“The ‘objective world’… is formed by excluding the experiencing subject.”(Merleau-Ponty)
Knowledge is taken to consist in a faithful mirroring of a mind-independent reality. It is taken to be of a reality which exists independently of that knowledge, and indeed independently of any thought and experience (Williams 2005, 48). If we want to know true reality, we should aim at describing the way the world is, not just independently of its being believed to be that way, but independently of all the ways in which it happens to present itself to us human beings. An absolute conception would be a dehumanized conception, a conception from which all traces of ourselves had been removed.
Nothing would remain that would indicate whose conception it is, how those who form or possess that conception experience the world, and when or where they find themselves in it. It would be as impersonal, impartial, and objective a picture of the world as we could possibly achieve (Stroud 2000, 30). How are we supposed to reach this conception? Metaphysical realism assumes that everyday experience combines subjective and objective features and that we can reach an objective picture of what the world is really like by stripping away the subjective. It consequently argues that there is a clear distinction to be drawn between the properties things have “in themselves” and the properties which are “projected by us”. Whereas the world of appearance, the world as it is for us in daily life, combines subjective and objective features, science captures the objective world, the world as it is in itself.
But to think that science can provide us with an absolute description of reality, that is, a description from a view from nowhere; to think that science is the only road to metaphysical truth, and that science simply mirrors the way in which Nature classifies itself, is – according to Putnam – illusory. It is an illusion to think that the notions of “object” or “reality” or “world” have any sense outside of and independently of our conceptual schemes (Putnam 1992, 120). Putnam is not denying that there are “external facts”; he even thinks that we can say what they are; but as he writes, “what we cannot say – because it makes no sense – is what the facts are independent of all conceptual choices” (Putnam 1987, 33).
We cannot hold all our current beliefs about the world up against the world and somehow measure the degree of correspondence between the two. It is, in other words, nonsensical to suggest that we should try to peel our perceptions and beliefs off the world, as it were, in order to compare them in some direct way with what they are about (Stroud 2000, 27). This is not to say that our conceptual schemes create the world, but as Putnam writes, they don’t just mirror it either (Putnam 1978, 1). Ultimately, what we call “reality” is so deeply suffused with mind- and language-dependent structures that it is altogether impossible to make a neat distinction between those parts of our beliefs that reflect the world “in itself” and those parts of our beliefs that simply express “our conceptual contribution.”
The very idea that our cognition should be nothing but a re-presentation of something mind-independent consequently has to be abandoned.(Dan Zahavi)
I wonder…..is anyone that stupid, that he doesn’t realize those two are not the same?
Perhaps identifying the grounding perspective is in order. Shouldn’t be hard; been around in its formal iteration since the late 1500’s, and from which it should be rather easy to determine whether purely aesthetic subjectivity, which just is that condition belonging only to the observer, is excluded as a matter of principle.
Calling this ‘stereotyping’ is just a pejorative judgment that serves to shut down argument.
What they lack is self-subsistence, what @Wayfarer mentioned, and this manifests as self-movement and nourishment. These are capacities which living things have but inanimate do not. That is the basis for the meaning of “animate”.
The inanimate things act strictly according to the laws of physics, requiring an external force to cause movement, as described by Newton’s first law, but the living have an internal source of movement which allows them to violate that law. The cause of this self-movement has never been identified, and some have called it “elan vital”. I am not averse to that name, as it means exactly that, the cause of self-movement which has not been isolated.
I understand Whitehead’s system to some extent. In my understanding, he took a process approach to reality, and tried to understand reality simply in terms of events. he steered away from God in the beginning, but in the end he found that he needed some kind of God to support the reality of time, and the interconnectedness, or order of events, as we experience them.
He proposed that instead of breaking down reality into fundamental static parts, like atomism, it would be more realistic to assume fundamental events. But then he had to explain the appearance of interconnectedness between events, the coherence we observe as the passing of time. He proposed two principles, prehension, which I understand as a view toward the past like memory, and also concrescence, which I understand as the process whereby future possibilities are unified into a single present.
The issue is that he modeled his system based on human experience, how we experience activity at the present. And since we are living beings, the system doesn’t translate well over to the inanimate world, to explain how the nonliving “experience” activity, and the passing of time.
So he explains the interconnectedness, and coherence of events within the complete reality, with principles derived from how a conscious mind experience events. Then he projects this onto the inanimate and finds that he needs to assume a God to support these ‘mental’ principles required for the interconnectedness and coherence of inanimate things. I find it to be a sort of panpsychism.
The problem is that physics studies motion under determinist premises. This is the concept of “mass” (the essential property of a body), and how it behaves. This concept does not allow that mass (a body) could have inherent within it, the capacity to select its own motion, as the free willist principle dictates. Since Newtonian physics requires a “force” to move a body, the internal source of self-motion is often portrayed as a type of force, “elan vital”. What is implied, is that there is a fundamental gap of incoherency between physics, and our lived experience of what it means to be alive, and to be able to choose our actions.
