a model is presumably a model of something. — Banno

That presupposes the separation between the model/construct and the world it attempts to represent. Presumably, from some point outside both of them ;-)

I thought the speech was fine. Only that he was obviously reading a prompter, but the point was clear enough. I believe Biden when he says democracy is on the ballot.

Looks like Kamala Harris is the nominee. So far I'm cautiously optimistic. The campaign ought to concentrate on Trump as not a fit and proper person, as he's obviously not, and also on the legislative wins and prospects for the Biden period. I really do think Harris will run rings around Trump on the debate stage but I wouldn't be surprised if we never see that. Trump has reverted to form, hurling insults and incomprensible grievances. How anyone can think he should be electable will forever be beyond me.

There is no point saying that I don't understand some idea if you cannot explain it yourself. — Janus

I can explain it to you, but I can't understand it for you. Over and out.

:100:

Didn't we at least reach some agreement that being good at physics does not make one good at philosophy? — Banno

Physicalism is a major influence in philosophy, as you well know. So-called 'non-reductive physicalism' is probably the mainstream majority amongst academic philosophers. So the fact that physics calls physicalism into question is directly relevant.

This sort of stuff can't not remind me of Deepak Chopra. — Lionino

Yes, it's true that stereotyping comes very easily.

My criticism of the view that everything is mind is that we really have no idea what that could mean — Janus

By 'we' you mean 'me'. Take Richard Conn Henry. He's a Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Johns Hopkins University, author of many publications on the topics of astrophysics and various forms of astronomy including optical, radio, ultraviolet, and X-ray. He had a kind of 'aha' moment in the 90's when he came to realisation that physics has undermined physicalism, which lead to him publishing an essay in Nature in 2005, The Mental Universe:

The only reality is mind and observations, but observations are not of things. To see the Universe as it really is, we must abandon our tendency to conceptualize observations as things.

There are a lot of people in this territory nowadays. Kastrup's publishing organisation is called the Essentia Foundation - take a look at the list of authors and includes a lot of scientists. Essentia has a free online course on analytical idealism.

I don't see how you could transcend the "I-making and mine-making proclivities" as long as you cling to the idea that the mind (that is the self) creates the world — Janus

Again, 'I don't see how'. The fact you don't understand it is not a criterion. It's insight into a general process, one in which we're all involved. It's basic to the human condition, in fact it's basic to any form of organic life. It's the inveterate tendency to keep going. It's where there's convergence between Buddhism and Schop's 'will'.

I continue to add "details" to my own thesis, as do you, but I doubt that any amount of itemization will convince someone who is not already inclined toward your point of view. If the general notion is abhorrent to their worldview, more particulars will not sway them. Concur? — Gnomon

That's often the case here. The basic insight of the 'mind-created world' is like a gestalt shift - a sudden shift in understanding. (As a whimsical aside, I often feel that Lewis Carroll's madcap adventures in Alice in Wonderland were a kind of presage of post-modernism - the absurdity and groundlessness of the post-modern situation. The Chesire Cat's grin - the grin without the cat - a very pregnant metaphor for the post-modern landscape.)

The conscious self is a construction that arises in the dialectical process that is a world-making.
— apokrisis

:100:
— Wayfarer

You see, I don't think that this comment says anything. At least, not clearly. — Banno

I agreed with it, in light of considerable earlier conversation. What resonated with me is the 'constructivist' perspective - the sense in which the mind is 'world-making', moment to moment. It can be said of mindfulness meditation that its aim is to gain insight into the mind's 'I-making and mine-making' proclivities, which are going on ceaselessly due to ingrained habits of thought. There are articles about the role of Kant and Schopenhauer in Freud's development of the theory of the unconscious. Then there's Andrew Brook, who says that Kant was the godfather of modern cognitive science.

It's the sort of text against which Russell and Moore rebelled — Banno

Right. Which is why most of what they say is jejune and how modern analytic philosophy became part of Elliott's wasteland.

Possible VP picks: Mark Kelly, Senator, Arizona

Kelly’s credentials begin with his dazzling biography as a combat-tested Navy pilot and NASA astronaut who commanded shuttle missions aboard both the Discovery and Endeavour and traveled more than 20 million miles in space.

