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.'

That is the subject of the David Chalmers paper being discussed.

Speaking of whom, a very young Chalmers laying it out, in an interview I’m guessing in the first half of the 90’s.

https://youtube.com/shorts/-jEp6BqVOZ8?si=JQk66I3HXlbtXHtB

Notice the explicit Cartesian allusion in the first few sentences. Turns out that ‘know thyself’ is actually a lot harder than stellar chemistry! Who’d have thought?

:up:

What seems crucial here is not so much what is said, but what’s left unsaid. By framing NDE testimony within Wittgensteinian grammar and JTB-style analysis, the discussion is kept in epistemological and analytical territory. That’s careful and deliberate. But perhaps the unsaid premise is the one that gives the whole topic its charge: if NDEs are veridical, then the standard mind–brain equivalence is challenged - along with the assumption that humans are wholly or simply physical. That is what makes the discussion so charged in my view.

I can see why you would want to avoid religious overtones, but the metaphysical implications can’t simply be wished away. They’re the silent partner in the argument. I mean, can we imagine Wittgenstein entertaining these hypotheses?

chitta chatta — Punshhh

This is a 'yogic pun', of course. In Eastern philosophy 'citta' is variously translated as 'mind', 'heart', or 'being'. According to the classical texts of yoga, the citta (mind-stream) is continuously disturbed or polluted by sense-impressions, cravings, longings, memories of past traumas and so on, which manifest as 'vritti', thought-forms or disturbances. The yogic aspirant aims for the stilling of these vritti, hence the long and arduous periods of 'dhyana' (meditation) and entering states of inner stillness (samadhi). A higher state of samadhi is called 'nirvikalpa', where 'nir-' means ' negation of' and 'vikalpa' are 'discriminative ideas'. So, the negation of thought-forms and inner stillness. Very far from my normal busy mind.

Would you agree that the hard problem is also a problem of how consciousness emerges, and why it does so? — J

Even that has an implicit assumption - that consciousness is 'something that emerges', while 'emergence' is only one of several approaches.

The problem Chalmers describes is the relationship of third-person, objective descriptions of physical processes with first-person experience. It's the same problem as the explanatory gap problem - the physiology of pain does not capture the experience of pain. Of course, none of this is 'a problem' at all, except for those who try to insist that the third-person, objective account of experience leaves no explanatory gap. In that sense, the 'hard problem' is nearer to a rhetorical argument than a theory about physiology. It’s an argument against ‘scientism’.

The eye can see itself, actually, by using scientific technology -- in fact, such technology allows us to see, and explain, the eye much better than we can do as mere experiencers and observers. — J

I wear specs and of course the optometrist has instruments and expertise to examine my eyes and prescribe the necessary lenses. But she doesn’t see my seeing. She presents charts and asks me to describe what I see. And then, she has expertise to interpret those results, but even if I saw those results I wouldn’t have the expertise to interpret them. This is an exact analogy for the issue Chalmers describes.

There's a parallel there with what Heidegger called the "forgetfulness of being" - the way that Being itself (the fact that things are, rather than what they are) tends to remain hidden or taken for granted in our everyday engagement with the world.

In scientific analysis, we focus exclusively on properties, structures, functions, causal relations - but the sheer fact of being, existence as such, doesn't appear as an object of investigation. It's presupposed but never thematized. Similarly, in studying consciousness, we analyze neural correlates, cognitive functions, behavioral outputs - all the what of consciousness - but the that of experience, the bare fact that there's something it's like to be conscious, remains curiously absent from the scientific picture. And attempts to point it out are vigorously resisted, or dismissed as sophistry or confusion. I've seen that happen on this forum dozens of times.

This forgetfulness isn't a failure of science but perhaps an inevitable consequence of its method. The third-person stance that makes science so powerful necessarily brackets the first-person dimension - not just of human experience, but of existence itself. When we adopt the scientific attitude, we're looking at beings as objects of study rather than relating to them as fellow existents (although of course we can do both.) So the "hard problem" might be seen as a specific instance of this more fundamental forgetfulness - not just about consciousness, but about the being-dimension of reality that always already underlies any scientific investigation but never shows up within the objective data.

>See It is Never Known but Is the Knower (.pdf), Michel Bitbol

I was contrasting organisms with atoms. I believe that only organisms are capable of experience, not atoms. So, no, an atom does none of those things.

