Where I disagree with Popper is that something needs to be falsifiable in order to be valuable on pain that history is not falsifiable, and that this is the only way we understand how science works — Moliere

That is why I like the modern systems approaches to history. Fukuyama for example offers the counter-examples that would inform this debate about how hierarchical social order should pan out.

There are horses for courses. But then also the deeper balancing principles show through.

So paraphrasing Fukuyama, he says the growing agrarian inequality within a Europe moving towards a continent of nation states and organised capital/property rights – a phase transition in terms of societies organised by the polarity of taxed masses and paid armies – sees a triadic balancing act with the king as its fulcrum.

The king is meant to do the double job of being the chief decider of the day to day but also God's representative of the long-term good here on Earth. There was not yet a proper institutional division of these powers that suited the new sovereign nation political formula – taxing agriculture for the surplus to feed the king's now centralised military. So kings struggled with this legitimacy problem and had to play off the aristocracy against the common folk.

Simply put, the dialectic balance from the king's point of view was deciding whether to side with the down trodden peasants or the entrenched aristocracy. Sweden and Denmark saw kings side with peasants when aristocrats were weak in 18th C. They pushed through land reform. But monarchs went the other way in Russia, Prussia and other parts east of the Elbe from 17th C. This saw the rise of serfdom with the collusion of the moneyed state.

Or giving a finer grain – more hierarchically fleshed out account – he says that during the general period of European state formation, the peasantry didn’t really count as it wasn't organised. The monarch just faced the three levels of social power in the nobility, gentry and the third estate. That is, the lords, small landowners and the city rich. So a four legged balancing act was emerging as industry joined agriculture as the new entropic driver of a nation and its taxable surpluses.

Fukuyama then details the four outcomes of this more complex industrial phase transistion happening even as the agricultural one was still playing out.

First was weak absolutism like the French and Spanish kings. Their nobility kept them in check. Russia manage successful absolutism as the nobility and gentry were tied into the monarchy in way that allowed the upper class to ruthlessly enslave and tax the peasant class.

Hungary and Poland he classes as failed oligarchies where the aristocracy kept the king so weak he couldn’t protect the peasants, who again got exploited to the hilt.

Then England and Denmark developed strong accountable systems with effective balances. Managed to organise militarily while preserving civilian liberty and property rights.

Beyond that, the Dutch republic, Swiss confederation and Prussian monarchy all add to the variety of outcomes seen.

So history does offer its retrospective test in that we can apply a dialectical (or rather triadic systems) frame on what occurred and find that it is all the same general dilemma getting solved in a natural variety of ways.

As the systems view emphasises, developmental histories are not deterministic. They are just constrained by the requirement to stabilise their entropy flows through optimising balances. Accidents of place and time just get either smoothly absorbed into the general outcome, or that particular historical offshoot goes extinct – absorbed into someone else's general entropic flow.

As to Prussia more particularly, Fukuyama says it makes the point that it matters which comes first, the state building or the democracy. Prussia was an example of a strong autocratic state arising before then opening up to modern democracy.

The UK and US were instead democratic ahead of becoming statist, so in fact had a lot of corrupt patronage until they both found social coalitions that could enforced reform. The US heard business complaining about the state of public administration, farmers complaining about the railways, urban reformers complaining about public infrastructure. All coalesced to force institutional change.

Fukuyama says Italy and Greece are soft states that got democracy without a matching internal competition to drive out corrupt public service tendencies.

Or for the fun of it, I will tack on a larger chunk of my notes from his masterful trilogy. The point is that dialectics might be a start. But where we want to end up is being able to see the dialectical difference at the hierarchical or systems level of what is truly general and what is properly accidental in a logic of evolutionary development. And a close study of history does reveal that in terms of the evidence of a set of counterfactuals.

Fukuyama on Hegel’s Prussian bureaucractic state….

The unification under Bismarck led to a stronger model of French state control. No democratic accountability but the Kaiser was only in charge through the filter of national law. Property rights and execution of justice were impartially enforced. This set conditions for rapid German industrialisation. Business could flourish in a stable regulatory setting.

Germany emerged out of a long struggle of fiefdoms, like China’s original Qin dynasty story. War was the organising need that led to meritocratic state order. Business is local in nature, but war is global driver.

Germany had become a fragmented landscape of “stationary bandits” - junkers - living off local peasants and fighting with hired mercenaries. In Prussia, a series of kings gradually centralised control after they started to maintain a standing army.

