Idealism in Context

As d’Espagnat famously [s]observed[/s][assumed], quantum physics suggests that “reality is not wholly real” in the classical sense presupposed by scientific realism.

By contrast, the word objective, in its modern philosophical usage — “not dependent on the mind for existence” — entered the English lexicon only in the early 17th century, during the formative period of modern science, marked by the shift away from the philosophy of the medievals. This marks a profound shift in the way existence itself was understood. As noted, for medieval and pre-modern philosophy, the real is the intelligible, and to know what is real is to participate in a cosmos imbued with meaning, value, and purpose. But in the new, scientific outlook, to be real increasingly meant to be mind-independent — and knowledge of it was understood to be describable in purely quantitative, mechanical terms, independently of any observer. The implicit result is that reality–as–such is something we are apart from, outside of, separate to.

This conceptual shift took decisive form in the work of Galileo, Descartes, and John Locke (against whom most of Berkeley’s polemics were directed). Galileo proposed that the “book of nature” is written in the language of mathematics, and that only its measurable attributes — shape, number, motion — belonged to nature herself?.

George Berkeley....................best known for his philosophy of immaterialism — the view that physical objects exist only if perceived

What Berkeley objected to was the notion of an unknowable stuff underlying experience — an abstraction he believed served no explanatory purpose and in fact led to skepticism. His philosophy was intended as a corrective to this, affirming instead that the world is as it appears to us in experience

What Berkeley objected to was the notion of an unknowable stuff underlying experience — an abstraction he believed served no explanatory purpose and in fact led to skepticism. His philosophy was intended as a corrective to this, affirming instead that the world is as it appears to us in experience — vivid, structured, and meaningful, but always in relation to a mind — although importantly for Berkeley, as a Christian Bishop, the mind of God served as a kind of universal guarantor of reality, as by Him all things were perceived, and so maintained in existence.

Abstract: Berkeley’s idealism should be reinterpreted not as an outmoded metaphysical theory, but as a philosophically astute protest against the “great abstraction” initiated by the scientific revolution — a defense of the primacy of experience and the indispensability of the observer, in a historical moment when knowledge was being severed from consciousness in favor of a disembodied ‘view from nowhere’.

Perhaps, as "Schrödinger Cat" as well as e.g. Einstein, Popper, Hawking, Penrose, Deutsch et al suggest, "quantum physics" provides an extremely precise yet mathematically incomplete model of "reality"

(3) Finally, a mechanical world where only numbers, shape, motion ignores the observers entirely. We belong in the world, as tangible, perceptible objects that have a central doing in existence.

if the 'reality beyond/prior to phenomena' is unknowable, how could our cognitive faculties be able to 'order' appearances in the first place?

I think if he had been around in the early twentieth century he would have been a logical positivist and then made the natural adjustments in light of post-positivism.

The Sapient Cosmos.

Do you think the Cosmos is currently Conscious, or is it evolving toward Collective Sentience, or was the First Cause of the evolutionary program Sentient in some sense?

But to understand why idealism is important, we need to be clear about what prompted its emergence….

Berkeley's metaphysical idealism is polar opposite to logical positivism's hardline materialism.

I don't think he would have been impressed with Kastrup's view which seems to always be alluding to something mysterious under the hood.

Humans cannot perceive Black Holes.

They may be inferred, but they cannot be perceived in Berkeley's terms.

Would it be Berkeley's position that Black Holes don't exist?

Yes, but the positivists detested metaphysics. How would Berkeley have been received, explaining that everything is kept in existence by being perceived by God, in that environment?

Bernardo Kastrup never says that. His analytical idealism says that the reality of phenomenal experience is the fundamental fact of existence.

have seen (Kastrup) talk about quantum theory and about how he thinks the alleged falsification of "realism" there is some kind of indication that these physical things are only appearances and whats really going on is something deeper.

His first employment was at CERN

He doesn't seem to have a physics PHD.

We noted above that what Berkeley denies is not the reality of the objects of sense, but of a material substance — something which underlies and stands apart from the objects it comprises.

Kant doesn’t say our faculties impose order on “reality in itself” — only on the raw manifold of intuition as it is given to us.

Why would it be thought that material substance "stands apart from the objects it comprises" if it is what constitutes them?

Should we take science as our guide to determine which seems more plausible, or should we take our imagination, intuitions, feelings and wishes?

Should we take science as our guide to determine which seems more plausible, or should we take our imagination, intuitions, wishes and so on?

Recall that in the early modern scientific model, the measurable attributes of bodies were said to be different from how the object appeared to the senses. This is central to the 'great abstraction' of physics that Berkeley was criticising.

Perhaps we could study philosophy, and also study philosophically, rather than referring everything to science as the arbiter of reality.

Science provides no guidance on this. It is a metaphysical question. The fundamental matter/energy assumption falls to infinite regress in scientific experimentation.

The question of interpretion of physics is as much one of philosophy as of physics. And Kastrup has got considerable practical experience in physics

Do you have a reference or an argument for your 'fundamental matter/ energy' claim?

Every proposed fundamental particle has been broken down into further particles in experimentation, implying infinite regress.

there is no like established consensus or even empirical accessibility on these issues where you could appeal to an expert's opinion on "realism" in QM as reliable or unimpeachable. All the experts have different opinions in this field.

Hence Penrose’s insistence that quantum physics is just wrong - because of his unshakeable conviction in scientific realism.

Whereas more idealistically-tinged interpretations are compatible with the observations without having to question the theory.

His objection is philosophical: the equation should describe the world in a completely deterministic way; they don’t describe ‘what the world is doing’. But what if ‘the world’ is not fully determined by physics? What if it is in some fundamental sense truly probabilistic, not entirely fixed? He doesn’t seem to be able to even admit the possibility.

The quoted passage just shows that Penrose is not a rigid determinist,

Can physics provide, and should it aim to provide, a truly objective account of the world? Realism tends to treat this as a yes-or-no question. And that’s where, I think, the problem lies.

Kant doesn’t say our faculties impose order on “reality in itself” — only on the raw manifold of intuition as it is given to us. The in-itself is the source of that, but its true nature remains unknowable; what we know is the ordered phenomenal field that results from the mind’s structuring of the manifold of sensory impressions in accordance with its a priori forms and concepts.

I'm aware that D'Espagnat differed with both Kant and Berkeley, but he did mention both. Berkeley's idealism is often mentioned by physicists as representing a kind of idealism that they wish to differentiate themselves from. But the point is - he's mentioned!

John Wheeler, 'Law without Law'

It would seem that the theory is exclusively concerned about ‘results of measurement’, and has nothing to say about anything else. What exactly qualifies some physical systems to play the role of ‘measurer’? Was the wavefunction of the world waiting to jump for thousands of millions of years until a single-celled living creature appeared? Or did it have to wait a little longer, for some better qualified system . . . with a PhD? If the theory is to apply to anything but highly idealised laboratory operations, are we not obliged to admit that more or less ‘measurement-like’ processes are going on more or less all the time, more or less everywhere? Do we not have jumping then all the time?

I'm not sure about that. The gravity waves from black hole collisions can be perceived via gravity wave detection. Wouldn't that put them in the same category as, say, neutron stars?

As regards black holes, Berkeley doesn’t reject inductive inference; in fact, his Principles of Human Knowledge and Three Dialogues show that he accepts the regularities of experience and the way we extend them to predict or explain things we haven’t directly sensed.

Both Reid and Berkeley reject ‘representationalism’, an epistemological position whereby we (mediately) perceive things in the world indirectly via ideas in our mind, on the grounds of anti-scepticism and common sense.
https://www.euppublishing.com/doi/abs/10.3366/jsp.2019.0242?journalCode=jsp

What Berkeley objected to was the notion of an unknowable stuff underlying experience — an abstraction he believed served no explanatory purpose and in fact led to skepticism.

Two meanings of ‘representation’ in play there. He objects to representative realism but I’m sure he would accept that the sight of smoke represents fire or a dangerous animal represents a threat.

In Berkeley's expression "esse est percipi", I understand the word "perceive" to refer to something through one of the five senses, not to something understood in the mind.

But, for Berkeley, all that is real are spirits, which could be glossed as ‘perceiving beings’, and objects are ideas in minds.

George Berkeley (1685–1753) was an Irish philosopher and Anglican bishop best known for his philosophy of immaterialism — the view that physical objects exist only if perceived (summed up in the memorable aphorism ‘esse est percipi’).

The problem is always that ‘mind’ is outside a Wheeler’s usual term of reference. But Andrei Linde doesn’t hesitate to speak about it.

But I don’t think that the corollary of that is that non-perceived objects cease to exist. They exist in the sight of God

Why would that necessarily be so? For all we know there is nothing more fundamental than quarks. There does seem to be a limit to the possibility of measurement, that much is known.

I think that terminology is certainly not his. Have a browse of the Early Modern Texts translation provided in Ref 1. He’s quite the sophist. (I recommend the Dialogues.)

Berkeley defends idealism by attacking the materialist alternative. What exactly is the doctrine that he’s attacking? Readers should first note that “materialism” is here used to mean “the doctrine that material things exist”.

Thus, although there is no material world for Berkeley, there is a physical world, a world of ordinary objects. This world is mind-dependent, for it is composed of ideas, whose existence consists in being perceived. For ideas, and so for the physical world, esse est percipi.

In many contexts physical and material are synonyms

But specifically for Berkeley, as an Immaterialist, he does not believe in a world of material substance, fundamental particles and forces, but he does believe in a world of physical form, bundles of ideas in the mind of God.

Published by Essentia Foundation, which is Kastrup's publishing house. I like Glattfelder but my interests are a little more prosaic, he's a bit too far out when he gets into shamanism and psychedelics.

But IMO he used the empiricists' arguments (e.g. Locke)

Berkeley IMO took away the 'physical' using empiricist arguments.

?Wayfarer

Not really sure what this is trying to convey. The[re] are several coherent realist perspectives on QM which don't invoke any form of collapse, such as Bohmian, Many Worlds, Stochastic mechanics and possibly others. Your response just seems to me like someone pretending that these theories, which all reproduce the correct quantum behavior, don't exist. You have clearly put yourself in an echo chamber where the only releva[nt] opinions on QM are those of subjectivists, wooists, relationalists.

In this view, to know something is not simply to construct a mental representation of it, but to participate in its form — to take into oneself, immaterially, the essence of what the thing is.

Thefe are several coherent realist perspectives

This is why I think in another context (Berkeley) could have been something like a logical positivist.

Aristotle postulated a primitive definition of Energy (energeia) as the actualization of Potential. And modern physics has equated causal energy with knowledge (meaningful Information)*1*2. For which I coined the term EnFormAction : the power to transform.

Berkeley, like the logical positivists after him, failed to reconcile his philosophical commitment to a radical form of empiricism with his other philosophical commitment to agency and morality. But in his defence, nobody before or after Berkeley has managed to propose an ontology that doesn't have analogous issues.

Not really sure what this is trying to convey. Thefe are several coherent realist perspectives on QM which don't invoke any form of collapse, such as Bohmian, Many Worlds, Stochastic mechanics and possibly others

It (Copenhagen Interpretation) may lack philosophical rigor

The positivists have a simple solution: the world must be divided into that which we can say clearly and the rest, which we had better pass over in silence. But can anyone conceive of a more pointless philosophy, seeing that what we can say clearly amounts to next to nothing? If we omitted all that is unclear, we would probably be left with completely uninteresting and trivial tautologies.

