Unplug the thermostat from the heater, and drop the temperature - the thermostat tries to turn the heater on, but can't... (a description in terms of intent, not physics) — Banno

This does not rule out that the reaction of a mind to the environment is just that - an energetic reaction which can be described entirely in physical terms — Banno

It remains that, for the OP, explaining the interaction of ghost and machine is problematic. — Banno

The Atlantic is an American magazine and multi-platform publisher based in Washington, D.C. It features articles on politics, foreign affairs, business and the economy, culture and the arts, technology, and science.

It was founded in 1857 in Boston as The Atlantic Monthly, a literary and cultural magazine that published leading writers' commentary on education, the abolition of slavery, and other major political issues of that time. Its founders included Francis H. Underwood[3][4] and prominent writers Ralph Waldo Emerson, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and John Greenleaf Whittier.[5][6] James Russell Lowell was its first editor.[7] During the 19th and 20th centuries, the magazine also published the annual The Atlantic Monthly Almanac.[8] The magazine was purchased in 1999 by businessman David G. Bradley, who fashioned it into a general editorial magazine primarily aimed at serious national readers and "thought leaders"; in 2017, he sold a majority interest in the publication to Laurene Powell Jobs's Emerson Collective.[9][10][11]

The magazine was published monthly until 2001, when 11 issues were produced; since 2003, it has published 10 per year. It dropped "Monthly" from the cover with the January/February 2004 issue, and officially changed the name in 2007.[12] In 2024, it announced that it will resume publishing monthly issues in 2025.[13][14]

In 2016, the periodical was named Magazine of the Year by the American Society of Magazine Editors.[15] In 2022, its writers won Pulitzer Prizes for feature writing and, in 2022, 2023, and 2024 The Atlantic won the award for general excellence by the American Society of Magazine Editors. In 2024, it was reported that the magazine had crossed one million subscribers[13] and become profitable, three years after losing $20 million in a single year and laying off 17% of its staff.

As of 2024, the website's executive editor is Adrienne LaFrance, the editor-in-chief is Jeffrey Goldberg, and the CEO is Nicholas Thompson.

You again make the mistake of assuming there is a ghost in the machine, and then pretending you have demonstrated it. — Banno

P1) Experience, the subject, is a conscious event that is informative and coherent
C1) So, there must be a substance, the object, that contains the information and is coherent#1
P2) The object cannot directly perceive its content, the information#2 — MoK

a word designed by the anti-Aristotelian Augustine to mean a low and empty sort of being turns up in our translations of the word whose meaning Aristotle took to be the highest and fullest sense of being. Descartes, in his Meditations, uses the word substance only with his tongue in his cheek; Locke explicitly analyzes it as an empty notion of an I-don’t-know-what; and soon after the word is laughed out of the vocabulary of serious philosophic endeavor. It is no wonder that the Metaphysics ceased to have any influence on living thinking: its heart had been cut out of it by its friends. — Aristotle's Metaphysics, IEP

However, a thermostat "perceives" the temperature — Banno

AMERICANS ARE LIVING IN TRUMP’S DREAM

In Ursula Le Guin’s novel The Lathe of Heaven, George Orr wakes to discover that he has the power to control reality through his dreams. Each night while he sleeps, the world changes in profound and unexpected ways. In the morning, Orr alone remembers reality as it was. Soon, Orr (named, one would assume, for George Orwell) finds himself under the care of a psychiatrist, who, realizing that Orr has these powers, tries to use them to turn the world into a utopia. This does not go well for the world.

It doesn’t go well because dreams have their own logic. They are nonlinear and to some degree nonsensical, and so directing oneself to dream of world peace may result in an alien invasion. Technically the dream has been fulfilled. Earthlings have stopped fighting with one another, but only because all of Earth is now ruled by an alien species. In this new dream reality, a world ruled by aliens becomes the only world you have ever known.

That is what the American experience is beginning to feel like in 2025: Not as if we are living in President Donald Trump’s reality, but as if we are living in his dream. As the showrunner and director of TV shows including Fargo, Legion, and the upcoming Alien: Earth, I think a lot about how audiences navigate the tension between horror and the absurd. Now we’re all in this liminal space of the president’s devising.

When the Trump administration pretends that the three branches of government are not and never have been equal, it creates a state of unreality in the minds of everyday Americans, similar to that of a dreamer in a dream. When the president and his proxies ignore both laws passed by Congress and Supreme Court decisions, they seek to replace the vérité of our shared history and experience with a fantasy, turning the stabilizing force of precedent into the quicksand of dream.