You could call me a defender of the op, and I clearly uphold a distinction between animate and inanimate.
You might call my proposals a “vital force” type of concept, if you like. I think it’s very clear that the evidence indicates this type of concept is required to account for the reality of selection, so I don’t understand why you would dismiss it offhandedly. An agent which selects is required to account for the reality that certain possibilities are actualized rather than others, as time passes. And, the agent must be an active cause. This is where common forms of semiosis faulter. They refuse to accept that an agent is required as interpreter of signs, interpretation being a selective process, rather than deterministic.
It’s not movement per se but the organization of that movement. Living things pattern their ways of functioning such as to produce and aim to perpetuate a normative consistency. So it’s not an ‘internal source’, it’s the basis of the achievement of an inside. A dynamic of circular and reciprocal causality among the parts of the organism produces the ‘inside’, the ‘self’ of the organism.
As for inanimate things, we don’t have to assume Newtonian mechanistic causality. Rather than the genesis of the whole by composition of the parts, Merleau-Ponty argues:
each local change in a [physical] form will be translated by a redistribution of forces which as-sures us of the constancy of their relation; it is this internal circulation which is the system as a physi-cal reality. And it is no more composed of parts which can be distinguished in it than a melody (al-ways transposable) is made of the particular notes which are its momentary expression. Possessing internal unity inscribed in a segment of space and resisting deformation from external influences by its circular causality, the physical form is an indi-vidual. It can happen that, submitted to external forces which increase and decrease in a continuous manner, the system, beyond a certain threshold, re-distributes its own forces in a qualitatively differ-ent order which is nevertheless only another ex-pression of its immanent law. Thus, with form, a principle of discontinuity is introduced and the conditions for a development by leaps or crises, for an event or for a history, are given.
I can’t see the logic in what you’re trying to say. Let’s assume that we’re talking about “the organization of that movement”, as you say. This implies a purposeful agent which does the organizing. We could call it “directing” the motion, the agent directs the causal activity. The agent must act as a cause to select for, and direct the motions in the observed (purposeful) manner. That cause must be from an external source. if it were the case that all the causal force simply came from outside forces, it could not direct itself internally, and there would be no internal/external boundary. The boundary which locks the causal activity within, allowing it to be directed, is not produced from the outside. Therefore there must be an internal cause which creates the boundary and directs the activity internally.
Circular or reciprocal causation, amongst the parts, cannot account for selection and directedness. Even if the boundary of a living organism, as a system, somehow created itself, the force of causation would enter from outside the living system, bounce around the parts according to the laws of physics, until maximum entropy was reached. But this is not the case in living creatures, where the force of causation is actually directed in a lessening of entropy. So the purposeful creation of the various boundaries within a living organism is a very important aspect of the directing. And living organism are full of such boundaries, all sorts of membranes.
In your quote from Merleau-Ponty, the use of phrases like “redistribution of forces”, “the system, beyond a certain threshold, re-distributes its own forces”, implies an internal agent acting as cause, like I said above. That’s why he calls this an expression of the system’s “immanent law”.
That seems to be just another way of saying “sentience”.
Whitehead prefers “panexperientialism” because, as I understand it, he does not want to impute mind (psyche) to all of nature.
My point was only that the observer per se is not excluded by physicalism. That is not to say that physicalism does not have a different conception of what the observer is.
So, physicalism will not necessarily exclude “aesthetic subjectivity”, but it may not agree with phenomenology as to what the existence of that aesthetic subjectivity implies or what its nature is.
I interpret this as meaning that the objective world is understood to exist as whatever it is independently of being perceived. How do you read it?
Conversely the objective world might be understood to be what is experienced in common by all subjects, in which case the experiencing subject is not being excluded at all.
That is one take, but what does it really mean? We are precognitively affected in ways that lead to the perception of a world of things which certainly seem to have their own existence. What could it mean to say that our perceptions, in the global sense, are either mirroring or not mirroring whatever it is that affects us? If we say our perceptions are not mirroring what is affecting them (whatever that might mean), how do we establish that, and how could we explain what a true mirroring would look like?
I don’t think so, plants move and nourish themselves, but “sentience” implies sensing.
Did the fact that there were 4 living beings, with hopes and fears, interests and preferences, pop up in the calculations for the Artemis moon flyby? I guess as nothing more than masses, w kg, x kg, y kg, z kg. The masses of the 4 Artemis astronauts were all that mattered to the rocket engines.
Of course there’s O_2 and CO_2 to worry about, along with food, excrement disposal, and psychological health. These would be genuine biological aspects of the mission, but still reducible to chemistry.
What about the Artemis moon flyby isn’t reducible to physics and chemistry? 
