Aren't there numerous examples of things like that (troops tear-gassing demonstrators) happening in our history already? — MrLiminal

Don’t know, I’d have to do the research. But it has been said the last two days that in the Rodney King riots in LA in 1992, the Governor requested the National Guard’s help. It wasn’t imposed on them.

I don't really think of Trump as conservative, but if he is, he seems a 'postmodern' conservative. — Jeremy Murray

Trump is not a conservative in any meaningful sense. He’s someone who has hijacked conservatism for his own ends, and evicted many meaningful dissent from the Republican Party. There are some skilled Republican operatives who are using all of this as a vehicle, like remora fish around the great white shark, but none of the classical conservatives would recognise what the Republican Party has become.

Perhaps, but it also could be seen as a ‘Bring it on! Show us what you got!’ When Trump and Hegsmeth really start to order American troops to teargas demonstrators, then let’s see what kind of loyalty they really command. They’ve been doing everything the can to root out anyone who is going to oppose the King’s Will, but how much loyalty do the military and intelligence services really owe to the King? Perhaps we’ll find out.

As the Buddha taught us, accepting inherent suffering is crucial, because there is no way around it. — Martijn

Nevertheless, the Buddha is also said to have taught that suffering has a cause, and also an end, and that there is a way to the end of suffering. Whether that can be a real possibility is, I suppose, a matter of faith, but I at least can see the logic of the claim (although granted it requires recognition of states of being beyond that which naturalism can envisage.)

Arthur Schopenhauer, a German philosopher I admire, also had a lot to say about suffering, its cause, and the ability to transcend it through aesthetic contemplation and the reduction of craving, although I don’t see him as having fully realised the Buddhist path, despite his professed admiration for Eastern philosophies.

Your points about mastering detachment and overcoming self-induced mental torment are well made, and suggestive of the kind of stoicism that has become quite a popular movement in revivals of ancient philosophies. I’ve learned to let go of harmful and negative thoughts to some extent, which is indeed liberating, although there remain many forms of suffering which are quite outside one’s conscious control, or so it seems to me.

But, overall, a wise and mature post about a topic that ought to be of interest to everyone.

I don’t think the two-party system is specifically at fault. Trump is a textbook demagogue - to revisit the definition, a demagogue ‘is a political leader in a democracy who gains popularity by arousing the common people against elites, especially through oratory that whips up the passions of crowds, appealing to emotion by scapegoating out-groups, exaggerating dangers to stoke fears, lying for emotional effect, or other rhetoric that tends to drown out reasoned deliberation and encourage fanatical popularity. Demagogues overturn established norms of political conduct ‘ (Wikipedia.) That was basically written in the earliest democracy, that of Athens, and Trump is following the playbook. He’s skilled at using mass media to bully and intimidate his opponents - but it’s also the case that Congressional Republicans have clearly abdicated their responsibilities to check the excesses of the Executive Branch.

Everything about the Los Angeles situation is political theatre aimed at establishing the precedent of using American military forces to stifle dissent, another building block in his attempt to create a one-party state (and you think two parties are a problem!) With Trump, everything is always pretext - he appeals to so-called ‘emergencies’ to as to use emergency powers to rationalise economic and social policies that would otherwise never be considered. This Saturday 14th June, he’s having his mock Putin-style military parade in Washington, but there’s also a massive series of demonstrations planned under the banner of No Kings. Let’s hope there’s a massive, US-wide turnout.

What value do you place on the potential versus the actual? — prothero

In the context of the discussion with Vera Mont, I was making the point that humans are able to envisage possibilities and then bring them about - which is the capacity that underlies the whole history of human invention, is it not? I’m also making the point that this suggests that the domain of possibility exceeds and is different to the domain of actuality - again, something which recent history abundantly illustrates.

In 1895 Lord Kelvin (William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin), a prominent British mathematician and physicist, and President of the British Royal Society, was widely quoted as saying "Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible." Simon Newcomb, a leading American astronomer and mathematician, likewise in 1903 (shortly before the Wright Bros flight) also stated that powered heavier-than-air flight was "unpractical and insignificant, if not utterly impossible. The New York Times, which published an editorial in October 1903 (just two months before the Wright flight) predicting it would take “one to ten million years” for humanity to develop an operating flying machine.

