I have an essay on it I’m trying to get published. If it is I’ll provide a link if you’re interested.

The irony enters when those, who generally take science to have only epistemic or epistemological, and not ontological, significance, nonetheless seek to use the results of quantum physics to support ontological claims, such as that consciousness really does, as opposed to merely seems to we observers to, collapse the wave function, and that consciousness or mind is thus ontologically fundamental. — Janus

I’ve been studying Michel Bitbol on philosophy of science, and he sees many of these disputes as arising from a shared presupposition: treating mind and matter as if they were two substances, one of which must be ontologically fundamental. In that sense, dualists and physicalists often share two assumptions—first, that consciousness is either a thing or a property of a thing; and second, that physical systems exist in their own right, independently of how they appear to us.

On Bitbol’s reading, quantum theory supports neither position. It doesn’t establish the ontological primacy of consciousness conceived as a substance—but it also undermines the idea of self-subsisting physical “things” with inherent identity and persistence. What it destabilises is the very framework in which “mind” and “matter” appear as separable ontological kinds in the first place.

Because both dualism and materialism tacitly treat consciousness as something—a thing among other things—while also presuming that physical systems exist independently of observation, the observer problem then appears as a paradox. The realist question becomes: what are these objects really in themselves, prior to or apart from any observation?

This line of thought aligns closely with what has humorously been called Bitbol’s “Kantum physics”—a deliberate play on words marking the Kantian dimension of quantum theory. Just as Kant argued that we know only phenomena structured by our cognitive faculties, Bitbol argues that quantum mechanics describes the structure of possible experience under the conditions of measurement. It is less a picture of an observer-independent world than a framework specifying how observations arise from our experimental engagement with it.

See The Roles Ascribed to Conscousness in Quantum Physics (.pdf) He's also done a set of interviews with Robert Lawrence Kuhn recently.

The real world object (rock, tree...) exists irrespective of our ever having perceived it — Relativist

This is the whole point at issue. I've given my reasons in detail, if you can't see them, so be it, (although it might be noted that AI has no trouble understanding them). But I see no point in responding further, I'll leave it at that.

‘Does the moon continue t exist when nobody is looking at it?’ Einstein asked Abraham Pais.

Why do you think he asked that question?

Well said!

you still have provided no justification for the ontological claims I highlighted:
.....
- that the supposed ‘unperceived object’ neither exists nor does not exist. Nothing whatever can be said about it. — Relativist

My claim arises in response to the familiar objection: if idealism is true, does an object cease to exist when no one is perceiving it? Berkeley famously answered this by invoking God as the perpetual perceiver. I’m not taking that route.

My point is more basic and logical than theological. If you take any object — this rock, that tree — and ask, “Does it exist when unperceived?” you have already brought it into cognition. To refer to it, designate it, or even imagine its absence is already to posit it as an object for thought. The very act of asking the question places the object within the space of meaning and predication.

So when I say that an unperceived object neither exists nor does not exist, I am not saying that objects go in and out of reality. I am saying that outside all possible cognition, conception, designation, or disclosure, there is nothing of which existence or non-existence can be meaningfully asserted. You cannot truthfully say “it exists,” because existence is never encountered except in disclosure. But you also cannot say “it does not exist,” because there is no determinate object there to which the predicate “non-existent” could attach.

Accordingly, existence and non-existence are not free-floating properties of a reality wholly outside cognition; they are predicates that arise only within the context of intelligibility. Outside that context, nothing positive or negative can be said at all. It's not a dramatic claim.

Again: Demonstrate how "cognition" is "more fundamental" than whatever is (i.e. nature) that embodies "acts of understanding". A 'Machine in the Ghost'? (pace Bishop Berkeley) — 180 Proof

That's confused. What I'm saying is that cognition is a constructive and active process. The mind is not a blank mirror which simply reflects or receives what is already there. It is continually interpreting and synthesising whatever it perceives into its internal world-model. That is enactivism and embodied cognition. So I'm saying, that process of cognition and assimilation is what is truly fundamental - not the ostensible primitives of physics. I'm arguing that the world that we perceive as separate and apart from ourselves is in that sense a mental construct (Vorstellung in Schopenhauer.) And that 'objectivism' forgets this, and imagines that it sees the world as it would be with no observer in it. That is the argument in a nutshell.

This is an unjustified statement: you have provided no basis to claim reality has a mental aspect. — Relativist

But you do understand when you say this, you are assuming that the world is mind-independent - that reality is outside of us, and our mental picture is inside our minds. This, to you, is so obvious that it can't be questioned - but it is what I am calling into question.

The view I’m defending is closer to a cognitivist idealism than to any denial of science or of an external world. The claim is not that reality is “mental stuff,” but that what we know as a world — objecthood, existence, lawfulness, measurability — is intelligible only through the constructive activity of brain/mind. The mind is not a mirror of nature, as if there were mind here and world there as two independently existing domains. Mind and world are co-arising, not separable in that way. Because, how would you know what the world is, without mind?

So when you say I lack justification for speaking of a “mental aspect” of reality, that objection already presupposes the very mirror-of-nature model that is under dispute. It also implicitly assumes a standpoint outside cognition itself — as if one could survey both “mind” and “world” from some position beyond one’s actual living cognition of either.

