Do you hold a metaphysical commitment to the claim the phenomenal world is undergirded by an immaterially extant realm ultimately real albeit undetectable to the senses? — ucarr

If you read the OP Mind-Created World you will see that I deny that. From my perspective your criticisms are a product of the Cartesian tendency to objectify the mind as 'thinking substance', something which can be thought of as an existing object, a denizen of an 'extant realm undetectable to the senses'. I'm explicitly not saying that. My argument is that the mind is never an object of perception, it is 'the unknown knower' to draw on a phrase expressed in Indian philosophy. It is never appears to us as object, but as us, as the subject. And 'the hand can only grasp what is other to it', to quote the Upaniṣad again.

this essay (Nature of Number) takes for granted the division of mind (‘in here’) and world (‘out there’) as being, to all intents, separate realities. And that itself is a metaphysical construction! — ucarr

Nowhere do I say that - that is your interpretive paradigm. At the end Mind Created World, I quote the phenomenologist Dan Zahavi:

Ultimately, what we call “reality” is so deeply suffused with mind- and language-dependent structures that it is altogether impossible to make a neat distinction between those parts of our beliefs that reflect the world “in itself” and those parts of our beliefs that simply express “our conceptual contribution.” The very idea that our cognition should be nothing but a re-presentation of something mind-independent consequently has to be abandoned.

The distinction between self and world is a mental division, a division of the totality of experience into subject and object. Whereas we are not outside of, apart from, or other to reality. That is a key insight of non-dualism, albeit a difficult perspective to realise.

Try to think about anything without spatial and temporal extension and you’ll soon discover language cannot proceed meaningfully without them. — ucarr

Quite. Concepts without percepts are empty, percepts without concepts are blind, said Kant.

i think it is indisputable that science sees the world through mathematical hypotheses - the mathematization of physics and other sciences was the cardinal achievement of the scientific revolution. And yet there is still controversy as to why this can be so, and the related question of whether mathematics is discovered or invented. This is motivated by what has been described as 'the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences'. Mathematical logic has become internal and fundamental to the scientific apprehension of the world, through the process of conjecture, hypotheses, observation and experiment. But the nature of number itself is not a scientific, but a metaphysical, question. The controversy revolves precisely around the question of in what sense mathematics can be considered real as distinct from products of the mind. The realist view is that mathematical regularities are implicit in nature itself or at any rate are not simply useful fictions or constructions. The question then becomes, what kind of existence do they have? Mathematical platonists say that numbers are real independently of whether anyone perceives them or not, 'in the same sense', said Frege, 'just as a planet, even before anyone saw it, was in interaction with other planets'. But although they're independent of any particular mind, they can only be grasped by a mind. So they are 'intelligible objects', bearing in mind that 'object' is used in a metaphorical sense of 'the object of thought'. That is the sense in which there is an 'intelligible realm' that doesn't exist on the level of sensory perception (per Plato's analogy of the divided line) but is real in a noetic or intellectual sense.

My hypothesis claims that If spirituality is higher-order thermodynamics (teleodynamics), then matter/energy are two positions on one continuum. — ucarr

Einstein showed that matter and energy are interchangeable through his famous equation e=mc². It has nothing to do with spirituality per se.

As for 'existence dualism', the philosophy I'm trying to articulate is nearer to objective idealism.

If by "thing" one means an idea in the mind... — RussellA

The Eiffel Tower is indeed an idea, which has been realized (made real) in iron. Without the idea, no such thing could have been wrought.



The resulting artefact is an ideal exemplar of the synthesis of matter and form.

Re-statement of the 14th Amendment:

No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.

But doesn't apply to Donald Trump, because...

I know this is a little hackneyed, but a (bona fide) quote from Albert Einstein expresses something similar:

A human being is a part of the whole, called by us "Universe", a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest — a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. The striving to free oneself from this delusion is the one issue of true religion. Not to nourish the delusion but to try to overcome it is the way to reach the attainable measure of peace of mind. — Letter of condolence sent to Robert J. Marcus of the World Jewish Congress (12 February 1950)

Likewise, in Spinoza's Ethics (and 'Spinoza's religion' was the only kind Einstein would ever acknowledge acceptance of):

Spinoza finds lasting happiness only in the “intellectual love of God”, which is the noetic vision of the single “Substance” (I prefer 'subject') underlying everything and everyone. The nature of this vision is clearly announced by Spinoza when he says that “[t]he mind’s intellectual love of God is the very love of God by which God loves himself” (Ethics, Part 5, Prop. 36). Since, for Spinoza, God is the Whole that includes everything, it also includes your love for God, and thus God can be said to love Itself through you.'