So control over money and command needed, and that caused the development of an efficient bureaucracy. Prussia became known as the army wth a country. King’s Calvanist puritan creed also a big influence as it led to state education and poor houses. Austerity imposed from the top.

But as Prussia tamed its neighbourhood, favouritism began to replace merit. Prussia lost its 1806 Battle of Jena-Auerstadt to the more modern Napoleonic army. Hegel saw Napoleon ride through Jena and said it was the arrival of fully modern rational state. Human reason become manifest, according to Phenomenology of Spirit and The Philosophy of Right.

In 1807, Prussia’s Stein-Hardenberg reforms saw noble privilege abolished and commoners allowed to compete for posts via public exams. The new aristocracy was based on education and ability over birth. Universities became the pathway to office.

So reforms like France, and like Japan’s Meiji Restoration. Commoners could now buy protected noble property. Social mobility created. The German notion of Bildung, or moral cultivation and education of the self, distilled Kant and other German rationalism.

Prussia was an autocratic and technocratic society, like Singapore. While it had a king, the new legal distinction between public and private meant that the sovereign ruled in the name of the global state - the wish of the people - in an abstracted sense that was enshrined in a scalefree national bureaucracy.

The bureaucracy became its own institutional statehood, with Royal line coming to be marginal. Hegel saw this as the rise of a universal class that represented the whole community.

Prussia’s unification of a Germany achieved in 1871 under chancellor Bismarck. His rule resisted both control by the Kaiser and also the calls for actual democracy. A technocracy in charge.

This became a problem after WW1 as the change to a federal democracy was weakened by the entrenched bureaucracy with its right wing and conservative character. This paved way for Hitler to take the reins. The military had become an isolated caste and stayed outside democratic control, used to being accountable to a Kaiser alone.

In the end, the bureaucratic service survived even the Nazis. Most Prussian civil servants were party members and got purged by the allies. But then had to be rehired to get post-war Germany going - p78.

So Germany - like Japan - got rational state ahead of democracy. Fukuyama says that works better and leads to sturdy, low corruption, tradition. Their industrial base also seems crucial though.

I really can't blame him for this because I don't think a cogent (consistent and compete) ontologically is possible. — Janus

Perhaps not, but we could go for at least consistency. I'm not keen on faith... depending on how it is understood.

Wayfarer claims he doesn't agree with Kastrup's "mind at large", which I would say is itself an incoherent idea, but he apparently cannot offer any coherent alternative. — Janus

I've addressed that, in Is there 'Mind at Large'?, which I think is coherent, even if @Tom Storm says it needs more detail. (I'm planning further installments. And re-visiting it, I think perhaps rather than invoking the spooky 'mind at large', I would just use the term 'some mind' or 'any mind' or 'the observer'.)

Philosophy itself ultimately consists in faith, not in knowledge or understanding in a scientific, mathematical or logical kind of sense. — Janus

I'd rather say that reason points to something beyond itself. But you will often say that anything that can't be understood in terms of maths or science is to be categorised as 'faith'.

I should remind you of Joanna Macy who drew the parallels between systems theory and dependent co-arising. — apokrisis

Thanks for the reminder. I will re-visit her podcast.

Yes, there is no coherent way to render mind ontologically fundamental, since the notion has its roots only in our naively intuitive apprehension of our own experience. Wayfarer claims he doesn't agree with Kastrup's "mind at large", which I would say is itself an incoherent idea, but he apparently cannot offer any coherent alternative. So, all he can do is vaguely gesture towards something he doesn't seem to want to give up, rather than being able to state a cogent position constituting an ontology. — Janus

I may be wrong, but I think his account is essentially Kantian. We know phenomena (it works for us; science can achieve extraordinary things, etc) but we can say precisely nothing meaningful about noumena. Noumena or the raw 'stuff' that somehow gives rise to our empirical relationship with the world does not require a god or some variation of cosmic consciousness to exist. I guess it is in this knowledge gap that we can insert any number of notions relating to higher consciousness - reincarnation, karma, spirits, clairvoyance, etc.

I can get behind a phenomenological account of idealism, in as much as our values and reality are shaped and codified by our experience, and is the contingent and intersubjective product of culture and linguistic practice. I guess that is a type of idealism - a constructivist account, perhaps. The big question is how useful is this perspective? What can be done with this frame?

Yes, I think consistency with our experience is important. I'm not a fan of religious faith at all, at least insofar as it makes ontological or metaphysical claims. When I said philosophy is a matter of faith I meant that each of us, in taking some position or other, necessarily is placing their faith in what seems most plausible and consistent with our experience. It's difficult or impossible to determine truth in that context though, unless it is a simple matter of logic or empirical observation, and hence the role faith must play for each of in deciding what to think philosophically speaking.

