented spirituality characterised by at least some of the Gnostic movements. (At the time, I was very much influenced by the kind of 60’s orientation that enlightenment was something immediately apparent or realisable through meditation, although in subsequent years I have found reason to question it.)

Anyway, what I saw as the gnostic element was centered around the kind of consciousness-oriented practices that characterised many of the ‘new religious movements’ of the 20th C. The idea was that some of the gnostic schools were very much more like for example the Eastern non-dualist teachings particularly Advaita Vedanta and Zen Buddhism. (Of course Alan Watts and D T Suzuki also figured in my formation of these views.) I formed the view that the victory of the so-called ‘pistic’ as distinct from ‘gnostic’ form of Christianity was to have gravely adverse consequences for the development of Western culture. This was based on the idea that the gnostic-oriented movements were much more experiential in nature, and so much more like Buddhist schools, in that they aimed at empowering the aspirant with insight, rather than compelling them to believe. I argued that they were more ‘centripedal’ than ‘centrifugal’, in that they were propagated through networks of enlightened teachers rather than the centralised authority structure constructed by the early Church which ruled by fear and demanded obedience. (Have a read of the treatment of the Cathars by the Pope in the Albigensian Crusades, one of the most bloodthirsty episodes in Christian history.)

One of the key authors in all this was Elaine Pagels, a professor of Comparative Religion at Princeton. She was an expert on the Nag Hammadi codex (which was a large collection of papyri discovered in the 1970s in Egypt by a peasant family who brought them home and actually started cooking on them before one of their number recognised they might be important and took them into the market.) Amongst these papyri were many gnostic texts and gospels, including the apocryphal Gospel of Thomas, which has become a favourite amongst New Age and dissident Christians, known for its Zen-like aphorisms and oracular pronouncements.

Pagel’s contention, described in some of her books including Beyond Belief and The Gospel of Thomas, was that there was power struggle in the early church between the ‘Johanine’ (followers of the gospel of John) and Thomist factions, with the former representing ‘pistic’ Christianity (where ‘pistic’ means ‘belief’ or ‘faith’ as distinct from the ‘gnosis’ which represents ‘knowledge’ or ‘insight’.) The Johanine faction won out, and as the saying has it, history was then written by the victors. Indeed most of what was known of the Gnostics was due to the polemics of the Pistics, such as Tertullian, until the discovery of the Nag Hammadi texts.

I didn’t pursue it much beyond that point, although I did notice a book by a rather angry Protestant theologian called Against the Modern Gnostics which was protesting that the influx of New Age and Eastern belief systems in Western culture was a return of Gnosticism. Which I think is quite an accurate diagnosis, although I still also think that the victory of the so-called ‘pistic’ elements had some adverse consequences (although my views have changed somewhat in the intervening years.)

There’s a scandalous article that I’ve been aware of for years on some alt Christian website, Christianity has Pagan DNA. I say ‘scandalous’ because it makes a lot of very sweeping claims, and I don’t know how accurate many of them are. But I think it’s worth reading regardless, because it gives some hint at what might have happened if the experiential/gnostic elements of Christianity had had more influence on the way the faith unfolded over centuries.

:up: I do see the distinction.

That book does look a very interesting title indeed. I discovered the fascinating history of the Nestorian Christians and their scriptures called the Issa Sutras (‘Issa’ being the Asianised rendering of Jesus.) They fled religious persecution in Persia and fled 6,000 km along the Silk Road to China where they were given rights to build churches and to teach. The Issa Sutras told the story of Jesus in scroll format with imagery and symbolism similar to Buddhism. They were re-discovered by the intrepid Orientalist and explorer Aurel Stein in the 1920’s.

This sounds like the No True Scottish Terrier fallacy. — T Clark

Never having owned a Scottish Terrier, I wouldn’t claim to know.

I did add that I see all sentient organisms as subjects. Whether they think or have ‘emotional states’ is another matter.

