:rofl:

You're welcome.

The “map vs. territory” distinction isn’t what’s at issue.
The argument from Aristotle through Russell is about the conditions of intelligibility that make any map–territory distinction possible in the first place — universals, logical form, meaning. These aren’t maps; but they’re not parts of the physical territory either. They’re what both map and territory presuppose. If you want to challenge that, you need to address the argument, not just repeat slogans.

Consider this article concerning findings on (in my words) 'the materiality of thinking' presented by a distinguished MIT researcher at a recent neuroscience conference:

https://picower.mit.edu/news/brain-waves-analog-organization-cortex-enables-cognition-and-consciousness-mit-professor

Neuroscience tells us how the brain behaves when we think; it cannot tell us what thinking is — because the very act of interpreting neural data requires the conceptual structures (universals, logical form, mathematical norms) that the brain-waves theory is supposed to explain. You cannot use “if… then…” reasoning to argue that reasoning is nothing but brain waves, because the argument presupposes the very universality that oscillations cannot provide. You can't see those mental operations 'from the outside', so to speak, as you're already drawing on them to conduct the research that the findings rely on. 'The eye cannot see itself'.

Neuroscience tells us how the brain behaves when we think; it cannot tell us what thinking is — — Wayfarer

– and neither can idealism, subjectivism, spiritualism nor any other woo.

C’mon 180. Bertrand Russell and Lloyd Gerson. Middle-of-the-road classical philosophy.

This is the sense in which the mind “constructs” or “creates” the cosmos: not as an external agent shaping an independent material realm, but as the ongoing process of perception, interpretation, and conceptual synthesis that yields our experience of a coherent, ordered world — which is precisely what kosmos meant. — Wayfarer

Yes. I use the term Universe in reference to the expanding evolving ball of matter & energy that somehow formed a safe haven for us living beings. But the term Cosmos is a more philosophical concept that emphasizes the laws that organized an explosion of Matter into the evolution of Mind.

Philosophically, the Cosmos is not a material object, but a human-mind-constructed concept about the material world we inhabit, and which we find to be mostly understandable by applied Reason (science) : a well-ordered whole system. And as Plato illustrated, philosophers can't just take it for granted, but insist on asking "why?" and "whence?".

Taken together, those curious questions seem to infer & imply a non-human-non-local Mind that designed the process and the system. But this thread asks the question : is that Cosmic Mind currently beaming ideas into our heads, in a mysterious manner that allows us to naively believe that we are thinking for ourselves. I can accept the notion of hands-off creator-programmer-observer, but not one who deceives its creatures, and uses them as mechanical robots. :worry:

... the world-as-lived, the meaningful, structured world of experience, is constituted through the operations of cognition [ ... ] the world we inhabit is inseparable from [enables-constrains] the activity of consciousness [discursive practices] that renders it intelligible [explicable / computational]. — Wayfarer

I.e. ecological-embodied metacognition ...

I can accept [without a shred of evidence] the notion of hands-off creator-programmer-observer [that doesn't explain anything] ... — Gnomon

:roll:

This is not solipsism, nor the denial of an external world, but an insistence that the world we inhabit is inseparable from the activity of consciousness that renders it intelligible. And that, of course, is the bridge to both phenomenology and enactive cognition. — Wayfarer

If you mean this literally, it's absurd because it assumes the actual, external world depends on (human?) consciousness. If you believe that, I doubt you could provide a reasonable justification for that belief.

It would not be absurd to say the world as we perceive and understand it is inseparable from our consciousness. Although it's trivial.

It seems to me that the limits you assume to our abilities to understand the external world makes your position self-defeating: it implies that our knowlwdge of the world is too limited to judge that it's too limited.

I.e. ecological-embodied metacognition ... — 180 Proof

It is ecological-embodied metacognition. But in enactivism, it is more than 'discursive practices' i.e. verbal behaviours. It goes 'all the way down' into pre-verbal and primitive cognition - the organism 'brings forth' the environment as much as vice versa. And the aim is not to explain but to navigate and to thrive.

