I don’t know if you noticed this post but I’m trying to make the point that what has been previously designated (and disparaged) as ‘philosophical idealism’ is nowadays well known to cognitive science.

University Vice Chancellor to Treasurer: ‘Hey the physics department is totally out of hand. Did you see how much they want for equipment this semester? Why can’t they be like the maths department? They only want paper, pencils and waste paper bins. Or philosophy. They don’t even want the bins.’

But his beliefs as to "why" the experience happened is like a blind man feeling around in the dark compared to the lights we have today. — Philosophim

I really don’t accept that. You’re talking about him as if he lived in Medieval Europe. He had a career spanning 50 years, which wasn’t even 100 years ago.

I don't ascribe to "materialism", or "physicalism" — Philosophim

I had thought so based on such statements as

One way to look at life is it is an internally self-sustaining chemical reaction. In a non-living reaction, the matter required to create the reaction eventually runs out on its own. Life seeks to sustain and extend its own balance of chemical reactions. — Philosophim

However on second reading, you’re differentiating life from chemistry, by saying that ‘life seeks to sustain and extend….’ So you’ve introduced the element of intentionality which I agree is necessary and which I don’t believe has any analogy in materialism.

I mean, at its basic Wayfarer, why is your consciousness stuck in your head? — Philosophim

Don’t accept that it is. Conscious thought is an activity of the brain, but consciousness does indeed extend throughout your body and permeates all living things to one degree or another.

That's an argument from false authority fallacy — Nickolasgaspar

It wasn’t so much an appeal to authority, but the observation that a lot of people say that Chalmer’s work is pseudo-philosophy, without, I think, demonstrating an understanding of the rationale behind his ‘hard problem’ argument. And indeed, that single paper launched Chalmers into a career as an internationally-renowned and tenured philosopher, which says something.

That points away from reductionism and suggests something emergent is necessary in understanding consciousness. — Mark Nyquist

This is where biosemiosis enters the picture. I’ve learned a lot about that from this forum.

So if we have no access to anything not a perception, how could we ever differentiate between what we experience and what we don't....? — Banno

Berkeley knocks that out of the park in his Dialogues

Don’t like the ‘made from’. More later.

What is it, if anything, in that quote that counts specifically agains realism? — Banno

Realism holds that the activities of the agent's mind have no bearing on the existence of the world, that these can be regarded as separable.

Dr. Penfield was practicing until 1960. That's before we had computers. — Philosophim

I don't see how the invention of computers has any bearing. The specifics of his claim haven't been shown to be incorrect, and the fact that it happened 50 years ago is not relevant. His main point is that his patients could clearly distinguish memories and sensations that were triggered by his instruments from their own volitional control. They would say 'you're doing that'. Penfield interpreted that to mean that their own awareness was separate to the reactions he was able to elicit by manipulation. That is why he tended towards a dualist view late in his career.

"Using fMRI brain scans, these researchers were able to predict participants’ decisions as many as seven seconds before the subjects had consciously made the decisions. — Philosophim

That indicates that conscious awareness of an action lags the unconscious, autonomic processes that initiate the action. I don't see how it has any bearing on the question of the nature of intentionality, and whether intentional actions can be understood as causally dependent on physical processes, which is really the point at issue. The 'placebo effect' and many other aspects of psychosomatic medicine show a 'downward causative' effect from states of mind and beliefs to actual physiology. According to the 'bottom-up' ontology of materialism, this ought never to happen. (Hence the hackneyed saying 'mind over matter'.)

As far as the overall efficacy of fMRI scans, this was one of the areas that was shown to be subject to the so-called 'replication crises' in the social sciences about ten years ago. See Do You Believe in God, or is that a Software Glitch

The problem that is always going to undermine physicalism or materialism is that being has a dimension that no physical process has. A first-person experience has a dimension of feeling that can never be replicated in a third-person or objective description. It's a very hard point to articulate, as it is more an implicit reality than an objective phenomenon. That is what the argument about 'the hard problem of consciousness' seeks to illuminate, and from your analysis of it, I'm not persuaded you see the point.

Only that you never seem to see the point of that passage whenever it's quoted.

