“We know consciousness can’t exist apart from the brain; therefore, any report that it does must be false—even if it’s detailed, verified, and repeated across cultures.” — Sam26

Why do we have brains if we don't need them for complex experiences?

Doing this also allows asking it questions, like "explain that for a lay person" or " I still don't understand that, please give me examples." — Hanover

Honestly, I don't think A.I. is reliable at doing this. Its only good if you know what you're looking for and are both willing and able to check what its saying. I sometimes use the A.I. on search engines as a quick way to look for an answer, but I always check the sources it gives and if I can't find an unambiguous verification I don't take on the answer. In fact, I find it common that A.I. completely misrepresents knowedge in papers. Its actually very rare the I find that it gives me an answer that right off the bat I don't find questionable to some degree or have skepticism. Its not even that uncommon that I see some sort of direct contradiction straight up in the answer. Albeit, I still think the A.I. still will get a signfiicant proportion of things correct; its just that that isn't really good enough because what we want is consistency, and you can't do that even if quite a small amount of things are wrong. There is then also the issue I think that if you are naive on a topic you might ask it questions that don't actually really make sense, and the A.I. is still going to give you a nonsensical answer anyway.

Did I discuss this with you before, or was that with someone else who referenced the same woefully inadequate model? — Metaphysician Undercover

No clue what you're taking about

This is not really the case. In most instances the goal is to create what happens next, i.e. we want to shape the future, not predict it. The ability to predict is just a means to that further end. — Metaphysician Undercover

This can be framed in terms of prediction, inference, model construction. It is called active inference, a corollary of the free energy.

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

So there is no conflict imo. At the same time, all these things like desire still work via neurons that are effectively prediction machines.

I realize that's standard way of putting it and I would love to agree with you. But the problem is that a representation implies an original. So to know that a given representation represents the original, we have to examine the original and compare it to the representation. Which we cannot do. — Ludwig V

Well, we don't necessarily need representation in that kind of way. All that we do is predict what happens next. All that we have to be able to do is know how to navigate. If something unexpected happens, the structure of my navigational "map" was wrong. Clearly, the shape of trees represents part of our navigational maps that is quite consistent and enduring. I don't understand in what sense this could not be veridical. It becomes very apparent usually when that fails. I don't need to know everything about trees or everything at exact precision. But I have a pretty good understanding of tree shape, leaf shape that seens consistent.

Do you really want me to trot out the bent stick, mirages and Macbeth's dagger, or perhaps quantum mechanics and relativity? — Ludwig V

I've already said we can be wrong, but when we are wrong, its usually intelligible why we are wrong in terms of not having the right information. In principle one can understand ehy information processing in the brain produces illusions regarding things in the world we understand well physically. My view of quantum mechanics is realistic. I don't think relativity really has the same problems as the alleged difficulties in quantum theory.

I agree that "what happens next?" is important. Whether that's the whole story is another question. Could you explain what you mean by "reduce to" and "in some sense"? — Ludwig V

I believe it is because thats all that neurons do, thats all that state-of-the-art A.I does. Obviously what I am saying must be some kind of simplification but I think it fundamentally characterizes intelligence, to make distinctions and recognize things.

Sure, but do I have to be a mentalist to be a phenomenologist?

specifically, that so-called “sense objects” are only ever known as appearances — Wayfarer

Pictures taken by the camera.

It’s the object's appearance as mediated by the particular structure of the apparatus. Likewise, our perception is not of the thing in itself, but of its appearance as structured by our perceptual and cognitive apparatus. — Wayfarer

Yes, but so what. If I want to know more about the object, I take more pictures, I use other tools to investigate.

