A mind is a physical system that converts sensations into action. A mind takes in a set of inputs from its environment and transforms them into a set of environment-impacting outputs that, crucially, influence the welfare of its body. This process of changing inputs into outputs—of changing sensation into useful behavior—is thinking, the defining activity of a mind. — Patterner

That describes how organisms respond to their environment - which the vast majority do, quite successfully, without thought.

I've long felt there's a sense in which the project of modern consumer culture and techno-capitalism is to create a safe space for ignorance (in the sense of avidya, spiritual blindness.)

We believe that we know something our predecessors did not: that we can live freely at last, enjoying all our senses — except the sense of the past — as unremembering, honest, and friendly barbarians all, in a technological Eden.

See also The Strange Persistence of Guilt Wilfred McClay, Hedgehog Review.

Bear in mind, what you quoted is from my paraphrase of the original post, not an argument that I myself was putting forward. So perhaps the original poster might like to respond, as there are quite a few difficulties with that post.

So now the MAGA administration is predictably leveraging the Kirk assassination as a pretext for the furthering of authoritarianism.

On Monday, two senior administration officials, who spoke anonymously to describe the internal planning, said that cabinet secretaries and federal department heads were working to identify organizations that funded or supported violence against conservatives. The goal, they said, was to categorize left-wing activity that led to violence as domestic terrorism, an escalation that critics said could lay the groundwork for crushing anti-conservative dissent more broadly. — NY Times

This, from the President who pardoned more than a thousand felons convicted of looting the Capital Building on 6th January 2021. The hypocrisy of this administration knows no bounds.

On the hand, would a quantum computer care? Would it be driven to come up with better decisions when it does not have a body screaming, "something has to be done". — Athena

THAT is the big question!

You need to start trying to grasp my reasons for considering physicalism, as I described above, instead of attacking a strawman. There are no facts about dark matter and energy to be accounted for. With regard to QM: there is no fact regarding which interpretation is correct. An interpretation is a metaphysical hypothesis, and physicalism is consistent with most of them. — Relativist

I'm not attacking a strawman - you’re treating “the facts of science” as if they were metaphysically transparent, a window to 'how the universe truly is', when they are plainly not. You say physicalism is the “inference to best explanation” from all the facts. Yet what counts as fact in science is already theory-laden. Quantum mechanics provides experimental regularities, but the interpretations of what those regularities mean about reality are metaphysically contested. To say physicalism is “consistent with most interpretations” is just to admit that physics itself doesn’t decide the metaphysical question.

And then there’s the incompleteness issue. Even if you bracket dark matter and energy, you’re still working with a framework that according to its own posits provides for only a minute percentage of the totality of the cosmos and leaves many questions about it own foundations unresolved. How can that be invoked as the basis of a metaphysics as 'first philosophy', when it is plainly contingent in nature.

There are academics and scientists, some of whom say that quantum physics proves that the universe is mental, others who claim that it shows there are infinitely many worlds, and yet others who say that quantum physics is simply wrong. So if physicalism is consistent with wildly divergent interpretations of what physics means, how could it be meaningful?

you reject the account I've given that universals exist immanently. — Relativist

You say universals “exist immanently as constituents of states of affairs.” But what does that really mean? If I say “this apple is larger than that plum,” the 'larger than relation' is not something you can isolate in either piece of fruit. It’s not inherent in either object, but grasped by an intellect making the comparison.

That’s why I say such relations are not “immanent” in objects but imputed to them by reason. They are formal judgements. Armstrong’s ontology tries to locate them in the furniture of the world, without acknowledging that they are in a fundamental sense dependent on the mind which recognises them.

I GAVE you an opening, by admitting there's an issue with the "hard problem", so that I was willing to entertain the "negative fact" (actually a negative hypothesis) that there's something about the mind that is non-physical. — Relativist

You say I've been vague, but I’ve been quite explicit. Let me spell it out.

