it will be ignored — Janus

It was, in fact, addressed, point by point - but there's no use explaining that to someone who is not prepared to reckon with it. Hence Twain's adage, very suitable in the context.

Thompson sees reason as emerging from our everyday experience and the ways we engage with the world, not from a detached, universal viewpoint. We develop our thinking through action, conversation, and the practices we inherit. He rejects the notion that this makes him a relativist: being aware that reasoning is 'situated' doesn’t mean all ideas are equally valid or that anything goes. On the contrary, some ways of thinking are better than others, and we can test, refine, and improve our ideas through experience, dialogue, and careful reflection. Thompson would probably acknowledge that reasoning is grounded in context but this doesn’t weaken it, it makes it more honest, responsible, and connected to how we actually understand and navigate the world. — Tom Storm

Spot on. I had the idea of writing an OP on disembodied cognition. Why? To bring out what was important about embodied cognition in the first place - what it was critiquing. I think that was largely focussed on intellectual abstraction, functionalism, physicalism, and many of the other popular 'isms' of the academic philosophy. So, I agree with you, I don't think Thompson's project is relativist, but it's also //not// hanging off philosophical absolutes. It's threading the needle between those kinds of dilemmas which gave rise to the whole project. Which is why it is not co-incidental that the whole of The Embodied Mind is pervaded with references to the Buddhist 'middle way'.

I confess I don't understand the point of the exegesis on triangulation. I'm uncertain just what an imperfect triangle might be. My guess, however, is that it isn't a triangle. In which case a "perfect" triangle is, simply, a triangle. It should be unsurprising that when we think about a triangle, we think about a triangle. It's difficult to ascribe much significance to this fact. But it seems some do and I wonder why? — Ciceronianus

You’re able to grasp the concept of a triangle — “a flat plane bounded by three intersecting straight lines” — because you possess a rational intelligence capable of understanding what the word means. That capacity is fundamental to language and to rational thought itself.

It’s easy to take this for granted because you and I both possess it: the ability to apprehend abstract, intelligible forms. The triangle is merely a simple example. The same point applies to any number of concepts, principles, and relations that H. sapiens can grasp thanks to its fantastically elaborated forebrain.

Why does this matter? Because without universals, you can’t explain how any rule-governed thought is possible. You can’t explain how different people can understand the same concept, or why a mathematical truth holds regardless of who considers it, or how we recognise something as falling under a shared description. And, crucially, you can’t explain how we move from particular things to general claims — which is what every argument requires.

(And if that sounds like neural reductionism, it isn’t. You won’t find any of these forms or principles in neural data. The brain enables the grasp of concepts, but the concepts themselves aren’t hiding in the folds of the cortex. The way I think of it is that h.sapiens evolved to the point of being able to grasp universals, which affords them – us – with a capacity to grasp universal truths. I think this capacity is usually either assumed, explained away, or ignored. See Jacques Maritain, The Cultural Impact of Empiricism, Parts II - III.)

:ok:

Saying they are “immanent” does not reduce them to material particulars. Aristotle’s forms are not products of material processes; they are the preconditions for there being any particular thing at all. They are real as structures of intelligibility, not as material objects. The reality of triangles is not dependent on there being physical triangles — just as the reality of numbers, ratios, limits, and functions is not conditional on physical instantiation. Almost the entirety of pure mathematics would otherwise collapse into “idle fiction,” which is a reductio of your position, not mine.

And I think you already knew what I would say. — Mww

I still don't quite get it. My thoughts on it are that time and space are meaningless without there being a perspective. And perspective can only be provided by an observer. I think that goes back to the Transcendental Aesthetic.

