To try to sum my rambling attempts above I would point to:

A. The substantial empirical support for the "process metaphysics view," which is well summed up in this extensive excerpt from Bickhard's "Systems and Process Metaphysics" https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/826619 . Better, more philosophical arguments in favor of the process view can be found in the opening chapters of Rescher's introductory text on the topic, which ably disambiguates what is essential to process metaphysics and what is particular to popular, but not necessarily representative versions of it in Whitehead or Bergson. The first few chapters are even free: https://books.google.com/books/about/Process_Metaphysics.html?id=9V2FoMPTl5MC

B. This view would seem to dissolve the brain/environment dichotomy, whereas we are still left with a world where there appear to be multiple minds, but just one universal process.

C. Given this shift in starting presuppositions, something like Hegel's conception of the relationship of Mind/Giest to Nature, and his theory of universals seems much more plausible. More importantly, it seems like it should be possible to describe it in much more "down to Earth," less obscure terms (maybe).

If earlier abstract thought was interested in the principle only as content, but in the course of philosophical development has been impelled to pay attention to the other side, to the behaviour of the cognitive process, this implies that the subjective act has also been grasped as an essential moment of objective truth, and this brings with it the need to unite the method with the content, the form with the principle.

The Science of Logic

I once saw process philosophy likened to a knuckleball. No one denies you can strike people out with it. No one denies it would be a great pitch for all pitchers to learn, because it is low velocity and lets you pitch lots of innings. But knuckleballers, like process philosophers, are quite rare. Why? Because the pitch is awkward and because, since no one throws it, no one teaches it. And because only a few throw it, it gets identified with the particularities of greats like Tim Wakefield (Whitehead) or R.A. Dickey (Bergson). But we are left with the suspicion that it isn't just the best breaking ball, but properly used, a full on alternative to the fastball (Niekro had 300+ wins, 3,300 Ks after all, philosophical case closed).

But is this distinction somehow fundamental, or just bookkeeping by the brain? I think the latter

I'm not sure what you're arguing for, that there is no real distinction between imaginings and sense perception? No real difference between dementia and psychosis and proper functioning?

If such "bookkeeping" doesn't correspond to any real difference between the proximate causes of sensations this would seem to lead to a sort of radical skepticism and solipsism, as there would be no grounds for distinguishing between imaginings and sensory experience, dementia and healthy cognitive function. I'd maintain that these are clearly not the same thing.

But you've seemed to ignore my main point, which is that brains don't appear to "bookkeep" or produce any sort of experience in the vast majority of environments that exist in the universe. Nor do they develop the capability to experience things in isolation. A back and forth between the "enviornment"/"individual" barrier is essential for embryo development and essential for survival. E.g., a radical constriction of sensory inputs after birth leads to profound deficits in mammals, whereas a total constriction of sensory inputs would obviously require an enviornment that is going to kill any animal.

Nor do true dividing lines between different "things" seem to show up in the world upon closer inspection. If the mind "constructs" things, it surely appears to construct these boundaries.

The resulting picture is a single universal process with multiple phenomenological horizons, which appear to be relatively discrete (arguments for group minds and super organisms not withstanding). But once you've dropped the conceit of discrete things behaving according to intrinsic properties, the direct/indirect distinction seems to dissolve, because it requires these boundaries to be framed in the first place.

The question of whether true/false, beautiful/ugly, good/bad, makes any sense outside of the context of subjectivity then comes up. If these lack content outside the subjective frame, truth having no meaning without the possibility of falsity, etc. then we might want to ask if "truth" "beauty," "color," "shape," etc. exist, "out there" without reference to the phenomenological sphere. This, IMO, is a mistake. It is simply to reinstate the discrete distinctions we've discovered to lack merit. The very fact that we are considering something already places it inside the phenomenological horizon, the realm of Mind/Geist.

Is the red thing red if no one looks at it? Again, the truth/falsity distinction only makes sense in terms of Mind. Universals are what they are because of Mind, but Mind is what it is because of the universal process. Color isn't unique here. In reality, all properties are defined in terms of interaction. A thing is only said to have mass because of how it interacts with other things; if it didn't display these characteristic interactions we wouldn't say it had mass at all. The "properties of substances" only ever show up in process and interaction. Relations considered essential to minds are no different. We might as well ask if electrons have charge "of themselves" or only when interacting in some way? We seem to be able to dispense with things and deal only in relations (process) e.g. Rovelli's Relational Quantum Mechanics.

The question of universals then, seems to require two tiers. There is first, the abstractions of mind, the identification of what is common to sets of things, what Aristotle describes. It's easy to see how nominalist intuitions can cash out if we end here.

But then there is the universal of the entire process by which something comes to be, and be known as, a universal, a sort of causal unfolding, which Hegel illuminates:

"But thought is capable of another and deeper movement. It can rise to a universality which is not foreign to, but the very inward nature of things in themselves, not the universal of an abstraction from the particular and different, but the unity which is immanent in them and finds in them its own necessary expression; not an arbitrary invention of the observing and classifying mind, . . . but an idea which expresses the inner dialectic, the movement or process towards unity, which exists in and constitutes the being of the objects themselves. This deeper and truer universality is that which may be designated ideal or organic universality. The idea of a living organism . . . is not a common element which can be got at by abstraction and generalization, by taking the various parts and members, stripping away their differences, and forming a notion of that which they have in common. That in which they differ is rather just that out of which their unity arises and in which is the very life and being of the organism; that which they have in common they have, not as members of a living organism, but as dead matter, and what you have to abstract in order to get it is the very life itself. Moreover, the universal, in this case, is not last but first. We do not reach it by first thinking the particulars, but conversely, we get at the true notions of the particulars only through the universal. What the parts or members of an organism are their form, place, structure, proportion, functions, relations, their whole nature and being, is determined by the idea of the organism which they are to compose. It is it which produces them, not they it. In it lies their reason and ground. They are its manifestations or specifications. It realizes itself in them, fulfills itself in their diversity and harmony. . . . You cannot determine the particular member or organ save by reference to that which is its limit or negation. It does not exist in and by itself, but in and through what is other than itself, through the other members and organs which are at once outside of and within it, beyond it, and yet part and portion of its being. . . . Here, then, we have a kind of universality which is altogether different from the barren and formal universality of generalization, and the indication of a movement of thought corresponding to an inner relation of things which the abstracting, generalizing understanding is altogether inadequate to grasp."

But this is factually untrue. I can, just by imagining it, picture the color "sky blue", in any environment I might be in. This suggests that the sensation is mine, and I am just fine tuned so that the environment can appropriately stimulate it.

First, phenomenology distinguishes between imagined/pictured phenomena and sensory experience. This seems uncontroversial since we do not generally have trouble distinguishing our imaginings and reality, and indeed of we did much of philosophy would need to be reworked. But here I am referring to sensory experience.

As to the environment being irrelevant, I would maintain that on the surface of a star, inside a gas giant, on the surface of Venus, at the bottom of the ocean, or in the vacuum of space, you'd not experience much of anything, being virtually instantly dead. Most of the universe is space in which human life consciousness would appear to be unsustainable.

Further, a person does not develop vision if they are gestated in a vacuum, they die. The claim that recalling sky blue doesn't require any prior exposure to any particular enviornment or any particular enviornment seems hard to sustain.

As to the guitars, a guitar string makes no sound in a vacuum. This is the problem with substances in general, their properties only exist via interaction.

I see the good points of process philosophy as being, in some ways, anti-realist re substances (or at least they are made less fundemental), but allowing for realism re "the external world," and universals.

