Does it just mean that the animal feels something then? — Janus

I believe that's what Nagel means. I think "There's something it's likes to be a bat" means "There's something it feels like to be a bat.". But not a physical feeling.

ChatGPT doesn't play with language in the sense I mean. It is programmed to sample vast amounts of relevant language and predict the most appropriate sentences to any question as I understand it. It doesn't claim to be self-reflective either. — Janus

I don't know enough about ChatGPT to know if it's a good example of the idea that's only half-baked in my head. I'm wondering what you mean by "playing with language". How does that come about? Can we program a computer to do that? If so, does that mean it's self-reflectively aware? Even if it doesn't claim to be? If it needs to claim to be, but doesn't, what is it about us that makes us claim to be, despite the fact that we aren't? What extra programming would we have to give the computer?

But not a physical feeling. — Patterner

What else could feelings be but bodily?

We will just have to agree to disagree then :wink: .

Sorry. It was getting late, and I forgot to finish my thoughts.

Does it just mean that the animal feels something then? — Janus

I believe that's what Nagel means. I think "There's something it's likes to be a bat" means "There's something it feels like to be a bat." But not a physical feeling. At least not only physical feelings. Do you have a feeling of your own existence aside from your physical body? Yes, we feel when our skin is torn. But we have a feeling about pain. We feel different ways about different people. We feel a certain way about one genre of music, but differently about another. We have feelings about specific pieces of music. I have very strong feelings about various instrumental works be Bach, Beethoven, and others. The last half of Layla, by Derek and the a Dominoes is a good example. We feel certain ways about political issues and moral issues. We feel love and hate. Many different feelings and types of feelings. And it all combines into what it's like to be me.

Animals don't have feelings about political issues. I doubt they have moral concepts. What about music; food; being chased, or hugged, by a human? Which animals is there something it is like to be? Which are self-reflectively aware?

I don't know about you, but all my feelings seem physical, visceral, bodily, to me. Even mental associations, such as I may experience when reading, looking at artworks, listening to music or thinking about someone I love, evoke feelings I can only understand and describe as bodily.

I believe that's what Nagel means. I think "There's something it's likes to be a bat" means "There's something it feels like to be a bat." But not a physical feeling. At least not only physical feelings. Do you have a feeling of your own existence aside from your physical body? — Patterner

I think the obvious but un-stated point in David Chalmer's famous paper, Facing up to the Problem of Consciousness, is about the nature of being. Consider the central paragraph:

The really hard problem of consciousness is the problem of experience. When we think and perceive, there is a whir of information-processing, but there is also a subjective aspect. As Nagel (1974) has put it, there is something it is like to be a conscious organism. This subjective aspect is experience. When we see, for example, we experience visual sensations: the felt quality of redness, the experience of dark and light, the quality of depth in a visual field. Other experiences go along with perception in different modalities: the sound of a clarinet, the smell of mothballs. Then there are bodily sensations, from pains to orgasms; mental images that are conjured up internally; the felt quality of emotion, and the experience of a stream of conscious thought. What unites all of these states is that there is something it is like to be in them. All of them are states of experience.

'Something it is like to be...' is actually an awkward way of referring to 'being' as such. We are, and bats are, 'sentient beings' (although in addition h.sapiens are rational sentient beings), and what makes us (and them) sentient is that we are subjects of experience. When the term 'beings' is used for bats and humans, this is what it means. And the reason that 'the nature of being' is such an intractable scientific problem is that it's not something we are ever outside of or apart from, and thus it can't be satisfactorily captured or described in objective terms.

↪Patterner I don't know about you, but all my feelings seem physical, visceral, bodily, to me. Even mental associations, such as I may experience when reading, looking at artworks, listening to music or thinking about someone I love, evoke feelings I can only understand and describe as bodily. — Janus

You and I seem to be very different. :rofl: This isn't the first time our conversation has made me think of things like aphantasia and anaduralia. I don't know which of us lacks this or that ability that the other has, but we experience life very differently.

This isn't the first time our conversation has made me think of things like aphantasia and anaduralia. I don't know which of us lacks this or that ability that the other has, but we experience life very differently. — Patterner

I don't think it has anything to do with those conditions. It's just different interpretations is all.

I didn't mean those conditions specifically. I just used them as things that are sometimes very different from one person to another. You and I are not always simply interpreting things differently.

I didn't mean those conditions specifically. I just used them as things that are sometimes very different from one person to another. You and I are not always simply interpreting things differently. — Patterner

We have much in common physiologically speaking. I seems to me that the greatest divergence consists in the ways we each interpret the general nature of experience.

'Something it is like to be...' is actually an awkward way of referring to 'being' as such. — Wayfarer

Hmm, interesting observation possibly.

Glad someone noticed!

I think it's a vague way of approaching the issue, and I think it has to be. Part of what Nagel was saying is that we can't understand what it's like to be a bat. We're too different to even pretend we can imagine being a bat.

But we can still consider whether there's anything it's like. As opposed to what it's like to be a rock. There's nothing it's like to be a rock. Who thinks a bat's subjective experience is as absent as a rock's?