You’re still treating the point I’m making as if it were an empirical claim about the contents of the world — something that could be justified the way a scientific hypothesis is. You invariably defer to the authority of science. But mine isn’t “untethered philosophising”: it’s philosophy. And I’m not dismissive of science; I’m pointing out that this is a philosophy forum, not physics.org (where, incidentally, philosophical questions about physics are often deleted by moderators). Yet whenever a philosophical question is raised here, you immediately transpose it into a scientific register and then fault it for not producing scientific evidence. That simply begs the question

Science does produce beliefs: scientific facts that are grasped and accepted by an individual are beliefs that the person holds. — Relativist

Scientific facts are not matters of belief. If you know something to be factually true, then belief is superfluous. “Belief” becomes relevant only where we are dealing with matters that science cannot settle: questions of meaning, interpretation, value, and conceptual understanding. That is precisely why, even in the most rigorously empirical of sciences — quantum physics — there are enduring and unresolved controversies over how to understand the theory. Everyone agrees on the equations and the experimental results; what is disputed is their meaning. If your view were correct, these interpretive disagreements could be resolved simply by “consulting the science.” But they can’t be — because the science gives us the data and the mathematical formalism, not the framework for interpreting what the data mean.

These resulting beliefs are better justified than philosophical speculations that produce a myriad of mutually exclusive, possibilities: — Relativist

Such as? Tell me what is "speculative" about this kind of observation:

Consider that when you think about triangularity, as you might when proving a geometrical theorem, it is necessarily perfect triangularity that you are contemplating, not some mere approximation of it. Triangularity as your intellect grasps it is entirely determinate or exact; for example, what you grasp is the notion of a closed plane figure with three perfectly straight sides, rather than that of something which may or may not have straight sides or which may or may not be closed. Of course, your mental image of a triangle might not be exact, but rather indeterminate and fuzzy. But to grasp something with the intellect is not the same as to form a mental image of it. For any mental image of a triangle is necessarily going to be of an isosceles triangle specifically, or of a scalene one, or an equilateral one; but the concept of triangularity that your intellect grasps applies to all triangles alike. Any mental image of a triangle is going to have certain features, such as a particular color, that are no part of the concept of triangularity in general. A mental image is something private and subjective, while the concept of triangularity is objective and grasped by many minds at once. — Edward Feser

Nothing in this argument is speculative. It is critical. These points are pre-scientific in the strict sense: they concern the capacities presupposed by scientific reasoning itself. To grasp that a geometrical construction is valid, or to reason inferentially from data to theory, you must already possess the conceptual capacities the argument is describing. Scientific method does not generate those capacities, and cannot analyse them into "neural firings" without presupposing exactly what it seeks to explain.

As Kant put it, empirical reasoning is only possible because the mind already brings certain forms and concepts to bear on experience.

The point of this example — and the others I’ve given — is simple:

Concepts are real, but not material.
They can only be grasped by a rational intelligence.
They do not exist as physical particulars or “states of affairs” in the world.
Yet science would be impossible without them.

This is the level at which philosophy operates.

Just to make clear, it isn’t space and time that is measured, so by this I understand you to mean measurement in general. I’m maybe over-thinking it. — Mww

But don’t rulers measure space, and clocks time?

https://youtu.be/SkEWWdDWDBg?si=oLwi5aFDaFs6fAKp

https://youtu.be/8FEYm8ehaTE?si=UGZHgVDvIEviIrG9

Yes unfortunately me too. It’s pitched to the academic profession with all the necessary armour-plating. But Evan Thompson is just one of the people in the academic world I really like. I listened to a couple of conversations with he and Vervaeke earlier this year. (Fun fact - both Uni of Toronto, Vervaeke covered for Thompson when the latter was over-booked and couldn’t deliver a lecture series.)

Better! I’m going through Mind in Life although finding it a difficult read. But my Christian cultural heritage has instilled in me a conviction that reason is somehow knitted into the grand scheme, not that there aren’t also things beyond it. Overall my orientation is nearer the rationalists than the empiricists.

Yeah shows :rofl:

Ever seen Soylent Green? Long before your time, but a chilling dystopian sci-fi.

It’s also worth noting the growing debate—both in physics and in philosophy of physics—about whether time and space themselves exist independently of measurement. Einstein always insisted they must: spacetime, for him, was the objective arena within which events unfold, regardless of whether anyone observes them. But in their famous 1922 debate, the philosopher Henri Bergson challenged this directly. Bergson argued that the very meaning of time depends on duration, and duration is something only a conscious observer can bring. Without the lived sense of temporal flow, “time” collapses into abstract coordinate labels on a graph.

