Inferentially.

Semiotic logic says reality has irreducible complexity. You can't get simpler than – as Gestalt theory puts it – the relational view that is a figure and its ground. — apokrisis

Still struggling with how this can be meaningfully said to be physical in nature. The appeal of atomism is the ostensible 'indivisible unit' which represents in atomic form 'the unchanging'. To say that reality is 'irreducibly complex' seems to omit something fundamental to metaphysics, the unconditioned or unmade.

And how is this incompatible with, say, Kastrup's form of analytical idealism?

Henri Bateson — Gnomon

Bergson.

It remains that the universe is fair and just only if those "complex brains & minds" make it so - is that right? — Banno

It's only to rational sentient beings that the question matters.

the basic features of the world are not mind-created, but mind-recognized. — Janus

There are no features without minds. In the absence of minds the universe, such as it is, is featureless, formless, and lacking in any perspective.

I want to backtrack to the post about the Wheeler diagram and a response to it. The response was:

The point is epistemic. And it reflects the semiotic fact that the mind must reduce reality to a system of signs. The world is a blooming, buzzing confusion of noise and we must distil that down to some orderly arrangement of information. A set of counterfactuals that impose a dialectical crispness on the vagueness of our experience.

So in Gestalt fashion, we turn sensory confusion into perceived order by homing in on critical features that would distinguish and R from an E or a K. We have to be sensitive to the fact that Rs have this loop that Es leave open. This becomes a rule of interpretation for when we start having to deal with a real world of messy handwriting and wild fonts. We have to see information that was meant to be there according to the rules and so ignore the variation that is also in some actual scribble or fancifully elaborate font.

Our interpretative experience of even the alphabet, let alone the world, has this epistemic character. — apokrisis

So, I agree, I think it exactly the point of the diagram. As the response notes, the mind creates gestalts, meaningful wholes, by which recognise not only letters, but also the basic features of the world. Gestalts are fundamental to cognition. Here I also want to mention Mind and the Cosmic Order, Charles Pinter. His basic thesis is likewise that cognition operates in terms of gestalts, those elements, corresponding to categories of animal sensation, which it carves out from the background and recognises as meaningful wholes. This, he says, operates even in insects (citing research to this effect)

Everything you see, hear and think comes to you in structured wholes: When you read, you’re seeing a whole page even when you focus on one word or sentence. When someone speaks, you hear whole words and phrases, not individual bursts of sound. When you listen to music, you hear an ongoing melody, not just the note that is currently being played. Ongoing events enter your awareness as Gestalts, for the Gestalt is the natural unit of mental life. If you try to concentrate on a dot on this page, you will notice that you cannot help but see the context at the same time. Vision would be meaningless, and have no biological function, if people and animals saw anything less than integral scenes. — Chapter 3, Abstract

The question I want to ask is the sense in which gestalts are irreducible. (Maybe it’s here where I'm said to be constantly 'sliding between the epistemic (what is knowledge) and ontological (what are the fundamental constituents of the world.)) But if gestalts are fundamental to cognition, how can you get outside them to see what is causally prior to them? And isn’t the so-called ‘wave function collapse’ exactly analogous to the forming of a gestalt where there was previously only an array of probabilities? It must surely be something like that for Wheeler’s diagram, as it was presented in the context of his discussion of his baffling ‘delayed choice’ experiment. But then, this analysis is naturally holistic rather than reductionist, as in this analysis the fundamental units are not physical but cognitive.

metaphysical meat. — apokrisis

My favorite!

I may be idealist, but I recognize a brick wall when I encounter one.

I have outlined many times how biosemiosis now adds the epistemic cut to the business of quantum interpretation — apokrisis

Indeed, I didn’t know what biosemiosis meant when I joined this forum, and I’ve come to appreciate it. But there’s also a spectrum of views in that community, I’ve learned, and not all of the scholars in that field are as committed to physicalist principles. I’ve found a recent book on biosemiotics and philosophy of mind which I mean to get back to. Meantime, grandad is being paged ;-)

It might help to try and look at why we keep coming back to these same arguments. I think it to do with the vanity of small differences — Banno

It also had to do with ignoring much of what I’ve been saying.

