All of this still operates entirely within the materialist frame. It searches for an objective correlate—some measurable physical proxy—that can be mapped onto the intentional, semantic, and affective dimensions of experience. McFadden’s “cemi field” belongs to the familiar genre of quasi-scientific proposals that promise to locate consciousness in some previously overlooked physical substrate. But despite adopting new language (“information field,” “downloading,” “integration”), it remains materialist in essence: the hope is that adding one more physical principle will bridge the explanatory gap.

But ask the obvious question: even if such a field were discovered, would it bring us one step closer to the meaning of "know thyself"? The point is that we already have intimate acquaintance with consciousness—not as an object among objects, but as the observer, to whom anything appears as an object in the first place. No amount of empirical elaboration on electromagnetic dynamics touches this first-person dimension. It only charts more correlations.

So I think Mcfadden's confidence in 'solving' the hard problem is misplaced. Problems are things for which solutions are possible; mysteries are circumstances of which we are a part (McGinn?). In that sense the hard problem is not a puzzle awaiting a clever physical hypothesis. It is the modern reappearance of an older insight: that the subject cannot be catalogued as one more item in the world, any more than walking far enough will take you to the horizon.

For that matter, why is THIS thread on the front page? :brow:

Fair enough. What with today's climate shenanigans in Australian politics, I'm sensitive to the downplaying of it, that's all.

Other than that there will be bumps in the road not a a collapse of civilisation. — I like sushi

A lot of really bad things can happen, short of civilizational collapse. For example, Bangladesh faces exceptionally severe consequences from climate change due to its unfortunate combination of geography and high population density. This densely-populated nation is predominantly a low-lying delta, making it acutely susceptible to sea-level rise, which threatens to permanently inundate vast coastal areas and push saline water inland, contaminating freshwater and soil. Exacerbating this risk is its location on the Bay of Bengal, a "funnel" that intensifies tropical cyclones, leading to catastrophic storm surges and increasing the frequency of devastating riverine flooding. This environmental fragility is amplified by the country's immense population density, where millions of people are dependent on climate-sensitive livelihoods like agriculture and fishing. Consequently, climate impacts directly translate into massive food and water insecurity, large-scale displacement, and mounting humanitarian and economic crises, making Bangladesh one of the most climate-vulnerable nations globally.

Already, the unfortunate Rohinga refugees, largely displaced from their homelands in Bengal, subsist by their thousands in miserable squalor on the fringes of Myanmar, wracked by civil war. So what happens if another 30 or 40 million Bangladeshis are displaced by these catastrophes in an adjacent region?

It may not be global civllisational collapse, but for those millions involved, it might as well be.

Any one-sentence OP is basically click bait.

…the plainly crackpot idea of there being a mind field or plane of consciousness which brain biology “tunes” into and so “lights up with” that magically subjective phenomenonal state. — apokrisis

What if the whole of evolutionary history is that process? That the emergence of life just is the manifestation of the subjective? And furthermore, that the reason this won’t be considered scientific, is because this field is something you’re never outside of, and so cannot objectify.

Doesn’t this dovetail with Peirce’s ‘feeling’ as fundamental? Matter as effete mind? The embodiment of Firstness?

In considering this in manners devoid of a “cosmic (ultimate) telos”, how would ethics not reduce to evolutionary processes of natural selection? Something I so far thought you were opposed to. — javra

Excellent question! Broadly, it means humans are confronted with the fact of their own mortality, in a way that animals are not. (This is not to say that some animals aren’t aware of death and dying, as elephants clearly are.) But it means wrestling with questions of meaning again in a way that animals do not.

(Speaking of ‘wrestling’, this is where John Vervaeke comes closer to a kind of spiritual longing. He speaks of ‘strong transcendence’ comprising a noetic insight into a more integrated and in that sense ‘higher’ level of Being, akin to the unitive vision of Neoplatonism. He’s trying to stay within the naturalist lane in all of this although to be honest I think his trajectory the last two years, in dialogue with many religious scholars and philosophers, is drawing nearer to a religious understanding.)