He has also turned out to be a supremely skillful politician in a tough state where the Biden-Harris ticket has been running behind. Kelly won a close race in 2020 to fill the unexpired term of John McCain (R) and then turned around to win it again two years later — this time, with a more comfortable five-point margin against a hard-right Republican election conspiracy theorist endorsed by Donald Trump.

Border Politics: “When I first got to Washington, it didn’t take me long to realize that there are a lot of Democrats who don’t understand our southern border and a lot of Republicans who just want to talk about it, don’t necessarily want to do anything about it, just want to use it politically,” he told me shortly after his 2022 victory. “So my approach has been — to the extent that we could and can — to make progress on securing it, but also doing it in a way that’s in accordance with our ethics and our values, not to demonize people.” — WaPo

. Of course, the fact that some scientific theories have been observed to yield accurate predictions countless times is a point in their favour. The same cannot be said for metaphysical speculations, because they make no predictions that can be rigorously tested. — Janus

However, and has been discussed many times in this thread, physics itself, the hardest of hard sciences, has produced an outcome where interpretations of quantum theory seem to be unavoidable. And those interpretations are themselves untestable and in some sense metaphysical. Furthermore, it's physics itself which has called the 'mind-independence' of what were thought to be the fundamental constituents of existence into question.

Most actual physicists can disregard all of this - 'shut up and calculate' - but surely it has philosophical significance.

The problem I see is that without positing either some mind-independent reality or collective or universal mind it is impossible to explain how it is that we all see and hear the same things in the environment. — Janus

That’s only a problem for solipsism - that only MY mind is real. I didn’t explain it, because feel no need to.

Wayfarer claims he doesn't agree with Kastrup's "mind at large", which I would say is itself an incoherent idea, but he apparently cannot offer any coherent alternative. — Janus

I've addressed that, in Is there 'Mind at Large'?, which I think is coherent, even if @Tom Storm says it needs more detail. (I'm planning further installments. And re-visiting it, I think perhaps rather than invoking the spooky 'mind at large', I would just use the term 'some mind' or 'any mind' or 'the observer'.)

Philosophy itself ultimately consists in faith, not in knowledge or understanding in a scientific, mathematical or logical kind of sense. — Janus

I'd rather say that reason points to something beyond itself. But you will often say that anything that can't be understood in terms of maths or science is to be categorised as 'faith'.

I should remind you of Joanna Macy who drew the parallels between systems theory and dependent co-arising. — apokrisis

Thanks for the reminder. I will re-visit her podcast.

...whatever we consider to be real has a subjective as well as objective grounding
— Wayfarer

Do you see how this crosses from the epistemic to the ontic, in the way I tried to encapsulate using cake? — Banno

I do. But I also see that you have a pre-reflective world-model of 'self in world' - yourself as subject, in the domain of objects, other persons, and so on. For us, the world naturally divides itself along those lines. It is part of the mindset of modernity and of liberal individualism. (This is discusssed in detail in Charles Taylor's A Secular Age, where the 'buffered self' refers to the modern understanding of the self as the autonomous individual, sole arbiter of value, separate and apart from the world. He contrasts that the kind of 'participatory knowing' which characterizes pre-modern identity in which the self-world division is not nearly so impermeable, where the subject participates in the (re)creation of the world through ritual.)

The reason for my references to Buddhism, is that I look to it for a normative framework, one that is separate from the cultural mainstream (hence, counter-cultural) . As you introduced the subject of dialectic, Central Philosophy of Buddhism describes the 'madhyamika dialectic' of Mahāyāna Buddhism (and compares it with Western idealism for which it is criticized by later Buddhist scholars for euro-centricity.) But the over-arching perspective of that philosophy is non-dualism and a way of enacting it, a way of being in the world.

Now I really don't want come across as one of the holier-than-thou 'western Buddhists', most of my existence has been suburban family man mode (now also a grand-parent). I'm entangled in the hindrances and have attained nothing by way of higher states. But that's the philosophy or 'way' that I am attempting to understand in some degree. At least it provides, as it were, a vantage point, and also, however remote, a sense of there being a destination.

The conscious self is a construction that arises in the dialectical process that is a world-making. — apokrisis

:100:

We become not just selves but superbeings. — apokrisis

Wasn't that Nietszche's answer? I never warmed to him.

(I'm off to gym to spend an hour on the machines listening to a Chris Fuchs lecture on QBism.

I can't tell the difference between Wayfarer and ChatGTP anymore — apokrisis

I use it as a reference source.

