*

Arche-fossils, you mean?

The difference between what you might say in a fight is different from the problems that belong to an idea as that idea.

That is what I think is at stake in the passage I quoted. — Paine

Thanks for that elaboration, but I’d like to return to the interpretation of the passage you quoted previously.

I was rather thinking that ‘what is at stake’ in that dialogue is the reality of the Ideas, and consequently what the implications would be if they are found not to be real. Denial is what ‘naturalism’, which you say is ‘hard to define’, is inclined towards, isn’t it? The denial of the reality of the ideas? I had thought that in the passage, that ‘the friends of the forms’ were defending the forms. The ‘earth-born’ represent those who are unable to reconcile the distinction between ‘being’ - what truly is - and ‘becoming’, the world of change, growth and decay, and so are calling ideas into question. (And indeed there are many ‘perplexities’ involved as has been mentioned already, as the reality of change and decay seems undeniable. It is not as if admitting the reality of the ideas is a simple matter.)

Consider this passage in particular:

And you say our communion with becoming is through the body, by means of sense perception, while it is by means of reasoning through the soul that we commune with actual being, which you say is always just the same as it is, while becoming is always changing. — Sophist, 248A, translated by Horan

I can’t help but be struck by the resemblance to a passage I’ve often quoted in the past here in respect of Aquinas:

….if the proper knowledge of the senses is of accidents, through forms that are individualized, the proper knowledge of intellect is of essences, through forms that are universalized. Intellectual knowledge is analogous to sense knowledge inasmuch as it demands the reception of the form of the thing which is known. But it differs from sense knowledge so far forth as it consists in the apprehension of things, not in their individuality, but in their universality.

Can you see the resemblance in those two passages? The differentiation between ‘sense perception’ and ‘ideas grasped by reason’? That in the platonic vision, the faculty of reason is able to grasp what is ‘always the case’? I know my attempt here might be a bit simplistic but I’m trying to get a handle on the big underlying issue as I see it.

I would say there is no physical basis. As someone remarked in a philosophical essay I once read, ‘there’s no such thing as a thing.’ Things or objects are designated as such by a subject for a purpose. But there is no ultimately-existing, discrete, and completely definable thing. No such thing.

That something is not explainable in physical terms does not entail that it is anything over and above its physical constitution, the relations between its parts and the global and local constraints it is subject to. — Janus

But such constraints are not considered in reductionism.

reject physicalism on this basis is to be working from and reacting to outmoded mechanistic conceptions of physicality. — Janus

Mechanistic materialism still prevails in or underlies many naturalistic accounts.

Of course, but in times past global and environmental conditions were thought to be given by God or determined by karma or some imagined supernatural principle. Are you now appealing to those kinds of ideas, and if not, just what are you appealing to? — Janus

I’m not ‘appealing to’ anything. The physicalist paradigm is just exactly that everything is ultimately reducible to the laws of physics. But it’s clear that these are abstractions that don’t describe the complexities of organic life.

That Talbot essay is really worth the effort.

It is also worth mentioning:

Terrence Deacon's concept of "ententionality," introduced in "Incomplete Nature," seeks to describe the unique properties and attributes of organisms and their goal-directed behaviors, which he believes are inadequately explained by traditional physical and intentional frameworks. Ententionality combines "intentionality" with "entelechy" (Aristotle's term for realizing potential), emphasizing that organisms inherently pursue goals and maintain themselves through a dynamic process of self-organization and adaptation. This idea highlights the complex interplay between biological structures and functions that give rise to purposeful behavior and consciousness, suggesting that life inherently possesses a form of directedness that goes beyond mere mechanistic explanations. — ChatGPT

I have a question or two about this. By "reducible to" do you mean 'explainable in terms of' or 'has its origin in'? Do you count global or environmental conditions as physical interactions? Do you claim there is "something more" metaphysically speaking than the physical world with its global and local conditions and interactions? If you do want to claim that, then what could that "something more" be in your opinion? — Janus

‘Physical reductionism’ is generally taken to mean ‘explainable in terms of the laws of physics and chemistry.’ It is the kind of attitude which says that living organisms are ‘nothing but’ colllections of atoms or ‘nothing but’ the vehicles by which genes propagate. In practical terms, the desired reduction base is something that can, at least in theory, be explained and predicted in those terms.

‘Global and environmental conditions’ were not, in times past, considered to be physical interactions, or considered as part of the reduction base. That is what might be called a holistic approach which is the opposite to reductionism.

The ‘law of physics’ are context-free. They don’t need to take into account environmental factors but rather describe the behaviour of ideal objects under specified conditions. This is what makes them universal - the behaviour of a body with specific physical attributes will predictably act in accordance with physical laws under said conditions - like, the apple will fall at a given rate, provided nobody catches it, or the wind doesn’t blow and alter its path, or it isn’t in zero-gravity environments.

The ‘something more’ that biology has to consider is precisely the environment and the constant interaction of organisms with each other and their environment. That is where ‘physicalist reductionism’ has been found wanting, and why biosemiotics and systems science have gained traction in biology: living beings are far more ‘language-like’ than ‘machine like’, right down to the most fundamental levels of cellular biology.

