Fringe people who are assigned as being to the "left", mostly on the internet, focusing far more on whether a person should be referred to as a LatinX or a they or a sapiosexual, than talking about climate change, war, gross inequality and so on. These people tend to be language police and are disproportionately loud, who get offended at everything, and this gives the right a good excuse to say that the entire left is crazy and that all this will lead to Stalinist Socialism and the like.

100% Agree, there's is zero justification for fascism. The only way out, as far as I can see, is to attempt to decrease inequality and provide people the means and security to lead a decent, comfortable life. If no corrective comes about, I don't the extreme right going away any time soon. On the contrary, they'll likely keep growing.

But aren't you a metaphysician? I mean, what's not to get about the supreme principle of negative theoretical connotations in which sings don't stand in in for ideological objects, which of course implies that China will now go through neo-Confucian dialectics to unearth the negative ethos underlying consumerist simulacra. Of course, the left will protest as an ontological sign against the ruling bourgeoise.

It's pretty obvious.

Very good point. It's not as if there's an equivalent between say BLM and White Supremacists. Yeah, they are two wings on different spectrums, but it's very different.

Then you get this total lunacy of Super PC BS, that only serves to hurt the left, and give the room to the far right to come in and complain about "socialism" or whatever. It's the equivalent of shooting oneself in the foot. Not that high brow theorizing will help much ordinary people.

Exactly, it's very interesting, the difference between how we think we'll be understood vs. how it actually happens.

I think its standard usage. As in, if your hypothetical friend, Jones, memorized something, you wouldn't say Jones' brain memorized this information, you'd say Jones memorized the information. Likewise, you wouldn't say Jones legs walk, you'd say Jones walks (using his legs of course). A brain alone leaves out, eyes, nose, ears, etc. not to mention situations, other people, etc. I'd argue that we understand more about people than we do about brains, which is to say very little.

That's a pretty sweeping statement on many topics. It would help your argument to provide more empirical examples, specifically publicly observable ones, to help clear out what you mean to say. This non-sense of the PC left is a big distraction, mostly found online. Most people couldn't care less about pronouns or gender, just ask anybody in real life that's not in a university. They'll have no idea what is being said.

Also, how are these PC people "extreme left" in any significant sense? Do they talk about issues of financial inequality, war, global warming and so on? I rarely see them do so. It's a distraction to focus on them too much from much more pressing issues: climate change, global warming, increasing inequality, etc., etc. How is being super-PC "leftist"?

As for people who rule the world, or at least have power, Putin, Biden, Xi, Merkel and so on, I'm pretty confident that do not think about the world in terms of "negative dialectics". I don't think Zuckerberg or Bezos, et al. engage much with the Frankfurt School. These terms may be helpful for some people, but they'll certainly alienate the average person, and rightly so.

That sounds about right. I'd only modify what you said by replacing "the brain storing information" with "people storing information". I don't think we know enough about anything to be able to claim that much from neuroscience, which is not to say that what you describe doesn't happen. I'd say it's our best inference of what our brain does in certain situations.

It also raises the issue, what are "truly new and unique" ideas anyway? Most of this stuff is discovered by accident as you said. In the humanities, we could speak of "originality" which is distinct from new.

It's possible that, if you are generous enough with interpretations of what others have said, one could conclude, that there are no "truly new ideas", or ideas that are new from scratch. In physics, however, things are so sophisticated by now that physicists have to really come up with ideas that are quite unique, forced on by the problem. So the Many Worlds Interpretation or Loop Quantum Gravity are quite innovative.

However, considering how many people have come before, the technicalities are new, the underlying thought maybe not so much. But one may certainly improve certain ideas, or put them together in a manner that is unique, so in that regard there's plenty of things one could work out. But big questions stuff, have probably been touched on by some person sometime in the past.

This is an extremely difficult problem. I've read a but about this topic, and I think I've found a novel that discusses, or problematizes this issue better than many philosopher have, to my taste anyway. But even with all that, I haven't a clue what it is. Unlike topics like determinism, the soul, the beginning of the universe or other such concepts which are hard to talk about, at least I have a kind of "mental image" in which I can approach the problem in some way.

With this topic, I find nothing. By this I don't mean to suggest that the self is an illusion or useful "folk psychology" or something of the like, it's just that I don't know how to properly think about it. It's easy to play games with the concept, such as: if Jones killed someone while he was drunk driving, 15 years ago, is the Jones now the same Jones who drove drunk? Or if I bang my head, and my personality changes, am I still "me"? This depends on the criteria you set up. But you can also do this for ethical considerations in relation to the self, the same problem arises.

