They may have stopped threatening Galileians with torture, but they continue appointing Cartesians to the Royal Court!

If I understood that comment, I’d probably criticize it.

If I understood that comment, I’d probably criticize it. — Wayfarer

Why let mere incomprehension stop you? Others here are unconcerned by such trivial impediments.

Well I wouldn’t shed a tier over it.

I've been looking at the essay on your profile page. That's what I'm talking about. The blind-spot is not a consequence of objectivism and physicalism, but rather - of an assertion that subjectivism has absolute primacy; such that humans believe they can use science as a tool while ignoring the picture of reality science paints, dot by tiny factual dot.

It begins with Galileo - who formulated scientific method in order to prove the earth orbits the sun, and was threatened with torture and forced to recant, was found grievously suspect of heresy and held under house arrest for the rest of his life. Meanwhile, his contemporary, Descartes - using an argument that can only be described as sophistry, asserted the primacy of the subject - in a manner consistent with emphasising the spiritual and reviling the profane, and he was appointed to the Royal Court of Queen Christina of Sweden.

Nagel is a subjectivist - and now recipient of:

The 2021 Nicholas Rescher Prize for Systematic Philosophy — Wayfarer

Hence:

They may have stopped threatening Galileians with torture, but they continue appointing Cartesians to the Royal Court! — counterpunch

Right! That helps a lot.

I noticed your impassioned response against my purported ‘subjectivism’ in one of our recent exchanges. But I stand by it. Michel Bitbol’s observation about ‘the blind spot’ is both physiologically and analogically accurate. Physiologically, because there really is a blind spot, where the optic nerve joins the eye, which you never notice until it’s pointed out by way of the blind spot test.

The reason it’s analogically accurate is not nearly so simple to explain, but equally true. First, let me observe that Galileo’s treatment by the Catholic Church had nothing to do what what is discussed in that essay by Bitbol. Yet, it’s the first thing you mention. Why is that? What is the connection?

What is at issue is not that ‘subjectivism has absolute primacy’ at all. Rather, it’s the belief that science is ‘the umpire of reality’, that science alone can tell us what is real, what is worth paying attention to. That is so ingrained in our culture that it, like the blind spot, can’t even be discerned, unless you know how to look for it.

There is no ‘picture of reality’ that science paints, dot by dot. There are multiple fields of enquiry, now proliferating beyond any hope of individual comprehension. The idea that there is a supreme truth ‘out there somewhere’ which we’re advancing on, dot by dot, or research paper by research paper, is a quaint hope, in a world where the hardest of hard sciences now seriously entertains the Many Worlds interpretation of Hugh Everett III as the likely meaning of physics.

Science is a tool, or rather, the means of discovering many tools, which are indispensable and crucial to amelioration of the multiple crises we face. But science cannot solve the crisis of meaning. That is mostly what Nagel writes about.

Philosophy and subjectivity didn't begin with Descartes. The ancient Greeks, Chinese and Indians recognized that subjectivity or the mental was something substantial that needed to be dealt with. Seems like modern critics of the hard problem think that Descartes put philosophy on the wrong path and all it takes is to point that out and the problems go away or something. They don't.

The blind-spot is not a consequence of objectivism and physicalism, but rather - of an assertion that subjectivism has absolute primacy; such that humans believe they can use science as a tool while ignoring the picture of reality science paints, dot by tiny factual dot.

It begins with Galileo - who formulated scientific method in order to prove the earth orbits the sun, and was threatened with torture and forced to recant, was found grievously suspect of heresy and held under house arrest for the rest of his life. Meanwhile, his contemporary, Descartes - using an argument that can only be described as sophistry, asserted the primacy of the subject - in a manner consistent with emphasising the spiritual and reviling the profane, and he was appointed to the Royal Court of Queen Christina of Sweden. — counterpunch

:fire: :clap: Eppur si muove ...

Right! That helps a lot. I noticed your impassioned response against my purported ‘subjectivism’ in one of our recent exchanges. But I stand by it. Michel Bitbol’s observation about ‘the blind spot’ is both physiologically and analogically accurate. Physiologically, because there really is a blind spot, where the optic nerve joins the eye, which you never notice until it’s pointed out by way of the blind spot test. — Wayfarer

Physiologically, sure! Physically, there is a blind-spot. It's where the term blind spot comes from! Analogically too, there is a blind-spot, but the essay is completely wrong about its nature and cause.

