Excellent question. To digress, as I so often do, there's an article I refer to , Quantum mysteries dissolve if possibilities are realities, which echoes an idea spelled out by Werner Heisenberg - that quantum states exist as unrealised potentialities, 'res potentia', one of which is actualised by the measurement process. It's the idea that the unmanifested or potential reality is actualised through measurement.

Excellent question. To digress, as I so often do, there's an article I refer to , Quantum mysteries dissolve if possibilities are realities, which echoes an idea spelled out by Werner Heisenberg - that quantum states exist as unrealized potentialities, 'res potentia', one of which is actualized by the measurement process. It's the idea that the unmanifested or potential reality is actualized through measurement. — Wayfarer

Big debate in quantum theory, does the measurement discern the actual property (location, momentum) or does the measurement, observation, interaction (itself) create the actual from the range of potential possibilities. I following process think of these things as events and thus think there is no exact location or property until the interaction takes place. I do not think this process however is confined to human measurement and instrumentation but that these interactions (collapses, potential to actual) are occurring all the time between events and processes thus the more seemingly concrete macro world we largely live in and observe.

I do not think this process however is confined to human measurement and instrumentation but that these interactions (collapses, potential to actual) are occurring all the time between events and processes thus the more seemingly concrete macro world we largely live in and observe. — prothero

That's the process of decoherence. It explains why we don't ever find a cat that is at once dead and alive, but it still doesn't totally solve the observer problem. What interests me in this context is the role of observation in the actualisation of potential.

I don't see the observer (human I presume) interaction or measurement as being any different than all the interactions that are occurring all the time in nature. Why would they be?
We agree on the way our minds structure and interpret reality for us, we disagree on to what degree we create reality external to our minds (seemingly consequential for you, for me just an effect on our understanding fairly trivial as to its effect on the external world itself)..

You mean, the in itself, right?

I think another area of disagreement is our access to the "ding an sic}. You seem to think we are pretty much excluded from Knowledge about it. I don't envision us as cut off in that way, we arise from the world, we are embedded in the world, we have to navigate it to survive and thus I think our "representation" is pretty accurate. Just as subjective experience is as much part of nature (and philosophy) as scientific investigation, we are part of nature not isolated from it..

many deep questions involved. I’ll revert to my initial post - material reality is an aspect of cognitive experience.

//although I will mention the title of the Whitehead article I mentioned yesterday, which I believe is a quote from the man himself - ‘ Apart from the Experiences of Subjects There Is Nothing, Nothing, Nothing, Bare Nothingness’,//

//although I will mention the title of the Whitehead article I mentioned yesterday, which I believe is a quote from the man himself - ‘ Apart from the Experiences of Subjects There Is Nothing, Nothing, Nothing, Bare Nothingness’,// — Wayfarer

Ah, yes, but for whitehead every event (actual occasion) is a subject onto itself, there are no vacuous entities. He does not mean just humans' and .higher forms of life. :grin: Isolated quotes lack context.

I know they do, but the article from which that line was taken was very detailed — many thousands of words — and it spells out what that remark means in considerable depth.

I understand Whitehead's point, which is made quite explicit in that sentence: that there are no objects that exist in their own right, apart from or independent of any subject. I also understand that, for Whitehead, subjects are not necessarily human — or even organic — but are what he calls ‘actual occasions of experience’, which are the fundamental units of reality. So his aim is to restore subjectivity — the subject — which had been excluded or bracketed out by post-Cartesian dualism. He seeks to disclose subjectivity as a fundamental constituent of existence.

I understand and respect that project, but I would say I’m approaching the same issue from a different orientation. I’m criticizing the notion that objects possess inherent existence independently of any mind, as well — but whereas Whitehead’s approach is ontological (concerned with the constituents of being), the approach I’m exploring is epistemological (concerned with the conditions of knowing). That’s why I align more closely with a Kantian perspective.

While both philosophers are deeply engaged with the relationship between mind and world, Kant approaches it by asking how the mind structures experience and knowledge, whereas Whitehead approaches it by proposing that the world itself is composed of proto-subjective events or ‘prehensions’ at every level of reality.

