There's a grave danger of angry dolphins here. It might be clearer if I take issue with this:

The argument style I find most persuasive for physicalism is causal closure. If you find that A causes B, it's hard to explain how phenomena of type A could impact phenomena of type B without type A and type B having shared causal structure. Like brain lesions and memory, serotonin and happiness, or light and magnetism. — fdrake

Now I find it still a bit unclear what you are suggesting here - of course if we find that A causes B, then by that very fact type A and type B having shared causal structure. But if you are saying that all we need to find, in order to assert causation, is a pattern such that A occurs and B occurs, then I very much disagree. And not just because correlation does not imply causation, but because cause is a very much more complicated issue than this - and I'd refer you to Anscombe's paper for details. What causes what is very much an issue of how we chose to describe events, not just of correlations.

I also do not think that intentional accounts provide a theory of how brains function. I think it pretty clear that there will be no structure found in one's brain that corresponds to one's belief that Sydney is in Australia.

As a consequence I do not think that propositional attitudes are reducible to any sort of brain structure.

But if I've understood you, you seem to think that some similarity in structure between a network of propositional attitudes and brain structures would imply a causal connection, that is, intentions would be reducible to brain structure.

And this seems to be where we differ.

But if I've understood you, you seem to think that some similarity in structure between a network of propositional attitudes and brain structures would imply a causal connection, that is, intentions would be reducible to brain structure. — Banno

I'm not really trying to imply any of that. We can just leave the reduction issue for later, I think.

But if you are saying that all we need to find, in order to assert causation, is a pattern such that A occurs and B occurs, then I very much disagree. — Banno

What I'm saying is that you can establish that type X entities have causal relations with type Y entities without necessarily finding a specific type X entity which has a causal relation with a type Y entity. As an example, societies and the bodies of people living within them.

They're different types of entities, a society can be a democracy but a person cannot. They have different predicate classes which may apply to them.

An argument would go:

1 ) If a societal change impacted a person, it would impact their body's state.
2 ) All societal changes impact persons.
3 ) All person changes impact bodies.
Conclude 4 ) All societal changes impact some bodies

Just assume this argument is sound for illustration purposes. It would show that societal changes supervene on bodily changes. without showing that any particular societal change depended upon any particular body change. It'd just be bloody weird if all the people's bodies stayed the same if, say, a country went to war. The people would move places, people would get stressed and die... Those require bodily processes to work.

That argument also doesn't express a bridge law (unless there's a suppressed premise), since there's no societal property which ensures a bodily property or vice versa.

I think what this illustrates is that if property class X supervenes on property class Y, that can hold without it being established that there is a particular property P in X and a particular property Q in Y such that such that:

some (x) [ (x is P iff x is Q ]

IE, supervenience without establishing bridge law.

At this point I'm trying to talk about supervenience and reduction in general, rather than about propositional attitudes and brainstates. I also agree that propositional attitudes don't reduce to brainstates.

We can just leave the reduction issue for later, I think — fdrake

Well, it seems not, since you go on to talk of bridge laws and supervenience.

Anomalous monism amounts to denying that there are bridge laws between brains and intentional attitudes.

My inclination is to agree with this. But I'm not sure if you agree, or not.

Anomalous monism amounts to denying that there are bridge laws between brains and intentional attitudes. — Banno

I agree that there aren't bridge laws between brains and propositional attitudes. I'm not convinced the latter exist in the way they're purported to.

I have no doubt that if you search biology journals the term "eyes" would appear far less frequently than the terms "cells" or "genes." But would this entail that biology has eliminated the concept of eyes?

I'll just throw out there that even the Neo-Russelians, people who have committed a substantial part of their careers and thus their lives to trying support the general thrust of Russell's argument, don't think the "appeal to use in the advanced sciences," premise is either true, or that if it were true that it would support Russell's conclusion.

