If all you're saying is that what we experience is mediated by our senses, our bodies and brains, then you are saying nothing controversial. — Janus

You alternate between saying that it's obvious, and that it's absurd. Wrong on both counts, but then I've noticed your inveterate tendency to regard your own educational limits as binding on the rest of the community here.

Don't be like Wayfarer who acts childish when he realizes he's beat. — Philosophim

:rofl: You don't understand the criticism that are made of your posts, and then think that your not understanding them is a counter-argument. You don't understand what it is you don't understand even if it's explained to you, as a number of other people have said to you in this thread. That's why I gave up trying. Nothing to do with being 'beat'.

We should be aware that there are many who won't recognize the 'hard problem of consciousness' or who will say it's a pseudo-problem or philosophical sophistry with no real meaning. I'm not one of them.

The 'hard problem of consciousness' is connected to the blind spot of science. This is the failure to acknowledge the primacy of subjective experience—the fact that all observation and knowledge occur from a conscious point of view, which science treats as external or irrelevant, despite the obvious fact that science is conducted by subjects. This tendency grew out of the fact that early modern science divided the world up into primary attributes (measurable in mathematical terms) and secondary attributes (taste, color, smell etc), and also into mind (res cogitans) and matter (res extensa.)

I've also noticed a pattern - that when I bring this topic up, especially in relation to panpsychism, you will not respond to those posts, even if they're addressed to you. I think this is because you don't understand the point, but I suspect it is also because you don't want to know. Perhaps you can help me out here.

Noodling around on the Internet, I happened upon a book by one Robert Ornstein, who's earlier book on the evolutionary roots of consciousness I bought in the 1990's. (He died in 2018). On Amazon, I find his last book (published posthumously) is called God 4.0:

The book explores how our "everyday" mind works as a device for selecting just a few parts of the outside reality that are important for our survival. We don't experience the world as it is, but as a virtual reality – a small, limited system that evolved to keep us safe and ensure our survival. This system, though essential for getting us safely across a busy street, is insufficient for understanding and solving the challenges of the modern world. But we are also endowed with a quiescent "second network" of cognition that, when activated, can dissolve or break through the barriers of ordinary consciousness. We all experience this activation to some degree, when we suddenly see a solution to a problem or have an intuitive or creative insight – when we connect to a larger whole beyond the self. By combining ancient teachings with modern science, we have a new psychology of spiritual experience – the knowledge to explore how this second network can be developed and stabilized. ...they emphasize the need to reflect on and explicate, both individually and collectively, the functional value of virtues such as generosity, humility and gratitude, and of service. These attitudes and activities shift brain function away from the self and toward an expanded consciousness – an experience of the world's greater interconnectedness and unity and an understanding of one's place in it. — God 4.0 - in the Nature of Higher Consciousness and the Experience called God, Robert Ornstein, Sally M. Ornstein

Which seems thoroughly compatible with the ideas expressed by the O.P.

Let's recall what this thread is about. Scientific instruments vastly expand the sensory capabilities of humans, but the data they generate are still essentially empirical in nature. The OP is a more about insight into the way the brain or mind interprets experience. It's about the meaning of empirical experience, not its veridicality.

My claim in the OP is that cognitive science validates at least some important aspects of idealist philosophy - that what we perceive as the external world is, in an important sense, mind-dependent, because what we know of it is constantly being assimilated and interpreted by the mind.

And that therefore empiricist philosophy errs when it seeks a so-called 'mind-independent object', as sense objects are, by their very nature, only detectable by the senses (or instruments) and cannot be mind-independent in that way.

Being aware of the way ‘mind constructs world’ is more a matter of self-knowledge and self-awareness - something with which phenomenology and Eastern philosophy (and indeed Greek philosophy) is much more familiar with than science or much of modern philosophy.

The whole thread may have been given too much credit. It's fairly hard to salvage a thread that begins that way. — Leontiskos

You gotta know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em.

'Duty' is a rather odd word to use.

The graphics provided by @punos in the above post are instructive. They illustrate the massive proportion of the forebrain in h.sapiens, and primates generally, in relation to other species. The human brain and human anatomy, generally, evolved very rapidly, in geological and evolutionary terms (compared with evolutionary changes in other lineages).

In any case, with h.sapiens, the capacity for language, abstract thought, story-telling, art, tool-making, has arrived. Plainly that is linked to the development of the forebrain, but in my view, the evolutionary account doesn't capture the full significance of that.

There's a lot of reading to do in that subject - evolutionary psychology, linguistics, anthropology, paleontology to mention a few subjects. But again, the philosophical question of whether mind and brain are the same may not be answered even by all of that.

Very briefly, I think the development of the kind of self-awareness that h.sapiens has, means we're no longer just biologically determined, in the way that other creatures are. We can enquire into nature, our own and generally, in a way that animals cannot. We still bleed, breed, sweat, and die, but we are able to awaken to intellectual and spiritual capacites beyond the biological. That's what I think the ancient intuition of 'soul' is pointing to.

Spontaneously!

Some people are unaware of physicalism for the same reason fish are unaware of water :lol:

One has to examine
what this means in practice in the way a culture conducts itself, treats expressions of otherness i. one’s family and community, avoids war and other violent acts which define the boundaries of ‘interconnectedness’. — Joshs

Indeed. And on the whole, with some notable exceptions, Buddhism has been a civilizing influence through the East.

By way of contrast this is where the Buddhist model is relevant. In the early texts, the Buddha emphatically denies that there is a ‘what’ that survives death. This is laid out clearly in two key discourses: the Sāti the Fisherman’s Son sutta and the discourse to Ariṭṭha.

In the first, Sāti claims that consciousness is the “what” that transmigrates. The Buddha responds by firmly rejecting this as a wrong—and even pernicious—view. It is not simply mistaken, but actively obstructive to insight. After attempts to correct him fail, the Buddha dismisses Sāti as unable to grasp the teaching, and then clarifies with the monks the correct understanding: that consciousness does not persist as a self-same entity, but arises dependent on conditions, ceasing when those conditions cease.

