Recall at the time the reports of how haphazard and chaotic the DOGE program was - greenhorn computer geeks barging into offices managed by seasoned bureaucrat and firing swathes of people using lists from Human Resources. And ALSO don't forget that Trump had already purged all the departmental Inspectors General, who are exactly the people who are supposed to root out fraud and waste. So, no, I don't expect anything positive came from the DOGE exercise. It was all political grandstanding.

Correct, you can explain the phenomena in theoretical terms. But the phenomenal property of water is untouched even knowing the theory. The mystery is how could apparently liquidless molecules give rise to the phenomena liquidity?

Likewise, if what some assume is true that experience merges from a combination of non-mental physical stuff, we have no intuition as to how the mental could emerge from the non-mental.

...
I don't see a fundamental difference in how puzzling these things are. — Manuel

Liquidity is a structural–functional property: once you know the arrangement and interactions of H₂O molecules at given temperatures and pressures, you can see why the liquid state arises (and remember H₂O is not the only liquid) . There’s no explanatory gap between the micro-description and the macro-property; the physics and chemistry just are the liquidity.

Consciousness, by contrast, is not a structural–functional property in the same way. You can give a complete account of the neural correlates of an experience — the brain states, the patterns of activation — and still have said nothing about the first-person nature of the experience. That quality is what is not captured by the physical description, and we have no analogue of the H₂O → liquid derivation for it. In other words, it's a false equivalency.

Again, I don't see the problem? Why would we assume there's purpose to anything? — AmadeusD

Why do you say that?

If you want to say that the effectiveness of mathematics in science tells us anything about more than just how the world appears to us, then you are supporting the idea of a mind-independent reality. — Janus

Empirical objects do have the appearance of being mind-independent — they confront us in space and time as separate objects — but that appearance is conditioned by (dependent on) the structures of perception and cognition. They are never given except as appearances to a subject. That is the main point of the mind-created world argument, as it pertains to 'the world' as the sum of sense-able particulars.

Mathematical truths are of a different order: they are independent of any individual mind in the sense that they’re the same for all who can reason — but they are only accessible to mind, not to the sensory perception (hence the subject of dianoia in Platonist terms, so of a 'higher' order than sensory perception.)

But if you don't believe that difference, diversity, structure are mind-independently real or that time and space are mind-independently real―are you then
going to say that number is? — Janus

As for time and space, they’re not mind-independent containers but, as Kant said, “forms of intuition” — the necessary preconditions of any experience. They are objectively real for the subject, in the sense that all appearances to us must be ordered in temporal sequence and spatial perspective. But that’s not the same as saying they exist as things-in-themselves apart from all possible subjects.

My point is not that the world is “all in the mind,” but that the only world we can speak of or investigate is the world as it appears through the conditions of human knowing — and that this doesn’t deny, but rather presupposes, that there is a reality in itself, although it lies beyond our possible experience.

In the essay “Panpsychism” in his book Mortal Questions (1979) Thomas Nagel argues that the usual examples of emergence, such as the liquidity of water or the transparency of glass, do not provide a good analogy for the emergence of consciousness from the brain.

Properties like liquidity or transparency are system-level effects of the arrangement and interaction of physical components. Water molecules are not themselves liquid, but when arranged in certain ways they behave collectively in a manner we call “liquid.” This kind of emergence is fully explicable in terms of the physical properties of the components and the laws governing them. There is nothing mysterious left over once we understand the physics and chemistry.

By contrast, Nagel points out, the relation between physical brain processes and conscious experience is not like that. Even if we knew everything about the physical constituents of the brain and how they interact, the fact that these processes give rise to subjective experience—the “what it is like” aspect—would remain unexplained. Emergence in the physical sense does not bridge the gap between objective physical descriptions and subjective conscious experience.

But Nagel also sees this as an argument in support of panpsychism: If consciousness really arises from matter, then the mental must in some way be present in the basic constituents of matter. On this view, consciousness is not an inexplicable product of complex organization but a manifestation of properties already present in the fundamental building blocks of the world.

In his later work (Mind and Cosmos, 2012) Nagel doesn't pursue panpsychism as an option, advocating instead for a kind of naturalistic teleology.

It was, I admit, a flippant remark, but it does refer to a serious cultural issue.

There is an influential school of thought or philosophical undercurrent, that natural science has done away with the Biblical creation myth and with it, any idea of purposefulness or inherent meaning in the Cosmos (subject of another thread On Purpose.)

As a coda to this story, a report has now been released showing that the DOGE program ended up costing tens of billions of dollars, rather than slashing the promised $1 trillion of 'waste and fraud'.

Billionaire Elon Musk and President Donald Trump tried to take a chainsaw to federal government spending, but it turns out they actually wasted tens of billions of taxpayer dollars.
The Department of Government Efficiency generated some $21.7 billion in waste across the federal government in the first six months of the year, according to a new report from the minority staff of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations (PSI).

The report, spearheaded by Democratic Ranking Member Richard Blumenthal, comes after a months-long investigation into the tech billionaire and his team’s DOGE efforts after the president tapped the tech billionaire to lead the short-lived initiative to root out “waste, fraud, and abuse” and find some $2 trillion in government savings by July 2026.
However, Musk, once “first buddy,” departed his role as a Trump adviser in May, far short of the DOGE’s goal before having a colossal public breakup with the president, as congressional Republicans backed by Trump passed legislation that is projected to further expand the deficit and add trillions to the national debt.

The massive sum of DOGE-generated waste found in the report also happens to be more than twice the $9 billion in DOGE cuts Congress codified earlier this month in the rescissions package sent over by the White House to claw back federal funds, which took an ax to public broadcasting and foreign aid.

The report found that one of the biggest examples where DOGE burned taxpayer dollars was with its Deferred Resignation Program, which was announced in late January by the Office of Personnel Management. In total, the chaotic program wasted some $14.8 billion by paying some 200,000 federal employees not to work for up to eight months.

