I think the question presupposes not so much that there is some way, but that the question can be meaningfully asked, and is important. — J

Presupposing that the question can be meaningfully asked is not the same as knowing how to answer it. Perhaps you are thinking that we can work out what will count as an answer and go on from there. It may be possible, but it doesn't exclude the possibility that it cannot be answered because nothing would count as an answer. On the other hand we can answer lots of questions about the world and, for me, these count as telling us how the world really is. What is puzzling is why you think those answers do not count.

If my point of view is such that aliens have secretly replaced my family, that is not how the world really is. — J

That's not quite what I mean by a point of view. It is a conclusion which you have no doubt reached from some point of view. Most likely, you have adopted a way of interpreting the information that you have, so let's allow that is a point of view. The issue then comes down to your principles of interpretation and how you are applying them. Certainly, it is not likely that a direct challenge to your conclusion will be particularly persuasive. Changing the subject might help.

For Sider, what's fundamental is structure, grounding. — J

Structure and grounding are not the same thing. There such things as self-supporting structures that do not require grounding or even require not to be grounded. Planets, for example, and space-ships.

we're supposed to conclude that the only reason the latter truth is more important than the former is because it reflects our interests and our way of life. — J

I'm open to ideas. Actually, in this case, I would suggest that it is important that "The sum of the angles of a triangle is 180 degrees" is embedded in a complex web of beliefs, whereas "grue" and "bleen" don't seem to be embedded in anything.

So for me it is meaningless to say that our experience gives us no true picture of the real. It doesn't give us a complete picture, but that is a different consideration. — Janus

I can buy that.

Presupposing that the question can be meaningfully asked is not the same as knowing how to answer it. Perhaps you are thinking that we can work out what will count as an answer and go on from there. It may be possible, but it doesn't exclude the possibility that it cannot be answered because nothing would count as an answer. On the other hand we can answer lots of questions about the world and, for me, these count as telling us how the world really is. What is puzzling is why you think those answers do not count. — Ludwig V

I don't think we're that far apart on this question. There may, as you say, be no answer at all to the question, which, just to jog our memories, was:

The problem, I think, comes when we ask which of these points of view (if any) reflect how the world really is. — J

The "if any" was meant to acknowledge your point: No answers may be forthcoming, and that could be for (at least) two reasons: We can't find the answer, or the question is badly put because it implies that "how the world really is" is meaningful when in fact it isn't. I'm not sure I know how we would "work out what will count as an answer," exactly, though I rather like putting it that way because it's a reminder that there's probably no way to simply discover the answer.

As for the kinds of answers we do have about the world, I certainly think they count, but it's not obvious what they count for. If we decide that "how the world is" is a matter of semantics, and we ought to just go ahead and allow that our current best objective knowledge is about how the world really is, then that knowledge counts for a lot, maybe everything. But I'm arguing that it's an open question whether we need to do that.

That's not quite what I mean by a point of view. — Ludwig V

I know, but I deliberately chose an outrageous example so I can illustrate the idea that "point of view" is uncomfortably ambiguous, though it gets invoked constantly in these discussions. As you say, my deluded self has "most likely . . . adopted a way of interpreting the information that you have, so let's allow that it is a point of view." But is a point of view merely a perspective, any perspective? How is what I do when I take a deluded point of view different from what any non-insane, objective, scientifically respectable point of view does? I think it's a lot different, myself, but why? What makes objectivity different from "just what I think"? Surely it has something to do with the way the world is . . . and maybe we should just leave out the "really" part.

So for me it is meaningless to say that our experience gives us no true picture of the real. It doesn't give us a complete picture, but that is a different consideration.
— Janus
I can buy that. — Ludwig V

Me too. As Nagel says, how the world appears to us is part of what is real.

Structure and grounding are not the same thing. — Ludwig V

Sorry, forgot to respond to this. Sider doesn't mean grounding in any physical sense. Rather, it's a question of what must be metaphysically fundamental -- what concepts give rise to, or secure, other concepts. Jonathan Schaffer's excellent essay, "On What Grounds What," gives a clear picture of these issues, influenced by both Sider and Aristotle.

