There are three aspects to this account that I think are salient. — Banno

This is in contrast to Wayfarer's thesis that science neglects lived experience. A better way to think of this is that science combines multiple lived experiences in order to achieve agreement and verity. — Banno

does that answer your question, or not? — Arcane Sandwich

For Husserl it is not that consciousness creates the world in any ontological sense… but rather that the world is opened up, made meaningful, or disclosed through consciousness. The world is inconceivable apart from consciousness. Treating consciousness as part of the world, reifying consciousness, is precisely to ignore consciousness's foundational, disclosive role. For this reason, all natural science is naive about its point of departure, for Husserl. Since consciousness is presupposed in all science and knowledge, then the proper approach to the study of consciousness itself must be a transcendental one. — Source

. How can I contribute to this discussion, now? — Arcane Sandwich

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, 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… but rather that the world is opened up, made meaningful, or disclosed through consciousness. The world is inconceivable apart from consciousness. Treating consciousness as part of the world, reifying consciousness, is precisely to ignore consciousness's foundational, disclosive role. For this reason, all natural science is naive about its point of departure, for Husserl. Since consciousness is presupposed in all science and knowledge, then the proper approach to the study of consciousness itself must be a transcendental one - one which… focuses on the conditions for the possibility of knowledge. — Source

I believe that's what Nagel means. I think "There's something it's likes to be a bat" means "There's something it feels like to be a bat." But not a physical feeling. At least not only physical feelings. Do you have a feeling of your own existence aside from your physical body? — Patterner

The really hard problem of consciousness is the problem of experience. When we think and perceive, there is a whir of information-processing, but there is also a subjective aspect. As Nagel (1974) has put it, there is something it is like to be a conscious organism. This subjective aspect is experience. When we see, for example, we experience visual sensations: the felt quality of redness, the experience of dark and light, the quality of depth in a visual field. Other experiences go along with perception in different modalities: the sound of a clarinet, the smell of mothballs. Then there are bodily sensations, from pains to orgasms; mental images that are conjured up internally; the felt quality of emotion, and the experience of a stream of conscious thought. What unites all of these states is that there is something it is like to be in them. All of them are states of experience.

But (and I ask this genuinely, no offense meant) is there any scientific evidence that karma exists? I don't think there is. Which means that if you wish to convince me that karma exists, you will have to do so by way of reason, not of poetry. Logos instead of Mythos, if you will. — Arcane Sandwich

it quickly discovers that, in this way, its labours must remain ever incomplete, because new questions never cease to present themselves; and thus it finds itself compelled to have recourse to principles which transcend the region of experience, while they are regarded by common sense without distrust. It thus falls into confusion and contradictions…. — Mww

Why is my existence as a person (and as an "Aristotelian substance") characterized by the factual properties that I have, instead of other factual properties? — Arcane Sandwich

Not only did I not choose to be born, I didn’t even choose to be born in this place instead of that place. — Arcane Sandwich

If we think of it akin to personality disorder, which Kastrup does quite often, then we would expect trauma to cause a disassociation (i.e., an alter) or at least something significantly violent or powerful; but, because we know sex produces life, Kastrup must hold with consistency that sex somehow is the act that forces the Mind to disassociate from itself. Sex, simpliciter, is not violent; it is not traumatic; it is not particular powerful; etc. — Bob Ross

But then I have another follow-up question. There are four apples on the table. I claim (I might be wrong, of course) that those four apples are still four apples even when no one is looking at them (i.e., "intending" them in any way, as in Husserl's concept of intentionality as a subject-object relation). I would say, the number "one" exists, like an "Aristotelian accident", in each of the four apples. And that "one-ness", if you want to call it that, doesn't somehow "dissipate", or "cease to be", when no one is contemplating the apples, or thinking about them in any sort of way. It's just a brute fact that there are four apples on the table instead of five or three. — Arcane Sandwich

My follow-up question would be, are they physical? Like, are they somewhere, in spacetime? Are they in our head, in some sense? Not necessarily in the brain, but then where? In "the mind", assuming that "the mind" is something other than the brain? Are they outside the brain? Where are they? In the things, themselves? — Arcane Sandwich

...scholars—especially those working in other branches of science—view Platonism with skepticism. Scientists tend to be empiricists; they imagine the universe to be made up of things we can touch and taste and so on; things we can learn about through observation and experiment. The idea of something existing “outside of space and time” makes empiricists nervous: It sounds embarrassingly like the way religious believers talk about God, and God was banished from respectable scientific discourse a long time ago.

