Ever read The Emperor's New Mind by Roger Penrose? — J

Tried and failed. The maths was beyond me. I’ve often enjoyed Sir Roger’s talks on other topics. I’ve recently written a Medium essay about his views on QM.

Sense-making is about pragmatically relevant actions , not concordance with ‘reality as it is’, whatever that’s supposed to mean. This doesn’t make what sense-making reveals as an illusion, or mere appearance as opposed to the really real. It shows us that this is what ‘reality as it is’ IS in itself. — Joshs

I’ve learned that the principle is called ‘relevance realization’ or ‘the salience landscape.’ It’s a guiding principle for all organic life. But self-aware rational beings might have requirements beyond those of other life-forms - think Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Other organisms are not able to consider the nature of existence in the way h.sapiens is, so questions of truth or falsehood don’t arise as part of their ‘salience landscape’.

As for the ‘in itself’ that has been construed in diverse ways throughout history. In philosophy the problem arises from the intuition that the way humans construe the nature of existence might be obscured by some deep-seated cognitive error. That was the fundamental insight behind the origin of the Western metaphysical tradition with Parmenides. But philosophy in that sense seems impossible in the age in which we live, burdened as we are by the enormous accumulation of facts and theories that no single individual can hope to comprehend.

To me, to take a ‘realist’ account, in the medieval sense, is to necessarily posit that the a priori ways by which we experience is a 1:1 mirror of the forms of the universe itself; — Bob Ross

By way of footnote, there is a sense in which that is true for Aristotelian and Thomist philosophy. It is because the forms or essences of particulars are what is most real about them, and nous is able to directly apprehend them, whereas the senses only know indirectly. Anyway thanks for your patience Bob. It's a thesis I'm pursuing in history of ideas but very I'm very much a voice in wilderness.

That would mean consciousness is matter/energy at its core. — Patterner

Or vice versa.

m. I think Hoffman learns the wrong lessons from evolutionary theory. — Joshs

Possibly. I’m pretty confused about aspects of his theories. The reason I mentioned him was as a foil to the last paragraph of the OP that appeals to evolutionary biology in support of scientific realism. I was pointing out that Hoffman’s evolutionary cognitive theory doesn’t support realism.

A Zen Dialogue with ChatGPT.

Hey I did it



:rofl: :lol: :rofl:

One thing for sure, the Master Propogandist has sure as hell put Jan 6 front and centre for the last three weeks of the run up, with his Day of Love shtick. I'm going to get AI to make me a 1969 style psychedelic poster with Day of Love in flouro, and DJT against the MAGA mob in silhouette.

I don't agree with it. I just don't have a problem with it — Philosophim

You're taking issue with it, saying he's mistaken, so don't be too polite about it. :wink:

I disagree with his solution to the problem, because he also currently has no evidence to deny that subjective consciousness could be an aspect of matter and energy. — Philosophim

A lot is resting on 'aspect' there. You could mean panpsychism, or dual aspect monism or some other view. Certainly as physical beings we are constantly energetic. If you read more of Chalmers, you will see he in no way discounts the neurological perspective. But he says it must be combined with a phenomenological approach because that methodology specficially integrates a first person perspective.

Speaking of evidence - and here we're talking philosophically not scientifically - matter is only known to us contingently and indirectly. We don't know what it actually is. We receive visual and auditory data about it, on that we all agree, and then interpret it. When you say that 'neurons cause consciousness', that they are an aspect of consciousness, that is not in doubt. What that leaves out is the mind that makes the judgement. As it must, because mind is not objective. But then as Schopenhauer says, 'Materialism is the attempt to explain what is immediately given us by what is given us indirectly'.

Space is a concept we use in relation to matter. We measure it with matter, yet space itself is not matter, but the absence of it. Time is not an existent 'material' concept, but it is is determined by watching and recording the differences in materials. Subjective consciousness as well, if it can only be known by being a material, is still known and defined in terms of the material that it is. — Philosophim

What do you make of this, then? it does have bearing as I will explain.

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.

So the observer plays an absolutely crucial role in this respect. Linde expresses it graphically: 'thus we see that without introducing an observer, we have a dead universe, which does not evolve in time', and, 'we are together, the Universe and us. The moment you say the Universe exists without any observers, I cannot make any sense out of that. I cannot imagine a consistent theory of everything that ignores consciousness...in the absence of observers, our universe is dead'. — Paul Davies, The Goldilocks Enigma: Why is the Universe Just Right for Life, p 271

The point being, physicalism only gets to a certain point before having to admit the reality of 'the observer', who is not in the picture. Happens at the other end of the scale, too. It is another aspect of the 'hard problem'.

It is great that you like the idea of subjective consciousness as another category of thinking — Philosophim

I don't think that its another category of thinking. It's the first- and third-person perspectives.

The idea is that, in addition to the physical properties of matter we're familiar with - mass, charge, spin, etc. - properties that we can measure and study with our physical sciences, there is a mental property. Not being physical, we cannot measure and study it with our physical sciences. It is no more removable from matter than mass is. Even though it is not physical, it is not "apart from the physical reality we live in." — Patterner

I'd sign off on that as in interpretation of Chalmers.

Another, from Bernardo Kastrup:

Chalmers basically says that there is nothing about physical parameters – the mass, charge, momentum, position, frequency or amplitude of the particles and fields in our brain – from which we can deduce the qualities of subjective experience. They will never tell us what it feels like to have a bellyache, or to fall in love, or to taste a strawberry. The domain of subjective experience and the world described to us by science are fundamentally distinct, because the one is quantitative and the other is qualitative. It was when I read this that I realised that materialism is not only limited – it is incoherent. The ‘hard problem’ of consciousness is not the problem; it is the premise of materialism that is the problem.

