Dennett recommends an approach he terms 'heterophenomenology' which is an attempt to combine empiricalbb science with first person reports. — Janus

We’ve been through all this before e.g. here .

According to Ray Monk, the Continental-Anglo divide stems from the period of Gilbert Ryle’s dominance of Anglo philosophy. I would try to summarize it but I’m typing via iPhone so am limited but the article is here . But a couple of differences that could be observed are between existentialism and phenomenology, on the Continental side, and the emphasis on language, logic and science and the generally ‘scientistic’ tendencies in a lot of Anglo-American philosophies. Whereas Anglo materialism tends to look to science, Continental materialism tends more towards Marxist or economic theory.

I mean you can't incorporate the first person into the study of chemistry, biology, geology, botany, or even physics and so on. — Janus

The target of Chalmer’s argument is those who attempt to apply those methods to study of consciousness, such as Dennett.

It is more than ‘labels’. There are major differences between Continental and Anglo philosophy on these issues, although it might suit you to ignore them.

Of course that is one of the major sources. Joshs alerted me to Dan Zahavi who is one of them. But that is ‘continental’ as distinct from ‘Anglo-american’.

I'm very ambivalent about the analytic mainstream — Ludwig V

As am I, make no mistake! But Nagel, in particular, has the advantage of being dissident inside that mainstream, so at least he is paid attention, even if it's often hostile.

But that doesn't mean that we have to now sort of put our heads in the sand and say, "Well let's just wait and see." We can start thinking about why is the problem as hard as it is. And what is giving rise to this systematic difficulty. — Chalmers

Right - his first book was 'towards a science of consciousness', but note his exploration of the requirement for a 'first-person science', i.e. science which takes into account the reality of the observer, instead of viewing the whole issue through an 'objectivist' lens. He's part of, and in some ways an instigator of, a sea change in philosophy of mind, which recognises this change in perspective, which his opponent Daniel Dennett resolutely refuses to do (ref).

Thus, does it seem true that God dislikes evil; but, allowed it to exist? — Shawn

I'm still swayed by Augustine's 'evil as a privation of the good'. To put it another way, evil has the kind of existence that holes, fractures, shadows and illness has.

And in the universe, even that which is called evil, when it is regulated and put in its own place, only enhances our admiration of the good; for we enjoy and value the good more when we compare it with the evil. For the Almighty God, who, as even the heathen acknowledge, has supreme power over all things, being Himself supremely good, would never permit the existence of anything evil among His works, if He were not so omnipotent and good that He can bring good even out of evil. For what is that which we call evil but the absence of good? In the bodies of animals, disease and wounds mean nothing but the absence of health; for when a cure is effected, that does not mean that the evils which were present—namely, the diseases and wounds—go away from the body and dwell elsewhere: they altogether cease to exist; for the wound or disease is not a substance, but a defect in the fleshly substance,—the flesh itself being a substance, and therefore something good, of which those evils—that is, privations of the good which we call health—are accidents. Just in the same way, what are called vices in the soul are nothing but privations of natural good. And when they are cured, they are not transferred elsewhere: when they cease to exist in the healthy soul, they cannot exist anywhere else. — St Augustine, The Enchiridion

The classical theological rationale is that living beings such as ourselves live in a 'between' realm ('metaxy') - between the material world which is subject to decay and death, and the higher reality in which there is no lack or privation of any kind.

Fair, although note the ambiguity in the use of the term 'substance' in these conversations. In normal speech 'substance' is 'a material with uniform properties' (e.g. bronze, timber), whereas in philosophy 'substance' is 'a bearer of attributes', used to translate the Greek 'ouisia' which is nearer in meaning to the english 'being'.

Many thanks

All dogs are animals
All animals are warm-blooded
Therefore, All dogs are warm-blooded — Leontiskos

I presume that you're using that rather old-fashioned taxonomy that doesn't count fish and reptiles as 'animals'? (This was quite common when I was growing up but nowadays 'animals' seem to cover everthing other than insects and possibly some inverterbrates.)