I'll add that whilst I question whether animals think and have emotional states, I don't question that they are subjects of experience. In fact I'm strongly drawn to the idea that the appearance of life just is the appearance of subjective awareness, even if in very rudimentary form.

science is just the process of understanding the first, simple principles in terms of which a complex phenomenon arises and it pretty much characterizes all intellectual endeavors. — Johnnie

So - all intellectual endeavours can be understood in terms of the 'simple principles' from which 'complex phenomena' arise? What about physics? It is concerned with ostensibly 'simple principles' in the form of the so-called fundamental particles and forces, but it is self-contradictory to attempt to explain everything, including abstract reasoning, purely in terms of lower-level physical processes like particles and forces. The act of doing physics itself—engaging in abstract reasoning, mathematical formulation, and conceptual understanding—cannot be fully reduced to or explained in terms of these lower-level physical entities. This kind of reasoning involves higher-level cognitive processes that are on a completely different level to the so-called 'simple first principles', and in fact, we rely on those higher-level abstract skills (which I myself am almost entirely bereft of) in order to populate the now-incredibly-complex 'particle zoo' of the Standard Model of Particle Physics.

Belief is reality. There is no difference. — Noble Dust

The problem with that is that you can obviously have false beliefs. We do it all the time. 'I believed she was faithful to me but now I find she's been cheating the whole time.' 'I believed when I finally cracked that password I'd get access to all those files, now I discover they've been individually encrypted'. 'Europeans believed that India lay on the far side of the Atlantic Ocean, but Columbus discovered otherwise'. Examples could be multiplied indefinitely. So I think it's plainly misleading to say that belief is reality. One's beliefs might be grounded in reality, but they're often not.

As for 'attitude', it's more wide-ranging, isn't it? Someone with a generally sceptical attitude has a certain mindset, we say - not gullible, prone to question, makes careful judgements. Belief may be part of it. Similar to 'disposition'.

Behaviourist after making love: 'That was wonderful for you, dear. How was it for me?'

To the animal mind, the world is subdivided into separate, discrete things. Without a separation into independent parts, nothing would be comprehensible, there could be no understanding, and thought would not be possible. Common sense has us believe that the world really does consist of separate objects exactly as we see it, for we suppose that nature comes to us ready-carved. But in fact, the animal visual system does such a thorough job of partitioning the visual array into familiar objects, that it is impossible for us to look at a scene and not perceive it as composed of separate things.

Every species of living creature has its own mental segmentation of the world, that is, its own way of cutting up the perceived world into varied and separate things. Humans, no less than other animals, carve up the world in a certain way into objects, features, categories, natural forces, all of which constitute their reality*. The way we divide our environment into objects and other things circumscribes and determines our way of life as well as the way we see reality. Such a segmentation of reality is formed gradually over evolutionary time and is part of every species’ genotype.

A scheme of segmentation  is a way that the world is carved up into component parts. However, segmenting reality is more than merely cutting it up into pieces. The most significant part of segmenting the world is picking out those objects that are important and relevant to us**. Such objects are individuated, that is, made to exist in our world model. The same is true in other species: The objects that have been individuated are then recognized by members of the species, who learn how to act appropriately toward them.

To individuate a chunk of the world is to grant it recognition as an existing thing. It is not only material objects that are individuated, but also categories of objects, kinds of events, things people do, and so on. These become parts of our version of reality, and are inserted into our world model. There are countless different ways that reality can be divided up into parts, and the one selected for us is our scheme of individuation, or scheme of segmentation. — Pinter, Charles. Mind and the Cosmic Order: How the Mind Creates the Features & Structure of All Things, and Why this Insight Transforms Physics (pp. 67-68).

*This is what is referred to as the 'umwelt' or 'lebenswelt' of phenomenology and embodied cognition.

**This is what John Vervaeke refers to as 'relevance realisation' and 'the salience landscape'.

The book this is quoted from is considerably clearer than Hoffman, while also grounded in cognitive science. It makes the sense in which the brain constructs the cognitive arena we call 'the world' much clearer.

I detest behaviourism. I know dogs have moods, because I've owned many. But then domestic dogs have existed in a symbiotic relationship with humans for 50,000 years. Cats, it's hard to tell. Animals play - I'm sure fish jump and whales breech for the sheer fun of it. But it's still a leap to say that this reflects an emotional state in the human sense, it could well be anthropomorphic projection. And also that, on this basis 'hedonism' underlies animal, and therefore human behaviour.

This OP contains many sweeping claims.

