Within the Indian traditions the self can be known. — Punshhh

Capital ‘S’ Self. Which is the entire aim of the path. There’s nothing really corresponding with that in Western culture save as a kind of import from Indian sources. Which is not to imply disrespect but mindfulness of context.

*

The point is that all morality comes from our evolution. — Questioner

I very much hope that we don’t revert to the idea of survival of the fittest in planning our politics and our values and our way of life. I have often said that I am a passionate Darwinian when it comes to explaining why we exist. It’s undoubtedly the reason why we’re here and why all living things are here. But to live our lives in a Darwinian way, to make a society a Darwinian society, that would be a very unpleasant sort of society in which to live. It would be a sort of Thatcherite society and we want to – I mean, in a way, I feel that one of the reasons for learning about Darwinian evolution is as an object lesson in how not to set up our values and social lives. — Richard Dawkins, in response to a question about whether survival of the fittest might serve as a basis for values

Dawkins often expresses this sentiment. It is one of the things I find agreeable in his public utterances.

Also, from Richard Polt, a Heidegger scholar:

I have no beef with entomology or evolution, but I refuse to admit that they teach me much about ethics. Consider the fact that human action ranges to the extremes. People can perform extraordinary acts of altruism, including kindness toward other species — or they can utterly fail to be altruistic, even toward their own children. So whatever tendencies we may have inherited leave ample room for variation; our choices will determine which end of the spectrum we approach. This is where ethical discourse comes in — not in explaining how we’re “built,” but in deliberating on our own future acts. Should I cheat on this test? Should I give this stranger a ride? Knowing how my selfish and altruistic feelings evolved doesn’t help me decide at all. Most, though not all, moral codes advise me to cultivate altruism. But since the human race has evolved to be capable of a wide range of both selfish and altruistic behavior, there is no reason to say that altruism is superior to selfishness in any biological sense.

In fact, the very idea of an “ought” is foreign to evolutionary theory. It makes no sense for a biologist to say that some particular animal should be more cooperative, much less to claim that an entire species ought to aim for some degree of altruism. If we decide that we should neither “dissolve society” through extreme selfishness....nor become “angelic robots” like ants, we are making an ethical judgment, not a biological one. Likewise, from a biological perspective it has no significance to claim that Ishould be more generous than I usually am, or that a tyrant ought to be deposed and tried. In short, a purely evolutionary ethics makes ethical discourse meaningless. — Anything but Human

The passage from Eric Reitan that I had in mind was this:

(Hegel) thought that Kant had missed something important—namely, that the self which experiences the world is also a part of the world it is experiencing. Rather than there being this sharp divide between the experiencing subject and things-in-themselves, with phenomena emerging at the point of interface, the experiencing subject is a thing-in-itself. It is one of the noumena—or, put another way, the self that experiences the world is part of the ultimate reality that lies behind experience.

So: the self that has experiences is a noumenal reality. ...Hegel believed that this fact could be made use of, so that somehow the self could serve as a wedge to pry open a doorway through the wall of mystery, into an understanding of reality as it is in itself.

But this understanding couldn’t be achieved by simply turning our attention on ourselves. As soon as we do that we’ve made ourselves into an object of experience, and this object is just as likely to be the product of our own cognitive reconstructions as any other object. In other words, what we are presented with when we investigate ourselves introspectively is the phenomenal self, not the noumenal self. The self as it appears to itself may be radically unlike the self as it is in itself. ... — Eric Reitan

The point I'm trying to bring out, is the elusive nature of the self (or subject). I often return to the idea found in Indian philosophy (and hardly elsewhere) that 'the eye can see another, but not itself'. This conveys the idea that the knower or subject cannot know itself, paradoxical though that might seem. Kant's insistence on the 'mere' acts of cognition makes a similar point, although expressed differently. But he is arguing that we can't make out the knower or subject as any kind of knowable entity or object, even though it invariably accompanies every act of thought.

The point which Reitan goes on to make is that both Hegel and Schleirmacher say that though we can't know the self as such, because we are the self, so this fact of our identity as the self could 'serve as a wedge to pry open a doorway'. But then, considering the great complexity (not to say prolixity) of Hegel's philosophy, this is not simple or straightforward.

But if nothing changed at all in the world, would anyone perceive time? The fact of the matter is, things change (e.g. Sun rises every morning), hence people notice time passing. — Corvus

What Kant means by pure intuition is likely not what you think it means. Pure intuition is the a priori (already existing) form of sensibility (sensory cognition) through which anything can appear to us at all, independent of any particular sensory content (i.e. irrespective of what it is.)

