Rachel Maddow points out that Trump has said on a number of recent occasions that ‘I don’t need your votes, we have plenty of votes’. She also notes around 70 known 2020 election deniers have found their way into management positions in electoral offices in swing states. Trump/MAGA has form trying to stitch up or throw elections and will have had plenty of time to work on it this time around. I wouldn’t like to believe it, but I also wouldn’t put it past them.

your claim:

You want consciousness to be the special thing — Banno

I have explained the sense in which the mind is not ‘a thing among other things’. It is perfectly clear.

and there you’re referring to the object of your present experience appearing to you as subject (although it shouldn’t have to explained.)

It was indeed facetious, since the quote had so little to do with the issues at hand. — Banno

The way you see them, anyway….

So long as you’re trying to treat consciousness, or mind, or observation, as one among the other objects in the world, then you’re adopting a faulty perspective. — Wayfarer

Hence:
it implies the observer, who is not in scope for the objective sciences
— Wayfarer
and
I reject any notion of ‘consciousness as substance
— Wayfarer

But how can you have it both ways? You both physicalism and dualism. — Banno

As I said at the beginning of mind-created world, my argument is perspectival. So long as you’re trying to treat consciousness, or mind, or observation, as one among the other objects in the world, then you’re adopting a faulty perspective. The mind/observer/subject is not an object in the world, one factor among others, to be considered alongside gravity or radiation. It is that which discloses such things as gravity and raditation and sub-atomic particles, amidst innumerable other things. It is the subject to whom all this occurs or appears. The ‘unknown knower’.

You will recall I quoted the first para of Schop’s WWI a few pages ago:

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.” ~ Schopenhauer

To which you responded:

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

I thought this response was so comically off the mark that I replied with an emoji. So trying again, and possibly for the last time - the reason ‘the mind’ (observer, subject) is not in scope for science IS NOT that it is a ‘mysterious spooky substance’, but because it’s ‘the subject of experience’. Which is never included in the scientific reckoning, for the obvious reason that it’s not amongst the objects of perception.

Is it possible to 'split' the thread? — boundless

This thread is well beyond that. It’s like the many worlds interpretation where every possible variation happens. :lol:

Linde says it changes our perception of what appears to be ‘the past’.

That’s pretty right - I do hold to a form of epistemic idealism. But I also claim that what we can claim is real is inextricably connected to what we can know, which I think is a consequence of my training in Buddhist philosophy.

As far as QBism is concerned, it says that each individual has a separate observation, and to that extent, it undermines the claim that they’re all observing the same thing. In other words, it calls objectivity into question - which is too high a price for its critics.

You want consciousness to be the special thing that collapse wave functions, but you don't want it to be different to the other stuff of the universe. — Banno

Thank you for that question. It is only taken about five years of argument to get to this point. I will carefully compose a response in due course.

*

IIRC there was a paper by philosopher Michel Bitbol that discussed this kind of thing — boundless

Bitbol one of the great discoveries I’ve made reading this forum. He’s written a book on Schrodinger’s philosophy of physics, which is a bit difficult without advanced physics, but many of his other papers are well worth reading, such as It is Never Known but it is the Knower. (By the way, during your absence I wrote an OP on idealism which you can find here.)

You presume it must involve a conscious being, — Banno

As did Schrödinger. But it’s metaphysically embarrassing, isn’t it, because it implies the observer, who is not in scope for the objective sciences. (If you bother to read the OP I wrote on idealism, you will notice I reject any notion of ‘consciousness as substance’ right at the beginning.)

that article was specifically about John Wheeler with additional commentary by Andrei Linde. Wheeler is the one known for the participatory universe idea. You can see how he gets that from the ‘delayed choice’ experimental results, particularly his thought-experiment where the experimental apparatus comprises light arriving from distant qasars.

Christian Fuchs who developed QBism was one of Wheeler’s (many) students but I think Wheeler had passed on by the time he started publishing. I listened to a long interview with him recently, I find his account of the interpretation of the physics quite understandable.

on second thoughts, don't worry about telling me. But it's worth the read.