In the second dialogue, when Rādha asks the Buddha what the constituents of a ‘being’ are, the Buddha replies:

“Any desire, passion, delight, or craving for form, Rādha: when one is caught up (satta) there, tied up (visatta) there, one is said to be 'a being.'”

So again, the picture is not of an ego, soul, or substance that is born, dies, or survives. It is of a process: craving and clinging give rise to the experience of continuity, both within this life and beyond. What “continues” is not a person but an impersonal dynamic of becoming.

Interestingly, this resonates with Schopenhauer’s conception of the will as the blind striving underlying phenomenal existence. But the Buddha goes further in prescribing a path by which this process can be understood and released (which is the entire thrust of his teaching.)

In later Buddhist traditions—particularly Tibetan—the Bardo Thödol offers detailed accounts of what is said to occur in the intermediate states after death. These are rich with imagery and vivid experiences, including visions of light, peaceful and wrathful beings, and karmically influenced encounters. But the subject undergoing these experiences is not taken to be an enduring self, but rather a locus of karmic momentum—an apparent subjectivity without essence ('citta-santāna'). The continuity is real, but not personal in the conventional sense. This provides a philosophical model that avoids both materialist reductionism and dualism. And it arguably offers a conceptual framework within which to interpret NDEs—especially those that are less reassuring and more morally charged, like the account by Sam Bercholz in A Guided Tour of Hell.

it doesn't affect the strength of my argument. — Sam26

Indeed. A point to consider.

Brook Ziporyn. And it's not just nostalgia. Indra's Net is hardly a primitive ontology.

For NDEs, with 200-300 million reports…. — Sam26

I read your rationale for this the other day but it easily seems like overreach. It is inferred that there would be that number of reports, on the basis of scaling up the numbers of reports from a sample population, but if many of these experiences are not formally written down or described then it’s purely conjectural. And it’s a large number! I don’t think it would hurt your case to omit references to such large speculative numbers, while still pressing the point that they are frequently reported and may be far more common than we're inclined to believe.

When astronomers observe distant galaxies, when biologists examine cellular structures, and when physicists read instrument displays, all involve sensory experience. The suggestion that our senses are "the worst data-taking devices" would collapse the empirical foundation of science itself. — Sam26

But it’s not directly comparable. Third-person validation is obviously missing from near-death experiences. The difference is not merely in kind of object observed but in what sort of epistemic access is possible. Empirical science rests on public reproducibility, while SME research often relies on private, unrepeatable events. True, there is the ‘replication crisis’ in science, which is probably of special relevance in your subject matter, as it is much more common in the social than the physical sciences. But even so, the experiences reported by these subjects can only be validated first-hand by actually having them. Otherwise they remain anecdotal.

Subjective vs. Objective Elements

NDE testimony includes objective elements (verifiable details like surgical procedures) and subjective elements (e.g., feelings of love, encounters with deceased relatives). Corroborated objective elements, such as a child's verified ER observations, lend credibility to subjective reports, suggesting genuine experiences. Cultural variations affect interpretation (e.g., light as Jesus or ancestors), but core phenomena remain consistent, indicating universal features of consciousness. — Sam26

Fair distinction between the subjective and objective elements of NDEs, and I agree that verifiable observations—such as accurate descriptions of surgical instruments or events during clinical death—are especially significant. They do suggest that something more than imagination is at work, and lend weight to the credibility of the overall report, although it’s important to stay mindful of the epistemic difference between first-person and third-person validation. While veridical cases strengthen the evidential basis of NDE studies, many of the other reported elements—particularly those involving feelings of peace, tunnels of light, or meetings with deceased persons—remain inherently subjective. This isn’t a criticism, but a caution about evidential weight.

Cultural frameworks may shape the interpretation of NDEs —whether the “being of light” is perceived as Jesus or an ancestor—and while that may point to a universal phenomenological core, it could also reflect how deeply interpretive structures are embedded in the unconscious. That cultural dimension was also encountered by Ian Stevenson in his research of past-life memories, where children in cultures like India were far more likely to be believed than those reporting such memories in Western cultures. ('In the West', he once said, 'people ask "why would you research that? Everyone knows it's a myth". In the East, the reaction was more like "why would you research that? Everyone knows it happens all the time.")

Open questions persist, such as the timing of experiences or the mechanisms of survival, but these do not negate the robust evidence for consciousness persistence. — Sam26

Your argument highlights what I think is a central and underappreciated point: that materialist objections to NDEs and (and related phenomena such as past-life recall) often rest on explanatory gaps of their own, especially when faced with rigorously investigated cases of veridical perception. But I think the real challenge lies not just in identifying the limits of materialism, but in what the alternative is. Your metaphor of “survival” still implies a kind of thing that persists, and a mechanism by which it does so—concepts which themselves are grounded in the very materialist kind of ontology that you're seeking to question.

If these phenomena point to anything, perhaps it's that we need to rethink the ontological categories themselves—maybe life and mind are not simply functions of biology, but expressions of a deeper order that isn’t bounded by physical birth and death. That doesn’t give us a ready-made metaphysical framework, but it may point to the need for one. I think there are hints of this emerging all over the place at this point in history, but it's obviously a very deep subject. So while I agree that NDEs may well 'transcend current theoretical frameworks', what the emerging paradigm might be is still, as you say, an open question.

One thing to bear in mind is that philosophical disputes may involve disagreements about what the participants think is real - and that can’t help but generate heat at times. (‘How on earth can he honestly believe that?!?’) One habit I’ve adopted is to say that views I think are wrong are incorrect - rather than some more inflammatory term, which I was often tempted to use in the past. But disagreements are disagreements, and there’s no getting around that.