If the relational view re color blends together the best parts of dispositional and realist theories (covering brain and enviornment respectively), then the process view is able to blend the adverbial, constructivist (indirect) and relational views. For what it means to be red is defined in terms of just those processes that result in the experience of redness and the way they map to one another.

How are we to know which parts of our experience provide us with “raw” information about the external world?

Right, but I would challenge the entire legitimacy of distinctions like raw/doctored or internal/external. So many of the arguments for indirect realism rely on hitting home the difficulties with saying "color is out there," or "shapes exist simpliciter," pointing out all the ways the mind is said to "construct" all such categories. But then the categorization of mental/physical as discrete, different types of "thing," or of a world with discrete objects, e.g., apples versus brains, each of which possess properties and dispositions, is invoked anyhow, as if the suppositions underlying such categories hadn't just been fatally undermined. Brains are said to "construct" out of causal inputs because they are said to be one sort of discrete object, with x properties and y dispositions.

But where are the actual discrete systems in nature? I'd argue you can find none. There is no boundary line to separate internal and external. There is a phenomenological boundary line in terms of what we as individuals experience, but that's it. This boundary can't be made equivalent with the body on pain of solipsism, for if this is the boundary it would imply we experience nothing outside of our body, either "directly" or "indirectly."

So, what you get is a portrait of one universal process giving rise to multiple phenomenological horizons, and much else that seems to "lie in between" any conscious awarenesses.

What causes minds within these horizons to experience similar things, such that they can communicate with one another? It would seem to be commonalities in the processes that give rise to experience themselves, commonalities that lie on either side of the external/internal distinction, or more appropriately, which seem to completely transcend this distinction and "act like it doesn't exist."

The reality/appearance distinction makes no sense outside of these phenomenological horizons, and deep problems emerge from trying to apply the distinction where its terms can have no content. So, there is on the one hand the attempt to use the distinctions proper to Mind/Geist outside the context wherein they derive their content, and on the other to solve the problem of the One and the Many by demoting Mind/Geist to the status of "appearance," a fallacy of composition.

My experience, of sight or of smell and so on, is an experience entirely created inside my head. The data for the experience comes from outside, but the experience is crafted inside. And that's why I don't agree with "we experience reality as it is ".

I think this is exactly where the disagreement arises. If something essential to experience "comes from outside," is caused by what is "external" then:

A. It doesn't seem that experience is "created entirely inside the head."

B. It doesn't seem that these essential, "external" parts of the process can be dispensed with. They do not seem truly external to the process from which thought arises.

Consider that the human body does not produce any experience unless it is an extremely narrow environmental range; the enviornment is always essential to the processes that give rise to perception.

The nature of the "data" that comes from outside then is a hinge issue here. The data's introduction into the body does not seem indirect, in that the interaction is like anything else. Even in one billiard ball hitting another, it is only the surface of the ball that is contacted and interactions cascade through the balls' "parts" through the same sort of processes at work in the body.

But more important is the question of what this data amounts to. Is it Aristotlean form? Is it best described in terms of the conservation of mass energy (one attempted method to define cause)? Or is it best described as a transfer of information (another attempt to define cause that aims to correct weaknesses in the conservation explanation)?

If you buy into the popular pancomputationalist explanations of physics, particularly Wheeler's "It From Bit," the information-based approach has a lot going for it. Cause can be defined in terms of information transfer that affects future state evolution in some system. Given such a view, we could then say there is a relationship between information in conciousness and information in the enviornment in the same way that a billiard ball's path contains information about the cue ball that struck it, or in the same way fossils' contain information about past life forms.

But of course, we don't think all causal interactions have an element of subjective, first person experience. So what what do we as persons "add" to the process in being concious ?

We allow that a stream bed contains information about the past flow of water, even if it becomes impossible to determine the past of any one raindrop. Likewise, we think a break in billiards can, in theory, be traced back to cue ball. In the human person, much is added to any interval of incoming sense "data" before that data would appear to reach self-aware conciousness. How can this be described? At what level of decomposition will we lose the context required to explain phenomenal experience?

I would argue that our conceptions of reducibility are key here. Can we reduce sensation to a discrete series of intermediate steps or would it be better say that something like "appearing green," is a relationship that obtains between a tree and healthy human person, as wholes?

A similar sort of problem crops up in scholastic philosophy. If theoretical, practical, and aesthetic reason are human faculties, what are they adding to the experience of their target. Truth, Goodness, and Beauty, each type of reason's respective target, are said to transcend categories, being essential aspects of Being itself, so what does the human person bring to the table that affects them so that they are not tautological (as Kant would later claim)? St. Thomas's solution was to say that Truth, Beauty, and Goodness do not add to Being in terms of content (ad rem), but only conceptually (ad rationem), that is, as refracted through human will and consciousness. I am not sure this was a good way of thinking of things though, and we seem to be recreating it in modern philosophy.

Our experiences are part of the world, and the property of "appearing yellow," or "feeling smooth," would thus should be part of the world. Claims of "anthropomorphizing," are ubiquitous in this area, but I can see no greater anthropomorphization then the starting presupposition that experiences must be described in terms of discrete objects and properties possessed by me. There is no such discrete separation in nature, and properties themselves are only revealed through process. Substance and property alone, without reference to process, get you absolutely nowhere in metaphysics.

Thus, on sensory experience I'd tend to go with the relational-dispositional theories, that sensation of say "sky blue" requires both a disposition on the side of the experiencer, and a certain sort of environment. But I think these only go halfway to what is required, which is a process metaphysics grounded view where the question of properties "inhering in external objects," versus being "constructed by brains," is overcome by the recognition that these are not separate "things," vis-á-vis how conciousness is produced.

Balthasar is interesting here which sort of flows from the older conception of Kantian Pure Reason, Practical Reason, and Judgement as Theoretical Reason, Practical Reason, and Aesthetic Reason, three united faculties attuned to the same Being.

In an important section, entitled ‘The Task and the Structure of a Theological Aesthetics’, Balthasar sets out the distinctions between ‘theological beauty’ and ‘worldly beauty’, establishes the analogical continuities between them, and reflects upon the internal characteristics of a faith which is understood to be a perceiving of the beautiful (GL1, 117–27).

As Balthasar remarks: ‘the form as it appears to us is beautiful only because the delight that it arouses in us is founded upon the fact that, in it, the truth and goodness of the depths of reality itself are manifested and bestowed, and this manifestation and bestowal reveal themselves to us as being something infinitely and inexhaustibly valuable and fascinating’ (GL1, 118).

The [medieval transcendental and later Romantic] tradition asserts that Being (which it would prefer to capitalize)has a certain luminosity and intrinsic attractiveness or splendour, and that it is linked in particular with the theme of eros, as the active principle of longing or attraction. This offers Balthasar an entirely new analysis of the ground of faith which is now removed from the propositional realm and is refigured as a ‘movement’ of the soul which is akin to the response we feel before the immense complexity of meaning, expression, and ‘form’ of a major work of art.

Perhaps more than any other feature of his work, Balthasar’s restructuring of faith opens up significant and hitherto unseen perspectives on the nature of the Christian life. At a single stroke, he breaks the link between faith and reason which has so dominated modern theological apologetics, while retaining faith’s cognitive character.

I don't disagree with your assessment at all. Perhaps I should have said "ideally" lol.

Wittgenstein didn't really call "all sorts of things" meaningless.

Maybe, but it was certainly a very large trend in the enviornment he was writing in. That said, plenty of students of Wittgenstein who bought into the "anti-metaphysical" stance certainly came away with the perception that he had declared, convincingly, that whole areas of inquiry, and their contents, were meaningless.

