you're asking me to believe NDE testimony has been offered in a way that leads to no other conclusion than to admit that our physical laws as we know them have been violated. — Hanover

We demand physical evidence that there is anything that is not physical!!

The truth concerning what is neither empirically nor logically demonstrable is not strictly decidable and so is a matter of what each of us finds most plausible or in other words a matter of opinion...call it what you like. And of course a dogmatist won't want to accept that. — Janus

I'm saying that the argument in the OP is a logical argument. If arguments can only be decided by empirical means, then we're back at verificationism or positivism. You will also need to justify why you think the argument is dogmatic.

A canyon reveals fossil memory of the distant past. The Atlantic floor has wonder memory of the history of Earth's magnetic pole shifts. — noAxioms

I don't rate that as memory. A rational observer such as ourselves can intepret it, but it is not information that is conserved for the sake of maintaining homeostasis as memory is for an organism.

maybe that’s the price of debunking myths and sacred cows. — Tom Storm

We have plenty of our own.

So, to refer to things-in-themselves as "strictly transcendental human constructs" is again a particular way of framing, not an expression of any determinable fact of the matter. — Janus

Basically you're saying that it's subjective, a matter of opinion. 'It's OK if you see it that way, but I see it a different way'. It's not 'determinable' because it can't be validated empirically. Whatever is not determinable by science is a matter of personal preference.

I don't understand why you keep repeating this. — Janus

I keep repeating it, because you keep misrepresenting it. You say 'Science can study this and even model what the world might look like to different animals'. But you're still positing a real world beyond what appears, as if that is the criterion of realness, when it is the very point at issue. That's why I posted this:

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. Treating consciousness as part of the world, reifying consciousness, is precisely to ignore consciousness’s foundational, disclosive role. — Routledge Introduction to Phenomenology

So in "our world" our perception differentiates to create entities. — AmadeusD

I do agree, but I also think there is a danger in the word 'create' - even though I used it in the OP. I think 'construct' might actually have been a better choice, and besides, there is a school of thought 'radical constructivism' which is very similar in outlook to what I'm arguing for (info). But it is a semantic distinction.

There's a very simple metric which ought to be mentioned in this context. That is the idea of a 'metaphysics of quality'.

One popular source for that was Robert M. Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Enquiry into Values (and his subsequent Lila: An Enquiry into Morals.) Pirsig dissected the typical subject-object dualism that dominates Western thought, arguing that Quality—the immediate, pre-intellectual recognition of value or excellence—exists prior to, and gives rise to, the division between observer and observed. This Quality is not merely aesthetic preference or subjective judgment, but rather the dynamic source from which both the mental and physical arise. Pirsig suggests that when we realise Quality directly—whether in a well-crafted piece of work, a moment of understanding, or the proper maintenance of a motorcycle—we encounter reality in its most fundamental form, before it gets carved up by analytical thinking into separate categories of self and world. This metaphysical position attempts to bridge the gap between classical rationality and romantic intuition by showing how both emerge from a more primary encounter with value itself.

It is precisely this 'axis of quality' which has tended to collapse in (post)Enlightenment thought. This is the 'flattening of ontology' that John Vervaeke often references in his talks. His concept of "leveling up" refers to his argument for restoring an hierarchy of value as a response to what he sees as the meaning crisis in contemporary culture. Vervaeke contends that reductive materialism has created a "flat ontology" where everything is reduced to the same fundamental level—typically physical processes—thereby collapsing meaningful distinctions between different orders or levels of reality. In contrast, an hierarchical approach recognizes genuinely emergent levels of being, where higher-order phenomena like consciousness, meaning, and wisdom represent real ontological categories that cannot be fully captured or described in terms of lower levels. "Leveling up" involves cultivating practices and perspectives that allow individuals to access and participate in these higher orders of reality through what he calls "religio" (reconnection), moving from mere propositional knowledge through procedural and perspectival knowing toward participatory knowledge that transforms the knower. This hierarchical framework doesn't reject scientific understanding but embeds it within a richer ontology reflecting the existential context of human beings, who are capable of grasping meaning in a way that other creatures are not.

But this is invariably met with the objection, what do you mean by 'higher'? Higher, according to whom? (Just wait!) This is because any such values are generally expected to be matters of individual conscience - the individual being the arbiter of value on modern culture.

I think you're suggesting that the blind spot is methodologically structural, that it can't be overcome in terms of objective science. — J

Scientific objectivity has customarily been grounded in the notion of the 'mind-independent object' without taking into account the Kantian insight into the mind's constitution of the object. Phenomenology does take that into account. That is one of the main points of The Blind Spot of Science.

Where is the mystery? — Apustimelogist

The mystery lies precisely in the fact that every scientific explanation presupposes symbolic mediation — concepts, meanings, language — which themselves are not physical properties. The ink marks, sounds, or neural firings are physical events; the meaning they convey is not. That irreducible distinction is what Howard Pattee called the “epistemic cut" which arises precisely with the beginning of organic life and the implicit distinction between self and other, subject and object.