But this is another way of talking about that holism vs atomism division which a logic of vagueness hoped to resolve. — apokrisis

You have your way of carving up the territory, but it's not the only way, and it's more concerned with modelling and engineering.

I am not enamoured with a simple division into ontic and epistemic versions of idealism. — Banno

And I can see why. It's a fluctuation between 'world' (ontic) and 'mind' (epistemic) - which is fundamental? My approach is like that of phenomenology - the world and mind are co-arising. My claim is that whatever we consider to be real has a subjective as well as objective grounding, but that the subjective tends to being ignored or neglected in the pursuit of objectivity.

According to Politico, the attack theme that Trump is working up is that Harris is 'as dumb as a rock'. Which strikes me as being, well, about as dumb as a rock. Harris is a career politician, Senator, courtoom prosecutor, and now VP. Look at her ancestory - her father, Donald J. Harris, was an eminent Jamaican-American economist and professor at Stanford. Her mother, Shyamala Gopan, 'was a biomedical scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, whose work in isolating and characterizing the progesterone receptor gene stimulated advances in breast biology and oncology.' Folks like these don't have rocks for progeny. Harris is a formidable debater and public speaker, if Trump goes up against her in debate with that attitude, she'll tear strips off him. See a televised sample of the approach she intends to take with Trump. ("In those (prior) roles I took on perpertrators of all kinds." Incidentally Bryan Tyler Cohen is pointing to tweets by Trump declaring that ABC is 'corrupt' and the debate must be televised on Fox - already preparing the ground to bail if the organisers don't comply.)

I wonder if that sometimes engenders an uncomfortable loyalty to ontological idealist metaphysics of a Berkeleyan stripe. — bert1

Berkeley is an ingenious defender of idealism, but nominalism is his weak point. However nearly all the objections I read to him are no different in essence to Johnson’s 'kicking the stone' which in my view fail to come to terms with his arguments.

I note that C S Pierce admired Berkeley particularly his arguments against materialism and his emphasis on the importance of perception and the mind. However, Peirce was critical of Berkeley’s nominalism. He saw value in Berkeley’s challenge to the materialist conception of reality, which aligns with his own semiotic and pragmatic views where meaning and understanding arise from signs and their interpretation.

Peirce criticized Berkeley’s nominalism, the idea that universals are merely names without any real existence. Peirce, a classical realist, believed that general concepts and laws have a real existence independent of individual instances. He thought that Berkeley’s nominalism undermined the reality of general concepts, which Peirce saw as essential for a coherent theory of knowledge and science.

Whenever I read Berkeley (the editions on Early Modern Texts are excellent) I’m impressed by his rhetorical ingenuity and subtlety. However too much of his argument is underpinned by reliance on God as a universal agent and his vague notion of ‘spirits’. He blurs the line between philosophy and faith. And due to his nominalism, he is unable to draw upon the repertoire of Platonist philosophy (as did Schopenhauer and Kant) in support of his views.

But then, if the scales are lifted, whether what is seen is beneficial surely depends on what's there. I mean, if a character in a Lovecraft novel saw what is 'really there' he or she might want to put them right back on again. :yikes:

what is the "super-natural" other than the longing for something different? — schopenhauer1

Gee that's a leading question! Supernatural and metaphysical are really the Latin and Greek synonyms for 'beyond nature'. Catharsis was interpreted, in metaphysical traditions such as neoplatonism, as the means of spiritual purification, so as to awaken the relationship with the 'beyond nature', which was taken to be an awakening to a higher identity.

That is at odds with naturalism. I suppose you could see catharsis in a naturalistic sense as a purgation of traumatic memories. In some of the awareness-training workshops I did back in the 90's I witnessed a lot of that - people bringing things to the surface that they have been carrying around for decades. Involves a lot of crying but also a great sense of release - your archetypical 'cathartic experience'.

Oh, and Andy Beshear looks a good pick. Two-term Democratic governor in a Red state.

Still saying Gavin Newsom.
— Wayfarer

Care to bet? — Mikie

No :yikes: It's only that he's always struck me as telegenic and articulate. Whoever it is, I think it's an absolutely crucial choice.

removing a presumptive nominee, forcing him to step aside, and replacing him with someone else isn’t. — NOS4A2

He wasn't removed, or threatened with the noose :rage: He was persuaded to retire rather than contest and made a principled decision in the interests of the greater good (although in my view about 6 months too late.)