But if that's a misreading of the Tractus, particularly 7.1, it's a misreading that is partly a product of that same environment, where it wasn't uncommon to deem things meaningless, incoherent, unsayable, etc.

:worry:

Would you deprive us from a future where articles in metaphysics discuss "quanticularity qua quanticularity?" :cool:

Even if our eyes were windows, direct passthroughs to some sort of humonculus, they would still introduce bias by being only on the front of our heads. We'd see the world differently if we had eyes on our hands for instance. Surveillance cameras can introduce this same sort of bias into court cases by only recording from one perspective.

The question of bias seems like one that goes all the way down. It even shows up in basic chemical reactions. Physicists have moved to defining physical systems in terms of all the information required to fully describe them — all the differences that make a difference. But which ontic differences make a discernible difference depends on the context. Enzymes tend to treat isotopes as identical for example. In that context, the extra neutrons might as well not be there; it's akin to the human blindspot or our inability to see UV light.

With things like Rovelli's relational quantum mechanics you get a view of nature where context seems to be an essential element of "what exists" to some degree. But then I'd argue that the direct/indirect distinction is based on a false intuition about what a "direct" interaction could be.

They are similar because how we learn is similar, and because the proximate goals of "reinforcing x behavior," are similar.

I'd argue that they can't be the same thing. When we train animals, a behavior, or lack of it, is the end itself. The Aristotlean distinction between continence and virtue makes no sense with animals. But with people, we want them to want what is good — Frankfurt's second order volitions — and we want to convince them that it is good to act in this way.

The difference is that the person and their excellence, excellence in our eyes and theirs, is an end in itself. We want people to be free, and in being free they must understand why they act and accept it "with the rational part of the soul." A merely continent person is always unstable, and in a way, unfree. They want to act in vice and are at war with themselves (Romans 7). But education aims at the enhancement of freedom and harmonization of the person, giving them the tools to harmonize themselves. Training only focuses on the ends of behavior.

But without a conception of the human good, virtue, and freedom, education and training for human beings degenerates into the sort of thing we do for animals.

But it's too minor a problem to debate

Au contraire, metaphysics being onanistic is a central point of contention re misology. That's where claims about the limits of reason started — the inability of speculation not to be led by mere passion and appetite in the end. The "Masters of Suspicion," Hume, Nietzsche, Russell, etc. get the ball rolling on that. It's just that it takes a long time for similar sorts of arguments to start getting made about "the things we know well," i.e., human relations: gender relations, race relations, inequality, justice, etc. But the skepticism re reason starts with "the external world," with the British empiricists (or arguably with medieval nominalism and Protestant fideism re God).

Wittgenstein is a product of his time, and the thing in philosophy at that time was to call all sorts of things "meaningless." I think Putnam makes a good point that it would be more charitable to swap in "useless" in many of these cases. It's not that someone has no idea what you're talking about when you explain Plotinian hypostases or something, it's that there are "bad paradigms," "blind allies," and "poor ways of thinking." But because of the conversations around philosophy of language at the time and around propositions, you get claims about "meaninglessness," and "incoherence."

:up:

It brings up the same question as the "What Is Logic?" thread. We have our formal systems, mathematics as a field of inquiry; we have the possible universe of all such systems we might create (our potentiality for math?); and then you have the apparent instantiation of mathematics in nature. Yet our math and this math are clearly not the same thing.

Are these all the same thing in some way? Is there a general principle that connects them? For, from the naturalist perspective, it seems like the easiest way to explain our and other animals' ability to fathom quantity is that quantity exists "out there" in some way, but obviously there are arguments against this intuition.

In the logic thread I proposed "logos" for the logic-like function of the world. I wonder what a good term would be for "the apparently mathematical in nature?" Quantos? Mathematicularity? Máthēma? Quanticularity?

Consider Alistair MacIntyre's description of how proponents of Rawls and Nozick's ethical theories end up talking past one another:

It is in any case clear that for both Nozick and Rawls a society is composed of individuals, each with his or her own interest, who then have to come together and formulate common rules of life . In Nozick's case there is the additional negative constraint of a set of basic rights. In Rawls's case the only constraints are those that a prudent rationality would impose. Individuals are thus in both accounts primary and society secondary, and the identification of individual interests is prior to, and independent of, the construction of any moral or social bonds between them. But we have already seen that the notion of desert is at home only in the context of a community whose primary bond is a shared understanding both of the good for man and of the good of that community and where individuals identify their primary interests with reference to those goods. Rawls explicitly makes it a presupposition of his view that we must expect to disagree with others about what the good life for man is and must therefore exclude any understanding of it that we may have from our formulation of the principles of justice. Only those goods
in which everyone, whatever their view of the good life, takes an interest are to be admitted to consideration. In Nozick's argument too, the concept of community required for the notion of desert to have application is simply absent.

MacIntyre goes on to describe how members of the laity who might sympathize variously with Nozick (conservative) or Rawls (liberal) would put things slightly differently. In general, these people will talk about deserts, what people "deserve," given good action. Thus the conservative will talk about how they worked hard for their income and deserve to reap the rewards of it, to use the fruits of their labor to buy their parents a house, etc. The liberal will talk about how the inherited wealth of economic elites is underserved, or how the hard working but impoverished laborers deserve a higher standard of living.

Desert is missing from the more sophisticated theories because it is assumed that "what is good for man," man's telos, and "what the virtues consist in," is unknowable. MacIntyre's point is a different one but it ties in to the problem we are discussing. It is because man's telos and the nature of virtue is unanalyzable that desert, a natural part of naive conceptions ethics, ends up missing from the picture.

The risk when just deserts leaves the picture is most acute when it comes to criminal justice. There, when we cease to focus on what is deserved, and instead only focus on the pragmatics of recidivism and incentives, we risk falling into a conception of the justice system as largely a tool for properly training people to behave in accordance with the law, the way we might "train" a horse.

Context might be helpful:

Wittgenstein famously states that (Tractatus Logico Philosophicus, proposition 5.1361) : "The events of the future cannot be inferred from those of the present." and "Superstition is the belief in the causal nexus."

Later (Propositions 6.37, 6.371 and 6.362) "A necessity for one thing to happen because another has happened does not exist. There is only logical necessity. At the basis of the whole modern view of the world lies the illusion that the so-called laws of nature are the explanations of natural phenomena. So people stop short at natural laws as at something unassailable, as did the ancients at God and Fate. And they both are right and wrong. But the ancients were clearer, in so far as they recognized one clear conclusion, whereas in the modern system it should appear as though everything were explained."

Does he have things backwards? Do we know cause first, in experience, and then abstract logical necessity from that? Arguably; I would say yes. But the statement in question makes more sense when you know where he is coming from.

I'd argue that the ancients didn't have this problem because reason was seen as inheritly transcendental, or even ecstatic (Plato). So, Plato approached the mind/nature, appearance/reality distinction differently. The transcendental argument in the first sailing of The Republic lies in the unity of the Good vis-á-vis Being and Reason, the Goods role as something that is both absolute and relational. There is not, as Wittgenstein puts it, something "unassailable" that we run up against, but something transcendent and without limit, which, in having no limit, must necessarily include the whole, and thus both sides of mind/nature and appearance/reality (and in this, we get something closer to Hegel's solution to the same issues).

