I am unencumbered by dogma — Tom Storm

isn't the reflexive association of 'dogma' with 'transcendence' itself a kind of dogma, or at least a stereotype?

I think nihilism is endemic in today's culture. It doesn't necessarily manifest in dramatic ways, it might just be a shrug, a whatever, a 'makes no difference'. It might manifest as anomie or ennui or in other ways, but it's an afflictive state, as it saps the sense of relatedness to the Cosmos and any real sense that actions are meaningful.

I'm too optimistic to see anything other than the utter collapse of Maga through self-destruction. They're too stupid to function as a revolutionary movement. They're too stupid to uphold any momentum of such actions. — Christoffer

My thoughts also. I'm sure the polling data is misleading and that they will be punished at the ballot box.

It's never been a mystery to me — 180 Proof

Yes, well I guess the other predominant emotion I'm feeling is dissappointment. I thought the US was better than that, although a lot of people here tell me that it's naive.

At the end of the day, while the wheels of justice are turning very slowly, they are turning, and they have a kind of inexorability about them. (In today's hearings, Trump has been threatened with incarceration if he keeps up his insults.)

(Today's) testimony offered another remarkable moment in a trial whose early days have been full of them: a former president and current Republican nominee watching helplessly as two strangers exposed details of a sex scandal that he had fought to keep secret.

It also underscored the wide array of evidence at the prosecution’s disposal as it assembled its case against the former president. On Tuesday alone, prosecutors elicited live testimony from Mr. Davidson and three other witnesses, a string of provocative text messages, videos of Trump campaign events and excerpts from a deposition the former president gave in a separate case — all woven into a story that they say paints Mr. Trump as a criminal. — NYTimes

Have a read of this OP https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/7110/how-to-write-an-op

We hear daily that Trump is either leading or tying with Biden in polls. What I can't figure out is, what Trump voters think they're voting for. Trump, in the delusional monologues that pass for his campaign speeches, outlines no policies, presents no ideas, but raves and rambles about his enemies and what he'll do to them. (You'll remember that at the 2020 Republican Party convention, the Party abandoned the idea of presenting a policy platform, in favour of a simple declaration supporting Trump.)

There's a lengthy OP in the Washington Post (gift link) which discusses the idea that the reason for Trump's popularity is that he is harnessing hostility towards liberal principles amongst voters who want to destroy the current system. (This is also Steve Bannon's main focus.)

A healthy republic would not be debating whether Trump and his followers seek the overthrow of the Founders’ system of liberal democracy. What more do people need to see than his well-documented attempt to prevent the peaceful transfer of power with the storming of the U.S. Capitol, the elaborate scheme to create false electoral slates in key states, the clear evidence that he bullied officials in some states to “find” more votes, and to persuade Vice President Mike Pence not to certify the legitimate results? What more do they need to know than that Trump continues to insist he won that election and celebrates as heroes and “patriots” the people who invaded the U.S. Capitol and smashed policemen’s faces with the stated aim of forcing Congress to negate the election results? As one 56-year-old Michigan woman present at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, explained: “We weren’t there to steal things. We weren’t there to do damage. We were just there to overthrow the government.”

Trump not only acknowledges his goals, past and present; he promises to do it again if he loses this year. For the third straight election, he is claiming that if he loses, then the vote will have been fraudulent. He has warned of uprisings, of “bedlam” and a “bloodbath,” and he has made clear that he will again be the promoter of this violence, just as he was on Jan. 6. Trump explicitly warned in 2020 that he would not accept the election results if he lost, and he didn’t. This year he is saying it again. Were there no other charges against him, no other reason to be concerned about his return to the presidency, this alone would be sufficient to oppose him. He does not respect and has never pledged to abide by the democratic processes established by the Constitution. On the contrary, he has explicitly promised to violate the Constitution when he deems it necessary. That by itself makes him a unique candidate in American history and should be disqualifying. .....

So, why will so many vote for him anyway? For a significant segment of the Republican electorate, the white-hot core of the Trump movement, it is because they want to see the system overthrown.

So they don't want a better government, better economic policies, or better anything. What they want, is to bring down the whole system, because they don't accept the principles on which it was founded.

For two centuries, many White Americans have felt under siege by the Founders’ liberalism. They have been defeated in war and suppressed by threats of force, but more than that, they have been continually oppressed by a system designed by the Founders to preserve and strengthen liberalism against competing beliefs and hierarchies. Since World War II, the courts and the political system have pursued the Founders’ liberal goals with greater and greater fidelity, ending official segregation, driving religion from public schools, recognizing and defending the rights of women and minorities hitherto deprived of their “natural rights” because of religious, racial and ethnic discrimination. The hegemony of liberalism has expanded, just as Lincoln hoped it would, “constantly spreading and deepening its influence, and augmenting the happiness and value of life to all people of colors everywhere.” Anti-liberal political scientist Patrick Deneen calls it “liberal totalitarianism,” and, apart from the hyperbole, he is right that liberalism has been steadily deepening and expanding under presidents of both parties since the 1940s.