But then I won't be surprised if the cycle repeats because you seem to vacillate as to whether you want to make an ontological claim or merely an epistemological one. — Janus

This link:

You mean experimentally? - https://www.nature.com/articles/nphys3343 — apokrisis

Refers to Wheeler's 'Delayed Choice' experiment. I haven't read that particular article, but there's another on Discover Magazine about Wheeler and this famous experiment. That magazine article is called Does the Universe Exist if We're Not Looking?

That seems to be making 'an ontological claim'. Or wait - is it an 'epistemological claim?'

You tell me.

So you acknowledge that unperceived things exist, and you are only denying that we can see things as they are when unperceived? — Janus

If you look at the OP again, you will notice that I've worded it very carefully. I will draw attention to a specific passage:

Let me address an obvious objection. ‘Surely “the world” is what is there all along, what is there anyway, regardless of whether you perceive it or not! Science has shown that h. sapiens only evolved in the last hundred thousand years or so, and we know Planet Earth is billions of years older than that! So how can you say that the mind ‘‘creates the world”’?

As already stated, I am not disputing the scientific account, but attempting to reveal an underlying assumption that gives rise to a distorted view of what this means. What I’m calling attention to is the tendency to take for granted the reality of the world as it appears to us, without taking into account the role the mind plays in its constitution. This oversight imbues the phenomenal world — the world as it appears to us — with a kind of inherent reality that it doesn’t possess. This in turn leads to the over-valuation of objectivity as the sole criterion for truth. By ‘creating reality’, I’m referring to the way the brain receives, organises and integrates cognitive data, along with memory and expectation, so as to generate the unified world–picture within which we situate and orient ourselves. — Wayfarer

Beyond that, I'm unwilling to try and re-state and re-explain what I think is stated and explained quite clearly in the OP.

@Banno - 'taking for granted the reality of the world as it appears to us, without taking into account the role the mind plays in its constitution' is what I took to be compatible with 'the myth of the given', although I didn't have that in mind when I composed it.

I am fascinated by disaster tourism....There is nothing more fun than a complete mess — Tarskian

That explains a lot ;-)

The only "deep state" is Project 2025 (i.e. The Heritage Foundation + The Federalist Society). Take your meds, dude. Roevember is coming! :victory: — 180 Proof

So once the direct route is accepted as forbidden to us, then what becomes the best indirect route? That is what pragmatism is about. We can subtract the psychological individual from the equation and make it about a dispassionate community of reason. — apokrisis

I don't know if 'forbidden' is the right word.

There's a relationship between 'subtracting the psychological individual' and the idea of detachment or disinterestedness. The 'dispassionate community of reason' is what the scientific community aspires towards, striving for objectivity and minimizing personal biases and emotions to gain an accurate understanding of the natural world through empirical observation, repeatability, and falsifiability. Detachment in the earlier, pre-modern sense esteemed by philosophical spirituality demands self-effacement and the abandonment of personal desires and ego to achieve insight into universal truths. They're historically related, in that the scientific developed out of the pre-modern, but as it did so, it also assumed a more anthropocentric perspective. (Maybe that's discussed in the Peter Harrison book on the foundations of science. )

There is the myth of the given; that mere observation, uninterpreted, is a given foundation for knowledge. — Banno

I see your point, but it's not too remote from my argument. My bad for bringing up Sellars. But nowhere have I said 'there is no world', only that we can't see it as if we were not a part of it, that the objective stance is treated as if it were an absolute, which it isn't.

the judgement that there are (or are not) such realities is an expression of a perspective. — Janus

But what can be expressed about anything without bringing a perspective to bear on it? As soon as you start to talk about 'whether the tree falls in the forest if no-one is there to hear it', you're already bringing a perspective to bear. As soon as you say there are unseen planets and unknown vistas, then you're already bringing a perspective to bear. The only way not to do that is to not say or think anything whatever.