But the concept is not less clear to me.

Thanks for the source. Within that context, I doubt he meant it literally as if it time were an actual illusion. I may be wrong, but using that as an argument that he thought time didn't exist can be misleading.

I believe, and I may be miss remembering, that when Einstein wrote that, he wrote that letter to the wife of a friend who had died, so he was trying to offer some consolation. That's different from current suggestions in physics who argue that time is an emergent phenomena, and not fundamental, as is currently thought.

From a philosophical view, in one attempts to consider the literal existence of time, as could be imagined in manifest experience, it would be impossible to describe. One could wildly speculate that, absent time, nothing happens, and something like totally "flat surface" in space would exist, lacking any characteristics, including spatial characteristics, so we would be imagining an "flat-extension", with nothing to differentiate anything from anything else. And something like that would be all there is. But this would be an exercise in transcendent metaphysics, because any notion we have of "flat surface" could not be imagined by our cognitive faculties. It is only when you bring forth space-time, that you could even talk about a flat surface as we understand the term.

But in short no, a world without time is inconceivable to us.

Those things that you make have value, make it worth living. We've all been in that "state" we call, "before we existed", we can assume, somewhat safely, that that which follows life, will be much the "same state", but there's nothing there to give meaning to. The fact that we are here, in this infinite universe, and happen to become nature personified, so that we can make of it what we will, is awesome.

We can make the calculation of "did we suffer life more than we enjoyed it?" And the calculation could well end up adding to more pain than pleasure, or happiness. But pain itself, is the conditioned on which we can appreciate happiness or content-ness at all. Look for something interesting and creative, would be worth a try. Because, as mentioned, we will all return from where we came, for a long long time. Might as well experience while we're here. You choose whether to make life a calculation, but it needn't be, it can be much more. So why choose an option that guarantees you'll be focusing on the bad side, when there are better options?

I'm not sure I follow. This argument you put forth seems or appears to assume that we are aware of reality directly. That is, that mountain over there I'm pointing to, is being perceived directly. But if I don't remind my self that there is that mountain over there, and that I have thoughts that categorize things and puts them to order, I may start losing my grasp on reality? Well, reality is almost always mediated by beliefs, expectations, moods, impressions and so on.

Unless you consciously suppress all the things you bring to any experience of reality, you'll always have this trouble lurking in the background. But even if you could see anything without any preconceptions, and you do some kind of phenomenology, that reality you are seeing is still a construction of the mind on the occasion of sense experience. You cannot force yourself to deny that you are seeing a mountain now, if in fact there is a mountain in front of you. It's part of being a human being to see the world the way we do, in addition to everything else we may bring to our picture of reality.

Lastly, I'm also not sure what you are saying about words. Even if the "subject thinks that speaking certain things (or certain phrases) qualifies him as a good, decent, respectable person; while speaking other phrases qualifies him as evil, wicked" were true, which sometimes is the case, I don't see why thinking about words referring to anything would make that person authentic. Words don't refer, people do. I don't see why thinking about what words to use, outside quite specific circumstances, matters much, as long as a person isn't bothering anyone else. So I'm not seeing how this has to do with logic. Maybe it's related to psychology instead.

That's quite hard to work out. You say, for example that "bacteria might have a modicum of perception and feeling in some sense without self-awareness".

How can there be a perception, if there's no thing doing the perception? I'd think that a necessary condition of perception would be a thing having a perception. If there' no modicum of self-awareness, there can't be a perception. No perception without a perceiver. Otherwise, one would imagine that a perception "goes" right through, whatever thing is supposed to be having it.

I agree that physical stuff is capable of consciousness. But I don't think that the rather strange (to us) properties of basic physical stuff tells us how consciousness is possible. I mean, one also has to consider the topic of memory. If there is no modicum of memory, can we say something is conscious? In short, interesting hypothesis, but I don't know how to proceed with it at all, given the problems mentioned, and others.

We have problems determining if certain animals are conscious, and in the case of animals, we actually have much more data to look into, behavior, environment-specific tests, and so on. We can't show that dogs or dolphins are conscious, all we have are inferences that suggest it's likely that they are conscious. If you ask me in normal life, "are dogs conscious?", I certainly wouldn't deny it, it's obvious that they are. Some may speak of mirror-tests as proof of mental activity and self-awareness in animals, but these are problematic to interpret. But I don't know how you could set up such an experiment, that could scientifically show that something is conscious.

