It’s a dark day in history when the US refuses to condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine at the UN, because Trump :heart: Putin.

. Which means that I can be dead (the worldly self) and the "I am" is still originally self-evident. — JuanZu

Is this at all related to the immortality of the soul?

The multiple appearances are not single separate beads following one another; they are “threaded” by the identity continuing within them all. As Husserl puts it, “Each single percept in this series is already a percept of the thing. Whether I look at this book from above or below, from inside or outside, I always see this book. It is always one and the same thing.”

‘transcendental unity of apperception’.

A potentially significant judgement - from NY Times (I’m all out of gift links):

A federal judge in Washington said on Monday that the way the Trump administration set up and has been running Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency may violate the Constitution.

The skepticism expressed by the judge, Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, did not come as part of a binding ruling, but it suggested that there could be problems looming for Mr. Musk’s organization, which is also known as the U.S. DOGE Service.

“Based on the limited record I have before me, I have some concerns about the constitutionality of U.S.D.S.’s structure and operations,” Judge Kollar-Kotelly said at a hearing in Federal District Court in Washington. She expressed particular concern that it violated the appointments clause of the Constitution, which requires leaders of federal agencies to be nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate. Mr. Musk was neither nominated nor confirmed.

….

At the hearing, Judge Kollar-Kotelly repeatedly asked a lawyer for the government, Bradley Humphreys, to identify the service’s administrator. He was unable to answer her.

Judge Kollar-Kotelly also asked Mr. Humphreys what position Mr. Musk holds. Mr. Humphreys responded that Mr. Musk was not the DOGE Service’s administrator, or even an employee of the organization, echoing what a White House official had declared in a separate case challenging the powers of the group.

When the judge pressed him on what Mr. Musk’s job actually was, Mr. Humphreys said, “I don’t have any information beyond he’s a close adviser to the president.”

That exchange seemed to irk Judge Kollar-Kotelly, who signaled her skepticism about the organization’s structure and powers.

“It does seem to me if you have people that are not authorized to carry out some of these functions that they’re carrying out that does raise an issue,” she said. “I would hope that by now we would know who is the administrator, who is the acting administrator and what authority do they have?” — Judge Questions Constitutionality of Musk’s Cost-Cutting Operation, NY Times

It’s a very transparent tactic - nobody is responsible for these massive disruptions and layoffs to the Federal workforce.

Indeed. Which is a perfect segue to

Part IV: Detachment East…

Interestingly, the Stoic concept of the Logos bears a striking resemblance to the Chinese notion of the Tao, the Way. Both represent a fundamental principle of order and harmony underlying and animating both Nature and the Cosmos. Just as the Stoics believed that living in accordance with the Logos brings freedom and equanimity, so too does the Tao emphasize flowing with the natural order of things, free from attachment to personal desires or rigid expectations.

While the Tao is often associated with Daoism, its influence also extends into Ch’an (Chinese) and Zen (Japanese) Buddhism, where detachment takes on a uniquely contemplative and meditative dimension. Zen emphasizes direct experience and letting go of conceptual thought to grasp reality as it truly is — which in Buddhist terminology is called yathābhūtaṃ.

Accordingly, an invocation of serene detachment is made in the famous Zen poem Hsin Hsin Min, from the Third Patriarch of Zen, the first stanza of which reads:

The Great Way is not difficult for those who have no preferences. When love and hate are both absent, everything becomes clear and undisguised. Make the smallest distinction, however, and heaven and earth are set infinitely apart. If you wish to see the truth, then hold no opinions for, or against, anything. To set up what you like against what you dislike is the disease of the mind¹¹.

This principle of detachment goes back to the earliest Buddhist texts, where ‘philosophical views and opinions’ are described as ‘writhings and thickets of views’, and virtue obtains in the relinquishing of views. And, since the first step on the Eightfold Path is samma ditthi, ‘right view’, it turns out that ‘right view’ is no view, in the sense of not holding to opinions or arguing for philosophical positions. The Buddha denies holding views about questions normally considered essential to philosophy, such as whether the Universe is eternal or infinite, or not, or whether the soul is the same or different to the body. In this dialogue from the early Buddhist texts, the questioner asks:

“Does Master Gotama have any position at all?”

“A ‘position,’ Vaccha, is something that the Buddha has done away with.”¹²

This is an expression of the understanding of emptiness, śūnyatā, often mis-translated as ‘the void’, but in reality, again resonant with the phenomenological epochē, the suspension of judgement:

Emptiness is a mode of perception, a way of looking at experience. It adds nothing to and takes nothing away from the raw data of physical and mental events. You look at events in the mind and the senses with no thought of whether there’s anything lying behind them.

