There really isn't any such thing as the Formless. — frank

Cosmology shows there are enormous amounts of formless matter scattered throughout the Universe. And that's only the matter that can be seen!

I appreciate your response... — ucarr

You're welcome.

I chose not to continue with the conversation because I don’t understand a lot of what you’ve written. It seems you’ve picked up on some of the ideas swirling around the internet about the fusion of quantum physics and consciousness and are trying to fashion them into a coherent system of thought, but to be brutally honest they’re not working out. ‘Consciousness being non-local because of superposition’ ?? Honestly the expression 'nonsense on stilts' comes to mind.

One of my guiding principles is that the subject of philosophy is the human condition and the place of w/man in nature. Clearly that has to take into account scientific discoveries, but I question whether philosophy should allow itself to be defined in those terms. Philosophy as I understand it is very much a matter of stance and attitude. Certainly it must draw on and acknowledge whatever empirical science demonstrates, but philosophy considers very subtle questions, that are beyond the scope of science not because they're incredibly complicated, but because they're generally very simple questions with a lot of depth.

I think Carroll is correct about consciousness being fully within the capacity of physicalist science to replicate. — ucarr

I strongly object to that proposition, not for sentimental reasons, but because of an impossibility in principle which is inherent in the nature of scientific method.

This does not mean, as many here seem to conclude, being anti-science or science denialism. It’s a matter of one of the fundamental assumptions of science since Galileo, that the domain of science is what is objectively observable and measurable. That ought not to be a controversial statement. And the reason ‘consciousness’ (I prefer ‘mind’) is intractable within that framework, is because it is not objective. Sure we can be more or less objective in our judgements about the matter, but the basis of the difficulty is stated clearly by David Chalmers in his 1996 paper:

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.

It is undeniable that some organisms are subjects of experience. But the question of how it is that these systems are subjects of experience is perplexing. Why is it that when our cognitive systems engage in visual and auditory information-processing, we have visual or auditory experience: the quality of deep blue, the sensation of middle C? How can we explain why there is something it is like to entertain a mental image, or to experience an emotion? It is widely agreed that experience arises from a physical basis, but we have no good explanation of why and how it so arises. Why should physical processing give rise to a rich inner life at all? It seems objectively unreasonable that it should, and yet it does. — Facing up to the Problem of Consciousness, David Chalmers

In line with what I said above, I think there's a very simple reason that this question is not scientifically tractable, but it's not a technical matter or something that requires advanced mathematics or sub-atomic physics to understand. When David Chalmers talks about 'what it is like to be...', he's referring to being. And being is not an object. This is something that Sean Carroll, despite his expert knowledge in physics, doesn't seem to grasp (whereas many of the specifically Continental philosophers and existentialists do.)

- No further comment.

:pray:

When Carroll claims there’s nothing special about consciousness, I think he’s saying the human individual is not unique and that with sufficient technology, perfect and complete replicas of human individuals are possible — ucarr

I think that Sean Carroll perfectly exemplifies what Thompson, Gleiser and Frank designate the blind spot of science. This is, according to them, is the exclusion of the subject from scientific reckoning. First spelled out in a 2019 Aeon essay, and now a book, the authors argue that the experience of the objects of analysis is indispensable to the understanding of them. They say that since the Enlightenment, humanity has looked to science to tell us who we are, where we come from, and where we're going, but we've gotten stuck thinking we can know the universe from outside our position in it; but that when we try to understand reality only through external objects projected from this perspective we lose sight of reality as experienced. This is what lies behind the subject-object divide in the thread title. The book goes into great detail on the origin of this 'cartesian divide' and its historical precedents and consequences.

So, why would Sean Carroll not see that? In what he says about consciousness as 'a way of speaking about physical things', he doesn't see that he or anyone else is only able to engage in those speech acts because we're conscious. Of course 'consciousness' is not an object as such, rather it is the ground of the awareness which allows us to say anything whatever (as Descartes affirmed). But there is nothing objective about it, save for the fact that we can infer that it is something that others share with us. If that seems like philosophy 101, it is, but Carroll doesn't see it.