I've always found your posts to be a model of courtesy and have no idea why you think you might be 'thrown out' for saying so. I completely agree with the importance of manners (and wish my grandsons had more of them ;-) ) I think the more delicate point is, how to disagree with others whilst remaining civil. That is especially important in philosophy and in navigating online discussions. My experience is, I have plenty of disagreements, some of them quite heated, but I try and refrain from inflammatory language and bomb-throwing. But it's especially difficult in this polarised time, where standards of civility are under constant assault by people in high places (some more than others, if you catch my drift.)

Anyway - overall in total agreement, and the model of 'paideia' is certainly one that we should all aspire to.

Thanks! I found the essay itself very insightful, I think he makes a really important point about the distinctin between human abilities and artificial simulation.

without a human body for internal reference, the simulation may be lacking substance. A metal frame robot may come closer to emulating humanity, but it's the frailties of flesh that human social groups have in common — Gnomon

:100: I elaborate on some of these themes in Part II

Part Two

This brings us to the deeper and more elusive question: what does it mean to reason? The word is often invoked — as if self-evident — in contrast with feeling, instinct, or mere calculation. Yet its real meaning resists easy definition. Reason is not simply deduction or inference. As the discussion so far suggests, it involves a generative capacity: the ability to discern, initiate, and understand meaning. The following references are an attempt to explore the question of the grounding of reason, in something other than formal logic or scientific rationalism. The basic premise here is that the question must have some real concern - it needs to grapple with the 'why' of existence itself, not simply operational methods for solving specific problems.

A Phenomenological Perspective

This is the deeper territory Edmund Husserl, founder of phenomenology, explored in The Crisis of the European Sciences, his last work, published after his death in1938. He sees the ideal of reason not merely as a formal tool of logic or pragmatic utility, but as the defining spiritual project of European humanity. He calls this project an entelechy — a striving toward the full realization of humanity’s rational essence. In this view, reason is transcendental — because it seeks the foundations of knowledge, meaning, and value as such. It is this inner vocation — the dream of a life grounded in truth and guided by insight — that Husserl sees as both the promise but also as the crisis of Western civilization: promise, because the rational ideal still lives as a guiding horizon; crisis, because modern science, in reducing reason to an instrumental or objectivist pursuit, has severed it from its original philosophical and ethical grounding.

The Instrumentalisation of ReasonThe idea of the instrumentalisation of reason was further developed by the mid-twentieth century Frankfurt School. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer described the instrumentalisation of reason as the idea of reason as a tool to achieve specific goals or ends, focusing on efficiency and effectiveness in means-ends relationships. It is a form of rationality that prioritizes the selection of optimal means to reach a pre-defined objective, without necessarily questioning the value or morality of that objective itself, morality being left to individual judgement or social consensus.  


Instrumental reason focuses on optimizing the relationship between actions and outcomes, seeking to maximize the achievement of a specific goal, generally disregarding the subjective values and moral considerations that might normally be associated with the ends being pursued. According to them, instrumental reason has become a dominant mode of thinking in modern societies, particularly within technocratic and capitalist economies.

In The Eclipse of Reason, Horkheimer contrasts two conceptions of reason: objective reason, as found in the Ancient Greek texts, grounded in universal values and aiming toward truth and ethical order; and today’s instrumental reason, which reduces reason to a tool for efficiency, calculation, and control. Horkheimer argues that modernity has seen the eclipse of reason, as rationality becomes increasingly subordinate to technical utility and subjective interest, severed from questions of meaning, purpose, or justice. This shift, he warns, impoverishes both philosophy and society, leading to a form of reason that can no longer critically assess ends—only optimize means.

Tillich’s Ultimate Concern

For humans, even ordinary language use takes place within a larger horizon. As Paul Tillich observed, we are defined not simply by our ability to speak or act, but by the awareness of an ultimate concern — something that gives weight and direction to all our expressions, whether we are conscious of it or not. This concern is not merely psychological; it is existential. It forms the background against which reasoning, judgment, and meaning become possible at all.

“Man, like every living being, is concerned about many things... But man, in contrast to other living beings, has spiritual concerns — cognitive, aesthetic, social, political. They are expressed in every human endeavor, from language and tools to philosophy and religion. Among these concerns is one which transcends all others: it is the concern about the ultimate.”
— Paul Tillich, The Dynamics of Faith (1957)

Without this grounding, reason risks becoming a kind of shell — formally coherent, apparently persuasive, but conveying nothing meaningful. Rationality divorced from meaning can lead to propositions that are syntactically correct yet semantically meaningless — the form of reason but without content.

Heidegger: Reason is Grounded by Care

If Tillich’s notion of ultimate concern frames reason in theological terms — as a responsiveness to what is of final or transcendent significance — Heidegger grounds the discussion in the facts of human existence. His account of Dasein (the being for whom Being is a question) begins not with faith or transcendence, but with facticity — the condition of being thrown into a world already structured by meanings, relationships, and obligations.

Even if Heidegger is not speaking in a theological register he, too, sees reason not merely as abstract inference but as embodied in concerned involvement with the world. For Heidegger, we do not stand apart from existence as detached spectators. We are always already in the world — in a situated, embodied, and temporally finite way. This “thrownness” (Geworfenheit) is not a flaw but essential to existence. And we need to understand, because something matters to us. Even logic, for Heidegger, is not neutral. It emerges from care — our directedness toward what matters. This is the dimension of reasoning that is absent from AI systems.

What AI Systems Cannot DoThe reason AI systems do not really reason, despite appearances, is, then, not a technical matter, so much as a philosophical one. It is because for those systems, nothing really matters. They generate outputs that simulate understanding, but these outputs are not bound by an inner sense of value or purpose. Their processes are indifferent to meaning in the human sense — to what it means to say something because it is true, or because it matters. They do not live in a world; they are not situated within an horizon of intelligibility or care. They do not seek understanding, nor are they transformed by what they express. In short, they lack intentionality — not merely in the technical sense, but in the fuller phenomenological sense: a directedness toward meaning.