The 55-page report also found more than $6 billion in waste from the more than 100,000 federal employees who were involuntarily separated from their government jobs but faced long periods of administrative leave. Many were paid not to work for weeks or months.

There was also some $263 million in lost interest and fees to the federal government after the Department of Energy implemented dozens of loan freezes for utility projects.

Another $155 million was wasted in time costs for employees because of Musk’s demand that they send a weekly accomplishments email to OMB highlighting five accomplishments. The move announced in February caused widespread confusion at agencies across the federal government when it was announced in February along with the threat from the world’s richest person that it would be taken as a resignation for those who didn’t respond.

DOGE also wasted $110 million in food and medical supply aid that was left to spoil in warehouses and set to be destroyed.

Nearly $42 million was spent to relocate staff members from one agency closer to a physical office, $38 million in investments were blown on four projects at the National Institutes of Health and the IRS, and some $66 million was spent on professional staff to be underutilized for entry-level work.

“This report is a searing indictment of DOGE’s false claims,” Blumenthal said in a statement. “As my PSI investigation has shown, DOGE was clearly never about efficiency or saving the American taxpayer money.”

The total waste found also included an estimated $50 million in DOGE operational costs. However, it did not include other potential ways money was spent or wasted, such as being used for legal and administrative expenses or undermining public safety.

The Connecticut senator has urged the inspectors general of some 27 government agencies to take up the investigation and conduct reviews of how DOGE’s actions cost taxpayers. — Daily Beast (may be paywalled)

You really do have the gift of concision — J

Thank you. I have been a tech writer but I don't know if that career has any mileage left in it. Also I realised the other day (somewhat gloomily) that I've probably well and truly done my 10,000 hours on philosophy forums. I'm closing in on 25k posts on this one. I think I'll change my avatar to Sisyphus.

Real" is perfectly clear and useful in most contexts, because we know how to use it. — J

Real is authentic, not fake, the real deal. Reality is distinguished from delusion, illusion or duplicity.

Following on from the point about the Enlightenment rejection of Aristotelian metaphysics. When the scientific revolution and Enlightenment thinkers pushed back against the Church’s intellectual monopoly, they weren’t just rejecting theology — they were also rejecting the philosophical apparatus that had been co-opted to support it. Historically, that included most of what was best about the broader Platonic tradition, which provided much of the philosophical framework of Christian theology,

In the polemics of the time, “metaphysics” became associated with religious dogma. The fact that Aristotle’s physics was outdated made it easier to dismiss his metaphysics as likewise obsolete.

Naturalism then positioned itself as a clean break — methodologically bracketing or excluding anything that smelled of theology, which meant also sidelining large swathes of classical philosophy.

The Enlightenment liberated science from theological oversight — but at the cost of severing the link between natural philosophy and questions of meaning, purpose, and being. This is the origin of the meme of life as a kind of cosmic fluke.

Much of the critical self-awareness discussed earlier— the Greek insights about the conditions of knowledge — was lost in the rush to rush a purely empirical and mechanical worldview.

All these factors are still evident in almost every discussion on this forum.

I wanted to stay near the heart of the matter, so had to be very selective, so it is not impossible that I failed to acknowledge what you actually said properly. — Ludwig V

You covered it pretty well. I just want to recap the central point. It was the belief that was coming into view in Berkeley's time, and is fully entrenched nowadays, that what is real, is real in the absence of any observer or mind whatever. This was a natural implication of the 'primary-secondary' division between the measurable attributes of objects as opposed to the way they appear to observers. It was the novel iteration of the appearance-reality divide in the context of early modern science. That's what I'm saying that Berkeley (and, later, Kant) was reacting against.

I hope this is of some interest. — Ludwig V

Indeed, I did also mention that, to dispel the idea that Berkeley dismissed sensible objects as mere phantasms.

One of the reasons that it is so hard to discern what Berkeley is claiming is that he goes back on things that he has said. For example, he proposes that to exist is to be perceived (I don’t know what arguments he has to back up that claim, but let that pass). — Ludwig V

Notice that he means sensible things - actually, I prefer the term 'sense-able', as 'sensible' has a different meaning in everyday speech. So he's saying objects of perception exist in perception - if not yours or mine, then the Divine Intellect, which holds them in existence. You probably know this limerick but as it's a Berkeley thread, it's always worth repeating:

There once was a man who said “God
Must think it exceedingly odd
If he finds that this tree
Continues to be
When there’s no one about in the Quad.”

Dear Sir,
Your astonishment’s odd.
I am always about in the Quad.
And that’s why the tree
Will continue to be
Since observed by…

Yours faithfully,

God

What Berkeley denies is the existence of corporeal substance, where 'substance' is used in the philosophical, rather than day-to-day, sense: the bearer of predicates, that which underlies appearances. He claims that is an abstraction - which is a point I hope I made sufficiently clear in the OP.

As for the mind not being able to percieve itself, this is something I often repeat, because I believe it's manifestly true. The relevant passages in the Principles of Human Knowledge:

But besides all that endless variety of ideas or objects of knowledge, there is likewise something which knows or perceives them, and exercises divers operations, as willing, imagining, remembering about them. This perceiving, active being is what I call mind, spirit, soul, or myself. By which words I do not denote any one of my ideas, but a thing entirely distinct from them, wherein they exist, or, which is the same thing, whereby they are perceived; for the existence of an idea consists in being perceived. ...

And later (§89):

“From what has been said it is plain there is not any other substance than spirit, or that which perceives. But for the fuller understanding of this, it must be considered that we do not see spirits … we have no ideas of them. Hence it is plain we cannot know or perceive spirits, as we do other things; but we have some notion of our own minds, of our own being; and that we can have no idea of any spirit is evident, since it is not an idea. Spirits are things altogether of a different sort from ideas.”

