:roll: When you stop with the shitty misrepresentations of what I've said I might respond.

I do endeavour to address your arguments with courtesy, reciprocation would be appreciated.

The only thing in cognitive sciences that is in principle not amenable to the kind of explanation a physicalist might like is experience / "qualia". — Apustimelogist

Paraphrased: 'The only thing not amenable to explanation in physicalist terms is the question of the nature of being'.

If experience or “qualia” is in principle not amenable to physical explanation, then what is not explained is not a local feature or particular function of cognition but the very faculty for which there is any appearance to consider at all. Physical explanation works within, and assumes as real, the sensory domain; experience (consciousness, the subject, mind) is that for which these appearances hang together as a meaningful world. So this isn’t a small leftover problem — it marks a boundary to what physicalist explanation, by its own lights, can reach.

A second point is that physicalist explanation will typically not even see this boundary, because it has already excluded the subjective ground of experience from what counts as explanatorily relevant in the first place. That is precisely why this has been called the “blind spot of science” — the systematic neglect of lived experience as a condition of intelligibility rather than a phenomenon to be explained. (As discussed in this article.)

This is why Chalmer's called his essay 'facing up to'!

I do endeavour to address your arguments with courtesy, reciprocation would be appreciated. — Wayfarer

That is the John Stuart Mill argument, standard empiricism, 'all knowledge comes from experience'. Against that, is the fact that rational thought is the capacity to grasp 'a triangle is a plane bounded by three interesecting straight lines'. A non-rational animal, a dog or a chimp, can be conditioned to respond to a triangular shape, but it will never grasp the idea of a triangle — Wayfarer

Strangely, I don't believe you because you try to dismiss what I've said by framing it as an empiricist argument, when all I've presented is an alternative view. Unfortunately your dogma apparently does not allow you to be open to alternative views. I can reasonably say that the ability to grasp a triangle as a plane bounded by three intersecting straight lines just is a matter of abstracting away from a recognized pattern and stating it as a specification or rule.

Visually enabled animals can unquestionably recognize all kinds of patterns, but of course they cannot linguistically specify the concepts of those patterns, Whether or not it would be reasonable to say that they have pre-linguistic concepts of patterns would be a matter of whether you believe concepts are embodied in neural patterns or not.

Whenever you say that, you are comparing ideas, considering arguments, making a case in your mind. Of course that entails brain activity, but to try and explain it in terms of brain activity is another matter entirely. — Wayfarer

Nothing I have said relies upon or implies that "comparing ideas, considering arguments, making a case in your mind" can be usefully explained in terms of brain activity. So, again you misrepresent.

Not so. The 'natural attitude' is a specific reference to Husserl's criticism of naturalism. — Wayfarer

And again you misrepresent and bring in something completely irrelevant. I was not referring to Husserl when I wrote "the natural attitude". Husserl can claim no ownership of that phrase, not least because he wrote in German. You seem to be incapable of just having an engaged discussion without resorting to mischaracterizing anything you disagree with as some "bogeyman" of an argument that you take for granted has long been refuted, or trotting out one of your favorite quotes from those you have accepted as authoritative. I'm not interested in that style of engagement. I'd rather you addressed what I wrote point by point and in your own words. Your monomaniacal repetitions of your own prejudices as if they are absolute truths are tedious in the extreme. You would have to be one of the most closedminded interlocutors I have ever encountered.

Besides, your own entries are shot through with plenty of dogma, first and foremost that science is the only court of appeal for normative judgement in any matters whatever. — Wayfarer

Another misrepresentation, making it look as if you are just plain lying or do not read what I write closely. That is not what I believe at all. Cite something where I have actually said, or even unambiguously implied, that. Put up or shut up. I won't be responding to you again if you don't up your game.

I can reasonably say that the ability to grasp a triangle as a plane bounded by three intersecting straight lines just is a matter of abstracting away from a recognized pattern and stating it as a specification or rule — Janus

Of course you can. Saying that it is an appeal to empiricism is not a personal insult. It's a common philosophical attitude, and you're appealing to it.

Nothing I have said relies upon or implies that "comparing ideas, considering arguments, making a case in your mind" can be usefully explained in terms of brain activity. — Janus

Except for

I see no reason why the conscious experience of anything, even of a thought itself, could not be a neural process which we do not consciously experience as such. — Janus

Whether or not it would be reasonable to say that they have pre-linguistic concepts of patterns would be a matter of whether you believe concepts are embodied in neural patterns or not. — Janus

The so-called "natural attitude"... — Janus

I took this to be a reference to Husserl, as he is associated with that expression. The reason I cited him is not 'an argument from authority'. It is more along the lines of citing a well-known philosopher, so as to establish the point at issue is not a personal idisyncratic expression.

Of course you can. Saying that it is an appeal to empiricism is not a personal insult. It's a common philosophical attitude, and you're appealing to it. — Wayfarer

Firstly, I'm not appealing to it, and this is what you constantly fail to understand. Secondly I don't take it as a personal insult, but as an attempt to refute by association. There is no need to mention John Stuart Mill or anyone else, when all I'm doing is presenting what I see as a perfectly reasonable alternative view. I present such an alternative view as counterpoint to your seeming presupposition that the view you favour is the only one which is not self-refuting.