This is why machines cannot truly reason, and why their use of language — however fluent — remains confined to imitation or simulation. Reason is not just a pattern of inference; it is an act of mind, shaped by actual concerns. The difference between human and machine intelligence is not merely one of scale or architecture — it is a difference in kind.

Finally, and importantly, this is not a criticism, but a clarification. AI systems are enormously useful and may well reshape culture and civilisation. But it's essential to understand what they are — and what they are not — if we are to avoid confusion, delusion, and self-deception in using them.

That’s a marvelous anecdote—almost a miniature case study in how meaning emerges through social practice. It nicely illustrates the distinction between the physical substrate of the pawn (as a wooden object subjected to forces) and its role within the normative structure of a game. The chipped pawn becomes a functional sign within a shared rule-governed space, which the young observer grasped in her own intuitive way – but without even knowing the rules!

It brings to mind Alicia Juarrero’s insistence that causation in complex systems can’t be understood solely in terms of efficient causes. (This is the subject of Part One of her book 'Why Action Theory Rests on a Mistake'.) Constraints—especially those arising from intentional and socially embedded contexts—play a formative role. They shape not only how things unfold, but also determine which patterns of behavior are recognized as meaningful actions within the system. The 'downward causation' you describe is not merely an influence from “macro” to “micro,” but a change in the frame of reference for explanation—from physical movement to meaningful action. It's a different kind of 'why'.

Another essay on the topic says

We commonly explain occurrences by saying one thing happened because of — due to the cause of — something else. But we can invoke very different sorts of causes in this way. For example, there is the because of physical law (The ball rolled down the hill because of gravity) and the because of reason (He laughed at me because I made a mistake). The former hinges upon the kind of necessity we commonly associate with physical causation; the latter has to do with what makes sense within a context of meaning. — Steve Talbott, What do Organisms Mean?

@Patterner I’d like to respond to your thoughtful posts on panpsychism, particularly the idea that consciousness is latent in all matter, and to clarify where I think this position runs into difficulty.

You quoted Brian Greene:

And within that mathematical description, affirmed by decades of data from particle colliders and powerful telescopes, there is nothing that even hints at the inner experiences those particles somehow generate. How can a collection of mindless, thoughtless, emotionless particles come together and yield inner sensations of color or sound, of elation or wonder, of confusion or surprise? — Patterner

This is the crux of the so-called "hard problem": how consciousness could possibly emerge from wholly non-conscious components. But note the implicit assumption — that a configuration of matter and forces gives rise to inner experience. What if this assumption is itself misguided?

This assumption reflects the standard materialist framework, in which physical entities and causal interactions are ontologically primary, and organic life and consciousness are emergent or derivative phenomena — i.e., products of physical complexity.

Panpsychism doesn’t abandon this framework but tries to accommodate consciousness within it by attributing some form of proto-consciousness to matter itself. This leads to the position Strawson articulates:

Naturalism states that everything that concretely exists is entirely natural; nothing supernatural or otherwise non-natural exists. Given that we know that conscious experience exists, we must as naturalists suppose that it’s wholly natural. And given that we’re specifically materialist or physicalist naturalists (as almost all naturalists are), we must take it that conscious experience is wholly material or physical. — Galen Strawson

But this, as Joshs points out in another thread, is a kind of conceptual sleight-of-hand:

Strawson is among many within the analytic community who have been unable to make the leap to a post-Nietzschean way of construing objectivity, causality and subjectivity. They don’t see that the problem is their reliance on an inadequate formulation of the physical, and an inadequate biological model. As a result, Strawson finds subjective experience to be so qualitatively alien with respect to his understanding of the non-experientially physical that he has no choice but to create a new category of the physical to make room for it. — Joshs

In other words, instead of questioning the conceptual framework that makes consciousness seem alien to materialism, Strawson redefines matter to include it — which looks suspiciously like moving the goalposts. That's the sleight-of-hand that panpychism tries to get away with.

The deeper problem, I would argue, is the assumption that only objective knowledge — that is, publicly measurable, intersubjectively verifiable data — qualifies as real knowledge. But consciousness is not something that shows up in that framework. It doesn’t appear as a quantity in equations or an observable in experiments. Its existence is given only in the first-person mode, and this makes it invisible to objectification (the rationale behind 'eliminative materialism').

Hence the various contortions in contemporary philosophy of mind — from eliminativism and behaviourism to panpsychism — all share a desire to naturalise consciousness, but without challenging the presuppositions of naturalism itself.

To make a broader point: maybe it’s not that consciousness needs to be shoehorned into a redefined "physical," but that our concept of the physical itself — inherited from early modern science — is too narrow to account for the kind of being that consciousness represents. And we're still labouring in the shadow of the cartesian division between mind and matter. If that's so, then rather than grafting mental properties onto matter, perhaps we should revisit the metaphysical assumptions that led us to this impasse in the first place.

But this kind of “revisiting” isn’t just a terminological matter. It calls for a deeper philosophical reorientation — a kind of conversion, a 'meta-noia'. It means stepping outside, or seeing through, the objectivist framework that assumes reality is fundamentally mind-independent, and instead recognising that our very notions of “reality,” “existence,” and “nature” are themselves shaped by our modes of access to them. Consciousness isn’t simply another puzzle to be inserted into a pre-existing picture of the world; its existence requires us to reconsider what it means to be at all.

Phenomenology has seen this from the outset, as made clear in this snippet:

In contrast to the outlook of naturalism, Husserl believed all knowledge, all science, all rationality depended on conscious acts, acts which cannot be properly understood from within the natural outlook at all. Consciousness should not be viewed naturalistically as part of the world at all, since consciousness is precisely the reason why there was a world there for us in the first place. For Husserl it is not that consciousness creates the world in any ontological sense—this would be a subjective idealism, itself a consequence of a certain naturalising tendency whereby consciousness is cause and the world its effect—but rather that the world is opened up, made meaningful, or disclosed through consciousness. The world is inconceivable apart from consciousness. — Routledge Introduction to Phenomenology, ed. Dermot Moran, p144

The question isn’t merely how does consciousness arise from matter? but what kind of understanding allows us to see consciousness as a problem in the first place? And from there, we might begin to entertain a radically different vision: not of matter with consciousness as a puzzling add-on, but of a world already shaped by and through the possibility of experience.