Also known as The Way of Tao, I believe. A perennial.

GREAT BARRINGTON, Mass. — Maybe they really were immigration officers, just as they claimed. Or maybe they were a ragtag vigilante group, arbitrarily snatching brown-looking people off the street.

“It could have been like a band of the Proud Boys or something,” said Linda Shafiroff, recounting the agents who showed up outside her office in masks and tactical gear and refused to show IDs, warrants or even the names of any criminals they were supposedly hunting.

As unrest and military troops overtake Los Angeles, terrifying scenes are also unfolding in smaller communities around the country. They, too, are being invaded by what resembles a secret police force, often indistinguishable from random thugs.

Shafiroff and business partner Sarah Stiner own a boutique home-design and construction firm in Great Barrington, a New England town largely populated by artists, aging hippies and affluent second-home-owners. On May 30, around 11 a.m., six armed agents showed up outside the women’s office. The agents were dressed as though they had parachuted into a war zone, rather than a small town where the crosswalks are painted in rainbows. ….

“These guys had guns hanging all over them,” said Shafiroff, but they otherwise had no conformity to their dress. “None of them had the same letters on the front of their vests. Some of them didn’t even have letters, but it said ‘Police’ across the back. … One had light-colored jeans and sneakers on, and one had on a Red Sox hat.” The agents arrived in unmarked cars, some with out-of-state plates.

The women asked to see IDs or warrants, or even the names of the alleged criminals these agents were there to track down. They refused. One briefly flashed a badge, Stiner recounted, but would not let her inspect it even to see what agency it was for. — WaPo

:100:

I have an amusing anecdote. Way back in my undergraduate days I was looking for books in the uni library. I noticed one particular volume seem to have slipped behind all the others and fished it out. To my surprise, it had no borrowing slip on it (usually pasted in to the front to be stamped with the return-by date). I took it to the front desk to borrow it. It wasn’t even on the register! The librarian quickly amended the records and made an entry for it, and also pasted the borrowing slip into it and I took it home.

The name of that book: ‘The Unknowable’, Simon Frank (a Russian Orthodox philosopher.) But I loved the irony of having found it, completely unknown even to the library I found it in (although I admit, I never made a lot of headway with it, as it is a very arcane text. )

But the aphorism on the dedication page always stayed with me: ‘The Unattainable is Attained through Non-Attainment’ (I think from Nicholas of Cusa).

I can see what you’re getting at - but in response to the particular question I was trying to address, why the need for faith?, I don’t know if it is a useful perspective.

The early Buddhist texts differentiate levels of understanding - ‘stream-winners’ from ‘non-returners’ and from the putajjhana (uneducated persons.) Mahāyāna makes it even more elaborate with the Ten Bhumis. None of which actually negates the point you’re making. ‘First there is a mountain, then there is no mountain.’ That koan is also about stages of the understanding. From the ultimate point of view, there’s ‘nothing to attain’ but that is a very difficult understanding to attain.

Don’t know if I agree with that. There are levels and kinds of knowing. In Greek philosophy, for example, there’s the ‘analogy of the divided line’ in the Republic, which differentiates between belief, opinion, mathematical and noetic insight. And if there were no difference between the aspirant and those who realise the goal of aspiration, then would there be anything to which to aspire?

I understand the legal requirement to remove illegal immigrants, but Trump is going about it in a particularly heavy-handed way. All through his campaign he spouted a lot of hysterical hyberbole about illegal criminals and rapists flooding the country. Remember ‘they’re eating the dogs?’ So he’s exploiting a legitimate concern for polemical and political reasons - stirring fear and xenophobia, typical of the kind of demagogue that Trump is.