And Republicans complain that Trump is ‘falsely accused’ of threatening democracy….. :chin:

Christians, get out and vote, just this time. You won’t have to do it anymore. … You got to get out and vote. In four years, you don’t have to vote again. We’ll have it fixed so good you’re not going to have to vote. — Trump

Believer’s Summit, Florida.

Realizing the implications, a Trump spokesman later helpfully added ‘of course he didn’t mean it.’

Of course.

There is still this tendency to slide from an epistemic to ontic position in your choice of words. — apokrisis

Between the iron posts and the paper maché, you mean?

An understanding is an Umwelt. It is the manufacturing, or co-dependent arising, of the subjective and the object, the self and its world, as the one cohesive dialectic.

There is no ontological self that is the seat of consciousness. That is as much a useful epistemic construct as the world in which this self sees itself living within. — apokrisis

Just as I said. Self and world are co-arising, just as posited by enactivism. That is why we see the convergence between phenomenology and Buddhism in The Embodied Mind.

You didn't take the time to set out what it is you want me to take from the extended quote — Banno

Apologies if that was not clear. It was posted in response to your:

there is a difference between how things are and how we believe they are. A difference between how they are and how we say that they are. A difference that tends to dissipate in idealism. A difference that explains what it is to be mistaken. — Banno

That argument was used against Berkeley: if our grasp of appearances can be mistaken, then how can he argue that the ideas and impressions which he claims constitute our knowledge should be trusted? How can there be a distinction between ‘what appears the case’, and ‘what is the case’ if all we have are our ideas?

So the passage from Berkeley’s imaginary dialogue was provided to illustrate how Berkeley deals with that criticism.

I think we agree that there is a world, and that we have what philosophers call intentional attitudes towards that world, but you put all the emphasis on those attitudes, as if the world were not also part of what is going on — Banno

As I said in the essay, there is no need for me to deny that there are ‘planets unseen by any eye’, to quote myself. Again, the question is the purported ‘mind-independence’ of the objective domain. As I’ve acknowledged many times already, there are different levels of understanding - in the empirical sense, obviously the world and everything in it is independent of my mind, unknown to me. Heck, I only know about half a dozen people in my street. But on a deeper level, ‘the world’ is a construct - not a confabulation, not an hallucination, but a construct of the mind. That is the sense in which it’s not ‘mind-independent’. And as soon as you posit ‘an unknown object’ - the tree that falls in the forest - you’re already bring a perspective to bear, attempting to illustrate the point with respect to some ‘intentional object’. (This incidentally I take to be in conformity with Kant’s understanding of the distinction between reality and appearance.)

The philosophical point behind the argument, is that naturalism tends to regard ‘mind-independence’ as a criteria for what is real. It attempts to arrive at an understanding of what exists in the absence of any subjective elements whatever. In that world-picture, we view ourselves as objects, and miniscule, insignificant objects at that, epiphenomenal occurrences thrown up by unknowing physical processes in the vast universe. That is what I take scientific realism to be advocating. In addition to that physicalism posits that the mind-independent realm comprises physical elements, which are purportedly the objects of physics itself. That is what I’m arguing against. Hence the emphasis on the ‘observer problem’ in physics, which directly undermines that formulation of physicalism.

Arguably, science itself is now moving beyond that formulation, but regardless, that is what I have in my sights.

Our interpretative experience of even the alphabet, let alone the world, has this epistemic character. We must divide the confusion dialectically into global formal necessity and local material accident. That is then how we can “decode” reality. That is how we can construct an “understanding”. — apokrisis

No need for the scare quotes around understanding. Which pretty well illustrates the point of the ‘mind-created world’.