Not all souls are self-aware — punos

Agree. But consider again Aristotle's view of 'psuche' (psyche). There was the vegetative, animal, and rational soul, each with different levels of capability, and each possessing the powers of the lesser kind, plus additional powers - in humans, the capacity for rational thought and speech (hence humans, the 'rational animal'.)

This view is deprecated nowadays with decline of the belief in soul. But phenomenology of biology explores the sense in which even very primitive organisms are 'intentional' in some basic kind of way, which can be seen as an analogy for Aristotle's psuche. Phenomenological biology takes seriously the distinctive features of living beings—purpose, self-organization, and intentionality—and tries to show how these features can be understood in a way that respects both the insights of modern science and the wisdom of philosophical traditions, particularly Aristotle's.

However, again, agree that overall humans are uniquely self-aware in a way that other creatures are not.

Consider animals that do not recognize themselves in a mirror. — punos

Ah, but some do. See The Mirror Test

Seems a very good presentation. Have you encountered Matt O'Dowd and the channel PBS SpaceTime? He also has a large collection of lucid videos on physics and cosmology.

Later, bending of light around large masses, and gravitational redshift were verifications, but neither of these had been done at time of GR publishing. — noAxioms

Those were the subject of the measurements carried out by Sir Arthur Eddington, which provided observational validation of Einstein's theories. Specifically, the 1919 expedition aimed to measure the bending of starlight as it passed near the Sun. The position of stars observed during the eclipse was compared to their known positions when the Sun was not in the sky. Eddington's team found that the starlight was indeed deflected, and the amount of deflection was consistent with the predictions of general relativity, not the predictions of Newtonian gravity. This finding propelled Einstein to international fame and was a crucial piece of evidence in favor of his new theory. It also made Eddington a notable scientific hero - his books sold hugely in the period between the World Wars, and helped make Einstein's theories understood by the broader audience.

There was a famous and highly influential experiment conducted by Dr. Álvaro Pascual-Leone and his team at Harvard Medical School in the 1990s. This study is a cornerstone in the field of neuroplasticity and motor learning, and it beautifully illustrates the power of mental practice.

Here's a breakdown:

The Experiment:

The Task: A group of volunteers who had no prior piano experience were taught a simple, five-finger piano exercise.

The Groups:

Physical Practice Group: This group was instructed to physically practice the exercise on a piano for two hours a day, for five consecutive days.

Mental Practice Group: This group was given the exact same instructions, but with a critical difference: they were told to only imagine playing the piano exercise. They were not allowed to move their fingers or touch a piano. They simply "played" the piece in their mind.

The Measurements: Before and after each daily session, the researchers used a technique called transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to map the volunteers' brains. TMS allowed them to measure the size of the motor cortex region dedicated to controlling the specific finger movements required for the exercise.

The Remarkable Results:

Both groups showed a measurable and significant change in their neural configurations.

The brains of the students who physically practiced the piano piece showed a clear expansion of the motor cortex area responsible for controlling the fingers used in the exercise. This was the expected result—that physical skill acquisition leads to brain reorganization.

However, the most groundbreaking finding was that the brains of the students who only mentally practiced also showed a similar, and in some cases, almost identical expansion of the motor cortex.

The Conclusion and Implications:

This experiment provided compelling evidence that the brain's "plasticity" is not solely dependent on physical action. The mere act of mental rehearsal or motor imagery is enough to trigger the same kind of neural changes that occur with actual physical practice.

This has profound implications, not just for musicians and athletes who use mental rehearsal to improve their performance, but also for fields like rehabilitation. For example, the findings suggest that patients who are physically unable to perform an action (e.g., due to a stroke or injury) can still stimulate and rewire their brains by mentally rehearsing the movements they wish to regain.

The Pascual-Leone experiment is a perfect example of how "mind" (or in Buddhist terms, citta-santāna) can directly and tangibly "change the brain" (or its neuroplastic structure), providing a powerful scientific bridge between contemplative practice and neuroscience.

Ref: Pascual-Leone, A., Nguyet, A. D., Cohen, L. G., Brasil-Neto, J. P., Cammarota, A., & Hallett, M. (1995). Modulation of muscle responses evoked by transcranial magnetic stimulation during the acquisition of new fine motor skills. Journal of Neurophysiology, 74(3), 1037-1045. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/7500130/.

Also

Begley, Sharon. Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain: How a New Science Reveals Our Extraordinary Potential to Transform Ourselves. New York: Ballantine Books, 2007.

Well, my main point is that the soul - not that you have to believe in such a word! - is not something you have, like an appendix or a limb, but what you are. It's a question of identity. Someone (might have been you?) mentioned the Ship of Theseus puzzle. It's that kind of question - how something or someone can remain the same while also changing.

Here again the Buddhist view is instructive. Buddhists firmly reject the idea of the soul as something unchanging that travels from life to life. But there is a 'stream of consciousness' (citta-santāna), an ongoing flow of existence-experience. It is not a static entity but a dynamic series of arising and passing mental moments (dharmas).

Interestingly, there has been research on the connection between citta-santāna and neuroplasticity, showing that brain function can be measurably altered by persistent patterns of attentional activity. See Exploring Meditation's Role in Neuroplasticity.

Over a period of seven to eight years, almost all the cells in your body have been replaced, — punos

I thought your depiction had merit. I'll also add that it is now thought that neurons are actually generated in specific regions of the adult brain throughout life, and also that new neural connections and pathways are being created and destroyed regularly through the process of neuroplasticity.

Jaurrero’s Dynamics in Action begins with Aristotle.

