Notice that Rovelli IMO overstates the similarities. — boundless

Perhaps. It's been said he has a nihilist view of Nāgārjuna, and this kind of mistaken interpretation is not infrequent even amongst expert readers.

Have you encountered the charming and ebullient Michel Bitbol? I learned of him on this forum and have read some of his articles. He is a French philosopher of science who has published books on Schrodinger, among other subjects. Also has an expert grasp of Buddhist philosophy. See for example It is never Known but Is the Knower (.pdf)

There are convergences between Buddhism and physics, but they're nothing like what you would assume at first glance. It has to do with the ontology of Buddhism, which is not based on there being Aristotelian substances or essences, and also on the way that Buddhism understands the inter-relationship of 'self-and-world'. It has a relational, not substantial, ontology. Husserl sang high praises of it.

By what means? Its the current scientific consensus. — Philosophim

Citations, please. First, your appeal to “scientific consensus” is misleading unless you specify what kind of consensus you mean. Neuroscience as a practice generally assumes a physicalist framework, because that is the methodological stance required to investigate physical systems. But method is not metaphysics. Many scientists are methodological physicalists for the purposes of doing their work, while remaining agnostic or noncommittal on the ontological status of consciousness.

Moreover, many philosophers of mind—including those working closely with cognitive science—do not regard physicalism as an adequate or complete explanation of consciousness. David Chalmers, Thomas Nagel, Galen Strawson, Evan Thompson, and many others explicitly challenge physicalist orthodoxy. So no, it is not a settled consensus unless you simply mean, “this is the working assumption in one domain of science.” But working assumptions are not metaphysical conclusions.

Saying that physicalism is true because science assumes it is, is like saying that only metal objects are real because metal detectors never find wooden objects.

Take an instrument. Take air. Alone they are physical substrates. Combine them together over time and you have interactions. But those actions cannot occur without the existence of the two physical identities. — Philosophim

This analogy misses the point. Yes, physical material and interaction is required. But what is not explained by appealing to physical substrates is why and how such interaction results in semantic content, intentions, or meaning. To continue with the analogy: you can describe how a violin works in physical terms—strings, bow pressure, air movement—but that doesn’t explain what makes a musical phrase evocative, expressive, or meaningful. Nor does it explain the act of composing music or understanding it. You could play a melody on many different physical instruments, but it would still be recognisably the same melody. So the melody is something other than the physical instrument.

Semantic content is not a mere epiphenomenon of molecular motion. It’s a distinct order of intelligibility, one that involves interpretation, context, and intention—none of which are physical properties. They're not found in the particles or interactions.

If you don't include the meaning, content, and intentions, then of course they aren't included. If you do, they are. — Philosophim

This is tautological. The issue is how you include them. To "include" meaning or intention in your description is not to reduce them to physics, unless you're simply smuggling them in and calling them physical. But physical properties are defined in terms of extension, motion, mass, energy, etc.—not meaning. So what kind of thing is “meaning”? Where does “aboutness” (intentionality) fit into physical ontology?

The problem is not that you forgot to mention content and meaning, but that the physicalist framework can’t account for them. That’s what the “explanatory gap” and the “hard problem” are actually pointing to: not a temporary lack of data, but a categorical difference between the vocabulary of physics and the nature of conscious experience.

This kind of physicalist reasoning has been subjected to careful critique by philosophers and neuroscientists alike. A notable example is Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience by Max Bennett (a neuroscientist) and P. M. S. Hacker (a philosopher of mind and Wittgenstein scholar - review). They argue that many claims made in the name of neuroscience rest on category errors—particularly the idea that “the brain thinks,” “the brain interprets,” or “the brain understands,” when in fact it is persons who do these things. The brain is a necessary condition, yes—but not the experiencing subject. Treating the brain as a standalone thinking agent or process is not a scientific theory but philosophical confusion.

I question that the brain can be described in solely physical terms or as a physical thing. Of course, in some respects the brain is physical - it weighs so much, occupies such and such a volume, and so on. When extracted and placed in a bottle of formalin, it is a physical thing. And physical injuries to the brain plainly have consequences. But a functioning brain in situ is a different matter.

Consider that descriptions of physical things are necessarily static and structural - they tell us about composition, weight, neural connectivity, biochemical processes and interactions and the like. But a living brain exists in constant flux, generating experiences, meanings, and novel responses that seem to emerge from, but aren’t reducible to, these physical substrates. To measure them physically - to try and capture the so-called 'neural correlates' of thinking - would be like trying to capture a conversation by analyzing the acoustic properties of the sound waves of which it consists (although orders of magnitude more complex). Even if successful, it would miss the semantic content, the intentions, the meaning being imparted. 'It would be possible', wrote Einstein, 'to describe everything scientifically, but it would make no sense; it would be without meaning, as if you described a Beethoven symphony as a variation of wave pressure.'