Perhaps the only speck of awareness in the universe — Patterner

In whose eyes are we a mere speck, other than our own? In the absence of any perspective there's no scale against which to make the comparison against which our physical size may be judged. It's true that in our age the Universe has been revealed to be of absolutely unthinkably vast dimensions but again, by whom has this been discovered?

That's a rhetorical way of pointing out the sense in which the Universe knows itself through human eyes. As far as we're aware, they're the only one of such a kind that exist.

One of my canonical texts

It's from a review in a UK Buddist online magazine, of Thomas Nagel's 2012 book Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False.

But this doesn't sound like a good argument in favor of something. Isn't this close to an appeal to ignorance? — Tom Storm

I don't think so. Look at the history of ideas, at how philosophy started, the dialogues of Plato. There are very many examples of consideration of this very question. Likewise the Indian philosophical traditions. Some of the accounts are mythical, some rationalist. If you consider the various meanings of 'logos' in Greek philosophy, for example, you will find it is something very like a principle or guiding intelligence. Hence the proliferation of words ending -logy (psychology, anthropology, theology, etc).

I think the idea of a meaningless universe into which humans are an accidental byproduct is very specific to modernity. It co-incides with a new type of awareness, and the discovery of the vastness of the cosmos (although that said, it seems Indian cosmologists entertained realistic ideas of the age of the cosmos.)

What exactly does self-awareness consist of when it comes to a universe (I am assuming by universe you mean something more like cosmic consciousness)? Is there an end result - all meaning is assimilated and converges and 'bang' a new stage in consciousness commences? — Tom Storm

The idea is explored in Mind and Cosmos:

Nagel’s basic argument is this. If materialism cannot explain consciousness, then materialism cannot be a complete explanation of the natural order. This argument is more interesting than it looks. It is perhaps easy to suppose that we could fully explain the beginning of the universe in terms of matter and forces and so on. But if the arising of life and subsequently consciousness cannot be explained in terms of matter and forces – that is, that life and consciousness are not susceptible to reductionist explanations – then materialism has not explained the natural order. Life and consciousness must always have been possibilities within the natural order, even before the conditions for their actual arising were not fully present. Therefore materialism is not a complete theory. Nagel does not stop there. In a chapter on ‘Cognition’, he goes on to argue that the faculty of reason, by which he means the capacity (for a few of us) to intuit truths that are independent of the mind, such as mathematical or logical truths, cannot be explained by evolutionary theory alone. Neo-Darwinian theory must explain the appearance of faculties such as reason as somehow adaptive, but we cannot explain the capacity for insight into the truth in terms of adaptation for survival. And in a chapter on ‘Value’ Nagel argues that our capacity to make correct moral judgements is based on the objectivity of good and bad, it being an objective matter that certain actions are good and certain bad, which is similarly inexplicable in terms of materialism alone. For each of these broad areas – consciousness, cognition and value – Nagel sketches what might count as more satisfactory explanatory theories. One such sort of theory would be intentional – that God has set up the natural order is such a way that there is consciousness, that we can intuit the truth and know good and bad. But Nagel does not explore intentional theories as he does not believe in God. He plays with panpsychism – the theory that mind is somehow in everything – but does not find this kind of metaphysical theory very useful. His preferred tentative solution is what he calls ‘teleological naturalism’, meaning the theory that the natural order is biased in some way towards the emergence of life and consciousness, as more-than-likely directions or potentials of development. He does not develop this theory but merely indicates that it might at least be along the right lines. — The Universe is Waking Up

I think the case can be made that at least esoteric spirituality presents this kind of understanding in symbolic or mythological terms. Why symbolic or mythological? Because it is a very difficult thing to discern!

I wonder if, should this case be taken up by the Supreme Court, whether they ought to wait and see what the outcome of the Jan 6 insurrection case is? You would think a guilty verdict in that case would have a bearing.

What is the alternative? The strictly materialist account can only be something along the lines of living organisms originating as a consequence of chance. Jacques Monod lays that out in the 1970 book Chance and Necessity, although there are many other examples in the popular literature. I know many contributors here believe that, I could quote examples. But it seems to me to subvert any sense of there being a meaningful philosophy.