I think it's utterly hilarous that Mike Johnson is threatening to sue the Democratic Party to force them to bring Biden back. They're upset over the $10million they spent on Biden attack ads and want their money back. Hilarious.

Still saying Gavin Newsom. He's got higher recognition, I think, and he's been running a shadow campaign.

Literally overturns an election. — NOS4A2

What 'election' has been overturned? The votes from the primaries are not formally attached to a candidate until the Convention. It would be quite possible for a winning candidate to be injured or fall ill and so not be the final choice at the Convention. This is no different, the candidate in question has simply, and sensibly, decided to retire rather than seek another term.

And although obviously a close-run thing, I would have thought that any candidate who DID NOT try and overthrow the 2020 election would have a clear advantage.

Philosophers may catch up in their own sweet time. If they have nothing better to do. — apokrisis

What do you call a Greek skydiver?

From an idealist standpoint, it is equally plausible to see the emergence of organic life as the first stirrings of intentionality in physical form.
— Wayfarer

But then you would have to explain how exactly. What changes? What creates this epistemic cut? — apokrisis

Without doubting that the scientific modelling of the biochemistry involved, the question remains, to what end? For what purpose?

You said upthread:

We are modellers that exist by modelling. There are naturally progressive levels to this modelling. Words and then numbers have lifted humans to a certain rather vertiginous point. Numbers as the ultimate abstractions – variables in equations matched to squiggles on dials – take the basic epistemic duality of generalisation and particularisation to their most rarified extreme. I don't really see what comes next.... — apokrisis

Maybe it's because the only aims in your philosophy are instrumental and pragmatic. No 'beyond'.

How easily you slide from the germane to the ridiculous. — apokrisis

Don't mistake whimsicality for ridicule. There is a serious point about the reason for existence. I'm suggesting that life provides a means for the disclosure of horizons of being that otherwise cannot be realised. From a review of Thomas Nagel's Mind and Cosmos:

Nagel’s starting point is not simply that he finds materialism partial or unconvincing, but that he himself has a metaphysical view or vision of reality that just cannot be accommodated within materialism. This vision is that the appearance of conscious beings in the universe is somehow what it is all for; that ‘Each of our lives is a part of the lengthy process of the universe gradually waking up and becoming aware of itself’.

That is something lacking in your account. Your deprecation of Pierce's idealism likewise, that it only existed because 'science hadn't yet figured out the physical causes yet'. The reason you're critical of reductionism is not philosophical, but technical - semiotics provides a better metaphor for living processes than machines. And yet your descriptions are still illustrated with 'switches' and 'mechanisms' and energy dissipation - it is still resolutely physicalist in a way that I don't think C S Peirce himself ever was.

That "ought" thing, again. — Banno

Quite.

There's three paragraphs in your essay I need to consider more deeply and I'll get back to you. — Tom Storm

I get it. I'm not entirely happy with it, that's one of the reasons I haven't written many more.

I'm kind of on board with Kastrup's terminology, but not unreservedly.

Do you consider phenomenology, in some of its guises (perhaps the neurophenomenological of Francisco Varela) to be a compromise between your position and one shaped by embodied cognition? — Tom Storm

Thanks! Not a compromise, but an inspiration, the subject I'm working to understand.

In your Mind At Large article, you distinguished Scientific Materialism from Scientifically-Informed Idealism. — Gnomon

Yes, well put. That's exactly what I have in mind. A convergence between cognitivism and philosophical idealism.

For me, it's definitely not the God of Theology, but more like the Way-Path (organizing principle) of Taoism, or the Logos (rational principle) of Western Philosophy. Is my reckoning even close to your standpoint? :smile: — Gnomon

:100:

So the mistake in terms of idealism is to treat "mind" as something as foundational as substantial being. — apokrisis

I can see why you would say that, but your perspective is predicated on the physicalist notion that mind is 'the product of' the brain. I really don't know if your philosophical mentor, C S Peirce, would have endorsed that. I find his metaphysics hard to fathom, but he does say that 'matter is effete mind'. 'Effete' means 'degenerate' or 'depleted' or sapped of its original vitality. What 'mind' is in Peirce is nothing at all like the Cartesian 'res cogitans' which he views as completely mistaken. He proposes a continuum between mind and matter, where they are not entirely distinct but different manifestations of the same underlying reality (and which I don't think can be described in terms of physics). He suggests that mind and matter are fundamentally connected, with mind being a more dynamic and vital principle, while matter represents a more static and inert state. By saying "matter is effete mind," Peirce implies that matter is a kind of mind that has lost its vitality and dynamism. In other words, what we perceive as physical matter is, in essence, mind that has become fixed and less active. Kind of like your hair- or finger-nail clippings in relation to your whole body, or your whole body after death. I sometimes muse that matter consists entirely of fossils.