Nothing I have said relies upon or implies that "comparing ideas, considering arguments, making a case in your mind" can be usefully explained in terms of brain activity.
— Janus

Except for

I see no reason why the conscious experience of anything, even of a thought itself, could not be a neural process which we do not consciously experience as such.
— Janus

Whether or not it would be reasonable to say that they have pre-linguistic concepts of patterns would be a matter of whether you believe concepts are embodied in neural patterns or not.
— Janus — Wayfarer

Except that I have not claimed that "the experience of anything, even a thought itself" is nothing but "a neural process which we do not consciously experience as such". You read it that way because you are antagonistic to such a view. I am not antagonistic to alternative views, but only to the tendentious claim that the view you don't favour is self-refuting.

As to the last-quoted, all I'm saying is that the idea that animals might have pre-linguistic concepts of patterns only seems unreasonable given certain presuppositions, i.e. that conceptualization must be linguistically mediated.

I took this to be a reference to Husserl, as he is associated with that expression. The reason I cited him is not 'an argument from authority'. It is more along the lines of citing a well-known philosopher, so as to establish the point at issue is not a personal idisyncracy. — Wayfarer

Husserl writes against the natural attitude, but he is referring to something else―that is the assumption that there is a mind-independent external world―and If you had read what I wrote closely you would see that I was referring to something else, namely the attitude that we ought to argue only on the grounds of what nature presents to us, not on traditional or scriptural authority or personal intuitions, which might purport to pertain to something beyond nature.

As I said recently in another post, I tend to feel that there is something more going on, but I don't claim as a reason for anyone else to believe anything, and I don't allow that feeling to crystallize in me as a firm belief that I feel compelled to defend. I am open-minded on the subject―that is, I don't come down on either side. If I defend anything it is only open-mindedness. The "something more" might turn out to be something we had hitherto failed to understand about matter―otherwise it is hard to see just how it will be able to be demonstrated to be something immaterial.

But by all means continue to misunderstand and misrepresent me―you've been doing it for long enough now, and I've grown tired of trying to set you straight on what I am saying.

I present such an alternative view as counterpoint to your seeming presupposition that the view you favour is the only one which is not self-refuting. — Janus

It was not a presupposition. Remember, this went back to three passages I provided, from Gerson, Feser and Russell, in support of the general idea of 'Aristotelian realism'. Aristotelian realism upholds the reality of universals, which are 'intelligible objects', of which the triangle, and other geometric forms, are examples. I do defend Aristotelian or scholastic or (some forms of) Platonic realism, in that I believe that there are real intelligibles, that are not the product of the mind, but can only be grasped by the mind. Insofar as there are 'immaterial things' then these are those with the caveat that they're not things but intellectual acts that are common to all rational minds (my 'doctrine of universals' in a nutshell.)

Your response:

The idea of a perfect geometrical figure can be understood to be simply an abstraction away from the inevitable imperfections in any geometrical physical construction — Janus

The 'abstraction away' from the sensory impression of a triangle is the kind of argument that empiricists appeal to. I only mentioned John Stuart Mill as an eminent example of that.

Mill’s view in A System of Logic is precisely:

• Numbers arise from collections of concrete objects
• Geometry arises from idealizing sensory experience
• Universals are formed by abstracting common features
• Necessity is a product of psychological expectation hardened into habit

It is very close to the kinds of arguments you often articulate. If that is offensive, I didn't mean it to be, so, sorry for that. It was an effort to contextualise the kinds of arguments we're presenting - Neo-Aristotelian vs Empirical.

If you had read what I wrote closely you would see that I was referring to something else, namely the attitude that we ought to argue only on the grounds of what nature presents to us, not on traditional or scriptural authority or personal intuitions, which might purport to pertain to something beyond nature. — Janus

So what you really meant by 'the natural attitude' was actually 'naturalism'. You frequently appeal to naturalism and/or natural science is the 'court of appeal' for normative claims. Again, this is not meant as a pejorative or personal criticism, it is demonstrably what you're saying. I might have misinterpreted it, because the expression 'the natural state' is associated with Husserl's critique of naturalism.

His criticism of the 'natural attitude' is of the kind of taken-for-grantedness of the domain of empirical experience, which looses sight of the framing assumptions which natural science brings to experience. As one of the modern Buddhist scholars I follow, David Loy, put it in respect of secular culture, 'The main problem with our usual understanding of secularity is that it is taken-for-granted, so we are not aware that it is a worldview. It is an ideology that pretends to be the everyday world we live in. Most of us assume that it is simply the way the world really is, once superstitious beliefs about it have been removed.”

And this, in turn, is because of the association of transcendentals with religious commitments, something which intertwined with the history in our culture. I've published an essay on it on Medium (although it's a complex argument.)

