My own thought experiment is of thinking about how life would have been if I had not existed. — Jack Cummins

non cogito ergo non sum

For example; I have come to realise that extremely inprobable events and coincidences happen all the time. — Punshhh

The story of Jung and the scarab beetle is one of the most famous examples he used to illustrate his concept of synchronicity.

Once Carl Jung was treating a young woman who was a very difficult patient. She was highly educated and deeply rational, so much so that she had "sealed herself" off from emotional or psychological progress. Jung felt he was at an impasse with her, as she was resistant to his therapeutic attempts to get her to a "more human understanding." He hoped that something "unexpected and irrational" would happen to break through her intellectual defenses.

One day, she was in his office telling him about a dream she had the previous night. In the dream, she was given a piece of jewelry in the shape of a golden scarab beetle. As she was recounting this dream, Jung heard a gentle tapping sound on the window behind him. He turned around and saw a large flying insect tapping against the pane, seemingly trying to get into the dark room.

Jung opened the window and caught the insect as it flew in. He was astonished to discover that it was a scarabaeid beetle, a common rose-chafer, whose golden-green color was the closest thing in that region to a "golden scarab."

Jung handed the beetle to his patient and said, "Here is your scarab."

The event had a profound effect on the woman. Her rigid, rational worldview was shattered by the coincidence of her dream and the appearance of the real beetle. Jung noted that this "broke the ice of her intellectual resistance," and the treatment was able to proceed with satisfactory results.

You're conflating law realism with physicalism — Relativist

From our previous discussions, I presumed you had D M Armstrong in mind, who is an avowed physicalist. Are the 'law realists' who are not physicalist? (Coming to think of it there would be.)

I’d say that “law realism” really just smuggles Platonism back in through the side door. It appeals to universals to ground necessity, but universals are not observable particulars — they are grasped only by reason. That makes them, in effect, intelligible structures postulated to explain phenomena, which is a Platonic move, whether admitted or not. Kant on the other hand accepted that these lawful relations are indispensable for science, but located them in the activity of the mind as a priori conditions of experience. They were not ‘in re’ but ‘in intellectus’

The difficulty is that law realists won’t acknowledge it, because it thinks mind itself is simply the product of those same physical processes which it situates ‘in things’. But that is circular: the only way we ever know about universals or laws is through the activity of reason, the mind’s ability to discern likeness within diversity and to infer necessity where the senses show only succession. To explain mind as product of the very processes whose necessity it is positing is to fall into a circularity. The scientific realist appeal to universals already presupposes rational relations that cannot be explained away as a physical mechanism, and it’s here that the Platonic and Kantian implications reassert themselves.

the Law Realists — Relativist

Such as?

You really need to have a look at Alicia Juarrero Dynamics in Action. The book starts with the question ‘what is the difference between a wink and a blink?’ and then proceeds to review ‘action theory’ in the context of that question. (I’ll add that I haven’t finished the book nor really assimilated it yet but it seems directly relevant.) Also see https://www.meaningcrisis.co/episode-6-aristotle-kant-and-evolution/

I recognise that, it's David Bentley Hart's latest All Things are Full of Gods. And he states exactly what I was about to write, which is the vexed relationship between logical necessity and physical causation. I've been drafting some material on this question, which I'll present below.,

Once again, I'll situate this historically. Pre David Hume, there was an assumption that the world was intelligible — that is, there was an intrinsic link between the order of nature and the order of reason. Causes were understood in terms of formal and final causes, which often carried logical or conceptual necessity. For example, water flows downhill because that is part of its nature — a blend of formal and final causation. More from Hart:

In the pre-modern vision of things, the cosmos had been seen as an inherently purposive structure of diverse but integrally inseparable rational relations — for instance, the Aristotelian aitia, which are conventionally translated as “causes,” but which are nothing like the uniform material “causes” of the mechanistic philosophy. And so the natural order was seen as a reality already akin to intellect. Hence the mind, rather than an anomalous tenant of an alien universe, was instead the most concentrated and luminous expression of nature’s deepest essence. This is why it could pass with such wanton liberty through the “veil of Isis” and ever deeper into nature’s inner mysteries.