Again, I'm making the distinction that Kant identified about the compatibility of empiricism and transcendental idealism. In Kant's philosophy, there is no inherent conflict between empiricism and transcendental idealism because they address different aspects of knowledge. Empiricism pertains to the content of our experiences, emphasizing that all knowledge begins with sensory input. Transcendental idealism, on the other hand, concerns the conditions that make such experience possible, positing that our minds actively structure and organize sensory data through a priori categories and forms of intuition, such as space and time. Thus, while empiricism provides the raw material for knowledge, transcendental idealism explains the framework within which this material is synthesized and understood, harmonizing the two by showing how empirical data is shaped by the mind's innate structures to produce coherent experience. That is the framework you can't get outside of, yet this is what you posit when you imagine a world with no subject in it.

I understand by the transcendental idealism of all appearances the doctrine that they are all together to be regarded as mere representations and not things in themselves, and accordingly that space and time are only sensible forms of our intuition, but not determinations given for themselves or conditions of objects as things in themselves. To this idealism is opposed transcendental realism, which regards space and time as something given in themselves (independent of our sensiblity). The transcendental realist therefore represents outer appearances (if their reality is conceded) as things in themselves, which would exist independently of us and our sensibility and thus would also be outside us according to pure concepts of the understanding. (CPR, A369)

Time and space are themselves projected by the mind onto the cosmos. They're not real independently of your perception of them.

It is why Kant says that we can't know the Universe (or object) as it is in itself, although @Banno has already declared that he rejects the idea (whereas I think he simply doesn't get it.) The "thing in itself" (which I'm saying is 'the Universe with no observers) represents the reality that lies beyond our perceptual and cognitive reach. This underscores the limits of human knowledge and reinforces the idea that our understanding is always shaped by the conditions of our cognition, making any direct knowledge of the "thing in itself" both impossible and meaningless within our conceptual framework.

Now I question Kant on that score, and there have been plenty of objections raised by generations of subsequent scholars. But I still say the substantive point remains.

There was a mention earlier in this thread about Kastrup's 'mind-at-large', and my questioning of that in a Medium essay. On further reflection, I am beginning to see that this could be conceptualised as 'the subject' or 'an observer' in a general sense. It doesn't refer to a particular individual, nor to some ethereal disembodied intelligence that haunts the Universe. But I wonder if it might also be plausibly understood as represented by the 'transcendental ego' in Kant and Husserl. Also, quite plausibly, the role of 'observer' in physics, which is never something included in the mathematical descriptions.

state a clear position. — Janus

What is clear from ten years of interactions, is that you don't understand what I write despite repeated efforts on my part to lay it out as clearly as I can. I'm about at the end of my tether as far as you're concerned.

The irony is that someone like Wayfarer who doesn't want to acknowledge that many things have happened, are happening and will happen that we can never know about, — Janus

A constant reminder that incomprehension of an argument doesn't constitute a rebuttal.

So though we know that prior to the evolution of life there must have been a Universe with no intelligent beings in it, or that there are empty rooms with no inhabitants, or objects unseen by any eye — the existence of all such supposedly unseen realities still relies on an implicit perspective. What their existence might be outside of any perspective is meaningless and unintelligible, as a matter of both fact and principle.

Hence there is no need for me to deny that the Universe is real independently of your mind or mine, or of any specific, individual mind. Put another way, it is empirically true that the Universe exists independently of any particular mind. — Wayfarer

sages can "directly" know "what is really going on". — Janus

I had Parmenides in mind, but obviously a very difficult text to fathom. I was recently musing whether Krishnamurti has a similar insight to Parmenides:

If you see "what is" then you see the universe, and denying "what is" is the origin of conflict. The beauty of the universe is in the "what is" and to live with "what is" without effort is virtue. — Krishnamurti

Perhaps Wayfarer could take you on a Zen retreat? — apokrisis

I myself never went to a specifically Zen retreat, although I did do others, including the arduous 10-day Goenka retreat in the past. Anyway I don't have the temperament or self-discipline required for Zen, I'm what Buddhists call bombu (the foolish ordinary man. )

That Nature quote - sure, I’ve been hearing about the 4E approach - enactive, embodied, embedded, extended. Vervaeke often talks about that. Kant is not the last word but there are aspects of his philosophy that remain essential (the fifth E?)