What you describe as “information about the world” presumes precisely what is at issue: that the world is available to us as it is, rather than as it appears under our particular modes of access — Wayfarer

Well you have to explain why the world would not appear to us "as is". When I see a tree, is there not something about the shape of that tree which veridically represents how it is? What would you mean about how the shape of the tree appears to us that is different than how it really is which isn't trivial? Sure, I can't see everything about the tree, I don't know everything. But in what way is the stuff I do see not capturing some enduring structure in reality that is consistent? If different modes of access just means that some perspective can access information that others do not, and vice versa, then to me that is just different organisms capturing actual structures in the world that happen to be distinct. A snake might be able to sense heat or infra-red light, or whatever it is, in a way that I cannot. I might be able to hear in a way that a snake cannot. Nonetheless, we are both picking out information regarding events in the world.

“if it works, it's real” — Wayfarer

Its not necessarily just that as if it were purely pragmatics, but the fact that there is nothing more to knowing about stuff than the observable interactions that they have with us, or in principle could have with us. The idea that there is something out therr that in principle cannot interact with anything or make its presence known is nonsensical, grounds for reasonable disbelief and perhaps not even intelligible. Reality as it really is must be effective, must have consequences. All understanding really does reduce to 'what happens next?' in some sense because thats how brains work, thats how state-of-the-art artificial intelligence works.

it's a declaration of faith in the transparency of perception, which is precisely what’s being contested! — Wayfarer

In what way should I be skeptical?

acknowledge the primacy of subjective experience — Wayfarer

I acknowledge that I can only see what I can experience. This is not interesting though.

And that therefore empiricist philosophy errs when it seeks a so-called 'mind-independent object', as sense objects are, by their very nature, only detectable by the senses (or instruments) and cannot be mind-independent in that way. — Wayfarer

Thats like taking a picture of something and calling it a "camera-dependent object". I don't know why you keep phrasing it as if the object is dependent on your mind when you should be talking about what you see or perceive. It just makes it much clearer for everyone else to talk about it in that way.

I would say that sure all our perceptions are in the context of the structure of a brain which, in the context of the whole universe of intelligent things, can be very diverse with different levels of capabilities. At the same time, I would say that they are all picking out or extracting information about structure that exists out in the world independently of us. Different brains, different perceptual apparatus give us different purviews, different informational bottlenecks, and affect our ability to extract this information effectively.

Obviously a lot of the time we are wrong about a lot of things; but, I think my point is that there is no kind of mysterious intrinsic barrier between perception and some way the world really is. All of the information we could want, that there is to know about the world, is available to any information processing system that can interact with the rest of the universe in the right way. Unfortunately, we are just naturally extremely limited, even wuth technology. I don't think the notion of some kind of serene, "objective", platonic, God's eye picture is required to have real information about the world. Information is effective; Can I predict what happens next? There is nothing more than that. And if I can't do that, its not due to some mysterious noumeno-phenomenal barrier, but because I don't have all the information I need or there is stuff I haven't seen.

Hmm, is mathematics a meta-language for relational structure?

Exactly one point in time is a low probability event!

But we all act like it's a low probability event. — RogueAI

If it was a high probability event then you wouldn't be here!

My condolences, very sad to hear.

May you rest in peace.

So to be clear, the first two paragraphs are you and the rest is chatgpt's commentary?

Chatgpt did all the work

then there is no 'brain' as a 'material object' outside minds. In another sense, however, yes: the models are still good for predictions and for practical usefulness. — boundless

But the point is that the scientific study of brains doesn't care about fundamental metaphysics. We just study and describe patterns of what we observe in reality regardless of some fundamental metaphysical description.

The point is that if one is able to explain our intelligibility of the world in terms of brains, it is open to anyone regardless of their metaphysical preference. Providing one can make a good argument that brains are sufficient to explain intelligibility, then it seems less compelling imo to just assert that any specific metaphysical picture precludes intelligibility unless one can give some concrete argument other than incredulity.

are correct at the level of phenomena, not at the level of the things-in-themselves. — boundless

This is meaningless imo. To say something is incorrect means that we get things wrong about it and make predictions that do not come true. But to my understanding of these viewpoints, one could in principle exhaust the correct in-principle-observable facts and still not penetrate the noumena. But then if no one can access it, then in what sense do these things actually have any influence on events in the universe? In what sense is there anything at all to learn about them?