Only in a dream could the bicycle you’re riding become a pony. But if you tell the pony in the dream that he used to be a bicycle, he will deny it. I’ve always been a pony, he will say. And because this is a dream, you will accept that. But what if you’re awake and your government is doing things and saying things that seem nonsensical? What are you supposed to think when you search for the Gulf of Mexico on Google Maps and discover that it no longer exists? What happens if, as a next step, the history books are revised to erase all records of the name? In this new reality, that body of water has only ever been called the “Gulf of America.” You can imagine the argument that will happen years from now, where you swear there was once a Gulf of Mexico, but, for the life of you, you just can’t prove it.

Over the past two months, the rule of law in this country has been replaced by the rule of whim. The whim is not just that of one man but of a loose cabal of Cabinet members and “special advisers” who are combining revenge fantasies with small-government dreams, xenophobic visions, and cryptocurrency delusions. And so former national-security officials have had their security clearances revoked, government agencies have been fed into the wood chipper, “alien enemies” have been deported despite a judge’s court order, and a vaccine denier and pseudoscience champion has been confirmed as the secretary of Health and Human Services.

The only thing these dreamers have in common is that they want to control reality itself, to rewrite the past, present, and future simultaneously. Their actions create a maelstrom of daily news and revisionist history that the mind struggles to combine into a coherent reality. As a result, we are moving from a waking state to a dream state, where logic is flexible and anything can happen.

The movie Inception introduced us to a world in which corporate spies infiltrate the dreams of CEOs. Once inside, they steal secrets or, in the central action of the film, seek to implant an idea that the dreamer will, upon waking, turn into a reality. Inception, as they call this process, is considered almost impossible because of how difficult it is to make someone believe that an outside idea is their own. In this framework, however, the logic of the waking world is distinctly different from that of the dream. It assumes a waking world in which things make sense. Where facts have meaning. Not a world whose richest man brandishes a chain saw onstage and hires teenagers nicknamed “Big Balls” to gut the federal government, while the president of the United States reposts an AI video of the Gaza Strip as a luxury resort destination.

Inception did not envision a world in which only dream logic exists even when the dreamer is awake; a world where the federal government is trying to both shut down the Department of Education and weaponize it in order to remake how and what children in this country are taught. A world in which the president signs an executive order invoking the Alien Enemies Act against immigrants from Venezuela, even though the country is not at war with Venezuela. In the administration’s dream logic, the executive order itself creates a preexisting state of war, allowing it to issue the order. The logic is circular. Without being at war, the administration cannot use the act to justify the deportations. Or whatever. The bicycle is a pony. The logic is dream logic.

In the past century, authors in Russia, China, and other countries with totalitarian regimes have written about how absurd life becomes under autocracy. But until you experience it yourself, you can’t fully comprehend the illogic of it—or, I should say, the dream logic of it. It is a feeling as much as an idea, a surreal sense of unreality, from which the dreamer wills himself to wake up.

As the Austrian-born psychologist Bruno Bettelheim wrote about life under fascism: “Thus has tyranny robbed men of their sleep and pursued them even in their dreams.”

In this warped reality, rather than dreading sleep, we begin to dread waking up, because every day there is a new dream, one that, like George Orr’s, threatens to fracture our reality yet again. Our job over the next four years is to remember what life was like before the dream so that one day we can make the world a logical place again. — Noah Hawley, The Atlantic, 24 Mar 2025

Of course, such states of pure consciousness are exceedingly difficult to realise in practice, but in Eastern lore, they are amply documented. The difficulty being, from a philosophical perspective, that they're all well outside the bounds of discursive reason.
— Wayfarer

I started to write "Yes" but then I asked myself, "Well, why exactly?" What's so exceptional about such a claim that puts it outside anything we can reason about? Is the experience itself seen as so esoteric as to defy description, and perhaps credulity? This may be a Western bias. — J

My understanding is that an experienced meditator would agree that there is indeed no "I" remaining -- but this does not show that consciousness requires an object. For pure consciousness is said to remain, even in the absence of the "I" and its objects — J

Wolff found himself being in a state of euphoric consciousness he called the "Current of Ambrosia", which he described as being "above time, space and causality". — Wikipedia

That said, no, this will not prevent skills and knowledge being handed on to further generations. That doesn't even strike me as a possible outcome. Could you explain? — AmadeusD

It's interesting that serious meditation practice, especially in Hinduism and Buddhism, makes this point vivid. My understanding is that an experienced meditator would agree that there is indeed no "I" remaining -- but this does not show that consciousness requires an object. For pure consciousness is said to remain, even in the absence of the "I" and its objects. Of course we're free to raise an eyebrow at that, but there's a lot of testimony to the validity of this experience. — J

In his book Pathways Through to Space, Wolff describes having a profound spiritual realization in 1936, which provided the basis for his transcendental philosophy. It was induced "in a context of sustained reflective observation and deep thought," rather than by the usual practice of meditation. He called this experience the "Fundamental Realization". In its aftermath, Wolff found himself being in a state of euphoric consciousness he called the "Current of Ambrosia", which he described as being "above time, space and causality". It also led Wolff to a state of "High Indifference", or consciousness without an object. At the center of these experiences was the realization of "Primordial consciousness", which, according to Wolff, is beyond and prior to the subject or the object and is unaffected by their presence or absence. — Wikipedia

President Donald Trump is escalating his multi-front assault on what supporters see as an elite establishment, using raw presidential power to bend the government, law, media, public health, foreign policy, education and even the arts to his will.