Most physicalists will unthinkingly say that language, mathematics, abstract thought, and so on, can be explained as being physical, because they are produced by the brain. But the problem with this is how much weight is placed on 'produced by'. How any combination of neurochemicals can 'produce' or equate to an idea or some neural content is currently completely unknown. Many physicalists will just assume that it is something understood in principle, that will be known when the science is sufficiently advanced. But the principles are different to those in other areas of science (such as physics). This gets into the whole area of the explanatory gap and the hard problem, of course.

At any rate, I think the really interesting question is that of mental causation - of how ideas and thoughts can have physical consequences, as they plainly do. I don't think it's an insoluble problem, but I think that the assumption the brain is a physical thing is the wrong place to start.

An impressive synopsis, clearly written and well-argued.

Something leaped out at me - my dear other’s family belong to a traditionalist Christian sect, and one of the hymns they sing echoes this passage:

’and beheld a cosmic pillar of light "straighter than a rainbow" that held the universe together.’ (From The Republic) — Sam26

From the hymn:

Guide me, oh thou great Jehovah: (excerpt)
Open now the crystal fountain
Whence the healing waters flow
Let the fiery, cloudy pillar
Lead me all my journey through

That phrase ‘crystal fountain’ always struck me as an esoteric reference. Perhaps one of your ‘shared patterns’.

Religiously, NDEs challenge dogmatic narratives, particularly those centered on eternal punishment. — Sam26

There was one book published about NDE’s by Sam Berchholz, a publisher of Buddhist literature in the US. He underwent an NDE whilst having heart surgery, but his vision of the afterlife was of hell rather than heaven. He wrote about it in an illustrated book, A Guided Tour of Hell (although I’ll acknowledge that I haven’t bought or read it.) The thrust of it seems to be the urgent necessity of overcoming selfishness and greed in this life, as there are many beings in these ‘lower realms’. I thought it might be worth mentioning as an outlier, perhaps. It can’t be all rainbows and sunshine, considering what people get up to in their lives.

Another, more well-known NDA case that might be of interest is A J Ayer, the famous British philosopher and evangelical atheist, known for his rigorous criticisms of religion and metaphysics. Late in life he nearly died as a consequence of choking on some food, and (somewhat incredulously) reported on his own NDE. It seems to have changed his views on materialism, although he remained adamantly atheist. Recounting the story, and also its similarity to a report by a friend, he acknowledged:

On the face of it, these experiences, on the assumption that the last one was veridical, are rather strong evidence that death does not put an end to consciousness. Does it follow that there is a future life? Not necessarily. The trouble is that there are different criteria for being dead, which are indeed logically compatible but may not always be satisfied together. — A J Ayer, What I saw when I was Dead

It did at least plant the seed of doubt in his confident physicalism.

Anyway - admire your persistence with this work.

The clear, logical problem with "the whole as primary", is as I describe, the whole has no existence until the parts are united in its creation. Therefore the whole cannot be causal in its own creation. We can assume that something external puts the parts together, creating the whole, in a top-down fashion, but this would be nothing but what is called "external telos". — Metaphysician Undercover

On the contrary, the whole is what gives unity and function to the parts. In living systems, it is the organism that organizes the parts, not the other way around. Outside the context of the whole, those “parts” aren’t really parts at all — they’re just bits of organic matter. (Gametes and zygotes are special cases, already caught up in larger reproductive processes.)

Reductionism typically assumes bottom-up causation: that component parts determine the behavior of the system. But top-down causation recognizes that the formative influence of the whole — the organism, the ecosystem, the developmental system — constrains and governs the activity of its components.

Take the acorn: yes, its DNA encodes the blueprint for the oak tree. But that blueprint is itself a product of evolutionary history — not just a list of parts, but a living record of how the whole organism has been shaped to grow, reproduce, and interact with its environment.

This has been pointed out to you again and again, but you keep reciting the same basic error to anyone who challenges you. There’s something fundamentally amiss in your grasp of this issue, so I would be obliged if you could maybe start your own thread on it, rather than persisting to make these plainly erroneous comments in this one.

My reason for quoting Philip Ball… — Gnomon

The reference is to a book How Life Works: A User’ Guide to the New Biology. Yet another book I must look at :roll:

A world is unaffected by something elsewhere imagining one. — noAxioms

Which world?