But I'm open to considering it in more detail. And also exploring parallels between Whitehead and other pan-experientialist approaches.

but whereas Whitehead’s approach is ontological (concerned with the constituents of being), the approach I’m exploring is epistemological (concerned with the conditions of knowing). That’s why I align more closely with a Kantian perspective.

While both philosophers are deeply engaged with the relationship between mind and world, Kant approaches it by asking how the mind structures experience and knowledge, whereas Whitehead approaches it by proposing that the world itself is composed of proto-subjective events or ‘prehensions’ at every level of reality. — Wayfarer

You can try David Skrbina "Panpsychism in the West" for a survey or David Ray Griffin writings on Whitehead and panexperientialism. It is a pretty significant difference there between Kant and human minds and epistemology and Whitehead with subjectivity as an ontological feature of all of the fundamental constituents of reality "actual occasions". Kant I do not think would entertain panpsychism in any form as an explanation of human mind whereas Whitehead sees primitive experience as a fundamental feature of all of reality and process.

Kant I do not think would entertain panpsychism in any form as an explanation of human mind whereas Whitehead sees primitive experience as a fundamental feature of all of reality and process. — prothero

I read a book by David Ray Griffin, (although was later dissappointed to learn he was a 9/11 conspiracy theorist.)

The view I'm advocating also draws on Buddhism, specifically a 1955 book called The Central Philosophy of Buddhism, T R V Murti. Murti draws comparisons between Buddhist 'middle way' (madhyamaka) philosophy and Kant, Hegel, Bradley and other idealist philosophers.

The problematic that Buddhism begins with is not the nature of the constituents of reality, but the cause of dukkha (usually translated as 'suffering'). Within that framework, the nature and relation of subjective and objective reality is resolved in a completely different way to Whitehead's. It does not posit any kind of pan-experiential elementary constituents. My interpretation is that subjectivity emerges with the formation of organic life. Even very rudimentary life-forms possess a kind of subjectivity, if not subjective awareness in the sense humans do. Schopenhauer puts it like this, speaking in terms of the evolution of life (and bearing in mind, this was published before the Origin of Species):

each more highly organised state of matter has succeeded a cruder state: so that the lower animals existed before men, fishes before land animals, plants before fishes, and the unorganised before all that is organised; that, consequently, the original mass had to pass through a long series of changes before the first eye could be opened. And yet, the existence of this whole world remains ever dependent upon the first eye that opened, even if it were that of an insect. For such an eye is a necessary condition of the possibility of knowledge, and the whole world exists only in and for knowledge, and without it is not even thinkable. The world is entirely idea, and as such demands the knowing subject as the supporter of its existence. This long course of time itself, filled with innumerable changes, through which matter rose from form to form till at last the first percipient creature appeared,—this whole time itself is only thinkable in the identity of a consciousness whose succession of ideas, whose form of knowing it is, and apart from which, it loses all meaning and is nothing at all.

The point I'm pressing is that, outside our consciousness of time, space, matter, and so on, the whole notion of existence or non-existence is meaningless. We know, of course, that there was an immense period of time prior to the evolution of h.sapiens (which is where this discussion started) - but Schopenhauer is pointing out that this whole conception is meaningful within the framework provided by the observing mind. So, while it's empirically true that the world existed prior to the evolution of h.sapiens, the true nature of that existence is unknowable apart from the cognitive and theoretical framework within which we imagine it. Hence, with Whitehead, I agree that 'outside the subject there is nothing', but within a different explanatory framework to the one he proposes.

Schopenhauer goes on:

Thus we see, on the one hand, the existence of the whole world necessarily dependent upon the first conscious being, however undeveloped it may be; on the other hand, this conscious being just as necessarily entirely dependent upon a long chain of causes and effects which have preceded it, and in which it itself appears as a small link. These two contradictory points of view, to each of which we are led with the same necessity, we might again call an antinomy in our faculty of knowledge… The necessary contradiction which at last presents itself to us here, finds its solution in the fact that, to use Kant’s phraseology, time, space, and causality do not belong to the thing-in-itself (i.e. the world as it is independently of perception), but only to its phenomena, of which they are the form; which in my language means this: The objective world, the world as idea, is not the only side of the world, but merely its outward side; and it has an entirely different side—the side of its inmost nature—its kernel—the thing-in-itself… But the world as idea… only appears with the opening of the first eye. Without this medium of knowledge it cannot be, and therefore it was not before it. But without that eye, that is to say, outside of knowledge, there was also no before, no time. Thus time has no beginning, but all beginning is in time.