Then, as somebody with a strong analytic disposition, I immediately felt a gaping abyss in my understanding of the world. So I started looking for an alternative, correcting those previously unexamined assumptions – materialist assumptions – that I was making, replacing them with what I thought was a more reliable starting point and trying to rebuild my understanding of the world from there. I ended up as a metaphysical idealist – somebody who thinks that the whole of reality is mental in essence. It is not in your mind alone, not in my mind alone, but in an extended transpersonal form of mind which appears to us in the form that we call matter. Matter is a representation or appearance of what is, in and of itself, mental processes.

I generally resist posting partisan media here but this one I couldn't pass up.



Responding to a question from an undecided voter, Trump called January 6th a 'day of love'.

Materiality is discursive in the sense that it consists of reciprocal acts of affecting and being affected that form normative systems. — Joshs

But to me that requires the existence of the kind of agency that only begins to appear with organic life (by no means only conscious agency.) That is the reason I'm open to biosemiosis but not to pansemiosis. The first refers to the process of semiosis (the production and interpretation of signs) specifically within biological systems. It focuses on how living organisms generate, interpret, and respond to signs and signals in their environment—such as how cells communicate or how animals process sensory information - Pattee's area of expertise. The second extends the idea of semiosis beyond biological systems, suggesting that semiosis is a universal feature of reality, occurring at all levels of existence, including inanimate matter. In this view, the entire cosmos can be understood as engaging in some form of sign interpretation or meaning-making, not just living organisms. That doesn't register for me.

With respect to the Evan Thompson quote, the way I interpret that is in line with phenomenology - it aims to avoid dualistic categorisation by avoiding reduction to purely physical or purely mental. part of 'healing the split' caused by mind-body dualism. But I don't think that supports any form of materialism.

I'll see your Thompson, and raise you one Pattee:

I have made the case over many years that self-replication provides the threshold level of complication where the clear existence of a self or a subject gives functional concepts such as symbol, interpreter, autonomous agent, memory, control, teleology, and intentionality empirically decidable meanings. The conceptual problem for physics is that none of these concepts enter into physical theories of inanimate nature.

Self-replication requires an epistemic cut between self and non-self, and between subject and object.

Self-replication requires a distinction between the self that is replicated and the non-self that is not replicated. The self is an individual subject that lives in an environment that is often called objective, but which is more accurately viewed biosemiotically as the subject’s Umwelt or world image. This epistemic cut is also required by the semiotic distinction between the interpreter and what is interpreted, like a sign or a symbol. In physics this is the distinction between the result of a measurement – a symbol – and what is being measured – a material object.

I call this the symbol-matter problem, but this is just a narrower case of the classic 2500-year-old epistemic problem of what our world image actually tells us about what we call the real world. — Howard Pattee

he issue for Thompson isn’t whether the animate and the inanimate are ontologically distinct, but how to understand subjectivity in terms of autonomous processes of self-organization in living systems. — Joshs

But he still differentiates living from non-living right at the outset. 'The living order is characterized by the emergence of a new kind of structure in the physical order.' I can't see how what you're advocating is not reductionist.

First up, great work reviewing those videos and taking it on.

This is a question I've been asking for some time now from you Wayfarer, "What is it for consciousness to not be physical?" Here Chalmers gives a clear reply. And this definition of 'not physical', I have no problem with. Its a classification of category, not a claim that, "It is not matter and energy"...Check out around 6:40. His notes are:

"The hard problem is concerned with phenomenal consciousness: what its like to be a subject. — Philosophim

Right - and he says, straight out:

7:05: Lawrence Robert Kuhn: "is your consciousness immaterial?"

David Chalmers: "It's not physical"

He says 'there are properties of the world that go beyond atoms and space and time'. It is a claim that whatever consciousness is, it's not included in space-time-matter-energy. He says outright (7:16) we need to add a further property to our inventory of the world's properties, namely, 'consciousness'. He then says, it doesn't mean it has to be located 'up in heaven' or 'in some wholly different realm' - he says it might be an additional property that is associated with matter (a position which is called 'panpsychism'). But it's crucial to recognise that he doesn't say it can be explained in terms of known physical properties. He says that science has to admit consciousness as a fundamental property. By that he means it is irreducible, it can't be explained in terms of something else.

This definition of 'immaterial' is perfectly fine for me — Philosophim

Well, that's progress, so long as you understand what you're agreeing with.

I was with you until you said it had to be something other than physical. We don't even know if something other than the physical exists. — Philosophim

I keep trying to explain that this is because of the way that we conceive of 'something other than physical'. As I said already, we see it the way we do, because of the way modern thought has divided the world into 'the physical' (the things science can examine, matters of objective fact) and 'the subjective' (mind, thought, etc), following Descartes, who called the mind 'res cogitans' or 'thinking substance'.

Notice that Chalmer's says that the fact consciousness is not physical doesn't mean it's (7:26) 'up in heaven' or 'in the land of ectoplasm'. He says that because we're inclined to concieve of 'the non-physical' in those terms - ghostly ethereal stuff, thinking substance. So it's a trap! Chalmers is pointing out that we have to approach the whole question in a different way: neither 'physicalism', nor 'immaterialism' in that archaic sense.

Just like we cannot have space without matter, and time without matter, it is not a claim that we can have consciousness without matter. — Philosophim

Right. There's your 'thinking stuff' again.

It's great you're digging into this, but you will need to understand that you can't both agree with Chalmer's argument, and also hold that consciousness is physical.