All thinking animals (such as birds and mammals) appear to be hardwired to try to improve their emotional state — Brendan Golledge

Contentious statement. First, there is no way of knowing, or of testing, whether animals have emotional states. ‘Thinking animals’ is also a contentious claim, as what ‘thinking’ implies, and whether animals are capable of it, is vaguely defined and probably untestable. Then the first paragraph glides directly into ‘animals such as ourselves’, when it is precisely self-consciousness, language and abstract thought that differentiates h.sapiens from other organisms. Ergo the argument is based on questionable foundations.

One point I will call out - there are tons of stories about Republican operatives and politicians ‘pleading with Trump’ to stop campaigning on insults and to try to ‘concentrate on policy’. They say that if Trump campaigns on economic policy, taxation and immigration that he has a strong suit. The problem is, it just ain’t true. First, Trump can only campaign on lies, insults and exaggerations, because they are his only weapons. Second, Biden’s economic record is better than the previous administration. Trump himself tanked the most aggressive border control policy that had ever been agreed to by a Democratic President just to be able to brag about the issue. And his taxation policies favour the rich.

He’s sporadically trying to be ‘teleprompter Trump’ on the podium from time to time, but ‘Truth Social Trump’ will always, well, trump the effort. I expect the more he lags in polls the more desperate, spiteful and vindictive he will become. A truly vicious circle.

Most of these speeches are lame — Mikie

I was referring to Biden's farewell speech in particular. But then, I admit I'm emotionally attached to the outcome of the election in a way that, if it were any other time and any other pair of candidates, I woudn't be.

But the problem is, the 'human dimension' was explicitly eliminated from the scientific image of man in the early modern period.
— Wayfarer

Science does not operate according to unchanging truths and immutable doctrines. — Fooloso4

But it does assume the division between object and subject as a limiting step, which has many consequences beyond it's range of application. And there certainly is such a stance as dogmatic scientism - for physicalism, the laws of physics are both immutable and fundamental. But I'll take that up in some other place.

I don't agree it's boring. I've beeing watching on and off, and some of it has been scintillating. Biden is just wrapping up, and he's given a powerful and poignant speech. It was also a great send-off, not at all mawkish or regretful. More strength to the Democrats.

Recently published:

Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past, Steve Benen.

For as long as historical records have existed, authoritarian regimes have tried to rewrite history to suit their purposes, using their dictatorial powers to create myths, spread propaganda, justify decisions, erase opponents, and even dispose of crimes.

Today, as America’s Republican Party becomes increasingly radicalized, it’s not surprising to see the GOP read from a similarly despotic script. Indeed, the party is taking dangerous, aggressive steps to rewrite history—and not just from generations past. Unable to put a positive spin on Trump-era scandals and fiascos, GOP voices and their allies have grown determined to rewrite the stories of the last few years—from the 2020 election results and the horror of January 6th to their own legislative record—treating the recent past as an enemy to be overpowered, crushed, and conquered. The consequences for our future, in turn, are dramatic.

...Steve Benen’s new book tells the staggering chronicle of the Republican party’s unsettling attempts at historical revisionism. It reveals not only how dependent they have grown on the tactic, but also how dangerous the consequences are if we allow the party to continue. The stakes, Benen argues, couldn’t be higher: the future of democracy hinges on both our accurate understanding of events and the end of alternative narratives that challenge reality.

I don't think you've seen the point of the objection. The word 'information' is often used in this context, but 'order' and 'meaning' are both much broader in meaning that 'information'. The reason that measures of entropification can be applied to information, is just because information represents a form of order, and entropy naturally applies to order. No wonder that Von Neumann spotted an isomorphism between Shannon's methods and entropy.

Besides, I have a suspicion that the designation of 'information' as being foundational to existence, goes back to Norbert Wiener saying 'Information is information, not matter or energy. No materialism which does not admit this can survive at the present day.' I'm sure this is what leads to the prevalence of information-as-foundation in contemporary discourse.

information and entropy become two ways of talking about the same fact. — apokrisis

I see the connection you're drawing between entropy and information at the physical level, where both are linked by thermodynamic principles through the Boltzmann constant (after a bit of reading!) However, I wonder if equating the two risks losing sight of the fact that information derives its significance from its order. For instance, a random string of letters might technically have entropy, but it lacks the kind of structured information we get from an ordered string of words. Even so, you could transmit random strings of characters and measure the degree of variance (or entropy) at the receiving end, but regardless no information would have been either transmitted or lost. It's this order that makes information meaningful and, importantly, it’s the order that gets degraded in transmission. So I question that equivalence - might it not be a fallacy of equivocation?