This tension hasn’t gone away. Contemporary discussions about emergent spacetime, relational quantum mechanics, and the observer-dependence of temporal order show that Bergson’s challenge still resonates. The issue isn’t whether clocks tick; it’s whether clock-time exhausts what time is.

To examine the measurements involved in clock time, Bergson considers an oscillating pendulum, moving back and forth. At each moment, the pendulum occupies a different position in space, like the points on a line or the moving hands on a clockface. In the case of a clock, the current state – the current time – is what we call ‘now’. Each successive ‘now’ of the clock contains nothing of the past because each moment, each unit, is separate and distinct. But this is not how we experience time. Instead, we hold these separate moments together in our memory. We unify them. A physical clock measures a succession of moments, but only experiencing duration allows us to recognise these seemingly separate moments as a succession. Clocks don’t measure time; we do. — Clock Time contra Lived Time (Aeon)

But acknowlegement of the fact that we are dependent on our cognitive structure leads to no additional insights about the world: it's impossible to escape our inherent perspective. — Relativist

If you want a scientific context for the point I’m making, consider the most famous scientific dispute of the 20th century - the Einstein-Bohr debate.

The reason Einstein objected to the Copenhagen scientist's interpreration of quantum physics was because it challenged his assumption that physics describes a world “as it is in itself,” independent of observation. He said "I cannot seriously believe in it because the theory cannot be reconciled with the idea that physics should represent a reality in time and space, free from spooky actions at a distance", and "I think that a particle must have a separate reality independent of the measurements. That is an electron has spin, location and so forth even when it is not being measured. I like to think that the moon is there even if I am not looking at it."

But Bohr (and Heisenberg, and Pauli) were not fringe thinkers, and they explicitly argued that physical quantities have no definite value prior to measurement, that the observing apparatus is inseparable from the observed phenomenon, and that descriptions of nature are constrained by the conditions of observation. That, in other words, that at the most fundamental level of reality, we're not seeing what is truly there when unobserved, and that furthermore, we may not even be able to say what it is (which was Bohr's view.)

And quantum experiments have continuously reinforced that point. Most recently, the 2022 Nobel Prize confirmed the empirical consequences of Bell’s theorem — precisely the kind of nonclassical correlations that Einstein derided as “spooky action at a distance.”

So when you say that my view implies “we can’t get the world as it is,” or that recognising our cognitive structure gives “no additional insight,” that’s simply out of step with the scientific history. The 20th century forced physics itself to confront the limits of the classical, observer-independent picture of the world. You can disagree with Copenhagen, but you can’t say the issue isn’t philosophically significant — physicists have spent decades wrestling with it (and it is still the predominant attitude).

More importantly: science produces justified beliefs about the world. What justified beliefs can be produced by these philosophical inquiries? It appears to me to do no more than generate possibilities. — Relativist

Science doesn’t “produce beliefs.” It produces models that organise and validate observations within a conceptual framework. But it does not — and cannot — investigate the preconditions that make observation, measurement, and intelligibility possible. That is where philosophical analysis is indispensable. Not everything about human existence, or about the structure of experience, is amenable to empirical methods — and ignoring that doesn’t make the questions go away.

The dependence of what is observed upon the choice of the experimental arrangement made Einstein unhappy. It conflicts with the view that the universe exists "out there" independent of all acts of observation. In contrast, Bohr stressed that we confront here an inescapable new feature of nature, to be welcomed because of the understanding it gives us. In struggling to make clear to Einstein the central point as he saw it, Bohr found himself forced to introduce the word "phenomenon". In today's words, Bohr's point - and the central point of quantum theory - can be put into a simple sentence: "No elementary phenomenon is a phenomenon until it is a registered (observed) phenomenon". — Law without Law, John Wheeler

The Rigor of Angels: Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality, Wiliam Egginton. NY Times Review (gift link).

I.e. ecological-embodied metacognition ... — 180 Proof

It is ecological-embodied metacognition. But in enactivism, it is more than 'discursive practices' i.e. verbal behaviours. It goes 'all the way down' into pre-verbal and primitive cognition - the organism 'brings forth' the environment as much as vice versa. And the aim is not to explain but to navigate and to thrive.