We have much in common physiologically speaking. I seems to me that the greatest divergence consists in the ways we each interpret the general nature of experience. — Janus

I think we have at least a couple of major differences. Going back to an earlier conversation, I can definitely look at something, and be aware that I'm looking at it, at the same time. I can talk about my awareness of looking at it, and anything else about it, and I will still notice if something blocks my vision of the thing, moves it, throws paint on it... I wouldn't see it move or change if I was not still looking at it while discussing my awareness of looking at it.

If you cannot do that, then we are very different.

I think it's a vague way of approaching the issue, — Patterner

It's not vague. As David Chalmers says, 'It is undeniable that some organisms are subjects of experience.' And subjects of experience are generally referred to as 'beings', while minerals are not. Chalmers goes on to sketch what would be required for a satisfactory theory of consciousness, but in my view he doesn't wrestle with the question of ipseity, the nature of subjective awareness as such. That is more a topic of consideration in Evan Thompson's Mind in Life. But the question of the nature of being is the subject of philosophy.

in my view he doesn't wrestle with the question of ipseity, the nature of subjective awareness as such. — Wayfarer

So then he doesn't get specific. Which sounds something like in there neighborhood of vague to me. Anyway, I have Mind in Life. I hope to get to it soon.

From here.

Again, thanks for your comments on the OP. Here I would like to clarify the key points where my claim goes further than a cautiously realist reading would allow.

The main divergence lies in what we take for granted about the independence of the world “as it is”—that is, the world assumed to exist apart from all modes of disclosure, experience, or intelligibility. While nobody would disagree that the mind plays a role in cognition—supplying the conceptual framework, perceptual integration, and interpretive acts by which we know—they would nevertheless retain an innate conviction that there exists, in the background, a world that is fully real and determinate independently of mind. This is what I see as the import of metaphysical realism and that is what I am seeking to challenge.

My position is closer to what might be called a phenomenological form of idealism: it asserts that there is no reality outside of some perspective, not in a merely epistemological sense (i.e., that we only know from a point of view), but in a deeper sense—namely, that the very structure of the world, as intelligible and coherent, is constituted in and through the relation to mind. Not an individual mind, of course, but the noetic act—the perceiving, structuring, and meaning-bestowing – that makes any world appear in the first place. (Relevant to note that the etymology of 'world' is from the old Dutch 'werold' meaning 'time of man'.)

To make this clearer, consider the example you cite of Neptune’s pre-discovery existence. The realist insists: “It existed all along—we simply didn’t know it.” But the claim I'm advancing would point out that what “it” was prior to its discovery is not just unknown, but indeterminate. The very notion of “an object that exists but is wholly outside any possible disclosure” is, I suggest, an imaginative construction. It is an extrapolation or projection. The fact that it might be accurate doesn't undercut that.

I'm not arguing for solipsism or Berkeley's idealism. I’m not saying “nothing exists unless I think it.” Rather, I’m arguing that the world as a coherent totality is incomprehensible outside the structures of consciousness. It’s not that the mind projects onto a blank slate, nor that it merely filters a pre-existing reality, but rather that reality as it shows up at all is a co-arising: dependent on the mutual implication of mind and world. (This is the aspect that is specifically phenomenological.)

This is why, when I write that “what we know of its existence is bound by and to the mind,” I do not mean this as a mere limitation of our faculties, but as a disclosure of something fundamental: that intelligibility is not something we add to a blank canvas but something that arises with, and through, the encounter of mind-and-world.

The critique that “the world exists anyway” misses this crucial nuance. Of course, something is there. But to designate it as “the world,” or even as “something,” already presupposes the categories of thought—form, object, existence, and so on. The realist mistake, in my view, is to treat these categories as transparent labels for things that are "there anyway", failing to recognise the way the mind categorises and situates them, without which they would be unintelligible.

Regarding “form”: Aristotle posits forms as intrinsic to particulars, but in a way that already implies a kind of noetic participation—form is what renders a thing intelligible, it is how we know what it *is*. I agree with that, but add a post-Kantian refinement: the intelligible world is not merely a cross-section or partial view of some greater reality—it is the only world we encounter. To speak of things as intelligible independently of any mind is, I believe, to risk incoherence. Intelligibility is not something that can be separated off from consciousness and remain intact. As our empirical knowledge of the universe expands, it becomes incorporated into the intelligible body of knowledge that consitutes science.

So in sum: my position is not that mind is just one actor among others in an otherwise mind-independent world. It is that there is no world at all without mind—not as a subjective opinion, but as the condition for appearance, for disclosure, and for anything we might meaningfully call real.

And finally, the reason this matters is so we do not lose sight of the subject—the observer—for whom all of this is meaningful in the first place. The scientific, objective view is essentially from the outside: in that picture, we appear as one species among countless others, clinging to a pale blue dot, infinitesimal against the vast panorama that scientific cosmology has revealed. But it is to us that this panorama is real and meaningful. So far as we know, we are the only beings capable of grasping the astounding vistas disclosed by science. Let’s not forget our role in that.

a world that is fully real and determinate independently of mind. — Wayfarer

Can you explain what you take that to mean, if you are implying something beyond "A world that does not depend for it's existence on any or all minds"?