The current efforts seem driven by a quota system - they have a number in mind and want to meet it. From what I’m reading, ICE are turning up at workplaces where there are likely to be undocumented immigrants employed and basically arresting anyone who appears to be trying to run. Many of those deported are indeed undocumented migrants, but it appears very few are dog-eating rapists. To make matters worse, Trump is deliberately exploiting the effort as a wedge issue to justify further authoritarian steps, such as using the military against civilian demonstrators.

I agree that the Democrat border policies and enforcement thereof were lax, but let’s not forget Biden offered a much stricter regimen, crafted with input by James Lankford, a Republican immigration hawk, which was torpedoed by Trump in 2024, specifically because it might have worked. As always, Trump is only ever interested in political advantage and his own self-interest, which will always trump (no pun intended) any legitimate public interest.

If 'divinity' is real, why believe in it (e.g. mother, gravity & numbers are real)?

Or if (we) believe in it, why also need 'divinity' to (seem) real? — 180 Proof

First (not wanting to sound pedantic) 'divinity' comes from the Indic root 'deva', God or gods or divine beings. I think divinity can be distinguished from 'the holy' insofar as (for example) the Buddhist idea of the holy is not based on or derived from Devas (although Devas are part of the Buddhist religious imagination, they play only an ancillary role.) The same could also be said of other non-theistic spiritualities (dare I say, including Spinoza's? In Ethics V, Spinoza describes the kind of intuitive knowledge or insight as bringing about the mind’s “intellectual love of God” (amor Dei intellectualis), which could be compared, in a very general way, with the fruit of gnosis or jñāna, in that it is not propositional belief but direct realization.)

That aside, the key point about specifically religious knowledge or insight (gnosis, jñāna, etc) is that the attainment of insight requires a certain mental maturity and ethical stability. That is why there is such emphasis on morality, discipline, renunciation, and so on, in religious orders. The theory is, because the mind is ordinarily attached to and distracted by so many wants (and wounds) then it is impossible for it to become aware of any reality outside itself. Hence the customary requirement for self-abnegation which is common to both theistic faiths and to non-theistic religious disciplines. Hence also the need for concentration, not in the sense of a momentary focus of attention, but an atunement of the mind with the object of insight through disciplined meditation, liturgy and practice.

So belief or faith is required for the aspirant, because in the absence of the insight which is the actual fruition of that discipline, one only has the faith that it is, in fact, a real possibility. In this Buddhist sutta, the disciple Sariputta says that 'Those who have not known, seen, penetrated, realized, or attained it by means of discernment would have to take it on conviction' that nibbana ('gaining a footing in the deathless') is real - whereas those (such as himself) who have 'seen, known, penetrated' etc, would not have to take it on conviction, rather, they would know it directly.

//ps realised after I’d written this that it sidesteps the topic posed in the OP, which is specifically theistic, but I hope the more general point stands//

Bring things back from the future? — Vera Mont

Not from the future - from the possible, from the realm of possibility. Today's techno-industrial culture is able to 'peer into the realm of the possible' and bring back things, like LLMs, that could scarcely have been conceived of until we actually started to use them. And where, precisely, does 'the possible but not actual' exist, if not in the mind?

Surely one of the astounding, if often taken-for-granted, aspects of the human imagination is the ability to peer into the realm of the possible-but-not-yet-existent and bring things back from it, to make them real. ( You’re looking at an example.)

Suppose you sitting with friends and you allude some technical issue in an offhand way. One of your friends shakes his head, smiles, and responds to the allusion appropriately. The other just stares in silence. — frank

The legendary (probably apocryphal) origin of Zen (Ch'an) Buddhism was the 'Flower Sermon' of the Buddha. The assembly of monks was gathered to hear the Blessed One speak as was usual practice, but on this occasion, He simply picked up a lotus flower from the pond next to which he was sitting and silently held it up. All the monks, save one, looked puzzled and whispered among themselves as to what the Buddha meant. Save one - Mahākāśyapa, who simply smiled, upon which the Buddha said

I possess the true Dharma eye, the marvelous mind of Nirvāṇa, the true form of the formless, the subtle dharma gate that does not rest on words or letters but is a special transmission outside of the scriptures. This I entrust to Mahākāśyapa.