Accordingly, I think it’s a mistake to try and conceive of the ‘something more ‘ - the aspects of organisms that can’t be reduced to the chemical and physical - as any kind of ‘something’. That leads to the misconception of an elan vital or spooky ethereal substance - in other words it’s a reification. As you know, I’ve often commented that I think one of the consequences of Cartesian dualism is exactly that kind of reification, by treating mind as a ‘thinking thing’, more or less on a similar plane to physical things, but of a different kind.

Whereas the dynamic systems theory approach of e.g. Terrence Deacon and Alice Juarrrero and others speaks in terms of the interaction of ‘bottom-up’, physical reactions with ‘top-down’, causal constraints. Those latter kinds of factors are precisely what reductionism fails to consider.

See From Physical Causes to Organisms of Meaning, Steve Talbott.

This post could benefit from a clearer thesis, more structured argumentation, and substantial references to support its claims. As it is, it’s a grab bag of ideas and catch-phrases. Each historical and cultural point should be connected with well-defined arguments and evidence. The analogies and comparisons need deeper exploration and should be grounded in specific examples and references to provide credibility and coherence. It also combines purportedly factual statements with opinions, and switches tone between formal and casual. The comparison between a popular rock band and one of the giants of classical music is interesting but is not sufficiently developed to make a compelling point. And any clear statement of what ‘the Enlightenment’ means, and why and in what way its effects are pernicious or beneficial, is not made clear. But then, that would require a thesis, not a post.

I’m not going to enlighten you — EdwardC

Plainly.

Homeostasis is a state where a human being is in a stable state functioning. This state is commonly known as 'sobriety.' — Shawn

Homeostasis is a technical term from biology. ‘Stasis’ is a more accurate description of the normal state. Which leads us to the etymological root of ‘ecstacy’, that is based on the same root word:

ecstacy: late Middle English: from Old French extasie, via late Latin from Greek ekstasis ‘standing outside oneself’, based on ek- ‘out’ + histanai ‘to place’.

But then apart from the etymology, the meaning is:

1. an overwhelming feeling of great happiness or joyful excitement.
"there was a look of ecstasy on his face"
Similar:
rapture
bliss
elation
euphoria
…
Opposite:
misery
2. an emotional or religious frenzy or trance-like state, originally one involving an experience of mystic self-transcendence.

So perhaps the interesting philosophical question would be, why would being ‘outside oneself’ result in ‘great happiness or joyful excitement’? And, do intoxicants or hallucinogens genuinely induce such states?

Face it 180, life would hardly be worth living without Christians to bait. :rofl:

lower" organisms obviously respond to their environments, but I don't see how that equates to intentional behavior.
Just address that question or we will be unable to proceed. — Janus

Organisms not only react to stimuli but often do so in ways that are adaptive and goal-directed, suggesting a form of intentionality. This is seen in behaviors that enhance survival and reproduction, such as finding food, avoiding predators, and seeking mates. These behaviors imply a level of agency and purposiveness that goes beyond the deterministic nature of physical laws.

Furthermore, the internal regulatory mechanisms of organisms, such as homeostasis, also exhibit intentional-like behavior. These systems maintain stability through feedback loops, dynamically adjusting to changes in the environment to sustain life. This regulatory process involves a form of self-organization and information processing that seems distinct from non-living physical processes.

Such adaptive, purposive behavior cannot be entirely reduced to physical interactions because it involves a level of complexity and coordination that physical laws alone do not account for. That suggests that the principles governing biological systems include emergent properties and processes that arise from, but are not reducible to, their physical and chemical constituents.

Those are the kinds of considerations that are behind Terrence Deacon's 'Incomplete Nature', although they're also addressed in diverse ways by the theorists listed on the Third Way website.

I believe “supernatural” is a vacuous term because we do not yet know the limits of the natural world. — Art48

'Miracles are not against nature but against what we know of nature' ~ St Augustine.

First, what exactly do you mean by saying that intentionality is active at every level of organic life? — Janus

How is it not clear? That every organism acts intentionally (although not with the conscious self-awareness that characterises higher organisms.) And it re-introduces intentionality at a fundamental level, in contrast to the physicalist model, which posits that organic life is understandable in terms of the same laws which govern physical and chemical reactions. If there's anything 'transcendent' about it, it is simply that.

How to demonstrate that - it's more like a philosophical framework or metaphorical model, a way of thinking about life. We're all looking at the same data, but some frameworks or metaphors might be more consonant with the observations than others. The physicalist/materialist model is mechanistic, whereas this line of thinking recognises a basic distinction between the organic and the mechanistic.

Perhaps there was a good reason that Gotama refused to answer metaphysical questions; not just because he thought that such preoccupations would distract people from practice, but perhaps also because he realized that such question are inherently unanswerable. — Janus

But this question was probably never even considered by the Buddha. This is a question about science and scientific models. It is being actively explored by many scientists - the Third Way Evolution site has an index of scientists that are exploring these ideas.

I think the underlying philosophical rift is between the materialism pushed by the so-called 'ultra-darwinists', which sees everything as being explicable in terms of physical laws, and an emerging holistic model of life and mind. It's part of the overall decline of materialism as a model, which is occuring in many areas of science.

Is such a shift in models itself a scientific matter? Are the conflicts about the interpretations of physics scientific questions? I would say not - they're all concerned with questions of meaning and interpretation, and that definitely overflows the bounds of scientific observation. Philosophy of science (Kuhn et al) have been documenting that since the 1960's. Is that 'metaphysics'? In a way it is, but that doesn't mean it shouldn't be considered.