Something (i.e. a number) can be real without being material? How can that be? I'm admittedly a scientific materialist. — Arcane Sandwich

He says that the number 3, for example, is just a brain process. — Arcane Sandwich

Does it make sense to agree with Platonism on some intellectual fronts but not in others? — Arcane Sandwich

Speaking from a purely personal POV, I think that Natural numbers might objectively exist, and perhaps Real numbers as well. But when you get to stuff like the set of Complex numbers, things just don't make sense anymore. — Arcane Sandwich

But if something can't be said, it might be important to say why and surely philosophy has a role to play there.
— Wayfarer

I . . . take [it] to be one of the main themes of the Investigations - that what cannot be said may be shown or done.
— Banno

I just want to point out that these two views are not the same. You can indeed move on from inexpressibility to a demonstration or showing of what can't be expressed. But first (or conjointly) you can also say why, as Wayfarer suggests. Or would the claim be that inexpressibility itself can only be demonstrated, not justified? — J

The sense of the world must lie outside the world. In the world everything is as it is and happens as it does happen. In it there is no value—and if there were, it would be of no value.

If there is a value which is of value, it must lie outside all happening and being-so. For all happening and being-so is accidental.

What makes it non-accidental cannot lie in the world, for otherwise this would again be accidental.

It must lie outside the world.

he here cannot be wrong. — Banno

"For it does not admit of exposition like other branches of knowledge; but after much converse about the matter itself and a life lived together, suddenly a light, as it were, is kindled in one soul by a flame that leaps to it from another, and thereafter sustains itself" ~ Plato, VII Letter — Count Timothy von Icarus

According to his logic, people conceiving a baby is somehow an instance of the Universal Mind disassociating from itself thereby creating an alter. — Bob Ross

either there is a foundation, or there's a vicious infinite regress of ever-deeper layers of reality - which I reject. — Relativist

I personally reject deism because it depends on an infinitely complex intelligence, with magical knowledge, just happening to exist by brute fact. — Relativist

However, if the adage “magic is science we don’t understand yet” is true, then the reverse may also be true: that science is magic that we do understand. — MrLiminal

I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics. — Richard Feynman, Nobel Laureate in Physics

”Intellectus is the higher, so that if we call it ' understanding', the Coleridgean distinction which puts 'reason' above ' understanding' inverts the traditional order. Boethius, it will be remembered, distinguishes intelligentia from ratio; the former being enjoyed in its perfection by angels” — Count Timothy von Icarus

Intellectus is the Latin term adopted by Roman philosophers like Cicero and later by medieval Scholastics to translate nous from Greek philosophical texts. It similarly denotes the capacity for intellectual intuition or understanding of universal principles. Nous (and therefore Intellectus) is a key term for the higher faculty of the soul, distinct from reason (ratio), which operates discursively. … In the Aristotelian scheme, nous is the faculty that underwrites the capacity of reason. For Aristotle, nous was distinct from the processing of sensory perception, including the use of imagination and memory, which animals can do. For Aristotle, discussion of nous is connected to discussion of how the human mind sets definitions in a consistent and communicable way (through the grasp of universals) and whether people must be born with some innate potential to understand the same universal categories in the same logical ways. Derived from this it was also sometimes argued, in classical and medieval philosophy, that the individual nous must require help of a spiritual and divine type. By this type of account, it also came to be argued that the human understanding (nous) somehow stems from this cosmic nous, which is however not just a recipient of order, but a creator of it. — various sources including Wikipedia

'God' is not the concept of nothing. — Clearbury

Which of course leads into the discussion of what is to count as a justification... — Banno

Physics is the question of what matter is. Metaphysics is the question of what is real. People of a rational, scientific bent tend to think that the two are coextensive—that everything is physical. Many who think differently are inspired by religion to posit the existence of God and souls; Nagel affirms that he’s an atheist, but he also asserts that there’s an entirely different realm of non-physical stuff that exists—namely, mental stuff. The vast flow of perceptions, ideas, and emotions that arise in each human mind is something that, in his view, actually exists as something other than merely the electrical firings in the brain that gives rise to them—and exists as surely as a brain, a chair, an atom, or a gamma ray.

In other words, even if it were possible to map out the exact pattern of brain waves that give rise to a person’s momentary complex of awareness, that mapping would only explain the physical correlate of these experiences, but it wouldn’t be them. A person doesn’t experience patterns, and her experiences are as irreducibly real as her brain waves are, and different from them.