How this relates to evolutionary theory is a big subject. I will observe that in some important ways evolution has become a secular religion, a kind of naturalist creation myth in its own right (See Is Evolution a Secular Religion?, Michael Ruse, incidentally no friend of Intelligent Design.) But one of the consequences of this is the vanishing of the cognitive and existential facts that pertain to the human condition. I think it is because it enables us to see ourselves as a part of nature but in a scientific rather than religious sense. While the basic, empirical facts of evolution are undeniable, the question has to be asked, what philosophical resources does evolutionary biology provide us with? After all the aim of the theory is to demonstrate how species, including h. Sapiens, evolved. The drivers for those processes are biological, genetic and environmental, but it has long been appreciated that we’re genetically hardly different than our early h.sapiens ancestors of 100,000 years ago. And yet, look what has transpired in those aeons.

All kinds of meanings have been read into it from the theistic (Pierre Tielhard du Chardin) to the atheist (Richard Dawkins.) Without venturing into those difficult waters, all I will say is that the facts of evolutionary theory do not really comprise an existential philosophy, and that this can be said with no disrespect to those facts. Within this ambit, all manner of possibilities present themselves, including the possibility of transcendence.

Amongst all the themes emerging from this debate, one that has struck me is the insight that in h.sapiens, the evolutionary process has become aware of itself. No lesser light than Julian Huxley said the same:

Man is that part of reality in which and through which the cosmic process has become conscious and has begun to comprehend itself. His supreme task is to increase that conscious comprehension and to apply it as fully as possible to guide the course of events. In other words, his role is to discover his destiny as an agent of the evolutionary process, in order to fulfill it more adequately.

However, I am closer to his more spiritually-inclined brother, Alduous, author of The Perennial Philosophy. Within that context, there are also expressions of the idea that we are ‘life made conscious’ but set against the understanding that physical existence is but one phase or facet of the totality of Being.



:pray:

Meanwhile, here in Australia, the conservative political parties (Liberal-National Coalition) look set to dump the commitment to Net Zero emissions by 2050, which they had previously signed onto while in Government.

It's a sorry state of affairs, but then, climate change politics have wrecked many a career in Australia. The conservative parties have been decimated by the upsurge of so-called 'Teal Independents', mainly women, 'teal' because they tend to coalesce around Liberal (Blue) principles but stand up for green values (hence blue-green.) Many of the safest liberal seats in the country were taken by them, who now number 10 in the national Parliament, where Prime Miinister's Albanese's Labor has a massive majority. Commentators generally believe that the conservative abandonment of net zero will further weaken the coalition who currently only hold 43 out of 150 parliamentary seats (Labor holds 94).

As for how Australia is going in the race to decarbonize - still a massive amount to be done, but household rooftop solar and installed batteries are becoming a big factor. Still gaps, though, that are going to have to be filled by natural gas-powered electricity.

At this point, I’d like to draw attention back to a book page mentioned by @Pierre-Normand - Hillary Putnam on Facts and Values. The cover description:

If philosophy has any business in the world, it is the clarification of our thinking and the clearing away of ideas that cloud the mind. In this book, one of the world's preeminent philosophers takes issue with an idea that has found an all-too-prominent place in popular culture and philosophical thought: the idea that while factual claims can be rationally established or refuted, claims about value are wholly subjective, not capable of being rationally argued for or against. Although it is on occasion important and useful to distinguish between factual claims and value judgments, the distinction becomes, Hilary Putnam argues, positively harmful when identified with a dichotomy between the objective and the purely "subjective."

I’ve noted this time and again in debates here. But the problem usually manifests around the issue of the criteria for what can be considered good, because those criteria are not necessarily scientifically adjudicable. Meaning that an argument and an explanatory framework has to provided for what can be considered good, true, or ethically meaningful. And this is where the ever-present ‘who says?” or “by what authority?” enters the fray. At this point, appeals to Kant (deontology) and Aristotle (eudomonia) are considered philosophically acceptable, but if you bring an appeal to religion into the picture, then look out! (@baker) This is because scientific rationalism provides something like publicly-available normative standards, in a way that neither religious nor philosophical judgements seem to. It’s objective -whereas philosophical and religious arguments are too easily seen as resting on the individual faith commitments or philosophical proclivities. That is where the false dichotomy that Putnam is describing originates (or so I would surmise, not having read the book.)