And re-visiting it, I think perhaps rather than invoking the spooky 'mind at large', I would just use the term 'some mind' or 'any mind' or 'the observer'.) — Wayfarer

The problem I see is that without positing either some mind-independent reality or collective or universal mind it is impossible to explain how it is that we all see and hear the same things in the environment. Even animals see and hear the same things we do, albeit maybe not in just the same ways. That is what
needs to be explained, and reading your essay, I found nothing there that could explain it.

Noumena or the raw 'stuff' that somehow gives rise to our empirical relationship with the world does not require a god or some variation of cosmic consciousness to exist. I guess it is in this knowledge gap that we can insert any number of notions relating to higher consciousness - reincarnation, karma, spirits, clairvoyance, etc. — Tom Storm

I agree that we cannot know with certainty what lies beyond human experience. But it seems most plausible that whatever it is, it must give rise to the commonality of experience I mentioned in my reply to Wayfarer above. To my mind positing a universal or collective mind, or a karmic storehouse consciousness, or whatever to explain that commonality is way less parsimonious and way less in accordance with our everyday experience than positing a much less problematic mind-independent reality. All the evidence, all our knowledge and all our scientific theory indicates that the Universe existed for an almost unimaginable period prior to the existence of any humans.

The problem I see is that without positing either some mind-independent reality or collective or universal mind it is impossible to explain how it is that we all see and hear the same things in the environment. — Janus

That’s only a problem for solipsism - that only MY mind is real. I didn’t explain it, because feel no need to.

That’s only a problem for solipsism - that only MY mind is real I didn’t explain it, because feel no need to. — Wayfarer

No, it's a problem that goes way beyond solipsism. If there are mind independent existents that would explain how it is that we see and hear the same things. The only other way to explain it is to posit some kind of universal connection or collective of minds, and hence we have Berkeley's "mind of God", Jung's "collective unconscious" and Kastrup's "mind at large".

I'd rather say that reason points to something beyond itself. But you will often say that anything that can't be understood in terms of maths or science is to be categorised as 'faith'. — Wayfarer

I missed this earlier. How you have characterized what I often say is not quite right. I think the only things we can know are those things which are tautologous, or which we directly observe, and with the latter we know only how things appear to be. Scientific theories are never proven, only may be disproven or surpassed, so faith operates there as well when we place our provisional confidence in them. Of course, the fact that some scientific theories have been observed to yield accurate predictions countless times is a point in their favour. The same cannot be said for metaphysical speculations, because they make no predictions that can be rigorously tested.

. Of course, the fact that some scientific theories have been observed to yield accurate predictions countless times is a point in their favour. The same cannot be said for metaphysical speculations, because they make no predictions that can be rigorously tested. — Janus

However, and has been discussed many times in this thread, physics itself, the hardest of hard sciences, has produced an outcome where interpretations of quantum theory seem to be unavoidable. And those interpretations are themselves untestable and in some sense metaphysical. Furthermore, it's physics itself which has called the 'mind-independence' of what were thought to be the fundamental constituents of existence into question.

Most actual physicists can disregard all of this - 'shut up and calculate' - but surely it has philosophical significance.

I don't beleive that Quantum physics

has called the 'mind-independence' of what were thought to be the fundamental constituents of existence into question. — Wayfarer

although of course some want to interpret the results that way.

The metaphysical speculations about the results of quantum physics are of course untestable as I already implicitly acknowledged, as is the idea that reality is mind independent. That's way I say that for me, and I think taking parsimony and accordance with experience, and the incoherence of idealist speculations into account, the mind independence of reality is simply the most plausible assumption; but of course, it remains a question of faith and individual assessments of plausibility.

The only "philosophical significance" I can see in these metaphysical interrogations and in metaphysical speculations in general is that it is a fact of the human condition that people cannot help but fall into continuing to speculate in those ways. And as I've said many times, I see no problem with that except where people begin to imagine that they could ever come to know the answer to such questions. Apart from that error, they may be creative exercises of the imagination (although it doesn't seem as though anyone has come up with much new material in the last couple millennia, except for semiotic, enactive and information theory and related ideas, which at least have some connections with science.