What is this thing that Bob paid for? We could call it form. In the world of art, form goes hand in hand with its brother: content. Form is actual shapes molded into the clay. — frank

One reference point that comes to my mind is Aristotle's form (morphe) and substance (hyle). Now there's a complicating factor here, because 'hyle' - derived from the word for timber - has a different meaning to 'substance' as that is used in translations of Aristotle's metaphysics. 'Hyle' refers to the underlying potentiality or material aspect of a particular, while morphe (form) refers to the actualizing structure or organization. Hyle, in this case, is more about potential than about an actual material substance with uniform properties like timber or lumber. It is what is capable of taking on form, a kind of indeterminate potentiality that becomes something specific when combined with morphe.

In Greek philosophy, I think the form would be presumed to be the work of a mind, e.g,. Plato's demiurge in the Timaeus. In Aristotle’s biology there is a kind of proto-concept of self-organization. For Aristotle, natural things have an internal telos or goal-directedness—an internal principle of motion and rest. While Aristotle didn’t propose self-organization in the modern sense, he did argue that living organisms have an inherent purpose and organization that arises from their nature, not from the imposition of an external mind.

I don't think the Greeks shared the conception of self-organisation that is associated with modern biological theory.

So a formless lump of clay would be, in this scheme, merely a potential something, it would have no identity. Bob has paid for a lump of clay, let's hope at the market rate.

However, form and content has a slightly different meaning to form and substance. 'In art and art criticism, form and content are considered distinct aspects of a work of art. The term form refers to the work's composition, techniques and media used, and how the elements of design are implemented. It mainly focuses on the physical aspects of the artwork, such as medium, color, value, space, etc., rather than on what it communicates. Content, on the other hand, refers to a work's subject matter, i.e., its meaning' ~ Wikipedia. Form and content is a more characteristically modern expression, although the lineage of the idea might be traced back to the earlier form and substance. But even in that case, a lump of clay really has no form, and so, no meaningful content, other than as raw material. Again, it looks like Bob has been ripped off.

That’s a book, not an argument. A synopsis would be preferable.

Do tell!

it’s the precise nature of the causal relationship that is at issue. Physicalism says it must be bottom-up, but the placebo effect mitigates against that.

The reason I went to the shops was to buy milk. The cause of my going to the shops was neural activity. — Janus

Without wanting to nit pick, I don’t think that’s quite right. The stock example I’ve always read is, the answer to ‘why is the kettle boiling?’ can be either ‘to make tea’ or ‘because it’s been heated to the appropriate temperature.’ Both answers are of course correct, but the former is teleological - what is the water boiling for? - while the latter refers to the preceding cause of the water boiling. Generally speaking science since Galileo has attempted to avoid teleological explanations, preferring explanations in terms of preceding causes.

The damage to the financial industry is much more than getting their money back. Are you really saying "No harm done"? — L'éléphant

Not at all. But reading that article - as I said, a long read - one of the points that Lewis made was that it might have been possible for FTX to have recovered the supposedly missing funds by itself:

On May 7, 2024, John Ray, FTX’s new CEO, revealed to the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware that, against the $8.7 billion in missing customer deposits, FTX was now sitting on something like $14.5 to $16.3 billion. Whatever the exact sum, it was enough to repay all depositors and various other creditors at least 118 cents on the dollar — that is, everyone who imagined they had lost money back in November 2022 would get their money back, with interest. After paying off FTX’s debts — and paying themselves at least half a billion dollars — Ray and his team will likely still be sitting on billions of dollars. How many billions of dollars is still an open question, but very few of these dollars can be the result of Ray’s various lawsuits to claw back money paid out by FTX in good times. The money came almost entirely from a fire sale of the contents of Sam Bankman-Fried’s dragon’s lair.

The success of the bankruptcy clearly surprised, and maybe even alarmed, the lawyers running it. Months after Sam Bankman-Fried handed him the company, Ray had been keen to stress how little of value he’d been given. More than a little bizarrely, he talked down the value of the assets he was meant to dispose of to repay creditors. Ray called the 20 percent stake Sam had acquired in Anthropic “worthless.” The giant pile of Solana tokens Sam had acquired for pennies were “shitcoins” whose value had been falsely inflated by Sam’s purchases. The Anthropic stake has wound up being worth billions. The Solana token, even without Alameda Research around to prop it up, popped back up from roughly $10 at the end of 2022 to $150 a year and a half later. To this day, Ray hasn’t spoken to Sam Bankman-Fried. It’s hard not to wonder, if they had simply called Sam, what else the lawyers running the FTX bankruptcy might have learned about the contents of his lair. Also, how much more money would be on hand if, for their first 18 months on the job, the bankruptcy lawyers had simply not shown up for work.