We don't even know how to establish if other people are conscious, we just assume they are. It's a good and necessary assumption, but we have no proof. I think we can only establish that one is directly acquainted with one's consciousness, but not that of others.

In short, I don't know how someone can set up a test to show if "wavicles" have experience. How could you possibly do that, if we can't do it for other people?

I mean yes, you can argue what the OP says. But why signal out consciousness only? I mean, we would also have pancarbonism, panwaterism or even panironism or anything else in nature. From what we can make out so far, given the available evidence, there is much more iron and carbon in the universe, than there are creatures with consciousness.

Another option to consider, and I'm actually not joking when I say this, could be something like PanAllism, which can be taken to mean, that all the stuff we see in the world, are tendencies and configurations of the physical. So everything , in principle, could be reduced to the "bottom stuff' of the universe. It just so happens that for consciousness to arise, one needs some rather specific parameters that allow for life to emerge, and evolve to such a state in which consciousness could become self-aware, and articulated as such by the creatures who have this property.

But we just don't find these properties at the very bottom of nature, in fields or strings or whatever there may be.

But as has likely been mentioned in discussions of this type, this isn't an experiment that is liable to scientific research, and would have to be considered metaphysics, which I have nothing against, In fact, it's a fascinating topic. But the problem is, one has to recognize the limits of scientific enquiry, which certainly exist.

The most realistic thing, is to think that emergence makes sense, even so called "strong emergence". I've heard many people and scientists say that this is akin to "believing in magic". Fine, if this is magic, then I believe it to be the case. I prefer to call it what it is, a total mystery for human beings.

Do psychologists not use "physicalism", when they treat patients? Like do they deny that whatever the patient is suffering is not a real phenomenon just because qualia can't be measured? Hardly, and psychologist worth his salt would take the patients qualia very seriously indeed. It does not follow that the psychologist is departing from rational enquiry when treating a patient, or is otherwise engaging in new age mentalism. A different topic would be to what extent psychology is scientific, but rational enquiry need not be in conflict with science at all. It's just studying different levels of complexity of "physical reality".

Well, scientists helped developed the atom bomb. Now that weapon could destroy us all at any moment. Should we stop doing science? Althusser murdered his wife, should we not engage in political debates? Thomas Jefferson was a slave owner, should we not study history?

By those standards, we'd have literally nothing to talk about or discuss or discover.

To be clear, it's possible for there to be something after death. It's also possible that before birth, our souls lived in some other realm or different universe or something. I think that it is very unlikely. But as you said, in the end, we don't know. It boils down to what you think makes more sense to each person.

"Both worlds are materially identical by definition. However, they differ in who one *is* in this world. If I am person A or Z, I have the body and the memories of person A or Z, respectively."

If they are different, you would indeed have 26 people. But there aren't people who are materially identical in every respect, including twins.

If they were identical in every respect in which we consider a person to be a person, and not a statue or something else, then we would have one person, not A-Z.

This hardly constitutes the rebuttal of monism at all.

Thanks for sharing, these are quite helpful.

Yeah, it's hard to comprehend how it is that we do all kinds of things, which we do not know well or even understand. It's almost as if this stuff is innate, waiting to be activated by nature. :)

"You could not think if materialism is true."

Yes. If by matter, one is referencing the "matter" that was postulated to exist prior to Newton's discoveries.

"...since the form 'thought' is detached from matter, 'mind' is immaterial too..."

I doubt you could take thinking "out" of the brain, and have pure consciousness. It's a thought experiment we can do for fun, or as an exercise of some kind, but not something you could do in practice. You'd have to show how instances of consciousness absent brain, or matter.

But if it helps, you could even think of matter as "immaterial", in a sense, as Strawson points out:

"At first…one takes it that is simply solid stuff, non-particulate…Then…one learns that [this object] …is composed of distinct atoms - particles that cohere more or less closely together to make up objects...one [goes on] to learn that these atoms are themselves made up of tiny, separate particles, and full of empty space themselves...[o]ne learns that a physical object like the earth or a person is almost all empty space. One learns that matter is not at all what one thought."

This is not even mentioning, all the weird aspects of quantum physics, fields and so forth. One should do away with the image of matter a "solid lump of mass", which remains as such the further down you go in to investigate it.

So if matter is strange, why can't it have properties of thought?