Consider also how speculative arguments about the role of information in physics and metaphysics go back quite a long way. But through Russell's era, and a good deal after, one would have been hard pressed to find many references to "information" in physics journals. Now the term is everywhere, information theory a major component of the field. And yet information theory itself was developed in the special sciences, with Shannon drawing heavily of philosophical work that had been done earlier.

What about 'energy' or 'force'? — Janus

Sure, I gave you the links, go ahead and type them in and see what you get.

The result is much the same: "cause" occurs about two orders of magnitude less often than other key terms in physics.

Two orders of magnitude. If "cause" is a key concept in physics, it's one that's scarcely mentioned.

It's not the people doing physics making use of "A causes B" in their work, but the folk who talk about what physicist do: the methodologists and philosophers. And it's a gross oversimplification. As can be seen in your short list of examples.

I'm not convinced the latter exist in the way they're purported to. — fdrake

And I'm not sure how they are purported to exist. Another thread, sometime.

it's a gross oversimplification. — Banno

It's a perfectly valid English expression, obfuscated by Betrand Russell in support of his own philosophical agenda.

'Don't mention the cause....' :worry:

Yes, I think it makes sense that we cannot and maybe sometimes should not go for the most reductive explanations. I don't think of science as having a goal toward explaining things in increasingly reductive or decomposed ways. — Apustimelogist

I feel as though something needs to be said about physical reductionism and it's place in culture. One of the quotations I often fall back on is from Thomas Nagel's 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. — Mind and Cosmos, Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False, Thomas Nagel, Pp35-36

This 'poweful but austere spatiotemporal conception of objective physical reality' comprises the basis of what is generally described as the modern scientific worldview. Although science itself has already overflowed those bounds on many different fronts, it still retains considerable if not always obvious influence in philosophical discourse: that what is real are the objectively-measurable attributes of the kinds of entities that science is able to analyse. 'The subject' was bracketed out of this reckoning at the very outset. (The quotations that @Joshs provided in this post both diagnose and remedy this issue from the perspective of phenomenology and embodied cognitive science.)

This view is at the back of many of the arguments in favour of physical reductionism, as to admit an alternative philosophy is to have to defend some form of dualism or philosophical idealism and their attendant metaphysical baggage.

It's a perfectly valid English expression, obfuscated by Betrand Russell in support of his own philosophical agenda. — Wayfarer

Meh. You have no argument.

Just to be clear, my target is the sort of thinking found in 's Op, and in simplistic suppositions in this thread that mind is caused by brains. the way causation is treated in science is way more sophisticated than such accounts imply, and even more so in our accounts of our everyday actions. The notion of non-reductive supervenience only gives a rough outline of what might be going on. The outcome is hopefully an account of mind in a physical world that does not rely on the nonsense of idealism.

So yes, it is in your face, Wayf. As in, it runs against what you have been proposing hereabouts.

The outcome is hopefully an account of mind in a physical world that does not rely on the nonsense of idealism. — Banno

As long as an organizing contribution of a subject can be detected in the description of physical phenomena, then a species of idealism is at work.

Another thread, sometime. — Banno

:up:

Something that is important to physicalism is the question of how does the brain hold some specific item of subject matter. One model could be than it is somehow encoded directly into specific brain matter but I don't think that is how it works. Help me out if you know more.

My guess is there is some rather complex mental architecture going on that can project and modify non-physical objects.

An example of a problem would be how your brain encodes the number 5 and the number one million. There doesn't seem to be a proportional increase in the mental effort so how is it done.

That would be something like Popper’s ‘promissory materialism’, would it not? Popper coined this term to critique a particular stance within the philosophy of mind. This stance holds that physicalist explanations for all mental phenomena will eventually be found, even if current scientific understanding falls short. Popper saw this as a kind of "promissory note" – a belief in future explanations based on physicalism, despite a lack of current evidence or understanding. It is difficult to disentangle from scientism, the view that empirical science constitutes the most authoritative worldview or most valuable part of human learning to the exclusion or marginalization of any other perspective. Like promissory materialism, scientism assumes that science will eventually provide answers to all questions, including those traditionally addressed by philosophy, the humanities, or religions.