I do defend Aristotelian or scholastic or (some forms of) Platonic realism, in that I believe that there are real intelligibles, that are not the product of the mind, but can only be grasped by the mind. — Wayfarer

I have no problem with you defending that view. I also believe that things are only intelligible in terms of generalities― forms, relations and attributes. It is the question of what those generalities consist in that is at issue, and I don't think the answer to it can ever be demonstrated such as to garner universal consent. So, I don't hold a firm view in that regard, as I consider the question to be empirically and logically undecidable. It doesn't follow that I think the question is meaningless―I don't. Thus I am not a positivist.

The 'abstraction away' from the sensory impression of a triangle is the kind of argument that empiricists appeal to. — Wayfarer

Yes, but as I said I was not defending that empiricist view, but merely presenting it as a rational, reasonable alternative.

It is very close to the kinds of arguments you often articulate. If that is offensive, I didn't mean it to be, so, sorry for that. It was an effort to contextualise the kinds of arguments we're presenting - Neo-Aristotelian vs Empirical. — Wayfarer

Fair enough, no need to apologize. There really do seem to be, at this stage of human understanding, only two alternatives. Each alternative has its own difficulties. You might be interested in the fascinating work of the biologist Michael Levin, who posits a kind of platonic space at work in nature. I asked Claude to give an account of it to save myself the trouble. Here it is:

Michael Levin, a biologist at Tufts University, uses the term "platonic space" to describe an abstract, goal-oriented space in which biological systems navigate and problem-solve. Here are the key aspects:
The Core Idea: Platonic space refers to a space of possible configurations or states defined by functional goals rather than physical implementation. For example, a developing embryo might be navigating toward a specific anatomical target state (like "correct frog anatomy"), and this target exists as a point in an abstract space of possible body plans.
Problem-Solving Without Explicit Instructions: Levin argues that biological systems—from cells to tissues to organisms—don't follow rigid, pre-programmed instructions but instead solve problems by navigating toward goals in this abstract space. The system "knows" what the goal state looks like (in some information-theoretic sense) and can find multiple different paths to reach it, even when obstacles are encountered.
Scale-Free Cognition: This concept connects to Levin's broader thesis that cognition and goal-directedness exist at multiple scales—not just in brains, but in cells, tissues, and even subcellular systems. Each level has its own "platonic space" of possible states it's trying to navigate.
Plasticity and Robustness: The platonic space framework helps explain why biological systems are so robust and plastic—if you perturb development, organisms often still reach the correct end state because they're navigating toward a goal in abstract space rather than executing a fixed sequence of steps.

So what you really meant by 'the natural attitude' was 'naturlaism'. You frequently appeal to naturalism and/or natural science is the 'court of appeal' for normative claims. Again, this is not meant as a pejorative or personal criticism, it is demonstrably what you're saying. — Wayfarer

I actually don't say that science can adjudicate when it comes to aesthetics or ethics, in fact I say the opposite―so I'm not really sure what you are referring to.

. As one of the modern Buddhist scholars I follow, David Loy, put it, 'The main problem with our usual understanding of secularity is that it is taken-for-granted, so we are not aware that it is a worldview. It is an ideology that pretends to be the everyday world we live in. Most of us assume that it is simply the way the world really is, once superstitious beliefs about it have been removed.” — Wayfarer

I'm familiar with Loy―I read and enjoyed his book on non-duality, which I mostly agreed with. I see secularity or naturalism as being simply the attitude we would have if we were not culturally inducted into
religious views. I believe that religious views IF TAKEN LITERALLY do seem at best underdetermined, and at worst absurd, to the modern mind. I think most people, who haven't thought about it much, do by default take religious views literally if they are emotionally inclined to do more than pay mere lip service to them by, for example, just showing up at church or upholding religious festivals.

It's hard to see how we might support the idea that the world is different than it just appears to us to be, except that we might intuitively feel that the appearance is not all there is, even if we cannot say precisely what more is going on. Religions do generally purport to be saying precisely what more is going on.

You might be interested in the fascinating work of the biologist Michael Levin, who posits a kind of platonic space at work in nature — Janus

You bet! I've been taking in his lectures the last few months. He has a role in the story I'm writing (under an alias, of course.)

Problem-Solving Without Explicit Instructions: Levin argues that biological systems—from cells to tissues to organisms—don't follow rigid, pre-programmed instructions but instead solve problems by navigating toward goals in this abstract space. — Janus

Which is intelligence in action. Dovetails very nicely with Evan Thompson's phenomenology.

I've been listening to all these guys, often while working out. (YouTube is now the very last subscription I'd cancel.. well, along with Chuck, which is my name for ChatGPT.)

You two should try a bit of mud wrestling for that (I’m joking). The Greek philosophers enjoyed a bit of wrestling.

It seems to me that you are in agreement. As long as you both accept there is something going on there that we haven’t quite got to the bottom of yet.

Constructive disagreement is the lifeblood of philosophy.

