When an experiment produces results, those results become a fact that has to be explained. Other than discovering error or fraud in the reporting of measurements etc., those facts become a permanent and unchanging record — Gary Enfield

How we interpret facts is ever changing as new philosophical ideas emerge - but the facts themselves don't change — Gary Enfield

the old facts don't go away, and must still be accommodated by any new theory. — Gary Enfield

Thanks to analytic philosophers like Quine , Sellers and Putnam, it is now commonly accepted within at least some quarters of philosophy of science that facts cannot be separated from values, that is, interpretive schemes that define what a fact is. So there no such thing as a fact in itself independent of a particular interpretation. Change the interpretation and you change the fact.

If you can show some general progress that philosophy has made you'd be in a very small minority. Even among its advocates, it's generally accepted that philosophy doesn't actually 'progress' in that way. — Isaac

As I started to say in the previous post, but want to expand upon now, I don’t think there is any stable way of defining the difference between a concept called ‘science’ and one called ‘philosophy’ , not in terms of methods, goals , the possibility of ,or rate of , progress.
I do want to say that I believe that we can talk of a progress in ideas over the course of cultural history, as long as we understand this not in the 19th century sense of a linear accumulation, but rather in pragmatic terms of periods of Kuhnian normal science and transformative revolutions. In fact, I view this progress as accelerative.
And unlike those who argue that human nature does not change , I believe that inter-personal
insight , the ability to adapt to and empathize with the alien other , and to predict others actions and ways of thinking , is at the core of this cultural progress.

Now , one particular view of science is that it offers a privileged access to truth through its methods in comparison to other cultural modalities , including philosophy. The thinking goes that the rigorous social process of hypothesis , definition , test , validation and replication (not to mention quantification) that developed during the Enlightenment led to a rapid acceleration of knowledge that would not have been possible without the use of its methods.

I started out a firm believer in this narrative , and in my grad school days in experiment psychology , as I was working out my own psychological perspective , I firmly believed that any the pricks innovation in the field
could , as. must, be demonstrable though construction of the right experimental design.

I had no interest in what I understood to be the role of philosophy , and I even wrote a piece in a student publication arguing that philosophy was essentially obsolete, given that all the old philosophical questions concerning memory, emotion, perception and cognition could now be submitted to empirical test.

It took a few years of restless, futile attempts to force my psychological model into the confines of the reigning cognitive science paradigm for me to begin reading original sources of philosophy, and I did so with great skepticism and suspicion. It told a few years for me to be won over to the view that the ‘introspective methods’ of continental philosophy allow them to make as much progress as the sciences, because it is this same introspection that causes scientific revolutions. You might say, sure , of course there are conceptual ‘introspectively originating’ leaps in science , but what gives it its advantage is that it submits such leaps to the communal processes of method I mentioned above.

My response is that those methods serve to define in a certain way , for a certain audience , a scientific paradigm. They bring its definitions into sharp focus and clarity , so that the community can agree on what it is testing. but this testing process mainly describes the period of normal science when there is more or less a consensus concerning the hypotheses involved.

During shifts from one paradigm to another , much of that painstaking detailed work of validation may be jettisoned. For instance , how useful are the decades of intricate research studies within the S-R paradigm today when almost no one is making use of that framework any more?

So it is quite possible to have a number of psychological research communities operating in the same era on the basis of mutually incompatible paradigms. One of them will likely to ultimately be determined as more useful than the others , resulting in the discarding of all of the detailed research results belonging to the rival approaches. This parallels the progression of philosophical positions over cultural history( from Greek to Medieval to Enlightenment to Idealist to postmodern philosophy, we have a direct parallel to the progress of science. ).

I think the main difference between your thinking about scientific ideas ( or ideas in general) and mine is that I view any particular fact as belonging to a holistic gestalt ( what you would call a theory ). All the terms of a theory are interlocked in such a way that each term is mutually defined by its relation to all the other terms and no term can be removed from the whole.

When a paradigm is replaced by another , every concept within the old paradigm, no mater how insignificant or subordinate , is transformed along with the whole. And what is the relation between this gestalt and the world which it is attempting to predict? The shift in paradigm is
also a shift in world , because the paradigm isn’t a template designed to match itself to the world , it is a remaking of the world. Science ,( as well as all
other cultural modalities ) is in a sense the world coming to know itself through its becoming, and our inquiries are a part of that becoming.

The most difficult implication of this gestalt view for most empirically oriented types is that one can translate from one field of culture to another and recognize them as variations on a shared theme. For instance, it would mean that Einstein’s relativity is just a variation of Kant’s
idealism, translated into an operationalized language of physics. This implies the even more outrageous supposition that there are a range of post-Kantian philosophies that imply a post -Einsteinian view of physics that needs to be ‘ filled in’ by the next generation of physicists. ( for a preview of what this may look like , check out Lee Smolin or Ilya Prigogine).

