...time cannot be stopped, not even within a singularity
— ucarr

Here I disagree. If you throw a watch in a black hole, it doesn't stop indeed. It gets almosts instantly radiated away by Hawking radiation (the information, that is). — Hillary

Leonard Susskind won a debate with Hawking to the effect that 2nd law of thermodynamics is preserved through the singularity, and thus no info is permanently lost, which would include temporal info.

f you’re trying to distinguish between something you would want to call scientific method from your conception of the methods of inquiry typifying continental
philosophy, as that between experimental conjecture and received opinion, I would strongly suggest that no such distinction can be drawn. A philosophical account is no more or less tentative, and no more or less validated, than a scientific one. — Joshs

If a philosopher is not a Berkeley type idealist, s/he acknowledges the source of ideas being external, objective nature (holistically unified, or not), and thus probative investigation requires empirical journeys beyond the boundaries of the explorer's own mind.

If you want to counter by arguing no explorer can get completely beyond one's mental boundaries, then we're venturing into Idealism's skeptical POV on the empirical. Is that where you're coming from?

One god, in its most general sense, is precisely what is subjected to an authentically public scrutiny through experimental verification by countless
observers, because the shard [sic] commitment to a certain understanding of concepts like ‘observation’ and ‘experimental verification’ already presupposes a certain. metaphysics. In a certain historical era of science, this made God and scientific truth synonymous. — Joshs

Sounds like herein you place your faith in Kant's transcendental idealism, which has the mind's conceptualization limits & biases shaping our view of nature via a priori intuition.

Well, Kant's claims about space & time (the foci of this theory) being necessarily rendered to us by a priori intuition hinges upon discarded Newtonian physics. We now know, in the wake of Einstein, that space & time are out there, impacting our world quite beyond the boundaries of mind.

If a philosopher is not a Berkeley type idealist, s/he acknowledges the source of ideas being external, objective nature (holistically unified, or not), and thus probative investigation requires empirical journeys beyond the boundaries of the explorer's own mind.
— ucarr

Sounds like herein you place your faith in Kant's transcendental idealism, which has the mind's conceptualization limits & biases shaping our view of nature via a priori intuition.

Well, Kant's claims about space & time (the foci of this theory) being necessarily rendered to us by a priori intuition hinges upon discarded Newtonian physics. We now know, in the wake of Einstein, that space & time are out there, impacting our world quite beyond the boundaries of mind. — ucarr

Einstein’s work was fully compatible with Kantian Idealism, while Newton was following Descartes.

If you want to counter by arguing no explorer can get completely beyond one's mental boundaries, then we're venturing into Idealism's skeptical POV on the empirical. Is that where you're coming from? — ucarr

This is what I have in mind. It is indebted to Kant but it is not Kantian idealism. It is Pragmatism and phenomenology:


“ "I follow the trajectory that arises in the later Husserl and continues in Merleau-Ponty, and that calls for a rethinking of the concept of “nature” in a post-physicalist way—one that doesn't conceive of fundamental nature or physical being in a way that builds in the objectivist idea that such being is intrinsically of essentially non-experiential. But, again, this point doesn't entail that nature is intrinsically or essentially experiential (this is the line that pan-psychists and Whiteheadians take). (Maybe it is, but I don't think we're now in position to know that.) All I want to say for now (or think I have grounds for saying now) is that we can see historically how the concept of nature as physical being got constructed in an objectivist way, while at the same time we can begin to conceive of the possibility of a different kind of construction that would be post-physicalist and post-dualist–that is, beyond the divide between the “mental” (understood as not conceptually involving the physical) and the “physical” (understood as not conceptually involving the mental).

“Many philosophers have argued that there seems to be a gap between the objective, naturalistic facts of the world and the subjective facts of conscious experience. The hard problem is the conceptual and metaphysical problem of how to bridge this apparent gap. There are many critical things that can be said about the hard problem (see Thompson&Varela, forthcoming), but what I wish to point out here is that it depends for its very formulation on the premise that the embodied mind as a natural entity exists ‘out there' independently of how we configure or constitute it as an object of knowledge through our reciprocal empathic understanding of one other as experiencing subjects. One way of formulating the hard problem is to ask: if we had a complete, canonical, objective, physicalist account of the natural world, including all the physical facts of the brain and the organism, would it conceptually or logically entail the subjective facts of consciousness? If this account would not entail these facts, then consciousness must be an additional, non-natural property of the world.