But...there's no reason to think this is the case- there's no evidence of it, and it's not entailed by accepted theory.

But there’s no reason to assume that it isn’t the case either. It’s a possibility, so having an understanding of what we don’t know helps us to not make assumptions, or broad brush conclusions about the world and existence. I’m not accusing you or any (with one or two exceptions maybe) of the posters here of doing this. As philosophers you are open minded about these ideas.

Now taking the idea a stage further, it brings into question what is natural, maybe only the neumenon is natural and all appearances, or phenomenon are artificial. For example, this whole big bang theory with reality emerging from a worm hole, or a singularity. It comes across like comic book pseudoscience. It makes more sense to me that what is going on is that extension (including temporal extension) is an illusion/projection (like the Truman Show) and that something more akin to the Hindu cosmogony, of transcendent being makes more sense.

Newsflash - just heard Sheldrake say that ‘Michael Levin and I both think that biological development comes about through morphogenetic fields.’

Just remember, this was the very concept that the erstwhile editor of Nature, John Maddox, said, in a hostile review, made Sheldrake’s book A New Science of Life (1981) “fit for burning”. He described the book, which proposed the concept of morphic resonance to explain biological and physical phenomena, as an "infuriating tract" and an "exercise in pseudo-science.”

The times, they are a’ changin’.

Verse 4, line 2.

Truer words, and all that, for all of us I should think.

Actually I should clarify what I said above about Sheldrake - morphic resonance is Sheldrake’s controversial idea. The morphogenetic field is a related but different idea which is part of mainstream biology. Nevertheless Sheldrake is enamoured of Levin’s work for its holistic and non-reductionist approach.

↪Wayfarer
:roll: When you stop with the shitty misrepresentations of what I've said I might respond. — Janus

↪Janus
I do endeavour to address your arguments with courtesy, reciprocation would be appreciated. — Wayfarer

Since Janus and Wayfarer seem to be among the most philosophically erudite posters on this forum, such combative dialog conjures an image of Plato and Aristotle duking-it-out in the Academy or Forum. Today, we honor both of those ancient Greeks as Past Masters of the philosophical arts. But back in the day, I suspect they passed some harsh words between them.

Maybe constructive agreement, in the search for truth, has always been elusive & arduous. So we in the midst of the ongoing creative work of wisdom-building notice mainly the piles of debris from "constructive disagreement". Perhaps history will record this thread as a win-win : both Real and Ideal; both Physical and Metaphysical. :smile:


Plato and Aristotle differed significantly in their approach to reality, with Plato emphasizing an ideal, abstract realm of Forms as the ultimate reality, accessed through reason, and Aristotle focusing on the tangible, physical world as the primary reality, understood through empirical observation and the senses. This led Plato to an idealistic philosophy and Aristotle to a more pragmatic, scientific approach.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=plato+vs+aristotle+philosophy

Transcendent! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . No, Immanent!

it marks a boundary to what physicalist explanation, by its own lights, can reach. — Wayfarer

But I don't think this is an issue for physicalism; this is an issue for any kind of possible explanation. No theoretical framework can account for what it is like to feel something. A panpsychist or idealist is not going to be able to explain conscious experience anymore than a physicalist; panpsychism and idealism will also both have gaps in explaining how experiences emerge, such as the combination problem.

That is precisely why this has been called the “blind spot of science” — the systematic neglect of lived experience as a condition of intelligibility rather than a phenomenon to be explained. — Wayfarer

Experience may be fundamental to knowledge and explanation in the sense that they can be seen as the information that cognizing organisms utilize, manipulate, predict; but under pains of circularity or dogmatism, that organism will have no articulable explanation or description of it. All explanations and descriptions are relational and predictive; physical explanations are nothing more than a special case that lays out such relations without being able to elucidate "intrinsic" natures of reality. No other form of explanation can do better.

Knowledge and epistemic behavior may be realized within one's experience, but I believe you are assuming that the only meaningful account of realism is through a God's eye perspective. I disagree, and think that realism through a perspectival lense is at least permissible from a deflationary perspective on truth / realism. There is then no conflict between purported realism about physical explanations and the fact that the intelligibility and realization of explanations and descriptions is effectively entirely through our experiences.

That the experiential cannot be given an explanation then suggests that there is no blindspot - which might be emphasized if at somr point we can give computational / information-processing account of the meta-problem of consciousness (i.e. give an account of information processing limitations that cause intelligent information processing agent to hit a brick wall when it comes to accounting for certain things that it perceives or processes, related to what it would call experiences). The blindspot is then only apparent if you think that explanations can do more than give predictive or relational accounts and should be about God's eye perspective; but they simply can't, and there are strictly no unique preferred descriptions either in any God's eye objective sense. If no explanations tell you about "intrinsic" nature of experience, and you can have realism without God's eye perspectives, then there is no conflict with physicalism, which simply excludes alternative reductive accounts like substance dualism that are mutually exclusive to physical explanation.

