To shut up and calculate, then, recognises that there are limits to our pathways for understanding. — Banno

…in respect of what is ultimately real.

I said that any statement of, or knowledge about, the object's existence or non-existence can only be made by an observer.
— Wayfarer

Were this the limit of your claim, no one would be objecting. This is entirely compatible with hard realism. — Banno

On the contrary realists insist that the object is as it is irrespective of the presence or absence of an observer. And that the understanding we hold of a world with no observers truly describes a mind-independent reality.

The reason 20th c physics undermined realism is precisely in respect of those claims. That is why books about it refer to ‘arguments about reality.’ That is not a figurative description.

(a) How do you know (i.e. corroborate) that you or any other agent is "conscious" if "consciousness" is completely, inaccessibly subjective? — 180 Proof

cogito, ergo sum

Even in deciding not to run, Joe Biden did something Trump could never do - which was to put the interests of the Party and the nation above his own.

I’m not particularly swayed by the euphoria sorrounding Harris today. Let’s see how it plays out over the weeks and months ahead (although there’s not that many of them.) I think it is true to say that it’s the politics of hope against the politics of hate and fear. All Trump has, is hate and fear. Harris is a ‘psychopath’, the country is ‘being overrun by Mexican rapists’, Democrats are ‘radical communists’. He has nothing positive to say - no policies, no ideas, no real platform. In the end it will probably come down to the progressive/diversity vote vs the scared old white guys vote (which is why the Republicans have been frantically gerrymandering the last ten years). But I hope and believe the former will have the numbers in the end.

Biden was not removed by lawful means. — fishfry

He wasn’t removed at all. He decided not to run.

I will make a philosophical point, in respect of the link you provided to the video ‘what creates consciousness?’ That point is that to understand what creates or gives rise to something, is to explain it in terms of something else. The issue with consciousness, is that you must first be a conscious agent to create or provide any kind of explanation. So in that sense, it’s extremely hard to avoid a non-question-begging account of consciousness (where ‘begging the question’ already assumes what the argument is setting out to prove.) In other words, any kind of reduction or explanation can only be offered by a conscious agent. We can’t, as it were, examine it from the outside, as an object to be explained, because we’re always already ‘inside’ it. That’s the precise sense in which consciousness is ‘irreducible’ - that is, it can’t be explained by something else. (Of course, cognitive science provides explanations of the functions of consciousness in terms of neuroscience, and so on, but that is what Chalmers describes as an ‘easy problem’. To describe what consciousness is with reference to anything other than consciousness, is the ‘hard problem’.)

Hey Sam - great you’ve discovered this site - Essentia Foundation is a really important voice in this debate. I will take this one in. Oh, and your long post above this one, I’ll take that in as well.

OK I did a bit more research and uncovered this: that Schrödinger intended the famous Cat thought-experiment to highlight the paradoxes and limitations of the Copenhagen interpretation. He found the idea that a macroscopic object like a cat could be in a superposition of being both alive and dead to be absurd. The thought experiment was meant to provoke deeper consideration and debate about the implications of quantum mechanics and to question the completeness and coherence of the Copenhagen interpretation.

Schrödinger's overall attitude towards quantum mechanics was complicated. While he was one of its founding figures and developed the Schrödinger equation, he was also troubled by its philosophical implications and sought alternative interpretations that could provide a more intuitive and realistic understanding of the quantum world. His engagement with these questions reflects his desire for a theory that could reconcile the quantum and classical worlds in a more satisfactory manner.

This was the context:

the object neither exists nor doesn't exist in the absence of the observer. Nothing can be said about it.
— Wayfarer
So the cup ceases to exist when you put it in the dish washer? We can't say that it is being cleaned? — Banno

Banno always returns to homely examples like kitchen utensils, not that there's anything the matter with that. In this context, 'cups' are just a stand-in for 'the object'.

Anyway, I merely said 'this was the precise point that Schrodinger was making with his famous cat'. So you're correct in saying that Schrodinger was sceptical about the Copenhagen interpretation, but I wasn't really appealing to Schrodinger for support of a particular view, only remarking that it is basically the same question. And hence the relevance of physics!