The philosophical point lurking behind this is the question of 'randomness'. There's a lot of heat generated around the idea that evolution is a 'random process' - which of course it actually isn't, even under neo-Darwinism, because natural selection is a far from random process. But there still is an element of chance in two senses - that the existence of life itself is posited by naturalism to be a kind of fluke occurence, the fortuitous combination of elements that happened to give rise to organic life. And that the process by which mutations occur is also largely fortuitous, with unfavourable mutations being eliminated while those favourable to replication of the genotype being preserved. But the overall paradigm is still one of the 'blind watchmaker', to use Richard Dawkin's memorable simile: the process itself is not driven by any kind of intelligence, but is ultimately reducible to, and explainable in terms of, physical principles, albeit represented in unique forms by the complexities of organic chemistry.

Notice that the 'Third Way' approach mentioned above is not an attempt to re-introduce an 'intelligent designer' or presiding intelligence. It's strangely similar to one ancient form of the Logos, namely, the Logos Spermatikos, similar to that described in the Catholic (New Advent) Encylopedia:

God, according to them (the Stoics), "did not make the world as an artisan does his work, but it is by wholly penetrating all matter that He is the demiurge of the universe" (Galen, "De qual. incorp." in "Fr. Stoic.", ed. von Arnim, II, 6); He penetrates the world "as honey does the honeycomb" (Tertullian, "Adv. Hermogenem", 44), this God so intimately mingled with the world is fire or ignited air; inasmuch as He is the principle controlling the universe, He is called Logos; and inasmuch as He is the germ from which all else develops, He is called the seminal Logos (logos spermatikos). This Logos is at the same time a force and a law, an irresistible force which bears along the entire world and all creatures to a common end, an inevitable and holy law from which nothing can withdraw itself, and which every reasonable man should follow willingly (Cleanthus, "Hymn to Zeus" in "Fr. Stoic." I, 527-cf. 537).

which I find a compelling metaphor (although I hasten to add, nothing like that is proposed on the Third Way site that I'm aware of.)

Teleology is a way of studying things which looks at things in relation to purpose, reason for being. — Metaphysician Undercover

That's correct: teleological explanations explain phenomena in terms of their purpose, rather than in terms of their antecedent causes. It seems a minor difference but a lot hinges on it.

The 'literal' question is as to whether evolution is directed and driven by an end goal or goals. If it would have this kind of purpose then the question becomes 'Whose purpose?" and of course the only intelligible answer would seem to be 'God's". — Janus

But this illustrates the very point I was making. The way we have to see it is that it must be either psychological - in the mind - or then it's theistic - as the agency of God. I'm attempting to deconstruct the worldview which makes it seem that these are the only choices. I think (and MU agrees in the above) that 'intentionality' is manifest at every level of organic life, and that it is purposeful.


The Forbes article:

Dennis Noble sees evidence of purposive and intentional evolution in our immune response to viruses. Detection of the invader triggers a flurry of rapid mutations in the genes of B cells, creating a legion of gene variants. These variants are antibodies, the most effective of which are deployed to combat the virus. In a defensive assault, the immune system self-modifies its own DNA. “It changes the genome. Not supposed to be possible,” says Noble. “Happens all the time.”

The conventional view is that this is still random natural selection—cranked up to warp speed inside the body during the lifetime of an individual organism. Noble agrees, but adds the observation that the organism’s immune system initiates and orchestrates the ramped up process, harnessing natural selection to fight off the invader. For Noble, this routine procedure offers clear evidence of the organism actively participating in its own evolution—it’s doing natural selection. This is an alternative theory of evolution where cognition is fundamental. In this theory, the smallest unit of life—cells—have some version of intelligence and intent that allows them to detect and respond to their environment. Noble clocks the immune response as a goal-directed pattern of behavior at the cellular level that scales to every level of organization within a living system. He believes we’re working ourselves into a sweat to exclude something so essential to evolution and to life as purpose and intention.

The article goes on:

Noble is part of The Third Way, a movement in evolutionary biology that views natural selection as part of a holistic, organism-centered process. He co-authored Evolution “on Purpose," published by MIT Press in 2023, which argues that organisms evolve with intention.

The Third Way site is here - I've been aware of it for a while, I read it from time to time. It's not aligned with any form of ID, but it's also sceptical of mainstream neo-darwinism. (I'm particularly drawn to the essays of Steve Talbott, which I encountered on The New Atlantis website.)

The historical background to the rejection of teleological explanations is tied to the advent of Galileo's physics which eliminated Aristotelian physics. But the idea of purpose and its absence is another matter.

What "naturalism" refers to is the loosest ball in this discussion. — Paine

What do you think is at stake in that passage you cited from The Sophist? Anything?

Of course he's no 'voice in the wilderness', he's a highly-respected scholar in his field. But don't you think that his declaration of the incompatibility of Platonism and naturalism might be considered 'dissident', or at least 'dissenting'? Banno often refers to surveys of academic philosophers who's views are overwhelmingly in favour of one or another form of naturalism. He's using his very well-earned seat at the table to question the mainstream.