David Hume broke this supposed relationship. He argued that causation is not something we can deduce from reason alone — it's only ever inferred from constant conjunctions: "We see A followed by B, and infer causation." Hence, causation is not logically necessary but contingent and habitual.

All reasonings concerning matter of fact seem to be founded on the relation of cause and effect. But... the connection between cause and effect is not a product of reasoning, but of custom. — An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding

This cleaved the empirical from the rational, leading to the so-called Humean bifurcation: facts (contingent, empirical) vs. norms/logical truths (necessary, conceptual). And that is still writ large in so many of the dialogues on this forum. Many of the contributors I will talk to here - Apustimologist, Relativist, Philosophim, to name a few - assume that, as the brain is physical, and the brain is the source of throught, then thought too has a physical basis. In fact they can't even conceive of there being an alternative to that, it is so firmly a tenet of modern culture.

I think one way to address this rupture is through what John Vervaeke calls relevance realization — a contemporary cognitive science account that begins to heal the divide Hume opened between logical structure and physical causality.

Vervaeke argues that cognition — especially human intelligence — is not a matter of brute computation or mechanistic stimulus-response. Rather, it's grounded in our dynamic ability to interpret what is relevant in a given situation, from among an almost infinite range of possible inputs, actions, and interpretations. This isn’t something that can be fully formalized or predicted — it’s emergent, self-organizing, and constrained by the organism's goals, embodiment, and interaction with the world.

In this light, cognition is not just caused — it's structured. That is, our awareness of the world is shaped by a salience landscape, a kind of lived topography of what stands out, what matters, and what calls for action. And this is not imposed on a passive agent; it is co-constituted by organism and environment ('co-arising'). The world does not merely act on us through physical causes — it is disclosed to us through a structure of intelligibility that is tied to our biological, emotional, and social existence.

What’s significant here is that this structure of salience and relevance is normative and existential in character — it allows for truth and error, insight and illusion, precisely because it is not just reducible to efficient causes. Vervaeke’s insight is that intelligence is the capacity to realize what is relevant — and this is not simply a logical deduction nor a chain of physical causes, but an enacted form of knowing by being, to borrow Hart’s phrase.

This begins to undo the Humean bifurcation. Relevance realization is causal — grounded in the biological dynamics of neural networks, evolution, and interaction — but it also has logical structure, in the sense that it underwrites all higher-order cognition, including our grasp of concepts, categories, language, and truth itself. But the normative aspect recognises that for us, as intelligent rational agents, the fact that things matter cannot be captured in reductionist or physical terms.

In a way, it returns us to something like the Aristotelian sense of logos as both reason and structure — where mind is not a ghost in the machine, but the expression of nature’s capacity for self-disclosure. The very idea of a "veil of Isis" only makes sense if there is something behind the veil that is able to be seen — and something within us that is capable of seeing it. That is the intuition the pre-modern world preserved — and one that Vervaeke’s work is attempting to recover in post-cognitive-scientific terms.

It doesn’t mean reverting to pre-scientific metaphysics, but it does mean questioning the flattening effect of a purely mechanistic view of causality. In a salience-structured world, causation isn't just physical interaction — it’s also the enactment of meaning. And meaning, far from being a subjective gloss on an indifferent universe, becomes a central feature of how the world comes into presence at all.

In the one paper I’ve read about Frege, he describes logic as ‘the laws of thought’. ‘Frege on Knowing the Third Realm’, Tyler Burge. The thing is, logic connects thoughts by way of necessity. Causation itself is physical.

couldn't believe my eyes when Trump started doing whatever he wanted and neither the Senate nor the court stopped him. The system of checks and balances stopped working? How did it happen that he can do almost whatever he wants? Isn't that a decline? — Astorre

Indeed. I'm in Australia, and here, most people - a huge majority, in fact - are shocked, frightened and appalled by what's happening in America under Trump. There's some degree of cynicism about the US here, but probably much less than other places - my parents (who lived through WWII, one of my father's brothers died in the Pacific Theatre) never ceased to say that 'MacArthur saved us from invasion from the Japanese'. So in my household, America was always the 'light on the hill'. My mother wept bitter tears when Kennedy was assasinated (I was ten). So I've been extremely dissappointed by the Trump phenomenon, ever since it started - it is the victory (for now), of greed, of hatred and cynicism. Anyway this isn't the Trump thread but as the topic came up....