So I’m trying to break this down in terms intelligible to analytic philosophy. I think the simplest way to portray it is in terms of a vertical axis - the axis of normative value judgements.

Consider the previously-discussed example from John Vervaeke. Vervaeke argues that normativity doesn’t need to be imported from a cosmic telos or moral law and that it’s implicit in our very capacity for rational, self-corrective cognition.

Our “is” — our biological and cognitive architecture — already entails competences that can be exercised well or poorly.

“Ought” simply names the direction of self-correction toward more adequate realization of those competences.

It might be asked, why then does this not apply to non-human beings such as the higher animals? The reason, I think, is that higher animals, though clearly intelligent and affectively rich, lack the capacity to imagine things being otherwise than as they are. They inhabit what Vervaeke might call an unbroken salience landscape — a world of immediate affordances, where meaning is lived rather than reflected upon. Humans, by contrast, can step back from the immediate field of relevance, entertain counterfactuals, and evaluate our own salience-mappings. It also means that things matter to us in a way that they don’t for animals. This reflexivity is the root of both our freedom and our moral burden.

As I understand Putnam’s book, from reading abstracts and reviews, his is not an entirely dissimilar type of argument - Vervaeke’s from cognitive science and Putnam’s from analytical philosophy.

Existentialism grew out of phenomenology. But neither of them are the subjects of Chalmers’ argument in ‘facing up to the problem of consciousness’.

Might I suggest that this is an overly rosey picture? For instance, across the Roman Empire vast numbers of people were tortured to death, publicly executed, or enslaved because they wouldn't offer sacrifices to the state gods and worship the emperors… — Count Timothy von Icarus

… not to forget Socrates….

This is a difficulty with various sorts of perennialism too. — Count Timothy von Icarus

It’s not all ‘lazy syncretism’. Consider for example Fathers Bede Griffiths and Raymundo Panikkar. Both exemplified Christian virtue in close companionship with Indian religions. And I would think that the ability to accommodate a plurality of outlooks is essential in cosmopolitan culture.

As Albert Camus said, Everything begins with consciousness, and nothing is worth anything except through it. — Patterner

the world is opened up, made meaningful, or disclosed through consciousness. The world is inconceivable apart from consciousness. — Routledge Intro to Phenomenology

Hmmm… do I detect a similarity here? :chin:

what about the human sciences -- psychology, economics, history, textual hermeneutics, etc.? I'm fine with the first two, at any rate, being a science, aren't you? — J

In a broad sense, but they are not counted amongst the ‘exact sciences’, are they? Their proponents might aspire to it, but there are many difficulties. Furthermore, as far as psychology is concerned, what are the broader questions that underlie it? What vision, or version, of humanity? That we’re species like other species, vying for survival and adaption? And that itself is not a question for psychology.

The genius of modern science was deciding what to exclude from its reckonings. For example, intentionality or telos. Such factors are invisible to precise definition and measurement. So, leave them out! Consider only what can be measured and predicted according to theory.

Wouldn't it be reasonable to assume that, in time, we'll have positive tests for the presence of consciousness, and be able to describe its degrees and characteristics? — J

I’m sure that medicine does have such tests, they would be extremely important in the treatment of comatose patients. But the ‘how much’ and ‘what kind’ of consciousness questions are still within the ambit of what Chalmers designated solvable problems. (And for that matter, maybe the whole use of ‘problem’ in this regard is mistaken. Others have pointed out that it’s more of a mystery - the distinction being that problems are there to be solved, while mysteries are something we’re a part of, meaning we can’t step outside of them and ‘explain’ them.)

That’s a reasonable point and one that turns on what “natural” means.

If by natural we mean “what belongs to the order of things that occur independently of human artifice,” then consciousness is indeed natural — but not physical in the sense of being an object or process describable in terms of physics. To call it “non-physical” doesn’t mean “supernatural” or “mystical”; it means that it doesn’t present as a measurable phenomenon, as an object.

Mind is that to which the physical appears. It is the horizon within which things become present as physical, as measurable, as anything at all. So the distinction isn’t between “natural” and “supernatural,” but between 'that which appears' and the subject to whom it appears. That is what I'm saying (and not just me!) has been bracketed out by science. It is also what Husserl, and before him Kant, were getting at: consciousness isn’t a part of the world in the same way the brain, trees, or galaxies are. It’s the faculty for which a world appears.