I note that in philosophy encyclopedias, Peirce is categorised as an objective idealist, positing that the physical world is not independent of the mind but is intertwined with it. In his view, reality consists of both mental and material elements that are deeply interconnected. He proposed that the universe has a mental or spiritual dimension that cannot be fully explained by physical processes alone. That is central to his idea of agapē-ism, that love, understood as a creative and unifying force, plays a crucial role in the development and evolution of the universe and is a fundamental principle that guides the growth of complexity and order in the cosmos. He believed that the creative and purposive aspects of evolution could not be fully explained by natural selection alone. In that he was a lot more like Henri Bergson than Richard Dawkins.

Even if the organism is also still a self-organising dissipative structure, just now self-organising in a self-interested fashion by virtue of being able to encode information. — apokrisis

From an idealist standpoint, it is equally plausible to see the emergence of organic life as the first stirrings of intentionality in physical form. Of course primitive and simple organic forms have practically zero self-awareness or consciousness in any complex sense, but already there the self-other distinction is operative, as it must be, for the organism's first task is to remain separate. The dissolution of the self-other boundary is death. So then through the evolutionary process, what we're seeing is ever-expanding horizons of being. The appearance of life is the appearance of perspective - of 'what it is like to be' a bat or whatever else. Alan Watts' cosmic hide-and-seek, in which the Universe appears to itself in any number of guises. And in Nagel's 'Mind and Cosmos', he entertains the notion that in life, the universe is becoming self-aware, 'waking up', as he puts it. I find that more congruent with Peirce's philosophy than any form of physicalism.

It should be reported as: ‘President Biden has decided not to contest the next election, and instead to retire. He has endorsed his VP…’ etc, instead of all this breathless hyperbole.

Still, it would have been far better had he made the decision before the primaries. Regardless, it’s still imperative that the MAGA cult is thwarted.

As biological creatures, we only need to insert ourselves into our worlds in a semiotically constructed fashion. — apokrisis

You’re selling us short ;-)

I can't accept GPT as authoritative — Banno

There’s no requirement to. I used it to generate a useful summary rather than going to the trouble of drafting one de novo. Like a glossary entry.

I can't see how to make sense of (the in itself) in a way that enables it to be useful. If there is a way that things are that is outside of our comprehension, then it is irrelevant to that comprehension. The only practical consequence can be a nod to the mysterious, and silence. We cannot access "the world as it is in itself", not because it represents some profound fact about the world and our relation to it, but because the thing-in-itself is a useless metaphysical construct. — Banno

Knowledge of appearances *is* knowledge of phenomena. It can be and is consistent and effective without it needing to be all-knowing. The “thing in itself” is a boundary in Kant's system; it marks the limits of what we can know and expresses a sense of mystery.. Through that it serves to keep us humble. I see it as a modest claim, not as a sweeping declaration. ‘What we see is not nature herself but nature exposed to our method of questioning.’

As for as Kastrup’s idealism - I do question the ‘mind at large’ idea in this essay - Is there ‘mind at large’? - although it’s quite a long piece so don’t feel any obligation.

So I just read that she reacted to Biden's endorsement by saying she hopes to "earn and win" the nomination. So she considers herself in the race, but not the heir apparent. — Echarmion

That’s encouraging. I’ve been reading that there’s the chance of an ‘open convention’, but that in the past these haven’t been very successful. But if it is an open convention, I hope another candidate comes of it.