Nagel offers mental activity as a special realm of being and life as a special condition—in the same way that biology is a special realm of science, distinct from physics. His argument is that, if the mental things arising from the minds of living things are a distinct realm of existence, then strictly physical theories about the origins of life, such as Darwinian theory, cannot be entirely correct. Life cannot have arisen solely from a primordial chemical reaction, and the process of natural selection cannot account for the creation of the realm of mind. — Thoughts are Real (Review of Nagel, Mind and Cosmos)

It means the act of creating something out of materials that did not previously exist. The creator already exists. — Clearbury

The Greek natural philosophers were quite correct in saying that from nothing, nothing comes. But by “comes” they meant a change from one state to another, which requires some underlying material reality. It also requires some pre-existing possibility for that change, a possibility that resides in something.

Creation, on the other hand, is the radical causing of the whole existence of whatever exists. To be the complete cause of something’s existence is not the same as producing a change in something. It is not a matter of taking something and making it into something else, as if there were some primordial matter which God had to use to create the universe. Rather, Creation is the result of the divine agency being totally responsible for the production, all at once and completely, of the whole of the universe, with all it entities and all its operations, from absolutely nothing pre-existing.

Strictly speaking, points out Aquinas, the Creator does not create something out of nothing in the sense of taking some nothing and making something out of it. This is a conceptual mistake, for it treats nothing as a something. On the contrary, the Christian doctrine of Creation ex nihilo claims that God made the universe without making it out of anything. In other words, anything left entirely to itself, completely separated from the cause of its existence, would not exist—it would be absolutely nothing. The ultimate cause of the existence of anything and everything is God who creates—not out of some nothing, but from nothing at all.

If there is a God, then it exists. — Relativist

A materialist ontological foundation would also exist at all times- it being the basis for everything else that exists. — Relativist

God manages to possess knowledge with no such encoding- it just exists magically. — Relativist

I do not think that argument is sound, but we should at least be clear about what it is. — Clearbury

Platonism, as mathematician Brian Davies has put it, “has more in common with mystical religions than it does with modern science.” The fear is that if mathematicians give Plato an inch, he’ll take a mile. If the truth of mathematical statements can be confirmed just by thinking about them, then why not ethical problems, or even religious questions? Why bother with empiricism at all?

Massimo Pigliucci, a philosopher at the City University of New York, was initially attracted to Platonism—but has since come to see it as problematic. If something doesn’t have a physical existence, he asks, then what kind of existence could it possibly have? “If one ‘goes Platonic’ with math,” writes Pigliucci, empiricism “goes out the window.” (If the proof of the Pythagorean theorem exists outside of space and time, why not the “golden rule,” or even the divinity of Jesus Christ?)

Our account of the Blind Spot is based on the work of two major philosophers and mathematicians, Edmund Husserl and Alfred North Whitehead. Husserl, the German thinker who founded the philosophical movement of phenomenology, argued that lived experience is the source of science. It’s absurd, in principle, to think that science can step outside it. The ‘life-world’ of human experience is the ‘grounding soil’ of science, and the existential and spiritual crisis of modern scientific culture – what we are calling the Blind Spot – comes from forgetting its primacy.

Whitehead, who taught at Harvard University from the 1920s, argued that science relies on a faith in the order of nature that can’t be justified by logic. That faith rests directly on our immediate experience. Whitehead’s so-called process philosophy is based on a rejection of the ‘bifurcation of nature’, which divides immediate experience into the dichotomies of mind versus body, and perception versus reality. Instead, he argued that what we call ‘reality’ is made up of evolving processes that are equally physical and experiential.

Nowhere is the materialistic bias in science more apparent than quantum physics, the science of atoms and subatomic particles. Atoms, conceived as the building blocks of matter, have been with us since the Greeks. The discoveries of the past 100 years would seem to be a vindication for all those who have argued for an atomist, and reductionist, conception of nature. But what the Greeks, Isaac Newton and 19th-century scientists meant by the thing called an ‘atom’, and what we mean today, are very different. In fact, it’s the very notion of a ‘thing’ that quantum mechanics calls into question.

The classic model for bits of matter involves little billiard balls, clumping together and jostling around in various forms and states. In quantum mechanics, however, matter has the characteristics of both particles and waves. There are also limits to the precision with which measurements can be made, and measurements seem to disturb the reality that experimenters are trying to size up.

Today, interpretations of quantum mechanics disagree about what matter is, and what our role is with respect to it. These differences concern the so-called ‘measurement problem’: how the wave function of the electron reduces from a superposition of several states to a single state upon observation. For several schools of thought, quantum physics doesn’t give us access to the way the world fundamentally is in itself. Rather, it only lets us grasp how matter behaves in relation to our interactions with it. — The Blind Spot of Science and the Neglect of Lived Experience

There is nothing "necessary" about 2 + 2 = 4. In fact this depends on a number of more basic assumptions (axioms). — EricH

It assumes God pre-exists matter, but God is something. — Relativist