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

Care to elaborate on that?

The actual answer is yes. — punos

That technology is astounding, no question. But it should be born in mind that those systems are trained on many hours of stimulus and response for particular subjects prior to the experiment being run. During this training the system establishes links between the neural patterns of the subject, and patterns of input data. So human expertise is constantly being interpolated into the experiment in order to achieve these results.

My question then is if the dog had propositional knowledge, then he is engaging in thought, and the dog might also know that if he tries to sit on the mat next to the cat he will be swatted. Is this then the distinction you're drawing between humans and animals just that humans are unusual in that they use sentences to express their thoughts where animals do not? — Hanover

Well, bear in mind, that was a paraphrase of Noam Chomsky and Robert Berwick's book. But it is also addressed in a polemical argument by Aristotelian philosopher Jacques Maritain:

Thanks to the association of particular images and recollections, a dog reacts in a similar manner to the similar particular impressions his eyes or his nose receive from this thing we call a piece of sugar or this thing we call an intruder; he does not know what is 'sugar' or what is 'intruder'. He plays, he lives in his affective and motor functions, or rather he is put into motion by the similarities which exist between things of the same kind; he does not see the similarity, the common features as such. What is lacking is the flash of intelligibility; he has no ear for the intelligible meaning. He has not the idea or the concept of the thing he knows, that is, from which he receives sensory impressions; his knowledge remains immersed in the subjectivity of his own feelings -- only in man, with the universal idea, does knowledge achieve objectivity. And his field of knowledge is strictly limited: only the universal idea sets free -- in man -- the potential infinity of knowledge. — The Cultural Impact of Empiricism

Physicalism is an ontological grounding thesis, not an effective paradigm for answering all questions about the human condition - your areas of interest and concern. — Relativist

But surely philosophy is concerned with the whole range of questions about the human condition. The task of science is to explore and explain what exists; philosophy asks what it means to exist. That inquiry is not merely subjective in the sense of personal preference, but recognises that the subject is ineliminable.

Similarly with the way you see the relationship between science and the metaphysical theory of physicalism. You reject my description of the relationship, and you misconstrue it or insist on your own view. — Relativist

Yet you’ve said repeatedly that physics provides the paradigm for metaphysics — that the “ontological grounding” is the ontology of physics. You said earlier

Most of mental life is better considered from completely different perspectives. My issue is specifically with ontology: what actually exists. I think ontology can be set aside for the issues you raised. If this is wrong, and there is such a dependency then there's a burden to make an epistemological case for that ontology. — Relativist

That “burden,” as you phrase it, could only be met by demonstrating the objective existence of some “non-physical thing.” But this already presumes the physicalist framing, where what counts as real must be an object existing in the same way as physical entities.

On “immanent universals”: my criticisms here are not inventions of my own — they’ve been made by many philosophers. If I tracked down the sources, I could easily point to published critiques (e.g. E. J. Lowe, The Possibility of Metaphysics (Oxford, 1998) - Lowe argues against Armstrong’s immanent realism, suggesting that it fails to account for the reality of universals and necessary connections.)

This approach gives you a valid reason to reject physicalism (i.e. it's inconsistent with your world-view), but does not constitute the objective take-down of physicalism that you think it is — Relativist

And that is relativism in action. You hold physicalism as true; I work from an idealist framework. You don’t recognise the kinds of arguments I offer, not because they are subjective, but because they cut against what you take to be undeniable. Physicalism starts by bracketing out the subject in order to ascertain what exists independently of the subject; Kantian idealism (which you don't seem to recognise) shows why this is untenable.

I don't think you are interested in understanding. — Relativist

I've learned a great deal from this forum, about new subjects, schools of thought, and philosophers that I'd never heard of. I read constantly, often the sources that others have recommended, and I often quote from external sources in support of my arguments. So, sure, I'm interested in understanding,

But the bottom line is, you can't conceive of a way in which physicalism might be false. So, I'm quite happy to leave it there, but I will not concede that what I'm arguing is 'subjective' in any pejorative sense. But I will agree that my philosophy is incompatible with physicalism, as I would hope it to be!