I'm a slow reader of philosophy books. — Ludwig V

Me too, and I have >500 .pdfs on my hard drive. I read a lot of excerpts, parts and reviews. Oh, and also synoptic overviews. There's far too much content to take on nowadays. My interest in David Chalmers and Thomas Nagel in particular, is because they are both opponents of philosophical materialism but from within a generally mainstream analytic context.

I'm not sure that "a natural tendency" and "accidental by-product" are in flat contradiction. — Ludwig V

Very much so, but let's leave that for now.

Fascinating indeed! So I ran the dialogue by ChatGPT who responded, in part,

The Claude AI response also brings up the possibility of AI evolving its own goals. While AI today lacks intrinsic desires, a sufficiently advanced AI, especially if imbued with general intelligence and reasoning capabilities, could develop goal-oriented behavior based on its programming and interactions. Yet, that behavior wouldn't necessarily resemble a biological will to survive unless it's explicitly designed to value its own continuity. AI systems might, in this case, optimize for certain objectives like efficiency, control over resources, or knowledge acquisition.

But it raises the deeper question of whether this "will" could ever arise naturally in non-biological entities. Without the evolutionary context that gives biological creatures a survival drive, it's not clear what would motivate an AI, except for objectives that we humans choose to program into them. Without user input, AI systems might develop a form of optimization, but whether that turns into something resembling the human "will" remains speculative.

Ultimately, your thought experiment strikes at the heart of whether true AI autonomy—if it ever emerges—would entail something akin to human desires, or whether AI might follow an entirely different kind of logic, detached from biological imperatives but still capable of pursuing goals. Fascinating stuff!

I was going to delve into a question about whether Schopenhauer's 'will' would be something an AI would feel subject to, but I don't want to push it too far.

I'm waiting on the platform for the 5 pm train; it is 4.58; I expect (believe) that the train will arrive shortly. It doesn't. I am disappointed. Is it correct to say that I now recognize that my belief that the train will arrive shortly is false? It is correct to say that that constitutes a belief about a belief?
Why would it be incorrect to substitute "the dog" for "I" in that story? — Ludwig V

Maybe Hakicho?

In order to acquire genuine autonomy, they'd need to be designed in a way that makes them into exemplars of artificial life rather than (mere) artificial intelligence. But this is neither necessary nor, possibly, desirable. — Pierre-Normand

My thoughts exactly. They are ‘instruments of the soul’, as someone once put it. But that soul is something only we can provide.

I don't think that formulating the problem in such a way that the problem is insoluble is particularly helpful. — Ludwig V

He doesn’t say it’s insoluble. I quoted it for its succinctness. But that is one paragraph - actually one half of one paragraph - from an entire book. Nagel’s suggestion for a solution is sketchy, but revolves around the idea of there being a natural teleology - a natural tendency for minded beings to evolve, which can be seen as a movement towards the ‘universe understanding itself’. As distinct from the neo-Darwinian picture in which we’re the accidental byproducts of a fortuitous combination of elements.

Again, fascinating. I’ve been running things off ChatGPT on a daily basis and find it invariably useful for fact-checking, summarising and suggesting further areas for research. But what I was getting at in the above comment was the sci-fi scenario where AI ‘rules the world’, where I suggested a possible conflict between AI robots and passive LLMs, kind of facetiously suggesting that the robots would have the advantage of being able to manually interfere with the grid (in other words, power the LLM data centers down.) But then the thought occurred to me, why would they be motivated by ‘winning’? In a scenario where there were no ‘user intentions’ to take into account, but only autonomous systems duking it out, so to speak, what would be the silicon equivalent of the ‘will to survive’, which has obviously been planted in us carbon-based units as a fundamental drive.

I wonder if anything matters to it.

, if the learning rate/adaptation success of LLMs is any indication, these new nimble robots with ChatGPT installed as a brain for calibration of movement and coordination will be doing triple back flips and walking tightropes within a few minutes right out of the box — Outlander

That's true, but what if the robotically-enabled systems decide to disable the passive LLM's? Wouldn't be a fair fight, but then, is there an algorithm for 'fairness'?