Chalmers's why questions are pseudo philosophical questions (Sneaks in Intention and purpose in to nature). — Nickolasgaspar

Curious then that Chalmers is University Professor of Philosophy and Neural Science and co-director of the Center for Mind, Brain, and Consciousness at New York University, and an Honorary Professor of Philosophy at the Australian National University. Must have fooled a lot of important people!

That is the basis of Ryle's idea of the category mistake. He argues that, 'the hallowed contrast between Mind and Matter will be dissipated, but not dissipated by either of the equally hallowed absorptions of Mind by Matter or of Matter by Mind, but in quite a different way'. — Jack Cummins

Ryle's criticism is valid in saying that Descartes' division of 'mind and matter' has absurd consequences by proposing 'res cogitans' as a literal 'thinking thing' with no extension - how then can it contact or interact with extended but mindless matter?

But the downside of Ryle's criticism has been the tendency to dismiss the concept of mind altogether, which you see in its most extreme form in Daniel Dennett (who incidentally studied under Ryle at Oxford.) This has lead to the 'post-Cartesian' attitude prevalent in much English-speaking philosophy which tends toward materialist theories of mind, i.e. that mind is a product of brain, itself a product of evolutionary biology, itself a product of undirected physical laws, and so on.

This is a scrapbook entry about how discoveries in cognitive science lend support to transcendental idealism.

As understood by evolutionary biology, Homo Sapiens is the result of millions years of evolution. For all these thousands of millions of years, our sensory and intellectual abilities have been honed and shaped by the exigencies of survival, through various life-forms - fish, lizard, mammal, primate and so on - in such a way as to eventually give rise to the capabilities that we have today.

Scientific disciplines such as cognitive and evolutionary psychology have revealed that conscious perception, while subjectively appearing to exist as a continuum, is actually composed of a heirarchical matrix of thousand, or millions, of interacting cellular transactions, commencing at the most basic level with the parasympathetic system which controls one’s respiration, digestion, and so on, up through various levels to culminate in that peculiarly human ability of rational thought (and realms beyond, although this is beyond the scope of current science.)

Consciousness plays a central role in co-ordinating these diverse activities so as to give rise to the sense of continuity which we call ‘ourselves’ and the apparent coherence and unity of the external world. Yet it is important to realise that the naïve sense in which we understand ourselves, and the objects of our perception, to exist, is in reality dependent upon the constructive activities of our consciousness many of which are below the threshhold of conscious awareness.

When you perceive something - large, small, alive or inanimate, local or remote - there is considerable work involved in creating the object from the raw material of perception. Your eyes receive the sensory stimuli, your mind cognises the image in relation to all of the other stimuli impacting your senses at that moment – either acknowledging it, or ignoring it, depending on how busy you are; your memory will then compare it to other objects you have seen, from whence you will (hopefully) recall its name, and perhaps know something about it ('star', 'tree', 'frog', etc).

In other words, the mind is *not* simply the passive recipient of sensory objects which exist irrespective of your perception of them (this is 'the myth of the given'). Rather consciousness is an active agent which constructs what we understand as reality on the basis of sensory input, but also on the basis of unconscious processes, memories, intentions, intuitions, prejudices, prior knowledge, and so on.

Furthermore, and this is the philosophically interesting aspect of it, the neural systems by which the mind creates the consciousness of a unified whole remain unknown. As computer scientist Jerome Feldman shows in The Neural Binding Problem, Chalmer's 'hard problem' is recognised in scientific accounts of consciousness, insofar as there has been no neural mechanism identified which accounts for the unity of conscious experience. There are detailed accounts of all of the aspects of the brain which assimilate different aspects of perception (color, shape, movement and so on) but 'this functional story tells nothing about the neural mechanisms that support this magic. What we do know is that there is no place in the brain where there could be a direct neural encoding of the illusory detailed scene. That is, enough is known about the structure and function of the visual system to rule out any detailed neural representation that embodies the subjective experience. So, this version of the Neural Binding Problem really is a scientific mystery at this time.'

And that holistic, gestalt-generating ability of the mind to forge the 'subjective unity of experience' maps very well against Kant's 'transcendental apperception' - the process by which we become aware of the unity and coherence of our experiences and their integration into a single, integrated whole.