Mahākāśyapa was thereby designated the first patriarch of Ch'an Buddhism. ('Ch'an' and Zen are the Chinese and Japanese, respectively, terms for the indian 'dhyana' meaning 'meditative trance'. Also worth noting that this 'special transmission outside the Scriptures' generated a massive number of volumes of commentary and instruction, which are housed in monastic libraries throughout the East.)

What is the nature of reality apart from us or apart from our mind and experience? — prothero

I've been reading a presentation of Whitehead's bifurcation of nature, from which:

One of the most decisive systematic–historical reasons for the inconsistency within the concept of nature and the concomitant exclusion of subjectivity, experience, and history from nature is, according to Whitehead, the abstract, binary distinction between primary and secondary qualities of the 17th century physical notion of matter based on the substance–quality scheme. Quantitative, measurable properties, such as extension, number, size, shape, weight, and movement, are for Galileo via Descartes through to Locke real, i.e., primary qualities of the thing itself. They are conceived as inherent to things as well as independent of perception. In contrast, secondary qualities, such as colors, scents, sound, taste, as well as inner states, feelings, and sensations, are understood to be located in subjective perception, in the mind, and are considered to be dependent on the primary qualities. They only appear to the subject to be real qualities of the objects themselves. In modernity, then, the subject—which, by the way, theoretically as well as practically, cannot be justifiably defined as naturally human—has to endow the ‘dull nature’ with qualities and values, with meaning. — Nature and Subjectivity in Alfred North Whitehead

This is the very point at issue. What I'm arguing in 'the mind-created world', is that this attitude, which Whitehead sees as the fundamental flaw in modern philosophy, is based on a false notion of mind independence (‘the exclusion of subjectivity’). I'm not presenting the same argument as Whitehead's, but I'm talking about the same problem.

Kant would argue we can know very little about the noumena. Modern science especially with the aid of instruments and technology would seem to argue we can know quite a lot, and our ability to manipulate and alter the world would seem to agree. — prothero

You are seeing the point I’m making, which is good. Yes, cognitive science illustrates the sense in which the brain constructs the world by synthesising perceptual data with the categories of the understanding - that is the broadly Kantian point. I refer in the OP to an important but largely unheralded book Mind and the Cosmic Order, Charles Pinter, which is, of course, a much more current work than Kant (although he does mention Kant), drawing on cognitive science and evolutionary theory. (It’s unheralded because Pinter was a maths professor emeritus, who published this book in the last years of his life, and it didn’t receive much attention from the academy, which is a shame, because it’s a very insightful piece of work (ref)

As for ‘knowing very little about noumena’ — two points. The noumenal and the in-itself are not the same, although the distinction is not very well drawn. Noumenal originally meant ‘object of mind (nous)’, but Kant uses the term to denote something like the object as it must be thought independently of the conditions of sensibility — that is, as intelligible rather than sensible. The Ding an sich means the object as it is in itself, distinct from how it appears or is presented to the senses.

My interpretation is that the in itself simply refers to ‘the object’ (where this is any object including the world as a whole) unperceived and unknown. Where this can be mapped against philosophy of physics, is in relation to something like Wheeler’s ‘it from bit’, and Bohr’s ‘no phenomenon is a real phenomenon until it is registered’. So the question as to what are the objects of sub-atomic physics aside from how they show up when registered or measured, is precisely the question of ‘what they really are in themselves’ as distinct from ‘how they appear’. And that, I believe, is still an open question - otherwise there wouldn’t be the interminable disputes about interpretation of the theory! (From my readings, the interpretation I’m most drawn to is Quantum Baynsianism, or QBism.)

It is also why Einstein asked the rhetorical question about the moon still being there. Of course it is, was the implication, but the point was, he had to ask the question! And that was because his colleague’s work had called the objectivity of the so-called fundamental constituents of nature into question. Einstein was a staunch scientific realist, the main point of which is that the objects of physics are mind-independent. It was the suggestion that they are not that he couldn’t accept.