Note again that 'substance' here is from the Latin 'substantia', originating with the Greek 'ousia'. So it could equally be said 'there is not any other kind of being than spirit', which sounds to me less odd than 'substance' in the context.

the sense-data theory of Ayer and the phenomenalism of Carnap was very much in the tradition of Berkeley — Ludwig V

Only insofar as all were empiricists - 'all knowledge from experience'. IN other respects, chalk and cheese. Ayer and Carnap would have found Berkeley's talk of spirit otiose, to use one of their preferred words.

They exist as physical matter, whether as electrons or the pixels 0 and 1, and they exist as spatial and temporal relations between these electrons or pixels. — RussellA

Are you familiar with the modern philosophical expression 'the space of reasons?' The "space of reasons" is a concept developed by philosopher Wilfrid Sellars. It refers to the domain of rational thought where beliefs, judgments, and actions can be justified through reasons and evidence.

The key idea is that there's a fundamental distinction between two realms: the "space of reasons" (where we give and ask for justifications, make inferences, and engage in rational discourse) and the "space of causes" (the physical world of natural laws and causal mechanisms). When we're in the space of reasons, we're not just describing what happens, but explaining why something is justified or makes sense.

For example, if you believe it's going to rain, you're in the space of reasons when you point to dark clouds as your justification - not just as a physical cause of your belief, but as evidence that makes your belief rational. The space of reasons is essentially the arena of human rationality where we can evaluate whether our thoughts and actions are warranted.

Do you see the distinction being made between reasons and causes?

What about abstract objects like numbers and logical rules? Do you think there are physical explanations for them?

There's not even a single wild guess as to a model about how the non physical mind works, operates, evolves from the past into the future. Nobody who believes in non physicalism even tries to come up with one, and they don't have the vaguest idea how to find one or even begin performing experiments on the non physical mind to test their ideas. — flannel jesus

Can I suggest that this is a result of the way the 'physical versus non-physical' has been framed after Descartes? His philosophy, which was strongly connected to the emergence of modern science post Newton and Galileo, proposed a model comprising res extensa (extended matter) and res cogitans (literally 'thinking thing'). From the time he proposed it, Descartes had difficulty explaining how res cogitans affects matter, suggesting that the rational soul operated through the pineal gland.

Subsequently, the whole model of mind and matter became less credible as a model, on account of these and other conceptual problems. Meanwhile the physical sciences went strength to strength with huge progress in physics, chemistry, materials science and so forth. Descartes res cogitans ended up being described as the wan 'ghost in the machine' by Gilbert Ryle.

Might this be how you're thinking of the 'non-physical'?

So when asked as to where the numbers and universals are to be found if somewhere other than in human thought, no answer is forthcoming. — Janus

It's not a matter of 'locating' them. That depiction is only because of the inability to conceive of anything not located in time and space. The unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences and the abilities that it provides to discover facts which otherwise could never be known, indicate that numbers are more than just 'products of thought'. They provide a kind of leverage (that also being something discovered by a mathematician, namely, Archimedes). Which lead to many amazing inventions such as computers, and the like, which all would have been inconceivable a generation or two ago (as previously discussed.)

Their motivation was to look at nature with fresh eyes, stripped of inherited authority. That turn is the beginning of modern science as we know it — but in rejecting the scholastic framework wholesale, something else was lost: the kind of critical self-awareness about the act of knowing itself that we see in Greek sources.
— Wayfarer

How so? I mean Descartes was responded to the reigniting of Pyrrhonian skepticism, — Manuel

Among other things. But Descartes was taught to me as 'the first modern philosopher', and the point was stressed about his efforts to free himself from the scholastic authorities and Aristotelian dogma. Hence the whole exercise of locking himself away and forgetting all that he had been taught so as to arrive at his apodictic insight cogito ergo sum.

This is a critical point so often overlooked, — Tom Storm

Something often stressed by Fooloso4.

In any case, in the context, I am trying to make the argument for philosophical insight as a means to a higher truth, which is often depicted as 'an appeal to dogma', for the reasons I've tried to explain above.

…but actively resisting any type of discussion which might describe, in rational terms, why it is true. — AmadeusD

I’ve noticed that.

So you'd say that Aristotle was critically self aware like say, Kant or Hume? — Manuel

The Platonic tradition was itself critical — the Dialogues show Plato testing every proposition from multiple angles, leaving many questions unresolved. They’re not a compendium of answers so much as of questions. In that sense, philosophy has always been “critical” — not just of others’ views, but reflexively aware of its own assumptions.

By the late Middle Ages, however, much of Aristotelian philosophy had ossified into scholastic dogma. In the first philosophy of science lecture I ever attended (Alan Chalmers’ What is this Thing Called Science?), the lecturer recounted a story of monks debating how many teeth a horse has. They consulted Aristotle’s works, found no answer, and threw up their hands — ridiculing the one monk who suggested checking an actual horse. Anecdotal perhaps, but also quite likely true.

The Enlightenment’s philosophes rebelled against that mindset. (Remember the famous trial?) Their motivation was to look at nature with fresh eyes, stripped of inherited authority. That turn is the beginning of modern science as we know it — but in rejecting the scholastic framework wholesale, something else was lost: the kind of critical self-awareness about the act of knowing itself that we see in Greek sources.

That question re-emerges in the 19th and 20th centuries. Franz Brentano’s doctoral work on Aristotle’s On the Several Senses of Being seeded his concept of intentionality, which in turn became foundational for Husserl. Heidegger, who lectured extensively on Aristotle, re-engaged the question of Being from a different angle. And Husserl’s Crisis of the European Sciences can be seen not as a nostalgic return to pre-modern metaphysics, but as a re-interpretation of those ancient questions in light of modern science, and as a critique of the unexamined “naturalism” that has become the default. That’s also why it’s central to the OP

I think the issue is that if we don't even agree on what's 'real' then we cannot discuss anything other than speculations. That is absolutely a cultural problem. It's not an issue of having differing views, it's about having different standards for things like claims, evidence and rationality. — AmadeusD

I agree. But there's no easy solution. It's part of living in a pluralistic culture with innummerable perspectives, views, opinions and cultural backgrounds. But we can at least discuss it. It is natural, in the secular world, to regard science as the arbiter of fact, but when it comes to values and the search for meaning, it isn't so clear cut.