My understanding of the Copenhagen interpretation is that it's not a scientific hypothesis, nor a fully worked out philosophical framework. It's more like various aphorisms and writings of Heisenberg and Bohr on the interpretation of quantum physics. But I think it can't be disputed that it calls realism into question. Einstein's objections were not against the predictive powers of quantum mechanics, which are unarguable, but against its philosophical implications. He believed that quantum mechanics must be incomplete and that there must be underlying hidden variables that could restore a deterministic and objective reality. This viewpoint is encapsulated in his famous thought experiments, such as the EPR paradox (Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox), which aimed to show that quantum mechanics could not be a complete description of reality. However the Alain Aspect experiments confirming the 'Bell inequality' went against Einstein's realist views (even though, of course, he didn't live to see that.)

Bohr emphasized the role of the observer and the fundamental limits of what can be known. Bohr argued that quantum mechanics does not describe an objective reality but rather deals with the probabilities of different outcomes of measurements. He maintained that questions about the underlying reality were not meaningful within the framework of quantum mechanics, as the theory only provides information about observations. I think he kind of 'bracketed out' questions about what it ultimately meant or pointed to. It is sometime said he was a positivist, but he didn't agree with positivism either. His quote 'if you're not shocked by quantum mechanics then you can't have understood it' came from a lecture he gave to the Vienna Circle positivists, who all applauded politely and nodded sagely at the conclusion of his lecture on quantum physics. (As told in Heisenberg's Physics and Beyond.)

The point I was arguing about was against the contention that the type of idealist view I'm advocating must imply that the world doesn't exist in the absence of the observer. I said that any statement of, or knowledge about, the object's existence or non-existence can only be made by an observer. Science has no trouble depicting the world as it was before the evolution of h.sapiens, for instance - an empirical fact - but the interpretive framework within which that description is meaningful, is still provided by the mind - which is transcendental idealism. That's the sense in which I think there can be a kind of Kantian attitude to the Copenhagen interpretation. If you or anyone is interested, Michel Bitbol has a lecture on that, Bohr's Complimentarity and Kant's Epistemology.

And as lived experience in the moneyed world, our children aren't having children. — apokrisis

It's said that the current GenX/Y are the first to experience a less affluent lifestyle than their parents. And in my family's case it is true, sadly. Younger son with two kids and another coming are consigned to the brutal rental market due to the cost of real estate here. Maybe the affluent days are on the wane.

But then, what philosopher under-writes a 'no-growth' economic policy? How to incentivize that, when so much of the economy is geared around greater wealth as the sole yardstick of progress?

Schrödinger proposed this thought-experiment only to show that the 'Copenhagen interpretation' of quantum mechanics is, at best, paradoxical (i.e. does not make sense). — 180 Proof

Of course I understand that. It’s an ironic way of illustrating the anti-realist implications of the very principles that he discovered.

Incidentally apropos the question you asked about the independent reality of the wave function, QBism says definitely not.

‘The future you impoverish may be your own’?

One of the catchy titles on John Michael Greer’s site is ‘Collapse Now and Avoid the Rush’.

It could be opposed to its alternative. Not exponential growth but just an expectation of maintaining the world as it has always existed. — apokrisis

I wonder if an alternative has ever really been articulated. A few years back I did some cursory reading of books like Prosperity Without Growth and The Value of Nothing, among others. I can see the rationale, but I'm also very dubious of green-left politics. (I went to a solitary Australian Greens party meeting about 15 years ago, which I found depressingly awful.)

But in any case, isn't the root problem the underlying idea of ever-increasing 'economic growth'? And that pretty well defines liberal capitalism. I don't know if anyone outside the sustainability movement really takes it seriously, and, apart from the Greens, who stands for that in politics?

And what are the alternatives? I've never seen Marxism as a credible alternative, considering the disasters of the USSR and the Cultural Revolution. I said about 20 years ago, in a workshop setting, that what the world really needs is an alternative to capitalism that isn't communism. But I don't know if there really is any such thing. (Thomas Piketty, anyone? Haven't read it, myself.)