I just read an article, in Beshara magazine, entitled Mind Over Matter*3. It's an interview with Bernardo Kastrup about his Analytical Idealism beliefs. One of his responses refers to Matter as an "extended transpersonal form of mind". Again, that sounds like Cosmic Mind-stuff (res cogitans) is a non-local ideal substance that can be molded into various forms of extended substance (res extensa). — Gnomon

I know that interview. I’ve been reading and listening to Kastrup the last couple of years. He’s an articulate defender of philosophical idealism. (A lot of people think ‘idealism’ is the belief in ideals, It’s not. It goes back to the ‘ideas’ of Plato, which are arguably the starting-point of Western philosophy,)

It is true that neither idealism or materialism are falsifiable in Popper’s sense, but the point of falsifiability is not to establish what is true, but what is a testable claim. Classic examples Popper gave of non-testable hypotheses were Marxism and psycho-analysis, because they could accomodate any counter-factuals on an ad hoc basis - no claim could prove them wrong. Whereas a proper scientific theory is always open to refutation by new facts.

Philosophical ideas are not necessarily hypotheses in the scientific sense. They’re more like frameworks. The subject is generally discussed under ‘philosophy of mind’ so it might be useful to seek out primers on that topic. Banno points out that idealism is very much a minority position in the academic mainstream, but there are some.

I should add, that idealism itself as a philosophical term really only came into vogue after Descartes and his division of res cogitans and res extensia (customarily described as mind and matter in this context.) The Aristotelian matter-form duality was not divisible in that sense, as form and matter always co-exist in a particular. There’s an article by a Buddhist studies scholar that has a useful summary under heading 2a http://www.acmuller.net/yogacara/articles/intro.html

I don’t know if Harris will end up as the nominee, and not confident that she can win. But let’s see what happens.

I followed this exchange with one part interest and three parts bafflement, but I also remembered a book I have saved in my Google Books library which may be of interest as it seems to be very much about the substance of your disagreement - Modes of Knowledge of the Transcendental, Henri Oosthout. The reason I call attention to it, is from my very brief reading, the is very much concerned with he problem of reflexivity in transcendental knowledge - how the self can know the self.

If there is a God….. — Igitur

That basically excludes Buddhism, which is not predicated on there being a God. It might be better phrased ‘if there is a higher truth’ or something along those lines. What you’re expressing is quite a well-trodden path for the last few centuries, what with the growth of globalisation and new religious movements. (But then I’m writing as a long-time habitué of the now long-gone Adyar Bookshop).

God likely doesn't care if you follow a particular religion, but only if you act according to the correct concepts — Igitur

Have a read of Karl Rahner’s rather controversial concept of the ‘anonymous Christian’, which

declares that all individuals, who sincerely seek truth and goodness, and strive to follow the moral truths they know, can respond positively to God's grace, albeit unknowingly or indirectly, even if they do so through other religious traditions and/or are not explicitly aware of Jesus Christ. In other words, God's grace, including the benefits of Christ's sacrifice, are not confined to the boundaries of any particular religious tradition or by our awareness or acceptance of Christian doctrine. Instead, anyone who lives a life of love and goodness, guided by the moral teachings found in Christianity, even if they don't consciously identify with it, is implicitly united with Christ and can be saved through him, implying that non-Christians can still be recipients of God's grace and attain salvation.

:clap: fair points. But I think a more ‘Buddhist’ attitude to production and consumption a la Schumacher's Small is Beautiful would not be amiss. (Not that I can claim any moral high ground in that regard.) But culture and society needs an ideal other than limitless growth and endless consumption. Who’s providing a model for that?

And I agree that there is a division here that needs acknowledgement. For Way, it is the difference between the world and mind. For me, it is the difference between how things are and how they ought be. — Banno

Thanks for the compliment, appreciated. This forum has been a great learning experience for me. I had never heard of Davidson or Austin, for example, whereas I have at least now read their SEP entries. Where we diverge, I think, is that my overall approach is more counter-cultural, than oriented with respect to mainstream Anglo philosophy. But, I continue to learn and there is much more to be discovered. I do follow up on many of the topic discussed and debated here.

The argument attempts to show that the world is partially mental, but only succeeded in showing that the what we say about the world is "mental".

That is, the argument presented here does not demonstrate it's conclusion. — Banno

Note at the outset, I don’t pretend to claim to show what the world really is. Physicalism claims that the world really is physical. Customarily, idealism is often taken to claim the world really is mental. But note at the outset I say ‘I will concentrate less on arguments about the nature of the constituents of objective reality, and focus instead on understanding the mental processes that shape our judgment of what they comprise.’