Again, there is a difference between how things are and how we believe they are. A difference between how they are and how we say that they are. A difference that tends to dissipate in idealism. A difference that explains what it is to be mistaken. — Banno

Say we see an oar in water and it appears bent to us. We then lift it out and see that it is really straight; the bent appearance was an illusion caused by the water's refraction. On Philonous' (i.e. idealist) view, though, we cannot say that we were wrong about the initial judgement; if we perceived the stick as bent then the stick had to have been bent. Similarly, since we see the moon's surface as smooth we cannot really say that the moon's surface is not smooth; the way that it appears to us has to be the way it is. Philonous has an answer to this worry as well. While we cannot be wrong about the particular idea, he explains, we can still be wrong in our judgement. Ideas occur in regular patterns, and it is these coherent and regular sensations that make up real things, not just the independent ideas of each isolated sensation. The bent stick can be called an illusion, therefore, because that sensation is not coherently and regularly connected to the others. If we pull the stick out of the water, or we reach down and touch the stick, we will get a sensation of a straight stick. It is this coherent pattern of sensations that makes the stick. If we judge that the stick is bent, therefore, then we have made the wrong judgement, because we have judged incorrectly about what sensation we will have when we touch the stick or when we remove it from the water. — Dialogue between Philonious and Hylas, Berkeley

What, you say particle mechanics and wave mechanics both seem to apply? — apokrisis

Very rich post with much that could be commented on, but I wonder if you might provide an interpretation of this graphic. I’ve posted it here previously, it’s from John Wheeler’s paper, Law without Law:




The caption reads, ‘what we consider to be ‘reality’, symbolised by the letter R in the diagram, consists of an elaborate paper maché construction of imagination and theory fitted between a few iron posts of observation’.

What do you think the point of that simile is? Do you think it suggests something similar to what I’m proposing as the ‘mind-created world’?

@Banno

Lao Tse is considerably less loquacious than Hegel and the basis of a living philosophy.

Bohr as you know incorporated the ying-yang symbol into the family Coat of Arms that was crafted when he was knighted by the Danish Crown.

Bohr regarded his ‘principle of complementarity’ a major discovery in its own right.

This is quite a useful article - https://phys.org/news/2009-06-quantum-mysticism-forgotten.html

It points out that the pioneers were deep thinkers - cultured Europeans who understood philosophy. Schrödinger and Heisenberg both wrote perceptively on physics and philosophy. Post-war the action shifted to the US, ‘big science’ and military/industrial research.

The Statement can only be made by an observer — Banno

I said ‘any judgement regarding what exists’. The position I’m defending is near to Berkeley’s esse est percipe, but the way I put it is that nothing exists outside a perspective.

Optical illusions and mistaken perceptions such as ‘the bent oar’ are discussed by Berkeley. I’ll dig up the ref although not right now.

Why do you think there is and has been an argument in physics as to ‘what is real’, were the issue so simple as you appear to believe? What is the argument about, do you think?

Hence ontic structural realism as the new Platonic sounding metaphysics that has arisen out of a contemplation of gauge symmetry and quantum field theory. — apokrisis

I’ve read about those guys but I really don’t like them so far.

But instead of celebrating this quite remarkable success in fundamental science, you ... complain we're "not there yet". — apokrisis

Complaint?

To shut up and calculate, then, recognises that there are limits to our pathways for understanding. — Banno

…in respect of what is ultimately real.

I said that any statement of, or knowledge about, the object's existence or non-existence can only be made by an observer.
— Wayfarer

Were this the limit of your claim, no one would be objecting. This is entirely compatible with hard realism. — Banno

On the contrary realists insist that the object is as it is irrespective of the presence or absence of an observer. And that the understanding we hold of a world with no observers truly describes a mind-independent reality.

The reason 20th c physics undermined realism is precisely in respect of those claims. That is why books about it refer to ‘arguments about reality.’ That is not a figurative description.

(a) How do you know (i.e. corroborate) that you or any other agent is "conscious" if "consciousness" is completely, inaccessibly subjective? — 180 Proof

cogito, ergo sum

Even in deciding not to run, Joe Biden did something Trump could never do - which was to put the interests of the Party and the nation above his own.