As soon as you name a ‘world’ or a ‘thing’ or ‘an unknown object’ which you claim is unaffected by or separate from your thought of it, you are already bringing it within the ambit of thought. The realist always has something in mind when he or she speaks of ‘something unaffected by thought’. It’s a Chinese finger trap - you can’t even say it without undercutting the point.

His [Einstein’s] critique was critical to the development of quantum theory. — noAxioms

Yes, but the article acknowledges that. It quotes Alain Aspect:

"When people say, 'Oh, you showed Einstein wrong', I say, 'Come on, I showed Einstein was great,'" he said in response to the award.

I’ve listened to a couple of interviews with Sir Roger Penrose of late, and he’s adamant that quantum theory is wrong - and you’d think he would know! But when you drill down, his objection is philosophical, not scientific.

Discover Magazine: In quantum mechanics an object can exist in many states at once, which sounds crazy. The quantum description of the world seems completely contrary to the world as we experience it.

Sir Roger Penrose: It doesn’t make any sense, and there is a simple reason. You see, the mathematics of quantum mechanics has two parts to it. One is the evolution of a quantum system, which is described extremely precisely and accurately by the Schrödinger equation. That equation tells you this: If you know what the state of the system is now, you can calculate what it will be doing 10 minutes from now. However, there is the second part of quantum mechanics — the thing that happens when you want to make a measurement. Instead of getting a single answer, you use the equation to work out the probabilities of certain outcomes. The results don’t say, “This is what the world is doing.” Instead, they just describe the probability of its doing any one thing. The equation should describe the world in a completely deterministic way, but it doesn’t.

Notice the ‘should’! Penrose’s gripe is the same as Einstein - the belief that the world is a certain way, and it’s science’s job to discern that, to discover ‘the way it is’. But what if physical reality is actually indeterminate on a fundamental level? What if it really is probabilistic and in some basic sense incomplete? That is the idea that drives scientific realism around the bend. Whereas there are philosophies, ways of seeing the world, in which that openness is understood. This is one of the points of convergence between quantum physics and the Buddhist philosophy of emptiness (śūnyatā).

(This has been explored by credible academic sources, moving beyond popular mysticism, to examine genuine philosophical parallels. Theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli, founder of loop quantum gravity, has written seriously about how Nagarjuna’s philosophy of emptiness—the idea that phenomena lack intrinsic existence—resonates with quantum mechanics’ relational ontology, where particles and properties exist only through measurement relationships rather than independently. Academic journals have published rigorous analyses, such as SpringerLink’s examination of “Two Aspects of Śūnyatā in Quantum Physics,” which argues that both quantum mechanics and (Middle-Way) Buddhism suggest there are no intrinsically existing particles with inherent properties, but rather that all phenomena arise through dependent relationships. This philosophical convergence centers on the idea that reality is fundamentally relational rather than consisting of purportedly mind-independent objects, challenging the classical scientific assumption that the objective domain has fixed, determinate properties independent of observation. It dovetails well with aspects of the Copenhagen and QBist interpretation, not so much with classical realism.)

Okay, but how does any of that help your thesis which holds that causality is physical? — Leontiskos

I feel no burden of proof.

I too think Schopenhauer was wrong on some things, but not on that.

I inherited some of Schopenhauer's views. In short, life is eternal suffering. — kirillov

That's not all he said. Nobody seems to pay much attention, but Schop. also believed in some form of redemption. As is well known, he read a translation of the Upaniṣads throughout his life, and often referred to Hindu and Buddhist philosophy.

In a manner reminiscent of traditional Buddhism, he recognizes that life is filled with unavoidable frustration and acknowledges that the suffering caused by this frustration can itself be reduced by minimizing one’s desires. Moral consciousness and virtue thus give way to the voluntary poverty and chastity of the ascetic. St. Francis of Assisi (WWR, Section 68) and Jesus (WWR, Section 70) subsequently emerge as Schopenhauer’s prototypes for the most enlightened lifestyle, in conjunction with the ascetics from every religious tradition.

This emphasis upon the ascetic consciousness and its associated detachment and tranquillity introduces some paradox into Schopenhauer’s outlook... — SEP, Schopenhauer

More than some! But regardless, it's important to understand that there was, at least in theory, an end to suffering, comprising the ability to detach from the 'blind striving' of Will (which has been compared to the 'trsna' or 'thirst' which is the cause of suffering in Buddhism. Also Schopenhauer and Buddhism, Peter Abelson.)