Op is excellent. I wasn't going to enter into this conversation since it's stuff he and I have been over multiple times.

In this view, to know something is not simply to construct a mental representation of it, but to participate in its form — to take into oneself, immaterially, the essence of what the thing is. (Here one may discern an echo of that inward unity — a kind of at-one-ness between subject and object — that contemplative traditions across cultures have long sought, not through discursive analysis but through direct insight.) Such noetic insight, unlike sensory knowledge, disengages the form of the particular from its individuating material conditions, allowing the intellect to apprehend it in its universality. This process — abstraction— is not merely a mental filtering but a form of participatory knowing

I can't see how idealism is able to explain three things - or perhaps better, in offering explanations it admits that there are truths that are independent of mind and so ceases to be different to realism in any interesting way.

Novelty.
We are sometimes surprised by things that are unexpected. How is this possible if all that there is, is already in one’s mind?

Agreement .
You and I agree as to what is the case. How is that possible unless there is something external to us both on which to agree?

Error.
We sometimes are wrong about how things are. How can this be possible if there is not a way that things are, independent of what we believe?

I reject the idealism/realism dichotomy

The way I see it, the fact that we all experience the same world can be explained only by a collective mind we all participate in or an independently existing material world. We cannot know which alternative is true, the best we can do is decide which seems the more plausible.

..the thrust of this particular OP is historical

Transcendental idealism does not claim that the world is a mere figment of individual minds, but rather that the structure of experience is provided by our shared and inherent cognitive systems.

Agreement arises because we all operate with fundamentally similar mental structures. This preserves the objectivity of the external world while acknowledging the active role our minds play in organizing experience.

The explanation on offer, "god did it", can account for anything, and so accounts for nothing. Not what I look for in an explanation.

I find it hard to make sense of "collective mind".

From SEP - George Berkeley:

Berkeley defends idealism by attacking the materialist alternative. What exactly is the doctrine that he’s attacking? Readers should first note that “materialism” is here used to mean “the doctrine that material things exist”.

Thus, although there is no material world for Berkeley, there is a physical world, a world of ordinary objects. This world is mind-dependent, for it is composed of ideas, whose existence consists in being perceived. For ideas, and so for the physical world, esse est percipi.

But there are restrained versions of it which argue is that what we access is necessarily mentally mediated - without making ontological commitments about what these objects are (non-mental, immaterial, mechanistic, etc.)

But, on a philosophical forum, and for philosophical purposes (introspecting the human mind), some form of Idealism

It's more that the way we access what we access is mentally mediated, and that is really a truism, even tautologous, If we say that perception is a mental process.

BTW, even Bohm's*4 "realistic perspective" is typically labeled as a form of Idealism

But specifically for Berkeley, as an Immaterialist, he does not believe in a world of material substance, fundamental particles and forces, but he does believe in a world of physical form, bundles of ideas in the mind of God.

Is matter, stripped of all the perceptible qualities and can only exist parasitically on other objects, a perceptible object? I understand by asking this, I am committing an error -- but please humor me.

I’m not alone in thinking that the many-worlds interpretation is wildly incoherent.

I believe that Bohm’s pilot waves have been definitely disproven

Nothing to do with ‘echo chambers’ more that you can’t fathom how any anti-realist interpretation could possibly be meaningful.

Why, do you think?

That is what he shares in common with positivism, but the conclusions he draws from it are radically different.

In fact, I think that Many Worlds is actually very coherent. Its fault is not intelligibility but that its just radically strange. Qbists and relationalist views are much more incoherent imo.

If all knowledge comes from experience - as Locke himself says - then how do we know this supposedly non-appearing, measurable 'stuff' we designate 'matter' actually exists?For Berkeley, that’s not empiricism, it’s speculation disguised as science

I think [Berkeley] believed it to be a completely useless concept.

Recall that in the newly-emerging physics

For him, perhaps it was; but nonetheless "matter" is very useful as a working assumption (like e.g. the uniformity of nature, mass, inertia, etc) for 'natural philosophers' then as it is now; certainly, as we know, not as "useless" of a "concept" for explaining the dynamics in and of the natural world as the good Bishop's "God" (pace Aquinas).

I take Berkeley to be arguing that we can do without the concept of matter.

What Newton did, is replace the concept of "matter" with "inertia", as the defining feature of a body. We can understand a body as having inertia, instead of understanding it as having matter. So the emerging physics, which understood the principal property of a body as inertia, rather than as matter, rendered the concept of matter as redundant.

The material world adds nothing if nothing is determined by the material world but is determined by the mind of God.

Is matter, stripped of all the perceptible qualities and can only exist parasitically on other objects, a perceptible object?

This is why I think in another context he could have been something like a logical positivist.

Berkeley did not believe in what today we call Physicalism, as he believed that everything in the world, whether fundamental particles, fundamental forces, tables, chairs or trees are bundles of ideas in the mind of God.

Berkeley, by contrast, accepts that there are regular sequences among ideas (what we might call “natural causes”), which God has ordained as the stable framework of experience. These patterns aren’t illusions; they’re effective causes in the world as God presents it to us.

One might ask, however, how one that endorses an 'idealist' position that flatly denies the existence of some kind of material substratum can explain the regularites (and 'intersubjective agreement') without assuming the existence of God or some God-like being.

I always found Kant's arguments to explain intersubjectivity and regularities without appealing to some 'reality beyond phenomena' as insufficient. Of course, Kant posited some kind of unknowable reality beyond phenomena.

Berkeley, by contrast, accepts that there are regular sequences among ideas (what we might call “natural causes”), which God has ordained as the stable framework of experience

Whereas, I think, for you, the idea that objects are not physical means that they must be in some sense illusory. Would that be true?

For Malebranche, God not only started the world but ensures that it keeps running.

So the cause of the red ball starting to move is not the white ball but the mind of God. The only necessary connection between the white ball and the red ball is the mind of God

For Berkeley, it initially seems that God no longer needs to control every interaction because He has created the Laws of Nature. For example, the conservation of momentum. The interaction between the white ball and red ball is now controlled by a Law of Nature rather than God directly.

That is not something that Newton himself would have said. It’s true that his discovery of inertia fundamentally changed the conception of matter, but I don’t think Newton had any doubt that physical objects were really physical. Newton didn’t eliminate “matter” from his vocabulary or ontology — he simply avoided metaphysical speculation about it.

Conversely, how can materialism justify belief in a mind-independent physical world without appealing to a likeness principle and a "master argument", in order to ground a theory of evidence relating subjective observations to the material world?

This is where his nominalism shows through. By designating universals purely mental or linguistic, Berkeley undercuts the possibility of a robust theory of lawlike regularities within his immaterialism.

Kant does acknowledge that there is a domain beyond our knowledge - so there is a reality beyond, or in a sense other than how it appears to us. But he avoided the weakness in Berkeley's argument by allowing that the forms of thought (categories) and of intuition are universal structures of cognition, not mere names — though still mind-dependent in his transcendental sense.

//also consider that the ‘material substratum’ is nowadays regarded as being of the nature of fields in which particles are ‘excitations’. I think this is why Berkelian idealism keeps being mentioned in this context.//

The determinist perspective, which dictates that the white ball, in the past, will necessarily cause the red ball to move, in the future, assumes a necessary continuity through the present, thereby eliminating the possibility of choice.

If this is the case, then there is no necessary continuity of existence of an object from past to future

If the world is recreated at each passing moment, then it could be created in any random way, so the observed consistency needs to be accounted for.

but isn't this more or less the same as the axiom of a persistent world under materialism?

As an Indirect Realist, for me, objects such as tables and chairs don't exist in the world, but only exist in the mind as concepts.

I can't see how idealism is able to explain three things - or perhaps better, in offering explanations it admits that there are truths that are independent of mind and so ceases to be different to realism in any interesting way.
Novelty.
We are sometimes surprised by things that are unexpected. How is this possible if all that there is, is already in one’s mind?
Agreement .
You and I agree as to what is the case. How is that possible unless there is something external to us both on which to agree?
Error.
We sometimes are wrong about how things are. How can this be possible if there is not a way that things are, independent of what we believe? — Banno

Depends on how idealism is interpreted.

BTW, even Bohm's*4 "realistic perspective" is typically labeled as a form of Idealism — Gnomon
Bohmian mechanics is just straightforward realism that happens to involve non-locality.

How do you account for truth? Is truth entirely subjective?

This must be a correspondence theory of truth, in that a true statement in language corresponds to a fact in the world.

In premodernity, the primary method of knowledge was religion: knowledge was given through divine revelation.

In modernity, this method was discarded and replaced by objectivism—the belief in an independent reality knowable by reason. As Nietzsche said, "God is dead, and we have killed him."

Today, when we see the limitations of objectivism but can't return to religion, we find ourselves at an impasse. This is where radical ideas like the "cancellation" of the subject arise.

But Newton did eliminate "matter" from his ontology. He replaced it with 'the Will of God', which is the mystical perspective described above.

Banno's questions seem to be based on an Either/Or dichotomy between Realism/Idealism or Subject/Object ; in which reasonable people must accept one perspective and reject the other. Hence, if you are an Idealist, then for you (the subject) there is no (objective) Reality.

As regards definitions, I believe in what today is called Physicalism, being fundamental particles and forces.

Of course it is a truism that the advent of modernity shattered this sense - this is what Max Weber described as the disenchantment of the world. So we need to understand the tectonic shifts, so to speak, that underlie all of these massive changes. It is no easy task, especially as we ourselves are both its proponents and its casualties.

Sure - I entirely agree, it should be trivial. Some people might disagree, as with everything else in philosophy.

Now the only issue is if you are OK with saying some versions of idealism entail mental mediation or if you think idealism must entail something else.

non-locality was not as "straightforward" as you imply.

What point would there be in explaining it to someone who thinks it's meaningless?

I am unclear as to the meaning of "perceive" in "esse est percipi", "to be is to be perceived".

Does it mean perceive through the sense, as in "I perceive a red postbox" or "I perceive a loud noise" or does it mean perceive in the mind, as in "I perceive she is bored" or "I perceive the cause of the smoke was a fire"?

Today, my understanding of reality is described by Physicalism, where particles and forces are fundamental to the reality of the world.

Berkeley did not believe in what today we call Physicalism, as he believed that everything in the world, whether fundamental particles, fundamental forces, tables, chairs or trees are bundles of ideas in the mind of God.

You won't dare to engage with my arguments directly

The problem is that in order for our own categories and intuition to 'ordain' the empirical world, I believe you need to posit some structure onto the noumenal and this suggests that we do have some knowledge of the noumenal,

aren't puzzling features of physical reality that need to be accounted for

They are obviously physical events happening out in reality

Because registering a measurement result requires the measuring device to physically interact with the system you are measuring.

the solution or interpretation would still have to account for how measurements to have a disturbing physical effect.

What's a "fact"? It's apparently not something existing in the world, so what is the correspondence? It seems to be a correspondence between two "things" that are both within your mind, and therefore circular.