For instance, from Varela-Thompson-Rosch, Embodied Mind:

“The enactive approach does not seek to reduce mind to the mechanisms of biology but rather to show the continuity of mind and life as forms of autonomous, sense-making activity.”'

and

“Objectivism commits a category mistake: it treats the world disclosed through our embodied coping as if it were an observer-independent reality ‘out there’.”

They also refer to Buddhist philosophy in this respect:

"Mind and world arise together in mutual specification.”
“There is no mind without world and no world without mind.”

Also from Merleau Ponty: 'The world is inseparable from the subject, but from a subject which is nothing but a project of the world, and the subject is inseparable from the world, but from a world which the subject itself projects.'

If you mean this literally, it's absurd because it assumes the actual, external world depends on (human?) consciousness. — Relativist

You’re interpreting a transcendental argument as if it were a metaphysical claim. I’m not saying that mountains, stars, or dinosaurs depended on human consciousness to exist. That really would be absurd.

My point is that the actual world is never given “as it is in itself,” but only as disclosed through the structures of perception, embodiment, and understanding that are the conditions for any intelligible world at all.

This is not denying an external reality. It denies that we can meaningfully speak of a “mind-independent world” in the strong sense— i.e., a world that would exist in the way we understand it to exist even in the absence of any standpoint, any cognitive frame, any lived perspective.

That stronger claim is the hidden metaphysics of naturalism.

What naturalism calls “observer-independent states of affairs” isn’t a discovery about the world; it’s an idealization, a projection that abstracts away precisely the conditions that make any disclosure of a world possible.

Philosophy can inquire into what lies beyond the limits of objectivity in a way science cannot.

... not denying an external reality. — Wayfarer

Good.

It denies that we can meaningfully speak of a “mind-independent world” in the strong sense— i.e., a world that would exist in the way we understand it to exist even in the absence of any standpoint, any cognitive frame, any lived perspective.

So explain what objective difference this subjective distinction makes.

Philosophy can inquire into what lies beyond the limits of objectivity in a way science cannot.

What does "limits of objectivity" mean? Of course "science cannot" investigate non-phenomena (e.g. metaphysical fiats).

My point is that the actual world is never given “as it is in itself,” but only as disclosed through the structures of perception, embodiment, and understanding that are the conditions for any intelligible world at all. — Wayfarer

But acknowlegement of the fact that we are dependent on our cognitive structure leads to no additional insights about the world: it's impossible to escape our inherent perspective.

More importantly, it doesn't imply that our human-centric understandings are false. In fact, if we don't accept the truth of our human-centric understandings, then we have no means of advancing knowledge about the world.

Philosophy can inquire into what lies beyond the limits of objectivity in a way science cannot. — Wayfarer

Philosophy is still being done by humans, so the same limitations apply: you aren't going to get closer to understanding the world "as it is" this way.

More importantly: science produces justified beliefs about the world. What justified beliefs can be produced by these philosophical inquiries? It appears to me to do no more than generate possibilities.

But acknowlegement of the fact that we are dependent on our cognitive structure leads to no additional insights about the world: it's impossible to escape our inherent perspective. — Relativist

If you want a scientific context for the point I’m making, consider the most famous scientific dispute of the 20th century - the Einstein-Bohr debate.

The reason Einstein objected to the Copenhagen scientist's interpreration of quantum physics was because it challenged his assumption that physics describes a world “as it is in itself,” independent of observation. He said "I cannot seriously believe in it because the theory cannot be reconciled with the idea that physics should represent a reality in time and space, free from spooky actions at a distance", and "I think that a particle must have a separate reality independent of the measurements. That is an electron has spin, location and so forth even when it is not being measured. I like to think that the moon is there even if I am not looking at it."

But Bohr (and Heisenberg, and Pauli) were not fringe thinkers, and they explicitly argued that physical quantities have no definite value prior to measurement, that the observing apparatus is inseparable from the observed phenomenon, and that descriptions of nature are constrained by the conditions of observation. That, in other words, that at the most fundamental level of reality, we're not seeing what is truly there when unobserved, and that furthermore, we may not even be able to say what it is (which was Bohr's view.)

And quantum experiments have continuously reinforced that point. Most recently, the 2022 Nobel Prize confirmed the empirical consequences of Bell’s theorem — precisely the kind of nonclassical correlations that Einstein derided as “spooky action at a distance.”