The products of reason are, ultimately, material. — ucarr

Nothing is ‘ ultimately material’. No material ultimate has been discovered, despite the construction of the most complex apparatus in the history of science. The standard model of physics is itself a mathematical construction.

He's being more overtly fascist than he was the first time around — frank

My theory about his attraction to dictators and facists is that it’s not grounded in political theory, but the simple fact that they wield the kind of power that he craves. He wants to be able to liquidate critics and journalists and be sorrounded by toadies who worship his every word and hang portraits of him in their offices. That’s why he expresses admiration for Putin and Kim (who incidentally are about the only world leaders that Trump ever had good things to say.)

As to the ‘fairness’ or otherwise of Trump being ruled ineligible as a candidate, let’s nor forget he repeatedly called for disqualifications of others. Apart from the mendacious ‘birther’ campaign against Obama:

Trump repeatedly pointed to the possibility that lawsuits could disqualify Ted Cruz over his birthplace, adding, “I don’t want to win it on technicalities, but that’s more than a technicality. That is a big, big factor.”


He added that a constitutional lawyer who questioned Cruz’s eligibility “should go into court and seek a declaratory judgment because the people voting for Ted, for Ted Cruz, those people — I think there’s a real chance that he’s not allowed to run for president.”

Shortly after Cruz won the Iowa caucuses, Trump tweeted, “The State of Iowa should disqualify Ted Cruz from the most recent election on the basis that he cheated — a total fraud!” (The thrust was that Cruz allies had promoted the false claim that Ben Carson had suspended his campaign, affecting the results.)


Trump also said in 2011 that then-Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.) “should never ever be allowed to run for office” because of his sexting scandal

And during the 2016 campaign, on dozens of occasions he said that Hillary Clinton shouldn’t “be allowed to run” because of her private email server. “She shouldn’t be allowed to run for president. She shouldn’t be allowed,” Trump said shortly before Election Day 2016. “I’m telling you, she should not be allowed to run for president based on her crimes. She should not be allowed to run for president.” — Washington Post

Never mind, I was being flippant. The serious reason is that I believe there is a reason for existence, but that is a religious or philosophical conviction, not a scientific argument.

is there any reason you can posit for why the universe would need to become self-aware? — Tom Storm

To sleep in late one morning, then saunter down to the corner store for a lemon gelato.


Well that would be one reason, anyway.

Semiotics for Beginners - useful reference.

A Democracy in which one cannot vote for a popular candidate of a major party because the reigning opposing party won't even allow his name to be penciled in on the ballot? — jgill

Remember the 'birther theory'? That Obama was ineligible as a candidate because of being born in Africa? That hoax was pushed for years by Trump even though it was a lie. But it is a fact that if someone is ineligible to be on the ballot, then they are not eligible as a candidate for the democratic process. And I think Trump's actions have proven his ineligibility in spades.

The lower court in Colorado believed that the wording of 'officer of the US' in the 14th Amendment doesn't apply to the office of President, but the Colorado Supreme Court says it does. But they both agree that he participated in an insurrection - something for which he is due to face trial in early 2024. How he can remain a candidate in light of all this beggars belief. He's seeking popular support to overturn the constitution. The electors want the right to overturn elections. Makes zero sense.

The question I keep asking is: how can someone who continues to deny the lawfully-determined result of the last election be permitted to contest the next election? You wouldn't be allowed to compete in a tennis tournament or chess tournament if you didn't agree to abide by the umpire's rulings. So why this contest? Especially since there is abundant evidence of Trump attempting to subvert the outcome. The fact that Trump is even considered a candidate is a symptom that something is terribly wrong in America.

And perhaps you're saying things exist that are experienceable not in the conventionally empirical sense, but rather in the cognizable sense. — ucarr

As constituents of reason, is how I put it. That applies to a very wide range - arithmetical objects, rules of logic, conventions, scientific laws. All of these are arguably real, but not existent as phenomena - they're only perceptible to a rational intellect.