The thing in itself is left out of the equation. And science makes a big mistake in seeming to claim otherwise. But while science often does seem to claim this, along with the lumpen realists, science just as much understands in great detail the way it is all a self-interested cognitive construct that we dwell in as our personal space. That other semiotic view has always been there and has grown stronger in recent years. — apokrisis

Totally. I get there are many scientists who have that insightful approach. I’m arguing more against the residue of old-school materialism which is a very different thing, and still a very influential stream of thought. It’s like ‘the greening of America’, the emergence of ‘Consciousness III’ as that book had it. I’m pretty well on board with all the biological theorists you’ve introduced me to, as they’re generally not what I have in mind when I criticize ‘scientism’.

in reply you seem to hold that there are no true statements, only propositional attitudes. — Banno

I have acknowledged that there are empirical facts that can be objectively demonstrated. It's not as if they’re mind-dependent in depending on my believing them. Fire burns, medicine heals, knives cut and those who say otherwise are objectively mistaken. As I’ve said, Kantian philosophy allows for the consanguinity of empirical facts with transcendental idealism. But the empirical realm is itself constituted by and in the transcendental subject (i.e. some mind, some observer, not myself or a particular individual).

I never did call it into question. What I call into question is a 'mind independent world'. Reality contains an ineliminable subjective pole or element which in itself is not amenable to objective description. You say that, like me, you're opposed to 'scientism' but you don't say on what grounds. From my perspective, my argument shows how 'scientism' always contains a blind spot, as detailed in the essay I often refer to, The Blind Spot of Science is the Neglect of Lived Experience, by Thompson, Frank and Gleiser (now a book.)

The "reality" of the world - that some things are the case - cannot be called into question. — Banno

Why the scare quotes around reality?

At issue is whether the world is mind-independent or is not. You claimed:

There are three problems - the puzzle of other people, the fact that we are sometimes wrong, and the inevitability of novelty - each of which points to there being meadows and butterflies and other people, despite what you have in mind. I think you know that idealism won't cut it." — Banno

And I think that what you have in mind when you say that, is not what I mean by the term 'idealism', although I quite agree it's not worth another go-around.

You are disparaging of "The world is all that is the case", but have offered nothing coherent, no alternative and certainly not a refutation. — Banno

I said, in declaring this, you are basically starting that the empirical world is a given, the reality of which can't be called into question. I said this is subject to the criticism usually described as the myth of the given. I regard that as a coherent criticism of your common-sense realism.

I know we're talking past one another. From my side, I feel I offer arguments, and they're often ignored. From your side, what I think are arguments seem to be meaningless or pointless. Perhaps our perspectives are in some sense incommensurable.

One of those possibly pseudo-questions which may be sophistry; but, in your opinion do you think physics describes logic? — Shawn

You need logic before you can study physics. As was said already. (This incidentally is a cogent argument against physicalism as logic is used to construct physics, but not vice versa.)

Does physics entail logic? — Fire Ologist

I think there's a fascinating connection between Galileo's 'book of nature is written in mathematics' and the ability of modern mathematical physics to model and predict hitherto unknown natural processes. Through quantification, which comprises the ability to capture the measurable attributes of objects and forces, we are able to apply abstract mathematical methods, which often produce startingly novel results (per Eugene Wigner's The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences.)

That would require a usable theory of physical reality, which we don't have. We just have a collection of stubbor — Tarskian

Isn't a lot of what you write based on the fact that science doesn't explain science, mathematics doesn't explain maths, and so on? I mean, physical principles, such as Newton's Laws of Motion, and related mathematical techniques including calculus have been deployed to enormous effect across a huge range of applications. But Newton's laws don't explain why F=MA - nor do they need to. Can't we get by without knowing that?Isn't it sufficient to know how they work and how to apply them?

