NeoDarwinian Evolution is a scientific model…. — 180 Proof

…which also serves as an ideological attitude, as amply illustrated in many exchanges here.

Indeed, one of the main points at issue. Something to do with philosophical shortcomings of naturalism.

But then, biologists may be poor judges of philosophical argument.

Punctuation is not an end and a beginning, because something carries through, some kind of continuity, so that we say the parts are connected as one — Metaphysician Undercover

There is actually a Buddhist answer to that question, in form of the principle of 'nirodha' (cessation. It has been compared to, and might actually be the source of, 'epoche', or 'suspension of judgement' according to the suggested connection between Buddhism and Pyrrhonian scepticism.) Nirodha is, in some contexts, a synonym of Nirvāṇa - the cessation of any sense of 'I and mine', through insight into dependent origination grounded in meditative awareness of the psycho-physiological activities of the body-mind. What 'carries through' are the impulses and desires that continue to seek embodiment - until such time as they don't. (Hence the designation of various grades of realisation as 'once-returner', 'never-returner' etc.)

I have noticed that. But I think his basic criticism, that neo-darwinism has become a 'theory of everything', is solid.

Wow, you have some interesting friends. I'll see if I can get started on it.

------

I was going to add this snippet I was reading in a New Yorker obituary of Jerry Fodor:

“Neo-Darwinism is taken as axiomatic,” he wrote in “What Darwin Got Wrong,” co-written with Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini, a cognitive scientist, and published in 2010. “It goes literally unquestioned. A view that looks to contradict it, either directly or by implication, is ipso facto rejected, however plausible it may otherwise seem.”

Which reminded me of this exchange earlier in the thread:

mathematical and artistic abilities can't be accounted for in terms of the theory (of natural selection, according to Alfred Russel Wallace)

— Wayfarer

We're the only critters we know that have math and art, and we are the way we are because of natural selection, so evidently it does account for math and art. — Srap Tasmaner

Sounds very similar to my own personal project — Gnomon

The year before my first child was born - he's now 34 - I saw my first-ever laser printer, which had been bought by the place I worked (for about the price of a car). I composed a one-pager on ideas related to the Tao of Physics. When printed, it looked amazingly slick. I was so impressed with myself that I tried to start an actual publication dedicated to such ideas. Of course, it bombed - I had no experience in publishing or marketing and distribution. Tilting at windmills. Later on when blogs became a thing, I too started a blog, but it got no readership. I tried writing a couple of articles on Medium, but there are literally hundreds of thousands of people publishing there. The problem with philosophy as a field is that there are many very clever people with their own agendas. Cutting through is exceedingly difficult. That's why I respect David Chalmers and Jules Evans. Nowadays I'm more circumspect.

I try to stay within the bounds of philosophy, although I do draw on Buddhist and Hindu sources that are outside the Western canon. To my mind, a great deal of what is designated philosophy in modern culture is diametrically opposed to what philosophy originally was (as per Pierre Hadot) - there is a tension between philosophical wisdom and liberalism.

Isn't it obvious to you though, that revelation must produce knowledge? — Metaphysician Undercover

Far from being ‘obvious’, to most contributors here it would be highly objectionable. In fact you could almost say that anything designated 'revealed truth' will be discounted at the outset of any discussion. Deserves a separate thread.

.

As a solution, we are told that the mind cannot be reduced to matter, but if we introduce "form" into the equation, things are resolved. — Eugen

Thanks for introducing us to this author. He looks like a very substantial thinker, going on the ToC of his book, Structure and Metaphysics of Mind. (Review here.) Perhaps the answer to your question can be found there, it is after all a 353 page book with a very detailed survey of many of the issues. I would look for an account of the origin of forms (morphe). There are accounts in later Greek philosophy of this idea, I don't know if he draws on them for his account. Given that physics is the science of matter (hyle), then the question is, what is the science of form? (morphe)

I notice this thought-experiment mentioned in the review (above):

Suppose we put Godehard [i.e. 'a human'] in a strong bag -- a very strong bag since we want to ensure that nothing leaks out when we squash him with several tons of force. Before the squashing, the contents of the bag include one human being; after, they include none. In addition, before the squashing the contents of the bag can think, feel, and act, but after the squashing they can't. What explains these differences in the contents of the bag pre-squashing and post-squashing? The physical materials (whether particles or stuffs) remain the same -- none of them leaked out. Intuitively, we want to say that what changed was the way those materials were structured or organized. (p. 9)

Interestingly, there's an exact parallel in the early Buddhist texts, wherein one Prince Payasi (generally depicted as representing materialism) was said to have ordered that condemned prisoners be sealed into a clay jar and suffocated. The jar containing the prisoner was to be weighed before and after death, and if it weighed the same, it would show that no soul had escaped from the body at time of death. Primitive, maybe, but it was after all 400 b.c. or so, and in pursuit of exactly the same facts.