I hope you can see that distinction, because I think it's important.

There's an important perspectival shift missing in that account, somewhat analogous to 'figure and ground'. As I said, you cannot find or point to consciousness in any sense meaningful to the natural sciences. You can only infer it. This is why Daniel Dennett continued to insist right until the end that it must in some sense be derivative, unreal or non-existent.

A note on Tillich (various sources)

Consciousness is part of the world. How is that in question? — Patterner

Because it's not! You can observe other people. and animals, which you can safely assume to be conscious, and which you can safely assume feel just like you do. But you will not observe consciousness as such - only it's manifestations. The only instance of consciousness which you really know, is the instance which you are, because you are it. Not because it's something you see. You can't experience experience. The hand can only grasp something other to itself (from the Upaniṣad).

I don't sponsor authoritarian religions. — javra

I agree with you, but I already acknowledged somewhere in this thread (can't find it now) the role that ecclesiastical Chrisianity had in spawning atheism. Paul Tillich said the same! The inevitable consequence of 'no other God beside Me' and 'I am the Truth.... no other way but Me'. My way or the highway, and woe betide unto anyone who differs.

But again, there are literalistic and esoteric ways of understanding. The Gnostics had a completely different way of understanding these things, but they ended up on the wrong side of history - which is, as you know, written by the victors.

And the jealous God dies hard! A great deal of atheist polemic is clearly derived from its Christian forbears. No other substance, but matter energy, and no way of interpretation, save by the Method! Woe betide unto anyone who differs.

does that necessarily put science on one side of an impermeable line? — J

It certainly puts modern Western science, as understood since Galileo, on one side of it. Unambiguously. You know that German culture has a word, Geistewischenschaft, meaning 'sciences of the spirit', right? You could put Ricouer, Hegel, Heidegger, and Husserl under that heading, but there's no way you could include them under the heading 'science' in a Western university.

I think there's a clear, bright line.

Although my overall knowledge of Aristotle is pretty slight, this is one of the passages that has stayed with me (previously quoted)

But if happiness (εὐδαιμονία, eudomonia) consists in activity in accordance with virtue, it is reasonable that it should be activity in accordance with the highest virtue; and this will be the virtue of the best part of us. Whether then this be the Intellect (νοῦς nous), or whatever else it be that is thought to rule and lead us by nature, and to have cognizance of what is noble and divine, either as being itself also actually divine, or as being relatively the divinest part of us, it is the activity of this part of us in accordance with the virtue proper to it that will constitute perfect happiness; and it has been stated already* that this activity is the activity of contemplation [θεωρητική, theoritikós) — The Nicomachean Ethics 1.1177a11

The suggestion, in Aristotle, and indeed in Greek philosophy generally, is that nous, the instrument of reason, is able to discern immaterial truths, those being the universal forms or ideas. 'In the Aristotelian scheme, nous is the faculty that enables rational cognition. For Aristotle, this was distinct from the processing of sensory perception, including the use of imagination and memory, which animals possess. For Aristotle, discussion of nous is connected to discussion of how the human mind sets definitions in a consistent and communicable way, and whether people must be born with some innate potential to understand the same universal categories in the same rational ways. Derived from this it was also sometimes argued, in classical and medieval philosophy, that the individual nous must require help of a spiritual and divine type. By this type of account, it also came to be argued that the human understanding (nous) somehow stems from this cosmic nous, which is however not just a recipient of order, but a creator of it'.

Practicing a religion/spirituality works in the exact same way as going to school or taking up some other course of education or training. It's supposed to transform the student, and in a standardized, predictable way. — baker

I just noticed your post now, but what you said in it, seems completely at odds with this conclusion. Karen Armstrong says something very similar:

Religious truth is ...a species of practical knowledge. Like swimming, we cannot learn it in the abstract; we have to plunge into the pool and acquire the knack by dedicated practice. Religious doctrines are a product of ritual and ethical observance, and make no sense unless they are accompanied by such spiritual exercises as yoga, prayer, liturgy and a consistently compassionate lifestyle. Skilled practice in these disciplines can lead to intimations of the transcendence we call God, Nirvana, Brahman or Dao. Without such dedicated practice, these concepts remain incoherent, incredible and even absurd.