First: the hard problem, as Chalmers framed it in his original paper, is about experience. There is information-processing in the brain, but there is also the first-person, subjective aspect — what Nagel called something it is like to be a conscious organism. That “what-it-is-like” is experience, and objective, third-person accounts don’t capture it:



Second: this stems from the constitution of modern science since Galileo, which gave primary reality to the measurable, objective domain and relegated how phenomena appear in experience to the secondary domain of the subjective. Physicalism inherits this stance, but in doing so it excludes something very obvious: the subject to whom a theory is meaningful, the very mind that provides the definitions and draws the conclusions (which, incidentally, is also what shows up in 'the observer problem' in quantum physics.)

Third: The problem is that you can only conceive of what is not physical as a 'non-physical thing'. You request 'evidence' of 'some non-physical thing', but that is because of the objectivism that is inherent in the physicalist attitude. The 'non-physical' is not 'out there somewhere', it is in the way the mind constructs a coherent and unified world from the disparate elements of science, sense-data and judgement. This insight is, of course, fundamental to Kant, and was developed further by phenomenology.

So: the mind is not outside the physicalist scope because it’s a spooky Cartesian “thinking thing” or ghost in the machine. It’s excluded because it is not an object of cognition at all, but the seat of cognition — the condition that makes objects intelligible in the first place. Demanding “evidence of a non-physical thing” only shows how objectivism presupposes what it cannot see. This is why Kant, and later phenomenology, makes the constitutive role of mind explicit. Physicalism of Armstrong's variety methodically screens this out, or ignores this fundamental fact. Hence the critique given in 'The Blind Spot of Science'.

So I don't accept that these are vague arguments. Perhaps you might actually address them.

Ask AI if a quantum computer could be considered a conscious, sentient being.

Have you looked into quantum computers? — Athena

I've read up on them. Currently, they don't actually exist, and there is still some skepticism that they will operate as intended. But I still believe that of they do come to fruition, that while they can emulate aspects of consciousness, they won't be conscious sentient beings as such.

I mentioned Vervaeke’s series Awakening from the Meaning Crisis, which addresses similar themes. It is much broader than philosophy as such, it’s a study in the history of ideas and cultural evolution. But I think the underlying idea is also found in Max Horkheimer’s book The Eclipse of Reason: that Western culture has lost faith in the principle of normative reason.

I know you feel that way :wink:

I very much want to know why it is, how it can be the case that the supernatural (non-pejoratively) arises within the natural. I believe this is the explanation of reason that Nagel also wants. Considered from a certain angle, there is something absolutely fantastic, or fantastical, about it -- how could such a fact have arisen? — J

The way I think about it is very much shaped by evolution (and anthropology) in that whatever is said about it must be able to accomodate the facts that have been disclosed by science about evolution. But the way I think about it is that h.sapiens crossed a threshold, past which they are no longer determined in purely biological terms and in that sense have transcended biology (not that we're not still biological beings). A large part of that is bound up with reason, language, symbolic thought, and technē. (Terrence Deacon explores this in his book The Symbolic Species. It is also the main area in which Alfred Russel Wallace differed with Charles Darwin for which see his Darwinism Applied to Man.)

So with the benefit of hindsight, we now know that we can grasp 'the idea of equals' (The Phaedo, referred to above) not because 'the soul learned it prior to this life' but because h.sapiens, the symbolic species, is uniquely able to perceive such 'truths of reason'. But then again, how different are those two accounts, really? Plato may not have understood the biological descent of h.sapiens, but we now believe that we first appeared perhaps 100,000 years prior. Considering the amount of time that has passed between us and Plato, that is a very, very large number of generations. Surely there was the discovery of fire, of art, language, story-telling, and so on. So Plato's surmise that the ability to perceive the ideas was acquired 'prior to this life' may be considered a mythological encoding of prior cultural and biological evolution.

So maybe the “absolutely fantastic” fact isn’t that reason is supernatural intruding into nature, but that nature itself is fecund enough to give rise to symbolic beings whose grasp of universals is more than merely biological. That’s both a naturalistic story and a recognition that reason points beyond naturalism.

Have you read Logos, by Raymond Tallis? A good discussion of this issue. — J

Thanks for the tip. I have Aping Mankind but not that one. Reading about it, it seems just the kind of book that discusses this issue, The Symbolic Species being another.