I can't speak for Wayfarer, but the definitions in footnote *2 do not define my more complex integrated worldview, which is intended to combine the Objective (concrete) view of empirical science with the Subjective (abstract)*5 perspective — Gnomon

The model I'm trying to flesh out posits mind or consciousness as being a latent attribute or dimension of reality, which manifests when and wherever the appropriate physical conditions exist (apparently a rare occurrence) through the processes we know as evolutionary biology. This implies that the mind is not the outcome of that process, but at the source of it - but not as a creator Deity, more like Schopenhauer's Will. It is also not to say that ‘everything is conscious’ in the pantheistic sense, or that sub-atomic particles have some primitive form of experience. I see that as an attempt to rescue materialism by the injection of mind-stuff.

Consider this quote:

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. — Julian Huxley

In my view, mind is as fundamental as atomic structures although not reducible to them. But here's the key point: it is never encountered as an object - it only ever manifests as the subject of experience, not to the subject as an object of cognition. So it is not anything - no-thing or not-a-thing - but at the same time, is at the foundation of existence. (I don't think Julian Huxley saw it that way, but his brother Alduous might have.)

You can also see why such an insight is outside the purview of naturalism, although I think phenomenology understands it (for which see It is never known but it is the knower, Michel Bitbol, .pdf.)

Where reason comes into the picture is that reason and mathematics provides the logical structure of experience and cognition. Objects are given in perception but the received sensory data is structured by cognition and reason (per Kant, although I am more inclined to admit the reality of universals).

Notice also this snippet on C S Peirce 'The phrase "matter is effete mind" is attributed to Peirce and reflects his metaphysical views on the nature of reality. Peirce believed in a form of philosophical idealism, which means that he considered mind or consciousness to be fundamental and primary, with matter arising from it in some sense. He argued that matter, rather than being something independent or external to mind, is a product or result of mind.

He conceived of three categories that underpin his philosophical system: firstness, secondness, and thirdness. Firstness refers to the realm of pure possibility, potentiality, and quality. Secondness is associated with concrete individual instances, facts, and brute realities. Thirdness encompasses generality, law, and the relational aspects of things.

According to Peirce, mind or consciousness belongs to the category of firstness, characterized by a pure qualitative aspect. Matter, on the other hand, falls within the category of secondness, representing concrete, individual manifestations of existence. However, Peirce posited that matter, as we perceive it, is not entirely separate from mind but is derived from it or evolved from it.'

(Still trying to put the pieces together, may well not succeed.)

OK, never mind. Mistaken impression on my part.

Would I be right in surmising that you find 'the argument from reason' an affront to common sense?

:chin:

But already science allows such challenges. There are some really obvious examples I dare not mention. — Srap Tasmaner

Please do!

think your position is that naturalism itself makes an unjustified claim to exclusivity, and you're just rebutting that. — Srap Tasmaner

It’s more that I think some taken-for-granted elements of the scientific worldview amount to popular mythology, which has subtle but important consequences.

Analytical Thomism was an attempt to bridge the analytical way of doing philosophy that we find in the anglophone world with classical Thomist propositions — Dermot Griffin

I'm quite interested in this school of thought, although it's rather difficult to find specific readings. (I read Gilson's Unity of Philosophical Experience, although it didn't have much about that in particular). I've also read Edward Feser's online posts about neo-Thomism. What interests me about the subject, is that I have come to accept that universals (and other abstractions, such as number) are real, not just products of the human mind. The question as to in what sense they are real, and how they can be of a different order to phenomenal objects, very much interests me. (For example see an essay in the Cambridge Companion to Augustine, Augustine on Intelligible Objects). I've been exploring these ideas, in a piecemeal way, ever since starting to post on forums, although I find there's very little interest in, or comprehension of, the issue here.

