Reminds me of a nice Wittgenstein aphorism: — Srap Tasmaner

Ah, that's a nice quote of Witty's.

Also saying that we may never have a complete account does not necessarily leave the door open to God and esoterica, because those posits can never be scientific or satisfactorily explanatory. — Janus

I think you misunderstood me. I should have said that we would leave the door open to superstitions, folk traditions, and supernatural ideas, God and esoterica. There is little doubt that wherever there is a gap, God will be inserted, as a kind of explanatory wall filler.

Again I think this is not right. — Janus

I don't think that is a fair assessment of either physicalism or naturalism. — Janus

I’m not saying that other more circumspect views, like the ones you mentioned, aren’t also present. I’m just describing what I often hear and regarding physicalism and naturalism: the usual claims about eventually achieving a full understanding of consciousness in the future. In the meantime, trust in complexity and brain states. And yes, some naturalists agree that we may never have a complete account, leaving the door forever open to versions of God and esoterica.

A big issue for naturalism is whether we are talking about methodological or metaphysical naturalism, as people often shift the meaning of their claims.

The concept of ego may have gone out of fashion, especially as the term consciousness has become used to cover so much ambiguity in meaning. — Jack Cummins

I wouldn’t say these ideas are out of fashion so much as understood as wrong, outmoded. Personally, I'm not attracted to the “masters of suspicion,” and I don’t really accept the will to power, the ego, or similar explanatory schemas. I’m not convinced those kinds of frames are particularly useful.

What's your attraction to these sorts of descriptions?

. It would be like talking about contradictions in art. Art doesn’t care about contradictions. — Angelo Cannata

Hmm, well, I’m not entirely convinced by this. Academics and critics do identify when art is incoherent or when it fails to follow its own internal logic. It isn’t the case that any art is ipso facto beyond critical understanding or even judgement, as if art were off-limits to rational or evaluative standards. But I do kind of understand what you’re saying.

If we clarify that this creation that subjectivity operates is not a metaphysically realistic creation, but an interpretation of our experience, then yes, I think that everything in this world can be considered as created by us. — Angelo Cannata

We invent the names, the measurements, and the descriptive frameworks; the coherence is largely ours, and the regularities may well be a product of how we conceptualise the world rather than features of the world itself, though I’m not entirely sure. Hence, objectivity could be understood as shared subjectivity.

Nice. I don’t think the world in general has caught up to any of this. How long will it take?

torturers and interrogators and The Spanish Inquisition, have known that since the dawn of time. — RogueAI

I think that initiative was a bit later than this. :wink:

This make me deduce that true subjectivity is that part that is impossible to express, that part that remains in each personal experience, that everybody can feel inside themselves, but cannot be communicated because, since it is unique, we should create a dedicated specific word for each unique experience that otherwise is inexpressible. — Angelo Cannata

Isn’t the opposite also true, objectivity is an artifact of human constructivism, culture, language and values? Objectivity perhaps being a shared subjectivity. Perhaps we could even say objectivity is a contradiction inside subjectivity?

Do we have access to anything that isn’t spun, woven and contextualised by our cognitive processes and principles we have created?

A salient question for me, and apologies if I have missed this since I dip in and out, are to what extent are any patterns we observe “in the world” or are they a co-created outcome of human interactions?

Fair point.

I'll try to stay more focused. These were just my first thoughts. — Moliere

Coming back to this. I wasn’t being critical of you or your thinking; I apologize if it came across that way. We’re all just fumbling through this stuff. :up: :up:

We often end up in physicalist or naturalist circles claiming that our mysteries are explained by evolution or complexity and emergence, and that time will answer them definitively, or that we’ve described the problem incorrectly, so we simply restate it in a way that makes it disappear.

Which, yes, charitably that means I don't understand the argument. — Moliere

What I potentially like about the argument is its apparent simplicity (although, obviously, I don’t fully understand it). It isn’t talking about consciousness, mind, or any number of tedious philosophical problems; it is simply saying that a mere point of view can’t be explained by naturalistic processes.

Probably both. But a problem with "naturalism" is that it’s so vague that you can smuggle a lot into it. I think the explanatory gap for intentionality applies to both naturalism and physicalism, because both seem to share the central assumption that everything, including mental states can be explained in terms of physical processes or natural laws.

If the non-naturalist explanation is that intelligibility is somehow an essential feature of things, even a matter of essences that allow an "agent intellect" to grasp their meaning and significance, would that apply only to symbolic language enabled beings or would it apply to animals also — Janus

Yes, I think it might apply to animals. But we can't talk to them.

