He wanted to implode the institutional prejudices associated with reason with better reasoning rather than spiritualist or religious claptrap... — fdrake

Did he consider his project a success?

I don't think capitalism ended?

No implosion, of course. But had he felt he'd discovered a (potentially implosive) revamp, amelioration, of reason?

By 'mysticism' Wayfarer seems to refer to (supposing my reading has been at all accurate over the years) a catalog of vivid and unusual experiences best described using the mystical dialect: a dialect historically highly subjective and imprecise in its (unfortunate) referentiality to mythological beings, entities, energies, effluences, and commonly reliant on the atmosphere of paradox.

The language used to describe these experiences - an enormous obstacle to understanding their importance to the human condition - is unfortunately stigmatized and corrupted and generally rings silly and grotesque. Nonetheless, the experiences qua experience (stripped of mysticalized descriptors) are latent in every mind and reflect, by their absence, a gap in self-knowledge.

I'm not sure if I am a wanker or a cunt. — bert1

I'm a cunt. — bert1

I'm glad you sorted this out.

For a sketch of reductionism, my take on it anyway:

I understand an explanation; of X by Y; as an asymmetric epistemic relationship between X and Y wherein what is known of/about/how/why of (information concerning X) X is at least partially specified by what is known of/about/how/why (information concerning Y) Y. X="Why did he eat the potato chips?" Y="He was hungry" (the potato chips were also available in a nearby shop that was established in the 1980s due to small business promoting loans that an industrious pair of second generation Pakistani Brits made use of due to... and the loans were suggested by a think tank which studied... and the shop had his favourite flavour and...).

I understand a reductive explanation; of X by Y; as an explanation of X by Y wherein the information concerning Y completely specifies the information concerning X.

Complete specification might look like logical/deductive inference or exhausting causal pathways (finding the bacteria which cause the disease - but not the specifics of each symptom in each patient). The germ theory of disease doesn't have to tell you precisely how red your mate Steve's leg got with that infected cut; but it does reduce (some) disease symptom presence to germ presence.

Reductive explanations don't work very well in cases where the studied phenomena are difficult (ontically/ontologically or epistemically) to completely specify. Try to explain why a photon takes a particular path in a double slit experiment in terms of the particular photon and the slits and you get nonsense. Try to explain why one Vietnam vet becomes mentally ill and another does not based upon their shared experiences and background differences and you don't get a complete picture due to the available information (and randomness in life). Try to study whether a butterfly flapping its wings 1 day ago caused a tropical storm now and the system itself pulls apart arbitrarily close causal histories - rendering the question askable but moot.

The stuff you study places constraints on what your modes of inquiry into it can be. So when someone says: "men are more aggressive because they have more testosterone", you shouldn't just point out that it's wrong, you should be highly suspicious that the person knows anything (substantial) about aggression or testosterone or sex differences; since they're not thinking in a way which tracks the relationships between any of the things in question.

Reductive explanations we encounter are usually just so stories.

Nonetheless, the experiences qua experience (stripped of mysticalized descriptors) are latent in every mind and reflect, by their absence, a gap in self-knowledge. — ZzzoneiroCosm

I've gotten real fucking high a few times, and it has impacted how I think about things, but I would never believe that the intuitions and sensations produced in those states were insights into the true nature of reality. Altered states shatter, reasoning builds anew.

If I may: reductionism = context-invariance of explanation (changed/changing conditions do not/can not alter how something works).

reductionism = context-invariance of explanation (changed/changing conditions do not/can not alter how something works). — StreetlightX

Yes! That's a good way of putting it I think.

Another feature this highlights is that explanations need not tell the 'whole story', whereas reductive explanations, when right, must.

I've gotten real fucking high a few times, and it has impacted how I think about things, but I would never believe that the intuitions and sensations produced in those states were insights into the true nature of reality. Altered states shatter, reasoning builds anew. — fdrake

With daily practice, altered states can have a profound lasting influence on brain wave patterns.

I suppose you've seen the studies.