That’s well taken, and I appreciate the elaboration. What I was aiming to highlight—perhaps somewhat obliquely—was a structural contrast between classical physics and the perspectives emerging in complexity science. Classical physics, as Nancy Cartwright says, tends to abstract away context by focusing on isolated, idealized systems—leading to the formal time-reversibility of its laws, which abstracts from the temporally asymmetric character of actual processes. But in non-equilibrium thermodynamics and the study of complex systems, contextual factors are not just boundary conditions; they are essential to the system’s dynamics. I’m studying that through Alicia Juarrero.

You are being far from clear. But grass is considerably more complicated than are stars, although admittedly there would be no grass if there had not been stars. But more is involved and required than physics to understand grass, otherwise biologists would only have to study physics.

What does ‘plays by physics’ mean?

even within physics, especially when the thermodynamics of non-equilibrium processes is involved, many phenomena are strongly emergent in the sense that they aren't intelligible merely in light of, or deducible from, the laws that govern their smaller components. — Pierre-Normand

Would you say they need to take context into account in a way that classical physics did not?

‘Thought operates according to different rules than matter, but that shouldn’t cause us to conclude that the world is anything other than physical.’

I have seen no indication that this is a false distinction besides you just insisting that it is — Philosophim

You’re equating sameness with numerical identity—i.e., “the same thing” must mean one and the same physical object. But this confuses the distinction between numerical identity and formal identity.

Two tokens of the same word, say “cat” typed twice, aren’t the same instance, but they are instances of the same word. Likewise, two trees aren’t the same specific tree but they share the same form. That’s what it means for a concept like “tree” to be meaningful in the first place—it refers not to a particular, but to a universal type, represented by many particulars.

So it's nonsense to say that different versions of the same song are not the same song. They're numerically different instances of the same idea - which is the point!

I wrote an entire paper on knowledge and identity here if you're interested. — Philosophim

Your 'papers' contain no references to any other philosophers or philosophies - yet you seem to believe that they should be regarded as authoritative sources for any reader. But you don’t get to define basic philosophical terms in the way that suits your purposes.

Done talking to you.

An excerpt from an essay on Medium. These paragraphs briefly discuss the transition from the participatory knowing of Aquinas' Aristotelianism, to the sense of otherness or separateness that characterised early modern science.

The earlier philosophy of St Thomas Aquinas, building on Aristotle, maintained that true knowledge arises from a real union between knower and known. As Aristotle put it, “the soul (psuchē) is, in a way, all things,” meaning that the intellect becomes what it knows by receiving the form of the known object. Aquinas elaborated this with the principle that “the thing known is in the knower according to the mode of the knower.” In this view, to know something is not simply to construct a mental representation of it, but to participate in its form — to take into oneself, immaterially, the essence of what the thing is. (Here one may discern an echo of that inward unity — a kind of at-one-ness between subject and object — that contemplative traditions across cultures have also sought, not through discursive thought but through direct insight.) Such noetic insight, unlike sensory knowledge, disengages the form of the particular from its individuating material conditions, allowing the intellect to apprehend it in its universality. This process — abstraction— is not merely a mental filtering but a form of participatory knowing: the intellect is conformed to the particular, and that conformity gives rise to true insight. Thus, knowledge is not an external mapping of the world but an assimilation, a union that bridges the gap between subject and object through shared intelligibility.

By contrast, the word objective, in its modern philosophical usage — “not dependent on the mind for existence” — entered the English lexicon only in the early 17th century, during the formative period of modern science, marked by the shift away from the philosophy of the medievals. This marks a profound shift in the way existence itself was understood. As noted, for medieval and pre-modern philosophy, the real is the intelligible, and to know what is real is to participate in a cosmos imbued with meaning, value, and purpose. But in the new, scientific outlook, to be real increasingly meant to be mind-independent — and knowledge of it was understood to be describable in purely quantitative, mechanical terms, independently of any observer. The implicit result is that reality–as–such is something we are apart from, outside of, separate to. — Idealism in Context

(See attached for further elaboration.)

You're going to have to explain to me how the physical variations of the song being played at different locations resolve to 100% equality and not simularity. Without explaining that, your point is simply false. — Philosophim

I don't need to respond to a false distinction. Two instances of the same song are of the same song. If you put out a version of a Beetles song that you created in GarageBand, you would be sued for infringing copyright.

This is the question of nature of identity that has occupied philosophers for centuries. But you won't find it in neuroscience, as neuroscience doesn't need to consider these kinds of questions.

I am by pointing to the brain, which is matter and energy, being the source. Can you demonstrate a counter that allows meaning to exist apart from a brain? — Philosophim

Your response assumes the old identity theory—that “mind is what the brain does”—but that view has run into serious problems. To say that meaning is reducible to brain activity is to confuse the physical substrate that enables cognition with the semantic content of thought. That's a category mistake. Neural activity may correlate with thought, but it isn't identical to meaning. Meaning belongs to the realm of intentionality—aboutness—which isn’t captured by physical properties like mass or charge or ion transmission. Even to say that the physical state and the meaning are 'the same' is to rely on a non-physical concept, as such 'sameness' is an intellectual judgement, not a physical fact (a point recognised in Plato's dialogues).

Consider: “The cat is on the mat” can be expressed in English, French, Morse code, or binary. The physical forms are completely different, but the meaning is the same. So clearly, the meaning isn't reducible to any particular physical configuration. It’s multiply realizable—something that’s deeply problematic for strict identity theory.

And Deacon’s point stands: meaning isn’t a physical property, yet it makes a difference. That’s the real issue, and why so many philosophers have moved away from identity theories altogether. Neural correlates are not the same as semantic content—and neuroscience doesn’t claim otherwise. That leap—from correlation to identity—is your philosophical presumption, not an empirical fact. (That's from his book, Incomplete Nature, which attempts to provide an account of how mind emerged from matter, but it's nothing like your form of neural reductionism.)