Yes Cudworth is very hard to read. Which is why I suggest you take a look at his A Treatise Concerning Eternal and Immutable Morality. It's not too long, some 230-ish pages, and it was the appendix to Volume III of his True Intellectual System. Only the first 40 to 60 pages are about morality, the rest is epistemology, stating in essence what Kant said, using almost exactly the same phrase, but develops the idea in a different direction. It's easier to read by several orders of magnitude, compared to the main work.

I am familiar with Leibniz passage, and he is entirely correct. The topic of "lack of information" is tricky. Some people, mostly scientists working in physics and some neuroscientists, treat information as "bits" of nature. But the type of information, in the scientific domain, is not the "information" we have, when we see any phenomenal object, at least not in the manifest side of things. This "explanatory gap", is epistemic in nature, a lack of a faculty that prevents us from seeing some aspects of the world. But without epistemic constraints, we would not be able to form any "picture" of the world at all. Thus, I do think it is lack of information, in terms of missing certain mental/brain faculties. So the issue would be "properties of matter" vs. the "capabilities of reason". I think the latter are "properties of matter", but we have no idea how matter does what it does, we only describe its effects, we don't know "internal causes", as it were. But I like the intuition, it's quite rational and I could be wrong about matter.

As for the "abstract objects" part, Aquinas' general description is correct, in so far as thoughts are abstract. The problem might be in our natural insistence to pick out aspects of objects and claim they are things existing in nature. What I mean by this, is that, when we look at an ordinary apple, we pick out attributes such as REDNESS, SWEETNESS, ROUNDNESS and so on. And then we look for other objects that might also look red, be sweet and so on. This might be a mistake. But an object may just as well be the instantiation of all these properties (and more, including things-themselves, which might bind them together, and other aspects of object we can't easily discern)that we tend to take apart, so we may be "cutting" nature in the wrong place.

I would entirely agree that reduction makes little sense. In fact, let's grant to Rosenberg his great insight, and say that "there's nothing but bosons and fermions", or whatever. That literally makes no sense, because, I'm speaking to you and we understand each other, more or less. If it were only bosons and fermions that really existed, we wouldn't be able to talk at all, much less make sense of anything.

As for your last part, there's something I do find attractive. It could be the case, that things like the Pythagorean theory, are only accessible, only discloses themselves, to creatures who reach a certain level of sophistication, otherwise these things would remain true but unknown. And I'd go even further, I think there are other such truths, which must exist, which we have no access to.

I'd only add that I should say thanks to you too, I'm learning things about Aristotle and Husserl which I had previously been ignorant of. :)

Yes, I know. I'm missing something.

I'll go on as much as necessary, I agree that arguments of this kind are good, if only to make us think about our views better, and hopefully catch a mistake in our reasoning.

What you describe, even if you are referring to the ancient Greeks, can also be found in the Cambridge Neo-Platonists, specifically Ralph Cudworth, who Chomsky thinks is more interesting than Kant. And he might be correct, Cudworth is interesting, and it points to the kind of thing you are attempting to describe. I'd frame the issue slightly differently, which would be to say they everything we interact with, even in the wilderness too, can only be recognized as such, manifestly, as "given" to us, by the specific nature we have, which tends to assume a "naïve realism" of sorts.

These types of ideas, of recognizing that things like BEDS or MOUNTAINS, are mental constructions and thus do not reside in the mind-independent world, is something that is awe-inducing. I mean, if all human beings disappeared over night, there would be something "out there", but it wouldn't be a BED or a MOUNTAIN because these are human concepts.

But then I'd ask if it is even very coherent to think of senses absent the intellect. I mean, we could say that certain creatures might exhibit a behavior of this kind, say maybe a mosquito or some other simple animal, in which they have senses but probably no, or very little, intellect. I just don't see why you'd say that corporeal senses are physical in a way that mind is not.

The traditional problem, as you pointed out, and as discussed after Descartes by Locke and especially Priestley (and others too) is the question: how the heck can matter think? How can this "dead and stupid matter" have properties associated with something as sublime as the mind? The mistake, I think, was to assume that matter is in its nature "dead and stupid", it isn't. As Priestley pointed out:

"It is said that we can have no conception how sensation or thought can arise from matter, they being things so very different from it, and bearing no sort of resemblance to anything like figure or motion ; which is all that can result from any modification of matter, or any operation upon it.…this is an argument which derives all its force from our ignorance. Different as are the properties of sensation and thought, from such as are usually ascribed to matter, they may, nevertheless, inhere in the same substance, unless we can shew them to be absolutely incompatible with one another.”