For instance, from Varela-Thompson-Rosch, Embodied Mind:

“The enactive approach does not seek to reduce mind to the mechanisms of biology but rather to show the continuity of mind and life as forms of autonomous, sense-making activity.”'

and

“Objectivism commits a category mistake: it treats the world disclosed through our embodied coping as if it were an observer-independent reality ‘out there’.”

They also refer to Buddhist philosophy in this respect:

"Mind and world arise together in mutual specification.”
“There is no mind without world and no world without mind.”

Also from Merleau Ponty: 'The world is inseparable from the subject, but from a subject which is nothing but a project of the world, and the subject is inseparable from the world, but from a world which the subject itself projects.'

If you mean this literally, it's absurd because it assumes the actual, external world depends on (human?) consciousness. — Relativist

You’re interpreting a transcendental argument as if it were a metaphysical claim. I’m not saying that mountains, stars, or dinosaurs depended on human consciousness to exist. That really would be absurd.

My point is that the actual world is never given “as it is in itself,” but only as disclosed through the structures of perception, embodiment, and understanding that are the conditions for any intelligible world at all.

This is not denying an external reality. It denies that we can meaningfully speak of a “mind-independent world” in the strong sense— i.e., a world that would exist in the way we understand it to exist even in the absence of any standpoint, any cognitive frame, any lived perspective.

That stronger claim is the hidden metaphysics of naturalism.

What naturalism calls “observer-independent states of affairs” isn’t a discovery about the world; it’s an idealization, a projection that abstracts away precisely the conditions that make any disclosure of a world possible.

Philosophy can inquire into what lies beyond the limits of objectivity in a way science cannot.

C’mon 180. Bertrand Russell and Lloyd Gerson. Middle-of-the-road classical philosophy.

Thank you for that.

Big piece of work! I’m impressed by it although have as always a large stack of ‘things I ought to read’. But anyway :pray:

True - it's function is not directed at itself but as part of a larger system. Nevertheless, it does meet their definition: it senses (temperature) and does (turn on or off). But it's allopoeitic rather than autopoeitic, in enactivist terms.

Maybe it helps to refer once again to meditative states, in which it's possible to experience a very simple, seemingly objectless state of awareness. Am I "viewing con itself" in such a state? What's especially interesting is that the literature of meditation claims that the ego, the (possible) source of conscious awareness, is largely absent in such states. Should we conclude that "I" am not doing anything at that moment, so the whole loop question can never get started? — J

Very insightful question! 'Non cogito ergo non sum'. I tried diligently to practice Buddhist meditation for years, but one of the early understandings I had was, so long as you're aware of yourself meditating, then you're obviously not in that kind of 'contentless consciousness' state, as you're still aware of 'I am doing this'. Getting to that kind of complete cessation of self-consciousness always eluded me. In yoga terminology, such states are called 'nirvikalpa', meaning 'nir' (no) 'vikalpa' (thought forms). But in my experience realising such states is very rare in practice. That's why genuine yogis and real spiritual adepts are often reclusive and keep away from society. It's the opposite of our over-stimulated high-tech culture.

Neuroscience tells us how the brain behaves when we think; it cannot tell us what thinking is — because the very act of interpreting neural data requires the conceptual structures (universals, logical form, mathematical norms) that the brain-waves theory is supposed to explain. You cannot use “if… then…” reasoning to argue that reasoning is nothing but brain waves, because the argument presupposes the very universality that oscillations cannot provide. You can't see those mental operations 'from the outside', so to speak, as you're already drawing on them to conduct the research that the findings rely on. 'The eye cannot see itself'.

I always go back to Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam in Journey of the Mind: How Thinking Emerged From Chaos:
A mind is a physical system — Patterner

That's an immediate red flag for me. According to their definition, a thermostat is a mind. From a review:

Despite the splashy blurb, Journey of the Mind is essentially a pancomputational, complexity-theoretic evolutionary narrative. It treats mind as something that emerges when matter organizes into systems capable of learning, in the broadest, most information-theoretic sense.

