Upthread somewhere I linked to an Evan Thompson paper 'Could All Life be Sentient'? He says, briefly, that it's an undecideable question, because it's too hard to specify exactly where in the process of evolution sentience begins to emerge. But he says it's an open question, and an important question, one that hasn't been settled. It's also a question in phenomenology of biology, as 'phenomenology' is specifically concerned with the nature of experience from the first-person perspective.

One of the ground-breaking books (which Thompson cites) is Hans Jonas The phenomenon of life: toward a philosophical biology. Dense book, too hard to summarise, but well worth knowing about. One of the gists is that the emergence of organic life is also the emergence of intentional consciousness, even at very rudimentary levels of development. Like, nothing matters to a crystal or a rock formation, but things definitely matter to a bacterium, because it has skin (or a membrane) in the game, so to speak. It has the drive to continue to exist, which is something only living things exhibit. And that it plainly tied to the question of the nature of consciousness (if not rational sentient consciousness of the type humans exhibit.)

There's no third person without the first person. Modern science began by the bracketing out of the subject. Another of my potted quotes:

The modern mind-body problem arose out of the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, as a direct result of the concept of objective physical reality that drove that revolution. Galileo and Descartes made the crucial conceptual division by proposing that physical science should provide a mathematically precise quantitative description of an external reality extended in space and time, a description limited to spatiotemporal primary qualities such as shape, size, and motion, and to laws governing the relations among them. Subjective appearances, on the other hand -- how this physical world appears to human perception -- were assigned to the mind, and the secondary qualities like color, sound, and smell were to be analyzed relationally, in terms of the power of physical things, acting on the senses, to produce those appearances in the minds of observers. It was essential to leave out or subtract subjective appearances and the human mind -- as well as human intentions and purposes -- from the physical world in order to permit this powerful but austere spatiotemporal conception of objective physical reality to develop. — Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos, Pp 35-36

:clap: :ok:

I am not positing 'metaphysical beliefs'. I am pointing out the inherent contradiction in the concept of the mind-independent object.
— Wayfarer

You made these assertions that apply to ontology:

1. Mind is foundational to the nature of existence

2. To think about the existence of a particular thing in polar terms — that it either exists or does not exist — is a simplistic view of what existence entails. In reality, the supposed ‘unperceived object’ neither exists nor does not exist. Nothing whatever can be said about it."

Both of these pertain to ontology (metaphysics). By stating them, you are expressing something you believe. Hence, they reflect metaphysical beliefs.

There is no "inherent contradiction" in the concept of a "mind independent object", but I think I understand why you say this: "object" is a concept - an invention of the mind. But this overlooks the possibility that there is a real-world referrent for the "objects"; and that there are good reasons to believe this is the case (irrespective of whether you find these to be compelling) — Relativist

The reason I'm not making an ontological statement, is because I've already stated 'Adopting a predominantly perspectival approach, I will concentrate less on arguments about the nature of the constituents of objective reality, and focus instead on understanding the mental processes that shape our judgment of what they comprise.'

You, however, will interpret that as an 'ontological statement' because of your prior acceptance of the reality of mind-independent objects. Mind-independence is your criterion for what must be considered real. That is why I say at the outset that a perspectival shift is required.

I'm not saying that 'objects are an invention of the mind' but that any idea of the existence of the object is already mind-dependent. What they are, outside any cognitive activity or idea about them, is obviously unknown to us. What 'an object' is, outside any recognition of it by us, is obviously not anything. Neither existent, nor non-existent. (That I take as the actual meaning of Kant's 'in-itself' although he spoiled it by calling it a 'thing', as it hasn't even really reached the threshold of any kind of identity.)

But does "nature of existence" refer to the mind-independent (billions of years old) real world that you acknowledge? Whether or not your inclined to talk about it, the real world is something we can talk about, and we can talk about its "nature". That's an integral part of ontology. — Relativist

"though we know that prior to the evolution of life there must have been a Universe with no intelligent beings in it, or that there are empty rooms with no inhabitants, or objects unseen by any eye — the existence of all such supposedly unseen realities still relies on an implicit perspective. What their existence might be outside of any perspective is meaningless and unintelligible, as a matter of both fact and principle."

I accept that, at the outset, as an empirical fact. So I'm not denying it. What physicalism wants to do, though, is to say that the Universe with nobody in it is 'the real universe' (which is the same as 'the unseen object' or the 'mind-independent object'). Physicalism forgets that the mind provides the framework within which any ideas about the universe (or anything whatever) are meaningful.




If I challenge you, which tree are you talking about, you will say, 'I don't know, any tree.' But you and I both have ideas of the tree already in mind, which allows us to converse. What is the 'real' tree, outside any conception or experience of it - that is an abstraction which has no meaning. At that point it become an empty word, a stand-in for 'any object'. And the 'billions of years old universe' is reckoned in units which we derive from the annual rotation of the earth around the Sun. When you speak of it, you already have that unit in mind. Remove any idea of perspective or 'years' and then what do you see?