Generally surgeons will keep you awake and map your experiences when they stimulate certain areas of the brain. They literally alter your conscious subjective experience. — Philosophim

There was a Canadian neurosurgeon, Wilder Penfield, who was famous for conducting such tests, which he did over many years. He started out a convinced physicalist, but in the end he subscribed to a form of dualism. He noted that patients were always aware that the sensation, memory, etc., evoked by brain stimulation was done to them, but not by them. Penfield found that patients retained a “third person” perspective on mental events evoked by brain stimulation. This lead him to conclude that the patient's mind operated independently of cortical stimulation:

The patient’s mind, which is considering the situation in such an aloof and critical manner, can only be something quite apart from neuronal reflex action. It is noteworthy that two streams of consciousness are flowing, the one driven by input from the environment, the other by an electrode delivering sixty pulses per second to the cortex. The fact that there should be no confusion in the conscious state suggests that, although the content of consciousness depends in large measure on neuronal activity, awareness itself does not. — The Mystery of the Mind, Wilder Penfield, p55

you're advocating various Eastern mystical traditions without making a case for how 'transcendental idealism' follows from or is consistent with them — 180 Proof

The similarities between Kant's and Schopenhauer's transcendental idealism and the philosophies of the Upaniṣads and Buddhists texts is well known. As I already said, it is not too long a bow to draw between the 'unknown knower' of the Upaniṣad and Kant's 'transcendental apperception'. Both of them recognise the sense in which 'life is the creation of mind' - not the theistic sense of divine creation, but moment by moment, mind by mind.

Consciousness is neither the contents we being aware of information apprehend, nor the resulting qualia, but being aware of information.

The way I put it is 'sentient consciousness is the capacity for experience. Rational sentient consciousness also includes the capacity for reason'.

one can hardly anthropomorphize humans

:clap: But today's naturalism tends on the contrary to animalise humans, to deny any essential distinction to being human (see Anything but Human.)

Many argue that intentional being is too different from physical being to be reduced to it – a position performatively affirmed by eliminative materialists

Perhaps you could comment on that a little further?

Thus, natural science begins with a Fundamental Abstraction

I see the origin of the fundamental abstraction in Galileo's mathematization of nature, combined with the separation of primary and secondary qualities. This is the point where the objects of physics proper came to be conceived solely in terms of attributes which could be successfully quantized - mass, velocity, force, and so on - whilst appearance and many other attributes were assigned to the observer, and thus relegated, in effect, to the subjective domain, with what is physically measurable being declared what is actually real - hence, modern physicalism, the veritable origin of what you're calling 'the standard model'.

It is as absurd to reject replicable introspection because its token is private, as to reject Galileo’s observations because he made them in solitude.

Here I differ. The point about Galileo's observations, and Newton's laws, is that they can be validated in the third person. In that vital sense, they're objective - the same for all who can observe them. Introspection, per se, has no such method of validation - this was the cause of the failure of the early psychological methods of Willhelm Wundt.

Phenomenology introduces a disciplined method of the examination of the nature of experience, although I don't know whether it could be called 'introspective'.

Self-knowledge - insight into the nature of one's mind - often comes, not through introspection, but through life events. Thinking about the nature of experience in the naive sense of awareness of one's own stream of thinking rarely gets you any further than self-absorption, while true self-awareness often requires something more than that, often appearing in the form of shock, loss, or dissappointment. Perhaps the term is 'soul-searching'. But I don't know if the anodyne term of 'introspection' really conveys that.

For [Aristotle], form and ‘matter’ (ὕλη) are not things, but the foundations for two modes of conceptualization.

Excellent - sums up an idea that has been in the back of my mind reading Aristotelian-Thomistic dualism for a long while. I've never studied either Aristotle or Aquinas in depth and at my stage in life, I'm not likely to, but I've come to see the 'A-T' school as representative of the 'perennial philosophy' in Western culture.

But prey, continue. — Banno

Now there's a freudian slip for the ages.

My point was idealism has not been constantly mainstream — Tom Storm

Idealism IS the mainstream. All else is degeneration. ('Footnotes to Plato' - remember?)

So the poll is simply a reflection of the fact that we live in a degenerate age - something Plato would no doubt vigourously agree with. But then, Popper did call him an enemy of the open society.

ChatGPT Question de Jour

Q. What are some great movies about the theme of the main character getting self-knowledge or self-awareness through the story?

