It's a judgement based on critical thought. The human notion of purpose presupposes agency. and agency presupposes perception/ experience. If the universe as a whole has no agency, no perception/ experience then how could it have a purpose? — Janus

The ‘universe as a whole’ is the subject of scientific cosmology. It’s what is examined through the astounding technology of the Hubble, James Webb and now Vera Rubin observatories. Of course you won’t see anything like purpose or agency in the data that these instruments collect - but as I said, this is red herring. As I said, scientific method itself brackets out or disregards those kinds of considerations. But to refer back to the OP ‘the familiar claim that the universe is meaningless begins to look suspicious. It isn’t so much a conclusion reached by science, but a background assumption—one built into the methodology from the outset. The exclusion of purpose was never, and in fact could never be, empirically demonstrated; it was simply excluded as a factor in the kind of explanations physics was intended to provide. Meaning was left behind for the sake of predictive accuracy and control in specific conditions.

That this bracketing was useful—indeed revolutionary—is not in doubt. But the further move, so often taken for granted in modern discourse, is the assertion that because physics finds no purpose, the universe therefore has none. This is not science speaking, but metaphysics ventriloquizing through the authority of science. It is a philosophical sleight of hand that confuses methodological silence for ontological negation.’ And you continually pull on that to justify your claims that whatever can’t be known by way of science is not a legitimate subject for philosophy.

We think of human behavior as intentional. We also think of some animal behavior as intentional, but it seems a stretch to call the behavior of simple organism, or even plants or fungi, intentional. You agree that the inorganic universe is not intentional or purposeful, and if the vast bulk of existence is inorganic, then how do you reconcile that? — Janus

I’m interested in a perspective based on phenomenology - that the appearance of organisms IS the appearance of intentionality. It is how intentionality manifests. It’s not panpsychism, because I’m not saying that consciousness is somehow implicit in all matter. The fact that inorganic matter is not intentional in itself is not particularly relevant to that.

And yet, no doubt, this "being challenged by science" is an objective process. — 180 Proof

Perhaps - but, ironically, the whole question of the mind-independence of the fundamental aspects of nature has been thrown into question by this objective process. That’s what the Einstein-Bohr debates were about - Einstein the staunch realist, ‘the world is the way it is no matter what we think or see’ vs Bohr ‘no phenomenon is a real phenomenon until it is an observed phenomenon.’

Of course, but the sense that the universe is, in Bertrand Russell’s words, ‘the meaningless outcome of the collocation of atoms’ is very much a product of Enlightment and post-Enlightenment rationalism. (And it’s not for nothing that Plato wanted all Democritus’ books burned ;-) )

To briefly recap the OP

• Modernity tends to view the universe as basically meaningless, although individuals and cultures may project concepts of meaning on it.
• But on the level of lived existence, organic life is animated by purpose, driven by the will to survive.
• Phenomenology has re-conceived intentionality as something much broader than conscious intention, instead identifying it as an aspect of the will to survive (re Hans Jonas The Phenomenon of Life)
• Enlightenment science divided the universe into the primary and secondary attributes of matter, roughly corresponding with the objective and subjective domains, respectively.
• A major aspect of early modern science was the abandonment of the idea of ‘telos’ associated with Aristotelian physics, which superseded by Galileo’s then-new physics.
• In this model, meaning, purpose and values are identified as being subjective and the universe said to be devoid of ‘telos’, however this view is itself a consequence of the perspective required by physics, now brought to bear on the life as a whole. This is the origin of physicalism.
• Biology is a different discipline to physics, and accordingly telos has had to be re-introduced through the neologism ‘teleonomy’ which describes the apparently-purposeful activities of organic life.
• Finally, unlike in early modern physics, current physics itself has now been obliged to take the context of its observations into account because of the ‘observer problem’ in quantum physics.

Meaning that the stark object-subject divide that characterised modern thought is now being challenged by science itself.

When you have a question that has a bearing on the OP then I’ll be happy to respond.

Modern philosophical analysis has exposed the idea as incoherent. — Janus

You’re not even addressing the OP, simply repeating the same positivist dogma you always fall back on.

The idea that the universe is purposeless is a modern invention, arising in the early modern period with Newtonian science and Cartesian philosophy. That is briefly described in the OP under the heading of ‘The Great Abstraction’ — which is precisely what it was.

the belief that the Universe is purposeless is itself a judgement about meaning. Asking what this purpose might be, in the abstract, is almost a red herring - it doesn’t really exist in the abstract, but it is inherent in the purposeful activities of beings of all kinds, human and other. It is, as it were, woven into the fabric. — Wayfarer

Immanent because inherent in everything you do, transcendent because it can’t be simply defined.