The "if any" was meant to acknowledge your point: No answers may be forthcoming, and that could be for (at least) two reasons: We can't find the answer, or the question is badly put because it implies that "how the world really is" is meaningful when in fact it isn't. I'm not sure I know how we would "work out what will count as an answer," exactly, though I rather like putting it that way because it's a reminder that there's probably no way to simply discover the answer. — J

Yes. Questions need to be nested in a considerable web of beliefs. There's quite a lot of different things that can go wrong. The fact that there's so much debate suggests that something is wrong here. "Real" is being used outside or beyond the structure that it usually carries with it.
But sometimes there does seem to be a meaning to it. For example, there is a real puzzle about how to make sense of the physics of colours and sounds in relation to our experience of them - and why not add pain, for that matter. It is, to me, unbearably paradoxical to assert that there are no colours and sounds in the world, and yet colours etc. are not objects in the world. The facts suggest to me that those sensations are produced by the interaction of our sense organs with the world. But then, how to make sense of the fact that we see colours and hear sounds at spatial locations - not in our heads or eyes.

I know, but I deliberately chose an outrageous example so I can illustrate the idea that "point of view" is uncomfortably ambiguous, though it gets invoked constantly in these discussions. As you say, my deluded self has "most likely . . . adopted a way of interpreting the information that you have, so let's allow that it is a point of view." But is a point of view merely a perspective, any perspective? How is what I do when I take a deluded point of view different from what any non-insane, objective, scientifically respectable point of view does? I think it's a lot different, myself, but why? What makes objectivity different from "just what I think"? — J

"Point of view", "perspective", "interpretation", "presupposition" are all involved here. It wouldn't be hard to work out distinct senses for them in this context, and it would help to prevent people over-simplifying things. But I'm just as lazy as the rest of humankind.

Sider doesn't mean grounding in any physical sense. Rather, it's a question of what must be metaphysically fundamental -- what concepts give rise to, or secure, other concepts. Jonathan Schaffer's excellent essay, "On What Grounds What," gives a clear picture of these issues, influenced by both Sider and Aristotle. — J

I didn't think he did. On the other hand, metaphors affect our thinking, so it is worth paying attention to them. However, I don't think that "metaphysically fundamental" helps much. I'm trying to suggest we should pay attention to different kinds of case. Russell's project, for example, was (if I remember right) about the foundations of mathematics. That's completely different from the Wittgensteinian idea that the foundation of mathematics is our practices of counting and measuring things.
Thanks for the reference. I'll certainly look at it.

To conclude: metaphysics as I understand it is about what grounds what. It is about the structure of the world. It is about what is fundamental, and what derives from it.

I have a weakness for reading last paragraphs first. So here we go - three different metaphors in two lines - and still the assumption that any one of them applies universally. ?

So for me it is meaningless to say that our experience gives us no true picture of the real. It doesn't give us a complete picture, but that is a different consideration.
— Janus
I can buy that.
— Ludwig V

Me too. As Nagel says, how the world appears to us is part of what is real. — J

I think that's an important point. We can say that what is beyond the possibility of experience, whether in principle or merely in practical actuality cannot be real for us except in imagination, and hence transcendental idealism follows. But that argument seems to me to be a kind of "cooking of the books" and for the sake of honest intellectual bookkeeping we should admit that we do think that whatever is beyond our possible experience is real in itself, with the other category being whatever is amenable to experience, which is thought of as being real for us.

I think that is a very common way of thinking―people think of God like that. We cannot prove or know whether God exists, but if he exists he must be real and if he doesn't exist then he is imaginary. So we would then have empirical realism and transcendental realism, two different categories of the real, the nature of the latter of which we are terminally ignorant about iff we don't allow that what is real for us tells us nothing about what is real in itself. That question is the one which cannot, even in principle, be definitively answered―if we hold a view about it we take a leap of faith.

The question then becomes as to whether there can be any worthwhile point arguing about which faith is true.