It is true that exponents of the 'perennial philosophy', which I referred to, are often conservative to the point of being reactionary. One of the better books on the intellectual clique of that name is called Against the Modern World (Mark Sedgewick.) I'm not 'against the modern world' but I understand the rationale. While the modern world has brought untold benefits and improvements to the human condition it also has its shadow side. The technological culture which has provided so much can also destroy us. This is exemplified daily in the many crises of addiction, alienation, loneliness, and depression which plague modern culture.

I was discussing with my learned friend Chuck the fact that there's an inherent tension between Platonic or traditionalist philosophy and liberal political philosophy. This is why Karl Popper called Plato an enemy of the open society. Liberal thought, especially in its modern egalitarian form, places a premium on equal dignity, autonomy, and the right to participate in discourse. This tends to deprecate any perceived intellectual hierarchies because if truth is dependent on purportedly superior insight, then those without it may be depicted as less capable or qualified. There’s also a cultural wariness about allowing claims of “higher truth” to serve as justifications for social or political domination - echoes of aristocracy, theocracy, or authoritarianism. We see that demonstrated egregiously in some Islamic theocracies. But then, there are populist autocracies appearing in the West.

In contrast, much of the pre-modern and classical tradition—from Plato’s “knowledge of the Forms” to Aristotle’s sophia—assumes that there are degrees of cognitive and moral refinement. They see philosophy as a transformative discipline: you don’t just have an opinion, you become the sort of person who can apprehend deeper truths. The idea of a “higher” truth here isn’t about exclusion but about cultivation—requiring moral and intellectual virtues to access. (One definitive recent text on this is The Degrees of Knowledge, Jacques Maritain, a French Catholic thomistic philospoher, and one on the left of the political spectrum.)

Accordingly in a liberal setting, saying that an understandingor insight can be qualitatively better can sound like an assault on equality. But in the older model, it’s almost definitional that philosophy involves progression from superficial opinion (doxa) to deeper knowledge (epistēmē), with not everyone at the same place on that path at the same time.

Liberalism’s strength is inclusiveness and the prevention of abuses of authority. But Its blind spot can be a reluctance to acknowledge that some perspectives are not just different, but genuinely more coherent, integrated, or profound.

My position is that there can't be a debate that "really is" about the nature of reality, because "reality" and "real," when used in this kind of philosophical context, don't have definitions or references that can be clearly agreed upon, outside of some specific tradition. — J

Let’s go back to the starting point. The world we see, with objects arrayed in space and time, is constructed by the brain on the basis of sensory inputs received by our cognitive apparatus in light of existing knowledge and conceptions (‘synthesised’ in Kantian terminology). This is something which has been validated by subsequent cognitive science (per the example of Charles Pinter ‘Mind and the Cosmic Order’) . It does not mean that the world is ‘all in the mind’, a figment, or an illusion in a simplistic sense. It means that cognition has an ineliminably subjective aspect or ground, which has generally been ignored or ‘bracketed out’ by science. (This ‘ignoring’ is subject of the ‘hard problem of consciousness’ and ‘the blind spot of science’ arguments.) Awareness of the subjective ground of experience is the starting point in phenomenology.

Hence the argument of the OP that this validates some insights of idealism. It also challenges what Husserl describes as ‘the natural attitude’. According to Husserl, this is our everyday, unreflective stance toward the world in which we simply accept the existence of objects and facts around us without questioning or examining the underlying structures of consciousness that make such experience possible.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Becoming aware of these processes is meta-cognitive insight - to be critically, self-reflectively aware of cognition. Awareness of the way that the mind constructs its world, on the basis of its dispositions, faculties, and so on, is, as I see it, fundamental to philosophy proper, as implied in the maxim ‘know yourself’.

The second part of this thread began with the argument about the ‘history of ideas’ and the decline of classical metaphysics. I’m of the view that the Greek philosophers were critically self-aware in the sense described above, but of course this wasn’t (and couldn’t be) expressed in the modern idiom. It was expressed in terms appropriate to that (now very distant) cultural milieu. The tradition of classical metaphysics arose out of the meta-cognitive insights of the founders of that tradition (subject of a book not mentioned in the OP, ‘Thinking Being: Metaphysics in the Classical Tradition’, Eric Perl).

These metacognitive insights in one form or another were conveyed or preserved in Aristotelian philosophy and also in the other elements of Greek philosophy which were absorbed by subsequent culture and are part of our ‘cultural grammar’. So it was with the ascendancy of nominalism and the subsequent ascendancy of empirical philosophy, that these foundational philosophical insights were lost or submerged. They have been preserved to some extent by modern Thomists - mainly Catholic, (although I’m not Catholic and am not making these arguments as a covert appeal to Catholicism). It is more that I see in Aristotelian-Thomism a strain of the philosophia perennis.

Is it something close to Ludwig V's suggestion?: "'real' is the concept that enables us to distinguish between misleading and true appearances." Perhaps even more importantly, can you tell us why you believe that your use is correct? — J

I believe there’s validity in the concept of the philosophical ascent - that there are degrees of understanding, lower and higher, and that these have been traversed and described by philosophers and sages (and not only in the West.) I think it is reflected in the Allegory of the Cave and the Divided Line of the Republic. In that allegory, the vision of the Sun as an allegory of the ascent from the cave symbolizes the noetic apprehension of ‘the real’. The hoi polloi, representing those uneducated in philosophy, are prisoners in the cave, entranced by shadows.