I don’t expect you to buy this , but it should at least look a bit familiar ,because you’re seeing more and more argumentation of this sort coming from the Left concerning the ideological underpinnings of science.

Anyone can do what Kant did. I could write something similar tomorrow. His insights were gained entirely by introspection using his mind, and we all have one of those. Even the authors he may or may not have read (Wittgenstein had famously read very little philosophy) he has simply chosen to agree or disagree with using nothing but introspection.

Even the most trivial scientific theory, by contrast, is based on a set of empirical findings which a non-scientists would be usually prevented from replicating or testing, simply for pragmatic reasons - the sample size is too large or the equipment too technical. There is a body of such empirical knowledge which, if you haven't read it, you will be unable, no matter how hard you try, to replicate it. — Isaac

‘Introspection’ in philosophy and in science will not lead to a revolution in thinking unless it takes as its starting point the most advanced forms of thinking of its era, so not everyone can do what Kant did. The most innovative philosophers were extremely knowledgeable about the mathematics and science of their day, which is why so many contributed new forms of mathematics or participated in the loftiest debates about the field (Descartes, Leibniz, Husserl, Wittgenstein ). So when they introspect, they are connecting the cutting edge of ideas of their era with something new., and it becomes irrelevant which specific empirical facts
they may be missing , be user those facts are just variations within the larger frame that they are turning on its head The ‘intro’ of introspect implies something sealed up inside a subject , but it should instead be seen as the subject’s encountering something new in the world. If what they create is validated by a community then that person will have a lucrative career ahead of them , it will not likely have ventured very far from conventional thinking. But didnt Einstein venture significantly from the conventional thinking in physics? Maybe in physics but not in philosophy. There was already a ready intellectual home for his ideas thanks to the prior work of philosophers, artists, psychologists and biologists( remember now , I’m sticking with my outrageous notion of different modalities
of culture as variations on shared intellectual
themes ).

The most cutting edge thinking in philosophy as well as psychology sits out in the wilderness with no community able to understand it well enough to validate it( James, Dewey , Meade, Kelly).

I used to think that nothing could match the precision of quantitative measurement within the sciences, so it was a shock to me when I was forced to reverse that view and consider the most powerful continental
philosophies to embody a more intricate and profound precision than that of empirical styles of theorization .
This is because precision cannot simply be a function of measured variables with an empirical system. It has to include everything f that allows us to define the terms of the system , what its fundamental propositions mean and how they are grounded. For the purposes of designing tools, machines, medical treatments, a less comprehensively defined precision is appropriate , since , like a commercial commodity , by definition technology or scientific products must be accessible to a wider range of people( In fact, can there be something like science’ without a conventional community defining what counts as empirical and what doesn’t? If a scientist co struts their model outside of what is defined as properly empirical by the. irma of that community they willbe derided as a crank, a mystic or worse yet , a philosopher). This to me describes the philosophy-empirical-technological-commercial spectrum of ideation as ranging from the most comprehensively defined to the most generic and operationalized( Nietzche to Freud to Friston).

My belief is that those who prefer to work within empirical communities rather than philosophical communities do so because their style of ideation is better suited for a more generic operationalized language than the
comprehensive language of continental
philosophy( the same
reason one prefers to work in applied sciences like engineering rather than in theoretical sciences). This is true even though they may tell themselves that only science advances , because only science validates itself effectively in relation to the real world.

It is true that embracing a very rich style
of ideation of like that of continental philosophers encourages mediocre thinkers to confuse vagueness and vacuity with profundity. Most of the academic output is of this sort. At the other end of the spectrum, less talented empirically oriented researchers an clog up
the research pipeline with hyper-detailed studies on trivial
themes. So we have the dangers of vacuous in coherence at one end and mind-numbing conformity at the other.

It's just personal bias to suggest that there's a direction of thought that they should be moving toward but aren't (or are doing so too slowly). It's not as if all the philosophers in the philosophy of science have all agreed on anything, there's no "Yep, we nailed that one - let's tell the scientists" on any issue at all. — Isaac

It certainly is a personal bias. . But that’s all we have to rely on in the end , even with all our empirical proofs.
You’ll never find any issue in which all the psychologist agree either, but that shouldn’t stop them from saying ‘ "Yep, we nailed that one - let's tell the scientists". And they do that all the time. ( extended mind and enactivism vs pp). Again, I shouldn’t have put this as a rivalry between empiricism and philosophy. I think i the leading edge of psychology is close to the same page as the leading edge of philosophy ( phenomenology).

