If brain capacities are not the result of our evolution, what is your alternative explanation? — Questioner

The question is improperly framed as it presumes that morality can be explained by neurology.

WE learn more about the development of moral codes by studying the development of moral codes than by studying the human brain. . — Ecurb

:ok:

The Immanuel Kant Song

If brain capacities are not the result of our evolution, what is your alternative explanation? — Questioner

The evolution of the h.sapiens brain, along with the the upright gait, opposable thumb, and much else, is one of the most, if not the most, spectacular examples of evolutionary development in the annals of evolution. But whether all of the capabilities that arrive as a consequence can be understood or explained in terms of evolutionary biology is another matter. It's subtly reductionist - it equates human ethical and intellectual abilities with the kinds of adaptive advantages that are provided by claws and teeth. If, as someone asked, reason is a product of natural selection, then how much confidence can we have in a rational argument for natural selection? The power of reason is owed to the independence of reason, and to nothing else. (This observation is the source of a vast amount of literature, by the way.)

So your concern is not that the science may be "right" but that it displaces religion? — Questioner

No, that was not the point. The point was, that it is often treated as a substitute for religion, when it is held up as an explanation for morality or ethics or other distinctively human abilities. I suggest that the appeal to 'evolution as the source of morality' arises from that. But it fails to recognise the differences which arise due to the human capacity for self-reflection, reason, story-telling, invention, science and such capacities. Yes, we evolved to the point where such capacities become available, but whether they can be understood as a result of evolution is another matter.

No, the theory of evolution, which works by natural selection, does what scientific theories do - they provide explanations based on the best available evidence. — Questioner

They certainly do, for the evolution of species.

//see also Michael Ruse, Darwinism as Religion//

the capacities for love, hate, empathy, a sense of fairness, a sense of right and wrong - and the cognition to make decisions - are the drivers of morality - and these capacities evolved through brain evolution — Questioner

Thanks for the elaboration. You acknowledge the importance of factors such as upbringing and culture, which I agree are of fundamental importance. But that is a far cry from acknowleding that evolutionary biology provides the 'building blocks of morality'. And I question whether the biological theory of evolution really does account for those capacities. It is a theory about the origin and evolution of species, and of the traits of species, seen through the perspective of adaptive fitness.

I'm sceptical about the way that evolution is invoked as a kind of catch-all theory of eveything about human nature. But then, the historical circumstances of its discovery were such that it came to fill the cultural vacuum, left by the abandonment of the religious traditions. For some, then, it inherited the mantle as the source or arbiter of values, as it seemed a natural fit. But the theory was never intended as the basis for ethics (or epistemology for that matter.)

Eh. don't see it like that. Did you choose to be born? Do you choose to die? Not everything is of your own choosing.

The religious only follow their god because they so choose. — Banno

My conscience is captive to the word of God. Here I stand. I can do no other. God help me. Amen. — Martin Luther

if we read it as suggesting that the origins of moral behavior may be found in our evolving together as a social species: strength through cooperation, empathy and love. — Tom Storm

Sure, there are those that write on those themes. Ever encountered the 'Third Way' evolutionary theorists? Dennis Noble is a prominent advocate, often debates Dawkins.

in the previous post, I referred to 'relevance realisation' which is some terminology John Vervaeke has introduced into the discussions of cognitive science and ethical orientation. The definition 'is the cognitive capacity of an agent to flexibly generate and adjust representations of its environment to highlight what matters and ignore what does not. It is the core process of identifying, in real-time, which aspects of experience are significant for achieving a specific goal, thus filtering an overwhelming amount of information into a manageable, meaningful world.' I think it goes some way to bridging the is-ought gap. But not all the way.

I will add that people (as distinct from other animals) orient themselves toward truth, meaning, beauty, justice, and integrity even when these conflict with comfort or survival. So whatever 'relevance realisation' ultimately is, it can’t be reduced to biological optimisation alone. There’s a higher-order normative dimension at work in human cognition, due to the very nature of the human condition, as humans alone are able to discern meaning, assign value, and so on.

Which is exactly where philosophy and religion historically enter the frame: they address ultimate questions of meaning, value, life and death — not merely optimisation problems. I agree there’s some truth in the OP's claim that secular culture often provides an insufficient basis for moral deliberation, especially given how much modern philosophy has defined itself in opposition to religious or spiritual traditions, rather than engaging their deeper concerns. (And also that scientific rationalism, alone, is not equipped for this task.)