If I remember correctly, I agree with the idea that we should not lose sight of the human dimension of scientific inquiry. The question of the meaning of life need not and should not be forbidden from scientific inquiry, but, in my opinion, this does not mean that the supernatural has thereby earned a place at the table of what is fundamentally an investigation of nature. — Fooloso4

But the problem is, the 'human dimension' was explicitly eliminated from the scientific image of man in the early modern period. The division between natural and supernatural, in that context, amounts to the division between what can be explained and understood through physical causes and mechanistic analogies, and revealed religion (which, remember, had also absorbed and was the vehicle for much of classical metaphysics and philosophy. The division between the sciences and the humanities is being discussed in another thread.)

Hans Jonas anticipates many of the ideas of autopoesis and systems science that were to develop in the decades after him. 'Jonas sees metabolism as the building and perpetuation of a self-distinct unity. Organisms never fully coincide with their material constitution. In constant flux, they maintain an organization which assures durability in the face of randomizing events and gives them an identity where form prevails over matter.' ¹ He argues that there is an an ontological distinction between the organic and inorganic domains. That is what is denied by materialism, as it developed in an intellectual culture which had divided mind from matter and then attempts to explain the former as dependent on, or derived from, the latter.

There is what amounts to a phobia ( ) around admitting anything which suggests the supernatural, it's an implicit prohibition, mainly drawn on cultural and historical grounds, on what can and can't be considered scientific. But as to what is supernatural, the boundaries are always shifting. There are emerging perspectives in evolutionary biology which, while not appealing to the supernatural, nevertheless challenge neo-darwinian materialism (such as the Third Way).

I don't accept that there can be an empirical argument for a higher intelligence as a matter of principle, but that there are reasonable philosophical arguments against reductionism, for instance the design argument from biological information. Again I see it in terms of adopting a philosophical framework which sees life, and human life in particular, as something other than 'the accidental collocation of atoms' (Russell.)

Are subjects of experience observable and identifiable or not? — sime

I would put it this way: the nature of being can only be realised in the first person. There can't be a complete 'third person' or objective description of it (per 'the hard problem'). We ourselves understand being at least in some degree because we are beings. But we know it insofar as it comprises the ground of our own existence, not as an object of experience. What can be known to exist objectively is only a sub-section of the sum total of our knowing.

(if) one considers persons to be semantically reducible to impersonal forces of nature — sime

The no-self principle in Buddhism makes no such claims, although it is often interpreted that way. But that description would be designated nihilistic in Buddhist philosophy. It's a fact that belief in, or rejection of, the reality of rebirth is a major divide between secular Buddhism as it has been adopted in Western culture and Buddhism as it is practiced in traditional cultures, but in the context of the OP, Buddhist principles at least provide an interpretive framework for a view of consciousness (or being) which is not defined in purely physicalist terms (again see Bhikkhu Analayo Rebirth in Early Buddhism and Current Rebirth.)

Does the color “red” exist outside of the subjective mind that conceptually designates the concept of “red?” — Mp202020

This is the question that the OP poses in the first sentence. But the question is actually not about 'perception'. The study of perception is (as many on this thread have pointed out) a matter for cognitive science. But whether the color red exists apart from experience is not about perception as such. It's a philosophical question related to 'the hard problem of consciousness' and the relationship between perception and experience.

I've tried to explain recently why I think it's fallacious to say that Platonism in mathematics is a reification, meaning literally 'making into a thing'. Numbers and 'forms' in the Platonist sense can be thought of as being real insofar as they can be grasped by reason, but it's not because they exist in the sense that objects exist.

Forms are ideas, not in the sense of concepts or abstractions, but in that they are realities apprehended by thought rather than by sense. They are thus ‘separate’ in that they are not additional members of the world of sensible things, but are known by a different mode of awareness. — Perl, Thinking Being

that different mode being rational insight rather than sensory perception.

Yet the holographic principle in fundamental physics says it means something that the same formalism works for information and entropy — apokrisis

Wasn't that because Von Neumann, who was an associate of Claude Shannon, suggested to him that he adopt the term 'entropy', noticing that it was isometric with Bolzmann's statistical mechanics interpretation of entropy? He also said that 'as nobody really knows what it means then you will always have an advantage in debates'. (Ain't that the truth ;-) )

then back to sound waves as you finally hear it, led me to start conceiving of information and matter as being independent, and both as fundamental elements of the universe (maybe not unlike Aristotle's hylomorphism). — hypericin

That, I agree with :100: and have often argued along these lines (see this thread).