So again this lends support to some basic aspects of Kant's (as distinct from Berkeley's) form of idealism. The idea that 'the structure of possible experience constrains what can count as empirical knowledge' has had considerable consequences in many schools of thought beyond quantum mechanics. As for Berkeley, though, these kinds of developments provide a partial vindication - by bringing the observer back to the act of observation ;-)

Brian Greene, The Fabric of the Cosmos:But where is the particle? Since the wave is uniformly spread throughout space, there is no way for us to say that the electron is here or there. When measured, it literally could be found anywhere. So while we know precisely how fast the particle is moving, there is huge uncertainty about its position. And as you see, this conclusion does not depend on our disturbing the particle. We never touched it

The claim "esse est percipi", to perceive is defined and explained clearly in many of the philosophers' passages. Berkeley's is no different -- to perceive is to use the 5 senses and of course the understanding of this perception.

I think you must be conflating physicalism with "matter" which we call substance that is independent of tangible things and perceptible qualities.

Physicalism is sometimes known as ‘materialism’. Indeed, on one strand to contemporary usage, the terms ‘physicalism’ and ‘materialism’ are interchangeable. But the two terms have very different histories.
As the name suggests, materialists historically held that everything was matter — where matter was conceived as “an inert, senseless substance, in which extension, figure, and motion do actually subsist”
But physics itself has shown that not everything is matter in this sense; for example, forces such as gravity are physical but it is not clear that they are material in the traditional sense
I will adopt the policy of using both terms interchangeably.

Tables and chairs may not exist in the world as physical things, but "tables" and "chairs" do exist in the world as physical things, as physical words.

Scenario one. A white ball hits a red ball, and the red ball moves.

Scenario two. A white ball almost hits a red ball. I put my hand between them and the red ball doesn't move.

Both scenarios are consistent with being in a deterministic world.

In scenario one, there is the conservation of momentum.

In scenario two, living in a deterministic world, I had no choice but to put my hand between the white and red ball.

In both scenarios, there is a necessary and deterministic continuity from past to present.

For example, consider two identical clocks both set at 1pm that slowly move apart. The times shown on their clock faces will remain the same, not because of some external connection between them, but because Clock A is identical to itself, clock B is identical to itself and clock A is identical to clock B.

I don't believe so. Newton like others of his period was deist. Deists believed that God 'set the world in motion' but that thereafter it ran by the laws that Newton discovered. Hence LaPlace's declaration (LaPlace being 'France's Newton'), when asked if there were a place for the Divine Intellect in his theory, that 'I have no need of that hypothesis'.

But the issue is, how do these things, words in this example, exist in that medium between you and me? Is the concept of "matter" required to explain that medium?

To say "I had no choice but to put my hand between the white and red ball" is not a good answer. It denies the usefulness of deliberation, which is not a good thing to do.

The law of identity denies the possibility that two distinct clocks, named as A and B, are identical. So your example, although referring to the law of identity, really violates it.

This assumes measurement is fundamentally about one physical system causally interacting with another physical system.

The "disturbance" language already smuggles in a particular metaphysical picture - that there are definite physical properties in existence that are disturbed by measurement.

In any case, the so called 'interaction-free measurements' are ways to get new information without getting 'positive' results.

I guess that for me Kant's (…) approach is incomplete….

However, it seems to me that if the 'reality beyond/before phenomena' was structureless, it would not possible for us to give it a 'form'.

Not sufficient to explain the commonality of experience. That's why Kant says there are things in themselves which appear to us as phenomena. Schopenhauer disagreed and claimed there cannot be things in themselves if there is no space and time (both of which are necessary for differentiation) except in individual minds. To posit an undifferentiated, unstructured thing in itself that gives rise to an unimaginably complex world of things on a vast range of scales is, to say the least, illogical.

Words must physically exist in some form in the physical space between where you exist and where I exist, otherwise we would not be able to exchange ideas.

Deliberation is part of a process that is determined in a deterministic world.

My main point is that the clocks A and B will continue to show the same time, not because of any external connection between them, but because of their particular internal structures. IE, there need not be a universal time in order for these two clocks to show the same time.

Of course, but the question is how. Do they consist of matter, or do they exist in some other way?

If it is something which is determined, by a deterministic world, then I'll just forget about making that stressful annoying effort.

They exist as physical matter, whether as electrons or the pixels 0 and 1, and they exist as spatial and temporal relations between these electrons or pixels.

Do you see the distinction being made between reasons and causes?

Reason, in philosophy, the faculty or process of drawing logical inferences.

Logic in a narrow sense is equivalent to deductive logic. By definition, such reasoning cannot produce any information (in the form of a conclusion) that is not already contained in the premises.

Berkeley - Treatise 35:I do not argue against the existence of any one thing that we can apprehend, either by sense or reflection. That the things I see with my eyes and touch with my hands do exist, really exist, I make not the least question. The only thing whose existence we deny is that which philosophers call ‘matter’ or ‘corporeal substance’.

Berkeley Treatise 26:I do not argue against the existence of any one thing that we can apprehend, either by sense or reflection. That the things I see with my eyes and touch with my hands do exist, really exist, I make not the least question. The only thing whose existence we deny is that which philosophers call ‘matter’ or ‘corporeal substance’.

However, by the early 20th century, philosophical idealism fell out of favor — particularly in the English-speaking world

I hope this is of some interest.

One of the reasons that it is so hard to discern what Berkeley is claiming is that he goes back on things that he has said. For example, he proposes that to exist is to be perceived (I don’t know what arguments he has to back up that claim, but let that pass).

[i]There once was a man who said “God
Must think it exceedingly odd
If he finds that this tree
Continues to be
When there’s no one about in the Quad.”

Dear Sir,
Your astonishment’s odd.
I am always about in the Quad.
And that’s why the tree
Will continue to be
Since observed by…

Yours faithfully,

God[/i]

But besides all that endless variety of ideas or objects of knowledge, there is likewise something which knows or perceives them, and exercises divers operations, as willing, imagining, remembering about them. This perceiving, active being is what I call mind, spirit, soul, or myself. By which words I do not denote any one of my ideas, but a thing entirely distinct from them, wherein they exist, or, which is the same thing, whereby they are perceived; for the existence of an idea consists in being perceived. ...

And later (§89):

“From what has been said it is plain there is not any other substance than spirit, or that which perceives. But for the fuller understanding of this, it must be considered that we do not see spirits … we have no ideas of them. Hence it is plain we cannot know or perceive spirits, as we do other things; but we have some notion of our own minds, of our own being; and that we can have no idea of any spirit is evident, since it is not an idea. Spirits are things altogether of a different sort from ideas.”

the sense-data theory of Ayer and the phenomenalism of Carnap was very much in the tradition of Berkeley

Words exist in a mind-independent world in two ways, in the same way that 0 1 1 1 0 1 0 exists in two ways.

They exist as physical matter, whether as electrons or the pixels 0 and 1, and they exist as spatial and temporal relations between these electrons or pixels.

Your mind perceives not only the pixels on your screen but also the spatial relations between these pixels on your screen

Even when not looking at your screen, these pixels and spatial relations between them exist on your screen.

To forget about making an effort assumes free will. In a deterministic world, your decision to forget about making an effort has already been determined.

In effect, you are telling me to forget about having any freedom, because you don't have any. That might work on some people, but you can't pull the wool over my eyes.

In effect, you are telling me to forget about having any freedom

And if we think of "physical matter" in this way, we get the appearance of an infinite regress, because each time we find what looks to be the fundamental elements, we then find out that they can be broken down into further spatial relations.

There is a strong argument for the ideality of spatial relations......................................The developing problem, is that as described above, the "spatial relations" are ideal, conceptual mathematics and geometry

Some philosophers are wary of admitting relations because they are difficult to locate. Glasgow is west of Edinburgh. This tells us something about the locations of these two cities. But where is the relation that holds between them in virtue of which Glasgow is west of Edinburgh?

This is why space itself needs to be understood as real active substance.

Now we have a second possible intuition. Perhaps there is no fundamental matter at all, and the activity is simply the activity of space. What was represented as particles of matter existing in 'changing spatial relations', may actually be just 'changing spatial relations' without any real particles of matter.

Wittgenstein’s private language argument is a case in point, and recent philosophy has been much concerned about Dennett and others who seem to claim that our perceptions are all illusions.

I don't think either of these philosophers claim that what you experience doesn't exist in some sense though.

LLMs are demonstrating his beetle-in-box argument.

FH Bradley made a regress argument against the ontological existence of relations in the world

Only insofar as all were empiricists - 'all knowledge from experience'. IN other respects, chalk and cheese. Ayer and Carnap would have found Berkeley's talk of spirit otiose, to use one of their preferred words.

Note again that 'substance' here is from the Latin 'substantia', originating with the Greek 'ousia'. So it could equally be said 'there is not any other kind of being than spirit', which sounds to me less odd than 'substance' in the context.

What Berkeley denies is the existence of corporeal substance, where 'substance' is used in the philosophical, rather than day-to-day, sense: the bearer of predicates, that which underlies appearances. He claims that is an abstraction - which is a point I hope I made sufficiently clear in the OP.

So he's saying objects of perception exist in perception - if not yours or mine, then the Divine Intellect, which holds them in existence.

Indeed, I did also mention that, to dispel the idea that Berkeley dismissed sensible objects as mere phantasms.

Do you mean that they are capable of engaging in rational discourse without the benefit of human consciousness?

They are capable of intelligibly talking about experiences even though they don't even have the faculties for those experiences. An LLM has a faculty for talking, it doesn't have a faculty for seeing. The structure of language itself is sufficient for its intelligible use.

I wanted to stay near the heart of the matter, so had to be very selective, so it is not impossible that I failed to acknowledge what you actually said properly.

The Universe is, according to theory, constantly expanding, and as a result (or many results of said result) will, allegedly, succumb to "Heat Death."

This is a widely accepted scientific theory.

What I'm saying is, perhaps the speaker of the message is simply aware of the inevitable result of such, which, no matter how long it lasts (say X as freedom), it will inevitable turn into a certain state (say Y as lack of freedom).

In simple terms, say you're in a desert next to an oasis. The person is telling you that oasis, the water within, and as a result all life situated next to it that makes it unique from the barren desert-scape around it, is temporary. This is a fact. You consider what is temporary as a permanent concept, because, for all you know, and have ever known, it logically seems to be -- while the other person has seen that it is in fact, not. At least, that's a reasonable counter-argument to the aforementioned quote of yours.

Not an infinite regress, as we eventually arrive at the (indivisible) fundamental particles and forces.

There are four fundamental interactions known to exist: Gravitational force, Electromagnetic force, Strong nuclear force, Weak nuclear force.

There is also a strong argument that ontological relations don't exist in the world but only the mind. As numbers and mathematics only exists in the mind (are invented not discovered), these relations are expressed in the mind mathematically.

Current scientific thinking seems to be that fundamental particles and forces exist in the world. Accepting that ontological relations between these fundamental particles and forces only exist in the mind, there is no necessity for space to be understood as a real active substance.

As I see it:

The fundamental particles and forces exist in the world as ontological Realism

The relations between these fundamental particles and forces exist in the mind as ontological idealism

You reason it through. If you have a large glass then you will feel tired. If you feel tired then you may miss the train. If you miss the train then you may be stuck in the city. If you get stuck in the city then you will have to pay for a hotel. But you have no money on you. You therefore conclude that you will stick to a glass of water.

He thinks that to eliminate the concept of matter is to remove an important cause of atheism, scepticism and even socianism – and who could not think that those are important issues?