Hey no apologies necessary, it’s only that ‘landslide victory’ is yet another Trump exaggeration so should be called out.

He (Trump) won by a large margin. — Astorre

Not that large:

• 2024: Trump won the popular vote with a lead of about 1.5% over Kamala Harris. This was the first time he won the national popular vote in a presidential election.
• 2020: Joe Biden won the popular vote by 4.5% over Trump.
• 2016: Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by 2.1% over Trump, despite losing the Electoral College.
• 2012: Barack Obama won by 3.9% over Mitt Romney.
• 2008: Barack Obama won by 7.3% over John McCain.

As in, Berkeley is logically consistent and Kant allows a distinction between the unknowable noumena (the ontologically real) and the phenomena (the mentally known). Those folks aren't muddling epistemology with ontology. — Hanover

:up:

Why not say that there is something mental in the measuring device? — JuanZu

Sure - as I already said, it’s a product of our design. In other words whatever ‘mentality’ it possesses is ours.

I believe Timothy has addressed this adequately in his subsequent post.

To know anything in total one must know everything, which is impossible. This leads to a limited sort of fallibilism. — Count Timothy von Icarus

We don't see things as they are in themselves, one might say.

That may be part of the reason we find QM so hard to understand, we don't have the type of intuitions that would help up make sense of the phenomena. — Manuel

I think there are interpretations that make sense of quantum physics Ruth Kastner's transactional interpretation, and The Timeless Wave (especially the section on QBism)

To me, that sounds like the ghost in the machine — JuanZu

I know! That conditions your approach to the issue, where it is something to be avoided at all costs. But that is a consequence of the very 'Cartesian division' that this thread is about. If there is a ghost, it is the ghost of the dualism that radically separates mind and body, matter and meaning, and then seeks what is real only in the measurable.

The modern mind-body problem arose out of the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, as a direct result of the concept of objective physical reality that drove that revolution. Galileo and Descartes made the crucial conceptual division by proposing that physical science should provide a mathematically precise quantitative description of an external reality extended in space and time, a description limited to spatiotemporal primary qualities such as shape, size, and motion, and to laws governing the relations among them. Subjective appearances, on the other hand -- how this physical world appears to human perception -- were assigned to the mind, and the secondary qualities like color, sound, and smell were to be analyzed relationally, in terms of the power of physical things, acting on the senses, to produce those appearances in the minds of observers. It was essential to leave out or subtract subjective appearances and the human mind -- as well as human intentions and purposes -- from the physical world in order to permit this powerful but austere spatiotemporal conception of objective physical reality to develop. — Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos, Pp 35-36

For me, if there is no Ghost in the machine the answer no longer lies in how the machine resembles us, but in how we resemble the machine. — JuanZu

And that is the cost — the de-humanisation is the legacy of this division. When you say “the machine provokes a response in us,” you’re still trying to frame the matter purely in terms of physical causation. But signs are not physical things. They are relations, interpretations, meanings — irreducible to mechanism, yet not “ghostly” either. This is precisely the false dichotomy that the ghost of Descartes has saddled us with. The irony is that by trying to exorcise the ghost, we remain haunted by it. The world this ghost inhabits is one in which the entire cosmos is stripped of interiority and meaning, and we ourselves are left as the orphaned offspring of blind physical causes that somehow, against all odds, have given rise to mind.

Nagel describes how the scientific revolution created this austere conception of objectivity by stripping away appearances, meaning, and intention. But there are many emerging alternatives. Biosemiotics, for example, begins from the insight that living systems are already engaged in the interpretation of signs, not merely pushed around by causes. Phenomenology and existentialism seek to restore the first-person perspective that the cartesian divide occludes. Enactivism, likewise, emphasises that cognition is not something injected into an otherwise meaningless world, but a mode of sense-making that arises through our embodied engagement with it. Both perspectives see through the ghost by refusing the dualism itself: the world is neither “mere matter” devoid of meaning, nor a projection of a private subjectivity, but a field of ongoing interactions where significance is intrinsic to life and mind.