It's nuanced tale, of competing judgements about what SBF was really up to. Lewis doesn't try to absolve him of guilt, but he does call into question whether SBF was conniving or delusional.

(Incidentally, Caroline Ellison has just now been sentenced to two years for her role in the scheme.)

See this reference, under the question 'Whether it can be demonstrated that God exists'.

It would be useful in future if you provided a link or reference for further context for weighty questions such as these.

I note that this is mentioned as the second objection to the proposition. The answer is given below as:

Reply Obj. 2: When the existence of a cause is demonstrated from an effect, this effect takes the place of the definition of the cause in proof of the cause’s existence. This is especially the case in regard to God, because, in order to prove the existence of anything, it is necessary to accept as a middle term the meaning of the word, and not its essence, for the question of its essence follows on the question of its existence. Now the names given to God are derived from His effects; consequently, in demonstrating the existence of God from His effects, we may take for the middle term the meaning of the word God.

Quite!

I found this note on the Wikipedia entry on Pragmatism:

Joseph Margolis in Historied Thought, Constructed World (California, 1995) makes a distinction between "existence" and "reality". He suggests using the term "exists" only for those things which adequately exhibit Peirce's Secondness: things which offer brute physical resistance to our movements. In this way, such things which affect us, like numbers, may be said to be "real", although they do not "exist". Margolis suggests that God, in such a linguistic usage, might very well be "real", causing believers to act in such and such a way, but might not "exist".

Close to what I believe, although I think the number is indeed embedded in the fabric of the cosmos, so that it is ontologically greater than merely 'something that affects us'.

I have no idea what you mean unless you are thinking of counting as an act. — Janus

Yes, I’m exploring that way of thinking about it. It’s often said that numbers are abstract or intelligible objects, but I’ve long felt that ‘object’ is the wrong word, a reification (thingifying). But number as the representation of the act of counting and other mathematical operations makes sense to me. It is also linked to the active sense of being, which is what I mean by ‘being is a verb’. (I sense some connection here with Aquinas on the dynamic nature of being but I won’t take that up right now.)

Now you have opened the door to the world of pain that is reality in philosophy. The meaning of "real" depends heavily on the context of its use. — Ludwig V

My intuition is that numbers are real but not existent in the same sense that objects are. The deep issue is that in modern philosophy, ‘what is real’ and ‘what exists’ are generally understood to be synonymous. Whereas I believe ‘what exists’ is a subset of ‘what is real’, which includes potentiality, possibility, logical laws and mathematical principles, and much else besides. (C S Pierce has a similar view and has writings on the distinction between reality and existence.)

But this is why, when you say ‘number is real’, the difficult question comes up ‘what do you mean by “real” or “exists”?’ The analogy of the divided line in the Republic addresses this. Plato says there are different kinds or levels of knowing with different kinds of objects - pistis, doxa, dianoia and noesis. But this is precisely what has been lost in the transition to modernity. Dianoia - mathematical and geometrical knowledge - was retained, through Galileo’s Platonism, but noesis was rejected, along with realism concerning universals. And the other background issue is that the idea of the hierarchy of being and knowing had become integrated with the ‘medieval synthesis’, Ptolemaic cosmology and geocentricity, so that when this collapsed, the ‘great chain of being’ collapsed with it. And it was that metaphysics which had allowed for ‘degrees of reality’. Without it mankind is confined to a kind of single dimension of reality, that of objects and forces, the isolated Cartesian ego exploring and manipulating a world of objects through abstract geometry - modern materialism, in a nutshell.

Looking back, the original clarity looks like an inheritance from Plato. But perhaps that's just me. — Ludwig V

Not at all, a priori/a posteriori was Kant’s summary of a fundamental philosophical distinction, later called into question by Quine in his Two Dogmas of Empiricism. But I still think it’s a valid distinction, in fact I recall it being one of the first things I was taught as an undergraduate, in the class on Hume.