The other alternative is that you are simply saying we have (alot) more to learn about the brain and may have got some stuff wrong, which isn't a particularly radical or troubling claim.

Ok, but the panpsychist postis that the 'mental' is a fundamental aspect of reality. So it's no surprise to me that the 'material' and the 'mental' share some properties if panpsychism (in some form) were true. — boundless

So are you suggesting that what science understands about brains could never be true under idealism? How would you explain what we observe about brains and human cognition / behavior in that case?

But even in a panpsychist universe, the brain would have exactly the same role and would completely explain intelligibility in either a materialist or a panpsychist universe. It seems that once you start talking about our understanding of brains, the fundamental metaphysics is irrelevant to intelligibility. The intellect and the material world have analogous structures because a brain is a model of structure that exists in the material world.

the material world has a structure analogous to the one of the intellect. Is this acceptable under a materialist ontology? I am not sure. — boundless

The materialist would say that an understanding of how brainsw work fills this gap.

All very good, thoughtful posts :up:

But the point at issue is, whether time is real independently of any scale or perspective. So a 'mountains' measurement of time will be vastly different from the 'human' measurement of time.

Sensory information doesn't really come into it. Clearly we have different cognitive systems to other animals, but the question of the nature of time is not amenable to sensory perception. — Wayfarer

I don't really see any merit in what you're saying. At the end of the day, we have clocks. At the end of the day, things happen when you no one is looking that seem to behave according to scientific theories which have clocks. At the end of the day, clocks help people co-ordinate actual behavior and activities all over the world. At the end of the day, subjects like history, paleontology many others only make sense when clocks work like they should. At the end of the day, people can have different units of time or find different scales time relevant for different activities but clocks still work and they don't appear to be subjective. Clocks are even relevant to subjective time since subjective time is due to brains whose neurons behave in ways which rely on the timing of processes as measurable by clocks. But we don't need to over-conflate subjective time and what clocks do.

You said, 'So if something is mind-dependent, it co-varies with the state of your subjective state of mind.' The 'mountain' thought experiment shows how one's sense of reality is dependent on the kind of mind. Hence, mind-dependent. — Wayfarer

I would argue that these reflrct how a system might be sensitive to different information, like how some animals see at greater resolution and detail than others.

It depends on mind in a different way to that. — Wayfarer

In what way? I am nit sure what the thought experiment conveys.

But physically, it is not the reality it represents, it is plastics and polymers. — Wayfarer

But this is trivial, no one expects that information about something has to be the same as that thing. That doesn't really make sense, it undermines the whole notion of knowledge, belief, epistemics, etc.

The ability to reproduce the image — Wayfarer

This should be the point: the image can be reproduced on different mediums. Regardless of these mediums you cna probably get a machine or AI to read the same information off of it because the image is the same on different media. The image needs to be put on a media, but the media doesn't change the image, or it is not necesdarily the case that it does, it seems to me.

You seem to be assuming that we’ve already answered that question — Wayfarer

No, I offered that if we can produce concepts that don't seem to subjectively vary (e.g. the ticking of a clock), then is that not mind-independent?

Dependence means that things co-vary. So if something is mind-dependent, it co-varies with the state of your subjective state of mind (withstanding you representing or seeing it). If something does not co-vary with that, then surely it is mind-independent; for instance, the location of Paris. You can see something with your mind, but if it doesn't co-vary with arbitrary states of your mind, then I don't see that as a good definition of mind-dependence. Sure, different animals have different perceptual capabilities, but arguably they are picking up slightly different facets of information in reality; maybe, there could be a case for mind-dependence in some way for some of these things (is a di-chromacy vs trichromacy mind-dependence, or is it more analogous to how some animals have better visual resolution than others and so can pick out more details or fine-grained structure that others cannot?). But I don't think the location of Paris and various other things we can corroborate together satisfy that.