Which is, admittedly, how they must seem to many contributors.

Why is this not a conversation, but an ex cathedra lecture? — baker

Is it? I have not been aware of lecturing. I presented an argument, and am prepared to defend it, but only up to a point. The reference to Edward Conze's essay was intended to illustrate a point. But then, I suppose you take that as an 'appeal to authority', which naturally has to be shot down.

That's why physicalism is untenable. Science is broader than that. — J

But think it through in relation to Chalmers' 'facing up to the problem of consciousness'. What you're saying is, you already agree that physicalism is untenable. But Chalmers, Nagel and Husserl are giving arguments as to why it is. And while their arguments are different, the distinction between the first- and third-person perspective is intrinsic to all of them. @noAxioms has already explained that he can't see any distinction. To be sure, many others say the same. But I think there's a real distinction that is not being acknowledged.

I think he (Nagel) would say that it isn't a physical science. — J

But think that through. If it's not a physical science, then, according to physicalism, how could it be a science? It must by definition be metaphysics.

:100: But, you know, that book was subject of a massive pile-on when it was published. Nagel was accused of 'selling out to creationism'.

Another passage from the same book:

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

There's a typical forum style of argumentation I think of as 'the coconut shy'. A coconut shy, as you will recall, is a popular sideshow attraction, whereby coconuts are put on poles, and punters then try to knock them off by throwing tennis balls at them, thereby winning a prize.

This is one of those kinds of questions. :wink:

Obviously, many people have been gravely hurt by the religions. The history of religion in historical Europe is marred by episodes of appalling violence and repression - the Inquisition, the slaughter of the Cathars, the religious wars. The institution of the Papacy was a model for authoritarianism. There is no question about that, but it was not only that. David Bentley Hart makes the case eloquently in his book Atheist Delusions, which I’ve already mentioned. The social institutions of universities, hospitals, organised charities, and much else besides, grew out of the soil of Christian culture. The ideas of Christian humility, ‘all believers equal before God’, was also profoundly influential. (India still has a caste system to this day.) James Hannam makes an excellent case for how medieval Christian scholars laid the foundations for modern science in his book God’s Philosophers. Of course they all drew on an amalgamation of theology with Greek philosophy, which is foundational to the genius of Western culture.

As an undergrad, I was struck by the fact that so much of characteristically modern philosophy (starting with Descartes) was shaped around the unspoken premise of ‘anything but God’. It was a pervasive but largely unspoken theme. As I’ve explained many times, my own quest was shaped by 1960’s counter-culture and the quest for spiritual enlightenment, which at that time I did not associate at all with religion as such. But then I went on to study world religions and the perspective of the perennial philosophies and began to realise that the enlightenment I thought was the sole prerogative of the East was also to be found in Christianity (mainly via the early 20th C scholars of mysticism, Dean Inge and Evelyn Underhill.) It changed my view considerably, and there are now many Christian philosophers whom I hold in high regard (although I must confess a considerable degree of scepticism in regard to Reformed Theology.)

In any case none of this is an appeal to a ‘return to a golden past’. But religious symbolism inevitably portrays, in symbolic form, many of the archetypal factors and forces that underlie everyday thoughts and actions. They need to be understood and re-integrated, rather than fought against due to the animus we’ve inherited from the religious conflicts of the past. That’s where Vervaeke’s lectures are exemplary.

f someone can come along and challenge me, why shouldn't I challenge them in return? — baker

No reason. This entire milieu revolves around it.

The premiss of the OP is to explore the historical causes of the divisions between religious/secular, mind/matter, and so on, whereas many of the contributions just exemplify the very division at issue.