//I also note you had nothing to say about David Chalmers’ challenge to physicalism//

All this is the story of someone escaping responsibility to someone else. What I wrote above - no one is responsible for anything. The question arises: What is the next stage of liberation? Maybe now is the time to free ourselves from the need to be? After all, we are already free from everything else, including any identity, social connections, aren't we? This is exactly where I see one of those very pillars of liberalism that I spoke about earlier. — Astorre

I don't really understand what you mean by this. I think you correctly identify the role of Protestantism in the formation of individualism, and the role of Christianity in grounding the value of the person. And also that these are very much one of the 'pillars of liberalism'. The founding philosophers of liberalism generally had a commitment to the social contract in the form of reciprocal rights and duties (although today the rights seem to be exaggerated and duties deprecated.) All of this was developed against an implicitly Christian background, from which the idea of social equality originated (as opposed to the rigid social hierarchies of the preceeding cultures). Furthermore that the ideal of progress was a version of the Eschaton transposed into a secular register. But the human condition, as such, was never envisioned to be complete or capable of fulfilment in the original Christian sense. So while liberalism grew out of that soil, it lost its connection to it in some fundamental way with the decline of faith.

So what next stage of liberation could there be, if not some version of the utilitarian ethos of the 'greatest good for the greatest number'? I think the obvious issue is the need to culture to transition from an economy of abundance to one of scarcity, as that is what the world is facing. We can't sustain the levels of consumption of goods and energy that the West has grown used to. Already we overshoot the Earth's capacity to sustain the consumption of resources which outstrips the natural regenerative capacity of the planet on an earlier date each year (see Earth Overshoot Day). So what kind of economic or political system would recognise or validate frugality and conservation rather than conspicuous consumption? That doesn't look a lot like 'freedom' in the economic sense, which is the freedom to pursue and fulfil one's desires.

Actually a pioneering political economist comes to mind, E F Schumacher, who published the trendsetting Small is Beautiful book in 1973, one of the early influential books in sustainable economics. Schumacher argued in his chapter on Buddhist Economics that economics should serve people rather than the other way around. The Buddhist model prioritizes well-being, meaningful work, simplicity, and ecological balance over the Western fixation on growth, profit, and consumption. He frames this not as a religious doctrine but as a reminder that economics is always rooted in values, and that the Western “science” of economics has its own unexamined metaphysics—one that Buddhist economics can help illuminate and counterbalance (although it must be noted, he developed this concept whilst an economic adviser in Burma, which has hardly gone on to become an exemplar for any kind of development.)

Nevertheless, the broader point stands: that Western capitalism has prioritised material abundance and consumption as the hallmark of progress, and it's a model that is not sustainable in the face of the scarcities that are threatening global well-being. So maybe the kind of liberation that needs to be sought, is the liberation from endless consumption - which does sound rather Buddhist.

Hey, I like that. Very helpful framing, thank you.

Hope you read that poetry above, it is really very good. I understand a lot more about Alfred North Whitehead just having read it.

Great work. Process philosophy sung into verse—beautifully done. :clap: :pray:

As you say, there are no synthetic a priori judgements, but as Kant says, that logical construct (proposition, judgement), in which the conceptions have no relation to each other but are connected in thought, are called synthetic a priori judgements, and are used by the cognitive faculties as principles. — Mww

Might be a good place for a recap of what the synthetic a priori is, and the role it has in Kant's COPR. The phrase “synthetic a priori” is one of the pivots of the entire text. Kant thought the whole problem of pure reason could be summed up in the question: how are synthetic a priori judgments possible? (B19).

The types of judgements are:

• Analytic a priori = true by definition, like “all bachelors are unmarried.”
• Synthetic a posteriori = adds new content, but known through experience, like “this apple is red.”
• Synthetic a priori = adds new content, but is knowable independently of experience.

That last category was Kant’s unique insight. Mathematics is built around it — “7+5=12” is not analytic, because “12” isn’t contained in “7+5,” but it’s still a priori. Geometry also: “the shortest distance between two points is a straight line.” And physics relies on principles like “every change has a cause,” which aren’t derived from experience but condition how we can have experience of a lawful world in the first place (indeed are central to the whole idea of there being physical laws.)