“Objectivist ontology became king as scientists grew accustomed to assuming that the creations of their mathematical physics could be treated as timeless laws held in the “mind of God” and viewable from a perfectly objective, perfectly perspectiveless perspective—a “view from nowhere.” Thus, when quantum mechanics appeared from the same experimental workshop that had created the triumph of classical physics, many scientists believed their job was to defend the ontological heights and equate reality with the abstract formalism." So, no, I don't believe their interpretation is at odds with Nagel's, in fact Nagel is cited repeatedly in the text. I think they're converging on a similar point.
— Wayfarer

Here my question is about your "they" (though I may just be misreading you). Do you mean Frank and Gleiser, or the scientists referred to in the quote? I think you mean F&G, in which case I'd ask you to expand on this. — J

Let's focus on what the basic argument is about. What I'm saying is that the authors ('they' - Adam Frank, Marcello Gleiser, Evan Thompson), cite and endorse Nagel's The View from Nowhere:

Our purpose in this book is to expose the Blind Spot and offer some direction that might serve as alternatives to its incomplete and limited vision of science. Scientific knowledge isn’t a window onto a disembodied, God’s-eye perspective. It doesn’t grant us access to a perfectly knowable, timeless objective reality, a “view from nowhere,” in philosopher Thomas Nagel’s well-known phrase.

That passage you quoted above from Thomas Nagel's 'View from Nowhere' is from his chapter on Mind, and the difficulty of framing an objective view of consciousness, given its first-person nature. But it doesn't really conflict with anything in the essay or the associated book. They're approaching the same kinds of questions from separate angles, but I don't see any inherent conflict.

(Frank) says things like “Science has no answer to this question” and “Science is silent on this question” as if we should then conclude than ignorance and silence are the end of the story. — J

In the essay, the context is as follows:

consider that in certain intense states of absorption – during meditation, dance or highly skilled performances – the subject-object structure can drop away, and we are left with a sense of sheer felt presence. How is such phenomenal presence possible in a physical world? Science is silent on this question.

Experiences have a subjective character; they occur in the first person. Why should a given sort of physical system have the feeling of being a subject? Science has no answer to this question.

This is not 'science has reached a dead end', or that 'silence is the end of the story'. The point is polemical: to illustrate how these fundamental elements of experience are outside the scope of science. It is in keeping with the whole thrust of the work: that science is grounded in objective analysis, that is, analysis of those things, states, processes that can be made objects of analysis. The argument is that this involves the process of abstraction - the bracketing out or exclusion of factors that are not part of the specific process that science wishes to study. This process of abstraction then becomes internalised as part of the 'scientific worldview' - and voila! No subject! No experience! All that remains are the equations and abstractions that describe - very effectively! - how stuff happens.

This is very much the same territory as that explored by Husserl in the Crisis of the European Sciences.



I don't think Husserl's grand aims for phenomenology as a universal science really took off, but it made a mark, and this book is in that lineage.

In order to understand the experience, one has to be the being experiencing it. — Punshhh

This is what is in question, I think. Nagel, in the passage I quoted in response to @Wayfarer, doesn't think this follows. And I don't see why it must, though no one would deny that we learn more about an experience if we're the ones having it.

And by being, I’m not talking of the mind*, I’m talking of a living creature. — Punshhh

This is good. We equate mind with subjective experience much too facilely.

[The tree] is there, is reacting to, is growing through all these events and circumstances. These are events being experienced by a living being. — Punshhh

Or at least they may be. Unless we stipulate a certain meaning for "experience" which we're not entitled to ("everything that happens to an entity is an experience"), I don't think we can know whether a tree has them.

@Wayfarer

The problem of Scientism seems more far-reaching than I had previously understood. It is very obvious in the religious sphere, it is fairly obvious in the logical sphere (Ayer, Tarski, etc.), but as I read Simpson's Goodness and Nature I find him illustrating convincingly that Scientism is also a dominant confusion in ethics (with the 20th century figures of Moore, Stevenson, Hare, Anscombe, Foot, Lovibound, Lee, and Warnack; as well as the earlier figures of Bacon, Descartes, Hume, Kant, etc.).

The meta-ethical confusion seems to bear directly on "the meaning crisis," given the way it precludes non-scientific human acts in a very forceful way, beginning with any acts that pertain to "values" or "oughts."

:clap: Your speaking my language!

- I thought I might be. :razz:

It is worth noting that one could revise the so-called "Hume's law" as follows: One cannot get meaning from an 'is'. Such is the point at which we've now arrived. When meaning (or anything else) is separated from 'is' (being), it inevitably suffocates. To say that meaning does not come from being is little different than saying that meaning does not exist. Contrariwise, anyone who leads a meaningful life would of course reject such a "law."