But that diagnosis easily turns into an evangelical dog-whistle, as we’ve already seen in this thread, and that’s no solution either. The failure of reductive secularism doesn’t license a slide into Christian apologetics or doctrinal authority. The real task is to recover depth without that kind of regression to an imagined superior past.

Yes, I suppose you're right. I did cherry-pick that passage, which was then subjected to the same kind of criticism that I would make of it. Still, worth emphasising in respect of @Questioners claim that

all morality comes from our evolution — Questioner

which passes for popular wisdom in today's culture.

Pure science does not enter the realm of ethics. That is not part of its mandate. — Questioner

So how can it be, then, that

all morality comes from our evolution. — Questioner

?

But that things are indeed arranged in a certain way says nothing about how they ought be arranged. That there are purses tells us nothing about how those purses ought be distributed. That there are puppies tells us nothing about how we ought treat them. — Banno

Isn't this just Hume's is/ought in a nutshell? Descriptive facts about what exists or how things are arranged don’t, by themselves, entail any normative claims about how things ought to be treated or distributed. If you accept that picture of cognition — a value-neutral world first described, and values added later by way of judgement — the gap follows pretty much automatically. Indeed that was a major animating factor of Enlightenment philosophy.

But that framing has been challenged in cognitive science. John Vervaeke, for example, argues that cognition is fundamentally a process of relevance realisation: creatures don’t encounter a neutral inventory of facts and then evaluate them afterwards; the world shows up already structured in terms of salience, affordances, risk, care, and action. Even a germ knows what's bad for it. What counts as “real” for an agent is inseparable from what matters for coping and flourishing.

On that view, there isn’t a clean separation between an “is” that is purely descriptive and an “ought” that is added later. Normativity is already built into how the world is disclosed to living agents. A puppy is not first encountered as a value-free object and only later assigned significance — its vulnerability, responsiveness, and social meaning are part of how it is perceived in the first place. We're hard wired to think baby animals are cute and warrant protection, never mind that there will always be those whose empathy has been short-circuited.

That doesn’t magically solve every ethical question, but it does undermine the idea that the is/ought gap is a deep or inevitable feature of cognition. I think it's very much the product of the emerging Enlightenment mindset.

The "predicament of modernity", the "modern crisis of meaning" is, in my view, the consequence of too many people too readily embracing socialist, liberal, humanist, democratic views, and then realizing the hard way that they can't live holding those views without also becoming miserable, and, more importabntly, without failing in life. — baker

As compared to - what? Traditionalist, conservative, undemocratic, illiberal? I would rather hope that authentic values can be realised without that.

The point of the argument in the original post is an analysis of how philosophical and scientific materialism came to be such a dominant force in globalised Western culture, and it's consequences for the 'meaning crisis'. I'm trying to articulate a very specific process initiated by Descartes' dualism of 'mind and body' and Galileo's separation of 'primary and secondary' qualities. This leads to the self-contradictory conception of the mind as a 'thinking substance', which, when rejected, leaves only the 'extended substance' of matter/energy as the causal basis of manifest reality.

You're correct in saying that all of this is intrinsically bound up with the emergence of liberalism in politics and economics. But this whole complex of views is also now being called into question by many currents and movements within Western liberal democracies themselves. Accordingly the dominance of materialism can no longer be assumed. People are exploring or re-exploring all manner of philosophical ideas and value systems outside the bounds of Western liberal democracy without however having to literally overthrow it.

I happened upon a sceptical analysis of Michael Levin on Medium - i think you can access it, it opens OK for me in a clean browser. The author says he is PhD, complex systems, physics, CS, maths and philosophy. Interestingly, the critique was developed as a dialogue with Google Gemini. Where I think it's relevant, is in identifying the kind of push back Levin's Platonist ideas will get from other philosophers of biology.

https://medium.com/@AIchats/michael-levins-platonic-biology-fcadcb67c3bf

Another passage from the Transcendental Aesthetic:

We have therefore wanted to say that all our intuition is nothing but the representation of appearance; that the things that we intuit are not in themselves what we intuit them to be, nor are their relations so constituted in themselves as they appear to us; and that if we remove our own subject or even only the subjective constitution of the senses in general, then all constitution, all relations of objects in space and time, indeed space and time themselves, would disappear, and as appearances they cannot exist in themselves, but only in us. What may be the case with objects in themselves and abstracted from all this receptivity of our sensibility remains entirely unknown to us. We are acquainted with nothing except our way of perceiving them, which is peculiar to us and does not necessarily pertain to every being, though to be sure it pertains to every human being. — General Remarks on the Transcendental Aesthetic

Notes:

•“Aesthetic” in contemporary usage usually refers to beauty or artistic appreciation. In Kant, it simply means what pertains to sensibility or sense-perception (from aisthēsis), as distinct from logic. Aesthetic concerns how things are given to us in experience; logic concerns how we think about what is given.