I will add that whatever we say about the fundamental constituents of the world and whatever they may be, when they appear to us, they do so as elements of experience, even if mediated by symbolic representations such as mathematics. As Apokrisis rightly noted, it’s an epistemological form of idealism. And actually it’s most closely related to Buddhist philosophy - Leontiskos correctly recognised its connection to the Madhyamaka school of Buddhism.

I asked ChatGPT to provide a brief account of the distinction between epistemological and ontological idealism:

Epistemological idealism and ontological idealism both emphasize the centrality of the mind in understanding reality, but they focus on different aspects of the relationship between mind and world. Epistemological idealism concerns itself with the nature and scope of human knowledge, asserting that what we can know about the world is inherently shaped by the structures of our minds. This perspective holds that our understanding of reality is mediated by our perceptions, concepts, and cognitive faculties, suggesting that we cannot access the world as it is in itself, independent of our mental activities. Philosophers like Immanuel Kant exemplify this view, arguing that while things-in-themselves (noumena) exist, our knowledge is limited to phenomena—the world as it appears to us through our cognitive filters.

Ontological idealism, on the other hand, posits that reality itself is fundamentally mental or immaterial in nature. This viewpoint claims that what exists is inextricably linked to or constituted by consciousness. In its strong form, as articulated by George Berkeley, ontological idealism denies the existence of a mind-independent material world altogether, maintaining that only minds and their ideas exist. In this view, objects are collections of ideas perceived by a mind, and their existence depends on being perceived. Ontological idealism thus extends beyond the limits of human knowledge to propose a metaphysical thesis about the very nature of being.

Many grey areas and porous boundaries to be sure, but I’m nearer the first. No coincidence that I discovered Kant through The Central Philosophy of Buddhism by T R V Murti, which has extensive comparisons of Kant and Madhyamaka philosophy (the ‘middle-way’ school of Mahāyāna Buddhism). But there are many cross-overs and commonalities with Kant, phenomenology and Madhyamaka, exemplified for instance in The Embodied Mind and in John Vervaeke’s lectures.

Reality has an inextricably mental aspect, which itself is never revealed in empirical analysis ~ Wayfarer

This has not been demonstrated. What has been shown is that what we know "has an inextricably mental aspect". — Banno

Right. I should have said ‘being’ has an inextricably mental aspect. But this requires a differentiation between ‘being’ and ‘what exists’, which is itself contentious and which I’ve had many arguments over.

Suffice to ask: who was the source of the well-known aphorism ‘What we observe is not nature herself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.’ Why, that was Werner Heisenberg, but here I’m quoting him as a scientifically-informed philosopher, and in support of an overall Kantian attitude, recognising the distinction between phenomena (what appears) and the unknowable in-itself. Likewise Neils Bohr’s ‘In our description of nature the purpose is not to disclose the real essence of the phenomena but only to track down, as far as possible, relations between the manifold aspects of our experience.’ Examples could be multiplied.

But does anyone claim that your observation --- of a "collapsing" quantum event for instance --- creates the actual world that I personally routinely experience, apart from scientific experiments/measurements? Or that we collectively "participate" in creation of the world that we all more or less agree is out there? — Gnomon

The salient point is that we’re participants, moral agents, in our own lives, whereas scientific objectivity is predicated on the separateness of subject and object. We’re behind the glass, or in the observatory, looking out, or looking up. And while modern science is one of humanity's most impressive achievements, we are not just knowers: we are also agents who make choices and hold ourselves responsible for our actions, and need to sense that we are participants in a meaningful cosmos, not just ‘heat sinks’ doing our own little bit towards maximising entropy.

I think there’s a resonance between Wheelers ‘participatory universe’ and the pre-modern sense of the same, whereby you’re related to the cosmos at large through the mythological re-enactment of creation (someone quipped in one of those YouTube videos I’ve been watching, every observation in physics is a mini-big-bang). But the key insight I take from it is the realisation that reality, being itself, however you want to designate it, is not something we’re outside of or separate from. It’s more than an objective reality, it includes both subject and object in a larger whole. That is what I think the shock of quantum physics has obliged us to recognise. Phenomenology has been more aware of that, as has its offspring existentialism. That’s why ‘objectivity’ is a necessary but not sufficient criterion for truth. I requires more than objectivity - something like sagacity, an insight into the whole.

(I like to say ‘naturalism is concerned with what you see looking out the window. Phenomenology is concerned with ‘you looking out the window’. In other words, it includes the experience of looking.)