You might find R. Scott Bakker's "On Alien Philosophy," to be an interesting read. He speculates in how these same issues would likely crop up for all sentient species.

https://www.academia.edu/31152366/On_Alien_Philosophy

He also has one more focused on the causes of these issues. I don't really buy the thesis all the way but it's an interesting paper:

https://www.academia.edu/1502945/The_Last_Magic_Show_A_Blind_Brain_Theory_of_the_Appearance_of_Consciousness



William Harmless' "Mystics" is hands down the best overall coverage of this I've found. After framing the initial question of "what is mysticism?" and point out flaws in James's "peak experience" focused study, he begins on a number of in-depth case studies. IIRC, he does Thomas Merton, Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, Saint Hildegard, Saint Bonaventure, Meister Eckhart, Evargrius Pontus, Rumi, and Dogen. So, weighted towards the West, but also including Sufism and Zen. Where Harmless shines is in his seamless blending of exposition, background, and long, skillful excerpts that let the authors speak in their own words. He also has a really great book on Saint Augustine and one of the Desert Fathers. I do wish Mystics included some Hindu thinkers but I think that's outside Harmless' comfort zone.

For the esoteric tradition, the Cambridge Handbook of Western Mysticism and Esoterica is a real light in the darkness for a field where a lot of the "histories" and "studies" lack rigor and are more interested in grounding their own ideas in "tradition." That's a bit drier though.

I find this area interesting, but it's a hard area to find good sources on because you get perrenialists who want to flatten everything down in accordance with their own agenda, or esotericists who want to use (and abuse) texts for their own purposes. "Light From Light" is another good anthology but it's all Christian and it isn't quite as good as Harmless.

I will attempt two more illustrations that might be helpful.

Can a person "drive a car," or can they only "move a steering wheel, push pedals, and adjust a gear shifter?"

When a carpenter cuts a piece of wood, does he really cut it, or does he merely "move a saw?"

One way to think of this might be to consider if acts of experiencing are infinitely decomposable. Can we afford to leave the sandpaper out of a complete description of feeling sandpaper?

For it would seem like the same problem you bring up could be applied to "feeling nerve impulses." We obviously can't feel the nerve impulses in our fingers, because those just work by stimulating other neurons closer to the brain. Nor do we experience that second set of neurons, for they only carry the signal to a third set of neurons, and so on.

Between each set of neurons, sits a synaptic cleft. Current doesn't jump across the cleft, rather neurotransmitters are released into the cleft, spurring on or halting depolarization. So, now we might say that we don't feel nerve signals from our fingers at all, but rather "feel the release of neurotransmitters into the synapse connecting our fingers to our brain." Thus, "we feel molecules in our synaptic cleft." But these molecules only perform this function in virtue of allowing variable rates of calcium and potassium ions to move across channels in the cell, so it might be that we actually "feel calcium and potassium ions." Yet these only work the way they do because of the valance electrons they possess, and the electrons only act as part of a field. Thus, we might be said to only experience "changes in quantum fields."

None of these is necessarily inaccurate, but they seem to be losing important details.

Hmm, I find the issue more intimately entwined with whether or not quantity in fact occurs within the cosmos.

Well, in an important way, it doesn't seem to. Everything bleeds into everything else, there are no truly discrete physical systems. We have a "bloboverse." There is one universal process, and this would seem to preclude quantity.

Indeed, it's unclear what it would mean to have multiple things "be" without them interacting (and thus forming a unity). In what sense totally discrete things all "be" and be part of the same singular category of "being?"

But processes necessarily change. A toy universe needs at least some variance to have content. A world that consists of just a single undifferentiated point is essentially the same thing as nothing. It's like how a signal of just 1s or just 0s cannot transmit any information. Floridi has a good proof of this in his "The Philosophy of Information," and Spencer Brown's Laws of Form and Hegel's Logic get into similar territory.

For something to be, there has to be some variance, as sheer indeterminate being reveals itself to be contentless. And in variation, you get the seeds of quantity.

For what would it mean for something to have unity if plurality is not a possibility? From the one comes the many.

I guess I'm just not understanding why you say Nature exists at all. If all we ever have access to is Mind, and this is empty fiction, wouldn't Nature just be another of our fictions? Can we know anything of Nature? If not, why suppose the body and nature? Is it an article of faith?

Shankara similarly has it that all is illusion, Maya, part of the infinite creativity of Brahaman. But in Advaita Vedanta, being is one, a unity, and we are not cut off from the recognition of Brahman and recognition of our true nature. I'm not sure if this works in a case where there isn't knowledge of the Absolute, since we end up with no grounds for the fiction/reality distinction.

We dont have to assume our cognitions are illusory simply because we recognize the inextricable role of the subject and intersubjective community in the construction of our understanding of nature.

Exactly. And from the naturalist frame this community exists in nature, and it's evolution is not arbitrary or unrelated to nature to begin with, so there is no need to worry about it "floating free," of nature, having nothing to do with it.

This reinstates the Cartesian veil separating appearance from reality, and a correspondence approach to empiricism.

I'll admit, I don't really see how "recogn[ing]the inextricable role of the subject and intersubjective community in the construction of our understanding of nature..." implies the above, it seems consistent with denials of the veil as well.

We can bypass the whole reality vs illusion mentality by focusing on the inexhaustible variety of ways our constructions of the real can allow us to do things in the world, and find ways of making those constructions more inclusive and open-ended, rather than reifying one construction as more ‘truly real’ than others.

I don't really know how this works either. Didn't we just reinstate the Cartesian veil?

Anyhow, how might this apply to common reality/appearance distinctions? Such as:

"Is economic inequality really increasing, or is it a mirage from statistical choices employed by economists?"

"Is there life on Mars, or are these weird patterns in rock samples caused by abiotic processes?"

"Hey, is that my friend's girlfriend over there making out with that guy?! Or is it just a woman with the same jacket and haircut?" (A classic Seinfeld problem for George when he loses his glasses!)

Such constructions might well be open ended, and inexhaustible, but they aren't unconstrained. Many — most really — ways of trying to do things run into immediate problems. If you want to patch a tire, there are myriad ways to do it right. Yet, just as certainly there are many more ways to do it wrong (e.g. pouring spaghetti on it, drinking potions, etc.) than ways that will make the tire hold air.

Likewise, there might be many ways to describe something plausibly and consistently (e.g. the nine or so big interpretations of quantum mechanics) but there will also many more ways to describe things in ways that are gibberish or which no one will find plausible. E.g., we might think there are very many ways we could design an airplane, but there are more ways to design airplanes that can't fly than ones that can.

These constraints I think, can usefully be thought of as reality, without losing the insights re intersubjectivity.

We could take Husserl's conception of the "zig-zag" in perception as the phenomenologically basic case of this. "Is this really the case?” we can ask, “is my interlocutor correct that Yosemite Park is in Wyoming?” When we perform this zig-zag we are moving between focusing on the judgment and focusing on things, and through this movement we can see whether the judgment and the state of affairs can be blended with one another. This oscillation is the origin of the kind of truth we call correspondence, but it is not "correspondence truth," in this naive form because it lies below the level of philosophical thought, in the realm of everyday communication.

Humanism presupposes objective empiricism and vice versa. Both originate in the Christian( which is indebted to the Platonic) notion of an absolutely certain ground for truth. In the wake of Descartes, God was replaced by the human subject , the consciousness of the ego, as the source of absolute certainty. According to then modern scientific , and humanist, notion of the subject-object relation, the subject is seen as a self-reflective consciousness that posits and represents the object before itself.

I'm sort of with you here, but historically it seems like this has led to relativism as often as "absolute grounds for certainty." E.g., arguments along the line of "the individual is the origin point for moral judgement. Individuals disagree about moral judgements. Therefore, moral truth depends on who you are and where you stand." You see a similar move with aesthetic judgement too, "beauty lies in the eye of the beholder."