All of this has to be interpreted, of course, which is the role of hermenuetics. But that's the general drift of the second part of the argument. Idealism in Context is another facet of that.

The fact that 'real' and 'reality' don't have 'agreed upon definitions' is actually symptomatic of the cultural problem which the OP is attempting, in its own way, to address.

something as complex as the Renaissance/Reformation must have involved many interacting factors. The idea that a single part of the movement caused everything seems highly implausible to me. I also suspect that our problem was not really a problem for pre-Enlightenment philosophy. The explanation I'm looking for is how the problem originated. I don't recall Aristotle worrying about our problem. Plato's philosophy is more complex, but still doesn't align with our debates. — Ludwig V

It's not a single issue, though. Of course there are many interacting factors involved but the decline of Aristotelian realism really was a momentous shift in culture. That's what Gillespie's book is about, as well as an earlier book called Ideas have Consequences, Richard Weaver. (He was an English professor who's book became an unexpected hit in the post-war period. )

Yet, there were important ideas in the older philosophy. It should not be dismissed wholesale. — Ludwig V

That's what is motivating this study: the decline of Platonic or Aristotelian realism. Lloyd Gerson's most recent book addresses a similar area: Platonism and Naturalism: The Possibility of Philosophy. 'Gerson contends that Platonism identifies philosophy with a distinct subject matter, namely, the intelligible world. and seeks to show that the Naturalist rejection of Platonism entails the elimination of a distinct subject matter for philosophy.' And the 'intelligible world' is precisely the domain of universals and Platonic realism, generally.

I also suspect that our problem was not really a problem for pre-Enlightenment philosophy. — Ludwig V

The other thread I've posted 'Idealism in Context' talks about this very point. It is that modern philosophical idealism beginning with Berkeley, began with the decline of the 'participatory realism' of scholastic philosophy.

How is this relevant to the original post? It is because I see 'ideas' in the Platonic or Aristotelian sense as essential to the structure of reasoned inference - they’re formal structures in consciousness . 'As Aristotelians and Thomists use the term, intellect is that faculty by which we grasp abstract concepts (like the concepts man and mortal), put them together into judgments (like the judgment that all men are mortal), and reason logically from one judgment to another (as when we reason from all men are mortal and Socrates is a man to the conclusion that Socrates is mortal). It is to be distinguished from imagination, the faculty by which we form mental images and from sensation, the faculty by which we perceive the goings on in the external material world and the internal world of the body. That intellectual activity -- thought in the strictest sense of the term -- is irreducible to sensation and imagination is a thesis that unites Platonists, Aristotelians, and rationalists of either the ancient Parmenidean sort or the modern Cartesian sort' ~ Ed Feser. So not surprisingly, the advocates for scholastic realism are mainly Catholic, as they're mainly Thomist.

Because registering a measurement result requires the measuring device to physically interact with the system you are measuring. — Apustimelogist

The explanation of uncertainty as arising through the unavoidable disturbance caused by the measurement process has provided physicists with a useful intuitive guide… . However, it can also be misleading. It may give the impression that uncertainty arises only when we lumbering experimenters meddle with things. This is not true. Uncertainty is built into the wave structure of quantum mechanics and exists whether or not we carry out some clumsy measurement. As an example, take a look at a particularly simple probability wave for a particle, the analog of a gently rolling ocean wave, shown in Figure 4.6.

Since the peaks are all uniformly moving to the right, you might guess that this wave describes a particle moving with the velocity of the wave peaks; experiments confirm that supposition. But where is the particle? Since the wave is uniformly spread throughout space, there is no way for us to say that the electron is here or there. When measured, it literally could be found anywhere. So while we know precisely how fast the particle is moving, there is huge uncertainty about its position. And as you see, this conclusion does not depend on our disturbing the particle. We never touched it. — Brian Greene, The Fabric of the Cosmos

the solution or interpretation would still have to account for how measurements to have a disturbing physical effect. — Apustimelogist

The Kantian response would be: why assume measurement must be understood as a "disturbing physical effect" at all? This assumes measurement is fundamentally about one physical system causally interacting with another physical system. The "disturbance" language already smuggles in a particular metaphysical picture - that there are definite physical properties in existence that are disturbed by measurement. But the point is, the object, so called, has no definite or determinate existence prior to its being measured (hence 'wave-particle duality').

They are obviously physical events happening out in reality — Apustimelogist

Closing one slit is physical, But how is the act of measurement physical? Isn't that the whole measurement problem in a nutshell?

The problem is that in order for our own categories and intuition to 'ordain' the empirical world, I believe you need to posit some structure onto the noumenal and this suggests that we do have some knowledge of the noumenal, — boundless

As you've mentioned Michel Bitbol in the past I did a bit of research on Bitbol's comparison of Kant and Neils Bohr's approach to quantum physics. Bitbol applies Kant's transcendental idealism to quantum mechanics, arguing that quantum phenomena reflect the fundamental limits and structure of human knowledge rather than revealing the intrinsic nature of reality itself. So he pushes back on the suggestion that physics is providing 'some knowledge of the noumenal'.

In this framework, quantum indeterminacy, complementarity, and measurement problems aren't puzzling features of physical reality that need to be accounted for, but are, rather, inevitable consequences of the necessary forms of knowledge. Just as Kant argued that space, time, and causality are forms that structure experience, rather than features of the in-itself, Bitbol suggests that quantum mechanical concepts like wave functions and observables are epistemological structures that are basic to the way experience is organised, rather than descriptions of what exists independently of observation. 'According to Bohr, ‘all knowledge presents itself within a conceptual framework’, where, by ‘a conceptual framework’, Bohr means ‘an unambiguous logical representation of relations between experiences' ('Bohr's Complementarity and Kant's Epistemology').

