It's frustrating because there seems to be no way to test any theories. — Relativist

But if a child's alleged memories of a previous life can be validated against documentary records and witness testimony, that amounts to some form of verification. (I've discussed Ian Stevenson previously but it usually generates such hostility that I refrain.) However his activities spanned a 30 year period and many thousands of cases. He himself never claimed to have proved that cases of re-incarnation occur, but that the evidence 'suggests it'. My knowledge of it is limited to a book I read about him by a journalist who travelled with him, and one of his publications borrowed from a library. Seems legit to me, but to a lot of people, not only is it not true, but it can't be true. Whereas I'm open to the idea.

Do you think idealism solves it? Did you see the conversation with Kastrup and Koch yet? — RogueAI

I watched about half of it, but I didn't notice anything about this topic. Besides, I don't know if idealism 'solves' the question of re-incarnation. Perhaps Sheldrake's morphic resonance at least provides a candidate for a medium of transmission. He says, as you will recall, that nature forms habits, that memories are not merely encoded in brains but in morphic fields. One question I've got is this: science only discovered electromagnetic fields in the mid-19th century. Until then, we had no idea of such a phenomenon, now they're thought to be more fundamental than sub-atomic particles. So what if there are fields other than electro-magnetic? How would they be detected? Electromagnetic fields are detected using instruments that register electric current. Even if there were morphic fields, presumably they are not detectable by those instruments, so they might exist undetected. There have been ideas like this in esoteric and occult circles for millenia. Maybe they're on to something, but it's a taboo subject as far as the mainstream is concerned.

Right. But the error I think the Verasatium presentation makes is then to equate non-compressibility with information - that a completely random string carries the greatest amount of information, because it can't be compressed. Whereas I think a random string embodies no information whatever.

That said, I frequently watch that Youtube channel, he's a very good popular science commentator. But I think this was not one of his better efforts.

:lol:

Oh, sorry, I re-quoted a question originally posed by @180 Proof (but it doesn't change my response, such as it is.)

Oh yes, I perfectly agree. I'm a staunch advocate for one or another form of idealism on this forum, see The Mind-Created World which I think I posted before you joined (and most enjoying your contributions, by the way.)

The first of the Towards a Science of Consciousness, a bi-annual spielfest held at Uni of Arizona Tucson (next one is this month!). If you zoom in on that ‘album cover’ it comprises photos of many of the main attendees, with David Chalmers in the middle. (His ‘Facing up to the problem of Consciousness’ was one of the main motivators for the conference. To his right is Stuart Hameroff who is known for the OrchOR model co-developed with Roger Penrose. I can identify a few of the others also.) But the thing which grabbed me about that, is how hippies have now become part of the mainstream, hence the salute to Sgt Pepper's. There's another great book along those lines, How the Hippies Saved Physics, David Kaiser, which features this great photo of the Fundamental Fysiks Group


Standing, left to right: Jack Sarfatti, Saul-Paul Sirag, Nick Herbert;
Bottom right: Fred Alan Wolf.

Hence the mainstreaming of the counter-culture in physics and philosophy of mind.

Zombies be damned :flower:

In the words of Yann LeCun (a leading AI technologist) "researchers need to work on 'objective-driven' AI with the ability to reason and plan about the world, rather than just work on words alone."

So what does it mean to have an "objective", and "reason" towards a resolution instead of just predict one? — Benj96

Does it mean, something has to matter to it? Humans and other creatures are driven by basic needs, but also by desires, plans, intentions and goals. I think the human capacity to reason is also goal-oriented in that way, and so ultimately driven by necessity. How could such attributes be genuinely embedded in an artificial system?

On Pierre-Normand's suggestion, I put it to ChatGPT 4, which responded as follows:

I've always thought that Kant essentially accepts Berkeley, — Ludwig V

I have read that Kant was infuriated by those critics of his first edition who accused him of basically re-cycling Berkeley's idealism, to which end he included a lengthy section in the second edition, 'A Refutation of Idealism' (see e.g. this reference.)

mind is a 'mystery' too intractable for science, even in principle, to explain? — bert1

(Apologies for the delay in responding, I only just noticed the question from 15 days ago.)