So when you say that my view implies “we can’t get the world as it is,” or that recognising our cognitive structure gives “no additional insight,” that’s simply out of step with the scientific history. The 20th century forced physics itself to confront the limits of the classical, observer-independent picture of the world. You can disagree with Copenhagen, but you can’t say the issue isn’t philosophically significant — physicists have spent decades wrestling with it (and it is still the predominant attitude).

More importantly: science produces justified beliefs about the world. What justified beliefs can be produced by these philosophical inquiries? It appears to me to do no more than generate possibilities. — Relativist

Science doesn’t “produce beliefs.” It produces models that organise and validate observations within a conceptual framework. But it does not — and cannot — investigate the preconditions that make observation, measurement, and intelligibility possible. That is where philosophical analysis is indispensable. Not everything about human existence, or about the structure of experience, is amenable to empirical methods — and ignoring that doesn’t make the questions go away.

The dependence of what is observed upon the choice of the experimental arrangement made Einstein unhappy. It conflicts with the view that the universe exists "out there" independent of all acts of observation. In contrast, Bohr stressed that we confront here an inescapable new feature of nature, to be welcomed because of the understanding it gives us. In struggling to make clear to Einstein the central point as he saw it, Bohr found himself forced to introduce the word "phenomenon". In today's words, Bohr's point - and the central point of quantum theory - can be put into a simple sentence: "No elementary phenomenon is a phenomenon until it is a registered (observed) phenomenon". — Law without Law, John Wheeler

It’s also worth noting the growing debate—both in physics and in philosophy of physics—about whether time and space themselves exist independently of measurement. Einstein always insisted they must: spacetime, for him, was the objective arena within which events unfold, regardless of whether anyone observes them. But in their famous 1922 debate, the philosopher Henri Bergson challenged this directly. Bergson argued that the very meaning of time depends on duration, and duration is something only a conscious observer can bring. Without the lived sense of temporal flow, “time” collapses into abstract coordinate labels on a graph.

This tension hasn’t gone away. Contemporary discussions about emergent spacetime, relational quantum mechanics, and the observer-dependence of temporal order show that Bergson’s challenge still resonates. The issue isn’t whether clocks tick; it’s whether clock-time exhausts what time is.

To examine the measurements involved in clock time, Bergson considers an oscillating pendulum, moving back and forth. At each moment, the pendulum occupies a different position in space, like the points on a line or the moving hands on a clockface. In the case of a clock, the current state – the current time – is what we call ‘now’. Each successive ‘now’ of the clock contains nothing of the past because each moment, each unit, is separate and distinct. But this is not how we experience time. Instead, we hold these separate moments together in our memory. We unify them. A physical clock measures a succession of moments, but only experiencing duration allows us to recognise these seemingly separate moments as a succession. Clocks don’t measure time; we do. — Clock Time contra Lived Time (Aeon)

whether time and space themselves exist independently of measurement — Wayfarer

Just to make clear, it isn’t space and time that is measured, so by this I understand you to mean measurement in general. I’m maybe over-thinking it.

So when you say that my view implies “we can’t get the world as it is,” or that recognising our cognitive structure gives “no additional insight,” that’s simply out of step with the scientific history. — Wayfarer

It was you who said:

My point is that the actual world is never given “as it is in itself,” but only as disclosed through the structures of perception, embodiment, and understanding that are the conditions for any intelligible world at all. — Wayfarer

And you seem somewhat dismissive of science, and yet you're now suggesting that science can indeed give us some insight into "the world as it is".

My position is that science is our best means of learning information about the world as it is, because the alternative (philosophical speculation untethered to empirical data) cannot produce justified beliefs.

My view on the role of our sensory/cognitive framework is that it's not really an impediment (as you seem to suggest) but the explanations (of the world as it is) developed by science will necessarily be expressed in human terms, and that's not the least problematic -understanding by humans is necessarily going to be in human terms.

By contrast, you have been dismissive even of Ontic Structural Realism- which makes the modest claim that successful science provides some true information about reality.