But here, 'form' is also not what you might take it to be. It does not mean a kind of internal template or mental container that sensations enter into. Kant is referring to the necessary condition of appearance — the way anything must be given in order to be experienced at all. Things must appear in space and time if they are to appear at all. And space and time are not objects we perceive, nor features abstracted from experience, but the already-existing field within which perception occurs.

If you find that hard to understand, you’re not alone. These are among the foundational moves in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, which while a great work, is also acknowledged by everyone, a very difficult book to read and interpret.

The way I put it — and this is my gloss on Kant — is that while time is objectively measurable (which Kant does not dispute), it is grounded in the faculty of knowledge itself rather than in the objective domain as such. So your remarks about time being objective are broadly correct, but its objectivity is not really the point at issue. The deeper question is: in what sense would time exist absent any awareness of it? The difficulty is that as soon as you begin to think about that question, you are already bringing time into awareness, or rather, bringing your mind to bear on the question. So time is always already part of the consideration.

Have another look at the original post, particular the section 'what is not at issue'. You will see that it is not the intention to deny the objective reality of time. Rather it is the constituents of objectivity that are in question.

But what's so galling is the casual way Trump has brushed off any legitimacy of her claim to be the rightful president of Venezeula, 'because the people don't like her.' When it is common knowledge that Maduro lost and stole the last election. But then, losing and then stealing an election is all part of the Trump playbook, right? Probably it means the current regime is more tractable to bribery and coercion, which is why Trump wants to keep them. The whole thing is a disgusting cesspit of robber-baron colonialism.

The point being that Energy is an Idea (mental inference), not a real thing (physical observation) — Gnomon

This is simply mistaken. Drop that phrase into Google Gemini and see what comes back. No amount of verbalisation is going to alter the facts.

I know the term ‘transpersonal’ used to be associated with Wilbur, but he stopped using it and it generally fell out of use in the 1990s. But I think it conveys the drift of the transcendental subject quite well - ‘those capacities and faculties which characterise any rational sentient being, not this or that person’. I haven’t noticed anything in Bitbol about ‘mystical experience’ and mystical experience is not a term I’m inclined to use in the context of his material.

It's more that you seem to deplore modernity, see it as a step backwards somehow — Janus

Generally not, except in this specific regard. The solution surely comprises recognizing it. At least that is a starting point.

the physical is not merely mechanical and mindless as has been assumed by the scientific orthodoxy. — Janus

My point exactly!

The problem, though, is always going to be finding clear evidence for such a thing, and being able to develop a clear model of just what might be going on — "Janus

Evidence and models are again appeals to empiricism, don’t you see? Not all philosophical analyses can be expressed in those terms.

As for whether there is a ‘crisis of meaning’ I think it’s axiomatic, but I wouldn’t want try and persuade those who don’t agree.

As it is the basic argument of this thread has a clear provenance in the sources quoted.

She is ready to drop off many of her things just to finally start addressing and solving the big social issues of Venezuela. — javi2541997

True. No slight on her. But then Trump is like ‘thanks lady, now go away.’ I bet the Nobel Committee is less than impressed.

So the Orange Emperor is gifted a Nobel Peace Prize medal by Maria Corina Machado, leader of the Venezuelan opposition, which had been awarded to her. Never mind that the Committee says that in no way such honours can be transferred! The Emperor will grasp the opportunity. Even though he’s basically disenfranchised Machado after snatching Maduro, declaring that she ‘lacks popular support’. (Oh well, I guess he’s saved the Venezuelans the trouble of having an election as he obviously knows ‘the will of the people’ better than they themselves.)

But what an unbelievably gauche and classless gesture, accepting someone else’s Nobel. With Trump, there’s never any bottom.

:pray: Someone I'm meaning to study. I've only ever read his obituary.

Fair enough. I'd go along with that. But I've got a more specific focus in mind. (I meant by the 'italicized pargraphs' the post directly above your last post, which re-states the thrust of the OP.)

I've gone back and looked at your initial comment in this thread, so I offer the following retrospective response.

I take Wayfarer to mean we are adrift from a culturally imposed overarching purpose. Such overarching purposes were imposed by political elites who throughout most of history were the only literate members of societies. The oppressed illiterate masses had no choice but to at least pay lip service to the imposed values and meanings. To what extent they were genuinely interested in, or were privately opposed to, these impositions remains, and will remain, unknown, precisely because they were illiterate. — Janus

I take this to imply that the hidden purpose of my argument is to 'restore the ancient order'- harking back to some supposed 'higher knowledge' which was imposed on the masses by the aristocracy and the Church ('political elites'.) This is the way you often intepret my posts, and I can sort of understand why. After all the so-called 'perennialists' who invoke the 'wisdom traditions' are often political reactionaries. So this kind of analysis can easily be associated with them. But, not my intent. I think I'm fully cognizant of the way that the knowledge we have now prevents any kind of return to a traditionalist mindset. Yet at the same time, those perennial philosophies must still remain perennial (otherwise, they never were!)

And also, it is true that Biblical narratives provided an historical framework which could be interpreted as an imposed political order and hence an imposed 'purpose'. indeed the European Enlightenment was largely inspired as a means to throw of the 'ancien regime' and ending of our self-imposed tutelage (Kant). This has obviously been hugely beneficial in many ways - in that sense, I'm very much a progressive liberal. But at the same time, it has its shadow. And the shadow is precisely the sense of being cast adrift in a meaningless cosmos, the children of chance and necessity, with only our own wits and purposes set against the 'appalling vastnesses of space' (Pascal). That's nearer to what I mean by the 'predicament of modernity'. The resulting idea that 'the universe is meaningless' is very much the product of that mindset. It comes directly from the 'Cartesian Division' that was mapped out in the OP. And yet, it remains a kind of cultural default for much of the secular intelligentsia. That is Vervaeke's 'meaning crisis' in a nutshell.

So I am reacting against the physicalist view, yes. The view that what is real, are the entities describable in terms of physics, and that life and mind are products of, or emerge from, that. If you see the way the division or duality was set up in the first place, then you can see how it is a picture based on an abstraction. That is what this thread is about.

Great! Thanks for that clarification.

You fail to realize it (physicalism) is self-contradictory only on the the assumptions, the strictures, that you place on it. — Janus

Well, they're spelled out in the two italicized paragraphs above. What I'm arguing is that physicalism in its modern form, arose as a consequence of the Galilean and Cartesian divisions between mind and matter, between primary and secondary qualities, and so on. This thesis has been explored in detail in those sources I provided, amongst many others (i.e. Whitehead's 'bifurcation of nature'.) So if you think that is overall mistaken, then how so?

then accuse others who don't agree with your dogmatic strictures of being positivists. — Janus

The only reason I have said that some of your posts are 'positivist', is when they clearly are. Not all the time, but also not infrequently.

Positivism is a philosophy asserting that genuine knowledge comes only from sensory experience and logical/mathematical analysis, emphasizing scientific methods, objective facts, and observable phenomena while rejecting metaphysics, intuition, or faith as sources of truth.

You might explain what about that definition you disagree with.

The 'tendentiously monolithic history of ideas' is summed up in these paragraphs, and is supported by the references provided.

Descartes systematised what Galileo had begun. Taking the measurable world as the paradigm of objective knowledge, he posited a strict ontological division between res extensa—the extended, mechanical substance of nature—and res cogitans—the unextended, thinking substance of the mind. This dualism safeguarded human subjectivity from the reductionism of mechanism, yet it did so at the cost of severing mind from world. Thought was now a private interior realm looking out upon an inert, external nature. The result was a self-conscious spectator of a disenchanted universe: the modern subject—liberated from dogma yet exiled from a cosmos stripped of inherent meaning.

The Cartesian worldview soon became the framework of modern science. Its success lay in treating the natural world as a closed system of mechanical causes, perfectly describable in mathematical terms and open to experimental verification. By excluding subjective and qualitative dimensions from its domain, science achieved unprecedented predictive power and technological mastery. Yet this very exclusion became an implicit metaphysic: reality was equated with what could be measured, while everything else—value, purpose, consciousness—was deemed epiphenomenal, a by-product of the essentially purposeless motions of matter. Thus the Galilean and Cartesian divisions were no longer simply methodological but ontological, shaping the modern sense of the meaning of being. We're all inheritors of those ways of thinking, whether aware of it or not.

Refs: Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of the European Sciences; Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False (2012); Michel Henry, Barbarism (1987).

And it's a perfectly defensible historical analysis.

I think of myself, in behalf of a possible experience, by abstracting from all actual experience, and from this conclude that I could become conscious of my existence even outside experience and of its empirical conditions. Consequently I confuse the possible abstraction from my empirically determined existence with the supposed consciousness of a separate possible existence of my thinking Self, and believe that I cognize what is substantial in me as a transcendental subject, since I have in thought merely the unity of consciousness that grounds everything determinate as the mere form of cognition. — ibid. B426

Again, a very useful passage, in terms of understanding Kant's view of the matter, and thanks for it.

The repeated use of “mere” and “merely” in that sentence really caught my eye — they’re doing a lot of work.

Kant isn’t just describing the unity of consciousness, he’s also putting a fence around how we’re allowed to think about it. What he’s warning against is a very natural slide: we abstract in thought from all particular experiences, and then quietly slip into thinking that the “I” could exist on its own, as a separate kind of entity altogether outside experience.

So when he says that what we really have is “merely the unity of consciousness” and “the mere form of cognition,” the point isn’t that it’s trivial or unimportant. It’s that it isn’t substantia — a thing or an entity in its own right. It’s a formal condition: the structural unity that makes determinate experience and judgement possible at all. The “mere” is there to stop us reifying it into a metaphysical self or soul.

At the same time, though, this “mere form of cognition” is doing incredibly deep work. Literally pivotal. It’s what makes any experience hang together as experience in the first place. Without it, nothing could count as an object for a subject, and nothing could really be judged or known. So the language feels a bit defensive. In the effort to avoid dogmatic metaphysics, he risks slipping into dogma of another kind.

Which leaves an interesting tension. On the one hand, he insists it’s only formal. On the other hand, it’s the most basic enabling condition of intelligibility that we ever encounter. You can’t help wondering whether it’s really “mere” in any innocent sense — or whether Kant is deliberately bracketing off a deeper way of understanding it in order to avoid drifting back into old-style metaphysics. I think in this vital respect he is leaning too far towards empiricism.

It's also the very point which his later critics (even his friendly critics) used to pry open the 'door to the noumenal' (see this blog post.)

@boundless - I think this might echo some of your concerns.

There'll be no hats. :yikes:

Anyway - my basic point is still, there's an awful lot of basic stuff that needs doing here on Earth, before 'fixing our gaze on distant worlds'.

Hey, I like Gnomon as a person, and he's not a disruptive or antagonistic contributor. But, you know, this forum is a place where ideas go to get criticized.

They're not cranks. It's published by the Union of Atomic Scientists.

Founded in 1945 by Albert Einstein, J. Robert Oppenheimer, and University of Chicago scientists who helped develop the first atomic weapons in the Manhattan Project, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists created the Doomsday Clock two years later, using the imagery of apocalypse (midnight) and the contemporary idiom of nuclear explosion (countdown to zero) to convey threats to humanity and the planet. The Doomsday Clock is set every year by the Bulletin’s Science and Security Board in consultation with its Board of Sponsors, which includes nine Nobel laureates. The Clock has become a universally recognized indicator of the world’s vulnerability to global catastrophe caused by man-made technologies.

Last week, Putin fired a nuclear-capable missile into Ukraine.

the material/immaterial gap — AmadeusD

The 'material-immaterial' gap is an artefact of Cartesian philosophy, with his 'mind-matter dualism', which has been woven into the fabric of modern culture. That can be understood through examining the philosophy, culture and history of the last several centuries, without having to compare energy with ghosts. The Predicament of Modernity presents that argument in more detail.

I don't think we're at risk of a catastrophe — AmadeusD

Well, I admire your optimism. The Doomsday Clock was last set 28th Jan 2025, at 89 seconds before midnight.

Some commentary on the idea of transpersonal subjectivity developed in dialogue with claude.ai

The supposedly "objective" view of science - the God's eye view, the view from nowhere - actually depends on subjective capacities (conceptualization, measurement, mathematical reasoning) that have been systematically hidden or bracketed. The subject is constitutively necessary for the objective picture but gets erased from the picture itself.

In quantum mechanics specifically:

This erasure becomes impossible to maintain. The measurement apparatus, the observer's choice of what to measure, the collapse of the wave function - the subject keeps reappearing because quantum phenomena are inherently relational. You can't bracket out the conditions of observation the way classical physics was able to.

Michel Bitbol's "veiled subject":

Bitbol argues that modern science achieved its success precisely by veiling the transcendental subject - making it seem like we're describing nature "as it is in itself." But this veiling has costs: we forget that all such knowledge is contingent on the structures of possible experience. Quantum mechanics has forced this forgotten 'bracketing' back into view.

The "transpersonal" qualifier is important:

The transpersonal subject is not solipsistic - it is not 'the individual consciousness creating reality'. Rather, it's the shared structures of rationality, perception, and measurement that together constitute the conditions for any subject. Accordingly, the 'veiled subject' is transcendental/transpersonal, not psychological.

warp drive/wormhole/gravity drive type of thin — AmadeusD

I respectifully think a lot of these ideas are science fiction. Which has, after all, seeped into the culture through nearly a century of cinematic memes. But if the Earth can't even get it together to agree to a treaty to prevent climate catastrophe, what are the odds of pulling together the kind of massive global effort required for planetary expansion. All the people spruking it - Bezos and Musk, mainly - are the top 1% of the top 1%, and they stand also to be the chief finacial beneficiaries of the whole endeavour, such as it is.

Can i put to those people: The long stretch between the wheel and the engine, the engine and the aeroplane, and the aeroplane and the Moon landing. — AmadeusD

Yeah, I'm one. The analogy doesn't hold, though. Mars is a possibility, as it is within some kind of striking distance. But even so, the problems involved in travelling there, let alone setting up habitable environments, are enormous.

But anything outside the solar system is another matter altogether. The times and distances involved are unthinkably huge. The nearest star system, Proxima Centauri, is 4.25 light years away and any kind of travel that covers those distances would take millions of years. That is 40 trillion kilometres, give or take. To give a sense of scale: even at 100,000 km/h (far faster than any crewed spacecraft has ever flown), the trip would take roughly 45 million years.

And even if propulsion and life-support challenges could somehow be overcome, human interstellar travel faces a fundamental biological barrier in the form of radiation exposure. Beyond Earth’s magnetosphere and the Sun’s heliosphere — crews would be continuously bombarded by high-energy galactic cosmic rays and episodic solar particle events. These particles penetrate most conventional shielding, generate secondary radiation within spacecraft materials, and accumulate irreversible damage to DNA, nervous tissue, and immune systems over time. Measured radiation doses on a Mars trajectory already approach the upper limits considered acceptable for astronaut careers; over interstellar timescales of decades or centuries the cumulative exposure would almost certainly exceed survivable thresholds. In this sense, radiation is not merely an engineering inconvenience but a hard biological constraint on human deep-space travel.

There was an ambitious idea to send ultra-light computer-powered systems to Proxima Centauri using laser-guided sails, Breakhrough Starshot. It sounds at least feasible, if not actually possible. But even that is effectively on hold.

My definition of Energy : A. not a tangible material substance — Gnomon

The point remains that energy is an abstract but universal, constant, and predictable property of matter - precisely measurable to minute degrees of accuracy. It is not a material substance, but the matter-energy equivalence has been demonstrated in Einstein’s famous equation e=mc². Ghosts are in no way measurable or observable whatever. So the comparison is fatuous.

All due respect, I don’t think you demonstrate understanding of the sources you’re quoting. You’re still grasping after the idea of a ‘mysterious substance that does stuff’ - some cross between information and energy - so you will gather up definitions and catch-phrases that you think can be pressed into this mould. Not interested in pursuing this further.

Also, bear in mind that Kant has more to say about his religious philosophy, in his Critique of Practical Reason (and also, I think, his Religion within the Limits of Pure Reason), which I haven't studied, and only have a superficial acquaintance with.

I asked claude.ai to provide a synopsis of my posts on the Forum, which it did in about 3.1 seconds. It pointed out that:

3. Platonism & Mathematical Realism
You're interested in Platonic forms, mathematical platonism, and the "unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics." You argue that formal concepts exist independently of individual minds and reflect an intelligible order in the cosmos.

So I have to take ownership of this, as I've so often argued it and I do believe it.

SpaceX has made advances in the re-usability of the rockets, which wass quite a leap. — ssu

That, I have to agree with. SpaceX is clearly an astoundingly competent company, Those re-landing rockets are an engineering marvel, no doubt about that. StarLink is also an extremely clever company with global impact. Up until Elon Musk turned out to be such a complete a***hole, I was really impressed with him. It's depressing to see such obvious brilliance yoked to such malevolent politics.
--

Yet obviously when there's poverty, many can obviously make the question that "Why are we spending money in things like space programs, when there are so many people that are poor?" — ssu

Silicon Valley has given a lot of money to the effective altruism community, which has provided scholarly legitimacy to tech billionaires’ hobbyhorses. Effective altruists encourage the use of reason and data for making philanthropic decisions, but Becker highlights how some of their most influential thinkers have come up with truly bizarre “longtermist” calculations by multiplying minuscule probabilities of averting a hypothetical cataclysm with gargantuan estimates of “future humans” saved.

One prominent paper concluded that $100 spent on A.I. safety saves one trillion future lives — making it “far more” valuable “than the near-future benefits” of distributing anti-malarial bed nets. “For a strong longtermist,” Becker writes, “investing in a Silicon Valley A.I. safety company is a more worthwhile humanitarian endeavor than saving lives in the tropics.” — NY Times Review

And it's those philosophically-inferred relationships that I refer to as Causation, and use physical Energy as an analogy for how the world works on multiple levels. Including Ontology and Epistemology. However, I don't mean that physical Energy is the same thing as metaphysical Causation. — Gnomon

But that's what I mean. In our previous exchange about energy:

My point was simply that Energy is not a tangible material substance, but a postulated immaterial causal force (similar to electric potential) that can have detectable (actual) effects in the real world : similar to the spiritual belief in ghosts. — Gnomon

I'm afraid this is a terrible analogy (and many others would describe it much more harshly).