I don't think the advent of ChatGPT changes anything in her article. — Leontiskos

Yes, true, that. I went back and looked again. What i siezed on first time around was her mention of the Blake LeMoine case which was discussed here at length. I agree with her conclusion:

"For now, if we want to talk to another consciousness, the only companion we can be certain fits the bill is ourselves."

Furthermore, I know a priori that LLMs would affirm that.

You accept that the universe existed billions of years ago, despite it not having actually been perceived (so...does inferred count?) — Relativist

I note this objection at the outset. 'Science has shown that h. sapiens only evolved in the last hundred thousand years or so, and we know Planet Earth is billions of years older than that! So how can you say that the mind ‘‘creates the world”’? I also say that 'there is no need for me to deny that the Universe is real independently of your mind or mine, or of any specific, individual mind. Put another way, it is empirically true that the Universe exists independently of any particular mind. But what we know of its existence is inextricably bound by and to the mind we have, and so, in that sense, reality is not straightforwardly objective. It is not solely constituted by objects and their relations. Reality has an inextricably mental aspect, which itself is never revealed in empirical analysis. Whatever experience we have or knowledge we possess, it always occurs to a subject — a subject which only ever appears as us, as subject, not to us, as object.'

Do you see the point?

These are unsupported assertions about the nature of existence. — Relativist

It is supported by the above. The argument is that 'existence' is a compound or complex idea, not a binary 'yes/no': it's not always the case that things either exist or don't exist, there are kinds and degrees of existence. The key point is that our grasp of the existence of objects, even supposedly those that are real independently of the mind, is contingent upon our cognitive abilities. Physicalism declares that some ostensibly 'mind-independent' object or state-of-affairs is real irrespective of the presence of absence of any mind - that is what is being disputed (on generally Kantian grounds).

On the other hand, your only justification seems to be that physicalism is false, therefore your view must be true. — Relativist

Physicalism is highly influential in modern culture. Much of modern English-speaking philosophy is based on a presumptive physicalism, and it's important to understand how this came about. So the argument I'm putting is not peculiar to me but to many other critics of physicalism.

having a perspective doesn't entail falsehood. If you accept science, then you have to accept that our human perspectives managed to discern some truths about reality - truths expressed in our terms- but nonetheless true. (I discussed the role of perspective in the post that led to your dropping out. Considering the importance you place on perspective, it's something you need to be able to address). — Relativist

I don't say that having a perspective entails falsehood. Nor do I dispute scientific facts.'I am not disputing the scientific account, but attempting to reveal an underlying assumption that gives rise to a distorted view of what this means. What I’m calling attention to is the tendency to take for granted the reality of the world as it appears to us, without taking into account the role the mind plays in its constitution. This oversight imbues the phenomenal world — the world as it appears to us — with a kind of inherent reality that it doesn’t possess. But nor am I advocating relativism or subjectivism - that only what is 'true for you' is real. Only that the subjective pole or aspect of reality is negated or denied by physicalism, which accords primacy to the objective domain, neglecting the foundational role of the mind in its disclosure.

I don't see any examples on this thread of anyone using physicalism as an ontological category. — 180 Proof

Relativist has made this claim repeatedly in numerous discussions over the past year. We've extensively discussed D M Armstrong's 'Materialist Theory of Mind', as recently as a few pages back. Armstrong's is the textbook example of physicalism as an ontology.

Physics is grounded in such irreducible acts of understanding ~ Wayfarer


Nonsense. "Physics is grounded" in useful correlations with natural regularities or processes. — 180 Proof

They are correlations between observations and mathematical calculations. Which, incidentally, have yielded insights into physical principles far beyond the scope of un-aided observation, purely on the basis of Wigner's 'unreasonable efficacy of mathematics in the natural sciences.' Dirac's prediction of anti-matter is a boilerplate example. Such calculations are purely intellectual in nature, then correlated against observations, so far as they can be (and as you note with many gaps.)

So when you insist that everything is “physical,” you are making a metaphysical assertion, not a scientific one ...

Well, since no one has made such a "metaphysical assertion", Wayf, your statement is, at best, just another non sequitur. — 180 Proof

Your 'fundamental ontological primitive', defined in negative terms, is of course a metaphysical assertion.

You constantly use the description 'non sequiter' to describe things you can't understand or don't agree with. Nothing I've said here or elsewhere in this thread is a non sequiter.

I can see perfectly clearly the background to this interminable debate - the aftermath of Cartesian dualism, the division of the universe into mental stuff and material stuff, the incoherence of the idea of mental stuff, the subsequent attempt to define everything in terms of matter and energy.

The core problem is this: physicalism treats “the physical” as the fundamental ontological primitive, yet physics itself does not—and cannot—define what 'the physical' ultimately is. The content of physics is a sequence of evolving mathematical formalisms, not an account of what being physical means in itself. (The fact that you say that the definition entailed by physics is not relevant to your claims only serves to underline, not defuse, this point.)

So when you insist that everything is “physical,” you are making a metaphysical assertion, not a scientific one—while simultaneously denying the legitimacy of metaphysics. That is the equivocation.

My point is precisely that you cannot justify treating “the physical” as the basic category of being when you cannot even say what it is, except by contrast with “the mental.” That inability is not a flaw in my argument—it is the unresolved foundation of your position.

The position I defend is that the mathematical models used to analyse the physical domain are themselves intellectual structures, consisting of meanings, identities, and necessities that can only be grasped by rational understanding. No equation, proof, or law functions as physics in virtue of its physical inscription, but only in virtue of its intelligible content. Physics is grounded in such irreducible acts of understanding.

More fundamentally still, cognition—even in non-human animals—is not built up from meaningless physical atoms, but is organized through meaningful gestalts: structured wholes that are apprehended within a lived context of significance. Charles Pinter's 'Mind and the Cosmic Order' shows that this can be said even of insects. Meaning is therefore not something added to or emerging from a self-contained physical process; it is the form in which all cognition exists.

If that is so, then neither rationality nor meaning can coherently be treated as derivative products of a domain that is itself defined only in abstraction from them.

That is the basic argument presented in the Mind Created World, which I don't believe you have countered.

If you have anything other than ad homs, sarcasm and emojis, this would be a good time to provide it.

It was the substance of the famous debates between Bohr and Einstein that occupied decades. At issue was the status of objectivity, about the question as to whether the primitive elements of quantum theory were indeed mind-independent. Einstein held a strong belief in realism, the view that physical systems possess definite, objective properties (like position or momentum) that exist independently of whether they are observed or measured.

He argued that quantum mechanics (specifically the Copenhagen interpretation associated with Bohr and Heisenberg) was an incomplete theory because its mathematical description (the wavefunction) does not account for these definite, pre-existing properties of individual systems. Bohr, the chief architect of the Copenhagen interpretation, argued that quantum mechanical elements do not possess definite properties until a measurement is made. The act of observation, through interaction with a classical measuring device, is what forces a quantum system to acquire a definite state (the "collapse" of the wavefunction). Einstein believed that a complete theory must provide a description of reality that is objective and local. That was behind the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen (EPR) thought experiment (1935), where he used the concept of entanglement to argue that particles must have definite, pre-existing properties before measurement, or else quantum mechanics violated the principle of locality. As is well-known, experimental evidence after Einstein's death did confirm that quantum mechanics violated the principle of locality, the subject of the 2022 Nobel Prize.

What I'm looking for is your own epistemic justification to believe what you do. You previously shared the common view - it was a belief you held — Relativist

I've laid it out in the OP, The MInd Created World. It makes a rational case for a scientifically-informed cognitive idealism. We had a long discussion in that thread. We'll always be at odds. Simple as that.

Notice that OP was published five months before ChatGPT went live. Apropos the problem posed in the thread, there is no way to put this particular genie back it's bottle. ChatGPT has the largest take-up of any software release in history, it and other LLM's are inevitable aspects of techno-culture. It's what you use them for, and how, that matters.

This is Mary's room. Knowledge of pain and other qualia is a knowledge of experience. Nevertheless, it IS an explanatory gap that a complete ontology should account for. You talk around the issue in vague terms, by (I think) implying there's something primary about first-person-ness. Does that really tell us anything about ontology? It's not an explanation, it's a vague claim that you purport to be central. — Relativist

THe fact that you can't see something which I and many others believe to be obvious, and instead describe it as 'vague', is only an indication of your inability to see the issue. I'm done trying to explain it to you.

I think the point he's making, if I understand it, is an error because he treats the "observer" as separate from the "observed." — Ciceronianus

Quite right! But this is one of the major points of contention that quantum physics threw up. Albert Einstein, for one, never accepted the questioning of this separation which for him was an absolute presupposition of science. That was behind his legendary remark 'does the moon continue to exist when nobody is looking?' I think the rhetorical import was 'Of course it does!" But he had to raise the question because it is what the findings of Neils Bohr and Werner Heisenberg seemed to call into question. Sir Roger Penrose, to this day, loudly and often declares that quantum physics must be wrong, on just those grounds.

Poetic language may be able to evoke them, and that's about the best you're gonna get. — Janus

Philosophy has always grappled with the 'meaning of Being', explicitly or otherwise.

Let physics do physics. Let phenomenology do phenomenology. Lets not conflate them. — Apustimelogist

You're not thinking philosophically, but like an engineer.

I will be offline for a while. Thanks for the feedback.

Whatever Husserl is doing, he is not solving this issue — Apustimelogist

He's not solving what you think is the issue. You see everything from the perspective of science and engineering - how does it work? What is the causal mechanism? How do you account for it?

But if no one can describe the feeling of pain. Then how on earth can you give an explanatory account of pain? — Apustimelogist

But the point is not about 'giving a better explanation'! It's the fact that a third-party, objective description does not embody the felt experience of pain - and yet everybody, in fact, practically every animal, knows what pain is. So it's not a 'problem to be solved'. It's not that 'nobody can describe pain satisfactorily'. It's being pointed to as an 'explanatory gap' - 'look, no matter how sophisticated your scientific model, it doesn't capture or convey the felt experience of pain, or anything other felt experience.' So there's a fundamental dimension of existence that is left out of objective accounts.

Well maybe you can elaborate on what this blind spot is about and what implications it has? — Apustimelogist

Behind the Blind Spot sits the belief that physical reality has absolute primacy in human knowledge, a view that can be called scientific materialism. In philosophical terms, it combines scientific objectivism (science tells us about the real, mind-independent world) and physicalism (science tells us that physical reality is all there is). Elementary particles, moments in time, genes, the brain – all these things are assumed to be fundamentally real. By contrast, experience, awareness and consciousness are taken to be secondary. The scientific task becomes about figuring out how to reduce them to something physical, such as the behaviour of neural networks, the architecture of computational systems, or some measure of information. — The Blind Spot

What do you think about that?

"I" refers to a single, specific identity - I am an individual with this unique identity, distinct from all other identities. I have perceptions and experiences; I interact with the world beyond me - the world I am a part of. My experiences are distinct from yours; your experiences take place when and where your body is are, mine take place when and where my body is. What part of this do you disagree with? — Relativist

What you’ve described there is the empirical self — an individual being located in space and time, with experiences correlated to a body. It’s an accurate description, but it is a description from the ego’s perspective. By ‘ego’ I mean the self as it appears to itself, as an object in the world — the self-image or personal identity.

The ‘subject’ at issue is not you viewed objectively; it is the subject or observer for whom anything can appear as ‘a world’ at all. By re-describing the ‘I’ entirely from the third-person standpoint, you’ve already shifted back into the objective stance and thereby bracketed out the very role of subjectivity that is in question.

This is precisely the point made by phenomenology: natural science is methodologically blind to its own point of departure, because all science already presupposes consciousness as the condition of there being a world to investigate. To then try to explain consciousness in the same terms as the objects of physics and chemistry is a category mistake — not because mind is mystical, but because it is an inappropriate perspective from which to approach philosophy of mind.

Nearly everyone on earth does this implicitly! — Relativist

Right! Which is why it's so hard to argue against. But philosophy's role, as Aristotle put it, is to 'wonder at what men think ordinary'. Physicalism and naturalism begin with abstractions - the 'ideal bodies' of physics, the mathematical description of phenomena. Tremendously powerful, no question about it - but the mind that devises these abstractions has been left out at the very beginning. And then, the attempt is made to put it back in again, by attempting to put it on the same ontological footing as the objects of that method. That's the category mistake at issue.

I don't know about that! Sheldrake has published many scientific papers - dozens, in fact. He was trained entirely within orthodox biology: BA & PhD in Biochemistry – Cambridge, Research Fellow at Clare College, Cambridge Royal Society Research Fellow; Worked at Harvard as a research fellow; Principal plant physiologist at ICRISAT (India) – an international agricultural research institute. During this period (roughly late 1960s–1970s), he published dozens of standard experimental papers, mainly on: Plant hormones (auxins); Plant development; Cellular differentiation; Transport mechanisms in plants. These appeared in fully mainstream journals such as: Nature; Journal of Experimental Botany, Planta Biochemical Journal.

Of course everything changed with his New Science of Life, 1981, and with it, the focus of his experimental work. That was the book which John Maddox reviewed harshly in Nature, saying it was 'heresy' and 'pseudo-science'. But, you know, Sheldrake didn't throw up his hands and walk away. He still has considerable presence in modern culture.

Michael Levin’s work is often said to be “non-standard” or “post-genomic,” but his research programme presupposes a kind of naturalised Platonism - not in a mystical sense, but in the straightforward biological sense that forms, patterns, and target morphologies have real causal powers.

Levin’s central claim—that cells cooperate toward an anatomically defined end-state—only makes sense if that end-state has some ontological status. The “target morphology” guiding regeneration and development is not encoded neuron-by-neuron or gene-by-gene; it is a structural attractor, a normative form. It is something like a real abstract—a pattern that exists as an organising principle even when no physical structure currently instantiates it. So he really has re-introduced the teleonomic element, life as goal-directed right through to the most basic levels. He's firmly anti-physicalist for all these reasons.

Levin appears in my story as Stephen Leavitt, although only by way of being mentioned, he doesn't have a walk-on role. But morphic resonance definitely comes into it. Which means what? Very simply - nature has memories. Not only in brains, but in nature herself. That is what Maddox screamed 'heresy' about. (Peirce's 'nature forms habits' seems to make a similar point. I met Rupert once, in the early 90's, he was brought out by a group I was associated with and gave a talk. He's hardly changed since, really.)

Plato and Aristotle differed significantly in their approach to reality, with Plato emphasizing an ideal, abstract realm of Forms as the ultimate reality, accessed through reason, and Aristotle focusing on the tangible, physical world as the primary reality, understood through empirical observation and the senses. — Gnomon

I think this is a serious oversimplification. Aristotle does not abandon Forms; his hylomorphism is still a form–based ontology—the difference is that Forms are no longer conceived as existing in a separate, self-subsisting realm, but as ontologically prior principles instantiated in matter. Matter, for Aristotle, has no actuality or determinate identity on its own; it exists only as pure potentiality until it receives form.

Moreover, intellect (nous) is precisely the faculty that apprehends forms, and thereby knows what particulars are. This is what differentiates rational from non-rational cognition—hence the classical definition of man as the rational animal. Sense perception alone never yields universality; it is nous that grasps form as such. In Aristotelian philosophy, this grasp of the Forms is what enables us to converse rationally, as reason converges on principles which are common to every rational intellect.

So Aristotle does not replace forms with brute physical particulars understood purely by the senses. Rather, he relocates form from a separate Platonic realm into the structure of being itself, while preserving its ontological and epistemic priority. If you look again at this post, what’s being argued in those three quoted passages is exactly this point: Aristotle’s realism remains fundamentally a formal realism, not a straightforward empiricism (although it is dismally apparent that this distinction is not being understood, with the attempt on my part to elucidate it being described as 'monomania'.)

Sure. Thanks for your comments.

From the passage above your post - why do you think the speaker says "It (physics) is screaming at us that observers really matter"? What is the point do you think he's making?

I don't accept that I misrepresented Janus' contributions, even though my description of them as naturalist empiricism was rejected. That is Janus' basic stance, whether he acknowledges it or not.

But I don't think this is an issue for physicalism, this is an issue for any kind of possible explanation. No theoretical framework can account for what it is like to feel something. A panpsychist or idealist is not going to be able to explain conscious experience anymore than a physicalist; panpsychism and idealism will also both have gaps in explaining how experiences emerge, such as the combination problem. The nature of explanation. — Apustimelogist

From my side, where the problem lies is that you don your physicalist spectacles and look at the whole discussion through them. Like a pair of polarising glasses that block out particular wavelengths, there are philosophical concepts that these spectacles won't let you see. Then you think that your inability to see them is somehow due to the nature of explanation, or the nature of the subject. That article I linked to is called 'the blind spot of science is the neglect of lived experience'. And really I don't think it even registered. It's like 'what "blind spot"?'

I think the central issue of the mind-body problem is that we take experience as some kind of special ontological primitive when I can't even articulate what that means — Apustimelogist

No! You can't articulate what it means, because of the physicalist framing of the issues. The school of phenomenology, initiated by Edmund Husserl, is precisely about the recognition of the primacy of experience. But I suspect as you read about it, you would auto-translate it into the physicalist framework, thereby missing the point again. You really should read some existentialism.

No other account can do better in principle — Apustimelogist

Here, you're falling back on scepticism - 'nobody really knows anything'.

The idealist and physicalist accounts are not two versions of the same kind of philosophy, one with mind as fundamental, the other with physical fundamentals. Not at all. Surely nobody can describe the feeling of pain such that another on hearing that description will know that particular pain, but everyone knows what pain is, because they suffer it. That is the 'explanatory gap' in a nutshell.

Actually I should clarify what I said above about Sheldrake - morphic resonance is Sheldrake’s controversial idea. The morphogenetic field is a related but different idea which is part of mainstream biology. Nevertheless Sheldrake is enamoured of Levin’s work for its holistic and non-reductionist approach.

Newsflash - just heard Sheldrake say that ‘Michael Levin and I both think that biological development comes about through morphogenetic fields.’

Just remember, this was the very concept that the erstwhile editor of Nature, John Maddox, said, in a hostile review, made Sheldrake’s book A New Science of Life (1981) “fit for burning”. He described the book, which proposed the concept of morphic resonance to explain biological and physical phenomena, as an "infuriating tract" and an "exercise in pseudo-science.”

The times, they are a’ changin’.

Constructive disagreement is the lifeblood of philosophy.

You might be interested in the fascinating work of the biologist Michael Levin, who posits a kind of platonic space at work in nature — Janus

You bet! I've been taking in his lectures the last few months. He has a role in the story I'm writing (under an alias, of course.)

Problem-Solving Without Explicit Instructions: Levin argues that biological systems—from cells to tissues to organisms—don't follow rigid, pre-programmed instructions but instead solve problems by navigating toward goals in this abstract space. — Janus

Which is intelligence in action. Dovetails very nicely with Evan Thompson's phenomenology.

I've been listening to all these guys, often while working out. (YouTube is now the very last subscription I'd cancel.. well, along with Chuck, which is my name for ChatGPT.)

I present such an alternative view as counterpoint to your seeming presupposition that the view you favour is the only one which is not self-refuting. — Janus

It was not a presupposition. Remember, this went back to three passages I provided, from Gerson, Feser and Russell, in support of the general idea of 'Aristotelian realism'. Aristotelian realism upholds the reality of universals, which are 'intelligible objects', of which the triangle, and other geometric forms, are examples. I do defend Aristotelian or scholastic or (some forms of) Platonic realism, in that I believe that there are real intelligibles, that are not the product of the mind, but can only be grasped by the mind. Insofar as there are 'immaterial things' then these are those with the caveat that they're not things but intellectual acts that are common to all rational minds (my 'doctrine of universals' in a nutshell.)

Your response:

The idea of a perfect geometrical figure can be understood to be simply an abstraction away from the inevitable imperfections in any geometrical physical construction — Janus

The 'abstraction away' from the sensory impression of a triangle is the kind of argument that empiricists appeal to. I only mentioned John Stuart Mill as an eminent example of that.

Mill’s view in A System of Logic is precisely:

• Numbers arise from collections of concrete objects
• Geometry arises from idealizing sensory experience
• Universals are formed by abstracting common features
• Necessity is a product of psychological expectation hardened into habit

It is very close to the kinds of arguments you often articulate. If that is offensive, I didn't mean it to be, so, sorry for that. It was an effort to contextualise the kinds of arguments we're presenting - Neo-Aristotelian vs Empirical.

If you had read what I wrote closely you would see that I was referring to something else, namely the attitude that we ought to argue only on the grounds of what nature presents to us, not on traditional or scriptural authority or personal intuitions, which might purport to pertain to something beyond nature. — Janus

So what you really meant by 'the natural attitude' was actually 'naturalism'. You frequently appeal to naturalism and/or natural science is the 'court of appeal' for normative claims. Again, this is not meant as a pejorative or personal criticism, it is demonstrably what you're saying. I might have misinterpreted it, because the expression 'the natural state' is associated with Husserl's critique of naturalism.

His criticism of the 'natural attitude' is of the kind of taken-for-grantedness of the domain of empirical experience, which looses sight of the framing assumptions which natural science brings to experience. As one of the modern Buddhist scholars I follow, David Loy, put it in respect of secular culture, 'The main problem with our usual understanding of secularity is that it is taken-for-granted, so we are not aware that it is a worldview. It is an ideology that pretends to be the everyday world we live in. Most of us assume that it is simply the way the world really is, once superstitious beliefs about it have been removed.”

And this, in turn, is because of the association of transcendentals with religious commitments, something which intertwined with the history in our culture. I've published an essay on it on Medium (although it's a complex argument.)

I can reasonably say that the ability to grasp a triangle as a plane bounded by three intersecting straight lines just is a matter of abstracting away from a recognized pattern and stating it as a specification or rule — Janus

Of course you can. Saying that it is an appeal to empiricism is not a personal insult. It's a common philosophical attitude, and you're appealing to it.

Nothing I have said relies upon or implies that "comparing ideas, considering arguments, making a case in your mind" can be usefully explained in terms of brain activity. — Janus

Except for

I see no reason why the conscious experience of anything, even of a thought itself, could not be a neural process which we do not consciously experience as such. — Janus

Whether or not it would be reasonable to say that they have pre-linguistic concepts of patterns would be a matter of whether you believe concepts are embodied in neural patterns or not. — Janus

The so-called "natural attitude"... — Janus

I took this to be a reference to Husserl, as he is associated with that expression. The reason I cited him is not 'an argument from authority'. It is more along the lines of citing a well-known philosopher, so as to establish the point at issue is not a personal idisyncratic expression.

The only thing in cognitive sciences that is in principle not amenable to the kind of explanation a physicalist might like is experience / "qualia". — Apustimelogist

Paraphrased: 'The only thing not amenable to explanation in physicalist terms is the question of the nature of being'.

If experience or “qualia” is in principle not amenable to physical explanation, then what is not explained is not a local feature or particular function of cognition but the very faculty for which there is any appearance to consider at all. Physical explanation works within, and assumes as real, the sensory domain; experience (consciousness, the subject, mind) is that for which these appearances hang together as a meaningful world. So this isn’t a small leftover problem — it marks a boundary to what physicalist explanation, by its own lights, can reach.

A second point is that physicalist explanation will typically not even see this boundary, because it has already excluded the subjective ground of experience from what counts as explanatorily relevant in the first place. That is precisely why this has been called the “blind spot of science” — the systematic neglect of lived experience as a condition of intelligibility rather than a phenomenon to be explained. (As discussed in this article.)

This is why Chalmer's called his essay 'facing up to'!

I do endeavour to address your arguments with courtesy, reciprocation would be appreciated.

Of course, your mental image of a triangle might not be exact, but rather indeterminate and fuzzy. But to grasp something with the intellect is not the same as to form a mental image of it.
— Edward Feser

The idea of a perfect geometrical figure can be understood to be simply an abstraction away from the inevitable imperfections in any geometrical physical construction. — Janus

That is the John Stuart Mill argument, standard empiricism, 'all knowledge comes from experience'. Against that, is the fact that rational thought is the capacity to grasp 'a triangle is a plane bounded by three interesecting straight lines'. A non-rational animal, a dog or a chimp, can be conditioned to respond to a triangular shape, but it will never grasp the idea of a triangle

I see no reason why... — Janus

Whenever you say that, you are comparing ideas, considering arguments, making a case in your mind. Of course that entails brain activity, but to try and explain it in terms of brain activity is another matter entirely.

Secondly, the thrust of Aristotle's argument is this: that material configurations, neural states, circuits, and the like, are always particular and specific, whereas ideas are by their nature general (universal in his lexicon.) We understand what a geometric form is in general, such that we can recognise it whereever it is encountered, or even merely considered. So it can't be identified with a particular configuration of matter, a neural configuration, circuit or switch. (That is Gerson's gloss on Aristotle's argument.)

The so-called "natural attitude" just consists in the refusal to submit one's thinking, experience and understanding to any dogma, and the "interpretive/ methodological" application "to science, historiography, law, pedagogy religion, etc." is simply the extension of that free-mindedness to the human disciplines. — Janus

Not so. The 'natural attitude' is a specific reference to Husserl's criticism of naturalism. 'Husserl’s insight is that we live our lives in what he terms a “captivation-in-an-acceptedness;” that is to say, we live our lives in an unquestioning sort of way by being wholly taken up in the unbroken belief-performance of our customary life in the world. We take for granted our bodies, the culture, gravity, our everyday language, logic and a myriad other facets of our existence' (IEP). We take the reality of the world at face value - really it's not that different from naive, or even scientific, realism.