Another thing is that in the pre-modern world, the possibility of the world being the product of blind chance and physical energy was barely conceivable. There might have been individuals that would believe such things, but the pre-modern vision of the Cosmos was of a harmonious and rational whole - which is what 'Cosmos' actually means. Alexander Koyre's book From Closed World to Infinite Universe is all about that. So within the context, 'reason' was naturally assumed to be 'higher' in the sense that it was nearer to the source or ground of being, whether that was conceived in theistic terms or not (for example in Plotinus). Whereas reason when seen in terms of adaptation naturally tends to 'deflate' it to the instrumental or pragmatic - it looses that sense of connection with any form of extra-human intelligence. Hence the prevailing view that reason is 'the product of' the hominid brain.


From Alexander Koyré

(Vervaeke considers a similar idea in one of his lectures The Death of the Universe.)

Do you agree there is no good reason to doubt that the standard model identifies the physical composition of everything that exists (setting aside the mystery of dark matter and dark energy)? — Relativist

But how can you 'set aside' the posit that current physics accounts for 4% of the totality of the universe? And the entrenched controversies around the whole question of the interpretation of physics and what is says about the nature of reality? You really need to read some more in this subject.

I've explained the actual relationship between science and physicalism, and you choose to ignore what I said and repeat your false understanding. — Relativist

Remind me! Everything you've said in this exchange is predicated on equating the model of physics with a philosophy of everything. You're simply abstracting what you think are 'existents' from the models of physics as the basis for philosophy, when the very nature of the existence of these forces and entities is still very much an open question.

You've brought up a number of mental activities you considered "obvious" that are easily accounted for in physicalism, so your judgement of what is "obvious" is suspect. — Relativist

What I consider 'obvious' is that the observer or subject is implicitly present in physicalism, but has been suppressed for methodological reasons.

So you embrace a the platonic principle that (at least some) abstractions have objective existence — Relativist

‘Transcendental’ is not the same as ‘objective’. Universals are transcendental because they transcend the specific forms in which they are instantiated. For example a number can be represented by a variety of different symbolic forms but still retain its identity. As Bertrand Russell said, ‘universals are not thoughts, though when known they appear as thoughts.’

I ran across the following state by (Christian, dualist) pholosopher Ed Feser: — Relativist

He is saying the exact opposite of what you describe him as saying. He is saying that Churchlands and Dennett are 'clueless' for suggesting that 'there is no good reason to think that the mind will fail to yield to the same sort of reductive explanation in terms of which everything else in nature has been accounted for.'

This conversation has been going on since 5th November 2024 - I happen to remember, as it was the date of the US presidential election. And I think it's run it's course. Thanks and so long.

How are they properties of the universe? If all beings die. Where are the properties? — Jack2848

Some properties are recognised by the rational mind as being real independently of the mind, but only perceptible to reason, such as 'the idea of equals' (two different things being the same.) It is just the invariance of these that leads to them being associated with immortality. See Idea of Equals in Phaedo

Yes currently it doesn't seem like there is a neural correlate or specific way reality acts when the idea of a circle arises. — Jack2848

I suspect the problem you're wrestling with is the idea that the brain 'in here' represents the world 'out there' by way of creating a model, such that a shape or form has a neural correlate. But I think it's a simplistic view of what concepts are and how they operate. Can a concept be tied to any specific neural form, when it can be represented in so many diverse symbolic forms? Of course, that's a very big question, but it's something to think about.

inside reasoning is non meta reasoning. And must be used to determine truth of an argument generally. Rather than using a meta lens like psychology or sociology or genetics. — Jack2848

Yes, that's right. Typical 'outside' claims, of the type Nagel is criticising in that essay, are claims that attempt to justifiy reason based on evolutionary biology.

Scientific materialism and science are not the same.

//Neils Bohr said 'It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how Nature is. Physics concerns what we can say about Nature.'

That is neither polemic nor rhetoric.//

You're conflating the mental act of counting with four-ness. A group of 4 geese has a property in common with a group of 4 pebbles, whereas a group of 3 trees lacks this property. This property of four-ness is ontological. It exists irrespective of human minds or anyone doing a count. — Relativist

It’s ontological but not physical - an intellectual act which enables the recognition of abstractions. The property can only be recognised by a mind capable of counting. Real numbers are independent of any particular mind, but they can only be grasped by a mind. And they're certainly not physical.

Let's be clear: physics theory makes the theoretical claim that everything in the material world (the domain of physics) is made of particles. It's a claim supported by evidence and theory. — Relativist

You’re talking atomism. Ever since Heisenberg discovered uncertainty - 100 years ago as it happens - the possibility of atoms as ultimate point-particles has been undermined (or undetermined). Nowadays atoms are conceptualised as excitations of fields, and the ontological status of fields is far from settled. It is well known that the equations of quantum physics show that particles can be in superposition, i.e. have no definite location. This is incidentally one of the things that caused Einstein to ask that question. Nowadays, interpretation of physics with realist vs anti-realist arguments is still the basis of controversy which mitigates against the kind of physicalist realism you're proposing.

You're the one insisting physicalism is false on the basis of the "something", but you have no answers as to what it is (other than an additional negative fact: not an object). — Relativist

I made it perfectloy explicit:

There is something very obvious that it excludes, as I've already said time and again. And you don't notice or acknowledge what it is - you basically gloss over it or ignore it. And what is that 'something'? Why, it is the subject to whom a theory is meaningful, the mind that provides the definitions and draws the conclusions. — Wayfarer

The fact that you ignored it makes my argument for me!

Truth is not a property that objects have; rather it is a label we apply to some statements. Logic applies to statements. Meaning is a mental association, not a physical property. Intentions are behavioral. — Relativist

Well your screen name is ‘Relativist’, and you're preaching relativism.

As for 'special pleading', it's physicalism that does this. It appeals to physics as the basis of its ontology, but when presented with the inconvenient fact that today's physics seems to undermine physicalism, it will say it is 'not bound by physics'.

As for philosophical idealism, the one apodictic fact it begins with is the one proposed by Descartes - cogito ergo sum. Whereas physicalism attempts to account for that in terms of the objects the ultimate nature of which is indeterminable in the absence of an observer.

that was certainly an attempt to explain how reason can be, and do, what it is and does. — J

I believe that for pre-modern culture, it was always assumed that things happen for reasons. This of course is the subject of causality, which is still an open question in today's culture. But here's one point: for the Greeks, reason was understood to be top-down. The cosmos reflected an order and intelligence, an intuition which, as I said, later became absorbed by theology and associated with it. But our understanding of reason is resolutely bottom-up: rreason is an evolved capacity that has developed through aeons of evolutonary development. Its precursor was itself non-rational (not to say irrational). So now the task seems to be to 'explain' reason - this I take to be the task that the 'natiuralisation of reason' has set itself.

This also has its critics in modern philosophy - Jerrold Katz and Hilary Putnam, among others. I;ve tried to read Katz and he really does require post-graduate level understanding of analytic philosophy to understand what he's criticising. 'Putnam criticises the naturalisation of reason because reason is normative and self-corrective, not a natural phenomenon reducible to psychology or biology; to explain away norms is to undermine the very rational standards that science and philosophy themselves presuppose.' I think this is somewhat similar to Nagel's criticism in The Last Word. All of it amounts to the attempt to 'explain' reason in empiricist or evolutionary terms. But reason is what explains, not what is to be explained.

Big picture, the 'principle of sufficient reason' is nowadays scorned or at least deprecated on the grounds that reason is an anthropomorphism, a human adaption to an irrational universe. Whereas in the classical traditon, human reason reflects the Logos, the universal reason of the cosmos. I find the latter intrinsically more satisfying, as it provides a natural place for reason in the grand scheme, instead of it being an adventitious adaption. I think that's where my Christian intellectual background still holds sway.

That depends on whether the thinking is binary or qubits. — Athena

Thinking is neither. Computers can encode ideas in symnolic form, but computers do not think.

Hey, ChatGPT: do computers think?

ChatGPT: No, computers do not think - at least not in the way humans do.

A calculator can "solve" math problems instantly, but it doesn't understand numbers or why math works. The same applies to AI and more complex tasks.