So when you say that my view implies “we can’t get the world as it is,” or that recognising our cognitive structure gives “no additional insight,” that’s simply out of step with the scientific history. The 20th century forced physics itself to confront the limits of the classical, observer-independent picture of the world. You can disagree with Copenhagen, but you can’t say the issue isn’t philosophically significant — physicists have spent decades wrestling with it (and it is still the predominant attitude).

SCIENCE identified an aspect of reality that is counter-intuitive, based on measurements - not on detached philosophizing. It was able to do this DESPITE the limitations of our sensory-cognitive structure and perspective that you focus on. There is no viable alternative. Aristotle could have philosophized for thousands of years, and he would never have developed the insight that empirical science has given us.

There is, of course "philosophizing" in science, but it is philosophizing on explanations for empirical data, a means of generating testable hypotheses. The various interpretations of QM aren't testable hypotheses, and does establish a limit to what we can justifiably know about the world- but it's a boundary that's been reached through science, not by untethered philosophizing.

Science doesn’t “produce beliefs.” It produces models that organise and validate observations within a conceptual framework... — Wayfarer

Science does produce beliefs: scientific facts that are grasped and accepted by an individual are beliefs that the person holds. These resulting beliefs are better justified than philosophical speculations that produce a myriad of mutually exclusive possibilities:

But it does not — and cannot — investigate the preconditions that make observation, measurement, and intelligibility possible. That is where philosophical analysis is indispensable. Not everything about human existence, or about the structure of experience, is amenable to empirical methods — and ignoring that doesn’t make the questions go away.

Identify something you believe about "the preconditions that make observation, measurement, and intelligibility possible", and provide your justification for believing it.

:100: :up:

Excellent argument. But it will be ignored. :grin:

because the alternative (philosophical speculation untethered to empirical data) cannot produce justified beliefs. — Relativist

Is this also true of mathematics?

:up: :up:


Maybe not but probably not that relevant to the disagreement.

because the alternative (philosophical speculation untethered to empirical data) cannot produce justified beliefs.
— Relativist

Is this also true of mathematics? — AmadeusD

Not to pure mathematics. I'm discussing the justified beliefs we can derive about the actual world. Beliefs derived from science have a good justification, whereas beliefs derived from metaphysical speculation seem (to me) unjustified, or only weakly justified. We see lots of philosophical theories tossed around, but I'm not seeing much of a defense of them- other than it being possibly true.

↪Relativist Excellent argument. But it will be ignored. — apokrisis

I had the same thought and had written (but not posted) the following:

But it does not — and cannot — investigate the preconditions that make observation, measurement, and intelligibility possible. That is where philosophical analysis is indispensable. Not everything about human existence, or about the structure of experience, is amenable to empirical methods — and ignoring that doesn’t make the questions go away.
—Wayfarer

Identify something you believe about "the preconditions that make observation, measurement, and intelligibility possible", and provide your justification for believing it. — Relativist

I wouldn't expect a response to this. (Although now that I've brought it up as well...)

You’re still treating the point I’m making as if it were an empirical claim about the contents of the world — something that could be justified the way a scientific hypothesis is. You invariably defer to the authority of science. But mine isn’t “untethered philosophising”: it’s philosophy. And I’m not dismissive of science; I’m pointing out that this is a philosophy forum, not physics.org (where, incidentally, philosophical questions about physics are often deleted by moderators). Yet whenever a philosophical question is raised here, you immediately transpose it into a scientific register and then fault it for not producing scientific evidence. That simply begs the question

Science does produce beliefs: scientific facts that are grasped and accepted by an individual are beliefs that the person holds. — Relativist

Scientific facts are not matters of belief. If you know something to be factually true, then belief is superfluous. “Belief” becomes relevant only where we are dealing with matters that science cannot settle: questions of meaning, interpretation, value, and conceptual understanding. That is precisely why, even in the most rigorously empirical of sciences — quantum physics — there are enduring and unresolved controversies over how to understand the theory. Everyone agrees on the equations and the experimental results; what is disputed is their meaning. If your view were correct, these interpretive disagreements could be resolved simply by “consulting the science.” But they can’t be — because the science gives us the data and the mathematical formalism, not the framework for interpreting what the data mean.

