"Does existence have a purpose?" -- "whether life, the universe, and everything is in any sense meaningful or purposeful." Were you trying to get to a purpose that is actually meaningful for humans? I don't think your OP addressed that — J

You're right to note that I didn't try to answer the question of human purpose directly. My intention was more foundational: to challenge the premise that the universe is inherently meaningless by pointing to the ubiquity of purposive activity in life itself, starting at the cellular level.

You could say this is a “thin end of the wedge” strategy. If even the simplest organisms act in goal-directed ways, then purposefulness is not merely a projection of the human mind onto an otherwise purposeless background—it’s already there, intrinsic to the structure of life. My aim was to question the modern assumption (popular among positivists) that purposiveness is somehow unreal or merely heuristic.

I do think this ultimately has implications for human purpose—but I didn't try to develop that in this piece. What I wanted to show is that the universe, far from being “purposeless,” brings forth beings whose very mode of existence is purposive. That alone, I think, should shift the philosophical burden of proof.

I don't think there is sufficient evidence to say that there are 'purposes' outside living beings. — boundless

Nor I, but that’s why I said that the argument is kind of a red herring - if you were looking for purpose in the abstract, what would you be looking for? But I’m interested in the idea that the beginning of life is also the most basic form of intentional (or purposive) behaviour - not *consciously* intentional, of course, but different to what is found in the inorganic realm. (The gap between them being what Terrence Deacon attempts to straddle in Incomplete Nature.)

As for the anthropic principle - that general argument provides a meaningful counter to the kinds of ideas expressed in (for example) Jacques Monod ‘Chance and Necessity’. Monod, a Nobel laureate in biology, argued that life, and indeed human existence, is a product of "pure chance, absolutely free but blind." He saw genetic mutations, the ultimate source of evolutionary innovation, as random and unpredictable events at the molecular level. While natural selection then acts out of "necessity" (the necessary outcome of differential survival based on adaptation), the initial raw material for selection (mutation) is blind and without foresight or purpose. A central tenet of Monod's philosophy was the forceful rejection of any form of teleology (inherent purpose or design) in the universe, especially concerning the origin and evolution of life. He argued that science, particularly molecular biology, had revealed a mechanistic universe governed by objective laws, where the biosphere is a "particular occurrence, compatible indeed with first principles, but not deducible from those principles and, therefore, essentially unpredictable.

The strong anthropic principle (that the universe is such that life must appear) mitigates against the possibility of life being understandable as a sheer accident. It suggests that the universe is structured such that life (or observers) is either a necessary or at least a highly probable outcome. Some readings explicitly embrace a form of teleology, positing a "design" or "purpose" for the universe's life-permitting properties. In any case, it challenges the cardinal role of 'blind chance' typical of Monod's (and Dawkins') style of scientific materialism.

But here's my main question: Let's grant that biological life is purposive in all the ways you say it is. Let's even grant, which I doubt, that all living creatures dimly sense such a purpose -- gotta eat, gotta multiply! The question remains, Is that the kind of purpose worth having for us humans? Is that what we mean by the "meaning of life"?

Indeed -- and I think Nagel goes into this as well -- it's precisely the pointlessness of the repetitive biological drives you cite, that causes many people to question the whole idea of purpose or meaning. It looks absurd, both existentially and in common parlance: "I'm alive so that I can . . . generate more life? That's it? Who cares?" Cue the Sisyphus analogy . . .

Any thoughts about this? — J

That's a fundamental question of philosophy. It's basically a 'what's it all about?' question. Nagel said

Darwin enabled modern secular culture to heave a great collective sigh of relief, by apparently providing a way to eliminate purpose, meaning, and design as fundamental features of the world. Instead they become epiphenomena, generated incidentally by a process that can be entirely explained by the operation of the non-teleological laws of physics on the material of which we and our environments are all composed.

It's taken for granted nowadays that evolutionary naturalism is a philosophy of existence, but it's not.. It is a scientific theory of the evolution of species. I should say, what prompted this OP was a Medium essay by Massimo Piggliuci The Question of Cosmic Meaning or Lack Thereof (may require account to read). He takes on Nagel but then draws on the basic Monod-style materialism I refer to above. The germ of this OP came from his response to a comment of mine, where he breezily dismisses any idea of purpose as being 'explained by teleonomy'. Perhaps I have too have been breezy, but really, the distinction between 'actual' and 'apparent purpose' is a slim reed on which to support such argument!

In any case, getting back to your question - are we really only defined in terms of the terminology of evolutionary biology (the 'four f's' of feeding, fighting, fleeing and reproduction)? I don't think evolutionary theory, as such, provides the basis for a great deal more than that. Which is why I argue that h.sapiens transcends purely biological determination. Hence, philosophy! (along with art, science, literature, and a great deal else.)

Some interpretations of quantum mechanics bring the observer into the equation, others do not — T Clark

They don't really 'bring the observer into the equation'. The problem is precisely that 'the equation' makes no provision for the act of observation. The famous wave-function equation provides predictive accuracy as to where a particle might be found, but the actual finding of it is not something given in the mathematics. That is where the observer problem originates. (The 'many worlds' interpretation attempts to solve this by saying that every possible measurement occurs in one of the possible worlds.)

Regarding whether organisms really act purposefully, or only as if they do - this is central to the whole debate about teleology and teleonomy. (The Wikipedia entry on teleonomy is worth the read.)

you can't answer scientific questions with metaphysics and you can't answer metaphysical questions with science. — T Clark

What I said.

I think that is Wayfarer’s point. — Joshs

Pretty much! I like that expression I've picked up from enactivism, 'the salience landscape'. Might do another OP on that.

philosophy is like science with no balls. — Fire Ologist

It’s more that most of the intellectual resources of Western philosophy became concentrated on science (‘natural philosophy’) to the extent that the other aspects of it withered away. Banno has referred to surveys which show that a very small percentage of the academic philosophy profession defend philosophical idealism. Most seem to align with some form of physicalism, such as non-reductive physicalism (Davidson et el). So the lexicon for alternative philosophical conceptions has dried up been deprecated - the presumption is that the word is physical (whatever that means) and science is the way to investigate it (wherever that leads). Meanwhile philosophers can talk quietly amongst themselves at conferences and publish learned papers for each other.