For sure, looking forward to it!

But this was the very question that awoke Kant from his dogmatic slumber. His famous “answer to Hume” was, paraphrased, that we do not infer causality from observed sequences; rather, we could not even recognize those sequences as such unless the category of causation were already present in the intellect. The freezing of water is experienced as a physical transformation precisely because we perceive the world through the perspective of causality Causality isn’t a physical object to be found so much as a necessary condition for the coherence of experience.

Hume argues that since we never observe causality directly—only sequences of events—then causality must be a mental habit or convention, not something real, as it can’t be observed. But Kant says the fact that we can experience sequences as ordered events already presupposes the possibility of causal relationships. What makes experience possible is not just sensory data - as the empiricists argue - but the conceptual framework through which we cognise it.

The idea that the mind plays an active role in structuring reality is so familiar to us now that it is difficult for us to see what a pivotal insight this was for Kant. He was well aware of the idea’s power to overturn the philosophical worldviews of his contemporaries and predecessors, however. He even somewhat immodestly likens his situation to that of Copernicus in revolutionizing our worldview. In the Lockean view, mental content is given to the mind by the objects in the world. Their properties migrate into the mind, revealing the true nature of objects. Kant says, “Thus far it has been assumed that all our cognition must conform to objects” (B xvi). But that approach cannot explain why some claims like, “every event must have a cause,” are a priori true. Similarly, Copernicus recognized that the movement of the stars cannot be explained by making them revolve around the observer; it is the observer that must be revolving. Analogously, Kant argued that we must reformulate the way we think about our relationship to objects. It is the mind itself which gives objects at least some of their characteristics because they must conform to its structure and conceptual capacities. Thus, the mind’s active role in helping to create a world that is experiencable must put it at the center of our philosophical investigations. The appropriate starting place for any philosophical inquiry into knowledge, Kant decides, is with the mind that can have that knowledge. — Kant Metaphysics IEP

Perhaps, but it is a vital insight nonetheless. (Interestingly, if I select that Russian term and choose Translate, the choice offered is ‘involvement’, which is not too far from the mark!)

*

I hope you find it interesting. — Astorre

I do. I make a similar point in On Purpose, with respect to organisms generally - they are all engaged, even very primitive organisms, with maintaining themselves distinct from their environment. If they’re subsumed by their environment, they are dead. It’s what ‘dead’ means.

I wonder if this is at all relatable to Gilles Deleuze idea of the fundamental nature of difference? I only know about it from comments made here on this forum, but it strikes me that there’s a similarity.

The water is physical, and the cold temperature is physical, and the ice is physical, but is the relation that describes and accounts for the transformation itself physical? — Leontiskos

Surely. The precise mechanism is very well understood, in terms of molecular dynamics.

You’re right that causality as a principle isn’t a material object—but that doesn’t mean causation between physical events isn’t physical. The principle may be abstract, but the relation it captures is physically real and measurable. So, if I say “the high temperature caused the water to boil,” I’m referring to a physical state change governed by known physical laws, not invoking an abstract metaphysical principle.

Now supposing the consequence really does represent a cause, is it physical? Is the if-then relation that obtains in reality between water and temperature a physical thing? The water is physical, and the cold temperature is physical, and the ice is physical, but is the relation that describes and accounts for the transformation itself physical? — Leontiskos

The description of the relation is of course not physical—it’s verbal or symbolic, a product of language or mathematical formalism. No argument there: the sentence “cold temperatures cause water to freeze” is composed of words, not ice crystals. And likewise, the water is composed of H₂0, not phonemes.

But the relation being described—namely, the causal link between temperature and phase change—is a physical phenomenon. It reflects real, observable, and measurable interactions in the physical world. Water molecules slow down at lower temperatures; hydrogen bonds lock them into a crystalline lattice. That’s not a metaphor, that’s molecular physics.

So while talking about causation involves non-physical symbols (words, formulas), the causation itself in this case—between temperature and freezing—is every bit as physical as the molecules involved.

And yet this is the danger of talk of qualia — Banno

Only to the misinterpretation of it. Anway, enough for now, you won't find the keys under this streetlight.

The very entomology asks what kind of thing... — Banno

Misleading use of 'thing'. The point about first-person experience is that it is not a thing.

The term imports metaphysical commitments about the structure of experience that should be questioned, not assumed. — Banno

No, it points out premisses that have been suppressed in naturalism.

The precedent for David Chalmer's framing of the question 'Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness is precisely the question arising as a direct result of scientific naturalism.