One problem with this whole way of setting up the issue, however, is that it presupposes we can make sense of the very notion of a single, canonical, physicalist description of the world, which is highly doubtful, and that in arriving (or at any rate approaching) such a description, we are attaining a viewpoint that does not in any way presuppose our own cognition and lived experience. In other words, the hard problem seems to depend for its very formulation on the philosophical position known as transcendental or metaphysical realism. From the phenomenological perspective explored here, however — but also from the perspective of pragmatism à la Charles Saunders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey, as well as its contemporary inheritors such as Hilary Putnam (1999) — this transcendental or metaphysical realist position is the paradigm of a nonsensical or incoherent metaphysical viewpoint, for (among other problems) it fails to acknowledge its own reflexive dependence on the intersubjectivity and reciprocal empathy of the human life-world.
(Evan Thompson)

Knowledge is taken to consist in a faithful mirroring of a mind-independent reality. It is taken to be of a reality which exists independently of that knowledge, and indeed independently of any thought and experience (Williams 2005, 48). If we want to know true reality, we should aim at describing the way the world is, not just independently of its being believed to be that way, but independently of all the ways in which it happens to present itself to us human beings. An absolute conception would be a dehumanized conception, a conception from which all traces of ourselves had been removed. Nothing would remain that would indicate whose conception it is, how those who form or possess that conception experience the world, and when or where they find themselves in it. It would be as impersonal, impartial, and objective a picture of the world as we could possibly achieve (Stroud 2000, 30). How are we supposed to reach this conception?

Metaphysical realism assumes that everyday experience combines subjective and objective features and that we can reach an objective picture of what the world is really like by stripping away the subjective. It consequently argues that there is a clear distinction to be drawn between the properties things have “in themselves” and the properties which are “projected by us”. Whereas the world of appearance, the world as it is for us in daily life, combines subjective and objective features, science captures the objective world, the world as it is in itself. But to think that science can provide us with an absolute description of reality, that is, a description from a view from nowhere; to think that science is the only road to metaphysical truth, and that science simply mirrors the way in which Nature classifies itself, is – according to Putnam – illusory. It is an illusion to think that the notions of “object” or “reality” or “world” have any sense outside of and independently of our conceptual schemes (Putnam 1992, 120).

Putnam is not denying that there are “external facts”; he even thinks that we can say what they are; but as he writes, “what we cannot say – because it makes no sense – is what the facts are independent of all conceptual choices” (Putnam 1987, 33). We cannot hold all our current beliefs about the world up against the world and somehow measure the degree of correspondence between the two. It is, in other words, nonsensical to suggest that we should try to peel our perceptions and beliefs off the world, as it were, in order to compare them in some direct way with what they are about (Stroud 2000, 27). This is not to say that our conceptual schemes create the world, but as Putnam writes, they don't just mirror it either (Putnam 1978, 1). Ultimately, what we call “reality” is so deeply suffused with mind- and language-dependent structures that it is altogether impossible to make a neat distinction between those parts of our beliefs that reflect the world “in itself” and those parts of our beliefs that simply express “our conceptual contribution.” The very idea that our cognition should be nothing but a re-presentation of something mind-independent consequently has to be abandoned.”
(Dan Zahavi)

Must have been bitter champagne for Hawking. He bit his tires!

Recently, Strominger et. al. have dine some heavy cakculationd: soft hair! Some barbers. I could have told them though. It seems so obvious.

Your elaboration of gnarly issues pertaining to the subject/object question shows clear & thoroughgoing scholarship on your part. I find what you've written very instructive and I understand myself to be a beneficiary of insightful readings & ruminations by you. I'm grateful for the time & effort you've expended in the writing of this latest post.

David Chalmers' Hard Problem of Consciousness is sparking current & exciting work in consciousness studies, and maybe you have fashioned a berth for yourself therein.

Many philosophers have argued that there seems to be a gap between the objective, naturalistic facts of the world and the subjective facts of conscious experience. — Joshs

I see that one of the big problems in bridging the gap is language. Subjective facts tries to express some realities of the observing self i.e., the personal POV, but it is blatantly a literal oxymoron because if subjectivity is factual, then it's objective, thus a general public of observers can perceive it in consensus, but, as we know, you're using Subjective facts in contrast with Objective facts.

I'm beginning to see your position overall as a heavily QM-influenced conceptualization & understanding of the hard problem; I'm thinking it's center is entanglement at the human scale.

see that one of the big problems in bridging the gap is language — ucarr

Thanks to language I have actually closed the gap. If I didn't speak with other people and read things I doubt this would have been the case.

Or do you mean the gap between people, speaking different languages?

Einstein’s work was fully compatible with Kantian Idealism, — Joshs

How can that be? Einstein saw spacetime as a real substance. Didn't Kant see it as an ideal, whose real being we can't know?