(I also completed an MA in Buddhist Studies about 10 years ago, where I learned about Father Ippolito - those travelling Jesuit missionaries were amazingly accomplished explorers and scholars, Matteo Ricci in China being another one. When you consider how arduous travelling to those locations must have been in their day and age, one can only wonder.)

The question is, why would he think that? And it looks like the answer is: theology. — Srap Tasmaner

Of relevance, however, is the Marcus book I mentioned, Rational Causation, which explores similar territory without any reference to theology. 'We explain what people think and do by citing their reasons, but how do such explanations work, and what do they tell us about the nature of reality? Contemporary efforts to address these questions are often motivated by the worry that our ordinary conception of rationality contains a kernel of supernaturalism—a ghostly presence that meditates on sensory messages and orchestrates behavior on the basis of its ethereal calculations. In shunning this otherworldly conception, contemporary philosophers have focused on the project of “naturalizing” the mind, viewing it as a kind of machine that converts sensory input and bodily impulse into thought and action. Eric Marcus rejects this choice between physicalism and supernaturalism as false and defends a third way.

Marcus argues that philosophers have failed to take seriously the idea that rational explanations postulate a distinctive sort of causation—rational causation. Rational explanations do not reveal the same sorts of causal connections that explanations in the natural sciences do. Rather, rational causation draws on the theoretical and practical inferential abilities of human beings. Marcus defends this position against a wide array of physicalist arguments that have captivated philosophers of mind for decades.'

Likewise, Thomas Nagel's Evolutionary Naturalism and the Fear of Religion also examines 'the naturalisation of reason' from the perspective of secular, analytical philosophy rather than religion per se (although acknowledging that philosophers such as Plato and Spinoza have a 'quasi-religious' aspect.) That essay too argues that the 'sovereignty of reason' is called into question by evolutionary naturalism, which depicts reason as a form of adaptation, not of discerning truth. It also contains the often-quoted passage where Nagel writes that the 'fear of religion' is what drives a great deal of the 'scientism and reductionism of our times'.

It's hard to see how consciousness can create an awareness and point of view, without being part of a physical being. — Tom Storm

My take is that is very much characteristic of modern objective consciousness. Our world-picture is one of separate embodied subjects in a domain of objects configured by impersonal laws, whereas the world-picture of the pre-moderns was that the world is an expression of a will with which we ourselves have a relationship through faith. But, you know, 'compulsory disenchantment'.

I don't see why a decision to (for example) go to the shop to buy milk, cannot be explained in terms of physical causes — Janus

The simplest reason is that it's intentional, and intentionality is lacking in physical causation.

And then it starts again because there is always another thought, like this ... until one has one's 'every minute zen', at which point, if anyone asks you about the sound of one hand clapping , you give them a hearty slap or some such. — unenlightened

All quite sound, and something I have long taken as a guidepost to wisdom. But the thing I'm now wrestling with is that Zen wisdom (as Buddhism generally) was very much a product of a monastic life, whereas I myself, average middle class guy, has the possessions and encumbrances that don't just pass on, like our thoughts do. Or rather, they are the externalised form of our thoughts and desires - just those kinds of things which the homeless monks and wanderers have renounced. And outside that context it has another meaning.

Don't get me wrong - I am thoroughly on board with the principle - but walking the walk is something else.

So what's the deal with lesion studies, anesthesia, all the usual things people point to where changes in the brain affect a person's thinking and emotions in predictable ways? — Srap Tasmaner

No realistic dualism or idealism would deny that physical influences affect cognition and affect. But the argument from reason is about physicalism - that everything about the mind can be reduced to or explained in terms of physical causes. Can you see the distinction?

Earlier in the thread, I mentioned a subject whose behavioural abnormalities had been found to have been caused by a tumor. Of course there are many such cases of physical conditions or substances affecting behaviour. They are what I would designate as physical causes. But being persuaded by reason to accept the truth of a proposition is of a different order - that is an example of rational causation (hence my link to the book of that name - do take the time to read the abstract, at least.)

Too bad this is what he’ll get nailed for and not attempting to literally overturn the election and then inciting an insurrection — Mikie

All the indications are that he will be indicted on those charges, and also on the Georgia election interference charges. He's going to have a very busy 2024, what with scheduling campaign rallies between court appearances. Although there is something grotesque about the fact that, even after all that, he can be regarded as a legitimate candidate. He really is a knife at the throat of the Republic.