The argument pivots on whether physicalism can explain intelligibility. The reasoning for why it can’t is what I’m trying to drill into. See above.

The argument is going to sound plausible to those who reject naturalism as an adequate metaphysics and not plausible to naturalists. — Moliere

I think that’s unfair. There are people who were naturalists and have changed their minds precisely because of this reasoning. I’ve met people who are persuaded by good arguments. Forget the ones who have already decided, they exist in every area and can be left in brackets for this discussion.

For my part I'm not sure naturalism "explains" anything anymore than non-naturalism does with respect to intentionality. I feel like that's the wrong sort of way to think about metaphysical questions. — Moliere

I’m not accusing you of sidestepping the problem, but you can see how people might call this avoidance. In other words, if I say the model is wrong, I don’t have to engage with it, I can just change the subject.

Fair. I'm not convinced I do either, especially as I haven't read Hart -- only the thread. — Moliere

Yes, and this is really the area I’m interested in: understanding the argument, not refuting it or trying to sidestep it. I want the best possible formulation of this argument. We often move so fast on this site that, for the most part, people are playing a kind of tennis with their own preconceptions: you hold this, I return your serve with mine.

Hart’s argument concerns an explanatory gap. Even if every mental state is correlated with a brain state, that only gives a correlation, it doesn’t explain why the brain state represents the world rather than merely being a physical pattern. The point, it seems is that naturalistic accounts struggle to bridge the gap from physical patterns to meaningful content.

I find this argument lacking because it depends entirely on one's beliefs. If one is a theist then the plausibility of naturalism is simply false, and if one is a naturalist then intelligibility couldn't have come from anything but a blind watchmaker. — Moliere

The problem with this formulation is that even for Hart the argument is independent of theism. Hart is quite comfortable to say that his argument does not lead to theism specifically; it merely identifies an inadequacy in physicalism's explanatory power, for reasons that @wafarer has often pointed out (and he is not a theist either). Thomas Nagel holds a similar view and he is an atheist.

I think it's better to identify the specific reasoning and work out what is actually going on. But the first step is to understand the argument properly, and I’m not convinced that I do. Hence my OP.

But some things aren't in need of an explanation. "Why is the world intelligible?" may not have an answer at all. It's something like asking "Why is there something rather than nothing?" -- if there be an answer it won't be of the sort which we abduce. — Moliere

I don’t think that’s a fair comparison. They are only similar in that both issues seem to be unresolved, but they are not addressing the same type of question. Even your formulation of the issue isn’t quite right: the question is not 'why the world is intelligible', but how naturalism explains intelligibility. Given that naturalism presents itself as the predominant explanatory framework for all things, the question seems apropos.

In my own life (I agree with you) I am content with not having explanations for things, like life or consciousness. My favourite three words are 'I don't know' and I wish more people would employ them. But that's a separate matter to trying to understand this argument.

Yes and this too. :up:

Cool. There should still be a process. At least I would like one. There are still situations and facts behind any action that would not be gleaned from a video alone: history, situation, etc. if you’re saying that an AI can oversee all this with no mistakes and based on human values then I might be skeptical.

I'm not a science guy. But I have never 'ruled in' god as a candidate explanation since it is bereft. The idea is incoherent and usually gets a work out when people don't know answers.

We can't rule out a natural cause of life and since there is pretty much zero evidence of supernatural entities, a natural cause seems more likely to me. But "don't know" are two words that should be used more often by more people.

If the yet to be explained can never be explained because it would be outside the remit of science — kindred

You can’t say something can never be explained. That claim can’t be demonstrated. At best, all you can show is that this is where the inferences lead you, but that largely reflects a belief you already hold.

I would not say there is no god, because that claim can’t be demonstrated either.

But this question isn’t about god. It’s about whether life can, in principle, be explained by natural processes. At present, we simply don’t know, but lack of explanation now is not evidence of impossibility. And none of us here have any expertise on the lates scientific research into this matter.

What is wrong with believing in god or god and science ? — kindred

You tell me.

The point of the argument is to prove that god exists by way of understanding the artefacts of creation such as life and intelligence. — kindred

For my money, the argument proves nothing, for the reasons I’ve already given. God is not really an explanation for anything. An explanation explains, by showing how or why something occurs. Saying “God did it” merely replaces the question with a supernatural label. It amounts to saying that a supernatural power, or magic, did it, which adds no explanatory content.