To make this clearer, consider the example you cite of Neptune’s pre-discovery existence. The realist insists: “It existed all along—we simply didn’t know it.” But the claim I'm advancing would point out that what “it” was prior to its discovery is not just unknown, but indeterminate. — Wayfarer

It couldn't have been "indeterminate" if by that you mean indeterminable, because otherwise it could not have been discovered. If "indeterminate" it you means something more that "undetermined' or "indeterminable", then please explain what that additional meaning is.

And finally, the reason this matters is so we do not lose sight of the subject—the observer—for whom all of this is meaningful in the first place. The scientific, objective view is essentially from the outside: in that picture, we appear as one species among countless others, clinging to a pale blue dot, infinitesimal against the vast panorama that scientific cosmology has revealed. But it is to us that this panorama is real and meaningful. So far as we know, we are the only beings capable of grasping the astounding vistas disclosed by science. Let’s not forget our role in that. — Wayfarer

How can the scientific view be "from the outside"? Perhaps you meant "of the outside". Surely all human views of the external world are, by definition "from the inside" (if you want to speak at all in terms of "outside" and "inside"). It's more accurate to say that all views of the world, including human ones, are views of what lies outside the skin of the viewer.

That we are, as far as we know the "only beings capable of grasping the astounding vistas disclosed by science" is a simple truism. I'm puzzled as to what you think the import of these trivial factoids, acknowledged by anyone who thinks about it for a minute, are.

While nobody would disagree that the mind plays a role in cognition—supplying the conceptual framework, perceptual integration, and interpretive acts by which we know—they would nevertheless retain an innate conviction that there exists, in the background, a world that is fully real and determinate independently of mind. This is what I see as the import of metaphysical realism and that is what I am seeking to challenge. — Wayfarer

You have noticed that I am cautious. That’s true (most of the time). So, with due caution, that looks like something I can accept. Apart from deleting the word “fully” in “fully real and determinate”. I don’t know what that commits me to and suspect it may be a bit rhetorical.

…. the very structure of the world, as intelligible and coherent, is constituted in and through the relation to mind. Not an individual mind, of course, but the noetic act—the perceiving, structuring, and meaning-bestowing – that makes any world appear in the first place. — Wayfarer

I’m clear that intelligibility is something that is constituted (“created”?) in the interaction between mind and world. However, our understanding of the world tells us that it has not changed in any radical way since we appeared and that many of the processes now going on must have been going on long before any sentient or intelligent creatures appeared. So is it not reasonable to infer that the world would have been intelligible if there had been anyone around to understand it? (Note that this is a counter-factual, not a blunt assertion.)
Coherence I’m less sure about. But I do understand that “order” is not really a mind-independent phenomenon. For this reason. If I have a pile of books, there will be an order in which they happen to be piled up. But there will be nothing special about that. There are many arrangements of them that can be called an order, and some that we would call disordered. But – how should I put it - nothing in the nature of the books has any special intellectual privilege in this.
I don't really understand what the "noetic act", just on its own like that, means. I have to reduce it to a large number of such acts done by almost everyone from time to time. So, for me, if there are no sentient or intelligent creatures about, there will be no noetic acts to create intelligibility.

(Relevant to note that the etymology of 'world' is from the old Dutch 'werold' meanig 'time of man'.) — Wayfarer

I love etymology and the history of words (and concepts). It is important in its way, and sometimes is relevant to philosophical understanding. But words change their meanings over time. So the relevance of etymology is always in need of demonstration. I’m afraid that, in this case, I don’t think that the etymology is particularly helpful.

But the claim I'm advancing would point out that what “it” was prior to its discovery is not just unknown, but indeterminate. The very notion of “an object that exists but is wholly outside any possible disclosure” is, I suggest, an imaginative construction. It is an extrapolation or projection. — Wayfarer

There is indeed something very odd about the concept of "an object that exists but is wholly outside any possible disclosure".
I’m hesitant about the word “possible” there. One does expect that any unknown unknowns can become known under the right conditions, except for some facts at quantum scale, which are a special case. The thing is, I wouldn’t want to make the existence of unknown unknowns conditional on their potential to be discovered. That would be verificationism and, as Wittgenstein says, truth-conditions are important, but they are not everything.
However, I have no problem with saying that anything that we might say about them is an extrapolation or projection, or, sometimes a purely imaginative construction. Extrapolations are not necessarily irrational, and the borderline between rational extrapolation and imaginative construction is very hard to discern. Perhaps only the outcome will tell us which is which.

I’m arguing that the world as a coherent totality is incomprehensible outside the structures of consciousness. It’s not that the mind projects onto a blank slate, nor that it merely filters a pre-existing reality, but rather that reality as it shows up at all is a co-arising: dependent on the mutual implication of mind and world. — Wayfarer

I’m all for co-arising of “reality as it shows up at all”. Reality is a different matter. Much of reality has not shown up yet. Yet it is true that we expect our ways of understanding the world as we know it to apply to the bits of the world that we do not yet understand or even know about. If perchance our current ways of understanding the world turn out not to yield what we expect, we work out new ways of understanding – in the process, we are prepared to abandon what seemed to be important parts of our existing understandings, extract whatever we can from the data and work out new ways of understanding it. So what it would take for us to acknowledge that we do not, and cannot ever, understand some new phenomenon, I cannot imagine. (I’m thinking of quantum physics and relativity, of course. But the Galileo/Newton revolution was, in its way, very dramatic indeed – it’s just that we’ve got used to it.