//here is another essay (in .pdf) by Chalmers with a round-up of the various arguments for and against materialism in philosophy of mind. It's quite long but clearly written and may be a useful reference.//

The only issue I have is with your semantics: I think you are using ‘existence’ as if it is reserved for only things which exist materially (or perhaps physically). — Bob Ross

Things that exist as phenomena. And recall, 'phenomena' means 'what appears'. Whereas what I'm calling attention to are what were understood to be 'intelligible objects' in classical philosophy, using number as an example. Notice the difference between 'the diamond exists' and 'the value of the diamond'. Its existence is phenomenal, but the value it has is derived from perceptions of worth.

I will often concede that it is perfectly intelligible to say in normal speech, that the number 7 exists, but the square root does not. But that, strictly speaking, the number which you indicate is actually a symbol. What is real is what is denoted by the symbol, and that is not something that exists in the sense of being real independently of any mind (as only a mind can grasp number.)

What you are doing is conflating this with colloquial language where one would mean by “is this fictional character real?” — Bob Ross

What I'm doing, is calling attention to a real distinction which has been lost sight of, for deep historical reasons. You will know that the description 'realist philosophy' has a completely different meaning now, than it did in medieval culture. Now, it means 'belief in the mind-independent reality of objects'. Then, it meant 'belief in the reality of universals.' I say that in the transition from the medieval to the modern, something of importance was lost, which we now can't even see as nominalism (the view opposed to scholastic realism) won out.

C S Peirce upheld this same distinction.

C.S. Peirce’s distinction between reality and existence is rooted in his pragmatic philosophy and his interest in semiotics. For Peirce, reality refers to that which is independent of individual thought, meaning it would still be true regardless of what anyone believes. In contrast, existence pertains to something that actively interacts with other things in time and space, having a physical presence. Thus, while something real may exist, reality encompasses a broader domain of truths, including abstract concepts like laws of nature or mathematical objects, which don’t exist in a material sense but are still real because they hold independently of personal opinion.

Peirce's scholastic realism was grounded in the form of medieval scholasticism which argued that universals (such as concepts like 'redness' or 'beauty') are real, though they don’t exist as independent objects. Peirce adopted this view, opposing nominalism, which claims that universals are merely names we use to group things together. For Peirce, universals are real because they represent tendencies or patterns in nature that guide how things behave. His realism is grounded in his belief that the regularities of the world, such as the laws of logic or nature, are not arbitrary constructs of the human mind but are real features of the universe. Thus, scholastic realism for Peirce upholds the idea that general principles and categories have a real basis in the fabric of reality, not just in human thought.

//

Peirce understood nominalism in the broad anti-realist sense, usually attributed to William of Ockham, as the view that reality consists exclusively of concrete particulars and that universality and generality have to do only with names and their significations. This view relegates properties, abstract entities, kinds, relations, laws of nature, and so on, to a conceptual existence at most. Peirce believed nominalism (including what he referred to as "the daughters of nominalism": sensationalism, phenomenalism, individualism, and materialism) to be seriously flawed and a great threat to the advancement of science and civilization 1.

//

Characterized by forms, reality had an intrinsic intelligibility, not just in each of its parts but as a whole. With forms as causes, there are interconnections between different parts of an intelligible world, indeed there are overlapping matrices of intelligibility in the world, making possible an ascent from the more particular, posterior, and mundane to the more universal, primary, and noble.

In short, the appeal to forms or natures does not just help account for the possibility of trustworthy access to facts, it makes possible a notion of wisdom, traditionally conceived as an ordering grasp of reality. Preoccupied with overcoming Cartesian skepticism, it often seems as if philosophy’s highest aspiration is merely to secure some veridical cognitive events. Rarely sought is a more robust goal: an authoritative and life-altering wisdom. — Joshua Hochschild, What's Wrong With Ockham?

I understand you will probably reject this, because of the overwhemingly nominalist cast of modern culture and philosophy. But that's OK, and thanks for reading.

I know it’s difficult not to associate agency with consciousness... — Joshs

‘Whereas Barad dilutes the theoretical distinction between mind and matter as well as the distinction between animate and inanimate, the contention here is that it is ethically and politically vital to hold on to a notion of subjectivity understood in terms of the capacity for experience’ - from a critique of Barad’s agential realism.

Barad’s ‘agential realism’. Streetlight mentioned it also. As a form of materialism, it is obliged to deny the ontological distinction between animate and inanimate, per the above.

Could it be argued that modern (enlightenment) Science is an attempt to improve observational accuracy for the purpose of learning to manipulate reality in service to human survival and thrival? Hence, not eliminative Materialism (matter only), but inclusive Realism (matter + mind). For example, the Webb telescope extends the range of our vision, not for practical survival purposes, but for theoretical knowledge that may have some specific survival advantages, if we humans ever encounter predatory aliens from foreign galaxies — Gnomon

There’s always been a relationship between Enlightenment rationality and practical purposes. One of the motivations for the invention of calculus was better ability to calculate the trajectory of artillery fire. Darwinian biology fits nicely with that attitude as practically the sole purpose it assigns to the living is the business of surviving.

‘Facing up to the Problem of Consciousness’ is first and foremost a rhetorical essay, intended to illuminate the unintended consequences of Cartesian dualism on philosophy of mind, which has done to great effect.

I watched a few snippets of the Fox interview. Harris holds her ground as always. Baier had the temerity to play a Trump campaign advertisement during the break and interrupted continuously. But then that’s the kind of crassness you’d expect from MAGA media.