What is mind-boggling about the hard problem is present in all perspectives, and in my opinion the only reason people feel they need to shift from a physicalist account is because they view physical explanations as aspiring to be explanations of God's eye "intrinsicness", which in my opinion is simply not what physical explanations do and not what any other explanation can do either. No other account can then do better in principle when viewing realism and explanation in a way that does not aspire to some kind of idealized God's eye perspective about "intrinsic" stuff. Being unable to explain experience is no different from being able to explain any other purported "intrinsic" nature of the world that cannot be given an explanation or captured intelligibly due to things like Munchausen trilemma with regard to information processing.

I think a central issue of the mind-body problem is that we take experience as some kind of special ontological primitive when I can't even articulate what that means. I can't even give a non-circular explanation of what "ontology" or "being" means (something which more deflationary attitudes to truth are less likely to have a problem with, imo from what I can see). I then don't think the fact that I see things necessarily further entails much else about the intrinsic ontology of reality becausr doing so would be going beyond what I can really say or ascertain about my own experiences. I can't even elaborate on what it means to say that I see things. I just know that it reflects some causal structure in the world at some scale.

And I think this kind of rejection of prematurely attributing properties to experience is what illusionist are actually advocating for - they are not saying that experience doesn't exist, but that seeing things doesn't entail some extra-elaborate ontological account, let alone a dualistic one. The illusion isn't the experience itself but the ontological account people might be prone toward (e.g. that there is some extra substance out there). And the inability to articulate about experiences is evidence that an ontological account of experience is fruitless, imo. The illusionist will then want to explain our difficulties in explanatory accounts of consciousness as being a consequence of information processing without trying to imply something profound about "intrinsic" reality. But ofcourse, being agnostic or even rejecting the role of "intrinsicness" in explanations preserves the role of physical sciences in our web of knowledge whilst revoking any apparent need for additional and mutually exclusive explanatory accounts (e.g. a theory of substance dualism or Kastruppian idealism) which we have no evidence for.

I might be tempted to make a statement like "what "ontology" or "being" means is to have a Markov-blanket" which would mean ontology is scale-relative and informational. I would want to make that statement because its hard to escape the intuition that to be having experiences suggests there is some very vague sense in which reality does not have a preferred scale. But I am not sure this assertion makes "intrinsic" nature of reality anymore articulable, and I am not even sure about the validity of the intuition motivating it. Because my tempted statement doesn't really address what I think of as the "intrinsicness" issue, its not clear that it is that helpful beyond reasserting a trivial fact about nature that systems are nested inside each other as we zoom out.

But if physicalism is perspectivally realist grounded by something like a deflationary notion of truth, not on explaining "intrinsicness", I am not sure there is any sense of a blindspot that physicalism misses out on that is not missed out by any other perspective. Physicalism just asserts the position of physical theories in articulable explanations about the universe, our web of knowledge also including many non-physical things also.

** Extensive editing for (possibly more my own) clarity

I don't accept that I misrepresented Janus' contributions, even though my description of them as naturalist empiricism was rejected. That is Janus' basic stance, whether he acknowledges it or not.

But I don't think this is an issue for physicalism, this is an issue for any kind of possible explanation. No theoretical framework can account for what it is like to feel something. A panpsychist or idealist is not going to be able to explain conscious experience anymore than a physicalist; panpsychism and idealism will also both have gaps in explaining how experiences emerge, such as the combination problem. The nature of explanation. — Apustimelogist

From my side, where the problem lies is that you don your physicalist spectacles and look at the whole discussion through them. Like a pair of polarising glasses that block out particular wavelengths, there are philosophical concepts that these spectacles won't let you see. Then you think that your inability to see them is somehow due to the nature of explanation, or the nature of the subject. That article I linked to is called 'the blind spot of science is the neglect of lived experience'. And really I don't think it even registered. It's like 'what "blind spot"?'

I think the central issue of the mind-body problem is that we take experience as some kind of special ontological primitive when I can't even articulate what that means — Apustimelogist

No! You can't articulate what it means, because of the physicalist framing of the issues. The school of phenomenology, initiated by Edmund Husserl, is precisely about the recognition of the primacy of experience. But I suspect as you read about it, you would auto-translate it into the physicalist framework, thereby missing the point again. You really should read some existentialism.

No other account can do better in principle — Apustimelogist

Here, you're falling back on scepticism - 'nobody really knows anything'.

The idealist and physicalist accounts are not two versions of the same kind of philosophy, one with mind as fundamental, the other with physical fundamentals. Not at all. Surely nobody can describe the feeling of pain such that another on hearing that description will know that particular pain, but everyone knows what pain is, because they suffer it. That is the 'explanatory gap' in a nutshell.

Given that the experiential cannot be given an explanation then suggests that there is no blindspot - which would only be emphasized if one can give computational / information-processing account of the meta-problem of consciousness (i.e. give an account of information processing limitations that cause intelligent information processing agent to hit a brick wall when it comes to accounting for certain things that it perceived or processes). The blindspot is then only apparent if you think that explanations can do more than give predictive or relational accounts and should be about God's eye perspective; but they simply can't ... — Apustimelogist

:up: :up:

Surely nobody can describe the feeling of pain such that another on hearing that description will know that particular pain ... — Wayfarer

:roll: Wtf: map (description) =/= territory (pain).