I believe there’s a physics equation that describes all the particles of a human body, and all the forces acting on those particles. The description is complete and given information on the particles at time T_0, the equation will tell you how the system will evolve over time. Fully deterministic state of affairs, with no room for free will.
By “plants move” I presume you refer to plants seeking sunlight. Plants don’t have identifiable sense organs, but neither do single celled organisms. Even nematodes don’t possess identifiable sense organs and yet they respond to environmental conditions, just as plants do. Does this count as sensing? It all depends on where exactly you want to locate the cut-off point beyond which you will say that an organism is not sentient. Take a look at some of Michael Levin’s experiments with “anthrobots” and “zenobots”.
‘John’ said that ‘belief in a divine intelligence’ was an ‘unstated premise’ in the original post (which it is not). Then you chimed in and said, if it’s not physical, then it is necessarily vitalist.
So I am saying that this represents a forced dichotomy — on one side, the physicalist account, said to be ‘parsimonious’; the only alternative being vitalism, which posits an immaterial force.’ If it’s not one, then it must be the other’ - you as good as said this. Any attempt to show that there’s another way of looking it is dismissed as ‘dancing around the question’, which means, it probably hasn’t been understood.
When you find it, please invite me to the Nobel ceremony. Because, after all, even though the wave equation is fully deterministic, there is no agreed account of what it describes, prior to a measurement being taken. And that is for a single sub-atomic particle.
It’s a case of total/extreme reductionism. A human being as simply a bag of particles, a box of balls being knocked around by some force.
This equation, I was told, is a quantum mechanical equation, dealing as it must, with particles, inside the human body. I’m in the dark as to what about the particles is being computed; probably those states that matter to a physicist (position, velocity, etc.). There’s mention of Laplace’s demon. In the lecture, from where this information comes from, we’re reminded that though the physical aspects (the human body) is fully deterministic, there are different levels/planes of being (?) and each level comes with a different conceptual schema and that free will is a notion that is a level above the physical. Consciousness, it is admitted, is a mystery but ending in optimism, it is something that science will eventually figure out.
No bag of particles could have written that post, even if it says nothing of note.
Where were those MP quotes from, I’d like to follow up.
You say that you are only concerned to say that purpose is an integral aspect of life given that animals obviously manifest purposive behavior. I have no argument with this―in fact this is what I said for years in discussions with you when you used to claim that animal behavior is nothing more than “stimulus and instinctual response”. Also, that (at least some) animal behavior is purposive is unarguable, and hence not controversial at all, so what could be the point of making an OP about it?
You claim that you are not concerned with the question about the “meaning of life”, the idea that there is not only purpose within the cosmos, specifically as manifested by living beings, but that the very existence of the Cosmos and of life itself has a meaning (purpose). You say you are not at all concerned with that question and yet you say this:
So, your OP may not explicitly assert or even state its concern with overarching meaning and purpose, but it is implied there for all to see nonetheless. “If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck”.
The other point is that it seems as though you are accusing science of a mistake in its methodological exclusion of the metaphysical idea of cosmic purpose, when the fact is that science is simply not equipped to deal with that kind of question―its empirical methodology has to deal only with what is observable, and with causally based explanatory hypotheses for what is observed.
So your OP is really a kind of “lame duck”. And as Mr Fawlty would have it “if you don’t like duck then you’re rather out of luck”.
The equation is real and was displayed in a large font on a screen for the entire audience to see. Unlike the standard model equation, this one fits on a cell phone screen. I have no reason to doubt its authenticity; it seems double/cross-checkable. I wonder if you have any pertinent views on the matter. 
Plants move in a number of ways, growing above ground, and below ground. Then they spread their seeds and the next generation gets a new location.
The acts of planning it, and carrying it out. You are talking about the science, but science doesn’t describe itself.
OK, so you think science does describe itself. You probably really know that is fiction.
You’re pretty gullible. Either that or delirious.
Science describes the body as a sack of particles. There’s nothing fictional about the reality of physics computations, even at the particle level. “Give me a lever and a place to stand …”
Science works, nothing in human experience has worked like it.
However, there are other questions which for science are harder to answer. Take for example the hard problem of consciousness or turbulence.
You ascribe goal-directedness to life yet deny that any apparent goal-directedness of life could simply be an emergent effect resulting from evolution that is interpreted as ‘goal-directedness’ by we humans.
That leaves two other options, i.e. that life is given goals by some greater cosmic will (e.g. God) or that life has some special metaphysical quality to it that gives it goals (i.e. a vital force).
You deny both of these, even though at different points in this thread you seem point to both of them (e.g. your running argument strongly smells like vitalism-that-refuses-to-acknowedge-it-is-vitalism while you simultaneously complain about the rejection of meaning in the universe). And you refuse to really persuasively argue about how your position is neither of these; rather, when argued into a corner you seem to object to the connotations of terms like ‘vital force’ rather than their substance.