We don’t notice this because we’re always looking through the symbolic, not at it. That’s why meaning is so hard to make the object of analysis — and why newer sciences like biosemiotics and phenomenology are needed. They still fall under the umbrella of science, but they’re worlds away from the hard-edged materialism of earlier generations, precisely because that old framework has proven untenable.

One thing I notice in your posts is the taken-for-granted-ness of many of your responses, and the many arguments you “don’t see the point of.” Since antiquity it has been said that wisdom begins in wonder, and it strikes me that this dimension is absent from your replies, which read more as “business as usual.” No offense intended — it’s just that philosophy, at least for me, is about keeping that sense of wonder alive.

Then I respond that everything we say is from within the empirical context. So, what are we disagreeing about? — Janus

The objection:

‘Surely “the world” is what is there all along, what is there anyway, regardless of whether you perceive it or not! Science has shown that h. sapiens only evolved in the last hundred thousand years or so, and we know Planet Earth is billions of years older than that! So how can you say that the mind ‘‘creates the world”’? — Questioner

The response

As already stated, I am not disputing the scientific account, but attempting to reveal an underlying assumption that gives rise to a distorted view of what this means. What I’m calling attention to is the tendency totake for granted the reality of the world as it appears to us, without taking into account the role the mind plays in its constitution. This oversight imbues the phenomenal world — the world as it appears to us — with a kind of inherent reality that it doesn’t possess. This in turn leads to the over-valuation of objectivity as the sole criterion for truth. — Wayfarer

It's this taken-for-grantedness that is the main target.

The limits of human cognition does not define or determine the limits of what exists. — Janus

But the whole point of the essay is what we know of what exists. When I say the world “relies on an implicit perspective,” I mean the world-as-known. To speak of what lies entirely outside that perspective is already speculative. Better to call it “purported” or “imagined” existence.

I would say it is something before it "enters the mind" otherwise there would be nothing there to be perceived. — Janus

To call it “something” already applies a category it doesn’t yet have. That’s why I said: it is not some-thing. But I'm also not saying it is simply non-existent. This is what you keep insisting is 'nonsensical', but when the context is understood, it is really quite straightforward: it is neither a “thing” nor “nothing,” but precisely what lies beyond the scope of those categories.

The bifurcation is yours―between the empirical and the transcendental. If all we know is the empirical world, and everything that has evolved out of that experience, and attempting to understand that experience―maths, geometry, scince, music, poetry, literature―then we can say nothing about the transcendental other than that it is an idea of the possibility of something beyond. — Janus

There is no division between the empirical and the world as it is in itself. The world known by empiricism is simply the universe as it appears to us. To speak of “the world in itself” is not to posit a separate domain, but to point to the condition that makes the empirical world possible in the first place.

The point being that a lot of modern thought tends to forget that empirical knowledge is contingent in this way, which is to accord science an authority it doesn't really have.

, Are there structural or even transcendental arguments that show [consciousness] must remain [mysterious]? McGinn thinks so. — J

McGinn thinks it's an intractable scientific problem, that it's so complex we can't feasibly tackle it. Marcel was an existentialist, he didn't understand it as a problem to be solved but a reality to be accepted.

Buddhism has 'theories of consciousness', beginning with abhidharma, and elaborated over subsequent millenia. But the aim was never to 'explain consciousness'. It was to address the cause of suffering, dukkha, and its ending. Buddhism was always phenomenological, right from the outset. It never posited that the self and world were separated in the way that modern science does. In translations of the early Buddhist texts, the expression 'self and world' is often encountered, as they are understood to be co-arising, in modern parlance. (This is where there are convergences between modern phenomenology and Buddhism, e.g. Merleau Ponty and Buddhism)

Without the intellect setting out borders and providing explanations, there is just emotion. It doesn't belong to anybody. It's just there. Does that make sense? — frank

It does. It's an argument against solipsism. Solipsism takes as its starting point the claim that ‘my consciousness is the only thing I am indubitably certain of.’ But this claim depends on the sense of mine—of ownership—which is itself a mental construct rather than a self-evident given. What is indubitable is consciousness as such, not its appropriation as ‘my’ consciousness. If the ‘mine’ is deconstructed, then solipsism evaporates, because the certainty lies only in consciousness, not in its supposed exclusivity to a solitary self.

Descartes could have more accurately said cogitatio est, ergo esse est — 'thinking is, therefore being is.' What is indubitable is the occurrence of thought, not the existence of an enduring ego.

Although, that said, I think the nature of mind is mysterious, but not in the way Chalmers, or McGinn, are suggesting. It's not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be faced.