Plato and Aristotle differed significantly in their approach to reality, with Plato emphasizing an ideal, abstract realm of Forms as the ultimate reality, accessed through reason, and Aristotle focusing on the tangible, physical world as the primary reality, understood through empirical observation and the senses. — Gnomon

I think this is a serious oversimplification. Aristotle does not abandon Forms; his hylomorphism is still a form–based ontology—the difference is that Forms are no longer conceived as existing in a separate, self-subsisting realm, but as ontologically prior principles instantiated in matter. Matter, for Aristotle, has no actuality or determinate identity on its own; it exists only as pure potentiality until it receives form.

Moreover, intellect (nous) is precisely the faculty that apprehends forms, and thereby knows what particulars are. This is what differentiates rational from non-rational cognition—hence the classical definition of man as the rational animal. Sense perception alone never yields universality; it is nous that grasps form as such. In Aristotelian philosophy, this grasp of the Forms is what enables us to converse rationally, as reason converges on principles which are common to every rational intellect.

So Aristotle does not replace forms with brute physical particulars understood purely by the senses. Rather, he relocates form from a separate Platonic realm into the structure of being itself, while preserving its ontological and epistemic priority. If you look again at this post, what’s being argued in those three quoted passages is exactly this point: Aristotle’s realism remains fundamentally a formal realism, not a straightforward empiricism (although it is dismally apparent that this distinction is not being understood, with the attempt on my part to elucidate it being described as 'monomania'.)

You bet! I've been taking in his lectures the last few months. He has a role in the story I'm writing (under an alias, of course.) — Wayfarer

You ae writing the story under an alias or Levin appears in the story under an alias? (I'm guessing the latter, but the ambiguity...)

Actually I should clarify what I said above about Sheldrake - morphic resonance is Sheldrake’s controversial idea. The morphogenetic field is a related but different idea which is part of mainstream biology. Nevertheless Sheldrake is enamoured of Levin’s work for its holistic and non-reductionist approach. — Wayfarer

Yes, I read the Sheldrake book introducing the idea of morphic resonance in the 80s. It was purporting to explain how, among other things, magpies in England began piercing the aluminum milk bottle tops in England in order to drink the milk around the same time as they did in Europe. That's the only example I can remember, because a few years before that I had been a milkman briefly and the magpies here (although classed in a related, but different, genus) I had observed to be doing the same thing.

The point about Levin's work and his speculations, though, is that they have evolved in the context of solid scientific research., whereas Sheldrake's work was much less determined by observational and experimental evidence.

I don't accept that I misrepresented Janus' contributions, even though my description of them as naturalist empiricism was rejected. That is Janus' basic stance, whether he acknowledges it or not. — Wayfarer

This is not unexpected. I have noted over many years that you can never admit you were wrong.

Maybe constructive agreement, in the search for truth, has always been elusive & arduous. — Gnomon

I don't think it is to be expected, or even desired. Since we are diverse individuals, with different experiences, different views work for different people. What is desirable though, is honest acknowledgement of what the other is actually saying.

It seems to me that you are in agreement. As long as you both accept there is something going on there that we haven’t quite got to the bottom of yet. — Punshhh

No doubt we agree about that. About how it might be gotten to the bottom of, not so much, though.

I don't know about that! Sheldrake has published many scientific papers - dozens, in fact. He was trained entirely within orthodox biology: BA & PhD in Biochemistry – Cambridge, Research Fellow at Clare College, Cambridge Royal Society Research Fellow; Worked at Harvard as a research fellow; Principal plant physiologist at ICRISAT (India) – an international agricultural research institute. During this period (roughly late 1960s–1970s), he published dozens of standard experimental papers, mainly on: Plant hormones (auxins); Plant development; Cellular differentiation; Transport mechanisms in plants. These appeared in fully mainstream journals such as: Nature; Journal of Experimental Botany, Planta Biochemical Journal.

Of course everything changed with his New Science of Life, 1981, and with it, the focus of his experimental work. That was the book which John Maddox reviewed harshly in Nature, saying it was 'heresy' and 'pseudo-science'. But, you know, Sheldrake didn't throw up his hands and walk away. He still has considerable presence in modern culture.

Michael Levin’s work is often said to be “non-standard” or “post-genomic,” but his research programme presupposes a kind of naturalised Platonism - not in a mystical sense, but in the straightforward biological sense that forms, patterns, and target morphologies have real causal powers.

Levin’s central claim—that cells cooperate toward an anatomically defined end-state—only makes sense if that end-state has some ontological status. The “target morphology” guiding regeneration and development is not encoded neuron-by-neuron or gene-by-gene; it is a structural attractor, a normative form. It is something like a real abstract—a pattern that exists as an organising principle even when no physical structure currently instantiates it. So he really has re-introduced the teleonomic element, life as goal-directed right through to the most basic levels. He's firmly anti-physicalist for all these reasons.