Mysticism and reason should be dual (dueling) handmaidens not frittering in a myopic loggerheads we've come to see as natural and even inevitable. This synthesis will come. (In my opinion.)


https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/zen-gamma/

"The Wisconsin study took electroencephalograms (EEGs) of 10 longtime Buddhist practitioners and of a control group of eight college students who had been lightly trained in meditation.....Zen Buddhist monks show an extraordinary synchronization of brain waves known as gamma synchrony—a pattern increasingly associated with robust brain function and the synthesis of activity that we call the mind."

In other words, the world can be (to some degree) reenchanted - without subscribing to any sub- or transrational beliefs. Indeed, without believing much of anything.

"The Wisconsin study took electroencephalograms (EEGs) of 10 longtime Buddhist practitioners and of a control group of eight college students who had been lightly trained in meditation.....Zen Buddhist monks show an extraordinary synchronization of brain waves known as gamma synchrony—a pattern increasingly associated with robust brain function and the synthesis of activity that we call the mind." — ZzzoneiroCosm

18 people for a between groups study? Skeptical. Anyway, the research question is "do well practiced meditators have higher gamma synchrony than controls?", not the auxiliary contextual information in this thread or about the contrast between mysticism and reason.

Mysticism and reason should be dual (dueling) handmaidens not frittering in a myopic loggerheads we've come to see as natural and even inevitable. This synthesis will come. (In my opinion.) — ZzzoneiroCosm

Mysticism is a thinking style completely at odds with reasoning (gnosis vs episteme); rational theory is not generated through affect alone. Meditation is something people can do without the Buddhist religion or mysticism; secular mindfulness practices. They don't come with such ontological commitments, like belief in god, or the falsehood of evolution.

Close your eyes, breath, the ape is a lie...

Mysticism is a thinking style completely at odds with reasoning... — fdrake

I've described mysticism as "a catalog of intense and unusual experiences." You've described mysticism as a "thinking style."

Yeah, it's a lesson I learnt from Isabelle Stengers:

"The question of complexity... is truly a product of the analytical spirit. Analysis and reductionism are too often lumped together in the same critique. But ... it is quite possible for the analytical method to directly contradict the generalization of reductionism. Far from entailing the idea of a more simple world, analysis can lead to the conclusion that we do not know what a being is capable of. One way or another, reductionism always ends up "... is only"; the analytical method, on the other hand, may lead to "this...., but in other circumstances that... or yet again that....' "(Power and Invention)

So I'd be even more stringent than you about Wayfarer: it's not that his problem is with education and politics, and he's focusing on the science. He doesn't even get the science right, as far as I'm concerned.

So I'd be even more stringent than you about Wayfarer: it's not that his problem is with education and politics, and he's focusing on the science. He doesn't even get the science right, as far as I'm concerned. — StreetlightX

@Wayfarer

On the one hand you want to reserve an isolated realm for your philosophical speculation; rendering it out of the reach of science. On the other, you want to project the impact of your speculation back into the scientific domains! — fdrake

I've described mysticism as "a catalog of intense and unusual experiences." You've described mysticism as a "thinking style." — ZzzoneiroCosm

So long as the catalogue doesn't necessitate buying anything in it, we can see eye to eye.

So long as the catalogue doesn't necessitate purchase of its items, we can see eye to eye. — fdrake

No need sign your soul away. The bottom line, to my view: no one sheds the mortal coil without having a mystical experience or two. A scientist-ist (sic) would never call it mysticism. (Moments of psychological abundance, fullness, joyfulness; the obverse of ennui.)

A scientist-ist (sic) would never call it mysticism — ZzzoneiroCosm

I would believe that mysticism and reason were two sides of the same coin if they were, but they are not.

Interesting. Divergence is good.

I just wonder why you'd reject that homo sapiens (and our minds) are descended from our homo ancestors (and their minds), when you're so happy to accept all the facts of evolution... one more is hardly a violence against your worldview, no? You're rejecting a framing of the facts, rather than the facts, right? — fdrake

It's the meaning. Your thinking has a ceiling on it, delimited by empiricism - exactly what a smart ape might think, pardon my impudence. (In fact, I think this is what the Planet of the Apes was a satire of.) When I said before that we only accept what can be weighed, measured, felt, sensed (including by instruments) this is what I mean. Empiricism amounts to the elevation of the senses to the sole criteria for valid knowledge (along with predictive power and replicability, per Jacques Maritain).