A genuine problem is subject to an appropriate technique by which it can be attacked and reduced. A mystery, by contrast, transcends any conceivable technique; it is not reducible, because it is a situation in which the inquirer is him- or herself a participant. — Paraphrased from Marcel’s The Mystery of Being

Which I think is much nearer the mark.

I think Wayfarer sees Chalmers as being closer to the New Mysterian position of McGinn and others. — J

Never took to Colin McGinn, although enjoyed his scathing review of Paula Churchlands materialist baloney. Besides, 'New Mysterian' sounds like a band name. I simply reference the original paper (Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness) as a stepping-off point. Chalmers wants to redefine science to accomodate the first-person perspective.

One reaction this provoked was Daniel Dennett’s essay The Fantasy of First-Person Science. Dennett argued that the very idea of a “science” based on private, first-person data is incoherent (ridiculous, even!) Science, in his view, can only proceed on the basis of what is publicly observable and intersubjectively testable. Strictly objective, right? He was wary of granting privileged epistemic authority to introspection, which he regarded as unreliable and uncheckable. To resolve this, he proposed “heterophenomenology,” a method in which the researcher treats subjects’ reports of their experiences not as direct windows onto consciousness, but as neutral data to be interpreted. If a subject says “I see a red afterimage,” the scientific claim is not that an afterimage exists as described, but simply that the subject reported seeing one, a fact which can be combined with other behavioural and neurological evidence. For Dennett, this move rescues science from what he saw as the illusion that first-person testimony could form a scientific foundation.

Dan Zahavi responded in Killing the Straw Man that Dennett’s picture of phenomenology is based on a fundamental misunderstanding. Dennett assumes that phenomenology is a species of naïve introspection, committed to the incorrigibility of private reports and the construction of a “first-person science” in that sense. Zahavi insists that this is precisely not what phenomenology is. For Husserl and those who followed him, phenomenology is not a catalogue of inner episodes, but a disciplined investigation of the structures of experience itself—intentionality, temporality, embodiment, and above all, intersubjectivity. Phenomenologists have long recognised that introspection can be fallible and misleading; their project is not to defend subjective reports as infallible data, but to uncover the fundamental patterns through which experience arises, which are themselves shared and already presupposed in any science. In that light, Zahavi argues, Dennett is fighting an enemy that doesn’t exist. His “heterophenomenology” might be a corrective to old-fashioned Willhelm Wundt-style introspective psychology, but it is not a correction of phenomenology, which never claimed what he attributes to it.

It’s a worthy aspiration although one I haven’t necessarily mastered.

I wasn't taking issue with ontic structural realism.

Another disgraceful illustration of corruption in Trump's America




This is a gift link to a New York Times exposé of the way that those who were tasked with prosecuting the January 6 Rioters were treated after Trump regained power. Summarily sacked, dismissed, demoted, walked out of offices. Some excerpts.

[Michael]Gordon was heading up on this steaming late July day in Tampa, Fla., to collect his things and say goodbye. Three weeks earlier, and just two days after receiving yet another outstanding performance review, he had been interviewing a witness online when a grim-faced colleague interrupted to hand him a letter. It said he was being “removed from federal service effective immediately” — as in, now.

Although the brief letter, signed by Attorney General Pam Bondi, provided no justification, Mr. Gordon knew the likely reason: Jan. 6, 2021.

He was being fired for successfully prosecuting people who had stormed the United States Capitol that day — assaulting police officers, vandalizing a national landmark and disrupting that sacrosanct moment in a democracy, the transfer of presidential power.

He was being fired for doing his job.

The letter did more than inform Mr. Gordon, a 47-year-old father of two, that he was unemployed. It confirmed for him his view that the Justice Department he had been honored to work for was now helping to whitewash a traumatic event in American history, supporting President Trump’s reframing of its violence as patriotic — and those who had prosecuted rioters in the name of justice as villains, perhaps even traitors. ...

By tradition, the [Justice] department long steered clear of White House intervention. Now, to remedy what the president has deemed the past weaponization of Justice, it has been deployed as a weapon for his score-settling and political crusades. To that end, it has sought to investigate and perhaps prosecute those who once investigated and prosecuted Mr. Trump and his allies, from the former special counsel, Jack Smith, to New York’s attorney general, Letitia James, to former President Barack Obama.

The template for that transformation was Jan. 6 — the pardons and then the purge.

To date, the Justice Department has fired or demoted more than two dozen prosecutors who were assigned to hold the rioters accountable — roughly a quarter of the complement. Some were junior prosecutors, like Sara Levine, who had secured a guilty plea from a rioter who had grabbed a police officer. Others were veterans, including Greg Rosen, who had led the department’s Jan. 6 task force. Scores more prosecutors, involved in these and other cases, have left, either in fear of where the ax might next fall or out of sheer disgust.

