Or maybe that is my mistake as I have enjoyed all the benefits of a progressive and pragmatic social order. I feel no urge to go back to the certainties of life as lived in previous centuries. — apokrisis

There is a boundary between philosophy as making rational sense of the world and philosophy as making shit up. — apokrisis

You can’t give a straight answer so only give me crooked ones. — apokrisis

Are you confessing finally to just being an epistemic idealist? And modern Buddhism is only that too? If so, great. Just be brave enough to come out and say it. And then be consistent in that position in your posting. — apokrisis

So in what sense is that now any different from what the biologist would say? — apokrisis

But do you really expect to die a man and come back as a monkey, frog or amoeba? — apokrisis

But then once you start breaking out this "self" as some kind of ontological essence or substantial being – a spirit stuff – then you have crossed a line and now need to provide a new justification for what you have started claiming. — apokrisis

Both world and self are products of a modelling relation embodied in the structure of an organism. — apokrisis

The world is inseparable from the subject, but from a subject which is nothing but a project of the world, and the subject is inseparable from the world, but from a world which the subject itself projects — Maurice Merleau Ponty

But this means YOUR reasons to reject it do not falsify MY beliefs. And vice versa: my reasons to reject your position are epistemically contingent upon my background beliefs. The difference is that I recognize this contingency - and that's why I can respect your position. You overlook this contingency, and hence you conflate your subjective basis for rejecting physicalism with an objective falsification. — Relativist

What categories should I have used when explaining how "I made sense" of the meaning of "physical"- after you indicated I'd "left the meaning of 'physical' indeterminate"? I referenced categories of hypothetical objects that many take for granted:

-supernatural/spiritual objects- a common belief about God and angels
-abstract objects - a common belief of platonists — Relativist

I referenced this model when referring to immanent universals, and pointed out that quantum fields fit the model. The ontology hangs together quite consistenly, and if you don't see that - then you were premature in dropping the topic. There's nothing vague about the ontology itself, so any perceived vagueness could be cleared up. No one's compelling you to pursue it further, but recognize the folly of trying to falsify something you don't understand. — Relativist

• Kumar, Manjit. Quantum: Einstein, Bohr, and the Great Debate about the Nature of Reality. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2008.
• Lindley, David. Uncertainty: Einstein, Heisenberg, Bohr, and the Struggle for the Soul of Science. New York: Anchor Books, 2007.
• Becker, Adam. What Is Real? The Unfinished Quest for the Meaning of Quantum Physics. New York: Basic Books, 2018.

Naturalism is a metaphysical system that assumes as a first principle that the natural world comprises the totality of reality. — Relativist

Philosophy in general is the most systematic form of self-consciousness. It consists in bringing to consciousness for analysis and evaluation everything that in ordinary life is invisible because it underlies and pervades what we are consciously doing. Language, thought, consciousness itself become the explicit objects of philosophical attention instead of just serving as the medium for our lives. — Thomas Nagel, Secular Philosophy and the Religious Temperament

So where does value come from in this telling? Is it on the side of the epistemic relation between an organism and its world, or is it something more - an ontological level break between the realm of matter and the realm of ideas? — apokrisis

We talk as if value and meaning are separate from material being and yet share the same Universe, but that separateness is then just a figure of speech? — apokrisis

In logic, the corollary of that is that value alone has no matter. And that is absolutist talk, matey! — apokrisis

When you call something good, or beautiful, or divine, or whatever, the question becomes, well what is the shape of that? What does that look like in practice? — apokrisis

This runs into a problem when science tells us matter is shaped by a thermodynamic purpose. The Big Bang could happen as it was a grand carving out of the very Heat Sink it was throwing itself headlong into. The Universe expands so it can cool, and cools so it can expand. — apokrisis

perhaps instead penalised by coming back in the next life to try over from the level of a bug or mushroom. — apokrisis

Can't a sorry old pragmatist like me not have values and meaning without all the claptrap? — apokrisis

I understand that - what is physical is defined in contrast with or distinct from what is supernatural or spiritual. That's a part of my point - it is an aspect of the 'Cartesian division' which I've already referred to. I'm trying to explain what is wrong with the expresssion 'spiritual/supernatural objects...'
— Wayfarer

Why does it matter, if it's a category that maps to an empty set? — Relativist

The only thing being "transformed" is the mind of the person, not the external world. — Relativist

you seem to be latching onto the "consciousness causes collapse" interpretation of QM — Relativist

You've provided no reason to think this is a false distinction — Relativist

So life and mind are fully part of Nature and entrained to its thermodynamic constraints. — apokrisis

Paticcasamuppada as your Buddhist mates would say. — apokrisis

Buddhists believe in the Universe. The Universe is, according to philosophers who base their beliefs on idealism, a place of the spirit. Other philosophers whose beliefs are based on a materialistic view, say that the Universe is composed of the matter we see in front of our eyes. Buddhist philosophy takes a view which is neither idealistic nor materialistic; Buddhists do not believe that the Universe is composed of only matter. They believe that there is something else other than matter. But there is a difficulty here; if we use a concept like spirit to describe that something else other than matter, people are prone to interpret Buddhism as some form of spiritualistic religion and think that Buddhists must therefore believe in the actual existence of spirit. So it becomes very important to understand the Buddhist view of the concept spirit.

I am careful to refer to spirit as a concept here because in fact Buddhism does not believe in the actual existence of spirit. So what is this something else other than matter which exists in this Universe? If we think that there is a something which actually exists other than matter, our understanding will not be correct; nothing physical exists outside of matter.

Buddhists believe in the existence of the Universe. Some people explain the Universe as a universe based on matter. But there also exists something which we call value or meaning. A Universe consisting only of matter leaves no room for value or meaning in civilizations and cultures. Matter alone has no value. We can say that the Universe is constructed with matter, but we must also say that matter works for some purpose.

So in our understanding of the Universe we should recognize the existence of something other than matter. We can call that something spirit, but if we do we should remember that in Buddhism, the word spirit is a figurative expression for value or meaning. We do not say that spirit exists in reality; we use the concept only figuratively. — Nishijima-Roshi, Three Philosophies and One Reality

The sense of the world must lie outside the world. In the world everything is as it is and happens as it does happen. In it there is no value—and if there were, it would be of no value.

If there is a value which is of value, it must lie outside all happening and being-so. For all happening and being-so is accidental.

What makes it non-accidental cannot lie in the world, for otherwise this would again be accidental.

It must lie outside the world. — 6.41

But semiosis happily puts human values back in the actual world. — apokrisis

I respect that your noetic structure differs from mine, and would not suggest this means you're objectively wrong. — Relativist

Folk like Pattee who directly tackle the symbol grounding issue and show how biology works. — apokrisis

The concept of Biosemiotics requires making a distinction between two categories, the material or physical world and the symbolic or semantic world. The problem is that there is no obvious way to connect the two categories. ...I have not solved this problem… All I can do is set up the problem clearly by specifying the minimum logical and physical conditions necessary. — Howard Pattee, Physics and Metaphysics of Biosemiosis

The story of how epistemic creatures could arise as Nature’s way of accelerating its entropy flow. — apokrisis

Then watch this short video by cosmologist Sean Carroll... — Relativist

Indeed, it seems that the science of today, by going back in one leap millions of centuries, has succeeded in being a witness to that primordial Fiat Lux, when, out of nothing, there burst forth with matter a sea of light and radiation [... Thus modern science has confirmed] with the concreteness of physical proofs the contingency of the universe and the well-founded deduction that about that time the cosmos issued from the hand of the Creator.

Lemaître was reportedly horrified by that intervention and was later able, with the assistance of Father Daniel O’Connell, the director of the Vatican Observatory, to convince the Pope not make any further public statements on religious or philosophical interpretations of matters concerning physical cosmology.

According to the theoretical physicist and Nobel laureate Paul Dirac,

Once when I was talking with Lemaître about [his cosmological theory] and feeling stimulated by the grandeur of the picture that he has given us, I told him that I thought cosmology was the branch of science that lies closest to religion. However Lemaître did not agree with me. After thinking it over he suggested psychology as lying closest to religion. — Wikipedia

The term, "subjectively real" seems problematic. The "contents" of my mind (my mental states) are objectively real - but known only to me. If I'm interpreting you correctly, you are simply suggesting the converse of objectivism. — Relativist

And you keep leaning on semiotics and believing it is leading you to idealism. You see it as a sword to smite materialism. — apokrisis

President Trump remembered the conservative activist Charlie Kirk as a “martyr” on Sunday in remarks at his memorial in Arizona, but he pivoted swiftly to blunt politics by saying that he hated his political opponents and that they “cheated like dogs.”

Striking a far different tone from that of Mr. Kirk’s widow, Erika, who spoke immediately before him, Mr. Trump said he disagreed with Mr. Kirk’s view of wanting the best for one’s opponent.

“I hate my opponent and I don’t want the best for them,” he said. — at Kirk Memorial

Only absolute reality cannot be granted to it (time) according to what has been adduced above. It is nothing except the form of our inner intuition. — CPR A36/B53

Think of a melody. Each note has its own distinct individuality while blending with the other notes and silences that come before and after. As we listen, past notes linger in the present ones, and (especially if we’ve heard the song before) future notes may already seem to sound in the ones we’re hearing now. Music is not just a series of discrete notes. We experience it as something inherently durational.

Bergson insisted that duration proper cannot be measured. To measure something – such as volume, length, pressure, weight, speed or temperature – we need to stipulate the unit of measurement in terms of a standard. For example, the standard metre was once stipulated to be the length of a particular 100-centimetre-long platinum bar kept in Paris. It is now defined by an atomic clock measuring the length of a path of light travelling in a vacuum over an extremely short time interval. In both cases, the standard metre is a measurement of length that itself has a length. The standard unit exemplifies the property it measures.

In Time and Free Will, Bergson argued that this procedure would not work for duration. For duration to be measured by a clock, the clock itself must have duration. It must exemplify the property it is supposed to measure. To examine the measurements involved in clock time, Bergson considers an oscillating pendulum, moving back and forth. At each moment, the pendulum occupies a different position in space, like the points on a line or the moving hands on a clockface. In the case of a clock, the current state – the current time – is what we call ‘now’. Each successive ‘now’ of the clock contains nothing of the past because each moment, each unit, is separate and distinct. But this is not how we experience time. Instead, we hold these separate moments together in our memory. We unify them. A physical clock measures a succession of moments, but only experiencing duration allows us to recognise these seemingly separate moments as a succession. Clocks don’t measure time; we do. — Who Won when Einstein Debated Bergson?

Idealism is fatuous as it imagines the world made perfect under a set of guiding values like good, truth, beauty, the divine. — apokrisis

Ontic Structural Realism as now the fact of metaphysics catching up with the physics — apokrisis

So two guys who ran the risks of heresy charges and book bans unless they made a show of still being good Catholics. Their moves towards materialist explanations had to be publicly renounced — apokrisis

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

I brought up the "spiritual/supernatural" because there are common beliefs about it, and my purpose was to explain what it means to be physical. — Relativist

How does our "participation" in existence differ from the participation of the sun? — Relativist

I gather that you're challenging the direction it took, but swimming against the current is extremely challenging. — Relativist

Referring to this as "observer dependency" implies there's something special in the relation between a human observer and the quantum system being measured. The more objective description is "entanglement" - which occurs when a quantum system interacts with a classical object. — Relativist

the concept of each universal has something to do with the world outside ourselves - does it not? I claim that the universal "90 degrees" that I conceptualize is exhibited in the walls of my room. The abstraction is distinct from the walls that exhibit it, but it describes an aspect of the walls- and this same as aspect is exhibited in many places. — Relativist

Aquinas, building on Aristotle, maintained that true knowledge arises from a real union between knower and known. As Aristotle put it, “the soul (psuchē) is, in a way, all things,” meaning that the intellect becomes what it knows by receiving the form of the known object. Aquinas elaborated this with the principle that “the thing known is in the knower according to the mode of the knower.” In this view, to know something is not simply to construct a mental representation of it, but to participate in its form — to take into oneself, immaterially, the essence of what the thing is. (Here one may discern an echo of that inward unity — a kind of at-one-ness between subject and object — that contemplative traditions across cultures have long sought, not through discursive analysis but through direct insight.) Such noetic insight, unlike sensory knowledge, disengages the form of the particular from its individuating material conditions, allowing the intellect to apprehend it in its universality. This process — abstraction— is not merely a mental filtering but a form of participatory knowing: the intellect is conformed to the particular, and that conformity gives rise to true insight. Thus, knowledge is not an external mapping of the world but an assimilation, a union that bridges the gap between subject and object through shared intelligibility.

Quantum fields fit the state-of-affairs model: they are particulars with properties and relations to other quantum fields. — Relativist

I would understand Mww's example like this. Time is already required, as the internal intuition, prior to writing a number, then when it is written, it is apprehended through the external intuition as having a spatial presence — Metaphysician Undercover

Matter has been dematerialised in physics. It is now raw potential. Pure possibility. — apokrisis

...the common conception of “reality” is too limited. By expanding the definition of reality, the quantum’s mysteries disappear. In particular, “real” should not be restricted to “actual” objects or events in spacetime. Reality ought also be assigned to certain possibilities, or “potential” realities, that have not yet become “actual.” These potential realities do not exist in spacetime, but nevertheless are “ontological” — that is, real components of existence.

"This new ontological picture requires that we expand our concept of ‘what is real’ to include an extraspatiotemporal domain of quantum possibility,” write Ruth Kastner, Stuart Kauffman and Michael Epperson.

Considering potential things to be real is not exactly a new idea, as it was a central aspect of the philosophy of Aristotle, 24 centuries ago. An acorn has the potential to become a tree; a tree has the potential to become a wooden table. Even applying this idea to quantum physics isn’t new. Werner Heisenberg, the quantum pioneer famous for his uncertainty principle, considered his quantum math to describe potential outcomes of measurements of which one would become the actual result. The quantum concept of a “probability wave,” describing the likelihood of different possible outcomes of a measurement, was a quantitative version of Aristotle’s potential, Heisenberg wrote in his well-known 1958 book Physics and Philosophy. “It introduced something standing in the middle between the idea of an event and the actual event, a strange kind of physical reality just in the middle between possibility and reality.” — Source

The dualist complaint about physics was that it only spoke to inanimate matter – lumps of stuff – and that made it a story of pure contingency. Billiard balls clattering about mindlessly. The materialist view of nature was patently soul-less. — apokrisis

Who needs a creating god when mathematical logic already enforces its absolute constraints on material possibility? — apokrisis

Physicalism now clearly sees the world in hylomorphic fashion as an interaction between naked contingency and rigid constraint. — apokrisis

It all starts with a fluctuation. — apokrisis

But is it not so much more complex than this? Why is a marble a marble and a pebble a pebble? Or for that matter, a stone a stone, and a ball of dough a ball of dough. They're all similar, aren't they? — Outlander

“…. That which in the phenomenon corresponds to the sensation, I term its matter; but that which effects that the content of the phenomenon can be arranged under certain relations, I call its form. (…) It is, then, the matter of all phenomena that is given to us à posteriori; the form must lie ready à priori for them in the mind, and consequently can be regarded separately from all sensation….” (A20/B34) — Mww

When we draw a figure or number, that becomes the appearance, and that, conditioned by space, combined with time already established as present in the mind, and we have an actual phenomenon. — Mww

Everything that physics theorizes to exist is causally interconnected. Physicalism is a thesis that the complete set of causally connected things comprise the totality of reality. It seems to me it is this interconnectedness that is the anchor.

The term "physicalism" is used largely for historical reasons. These are discussed in the SEP article on physicalism. Personally, I make sense of it by considering proper subsets of the sorts of things commonly treated as existing: spiritual/supernatural objects (e.g. angels), abstract objects, and physical objects. Physicalists deny the existence of the first two. — Relativist

Are you are claiming that universals are nothing but abstractions of aspects of the things we perceive, measure, and theorize: existing exclusively in minds but having no ontological significance to the objects thenselves. That would be fine, but it's a different definition. — Relativist

Particulars are reducible to simpler particulars, all the way down to the ground: atomic particulars/states of affairs which are irreducible. These atomic states of affairs still have all 3 sets of constituents (bare particular, intrinsic properties, relations to other particulars). ... Electrons had -1 electric charge before anyone recognized there were electrons and they each have this exact charge. — Relativist

My one hope is that you have a bit more respect for my position after this exchange. — Relativist

What would help would be some short description of a reasonable form of idealism. — Relativist

The mind-created world, as I understand the OP, has no external cause and is a monism where everything that exists has mental properties. — JuanZu

how can physicalism transcend physics? If physics is not relevant to physicallsm, then why describe such a foundational ontology as “physical” at all? Physical compared to what?
— Wayfarer
I googled the definition of Transcend:
"to rise above or go beyond the limits of"

Each of the postulates of physicalism goes beyond what physics can properly do:
-identify the ontological structure of existents as states of affairs
-the ontology of universals: that they exist at all; that they exist immanently
-the ontological structure of laws (relations between universals); physics can identify instrumentalist methodology (equations). As I described, theoretical models are heuristics and/or metaphysical claims.
-that physical reality = the totality of reality. — Relativist

every object that is examined is accounted for by simpler and simpler components. The absence of a bottom layer implies the series as a whole isn't accounted for, and it would be impossible for an infinite number of parts to assemble. — Relativist

A remark like this suggests to me you aren't trying to understand, and are instead casting judgement, rooted in your own perspective. — Relativist