If you look at Buddhism, for example, it originally was a criticism of the totality of sensory experience -the 'five skandhas' or sensory aggregates of seeing, taste, touch, thought, etc.) The monk was enjoined to know that this defined the totality of knowledge, and to abandon it. What is 'beyond' that is never explained, put into words, or talked about, because that so easily lends itself to 'conceptual proliferation'. ("That of which we cannot speak.....")

The point about classical philosophy was that it also in some sense took you to the border of what can be empirically known and points to what is beyond it. That's what metaphysics is. (Kant, for instance, with his 'conditions of knowledge'.) I know already that for most of us, this 'beyond' is unintelligible, that it's woo. But that's precisely because of the move made above, to limit what amounts to knowledge to what can be weighed, measured, and the rest of it. Our culture no longer has a lexicon to describe that beyond, hence, 'woo', 'thar be dragons' (although, as we see, metaphysics also has a way of re-imposing itself, or, as Gilson said, 'philosophy buries its undertakers'.)

Anyway -as I said upthread, when h. sapiens becomes a meaning-making and meaning-seeking being, which surely co-developed with language and tool use over the achingly long millenia of pre-history, the we are simply no longer like other animals. I mean, after all, it culminates in the amazing built environment, which is in no way a better class of beehive, is it.

They should be as surprising as human digestive tracts behaving in much the same way as chimp ones. Or humans and chimps consisting of complex cells with similar internal structures. — fdrake

Right. Again it's worth reading Russel's Darwinism Applied to Man (from where my earlier quote was taken.) He obviously fully endorses natural selection to account for the anatomical structure of h. sapiens (being to co-discoverer of it), and compares it in detail with that of the great apes. But then he goes on to argue that natural selection can't account for mathematical skill or musical talent and many other capacities of mankind:

The special faculties we have been discussing clearly point to the existence in man of something which he has not derived from his animal progenitors--something which we may best refer to as being of a spiritual essence or nature, capable of progressive development under favourable conditions. On the hypothesis of this spiritual nature, superadded to the animal nature of man, we are able to understand much that is otherwise mysterious or unintelligible in regard to him, especially the enormous influence of ideas, principles, and beliefs over his whole life and actions. Thus alone we can understand the constancy of the martyr, the unselfishness of the philanthropist, the devotion of the patriot, the enthusiasm of the artist, and the resolute and persevering search of the scientific worker after nature's secrets. Thus we may perceive that the love of truth, the delight in beauty, the passion for justice, and the thrill of exultation with which we hear of any act of courageous self-sacrifice, are the workings within us of a higher nature which has not been developed by means of the struggle for material existence.

He then goes on to argue for ontological discontinuities between mineral, plant, organism and self-conscious beings:

The next stage is still more marvellous, still more completely beyond all possibility of explanation by matter, its laws and forces. It is the introduction of sensation or consciousness, constituting the fundamental distinction between the animal and vegetable kingdoms. Here all idea of mere complication of structure producing the result is out of the question. We feel it to be altogether preposterous to assume that at a certain stage of complexity of atomic constitution, and as a necessary result of that complexity alone, an ego should start into existence, a thing that feels, that is conscious of its own existence.

Which of course anticipates Nagel's 'what is it like to be a bat', not to mention Chalmer's 'hard problem of consciousness. They're all facets of the same issue - and an issue, mind you, which Daniel Dennett must deny the reality of, demonstrating it's possible not to comprehend it at all.

better reasoning rather than spiritualist or religious claptrap; the better angels of our nature removed all further need for their namesake. — fdrake

'Better reasoning' culminating in what. What is apotheoses for homo faber? I'll tell you what - it's the (forlorn hope) of the conquest of space in lieu of 'going to heaven'. The cosmos is now interpolated into the conceptual category previously assigned to divinity, and science to religion. 'Cosmos', said Sagan, 'is all there is'. (Pity we now know we can only account for 4% of it.)