But that is just to restate the blind spot. To say “the subject is irrelevant to science” is precisely the forgetting I am talking about. Science can only operate because there are subjects who perceive, measure, theorize, and draw conclusions. When it presents its findings as “the way the world is in itself,” it effaces the constitutive role of the subject in making any of those findings meaningful in the first place.

Scientific realism, as you describe it, is not incoherent—it’s indispensable within its proper scope. What’s incoherent is to extend it into a metaphysical claim: that the world is the way science describes it independently of the perspective through which such descriptions become possible. That is the leap from method to ontology, and that is exactly what the “blind spot of science” critique is about.

I don't question that the predicates you mention can meaningfully apply to what is independent from human perception―to me questioning that is a nonsense. It's not a blind spot, I understand your argument, and I simply disagree with it. — Janus

But you’ve just restated the issue in another guise. To say the predicates of sameness, objectivity, and existence “can meaningfully apply” to what is independent of perception is exactly the move that the blind spot critique is drawing attention to. Of course it feels like nonsense to you to question that—because you’re presupposing the very standpoint I’m asking us to examine!

The point is not that your position is inconsistent. It’s perfectly consistent within the realist frame. The point is that this frame cannot account for its own conditions of possibility—namely, the constituting role of the subject. That is what Kant meant when he said that if you remove the subject, the world of appearances vanishes. It doesn’t mean reality is “just in the mind,” but that our very talk of “existence” and “objectivity” already presupposes the subject’s framework.

So when you say you “understand the argument and disagree,” that is precisely what the blind spot looks like from inside it. I don’t think it’s dogmatic to point out the conditions that make any interpretation possible. You and I can only disagree because there is already a subjectivity through which concepts like “existence,” “sameness,” and “objectivity” have meaning. That’s not my dogma; it’s the very ground on which both of us are standing when we argue.

He is talking about Noumena negatively because we have no sense of other-than space and time. That is the point. He cannot even 'point to' noumena only flit around it as a kind of negative limitation on human 'sensibility' (which is all we have). — I like sushi

:up:

You are presenting a strawman of science―it deals with the world as perceived by us, no reasonable scientists would deny that. — Janus

It’s not a strawman at all. The Blind Spot of Science article in Aeon (and the later book by Frank, Gleiser, and Thompson) addresses mainstream science, the assumptions of physicalism and objectivism, which you will also argue in favour of in other contexts. The point is not that individual scientists are naïve realists who think the eyes are passive “windows,” but that the methodological outlook of modern science brackets the constituting role of the subject, and then forgets that it has done so. Of course that attitude is contested, but it remains the default for many. So declaring that many scientists hold to scientific realism is hardly a 'straw man' :rofl: .

Apart from perceptions and judgements, the world would be the same without any observer. — Janus

Precisely the point at issue! What world are you referring to? The moment you speak of “the world apart from perceptions and judgments,” you are already invoking the categories of thought and perception through which such a world is conceived. You have a world in mind, so to speak. To say it “would be the same” is to assume what is in question—namely, that the predicates of sameness, objectivity, and existence can meaningfully apply outside the framework of an observer. That’s exactly the blind spot. To which your response is invariably: 'what "blind spot"? I don't see any "blind spot"!'

Of course they're memory-less, since atoms don't have memories. — Patterner

The whole essence of anything organic is memory. It stores memories of what happened so as to better cope with what's coming up.

if you insist that the category of existence can only pertain to the things we perceive then we can say that things as they are unperceived do not exist. — Janus

I’m not claiming that the thing-in-itself is some ghostly half-real entity. My point is that existence and non-existence are categories that only make sense within experience, within a perspective. When you try to apply them outside that framework—i.e., to the 'unperceived in itself'—they lose their meaning. Saying 'it neither exists nor does not exist' is shorthand for saying: the category of existence simply doesn’t apply there. That’s not a contradiction but a recognition of a boundary or limit to knowledge.

Kant’s remark in the Transcendental Aesthetic that if we “take away the thinking subject the whole world of appearances would vanish” is often misconstrued. It doesn’t mean the world literally ceases to be, but that the world as knowable is always ordered through the framework of an observer. The realist assumption—that the world would be just the same even if there were no observer—forgets this constituting role of the mind - which is precisely the point of the 'blind spot of science', which regards the world it studies as if it were simply there in itself, while forgetting that the very concepts of objectivity and existence already presuppose the standpoint of an observer.