If the world reveals itself to the degree it can frustrate our desires, then dialectically this epistemology of truth demands the existence of those desires as the other half of its egocentric equation. — apokrisis

'Not my will, but thine, oh Lord' is one way of solving that problem.

Incidentally I did a search on 'biosemiosis and idealism' which predictably returned a number of interesting articles, the top one of which is called The Idealistic Elements of Modern Semiotic Studies. So far it seems quite an approachable read. It starts with this quotation:

“All reality is subjective appearance.
This must constitute the great, fundamental
admission even of biology.”
—Jakob von Uexküll, Theoretical Biology

Which seems congenial to my p-o-v. Much of what I've read so far is on the contribution of Kant to Uexküll vision of the 'umwelt' but I'm still going....

Perhaps edits should only be allowed for a certain amount of time. — Leontiskos

I'd agree with that, as it has been the practice for every other forum I've joined. I make use of the ability to edit but generally try and observe a rule of not editing any post after it has been replied to or quoted. I think many of the other points are up to the discretion of the mods, although I don't think any of them bad ideas.

Make yourself a coffee. I know you have plenty of cups, even if I can’t see ‘em.

No. I'm a bit surprised you think this of what has been said. The world is what is the case. — Banno

Well, you said:

The world just is as it is, regardless of what you think of it — Banno

Isn't that just another way of saying that its reality is a given? What else could it possibly mean?

Notice the difference between the world being what is the case, and the idealist view that the world is what we believe, know, intuit, hope, doubt to be the case. — Banno

But I've already addressed that very point:

this is something much deeper than a matter of belief. The cognitive process of world-construction is subconscious or subliminal. I'm talking about our whole 'meaning-world', the entirety of our sense of self-and-world. That is created by the mind but not the conscious ego or self. — Wayfarer

According to the classical tradition of philosophy, we do not see 'what is really the case'. Seeing what is really the case is the hallmark of sagacity, and it's generally considered very rare. We are too self-centred and our cognition is distorted by innummerable biases (encapsulated under the heading 'avidya' in Indian philosophy). The purpose of philosophy is to dispel the darkness of ignorance, to overcome our unconsciously self-centred view of the world. Science actually got it's start from this very same intuition.

We seem to see directly the material event - the bruteness of the stone we kick or cup we smash - but not so directly the global organising purpose or finality involved. — apokrisis

:100:

(2) that no world can be imagined in which this is not the case.
To imagine is to invoke this "subjective" pole; so this looks to be tautologous. — Banno

You'll notice I struck out 'imagined' and replaced it with 'real'.

I'm showing how language works, rather than defending naive realism. — Banno

Of course you're defending naive realism. That is made particularly obvious by your homely choices of kitchen utensils to stand in for 'the object'.

The world just is as it is, regardless of what you think of it — Banno

It's a given, right?

You have been challenged to explain how it is that we all perceive the same things, — Janus

I don't deny the reality of objects. Heck, I myself have coffee cups, and some of them are in the dishwasher even as I write this. I'm not arguing for solipsism. My claim is that (1) reality has an ineluctably subjective pole, and (2) that no world can be imagined real in which this is not the case (3) that this subjective pole or ground is never itself amongst the objects considered by naturalism, and (4) that the emphasis on objectivity as the sole criteria for what is real is deeply mistaken on those grounds.

That there is a world that may be different to our beliefs is shown, not said. It's not an "inference". It's demonstrated by the cup coming out of the dishwasher clean, and all manor of other interactions, with medium sized smallgoods and whatever else you might find. — Banno

That was the very point of the passage from Berkeley's dialogues that I provided, in which this exact objection is made to Philonous/Berkeley. Hylas says 'if all you admit is the reality of ideas, then how come your ideas can be wrong, like when a stick in the water appears to be bent?' It's the same objection you're offering here, that our beliefs can be different to what we discover about the world. But notice that Philoonous qua idealist does have an answer to that, along the lines of coherentism.