The reason it’s analogically accurate is not nearly so simple to explain, but equally true. First, let me observe that Galileo’s treatment by the Catholic Church had nothing to do what what is discussed in that essay by Bitbol. Yet, it’s the first thing you mention. Why is that? What is the connection? — Wayfarer

"Many of us like to think that science can give us a complete, objective description of cosmic history, distinct from us and our perception of it. But this image of science is deeply flawed. In our urge for knowledge and control, we’ve created a vision of science as a series of discoveries about how reality is in itself, a God’s-eye view of nature. Such an approach not only distorts the truth, but creates a false sense of distance between ourselves and the world. That divide arises from what we call the Blind Spot, which science itself cannot see. In the Blind Spot sits experience: the sheer presence and immediacy of lived perception."

I mention the trial of Galileo because it's where the divergence between science as a tool, and science as a description of reality begins - and because this is the true nature of the blind-spot. The essay claims: "Many of us like to think that science can give us a complete, objective description of cosmic history, distinct from us and our perception of it." But the Church asserted the exact opposite by arresting Galileo. Descartes jumped on board with both feet. He withdrew a work on physics from publication, and instead made an argument in Mediations on First Philosophy that methodologically, is presented in terms of sceptical doubt (such that falls at the first cut of Occam's Razor) to arrive at views consistent with religious orthodoxy; and he was showered with gold while Galileo remained imprisoned. The rest of Western philosophy piled in behind Descartes - and justified science used as a tool in the Industrial Revolution, and for military power, without any regard to a scientific understanding of reality.

So who are these "many of us [who] like to think that science can give us a complete, objective description of cosmic history, distinct from us and our perception of it." They're certainly not making decisions in government or industry, because it was only this time last week they even acknowledged the reality of climate change?

What is at issue is not that ‘subjectivism has absolute primacy’ at all. Rather, it’s the belief that science is ‘the umpire of reality’, that science alone can tell us what is real, what is worth paying attention to. That is so ingrained in our culture that it, like the blind spot, can’t even be discerned, unless you know how to look for it. — Wayfarer

No, no - here's another quote from the essay:

"Behind the Blind Spot sits the belief that physical reality has absolute primacy in human knowledge, a view that can be called scientific materialism."

It's very clear what he's saying, and it's also quite clear that the absolute opposite is true - and has been since science as a tool, was divorced from science as an understanding of reality by the trial of Galileo. If you think otherwise, please explain why, 150 years after Galileo's trial - Darwin was attacked and ridiculed, and remains under attack to this day!? Explain why, in 2008 - Craig Venter was attacked for "playing God" for creating artificial life in the lab? Explain why, technology is still applied for power and profit - and not as a scientific understanding would suggest it should be applied, assuming we want to continue to exist?

The ancient Greeks, Chinese and Indians recognized that subjectivity or the mental was something substantial that needed to be dealt with. — Marchesk

Granted, but in contrast to what? Galileo developed scientific method to contrast with revelation as a means to truth, and Descartes immediately rubbished it, by using a radically unscientific method to assert the primacy of the subject. And Descartes got the gold and the glory while Galileo got threatened with torture, death and everlasting damnation.

Philosophers, according to a source I chanced upon, is about knowing more and more about less and less until there comes a point when a philosopher knows everything about nothing.

What's your take on the above damning report on philosophers?

By the way I'm "more than happy" for the esteemed Thomas Nagel. I put the quotes there because the late comedian George Carlin has issues with being "more than happy", it seems or he points out that being "more than happy" is a rather stupid thing to say because what exactly does it mean?

I would like to discuss his "what is it like to be a bat?" if you're game. Are you?