Throughout history, time after time, claims of the supernatural as the only viable "explanation" for a wide variety of phenomena have given way to natural, rational, demonstrable, transmissible scientific knowledge. — Fooloso4

That is obviously true to some extent, but the nature of the questions change as culture develops and new discoveries are made. The argument that religion is bronze-age superstition replaced by scientific knowledge is rather too near the kind of thing that Richard Dawkins is fond of saying for my liking.

I'm not all in on intelligent design-style arguments but I will say this: that the assumption of naturalism, that life arises from the self-assembly of chemical constituents, is deficient in my view, along many different lines. First because of the inherent unlikelihood of anything of the kind happening, and secondly because of the role assigned to chance. In that sense it's 'irrational' from the outset, as it is conceived of happening without cause, so to speak. It is true, of course, that natural selection doesn't appeal to 'pure chance' as the entire processes is embedded in a deep series of constraints regarding possibilities, but there is a sense in which the whole phenomenon is still understood as being a result of chance as distinct from purpose.

Secondly, that naturalism doesn't explain natural principles. We observe natural principles and extrapolate what will occur by the application of mathematical hypotheses. All well and good, but the fact why there are natural regularities and laws is not itself a scientific hypothesis, but a philosophical one. Scientists may venture hypotheses about it but they are by nature metaphysical speculation at that point (and usually underwritten by the very naturalist assumptions that they are seeking to establish.)

I've been reading from a mid-last-century book of phenomenological philosophy, The Phenomenon of Life, Hans Jonas. He points out that at the time of the Greek philosophers, it was simply believed that the Universe was alive - a form of simple animism and panpsychism. Precisely the kind of consciousness that was to be shed in the so-called 'great disenchantment' of modernity. At that early stage, life was assumed to be omnipresent, and death an anomaly. Hence the mythology of overcoming death in the cosmic religions. Whereas since the Renaissance and the advent of materialism, the whole picture has been inverted, as inanimate matter is presumed to be real, and living organisms the anomaly:

The tremendously enlarged universe of modern cosmology is conceived as a field of inanimate masses and forces which operate according to the laws of inertia and of quantitative distribution in space. This denuded substratum of all reality could only be arrived at through a progressive expurgation of vital features from the physical record and through strict abstention from projecting into its image our own felt aliveness. In the process the ban on anthropomorphism was extended to zoomorphism in general. What remained is the residue of the reduction toward the properties of mere extension which submit to measurement and hence to mathematics. These properties alone satisfy the requirements of what is now called exact knowledge: and representing the only knowable aspect of nature they, by a tempting substitution, came to be regarded as its essential aspect too: and if this, then as the only real in reality.

This means that the lifeless has become the knowable par excellence and is for that reason also considered the true and only foundation of reality. It is the "natural" as well as the original state of things. Not only in terms of relative quantity but also in terms of ontological genuineness, non-life is the rule, life the puzzling exception in physical existence.

Accordingly, it is the existence of life within a mechanical universe which now calls for an explanation, and explanation has to be in terms of the lifeless. Left over as a borderline case in the homogeneous physical world-view, life has to be accounted for by the terms of that view. — Hans Jonas, The Phenomenon of Life: Towards a Philosophical Biology

This is the source, I think , of the deep animus towards any idea of the sacred, the supernatural, the life beyond, etc, which lies behind these debates. I think it's because for the "non-believer", the case is closed, God is dead, and to admit otherwise is to re-open many large questions we'd rather not have to contemplate.

Of course, they are measurable, but how it appears to the subject is dependent on her faculties. She might, for example, be red-green colorblind. Besides, making the distinction between primary and secondary qualities was in the context of explaining the origin of those distinction in early modern science and their consequences in philosophy.

:up: :pray:

Objects in space are there to communicate information about your fitness. They are not apart from you - Yourself and the environment are co-dependent and co-arising. You're entangled. A system dividing itself into two -- but not separate things-- to communicate information to itself about how to perpetuate its own existence. If you don't interpret the icons properly, the Conscious Agent-Decision-Action loop breaks and both you and the environment "die". — Bodhy

that's one for the scrapbook!