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

Chalmers pointed this out - that the modern conception of objective reality excludes the subject to whom it is meaningful. Which is also the basis of Husserl's Crisis of the European Sciences.

If you think of being conscious as an activity, — Banno

Hate to point out the obvious, but 'being' is a verb.

I've learned that Lewis is generally credited with introducing the term, although Peirce had anticipated it. But the modern problem of qualia took shape in response to the limitations of functionalist and behaviorist theories of mind. The issue isn’t that philosophers want to posit mysterious mental atoms, but that subjective experience resists functional decomposition. This is not an invention or a mistake—it's a response to a real explanatory gap. And one that has been pivotal for the emergent field of consciousness studies, in which David Chalmers has been a principal.

Here's my question for those who would have us talk of qualia: what is added to the conversation by their introduction? — Banno

Do you know in which philosophical esay or book the term was introduced, and why? Quite aside from the difficulties you seem to be having in grasping its significance, the fact is that it has become an item of debate. Why, do you think? All a mistake?

However, one of organic life's most stunning features still remains obscure, namely agency, intentionality, volition, and purpose. Phillip Ball reports on a workshop held in 2016 at the Santa Fe Institute investigating the uniqueness of terrestrial biology — Gnomon

Of course. But then, I recall you discussing Deacon's Incomplete Nature. He also is very interested in teleonomic (as distinct from teleological) phenomena in biology, as well as ententional structures (a word he coined) in both organic and inorganic. (Incidentally I just now received my copy - second hand, looking like it's been on a shelf for a good while, but in fair condition. It's an important book in my view, not that I will agree with him on every philosophical point.)

I think the basic issue is that purpose, generally, is a much more ambiguous term than the metrics of classical physics (mass, velocity etc) which can be measured and defined very accurately. To introduce consideration of what things are for, or why they exist, is to immediately raise all these questions about purpose, aboutness, intentionality, and so on.

What Deacon and others are trying to do, is accomodate purposefulness in an extended naturalist framework - to see how purpose can be understood without appealing to divine creation, but also without reducing living things to machines or bits of matter.

But an abacus is not a computer. — Patterner

It’s not a digital computer, but it’s a device used for calculations. But the rhetorical point, was simply that computers no more intend than does the abacus. And notice in the question you posed, that you placed ‘learn’ and ‘teach’ in quotation marks.

By the way - I might draw your attention to an AEON article from a few years ago - now a book - The Blind Spot. It is a relevant criticism of the form of panpsychism (of the Harris/Goff variety) that you’re pursuing.

Sure, but in a mind-independent view, you bringing it to mind has zero effect on the thing itself. — noAxioms

What thing would that be?

Incidentally a nice Australian Broadcasting Corp feature on the 100 year anniversary of Heisenberg's famous paper https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2025-07-29/quantum-mechanics-100-years-physics-heisenberg-schroedinger/105425950

Instead of questioning whether intelligence is a meaningful concept, namely the idea that intelligence is a closed system of meaning that is inter-subjetive and definable a priori, critics instead reject the idea that human behaviour is describable in terms of algorithms and appeal to what they think of as a uniquely human secret sauce that is internal to the human mind for explaining the apparent non-computable novelty of human decision making. Proponents know that the secret sauce idea is inadmissible, even if they share the critic's reservation that something is fundamentally wrong in their shared closed conception of intelligence. — sime

I think that’s a rather deflationary way of putting it. The 'non-computable' aspect of decision-making isn’t some hidden magic, but the fact that our decisions take place in a world of values, commitments, and consequences. That’s not a closed system — it's an open horizon that makes responsibility possible. Human beings, as @Astorre points out above, are bound by limitations or constraints that could never even occur to an AI system. It has no 'skin in the game', so to speak. Nothing matters to it.

I agree that phenomenology has some important things to say about what intelligence means. I'm also intrigued by your second point:

I am convinced that the origins of being, which make a person who he is, cannot be known rationally. But if such knowledge occurs, the meaning of being itself will immediately disappear and it will simply disappear. — Astorre

Perhaps you might elaborate on why you think this must be so? (not that I don't agree with you!)

Given that we know the Turing Test, for example, only measures a subset of both human and intelligent behavior, I don't think anyone (here) is saying that there is some sort of a priori "universal" test that requires the complete distillation of the breadth of human behavior and the ways we create meaning in the form of an algorithm for said algorithm to pass such a test. — ToothyMaw

With the possibility of AGI being debated - the 'G' in AGI signifying a degree of autonomous intelligence – and the related discussion of whether or if AI systems are truly conscious, the questions of meaning really ought to be central. I mean, there are many people now who are convinced AI systems are persons. There was a CNN story recently about a married couple, where the husband is convinced that his AI friend has a 'spiritual message for mankind', and the wife thinks him delusional (which he probably is.) But that's just one example, there are going to be many, many others.