Was he saying that relations don't really exist? Or just that they don't really exist in the physical world?

Therefore, it's very reasonable not to reason through anything, but just do what you feel like doing, if you believe in a deterministic world.

Yes, sure. LLMs don't encounter information in the same way we do, they cannot choose how they encounter information in the way we do, they don't have aversion or reward afaik.

Like I explained, there is a big difference between fundamental particles, and fundamental forces. One is matter, the other is concepts...So, are you saying that "forces" only exist in the mind, since forces are relations expressed mathematically?....................................But "forces" are relations between particles, and as such they only exist in the mind, by your principles......................................"Forces" refers to conceptualized relations between material objects. Consider the traditional formula, f=ma.

Physicalism is sometimes known as ‘materialism’. Indeed, on one strand to contemporary usage, the terms ‘physicalism’ and ‘materialism’ are interchangeable. But the two terms have very different histories.
As the name suggests, materialists historically held that everything was matter — where matter was conceived as “an inert, senseless substance, in which extension, figure, and motion do actually subsist”
But physics itself has shown that not everything is matter in this sense; for example, forces such as gravity are physical but it is not clear that they are material in the traditional sense

You covered it pretty well.

It was the novel iteration of the appearance-reality divide in the context of early modern science. That's what I'm saying that Berkeley (and, later, Kant) was reacting against.

It was the belief that was coming into view in Berkeley's time, and is fully entrenched nowadays, that what is real, is real in the absence of any observer or mind whatever.

I treat "in the absence of any observer or mind" as an extreme example of mind-independent existence

But that is exactly what was implied by the Galilean division. The distinction between what was measurably the case, and how objects appear, was central. I quote this passage about once a week:

physics is understood as amounting to finding useful indexical relations for the purpose of defining protocols for intersubjective communication

That relations don't really exist in the physical world.

Relations certainly exist in the mind, in that I know the apple is to the left of the orange, but in what sense does the apple "know" it is to the left of the orange.

I'm not sure I follow you exactly. But the intention to interpret Locke's distinction as semantic seems like a good way to go. I think of it as a methodological decision. I don't know how far that coincides with your view.
When you talk of "indexical relations" are you thinking of the equation, for example, between photons and colours? If so, I wouldn't equate finding them with the whole purpose of physics, nor think that it amounts to enabling inter-subjective communication. Or do I misunderstand you?

Your particular beliefs is no evidence either for or against your living in a deterministic world.

It is possible to believe in free will even in a deterministic world.

Fundamental particles and fundamental forces are both physical in the world, even if we have concepts for them in the mind.

The force on the Moon because of the Earth does not depend on our knowing the spatial relation between the Moon and the Earth.

The equation f = ma is a human assumption that has been found to work through numerous instances. We know the equation works, but we don't know why it works . It is an axiom. It could well be that tomorrow it stops working, unlikely but possible. The equation f = ma is a conceptualized relation that has been found to describe what we observe in the world. It doesn't describe why f = ma

That's a silly question. It is presumably an attempt to explain what Bradley meant, but it is very unhelpful, amounting to mystification. It can't be what Bradley was saying.

Some philosophers are wary of admitting relations because they are difficult to locate. Glasgow is west of Edinburgh. This tells us something about the locations of these two cities. But where is the relation that holds between them in virtue of which Glasgow is west of Edinburgh? The relation can’t be in one city at the expense of the other, nor in each of them taken separately, since then we lose sight of the fact that the relation holds between them (McTaggart 1920: §80). Rather the relation must somehow share the divided locations of Glasgow and Edinburgh without itself being divided.

Well of course, a belief is not evidence of the thing believed..........................However, beliefs do influence the way that we behave. And, I argue that this is in a non-deterministic way.

I will argue that all forms of realism are reducible to, or dependent on Platonic realism, for ontological support. So, if you are a realist, you are a Platonist.

It's very evident here, that you have no idea what "force" actually means...Very clearly it is a human creation.

(Newton's) second law says that when an external force acts on a body, it produces an acceleration (change in velocity) of the body in the direction of the force. The magnitude of the acceleration is directly proportional to the magnitude of the external force and inversely proportional to the quantity of matter in the body.

Some philosophers are wary of admitting relations because they are difficult to locate. Glasgow is west of Edinburgh. This tells us something about the locations of these two cities. But where is the relation that holds between them in virtue of which Glasgow is west of Edinburgh? The relation can’t be in one city at the expense of the other, nor in each of them taken separately, since then we lose sight of the fact that the relation holds between them (McTaggart 1920: §80). Rather the relation must somehow share the divided locations of Glasgow and Edinburgh without itself being divided.

Consider such a proposition as 'Edinburgh is north of London'. Here we have a relation between two places, and it seems plain that the relation subsists independently of our knowledge of it. When we come to know that Edinburgh is north of London, we come to know something which has to do only with Edinburgh and London: we do not cause the truth of the proposition by coming to know it, on the contrary we merely apprehend a fact which was there before we knew it. The part of the earth's surface where Edinburgh stands would be north of the part where London stands, even if there were no human being to know about north and south, and even if there were no minds at all in the universe. ... But this fact involves the relation 'north of', which is a universal; and it would be impossible for the whole fact to involve nothing mental if the relation 'north of', which is a constituent part of the fact, did involve anything mental. Hence we must admit that the relation, like the terms it relates, is not dependent upon thought, but belongs to the independent world which thought apprehends but does not create.

This conclusion, however, is met by the difficulty that the relation 'north of' does not seem to exist in the same sense in which Edinburgh and London exist. If we ask 'Where and when does this relation ["north of"] exist?' the answer must be 'Nowhere and nowhen'. There is no place or time where we can find the relation 'north of'. It does not exist in Edinburgh any more than in London, for it relates the two and is neutral as between them. Nor can we say that it exists at any particular time. Now everything that can be apprehended by the senses or by introspection exists at some particular time. Hence the relation 'north of' is radically different from such things. It is neither in space nor in time, neither material nor mental; yet it is something [real].

It is largely the very peculiar kind of being that belongs to universals which has led many people to suppose that they are really mental. We can think of a universal, and our thinking then exists in a perfectly ordinary sense, like any other mental act. Suppose, for example, that we are thinking of whiteness. Then in one sense it may be said that whiteness is 'in our mind'. ...In the strict sense, it is not whiteness that is in our mind, but the act of thinking of whiteness. The connected ambiguity in the word 'idea', which we noted at the same time, also causes confusion here. In one sense of this word, namely the sense in which it denotes the object of an act of thought, whiteness is an 'idea'. Hence, if the ambiguity is not guarded against, we may come to think that whiteness is an 'idea' in the other sense, i.e. an act of thought; and thus we come to think that whiteness is mental. But in so thinking, we rob it of its essential quality of universality. One man's act of thought is necessarily a different thing from another man's; one man's act of thought at one time is necessarily a different thing from the same man's act of thought at another time. Hence, if whiteness were the thought as opposed to its object, no two different men could think of it, and no one man could think of it twice. That which many different thoughts of whiteness have in common is their object, and this object is different from all of them. Thus universals are not thoughts, though when known they are the objects of thoughts.

• [1] Independence from mind – The truth of “Edinburgh is north of London” doesn’t depend on anyone thinking it; it would hold in a mindless universe.[2] Non-spatiotemporal status – ‘North of’ isn’t in either city, and it’s not in space or time like physical objects are.[3] Act vs. object of thought – Thinking of whiteness is a mental act in time; whiteness itself is not the act but the object of that act.[4] Universality preserved – If whiteness were just a thought, it would be particularized (your thought now, my thought then), and couldn’t be the same across different thinkers and times.

It is possible to be a Philosophical Realist and a Nominalist, which is the view that universals and abstract objects do not exist in a mind-independent world (Wikipedia - Nominalism)

However, a body would not accelerate if there were no external force acting on it,

Russell makes a simple but important point about universals: things like the relation “north of” or the quality “whiteness” are real, but they’re not located in space or time, and they’re not just mental events.
Here’s the gist of his argument in four steps:

When a body is caused to accelerate, it may continue to accelerate long after that cause has ceased acting.

That's why I say that all forms of realism are grounded in idealism.

When a body is caused to accelerate, it may continue to accelerate long after that cause has ceased acting.

Now you mention it, I don’t recall Kastrup saying much about Kant, but I think Kant, Schopenhauer, and Kastrup could comfortably fit under one umbrella, so to speak.

Bertrand Russell has a chapter called World of Universals in his early Problems of Philosophy, which I often refer to.

Bertrand Russell: Consider such a proposition as 'Edinburgh is north of London'. Here we have a relation between two places, and it seems plain that the relation subsists independently of our knowledge of it.

The empirical reality of objects is grounded in the fact that they conform to the universal and necessary structures of cognition (space, time, causality, and so forth).

….the exact difference between Kant’s transcendental idealism and classical idealism.

The actual distinction Kant makes is between empirical realism and transcendental idealism..............................................For Kant, empirical realism means that objects of experience - the phenomena we encounter in space and time - are real within the empirical domain. When we perceive a tree or a rock, these objects have objective reality as appearances.

So you can be reassured that the ship is securely next to the quay and physics will prevent it from moving. You can decide where the relationship is

I’m still not entirely clear on the exact difference between Kant’s transcendental idealism and classical idealism. Kant isn’t really saying that everything is consciousness, is he? He’s saying that there is something out there (we can't apprehend), and we shape our experience of it through our cognitive apparatus and this we experience as phenomena/reality. Which sounds similar to some of the perspectives you have offered. Thoughts?

Well said, except a minor quibble,

I agree that it it seems plain that Edinburgh and London exist in different places independently of our knowledge of them.

The concept "relation" certainly exists in our mind, in that I know that Edinburgh is to the north of London.

But is it the case that relations exist independently of the mind?

In B276 of his Critique of Pure Reason, in his Refutation of Idealism, he attempts the proof of his theorem "The mere, but empirically determined, consciousness of my own existence proves the existence of objects in space outside me."

The ship is not secured because of the relationship between the ship and the bollard, otherwise no rope would be needed.

But for me Bradley's mistake is thinking of the relation as if it were an entity in its own right - an object corresponding to R.

I see that you have decided that the relationship is between the ship and the bollard.

Perhaps that is what I am trying to say. A relation is a concept in the mind rather than an object in the world. Relations exist in the mind, not the world.

The meaning of the expression 'everything is in consciousness' is elusive. It is often taken to mean that its adherents say the world is all in the mind of the perceiver - everything is in my consciousness. But that leads to problems of solipsism.

This process of world-creation is actually going on, all the time - it is what consciousness is doing every second. Becoming directly aware of that world-making process is key. As I've mentioned, I learned about Kant from a scholarly book comparing Buddhist and Kantian philosophy (ref).

The general, rather than the exact, difference reduces to an investigation of the faculty, thus the role of, and limitations imposed on, pure reason, as that which provides the principles for proper thinking, re: in accordance with logical laws, hence the name “transcendental” as a modified doctrinal idealism.

The fact that I perceive the colour red does not mean the colour red exists in the world.

Your mind is not a spatial object - it occupies no space whatever. The physical substrate of your mind is in your brain (though I prefer to say that it is your entire body).