This mode is called emptiness because it’s empty of the presuppositions we usually add to experience to make sense of it: the stories and world-views we fashion to explain who we are and to define the world we live in. Although these stories and views have their uses, the Buddha found that some of the more abstract questions they raise — of our true identity and the reality of the world outside — pull attention away from a direct experience of how events influence one another in the immediate present. So they get in the way when we try to understand…¹³

The point of this, and the element that Buddhism and phenomenology have in common, is paying close attention to — or having mindful awareness of— the qualities and attributes of experience and sensation as they arise and fall away. It is having the clarity of awareness to see each moment of experience as it is. Buddhist meditation is a way of amplfying or magnifying that close attention to the nature of lived existence, moment by moment. It is insight into that process which deconstructs the habitual sense of oneself. This is not by any means a simple or trivial undertaking, and indeed in Buddhist cultures, is the basis of an entire way-of-being, emphasising the virtue of renounciation and compassion as the way to detachment from purely personal concerns.

…and West

The supreme value of detachment was often the subject of the sermons of the famed Meister Eckhart. A medieval monastic and mystic, Eckhart is a seminal figure in the history of spiritual philosophy, who challenged prevailing norms — to the point where towards the end of his life, he was accused of heresy — but whose insights have been prized by generations of seekers since his day. His reflections on detachment (Gelassenheit) reveal a profound understanding of transcendence and freedom from ego, resonating across spiritual traditions.

Now you may ask what this detachment is that is so noble in itself. You should know that true detachment is nothing else but a mind that stands unmoved by all accidents of joy or sorrow, honour, shame or disgrace, as a mountain of lead stands unmoved by a breath of wind. …

You should know that the outer man can be active while the inner man is completely free of this activity and unmoved … Here is an analogy: a door swings open and shuts on its hinge. I would compare the outer woodwork of the door to the outer man and the hinge to the inner man. When the door opens and shuts, the boards move back and forth but the hinge stays in the same place and is never moved thereby. It is the same in this case if you understand it rightly.

Now I ask: What is the object of pure detachment? My answer is that the object of pure detachment is neither this nor that. It rests on absolutely nothing and I will tell you why: pure detachment rests on the highest and he is at his highest, in whom God can work all His will … And so, if the heart is ready to receive the highest, it must rest on absolutely nothing…¹³

Conclusion

It’s important to re-state that nothing in the above should be taken to deprecate the scientific method, which has proven extraordinarily powerful in ways that our pre-modern forbears could not have even imagined. But, as the saying has it, ‘with great power comes great responsibility’, and there’s an important sense in which an over-reliance on objectivity enables us to sidestep many larger questions about the nature and meaning of our own existence. Objective judgement, you might say, has a shadow side.

Science was born out of the quest for Truth, capital T, yet the fascination with its powers and potentialities can sometimes obscure larger questions of meaning. Philosophical detachment, the wellspring of scientific objectivity, offers a more expansive perspective — one that embraces our existence as living beings, inextricably connected to the world we seek to understand. By marrying the rigor of objectivity with the wisdom of detachment, we may find a more holistic way to see ‘things as they truly are,’ enriching both our knowledge and our humanity.

---------
11. The Great Way (retrieved 14th Jan 2025)
12. Aggi-Vachagotta Sutta MN72
13. What is Emptiness?Bhikkhu Thanissaro
14. Meister Eckhardt: On Detachment

:up:

Believing that there was a time before humans is mind-dependent. There being a time before humans, isn't. — Banno

Time itself is mind-dependent. Given that, we know there was a time before h.sapiens evolved. The two levels, again. It is logically possible that the Universe and everything in it was created so as to appear to have a specific duration. It's the evil daemon argument all over again.

Horses' mouth.

'The world' outside any mind has no structure or any features.
— Wayfarer

You can't know that. that's the step too far. All you can say is that you do not know what that structure might be. At least until it is understood, by coming "inside" the mind. — Banno

No, I reject that emphatically. Again, 'before h.sapiens existed' is itself mind-dependent. That doesn't mean it is all in the mind.

Yours is the act of faith.

Interesting and not something I'm familiar with. I've been reading Jonas' book of late, which I find overall amenable (not finished it.) I'm familiar with Evan Thompson's background, his father's book, which I also had in the dim distant past, and his recent Why I am Not a Buddhist. I've also listened to a couple of interviews with him. In the Why I am Not a Buddhist, he deprecated 'Buddhist modernism' and the claim that Buddhism is a 'science of mind', saying that it is and should be understood as a religious practice and culture. But in one interview about it, he said he's by no means hostile to Buddhism, in the way Bertrand Russell's Why I am Not a Christian was hostile to Christianity.