Science construed as dealing solely with objective phenomena. But the grounds are rapidly shifting. I'm spending a lot of time nowadays perusing various Internet speilfests and panel discussions which are challenging the over-arching physicalist/objectivist paradigm that has dominated science until now. Phenomenology, analytical idealism, post-modernism and non-dualism (to mention a few) are challenging the physicalist paradigm and conception of the nature of science.

Who remembers the poster from the 2014 Tucscon Science of Consciousness conference?



'It was twenty years ago today'. And that was ten years ago!

Stevenson's research on children who remember their past lives might be of interest. Of course it's wildly controversial and a taboo subject but he assembled a large data set. See this article.

A bunch of chalk on a blackboard, not a universe. — Count Timothy von Icarus

True - but that said, it is remarkable that the equations of general relativity can be captured on a single piece of paper. I don't think Thomas Nagel (or myself) wants to deprecate the astonishing reach of mathematical physics, so much as to point to what it assumes, and what it leaves out. Mind you, Wheeler's 'participatory universe' is one of the ways that these kinds of reflections became apparent from within science itself.

From here. I will try and respond to this here because it is more relevant to this thread than to the one from which it originated.

If the physical is naturally understood to have substantial or substantive existence, and it is upon that idea of substance that the notion of reality is founded, and the idea of a mental substance is untenable, then what justification would we have for saying that anything non-physical is real?

The alternative to eliminative physicalism would be to say that mental phenomena are real functions of some physical existents, and that the only sense in which they are not physical is that they do not (obviously) appear as objects of the senses. — Janus

I think what you mean by 'substantial' and 'substantive' is 'tangible' and/or 'measurable'. Those are the empirical criteria for what is considered to exist.

There are many things that could be said, but as the question originated in a thread about Descartes, it might be noted at the outset that the idea of 'substance' and 'substantial' in philosophy is not an empirical one. Rather it originates with Aristotelian/Platonic metaphysics, wherein 'substance' was 'a thing whose existence is independent of that of all other things, or a thing from which or out of which other things are made or in which other things inhere' (Brittanica. It is, of course, true, that the classical idea of substance has fallen out of favour except for with adherents of Thomism and perhaps other modern forms of hylomorphism, for which see this daunting index.)

That said, I think that the traditional notion of substance became associated with, or displaced by, the objects of physics, as a part of the 'Scientific Revolution'. After all, the hallmark of the 'new science' was (1) the identification of the 'primary attributes' of matter as the principle subject-matter of physics and (2) the supposedly universal scope of the new physics (i.e. Galilean-Newtonian) to all such objects of analysis. This leads to the paradigm that I also quoted in the thread from which this query originated:

The modern mind-body problem arose out of the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, as a direct result of the concept of objective physical reality that drove that revolution. Galileo and Descartes made the crucial conceptual division by proposing that physical science should provide a mathematically precise quantitative description of an external reality extended in space and time, a description limited to spatiotemporal primary qualities such as shape, size, and motion, and to laws governing the relations among them. Subjective appearances, on the other hand -- how this physical world appears to human perception -- were assigned to the mind, and the secondary qualities like color, sound, and smell were to be analyzed relationally, in terms of the power of physical things, acting on the senses, to produce those appearances in the minds of observers. It was essential to leave out or subtract subjective appearances and the human mind -- as well as human intentions and purposes -- from the physical world in order to permit this powerful but austere spatiotemporal conception of objective physical reality to develop. (Mind and Cosmos, Pp35-36) — Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos, Pp 35-36

I am proposing in this OP, that this amounts to more than just a theoretical paradigm - it's also a worldview, and one which is essentially the default view of secular, scientifically-informed culture. I also claim that an implicit assumption of this worldview is the 'subject-object' relationship - it takes for granted or assumes our status as intelligent subjects existing in a world of objects (and other subjects). Within that paradigm, 'objectivity' is the criterion for what is real or existent; what is 'objectively true' is what 'exists when you stop believing in it', as Philip K. Dick put it.