But then, how can the relationship "next to" be between between the ship and the quay? It is true that we can see that the ship is next to the quay, and you might choose to describe that as having the ship and the quay and the relationship between them in your mind in some sense. But that doesn't mean that your mind has created any of them.

Very good. What's your criterion for something to exist in the world? Colours, for example, occupy space - admittedly in two dimensions - and have definite locations.

This statement is incorrect according to Newton’s first law of motion (the law of inertia).

Kant in Critique of Pure Reason would agree that realism is grounded in idealism, in that the pure intuitions of space and time and pure concepts of understanding are the a priori conditions of experience.

But Kant would also agree that idealism is grounded in realism, in that there have to be experiences before they can be categorized by the pure intuitions and pure concepts.

I don't think that this is the case. From Newton's Second Law, F = ma. If there is no force, then there can be no acceleration.

The mind structures experience.

The point is that universals are not “in the mind” — not mere thoughts or conventions.

Anyway…..light is always good.

However, I may perceive Mary is bored because she is wearing bright clothes and you may perceive that Mary is not bored precisely because she is wearing bright clothes.

If perception refers to understanding, the situation becomes very unclear. How can anyone know what is in the mind of God if everyone's perceived understanding of the same situation is probably different. How can anyone ever know Mary's true state of being.

Mary's "to be" can never be known if "is to be perceived" means perceived in the understanding.

This suggests that the mind, which depends on a brain, which has a physical size, should be able to cognise spatial relations.

The observer perceives that one person appears taller than the other.

The mind has created the perception of a height difference, even though a height difference does not exist in the world.

Where does the relation between their heights exist in the world?

If the relation between their heights existed in the world, then it wouldn't change dependent on how far the observer was standing away form them.

The fact that the relation between their heights is relative to the observer suggests that the relation between their height exists in the observer not the world.

Where in an electromagnetic wavelength of 700nm can the colour red be discovered?

which underwrites my commitment to p-naturalism.

So if someone says 'there is nothing except consciousness" what is your view of this?

P naturalism? As in [s]physicalist[/s] naturalism?

If one were to put it this way: instead of consciousness arising from matter, matter arises within consciousness.

In other words, reality is pure consciousness.

Kant is a kind of dualist with his phenomena/noumena distinction.

Philosophical naturalism (i.e. all testable explanations for nature, including the capabilities of natural beings (e.g. body, perception, reason), are completely constituted, constrained and enabled by (the) laws of nature) —> anti-supernaturalism, anti-antirealism. Re: Epicurus, Spinoza ... R. Brassier.

Then where is this relation?

I find 'indirect/critical realism' (e.g. perspectivism, fallibilism, cognitivism/enactivism) to be much more self-consistent and parsimonious – begs fewer questions (i.e. leaves less room for woo-woo :sparkle:) – than any flavor of 'idealism' (... Berkeley, Kant/Schopenhauer, Hegel ... Lawson, Hoffman, Kastrup :eyes:) which underwrites my commitment to p-naturalism.

When someone says that they perceive the colour red, science may discover that they are looking at an electromagnetic wavelength of 700nm.

Where in an electromagnetic wavelength of 700nm can the colour red be discovered?

It strikes me that, in a sense, Kant is a kind of dualist with his phenomena/noumena distinction.

And did it occur to you that your understanding that she is bored might be erroneous?

The relation just is the amount of actual space between them. That is, if you allow that space exists mind-independently, which I find it most plausible to think.

The mind does make mistakes, but it is a lot cleverer than that. It judges the size of distant objects by comparing their height with other objects in the field of vision. It knows the actual height of the other objects, so it can work out the height of the unknown object.
So, yes, it creates a perception, but not necessarily a false one.

Newton's laws cannot account for the reality of free will, where the cause of motion is internal to the body which accelerates.

Even in fee will, the present has been determined.

A table is an object, not a relation.

Without wanting to wade into the endless quantum quandries...................................But it seems irrefutable nowadays, that at a fundamental level, physical reality is not fully determined.

What is a table to you, is a meal to a termite, and a landing place to a bird.

a commitment to determinism looks like a metaphysical commitment to the objective existence of intentional forces of agency (i.e. spirits) that exist above and beyond the physically describable aspects of substances.

Kant is a kind of dualist with his phenomena/noumena distinction.
— Tom Storm

He is! Perhaps Mww can check in here, but I often refer to this passage:

The transcendental idealist... can be an empirical realist, hence, as he is called, a dualist….

My belief about the in-itself is that it has caused a great deal of baseless speculation….

There is only one past, one present and several possible futures.

In free will, as there is only one present, one of the several possible futures must have been chosen, and it is this choice that determines the one present.

Even in fee will, the present has been determined

But today not everyone agrees. Some believe in Superdeterminism, in that there are hidden variables that we do not yet know about.

The movement of the stone is determined by the force of gravity.

It is part of the nature of language that many words are being used as figures of speech rather than literally, such as "determined". Also included are metaphor, simile, metonymy, synecdoche, hyperbole, irony and idiom.

Where did these extra relations come from?

The earlier philosophy of St Thomas Aquinas, building on Aristotle, maintained that true knowledge arises from a real union between knower and known. As Aristotle put it, “the soul (psuch?) is, in a way, all things,”² meaning that the intellect becomes what it knows by receiving the form of the known object. Aquinas elaborated this with the principle that “the thing known is in the knower according to the mode of the knower.”³ In this view, to know something is not simply to construct a mental representation of it, but to participate in its form — to take into oneself, immaterially, the essence of what the thing is. (Here one may discern an echo of that inward unity — a kind of at-one-ness between subject and object — that contemplative traditions across cultures have long sought, not through discursive analysis but through direct insight.) Such noetic insight, unlike sensory knowledge, disengages the form of the particular from its individuating material conditions, allowing the intellect to apprehend it in its universality. This process — abstraction— is not merely a mental filtering but a form of participatory knowing: the intellect is conformed to the particular, and that conformity gives rise to true insight. Thus, knowledge is not an external mapping of the world but an assimilation, a union that bridges the gap between subject and object through shared intelligibility.

By contrast, the word objective, in its modern philosophical usage — “not dependent on the mind for existence” — entered the English lexicon only in the early 17th century, during the formative period of modern science, marked by the shift away from the philosophy of the medievals. This marks a profound shift in the way existence itself was understood. As noted, for medieval and pre-modern philosophy, the real is the intelligible, and to know what is real is to participate in a cosmos imbued with meaning, value, and purpose. But in the new, scientific outlook, to be real increasingly meant to be mind-independent — and knowledge of it was understood to be describable in purely quantitative, mechanical terms, independently of any observer. The implicit result is that reality–as–such is something we are apart from, outside of, separate to.

Kant scholars are divided between a 'dual worlds' interpretation where there is the phenomenal (empirical) world and the noumenal world and a 'dual aspect' interpretation where there is one world with both a phenomenal and a noumenal aspect.

Suppose a table exists mind-independently. A table is an object, not a relation.

Suppose space exists mind-independently. As with the table, then isn't space an object rather than a relation?

So what I'm arguing is that it wasn't Kant who 'blew up the bridge', but the developments in the early modern period to which Kant was responding.

How is "several possible futures" consistent with determinism?

Meanwhile, "God's Will" is a sound theory, supported by the experience of every human being who makes choices. And "superdeterminism" is just the pie-in -the-sky clutching at straws of deluded determinists.

On the other hand, we can say that Newton's first law applies only to the aspects of the universe which our sense capacities allow us to observe................................we have no reason to believe that it behaves in the same way as the part which we can observe.

That sounds just like "God's Will". However, there is one big difference. "God's Will" is consistent with human experience of choice, free will, the known difference between past and future, and our knowledge of final cause, while "superdeterminism" is not.

The distance (amount of space) between any two things at some "point in time" is not dependent on perception, even though the measurement of that distance can be said to be so.

W. Norris Clarke - The One and the Many: A Contemporary Thomistic Metaphysics:He admits that things in themselves act on us, on our senses.

My intention was that from the viewpoint of a human observer, even in a deterministic world, they cannot know the future.

We don't need to know whether Newton's Laws apply to those parts of the Universe that we don't observe, we only need to know that they apply to the parts of the Universe that we do observe.

It seems that in In God's Will, the changes a human makes to their present are determined by the final cause, the unmoved mover. A human's will is free providing they use their will to move towards this final cause, this unmoved mover.

Yes, that is perfectly reasonable as an informal description of gravity when describing a particular case of motion in the concrete rather than in the abstract

as Russell observed, in such cases the concept of causality can be eliminated from the description.

But determinism takes the causal "determination" of movement by gravity literally, universally and outside of the context of humans determining outcomes

The thesis that all events in the universe, including human decisions and actions, are causally inevitable.

and in a way that requires suspension of Humean skepticism due to the determinist's apparent ontological commitment to universal quantification over generally infinite domains.

That all events in the universe are causally inevitable is the thesis of Determinism. A thesis is an hypothesis, not an ontological commitment. As a thesis, it accepts that it may be proved wrong, in the same way that the equation s=0.5?g?t2 may be proved wrong. A thesis does not require a suspension of scepticism, which is why it is a thesis.

Actually that's untrue, because without ontological commitment to universal quantification over absolute infinity, one cannot distinguish the hypothesis of determinism from its anti-thesis.

The things that we intuit are not in themselves what we intuit them as being [yet they are the "things we intuitive"]. Nor do their relations in themselves have the character that they appear to us as having. And if we annul ourselves as subject, or even annul only the subjective character of the senses generally, then this entire character of objects and all their relations in space and time-indeed, even space and time themselves would vanish; being appearances, they cannot exist in-themselves, but can exist only in us. What may be the case regarding objects in themselves and apart from all this receptivity of our sensibility remains to us entirely unknown. All we know is the way in which we perceive them.

A-42/B-59 (emphasis mine)

hence what is in them (appearances) are not something in itself, but mere representations, which if they are not given in us (in perception) are encountered nowhere at all.

The non-sensible cause of these representations is entirely unknown to us, and therefore we cannot intuit it as an object; for such an object would have to be represented neither in space nor in time (as mere conditions of our sensible representation), without which conditions we cannot think any intuition. Meanwhile we can call the merely intelligible cause of appearances in general the transcendental object,' merely so that we may have something corresponding to sensibility as a receptivity.

(Emphasis mine)

in themselves, appearances, as mere representations, are real only in perception, which in fact is nothing but the reality of an empirical representation, i.e., appearance. To call an appearance a real thing prior to perception means either that in the continuation of experience we must encounter such a perception, or it has no meaning at all. For that it should exist in itself without relation to our senses and possible experience, could of course be said if we were talking about a thing in itself. But what we are talking about is merely an appearance in space and time, neither of which is a determination of things in themselves, but only of our sensibility; hence what is in them (appearances) are not something in itself, but mere representations, which if they are not given in us (in perception) are encountered nowhere at all.

If a determinist wants to avoid being charged with being ontologically commited to Berkeley's Spirits in another guise, then he certainly cannot appeal to a standard game-semantic interpretation of the quantifiers. But then what other options are available to him? Platonism?

n language, one can justly say that "the force of gravity causes a stone to move towards the ground". Some of these words are figures of speech, some are concrete and some are abstract.

What causes the stone to fall is gravity. "Force" is not an independent thing in the world which causes anything. "Force" is a mathematical concept, how we quantify the effects of things like gravity.

If a human observer cannot know the future, but can know the past, this implies a real difference between future and past. How can a determinist adequately account for this difference?

If the determinist laws (the laws of physics which support one's belief in determinism), are not believed to extend to all parts of the universe, then how is the belief in determinism supported

Wouldn't it be possible that nondeterministic activity reigned in some part of the universe, and there could be some interaction between the various parts?

The question is, what supports the belief that the supposed hidden variables are deterministic.

A person who believes in free will, and the reality of the immaterial in general, does not allow that Newton's first law extends to a living body moved by final cause.

But the immaterial things are the philosophically more interesting. These include consciousness, thoughts, words, meanings, concepts, numbers, emotions, intentions, volitions, moral principles, aesthetic experiences, and more. What would philosophy be without them?

The immateriality of God simply means that God is not composed of material. In other words, God is not made of any kind of matter, material, or substance which entails that he cannot be seen.

Useless trivia here aside, should I have found something in your response that shows I misunderstood Clark’s statement?

We can quantify the force of gravity. On Earth, the average gravitational force is about 9.81 m/s². On the Moon, it is about 1.63 m/s².

Basically…

Mass-energy curves space-time — a new version of Hooke's law.
Objects trace out world lines that are geodesics (paths of least action in curved space-time) unless acted upon by a net external force — a new version of the law of inertia.
Gravity isn't a force, it's the curvature of space-time caused by the presence of mass-energy.

Even someone who believes in Determinism may know their past but cannot know their future.

The article What Sorts of Things Exist, & How? writes

But the immaterial things are the philosophically more interesting. These include consciousness, thoughts, words, meanings, concepts, numbers, emotions, intentions, volitions, moral principles, aesthetic experiences, and more. What would philosophy be without them?

However, the article Immateriality of God writes

The immateriality of God simply means that God is not composed of material. In other words, God is not made of any kind of matter, material, or substance which entails that he cannot be seen.

There are different meanings to "immaterial".

So we have two very different ways to conceive what you call "gravitational force". One is as a force, the other as a property of spacetime. The latter is distinctly not "a force"

Gravity is the force by which a planet or other body draws objects toward its center. The force of gravity keeps all of the planets in orbit around the sun.

Gravity isn't a force, it's the curvature of space-time caused by the presence of mass-energy.

Can you agree that a person can know one's past and cannot know one's future, and because of this we ought to conclude that there is a real difference between past and future?

I don't think those two examples constitute two different meanings. They are applying the same definition of "immaterial" to refer to different things......................................And if such things are believed to be real, independent and not merely conceptual, then we'd have a belief in the real existence of the immaterial.

The immateriality of God simply means that God is not composed of material.

Yes, there are at least two ways to think of gravity. One is as a force and one is as the curvature of space-time caused by the presence of mass energy.

I think you are are making a logical leap too far.

The Merriam Webster Dictionary defines "immaterial" as "not consisting of matter".

As photons don't consist of matter, they can be considered immaterial.

The article Immateriality of God writes

The immateriality of God simply means that God is not composed of material.

Premise 1 - God is immaterial
Premise 2 - Photons are immaterial
Premise 3 - Photons have a real existence

Conclusion - as some immaterial things have a real existence and as God is immaterial then God has a real existence.

As photons don't consist of matter, they can be considered immaterial.

Conclusion - as some immaterial things have a real existence and as God is immaterial then God has a real existence.

If matter just is energy then, then photons are material. Are electrons, protons and neutrons material in your opinion?

That would be an invalid inference.

Other physicists say that matter is categorically distinct from energy. For example, Matt Strassler.

That article also says unambiguously that photons are STUFF, like matter. So if we're going by that article, photons are material, as are electrons and protons and neutrons

But energy is not itself stuff; it is something that all stuff has.
Photons are stuff; energy is not.

In classical physics and general chemistry, matter is any substance that has mass and takes up space by having volume (Wikipedia - Matter)

In other words, "force" is purely conceptual. It is only one of a number of conceptions which can be applied toward representing the effects of gravity, but not the only one. "Force" doesn't represent gravity, it is a method of categorizing the effects of gravity.

I made no conclusion about God.

Whether a photon is material or immaterial depends on one's particular viewpoint.

I think "photon" is a concept created in an attempt to explain the photoelectric effect.

"In his article on the use of metaphors in physics (November issue, page 17), Robert P Crease describes several interesting trees but fails to notice the wood all around him. What is a scientific theory if not a grand metaphor for the real world it aims to describe? Theories are generally formulated in mathematical terms, and it is difficult to see how it could be argued that, for example, F = ma "is" the motion of an object in any literal sense. Scientific metaphors possess uniquely powerful descriptive and predictive potential, but they are metaphors nonetheless. If scientific theories were as real as the world they describe, they would not change with time (which they do, occasionally). I would even go so far as to suggest that an equation like F = ma is a culturally specific metaphor, in that it can only have meaning in a society that practices mathematical quantification in the way that ours does. Before I'm dismissed as a loopy radical, I should point out that I'm a professional physicist who has been using mathematical metaphors to describe the real world for the last twenty years!"

Sure, BUT if you're calling photons "immaterial" as if to compare them to something abstract, I think that's a mistake. Matter or not, mass or not, they're a part of physics.

An alternative conception of concepts takes concepts to be abstract objects of one type or another.

But "photon" is a concept in the English language, and concepts are something abstract.

I think that the following is still relevant to Berkeley's Idealism and ‘esse est percipi’.

A photon is an example of a massless particle.

A massless particle may be defined as immaterial.

I agree when you say "and suggested that if a person believes in the real existence of massless particles, then they believe in the real existence of the immaterial"

I believe in the real existence of the immaterial.

But you also said "In the first example there is thoughts, conception etc., and in the second there is God. Each case uses "Immaterial" in the same way, by the same definition."

So, both photons and God are immaterial, where immaterial means the same thing.

But if a person believes in the real existence of photons then they believe in the real existence of the immaterial.

But if a person believes in the real existence of the immaterial, and God is immaterial, then should not a person believe in the real existence of God?

That is the nature of language, where concepts are about the sense of things in the world rather than refer to things in the world (Frege).

Words need boundaries. Words without boundaries are usually words without meaning. If everything is immaterial, the designation "immaterial" has no weight.

material and immaterial

"photon" is a concept in the English language, and concepts are something abstract.

Surely mathematical concepts cannot be classified as metaphorical.

So give me an example of something material.

I made the same point myself earlier in the thread but it received no response?which is probably understandable.

Anti-realists, anti-materialists, anti-physicalists have a vested interest in denying the reality of things in themselves, because to allow them would be to admit that consciousness is not fundamental, and, very often it seems, for religious or spiritual reasons they want to believe that consciousness is fundamental, especially if they don't want to accept the Abrahamic god. One can, without inconsistency, accept the Abrahamic god and be a realist about mind-independent existents.

Better to say D’Espagnat developed a more complete epistemic idealist theory grounded in transcendental realism, than to say Kant developed a less complete epistemic theory because it wasn’t.

But "interaction-free measurements" work because there is a physical change in the system behavior due to a change in the experimental context, analogous to closing a slit in the double slit experiment.

A classical analogy for interaction free measurements, as in the quantum Zeno Elitzur–Vaidman_bomb_tester, can be given in terms of my impulsive niece making T tours of a shopping mall in order to decide what she'd like me to buy her for her birthday.
...

sorry buddy, "table" is a concept in the English language, and concepts are something abstract.

Agreed with that. But this doesn't change the fact that it seems quite different from the classical case. In fact, I believe that your example is perfect here. In de Broglie-Bohm, changing the experimental context has a nonlocal effect also on the measured system.

Taking one example, that of the mathematical concept of zero.

A metaphor is a figure of speech that in mentioning one thing actually refers to another thing, such as "all the world's a stage".

As with Derrida's concept of différance, absence is as important as presence. It is the absence of meaning that allows the presence of interpretation to emerge (Wikipedia - Jacques Derrida).

Zero is metaphorical in that it turns absence into presence. Zero refers to nothing, but it has the sense of something.

For me the problem with this 'variant' of Kantianism is that it can only explain the form of appearances, not that there are appearances at all.

I do believe that the great merit of Kant (and epistemic idealism in general) is his view that mind isn't a 'passive' recorder of 'what happens' but that it actively interprets phenomena. I also believe that we can't easily differentiate what is 'mind-dependent' from what is 'mind-independent', an antinomy if you will.

Well, I am sympathetic to theism, in fact. IMO, our mind can 'produce' the representation because the 'external reality' is itself intelligible. However, we can only know it by interacting with it and producing a representation of it, which is the 'phenomenal world'. It's not a 'deceptive' veil - at least, if we remember that it is also the result of the interpreteation that our mind makes of the 'external reality'. In fact, I think that the act of 'knowing' is always mediated. The 'external reality' is the 'known', our mind is the 'knower' and the 'phenomenal world' (or the 'representation') is the medium by which our mind can know the external reality.

If Kant's 'idealism' asserted that appearances are mere mental contents then, it would be subjective idealism. However, Kant also asserts that there is 'something' about phenomena that it is not 'mental'. However, we are left with no clue on how that 'something' is related to appearances.

I actually think a table is MORE abstract than a photon.

Yes, ofcourse. Interestingly, you can produce bombtester-like behavior in baths of fluid: e.g.

For me, a mechanism like this is the most attractive explanation of quantum theory, something already postulated in the stochastic mechanical interpretation and some versions of Bohm. It sounds weird but it seems quite compatible with the ontologies of quantum field theory imo, which additionally also seems to tell us that there is no truly empty space, i.e. vacuum energy and fluctuations.

Yes, and I would say that it can only explain the general forms that our experiences take, and not the commonality of experiences of particular forms (which we might call the content of experiences).

So, it is hard to say what we might mean by 'mind-dependent' in distinction to 'body/brain dependent'.

That there are such existents is strongly suggested by science and even by everyday experience. Of course as soon as we perceive something it no longer strictly qualifies to be placed in that category.

I agree with most of what you say here, although I'm not clear on how you have related it to theism. In Kant was the problem that the senses might thought to be deceptive veils, and I think Hegel effectively dealt with that error in his Phenomenology.

If we do away with the external world we are left with a mere Phenomenalism, which seems to explain nothing. By "external world" I simply refer to what lies outside the boundaries of our skins. I cannot see any reason to doubt the existence of external reality defined that way. What the ultimate nature of that external reality might be is unknown and perhaps unknowable. It might be ideas in the mind of god, or it might simply be a world of existents.

You seem to allude to the idea that without god the intelligibility of the external world is inexplicable

Don't forget that the categories of the understanding and our sensory abilities are factors that we all share. They're not particular to individuals, although individuals 'instantiate' those capacities. I have just responded in the mind-created world discussion to further points along these lines.

It takes the word out of the context of mathematics, it doesn't bring metaphor into mathematics.

right, so you saying table is concrete and photon is not is... not quite it then is it?

I found Matt Strassler's article about matter and energy very interesting, as it casts doubt on the assumption that matter is energy. Perhaps the equation of the two is simplistic. I need to explore this question further.

For me the fact that the mind is not "passive recorder" is uncontroversial. We are affected by what is external to our bodies via the senses...

Presumably it's possible because I have experienced the universe and I have registered that it can exist without conscious minds.