There are some posts I know better than to respond to ;-)

Right. I'm still apprehensively optimistic that Harris-Walz will win, but the fact that it's as close as it is, is a source of deep disquiet. He really ought to have been booed offstage long since.

DNA is a better example. The information encoded in it is the blueprint for amino acids and proteins. The interpretation of that information and the production of the amino acids/proteins is the same process. — Patterner

Quite agree! That's why biosemiotics and information biology is such a big deal.There's a biological theorist called Marcello Barbieri who addresses this exact point in What is Information? He distinguishes two competing paradigms, the 'chemical' and 'informational' paradigm, the former being more materialist of the two.

the ontological claim of the chemical paradigm (is) the idea that all natural processes are completely described, in principle, by physical quantities. This view is also known as physicalism, and it is based on the fact that biological information is not a physical quantity. So, what is it? A similar problem arises with the rules of the genetic code: they cannot be measured and cannot be reduced to physical quantities, so what are they?

According to physicalism, biological information and the genetic code are mere metaphors. They are like those computer programs that allow us to write our instructions in English, thus saving us the trouble of writing them in the binary digits of the machine language. Ultimately, however, there are only binary digits in the machine language of the computer, and in the same way, it is argued, there are only physical quantities at the most fundamental level of Nature.

He distinguishes that from the infomation paradigm:

Ernst Mayr, one of the architects of the modern synthesis, has been one of the most outspoken supporters of the view that life is fundamentally different from inanimate matter. In The growth of biological thought [15], p. 124, he made this point in no uncertain terms: ‘… The discovery of the genetic code was a breakthrough of the first order. It showed why organisms are fundamentally different from any kind of nonliving material. There is nothing in the inanimate world that has a genetic program which stores information with a history of three thousand million years!’

The idea that ‘life is chemistry plus information’ implies that information is ontologically different from chemistry, but can we prove it?

I'll leave it to you to read it, but it's a deep question. Suffice to say, I'm more persuaded by what he calls the informational view. But then, I believe there's a real distinction - an ontological distinction - between inorganic matter and life itself, which is why I'm not a materialist. Materialism must deny that distinction, as for it, there is only one kind of substance, and living forms are just 'arrangements of matter'.

Don't expect a resolution anytime soon.

That is, the ability to know and understand the metaphysical basis of reality constitutes wisdom. — Leontiskos

There's a nice term you encounter in the writings of some of those who advocate for a philosophia perennis, the perennial philosophy. That is, sapiential, as distinct from (but not necessarily in opposition to) scientific. Hence, the 'sapiential traditions.' In my case, those that I know at least something about are Christian Platonism, Vedanta, and Mahāyāna Buddhism.

In all of them, there is the implicit idea of the 'philosophical ascent', and that knowledge of the real is contingent upon qualities of character - which is something different to 'scientific detachment' even if you can trace how the latter developed out of the former (James Hannam's 'God's Philosophers' is really good on that.) That what is 'higher' is also possessed of a greater reality. You find that also in the German idealists (ref).

But I think the key thing is, all of those traditions emphasise self negation and the requirement of transcending egoic consciousness ('he who looses his life for My sake'), whereas science and liberal individualism is grounded very much in the individual's self -awareness. I'm not wishing to present that as a value judgement or to dissapprove of it, but as a philosophical perspective.

we can't objectively know what its like for the other person. — Philosophim

Hoffman's theory is that there's no plausible theory that links the physical causes with the experiential feeling.

Why introduce unnecessary complexity when we have the simple answer in front of us that works in accordance near perfectly with the behavior aspect of consciousness as well? — Philosophim

The 'unnecessary complexity' you're referring to is philosophy, growing from the awarness that we're not simply physical things.

Regardless Wayfarer, thank you for tackling those points again. You're an intelligent and well spoken person, and I do enjoy reading your perspective even if I don't always agree on it. — Philosophim

:pray: Kind of you to say so.

//

There are a few more points I will make:

I'm simply noting the underlying support and reason for the hard problem. — Philosophim

You're not, though. You say:

The idea that consciousness is caused by our physical brains is the easy problem. — Philosophim

That is not what Chalmer's says at all. So stop saying that you're 'interpreting' or 'supporting' Chalmer's argument, when you're actually disagreeing with it. If you were honest, what you would say is 'there is no hard problem as Chalmers describes it'.

I can agree that we can have an interpretation of information as both a medium which exists, and the interplay between that medium and an interpreter. What hasn't been shown is the noun or the interpretation of information that isn't through some physical medium. Can you think of one? — Philosophim

Information itself is not a medium. If I transmit information electronically, the medium is copper or electromagnetic waves, or through speech as sound waves in the air. They are physical media. But the interpretation of information is not a physical process, and information is not physical. Again this is why Norbert Weiner says that 'information is not matter or energy'.

What is wrong with saying that this is an aspect of the physical world, when we have evidence of a radio interpreting waves? .. wasn't there a relationship between the radio waves, the radio, and then the sound played? Isn't an interpretation a physical response to stimulus or an event? — Philosophim

Humans build radios to do that and then interpret the sounds as meaningful. There is nothing in the 'physical world', if you mean the world outside human affairs, that will do that.

For decades, radio telescopes have been scanning the universe looking for signals from intelligent life. Overall, they've found none (with one possible exception.) All the signals so far have a physical or natural origin. If they found a signal originated by an alien intelligence, it would be something other than physical or natural.