Here, this point is relevant:

...physics reveals a physical world that is almost completely insubstantial. "Substantial" and "real" have a meaning in the context of physics, but not one that meets the demands of this philosophical wild-goose chase. Berkeley was wrong about many things, but about this, he was right. — Ludwig V

With which I agree. I take his main point to be a reference to the well-known 'observer problem' in quantum physics, which has undermined the whole idea of the 'mind-independent reality' of the objects of quantum physics, although I don't want to go into the whole 'interpretations of physics' tangle.

So what I was arguing in the other thread is that a consequence of Cartesian dualism is to depict mind (res cogitans) as something that exists within this subject-object paradigm, which is the scientific paradigm, and which is the only one we know or are confident of. The question becomes, how do you demonstrate or prove the existence of such a 'thinking thing'? Why, you can't! It's a specious concept. So what are we left with? The other half of Descartes' duality, namely, res extensia, extended matter, which Modern Science has proven so extraordinarily adept at analyzing and manipulating. (This is the sense in which I agree with Ryle's categorisation of Descartes' error as a category mistake, although I don't accept his remedy.)

Mind is not something that exists in this paradigm, except for as a product of the brain, an epiphenomenon, or an emergent attribute of what really does exist - which is the physical. That I see as the common-sense, mainstream view (which eliminativism takes to the most extreme, but also most consistent, position.)

This is why the argument in the OP says that an alternative to this view is a perspectival shift, a different way of seeing, which also turns out to be a different way of being. I'm pretty much in agreement with Bernardo Kastrup's analytical idealism in that regard, but it's really important to understand that this doesn't mean establishing that mind is something objectively existent.

I'll add, I think these subjects *are* very difficult to fathom, as the Buddha's quote. After all, those who sought to fathom them often gave away everything in order to pursue it.

When I was much younger, I had the foolish idea that Zen enlightenment, satori, was a simple matter - probably from reading too much of Alan Watts. I recently read an essay by an Australian poet and esotericist, Harold Stewart, who emigrated to Kyoto Japan where he spent the last decades of his life. He observes:

But many Western enthusiasts for what they imagine to be Zen have never actually come into contact with this branch of the Buddhist Tradition as it still exists and functions in the Far East. ....Those few who took the trouble to visit Japan and begin the practice of Zen under a recognized Zen master or who joined the monastic Order soon discovered that it was a very different matter from what the popularizing literature had led them to believe. They found that in the traditional Zen monastery zazen is never divorced from the daily routine of accessory disciplines. To attenuate and finally dissolve the illusion of the individual ego, it is always supplemented by manual work to clean the temple, maintain the garden, and grow food in the grounds; by strenuous study with attendance at discourses on the sutras and commentaries; and by periodical interviews with the roshi, to test spiritual progress. Acolytes are expected to develop indifference to the discomforts of heat and cold on a most frugal vegetarian diet and to abstain from self-indulgence in sleep and sex, intoxicating drinks and addictive drugs. Altogether Zen demands an ability to participate in a communal life as regimented and lacking in privacy as the army.

I read a few accounts of Westerners who did spend time in Zen monasteries, like Jan Westerling's 'An Empty Mirror.' And it's extremely taxing. The Japanese are famously strict disciplinarians and the daily routines are exacting - one of those visiting Westerners (can't remember which) became so severely malnourished he almost died because the monks were given only a few minutes to eat.

Not that I've abandoned any effort, I'm still keen to learn and practice, and some things I've learned have sunk in. But it's a hard row to hoe.

upon its obtainment the conventional truth of phenomena (such as of phenomena-dependent pains and pleasures together the our apprehension of selfhood) will also persist in this state of ultimate being - for the two truths were roughly stated to be one and the same. Yet, as expressed, I can currently only presume this to be wrong, for it is contrary to what Nirvana without remainder is described to be — javra

In the early Buddhist texts, speculation about 'what it must be like' is discouraged. In later Buddhist texts, like the Diamond Sutra, whether Nirvāṇa is something that can really be obtained is an open question.