I was the emphasis on hallucinogens that dampened my enthusiasm for Glattfelder’s book. It’s been many decades since my ingestion of lysergines. There were certainly remarkable hallucinations many of which were marked by astonishing apparent lucidity. But the most significant aspect was the awakening to the indescribable beauty of life itself, plants and trees seeming to possess a kind of luminous aliveness and perfection, and the sense that this sense of heightened awareness was reality itself.

As for the paranormal, I’m an open-minded sceptic. I don’t think it will ever be proven to exist, but I know that telepathy happens, it can’t simply be explained away. I think it’s possible that there are fields other than electromagnetic fields, something like Sheldrake’s morphic fields, but that can’t be detected by electronic instruments.

I will continue to say the universe is not comprised only of physical. — Patterner

Out of blind faith.

Well, I’ll go back to saying it’s an attempt to rescue materialism by attributing consciousness to matter.

From The Daily Beast via Apple News:

Kirk was no hero. The record is clear. If Kirk was a victim of a pernicious culture of violence in America, it must also be acknowledged that he was an author of that culture.

His primary accomplishment in life was to foment hatred and division across the United States. He blamed all of America’s ills on the left, and cheered violent attacks on Democrats. He fought against equal rights for many Americans; some of his last words were condemning women’s reproductive freedoms. He promoted America’s gun pathology, and asserted the death of innocents was an acceptable cost for that culture.

However, what is happening is far worse than simply devoting our national resources or devaluing our national reputation by elevating an unworthy individual.

In tributes from across the political spectrum, Kirk is being praised as a champion of “free speech.” He was not. He mercilessly attacked those with whom he did not agree. He was an enemy of truth and of equity. Kirk perverted the idea of our First Amendment rights to suggest they required universities to embrace lies, as though there were some obligation to present unfounded idiocy and malice simply because some special interest or political group supported them.

Much of his political identity was tied up in the dangerous promotion of white Christian nativism and its alliance with the most corrupt president in American history—a felon, a sex offender, a man who incited an insurrection against the United States government.

This president has already explicitly said he will use the attack on Kirk to justify going after his opponents, condemning the “left” in America as terrorists and lunatics and asserting—without presenting evidence—that they were responsible for Kirk’s murder. The State Department announced consular officials were being directed to revoke visas or deny them to people who might have commented on Kirk or his death in ways they did not approve of.

What a fitting tribute to a fake First Amendment warrior.

Consciousness is the property by which matter subjectively experiences — Patterner

But only organic matter. Consciousness is what differentiates organic from non-organic matter. Agree or disagree

A healthy strategy would be to acknowledge that the past can't be changed — LuckyR

But what it means can be changed - by what you do next.

:rofl:

I’ve noticed many sports people interviewed courtside have really internalized this ‘here and now’ mentality’. This point, this match - don’t think about the championship or the series. Be in the now.

Do you mean by that, that an idea is not bound to any specific expression or form, but can maintain an identity even in different expressions?

Good, and dfficult, question. There was a huge cult book published in the late 60's, Be Here Now, by Richard Alpert, who became Ram Dass, a key figure in the counter-culture. The idea was that to drop all attachments to the past and expectations for the future was to live in the 'eternal now'. And that is a theme that surfaces in many works of the perennial philosophy.

Joshs is right in saying that were we to literally abandon all expectation and memory, we would in effect be unconscious, as consciousness is inextricably intertwined with memory and expectation. But I don't think those spiritual admonitions should be interpreted that way. I think they're referring to a state of rapture in which all sense of time drops away, and we see 'eternity in an hour' as William Blake put it. As to 'attaining' such a state of being - I think it's a practical impossibility to consciously engineer such a state, although it can be sought in a variety of ways. I think, maybe, mountaineers and climbers experience such states through total absorption in the moment (and coming to think of it, this is the meaning of flow states, described by the late psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (trying to pronounce that name might produce a flow state.)) Eckhart Tolle's book The Power of Now is specfically about it.

Keep digging, but don't expect to find any gold.

Trump fans the flames of fear of ‘the other’ to his own political advantage. This is an undeniable factor in his rise to power.