Levin appears in my story as Stephen Leavitt, although only by way of being mentioned, he doesn't have a walk-on role. But morphic resonance definitely comes into it. Which means what? Very simply - nature has memories. Not only in brains, but in nature herself. That is what Maddox screamed 'heresy' about. (Peirce's 'nature forms habits' seems to make a similar point. I met Rupert once, in the early 90's, he was brought out by a group I was associated with and gave a talk. He's hardly changed since, really.)

Appealing to Sheldrake's academic credentials seems irrelevant. The question is whether he did experimental work that directly and plausibly supported his hypothesis. He might have, but I'm not aware of it, and I'm not interested enough in the question to research it.

Michael Levin’s work is often said to be “non-standard” or “post-genomic,” but his research programme presupposes a kind of naturalised Platonism - not in a mystical sense, but in the straightforward biological sense that forms, patterns, and target morphologies have real causal powers. — Wayfarer

The results of his research do seem to point to forms having causal efficacy. I wondered, when I was taught in school that DNA contained the "blueprint" for building organisms, taking into account the unimaginable complexity of animal anatomy and physiology, how that could possibly work, and it certainly wasn't comprehensively explained.

I wouldn't say his research program presupposes platonism, but that its results might lead to considering something like that as a possible explanation. It's going to be interesting to see what comes out of his research, and how it is received. Jaimungal is already saying he should get a Nobel prize.

the “I” that is the subject of experience — the subject to whom qualia appear, the one that is doing the thinking right now — is not itself an object within the field of objects. It is the condition for there being a field of objects at all. You never encounter this “I” as a thing in the world in the way you encounter tables, neurons, or even brain scans. It is always on the experiencing side of the relation. — Wayfarer

"I" refers to a single, specific identity - I am an individual with this unique identity, distinct from all other identities. I have perceptions and experiences; I interact with the world beyond me - the world I am a part of. My experiences are distinct from yours; your experiences take place when and where your body is are, mine take place when and where my body is. What part of this do you disagree with?

So when you say:

"I am an objective existent. I engage in mental activities; I experience qualia."

you are illicitly fusing:

The organism that can be studied objectively, and

The subjectivity in virtue of which anything is experienced at all. — Wayfarer

I'm "Illicitly fusing?! You seem to implying my view is the idiosyncratic one. Hardly. Nearly everyone on earth does this implicitly! You have devised a dichotomy that is counterintuitive - at odds with our innate view of ourselves and the world - you need to make the case for why the intuitive/innate view is wrong, and your claims are correct. It seems unnecessarily complex - you need a reason to embrace this complexity over a simpler, more intuitive view.

Those are not the same ontological role. The first is an object in experience; the second is what makes experience possible in the first place.

I think we agree that "what makes experience possible" is "the mind" (irrespective of what this refers to). And yet, you propose some vague dichotomy - seemingly contradicting the law of identity.

You mentioned a "field of objects" , seemingly refering specifically to my mental image/understanding of the objects around me. That much would be fine, but nevertheless - I believe this mental "field of objects" corresponds to actual objects around me. Do you consider this wrong? If so, then explain why you would deny this intuitive (and innate) belief.

You refer to an "ontological role". Generally speaking, a role is contextual: it relates an object to some aspects(s) of the rest of the world. "Parent" is a role that a person plays with respect to his children. "Food" is a role a bull might play, to people who eventually consume him. If you don't mean it this way, then you need to define what you mean by, "role".

"I" refers to a single, specific identity - I am an individual with this unique identity, distinct from all other identities. I have perceptions and experiences; I interact with the world beyond me - the world I am a part of. My experiences are distinct from yours; your experiences take place when and where your body is are, mine take place when and where my body is. What part of this do you disagree with? — Relativist

What you’ve described there is the empirical self — an individual being located in space and time, with experiences correlated to a body. It’s an accurate description, but it is a description from the ego’s perspective. By ‘ego’ I mean the self as it appears to itself, as an object in the world — the self-image or personal identity.

The ‘subject’ at issue is not you viewed objectively; it is the subject or observer for whom anything can appear as ‘a world’ at all. By re-describing the ‘I’ entirely from the third-person standpoint, you’ve already shifted back into the objective stance and thereby bracketed out the very role of subjectivity that is in question.

This is precisely the point made by phenomenology: natural science is methodologically blind to its own point of departure, because all science already presupposes consciousness as the condition of there being a world to investigate. To then try to explain consciousness in the same terms as the objects of physics and chemistry is a category mistake — not because mind is mystical, but because it is an inappropriate perspective from which to approach philosophy of mind.

Nearly everyone on earth does this implicitly! — Relativist

Right! Which is why it's so hard to argue against. But philosophy's role, as Aristotle put it, is to 'wonder at what men think ordinary'. Physicalism and naturalism begin with abstractions - the 'ideal bodies' of physics, the mathematical description of phenomena. Tremendously powerful, no question about it - but the mind that devises these abstractions has been left out at the very beginning. And then, the attempt is made to put it back in again, by attempting to put it on the same ontological footing as the objects of that method. That's the category mistake at issue.