As for behavior, the entirety of neuroscience, pharmacology, and psychiatry operates and functions as if consciousness as a behavior is an objective result of the mind. Without this, the entirety of modern medicine would not work. — Philosophim

As noted, psychosomatic medicine, the placebo effect, etc, undercut physicalist accounts of mind.

if you provide physicalism with the baggage of every phenonemon, it loses its explanatory power as to what "physical" even means. — schopenhauer1

Quite! The sources I've been reading and listening to of late - these include Bernardo Kastrup, Evan Thompson and John Vervaeke - are open to perspectives more often associated with religious philosophies. They're not formally religious - Thompson has a book called Why I am not a Buddhist - but they're open to considering those perspectives. And I think much of the motivation for physicalism has been based on the delineating it from anything that might be associated with such perspectives. It's like an implicit prohibition, or even a taboo (as Alan Watts said). That is one of the main points of the Thomas Nagel essay mentioned above, Evolutionary Naturalism and the Fear of Religion, resulting, he says, in 'the ludicrous overuse of evolutionary biology to explain everything about life, including everything about the human mind. Darwin enabled modern secular culture to heave a great collective sigh of relief, by apparently providing a way to eliminate purpose, meaning, and design as fundamental features of the world. Instead they become epiphenomena, generated incidentally by a process that can be entirely explained by the operation of the non-teleological laws of physics on the material of which we and our environments are all composed.' And that is the default for a lot of people and questioning it often results in accusations of 'supporting creationism' (one which was actually levelled at Nagel!) So that's a fault line, like a cultural tectonic plate.

But there has been a sea change in culture since the 1960's, what with the growth of ecological awareness, ideas relating to higher consciousness (mainly originating from the East) and a kind of scientically-informed idealism which you can find even in relatively hard-headed popular intellectuals like Paul Davies. Tao of Physics was another pop milestone. The times they are a'changing.

The alternative is a view of science which opens the door to the soft sciences, including theology. If the repeatability requirement is softened then interpersonal realities can be the subject of scientific study, because repeated interpersonal interactions do yield true and reliable knowledge, even though the repeatability is not as strict as that of the lab scientist who deals with a passive and subordinate substance. — Leontiskos

Quite agree. As a resident idealist, I'm often challenged to prove my claim that there can be such a thing as 'higher knowledge', beyond merely subjective conviction or faith. The argument is there is no method of inter-subjective validation for such claims, in the way there is for peer-reviewed, objective science.

I will often answer that there is indeed a kind of peer-review and 'quality control' method, if you like, in spiritual cultures, such as Zen Buddhism, and I'm sure there have been analogies in other cultural settings. These provide an environment where there is instruction, execution and judgement by higher authorities, in lineages that have persisted for centuries, millenia even. (The Buddhist Sangha is arguably the oldest social organisation still in existence.)

The real problem with the idea of higher knowledge is the lack of a vertical axis against which the term 'higher' is meaningful. But that is the very thing that physicalism has undermined. Physicalism has a 'flat ontology', with matter (or nowadays, matter-energy-space-time) being the sole constituent of existence. This was the point of Robert M. Pirsig's book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance which recognised the lack of a 'metaphysics of quality' in Western culture. Another of those 'consciousness raising' books from that era.

.All other corners of the world untouched by our participation also are agentially perspectival with respect to themselves via their interaffecting within configurative patterns of interaction. — Joshs

isn't that panpsychism?

There are many, many diverse voices in that 'systems science' and biosemiosis field, and not all of them are beholden to any kind of physicalism. As you well know, there is a pretty free-wheeling form of scientific idealism associated with physics and variants of the Copenhagen interpretation, and many of them take mind to be fundamental, in an epistemological if not ontological sense. Same too with biosemiotics. Check out Søren Brier's academic homepage (and I was alerted to him by Apokrisis) - titles like 'Information and consciousness: A critique of the mechanistic concept of information', 'Bateson and Peirce on the pattern that connects and the sacred'. I also found a paper by Marcello Barbieri on the history of biosemiosis and it's very wide-ranging.

On the whole, I think physicalism is on the wane. It's real heyday was actually the late 19th century, I think the scientific justification for it was demolished by the introduction of quantum physics in 1927.

The decisive error in thinking now occurs when we swap or mix the levels of description. So if we suddenly switch from the physiological to the psychological level and construct a causal relationship between the two that cannot exist in reality. So if we claim that physiology is the basis of psychology, or that the excited group of neurons causes the conscious experience of red. — Wolfgang

It's not an error. The point being made in the argument is that the physical description doesn't account for the subjective experience, that it leaves out or fails to account for the subjective experience of colour. It is a fact that experience can be described from the physiological perspective or from the first-person perspective. Comparing them is not an error.

This change of perspective is particularly treacherous because it often happens unnoticed. — Wolfgang

Not in the least. In David Chalmer's original paper it is made perfectly explicit - he calls it out.

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.
— David Chalmers, Facing up to the problem of experience

The hard problem of consciousness can therefore be seen as a misunderstanding of the evolutionary function and development of consciousness. What we perceive as a subjective experience is essentially the evolution of a mechanism that ensures that relevant stimuli are registered and processed in an adaptive way. — Wolfgang

Daniel Dennett argues from evolutionary biology in support of eliminative materialism, which seems to be the attitude you favour. However, evolutionary psychology is also the basis of a book called The Case Against Reality: How Evolution Hid the Truth from our Eyes, by cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman, which argues for a radically different conclusion. He argues that our perceptions of reality are not accurate reflections of the world as it truly is. Instead, he proposes that evolution has shaped our perceptions to prioritize survival. According to Hoffman, organisms that perceive the world in a way that maximizes fitness, rather than accuracy, are more likely to survive and reproduce. This leads to the conclusion that what we see, hear, and experience is not an objective representation of the world as it is, but a kind of 'user interface' designed to hide the complexity of reality and present simplified, useful representations to aid survival.