I have a simple argument about the non-physical nature of consciousness and it starts with a simple memory stick/pen drive (it seems I have a fetish but that's another story). Anyway, I remember plugging my pen drive into my computer to copy a movie that I had just downloaded. The information on the screen showed that the pen drive had 0 bytes of data - I had just formatted it. I then proceeded to cut and paste the movie to the pen drive and as the file copy window displayed the progress I just sat there and waited, impatiently of course. In a matter of a few minutes the copy command was complete. I looked at the screen and the display read 6.56 GB of 8 GB free - the movie was now in the pen drive but...here's what's interesting to me...as far as I could tell, neither the mass nor the volume of the pen drive had changed and nor could I use the pen drive to heat up my tea that had gone cold. In other words, there was something in the pen drive but it wasn't physical (no mass/volume change was detected and no net energy gain was noticeable to the extent that my knowledge of science informed me). The movie was definitely not physical.

It's my contention that a similar argument can be made for the brain/mind. Over the years that we live and experience the world (after attaining physical maturity of course), we gather "information" about the world but our brains neither gain mass nor do they expand in volume and too there's no net change in energy of the brain. Clearly, at the very least, information isn't physical and the best guess I can offer is that like data on a pen drive are simply a matter of configuration of tiny magnets, the mind/consciousness could also be simply a functional/material configuration of neurons and their supporting structures and that implies, in my opinion, that mind uploading - transferring consciousness from brains onto suitable media - could be possible but, above all, it implies that consciousness isn't physical.

What say you?

Your argument implies the opposite. Your argument suggest that consciousness is a consequence of the configuration of the brain. Can you download your movie without a pen drive? Can you put it in a bucket? No, it has to be configurable hardware.

configuration of the brain — counterpunch

A configuration isn't physical. Imagine 3 balls, one red, one green and the other blue. A configuration would be some kind of permutation/combination of these balls but there's no net energy, mass, volume difference between these configurations.

The scientific method doesn't include subjectivity in its theories, even though that's how we all experience the world. Whatever consciousness is and however it fits in with the world science describes, that fact can't be wished away by blaming Descartes.

A configuration isn't physical. Imagine 3 balls, one red, one green and the other blue. A configuration would be some kind of permutation/combination of these balls but there's no net energy, mass, volume difference between these configurations. — TheMadFool

Right, but what you're asking me to do, is imagine three balls - and then take them away, and suppose there's some substance of configuration still there.

Right, but what you're asking me to do, is imagine three balls - and then take them away, and suppose there's some substance of configuration still there. — counterpunch

We could copy the configuration onto another (synthetic) brain or other appropriate analog. It would be like an artist creating the exact painting (the configuration of shapes and colors) on two different media (one on canvas and the other on paper for instance). Carbon copying? Xerox machines?

The scientific method doesn't include subjectivity into its theories, even though that's how we all experience the world. Whatever consciousness is and however it fits in with the world science describes, that fact can't be wished away by blaming Descartes. — Marchesk

But science does account for subjectivity - admittedly, as an obstacle to understanding to be accounted for and subtracted from the objective, but there's observer bias, the Hawthorne effect, the placebo effect - all sorts of ways in which subjectivity is accounted for in science.

Right, but the configuration doesn't exist of itself; it exists as a configuration of three balls, a pen drive, a brain. What's at issue here, ultimately, is this:

"Elementary particles, time, genes and the brain are manifest to us only through our measurements, models and manipulations. Their presence is always based on scientific investigations, which occur only in the field of our experience."

If that's the case - how do we know we're not just brains in jars, being fed sensory data we mistake for reality? How do we know we're not in the Matrix? If we assume we are not in the Matrix, we have to assume the primacy of the objective, if only on the basis of the chronology of the question. Consciousness evolved from inanimate matter. If consciousness is subjective - where did it come from? The spirit realm?

Right, but the configuration doesn't exist of itself; it exists as a configuration of three balls, a pen drive, a brain. What's at issue here, ultimately, is this:

"Elementary particles, time, genes and the brain are manifest to us only through our measurements, models and manipulations. Their presence is always based on scientific investigations, which occur only in the field of our experience."

If that's the case - how do we know we're not just brains in jars, being fed sensory data we mistake for reality? How do we know we're not in the Matrix? If we assume we are not in the Matrix, we have to assume the primacy of the objective, if only on the basis of the chronology of the question. Consciousness evolved from inanimate matter. If consciousness is subjective - where did it come from? The spirit realm? — counterpunch

Red herring is all I can say.