A perfect translation is almost impossible — Philosophim

Agree for poetry or prose texts, in some ways, which rely on allusion, cultural context, and so on. But a recipe or a specification, for example, has to be consistent across different languages and media. In such cases, the information being conveyed is clearly separable from its physical form.

Tales like Aesop's Fables have been told in hundreds of languages over centuries. Surely, the details vary, a donkey in one version might be a mule in another, but they're still recognizably the same stories. Again, questions of identity - what makes a story unique and particular and recognizably the same story.

many words we use to point to real things are no more than a sign post. "This" is 'that'. What is that? Well 'that' is over there. Again, very useful for general sign pointing and broad ideas. A big part of philosophy is dissecting these generic words down and pariing them down to the core specifics that unify the multiple objects the generic word will lump together. — Philosophim

You're right that terms like “intention,” “purpose,” or “mind” are general. But that’s because they refer to universals, not particulars. And universals aren’t vague by nature—they’re abstract because they apply across many instances. That’s their function. Saying “tree” doesn’t point to one tree, but to a kind of thing; just as “intention” doesn’t refer to a lump of matter, but to a particular structure of thought.

You seem to assume that unless a word can be pared down to a physical or operational definition, it lacks explanatory value. But that’s a philosophical assumption—specifically, a nominalist one: the idea that only particulars are real and general terms are just verbal conveniences. That view has a long and controversial history, and it’s far from the only option.

Much of philosophy—going back to its roots —was precisely concerned with the reality of universals: forms, essences, and structures that are intelligible rather than physical. These are not “emotional indicators,” but necessary for any coherent account of meaning, logic, mathematics, and mind. And many of the hardest problems in contemporary philosophy of mind arise precisely because modern thought has largely abandoned this ontology.

So yes, we should clarify our terms—but not by reducing them to what can be physically pointed at. That would be like trying to explain arithmetic by pointing at pebbles. It misses the level at which the concept operates.

So if a fairly competent physicist doesn't know what a couple of important physical properties are - properties that we know certainly exist because of the effects they have on things, effects that we have measured with incredible precision - then I'm not going to worry that we can't do more for a non-physical property. — Patterner

But Brian Greene's point is, the physical properties of an electron can be measured with precision. The alleged 'consciousness' that pan-psychism says is also a property of an electron can neither be measured nor described. Ask where or what it is, you get a shrug, 'it must be there'. Why? Because we're conscious, and we're physical. That's all it is, in a nutshell.

You create a definition of a song that follows a general pattern of tone and melody. A copyright, is literally the right to copy a work. A copy, like a twin, is a unique but similar emulation of something else. A 'song' is a category of different similar physical expressions of melody. — Philosophim

Not so. A melody can be reproduced in any number of media, but remain the same melody. Not 'similar', not 'like', but 'the same'. Likewise, a story, a recipe, a formula - it can be reproduced in any number of languages or media or formats, but still retain the same information or meaning. This shows that the information being embedded or represented, is separate from the physical form.

The meaning of a sentence is not the squiggles used to represent letters on a piece of paper or a screen. It is not the sounds these squiggles might prompt you to utter. It is not even the buzz of neuronal events that take place in your brain as you read them. What a sentence means, and what it refers to, lack the properties that something typically needs in order to make a difference in the world. The information conveyed by this sentence has no mass, no momentum, no electric charge, no solidity, and no clear extension in the space within you, around you, or anywhere. — Deacon, Terrence W. (2011). Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter (Function). Kindle Edition.

where's the clear definition of 'non-physical'? Is it just concepts? Definitions the human brain constructs? — Philosophim

The more general a term is, the harder to define. 'Hammer' and 'nail' are easy to define, they have a particular purpose and form. But very broad terms, like physical (or non-physical), will, intention, purpose - these are very hard terms to define. But acknowledging that, doesn't mean they're not real.

As I said, numbers, laws, conventions, principles - these are not physical but they're real nonetheless. Some say they're constructs of the brain, but I say they're perceived by reason. It follows that the rational mind is the faculty which can make distinctions and represent facts abstractly and conceptually. What the physical is, is what resists our will or requires energy to move or change. But among non-physical things are theories of the physical. These include mathematical constructs and hypotheses which are in themselves not physical.

But we know from neuroscience that this is all an action of the brain — Philosophim

But what if what we think if the 'physical world' is also an action of the brain? And that this is what makes it non-physical. Within that mind-constructed world, the physical is what resists our touch, what is physically tangible. But the ideas we have about that are not themselves physical. Have a look at this video presentation, Is Reality Real, which features neuro- and cognitive scientists talking about the way 'mind constructs reality'.

David Eagleman :
". . . . what we call normal perception does not really differ from hallucinations, except that the latter are not anchored by external input. . . . . . Instead of reality being passively recorded by the brain, it is actively constructed by it."

That's a big exception for rational thinkers. But does the notion that humans "actively construct" their worldview resonate at all with your concept of a Mind-Created World? — Gnomon

Of course! That's what the whole thread is about. (Maybe I should have called it 'Mind-Constructed World'). It's about how cognitive science validates philosophical idealism. The realisation that what we think is the external world, is constructed, ("synthesised" to use Kant's terminology) by the magnificent hominid forebrain. It's not an hallucination or an illusion, but it does not possess the inherent reality that we accord to it. It arises as a result of the interaction between mind and world.

One of the videos I refer to in the references is Is Reality Real? featuring neuroscientist Beau Lotto (who looks like a Californian surfer), Donald Hoffman (whom we've discussed) Alva Noe, and others. (Richard Dawkins makes a cameo, talking nervously about some 'plot against objectivity'.) I discussed this video with various contributors who couldn't see the point (i.e. 'What do you think it means...?' It means what the OP is about! :grimace: )

What does "bougie" mean? — Ludwig V

bourgeois

No, by fact it is not the same Wayfarer. Same being identical. Are a pair of twins the same? Similar, but not identical. Again, lumping things into a category is not the same as saying that all the things in that category are identical in reality. I can define sheep, but there is no one sheep that is identical to any other sheep. — Philosophim

If your philosophy cannot allow for the existence of a song, and copywright to it, then all I can say is that it has a serious deficiency.

there is no one sheep that is identical to any other sheep. — Philosophim

Regardless, it's different from everything except another sheep. It's not a camel, or a llama.