Hoffman builds his case using evolutionary game theory, demonstrating that perceptions that accurately represent reality are not favored by natural selection. He further critiques the conventional view of physicalism—the idea that the physical world is the foundation of all reality—arguing that space, time, and objects themselves are human constructs rather than fundamental aspects of the universe. Instead, he suggests that consciousness itself might be fundamental, proposing a theory in which reality consists of a network of conscious agents interacting.

The moral of the story being, don't lean to hard on evolutionary biology in defense of scientific realism, if that's the intention. It may not take the strain.

That the core principle of scientism (that the scientific method is the only way to render truth about the world and reality) cannot be established with the scientific method. This implies the core principle is an unjustified belief- that's the gap. — Relativist

Ah, I see. Somewhat similar to the fact that positivism fails according to the very criteria that it sets. Not a co-incidence. One of my lecturers used to compare positivism to the legendary uroborous, the snake that eats itself. ‘The hardest part’, he would say, with a mischievous grin, ‘is the last bite.’

My point is that metaphysical naturalism provides a similarly complete metaphysical system, one in which science fits perfectly - with no gap. — Relativist

But you would only say that, if you think that metaphysical naturalism is metaphysically sound, wouldn’t you? That metaphysical naturalism is capable of being all knowing?

If the two domains in question do not interact, then it is unnecessary. If the two domains in question do interact, then a two-truth theory is a simplistic bandage on a rather difficult problem. — Leontiskos

According to Buddhists, in reality, there are not two domains. Only from the perspective of the conventional domain is there considered to be a separate domain, that of the 'ultimate truth'. But in reality, that perceived division is a consequence of a dualistic outlook and the 'two truths' teaching is merely a 'skillful means' (upaya) intended to demonstrate the limitations of that mindset.

Buddhism grows out of praxis and Western science grows out of theoria, and therefore these are very different animals (even though the West is now becoming preoccupied with a different praxis, namely a Baconian praxis). — Leontiskos

I agree in some ways.

The Madhyamika ('Middle Way') has no doctrine of existence, ontology. This would be, according to him, to indulge in dogmatic speculation. To the Vedanta (Hindu) and Vijñanavada (Mind Only), the Madhyamika, with his purely epistemological approach and lack of a doctrine of reality, cannot but appear as nihilistic. The ‘no-doctrine’ attitude of the Madhyamika is construed by Vedanta and Vijñanavada as a ‘no-reality’ doctrine; they accuse the Madhyamika, unjustifiably, of denying the real altogether and as admitting a theory of appearance without any reality as its ground. In fact, the Madhyamika does not deny the real; he only denies doctrines about the real. For him, the real as transcendent to thought can be reached only by the denial of the determinations which systems of philosophy ascribe to it. — TRV Murti

But in the absence of 'the real as transcendent to thought', actual nihilism looms an ever-present threat.

Metaphysical naturalism (or physicalism) fills in the gap that scientism leaves. — Relativist

What gap?

Trump Escalates Threats to Political Opponents He Deems the ‘Enemy’

In a Fox News interview on Sunday, Mr. Trump framed Democrats as a pernicious “enemy from within” that would cause chaos on Election Day that he speculated the National Guard might need to handle.

A day later, he closed his remarks to a crowd at what was billed as a town hall in Pennsylvania with a stark message about his political opponents.

“They are so bad and frankly, they’re evil,” Mr. Trump said. “They’re evil. What they’ve done, they’ve weaponized, they’ve weaponized our elections. They’ve done things that nobody thought was even possible.”

Of course, in all of this, he is describing his own actions, but projected on to The Other, blatantly obvious to anyone not inside the Bubble.

“There is not a case in American history where a presidential candidate has run for office on a promise that they would exact retribution against anyone they perceive as not supporting them in the campaign,” said Ian Bassin, a former associate White House counsel under Barack Obama who leads the advocacy group Protect Democracy. “It’s so fundamentally, outrageously beyond the pale of how this country has worked that it’s hard to articulate how insane it is.”

...“He’s talking about, he considers anyone who doesn’t support him or will not bend to his will an enemy of our country,” [Harris] told several thousand supporters at a rally in Erie, Pa. “He is saying that he would use the military to go after them.”

Simplifying, some theologians at that time posited the idea that there are scientific truths and theological truths, and never the twain shall meet. — Leontiskos

The Buddhist idea is not at all like that. With respect, I think this gives you a preconceived idea of what it means.

And as far as your set of interests are concerned, I would say that methodological naturalism is little more than a stand-in for mechanistic natural philosophy. It asks us to behave as if mechanistic natural philosophy is true. But if mechanistic natural philosophy is false, then why would we behave as if it is true? — Leontiskos

I think mechanistic analogies of organic life and nature are on the wane, not least because of emergence of movements like biosemiosis, previously mentioned, which sees nature as more language-like than machine-like (although residual mechanistic analogies are still prevalent in molecular biology. I think it's always been rather an anachronism that quantum physics is also called 'quantum mechanics' as the goings on of sub-atomic phenomena have never seemed remotely 'mechanical'.) But I have no problem with the idea that natural philosophy is true within its range of application.

Speaking of 'range of applicability' I could mention a principle here that is articulated in Buddhist philosophy - that of the 'two truths'. This is associated with early Mahāyāna Buddhism, and is the view that there are two levels or domains of truth - saṃvṛtisatya, meaning conventional or relative, and paramārthasatya, meaning ultimate. In this schema, natural philosophy falls under the heading saṃvṛtisatya. This does not necessarily deprecate 'conventional' knowledge, which includes science, but situates it relative to the insight (jñāna) of the enlightened.