…. intelligibility is not something we add to a blank canvas but something that arises with, and through, the encounter of mind-and-world. — Wayfarer

Yes, what we know is “bound” to the mind. How else could it be known? But one of the things we know is that there is much that we don’t know; it is reasonable to think that what we don’t know is not “bound” to the mind.

The critique that “the world exists anyway” misses this crucial nuance. Of course, something is there. But to designate it as “the world,” or even as “something,” already presupposes the categories of thought—form, object, existence, and so on. The realist mistake, in my view, is to treat these categories as transparent labels for things that are "there anyway", failing to recognise the way the mind categorises and situates them, without which they would be unintelligible. — Wayfarer

If something is there, it must be part of the “world”. It certainly will be when we find out what it is. On the other hand, “form, object, existence and so on” are certainly not transparent labels (any more than “world” is, especially since recent developments in physics). Anyone who looks carefully can see that. (Philosophers don’t always look very carefully – they are too often in a hurry to get to some huge vista or other.)

Aristotle posits forms as intrinsic to particulars, but in a way that already implies a kind of noetic participation—form is what renders a thing intelligible, it is how we know what it *is*. — Wayfarer

Yes, form is what makes something intelligible. On the other hand, I think that Aristotle calls the form “what it is to be” something (a.k.a. essence) and believes that whatever it is is mind-independent and yet is required if things are to be intelligible.
I mostly agree with the rest of the paragraph.

…my position …. is that there is no world at all without mind—not as a subjective opinion, but as the condition for appearance, for disclosure, and for anything we might meaningfully call real. — Wayfarer

Well, yes. We can’t meaningfully call anything real if we don’t exist. That does not justify saying that there is “no world at all without mind”.

And finally, the reason this matters is so we do not lose sight of the subject—the observer—for whom all of this is meaningful in the first place. The scientific, objective view is essentially from the outside: in that picture, we appear as one species among countless others, clinging to a pale blue dot, infinitesimal against the vast panorama that scientific cosmology has revealed. But it is to us that this panorama is real and meaningful. So far as we know, we are the only beings capable of grasping the astounding vistas disclosed by science. Let’s not forget our role in that. — Wayfarer

I agree that the subject, the observer (and, sometimes, intervener) should not be lost sight of and that the vistas disclosed by science are astounding. You’ll think that I’m a bit of a heathen, but I’m just not convinced that scientific knowledge – and still less, physics - is the whole of knowledge or that science has a monopoly of astounding vistas.

that gives us an easy way to measure bullshit in this thread. See which group is having an easier time defending their position - the group that's having a harder time of it must be right

I’m clear that intelligibility is something that is constituted (“created”?) in the interaction between mind and world. However, our understanding of the world tells us that it has not changed in any radical way since we appeared and that many of the processes now going on must have been going on long before any sentient or intelligent creatures appeared. So is it not reasonable to infer that the world would have been intelligible if there had been anyone around to understand it? (Note that this is a counter-factual, not a blunt assertion.) — Ludwig V

Yes, it is reasonable: but the point is, there was not! What I'm arguing against is the idea that our picture of the world, as we imagine it to be without any observer, still relies on perspective, on there being a viewpoint, which is implicit in the picture of the early universe before life evolved. It is an empirical fact that there is and was the universe before h.sapiens evolved and outside the conception of any human being. But empirical fact still relies on an implicit perspective, which we have tended to absolutize in such a way that we believe it to be 'the way things truly are'.

As this is such a central point, I'll elaborate it at length. There's a post on the philosophy blog Partially Examined LIfe, about this issue, seen through the perspective of Schopenhauer. The introduction says:

On the Schopenhauer discussion I referred to his view qua idealist that, really, there was no world per se before the first perceiver, but also that science is correct in investigating ancient history, i.e. the world before perceivers. How could both of these claims be true? This is a general problem that idealism must address, summed up adequately by the old chestnut about the tree falling in the forest: The idealist must say that no, it doesn’t make a sound, and in fact there’s no tree or falling at all unless something (not necessarily a person) is there to witness it, to be a subject and thereby create it as a distinct object. Yet science still needs to work, i.e. people should be able to come along later and truly say that yes, there was a tree here standing, and it fell at such and such a time from such and such causes.

So this is the problem you've identified. Schopenhauer's analysis is that:

the law of causality and the treatment and investigation of nature which is based upon it, lead us necessarily to the conclusion that, in time, each more highly organised state of matter has succeeded a cruder state: so that the lower animals existed before men, fishes before land animals, plants before fishes, and the unorganised before all that is organised; that, consequently, the original mass had to pass through a long series of changes before the first eye could be opened.

(Here Schopenhauer demonstrates a grasp of evolution, which is interesting in its own right as he published World as Will and Idea decades before Darwin published Origin of Species. But German 'naturphilosophie' anticipated the general idea through Goethe and Lamarck.)