Red herring is all I can say. — TheMadFool

No thanks, I had cereal!

No thanks, I had cereal! — counterpunch

:rofl: Thanks for the discussion and to be honest I didn't quite catch your drift.

Analogically too, there is a blind-spot, but the essay is completely wrong about its nature and cause. — counterpunch

So what is it really?

But science does account for subjectivity - admittedly, as an obstacle to understanding to be accounted for and subtracted from the objective, — counterpunch

‘Blind spot? What do you mean, ‘blind spot?’

Great. Good to know I haven't made a difference!

Philosophers, according to a source I chanced upon, is about knowing more and more about less and less until there comes a point when a philosopher knows everything about nothing. — TheMadFool

Funny, I thought it said ‘scientist’. Silly me!

Analogically too, there is a blind-spot, but the essay is completely wrong about its nature and cause.
— counterpunch

So what is it really? — Wayfarer

Its the difference between science as a tool, and science as an understanding of reality. We use the tools, but pay no attention whatever, to science as an understanding of reality. See: climate change!

‘Blind spot? What do you mean, ‘blind spot?’ — Wayfarer

It's from the essay on your title page. The question rather, is what that essay means by blind spot? I simply disagree with that essay.

I suggest that if there is a "problem with science" it's not the assumption of an objective physical reality that exists independently of our experience of it. And it's not exclusion of the subjective - by virtue of such an assumption, but rather the divorce of science as a tool from science as a description of reality by Cartesian subjectivism in defence of religiosity.

But science does account for subjectivity - admittedly, as an obstacle to understanding to be accounted for and subtracted from the objective, but there's observer bias, the Hawthorne effect, the placebo effect - all sorts of ways in which subjectivity is accounted for in science. — counterpunch

The problem with this idea, that subjectivity is accounted for by subtracting from, is that to be able to subtract the appropriate thing, we need to be able to accurately determine what subjectivity has added. Since what ought to be subtracted must be determined by some sort of process, and that process might itself be somewhat subjective, then the wrong thing might be subtracted. If the wrong thing is subtracted, then the proposed accounting for, is actually making the subjectivity worse, by subtracting the wrong thing.

This means that we need a good method to determine, in each application of the scientific method, what is being added in that particular instance, by subjectivity. If we use a scientific method to make that determination then there is subjectivity within that method, and it is very likely that we are actually adding to the subjectivity, rather than properly subtracting it.

You gotta love the top comment in the combox — Wayfarer

.....and the name of the commenter.

Descartes jumped on board with both feet. He withdrew a work on physics from publication, and instead made an argument in Mediations on First Philosophy that methodologically, is presented in terms of sceptical doubt (such that falls at the first cut of Occam's Razor) to arrive at views consistent with religious orthodoxy; and he was showered with gold while Galileo remained imprisoned. The rest of Western philosophy piled in behind Descartes - and justified science used as a tool in the Industrial Revolution, and for military power, without any regard to a scientific understanding of reality. — counterpunch

I’ve never encountered this reading of history before. The orthodox account is that Cartesian algebraic geometry was a crucial foundation for the ‘new science’ of Newton and Galileo. The other crucial element was the definition of primary and secondary qualities, with the former being those which were amenable to precise mathematisation and the latter being relegated to the mind of the observer. This set the stage for modern scientific materialism. As Nagel puts it in his 2012 book, Mind and Cosmos:

The modern mind-body problem arose out of the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, as a direct result of the concept of objective physical reality that drove that revolution. Galileo and Descartes made the crucial conceptual division by proposing that physical science should provide a mathematically precise quantitative description of an external reality extended in space and time, a description limited to spatiotemporal primary qualities such as shape, size, and motion, and to laws governing the relations among them. Subjective appearances, on the other hand -- how this physical world appears to human perception -- were assigned to the mind, and the secondary qualities like color, sound, and smell were to be analyzed relationally, in terms of the power of physical things, acting on the senses, to produce those appearances in the minds of observers. It was essential to leave out or subtract subjective appearances and the human mind -- as well as human intentions and purposes -- from the physical world in order to permit this powerful but austere spatiotemporal conception of objective physical reality to develop. (pp. 35-36)

This provides the context for what Michel Bitbol terms ‘the blind spot’, because in this picture, the ‘observer’ is bracketed out so as to arrive at the purely quantitative, scientific ‘view from nowhere’, to allude to the title of one of Nagel’s other books on this subject.