I see what you’re saying, but I am inclined to think that the failure to think reflexively about what science does, and the methods a particular science uses, is not a limitation of a thing called science meant in some universal, ahistorical sense, but of a certain era of science which doesn’t recognize human becoming, including the wives we create, as open-ended, historical, and contextual. — Joshs

:100: That's where science, philosophy and culture are all going through massive changes. Science is becoming self aware! :party: The zenith of 'scientism' per se was probably around the end of the 19th to the middle of the last century. It still has considerable influence, but the times they are a'changin'.



wives...? :chin:

your view of what happened from then and now is more reliant upon recent scholarship than those who see no reason to question previous descriptions. — Paine

I've been upfront about my motivation and background, which is that I came to philosophy from a counter-cultural perspective, the quest for philosophical or spiritual illumination. My view is that some form of Platonism (specifically, realism about universals) is the real mainstream of Western philosophy, but that the tradition has been hijacked or subsumed by philosophical materialism. Hence my response when I saw the abstract of Gerson's Platonism and Naturalism (which I'm still only half-way finished):

Gerson contends that Platonism identifies philosophy with a distinct subject matter, namely, the intelligible world and seeks to show that the Naturalist rejection of Platonism entails the elimination of a distinct subject matter for philosophy. Thus, the possibility of philosophy depends on the truth of Platonism. From Aristotle to Plotinus to Proclus, Gerson clearly links the construction of the Platonic system well beyond simply Plato's dialogues, providing strong evidence of the vast impact of Platonism on philosophy throughout history. Platonism and Naturalism concludes that attempts to seek a rapprochement between Platonism and Naturalism are unstable and likely indefensible.

Consequently, I'm with 'the friends of the forms', whereas I think the predominant voice in modern philosophy is that of the 'earth-born ancestors'. As a result, much of what is taught in philosophy departments is in conflict with classical philosophy per se. (Which is why I said that Gerson is a 'dissident voice' in respect of many of his academic peers.)

Here's Gerson presenting the core of the ideas in that book, for those interested.

I took it to be implied by your earlier declaration that 'modernity is our cave'.
— Wayfarer

Fair point. I think we can be in the situation of the prisoner who becomes unshackled but has not escaped the cave. We can be aware of the sources that shape our understanding of things and also be aware that there are earlier sources that differ from these. — Fooloso4

:pray:

The idea that ancient texts were saying something other than established interpretations was through a recognition of their development through time. — Paine

That's getting close to the point that I've been pressing all along. And the reason for my interest in Gerson: he's a dissenting voice in the modern academy. (Thomas Nagel is another.)

Right. Scientism is the result of attempting to apply scientific methods to philosophical problems
— Wayfarer

I would argue that scientism involves the belief that the science-philosophy separation you’re suggesting is even possible. — Joshs

But don’t you see a distinction between legitimately empirical questions that are answerable in terms of data and measurement, and philosophical questions that can’t be addressed in those terms?

For instance:

Newtonian mechanics , like all scientific theories, also rests on a philosophical perspective. As a theory, its predictions are ‘good’ and ‘accurate’ according to a particular metaphysical way of thinking about things. The predictions of quantum physics are also good and accurate, but in relation to a changed metaphysical perspective. Both the old and the new physics use terms like mass and energy, but their qualitative meaning has shifted in subtle ways that, as you and Collinwood say, can’t be subsumed under the categories of true and false. The new physics isn’t simply ‘more true’ than the old, it is qualitatively different in its concepts, but in subtle ways that are easy to miss. — Joshs

Both Newtonian and quantum mechanics can be utilised successfully to achieve various goals - his development of calculus was later used to improve the accuracy of artillery fire. And as is well-known quantum mechanics plays an indispensable role in the technology we’re all using to conduct this conversation. Hence the well-known advice for those working in physics not to pursue the puzzling questions it seems to imply, but to ‘shut up and calculate’.

But what physics means is not itself a question for physics. ‘Scientism’ comprises not recognising that, or ignoring the fact that the meaning of scientific theories is not itself a scientific theory, or believing that science will “one day” explain the meaning.

Beauty, like love, is a very unfortunate word in our culture. Think ‘beauty queens’, the Hollywood icon, the poster girl or boy. I’m sure in times past, and older tongues, there were words that described kinds of beauty, like the beauty of an art or an aesthetic that our modern beauty fashions could never grasp or emulate. An example: that crusty old codger, Bertrand Russell, once said that mathematics has beauty, cold and austere. Mathematicians and physicists and engineers would get that, but nobody generally would say that math is beautiful. So maybe in the classical sense, there can be an association with the good and the beautiful, but it’s far from what those words convey in our modern cultural context.

The reality of human and animal purpose is not in question. The question as to whether nature itself exists to fulfill an overarching purpose ("overarching" because such a purpose would necessarily be beyond nature itself) seems to be an impossible question to frame coherently outside the context of the assumption of theism. — Janus

That’s the question I was exploring above:

as our culture is individualist, we tend to conceive of purpose and intentionality in terms of something an agent does. Purposes are enacted by agents. This is why, if the idea of purpose as being something inherent in nature is posited, it tends to be seen in terms of God or gods, which is then associated with an outmoded religious or animistic way of thought. I think something like that is at the nub of many of the arguments about evolution, design and intentionality, and the arguments over whether the Universe is or is not animated by purpose. — Wayfarer

As for the purpose of ‘nature as a whole’, I think that indeed frames the question in such a way that we could never discern an answer. We don’t know ‘the whole’, but only participate in and enact our roles and purposes within that larger context. But as Victor Frankl observed, those with the conviction that there is meaning and purpose in life generally do better than those without it. Call it faith, if you will, but I resist the facile claim that this amounts to ‘belief without evidence’.