The fury on the anti-liberal right against what is today called “wokeness” is nothing new. Anti-liberal movements in America, whether in defense of the White race or Christianity, and more often both together, have always claimed to be suffering under the expanding hegemony of liberalism. They have always claimed that a liberal government and society were depriving them of their “freedom” to live a life according to Christian teachings and were favoring various minority groups, especially Black people, at their expense. In the 1970s, influential theologian R.J. Rushdoony complained that the Christian in America had “no right to his identity” but was forced to recognize “all others and their ‘rights.’” And he was correct if a Christian’s “rights” included the right not only to lead a Christian life oneself but to impose that life on the entire society, or if a White person’s “freedom” included the freedom to preserve white primacy in society. In the 19th century, enslavers insisted they were deprived of their “freedom” to hold human beings as property; Southerners in the post-Reconstruction era insisted on their “freedom” to oppress Black citizens in their states.

Today, anti-liberals in American society are indeed deprived of their “freedom” to impose their religious and racial views on society, on public schools, on the public square and on the laws of the nation. What Christian nationalists call “liberal totalitarianism,” the Founders called “freedom of conscience.”

The most rabid of the so-called Christian Nationalists want to impose a more or less 'Christian Sharia Law' to replace the constitution:

The influential advocate of “conservative nationalism,” Yoram Hazony, wants Americans to abandon the Declaration (of Independence) in favor of a nationhood built on Protestantism and the Bible. America is a “revolutionary nation,” Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) insists, not because of the principles of the Declaration and not even because of the American Revolution itself, but “because we are the heirs of the revolution of the Bible” that began with “the founding of the nation of Israel.” There could hardly be a statement more at odds with the American Founders’ liberal, ecumenical vision.

Expressing a belief in God is no threat to the Founders’ system, but reshaping society in accord with Christian teachings is. To build the nation Hawley and Hazony imagine would require jettisoning not only the Declaration but also the Constitution, which was designed to protect the Declaration’s principles. The Christian commonwealth would not and could not be a democracy because the majority of people can’t be trusted to choose correctly. According to the Claremont Institute’s Glenn Ellmers, “most people living in the United States today — certainly more than half — are not Americans in any meaningful sense of the term.” They are a “zombie” or “human rodent” who lives “a shadow-life of timid conformity.” Only “the 75 million people who voted in the last election” for Trump are true Americans. Instead of trying to compete with Democrats in elections that don’t reflect the will of the people, Ellmers writes, “Why not just cut to the chase and skip the empty, meaningless process?” The “only road forward” is “overturning the existing post-American order.”

When you consider that GOP representatives in multiple states are charged with election interference, and that a sizeable portion of the electorate doesn't believe that the last Presidential election was legitimate - well, there's some very dangerous forces at work here. One can only hope that Trump's track record of 'malevolence hobbled by incompetence', along with the basic common sense of a slightly larger proportion of the electorate, will prevail over this madness.

But it's not guaranteed.

It's a manifesto more than an OP.

Somehow you've managed to attribute nearly all the quotes in your reply to a poster who's not even participating in this thread.

However, I prefer to define the science of morality as:

“The study of why our moral sense and cultural moral norms exist". — Mark S

Wouldn't evolutionary psychology, sociology and anthropology be the relevant disciplines for such an enquiry? They're scientific, as far as the social sciences can be scientific, and I'm sure there are many relevant studies. You list some of them under Notes. What would be missing from those sources?

other suggestions for defining the science of morality studies are welcome. — Mark S

I would start by not categorising it as science in the first place. Science at least in the modern context relies on what is objectively, or better still, inter-subjectively observable and measurable. The thrust of the 'is/ought' problem is that what ought to be the case, or what one ought to do, cannot be subjected to quantitative measurement. Hopefully, all can agree on what is measurably the case, but what ought to be the case, is a different matter altogether. So how could it be a scientific matter, insofar as science relies on objective judgement?

Most normative moral systems in civilized cultures originated with the truths of revealed religion (Semitic, Indic, Chinese) or some other form of sapiential insight (e.g. those of the pre-socratic philosophers), which characterised the 'axial age' of philosophy. In the absence of such sources, which are generally deprecated in secular philosophy, how do you arrive at a moral good, beyond a utilitarian definition of 'the greatest good for the greatest number'? (and leaving aside questions of what 'the greatest good' might constitute, beyond an equitable distribution of resources.)

This is why I think the articulation of moral norms is such an intractable philosophical question - because when you introduce religious considerations then you face the intractable conflicts between competing truth-claims, conflicts which generally have no objectively measurable means of adjuticating. But then you've also set aside many of the sources of morality, reflected in the setting aside of the questions you say are fundamental to any proposed 'science' (e.g. 'what is good'? etc).