The cardinal difficulty with both views is that it neglects or ignores a fundamental starting axiom of scientific method, which is limiting the scope of enquiry to the realm of objective fact, and in so doing, also disregarding the role of the scientist in choosing which questions to pose and how they should be posed. And that can’t be dealt with by the idea of emergence, because in that paradigm, the very faculty which poses the questions is supposed to be the outcome or effect of some prior and presumably physical causal chain, by some unknown means - which we’ll work out in future, promise! — Wayfarer

I'm not arguing for science able to prove everything, just as it is impossible for you to say that it won't. Your argument kind of requires science to not be able to, which in itself is equally absolute in its claim. With how, through the history of science, breakthroughs often were preceded by claims that science would never prove a thing that then got proven, the probability of science answering something still lies in its favor based on its previous history compared to anything else.

But outside of that, as I said, I'm not arguing that it will prove everything, I'm saying that it is by far the best probability to work path for any kind of searching for answers about reality. If you were to choose a path to go in search of truth and answers, why would you choose something that relies on less than the rigor that science provides? It looks more like you try to force any argument in favor of science to fall under dogmatism in order to conclude it wrong.

It may be, as I wrote in my argument, that we may never be able to measure or find answers that directly links between low complexity and emergent properties. It may be that because how extreme the numbers get, there can never be anything more than a holistic conclusion of emergentism through the holistic observation of all systems in nature.

So I'm not saying that "the answers will come", I'm saying that the reason I position myself as a physicalist emergentist is because it finds most of its roots in verifiable science while acknowledging an observation about reality that can be found everywhere we look.

If we did find an answer, some equation that defines just how a growing complexity eventually form emergent properties, it may be part of a fundamental understanding that expands from answering how reality works, to consciousness, to complex mechanisms in biology and so on. But that's not the same as saying it will definitely happen.

But equally the evidence for emergent properties are not entirely unknown, they're observable everywhere. It's just that drawing a deterministic line between the parts and the properties haven't been done and might not be able to be done based on how complex it gets.

My central argument is simply to argue that science holds the most valid ground for finding answers to these questions. And I question how anyone can position other methods as better systems to reach those same answers. If you ask a question about reality, why would you use an alternative method? Why would you present a theory with less observable parts? Physicalist emergentism draws from what we actually observe everywhere, in almost every field of science there's observations of these phenomena.

Remember, physicalist emergentism is not really reductionism. Just so you understand that difference. And physicalist emergentism is closer to modern science than reductionism, which was closer to how science functioned in the past. More and more scientists today incorporate emergentism into their framework, rather than a reductionist one.

What would you suggest be a better position?

Notice the scope of that claim - not about those things which are objectively measurable and about which we may arrive at inter-subjective agreement, but anything. So here science is being presented not only as an authority, but as a moral authority.

Maybe (as I suspect) that's a claim that scientists themselves would not make, regardless it is true that science is looked to as the 'arbiter of reality'. — Wayfarer

Again, in order to find answers to questions about why reality is what it is, how consciousness functions and so on, what method would you go by? What would your strategy be? What position would you use as a framework of thought?

You argue in a way that feels more like an attack on science because it works too well for answering these kinds of questions. But it does not change the fact that if you attempt to answer them in any other way, you deviate from knowledge that functions as universal for all.

I can see that you don't like how well it works, but what would you replace it with? What's the alternative in your book?

Something that is important to physicalism is the question of how does the brain hold some specific item of subject matter. One mobel could be than it is somehow encoded directly into specific brain matter but I don't think that is how it works. Help me out if you know more. — Mark Nyquist

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hebbian_theory

Read the words of Hume and awake from your slumbers! You have nothing to lose but your chains! :D

Supposing science uses cause, that does not then in turn mean that causation is real. Further if cause is real then that could even be read as a strike against physicalism given the Transcendental Idealist interpretation of causation -- even if cause is real it could be that physicalism is false.