Both piggyback on the logic of counterfactuality. — apokrisis

Can you unpack that a bit? The meaning doesn't spring from the page, so to speak.

There is more to say, and I think there are problems with this idea, but what do you guys think? — hypericin

A question that has long interested me, and one of the motivators for joining forums. I once had an epiphany along the lines that while phenomena are (1) composed of parts and (2) begin and end in time, that these attributes don't obtain to numbers, which are neither composed of parts nor begin or end in time (although I later realised that (1) only properly applies to prime numbers, but the point remains.) At the time I had this epiphany, the insight arose, 'so this is why ancient philosophy held arithmetic in high esteem. It was certain, immutable and apodictic.' These are attributes of a higher cognitive functionality, namely rational insight. Of course, I was to discover that this is Platonism 101, and I'm still drawn to the Platonist view of the matter. The philosophical point about it is that through rational thought we have insight into a kind of transcendental realm. As an SEP article puts it:

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

See also What is Math? Smithsonian Institute.

As for Shannon's information theory, I think it tends to be somewhat over-interpreted. Shannon was an electronic engineer trying to solve a particular problem of reliable transmission of information. Of course one of the fundamental discoveries of cybernetics, we all rely on Shannon's work for data compression and tranmission every time we use these devices. But there's a lot of hype around information as a kind of fundamental ontological ground, kind of like the digital geist of the computer age.

So there is nothing "behind" or "underneath" appearances. Without observation, there is just superposition of quantum possibilities, but no "unknowable" world out there. I do believe, though, that there are many observers and many concomitant worlds, but these are their worlds, so this might actually be a kind of ontological pluralism. — Bodhy

It’s also perfectly compatible with the Buddhist philosophy of śūnyatā, the absence of own-being of particulars, and the doctrine of dependent origination. (I thought perhaps with your forum name, this might ring a bell.)

I downloaded and tried to read that article, but I am not the audience for it. The audience is other academics, cognitive scientists, and cognitive realists who need to be persuaded in their own terminology and using their own methods. It’s above my pay-grade.

This brings out part of what appears so circular in Hoffman - he uses the physics of the world to show that there is no world. This leads me to supose he has missed something important. — Banno

But he doesn’t say that. What he’s disputing is the mind-independent nature of the objects of physics. Whereas for you, what is real is by definition what is mind-independent. As I said earlier in this thread the thread about Hoffman, his book could be called ‘the case against cognitive realism’. He doesn’t say ‘nothing is real’. He has a lot to say about science, and bases his arguments on science, so he’s not calling the efficacy of science into question, which would indeed be self-contradictory. He’s pointing to physics itself as undermining the claim that objects of cognition are mind-independent. That’s one crux of the argument.

What needs to be examined is a) the assumption that there must be an agent, whether personal or impersonal, and b) the illusion that having posited an agent that we have done more than simply assert this assumption as if it were an explanation. Rather than provide an explanation it forecloses the search for explanations, as if a mystery behind the mystery does more than multiply mysteries. — Fooloso4

It still leaves open the question of where does any agency whatever arise, or whether all agency, and by implication, all subjectivity, can be seen as anything other than a consequence (epiphenomenon) of the interplay of meaningless physical forces. For argument’s sake, that is very much the view of Daniel Dennett, who straightforwardly claims that organic life is analogous to a form of spontaneous chemical reaction, which becomes self-organising and then continues to survive, mutate and evolve through what he describes as the ‘algorithm’ of natural selection. Dennett as is well known goes on to argue that this means that any sense of agency is ultimately illusory, but that we are compelled to behave as if we are agents who make free choices. Of course it is true that Daniel Dennett’s is not a majority view, but it could be said that he courageously gives voice to the logical implications of the kind of materialism that underlies the so-called ‘neo-Darwinian synthesis’.