Besides, your own entries are shot through with plenty of dogma, first and foremost that science is the only court of appeal for normative judgement in any matters whatever. Anything you deem cannot be adjuticated scientifically, you declare 'indeterminable', because you can't see any other criteria, including logical criteria, by which it could be decided. So if an argument is advanced that doesn't fit within this procrustean bed - why, then, it must be dogma!

From New Scientist:

The physicist who argues that there are no objective laws of physics

Daniele Oriti’s pursuit of a theory of quantum gravity has led him to the startling conclusion that the laws of nature don’t exist independently of us – a perspective shift that could yield fresh breakthroughs.

Thomas Lewton: What do people get wrong about the nature of reality?

Daniele Oriti: At the risk of seeming provocative, most scientists – and anybody who hasn’t really thought about the issue – maintain a position that philosophers call “naive realism”. This is the idea that there is a world out there that is entirely independent from us, not just in its existence but also in its properties: independent from the minds apprehending it, or from our theories about it. It’s made of things that are similarly independently defined, with intrinsic properties, which follow patterns that are also independent of us – even if we may not know about them.

I have been guilty of that position too. As a physics student, you want to understand the world. You build models, you revise them and you think that you are getting closer to the actual story. That’s the picture, and it’s very naive.

Why is that kind of thinking so naive?

First of all, it is naive on conceptual, philosophical grounds. But I would also say that modern science, particularly quantum mechanics, blurs this picture. One of the main lessons of quantum mechanics is that the distinction between us and the world isn’t really there, not sharply anyway. It tells us the properties of a particle are encoded in a probabilistic entity we call a 'wave function', which tells us the likelihood of it appearing here or there, for instance – but that the particle cannot be attributed definite properties until it is observed. It’s screaming at us that observers really matter.

....I’m still inclined to think that physical laws are really epistemic in nature, so something that exists primarily in our minds.

That’s because, from a philosophical standpoint, what we identify as a “law of nature” always has some component of our models of the world, selected because of some epistemic virtue we favour. The further claim that the law is somehow “out there” seems gratuitous to me. And, as I’ve already said, I think quantum mechanics challenges the idea of a separation between the “world” and “us”.

article pdf | Daniele Oriti on Google Scholar

The only thing I'm opposing, is the application of scientific method to philosophical problems.
— Wayfarer
"Problems" such as? — 180 Proof

Questions of meaning, purpose, value, aesthetics. The scientific method is undoubtedly successful in respect of understanding objective processes and relations. No question at all. That is the context within which physicalism is meaningful and effective. I don't dispute that it is, but physicalism is the attempt to apply the same mindset to philosophy. I've said before that physicalism is really no different to 'metaphysical naturalism' - the attempt to ground metaphysical arguments on naturalistic assumptions.

When we identify something, we identify a gestalt, not an assembly of simples. This is a basic fact of cognition.

A gestalt has properties that no list of constituent parts captures: unity, salience, meaning, intentional relevance.
— Wayfarer

And this is just a certain level of explanation in the realm of psychology, where these concepts may have some utility whether on a formal or informal basis, or fundamentally inaccurate/accurate. But that doesn't invalidate the possibility or validity of explanations from the view of neurons as units of information-processing. — Apustimelogist

Not so. Charles Pinter's book is cognitive science, not psychology. When you say it's psychology, it shifts the whole meaning. But his argument is that when you appeal to atomic structures. neurons, brains, or other elemental entities, your thinking is always operating in terms of gestalts, which are perceived meaningful wholes that exist inside the world of lived meanings. Take the time to look through the chapter abstracts. Pinter's book is thoroughly scientifically informed but not reductionist.

It seems that I am actually advocating for the complete opposite of what you think I am - usign the full range of conceptual tools and explanations to alk about things. — Apustimelogist

Using the full range, but generally deferring to the reductionist, 'bottom-up' ontology, wherein the material substrate is the causal explanation for the higher-level features of experience. This comes across all the time in your posts.

I appreciate that you take a lot of time to respond to my objections and I read your posts as being earnest and sincere. But can I ask — have you ever dipped into philosophy of science at all? I’m thinking of people like Kuhn or Polanyi. The reason I ask is that a lot of what I’m advocating here about cognition and objectivity comes from that tradition, where the idea of a completely neutral objective science is challenged on scientific and philosophical grounds. It might clarify where I’m coming from, even if you end up disagreeing. It may not only be 'Colorless green ideas sleeping furiously' ;-)

in other words, "the mind" is mind-dependent. — 180 Proof

The subjective reality of existence is ineliminable. Cogito ergo sum.

I take your point. My concern was more existential than transcendental: how, in the wake of the collapse of shared cosmic narratives, lived significance is actually sustained or whether it decays into nihilism. In that sense, I wasn’t claiming that meaning is constructed from nothing, but that historically we now inhabit conditions where the background structures that once stabilized meaning have broken down and is often experienced as “nothing matters.”

I engage in mental activities; I experience qualia. — Relativist

The mind - neither mine, nor yours, nor anyone else's should they be in this room - is not an objective existent.
— Wayfarer
However I am an objective existent. I engage in mental activities; I experience qualia. As I suggested, and you did not dispute: "the mind" is conceptually that aspect of myself that engages in mental activities. You have not reconciled the fact that I am an objective existent with your claim that "the mind" is not.

it is categorically, or ontologically, of a different order to existent things.
— Wayfarer
This is vague. Describe these various ontological categories. — Relativist

You’re eliding two very senses of “I” without noticing it.

Yes — as a human organism, you are an objective existent. Your body, your brain, your behaviour are all perfectly legitimate objects of third-person description. No one disputes that.

But the “I” that is the subject of experience — the subject to whom qualia appear, the one that is doing the thinking right now — is not itself an object within the field of objects. It is the condition for there being a field of objects at all. You never encounter this “I” as a thing in the world in the way you encounter tables, neurons, or even brain scans. It is always on the experiencing side of the relation.

So when you say:

"I am an objective existent. I engage in mental activities; I experience qualia."

you are illicitly fusing:

The organism that can be studied objectively, and

The subjectivity in virtue of which anything is experienced at all.

Those are not the same ontological role. The first is an object in experience; the second is what makes experience possible in the first place.

That is what I mean by saying that the mind (or the subject) is “of a different ontological order.” It is more basic than the objective/subjective split itself.

If you insist on treating the subject as just another object, you erase the very distinction that makes the word “experience” intelligible. But, as I already predicted, this is something you won't notice or acknowledge. It is the blind spot of physicalism.

A world without truth could not be, as there would be no actuality. Of course it is something each must realize by themselves, which is the task of philosophy.

And furthermore the statement ‘there is no truth’ is self contradicting: if it is true then there is a truth. If it is not it is false.

Best to avoid categorical statements of this kind.

I grant, the steam of images that comes out of our devices is endlessly fascinating. I can't argue with that. But on the other hand, it's also a window into all kinds of conversations, ideas, images, concepts, and information which otherwise we would never have. it can be a problem but it's not necessarily a problem (although human beings seem to be able to make a problem out of anything.)

Going back to the title of your thread - positivism is rather passé terminology. Positivism as a formal philosophical movement went out of fashion in the 60's. Positivism as an undercurrent in culture is however very much alive. It is simply the idea that only those things that are ascertainable by science, and mathematical theories that can be justified on those things, constitute real knowledge. It is certainly the presumption of many here, even though if called out they'll deny it.

But what it means, is that there is no basis for philosophical, ethical or aesthetic judgements, other than either the scientific or objective, on the one side, or personal conviction or the subjective, on the other. This is a direct consequence of the predicament of modernity that I wrote another thread about. So the bigger existential question is, surely, what makes life worth living, what is meaningful? This is the ontological or existential crisis you're referring to.

An article I often refer to, published when I was first posting to forums, comes to mind. It is a review of Jürgen Habermas' dialogues on religion with the then Cardinal Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI). This review is called Does Reason Know what it is Missing?. It's basically about the respective roles of reason and religion in a secular culture. I'll quote an excerpt:

What secular reason is missing is self-awareness. It is “unenlightened about itself” in the sense that it has within itself no mechanism for questioning the products and conclusions of its formal, procedural entailments and experiments. “Postmetaphysical thinking,” Habermas contends, “cannot cope on its own with the defeatism concerning reason which we encounter today both in the postmodern radicalization of the ‘dialectic of the Enlightenment’ and in the naturalism founded on a naïve faith in science.”

Postmodernism announces (loudly and often) that a supposedly neutral, objective rationality is always a construct informed by interests it neither acknowledges nor knows nor can know. Meanwhile science goes its merry way endlessly inventing and proliferating technological marvels without having the slightest idea of why. The “naive faith” Habermas criticizes is not a faith in what science can do — it can do anything — but a faith in science’s ability to provide reasons, aside from the reason of its own keeping on going, for doing it and for declining to do it in a particular direction because to do so would be wrong.

The counterpart of science in the political world is the modern Liberal state, which, Habermas reminds us, maintains “a neutrality . . . towards world views,” that is, toward comprehensive visions (like religious visions) of what life means, where it is going and what we should be doing to help it get there. The problem is that a political structure that welcomes all worldviews into the marketplace of ideas, but holds itself aloof from any and all of them, will have no basis for judging the outcomes its procedures yield. Worldviews bring with them substantive long-term goals that serve as a check against local desires. Worldviews furnish those who live within them with reasons that are more than merely prudential or strategic for acting in one way rather than another.

The Liberal state, resting on a base of procedural rationality, delivers no such goals or reasons and thus suffers, Habermas says, from a “motivational weakness”; it cannot inspire its citizens to virtuous (as opposed to self-interested) acts because it has lost “its grip on the images, preserved by religion, of the moral whole” and is unable to formulate “collectively binding ideals.”

The review goes on to be critical of Habermas in some respects, but I call this particular passage out, because it's a pretty pithy expression of what many people are feeling in the modern world. We're all of us wrestling with a crisis of meaning, but philosophers, at least, are prepared to acknowledge it, and try to face up to it. Which is something!

This phase of Habermas' thought - he has a massive corpus - is associated with the phrase 'post-secular'. I think that's an interesting phrase.