Intelligence is the ability to adapt, among other things, but it is not exhausted by that description. More to the point, its attributes can't be either predicted or explained on the basis of physics.

Against better judgement, I want to revisit this exchange. My claim was that when a subject is persuaded by another's reasoning and realises the truth of a proposition, then nothing physical has transpired between the two parties. The objection was:

Abstractions themselves do not "act upon matter" because they are not evental (or causal); rather instantiations (encoding / patterning) of abstractions (from matter) in matter act upon matter (e.g. typing on my keyboard these sentences you're reading on your screen), — 180 Proof

Language is represented physically, and transmitted physically, by way of binary code across the Internet (or printed and sent). The question is, what is it that enables the 'encoding or patterning' of the specific words that have been selected, to which the answer is 'intelligence' - in the case of this example, clearly human intelligence, mine and the subjects'. And in this case, if I persuade another to see the truth of an argument, then that persuasion is indeed 'causal'. You can hardly argue that reasoned persuasion is not an enormous causal factor in human affairs.

So the question then becomes, is intelligence physical? Which is one of the key questions of philosophy of mind. Those arguing the case for dualism will answer in the negative. So while there are physical words on the screen, it is the nature of the faculty that composes and interprets them that is at issue. And I will not cede the case to materialist theory of mind.

(And as to whether 'abstractions are causal', that is another question altogether. But the formative role of mathematical physics in science at least points in that direction.)

A related issue, arising from my response to @Fooloso4's saying there can be no such thing as 'immaterial beings', was this:

Living beings, even the very simplest beings, display attributes and characteristics that actually can't be accomodated in the mind-body duality that is embedded in the modern worldview. — Wayfarer

So here, the argument concerns the materialist assumption that organisms are not ontologically different from non-organic matter, on the basis that they're all 'made from the same stuff' - that living things are just elements of the periodic table, arranged in a specific way. That is the basis of materialism and the point about which I referenced the Talbott article 'From Physical Causes to Organisms of Meaning'.

The point of this article is anticipated by the title - which is, to try and express it as succintly as possible, that organisms right from the outset exhibit attributes and characteristics that cannot be found in the inorganic domain. Talbott writes that much of the lexicon of biology - 'words like “stimulus”, “response”, “signal”, “adapt”, “inherit”, and “communicate”, in their biological sense, would never be applied to the strictly physical and chemical processes in a corpse or other inanimate object.'

So, what is it that organises the elements of the periodic table in such a way as to give rise to living beings? There are those that argue for those causes being physical ('the chemical paradigm') and those who argue for it being fundamentally different (code biology, biosemiotics). At this time it's an open question, but the implication is that living beings are not simply or only physical in nature. They embody intentionality and are subjects of experience - just those factors that have been excluded from the objective domain in Cartesian dualism.

At least you'd learn to dance.

I also want to point out how selfhood - the “reality” of the first person point of view - is a product of the closure, the epistemic cut, that produces the self-interested view we then call “the real world”. — apokrisis

Is 'the epistemic cut' avoidable, do you think? It seems a necessary condition of existence. Which would explain why the 'self-overcoming' or 'detachment' of traditional philosophy would provide a portal to understanding 'things as they truly are'.

‘ Conservatives Are More Open to Seemingly Inferior Products Political Leaders Than Liberals Are’

Hey, I'll be a hundred. Better look after my health if I want to see it.

It's an interesting article. I have no trouble accepting the idea that insects are sentient, although I'm dubious about whether the experience of pain would be the same as the human's (after all, what would it be like to be a bee?) But overall, I'm forming the view that as organisms are all agents of greater or lesser degrees of intelligence, then the article is quite congenial.

You seem to dislike it for aesthetic reasons - that it robs us of enchantment and special meaning. — Tom Storm

Speaking of Hart, take a look at his review of Dennett ('so preposterous as to verge on the deranged').

If you ever figure out exactly what you want to say, let me know. — Srap Tasmaner

I think the original post makes a perfectly intelligible point, and one not of my invention - I'm puzzled by the fact that it seems so incomprehensible to you. You said already a few times in this thread that it was drawing a distinction between different senses of the word 'because' - which is closer to what it's getting at than anything said by anyone else here. But you then say you can't see the point of the distinction. The fact that humans are physical and mental combined in a unity is hardly a novel philosophical idea. So I don't really understand what it is you're not understanding, although again, thanks for making the effort.