Regarding frameworks, I certainly accept that there are meaningful frameworks, or rather, domains of discourse, but again, the implicit presumption will generally be that these will be subsumed under the heading of natural science (or ‘naturalism’ in philosophy). But that is why I will call out to Indian and current idealist philosophy from time to time, as their philosophies have not on the whole been subsumed under naturalism, to the degree that Anglo philosophy has.

Cognitive science shows that what we experience as 'the world' is not the world as such - as it is in itself, you might say - but a world-model generated by our perceptual and cognitive processes. So what we take to be "the external world" is already shaped through our cognitive apparatus. This suggests that our belief in the world’s externality is determined by how we are conditioned, biologically, culturally and socially, to model and interpret experience, rather than by direct perception of a mind-independent domain.
— Wayfarer

OK, I agree with all that, but our belief being shaped by perceptions does not alter what is, does not falsify this externality, no more than the physicalist view falsifies the idealistic one. — noAxioms

The assumption that the object is at it is, in the absence of the observer, is the whole point. That is the methodological assumption behind the whole debate. The fact that there is an ineliminable subjective aspect doesn’t falsify that we can see what is, but it does call the idea of a completely objective view into question.



From John Wheeler, Law Without Law. The caption reads ‘what we consider to be ‘reality’, symbolised by the letter R in the diagram, consists of an elaborate paper maché construction of imagination and theory fitted between a few iron posts of observation’.

But the philosophical question is about the nature of existence, of reality as lived - not the composition and activities of those impersonal objects and forces which science takes as the ground of its analysis. We ourselves are more than objects in it - we are subjects, agents, whose actions and decisions are of fundamental importance ~ Wayfarer

This part seems to be just an assertion. 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

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

This context is crucial because it provides fertile ground for a person to grow into knowledge and understanding and become one of the more advanced students sitting alongside them. — Punshhh

:100: It's the essence of culture.

Do you have an opinion about this "more"? How would you answer your own question? I'm guessing you would point to a wisdom-tradition response that "gestures beyond" this kind of philosophy. . . ? (as suggested by your subsequent post, from which I quote below) My own answers would be similar. — J

Quite right. But Greek philosophy was also animated by just that ideal. See Becoming God: Pure Reason in Early Greek Philosophy, Patrick Lee Miller:

Becoming god was an ideal of many ancient Greek philosophers, as was the life of reason, which they equated with divinity. This book argues that their rival accounts of this equation depended on their divergent attitudes toward time. Affirming it, Heraclitus developed a paradoxical style of reasoning-chiasmus-that was the activity of his becoming god. Denying it as contradictory, Parmenides sought to purify thinking of all contradiction, offering eternity to those who would follow him. Plato did, fusing this pure style of reasoning-consistency-with a Pythagorean program of purification and divinization that would then influence philosophers from Aristotle to Kant. Those interested in Greek philosophical and religious thought will find fresh interpretations of its early figures, as well as a lucid presentation of the first and most influential attempts to link together divinity, rationality, and selfhood.

Plainly, 'reason' had a very different meaning in that context than it does for us. Not the tidy propositional format of 'justified true belief' but the basis of an all-encompassing way of life. Of course there's been much water under the bridge, there's no way to re-inhabit the ancient mind, but at least the lexicon of ancient philosophy provides a better vocabulary than does modern.

In Neoplatonism:

• The One is absolutely simple — beyond all predication, even being itself (beyond existence, as Plotinus puts it).
• So cannot be known in the discursive or propositional sense.
• But because all things emanate from the One, and because the soul is ultimately a trace of it, we can become united with it by a kind of reversion or return (epistrophe).
• This is not knowledge about the One, but an ascent — what Plotinus described as the “flight of the alone to the Alone.”

There are similes in Buddhism and Vedanta. In Vedānta, Brahman is not an object of knowledge — it is the ground of the knower. The jñāni (knower) realizes his/her identity as “I am Brahman.” In Buddhism, ultimate truth (paramārtha-satya) cannot be framed in conceptual thought. It requires a transformative mode of knowing that is not reducible to cognition, but is existential or participatory, knowing by being. This is what Pierre Hadot called philosophy as a way of life — and what the early Greek philosophers likely meant by "know thyself”.

His scope is limited to outlining the "nature of man". — Relativist

But the point stands. He starts his book Materialist Philosophy of Mind with the assertion that man is an object, which is wrong on so many levels that it’s not even worth discussing.

If you like you can replace "knowledge" with "absolute knowledge" and then ask J what the heck "absolute knowledge" is supposed to be — Leontiskos

I can’t help think it must be something like gnosis or one of its cognates - subject of that rather arcane term 'gnoseology' which is comparable to 'epistemology' but with rather more gnostic overtones. In any case, it is knowledge of the kind which conveys a kind of apodictic sense, although that is a good deal easier to write about than to actually attain.

Thus we have multiple uses or senses of know happening at once without distinction, “we have to know [as in: understand (be aware of) the criteria] that we have [for] an absolute conception of the world… To ask not just that we should know [be aware], but that we should be [absolutely certain] that we know [have the right criteria]. — Antony Nickles

I linked earlier to an article by Steven Shakespeare on the unconditioned in philosophy of religion. One of his key points is that “the unconditioned” might serve as a more open-ended alternative to the term “God” in philosophical discourse, especially when trying to speak about the absolute without presuming a theistic framework. The unconditioned, as he frames it, is not just another necessary being in all possible worlds—it’s that in virtue of which any world, or any necessary being, is intelligible at all.

This seems to resonate with the question Williams raises: can philosophy speak meaningfully of something absolute without claiming to know it in the apodictic, Cartesian sense? Maybe what’s needed isn’t absolute knowledge but an orientation toward the limits of conditioned thought—a recognition that philosophy, at its best, gestures beyond what it can fully capture.