For materialists, mysteries are simply annoying, unsolved problems that will one day be cleared up by the inexorable progress of Science. :naughty:

In the case of the no-soul rebirth paradox, if concepts related to personhood aren't part of one's fundamental ontology, for example because one considers concepts of personhood to be unreal because one considers persons to be semantically reducible to impersonal forces of nature, then rebirth follows as a tautological conclusions, since the personhood concepts of life and death are both eliminated in the final analysis of of reality. In which case empirical evidence for rebirth is meaningless. — sime

Buddhism also rejects as nihilistic the view that actions do not have consequences in future forms of existence. In that sense, the death of the subject does not bring to an end the process which results in future re-birth. The principle of no-self (anatta) does not amount to an assertion that there is no self tout courte as this verse illustrates The Self-Doer.

So the idea of persons as real and local spatial-temporal objects with objective physical boundaries is fundamentally incompatible with the idea that persons can be reincarnated. — sime

Beings are not only objects, they are also subjects of experience, and the nature of subjective experience is not necessarily describable in those terms. Also consider the discovery of tulkus in Tibetan Buddhism. They are sought out by various means and subjected to examination and are said to be clearly discerned as incarnations of previously-existing figures. As already mentioned, Buddhist culture assumes the reality of rebirth as a matter of course, even despite the tension with the no-self principle. (And even that is an open question, there was an influential ancient school called the Pudgalavada, a personalist school of Buddhism, EIP entry here. In my view the philosophical conundrum that underlies much of this confusion about the real nature of self, subject or being is the reflexive and deeply-rooted tendency towards ‘objectification’. This manifests as trying to answer the question ‘what is self?’ or ‘what is the subject?’ in objective terms, as being ‘this kind of being’ or ‘this combination of elements’ and so on. In the early Buddhist texts, there are discussions of the futility of attempting to ‘objectify’ the ‘non-objectification’ which characterises meditative awareness.)

Never read Kafka, although of course I do know something about him as he's a cultural icon.

Incidentally - a Medium essay on the origin of 'transjective'.

We must each build hue discrimination for ourselves as bodies that develop neural pathways via processes of growth and pruning. We must get wired for colour as a pragmatic interaction we form with the world as we find it. — apokrisis

Of course. I read somewhere - can't recall where - that ancient Greek has a very limited range of words for colours, and that the 'wine-dark sea' of the Homeric epics might have really reflected that they couldn't differentiate the colours of wine and the ocean as we do now. And there's the old trope, I think now debunked, about the Eskimos having 37 terms for snow, allowing them to make all kinds of differentiations in snow colour and conditions which we ourselves wouldn't see.

Anyway I think you would concur that color perceptions are instances of the co-arising of sensation, apperception and judgement - neither objective nor subjective but transjective - 'referring to a property not of the subject or of the environment but a relation co-created between them'.

The perfect sphere of a ball set against the messy fractal scene of a typical natural landscape just kind of pops out as being "that kind of Platonically perfect object that we form as an ideal object". — apokrisis

Everything you see, hear and think comes to you in structured wholes: When you read, you’re seeing a whole page even when you focus on one word or sentence. When someone speaks, you hear whole words and phrases, not individual bursts of sound. When you listen to music, you hear an ongoing melody, not just the note that is currently being played. Ongoing events enter your awareness as Gestalts, for the Gestalt is the natural unit of mental life. If you try to concentrate on a dot on this page, you will notice that you cannot help but see the context at the same time. Vision would be meaningless, and have no biological function, if people and animals saw anything less than integral scenes.

The obvious reason for this is that life plays out in whole events, and the objects with which every animal interacts are complete things. A deer must instantly recognize the form of a cougar (and vice-versa), a squirrel must see the separate branches on a tree, a honeybee must know different kinds of flowers each having a distinctive design. Birds must tell the difference between nourishing and poisonous butterflies by subtle differences in wing design and markings. The habitat of every living thing is multiple and complex, and survival depends on the power to learn and recognize its intricacies. Even single-celled animals respond differentially to complex configurations. The more we learn about animal life, the more clearly we see that all perception and all action are designed for survival in a multiform and dynamic world of whole objects and complete events. In such a world, living organisms must be able to perceive undivided patterns and whole configurations. — Pinter, Charles. Mind and the Cosmic Order (p. 29). Springer International Publishing. Kindle Edition.

Appearance of anything requires a viewer. So where is the distinction? — Janus

The whole thread is about it, it shouldn't have to spelled out. The physical attributes of a wavelength of light vs how it appears in the eyes of a subject. The former is exactly specificiable in objective terms, the latter is prone to subjective particularities. This is what the OP was getting at and what has been debated since.