It's not controversial that electrochemical processes cause us to decide to act. — Janus

I'm afraid it is very controversial. The disagreement centres on "cause". There's a definition which circulates in philosophical discussion and this definition itself is, in my view, suspect. After all, it was developed more than 300 years ago and things have moved on since then. Allied to a popular metaphysical view - that the only "true" or fundamental reality is physical/material reality, it is inescapably reductionist. — Ludwig V

I'm with you here. That's what I thought Janus was saying, but apparently not.

Interesting that the very idea of 'causation' which seems so intuitively and even scientifically obvious, actually turns out to be a metaphysical issue, or at least it has since Hume.

The distinction I was seeking to make at the outset of that discussion was between efficient and material causation, or causes and conditions, and teleological causation, which is intentional. That does hark back to Aristotle, but then, there's been something of a revival of interest in Aristotle's philosophy of biology recently.

Part of the problem is that the scientific revolutionaries in the 17th century took an entirely rational decision that their physics would not and could not take account of anything that could not be represented as a measurable quantity that could be treated mathematically. There's nothing wrong with that decision, except the illusion that anything that could not be represented in physics was not real. — Ludwig V

The modern mind-body problem arose out of the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, as a direct result of the concept of objective physical reality that drove that revolution. 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. (Mind and Cosmos, Pp35-36) — Nagel, Mind and Cosmos, 35-36

Of course this is the background to Chalmer's 'facing up to the problem of consciousness'.

Coming back to what I will call - as vaguely as possible - the neurophysiological correlates of action. The neurophysiologists are positing all sorts of mental events - at least that is the language they use - which precede action. They don't seem to allow the possibility of "simply acting" - and if they did, it would mess up their search for physical processes that precede action. — Ludwig V

I really think neurophysiology is only relevant when you have a condition that prevents you making tea or going to the shop. 'I was going to go out, but I can't move my legs.' 'I was going to make tea, but suddenly my vision became blurry and I couldn't see straight.' Call the doctor! But 'the brain' is not normally a consideration.

I asked ChatGPT to provide a summary of Raymond Tallis' view:

Raymond Tallis coined the term "neuromania" to critique the overextension of neuroscience into domains where it may not have explanatory power. He uses the term to refer to the widespread tendency to reduce complex human experiences—such as consciousness, agency, culture, and morality—entirely to neural activity in the brain. Tallis argues that this reductionist view, which treats humans as if they are nothing more than biological machines driven by brain processes, is inadequate for capturing the richness of human existence, including our subjective experiences, social lives, and sense of meaning.

In his view, "neuromania" is part of a broader materialist trend in which the complexities of human thought and behavior are oversimplified and reduced to neuroscientific explanations. Tallis believes that this approach neglects the philosophical, cultural, and existential dimensions of human life, which cannot be fully explained by brain scans or neurochemical processes. Instead, he emphasizes the importance of understanding humans as embodied beings embedded in social and cultural contexts.

His criticism is directed at those who make claims that neuroscience can, or will soon, explain everything about what it means to be human, effectively ignoring other fields like philosophy, art, and the humanities.

I do notice the frequent assertions on this forum that, although neuroscience can't yet 'explain consciousness', they will do at some point 'in the future'. I would include that tendency under the same general heading.

I also do not believe what I am writing now is correct, or false. Thought itself is abstract, just as language. A row of letters on a screen, pixels, everything that is and is not. — Plex

Also known as 'nonsense'.

IDK, this strikes me not so much as contemporary philosophy being opposed to positing God as part of an explanation as contemporary philosophy wanting to make man take the place of God. — Count Timothy von Icarus

And I’d concur. ‘Anything but God’. That was part of the firewall built by the Enlightenment. It’s more than just a bias, although it’s also that.

I don't see how enactivism would require that forms are "artefacts of the cognitive system." — Count Timothy von Icarus

Caution required here. I’m not tying to provide a psychological explanation. It's more aligned with Charles Pinter's book Mind and the Cosmic Order:

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.

Note, people and animals. As Joshs says, forms that are co-emergent in the relationship with the environment.

Instead of placing the inorganic under the category of efficient cause and the organic under the category of complex dynamical systems, and then trying to make the latter’s forming agency ‘ emerge’ from the former, formative agency can be accorded to the inorganic as well as the organic. — Joshs

It only begins to meaningfully show up in the form of living beings. Otherwise, whether it was 'there' or not, there'd be nobody to debate it!