I’m not particularly swayed by the euphoria sorrounding Harris today. Let’s see how it plays out over the weeks and months ahead (although there’s not that many of them.) I think it is true to say that it’s the politics of hope against the politics of hate and fear. All Trump has, is hate and fear. Harris is a ‘psychopath’, the country is ‘being overrun by Mexican rapists’, Democrats are ‘radical communists’. He has nothing positive to say - no policies, no ideas, no real platform. In the end it will probably come down to the progressive/diversity vote vs the scared old white guys vote (which is why the Republicans have been frantically gerrymandering the last ten years). But I hope and believe the former will have the numbers in the end.

Biden was not removed by lawful means. — fishfry

He wasn’t removed at all. He decided not to run.

I will make a philosophical point, in respect of the link you provided to the video ‘what creates consciousness?’ That point is that to understand what creates or gives rise to something, is to explain it in terms of something else. The issue with consciousness, is that you must first be a conscious agent to create or provide any kind of explanation. So in that sense, it’s extremely hard to avoid a non-question-begging account of consciousness (where ‘begging the question’ already assumes what the argument is setting out to prove.) In other words, any kind of reduction or explanation can only be offered by a conscious agent. We can’t, as it were, examine it from the outside, as an object to be explained, because we’re always already ‘inside’ it. That’s the precise sense in which consciousness is ‘irreducible’ - that is, it can’t be explained by something else. (Of course, cognitive science provides explanations of the functions of consciousness in terms of neuroscience, and so on, but that is what Chalmers describes as an ‘easy problem’. To describe what consciousness is with reference to anything other than consciousness, is the ‘hard problem’.)

Hey Sam - great you’ve discovered this site - Essentia Foundation is a really important voice in this debate. I will take this one in. Oh, and your long post above this one, I’ll take that in as well.

OK I did a bit more research and uncovered this: that Schrödinger intended the famous Cat thought-experiment to highlight the paradoxes and limitations of the Copenhagen interpretation. He found the idea that a macroscopic object like a cat could be in a superposition of being both alive and dead to be absurd. The thought experiment was meant to provoke deeper consideration and debate about the implications of quantum mechanics and to question the completeness and coherence of the Copenhagen interpretation.

Schrödinger's overall attitude towards quantum mechanics was complicated. While he was one of its founding figures and developed the Schrödinger equation, he was also troubled by its philosophical implications and sought alternative interpretations that could provide a more intuitive and realistic understanding of the quantum world. His engagement with these questions reflects his desire for a theory that could reconcile the quantum and classical worlds in a more satisfactory manner.

This was the context:

the object neither exists nor doesn't exist in the absence of the observer. Nothing can be said about it.
— Wayfarer
So the cup ceases to exist when you put it in the dish washer? We can't say that it is being cleaned? — Banno

Banno always returns to homely examples like kitchen utensils, not that there's anything the matter with that. In this context, 'cups' are just a stand-in for 'the object'.

Anyway, I merely said 'this was the precise point that Schrodinger was making with his famous cat'. So you're correct in saying that Schrodinger was sceptical about the Copenhagen interpretation, but I wasn't really appealing to Schrodinger for support of a particular view, only remarking that it is basically the same question. And hence the relevance of physics!

My understanding of the Copenhagen interpretation is that it's not a scientific hypothesis, nor a fully worked out philosophical framework. It's more like various aphorisms and writings of Heisenberg and Bohr on the interpretation of quantum physics. But I think it can't be disputed that it calls realism into question. Einstein's objections were not against the predictive powers of quantum mechanics, which are unarguable, but against its philosophical implications. He believed that quantum mechanics must be incomplete and that there must be underlying hidden variables that could restore a deterministic and objective reality. This viewpoint is encapsulated in his famous thought experiments, such as the EPR paradox (Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox), which aimed to show that quantum mechanics could not be a complete description of reality. However the Alain Aspect experiments confirming the 'Bell inequality' went against Einstein's realist views (even though, of course, he didn't live to see that.)