In Buddhism this whole world of appearances is nothing but maya. — Punshhh

Actually Māyā is Hindu terminology. The Buddhist term is saṃsāra, ‘cyclical existence’. It’s idea of the illusory nature of experience is more that we wrongly attribute significance to things we’re attached to - not that the world is illusory per se, but we evaluate it wrongly.

He says that there cannot be such existents, that they are neither existent nor non-existent. — Janus

Context:

I am not arguing that… ‘the world is all in the mind’. It’s rather that, whatever judgements are made about the world, the mind provides the framework within which such judgements are meaningful. So though we know that prior to the evolution of life there must have been a Universe with no intelligent beings in it, or that there are empty rooms with no inhabitants, or objects unseen by any eye — the existence of all such supposedly unseen realities still relies on an implicit perspective. What their existence might be outside of any perspective is meaningless and unintelligible, as a matter of both fact and principle. — Wayfarer

This is a different problem from "What is it like to be conscious?" The latter problem is associated with Nagel, not Chalmers. — J

No it isn’t. He quotes Nagel in support of his definition;

The really hard problem of consciousness is the problem of experience. When we think and perceive, there is a whir of information-processing, but there is also a subjective aspect. As Nagel (1974) has put it, there is something it is like to bea conscious organism. This subjective aspect is experience. When we see, for example, we experience visual sensations: the felt quality of redness, the experience of dark and light, the quality of depth in a visual field. Other experiences go along with perception in different modalities: the sound of a clarinet, the smell of mothballs. Then there are bodily sensations, from pains to orgasms; mental images that are conjured up internally; the felt quality of emotion, and the experience of a stream of conscious thought. What unites all of these states is that there is something it is like to be in them. All of them are states of experience.

Again, the problem is to say how "what it's like" consciousness arises from brain processes, not to give a description of consciousness itself. — J

The two are inseparable. You need to specify something if you are to describe it.

why does that mean we can't seek an explanation for it? — J

Because of recursion: you’re trying to explain that which is doing the explaining. ‘The eye cannot see itself’.

If mind can be an object for the cognitive sciences, what does this mean? How does the attitude or program of cognitive science allow an escape from what you call "the indubitable fact that we are that which we seek to know"? Perhaps the answer lies in a discrimination between 1st and 3rd person perspectives, but what do you think? When a scientist studies consciousness, what are they doing differently from our everyday experience of being conscious? — J

Going back to Chalmer's Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness, he makes the distinction between what he calls easy problems of consciousness and the hard problem. The 'easy problems' are a catalog of just those kind of mental phenomena which are the subject of cognitive science, for instance

• the ability to discriminate, categorize, and react to environmental stimuli;
• the integration of information by a cognitive system;
• the reportability of mental states; ...

(Partial list)

As is well known, he says the really hard problem is 'what it is like to be...' By that he means the experiential dimension of life, the 'subjective aspect' as he calls it. Which, I think, is really a roundabout way of describing 'being' as such. That is what cannot be described in objective terms - well, not really. I can say to you 'I feel sick', but you will only know what the means, because you yourself know 'what it is like.' The state, like sentient existence itself, is irreducibly first-person. But the first person is just what the objective sciences seeks to bracket out. There’s the issue in a nutshell. Phenomenology realizes this from the outset.

As for psychology, there’s a reason why it’s often called ‘soft science’. Cognitive perhaps less so, because many of its objects are objectively quantifiable.

That some awareness is an indubitable fact does not entail that it can't be explained in other terms. Yet you seem to imply that this must be so. Why? Aren't we confusing the experience, the phenomenology, with that which is experienced? — J

Simply because there has to be an observer, a subject to whom the experience occurs, for there to be anything to analyse! One of my stock quotes, from Routledge Phenomenology, is right on point here:

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.

Continental philosophy, generally, seems to understand this in a way that Anglo philosophy really struggles with. Perhaps physicalism functions as a kind of shield. By insisting that only what is scientifically observable really matters, it allows one to preserve that sense of separateness that science relies on in the first place. In that way the ‘egological’ perspective shelters behind it — a defensive move, more than a philosophical one. This is also why psychology is really existential rather than strictly scientific. Science begins from the standpoint of separation, the stance of standing outside or apart from. But psychology, at least when it’s true to its subject, has to begin from within: from the lived situation of the self. It can’t hide behind the shield of objectivity, because what it investigates is the very ground of experience itself. Hence, 'we are what we seek to know'.

(There is another mode of self-transcendence, the noetic rather than the scientific but can’t go into that here.)