He goes on:

And yet, the existence of this whole world remains ever dependent upon the first eye that opened, even if it were that of an insect. For such an eye is a necessary condition of the possibility of knowledge, and the whole world exists only in and for knowledge, and without it is not even thinkable. The world is entirely idea, and as such demands the knowing subject as the supporter of its existence.

This is where the claim becomes radical - but it's also the argument in the OP. The argument is, that '‘existence’ is a compound or complex idea.' Whatever we think of as 'existing' is already embedded in a complex of supporting ideas, concepts, practices, and so on. This is so, for anything we can know or identify as an existent.

Thus we see, on the one hand, the existence of the whole world necessarily dependent upon the first conscious being, however undeveloped it may be; on the other hand, this conscious being just as necessarily entirely dependent upon a long chain of causes and effects which have preceded it, and in which it itself appears as a small link. These two contradictory points of view, to each of which we are led with the same necessity, we might again call an antinomy in our faculty of knowledge...

You may recall the role of antinomies in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. The antinomies show how reason, when it tries to grasp the totality of the world beyond possible experience, runs into contradictions. Each antinomy has a thesis and an antithesis that are both logically valid but mutually exclusive. Kant uses them to demonstrate the limits of pure reason and to argue that certain metaphysical questions (like whether the world has a beginning in time) cannot be answered by reason alone.

So:

The necessary contradiction which at last presents itself to us here, finds its solution in the fact that, to use Kant’s phraseology, time, space, and causality do not belong to the thing-in-itself, but only to its phenomena, of which they are the form; which in my language means this: The objective world, the world as idea, is not the only side of the world, but merely its outward side; and it has an entirely different side—the side of its inmost nature—its kernel—the thing-in-itself… But the world as idea… only appears with the opening of the first eye. Without this medium of knowledge it cannot be, and therefore it was not before it. But without that eye, that is to say, outside of knowledge, there was also no before, no time. Thus time has no beginning, but all beginning is in time.

The counterfactual—“the world would have been intelligible if there had been anyone there to understand it”—is indeed reasonable in everyday thought. But it conceals an important ambiguity. It implies that intelligibility is somehow already in the world, lying in wait for a knower, like treasure waiting to be found. What Schopenhauer shows is that intelligibility is not merely discovered; it is co-constituted by the subject. That is why our picture of the pre-human universe still bears the marks of perspective—it is our rendering of what “must have been,” shaped by our cognitive categories, spatiotemporal intuitions, and causal frameworks. It is intelligible because it is already a reconstruction—ours.

Schopenhauer’s inversion—“the world only begins with the first eye that opens”—is not a denial of evolution or cosmology but a metaphysical clarification: that the world-as-known, the world as idea, is dependent on consciousness, even while consciousness is, in turn, causally embedded in that world. This reciprocity, this antinomy, reflects the limits of our faculty of reason when it tries to grasp the world in itself.

So yes, we may speak of a pre-human world, and science can rightly describe its conditions. But this remains, necessarily, a retrospective construction. The error is to mistake this picture for something that exists independently of any condition for its appearance—as if meaning and form could simply hover, unperceived, in the void. That, I believe, is the illusion of realism, and why the universe and the mind are truly 'co-arising'.

I’m clear that intelligibility is something that is constituted (“created”?) in the interaction between mind and world. However, our understanding of the world tells us that it has not changed in any radical way since we appeared and that many of the processes now going on must have been going on long before any sentient or intelligent creatures appeared. So is it not reasonable to infer that the world would have been intelligible if there had been anyone around to understand it? (Note that this is a counter-factual, not a blunt assertion.) — Ludwig V

Must the world be understood in order to be intelligible (able to be understood)? As an analogy, must something be seen in order to be counted as visible?

that gives us an easy way to measure bullshit in this thread. See which group is having an easier time defending their position - the group that's having a harder time of it must be right — flannel jesus

First you have to determine which group is having the easier and which the harder time defending their positions. What're the criteria? Which ones do you think are which, and why?

Must the world be understood in order to be intelligible (able to be understood)? As an analogy, must something be seen in order to be counted as visible? — Janus

In answer to the second question, the short answer is no. In order to count something as visible it is only necessary to demonstrate that it is capable of being seen. However the best, and arguably only conclusive way to demonstrate that something is capable of being seen is to see it.
On the assumption that "intelligible" means "capable of being understood", is the analogy a good one? Showing that one understands something is a good way of showing that it is capable of being understood; that's a parallel with "visible". But there is also a difference. Seeing something can be completed - one can reach a point at which one has actuallly seen whatever it is. But understanding is (usually) incomplete - there is almost always further that one could go. Usually, we settle for an understanding that is adequate for the context and do not worry about whether our understanding is complete.
So the answer is (as it usually is with analogies) the parallel is partial. Yet it is somewhat strange that we also use "see" to describe understanding as well as vision. So perhaps there is more to be said.