I can very much pitch my decisions as reactions to inputs, so it's merely a choice to apply one word or the other according to ones preferences. — noAxioms

You have a choice, and you have preferences, which an instrument does not. Its reaction is strictly determined, whereas yours is unbounded. You could respond in an incalculable number of ways, or choose not to respond at all.

physicalism doesn't deny intentionality — noAxioms

Doesn’t it? Intentions and intentionality are, after all, very difficult to accommodate in a physical framework. Physicalism holds to the causal closure of the physical domain, which means that for every effect, there is a physical cause. Now, of course, this seems very difficult to reconcile with the apparently-obvious fact that intentions and mental acts have consequences - but a lot of effort has been made to explain away this apparent discrepancy. So it’s not really true that ‘physicalism doesn’t deny intentionality’ - what it does, is try to account for it in terms of theories of action which purport to show that intentional behaviour is ultimately reducible to brain states and is therefore physical. That seems obvious to a lot of people here but there have been many books written about it and it’s not at all regarded as resolved.

You correctly notice the colossal role of the unconscious, intuitive, emotional in human decision-making. And perhaps it is this "ignorance" about our deep determinants, about the very "program" or "source of Being" that we cannot "count," that allows our Being to retain its authenticity. This is what makes our choice not just a rational calculation or execution of instructions, but an act of creation arising from an internal, to the end unknowable depth. — Astorre

That’s a great insight :pray:

Physical science "is misapplied science"? — 180 Proof

Not when it's applied to physical objects. But as I said in the OP, physics achieved its enormous successes by concentrating on what could be quantified and physically measured, to the exclusion of other factors. That is what I mean by the great abstraction.

The scientific revolution of the 17th century, which has given rise to such extraordinary progress in the understanding of nature, depended on a crucial limiting step at the start: It depended on subtracting from the physical world as an object of study everything mental – consciousness, meaning, intention or purpose. The physical sciences as they have developed since then describe, with the aid of mathematics, the elements of which the material universe is composed, and the laws governing their behavior in space and time.

We ourselves, as physical organisms, are part of that universe, composed of the same basic elements as everything else, and recent advances in molecular biology have greatly increased our understanding of the physical and chemical basis of life. Since our mental lives evidently depend on our existence as physical organisms, especially on the functioning of our central nervous systems, it seems natural to think that the physical sciences can in principle provide the basis for an explanation of the mental aspects of reality as well — that physics can aspire finally to be a theory of everything.

However, I believe this possibility is ruled out by the conditions that have defined the physical sciences from the beginning. The physical sciences can describe organisms like ourselves as parts of the objective spatio-temporal order – our structure and behavior in space and time – but they cannot describe the subjective experiences of such organisms or how the world appears to their different particular points of view. There can be a purely physical description of the neurophysiological processes that give rise to an experience, and also of the physical behavior that is typically associated with it, but such a description, however complete, will leave out the subjective essence of the experience – how it is from the point of view of its subject — without which it would not be a conscious experience at all.

So the physical sciences, in spite of their extraordinary success in their own domain, necessarily leave an important aspect of nature unexplained. Further, since the mental arises through the development of animal organisms, the nature of those organisms cannot be fully understood through the physical sciences alone. Finally, since the long process of biological evolution is responsible for the existence of conscious organisms, and since a purely physical process cannot explain their existence, it follows that biological evolution must be more than just a physical process, and the theory of evolution, if it is to explain the existence of conscious life, must become more than just a physical theory. — Thomas Nagel

I've no doubt Pigliucci, as well as most philosophically sophisticated modern scientists, would agree that the physical sciences are applied metaphysics which actually work (i.e. reliably generate good explanations for physical phenomena and processes). — 180 Proof

It's not 'applied metaphysics' but 'misapplied science', as I've already made amply clear in the OP, and which I won't repeat.

The essence of scientism is the attempt to apply the methods of science to the questions of philosophy.

The only thing that seems likely is something about Trump’s relationship with Epstein. But if you look at what all the Trump followers were saying before the election, I think it was completely over the top. When Patel and Borgano were shown the actual data, they both had to admit there was no evidence of murder or of much else, but they’ve whipped up such a frenzy of expectation that MAGA refuses to let it go, But as you said, the real scandal is Trump’s action in Government.