A. There are many great movies that explore the theme of the main character gaining self-knowledge or self-awareness through the course of the story. Here are some examples:

"The Matrix" (1999) - Neo, the main character, learns that his life is a simulation and he must break free from his programmed reality to become the hero of a rebellion.

"The Truman Show" (1998) - Truman Burbank, the main character, discovers that his entire life has been a reality TV show and he must escape to find true freedom and purpose.

"Groundhog Day" (1993) - Phil Connors, a weatherman, is forced to relive the same day over and over until he learns to become a better person and find fulfillment in life.

"Fight Club" (1999) - The narrator, an insomniac, creates an alter ego named Tyler Durden to escape his mundane life but ultimately realizes the destructive consequences of his actions.

"Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" (2004) - Joel Barish, the main character, undergoes a procedure to erase his memories of his former lover but ultimately decides that the pain of loss is worth the joy of love.

"The Social Network" (2010) - Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, learns the cost of success and the importance of relationships as he navigates the rise of his social media empire.

"Into the Wild" (2007) - Christopher McCandless, a young man disillusioned with society, embarks on a journey of self-discovery in the wilderness but ultimately learns the value of human connection.

"Good Will Hunting" (1997) - Will Hunting, a janitor at MIT, discovers his genius for mathematics and confronts his emotional demons with the help of a therapist.

"The Shawshank Redemption" (1994) - Andy Dufresne, a prisoner, learns to navigate the harsh realities of prison life and finds hope and redemption through his friendship with fellow inmate Red.

"Lost in Translation" (2003) - Bob Harris, a middle-aged actor, forms a bond with a young woman in Tokyo and learns to appreciate the beauty of life's fleeting moments.

Now, I could have arrived at that through my own research and investigation.

But not in 4 seconds.

Incidentally, I haven't seen all those movies, but every one I've seen, I regard as a great movie. (On reflection, the only one I haven't seen is Fight Club. I bet it's a great movie. )

The hard problem really boils down to "What is it like to be another conscious being?"
— Philosophim

this doesn't seem quite correct. — jgill

+1. That is indeed not the point of the argument. The point of the argument about 'what it is like to be...' is to convey the fact of being a subject of experience. 'Being a subject of experience' is not something that can be captured in any objective description. So depicting it in terms of 'what it is like to be someone else' plainly misses the point of the argument.

@Dfpolis - I've read most of the article. As I too am generally critical of physicalism and reductionism, then I'm onside with your general approach ('the enemy of the enemy is my friend ;-) ) - although there are a few specific points with which I will take issue, when I've spent a bit more time digesting it.

As far as I'm concerned" ... i.e. a cop-out. — 180 Proof

You asked a question:

I just don't see how nonduality prioritizes "mind" "subject" "experience" over above "world" — 180 Proof

I answered with a passage from a canonical text of Advaita non-dualism, saying that 'outside the atman, nothing has any sense'.

What about that exchange is not clear?

I sort of, kind of, agree. But I've become acutely aware of how 'post-Cartesian' our worldview instinctively is. Descartes is where the modern 'mind-body' problem comes from - along with a constellation of early moderns, notably Galileo, Locke, Newton, and so on, the division of mind and matter, 'primary' and 'secondary' attributes, religion and science. I see being modern as itself a state of being, a station of consciousness, shaped by these influences. Learning how to be aware of that is a big part of philosophy IMO. This is not to say that modernity, or Enlightenment rationalism, or what have you, is 'bad' or 'wrong' - sure prefer it to many alternatives - but the problems it has are like it's shadow, in the Jungian sense.

Also don't agree with the equivalence of materialism and idealism. Kastrup has a lot to say on that - materialism relies much more on abstractions than does idealism. Why? Because the concept of matter is itself an abstraction whereas the reality of first-person experience is apodictic. I don't have to copy in again that paragraph from Schopenhauer0 about how time and space only enter into reality through the brain.

So - not just on and on, around and around. There's light at the end of the tunnel, and I'm seeing it ;-)

I know this and agree. But it's a blip. — Tom Storm

A blip could indicate incoming ordinance, so beware.

I was going to add, idealism nowadays has rather counter-cultural implications. Kastrup is still considered by a lot of people a crank. Realism is - you know - hard-headed, real world, scientific, modern. Idealism sounds to closer to mysticism.

