I just can't see how the notion that everything is just minds and mental contents, survives the modern scientific view of the world we live in — prothero

I've written an OP on it, The Mind-Created World. Here, I'll point out that the empirical facts to which you refer, and which science discloses, are themselves inextricably related to human concepts of time, space and measurement. If you were to subtract the conceptual framework within which the 'modern scientific view of the world' is meaningful, nothing would remain.

The very idea of science from the usual point of view is to take out everything to do with human subjectivity and see what remains. QBism says, if you take everything out of quantum theory to do with human subjectivity, then nothing remains ~ Christian Fuchs

Since, however, what is grasped by the intellect are 'forms'/'concepts', this would imply that 'forms' are, indeed, an essential aspect of the material reality. I am not sure how this is consistent with a purely materialistic outlook. — boundless

Materialist philosophy of mind would probably account for that in terms of the well-adapted brain's ability to anticipate and model the environment. Impressive indeed, he will say, but ultimately just neurochemistry. D M Armstrong, who was Professor of the department where I studied philosophy, was a firm advocate for universals, which he identified with scientific laws. But his major book was Materialist Philosophy of Mind, which is firmly based on the identity of mental contents and neural structures. There are universals—but they are nothing over and apart from the physical form they take. They are repeatable properties instantiated in space and time. You and I wouldn’t accept that, but it’s a hard argument to refute.

I think the interesting philosophical question, is why objectivity is tacitly regarded as the sole criterion of quality. Objectivity generally refers to the ability to set aside personal beliefs so as to arrive at a judgement based solely on the attributes of the object or situation. Interestingly the term ‘objectivity’ enters English only in the early modern period, reflecting a broader underlying cultural shift. As science begins to hold sway, knowledge came to be understood as that which is independent of individual perspective. This was a shift from earlier models of truth, such as aletheia in Ancient Greece or veritas in the medieval Christian context, which assumed a participatory or disclosed relationship between knower and known.

And clearly in many occupations objectivity is necessary and desirable - such as jurisprudence, history, and the like. But aesthetics, literature and philosophy are a different matter. Objectivity is part of it, but you’re also appealing to factors which can’t be reduced to objective terms. How it moves you, what it evokes, how it resonates - none of these qualities are strictly objective, but they’re also not necessarily subjective in the sense of being simply or merely personal or pertaining only to the individual.

So it turns out Putin's retaliation is the murder of more Ukrainian citizens and general destruction, which appears all they are capable of.

Didn’t stop him from spending, or wasting, 50 years talking about it.

My basic objection is that if they are private experiences then they are unavailable for discussion — Banno

I think there's an unreasonable equivocation between 'subjective' and 'private'. The subjective qualities of experience ('qualia') are not objective (as a matter of definition) but neither are they necessarily private.

I make this distinction between the subjective and the personal: 'The subjective refers to the structures of experience through which reality is disclosed to consciousness. In an important sense, all sentient beings are subjects of experience. Subjectivity — or perhaps we could coin the term ‘subject-hood’ — encompasses the shared and foundational aspects of perception and understanding, as explored by phenomenology. The personal, by contrast, pertains to the idiosyncratic desires, biases, and attachments of a specific individual.'

I would say that what you're calling 'private' equates to the latter.

'qualia' is academic jargon. You will notice that the only time it is ever usually mentioned is in relation to discussions of a certain clique of academic philosophers, mainly American, and often in support of the so-called 'eliminative materialism'.

I can't quite agree with this. — Pierre-Normand

I see your point and it’s a fair caution. But I think we might be talking at cross-purposes. When I said "we know what it is to be a subject, because we are both subjects," I wasn’t suggesting inductive inference from similarity of biological structure or behavior, rather a kind of eidetic insight—a recognition of subjectivity from the inside, so to speak, that others are beings like myself.

It's quite possible to reject the second thesis and yet argue that qualia (i.e. what one feels and perceives) can be expressed and communicated to other people by ordinary means. — Pierre-Normand

Agree, but because of the fact we're similar kinds of subjects. We know what it is to be a subject, because we are both subjects.

I think, as @Pierre-Normand suggested, the problem lies with Sabine's gloss on what the paper means. Her video is called 'scientists measure qualia for the first time' but I don't think they actually make the claim. (I like Sabine's videos, overall, but philosophy is not her strong suit.)

Thanks, Jamal, appreciated. I did go looking for the explanation but overlooked that it had been made there.