...The Justice Department declined to comment for this article, but a White House spokesman, Harrison Fields, described the agency during the Biden administration as “a cabal of anti-Trump sycophants” engaged in a “relentless pursuit to throw the book at President Trump and his allies.” By “uprooting the foot soldiers,” Mr. Fields added, Mr. Trump’s attorney general, Ms. Bondi, “is restoring the integrity of the department.”

I've started on a book called Dynamics in Action, Alicia Juarrero - one of the many books I've learned about here. She makes it freely available on her website.

What is the difference between a wink and a blink? The answer is important not only to philosophers of mind, for significant moral and legal consequences rest on the distinction between voluntary and involuntary behavior. However, "action theory" the branch of philosophy that has traditionally articulated the boundaries between action and non-action, and between voluntary and involuntary behavior has been unable to account for the difference.

Alicia Juarrero argues that a mistaken, 350-year-old model of cause and explanation one that takes all causes to be of the push-pull, efficient cause sort, and all explanation to be prooflike, underlies contemporary theories of action. Juarrero then proposes a new framework for conceptualizing causes based on complex adaptive systems. Thinking of causes as dynamical constraints makes bottom-up and top-down causal relations, including those involving intentional causes, suddenly tractable. A different logic for explaining actions - as historical narrative, not inference - follows if one adopts this novel approach to long-standing questions of action and responsibility. — Dynamics in Action

It mentions another volume, Mental Causation, but mainly to show what's wrong with it.

Must say, finding it a slog, but then, she does take to task many of the principles of 'action theory' which is a large topic in analytic philosophy.

Whether it's about the specific kind of causation you have in mind, i don't know, but I also don't know if there is such a book.

It can all be explained in terms of physical events and brain activity. I don't see that as contoversial. — Apustimelogist

But it can't. Any explanation relies on symbolic language, obviously. You're using words to describe the process, but you can't see the words for the trees :rofl:

I don't see what else is going on. — Apustimelogist

You don't say! You keep telling me that you don't 'see the point' of what I'm trying to explain. I think I'll give up.

The distinction between the physical and the semantic is not a matter of taste, it’s a matter of fact. The ink marks on a page, or the neural firings in a brain, are physical events. The meaning those marks or firings convey is not reducible to those events. That’s why the same sentence can be written in English, Greek, or Sanskrit, with different marks and sounds but carry the same meaning. So the meaning and the physical form are different things.

Philosophers across traditions have recognised this as a basic divide — Aristotle with form vs matter, Kant with concept vs intuition, Peirce with sign vs object, and so on. It's not a distinction that can be denied. Hence my question!

Whose limits, and justified by appealing to what exactly? — Janus

Ours — the limits of human cognition. And justified by what? By the recognition that our categories of thought (existence, objectivity, causality, etc.) are the very means by which the world is knowable to us. To apply them beyond possible experience - to imagine a world as it would be outside any cognition of it - is to use them outside the domain in which they have sense. That’s the force of the transcendental distinction: not a ban on thinking, but a clarification of what kind of thinking makes sense.

What has never entered your mind is not anything, obviously. And when it has entered your mind, it has done so via the senses, and has been interpreted by your intellect. What is outside that, neither exists nor does not exist. It is not yet anything, but that doesn't mean it's nothing. This is not dogma.

You even agree that it makes sense to say that things existed prior to humans. Then you go on to say it makes sense in an empirical context, but not in a transcendental context. I don't accept that bifurcation. — Janus

It is not a 'bifurcation'. That term is usually associated with A N Whitehead and is a different matter. In fact, the division is between the world as known to us, and what you think it must be, beyond that.

It's dogma, pure and simple, but I can't make you see that, you have to come to that realization yourself. — Janus

I’m not laying down a stricture about what others may or may not think. I’m pointing out that when we use concepts like “existence” or “independence,” we are already relying on the framework of experience that gives those concepts their sense. That isn’t dogma — it’s analysis. To ignore that is not to be “freer” in one’s thinking, but simply to overlook the conditions that make thought coherent in the first place.

I don't so much object to the word 'transcendental' because we can only really reflect on what we experience and on what we can imagine.... — Janus

I don’t disagree except I’d stress that the “natural attitude” you invoke is exactly what phenomenology and Kantian critique are meant to interrogate. Yes, we all tacitly assume that the objects we encounter exist “anyway” and independently of perception. But to take that assumption as foundational is precisely to overlook the constitutive role played by the observer.

You’re right that phenomenalism explains nothing; but the transcendental approach is not phenomenalism. It’s not saying “objects are only in the mind,” but that our very idea of an “independent existence” is already framed by the categories through which we think. That’s why Kant speaks of “the transcendental” not as another realm to imagine, but as the condition that makes imagining and experience possible at all.

So I’d put it like this: you’re right that “it doesn’t really matter” whether we speculate about God or noumena. But it does matter whether we recognize the limits of our categories, because that recognition is the difference between naïve realism (taking the natural attitude as ultimate) and critical philosophy (understanding it as a conditioned and contingent reaiity).