Even if we grant him the reality of abstract objects, which is true in a sense, it would be hard to grasp what that phrase means. — Ludwig V

When Frege says that 'thought contents' are real 'in the same way' as a pencil, he means, well, real. (He distinguishes 'thought content' as numbers and logical laws from casual thought.) So he's granting reality to abstract objects, which nowadays is controversial. As regards the empiricist rejection of Platonic realism, it's sadly typical, I'm afraid. The simple reason is - and it is simple - that if number is real but not material, then it's a defeater for materialism - and we can't allow that :rage:

Mathematical platonism has considerable philosophical significance. If the view is true, it will put great pressure on the physicalist idea that reality is exhausted by the physical. For platonism entails that reality extends far beyond the physical world and includes objects that aren’t part of the causal and spatiotemporal order studied by the physical sciences. Mathematical platonism, if true, will also put great pressure on many naturalistic theories of knowledge. For there is little doubt that we possess mathematical knowledge. The truth of mathematical platonism would therefore establish that we have knowledge of abstract (and thus causally inefficacious) objects. This would be an important discovery, which many naturalistic theories of knowledge would struggle to accommodate. — SEP

This is an old thread, but I thought better to post this here than start a new one. Sam Bankman-Fried: A Personal Verdict (Washington Post gift link) by Michael Lewis who had written a book on him. (Also author of the Big Short.)

It’s a long read which I won’t try to summarise, other than to note that all of the investors in FTX got their funds back, which was announced in May this year. Which, I think, tends to throw the very long sentence that SBF received into some question. Lewis doesn’t say it outright, but he seems to suggest it. He says in conclusion ‘I think the truth is closer to “young person with an intellectually defensible but socially unacceptable moral code makes a huge mistake in trying to live by it” than “criminal on the loose in the financial system.” ‘ And the fact that none of the investors lost their money - although they did fail to realise Bitcoin gains they might have made - makes me feel a bit uneasy about it.

Well, ‘being’ is a verb.

I think of number as an act rather than an entity.

1.We should recognize (and I do mean recognize) that discovering Neptune is different from Pythagoras' discovery of his theorem or the discovery of the irrationality of pi or sqrt2. — Ludwig V

Traditionally, this was regarded as a distinction between a posteriori (learned through observation) and a priori (established through deduction), although this distinction has become far less clear-cut than it was in Kant's day.

Did he construct his distinction between present-at-hand and ready-to-hand or create it? — Ludwig V

I know that 'ready to hand' would suggest Heidegger but it wasn't really meant as an allusion to him. It's closer to something Frege said:

Frege believed that number is real in the sense that it is quite independent of thought: 'thought content exists independently of thinking "in the same way", he says "that a pencil exists independently of grasping it. Thought contents are true and bear their relations to one another (and presumably to what they are about) independently of anyone's thinking these thought contents - "just as a planet, even before anyone saw it, was in interaction with other planets." '

...in The Basic Laws of Arithmetic he says that 'the laws of truth are authoritative because of their timelessness: "[the laws of truth] are boundary stones set in an eternal foundation, which our thought can overflow, but never displace. It is because of this, that they authority for our thought if it would attain to truth." — Frege on Knowing the Third Realm, Tyler Burge

The fact that impresses me is the discovery of scientific and mathematical principles that are true, independently of any grasp of them. So they're mind-independent, on the one hand, because they're true for anyone who can grasp them. But at the same time, they're only perceptible to reason (which I will continue to insist is not available to animals in anything but the most rudimentary form.)

So such principles are in some basic sense 'structures of rational thought'. They pertain to and arise from what has been known in some schools as 'the formal realm', the domain of laws and principles (hence Frege's 'third realm'.) The difficulty this presents for moderns, though, is that this 'realm' is not an actual place or location, it's real in the same sense that the 'domain of natural numbers' is real while not materially existent. Whereas empiricism usually continues to insist on the reality of the mind-independent physical object, which I regard as an oxymoronic construction.

//

Frege held that both the thought contents that constitute the proof-structure of
mathematics and the subject matter of these thought contents (extensions, func-
tions) exist. He also thought that these entities are non-spatial, non-temporal,
causally inert, and independent for their existence and natures from any person's
thinking them or thinking about them. Frege proposed a picturesque metaphor of
thought contents as existing in a "third realm". This "realm" counted as "third"
because it was comparable to but different from the realm of physical objects and
the realm of mental entities. I think that Frege held, in the main body of his career,
that not only thought contents, but numbers and functions were members of this
third realm. — ibid

Compare with:

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

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

Well, there's a good answer to that - someone has to build and maintain all the things we rely on. But they shouldn't have the last word.//

I thought that as well, but isn’t a syllogism a logical construct in propositional form, which we create? — Mww

Construct, I think, rather than 'create', out of materials ready to hand, so to speak.