As far as Advaita is concerned, my reading is limited mainly to the teachings of Ramana Maharishi. At the end of his life, he developed a tumor on his arm which turned out to be the cause of death. When asked if it was painful - it certainly looked pretty gruesome, according to the accounts of those around him - he would reply 'I feel the pain, but it doesn't hurt'.

From a philosophical perspective, which is inevitably quite shallow, his sense of the Self is such that the pain experienced on a physical level no longer seems all-pervading, as it would do to most of us who completely identify with the physical. I suppose you could say that pain is then experienced in a much broader context, as his sense of the Self transcends the physical. But that doesn't mean he's simply numb or unfeeling.

(In all this I'm only reflecting what I've read, I don't claim to have any special insight or realisation.)

Incidentally I read an Aeon essay some time back from a philosopher who is interested in dialetheism, Graham Priest, on Buddhist logical paradoxes, you can find it here https://aeon.co/essays/the-logic-of-buddhist-philosophy-goes-beyond-simple-truth . (I couldn't really understand it but others might find it helpful.)

Nāgārjuna's philosophy posits that the ultimate truth is not a separate, higher realm of reality but is instead the real nature of the conventional world when it is seen without the distortions of conceptual thought. In other words, ultimate reality is not an alternative to conventional reality; it is the insight into the emptiness (śūnyatā) of inherent existence in all phenomena. This realization leads to the understanding that what we consider to be fixed and separate entities are actually interdependent and devoid of intrinsic nature (svabhava).

Thus, the distinction between conventional and ultimate truths is a skillful means (upāya) to guide beings towards enlightenment. For unenlightened beings, the world appears in dualities and distinctions. For those who have realized enlightenment, however, these dualities are seen as expressions of a single, indistinguishable reality that is empty of inherent existence. The "two truths" are therefore not ultimately separate; they are two ways of perceiving the same reality, contingent upon one's level of insight.

Like I said (somewhat tongue-in-cheek) 'burn after reading' ;-)

what I was fishing for here is any rational criticism of the presented necessity that non-dualism, this regarding the world as it’s known, entails a duality between a) a real (or ultimately real) and non-dual fundamental essence and b) a contingent fundamental essence of phenomena (etc.) which brings about duality in the world and which is ultimately illusory in full. — javra

I haven't read Loy's book in full, either, but I would be surprised if he doesn't cover this.

But the epistemology of non-dualism is a very subtle and difficult thing to understand. That's because at its core, it arises out of dhyana, meditative stillness, which is the practical negation or transcendence of self-and-other. The early Buddhist texts constantly repeat a fundamental theme, which is that of dependent origination, the causal chain which leads to suffering, and the seeing through of it by insight. But the insight is always inseperable from praxis - the three legs of the tripod are sila, prajna, samadhi, meaning right action, right wisdom, and meditative absorbtion. But that is not presented or understood as being something easy to attain or understand, it requires constant application and deep commitment. So it's a form of practice.

Actually if you read Pierre Hadot, ancient philosophy in the West was also like this:

For Hadot...the means for the philosophical student to achieve the “complete reversal of our usual ways of looking at things” epitomized by the Sage were a series of spiritual exercises. These exercises encompassed all of those practices still associated with philosophical teaching and study: reading, listening, dialogue, inquiry, and research. However, they also included practices deliberately aimed at addressing the student’s larger way of life, and demanding daily or continuous repetition: practices of attention (prosoche), meditations (meletai), memorizations of dogmata, self-mastery (enkrateia), the therapy of the passions, the remembrance of good things, the accomplishment of duties, and the cultivation of indifference towards indifferent things. Hadot acknowledges his use of the term “spiritual exercises” may create anxieties, by associating philosophical practices more closely with religious devotion than typically done. Hadot’s use of the adjective “spiritual” (or sometimes “existential”) indeed aims to capture how these practices, like devotional practices in the religious traditions, are aimed at generating and reactivating a constant way of living and perceiving in prokopta (=preceptors, students), despite the distractions, temptations, and difficulties of life. — IEP