Think of it as:

Daniel Dennett + Integrated Information + Complexity Theory + Evolutionary Just-So Storytelling,
but written for a general audience with lots of nice pictures.

They argue that:

A mind is any system that takes in information, updates internal structure, and generates adaptive behaviour.

Minds scale: archaeal → amoebic → worm → reptile → bird → mammal → human → societal “supermind.”

Consciousness = a sufficiently complex, recursively self-modelling prediction engine.

It’s an attempt to unify everything from basic chemotaxis to human language under one computational umbrella.

Me, I don't think it qualifies as philosophy. It's pop science.

The “map vs. territory” distinction isn’t what’s at issue.
The argument from Aristotle through Russell is about the conditions of intelligibility that make any map–territory distinction possible in the first place — universals, logical form, meaning. These aren’t maps; but they’re not parts of the physical territory either. They’re what both map and territory presuppose. If you want to challenge that, you need to address the argument, not just repeat slogans.

:rofl:

I see no reason to believe that. — Janus

Can you rebut the arguments that I provided from Gerson, Feser, Russell? Or is it just 'what you reckon'?

This is the sense in which the mind “constructs” or “creates” the cosmos: not as an external agent shaping an independent material realm, but as the ongoing process of perception, interpretation, and conceptual synthesis that yields our experience of a coherent, ordered world — which is precisely what kosmos meant. The Buddha’s teaching that “within this fathom-long body, with its perception and intellect, is the cosmos, its origin, its cessation, and the path to its cessation” (AN 4.45) is making the same point: the world-as-lived, the meaningful, structured world of experience, is constituted through the operations of cognition. This is not solipsism, nor the denial of an external world, but an insistence that the world we inhabit is inseparable from the activity of consciousness that renders it intelligible. And that, of course, is the bridge to both phenomenology and enactive cognition.

I stil maintain that an effective (if not 'slam dunk') argument against physicalism is from classical philosophy: that linguistic communication would be impossible if materialism were true. Or, as Lloyd Gerson put it, you could not think if materialism were true.

Aristotle, in De Anima, argued that thinking in general (which includes knowledge as one kind of thinking) cannot be a property of a body; it cannot, as he put it, 'be blended with a body'. This is because in thinking, the intelligible object or form is present in the intellect, and thinking itself is the identification of the intellect with this intelligible. Among other things, this means that you could not think if materialism is true… . Thinking is not something that is, in principle, like sensing or perceiving; this is because thinking is a universalising activity. This is what this means: when you think, you see - mentally see - a form which could not, in principle, be identical with a particular - including a particular neurological element, a circuit, or a state of a circuit, or a synapse, and so on. This is so because the object of thinking is universal, or the mind is operating universally.

….the fact that in thinking, your mind is identical with the form that it thinks, means (for Aristotle and for all Platonists) that since the form 'thought' is detached from matter, 'mind' is immaterial too. — Lloyd Gerson, Platonism v Naturalism

Interpretation - De Anima III.4–5. Here, Aristotle argues that thinking cannot be the act of a bodily organ because the intellect receives forms “without matter,” i.e., as universals; it grasps the idea of the object, which is an intellectual, not a sensory, act. Whereas a bodily organ always perceives specific material thing. But the intellect must be capable of receiving any form whatever, which requires that it be “unmixed” with the body (429a15–b22).

In the act of thinking, the intellect is identified with the form it thinks. Since the form considered as intelligible is not a particular, and no brain-state can be anything other than a particular, the thinking intellect cannot be identical with any material structure. This is why Aristotle says that intellect is “separate,” “impassive,” and “unmixed.”

Gerson is simply stating this classical Aristotelian point: if materialism is true—that all mental acts are particular physical states—then universal thought would be impossible, and without it, you could not think. But universal thought occurs. Therefore materialism cannot give an adequate account of thought.