The metaphysical speculations about the results of quantum physics are of course untestable — Janus

The progress hasn’t quite been zero. Nobels have been handed out…

Experimentalists such as Alain Aspect have verified the quantum violation of the CHSH inequality as well as other formulations of Bell's inequality, to invalidate the local hidden variables hypothesis and confirm that reality is indeed nonlocal in the EPR sense.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_nonlocality

Of course folk can still invent even more outrageous loopholes to preserve classical realism like superdeterminism. Which is pretty much equal to claiming we all exist in the mind of God.

But meanwhile, back in the real world, quantum theory explains more and more about supposedly metaphysical issues like how the Universe is structured as it is. Quantum contextuality says a particle is a sum over all its possibilities, and the answers turn out correct to as many decimal places as you can measure.

It can pose questions like whether the vacuum is stable or prone to another inflationary decay event - a Big Rip. The test becomes whether the top quark is more massive than the Higgs boson. And thankfully it is.

Wayfarer will protest that quantum theory is still incomplete. Just as Bert will complain neuroscience hasn’t answered the Hard Problem despite the vast insight we now have into the fine detail of cognition as a process.

At least science acknowledges that it is all only pragmatic modelling and not a pretence at knowing the ultimate truths. But science can afford to humble brag having achieved so much in telling the structural story of Nature.

Just as Bert will complain neuroscience hasn’t answered the Hard Problem despite the vast insight we now have into the fine detail of cognition as a process. — apokrisis

My complaint isn't that it hasn't. It's that people think it has.

What can you say to folk who claim to believe in philosophical zombies? :death:

As long as we live in a world not of our making, that often causes great harm to the users and which the users cause great harm to each other, then no, this world isn’t fair and just a priori from any individual instance. No political arrangement will save this fact.

What can you say to folk who claim to believe in philosophical zombies? — apokrisis

No one believes in them.

EDIT: except eliminatavists I guess

Wayfarer claims he doesn't agree with Kastrup's "mind at large", which I would say is itself an incoherent idea, but he apparently cannot offer any coherent alternative. — Janus
I've addressed that, in Is there 'Mind at Large'?, which I think is coherent, even if Tom Storm says it needs more detail. (I'm planning further installments. And re-visiting it, I think perhaps rather than invoking the spooky 'mind at large', I would just use the term 'some mind' or 'any mind' or 'the observer'.) — Wayfarer

seems to frequently criticize posts on the basis of incoherence. Which could mean that various statements & assertions in the post don't add-up to the postulated conclusion, or that the critic is incapable of following the implicit logic of the discussion. I Googled "philosophy -- coherence"*1 and found the page linked below. It says that "coherence" may imply Justified Belief, or may prove that the conclusion is True. I doubt that you are claiming that "Mind at Large" is provably true, but only that it is a believable possibility. So, his criticism may be saying that he doesn't agree with your conclusion, or that you haven't presented a detailed logical "system" to support your conjecture of a Universal Consciousness.

Over the millennia there have been many "systems" (theories) of philosophical Cosmic Consciousness : PanPsychism, PanTheism, PanEnDeism, . . . . ; and Kastrup's systematic & detailed worldview of Analytical Idealism is a recent addition. So, the easiest way to present a "coherent" theory pointing to the existence of some kind of intrinsic Mind in the Universe would be to simply accept one of those time-proven systems from the past as a label for your personal view. But apparently, what you have in mind is not exactly in accordance --- difference in detail --- with any of those older schemes of belief.

I'm in the same seemingly rudderless boat. Consequently, I was forced to produce my own personal thesis leading to the conclusion that our evolving world does indeed have a rudder. But few posters on this forum are willing to invest the time to plow through the details, evidences & arguments. So, they prefer to use prejudicial labels to characterize an unfamiliar system-of-thought, that they don't understand, as incoherent or simply untrue.

I continue to add "details" to my own thesis, as do you, but I doubt that any amount of itemization will convince someone who is not already inclined toward your point of view. If the general notion is abhorrent to their worldview, more particulars will not sway them. Concur? :smile:


*1. Coherentist Theories of Epistemic Justification :
According to the coherence theory of justification, also known as coherentism, a belief or set of beliefs is justified, or justifiably held, just in case the belief coheres with a set of beliefs, the set forms a coherent system or some variation on these themes. The coherence theory of justification should be distinguished from the coherence theory of truth. The former is a theory of what it means for a belief or a set of beliefs to be justified, or for a subject to be justified in holding the belief or set of beliefs. The latter is a theory of what it means for a belief or proposition to be true.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/justep-coherence/

In my discussions with fellow semioticians, a dichotomy of dichotomies emerged from this murk. The local~global and the vague~crisp. — apokrisis

Could another set of dichotomies emerge?