This is why Kant recognized the synthetic a priori judgment as fundamental to science. They’re what make mathematical physics possible — and because physics underpins so many other domains, they’re indirectly what make large parts of the other sciences possible. Without them, knowledge would collapse into either tautology (analytic truths) or mere observation (synthetic a posteriori). The ability to make predictions based on axioms is central to scientific method, and that ability depends on having judgments that are both synthetic (they extend knowledge) and a priori (they hold universally and necessarily).

Kant’s point was that the mind isn’t just passively recording facts, but actively structuring experience according to a priori forms and concepts. That’s how we get laws of nature that are universal and necessary, rather than just habits of expectation.

So when people debate whether the “synthetic a priori” really exists, it’s worth remembering: Kant wasn’t spinning an abstraction — he was trying to explain the actual success of mathematics and Newtonian science. His claim is that you can’t make sense of those successes without granting that there are truths that are both synthetic and a priori.

Nowadays, there is debate over whether there really are laws of nature (see Nancy Cartwright, No God, No Laws.) There is also the tendency to regard such Kantian posits as aspects of psychology or to relativise them in other ways (Quine's Two Dogmas of Empiricism for instance.) But in Kant's terms, the idea of the 'synthetic a priori' is basic to the entire project of the Critique, and without it the possibility of mathematics and natural science as objective knowledge would be left unexplained.

Nevertheless, I think it must be acknowledged that the consequences of Galileo's overturning of Aristotelian physics was of major consequence in intellectual history, was it not? That that was central to the Scientific Revolution and the advent of the worldview of modern science, which is the topic under discussion.

How germane is it to the point at issue? I started with a quote from James Glattenfelder's synopsis of his book (as mentioned by @Gnomon), and then provided some context for why he would make the claim that he did.

fringe cases. I'd go with Chomsky.

Well, sure - there is much commentary on the fact that Galileo was deeply influenced by Plato in conceiving of “the book of nature” as written in mathematics. He was also indebted to Marsilio Ficino’s translation of Plato into Italian, one of the hallmark achievements of the Renaissance. Platonic and Neoplatonic influences run through much of early modern thought. Copernicus, for example, set out to show that the orbits of the planets were perfect Platonic circles—though Kepler was later to correct this with his vital discovery that they are elliptical.

By contrast, in Aristotelian philosophy, “matter” was only ever a potential something; outside of form, it had no intrinsic existence. Aristotle’s prima materia was a theoretical posit, not a substance you could pick up and throw. Galileo, however, shifted the emphasis: he insisted on the primacy of the measurable attributes of matter—those that could be captured mathematically. As John Vervaeke observes, matter now also possessed inertia, hence the modern concept of “inert matter.” So here the idea of inert matter, now devoid of intentionality and purpose, but conceived instead as passive, measurable, and defined in mathematical terms.

That would figure - he doesn't know, because without any language, there would be no way for ideas to 'register in memory' so to speak (at a guess).

Presumably, they are stil able to speak, so, form concepts, understand meanings and grammar - all of which require thought.

It might indeed be 'a step in the development' of thinking, but it's not thought in the sense that you and I are doing, in composing and replying on this forum.

Noam Chomsky has a book on this, "Why Only Us? Language and Evolution" (co-authored with Robert Berwick). The title highlights the central question: why did only h.sapiens develop language? Other animals can communicate—bees dance, birds sing, primates vocalize—but only humans can generate an unbounded array of meaningful sentences with a recursive structure. The “only us” refers to the exclusive possession of this recursive, generative capacity by humans. This refers to ability to nest and recombine units of meaning, which is what gives human language its unbounded expressive power. No animal communication system has been shown to allow recursive embedding. They stress that language is not primarily a system of communication, but a system of thought. Communication is a secondary use of an internal capacity for structuring and manipulating concepts. Animal communication systems (e.g., vervet alarm calls) are qualitatively different, not primitive stages of language.