The point isn’t that instruments are “out of this world,” but that they’re not just neutral parts of nature either. They’re artifacts manufactures to register specific events in a communicable and repeatable manner. That means they embody our intentions, and precisely there the epistemic cut reappears — between what simply happens in nature and what is meaningful as information. There's a really fundamental ontological divide there which you can't simply paper over by declaring instruments 'natural'.

Once we naturalise the measuring device, it becomes something external to subjectivity. — JuanZu

Unfortunately for that argument, devices are not naturally-occurring phenomena.They embody our intentions.

I take your point that we should not confuse subjectivity with the role of the measuring apparatus. Of course it is the detector, not personal awareness, that interacts with the system. But the question that persists — and this is what makes the problem metaphysical — is: why does the interaction only count as a measurement when it enters the domain of observables, that is, when it becomes information available to us?

In other words, the physics itself says that quantum systems evolve continuously according to the Schrödinger equation until a “measurement” occurs. We can naturalise the apparatus, but we have still not eliminated the conceptual distinction between interaction in general and the interaction that produces definite outcomes. This is why Copenhagen does not simply dissolve into realism: the transition from indeterminate states to determinate observations remains stubbornly tied to the framework of knowledge, including the observer - not just to physical process. That is the sense in which it transgresses objectivity.

That’s what I was getting at by mentioning Berkeley and d’Espagnat. Not that the ‘mind causes reality’ in a gross sense, but that the very structure of quantum theory reopens the question of how far reality can be described apart from the conditions of observation. That’s why Berkeley often crops up in these conversations: he represents one pole in the dialectic, so to speak. After all there’s plainly a resonance between Bohr’s ‘no phenomenon is a real phenomenon until it is observed’ and ‘esse est percipe’. It is what caused Einstein to ask ‘does the moon not continue to exist when nobody is looking?’.

Mind you Bohr himself strenuously resisted any idea of subjectivity in the obvious sense. He didn’t say that consciousness collapses the wavefunction (that was Wigner, later, but even he then later abandoned the idea); Rather, Bohr insisted that what counts as a “phenomenon” in quantum mechanics is the indivisible whole of the system-plus-the-measuring-apparatus. The observer enters only insofar as we need a shared, classical description to record and communicate the outcome. But this is precisely what raises the philosophical tension: even while Bohr denied the role of subjectivity, his insistence that physics can only speak in terms of observables leaves open the question of how far quantum theory describes nature as it is, apart from the conditions of our access to it. In other words it calls the ideal of complete objectivity into question.

Thank you.

I don't know Scholastic philosophy very deeply, but I thought that the concept of intelligibility meant that we can know what is real in the physical world as well. — J

Nor do I, but the theme I'm exploring is more like a current in the history of ideas, which shows up in Scholastic philosophy. But what was 'real' to the scholastics, was not the physical world as such. When we say “physical world,” we usually mean what modern physics investigates—matter, energy, and their interactions. But for St. Thomas, there was no such concept as a self-subsisting “physical” realm. The world was composed of created beings, each a union of form and matter, whose being itself is dependent on God as ipsum esse subsistens (being itself). In that sense, he would not have recognized “the physical world” in the sense we do today.

Summa Theologiae I, q. 85, a. 1 (On whether our intellect can know material things)

“The intellect does not know matter except as it is under form.”
(intellectus non cognoscit materiam nisi secundum quod est sub forma)

Sensible Form and Intelligible Form:



The Cultural Impact of Empiricism



How this relates to 'Idealism in Context'

The thesis is that the medievals operated within a participatory ontology — a “knowing by being,” where intelligibility arises through the interplay of form and matter, and ultimately through participation in God’s act of being. In this framework, “matter alone” was unintelligible; as Aquinas put it, “prime matter cannot be known in itself, but only through form” (per Eric Perl).

This was increasingly challenged by the emerging paradigm of modernity, which sought to secure knowledge through objectivity — facts conceived as mind-independent, accessible to a detached observer. The sense of separateness entailed by this paradigm was alien to the scholastic worldview.