That's a very dramatic way of phrasing the dilemma but it seems appropriate and I like your wording. I also think sometimes people give up by finding the answer - one that satisfies but is really just a holding statement of sorts. "I'm an X..." — Tom Storm

Yes, but if that is meant to refer to norm’s comments here concerning the relation of language in a Wittgensteinian sense to issues like mind versus body I think it would be missing the point of his argument.

Really we can zoom in on any word and find a hollowness. They make approximate sense working together in a specific practical context. Float away from that and it's poetry, sometimes good sometimes bad. — norm

Still. for Dharmi there is a range of contexts that he is likely putting together with his concepts without realizing the synthetic act he is pulling off, and this range of contexts has a certain stability , at least enough of one to appear to him to indicate grounded truths. He is likely hearing you saying that we have to dissolve that stability( thus the accusation of nihilism), when in fact to follow Wittgenstein here would be to respect that relative contextual stability and show how we can see our concepts as intertwined in much more intimate ways as interpersonally founded events than as the abstractive templates that dualist thinking sees them as. So what you are doing isnt substituting chaos for his ordered truths , as it appears to him, but enriching and interrelating his
notions. The problem , though , is that the most superordinate understandings that we carry with us are very resistant to transformation.

He also dissolves the self and yet still speaks in terms of perceptions, clinging to the image of a single something that perceives, that is separate from the world. — norm

William James thought Hume came close to recognizing the difficulty of maintaining an ideal separation of self and world , but settled for a traditional metaphysical explanation.

I doubt It's much influenced by Kant though. The majority of scientists I know just tend to get on with what they do and any underlying assumptions and broader frameworks are questioned (when they're questioned at all) by their own intellect - coffee room discussions. They don't feel the need to borrow the intellect of an eighteenth century German. Just weird like that I suppose. — Isaac

That’s true, but for me the significant point is that the scientists are usually playing catch-up with the philosophers. I’m glad they don't feel the need to borrow the intellect of an eighteenth century German, but knowing a bit about my perspective , I don’t think you’d be surprised if I suggested that they could do worse that to borrow the intellect of certain 20th century philosophers, since they seem to be playing catch-up again.

Looking at your conversation with Olivier, I should add that there are no fixed boundaries between what constitutes science vs philosophy. There are more and less theoretical or applied sciences , and the same goes for philosophy( analytic vs continental) . I’m less interested in whether a particular set of ideas is labeled philosophy or science that how profound and useful
those ideas are. I should add that all other areas of
culture including poetry, literature , music and art , contribute to the shaping of theoretical ideas. That’s why I’m fascinated by the way a particular scientific theory belongs to a large cultural
movement.

All I need do is point to myself to confirm this, in my view. — NOS4A2

Pointing to oneself and recognizing this as a unity body requires an intersubjectively shaped concept of one’s body. Before looking in a mirror, a child’s model of their body is piecemeal. The reflection for the fist time shows the body as a unitary phenomenon, but it also requires that the child recognize that others see them in this way, from the outside in. Schizophrenics often lose the ability to know where their body leaves off and the world begins, and many brain injuries can change our sense of whether and how our limbs belong to us. Now can this be? It is because concepts concerning the unity of the body involve complex correlations of perceptions and actions in the world. The unity of the body is an achievement , not a given.

In my own view the self begins and ends at the exterior surface, which can be discerned from simple observation and direct contact. It cannot extend any further outward or inward, and any notion of the self that violates this principle is illusory. — NOS4A2

Sounds simple but may not be so. Have you heard of the research on extended cognition? Drawing a boundary based on the physical body is somewhat arbitrary, since cognition is not a calculating computer in a bag of bones.
Cognition, like other organismic functions is interactive exchanges of activity with an environment. We eat , we breath, we excrete. Should the functioning body not include the oxygen we take in, and the aspects of our surrroudinga that keep our nerve and muscle cells from atrophying? Our perceptual-motor systems that power our actions in the world as well as allowing us to
perceive it in the first place cannot even be properly defined from a functional point of view without taking into account the complete interactive body-environment cycles. These are not machines that are designed first and then plopped into a world. Drawing a contour around an anatomical body and calling it self is artificially separating what was never separate to begin with.

It makes sense to ask if it is warm. If you say "it is", where is you? — Heiko

There is a difference in meaning between ‘it is warm’ , which doesnt necessary require a subjective experience ( I could be looking at a thermostat) and proclaiming that it is I who feel warm. And what about my pain?Does it make sense to ask if it is ‘I’ who am in pain? Is my pain the same thing as ‘there is pain’?
My own arguments in favor of the idea that all experience has a ‘for-menses’ quality about it is a bit different from what I’ve been describing. These accounts depend on the idea of a certain felt sense of ‘ ‘ me ness’.
My own account is based on the argument that all of our sensory, perceptual , cognitive and affective experiences are defined i relation to our prior goal oriented understanding. We recognize the new in relation to pre-existing schemes of sense. So the ‘self is always changing but there is an ongoing integrity and unity to it. What I experience is always a variation on a prior theme for me.

