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

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

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

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

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

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

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

According to the theoretical physicist and Nobel laureate Paul Dirac,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The modern mind-body problem arose out of the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, as a direct result of the concept of objective physical reality that drove that revolution. Galileo and Descartes made the crucial conceptual division by proposing that physical science should provide a mathematically precise quantitative description of an external reality extended in space and time, a description limited to spatiotemporal primary qualities such as shape, size, and motion, and to laws governing the relations among them. Subjective appearances, on the other hand -- how this physical world appears to human perception -- were assigned to the mind, and the secondary qualities like color, sound, and smell were to be analyzed relationally, in terms of the power of physical things, acting on the senses, to produce those appearances in the minds of observers. It was essential to leave out or subtract subjective appearances and the human mind -- as well as human intentions and purposes -- from the physical world in order to permit this powerful but austere spatiotemporal conception of objective physical reality to develop. — Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos, Pp 35-36

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It all starts with a fluctuation. — apokrisis

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Example: Armstrong's "atomism" is an ontological claim that there is an irreducible bottom layer of physical reality. — Relativist

Physicalism respects the discoveries of physics, and as such is a form of scientific realism, but it doesn't entail treating any specific findings in physics as an element of the ontology or as a set of assumed facts upon which it depends. — Relativist

The scope of ontology is the totality of existence. Physicalists are philosophers who assert the physical world to BE the totality of existence, but it is not a conclusion derived from physics. — Relativist

It (the 'hard problem' is problematic for a physicalism that assumes science can and will answer all questons about the natural world — Relativist

What is the ideal situation in which an a priori judgment is imagined to take place? Prior to what, exactly, can we know that 7+5=12? — J

I submit that it is incompatible with the Gerson view of Platonism. — Paine

A nice case of the “unreasonable effectiveness” is Dirac’s prediction of anti-matter — it literally “fell out of the equations” long before there was any empirical validation of it. That shows mathematics is not just convention or generalisation, but a way of extending knowledge synthetically a priori.
— Wayfarer

IMO, that is a merely an instance of an inductive argument happening to succeed. A purpose of any theory is to predict the future by appealing to induction -- but there is no evidence of inductive arguments being more right than wrong on average. Indeed, even mathematics expresses that it cannot be unreasonably effective, aka Wolpert's No Free Lunch Theorems of Statistical Learning Theory. — sime

The unit of survival is a flexible organism-in-its-environment. — Bateson, Form, Substance, and Difference

In my view, he makes too little of what can be derived from experience in combination with symbolic language — Janus

What Kant seems to gloss over is that this kind of a priori reasoning is distilled from perceptual experience, — Janus

Can you provide an argument that supports it. — Janus

...supposed authorities... — Janus

Thanks to the association of particular images and recollections, a dog reacts in a similar manner to the similar particular impressions his eyes or his nose receive from this thing we call a piece of sugar or this thing we call an intruder; he does not know what is 'sugar' or what is 'intruder'.
— The Cultural Impact of Empiricism

What scientific study does he cite for this empirical claim? If my dog goes and gets a ball when I say "go get your ball," even new balls not previously seen, have I disproved his claim by showing the dog's understanding of categories? If not, what evidence disproves his claim? — Hanover

If you are waiting for Wayfarer to provide an actual argument you'll be waiting a long time, perhaps forever. — Janus

Who are you showing this to? — Relativist

This has no bearing on the what I said, except to the extent that Philosophy deals with more than ontology (the ONLY thing physicalism is dealing with). — Relativist

Physicalism is the theory that everything that exists, is composed of physical things, and that they act and assemble entirely due to physical forces due to laws of nature.
.... — Relativist

...physics theory makes the theoretical claim that everything that exists in the material world (the domain of physics) is composed of elements of the quantum fields (as identified in the standard model) It's a claim supported by evidence and theory ....The metaphysical claim is that an object IS its physical compostion, there's nothing more to the object..

You don't agree, but you haven't explained why you disagree. — Relativist

I can consider most philosophical issues even when framed in terms inconsistent with physicalism. That's because I regard the framing as paradigm, which can be utilized without ontological commitent to the paradigm. — Relativist

• The Hard Problem: first-person experience (“what it is like”) is not captured by third-person physical accounts.
• Universals and theory of meaning: truths, logical relations, and mathematical structures are not physical categories, even if they can be represented in physical media.
• The Blind Spot: since Galileo, science has bracketed the subject to focus exclusively on objects — but philosophy must also account for the subject who knows and experiences.

But their (ancestral) life is vivid in the expression of character and disposition of particular individuals. That view does not mesh well with the vision of souls being their own thing but also conscripted to the "material" world. — Paine