Bohr emphasized the role of the observer and the fundamental limits of what can be known. Bohr argued that quantum mechanics does not describe an objective reality but rather deals with the probabilities of different outcomes of measurements. He maintained that questions about the underlying reality were not meaningful within the framework of quantum mechanics, as the theory only provides information about observations. I think he kind of 'bracketed out' questions about what it ultimately meant or pointed to. It is sometime said he was a positivist, but he didn't agree with positivism either. His quote 'if you're not shocked by quantum mechanics then you can't have understood it' came from a lecture he gave to the Vienna Circle positivists, who all applauded politely and nodded sagely at the conclusion of his lecture on quantum physics. (As told in Heisenberg's Physics and Beyond.)

The point I was arguing about was against the contention that the type of idealist view I'm advocating must imply that the world doesn't exist in the absence of the observer. I said that any statement of, or knowledge about, the object's existence or non-existence can only be made by an observer. Science has no trouble depicting the world as it was before the evolution of h.sapiens, for instance - an empirical fact - but the interpretive framework within which that description is meaningful, is still provided by the mind - which is transcendental idealism. That's the sense in which I think there can be a kind of Kantian attitude to the Copenhagen interpretation. If you or anyone is interested, Michel Bitbol has a lecture on that, Bohr's Complimentarity and Kant's Epistemology.

And as lived experience in the moneyed world, our children aren't having children. — apokrisis

It's said that the current GenX/Y are the first to experience a less affluent lifestyle than their parents. And in my family's case it is true, sadly. Younger son with two kids and another coming are consigned to the brutal rental market due to the cost of real estate here. Maybe the affluent days are on the wane.

But then, what philosopher under-writes a 'no-growth' economic policy? How to incentivize that, when so much of the economy is geared around greater wealth as the sole yardstick of progress?

Schrödinger proposed this thought-experiment only to show that the 'Copenhagen interpretation' of quantum mechanics is, at best, paradoxical (i.e. does not make sense). — 180 Proof

Of course I understand that. It’s an ironic way of illustrating the anti-realist implications of the very principles that he discovered.

Incidentally apropos the question you asked about the independent reality of the wave function, QBism says definitely not.

‘The future you impoverish may be your own’?

One of the catchy titles on John Michael Greer’s site is ‘Collapse Now and Avoid the Rush’.

It could be opposed to its alternative. Not exponential growth but just an expectation of maintaining the world as it has always existed. — apokrisis

I wonder if an alternative has ever really been articulated. A few years back I did some cursory reading of books like Prosperity Without Growth and The Value of Nothing, among others. I can see the rationale, but I'm also very dubious of green-left politics. (I went to a solitary Australian Greens party meeting about 15 years ago, which I found depressingly awful.)

But in any case, isn't the root problem the underlying idea of ever-increasing 'economic growth'? And that pretty well defines liberal capitalism. I don't know if anyone outside the sustainability movement really takes it seriously, and, apart from the Greens, who stands for that in politics?

And what are the alternatives? I've never seen Marxism as a credible alternative, considering the disasters of the USSR and the Cultural Revolution. I said about 20 years ago, in a workshop setting, that what the world really needs is an alternative to capitalism that isn't communism. But I don't know if there really is any such thing. (Thomas Piketty, anyone? Haven't read it, myself.)

As is well-known, the emerging middle classes of the developing world simpy can't consume like those in the developed nations - there ain't enough to go around. Beef production, for instance, is massively expensive in terms of environmental and resource costs, and the several billion citizens of emerging countries won't be able to consume beef like the West has. Earth Overshoot Day is moving closer to Jan 1 every year (this year it's 1 August :yikes:)

On the other hand, and maybe belatedly, there is a huge global effort towards decarbonisation. Maybe too little and too late, but it's something. Maybe we need an Al Gore for alternative economics. God knows there are those who are trying, but they don't seem to have much of a profile.