You say you “trivially need experiences to experience the fruit that is beared,” but that’s actually the core issue. It’s not just that we need experience to observe outcomes—experience is the condition for building, interpreting, and validating any model at all. — Wayfarer

To me, this is like saying a photo on a piece of paper doesn't capture information about reality because it is on paper. But surely, regardless of the medium, if the image is faithfully captures or maps to parts of reality, then it doesn't matter.

But the philosophical point is that this doesn’t capture what time is, as in some fundamental way, it is lived. That is the sense in which it is still observer dependent. — Wayfarer

I don't think there is anything more to capture. My view is that mappings or couplings between us and reality are sufficient to pick out "stuff" or ontologies. Time is just a relation we can pick out. And sure, we have subjective sense of time, we may have different time systems, but people have worked together to corroberate these things between them so that we have a time that is "objective", certainly a bit more than intersubjective. And when we look at how relativity changes things, it is not a matter of subjectivity - reference frames are "objective".

From my perspective, "intrinsic properties" of stuff devoid of structure not only are inarticulable but don't really make sense. If something is to be a thing, it out to be a "difference that makes a difference". If it cannot make a difference to other things, and so in principle cannot even be perceived by myself, then its difficult to see in what sense that fits into reality or should be considered as part of reality. To say that there is a fundamental way time is that cannot be captured by any perception then doesn't make sense to me.

Bayesian inference says we should update our models only as much as we need to given the evidence, but if there is no evidence because we are talking about something that cannot make a difference, then why should I change anything about my view?
I can conceptualize the idea that there are things I cannot see right now, but I don't see why there should be a change in properties of objects when I am not looking at them compared to the information I gain were I to measure them in some way, whether through my own perceptions or some experimental device. And one would have to assume there is a change, because it seems to me that you are saying that there is no possible way to perceive the way time or anything else is, so there is no way one could even exhaust the ways of looking at something and find out what it is like fundamentally.

Bergson’s insight was that clocks don’t measure time; we do. What we call “objective time” (e.g., seconds, hours, spacetime intervals) depends on our ability to synthesize change into a unified experience. — Wayfarer

Okay, clocks don't measure objective time, they measure schm-ime. I can then do a separate study on actual (subjective) time and the cognition of our perception of it, possible cognitive mechanisms that are undergirded by neural mechanisms which can be related to schm-ime since they are physical. I can integrate time and schm-ime into the same view of the world, neither have to be wrong.

Without someone to whom change occurs as change, your "objective time" is just an uninterpreted sequence of events with no temporal character. — Wayfarer

Bit schm-ime doesn't have a temporal character because its not time.I don't need time to have a model of the physical world with schm-ime in it. Obviously my model of the physical world is something used and done by person with experiences and who experiences time, and tjeyir direct experiences of the world involve their subjective time. But their subjective time is not the contents of the model of physical time which can be used to make predictions, just as their subjective time has nothing to do with sabermetrics, even though they may be experiencing time when watching a baseball game or doing sabermetric calculations.

The fact that I have a subjective awareneaa doean't necessarily refute what my models do and the fact that they can make predictions which bear fruit. I trivially need experiences to experience that fruit that is beared, but if humans can construct models and ways to examine those models and their empirical consequences in ways that are not changed by subjective experiences (in virtue of experiential subjectivity), then in what sense do they depend on the subjective. I see things through subjective experience, but there are things I see that can be mapped to events that occur can regardless of whether I am there to see them. If there is a fundamental way those things are that cannot ever be known to me in principle then that doesn't make much sense to me.

But it's also important to point out 'post-positivism' which acknowledges that certainty is rarely achieveable but often probabilistic and provisional; that theories are not simply verified so much as confirmed or falsified; and which also recognises that values and paradigms inevitably shape theoretical posits. — Wayfarer

The irony is that I would consider myself closer to these post-positivists than positivists, and many post-positivists would probably also disagree with your ideas.