Trump left no doubt in last year’s campaign that he’d use executive authority to seek retribution against his political enemies. But his attempt to transform America’s politics and culture is far broader than a personal revenge trip.

He’s targeting Ivy League universities; using executive authority against top law firms; eviscerating the bureaucracy; rejecting 80 years of elite orthodoxy about American global leadership; and using tariffs to shatter the global trading system that Make America Great Again proponents regard as the self-enriching treachery of global elites. ....

His program mirrors the goals of Project 2025, the playbook for conservative presidential leadership that Trump disowned during his campaign but that now helps explain the policy decisions of his administration. “The next conservative president must possess the courage to relentlessly put the interests of the everyday American over the desires of the ruling elite,” Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts wrote in the foreword of the document. “Their outrage cannot be prevented; it must simply be ignored, and it can be.” — CNN

Mr. Trump and his advisers have ushered the country into a new era of post-truth politics, where facts are contested and fictions used to pursue policy goals. — NY Times - Trump Fuels a ‘Machinery’ of Misinformation

US officials reacted with shock— and in many cases, horror — to revelations in The Atlantic that top members of President Donald Trump’s Cabinet sent detailed operational plans and other likely highly classified information about US military strikes on Yemen to a group thread on a messaging app to which a reporter had accidentally been added.

The Trump administration acknowledged the messages, sent over the nongovernment encrypted chat app Signal, seem to be authentic without offering any explanation for why senior officials were discussing national defense information outside of approved classified government systems. — CNN

The thing in itself is constructed by Kant, as a product of his dualistic thinking. There is no 'thing in itself'. 'A world of the unknown' is contradictory because how can we know of such a 'world' and in what way would something posited as absolutely unknown, constitute a world? — Tobias

Kant's introduced the concept of the “thing in itself” to refer to reality as it is independent of our experience of it and unstructured by our cognitive constitution. The concept was harshly criticized in his own time and has been lambasted by generations of critics since. A standard objection to the notion is that Kant has no business positing it given his insistence that we can only know what lies within the limits of possible experience. But a more sympathetic reading is to see the concept of the “thing in itself” as a sort of placeholder in Kant's system; it both marks the limits of what we can know and expresses a sense of mystery that cannot be dissolved, the sense of mystery that underlies our unanswerable questions. — Emrys Westacott

At least it keeps some fresh blood running into the big media's collapsing advertising veins. — kazan

The processes by which the world shows itself are the same as the operations of thought. 'Substance as subject'. — Tobias

WASHINGTON — A federal judge on Thursday ordered the Trump administration to reinstate tens of thousands of fired federal employees across six agencies, calling their terminations “unlawful.”

U.S. District Judge William Alsup ruled that the Trump administration must immediately reinstate all of the probationary employees it fired from the departments of Defense, Treasury, Agriculture, Energy, Interior and Veterans Affairs.

The mass firings of federal workers were a “sham” effort by the Office of Personnel Management ― the human resources agency of the federal government ― to skirt laws in order to drastically reduce the size of the federal workforce, Alsup said. ....

The White House has already signaled it will appeal the ruling.

“A single judge is attempting to unconstitutionally seize the power of hiring and firing from the Executive Branch. The President has the authority to exercise the power of the entire executive branch — singular district court judges cannot abuse the power of the entire judiciary to thwart the President’s agenda,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement. — Judge Orders Trump To Reinstate Thousands of Fired Employees At 6 Agencies

More than 5,000 probationary employees who were fired from the Department of Agriculture got their jobs back last week, after a government employee oversight board found they were illegally terminated. The decision by that panel, the Merit Systems Protection Board, came after it had restored the jobs of six federal employees at other agencies who had been similarly and haphazardly fired by the Trump administration.

Both of those decisions came down after Alsup ruled earlier this month that OPM had no authority to direct federal agencies to fire their employees — something it had been doing for weeks — and that its actions likely were illegal. That ruling led to OPM abruptly walking back its directive to agencies to fire people, and instead contorting its previous guidance to suggest it had been up to agencies all along to fire people.

In several instances, the President has scrambled to rehire federal employees he had just fired ― not because of a court order, but because it turns out we need experts on things like nuclear weapons, bird flu and park management.

Last week, more than 180 probationary employees who were fired from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were reinstated.

In an email with the subject line, “Read this e-mail immediately,” these dozens of previously fired CDC workers were told they could return to work “after further review and consideration.”