Does anybody have some ground rules for things real but not material? — ucarr

I do, but I'm a little pressed for time. But in short, the problem is that our culture is deeply committed to the notion that what is real exists in time and space - out there, somewhere, potentially experienceable as an object in relation with other objects. Empiricism, in short. But numbers, plainly, are not like that, as has already been noted in some of the comments in this thread, which makes them very difficult to account for in empirical terms. Even to conceive of them as being in a 'Platonic realm' is to try and locate them in some sense. But consider for example the domain of natural numbers - there are things 'inside' it (natural numbers) and outside it (imaginary numbers). That doesn't mean the domain exists in an empirical sense, but it's nevertheless real. (I've written an essay on Medium about my musings on the nature of number, although it's scarcely been read as yet.)

They're not anti-democratic. They just love the irony.

:up: We're on the same page.

So, you are you convinced that when you look at a pair of diamonds encased in the platinum ring encircling your beloved's finger, no part of that crushed carbon attaches to the number two floating around immaterially within your brain? — ucarr

That really is a nonsensical question.

You seem to be trading on the obvious truism that all our judgements are mind-dependent to draw the unwarranted conclusion that all existence must be mind-dependent. — Janus

Every judgement concerning what exists is indeed dependent on our intellectual and sensory faculties. I believe this is in line with Kant's philosophy, as is the OP on the whole.

TRUMP DECLARED INELIGIBLE ON COLORADO BALLOT UNDER SECTION 14 OF THE CONSTITUTION

https://edition.cnn.com/politics/live-news/colorado-trump-14th-amendment-12-19-23/index.html

This is huge. Yes, Trump can appeal, but if the decision is under appeal in the Supreme Court, how many States will admit him on the Ballot, with a decision pending.

Philosophers cannot agree on whether mathematical objects exist or are pure fictions — Gnomon

For the very simple reason that if numbers are real, but not material, then there are real things that are not material. The intellectual contortions that modern philosophers perform to avoid this conclusion are striking. That SciAm article you linked - very good article - says:

there are some important objections to (platonic) realism. If mathematical objects really exist, their properties are certainly very peculiar. For one, they are causally inert, meaning they cannot be the cause of anything, so you cannot literally interact with them. This is a problem because we seem to gain knowledge of an object through its impact. Dinosaurs decomposed into bones that paleontologists can see and touch, and a planet can pass in front of a star, blocking its light from our view. But a circle is an abstract object, independent of space and time. The fact that π is the ratio of the circumference to the diameter of a circle is not about a soda can or a doughnut; it refers to an abstract mathematical circle, where distances are exact and the points on the circle are infinitesimally small. Such a perfect circle is causally inert and seemingly inaccessible. So how can we learn facts about it without some type of special sixth sense?

I would have thought the answer was 'through reason'. By dint of reason we are able to discern mathematical regularities which characterise many underlying aspects of nature - 'the book of nature is written in mathematics' - but which don't exist empirically. The difficulties posed by this are mainly due to the cultural impact of empiricism which must insist that what is real must be 'out there somewhere'. But mathematics is not 'out there' anywhere, even though mathematical reasoning is fundamental to the invention of the JWT which has had such stellar success in exploring what is 'out there somewhere'.

Yet they play a vital role in how we do so many things. Yes, the universe operated just fine without us. But we have begun shaping it in ways it would not have become shaped without us. — Patterner

:100: That feeds into the meme you will sometimes encounter that conscious sentient beings are the Universe become self-aware.

The universe operated just fine during the billions of years it existed before there were any minds around to grasp, reason,or understand anything about it. — Relativist

It appears to have, yes. There is a much deeper issue here than the hard problem of consciousness, although it is related. But if you do have time, have a look at my OP The Mind Created World, which presents an alternative view to the one you're proposing. Comments would be welcome.

The point about number is that it can only be grasped by the mind. A number doesn't exist in the same way that trees and chairs do, but numerical reasoning, and reasoning more generally, are fundamental to the understanding and to science in particular. But this is not the thread for this argument - although your mention of a third realm brought to mind an academic paper I sometimes cite in this regard, Frege on Knowing the Third Realm, Tyler Burge:

Frege held that both the thought contents that constitute the proof-structure of mathematics and the subject matter of these thought contents (extensions, functions) exist. He also thought that these entities are non-spatial, non-temporal, causally inert, and independent for their existence and natures from any person's thinking them or thinking about them. Frege proposed a picturesque metaphor of thought contents as existing in a "third realm". This "realm" counted as "third" because it was comparable to, but different from, the realm of physical objects and the realm of mental entities. I think that Frege held, in the main body of his career, that not only thought contents, but numbers and functions were members of this third realm.