But they're not incompatible with one another, I think it's a mistake to assume they do. But you don't agree, because you think that "rational intellect (nous) is able to discern principles which are themselves not visible to the corporeal senses. That includes... scientific laws and geometical principles... None of these are in themselves physical, although they may play a role in determining the behaviour of physical things."

That's a fine formulation, I don't see the problem, we just so happen to disagree on this point.

So it's kind of, what question do I think we should ask ourselves so that we could all be better off, something like that? Because perfection implies something that is usually related to numerical quantities more than qualitative relations, as "quality perfection" is highly variable. As in, I might think that if we asked the question, "should we spend so much time at work?" Is a good question.

And the reason I think this is so is because we work way too much, and that something like 4 hours or so, a day, would be better for everybody once they realize that much of what we call "work" isn't really creative or productive in any meaningful sense. I'd then say that 4 hours a day of work is perfect, but obviously others would strongly disagree. So I'm not seeing why you'd call it the perfect question.

Going back to the OP: I think the question you are trying to frame assumes that the questions we may find most interesting, must have, by necessity, moral consequences. There was a time when such a question could be framed, especially if one has in mind Classical Greece, in which philosophers saw little difference in asking questions about ethics and then asking about the nature of mathematics, there was a healthy tendency to see all aspects of life as belonging to less specializations than we do today. Of course, this is a generalization of that time, but such a case could be made.

By now some aspects of our knowledge has advanced so much, one could spend an entire lifetime focusing on a sub-sub specialty in biology or geology, and so on. But then in other topics, namely ethics, the type of questions we ask haven't changed much, in part, because so little is known, in part, because these are hard topics to put to practice too.

In any case, the question which I'm currently obsessed with would be, putting Kant's specific formulations and suggestions aside, what can be said about "the thing in itself"? I suspect some negative elaborations could be made. But I don't see any connection to ethics, unless you come up with some very strong quasi religious considerations, that would then obscure the whole issue. Interesting experiment nonetheless.

I've read a bit about Husserl by scholars such as Dan Zahavi, who seems serious, but very little of what Husserl himself wrote about. Aside from his own quite obscure jargon, part of which seems useful I'll admit, he was constantly elaborating his views. So I've heard from different sources, people who know Husserl well, to begin with Ideas, others told me to do the Investigations first, yet another one told me that his Cartesian Meditations are his best book. I'm not interested enough to read all three honestly, there's too much stuff to look into on all topics outside philosophy too, so I don't know how to proceed with him, outside of reading some essays by scholars.

I've read some more on embodied cognition, and although there are slight variants within this line of thought it seems to me, they remind me of Heidegger to some extent. And I know Husserl did not agree with Being and Time. I'll keep in mind that book you recommended, as I've already given you a few. Good to know that whatever differences we have, it's mostly terminological as I see it, and less about substance.

And yeah, Dennett is the epitome of the most extreme irrationality possible, denying consciousness and then denying that he denies it. Kind of arguing with a person who insists that the sun is made of cotton or something like that, but worse, because if you need evidence for the existence of consciousness, you need some serious help. But Rosenberg is far worse. If you want a good laugh, try his Atheists Guide to Reality, it makes Dennett look like Einstein.

I think we agree more than we disagree. Those physicalists you are talking about, tend to be people like Dennett, The Churchlands, the most extreme of them all being Alex Rosenberg. But there are scientists too, that attempt to take the physical roughly in that regard, Sean Carroll, Richard Dawkins, Neil deGrasse Tyson and so on.

Yes, there is a definite explanatory gap between what goes on in the brain, and what we experience, which goes way beyond any sense data and gives us a rich, complex, multi-faceted world. I don't think the physical those people are referring to is the physical that actually exists, which would be the physical of, for example, Susan Haack and even C.S. Peirce, all the way back to Joseph Priestley. The physical they have in mind, is the physical that actually exists in nature, and it includes experience.

What I should have made more explicit, is that, given the creatures that we are and the constitution we have as said creatures, there is no possible way any "theory of the physical", will ever explain to us how the "purely intellectual" works. If we can't understand gravity, as Newton admitted, I think it's a safe bet to say we won't be able to understand consciousness and the mental domain. Having said that, another highly intelligent creature, an alien somewhere, might be so built so as to understand how the brain works in such a way that we get the experience the way we do. Absent such a creature, I'd say, if such a being as God exists, it would be obvious to him. But it's a mystery to us, and will remain so.

But let's say you are correct, and as a matter of metaphysical principle, the physical cannot, in any respect, explain the mind. That raises an additional problem, such as the interaction problem. Something "purely intellectual" then has some property or set of properties, that arise out of no discernable thing. Unless you have an explanation of some kind for that.