I’m not claiming any esoteric insight, but I’d suggest that to speak of the unconditioned meaningfully may require not just analysis but transformation: something more like philosophical detachment than scientific objectivity. And that, I think, also points toward a different conception of knowledge than the scientific—one closer to insight or self-knowledge. It’s not often found in the dominant strains of Anglo-American philosophy, but it’s much more characteristic of certain strands of European and Asian thought.

So he's not deferring to science to answer the question of what the "nature" of mind is- he's drawing the conclusion as a philosopher. And his account merely aims to show that mental activity is consistent with physicalism (a philosophical hypothesis). — Relativist

But all of his work is based on the presumption that science is the definitive source of knowledge for what the mind might be. It's a philosophy based on solely on science, rightly criticized as 'scientism' ' the belief that science and the scientific method are the best or only way to understand the world and gain knowledge'.

Williams is asking, If philosophy asserts this, is it asserting a piece of absolute knowledge? It's certainly a striking and important assertion, if true; the question is, what is its claim to being knowledge, and of what sort? Is it "merely local" -- that is, the product of a philosophical culture which cannot lay claim to articulating absolute conceptions of the truth? — J

So if it’s a philosophical claim, then how is it to be adjudicated? Surely that would require some framework within which the expression “philosophical absolute” is meaningful. I suppose when Williams asks whether, if we were to possess such an insight, we must know we possess it, he’s invoking the Cartesian expectation that a genuine absolute insight would be, as Descartes claimed of the cogito, apodictic — self-certifying by virtue of its subject matter.

But if we never say more than “here’s what an absolute would be like if there were one,” have we said anything of consequence? Or would it have been better not to have asked the question?

I think what we're experiencing here is a version of what Richard Bernstein called the Cartesian anxiety: the fear that unless we can affirm an absolute with certainty, we’re condemned to relativism. But perhaps that anxiety itself arises from a false dichotomy: philosophical reflection can meaningfully trace the limits of conditioned knowledge without pretending to stand outside of it. When I said that 'the natural sciences cannot be complete in principle,' I'm not making a metaphysical declaration from on high but reflecting critically — and necessarily — on the conditions of intelligibility that science presupposes but doesn't (and doesn't necessarily need to) account for. That stance doesn't claim to possess the absolute — but it does require that we be open to 'the unconditioned' as a necessary item in the philosophical lexicon. Which we're generally not!

(Here's a relevant piece of analytical philosophy on this subject, The unconditioned in philosophy of religion, Steven Shakespeare, which makes the case for the necessity of 'the unconditioned' in place of a putative deity in this debate.)

He points to a familiar problem: We would like some sort of absolute knowledge, a View from Nowhere that will transcend “local interpretative predispositions.” But what if we accept the idea that science aims to provide that knowledge, and may be qualified to do it? What does that leave for philosophy to do? — J

What is problematic in that formulation is the hidden or implicit metaphysics in the modern conception of science. A part of that is the assumption that the natural sciences, or nature, or our conception of nature, is in principle complete or able to be completed, as others have said. But then these founding assumption are themselves ignored, meaning that the natural sciences cannot be complete in principle, as they neglect the very foundational assumptions upon which they rest.

Scientific objectivity is methodological - it's about designing studies, collecting data, and interpreting results in ways that minimize bias and personal influence. It involves using controlled experiments, peer review, replication, and statistical analysis to separate reliable findings from subjective impressions. The goal is to let the evidence speak for itself, regardless of what the researcher might personally prefer to find.

Philosophical detachment, on the other hand, is more about an existential stance toward knowledge and experience. It involves stepping back from immediate emotional investment or personal attachment to outcomes. A philosopher might cultivate detachment to see issues more clearly, to avoid being swayed by passion or self-interest, or to maintain intellectual humility about the limits of human understanding.

The key difference is that scientific objectivity is primarily about method and process, while philosophical detachment is about attitude and perspective. So the former provide criteria which can be validated in the third person, whereas the latter requires subjective commitment. So modern philosophy finds itself caught between two impulses: the traditional philosophical concern with wisdom, meaning, and understanding (which seems to require some form of first-person insight), and the modern demand for empirical rigor and third-person validation. The result is that philosophical detachment itself becomes suspect - how can you verify that someone has achieved it? How can you test whether it actually leads to truth rather than just personal satisfaction? Which explains why so much of contemporary philosophy focuses on conceptual analysis, logical argumentation, and empirically-informed theories rather than the exploration of ways of being.

So, there's real difference between the scientific and the philosophical attitude towards these questions, but it's very hard to articulate in terms that are acceptable to the former. From a scientific perspective, if you can't specify what would count as evidence for or against a claim, if you can't operationalize your concepts, if your insights can't be independently verified - then you're not really saying anything meaningful. The scientific framework becomes the measure of what counts as legitimate knowledge.

And as the scientific framework is by definition is reliant on conditions, then nothing whatever can be said about any supposed philosophical absolute which by definition is unconditional. That's the problem in a nutshell.

But now I guess the time to make those beautiful trade agreement before the "liberation" tariffs set in is coming to an end. And Trump has done... one with the UK? — ssu

Just today, he's crashed the negotiations, sending out his inane missives on his social media platform that he's slapping 30% tarriffs on EU and Mexico, who were in the middle of intricate and apparently promising negotiations to lower trade barriers.

It's clear Trump has no idea what he's doing with these tarriffs. He's driven by pique, whim, imagined vengeance, and a total misunderstanding of basic economics. The share market is 'irrationally exuberant' only because of the belief that he'll back down again, but if he doesn't, and the resulting inflation and contraction begins to appear, then it might be a very different outcome.

Where did Armstrong say that all questions should be deferred to science? — Relativist

What does modern science have to say about the nature of man? There are, of course, all sorts of disagreements and divergencies in the views of individual scientists. But I think it is true to say that one view is steadily gaining ground, so that it bids fair to become established scientific doctrine. This is the view that we can give a complete account of man in purely physico-chemical terms. — The Nature of Mind, p1

Doesn't leave a lot of room for equivocation.