Science doesn't deal in anything which is either unobservable or has no observable effects, so I don't find it surprising that it is not a scientific question — Janus

But this is why the question has assumed urgency in biology, in particular, as all living organisms obviously act purposefully. Of course, in physics, there is no question of purpose - it’s all action and reaction, describable according to mathematical laws. As that became a paradigm for knowledge generally, namely ‘physicalism’, then it was simply assumed that life itself was also purposeless, as physicalism assumes that physics is the master paradigm, of which organisms are but one instantiation. But this is just what is being challenged in this debate over whether and how organisms and evolutionary processes are purposeful.

The other question I would ask is how such an unanswerable (if not coherently unaskable) question could have any bearing on the philosophical issues around the human situation and human potential. — Janus

But this is exactly an instance of the kind of positivism that I keep saying you seem to advocate. Remember the exchange yesterday, about Wittgenstein’s complaint that modern culture seems to say that something either has a scientific solution, or no solution at all? Isn’t this what you’re implying? That if science can’t adjudicate the question, then there can’t be an answer to it?

I'd prefer if you would speak for yourself rather than asking me to read linked articles. Otherwise, I'll be left guessing as to what your own thoughts are, and I really don't have the time for that. — Janus

I did compose a lengthy response. I pinned the Forbes article because of its particular focus on the subject of the OP, and also to indicate that the question is a live issue and subject of debate, especially in biology.

I don't see any reason to think that is the case with nature, although the question is one of those imponderables which cannot be definitively answered. — Janus

In fact, the question of purpose, whether it is real or whether it is just imputed, seems to me a philosophical question par excellence. The fact that it’s *not* a scientific question, and why it’s not, is also a very interesting question.

So, you think it would be better if everyone thought the same and all find the same meaning in, and purpose for, life? — Janus

Not for a minute.

Why should we project thinking in terms of formal and final causes beyond the human context? — Janus

The ‘nature of purpose’ is the question posed in the original post. I feel that article I linked at least addresses it. The Aristotelian dimension places it in historical context.

Hey Art - now I see your name on that Youtube preso (which I haven't got around to viewing yet) I realise we corresponded in the 1990's.

which makes the point that materialism is a good (even indispensable) theory for making sense of the world but may not be true, just as Newtonian Physics is a good (even indispensable) theory for making sense of the world but is not true. — Art48

Right. Scientism is the result of attempting to apply scientific methods to philosophical problems.

From here:

I don't see why a lack of overarching purpose and meaning should diminish the importance of general human and particular individual purpose and meaning. — Janus

But doesn't it reduce it to a matter of opinion? The assumption of Greek philosophy, generally, was that reason, logos, animated the universe but was also the animating principle of the individual soul/psyche. Not that there's anything wrong with what you're saying - it's not meant as a personal criticism, but insofar as this is typically how us moderns view the world, in terms of our individual search for meaning.

I saw an account recently of the meaning of a teleological explanation: it is an explanation in terms of what something is for, rather than what conditions caused it. It doesn't sound like much, but really a lot hinges on that distinction.

For instance in Aristotle's fourfold causation, the final cause of a particular thing is its end goal or purpose. A mundane example is that the final cause of a match is fire, as the lighting of fires is the purpose of a match. But notice that in this case, the final cause comes after the striking of the match, being the reason for the existence of the match.

The efficient and material causes are the composition of the matchhead and the act of striking it. That is very much how science since the scientific revolution has tended to view causality: what causes something to happen, in terms of the antecedent combination of causes giving rise to an effect. Cause in the Aristotelian sense has largely been dropped. That's where a lot of the controversy about the so-called meaninglessness of the scientific worldview originates. It's also what is addressed in the Forbes Magazine article I linked above - and it's a bitter controversy, indeed, with a lot of heavyweights slugging it out. So trivial, it isn't.

The result is that now we have created a separation between the intentional acts of conscious agents, and the "purposeful" acts of other living creatures. But in truth, to understand biology and all the various activities of the multitude of living beings, along with the process of evolution, we need that continuity, between the purposeful acts of other living creatures, and the intentional acts of human agents. In reality, the intentional acts of human agents are just an extension, another specific incidence, of a purposeful act of a living creature. — Metaphysician Undercover

Agree. (I think this opens out into a discussion of Terrence Deacon's book Incomplete Nature, where he develops the idea of 'ententional processes' in nature although I've only read the first half of it.)

Our bodies and our minds are made of the matter in the universe, and the only change is the complexity of the structures that 'life' "creates". — Caerulea-Lawrence

But it's a difference that makes a significant difference. Look at the following nonsensensical words:

Blimp wozel finty glorm, cradd zifter lorny daple. Splexh voond zater flink, draff kipto glenty. Wexal dramp yoter blisk, quist nober frinty wald. Blorp kinfa jexty mavel, tind skrop lexin gader. Vekil drorn wopsy glent, kelfy blishd toren valk. Plunty miglo fenst joder, krelf zent flompy wexal.

They're all "just letters", right? What distinguishes that paragraph from the rest of the text on this page is that, absent the organisation imposed by language-using agents, it conveys no meaning.

isn't it more reasonable to say it is Atoms and matter having a living experience — Caerulea-Lawrence

But there's nothing in the theory of 'atoms and matter' which account for the nature of experience. That is the subject of the well-known David Chalmer's paper Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness, a perennial topic on this forum, and which spawned an entire academic industry of 'consciousness studies'.