Yes, neural networks seem the right direction.

I have some reservations though, a puzzle piece but a lot more is going on.

I'm not agreeing that the brain does it like a computer does it. Something seems really off.

Maybe it is okay. On large scales you can have things like feedback and loops. Don't know...

...a puzzle piece but a lot more is going on. — Mark Nyquist

Sure. There is lots more to look into, and our technology is crude next to the complexity to be understood.

You argue in a way that feels more like an attack on science because it works too well for answering these kinds of questions. But it does not change the fact that if you attempt to answer them in any other way, you deviate from knowledge that functions as universal for all. — Christoffer

But that is the very essence of 'scientism' (link to wikipedia.) Note the sinister overtones of 'deviating from knowledge'.

I think your arguments are influenced by what Thomas Nagel describes in his essay, Evolutionary Naturalism and the Fear of Religion. (Nagel is not a religious apologist, and that essay is written from the perspective of analytical philosophy. I can provide a reference to it if need be.)

As long as an organizing contribution of a subject can be detected in the description of physical phenomena, then a species of idealism is at work. — Joshs

I think I follow - can you say some more?

Then explain it to me.

I think he is suggesting that our conventional understanding/description of the world is based on premises as contestable as those of idealism. It is us who organise and interpret the world, so when we arrive at a model of reality this itself is like a form of idealism. But I have asked for more to check on how this tracks with Joshs.

ALL IS ENERGY.

I liked Nagel's book, but it occured to me that the problem goes back even further, to Plato and the Pythagoreans. Way back with the Republic, we get the idea that the knowledge of mathematics is of a higher type, the standard to which all knowledge must aspire.

Because mathematics hadn't been successfully applied to the world yet, Plato decided there was simply something wrong with the world. That wasn't a fatal problem, because we could still get to the mathematical truths through our mind.

The modern period is defined by the success of applying mathematics to the world, and over time Plato gets inverted. Now there is no problem with the world, it exemplifies perfect mathematical beauty, but with the the mind.

Plato, on some readings, ends up quasi-elimintivist on the world. It is, in a crucial way, less real. Modern thought ends up quasi eliminitivist on the mind in the same way. Even Hume's matters of fact/relations of ideals (roughly Kant's synthetic/analytic) mimics Plato.

The history is instructive in that I think Plato, and later Plotinus, Porphery, Proclus, Augustine, etc. resolve this idea with their principle of non-dualism and unity, elements of Platonism that do not appear in the inverted modern views as much.

We don't need to suppose that "science," as a whole, uses cause. One cannot get through a science degree without having heard the mantra of "correlation does not entail causation," hundreds of times. Compare that to the idea of constant conjunction.

Take Cartwright's example of TIAA, some life insurance provider for teachers. Members of TIAA tend to live longer. This is because of traits that teachers tend to have, the fact that the job is not particularly dangerous, that they are less likely to smoke, etc.

You can't tell me that there is not a scientific explanation for why filling out a form for TIAA does not cause people to live longer in the way that their quitting cigarettes will cause them to live longer on average. Or that there is no difference in the way effective medical treatments such as antibiotics cause infections to clear up, versus how snake oil works.

The problems with cause become acute precisely in those situations where one want to make absolutely global descriptions that have no external frame and engulf the description itself. This is why it was so intuitive for 19th century thinkers to make "natural laws," external Platonic entities that act on the world from outside it. But we have good reason to believe these problems might be broader conceptual issues not even specific to cause, but to self-reference. This is why they are a problem for Hume, because he's primarily thinking of the broadest aspects of natural philosophy.