As for Whitehead’s bifurcation of nature - of course I agree that he is also diagnosing the same issue. Another of the books I’ve read on it is Nature Loves to Hide, Shimon Malin, a philosopher of physics (also a physicist) which draws considerably on Whitehead and process philosophy, but situates it more broadly within the Neoplatonic tradition.

Arguing whether our experience of the world is direct or indirect, mind independent or mind created in some ways seems beside the point, as long as you understand cognition and perception. — prothero

Having insight into that IS the point! The whole point of a critical philosophy, in fact. Overlooking or not understanding the role of the observing mind in the construction of reality is what comprises the ‘blind spot of science’ (yet another book, but I’ve already cited enough in this post.)

Of course computer hardware is physical, but I would dispute that the software is. In fact the computer chip manufacturing process echoes Aristotle's form-matter dualism. Nowadays, chip manufacturing (an immensely complex technical process) is divided between the fabricators, who actually etch the chips in silicon, and designers, who work purely in logic, computer science and mathematics. So the fabricators are the 'matter', the designers the 'form'.

Now, of course, software has to interface with the physical layer, mediated by electrical signals - bits are after all on-off switches. But as to whether the software itself is physical or symbolic, I think that question is, at the very least, moot.

The fact that almost everything we do, insofar as it is mediated by technology, as this conversation is, is dependent on the effectiveness of mathematics.

This is a large and ancient debate in philosophy and epistemology. Broadly speaking, mathematical platonists believe that number is real, independently of any particular mind. Other schools of thought include fictionalism, formalism, and so on. I'm inclined to the platonist understanding. See What is Math (Smithsonian Magazine.)

:lol: If you want to bake a rabbit pie, first catch your duck.

I couldn't manage without anything physical - food, for instance - but it in no way describes everything about existence. Like numbers, for instance: quite real, but not physical, even if they are represented by physical symbols.

Nevertheless, that said, the fault for the degree of escalation lies wholly and solely with Trump and Stephen Miller. They're itching for this kind of conflict, it validates all of Trump's inflammatory rhetoric about 'the evil Other' that animated his entire campaign. Bernie Sanders spells it out perfectly clearly - Trump is a dictator, a tyrant, who will brook no criticism and endure no challenge to his will. These protests, and the flare-ups of violence they trigger, are first and foremost a pretext for Trump asserting his dictatorial power.

I always have had trouble with philosophical skepticism (especially solipsism) and any form of absolute idealism, even to the point of refusing to seriously entertain the premise or spend considerable time or effort to follow the argument. — prothero

Incidentally, I don't regard the view I'm arguing for as necessarily skeptical, in the sense that I don't take issue with established scientific hypotheses. I'm not claiming that scientific knowledge is illusory or fallacious. The principle I'm arguing against, is the idea that mind-independence is a criterion of what can be considered real, in regards to objects of perception and cognition. The problem with it is that perception of objects is itself contingent upon our perceptual and cognitive faculties, and in that important sense, objects are not 'mind-independent', even if, in another sense, they exist independently of us.

This was the philosophical point behind the famous Bohr-Einstein debates that occupied them for decades. While there are many complexities in those debates, the fundamental point was Einstein's insistence of the mind-independence of the objects of physics, 'otherwise', he said, 'I don't know what physics is meant to be about'. Bohr, on the other hand, wasn't being a solipsist or skeptic. His point was more nuanced: the conditions under which sub-atomic phenomena appear are not separable from the means of observation and measurement. As he put it, “Physics is not about how the world is, it is about what we can say about the world.” This reflects a kind of epistemological modesty, not a sweeping skepticism.

As regards absolute idealism - we had a thread at the beginning of this year on a current German philosopher, very much in the lineage of German idealism, Sebastian Rödl, Professor of Practical Philosophy at Leipzig University and an advocate of absolute idealism, associated with G W Hegel:

“According to Hegel, being is ultimately comprehensible only as an all-inclusive whole (das Absolute). Hegel asserted that in order for the thinking subject (human reason or consciousness) to be able to know its object (the world) at all, there must be in some sense an identity of thought and being.”