Science consists in investigation and analysis of the nature of the phenomena we experience. Phenomenology='What is the nature of experience ' and science= 'what is the nature of the things we experience'. — Janus

Do you see the difference? Don't you think it's very significant? This is the subject of this quote, which I've posted quite a few times already, about Husserl's criticism of naturalism, from the Routledge Introduction to Phenomenology:

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. Treating consciousness as part of the world, reifying consciousness, is precisely to ignore consciousness’s foundational, disclosive role.

Why do you think Husserl says that conscious acta cannot be properly understood from with the natural outlook? Do you agree? Do you think it's significant?

Of course I admit that our knowledge has limits, but I'm not a fan of pre-determining those limits. Of course we can talk about limits in tautologous way―once we conceive of objects as being "appearances for us" and "things in themselves" it is true by mere definition that if we define 'in itself' as what lies beyond 'how it appears' then we cannot have cognitive access to the in itself. But it doesn't follow logically that speculative talk about what it might be is meaningless. — Janus

But it is likely to be dogmatic.

Have you ever studied philosophy, as distinct from popular science? By 'studied', I mean, done a course in the subject and submitted a term paper in it.

When it comes down to speculating about noumena or things in themselves there can be no discernible fact of the matter which could confirm or disconfirm any conjectures, so it comes down to what each of us might find to be the most useful and/or plausible way of thinking and talking about them.

My beef is with the dogmatic "thought police" prescriptions about what we can and cannot coherently think and talk about. For me it makes no sense to say "of course things have their own existence independent of any mind in the empirical sense, but not in the transcendental sense'. I see this prescription as dogmatic because there can be no strictly determinable transcendental sense. — Janus

But the distinction isn’t a matter of “thought-police prescriptions.” It’s a matter of recognizing limits. The “transcendental sense” isn’t an extra layer of metaphysical speculation—it’s the recognition that our very categories of existence, objectivity, and independence only make sense within the framework of possible experience.

When you say “of course things exist independently of any mind,” you’re already employing the categories of existence and independence. The transcendental point is simply: those categories have meaning only in relation to a subject. It’s not dogma, but an analysis of how thought works.

So you’re right that there’s no empirical way to confirm or disconfirm claims about noumena—that’s precisely why Kant warns against treating them as if they were positive objects. The “transcendental sense” is not something determinable in the way empirical claims are; it’s the limit-condition that makes empirical determination possible at all.

You keep calling it “dogma,” but it seems to me the real issue is that you’re not willing to admit that our knowledge has limits. The transcendental distinction isn’t a prescription about what we’re allowed to think so much a recognition that our categories of thought don’t reach beyond the conditions of possible experience.

And I suspect the reason you push back so strongly is that you have an instinctive aversion to the very word transcendental—for you it smacks of “God talk,” which is why you keep insisting it must be dogmatic. But that’s really just your pre-existing conception of the question, not what’s actually at stake.

Besides, calling Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason “dogmatic” is wildly unjust. Dogma is the very last thing Kant wanted to propagate. His whole project was precisely the opposite: to dismantle dogmatism by showing that speculative claims about the world-in-itself go beyond what reason can justify. What you keep dismissing as “dogma” is in fact Kant’s attempt to set clear limits, so that reason doesn’t mistake its own constructions for knowledge of things as they are in themselves.

I don't see myself as one of the thought police on this forum. That honour goes to all of those who squeal every time the word 'transcendent' is so much as mentioned.

The "meaning" is not different to the sounds, squiggles and neuronal events in anyway that suggests some inherent divide between physical and menta — Apustimelogist

It is, though - plainly and obviously. Symbols convey nothing to animals, they have no impact on the structure of materials. You're not seeing a distinction which is fundamental to philosophy.

There was a philosophical movement in the mid 20th century called 'brain-mind identity theory', but it fell out of favour in the subsequent decades and was replaced by non-reductive physicalism. Are you familiar with any of those discussions?

Did you pursue this line very much? — Tom Storm

I contemplated it as a possible thesis subject, but in the end, I went with the American Transcendentalists (Emerson and Richard Bucke).

being organic is not a requirement to have memory, nor to be a thing that attempts to cope with what's coming up. — noAxioms

Examples?

When it comes to consciousness, we may have a special case -- and I think that's the deeper subject of this discussion. Is there something about consciousness, and about being conscious, that calls into question this division between knowing and experiencing? We need consciousness to do any sort of seeing or knowing, including the strictest of scientific projects. A blind person can understand how the eye works, because understanding is not a true visual seeing, but a way of grasping intellectually. But can the blind person (from birth, we'd have to stipulate) know what the experience of seeing is? Probably not. — J

Now you're getting it! And yes, that is the subject of the discussion. And here, I suppose you realise that you've restated a version of the well-known 'Mary's room' thought-experiment?