As is well-known, the emerging middle classes of the developing world simpy can't consume like those in the developed nations - there ain't enough to go around. Beef production, for instance, is massively expensive in terms of environmental and resource costs, and the several billion citizens of emerging countries won't be able to consume beef like the West has. Earth Overshoot Day is moving closer to Jan 1 every year (this year it's 1 August :yikes:)

On the other hand, and maybe belatedly, there is a huge global effort towards decarbonisation. Maybe too little and too late, but it's something. Maybe we need an Al Gore for alternative economics. God knows there are those who are trying, but they don't seem to have much of a profile.

In many cases it comes down to the point I just made, that physics is based on the presumption that physicists have available a shared topic — Banno

'Shared topic', indeed. I have no beef whatever with science or scientists inter-subjective validation. My beef is with the over-valuation of objectivity as the sole criterion of truth.

I've read a few. — Banno

None of the good ones, I would hazard.

Edit: this is not trivial; physics is based on the presumption that physicists have available a shred topic that they can prod and poke and about which they can talk - the world. — Banno

You would benefit from reading those books I mentioned. They're aimed at a non-specialist audience. But once again, thanks for your criticisms. :pray:

So the cup ceases to exist when you put it in the dish washer? We can't say that it is being cleaned? — Banno

The precise point Schrodinger was making with Schrodinger's Cat.

Why are eyes and hands OK, but not the sun or the earth? — Banno

Gosh, I wonder. :chin:

That Chris Fuchs interview is here. You have excerpted the graph but not the commentary, which is that:

Spooky action at a distance, wherein one observer’s measurement of a particle right here collapses the wave function of a particle way over there, turns out not to be so spooky — the measurement here simply provides information that the observer can use to bet on the state of the distant particle, should she come into contact with it. But how, we might ask, does her measurement here affect the outcome of a measurement a second observer will make over there? In fact, it doesn’t. Since the wavefunction doesn’t belong to the system itself, each observer has her own. My wavefunction doesn’t have to align with yours. ...

QBism...treats the wave function as a description of a single observer’s subjective knowledge. It resolves all of the quantum paradoxes, but at the not insignificant cost of anything we might call “reality.”

Read the remainder for more context. Also this documentary.

The point is, the whole of the empirical world in space and time is the creation of our understanding
— Bryan Magee Schopenhauer's Philosophy, Pp 106-107
...are incompatible with your contending that you are no ontic idealist. You are sayign that the world is, and isn't, the creation of mind. — Banno

That is a gloss on a paragraph from Kant. The sorrounding text in Magee's book discusses how Kant himself didn't follow through on the implications of that paragraph, and that Schopenhauer does. And recall the opening few lines of Schopenhauers WWI:

“The world is my idea:”—this is a truth which holds good for everything that lives and knows, though man alone can bring it into reflective and abstract consciousness. If he really does this, he has attained to philosophical wisdom. It then becomes clear and certain to him that what he knows is not a sun and an earth, but only an eye that sees a sun, a hand that feels an earth; that the world which surrounds him is there only as idea, i.e., only in relation to something else, the consciousness, which is himself.

----

Sure. But so what? It's as if you were to say there is no vista without there being someone to see it, and that therefore the mountains depend on the tourist for their existence. — Banno

But again, I address this. You think I must maintain that the vista (i.e. 'object') doesn't exist in the absence of the observer. But that is what I'm saying is the 'imagined non-existence', your imagining it as being non-existent. But the object neither exists nor doesn't exist in the absence of the observer. Nothing can be said about it. The object that you're referring to as existing (or not existing) in the absence of an observer is still a product of your mind.