Murti's book points out the many parallels between Kant's 'antinomies of reason' and the Buddha's 'unanswereable questions' (i.e. whether the world is eternal, whether the mind and the body are the same or different, among other things.) So in this framework it is not necessary to posit a speculative 'pan-subjectivity'. It starts and ends with insight into the world-making activities of the mind.

This article is presented quite well. I will point out three things:

1.

Emergent properties are known to be partially independent from their grounds because they have attributes and functions not present in their grounds. Chief among these distinct attributes and functions is intent. Intent is a function of the designing mind that thinks strategically about “that which is not yet but will be.”

Are they known as such? This is a topic of huge debate. The author might be interested in Jaegwon Kim's monographs. He is considered to have offered a devastating critique of the idea of anything like "strong emergence" under a supervenience metaphysics. But this article avoids the problem of "how do chemicals interacting cause first person experiences, emotions, intentionality, sensory experience," with this appeal to emergence, while still seemingly embracing a substance metaphysics of supervenience. This would be something to address to make the argument tighter. Process metaphysics is often suggested as a potential avenue around this, but process metaphysics rejects supervenience (and might not be considered "materialism" in the normal sense).

Weak emergence is pretty much just data compression, so it doesn't solve the problem here at all.

Second, as a number of authors have pointed out, whatever emerges from strong emergence is in some sense fundamental because it cannot be accounted for by what it emerges from. So, even if the mental is a product of strong emergence, it would not seem to be the case that it could be adequately explained in terms of neurons. It would rather be the case that neurons, etc. are a prerequisite for mental phenomena, but cannot fully explain them. That is, physical sciences couldn't fully explain mental life. Would that still count as what the author means by "materialism?"

This is a tension, since arguably this is exactly what people mean by "non-material" many times, right? This leads to...

2. Material and non-material are never defined. This makes it difficult to understand what exactly is being argued against or for. The main explanation of what the non-material must entail sounds like substance dualism. This is a popular punching bag, but not a popular position. It might be good to take on some more popular positions as a means of clarifying what the positive position is, or just clarifying the positive position. That the body is a cause of experienced isn't really denied by many metaphysical theories, so the basics that get outlined don't clarify this much.

3. The brain in the vat example seems to actually stress the idea that brains don't cause consciousness on their own. Any brain locked in vacuum will be a dead brain. Brains only ever produce consciousness in bodies, outside of sci-fi situations bordering on magic. They need a constant exchange of energy, information, and causes across their boundaries to produce any experience at all. Bodies also only produce experience within a very narrow range of environmental conditions. They won't do so on a star, in space, or at the bottom of the sea. So it's really a much larger physical system that is required to account for even tiny intervals of mental life. And these include elements outside the body.

The author sort of gets at this, I just think it undermines the early framing of things largely in terms of neurons. Neurons are important, necessary, but apparently not sufficient for experience. You always need a body and an environment. These can just be more variable, but still must comport to a very narrow range in the grand scheme of things.

Finally, some views of "materialism" rolled out by physicists are so thoroughly mathematized that they seem more like idealism. This is just another reason why 'materialism' needs to be defined. Otherwise, it seems vulnerable to Hemple's dilemma and the charge that " material" is just a vague term for "real."

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. — Wayfarer

Do you think that within the domain of possibility, there is a social reality such that P1 (possibility one) holds a conversation with P2 (possibility two)?

If we conclude social reality doesn't attach itself to possibility, must we also conclude possibility is emergent from human conversation?

You seem to acknowledge mind cannot be uncoupled from brain.

If you do make this acknowledgement, then consider the following transitive argument: If mind cannot be uncoupled from brain, then possibility cannot be uncoupled from brain.