These resulting beliefs are better justified than philosophical speculations that produce a myriad of mutually exclusive, possibilities: — Relativist

Such as? Tell me what is "speculative" about this kind of observation:

Consider that when you think about triangularity, as you might when proving a geometrical theorem, it is necessarily perfect triangularity that you are contemplating, not some mere approximation of it. Triangularity as your intellect grasps it is entirely determinate or exact; for example, what you grasp is the notion of a closed plane figure with three perfectly straight sides, rather than that of something which may or may not have straight sides or which may or may not be closed. Of course, your mental image of a triangle might not be exact, but rather indeterminate and fuzzy. But to grasp something with the intellect is not the same as to form a mental image of it. For any mental image of a triangle is necessarily going to be of an isosceles triangle specifically, or of a scalene one, or an equilateral one; but the concept of triangularity that your intellect grasps applies to all triangles alike. Any mental image of a triangle is going to have certain features, such as a particular color, that are no part of the concept of triangularity in general. A mental image is something private and subjective, while the concept of triangularity is objective and grasped by many minds at once. — Edward Feser

Nothing in this argument is speculative. It is critical. These points are pre-scientific in the strict sense: they concern the capacities presupposed by scientific reasoning itself. To grasp that a geometrical construction is valid, or to reason inferentially from data to theory, you must already possess the conceptual capacities the argument is describing. Scientific method does not generate those capacities, and cannot analyse them into "neural firings" without presupposing exactly what it seeks to explain.

As Kant put it, empirical reasoning is only possible because the mind already brings certain forms and concepts to bear on experience.

The point of this example — and the others I’ve given — is simple:

Concepts are real, but not material.
They can only be grasped by a rational intelligence.
They do not exist as physical particulars or “states of affairs” in the world.
Yet science would be impossible without them.

This is the level at which philosophy operates.

Just to make clear, it isn’t space and time that is measured, so by this I understand you to mean measurement in general. I’m maybe over-thinking it. — Mww

But don’t rulers measure space, and clocks time?

With the trove of usual antagonists in line, you take time for me. How cool is that?

But….no, they don’t. And I think you already knew what I would say.

Concepts are real, but not material. — Wayfarer

Only to the extent "concepts" are instantiable in the material (contra Plato et al) are they "real" and useful for living (i.e. phronesis), otherwise non-instantiable concepts (aka "pure reason") are, at best, idle fictions.

Saying they are “immanent” does not reduce them to material particulars. Aristotle’s forms are not products of material processes; they are the preconditions for there being any particular thing at all. They are real as structures of intelligibility, not as material objects. The reality of triangles is not dependent on there being physical triangles — just as the reality of numbers, ratios, limits, and functions is not conditional on physical instantiation. Almost the entirety of pure mathematics would otherwise collapse into “idle fiction,” which is a reductio of your position, not mine.

And I think you already knew what I would say. — Mww

I still don't quite get it. My thoughts on it are that time and space are meaningless without there being a perspective. And perspective can only be provided by an observer. I think that goes back to the Transcendental Aesthetic.

Saying they are “immanent” — Wayfarer

:roll: Instantiated, I wrote, not "immanent". Anyway, Wayf, your quarrel regarding the ontology of abstractions (e.g. concepts) begins with Kant(ians) ...

I confess I don't understand the point of the exegesis on triangulation. I'm uncertain just what an imperfect triangle might be. My guess, however, is that it isn't a triangle. In which case a "perfect" triangle is, simply, a triangle. It should be unsurprising that when we think about a triangle, we think about a triangle. It's difficult to ascribe much significance to this fact. But it seems some do and I wonder why.

We know how "triangle" is defined. We've seen triangles. I'm reasonably certain I didn't know what a triangle was until I saw one and was told it was called a triangle. On what basis, then, do we maintain that a triangle is a form or concept our minds "bring" to experience (assuming for the sake of argument our minds are separate from experience)?

My thoughts on it are that time and space are meaningless without there being a perspective. And perspective can only be provided by an observer. — Wayfarer

Sure, I agree with that. But rulers measure relative distance (not space) and clocks measure relative duration (not time). This is not all that can be said of space and time, but it is, with respect to rulers and clocks. And I rather think it is the “relative” that concerns perspective/observer.

Guess I was over-thinking it. Sorry.