But when did it start and what do we count as idealism? — Tom Storm

I think a fair case can be made for the ancestor of what was to become known later as 'idealism' in Greek philosophy - specifically Plato, of course, as the Ideas as fundamental constituents of being must be considered Ur-Idealism.

In the history of ideas, I think there are some major philosophers who can count as idealist - one in particular being Duns Scottus Eriugena. A scholar by the name of Dermot Moran has published a book arguing that Eriugena's philosophy, which was a subtle synthesis of neo-Platonism and Christian doctrine, was a formative influence on later German-speaking philosophy and was clearly visible in the German idealists (ref). And I don't think it's controversial to say that the last really influential idealists were the German idealists - Hegel, Schopenhauer, Schelling, Fichte. The British idealists, like Bradley, were very much part of the same overall movement. (In my view, Hegelian philosophy kind of collapsed under the weight of its own verbiage - you could gather a room full of so-called experts on Kant and Hegel and none of them would agree. It lacked the experiential dimension that characterises Buddhist culture in the form of a continuous lineage of monastic practitioners.)

Can you demonstrate that idealists are less individualist or materialistic? — Tom Storm

It's not a matter of individuals, people can profess one thing and do another altogether. But I'm a fan of various historiographic theories, like Oswald Spengler's, or Pitirim Sorokin - that cultures go through cyclical changes and have characteristic kinds of mentality. And I just don't think it can be disputed that secular western culture has a predominantly materialist attitude: not materialist in the sense of coveting material stuff, but as understanding the fundamental stuff of the world to be bodies in motion, governed by physical laws (which have now usurped the role previously assigned to divine commandments.)

How does Mary describe the knowledge? — TiredThinker

I would imagine it would be simple to describe her experience to another person who is not colour-blind: 'I saw colours for the first time! Now I know what colours are!' And presumably her interlocutor would know just what she meant. But apropos of your OP, she could not, of course, convey that understanding to a blind person, who at best has an analogical understanding of what colour must mean.

I think idealism as any kind of majority view died with the 19th Century. In the 'Golden Age' of American philosophy - C.S. Peirce, Joshua Royce, William James, Borden Parker Bowne - idealism, mainly adapted from European idealism, was assumed. In England with Russell and Moore's overthrow of idealism, and later Gilbert Ryle's long reign at Oxford - idealism was regarded as superseded. But there are always a few brave souls who carry the torch - I've noticed the books of Timothy Sprigge, who published A Vindication of Absolute Idealism in 1984. There's also a current German Professor, Sebastian Rodl, who defends absolute idealism in his book Self Consciousness and Objectivity (impenetrable to the casual reader, alas.) But the popularity of idealism is irrelevant as far as I'm concerned, the fact that it's a minority view can just as easily be ascribed to a deficiency of modern culture as to any deficiency of the basic principles. After all we live in an individualist, materially-oriented, technocratic culture, and will naturally adopt philosophies that support this milieu.

Doesn't this imply that matter is capable of intentional action?
— Wayfarer

At a sufficient level of organization, yes. — Fooloso4

But there must be some level of intention to reach a sufficient level of organisation in the first place. (I'll leave it there until I finish the article.)

Excellent. That's more or less the point I was labouring to make. You wouldn't see much of it in academic philosophy lectures, though.

Born in 1932, that makes him 90 this year. When I found his book, I emailed him and got a nice reply - about July last year. His book has gone under the radar, because he's not known in philosophy or cog sci, so I don't think it received a lot of attention, which is a pity - deserves it.

The theory is that matter is self-organizing. — Fooloso4

Doesn't this imply that matter is capable of intentional action?

Meaning is both embedded and embodied. It's embedded in our environment, embodied in language and gestures, interpreted on many levels from the cellular to the semantic. It's arguably the fundamental stuff of life, much more so than molecular structures. That's the rationale behind biosemiotics.

Wasn't trying to single you out - It was just some remarks you made earlier in the thread . (Did I mention Charles Pinter to you before? You can find his website here https://charlespinter.com/ . He has many publications in mathematics and has recently published what I consider an excellent book, not strictly speaking on philosophy, but with many interesting philosophical implications, Mind and the Cosmic Order.)

The unexamined life, yes. Not the unexamined "me." — Ciceronianus

Pretty fine distinction, in my view.