We devise a powerful explanatory method that abstracts away consciousness while forgetting that the method remains fundamentally dependent on consciousness.
— The Blind Spot - Adam Frank, Marcelo Gleiser, Evan Thompson

Is this in fact a flaw? Does this dependence vitiate whatever explanation may result? — J

It's not a flaw, when it comes to the data of the objective sciences. The blind spot is blind with respect to the subject to whom the data means something, the subject, the observer. This, again, is what the whole argument is about!

I have to paste this in, I beg the moderator's indulgence as it is entirely relevant to the subject being discussed. It is the exact point being made by the young and charismatic (as distinct from the older and careworn) David Chalmers:

It was just life, at the time. As I said, in the 1960's there was much more of this in the air, so to speak - part of popular culture. I didn't really try to proselytize what I was seeking to understand, although I would try and convey what I thought was important about it.

My initial interest in philosophy was linked to my interest in and belief in meditation and 'higher awareness'. I came of age in a period where there was popular interest in these ideas which were circulating in 60's culture. I had this idea that an insight could be attained which revealed something very deep and meaningful about life, which most people didn't understand or see. My role models and sources were popular teachers like Krishnamurti and Alan Watts, with his books on Vedanta and Zen Buddhism.

So in that sense, right from the outset, I linked philosophy with the idea of spiritual awareness which implies a qualitative change in your way of being. Of course, though, I was to learn that it was much easier said than done - something that was to become clear in the years ahead.

Regardless, that was the mindset that I took to my rather late entry to university, where I studied philosophy, anthropology and comparative religion among other subjects. My aim was to discern how this idea of enlightenment (in the Asian rather than European sense) had been framed in various cultures and philosophies.

This culminated in an epiphany which of course is very hard to convey in words. But it had definite effects on my personality and way of being. Not that I 'became enlightened', which I was to learn is the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, but an awareness of a kind of compassionate energy that is at the centre of existence. That has always stayed with me at least to some extent, although often overgrown with weeds, to refer to the Biblical parable. But one (sometimes embarrasing) consequence that stayed with me, was the tendency to begin to shed a tear when considering something important or profound, even in the most quotidian of circumstances. I felt like the quinessential 'new age guy', except I learned that the 'gift of tears' really is a thing.

So - did I find much of this in philosophy? Not as an academic subject. As I attended an Anglo university, the curriculum was, on the one hand, 'Oxbridge' (Cambridge and Oxford) and on the other, cultural marxism (the Department was controversially split between them during that period). A philosophy lecturer in the Oxbridge department counselled me that I wouldn't find what I sought in his deparment, and I majored in comparative religion (important to understand this is *not* 'Divinity' or 'Biblical Studies'.)

At the time, the nearest thing I could find in Western culture to the enlightenment I was seeking was via the Gnostics. There had been a revival of interest in the subject, due to the discovery of the Nag Hammadi codex, a set of ancient scrolls that had been discovered in the desert by a shepherd (a suitably Gnostic re-introduction to the world!) Also the perennial philosophical texts of East and West. They contain these kinds of veins of authentic wisdom, often interspersed with historical sediments and base rock.

So, as to whether this has all had consequences in daily life - yes, as outlined above. That has stayed with me. But also 'no' in that I came to the realisation that I was not capable of the kind of sagacious wisdom and detachment that those I had learned about exhibited. I was still very much, in Japanese Buddhist terminology, 'bombu: a foolish ordinary person inherently ignorant, deluded, and flawed by their passions and karmic shortcomings'.

Nevertheless I should point out to you one important philosophical scholar, whom I discovered later in my search. That is Pierre Hadot. He is well-known for books such as Philosophy as a Way of Life. Also I am now subscribed to a number of podcasts and substacks, very much concerned with practical philosophy, often Stoic in orientation. There's a big audience for this material in the apocalyptic times we live in.

So, yes, overall, philosophy in one form or another has become very much part of day-to-day life. That's what it must be about, to be meaningful.

Carrol would say that the mental is nothing m9re than the physical. — Apustimelogist

Apustimologist, I think this is exactly where the crux lies. You’re so sure that “mental = physical” that you don’t see how the distinction shows up right under our noses. Consider Terrence Deacon’s formulation:

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. — Terrence Deacon, Incomplete Nature

That distinction is the distinction between the physical and the mental. The squiggles, sounds, and neuronal events are physical. The meaning is not. Yet meaning is not nothing — it structures our cognition, action, and communication. It is essential to our way of being in the world.

So when you say there’s “no evidence” for an ontological difference, you’re missing the point that that every act of reading, speaking, or thinking is already evidence. Information, significance, and intention aren’t physical, but they are nevertheless significant and fundamental to thought and speech.