How is "qualities of experience" clearer than that? — Banno

Let's go back to the source.

The really hard problem of consciousness is the problem of experience. When we think and perceive, there is a whir of information-processing, but there is also a subjective aspect. As Nagel (1974) has put it, there is something it is like to be a conscious organism. This subjective aspect is experience. When we see, for example, we experience visual sensations: the felt quality of redness, the experience of dark and light, the quality of depth in a visual field. Other experiences go along with perception in different modalities: the sound of a clarinet, the smell of mothballs. Then there are bodily sensations, from pains to orgasms; mental images that are conjured up internally; the felt quality of emotion, and the experience of a stream of conscious thought. What unites all of these states is that there is something it is like to be in them. All of them are states of experience. — Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness, David Chalmers

The whole 'problem' is intended to demonstrate the sense in which objective, third-party descriptions, the basic currency of the natural sciences, doesn't capture the first-person nature of experience (also known as 'being'.) So, as such, it's only a 'problem' within that context.

Yes, would need all of that - but the point being, computers are still physical systems.

The problem is that qualia are no more clearly defined than is consciousness, and so are not all that helpful. — Banno

The point is they are qualities of experience and therefore precisely what eludes objective description. So even though you can't define them, exactly, we all know directly what 'quality of experience' means.

If you situate them in the context of quantitative measurement as distinct from qualitative experience, you can see the point more clearly. A piece of medical equipment can provide a quantitative description of some physical condition, right down to the molecular level. But only the subject can feel the condition.

I don't see what is obtuse or controversial about that.

I’m clear that intelligibility is something that is constituted (“created”?) in the interaction between mind and world. However, our understanding of the world tells us that it has not changed in any radical way since we appeared and that many of the processes now going on must have been going on long before any sentient or intelligent creatures appeared. So is it not reasonable to infer that the world would have been intelligible if there had been anyone around to understand it? (Note that this is a counter-factual, not a blunt assertion.) — Ludwig V

Yes, it is reasonable: but the point is, there was not! What I'm arguing against is the idea that our picture of the world, as we imagine it to be without any observer, still relies on perspective, on there being a viewpoint, which is implicit in the picture of the early universe before life evolved. It is an empirical fact that there is and was the universe before h.sapiens evolved and outside the conception of any human being. But empirical fact still relies on an implicit perspective, which we have tended to absolutize in such a way that we believe it to be 'the way things truly are'.

As this is such a central point, I'll elaborate it at length. There's a post on the philosophy blog Partially Examined LIfe, about this issue, seen through the perspective of Schopenhauer. The introduction says:

On the Schopenhauer discussion I referred to his view qua idealist that, really, there was no world per se before the first perceiver, but also that science is correct in investigating ancient history, i.e. the world before perceivers. How could both of these claims be true? This is a general problem that idealism must address, summed up adequately by the old chestnut about the tree falling in the forest: The idealist must say that no, it doesn’t make a sound, and in fact there’s no tree or falling at all unless something (not necessarily a person) is there to witness it, to be a subject and thereby create it as a distinct object. Yet science still needs to work, i.e. people should be able to come along later and truly say that yes, there was a tree here standing, and it fell at such and such a time from such and such causes.

So this is the problem you've identified. Schopenhauer's analysis is that:

the law of causality and the treatment and investigation of nature which is based upon it, lead us necessarily to the conclusion that, in time, each more highly organised state of matter has succeeded a cruder state: so that the lower animals existed before men, fishes before land animals, plants before fishes, and the unorganised before all that is organised; that, consequently, the original mass had to pass through a long series of changes before the first eye could be opened.

(Here Schopenhauer demonstrates a grasp of evolution, which is interesting in its own right as he published World as Will and Idea decades before Darwin published Origin of Species. But German 'naturphilosophie' anticipated the general idea through Goethe and Lamarck.)

He goes on:

And yet, the existence of this whole world remains ever dependent upon the first eye that opened, even if it were that of an insect. For such an eye is a necessary condition of the possibility of knowledge, and the whole world exists only in and for knowledge, and without it is not even thinkable. The world is entirely idea, and as such demands the knowing subject as the supporter of its existence.