Surely some media somewhere must be tracking the Trump Damage List? Trump is attacking so many fundamentals that it’s hard to keep track:

• Democratic institutions (i.e. purging of civil services, stacking the bench, withholding congressionally-approved funds)
• Abolition of agencies (U.S.A.I.D., Voice of America, public broadcasting)
• The constitution - by undermining the authority of Congress and the Judiciary
• Science and science education - abolition of NIH grants, attacks on vaccination and medical science
• Universities
• Climate Change - abolition of green energy transition, undermining of renewables
• Economics - tariff policies generate inflation and slow economic growth

There are probably many other issues. Surely by this time next year many of these issues will be having serious consequences for a lot of Americans.

Thanks for that thorough analysis, appreciated. Going on my experience, the models seem to cope with everything I ask of them. I seem to recall in the CNBC video, one of the commentators saying there was a possibility of Apple ofuscating some points to distract from the often-commented fact that its own AI implementation seems a long way behind the pack.

This is so because "consciousness" (qualia, intention, feeling, or other folk-percepts), in contrast to observation, on occasion might be a consequence but is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition (or operational requirement) of "scientific theorizing". — 180 Proof

You're not seeing the point. The passage is not a 'theory about consciousness'. Read it again:

Husserl believed all knowledge, all science, all rationality depended on conscious acts, acts which cannot be properly understood from within the natural outlook at all — Routledge Introduction to Phenomenology, p143

How can they not be dependent on conscious acts? They all rely on reasoning, rational inference, calculation and judgement.

As to why this can't be understood from 'within the natural outlook', this is because consciousness (or simply 'the mind') never appears as an object for the natural sciences: 'Consciousness should not be viewed naturalistically as part of the world at all, since consciousness is precisely the reason why there was a world there for us in the first place.' It is more accurate to say that the world appears in the mind, than that the mind appears in the world.

A clearing, as one of his successors would call it.

Husserl deliberately brackets metaphysical and spiritual claims in the context of the practice of epochē —the suspension of judgment about the existence or non-existence of the external world. This does not mean he denies such claims, but rather that phenomenological analysis proceeds without them, focusing instead on the structures of experience and the intentional acts of consciousness. In that way, he’s not a metaphysician in the traditional sense, and certainly not a “spiritual” philosopher in any confessional or mystical way. But—and this is important—his work touches on the metaphysical at the deepest level, especially in the Crisis, where he discusses the forgotten origins of science in the life-world and argues for a kind of transcendental grounding of meaning and rationality. Meta-metaphysical, if you like.

There’s also a strong Platonic or idealist undercurrent in Husserl’s later thought—his notion of eidetic reduction suggests that essences are real and perceptible to intuition, and not merely empirical generalizations. So while he doesn't affirm metaphysical or spiritual doctrines, his work provides a space for them.

In the context of the discussion with @Relativist, I'm trying to avoid arguing on the basis of 'the spiritual', as that is seen as being the natural opponent of 'the physical'. But that, again, is the shadow of Cartesian dualism, the very divisions of mind and matter, spiritual and physical, that Husserl is careful to avoid, and that I wish to avoid also.

Embracing physicalism as an ontological ground* does not entail deferring all questions to science. — Relativist

That is exactly what David Armstrong and Daniel Dennett do. Where do you differ from them on that score?

Another point I’ve noticed: that you label a very wide range of philosophies ‘speculative’. You’re inclined to say that, even if physicalism is incomplete, anything other than physicalism is ‘speculative’, simply 'an excuse' to engage in 'wishful thinking'. But isn't it possible that this might be because you’re not willing to entertain any philosophy other than physicalism? That it's a convenient way not to have to engage with anything other than physicalism - label it ‘speculative'? And how is that not also 'wishful thinking'?

As for the 'unknown immaterial ground' - what if that 'unknown immaterial ground' is simply thought itself? I know what David Armstrong's answer to that would be: thoughts are brain-states, configurations of neurochemicals, in line with his view that everything about the mind can be explained in terms of physics and chemistry:

What does modern science have to say about the nature of man? There are, of course, all sorts of disagreements and divergencies in the views of individual scientists. But I think it is true to say that one view is steadily gaining ground, so that it bids fair to become established scientific doctrine. This is the view that we can give a complete account of man in purely physico-chemical terms. — The Nature of Mind, D M Armstrong

(Notice also the claim to authority inherent in it becoming 'established scientific doctrine'. The triumphal flourish: 'It's true, because science says it is!')

So, what is the matter with the claim that thoughts are brain-states? Consider Edmund Husserl's criticism of naturalism:

In contrast to the outlook of naturalism, Husserl believed all knowledge, all science, all rationality depended on conscious acts, acts which cannot be properly understood from within the natural outlook at all. Consciousness should not be viewed naturalistically as part of the world at all, since consciousness is precisely the reason why there was a world there for us in the first place. For Husserl it is not that consciousness creates the world in any ontological sense—this would be a subjective idealism, itself a consequence of a certain naturalising tendency whereby consciousness is cause and the world its effect—but rather that the world is opened up, made meaningful, or disclosed through consciousness. The world is inconceivable apart from consciousness. Treating consciousness as part of the world, reifying consciousness, is precisely to ignore consciousness’s foundational, disclosive role. For this reason, all natural science is naive about its point of departure, for Husserl (PRS 85; Hua XXV 13). Since consciousness is presupposed in all science and knowledge, then the proper approach to the study of consciousness itself must be a transcendental one—one which, in Kantian terms, focuses on the conditions for the possibility of knowledge... — Routledge Introduction to Phenomenology, p143

This is not speculative but analytic: naturalism and physicalism ignore the foundational, disclosive role of consciousness at the basis of scientific theorising. Even to develop a theory of how the brain generates or forms or causes the content of thought relies on those conscious actions. And you can't see those activities from the outside - you will never see a true proposition in the data of neuroscience, only images that the expert will need to interpret, in order to judge.