Edward Feser amplifies the point:

Consider that when you think about triangularity, as you might when proving a geometrical theorem, it is necessarily perfect triangularity that you are contemplating, not some mere approximation of it. Triangularity as your intellect grasps it is entirely determinate or exact; for example, what you grasp is the notion of a closed plane figure with three perfectly straight sides, rather than that of something which may or may not have straight sides or which may or may not be closed. Of course, your mental image of a triangle might not be exact, but rather indeterminate and fuzzy. But to grasp something with the intellect is not the same as to form a mental image of it. For any mental image of a triangle is necessarily going to be of an isosceles triangle specifically, or of a scalene one, or an equilateral one; but the concept of triangularity that your intellect grasps applies to all triangles alike. Any mental image of a triangle is going to have certain features, such as a particular color, that are no part of the concept of triangularity in general. A mental image is something private and subjective, while the concept of triangularity is objective and grasped by many minds at once. — Edward Feser

Feser makes the same point in contemporary terms: a mental image of a triangle will always be of one specific triangle (isosceles, oriented, coloured, etc.), whereas the concept of triangularity is perfectly determinate, universal, and shareable among many minds. Because the object of intellection is universal, and because thought consists in the mind’s identity with that universal form, no physical state—necessarily a particular—can be identical to an act of understanding.

And from Bertrand Russell:

It is largely the very peculiar kind of being that belongs to universals which has led many people to suppose that they are really mental. We can think of a universal, and our thinking then exists in a perfectly ordinary sense, like any other mental act. Suppose, for example, that we are thinking of whiteness. Then in one sense it may be said that whiteness is 'in our mind'. ... In the strict sense, it is not whiteness that is in our mind, but the act of thinking of whiteness. The connected ambiguity in the word 'idea', which we noted at the same time, also causes confusion here. In one sense of this word, namely the sense in which it denotes the object of an act of thought, whiteness is an 'idea'. Hence, if the ambiguity is not guarded against, we may come to think that whiteness is an 'idea' in the other sense, i.e. an act of thought; and thus we come to think that whiteness is mental. But in so thinking, we rob it of its essential quality of universality. One man's act of thought is necessarily a different thing from another man's; one man's act of thought at one time is necessarily a different thing from the same man's act of thought at another time. Hence, if whiteness were the thought as opposed to its object, no two different men could think of it, and no one man could think of it twice. That which many different thoughts of whiteness have in common is their object, and this object is different from all of them. Thus universals are not thoughts, though when known they are the objects of thoughts. — Betrand Russell, The World of Universals

Of course, the nominalist objection will be that there is no universal 'triangle', only particular triangles, which we can see resemble each other. But that objection fails because it can't explain what it appeals to. A mental image or sensory perception is always specific: coloured, sized, oriented, isosceles or scalene, etc. But the concept of triangularity is exact, universal, and common to all minds. No image captures this, and no neural configuration can be identical with something that applies to indefinitely many images. Moreover, nominalism presupposes the very universals it denies: similarity, classification, identity of meaning, and the laws of logic are themselves universals. Without universals, no two thinkers could ever mean the same thing, no inference could be valid beyond the moment, and mathematics would be impossible. This is why the Aristotelian argument stands: the universal content of thought cannot be reduced to any particular material state, and a materialist–nominalist account cannot explain the phenomenon it tries to deny, as any explanation will implicitly rely on the very universal categories of thought which nominalism insists are unreal.

Great work Jamal. Super impressed with your commitment to the Forum. I'll help with subscriptions when the new platform goes live.

Please refer to what I said in this thread. As I interpreted this discussion as being about metaphysics I responded accordingly here and here. These are not recapitulations of the ‘mind-created world’ OP, although I believe they’re compatible with it.

you're not addressing the issue, beyond re-stating 'what is wrong with religion'.
— Wayfarer

And this is your projection, that I'm stating 'what is wrong with religion'. You insist on reading that into my posts, and no matter how hard I try to explain otherwise, you won't desist — baker

You'll need to try harder:

Institutionalized religion seems always to become politicized, and hence corrupted, coming to serve power instead of free inquiry and practice.
— Janus

I can see why you’d say that...
— Tom Storm

How about we follow the money and suggest that what is going on is not a politization of institutionalized religion, nor a corruption -- but a correct, exact, adequate presentation of religion/spirituality.