A metaphor is a figure of speech that in mentioning one thing actually refers to another thing. For example, the symbol "+" in mathematics refers to the combining of sets.

do the fundamental particles and forces contribute to the higher order of a 'table'? If no, then the forces and particles aren't really doing anything...

I meant that I prefer d'Espagnat's view than Kant's….

Kant also asserts that there is 'something' about phenomena that it is not 'mental'. However, we are left with no clue on how that 'something' is related to appearances.

Huh? I only see one thing, "the combining of sets". And that is how you defined "+". Where is the other thing, which makes it metaphorical?

Perhaps. I know that there are some technical difficulties for de Broglie Bohm's extensions to QFT but I am not competent enough to comment.

Addition is a metaphorical concept, because one thing, namely 2 + 3, refers to a different thing, namely 5.

Energy is taken to be equivalent to mass, and mass is taken to be the fundamental, essential property of matter.

The determinist perspective sees the actions of living beings as effects of external causation. The free will perspective sees an internal cause of action which has an effect on what is external.

But it is a bit of a stretch to say that all 'formal' properties of experience depend on the regulative faculties of our minds.

To me the problem is trying to make sense of the mind in purely 'physical' terms, once you assume that the 'physical' is completely devoid of any quality that pertains to mind.

But the sixth is the 'inner' sense of the mind. So, to a Buddhist when we are aware of a mental content, it's like being aware of a sense object.

I don't think that even Wayfarer reject that.

Can we be certain on how the 'external reality' is? I would say no, because our knowledge is limited and imperfect (and not strictly speaking becuase it is mediated).

Note, however, that the epistemic idealist is right in suggesting that we do not have a direct knowledge of 'reality' and our 'phenomenal world' is our 'best guess' of it, so to speak (to borrow a phrase from St. Paul, 'we know as if through a glass, darkly').

Given that we do not have a possibility to 'check' how our 'interpretation of reality' corresponds to 'reality', we IMO should grant the epistemic idealist that we cannot make certain claims on the noumenal. The epistemic idealist might say that the 'noumenal' is beyond concepts, beyond intelligibility and we should be silent on it (and you find quite similar claims in some Buddhist and Hindu tradition, to be honest).

We can, however, debate on which picture of the 'noumenal' seems more reasonable.

If physicalism were right, intelligibility of 'the world' seems to that has no explanation at all. Just a brute fact, that allowed our minds to navigate in the world. Note, however, that mathematical and logical laws (the 'laws of reasons' in general) seem to have a character of 'eternality' (or 'time independence') and 'necessity', which both do not seem to be compatible with a view that mind isn't in some sense fundamental.

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

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.

Which is your prerogative. My point was simply that the two views are distinct enough from each other that they should be considered as different theories altogether.

Of what there is no clue, is how the non-mental matter of appearance transitions to its mental component of intuition. That it is transitioned is necessary, so is given the name transcendental object, that which reason proposes to itself post hoc, in order for the system to maintain its speculative procedure.

Even if there is a transcendental realist epistemological theory which explains Kant’s missing clue, it remains the case no human is ever conscious of all that which occurs between sensation and brain activation because of it, which just is Kant’s faculty of intuition whose object is phenomenon.

More than a bit of a stretch I'd say, there would seem to be no way this could be possible. We see the same things at the same times and places, and since as far as we know our minds are not connected this is inexplicable in terms of just our minds.

I don't see why we should assume that of the physical. The world shows lawlike patterns and regularities. I think the old image of dead, brute matter died a long time ago, but it still seems to live in some minds.

Today that sense is know as interoception?the sense of what is going on in our bodies. We also have proprioception?our sense of the spatial positions, orientations and movements of the body.

He says that there cannot be such existents, that they are neither existent nor non-existent. I think that is meaningless nonsense.

I'd say there is no certainty except in tautologies if anywhere. I agree our knowledge is imperfect, but it's all we have.

I don't see the phenomenal world as a guess. If we were all just guessing then the fact that we see the same things in the same places and times would be inexplicable. Perhaps you mean our inferences about the nature of the phenomenal world? Even there, given the immense breadth and consistency of our scientific knowledge, I think 'guess' is too strong.

I think it is a kind of artificial problem. We experience a world of phenomena. It seems most plausible (to me at least) that the ways phenomena appear to us is consistent with the real structures of both the external phenomena and our own bodies. We can recognize that this cannot be the "whole picture" and also that, while our language is inherently dualistic, there is no reason to believe nature is dualistic, and this means our understanding if not our direct perceptual experience is somewhat out of kilter with what actually is. I think it is for this reason that aporia may always be found in anything we say.

We can, but experience on these and like forums tells me that people rarely change their opinion on account of debating about what seems most reasonable when it comes to metaphysical speculation.

I agree. I think a physicalism that allows for the semiotic or semantic dimension to be in some sense "built in" is the most reasonable. However many people seem to interpret the idea that mind in fundamental to entail and idealist position that claims mind as fundamental substance or as some form of panpsychism which entails that everything is to some degree conscious or at least capable of experience and some kind of "inner sense". I don't think it is plausible to think that anything without some kind of sensory organ can experience anything.

Anyway we seem to agree on the major points.

I don't think so. "2+3" has its meaning, and "5" has its meaning. The two are distinct. The left side of an equation always means something different from the right side, or else the equation would be totally useless.

Not true?in the determinist picture there are both exogenous and endogenous causes of action.

Interesting. But isn't this a form of 'transcendental realism', though?

…..it remains the case no human is ever conscious of all that which occurs between sensation and brain activation because of it…..
— Mww

On this, I agree. That's why I think that our knowledge is imperfect.

Exactly, fulfils the definition of a metaphor.

A metaphor is a figure of speech that describes one thing as if it were another.

For example, saying "time is a thief" or "2+3=5".

The metaphor
We understand abstract ideas by making them concrete, as described by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson in their book Metaphors We Live By 1980. For example, we understand the abstract concept of argument by making it concrete, as in "argument is war". We understand an abstract feeling by making it concrete, as in "I am feeling low".

Set theory
Frege and Russell proposed defining a natural number n as the collection of all sets with n elements. Set theory is foundational to mathematics. Set theory provides a framework whereby operations such as addition can be built from first principles (Wikipedia - set theory)

The abstract addition of the natural numbers 2 and 3 can be achieved within the framework of a set theory that is built on concrete first principles, similar to the function of the metaphor.

Therefore your proposed analogy is false.

The Kantian system of knowledge a posteriori, is twofold: sensibility, arrangement of the given, and, cognition, the logic in the arrangement of the given. The logic of the arrangement is determined….thought….. by the tripartite coordination of understanding, judgement and reason.

Such is the fate of metaphysics in general: a guy adds to a theory in some way, shape or form, then accuses the original of having missed what was added. It may just as well have been the case it wasn’t missed in the former at all, so much as rejected. So the new guy merely cancels that by which the original rejection found force, and from within which resides the ground of accusation of the missing. Even without considering your particular instance of this, it is found in Arthur’s critique of Kant, and, ironically enough, Kant’s critique of Hume, a.k.a., The Reluctant Rationalist.

Dunno about imperfect, but even if it is, it has nothing to do with being unconscious of some operational segment of our intelligence, in which no knowledge is forthcoming in the first place. Perhaps you’ve thought a reasonable work-around, but from my armchair, I must say if you agree with the former you have lost the ground for judging the relative quality of your own knowledge.

Contingent, without a doubt. Imperfect? Ehhhhh……isn’t whatever knowledge there is at any given time, perfectly obtained? Otherwise, by what right is it knowledge at all? If every otherwise rational human in a given time knew lightning was the product of angry gods, what argument could there possibly be, in that same time, sufficient to falsify it? Wouldn’t that knowledge, at that time, be as perfect as it could be?

The system used to amend at some successive time the knowledge of one time, is precisely the same system used to obtain both. So maybe it isn’t the relative perfection of knowledge we should consider, but the relative quality of the system by which it is obtained.

Do you see the contradiction? What would you do about it?

I see two unexplained assertions here: that there is a 'given' and that such a 'given' can be arranged

…..philosophy doesn't seem to 'progress'.

Our knowledge is imperfect in two ways:….

There are degrees of (the quality of) knowledge.

If object A is 1.8 metre in size and object B is 1.7m in size, then there is a relation between their sizes. Does this relation exist in the mind, the world or both?

If there were only 2 objects in the universe there is one relation. If there were only 3 objects in the universe there are 3 relations. If there were only 4 objects in the universe there are 6 relations. IE, in the Universe, there are more relations than objects.

If relations do exist in an ontological sense in the world, then there are more relations than actual objects. Where did these extra relations come from?

We sometimes are wrong about how things are. How can this be possible if there is not a way that things are, independent of what we believe?

You and I agree as to what is the case. How is that possible unless there is something external to us both on which to agree?

Yeah, I can see that. My response to the first would be there is no need to explain it, and for the second, we simply don’t know how.

Agreed. While it certainly changes, it doesn’t necessarily improve.

We might even be able to reflect this back on the lack of philosophical progress, in that regardless of the changes in the description of knowledge, we still cannot prove how we know anything at all. I think it a stretch that because we con’t know a thing our knowledge is imperfect.

What would perfect knowledge look like anyway?

Again, the general, or the particular? The quality of knowledge in general remains constant regardless of the quantity of particular things known about. I’m not sure knowledge of is susceptible to qualitative analysis: a thing is known or it is not, there is no excluded middle. By the same token, I’m not sure that when first we didn’t know this thing but then we do, the quality of our knowledge has any contribution to that degree of change.

Even if your idea revolves around the possibility that because our knowledge is imperfect there may be things not knowable, which is certainly true enough, it remains that there are more parsimonious, logically sufficient….simpler……explanations for why there are things not knowable.

The answer depends on what you mean by your question......................................However, one might start by asking whether A and B exist in the mind, the world or both.

For the Indirect Realist, objects such as tables and chairs only exist in the mind and not the world. The Indirect Realist believes that they don't experience the world as it really is, but only through representations of it.

For the Indirect Realist, relations exist in the mind otherwise they would not have the concept of table, but relations between the parts in the world are unnecessary. There need be no ontological relations between parts in the world in order for the Indirect Realist to have the concept of tables and chairs.

For the Direct Realist, the experience of tables and chairs in the mind is a direct experience of the same tables and chairs that exist in the world. The Direct Realist believes they experience the world directly, and there is a direct correspondence between their concept of a table and the table in the world.

For the Direct Realist, if the table exists as an ontological object in the world, then the relations between the parts that make up the table must also ontologically exist in the world. If ontological relations did not exist in the world then neither would the table ontologically exist in the world.

If relations existed in the world but not in the mind, as with Kant's things-in-themselves, we would not be able to discuss them, as we would not know about them.

An object such as a table exists as a relation between the parts that make it up.

As you say "Counting relations is not as straightforward as it looks." A relation suggest two things. There is the relation between a table and a chair. But there is also a relation between the table top and its legs. But then again there is a relation between the atoms that make up the table top. And there is a relation between the elementary particles and forces that make up an atom. There is an "overpopulation" of relations.

As you say "Existing in both the mind and the world is hardest of all to understand. Does it mean that there are actually two relations? Which of them is the real one?" This is a problem for the Direct Realist as the relations in the world are duplicated in the mind, a case of "over-determination". For the Direct Realist, which are the real relations, the ones in the world or the ones in the mind. But this is not a problem for the Indirect Realist, in that the real relations are the one that exist in the mind.