In many cases it comes down to the point I just made, that physics is based on the presumption that physicists have available a shared topic — Banno

'Shared topic', indeed. I have no beef whatever with science or scientists inter-subjective validation. My beef is with the over-valuation of objectivity as the sole criterion of truth.

I've read a few. — Banno

None of the good ones, I would hazard.

Edit: this is not trivial; physics is based on the presumption that physicists have available a shred topic that they can prod and poke and about which they can talk - the world. — Banno

You would benefit from reading those books I mentioned. They're aimed at a non-specialist audience. But once again, thanks for your criticisms. :pray:

So the cup ceases to exist when you put it in the dish washer? We can't say that it is being cleaned? — Banno

The precise point Schrodinger was making with Schrodinger's Cat.

Why are eyes and hands OK, but not the sun or the earth? — Banno

Gosh, I wonder. :chin:

That Chris Fuchs interview is here. You have excerpted the graph but not the commentary, which is that:

Spooky action at a distance, wherein one observer’s measurement of a particle right here collapses the wave function of a particle way over there, turns out not to be so spooky — the measurement here simply provides information that the observer can use to bet on the state of the distant particle, should she come into contact with it. But how, we might ask, does her measurement here affect the outcome of a measurement a second observer will make over there? In fact, it doesn’t. Since the wavefunction doesn’t belong to the system itself, each observer has her own. My wavefunction doesn’t have to align with yours. ...

QBism...treats the wave function as a description of a single observer’s subjective knowledge. It resolves all of the quantum paradoxes, but at the not insignificant cost of anything we might call “reality.”

Read the remainder for more context. Also this documentary.

The point is, the whole of the empirical world in space and time is the creation of our understanding
— Bryan Magee Schopenhauer's Philosophy, Pp 106-107
...are incompatible with your contending that you are no ontic idealist. You are sayign that the world is, and isn't, the creation of mind. — Banno

That is a gloss on a paragraph from Kant. The sorrounding text in Magee's book discusses how Kant himself didn't follow through on the implications of that paragraph, and that Schopenhauer does. And recall the opening few lines of Schopenhauers WWI:

“The world is my idea:”—this is a truth which holds good for everything that lives and knows, though man alone can bring it into reflective and abstract consciousness. If he really does this, he has attained to philosophical wisdom. It then becomes clear and certain to him that what he knows is not a sun and an earth, but only an eye that sees a sun, a hand that feels an earth; that the world which surrounds him is there only as idea, i.e., only in relation to something else, the consciousness, which is himself.

----

Sure. But so what? It's as if you were to say there is no vista without there being someone to see it, and that therefore the mountains depend on the tourist for their existence. — Banno

But again, I address this. You think I must maintain that the vista (i.e. 'object') doesn't exist in the absence of the observer. But that is what I'm saying is the 'imagined non-existence', your imagining it as being non-existent. But the object neither exists nor doesn't exist in the absence of the observer. Nothing can be said about it. The object that you're referring to as existing (or not existing) in the absence of an observer is still a product of your mind.

And this is where 20th century physics is relevant. It has called into question the very existence of the so-called 'mind-independence' of reality. That is what the decades-long debate between Bohr and Einstein was about (reference - Quantum: Einstein, Bohr, and the Great Debate about the Nature of Reality, Manjit Kumar. Note the title! Another similar popular science book is David Lindley's 'Uncertainty: Einstein, Heisenberg, Bohr, and the Struggle for the Soul of Science'. Why 'the struggle'? It is an argument between Einstein's scientific realism, which is precisely that 'the object is mind-independent', and the Copenhagen interpretation, which is that this can't be upheld.)

If you reject ontic idealism, then consciousness does not "create reality". — Banno

Again, you only say that, because you have something in mind.

Sure, consciousness is not a passive recipient of the stuff in the world; nor is it it's creator. — Banno

The jealous God dies hard, eh? Hence the note about the distinction between Buddhist and Christian philosophy. Buddhist philosophy is not concerned with the origin of everything in the sense that Christian (and post-Christian) philosophy feels compelled to be.