As with the concept of "truth," I think people have been far to quick to say "if we can't currently formalize it and figure out problems with it, if old theories have holes, then it doesn't exist/is meaningless/a pseudo problem." If we did this with other areas of inquiry we'd have long since decided life, mind, spacetime, etc. all don't exist.

As for Hume waking us up, I've always thought Hume was too good for his own good. If I take all his arguments seriously, I have to allow that some force me to reject others, and that I actually have absolutely no good reason for thinking Hume can teach me anything about anything, or even that a person named David Hume ever existed... or that I exist... If Hume is right, then I shouldn't believe him.

ALL IS ENERGY. — boagie

Not first thing in the morning

The modern period is defined by the success of applying mathematics to the world, and over time Plato gets inverted. Now there is no problem with the world, it exemplifies perfect mathematical beauty, but with the the mind. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Perhaps a relevant aspect of the inversion - I'd say contra Plato's anamnesis, that we are all born ignorant and we are all going to die only somewhat less ignorant.

(Not that I know much about Plato's thinking that hasn't come from secondary and tertiary sources.)
@Fooloso4

Not first thing in the morning — frank

No energy until coffee.

I feel as though something needs to be said about physical reductionism and it's place in culture. One of the quotations I often fall back on is from Thomas Nagel's 2012 book, Mind and Cosmos. — Wayfarer

This 'poweful but austere spatiotemporal conception of objective physical reality' comprises the basis of what is generally described as the modern scientific worldview. Although science itself has already overflowed those bounds on many different fronts, it still retains considerable if not always obvious influence in philosophical discourse: that what is real are the objectively-measurable attributes of the kinds of entities that science is able to analyse. 'The subject' was bracketed out of this reckoning at the very outset. (The quotations that Joshs provided in this post both diagnose and remedy this issue from the perspective of phenomenology and embodied cognitive science.)

This view is at the back of many of the arguments in favour of physical reductionism, as to admit an alternative philosophy is to have to defend some form of dualism or philosophical idealism and their attendant metaphysical baggage. — Wayfarer

I was talking about general explanations appropriate to their respective scales of being as opposed to mind-physical reduction.

I don't have the same issue as put forwarx in your quote because I simply don't believe that subjective experiences can be explained and so they don't really have a role in any of our explanations anymore than they already do in psychology. The only explanations we have are the kind of functional ones that cannot apply to experience.



One thing you have to understand is that because of the hard problem, it is impossible for there to be an intuitive connection between how brains work in a mechanistic manner compared to how we experience the world.

I think its less about trying to explain what minds are doing as we directly experience them and toward just finding neuronal architectures and objective functions that will lead to reasonably realistic replications of behavior that humans can do. The most you can do is correlate neural behavior and experiences or behaviors. There is no assumption of some kind of interaction with non-physical things. Obviously, many people will find this unsatisfying but for me, replicating complex behavior, finding information information processing principles is enough. We can't do more than that.

But that is the very essence of 'scientism' (link to wikipedia.) Note the sinister overtones of 'deviating from knowledge'.

I think your arguments are influenced by what Thomas Nagel describes in his essay, Evolutionary Naturalism and the Fear of Religion. (Nagel is not a religious apologist, and that essay is written from the perspective of analytical philosophy. I can provide a reference to it if need be.) — Wayfarer

No, it seems that you fear science more than I fear religion.

The reason I don't think religion has merits for factually describing anything is primarily due to what psychology tells us about biases and our pattern seeking functions. We are absolutely slaves to pattern interpretations in everything around us. Even our vision is mostly based on interpreting between slow input data rather than functioning as a camera. We form an interpretation of our sensory information and we generate not only perception through this, but also ideas. Without externalizing our methods of gathering factual information, a logical summery of data we collect and logical rationalization through math and secondary observations, we are absolute slaves to emotional interpretations and imagination that blurs our ability to form actual truth about the world around us.