“We apologize for any disruption that this may have caused,” read the email.

Pincock distinguishes Franklin’s epistemic stance from another one that Franklin might have taken. He might have said, “I’m disposed to claim to know L when I have this kind of evidence. It’s just what I do, or what seems best to me; others may do differently.” For Pincock, this wouldn’t give Franklin reasons for his claim that L. Pincock asks us to imagine how this “non-theoretical” Franklin would respond to a challenge to his claim about L: He has nothing at his disposal that would count as a reason for others to adopt, so he would have to be silent in the face of his challengers. The actual Franklin, though, scientific realist that he was, can reply with an account that involves how evidence is connected to knowledge claims. — J

Once the interpretation of terms like "fact" or "evidence" become dependent on an epistemic stance, we have to look for an interpretative truth that is outside the stance itself. How do we find it? — J

Therefore, although I benefit from social security, I am appalled at Trumpsk heavy-handed axing. Yet, I must admit that something must be done to keep the nation solvent. — Gnomon

A federal judge on Tuesday found that Elon Musk and the White House's Department of Government Efficiency likely violated the Constitution when they unilaterally acted to shut down the U.S. Agency for International Development.

U.S. District Judge Theodore Chuang ruled in favor of a group of more than two dozen unnamed current and former USAID employees and contractors who had challenged the efforts to shutter USAID, which were mounted by DOGE and Musk, a senior White House adviser who President Trump has said is the leader of the task force.

Chuang granted in part their request for a preliminary injunction and said in a 68-page decision that DOGE and Musk likely violated the Constitution's Appointments Clause and separation of powers.

He ordered Musk and task force employees to reinstate access to email, payment and other electronic systems to all current USAID employees and personal services contractors. The judge also prevented DOGE and Musk from taking any action relating to the shutdown of USAID, including placing employees on administrative leave, firing USAID workers, closing its buildings, bureaus or offices, and deleting the contents of its websites or collections. — Judge finds Elon Musk and DOGE's shutdown of USAID likely unconstitutional

A federal judge ruled Thursday that the mass firing of federal employees was an “unlawful” directive by the Office of Personnel Management.

U.S. District Judge William Alsup ordered several agencies to “immediately” reinstate all fired probationary employees. Those agencies included the Department of Veterans Affairs, as well as the Departments of Defense, Energy, Interior, Treasury, and Agriculture. That would also restore numbers at the Internal Revenue Service, which falls under the helm of the Treasury Department and has been hit hard by job cuts in recent weeks.

In a hearing leading up to the decision, Alsup torched the Trump administration’s decision not to submit OPM director Chad Ezell for questioning as a “sham,” and accused the White House’s effort to cast the firings as performance failures as “a gimmick.”

“It is sad, a sad day, when our government would fire some good employee and say it was based on performance when they know good and well that’s a lie,” Alsup said, according to Politico’s Kyle Cheney.

The Trump administration has fired at least 30,000 employees with the help of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency. DOGE has made a point to target probationary employees still within the first year of their roles. Some of those employees have been called to return, but most are still not working, reported Axios. — Trump Suffers Huge Loss as Judge Overturns “Unlawful” Mass Firings

Alan Watts says that our apparent individuality is a kind of illusion created by the limitations of perception and conceptual thought. The true nature of reality is an undivided whole in which subject and object, self and world, are not utterly separate but poles in an underlying reality which transcends both. This realization, often associated with enlightenment or awakening, dissolves the artificial boundaries between self and world, leading to liberation from the ego’s illusion of separateness.

according to the dialogue (Phaedo) knowledge of the good can only be attained in death if at all. — Fooloso4

But my senses only feel in my visiom of sense. It takes abstract thought coupled withe imagination to think of something or someone not before you in their presence. We know each oher as humans, so then should we treat the body as phenomena or the thing in itself — Gregory

If I think of the Big Bang for example, since there was no consciousness in the space-time reality at that time, to even think about it is to declare that a subjectless object existed once. — Gregory

What about this rock question however: are there rocks in existence when they are never seen? — Gregory

What of truth for it's own sake? Why is desire for a knowledge wrong? — Gregory

Kant never lost sight of the fact that while modern science is one of humanity's most impressive achievements, we are not just knowers: we are also agents who make choices and hold ourselves responsible for our actions. In addition, we have a peculiar capacity to be affected by beauty, and a strange inextinguishable sense of wonder about the world we find ourselves in. Feelings of awe, an appreciation of beauty, and an ability to make moral choices on the basis of rational deliberation do not constitute knowledge, but this doesn't mean they lack value. On the contrary. But a danger carried by the scientific understanding of the world is that its power... may lead us to undervalue those things that don't count as science. — Emrys Westacott

Can reason never know full truth? — Gregory