:party:

If I put three cupcakes on a table otherwise devoid of cupcakes, I have caused an odd number of cupcakes to be on the table. — Srap Tasmaner

The act of putting them there is physical, from which you then can draw mathematical conclusions. Dual, you see - physical in some respects, mental in others.

Go see Naked Lunch — jgill

All I know is that it was the novel in which there was a metal dildo called Steely Dan which then provided the name for the well-known musical ensemble (and my personal all-time favourite band).

What bet?

Then what are we talking about? — Srap Tasmaner

The philosophical distinction between physical causation and logical necessity, and the implications of that.

How do you feel about neuroscientists saying things like "the self is an illusion"? --- Before answering, note that no reduction is implied; it's not a claim that the self is "really" a bit of functioning brain tissue... — Srap Tasmaner

For eliminative materialism, the claim really is that reductionist - e.g. Dennett's 'competence without comprehension'.

As to the sense in which self is an illusion - as many have pointed out, illusions are artefacts of consciousness, a mistaken perception. I can't see how to avoid the necessity of there being a subject of such an illusion.

just as our visual field has no real correlate in the brain and is, in a suitable sense, an illusion — Srap Tasmaner

What do you mean, 'suitable', here. Are you referring to the neural binding problem in respect of the subjective unity of experience (e.g. here)?

Is anyone here defending mechanistic materialism? And does anyone here advocate Dennett in this space? — Tom Storm

No, they're mainly picking arguments with me. I select Daniel Dennett because he's unapologetically materialist so I can't be accused of attacking a straw man. But it's relevant to note that Dennett does defend the claim that humans are no different in principle to robots or computers. He's a walking, talking illustration of what I think is meant by the 'forgetfulness of Being'.

Cite an instance.... — 180 Proof

The general point is that science has accomplished many things which were previously thought impossible according to then known physical laws. The understanding of what constitutes 'the physical' is constantly changing (as per Hempel's dilemma).

The question is why you think the existence and utility of this framework, our everyday understanding of mentality, invalidates the framework used in neuroscience and biology at large. — Srap Tasmaner

I don't necessarily think that at all. (There was an amazing segment (might be geo-blocked) on a current affairs program yesterday about a female virtuoso violinist who fell victim to a rare condition called dystonia which affected her muscular co-ordination, meaning she suddenly, and completely, lost the ability to play. She was treated with a form of magnetic resonance in an fMRI scanner, which ameliorated her condition and restored her ability, such that she's now planning to resume her career. In those kinds of cases and millions of others, like the ability to provide paralysis victims with the ability to walk, neuroscience verges on the miraculous. But that is not the point of the philosophical issue at hand. In practice, probably many neuroscientists hold a generally materialist or physicalist framework but whether they do is irrelevant to the problems they are dealing with. The philosophical issue is one of philosophy of mind and the nature of being. (Although there have been some neuroscientists, like John Eccles, Roger Sperry ('In calling myself a ‘mentalist’, I hold subjective mental phenomena to be primary, causally potent realities as they are experienced subjectively, different from, more than, and not reducible to their physicochemical elements') and Wilder Penfield, who have argued against brain-mind identity on the basis of their practical experience with neurosurgery subjects.)

As for biology, as there has been a sea-change in physics since the discoveries of the 1920's, so too there has been in biology, although there are still many hold-outs (more in biology than in physics, some say). But the change towards biosemiotics, epigenetics, and other developments, call into question the kind of neo-darwinian materialism that is the subject of the argument from reason.

If I am correct, then Gerson has misunderstood Aristotle. — Paine

I'm sure that Lloyd Gerson doesn't misunderstand Aristotle, it's more likely that I misunderstand Lloyd Gerson, or rather, have taken one of his arguments out of context.

I'm not that knowledgeable about the Platonic forms, but I do think that they're frequently misunderstood as a kind of immaterial template or blueprint purportedly 'located' in some 'ethereal realm'. It is under that kind of reading that they're usually dismissed. But I think there might be a plausible case that what is meant by the 'forms' is much nearer in modern terms to 'principle', 'concept' or 'universal' in the sense understood by Scholastic realism.