What I'm noticing from the primer on hierarchies is that it's a descriptive venture. It's purpose is to model phenomena.

But what if rather than modeling the world we wanted to change it?

Then the question: "To what?" comes up.

That's what the "ought" side of the is/ought distinction is asking.

The description of the hierarchies may be useful to this or that end, but without an end there is no ought, only description.

No one believes in them. — bert1

And yet you think it is your gotcha…

As biological creatures zombies, we only need to insert ourselves into our worlds in a semiotically constructed fashion. The task is to build ourselves as beings zombies with the agency to be able to hang together in an organismic fashion. — apokrisis

Then the question: "To what?" comes up. — Moliere

Sure. You have the freedom to choose otherwise. Or claim you intend to.

Agency is what hierarchy produces. Constraints limit possibilities but then what is not forbidden is what is not just allowed but expected. It is the range of choices that are statistically likely to rebuild the systems as it is. Along with any adaptation that proves necessary.

So degrees of freedom are entrained to the general project. Keeping this body, this species, this society, this economy, going. It is what has worked before and - with some adjustment as circumstances shift - ought to serve it in the future.

Your political comments seem of that mind. It is fair enough to say the general human system doesn’t seem well balanced and we ought to be making serious adjustments. You want to do your bit to serve the greater imperative of keeping the human project on the road.

But then comes the real work of understanding what has been making that system tick along and how pro-system change could actually be effected.

Your choices may be free - but also likely to fail if your analysis of how is and ought are connected is faulty. The past doesn’t determine the future but it sure as hell constrains it.

This is captured in cosmology as the evolving block universe concept. It has physical generality.

Hmmm. I write a post explaining how dialectic invites confabulate, and get and in reply.

The conscious self is a construction that arises in the dialectical process that is a world-making.
— apokrisis

:100: — Wayfarer

You see, I don't think that this comment says anything. At least, not clearly.

Perhaps, , I do lack faith. I'm not convinced that's a bad thing.

Hmmm. I write a post explaining how dialectic invites confabulate, and get ↪Moliere and ↪apokrisis in reply. — Banno

You are so deeply confused on the issue that I thought I didn't offer you any reply. It seemed pointless to attempt to unravel your tangled thoughts.

You see, I don't think that this comment says anything. At least, not clearly. — Banno

Your standard phrasing, setting yourself up as the judge of the matter, then denying anything has been said that would require you actually giving your counter argument, ended with a grudging acknowledgement that perhaps not exactly nothing was said.

You are your own parody.

The progress hasn’t quite been zero. Nobels have been handed out… — apokrisis

Sure, however I'm not talking about the science, but the various metaphysical interpretations of the implications of QM made by probably mostly non-scientists.

At least science acknowledges that it is all only pragmatic modelling and not a pretence at knowing the ultimate truths. But science can afford to humble brag having achieved so much in telling the structural story of Nature. — apokrisis

I agree with this. though I think the general existential problem is, as Margaret Wertheim puts it in Pythagoras' Trousers, that the scientific world picture is only really accessible to a tiny minority, whereas the older, much simpler religious and mythological models of the Cosmos and Humanity's place in it were much more readily comprehensible, despite that fact that, under critical examination, they prove to be incoherent and rife with inconsistencies. Shared worldviews allow a more closely bonded society, so the challenge for science is to make itself more accessible to the average person.

I suggest that contemporary physicists' obsession with a theory of everything is socially irresponsible. In expecting society to provide billions of dollars to support this quest, TOE physicists have become like a decadent priesthood, demanding that the populace build them ever more elaborate cathedrals, with spires reaching ever higher into their idea of heaven, Since a theory of everything would be not only utterly irrelevant to daily human life and concerns, but also incomprehensible to the vast majority of people, TOE physicists can be likened to the late medieval Scholastics. This is the twentieth-century equivalent of asking how many angels could dance on the head of a pin.
From Pythagoras' Trousers

If you don't take a metaphysical position then you haven't put your faith in anything. I also try to avoid taking any metaphysical position.

When it comes to the simple question about whether the world existed before humans, I think all the evidence suggests it did and acknowledging that does not involve metaphysics.

My criticism of the view that everything is mind is that we really have no idea what that could mean. On the other hand, we know very well what it means to say that everything is material or physical, since we find ourselves in a material world, where everything, except abstract generalities, does seem to be physical. Abstract generalities can be said to only exist in their material instantiations, and we have no way of clearly conceiving and saying how they could exist in any other sense.