The fact that Sabine feels the hard problem 'is bullshit' - her words - indicates to me that she hasn't grasped the point of the argument (and many don't.) 'Qualia' really just means 'the quality of (an) experience' - and as such is something that only a subject can be aware of, as experiences are only ever undergone by subjects.

The paper by Da Costa et al does not claim to measure qualia per se, nor does it claim to 'resolve' the hard problem of consciousness. What it does is assume (as a methodological stance) that the content of conscious experience can be formally modeled as a belief state — i.e., a probability distribution of observable correlates of internal or external causes of sensory input. It proposes to use this to explore how differences in these belief states might correlate with differences in reported phenomenology, and then to apply mathematical tools to quantify differences between such modeled belief states, and to propose testable hypotheses related to time perception, attention, and cognitive effort.

What it doesn't do is offer a means to measure qualia themselves in any philosophically robust sense (which after all would require the quantification of qualitative states!) That would require somehow rendering the intrinsically first-person nature of experience into a third-person measurable variable—which remains the crux of the hard problem.

(Actually, the first sentence of the abstract gives the game away - ' a key challenge is how to rigorously conceptualise first-person phenomenological descriptions of lived experience'. 'Conceptualising' an experience is in no way the same as undergoing it.)

Maybe he just felt that he was spending too much time on TPF and made a strong decision to leave. — Leontiskos

I really do get that, and often consider it, although even if I decided to stop posting, I wouldn't have all my posts deleted.

I noticed my grandson watching an animated Christian feature as a ‘children’s introduction to God’. I didn’t spend any time watching it, beyond noting that it was trying to bring the concept down to kid level, make it understandable for pre-schoolers through words and images. (His mother is quite religious and he is expressing some religious sentiments.) I attend the occasional Christian service mainly due to familial obligations, and I notice how much modern Christian services concede to individual predilection. Like a sermon I heard on how much 'God likes you for the person you are' (never mind the dour Biblical verse 'God is no respecter of persons' Acts 10:34).

Which was, I thought, all well and good. But then, back in olden times, the parishioners were not expected to ‘understand God’. When you went into the Church, your role was entirely passive. Your informed assent or agreement with the proceedings had nothing to do with it. If you were to be the recipient of God’s grace and forgiveness, that was entirely up to God. Children were expected to listen and obey, and perhaps receive instruction in Sunday school. The only thing you had to do was accept and believe and to behave accordingly; to have an opinion about it was precisely the meaning of ‘heresy’.

(That was a point made by Peter Berger in a book called The Heretical Imperative (1979). The rationale behind the book title, is that this model of the complete passive receptivity of belief is hardly viable in a pluralistic, individualist culture such as our own - we are required to make a choice, hence, 'the heretical imperative'. Furthermore that we are faced with a choice our ancestors did not practically have to make - that between 'Jerusalem and Benares', as Berger calls it - the choice between a Biblical faith, and a faith grounded in Asiatic religions.)

But I've also come to understand the rationale behind the traditional attitude. Just as you wouldn't be your own surgeon or defense lawyer, you don't have the necessary skills and attributes to 'enter the life eternal' through your own understanding and efforts, given the ubiquity of ignorance and//or corruption ('original sin') that we have been born into. Hence the demand for the surrender of the ego. Zen Buddhists have an expression, 'washing off blood with blood' which is about the futility of trying to suppress or control thoughts and emotions through conscious effort.

I don't have any answers on this matter but that is a question I'm mulling over.

Incidentally, apropos of the Godel discussion in this thread, I heard John Vervaeke remark the other day that practically all postmodern philosophers are united in their hatred of Plato (whereas I have probably a rather naive admiration for Platonism.)

Yes, took me by surprise. We were debating the possibility of there being philosophical absolutes but it was hardly what you'd call a blazing row.

So, Tim Wood has departed the forum.

That is something I have never experienced and can't really imagine. I would think to be conscious entails awareness of self and surroundings. Therefore, there are contents.

How would you know if there was no content to remember? — Amity

It is something quite well documented (paradoxically!) in Buddhist and Hindu sources. Thomas Metzinger whom you quote is quite the expert in scientific studies of such states of consiousness. As for pure mathematics, one doesn't need to be an expert in it - I'm certainly not - to appreciate that it is purely intellectual in nature. Applied maths, less so, but even there, the mind is navigating via conceptual acts that I don't believe are reducible to material or physical states (which is an inconvenient truth for the kind of materialism the OP wishes to advocate). As to whether you 'enjoy the sun and breeze', I should hope so, and good for you, but the OP has raised a philosophical question and that's what I responded to.