The Scientism angle is based on the idea that science is super important, and that its value derives from its neutrality or meaninglessness. If science had an intrinsic meaning—so the story goes—then it would lose its neutrality and it would no longer be super important (...and nevermind the fact that the import/value with which science is imbued by our culture is chock full of meaning).

:up:

This is what is in question, I think. Nagel, in the passage I quoted in response to @Wayfarer, doesn't think this follows. And I don't see why it must, though no one would deny that we learn more about an experience if we're the ones having it.

Yes, I’m not denying that. I was emphasising the importance of mind as body and that different kinds of body have different kinds of experience, unique to them. I agree that rational intelligent minds can observe other kinds of bodies (minds), but it’s always an observation from the perspective of the experience of different kind of body, (third person) when it is done. Also, I think we can (we have the capacity to) as rational intelligent beings break out of our inherent perspective and develop understanding of other experiences.

Or at least they may be. Unless we stipulate a certain meaning for "experience" which we're not entitled to ("everything that happens to an entity is an experience"), I don't think we can know whether a tree has them.

But surely it has the experience of being a tree? Yes, I know we never be able to know for certain, but it has a shared presence with us is our physical domain. A domain where there is a common scale, a tree is approximately ten times our height and lives about as long, or a few times longer than us. Senses and reacts to stimuli in that environment which we sense and react to. If there is mind of some kind in the body of the tree as there is in our bodies, surely there are experiences being felt. Albeit so far removed from our kind of experience, that it may be inconceivable to us. For example, it is known that trees in a forest communicate with other trees. They may have a feeling of being in a group, chemical messages are being sent through the group. They may be detecting the presence of destructive fungi at one end of the forest and sending messages about it to other parts of the forest etc.

Thanks for the link. Some interesting ideas about how beings can feel and act independent of a central nervous system.

You’re welcome, I found it a fascinating lecture (although I have to say I’m sceptical about ‘tree consciousness’.)

I’m not saying a tree is in any way conscious as we understand it to be. Which is why I suggest it may be inconceivable to us. But what we could perhaps conceive of is a sense, or feeling of being, being alive. As opposed to the total lack of feeling, or being in an AI device.

Yes I certainly believe trees are organisms and categorically different to devices.

An organism feels.

An organism feels. — Punshhh

I once watched a documentary on a child with CIP (congenital insensitivity to pain). While fascinating, it was tragic. Apparently the kid would run into walls and not realize they were severely hurting themself, resulting in innumerable medical visits and related costs.

Point being, just because that human being is unable to "feel" (yet does have the "hardware" per se to) and another living being that is also unable to feel (and does not have the necessary "hardware), do you see the connection? I can't prove it, and admittedly, I probably wouldn't want to go out on a limb suggesting otherwise, but it was discovered that plants communicated by what was previously undetectable means only semi-recently. Who knows what other secrets and untold truths may exist beyond the thin veil, the tiny tip of an iceberg, that is human understanding.

"Real" is being used outside or beyond the structure that it usually carries with it.
But sometimes there does seem to be a meaning to it. — Ludwig V

Yes. I strongly dislike using "real" in serious philosophy, but we can't simply erase hundreds of years of usage. We need it, or something like it, for some of the important things we talk about. Just make sure you define it as "according to X . . ."!

I don't think that "metaphysically fundamental" helps much. I'm trying to suggest we should pay attention to different kinds of case. — Ludwig V

But notice that, if one says, "There is little that's helpful in the term 'metaphysically fundamental'; we should instead look at things case by case," one has nonetheless said something metaphysically fundamental! -- indeed, something of great importance. This is what Sider means when he says, "If nothing else, the choice of what notions are fundamental remains. There’s no detour around the entirety of fundamental metaphysics."

So here we go - three different metaphors in two lines — Ludwig V

:grin: I wonder if it's possible to write about metaphysics at all without using metaphors. Better not to mix them, though, I agree.

the other category being whatever is amenable to experience, which is thought of as being real for us. — Janus

And we can even put a highly skeptical slant on "real for us" and insist that this is a kind of bastard child of true Reality, consisting of illusions and "perspectives," without changing Nagel's point. Illusions actually happen; if we see something illusory and believe it is (deeply) Real, this is an experience we have. It has to be explained, just as much as anything else, if we want to give a complete account of the world we encounter. Of course, when we start parsing "real" in a way that requires a capital R, we start to confuse ourselves.