Yes, it is reasonable: but the point is, there was not! What I'm arguing against is the idea that our picture of the world, as we imagine it to be without any observer, still relies on perspective, on there being a viewpoint, which is implicit in the picture of the early universe before life evolved. It is an empirical fact that there is and was the universe before h.sapiens evolved and outside the conception of any human being. But empirical fact still relies on an implicit perspective, which we have tended to absolutize in such a way that we believe it to be 'the way things truly are'. — Wayfarer

Yes. This is very like the argument that Berkeley calls his Master Argument, because he says he will rely on that argument in favour of his idealism above all the others. There's no easy way to crack it. Suppose I protested to you that I do not imagine the dinosaurs without any observer. On the contrary, I imagine myself there as an observer. Does that help?
I'm not quite sure that I know what you mean by "absolutize". But I admit that retrospectively applying knowledge about how things are now to times before there were any sentient beings is a risk. What I'm doing is supposing that the absence of perceivers did not make a significant difference to the way things were. There's no evidence to the contrary (saving quantum physics and relativity), so is it not a reasonable inference?

And yet, the existence of this whole world remains ever dependent upon the first eye that opened, even if it were that of an insect. For such an eye is a necessary condition of the possibility of knowledge, and the whole world exists only in and for knowledge, and without it is not even thinkable. The world is entirely idea, and as such demands the knowing subject as the supporter of its existence.

What do you mean by "the whole world exists only in and for knowledge"? I certainly don't think that's true of the insensate world; it's not even true of people.
The world is not entirely idea. It has all sorts of other things in it.

Whatever we think of as 'existing' is already embedded in a complex of supporting ideas, concepts, practices, and so on. This is so, for anything we can know or identify as an existent. — Wayfarer

You seem to be claiming that the moon, for example, is "embedded in a complex of ideas, concepts and practices". That's true, in a way. But clearly false in another way. The ideas, concepts and practices that you are talking about are the ideas, concepts and practices of human beings about the moon. The moon, in fact, is an element, not a participant, in those activities; human beings are participants. But neither human beings nor moons are only or merely embedded in complexes of ideas, concepts and practices.

The necessary contradiction which at last presents itself to us here, finds its solution in the fact that, to use Kant’s phraseology, time, space, and causality do not belong to the thing-in-itself, but only to its phenomena, of which they are the form; which in my language means this: The objective world, the world as idea, is not the only side of the world, but merely its outward side; and it has an entirely different side—the side of its inmost nature—its kernel—the thing-in-itself…But the world as idea… only appears with the opening of the first eye. Without this medium of knowledge it cannot be, and therefore it was not before it. But without that eye, that is to say, outside of knowledge, there was also no before, no time.

One could say that idealists (the eye) mistake the reflection of the moon in a lake for the actual thing. They need to look up, or perhaps out. That is what the eye is designed to do.
Where are the embodied minds (a.k.a. people) in all this? Do our bodies only exist as an idea?
Idealism is all very well, and I don't think that an old-fashioned argument in refutation is available. It's a way of seeing things. The problem with it is that it ignores the message that ideas and concepts and practices quietly and persistently send - that there exists a world beyond them. Ideas are ideas of something that is usually not an idea. Ditto concepts. Our practices involve things that are not ideas.
OK, so you acknowledge that, in a way, with your talk of a kernel (which I'm taking as equivalent to Kant's noumena), you accept there is something that escapes ideas etc. But for you (and Kant) the excess escapes our knowledge. For me, it only means that there is always more to discover.

This reciprocity, this antinomy, reflects the limits of our faculty of reason when it tries to grasp the world in itself. — Wayfarer

I accept that there are boundaries to our knowledge. But these boundaries, like boundaries everywhere are also opportunities to go further. Our knowledge is never complete, finished. Every answer we find generates more questions. We push at the boundaries of what we know and expand what we understand. From time to time, we find that simple expansion is not enough. We find phenomena that do not fit our ideas and concepts - and this is where the unknown and unthought reveals itself. But we don't stop there. We develop new, more comprehensive, ideas that enable us to understand the new anomalies and puzzles, or at least to extract from the data as much understanding as we can. Then, the boundary moves on.

The error is to mistake this picture for something that exists independently of any condition for its appearance—as if meaning and form could simply hover, unperceived, in the void. That, I believe, is the illusion of realism, and why the universe and the mind are truly 'co-arising'. — Wayfarer

The picture is one thing, the universe is another. Isn’t that obvious? There are some issues there, but that is something of a starting-point for sorting this out.
“Co-arising” could do with some cashing out, I think. There is a common sense account which says that the universe/world existed long before humans, so it seems absolutely clear that the universe arose first, and produced human beings later, so it seems absolutely clear that the mind arose later. But there is interaction between the two. What’s wrong with that?
True, meaning and form do not hover, unperceived, in the void. I’m not sure that I know exactly what you mean by “form”, but I’m clear that meaning arises from the interaction between universe and mind, but does not exist independently of the mind. If “form” means “how we think of things”, then, of course, it only arises when there are people to think.

I'm far from satisfied with this, but it will have to do for now.

I'm not quite sure that I know what you mean by "absolutize" — Ludwig V

That's relatively simple — it means taking the reality of the world to be as it appears, or as it is presented to us, without recognizing the interpretive framework involved in that presentation. This is what is generally intended by realism. Scientific realism, in particular, tends to treat the world as an object of scientific analysis — as if it is simply given. That is what Edmund Husserl called 'the natural attitude' (explanation here.)