I really think there’s nothing to see, although that does make wonder why they don’t just put them up. I guess they’re saying Trump won’t release them cause he’s in them, a reasonable surmise. But overall agree, it’s a real horror show all up.

Says who? — T Clark

I linked to the source, it has ample documentation.

That "perspectiveless abstraction, stripped of embodiment, situatedness, or any first-person particularity" is a philosopher's invention. — Banno

Nothing of the kind, it's an accurate description of basic scientific methodology. When you publish a scientific paper you may or may not get pubic recognition of what you've discovered or said, but who you are is by definition quite irrelevant to the content. But I'm done squabbling over it.

Science is not trying to give an account of what the universe would be like were there no observers. It is trying to give an account of what the universe is like for any observer. — Banno

Right — but that idealised observer is precisely not a concrete subject. It's a perspectiveless abstraction, stripped of embodiment, situatedness, or any first-person particularity. In other words, it's not any actual observer, but a methodological abstraction — which is exactly what Nagel critiques in The View from Nowhere. The idealised observer is, furthermore, of the same general type as the frictionless planes and dimensionless points that constitute the lexicon of science generally - an abstraction.

Fair enough, but the reference frame entered the public discourse through Einstein, and as that excerpt says, Einstein drew on those discoveries in devising his theories.

If it's possible to overdose on schadenfreude, then I'm in trouble. But it's just hilarious to see the whole 'MAGA' movement convulsing over the very conspiracy theory that they themselves cooked up. There's news footage of Kash Patel and Dan Borgiono - now director and deputy director of the FBI - braying on Fox, before the election, that there's a deep state conspiracy involving the 'client list' - now the foxes have been put in charge of the henhouse, and suprise! not a pretty outcome. Pam Bondi, a glove puppet if ever there was one, said into the camera in February, 'we have the client list'. Now they're all having to say, nothing to see here folks.

'Reference frame' is from relativity theory. It is true that relativity theory and quantum theory undermine the idea of absolute objectivity. That's one of the sources of the very anxiety that this thread is about.

I wonder….but not very much….what these AI chatbots would say about that. — Mww

A thermostat reacts. It doesn’t decide. It compares a set input (say, 22°C) to the ambient temperature and triggers a mechanism based on that difference. It operates entirely within a pre-defined causal structure: stimulus → comparison → output.

When we perform an experiment, we ask a question about the world and design a process to answer it. There's intentionality, inference, and anticipation involved—none of which apply to the thermostat. Even if you set up a robotic lab that automates experiments, the initiative, the meaning, and the goals originate from a human context. The system doesn't care—it can’t care—what the results mean.

This connects to a deep point: an experiment is not just a procedure but a question posed to nature. And asking a question is a noetic act. — ChatGPT

The view from anywhere. — Banno

It means precisely the same thing. No, they're not seeking to remove perspective, they're seeking an observation, outcome, or finding which will be the same for anyone conducting the same experiment or making the same observation in the same circumstances. It's called 'reproducibility' (the same thing that's allegedly in crisis in the social sciences.)

It's the view from anywhere. — Banno

The “view from nowhere” isn’t a critique of what scientists do, but of what scientific objectivity aspires to — a standpoint purified of subjectivity. Nagel’s argument is that this abstraction leaves out the very thing it can’t explain: the subject itself. And if you've ever studied philosophy of science (Polyani, Kuhn, et el), you would know that this criticism is perfectly well-grounded.

Still, I can see why it might be considered "mainstream" because 'something like it' seems to be a very common framing. That is, "when we put out 'scientist hats on' we must suppose to world is purposeless and valueless. We focus on 'description'" (where "description" is axiomatically assumed to exclude value, which is privatized). This isn't true for all science though. No one expects medical researchers to do this, or zoologists, or even evolutionary biologists, let alone social scientists. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I agree. That's why I say 'probably'. But then, as I mentioned, the essay which prompted my response was one by Massimo Pigliucci, who is quite a visible internet philosopher on stoicism and the like, and he wrote:

First of all, the scientific worldview holds that physical processes alone, operating through natural selection and other mechanisms, are sufficient to explain the emergence of all phenomena including consciousness and reason, without requiring any overarching purpose. Of course both Nagel and Goff object to this, but the reality is that the scientific worldview has been incredibly successful in practice, while the sort of metaphysics these authors keep pushing has done absolutely nothing to advance our understanding of the world and represents, in fact, a sliding back to the Middle Ages, if not earlier.