So you relate the existence of the warmth to "modalities"? — Heiko

We all do, according to studies. And what about the use of the world ‘I’ here? We can talk about the feeling of warmth in the abstract , in third personal terms, i. which case ‘I’ is irrelevant. But when I have a personal feeling of warmth, does it makes sense to ask the question, ‘is it ‘I’ who is feeling warm’?

- but where is the proof? Maybe the warmth just IS warm. — Heiko

You are not only aware of the warmth. You are also aware of the mode of subjective access to the experience. Did you experience it directly or recollect it, or did you just fantasize about warmth? One is not only aware of an experience but can report what personal modality the experience arose from.

Where do you find yourself at all? All there is is the things that are there... — Heiko

That’s an interesting question. There’s a consensus forming among a community of phenomenologically influenced writers in philosophy of mind that self-consciousness is intrinsic to all awareness. I am not only are aware of smelling the rose, I am aware that it is I use smell the rose. Ther is what, after Nagel, they call the feeling of what it is like to experience anything, a quality of for-meness’ that attaches to all my encounters with the world. Social constructionists take the opposite view , arguing that the self is just a socially created construct.

My aim with the Hume quote was to show that the assumed pure
interiority of consciousness falls apart when analysed closely, because when we search for ourselves what we find is always reshaped by exposure to an outside. If you want to call that outside ‘physical’ then you’re maintaining a kind of dualism between interior and exterior. I prefer ‘phenomena’ or appearances’ to physical objects( as Nietzsche wrote, there is nothing behind those appearances) , because it indicates the indissociable reciprocal depends of interior and exterior, making mind embodied and embedded in a world , which itself is co-constructed by its relationships with embodied mind. In this view of mind-body-environment no clear-cut interior or exterior can be discerned.

Even from the first-person point of view we come into direct contact with the outer world. I think the burden of proof lies with those who claim otherwise. — NOS4A2

My favorite quote from Hume:

“ For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe any thing but the perception…. If any one, upon serious and unprejudic'd reflection thinks he has a different notion of himself, I must confess I can reason no longer with him. All I can allow him is, that he may be in the right as well as I, and that we are essentially different in this particular. He may, perhaps, perceive something simple and continu'd, which he calls himself; tho' I am certain there is no such principle in me.”

Whatever a dog represents as a ball or food, isn't learned, it's represented, learning doesn't arise.

In either case representations aren't learned. They grow in the mind. — Manuel

I’m not sure I understand the distinction you’re making between the act of representing a feature of the world , and learning. Isn’t all representation a creative act? Or are you arguing for innate hard-wired categories as an explanation of instinctive behavior?

When scientists apply an interpretation to their findings, they are applying a philosophical judgement, and until their case is proven, there will always be alternate explanations from across the range of possibility. Yet 'Facts' remain unchanged, for ever, and therefore every philosophical interpretation must accommodate every relevant fact if it is to be held as potentially valid. — Gary Enfield

Could you elaborate a bit more on your philosophy of science stance with regard to your assertion that facts remain unchanged forever?

Are you saying that scientific progress is cumulative, with every new set of facts added onto the previous body of scientific knowledge?

Idealism should be the default starting position.
— RogueAI

Irrelevant. Physicalism is the default starting position. — Isaac

There are many forms of physicalism.
For instance , what allows Barrett to reject naive realism is her indebtedness to Kantian idealism. That’s why she can talk about a veil of appearances separating us from a world we have no direct access to and must use interpretive faculties to understand. She would agree we can never access the thing in itself. That notion of the physical only emerged with Kant. So I would say the default position in most of the sciences is a physicalism
derived from , or at least consistent with, Kant’s idealism.

Animals don't have language in any sense of the word. They can communicate, sure. But that's not language. The have cries that signify things like this is edible, this is dangerous, come here and so on. I'm obviously anthropomorphizing the cries. They probably have categories of some kind that allows them to interpret something as a sound for something specific like food or predator, etc. As for dogs when they respond to a command, they are repeating a behavior which they have associated with that command. One command is for them to sit down, for example. They do an action which the human has shown leads to a reward, or a desired outcome. — Manuel

It sounds like you are using a combination of Stimulus Response theory and a notion of prewired innate categories to explain animal communication. But there is much new research showing that animals conceptualize in ways similar to humans.

Can Dogs Learn Concepts the Same Way We Do? Concept Formation in a German Shepherd

https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4pb6w96g


“Do animals have concepts?