Secondly, the relationship between reality and illusion is also very subtle. In the Madhyamaka of Nāgārjuna, there is 'the doctrine of two truths', the domain of conventional reality, Saṃvṛtisatya, in which all sentient beings are situated, but then the domain of ultimate reality, Paramārthasatya which is the higher truth perceived by the Buddhas. But part of this doctrine is that (1) these are not ultimately two and also that (2) the principle of emptiness (śūnyatā) is also empty.

There's a saying in both Advaita and Buddhism, that wisdom-teachings are like the stick you use to stoke the fire. Once the fire is burning, then the stick can be thrown into it. Like, 'burn after reading'. All of that goes back to the Buddha's 'parable of the raft', which compares the teaching to a raft, used to cross the river of suffering, but not to be clung to. See the Zen calligraphy, Hui Neng tearing up the Sutras:



I think the way to see all this, is that awakening is something like a deep gestalt-shift, a complete shift or reversal of perspective, so that from the 'conventional' perspective, there are 'two truths', conventional and ultimate, but from the 'higher' perspective, the distinction vanishes. The world appears as multiplicity to the conventional mind, but is seen as being ultimately one in the unitive consciousness. Of course that is a very hard thing to grasp also, as the Buddha says to one of his philosophical interlocutors, 'Deep, Vaccha, is this dharma, hard to see, hard to realize, tranquil, refined, beyond the scope of conjecture, subtle, to-be-experienced by the wise.'

Ain’t that the truth

Meanwhile Trump is holding a press conference on Election Integrity on Friday, some he’s said to ‘care deeply about’ :vomit:

amen :pray:

I recommend Pierre Hadot's "Philosophy as a Way of Life" — Fooloso4

From which:

Philosophy in antiquity was an exercise practiced in each instant. It invites us to concentrate on each instant of life, to become aware of the infinite value of each present moment, once we have replaced it with the perspective of the cosmos. The exercise of wisdom entails a cosmic dimension. Whereas the average person has lost touched with the world, and does not see the world qua world, but rather treats the world as a means of satisfying his desires, the sage never ceases to have the whole constantly present to mind. He thinks and acts within a cosmic perspective. He has the feeling of belonging to a whole which goes beyond the limits of his individuality. In antiquity, this cosmic consciousness was situated in a different perspective from that of scientific knowledge of the universe... . Scientific knowledge was objective and mathematical, whereas cosmic consciousness was the result of spiritual exercise. — Pierre Hadot, PWL, pa 273

(Incidentally just prior to this passage, Hadot says Descartes and Spinoza remained faithful to philosophy as 'the practice of wisdom'. Spinoza, in particular, despite being claimed as the harbinger of secular naturalism, was still within the current of Judaic mysticism, and his 'intellectual love of God' very much in keeping with Hadot's depiction of cosmic consciousness.)

Compare also Thomas Nagel:

Plato was clearly concerned not only with the state of his soul, but also with his relation to the universe at the deepest level. Plato’s metaphysics was not intended to produce merely a detached understanding of reality. His motivation in philosophy was in part to achieve a kind of understanding that would connect him (and therefore every human being) to the whole of reality – intelligibly and if possible satisfyingly. — Secular Philosophy and the Religious Temperament

there is no problem conceiving something immaterial that exists by itself unless you are a close-minded physicalist. — Lionino

What kind of 'something'? That's the rub. I'm sure the majority view is expressed by Janus here:

If the physical is naturally understood to have substantial or substantive existence, and it is upon that idea of substance that the notion of reality is founded, and the idea of a mental substance is untenable, then what justification would we have for saying that anything non-physical is real? — Janus

The notion is - mind is the product of the brain, which in turn is the product of evolutionary biology over many aeons of time. Rational sentient beings such as ourselves are therefore a very late arrival in the grand scheme, which is otherwise mindless. Isn't that what practically any sound person believes?