I'll try and find time to read that paper.

The 'metanarrative' I see life as embedded in, is what Buddhists call saṃsāra - the cycle of birth and death, extending back into an unknowably distant past. I think I'm on board with that. Concommitant to it is the promise of release from Saṃsāra, meaning going beyond it, not being entangled in it in future lives. Again, I'm tentatively open to that, although maybe not completely convinced or cognisant of its meaning, but the salient point is, I think 'enlightenment' (or the original term from which that was translated was 'bodhi') does indeed mean 'seeing things truly' or 'things as they really are'. We'll get to that in the next part!

Nothing odd about that, except that the world already has some structure apart from that mind, and hence novelty, error and agreement. — Banno

But it doesn't, Banno. 'The world' outside any mind has no structure or any features. Structure and features are imposed on it by the mind. This doesn't mean that the structure and features are invented from whole cloth, either. They are dependent on the kinds of beings we are. Human beings will naturally see features and structures that are determinable in accordance with their sensory capabilities and prior understanding. In one sense, they pre-exist the mind discovering them, but in another, they're dependent on our consensus agreement - weights and measures, units of distance and duration, qualities and quantitative attributes, which we decide and inter-subjectively agree on.

And it's not a panpsychic undermind, but the mind - the mind that you and I and every other sentient being is an instance of. Granted, perhaps something like Hegel's geist (although I'm no Hegel scholar.)

The point about time, again, and this is a thread about time, is simply that it cannot be said to be real, in the absence of an observer.

The problem of including the observer in our description of physical reality arises most insistently when it comes to the subject of quantum cosmology - the application of quantum mechanics to the universe as a whole - because, by definition, 'the universe' must include any observers.

Andrei Linde has given a deep reason for why observers enter into quantum cosmology in a fundamental way. It has to do with the nature of time. The passage of time is not absolute; it always involves a change of one physical system relative to another, for example, how many times the hands of the clock go around relative to the rotation of the Earth. When it comes to the Universe as a whole, time looses its meaning, for there is nothing else relative to which the universe may be said to change. This 'vanishing' of time for the entire universe becomes very explicit in quantum cosmology, where the time variable simply drops out of the quantum description. It may readily be restored by considering the Universe to be separated into two subsystems: an observer with a clock, and the rest of the Universe. — Paul Davies, The Goldilocks Enigma: Why is the Universe Just Right for Life, p 271

Run along now Banno. Enjoy your sandwiches.

Yet you say that this too is created by mind. — Banno

Important to know that this is true in one way, but not in another. It is empirically true that there is vast world outside my knowledge of it - heck, I only know two or three people in my street. You think that is what is meant by 'mind', hence it makes no sense to you. But there's another meaning in play, another sense of 'mind' altogether - not the personal, individual ego, but mind as it structures our experience-of-the-world. But I know that is likely to trip you up, as you'll probably say, what is that? What evidence can there be for it? Which is already to ask a wrong question, as it presumes it is something you're outside of. (This came up in the Rödl thread.)

That's why Kant acknowledges that transcendental idealism and empirical realism do not have to conflict, per Kant and Empirical Realism (Larval Subjects).

That's enough out of me, I have to do some quotidian chores.

These processes do not occur for a grain of sand (again, leaving aside strong arguments for panpsychism). — J

They're my feelings, also. I'm learning a lot from the readings of the various postmodernist philosophers, but I don't share with them the distrust of the meta-narrative. I see life as being utterly embedded in one. (Note to self - dig out Huston Smith's essay in The Truth about the Truth, Walt Anderson.)

No, I have not backtracked. You asked three questions, about novelty, error and consensus, and I addressed them, with reference to transcendental idealism. What you think are 'my claims' is not what I'm actually claiming.

Your reading is underwritten by an emotional commitment to realism (whether naive, scientific or metaphysical). But your return to the objects of domesticity - crockery and cutlery, cups in the cupboard - reassures you of the reality of the common-sense world. It is also why you so often express both resentment and hostility in this matter - because it threatens the common-sense understanding of the world. I can sense the exasperation in your posts - how can he say that? that is preposterous! They're not written to provoke, but this matter does provoke, because it calls into question one's innate sense of how the world is. But then, isn't that part and parcel of philosophy proper?