His book is Self-Consciousness and Objectivity: an Introduction to Absolute Idealism. And it was one tough read. We got through the first few sections, but discussion petered out, as his focus was so intense and specific.

:ok:

It should be pretty clear that I do not subscribe to Russell's view of our role in nature. — prothero

I didn't think that you would. My point was that the view that Russell expresses in that essay, is what Kant's form of idealism was a remedy for.

I've read a little of Whitehead 'science in the modern world' and other snippets. I'm generally on board with it, but struggle with his 'actual occasions' and pan-experientialism.

Surely is. I discovered Vervaeke's material in 2022 (whilst visiting the US as it happened) and have worked my way through a fair amount - often on the treadmill at the gym. He's also published the book version in the last couple of months.

It's an unfortunate fact that there are criminals and opportunists who will pile on to these protests and begin to burn cars, throw projectiles, attack police and generally create havoc. It gives Trump the perfect pretense to say he's restoring law and order and that the protestors are criminals (never mind that he himself freed 1,500 violent insurrectionists on his first day in office). But every incinerated Waymo feeds into Trump's narrative of illegal immigrants as violent criminals, and a lot of people are going to believe it.

It was the same in the Black Lives Matter protests after George Floyd. The whole world could see what an egregious act of murder it had been, but rioting crowds burning and looting buildings completely changed the public perception, and again played into the hands of the right, who will seek any excuse to invoke martial law.



And the Democrats are well aware of this dynamic. Adam Schiff: “The president would like nothing better than to create a conflict in L.A. to demonstrate his strongman credentials by then cracking down on the chaos,” said Mr. Schiff, who has clashed repeatedly with Mr. Trump and led his first impeachment. “The president is a chaos agent. He thrives on disorder. He thrives on situations that allow him to pretend, to act like a strongman.”

If the protestors really were able to conduct themselves in the spirit of non-violent resistance, it would take a lot of the wind out of Trump's sails. But, human nature being what it is, the protests will always attract a coterie of those who just want to rumble. They will provide the wedge that Trump needs to justify calling in the troops.

IMO such a materialism is hard to differentiate to either a panpsychism of sorts or something equal or close to hylomorphism. — boundless

D M Armstrong is strictly materialist - thoughts are the output of brains, and brains are purely physical. Mental states are nothing but brain states. The only point I was trying to get across, is that when you encounter someone who is well-versed in this attitude, they're surprisingly difficult to debate with. It seems to me (and probably to you) that once you see through it, 'the scales fall from your eyes' so to speak. But for the committed materialist, the shortcomings that you and I might see are not at all obvious.

In any case, I think the very best arguments against Armstrong's form of materialism is the fact that propositional content can be encoded in an endless variety of languages, symbolic forms, and material media. The same proposition can be written out in different languages, encoded as binary or morse code, carved in stone or written on paper - and yet still retain the same meaning. So it's not feasible to say that the content of an idea must be identical to a particular state of physical matter, such as a brain state, as the meaning and the form it takes can so easily be separated.

I see Armstrong's style of materialism as a direct descendant of scholastic philosophy, but with science assigned the role formerly attributed to God, and scientific laws equivalent to the Aristotelian universals.

A lot of what you think is natural to you — just part of how your mind works — is actually culturally internalized.
— Wayfarer
Physicalism, Materialism, Naturalism are philosophical worldviews that have been "culturally internalized" since the 17th century revolution in science. For most of us, they seem natural & normal, and unquestionable. — Gnomon

Hence the importance of understanding such themes and ideas in their historical context. The unfolding of geist, in Hegelian terms.

In the end it seems clear that there is a world, reality, universe which carries on with or without us and which is really quite oblivious to our conceptions and which will obliterate us (and thus our minds, perceptions and thoughts) if we get too carried away with the notion the we create reality as opposed to just living in it, temporarily and contingently — prothero

It's not a matter of being carried away. It's an antidote to having been carried away by the belief...