I'm merely asking for a clear definition of something non-physical — Philosophim

Melodies, as discussed. Numbers, laws, conventions, chess. There are thousands of these general kinds of things that are grasped by the mind (but not by 'neural activity').

No, the melody is not the same. It is similar, which is a very distinct difference. If I play the song in two different places at the same time, they are not the same. The physical composition of the instrument, the physical composition and actions of the player, and the very air and accoustics the song travels two are different. We summarize them as 'the same song' for convenience and summary in communication. But when we break it down and need to look at it in detail, our summary is not representative of some 'form' that exists outside of physical reality. — Philosophim

Incorrect. The melody IS the same. RIght now, my 10-month-old grand-child is playing with an electronic toy which is playing the song My World is Blue. It is the same melody. There are many arrangements of this song on Spotify and Apple Music which are the same melody but arranged with different instruments and vocalists. If I tried to put out a song with that melody, I would rightly be sued for copyright infringement. This happens frequently, and quite often the similarity is not even obvious.

I am very open to the existence of something non-physical. I am open to a God existing. A magical unicorn. I am not being sarcastic or intending to insult. I LOVE thinking of wonderful things. — Philosophim

The problem is, that is not at all what philosophy of mind believes by the immaterial or non-physical. The fact you can only conceive of alternatives to the physical in terms of magical unicorns indicates a misunderstanding of the subject.

Don't forget about property dualism. :grin: Matter has a non-physical property. — Patterner

Which nobody can specify.

Its when you start to think they (mental processes) exist apart from physical processes as some independent entities that you run into trouble. — Philosophim

They're still physical, but are designated 'mental'. How can that be distinguished from straight-ahead physicalism?

Are informational objects causally related in the same sense that physical objects are? If so, how. I not how so? — I like sushi

I think the thread is about 'mental causation' - can mind, if it is non-physical, cause physical effects? It seems obvious that it does, but it's a question of great controversy in academic philosophy, because of its commitment to metaphysical naturalism. And naturalism generally assumes a physicalist outlook. 'Non-reductive physicalism' is now popular - it posits that while everything is physical, not all physical phenomena can be reduced to or explained by basic physical laws and properties. It accepts that the world is fundamentally physical but denies that higher-level phenomena, like mental states or biological processes, are merely identical to or fully explained by the fundamental physical level. Donald Davidson who has been mentioned and about whom Banno knows a lot, is an example of non-reductive physicalism.

The alternative seems to be dualism - that mind is one kind of substance and matter another. That is the implication of Descartes' dualism, but it's not much accepted nowadays. Or idealism - that mind is somehow fundamental, which is hardly accepted by academic philosophy at all. But in any case it's a more complicated problem than it seems.

And Kant concluded that Ultimate Reality (noumenon) is fundamentally unknowable to humans. He seems to be implying that philosophers are just ordinary humans, who have made it their business to guess (speculate) about non-phenomenal noumena. — Gnomon

It’s more a question of intellectual humility - no matter how much we know there’s still a sense in which we lack insight into how things really are. Human knowledge is necessarily incomplete, in that sense.

I get quite confused about whether the aim is to end mental activity or give up one's attachment to it and in it. Both of these are hard to distinguish from ceasing to live. As to the epoche, it is clearly a cousin or something. You see, presented with this relationship, my first thought is to clarify the differences, and there are plenty of those.

You probably want to say "Shut up and meditate". — Ludwig V

I've given up on meditation. I attempted to practice it for many decades, having a disciplined routine of getting up an sitting in a customary 'zazen' position for anything up to 45 minutes (which was often excruciating, but then that's part of it.) About five years ago, the practice just fell away, and besides, I was never a disciplined yogi. My lifestyle remains pretty 'bougie' (a word I picked up from my adult son). I've tried to return to it a few times, but I can no longer assume the customary posture, and just sitting on a chair seems lacking. Due to books like 'The Miracle of Mindfulness', it's presented as a panacea, the end to all woes. But if you read the original text of mindfulness meditation, the Satipatthana Sutta, you will see that in context it is a very exacting discipline, conducted as part of a regimen of discipline and lifestyle (in which mindfulness, sati, is one leg of a tripod, the others being morality, sila, and wisdom, panna.)

All that said, something remains. My initial discovery of meditation involved a confluence of reading and practice which really did trigger some epiphanies. I used to see visiting teachers some of whom really did precipate awakening experiences. I was enrolled in comparative religion and studying what I understood as the enlightenment vision, and I really do believe that this is real. (Believing that is not necessarily the same as believing in God.) I have always had the sense of having, in some very distant past, an understanding which was the most important thing in life, the only thing that really needed to be understood. I came to understand this as an intimation of what Vedanta calls self-realisation although I make no claim to have realised a higher state. More like a glimpse or what Plato calls an anamnesis, an un-forgetting of something vital once known.

I can understand "emptiness" as meaning something like the idea that things and events do not, in some sense, have the significance or importance or weight that common sense attributes to them. That would enable one to abandon desire. (That would be a parallel to the stance that Western scientists and phenomenologists attempt.) But the difficulty with that is that it makes compassion hard to understand. — Ludwig V

Excellent insight and completely true. That is why Mayahana Buddhism stresses that emptiness (śūnyatā) and compassion (metta-karuna) are like the two wings of a bird - the bird needs both to take flight.

Scientific objectivity started, in Medieval thought, as a form of philosophical detachment, but it diverges from it, due to the emphasis on the 'primacy of the measurable', which we've already discussed. That is the subject of one of my Medium essays Objectivity and Detachment.