What this whole argument is about is, as Schopenhauer states clearly, is the 'subject who forgets himself'. That is precisely what physicalism does - it 'abstracts away' the subject from the so-called objective measurement of the primary attributes of bodies, and then tries to understand itself as a product of those objective entities that it has abstracted itself away from in the first place.

I don't see that as different to what I'm saying. So I don't agree that I'm not in agreement. :-)

And it seems to me that one simple explanation of this is that the notion is incoherent. — Banno

It's incoherent for the exact reason that this thread was created months ago! Even designating 'the quality of lived experience' as 'quale' or 'qualia', automatically transposed the entire discussion to the wrong register. It suggest that there is some such thing or state - which there is not. The quality of experience, 'what it is like to be', is always first-person, prior to any discussion. You will invariably try and drag the discussion in the direction of what can be expressed in terms of symbolic logic, but 'what it is like to be' can't be accomodated within that framework, for the simple reason that it is not objectively real. That is what this whole thread is about. That said, there is no 'hard problem of consciousness' at all. The whole reason for Chalmer's polemic is to show up an inevitable shortcoming of third-person science. Once that is grasped, the 'problem' dissappears. But it seems extraordinarily difficult to do!

Chalmers basically said that there is nothing about physical parameters – the mass, charge, momentum, position, frequency or amplitude of the particles and fields in our brain – from which we can deduce the qualities of subjective experience. They will never tell us what it feels like to have a bellyache, or to fall in love, or to taste a strawberry. The domain of subjective experience and the world described to us by science are fundamentally distinct, because the one is quantitative and the other is qualitative. It was when I read this that I realised that materialism is not only limited – it is incoherent. The ‘hard problem’ of consciousness is not the problem; it is the premise of materialism that is the problem. — Bernardo Kastrup

I don't agree that it undermines the idea of self-existing things, meaning things that exist in the absence of percipients. — Janus

That precise point is written all over the history of quantum mechanics. The customary dodge is 'well, there are different interpretations' - but notice this also subjectivises the facts of the matter, makes it a matter of different opinions. If you don't see it, you need to do more reading on it. The fields of quantum physics are in no way 'building blocks', which is a lame attempt to apply a metaphor appropriate to atomism to a completely different conceptual matrix.

The whole debate between Bohr and Einstein, whilst very technical in many respects, is precisely about the question of whether the fundamental objects of physics are mind-independent. This has already been posted more than once in this thread, but it still retains relevance:

From John Wheeler, Law without Law:

The dependence on what is observed upon the choice of experimental arrangement made Einstein unhappy. It conflicts with the view that the universe exists "out there", independent of all acts on observation. In contrast Bohr stressed that we confront here an inescapable new feature of nature, to be welcomed because of the understanding it givs us. Bohr found himself forced to introduce the word “phenomenon”. In today's words Bohr’s point – and the central point of quantum theory – can be put into a single, simple sentence. "No elementary phenomenon is a phenomenon until it is a registered (observed ) phenomenon”.

‘what we consider to be ‘reality’, symbolised by the letter R in the diagram, consists of an elaborate paper maché construction of imagination and theory fitted between a few iron posts of observation’.

A clear a statement of 'the mind created world', as I intended it, as you're likely to find anywhere.

But are qualia real without consciousness?
— Wayfarer

Can you set out how this might work? What are you suggesting? — Banno

I'm suggesting that in the context of philosophy, 'qualia' are defined as subjective and first-person in nature. Look it up.

I think an issue with Chalmer's 'Facing up to the Problem of Consciousness' is just that problems are there to be solved, whereas the nature of consciousness (or mind) is a mystery. 'A mystery is a problem that encroaches upon itself because the questioner becomes the object of the question' as Gabriel Marcel put it. It's also not a 'brute fact' - being consciously aware is prior to the knowledge of any facts. Infants are consciously aware, with almost no grasp of facts.

seeing colours - having qualia - is not constitutive of consciousness. — Banno

But are qualia real without consciousness? Qualia are first person as a matter of definition.

So we agree consciousness is not a thing. But I don't see how calling it a "subjective experience" is at all helpful in explaining what it is. — Banno

Perhaps it is not something that can be, or must be, explained. That's what makes it a hard problem!

This non-paywalled article in Philosophy Now is worth the read in respect of this topic. Presents the 'no' case for 'can computers think?' Rescuing Mind from the Machines, Vincent Carchidi. If if you don't agree with the conclusions, he lays out some of the issues pretty clearly.

You had pointed to your essay after I challenged your justification for your metaphysical beliefs — Relativist

I am not positing 'metaphysical beliefs'. I am pointing out the inherent contradiction in the concept of the mind-independent object. It's actually physicalism that is posing a metaphysical thesis (and a mistaken one.)

As for 'the constituents of objective reality', I said in the essay, I leave that to science, whilst also saying 'I’m well aware that the ultimate nature of these constituents remains an open question in theoretical physics' - which it does.

My challenge to physicalism is that it posits that there are objects that exist independently of any mind or act of observation. Physicalism doesn't just say "physical things exist"—it says they exist as determinate objects with specific properties prior to and independent of any cognitive relation. But "determinate object with specific properties" is already a description that presupposes a framework of conceptual articulation. The physicalist wants to stand outside all frameworks and describe what's there anyway—but that move is incoherent. You cannot meaningfully refer to "the mind-independent object" without already employing the cognitive apparatus you're trying to transcend.

This isn't a rival metaphysical thesis. It's pointing out that the foundational claim of metaphysical realism—that objects exist as determinate things-in-themselves wholly apart from cognition—cannot be coherently formulated.

:ok:

I have an essay on it I’m trying to get published. If it is I’ll provide a link if you’re interested.

The irony enters when those, who generally take science to have only epistemic or epistemological, and not ontological, significance, nonetheless seek to use the results of quantum physics to support ontological claims, such as that consciousness really does, as opposed to merely seems to we observers to, collapse the wave function, and that consciousness or mind is thus ontologically fundamental. — Janus

I’ve been studying Michel Bitbol on philosophy of science, and he sees many of these disputes as arising from a shared presupposition: treating mind and matter as if they were two substances, one of which must be ontologically fundamental. In that sense, dualists and physicalists often share two assumptions—first, that consciousness is either a thing or a property of a thing; and second, that physical systems exist in their own right, independently of how they appear to us.

On Bitbol’s reading, quantum theory supports neither position. It doesn’t establish the ontological primacy of consciousness conceived as a substance—but it also undermines the idea of self-subsisting physical “things” with inherent identity and persistence. What it destabilises is the very framework in which “mind” and “matter” appear as separable ontological kinds in the first place.

Because both dualism and materialism tacitly treat consciousness as something—a thing among other things—while also presuming that physical systems exist independently of observation, the observer problem then appears as a paradox. The realist question becomes: what are these objects really in themselves, prior to or apart from any observation?

This line of thought aligns closely with what has humorously been called Bitbol’s “Kantum physics”—a deliberate play on words marking the Kantian dimension of quantum theory. Just as Kant argued that we know only phenomena structured by our cognitive faculties, Bitbol argues that quantum mechanics describes the structure of possible experience under the conditions of measurement. It is less a picture of an observer-independent world than a framework specifying how observations arise from our experimental engagement with it.

See The Roles Ascribed to Conscousness in Quantum Physics (.pdf) He's also done a set of interviews with Robert Lawrence Kuhn recently.

The real world object (rock, tree...) exists irrespective of our ever having perceived it — Relativist

This is the whole point at issue. I've given my reasons in detail, if you can't see them, so be it, (although it might be noted that AI has no trouble understanding them). But I see no point in responding further, I'll leave it at that.

‘Does the moon continue t exist when nobody is looking at it?’ Einstein asked Abraham Pais.

Why do you think he asked that question?

Well said!

you still have provided no justification for the ontological claims I highlighted:
.....
- that the supposed ‘unperceived object’ neither exists nor does not exist. Nothing whatever can be said about it. — Relativist

My claim arises in response to the familiar objection: if idealism is true, does an object cease to exist when no one is perceiving it? Berkeley famously answered this by invoking God as the perpetual perceiver. I’m not taking that route.

My point is more basic and logical than theological. If you take any object — this rock, that tree — and ask, “Does it exist when unperceived?” you have already brought it into cognition. To refer to it, designate it, or even imagine its absence is already to posit it as an object for thought. The very act of asking the question places the object within the space of meaning and predication.

So when I say that an unperceived object neither exists nor does not exist, I am not saying that objects go in and out of reality. I am saying that outside all possible cognition, conception, designation, or disclosure, there is nothing of which existence or non-existence can be meaningfully asserted. You cannot truthfully say “it exists,” because existence is never encountered except in disclosure. But you also cannot say “it does not exist,” because there is no determinate object there to which the predicate “non-existent” could attach.

Accordingly, existence and non-existence are not free-floating properties of a reality wholly outside cognition; they are predicates that arise only within the context of intelligibility. Outside that context, nothing positive or negative can be said at all. It's not a dramatic claim.

Again: Demonstrate how "cognition" is "more fundamental" than whatever is (i.e. nature) that embodies "acts of understanding". A 'Machine in the Ghost'? (pace Bishop Berkeley) — 180 Proof

That's confused. What I'm saying is that cognition is a constructive and active process. The mind is not a blank mirror which simply reflects or receives what is already there. It is continually interpreting and synthesising whatever it perceives into its internal world-model. That is enactivism and embodied cognition. So I'm saying, that process of cognition and assimilation is what is truly fundamental - not the ostensible primitives of physics. I'm arguing that the world that we perceive as separate and apart from ourselves is in that sense a mental construct (Vorstellung in Schopenhauer.) And that 'objectivism' forgets this, and imagines that it sees the world as it would be with no observer in it. That is the argument in a nutshell.

This is an unjustified statement: you have provided no basis to claim reality has a mental aspect. — Relativist

But you do understand when you say this, you are assuming that the world is mind-independent - that reality is outside of us, and our mental picture is inside our minds. This, to you, is so obvious that it can't be questioned - but it is what I am calling into question.

The view I’m defending is closer to a cognitivist idealism than to any denial of science or of an external world. The claim is not that reality is “mental stuff,” but that what we know as a world — objecthood, existence, lawfulness, measurability — is intelligible only through the constructive activity of brain/mind. The mind is not a mirror of nature, as if there were mind here and world there as two independently existing domains. Mind and world are co-arising, not separable in that way. Because, how would you know what the world is, without mind?

So when you say I lack justification for speaking of a “mental aspect” of reality, that objection already presupposes the very mirror-of-nature model that is under dispute. It also implicitly assumes a standpoint outside cognition itself — as if one could survey both “mind” and “world” from some position beyond one’s actual living cognition of either.

I don't think the advent of ChatGPT changes anything in her article. — Leontiskos

Yes, true, that. I went back and looked again. What i siezed on first time around was her mention of the Blake LeMoine case which was discussed here at length. I agree with her conclusion:

"For now, if we want to talk to another consciousness, the only companion we can be certain fits the bill is ourselves."

Furthermore, I know a priori that LLMs would affirm that.

You accept that the universe existed billions of years ago, despite it not having actually been perceived (so...does inferred count?) — Relativist

I note this objection at the outset. 'Science has shown that h. sapiens only evolved in the last hundred thousand years or so, and we know Planet Earth is billions of years older than that! So how can you say that the mind ‘‘creates the world”’? I also say that 'there is no need for me to deny that the Universe is real independently of your mind or mine, or of any specific, individual mind. Put another way, it is empirically true that the Universe exists independently of any particular mind. But what we know of its existence is inextricably bound by and to the mind we have, and so, in that sense, reality is not straightforwardly objective. It is not solely constituted by objects and their relations. Reality has an inextricably mental aspect, which itself is never revealed in empirical analysis. Whatever experience we have or knowledge we possess, it always occurs to a subject — a subject which only ever appears as us, as subject, not to us, as object.'

Do you see the point?

These are unsupported assertions about the nature of existence. — Relativist

It is supported by the above. The argument is that 'existence' is a compound or complex idea, not a binary 'yes/no': it's not always the case that things either exist or don't exist, there are kinds and degrees of existence. The key point is that our grasp of the existence of objects, even supposedly those that are real independently of the mind, is contingent upon our cognitive abilities. Physicalism declares that some ostensibly 'mind-independent' object or state-of-affairs is real irrespective of the presence of absence of any mind - that is what is being disputed (on generally Kantian grounds).

On the other hand, your only justification seems to be that physicalism is false, therefore your view must be true. — Relativist

Physicalism is highly influential in modern culture. Much of modern English-speaking philosophy is based on a presumptive physicalism, and it's important to understand how this came about. So the argument I'm putting is not peculiar to me but to many other critics of physicalism.

having a perspective doesn't entail falsehood. If you accept science, then you have to accept that our human perspectives managed to discern some truths about reality - truths expressed in our terms- but nonetheless true. (I discussed the role of perspective in the post that led to your dropping out. Considering the importance you place on perspective, it's something you need to be able to address). — Relativist

I don't say that having a perspective entails falsehood. Nor do I dispute scientific facts.'I am not disputing the scientific account, but attempting to reveal an underlying assumption that gives rise to a distorted view of what this means. What I’m calling attention to is the tendency to take for granted the reality of the world as it appears to us, without taking into account the role the mind plays in its constitution. This oversight imbues the phenomenal world — the world as it appears to us — with a kind of inherent reality that it doesn’t possess. But nor am I advocating relativism or subjectivism - that only what is 'true for you' is real. Only that the subjective pole or aspect of reality is negated or denied by physicalism, which accords primacy to the objective domain, neglecting the foundational role of the mind in its disclosure.

I don't see any examples on this thread of anyone using physicalism as an ontological category. — 180 Proof

Relativist has made this claim repeatedly in numerous discussions over the past year. We've extensively discussed D M Armstrong's 'Materialist Theory of Mind', as recently as a few pages back. Armstrong's is the textbook example of physicalism as an ontology.

Physics is grounded in such irreducible acts of understanding ~ Wayfarer


Nonsense. "Physics is grounded" in useful correlations with natural regularities or processes. — 180 Proof

They are correlations between observations and mathematical calculations. Which, incidentally, have yielded insights into physical principles far beyond the scope of un-aided observation, purely on the basis of Wigner's 'unreasonable efficacy of mathematics in the natural sciences.' Dirac's prediction of anti-matter is a boilerplate example. Such calculations are purely intellectual in nature, then correlated against observations, so far as they can be (and as you note with many gaps.)

So when you insist that everything is “physical,” you are making a metaphysical assertion, not a scientific one ...

Well, since no one has made such a "metaphysical assertion", Wayf, your statement is, at best, just another non sequitur. — 180 Proof

Your 'fundamental ontological primitive', defined in negative terms, is of course a metaphysical assertion.

You constantly use the description 'non sequiter' to describe things you can't understand or don't agree with. Nothing I've said here or elsewhere in this thread is a non sequiter.

I can see perfectly clearly the background to this interminable debate - the aftermath of Cartesian dualism, the division of the universe into mental stuff and material stuff, the incoherence of the idea of mental stuff, the subsequent attempt to define everything in terms of matter and energy.

The core problem is this: physicalism treats “the physical” as the fundamental ontological primitive, yet physics itself does not—and cannot—define what 'the physical' ultimately is. The content of physics is a sequence of evolving mathematical formalisms, not an account of what being physical means in itself. (The fact that you say that the definition entailed by physics is not relevant to your claims only serves to underline, not defuse, this point.)

So when you insist that everything is “physical,” you are making a metaphysical assertion, not a scientific one—while simultaneously denying the legitimacy of metaphysics. That is the equivocation.

My point is precisely that you cannot justify treating “the physical” as the basic category of being when you cannot even say what it is, except by contrast with “the mental.” That inability is not a flaw in my argument—it is the unresolved foundation of your position.

The position I defend is that the mathematical models used to analyse the physical domain are themselves intellectual structures, consisting of meanings, identities, and necessities that can only be grasped by rational understanding. No equation, proof, or law functions as physics in virtue of its physical inscription, but only in virtue of its intelligible content. Physics is grounded in such irreducible acts of understanding.

More fundamentally still, cognition—even in non-human animals—is not built up from meaningless physical atoms, but is organized through meaningful gestalts: structured wholes that are apprehended within a lived context of significance. Charles Pinter's 'Mind and the Cosmic Order' shows that this can be said even of insects. Meaning is therefore not something added to or emerging from a self-contained physical process; it is the form in which all cognition exists.

If that is so, then neither rationality nor meaning can coherently be treated as derivative products of a domain that is itself defined only in abstraction from them.

That is the basic argument presented in the Mind Created World, which I don't believe you have countered.

If you have anything other than ad homs, sarcasm and emojis, this would be a good time to provide it.

It was the substance of the famous debates between Bohr and Einstein that occupied decades. At issue was the status of objectivity, about the question as to whether the primitive elements of quantum theory were indeed mind-independent. Einstein held a strong belief in realism, the view that physical systems possess definite, objective properties (like position or momentum) that exist independently of whether they are observed or measured.

He argued that quantum mechanics (specifically the Copenhagen interpretation associated with Bohr and Heisenberg) was an incomplete theory because its mathematical description (the wavefunction) does not account for these definite, pre-existing properties of individual systems. Bohr, the chief architect of the Copenhagen interpretation, argued that quantum mechanical elements do not possess definite properties until a measurement is made. The act of observation, through interaction with a classical measuring device, is what forces a quantum system to acquire a definite state (the "collapse" of the wavefunction). Einstein believed that a complete theory must provide a description of reality that is objective and local. That was behind the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen (EPR) thought experiment (1935), where he used the concept of entanglement to argue that particles must have definite, pre-existing properties before measurement, or else quantum mechanics violated the principle of locality. As is well-known, experimental evidence after Einstein's death did confirm that quantum mechanics violated the principle of locality, the subject of the 2022 Nobel Prize.

What I'm looking for is your own epistemic justification to believe what you do. You previously shared the common view - it was a belief you held — Relativist

I've laid it out in the OP, The MInd Created World. It makes a rational case for a scientifically-informed cognitive idealism. We had a long discussion in that thread. We'll always be at odds. Simple as that.

Notice that OP was published five months before ChatGPT went live. Apropos the problem posed in the thread, there is no way to put this particular genie back it's bottle. ChatGPT has the largest take-up of any software release in history, it and other LLM's are inevitable aspects of techno-culture. It's what you use them for, and how, that matters.

This is Mary's room. Knowledge of pain and other qualia is a knowledge of experience. Nevertheless, it IS an explanatory gap that a complete ontology should account for. You talk around the issue in vague terms, by (I think) implying there's something primary about first-person-ness. Does that really tell us anything about ontology? It's not an explanation, it's a vague claim that you purport to be central. — Relativist

THe fact that you can't see something which I and many others believe to be obvious, and instead describe it as 'vague', is only an indication of your inability to see the issue. I'm done trying to explain it to you.

I think the point he's making, if I understand it, is an error because he treats the "observer" as separate from the "observed." — Ciceronianus

Quite right! But this is one of the major points of contention that quantum physics threw up. Albert Einstein, for one, never accepted the questioning of this separation which for him was an absolute presupposition of science. That was behind his legendary remark 'does the moon continue to exist when nobody is looking?' I think the rhetorical import was 'Of course it does!" But he had to raise the question because it is what the findings of Neils Bohr and Werner Heisenberg seemed to call into question. Sir Roger Penrose, to this day, loudly and often declares that quantum physics must be wrong, on just those grounds.

Poetic language may be able to evoke them, and that's about the best you're gonna get. — Janus

Philosophy has always grappled with the 'meaning of Being', explicitly or otherwise.

Let physics do physics. Let phenomenology do phenomenology. Lets not conflate them. — Apustimelogist

You're not thinking philosophically, but like an engineer.

I will be offline for a while. Thanks for the feedback.

Whatever Husserl is doing, he is not solving this issue — Apustimelogist

He's not solving what you think is the issue. You see everything from the perspective of science and engineering - how does it work? What is the causal mechanism? How do you account for it?

But if no one can describe the feeling of pain. Then how on earth can you give an explanatory account of pain? — Apustimelogist

But the point is not about 'giving a better explanation'! It's the fact that a third-party, objective description does not embody the felt experience of pain - and yet everybody, in fact, practically every animal, knows what pain is. So it's not a 'problem to be solved'. It's not that 'nobody can describe pain satisfactorily'. It's being pointed to as an 'explanatory gap' - 'look, no matter how sophisticated your scientific model, it doesn't capture or convey the felt experience of pain, or anything other felt experience.' So there's a fundamental dimension of existence that is left out of objective accounts.

Well maybe you can elaborate on what this blind spot is about and what implications it has? — Apustimelogist

Behind the Blind Spot sits the belief that physical reality has absolute primacy in human knowledge, a view that can be called scientific materialism. In philosophical terms, it combines scientific objectivism (science tells us about the real, mind-independent world) and physicalism (science tells us that physical reality is all there is). Elementary particles, moments in time, genes, the brain – all these things are assumed to be fundamentally real. By contrast, experience, awareness and consciousness are taken to be secondary. The scientific task becomes about figuring out how to reduce them to something physical, such as the behaviour of neural networks, the architecture of computational systems, or some measure of information. — The Blind Spot

What do you think about that?

"I" refers to a single, specific identity - I am an individual with this unique identity, distinct from all other identities. I have perceptions and experiences; I interact with the world beyond me - the world I am a part of. My experiences are distinct from yours; your experiences take place when and where your body is are, mine take place when and where my body is. What part of this do you disagree with? — Relativist

What you’ve described there is the empirical self — an individual being located in space and time, with experiences correlated to a body. It’s an accurate description, but it is a description from the ego’s perspective. By ‘ego’ I mean the self as it appears to itself, as an object in the world — the self-image or personal identity.

The ‘subject’ at issue is not you viewed objectively; it is the subject or observer for whom anything can appear as ‘a world’ at all. By re-describing the ‘I’ entirely from the third-person standpoint, you’ve already shifted back into the objective stance and thereby bracketed out the very role of subjectivity that is in question.

This is precisely the point made by phenomenology: natural science is methodologically blind to its own point of departure, because all science already presupposes consciousness as the condition of there being a world to investigate. To then try to explain consciousness in the same terms as the objects of physics and chemistry is a category mistake — not because mind is mystical, but because it is an inappropriate perspective from which to approach philosophy of mind.

Nearly everyone on earth does this implicitly! — Relativist

Right! Which is why it's so hard to argue against. But philosophy's role, as Aristotle put it, is to 'wonder at what men think ordinary'. Physicalism and naturalism begin with abstractions - the 'ideal bodies' of physics, the mathematical description of phenomena. Tremendously powerful, no question about it - but the mind that devises these abstractions has been left out at the very beginning. And then, the attempt is made to put it back in again, by attempting to put it on the same ontological footing as the objects of that method. That's the category mistake at issue.

I don't know about that! Sheldrake has published many scientific papers - dozens, in fact. He was trained entirely within orthodox biology: BA & PhD in Biochemistry – Cambridge, Research Fellow at Clare College, Cambridge Royal Society Research Fellow; Worked at Harvard as a research fellow; Principal plant physiologist at ICRISAT (India) – an international agricultural research institute. During this period (roughly late 1960s–1970s), he published dozens of standard experimental papers, mainly on: Plant hormones (auxins); Plant development; Cellular differentiation; Transport mechanisms in plants. These appeared in fully mainstream journals such as: Nature; Journal of Experimental Botany, Planta Biochemical Journal.

Of course everything changed with his New Science of Life, 1981, and with it, the focus of his experimental work. That was the book which John Maddox reviewed harshly in Nature, saying it was 'heresy' and 'pseudo-science'. But, you know, Sheldrake didn't throw up his hands and walk away. He still has considerable presence in modern culture.

Michael Levin’s work is often said to be “non-standard” or “post-genomic,” but his research programme presupposes a kind of naturalised Platonism - not in a mystical sense, but in the straightforward biological sense that forms, patterns, and target morphologies have real causal powers.

Levin’s central claim—that cells cooperate toward an anatomically defined end-state—only makes sense if that end-state has some ontological status. The “target morphology” guiding regeneration and development is not encoded neuron-by-neuron or gene-by-gene; it is a structural attractor, a normative form. It is something like a real abstract—a pattern that exists as an organising principle even when no physical structure currently instantiates it. So he really has re-introduced the teleonomic element, life as goal-directed right through to the most basic levels. He's firmly anti-physicalist for all these reasons.

Levin appears in my story as Stephen Leavitt, although only by way of being mentioned, he doesn't have a walk-on role. But morphic resonance definitely comes into it. Which means what? Very simply - nature has memories. Not only in brains, but in nature herself. That is what Maddox screamed 'heresy' about. (Peirce's 'nature forms habits' seems to make a similar point. I met Rupert once, in the early 90's, he was brought out by a group I was associated with and gave a talk. He's hardly changed since, really.)

Plato and Aristotle differed significantly in their approach to reality, with Plato emphasizing an ideal, abstract realm of Forms as the ultimate reality, accessed through reason, and Aristotle focusing on the tangible, physical world as the primary reality, understood through empirical observation and the senses. — Gnomon

I think this is a serious oversimplification. Aristotle does not abandon Forms; his hylomorphism is still a form–based ontology—the difference is that Forms are no longer conceived as existing in a separate, self-subsisting realm, but as ontologically prior principles instantiated in matter. Matter, for Aristotle, has no actuality or determinate identity on its own; it exists only as pure potentiality until it receives form.

Moreover, intellect (nous) is precisely the faculty that apprehends forms, and thereby knows what particulars are. This is what differentiates rational from non-rational cognition—hence the classical definition of man as the rational animal. Sense perception alone never yields universality; it is nous that grasps form as such. In Aristotelian philosophy, this grasp of the Forms is what enables us to converse rationally, as reason converges on principles which are common to every rational intellect.

So Aristotle does not replace forms with brute physical particulars understood purely by the senses. Rather, he relocates form from a separate Platonic realm into the structure of being itself, while preserving its ontological and epistemic priority. If you look again at this post, what’s being argued in those three quoted passages is exactly this point: Aristotle’s realism remains fundamentally a formal realism, not a straightforward empiricism (although it is dismally apparent that this distinction is not being understood, with the attempt on my part to elucidate it being described as 'monomania'.)

Sure. Thanks for your comments.

From the passage above your post - why do you think the speaker says "It (physics) is screaming at us that observers really matter"? What is the point do you think he's making?

I don't accept that I misrepresented Janus' contributions, even though my description of them as naturalist empiricism was rejected. That is Janus' basic stance, whether he acknowledges it or not.

But I don't think this is an issue for physicalism, this is an issue for any kind of possible explanation. No theoretical framework can account for what it is like to feel something. A panpsychist or idealist is not going to be able to explain conscious experience anymore than a physicalist; panpsychism and idealism will also both have gaps in explaining how experiences emerge, such as the combination problem. The nature of explanation. — Apustimelogist

From my side, where the problem lies is that you don your physicalist spectacles and look at the whole discussion through them. Like a pair of polarising glasses that block out particular wavelengths, there are philosophical concepts that these spectacles won't let you see. Then you think that your inability to see them is somehow due to the nature of explanation, or the nature of the subject. That article I linked to is called 'the blind spot of science is the neglect of lived experience'. And really I don't think it even registered. It's like 'what "blind spot"?'

I think the central issue of the mind-body problem is that we take experience as some kind of special ontological primitive when I can't even articulate what that means — Apustimelogist

No! You can't articulate what it means, because of the physicalist framing of the issues. The school of phenomenology, initiated by Edmund Husserl, is precisely about the recognition of the primacy of experience. But I suspect as you read about it, you would auto-translate it into the physicalist framework, thereby missing the point again. You really should read some existentialism.