That when we look at religious/spiritual institutions and their practitioners, we see exactly what religion/spirituality is supposed to be. — baker

"There is abundant evidence for the efficacy of religious beliefs and practices in the lives of the religiius."

Of course there is abundant evidence of such efficacy. But what exactly is it that is efficacious, is another matter.

On the other hand, there are also many studies and reports of people saying how religion makes them miserable. — Baker

"David Bentley Hart says, in Atheist Delusions, that after the Roman Empire’s pagan social order collapsed, Christianity stepped in and changed things in ways that many moderns take for granted..."

You have got to be kidding. Or your baseline for human interaction is very, very low. — Baker

Only God can afford to give without demanding or expecting something in return. A human cannot do that, because humans have only limited resources that they need to use very carefully. One should be wary of a human who assumes to give without demanding or expecting something in return. Such a person will eventually become bitter, cruel, and revengeful. — Baker

There is an eagerness to absolve religious/spiritual people of all responsibility -- for what they teach, for what they say, what they do. We are supposed to let them get away with murder. We are supposed to trust them unconditionally, regardless of what they say and do.

what if someone's "profound spiritual insight and understanding" is actually simply what it's like when one lives a comfortable life where one doesn't have to work for a living, as is the case with many religious/spiritual people? If a person gets to spend all their waking hours thinking about things and writing them down, yes, they better come up with something "profound".

If modern-day religious/spiritual people don't burn people at the stakes this isn't because they would think that all people have a right to live or some such; but because it would be tedious to burn people like that, given the modern circumstances.

You can see why I said that this suggests a cynical view of religion, can't you? Or am I reading it all wrong?

Further to which, one of the books that started me down this route (although there were many) was a 1994 title Understanding the Present. It was a pretty ferocious polemic, by a British science journalist, but explored many similar themes to the OP:

In a brilliant and explosively controversial work, the author attacks modern science for destroying our spiritual sense of self.

What is the role of science in present-day society? Should we be as dazzled as we are by the innovations, the insights, and the miraculous improvements in material life that science has wrought? Or is there a darker, more pernicious side to our scientific success?

Renowned British science columnist Bryan Appleyard thoroughly explores each of these provocative topics in a book that has incited the ire of the scientific community. He points out that while scientists have shaped our lives and our beliefs, they have consistently failed to explain human consciousness, the soul, or the meaning of life. From Galileo to Darwin, from Copernicus to Oppenheimer, countless scientists have proclaimed a universe in which human beings are only an accidental presence. The unwitting result is that science has cast humankind adrift, paralyzing us with fear and cutting us off from personal or religious truth. In Appleyard’s view, science has done us “appalling spiritual damage.”

These startling conclusions have prompted strong counterattacks from the scientific establishment. Yet regardless of where one falls in the debate, Understanding the Present forces readers to re-examine society’s blind faith in the benevolence of modern science. — Understanding the Present, Bryan Applyard

This is an early version of the conundrum that still haunts us in the form of a dispute about subjectivity and objectivity, but what the enlightenment did was to come down firmly on both sides. It carves out a realm of physicality that is entirely separate from the mind of man and calls that the objective world, and relegates morality to the subjective world of Protagoras, where all is relative to man and thus a matter of opinion. The 'is/ought' separation begins here. ...

...It's all Descartes's fault! His meditations are an attempt to escape the limitations of the phenomenal world. ...what this does is establish for him the isolated individual mind as a world of its own, and a separate realm of matter, and the third realm of God. — unenlightened

:100: Very similar to the points I've been trying to make in the Predicment of Modernity and Idealism in Context.

I am going to take a break from this site, so I won't be responding for now — unenlightened

I know how you feel, I took all October out. Pity you won't be around to see how much I agree with you.

Actually if you'd bothered reading anything I've said in this particular thread, you would see i've said nothing of the kind (although I've never said anything of the sort in any other thread, either). As the discussion had turned into a general one on metaphysics, I was trying to make the distinction between phenomenal and intelligible objects, but no avail.

This is right, and perhaps not so neglected if we see the connection with the many discussions we've had about the status of propositions. The whole point of trying to separate out something called a proposition is to preserve that very distinction — J

Which I am seeking to leverage to make a point about metaphysics…a point which I still don’t think is being acknowledged.

unknown truths. — Banno

Name one.