I recall this old thread, but cannot remember the details of each and every discussions. But from my vague memory of reading in the past, they seem to be mostly in the form of irrelevant gobbledygook.

Now when I see the thread again, and by looking at the the title of the thread, "Mind created world" - sounds wrong and not making sense.

The world cannot be created by mind. The world exists before mind. Mind perceives the world. Hence it makes sens to say - perceived world. There are parts of the world which cannot be perceived, but intuited, believed or imagined. These part of the world is added to our perception via our intuition, belief and imagination.

No one can have the total perception or knowledge of the world. It is always partially perceived world, and everyone's perception and knowledge of the world is private to their own mind.

Creation sounds literal or poetic than logical, philosophical or scientific. Artists could create art objects by mimicking the real world. Ordinary folks perceives the world, scientists observes and investigate the world, and philosophers reflect and analyse the world. The world is the preexisting space we all live in. Without the world, nothing can exist.

That passage you quoted above from Thomas Nagel's 'View from Nowhere' is from his chapter on Mind, and the difficulty of framing an objective view of consciousness, given its first-person nature. — Wayfarer

Yes. And as I understand him, Nagel is acknowledging the difficulty but arguing that it's possible, at least in part. That's because, when he uses the term "view," he's making the distinction I described earlier, which Frank does not, between understanding and experience. To my mind, this definitely puts the two men at odds, though they do share a number of common concerns.

This is not 'science has reached a dead end', or that 'silence is the end of the story'. The point is polemical: to illustrate how these fundamental elements of experience are outside the scope of science. — Wayfarer

Maybe polemical is the right word. I agree, Frank isn't giving an interim report on what science has learned so far. I was saying that that's what he should be doing -- but he (and you) believe that we can demonstrate why science will never, on principle, be able to say anything about those elements of experience.

If one conceives of science in the way he does (based on what I regard as a somewhat dated historical account), then sure, science is limited in that way. But I'm not at all convinced that such a definition really captures the essence of scientific inquiry. There's way more to say about that, and probably more than you'd want to hear from me, but I'll just add that the pressure point lies here: "Science is grounded in objective analysis, that is, analysis of those things, states, processes that can be made objects of analysis." You're stipulating that subjective experience can never be made into such an object, and I'm saying that it probably can be -- that we shouldn't leap from our current (primitive) understanding of the concepts of "subjective" and "objective" to conclude that our concepts are not only adequate, but force a philosophical conclusion.

do you see the connection?

Yes, but firstly the child in question is either diseased, or has a disorder. So is a person with all the apparatus, but it doesn’t work properly. Animals with central nervous systems will rely on them for the experience of feelings etc. I’m talking of organisms which don’t have a disorder and will have alternative, or primitive feelings. Secondly, by feelings, I don’t mean like our feelings. With a central nervous system and an advanced bran. But primitive feelings, more like a state, rather than a subjectively defined state within an integrated person. Perhaps a tree knows in some way if it is not any more healthy, that it is diseased. Knows that there are other trees and plants in its environment and communicates with them. All this might well go on in what we would describe as an unconscious way. But perhaps that is our failing, that we think that consciousness requires sentience and other states that we see as normal.

Imagine that a tree in a forest has a sense of holding hands (roots) with the other trees around it. A sense of communion, a knowledge of this state and a response to it. Trees and other plants might experience movement, agency through growth, they do continue growing their whole life, where as we stop growing in adolescence and experience it in an entirely different way.

I probably wouldn't want to go out on a limb

You wouldn’t want it to snap off, it could hurt (the tree).

I once watched a documentary on a child with CIP (congenital insensitivity to pain). — Outlander

Wouldn't last long on the veldt.

You're stipulating that subjective experience can never be made into such an object, and I'm saying that it probably can be -- that we shouldn't leap from our current (primitive) understanding of the concepts of "subjective" and "objective" to conclude that our concepts are not only adequate, but force a philosophical conclusion. — J

You said the same in the thread on first- and third-person perspectives. Your use of 'primitive', even with scare quotes, implies that this, too, will somehow be unravelled by the inexorable march of science. But there's a logical contradiction which you're not seeing. Subject-object relations are fundamental to embodied existence - we are embodied subjects, and, to us, beings other than ourselves, and the entire objective domain, are 'other' to us. (What's the philosophical term? Alteriety? As opposed to ipseity, the sense of oneself.)