Glattfelder seems to believe that humanity was better-off before science penetrated the "mystical veil" of reality — Gnomon

I have a more prosaic view, although we arrive at a similar conclusion. He says in his Medium synopsis

physicists almost unanimously ignore the philosophical implications of their work. As such, most scientists have unknowingly adopted an implicit metaphysical belief, rendering the universe inherently random and meaningless, implying a sense of cosmic nihilism.

There is a solid historical basis to this claim (even if it sounds extremely polemical). This is that the Scientific Revolution split the world asunder - into objective/subjective, mind/matter, self/world. This was not a conscious choice nor the doings of any specific individual, although there are several individuals who crystallised these tendencies into the underlying paradigm of modernity (Descartes, Galileo and Locke, to name several). It's also central to the themes explored in John Vervaeke's lecture series Awakening to the Meaning Crisis (in particular, Episodes 20, 21, and 22.)

The upshot was that the Universe comes to be seen as matter acted upon by physical principles which is accorded the status of 'primary reality'. Purpose and meaning are then assigned to the mind, and mind is, through evolution, a product of or derivative from 'the blind watchmaker' (Dawkin's terminology). And, with Descartes, comes the view that 'mind' and 'matter' are of utterly different kinds, with mind being pictured as 'res cogitans' (thinking substance) - which I think is an incoherent picture (i.e. it doesn't hang together.)

It has never been universally accepted, and there are many cracks showing up in it, but that is the 'big picture' view of how the Universe came to be seen as the meaningless collocation of physical forces.

Bernardo Kastrup and James Glattfelder are two of those who are criticizing this picture. (Note that Glattfelder's book was published by Essentia which is Kastrup's publishing house.)

that fall from grace is blamed on the serpent of Science, the "most cunning of all beasts". The snake-eyes of objectivity have given us wise apes mastery over the garden of nature, which we have raped & pillaged to gratify our own material desires. — Gnomon

The symbolism of the Fall is appropriate, considering that the fruit was 'from the tree of knowledge'. Another potent metaphor is that of Faust who sells his soul to the devil in return for knowledge. Mythological but as often the case, these religious metaphors convey something profound about human existence. And I've often mused on the idea that the physicalism sees humans as 'advanced hominids' - it's almost an article of faith (pardon the irony). One of the consequences of popular Darwinism is the belief that we're no different from animals in essence - so why aspire to anything higher?

What is/was the first step in the process that came to be what you call "thinking"? — Patterner

Language. Not communication - birds and bees communicate - but language, representation of objects and relations in symbolic form.

Just recognize — wonderer1

Recognition relies on understanding the concept 'larger than'. Of course, an apple *is* larger than a plum but the mind still has a fundamental role in that recognition.

Before I respond again, please answer the question I asked:

What is your objective?

-Are you just explaining why you reject physicalism?

-Are you trying to convince me physicalism is false? — Relativist

I argue against physicalism because I believe that it's an inadequate understanding of the nature of existence. Beings are not purely or only physical, but we as a culture have lost touch with the alternative. My purpose isn’t simply to reject physicalism for the sake of argument, but to show why I think it leaves something crucial out of the picture.

This conviction goes back to before I started participating in forums (around 2009) but since then, I've been researching the question of why physicalism became so influential in culture.

Yes, they do exist. My bad. According to further research, quantum computers have made progress, but current systems are still too noisy, not large enough, and insufficiently fault-tolerant to achieve general commercial effectiveness. Whether and when they will is still uncertain.

A mind is a physical system that converts sensations into action. A mind takes in a set of inputs from its environment and transforms them into a set of environment-impacting outputs that, crucially, influence the welfare of its body. This process of changing inputs into outputs—of changing sensation into useful behavior—is thinking, the defining activity of a mind. — Patterner

That describes how organisms respond to their environment - which the vast majority do, quite successfully, without thought.

I've long felt there's a sense in which the project of modern consumer culture and techno-capitalism is to create a safe space for ignorance (in the sense of avidya, spiritual blindness.)

We believe that we know something our predecessors did not: that we can live freely at last, enjoying all our senses — except the sense of the past — as unremembering, honest, and friendly barbarians all, in a technological Eden.

See also The Strange Persistence of Guilt Wilfred McClay, Hedgehog Review.