Regarding 'mysticism' as 'irrational nonsense' - Meister Eckhardt is impeccably rationalist, ditto most of the platonic mysticism of medieval Christendom. Scotus Eriugena was able to translate ancient Greek works in the 'dark ages' in 7th Century Ireland - these people were not simple enthusiasts or fakirs

What I think you're expressing is what Nagel was talking about when he speaks of 'fear of religion':

Rationalism has always had a more religious flavor than empiricism. Even without God, the idea of a natural sympathy between the deepest truths of nature and the deepest layers of the human mind, which can be exploited to allow gradual development of a truer and truer conception of reality makes us more at home in the universe than is secularly comfortable.

The thought that the relation between mind and the world is something fundamental makes many people in this day and age nervous. I believe this is one manifestation of a fear of religion which has large and often pernicious consequences for modern intellectual life.

In speaking of the fear of religion, I don't mean to refer to the entirely reasonable hostility toward certain established religions and religious institutions, in virtue of their objectionable moral doctrines, social policies, and political influence. Nor am I referring to the association of many religious beliefs with superstition and the acceptance of evident empirical falsehoods. I am talking about something much deeper—namely, the fear of religion itself. I speak from experience, being strongly subject to this fear myself: I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well informed people I know are religious believers. It isn't just that I don't believe in God and, naturally, hope that I'm right in my belief. It's that I hope there is no God! I don't want there to be a God; I don't want the universe to be like that.

My guess is that this cosmic authority problem is not a rare condition and that it is responsible for much of the scientism and reductionism of our time.

Evolutionary Naturalism and the Fear of Religion.

I get it, but I'm not scared of religion. I've negotiated terms of surrender.

Another feature this highlights is that explanations need not tell the 'whole story', whereas reductive explanations, when right, must. — fdrake

I see what you're saying here, but I think you miss an important role of what is commonly considered under the umbrella of 'reductionism', and that is to act itself as a context, or constraint. To say, for example, "mental activity reduces to neural activity" is not necessarily to say that "by studying neural activity we can derive a complete account of mental activity". It more acts as a re-enforcement of parsimony, to say "don't, in our description of mental activity, develop models which are inconsistent with neural activity because that's the only thing we have any reason to believe mental activity reduces to". Reductionism, at its best, acts as a very long leash to loosely tie models of more complex systems to those beneath them which work well and on which we have good reason to think they supervene.

I'm trying to understand what's behind it all, where that belief originates, because I'm sure it originates in something real, but something very difficult to realise and understand. — Wayfarer

Exactly. You've prejudiced your own investigation. You've dismissed the possibility that it's not "something real, but something very difficult to realise and understand", and what's worse you extend that prejudice to others on the same path of investigation. Others who might, for now at least, be erring more towards the idea that what's behind a belief in God might just be a biological artifact, a cultural imposition, or any other physicalist explanation. Rather than engage with these people within the joint framework we share (the one prior to your subjective 'feeling' that it originates in something real, but something very difficult to realise and understand.), you presume that framework and insist the fault is ours for not tackling the investigation from the same starting point as you.

Empiricism amounts to the elevation of the senses to the sole criteria for valid knowledge (along with predictive power and replicability — Wayfarer

It's not about the uniqueness of the criteria, it's about the criteria itself. You say elevation to the 'sole' criteria, but what you really mean is development of any criteria at all. If you want to make an argument that correspondence with the sensate world, along with predictive power and replicability, should not be the sole criteria for valid knowledge, then what other criteria do you suggest?

I have a description in mind which I think explains 'the way things are' . Against what do I now measure it to provide the justification required to class it as knowledge?

Rational thought/logic? - Well we'd first have to demonstrate the soundness of those measures, then we'd have to explain why two people, both invoking such metrics could be completely at odds with each other and remain so despite thousands of years of open discussion.