I've responded to your post in a thread about purpose

I find being told to read something in lieu of a response is patronizing — Paine

I'm sorry if it came across that way. It's more that, 'this is a deep and multi-faceted topic, which is extensively treated in this book.' As the thread is about the work of Lloyd Gerson, then I referred to another of his books, Platonism and Naturalism. And I did then proceed to provide a direct response.

If by naturalism you mean the problems that have arise in the wake of European Enlightenment, then my answer is no, my interpretation is not influenced by the problems of European Enlightenment. — Fooloso4

I took it to be implied by your earlier declaration that 'modernity is our cave'.

To the extent that the claims of the earth-born line up with naturalism it is already present in Plato long before the European Enlightenment. — Fooloso4

Of course. Materialism is as ancient as philosophy itself. The Cārvāka of ancient India were materialists. Enlightenment materialism was represented by scholars such as Baron D'Holbach, who 'sees nothing but bodies in motion'. Like its opposite, it's a perennial theme in philosophy.

It isn’t robust relativism that leads to skepticism, but Idealism and empiricism, by not realizing that the practices of meaning we find ourselves enmeshed within are already real and true, already of the world, absent of any need to valid them on the basis of conformity to anything outside of these already world-enmeshed practices , ‘beyond the contingent’. — Joshs

Well, I don't want to enter into a long dissertation on Buddhist philosophy, other than to point out that the early Buddhist texts insist that:

There is, monks, an unborn — unbecome — unmade — unfabricated. If there were not that unborn — unbecome — unmade — unfabricated, there would not be the case that escape from the born — become — made — fabricated would be discerned. But precisely because there is an unborn — unbecome — unmade — unfabricated, escape from the born — become — made — fabricated is discerned. — Nibbāna Sutta

But this ought not to be thought of as a 'philosophical absolute', in the way of Western philosophical idealism. The principle in Buddhist philosophy is that it is something the individual has to know and see for him or herself by the path of insight.

It would have been helpful if you had mention Hadot in the first place. — Ludwig V

Only came to mind as I composed my reply to your earlier post.

I think what we call reality (human thought and perspectives) are contingent artefacts (products of social construction and language) which more or less work pragmatically, and none of our experiences are 'true' in any transcendent sense. Truth is not about accurately representing reality but rather about what works within a particular context or discourse. — Tom Storm

I agree that everything is contingent. The Buddha’s dying words were supposed to have been something like ‘all compound things are subject to decay’. But your sentiment is ultimately a form of relativism or scepticism, I would think. The difficulty is, that to even attempt to name or indicate something beyond the contingent or constructed, brings it within the scope of a ‘community of discourse’ which is once again one of social construction and language. But I think there’s been an awareness of that for as long as religion itself has existed. I believe that this was why the origin of the now-tired name Yahweh was a string of unpronounceable consonants - a name so sacred that to say it, brought it into the profane realm.

I'm not aware of any specific arguments that everybody needs a radical transformation of character in order to know anything. — Ludwig V

On the contrary, I think classical philosophy has always demanded something of that approach. I’m thinking for example of Pierre Hadot’s ‘Philosophy as a Way of Life’. Look at the origin of philosophy with Socrates - his constant search for the real meaning of justice, of virtue, of piety. The way the classical tradition developed. There’s a term I learned of - actually, it was in an interview between Jacob Needleman and Krishnamurti - which is ‘metanoia’. It doesn’t take a lot of knowledge of Greek word roots to guess what that connotes.

As for Hadot,

According to Hadot’s position as developed in What is Ancient Philosophy?, philosophical discourse must in particular be situated within a wider conception of philosophy that sees philosophy as necessarily involving a kind of existential choice or commitment to a specific way of living one’s entire life. According to Hadot, one became an ancient Platonist, Aristotelian, or Stoic in a manner more comparable to the twenty-first century understanding of religious conversion, rather than the way an undergraduate or graduate student chooses to accept and promote, for example, the theoretical perspectives of Nietzsche, Badiou, Davidson, or Quine. …

For Hadot…the means for the philosophical student to achieve the “complete reversal of our usual ways of looking at things” epitomized by the Sage were a series of spiritual exercises. These exercises encompassed all of those practices still associated with philosophical teaching and study: reading, listening, dialogue, inquiry, and research. However, they also included practices deliberately aimed at addressing the student’s larger way of life, and demanding daily or continuous repetition: practices of attention (prosoche), meditations (meletai), memorizations of dogmata, self-mastery (enkrateia), the therapy of the passions, the remembrance of good things, the accomplishment of duties, and the cultivation of indifference towards indifferent things (PWL 84). …Hadot’s use of the adjective “spiritual” (or sometimes “existential”) indeed aims to capture how these practices, like devotional practices in the religious traditions are aimed at generating and reactivating a constant way of living and perceiving in prokopta, despite the distractions, temptations, and difficulties of life. For this reason, they call upon far more than “reason alone.” — IEP

As regards the empirical claims of religious traditions - of course it is true that these are made, but ‘reproducibility’ is another matter (especially in respect of the resurrection!) But I recall an instruction I read once, that the student (‘prokopta’, or ‘preceptor’) can become aware of certain kinds of evidential experience in their quality of life as a consequence of right realisation, although for obvious reasons that is not necessarily something ascertainable in the third person.