Consider that when you think about triangularity, as you might when proving a geometrical theorem, it is necessarily perfect triangularity that you are contemplating, not some mere approximation of it. Triangularity as your intellect grasps it is entirely determinate or exact; for example, what you grasp is the notion of a closed plane figure with three perfectly straight sides, rather than that of something which may or may not have straight sides or which may or may not be closed. Of course, your mental image of a triangle might not be exact, but rather indeterminate and fuzzy. But to grasp something with the intellect is not the same as to form a mental image of it. For any mental image of a triangle is necessarily going to be of an isosceles triangle specifically, or of a scalene one, or an equilateral one; but the concept of triangularity that your intellect grasps applies to all triangles alike. Any mental image of a triangle is going to have certain features, such as a particular color, that are no part of the concept of triangularity in general. A mental image is something private and subjective, while the concept of triangularity is objective and grasped by many minds at once. — Edward Feser

It is largely the very peculiar kind of being that belongs to universals which has led many people to suppose that they are really mental. We can think of a universal, and our thinking then exists in a perfectly ordinary sense, like any other mental act. Suppose, for example, that we are thinking of whiteness. Then in one sense it may be said that whiteness is 'in our mind'. ... In the strict sense, it is not whiteness that is in our mind, but the act of thinking of whiteness. The connected ambiguity in the word 'idea', which we noted at the same time, also causes confusion here. In one sense of this word, namely the sense in which it denotes the object of an act of thought, whiteness is an 'idea'. Hence, if the ambiguity is not guarded against, we may come to think that whiteness is an 'idea' in the other sense, i.e. an act of thought; and thus we come to think that whiteness is mental. But in so thinking, we rob it of its essential quality of universality. One man's act of thought is necessarily a different thing from another man's; one man's act of thought at one time is necessarily a different thing from the same man's act of thought at another time. Hence, if whiteness were the thought as opposed to its object, no two different men could think of it, and no one man could think of it twice. That which many different thoughts of whiteness have in common is their object, and this object is different from all of them. Thus universals are not thoughts, though when known they are the objects of thoughts. — Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy

I look forward to challenging anyone who would champion his position as a scholar. — Paine

Here's his google scholar page. The paper I quoted that passage from is Platonism vs Naturalism.

So you think this process undermines or disproves naturalism? — Tom Storm

It doesn't disprove it, so much as being incommensurable with it. The activities of reason are grounded in intuitive insight into the relations between abstractions (which we designate 'facts' or 'propositions'). Whereas the naturalistic account seeks reasons in terms of antecedent physical causes. I don't get why this is such a hard distinction to grasp. (I've already noted that this objection may not apply to the more recent forms of naturalism such as biosemiotics, but then, they've also in the main moved away from the mechanistic materialism which the argument is against. But it remains a powerful influence.)

What 'I see' is not really relevant — Tom Storm

It's highly relevant. When you say, 'ah, I see' - what is it you're seeing?

Are thoughts physical? — Tom Storm

That is indeed the point at issue. In the physicalist view that is the subject of the argument, everything that exists, does so as a consequence of physical causation, due to the causal closure of the physical domain. So in that view, your thoughts are likewise determined by physical causes, that can be understood in terms of neurobiology or physiology. Mind is an output or consequence of matter. That is exemplified by Daniel Dennett's theory that what we experience as consciousness is really the consequence of millions of physical processes giving rise to 'unconscious competence'.

The counter to that is that when you see causal relationships between ideas, that this is distinct from the mindless processes typically invoked by physicalism. You're seeing the connection between ideas. That is a different process to that of physical causation.

Furthermore, if I write something that perturbs or upsets you, that will have physical consequences - blood pressure, adrenal reaction, heart rate, etc. But what has affected you, is not a physical influence, like my giving you a tablet or striking you. Your metabolic condition has been affected by a perception of meaning. That is an example of 'top-down' causation that I think generally supports the argument.

Of course, information (i.e. instantiated patterns). — 180 Proof

Of course you will assume that information is physical, given that everything must be.

(as if Newton's 3rd Law & conservation laws are violated, or miraculosly suspended, by "ideas"). — 180 Proof

The apparently inviolable constraints of physical laws have been transcended many times in the history of science. We have been able to discover hitherto unknown attributes and properties of the world through the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematical physics. But you continue to enjoy your procrustean bed, although I think it must be an awful fit.

I'd really appreciate it if you deleted that inane graphic.

I have no expertise in this subject. — Tom Storm

C'mon. What expertise is needed? Either you see a reason or you don't. What I'm asking you is that if I persuade you to accept something - not even the argument at hand, but anything - has anything physical passed between us?