Relations don't need to ontologically exist in the world in order for there to be lines of latitude and longitude as the colour red does not need to ontologically exist in the world in order for there to be traffic lights.

How can we know that relations exist in the world if we don't know where they are. If there is a relation in the world between A and B, and the relation cannot be found in A, the relation cannot be found in B and the relation cannot be found in a section of space between A and B, then why should we think that there are relations in the world at all.

In summary, the ontological existence of relations in the world is unnecessary, as Indirect realism, a valid theory of perception, does not require them. In addition, if relations did ontologically exist in the world, further problems would arise, including mereological overpopulation, the arbitrariness of determining the existence of objects, the question of whether a relation can exist independently of what it is relating and any scientific explanation of their nature alongside fundamental particles and forces.

What would perfect knowledge look like anyway?
— Mww

I don't know. But I do know thay my knowledge is imperfect.

In a sense, all phenomena are mysterious for us.

Consider a table. Even if we knew its composition at its atomic level

"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?

So I cannot depend on my understanding to know the true state of being in the world.

Therefore, "perceive" in "to be is to be perceived" cannot refer to the understanding but only to the sensibilities.

Here you are assuming that space is mind-independent. There is no need to do that for a 'realist' IMO.

To make a crude analogy... think about the Matrix. Alice and Bob visit a city in the virtual reality of the Matrix. The buildings are not really there.

Ok. What are these laws and regularities in physical terms?

Not only that, however. When I, for instance, make a calculation I am not aware of any bodily processes. I am aware of a relation between concepts.

Let's take again the Matrix example

So, is the 'mind-independent reality' more or less the same to the 'phenomenal world'? We do not a way of know. And we can't neglect the fact that our mind has an active role in shaping the 'phenomenal world'.

I almost agree with this. But I am open to the possibility of things like 'revelations', 'insights via meditative experiences' and so on that can allow us, in principle, to get a 'higher knowledge'. I do recognize that there are good reasons to be skeptical of these things, however.

Whereas, if one assumes that some kind of 'fundamental mental aspect' or 'Divine Mind' etc is fundamental, it's easier to understand why these properties are present even in matter.

Just because you might have perceived erroneously that Mary is bored, it doesn't follow that you cannot depend on your understanding.

We don't experience tables and chairs through representations of them. If we can't compare a representation with the original, there is no way to know whether it is truth or illusion.

The concept of a table is not a table.

I have never managed to work out what "direct experience" means.

That we can perceive objects-in-the-world, and how they are related does not mean that they exist in the mind.

A table consists of various parts, suitably organized. In the real world, the organization is called a design.

What matters is the "over-population". I don't see why "over-population" is a problem. Where does anything say what number of relations there should be in the world?

If the relations occupy space, they cannot be in the mind. If relations are even located in space, they are not in the mind.

One could even argue that it (physics) is impoverished because it can't recognize colours, etc.

Where is the design of the table or chair?

The distinction between table and chair is not arbitrary

Yikes!!! You done got yo’self in a whole heapa logical doo-doo. What are you judging the imperfect by, if you don’t know that by which imperfect can be measured?

You’d be correct in not knowing how perfect knowledge manifests in your consciousness, but you must know what the criteria for perfect knowledge is, in order to know yours isn’t that.

Be that as it may, and I agree in principle, how do we get to imperfect knowledge from mysterious phenomena?

Another logical mish-mash for ya: take that famous paradox, wherein if you cover half the distance to a wall at a time, you never get there. Using your atomic structure scenario, if you take enough half-distance steps, sooner or later you’re going to get into the atomic level of physical things, where the atoms of your foot get close to the atoms of the wall. Except, at that level there is no foot and there isn’t any wall. And as a matter of fact, there wouldn’t be any you taking steps, insofar as “you” have to be present in order for any half-step to be taken. So it is that talking about a table at the atomic level, isn’t talking about tables.

No that assumption is not necessarily entailed by what I said. I said the thing that calls for explanation is the undeniable fact that we see the same things in the same places and times, even down to the smallest details. The question is as to what is the most plausible explanation for that fact.

The you come up with?a fictional scenario, which it would not be implausible to think could not actually exist.

What, you are not writing down your calculation or being aware of thoughts within your body, manifesting as sentences or images?

Let's not?the Matrix is not a feasible scenario, and hence cannot serve as a relevant examples in my view. You would need to convince me that it warrants being taken seriously in order to interest me in it.

Observing animal behavior shows us that they see the same thing in the environment, and any differences in ways of perceiving across the range of animals can be studied by science to gain a coherent and consistent understanding of those differences. We see dogs chasing balls, cats eating out of their bowls and climbing tress. We don't see animals or people trying to walk through walls.

I see no problem in believing in such things, but they cannot serve as a foundation for clear and consistent rational discourse, since they are by general acknowledgement ineffable, and what people say about them is always interpretive, and generally interpreted in consonance within the cultural context in which people have been inducted into religious or spiritual ideas.

Okay, fair enough, but for me it is far more difficult to understand what a "fundamental mental aspect" or "divine mind" could be

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.

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.

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.

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.

As I said, once you accept that knowledge can be of better or lesser quality, it's easier to accept that our knowledge can be imperfect, despite not knowing what 'perfect knowledge' would be.

As I said, I won’t stand in your way of using perfection as a relative measure of knowledge quality. I’m satisfied with the amount we know about a thing in juxtaposition to the quality of our ways of finding out more about those things. From there, the jump to imperfect, from our knowledge being contingent on the one hand and incomplete on the other, is superfluous, insofar as calling it that doesn’t tell you anything you didn’t already know.

If we know that we don't know reality, we know it from our concepts, experiences, and what appears to us. Yet that's not what they tell us. All three of these concepts announce, quite clearly that they are about something. We have a concept of tables, our experience are experiences of chairs, and what appears in the morning is the sun. They are not identical with their objects, but they are existentially dependent on them. So denying the reality of those objects, or claiming that we don't know those objects, denies their reality.

If I want to find my way from A to B, I can use a map - a representation of the terrain. But it is no use to me unless I can read the map, and identify what point on the map represents where I am - I have to link the representation to what it is a representation of.

What I'm trying to point out is that, whatever mental object you posit in my head, the actual work is done by my mind, interpreting, applying and so forth. Those activities - skills - are what matters. The mental object doesn't actually do anything.

In a sense, we know nothing, because we do not have a complete knowledge of anything. But of course, this doesn't mean that we are completely ignorant.

Yes, to express a complete idea, a sentence needs both a verb (an activity) and generally a noun (object).

There is no complete idea in "apple", but there is in "the apple is on the table".

As Wittgenstein wrote in Tractatus "the world is the totality of facts, not of things", where "the apple is on the table" is a fact because it encompasses relations between things.

Stronger than an assertion, methinks, but not necessarily a fact? In the text, it’s simply an analytical logical judgement, true given the relations of the conceptions contained therein.

If there ever is a body encountered that isn’t extended, the judgement would need a revision, along with our entire logical system. I mean, blow one certainty out of the water is sufficient probability for blowing them all.

I think we don't know what bodies are. That is, when a body stops and becomes something non-body.

Are you saying "is on the table" is an activity? In predication the verb "is" does not express an activity.

In a sense, yes. An empirical sense, a posteriori. In a rational sense a priori, that which is known by us with apodeictic certainty, the negation of which is impossible, is complete knowledge of that certainty, re: no geometric figure can be constructed with two straight lines. Or, all bodies are extended. There aren’t many, but there are some.

Even though the verb "is" expresses a state of existence, the phrase "is on" suggests a temporary situation, as in the apple is on the table, the apple is under the table or the apple is on the floor.

The apple currently being on the table is part of an active situation.

A static state of existence, even if temporary, is very distinct from an activity. In no way is a static state a part of an activity, as there is a causal relation which separates the two. A cause is required to bring the static thing into an active situation.

Logical and mathematical knowledge are of a different kind of, say, empirical knowledge.

I am not sure we can even know completely any phenomena.

Where is this reality?

Our five sense are between our minds and a reality the other side.

As you say, we accept that our concept of the sun is not identical with its object, in that our mind, contained within our brain, being of the order 30cm diameter, is less than the 1.39 million km diameter of the sun.

As you also say, our concept of the sun is existentially dependent on its object.

The question is, where is this object? Where is this sun?

As an Indirect Realist, from appearances and experiences in my senses I can infer that their cause was the fact of there being a sun in reality. But this can only be an inference.

But how can we know without doubt the cause of the appearances and experiences in our senses?

As an Indirect Realist, this is not a problem. I simply name the unknown cause of my appearances and experiences after the appearances and experiences themselves, such that I name the set {appearance of a circular shape, experience of seeing the colour yellow, experience of hotness} as "sun".

Backwards in time, how can anyone know that the cause of a broken window was a stone or a bird when the observer was not present when the window broke?

How can you know the cause of an appearance or experience in the senses when no one cause is necessary but many possible causes are contingent?

But for the Indirect Realist, they only have the map. They cannot directly look at the actual world to compare it to the map.

Yeah, the argument is, empirical knowledge is required to prove logical or mathematical knowledge. But that doesn’t mean empirical and mathematical knowledge are the same. One must be an epistemological dualist to grant that distinction.

I suspect that’s true no matter which philosophical regimen one favors. Whether phenomena represent that which is external to us, or phenomena represent constructs of our intellect within us, we cannot say they are unconditioned, which relies on endless…..you know, like….boundless…..cause and effect prohibiting complete knowledge of them.

You are assuming that instants of time, static states of existence, are metaphysically possible.

It is more likely that there are not instants in time but rather durations of time. It would follow that the apple being on the table is part of an active situation.

That presupposes that our minds and reality exist in the same space. Since our minds are not physical objects, that cannot be the case.

Does the mind, as an activity say rather than an object, not reside within the brain/body?

reside within the brain/body?

The apple is in a static condition, the state of being on the table, for a duration of time. By what premise do you conclude that it also takes part in activity?

From the fact that I am here, I can reliably infer that I was born. I can also infer reliably that I will die.................. In a normal context, the answer would be 93 million miles from the earth...................................What earthly use is a map if you cannot relate it to what it is a map of? Is it perhaps possible to look at the world indirectly?

Mental objects such as appearances, experiences, concepts are not physical objects, so do not occupy space.

The mind-body problem has remained essentially unchanged since Descartes put it forward in 1641. The problem is: what is the nature of the conscious mind, and how does it relate to the body?

Today, the prevailing view is that the mind is really a physical phenomenon going on inside the brain. I shall call this view physicalism. It contrasts with two other broad views: dualism – which says the mind is irreducibly different from the brain; and mentalism – which denies the existence of the brain altogether.

From the appearance of something bright and yellow and the experience of something hot in my senses I can infer the existence of the sun.

I simply name the unknown cause of my appearances and experiences after the appearances and experiences themselves, such that I name the set {appearance of a circular shape, experience of seeing the colour yellow, experience of hotness} as "sun".

I see a broken window and can infer what broke it.

How can you know the cause of an appearance or experience in the senses when no one cause is necessary but many possible causes are contingent?

Today, the prevailing view is that the mind is really a physical phenomenon going on inside the brain.

It's a spatial metaphor in which brain/body is a container and the mind is something inside it. But from another perspective, the body exists 'within awareness'.