Don't we both agree that consciousness is a natural phenomenon, a part of the "given world" rather than some sort of intrusion into it? Do you think science is hobbled by its methods so that it can only inquire into certain parts of that world? — J

I'll refer to the potted quote I provided from Husserl again:

In contrast to the outlook of naturalism, Husserl believed all knowledge, all science, all rationality depended on conscious acts, acts which cannot be properly understood from within the natural outlook at all. Consciousness should not be viewed naturalistically as part of the world at all, since consciousness is precisely the reason why there was a world there for us in the first place. For Husserl it is not that consciousness creates the world in any ontological sense—this would be a subjective idealism, itself a consequence of a certain naturalising tendency whereby consciousness is cause and the world its effect—but rather that the world is opened up, made meaningful, or disclosed through consciousness. The world is inconceivable apart from consciousness. Treating consciousness as part of the world, reifying consciousness, is precisely to ignore consciousness’s foundational, disclosive role. For this reason, all natural science is naive about its point of departure, for Husserl (PRS 85; Hua XXV 13). Since consciousness is presupposed in all science and knowledge, then the proper approach to the study of consciousness itself must be a transcendental one — Routledge Intro to Phenomenology

Also, as you mentioned Nagel, another passage I quote regularly:

The scientific revolution of the 17th century, which has given rise to such extraordinary progress in the understanding of nature, depended on a crucial limiting step at the start: It depended on subtracting from the physical world as an object of study everything mental – consciousness, meaning, intention or purpose. The physical sciences as they have developed since then describe, with the aid of mathematics, the elements of which the material universe is composed, and the laws governing their behavior in space and time.

We ourselves, as physical organisms, are part of that universe, composed of the same basic elements as everything else, and recent advances in molecular biology have greatly increased our understanding of the physical and chemical basis of life. Since our mental lives evidently depend on our existence as physical organisms, especially on the functioning of our central nervous systems, it seems natural to think that the physical sciences can in principle provide the basis for an explanation of the mental aspects of reality as well — that physics can aspire finally to be a theory of everything.

However, I believe this possibility is ruled out by the conditions that have defined the physical sciences from the beginning. The physical sciences can describe organisms like ourselves as parts of the objective spatio-temporal order – our structure and behavior in space and time – but they cannot describe the subjective experiences of such organisms or how the world appears to their different particular points of view. There can be a purely physical description of the neurophysiological processes that give rise to an experience, and also of the physical behavior that is typically associated with it, but such a description, however complete, will leave out the subjective essence of the experience – how it is from the point of view of its subject — without which it would not be a conscious experience at all.

So the physical sciences, in spite of their extraordinary success in their own domain, necessarily leave an important aspect of nature unexplained. — Thomas Nagel, the Core of Mind and Cosmos

I would further claim that consciousness is a necessary postulate for many scientific inquiries — J

Not as an object of science, but as its pre-condition. Note the juxtaposition of 'natural' with 'transcendental' that Husserl refers to, which he derives from Kant, although he differs with Kant in signficant ways. Transcendental is 'what is necessary for experience but not given in experience.' So consciousness is not an 'intrusion' into the world, but neither is it an object within it.

:up:

Why, thankyou. Nietszche is not among my normal sources, but I'll take that on board.

Yes and no. Yes, methodologically. But no, not ontologically. There is nothing in the scientific viewpoint that has to deny subjectivity, or claim that it must be reducible to the currently understood categories of physical objectivity. — J

I'm afraid that's not the point. Modern scientific method was founded on a deliberate division between what came to be called the primary and secondary qualities of bodies — a move that located objective reality in quantifiable properties (extension, motion, mass) and relegated qualitative appearances to the mind of the observer. Locke and the British empiricists codified this, and Descartes’ separation of res cogitans and res extensa reinforced it. And none of that is a matter of opinion.

From that point on, the objective sciences proceeded by isolating the measurable, repeatable, intersubjectively verifiable aspects of phenomena — the features that should appear identically to any observer. That methodological bracketing was enormously fruitful, but it gradually hardened into an ontological assumption: the belief that the model thus produced is the whole of what is real.

This is the confusion Nagel examines in The View from Nowhere: the tendency to mistake the “view from nowhere” for a perspective that could exist independently of the conscious beings who adopt it.

When you say “it’s objectively true that you are conscious,” you’re appealing to an abstract inference that science can register only at one remove. The felt reality of consciousness — what it’s like to be an observer — is not something that can be observed. It’s not one more item within the world; it is the condition for there being a world of items at all.

If all agree that consciousness has always been there, and had just been ignored for certain purposes, then I don't know what the debate is about. — Patterner

The debate is about what you mean when you say 'there'.

Indeed. And isn't that the central factor in this debate?