I protested to you that I do not imagine the dinosaurs without any observer. On the contrary, I imagine myself there as an observer. Does that help? — Ludwig V

It’s not necessarily something we do consciously. Of course, we can imagine or re-create the world in which they lived. But more crucially, it takes an observer—someone with the interpretive framework and expertise—to locate the fossils, determine their significance, and reconstruct the story. The observer isn’t just a passive witness but an active participant in making that world intelligible. (Mind you, the amazing video reproductions we have nowadays, also really help make the subject come alive.)

"And yet, the existence of this whole world remains ever dependent upon the first eye that opened, even if it were that of an insect. For such an eye is a necessary condition of the possibility of knowledge, and the whole world exists only in and for knowledge, and without it is not even thinkable. The world is entirely idea, and as such demands the knowing subject as the supporter of its existence."

What do you mean by "the whole world exists only in and for knowledge"? I certainly don't think that's true of the insensate world; it's not even true of people. — Ludwig V

They’re not my words—I’m quoting Schopenhauer. But it’s important to clarify: he doesn’t mean idea in the everyday sense of “I have an idea.” Rather, he’s using idea (or Vorstellung) in the philosophical sense of representation. Everything you see when you look around—the tree, the computer, the room, the world as you experience it—is already synthesized through your cognition. It’s all representation, not in the sense of illusion, but in the sense that it is always grasped as idea, for the subject.

The picture is one thing, the universe is another. Isn’t that obvious? — Ludwig V

The aim of this whole exercise is to point out that it is not! That is the picture given by 'representative realism' - there is the actual world, which exists independently of any mind; and here, a representation of the world, a picture of the world, that is in my mind. But that picture is also in your mind - it is a mental construction. What is happening is your magnificent hominid brain is constantly synthesising this world-picture, Schopenhauer's vorstellung, 'representation' - which both you and your world-picture are 'inside'.

That’s what co-arising means: there is no world without a subject—but equally, no subject without a world. As phrased in The Blind Spot (from Maurice Merleau-Ponty) “The world is inseparable from the subject, but from a subject who is nothing but a project of the world; and the subject is inseparable from the world, but from a world that it itself projects.”

I do understand how difficult this point is, and I genuinely appreciate the seriousness and patience with which you’re engaging it—by now, most people would have thrown up their hands and walked away. But I still hold to the fundamentals of the argument. If there’s a shortcoming, it lies in my own inability to explain it more clearly.

I do understand how difficult this point is, and I genuinely appreciate the seriousness and patience with which you’re engaging it—by now, most people would have thrown up their hands and walked away. But I still hold to the fundamentals of the argument. If there’s a shortcoming, it lies in my own inability to explain it more clearly. — Wayfarer

Well, if a difficult philosophical point is not worth spending time on, what is?
I could not persist unless you were prepared to persist with me - so I also appreciate your patience. Fact is, I have got a bit fed up with walking away from insoluble disagreements. It keeps everything at a shallow level.
That said, there will be a pause before I actually respond to this. The wheels have to be kept on what we like to call real life.

An afterthought. If christening the baby changes the baby herself, who did we christen, the baby before the act, or the baby after the act? The parents will be very interested in the answer.

My position is closer to what might be called a phenomenological form of idealism: it asserts that there is no reality outside of some perspective, not in a merely epistemological sense (i.e., that we only know from a point of view), but in a deeper sense—namely, that the very structure of the world, as intelligible and coherent, is constituted in and through the relation to mind. Not an individual mind, of course, but the noetic act—the perceiving, structuring, and meaning-bestowing – that makes any world appear in the first place. — Wayfarer

I'm not very well-versed in Phenomenology. But it points to a key difference in worldviews upon which many of the contentious posts on this forum pivot : Realism vs Idealism. The notion that our world is actually an idea in the Mind of God (world mind), may be unintelligible, not just to secular scientists, but also to many spiritual religionists. It just goes against our intuition of Self vs Other.

Which, I suppose is the point of the Buddha's "non-dual unstructured awareness". Personally, I can accept it intellectually, but not experientially. However, the Matrix and Tron movies gave me some imagery by which to imagine a local mind within an encompassing non-local Mind. :cool:


Substance metaphysics and phenomenology represent distinct, yet sometimes intertwined, philosophical approaches. Substance metaphysics, particularly in the Aristotelian tradition, focuses on identifying and defining the fundamental, underlying realities (substances) that exist independently and support properties. Phenomenology, on the other hand, prioritizes the study of conscious experience and how things appear to us, often questioning the possibility or necessity of grasping underlying substances.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=substance+metaphysics+vs+phenomenology+

In philosophical idealism, the "mind of God" refers to the idea that the ultimate reality is fundamentally mental or spiritual, and that God's mind is the source and sustainer of all existence. This concept is central to many forms of idealism, particularly subjective idealism and objective idealism, where the perceived world is seen as existing within the mind of God or as a manifestation of divine consciousness.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=idealism+mind+of+god

I'm not very well-versed in Phenomenology. But it points to a key difference in worldviews upon which many of the contentious posts on this forum pivot : Realism vs Idealism. — Gnomon

I've read a bit, and I think I understand some basic points. There's a mixture of ideas in your post, but I'll start by saying realism v idealism is precisely the dichotomy that phenomenology seeks to avoid.