Could it be that the biggest problem for indirect realists, is being called indirect realists? — Mww

:100:

Isn’t the ‘order of reasons’ simply what it says? Something which any valid syllogism will exemplify? The book from which the Nagel essay is taken, is The Last Word (review), a defense of reasoned argument against relativism and subjectivism. They will insist that everything is perspectival, or that facts depend on parochial rather than universal considerations. Nagel spends considerable time illustrating that these styles of argument are necessarily self-defeating, as they provide no grounds for thinking anything true.

As for the ground of reason, obviously a deep question, but I will generally argue that the ‘furniture of reason’, the basic laws of thought, are discovered and not invented.

That passage from Kant is also polemical, namely against the ‘ridiculous despotism of the schools’, meaning scholastic philosophy with its rigid adherence to dogma under the banner of revelation trumping reason.

The hawk that can catch a rabbit is, in one sense, solving a complex mathematical problem even though it can't solve it in the way(s) that we can; it can also distinguish quite reliably between what it can, with benefit, eat without any (articulate) knowledge of chemistry. — Ludwig V

:chin:

Why are immaterial things we deal with all the time that are organized not relevant? Logic and mathematics, for example. — Patterner

My thoughts also. Platonism in a general philosophical sense (as distinct from specific discussion of Plato’s dialogues) upholds the reality of abstractions including numbers and universals. This was mainstream in Western philosophy until the medieval period, when it was eclipsed by nominalism and later by empiricism.

The Greek philosophers believed that such ‘intelligible objects’ belonged to a higher plane of reality than the material, which humans alone could grasp through the exercise of reason. These are real in a different sense to the objects of sense-perception, being graspable only by the intellect (nous).

Eric Perl’s book has the background to that.

The paradox is that the ‘thing-in-itself’, which Kant most definitely claims must exist as a transcendental truth, cannot be known if our conscious experience is representational; but to know that one’s conscious experience is representational requires us to trust that very conscious experience to know some aspects of the things-in-themselves (such as that we exist with a nature such that we represent objects which impact our sensibility). — Bob Ross

The way in which we know our own being, and the way we know the existence of other objects, is
different. It's the distinction between the first- and third-person perspective. I think that Kant agrees with Descartes that knowledge of our own being is apodictic i.e. it cannot plausibly be denied, as it is a condition of us knowing anything whatever (cogito ergo sum). However, knowing that we are is not the same as knowing what we are. And you may remember other elements of the famous essay in which Descartes made that claim, where he considers the possibility that all of what we perceive might be the consequence of an illusion cast by an 'evil daemon'. So the fact that we can have certain knowledge that we ourselves exist, yet be unsure that all our cognitions are reliable, is not in itself paradoxical, but instead one of the insights that Kant is responding to in his work.

just try to strip away the a priori means of understanding the ball, and you will certainly have nothing conceptually left but an object with no definite properties — Bob Ross

An object with no definite properties is not an object at all. To be an object is to have properties.

when you realize that you had to trust your experience to tell you that you exist in a transcendent world, you have representative faculties, and that those faculties are representing external objects—all of which are claims about reality as it is in-itself. — Bob Ross

Again, the key difference about knowledge of objects, and knowledge of your own faculties, is that the latter have an immediacy and first-person nature which affords a direct insight into their operations. I think Kant is intuitively exploring the nature of knowledge and reason through interogating the operations of his own mind. That is quite a different process to analysing e.g. the motions of bodies, which is done through precise measurement and specification of the conditions under which measurements are taken. Again its the distinction between first- and third-person understanding.

It has been claimed that Kant is a precursor to cognitive science ref. But rather than go into the detail of that, suffice to consider your 'paradox' in light of that framework. What Kant is famous for is the insight that our knowledge of the world is a constructive activity of the mind (his famous Copernican Revolution of Philosophy). We're not, as Locke and Hume say, tabula rasa, blank slates upon which ideas are inscribed by experience. The mind is actively constructing 'the world' (in the sense of the world of lived experience) moment by moment, which is where the categories come in. That is what makes Kant a source both of modern cognitive science and phenomenology, although they develop his insights in many different ways.