(FYI, this correlates with parts of something I'm currently working on.) — javra

You might find this a useful resource: Nonduality, David Loy, a .pdf copy of his book by that name, based on his PhD. You can find more about him on davidloy.org.

What is your claim? — Banno

Again - my claim is that due to the form that Cartesian dualism assumed, that there is a kind of widespread, implicit dualism of mind and body or spirit and matter that is endemic in culture. And that the untenability of the idea of a 'thinking substance' or 'thinking thing' has had huge influence of philosophy of mind ever since, it is one of the principal causes of the dominance of physicalism in mainstream philosohpy (remember your surveys in which only 1% of respondents hold to alternatives to physicalism?) Which is implicit in the question you asked.

You do understand that in your quote, Ryle is setting out his target, not defending a doctrine. — Banno

His target is, explicitly, Cartesian dualism of mind and body. That's the starting point of his book Concept of Mind. Ryle's solution to it is basically beaviourism - that categorisation of mind and body as two separate entities is a category mistake (which is the origination of that term), but then, the philosophy of mind that comes from that is essentially behaviourist.

Explaining how the ghost interacts with the machine is your problem. — Banno

Descartes' dualism is the origin of Ryle's 'ghost in the machine', surely. 'Analytic philosophy' is not a school of thought, but the English-language philosophers that I mentioned are operating within the overall paradigm which Nagel spells out.

There is a doctrine about the nature and place of the mind which is prevalent among theorists, to which most philosophers, psychologists and religious teachers subscribe with minor reservations. Although they admit certain theoretical difficulties in it, they tend to assume that these can be overcome without serious modifications being made to the architecture of the theory.... [The doctrine states that] with the doubtful exceptions of the mentally-incompetent and infants-in-arms, every human being has both a body and a mind.... The body and the mind are ordinarily harnessed together, but after the death of the body the mind may continue to exist and function. — Gilbert Ryle

Well, I gather you more or less agree with substance dualism, a notion that I cannot see as coherent. I decide to move my hand, the damn thing moves; I take the drugs, the pain goes away. I can't see how such facts can be made to fit Descartes without folly. — Banno

Consider this passage from Thomas Nagel "Mind and Cosmos":

The modern mind-body problem arose out of the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, as a direct result of the concept of objective physical reality that drove that revolution. Galileo and Descartes made the crucial conceptual division by proposing that physical science should provide a mathematically precise quantitative description of an external reality extended in space and time, a description limited to spatiotemporal primary qualities such as shape, size, and motion, and to laws governing the relations among them. Subjective appearances, on the other hand -- how this physical world appears to human perception -- were assigned to the mind, and the secondary qualities like color, sound, and smell were to be analyzed relationally, in terms of the power of physical things, acting on the senses, to produce those appearances in the minds of observers. It was essential to leave out or subtract subjective appearances and the human mind -- as well as human intentions and purposes -- from the physical world in order to permit this powerful but austere spatiotemporal conception of objective physical reality to develop. — Pp35-36

Notice the implicit division between the objective and measurable, and the subjective and internal. There's the origin of the problem, in the Cartesian 'bifurcation of nature'. There are ways of mending the split, but I feel you won't find them in your usual sources of Quine, Austin, Davidson, and so on, as they still operate within those basic parameters and assumptions (Although it might be noted that Nagel is also an analytic philosopher, although dissident from the mainstream.)

Those are the kinds of questions that Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia put to Descartes (here.) It seems Descartes didn't really have very good answers. But then, Descartes was a pioneer, he was attempting to explore a very difficult subject from a truly novel perspective. Even though Husserl critiques Descartes, he still recognised him as the founder of transcendental philosophy.