That article I linked to is called 'the blind spot of science is the neglect of lived experience'. And really I don't think it even registered. It's like 'what "blind spot"?' — Wayfarer

Well maybe you can elaborate on what this blind spot is about and what implications it has.

You can't articulate what it means, because of the physicalist framing of the issues. — Wayfarer

You can't articulate to me what redness is. This is not a physicalist issue. Absolutely no one can do this. This is why there is a combination problem in panpsychism. Whatever Husserl is doing, he is not solving this issue. And if you can point to a field of enquiry that is doing the things you want, I don't understand the issue you're having. Why not let physics do physics and phenomenology do phenomenology. And the breadth of human knowledge is probably great enough that you have various fields that sit somewhere in the middle.

Here, you're falling back on scepticism - 'nobody really knows anything'. — Wayfarer

Its very simple; explain to me what redness is. Convey to me in words that will give me that information. You simply can't. Our communication about experiences is analogous to the Wittgenstein box-beetle thought experiment, and this has nothing to do with physical explanation.

Surely nobody can describe the feeling of pain such that another on hearing that description will know that particular pain, but everyone knows what pain is, because they suffer it. That is the 'explanatory gap' in a nutshell. — Wayfarer

Alright, so you understand what I mean. But if no one can describe the feeling of pain. Then how on earth can you give an explanatory account of pain?

Tremendously powerful, no question about it - but the mind that devises these abstractions has been left out at the very beginning. And then, the attempt is made to put it back in again, by attempting to put it on the same ontological footing as the objects of that method. That's the category mistake at issue. — Wayfarer

There is a time and place for phenomenology. If you are interested in the chemical composition of the atmosphere on a distant planet many many light years away, why would you be interested in the phenomenology of what you see when you look at your instruments or data back home one earth? Its not relevant to the particular explanation at hand. Ofcourse, in a manner following from Kuhn, we can and should give cognitive and social accounts of how science works, but that should not necessarily be conflated with the topics or goals of these sciences.

Whatever Husserl is doing, he is not solving this issue — Apustimelogist

He's not solving what you think is the issue. You see everything from the perspective of science and engineering - how does it work? What is the causal mechanism? How do you account for it?

But if no one can describe the feeling of pain. Then how on earth can you give an explanatory account of pain? — Apustimelogist

But the point is not about 'giving a better explanation'! It's the fact that a third-party, objective description does not embody the felt experience of pain - and yet everybody, in fact, practically every animal, knows what pain is. So it's not a 'problem to be solved'. It's not that 'nobody can describe pain satisfactorily'. It's being pointed to as an 'explanatory gap' - 'look, no matter how sophisticated your scientific model, it doesn't capture or convey the felt experience of pain, or anything other felt experience.' So there's a fundamental dimension of existence that is left out of objective accounts.

Well maybe you can elaborate on what this blind spot is about and what implications it has? — Apustimelogist

Behind the Blind Spot sits the belief that physical reality has absolute primacy in human knowledge, a view that can be called scientific materialism. In philosophical terms, it combines scientific objectivism (science tells us about the real, mind-independent world) and physicalism (science tells us that physical reality is all there is). Elementary particles, moments in time, genes, the brain – all these things are assumed to be fundamentally real. By contrast, experience, awareness and consciousness are taken to be secondary. The scientific task becomes about figuring out how to reduce them to something physical, such as the behaviour of neural networks, the architecture of computational systems, or some measure of information. — The Blind Spot

What do you think about that?

It's not that 'nobody can describe pain satisfactorily. It's being pointed to as an 'explanatory gap' - 'look, no matter how sophisticated your scientific model, it doesn't capture or convey the felt experience of pain, or anything else.' — Wayfarer

It's not an explanatory gap. Science doesn't purport to explain the "felt experience" of anything. Phenomenology purports to do that. But it really can't either, because it is a simple fact that feelings cannot be adequately described. Poetic language may be able to evoke them, and that's about the best you're gonna get.

He's not solving what you think is the issue. — Wayfarer

Then I don't understand whatbyou are complaining about. Let physics do physics. Let phenomenology do phenomenology. Lets not conflate them.

So there's a fundamental dimension of existence that is left out of objective accounts. — Wayfarer

Well its left out of any account and you don't even want to give an explanation. From my perspective there is no fuss to be made out of it because I am not pretending that physicalism should give a kind of God's eye view of the "intrinsic" nature of reality. Explanations are predictive tools that are open to pluralism and are relational.

What do you think about that? — Wayfarer

My point is that if there is no scope to explain experience in any sense, or even clarify what it means, then its not actually clear what the implications of this are in terms of a complete explanatory model of the world. And you seem to keep saying that explanation isn't the point, you don't want a different explanation, you just want physicists to read Husserl for some reason I cannot fathom.