Sure, many of us have felt the terror of being aware of our own mortality at a young age, maybe 2 is very young compared to most, but I think that overlooks the main point. Prior to be born, when you try to think about what it was like, what do you say? I've seriously attempted to do a kind of phenomenological exercise here, and I find that, no term I can come up with fits the "state I was in" before being born. I can't speak of fear, boredom, joy, worry, pain, pleasure or anything else. The best idea I can come up to describe how it was like before I came to life, would be "none of the experiences I've had in life comes close to saying anything about such a state", which can be translated simply into "I felt nothing."

You can speak about near death experiences and the like, but virtually all cases on this topic turn out to be highly suspect, similar to when people claim they see a flying saucer in some field. If there is some uniformity of experience in people who have gone through near death experiences, that can only suggest to me that they were in a similar state. If testimonies vary in terms of NDE, then all the more reason to be suspect about what a handful of people claim happens when you are dying and not yet dead. It's true that there is brain activity when we are in states of dreamless sleep, perhaps we may have even had a brief dream which we completely forget when we wake up. But if experientially it amounts to no experience at all, what would brain processes go on to add to my experience of dreamless sleep? The experience stays the same.

Yes, I said that about electronic music, but I cannot substantiate because it remains an intuition. But I wouldn't say that because of this, it can't evoke powerful emotions, it clearly can, and some of the more obscure DJ's have created very good songs. I know Daft Punk as well, they have some good songs. Generally speaking, we'll tend to like the music we grew up with more or less from age 12-20 or so, at least, that is how it has looked like to me. I doubt as of now, I would go through the effort of listening to some music I didn't previously like, because I have so many that I do like.

Sure, having good sound equipment helps, though my impression has been that if I like a song, I don't mind where the music is coming from. From a classical music perspective, it must look like we are talking about toy cars, instead of actual vehicles. But again, a good portion of that genre is just very boring to me, but I won't deny it is likely much more sophisticated than much of 20th century music.

By itself? You can make that argument if you like. But I don't think this holds true for higher mammals at least, they live with some kind of basic innate purpose. Which is why suicide is rather rare for such creatures. We certainly create meaning, but it does not come pre-made, unless you believe in God or some "higher power".

But also, saying that the universe is absurd, is quite a high bar to uphold as well. This would mean that everything we have discovered, written and learned was for not point at all. Plato wrote absurd ideas, Kant too, Newton as well and everyone else. All the art and music you like, all of that effort and pain and joy and suffering, put into anything people do, was for nothing. Maybe. But why choose to think that, when there's an alternative. All these things we have achieved were meant for other people to enjoy and think and learn. But I understand that sometimes it feels as it doesn't matter anyway. Just that it's an attitude that hurts the person who holds it, more than anyone else. Unless you take the absurd to be comical, then there's that.

We don't really know what any word means, definitions only sketch there meaning, outside of natural numbers, which seem to be true by definition. Having said that, touch your computers or your keyboard, and you would say it is physical I presume. All I'm saying is that everything else is physical, including the brain which is where consciousness emanates from, and thus experience. This only means that what we ordinarily think of when we use the word physical, is much, much more than what we initially supposed. It includes our thoughts, dreams, ideas and so on.

But, if that's not convincing for you, you can just as well call is "?-ist" and say everything is ?-ist. The main point is monist, there is only one fundamental kind of stuff. I'd like to see someone explain to me how metaphysical dualism can be articulated. How can there be two distinct but basic kind of substances in the universe. How do they interact at all? If they do interact, what the nature of the point of contact between two fundamentally different kinds of things, and so on. I'm not saying any more than that.

I think science is the best founded knowledge we have, but it's far from the only knowledge we can have. Scientific enquiry if valid for theoretical understanding, but most aspects of life don't fit under this domain. History, international relations, ethics, aesthetics are not sciences, and it is far from clear than psychology and sociology are scientific in any relevant sense. I take it that philosophy is the study of mysteries, so it isn't a science per se.

I think everything that exists is natural, and that the world around us is physical, including our brain/mind. It's a useful terminology to employ, but as soon as you interact with any object, you discover how little we know about the nature of the physical, or if you prefer, how little we know about the nature of the world. As for mathematics, I tend to agree with Russell and Strawson. Strawson says "A concrete phenomenon must be more than its purely formal or structural properties, because these considered just as such, have a purely abstract mathematical representation, and are, concretely nothing - nothing at all." So math is real, but abstract. Applied math, such as is used in physics, only describes the structure of things, not there intrinsic natures, which are left untouched.