I would say that a belief must be capable of being true and most people think that religious doctrines are true or false. — Ludwig V

I haven't been contributing to this thread, but I'd like to pitch in here. The question is the criterion by which one decides what is true?

Plainly if the question is an empirical one, then the criteria can be provided accordingly - if I believe that 'ice melts at 0 degrees celsius' then it's not hard to validate or falsify such a claim. And there is a massive network of interlocking facts which can be validated according to those criteria, or according to valid inferences based on them. That is, of course, the nowadays massive body of facts established by the empirical sciences.

Religious doctrines are not empirical as a matter of definition (even though many religious texts contain purportedly first-person accounts of real experiences.) So the question becomes, how to ascertain their likely truth or falsity? The fallback for a lot of people is, if they're not empirically verifiable, then they are a matter of opinion, or perhaps of individual conviction. But both are in some important sense subjective, or, one is tempted to say, merely subjective. As distinct from the vast domain of facts which are verifiable 'in the public square', so to speak. Objective facts, in other words.

You may not be able to apply a certain framework to the claim, but I "believe" there's a Yule log in my fridge, it's because I have sufficient reason to believe so. That is, on the personal level, knowledge. — AmadeusD

The difficult point about religious doctrines, in particular, is that they generally demand certainly qualities of character. There are things that 'only the wise can see'. And why? because you have to be wise to see them! One can be worldly-wise - 'Oh, they're all like that when they start out. Just wait a while and see what they think after a couple of years!' And that comes in many varieties. But religious insight, and also philosophical understanding, which are related, if not quite the same, requires something else - a quality of character.

Here is a statement from a highly-regarded Catholic philosopher, Joseph Pieper, with whom I have only passing familiarity:

Our minds do not—contrary to many views currently popular—create truth. Rather, they conform to the truth of things given in creation. And such conformity is possible only as the moral virtues become deeply embedded in our character, a slow and halting process. We have "lost the awareness of the close bond that links the knowing of truth to the condition of purity.” That is, in order to know the truth we must become persons of a certain sort. The full transformation of character that we need will, in fact, finally require the virtues of faith, hope, and love. And this transformation will not necessarily—perhaps not often—be experienced by us as easy or painless. Hence the transformation of self that we must—by God’s grace—undergo “perhaps resembles passing through something akin to dying.”

Myself, I'm not Catholic, but this nevertheless rings true , at least to me (source).

Yes, I thought it a good article. Ray Monk wrote a highly-regarded biography of Wittgenstein, which is on my 'I really must get around to reading' list.

You’ll notice I deleted my remark before you replied. I thought better of it. But do peruse the article from which it came to see more context.

(on second thoughts.....)

he did not oppose the practice of science, only the claim it replaced everything else. — Paine

My view also.

I had not considered it as difference in motivation, only as a statement about what "science" does or does not provide. — Paine

(Wittgenstein's) work is opposed, as he once put it, to "the spirit which informs the vast stream of European and American civilisation in which all of us stand." Nearly 50 years after his death, we can see, more clearly than ever, that the feeling that he was swimming against the tide was justified. If we wanted a label to describe this tide, we might call it "scientism," the view that every intelligible question has either a scientific solution or no solution at all. It is against this view that Wittgenstein set his face. — Ray Monk, Wittgenstein's Forgotten Lesson

The biggest problem with this fixed meaning of form and anamnesis is that it becomes a kind of form itself that exists separately from those who speak of it. — Paine

I quite agree that the the 'fixing of doctrine' becomes a problem with many interpretations of Platonism - that is the source of dogma, I would have thought, which amounts to the formulaic representations of principles, as distinct from the living insight that they were supposed to convey. The ossification of insight into dogma has happened many times over history.

Thanks indeed for that quote from The Sophist, I can see how important that argument is in the overall scheme. Treating the form of a particular as 'a separate thing' is the crux of the problem. That is what the sections in Eric Perl address, in The Meaning of Separation, the Levels of Being, and the Ascent of the Soul.

We had a discussion about it a few months back and I'll refer to a very long post which summarises the relevant points from those chapters.

"I think naturalism is right, but I also think science forces upon us a very disillusioned “take” on reality. It forces us to say ‘No’ in response to many questions to which most everyone hopes the answers are ‘Yes.’ These are the questions about purpose in nature, the meaning of life, the grounds of morality, the significance of consciousness, the character of thought, the freedom of the will, the limits of human self-understanding, and the trajectory of human history." ~ Alex Rosenberg.

This could be Wittgenstein saying: "We feel that even when all possible scientific questions have been answered, the problems of life remain completely untouched." Tractatus 6.52 — Paine

I don't agree at all, I think they're motivation is completely different. It is something which Rosenberg celebrates and Wittgenstein mourns. Alex Rosenberg is a militant atheist which Wittgenstein, despite his reticence, never was. Remember he used to carry around Tolstoy's edition of the Gospels during his war service. The 'mystical aphorisms' in section 6 of the Tractatus, about the transcendent nature of ethics, would never be found in anything Rosenberg writes.

In part what needs to be addressed is the relationship between your understanding of naturalism and thinking and culture. — Fooloso4

That is a very big question. I'll try and tackle it without turning it into a dissertation.