Bear in mind, what you quoted is from my paraphrase of the original post, not an argument that I myself was putting forward. So perhaps the original poster might like to respond, as there are quite a few difficulties with that post.

So now the MAGA administration is predictably leveraging the Kirk assassination as a pretext for the furthering of authoritarianism.

On Monday, two senior administration officials, who spoke anonymously to describe the internal planning, said that cabinet secretaries and federal department heads were working to identify organizations that funded or supported violence against conservatives. The goal, they said, was to categorize left-wing activity that led to violence as domestic terrorism, an escalation that critics said could lay the groundwork for crushing anti-conservative dissent more broadly. — NY Times

This, from the President who pardoned more than a thousand felons convicted of looting the Capital Building on 6th January 2021. The hypocrisy of this administration knows no bounds.

On the hand, would a quantum computer care? Would it be driven to come up with better decisions when it does not have a body screaming, "something has to be done". — Athena

THAT is the big question!

You need to start trying to grasp my reasons for considering physicalism, as I described above, instead of attacking a strawman. There are no facts about dark matter and energy to be accounted for. With regard to QM: there is no fact regarding which interpretation is correct. An interpretation is a metaphysical hypothesis, and physicalism is consistent with most of them. — Relativist

I'm not attacking a strawman - you’re treating “the facts of science” as if they were metaphysically transparent, a window to 'how the universe truly is', when they are plainly not. You say physicalism is the “inference to best explanation” from all the facts. Yet what counts as fact in science is already theory-laden. Quantum mechanics provides experimental regularities, but the interpretations of what those regularities mean about reality are metaphysically contested. To say physicalism is “consistent with most interpretations” is just to admit that physics itself doesn’t decide the metaphysical question.

And then there’s the incompleteness issue. Even if you bracket dark matter and energy, you’re still working with a framework that according to its own posits provides for only a minute percentage of the totality of the cosmos and leaves many questions about it own foundations unresolved. How can that be invoked as the basis of a metaphysics as 'first philosophy', when it is plainly contingent in nature.

There are academics and scientists, some of whom say that quantum physics proves that the universe is mental, others who claim that it shows there are infinitely many worlds, and yet others who say that quantum physics is simply wrong. So if physicalism is consistent with wildly divergent interpretations of what physics means, how could it be meaningful?

you reject the account I've given that universals exist immanently. — Relativist

You say universals “exist immanently as constituents of states of affairs.” But what does that really mean? If I say “this apple is larger than that plum,” the 'larger than relation' is not something you can isolate in either piece of fruit. It’s not inherent in either object, but grasped by an intellect making the comparison.

That’s why I say such relations are not “immanent” in objects but imputed to them by reason. They are formal judgements. Armstrong’s ontology tries to locate them in the furniture of the world, without acknowledging that they are in a fundamental sense dependent on the mind which recognises them.

I GAVE you an opening, by admitting there's an issue with the "hard problem", so that I was willing to entertain the "negative fact" (actually a negative hypothesis) that there's something about the mind that is non-physical. — Relativist

You say I've been vague, but I’ve been quite explicit. Let me spell it out.

First: the hard problem, as Chalmers framed it in his original paper, is about experience. There is information-processing in the brain, but there is also the first-person, subjective aspect — what Nagel called something it is like to be a conscious organism. That “what-it-is-like” is experience, and objective, third-person accounts don’t capture it:



Second: this stems from the constitution of modern science since Galileo, which gave primary reality to the measurable, objective domain and relegated how phenomena appear in experience to the secondary domain of the subjective. Physicalism inherits this stance, but in doing so it excludes something very obvious: the subject to whom a theory is meaningful, the very mind that provides the definitions and draws the conclusions (which, incidentally, is also what shows up in 'the observer problem' in quantum physics.)

Third: The problem is that you can only conceive of what is not physical as a 'non-physical thing'. You request 'evidence' of 'some non-physical thing', but that is because of the objectivism that is inherent in the physicalist attitude. The 'non-physical' is not 'out there somewhere', it is in the way the mind constructs a coherent and unified world from the disparate elements of science, sense-data and judgement. This insight is, of course, fundamental to Kant, and was developed further by phenomenology.