I'm not at all convinced that such a definition really captures the essence of scientific inquiry. — J

So, please do tell. What would be an alternative to Frank's 'dated historical account'? You don't have to spell it out, a reference will do.

Your use of 'primitive', even with scare quotes, implies that this, too, will somehow be unravelled by the inexorable march of science. But there's a logical contradiction which you're not seeing. — Wayfarer

With respect, what you're not seeing is that this is only a logical contradiction if we define the terms in such a way that it is. Logic tells us nothing about the world; it only tells us what terms can be sensibly used together, given their definitions. Sure, if "subjective" and "objective" can only mean what you say they mean, then they can't be used in certain ways to say certain things without contradiction. But I'm questioning that use as too narrow. Specifically, I'm suggesting that understanding a number-theoretical statement, for instance, is not a subjective experience in the same way that eating a chocolate is. In such a case, the apparent bipolarity of subjective and objective starts to break down, it seems to me. This is a deep problem in how to understand the role of rationality (or call it hermeneutics, perhaps) in human experience. I think the possibility remains open that we can understand subjectivity without requiring that everyone have the same subjective experience, or that we somehow simultaneously inhabit objectivity and subjectivity, as defined in this way.

"Subject-object relations are fundamental to embodied existence" -- yes, they are, but that doesn't mean we understand them, or understand what we mean when we create this bipolarity, whether it is mere appearance or reflects something more. Do you believe it reflects a genuine metaphysical fact? I don't know if it does. I'm asking for more humility in the face of what we don't know. As philosophers, we should be suspicious of any position that says, "We know it to be the case that something is either A or B."

And actually, I don't think the march of science, by itself, will change how we understand subjectivity. It seems to me that what usually happens is a kind of two-step between scientific inquiry and philosophical analysis. As we learn more about what science discovers, we find we require new ways to talk about it (science tends to talk in math). So our concepts broaden, and innovate.

What would be an alternative to Frank's 'dated historical account'? — Wayfarer

What I find a bit dated is statements like this, as a description of what a scientific materialist must believe: "The scientific method enables us to get outside of experience and grasp the world as it is in itself." My reference would be to Kuhn, who I think shook this up pretty definitively, mid-20th century. I'd also reference my conversations with two scientist friends, but that's merely anecdotal. For what it's worth, they're both interested in philosophy of science, and enjoy chewing these things over with me, and I've asked them about the God's-eye view. It makes them smile. I've never heard either of them claim they were trying to grasp the world as it is. As best I can tell, they're trying to solve equations and make reliable predictions. Perhaps if I pressed them, they'd own to wanting something more . . . but as they're both physicists, they're hyper-aware of the role of the observer.

Logic tells us nothing about the world; it only tells us what terms can be sensibly used together, given their definitions. Sure, if "subjective" and "objective" can only mean what you say they mean, then they can't be used in certain ways to say certain things without contradiction. But I'm questioning that use as too narrow. Specifically, I'm suggesting that understanding a number-theoretical statement, for instance, is not a subjective experience in the same way that eating a chocolate is. In such a case, the apparent bipolarity of subjective and objective starts to break down, it seems to me. This is a deep problem in how to understand the role of rationality (or call it hermeneutics, perhaps) in human experience. I think the possibility remains open that we can understand subjectivity without requiring that everyone have the same subjective experience, or that we somehow simultaneously inhabit objectivity and subjectivity, as defined in this way. — J

Logic may well be formal and content-neutral, but it does not operate in a metaphysical vacuum. It still presupposes a thinker and something thought. The subject–object distinction is therefore not just a quirk of how narrowly we define certain words; it is assumed by logic itself. It was implicit throughout much of traditional philosophy, but made explicit in phenomenology in particular.

Also, subjectivity obtains across different registers. There is the “merely subjective,” such as my personal taste for chocolate; and there is the intersubjective, which takes account of subjectivity without reducing it to what is merely personal. And yes, we can “understand subjectivity.” But we can only ever be one subject; the only instance of subjectivity we directly know is our own, and that by being it, not by knowing it objectively.

As said in the Brihadaranyaka Upaniṣad '“You cannot see the seer of seeing. You cannot hear the hearer of hearing. You cannot think the thinker of thinking. That which is the Self is not grasped as an object; it is the ground of all grasping.”