As I've said many times, I first came to philosophy through my autodidactic attempt to understand the meaning of spiritual enlightenment. That's what drew me to Buddhism, as they're explicit about it. But I also found references to enlightenment are in the Western cultural tradition (see SEP Divine Illumination). Examples appear prominently in Christian mysticism, but then, Aquinas has some connection with that, and he was also a conduit for the grand tradition of Greek philosophy which represents (in Plotinus) a school of the philosophia perennis*.

I will choose a passage from a Buddhist scholar to illustrate what I see as the problem of naturalism and culture that have arisen in the wake of the European Enlightenment (from a conference keynote speech, 1994.)

The early founders of the Scientific Revolution in the seventeenth century — such as Galileo, Boyle, Descartes and Newton — were deeply religious men, for whom the belief in the wise and benign Creator was the premise behind their investigations into lawfulness of nature. However, while they remained loyal to the theistic premises of Christian faith, the drift of their thought severely attenuated the organic connection between the divine and the natural order, a connection so central to the premodern world view. They retained God only as the remote Creator and law-giver of Nature and sanctioned moral values as the expression of the Divine Will, the laws decreed for man by his Maker. In their thought a sharp dualism emerged between the transcendent sphere and the empirical world. The realm of "hard facts" ultimately consisted of units of senseless matter governed by mechanical laws, while ethics, values and ideals were removed from the realm of facts and assigned to the sphere of an interior subjectivity.

It was only a matter of time until, in the trail of the so-called Enlightenment, a wave of thinkers appeared who overturned the dualistic thesis central to this world view in favor of the straightforward materialism. This development was a following through of the reductionistic methodology to its final logical consequences. Once sense perception was hailed as the key to knowledge and quantification came to be regarded as the criterion of actuality, the logical next step was to suspend entirely the belief in a supernatural order and all it implied. Hence finally an uncompromising version of mechanistic materialism prevailed, whose axioms became the pillars of the new world view. Matter is now the only ultimate reality, and divine principle of any sort dismissed as sheer imagination. (@Paine - this is represented by Rosenberg.)

The triumph of materialism in the sphere of cosmology and metaphysics had the profoundest impact on human self-understanding. The message it conveyed was that the inward dimensions of our existence, with its vast profusion of spiritual and ethical concerns, is mere adventitious superstructure. The inward is reducible to the external, the invisible to the visible, the personal to the impersonal. Mind becomes a higher order function of the brain, the individual a node in a social order governed by statistical laws. All humankind's ideals and values are relegated to the status of illusions: they are projections of biological drives, sublimated wish-fulfillment. Even ethics, the philosophy of moral conduct, comes to be explained away as a flowery way of expressing personal preferences. Its claim to any objective foundation is untenable, and all ethical judgments become equally valid. The ascendancy of relativism is complete. — Bhikkhu Bodhi, A Buddhist Response to the Contemporary Dilemmas of Human Existence

Of course, many qualifications and caveats could be made, but I chose this passage because of it's straightforwardness.

However over many years, I've turned back towards the Christian Platonism which is actually our shared cultural background, and sought to understand enlightenment in those terms. I think Western culture has resources which Buddhism lacks, and besides, the 'crisis of the European sciences', as Husserl called it, was a European malady, and so the remedy needs to be sought in those terms.

And in any case, the times are well and truly a'changing. The kind of hardline materialism that this passage describes still exists, but science itself is dynamic and always changing, and the 'systems science' and new approaches in biology and physics are challenging that kind of dogmatic materialism. Nevertheless, naturalism is the assumed consensus of a secular age with a kind of unspoken convention about what kinds of ideas will or will not be admitted into consideration.

The concept of a vertical distinction between living and non-living things, and among living things themselves, conflicts with contemporary cultural and philosophical perspectives, particularly those grounded in natural science. Naturalism, with its emphasis on physical processes as the fundamental reality, will usually reject such metaphysical distinctions. It tends to flatten the Aristotelian hierarchy into a horizontal plane where differences among entities are seen in terms of varying arrangements of matter rather than different degrees or kinds of being. — Wayfarer

*Re the Philosophia Perennis - I am wary of the so-called 'traditionalists', René Guenon, Frithjoff Schuon, et al - I think it's something of a cult movement, notwithstanding some convergent interests.

How is this a different sense of "purpose" from when I said the purpose of the heart is to circulate blood? To circulate blood is "a thing to be done", by the heart, it is "the reason" for the heart. If the heart's effort is successful, it achieves its purpose. It's the very same sense of "purpose". — Metaphysician Undercover

Isn't the difference that one is consciously intended, and the other isn't? Isn't there a valid distinction to be drawn between conscious purpose and the autonomic system? One does not have conscious control over how fast your hair grows or your peristalsis.


Anyway, here's the 'meta-philosophical' point. That as our culture is individualist, we tend to conceive of purpose and intentionality in terms of something an agent does. Purposes are enacted by agents. This is why, if the idea of purpose as being something inherent in nature is posited, it tends to be seen in terms of God or gods, which is then associated with an outmoded religious or animistic way of thought. I think something like that is at the nub of many of the arguments about evolution, design and intentionality, and the arguments over whether the Universe is or is not animated by purpose.

This Forbes Magazine article just came up, on Dennis Noble’s quest to have purpose admitted back into biology

Evolution May Be Purposeful And It’s Freaking Scientists Out (wasn’t paywalled for me).