Idealism arises in early modern philosophy as a reaction against this development. There are of course caveats: Berkeley converges with Aquinas in rejecting the idea of an unknowable material substrate, yet diverges in rejecting universals. Kant, meanwhile, re-interprets hylomorphism in transcendental terms, shifting form and matter into the structures of cognition. But in their different ways, both Berkeley and Kant resisted the notion of a self-subsistent physical domain, independent of mind altogether.

---------------

The lived realization you talk about refers to Husserl's epoche. — Constance

Quite. There is also a geneological relation between Buddhism and Pyrrhonic scepticism, purportedly owing to Pyrrho of Elis travelling to Gandhara (today's Kandahar in Afghanistan, but then a Buddhist cultural centre) and sitting with the Buddhist philosophers. See Epochē and Śūnyatā.

To really do this, I am convinced one has to leave standard relations with the world behind, a monumental task. — Constance

Renunciation, in a word.

The tree is still a tree, the clock a clock — Constance

'First, there is a mountain; then there is no mountain; then there is' ~ Dogen Zen-ji

'If one takes the everyday representation as the sole standard of all things, then philosophy is always something deranged' ~ Martin Heidegger, 'What is a Thing?'

I have zero idea what you’re talking about.

But I did google ‘’life in North Korea’ from which:

Forced Labor:
Many North Koreans, including children, are forced to work on farms, in factories, and in political prison camps.
Food Insecurity:
Millions suffer from malnutrition and lack of adequate food, with prisoners sometimes eating insects and rats to survive.
Infrastructure:
Basic infrastructure, such as electricity and clean water, is underdeveloped, making daily tasks like washing and hygiene challenging.
Limited Information:
Access to the internet is restricted, and state-controlled TV channels are the only source of media.

According to many reliable sources, life in the Hermit Kingdom is a dystopian nightmare where you can be sent to a prison camp for expressing dissent. It has poor living standards. frequent shortages of food and no freedom of travel. I think it can be assumed that very few. other than the privileged elite, would want to live under such a regime.

What if we assume that they themselves simply like being who they are? — Astorre

Why would we assume that? They are given no choice at all in the matter. It’s a complete totalitarian dictatorship with an appalling human rights record under the thumb of a dangerous megalomaniac who has nuclear weapons. I see nothing good about it whatever.

the issue here is that the evidence is too sparse for most people to take it seriously as a falsification of the most successful paradigms of knowledge in human history. — Apustimelogist

:chin: What knowledge would the veracity of near-death experience falsify?



What’s an NPC?

I read an analogy, recently - imagine you’re one of millions of displaced people after a war. You find a large bulletin board in the city you used to live in, with photographs of faces on it. One of them is your mother. You know this with complete certainty - but in the circumstances, with all of the civilian bureaucracies destroyed, no records anywhere - you can’t prove it.

:100: MAGA plays that card very well.

‘Wanting a dictatorship’ is surely the abdication of freedom. And even if I agreed that sexual and identity politics has been taken too far in western culture, abandoning democracy is not a solution. It would be a case of the cure being worse than the disease.

Is the West prepared to coexist with ideological and civilizational alternatives that do not necessarily aspire to Western liberalism? — Astorre

Sure - provided they’re not imposed, but chosen by democratic means. The big parade in China today starred Xi Jin Pin, Modi, Putin and Kim Jong Un - only one of whom is a democratically-elected leader. Russia and China are both authoritarian dictatorships, as is North Korea. I don’t see them as any kind of alternative.

Of course it is also true, and tragic, that America of all nations is now hurtling towards totalitarianism, but that is not the fault of Western Liberalism except insofar as it has thus far been able to prevent it.

It seems quite possible to me that China will eclipse the USA as the dominant world hegemon in the near future but that gives me no joy.

+1 :up:

It is rather consumerist neoliberalism that educates us in vice, and so deprives us of liberty. That is, you don't automatically become self-determining and self-governing by turning 18 and avoiding severe misfortune. It is rather, considerable work, and involves a sort of habit formation and training — Count Timothy von Icarus

Totally. And I'm not holding myself up as an exemplar of one who has managed to accomplish that - in fact I'm rather driven by the gloomy awareness of the extent to which I am susceptible to being corrupted by the culture I've been born into. The 'inability to step outside the frame' is what I mean by learning to look at your spectacles and not just through them.