And this is where 20th century physics is relevant. It has called into question the very existence of the so-called 'mind-independence' of reality. That is what the decades-long debate between Bohr and Einstein was about (reference - Quantum: Einstein, Bohr, and the Great Debate about the Nature of Reality, Manjit Kumar. Note the title! Another similar popular science book is David Lindley's 'Uncertainty: Einstein, Heisenberg, Bohr, and the Struggle for the Soul of Science'. Why 'the struggle'? It is an argument between Einstein's scientific realism, which is precisely that 'the object is mind-independent', and the Copenhagen interpretation, which is that this can't be upheld.)

If you reject ontic idealism, then consciousness does not "create reality". — Banno

Again, you only say that, because you have something in mind.

Sure, consciousness is not a passive recipient of the stuff in the world; nor is it it's creator. — Banno

The jealous God dies hard, eh? Hence the note about the distinction between Buddhist and Christian philosophy. Buddhist philosophy is not concerned with the origin of everything in the sense that Christian (and post-Christian) philosophy feels compelled to be.

In the story I wrote for you, as we walked across the landscape we developed a way of talking about the movement of butterfly that became progressively less dependent on the place we were standing. — Banno

But I don't accept that your story does away with the requirement for an observer's perspective. It only compares perspectives between different observers. I'm not saying that it's reliant on a particular perspective, but that there is no perspective without an observer to bring it to bear. Absent observers, there are no perspectives.

Well, gosh, thanks :yikes: . A couple of my by-now standard pieces of text in support of my contention.

Everyone knows that the earth, and a fortiori the universe, existed for a long time before there were any living beings, and therefore any perceiving subjects. But according to Kant ... that is impossible.'

Schopenhauer's defence of Kant on this score was ...that the objector has not understood to the very bottom the Kantian demonstration that time is one of the forms of [human] sensibility. The earth, say, as it was before there was life, is a field of empirical enquiry in which we have come to know a great deal; its reality is no more being denied than is the reality of perceived objects in the same room.

The point is, the whole of the empirical world in space and time is the creation of our understanding, which apprehends all the objects of empirical knowledge within it as being in some part of that space and at some part of that time: and this is as true of the earth before there was life as it is of the pen I am now holding a few inches in front of my face and seeing slightly out of focus as it moves across the paper.

This, incidentally, illustrates a difficulty in the way of understanding which transcendental idealism has permanently to contend with: the assumptions of 'the inborn realism which arises from the original disposition of the intellect' enter unawares into the way in which the statements of transcendental idealism are understood.

Such realistic assumptions so pervade our normal use of concepts that the claims of transcendental idealism disclose their own non-absurdity only after difficult consideration, whereas criticisms of them at first appear cogent which on examination are seen to rest on confusion. We have to raise almost impossibly deep levels of presupposition in our own thinking and imagination to the level of self-consciousness before we are able to achieve a critical awareness of all our realistic assumptions, and thus achieve an understanding of transcendental idealism which is untainted by them. — Bryan Magee Schopenhauer's Philosophy, Pp 106-107

According to evolutionary biology, Homo Sapiens is the result of billions years of evolution. For all these thousands of millions of years, our sensory and intellectual abilities have been honed and shaped by the exigencies of survival, through billions of lifetimes in various life-forms - fish, lizard, mammal, primate - in such a way as to give rise to the mind that we have today.

Recently, other scientific disciplines such as cognitive and evolutionary psychology have revealed that conscious perception, while subjectively appearing to exist as a steady continuum, is actually composed of a hierarchical matrix of interacting cellular transactions, commencing at the most basic level with the parasympathetic nervous system which controls one’s respiration, digestion, and so on, up through various levels to culminate in that peculiarly human ability of ‘discursive reason’ (and beyond, according to the mystics.)

Consciousness plays a central role in co-ordinating these diverse activities so as to give rise to the sense of continuity which we call ‘ourselves’ - and also the apparent coherence and reality of the 'external world'. Yet it is important to realise that the naïve sense in which we understand ourselves, and the objects of our perception, to exist, is dependent upon the constructive activities of our consciousness, the bulk of which are completely unknown to us.