The crucial turning point in modern thought occurred with the ‘observer problem’ in quantum physics, which suddenly made it abundantly obvious that ‘the observer’ has rather a crucial role after all.

The problem of including the observer in our description of physical reality arises most insistently when it comes to the subject of quantum cosmology - the application of quantum mechanics to the universe as a whole - because, by definition, 'the universe' must include any observers. Andrei Linde has given a deep reason for why observers enter into quantum cosmology in a fundamental way. It has to do with the nature of time. The passage of time is not absolute; it always involves a change of one physical system relative to another, for example, how many times the hands of the clock go around relative to the rotation of the Earth. When it comes to the Universe as a whole, time looses its meaning, for there is nothing else relative to which the universe may be said to change. This 'vanishing' of time for the entire universe becomes very explicit in quantum cosmology, where the time variable simply drops out of the quantum description. It may readily be restored by considering the Universe to be separated into two subsystems: an observer with a clock, and the rest of the Universe. So the observer plays an absolutely crucial role in this respect. Linde expresses it graphically: 'thus we see that without introducing an observer, we have a dead universe, which does not evolve in time', and, 'we are together, the Universe and us. The moment you say the Universe exists without any observers, I cannot make any sense out of that. I cannot imagine a consistent theory of everything that ignores consciousness...in the absence of observers, our universe is dead'.

(Paul Davies, The Goldilocks Enigma: Why is the Universe Just Right for Life, p 271. Linde is one of the originators of 'inflation theory' of the Big Bang.)

There are of course enormous disputes over the meaning of quantum theory, which reinforces the point about the difficulties involved in separating objective and subjective when it comes to foundational theories.

As for Descartes wishing to ‘defend religious orthodoxy’, I’ve never encountered that idea, if you have any sources for it I would be interested in following it up.

Returning to the philosophical mundane, here is an appropriate passage on Nagel from Wikipedia:

Nagel is probably most widely known within the field of philosophy of mind as an advocate of the idea that consciousness and subjective experience cannot, at least with the contemporary understanding of physicalism, be satisfactorily explained using the current concepts of physics.

I agree. :smile:

I’ve never encountered this reading of history before. The orthodox account is that Cartesian algebraic geometry was a crucial foundation for the ‘new science’ of Newton and Galileo. The other crucial element was the definition of primary and secondary qualities, with the former being those which were amenable to precise mathematisation and the latter being relegated to the mind of the observer. This set the stage for modern scientific materialism. — Wayfarer

Galileo's Trial for heresy was 1634. Descartes didn't publish Meditations until 1641. Galileo had already made the necessary distinctions between subject and object to allow for scientific method in Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, before Descartes introduced subjectivism as the only certain truth in defence of religious thinking.

It was only because of what the Church did to Galileo, Descartes withdrew his essay on physics, "The World" from publication, and maintained throughout his life a subjectivist defence of the soul - that for example, in relation to his communications with Harvey, an English anatomist concerned with the function of the heart, clearly inhibited scientific advancement.

What if, instead of finding Galileo grievously suspect of heresy, the Church had welcomed Galileo as discovering the means to decode the word of God made manifest in Creation, and so afforded a scientific understanding of reality - the moral authority of God's word? Truth of Creation! Science would have been openly and enthusiastically pursued and integrated as an authoritative moral truth into political and economic decision making.

Instead, science was decried as heresy; stripped of anything but practical value - and used as a tool to drive the Industrial Revolution from 1730. All the while, for example, the Church burned people alive for witchcraft right through to 1792. If the Church had embraced Galileo, do you think that now, we'd be threatened with climate change, desertification, deforestation, overfishing, ocean full of plastics, etc, and be racing headlong for extinction? I'm not at all sure modern scientific materialism: the physical object to your spiritual subject, the scientific "is" to your religious "ought" is the unalloyed virtue you seem to think it is!