Incidentally as I introduced Vervaeke to the conversation, I will do him the courtesy of providing his statement of the problem in the introduction to the series:

We are in the midst of a mental health crisis. There are increases in anxiety disorders, depression, despair, suicide rates are going up in North America, parts of Europe, other parts of the world. And that mental health crisis is itself due to and engaged with crises in the environment and the political system. And those in turn are immeshed within a deeper cultural historical crisis. I called the meaning crisis. So the meaning crisis expresses itself and many people are giving voice to this in many different ways, is this increasing sense of bullshit. Bullshit is on the increase. It's more and more pervasive throughout our lives and there's this sense of drowning in this old ocean of bullshit. And we have to understand why is this the case and what can we do about it? So today there is an increase of people feeling very disconnected from themselves, from each other, from the world, from a viable and foreseeable future.

Let's discuss this. Let's work on it together. Let's rationally reflect on it. What can we do about the meaning crisis? These problems are deep problems that we're facing. Many people are talking about the meaning crisis, but what I want to argue is that these problems are deeper than just social media problems, political problems, even economic problems. They're deeply historical, cultural, cognitive problems, and we need to, we need to penetrate into them carefully and rigorously. Getting out of this problem is going to be tremendously difficult. It's going to require significant transformations in our cognition, our culture, our communities, and in order to move forward in such a difficult manner, we have to reach more deeply into our past to salvage the resources we can for such an amazing challenge.

I'll be talking about a lot of people who have spoken in in ways that will provide us the resources we need. We'll talk about ancient figures like Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, Jesus of Nazareth, Siddhartha, Gautama, the Buddha, but we'll also talk about modern pivotal figures. We'll talk about people like Carl Jung. We'll talk about Nietzsche. We'll talk about Heidegger. We'll talk about current work being done by psychologists, cognitive scientists, neuroscientists. We're going to cover a broad range of topics. We're going to talk about shamanism and altered States of consciousness related a modern things like psychedelic experience, mystical experience. But we'll also talk about existentialism, nihilism. We'll talk about AI, artificial intelligence. What's that telling us? But also what can our evolutionary past tell us about how we wrestle with the meaning crisis. So this is a complex and difficult problem. There are no easy answers. We need to go through this very carefully and rigorously. We got to get clear about what the problem is and clear about what our answer could be. So I want to bring all of this together in a coherent and clear fashion so that we together can discover how to awaken from the meaning crisis. — Awakening from the Meaning Crisis (YouTube)

Jung isn’t collapsing truth into belief. He’s pointing out the phenomenological fact that “world” always means world-for-us. The stone on Mars is there whether or not we know it, but the very notion of “there being a stone on Mars unbeknownst to us” is already an act of consciousness. So the distinction between truth and belief itself only arises within consciousness. That’s what Jung means by consciousness as a precondition of being.

But it would be a mistake to think that therefore the rock could not fall unless there is a mind present - that the rock's fall is inherently a mental phenomena.

That we cannot talk about the way the world is without thereby conceptualising it with our minds does not imply that there is no such world without our so conceptualising it. — Banno

You’re right that it would be a mistake to claim the rock literally can’t fall unless a mind is present. But the point is subtler: in order to say “the rock falls when no one is around,” you’ve already had to call it out, to mark it as “that rock.” You’re implicitly comparing the object with your idea of it. But from where can you make that comparison, if not within experience?

Kant explains the dilemma: to check whether cognition agrees with the object, you’d need access to the object apart from cognition — which is impossible, since you only ever have the object as cognized.

Truth, it is said, consists in the agreement of cognition with its object. In consequence of this mere nominal definition, my cognition, to count as true, is supposed to agree with its object. Now I can compare the object with my cognition, however, only by cognizing it. Hence my cognition is supposed to confirm itself, which is far short of being sufficient for truth. For since the object is outside me, the cognition in me, all I can ever pass judgement on is whether my cognition of the object agrees with my cognition of the object. — Kant, 1801. The Jasche Logic, in Lectures on Logic

So yes, there may well be a world beyond our conceptualisation, but it’s not the world we can ever talk about. Which is what I mean by trying to 'stand outside experience'.