But to admit agreement, error and novelty, you have to admit that sometimes our beliefs can be incorrect - can be at odds with how things are. — Banno

Again, if you read carefully, you would have understood it was something I was not obliged to deny in the first place. It is only characteristic of what you think I said.

So is there stuff that is independent of mind, or not? — Banno

It's not a yes/no question.

This is the bit where you walk back your own claims, were you are obliged to agree that there is a world that is independent of what you or I believe. — Banno

I never said otherwise! It's only your continuous and tendentious misreading of what I'm saying that is at issue.

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. — Wayfarer

With that in mind, there are three questions that I'd like answered. Firstly, how is it that there are novelties? How is it that we come across things that are unexpected? A novelty is something that was not imagined, that was not in one's "particular cognitive apparatus". If the world is a creation of the mind, whence something that is not a product of that mind? — Banno

As always you misconstrue the nature of 'mind'. What you are saying is that idealism claims that the world is the creation of your mind, or my mind, or at least some individual's mind. That is not what is being claimed, it is an all-or-nothing interpretation of the matter. As I've often pointed out Kant himself acknowledged the validity of empirical realism - within its scope. Kant took pains to differentiate himself from Berkeley in this regard, describing Berkeley's idealism is problematic and dogmatic. Kant does not deny that there is an objective realm and a world separate to the individual mind. So your criticism of idealism is based on a too simplistic an idea of what is being argued for.

Kant’s transcendental idealism does not claim that the world is a mere figment of individual minds, but rather that the structure of experience is provided by our shared and inherent cognitive systems. Novelty emerges from new external data interacting with our fixed frameworks. In Kant’s view, while the mind supplies the framework for experience, it must work in tandem with the manifold of sensory impressions. The unexpected quality of new data is what we call “novelty.” It doesn’t imply that the mind conjured it from nothing—it simply had to update its organization in response to an input that wasn’t fully anticipated.

Error occurs when our interpretations fail to match that data. When someone holds a belief that is incorrect, it is because there's a mismatch between their mental constructs and what is going on. Although our experience is structured by the mind, it still emanates from the external world. A belief is in error when that mental structure misrepresents or fails to adequately capture the sensible data.

Consensus arises because we all operate with fundamentally similar mental structures. This preserves the objectivity of the external world while acknowledging the active role our minds play in organizing experience.

Remember my argument is that what we regard as mind-independent has an ineluctably subjective element or ground, which itself is never revealed in empirical analysis. Not that the world is 'all in the mind' in the simplistic sense in which you will always take it.

how things are remains — Banno

The referent for that proposition is wholly and solely within your mind. That is one thing that is wholly 'mind-created'.

there are plenty of philosophies and even religions of the world which do not place us humans in arrogance over nature. Whose core ideas is about accepting ourselves to be a meaningless cog in the whole that is nature and the universe. — Christoffer

For instance? The only example that stands out to me is Albert Camus.

Science communicators are usually closer to this bridge of explaining the truths of nature and the universe into a comprehensible subjective construct that we use to understand the world around us, but a scientist can also be the one who sift through raw data and mathematically discover something that does not have any interpretational properties. How one equation connects and intersect with another is not able to exist as a subjective experience, it is simply pure logic. — Christoffer

The 'comprehensive subjective construct' sounds much like Kuhn's use of 'paradigm', a framework of scientific practice that defines the accepted theories, methods, and assumptions within a given scientific community.

Scientists, I'm sure, and scientific instruments, sift massive amounts of raw data today - I mean, the amounts of data generated by the LHC and the James Webb are almost incomprehensibly enormous. But surely the aim is always to integrate the data with the hypothesis, or alternatively develop new hypotheses to account for any anomalous data. What would something 'without any interpretational properties' be, in that context? And what would it mean? The difference between 'data' and 'information' is precisely that the latter means something. So if you mean by that data which does not have interpretational properties, then how could that mean anything? Wouldn't it just be the white noise, meaningless data, that is to be sifted out?

if scientific objectivity, if scientific research arrived at a conclusion that aligned with religion and spiritualism, that there is a place after death, a meaning to the universe and our existence, and that we actually found it.

How would you then think of scientific objectivity in relation to meaning and our subjective qualitative dimension of existence? — Christoffer

You're not seeing the broader epistemological point at issue. Modern scientific method begins in exclusion, idealisation and abstraction. It is an intellectual and practical methodology for framing what kinds of questions are meaningful to explore and what to exclude, and what kinds of factors ought to be taken into account in framing and exploring them. As I explain in Section One, The Cartesian Division, central to that method is the division of res cogitans, mind, and extensa, matter, on the one side, and primary attributes of bodies on one side, opposed to the secondary attributes, on the other. That is a construct. It is not and could never be 'naturally occuring' or 'part of nature'. It is thoroughly grounded in the acknowledged and conscious separateness from nature on the part of the scientist.