Big Bad Bill Adds Tax That Could Cripple Wind and Solar Power Generation (New York Times gift link)

Senate Republicans have quietly inserted provisions in President Trump’s domestic policy bill that would not only end federal support for wind and solar energy but would impose an entirely new tax on future projects, a move that industry groups say could devastate the renewable power industry.

The tax provision, tucked inside the 940-page bill that the Senate made public just after midnight on Friday, stunned observers.

“This is how you kill an industry,” said Bob Keefe, executive director of E2, a nonpartisan group of business leaders and investors. “And at a time when electricity prices and demand are soaring.”

The bill would rapidly phase out existing federal tax subsidies for wind and solar power by 2027. Doing so, many companies say, could derail hundreds of projects under development and could jeopardize billions of dollars in manufacturing facilities that had been planned around the country with the subsidies in mind.

Those tax credits were at the heart of the Inflation Reduction Act, which Democrats passed in 2022 in an attempt to nudge the country away from fossil fuels, the burning of which is driving climate change. President Trump, who has mocked climate science, has instead promoted fossil fuels and demanded that Republicans in Congress unwind the law.

But the latest version of the Senate bill would go much further. It would impose a steep penalty on all new wind and solar farms that come online after 2027 — even if they didn’t receive federal subsidies — unless they follow complicated and potentially unworkable requirements to disentangle their supply chains from China. Since China dominates global supply chains, that measure could affect a large number of companies.

“It came as a complete shock,” said Jason Grumet, the chief executive of the American Clean Power Association, which represents renewable energy producers. Soon after the Senate bill was made public, Mr. Grumet said that phones started ringing at 2:30 a.m. on Saturday with “everyone saying, ‘Can you believe this?’”

The new tax “is so carelessly written and haphazardly drafted that the concern is it will create uncertainty and freeze the markets,” Mr. Grumet said.

Even some of those who lobbied to end federal support for clean energy said the Senate bill went too far.

“I strongly recommend fully desubsidizing solar and wind vs. placing a kind of new tax on them,” wrote Alex Epstein, an influential activist who has been urging Republican senators to eliminate renewable energy subsidies. “I just learned about the excise tax and it’s definitely not something I would support.”

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce also criticized the tax. “Overall, the Senate has produced a strong, pro-growth bill,” Neil Bradley, the group’s chief policy officer, posted on social media. “That said, taxing energy production is never good policy, whether oil & gas or, in this case, renewables.” He added: “It should be removed.”

Wind and solar projects are the fastest growing new source of electricity in the United States and account for nearly two-thirds of new electric capacity expected to come online this year. For utilities and tech companies, adding solar, wind and batteries has often been one of the easiest ways to help meet soaring electricity demand. Other technologies like new nuclear reactors can take much longer to build, and there is currently a multiyear backlog for new natural gas turbines.

The repeal of federal subsidies alone could cause wind and solar installations to plummet by as much as 72 percent over the next decade, according to the Rhodium Group, a research firm. The new tax could depress deployment even further by raising costs an additional 10 to 20 percent, the group estimated.

The only voices in favour are fossil fuel energy lobbyists. And, of course, Trump, the universal wrecking ball.

(Also worth noting that Musk, having returned to his sinking ship, thinks it a terrible plan: “The latest Senate draft bill will destroy millions of jobs in America and cause immense strategic harm to our country! It gives handouts to industries of the past while severely damaging industries of the future.” Wish he'd had that realisation last October.)

Ok might be hyperbolic but it’s making it much harder to raise lawsuits against executive orders. A dissenting opinion said:

Today’s ruling allows the Executive to deny people rights that the Founders plainly wrote into our Constitution, so long as those individuals have not found a lawyer or asked a court in a particular manner to have their rights protected,” Jackson’s dissent states. “This perverse burden shifting cannot coexist with the rule of law. In essence, the Court has now shoved lower court judges out of the way in cases where executive action is challenged, and has gifted the Executive with the prerogative of sometimes disregarding the law.”

Jackson added ominously, the ruling was an “existential threat to the rule of law”.

And that’s from one of the dissenting judges, not a columnist.

Although David Brooks, a NY Times conservative (but definitely not pro-Trump) columnist, points out that the way it has been, Democrats could pick a Northern Californian judge, or Republicans a Texas judge, to pass judgements which would then have national consequences on the basis of a single judicial decision (interview can be reviewed here.) He says there are still avenues to litigate executive orders through class actions and other means.

To rub the salt, DJT made a platitudinous speech about the judiciary being ‘a threat to democracy’, when it is common knowledge that the ‘three equal branches’ of Government - Congress, Executive and Judiciary - are essential to American democracy. As always, Trump projects onto his opponents the very crimes that he is undertaking in his pursuit of unbridled power as he consolidates his grip.

The Trump autocracy makes another leap towards totalitarianism with today's Supreme Court ruling. It effectively neuters the ability of judges to halt the enforcement of executive orders on legal grounds.

What can individual federal courts immediately do when the president issues a blatantly unconstitutional order? The Supreme Court gave its answer on Friday morning: Not much.

In an astonishing act of deference to the executive branch, the Supreme Court essentially said that district judges cannot stop an illegal presidential order from going into effect nationwide. A judge can stop an order from affecting a given plaintiff or state, if one has the wherewithal to file a lawsuit. But if there’s no lawsuit in the next state over, the president can get away with virtually anything he wants. ...

But if the courts can’t stop illegal activity in the White House on a national basis, what good are they? That was the point made by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson in two of the most fervent dissents in recent memory. Both were clearly incredulous that the majority was willing to stand back and let Trump undermine a fundamental principle of citizenship in place for 157 years. Sotomayor, joined by Jackson and Justice Elena Kagan, said the Trump administration knows it can’t win a decision that its order is constitutional, so it is instead playing a devious game: applying the order to as many people as possible who don’t file a lawsuit. “Shamefully,” she wrote, “this court plays along.” — The Supreme's Court's Intolerable Ruling

So having neutered Congress by purging it of any non-MAGA members, Trump has now successfully neutered the judiciary, the last bastion against his plainly totalitarian impulses.