Claims are made by minds, so of course claims involve minds. What is not justified here is the further step that says mind is a requirement for there to be a world at all. — Banno

Without consciousness there would, practically speaking, be no world, for the world exists for us only in so far as it is consciously reflected and considered by a psyche. Consciousness is a precondition of being. — C G Jung

Your reply to the novelty argument admits that there is something "external" to mind, conceding the point. — Banno

It's not conceding the point. In the very first paragraphs of the mind-created world I spell it out: 'First is the criticism that ‘idealism says that the world is all in the mind’ — the implication being that, were there no mind to be aware of an object, then the object would cease to exist. Even very eminent philosophers have (mis)understood idealism in this way.' I will include you in that august company. I never claimed to reduce the world to the individual's mind, nor to show that the mind is a constituent of the natural world, but to show that any claims about the nature of the world contain an ineliminably subjective element, which itself is not revealed in the empirical data.

Well, yes, but that is not idealism. — Banno

I say that the point is that cognitive science, and the Charles Pinter's book Mind and the Cosmic Order, have validated some essential insights from philosophical idealism.

I notice you frequently use the fallacious tactic of refusing to use a word for anything nonhuman or at least nonbiological, as if a definition proves anything. — noAxioms

A definition 'proves' how the word is used. If you wish to re-define memory as 'the past', then the onus is on you to justify it.

Memory: the faculty by which the mind stores and remembers information.
"I've a great memory for faces"
2. something remembered from the past.
"one of my earliest memories is of sitting on his knee

When I say memory is characteristic of life, I mean it in the strong sense: not just a trace of the past, but the active retention of previous experience for the sake of survival and adaptation. To equate memory with anything in the past—erosion marks or planetary orbits —dilutes the meaning of the word until it just means “the past.” But organisms, in contrast to geological or crystal structures, must retain and carry their past forward in order to continue existing; without the ability to capture memory in this special sense, there is no life. Artificial systems such as RAM only “remember” as extensions of the organisms that do (those organisms being us). That’s why I argue memory as such is one of the defining marks of life and is generally absent in non-living matter. I suggest that the reason you find that unacceptable is that it represents an ontological distinction which your philosophy can't accomodate.

Yet there is a different sense of philosophy as a developing discipline -- or if that's too biased, at least an evolving, changing one. I do think we've made progress, in the last 100 years or so, in understanding what can be meaningfully discussed within philosophy. It's a good thing that we've been able to set limits on our attempts to wrestle experience into the rational language of analytic philosophy — J

Sure, I'd agree with that. I'm constantly on the lookout for new ideas, and the general tenor of academic philosophy changes constantly. There's a huge sea-change going on, with 'consciousness studies' and Robert Lawrence Kuhn's 'Closer to Truth' and John Vervaeke's endeavours (plus the infinite backlog of things I haven't read yet.)

But I'll try and re-state the aim of the OP. It was prompted by an assertion that Scholastic philosophy was 'realist' and would have been critical of what we now call 'idealism' (although I can't even recall where I read that now!) But I felt it was an anachronistic criticism, because Scholastic philosophy was not at all 'realist' in the sense we now understand the word. They were realist with respect to universals, whereas nowadays, realism concerning universals is categorised as Aristotelian or Platonic and basically relegated to the margins of debate. Realism nowadays usually means objective realism. I am trying to argue that idealism, both in Berkeley and Kant, was a reaction against the emerging nominalist-empiricist framework that now dominates philosophy and culture.

As the topic of wisdom is being discussed, it may be worth adding a note about Peirce’s philosophy of agapē, or selfless love. Peirce objected to the perceived selfishness implicit in Darwin’s account of the “struggle for existence.” While he accepted evolution, he argued that it could not be adequately explained by chance variation and competition alone. For Peirce, the larger cosmic order bore the mark of agapē—a creative, self-giving love that fosters growth and harmony. He drew this term from the Christian gospels, though he was not himself a denominational Christian, and recast it as a metaphysical principle. In his view, just as wisdom unites knowing with right action, so too does agapē unite being with a purposive direction—evolution not merely as struggle, but as participation in a love that brings novelty into being.