The Wikipedia entry says 'The conventional truth may be interpreted as "obscurative truth" or "that which obscures the true nature". Conventional truth would be the appearance that includes a duality of apprehender and apprehended, and objects perceived within that. Ultimate truth is free from the duality of apprehender and apprehended' (a clear reference to non-dualism which in the Buddhist form is 'advaya' to distinguish it from the Hindu 'advaita' ref).

This schema has an advantage over the rupture that is encountered in Western thought in the opposition between 'natural and supernatural' which is what lies behind the 'culture wars' over religion and science. It recognises the validity of conventional knowledge within its range of applicability, but at the same time makes explicit the essential dualism (e.g. self/other, mind/world), and hence the contingent nature, that characterises natural science, and that there is a real possibility of transcendental insight.

However, Western intellectual culture doesn't really have an equivalent to the Prajñāpāramitā (transcendental wisdom) which apprehends paramārthasatya, as that will generally be associated with religious revelation and be rejected on those grounds. It's part of the Western cultural predicament. But I still think it's worth considering this way of framing the issue in the context of the question in the OP.

let's say like Richard Dawkins (who I would presume comes close to what Wayfarer means by a "scientism") and the metaphysics of someone like apokrisis (who whatever else you think of his ideas, is scientifically oriented in regards to his metaphysics), would be very different. — schopenhauer1

I've learned a lot about biosemiotics from Apokrisis (including that it exists!) and benefitted a lot from it, although I don't agree with his metaphysics. Biosemiotics on the whole is not materialist in orientation so I don’t see biosemiotics as ‘scientistic’ in the sense that Dawkins/Dennett neo-darwinist materialism is. (Notice, though, that even though C S Peirce is categorised as an idealist philosopher in most directories, Apokrisis will generally downplay his idealist side.)

If the physicalist pivots to methodological physicalism, has he then solved the problem? — Leontiskos

I'd vote yes. I think there are plenty of scientists who are to all intents physicalist as far as their work is concerned but agnostic or open-minded with respect to matters that can't be adjuticated by science.

I first came to this realization through the Tao Te Ching. "The Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao." It has become a central part of my understanding of how the world works - reality is not objective, it is a mixture of an external non-human existence interacting with our human nature. Kant described something similar. — T Clark

:100: It might interest you to know that Evan Thompson, co-author of The Blind Spot article, did a higher degree in Chinese philosophy and was one of the authors of The Embodied Mind. His approach is very much aligned with what you're saying here.

If you're going to argue your position convincingly to someone else, you need to be open to tackling them. — Philosophim

And you need to be open to hearing your interlocutor, and I don't believe that you've been doing that.

Chalmer’s argument is directed at the inadequacy of physical accounts to accurately capture first-person experience, yours or anyone else’s.
— Wayfarer

Didn't you and I already address this on your first response to me? My point was that the heart of why this was is because we cannot know what its like to be another subjective individual. — Philosophim

Again, that is not the point of David Chalmer's essay, Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness. I'm taking issue with your paraphrase of his argument. If you want to argue that this is what he should say, feel free. But it's not what he does say.

And why is it hard to find why these functions are accompanied by conscious experience? Because we cannot know what it is like to BE that other conscious experience. — Philosophim

Again, it's not what he says. He says that there is no satisfactory theoretical account of ANY conscious experience, not just of other people's or of animals. I've said this a number of times, and then you straight away repeat your incorrect interpretation of his argument. You can take issue with his argument, but that's different to misrepresenting it. That's what I mean by 'not hearing'.

Alright, then try to counter these points, because these points note that our autonomy is physical.

1. Drugs that affect mood and decisions. A person getting cured of schizophrenia by medication for example.

2. The removal of the brain or physical processes that result in life from the brain, and the inability of autonomy to persist.

3. Brain damage resulting in differing behaviors and consciousness. — Philosophim

I think by 'autonomy', you mean 'anatomy'.

Certainly, physical influences can affect cognition—there’s no disputing that. Drugs can alter mood and behavior, and brain damage can lead to significant changes in consciousness and personality. But this doesn't demonstrate that consciousness is entirely a product of brain activity. It’s important to recognize that causation can work in both directions. Neuroplasticity—the brain’s ability to reorganize itself by forming new neural connections—shows that consciously undertaken actions and thoughts can have real, measurable effects on the brain’s structure and function. This is an example of top-down causation, where mental processes, such as attention, intention, and practice, influence neurophysiological changes, distinct from the bottom-up causation that is implied by physicalism. Your proposed schema is all 'bottom-up'.

Furthermore, the analogy of the brain as a receiver rather than just the generator of consciousness provides a different way to look at this issue. Just as a radio receives and tunes into waves without generating them, the brain may play a focusing or filtering role, modulating and organizing conscious experience but not wholly creating it. This view contrasts with the dominant idea that the brain produces consciousness in the same way that a factory produces a product. Instead, the brain might serve as a critical instrument through which consciousness manifests and interacts with the physical world. The fact that consciousness can change the brain's configuration through neuroplasticity suggests a dynamic interplay, rather than a one-way causal relationship between the brain and the mind. Besides, the origin of consciousness is arguably coterminous with the origin of life itself, and nobody really knows how that got started.