So what you're saying is tantamount to asking 'hey, what if the James Webb discovered Heaven out there amongst the stars? Wouldn't that change your attitude to science?' Your question is based on misconstruing the premise of the argument. You're looking through scientific method, not at it (which also applies to @Philosophim).

I'd argue that stoicism is a form of desperate detachment out of fear of engagement. — Christoffer

Not a credible criticism, based on any dispassionate reading of the texts.

I've experienced it myself while studying the nature of prediction coding in relation to experience; how our brain operate and take action before our conscious awareness of it. Thinking deep about this, meditating on it, it effectively making me aware of that process happening can trigger an almost panic attack as... — Christoffer

...it became evident that the self is a mental construct


---

We only run the danger of being ‘carried away’ or ‘owned’ by our feelings and thoughts when we reify them, isolate and unitize them into ‘this and only this’. We cut ourselves off from the meaningful whole context of feeling and thought when we do this. — Joshs

I don't think that conveys the sense of philosophical detachment that is implicit in the traditional sources, Stoic and others. I think they too had an intuitive sense of the sense in which 'the world' is a mental construct, and how the attachment to sense-pleasures, possessions and identity is inimical to peace of mind.

Agree with Zahavi.

I think there needs to be a sense of enquiry, of wanting to understand.

It does seem to be the case that our mind - our particular cognitive apparatus, with its characteristics and limitations - 'creates' the world we experience from an undifferentiated reality. — Tom Storm

Earlier today I was served up yet another youtube talk on this very thing, by an Oxford cognitive scientist (which I almost posted but decided not to). I do see a strong connection between cognitivism and philosophical idealism. I can't see how it's plausibly deniable, although from experience here, it seems mostly misunderstood, and it also triggers a lot of resistance. 'What? You mean you think the world is all in your mind :rage: ?!?'

Do you think that this noumena or preconceptual world might be something like an undivided whole? A major part of higher consciousness seems to be effort to go behind appearances and in some way engage with this. — Tom Storm

The way I'm currently thinking about it, is that the in-itself, the world as it would be outside any conception of it, is not anything, by definition. In fact, perhaps even Kant errs calling it 'ding an sich' ('thing in itself') because it implies identity, a thing-ness. I prefer simply the 'in itself'.

Those terms, noumenal and noumena, are laden with many meanings. Prior to Kant, 'noumenal' meant 'an object of pure intellect' (nous). But Kant adopted the term within his own framework and put his own particular meaning on it. It lends itself to a kind of speculation, but wondering what is 'beyond' or 'behind' or 'above' appearances is like thinking about what might be beyond thought (I think :yikes: )

Perhaps the most valuable thing we can do is puncture our arrogance: the assumption that we truly know the world, that there is a singular reality upon which we should all agree. — Tom Storm

Well, part of me wants to say there is. But that that world is not simply the world defined in terms of sense-experience and empiricism. There is much more to it, but that 'more' is not another intellectual construct. I was indelibly impressed by a quote attributed to Heraclitus by John Fowles, in The Aristos. 'The many live each in their own private world', he said, 'while those who are awake have but one world in common.'

hmm. I think it's very much your own interpretation, but I will yield the floor for now.

Hey you’ll like this one. I was discussing Chalmers with Chuck (as I now refer to ChatGPT) and we were both of the view that Daniel Dennett’s eliminative materialism is basically self-refuting. I mused:

One does wonder, were there a Hereafter, would this have finally become clear to him - but I guess we’ll never know! — Wayfarer

Yes, one does wonder! If there were a Hereafter, one imagines Dennett waking up, blinking in surprise, and muttering, Well, I’ll be damned…—before immediately trying to explain it away in computational terms. Perhaps he would spend eternity trapped in a Bayesian updating loop, endlessly refining a theory that can never quite account for his own postmortem awareness.

But, as you say, we’ll never know. Unless, of course, we do. — Chuck

I particularly liked that closing remark. :cool:

So the "I am" has full meaning and evidence even if in fact I am dead. How is this possible? — JuanZu

I can't see that at all. The paragraphs that I've just been studying are those concerning his critique of naturalism:



Here, he's saying that while logical laws have a priori justifications, so-called 'natural laws' can only be inductive. He's dealing with the paradox of how consciousness, which is always perspectival and structured by intentionality, can give us access to an objective world at all. He challenges the naïve realism of natural science, which assumes that it simply describes a world that exists independently of any observer. So in a key sense, it confuses observed with logical causality, and then mistakenly attributes to the former, the certainty that properly only belongs to the latter.