So: the mind is not outside the physicalist scope because it’s a spooky Cartesian “thinking thing” or ghost in the machine. It’s excluded because it is not an object of cognition at all, but the seat of cognition — the condition that makes objects intelligible in the first place. Demanding “evidence of a non-physical thing” only shows how objectivism presupposes what it cannot see. This is why Kant, and later phenomenology, makes the constitutive role of mind explicit. Physicalism of Armstrong's variety methodically screens this out, or ignores this fundamental fact. Hence the critique given in 'The Blind Spot of Science'.

So I don't accept that these are vague arguments. Perhaps you might actually address them.

Ask AI if a quantum computer could be considered a conscious, sentient being.

Have you looked into quantum computers? — Athena

I've read up on them. Currently, they don't actually exist, and there is still some skepticism that they will operate as intended. But I still believe that of they do come to fruition, that while they can emulate aspects of consciousness, they won't be conscious sentient beings as such.

I mentioned Vervaeke’s series Awakening from the Meaning Crisis, which addresses similar themes. It is much broader than philosophy as such, it’s a study in the history of ideas and cultural evolution. But I think the underlying idea is also found in Max Horkheimer’s book The Eclipse of Reason: that Western culture has lost faith in the principle of normative reason.

I know you feel that way :wink:

I very much want to know why it is, how it can be the case that the supernatural (non-pejoratively) arises within the natural. I believe this is the explanation of reason that Nagel also wants. Considered from a certain angle, there is something absolutely fantastic, or fantastical, about it -- how could such a fact have arisen? — J

The way I think about it is very much shaped by evolution (and anthropology) in that whatever is said about it must be able to accomodate the facts that have been disclosed by science about evolution. But the way I think about it is that h.sapiens crossed a threshold, past which they are no longer determined in purely biological terms and in that sense have transcended biology (not that we're not still biological beings). A large part of that is bound up with reason, language, symbolic thought, and technē. (Terrence Deacon explores this in his book The Symbolic Species. It is also the main area in which Alfred Russel Wallace differed with Charles Darwin for which see his Darwinism Applied to Man.)

So with the benefit of hindsight, we now know that we can grasp 'the idea of equals' (The Phaedo, referred to above) not because 'the soul learned it prior to this life' but because h.sapiens, the symbolic species, is uniquely able to perceive such 'truths of reason'. But then again, how different are those two accounts, really? Plato may not have understood the biological descent of h.sapiens, but we now believe that we first appeared perhaps 100,000 years prior. Considering the amount of time that has passed between us and Plato, that is a very, very large number of generations. Surely there was the discovery of fire, of art, language, story-telling, and so on. So Plato's surmise that the ability to perceive the ideas was acquired 'prior to this life' may be considered a mythological encoding of prior cultural and biological evolution.

So maybe the “absolutely fantastic” fact isn’t that reason is supernatural intruding into nature, but that nature itself is fecund enough to give rise to symbolic beings whose grasp of universals is more than merely biological. That’s both a naturalistic story and a recognition that reason points beyond naturalism.

Have you read Logos, by Raymond Tallis? A good discussion of this issue. — J

Thanks for the tip. I have Aping Mankind but not that one. Reading about it, it seems just the kind of book that discusses this issue, The Symbolic Species being another.

Another thing is that in the pre-modern world, the possibility of the world being the product of blind chance and physical energy was barely conceivable. There might have been individuals that would believe such things, but the pre-modern vision of the Cosmos was of a harmonious and rational whole - which is what 'Cosmos' actually means. Alexander Koyre's book From Closed World to Infinite Universe is all about that. So within the context, 'reason' was naturally assumed to be 'higher' in the sense that it was nearer to the source or ground of being, whether that was conceived in theistic terms or not (for example in Plotinus). Whereas reason when seen in terms of adaptation naturally tends to 'deflate' it to the instrumental or pragmatic - it looses that sense of connection with any form of extra-human intelligence. Hence the prevailing view that reason is 'the product of' the hominid brain.