I do not acknowledge that these abstractions (or any other) are part of the ontological structure of the world. — Relativist

Well, you will have an issue accounting for the 'unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences' (Eugene Wigner).

Is mathematics a mental thing? Like any thought, mathematics doesn't exist if nobody is thinking about it. — Patterner

The point about numbers and arithmetical principles is that they are not the product of thought, but can only be grasped by thought. This is the general area of Platonism in philosophy of mathematics, which is a big and contested question.

How do you deal with the problem of communicating immaterial-but-non-spiritual philosophical concepts in a materialist language? :smile: — Gnomon

It's very difficult. Numbers and the like are often referred to as 'intelligible objects', but here I think the term 'object' is being used metaphorically. Nevertheless mathematical platonists (which include Godel and Penrose) believe that mathematics is describing something real (again, using 'thing' metaphorically).

Our minds cannot process those changes to that degree, so we have a generalised idea of what a hammer is, how it looks to our eyes through the reflection of light, and we assign 'hammer' to it. But there can be no 'hammer' outside of this perception and....oh dear, now my brain is wondering whether our perception of the hammer actually does make the hammer exist.

Is this what Buddhism is talking about - that nothing exists and there is only emptiness, and realisation of emptiness brings enlightenment? — Daniel Duffy

Welcome to the Forum.

There's definitely something like that idea in Buddhist philosophy. Emptiness (śūnyatā) is very easily misunderstood principle, but it means basically 'empty of intrinsic or inherent existence'. Things exist as a consequence of causes and conditions, on the one hand, and because we relate to them in a certain way, on the other. A piece of stone is a hammer in the right circumstances. And of course, a hammer really is a hammer, made for a specific purpose, and something you could not do without if you needed to bang in a nail. But then, as Abraham Maslow said, if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. (This is a good intro to Buddhist 'emptiness' - which should never be, but often is, confused with nihilism.)

Someone on a spiritual path might say this means the soul always lives on. Someone of a more scientific ilk might suggest that consciousness arises as a result of electrical activity in the brain, and since energy cannot be created or destroyed, only changed, some form of soul always exists, but at what point do we stop considering it a soul and just a collection of energy? — Daniel Duffy

It's been said a few times in this thread that soul must be just energy - but energy is not intentional, whereas one would think that intentionality is at the very seat of the soul (or mind or consciousness). Another point about living beings is their ability to maintain their identity while going through change - and that identity can be maintained even through generations. Whereas inanimate material does not have that capacity (even if we can recognise its continuity. An interesting, although superficial, point - one of Aristotle's famous works is usually referred to as 'De Anima', usually translated as 'on the Soul'. I'm intrigued by the connection between 'anima', 'animate', and 'animal' - as if the soul is what 'animates' the body. Although that said, I've only ever read snippets of the actual text.)

That then creates an "arms race" where law-abiding people buy guns on the off-chance an armed person breaks into their house/apartment. That increases the number of guns, making it even easier for criminals to get one, etc. America reached that tipping long ago. — RogueAI

:100: That's why there's a huge surge of gun sales after every particularly heinous mass murder event. The most vicious of vicious circles.

America needs an influx of young workers to prop up social security and medicare. — RogueAI

Hey if the GOP thought said influx would vote for them they'd be laying out the red carpet.

On a more serious note, there's a kind of osmosis at work with undocumented immigrants. America has a human rights framework, whilst many or all of the countries from whence they come do not. So to return them to their point of departure is to violate their human rights - rights which of course are not recognised by their home countries. And no humane country can do that. So what MAGA are suggesting amounts to descending to the level of the originating regimes and abolishing the rights they are automatically granted to undocumented immigrants by merely turning up in America. It might work, but at the cost of undermining the kind of nation that America aspires to be (not that MAGA would understand that, as it means nothing to them, and they seem eager to bring it down to that level.)

I don't know where you got "reification" — Gnomon

Reification means ‘to treat as a thing’. It is from the root ‘re-‘ (from which ‘reality’ is also derived), and which Descartes employed in his ‘res cogitans’, and by virtue of which he has been accused of reifying mind (justly, in my view). But as per my question above, I say that one may regard numbers and logical conventions as real without reifying them as things.