The perceived paradox hinges on a misunderstanding of the different types of knowledge that Kant is discussing. While Kant acknowledges that we have an apodictic awareness of our own existence as thinking beings (first-person knowledge), this does not imply that we have direct knowledge of our cognitive faculties as things-in-themselves. The recognition that our experience is representational is a product of transcendental reflection, not direct knowledge of the faculties themselves. Thus, the claim that our knowledge of the world is representational does not require us to have knowledge of things-in-themselves, but rather to understand the conditions under which experience is possible—conditions that Kant elaborates through his analysis of the categories and the forms of intuition.

One lurking factor that I've been thinking over is the change in the conception of the nature of reason over history. As David Bentley Hart puts it:

In the pre-modern vision of things, the Cosmos had been seen as an inherently purposive structure of diverse but integrally inseparable rational relations — for instance, the Aristotelian aitia, which are conventionally translated as “causes,” but which are nothing like the uniform material “causes” of the mechanistic philosophy. And so the natural order was seen as a reality already akin to intellect. Hence the mind, rather than an anomalous tenant of an alien universe, was instead the most concentrated and luminous expression of nature’s deepest essence. This is why it could pass with such wanton liberty through the “veil of Isis” and ever deeper into nature’s inner mysteries.

This has been subject of much commentary, although not much is said of it on this site, nor in analytic philosophy generally. Alexander Koyré has explored this in his books, with which I have only passing familiarity. Max Horkheimer, The Eclipse of Reason, another, and more generally the New Left's critique of the Enlightenment and the 'instrumentalisation of reason'.

I won't go further with it here, other than to note that this is the background to much of this debate, in which 'reason' is now mainly understood in terms of evolutionary adaptation, rather than as an instrument which is able to discern truth.

Then again, is there any excluded middle in absence of any talk to apply it to? (Identity, instead, is presupposed by meaning; maybe identity is where ontology and logic meet.) — jorndoe

That observation can be made of any number of logical principles and even natural numbers themselves. My belief is that these are discovered not invented, and that this something about the nature of the rational intellect: that it is able to grasp such principles, but that they are not of its own making.

Thanks, by far the most considered response to that essay by any of those I've mentioned it to.

There's no explanation of where this "proposal" came from, nor any account of why anyone would think that such an explanation would justify relying on reason. I wish he had recognized what evolutionary theory does and doesn't justify. — Ludwig V

He's discussing Robert Nozick's The Nature of Rationality. (I now notice that the posted version has lost some of the formatting to distinguish passages from his book, for which I apologise.) He says that this book sets out to provide a 'naturalised epistemology', that is, to ground knowledge in the facts of natural science, and in particular, evolutionary theory. He's saying that Nozick's argument is that the facts of evolutionary biology are sufficient to 'ground reason':

It (i.e. Nozick's book) seems to be a proposal of a possible naturalistic explanation of the existence of reason that would, if it were true, make our reliance on reason “objectively” reasonable--that is, a reliable way of getting at the truth.

So throughout this passage, he's presenting Nozick's proposal as an example of a naturalised epistemology based on evolutionary biology.

(Naturalized epistemology seeks to understand knowledge, belief, and justification using methods and insights from the natural sciences, particularly psychology, evolutionary biology, and cognitive science, rather than relying solely on a priori philosophical analysis. It treats epistemology as a branch of empirical science, where the processes of acquiring knowledge are studied as natural phenomena. It was notably advanced by W.V.O. Quine in his influential essay "Epistemology Naturalized" (1969). In it, he argued that traditional epistemology's quest for a foundation of knowledge is misguided and that instead, epistemology should be concerned with how humans, as natural beings, actually acquire and justify beliefs. Quine suggested replacing traditional epistemology with a psychological study of how we come to believe what we do. Nozick is writing in this vein, and Nagel is using this book as a foil for a general criticism of naturalised epistemology.)

So he's questioning Nozick's account, asking:

But is the (evolutionary) hypothesis really compatible with continued confidence in reason as a source of knowledge about the non-apparent character of the world? In itself, I believe an evolutionary story tells against such confidence. Without something more, the idea that our rational capacity was the product of natural selection would render reasoning far less trustworthy than Nozick suggests, beyond its original “coping” functions. There would be no reason to trust its results in mathematics and science, for example. — Nagel, p5

The 'something more' is a reason that carries its own authority, which need not and should not be grounded in something else. Note the resemblance to this earlier quote:

Boiled down to essentials, a nervous system enables the organism to succeed in the four F's: feeding, fleeing, fighting and reproducing. The principle chore of nervous systems is to get the body parts where they should be in order that the organism may survive. . . . . Improvements in sensorimotor control confer an evolutionary advantage: a fancier style of representing is advantageous so long as it is geared to the organism's way of life and enhances the organism's chances of survival — Plantinga, Naturalism Defeated

Plenty of animals get along just fine without mathematics and science. So appealing to evolutionary principles in support of reason actually has rather the contrary effect of undermining it, rather than strengthening it.