Heidegger considers this self-presencing certainty of the subject as the basis of modern mathematical thinking. That is, as the certainty of calculation. Only because being is understood via the mathematical self-identity of subject and object can modern science and technology, as well as humanism, be thought. What is real is what is consistently present, and the object’s reality is made possible by its being represented by a self-present subject. A=A because , more fundamentally, the ‘I’ equals itself. Once you deconstruct the self-identical unity of the human subject , you simultaneously pull the rug out from under direct and interdict realism.

Yes, but you also pull the rug out on the agent of truth who interacts in the "Human Conversation," writ large, the one who preforms Bernard William's virtues of Sincerity and Accuracy. The ego might be dissolvable, but it must come back on the scene for declarative sentences — "I feel that," "I think that," — and their central role in human conversation. But moreover, total removals of self ala Hume run into difficulties:

Funes, [of Borges' "Funes the Memorius"], remembers “not only every leaf of every tree in every patch of forest, but every time he had perceived or imagined that leaf.”32 For him, each iota of the space- time continuum is utterly singular. Or so he claims. Hume also claimed this. For Hume, we could never know if there was a world of information, of necessary laws behind our sensory impressions. For him, each impression, each leaf In a garden, was condemned to be isolated, sui generis, and never an example of a general rule.

But where this challenge led him to extreme skepticism, Kant drew another lesson. Kant realized that Hume’s world of pure, unique impressions couldn’t exist. This is because the minimal requirement for experiencing anything is not to be so absorbed in the present that one is lost in it. What Hume had claimed— that when exploring his feeling of selfhood, he always landed “on some particular perception or other” but could never catch himself “at any time without a perception, and never can observe anything but the perception”— was simply not true.33 Because for Hume to even report this feeling he had to perceive something in addition to the immediate perceptions, namely, the very flow of time that allowed them to be distinct in the first place. And to recognize time passing is necessarily to recognize that you are embedded in the perception.

Hence what Kant wrote in his answer to Hamann, ten years in the making. To recollect perfectly eradicates the recollection, just as to perceive perfectly eradicates the perception. For the one who recalls or perceives must recognize him or herself along with the memory or perception for the memory or impression to exist at all ["displacement" in phenomenology]. If everything we learn about the world flows directly into us from utterly distinct bits of code, as the rationalists thought, or if everything we learn remains nothing but subjective, unconnected impressions, as Hume believed— it comes down to exactly the same thing. With no self to distinguish itself, no self to bridge two disparate moments in space- time, there is simply no one there to feel irritated at the inadequacy of “dog.” No experience whatsoever is possible.

William Eddington - The Rigor of Angels: Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality (2023)

and leads to anthropomorphic musings

But aren't this inevitable in anything we say?

I don't really see the danger in anthropomorphizing. Human beings are of the world, in the world. Obviously, we make mistakes when we anthropomorphize. Animism is ubiquitous in early cultures and children, "the sky is cloudy because it is sad." But the same faculties that lead to that judgement lead to its rejection.

I guess I'm not understanding, "out of images stored in memories." Is Mind ultimately empty because everything in comes out of images and memory and these aren't part of Nature?

Normally Darwinian processes are described as occuring in and through nature to natural things. There is actually a somewhat pathological insistence that "Mind" not he allowed to enter the picture, so I don't know if I am familiar with how you mean it.

How does conciousness "displace" nature? Could we also say it emerges from or is embedded in nature? Or is it something wholly different?

The original question seems sort of trivial on second thought. Math exists in thought. Thought is part of the universe. Ergo math is in the universe. For if we are "embedded" in the universe, surely math must be.

But more questions follow: "is math only in us? If so, where does it come from? What causes it?"

I guess this would probably depend on your views on perception. If we see apples because apples exist, then it doesn't seem to be much of a stretch to say we see numbers because numbers exist. But if we construct our apples out of an inaccessible noumena, then perhaps there are no apples or numbers — or other people to discuss the existence of numbers with for that matter.

I think math, like Language, and everything else accessible to human mind/experience is a posteriori constructed by Mind and accepted if functional, rejected if not.

Constructed out of what? Or is it creation ex nihilo?

Soon I hope to present my thesis that Wittgenstein was a Hegelian. :wink:

Nah, he's an Islamic Golden Age thinker: :cool:

It is easy to see why thinkers like Alfarabi, Avicenna, Averroes, and the Averroists might conclude that there is a separate “active intellect” for all human beings.12 The identities we achieve in language seem to transcend us as individuals, and so we might well suspect that something beyond us is at work in us when we manage to touch the intelligibility of things. These thinkers believed that we each have our own imaginations and that we supply the phantasms for the cosmic mind, but that it is the separate intellect that does the thinking in us, not we ourselves. There are analogies to this doctrine in more recent writers, who have located human thinking in the structuralism of language or in intertextuality

Yep. Wittgenstein and Davidson are much closer to your way of putting it than Kant is, since they emphasize other people, whereas Kant is thinking about the lonely subject perceiving objects. Davidson adds another element to make it a three-way relation, a "triangulation" ...

It's interesting though to ask, what makes something or someone capable of engaging in "triangulation" with us? Looking back at the SEP quote on Donaldson:

it is impossible to make sense of what it is to follow a rule correctly, unless this means that what one is doing is following the practice of others who are like-minded:

It seems like the term "like-minded," has to do a lot of lifting here if it isn't unpacked. I can train a dog to follow rules, but it doesn't seem like a dog can triangulate and ground the content of my thoughts.

What does the dog lack? What is it about the other human person that makes them able to ground the contents of thought for us? For if we say that the dog, the dolphin, and the chimpanzee fail to understand our rules, despite following them, and we turn around and say that to understand a rule is to follow the practice of like-minded individuals, we have just circled round the question.

And this might be where Kant comes back in, for Kant's focus leads him to an explanation of the ways in which we are "like-minded," such that we can ground word's meanings for one another. For to say only that "language is use," fails to explain why language is only useful vis-á-vis certain entities. We don't command rocks to move or explain our day to our house plants. "Use" can only become use because of what the other person is, and this leads us back to perceptions and experiences, the "meanings of words," since if words didn't mean anything to our interlocutors, what use could they have? The establishment of use itself seems to have certain prerequisites.

This is why I am skeptical of largely externalists explanations of language and meaning. I think they get something right, but I can't shake the suspicion that there is a large black box at the center of the explanation. The Swampman example seems to pop up because the content of thought is supposed to be entirely contingent on, and to exist in external linkages. But it seems possible to say that the external relations are a prerequisite for/a cause of thought, without having to move to saying thought subsists in or is fully defined in them.

I don't know how anyone can determine whether the universe exhibits chaos or order. How does one do this except by using a human made criteria?

There are similar arguments against systems being complex versus simple. But once you start deciding that key ways we cognize the world are illusory, it seems hard to know where to stop. In virtue of what is it appropriate to say that "my car is blue," when nothing looks blue without eyes? Could we also say color is a "human made" criteria? Or in virtue of what is "my car has more mass than the this bag of flour," free from being a human-made distinction? Sans the observer, there is no one to cut "my car" and "the bag of flour," into discrete physical systems.

The ability to quantize features has been a deciding factor here. Mass is real because it can be quantized. Likewise, color is illusory, while light really does have a wavelength, because the wavelength can be quantized. Except we can now quantize all the discernable colors the human eye can see, so this no longer seems like a good delineation.