I imagine that the argument might work if you already believe gods are real.

The best you can say is "don't know." I am as suspicious of god being thrown into explanatory gaps as I am of the overreliance on evolution made it. Although evolution at least has an evidential basis.

So, 8 billion people x 24 hours x 500 angles. How does the video get processed? Where does it get stored? Who decides what is criminal and what isn’t? Who judges whether a particular behavior constitutes a crime? — T Clark

I imagine AI woudl be able to do it based on parameters set up by some committee /government

Too many quesions inherent in this small sketch. I'm not all that interested in privacy or freedom as a themes so these sorts of scenarios don't set me off the way they do libertarian types.

What does:

People would have zero privacy and full and swift justice — Copernicus

mean?

If you are talking about a dystopia with instant death sentences, then perhaps not, hey?

I just find it improbable that life could emerge on its own without some sort of divine push to get things started…what is your take on this ? — kindred

I think the most sensible answer to this is that we don’t know as yet. A “God of the gaps” explanation, or an appeal to magic, while understandable, seems primitive and comes with its own problems. Since the idea of God is largely unknowable and arguably incoherent (depending on which of the many models one adopts), God has no real explanatory power. What does it actually mean to say “God did it”? It seems less like an explanation and more like an inscrutable placeholder that stops inquiry rather than advancing it.

I think you may well enjoy Anthropocentric Purposivism conceptually. — AmadeusD

Interesting. There's a theory for everything and everyone, isn't there? Perhaps this is a kind of soft-Aristotelian, telos affair.

Cool. :up: :up:

Consciousness is not physical. Although it is inextricably bound to the physical, and doesn't exist without a physical component (at least we are not aware of any consciousness without a physical component), it is not, itself, physical. It does not have any physical properties, like charge, mass, density, hardness. It does not have physical characteristics, like size, hardness, and weight. We cannot measure it's speed, direction, or any other characteristics of physical processes. It cannot be sensed with any of our senses, or our technology. It is not describable with mathematics. — Patterner

Would you say you were a dualist? You believe that there’s a physical world and are not an idealist?

Hart’s argument is clearly informed by idealism.

I’m not anlways attracted to arguments from evolutionary biology, they sometimes seem to function as a catch all for anything we can’t quite explain.

:up: :up:

Merleau-Ponty gestures toward this alternative when he speaks of subject and world as co-arising, with meaning disclosed in their relation rather than deposited in one or the other. I’m not especially well read in him, but this passage captures the idea:

The world is inseparable from the subject, but from a subject who is nothing but a project of the world; and the subject is inseparable from the world, but from a world that it itself projects.
— From Phenomenology of Perception, Quoted in The Blind Spot Adam Frank, Marcelo Gleiser. Evan Thompson — Wayfarer

Entirely subjective I know, but this frame is wonderfully seductive to me.

I had never thought of 'ego' as being a poetic model, but it is, of course bound up with language, especially in the formulation of autobiographical narratives. — Jack Cummins

I mean it's a defunct idea and now used mainly in literary circles, not in psychology. These days psychology tends to talk of conscious and unconscious processes as interacting cognitive mechanisms, not separate layers of a psyche. Modern research explains identity, memory, and awareness through processes like executive control, attention, and memory systems, making notions of a layered “ego” or collective unconscious metaphorical and now a historical notion. I think some people like the old language because it was used so much in the 20th century by modernists and artists, giving it a powerful poetic legacy.

Actually, I disagree with this one, also. :grin: But, iirc, you disagree with my reason. I think DNA means something it is not. I think the codons mean amino acids, and the strings of codons mean proteins. And teams of molecules use that information to assemble the amino acids and proteins. Meaning without thinking or intelligence. — Patterner

Not sure what that means. I have no useful science expertise.

I can't imagine. I think three of his four premises are wrong, so they cannot lead to his conclusion. I think he needs another argument entirely to come to that conclusion. — Patterner

Ok. Philosophers also disagree. Remember it’s my probably inadequate arrangement of the argument which I am trying to fully understand. Whether it’s right or not, I couldn’t say.

How do you generally react to @Wayfarer contributions on this subject, which seems to lean towards Neoplatonism. He may have been the better candidate to run this OP. But I do find it fascinating stuff.

Would you, for instance, accept that physicalism is unable to account for consciousness?