As for Frank’ book, it is a philosophy of science book. It isn’t aimed at Kuhn, Feyerabend, or Polanyi—or likely even at readers who take those figures seriously. Its target is metaphysical realism, which presumably those you are speaking too don't hold to.

The subject–object distinction is therefore not just a quirk of how narrowly we define certain words; it is assumed by logic itself. It was implicit throughout much of traditional philosophy, but made explicit in phenomenology in particular. — Wayfarer

This is a good point. You're right to question whether "subject-object" might not, in some cases, capture a genuine metaphysical structure.

And yes, we can “understand subjectivity.” But we can only ever be one subject; the only instance of subjectivity we directly know is our own, and that by being it, not by knowing it objectively. — Wayfarer

Well, then I think we're on the same page. I agree, and my suggestion is that all we can require of scientific inquiry is to (eventually) understand subjectivity. I could quibble a little, using Nagel's point about self-reflection as "a kind of objectivity," but that's a somewhat different issue. Again, it all comes down to the difference between experience and understanding. To my mind, science (and other similar, rational practices) can give us understanding without needing to experience the impossible. And of course, where you and I and Nagel are all in accord is in the tremendous importance of including subjectivity in the world of what is, without reduction or waving-away.

As for Frank’ book, it is a philosophy of science book. It isn’t aimed at Kuhn, Feyerabend, or Polanyi—or likely even at readers who take those figures seriously. Its target is metaphysical realism, which presumably those you are speaking too don't hold to. — Wayfarer

Fair enough.

Logic may well be formal and content-neutral, but it does not operate in a metaphysical vacuum. — Wayfarer

Logic is actually not content neutral, although there are lots of folks on TPF who refuse to admit this. Heck, if logic were content neutral then logicians wouldn’t constantly be arguing with one another over logic. Simpson’s paper, “Schopenhauer and Wittgenstein on Self and Object,” is a great expose of logical non-neutrality in Wittgenstein.

Logic tells us nothing about the world; — J

This is wrong, plain and simple. It’s actually a bit strange that you would say this. If you understood what you were doing in all of your threads on Kimhi, or Frege, or Rodl, you would understand that you were probing various ways in which logic is metaphysically laden, which is to say that the logical system that a logician dreams up will tell us a great deal about his views of the world.

As said in the Brihadaranyaka Upaniṣad '“You cannot see the seer of seeing. You cannot hear the hearer of hearing. You cannot think the thinker of thinking. That which is the Self is not grasped as an object; it is the ground of all grasping.” — Wayfarer

Consider the "ground" as that which remains even during a deep sleep with no dreams, which is akin to a successful meditation state, and that our night dreams that seem so real probably tap into the same ground as when we are awake and all seems so real.

And we can even put a highly skeptical slant on "real for us" and insist that this is a kind of bastard child of true Reality, consisting of illusions and "perspectives," without changing Nagel's point. Illusions actually happen; if we see something illusory and believe it is (deeply) Real, this is an experience we have. It has to be explained, just as much as anything else, if we want to give a complete account of the world we encounter. Of course, when we start parsing "real" in a way that requires a capital R, we start to confuse ourselves. — J

That is what is said by religions like Buddhism and Hinduism—that we live behind a veil of illusion, "maya". But there the illusion is the illusion of subjectivity/ objectivity, of separation—an illusory artefact of the discursive, dualistic mind. Nonetheless that illusion is a part of reality—That we have the illusion is not itself an illusion—the idea is that it shuts us off from a larger, non-discursive, ultimately non-dual Reality.

I doubt whether a complete account of the world we encounter is possible—it is always going to be a work in progress, and always limited by its very discursivity. For me the notion of reality with a capital R denotes the fact that our judgements, our accounts, although they are A reality, are not Reality in its fullness, but merely judgements and accounts. The map is never the territory.

To say that meaning does not come from being is little different than saying that meaning does not exist. Contrariwise, anyone who leads a meaningful life would of course reject such a "law." — Leontiskos

It seems to me this is really a pretty trivial strawman. Of course we can say, in one sense that meaning comes from being—simply because everything comes from being. Also the meaning in people's and other animal's lives comes from those lives, obviously—and life is being, but it is not merely being in the sense of sheer mere existence. The point is that the idea of meaning does not come from the mere idea of being.