Asking for someone to clarify what they mean doesn't make them a positivist.

If by 'realism' one means that our models do have necessarily correspondence with reality if they 'work', I guess that yes your view might be classed as 'anti-realist'.

But 'realism' and 'antirealism' have also an ontological meaning. In the most general sense, 'realism' in this context means that there is an independent reality that is in principle knowable. 'Anti-realism' is the denial of this (and I saw it used as a flat denial of any kind of independent reality). — boundless

I would say I allow realism but in a thinner, looser, more deflationary sense of a consistent mapping or coupling to the outside world without requiring much more than that. When those mappings become systematically erroneous, we might, it then becomes possible to conceptualize them as not real. But I do not think there are systematic, tractable, context-independent nor infallible ways of deciding what is real or not real. And I think people all the time have "knowledge" which is some sense false or not real but persists in how they interact with the world due to ambiguity.

but it seems to me that you are pretty certain that there is an external, independent reality. — boundless

Well, this seems a given unless you have a more nuanced definition of what you mean by external, independent reality (or the converse).

If some kind of 'rudimental' mentality is there in the more fundamental level of physical reality, we IMO have a more consciouness-friendly world than the usual 'physicalist' position. — boundless

I definitely see this point; but I think doing this unnecessarily specifies the metaphysics without adding anything in return since I don't think the notion of experiential or mental has much in the way of interesting properties to articulate other than the fact that it has structure. Why would I bring along additional connotations that come with "mental" or "qualia". I am trying to say that I cannot say anything further about the fundamental metaphysics; saying it was mental would get in the way of this and arguably would commit me even more to the prospect of strong emergentism which I don't find evidence for.

One might think that 'consciousness' exists as a 'latent potential' in panpsychist position (which is fully actualized in conscious beings). — boundless

This would make me commit more than I wish and it seems to suggest some kind of ontology that I would like to see scientifically backed-up, which I don't think is the case.

Anyway, since I lean more towards the 'idealist' side of things, I do not endorse panpsychism. — boundless

How does your panspychism and idealism differ?

Well I think any non-positivists, physicalists, naturalism-ists can say that too.

I just wanted more clarity on the meaning of space and time as about in the head, not outside it. Clearly, what we perceive is embedded in what is going on in our heads. Clearly we cannot perceive / experience everything, every event in the physical reality outside our heads that makes a difference that has an effect on other things in reality. But nonetheless, I think what we do experience, or at least a significant amount of it has a broadly consistent mapping to specific things that actually go on. To me, that is enough to say that we see real stuff in a weak sense. I think there is no observable intrinsic fact-of-the-matter about representation, only a dynamic statistical coupling between brains and the world which a scientist or philosopher can cash out as representation. The coupling is enough. If I think of veridicality weakly in terms of a kind of coupling or mapping then there is not really a sense that I could exhaustively couple a system to the rest of reality and have it miss anything about reality. When stuff is missed, it because there are couplings missing that give us novel information. Space and time can also be seen in terms of these kinds of couplings, at least the concepts we have made reasonably precise by measurement (i.e. objective time). My subjective sense of space and especially time may be more fallible or is different for various reasons (e.g. speculatively: because time and space are inferred through informational properties of the brain which can be easily perturbed, e.g. if I close my eyes, I lose some of the information required to specify physical space (at least at some allowable resolution) and become more reliant on say body information than I normally would; if subjective time could plausibly related to information flow (e.g. something like entropic time by ariel caticha, possibly), then information processing in my head may distort my sense of time).

So maybe there are discrepancies between objective time "inside" and "outside" as it were but only in some sense that informative couplings have been missed to some part of reality. Good example is obviously relativity phenomena like time-dilation. Maybe the way brains work or learn over time mean that mappings or couplings can be established or parcelled out in different ways; but nonetheless these are just different mappings to events that actually occur, and they are overlapping or inter-relatable so that even though I may be measuring in inches or centimeters, because they are being mapped to the same stuff in reality, there is no sense that these different perspectives are telling me anything new or different about space. And there is nothing else to know about space beyond my sensory boundaries unless that thing to know about space makes some physical difference (because space is physical) to observations and theories and experiential perceptions.