Second, and this is an elaboration of the point I have just made, teleological explanations simply fail to provide concrete mechanisms for how cosmic purpose would actually operate in physical reality. There is truly nothing there to be seen.

So he articulates exactly the kind of positivist dogma that I have in my sights. And plenty of people believe it, including plenty of philosophers. (That's why there's space for the books of Daniel Dennett and D M Armstrong - they provide defenses for the kind of materialism that few of them would actually advocate, but at least can refer to when asked - let them do the dirty work :-) )

So, I think it's worth considering the exact way in which such a view is, and remains, "mainstream." It isn't so much as firmly held belief (although it is for a minority), but more a sort of dogmatic position that is thought to be necessary for "modern society." — Count Timothy von Icarus

Quite right, but it's very infuential. But here's an interesting thing: those Pew Research surveys which report on beliefs and attitudes, say that a significant percentage of people who identify as atheist still believe in a 'higher power' of some kind. In this matter, it's very hard to pin down hard borders. My long experience on Internet forums, is that there are only a few committed materialists in Piggliuci's mold, but that it's a background belief for a lot of the uncommitted - the idea that 'of course' the Universe comprises nothing other than matter-energy going about its purposeless activities.

Well, these are "inclinations" and "desires" in an analogous sense. They aren't meant to imply consciousness, only the way a thing's nature determines how it interacts with other natures. Prima facie, it is no more anthropomorphic than claiming that rocks and stars "obey" "natural laws." — Count Timothy von Icarus

No God, No Laws, Nancy Cartwright, discusses whether the idea of 'natural laws' which proscribe outcomes is meaningful in the absence of deity.

The origin of life from inanimate material - abiogenesis - is not some mysterious unknowable process. It can be, and is, studied by science — T Clark

Of course, but it easily slides into 'nothing-but-ism' - that life is 'nothing but' a specific combination of complex chemicals reacting in very specific conditions to give rise to something like a long chain reaction. That was very much the kind of idea Daniel Dennett pushed, in books like Darwin's Dangerous Idea. The philosophical point about the irreducible nature of life, is that life is not reducible to chemistry. A vast debate, of course, but of note:

The idea that ‘life is chemistry plus information’ implies that information is ontologically different from chemistry, but can we prove it? Perhaps the strongest argument in support of this claim has come from Hubert Yockey, one of the organizers of the first congress dedicated to the introduction of Shannon's information [theory] in biology. In a long series of articles and books, Yockey has underlined that heredity is transmitted by factors that are ‘segregated, linear and digital’ whereas the compounds of chemistry are ‘blended, three-dimensional and analogue’.

Yockey underlined that: ‘Chemical reactions in non-living systems are not controlled by a message … There is nothing in the physico-chemical world that remotely resembles reactions being determined by a sequence and codes between sequences’.

Yockey has tirelessly pointed out that no amount of chemical evolution can cross the barrier that divides the analogue world of chemistry from the digital world of life, and concluded from this that the origin of life cannot have been the result of chemical evolution. This is therefore, according to Yockey, what divides life from matter: information is ontologically different from chemistry because linear and digital sequences cannot be generated by the analogue reactions of chemistry.

At this point, one would expect to hear from Yockey how did linear and digital sequences appear on Earth, but he did not face that issue. He claimed instead that the origin of life is unknowable, in the same sense that there are propositions of logic that are undecidable. — What is Information? Marcello Barbieri

Gödel, again.

the View from Nowhere puts some very peculiar demands on us as denizens of "the world." If "all happening and being-so is accidental," nothing we say in philosophy can escape this. It's all "local," in Williams' terms. "What makes it non-accidental [that is, what makes the Absolute Conception absolute, or unconditioned] cannot lie in the world, for otherwise this would again be accidental." So, how could we meet this demand? — J

It’s important to recall that The View from Nowhere is itself a critique of the limits of scientific objectivity. Nagel’s argument is that while the drive toward objectivity is crucial, it also distorts — especially when we try to abstract away the subject entirely: the world can't be reduced to “what can be said from no point of view.” At some level, the subjective standpoint is indispensable. He’s says he's not advocating idealism, but insisting that the nature of being has an ineliminably subjective ground or aspect (although that is what I think both idealism and phenomenology actually mean.)