From Alexander Koyré

(Vervaeke considers a similar idea in one of his lectures The Death of the Universe.)

Do you agree there is no good reason to doubt that the standard model identifies the physical composition of everything that exists (setting aside the mystery of dark matter and dark energy)? — Relativist

But how can you 'set aside' the posit that current physics accounts for 4% of the totality of the universe? And the entrenched controversies around the whole question of the interpretation of physics and what is says about the nature of reality? You really need to read some more in this subject.

I've explained the actual relationship between science and physicalism, and you choose to ignore what I said and repeat your false understanding. — Relativist

Remind me! Everything you've said in this exchange is predicated on equating the model of physics with a philosophy of everything. You're simply abstracting what you think are 'existents' from the models of physics as the basis for philosophy, when the very nature of the existence of these forces and entities is still very much an open question.

You've brought up a number of mental activities you considered "obvious" that are easily accounted for in physicalism, so your judgement of what is "obvious" is suspect. — Relativist

What I consider 'obvious' is that the observer or subject is implicitly present in physicalism, but has been suppressed for methodological reasons.

So you embrace a the platonic principle that (at least some) abstractions have objective existence — Relativist

‘Transcendental’ is not the same as ‘objective’. Universals are transcendental because they transcend the specific forms in which they are instantiated. For example a number can be represented by a variety of different symbolic forms but still retain its identity. As Bertrand Russell said, ‘universals are not thoughts, though when known they appear as thoughts.’

I ran across the following state by (Christian, dualist) pholosopher Ed Feser: — Relativist

He is saying the exact opposite of what you describe him as saying. He is saying that Churchlands and Dennett are 'clueless' for suggesting that 'there is no good reason to think that the mind will fail to yield to the same sort of reductive explanation in terms of which everything else in nature has been accounted for.'

This conversation has been going on since 5th November 2024 - I happen to remember, as it was the date of the US presidential election. And I think it's run it's course. Thanks and so long.

How are they properties of the universe? If all beings die. Where are the properties? — Jack2848

Some properties are recognised by the rational mind as being real independently of the mind, but only perceptible to reason, such as 'the idea of equals' (two different things being the same.) It is just the invariance of these that leads to them being associated with immortality. See Idea of Equals in Phaedo

Yes currently it doesn't seem like there is a neural correlate or specific way reality acts when the idea of a circle arises. — Jack2848

I suspect the problem you're wrestling with is the idea that the brain 'in here' represents the world 'out there' by way of creating a model, such that a shape or form has a neural correlate. But I think it's a simplistic view of what concepts are and how they operate. Can a concept be tied to any specific neural form, when it can be represented in so many diverse symbolic forms? Of course, that's a very big question, but it's something to think about.

inside reasoning is non meta reasoning. And must be used to determine truth of an argument generally. Rather than using a meta lens like psychology or sociology or genetics. — Jack2848

Yes, that's right. Typical 'outside' claims, of the type Nagel is criticising in that essay, are claims that attempt to justifiy reason based on evolutionary biology.

Scientific materialism and science are not the same.

//Neils Bohr said 'It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how Nature is. Physics concerns what we can say about Nature.'

That is neither polemic nor rhetoric.//

You're conflating the mental act of counting with four-ness. A group of 4 geese has a property in common with a group of 4 pebbles, whereas a group of 3 trees lacks this property. This property of four-ness is ontological. It exists irrespective of human minds or anyone doing a count. — Relativist

It’s ontological but not physical - an intellectual act which enables the recognition of abstractions. The property can only be recognised by a mind capable of counting. Real numbers are independent of any particular mind, but they can only be grasped by a mind. And they're certainly not physical.

Let's be clear: physics theory makes the theoretical claim that everything in the material world (the domain of physics) is made of particles. It's a claim supported by evidence and theory. — Relativist

You’re talking atomism. Ever since Heisenberg discovered uncertainty - 100 years ago as it happens - the possibility of atoms as ultimate point-particles has been undermined (or undetermined). Nowadays atoms are conceptualised as excitations of fields, and the ontological status of fields is far from settled. It is well known that the equations of quantum physics show that particles can be in superposition, i.e. have no definite location. This is incidentally one of the things that caused Einstein to ask that question. Nowadays, interpretation of physics with realist vs anti-realist arguments is still the basis of controversy which mitigates against the kind of physicalist realism you're proposing.