Pierre Hadot, classical philosopher and historian of philosophy, is best known for his conception of ancient philosophy as a bios or way of life (manière de vivre). His work has been widely influential in classical studies and on thinkers, including Michel Foucault. According to Hadot, twentieth- and twenty-first-century academic philosophy has largely lost sight of its ancient origin in a set of spiritual practices that range from forms of dialogue, via species of meditative reflection, to theoretical contemplation. These philosophical practices, as well as the philosophical discourses the different ancient schools developed in conjunction with them, aimed primarily to form, rather than only to inform, the philosophical student. The goal of the ancient philosophies, Hadot argued, was to cultivate a specific, constant attitude toward existence, by way of the rational comprehension of the nature of humanity and its place in the cosmos.

Quite germane to the conception of philosophy as a quest for truth.

When we see color I think we only gain knowledge about the physical phenomenon that allows for the phenomenon of color, namely wavelength? — TiredThinker

The point of the thought-experiment is that when Mary sees colour she knows what colour is like, for the first time - something she didn't know before.

If we narrowly interpret the meaning of an "intention" as referring only to the agent's internal state, then intentions as such cannot be teleological, for the agent's actions are explainable without final causes. — sime

Have a glance at the wikipedia entry on the word teleonomy. It is a neologism coined in 1958 by a biologist to accomodate the awkward fact that virtually everything in biology is goal-directed, while trying to differentiate it from the Aristotelian 'teleology', a boo-word for modern science.

Furthermore, there's been an increasing recognition of the significance of telos and teleology in biology, with Aristotelian ideas being re-considered. An idle search of Aristotle and DNA will return some interesting papers on that subject.

Thanks! I was terrible at school maths, much to my later regret in life, but the point is philosophical rather than arithmetical - as jgill says, many maths educators are not the least interested in the philosophical question.

But to what extent is philosophy useful to this self-examination as you call it? — Ciceronianus

'The unexamined life is not worth living' is one of the Socratic maxims. Philosophy itself means, not just the 'love of wisdom' but 'love-wisdom' and it's cultivation. I've been following a series of posts on Medium by a scholar of stoic philosophy, and that is its entire focus. Placing the question in the context of one or another philosophical school allows you to situate the maxims and concepts of philosophy in the context of others who have followed the same path. (This approach is historian of philosophy Pierre Hadot's claim to fame, in such books as Philosophy as a Way of Life. Alain Du Bouton and Jules Evans are two contemporary philosophers who have established a popular following - i.e. they're not academics - and much of whose writing is addressed as "practical philosophy".)

So does enlightenment give no information at all? — Isaac

I would put it like this: that it's more like a change in perspective.

When you have an insight, have you 'acquired information'? You may have no new information at all, but you might realise the information you already have means something very different to what you previously thought.

A good example are the processes involved in a gestalt shift - you see what you've already seen but something but suddenly it takes on a different significance.

Asked and answered as far as I’m concerned

I just don't see how nonduality prioritizes "mind" "subject" "experience" over above "world" "object" "thing" as transcendental idealism does, Wayf, so maybe you can explain to me. — 180 Proof

As mentioned earlier, the point about Buddhist idealism is not that it claims 'the world is mind-created' but that we normally misconstrue the nature of experience and cling to the impermanent as a source of the satisfaction that it cannot provide. It is different to Western metaphysical idealism in that sense, but neither does it support any form of materialism (as you know, materialists were represented by 'carvakas' in the Buddhist texts and always presented as philosophical opponents of the Buddha. See What Is and Isn't Yogācāra Dan Lusthaus. )

As regards Advaita, here is an abridged passage from the Upaniṣad comprising a dialogue with a Vedantic sage, about the nature of the ātman:

"Yājñavalkya, answer this. There is an eternal Being which is immediately presented into experience and directly observed; which is the Self of all beings and internal to everything. Explain it to me. What is that which is innermost to all beings, which is internal to everything, which is non-immediate experience – not immediately experienced as through the senses when they perceive objects, and which is direct, not indirect experience? Explain that to me." ....

Yājñavalkya says: "You tell me that I have to point out the Self as if it is a cow or a horse. Not possible! It is not an object like a horse or a cow. I cannot say, 'here is the ātman; here is the Self'. It is not possible because you cannot see the seer of seeing. The seer can see that which is other than the Seer, or the act of seeing. An object outside the seer can be beheld by the seer. How can the seer see himself? How is it possible? You cannot see the seer of seeing. You cannot hear the hearer of hearing. You cannot think the Thinker of thinking. You cannot understand the Understander of understanding. That is the ātman.