In this, Nagel approaches something like a dialectic: not a fusion of subjective and objective, but a dialogical relationship between them. There’s a similarity with a schema given by Zen teacher Gudo Nishijima Roshi in his commentary on Dōgen (the founder of the Sōtō Zen sect). In To Meet the Real Dragon Nishijima describes a fourfold structure of philosophical reflection, which he calls 'Three Philosophies and One Reality'. He says that everything in life can be seen through these perspectives:

• Theoretical — the abstract or subjective standpoint
• Objective — the empirical or material standpoint
• Realistic — the synthesis of the two, lived and integrated
• Ineffable — opening toward the ungraspable real

Nishijima emphasizes that these modes are not to be collapsed into each other. Each is partial, and reality overflows even their synthesis. Reality, in this view, is not reducible to any standpoint — not even to a dialectic — but it must be met, not captured. (Hence the uncompromising emphasis on practice in Zen schools.)

What this offers, perhaps, is a different way of engaging the demand for the unconditioned. Not by striving for a “view from nowhere” in the sense of Archimedean objectivity, but by learning to move fluidly among perspectives without assuming any one of them is exclusive. If there is an Absolute, it does not speak to us in the voice of a single register. It’s approached only through this layered reflection — and perhaps not known as much as embodied.

I think this is the reason why the Western philosophical tradition struggles with these questions — shaped, as it has been, by all-or-nothing theological categories, especially since the Reformation: belief or unbelief, salvation or damnation, truth or heresy. Nondualism allows for a more nuanced philosophical stance — one that doesn’t demand total certainty, but also doesn’t surrender to relativism:

Whether one tries to find an ultimate ground inside or outside the mind, the basic motivation and pattern of thinking is the same, namely, the tendency to grasp. In Madhyamika (Middle Way Buddhist philosophy) this habitual tendency is considered to be the root of the two extremes of "absolutism" and "nihilism." At first, the grasping mind leads one to search for an absolute ground — for anything, whether inner or outer, that might by virtue of its "own-being" be the support and foundation for everything else. Then, faced with its inability to find any such ultimate ground, the grasping mind recoils and clings to the absence of a ground by treating everything else as illusion. — The Embodied Mind, Varela, Thompson, Rosch, First Edition, p143

Also see: Three Philosophies and One Reality, Gudo Nishijima Roshi.

@Leontiskos @Fire Ologist

A thermostat is an instrument, designed by humans for their purposes. As such, it embodies the purposes for which it was designed, and is not an object, in the sense that naturally-occuring objects are.

How are we (as 'agents', whatever that means) fundamentally different than any other object, in some way that doesn't totally deny the physicalist view? — noAxioms

'In philosophy, an agent is an entity that has the capacity to act and exert influence on its environment. Agency, then, is the manifestation of this capacity to act, often associated with intentionality and the ability to cause effects. A standard view of agency connects it to intentional states like beliefs and desires, which are seen as causing actions.'

Physicalism has to account for how physical causes give rise, or are related to, intentional acts by agents. But then, the nature of so-called fundamental objects of particle physics - those elementaruy objects from which all else is purportedly arises - itself seems ambiguous and in some senses even 'observer dependent'.

Hence your thread! Which, incidentally, I've most enjoyed. (And belatedly, sympathies for your mother. Mine too was ill for a long while.)

Science’s power is, among other things, it is predictable and verifiable as an independent authority — Antony Nickles

But aren’t the limits of science also the limits of empiricism? That is: science deals with contingent facts — with what happens to be the case. It excels in explicating the conditioned and the observable, but it brackets questions about the unconditioned or the unconditional — questions that point toward what must be the case if anything is to appear at all, or what cannot not be the case. These are, in an older register, questions about the Absolute. Just the kinds of questions which positivism eschews.

That’s why I introduced the notion of the unconditioned. There’s a conceptual kinship between the unconditioned and what philosophers have called the unconditional — the necessary, the absolute, the ground that is not itself grounded. But empirical science, by its own design, isn’t structured to accomodate that. It works within a domain of contingencies, not ultimates. That’s not a criticism — it’s part of its power — but it is a limit. And as I said before, that limit has become like an unspoken barrier in many ways.

Wittgenstein, at the end of the Tractatus, makes a similar point:

The sense of the world must lie outside the world. In the world everything is as it is and happens as it does happen. In it there is no value—and if there were, it would be of no value.

If there is a value which is of value, it must lie outside all happening and being-so. For all happening and being-so is accidental.

What makes it non-accidental cannot lie in the world, for otherwise this would again be accidental.