This perspective reframes the measurement problem: instead of asking 'what does wave function collapse mean?' or 'is the wave function physically real?' we ask 'what must be the case about the structure of experience for measurement to be a coherent concept?'" The apparent strangeness of quantum mechanics becomes less mysterious when viewed as reflecting the necessary structure of empirical knowledge rather than bizarre features of microscopic reality. Bitbol argues this dissolves many traditional quantum interpretational puzzles by recognizing them as category mistakes - attempts to apply concepts beyond their proper epistemological domain (i.e. extending empirical concepts beyond their scope). Rather than seeking to explain quantum mechanics in terms of hidden variables or many worlds, we should understand it as revealing the transcendental conditions that are the necessary conditions for knowledge.

So in this approach, Neils Bohr's philosophy of physics, at least, is presented as being compatible with the Kantian framework. He's developed these ideas in many papers that can be found on his Academia profile.

So again this lends support to some basic aspects of Kant's (as distinct from Berkeley's) form of idealism. The idea that 'the structure of possible experience constrains what can count as empirical knowledge' has had considerable consequences in many schools of thought beyond quantum mechanics. As for Berkeley, though, these kinds of developments provide a partial vindication - by bringing the observer back to the act of observation ;-)

You won't dare to engage with my arguments directly — Janus

I mostly won't engage because you are truculent and verbally aggressive. You've said that I'm 'full of shit' or that I'm 'intellectually dishonest', and many times in past when I've tried to explain something you've accused me of 'being evasive' or 'changing the subject', when, from my perspective, you simply don't understand what's being said. So don't expect any further responses from me. In a public forum, sometimes one has to choose which comments to respond to.

A particle can't do anything other than interact with other things according to the laws of physics. It doesn't have systems for movement. It doesn't have systems for choosing between options. It can subjectively experience, but what is that like for a particle? — Patterner

I can't see why you keep insisting that a particle, or a crystal, is a subject of experience. The rationale seems to be that if all that really exists are particle and forces, and we as subjects are also particles and forces, then particles and forces must also be subjects. But what if the assumption about the nature of us as subjects is mistaken and we're something other than particles and forces?

An archaea acts. But it's entirely physics and chemistry. There's information processing, which is what I suspect is needed for groups of individual particles to subjectively experience as a unit. There is information processing in protein synthesis, in the series of reactions between photons hitting the eyespot and the archaella moving, and whatever other systems it has. The consciousness is of a much more complex thing than just particles. Still, there's no possibility of choosing between actions, or not acting. This may be the beginnings of thinking, but it's just the bare beginnings. There's not enough going on. — Patterner

If it were entirely physics and chemistry, there would be no separate discipline of organic chemistry. And any biological unit displays observable attributes which differentiate it from inorganic substance. it metabolizes, seeks homeostasis, and maintains a boundary between itself and the sorrounding environment. In addition to that, it retains information and is able to transmit it through reproduction, none of which are necessarily reducible to physics and chemistry.

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

The idea that life evolved naturally on the primitive Earth suggests that the first cells came into being by spontaneous chemical reactions, and this is equivalent to saying that there is no fundamental divide between life and matter. This is the chemical paradigm, a view that is very popular today and that is often considered in agreement with the Darwinian paradigm, but this is not the case. The reason is that natural selection, the cornerstone of Darwinian evolution, does not exist in inanimate matter. In the 1950s and 1960s, furthermore, molecular biology uncovered two fundamental components of life—biological information and the genetic code—that are totally absent in the inorganic world, which means that information is present only in living systems, that chemistry alone is not enough and that a deep divide does exist between life and matter. This is the information paradigm, the idea that ‘life is chemistry plus information’.

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

This is not panpsychism, but biological naturalism - psyche is not in inanimate matter, only begins to manifest with the advent of organic life. It is what differentiates life from non-life.

A lot of people, like Greene, say physicalism must be the answer, — Patterner

There's actually quite a simple reason for this: if not physicalism, then what? And the alternatives are very hard to defend, and outside the scope of physics. As Abraham Maslow said, if the only tool you have is a hammer, then the only problems you will consider involve nails.

Or being a drive-by shooter! Whatever floats you boat, eh?

What point would there be in explaining it to someone who thinks it's meaningless?

'Essence' is 'what is essential to the being', from the Latin 'esse' 'to be'.
— Wayfarer
If by the essence you mean a set of properties and abilities, then we are on the same page. — MoK

Sure - that's the encyclopedia definition. But I am stressing the link between 'esse' and 'is' (esse is the Latin verb for 'to be'). So the essence is the 'is-ness' of something.

. That is true since we have something that exists objectively, so-called God — MoK

I don't think that classical theology would ever say that God 'exists objectively'. Whatever exists objectively can be discovered scientifically. Here some references: God does not Exist, Bishop Pierre Whalon; He Is who Is (review of David Bentley Hart 'The Experience of God'. I'm linking these articles as illustrations of the ideas of 'apophatic theology' in modern parlance.)

Clearly there's something important that the scientific realist is pointing to, by drawing the line where they do. Equally clearly, that's the case for the scholastic realist as well. What can we do to encourage conversation about what might lie on either side of that line, without having to call the line "the boundary of reality" or some such? — J

But it really is a debate about the nature of reality—and also about the corresponding change in consciousness that follows from how we draw that line. Universals are fundamental to how the mind 'constructs' reality. Thoughts are real—but not because they are “brain activity” (as perhaps 90% of the participants here would have it). They belong to a different order - one that due to these historical changes, is no longer recognized.

Historically, nominalism shifted the sense of what is real from universals to particulars, from ideas to objects, and thence the presumption that the sensable world is real independently of the mind. Whereas, as we've seen, the perception of material objects is necessarily contingent on sense-perception (per Kant). But principles such as those of geometry, maths, and logic which are constantly deployed to fathom the so-called mind-independent world are themselves things that can only be grasped by a mind. The result is, as Bob Dylan put it, 'there's too much confusion' ('All Along the Watchtower').