Thanks to language I have actually closed the gap. If I didn't speak with other people and read things I doubt this would have been the case. — Hillary

So... you've solved the hard problem. This is good news. Please share your solution with us.

So... you've solved the hard problem. This is good news. Please share your solution with us. — ucarr

Letmme give it a shot. The problem arises directly in the monist approach and indirectly in the dualist approach. The problem in the monist approach seems obvious. If we choose either mind or matter the fundamentals of reality, it's hard to explain their opposites. Impossible actually. Very hard!

We get somewhat closer to the truth if we combine the two monisms to form a powerful double, the dual. But new clouds rise in the dual blue sky. The clouds that block the Sun tell their rainy tale. We have rightly posited two monisms to be the basis of nature, but wrongly put them together as separate. If we consider them simply as belonging to the same elements, we see the Sun breaking through and a rainbow appear. The pot with gold shining is the magic stuff we were looking for! It explains consciousness, matter and their interconnectedness. Matter depends on mind, mind on matter.

We have rightly posited two monisms to be the basis of nature, but wrongly put them together as separate. If we consider them simply as belonging to the same elements, we see the Sun breaking through and a rainbow appear. — Hillary

Yin and Yang dualism!

Get the picture? Both Ying and Yang would be hopelessly lost.

Both Ying and Yang would be hopelessly lost. — Hillary

In each other? Cosmic romance.

In each other? Cosmic romance. — ucarr

:grin:

That's an even better view! Ying and Yang hopelessly lost in each other. The new unifying dualism. Presented her on Tee-Pee-Fee...eeehh.... Tee-Pee-eeF!

The new unifying dualism. Presented her on Tee-Pee-Fee...eeehh.... Tee-Pee-eeF! — Hillary

:up:

Matter depends on mind, mind on matter. — Hillary

Wouldnt it be more satisfying to be able to see mind and matter as each in its own right possessing attributes that were formerly only seen in the other? Your approach, in Kantian fashion , maintains the split but makes each dependent on the other. What is needed is a way to get beyond the split, by making creative differentiation and transformation intrinsic to matter, and by understanding subjective feeling as having a kind of causality or logic.

Wouldnt it be more satisfying to be able to see mind and matter as each in its own right possessing attributes that were formerly only seen in the other? Your approach, in Kantian fashion , maintains the split but makes each dependent on the other. What is needed is a way to get beyond the split, by making creative differentiation and transformation intrinsic to matter, and by understanding subjective feeling as having a kind of causality or logic. — Joshs

Agree.

Let's consider, to get the taste, the simplicity of the early universe. Consider particles to be geometrical hyperspherical structures. Three dimensions of a 6D space curled up to Planck circles forming a tiny 3D closed structure, like a circle on a cyilinder forms a closed 1D spherical structure. The 1D circle moves in 1D only. Likewise, the 3D spherical Planck volumes move in three dimensions, the space around us. We can fill the Planckian volumes with physical charge. Seven kinds of them. The nature of charge is a great mystery in the world of physics. No physicist has an idea, and can't have an idea, of what it truly is. Let's call these charges mind charge. The vacuum is filled with virtual particles. Two kinds. Those used for the two basic massless matter fields, charged with various kinds of mindcharge. The compete set of charges can be specified but that go to far for a filosophy site. Suffices to know that their are two (again, the dual!) kinds of charges, attractive and repulsive. Mindcharge couples to the omnipresent virtual spectrum messenger particles. These contain mindcharge themselves, like the colored and supercolored charge, present in gluon messengers and supergluon messengers, or are mindcharge free, like the photon messenger. The two real basic massless mindcharges couple to the virtual messenger field (which can couple again to the two virtual basic massless matter mindcharge particles, which can couple again to the virtual messengers, etc. a bootstrap kind of interplay) to reach out to likes or anti likes.

To be continued. In the next episode we'll focus our attention to the origin of the real mindcharges in the primordial thermodynamically timeless (but filled with fluctuating time) 5D quantum vacuum to understand how TD time emerges together with a 3D time, and we'll try to get a better understanding of the duality.

Seeeeeeya next time! And remember, the gods are watching you! Make them laugh, make the cry, either way, you try!

What is needed is a way to get beyond the split, by making creative differentiation and transformation intrinsic to matter, and by understanding subjective feeling as having a kind of causality or logic. — Joshs

What you describe sounds to me like partial deconstruction of enlightenment scientific method back to modulated animism & also reinvigorated belief in instinct & intuition. Together these cultural currents appear to be slanting towards a mild version of postmodernism.