We have no knowledge or experience of any immaterial entity or process. — Fooloso4

My claim is that the perceived dichotomy between material and immaterial is a consequence of Cartesian dualism. Recall that Descartes posited mind as 'res cogitans', literally a 'thinking thing'. This leads to the problem of how the thinking substance interacts with 'material substance' and the so called 'ghost in the machine' argument. It is foundational to the modern mind-matter conceptual division, based on the premisses that physical sciences must provide a mathematically precise quantitative description of an external reality extended in space and time and specified in terms of the 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 relegated 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. This is the basis of the modern 'mind-matter problem', and what the argument from reason is aimed at. And within that paradigm, there are no immaterial entities as a matter of definition. That's why I said that whatever we try and conceive of as an immaterial entity will miss the mark , as it will invariably interpreted in those terms, which I'm sure you're doing.

But the question was actually this:

This is because it is my dogmatic belief that matter does not act, but is only acted upon.
— Wayfarer
If "matter does not act", then "matter" "is only acted upon" by what? — 180 Proof

In order to try and illustrate the alternative way of approaching it, I provided text of a couple of readings, apparently too long. So to try and paraphrase what I think the first reference is getting at: the non-material or non-physical factor involved is life itself. Living beings, even the very simplest beings, display attributes and characteristics that actually can't be accomodated in the mind-body duality that is embedded in the modern worldview. Steve Talbott's biological philosophy is that organisms are expressions of meaning. They're not mechanisms to which we have to attribute a spooky 'elan vital' to account for the uncanny abilities which life manifests. As soon as life begins to manifest, then we have the emergence of an order which can't be reduced to, or explained in terms of, only physical processes; organisms have their own reasons for acting as they do. At the very beginning there is the appearance of the 'epistemic split' of self-other, the beginning of cellular memory and genetic inheritance, and a very primitive form of subject-hood. So the subject, the mind, is not the accidental by-product of a material process, but way in which agency appears in the earliest forms of life. And, to appeal to Indian philosophy, tat tvam asi, 'thou art that'.

And in a broader sense, many of our intellectual processes rely on immaterial entities, such as numbers, ratios, laws, and so on. Humans are situated between two worlds, so to speak - the physical world, governed by the laws of physics, but also the world of ideas and reasons, 'the space of reasons' as it has been called. That is the argument of the second book, Rational Causation by Eric Marcus. I don't know if that book talks about the argument from reason as such (haven't had the chance to read it yet) but it seems to operate from similar premisses.

So by 'immaterial' I don't mean spooky ghosts in machines, or some 'ethereal realm of ideal forms'. But as soon as physicalism is questioned, that is what comes to mind, isn't it?

The arguments in Aristotle do not follow this line of reasoning. The "identity" with the object is not a simple correspondence of "forms". — Paine

Sure, you might be right. But in context, Gerson's point was this: 'when you think you see—
mentally see—a form which could not in principle be identical with a particular, including a
particular neurological element, a circuit or a state of a circuit or a synapse, and so on. This is so
because the object of thinking is universal, or the mind is operating universally. For example,
when you think ‘equals taken from equals are equal’ this is a perfectly universal truth which you
see when you think it. But this truth, since it is universal could not be identical with any
particular, any material particular located in space and time.' Which makes perfect sense to me.

Let's say that reason can not be explained by naturalism.

What follows from this, for you? — Tom Storm

The crux of this whole thread was an un-answered question:

I can see you have not been persuaded by the argument thus far and probably won’t be, until you can see a reason why you should accept. At that point, you might typically say 'I see'. So - what is it that you see? (Or in the other case, what is it you’re not seeing?) Whatever it is (or isn’t) it won’t be seen as a consequence of anything physical that has passed between us.

What do you make of that?

I haven't read through the Tractacus, but what you said reminded me of the Zen saying, "Before one studies Zen, mountains are mountains and waters are waters; After one gains insight through the teachings of a master, mountains are no longer mountains and waters are no longer waters; After enlightenment, mountains are once again mountains and waters are waters." — wonderer1

How do you interpret that? How does it bear on the topic?

In respect of the general question, one way of thinking about it is that the search for general laws brings a simplicity to complex phenomena. For example Newton's laws sum up in a few lines the rules which govern the behaviour of matter across an enormous range. Einstein's theories can be written on an A4 page (or so I believe). But their manifestations can form unfathomable complexities.