" ...it is empirically true that the Universe exists independently of any particular mind."
yet
"...its existence is inextricably bound by and to the mind we have" — Banno

Cherry-picked. The full passage is:

it is empirically true that the Universe exists independently of any particular mind. But what we know of its existence is inextricably bound by and to the mind we have, and so, in that sense, reality is not straightforwardly objective. It is not solely constituted by objects and their relations. Reality has an inextricably mental aspect, which itself is never revealed in empirical analysis. Whatever experience we have or knowledge we possess, it always occurs to a subject — a subject which only ever appears as us, as subject, not to us, as object.

Can you see the distinction? That what is empirically true is not the whole story?

Do you assume that 'the wavefunction' itself is mind-independent¹ (whether it 'collapses' (Copenhagen) or not (Everett))? — 180 Proof

It’s not a question of whether the ‘wave function’ is or isn’t mind-dependent. The equation describes the distribution of probabilities. When the measurement is taken the possibilities all reduce to a specific outcome. That is the ‘collapse’. Measurement is what does that, but measurement itself is not specified by the equation, and besides it leaves open the question of in what sense the particle exists prior to measurement. The Everett theory avoids all of those problems by saying the collapse never occurs, but with the implication that there are infinitely many worlds.

The deep question, to refer you to Pattee again, is how can a molecule be a message? How does genetic information regulate a metabolic flow? — apokrisis

It is a deep question but not the question I’ve been addressing. Maybe that book I’ve found on biosemiotics and philosophy of mind will have some insights.

First job was to wind you back from confusing cognition as epistemic method with cognition as some kind of ontological mind stuff that grounds mind-independent reality. — apokrisis

If you looked at the Mind Created World piece, I explicitly state that I am not arguing for any such thing.

The second objection is against the notion that the mind, or ‘mind-stuff’, is literally a type of constituent out of which things are made, in the same way that statues are constituted by marble, or yachts of wood. The form of idealism I am advocating doesn’t posit that there is any ‘mind-stuff’ existing as a constituent in that sense. The constitution of material objects is a matter for scientific disciplines (although I’m well aware that the ultimate nature of these constituents remains an open question in theoretical physics). — Wayfarer

(Banno’s is the first objection.)

If we couldn't generalise, your landscapes would just be a blooming, buzzing confusion of specks of light. We would not parse into shapes and objects of some more generalised type. We couldn't imagine the land held stories that might connect it as a more general historical flow. — apokrisis

But how does that detract from what I’m saying? Pinter’s book makes that precise point - that we organise cognition around Gestalts, meaningful wholes, precisely in terms of what is meaningful to our animal sensibility. He provides evidence that this is the case even in insect cognition (with the fairy-fly as an example, so small as to be imperceptible to the naked eye.) Mind does that, either animal or human, although only we can bring that fact into rational introspection. Gestalts, forms, don’t exist outside of minds. (I recommend that book - he doesn’t use it to argue for idealism, if that’s something that would put you off, although there are references to Kant.)

The point about quantum physics, is that, had the realist vision come to fruition, we might have really located the imperishable point-particles of atomism, fundamental entities with an unambiguous existence. But we didn’t. The debate between Bohr and Einstein was around Einstein’s fervent belief in a realistic ontology, as opposed to Bohr’s more philosophically subtle attitude. But then I’m sure you know all that. The only salient point for my argument is the sense in which the measurement problem undermines the presumptively mind-independent nature of sub-atomic particles - that at some fundamental level, the separation of observer and observed no longer holds. And that’s because in the final analysis, reality is not objective but participatory. We’re not outside of or apart from reality - one of the fundamental insights both of phenomenology and non-dualism. It’s easy to say, but hard to see.

So yes, modernity might create Cartesian anxiety. But that arises from a dichotomising logic being allowed to make an ontic claim – mind and matter as two incommensurate substances, two general forms of causality – and failing to see that the ontic position is that the cosmos just happens to have these epistemising organisms evolving within it as a further expression of the Second Law. — apokrisis

I agree with your description of the problem, but your answer is biological, not existential. You’re not seeing the plight of modernity from an existential perspective. It always seems to me you’re appropriating philosophical terminology for another purpose, to do with biology and engineering. That’s why you’re quite happy to dismiss the idealistic aspects of C S Peirce while utilising his logic for those purposes.