Shame, America. Shame.

Hard to put markers on it, but the late nineteenth and early 20th c were the culmination of processes which arguably started with the Italian Renaissance. Descartes (1596 - 1650) was presented to me in undergraduate philosophy as ‘the first modern philosopher.’ Newton’s Principia was published 1687. They are two of the main architects of modern science (along with Galileo who was an approximate contemporary with Descartes.)

I’m pretty sure that’s how E A Burtt would see it also.

I have repeatedly pointed out that that this negative fact explains nothing. It opens up possibilities, but possibility is cheap. — Relativist

And I have repeatedly pointed out that in this ‘explanatory gap’ dwells the very self that is seeking to understand. And that deferring every question to science only perpetuates the ignoring of that. And when I do point it out, you deflect some more by framing it as a speculative question. When in reality the real question of philosophy is ‘know thyself’’

Nothing further to add.

a basic assumption of both science and philosophy: that the world is in some sense rational,
— Wayfarer

IMO, that's an unwarranted assumption. We can makes sense of the portions of reality we perceive and infer. That is not necessarily the whole of reality. I also argue that quantum mechanics isn't wholly intelligible. Rather, we grasp at it. Consider interpretations: every one of them is possible- what are we to do with that fact? I'm not a proponent of the Many-Worlds interpretation, but it's possibly true- and if so, it has significant metaphysical implications- more specific implications than the negative fact we're discussing. — Relativist

Well, to start with, I think any philosophy that declares a fortiori that the world is irrational effectively undermines itself. If reality is, at bottom, unintelligible, then all attempts at understanding—including scientific attempts—are undermined from the outset. That doesn’t mean we can grasp everything, but it does mean that the act of inquiry assumes a basic trust in the rational structure of reality.

As for quantum theory, it may well be telling us something not just about particles, but about the limits of a purely material ontology. That matter should turn out to be elusive and probabilistic rather than solid and mechanistic would not have surprised a Platonist (indeed Werner Heisenberg was a lifelong Platonist). There are many competing interpretations, of course, but several do allow for idealist or participatory readings, where observation plays an essential role. In my essay on the subject, I defend QBism (quantum baynsianism) in which the subjective act of observation is fundamental.

Sure, but that doesn't give epistemic license to fill the gap arbitrarily or with wishful thinking. — Relativist

To label philosophical spirituality as “wishful thinking” is to close off inquiry too quickly. These aren’t arbitrary insertions into an explanatory gap—they’re attempts to interpret the nature of that gap itself. The history of philosophy is filled with thinkers grappling rigorously with the limits of physical explanation—not because they didn’t understand science, but because they recognized that experience, meaning, and subjectivity resist reduction.

So if there's something “wishful” here, it's perhaps the wish that the scientific method could explain everything, when it was never designed to do that.

If you agree that methodological naturalism is the appropriate paradigm for the advance of science, where should the negative fact enter into my metaphysical musings? — Relativist

Methodological naturalism isn’t metaphysical naturalism, which is the attempt to apply the methods of science to the questions of philosophy. That is basically all that Chalmer’s ‘facing up to the problem of consciousness’ is saying: that the physical sciences must by design exclude a fundamental dimension of existence - the nature of being.

How should I revise my personal views on the (meta)nature of mind? Alternatives to physicalism also have explanatory gaps (e.g. the mind-body interaction problem of dualism). — Relativist

You're quite right that dualism has its own explanatory gaps—especially regarding mind-body interaction. But physicalism's own explanatory impasse around consciousness, intentionality, and meaning suggests that we shouldn't treat it as the default view merely because it's scientifically adjacent.

As for how to revise your views: simply remain open. You don't have to adopt dualism to explore non-physicalist possibilities. There are entire traditions—phenomenology, idealism, panpsychism, even non-dualist metaphysics from Eastern thought—that approach mind as primary or irreducible, without falling into obscurantism or dualism.

None of these views are without their own puzzles, but they start from a different intuition: that experience isn't something that emerges from matter, but rather something intrinsic to reality—or at least not alien to it. Even just entertaining that possibility might open new questions that physicalism can't easily ask.

Following that thread has lead me to the view that the sense of separateness, of otherness to the world, which characterises so much of modern thought, is really a form of consciousness. Thomas Nagel, in particular, puts the case in his 2012 book Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False. In a précis of his book, he says

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.

*This is plainly a reference to the same issue that David Chalmers describes in his Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness, which also mentions Nagel's oft-quoted 1974 paper What is it like to be a Bat?

As far as I can see, postmodernism just regurgitates ideas that have been around for a long time and tries to apply them to modern life and politics — T Clark

This is probably a digression, but I think it's far more than that. The term 'post-' is significant - similar to the sense conveyed by 'post Christian'. A post-Christian society may no longer identify as Christian, but it relies on many fundamental terms and ideas which were originally part of the Christian ethos. They have a shared understanding of what it is they no longer believe - which you couldn't have had, had you never been Christian. Similarly with post-modernism. The modern period I put between the Trial of Galileo and the 1920’s, characterized by belief in progress, the normativity of reason and objective fact. Post modernism is characterized by relativism, the contextual nature of truth, and the rejection of meta-narrative. (And yes, @Tom Storm, I learned a lot from Street, but his vituperation was pretty hard to take at times.)

@Pierre-Normand - something you might find of interest. This mini-documentary from CNBC discusses, with many references, the apparent wall that AI is hitting with respect to the ability to reason. Many of the papers cited argue that LLM's, no matter how sophisticated, are really performing pattern-recognition, not rational inference as such. There are examples of typical tests used to assess reasoning ability - the systems perform well at basic formulations of the problem, but past a certain point will begin to utterly fail at them.



In response to my prompt about it, ChatGPT volunteered the following:

The Human Power of Rational Inference

When you say “rational inference,” especially in the context of mathematical intuition or Platonic reasoning, you’re referring to something that:


* Grasps necessity (e.g. that 2+2=4 must be true, always and everywhere),
* Sees truth through intelligibility, not trial-and-error,
* Penetrates meaning rather than merely predicting outcomes,
* And often leaps beyond data, reaching abstract, general truths through insight.