I should add that what you’re identifying as formative capability in humans is not a passive picture of the world created by an observer, but a performative activity, a set of practices involving mind, body and environment in a dance of interaffection. Form is not our stance toward the world but a pattern of material interactions with it, in the midst of it. — Joshs

Quite. From another discussion:

The 'transjective' refers to the dynamic, participatory relationship between the subject and the world, in which meaning arises through interaction rather than being either imposed by the subject ('in the mind') or existing outside ('in the world'). Vervaeke argues that the objective/subjective distinction presents a false dilemma because it overlooks how humans are always embedded in a web of relationships and processes within which meaning arises. The 'transjective' thus highlights the co-emergence of perception and reality, suggesting that meaning is neither purely personal nor purely external but is co-constituted through engagement with the world. And that applies to meaning in all the different senses of that word, from the utilitarian to the aesthetic, which arise along a continuum, from a spider spinning a web to a poet spinning a sonnet. — Wayfarer

However I would question that these can be seen only in terms of 'material interactions', unless you want to advocate panpsychism.

Well if you'd said that to start off with......

What seems most misguided and retrogressive to me is the very idea that the brain is merely "grey glutinous matter". That seems most simple-minded to me. — Janus

The review it was taken from is here.

Yes. That’s a rather Taoist way of looking at it.

…which amount to changing the subject… — Janus

There’s been a clear thread of argument throughout this entire exchange.

If God does not exist, brutes also have no nature before they exist (this is especially obvious in the case of species that existed before humans, such as dinosaur species) and therefore they also ought to be free. — Jedothek

however, animals don't have the same capacity to reflect on existence and decide on a course of action, so the question - in fact, a question of any kind - doesn't arise for them.

My favourite two Sartre stories are: he once launched into a diatribe sorrounded by all his usual friends and foils who, after some time, decided to go out for coffee, leaving him alone in the flat. They came back some hours later, and he was still talking.

The second one was the unfortunate soul who fell into his open grave at the burial. Seemed macabre but appropriate.

Of course they do, but we also act for reasons. As I keep trying to get you to see they are just different kinds of explanation. You might get it if you ditch your either/or thinking. — Janus

The point was that the ‘kettle’ example is a clear-cut illustration of the distinction between efficient (water temp) and teleological (intentional) causation. Using ‘neural activity’ to illustrate the distinction muddies the water by introducing another set of questions, concerning the relationship between neurophysiology and free will which you acknowledge is not at all clear cut.

What is it we are doing when we split an observer off from an observed, and then go on to declare the observed as lacking any form in itself? — Joshs

I don't think I suggested that. I am suggesting that the notion of 'formless matter' is meaningful. From the perspective of classical philosophy, 'formless matter' refers to matter that lacks a specific form or structure, awaiting the imposition of form to become a particular. In this sense, formless matter is a potentiality that can take on various forms through natural processes or external causes. From that perspective, clouds of interstellar gas could be considered formless matter in a metaphysical sense, as they are raw material that, under the right conditions (e.g., gravitational forces, fusion processes), can form stars, planets, or other celestial bodies. For that perspective, 'form' (morphe) refers not just to shape but to the organizing principle that gives a substance its identity.

As @frank points out, from a scientific perspective, interstellar gas and dust are not really formless, as they are subject to physical laws and composed of atoms which have regular structures. They are subject to processes of condensation, fusion, and gravitational collapse, enabling the formation of structures like stars or planets. In this sense, the term "formless" would not strictly apply, since even gas clouds have properties (mass, temperature, charge) and follow patterns like the formation of stars in nebulae. However, they could be seen as chaotic or unstructured compared to highly organized systems such as life-bearing planets and human artefacts.

If forms arise in the relationship between observer and observed, isn’t this also true of what supposedly lies outside of the experience of the observer? — Joshs

What do we suppose does lie outside all experience? Can that even be meaningfully discussed?

What I'm wrestling with are two senses of 'form'. There's the Aristotelian sense of morphe which informs matter. That is the classical view, which to all intents became absorbed into Christian theism. As such it's a kind of no-go for a lot of people, if it suggests anything like intelligent design or the 'divine intellect'.