The passage your Google search surfaced puts it like this:

Phenomenology...prioritizes the study of conscious experience and how things appear to us... questioning the possibility or necessity of grasping underlying substances. — Gnomon

But it hardly conveys the real gist of the phenomenological method. The starting point for phenomenology was Franz Brentano's studies of intentionality and 'about-ness'.

Brentano defined intentionality as the main characteristic of mental phenomena, by which they could be distinguished from physical phenomena. Every mental phenomenon, every psychological act has content, is directed at an object (the intentional object). Every belief, desire etc. has an object that they are about: the believed, the desired. ... The property of being intentional, of having an intentional object, was the key feature to distinguish psychological phenomena and physical phenomena. — Wiki

Edmund Husserl, generally regarded as founder of phenomenology, attended Brentano's lectures, and elaborated on these ideas. His works are dense and formal. (Most of what I know comes from his last book, published posthumously, The Crisis of the European Sciences, and the Routledge Introduction to Phenomenology, ed. Dermot Moran, and Phenomenology, an Introduction, Dan Zahavi, among others.)

Phenomenology re-introduced the 'primacy of awareness' and attempted to break out of the subject-object divide that had haunted Western philosophy since Descartes (on whom Husserl wrote extensively.) Situatedness, context and intentionality are all fundamental principles in phenomenology.

A relevant passage from the Routledge Introduction:

In contrast to the outlook of naturalism, Husserl believed all knowledge, all science, all rationality depended on conscious acts, acts which cannot be properly understood from within the natural outlook at all. Consciousness should not be viewed naturalistically as part of the world at all, since consciousness is precisely the reason why there was a world there for us in the first place. For Husserl it is not that consciousness creates the world in any ontological sense—this would be a subjective idealism, itself a consequence of a certain naturalising tendency whereby consciousness is cause and the world its effect—but rather that the world is opened up, made meaningful, or disclosed through consciousness. The world is inconceivable apart from consciousness. Treating consciousness as part of the world, reifying consciousness, is precisely to ignore consciousness’s foundational, disclosive role.

Which is exactly what the original post is about.

In philosophical idealism, the "mind of God" refers to the idea that the ultimate reality is fundamentally mental or spiritual, and that God's mind is the source and sustainer of all existence. — Gnomon

That is only true of certain strains or schools - Bishop Berkeley's being one, but then, he was a Bishop. The approach in the Mind Created World is epistemological rather than ontological - about the nature of knowing rather than about what the world is made from or of. I said 'The constitution of material objects is a matter for scientific disciplines (although I’m well aware that the ultimate nature of these constituents remains an open question in theoretical physics).' Also notice the word 'spiritual' does not appear in it.

In answer to the second question, the short answer is no. In order to count something as visible it is only necessary to demonstrate that it is capable of being seen. However the best, and arguably only conclusive way to demonstrate that something is capable of being seen is to see it. — Ludwig V

Right, so we know that the cosmos was visible prior to the advent of percipients, otherwise there never would have been any percipients.

On the assumption that "intelligible" means "capable of being understood", is the analogy a good one? Showing that one understands something is a good way of showing that it is capable of being understood; that's a parallel with "visible". But there is also a difference. Seeing something can be completed - one can reach a point at which one has actuallly seen whatever it is. But understanding is (usually) incomplete - there is almost always further that one could go. Usually, we settle for an understanding that is adequate for the context and do not worry about whether our understanding is complete.
So the answer is (as it usually is with analogies) the parallel is partial. Yet it is somewhat strange that we also use "see" to describe understanding as well as vision. So perhaps there is more to be said. — Ludwig V

I'd say there is always more to be seen in the seeing of anything, more and finer detail and also different ways of seeing as per the different ways, for example, different species see things.

When the OP says "a world that is fully real and determinate independently of mind", what could 'determinate' mean in a world containing no perceivers? How could something be determined when there is no one there to determine it? Percipients do determine their objects. If they could not do that they could not survive. It seems to follow that things were determinable , just as they were visible and understandable, but obviously not seen, understood or determinate, prior to the advent of percipients.

I am not arguing that [idealism] means that ‘the world is all in the mind’. It’s rather that, whatever judgements are made about the world, the mind provides the framework within which such judgements are meaningful. So though we know that prior to the evolution of life there must have been a Universe with no intelligent beings in it, or that there are empty rooms with no inhabitants, or objects unseen by any eye — the existence of all such supposedly unseen realities still relies on an implicit perspective. What their existence might be outside of any perspective is meaningless and unintelligible, as a matter of both fact and principle.

Hence there is no need for me to deny that the Universe is real independently of your mind or mine, or of any specific, individual mind. Put another way, it is empirically true that the Universe exists independently of any particular mind. 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. It is not solely constituted by objects and their relations. Reality has an inextricably mental aspect, which itself is never revealed in empirical analysis. — Wayfarer