(That quote is from the introduction to Terrence Deacon's book, Incomplete Nature. The remainder of the book is devoted to understanding how it is that these 'absentials' - factors which are not present, but nevertheless meaningful - came to be. Deacon is a biological anthropologist and neuroscientist.)

No not only humans, although I'll never know what it's like to be a bat.

'The root for wise traces back to the Proto-Germanic wis-, meaning "to see" or "to know". This Germanic origin is seen in words like the Latin sapientia ("wisdom") and the Greek sophia ("wisdom"), both connecting to discerning or tasting meaning.' In Sanskrit, 'vidya' is 'wisdom' or 'true knowledge' (more often encountered in the negative i.e. 'avidya', signifies lack or absence of wisdom). Also from the root 'vid', meaning 'to know' or 'to see'.

do we agree with contemporary thinkers like John Vervaeke that we “suffer a wisdom famine in the West”? — Tom Storm

Sure. The Enlightement casts a shadow. I'm overall in agreement with Vervaeke's diagnosis, although bearing in mind it is presented via a series of 52 hour-long lectures, staring with the neolithic, so it's very hard to summarise. But I think his syncretic approach of trying to integrate insights from cognitive science, evolutionary theory, philosophy and spirituality is right on the mark.

another 'hard problem of consciousness' thread? That discussion was with me, and that is what was being discussed. If I will still a mod I'd merge it, this topic sprouts endless threads.

As for others, it's a safe bet that they are beings just as I am - that everyone is 'me' but from their own unique perspective. Hence the maxim to 'treat others as you yourself would be treated'.

It's only that I see the Democrats being written off everywhere, 'bleeding voters', 'dire poll ratings'. And this, as the United States are quite visibly barrelling towards being a one-party State. The moves in Texas this week to tilt the electoral map, Trump's constant use of bogus 'emergencies', and many other factors - I think it's possible that there won't even be a 2028 Election. So the narrative of the Democrats being hopeless plays right into that.

"Esse est percipi" may be translated as "to be is to be perceived". Are the relations we perceive perceived only in the mind or perceived of the world through the senses?

Do relations exist in the mind, the world or both? — RussellA

There are some good instincts in what you’ve written, but I think a few key distinctions are blurred.

First, the direct vs. indirect realism debate is more nuanced than the picture you’ve set out. Hardly anyone today would defend the crude “objects exist only in the mind” version of indirect realism, or the equally naïve “mind is a passive window” version of direct realism. Contemporary debates are about representationalism, disjunctivism, and enactivism, which all handle the mind–world relation in subtler ways.

Second, the issue of relations is an old and thorny one (it goes back to Plato). But to ask “where are relations located?” may itself be a category mistake. Spatial relations, for instance, are not “in” object A, or “in” object B, or floating in a third place in between. They are structural features of how we understand and measure A and B. So the “overpopulation” worry—that there are too many relations to count as real entities—may dissolve once we stop treating relations as if they were objects alongside atoms and tables. They're on a different plane altogether.

Third, your latitude/longitude and red examples are on the right track, but I think they show how conceptual frameworks structure our understanding of the world, not that relations exist “only in the mind.” Latitude and longitude are conventions, but they reliably map onto real features of the Earth. Color doesn’t exist “in the world” in the same way as a wavelength does, but it is also not merely mental — it’s a mind–world hybrid. This is where Kant’s distinction between empirical realism and transcendental idealism is useful: empirically, we can say “the world is real,” but transcendentally, its knowability always presupposes the forms of our sensibility and understanding.

So you’re right to notice that “relations” aren’t as straightforward as they seem, but I’d caution against setting it up as “either in the mind or in the world.” They belong to the very interface where mind and world meet.

Truth, it is said, consists in the agreement of cognition with its object. In consequence of this mere nominal definition, my cognition, to count as true, is supposed to agree with its object. Now I can compare the object with my cognition, however, only by cognizing it. Hence my cognition is supposed to confirm itself, which is far short of being sufficient for truth. For since the object is outside me, the cognition in me, all I can ever pass judgement on is whether my cognition of the object agrees with my cognition of the object. — Kant, 1801. The Jasche Logic, in Lectures on Logic

Why must it be physical? this assumes from the outset that everything real must be made of particles or fields described by physics. But that is precisely the point in dispute.

Consider an analogy: in modern physics, atoms aren’t little billiard balls but excitations of fields. Yet fields themselves are puzzling entities—mathematically precise but ontologically unclear. No one thinks an electromagnetic field is a “blob of energy floating around.” It’s astructuring principle that manifests in predictable patterns, even if its “substance” is elusive.

Why not imagine psyche in analogous terms? Aristotle’s psuche was never conceived as a stuff or fluid but as an organising principle of the living body. Just as magnetic fields arrange iron filings, so too psyche might be conceived as a field-like effect that accounts for form, persistence, and perhaps memory.