The considerations above lead most cognitive scientists to assume that the meanings of words and sentences are to be cashed out in non-linguistic mental representations: ‘concepts’ hereafter. However, the cognitive revolution remains incomplete: while few today deny the existence of internal mental representations (concepts) in humans, many remain suspicious when attributing them to animals. Animal cognition researchers are typically required to reject all possible associative explanations, regardless of their complexity, before attributing mental representations to animals [23] and the discipline spends considerable energy and ingenuity refuting so-called killjoy associative explanations [10,24]. Fortunately, the field has matured to the point where, for many phenomena, there can be little doubt that mental representations exist in animals, and can be recalled, manipulated and themselves represented.”

https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rstb.2019.0046

“ We suggest that several of the major varieties of conceptual classes claimed to be uniquely human are also exhibited by nonhuman animals. We present evidence for the formation of several sorts of conceptual stimulus classes by nonhuman animals: perceptual classes involving classification according to the shared attributes of objects, associative classes or functional equivalences in which stimuli form a class based on common associations, relational classes, in which the conceptual relationship between or among stimuli defines the class, and relations between relations, in which the conceptual (analogical) relationship is defined by the relation between classes of stimuli. We conclude that not only are nonhuman animals capable of acquiring a wide variety of concepts, but that the underlying processes that determine concept learning are also likely to be quite similar. ”

https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2008-13159-002

Objects" in the world incite and elicit responses from us, but the world can't teach us what a tree is or what danger is nor what a book is. We have the concept book, tree and we apply it to certain objects in the world. A dog does not have the concept tree, nor does a wolf or an owl. In fact, most of the exotic animals we know of, we don't even encounter ever. We might get the idea from another person describing it, or from a book. Yet we've never experienced it. — Manuel

One could say that the world is a constantly changing flow of events that never repeats itself identically or doubles back on itself. Our challenge to construe stabilities and patterns in that constantly changing flow. Our constructs attempt to find order in events via the ways in which aspects of the world replicate themselves.
In this way a chaos of visual, auditory and tactile sensations which constantly bombard us becomes sorted into stable objects. Other animals must also construe perceptual order out of constantly changing sensory stimulation. So we invent constructs but the world teaches us whether those constructs are useful or not are by either validating or invalidating our constructed patterns that we attempt to impose on the world in order to make sense of it’s changes.
When we use a concept like ‘tree’ we have certain expectations of how that concept will allow us to interact with an aspect of the world. If in a particular context of its use the concept of tree no longer applies to some piece of the world we will have to adjust it.
Many concepts that we use ( book, chair, democracy) are created via our interaction with the human world and so describe social objects. They still need to be validated by the flow of events, just as does a concept like ‘tree’ but in this case they will be validated or invalidated by the interpersonal world rather than events in the world of ‘nature’. Other animals also have concepts for nature as well as social interchanges in their communities. They don’t have the complex verbal language that we do but they do have simpler gestural and auditory language. When your dog responds to a command , or anticipates your next behavior( taking him for a walk) based on your currents actions (bringing him his leash)he has formed a concept. Animals, like us, don’t have to ever have encountered a particular object in order to recognize it as familiar based on its resemblance to something they know. This is due to use of concepts.

as soon as someone can find a way to acquire reliable knowledge outside of what we call methodological naturalism, let's hear it. — Tom Storm

Sounds reasonable , but are you taking into account the problematics of the scheme-content distinction that motivated Kuhn, Rouse , Fine and others to level
the playing field between science and other modalities
of cultural creativity? Is ‘reliable knowledge’ a pragmatic construction that is simply useful in relation to human goals or an attempt to make knowledge
correspond to an independently existing external
world? Is science simply a relation between propositions or the relation between a proposition and ‘the way the world really is’?

All our concepts (tree, large, planet, rock, danger, river, person, pleasure, interesting, book, left, right, animal, books, grass, etc., etc.) , our ability to experience anything, language, the capacity for all our senses - all of these are innate. The world helps activate them, but the world doesn't "teach" us to see or to conceptualize. — Manuel

I was talking about perceptual and conceptual contents, not the innate biological capacities for experience( but even these biological structures are shaped and realized in relation to an environment). All of the concepts you mentioned (tree, large, planet, rock, danger, river, person, pleasure, interesting, book, left, right, animal, books, grass, etc., etc.) are constructed via interaction with a world. There are no innate concepts or perceptions, and that includes the concepts of number, space and time.

I think there's independent existence absent human beings. But I don't think we can access this independent existence. — Manuel

Do we access existence or do we construct it? Does our knowledge mirror an independent world or do we construct that world , contribute to its development? Is knowing copying an outside or is it an interaction that transforms what we see?

this is an empirical question, whether or not all desires are associated with positive or alleviation/avoidance of negative hedonic states. — HamiltonB

It’s a conceptual question before it is an empirical question, meaning that you would probably have to change your definitions of what a psychological system
is and how it operates before the empirical relevance of the idea of sense making as self-motivating can come into view as coherent.

I follow the psychologist George Kelly in substituting validation for reinforcement, and in the process doing away with the distinctions between motivation—affect-hedonic, and cognition-intentionality.
Validation is the relationship one senses between anticipation and realization, so we are ‘motivated’ to validate our anticipations of the world. This encompasses desire and hedonism. Perceived i coherence and confusion is intrinsically ‘unpleasant’.

There's this thing we call the world, there are subjects, and the a priori should be what we bring to the world prior to experience. — Manuel

How can we bring anything to the world
prior to experience? I know that is Kant’s argument but the phenomenological argument is that only IN experience, and not before or outside of it, is there anything that we bring to the world, and what we bring to it is not fixed but co-constructed along with what we experience in the world, and the tow are constantly changing each other. Put differently, we interpret what we experience in the world according to our previous history of experiences in the world. So how we organize the world is constantly being transformed by the world itself. But the world itself has no meaning apart from how we organize it. This is structural coupling , or reciprocal causality. so no ‘thing in itself, since ‘things’ are themselves the products of subject-object reciprocal causality.

Does it cause you displeasure?

This kind of discourse on desire and hedonism treats these terms as substantive entities which mechanistically push and pull a passive psychological system in one direction or another.I am attracted or repelled by an object because of the reinforcement properties of that object, as processed by my system. I think it makes the mistake of treating hedonic entities like pleasure and pain as physiological contents rather than organizational processes directly reflecting the struggles of cognitive sense-making. We are goal-directed, anticipatory creaturesWe don’t need arbitrary mechanisms like hedonic modules to motivate us, Sense making is intrinsically self-motivating.

The world is empirically real and transcendentally ideal. No objects without subject, but more interestingly, no subject without object. — Manuel

It sounds like you’re retaining Kant’s reification of subject and object here.

if we had enough information, we would know everything we could know about how the world is given to us. But we don't, so we investigate it. But what we investigate must have a "correlative" in our nature, because otherwise we couldn't make any sense of experience. — Manuel

What do terms like ‘information’ and ‘given to us’ imply here? It sounds like the world as an independent reality that the idealist subject organizes according to internal categories. But aren’t the subjective and the objective
merely poles of an indissociable interaction , before any a priori subjective formalisms or empirical realities can be claimed? Isn’t THIS the primordial a priori , that of radical interaction of the subjective and the objective? Don’t we need to jettison both the ‘empirically real’ and the categorical apriori?

That’s not saying very much. Most 20th and 21st century movements in philosophy are inconceivable without Kant ( Hegel, Marx, Kierkegaard, Whitehead, Bergson, Dewey, Nietzsche, Heidegger , Wittgenstein, etc.)

I think they're complimentary. Kant and Schopenhauer, same with Husserl. — Dharmi

Husserl’s work represented an explicit critique of Kant. Kant invested the transcendental subject with formal (categorical) contents and the world with independent reality. Husser rejected both categorical subjective content and independent external reality.

You have to start by comparing thought to material in order to conceive of either. They're a package deal conceptually. — frank

Which is why phenomenologisits argue that idealism and empiricism are two sides of the same coin, and both depend on dualist assumptions.

Empiricism subjects everything to the tribunal of 'what can be sense and quantified'. What cannot be quantified is discounted a priori.
— Wayfarer

Yes. As I just explained, this is not mindless dogma. There's a fundamental and very compelling reason why that's the case. It's because we're talking to one another, two humans. The thing we share is the material world. Anything else is not shared, so there's no fact of the matter about it to be discussed. You might feel there's a purpose to life. I might not. It's irrelevant to any discussion because there's no shared content. If you feel the cup is on the table and I don't, we can both reach for it and find out. — Isaac

We don’t ‘share’ the material world because the notion of a same world for everyone is incoherent. We each interpret a world relative to our unique vantage. This can result in communities of normative agreement because of relative interpersonal similarities in outlook. Quantitative methods in empirical research only work by masking interpersonal differences in interpretation, to provide the illusion that everyone is on the same page.
The reason there can appear to be more agreement within a scientific community than within a philosophical community is because the former uses less precise, more abstractive concepts than the latter.

As John Shotter wrote:

“ So, although two scientists might not differ at all in doing calculations, making predictions, and in pro-explanations when working with scientific formulae, differences could still occur between them in the connections and relations they sense as existing within the phenomena of their inquiries. But these would only show up, notes Hanson (1958) in the different directions their new inquiries would take, “in ‘frontier' thinking – where the direction of new inquiry has regularly to be redetermined” (p.118).”

But if it can be identified and measured, it is still materialism. — Tom Storm

Wiki says :

“Materialism is a form of philosophical monism that holds that matter is the fundamental substance in nature, and that all things, including mental states and consciousness, are results of material interactions. According to philosophical materialism, mind and consciousness are by-products or epiphenomena of material processes (such as the biochemistry of the human brain and nervous system), without which they cannot exist.”

Is this consonant with your view of materialism?
If so, I can give you plenty of examples of psychologists who considers themselves to be doing science but yet reject materialism. They deal with entities that can be identified and measured, but these are not ‘matter’ in a physicalistic sense but intersubjectively constructed patterns. And they do not believe these are reducible to physicalistic matter.

'The problem of evil' is something that I have often pondered since it was first brought to my attention by Franz Liszt. — scientia de summis

For me , the problem of evil is that people believe there is such a thing. There are those who call themselves atheists and still have use for this concept. But the notion of evil presumes a metaphysical stance. This may not include belief in a personal god but I do think it belongs within the camp of heretical, progressive approaches to religious faith, and probably motivates even those who would deny having any such faith.

I don’t see consciousness as ‘an additional property in the world’, and I don’t think that’s how Chalmers depicts it. Chalmers' issue is the how to provide an explanation of 'what it is like to be' something. — Wayfarer

Zahavi argues that Chalmers sees intentionality and phenomenology as separable properties in the world. It seems to me the paper you linked to also does this.

“Chalmers's discussion of the hard problem has identified and labeled an aspect of consciousness that cannot be ignored. However, his way of defining and distinguishing the hard problem from the easy problems seems in many ways indebted to the very reductionism that he is out to oppose. If one thinks that cognition and intentionality is basically a matter of information processing and causal co-variation that could in principle just as well go on in a mindless computer–or to use Chalmers' own favored example, in an experienceless zombie–then one is left with the impression that all that is really distinctive about consciousness is its qualitative or phenomenal aspect. But this seems to suggest that with the exception of some evanescent qualia everything about consciousness including intentionality can be explained in reductive (computational or neural) terms; and in this case, epiphenomenalism threatens.

To put it differently, Chalmers's distinction between the hard and the easy problems of consciousness shares a common feature with many other recent analytical attempts to defend consciousness against the onslaught of reductionism: They all grant far too much to the other side. Reductionism has typically proceeded with a classical divide and rule strategy. There are basically two sides to consciousness: Intentionality and phenomenality. We don't currently know how to reduce the latter aspect, so let us separate the two sides, and concentrate on the first. If we then succeed in explaining intentionality reductively, the aspect of phenomenality cannot be all that significant. Many non-reductive materialists have uncritically adopted the very same strategy. They have marginalized subjectivity by identifying it with epiphenomenal qualia and have then claimed that it is this aspect which eludes reductionism. But is this partition really acceptable, are we really dealing with two separate problems, or is experience and intentionality on the contrary intimately connected“

https://www.academia.edu/9561065/Intentionality_and_phenomenality_A_phenomenological_take_on_the_hard_problem

Through subjects including cognitive science and psychology, although there will always be a controversy about the degree to which psychology is real science. And what these approaches 'leaves out' is precisely the subject of Chalmer's paper, 'Facing up to the Hard Problem of Consciousness'. — Wayfarer

Their criticism applies equally to this general picture, it is true. But it is that general picture that Chalmers' criticism is addressing. — Wayfarer

So are you saying that Chalmers is arguing the following?:

“One way of formulating the hard problem is to ask: if we had a complete, canonical, objective, physicalist account of the natural world, including all the physical facts of the brain and the organism, would it conceptually or logically entail the subjective facts of consciousness? If this account would not entail these facts, then consciousness must be an additional, non-natural property of the world.”

Or that he is agreeing with this?:

“One problem with this whole way of setting up the issue, however, is that it presupposes we can make sense of the very notion of a single, canonical, physicalist description of the world, which is highly doubtful, and that in arriving (or at any rate approaching) such a description, we are attaining a viewpoint that does not in any way presuppose our own cognition and lived experience. In other words, the hard problem seems to depend for its very formulation on the philosophical position known as transcendental or metaphysical realism.”

My impression was that Chalmers is sympathetic to the first position,not the second , that he is arguing from a realist perspective that consciousness is an additional property in the world.

I was using "ideology" in a fairly negative way in my post. Ideology as an inflexible, dogmatic viewpoint. — T Clark

Of course, It doesn’t have to be used this way. Ideology can be synonymous with worldview, paradigm or philosophy, which is how I am using it to apply to science.

concept to what I have in mind. All life seems to exhibit intent, living organisms seem to want to do something as opposed to following the normal course of events either chemically or in a physics sense. What I'm getting at is in some sense encapsulated in the expression "a life of its own." — TheMadFool

It is possible the reason physics and the life sciences do not seem to converge on each other is not that there is something intrinsically different about the nature of life , but that the cocos tula foundation of physics has lagged behind that of evolutionary biology. That was Piaget’s argument. He suggested that physics would eventually catch up with where biology has led, in the same way that biology has recently converged with cognitive science via enactive self -organizing systems models. He mentions that complexity theory and dynamical
systems approaches show how physics can be re-thought as a science of creative self -transformation rather than static equilibrium states, and in this way reveal it to be dealing with ‘intentionality’.

“...physics is far from complete, having so far been unable to integrate biology and a fortiori the behavioural sciences within itsel. Hence, at present, we reason in dififerent and artificially simplified domains, physics being up to now only the science of non-living, non-conscious things. When physics becomes more 'general’, to use C.-E. Guye's striking expression-and discovers what goes on in the matter of a living body or even in one using reason, the epistemological enrichment of the object by the subject which we assume here as a hypothesis, will appear perhaps as a simple relativistic law ot perspective or of co- ordination of referentials, showing that for the subject the object could not be other than it appears to him, but also that from the object's point of view the subject could not be different.”

“ between two structures of different levels there can be no one-way reduction, but rather there is reciprocal assimilation such that the higher can be derived from the lower by means of transformations, while the higher enriches the lower by integrating it. In this way clectro-magnetism has enriched classical mechanics, giving rise to a new mechanics; and gravitation has been reduced to a kind of geometry in which curvature is determined by mass. Similarly we may hope that the reduction of vital processes to physico-chemistry will add new enriching properties to the latter.”

Prigogine's recent work on "dissipative-structures seems to show that the series "organism behavior- sensorimotor -conceptual psvchogenesis could be completed toward the lower end by relating the biological and hence cognitive structures to certain-forms ot dynamic equilibrium in physics (where the study of these structures -was motivated precisely by the need to relate the two disciplines to each other).

Science is an ideology, not a religion. — T Clark

Science is many ideologies , or. more precisely, a historical continuum of transforming ideologies, moving in parallel with transformations in all other areas of culture , including and interwoven with the continuum of transforming ideologies of religion.

If you are going to say science is a worldview, fine. So is everything, from medicine to sport. But some worldviews are more helpful than others. — Tom Storm

I would modify that statement to read: science is a word which points to a historically developing progression of worldviews rather than a single worldview, changing in tandem with other aspects of culture. Thus we can speak of Enlightenment , modernist and postmodernist eras of science, literature,art, philosophy, etc. It is the pragmatic usefulness of the larger cultural worldview informing and defining the science of a given era that determines its helpfulness. So I agree that’s some
worldviews are more helpful than others. For instance Popper’s Kantian-inspired modernist view of science as falsificationism is more helpful than Bacon’s Enlightenment hypothetical -indicative definition. And I think Kuhn and Feyerabend’s postmodern view of science is more helpful that Popper’s modernist worldview.
It has been said that modem physics is an instantiation .of a modernist worldview whereas Newtonian physics represented an Enlightenment worldview. The attempt to bring irreversible temporality into the center of physics by researchers like Lee Smolen may indicate the beginnings of a shift of physics into a postmodern science.
The shifts of worldview within the history of psychology can also be noted. Jerry Fodor, one of cognitivism's leading and most eloquent exponents, said that "In intellectual history, everything happens twice, first as philosophy and then as cognitive science.". He added that the only respect in which first generation cognitivism is a major advance over eighteenth- and nineteenth-century representationism is in its use of the computer. Enactivist approaches in cognitive
science represent a shift in worldview within the field
away from modernist realism and representationalism , and in the direction of postmodern intersubjectivity.

what benefits do you believe your worldview brings, which are not available to the person who thinks the scientific method is the only reliable pathway to truth available to us at the moment? — Tom Storm

Since when is the ‘scientific method’ not itself a worldview.? More accurately put, is there any such thing as THE scientific method? A quick glance at the history of philosophy of science shows that science’s understanding of its methods and practices has undergone many shifts over the past centuries. Your particular understanding of the methods of science and their significance and justification belongs to a particular
philosophy of science( a realist , Popperian one), as opposed to a post -realist philosophy of science along the lines of Kuhn, Feyerabend and science studies writers like Joseph Rouse. I suppose one way to define scientism is the mistaken belief that one particular interpretation of the role and methods of science is the one true interpretation.

I agree that there are important, completely non-scientific ways of understanding consciousness and experience and science that doesn't recognize that is scientism. But when people talk about "the hard problem of consciousness," they are generally talking about consciousness as a scientific issue. It is perfectly possible to study consciousness on a purely scientific basis. Something is lost, left out when you do that. — T Clark

That would be the realist position , which starts from the belief that the hard problem really is a problem rather
than a result of a dualist metaphysics. For the realist , all that is lost by studying consciousness is some ineffable subjective quality, like a spice that can be added or removed at will.

As Evan Thompson writes:

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

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