It must lie outside the world. — TLP 6.41–6.522

Which raises the key question: what lies outside the world — not as a factual object or hidden variable, but as the condition for intelligibility itself? It’s not a thing, not an empirical entity. And yet philosophy (in its reflective capacity) can’t help but trace the contours of what it cannot fully name — whether it’s called the unconditioned, the transcendental, the One, or the Ground. Not a thing, but not nothing.

This isn’t a claim to “absolute knowledge,” but an acknowledgment that some form of orientation toward the unconditioned may be a necessary feature of any philosophical reflection that seeks to account for intelligibility, normativity, or value without falling into relativism. So, his 'that of which we cannot speak' is not the 'taboo on metaphysics' that the Vienna Circle took it to be - as Wittgenstein himself said:

There is indeed the inexpressible. This shows itself; it is the mystical. — 6522

(See also Wittgenstein, Tolstoy and the Folly of Logical Positivism, Stuart Greenstreet, originally published by the British Wittgenstein Society.)

That is, over virtually every decision, every decision hangs the realization that you are not eternal.

I wonder: "isn't this exactly what creates colossal tension inside us and sets the very thirst to do something, and not to do it?" — Astorre

But some are much more aware of that finitude than others, aren't they? There are a lot of people that barely take into account, I don't know, the fact that they might go to jail, when about to do something. Whereas there are others, like yourself presumably, who are very much aware of their finitude, or you might say, mortality. Very much as suggested by Tillich's 'ultimate concern' or Heidegger's 'being unto death'.

But overall, I agree with you. For your info, it is also what the current large langage models would say:

The idea that not knowing is what enables authentic choice aligns with existentialist thought (e.g., Kierkegaard, Heidegger). For humans, finitude and uncertainty are the conditions under which meaning arises. In that context, the claim that death and ignorance ground authenticity is philosophically resonant.

LLMs generate outputs based on training data and probabilistic models. Even when simulating uncertainty (e.g., with temperature settings), the range of outputs is still bounded by patterns in the data. There is no "I" that chooses; there is no inwardness. Thus, what you call existential choice—rooted in mortality, anxiety, ambiguity—has no analogue in AI. LLMs don’t care, and without concern or dread, there is no authentic commitment. For them, there's nothing at stake. — ChatGPT

That's from the horse's mouth ;-)

what if the basis of such human behavior, unlike computer behavior, lies in the unknown for a person of his own ultimate goal, and the desire to act (make a decision without a task) is based on a person's understanding of his own finitude? — Astorre

Hi Astorre, welcome to the Forum, very good questions. I don't know if 'awareness of one's own finitude' is an explicit consideration for many people, although knowing that there's a lot they don't know might be. In any case, I agree with your intuition that the basis of human actions and decisions, is quite different to how AI systems operate - in fact, I'm sure you would find that most of the current LLMs would agree! (never mind the irony of that)

There's an interesting OP in the current edition of Philosophy Now, Rescuing Mind from the Machines, which makes an argument similar to yours.

worth looking at it in the context. She's using 'compute' in the metaphorical sense of taking in information and transforming it for a useful purpose, as metabolism does.

Because we make judgements, for starters. We decide, we act, we perform experiments, among other things. What object does that? ~ Wayfarer

I can think of several that might do all that, — noAxioms

The question stands - what kinds of objects think, decide, act, perform experiments? AI is not a naturally occurring object, nor does it possess agency in the sense of the autonomous intentions that characterise organisms. It operates within a framework of goals and constraints defined by humans.

Bearing all that in mind, the original question was:

How are we (as 'agents', whatever that means) fundamentally different than any other object, in some way that doesn't totally deny the physicalist view? — noAxioms

So - AI systems embody or reflect human agency, so again, they're not objects, in the sense that the objects of the physical sciences are.

You can dodge the question of agency so easily, nor how physicalist theories struggle to account for it.

(In philosophy, an agent is an entity, typically a person, that has the capacity to act and make choices. This capacity is referred to as agency. Agency implies the ability to initiate actions, exert influence on the world, and be held responsible for the consequences of those actions.)

I thought that might be the response. But AI is an instrument which has been created by human engineers and scientists, to fulfil their purposes. It's not a naturally-occuring object.

Most threads dealing with consciousness, regardless of their intent, soon turn into debates about Physicalism vs Idealism vs Panpsychism vs... I obviously can't keep the thread on the track, or system of tracks, I want. — Patterner

But that is the nature of this subject. Panpsychism, by definition, is a philosophical theory of mind, alongside materialism and idealism. You don't get to change that. It's like saying, let's discuss supply-side economics, without talking about economics.