"Nobody can know the ātman inasmuch as the ātman is the Knower of all things. So, no question regarding the ātman can be put, such as "What is the ātman?' 'Show it to me', etc. You cannot show the ātman because the Shower is the ātman; the Experiencer is the ātman; the Seer is the ātman; the Functioner in every respect through the senses or the mind or the intellect is the ātman. As the basic Residue of Reality in every individual is the ātman, how can we go behind It and say, 'This is the ātman?' Therefore, the question is impertinent and inadmissible. The reason is clear. It is the Self.

"Everything other than the ātman is stupid; it is useless; it is good for nothing; it has no value; it is lifeless. Everything assumes a meaning because of the operation of this ātman in everything. Minus that, nothing has any sense." Then Uṣasta Cākrāyana, the questioner kept quiet. He understood the point and did not speak further. — Brihadaranyaka Upaniṣad

Clearly it articulates the supremacy of ātman above the phenomenal domain. I don't think it's too long a bow to draw a comparison between this and Kant's 'transcendental apperception' . I've always believed that point about the inability to 'see the seer of seeing' is significant, and has not been made explicit in the Western canon, as far as I know. It is picked up in contemporary philosophy in the idea of 'the blind spot' as an inherent limitation of objective science.

But they are all thought-based, they all rely on some 'data-harvesting' method, be it meditation, revelation, or enlightenment... — Isaac

Well indeed I would agree that if you equate enlightenment and data-harvesting then there is probably no enlightenment to be had.

That is alarming — Nickolasgaspar

Look out! Idealists under the bed!

The Kantian question, for example, what can I know, places the human being as an abstraction, as it were as a pure spirit that, like a machine, can think about God and the world in a pure form. This idealized, individualized fictional human does not exist. — Wolfgang

Kant may have shortcomings, but he doesn't reduce mankind to abstractions. (My forum name is not 'wanderer' although it might be a nice alternative should I decide to change it.)

OK, I will try again. The point of the 'everyone knows' statement is to depict the apparently-obvious fact that the Universe pre-existed h. sapiens by billions of years, as is common knowledge. So this is a frequent objection to any form of idealism - 'if you say that the world is "created by the mind" then how do you account for the fact that it existed a long time prior to any conscious rational mind?' But your selective quotation of the passage then omits the grounds of Schopenhauer's 'defense of Kant', as he puts it. You then go to a peremptory dismissal: 'Obviously Kant doesn't know either'. But I don't think the 'sage of Konisburg' can be dismissed so easily.

I think the point of the argument is the reference to Kant's view that time and space are fundamental intuitions of the mind - *not* things that exist in themselves. In other words, space and time are not purely objective in nature but are grounded in the observing mind. And this has also dawned upon at least some scientists. (Andrei Linde is a scientific cosmologist.)

The problem of including the observer in our description of physical reality arises most insistently when it comes to the subject of quantum cosmology - the application of quantum mechanics to the universe as a whole - because, by definition, 'the universe' must include any observers. Andrei Linde has given a deep reason for why observers enter into quantum cosmology in a fundamental way. It has to do with the nature of time. The passage of time is not absolute; it always involves a change of one physical system relative to another, for example, how many times the hands of the clock go around relative to the rotation of the Earth. When it comes to the Universe as a whole, time loses its meaning, for there is nothing else relative to which the universe may be said to change. This 'vanishing' of time for the entire universe becomes very explicit in quantum cosmology, where the time variable simply drops out of the quantum description. It may readily be restored by considering the Universe to be separated into two subsystems: an observer with a clock, and the rest of the Universe. So the observer plays an absolutely crucial role in this respect. Linde expresses it graphically: 'thus we see that without introducing an observer, we have a dead universe, which does not evolve in time', and, 'we are together, the Universe and us. The moment you say the Universe exists without any observers, I cannot make any sense out of that. I cannot imagine a consistent theory of everything that ignores consciousness...in the absence of observers, our universe is dead'. — Paul Davies, The Goldilocks Enigma: Why is the Universe Just Right for Life, p 271

I don't know if "dead" is the right word, but I think the basic thrust of this paragraph tends to support the Kantian view. The observer has a fundamental role - but s/he is not part of the objective picture. That happens to be a different version of the same overall 'observer problem in physics'.