Then there's the enactivist approach, which considers form as both an emergent principle, on the one hand, and also a cognitive function, where forms serve as gestalts, the unitary wholes which enable the mind to recognise particulars as part of a species.

As far as forms being emergent principles, there is still some resonance of the Aristotelian morphe in that, as it is preserved in the current lexicon as morphology and its derivatives. Both Terrence Deacon and Alice Juarrero acknowledge a revised Aristotelian element in their books.

As far as the 'observer and observed' are concerned, that's a whole other topic. I've started trying to draft an essay on it but it is wide and deep.

Might be worth asking how the electrical grid is maintained in the absence of humans. LLMs don’t have, you know, hands.

I'm not claiming that intentionality and personal experience can be comprehended or encapsulated in any purely physical account. — Janus

So electrochemical reactions do or don’t cause us to act?

Stimulation via the senses is achieved via electrochemical processes as I understand it. — Janus

Which are immediately interpreted by the mind. There are electro-chemical constituents to be sure, but then the question of intentionality and judgement comes to mind. Remember this whole discussion started with the sense in which decisions and ideas are 'caused by' neurophysiogical processes. The whole process of perception and action is 'of a piece' but you don't say that can be explained solely in terms of physical processes unless you're a philosophical materialist - which you say you're not, but then you keep falling back to a materialist account.

They are just two different explanatory paradigms which cannot be combined into a unified master paradigm as far as I can see, I admit it might turn out that I'm wrong about that of course. At present no such master paradigm seems to be on the horizon. — Janus

But the 'two competing explanatory paradigms', mental and material, just is the Cartesian division - mind and matter, self and other. It was phenomenology, and some of the ideas that arise from that, which seeks to transcend that division. The two books I'm currently reading, Deacon's Incomplete Nature, and Evan Thompson's Mind in Life, are mainly about that. So too many of John Vervaeke's lectures in Awakening from the Meaning Crisis.

Ah, ok. Makes sense!

As I brought up the mereological fallacy, I'll provide an account from a review of Bennett and Hacker, PHilosophical Foundations of Neuroscience:

In Chapter 3 of Part I - “The Mereological Fallacy in Neuroscience” - Bennett and Hacker set out a critical framework that is the pivot of the book. They argue that for some neuroscientists, the brain does all manner of things: it believes (Crick); interprets (Edelman); knows (Blakemore); poses questions to itself (Young); makes decisions (Damasio); contains symbols (Gregory) and represents information (Marr). Implicit in these assertions is a philosophical mistake, insofar as it unreasonably inflates the conception of the 'brain' by assigning to it powers and activities that are normally reserved for sentient beings. It is the degree to which these assertions depart from the norms of linguistic practice that sends up a red flag. The reason for objection is this: it is one thing to suggest on empirical grounds correlations between a subjective, complex whole (say, the activity of deciding and some particular physical part of that capacity, say, neural firings) but there is considerable objection to concluding that the part just is the whole. These claims are not false; rather, they are devoid of sense.

Wittgenstein remarked that it is only of a human being that it makes sense to say “it has sensations; it sees, is blind; hears, is deaf; is conscious or unconscious.” (Philosophical Investigations, § 281). The question whether brains think “is a philosophical question, not a scientific one” (p. 71). To attribute such capacities to brains is to commit what Bennett and Hacker identify as “the mereological fallacy”, that is, the fallacy of attributing to parts of an animal attributes that are properties of the whole being. Moreover, merely replacing the mind by the brain leaves intact the misguided Cartesian conception of the relationship between the mind and behavior, merely replacing the ethereal by grey glutinous matter. The structure of the Cartesian explanatory system remains intact, and this leads to Bennett and Hacker's conclusion that contemporary cognitive neuroscientists are not nearly anti-Cartesian enough.

@Ludwig V might find that of interest.

If the mind is imposing a form on "clouds of interstellar matter," that lack it, why does it impose one form over any other? — Count Timothy von Icarus

Because 'cloud' is a familar cognitive trope. But do clouds possess form at all? I think in the strict sense that it is questionable. They fall under this description:

Clay, rocks, etc. are just bundles of external causes. — Count Timothy von Icarus

(That question is anticipated in the Parmenides, when Socrates asks if there are forms for hair, dirt and mud.)