This is what form religious explanations about reality; attempts to explain something without the tools to disconnect from our pattern interpretations and biases, and that generates absolute bias through our emotions, absolute skewing of our ability to rationally reason.

But that still doesn't make me fear religion because religion is part of our psychology. Humanity has just not matured out of mixing together factual statements with the psychological needs in religion. In my opinion, religion should focus on building rituals, traditions, meditation, emotional exploration etc. and get rid of any attempts to explain how reality functions because it has had no observed positive result of ability to do so throughout history. Whenever I observe someone trying to produce conclusions through a religious lens it is so absolutely crystal clear how that reasoning acts through their biases, through their emotional need for something to be a certain way and how all the logic is constructed around defending that belief rather than accepting reality for what it observably is. It is basic psychology that drives it and the lack of insight into these psychological processes seems to be responsible for making it impossible to explain anything outside of their realm of thinking due to them being fundamentally driven by those personal needs and perspectives.

In order to try and understand your viewpoint I read through your essay on philosophical idealism and it seems that your antagonism against any argument in favor of science is rooted in verifying this philosophical stance. It seems that you cannot accept what I say because that would negate your conviction about philosophical idealism. This is why you effectively strawman all I say about science into framing it as a dogmatic belief system rather than reading my actual points. And it seems you look at only a fraction of research, through a summery that all science is just reductionism.

But the process of science, the methods, the framework and praxis are not the same as only one field or philosophical position, and it is not defined by any bad actors throughout the history of science. Just as I explained about religious perspectives above, people in science can fail just as much because, as I mentioned, all people follows human psychology. And bad players in science will skew and produce similar religious dogmas around their perspectives as well. That does not equal the framework and method being the problem, that is culture, not science, and just summarize it as a "culture of science" and attaching a negative framing around it just forms a guilt by association; since some acts as zealots of science, science itself is the problem. That is the core problem in reasoning I spot when interpreting your counter argument to what I write.

It's like the waiter blaming math for you not able to count your money correctly when trying to pay for dinner, it makes very little sense.

But to adress the argument you've made for idealism in order to contextualize further:

In your argument you start off with a thought experiment about the inability to picture a landscape in all perspectives at once. But this is not anything that counters physicalist perspectives. We don't argue that what we observe with our senses is the all there is to describe reality. Observations simply means all that can be registered about reality. If we use measurements of microwave data from space, that is nothing we can ever perceive but it's still part of our perspective in understanding reality. Scientists do not require our human based perception to understand the abstract answers data gives us.

You can look at it as how we've discovered that when you use a hammer, our brain manifest an extension of our body to incorporate the hammer into our motor control; we essentially manifest extensions of our existence into whatever tool we handle. This extends to our thinking; if you understand the data, the tools to picture reality outside of our human perception, you do not think about reality in the same way as someone not learned in those mental tools. Why else do you think that theoretical physicists are able to come up with their concepts? All of the notable ones imagined and pictured reality far beyond the realm of human perceptions; they didn't start with math, they view the world in a different mindset which guides them towards how to formulate math to prove it. Simply focusing on our human perceptions of our surrounding reality, how we relate to reality, dismiss the ability of some to think in abstract ways about the reality that others aren't able to by their lack of similar "mental language". The fact that we have people who did just this and then verified the logic of their thinking with math after the fact, proves the ability of us to extend our perception beyond mere Gestalts.

But what we know of its existence is inextricably bound by and to the mind we have, and so, in that sense, reality is not straightforwardly objective.

Yet it is. You argue only for human perception, observation through our senses and how that forms our instinctual mental projection of reality. A musician does not observe music in the same way as a non-musician. A painter does not view the world in the same way as a non-painter. The ability of abstract thinking beyond the bounds of a mind dependent on Gestalts, depends on the "mental language" tool that extends it. What we know about reality is not limited by our perception programing if we then acknowledge the limitations we have. Our perception programmed mind is not equal to an inability to picture reality for what it is, it is just a limitation of direct observation. So we can construct methods that extends our ability to understand reality beyond anything based on Gestalts.