In the story I wrote for you, as we walked across the landscape we developed a way of talking about the movement of butterfly that became progressively less dependent on the place we were standing. — Banno

But I don't accept that your story does away with the requirement for an observer's perspective. It only compares perspectives between different observers. I'm not saying that it's reliant on a particular perspective, but that there is no perspective without an observer to bring it to bear. Absent observers, there are no perspectives.

Well, gosh, thanks :yikes: . A couple of my by-now standard pieces of text in support of my contention.

Everyone knows that the earth, and a fortiori the universe, existed for a long time before there were any living beings, and therefore any perceiving subjects. But according to Kant ... that is impossible.'

Schopenhauer's defence of Kant on this score was ...that the objector has not understood to the very bottom the Kantian demonstration that time is one of the forms of [human] sensibility. The earth, say, as it was before there was life, is a field of empirical enquiry in which we have come to know a great deal; its reality is no more being denied than is the reality of perceived objects in the same room.

The point is, the whole of the empirical world in space and time is the creation of our understanding, which apprehends all the objects of empirical knowledge within it as being in some part of that space and at some part of that time: and this is as true of the earth before there was life as it is of the pen I am now holding a few inches in front of my face and seeing slightly out of focus as it moves across the paper.

This, incidentally, illustrates a difficulty in the way of understanding which transcendental idealism has permanently to contend with: the assumptions of 'the inborn realism which arises from the original disposition of the intellect' enter unawares into the way in which the statements of transcendental idealism are understood.

Such realistic assumptions so pervade our normal use of concepts that the claims of transcendental idealism disclose their own non-absurdity only after difficult consideration, whereas criticisms of them at first appear cogent which on examination are seen to rest on confusion. We have to raise almost impossibly deep levels of presupposition in our own thinking and imagination to the level of self-consciousness before we are able to achieve a critical awareness of all our realistic assumptions, and thus achieve an understanding of transcendental idealism which is untainted by them. — Bryan Magee Schopenhauer's Philosophy, Pp 106-107

According to evolutionary biology, Homo Sapiens is the result of billions years of evolution. For all these thousands of millions of years, our sensory and intellectual abilities have been honed and shaped by the exigencies of survival, through billions of lifetimes in various life-forms - fish, lizard, mammal, primate - in such a way as to give rise to the mind that we have today.

Recently, other scientific disciplines such as cognitive and evolutionary psychology have revealed that conscious perception, while subjectively appearing to exist as a steady continuum, is actually composed of a hierarchical matrix of interacting cellular transactions, commencing at the most basic level with the parasympathetic nervous system which controls one’s respiration, digestion, and so on, up through various levels to culminate in that peculiarly human ability of ‘discursive reason’ (and beyond, according to the mystics.)

Consciousness plays a central role in co-ordinating these diverse activities so as to give rise to the sense of continuity which we call ‘ourselves’ - and also the apparent coherence and reality of the 'external world'. Yet it is important to realise that the naïve sense in which we understand ourselves, and the objects of our perception, to exist, is dependent upon the constructive activities of our consciousness, the bulk of which are completely unknown to us.

When you perceive something - large, small, alive or inanimate, local or remote - there is a considerable amount of work involved in ‘creating’ an object from the raw material of perception. Your eyes receive the light-waves reflected or emanated from it, your mind organises the image with regards to all of the other stimuli impacting your senses at that moment – either acknowledging it, or ignoring it, depending on how busy you are; your memory will then compare it to other objects you have seen, from whence you will recall its name, and perhaps know something about it ('star', 'tree', 'frog', etc).

And you will do all of this without you even noticing that you are doing it; it is largely below the threshold of conscious perception.

In other words, your consciousness is not the passive recipient of sensory objects which exist irrespective of your perception of them (Locke's tabula rasa). Rather, consciousness is an active agent which constructs reality partially on the basis of sensory input, but also on the basis of an enormous number of unconscious processes, memories, intentions, and so on, not to mention the activities of reason, which allows us to categorise, classify and analyse the elements of experience. — Wayfarer

So remind me again, what, exactly, is 'incoherent' about these claims?