Yes, I can make sense of the fact that there is stuff about reality that I and no one else can see right now, but that doesn't mean it isn't in principle mappable or coupl-able. Seems what you are saying is that there is some sense in which any kind of coupling misses something about the physical reality of time. But to me, that doesn't make too much sense because it seems to be saying that there are events out there that don't affect anything. In quantum theory, maybe there is an interesting exception in the sense that couplings disturb reality, but from my perspective of quantum theory, this isn't intrinsic to how reality (fundamentally speaking) works but just reflects a kind of very persistent kind of physically confounding effect not in principle different to the kinds of measurement confounds in any other kind of science; for instance, observer or hawthorne effects or demand characteristics in psychology (one might note, for example, that methods like weak measurement and other ways of getting weak values can be seen as approximating information about the undisturbed quantum state, so in some ways this is an example of avoiding measurement disturbance comparable to if one had some kind of technique for avoiding demand charcteristics [like observing someone who doesn't know they are being watched]).

So there is nothing more to say about the metaphysics of reality beyond our best scientific models that supervene on the physical — Apustimelogist

Well, I have come to the conclusion that if we cannot say more about reality than models that in some sense couple to it, there is nothing more to say about the metaphysics than those models themselves, which happen to be the scientific ones. I don't think science is in principle different from the rest of knowledge, so I wouldn't inherently rule out other areas; you can talk about history, anthropology, the study of religions, the analysis of sports as valid areas of knowledge, but its clear they are further away from the topic of metaphysics than physics is - and historical events, human behaviors sit on top of physics.

Someone doesn't have to be a positivist to disagree with your ideas.

That sounds close to logical positivism — Wayfarer

Well it is not.

And more broadly, the assumption that metaphysics supervenes on physics is itself a metaphysical position — Wayfarer

No, its just what the body of scientific knowledge looks like, and thereis no evidence to the contrary.

But as you said before you will only be persuaded by an empirical argument, — Wayfarer

Its about not including things in my account of things that don't have any difference. Its fine to say that we view the world from specific perspectives based on our brain machinery and how it interacts with the world, in the sense that there is information about stuff in the world, information for making predictions, that the brain does not have access to or is not able to utilize. In principle someone could have a different brain that can utilize this information, or use technology to gain access to things we ordinarily wouldn't.

But to say that there is a world out there, it is not the same as we perceive, yet there is no way to unveil what we cannot perceive, is meaningless, especially when we perceive the world through physical interactions. Its like saying there is something out there that the mind-independent world is like which has no physical consequences and no mental consequences either since we are talking about the noumena. I don't see a reason to entertain this anymore, its not saying anything. On the otherhand, if something like what a clock measures can find broad agreement, where discrepancies seem to be about our limited access to the physical world rather than the mental, there is no reason to think this is still obscuring some kind of further aspect of time in the mind-independent world which has no way of affecting anything we do anyway.

And that's because you look exclusively through the 'objectivist' stance that characterises scientific positivism. — Wayfarer

I like LSD and The Doors as much as the next guy, they just don't tell me much about the way the world that I see with my eyes is.

Anyway, it seems to me that you are saying: .... — boundless

I think this is more or less an acceptable interpretation.

I would think that your position should be called a form of 'realism'. — boundless

Hmm, I think it is compatible with realism and anti-realism, because I am just appealing to our models, claiming that our best models of reality don't point to the mental as fundamental among the things they talk about.