The justification of reason as a practice in its own right is a quite different project, and if that is his point, he (Nagel) is right. — Ludwig V

Well, that I take to be his point. Basically I read the argument as saying, to rely on scientific or evolutionary justifications for reason, is to undermine the sovereignty of reason. And why? Because it points to factors outside reason itself to ground reason:

The only form that genuine reasoning can take consists in seeing the validity of the arguments, in virtue of what they say. As soon as one tries to step outside of such thoughts, one loses contact with their true content. And one cannot be outside and inside them at the same time: If one thinks in logic, one cannot simultaneously regard those thoughts as mere psychological dispositions, however caused or however biologically grounded. If one decides that some of one's psychological dispositions are, as a contingent matter of fact, reliable methods of reaching the truth (as one may with perception, for example), then in doing so one must rely on other thoughts that one actually thinks, without regarding them as mere dispositions. One cannot embed all one's reasoning in a psychological theory, including the reasonings that have led to that psychological theory. The epistemological buck must stop somewhere. — p6

The fact that we have a rational capacity demands an evolutionary account. — Ludwig V

I don't know that it does. I agree that we certainly did evolve along the lines shown by the paleontological evidence, but I question how useful it is to rationalise the capacity to reason and speak in those terms.

Other than those points, mostly in agreement with the rest of the analysis, particularly the conclusion.

Sure, totally get that. It’s a very meaty essay.

How about the law of the excluded middle. Is that temporal?

Well, his 'hard problem' paper was the watershed moment. And don't loose sight of the fact that he was a bronze medallist at the Mathematics Olympiad before he got into philosophy. He's really rather a clever cookie. See the interview here, he grew up in my neighbourhood.

I'm expecting radical conceptual developments. A new Kuhnian paradigm. — Ludwig V

I think the outlines are beginning to emerge. Don't forget, the publication of Chalmer's book Towards a Theory of Consciousness, and the paper on the facing up to the problem of consciousness, virtually initiated the whole new sub-discipline of 'consciousness studies', which is at the intersection of phenomenology, psychology, cognitive science and philosophy. The bi-annual Arizona conference on the science of consciousness has been held ever since, co-chaired by Chalmers.

That's not quite what I had in mind. I was thinking of the way that so many economists think that everything is economics. Ai Wei Wei, apparently, once observed "Everything is Art, Everything is Politics." Other people think that everything is religion. — Ludwig V

It sounds very close to what I had in mind. Anyway - I'm sure you would agree that a large part of philosophy is learning to look at your spectacles instead of just through them.

Weinberg was a much more accomplished physicist — Pierre-Normand

But Michel Bitbol the more perceptive philosopher. As far as philosophy goes, Weinberg was a walking talking illustration of the 'Cartesian Divide'.

Michel Bitbol is definitely worth knowing about. One of the best discoveries I've made via this forum. He has many talks on YouTube.

Here’s the Wikipedia article on them https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jingjiao_Documents

I read excerpts from Martin Palmer’s book on the subject whilst doing Buddhist Studies. They’re very beautiful decorated silk scrolls written in Classical Chinese with many Buddhist and Taoist symbols and allegories.

By acknowledging the indispensability of the observer. Bitbol (whom you introduced me to, by the way) is a very different kind of thinker to Weinberg.

I don't believe the question is answerable because it comes from trying to combine two incommensurable accounts. So the "hard problem" is based on an incoherent question. — Janus

No, it asks a very good question which draws attention to the incoherence of physicalism and the inability of it to explain the process which you say is ‘fairly well understood.’

Weinberg argued that sequences of "why?" questions always lead down to particle physics (and general relativity) and, prospectively, to some grand Theory of Everything. — Pierre-Normand

Hence his well-known quotation 'the more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.' Physics is constructed to as to exclude meaning, context, etc - as you point out.