If you're claiming mental activity entails the existence of immaterial objects I'd regard that as a reification- treating an abstraction as something ontic. — Relativist

Would you acknowledge that arithmetical proofs and logical relations are real, even if not material? It doesn’t mean treating them as things - which is what reification means - but acknowledging that they are the same for all who are capable of understanding them.

I think you are going a step beyond this and saying that there is a greater existence beyond this is beyond the constructs of the mind, and some nirvana-like state is the real, non-illusory or whatnot, and this individuation we feel is illusory. — schopenhauer1

That's the thrust of Watts' book, yes.

This is another topic, but this kind of parallels our debate for why it matters whether one has achieved some "unity" of this monism (aka Nirvana), or nothingness. What if there were no lifeforms, as was the case prior to 4.5 billion years ago, give or take? Energy and matter on their own don't seem to need liberation from anything. It seems at the least, the problem is biological as much as it is existential, as existential matters not without the biological. And thus, this is contra to the always existing mind of idealism. — schopenhauer1

The post of mine you were responding to was tangential to the topic so I didn't pursue it. It was written from the perspective of Vedanta where 'the self' is understood as 'the self of all beings'. This intuition harks back to Alan Watts' book The Supreme Identity - hence the connection with 'identity'. (That book was an early influence of mine.)

As to the 'always-existing mind of idealism'. Your question is phrased from the naturalistic perspective, which understands the mind as an emergent or evolved capacity, or at any rate, something that only comes into existence as a result or consequence of evolution, as a product of material or natural causes. Philosophical spirituality (if we can call it that) looks at the matter differently, although it's somewhat difficult to articulate in today's terms. To put it in Watts' terms, in referring to "The Supreme Identity," he is talking about the idea that at the deepest level of reality, there is no fundamental separation between the individual self and the universe. It is the recognition that the distinction between "I" and "the world" is ultimately an illusion. Instead, there is a unitary being, the 'supreme identity' that underlies and encompasses all of existence. In this context, the individual ego or self is seen as a construct, a temporary and illusory identity that we create (very deeply!) in our minds. To discover the supreme identity is to recognize that our true nature is not limited to our individual ego but is interconnected with everything in existence. It's a profound shift in perception and consciousness, which transcends the boundaries between self and other, subject and object. It is emphatically not non-being or non-existence although it seems it must be that to the egoic consciousness. (Although his book is primarily based on Eastern philosophy Watts does also discuss the idea of divine union in Thomas Aquinas. You do find parallels, at least, in some schools of Christianity, especially Christian mysticism, but these kinds of ideas have a rather uneasy relationship with mainstream Christianity, hence the constant tendency of the Christian mystics to run afoul of ecclesiastical authority.)

But again, quite tangential to the OP.

can it be true that the content of all the scientific literature about the Universe prior to life can be dismissed as meaningless and unintelligible? — RussellA

Not at all. But it is meaningful and intelligible to an observer. It is empirically the case that the world existed prior to any observer, but there is still an implicit perspective in that understanding.

Isn't it admirable within philosophical language to be objective and have an independent point of view? — RussellA

Indeed it is, but neither objectivity or independence are absolute, but dependent. Persons may be, of course, more or less objective, or more and less independent, but that independence and objectivity still does not provide a window on a world 'as it is in itself'.

Yet we consider a mind-independent world every time we talk about the Universe before life began on Earth. — RussellA

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

Another fact to reflect on is that every being occurs as 'me' from their first person point of view. Every living being experiences themself as 'me' but it's not until the being becomes attached to a particular set of sensations and memories that it is differentiated as an individual self or soul by the thought 'this is me, I am this, this is mine'. Of course, from the p-o-v of a specific individual, every other being is 'not-me' (cf Kastrup's 'dissociated alters') as within their first-person perspective there is only one 'me', as due to their identification with ego. That's why it's said in the Upanisads that the awakened see themselves in every being and every being in themselves.

I think Janus point earlier is that there is clearly a boundary of organism with non-organism. — schopenhauer1

Maybe because with the emergence of organisms, there is an exponential increase in possibilities. And that in order to exist as an organism, the very first thing that appears is the boundary between self-and-not-self. After all, death is merely dissolution, isn't it? That the elements comprising a specific individual organism dissolve back into the periodic table. It is the ability of organisms not to simply succumb to chemical entropy that is the hallmark of organic life, isn't it?

What Do Organisms Mean?, Steve Talbott.