This is not just symbol manipulation, and it’s not mere statistical correlation. It’s an act of noetic insight—what Plato calls noesis, what Descartes calls clear and distinct perception, what Gödel called mathematical intuition, and what Kant calls synthetic a priori judgment.

The Limits of LLMs and AGI
What the CNBC video reflects is something AI researchers are beginning to confront:

LLMs perform astonishingly well at tasks requiring pattern recognition, but falter at tasks requiring deep conceptual understanding or inference.

Examples:

They can complete analogies, generate proofs, or mimic philosophical arguments,

But they often fail to spot contradictions, or to see why something follows from a premise,

And they have no grasp of the necessity, normativity, or insight that underpins genuine reasoning.

Why?

Because they operate by:

Predicting statistically likely sequences of tokens,

Optimizing based on feedback loops,

Lacking any inner “aha!” moment or directed noetic act.

So when you say they “fail past a certain point,” that may be the point where true rational insight is required—not just surface mimicry. — ChatGPT

I think it's philosophically interesting, quite aside from the technical and financial implications.

It's true that an afterlife entails some sort of immaterial existence, but it's fallaciously affirming the consequent to conclude that the presence of immateriality implies or suggests an afterlife. — Relativist

‘Afterlife’ is a term with strong religious overtones, and perhaps it muddies the waters. My point is more modest: as you acknowledge, the so-called explanatory gap—the inability of physicalism to account for subjective consciousness—suggests that a purely physical description of the human is incomplete.

Physicalism generally presumes the causal closure of the physical—that all causes and effects occur within the physical domain. But if that assumption is undermined, then other domains of explanation become conceptually possible. That doesn’t prove dualism, or an afterlife, or any religious doctrine—but it opens space for something beyond the materialist frame.

This quote from biologist Richard Lewontin in a book review spells it out.

“We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs... because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.

So, the materialist commitment is not demanded by science itself, but by a philosophical stance about what counts as an acceptable explanation. The key sentence: "We cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door." Whether or not one believes in a deity, that phrase betrays the anxiety that if materialism is not all-encompassing, then the coherence of the whole system is threatened.

So we’re not dealing with a dispassionate assessment of evidence, but with a boundary-defining metaphysical commitment.

"Fine tuning arguments" depend on the unstated (egocentric) assumption that life is a design objective, rather than an improbable consequence of the way the world happens to be. — Relativist

The attribution of the anthropic principle to a selection effect ("We find the universe fine-tuned because only in a fine-tuned universe could we find ourselves") is logically valid but explanatorily inert - it says nothing but only reaffirms the taken-for-granted nature of existence.

And, of course, for naturalism, existence is taken for granted. It is granted! Naturalism, I like to say, 'assumes nature'. So any line of questioning which interogates that sentiment is dismissed, whereas, in philosophy, it is an opening to a deeper sense of questioning.

The deeper philosophical issue behind the anthropic principle is not just whether our existence is improbable, but whether the existence of a rationally structured, life-permitting cosmos admits of any explanation at all, or whether we must simply accept it as a brute fact—what some, following Monod, would call “chance.”

In his book Chance and Necessity, Jacques Monod draws the contrast explicitly: chance is what happens in the absence of reason. It is, in effect, the denial that there is anything intelligible to be found behind or beneath the statistical patterns. In this view, the fact that the universe permits life, consciousness, and rational reflection is not something to be explained—but something that simply happened, and could easily not have.

But this is not a neutral position. It's a philosophical commitment—an affirmation of unintelligibility as the last word. And it stands in deep tension with the most basic assumption of both science and philosophy: that the world is in some sense rational, that its patterns are not only observable but meaningful. That’s what Einstein was gesturing at in his famous remark: “The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible.”

So the real question isn’t just whether life is improbable, but whether the emergence of beings capable of asking such questions is itself part of an intelligible order—or whether, as Monod would have it, we are the products of blind chance and cosmic indifference.

I don’t think that’s a scientific question. I think that’s the philosophical heart of the matter. So, and perhaps ironically, we find ourselves in a position where naturalism must accept that the universe is, at bottom, irrational—that reason is something we impose or invent for pragmatic survival, but that it has no intrinsic connection to the order of things. On this view, reason isn’t a window into the real, but a useful illusion—evolution’s trick to keep the organism alive. And yet, it’s this very reason we’re asked to trust when making that judgment.

You mention "unruly human nature" - so, do we accept that the "human nature" that has been studied for this 2,600 years is in fact strife, civil disobedience, revolution and war? — Pieter R van Wyk

Human nature has strong tendencies towards those activities. That humans are often inclined to those destructive behaviours is observable thoughout history. How to rein it in and to what ends are questions that indeed occupy philosophers (among others.)

Cite a single historical philosopher who says 'the material world is the whole story'. — 180 Proof

• Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) – Argued that all phenomena, including thought, are explicable in terms of matter in motion. Leviathan opens with: “The universe is corporeal; all that is real is body.”
• Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1709–1751) – In L’Homme Machine, he argues that humans are essentially sophisticated machines, governed entirely by physical processes.
• Baron d’Holbach (1723–1789) – In The System of Nature, he writes: “Man’s life is a line that nature commands him to describe upon the surface of the earth, without his ever being able to swerve from it... his ideas are the necessary effect of the impressions he receives.” That’s full-blown deterministic materialism.
• Ludwig Büchner (1824–1899) – In Force and Matter, he argues that all spiritual phenomena are explicable through matter and force.
• J. J. C. Smart (1920–2012) – A champion of the mind-brain identity theory: mental states just are brain states.
• David Armstrong (1926–2014) – Argued that mental states are physical states with a certain functional role.
• Paul Churchland & Patricia Churchland – Advocates of eliminative materialism, which holds that beliefs, desires, and intentions as ordinarily understood don’t really exist; they’re just folk-psychological illusions awaiting replacement by neuroscience.
• Daniel Dennett (b. 1942) – A leading proponent of functionalist materialism, famously dismissive of qualia and any notion of non-physical mind. See: Consciousness Explained (1991).
• Alex Rosenberg (b. 1946) – Author of The Atheist’s Guide to Reality, where he asserts that physics is all there is, and that even meaning and morality are illusions.