There is no detail to consciousness. The consciousness of different things is not different. Not different kinds of consciousness, and not different degrees of consciousness. There's no such thing as higher consciousness. — Patterner

This is self-evidently false, and yet you then declare that you have no interest in discussing the possibility that it is mistaken with anyone. You basically want to dictate what others might say, in advance.

In short: Consciousness is subjective experience. I have heard that wording more than any other, but I prefer Annaka Harris' "felt experience". — Patterner

This is a critique of Harris' panpsychism: Panpsychism: Bad Science, Worse Philosophy, Medium (requires registration).

This article critically examines Annaka Harris’s contribution to the popular resurgence of panpsychism—the view that consciousness is a fundamental property of matter. While philosopher Philip Goff argues for panpsychism as an alternative to the explanatory failure of materialism, Harris claims to remain a materialist while advocating for a form of consciousness-as-inherent-to-matter. To address the "combination problem"—how scattered micro-qualia could yield a unified conscious subject—she denies the existence of the self altogether. In her view, consciousness is just content arising, like bubbles in a pot, with no unified subject or experiencer. (My view is that in this, she draws on a popular but inaccurate interpretation of Buddhist philosophy, likely taken from her husband Sam Harris, who espouses a kind of Buddhist materialism: the notion that "the Buddha says there is no self." In fact, the Buddhist principle is that "all phenomena are devoid of self" (anatta), which is a much more subtle principle. Saying there is no self tout court completely undercuts any possibility of moral agency. It is, in fact, a form of nihilism, which was always rejected in Buddhism.)

The article contends that Harris’s move dissolves the very phenomenon needing explanation—coherent, first-person conscious experience—by asserting it to be an illusion. Moreover, it notes that the appeal to panpsychism, while framed as scientifically open-minded, ends up preserving the ontological blind spots of materialism in a new guise. Her reliance on common-sense distinctions (e.g., socks and rocks aren’t conscious) sits uncomfortably beside her claim that all matter entails consciousness.

By way of concusion, the author suggests that if one truly wishes to move beyond materialist assumptions, it must be done with a philosophical framework—such as idealism—that can account for the unity, structure, and intelligibility of consciousness, rather than erasing them in favor of a scattered field of unintelligible qualia.

Because we make judgements, for starters. We decide, we act, we perform experiments, among other things. What object does that? ~ Wayfarer

I can think of several that might do all that, — noAxioms

Well, name one.

Kudos for clearly & concisely summarizing a vexing question of modern philosophy. Ancient people, with their worldview limited by the range of human senses, unaided by technology, seemed to assume that their observable Cosmos*1 behaves as-if purposeful, in a sense comparable to human motives. "As-If" is a metaphorical interpretation, not an empirical observation. — Gnomon

Thanks for that. Maybe this is because pre-moderns did not have the sense of separateness or otherness to the Cosmos that the modern individual has. In a sense - this is something John Vervaeke discusses in his lectures - theirs was a participatory universe.

I've been reading an interesting book, a milestone book in 20th c philosophy, The Phenomenon of Life, Hans Jonas (1966). A brief précis - 'Hans Jonas's The Phenomenon of Life offers a philosophical biology that bridges existentialism and phenomenology, arguing that life's fundamental characteristics are discernible in the very structure of living beings, not just in human consciousness. Jonas proposes a continuity between the organic and the mental, suggesting that the capacity for perception and freedom of action, culminating in human thought and morality, are prefigured in simpler forms of life.' That is very much the theme of the OP. It is expanded considerably in Evan Thompson's 'Mind in Life', a much more recent book (2010) which frequently refers to Jonas' book.

Another point that Jonas makes in the first essay in the book is that for the ancients, life was the norm, and death an anomaly that has to be accounted for - hence the 'religions of immortality' and belief in the immortality of the soul:

That death, not life, calls for an explanation in the first place, reflects a theoretical situation which lasted long in the history of the race. Before there was wonder at the miracle of life, there was wonder about death and what it might mean. If life is the natural and comprehensible thing, death-its apparent negation-is a thing unnatural and cannot be truly real. The explanation it called for had to be in terms of life as the only understandable thing: death had somehow to be assimilated to life. ...