If your point is that "model" be used with care, I agree. — Banno

My point with respect to the 'mind-created world' theory is that many of the criticisms of it implicitly assume a perspective outside both. Like, 'the universe is so vast, and so ancient, how can that be something in my mind, when I'm only a few decades old?' But that perspective makes of an object of the very mind that provides the framework for the judgement of the vastness of space and duration of time. It's an abstraction.

I was going to add a point about 'dasein' although I tread warily as I've never read the entire work. But in my lay understanding, it is that our experience of the world is not one of the detached observer, where we build models of an external reality, but of direct involvement and engagement. It collapses the perceived dichotomy between self and world, as they're always intimately entertwined. We do not first exist as isolated subjects - islands! - who encounter a world of objects; instead, our very being is always already situated within a world we have imbued with meaning (or its lack). Even Wittgenstein touches on that in his Notebooks, with 'I am my world'.

And thank you. I will add, by way of a footnote to my footnote, that Lusthaus does acknowledge in that article:

To the extent that epistemological idealists can also be critical realists, Yogācāra may be deemed a type of epistemological idealism, with the proviso that the purpose of its arguments was not to engender an improved ontological theory or commitment, but rather an insistence that we pay the fullest attention to the epistemological and psychological conditions compelling us to construct and attach to ontological theories. — Dan Lusthaus

Again, the aim being not to 'explain the world' but to untangle the Gordian knot of dukkha.

his Buddhist-based metaphors & analogies… — Gnomon

I will add, by way of footnote, that scholars question the label of ‘idealism’ applied to Buddhist teachings. The very brief reason is that Christian principles begin with the creation conceived as the actual origin of the Universe, in which God is the Creator of everything that is. Buddhism doesn’t start with the origin of everything, but with the fact of dukkha (unease, distress, suffering), the cause of it, the ending of it, and the path to the ending of it.

Yogācāra doctrine is summarized in the term vijñapti-mātra, "nothing-but-cognition" (often rendered "consciousness-only" or "mind-only") which has sometimes been interpreted as indicating a type of metaphysical idealism, i.e., the claim that mind alone is real and that everything else is created by mind. However, the Yogācārin writings themselves argue something very different. Consciousness (vijñāna) is not the ultimate reality or solution, but rather the root problem. This problem emerges in ordinary mental operations, and it can only be solved by bringing those operations to an end.

Yogācāra tends to be misinterpreted as a form of metaphysical idealism primarily because its teachings are taken for ontological propositions rather than as epistemological warnings about karmic problems. The Yogācāra focus on cognition and consciousness grew out of its analysis of karma, and not for the sake of metaphysical speculation. — What Is and Isn’t Yogācāra, Dan Lusthaus

How the OP question is interpreted in light of that, is another matter. I think, suffice to say that ‘the world’ in Buddhism is basically understood as transient and not what it seems (although, as the Lankavatara Sutra mysteriously adds, neither is it otherwise.)

a model is presumably a model of something. — Banno

That presupposes the separation between the model/construct and the world it attempts to represent. Presumably, from some point outside both of them ;-)

I thought the speech was fine. Only that he was obviously reading a prompter, but the point was clear enough. I believe Biden when he says democracy is on the ballot.

Looks like Kamala Harris is the nominee. So far I'm cautiously optimistic. The campaign ought to concentrate on Trump as not a fit and proper person, as he's obviously not, and also on the legislative wins and prospects for the Biden period. I really do think Harris will run rings around Trump on the debate stage but I wouldn't be surprised if we never see that. Trump has reverted to form, hurling insults and incomprensible grievances. How anyone can think he should be electable will forever be beyond me.

There is no point saying that I don't understand some idea if you cannot explain it yourself. — Janus

I can explain it to you, but I can't understand it for you. Over and out.