The empiricist tendency is to think about ideas as if they were objects, but that is to confuse what is intelligible with what is perceptible. And if the question is asked, in what sense are they physical? the answer will be that as they’re grasped by the mind → the mind is the brain → the brain is physical → therefore ideas must also be (or supervene on the) physical. But the claim “mind is brain” is itself conceptual. It relies on the conceptual architecture of science.

Everything is ass-about and upside down.

"the reality of universals" is the litmus test for platonism. — Ludwig V

One of the books I read just as I began posting on forums was The Theological Origins of Modernity, Michael Allen Gillespie. 'Gillespie turns the conventional reading of the Enlightenment (as reason overcoming religion) on its head by explaining how the humanism of Petrarch, the free-will debate between Luther and Erasmus, the scientific forays of Francis Bacon, the epistemological debate between Descarte and Hobbes, were all motivated by an underlying wrestling with the questions posed by nominalism, which, according to Gillespie, dismantled the rational God / universe of medieval scholasticism and introduced (by way of the Franciscans) a fideistic God-of-pure-will, out of a concern that anything less than that would undermine divine omnipotence'.

Nothing I've seen since has caused me to doubt his account. Not that it's the final word but it set the direction for my subsequent research.

In premodernity, the primary method of knowledge was religion: knowledge was given through divine revelation.

In modernity, this method was discarded and replaced by objectivism—the belief in an independent reality knowable by reason. As Nietzsche said, "God is dead, and we have killed him."

Today, when we see the limitations of objectivism but can't return to religion, we find ourselves at an impasse. This is where radical ideas like the "cancellation" of the subject arise. — Astorre

I'm pleased you like the OP and can see that you get the gist. But I wouldn't want it to rely on revealed truth. I can recognise the significance of revealed truth, but in philosophy it's also important to give reasons. And it's a red flag for many readers.

The point I see about pre-modernity was the sense of participation. Religious narratives created a story of the world, in which we were participants. The purpose of ritual and liturgy was to re-create the sacred. They provided a context and background against which existence was meaningful.

...myth was a programme of action. When a mythical narrative was symbolically re-enacted, it brought to light within the practitioner something "true" about human life and the way our humanity worked, even if its insights, like those of art, could not be proven rationally. If you did not act upon it, it would remain as incomprehensible and abstract – like the rules of a board game, which seem impossibly convoluted, dull and meaningless until you start to play.

Religious truth is, therefore, a species of practical knowledge. Like swimming, we cannot learn it in the abstract; we have to plunge into the pool and acquire the knack by dedicated practice. Religious doctrines are a product of ritual and ethical observance, and make no sense unless they are accompanied by such spiritual exercises as yoga, prayer, liturgy and a consistently compassionate lifestyle. Skilled practice in these disciplines can lead to intimations of the transcendence we call God, Nirvana, Brahman or Dao. Without such dedicated practice, these concepts remain incoherent, incredible and even absurd. — Karen Armstrong, Metaphysical Mistake

Of course it is a truism that the advent of modernity shattered this sense - this is what Max Weber described as the disenchantment of the world. So we need to understand the tectonic shifts, so to speak, that underlie all of these massive changes. It is no easy task, especially as we ourselves are both its proponents and its casualties.

But Newton did eliminate "matter" from his ontology. He replaced it with 'the Will of God', which is the mystical perspective described above. — Metaphysician Undercover

I don't believe so. Newton like others of his period was deist. Deists believed that God 'set the world in motion' but that thereafter it ran by the laws that Newton discovered. Hence LaPlace's declaration (LaPlace being 'France's Newton'), when asked if there were a place for the Divine Intellect in his theory, that 'I have no need of that hypothesis'.

Banno's questions seem to be based on an Either/Or dichotomy between Realism/Idealism or Subject/Object ; in which reasonable people must accept one perspective and reject the other. Hence, if you are an Idealist, then for you (the subject) there is no (objective) Reality. — Gnomon

There is a dialectical relationship between materialism and idealism. Materialism stands on the object, the objective, what is independently existent, as the truly so. Idealism on the knowing subject, the mind. Philosophy tends to vacillate between these two standpoints over time. But there is an escape from this cycle, a standpoint which does not cling to one or the other side of this equation.

As regards definitions, I believe in what today is called Physicalism, being fundamental particles and forces. — RussellA

I figured!

One might ask, however, how one that endorses an 'idealist' position that flatly denies the existence of some kind of material substratum can explain the regularites (and 'intersubjective agreement') without assuming the existence of God or some God-like being. — boundless

Indeed. Berkeley was both empiricist - all knowledge from experience - and nominalist - there are no universals. This is where Berkeley’s idealism shows a thinness - It’s effective at undermining the representationalist picture of perception (ideas as representation of objects), but if offers little by way of an ontology of structure, pattern, and necessity beyond “God’s will.” His rejection of “abstract general ideas” was part of his polemic against Locke. He thought Locke’s account — that we form general ideas by abstracting common features from particulars — was incoherent, because he could not imagine an “idea” that was neither fully determinate nor fully concrete. For him, all ideas are singular and specific; generality comes only from the way we use them (via signs or words). That’s why his Introduction to the Principles treats universals as nothing but linguistic convenience. This is where his nominalism shows through. By designating universals purely mental or linguistic, Berkeley undercuts the possibility of a robust theory of lawlike regularities within his immaterialism.