I listened to a talk by a physicist the other day. He pointed out that the concept of gravity is simple. But if you balance, say, a pencil on its point, it is impossible, to all intents, to predict how it will fall. He used that as an illustration of how simplicity can give rise to complexity.

Overall, in traditional philosophy, I think 'the simple' was felt to be somehow prior to or superior to 'the complex' because of the tendency of complex things to break down. The source or origin of things - not God, in Greek philosophy, but the One - was completely simple, and so not prone to change. But then, the world, as they obviously recognised, was exceedingly complex. So how the simple One became the complicated Many was one of the major preoccupations of Greek philosophy. Intererestingly, atomism was a proposed solution to that problem, as the atom was essentially simple in that it was not composed of parts and was eternal, but in combination with other atoms, could give rise to an infinite number of variations. That was the genius of Democritus and Leucippus (eloquently stated in the classic text, De Rerum Natura, by the Roman poet Lucretius, still a staple of university curricula worldwide).

Shall I paraphrase?

I'm sure that whatever way we try and conceive of as 'an immaterial entity or process' will miss the mark. It requires, as one of the earlier contributors to this thread was wont to say, 'a paradigm shift'. Explaining all of the implications of that would take a lot of time. But one of the essays I've mentioned makes this point in respect to the differentiation between organisms and the inorganic domain. The context is that the author is arguing that an appeal to something other than physicalism doesn't necessarily imply an acceptance of some spooky 'elan vital'. He wishes to abide within the constraints of naturalism, whilst questioning mechanistic materialism. He writes:

The scientist observes meanings at play in organisms, and appeals to them in biological explanation. Anyone who construes this appeal as conjuring unacceptable vital forces needs not only to torch almost the entire biological literature, reconstructing it upon some new and as yet unknown basis; he also puts himself in an untenable position regarding the human being. For at least some of what we do, we do because we consciously think and intend it. If invoking this because of reason — this play of meaning and idea — in the explanation of human behavior is to rely on vital forces, then virtually everyone (in daily life, if not within their cocoon of theory) is a vitalist. If, on the other hand, we grant meaning to the human being without trying to make this meaning an expression of vital forces, then we can hardly voice the charge of “vitalism” when we observe meaningful activity in less conscious forms — for example, in the activity of cells and lower organisms.

So, no, we don’t need vital forces. If the organism as an expression of meaning requires us to recognize a different sort of order from that of inanimate nature, science offers no presumption against this. Our knowledge of some thought-relations in the world — for example, those of mathematized physical law — does not tell us what other thought-relations we might discover in various domains. The mathematical order, however, does tell us that there must be other principles of order. For mathematics alone doesn’t give us any things or phenomena at all; numbers are not things. Whatever the things may be to which our mathematical formulations refer, they either have a qualitative character that we can consciously apprehend in a conceptually ordered way, or they must remain unknown and outside our science. And that qualitative conceptual ordering cannot be predicted from the mathematics. Rather, the qualitative order is the fuller reality that determines whatever we abstract from it, including mathematical relationships. — From Physical Causes to Organisms of Meaning, Steve Talbott

There's another book that was mentioned by @Pierre-Normand a while back, Rational Causation, by Eric Marcus. I think it is compatible with this general line of reasoning. The abstract says:

We explain what people think and do by citing their reasons, but how do such explanations work, and what do they tell us about the nature of reality? Contemporary efforts to address these questions are often motivated by the worry that our ordinary conception of rationality contains a kernel of supernaturalism—a ghostly presence that meditates on sensory messages and orchestrates behavior on the basis of its ethereal calculations. In shunning this otherworldly conception, contemporary philosophers have focused on the project of “naturalizing” the mind, viewing it as a kind of machine that converts sensory input and bodily impulse into thought and action. Eric Marcus rejects this choice between physicalism and supernaturalism as false and defends a third way.

He argues that philosophers have failed to take seriously the idea that rational explanations postulate a distinctive sort of causation—rational causation. Rational explanations do not reveal the same sorts of causal connections that explanations in the natural sciences do. Rather, rational causation draws on the theoretical and practical inferential abilities of human beings. Marcus defends this position against a wide array of physicalist arguments that have captivated philosophers of mind for decades. Along the way he provides novel views on, for example, the difference between rational and nonrational animals and the distinction between states and events.

Bolds added. This is where the argument appears to converge with the argument from reason, although I haven't laid hands on the book yet.