The philosophical problem arises with the emergence of language and symbolic reason, where representation becomes normative rather than merely functional. Once we can make claims, give reasons, and distinguish truth from mere success, intentionality is no longer just a matter of reliable correlation with stimuli. It involves answerability to how things are in a much broader sense, including domains—logic, mathematics, counterfactual reasoning—where there may be no immediate adaptive payoff. That is the sense of intentionality that invites explanation. — Wayfarer

This is the nub of it, from what I can tell.

And I suppose one orthodox physicalist response is that intentionality emerges from a certain kind of organised complexity in the brain. When neural systems are arranged so that they can model the environment, correct their errors, and coordinate behaviour over time and across individuals, their internal states can function as representations. Intentionality, on this view, is not a basic feature of the world but a higher-level property that arises from the structure and dynamics of complex physical systems.

Would you say this summarises it?

In Dhammic religions, the context of spiritual efforts is different than what we are used to in the West (under the influence of Christianity).

Namely, in Dhammic religions, they basically don't care whether anyone believes them or not.
This isn't like in Christianity where people are expected to believe things and where religious/spiritual teachings are shoved down people's throats. In Dhammic religions, if you don't believe something they claim, they consider that your problem (and that you just have "too much dust in your eyes"). It's not something they feel responsible for fixing. — baker

Yes, I’m aware that they don’t care. But I don’t care that they don’t care. On this Western forum where we encourage quesions, I am simply asking one. I am not a Buddhist. I am not even convinced that a Westerner who attempts to escape Judeo‑Christianity to find refuge in Buddhism can achieve authenticity there. But that’s a personal bias I am happy to admit to.

It's short, but it's not reductionist. A monotheist has the above as a starting point, as the ground from which he makes his "philosophical" arguments. — baker

The point of Hart’s discourse on these matters is that he starts from reasoning and arrives at theism. Isn’t this why reason has been so assiduously employed by the Church over the centuries, to demonstrate the logical necessity of God?

Now, I happen to believe that, for the most part, behind all this, the atheist’s and the theist’s reasons for believing are much the same. Their accounts make sense to them for reasons informed by emotion and aesthetics. The reasoning is often post hoc.

Cults indoctrinate by sending out propaganda with their embedded beliefs. Capitalist society does just the same with the media industry and all the tropes of earn as much money as possible (far beyond is necessary for a comfortable life) and you will have all the trappings of success. The fast car, the big house, the perfect family, the perfect woman/husband.

Even if not everyone tries to be the next Gordon Gecko/Wolf of Wall Street, the message is still instilled that more money = better. Just like not every woman tries to be a supermodel, just seeing what is put on a pedestal in society instils beliefs in what the lay person should aspire to.

Why are millions/billions on anti-depressants because they hate their life and so much money poured into this? To keep the worker bees productive. Also all the science is bent on 'disease' models where things 'just happen' without there being a root cause. I would propose this is just propaganda to cover up that the root cause is the rotten capitalist society that it must protect at all costs. Science will only observe what it has been funded to, which is decided by politics, so it will be biased only for particular results. — unimportant

I think the more sinister element of capitalism is the banality of most people’s ambition which they don’t seem to mind; forget Gecko and supermodels. For most people it involves ceaseless spending to participate in the conventions - a house, children, vacations, transportation, healthcare, always having to spend and spend more just to have the basics. Often treading water to stay afloat. And they may even consider themselves fortunate.

I don’t think it’s a cult. It’s a dominant worldview that operates differently. A cult functions through exclusion and authoritarian control over behaviour and member's interactions. Capitalism is open, even if constraining, and it doesn’t seek to limit people’s choices directly. It does so indirectly as a by-product, through the blunt mechanism of a user-pays society.

Not sure I believe in the idea of ego except as a poetic way to organise different aspects of self. Personally I doubt it adds anything to our knowledge of personality and it probably promotes a lot of nonsense. Modern psychology doesn’t seem to use the term.

This isn't like in Christianity where people are expected to believe things and where religious/spiritual teachings are shoved down people's throats. In Dhammic religions, if you don't believe something they claim, they consider that your problem (and that you just have "too much dust in your eyes"). It's not something they feel responsible for fixing. — baker

Sure; that’s a much better way to deal with skepticism and/or the real world, for that matter. You could almost be describing Scientology. But the question remains even if they ignore it.

Hart’s point, as I read him, isn’t that natural processes couldn’t in principle produce intentional states, but that any attempt to explain reason, truth, or meaning already presupposes intelligibility and normativity. Scientific explanation itself depends on distinctions between true and false, valid and invalid, better and worse reasons. Those norms aren’t themselves causal properties, and so can’t coherently be treated as merely derivative features of otherwise non-intelligible processes.