Intuition? - Suffers from exactly the same problem, my intuition says one thing, yours another, now what?

The canon of previous thought on the matter? - Apart from issues of self-referentiality, how would such a canon ever be expanded if all it could say were things already approved by it?

Shared experience? - This goes back to what @fdrake has already said about the fact that the sciences are perfectly adept at managing shared experience.

It's not that scientists fear religion. It's that mystics fear science. They fear it removing the haze of self-referential, shape-shifting woo that they've made a lifestyle out of claiming to be expert in. At the end of the day, I'm interested in the philosophical positions, but psychologically, it just comes down to a perceived shortcut to the social kudos being an expert draws. Science is hard investigative work and it's possible to be wrong. Mysticism just takes a bit of reading and you can't be wrong.

It's the meaning. Your thinking has a ceiling on it, delimited by empiricism - exactly what a smart ape might think, pardon my impudence. — Wayfarer

I'm quite happy to be a smart ape. You don't seem to be. You want more. Luckily what apes as smart as us can do, think; how we are; is very very rich indeed.

When I said before that we only accept what can be weighed, measured, felt, sensed (including by instruments) this is what I mean. Empiricism amounts to the elevation of the senses to the sole criteria for valid knowledge (along with predictive power and replicability). — Wayfarer

Now you're making me into a bogeyman. Since you said you've read a lot of my posts, I thought you'd maybe noticed that I really like Heidegger and Spinoza; an arch-critic of instrumental rationality and naive empiricism and a full blown rationalist, both of them do metaphysics. I like philosophy!

The majority of the challenges I have brought against you in this thread have been conceptual. Mysticism vs reason as thinking styles, arguing against the claim that science is reductive, we even quoted from the same author at different points; we even made similar points about instrumental rationality (but we very very disagreed about where it comes from and what to do with it).

So I don't find it likely that I'm so blinkered I can't hope to understand how you see things.

But then he goes on to argue that natural selection can't account for mathematical skill or musical talent and many other capacities of mankind: — Wayfarer

Why would it ever need to? Natural selection can't account for why I trim my beard like I do. Therefore evolution is false? It's just (most likely) irrelevant to the theory.

A persuasive story goes that natural selection amplifies the presence of adaptive capabilities in populations of organisms over time (when they remain adaptive, when the ecology and communities within pose the same problems); development of the frontal cortex comes along with greater degrees of abstraction ability and language skills - tool use comes at some point, and we play like lower primates (who also make noises in play, and mock each other...). You put tools and play and high-order language together; whether it comes through a the evolution of a discontinuous presence/absence of a feature that allows recursive grammars or through a more gradual amplification primate abstractive ability doesn't matter; the ingredients are there. The rest? That's history. Literally history.

The point about classical philosophy was that it also in some sense took you to the border of what can be empirically known and points to what is beyond it. — Wayfarer

Science is never just about what can be empirically known, it's about what can be conceptually derived from or speculated about given what is known or suspected... Reason always points beyond the boundaries of experience; like memory and imagination do. Reason? A highly abstracted and linguistically mediated cognitive practice implicated with our episodic memory (prefrontal cortex declarative knowledge stuff) and anticipatory mechanisms (mirror neurons/internal state modelling). That it allows us to discover the true nature of existence is a buy one get one free offer from the trait shop.

Our culture no longer has a lexicon to describe that beyond, — Wayfarer

I find it difficult to believe this; our culture has charted different orders of infinity, has understood the universe from the first moments to its eventual death, when people get bored at work they invent entire fictional universes in day dreams. Humans are both inscribed in reality and a fold within it.

The next stage is still more marvellous, still more completely beyond all possibility of explanation by matter, its laws and forces.

What kind of idiot would expect mechanical laws of particle motion to explain the evolution of sensory mechanisms?

$F=m\text{OW ME LEG!}$


Well, probably some physicists imagining that the universe's dynamics are as simple as those they can test by manipulating state variables... See previous stuff I wrote about reductionism. That you think this is a limit of reason itself rather than something people who have reasoned poorly (here) believe is baffling to me.

Reductionism, at its best, acts as a very long leash to loosely tie models of more complex systems to those beneath them which work well and on which we have good reason to think they supervene — Isaac

I agree with you broadly; mind depends on brain (in some ways), brain depends on mind (in some ways); but I don't like supervenience very much at all.

What supervenes on what is always the question. So, you can jury rig a concept like "neural correlate" to do anything you like, so much so that it provides no explanatory power or conceptual insights over and above the brute stating of "when things in this register change there is a change in things of that register". That paper I referenced earlier, say, argued that psychological symptoms of PTSD (mind states) can remain unchanged even when neural architecture/hormone chemistry related to them changes. At that point you can say something like "well, the overall brain state still must have changed" or "the symptom is a type of brain state and not a token, and we only want token-token dependence between mind states and brain states" (which afaik is what happens)... It's just a rabbit hole devoid of any how questions (or generalisations from procedural descriptions), it's sitting there like it's waiting for something. Anyway. Rant.

It's just a rabbit hole devoid of any how questions (or generalisations from procedural descriptions), it's sitting there like it's waiting for something. — fdrake

Absolutely. I agree but I think it's far more of a problem invented by philosophers because it 'could be' the case than an actual problem in science that is the case. If one were to examine neural states and say "state X is PTSD", then say "The patient's brain is in state X1, and so despite his reports he cannot be suffering from PTSD", we'd be making a huge mistake, but I don't see anyone really doing that, it's a bit of a bogeyman. Maybe you've read papers I've not, it's quite possible, but in my field (psychology), I haven't really come across any concerning attempts to claim explanatory power from discoveries in neuroscience (which I kind of take to be the science psychology is loosely tied to). The overwhelming majority of neuroscience is medical, focussed on curing diseases, very little explanatory conclusions really come out of it, but that may just be my personal filtering system making that seem the case.

I agree but I think it's far more of a problem invented by philosophers because it 'could be' the case than an actual problem in science that is the case. — Isaac

but I don't see anyone really doing that, it's a bit of a bogeyman. — Isaac

This is an aside, but it's interesting. I agree with you that the token-token stuff doesn't correspond to, or shed light on, any scientific stuff; I also think the scientific stuff rarely sheds light on it (due to how fungible supervenience relations are). I think reductionism can be a big problem in psychology though, especially clinical psychology.

Maybe you've read papers I've not, it's quite possible, but in my field (psychology), — Isaac

I've read some stuff in clinical psychology that heavily criticises the naive application of the (diagnosis->treatment) paradigm in bodily health to mental health; since it promotes treatment methodology that just doesn't work. The individual level variability of mental health aetiology is so great, and the diagnoses interact so much (depression with anxiety as a comorbidity or anxiety with depression as a comorbidity anyone?), and the medication targets neurochemistry rather than psychological state (by necessity), "you're depressed? take prozac", "you're in chronic pain? try this exercise program!"; it's applying a billiard ball style reductive explanation (like germ theory) to interventions in crazy complicated complex systems, and as is predictable it doesn't work so well. And it's not necessary, since the patient is literally right there with self reports.

I've read some stuff in clinical psychology that heavily criticises the naive application of the (diagnosis->treatment) paradigm in bodily health to mental health; since it promotes treatment methodology that just doesn't work. The individual level variability of mental health aetiology is so great, and the diagnoses interact so much (depression with anxiety as a comorbidity or anxiety with depression as a comorbidity anyone?), and the medication targets neurochemistry rather than psychological state (by necessity), "you're depressed? take prozac", "you're in chronic pain? try this exercise program!"; it's applying a billiard ball style reductive explanation (like germ theory) to interventions in crazy complicated complex systems, and as is predictable it doesn't work so well. And it's not necessary, since the patient is literally right there with self reports. — fdrake

At the risk of veering wildly off topic, I think there's a lot of threads to this which are not necessarily to do with reductionism. The one which is - the over-emphasis on neurochemical correlates with metal health - I agree with you about, although I can't speak with authority (I'm social psychology, not clinical), but I think the extent to which it is the result of reductionist thinking is smothered by those 'other threads' to this. Chemical interventions are the only ones which are marketable and so where the research money gets invested. Chemical interventions are easier to control-trial and so make better papers. Reliance on self-reports and what we call 'person-centred therapy', despite their really high success rate, challenge the traditional doctor-patient epistemic dynamic which many practitioners find uncomfortable. There's more, but so very unrelated to the topic...