When you perceive something - large, small, alive or inanimate, local or remote - there is a considerable amount of work involved in ‘creating’ an object from the raw material of perception. Your eyes receive the light-waves reflected or emanated from it, your mind organises the image with regards to all of the other stimuli impacting your senses at that moment – either acknowledging it, or ignoring it, depending on how busy you are; your memory will then compare it to other objects you have seen, from whence you will recall its name, and perhaps know something about it ('star', 'tree', 'frog', etc).

And you will do all of this without you even noticing that you are doing it; it is largely below the threshold of conscious perception.

In other words, your consciousness is not the passive recipient of sensory objects which exist irrespective of your perception of them (Locke's tabula rasa). Rather, consciousness is an active agent which constructs reality partially on the basis of sensory input, but also on the basis of an enormous number of unconscious processes, memories, intentions, and so on, not to mention the activities of reason, which allows us to categorise, classify and analyse the elements of experience. — Wayfarer

So remind me again, what, exactly, is 'incoherent' about these claims?

If your point is that "model" be used with care, I agree. — Banno

My point with respect to the 'mind-created world' theory is that many of the criticisms of it implicitly assume a perspective outside both. Like, 'the universe is so vast, and so ancient, how can that be something in my mind, when I'm only a few decades old?' But that perspective makes of an object of the very mind that provides the framework for the judgement of the vastness of space and duration of time. It's an abstraction.

I was going to add a point about 'dasein' although I tread warily as I've never read the entire work. But in my lay understanding, it is that our experience of the world is not one of the detached observer, where we build models of an external reality, but of direct involvement and engagement. It collapses the perceived dichotomy between self and world, as they're always intimately entertwined. We do not first exist as isolated subjects - islands! - who encounter a world of objects; instead, our very being is always already situated within a world we have imbued with meaning (or its lack). Even Wittgenstein touches on that in his Notebooks, with 'I am my world'.

And thank you. I will add, by way of a footnote to my footnote, that Lusthaus does acknowledge in that article:

To the extent that epistemological idealists can also be critical realists, Yogācāra may be deemed a type of epistemological idealism, with the proviso that the purpose of its arguments was not to engender an improved ontological theory or commitment, but rather an insistence that we pay the fullest attention to the epistemological and psychological conditions compelling us to construct and attach to ontological theories. — Dan Lusthaus

Again, the aim being not to 'explain the world' but to untangle the Gordian knot of dukkha.

his Buddhist-based metaphors & analogies… — Gnomon

I will add, by way of footnote, that scholars question the label of ‘idealism’ applied to Buddhist teachings. The very brief reason is that Christian principles begin with the creation conceived as the actual origin of the Universe, in which God is the Creator of everything that is. Buddhism doesn’t start with the origin of everything, but with the fact of dukkha (unease, distress, suffering), the cause of it, the ending of it, and the path to the ending of it.

Yogācāra doctrine is summarized in the term vijñapti-mātra, "nothing-but-cognition" (often rendered "consciousness-only" or "mind-only") which has sometimes been interpreted as indicating a type of metaphysical idealism, i.e., the claim that mind alone is real and that everything else is created by mind. However, the Yogācārin writings themselves argue something very different. Consciousness (vijñāna) is not the ultimate reality or solution, but rather the root problem. This problem emerges in ordinary mental operations, and it can only be solved by bringing those operations to an end.

Yogācāra tends to be misinterpreted as a form of metaphysical idealism primarily because its teachings are taken for ontological propositions rather than as epistemological warnings about karmic problems. The Yogācāra focus on cognition and consciousness grew out of its analysis of karma, and not for the sake of metaphysical speculation. — What Is and Isn’t Yogācāra, Dan Lusthaus

How the OP question is interpreted in light of that, is another matter. I think, suffice to say that ‘the world’ in Buddhism is basically understood as transient and not what it seems (although, as the Lankavatara Sutra mysteriously adds, neither is it otherwise.)

a model is presumably a model of something. — Banno

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

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

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

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

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

:100:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

:100:
— Wayfarer

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

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

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

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

Possible VP picks: Mark Kelly, Senator, Arizona

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

:100:

We become not just selves but superbeings. — apokrisis

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

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

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

I use it as a reference source.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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