This oversight imbues the phenomenal world — the world as it appears to us — with a kind of inherent reality that it doesn’t possess. This in turn leads to the over-valuation of objectivity as the sole criterion for truth.

This is false. Science does the exact opposite. Our biases and our basic human perception of reality is included within research as negative properties to exclude when forming objective conclusions. The inclusion of such human perspectives are there to pinpoint where are limitations are so as to not skew the objective conclusion that's made. It's one of the most important parts of research in any field.

But it's easy to form such an argument seen as how discoveries are shaped in the form of Gestalt-based concepts. But this is done to simplify initial introductions to scientific discoveries. It's how it's explained initially to other scientists in order to form a basic guide and reference before they head into the actual details. It's also there in all journalism reporting on scientific discoveries. It is, however, not in the trenches of actual research. When you act within research itself, there are no Gestalts because the aim is to reach objective truth, not the simplified interpretation aimed at communication of the ideas. Those are two distinct different things. But the public, non-scientists, misinterpret science as only being these wild simplified and expressive conclusions. Just like how the atom is drawn everywhere in this simple graphical drawing with defined object features (Gestalts), while the real thing features quantum properties that cannot be visualized outside their inherent abstractness, which is what scientists are actually doing in research.

But it is not until all of these disparate elements are synthesized into Gestalts that meaning emerges.

Meaning is irrelevant to explain reality. Meaning is applied out of desperation for it, it is not part of how I view reality when utilizing facts outside of my limited perception and mental projection out of such perceptions. The act against incorporating "Gestalts" is part of good scientific research and practice. The meaning you refer to is what I described above, about simplified communication found mostly outside of science, where people not versed in scientific thinking, not versed in the "mental language" of understanding abstractions rooted in data, are required to understand the abstract concepts being presented. This is not science, this is pop-science and how the public understands it, not science itself and not the methods themselves. You mix these two together thinking Gestalts are required for understanding reality. They're only required for people not versed in science.

As a matter of fact, they exist only as claims made by sentient beings, with no material evidence to back up those claims. Indeed, brain scans reveal electrical activity, but do not display sensations or inner experience.

Which is why I argue for physicalist emergentism and not reductionism. Your critique against neuroscience, using this quote from Pinter, only focus on a reductionist principle. The modern and increasingly used explanation for our mind forming out of our physical being is rather rooted in a emergentist perspective, as I've explained. In essence, you get nothing from brain scans, you cannot get data on emergent properties as they require a full map of the complexity, which may or, more likely, is impossible to map due to computational limitations.

The problem is that arguments that use the lack of answers in science through criticizing its reductionistic approach, ignores that science in itself extends beyond just reductionistic perspectives. Emergent properties cannot easily be reduced to root causes, instead a shift in approach is required for science to research through an emergentist lens.

our cognitive construction of the world is not itself amongst the objects of the natural sciences, and so is deprecated by physicalism, even though, in a fundamental sense, the physical sciences depend on it. This points towards the fundamental contradiction in the physicalist conception of the world.

Science does not depend on it. And in a physicalist emergentist perspective it's no more different from other observations of reality. How for instance biological ecosystems exist as complex entities in themselves, but cannot be considered a thing in of themselves as they lack properties of what we constitute as "a thing". The mind therefor acts accordingly, as an emergent property that we can define as existing because of its consequences onto reality, but yet not able to be defined as a thing. That failure does not mean physicalism fails when working from a emergentist approach, since it acknowledge the existence of a featureless category of something as a result rather than some object. The idealist counter argument depends on the physicalist stance to only accept "things" as objects, which the emergentist approach does not. Going further, we could argue that everything is an emergent property based on fundamental probability rooted in mathematical starting points; that all steps of relations between physical processes from the Planck scale and up just form different scale levels of complexities that in turn form different scale levels of emergent properties that in turn form new complexities. That the reason we don't find clear connections between small and large scale physics is because we are unable to calculate the result of an emergent property with the individual parts that forms its necessary root complexity. Yet, I need no Gestalts to form an understanding of this concept. There's nothing in my human perceptional-trained mind that functions to formulate an idea about reality by my human standards, yet I perceive it anyway because I understand the language of its abstract nature.