• Note here the centrality of the subject (nowadays often referred to as “the observer”). This passage makes very explicit the constitutive role of the subject in the form of experience — arguably one of the most radical passages in the Critique.

• “Objects in themselves” are said to be entirely unknown to us. This is not to say that they cease to exist, but that whatever kind of existence they may have independently of our mode of cognition is inaccessible to us.

• Finally, note the qualification “every human being.” Kant allows for the possibility that other kinds of beings might have different forms of cognition, and elsewhere he speculates about what a divine intellect might be like. It does give a hint of the breadth of his considerations (elaborated at greater length in some of his other works).

When are the US media going to start talking about a ‘rogue President’? Because that’s what they have. This latest social media barrage - announcing huge public policy changes through his own social media platform for heaven’s sake - about putting punitive tariffs on Europe to force their hand on Greenland. It’s a total outrage. Again, where is Congress? Trump is plainly a narcissistic megalomaniac who has no sense of convention, propriety, or ethics, beyond his own massive ego. It’s often been said that he’s put a ‘wrecking ball’ through all kinds of things - higher education, public science, American diplomacy, responsible economics. You wonder what will be left if the demolition crew is ever stopped.

Although it should be noted at least some Republicans in Congress are speaking out against this lunatic scheme.

Representative Don Bacon, Republican of Nebraska, said in a social media post that the move was “foolish policy” and he likened it to something President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia would do. He added in an interview with CNN, “I feel like it’s incumbent on folks like me to speak up and say these threats and bullying of an ally are wrong.”

He also predicted that if Mr. Trump used military force to seize Greenland, the president would lose significant support from his own base. “Just on the weird chance that he’s serious about invading Greenland, I want to let him know it’ll probably be the end of his presidency,” he said. “Most Republicans know this is immoral and wrong and we’re going to stand up against it.”

….Senator Thom Tillis, Republican of North Carolina, wrote on social media on Saturday that the new tariffs were “bad for America, bad for American businesses, and bad for America’s allies. It’s great for Putin, Xi and other adversaries who want to see NATO divided.”

He added that the continued coercion “to seize territory of an ally is beyond stupid” and that it “hurts the legacy of President Trump and undercuts all the work he has done to strengthen the NATO alliance over the years.”

Senator Lisa Murkowski, Republican of Alaska, called the new tariffs in a social media post “unnecessary, punitive, and a profound mistake” that would only “push our core European allies further away while doing nothing to advance U.S. national security.” — NY Times

Perhaps next time he’s impeached, Republicans will actually finish the process.

Wrong. It's absolutely central. Buddhism stands and falls with kamma and rebirth. — baker

I understand that perfectly well. It’s more like, ‘don’t let ideas about reincarnation stop you from understanding Buddhism better’. As regards ‘supernatural’, I often point out that one of the traditional epithets of the Buddha is ‘lokuttara’ meaning ‘above the world’. The core of Buddhism is world-transcending, although again it means something different in Buddhist cultures, because the battle lines between ‘natural’ and ‘supernatural’ aren’t drawn in the same way (or never were drawn.)

Within the Indian traditions the self can be known. — Punshhh

Capital ‘S’ Self. Which is the entire aim of the path. There’s nothing really corresponding with that in Western culture save as a kind of import from Indian sources. Which is not to imply disrespect but mindfulness of context.

*

The point is that all morality comes from our evolution. — Questioner

I very much hope that we don’t revert to the idea of survival of the fittest in planning our politics and our values and our way of life. I have often said that I am a passionate Darwinian when it comes to explaining why we exist. It’s undoubtedly the reason why we’re here and why all living things are here. But to live our lives in a Darwinian way, to make a society a Darwinian society, that would be a very unpleasant sort of society in which to live. It would be a sort of Thatcherite society and we want to – I mean, in a way, I feel that one of the reasons for learning about Darwinian evolution is as an object lesson in how not to set up our values and social lives. — Richard Dawkins, in response to a question about whether survival of the fittest might serve as a basis for values

Dawkins often expresses this sentiment. It is one of the things I find agreeable in his public utterances.

Also, from Richard Polt, a Heidegger scholar:

I have no beef with entomology or evolution, but I refuse to admit that they teach me much about ethics. Consider the fact that human action ranges to the extremes. People can perform extraordinary acts of altruism, including kindness toward other species — or they can utterly fail to be altruistic, even toward their own children. So whatever tendencies we may have inherited leave ample room for variation; our choices will determine which end of the spectrum we approach. This is where ethical discourse comes in — not in explaining how we’re “built,” but in deliberating on our own future acts. Should I cheat on this test? Should I give this stranger a ride? Knowing how my selfish and altruistic feelings evolved doesn’t help me decide at all. Most, though not all, moral codes advise me to cultivate altruism. But since the human race has evolved to be capable of a wide range of both selfish and altruistic behavior, there is no reason to say that altruism is superior to selfishness in any biological sense.

In fact, the very idea of an “ought” is foreign to evolutionary theory. It makes no sense for a biologist to say that some particular animal should be more cooperative, much less to claim that an entire species ought to aim for some degree of altruism. If we decide that we should neither “dissolve society” through extreme selfishness....nor become “angelic robots” like ants, we are making an ethical judgment, not a biological one. Likewise, from a biological perspective it has no significance to claim that Ishould be more generous than I usually am, or that a tyrant ought to be deposed and tried. In short, a purely evolutionary ethics makes ethical discourse meaningless. — Anything but Human

The passage from Eric Reitan that I had in mind was this:

(Hegel) thought that Kant had missed something important—namely, that the self which experiences the world is also a part of the world it is experiencing. Rather than there being this sharp divide between the experiencing subject and things-in-themselves, with phenomena emerging at the point of interface, the experiencing subject is a thing-in-itself. It is one of the noumena—or, put another way, the self that experiences the world is part of the ultimate reality that lies behind experience.

So: the self that has experiences is a noumenal reality. ...Hegel believed that this fact could be made use of, so that somehow the self could serve as a wedge to pry open a doorway through the wall of mystery, into an understanding of reality as it is in itself.

But this understanding couldn’t be achieved by simply turning our attention on ourselves. As soon as we do that we’ve made ourselves into an object of experience, and this object is just as likely to be the product of our own cognitive reconstructions as any other object. In other words, what we are presented with when we investigate ourselves introspectively is the phenomenal self, not the noumenal self. The self as it appears to itself may be radically unlike the self as it is in itself. ... — Eric Reitan

The point I'm trying to bring out, is the elusive nature of the self (or subject). I often return to the idea found in Indian philosophy (and hardly elsewhere) that 'the eye can see another, but not itself'. This conveys the idea that the knower or subject cannot know itself, paradoxical though that might seem. Kant's insistence on the 'mere' acts of cognition makes a similar point, although expressed differently. But he is arguing that we can't make out the knower or subject as any kind of knowable entity or object, even though it invariably accompanies every act of thought.

The point which Reitan goes on to make is that both Hegel and Schleirmacher say that though we can't know the self as such, because we are the self, so this fact of our identity as the self could 'serve as a wedge to pry open a doorway'. But then, considering the great complexity (not to say prolixity) of Hegel's philosophy, this is not simple or straightforward.

But if nothing changed at all in the world, would anyone perceive time? The fact of the matter is, things change (e.g. Sun rises every morning), hence people notice time passing. — Corvus

What Kant means by pure intuition is likely not what you think it means. Pure intuition is the a priori (already existing) form of sensibility (sensory cognition) through which anything can appear to us at all, independent of any particular sensory content (i.e. irrespective of what it is.)

But here, 'form' is also not what you might take it to be. It does not mean a kind of internal template or mental container that sensations enter into. Kant is referring to the necessary condition of appearance — the way anything must be given in order to be experienced at all. Things must appear in space and time if they are to appear at all. And space and time are not objects we perceive, nor features abstracted from experience, but the already-existing field within which perception occurs.

If you find that hard to understand, you’re not alone. These are among the foundational moves in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, which while a great work, is also acknowledged by everyone, a very difficult book to read and interpret.

The way I put it — and this is my gloss on Kant — is that while time is objectively measurable (which Kant does not dispute), it is grounded in the faculty of knowledge itself rather than in the objective domain as such. So your remarks about time being objective are broadly correct, but its objectivity is not really the point at issue. The deeper question is: in what sense would time exist absent any awareness of it? The difficulty is that as soon as you begin to think about that question, you are already bringing time into awareness, or rather, bringing your mind to bear on the question. So time is always already part of the consideration.

Have another look at the original post, particular the section 'what is not at issue'. You will see that it is not the intention to deny the objective reality of time. Rather it is the constituents of objectivity that are in question.

But what's so galling is the casual way Trump has brushed off any legitimacy of her claim to be the rightful president of Venezeula, 'because the people don't like her.' When it is common knowledge that Maduro lost and stole the last election. But then, losing and then stealing an election is all part of the Trump playbook, right? Probably it means the current regime is more tractable to bribery and coercion, which is why Trump wants to keep them. The whole thing is a disgusting cesspit of robber-baron colonialism.

The point being that Energy is an Idea (mental inference), not a real thing (physical observation) — Gnomon

This is simply mistaken. Drop that phrase into Google Gemini and see what comes back. No amount of verbalisation is going to alter the facts.

I know the term ‘transpersonal’ used to be associated with Wilbur, but he stopped using it and it generally fell out of use in the 1990s. But I think it conveys the drift of the transcendental subject quite well - ‘those capacities and faculties which characterise any rational sentient being, not this or that person’. I haven’t noticed anything in Bitbol about ‘mystical experience’ and mystical experience is not a term I’m inclined to use in the context of his material.

It's more that you seem to deplore modernity, see it as a step backwards somehow — Janus

Generally not, except in this specific regard. The solution surely comprises recognizing it. At least that is a starting point.

the physical is not merely mechanical and mindless as has been assumed by the scientific orthodoxy. — Janus

My point exactly!

The problem, though, is always going to be finding clear evidence for such a thing, and being able to develop a clear model of just what might be going on — "Janus

Evidence and models are again appeals to empiricism, don’t you see? Not all philosophical analyses can be expressed in those terms.

As for whether there is a ‘crisis of meaning’ I think it’s axiomatic, but I wouldn’t want try and persuade those who don’t agree.

As it is the basic argument of this thread has a clear provenance in the sources quoted.

She is ready to drop off many of her things just to finally start addressing and solving the big social issues of Venezuela. — javi2541997

True. No slight on her. But then Trump is like ‘thanks lady, now go away.’ I bet the Nobel Committee is less than impressed.

So the Orange Emperor is gifted a Nobel Peace Prize medal by Maria Corina Machado, leader of the Venezuelan opposition, which had been awarded to her. Never mind that the Committee says that in no way such honours can be transferred! The Emperor will grasp the opportunity. Even though he’s basically disenfranchised Machado after snatching Maduro, declaring that she ‘lacks popular support’. (Oh well, I guess he’s saved the Venezuelans the trouble of having an election as he obviously knows ‘the will of the people’ better than they themselves.)

But what an unbelievably gauche and classless gesture, accepting someone else’s Nobel. With Trump, there’s never any bottom.

:pray: Someone I'm meaning to study. I've only ever read his obituary.

Fair enough. I'd go along with that. But I've got a more specific focus in mind. (I meant by the 'italicized pargraphs' the post directly above your last post, which re-states the thrust of the OP.)

I've gone back and looked at your initial comment in this thread, so I offer the following retrospective response.

I take Wayfarer to mean we are adrift from a culturally imposed overarching purpose. Such overarching purposes were imposed by political elites who throughout most of history were the only literate members of societies. The oppressed illiterate masses had no choice but to at least pay lip service to the imposed values and meanings. To what extent they were genuinely interested in, or were privately opposed to, these impositions remains, and will remain, unknown, precisely because they were illiterate. — Janus

I take this to imply that the hidden purpose of my argument is to 'restore the ancient order'- harking back to some supposed 'higher knowledge' which was imposed on the masses by the aristocracy and the Church ('political elites'.) This is the way you often intepret my posts, and I can sort of understand why. After all the so-called 'perennialists' who invoke the 'wisdom traditions' are often political reactionaries. So this kind of analysis can easily be associated with them. But, not my intent. I think I'm fully cognizant of the way that the knowledge we have now prevents any kind of return to a traditionalist mindset. Yet at the same time, those perennial philosophies must still remain perennial (otherwise, they never were!)

And also, it is true that Biblical narratives provided an historical framework which could be interpreted as an imposed political order and hence an imposed 'purpose'. indeed the European Enlightenment was largely inspired as a means to throw of the 'ancien regime' and ending of our self-imposed tutelage (Kant). This has obviously been hugely beneficial in many ways - in that sense, I'm very much a progressive liberal. But at the same time, it has its shadow. And the shadow is precisely the sense of being cast adrift in a meaningless cosmos, the children of chance and necessity, with only our own wits and purposes set against the 'appalling vastnesses of space' (Pascal). That's nearer to what I mean by the 'predicament of modernity'. The resulting idea that 'the universe is meaningless' is very much the product of that mindset. It comes directly from the 'Cartesian Division' that was mapped out in the OP. And yet, it remains a kind of cultural default for much of the secular intelligentsia. That is Vervaeke's 'meaning crisis' in a nutshell.

So I am reacting against the physicalist view, yes. The view that what is real, are the entities describable in terms of physics, and that life and mind are products of, or emerge from, that. If you see the way the division or duality was set up in the first place, then you can see how it is a picture based on an abstraction. That is what this thread is about.

Great! Thanks for that clarification.

You fail to realize it (physicalism) is self-contradictory only on the the assumptions, the strictures, that you place on it. — Janus

Well, they're spelled out in the two italicized paragraphs above. What I'm arguing is that physicalism in its modern form, arose as a consequence of the Galilean and Cartesian divisions between mind and matter, between primary and secondary qualities, and so on. This thesis has been explored in detail in those sources I provided, amongst many others (i.e. Whitehead's 'bifurcation of nature'.) So if you think that is overall mistaken, then how so?

then accuse others who don't agree with your dogmatic strictures of being positivists. — Janus

The only reason I have said that some of your posts are 'positivist', is when they clearly are. Not all the time, but also not infrequently.

Positivism is a philosophy asserting that genuine knowledge comes only from sensory experience and logical/mathematical analysis, emphasizing scientific methods, objective facts, and observable phenomena while rejecting metaphysics, intuition, or faith as sources of truth.

You might explain what about that definition you disagree with.

The 'tendentiously monolithic history of ideas' is summed up in these paragraphs, and is supported by the references provided.

Descartes systematised what Galileo had begun. Taking the measurable world as the paradigm of objective knowledge, he posited a strict ontological division between res extensa—the extended, mechanical substance of nature—and res cogitans—the unextended, thinking substance of the mind. This dualism safeguarded human subjectivity from the reductionism of mechanism, yet it did so at the cost of severing mind from world. Thought was now a private interior realm looking out upon an inert, external nature. The result was a self-conscious spectator of a disenchanted universe: the modern subject—liberated from dogma yet exiled from a cosmos stripped of inherent meaning.

The Cartesian worldview soon became the framework of modern science. Its success lay in treating the natural world as a closed system of mechanical causes, perfectly describable in mathematical terms and open to experimental verification. By excluding subjective and qualitative dimensions from its domain, science achieved unprecedented predictive power and technological mastery. Yet this very exclusion became an implicit metaphysic: reality was equated with what could be measured, while everything else—value, purpose, consciousness—was deemed epiphenomenal, a by-product of the essentially purposeless motions of matter. Thus the Galilean and Cartesian divisions were no longer simply methodological but ontological, shaping the modern sense of the meaning of being. We're all inheritors of those ways of thinking, whether aware of it or not.

Refs: Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of the European Sciences; Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False (2012); Michel Henry, Barbarism (1987).

And it's a perfectly defensible historical analysis.

I think of myself, in behalf of a possible experience, by abstracting from all actual experience, and from this conclude that I could become conscious of my existence even outside experience and of its empirical conditions. Consequently I confuse the possible abstraction from my empirically determined existence with the supposed consciousness of a separate possible existence of my thinking Self, and believe that I cognize what is substantial in me as a transcendental subject, since I have in thought merely the unity of consciousness that grounds everything determinate as the mere form of cognition. — ibid. B426

Again, a very useful passage, in terms of understanding Kant's view of the matter, and thanks for it.

The repeated use of “mere” and “merely” in that sentence really caught my eye — they’re doing a lot of work.

Kant isn’t just describing the unity of consciousness, he’s also putting a fence around how we’re allowed to think about it. What he’s warning against is a very natural slide: we abstract in thought from all particular experiences, and then quietly slip into thinking that the “I” could exist on its own, as a separate kind of entity altogether outside experience.

So when he says that what we really have is “merely the unity of consciousness” and “the mere form of cognition,” the point isn’t that it’s trivial or unimportant. It’s that it isn’t substantia — a thing or an entity in its own right. It’s a formal condition: the structural unity that makes determinate experience and judgement possible at all. The “mere” is there to stop us reifying it into a metaphysical self or soul.

At the same time, though, this “mere form of cognition” is doing incredibly deep work. Literally pivotal. It’s what makes any experience hang together as experience in the first place. Without it, nothing could count as an object for a subject, and nothing could really be judged or known. So the language feels a bit defensive. In the effort to avoid dogmatic metaphysics, he risks slipping into dogma of another kind.

Which leaves an interesting tension. On the one hand, he insists it’s only formal. On the other hand, it’s the most basic enabling condition of intelligibility that we ever encounter. You can’t help wondering whether it’s really “mere” in any innocent sense — or whether Kant is deliberately bracketing off a deeper way of understanding it in order to avoid drifting back into old-style metaphysics. I think in this vital respect he is leaning too far towards empiricism.

It's also the very point which his later critics (even his friendly critics) used to pry open the 'door to the noumenal' (see this blog post.)

@boundless - I think this might echo some of your concerns.

There'll be no hats. :yikes:

Anyway - my basic point is still, there's an awful lot of basic stuff that needs doing here on Earth, before 'fixing our gaze on distant worlds'.

Hey, I like Gnomon as a person, and he's not a disruptive or antagonistic contributor. But, you know, this forum is a place where ideas go to get criticized.

They're not cranks. It's published by the Union of Atomic Scientists.

Founded in 1945 by Albert Einstein, J. Robert Oppenheimer, and University of Chicago scientists who helped develop the first atomic weapons in the Manhattan Project, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists created the Doomsday Clock two years later, using the imagery of apocalypse (midnight) and the contemporary idiom of nuclear explosion (countdown to zero) to convey threats to humanity and the planet. The Doomsday Clock is set every year by the Bulletin’s Science and Security Board in consultation with its Board of Sponsors, which includes nine Nobel laureates. The Clock has become a universally recognized indicator of the world’s vulnerability to global catastrophe caused by man-made technologies.

Last week, Putin fired a nuclear-capable missile into Ukraine.

the material/immaterial gap — AmadeusD

The 'material-immaterial' gap is an artefact of Cartesian philosophy, with his 'mind-matter dualism', which has been woven into the fabric of modern culture. That can be understood through examining the philosophy, culture and history of the last several centuries, without having to compare energy with ghosts. The Predicament of Modernity presents that argument in more detail.

I don't think we're at risk of a catastrophe — AmadeusD

Well, I admire your optimism. The Doomsday Clock was last set 28th Jan 2025, at 89 seconds before midnight.

Some commentary on the idea of transpersonal subjectivity developed in dialogue with claude.ai

The supposedly "objective" view of science - the God's eye view, the view from nowhere - actually depends on subjective capacities (conceptualization, measurement, mathematical reasoning) that have been systematically hidden or bracketed. The subject is constitutively necessary for the objective picture but gets erased from the picture itself.

In quantum mechanics specifically:

This erasure becomes impossible to maintain. The measurement apparatus, the observer's choice of what to measure, the collapse of the wave function - the subject keeps reappearing because quantum phenomena are inherently relational. You can't bracket out the conditions of observation the way classical physics was able to.

Michel Bitbol's "veiled subject":

Bitbol argues that modern science achieved its success precisely by veiling the transcendental subject - making it seem like we're describing nature "as it is in itself." But this veiling has costs: we forget that all such knowledge is contingent on the structures of possible experience. Quantum mechanics has forced this forgotten 'bracketing' back into view.

The "transpersonal" qualifier is important:

The transpersonal subject is not solipsistic - it is not 'the individual consciousness creating reality'. Rather, it's the shared structures of rationality, perception, and measurement that together constitute the conditions for any subject. Accordingly, the 'veiled subject' is transcendental/transpersonal, not psychological.

warp drive/wormhole/gravity drive type of thin — AmadeusD

I respectifully think a lot of these ideas are science fiction. Which has, after all, seeped into the culture through nearly a century of cinematic memes. But if the Earth can't even get it together to agree to a treaty to prevent climate catastrophe, what are the odds of pulling together the kind of massive global effort required for planetary expansion. All the people spruking it - Bezos and Musk, mainly - are the top 1% of the top 1%, and they stand also to be the chief finacial beneficiaries of the whole endeavour, such as it is.

Can i put to those people: The long stretch between the wheel and the engine, the engine and the aeroplane, and the aeroplane and the Moon landing. — AmadeusD

Yeah, I'm one. The analogy doesn't hold, though. Mars is a possibility, as it is within some kind of striking distance. But even so, the problems involved in travelling there, let alone setting up habitable environments, are enormous.

But anything outside the solar system is another matter altogether. The times and distances involved are unthinkably huge. The nearest star system, Proxima Centauri, is 4.25 light years away and any kind of travel that covers those distances would take millions of years. That is 40 trillion kilometres, give or take. To give a sense of scale: even at 100,000 km/h (far faster than any crewed spacecraft has ever flown), the trip would take roughly 45 million years.

And even if propulsion and life-support challenges could somehow be overcome, human interstellar travel faces a fundamental biological barrier in the form of radiation exposure. Beyond Earth’s magnetosphere and the Sun’s heliosphere — crews would be continuously bombarded by high-energy galactic cosmic rays and episodic solar particle events. These particles penetrate most conventional shielding, generate secondary radiation within spacecraft materials, and accumulate irreversible damage to DNA, nervous tissue, and immune systems over time. Measured radiation doses on a Mars trajectory already approach the upper limits considered acceptable for astronaut careers; over interstellar timescales of decades or centuries the cumulative exposure would almost certainly exceed survivable thresholds. In this sense, radiation is not merely an engineering inconvenience but a hard biological constraint on human deep-space travel.

There was an ambitious idea to send ultra-light computer-powered systems to Proxima Centauri using laser-guided sails, Breakhrough Starshot. It sounds at least feasible, if not actually possible. But even that is effectively on hold.

My definition of Energy : A. not a tangible material substance — Gnomon

The point remains that energy is an abstract but universal, constant, and predictable property of matter - precisely measurable to minute degrees of accuracy. It is not a material substance, but the matter-energy equivalence has been demonstrated in Einstein’s famous equation e=mc². Ghosts are in no way measurable or observable whatever. So the comparison is fatuous.

All due respect, I don’t think you demonstrate understanding of the sources you’re quoting. You’re still grasping after the idea of a ‘mysterious substance that does stuff’ - some cross between information and energy - so you will gather up definitions and catch-phrases that you think can be pressed into this mould. Not interested in pursuing this further.

Also, bear in mind that Kant has more to say about his religious philosophy, in his Critique of Practical Reason (and also, I think, his Religion within the Limits of Pure Reason), which I haven't studied, and only have a superficial acquaintance with.

I asked claude.ai to provide a synopsis of my posts on the Forum, which it did in about 3.1 seconds. It pointed out that:

3. Platonism & Mathematical Realism
You're interested in Platonic forms, mathematical platonism, and the "unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics." You argue that formal concepts exist independently of individual minds and reflect an intelligible order in the cosmos.

So I have to take ownership of this, as I've so often argued it and I do believe it.

SpaceX has made advances in the re-usability of the rockets, which wass quite a leap. — ssu

That, I have to agree with. SpaceX is clearly an astoundingly competent company, Those re-landing rockets are an engineering marvel, no doubt about that. StarLink is also an extremely clever company with global impact. Up until Elon Musk turned out to be such a complete a***hole, I was really impressed with him. It's depressing to see such obvious brilliance yoked to such malevolent politics.
--

Yet obviously when there's poverty, many can obviously make the question that "Why are we spending money in things like space programs, when there are so many people that are poor?" — ssu

Silicon Valley has given a lot of money to the effective altruism community, which has provided scholarly legitimacy to tech billionaires’ hobbyhorses. Effective altruists encourage the use of reason and data for making philanthropic decisions, but Becker highlights how some of their most influential thinkers have come up with truly bizarre “longtermist” calculations by multiplying minuscule probabilities of averting a hypothetical cataclysm with gargantuan estimates of “future humans” saved.

One prominent paper concluded that $100 spent on A.I. safety saves one trillion future lives — making it “far more” valuable “than the near-future benefits” of distributing anti-malarial bed nets. “For a strong longtermist,” Becker writes, “investing in a Silicon Valley A.I. safety company is a more worthwhile humanitarian endeavor than saving lives in the tropics.” — NY Times Review

And it's those philosophically-inferred relationships that I refer to as Causation, and use physical Energy as an analogy for how the world works on multiple levels. Including Ontology and Epistemology. However, I don't mean that physical Energy is the same thing as metaphysical Causation. — Gnomon

But that's what I mean. In our previous exchange about energy:

My point was simply that Energy is not a tangible material substance, but a postulated immaterial causal force (similar to electric potential) that can have detectable (actual) effects in the real world : similar to the spiritual belief in ghosts. — Gnomon

I'm afraid this is a terrible analogy (and many others would describe it much more harshly).

I tried to point out that in physics, 'energy' has a precise definition and meaning, which I think you were disregarding, in order to use the term in a particular way to suit your polemical framework. I think Boundless was making the same point (and he's certainly not a scientific materialist.)

I'm sympathetic to your orientation, and also appreciate the fact that you're not an antagonistic contributor, both of which are plusses. But interpretive integrity requires a certain amount of respect for definitions and facts. And here we're often discussing and debating many difficult ideas which are very easy to misinterpret or misconstrue.