Perhaps "the randomness and information are essentially the same thing" simply means that you cannot compress something that is random or you will lose information (about the random sequence). At least that is the way I understand it. — ssu

You can't compress a random sequence of characters or a random collection of objects, you can only describe it, and that description will be 1:1. Whereas as soon as it is ordered, that order can be leveraged to create meta-data about the object.

I don't know if I agree with Verisatium's reasoning in this regard (that's the video that is referred to above which was the source for this thread) - chaos doesn't contain or convey information of any kind. It can't be compressed but how is that a criterion for 'information-bearing'? At 3:17 where he says that a completely compressed file is completely random - not sure about that, either. Otherwise, how could it be de-compressed, or intrepreted, at the receiving end? If it were totally random, then there'd be nothing to interpret. So I'm still not sold on the 'information=entropy' equation.

But I like that he recognises that quantum physics undermines LaPlace's daemon. Kudos for that.

Then there's "exist". Wikipedia tells us that "The word "existence" entered the English language in the late 14th century from old French and has its roots in the medieval Latin term ex(s)istere, which means to stand forth, to appear, and to arise." (Note that our use of the word has absolutely no basis in ancient Rome.) — Ludwig V

There's an article on the IEP, 17th Century Theories of Substance, which says:

In contrast to contemporary philosophers, most 17th century philosophers held that reality comes in degrees—that some things that exist are more or less real than other things that exist. At least part of what dictates a being’s reality, according to these philosophers, is the extent to which its existence is dependent on other things: the less dependent a thing is on other things for its existence, the more real it is.

I think the background to this 'degrees of reality' was the 'scala naturae', the great chain of being, which provided a vertical dimension, with matter at the lowest level and the Divine Intellect at the top (and transcendant to existence). It is virtually extinct in subsequent Western thought, although I believe references to it are still found in some of the modern Thomists, for example in Jacques Maritain's rather daunting book The Degrees of Knowledge.

Lionino is right, however that it arrived in English from Old French. — Ludwig V

Descartes' Principia Philosophia was published in Latin, in which I presume the word 'substantia' would have been used (although I'm open to correction).

As for the meaning of ousia in Greek, there's an entry in IEP on its use in Plato and Aristotle here. Joe Sachs makes the observation:

And so a word (i.e. 'substantia') designed by the anti-Aristotelian Augustine to mean a low and empty sort of being turns up in our translations of the word whose meaning Aristotle took to be the highest and fullest sense of being. Descartes, in his Meditations, uses the word substance only with his tongue in his cheek; Locke explicitly analyzes it as an empty notion of an I-don’t-know-what; and soon after the word is laughed out of the vocabulary of serious philosophic endeavor. It is no wonder that the Metaphysics ceased to have any influence on living thinking: its heart had been cut out of it by its friends.

(My personal heuristic is that classical metaphysics allows for a distinction between what exists and what is real which are generally assumed to be coterminous. I've had many lengthy and often vexed debates about this topic here over the years, centered around my claim that the term 'ontology' is concerned with 'the meaning of being', and not with 'the nature of what exists', which is the proper concern of the natural sciences. During the course of this debate, I was sent a reference to an apparently classic paper on this subject, The Greek Verb "To Be" and the Problem of Being, by Charles Kahn, which I feel actually rather supported my argument.)

Is it possible to be too preoccupied with defending Descartes to see Midgley's point? — Banno

I think Midgley makes a good point, and I generally enjoy reading her work, but I'm always interested in discussions of Descartes.

So his position is a bit more complicated than the simplified version that is usually considered in the literature. (And I do not know how to represent it more accurately.) — Ludwig V

Point taken, and an important distinction. Nevertheless the depiction of the 'thinking thing' is very much the residue of his philosophy in popular culture. And it should be added, the fact that he found it necessary to try and account for the interaction between mind and body through the pineal gland, is also indicative of the sense in which he treats the mind as something objectively existent.

Here is my reference for this derivation. If you have an alternative derivation, do tell.

You could, but I don’t think that’s what the op is interested in. (In fact on further reflection it’s pretty hard to work out what it is asking.)