The trail it sent me down was the implied ‘divinity of the rational soul’ in medieval philosophy (stemming from Aristotle’s ‘active intellect’.) The equation of reason with the capacity to grasp higher truths. But then as it had all become appropriated by theology, so too was it rejected for that very reason. But behind all of that, there’s something of fundamental importance to philosophy.

Their fear is legitimate. — BitconnectCarlos

Fear is MAGA rocket fuel. How much of Trump’s campaign was based on stoking fear? ‘They’re eating the dogs ! :rage: ‘

Me neither, but I still believe that Trump will ultimately fail because he’s a completely mediocre individual and not even competent. Amazingly it hasn’t stopped him yet, but I still hold out hope.

I don't know who David Hogg is. I do know that if a figure on the liberal side of politics had been shot giving a talk at a University, MAGA would downplay it or deprecate it or find some way to blame it on 'radical left lunatics'. Trump/MAGA is doing everything it can to deepen the division; Trump is 'the great divider'. It is the way that demagogues have to work - anything like a liberal consensus is kryptonite to them.

So all this talk about what the Kirk assassination really means - what I think it really is, is a pretext for Trump and the MAGA cabal to drive their 'second American revolution' ever harder.

This includes things like numericity: two-ness, three-ness, four-ness... each is a physical property that is held by certain groups of objects — Relativist

It is in no way 'a physical property'. One can count the members of a set of concepts, none of which is physical. Counting is an intellectual act which can be applied to both physical and non-physical entities.

My point is that any behavior that can be described algorithmically is consistent with the behavior of something physical- hence it's consistent with physicalism. — Relativist

But the issue is, can insight be described algorithmically?

To put it simply (and a little imprecisely)... — Relativist

Thanks for clarifying. But notice what you’ve said: the “in principle” part of physicalism is a metaphysical claim — that all things are ultimately just arrangements of particles under natural laws. That’s not a finding of science but a philosophical commitment hiding behind the skirts of science.

The “in practice” problem (computational impossibility) doesn’t really address the deeper issue I raised. With the moon, the problem is only one of calculation — we know what it is to be a moon, and the math just gets messy. But with mind, the issue is different: truths, meanings, logical relations, and intentions are not computationally intractable physical behaviors. They are not physical categories at all. And furthermore, Albert Einstein had good reason for asking the rhetorical question 'does the moon continue to exist when nobody is looking at it.' Do you appreciate why he would ask that question?

So I come back to Armstrong: if physicalism is only “in principle,” then his theory remains more an aspiration than an account. It assumes that what is mental must be reducible, even though what makes the mental what it is (logic, normativity, meaning) has never been captured in physical terms, and in fact we rely on logic to ascertain what physical means.

I think that the underlying aim is to declare that only the objects of the physical sciences can be said to exist - this is why you refer to the ontological side of the debate.
— Wayfarer

That's close, but you word it in a way that sounds like it is excluding something. Rather, it's a parsimonious view of what exists: it's unparsimonious to believe things exist that can't be detected or observed to exist + the observation that everything that is observed or inferred to exist is physical. — Relativist

There is something very obvious that it excludes, as I've already said time and again. And you don't notice or acknowledge what it is - you basically gloss over it or ignore it. And what is that 'something'? Why, it is the subject to whom a theory is meaningful, the mind that provides the definitions and draws the conclusions.

And this 'ignoring' is constitutional to materialist philosophy. Why? Because, as I'm sure I've already said, it is built into Galilean science, which divides the world into objective (primary) and subjective (secondary) attributes. It then tries to explain everything in terms of those primary attributes- which is the essence of materialism - including the very subject who is doing the explaining. This is the subject of an essay an Aeon, which has now become a book, called 'The Blind Spot of Science is the Neglect of Lived Experience', which spells out this same criticism.

So what your philosophy leaves out is actually the human being. That is what is not included in the account - which you then try and retroactively construct on the basis of a science from which it has been methodically excluded from the outset. So much so, that you no longer can notice that you don't notice it. Hence, a blind spot.