Basically, understanding reality does not require objects as we perceive them and the non-material nature of the mind does not conflict with this understanding of reality. It's merely a standard of perspective. Maybe some are more versed in it than others, but I believe it to be trainable, just like becoming versed in a musical instrument.

... the way in which our technology– and science–dominated culture accentuates the division between mind and world, self and other. Coming to understand the sense in which ‘mind creates world’ offers a radically new perspective and way of exploring this division.

Such divisions aren't necessary and not all science treats it as such. This reads more like a simplification of science and especially ignores the emergentist approach in which there's no such type of divisions present.

"mind creates the world" becomes more of a dismissal of just one type of theory in science, or philosophical approach, rather than a definitive perspective. It's merely pointing out how we are limited in our perceptive perspective and how it limits our instinctive ability to understand reality, but it dismiss all the examples of when we are able to extend our thinking beyond our limited sensory formed internal projections. While ignoring that there's further versions of physicalist approaches than just the reductionist one, only using a limited perspective on science to prove a point that isn't really a point that argues against science, only pop-science interpretation of it.

Essentially, you argue for idealism, but when I try to find answers in your argument as to what would replace our scientific methods and approaches, all I can find is a simplification of science to make a point about our limited human mind. Something that in real scientific work is included for the exact reason of not skewing our answers by our limitations.

So once again, what other approach are you proposing we use to find answers about what reality is? If I argue that the physicalist emergentist approach seems to point at the most valid framework to think and experiment about reality because of how it relates to so much in science and of observations between different fields. Then what is your alternative to that?

Because painting science as some dogmatic field that somehow abuse its moral power onto the world, while having an idealism argument in which I couldn't find support for such ideas about abuse either, and also not providing any alternative to what I proposed as being our best method in pursuit of answers, and instead just form an argument that primarily dismiss what I say as scientism linked to a form of abuse of moral power over others in the world... just doesn't work. It just sounds like a desperate attack on science lacking actual substance to it.

It only proves that there's an emotional desperation of alternatives to science, to the point of trying to paint it as a moral power system used by people like me to control the world. It's almost a conspiratorial reaction to a simple claim that science, by its own merits, proves itself to be the best method in pursuit of answers. Especially since its very focus is on dismissing human biases and our simplistic understanding of reality. Features you focus on in your idealism argument. And with a physicalist emergentist approach, much of those plot holes you point towards in science as reductionism goes away, replaced by a better holistic perspective that features an internal logic. Science isn't just about experiments viewed through the lens of Gestalts, it's also about forming abstract frameworks and theories that guides the experiments, verifying ideas about reality that demand projecting past our limitations. In essence, the verifications layer into new understanding, further and further forming an understanding far beyond the limitations you argue about. And none of it features any promises of "future answers", all of what I'm talking about focus on the value of the method in practice, the approach of seeing past the limited perception of reality that we have as humans. A solution to the problem you describe, not affected by those limitations.

I have no fear of science. Your posts are too long to deal with.

Because mathematics hadn't been successfully applied to the world yet, Plato decided there was simply something wrong with the world. — Count Timothy von Icarus

That’s a little simplistic, don’t you think? The point of the passage from Nagel that I quoted is really rather simple: the separation of the observing mind and the world, and the seizing of the mathematically-quantifiable aspects of the world as the only real attributes. That is the basis of both Hume’s ‘is/ought’ problem, and the problem of consciousness (which are two facets of the same underlying issue.)