One of Husserl’s key insights here is that the structure of consciousness itself is not incidental to how things appear to us—it constitutes the manner in which objects are given. The naturalist assumption that there is a reality “in itself,” wholly independent of the mind, runs into difficulty when we ask how it is that we can know this reality at all. As the passage suggests, merely accumulating experiences does not in itself explain the coherence of knowledge, nor does it explain why subjective acts of consciousness can make statements that claim objective validity.

This is where Husserl’s phenomenology originates—not in denying the reality of the world, but in questioning how the world is disclosed to us. His method, the epochē or phenomenological reduction, brackets assumptions about the apparently mind-independent existence of objects in order to examine the object-as-experienced. What he reveals is that objectivity is not something simply found in the world but something constituted through intentional acts of consciousness.

You continually mistake the limits of your understanding, for those of others. That’s why I stopped interacting with you a few months ago - oh, that, and you telling me I’m full of shit - a policy I will now resume.

nothing exists without the mind — Janus

As I’ve patiently explained many times, I do not say that nothing exists without the mind. I say that without the mind, there can be neither existence nor non-existence. The idea that the universe ceases to exist outside of any mind is simply imagining its non-existence. That too is a mental representation.

The error that I’m pointing to, is taking the mind-independence assumed by naturalism as a metaphysical axiom or a statement about the actual nature of reality. That’s where the actual confusion lies. What reality is outside the purview of an observer is precisely what Kant means by the ‘in itself’. It is not nothing, but it is also not anything. (Although @Banno has a grain of truth in pointing out that really nothing can be said of it, it is nevertheless required to sometimes point out what it is that nothing can be said about. )

…the claims of transcendental idealism disclose their own non-absurdity only after difficult consideration, whereas criticisms of them at first appear cogent which on examination are seen to rest on confusion. — Bryan Magee, Schopenhauer’s Philosophy

The US Speaker, Mike Johnson, is a young Earth creationist, holding that the Earth is about 6000 years — jorndoe

He should tell Trump there’s no use drilling for oil, then.

Thought I’d mention this given how common it is for westerners to associate “detachment” to utter unconcern, including relative to the welfare of other beings in general. — javra

Excellent point! I have noticed in Mahāyāna Buddhism, there is a lovely expression, that emptiness and compassion are like the two wings of a bird - that realisation of emptiness leads to detachment, but that detachment without compassion (Karuṇā) is meaningless.

And of course, it is true that objectivity is vital, in many areas of life and many disciplines.

He doesn't say it's a really hard problem? That leads to the natural reading that it is an especially hard problem. — Manuel

It's an especially hard problem for the generally-accepted forms of scientific naturalism, as they assume at the outset that whatever is real must be tractable in objective terms. The whole essay is a rhetorical argument against those assumptions.

Interestingly, in another thread, we're discussing Husserl's critique of naturalism, which actually says something rather similar.

In contrast to the outlook of naturalism, Husserl believed all knowledge, all science, all rationality depended on conscious acts, acts which cannot be properly understood from within the natural outlook at all. Consciousness should not be viewed naturalistically as part of the world at all, since consciousness is precisely the reason why there was a world there for us in the first place. For Husserl it is not that consciousness creates the world in any ontological sense—this would be a subjective idealism, itself a consequence of a certain naturalising tendency whereby consciousness is cause and the world its effect—but rather that the world is opened up, made meaningful, or disclosed through consciousness. The world is inconceivable apart from consciousness. Treating consciousness as part of the world, reifying consciousness, is precisely to ignore consciousness’s foundational, disclosive role. — Routledge Introduction to Phenomenology

. His aspiration was to objectivity and ideality, but then why shut himself up in subjectivity? Husserl himself in "The Origin of Geometry" gives us the tools to get out of the enclosure when he speaks of ideality as something constituted by repetition and reactivation through tradition. T — JuanZu

I have the feeling that you’re incorrect in this analysis although I’m not well versed enough in Husserl to put my finger on why. Perhaps you might consider glancing at the IEP Phenomenological Reduction article I mentioned above and find something in that which you consider to provide an example of where Husserl goes wrong with the epochē?

