I could say that a mystical experience is about something objective -- God or Divine Reality or whatever phrasing you like -- but only occurs subjectively. But the problem is how a subjective experience could provide evidence for sorting out the difference between some genuine objective reality and a mere psychological event, however powerful. In other words, my asserting the objective existence of what I'm experiencing doesn't make it so. How many such assertions would make it so? That's a complicated question, focusing on the blurred line between objectivity and intersubjectivity — J

You may recall that this is the subject of my essay Scientific Objectivity and Philosophical Detachment. It is also a point made in this OP, that the word 'objectivity' only came into use in the early modern period. The background idea is that the pre-moderns had a very different sense of what is real. Their way-of-being in the world was participatory. The world was experienced as a living presence rather than a domain of impersonal objects and forces. In that context, the standard of truth was veritas - rather than objective validation. This state was realised through the emulation of the sacred archetypes rather than made the subject to propositional knowledge (per Hadot's Philosophy as Way of Life).

what prompted its emergence is found in Kant, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, the Greeks, Hegel, etc., and what THIS is all about is, even prior to Husserl, the reduction-to-metaphysics discovered in an authentic analytic of what stands right before one's waking eyes. — Constance

Thanks for your insightful comments! One of the books I've been studying the last couple of years is Thinking Being, Eric Perl. It helped me understand the sense in which metaphysics could be a living realisation, not the static religious dogma it has become. I've read parts of Heidegger's critique of metaphysics, but I'm not completely on board with his analysis. I think the flaw that he detects is that of 'objectification' - that philosophy errs in trying to arrive at an objective description of metaphysics, when its entire veracity rests on it being a state of lived realisation. (This is the subject of Perl's introductory chapter in the above book.)

The problem is that the truth (or falsity) of such intuitions is not in any way definitively decidable. — Janus

You say this repeatedly, as if it were revealed truth, when in fact it’s simply the dogma of positivism: that only what can be scientifically validated can be stated definitively.

Religious orders have existed for millennia, during which countless aspirants have practiced and realized their principles. From the outside this may look like hearsay or anecdote, but that is because truths of this kind are first-person. They are not propositional or hypothetical, nor can they serve as scientific predictions.

As Karen Armstrong said

Religious truth is, therefore, a species of practical knowledge. Like swimming, we cannot learn it in the abstract; we have to plunge into the pool and acquire the knack by dedicated practice. Religious doctrines are a product of ritual and ethical observance, and make no sense unless they are accompanied by such spiritual exercises as yoga, prayer, liturgy and a consistently compassionate lifestyle. Skilled practice in these disciplines can lead to intimations of the transcendence we call God, Nirvana, Brahman or Dao. Without such dedicated practice, these concepts remain incoherent, incredible and even absurd.

The point isn’t that spiritual truths are “indecidable” in principle, but that they are not decidable by the methods of science. Their test is existential: whether practice transforms the one who undertakes it.

The fact is, if noumena do not represent, in an abstract phrasing, actual physical objects the system falls apart. That much is sound. — AmadeusD

I'm going to agree with in this regard. I don't think there is a phrase that translates as 'physical object' in the COPR. Kant is clear that noumena cannot be equated with physical objects. Physicality, for him, already belongs to the phenomenal realm (governed by space, time, and causality). Noumenon functions as a boundary concept (as you say), marking the limit of experience (or: hypothetically as an object of intellectual intuition). To say “noumena must be physical objects” is to import a post-Kantian usage of “physical” that he explicitly brackets out. The better way to put it is: noumena are required for the system, but precisely as non-physical and unknowable.

What I am saying is that the idea that there is "a thing" which is perceived is a faulty idea. So, I'm saying that all these supposed "things", forest fires, balls, and clouds, could be better understood if we simply accept that the perception of them as things is mistaken and misleading. — Metaphysician Undercover

Fascinating line of thought. It reminded me of Heidegger's essay on the topic What is a Thing? where he says that our very notion of 'thing’ is not given once and for all but always interpreted in accordance with the domain of discourse in which it is understood.

(Incidentally, a line from the introductory paragraph of that essay: “If one takes everyday representation as the sole standard of all things, then philosophy is always something deranged.” Something which participants in this thread would be well advised to contemplate.)

Let's recall the point of the original post. It was that Bishop Berkeley's idealism was a reaction against the emerging scientific worldview which sought objectivity as the sole criterion of truth.

This was connected with the influence of the empirical philosophers, who said that all knowledge comes from (sensory) experience. It was also due to the decline of the 'participatory ontology' of scholastic philosophy, in which 'to know something is not simply to construct a mental representation of it, but to participate in its form — to take into oneself, immaterially, the essence of what the thing is.'

And finally, with Galileo and Locke's division of primary and secondary attributes, whereby the 'primary attributes' were the province of objective knowledge, and the secondary, how things appear or feel to us, relegated to the interior realm of subjectivity.

This is the origin of that distinctly modern form of consciousness, the Cartesian ego seeking to subordinate nature through science and technology. It permeates all of our awareness in today's world.

:100:

I don’t conflate them at all. I distinguish them. To say that what exists must be subject to a perspective is not to deny its existence; it’s to say that “existence” is only ever intelligible to us under the conditions of possible experience. There is a difference between what is and what we can say about what is. My point is that when we speak of existence, we are always speaking from within the limits of our perspective. That doesn’t abolish the external world — it marks the difference between the world “as it is in itself” and the world as it is given to us.

The other point is that I don't accept the idea that things cannot exist outside of any perspective — Janus

Name one.

A lot depends on how much certainty you want to pack into "knowledge'. — J

Note the qualifier, 'objective knowledge'. Let's recall the point of the original post. It was that Bishop Berkeley's idealism was a reaction against the emerging scientific worldview which sought objectivity as the sole criterion of truth.

This was connected with the influence of the empirical philosophers, who said that all knowledge comes from (sensory) experience. It was also due to the decline of the 'participatory ontology' of scholastic philosophy, in which 'to know something is not simply to construct a mental representation of it, but to participate in its form — to take into oneself, immaterially, the essence of what the thing is.'

And finally, with Galileo and Locke's division of primary and secondary attributes, whereby the 'primary attributes' were the province of objective knowledge, and the secondary, how things appear or feel to us, relegated to the interior realm of subjectivity.

This is the origin of that distinctly modern form of consciousness, the Cartesian ego seeking to subordinate nature through science and technology. It permeates all of our awareness in today's world.

Positivism, pure and simple.

I point at a green one say, and that you also see me pointing at a green one shows that there must be something independent of both of us that explains that, provided we accept that our perceptual organs and minds are in no hidden way connected. — Janus

But I'm not denying that there is an external world. What I'm denying is that knowledge of that world is purely objective, that we can see it as it is or as it would be absent any observer. The entailment being that when we imagine or depict the Universe with no human observer in it, that depiction is still dependent on the perspective which only the mind can bring. But that we forget that, or suppress it, or bracket it out, such that we believe that our bare cognition of the world reveals it as it truly is, in itself.

There's no point in trying to 'explain' something to me in respect of something I haven't claimed in the first place:

By ‘creating reality’, I’m referring to the way the brain receives, organises and integrates cognitive data, along with memory and expectation, so as to generate the unified world–picture within which we situate and orient ourselves. And although the unified nature of our experience of this ‘world-picture’ seems simple and even self-evident, neuroscience has yet to understand or explain how the disparate elements of experience , memory, expectation and judgement, all come together to form a unified whole — even though this is plainly what we experience.

By investing the objective domain with a mind-independent status, as if it exists independently of any mind, we absolutize it. We designate it as truly existent, irrespective of and outside any knowledge of it. This gives rise to a kind of cognitive disorientation which underlies many current philosophical conundrums. — Mind-Created World

this is nothing like the "hylomorphism" presented by Aristotle and others. — Paine

I've been alerted to a book on Kant called Kant's Theory of Normativity, Konstantin Pollok. He refers to Kant's transcendental hylomorphism, by which he means that Kant transposes Aristotle's form and matter relation to the register of cognition itself (where form is supplied by the a priori structures of sensibility and understanding, and matter by the manifold of intuition). This is foreshadowed in the opening section of the Transcendental Aesthetic, where he writes:

I call that in the appearance which corresponds to sensation its matter, but that which allows the manifold of appearance to be intuited as ordered in certain relationsa I call the form of appearance. Since that within which the sensations can alone be ordered and placed in a certain form cannot itself be in turn sensation, the matter of all appearance is only given to us a posteriori, but its form must all lie ready for it in the mind a priori, and can therefore be considered separately from all sensation. — B34-A20

This is not to suggest a direct equivalence with Aristotelian hylomorphism, but rather a genealogical similarity: Kant is reworking the old form–matter distinction in a new, transcendental key, shifting it from the register of being (ontology) to the register of knowing (episteme).

Incidentally for those interesting reading Kant, the site Early Modern Texts has a useful resource here https://www.earlymoderntexts.com/authors/kant . The translator, Bennett, translates the texts into a more modern idiom with explanatory content. It's more an addition to the Cambridge/Guyer translation, rather than a substitute for it, but also has very useful detailed tables of contents which help with forming a mental map of the materials.

C.G. Jung once said that the world only exists when you consciously perceive it — Jan

The actual quote was:

Without consciousness there would, practically speaking, be no world, for the world exists for us only in so far as it is consciously reflected and considered by a psyche. Consciousness is a precondition of being. — Source

What is at issue is the explanatory power of your idealist thesis absent the inclusion of 'mind at large', collective mind, universal mind, God. — Janus

What I’m saying is that the frameworks through which we recognize “yellow, blue, green, red” are already the product of shared cognitive, biological, and cultural conditions. That explains the convergence without appealing to a “mind at large.” Agreement on basic perceptual categories doesn’t refute idealism — it actually illustrates it: what we call “the same world” is constituted through intersubjective structures of cognition. That’s the whole point of transcendental idealism: not denying reality, but clarifying that the way it shows up for us is inseparable from the conditions of human experience.

You keep coming back to the idea that I’m saying “the world is all in your mind.” But I’ve disclaimed that right from the start. My point is not solipsism. The point is that the only sense in which we can talk about “the world” is through the cognitive and experiential structures that make it appear for us at all. That doesn’t deny that there is a shared reality — on the contrary, it explains how we come to agree on things like colors in the first place: because we share common forms of sensibility, cognition, and culture.

Are you saying that the fact that there are different conceptual interpretations of the experimental results goes against my claim that every observer sees the same thing? — Janus

You’re the one who said that if science digs down far enough, different observers will converge on the same underlying reality. But quantum physics has shown that this is not straightforward. The uncertainty principle already tells us that knowledge of subatomic particles is inherently approximate, not exact. And in some cases, like the experiment described here A quantum experiment suggests there’s no such thing as objective reality. It doesn’t take a degree in maths to follow it: two observers obtain different and conflicting observations, both of which are accurate. But there are other examples from quantum physics, such as Wheeler’s delayed choice experiment.

And it’s not a matter of my choosing or preferring one interpretation over another. If it were truly objective, there’d be no question of interpretation.

among monotheistic religions, the philosophical god conceived by scholars of the church were much later additions to a traditionally personalist god. Ever since then, the god of the scholars and the god of the parish have remained two very different conceptions. — finarfin

Concepts of God(s) are notoriously difficult to define with any precision. What I had in mind with Feser and Hart were these kinds of critiques.

Feser says that theistic personalism tends to reject divine simplicity, a core tenet of the classical tradition. In classical theism, God isn’t composed of parts; rather, God is being. Theistic personalism, by contrast, portrays God as a being with distinct attributes (like intellect, will, power), effectively making God composite in a way classical theists view as metaphysically untenable. Theistic personalists (he's discussing William Lane Craig here) depict God essentially as “a person” with amplified human-like qualities—leading to what Feser sees as anthropomorphism: imagining God as a “super‑creature” rather than as the source of being ref

As for Hart:

Many Anglophone theistic philosophers …, reared as they have been in a post-Fregean intellectual environment, have effectively broken with clas­sical theistic tradition, adopting a style of thinking that the Dominican philoso­pher Brian Davies calls theistic personalism. I prefer to call it monopoly­the­ism myself (or perhaps “mono-poly-theism”), since it seems to me to involve a view of God not conspicuously different from the poly­theis­tic picture of the gods as merely very powerful discrete entities who possess a variety of distinct attributes that lesser entities also possess, if in smaller measure; it differs from polytheism, as far I can tell, solely in that it posits the existence of only one such being. It is a way of thinking that suggests that God, since he is only a particular instantiation of various concepts and properties, is logically dependent on some more comprehen­sive reality embracing both him and other beings. For philosophers who think in this way, practically all the traditional metaphysical attempts to understand God as the source of all reality become impenetrable. — Source

Of course, this may not be at all relevant to the God 'of the pews', but this is a philosophical discussion.

To be fair, neither survey included your option, "It's magic". — Banno

‘Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic’ ~ Arthur C Clarke. If you don’t think modern information technology is magic, you have a very limited imagination.

I’m not ‘proclaiming’ anything. I’m saying that quantum physics is like magic: it produces astonishing results but nobody can really say how. Hence the most embarrassing graph in modern physics. No wonder the staunch realists say it there must be something wrong with it.

But then, this is a philosophy forum, not physicsforum, where this discussion wouldn’t even be tolerated.

Our everyday experience shows us clearly that we live in a shared world. It can even be seen as an empirical fact, as it can be demonstrated so easily. — Janus

And what. specifically, about the original post goes against that?

What you are gleaning from physics is just one interpretation―the one you resonate with―there is no solid consensus that your interpretation is the correct one. Also you are not an expert in that field, by any means, which gives you even less warrant to cite it. — Janus

It goes directly against your contention that every observer sees the same thing when the observations show they don’t. If it were really objective there would be no need for interpretation.

Yes, with the very large difference being that they work :100:

I’m saying there’s a sense in which quantum physics seems like magic. Have a read of Spooky Action in Action

'I think i can safely say that nobody understands quantum physics' ~ Richard Feynman (who ought to have some credibility, as he won the Nobel Priize in the subject.)

I always comes back to this basic problem―experience shows us that we all see the same things at the same times and places is unquestionable that we live in a shared world. — Janus

That's where you're being dogmatic. As has been pointed out, physics itself has cast this into doubt, to which you then say you don't have the expertise to judge that. But it can be explained in English, even if the subject itself relies on mathematics. You can't just brush that off, as if it has no significance, when it's central to philosophy in the 21st century.

The second point is, that I've also repeated a number of times, we share a common set of cognitve, cultural and linguistic practices, which converge on what you describe as a shared world. I say it's a shared experience of the world, which is almost, but not quite, the same thing! The world as it perceived by very different kinds of beings, would be a very different world.

The things we encounter don't depend on us for their existence, but what their existence is for us does. So again you need to get clear what I mean by independent of mind. I say right at the outset there are many things we ourselves will never encounter or know, but that doesn't vitiate the argument, that all we know of existence is dependent on our cognitive and intellectual faculties.

Again what I'm arguing against is the idea of a kind of ultimate objectivtiy, that the real world is what exists independently of any observation or knowledge on our part. I'm arguing that all knowledge has an inelminably - can't be eliminated - pole or aspect. Contrary to what you say, this is not 'trivial', it's something that many objectively-oriented philosophers and scientists don't accept,

But maybe quantum mechanics really is magic. Not metaphorical magic, but actual sorcery. We build lasers, computers, and superconductors out of it, but the act of “observation” still works by means unknown — changing the outcome simply by measuring. Engineers can harness it, like magicians who know the words of power, but nobody can finally say why the spell works. It produces miracles daily, on a basis that remains mysterious. If that isn’t sorcery, what is?

Nevertheless the observer problem can’t be wished away by realist rhetoric.

But can only be validated by observation a posteriori.

Afaik, the vast majority of religious believers are not "classical" theists in practice and instead worship a personal God (or gods). — 180 Proof

More easy targets for you, 180 ;-)

You're not the only one it puzzles. Esteemed mathematical physicist Sir Roger Penrose adamantly declares that quantum physics must be wrong, deficient or incomplete for exactly that reason. He says that the Universe must be a certain way, and it's the job of science to discern the way it is, independently of any act on our part. But others, for example QBists, say that each act of measurement is unique to a particular observation and therefore that it is inherenently subjective in some sense.

By the way, I don't know if it was C G Jung who said that. Bishop Berkeley, who is often discussed on this forum, certainly said esse est percipe (to be is to be perceived) but he was a long time before Jung. But you're right in saying that quantum physics has opened these cans of worms again, of that there is no question,

I am perplexed the modern personalist idea of God. I've read some discussion of this by Edward Feser and David Bentley Hart (Thomist and Orthodox respectively, ) Theistic personalism, common in much modern philosophy of religion, conceives of God really as a “person” in the ordinary sense: a supremely powerful and intelligent agent who shares our basic categories of mind and will, only infinitely perfected. For critics like Edward Feser and David Bentley Hart, this picture risks reducing God to a kind of “super-creature,” a being among other beings, which makes Him vulnerable to anthropomorphic misunderstanding and to the criticisms of modern atheism. I see that depiction as being upheld by many evangelical Christians and disputed by scientifically-inclined atheists.

Classical theism, by contrast, sees God not as a being but as Being (ipsum esse subsistens), the source and ground of all. God is not less than personal but more than personal: the transcendent fullness of intellect and will, whose knowing and willing are identical with His essence, not discursive or contingent as ours are. This avoids the opposite error of treating God as an impersonal force or abstract energy, since God is the very ground of personality, consciousness, and agapē. In short, where theistic personalism projects human categories “upwards” into God, classical theism emphasizes God’s radical transcendence as the living source of all being, without collapsing Him into either a cosmic individual or a faceless principle.

But a more generaous hermeneutic could see theistic personalism as amenable to certain personality types or stages of spiritual development (somewhat analogous to the concept of 'dharma doors' in Buddhism, which are different kinds of teachings suited to beings on various levels of development.)

He’s not a mainstream philosopher, more an alternative type. But, I think, perfectly authentic. Probably overshadowed by more recent figures like Eckhart Tolle,

I don't think that's quite it.

Terrence Deacon's concept of "absentials" from *Incomplete Nature* refers to higher-order phenomena that are defined by what is absent, constrained, or negated rather than by what is materially present. These are real causal powers that emerge from organized absences or constraints.

Here are some key illustrative examples:

**Biological Examples:**
- **A hole in a membrane** - The hole itself is an absence of material, but it has real causal power (allowing specific molecules to pass through while constraining others)
- **Enzyme active sites** - The precisely shaped "empty" space in an enzyme that constrains which molecules can bind and react
- **Ecological niches** - Defined not by what's there, but by the absence of certain competitors, predators, or resources, creating opportunities for specific organisms

**Physical Examples:**
- **Soap bubbles** - The bubble's spherical form is maintained by the constraint of surface tension minimizing area, not by any positive structural material
- **Whirlpools or hurricanes** - Stable patterns maintained by constraints on fluid flow, with no fixed material components
- **Crystalline structures** - The regular lattice emerges from constraints on how atoms can be arranged, creating "forbidden" positions

**Information/Meaning Examples:**
- **Phonemes in language** - The sound /p/ is defined by the absence of vocal cord vibration that distinguishes it from /b/
- **Musical rhythm** - Defined as much by the silences and what doesn't happen as by the notes played
- **DNA's informational content** - Meaning emerges from constraints on which base pairs can form, not just from the bases themselves

**Thermodynamic Examples:**
- **Temperature gradients** - The difference (absence of equilibrium) drives heat engines and biological processes
- **Chemical potential** - The "tendency" for reactions based on what's energetically prohibited vs. allowed

These absentials demonstrate how constraint, absence, and negation can be causally efficacious - they do real work in the world by organizing and channeling material processes, even though they're not material things themselves.

Terrence Deacon's book is pretty novel, although it has convergences with Evan Thompson Mind in Life, and Alicia Juarrero Dynamics in Action (the latter accused him of plagiarising her ideas, but he was later cleared by a formal review.)

Deacon's Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emeged from Matter was published around 12 years ago. Very hard book to descibe in few words. Have a look at the info about it. particularly this interview. He stays within the bounds of scientific naturalism, but is critical of mainstream materialist explanations of living beings. He introduces concepts including 'absentials' and 'ententionality'. Worth knowing about.

But the important thing is that they are constitutive and non-present. In that sense consciousness is constituted by that which is not it. — JuanZu

Are you familiar with the book Incomplete Nature by Terrence Deacon, a biological anthropologist. He develops the idea of absentials, which are ‘constitutive absences’ - a purpose not yet achieved, such as a seed aiming to become a plant, or the absence of a specific structure, like the cylinder in an engine that channels force, which gives it causal power. or the axle hole which allows the wheel to spin.

So, we could all benefit from what troubled you while reading this text. — Paine

It’s not that I find Kant troubling so much as that reading him is very hard work. But I find if I go through it methodically I can understand the arguments. I also want to understand it well enough to understand the criticisms by his successors.

I’m determined to get through the whole work by year’s end. I talk a lot about it but am well aware of the gaps in my reading.

It is the 'egological' outlook. Not egocentric, in an obvious way, but the sense of being a separate subject/self in an object world primarily oriented around the visual senses. That term 'egological' I found in an academic paper on the logic of the Diamond Sutra (A is not A, therefore it is A)

That song, I don't remember, but then I never had any of their albums.

There is an expression in esoteric philosophy 'the eye of the heart'.

And I feel that sense we have of being 'in the head' is very much associated with a certain kind of mentality.

Ever run across Douglas Harding 'On Having no Head'? He hasn't been mentioned much on this forum, but he was quite a popular spiritual teacher a generation ago. https://amzn.asia/d/9kFTHpb

Aristotle believed that the heart was the seat of sensation, thought, and intelligence. In De Anima (On the Soul) and other biological works, he describes the heart as the central organ of life, the source of motion and sensation, and the place where the “soul” (in the sense of the animating principle) most directly resides. The brain, in his view, was a cooling device for the blood. Galen later corrected this view saying that the brain was the seat of thought.

Interestingly in Thai and other Eastern cultures, 'citta' can be translated as either 'heart' or 'mind' depending on the context. That is nearer the colloquial usage of 'knowing in your heart' or 'heartfelt'. I do wonder if there's a somatic element to knowing which those saying reflect.

Perhaps the ancients were not as much "in their heads" and language oriented as we are today.
— Janus
I think that's very likely. — Ludwig V

Good comments. The key point is ‘participatory’ - not being a bystander.

Krishnamurti used to say, ‘to see as it is without condemning it or justifying it.’ That is something that stayed with me,

That’s more Freud’s superego, The philosopher’s aim is always ‘seeing what is’.

often these prejudices become reinforced concrete for their bearer — Astorre

Ain’t that the truth. Everyone has them but the wise are willlng to own up to it.