This is where the claim becomes radical - but it's also the argument in the OP. The argument is, that '‘existence’ is a compound or complex idea.' Whatever we think of as 'existing' is already embedded in a complex of supporting ideas, concepts, practices, and so on. This is so, for anything we can know or identify as an existent.

Thus we see, on the one hand, the existence of the whole world necessarily dependent upon the first conscious being, however undeveloped it may be; on the other hand, this conscious being just as necessarily entirely dependent upon a long chain of causes and effects which have preceded it, and in which it itself appears as a small link. These two contradictory points of view, to each of which we are led with the same necessity, we might again call an antinomy in our faculty of knowledge...

You may recall the role of antinomies in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. The antinomies show how reason, when it tries to grasp the totality of the world beyond possible experience, runs into contradictions. Each antinomy has a thesis and an antithesis that are both logically valid but mutually exclusive. Kant uses them to demonstrate the limits of pure reason and to argue that certain metaphysical questions (like whether the world has a beginning in time) cannot be answered by reason alone.

So:

The necessary contradiction which at last presents itself to us here, finds its solution in the fact that, to use Kant’s phraseology, time, space, and causality do not belong to the thing-in-itself, but only to its phenomena, of which they are the form; which in my language means this: The objective world, the world as idea, is not the only side of the world, but merely its outward side; and it has an entirely different side—the side of its inmost nature—its kernel—the thing-in-itself… But the world as idea… only appears with the opening of the first eye. Without this medium of knowledge it cannot be, and therefore it was not before it. But without that eye, that is to say, outside of knowledge, there was also no before, no time. Thus time has no beginning, but all beginning is in time.

The counterfactual—“the world would have been intelligible if there had been anyone there to understand it”—is indeed reasonable in everyday thought. But it conceals an important ambiguity. It implies that intelligibility is somehow already in the world, lying in wait for a knower, like treasure waiting to be found. What Schopenhauer shows is that intelligibility is not merely discovered; it is co-constituted by the subject. That is why our picture of the pre-human universe still bears the marks of perspective—it is our rendering of what “must have been,” shaped by our cognitive categories, spatiotemporal intuitions, and causal frameworks. It is intelligible because it is already a reconstruction—ours.

Schopenhauer’s inversion—“the world only begins with the first eye that opens”—is not a denial of evolution or cosmology but a metaphysical clarification: that the world-as-known, the world as idea, is dependent on consciousness, even while consciousness is, in turn, causally embedded in that world. This reciprocity, this antinomy, reflects the limits of our faculty of reason when it tries to grasp the world in itself.

So yes, we may speak of a pre-human world, and science can rightly describe its conditions. But this remains, necessarily, a retrospective construction. The error is to mistake this picture for something that exists independently of any condition for its appearance—as if meaning and form could simply hover, unperceived, in the void. That, I believe, is the illusion of realism, and why the universe and the mind are truly 'co-arising'.

So even if we grant for the sake of argument that Δ-temperature is itself physical, what is in question is the cause. — Leontiskos

I think the onus is on you to show why it's in question.

I don't suspect an abacus is a conscious unit. While I suspect consciousness is everywhere, in all things, I don't think everything that humans view as physical units necessarily are conscious units. I think the unit must be processing information in order to be a conscious unit. — Patterner

An abacus can be used to process information - it's a primitive computer. There's no real difference in principle between the abacus and a computer. The difference is one of scale. The NVidia chips that drive AI have billions of transistors embedded in a patch of silicon. You could in principle reproduce that technology with the abacus, although it would probably be the size of a city, and it would take long periods of time to derive a result. But in principle, it's the same process.

You possess something that instruments don’t, namely, organic unity.
— Wayfarer

Is "organic unity" not a collection of material components? Because as far as I'm aware, organic matter is matter. — Michael

Organisms operate by different principles to non-organic matter. They grow, heal, maintain homeostasis, and reproduce. None of those behaviours can be observed in matter (crystals grow, but they don't exhibit any of the other characteristics.) None of the parts of inorganic aggregates are functionally related to the other parts, wheres the cells in a multicellular organism are differentiated in accordance with their functions in the various organs, as optic cells, kidney cells, etc. When they begin as stem cells, they are able to assume any of those functions depending on where in the organism they're located (hence the effectiveness of stem cell therapy).

Are you claiming that a temperature reduction is physical? — Leontiskos

Yes. How is it not? It is measurable with a physical instrument, and observable in the effects it has on matter.