...that Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the débris of a universe in ruins—all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built. — Bertrand Russell, A Free Man's Worship

The mistake is to situate, or confine, 'the soul' to that context to begin with. What if the entire spectacle were to exist in the soul, rather than vice versa?

We are accustomed nowadays to thinking of ourselves as 'the outcome' or 'the product of' material causation, the accidental byproducts of an entirely fortuitous chain of events. Historically, idealism arose as a criticism and protest against that, the observation that whilst physically h.sapiens is a mere blip in the vastness of cosmic time, nevertheless it is us who are aware of that vastness, we are the form in which it becomes aware of itself.

Meh. 'Physical' is just a catch-all term that people paint things with, so they think they know what they are or mean.

It requires a different conception and a different language from that inherited from the "philosophical theology of ages past". — prothero

One of the process theologians I really like was John B. Cobb. His book Beyond Dialogue: Toward a Mutual Transformation of Christianity and Buddhism was highly impactful for me. (Coming to think of it, I met him once, at the home of Charles Birch, in the early 1990's.)

Anyway - the point of my comment was that too often, people are speaking from their inherited cultural notions of what is God, truth, reality, and so on, terms which have been constructed in a particular context, and that context, the background against which the terms are being used, has now changed massively. Whitehead and Hartshorne were engaged in that kind of re-evaluation or re-interpretation. The series I mentioned was a set of 52 lectures by Canadian professor of cognitive science, John Vervaeke, Awakening from the Meaning Crisis (more info). He's doing something similar, albeit on a rather larger scale than pure philosophy.

How would a mind be able to think mathematical thoughts? — Vera Mont

Like this. (Closes eyes, adds two and two). While I agree we’re not born able to do mathematics, we’re born with the capacity to learn to do mathematics (a discipline I myself am not very good at.) But in any case, the upper reaches of pure mathematics are purely intellectual in nature, there’s nothing physical about them. It comprises the relations of concepts.

Do you agree with me here that Trump is chomping at the bit to send the troops in and look like a tough guy? — RogueAI

I think that’s exactly what’s happening. Urged on by Stephen Miller.

This just sounds like Kant's noumena, phenomena dichotomy or the repetitive discussions of indirect versus direct realism.. Sure our worldview is strongly shaped by our culture, our language, our limited sense perception and the way in which our mind integrates and presents sense data to us. I just don't see how that makes a reality independent of human minds any less "real" or "existent". It is our limitation not a limitation on reality independent of our minds and thoughts.

It seems like a tautology to see our minds create our reality but begs the question of a reality independent of our minds. — prothero

You're correct that the distinction between how reality appears to us (phenomena) and a supposed reality in itself (noumena) is central to Kant, and I acknowledge that my argument certainly draws from that lineage.

However, dismissing it as "just" those things misses the specific nuance and also the validation from cognitive science that I'm emphasizing. It's not simply a philosophical rehashing; it's showing how our modern understanding of cognition lends empirical weight to these philosophical insights. In fact, scholars like Andrew Brook, who has written extensively on Kant and cognitive science, highlight these very connections between Kant's insights and current cognitive science. I'm intending to show how our modern understanding of cognition lends weight to these philosophical insights, going beyond a mere rehashing of past debates.

As to 'not being able to see' - the very act of seeing (or not seeing) draws on the mind's structuring capacities. The thought experiment of picturing a scene from "no point of view" highlights this: our attempts to describe even an unseen reality always, implicitly or explicitly, reintroduce a perspective. It's not merely that our minds are limited in grasping an already-structured external reality. It's that the structure itself (the segmentation into "objects," the experience of "color" or "sound") arises from the interaction between the world and the mind's organizing principles. This doesn't make what we regard as 'external reality' any less than real - rather, it's to point out that its reality-as-known or reality-as-intelligible is co-constituted by mind. Self and world are co-arising, neither exists in any absolute sense.