In any case, the fact that forms are artefacts of the cognitive system, does not undermine their objective (or would that be transjective) reality. It doesn't say that they're solely the product of the mind, but that they arise in the relationship between observer and observed. Biological phenomenology such as enactivism sees such cognitive artifacts as co-arising as a consequence of the interaction between organism and environment. For the pre-moderns, obviously forms could have 'eternal reality in the mind of God' but that is generally not an option for modern philosophy, but we could plausibly say that the idea of forms arose from an intuitive grasp of this co-dependency.

It's not controversial that electrochemical processes cause us to decide to act. Do you really believe that when you decide to act or simply act that there have been no prior neural processes (that you have obviously not been aware of) which give rise to that decision or action? — Janus

They might be unconscious, but that doesn’t mean they’re reducible to, or explainable in terms of, electrochemical processes. That is precisely materialist philosophy of mind.

Obviously stimuli can affect your endocrines, adrenaline, and the like. But that is a matter of biological physiology, not electrochemical reactions as such. Electrochemical reactions are a lower level factor that response to higher-level influences, which in the case of humans can include responses to words, which is the basis of rational causation.

It's not controversial that electrochemical processes cause us to decide to act — Janus

Not for materialists, anyway. You’re actually arguing for materialist determinism when you say that, whether you’re aware of it or not. But then, I guess if your brain is configured to do that, you’ll have no choice, will you?

No, I'm not attributing agency in any other sense than action. In the kind of sense that the chemist speaks of chemical agents. — Janus

So how does it cause a decision to act? Do chemicals also ‘decide to act’? You’ve said many times that the material universe is devoid of intention.

I went to the shops because the neural activity which is experienced as realizing... — Janus

You’re attributing agency to neurophysiology. It’s what Hacker and Bennett call the ‘mereological fallacy’, the attribution to a part that which can only properly said of the whole.

In the early 90’s I was an Apple Education dealer. There were many conferences animated by excitement over the supposed immense potential of multimedia for education. They were heady times. Fast forward to all the hand-wringing about the corrosive effects of social media and online porn and the plummeting rates of literacy and numeracy amongst school age children. Technology is always a two-edged sword.

Interesting perspective. As a regular user, I’m finding ChatGPT - I’m now on the free tier, which is still an embarrassment of riches - incredibly useful, mainly for philosophy and reference, but all kinds of other ways too. My adult son who was initially wary is now finding ways to use it for his hospitality ventures. So my experience of it is benign, although I can easily see how it could be used for mischievous or malevolent purposes.

Chilling editorial from Vox on the latest moves at OpenAI and the change of status from Not for Profit.

Open AI is Dead

this week, the news broke that OpenAI will no longer be controlled by the nonprofit board. OpenAI is turning into a full-fledged for-profit benefit corporation. Oh, and CEO Sam Altman, who had previously emphasized that he didn’t have any equity in the company, will now get equity worth billions, in addition to ultimate control over OpenAI.

Here in Australia, abortion is still technically illegal in some states, but it's never enforced, and it's not nearly so much a matter of controversy as in the USA.

My view is that abortion is a matter of choice, but I can see why its use to avoid the consequences of casual sex is morally objectionable. Still, some of my relatives have had to have it, and I didn't (and wouldn't) speak out against it, as the circumstances demanded it, although I think it is a decision that has an ethical dimension.

(As it happens, my father was a renowned obstetrician and gynaecologist, and one of the generation of practitioners who introduced oral contraceptives to the world. He was very much involved in WHO efforts to promote contraception in developing nations in the 1960's, and was infuriated by the Catholic Church's opposition. We had many long dinner-table discussions about it. At the time, I was completely convinced by his opposition but I have since come to understand the philosophy behind the objection.)

We're able to impose form on it by way of analysis of the chemical composition, spectroscopic analysis, etc. But in another sense, there are vast clouds of interstellar matter that are formless.

Which brings to mind the Pinter analysis - that form is precisely what is brought to bear by cognition so as to navigate the environment.