I’d like to differentiate myself from the thread owner. And the so-called ‘step too far’ you keep accusing of me is nothing of the kind. It is plainly impossible to consider any sense of time without a scale or units of duration in mind. What time might be, or indeed anything might be, in the absence of any mind whatever, can a fortiori never be known.

perhaps form misunderstanding Kant... — Banno

My understanding is not that time doesn't exist, but that it has an ineluctably subjective aspect. Meaning that the reality of time is not solely objective but is in some basic sense subject-dependent. Whereas, as I'm discussing in another thread, we're accustomed to regarding only what is objective as fully real. What is subjective is usually relegated to the personal.

It (i.e. time) needs human mind to exist. Are we being extreme idealists here? — Corvus

My view is that this is not extreme.

I should add that I can't claim to have reached any plateau of serene detachment, although I do see the point.

I would prefer to say that scientific concepts are themselves qualitative ( mass, motion, energy,’etc), and what characterizes them as leaving out what you call the subjective dimension is that these are peculiar kinds of qualities. — Joshs

I see your point, but in the context of Galilean physics, the emphasis was certainly on the measurable attributes of bodies and its delineation from Aristotelian notions of purpose and teleology. Hence the wrangling in American philosophy about 'qualia' as the qualitative attributes of being.

Rather than aiming for detachment, one should do the opposite and immerse oneself as intricately as possible in the contextually shifting meanings that affective attunement to the world discloses. — Joshs

What would 'immersing yourself' mean in practice? I interpret detachment more in line with what is taught in mindfulness-awareness training - that you are very much aware of the swirl of feelings, sensations and thoughts, without becoming carried into them or away by them. An analogy often given is the 'lotus effect' whereby water forms droplets on the leaf surface rather than the leaf becoming saturated by them. As quoted in the OP, ‘Detachment is not that you should own nothing, but that nothing should own you.’

The Virtue of Detachment

As seen above, a scientific orientation often leads us to assume that objectivity is the sole criterion for what is real. This approach seeks to arrive at a view from which the subject is bracketed out or excluded, focusing exclusively on the primary and measurable attributes of objects and forces. In this framework, the subjective is relegated to derivative status. However, in so doing, scientific objectivity also excludes the qualitative dimension of existence — the reality of Being. This exclusion lies at the heart of the hard problem of consciousness, which is inextricably linked with the Cartesian divide. Scientific objectivity seeks to transcend the personal, but it does so at the cost of denying the reality of the subject¹⁰.

Since ancient times, both Eastern and Western philosophies have prized detachment as a virtue. It shares many characteristics with scientific objectivity but with a crucial difference. While both aim to transcend personal biases and arrive at an understanding of what is truly so, philosophical detachment seeks its goal through the transcendence of the ego, rather than by bracketing out the subjective altogether

To understand this distinction, we must first differentiate the subjective from the merely personal. The subjective refers to the structures of experience through which reality is disclosed to consciousness. In an important sense, all sentient beings are subjects of experience. Subjectivity — or perhaps we could coin the term ‘subject-hood’ — encompasses the shared and foundational aspects of perception and understanding, as explored by phenomenology. The personal, by contrast, pertains to the idiosyncratic desires, biases, and attachments of a specific individual. Philosophical detachment requires rising above, or seeing through, these personal inclinations, but not through denying or suppressing the entire category of subjective understanding.

Skeptics and Stoics

Husserl’s epochē has precursors in ancient philosophy. In ancient skepticism, particularly as practiced by Pyrrho of Elis, epochē refers to the suspension of judgment. It is the act of withholding assent to any belief or claim due to the insufficiency of evidence to determine its truth or falsity. By suspending judgment, Pyrrho and his followers sought to achieve ataraxia (tranquility) and freedom from conflicting emotions by recognizing the limitations of human knowledge and the potential for conflict in clinging to opinions. This pursuit of ataraxia — freedom from conflicting emotions and attachment to opinions — echoes the Stoic ideal of apatheia, which we now turn to examine.

Stoic philosophy, which is enjoying a cultural resurgence, is built on the foundation of apatheia — not mere indifference or callousness, but a state of calm equanimity that comes from freedom from irrational or extreme emotions (mood swings, in today’s language). The Stoics believed that apatheia was the essential quality of the sage, unperturbed by events and indifferent to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. ‘Detachment,’ said one ancient worthy, ‘is not that you should own nothing, but that nothing should own you.’