Quiet here, considering what's happened in the last FOUR DAYS :yikes: (although there is discussion in other threads.) But DJT seems to have been on a tear the last four days - whipping Iran and Israel into truce, blowing up the Iranian nuclear program (about which there are caveats) and convincing the Europeans to vastly increase their defense expenditure.

I had in mind mainly the disabling of U.S.A.I.D., RFK jr's war on vaccination, the abolition of NIS grants, and so on. Maybe the Democrats wouldn't restore them, but MAGA sure seems hellbent on destroying them (although that's probably a discussion for the Trump thread, I agree.)

If you're an American elector, supporting the Democratic Party would be a good start. The MAGA party seems intent on dismantling or opposing everything you're standing for.

1. What do you think of the philosophy, and direction of the project? Do you think A.I. has any "place" in philosophy? — 013zen

absolutely. I've been interacting with ChatGPT and despite recognising that it is programmed to be positive about the user it's interacting with, it also comes with ideas and arguments that I hadn't considered. It's also very good at finding sources and citations for ideas.

I've also signed up for (and paid for!) an app called Alter, after having heard a talk on it by John Vervaeke, who was involved in building it. I haven't had the chance to really assess it yet, but I think it's trying to do something similar to what you're up to.

So, yes, very interested to see what you're working on.

Related to this: you seem to be treating the current state of scientific knowledge regarding the origin of the big bang as a jumping off point to your hypothesis about causally efficacious mind. How is this not an argument from ignorance? As mentioned, there are various cosmological hypotheses - these are among the possibilities that you are setting aside in favor of you mind-hypothesis. — Relativist

If I might step in here. Recall the OP:

When God is described as the Ground of Being, this typically means that God is the fundamental reality or underlying source from which all things emerge. God is not seen as a being within the universe, but rather as the condition for existence itself. — Tom Storm

The anthropic principle can be relevant here—not to assert design in a simplistic sense, but to draw attention to the profound structural coherence underlying the cosmos. As Martin Rees pointed out in Just Six Numbers, a handful of fundamental physical constants—each of which cannot be varied without unravelling the entire fabric—determine the very possibility of matter, stars, chemistry, and life. These aren’t merely coincidental either; they function as master constraints that shape the entire cosmic order.

The question is not only why these values are what they are, but why any such finely balanced set of parameters is possible at all. This invites reflection on whether such constraints point to mathematical necessity, or even to truths that are in some sense a priori—true not because of empirical verification, but because they are necessary for any form of complex, knowable reality.

From this perspective, the universe’s intelligibility is not a happy accident, but might be grounded in something like what classical metaphysics calls the Logos—the rational structure underlying being. This isn’t “God of the gaps” reasoning, but an invitation to consider whether reason itself has a ground—and whether that ground might be ontologically prior to the contingent facts of the physical universe.

This isn’t a falsifiable hypothesis in the Popperian sense, but that’s not a flaw—it’s simply because we are operating in the domain of metaphysics, not empirical science. The claim here isn’t that science is wrong, but that it may presuppose metaphysical conditions (like intelligibility, order, and lawlike regularity) that it cannot itself explain (nor needs to!) Metaphysics begins where empirical method reaches its limits.

Whether or not one believes, I think it's at least worth recognizing that this line of thought is logically valid and not reducible to mere “God of the gaps” reasoning. Recognising, too, that in philosophical terms, the Christian mythos revolves around the idea that the soul or essential being has a familial relationship with the intelligence that animates the Cosmos, and that, therefore, the very ability to discern these truths is owed to that heritage.

The question I'm trying to sort out is: what impact does this alleged immateriality of mind have on my overall world view? It doesn't seem to undermine anything, except for the simple (possible) fact that there exists something immaterial. — Relativist

If there's a possibility that oneself is something other than physical, then there is also a possibility that it is not subject to the same fate as everything physical - which is change and decay. When you die, the physical body returns to the elements by either internment or cremation. Is there anything else to it?

I believe there is, but I don't want to believe it on purely dogmatic grounds, either. My intuition is based on several grounds. One is my intuitive sense of having lived prior to this birth, which of course I realise doesn't constitute any kind of evidence. (However, the cases of children with past-life memories does, per this case study.)

Beyond that, what I’m left with are fear and hope. The hope is that we are more than our bodies. The fear is that, if we are, that doesn’t necessarily guarantee a comforting outcome. The eschatological traditions warn us that post-mortem destiny might be varied and not always (n fact, mostly not) pleasant.

What I’m increasingly convinced of, though, is that secular philosophy—at least in its mainstream forms—has tended to dismiss these possibilities not because it has disproven them, but largely due to inherited cultural and methodological commitments. It’s not that metaphysical naturalism has decisively answered the question of the soul; rather, it often refuses to ask it, or declares it un-askable.

As we've discussed many times, I believe there are unassailable philosophical arguments against materialism, grounded in the fact that ideas are real but immaterial, and that, therefore, our ability to grasp ideas indicates something fundamental about the nature of the psyche - an argument which is as old as philosophy itself, and one which I believe still holds good.

It’s not that the material world is unreal—it’s that it cannot be the whole story. The reality of meaning, truth, and value all point beyond what materialism can contain, no matter how sophisticated its models.

Why is this? — Pieter R van Wyk

Do you think it might be because the lessons of philosophy may not actually be observed? That if more people actually comported themselves as philosophers, in a spirit of rational self-knowledge and temperance, then there would be correspondingly less strife. But then that can’t really be imposed, it is something that has to be taken up voluntarily. And besides, philosophy itself is generally regarded as a bookish and irrelevant subject by a lot of people.

So - why blame philosophy? Don’t the problems you’re lamenting characterise unruly human nature?