I get your objection, it's the one that everybody has: the world is there anyway, regardless of whether we're in it or see it or not. And we rely on that for our sense of orientation to the world, we are kind of reassured by it. But this is the philosophy of 'the subject who forgets himself', to put it in Schopenhauer's terms, an insight that has been subsequently elaborated by phenomenology and existentialism. Again, I'm not saying that the world exists in your or my mind: what I'm arguing is that what we understand as the world has an inextricably subjective element, which is provided by the observer, and outside of which, nothing can be said to exist or not exist.

The idea of union in truth is important because truth can only be grasped in a relation that is pre-symbolized, that is, therein lies its justification and grounding. Without a unificatory relation of subject / object, there is no way to ground or justify propositions that join the two linguistically. Regardless of level of abstraction, including mathematical abstraction, the dissolving of subject an object in a relation at the direct edge of experience is crucial as a base on which to build rational understanding. — Baden

In the pre-modern vision of things, the cosmos had been seen as an inherently purposive structure of diverse but integrally inseparable rational relations — for instance, the Aristotelian aitia, which are conventionally translated as “causes,” but which are nothing like the uniform material “causes” of the mechanistic philosophy. And so the natural order was seen as a reality already akin to intellect. Hence the mind, rather than an anomalous tenant of an alien universe, was instead the most concentrated and luminous expression of nature’s deepest essence. This is why it could pass with such wanton liberty through the “veil of Isis” and ever deeper into nature’s inner mysteries. — David Bentley Hart, The Illusionist

whereas here's me thinking it something that gentlemanly toffs fired at with shotguns.

something to bear in mind in all this, is the way in which the rules of the debate have been set by philosophical theology in ages past. All of the terms in lexicon of philosophy, at least up until recently, were dominated by the 'cultural grammar' (to use John Vervaeke's term) of the Bible and the Greek philosophers (mainly Platonist). Many of these rules become what we've been discussing in another thread, 'hinge propositions', which are foundational to any common understanding of philosophical terminology.

A lot of what you think is natural to you — just part of how your mind works — is actually culturally internalized. It has been generated historically and you have internalized it culturally — John Vervaeke

Yet the real context in which we're having these discussions is also subject to the enormously disrupting changes that have occured in modern culture since the 17th century, where long-accepted understandings of the nature of the world have been completely and radically altered. 'Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold'.

‘Surely “the world” is what is there all along, what is there anyway, regardless of whether you perceive it or not! Science has shown that h. sapiens only evolved in the last hundred thousand years or so, and we know Planet Earth is billions of years older than that! So how can you say that the mind ‘‘creates the world”’?

...I am not disputing the scientific account, but attempting to reveal an underlying assumption that gives rise to a distorted view of what this means. What I’m calling attention to is the tendency to take for granted the reality of the world as it appears to us, without taking into account the role the mind plays in its constitution. This oversight imbues the phenomenal world — the world as it appears to us — with a kind of inherent reality that it doesn’t possess. This in turn leads to the over-valuation of objectivity as the sole criterion for truth.

By ‘creating reality’, I’m referring to the way the brain receives, organises and integrates cognitive data, along with memory and expectation, so as to generate the unified world–picture within which we situate and orient ourselves. And although the unified nature of our experience of this ‘world-picture’ seems simple and even self-evident, neuroscience has yet to understand or explain how the disparate elements of experience , memory, expectation and judgement, all come together to form a unified whole — even though this is plainly what we experience¹ .

By investing the objective domain with a mind-independent status, as if it exists independently of any mind, we absolutize it. We designate it as truly existent, irrespective of and outside any knowledge of it. This gives rise to a kind of cognitive disorientation which underlies many current philosophical conundrums. — The Mind Created World

It is rather odd for me that, say, a purely 'material' world would 'follow' laws. Where do these 'laws' come from? Are they 'material'? It doesn't seem so. In fact, laws do not seem to satisfy the criteria to be considered 'material' — boundless

I agree with you, of course, but I've had some discussions with an advocate of Armstrong's materialist theory of mind, and he's pretty formidable. I don't think his style of materialism is much favoured any more, but it's instructive how far it can be taken.