... Modem thought which began with the Renaissance is placed in exactly the opposite theoretic situation. Death is the natural thing, life the problem. From the physical sciences there spread over the conception of all existence an ontology whose model entity is pure matter, stripped of all features of life. What at the animistic stage was not even discovered has in the meantime conquered the vision of reality, entirely ousting its counterpart. The tremendously enlarged universe of modern cosmology is conceived as a field of inanimate masses and forces which operate according to the laws of inertia and of quantitative distribution in space. This denuded substratum of all reality could only be arrived at through a progressive expurgation of vital features from the physical record and through strict abstention from projecting into its image our own felt aliveness. — The Phenomenon of Life, Essay One, Pp 9-10

As you implied, the nay-sayers seem to be looking through the wrong end of the telescope. — Gnomon

More the case that they forget that they're the ones who made the telescope.

it's doubtful that "meaning" (purpose) is anything other than a (semantic) property, or artifact, of "observers" and not, as you suggest, inherent in nature. — 180 Proof

You're seeing it from an anthropocentric sense of what meaning and purpose are. The point of the OP is that meaning, purpose and intentionality manifest at the most rudimentary stages of organic life. As soon as living processes begin to form, the fundamental requirement is for them to maintain separateness from the environment, otherwise they're simply subsumed into the thermodynamically-driven processes going on around them. That is the broader sense of intentionality that the OP is arguing from, not the projected meaning and purpose usually associated with theism and denied by atheism.

Again, this recent presentation, How the Universe Thinks Without a Brain, Claire L. Evans, is definitely worth watching in this context. 'To be, is to compute'.

You haven’t presented any reason for why you would think that.
— Wayfarer
Not in this thread. — Patterner

Well, you should. If you want to make an OP it has to stand on its own two feet, especially for a major topic such at this.

I don't think you're actually open to discussions. You're stipulating what others must accept as the case, before having the discussion. You say, you don't want to engage in the back-and-forth or give reasons for why you are saying it. So - are you talking to yourself?

The idea is that consciousness is always present. In everything, everywhere, at all times — Patterner

You haven’t presented any reason for why you would think that.

Standard QM by itself is silent, I believe, on what is an 'observer'. — boundless

Robert Lawrence Kuhn (Closer to Truth) has a series of interviews on 'the physics of the observer'.

More that they’re outside the electric fence.

Take a look at the video I just posted into the reply above yours. it is *exceedingly* interesting.

Intention requires a mind and a mind requires a nervous system. At that point, we've moved out of the realm of biology and into neurology, ethnology, and psychology. — T Clark

I watched an exceedingly interesting talk recently ('How the Universe Thinks without a Brian') on slime moulds and other very primitive organism, that utterly lack brains and nervous systems, but which nevertheless form memories in respect of their environment. For example, Physarum polycephalum can learn the patterns of periodic environmental changes and adjust its movement accordingly—despite being just a giant single cell.

This doesn’t mean it has a mind in the conscious sense, but it strongly suggests that intentional-like behavior—orientation toward what matters to it —can appear even before anything like a nervous system arises. That’s part of what I meant by “intentionality in a broader sense than conscious intention. It’s not about inner deliberation, but about the intrinsic organization of living systems around meaningful interaction with their environment.

This is why I think the boundary between biology and psychology isn’t as clean as the classical model would have it. A lot of the resistance to this idea, I think, comes from our folk understanding of intentionality: that it has to be something like what I am capable of thinking or intending. But that’s a very anthropocentric benchmark. The broader point from fields like enactivism and biosemiotics is that purposeful behavior need not be consciously formulated to be real—it can be embodied, embedded, and evolutionary long before it’s verbalized.

So when I say that purpose is implicit in life, I’m not projecting human psychology downward. I’m pointing out that living systems are organized around the kind of concern that enables them to persist, adapt, and flourish. That’s not a metaphor; it’s what they do.

I think this (i.e. Jacques Monod) is clearly incorrect as a matter of science and not of philosophy. — T Clark

As do I!

I might add—and as you probably know—Nagel at least sketches a kind of naturalistic teleology in Mind and Cosmos: the idea that human beings are, in some sense, the universe becoming conscious of itself. That motif actually appears across many different schools of philosophy and even within science itself. Think of Niels Bohr’s remark: “a physicist is an atom’s way of looking at itself.”

Now, that doesn’t amount to a fully formed metaphysics, but it at least opens a way of thinking that challenges the view of humanity as a cosmic fluke—an accidental intelligence adrift in a meaningless expanse.