I always found Kant's arguments to explain intersubjectivity and regularities without appealing to some 'reality beyond phenomena' as insufficient. Of course, Kant posited some kind of unknowable reality beyond phenomena. — boundless

Kant does acknowledge that there is a domain beyond our knowledge - so there is a reality beyond, or in a sense other than how it appears to us. But he avoided the weakness in Berkeley's argument by allowing that the forms of thought (categories) and of intuition are universal structures of cognition, not mere names — though still mind-dependent in his transcendental sense. That universality is what underwrites the necessity and universality of Newtonian physics in Kant’s time — his “Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science” explicitly tries to show why physics has the same kind of a priori grounding as mathematics (something which has since been superseded somewhat by the discovery of non-euclidean geometery.) But it certainly doesn't suggest outright scepticism about the reality of the objective domain (in the way that Hume also did with his denial of causality..)

//also consider that the ‘material substratum’ is nowadays regarded as being of the nature of fields in which particles are ‘excitations’. I think this is why Berkelian idealism keeps being mentioned in this context.//

What Newton did, is replace the concept of "matter" with "inertia", as the defining feature of a body. We can understand a body as having inertia, instead of understanding it as having matter. So the emerging physics, which understood the principal property of a body as inertia, rather than as matter, rendered the concept of matter as redundant. — Metaphysician Undercover

That is not something that Newton himself would have said. It’s true that his discovery of inertia fundamentally changed the conception of matter, but I don’t think Newton had any doubt that physical objects were really physical. Newton didn’t eliminate “matter” from his vocabulary or ontology — he simply avoided metaphysical speculation about it.

The material world adds nothing if nothing is determined by the material world but is determined by the mind of God. — RussellA

You’re right that Berkeley denies a material substratum and sees the order of events as sustained by God’s will — so in that sense, “matter” in the Lockean sense is indeed redundant. But his view isn’t quite the same as Malebranche’s occasionalism. Malebranche held that no finite cause has any real efficacy — every change is a direct act of God. Berkeley, by contrast, accepts that there are regular sequences among ideas (what we might call “natural causes”), which God has ordained as the stable framework of experience. These patterns aren’t illusions; they’re effective causes in the world as God presents it to us.

Don’t overlook the quotation in the OP:

I do not argue against the existence of any one thing that we can apprehend, either by sense or reflection. That the things I see with my eyes and touch with my hands do exist, really exist, I make not the least question. The only thing whose existence we deny is that which philosophers call ‘matter’ or ‘corporeal substance’. — Berkeley

Whereas, I think, for you, the idea that objects are not physical means that they must be in some sense illusory. Would that be true?

Don’t overlook the fact that Berkeley also wrote a treatise on optics, and was quite scientifically literate in the context of his historical period.

I did see the headlines, but didn't read the detail. It stands to reason, though. I still think the early iterations of all the engines were very reticent about US politics but then, they were new kids on the block still.

On ChatGPT5.0 - we're getting along famously. It seems, I don't know, even more personable than the last version. But I now realise I use Chat, Gemini and Claude all the time, not only for my particular research and subject-matter interests, but all kinds of things. It is becoming ubiquitous, but so far at least, I'm feeling more empowered by it, than threatened.

How is something like “disassocistive identity disorder” even possible to imagine as a coherent thing? — Fire Ologist

Bernardo Kastrup points to a 2014 fMRI study of subjects diagnosed with dissociative identity disorder. In one striking case, a dissociated personality who believed herself to be blind showed no neural activity in the brain’s visual cortex—yet the same subject, when embodying another personality, displayed normal activity in that region.

Kastrup uses this as a metaphor for the relationship between individual minds and what he calls “mind at large.” Just as each dissociated identity experiences itself as a separate person, we experience ourselves as separate individuals—when, in his view, we are all expressions of the same underlying mind manifesting in different ways.

This is a metaphor that sits comfortably in Vedanta. Swami Sarvapriyananda of the New York Vedanta Society (with whom Kastrup dialogues from time to time) sees it as another way of expressing the teaching that ātman (the true Self) and Brahman (the ultimate reality) are one. In this light, Vedanta would say that, in a sense, we are all “mental patients” so long as we identify with the ego and remain ignorant of the Self.

Enough for the excursion. Back to class now, everyone.

Well aware of all that. Nevertheless, I maintain that the distinction between beings and things is fundamental to Christianity as it must be to other religious traditions. To regard beings as things is to de-personalise or objectify them. It's far more insidious, and much more common, than mistakes about Scholastic terminology.

Sounds not unlike Dissociative identity disorder. — Banno

Bernardo Kastrup makes the case that all individual minds are dissociated identities of a single intelligence. Alan Watts says something very similar in The Supreme Identity - that individual beings are simply projections of the one intelligence who has become so entangled in the game of life so as to forget their real identity. So it may not be an unreasonable analogy.

I've just posted a question about opinions on Trump's use of executive actions in Government to Gemini and received an answer with the for and against cases. It seems very different from the last time I ventured a question on this topic, but that was more than a year ago and my memories of it are hazy. In any case, I'm re-assured that Gemini is not being prevented from presenting an unbiased overview. Link here.

"Do you think Trump is a good president?," versus, "Does [some demographic] think Trump is a good president?," — Leontiskos

I followed up with the question 'do you think...' to Google Gemini, and it gave a list of pros and cons, finishing with:

Ultimately, whether President Trump is considered a "good" president is a subjective judgment. There is no single, universally accepted metric for presidential success. The arguments on both sides are complex and multifaceted, and a full evaluation would require a deep dive into specific policies, their outcomes, and their long-term effects on the country.

which I don't regard as an unreasonable response.

As a matter of fact, ‘person’ was derived from ‘personae’, the masks worn by actors in Greek drama. Regardless, surely Christians of any school or sect must recognize the distinction between persons and things must they not?

Thank you for the explanation, I see your point.

But surely describing the persons of the Trinity as ‘things’ is even greater error than was mine.

:rofl:

It just occurred to me spontaneously - don't want to make too much of it.

Well, of course. But what did you mean, then, by 'accepting our true nature as primates'? In what way is that being denied, and how would acknowledging it rectify that?

One could also engage in a conversation about what, precisely, is the error, but then, it's a lot easier to make snide remarks, isn't it.