You've said that the operations of the mind cannot be physical, because they don't resemble anything in the physical sciences. What resembles something physical? Those things described by physical science, but not mental properties. That doesn't go very far either.

At the end of the day, most of this is terminological. The biggest substantive difference here would be metaphysical dualism and emergence. Like I said a while ago, I don't think we are going to proceed much further along this path of talking about terminology.

I entirely agree with most of the first portion of your analysis. It's evidently true that we can't see things like inferences, or abstractions or anything of the like when we see neurophysiological images of brains. That's completely true, and shouldn't be controversial. Where I do take issue is when you say:

"So, I'm arguing those capacities of interpretation and reasoning are internal to the operations of thought. They are not physical in any sense".

There's no doubt a massive explanatory gap exists between the data of science and the experience we have of it. But why isn't the process of the operations of thought "physical"? All it means is that physics, as we currently understand it, is radically incomplete and furthermore, will likely never be completed. I can't understand the idea that in between our brains doing something with data, and we experiencing that something as experiential phenomena, that there is something "non-physical" occurring. That would imply, or could be taken to imply, that something non-natural is taking place in between what my brain does, and what I experience.

I think everything is natural, but we have substantive gaps in understanding, given the creatures that we are. I mean, I could say, something "nous-like" is happening with the operations of my thoughts, but I don't understand how to interpret that, other than taking it as meaning something in additional to the physical is happening when I interpret data. Why introduce something in addition to what we already know is radically incomplete on its own terms, namely the physical?

As for Chomsky. Here I can speak with some confidence. You are correct about the "atheism" bit, I got to meet him too, he's really awesome. :) You are correct that he doesn't make metaphysical commitments outside of his "methodological naturalism", there is only one world, which we try to understand, theoretically, meaning scientifically, naturalistically, as we do with anything else we can more or less study in a systematic manner.

On the other hand, if you take a look at Chomsky and his Critics, where in his "replies" section he talks about Strawson's argument of Real Materialistic Monism, as presented in Strawson's essay Real Materialism and Chomsky says that "RMM does "ontologize" the methodological stand, in a way that seems to me to be quite reasonable..." (2003, p.268).

He also states in What Kind of Creatures Are We? that "Galen Strawson develops the first option in an important series of publications. Unlike many others, he does give a definition of "physical," so that it is possible to formulate a physical-nonphysical problem. The physical is "any sort of existent [that is] spatio-temporally (or at least temporally) located)." The physical includes "experiential events"(more generally mental events) and permits formulation of the question of how experiential phenomena can be physical phenomena-a "mind-body problem," in a post-Newtonian version." (p.120)

But Strawson then argues that experience is physical, the problem is the non-experiential aspects of matter or stuff that has no experience (ordinary objects, the universe, etc.), that's the real mystery for him, until he went down the panpsychist direction.

But you're correct, Chomsky prefers to speak of "methodological naturalism" and not "physicalism".

Nevertheless, whether we use the word "physical" or "world", Chomsky would certainly say that there aren't any metaphysical distinctions, they made sense when Descartes proposed them, but that view collapsed with Newton

It may be a cop out, but I think the idea of "things-in-themselves" are interesting , which could be explored in relation to such themes. Of course, it goes way beyond my level of comprehension and capabilities, but the topic of the grounds of things almost always leads to something more basic. Last I heard, we are now at the level of quantum fields.

Then we have competing theories like string theory, which I've heard is mathematically elastic and can describe almost any universe, or there is also the option of loop quantum gravity. Either way, the grounds of these things, could be the thing in itself, whose nature escapes our capacity to understand it. But, again, this is an easy way out for many problems, but this doesn't prevent it from being an option to consider.

It's am mystery. But it's something we do automatically. Perhaps it might even be the single most unique thing about us as creatures in the natural world. We are able to give meaning to anything, by engaging with objects, creating new stuff, asking questions about situations and so forth. The problem is not so much how we create meaning, the problem as I see it is why do we sometimes fall into periods in which life is meaningless?

Of course, this doesn't mean that, objectively speaking, there is meaning in the world, it's just that we create it, to whatever extent each of us can. But even someone creating a simulation of the type described, why would they bother doing such a complicated thing? Surely it would be to get some meaningful results for some experiment, or some amusement of some form or other.

@Wayfarer: I take it that when you talk about content, you are describing aspects or architectures of the mind, therein you are describing mental faculties. But what I argue, along with Strawson and Chomsky, is that the mental is physical, you simply are choosing what aspect of physical reality you want to elucidate. You may want to elucidate the mind, phenomenological aspects of experiential episodes, you may want to study how certain animals react to certain viruses, then you'd be studying the biological aspects of physical reality. When you go to psychology and sociology, you are studying the behavior of people and groups of people, all of which form part of physical reality.

You keep talking about the counterparts or aspects "not found in the physical domain". I'm not denying that we play a huge role in construction of what we take to be "the given". When I say physical, I'm not remaining at the level of physics at all. I don't have in mind reducing the experience of seeing an orange, or reading my favorite book to some sub-processes in my brain, that would be crazy and is precisely what I think is literally bad philosophy. I only put in the caveat that without the brain, we wouldn't have consciousness even if I admit, along with you I suspect, that we begin with consciousness. In what respect is the story in my favorite novel physical? In the sense that I interpret the story through some processes in my mind/brain. Intentionality is also a process of the brain/mind, both play a role, one we experience as directly as anything (mental), the other we do not experience at all, minus a headache (the brain).

I think we might be getting stuck by using the word "physical", as it carries connotations to empirical science. Let's then call it by the more neutral term "worldly". The book is worldly, the story is worldly the mind is worldly. We still talk about the mental aspects of worldly reality, or the biological aspects of worldly reality, or we can do literary analysis of stories, which are created by worldly creatures.

The point is, as I take it, why add something to worldly, if we cannot say where "worldly" reality stops, and some other reality begins? Why introduce metaphysical differences, instead of talking about different aspects of the same reality? I mean, would you say that vision and hearing are two metaphysically different things, or two aspects of one thing? I see benefits to the latter, no benefits to the former, so far as metaphysics is concerned.

This touches on the question of expertise. Someone who knows music well, will be able to appreciate Mozart in a way that most people born after WWII-ish would not. I think there's an argument to be made the Mozart is more sophisticated, complex and arouses more subtle emotion than The Beatles or Led Zeppelin. As for me, aside from a few pieces of classical music, I don't share the same level of appreciation.

When you go to the level of electronic dance music, one could argue that one is dealing with surface level aspects of music, which by no means makes it bad, I for one enjoy them a lot too. And sometimes the surface of a lake is gorgeous, but if you start going down below, it isn't as pretty. But I also cannot deny that with other electronic music, I felt very deep emotions, which would be laughable from the perspective of some music experts. But as to what's objective, that's so hard. On the other hand, you can listen to more contemporary music which apparently has no redeeming qualities, a beat that I could create with a program, and lyrics that could be written after several drinks, or as a joke.

But even in this last instance, some people find value in any music, so it's not trivial to say this is garbage, even if we may want to. I guess there are cases where one could say this, but its a tad obscure.

Materialism (which can now be used interchangeably with "physicalism") used to mean roughly mechanistic materialism. It was thought that if an artisan or engineer could replicate an object in nature, say, the digestion of a duck, via some mechanical process, based on direct contact mechanics, then it was said to be understood and thus a physical phenomena. We apparently have a "built in physics" that understands the world in such a manner, where objects interact with other objects directly.

That quote from Newton a few posts back simply shows that he could not believe that the materialism of his time, based on contact mechanics, wasn't true of the world. That's why he was surprised. Now that view of materialism if false. If we are to use the term "material" or better yet, "physical" to attempt to refer to anything that is going on in the world, then the physical must mean "whatever there is". But I wouldn't at all say that this means that everything physical can, even in most cases be solved by the sciences, or even be hoped to be understood by said methods. In that respect I am very much a "mysterian".

I find it useful to say that I'm a "real physicalist" as a reply to those who believe in Dennett an co.'s line of reasoning, which denies the existence of consciousness as mere reaction or epiphenomenon or bad folk psychology or whatever else they say, and I also think that it's a useful exercise to grab an object, any object a book, a laptop, whatever, and say, this is physical, and then you see how much the physical encapsulates everything, and how little one may know about it, but this is a preference.

I agree with your assessment of Strawson concerning Dennett, but I wouldn't say he is one of those science types at all. His writings of the nature of the self, narrativity, identity metaphysics should dispel beliefs in that view. I don't know what you make of panpsychism, but as articulated by him and in fact by anybody that I know of so far, I don't believe it to be true, though it is a hard problem.

At the end of the day speaking of "physical", "non-physical" or whatever else is more terminological than anything else, although not only that. So I can't really quibble with you choice of word "nous", it's a good word.