It just seems to me that if one sets out to measure the height of a mountain, one already presumes it has a height to be measured. — Banno

I don't dispute the reality of objective facts. Where I differ with cognitive realism is that I claim that objective facts are still in some fundamental sense dependent on cognition. Speaking of Mount Everest, for instance: if Mount Everest were to be sentient, then it would probably not comprehend humans, as humans are so small, and their life-spans so perishing, that they would be incomprehensible to a mountain, their movements imperceptibily brief and small. But Mt Everest would recognise glacial flows, as they stick around to tens of thousands of years, and have the mass to alter the topography of the mountain itself. At the other end of the scale, were microbes to be sentient, they would perceive human bodies as the limit of their Universe, and thousands of generations of them would live and die within a single body.

None of that is to deny that Mt Everest is - let's see - 8,849m (although source notes there are still disputes due to topography, ice mass, and other factors. That is the 'agreed definition' although whether it is objectively true is still, ahem, up in the air :-) )

Long ago, someone who has posted on this thread insisted that Mount Everest did not have a height until it was measured. — Banno

You might be interested to note that measurements of its height have varied considerably since it was first observed, and that furthermore its height is also changing due to movements in the underlying tectonic plates.

You can make exact predictions of how a colour should appear to a viewer, but appearance still requires a viewer. Obviously there are the color-blind who can't differentiate red and green. There are many other anomalies governing colour perception i.e. different types of organisms see by different bands in the electromagnetic spectrum. In that sense, perception of colour always entails a subjective aspect, as a phenomenon, because 'phenomenon' means 'what appears', and that isn't included the spectrographic analysis of a colour. (c.f. Mary's Room).

I don't think you're familiar with the concept. — frank

+1. Seems not.

I mentioned Whitehead's 'bifurcation of nature' previously:

Whitehead describes modern thought as plagued by a “radical inconsistency” which he calls “the bifurcation of nature”. According to Whitehead, this fundamental “incoherence” at the foundation of modern thought is reflected not only in the concept of nature itself, but in every field of experience—in modern theories of experience and subjectivity, of ethics and aesthetics, as well as many others. In “The Concept of Nature” Whitehead states that nature splits into two seemingly incompatible spheres of reality at the beginning of modern European thought in the 17th century: ‘Nature’ on the one hand refers to the (so-called) objective nature accessible to the natural sciences only, i.e., the materialistically conceptualized nature of atoms, molecules, cells, and so on; at the same time, however, ‘nature’ also refers to the (subjectively) perceptible and experienced, i.e., the appearing nature with its qualities, valuations, and sensations. Whitehead considers this modernist division of nature in thought—the differentiation of primary and secondary qualities, of ‘first’ and ‘second’ nature, of a material and mental sphere—a fundamental, serious, and illicit incoherence. His term for this incoherence is ‘bifurcation of nature’, for the question of how these two concepts of nature—‘objective’ and ‘subjective’—relate to each other remains largely unresolved for Whitehead within the philosophical tradition of modernity. — Nature and Subjectivity in Alfred North Whitehead

Similar analysis expressed by Hans Jonas:

The tremendously enlarged universe of modern cosmology is conceived as a field of inanimate masses and forces which operate according to the laws of inertia and of quantitative distribution in space. This denuded substratum of all reality could only be arrived at through a progressive expurgation of vital features from the physical record and through strict abstention from projecting into its image our own felt aliveness. In the process the ban on anthropomorphism was extended to zoomorphism in general. What remained is the residue of the reduction toward the properties of mere extension which submit to measurement and hence to mathematics. These properties alone satisfy the requirements of what is now called exact knowledge: and representing the only knowable aspect of nature they, by a tempting substitution, came to be regarded as its essential aspect too: and if this, then as the only real in reality.

This means that the lifeless has become the knowable par excellence and is for that reason also considered the true and only foundation of reality. It is the "natural" as well as the original state of things. Not only in terms of relative quantity but also in terms of ontological genuineness, non-life is the rule, life the puzzling exception in physical existence.

Accordingly, it is the existence of life within a mechanical universe which now calls for an explanation, and explanation has to be in terms of the lifeless. Left over as a borderline case in the homogeneous physical world-view, life has to be accounted for by the terms of that view. — Hans Jonas, The Phenomenon of Life: Towards a Philosophical Biology

:up: