He was - but don’t you think there’s something essential about spontaneity? Democritus had to introduce the famous ‘swerve’ to allow for the unpredictability of nature. C S Peirce had his ‘tychism’ which he thought of as the ‘sportive’ side of nature. And as I said, spontaneity is also bounded by constraints. But being constrained isn’t the same as being completely determined. There are ranges of possibility - another aspect of QM that Einstein didn’t like, but he was definitively proven incorrect by subsequent science

Following this path, we treat possible worlds not as metaphysical entities but as stipulated language games within which we can evaluate the truth of particular propositions, of how things might otherwise have been. And essential properties are not discovered, nor the attributes of Platonic Forms, but are decided by virtue of keeping our language consistent. They are a thing we do together with words. — Banno

If philosophy becomes merely a matter of keeping our language games internally consistent, then it risks becoming a kind of syntax-policing—about saying what can or can't be said, not about what is or must be. That’s a long way from asking what is real and how it might be known.

I would have thought that the existence of necessary truth, and questions as to what that implies, or why they are necessary, are fundamental philosophical questions, about more than simply 'what we can say'.

Musk is officially out of Government. By any objective account the entire episode was an abject failure. But spare a thought for the many careers ruined, services eviscerated and aid programs destroyed by DOGE.

The heart is often referred to as the "eye of the nous," the inner-most part of the mind that receives the highest forms of intelligible illumination in the Patristics (gnosis). It is not primarily a symbol for "emotion" or "sentiment," but often instead of the deepest possible sort of knowledge. — Count Timothy von Icarus

There's a similar term in Buddhism, namely 'citta' which means both 'mind' and 'heart', depending on the context - the organ of knowledge or insight. In Mahāyāna Buddhism 'bodhicitta' is the aspiration for the enlightenment of all beings.

So here's one interesting question: could one say that the ability to make a negative self reference means having subjectivity? — ssu

There's an aphorism from the Upaniṣads that I'm fond of quoting, to the effect that 'the eye can see another, but not itself, the hand can grasp another, but not itself'. It relates to the problem of reflexivity, that what is ordinarily considered knowledge is always considered in the subject-object framework, but as to the nature of the knowing subject, that is always outside the frame, so to speak.

By the same strict argument Popper's idea of falsifiability eliminates itself, since it is not itself strictly falsifiable. — Janus

But it wasn't intended as an empirical theory. It was intended as principle which was to be used to identify what was or was not in principle an empirical theory.

Appreciated! Polanyi covered a lot of the same territory as Thomas Kuhn even though he wasn't as well known. I always really liked his work.

Plato’s so-called ‘Forms’ might be better understood as principles of intelligibility —not ghostly objects in another realm, but the structural grounds that make anything knowable or what it is. To know something is to grasp its principle, to see what makes it what it is.

And they’re neither objective - existing in the domain of objects - nor subjective - matters of personal predilection. That is why they manifest as universals

Your depiction of the forms is something of a caricature. All I can say is, do more readings.

Beats me why they’re getting so much media attention. It will be good when Parliament resumes and there’s some actual legislative action to talk about.

Objectivity has logical rules which simply limit just what can be accurately modeled.

Here is the problem: many of our most important and critical questions about reality cannot be modeled accurately with a totally objective model, because objectivity demands an external viewpoint of the issues at hand. Yet we ourselves are part of the universe and when this fact needs to be in the model, then we cannot make an accurate model. We cannot just assume an external viewpoint, somebody observing reality / the universe outside it. — ssu

Completely agree! I think the ‘meta-algorithm’ you refer to might be close to what Roger Penrose was getting at in his Emperor’s New Mind. But overall in agreement with your post.

we said that mind is in a sense potentially whatever is thinkable, though actually it is nothing until it has thought? What it thinks must be in it just as characters may be said to be on a writing tablet on which as yet nothing stands written: this is exactly what happens with mind.

That’s a philosophically pregnant phrase if ever there was one. I’m fascinated by that idea.

Philosophy Now magazine (April 2025) presents the Question of the Month : Is Morality Objective or Subjective? And one writer said "Objective moral principles are necessary to reconcile worldviews". So, it occurred to me that his theory of universal Forms might have been an attempt to objectify-by-edict ("thus saith the Lord") mandatory ethical rules that would otherwise be endlessly debatable. — Gnomon

In a culture of revealed truth, the Commandments weren't simply 'objective' principles to be observed from a distance, nor were they subjective wishes. For the believer, they had an existential weight that transcended the subject-object divide. They weren't just rules about reality; they were constitutive of reality itself for those who lived under their sway. They were experienced as demands - on one's being, shaping identity and defining the very framework of a meaningful life.

To violate a Commandment wasn't just to break an external rule; it was to commit an act of self-alienation, a rupture with one's fundamental relationship to God and community. It was a failure of authenticity within that revealed framework, akin to what an existentialist might describe as choosing 'bad faith' – not by denying one's freedom, but by denying the profound, revealed truth that defined one's moral landscape.

While modern existentialism often grapples with a lack of pre-given meaning, it highlights the profound personal commitment required for moral choice. In a similar vein, for those living under divine revelation, the Commandments weren't just intellectual propositions; they were existential imperatives that demand commitment. It’s very hard for us to see that, as embedded as we are in the ‘Self-Other’ paradigm of modern individualism.

While Moses's revelation is of eternal commandments, Plato's noetic apprehension of the Forms (especially the Form of the Good) is more intellectual ascent. Both have a profound, transformative impact on the individual's moral and epistemological landscape, but the path to that is different. Moses's commands are given; Plato's Forms are apprehended through rigorous, self-cultivated effort.

For Plato, too, the "seeing" of the Form of the Good transcends the simple subject-object binary. The individual intellect (subject) doesn't merely observe the Form (object) from a detached distance. Instead, the intellect must become attuned to the Form, participate in its nature, and be transformed by it through participatory knowing. The boundary between knower and known is transcended in this insight. The Form of the Good isn't just "out there" to be observed; it's something that, once "seen," reorders the entire internal landscape of the individual.

This is all very much part of what used to be the Western cultural heritage of Christian Platonism.

So it seems we must accept them on Plato's authority, or by agreement of our own reasoning with his. Similarly, the ancient Hebrews were presented by Moses with a compendium of ethical rules, that were supposed to be accepted as divine Laws. And violations would be punishable by real-world experiences, up to and including death & genocide. — Gnomon

Many would say that Plato and Moses were completely different historical types. After all Plato’s dialogues are meticulously rational albeit with some mythological elements. But Plato’s academy, which operated for centuries and was re-constituted in various ways over nearly a millenium, was the precursor to the modern university. Students were expected to master a comprehensive curriculum of which philosophy was only one part - there were also athletics and other subjects. In any case, rational argument and rhetoric was a major part of it, even though in other respects Platonism seems religious by today’s standards.

Moses was part of the Biblical prophetic tradition relying entirely on the truth revealed by God in the Burning Bush. And there is an inherent tension between those two traditions, one religious, the other rationalistic. (Although early in the Christian era there was a school of thought that somehow Plato had learned from or was an inheritor of the Abrahamic tradition.)

So - I wouldn’t at all agree with this ‘similarly’.

I guess you’re right. Still I’m flummoxed as to why Hamas continues to hold those hostages. I can’t see how they’ll gain from it.

I’d suggest that there really isn’t a “classical form” of the law of identity in the sense you seem to mean. Aristotle doesn’t formulate such a law as a formal axiom—his concern is metaphysical, not symbolic. The modern statement “A is A” or “x = x” comes from a much later tradition, shaped by formal logic and set theory, not Aristotle’s ontology of substance and form. To read Aristotle as if he were simply asserting the self-contained identity of particulars is to read him through a modern lens that doesn’t fit.

According to Aristotle's Metaphysics, each individual thing has a form which is proper to itself and only itself. — Metaphysician Undercover

Aristotle's position is that form is what makes an individual intelligible as a member of a kind. It’s not that each individual has a completely unique form proper to itself, but rather that many individuals share a common form—what we’d call a species or essence. What individuates one member of a species from another is matter, not form - matter is what individuates them. To suggest that each individual has a form unique to itself closer to nominalism.

That's as far as I'm going to go. You've been on about this for years, as some kind of self-designated expert, but I'm never persuaded by your polemics, even while I don't claim to be an expert myself.

What do you mean by a mountain's measurement of time, if not sensory information? — wonderer1

It is a 'thought experiment' intended to impart the idea that the concept of time is inextricably linked to the subjective system of the relevant beings. Of course mountains don't perceive time or anything else for that matter. (I can see why you refer to that 'flicker fusion' idea.)

Surely not. Your intuitions can't be that bad. — Banno

Yes, acknowledge that they're not true a priori. Still struggling to see how the laws of motion would dictate that the Earth couldn't have two satellites, when other planets do.

It's Aristotle who designated the identity of the individual as within the individual itself, commonly known as the law of identity, "a thing is the same as itself". This identity supports the reality of primary substance. I think we discussed this before, and you didn't accept that Aristotle recognized the identity of the particular. — Metaphysician Undercover

Yes, the law of identity (a=a) is a logical principle—a tautology that belongs to the structure of thought and language. It tells us something about the consistency of our terms, but not about the ontological self-sufficiency of particulars. To read it as a statement about the intrinsic metaphysical identity of beings is to conflate logic with ontology.

When Aristotle discusses primary substance in the Categories, he's not saying that the identity of the individual particular is simply in the particular in some absolute sense. Rather, he's marking it as that which is neither said of nor in a subject—that is, the individual concrete thing, like “this man” or “this horse.” (ref). But even so, its intelligibility depends on form, not on its specific particularity.

Moreover, Aristotle’s deeper metaphysics—in the Metaphysics and De Anima—makes clear that a substance’s what-it-is is grasped through form, not through brute particularity. So it’s not that the individual grounds its identity in itself, but that its being is composed of matter and form, and its intelligibility lies primarily in the formal principle, not in the sheer fact of its being “this one.”

The law of identity is a logical framework that presupposes ontological grounding—it doesn't establish it.

Sure, right on both counts. My bad for introducing it, as quantum weirdness is a gauranteed thread de-railer, except for its undeniable relevance to questions of determinism.

The law of identity, "a thing is the same as itself" indicates that there is an identity ("correct construal" if you like), which inheres within the the thing itself, therefore independent of interpretation. — Metaphysician Undercover

In classical philosophy—especially in Platonic and scholastic traditions—particulars are not intelligible in and of themselves, but only insofar as they participate in or receive a form or essence. Their identity is not something they generate, but something they manifest - in the theistic traditions, bestowed by the Creator.

This contrasts with modern metaphysical assumptions, which often treat particulars as having an independent reality. Eckhart: “creatures are mere nothings”. From within this perspective, the mind doesn’t impose identity, but recognizes it through a kind of intellectual illumination that reveals a deeper metaphysical order (by recognising the form or what-it-is-ness of the particular being.)

It’s tempting to draw parallels between Plato’s Forms and modern physics—especially when figures like Heisenberg make explicit reference to Platonic ideas. But we should be cautious about pressing these analogies too far. The concept of Forms in Plato is not about invisible particles or mathematical abstractions per se, but about the intellect’s ability to grasp stable, intelligible principles that underlie the flux of experience.

This ability—what Plato would associate with the logistikon, the rational part of the soul—is foundational to reason itself. The Forms are not hypotheses about what “really exists” in some otherworldly sense, but expressions of the truth that the rational mind is oriented toward what truly is, not just to appearances. We can only recognize something as a tree, as just, as a triangle, because our minds can apprehend something universal, not merely register a bundle of sensations.

This whole conception of reason—as the faculty that “sees” the intelligible—is central to classical philosophy but has largely fallen out of favor in modern thought, due in no small part to the cultural and intellectual impact of empiricism. When knowledge is reduced to sensation and association, the idea that the mind participates in intelligible being comes to seem obscure or mystical - even if we're actually doing it every moment! And then when attention is drawn to that, we can't see it for looking.

But perhaps the real insight in Plato—and what Heisenberg may have been reaching for—is that the intelligibility of nature is not something we impose on the world, but something we discover because of the rational capacity to see what is. That’s a metaphysical claim, not a physical one, but it's crucial to any deeper understanding of what Plato's forms are supposed to mean.

Oh - and welcome to the Forum. :clap:

I haven't been following this thread too closely, but like everyone, am appalled by the bloodshed and suffering of the Palestinians we see on news bulletins every day. This morning, there was a report that Hamas had agreed to release 10 more hostages in return for a 70-day ceasefire - quickly denied by Israel and the US negotiator Witkoff.

So the question I have is, why isn't Hamas releasing the remaining live hostages, and returning the remains of the others? What advantage do they hold by retaining them in captivity? If they were to release them, wouldn't that pressure Israel to relent?

Are things (e.g. cats, trees, clouds, etc.) "in the senses" or are they "projected onto the senses," or "downstream abstractions?" Empiricism has tended to deny the quiddity of things as "unobservable," but a critic might reply that nothing seems more observable than that when one walks through a forest they sees trees and squirrels and not patches of sense data. Indeed, experiencing "patches of sense data without quiddity," — Count Timothy von Icarus

All due respect, I think you’re complicating the picture a little. John Locke, who was the emblematic British empiricist, was of the view that the mind is a blank slate, tabula rasa, on which impressions are made by objects. The term ‘quiddity’ is from scholastic philosophy, is precisely the kind of thing that Locke wouldn’t appeal to. He is associated with representative realism, whereby images represent objects, and general ideas are abstracted from the perception of many similar objects. J S Mill took a similar view.

‘Such subtle enquiry’, indeed.

Thankyou :pray:

Trump says Putin ‘has gone absolutely CRAZY!’ “Missiles and drones are being shot into Cities in Ukraine, for no reason whatsoever,” Trump says.


So DJT seems suddenly to have become aware of the fact that Putin is groundlessly and indiscriminately firing missiles and drones and killing Ukrainian citizens - three years after the invasion started. I would say 'better late than never', but you don't know what he's going to say next.

But the point at issue is, whether time is real independently of any scale or perspective. So a 'mountains' measurement of time will be vastly different from the 'human' measurement of time.

Sensory information doesn't really come into it. Clearly we have different cognitive systems to other animals, but the question of the nature of time is not amenable to sensory perception.

Anyway - I can see we're going around in circles at this point, so I will leave it at that. Thanks for your comments.

Still don't see any justification for the claim that the Earth could have only one moon as 'a matter of natural law'.

You'd have to assume random things happen for no reason, contrary to the PSR. — Relativist

Just remind me again why Einstein said he doesn't believe that God plays dice?

I am nit sure what the thought experiment conveys. — Apustimelogist

You said, 'So if something is mind-dependent, it co-varies with the state of your subjective state of mind.' The 'mountain' thought experiment shows how one's sense of reality is dependent on the kind of mind. Hence, mind-dependent.

The image needs to be put on a media, but the media doesn't change the image, or it is not necesdarily the case that it does, it seems to me. — Apustimelogist

Right - one of the points that I often make, which is the symbolic or representational or semantic level is separable from the physical.

Well, the times surely are a'changing. Something a lot of people don't appreciate, is that around the time David Chalmer's published his famous Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness, he was a a keynote speaker at the initial Science of Consciousness conference in Arizona (convened by Stuart Hameroff.) The TSC conferences are widely regarded as a landmark event, bringing together scientists and philosophers from various disciplines to discuss consciousness in a serious academic setting. This undoubtedly contributed to big changes in the field.

Herewith the image from the 2014 (20th Anniversary) conference, with everyone in the picture being some philosopher of mind or consciousness.



Deepak Chopra cheek-in-jowl with Daniel Dennett. Who'd have thought?

Dependence means that things co-vary. So if something is mind-dependent, it co-varies with the state of your subjective state of mind (withstanding you representing or seeing it). — Apustimelogist

It depends on mind in a different way to that. A thought-experiment I have posed is: imagine that mountains were consciously aware. A mountain has a life-span of hundreds of millions of years. To a mountain, human beings would be imperceptible, because their life spans are so minute as to be incomprehensible. You wouldn't be aware of a Mallory or a Hillary. Glaciers, you might recognise, as they'd be around long enough to register and carve canyons in your flanks. At the other end of the scale, imagine an intelligent microbe. Its entire lifespan of one human hour might be spent inside the internal organs of a larger creature. Again, it would have no conception of the scale or time-span that constitute that creature's life (like the flea who says 'I don't think I believe there's a dog' :razz: )

As for the photograph, it represents something to you because you know what a likeness is, you know what it means, and what it has captured, and that it is representative. But physically, it is not the reality it represents, it is plastics and polymers. The ability to reproduce the image depends on the technology of inkjet printers but the interpretation is dependent on your mind.

I get how difficult this is. I think this passage from Bryan Magee captures the difficulty many of us have in grasping what’s at stake in transcendental idealism. It helps explain why the view seems so implausible at first—but also why it deserves patient attention:

This, incidentally, illustrates a difficulty in the way of understanding which transcendental idealism has permanently to contend with: the assumptions of 'the inborn realism which arises from the original disposition of the intellect' enter unawares into the way in which the statements of transcendental idealism are understood, so that these statements appear faulty in ways in which, properly understood, they are not. Such realistic assumptions so pervade our normal use of concepts that the claims of transcendental idealism disclose their own non-absurdity only after difficult consideration, whereas criticisms of them at first appear cogent which on examination are seen to rest on confusion. We have to raise almost impossibly deep levels of presupposition in our own thinking and imagination to the level of self-consciousness before we are able to achieve a critical awareness of all our realistic assumptions, and thus achieve an understanding of transcendental idealism which is untainted by them. This, of course, is one of the explanations for the almost unfathomably deep counterintuitiveness of transcendental idealism, and also for the general notion of 'depth' with which people associate Kantian and post-Kantian philosophy. Something akin to it is the reason for much of the prolonged, self-disciplined meditation involved in a number of Eastern religious practices. — Bryan Magee, Schopenhauer's Philosophy, p106

Ok not ‘seem’. ‘Are’.

Sure—but I think we have to distinguish between how laws are discovered (epistemology) and what they describe about the world (ontology). You're right that laws like Newton's were formulated after observing motion, and that our models change with better observations. But that doesn't necessarily mean motion itself is lawless or "undetermined" in some deeper sense.

In the Newtonian framework—within its applicable range—the laws don't just describe motion, they enable precise prediction. If I know the mass, velocity, and position of a satellite, and I apply Newton’s equations, I can calculate where it will be tomorrow, and I’ll be right (at least to an excellent approximation). That’s more than just post hoc description—it reflects an underlying law-like regularity.

Granted, this breaks down at relativistic scales or in quantum domains—but that’s part of the point. Lawfulness can be domain-specific, and even in more advanced physics, the idea of constraint or structure doesn't vanish. It just becomes subtler. So I’d still say there’s a real sense in which orbital motion is determined—at least within the scope of classical mechanics.

So: yes, our formulations of the laws are historically contingent and always open to revision. But the regularities they describe are not arbitrary. They're what allow us to build spacecraft that actually arrive at their destinations. The laws of motion can predict how moons orbit planets, once they exist—but those same laws don’t determine how many moons a given planet will have. That depends on many contingent factors—collisions, accretion history, nearby bodies, etc.—that fall outside the scope of deterministic prediction. There’s lawfulness in how systems behave, but not everything that happens is fixed by those laws alone.

I think the interesting philosophical point is precisely the sense in which the laws of nature seem true a priori, irrespective of experience. I mean, whenever something is suggested that might not obey those laws on this forum, merry hell usually follows :-)

We're assuming QM is deterministic). You'd have to assume random things happen for no reason, contrary to the PSR. — Relativist

But I think that's a huge assumption. Even if it were true the amount of information one would have to have to calculate how many satellites a given planet could have is unknowable in practice, and it is known there are planets with more than one satellite (even other planets in our solar system.) The OP frames the relationship between PSR and determinism as binary—either every event is strictly determined, or not. But the relationship isn’t that simple. The principle of sufficient reason claims that everything has a reason or sufficient condition. However, that reason doesn't necessarily dictate a single, fixed outcome in all cases, it might only provide a range of possibilities (which is exactly what the Schrodinger equation does, come to think of it.) Meaning there can be degrees of likelihood, within a range (like, the particle will be registered, but it won't be a watermelon.)

And furthermore, natural laws are based on idealisations and abstractions - point particles, frictionless planes, and so on - which we don't encounter in reality. So in short, I don't see an a priori reason why a planet such as ours doesn't have two moons - it is a contigent fact.

Our new Dear Leader is planning a YUGE military parade on his upcoming birthday, the largest for more than 40 years. — J

I wonder if he'll have the massed missile launchers and tanks, like his comrade, Putin.

ON the OP, the only thing I have to add, is that when an aged relative was in her dotage and suffering dementia, one of the things I noticed is that she lost all sense of when memories had occurred. She would refer to people or events that we knew had happened decades previously as though they had just happened. ('Where is Lynne? She said she would call' - Lynne having died decades previously.) The metaphor I thought of was the index on a hard drive being corrupted so that random pieces of memory were floating to the surface of her conscious awareness without any reference to her current experience (which was, of course, very sad to see, although she did not appeared distressed by it.)

The other general point I've noticed in my own life is the deceptiveness of memory. One can have an apparently crystal-clear recollection of an episode or a scene in your life from years previously (now I'm older I notice this) but then find out that you weren't in that place at that time, or some other aspect of the memory is fictitious.

No, because the single moon is present as a result of the deterministic laws of nature. — Relativist

Sorry to but in, but surely the number of moons a planet has, and the number of planets a solar system have, is not determined by any laws of nature. What is determined is how they orbit their stars and planets. What could not occur would be an orbital path not determined by those laws.

The title of this thread—“Does anybody really support mind-independent reality?”—is precisely the issue. You seem to be assuming that we’ve already answered that question in the affirmative by default, and that everything else is just subjective garnish (“schm-ime”). But the whole point of this discussion is to ask: what do we mean by the “reality” that is supposedly 'mind-independent', and does it make sense without reference to a subject? That’s not a scientific question—it’s a philosophical one. I think there's a real distinction to be made.

I trivially need experiences to experience that fruit that is beared, but if humans can construct models and ways to examine those models and their empirical consequences in ways that are not changed by subjective experiences (in virtue of experiential subjectivity), then in what sense do they depend on the subjective. — Apustimelogist

You say you “trivially need experiences to experience the fruit that is beared,” but that’s actually the core issue. It’s not just that we need experience to observe outcomes—experience is the condition for building, interpreting, and validating any model at all.

Scientific models may not change based on individual subjectivity, but their entire framework—measurement, comparison, meaning—depends on the shared structures of cognition. That’s not a scientific claim; it’s a philosophical one. You can’t eliminate the subject without also eliminating the possibility of modeling anything in the first place.

But, if we agree that you do support the idea of a mind-independent reality, then perhaps we can leave it at that.

Werner Heisenberg was a lifelong Platonist. He was known for carrying a copy of the Timeaus with him when a student, and wrote intelligently on philosophy and physics. See his The Debate between Plato and Democritus', a transcribed speech, from which:

...the inherent difficulties of the materialist theory of the atom, which had become apparent even in the ancient discussions about smallest particles, have also appeared very clearly in the development of physics during the present century.

This difficulty relates to the question whether the smallest units are ordinary physical objects, whether they exist in the same way as stones or flowers. Here, the development of quantum theory some forty years ago has created a complete change in the situation. The mathematically formulated laws of quantum theory show clearly that our ordinary intuitive concepts cannot be unambiguously applied to the smallest particles. All the words or concepts we use to describe ordinary physical objects, such as position, velocity, color, size, and so on, become indefinite and problematic if we try to use them of elementary particles. I cannot enter here into the details of this problem, which has been discussed so frequently in recent years. But it is important to realize that, while the behavior of the smallest particles cannot be unambiguously described in ordinary language, the language of mathematics is still adequate for a clear-cut account of what is going on.

During the coming years, the high-energy accelerators will bring to light many further interesting details about the behavior of elementary particles. But I am inclined to think that the answer just considered to the old philosophical problems will turn out to be final. If this is so, does this answer confirm the views of Democritus or Plato?

I think that on this point modern physics has definitely decided for Plato. For the smallest units of matter are, in fact, not physical objects in the ordinary sense of the word; they are forms, structures or — in Plato's sense — Ideas, which can be unambiguously spoken of only in the language of mathematics.

I find the question of whether sub-atomic phenomena exist 'in the same way' that stones and flowers do very interesting.

I just wanted more clarity on the meaning of space and time as about in the head, not outside it. Clearly, what we perceive is embedded in what is going on in our heads. Clearly we cannot perceive / experience everything, every event in the physical reality outside our heads that makes a difference, that has an effect on other things in reality. But nonetheless, I think what we do experience, or at least a significant amount of it has a broadly consistent mapping to specific things that actually go on. To me, that is enough to say that we see real stuff in a weak sense. I think there is no observable intrinsic fact-of-the-matter about representation, only a dynamic statistical coupling between brains and the world which a scientist or philosopher can cash out as representation. The coupling is enough. If I think of veridicality weakly in terms of a kind of coupling or mapping then there is not really a sense that I could exhaustively couple a system to the rest of reality and have it miss anything about reality. When stuff is missed, it because there are couplings missing that give us novel information. Space and time can also be seen in terms of these kinds of couplings, at least the concepts we have made reasonably precise by measurement (i.e. objective time). My subjective sense of space and especially time may be more fallible or is different for various reasons (e.g. speculatively: because time and space are inferred through informational properties of the brain which can be easily perturbed, e.g. if I close my eyes, I lose some of the information required to specify physical space (at least at some allowable resolution) and become more reliant on say body information than I normally would); if subjective time could plausibly related to information flow (e.g. entropic time by ariel caticha), then information processing in my head may distort my sense of time).

So maybe there are discrepancies between objective time "inside" and "outside" as it were but only in some sense that informative couplings have been missed to some part of reality. Good example is obviously relativity phenomena like time-dilation. Maybe the way brains work or learn over time mean that mappings or couplings can be established or parcelled out in different ways; but nonetheless these are just different mappings to events that actually occur, and they are overlapping or inter-relatable so that even though I may be measuring in inches or centimeters, because they are being mapped to the same stuff in reality, there is no sense that these different perapectives are telling me anything new or different about space. And there is nothing else to know about space beyond my sensory boundaries unless that thing to know about space makes some physical difference (because space is physical) to observations and theories and experiential perceptions. — Apustimelogist

Thanks for that, I only just noticed it now, for some reason it wasn't picked up in Mentions.

I think your analysis illustrates the problem Bergson was concerned about. When you say that space and time can be understood as “informative couplings” or as co-ordinate systems tracking changes, you’re describing what clocks and instruments do—they measure intervals between states. That’s fine for physics. But the philosophical point is that this doesn’t capture what time is, as in some fundamental way, it is lived. That is the sense in which it is still observer dependent.

Let me again paste in the passage from the Bergson-Einstein debate which I think is the relevant point:

At each moment, the pendulum occupies a different position in space, like the points on a line or the moving hands on a clockface. In the case of a clock, the current state – the current time – is what we call ‘now’. Each successive ‘now’ of the clock contains nothing of the past because each moment, each unit, is separate and distinct. But this is not how we experience time. Instead, we hold these separate moments together in our memory. We unify them. A physical clock measures a succession of moments, but only experiencing duration allows us to recognise these seemingly separate moments as a succession. Clocks don’t measure time; we do. This is why Bergson believed that clock time presupposes lived time.

Bergson appreciated that we need the exactitude of clock time for natural science. For example, to measure the path that an object in motion follows in space over a specific time interval, we need to be able measure time precisely. What he objected to was the surreptitious substitution of clock time for duration in our metaphysics of time. His crucial point in Time and Free Will was that measurement presupposes duration, but duration ultimately eludes measurement.

Bergson’s insight was that clocks don’t measure time; we do. What we call “objective time” (e.g., seconds, hours, spacetime intervals) depends on our ability to synthesize change into a unified experience. The sequence of tick-tock-tick has no meaning unless it is held together in memory and felt as a flow; there is no time for the clock itself. Otherwise, it’s just isolated instants. That sense of flow—duration, which is fundamental to time —cannot be reduced to or captured by measurements alone. As Bergson put it, measurement presupposes duration, but duration eludes measurement.

The point isn’t that subjective time is a distortion of the real thing, but that subjective time is the ground of our sense of temporality itself. What you're calling “couplings” only make sense against the backdrop of a temporally structured awareness. Without someone to whom change occurs as change, your "objective time" is just an uninterpreted sequence of events with no temporal character.

Which, in turn, goes back to the idealist (or constructivist) argument: the subject cannot be subtracted from the equation without also subtracting the very conditions under which space, time, and objects can be said to exist. We can behave as if there is no subjective awareness of time for practical purposes, but this conceals a philosophical sleight of hand—the erasure of the subject whose presence is in fact a precondition for the very intelligibility of space, time, and objectivity.

Where this calls realism into question is not by saying the sensed world is illusory or imaginary, but by showing that the subjective pole of experience can't be eliminated, even though it can be forgotten. And that is very much what Evan Thompson, author of the Bergson-Einstein essay, is concerned with, as he says this 'forgetting' of the subjective ground of science constitutes its 'blind spot'.

When Wayfarer is presented with arguments that refute his ideas and which he has no answers to he resorts to labelling them as "positivist" in an attempt to discredit and dismiss them. — Janus

I will say that your posts reflect a positivist attitude when they do. I could, if I was bothered, find any number of examples of that in our discussions in years past - science as the arbiter of what is real, the subjectivity of religious or spiritual maxims, which might have poetic or affective value, but convey no truth. And so on. I'm not the least 'intellectually dishonest', I go to great lengths to explain and defend my views.

:100: :clap:

Everything there is, for the knowing mind, can’t be reduced to the physical/empirical, while that mind is doing the reduction. — Fire Ologist

That same mind which is bracketed out of early modern science with the division of the primary and secondary attributes - primary being those precisely measurable and quantifiable, secondary being color, taste, smell, and those other attributes which rely on subjective apprehension. Within that milieu, physics becomes paradigmatic, because of its precision and its universality. The laws of motion, for example, are thought to be universal in scope (which they are, subject to the limitations later discovered by relativity.)

The upshot of which is that the mind then has to be re-introduced to the world from which it has been banished, as a consequence or result of these same ‘universal’ physical forces which finds its most consistent expression in so called ‘eliminative materialism’. A hard problem, indeed.

Starting from the idea that sciences are universal, there is then often this attempt then to create a mathematical theory of something, something like physics. If it's mathematical, it's scientific! — ssu

Pretty much as I said above. It is, to allude to a rather controversial, but also profound, book, ‘the Reign of Quantity’. One of the discussions that prompted this thread, was about how qualia (an item of academic jargon in philosophy of mind referring to the qualities of subjective experience) can be explained away as illusion.

I also don't have much use final causes. — T Clark

From my readings on it, final causality was a fatal flaw in Aristotelian physics, as it in effect attributes intentionality to inanimate objects (i.e. a stone’s ‘natural place’ is on the Earth.) But it’s very different in biology, where indeed there’s a pretty strong ‘neo-Aristotelian’ revival nowadays. After dispensing with ‘teleology’, biologists found in necessary to re-introduce ‘teleonomy’ referring to the apparent goal-directedness of organisms ( wiki). It’s been said that Aristotle’s biology anticipated the discovery of DNA, not because he had any idea of molecular biology, but because he had worked out what is necessary for the transmission of traits.

Besides final causality is routinely invoked in day-to-day life. ‘Why is the kettle boiling?’ can be answered with either ‘because the water has reached boiling point’ or ‘I want to make tea’. Both are course correct but they answer slightly different questions.



Seems to me your proposing a kind of pragmatic redefinition of positivism, suggesting that its value lies in yielding useful or predictive models. But but that wasn't the central concern of logical positivism, which were epistemic and semantic—concerned with the meaning and justifiability of statements. Popper’s falsifiability criticism was a critique of the verification principle. While pragmatic utility is important in science, it doesn’t rescue the philosophical framework of positivism from its internal and methodological issues. I can see circumstances where a positivist attitude is pragmatically useful. But that isn't the point at issue.

There is a pretty massive conflation common in this area of thought re "science" and "empiricism. — Count Timothy von Icarus

It's not that difficult: empirical data is what can be captured by the senses (or instruments). Basically, what is tangible, physical, 'out there somewhere'.

(It is interesting to ask whether Popper's work remains within or moves beyond Positivism. I suspect that Wayfarer might say that Popper's response is a kind of extension of Positivism.) — Leontiskos

I don't think so. Recall that the initial targets of Popper's critique were psychoanalysis and marxist economics. Both of these were held up as being scientific theories. Popper pointed out that they were so poorly defined that they could accomodate any kind of observation - they couldn't be falsified. He contrasted that with Einstein's theory of relativity, which was subject of empiricial confirmation (or disconfirmation) which came from Eddington's observation of the gravitational deflection of starlight in 1919.

Besides, Popper, later in life, developed his 'third worlds' ontology which I think would be very different from anything the positivsts would endorse. In The Self and Its Brain, co-authored with John Eccles, he explicitly defends a form of interactionist dualism, rejecting the reduction of mind to brain — a clear departure from physicalist or positivist assumptions.

Even though Positivism & Empiricism, postulated as-if universal principles, fail their own test, they still serve as good rules of thumb for Scientific investigations into the material world. — Gnomon

Of course. It's when they're applied to 'the problems of philosophy' that tend towards 'scientism' - as you say.