My main point, though, was the structure of type and token that enables to say that it is the same symbol in many places and many occasions. Or at least, I thought that was what you meant. — Ludwig V

It is indeed a part of what I meant! But the additional point is that what is denoted by the symbol is an intellectual act, not a phenomenal existent. And I say that is a real, vital, and largely neglected distinction.

Because a lot of your comments come off as if you're trolling. You're clearly educated, but in threads like this, you're not addressing the issue, beyond re-stating 'what is wrong with religion'. I think everyone here knows 'what is wrong with religion' but in any case there are always more examples that can be dug up and thrown to illustrate the one point you seem intent on making.

If you look at the original post, it actually is not about religion. It is more along the lines of intellectual or social history - about how undercurrents in Western culture gave rise to the sense of a meaningless universe. Religion is part of that, but it's not intended as religious apologetics or evangalisation, so a little less 'negative evangalisation', or perhaps, nothing at all, would be preferable.

Whereas I think you're exemplifying the problem that the OP is seeking to explain.

Just a small point. What I "actually" point to is a mark on wall or paper. — Ludwig V

And not a valid one. The mark is a symbol. What it represents is a mathematical value, not an object.

You'd think!

That is the sense in which I hold they (sc. abstract objects) are real (in the noumenal or intelligible sense) but not existent (in the phenomenal, spatiotemporal sense.
— Wayfarer

Well, they are not phenomenal or spatiotemporal objects. But why does that mean they don't exist? — Ludwig V

If I ask you to point to the number 7, what would you actually point to? At most, you could indicate a token—a mark on paper, a glyph on a screen, or the word “seven.” But the number itself is not any of these tokens. We both understand “7” because we can perform the intellectual act of counting and grasping numerical relations. The token is a symbol, not the referent, which is a numerical value.

This is why I say that numbers, logical principles, and laws of nature are intelligible rather than phenomenal. They are not given in sensation the way tables, colours, or sounds are. You don’t encounter the number 7 in space and time; you grasp it by a capacity of the intellect. That makes them real, but not existent in the empirical sense.

Of course, we say colloquially that the number 7 exists, and I wouldn't take issue with that. But this is a philosophical distinction and in this context such distinctions are significant.

I'm not making arbitrary distinctions - I’m distinguishing two modes of existence. Phenomenal things exist as objects of sense. Intelligible things are real insofar as they can be grasped by a rational intellect, but they are not phenomena, in the way that sense objects are.

This distinction between phenomenal and intelligible objects isn’t something I’ve invented; it’s a well-established feature of the classical philosophical tradition. From Plato and Aristotle through the medievals and into early modern rationalism, the difference between what is apprehended by the senses and what is apprehended by the intellect was taken to be fundamental. It’s only with the rise of empiricism and the narrowing of “existence” to what can be observed or measured that this distinction began to fade from view.

I’m simply trying to keep both modes of understanding in play, because collapsing everything into the empirical domain obscures the reality of the intelligible structures we rely on in logic, mathematics, and science itself. And it is actually germane to the subject under discussion.

For the record, I will never accept eliminativism because it denies the very thing that makes knowing, questioning, arguing, or explaining possible in the first place. Consciousness is not an optional theoretical posit—it is the ground of the awareness within which every fact, every argument, and every experience appears. To “eliminate” it is to eliminate the condition of appearance itself. Whatever difficulties consciousness poses for physicalist explanation, denying its reality is not a solution but a performative contradiction: the eliminativist must rely on the very phenomenon he claims does not exist in order to assert that it does not exist. For me, the given reality of experience is more fundamental than any theory, and no philosophical outlook that begins by denying the existence of its own ground can ever be persuasive. That is my last word on it.

The data recorded by such devices can’t be an illusion until it is interpreted by a user. Otherwise it’s just pixels.

LLMs are different, as the operations they perform are orders of magnitude more complex than image capture. Regardless, their ‘hallucinations’ are possible concatenations of words and phrases. Ask any of the LLMs whether they are sentient beings, and they will always respond in the negative.