I don't know if the split-brain research is really relevant to that. In any case, it is discussed in Chapter 1 of Donald Hoffman's book Case Against Reality. He's a cognitive scientist, with a rather radical philosophical view, which I won't try and explain here. But after reviewing the split-brain experimental data, he concludes:

We have no scientific theories that explain how brain activity—or computer activity, or any other kind of physical activity—could cause, or be, or somehow give rise to, conscious experience. We don’t have even one idea that’s remotely plausible. If we consider not just brain activity, but also the complex interactions among brains, bodies, and the environment, we still strike out. We’re stuck. Our utter failure leads some to call this the “hard problem” of consciousness, or simply a “mystery.” ...

What do we want in a scientific theory of consciousness? Consider the case of tasting basil versus hearing a siren. For a theory that proposes that brain activity causes conscious experiences, we want mathematical laws or principles that state precisely which brain activities cause the conscious experience of tasting basil, precisely why this activity does not cause the experience of, say, hearing a siren, and precisely how this activity must change to transform the experience from tasting basil to, say, tasting rosemary. These laws or principles must apply across species, or else explain precisely why different species require different laws. No such laws, indeed no plausible ideas, have ever been proposed. — Donald Hoffman, The Case Against Reality, Pp 18-19

You seem to think that information can only matter if a human is involved. But if information can exist apart from matter and energy, how can this be? — Philosophim

Information doesn't exist in the same way that matter and energy do—it isn't a physical substance or force. Instead, information exists in the relationships between entities, and its significance depends on interpretation. Think of a book: where exactly is the information in that book? The ink on the page is simply matter, but the information arises only when a reader interprets it, and only if they understand the language or code it’s written in. The book itself is not one thing and its meaning another; rather, the meaning emerges through the interaction between the symbols on the page and a mind capable of understanding them.

Information, in this sense, is relational. It depends on the patterns or structures that carry meaning and on the existence of an interpreter. This makes information fundamentally different from matter and energy—it’s not a physical object but something that manifests through relationships and interpretation. I think this is what Norbert Weiner meant when he said 'information is information, not matter or energy'. And no, not just because he was a poor epistemologist.

What I'm noting is that the standard model of science posits that the brain is the source of human consciousness, at least in terms of behavior. — Philosophim

I think, actually, that you will find that a very difficult claim to support. You assume that this is what science posits, but there's some important background you're missing here.

At the beginning of modern science, proper, 'consciousness' in the first person sense was excluded from the objects of consideration. Proper objects were those which could be defined and analysed in terms of the primary attributes of determinate figure, size, position, motion/rest, and number etc. Qualities such as colour, taste, smell, etc, were deemed secondary or subjective.

Galileo and Descartes made the crucial conceptual division by proposing that physical science should provide a mathematically precise quantitative description of an external reality extended in space and time, a description limited to spatiotemporal primary qualities such as shape, size, and motion, and to laws governing the relations among them. Subjective appearances, on the other hand -- how this physical world appears to human perception -- were assigned to the mind, and the secondary qualities like color, sound, and smell were to be analyzed relationally, in terms of the power of physical things, acting on the senses, to produce those appearances in the minds of observers. It was essential to leave out or subtract subjective appearances and the human mind -- as well as human intentions and purposes -- from the physical world in order to permit this powerful but austere spatiotemporal conception of objective physical reality to develop. — Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos, Pp35-36

Now, when you say 'the standard model of science', I think this is what you mean. And within that model the only 'real objects' are, well, objects. If 'mind' or 'consciousness' can be said to exist, then it can only be as a product of those objects. That's why you're incredulous at the denial of a causal relationship between brain and mind - to you, it's just 'the way things are'. But I'm afraid it doesn't hold up to philosophical scrutiny.

Give me an example of where something is real but does not exist (if applicable); and where something exists but is not real (if applicable). — Bob Ross

What exists is what you can meaningfully encounter. But there are many things we take for granted as real which we can’t encounter and which don’t exist in that concrete sense. They are constituted as agreements, conventions, rules, and the like. Where do interest rates or exchange rates exist? Not in banks, or financial institutions. They are real even though we cannot encounter them in the sense we encounter existents. A contract is not just the piece of paper, but the meaning it conveys, likewise a national constitution or a penal code (adapted from here). Humans are embedded in a web of such meanings, which are every bit as real as the material objects we encounter but which are not existent in the sense that sensable objects are. We don't notice that, because that web of meanings lies beneath the threshold of conscious attention, unless we make the effort to bring it to awareness.

So these are factors in our cognitive life that are real but not phenomenally existent. As to things that exist but aren't real - well, fictional characters would fit the bill. We will both know who Bugs Bunny and Sherlock Holmes are, so we have a common reference point, but they're not real. Nowadays we're constantly bombarded by unreal imagery.

In actuality, conscious experience always comprises the synthesis of phenomenal existents - sensable objects - and the cognitive faculties which incorporate them into a web of meaning. That is what Kant was on to. But because of the natural extroversion of today's culture we tend to exagerrate the former and fail to notice the latter - we tend to think that only what is 'out there' is real, and fail to notice how much of what is 'out there' is really put there by our own minds.

Don’t want to go there. I was just trying to think of some ‘edge cases’ where there might be actual metaphysical considerations.

Now I'm completely confused. Good night.

1. AI has long since passed the point where its developers don't know how it works, where they cannot predict what it will do.
2. Today, AI developers know how AI works and can predict what it will do — Carlo Roosen

Well, the two are not necessarily linked. I'm sure the directors and architects of Open AI have a pretty good idea of how it works, but predicting what it might say or do is another matter. I remember sometime in 2023, one of the LLMs had learned a language it had never been trained on.

From ChatGPT I've just learned about a philosopher called Luciano Floridi, who is a major philosopher in the area of AI and ethics. Check out his books page here. He seems really worth knowing about, although my to-read list is always completely unmanageable.