Regarding the 'hard problem', I do believe, however, that it is a very profound problem and, like intelligibility, to me suggest that the 'mental' must be in some sense fundamental. I have found no explanation of the propeerites of consicousness in 'physical' terms that have been satisfying. — boundless

My line on this has always been that I think that there will always be things a brain or mind cannot explain, and so arguments like the knowledge argument or inverted qualia or whatever don't need to be construed as having any ontological import. From my perspective, saying that the mental is fundamental is about as informative as saying that structure is fundamental - I don't think these views are distinguishable, and I would rather lean to the latter rather than the former, if just to have a story to tell about things in reality. But it doesn't really say much.

I don't think saying that the mental is fundamental really solves the hard problem either. All resulting metaphysical views have an issue with the problem that our direct experiences seem to look completely irreducible to descriptions that science says are more fundamental because they seem to occupy a higher scale of reality. Panpsychism doesn't solve that, it just reframes the problem in a different way - the combination problem - which requires also something like a strong emergence of macroscopic experiential phenomena, which imo kind of has the same properties as substance dualism. The problem is for me that there is no scientific evidence of something like this strong emergence, which would result in epiphenomenalism also. So I don't think the problems you have with certain views are not necessarily resolved by panpsychism.

Woops, premature post.

To me, however, it isn't granted. It's a mystery that 'cries' for an explanation (which in turn might 'cries' for another and so on). — boundless

Fair enough. We will just have to agree to disagree.

If that is the case, it seems to me that the 'mental' is somehow fundamental (at least as a fundamental aspect of physical reality as some panpsychist affirm) — boundless

My use of the word physicalism is maybe misleading, but I like using the word because it captures where my side of these arguments leans toward.

I agree with some that the "physical" as a metaphysical category is difficult to make substantial because at the end of the day, we just construct models of things in the world from what we can point out and is plucked out of what we see empirically, which we do through "experience".

Everything we model boils down to (counterfactual) regularities or structures in experience, and I cannot further specify about experience other than the fact that they are informative. I would even say that there is no other property I can draw out of my experiences other than the notion of informativeness - i.e. making distinctions.

But nonetheless, our epistemic activities lead to a hierarchy of models explaining how the world behaves in increasingly general (i.e. fundamental) ways that, in principle, supervene on each other in a way describable in terms of coarse-graining as an epistemic consequence of the resolution of our perceptual / observational / technological apparati. At the end of the day, any models we construct about the world that survive just end up being either subsumed under "physical" or supervening on what is subsumed under "physical", so the physical as a metaphysical category seems vacuous because we just use it to subsume all our successful models.

Obviously, all our epistemic activities and their consequences are embedded and enacted within experience - surely experience is fundamental? But the aforementioned models of the natural world are the only ones we have, and they tell us that experience relates to the events described in those by the same kind of coarse-graining. Experiences are not as fundamental as the things being described by our models of the world at more fine-scaled levels of description, and with more causal generality. There is a kind of dual-nature to this insofar that experiences are structures that both: 1) supervene on brain activity; 2) In virtue of how experiences model the world, we can also say that they are about structures beyond our sensory boundary that supervene on other finer-grained or general structures beyond our sensory boundaries. Structures are just what we can consistently distinguish about the world beyond our boundaries. Perhaps the kind of dual-aspect thing, and other information processing properties elicit the intuition we have for dualism or ontologically separate mental "stuff".

My view of physicalism is more akin to a naturalism that asserts these models as the only ones we have. Because of the hard problem and perhaps other reasons (God? Religion? Spirituality? Supernatural? Parapsychology?), people try to assert additional models. The problem is that reality fails to give persistent indications of these things. But people still assert them, and naturalism (physicalism) is mostly a stance against that.

Human knowledge has not given us models of the mental that do not just relate to more fundamental descriptions through coarse/fine-graining. There is no evidence for mental substance (or similar category) that is separate from what our other physical models describe, and can make a difference to what those things describe. Nothing else is added beyond fine/coarse-graining of information. If the mental and cognitive fits into our hierarchy of scientific models via coarse-fine graining, it is then hard to make sense of them as more fundamental since they are not the most general or fine-grained way of describing what happens in the world. The mental supervenes on interactions at the bio-chemical level. At the same time, bio-chemical models are embedded in and describe or enact structural relations through our "experiences"; all physical models do this and so there is no sense that my physical models are talking about some kind of "substance" inherently incompatible with the nature of experience itself; they just track structural relations through whatever perspectival manifold or space our epistemic activities are furnished on. Experience itself is difficult to articulate anything about other than the property of informativeness or distinguishability (e.g. direct acquaintance), which has structure.