The famous Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, a work that has been continuously in print since the advent of printing, exemplifies this philosophy. In it, Marcus Aurelius recommends avoiding indulgence in sensory pleasures, a form of ‘skilled action’ that frees us from the pangs and pleasures of existence. He claims that the only way we can be harmed by others is to allow emotionality to hold sway over us. Like other Stoics, Marcus Aurelius believed that an orderly and rational nature, or logos, permeates and guides the universe. Living in harmony with this logos, through rationality and temperance, allows one to rise above the individual inclinations of what might be deemed ‘good’ or ‘bad,’ as well as external circumstances such as fame and wealth. In cultivating these qualities, the Stoic sage enjoys equanimity and imperturbability in the midst of life’s troubles.

As Marcus Aurelius succinctly puts it:

You have power over your mind — not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength. (Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book VI, 8)

Through these shared themes of epochē and ataraxia we can trace a lineage of detachment — from the ancient skeptics, to the Stoics, to phenomenology — each offering a path to seeing beyond the limitations of subjective opinion.

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10. Subject of David Chalmer’s famous 1996 essay, Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness.

Again, amazing. The depth and nuances are quite remarkable, as also the apparent self-awareness ('I suspect....')

(I've been getting help with redesigning my technical writer website. I've dubbed ChatGPT 'Chuck' (it liked that!) and I reach out to Chuck for all of the minutaie of CSS and WordPress among other things. It enables me to do so much more than previously. I mention it on the site, saying the 'A' in 'AI' should be for 'Augmented Intelligence', because that's what it does.)

I await mention of Husserl's bracketing, or epoche. — tim wood

There's a book-length article on IEP, The Phenomenological Reduction. I'm still going through it but it's a dense and rich entry. The passage I'll mention in this context is under the heading, The Epochē:

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. All of this together is present to every individual in every moment and makes up what Fink terms “human immanence”; everyone accepts it and this acceptance is what keeps us in captivity. The epochē is a procedure whereby we no longer accept it. Hence, Fink notes in Sixth Cartesian Meditation: “This self consciousness develops in that the onlooker that comes to himself in the epochē reduces ‘bracketed’ human immanence by explicit inquiry back behind the acceptednesses in self-apperception that hold regarding humanness, that is, regarding one’s belonging to the world; and thus he lays bare transcendental experiential life and the transcendental having of the world” (p.40). Husserl has referred to this variously as “bracketing” or “putting out of action” but it boils down to the same thing, we must somehow come to see ourselves as no longer of this world, where “this world” means to capture all that we currently accept.

...Here it is important to realize two things: the first is that withdrawal of belief in the world is not a denial of the world. It should not be considered that the abstention of belief in the world’s existence is the same as the denial of its existence; indeed, the whole point of the epochē is that it is neither an affirmation nor a denial in the existence of the world. — IEP

I was struck by something I read in a wikipedia entry on the Buddhist teaching of 'two truths' (conventional and transcendental):

By and large, Kaccāyana, this world is supported by a polarity, that of existence and non-existence. But when one sees the origination of the world as it actually is with right discernment, "non-existence" with reference to the world does not occur to one. When one sees the cessation of the world as it actually is with right discernment, "existence" with reference to the world does not occur to one. — The Kaccāyana Sutta

This is is making an essentially similar point; because here 'the world' is not the objective physical cosmos, but the totality of experience, or in other words, the world as it exists in experience (another Wikipedia entry discusses the resonances between Husserl and Buddhist philosophy.)

Personally, I think this is a far more practical line of enquiry than the metaphysics of objects or quantity, because it is grounded in the real nature of existence, not in grappling with abstract concepts.

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Husserl’s insight is that we live our lives in what he terms a “captivation-in-an-acceptedness" — IEP

Which sounds awfully like habituation, doesn't it? I bought a book over Christmas on exactly this topic, Look Again, although I have a habit of buying self-improvement books and then not reading them. :yikes:

whereas I'm inclined to grant the subject a kind of ontological primacy.

An utterly formless, structureless flow of change. — Joshs

That would be what is traditionally called chaos, would it not?

I’m personally very impressed by Jamie Raskin - I thought he was a stand-out during Comer’s ridiculous kangaroo court hearings about Biden’s supposed corruption (oh, the irony). But Raskin lacks gravitas, or at least it doesn’t convey it very well on the screen, which is where it counts nowadays. Chuck Schumer does his best but again doesn’t have the heft.

But something to bear in mind, is that DJT is making an enormous number of enemies. Who in the intelligence community or defence is likely to support him, after the way he’s denigrated them? He’s trying to replace everyone with MAGA loyalists, but how many are there, really? For every MAGA fanatic there must be half a dozen disenfranchised careerists who bear him only animosity. If push really came to shove and it comes down to ordering troops in against protestors…….