What might pure thought devoid of input from the five senses consist of? — Moliere

Pure mathematics would come close, wouldn't it?

Aside from that, there are states known to contemplatives that are devoid of sensory content - known as 'contentless consciousness' in some lexicons.

What I say is that the claim that ideas are themselves material - that appears to be the claim - must necessarily be circular, as 'the material' is itself an idea. Surely the keys which I'm depressing to register this idea are quite material, indeed tactile, but what is being registered are symbolic forms, namely the letters that form sentences and propositions. And those are not material in any meaningul sense, notwithstanding any attempt to depict them in terms of neurochemical signals. The key word there is 'signal', as a signal signifies, encodes and communicates meaning - just the kind of thing you will need to employ in the effort to demonstrate that thought, or anything else, is material in nature. Hence, Schopenhauer's quote, as both his and his predecessor Immanuel Kant had a keen insight into just this fact.

This segues into the whole question of intentionality, on the one hand - the fact that conscious acts are about or refer to something - and semiotics on the other, the fact that symbolic representation is fundamental not only to conscious expression, but to organic life on every level. And those intentional and symbolic dimensions of existence can't be feasibly depicted as being physical or material in nature.

So I'd turn the OP title upside down - material reality is actually an aspect of cognitive experience. Whatever we think or know is real occurs to us within experience.

When I say that mental impressions of the material world are themselves material, I'm trying to say that mental impressions are a material link in a chain of material terms connecting them with the material world. At the beginning of the material chain, we have the material world. Next comes the five senses that translate material reality into neural circuits of charged particles that code for material reality within the brain. The following link is cognition, which is internalization of the material world within the brain as an analog simulation of said material world. After this comes reason, which forms judgments by a process of logic. Reason is the hard link to unpack. It’s the time element that turns the mind into a puzzle. Internalization of the material world into ideas of the mind involves a manipulation of time most curious. — Moliere

materialism is the attempt to explain what is immediately given us by what is given us indirectly. All that is objective, extended, active—that is to say, all that is material—is regarded by materialism as affording so solid a basis for its explanation, that a reduction of everything to this can leave nothing to be desired (especially if in ultimate analysis this reduction should resolve itself into action and reaction i.e. Newtonian mechanics). But... all this is given indirectly and in the highest degree determined, and is therefore merely a relatively present object, for it has passed through the machinery and manufactory of the brain, and has thus come under the forms of space, time and causality, by means of which it is first presented to us as extended in space and... active in time. From such an indirectly given object, materialism seeks to explain what is immediately given, the idea (in which alone the object that materialism starts with exists), and finally even the will from which all those fundamental forces, that manifest themselves, under the guidance of causes, and therefore according to law, are in truth to be explained. To the assertion that thought is a modification of matter we may always, with equal right, oppose the contrary assertion that all matter is merely the modification of the knowing subject, as its idea. Yet the aim and ideal of all natural science is at bottom a consistent materialism. The recognition here of the obvious impossibility of such a system establishes another truth which will appear in the course of our exposition, the truth that all science properly so called, by which I understand systematic knowledge under the guidance of the principle of sufficient reason, can never reach its final goal, nor give a complete and adequate explanation: for it is not concerned with the inmost nature of the world, it cannot get beyond the idea; indeed, it really teaches nothing more than the relation of one idea to another. — Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea

I'm not familiar with his work, but he's not the only university professor arguing for a subjectivist understanding of perception. There's an entire industry dedicated to - telling us there's no such thing as colour, for example. That colour is subjectively constructed. Something I cannot reconcile with the physical reality of the different wave-lengths of different colours of light. — karl stone

Shameless plug for my original post The Mind Created World which is all about this topic.

As mentioned above, I requested a research report from gemini.google.com on the question:

What percentage of people in liberal democractic societies e.g. Britain, Germany, Canada, US, are inclined to accept scientific materialism as the best explanation for the nature of existence?

Gemini churned through tens of websites and research reports to produce this report (google docs format, 6,322 words). I was mistaken in believing that a majority of persons in liberal democratic societies fully accept scientific materialism although it is increasing in popularity in proportion to the decline in religious affiliation. There are many complexities and nuances, not least due to the fact that many who profess no religion still believe that there are questions science cannot answer. Part of the conclusion:

Across Britain, Germany, Canada, and the United States, there is an undeniable and accelerating trend of secularization, characterized by a significant increase in religiously unaffiliated individuals, particularly among younger generations. This demographic shift is fundamentally reshaping the religious landscape of these liberal democracies. Despite this, a full philosophical commitment to scientific materialism—understood as the belief that only matter exists and that science can ultimately explain everything—is not the dominant worldview in any of these societies.

(I will leave that report online for future reference.)

”Materialism", as I understand it, is not intuitive at all. I'm hesitant to guess anymore, but if I had to guess I'd say that "Dualism" is the "default" position of most people, if pressed; but mostly philosophy isn't interesting enough for people to define their categories that cleanly. — Moliere

I would have thought that scientific materialism is the default for the secular mainstream, even for those not familiar with the term, and who wouldn’t necessarily have thought it through. But the mainstream account of life’s origins, planetary formation, and so on, generally assumes that all of the underlying factors can be understood in physical or naturalistic terms (even given there is an allowance for a spectrum of belief.) In discussions on this and other fora, I’ve found many people assume that living beings can be understood in molecular or physical terms even if they haven’t given a lot of thought to it. (Also should be noted that there's confusion between scientific materialism and social materialism, as inordinate attachment to money and material possessions.)

And at the academic level, at least here in Australia, the scientific account of the origins of the Universe and living beings is presumptively materialist. Being a liberal culture, it is of course true that individual beliefs across the spectrum are expected. Belief in the soul, for instance, while not having any basis in science, is understood as being an individual prerogative, a belief one is entitled to hold. But it would generally be assumed that this has no basis in science.

(I might see if I can get one of the bots to find some polling data on the question.)

//In my view, something about Western culture forces this dilemma, or choice, on you. The religious account is anchored to the Biblical account, while the scientific worldview is explicitly defined in opposition to or the exclusion of it. That is writ large in the 'culture wars' over evolution and creation especially in America.//

Makes a lot of sense. I suppose it’s just a sense of dread on my part. As each day passes you wonder if Putin really has the means to launch a large-scale attack aside from the scattered missile and drone attacks they’re already doing.

what did Gödel believe in? The combined rules of reason, logic, and maths. Particular beliefs being consequences of applications of those rules. — tim wood

That is your description, written so as to support the point you're making. But it was not how Gödel understood it himself.

Gödel was a mathematical realist, a Platonist. He believed that what makes mathematics true is that it's descriptive—not of empirical reality, of course, but of an abstract reality. Mathematical intuition is something analogous to a kind of sense perception. — Rebecca Goldstein

Gödel’s view of mathematical intuition as a kind of perception echoes Plato’s claim that the soul has an eye suited to grasping the intelligible - the ‘eye of reason’. In the Republic, mathematics belongs to the level of dianoia—a faculty higher than belief, yet still dependent on symbols and hypotheses. Plato insists that geometrical and arithmetical truths do not belong to the world of becoming, but to a higher, stable, unchanging realm. Hence Gödel’s Platonism is not modern nostalgia, but a precise continuation of that classical outlook: mathematics is not invented, but discovered—seen by a faculty suited to such realities. And not a matter of belief, doxa or pistis, but insight into what is.

I expect their daily bombing will continue, but I fear Putin is planning something spectacularly awful by way of responding to Spiderweb. An obvious tactic would be deployment of a nuclear warhead, although I hope it doesn't come to that, but I fear something on a much larger scale to the day-to-day missile attacks might be in the works.

(It is true that physics constrains chemistry, which constrains biology, which constrains ethology, which constrains anthropology, but no one really thinks ― and there's no reason to think ― you could "explain" traditional religious practices in West Africa in terms of physics.) — Srap Tasmaner

But physicalism will nevertheless insist that traditional religious practices, whether African or other, will depend on causes which ultimately supervene on the physical. A physicalist might agree that the anthropological description of the culture is true on a different level to the physical, while still insisting that all of the factors are still ultimately physical or reducible to the physical. In fact, physicalism is obliged to believe that.

The Stanford entry on physicalism has it that 'the general idea is that the nature of the actual world (i.e. the universe and everything in it) conforms to a certain condition, the condition of being physical. Of course, physicalists don’t deny that the world might contain many items that at first glance don’t seem physical — items of a biological, or psychological, or moral, or social, or mathematical nature. But they insist nevertheless that at the end of the day such items are physical, or at least bear an important relation to the physical.'

As to why physics, in particular, is paradigmatic for the other sciences, and philosophy generally. Physics, historically, became paradigmatic not because it was declared so a priori, but because it achieved an extraordinary degree of mathematical formalism, predictive power, and empirical confirmation. From Newton to quantum mechanics, physics has yielded universal laws, often with breathtaking precision, and this led to the belief that any successful science should strive for the same kind of mathematical rigor and explanatory depth. This was not merely an aesthetic preference; it was assumed that to really know something was to be able to describe it in physical terms.

Allied with this development were the ontological implications of Cartesian dualism, which sharply distinguished between res extensa—matter, extended in space and measurable—and res cogitans—mind, the domain of thought and subjectivity. The success of science in predicting and manipulating the physical world proceeded without any clear account of how mind could interact with matter. As technology advanced without reference to mental causes, it became increasingly natural to treat mind as a kind of epiphenomenon, a “ghost in the machine.”

None of this is meant as an apology for physicalism, but it does help explain why it became so dominant in contemporary intellectual culture. The extraordinary effectiveness of physical science cast a long shadow, and many came to believe that anything real must ultimately be physical—or reducible to the physical.

My own tentative view is that we do not access reality directly, nor can we claim any definitive knowledge of what reality ultimately is. — Tom Storm

I would make the claim that philosophy is concerned with the nature of being, rather than reality in the scientific or objective sense, which is nowadays such a vast subject that nobody can possibly know more than one or two aspects of it. And also that this is a philosophically meaningful distinction although not often mentioned in Anglo philosophy (while it's fundamental to Heidegger, as I understand it.)

Given that perspective, the question is, how to come to have insight into the nature of being - not how to understand how the strong force is or why it works.

I’m pretty worried about what Putin is going to do to avenge the Spiderweb attacks. It is going to have to be something spectacularly awful. Let’s hope it’s not a mass casualty event.

Straw man description of idealism. Idealists don’t believe the world is all in the mind.

There is no metaphysical claim to be made. Truth (in- and by-itself) does not exist. — tim wood

Doesn't the second claim contradict the first? How is the statement 'truth (in- and by-itself) does not exist' not a metaphysical claim?

Now separate the true from the proposition as something separate from and not a part of the proposition. You cannot do it. And that which you might try to separate is usually called truth. So what is it? What is truth - beyond being just a general idea? All day long people may argue that truth is a something. They don't have to argue, all they have to do is demonstrate it - show it. But that never has and never will happen. — tim wood

I see the logic of your position — you're treating truth as nothing over and above the attribution of a property to a proposition, and I understand the deflationary intuition behind that. But the issue at stake, especially given the original context (Wittgenstein and Gödel), isn’t just about semantics. I'm saying, that the issue is really about whether there is a domain of what we might call the unconditionally true — truths not simply constructed or declared within discourse, but which ground discourse itself. That’s a metaphysical and ontological question, not simply a linguistic one.

Gödel, for example, was a mathematical Platonist. He believed that mathematical truths exist independently of our capacity to prove them — that they are so, whether we grasp them or not. Wittgenstein’s hinges aren’t proven either, but they’re not arbitrary. They are ‘taken to be true’ not because we say so, but because they constitute the background against which the very act of saying something becomes intelligible.

To deny that there is such a thing as truth ‘beyond being just a general idea’ risks collapsing this structural distinction. If truth is only ever the local property of propositions as we use them, then you effectively deny the possibility of truths that are not contingent on our grasp or declaration. But isn’t that exactly what Gödel’s theorems reveal? That some truths outstrip the systems we build?

This is just the kind of question Plato’s dialogues return to again and again — what it means for something to be true or to be good in itself. The dialogues often end in aporia, yes — but not as dismissals. Rather, they preserve the seriousness of the inquiry by refusing to reduce these questions to mere convention or definition or to provide a dogmatic solution. And we can’t define truth in some final way, that may be a sign of its depth, not its non-existence. Likewise, Socrates' consistent refusal to declare that he knows any kind of final truth - he's not denying that there is, but inviting deep contemplation of the question. (Is this why Socrates was said to have sometimes fallen into a kind of trance, standing rooted to the spot for hours or days? That stillness might itself be a kind of answer: a living witness to the fact that some truths are not merely stated, but must be grappled with through a deep questioning.)

To consider whether anything is unconditionally true — not merely 'true for us' — we have to ask questions beyond usage and attribution. We’re talking about the architecture of thought and language, of being itself. Those aren’t things you can ‘show’ in an empirical way — but neither are they merely artifacts of language. They belong to the domain of what Kant might call the (transcendental) conditions for the possibility of experience and understanding. And that’s a philosophical question, not a semantic one.

So there’s a deeper question here about the nature of truth — and it’s one that can’t be settled by appeal to semantics or usage alone. Certainly, truth doesn't exist as some abstract 'thing' out there in the world, waiting to be pointed to or depicted. But that doesn’t mean it’s not real.

Classical philosophy speaks of 'intelligible objects' — principles or forms that do not exist qua phenomena, but which nonetheless structure intelligibility (ref). Think, for instance, of the law of the excluded middle. Does it 'exist'? Not in the empirical sense. But is it real? It seems inescapably so — not because we invented it, but because rational discourse depends on it.

So in that sense, the truths of reason — logical principles, mathematical axioms, moral intelligibilities — don’t so much describe what exists as disclose the structure of intelligibility itself. They are not things among things, but conditions for thought, and for discourse.

This is why the denial of truth as a real — though not empirical — dimension is so radical. It’s not just a semantic revision. It amounts to a dismantling of the very architecture of meaning. And that’s why thinkers from Plato to Augustine (and indeed, Gödel and Wittgenstein in their own ways) were so attentive to this domain of the intelligible — not as 'objects' in the modern sense, but as realities grasped by the intellect.

I believe it was the philosopher Simon Blackburn who said that even the idealist philosophy professor adopts realism the moment they leave home in the morning. — Tom Storm

Once, in Karl Popper's living-room, I asked him why he rejected it (Kant's idealism), whereupon he banged his hand against the radiator by which we were standing and said: 'When I come downstairs in the morning I take it for granted that this radiator has been here all night' - a reaction not above the level of Dr Johnson to Berkeley ('kicking the stone'). — Bryan Magee, Schopenhauer's Philosophy

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t’s not clear to me that the discontinuity between the classical and quantum worlds is as profound as you, and I assume most others, think it is. — T Clark

The point I was making is that, during the heyday of modern physics, it was widely believed that the methods of the new sciences—which, of course, are no longer new to us—offered a universal framework for natural philosophy. This framework rested on the precise mathematical description of physical bodies, grounded in the laws of motion and Cartesian coordinate geometry.

As an historical heuristic, I would mark this era as spanning from the publication of Newton's Principia in 1687 to the Fifth Solvay Conference in 1927. That conference, in many ways, pulled the rug out from under the feet of the scientific realism that had been assumed in the modern perspective. The Solvay Conference is the line between the modern period proper, and the beginning of post-modernism in philosophy and culture. It’s a large claim, I know, but one that can be supported with ample documentation—both from within the scientific tradition and from philosophy of science.

During the modern period, physics was regarded as paradigmatic for science generally, indeed even for philosophy, hence physicalism and all that it entails. Postmodernism blurs all the boundaries considerably.

I think that the use of mathematics in physics actually undermines the materialist project. — boundless

As do I. Hence the interminable wrangling in academic philosophy over the reality of number.

Sure, a cockroach will flee when a light comes on suddenly; so clearly it has a degree of apperception, but is this knowledge? I don't think so. — karl stone

Which was my point. Adaptive ability is not an argument for the veracity of judgement.

Yet all this is missing the point that human beings survived, and evolved in relation to a physical reality - of which, we must be able to establish valid knowledge, or would have become extinct. — karl stone

Cockroaches have survived a lot longer than h. sapiens. Does that mean they have valid knowledge?

hence the ascendancy of biosemiotics, something I’ve learned a lot about here.

I thought you would pick it up, but I’m referring to the famous Fifth Solvay Conference, 1927, which introduced quantum physics to the world, and undermined the pristine certainty of classical physics as a truly universal science.

Why has physics become paradigmatic for science, generally? Isn’t it because of the universal scope and unerring accuracy of its predictions and calculations? If you can imaginatively cast your mind back a few hundred years, how intoxicating the discoveries of the Laws of Motion, and then the heliocentric solar system, must have seemed! So many things fell into place, so much begins to make sense where previously there was a patchwork of ancient philosophies and myths. It promised to encompass everything known, and all written in the language of mathematics and algebraic geometry, with its objective clarity and certainty. Or so it seemed, at least until 1927.

I was taking issue with meaning as the ‘creation of conscious beings’ if by that you mean something invented or projected by us onto the world as a kind of blank canvas. I’m pointing out that meaning can be understood as intrinsically connected to organic existence at a fundamental level - not simply as the product of our imaginative acts. At the same time I'm trying to avoid the two extremes of 'intelligent design' vs 'fortuitous origins'.

By true I mean a property, call it T of P, such that for proposition P, P is T, if in fact it is. Sometimes I might refer to it as the "truth" of P, by which I mean just another way to say that P is T. And if there is a bunch of different Ps, all with the property T, I might use "truth" to refer collectively to those Ts. And this exercise to clarify between us whether or not you attach any further meaning to "truth." As in, there is such a thing as truth. I hold there is not. I hold there is no such thing as truth, and the word is properly understood as an abstract general collective noun referring only to the property T which is only a property of individual Ps. If you disagree, please define "truth." — tim wood

Redefining it in semantic terms is a deflationary or minimalist move. This aligns with the disquotational theory of truth (e.g. “’Snow is white’ is true if and only if snow is white”), which claims that truth is not a substantive property, but merely a linguistic device for generalizing over propositions.

However, this doesn’t rebut the charge of relativism — it obscures it. If you say that no proposition is true in itself but only because we say it is T, then we’re right back to Protagoras:

"What is true is what we decide is true."

The sleight of hand here is that he avoids making a metaphysical claim about truth by shifting into a formal, semantic register — but this move itself carries a metaphysical implication, namely that truth has no independent reality beyond the operation of language and consensus.

You ask for a definition of "truth" as though it's a settled term — but even among philosophers, it remains contested. Some adopt deflationary or minimalist theories (like yours), others argue for correspondence, coherence, or pragmatic theories, and still others defend truth as a transcendental condition for meaning or knowledge. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy lists over a dozen major theories. So we can't assume it's a straightforward term reducible to a single semantic function.

If we reduce 'truth' to nothing but the property T of a proposition P — and then define T solely in terms of human stipulation — then we haven't solved anything; we've just defined truth out of existence, and replaced it with consensus or coherence within some human framework. But that doesn’t answer the philosophical question. It dodges it.

The absence of inherent purpose doesn’t necessarily imply arbitrariness; it simply means that meaning is not built into the fabric of reality, but must be created by conscious beings. This distinction often gets lost in emotional reactions to, shall we call them 'naturalistic' worldviews. — Tom Storm

I think it's indubitably true that the apparent conflict between the idea of ‘grand design’, on the one hand, and the meme of fortuitous origins, on the other, is a major cultural fault-line—no matter where one stands on the spectrum of views.

Consider the famous 'foundation statement' by Richard Dawkins:

An atheist before Darwin could have said, following Hume: ‘I have no explanation for complex biological design. All I know is that God isn't a good explanation, so we must wait and hope that somebody comes up with a better one.’ I can't help feeling that such a position, though logically sound, would have left one feeling pretty unsatisfied, and that although atheism might have been logically tenable before Darwin, Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.

I certainly don’t want to defend Dawkins’ Intelligent Design opponents. But many—myself included—have observed that Dawkins makes a kind of category error here. The God whose existence he sets out to refute is framed as a superhuman technician, a cosmic engineer meticulously assembling wings, flagella, and other biological contraptions. But this is far removed from the God of classical theism, who is not a being within the order of things at all, but the necessary ground of being itself. Creation, in this tradition, is not the manual assembly of parts, but the ongoing act of sustaining the whole of existence (per the Ever-Present Origin of Jean Gebser.)

But the thing is, as soon as the most rudimentary organisms begin to form, something else appears with them: the rudimentary emergence of meaning. How so? Because the very hallmark of an organism is that it maintains itself in distinction from its environment. It enacts a boundary—not merely spatial, but functional and existential. It resists entropy, resists the universal drift toward dissolution, by preserving internal order and homeostasis. In doing so, it expresses negentropy: it is for itself, in a basic but decisive sense. This is the first flicker of seity—the incipient sense of a self. Not yet a mind, not yet a subject in the rich psychological sense, but already more than mere matter. Already something that matters to itself.

So even if it's true, as some argue, that meaning is “created by conscious beings,” we ought to recognize that this act of creation is not simply a matter of conscious intention. It arises from a much deeper orientation—one that begins, however humbly, with life itself. That, I think, is the current framework for the debate.