Two things seem to be going on here. The allure of mathematization, and then the pairing down of the world to its features that appear to us through multiple senses. The reduction of all things to "bodies in space," popular since the dawn of philosophy, would seem to come from the fact that sight, hearing, touch, and the vestibular sense all can cross-check each other in verifying objects' position in space and their shape. But there is no prima facie reason why, if we distrust our senses re color or pitch, that we should necessarily think they give us a more accurate picture of the world when they agree.

But of course, there have been attempts to mathematize complexity, order, etc. It's just that it isn't easy, and there are multiple models for varying use cases. If there was a canonical mathematization of "what physical order is," would that settle the issue? Entropy is another area where subjectivity seems to get involved (Jaynes), yet this also lies at the foundations of physics.

Humans themselves are not "human made." Given a naturalist explanation of how humans come to have their cognitive capabilities, it seems odd to me how often it is proposed that there are totally sui generis, uniquely human things we are said to "project" on to reality. From whence do these illusions come? I think there is a deep, unsettled conflict between humanism and naturalism in modern philosophy, and it lies at the heart of the inability to move past the appearance/reality dichotomy.

Humanism wants man as the measure of all things, and proclaims our freedom when it proclaims that ethics, aesthetics, meaning, and even the objects of sense perception are our own invention. And yet naturalism would say these all have a causal history, having come into being through the same step-wise progression of physical state evolution (the logic of the world) that moves planets and dust particles. The result is a sort of bipolar view where scientific naturalism is held up as the paradigm of knowledge, but then it's objects are taken to be mere appearance. So to this point:

Why do you think we should regard the cosmos as knowable, let alone rational in any sense?

If everything known or experienced is appearance, why even posit an appearance/reality distinction? If the reality can't be known, then it's just an unsupportable posit, the proposal of a brute fact that relates to nothing.

But if appearances have "real" causes, then it stands to reason that there is something that causes people to widely agree on the usefulness of the order/disorder, simple/complex distinction.



I certainly don't think Rawls wants or envisions anything like ABNW. Rather, I think pushing definitions of the good back to the unanalyzable preferences of the individual makes it impossible to state precisely why ABNW is abhorrent. The society there would seem to allow for greater freedom than liberal states today. Virtually all the "manipulation" comes in the form of positive feedback and the environment of one's upbringing. People aren't censored by the state for bucking norms, but rather end up estranged from their community due to their fellow citizens' own preferences for the current order.

The only time explicit government restraint enters the picture is when the characters violently seize soma from other individuals to "free them." But surely the government can step in to stop people from taking other's property. The result isn't even punishment, they are essentially rewarded instead, sent to an environment of like-minded individuals. John Savage wants to leave, and they say "go right ahead."

Point being that virtually all the coercion in born out of the preferences of the individual citizens. To be sure, these preferences are born of their enviornment, one we might call manipulative, but if preferences run the show, I don't see what the objection here is supposed to be.

If a society based on Rawls principles is set up, and over time it evolves into ABNW, where is the objection supposed to come from? That's pretty much the origin story in the book. The advanced economies set about trying to resolve problems, and over time ABNW emerges, not from tyranny, but from bureaucratic, scientific-minded problem solving, economies of scale, and consensus building.

There is another thing that often gets brought up here by right-wing students of post-modernism and identity movements: in virtue of what is the liberal focus on the individual and their freedom legitimate? Why shouldn't we focus on the freedom of communities or ethnic groups to determine how they want to live? To use Nick Land's term, there is no way to "exit" the liberal system, aside from force. A classmate of mine had a similar take, from the far left, claiming that representation should be apportioned on racial lines and there should be parallel justice systems and juries for people of different ethnicities.


Groups on not free to create their own neo-fascist city states and raise the collective above the individual. But what makes the individual the proper arbiter here?

I'd argue that the claims of liberals and collectivist identify movements can't be adjudicated because they each have the origin of the good lying not in reason, which can adjudicate, but in the individual or collective's desires.

Thank you.

It can be upheld that whereas passions in themselves always addressed ends (passions always being in some way wants and that wanted being the end pursued

I am not sure about this. The "passions" are generally associated with emotion, and I am not sure these always have "ends". Consider being depressed or angry; is there necessarily an "end" here? Oftentimes the passions seem so problematic precisely because we cannot identify ends that would relieve/gratify them.

[reason] will always strictly be a means toward the ends pursued—including potentially those ends of discerning what is true

Again, I am not sure if this is always true. Is intuiting or understanding something we have not set out to understand an end or desire? It seems like understanding and knowledge sometimes come upon us "out of the blue," not as the end of some process, and yet these seem bound up in reason. The advice of mystics in the apophatic tradition - Saint John of the Cross, Saint Denis, the author of The Cloud of Unknowing - is precisely that all ends must be given up for the intuition of the highest goal of reason, contemplation.

But you do raise a good question: "is the desire for truth just one passion among many, or is it different from other passions and appetites?"

For Plato, they are obviously not the same. His entire anthropology is predicated on a distinction between appetites, passions/emotions, and reason. We don't necessarily have to buy the idea of a tripartite soul to agree that these are useful distinctions, and I do agree that there is a phenomenological difference between craving food or drink (appetites), being depressed or angry (passions), and wanting to know the truth, as well as differences in how these affect behavior. Addiction, a disorder centered on the appetites, manifests quite differently from bipolar or major depression, a disorder centered on the passions, which manifests quite differently from schizophrenia or dementia, disorders whose most prominent symptoms lie in how they affect reason.

The desire towards truth and "what is truly good," does not seem to be "just another passion." Why? Consider the following:

The Relevance of Expert Opinion:

Consider Aristotle's classification of the intellectual virtues. Reason would seem to be involved in craftsmanship, prudence, scientific knowledge, intuition, and philosophical wisdom. When we are dealing with our desire for knowledge, the drive for what is "truly good," we look to experts on how to actualize this. As Aristotle points out in Book II of the ethics, our proper reference for right action would be "the excellent/intelligent person's choice given the same scenario." That is, we look for someone who has the same desire as us for goodness and truth to show us how to actualize our goal.

But is this the same for any other desire? Does the hungry person craving a certain type of food look to another hungry person who craves the same thing to learn how to sate themselves or do they look to the person who knows how to cook what they want (the possessor of techne)? Does the depressed person look for help from other depressed people, or to just anyone who seems happy, or do they look to the psychologist or counselor for advice? People who desire truth look to others who desire it for aid and inspiration, but one who possesses an appetite or passion does not look to someone with the same appetite or passion to see how to act in the same way.

Reason's Ability to Affect Character:

At 1114a-b of theEthics, Aristotle discusses how every person aims for the "apparent" good, for it is obvious that we don't always know what is good for us. Our ability to not only do what we think is good, but to enjoy it, is affected by reason.

Per Aristotle's classification in Book VII of the Ethics, a person who has a vice, say overeating or smoking, engages in the bad behavior and gets pleasure from it. They are not conflicted. Whereas the incontinent person knows their actions are bad, but cannot overcome their drives and desires. The continent person then is the one who acts in accordance with their beliefs, but still desires vice. Finally, we have the virtuous person, who acts in accordance with what is good and enjoys it.

A key insight here is that people can move themselves between these states (and be helped in doing so). The first step of AA is "admitting you have a problem," the move from vice to incontinence. In the long term, the desire of reason for what is truly good can shift character, such that we come to be virtuous, enjoying acting in the way we think is right.

This makes the desires of reason take on a radically different role vis-a-vis ethics and the human being's ability to become a free agent from the other desires. For does the fulfillment of any other passion or drive tend to shift our other desires? Does fulfilling the desire for sex change what foods we want? Does lashing out in anger make us interested in different hobbies? I would allow that the fulfillment of one desire might change a persons character and desires in some ways; the alcoholic might have different desires after they've begun drinking. However, these changes have no end, they are incidental. Only the desires of reason can have a structured impact on long term character formation, such that we come to "desire what we want to desire." For this reason, only the desires of reason are likely to lead us towards a harmonized state, where we do what we think is good, and desire to act as we do.