I tried to point out that in physics, 'energy' has a precise definition and meaning, which I think you were disregarding, in order to use the term in a particular way to suit your polemical framework. I think Boundless was making the same point (and he's certainly not a scientific materialist.)

I'm sympathetic to your orientation, and also appreciate the fact that you're not an antagonistic contributor, both of which are plusses. But interpretive integrity requires a certain amount of respect for definitions and facts. And here we're often discussing and debating many difficult ideas which are very easy to misinterpret or misconstrue.

More than happy to debate it.

How things are going, it is extremely likely that the last astronaut that walked on the Moon may die of old age since we go back to the Moon, if we go anymore there. Going to Mars is even more questionable. Actually here Neil Armstrong (first on the moon) and Paul Ciernan (last on the moon) are asked that question on the future of manned space flight. Now both are dead and nobody has gone to the moon back. I think the youngest Apollo astronaut that walked on the moon is now 90 years of age. — ssu

That was a good and persuasive post, and I acknowledge the importance of space technology for scientific exploration and for the unintended benefits it has provided.

But I have become sceptical of the 'colonize Mars' narrative. There are plenty of articles out there on the huge physical impediments to doing that, let alone the economic and political barriers. There's also the fact that in the US at least, the ultra-wealthy tech oligarchs (Musk, Bezos, etc) are positioning themselves as the sole providers (and therefore beneficiearies) of the technologies required for these fantastical ideas. This article by Adam Becker, who is a reputable science author and journalist, spells it out particularly well. (His book More Everything Forever, is a powerful takedown of the tech bros visions.)

Mars is too inhospitable to allow a million people to live there anytime remotely soon, if ever. The gravity is too low, the radiation is too high, there’s no air, and the Martian dirt is filled with poison. There’s no plausible way around these problems, and that’s not even all of them. Nor does the idea of Mars as a lifeboat for humanity make sense: even after an extinction event like an asteroid strike, Earth would still be more habitable than Mars. Mammals survived the asteroid strike that killed the dinosaurs, but no mammals could survive unprotected on Mars today.

Putting all of that aside, if Musk somehow did put a colony on Mars, it would be wholly dependent on his company, SpaceX, for supplies. That’s one feature that tech oligarchs’ fantasies have in common: they all involve billionaires holding total control over the rest of us. — Adam Becker

Jezz Bezos, on the other hand, wants 'a trillion people living in a fleet of giant cylindrical space stations with interior areas bigger than Manhattan.' Also fantasy, plainly.

Recall that fantastic Tom Hanks movie about Apollo 13, that almost crash-landed on the Moon after an engine problem, and which required incredibly adroit improvisation and trouble-shooting with what we would now consider very primitive computer technology. That's the kind of pioneering spirit that made NASA great in the day. Whereas Musk and Bezos owe more to Star Wars than to down-home technological smarts.

This idea that we have to 'colonize other planets' to 'escape Earth' is a sci-fi fantasy. We have a perfect starship, one capable of supporting billions of humans for hundreds of milions of years. But it's dangerously over-heated, resource-depleted, and environmentally threatened. That's where all the technology and political savvy ought to be directed - to maintaining Spaceship Earth.

Getting the sense for what 'empirical realism' means for Kant is not a wholesale rejection of Descartes. — Paine

I agree. It's not a wholesale rejection, but a correction.

I've also noticed that Edmund Husserl similarly commented on the mistake Descartes makes in respect of 'res cogitans'. He sees the cogito and the turn to first-person evidence as the genuine origin of transcendental philosophy (including his own). His criticism is internal: Descartes discovers transcendental subjectivity but then reinterprets it in the old metaphysical grammar of substances, turning it into something quasi-objective. Then follows all of the confused questions about what 'it' is etc.

Very roughly, for me it shows up as (1) less compulsion to define or secure a fixed identity, (2) more tolerance for uncertainty and contingency, and (3) a slightly quieter self-preoccupation in everyday experience. Hard to argue for — more something noticed over time.

Kant never refers to the transcendental subject or transcendental ego
— Wayfarer

He does refer to it, albeit in as a source of misunderstanding — Paine

Thanks for those passages, they are right on point.

So he refers to the transcendental subject as something that can't be referred to! Which was the point I was trying to make.

Kant’s point is precisely that the “transcendental subject = x” is not something that can be known, described, or treated as an object at all. It is a formal condition of representation, not a determinate entity. So yes — he refers to it only in order to show why it cannot properly be referred to as an object of knowledge. Questions about its constitution, origin, or ontological status are, for Kant, literally empty of meaning (i.e. 'what is it?' presupposes an 'it'.)

Recall this passage from the related thread about MIchel Bitbol and phenomenology:

Bitbol argues in Is Consciousness Primary? (that) consciousness is not an object among objects, nor a property waiting to be discovered by neuroscience. It is not among the phenomena given to examination by sense–data or empirical observation. If we know what consciousness is, it is because we ourselves are conscious beings, not because it is something we encounter. — Wayfarer

It is precisely the tendency to reify (=make into something) the subject (or observer) that bedevils so much of the discourse about consciousness. First Descartes designates it res cogitans, 'thinking thing'. Then natural philosophy comes along and negates any such idea as self contradictory and incoherent, leading to philosophical materialism (=sole reality of res extensa). But Kant has already diagnosed and ameliorated these mistakes in this analysis.

I think learning to accept and live with the elusive nature of the self/subject/'I' is a fundamental life lesson.

Good as starting points and good to avoid dogmatisms but they can't structurally be 'the last world'. They seem to point to some conclusion and just stop before asserting it. In other words, these approaches seem to point beyond themselves naturally. — boundless

I think you meant ‘last word’ (although it’s an interesting slip). But I agree - they’re not ‘the last word’ in the sense of conveying the absolute truth. They’re a starting point, not a conclusion.

Hope all goes well, I too will be taking a few days out.

Clearly, idealism (i.e. 'mind-dependency') is an anthropocentric fallacy and contrary to the Copernican Principle — 180 Proof

But you never demonstrate a grasp of the implications of philosophical idealism. In the various OPs and essays where I present it, idealism is closely linked to what is called in modern philosophy constructivism: the understanding that the brain synthesises sensory input and conceptual structures to generate what we ordinarily take to be a fully external world. That is not anthropocentrism, nor does it imply that the universe depends on human minds in order to exist. It is an acknowledgment of the nature of knowledge, and, more to the point, the reality of being.

I started listening to the video, and the very first sentence already gives the game away: “It seems that reality somehow waits for awareness before deciding what it is.”

“Waiting” is an intentional predicate. It presupposes an agent that entertains a state of anticipation or suspension. But no serious account of observation — in either physics or philosophy — is committed to anything like that. Introducing this language at the outset inserts a straw man into the presentation. The follow-up claim that “physics dismantles this idea” continues the same. Physics does nothing of the kind; 'dismantling is the aim of a presentation about physics, which in turn always requires interpretation. Phrases like “the universe constantly measures itself” are further examples of a metaphor doing illicit conceptual work.

There is also equivocation in the use of the word 'observer'. Sometimes it denotes a physical interaction system (detectors, environments, particles); sometimes it implicitly refers to a conscious subject. Showing that decoherence does not require a conscious observer in the first sense does nothing to address the second sense. The two uses of the term operate at different explanatory levels.

Finally, look closely at the channel itself: joined Nov 2025, a stream of 6-minute videos comprising computer-generated images with AI voiceovers, driven by a creator with a clear agenda. Someone selected the prompts, framed the claims, and published the material. In other words, there is very definitely an observer — namely the author of those materials. Without him (or her), they wouldn’t exist. :-)

definitions specifically tailored to the subject matter. — Gnomon

Discussion is one thing, but re-definition in support of an argument is another. 'Everyone has a right to their own opinions, but not to their own facts' ~ Daniel Patrick Moynihan.

My proposed second installment on Michel Bitbol was rejected by Philosophy Today. No reason given, but maybe because it's too specialised a subject matter, Bitbol's philosophy of quantum physics. But anyone interested can access it here ('friend link', ought not to require registration.)

Note that if, instead, you say that the transcendental subject is a 'pragmatic model' used to 'make sense' of the world without asserting that it is 'real', then you imply a non-dualist view (i.e. the very distinction of 'subject-object' is provisional). In these kinds of view, there is no need to explain how the subject came into existence. It is, after all, an useful 'map' at best. — boundless

Kant never refers to the transcendental subject or transcendental ego. That comes with later philosophers. But also, notice that in singling out the subject as an individual being, you're already treating this as an object of thought. That is what I mean by taking an "outside view".

What seems to be driving the worry you keep returning to is not so much a disagreement about Kant but a discomfort with contingency itself — the idea that the conditions under which a world appears are not grounded in something further, necessary, or metaphysically self-explaining or self-existent.

What you keep coming back to is

1. The transcendental subject is a condition of intelligibility.
2. But if it is contingent, it must have an explanation.
3. If it has an explanation, there must be something beyond it.
4. Therefore transcendental idealism is incomplete or unstable.

This is, precisely something like 'the Cartesian anxiety'. And perhaps, now, the 'useful map' analogy is a good one. In presenting this OP, I didn't set out to offer a 'theory of everything'. Really the point is to call out the naturalistic tendency to treat the human as just another object — a phenomenon among phenomena — fully explicable in scientific terms. This looses sight of the way that the mind grounds the scientific perspective, and then forgets or denies that it has (which is the 'blind spot of science' in a nutshell).

The point is not to replace scientific realism with something else, but to recall that the very intelligibility of scientific realism already presupposes what it cannot itself objectify: the standpoint of the embodied mind. So I'm not presenting it as 'the answer' but as a kind of open-ness or aporia.

I think the main difference between Plato and Kant, is that Kant denies the human intellect direct access to the noumenon as intelligible object. — Metaphysician Undercover

Agree with the contrast you’re drawing: Plato allows a form of direct intellectual apprehension of intelligible reality, whereas Kant denies that human cognition has any such unmediated access apart from sensible intuition structured by space and time.

But I will call out the language of “intelligible objects.” I think this is where a deep metaphysical confusion enters. Expressions like “objects of thought” or “intelligible objects” (pace Augustine) quietly import the grammar of perception into a domain where it no longer belongs. They encourage us to imagine that understanding is a kind of inner seeing of a special type of thing. I'm of the firm view that the expression 'object' in 'intelligible object' is metaphorical. (And then, the denial that there are such 'objects' is the mother of all nominalism. But that is for another thread.)

But to 'grasp a form' is not to encounter an object at all. It is an intellectual act — a way of discerning meaning, structure, or necessity — not the perception of something standing over against a subject. Once we start reifying intelligibility into “things,” we generate exactly the kind of pseudo-problems that Kant was trying to dissolve.

I think @Joshs previous comment (above your reply to me) holds, I hope that what I've been arguing so far conforms with it.

the 'transcendental idealist' takes the 'transcendental subject' as being an individual sentient (or rational*) being. — boundless

Here, you are treating the transcendental subject as if it were an entity that could itself be viewed from an external standpoint and compared with a “world without it.” But the whole point of the transcendental analysis is that there is no such standpoint. The subject here is not a being in the world, but the condition under which anything can appear as world. So asking how the world would be “without reference to it,” or how it “comes into existence,” already presupposes what the analysis rules out.

the transcendental idealist wants to deny that "the world without reference to any sentient/rational being" has any intelligibility and is completely unknowable even in principle. — boundless

And what world would that be? Presumably, the earth prior to the evolution of h.sapiens . But then, you're conflating the empirical and transcendental again. Notice that even to name or consider 'the world without any sentient/rational being' already introduces the very perspective that you are at the same time presuming is absent.

I totally get that this is not an easy thing to internalise, because we are so habituated to treating time, space, and objectivity as simply “out there.” Seeing them instead as conditions of intelligibility rather than as objects of description requires a genuine shift in perspective, a kind of gestalt shift.

A note to clarify my view of what is meant by the 'in itself': it designates whatever has *not* entered 'the machinery and the manufactury of the brain' (to quote Schopenhauer.) Put another way: an object considered from no perspective.

You might be thinking of an object in the absence of any perspective, but even thinking of it requires either imagining it or naming it, both of which are mental operations.

This is why I have said previously that the ‘unobserved object’ neither exists nor does not exist — not because it is unreal, but because either claim already presupposes a standpoint from which it can be meaningfully predicated. To say 'it exists' is to predicate something of it when it literally 'hasn't entered your mind'. To say 'it doesn't exist' likewise already situates the object as something, the existence of which can be negated. So the 'in itself' is neither - in fact, not even a 'ding'! Just the 'in itself'.

(Again, the noumenon and the ding an sich are different in Kant's philosophy but they are often conflated, even by him.

Noumenon means literally 'object of nous' (Greek term for 'intellect'). In Platonist philosophy, the noumenon is the intelligible form of a particular. Kant rejects the Platonist view, and treats the noumenon primarily as a limiting concept — the idea of an object considered apart from sensible intuition — not as something we can positively know. And it’s worth remembering that Kant’s early inaugural dissertation already engages directly with the Platonic sensible/intelligible distinction.

The 'ding an sich' is not the same concept although as noted often treated as if it were. The ‘thing in itself’ designates whatever a thing may be independently of the conditions under which it appears to us. It is not an intelligible object we could know or describe, but precisely what cannot be brought under any standpoint or predicates at all.)

In relation to time, then: whatever we think exists, or might exist, is already implicitly located in time and space. Even the theoretical abstractions of modern physics (like virtual particles) are temporally, if ephemerally, existent. As Kant points out, in order to conceive of anything as a thing, it must be located in time and space which provide the structural conditions that underlie all empirical existence - the 'framework of empirical cognition', you might say. But because these ‘pure intuitions’ are so deeply embedded in our consciousness, we fail to recognise that the mind itself is their source. We think we are looking at them, when in fact we are looking through them, at the objects disclosed within them.