Yes, not a good choice of links. I was thinking of 'man as microcosm' which is a theme in some philosophies. So I'll try again. The point of a 'cosmic philosophy' is not that it 'benefits' the cosmos, but that it makes sense of it, that mind and cosmos have some common ground or basis. It is of course a truism that the dissolution of the medieval synthesis and the scientific revolution completely shattered the traditional Western sense of the cosmos (per Alexander Koyré). And that the image of man in the early 20th century was widely understood as the 'outcome of chance and necessity' (per Jacques Monod), and that we became kind of exiles in an indifferent universe (per existentialism). How to re-imagine any kind of cosmic order, knowing what we now know? Actually the book title that comes to mind is 'At Home in the Universe', Stuart Kauffman, which attempts to do so on a scientific basis. Perhaps Terrence Deacon's book is another.

But there's something even deeper than that, but more simple: the resonance of mind and world as I tried to convey in that overlooked quote from David Bentley Hart - that 'the natural order was seen as a reality already akin to intellect'. Considered alongside the argument in Pinter's book, Mind and the Cosmic Order, there is indeed an order, and mind is foundational to it. But it's never an object of analysis in the scientific sense (per David Chalmers). That's also where phenomenology and the emphasis on the reality of first-person experience is important.

I can make no sense of a grand scheme without positing a grand schemer, a grand designer without a grand designer or a grand purpose without a grand purposer. — Janus

That might be due to your cultural heritage, might it not? Buddhists have no such difficulty. Granted, they would also probably not talk in terms of a 'cosmic purpose', but it is at least implicit in their cosmologies, without a director to supervise the whole show. But in Western culture, we're caught up in this kind of Hegelian dialectic of theism (thesis), atheism (anti-thesis) and an emerging synthesis (whatever that turns out to be).

I've always been attracted to Keats's -- what? observation? suggestion? -- that the world is "a vale of soul-making". Through suffering we grow a soul, and thus become more fully human, more than we were when we were born. I think that's the idea, and it's interesting to cast that Greek idea in these terms -- it's the growth not of your body but of your soul, that matters. — Srap Tasmaner

:clap:

Whether this somehow benefits the universe in any way other than it possibly leading to you directly benefiting other proximal beings and/ or your environment, remains obscure to me. Would even benefiting the whole Earth make any appreciable difference to the Cosmos as a whole? I can't see any way to coherently understand how it could. Perhaps you can enlighten me? — Janus

Isn’t that the kind of intuition found in many forms? “Acting in accordance with the Tao”? There’s also such a thing as religious anthropology which asks precisely this question - see for instance https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Kadmon . It won’t appeal to everyone but I mention it as representative of this theme.

I do notice the unquestioned adoption of subjectivism in much of the above. Purpose is OK, but only if it’s mine.

This dharma/logos, whence? — tim wood

It’s axial age philosophy, going back to the origins of historical cultures, and their attempt to discern reason, in the larger sense. Of course we can’t re-adopt or go back to that period, we’re separated from it by millenia, but I think in relation to the question posed in the OP, that it’s important to grasp what the question meant then, and what has changed. Which I tried to articulate in my first post, from the perrspective of the history of ideas, although I was rather disappointed by the initial response.

Thank you for your kind words. I will only (gently) observe my view that philosophy proper ought to be concerned with such deep questions, even if out of keeping with the zeitgeist.

that the lights come on when mind is. No mind no world. And purpose comes with – or is invented by – mind. — tim wood

I also want to circle back to this remark in the OP. As I will continue to say to anyone on this forum, a recent book by mathematics professor emeritus (now deceased) Charles Pinter, Mind and the Cosmic Order throws this expression into much greater depth. But it also dispels the anthropocentric illusion that the mind of rational sentient beings alone generates this order. There’s a fascinating discussion of cognition in fruit-flies, showing how they are believed to perceive in gestalts, comprising the aspects of their world that are meaningful to them.

“The meaning of a sensation is something primary and biologically given. There is no need to interpret the feelings of hunger and thirst, for example. The meaning of a sensation is embedded in the sensation itself. It may be said that a sensation is its meaning. Primary feelings are genetically given, and constructed in the course of gestation just as organs are. They are “standard equipment” in every animal body.”

— Mind and the Cosmic Order: How the Mind Creates the Features & Structure of All Things, and Why this Insight Transforms Physics by Charles Pinter

He elaborates in detail how this is generally true for all organisms, h sapiens included. So the philosophical point I want to make is that this process is much more than a matter of the individual’s mind ‘creating’ or ‘inventing’ meaning or purpose. We are embedded in a psychosomatic process which stretches back to the origins of evolution itself. Of course nowadays, many biologists and philosophers of science realise this, but I still think it’s an under-appreciated point. The structure of the mind - yours, mine, anyone’s - comprises these layers of awareness and sensation, from the most basic organic functionality up to conscious thought (and beyond)! So while it’s true that mind is inexorably involved with this process, it’s simplistic to say that the mind simply invents it or devises it. There are ‘thoughts we can’t get outside of’, to allude to an essay by Thomas Nagel. As is well-known, I believe this line of thought leads inevitably to a kind of phenomenological idealism. And I see the shortcoming of the strictly naturalist attitude as not recognising our embeddedness in the process of living, of imagining that we’re standing apart from it and judging it as object to us, when in fact our minds have a fundamental role in creating that order.

Would you agree with me that teleology is an ancient attempt to make sense and that it is not of any great use today, nor since, say, Christians persuaded the world that God made nature? Or at least since Galileo? — tim wood

Nope.

However, you also ought to consider that purpose or intentional action also comes into existence with the very most primitive organisms, which act with purpose to preserve their existence.
— Wayfarer
And if I call this an anthropomorphic attribution? — tim wood

Not at all. It's the signal difference between any living and non-living thing. A crystal does nothing itself to maintain itself or to grow, even if it persists and grows. A cell must continuously act in order to do the same.

It all generally coalesces around the idea: "Oh, isn't the modern period hideously ugly and consumerist.' — Tom Storm

That is a caricature, and also not very perceptive. The modern world, and modern culture, offer more opportunities for growth, exploration, fulfilment, and individuation than any previous era. It is an incredible time to be alive. But it has it's shadow side, the things it doesn't see, or has lost, without really recalling what. (Although there is also no doubt that a great deal of modern consumer culture, like the Pacific Ocean's great Garbage Patch, *is* hideously ugly.)

Above I tried to say that my purpose is to be good (and not bad) and to be as perfect as chance will allow. But even with that, I have the question as to why that would become either a purpose, or even my purpose, thus strongly implying something primordial even to that. Suggestions? — tim wood

One can live a satisfactory life without a sense of over-arching purpose. Stoic philosophy for example didn't generally envisage an after-life, but still had a conception of eudomonia, right conduct leading to impeturbability. But again, very different to the hedonistic ethos native to liberalism (and maybe the reason why stoicism is attracting an audience.)

But I've always been drawn to cosmic philosophies, which are somewhat religious in nature. Not necessarily theistic, and in the sense of a cosmic-director God not at all, but something nearer the convergence of dharma and logos - that by discovering and being true to your purpose, you are doing your part in the grand scheme, and also discovering the reason of existence in a sense greater than the instrumental.

It’s often said – not in so many words – that there exists an X such that 1) X provides purpose in the world, and 2) if there be no X, then there is no purpose, that the world is without purpose. By purpose I tentatively mean, subject to adjustment, that which gives ultimate underlying meaning and significance. — tim wood

Hi Tim - splendid question. In response to the first part, consider this snippet (originally from David Bentley Hart's review of a book by Daniel Dennett, but serves admirably as a summary of the nub of the issue):

In the pre-modern vision of things, the cosmos had been seen as an inherently purposive structure of diverse but integrally inseparable rational relations — for instance, the Aristotelian aitia, which are conventionally translated as “causes,” but which are nothing like the uniform material “causes” of the mechanistic philosophy. And so the natural order was seen as a reality already akin to intellect. Hence the mind, rather than an anomalous tenant of an alien universe, was instead the most concentrated and luminous expression of nature’s deepest essence. This is why it could pass with such wanton liberty through the “veil of Isis” and ever deeper into nature’s inner mysteries.

I think the crucial change to the modern worldview co-incided with the scientific revolution and the advent of Galilean and Newtonian physics. The perspectival shift wasn't necessarily an intended consequence of that, but the world concieved as comprising fundamentally material bodies obeying solely physical laws, discernable by objective science, was a momentious shift in the conception of the Universe (and I won't say 'the Cosmos', because the Cosmos is by definition 'a unified whole', and today's universe is not that.)

The questions here are, then, what is purpose (in itself), where does it come from, what is its ground? Or, what exactly gives it all meaning, makes it all worthwhile? — tim wood

So, in the context of pre-modern philosophy, it was simply assumed that everything exists for a reason, and that this reason is discernable by nous, intellect. The philosopher, in particular, was one who discerned reason, but in the pre-modern sense, which included the telos of particulars, the reason why they came into being in the first place. Whereas the naturalist account comprises trying to discern only a material causal sequence, leaving out the broader sense of reason as the ancients understood it.

An anticipation of this distinction can actually be found in the Phaedo:

One day...Socrates happened to hear of Anaxagoras’ view that Mind directs and causes all things. He took this to mean that everything was arranged for the best. Therefore, if one wanted to know the explanation of something, one only had to know what was best for that thing. Suppose, for instance, that Socrates wanted to know why the heavenly bodies move the way they do. Anaxagoras would show him how this was the best possible way for each of them to be. And once he had taught Socrates what the best was for each thing individually, he then would explain the overall good that they all share in common. Yet upon studying Anaxagoras further, Socrates found these expectations disappointed. It turned out that Anaxagoras did not talk about Mind as cause at all, but rather about air and ether and other mechanistic explanations. For Socrates, however, this sort of explanation was simply unacceptable:

"To call those things causes is too absurd. If someone said that without bones and sinews and all such things, I should not be able to do what I decided, he would be right, but surely to say that they are the cause of what I do, and not that I have chosen the best course, even though I act with my mind, is to speak very lazily and carelessly. Imagine not being able to distinguish the real cause from that without which the cause would not be able to act as a cause. (99a-b)" — IEP

And in much ancient philosophy, it was taken for granted that there was, as Hart says, a kind of sympathy between nous and Cosmos. Again, the particular ability of the philosopher or sage was to discern this relationship. It is, of course, vastly different when mind is regarded as a consequence or output of the very material processes which it is seeking to discern - it reverses the perspective, which creates 'the hard problem'.

My own answer, briefly, is that the lights come on when mind is. No mind no world. And purpose comes with – or is invented by – mind — tim wood

However, you also ought to consider that purpose or intentional action also comes into existence with the very most primitive organisms, which act with purpose to preserve their existence. This is one of the insights of biosemiotics, and (from phenomenology) the idea of the 'lebenswelt' or living-world of organisms: their world (and ours) comprises lived meaning, which are neither precisely 'in' the world or 'in' the mind but arise as an interplay of self-and-world. Whereas, the objective stance naively assumes that the world really exists as no mind perceives it - the so-called 'mind-independent world' - and it is the sciences' task to ever enlarge the understanding of that, not seeing the hidden metaphysical flaw that this entails. (Although as noted, biosemiotics, and also phenomenology, are aware of that, an awareness which is gradually expanding.)

Does Kastrup view his 'dissociated alters' as Other Minds in that sense? — Gnomon

Are different bodies of water ‘other waters’? The theory is, that each individual’s particular memories, proclivities, likes and dislikes is what differentiates one from another. Hence the idea of union, henosis as the culmination of philosophy in Greek philosophy.

Henosis for Plotinus (204/5–270 CE) was defined in his works as a reversing of the ontological process of consciousness via meditation (or contemplation) toward no thought (nous or demiurge) and no division (dyad) within the individual (being). As is specified in the writings of Plotinus on Henology,[note 2] one can reach a tabula rasa, a blank state where the individual may grasp or merge with The One. This absolute simplicity means that the nous or the person is then dissolved, completely absorbed back into the Monad.

It was incorporated into Christian theology by the Greek-speaking Fathers, with the crucial caveat that according to the Christian doctrine, the individual soul eternally maintains its identity, which, according to them, is lost in other forms of mystical union, Plotinus included. Although that is a recondite argument!

Those "Other Minds" may filter information about True Reality through their own private or communal prejudices. — Gnomon

Kastrup's 'dissociated alters'.

But that doesn't make Theodosius Dobzhansky's statement any less valid, "Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution." — wonderer1

Indeed not. Interesting that Dobzhansky also wrote quite a religious book called the Biology of Ultimate Concern which discusses religious and philosophical ideas in relation to evolution. Synopsis here.

while the universe is surely not geocentric, it may conceivably be anthropocentric. Man, this mysterious product of the world's evolution, may also be its protagonist, and eventually its pilot. In any case, the world is not fixed, not finished, and not unchangeable. Everything in it is engaged in evolutionary flow and development.

Human society and culture, mankind itself, the living world, the terrestrial globe, the solar system, and even the “indivisible” atoms arose from ancestral states which were radically different from the present states. Moreover, the changes are not all past history. The world has not only evolved, it is evolving.

That also resonates with Julian Huxley's evolutionary humanism:

Man is that part of reality in which and through which the cosmic process has become conscious and has begun to comprehend itself. His supreme task is to increase that conscious comprehension and to apply it as fully as possible to guide the course of events. In other words, his role is to discover his destiny as an agent of the evolutionary process, in order to fulfill it more adequately — Julian Huxley, Evolution and Meaning

Even the randomness of mutations is questionable — wonderer1

So if it’s not random, and indeed these findings are

challenging the prevailing paradigm that mutation is a directionless force in evolution.

Then what is it that provides ‘direction’? Aren’t we back to orthogenesis, that being ‘evolution in which variations follow a particular direction and are not merely sporadic and fortuitous’? That is a very different picture to orthodox neo-Darwinism. I asked ChatGPT for a synopsis:

Neo-Darwinian theory, which is essentially the modern synthesis of Darwinian evolution and Mendelian genetics, focuses on natural selection, genetic drift, mutation, and gene flow as the main drivers of evolution. It emphasizes the role of random mutations, which are then acted upon by natural selection, leading to adaptations that increase the fitness of organisms in their environments.

Orthogenesis, on the other hand, is an evolutionary hypothesis suggesting that life has an inherent tendency to evolve in a unilinear direction towards some kind of predetermined goal or ideal form. This concept implies that evolution is guided by an internal or directional force rather than by random mutations and environmental pressures.

The key divergences between these two viewpoints are:

1. **Directionality**: Neo-Darwinian theory views evolution as non-directional, driven by random mutations and natural selection based on environmental pressures. Orthogenesis posits a direction or goal to evolution, implying a kind of intrinsic purpose or end-state.

2. **Role of Mutations**: Neo-Darwinism sees mutations as random events that provide raw material for natural selection to act upon. Orthogenesis often downplays the role of random mutations, suggesting instead that evolutionary changes are guided by inherent trends.

3. **Adaptation**: Neo-Darwinian evolution emphasizes adaptation through natural selection as a key driver of species change, while orthogenesis might lead to traits that do not necessarily enhance survival or reproductive success but fit an internal direction or trend.

Orthogenesis has largely fallen out of favor in mainstream biology because it lacks empirical support and doesn't align well with our understanding of genetics and evolutionary processes. The neo-Darwinian framework, which is well-supported by genetic evidence, has become the dominant paradigm in evolutionary biology.

But the times they are a’ changing. I would say that orthogenetic has fallen out of favour more for philosophical reasons, than for empirical, as it re-introduces the whole idea of intentionality and indeed ( :yikes: ) something like intelligent design.

There have been a couple of references provided on the Forum the last year or so suggesting a shift in favour of a more orthogenetic view (I don’t have time to dig for them right now but might later.) And philosophically, that is definitely a challenge to the prevailing paradigm.

Isn't the process which is random the actual mutations? Errors in replication of DNA? Only some of which are advantageous to the organism, and which are then subject to natural selection. So it's not a random process in that sense, as the time sequences involved in the winnowing out of mutations and the gradual development of species are enormous (although there are puzzling anomalies like the Cambrian Explosion in which many diverse species appeared very suddenly in geological scales.)

But I think the deeper questions are why did life begin in the first place - was this, as Jacques Monod claims in 'Chance and Necessity' a 'biochemical fluke', the fortuitious product of an essentially chemical process? That's where I think people feel that the process is random.

Then there's the question of whether evolution was always bound to produce rational sentient bipeds such as ourselves, and, if so, why? When it seems equally feasible that it might have reached stasis billions of years ago as blue-green algae. But then the idea that evolution gives rise to higher intelligence is categorised as orthogenesis, which is a no-go. Or maybe none of those questions are scientific questions per se but philosophical questions prompted by scientific discoveries.

One point I will note, is that the strictly scientific attitude to h. sapiens treats them - or us - as another species, as an object of scientific analysis. Which is fine, as far as it goes, but when that begins to serve as the basis for philosophical or (anti)religious ideologies then it oversteps the mark, and where the science begins to morph into scientism:

There is professional evolutionary biology: mathematical, experimental, not laden with value statements. But, you are not going to find the answer to the world's mysteries or to societal problems if you open the pages of Evolution or Animal Behaviour. Then, sometimes from the same person, you have evolution as secular religion, generally working from an explicitly materialist background and solving all of the world's major problems, from racism to education to conservation. Consider Edward O. Wilson, rightfully regarded as one of the most outstanding professional evolutionary biologists of our time, and the author of major works of straight science. In his On Human Nature, he calmly assures us that evolution is a myth that is now ready to take over Christianity. And, if this is so, “the final decisive edge enjoyed by scientific naturalism will come from its capacity to explain traditional religion, its chief competition, as a wholly material phenomenon. Theology is not likely to survive as an independent intellectual discipline.” — Is Evolution a Secular Religion, Michael Ruse

Buddhism, for one example, has had this creed of "no origin" for a few millennia now. — javra

Buddhism actually has a rather strange and not very well known creation story. The Aggañña Sutta is a discourse by the Buddha, in which he talks to two monks, Vasettha and Bharadvaja, about the origin of society and social classes. In the sutta, the Buddha describes how beings originally lived in a celestial realm and subsisted on joy or radiance. They later became attracted to a substance that appeared on Earth, and as they consumed it, they gradually lost their luminosity and celestial nature. The story goes on to describe the gradual formation of physical bodies and also how social divisions eventually emerged among humans. In Mahāyāna cultures, such as Tibet, there is also the cosmological mythology of Mt Meru, which is the mythological axis of the Universe and the centre of the world. It is of course thoroughly outmoded by scientific discoveries, something which has been a cause of disquiet in Buddhist culltures (notwithstanding the Dalai Lama's frequent expression that Buddhist doctrine must always recognise empirical facts when they're presented, Mt Meru being no exception.)

There have been some fanciful modern folk mythologies attempting to map Buddhist re-birth against evolutionary history, although I don't think they're part of indigenous Buddhist culture, which knew as little about biological evolution as did the West before Darwin. And none of which is particularly germane to Buddhism generally, which, overall, is probably not as susceptible to the apparent threat to their dogmas posed by natural origins.

not everything that can be teleological will necessarily be intentional, — javra

Right - but isn’t there some sense in which even the simplest life forms act intentionally? Not consciously, of course - but a living thing by definition seeks to maintain itself and continue to exist. So I wonder if in some abstract sense whether that adds up to a very primitive intentionality.

That evolution occured and is ongoing is indubitable, but what it means is another matter. (And I don't buy that it means 'whatever you want it to mean', either. :rage: )

London: Former British prime minister Boris Johnson was turned away from a polling station when trying to cast his vote in the local elections after he forgot to bring acceptable photo ID.

Johnson, who introduced the contentious new laws mandating photo ID when voting while he was in Downing Street, was reportedly trying to cast his ballot in South Oxfordshire, where a police and crime commissioner for the Thames Valley was being selected.

SMH

Talk about being hoist by one's own petard. :rofl: :rofl: :rofl:

What the baffling nature of quantum phenomena reveals to us, is that the reality of the world is very far outside of our current ability to understand it. "Indeterminate" means beyond our capacities to determine, and why he thinks that we ought to be "shocked by quantum physics" is that these "indeterminate" aspects are so significant, and have been shown to be so far outside our capacity to understand, that it reveals how shockingly minimal our current capacity to understand the reality of spatial temporal existence actually is. — Metaphysician Undercover

No, I don't think that was Bohr's attitude, based on the books I mentioned in the previous post. Bohr felt that his discovery of the 'principle of complementarity' resolved many of the apparent paradoxes implied in quantum physics. So much so, that when he received imperial honours late in life from the Danish Crown, he commissioned a coat-of-arms that had the ying-yang symbol at its center and was embossed with Contraria Sunt Complementa ('Opposites are Complementary'):



I think what he says is 'shocking' is precisely the implications for common-sense realism, the idea that the world exists independently of the way in which we perceive it. I think that commonsense realist view is innate, the 'natural inclination of the intellect' as Bryan Magee says in his book on Schopenhauer, and that questioning it is often violently rejected, even by the highly educated. But I think Bohr was relatively sanguine about it. He said 'everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real' and 'Physics is not about how the world is, it is about what we can say about the world.' I think he accepted the limitations of knowledge, in a rather Kantian way. (There's an excellent youtube lecture by philosopher of science Michel Bitbol on Bohr's Complementarity and Kant's Epistemology if you wish to explore that further.)

The problem being that if something is deemed as random, it is in that sense unintelligible. So if something is deemed as ontologically random, and it is considered to be unintelligible, then there is no will to attempt at figuring it out. — Metaphysician Undercover

Isn't it possible that the world considered as a physical system is unintelligible (Plato's 'shadows on the cave wall')? That this is why, the greater the discoveries, the bigger the questions! You will recall from the discussion of the Eric Perl book Thinking Being, that intelligibility in the sense metaphysics understood it, was completely different from today's mathematical physics. So much the worse for it, many will say, but then Robert Jastrow did say, in God and the Astronomers,"For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries."

I'll try and find time for that video, the first presenter, Beau Lotto, also figured in a video I attached to the Mind Created World OP. As for 'subjectivism', I almost accept that, with the crucial caveat that we are all subjects of similar kinds, and so the world occurs for each of us in similar ways. The subjective, so-called, is an ineliminable pole of reality, but there's no use looking for it, because it is what is doing the looking.

If minds, instead of mindless genes, might play some role in selection, then, so the reasoning goes, the "firewall" between the world of nature and the world of mind will be destroyed. — Count Timothy von Icarus

The Cartesian division of mind and matter, and the fundamental duality of self and world, primary and secondary attributes, Whitehead's 'bifurcation of nature', all stem from the same source. A snippet I often quote from Thomas Nagel: '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.' The next step is to then account for the nature of mind in those terms - as the product of these objective forces and principles, none of which display intentionality. (I've been reading Terrence Deacon's attempt to bridge this gap but I'm not there yet.)

my guess is we will uncover uses of the notion of intentionality that lie on the ‘other’ side of positivism than the one you would like to champion. — Joshs

:chin: I thought I've always been critical of positivism.

From the perspective of a secure attachment to a religious view, nihilism will seem deplorable, but not experienced as any kind of direct or indirect threat to oneself. — baker

Sure. But you can still be critical of it from a philosophical perspective.

I thought of saying something about the "terminal malfunction of another moist robot," but I was concerned it would be mean spirited as well. But this is how Dan himself talked about his own mortality, and he seemed to think there was a benefit in accepting this view. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yes, I regretted my remark, but the basic point stands. 'Rest in peace' is a superstitious hangover, from the materialist point of view. It harks back to belief in troubled spirits and the like which Dennett would want no part of.

Yes, 'inserting media' was covered in the OP, but I found trying to insert a 'Youtube Short' wasn't working, hence the comment I appended.

Which actually segues back to the theme of nihilism. As far as we're concerned today, life begins at birth and ends at death. And considering the vastness of space and time, it is a mere blip. But that's all there is, and all there can be, as there is nothing on the other side of death, save decomposition, as everything material will always decompose.

It was tongue in cheek, but agree it was in poor taste.

Actually, I will respond in a bit more detail. It was a tongue-in-cheek reference to the recent thread RIP Daniel Dennett. I felt the use of the expression 'RIP', meaning 'rest in peace' was incongruous in the context, as Dennett was well-known as one of the 'four horseman' of the so-called 'new atheism' which maligned and rejected religion, and as RIP is a religious expression, it is unintentionally ironic or ill-fitting. That's all it was a reference to, a point I clumsily tried to make by employing a more scientific expression, namely, decomposition.

Of course! Don’t know why I didn’t think of that.

Yes you’re right. It was inspired by the expression RIP, a religious sentiment that was incongruous in the context, but it was mean-spirited. But the point I wanted to draw attention to was the entry on teleonomy.

They might not be putting people on trial, but people were certainly threatened with having their careers ruined for dabbling in quantum foundations through the 1990s, largely because such work challenged the dominant "anti-metaphysical" paradigm, which was considered to be "anti-scientific." — Count Timothy von Icarus

Totally. There's an interesting article from a few years back, Quantum Mysticism - Gone but not Forgotten (and published in phys.org, not some new-age website) which points out that the pioneers of quantum mechanics - Heisenberg, Schrodinger, Bohr and Pauli, among others - were deeply cultured and philosophical thinkers (product of a classical European education, one might presume). But after the War, the research dollars and focus switched to the US, driven mainly by investments from the military-industrial complex, which is why the pragmatic approach of 'shut up and calculate' won out over 'I wonder what that means'. (Although that did indeed leave a very fertile field open for any number of new-age websites.)

Also an interesting article on a biologist who claimed that oysters somehow synched to the phases of the moon even when transported to a laboratory in the midwest and completely isolated from the outside world. He was ostracised, presumably for daring to proclaim the biological equivalent of 'spooky action at a distance'. There are many such mysteries in biology. (I love the story of the eels in a central Sydney park who, when the conditions are right, leave their ponds and make their way to the ocean, to breed in a marine trench near New Caledonia, 2000km distant, where the elvers mature for a few years before making their way back :yikes: .)

Positivist definitions of objectivity and in-itselfness are held out as the gold standard of existence, of thing's being not "mere illusion." But then evidence that this definition of objectivity is broken is rolled out as somehow being definitive on questions of meaning, rather than simply showing that the definition is flawed. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Again, 100%. As I established in the 'mind-created world' OP, no empirical object can be regarded as having unconditional existence. But then Kant said that in 1781 and most of the world still hasn't gotten it.

@flannel jesus - As regards the question of teleology, also see the wikipedia article on teleonomy, a neologism invented to deal with the fact that all biology is indeed goal-directed. It is said to describe the apparent purposefulness and of goal-directedness of living organisms, in much the same way as Richard Dawkins talks of the appearance of design, which however is attributable to the 'blind watchmaker' which 'acts' with no purpose or intention whatever. All part of the materialist dogma, I'm afraid (one of whose leading exponents has recently begun to decompose.)

As I understand it, the issue with teleology, goal-directedness and purpose is that it was associated with Aristotelian physics, which was in turn associated with the Ptomlaic cosmology and which was completely demolished by Galileo and the scientific revolution. And I'm sure Aristotelian ideas of the 'natural place' of stones, and that motion will continue indefinitely unless something stops it, are thoroughly outmoded. However the question of intentionality in a general sense is not so easily disposed of, which is why it was used as a wedge by Franz Brentano, and which ultimately gave rise to phenomenology. And the issue of intentionality or at least goal-directedness is also responsible for something like a rehabilitation of Aristotle's 'final causation' which is starting to enjoy a comeback in philosophy of biology. (And really, all 'final causation' is, is 'why something happens', so it's forward-looking, rather than the backward-looking 'physical causation'.)

the point about strictly scientific hypotheses is that they can be falsified (per Karl Popper). But a statement such as 'everything is determined' is difficult to falsify. Although, that said, this is at the heart of the debates over the interpretation of quantum physics. The effect known as entanglement, verified by experimental results, seems to indicate an a-causal relationship between two objects or states. But the 'hidden variables' interpretation, championed by David Bohm, sought to preserve causal determination (i.e one action here influences an outcome there), through the supposition of 'hidden variables' that haven't yet been discerned by science. (I understand Bohm's is a minority view. PBS Spacetime has an excellent presentation on this topic.)

More broadly speaking, Einstein always stood for a realist attitude: that everything is determined by or subject to general laws. That's why he couldn't abide the implications of quantum physics - entanglement ('spooky action at a distance') and uncertainty being prime examples.

I've read two good popular books on this subject - Quantum: Einstein, Bohr, and the Great Debate About the Nature of Reality, Manjit Kumar, and also Uncertainty: Einstein, Heisenberg, Bohr, and the Struggle for the Soul of Science David Lindley - and note the similarities between the book titles, published five years apart.

What Heisenberg had done....was to come up with an idea too sexy to stay confined to the physics world. As Mr. Lindley points out, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle is now freely bandied about in nonscientific contexts, from literary theory to television dialogue. He cites an instance when Heisenberg was glibly name-dropped on “The West Wing,” in an anecdote about a film crew’s changing an event simply by observing it.

If Heisenberg’s idea “has become a touchstone, a badge of authority, for a certain class of ideas and speculations,” Mr. Lindley says, perhaps that is because it can be used to make scientific truth sound less than all-powerful. Treated that way, “the uncertainty principle makes scientific knowledge itself less daunting to the nonscientists and more like the slippery, elusive kind of knowing we daily grapple with.”

But the real uncertainty principle is more precise than that. It states that while some phenomena produce a definable range of possible outcomes, it is impossible to infer from the outcome which single unique event actually produced it. This has evolved, Mr. Lindley says, into “a practical, workaday definition of the uncertainty principle that most physicists continue to find convenient and at least moderately comprehensible — as long as they choose not to think too hard about the still unresolved philosophical or metaphysical difficulties it throws up.” — NY Times Review of Lindley

My heuristic is that 'the modern period' is book-ended roughly by the publication of Newton's Principia Mathematica at the beginning, and the publication of Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity at the other. That, and the discovery of the indeterminate nature of sub-atomic particles, marks the advent of the post-modern period, with the abandonment of the idea of absolute objectivity that characterised the previous period. And notice, those two book titles, the reference to 'debates' and 'struggles' over the nature of reality. Even though Heisenberg's uncertainty is really quite specific in its application, it
is as metaphor that it really captures the zeitgeist, in my view.*

As already argued in this thread, above, the so-called "stochastic nature" of radioactive decay, is best understood as a feature of the means employed to understand it, rather than as a feature of the named activity itself. — Metaphysician Undercover

Says you. That is precisely the point at issue! Why do you think Neils Bohr, after presenting a lecture to a sanguine group of positivists, on the radical implications of quantum physics, and receiving only polite applause, said 'if you're not shocked by quantum physics then you can't possibly have understood it!' What do you think he means? I'm sure he doesn't mean that the indeterminate nature of quantum phenomena is simply due to gaps in our knowledge. There is a genuine indeterminacy, ontological as much as epistemological, which is something that a positivist audience, of course, was duty bound to ignore.

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* 'Freud remarked that ‘the self-love of mankind has been three times wounded by science’, referring to the Copernican revolution, Darwin’s discovery of evolution, and Nietszche’s declaration of the Death of God. Maybe the 'Copenhagen Interpretation' of quantum physics gave back to humanity what the European Enlightenment had taken away, by placing consciousness in a pivotal role in the observation of the fundamental constituents of reality. While this is fiercely contested by what Heisenberg termed ‘dogmatic realism’ it has nevertheless become an influential theme in modern cultural discourse.'

Yet, the general scientific attitude toward Nature is that nothing is left to Chance. — Gnomon

That's metaphysics not science.

Agree. I think the normalisation of LGBTQ rights and 'inclusiveness mandates' are big factors, but opposing them is to be automatically characterised as racist and bigoted. Hence the drawing power of a larger-than-life figure who makes unabashedly racist and bigoted statements. He provides the 'permission space' by saying what you're really thinking and taking it to the perceived authorities of political correctness, particularly the so-called 'liberal media'. (And I even sympathise to some extent, the mandatory political correctness of the mainstream media here in Australia, especially in regard to gender politics, is grating in the extreme.)

On the other hand, I think the upshot of a second Trump presidency - which I don't believe will happen - will be disastrous in ways that his followers don't anticipate. He could quite literally cause a massive global financial or military crisis, leading to enormous social disruption and poverty, out of pique and aggrievement. They don't seem to see that, or care about it. As I said above, he has no policies as such, nor any idea of what the Presidency or government is about, save as a vehicle for his own ego and interests.

Mathematics was not necessarily about its utility, but about its basis for some form of higher knowledge (gnosis), that was unchanging. This also seemed to be influential in notions of the "Logos" later on with various forms of Stoicism. — schopenhauer1

:100: I think you're making a vital and overlooked point. A snippet I sometimes refer to is this:

Neoplatonic mathematics is governed by a fundamental distinction which is indeed inherent in Greek science in general, but is here most strongly formulated. According to this distinction, one branch of mathematics participates in the contemplation of that which is in no way subject to change, or to becoming and passing away. This branch contemplates that which is always such as it is and which alone is capable of being known: for that which is known in the act of knowing, being a communicable and teachable possession, must be something that is once and for all fixed. — Jacob Klein, Greek Mathematical Thought and the Origin of Algebra

As is well known, Plato appropriated elements of Pythagorean philosophy, and placed dianoia, knowledge of geometry and arithmetic, higher up the 'divided line' of epistemology, than sensory knowledge (pistis). This became one of the primary sources of Galileo's mathematical philosophy of nature (via Marcello Ficino's Renaissance translations of Plato) which has had seminal influence on modern science.

The Platonist view of the reality of number is part of the general platonist veneration of the ideas or intelligible principles, which was foundational to Western culture. However, and as you say:

the original aesthetics underpinning a theory, that is more abstract, and even in some sense "spiritual" (or at least "metaphysical"), eventually becomes discarded, and what is retained really, are the "useful" things that come about from it. — schopenhauer1

I think that is exactly correct. We retained the parts that were useful (indeed, indispensable) for maths and science, but discarded the aesthetics and metaphysics, mainly because they sound too close to religion for our secular age. This too has enormous ramifications for culture.

It seems the best of philosophers have something in common, which is that they saw philosophy as bringing us to that more aesthetic/holistic understanding of reality. — schopenhauer1

:100: again. Aristotle says in the Metaphysics that it is an art pursued 'for it's own sake' and not for utility or pleasure:

At first he who invented any art whatever that went beyond the common perceptions of man was naturally admired by men, not only because there was something useful in the inventions, but because he was thought wise and superior to the rest. But as more arts were invented, and some were directed to the necessities of life, others to recreation, the inventors of the latter were naturally always regarded as wiser than the inventors of the former, because their branches of knowledge did not aim at utility. Hence when all such inventions were already established, the sciences which do not aim at giving pleasure or at the necessities of life were discovered, and first in the places where men first began to have leisure. This is why the mathematical arts were founded in Egypt; for there the priestly caste was allowed to be at leisure. — 981b

//

This is also one of the themes explored in Horkheimer's book The Eclipse of Reason. He shows how the ancient Greeks valued reason for its own sake, but also because it was naturally assumed that reason characterised or permeated the Cosmos:

the Cosmos had been seen as an inherently purposive structure of diverse but integrally inseparable rational relations — for instance, the Aristotelian aitia, which are conventionally translated as “causes,” but which are nothing like the uniform material “causes” of the mechanistic philosophy. And so the natural order was seen as a reality already akin to intellect. Hence the mind, rather than an anomalous tenant of an alien universe, was instead the most concentrated and luminous expression of nature’s deepest essence. This is why it could pass with such wanton liberty through the “veil of Isis” and ever deeper into nature’s inner mysteries. — David Bentley Hart, The Illusionist

However the modern period dramatically disrupts and breaks with this organic and participatory form of consciousness and instead situates the individual as subject in a realm of objects, caught in the cartesian division of mind and matter, self and other which characterise the hyper-pluralism of post-modern culture.

Surely this has no bearing upon what I love and enjoy or whether it’s worth getting up in the morning? — Tom Storm

I take nihilism to imply apathy and ennui. You may not have an articulated 'philosophy of meaning' but the fact you find your life meaningful would indicate to me that you’re not nihilist in the sense I understand it. But they're obviously difficult subjects to gauge.

But it is intrinsically qualitative. If it were really nothing then it would not be experienced as joy. So, no, I don't think you qualify ;-)

Most of my days are filled with joy despite my position that life is inherently without meaning — Tom Storm

So joy is not meaningful? :chin:

It is not useful to assume spontaneity, just like it is not useful to assume randomness. — Metaphysician Undercover

'I cannot believe that God plays dice', said Einstein, in response to the discovery of the so-called 'quantum leap'. (Bohr used to say 'stop trying to tell God how to manage the Universe'.) But it is a known fact, as is the stochastic nature of radioactive decay. That doesn't mean that maggots spring fully formed from damp cloth, of course, but that there is an inherent element of unpredictability at the most basic strata of nature.

By the way, I've worked out how to embed Youtube shorts. If you follow the usual procedure and embed the raw url enclosed in the media tag:

https://youtube.com/shorts/ywVHFo1na38?si=irPv4yTKSmrOX2Ww

It doesn't display onscreen as video. The solution is to replace 'shorts' with 'embed', and it works. :up:

Surely a lot of these problems go away if you concede that nature contains an element of spontaneity, as well as patterns which we characterise as "laws".

The philosophical point about sub-atomic physics is mainly that it torpedoed the notion of an ultimately-existing material point-particle - 'the atom' of classical thought. C S Pierce, with his 'tychism', would have been perfectly comfortable with the uncertainty principle. But for those seeking the atom as a kind of bedrock foundation of reality - no joy. And it is amazingly difficult for a lot of people to cope with that.

By the way, I love Zizek's take on this. He says that when God was programming the universe, like when programmers create background scenery on a video game, he thought 'why should I bother programming the atom? People are too stupid to see down to that level'. He left it undetermined. But then we out-smarted God - we caught 'God with his pants down', so to speak.

I am unencumbered by dogma — Tom Storm

isn't the reflexive association of 'dogma' with 'transcendence' itself a kind of dogma, or at least a stereotype?

I think nihilism is endemic in today's culture. It doesn't necessarily manifest in dramatic ways, it might just be a shrug, a whatever, a 'makes no difference'. It might manifest as anomie or ennui or in other ways, but it's an afflictive state, as it saps the sense of relatedness to the Cosmos and any real sense that actions are meaningful.

I'm too optimistic to see anything other than the utter collapse of Maga through self-destruction. They're too stupid to function as a revolutionary movement. They're too stupid to uphold any momentum of such actions. — Christoffer

My thoughts also. I'm sure the polling data is misleading and that they will be punished at the ballot box.

It's never been a mystery to me — 180 Proof

Yes, well I guess the other predominant emotion I'm feeling is dissappointment. I thought the US was better than that, although a lot of people here tell me that it's naive.

At the end of the day, while the wheels of justice are turning very slowly, they are turning, and they have a kind of inexorability about them. (In today's hearings, Trump has been threatened with incarceration if he keeps up his insults.)

(Today's) testimony offered another remarkable moment in a trial whose early days have been full of them: a former president and current Republican nominee watching helplessly as two strangers exposed details of a sex scandal that he had fought to keep secret.

It also underscored the wide array of evidence at the prosecution’s disposal as it assembled its case against the former president. On Tuesday alone, prosecutors elicited live testimony from Mr. Davidson and three other witnesses, a string of provocative text messages, videos of Trump campaign events and excerpts from a deposition the former president gave in a separate case — all woven into a story that they say paints Mr. Trump as a criminal. — NYTimes

Have a read of this OP https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/7110/how-to-write-an-op

We hear daily that Trump is either leading or tying with Biden in polls. What I can't figure out is, what Trump voters think they're voting for. Trump, in the delusional monologues that pass for his campaign speeches, outlines no policies, presents no ideas, but raves and rambles about his enemies and what he'll do to them. (You'll remember that at the 2020 Republican Party convention, the Party abandoned the idea of presenting a policy platform, in favour of a simple declaration supporting Trump.)

There's a lengthy OP in the Washington Post (gift link) which discusses the idea that the reason for Trump's popularity is that he is harnessing hostility towards liberal principles amongst voters who want to destroy the current system. (This is also Steve Bannon's main focus.)

A healthy republic would not be debating whether Trump and his followers seek the overthrow of the Founders’ system of liberal democracy. What more do people need to see than his well-documented attempt to prevent the peaceful transfer of power with the storming of the U.S. Capitol, the elaborate scheme to create false electoral slates in key states, the clear evidence that he bullied officials in some states to “find” more votes, and to persuade Vice President Mike Pence not to certify the legitimate results? What more do they need to know than that Trump continues to insist he won that election and celebrates as heroes and “patriots” the people who invaded the U.S. Capitol and smashed policemen’s faces with the stated aim of forcing Congress to negate the election results? As one 56-year-old Michigan woman present at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, explained: “We weren’t there to steal things. We weren’t there to do damage. We were just there to overthrow the government.”

Trump not only acknowledges his goals, past and present; he promises to do it again if he loses this year. For the third straight election, he is claiming that if he loses, then the vote will have been fraudulent. He has warned of uprisings, of “bedlam” and a “bloodbath,” and he has made clear that he will again be the promoter of this violence, just as he was on Jan. 6. Trump explicitly warned in 2020 that he would not accept the election results if he lost, and he didn’t. This year he is saying it again. Were there no other charges against him, no other reason to be concerned about his return to the presidency, this alone would be sufficient to oppose him. He does not respect and has never pledged to abide by the democratic processes established by the Constitution. On the contrary, he has explicitly promised to violate the Constitution when he deems it necessary. That by itself makes him a unique candidate in American history and should be disqualifying. .....

So, why will so many vote for him anyway? For a significant segment of the Republican electorate, the white-hot core of the Trump movement, it is because they want to see the system overthrown.

So they don't want a better government, better economic policies, or better anything. What they want, is to bring down the whole system, because they don't accept the principles on which it was founded.

For two centuries, many White Americans have felt under siege by the Founders’ liberalism. They have been defeated in war and suppressed by threats of force, but more than that, they have been continually oppressed by a system designed by the Founders to preserve and strengthen liberalism against competing beliefs and hierarchies. Since World War II, the courts and the political system have pursued the Founders’ liberal goals with greater and greater fidelity, ending official segregation, driving religion from public schools, recognizing and defending the rights of women and minorities hitherto deprived of their “natural rights” because of religious, racial and ethnic discrimination. The hegemony of liberalism has expanded, just as Lincoln hoped it would, “constantly spreading and deepening its influence, and augmenting the happiness and value of life to all people of colors everywhere.” Anti-liberal political scientist Patrick Deneen calls it “liberal totalitarianism,” and, apart from the hyperbole, he is right that liberalism has been steadily deepening and expanding under presidents of both parties since the 1940s.

The fury on the anti-liberal right against what is today called “wokeness” is nothing new. Anti-liberal movements in America, whether in defense of the White race or Christianity, and more often both together, have always claimed to be suffering under the expanding hegemony of liberalism. They have always claimed that a liberal government and society were depriving them of their “freedom” to live a life according to Christian teachings and were favoring various minority groups, especially Black people, at their expense. In the 1970s, influential theologian R.J. Rushdoony complained that the Christian in America had “no right to his identity” but was forced to recognize “all others and their ‘rights.’” And he was correct if a Christian’s “rights” included the right not only to lead a Christian life oneself but to impose that life on the entire society, or if a White person’s “freedom” included the freedom to preserve white primacy in society. In the 19th century, enslavers insisted they were deprived of their “freedom” to hold human beings as property; Southerners in the post-Reconstruction era insisted on their “freedom” to oppress Black citizens in their states.

Today, anti-liberals in American society are indeed deprived of their “freedom” to impose their religious and racial views on society, on public schools, on the public square and on the laws of the nation. What Christian nationalists call “liberal totalitarianism,” the Founders called “freedom of conscience.”

The most rabid of the so-called Christian Nationalists want to impose a more or less 'Christian Sharia Law' to replace the constitution:

The influential advocate of “conservative nationalism,” Yoram Hazony, wants Americans to abandon the Declaration (of Independence) in favor of a nationhood built on Protestantism and the Bible. America is a “revolutionary nation,” Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) insists, not because of the principles of the Declaration and not even because of the American Revolution itself, but “because we are the heirs of the revolution of the Bible” that began with “the founding of the nation of Israel.” There could hardly be a statement more at odds with the American Founders’ liberal, ecumenical vision.

Expressing a belief in God is no threat to the Founders’ system, but reshaping society in accord with Christian teachings is. To build the nation Hawley and Hazony imagine would require jettisoning not only the Declaration but also the Constitution, which was designed to protect the Declaration’s principles. The Christian commonwealth would not and could not be a democracy because the majority of people can’t be trusted to choose correctly. According to the Claremont Institute’s Glenn Ellmers, “most people living in the United States today — certainly more than half — are not Americans in any meaningful sense of the term.” They are a “zombie” or “human rodent” who lives “a shadow-life of timid conformity.” Only “the 75 million people who voted in the last election” for Trump are true Americans. Instead of trying to compete with Democrats in elections that don’t reflect the will of the people, Ellmers writes, “Why not just cut to the chase and skip the empty, meaningless process?” The “only road forward” is “overturning the existing post-American order.”

When you consider that GOP representatives in multiple states are charged with election interference, and that a sizeable portion of the electorate doesn't believe that the last Presidential election was legitimate - well, there's some very dangerous forces at work here. One can only hope that Trump's track record of 'malevolence hobbled by incompetence', along with the basic common sense of a slightly larger proportion of the electorate, will prevail over this madness.

But it's not guaranteed.

It's a manifesto more than an OP.

Somehow you've managed to attribute nearly all the quotes in your reply to a poster who's not even participating in this thread.

However, I prefer to define the science of morality as:

“The study of why our moral sense and cultural moral norms exist". — Mark S

Wouldn't evolutionary psychology, sociology and anthropology be the relevant disciplines for such an enquiry? They're scientific, as far as the social sciences can be scientific, and I'm sure there are many relevant studies. You list some of them under Notes. What would be missing from those sources?

other suggestions for defining the science of morality studies are welcome. — Mark S

I would start by not categorising it as science in the first place. Science at least in the modern context relies on what is objectively, or better still, inter-subjectively observable and measurable. The thrust of the 'is/ought' problem is that what ought to be the case, or what one ought to do, cannot be subjected to quantitative measurement. Hopefully, all can agree on what is measurably the case, but what ought to be the case, is a different matter altogether. So how could it be a scientific matter, insofar as science relies on objective judgement?

Most normative moral systems in civilized cultures originated with the truths of revealed religion (Semitic, Indic, Chinese) or some other form of sapiential insight (e.g. those of the pre-socratic philosophers), which characterised the 'axial age' of philosophy. In the absence of such sources, which are generally deprecated in secular philosophy, how do you arrive at a moral good, beyond a utilitarian definition of 'the greatest good for the greatest number'? (and leaving aside questions of what 'the greatest good' might constitute, beyond an equitable distribution of resources.)

This is why I think the articulation of moral norms is such an intractable philosophical question - because when you introduce religious considerations then you face the intractable conflicts between competing truth-claims, conflicts which generally have no objectively measurable means of adjuticating. But then you've also set aside many of the sources of morality, reflected in the setting aside of the questions you say are fundamental to any proposed 'science' (e.g. 'what is good'? etc).

Seems to me very hard to escape 'Hume's fork'. So is the point of the title of the OP that there can't be a definition of the subject matter of a purported 'science of morality'?

I love the political correctness of 'strawperson'. :rofl:

you cared more about Buddhism and its ideas than you did about smoking. — Janus

No, not at all. It was the recognition of the momentary nature of craving, that it was something that would pass in a few minutes, rather than fixating on the idea that if I could only stop for six weeks, then the craving would pass. It wasn't until later I realised the connection with the Buddhist 'anicca', impermanence, but I thought it a practical application of that principle.