So, on my reading of Hart, the pressure point isn’t really consciousness or even intentionality as a psychological phenomenon, but the status of normativity as such. The claim is that intelligibility has to belong to being itself, not merely to our ways of coping with it, otherwise explanation undermines the very standards it relies on. — Esse Quam Videri

Interesting points, let me think on this. :up:

Premise 1 is the one I think is flawed. Natural and physical are not synonyms. Anything in this universe is natural. It can't be otherwise. If there is something non-physical in this universe, then it is natural, and can be part of the explanation of some things. — Patterner

Hmm... I've generally thought that naturalism and physicalism were more or less interchangeable, both having superseded materialism. I suppose Hart might say that God is supernatural. But I can see how what is natural may not be physical. Does science have a view about the existence of non‑physical objects? How would you change that premise to retain the thrust of the argument? It's my approximation of Hart’s argument.

That said, Hart’s argument isn’t a knock-down proof that intentionality cannot arise via natural processes. I understand it to be a transcendental claim: any explanation that treats truth, validity, and correctness as derivative byproducts of non-normative processes already presupposes those norms in the act of explanation itself. Scientific explanation depends on truth-apt judgments, valid inference, and reasons that count as better or worse.

The conclusion Hart draws is not that science fails, but that intelligibility cannot be ontologically secondary or merely instrumental. It has to belong to reality itself in some fundamental way. That’s where the metaphysical move comes in. — Esse Quam Videri

Nice. Yes, that's pretty close to my understanding of Hart.

Of course, Husserl is in no way re-stating classical metaphysics, and I’m not trying to equate the two. But I do think his analysis recovers—within a radically different methodological framework—an earlier insight that was obscured once intelligibles came to be treated as existents. The decisive error is not realism as such, but reification: the assumption that universals must be objects of some kind—typically “abstract objects”—prompting questions like do they exist? and what sort of things are they?

Read differently, intelligibility does not concern objects at all, but a necessary structure of reason—necessary, objective, and invariant, yet accessible only in and through acts of understanding. In this sense, its being is inseparable from its givenness to reason, without collapsing into subjectivity or projection. Put that way, the position seems very close to Husserl’s own, once the misleading connotations of “constitution” as fabrication or projection are set aside.

This way of reading the terrain is also suggested by John Vervaeke, who has pointed to Thinking Being by Eric Perl as a model of participatory knowing (which is where I encountered it). Perl’s account makes explicit what is often missed in these debates: intelligibility is neither an object standing over against the mind nor a mere effect of cognition, but something disclosed in the act of knowing itself—where thinking and what is thought, knower and known, are formally united.

The only spectre that has to be slain here is the 'ghost in the machine'. — Wayfarer

I found this particularly interesting and your account of a necessary structure of reason makes sense.

But these “structures” are not objects, not inventions, and not projections. They are invariant relations disclosed through acts of understanding. — Wayfarer

That’s good, and it’s a useful refinement of what I’ve usually read.

For the Greeks and medievals, nous was not sharply separated from world; knowing was a kind of participation, not representation or “justified true belief”; form was something shared, not “in the mind”; and the order of the world was already meaningful, already articulate. — Wayfarer

Another useful breakdown.

I need a table that contrasts modern conceptions with classical or Neoplatonist ones, and maybe a third column for phenomenology, though there are various descriptions.

Do you think morality (at its best) could also be understood as a form of participation?

The image that comes to mind is being lost in a dense forest during a storm, when a flash of lightning briefly illuminates a magnificent structure on a distant hill. You can no longer see it, but you can’t forget that you did see it, and everything since has been an attempt to find a way toward it. — Wayfarer

I like this and it resonates.

Personally I like to think of death as being liberation for all―either in eternity or oblivion―the idea of rebirth makes little sense to me. It seems to be, if anything, to be motivated by attachment to the self. — Janus

Ditto.

the idea of liberating all beings is aspirational — Janus

Indeed. Can it be demonstrated that a single person has achieved this end? How would we even do that? How do we even know it is a plausible possibility?

Not expertise, just reading. — Wayfarer

Hmmm, well, isn’t expertise largely built from wide reading and remembering the right bits? For an average person like me, who often struggles to get through a paragraph, the amount of reading and comprehension required to actually make use of that knowledge is prodigious. I mean, I'd like to make use of Lloyd Gerson, but it's impossible.