You're the one insisting physicalism is false on the basis of the "something", but you have no answers as to what it is (other than an additional negative fact: not an object). — Relativist

I made it perfectloy explicit:

There is something very obvious that it excludes, as I've already said time and again. And you don't notice or acknowledge what it is - you basically gloss over it or ignore it. And what is that 'something'? Why, it is the subject to whom a theory is meaningful, the mind that provides the definitions and draws the conclusions. — Wayfarer

The fact that you ignored it makes my argument for me!

Truth is not a property that objects have; rather it is a label we apply to some statements. Logic applies to statements. Meaning is a mental association, not a physical property. Intentions are behavioral. — Relativist

Well your screen name is ‘Relativist’, and you're preaching relativism.

As for 'special pleading', it's physicalism that does this. It appeals to physics as the basis of its ontology, but when presented with the inconvenient fact that today's physics seems to undermine physicalism, it will say it is 'not bound by physics'.

As for philosophical idealism, the one apodictic fact it begins with is the one proposed by Descartes - cogito ergo sum. Whereas physicalism attempts to account for that in terms of the objects the ultimate nature of which is indeterminable in the absence of an observer.

that was certainly an attempt to explain how reason can be, and do, what it is and does. — J

I believe that for pre-modern culture, it was always assumed that things happen for reasons. This of course is the subject of causality, which is still an open question in today's culture. But here's one point: for the Greeks, reason was understood to be top-down. The cosmos reflected an order and intelligence, an intuition which, as I said, later became absorbed by theology and associated with it. But our understanding of reason is resolutely bottom-up: rreason is an evolved capacity that has developed through aeons of evolutonary development. Its precursor was itself non-rational (not to say irrational). So now the task seems to be to 'explain' reason - this I take to be the task that the 'natiuralisation of reason' has set itself.

This also has its critics in modern philosophy - Jerrold Katz and Hilary Putnam, among others. I;ve tried to read Katz and he really does require post-graduate level understanding of analytic philosophy to understand what he's criticising. 'Putnam criticises the naturalisation of reason because reason is normative and self-corrective, not a natural phenomenon reducible to psychology or biology; to explain away norms is to undermine the very rational standards that science and philosophy themselves presuppose.' I think this is somewhat similar to Nagel's criticism in The Last Word. All of it amounts to the attempt to 'explain' reason in empiricist or evolutionary terms. But reason is what explains, not what is to be explained.

Big picture, the 'principle of sufficient reason' is nowadays scorned or at least deprecated on the grounds that reason is an anthropomorphism, a human adaption to an irrational universe. Whereas in the classical traditon, human reason reflects the Logos, the universal reason of the cosmos. I find the latter intrinsically more satisfying, as it provides a natural place for reason in the grand scheme, instead of it being an adventitious adaption. I think that's where my Christian intellectual background still holds sway.

That depends on whether the thinking is binary or qubits. — Athena

Thinking is neither. Computers can encode ideas in symnolic form, but computers do not think.

Hey, ChatGPT: do computers think?

ChatGPT: No, computers do not think - at least not in the way humans do.

A calculator can "solve" math problems instantly, but it doesn't understand numbers or why math works. The same applies to AI and more complex tasks.

I was the emphasis on hallucinogens that dampened my enthusiasm for Glattfelder’s book. It’s been many decades since my ingestion of lysergines. There were certainly remarkable hallucinations many of which were marked by astonishing apparent lucidity. But the most significant aspect was the awakening to the indescribable beauty of life itself, plants and trees seeming to possess a kind of luminous aliveness and perfection, and the sense that this sense of heightened awareness was reality itself.

As for the paranormal, I’m an open-minded sceptic. I don’t think it will ever be proven to exist, but I know that telepathy happens, it can’t simply be explained away. I think it’s possible that there are fields other than electromagnetic fields, something like Sheldrake’s morphic fields, but that can’t be detected by electronic instruments.