Dude, "the world" is not an intentional agent so it cannot be "unfair" or "unjust". Stop whining about your category mistake, for fuck's sake, and get on with playing the cards you were dealt as well as you can – get on with living and thriving – or die trying (as per e.g. Laozi, Epicurus, Epictetus, Pyrrho, Montaigne, Spinoza ...) :death: :flower:

:up: :up:

↪Banno If you don't take a metaphysical position then you haven't put your faith in anything. I also try to avoid taking any metaphysical position. — Janus

Yep. Apo, Way and Moli are all attempting to answer the Big Questions with various stories. Much easier to point out the problems with their accounts, in my smug critical fashion, "setting myself up as the judge" - as if there were any alternative. (Choosing someone else to be the judge is itself making a judgement).

While the attempt might be admirable, and I have sympathy for each, none of them quite work.

"The conscious self is a construction that arises in the dialectical process that is a world-making" could be a quote from Edward Caird or T.H. Green.

Your choices may be free - but also likely to fail if your analysis of how is and ought are connected is faulty. The past doesn’t determine the future but it sure as hell constrains it. — apokrisis

I think the question about thermodynamics and value is to ask: How are is and ought connected?

And this also highlights a difference in our approach: I tend to think of these organisms in a historical model, meaning we come to understand them through political practice and study, of course. I'm not averse to description at all. And I'm trying to point out that what you say is pretty much what Marx is on about :D -- wanting to understand how the capitalist machine works through critique in order to supply theory for the movement.

One's freedom of choice is an existential condition more than a political one, I'd say. What position within a social organism you're born within has a lot more to do with the political situation than one's free choices.

For Marx if you're a proletarian then is/ought are connected through the teleology towards communism. It's the revolutionary program which "bounds" the dialectic: which in turn is bounded by the concrete conditions one finds oneself in, and what we are able to do together.

It's this latter part that gets more into the anarchy side. Marx's philosophy is a revolutionary philosophy much in the vein of progressive humanism, but anarchy supplies the positive vision which is at the same time presently practical in a prefigurative way or within collectives.


In order that I might understand ways in which to avoid such endings.

Though "confabulate" isn't the same as "making stuff up" -- if nothing is working then "making stuff up" is a necessity to continue.

Think about it this way: if you became convinced that all of the Dialectic was in error, would that change your view of what ought be done?

So what is it that dialectic does?



Edit:

...if nothing is working then "making stuff up" is a necessity to continue. — Moliere

Quite a good point. My question is only partly facetious. Metaphysics does seem to play a sort of background role in our actions, somewhat like a catechism.

Shared worldviews allow a more closely bonded society, so the challenge for science is to make itself more accessible to the average person. — Janus

Even just keeping everyone on the same page in terms of general rationality would be good. :smile:

TOE physicists have become like a decadent priesthood, demanding that the populace build them ever more elaborate cathedrals, with spires reaching ever higher into their idea of heaven, Since a theory of everything would be not only utterly irrelevant to daily human life and concerns, but also incomprehensible to the vast majority of people, TOE physicists can be likened to the late medieval Scholastics. — Janus

I think I've said that myself fairly often. It has become a widespread self-criticism within the field.

But humans are humans. CERN is an institution and so has develop the social skills to keep the funding rolling at the level to which it is accustomed. The same story as the Catholic Church or US military or Wall St banks.

At least CERN does remarkably little harm in its priesthood being so removed from the everyday of real life's temptations. The power bill is huge, but that is about it.

And if you shut it down, just cut it back to its mathematical department, it would be an absolute shoe-string project by anyone's reckoning. The bureaucracy and sizeable publicity machine would be gone. Just the metaphysical speculation could continue, as abstracted from the general populace as everything else vaguely difficult to understand would be.

"The conscious self is a construction that arises in the dialectical process that is a world-making" could be a quote from Edward Caird or T.H. Green. — Banno

I had to look up those two names—I don't know much about the British Idealists other than that they were followers of Hegel. Apparently, the early Bertrand Russell was of that ilk.

That said, I think there is a way of parsing the quoted statement that makes sense: 'The idea of a self co-arises with the idea of a world'. Both ideas are inherently vague—we never actually encounter a whole self, or a whole world.

"setting myself up as the judge" — Banno

But you just mumble the same old opinion. "Meh". There is never work done to justify you even speaking out. Who needs your "meh's"? Keep them to yourself. Or expect a kick up the bum for rudely interrupting just so folk know you are there.