---

That the desire for what is truly good and true is different from the desire for other ends is precisely Plato's point. No other desire is capable of shaping the other desires in the same way. No other end might be seen as "the end of ends." The distinction is a key point for our anthropology. Are all things with ends the same "sort of thing," or is this a bad way to classify them? I would tend to agree with the latter. Following Frankfurt, I would consider that the ability to have second-order volitions, "the desire to desire x," is essential to defining persons. But it is precisely the desires of reason that allow for second-order volitions. So, the desires of reason don't seem to be "just another desire" that persons have, but rather key to the definition of persons, making it play an entirely different role in philosophical anthropology.

Durkheim looks closely at how this communal-instrumental mind (which he consistently refers to as a real and essentially living thing, the cultural mind) is produced through the mechanism of habits, enlisted by moral norms, essentially.

Hegel has some good stuff on this too, although in his obscure mode of presentation. I've often thought of statistical offices as the nascent "sense organs of the state." But our institutions seem far off from the "mature state" for whom "thought and consciousness essentially belong." Such that, "the state knows what it wills and knows it as something thought." (Philosophy of Right § 270, Addition)

I feel like Truman is generally underrated. If you look at his dairies, he absolutely knew he was going to lose his shot at a third term over Korea, but he did the hard thing instead of the easy thing in canning MacArthur (absolutely warranted), avoiding nuclear brinkmanship and a larger war, and giving Rigeway what he needed while not allowing Europe to become weakened to the point where it enticed Soviet action.

The Post-War relief efforts, Marshall Plan, NATO, containment as the successful grand strategy of the Cold War, the reorganization of Japan, all feathers in his cap. West Germany, Japan, and South Korea all ended up as flourishing, free states, although Korea took a while. It really helps his legacy just how well Korea has done, from being an incredibly poor state to one of the wealthiest, and just how poorly North Korea has done.

I also feel like Bush I is deeply underrated. He did the hard thing with taxes and deficits instead of the easy thing of ballooning the debt, and handled the end of the USSR as well as could have been imagined in 88. He was probably America's most able foreign policy President in many decades.

And I would tend to rate Obama quite highly. I am more skeptical at attempts to rehabilitate LBJ's reputation.

It's Wikipedia, so you can always edit it.

Well, if they are skeptical regarding reason itself, as a whole, they might have their reasons, but they certainly shouldn't put any stock in them. :rofl:

Phyrro of Elis allegedly had to have his disciples follow him around to make sure he didn't walk of cliffs or into fire, so strong was his conviction in the unreliability of reason. But alas, he was one day caught running away from a wild dog and was disgraced.

A Brave New World world might be a good inroad for the problem I see with Rawls. It's a society that does extremely well at fulfilling everyone's appetitive desires and passions. It maximizes utility as well as might be possible without hooking everyone up to some sort of chemical pleasure creche. Each class thinks their role is best. It has a very equal distribution of goods.

It has a high degree of freedom as defined in the Lockean/liberal "freedom as freedom from external constraint," sense. You can do as you desire. If you're a rare person who doesn't desire just orgy porgy, mass media entertainment, and soma binges, you can go off to an island of other misfits and pursue your scientific or artistic projects; your own Gault's Gulch. You're free so long as you don't mess with the system that makes most other people happy. It's the minimal amount of external constraint to maximize utility for all; the liberal ideal!

But the world is a horrific dystopia. How does our abstract observer express this without having to get into how a good human life "ought" to be? They can't complain about freedom to fulfill desires, utility, or equality. What makes ABNW a dystopia is all about what we ought to desire, not what we might come to/do desire.

To get at why the world of ABNW is bad though, it seems we have to go beyond and behind the preferences of the agent. Something like Hegel's "people must be forced to be free," and "the criminal deserves the right to be punished" because they aren't a dog to be trained.

I don't think Popper even believed that. A criteria like "objectively measurable, verifiably repeatable evidence, that [is] capable of being falsified," would make it impossible to believe in historical events without being a dogmatist. How many times was the Declaration of Independence drafted by Thomas Jefferson and who was measuring him?

And I especially don't think you think that's a good way to define dogmatism, nor do I, nor do I think Schindler would either.

I should have posted the youtube link right away , since I think it is relevant to the OP that Schindler’s arguments are supposed to represent a bulwark against dogmatism, and yet he presumes as fact the appearance of god in the world, and presumes the manner of his appearance. I don’t understand how that isn’t dogmatic.

How can you tell if it's dogmatic or not? It's a brief conversation that is starting "in the middle." Does he "presuppose" the appearance of God in the world as an absolute or does he think that there is reasonable evidence for it? Certainly we can start out in the "middle" and say "flat-Earthers are ridiculous because they ignore all the evidence that the Earth is round," without having our assertion that the Earth is round rest on unquestioned dogma.

Bad argument and bad judgement isn't dogma. When it comes to religion, I find there is a bad tendency to presume dogmatism simply because religious belief often is dogmatic. But consider the case where I am convinced in the reality of the Incarnation for this reason:

Each night for a month, an angle came to me and took me on a tour of the heavens, and I was as awake and aware as I saw the wonders there as I ever am in my everyday life.

Further, my wife, and some reputable friends I had over heard me talking in my sleep and claim on their lives that they saw me glowing and levitating of the bed. Additionally, the angle who proclaimed God's revelation to me told me about the future, which I wrote down, and all that was said came to pass.

I would argue that doubt in this case would be more the dogmatic position. For it would be saying that seemingly no amount of evidence can shake me from my preexisting conviction that the Incarnation did not occur. But this is precisely what makes the epistemology of religion such a dicey business, for my justification is difficult to share, although this doesn't make it fail to be good justification.



Well, Hume and Nietzsche would be forerunners of the attack on reason. Schindler's argument, which seems credible, is that this has expanded from individual thinkers and lines of critique to whole areas of discourse where reason is secondary.

I did find the image I was thinking of:



Some of the bullets, particularly the last, would seem to make identity trump reason. Of course, there is also a difference between "all past discourse and attempts to produce rational evidence is corrupted by power relations, identity, etc." and "reason cannot adjudicate these issues, even in an ideal setting." Yet it's easy to see how one bleeds into the other, or how the former, if it makes the conditions where reason is valid utopian and forever out of reach, essentially becomes the latter for all practical purposes.

I'll back up @Wayfarer on this. It's no accident that Catholic universities tend to have large philosophy programs, nor that these philosophy programs tend to be Platonic or Aristotelian in nature. Indeed, Catholic clergy are required to have what is the equivalent of an undergraduate degree in philosophy, and this education leans into Platonism and Aristotelianism. You won't find this at all in Protestantism. Orthodox are warmer towards philosophy than Protestants, but they don't come near Catholics. There was a point in the Medieval period when the Orthodox Church turned a corner, rejecting Barlaam and opting for Palamas, and that decision cemented a distrust in philosophy and eclecticism. For my money the two most philosophically robust religions are Catholicism and Hinduism.

Agree 100%. I meant more that it's an accident that similar lines aren't popular in other places, that it doesn't seem like a necessarily Catholic set of ideas. But I agree that historically it has an extremely close relationship.

Consider a photovoltaic sensor. The number on the sensor can be quite accurate. It is mediated by the functioning device, and very much an indirect measure of the light falling on the sensor.

What would constitute a direct physical interaction? There seems to be plenty of mediation involved in two billiard balls bouncing off one another if you get fine grained enough in your analysis.

I think with smell it's clearly the second one. I think the experience you have when you're smelling things is clearly not just experiencing reality as-it-is.

So, it'd be experiencing reality-as-it-is-not?

And then I think when that becomes an experience, that experience isn't just raw-reality-as-it-really-is, it's an experience concocted for you by your brain.

If the mind is a barrier to experiencing reality-as-it-is, would this imply that reality-as-it-is is what reality "is like" without a mind? Is the true smell of coffee in-itself what it smells like without a nose, the true shape of the coffee mug what it looks like without eyes and what it feels like without a body?

The problem I see is that any appearance/reality distinction can't have everything be appearance "all the way down." If that's the case, why not just call "appearance" reality?

But I think the motivation here normally comes out of the evidence that sense experience isn't a direct passthrough of information from the environment. Organism's sense organs can only take in a vanishingly small amount of the total information in the environment without succumbing to entropy. Most information must be excluded, and what gets excluded is shaped by the architecture of the organism, which is shaped by natural selection. That our skin isn't one big eye, or that our toes aren't noses could itself be called a "bias," in that it constricts incoming information.

Then, the limited amount of information that actually makes it in is subjected to all sorts of computational methods that have evolved to pick out information relative to fitness. This all would appear to occur to prior to recursive self-awareness, so that the information that shows up in experienced perception has been compressed, curated, and combined with extrapolations, etc. I recall reading that the vast amount of information that comes down the optic nerve, itself a tiny fraction of all the light hitting the human body at any time, almost immediately gets "dropped" after a "scan" for relevance.

And yet, the qualia experienced by an individual obviously has a causal link with the objects experienced. The signal/information that starts with a wave of light bouncing off an apple ends up in perception. There is a direct relationship between the object and experience, such that if we remove the light reflecting off the apple we cease seeing it.

What then can we make of this? I do really like Donald Hoffman's work on this, which argues that we have to go for idealism, because there is no accessible reality in our current reality/appearance distinction, but I don't buy it. It's clear that there is not a direct relationship between every aspect of experience and the objects experienced, but there is at causal link between what perception "is like" and the objects perceived. This would seem to allow for reality to make it to sense perception. The object and the experience of the object are isomorphic, or at least share some form of morphism.

I don't like the language of "seeing representations" because it tends to lapse into humoncular thinking and because it presents such "representations" as static objects. But really we're talking about a process, and a process that, properly described, is going to need to involve the objects perceived.

Whether there are even any direct physical interactions (as in, not mediated by some third thing) is an interesting question in the philosophy of physics. I like Roveli's "entanglement is a dance for three."

Ah, right, I forgot , it also disproves Tarski's undefinability theorem somehow.

Give AI senses and the possibility to act, then the difference to human behaviour will diminish on the long run. Does this mean that we are just sophisticated machines and all talk about freedom of choice and responsibility towards our actions is just wishful thinking?

Determinism doesn't necessarily rule out many conceptions of free will. Many philosophers argue that determinism is a prerequisite for free will. If our acts didn't have determinate outcomes, or at least predictable ones, we couldn't enact our will in the world. Consider a videogame where you can push buttons but the buttons do random things each time you push them. In what way are you free to change things in the game?

The flip side of this problem is that if our actions are not determined by anything in the world, our past experiences, etc. then they wouldn't seem to rightly be "our actions." If they are determined by nothing that comes before, they become uncaused, arbitrary and random.

But free will can be conceived of a sort of "self-determination." Our recursive self-awareness has causes, its existence and contents are determined by past events, but our awareness itself also seems to play a causal role in our choices. We are not perfectly free, which is obvious, we cannot walk through walls or wipe memories from our mind at will. But who we are and what we think seems to play a determining role in what we do, and in this way we are free as "self-determining," entities. Nothing in determinism contradicts this sort of freedom.

The challenge to freedom in our "being reduced to machines," generally runs through smallism and epiphenomenalism. The argument is normally something like:

Atoms are not concious and lack purposes. We are nothing but atoms. Therefore, all our acts are determined by that which lacks purpose, and conciousness' effects on action must illusory, since all thought is determined by the rules governing mindless atoms.

But this doesn't follow from determinism, it follows from other concepts normally lumped in with determinism, namely reductionism and smallism, the idea that facts about all large entities can be wholly reduced to facts about smaller entities. However, such views seem to make accounting for conciousness impossible, barring panpsychism, so it's unclear how seriously they should be taken, nor is there overwhelming empirical support for them. True reductions in science are very rare.

Yes, AI can think if we know how we think

Or maybe rather, "we could determine that AI was thinking if we knew how we thought?" But we don't, and therein lies the massive hole at the center of this debate.

But for those who deny the possibility...




...what about "wetware" AI that is "grown" from neuronal tissue, perhaps with silicone involved as well? If these cannot be concious, why can natural entities composed of a similar material be conscious?

Of course, there the difference between "artificial life," and "AI" gets blurry. Where is the line between cyborg and hybot? How much biological material, or biological-like material can be involved in a potential "thinking thing" before we dismiss it as being "AI?"

Whether purely silicone based systems can produce sentience seems impossible to answer currently. Finding evidence of silicone-based life, while unlikely, would really shake this up.

The use of "analytic" here bears little resemblance to the normal usage. As far as I can tell, any fact is "analytic" so long as it can be defined as true by definition by some string. The analytic normally is "what is true by definition," and apparently non-analytic facts like "Moscow is the current capital of Russia," can become analytic despite the fact that "Moscow" is not synonymous with "the capital of Russia," by simply stipulating an axiom that says "Moscow is the capital of Russia, by definition."

But how would one determine if any such string is actually true? Wouldn't we need to look at the world and make sure the capital hasn't moved back to St. Petersburg again? No, because we have the "one true model of the world" in which all strings are true, by definition, and this makes everything analytic, because, given the model, you can point to an axiom for any fact that says "this is true by definition."

In virtue of what is the "one true model," true? In virtue of the fact that it stipulates that only true things are true (by definition). Why are these things true? Because they are stipulated as true by definition and they are also true because they are in the "one true model."

I'm not a Rawlsian all down the line, but I do think you're being unfair here. The veil of ignorance, or the "original position," is a technical contrivance Rawls uses to set a basis for his very complicated discussion.

I don't see where I stated otherwise. The point is merely that desire drives the ship. What "would we want?" is the framing, not "what should we want?" The relevance of us being unable to abstract ourselves into identical "rational agents," is its implications when desire is driving the ship, not that this somehow ruins the utility of Rawls' thought experiment, nor that Rawls assumes we can really do this (he doesn't). If we could all actually get "behind the viel," then what would be good would simply be "good" in virtue of the fact that this is what people behind the viel want.

But why does the abstract rational agent want the society they want? If it's because of their reason alone, then reason turns out to actually be behind the preferences, and we have gone back in time to a point where it is possible to articulate through reason the grounds for justice and morality. If this desire is unanalyzable, then the fact that we can't actually get behind the viel is quite a problem, for we cannot come to possess this unanalyzable desire.

But one person's "interminable debate" may be another's "ongoing process of communication and refinement of values." It raises the question, Why do we expect rational debate to terminate? Are there in fact instances of this, in philosophy?

This is a fair point. "Interminable," might be the wrong description, although they certainly are interminable. It is more that these debates turn into people talking past one another and splitting off into silos. The defining feature might be politicization, the shift of debate into power struggles, grounded in mutually exclusive presuppositions about the applicability of reason and argument to various subjects of debate.