No other account can do better in principle — Apustimelogist

Here, you're falling back on scepticism - 'nobody really knows anything'.

The idealist and physicalist accounts are not two versions of the same kind of philosophy, one with mind as fundamental, the other with physical fundamentals. Not at all. Surely nobody can describe the feeling of pain such that another on hearing that description will know that particular pain, but everyone knows what pain is, because they suffer it. That is the 'explanatory gap' in a nutshell.

Actually I should clarify what I said above about Sheldrake - morphic resonance is Sheldrake’s controversial idea. The morphogenetic field is a related but different idea which is part of mainstream biology. Nevertheless Sheldrake is enamoured of Levin’s work for its holistic and non-reductionist approach.

Newsflash - just heard Sheldrake say that ‘Michael Levin and I both think that biological development comes about through morphogenetic fields.’

Just remember, this was the very concept that the erstwhile editor of Nature, John Maddox, said, in a hostile review, made Sheldrake’s book A New Science of Life (1981) “fit for burning”. He described the book, which proposed the concept of morphic resonance to explain biological and physical phenomena, as an "infuriating tract" and an "exercise in pseudo-science.”

The times, they are a’ changin’.

Constructive disagreement is the lifeblood of philosophy.

You might be interested in the fascinating work of the biologist Michael Levin, who posits a kind of platonic space at work in nature — Janus

You bet! I've been taking in his lectures the last few months. He has a role in the story I'm writing (under an alias, of course.)

Problem-Solving Without Explicit Instructions: Levin argues that biological systems—from cells to tissues to organisms—don't follow rigid, pre-programmed instructions but instead solve problems by navigating toward goals in this abstract space. — Janus

Which is intelligence in action. Dovetails very nicely with Evan Thompson's phenomenology.

I've been listening to all these guys, often while working out. (YouTube is now the very last subscription I'd cancel.. well, along with Chuck, which is my name for ChatGPT.)

I present such an alternative view as counterpoint to your seeming presupposition that the view you favour is the only one which is not self-refuting. — Janus

It was not a presupposition. Remember, this went back to three passages I provided, from Gerson, Feser and Russell, in support of the general idea of 'Aristotelian realism'. Aristotelian realism upholds the reality of universals, which are 'intelligible objects', of which the triangle, and other geometric forms, are examples. I do defend Aristotelian or scholastic or (some forms of) Platonic realism, in that I believe that there are real intelligibles, that are not the product of the mind, but can only be grasped by the mind. Insofar as there are 'immaterial things' then these are those with the caveat that they're not things but intellectual acts that are common to all rational minds (my 'doctrine of universals' in a nutshell.)

Your response:

The idea of a perfect geometrical figure can be understood to be simply an abstraction away from the inevitable imperfections in any geometrical physical construction — Janus

The 'abstraction away' from the sensory impression of a triangle is the kind of argument that empiricists appeal to. I only mentioned John Stuart Mill as an eminent example of that.

Mill’s view in A System of Logic is precisely:

• Numbers arise from collections of concrete objects
• Geometry arises from idealizing sensory experience
• Universals are formed by abstracting common features
• Necessity is a product of psychological expectation hardened into habit

It is very close to the kinds of arguments you often articulate. If that is offensive, I didn't mean it to be, so, sorry for that. It was an effort to contextualise the kinds of arguments we're presenting - Neo-Aristotelian vs Empirical.

If you had read what I wrote closely you would see that I was referring to something else, namely the attitude that we ought to argue only on the grounds of what nature presents to us, not on traditional or scriptural authority or personal intuitions, which might purport to pertain to something beyond nature. — Janus

So what you really meant by 'the natural attitude' was actually 'naturalism'. You frequently appeal to naturalism and/or natural science is the 'court of appeal' for normative claims. Again, this is not meant as a pejorative or personal criticism, it is demonstrably what you're saying. I might have misinterpreted it, because the expression 'the natural state' is associated with Husserl's critique of naturalism.

His criticism of the 'natural attitude' is of the kind of taken-for-grantedness of the domain of empirical experience, which looses sight of the framing assumptions which natural science brings to experience. As one of the modern Buddhist scholars I follow, David Loy, put it in respect of secular culture, 'The main problem with our usual understanding of secularity is that it is taken-for-granted, so we are not aware that it is a worldview. It is an ideology that pretends to be the everyday world we live in. Most of us assume that it is simply the way the world really is, once superstitious beliefs about it have been removed.”

And this, in turn, is because of the association of transcendentals with religious commitments, something which intertwined with the history in our culture. I've published an essay on it on Medium (although it's a complex argument.)