I don't agree that this is what panpsychism is attempting to do. — Patterner

The metaphor Schrodinger gave was, 'once lived experience has been left aside in order to elaborate an objective picture of the world, “If one tries to put it in or on, as a child puts colour on his uncoloured painting copies, it will not fit." 'Putting colour back in' is a metaphor, but, leaving aside whether the metaphor itself is apt, Schrodinger's starting-point is accurate. Scientific method disregards or brackets out the subjective elements of phenomenal experience so as to derive a mathematically-precise theory of the movements and relations of objects. Consciousness is 'left out' of this, insofar as it is not to be found amongst those objects of scientific analysis. So panpsychism proposes that it must in some sense be a property of those objects, even if current science hasn't detected it. I think that's what Schrodinger's criticism means, and I think it is an accurate description of what panpsychism proposes to do.

As for whether its advocates are really trying to do that:

“Experience is the stuff of the world. Experience is what physical stuff is ultimately made of.”
— “Realistic Monism: Why Physicalism Entails Panpsychism,” Galen Strawson, Journal of Consciousness Studies 13(10–11), 2006.

“If physicalism is true, the experiential must be physical, because the experiential exists, and physicalism is the view that everything that exists is physical. The only way to avoid radical emergence is to suppose that experiential being is present throughout the physical world.”
— ibid.

It is exactly this kind of gambit that Schrodinger's critique anticipated.

Rather, it (panpsychism) is saying that if and when we understand what consciousness is, we will discover that our current division of "objective" and "subjective" into areas that can and cannot be studied scientifically, is just plain wrong. — J

But this division is intrinsic. Science depends on the bracketing out of the subjective. Its power lies in its ability to treat phenomena as objects of measurement and prediction, abstracting from the first-person standpoint. But that same abstraction ensures that consciousness — the condition of possibility for any object to appear — cannot itself appear as an object in that framework. In Husserl’s terms, consciousness is not one more thing among things; it is the ground within which “things” arise.

Bitbol’s point in Beyond Panpsychism is that phenomenology doesn’t try to patch consciousness back into the scientific picture (as panpsychism does) but to reverse the direction of explanation: instead of asking how consciousness arises within the world, it asks how the world appears within consciousness. That’s what makes phenomenology radical — it goes to the root (radix) of the knowing relation itself. The goal is not to extend the scientific image to include the subject, but to reveal that the scientific image itself is a derivative construction grounded upon experience. And you can see how this dovetails with Chalmers critique.

Sure but this isn't just about you and your individual take on the meaning crisis. — Tom Storm

Subjective, right? Personal preference. Edifying, but personal.

I know what you think of this, — Tom Storm

That there is bad religion, and it's worse than no religion.

It interests me that Hart has called fundamentalist Protestant Christianity (as is practiced widely in the US and throughout MAGA lands) a cult and heresy. Which is not hard to see. But it does beg the question what counts as the real thing? — Tom Storm

It doesn't beg the question. Begging the question would be 'The Bible is the word of God, because God says it is.' What I was responding to, was the blanket assertion, often made on this Forum, 'religion is belief without evidence'. To which I respond, what counts as evidence? I was pointing out the fact that Christianity, for instance, had a huge impact on the formation of Western culture. That furthermore the sacred literature and testimonial evidence of world religions amounts to an enormous corpus of actual information. Of course most of it is not subject to peer-reviewed scientific analysis, which as good as invalidates if for many of our number.

I'm not seeking to revive Christianity so much as the 'sense of the sacred', in light of which human life and suffering are meaningful and intelligible, and not just something to be borne, Sisyphus-like. As I've said already, it's why I've always sought the cosmic dimension in philosophy. As one of my analytic philosophy heros, Thomas Nagel, put it:

Plato was clearly concerned not only with the state of his soul, but also with his relation to the universe at the deepest level. Plato’s metaphysics was not intended to produce merely a detached understanding of reality. His motivation in philosophy was in part to achieve a kind of understanding that would connect him (and therefore every human being) to the whole of reality – intelligibly and if possible satisfyingly. He even seems to have suffered from a version of the more characteristically Judaeo-Christian conviction that we are all miserable sinners, and to have hoped for some form of redemption from philosophy. — Secular Philosophy and the Religious Temperament

Or Carl Jung in Modern Man in Search of a Soul:

I have treated many hundreds of patients. Among those in the second half of life - that is to say, over 35 - there has not been one whose problem in the last resort was not that of finding a religious outlook on life. It is safe to say that every one of them fell ill because he had lost that which the living religions of every age have given their followers, and none of them has really been healed who did not regain his religious outlook.