Firings and sackings over this issue are being used as a pretext to purge organisations of ‘elements incompatible with the President’s Agenda’ (MAGA code word for the Trump’s Will.) See https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/12/us/politics/charlie-kirk-shooting-firings-celebration.html?unlocked_article_code=1.lk8.bTUi.JHA8UCQh4sv1&smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

Nagel has done as good a job as anyone to make the case that reason is indeed "the last word." — J

The only form that genuine reasoning can take consists in seeing the validity of the arguments, in virtue of what they say. As soon as one tries to step outside of such thoughts, one loses contact with their true content. And one cannot be outside and inside them at the same time: If one thinks in logic, one cannot simultaneously regard those thoughts as mere psychological dispositions, however caused or however biologically grounded. If one decides that some of one's psychological dispositions are, as a contingent matter of fact, reliable methods of reaching the truth (as one may with perception, for example), then in doing so one must rely on other thoughts that one actually thinks, without regarding them as mere dispositions. One cannot embed all one's reasoning in a psychological theory, including the reasonings that have led to that psychological theory. The epistemological buck must stop somewhere. By this I mean not that there must be some premises that are forever unrevisable but, rather, that in any process of reasoning or argument there must be some thoughts that one simply thinks from the inside--rather than thinking of them as biologically programmed dispositions. — Evolutionary Naturalism and the Fear of Religion

Incidentally, there was an influential book published in the 1980’s, Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism, Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche. ‘Spiritual Materialism’ is exactly the kind of self-improvement orientation that the OP is about. (Trungpa was also Francisco Varela’s mentor in Tibetan Buddhism although his reputation has been tarnished due to the circumstances of his death from alcoholism and the misdeeds of his appointed successor, a very disillusioning episode in the annals of Western Buddhism.)

Better and better knowledge orients and organizes itself teleologically on the basis of the ‘way things are’ as a ground of becoming. The divine in-itself has given way to the natural in-itself. Meet the new boss… — Joshs

'The jealous God dies hard'.

But isn’t there commentary on the idea that the ‘myth of progress’ originated with a secularised version of the Christian eschaton? Christianity introduced a linear, purposeful view of history, culminating in an end (eschaton) with cosmic significance (Burkhardt, Lowith, et al). Whereas antiquity largely thought in terms of Eliade's myth of the eternal return.

Modernity, after the Enlightenment, retained the form of historical teleology but emptied it of transcendent content, replacing divine fulfillment with secular goals: reason, science, technological mastery, emancipation, utopia, communism - and now, transhumanism and space travel (Elon Musk et al).

here [Shaun Gallagher] quotes a Buddhist scholar who says when the reasoning mind no longer clings and grasps one awakens into the wisdom with which one was born and compassionate arises without pretense… The good is what compassion means, the good is to eliminate suffering — Joshs

One thing that might be understood about what we might call ‘religions of the spirit’ is that the very knowledge of the ‘higher truth’ is itself liberation, is itself ‘the Good’. It’s unmediated and inherently peaceful, joyous, and totally fulfilling in a way that knowledge of mundane facts can never be. So it’s not a matter of ameliorating social conditions or improving political systems (which it may or may not do). So the ‘ending of suffering’ is putatively a state where all the factors leading to suffering, and its causes, are for once and for all ended. Believe it, don’t believe it, that, at least, is what it is about.

And a champion of free speech:

Pete Hegseth, the former Fox weekend anchor serving as Donald Trump’s defense secretary, has ordered Pentagon officials to scour social media for comments by service members that make light of Charlie Kirk’s death and punish anyone expressing dissident views, NBC News reports.

Several service members have been relieved of their jobs already, Pentagon officials told the broadcaster.

The purge comes after Hegseth, his spokesman and the secretaries of the Army, Navy and Air Force all warned service members to express only the correct political opinions about Kirk and his killing.

The officials warned service members, and civilian employees of the Pentagon that “inappropriate comments,” including “posts displaying contempt toward” Kirk, or comments that “celebrate or mock the assassination,” would be “dealt with swiftly and decisively.”

The effort to root out dissidents in the ranks comes as online activists promised to get Kirk’s critics fired in a range of fields, including the military and academia. — The Guardian