Basically is reductionism is a problem (and it might be a small one, I don't want to deny it entirely), I think is is going to be impossible to tell beneath all the layers of social structure which favour apparent reductionism regardless of the philosophical commitments of the practitioners themselves.

There's more, but so very unrelated to the topic... — Isaac

Yes!

all the layers of social structure which favour apparent reductionism — Isaac

Yes!

We could talk about this elsewhere sometime if either of us can be bothered.

We could talk about this elsewhere sometime if either of us can be bothered. — fdrake

Yeah, good. If only I wasn't kept so busy being forced to write obloquial retorts to all the mystics, fakirs, and hyper-rationalist wisenheimer that seem to fill these threads I might actually spend time discussing something interesting!

If you want to make an argument that correspondence with the sensate world, along with predictive power and replicability, should not be the sole criteria for valid knowledge, then what other criteria do you suggest? — Isaac

Now there’s a term paper in epistemology.

Others who might, for now at least, be erring more towards the idea that what's behind a belief in God might just be a biological artifact, a cultural imposition, or any other physicalist explanation. Rather than engage with these people within the joint framework we share (the one prior to your subjective 'feeling' that it originates in something real, but something very difficult to realise and understand), you presume that framework and insist the fault is ours for not tackling the investigation from the same starting point as you. — Isaac

'rather than discussing it in a framework familiar to me', you mean. If it can't be reduced to the kinds of terms that physicalists can comprehend, then you say I'm talking about a 'subjective feeling'. But to try and explain why it's not a subjective feeling, requires you think outside the square that you wish me to step into.

'm quite happy to be a smart ape. You don't seem to be. You want more. — fdrake

Something other; simian=/=sapien

I thought you'd maybe noticed that I really like Heidegger and Spinoza; an arch-critic of instrumental rationality and naive empiricism and a full blown rationalist, both of them do metaphysics. — fdrake

I have never studied Heidegger and at my stage in life, am not expecting to, but I have read some points that resonate with me:

With its strict division between selves and the world, subjects and objects, or mind and nature, this picture sets us against the world, in effect treating it as alien to us. And it is a bad picture, since in reality, Heidegger argues, we and the world cannot, even notionally, exist without one another: “self and world” are not “two beings”, but mutually dependent.

This seems to me to resemble a lot of what I have argued in the quantum mechanics threads. It's also very similar to Buddhist philosophy.

Science is never just about what can be empirically known, it's about what can be conceptually derived from or speculated about given what is known or suspected... — fdrake

The general view as I understand it, is that data derived from empirical experience (including instrumentally-enhanced experience), and logical and mathematical treatments of such data, provide the exclusive source of all authentic (scientific) knowledge. Am I wrong in thinking that?

What kind of idiot would expect mechanical laws of particle motion to explain the evolution of sensory mechanisms? — fdrake

Daniel Dennett, in one of his characteristic remarks, assures us that “through the microscope of molecular biology, we get to witness the birth of agency, in the first macromolecules that have enough complexity to ‘do things.’ ... There is something alien and vaguely repellent about the quasi-agency we discover at this level — all that purposive hustle and bustle, and yet there’s nobody home.” Then, after describing a marvelous bit of highly organized and seemingly meaningful biological activity, he concludes:

"Love it or hate it, phenomena like this exhibit the heart of the power of the Darwinian idea. An impersonal, unreflective, robotic, mindless little scrap of molecular machinery is the ultimate basis of all the agency, and hence meaning, and hence consciousness, in the universe."

Evolution and the Illusion of Randomness, Steve Talbott.

So - do you think Dennett is an idiot? Lest I'm accused of 'attacking straw men', this is what I have in mind.