(Although as far as empirical evidence is concerned, I recall a 2025 NY Times article on the review of so-called miraculous cures associated with candidates for Sainthood, written by a medical doctor who was called on to revew a case. It might make for an interesting discussion.)

Agree. I think an awful lot of specious reasoning is associated with multiverse ideas. (Not that it isn't fertile ground for science fication.)

The problem is that religion asks people to believe things for which there is no evidence. — Janus

So says A J Ayer. There is abundant evidence for the efficacy of religious beliefs and practices in the lives of the religiius. David Bentley Hart says, in Atheist Delusions, that after the Roman Empire’s pagan social order collapsed, Christianity stepped in and changed things in ways that many moderns take for granted—human dignity, equality (in some form), charity, care for the vulnerable, the idea that the strong have moral obligations toward the weak, the notion that human beings are more than cogs in an imperial machine. He says that many secular cultural “goods” have Christian roots. He argues we need to recognise this transformation if we’re to assess religion’s legacy honestly, whilst also acknowledging that Christian culture has its faults and shadow sides. For sure it wasn't always beneficial but it demonstrably was foundational to the formation of Western culture.

Furthermore in religious epistemology, knowing is not merely an act of detached cognition based on third-party observervation, so much as participation in a transformative way of being. Truth is verified not only by correspondence between propositions and facts, but by a reorientation to the nature of existence towards that which is truly so in the holistic sense — the change in being that follows from insight. As Gregory of Nyssa or the Upaniṣads would say, to know the divine is to become like it.

Scientists don't know what Energy & Fields are in substance, but only what they do in causal relationships between material objects. To avoid misleading, when I use the Quantum Field or Universal Gravity as analogies to the Cosmic Mind notion, I try to make clear that these "forces" are not "objective" and observable, but rationally inferrable from observed processes. — Gnomon

Right - so what you're saying is that 'cosmic mind' is analogous to the 'noumenal'. Agree they might be rationally inferred, but as such cannot be empirically validated.

So my point is that what we know about the Big Bang should act as a constraint on our metaphysical claims. — apokrisis

Do you think that the 'multiverse speculation' (that there are potentially infinitely many 'other' universes) can be or ought to be similarly constrained?

As Erwin Schrödinger cogently pointed out, once lived experience has been left aside in order to elaborate an objective picture of the world, “If one tries to put it in or on, as a child puts colour on his uncoloured painting copies, it will not fit. For anything that is made to enter this world model willy-nilly takes the form of scientific assertion of facts; and as such it becomes wrong”. Panpsychism is the unambiguous target of this criticism. It represents a clumsy attempt at overcompensating the consequences of adopting the intentional/objectifying stance needed to do science, by adding to it (or by replacing it with) patches of experience very similar to the patches of colour added on the surface of an uncoloured drawing. As soon as this is done, the new picture of the world looks like a scientific picture, apart from the unfortunate circumstance that its additional elements cannot be put to test as it would be the case of a scientific theory. This does not make panpsychism plainly wrong, but rather torn apart between its phenomenological origin and its temptation to mimick a theory of the objective world. As a consequence, panpsychism proves unable to define adequate criteria of validity for its own claims. — Michel Bitbol, Beyond Panpsychism

Reference is to Schrödinger E. (1986), What is Life & Mind and Matter, Cambridge University Press

I think this criticism applies to all the current proponents of panpsychism - Philip Goff, Anakka Harris, Galen Strawson, etc. They're all trying to preserve the veracity of the scientific model while injecting an element of subjectivity into it 'from the outside', so to speak.

@Patterner

Perhaps because I don't see anything as a matter of fact. I call that closed mindedness. So I have instead mere opinions, and yes, ones that don't correspond with your 'facts'. — noAxioms

Well, that solves it. All living beings are made from marshmallows, and the moon really is cheese. Time we moved on.