Seems to me very hard to escape 'Hume's fork'. So is the point of the title of the OP that there can't be a definition of the subject matter of a purported 'science of morality'?

I love the political correctness of 'strawperson'. :rofl:

you cared more about Buddhism and its ideas than you did about smoking. — Janus

No, not at all. It was the recognition of the momentary nature of craving, that it was something that would pass in a few minutes, rather than fixating on the idea that if I could only stop for six weeks, then the craving would pass. It wasn't until later I realised the connection with the Buddhist 'anicca', impermanence, but I thought it a practical application of that principle.

I admit it's a trope of philosophical and scientific thought to think so highly of only the most abstract things we can entertain ourselves with. — substantivalism

It's not that quantification is either simply abstract or entertaining, but that it's exact. Insofar as you can quantify, you can predict and control. One of the prime factors in the success of science is the increasing scope and accuracy of measurement. In Plato there is recognition of the exact nature of arithmetical proofs, which are contrasted with value judgements about the sensory domain, hence dianoia, arithmetical reasoning, being judged higher that sense experience; when you know an arithmetic proof, you know it with perfect clarity and without reference to anything else. The Galileo quote you refer to was 'nature is written in mathematical language, and its characters are triangles, circles and other geometric figures, without which it is impossible to humanly understand a word; without these, one is wandering in a dark labyrinth.' Hence the fundamental significance of quantitative data in science, and the division I mentioned in the earlier post between primary (measurable) and secondary (subjective) attributes.

I sympathize, but your prose:

Given this, it is wiser to assert that the universe came into existence by some manifestation in, per se, a multiverse, than it is to park randomly on the conjecture it just popped up for no reason. — Barkon

needs work. I see what you’re trying to say but it’s a word salad in its current form.

I would put it like this: we generally believe that ‘things happen for a reason’ but scientists seem to believe that the Universe simply sprung into existence with no cause.

Here you’re asking deep questions, which is perfectly fine. Philosophy does ask deep questions but be prepared for deep thinking and a lot of reading. Be thankful that the medium exists in which these questions can be explored.

Hence this aphorism: to learn what it is that endures, first understand what is transient.

you could say this obscurity also pervades modern physics in general and the public is thrashed around as a rag doll in a storm of such poetic expressions which are neither clarified explicitly nor literalized properly to remove any confusion. Perhaps its not just obscure philosophy that needs to do some better PR but also modern physics as well. — substantivalism

That’s terrific writing. I’m really sensing the tension you are pointing out.

The only thing that survives being the math and its practical applications. — substantivalism

I would recommend looking into the origins of mathematical philosophy in Pythagoras. The Greeks had the insight that only number could be completely knowable; the expression A=A (the law of identity) offered an intrinsic certitude that things in the material/sensory world could only aspire to. If you can get hold of a copy of Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy, have a look at the chapter on Pythagoras. You might also enjoy an essay - originally a lecture - by Werner Heisenberg, The Debate between Plato and Democritus.

The point is that you cannot simply decide by fiat what will be more important to you. — Janus

Oh yes you can. I was a totally addicted smoker aged about 17 until about 40. Until aged about 60 I was an occasional smoker (= asked other people). When I was addicted I often did things I am ashamed of to get my fix (like, stealing cigarettes.) I was on nicotine gum for a long time (my then-small children called it ‘smoking gum’’.) In the end, the principle that got me off it was Buddhist - I realised that cravings are transient. I worked out that if I could hold off for just as long as it took to smoke a cigarette - about 2-3 minutes - then the craving would pass. That did the trick - before then I was always fantasising about ‘being without for 6 months’. It was the minutes that actually counted.

The last cigarette I smoked was at my 60th birthday, 10 and a half years back.

'Intelligence is the ability to make distinctions'.

Evan Thompson’s work in embodied cognition has interested me in recent times. — Tom Storm

Speaking of whom:

suppose we found that specific patterns of brain activity in Yo-Yo Ma’s brain reliably correlate with his playing Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1. This finding wouldn’t be surprising, given his years of training and expertise. Although that information would presumably be useful for understanding the effects of musical training and expert performance on the brain, it would tell us very little about music, let alone Bach. On the contrary, you need to understand music, the cello, and Bach to understand the significance of the neural patterns.

Excerpt From
Why I Am Not a Buddhist
Evan Thompson

Fair enough, agree with that. Much more like the Scandinavian model of democratic socialism. Although they have the advantage of a highly intelligent citizenry ;-)

Would you be willing to accept a set of principles that increases the prospects of others, even if it means having fewer opportunities yourself? — Rob J Kennedy

You mean, by paying income tax?

It's a very politically-incorrect fact that not all people are equal. All people should be treated equally by the law, and generally should have equal opportunity to participate in the economy. But not every one is equal in respect of their abilities, proclivities, talents, desires and intentions. To try and impose equality ends up being a recipe for totalitarianism, as Orwell prophesied so eloquently.

Dennett's not an eliminativist though. He's a critic of it. — fdrake

But he is included in that same article as a representative of eliminative materialism:

Although most discussions regarding eliminativism focus on the status of our notion of belief and other propositional attitudes, some philosophers have endorsed eliminativist claims about the phenomenal or qualitative states of the mind (see the entry on qualia). For example, Daniel Dennett (1978) has argued that our concept of pain is fundamentally flawed because it includes essential properties, like infallibility and intrinsic awfulness, that cannot co-exist in light of a well-documented phenomenon know as “reactive disassociation”. In certain conditions, drugs like morphine cause subjects to report that they are experiencing excruciating pain, but that it is not unpleasant. It seems we are either wrong to think that people cannot be mistaken about being in pain (wrong about infallibility), or pain needn’t be inherently awful (wrong about intrinsic awfulness). Dennett suggests that part of the reason we may have difficulty replicating pain in computational systems is because our concept is so defective that it picks out nothing real.

(Personally, I think disputing the apodictic reality of pain, because of not being able to form a concept of it, is all the illustration needed of the shortcoming of this attitude.)

Again, Thomas Nagel summarizes the problem he sees with Dennett's views:

According to Dennett...the reality is that the representations that underlie human behavior are found in neural structures of which we know very little. And the same is true of the similar conception we have of our own minds. That conception does not capture an inner reality, but has arisen as a consequence of our need to communicate to others in rough and graspable fashion our various competencies and dispositions (and also, sometimes, to conceal them):

"Curiously, then, our first-person point of view of our own minds is not so different from our second- person point of view of others’ minds: we don’t see, or hear, or feel, the complicated neural machinery churning away in our brains but have to settle for an interpreted, digested version, a user-illusion that is so familiar to us that we take it not just for reality but also for the most indubitable and intimately known reality of all. "

The trouble is that Dennett concludes not only that there is much more behind our behavioral competencies than is revealed to the first-person point of view—which is certainly true—but that nothing whatever is revealed to the first-person point of view but a “version” of the neural machinery. In other words, when I look at the American flag, it may seem to me that there are red stripes in my subjective visual field, but that is an illusion: the only reality, of which this is “an interpreted, digested version,” is that a physical process I can’t describe is going on in my visual cortex.

I am reminded of the Marx Brothers line: “Who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes?” Dennett asks us to turn our backs on what is glaringly obvious—that in consciousness we are immediately aware of real subjective experiences of color, flavor, sound, touch, etc. that cannot be fully described in neural terms even though they have a neural cause (or perhaps have neural as well as experiential aspects). And he asks us to do this because the reality of such phenomena is incompatible with the scientific materialism that in his view sets the outer bounds of reality. He is, in Aristotle’s words, “maintaining a thesis at all costs.” — Thomas Nagel, Analytical Philosophy and Human Life, Chapter 23 - Dennett's Illusions

It is this conviction on Dennett's part that I think allows his views to be fairly characterised as 'scientism', that is, 'the view that science and the scientific method are the best or only way to render truth about the world and reality', and then to exclude, or eliminate, as a matter of principle, the first-person perspective, because it is not something that science as currently practiced accomodates.

Nagel adds:

There is no reason to go through such mental contortions in the name of of science. The spectacular progress of the physical sciences since the seventeenth century was made possible by the exclusion of the mental from their purview.. To say that there is more to reality than than physics can can account for is not a piece of mysticism: it it is an acknowledgment that that we we are nowhere near a "theory of everything", and that science will have to expand to accommodate facts of a kind fundamentally different from those that physics is designed to explain. It should not disturb us that this may have radical consequences, especially for Dennett’s favorite natural science, biology: the theory of evolution, which in its its current form is a purely physical theory, may have to incorporate non-physical physical factors to to account for consciousness, if if consciousness is not, as he thinks, an illusion. Materialism remains a widespread view, but science does not progress by tailoring the data to fit a prevailing theory

.

I still say that philosophy itself is one of the casualties of eliminative materialism.

From the SEP entry on Michel Henry, phenomenologist:

If, for Henry, culture has always to be understood as “a culture of life”, i.e., as the cultivation of subjective powers, then it includes art without being limited to it. Cultural praxis comports what Henry designates as its “elaborate forms” (e.g., art, religion, discursive knowledge) as well as everyday forms related to the satisfaction of basic needs. Both types of forms, however, fall under the ethical category of subjective self-growth and illustrate the bond between the living and absolute life. The inversion of culture in “barbarism” means that within a particular socio-historical context the need for subjective self-growth is no longer adequately met, and the tendency toward an occultation (i.e. obscuration) of the bond between the living and absolute life is reinforced. According to Henry, who echoes Husserl’s analysis in Crisis, such an inversion takes place in contemporary culture, the dominating feature of which is the triumph of Galilean science and its technological developments.

Insofar as it relies on objectification, the “Galilean principle” is directly opposed to Henry’s philosophy of immanent affectivity. For Henry, science, including modern Galilean science, nonetheless remains a highly elaborated form of culture. Although “the joy of knowing is not always as innocent as it seems”, the line separating culture from “barbarism” is crossed when science is transformed into scientist ideology, i.e., when the Galilean principle is made into an ontological claim according to which ultimate reality is given only through the objectively measurable and quantifiable.

Dennett crossed that line.

Thanks! Helpful and illuminating as always.

I’d suggest not trying to hang on to it. These moments come and go, it is the intensity of the underlying enquiry which is key.

However those views that I ascribed to him are not misrepresentations, are they? Thomas Nagel said of him

Dennett is a materialist about the mind, but unlike many materialists he doesn’t identify mental events with physical events in the brain. Instead, he maintains that while we are nothing but complex physical systems controlled by what happens in our brains, we can’t in ordinary life understand ourselves in those terms. We operate instead with a useful fiction, namely that we are controlled by a mind full of sensations, intentions, beliefs, emotions, desires, and so on. This rough explanatory scheme enables us to understand and predict the actions of others, and to communicate with them. We treat ourselves and others as if we had these inner conscious lives. Like the rest of our natural, unscientific take on the world – colours, sounds, ordinary objects – these ideas about the mind are tools given to us by evolution, according to Dennett. Even though they don’t depict reality with scientific accuracy, they help us to function and survive, so they have been entrenched by natural selection.

In my view this is one of those philosophical positions that represent the triumph of theoretical commitment over common sense.

Fair comment, do you think?

Hey whatever it is, go with it! You’re actually doing philosophy!

Thanks Pierre-Normand, I am always impressed by your erudition which far exceeds my own. I do indeed only see Dennett as a reductive materialist, as I encountered him in his guise as New Atheist polemicist and confrere of Richard Dawkins. I’m pleased to learn there is more to him, as this would explain why people I respect hold him in respect.

If we are robots, are robots conscious according to him? — Johnnie

The key phrase is 'unconscious competence'. He argues that what we consider to be conscious thought actually arises from cellular and molecular processes of which we have no conscious awareness. Dennett asserts that the usual understanding of consciousness is a fallacious 'fok psychology' that interprets these processes after the fact. We believe we are autonomous agents, but our mental processes - which we mistakenly believe to have real existence - are really the outcome of the evolutionary requirements to solve specific kinds of problems that enhance our chances of survival and reproduction. That dovetails with Richard Dawkins' idea of the selfish gene. So he posits that what we experience as conscious decision-making is more about rationalizing or making sense of the outcomes of the unconscious competence of our unconscious evolutionary drives.

He says in his book Darwin's Dangerous Idea that Darwinian evolution is like a 'universal acid' that dissolves the container in which it developed, suggesting that it cannot be contained or limited to just biological sciences—it seeps into and transforms every field it touches. This idea reshapes our understanding not only of biology but also of philosophy, psychology, and even the social sciences. So in that sense it is 'supersessionist' - it supersedes, or dissolves, classical philosophy, most of which he says is merely self indulgent.

I think it's the sheer hostility that some of these media atheists have gotten — ssu

It was a two-way street. Richard Dawkins often made a point of being deliberately insulting to shock people out of their God delusions. He and Dennett both regarded anyone religious as either pitiable fools or hostile fanatics, depending on their overall congeniality.

And speaking of congeniality, by all accounts Dennett was a very congenial guy, and an excellent lecturer. He also paid his university tuition by playing jazz piano in bars, which definitely gets my respect. But all of that was in spite of his philosophy, not because of it. That's what he describes as 'compatibilism' (a 'wretched subterfuge', according to Kant.)

The mind’s a priori conceptual contribution to experience can be enumerated by a special set of concepts that make all other empirical concepts and judgments possible. These concepts cannot be experienced directly; they are only manifest as the form which particular judgments of objects take. Kant believes that formal logic has already revealed what the fundamental categories of thought are. The special set of concepts is Kant’s Table of Categories, which are taken mostly from Aristotle with a few revisions. — Kant, Metaphysics, Internet Encylopedia of Philosophy

I would think that since having these categories is actually having a form of knowledge, then we cannot truthfully say "Kant agreed that all our knowledge begins with experience". There is a bit of inconsistency here, whereby it is necessary to either break knowledge into two types, a priori and a posteriori (such as innate and learned), or else we need to provide different principles for understanding the a priori as something other than knowledge. — Metaphysician Undercover

Fair point. On the other hand, Kant said 'concepts (innate) without percepts (acquired) are empty' - if an infant is not primed with the right experiences, their innate capacities will not be activated. Children raised by wolves - there have been some - do not learn to speak.

Aristotle offered a resolution by portraying this as two distinct layers of potentiality — Metaphysician Undercover

Also true. There are continuities between Aristotle and Kant, after all, Kant adopted Aristotle's categories nearly unchanged.

I did not preconceive language: I learned it. I did not preconceive reasoning; I developed it over many years, — Vera Mont

Because you were born with the capacity to learn both, which animals are not, the cleverness of crows notwithstanding.

A peculiar world view that always seems to be removed from the clear definitions of others but pervades all of Classical physics and it also seems that those biases died hard when coming into modern physics. You may even say they are still rather prevalent despite the apparent 'transcendence' of physics disciplines from such thinking. — substantivalism

Here's a big-picture sketch of how I interpret the whole issue of mechanistic materialism and its demise at the hands of the new physics. The advent of Newtonian physics and Galilean astronomy posited a sharp division between the subjective and objective domains, with the objective domain being defined solely in terms of the 'primary attributes' of physics - measurable quantities such as mass, velocity, and the like. The 'subjective domain' - that of mind - was associated with the 'secondary attributes' of color, taste, and so on, and was associated with Descartes 'res cogitans'. It was conceived as a completely separate substance (or type of being), another aspect of this proposed separateness. With all this came the birth of a new form of awareness, an 'objective consciousness', which sought to understand the Universe solely in objective and physical terms. That reached its clearest contemporary expression with positivism, as you mention, with Carnap as one of its chief exponents.

That approach has yielded enormous benefits in technical and scientific terms. But its shortcoming was precisely that it excluded the subject, who after all was the instigator and beneficiary of the entire panorama, from the picture! There was no place in it for h.sapiens, save as the 'outcome of the accidental collocation of atoms', as Bertrand Russell put it.

Many factors have begun to call that picture into question, not least the 'Copenhagen interpretation' of modern physics, which found that the observer could not be sharply divided from the observed after all - and in physics, the hardest of the so-called 'hard sciences'! Physicist John Wheeler, commenting on one of the experiments which indicated this problem, said:

The dependence of what is observed upon the choice of experimental arrangement made Einstein unhappy. It conflicts with the (realist) view that the Universe exists "out there" independent of all acts of observation. In contrast Neils Bohr stressed that we confront here an inescapable new feature of nature... In struggling to make clear to Einstein the central point as he saw it, Bohr found himself forced to introduce the word "phenomenon". In today's words Bohr's point - and the central point of quantum theory - can be put into a single, simple sentence. "No elementary phenomenon is a phenomenon until it is a registered (observed) phenomenon". It is wrong to speak of the "route" of the photon in the experiment of the beam splitter. It is wrong to attribute a tangibility to the photon in all its travel from the point of entry to its last instant of flight. A phenomenon is not yet a phenomenon until it has been brought to a close by an irreversible act of amplfification such as ...the triggering of a photodetector. In broader terms, we find that nature at the quantum level is not a machine that goes its inexorable way. Instead, what answer we get depends on the question we put, the experiment we arrange, the registering device we choose. We are inescapably involved in bringing about that which appears to happen.

All of this is, of course, subject of enormous commentary and speculation. I found Paul Davies' books especially useful in getting a clearer picture of it, but there are many others.

I glanced at the link you provided about naturalism, which looks interesting, but it's a book, and I have more than enough on my hands at the moment. But as it mentions Wittgenstein, I thought you might find this magazine article on Wittgenstein relevant - it was was originally published by the British Wittgenstein Society so its provenance is established: Wittgenstein, Tolstoy and the Folly of Logical Positivism.

A couple of observations made off the top of my head.

It seems to me it's been written from a perspective of a kind of disillusionment, by someone who formerly believed that the role of science was to develop a true picture of the world, but has now come to see that this seems increasingly remote. So that even though you say you've seen through naive or scientific realism, you're still not really able to let it go, or see what could replace it. You seem to be expressing a fear that, if you completely let go the mechanistic world-picture, then (heaven knows) anything goes.

Anyone can observe a pen fall, tell us how fast it falls, repeat this experiment, and mathematically model it but something seems lost in it all. — substantivalism

Odd choice of an example object. One usually picks 'a billiard ball' or some other simple object - of course it is true that pens will fall at the same rate as billiard balls, all things being equal, but pens are primary for communication, and physical predictions of how it will behave when dropped will tell you nothing about what you might write with it when you pick it up. I think perhaps that your choice of metaphor here is an inadvertant expression of the problem you're grappling with!

Or is there some way to lean into non-visualization through metaphor or mathematical modeling but without an occultist taste to it? — substantivalism

Again, there seems a kind of fear at work, that letting go the scientific outlook will result in devolution into some kind of voodoo magic. I also notice your mention of Capital T Truth. But I don't think science is about that - certainly, philosophy as taught in the English-speaking academy is not. I think you feel a kind of longing for a unitive vision, a sense in which everything will hang together or make sense, but it's diabolically difficult in the modern world to arrive at that, now that everything is so specialized, and there are such vast amounts of information available.

One book I've been studying which might be of assistance to your quest is Incomplete Nature by Terence Deacon. He attempts to account for intentionality within a naturalist framework, although it's a pretty tough read. But a romantic or mystic, he ain't.

Me, I'm more drawn to classical philosophy (as well as philosophical spirituality), although it's taken me a lifetime to begin to understand it. But I'm realising the richness of our Platonic heritage, and I would recommend to anyone looking at Plato again. Also reading philosophy in a synoptically and historically - trying to form a picture of the way in which the subject started and developed through the history of ideas.

Of particular importance to the kinds of questions you're asking would be the metaphysical assumptions behind the advent of science (e.g. this). And also philosophy of science - Kuhn, Feyerabend and Polanyi. They can help re-frame the issue, such that the distinct difference between the philosophical and purely scientific perspectives comes into view.

That's about all for now, but you're into a lot of really big questions in all that.

It'll all be drones and robotic equipment to start off with. Like Breakthrough StarShot

Guliani, Meadows charged in Arizona Fake Electors Scheme

An Arizona grand jury on Wednesday indicted seven attorneys or aides affiliated with Donald Trump’s 2020 presidential campaign as well as 11 Arizona Republicans on felony charges related to their alleged efforts to subvert Joe Biden’s 2020 victory in the state, according to an announcement by the state attorney general.

Those indicted include former Trump White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, attorneys Rudy Giuliani, Jenna Ellis, John Eastman and Christina Bobb, top campaign adviser Boris Epshteyn and former campaign aide Mike Roman. They are accused of allegedly aiding an unsuccessful strategy to award the state’s electoral votes to Trump instead of Biden after the 2020 election. Also charged are the Republicans who signed paperwork on Dec. 14, 2020, that falsely purported Trump was the rightful winner, including former state party chair Kelli Ward, state Sens. Jake Hoffman and Anthony Kern, and Tyler Bowyer, a GOP national committeeman and chief operating officer of Turning Point Action, the campaign arm of the pro-Trump conservative group Turning Point USA.

Trump was not charged, but he is described in the indictment as an unindicted co-conspirator.

In a related article,

Republicans in four states are facing charges after submitting documents to Congress falsely claiming that Donald Trump won the 2020 presidential election in their states. Investigations are ongoing and more charges could be filed.

Why thanks! I'm perusing that last title he mentioned even as we speak.

Where is that "first place" supposed to reside? In the embryo? On the ovum? Surely not in the genes of apes that oh so recently could not philosophize at all? What is the origin of this mind that preconceives? — Vera Mont

To even write your response, you're drawing on your innate capacities of reason and speech, which you must have to mount an argument in the first place.

That's what it means.

We first interpret it as a story. It is not until the same kind of event is followed by the same kind of event repeatedly that we begin to understand cause and effect — Vera Mont

It seems an obvious, common-sense answer, but the point is that a dumb animal, for instance, might be likewise 'exposed' to a series of events but never form any idea of a causal relationship, unless in terms of stimulus and response. Our ability to discern cause and effect goes beyond just observing repeated patterns and constructing stories. According to Kant, and an important point even though he might be a dead white male, the concept of causality is a fundamental 'category of the understanding' that we rely on to make sense of our experiences. This isn't merely a habit or a learned response from observing the world; it's a precondition for how we perceive and interact with the world. When we perceive one event following another, it's our mind's inherent structure that compels us to see this sequence as causal. This isn't simply a narrative we construct after the fact; it's an immediate and automatic application of our cognitive faculties. This means that our recognition of cause and effect is not just a result of experience but a lens through which we interpret all experiences, enabling us to engage with the world in a meaningful way.

Now, as per Jacques Maritain's quote, dogs and cats surely perceive some level of causal relations. After all they're highly intelligent species. But they lack the ability to abstract from that to understand general ideas (or ideas generally!) It is that abstractive and intellectual ability, easily taken-for-granted, that differentiates h. sapiens from other species.

They're both dead enough not to trouble me overmuch — Vera Mont

Shows.

when I previously mentioned that we think and understand perceptions via concepts, but that concepts are in themselves extra-empirical (else non-observable).... — javra

@Vera Mont- what Javra says here is similar to 'Kant's answer to Hume'. Kant's response to Hume addressed Hume's skepticism about the ability of human reason to understand the world beyond sensory experience. Hume - the textbook empiricist philosopher - argued that our knowledge is limited to what we can perceive through our senses. He was particularly critical of the notion of causality, claiming that our belief in cause and effect is merely a habit of thought formed by observing repeated associations between events.

Kant agreed that all our knowledge begins with experience, but he disagreed with Hume's conclusion that it therefore arises solely from experience. Kant introduced a critical distinction between the forms of intuition (space and time) and the categories of understanding (including but not limited to causation), which are necessary for us to interpret sensory information.

According to Kant, these categories are not derived from experience but rather are the preconditions that make experience intelligible in the first place. They are the innate structures of the mind that organize sensory data into coherent perceptions ('percepts'). For example, when we perceive one event following another, our understanding interprets this as causation, allowing us to see one event as causing the other, rather than just as two events occurring sequentially. Thus, Kant argued that Hume's reduction of knowledge to mere sensations and perceptions overlooks the active role of the mind's inherent structures, which underpin experience.

Generally speaking, your posts seem to exhibit a straightforwardly empiricist approach, hence are susceptible to this kind of critique.

:up: You're a fount of interesting book recommendations!

I don't believe this is correct. The random nature of the 'quantum leap' is what caused Einstein to say that he doesn't believe God plays dice. He always maintained that quantum theory must be incomplete, as a consequence of this and other aspects of it, but I think subsequent discoveries have not favoured his objections.

to further judge a phenomena as undetermined is really troubling. — L'éléphant

I think the popular idea is that the elementary particles are lurking in a kind of fuzzy cloud, awaiting measurement; when in reality, they have no definite location, and therefore no definite existence, until they’re measured. Until then there are only degrees of probability, there are not definite particles in the realistic sense generally understood. This is the subject of comments by John Wheeler, in one of his popular essays, Law Without Law. Here he is referring to interpretations of a particular experiment in quantum physics which is associated with the well-known 'observer problem':

The dependence of what is observed upon the choice of experimental arrangement made Einstein unhappy. It conflicts with the (realist) view that the Universe exists "out there" independent of all acts of observation. In contrast Neils Bohr stressed that we confront here an inescapable new feature of nature... In struggling to make clear to Einstein the central point as he saw it, Bohr found himself forced to introduce the word "phenomenon". In today's words Bohr's point - and the central point of quantum theory - can be put into a single, simple sentence. "No elementary phenomenon is a phenomenon until it is a registered (observed) phenomenon". It is wrong to speak of the "route" of the photon in the experiment of the beam splitter. It is wrong to attribute a tangibility to the photon in all its travel from the point of entry to its last instant of flight. A phenomenon is not yet a phenomenon until it has been brought to a cloase by an irreversible act of amplfification such as ...the triggering of a photodetector. In broader terms, we find that nature at the quantum level is not a machine that goes its inexorable way. Instead, what answer we get depends on the question we put, the experiment we arrange, the registering device we choose. We are inescapably involved in bringing about that which appears to happen.

The implication being, the Universe does not comprise independently-existing elementary particles which exist as a kind of material ultimate. That is no longer a new realisation, although the implications are still being debated.

the grasp of (a) thing's intelligibility involves understanding its species and genus (scholastic sense of the terms), its telos (at least for living things; the healthy adult versions of living beings are phenomenologicaly "present" to us even when observing the immature or diseases for ), and the universals involved with it. — Count Timothy von Icarus

The human awareness of other animals did not begin with an idea; it began with individual real entities. The human realized that every example of a certain kind of prey was like every other in some ways in which it was unlike another kind of prey — Vera Mont

For Empiricism there is no essential difference between the intellect and the senses. The fact which obliges a correct theory of knowledge to recognize this essential difference is simply disregarded. What fact? The fact that the human intellect grasps, first in a most indeterminate manner, then more and more distinctly, certain sets of intelligible features -- that is, natures, say, the human nature -- which exist in reality as identical with individuals, with Peter or John for instance, but which are universal in the mind and presented to it as universal objects, positively one (within the mind) and common to an infinity of singular things (in the real).

Thanks to the association of particular images and recollections, a dog reacts in a similar manner to the similar particular impressions his eyes or his nose receive from this thing we call a piece of sugar or this thing we call an intruder; he does not know what is sugar or what is intruder. He plays, he lives in his affective and motor functions, or rather he is put into motion by the similarities which exist between things of the same kind; he does not see the similarity, the common features as such. What is lacking is the flash of intelligibility; he has no ear for the intelligible meaning. He has not the idea or the concept of the thing he knows, that is, from which he receives sensory impressions; his knowledge remains immersed in the subjectivity of his own feelings -- only in man, with the universal idea, does knowledge achieve objectivity. And the dog's field of knowledge is strictly limited: only the universal idea sets free -- in man -- the potential infinity of knowledge.

Such are the basic facts which Empiricism ignores, and in the disregard of which it undertakes to philosophize. — Jacques Maritain, The Cultural Impact of Empiricism

No; they exploit real differences. — Vera Mont

That’s only one way of looking at it, but it will fit right in here