Besides, this is something much deeper than a matter of belief. The cognitive process of world-construction is subconscious or subliminal. I'm talking about our whole 'meaning-world', the entirety of our sense of self-and-world. That is created by the mind but not the conscious ego or self. It goes much deeper than that, it is a process which informs all living things.

I think what you're instinctively defending is naive realism (no pejorative intended). You are shocked by the questioning of the reality of the sensable world. Damn it, can't he just see that my cups are in the cupboard even with the door closed?!? That they don't dissappear when I can't see them?!? I'm not saying that, but that is how you're reading it.

So, the world that you claim exists independently of any interpretation - how do you demonstrate the existence of that?

So please correct this Chat input:

The 'myth of the given' is a concept in philosophy, particularly within epistemology, that critiques the idea that there are certain immediate, self-evident pieces of knowledge that serve as a foundation for all other knowledge. This concept was primarily developed by philosopher Wilfrid Sellars in his essay "Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind" (1956). Sellars argued against the notion that there are "given" elements in experience—such as sense data, raw feels, or basic perceptual inputs—that can serve as an unquestionable foundation for knowledge.

Sellars maintained that any attempt to base knowledge on such "givens" fails because even these purportedly immediate experiences are influenced by our conceptual framework. For example, seeing a red apple is not just a matter of raw sensory input but involves recognizing and categorizing the experience within a framework of concepts and beliefs.

According to Sellars, all knowledge is theory-laden; it is shaped by the language, concepts, and theories that we use to interpret our experiences. Thus, the supposed "givens" are not independent of our conceptual understanding. This view challenges traditional empiricism, which often relies on the idea of foundational, immediate knowledge derived from sensory experience.

The critique of the myth of the given has significant implications for epistemology. It suggests that knowledge cannot be grounded in indubitable perceptual inputs but must instead be understood as a network of interdependent beliefs and concepts. This idea has influenced various areas of philosophy, including debates about foundationalism, coherentism, and the nature of perception and understanding.

But you will take this as implying that there is no world without mind. It doesn't. It implies only that there is no interpretation without mind.

You always take one step further than your argument allows. — Banno

No - because 'the world' that you imagine exists in the absence of any mind, is not 'a world'. The etymology of the noun 'world' comes from an old European word for 'time of man'. No mind, no world - not because the world ceases to exist, but it has no form, perspective, duration, and so on.

In order for you to establish what the world would be outside your cognition of it, you would have to stand outside that whole process of cognition. (This is even recognised in analytical philosophy, in Sellars' 'the myth of the given'.)

Shocking but true.

Any interested party, but as I said yesterday, I recognise a brick wall when I see one ;-)

Again, referring to Charles Pinter's book

The book’s argument begins with the British empiricists who raised our awareness of the fact that we have no direct contact with physical reality, but it is the mind that constructs the form and features of objects. It is shown that modern cognitive science brings this insight a step further by suggesting that shape and structure are not internal to objects, but arise in the observer. The author goes yet further by arguing that the meaningful connectedness between things — the hierarchical organization of all we perceive — is the result of the Gestalt nature of perception and thought, and exists only as a property of mind. These insights give the first glimmerings of a new way of seeing the cosmos: not as a mineral wasteland but a place inhabited by creatures. — Mind and the Cosmic Order: How the Mind Creates the Features & Structure of All Things, and Why this Insight Transforms Physics

You see, this also provides a plausible grounds for why the 'unreasonable efficiency of mathematics in the natural sciences' and Kant's 'synthetic a priori'. As our cognition naturally operates in terms of gestalts, which are fundamentally cognitive in nature, and both logic and mathematics pertain to the relation between gestalts. So there's no longer a question of how what is apparently 'internal to the mind' can be so accurate with respect to 'the external world', as on one level, they're united.

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!