Experience is structure. What physical models pick out about the world is structure. There is no inherent incompatibility when no intrinsic "substance" is attributed to either the experiential or what physical models are about, but we know that the structures of experience cannot be the bottom. And in principle, more elaborate structures (than naive experience) that describe brains, cognition and their relation to the world beyonds their boundaries may be able to better explain why experiential structures are limited in certain ways with regard to information about what they supervene on, and why our own explanations about them are limited. These limitations may be why we seem to have intuitions that there is something more to the mental beyond their place in the hierarchy of models about reality.

But to emphasize, all I have been talking about is this notion of structure. So there is an inherent agnosticism (or even rejection) about fundamental metaphysics, and even a skepticism about there being anything to say about it beyond what our intelligible models of reality say. These intelligible models are just the ones I have been talking about all along, with the physical at the core on which other models supervene or relate through coarse/fine-graining.

So there is nothing more to say about the metaphysics of reality beyond our best scientific models that supervene on the physical.

From this, there is no sense in which the mental can be the most fundamental as a model of how the world works, imo.

Then how are you supposed to convince me of what you say with such confidence if it has no demonstrable consequence for anything. If there is no demonstrable consequence for anything, how am I to be convinced that what you are saying actually means something and not just a bunch of words strung together like:

"Colorless green ideas sleep furiously"

Sure, I understand all the words. Sure, is grammatical. I can read it...

But am I saying anything ... ?

‘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.’ — Wayfarer

Again, with the example of quantum observer-dependence, you can point to actual theoretical, empirical consequences. That is what I want to see. I don't see the same kind of tangible consequence here, just someone choosing to use words in an unnecessarily mysterious way: e.g. "that there was no world per se". Imo, the veracity of time might be doubted when there are contradictions, irresolvable disagreements, false predictions. I get the impression that we don't really have those problems regarding what a clock measures; I don't see what is changed by noting 'time' is a concept. A concept is part of a model, and what is being modelled is a world that behaves independently of us.

we are able to measure time objectively and with minute accuracy, but that doesn't negate the necessity of their being a system of measurement nor a mind to measure it. — Wayfarer

Given that you would agree that the universe had a history before any organism observed it, this is just meaningless. Absolutely no need to conflate one's subjective sense of time and what clocks measure.

I'm talking specifically about your Kantian space and time stuff:

e.g.

What I’m proposing is in line with the Kantian (and later phenomenological) insight that space and time are conditions of appearance—they are the framework within which any object can appear to us at all, not features of things as they exist independently of experience. — Wayfarer

Yes, some.

Honestly, I find this time and space stuff meaningless. I don't understand what you actually mean by it or what implication has for anything at all in any possible way.

Contrast it for instance with the quantum stuff about perspective-dependence. That actually has information in it because quantum theory is telling you that system behavior actually depends on measurement in some way which can be demonstrated mathematically and empirically. So there is an actual concrete implication for this; there is a graspable fact of the matter about what this means, even if someone chooses to interpret these empirical facts differently.

I have absolutely no idea what kind of implication or difference to anything with regard to what you are saying about space and time. I want something that is actually tangible like in the quantum case so I know what you mean by this. And I don't think relativity is relevant.either because that has nothing to do with human cognition. The fact that clocks can read different times due to the effects of gravity after having been put on different plane journeys has nothing to do with human cognition. In one post you talked about people using different units of measurement, but I don't really see how these implications either. Some people use inches, aome use cm; so what? 1 inch = 2.5cm.