Evolutionary Love is that development of Mind which is the great business of the universe. It is not self-seeking; it is not law-bound; it is not fortuitous. It is the impulse toward perfect sympathy, toward the creation of continuity of feeling, toward the welding together of hearts.

The doctrine of evolution by the struggle for life seems to suppose a natural selection of selfishness. But evolution by love — by sympathy, by kindness, by the desire to make others happy — proves that growth comes by the self-giving of each to the other.

And in frustration at your lack of clarity my responses become increasingly uncharitable. — Banno

Here are your objections to idealism, and my response to them:

Firstly, how is it that there are novelties? How is it that we come across things that are unexpected? A novelty is something that was not imagined, that was not in one's "particular cognitive apparatus". If the world is a creation of the mind, whence something that is not a product of that mind?

Second, how is it that someone can be wrong? To be wrong is to have a belief that is different to how the world is, but if the world is their creation, that would require someone to create a world different to how they believe the world to be. How can we make sense of this?

Finally, How is it that if we each create the world with our particular cognitive apparatus, we happen to overwhelmingly agree as to what that construction is like? So much so that we can participate on a forum together, or buy cars made in Korea. — Banno

Novelty emerges from new external data interacting with our fixed frameworks. In the Kantian view, while the mind supplies the framework for experience, it must work in tandem with the manifold of sensory impressions. The unexpected quality of new data is what we call “novelty.” It doesn’t imply that the mind conjured it from nothing—it simply had to update its organization in response to an input that wasn’t fully anticipated.

Error occurs when our interpretations fail to match that data. When someone holds a belief that is incorrect, it is because there's a mismatch between their mental constructs and what is going on. Although our experience is structured by the mind, it still emanates from the external world. A belief is in error when that mental structure misrepresents or fails to adequately capture the sensible data. This can sometimes result in cognitive dissonance and there are a multitude of opportunities for that in today's world.

Consensus arises because we all operate with fundamentally similar mental structures. This preserves the objectivity of the external world while acknowledging the active role our minds play in organizing experience.

Remember my argument is that what we regard as mind-independent has an ineluctably subjective element or ground, which itself is never revealed in empirical analysis (that is the Kantian aspect). Not that the world is 'all in the mind' in the simplistic sense in which you are inclined to interpret it. I'm arguing against 'objectivism' in the sense propogated by scientific materialism which is very influential in today's culture.

anyway enough out of me for now, I have mundane duties to attend to, bye.

Perhaps we might proceed by looking for points of agreement. We both reject reductionism and scientism and those metaphysics that deny a place for mind at all. — Banno

Right. I am basically arguing against the popular view, or myth, of mankind as the 'accidental outcome of the collocation of atoms' (Bertrand Russell), a 'mere blip in the vastness of space-time' (Hawkings), and so on. Within that view, the mind is indeed the product of impersonal material forces, basically an accident. But that extends into popular culture as well. Some of the responses to the original post express that: what is real is what existed long before us and will continue after our extinction. Humans appear within that as mere epiphenomena. These are the roots of nihilism but they appear perfectly natural to a great many people nowadays. That is what I call the 'outside view': taking the attitude grounded in science as being normative, as if we see ourselves as objects from 'outside'. It is not realising that all of science itself is a human activity that relies on the human perspective, as phenomenology realises.

From my perspective, fact that people decided to try to interpret it as the physical particle is misplaced. They could have decided to interpret it differently from the beginning and no measurement problem would have existed. — Apustimelogist

But don't you see how momentous that decision would be? The admission that the fundamental particles of physics are not themselves physical? That you choose not to see this, is not any kind of argument.

You’re sounding like a phenomenologist. — Joshs

Yes, I noticed that. I'm sure it was a slip. ;-)

the chip, the theory, and all of the componentry of that experiment, are products of the mind. — Wayfarer

Just explain to me what about this statement was incorrect? And the fact that data is not information until it is interpreted? I'm simply stating that you can't see the world from some position external to your own being-in-the-world. You will find plenty of analogies for that idea in Wittgenstein, whom you know far better than I.