I think this is a central point, and I would just say that causation is not physical. I am surprised to see that there are a lot of claims within this thread which presuppose that causation is physical.....When one billiard ball collides with another and causes it to move, our talk of "cause" is not talk of something that is physically instantiated — Leontiskos

How is it not? How did the fall in temperature not cause the water to freeze, or the corrosion of the main support beam not cause the bridge to fall? If causation is not physical, what is it?

From a reader review of Tam Hunt’s (author of cited article) book:

Hunt jumps straight into the middle of the sensationalistic "culture war" between scientific atheism and religious creationism, not to side with either form of fundamentalism, but to carve out a more nuanced third way forward. This third way entails retrieving the insights garnered by marginalized figures in the history of science and philosophy (marginalized by mainstream academics, at least), like Alfred North Whitehead and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Both these thinkers offered a richly articulated alternative interpretation of 20th century physics and biology that not only reveals a lack of contradiction between scientific findings and an enchanted or ensouled cosmology, but a positive convergence. Hunt successfully draws on their contributions, as well as contemporary scientists like Eva Jablonka, Stu Kauffman, and the late Lynn Margulis, to combat the triumphalist version of scientific materialism still being proffered to the public by the likes of Lawrence Krauss and Richard Dawkins.

Sounds like my kind of writer

Beats listening to Trump!s lies. I’d trust any mainstream journo over that.

The absurdity of this investigation is underlined, too, by the fact that Mr. Obama is almost certainly immune from prosecution — thanks to Mr. Trump and the Supreme Court. In its decision last year in Trump v. United States, the court held that there was a presumption that former presidents could not be prosecuted for any “official” conduct during their time in office. The preparation and dissemination of intelligence findings are certainly official functions of the presidency, and accordingly, they would be off limits as the bases for any criminal charges. — NY Times

Not that facts ever matter to MAGA.

It's still a world. Nothing names it that, lacking information processing to give meaning, but that property (worldness) seems to be an example a feature of the thing in itself. — noAxioms

Nope. I dispute that. To say what it is, to name it, you have to bring it to mind. If you are considering what it would be, sans any observer, you're still bringing it to mind. And as soon as you say 'seems to be', already you're talking of what appears to be the case.

It is a matter of what the electronic switches are conscious of. — Patterner

What might an abacus be conscious of?

But floops are none of them flops, and that does not tell us what floops and flops are. So saying consciousness consists entirely of floops gets us nowhere. — Banno

So I take it that you're not seeing the point of the argument, then.

If "qualia" is a collective noun for "red", "loud" and so on, then I've no great problem with it. — Banno

The meaning of qualia is the quality of experience - what it like, as the literature has it. The experienced sensation of it. And the whole point of the so-called problem of consciousness is that they are fundamentally subjective, therefore eluding objective or physical description. The so-called ‘privacy’ of sensation owes itself to that - there can be no ‘third party’, publicly available instance of a sensation, as it is something only a subject can experience. Why this has provoked so much debate has nothing much to do with the fact of the matter, but with what it shows up about the limitations of the objective sciences - namely, that there is no room in it for what makes us human, which is really the rhetorical point of the whole ‘hard problem consciousness’ argument.

MU, this is going to be my last word on the topic. You're confusing distinct Aristotelian categories by treating formal and final cause as though they must be opposed. In Aristotle’s account—especially as taken up by Aquinas—the form of a thing is its principle of organization and development, and it is inherently purposive. That’s why formal cause and final cause are not separate domains in living beings: a plant’s form includes its telos to grow, reproduce, and flourish.

As for O’Callaghan, his description of internal teleology clearly includes non-conscious natural purposiveness—such as organs functioning for the sake of the organism—not just the deliberate intention of agents. That’s why Aquinas can say even non-rational beings “act for an end.” He’s not talking about conscious volition, but about nature acting according to its form, which is exactly what top-down causation refers to in this context.

So no, what I’m describing is not determinist, nor external imposition, nor a confusion of causes. It’s classical metaphysics. I think we've hit the point where clarification isn't really advancing, so I’ll leave it there.

I think we’re talking past each other at this point. My view, following O’Callaghan (and by extension, Aquinas and Aristotle), is that top-down causation refers to the way the form or structure of a whole gives meaning and function to its parts—not as external coercion, but as internal teleology. That’s distinct from bottom-up causation, which builds from autonomous parts upward. Your framing treats top-down as necessarily determinist or imposed, which misrepresents the whole issue. I don’t think there’s much value in continuing this, as the conversation is getting buried in long and speculative detours. So I’ll leave it there. No hard feelings.

I've pointed out a few times that you keep searching when you probably ought stop... — Banno

It's more likely I'm seeing something that you don't. But that your eyes have to adjust.