What I mean is that our understanding of ‘the external world’ as something completely separate from ourselves is mistaken. That's why I keep referring to the cognitive science perspective - their realisation of the role the mind (or brain) plays in constructing what we instinctively understand to be external to us. One way I have put it is that whilst we may be distinct and separate - an inevitable consequence of existence! - we are not, as it were, outside of, or apart from, reality itself. That, I think, is the key insight of non-dualism. So, forgive the New Age connotations, but the fruit of the idealist quest is 'the unitive vision' - which I believe is something your philosophical inspiration, Baruch Spinoza, also considered:

Thus, in his mature masterpiece, the Ethics, Spinoza finds lasting happiness only in the “intellectual love of God”, which is the mystical, non-dual vision of the single “Substance” (I would prefer "subject") underlying everything and everyone. The non-dual 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. — Peter Sas

The realist sees the existence of constraints as the most significant element, the idealist sees the degree of freedom within those constraints as the most important bit. — Isaac

Very good post, really brings out the issue.

If even our eyes and the fine-tuned measuring devices of the scientist are irrecoverably flawed by subjectivity, then merely 'thinking about it' can't very well be held up as being an improvement.... If even our eyes and the fine-tuned measuring devices of the scientist are irrecoverably flawed by subjectivity, then merely 'thinking about it' can't very well be held up as being an improvement. — Isaac

I think that the really deep aspects of the various world philosophical traditions do far, far more than just 'think about it'. They have their methodologies, strict, rigorous, and highly disciplined. But they're not within the ambit of 'the objective sciences' in the modern sense. Quite why that is, is not so much a matter of philosophy so much as cultural dynamics. Modern scientific method, and 'Enlightenment Rationalism', embody a kind of stance which is historically conditioned by the emergence of individualism and the dominance of technology. There's nothing from within that milieu which can provide a normative framework for judging what is of greater or lesser value, in the grand scheme. That's why I think there has to be a 'soteriological' element - excuse the jargon, but it means 'concerned with salvation', although in Eastern religions, the term is not 'salvation' but 'liberation'. In any case, it means some ultimate reason or ground, some pole star against which to set your moral compass. But then our secular culture has been innoculated against any such ideas as a consequence, again, of our cultural dynamics. Which is why people such as myself have had to search outside the framework of Western culture for resolution.

Magee is absentmindedly stupid in some important ways. — L'éléphant

I'll favour his account over yours in this case.

Is mind ontologically separate from / independent of (the) world?

Does mind correspond to Being and ideas to Beings (well isn't Being / mind also an "idea" – the one we're discussing)? — 180 Proof

Are you referring to the distinction between 'ontological' and 'epistemological' idealism. The former is said to hold that 'mind' or 'consciousness' is a literal constituent of the world (in a way analogous to electrical fields or as an attribute of fundamental constituents). This is something like Galen Strawson's and Philip Goff's panpsychism, which I don't subscribe to. It is an attempt to characterise 'mind' as an objective existent which I don't think can be done. (I critiqued one of Philip Goff's essays here and much to my surprise, he responded although I don't think any kind of conclusion was reached.)

'Epistemological' idealism is said to hold that mind (or experiential states) are fundamental in the sense that everything we know is experiential - knowledge of (x) is a state of experiencing x. It is actually close to some forms of empiricism - Berkeley is considered an empiricist.

Does mind correspond to 'Being' - not sure - I thnk 'being' is a more general term - mind indicates self-awareness.

Don't know if this addresses your questions.

If I was to describe everything I know of sight to a blind person who has always been blind could I even begin to make it clear what I perceive? — TiredThinker

Check out the article on Mary's Room.

The knowledge argument (also known as Mary's room) is a philosophical thought experiment proposed by Frank Jackson in his article "Epiphenomenal Qualia" (1982) and extended in "What Mary Didn't Know" (1986).

The experiment describes Mary, a scientist who exists in a black and white world where she has extensive access to physical descriptions of color, but no actual perceptual experience of color. The central question of the thought experiment is whether Mary will gain new knowledge when she goes outside the black and white world and experiences seeing in color.

It's not the same point you're making, but it's related.