This is roughly the metaphor behind Rupert Sheldrake’s “morphic fields”—a controversial hypothesis, yes, but one that at least shows how the psyche might be conceived without assuming it must be particle-based. Ian Stevenson’s work on children’s past-life recall provides data that challenge the default assumption that consciousness ends with brain-death (see report).

Carroll says: everything we know about quantum field theory rules this out. But that simply restates his physicalist presupposition: psyche must be physical, because everything is physical. That is circular. The real question is whether that underlying assumption is itself adequate to the evidence. And perhaps that will require more than ad-hoc adjustments to the presumption that everything is physical.

@180 Proof - save the eye-roll emojis. Seen them all before.

Chalmers is asking why, not what. — J

The what and why are all part of the same question.

Would you say that, because you are alive, you are unable to know what life is? . — J

Must the answer to the question ‘what is life?’ be only given in biological terms? For that matter, the question of the nature of life, even for biology, still eludes precise definition, even taking into account today’s vastly expanded knowledge of molecular biology. We know what living things are (although viruses are, of course, liminal examples), but there's no empirically verifiable answer to what life is, in the same way, and possibly for the same reasons, there's no clear-cut answer to what mind is.

Chalmers explains what the hard problem is. "What is the relationship" doesn't really get it -- Chalmers is asking why, not what. — J

The link doesn’t work, but I’ve already provided the reference and the passage, where Chalmers says that the problem is that no objective, third person account of the workings of the mind capture the lived nature of experience. He says it, black and white.

Chalmers has, of course, gone on to write an enormous amount in consciousness studies, he’s one of the pivotal figures in it, but the conceptions of what a scientific account of consciousness must be has changed tremendously in the period since that original paper came out. The avenue I’m pursuing is phenomenology of life and mind, through Evan Thompson’s books.

On the theme of the difficulty science has in accounting for the first-person nature of consciousness, another of his books (co-authored) is highly relevant to this discussion, namely, the Blind Spot of Science and the Neglect of Lived Experience. It says

“Despite the amazing, nonstop advances in physics, biology, and neuroscience, no fundamental progress on bridging the chasm between consciousness and physical models has been made in science since the bifurcation of nature that began with the rise of modern science. Although physical and biological models are increasingly sophisticated and informed by increasing amounts of data, the chasm remains. The problem that Huxley and Tyndall highlighted in the nineteenth century is the same one that philosophers Thomas Nagel and David Chalmers identified in the twentieth century and persists today.33 Indeed, it is hard to see how any advance in understanding physical processes, described in completely objective terms at whatever scale or level, will allow us to bridge this chasm. This situation should lead us to suspect that the hard problem of consciousness is built into blind-spot metaphysics, and not solvable in its terms.

... [the blind spot] arises when we mistake a method for the intrinsic structure of reality. We devise a powerful explanatory method that abstracts away consciousness while forgetting that the method remains fundamentally dependent on consciousness. — The Blind Spot - Adam Frank, Marcelo Gleiser, Evan Thompson

But you can also see what she sees, namely the eye itself. And thus for consciousness. — J

But that's precisely the problem. I can see an image of the eye, but I cannot see the act of seeing the image. That is the whole point, which I can't help but feel you're missing. And there's even robust scientific validation of this. This is the neural binding problem - the fact that no neural system has been identified which accounts for the subjective unity of experience. See this reference.

It also tells us something about the Democratic Party, — Mikie

Yeah, too many regular people in the Democratic Party. You know, people who go out and organise neighborhood events and waste time on community activism and grassroots stuff. Everyone knows they really need a charismatic huckster who can flood the airwaves. Poor fools, they should get with the times.

Look at the classified documents the FBI found stashed in John Bolton's bathroom!

No....wait.....

"Noumena" for Kant is analogous to "matter" for Aristotle. They are strictly conceptual, not referring to any independent thing as people are inclined to believe. — Metaphysician Undercover

A20/B34 (in the Transcendental Aesthetic): Kant says that in appearances there is “that which corresponds to sensation (the matter)” and “that which allows the manifold of appearance to be ordered in certain relations (the form).”

Here he is explicit: sensation provides the matter of appearances, while space and time are the form in which that matter is ordered.

This is Kant’s way of transposing the Aristotelian hylē–morphē distinction into the transcendental register: not about substances in the world, but about the conditions under which appearances are given to us. Konstantin Pollok has even described Kant’s position as “transcendental hylomorphism,” where the form/matter schema of Aristotelian philosophy is reworked at the transcendental level (ref).

Yes. That's the pun-ch line :rofl:

Meanwhile, Sergei Lavrov is saying that Zelenskyy is making any progress towards peace impossible. I'll fill in the blanks: 'The Ukrainians keep insisting that they own their own country. They won't agree that they should surrender to us and that Zelenskyy should resign. Therefore, we have no choice but to keep fighting.'