My question then would be: what makes materialism so appealing and intuitive? Why is the idea that 'everything is collocations of atoms, ensembles of balls of stuff,' or that 'things are what they are made of,' intuitive? — Count Timothy von Icarus

Situated historically, modern materialism arose as a consequence of, and part of, Rennaissance humanism, allied with intellectual movements such as the emerging nominalism and the proto-empiricism of Francis Bacon and other early modern scientists. So much of early modern science defined itself in opposition to 'the Schoolmen' and scholastic realism. Recall Hume's closing words in his Treatise: 'Take any book of scholastic philosophy....and burn it.' The emphasis became the physical world, the world knowable by the senses, to hell with metaphysics. And looking at the material consequences of those shifts, its proponents may well feel vindicated.

Hence, the common sensibles of size, shape, quantity, etc. get considered "most real." We can see this in Galileo, Locke, etc. with the demotion of color to a "less real" (merely mental) "secondary quality," while shape and motion, etc. remain fully real "primary quantities." In scholastic terminology, we might say this is because color is only the formal object of sight, and can be confirmed and experienced by no other faculty. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Absolutely central. The division of primary and secondary attributes, allied with Descartes' division of extended matter and incorporeal mind, lays the foundation of modernity proper.

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, Pp35-36

Next, we get smallism, the idea that all facts about large things are reducible to facts about smaller parts. — Count Timothy von Icarus

What we got was atomism, as originally propounded by the Greek atomists Leucippus and Democritus. The etymology of 'atom' is 'uncuttable' or 'undivisible'. Atomism provided a means by which the One, which is similarly not composed of parts or division, was able to account for the manifold world of change and decay. The Atom was the eternal and imperishable, but now at the very heart of matter itself. This was the subject of the classical prose poem De Rerum Natura, Lucretius, which is still on curricula to this day (indeed subject of an undergraduate unit that I took.) Lucretius work was seized on by the Enlightenment philosophes - Baron D'Holbach 'all I see is bodies in motion'.

The issue for me is the claim that there are so-called absolute truths, that there are propositions that are true without reference to some, or any, criteria or standard that gives the proposition its truth. And it's turtles.... That is, in any final analysis, what is true is what we decide is true. — tim wood

That's close to the Protagorean view — that truth is always relative to the perceiver or to the community's standards of justification ('man is the measure of all things"). There are only truths for us. But this view has profound implications, not least of which is that it undermines the possibility of truth as something we discover rather than merely decide. But If all truth is decided rather than discovered, then the proposition “truth is what we decide” must also be just a decision, not a truth, and one that we're under no rational obligation to accept. And if it’s presented as a universal fact, that stands in contradiction to relativism, as we're obliged to accept it.

Furthermore the whimsical example of the six-pack of beer made no reference to the absolute, but only to necessary facts - that given six of something, the subtraction of one will invariably leave five. I can't see how that can be a matter of controversy.

in the accretion of truths some are buried so deeply they are no longer candidates for debate or even consciously made; they're simply presupposed, becoming buried foundations for thinking. Which is a difference from axioms because axioms usually made explicit. — tim wood

And this cuts against your earlier claim - If some truths are so deeply embedded that they’re not decided but rather constitutive of meaning, then they’re not “true because we say so.” They’re true as conditions of intelligibility - already a step away from relativism (and near in meaning to the 'hinge propositions' we're discussing.)

Modern discourse often shies away from talk of ‘absolute truth’ — it’s seen as naïve, dogmatic, or even authoritarian. But that taboo has become a dogma in its own right! It is true that articulating any notion of the absolute is difficult — perhaps even impossible in a fully transparent or complete way — but it is part of what philosophy is about.

By contrast, the idea that truth is what we decide it is, sounds superficially tolerant but collapses into incoherence if pushed. If we genuinely believe that all truths are relative to individual or social standards, we lose traction in anything beyond personal preference. Disagreement becomes either a clash of taste or a power struggle, not a pursuit of understanding.

So I think we have to ask ourselves — not just in epistemology but across our culture — what’s lost when we treat truth as if it were merely a social construct. At the very least, philosophy ought to keep open the question of whether some truths are not of our own making, even if they are hard to articulate.

That is very much the thrust of Thomas Nagel’s The Last Word, where he defends the idea that reason has a kind of intrinsic authority that transcends subjective or cultural standpoints. He takes aim at the creeping relativism in contemporary thought that treats logic, objectivity, and justification as mere social conventions or evolutionary adaptations or instruments of power. Nagel argues that this position ends up undermining itself, because the relativist must rely on the very norms of truth and logic that they’re trying to dismiss. His point isn’t that everything is absolutely true in some metaphysical sense, but that there are certain truths — logical, mathematical, even ethical — which are binding not because we agree on them, but because they compel assent through reason itself. Facts that reason compels us to accept.