Is there a philosophical perspective on language/meaning/truth/metaphysics that acknowledges this weak inter-definability and balance of dependence/independence of our core concepts? — substantivalism

No, I hadn't heard of him, although looked up his Wikipedia entry now you've mentioned him. But in some ways, what you're point to is the way dialectic was conceived in the classical tradition isn't it? You mention Heraclitus and Parmenides - wasn't Plato very much engaged in the dialectic between those two apparent contraries? All very deep and difficult questions.

No reason it can't do those things about itself. No reason it can't be the object of its own examination. — Patterner

There's a very good reason, which is that a considerable proportion of its activities are sub- and unconscious.

Frege refers to real numbers as 'primitive concepts' i.e. cannot be reduced to, or explained in terms of, another concept. I wonder if basic concepts in logic are similar, such as the law of the excluded middle. We call upon such principles to explain higher-level or contingent facts.

This pecularity indicates, by my lights, that ‘being’ is a primitive concept and, as such, is absolutely simple, unanalyzable, and (yet) still perfectly valid. — Bob Ross

I recall that Aristotle considers the different meanings of the verb 'to be' in the Metaphysics. From the SEP essay on same:

But ‘being’, as Aristotle tells us in Γ.2, is “said in many ways”. That is, the verb ‘to be’ (einai) has different senses, as do its cognates ‘being’ (on) and ‘entities’ (onta). So the universal science of being qua being appears to founder on an equivocation: how can there be a single science of being when the very term ‘being’ is ambiguous? .... — Aristotle's Metaphysics

Here you can see the beginnings of what was to become a long history of debate over substance metaphysics, and the meaning of being is central to it.

do these so-called, alleged, primitive concepts need to be either (1) capable of non-circular definition or (2) thrown out? — Bob Ross

Every philosophy, even everyday language, must include some primitive concepts or else it would collapse into relativism and circularity.

Are there pure and unanalyzable concepts? Put me in the affirmative/similar view column, re: the categories of transcendental philosophy. — Mww

Would you include the so-called 'primary intuitions' of time and space? (It might be their very 'primitiveness' that makes them so hard to explain!)

A couple of refs: Frege on Knowing the Third Realm, Tyler Burge

The Greek Verb 'To Be' and the Problem of Being, Charles Kahn

Thanks! Interesting, although I had to call on Google Translate as I'm not fluent in French

You obliged me to warn me of the passage from Saint Augustine, to which my "I think, therefore I am" [has] some connection; I read it today in the Library of this City, and I truly find that he uses it to prove the certainty of our being, and subsequently to show that there is some image in us of the Trinity, in what we are, we know that we are, and we love this being and this knowledge which is in us; instead I use it to make it known that this self, which thinks, is an immaterial substance*, and which has nothing corporeal; which are two very different things. And it is something which in itself is so simple and so natural to infer, that we are, from what we doubt, whether it could have fallen under the pen of anyone; but I am still very happy to have met with Saint Augustine, even if it was only to shut the mouths of the little minds who have tried to rethink this principle.

*As noted previously, I think 'immaterial subject' conveys the gist better than 'immaterial substance' or 'immaterial thing' which I feel is oxymoronic. This anomaly comes from the translation of the Greek 'ouisia' into the Latin 'substantia' and then the English 'substance'.

Many years ago I read the Teachings of Ramana Maharishi, who was an Advaita sage (died 1960). Throughout his teachings, he makes a connection between the Self (ātman) of Vedanta and the 'I AM THAT I AM' of the Bible. According to Vedanta, this 'I AM' is the 'cosmic self', from which individual beings become alienated through attachment to the physical senses and body. (His website is here.)

:clap: :party:

My take is that Descartes, qua 'the first modern', introduces the individual as the arbiter of reality. It's not co-incidental that he is categorised with Newton and Galileo as one of the harbingers of modernity. It's the introduction of our modern subject-object consciousness and 'the reign of quantity' which is fundamental to liberal individualism.

I've been meaning to look at Parfit but, you know, too many books.... :fear: