It may well do. The problem is that for it to end up as a single thing, it must be an entity made up of both original parts. Which means ascribing the qualia, experience, etc. of consciousness to an entirely physical process, or vice versa. Making it illusory from the point of view of agency doesn’t absolve of the need to resolve Chalmer’s hard problem of consciousness. If we want an entirely physical model, then we need an entirely physical model of conscious experience.
If the illusion has no agency, how could it lead to a mental breakdown? Violating the illusion can have no physical consequences at all, surely? Or else it’s not an illusion.
I can understand the idea of conscious experiences being a byproduct of decision making, and I can understand that an illusion can exist such that we appear to have agency when we do not. I do not see how violating an illusion can break the decision making it arises from.
Because if it could have the effect of breaking the decision making, it could also change the decision making, and then it’s no longer an illusion.
Except that if you let the picture on the TV get distorted, that somehow damages the broadcast studio?
You appear to be embracing both physicalism and identity theory, and I’m not seeing how they reconcile. If the conscious qualia share an identity with physical neurology, then that means the qualia are a physical process in some sense. If physicalism pertains, then the non-physical aspects, such as the conscious experience are functionally irrelevent. How can something be both functionally irrelevent and part of the whole? Are there two parallel physical processes, one of which has no decision-making capability? Or are qualia non-decision making because they aren’t physical?
Wouldn’t that put music in the same realm as DNA providing the information for a human body? The construction process contributes a great deal. If the music does not exist on the paper, then where is the extra experience of the music, not on the paper coming from? What does it consist of? The perceiver is surely playing a major role here.
I don’t see that this analogy resolves the problem. Either the experience is a physical effect, in which case there is no reason to suppose it is not just as causal as any other, or it is entirely non-physical, in which case we’re back to a dualist homonculus, albiet a form of dualism in which purely mental events are deemed casually unimportant, rather than merely absent.
Maybe we’re getting a clearer picture here of why we keep circling back to separation of mind and brain? What is the difference, in this account, of the experience produced by the automated system, versus the automated system itself? Would it not be as good to just say that consciousness is an aspect of the decision making mechanism, rather than an illusion produced by it?
Or to put it another way, leaving aside for the moment whether or not we actually have free will or whether or not consciousness is casually effective, is there any requirement in this account that necessitates consciousness being illusory, rather than simply being part of the experience of making decisions?
Well, we could consider how qualia is sort of a deflated version of quiddity, stripped of its metaphysical import and noetic intelligibility.
I’d argue that the focus on qualia over similarly problematic issues (intentionality, normativity, etc.) is the result of upstream, often unstated metaphysical assumptions. From the perspective of a relatively flat, nominalist, empiricist psychology, qualia is what needs to get explained because “the act of understanding” is just discursive calculation over streams of incoming sense data. The upstream assumption determine what needs to be explained. Likewise, if a Humean “fact / value” distinction is assumed from the outset (even as a “methodological bracketing”) it will shape how the goal-directedness of life and the value-laden elements of understanding and experience can even be coherently explained by a theory.
Arguably, the dualism is irresolvable because it is built in at a higher level, into the epistemology and metaphysics itself. Different approaches don’t hew to these same, fairly dominant assumptions, and so they will tend to look at different issues.
— I’ve spent plenty of time with the metaphysical tradition, and I’m quite sympathetic to the reality of immaterial causation in some sense — but you haven’t yet earned the specific conclusions you’re drawing. Telling me to go study more isn’t a substitute for actually making an argument. If the argument exists and has “stood the test of time,” then it should be easy to sketch it out rather than gesturing vaguely at your own prowess and asking me to take it on faith. Looking at the arguments that you have provided so far doesn’t inspire a ton of confidence.
For example, your argument about the future conflates two very different things. You note that “I might be at work tomorrow or I might be at home” — neither is determinately true — and conclude that the future must have some kind of “immaterial, non-physical” existence. But this only follows if you assume that “real” means “physically determinate” and that anything not physically determinate must be non-physical. That’s a false dichotomy. Given your decades of study, you must be well aware that there are well-developed accounts of potentiality, probability, and real possibility that don’t require positing a separate immaterial realm.
On free will: you say the agent “selects from real possibilities” and is “free from past causation” and does not act “by chance or random occurrence.” But this just raises the classic problem: what does it act from, then? You’ve ruled out both deterministic causation and chance. The only option left is some sui generis causal power that operates outside every framework we have for understanding how anything happens. That’s not an explanation — it’s a placeholder dressed up as one. You’ve identified a gap and then named it “the agent” without actually telling us how it works.
On statistical explanation: you say that “being able to predict that the sun will rise tomorrow does not provide any explanation.” But statistical mechanics doesn’t just predict — it explains why gases behave as they do by showing how macroscopic regularities emerge from the collective behavior of micro-level constituents, even though individual trajectories are unpredictable. That’s genuine explanatory work. It tells you why the regularity holds, not just that it holds. The insistence that only individual-event prediction counts as “real” explanation is an artificially narrow criterion that would disqualify huge swathes of perfectly good science.
On time and truth: you say that the different temporal models used by different sciences indicate that “truth is not the goal.” But this doesn’t follow at all. Different sciences model time differently because they’re investigating different aspects of the same reality at different levels of analysis. Thermodynamics needs an arrow of time; fundamental physics may not. That’s not a deficiency — it’s what you’d expect if reality has multiple levels of intelligible structure, each requiring its own adequate mode of description. The demand for one single “true” model of time presupposes that reality is only intelligible at one level, which is precisely the reductionism I thought you were arguing against.
Schrodinger’s cat, for example, carefully constructs a scenario using a box that non-deterministically kills a cat. That’s not deterministic causation. It’s not pure chance either. It’s also not a sui generis causal power.
A computer that is running software that regulates how the hardware handles the software that regulates the hardware etc. The sum of that system is a singular entity that emerges out of the two. As I describe it, the physical brain and the algorithm of adaptability are equal to the hardware and software, but the experience is the two as a whole, inseparable, but yet the sum is not what drives it. It is the form of the whole that is our experience and so this emergent experience does not require itself to be physical. Not even the algorithm is essentially physical, it is a composition of abstract directions that guide the formation of neural pathways to form along the fundamental need for the function of adaptability.
The illusion is what I describe being feedback of experiencing the process. We do not essentially exist in the sense we think we do, that is the illusion. The process is not an illusion. The algorithm is not an illusion, but the experience of it all forms an illusion of existence. But the illusion itself is necessary to form a coherent grounding to reality for the adaptive system to function.
It doesn’t break the decision making, what it means is the experience of falling into a deeper awareness of the process, of the cogs of the machine. Similar to intentionally focusing on breathing causing you to become aware of breathing. That’s a very basic form of awareness of the body, but turning it inwards towards an awareness of the process causes a feedback loop; becoming aware of the process of being aware of the process of being aware of the process.
And when it comes to decisions in themselves, we’re not making them. The formation of us as automated entities is a process that develops over the course of our entire life. We are driven by our system constantly adapting and we get entangled in extremely complex webs of actions. Our experience of these “choices” is that we are making them, but we’re following a deterministic path of this adaptive system steering us. That it would take the action of attempting to deepen the awareness of the process would be a long line of causalities leading to the process trying to balance some prediction in the right way.
Otherwise the system would make good decisions all the time, but it doesn’t. Self-destruction may very well be a broken system or a system leaning towards an outcome that it has a hard time predicting. As with all things that is a mystery, it confuses our process. So the experience of breaking the system is similar to experiencing suicide; that kind of self-destruction is a topic in itself.
My point is that the experience you are calling your qualia, is not really you. Not in the sense you think. The real you is an autonomous being that is acting on adaptations to the environment, automatically reacting and acting according to changing conditions, and the conditions that makes you break the illusion are part of that deterministic causality. The mental breakdown happens as the process gets caught in a feedback loop it’s not supposed to operate in. But the decision is the system forming self-harm out of bad prediction or broken processing.
It is important to remember that a key point in all this is that your autonomous self makes the decision out of previous causes, these causes can still lead to the action of doing this self-harm, there’s no decision being made as a free choice and the experience is just the experience of the process going down that path, it is not part of taking action, it’s that idea of being in control of actions taken that is the illusion I’m speaking of, the illusion of consciousness is our experience of the process and the real us is what is causing this experience, while itself is just individual processes acting on each other.
I think that this need to categorize what I’m saying into specific fields becomes a limitation for understanding what I mean. It binds thinking about this into a requirement to adhere to a certain field. If conflicts arise, then I have to invent a new sub-field in order to summarize my position, but I’m extrapolating out of what I know, rather than from previous fields.
I would return to the computer analogy: “A computer that is running software that regulates how the hardware handles the software that regulates the hardware etc. The sum of that system is a singular entity that emerges out of the two.”
Qualia, or the experience you have while the physical/algorithmic process is happening is an emergent experience out of that process. If you want to call that physicalism, sure, but just as the computer/software analogy describes, the sum of that loop is not a physical thing, it is an emergent effect that exists, but does not have locality that describe where it can be found within any of the individual physical parts. The sum is a projection that is in turn stored as samples for further predictions by the system.
Like a hardware/software AI, generating an image, that is then added to memory to be used for new generations. While current such generative AIs break down in that process, that’s because they don’t ground reality with sensory information, but the point is that the generated image isn’t a physical thing, it is an abstract projection from the system, and then becomes part of the system that generates anew.
If we are looking for where “we” exist as the first-person experience you have right now reading this, it is merely the progress of this process happening over time. The “we” that we experience is us riding or surfing on this nexus point in time as it processes our function as an entity.
What I mean with the music sheet analogy is more about how if we map out the process of system actions over time, in the likeness of music notes as operations, the experience we have of this process is like a cursor sliding over it and playing the music. Our experience is something other than what the notes physically are, yet we experience the music as something real, even though it’s a byproduct of us flowing through the motions that we have no control over.
It’s an analogy for describing how the reality we call our perception and experience, is only a stream of abstractions that the process is causing while operating.
Perception is part of the process and automatic functions, the experience we have is just a distant projection of that entire process, which includes the perception itself.
Maybe thinking of this within the concept of the holographic universe theory is better as an analogy to understand what I mean with all this. The concept of real physical existence being in one location and operation, while our universe is merely a projection of that real physical reality elsewhere. The universe not consisting of anything but an abstract refraction of something else entirely. If the theory is true, then defining our universe as “real” becomes false as it is a holographic projection of what is truly physically real on a higher dimensional scale.
It’s this I’m getting at. That the experience we call qualia, or first-person experience, is just a projection of the automated process that is the real agent of our entity as individuals.
That the experience projected from the automated system, is just the sum of the system operating and analyzing itself in order to form an internalized simulated world to further predict actions and decisions; which creates the experience we have; a compounding and emergent stream that is the sum total of the process. It is there to form a stream of information about the world around the individual and store in memory for predicting and adapting more complex behaviors.
It is a cascade, an exponential rise of complexity with these adapting processes, in a feedback loop, which causes this hallucinatory illusion we have of this automated process.
“I” as I experience myself, is a projection of a process that in itself isn’t something I would consider “me”, but which is the actual me as the physical entity.
Our evolution has essentially caused an abstract projection of our own internal function. And this is what I call the byproduct of our existence. This awareness may be necessary for our system to summarize information for better prediction and for it to make sense as such information, this experience we have is a consolidating effect.
What contradicts this is predictive coding. The lag between decision and action. We operate faster than we are aware of our actions. The system needs to be automatic for us to function within the timescale of reality, otherwise we would die pretty quickly. And since it requires automation, there’s little evidence that we are anything but automated and that our internal cognition is merely a curation machine for fine-tuning the predictions necessary for the automation to work. Experience therefore, leans more towards being an afterthought, essentially an experience of the process after it happened.
I wouldn’t be surprised if our actual experience of reality is a few seconds after actual present time. A lagging awareness as it isn’t necessary to drive our being, it’s only necessary to curate upcoming predictions.
To summarize more simply:
Our physical brain/body handles an algorithm for adaptive behavior, programming predictions through internal simulation of the world.
The experience of this process is what we experience as our first-person perspective, our qualia.
This experience is further feeded back into the process as memory for the function of the simulation used to predict and adapt. This is the purpose of the sum experience.
We are automated by this biological process, and our experience of being is projected from it, becoming an experiential byproduct of the system analyzing itself as part of its operation.
I’m not sure how else I can explain this. I will have to try and tackle this in another way if it still is unclear.
@Togo — Fair point, and I should have been more precise. You’re right that “deterministic causation” and “pure chance” don’t exhaust the space of causal possibilities. Quantum mechanics does give us processes that are neither strictly deterministic nor “pure chance” in the colloquial sense.
But I don’t think this actually helps Meta_U’s position. The Schrödinger’s cat scenario is a case of physically constrained indeterminacy. The decay probability is fully governed by quantum mechanical laws. So, even though the individual outcome isn’t determined, it’s still firmly within the natural order.
What Meta_U was claiming is something much stronger: an agent that is “free from past causation” and does not act “by chance or random occurrence,” yet somehow still manages to select from future possibilities. That’s not quantum indeterminacy — quantum indeterminacy doesn’t select, it just resolves.
By contrast, Meta_U’s agent is supposedly doing something intentional, directed, and normatively guided, all while somehow being neither determined nor chancy. And that combination is what I was calling sui generis.
Well said, and akin to the objections you raised against my earlier ‘Mind Created World’ thread. But I don’t think that the enactivist paradigm denies empirical reality. The world is not only mind-created; it is a real world, as the empirical sciences attest. But the reality it has is co-constituted in and by the subject. By that, I don’t mean ‘subjective’ in the sense of ‘pertaining to a particular individual’. I mean ‘transcendental’ in the Kantian sense: conforming to the conditions of possible experience — the forms of sensibility and the categories of the understanding.
Put another way, the empirical domain is objective, but not wholly so. Which might sound trivially true, but the presumption of it’s inherent reality still holds sway over the realist.
Going back to Kant, this is spelled out in the Transcendental Dialectic:
To this (i.e. Kant’s) idealism is opposed transcendental realism, which regards space and time as something given in themselves (independent of our sensiblity). The transcendental realist therefore represents outer appearances (if their reality is conceded) as things in themselves, which would exist independently of us and our sensibility and thus would also be outside us according to pure concepts of the understanding. (CPR, A369, Cambridge Edition)
Kant’s point is that what he designates as the ‘transcendental realist’ who insists that objects must exist independently of sense, ends up generating skepticism about whether we can ever truly know them. The very attempt to secure objectivity by placing it outside cognition - in other words, declaring it to be mind-independent - is the source of scepticism, because then you are forever trying to compare the object as it really is with its representation. But such comparison is impossible. The very attempt to secure objectivity by placing it outside cognition is what produces the Cartesian anxiety.
The enactivist position in The Embodied Mind inherits, via Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, this broadly Kantian insight. The point is not to deny empirical reality, but to question the realist assumption that objects, as structured in experience, exist fully formed apart from the conditions of their disclosure.
But why is it important? Why the wish to explain the nature of experience (or being) in bottom–up terms, in accordance with neo-darwinian principles? And can’t that explanation itself be regarded as simply another instance of the very process you’re claiming is an explanation?
I don’t dispute that consciousness evolved, nor that its functional organization can be described in algorithmic terms. My question is why that explanatory paradigm is assumed to be comprehensive. Explaining the causal development of a capacity does not automatically explain its meaning. A structural account of processing is not itself an account of the first-person character of experience.
Moreover, if agency is merely an illusion generated by automatic processes, then the reasoning by which we arrive at that conclusion would itself be just such an automatic process. In that case, the claim that agency is illusory cannot appeal to rational normativity without cutting off the branch it’s sitting on. The issue is not whether our cognition has evolutionary roots, but whether bottom–up description captures what it is like to be the system in operation.
The current preoccupation with qualia is not an isolated puzzle. It arises within a framework that identifies reality with what can be quantified (hence ‘Descartes’ Ghost’). Once nature is defined in purely mathematical terms, the qualitative dimension of experience becomes inexplicable (a ‘hard problem’). Eliminativism then appears as a consistent extension of that framework: if something cannot be captured in structural-functional description, it must be reinterpreted or explained away. And that reflects the ‘upstream metaphysical commitments’ you’re referring to.
If we assume a strict fact/value distinction from the outset, then goal-directedness and normativity become mysterious add-ons to an otherwise neutral (or meaningless) world. Which is one of the problems engendered by ‘Enlightenment rationalism’.
But contemporary cognitive science — for example Vervaeke’s notion of a salience landscape — suggests that organisms do not encounter a value-neutral domain to which meaning is later added. Rather, the world shows up as already structured by relevance relative to the organism’s modus vivendi. This does not undercut objectivity; it reconceives it as inseparable from the conditions of embodied disclosure.
And for rational sentient beings such as h.sapiens, salience does not stop at biological relevance. It includes truth, coherence, obligation, and value.
Yes, good point. I guess what I was getting at is that the “unresolved remanent” is itself already defined so as to be incredibly thin. All we are left with, on many accounts, is having to explain “what it is like to taste strawberries,” etc. To my mind, this rather massively undersells the problem for physicalism.
Now, folks might be skeptical of quiddity and values, seeing them as “spooky,” but such skepticism presupposes semantic/noetic content in order to even be stated. Concerns over “woo” are themselves only intelligible if something is already understood. That is, the challenge to the substantial reality of noetic understanding is parasitic on that very understanding (a transcendental argument).
The same issue crops up with value. Presumably, one must already understand that truth is superior to falsity in order for science to have any proper ends at all. You need the noetic apprehension of truth as genuinely good, as worth pursuing for its own sake, to even get the epistemic enterprise off the ground. Without this grounding, without ends, all we’re left with is voluntarism and misology.
So, to my mind, it is explaining reason and the act of understanding, and particularly our understanding of the Good, that is the “thick” part of the “Hard Problem.” Call it, “the Harder Problem.” The tendency to reduce this issue to merely something like “explaining what drinking coffee feels like,” seems like a (probably unintentional) attempt to minimize just how great the problem is for physicalism. We’re not just talking about some extra, tacked on sensorium, but rather the very things that makes philosophy and science possible and meaningful at all, and the very things that allow us to say what grounds good versions of either. Default on explaining this, and all you’re explaining is a Chinese Room that has sensations.
It’s definitely a different view, non-dualistic for starters. It is far more aligned with the sort of idealistic ontology that I’ve been entertaining.
The video posted in you 2nd post is entitled ‘what is reality?’, but it just seems to talk about the direct/indirect realism distinction. Not being a realist, I don’t think there is an objective truth, but that doesn’t mean that a ‘thing’ cannot have nature-in-itself. Most of your posts seem to blend the with rather than keeping them distinct. This leads to what I see as misled conclusions.
But the idea of mental processes bringing forth the world is one I can get behind, but the Buddhist influence also seems to drag in its anthropocentric/biocentric biases, something I cannot get behind.
I’m also interested in the ongoing conversation about the evolution of consciousness, but find little on which to directly comment at this time. Too many books to read. The inner fish sounds worthy.
Because it provides the foundation and helps explain how we are not in control and what that means for the process that I’m describing.
We can discuss just the thing in itself, especially with the foundation already drawn up in detail now.
I’m not saying you are disputing the evolutionary process into consciousness; the reason I bring that in is because a large portion of my theory relies on a very specific evolutionary development in the form of an adaptability algorithm.
From that and with support in predictive coding, we run into the explanation that the brain operates on an algorithm of adaptation. In a feedback loop that constantly updates the prediction model of the world, it is an automatic process that is so complex in its operation that we are unable to map it out with a reductionist method.
Part of this operation, this process, is that it creates a sum total of the process that functions as a nexus of all operations, all combining into one point that is used to form a coherent information stream into our memory, for the purpose of further predictions.
It is this nexus, this convergence point, that becomes our experience of the whole system. And it is a passive experience which, when interacting with the prediction and memory, causes a sense of agency.
And this is a false agency; it is merely the experience of these processes working automatically. We are not choosing anything, we are not doing anything; the system operates on its own, and our experience of it makes us believe we are in control.
We are like marionettes to this system, but in full belief that we don’t have strings. It is the reason for the notion of free will when all theories point towards determinism.
And with this mapped out…
…that leads to the answer of its meaning.
The process we experience is an operation of our evolutionary trait of adaptability at play. It does not have any meaning at all, as the experience we have is just a projection of a system so complex that it doesn’t feel automatic.
But everything we are, everything about culture, expression, creativity, etc., is just the system operating on the far end of the complexity that started with a simple adaptation algorithm to basic changing situations in nature.
The first-person experience is just a passive experience of a highly advanced algorithm. So advanced and complex that it becomes indistinguishable from free-willed choices and expression. So advanced that when it operates, the system itself registers its own operational dimension within the algorithm, causing self-awareness.
Yes.
Why do we do this? Mapping out the complexity of the entire adaptive operation that constitutes our consciousness is required to figure out why we are doing this. Going from the primitive needs to adapt at the dawn of our consciousness, into the need for complex processing of social interactions that forms a social realm of interconnected collaborative adaptations, to trying to adapt to more and more complex situations, leading to the need to decode natural phenomena in order to adapt in the way of predicting nature, into needing to invent technology as an adaptation when harmony with the environment isn’t possible, etc., etc.
Up to the point of the modern world, in which the reasons for adapting in any given situation have so many complex strings attached in every sector of our being that we are unable to see the reasons for why we are doing this discussion and what change we are trying to achieve.
The complexity of this has grown with our evolving consciousness; the things we do have lost their reasons.
We are operating on notions of survival, triggered by our system that is recognizing that something is in need of change. As we perfected adaptation and found comfort, the system itself is scanning for new needs to change.
Because the system does not stop, even if we’ve adapted to our conditions so well that many of us have no risks around us.
Why do we seek out art, see movies, play games, or read books? Our system is actively scanning for problems to optimize ourselves to.
And we are experiencing this operation constantly working. We don’t choose—not just because we are systematically unable to, but also because there’s nothing to really choose. All choices we make are in service of satisfying this need our process is tuned to work on.
And our experience depends on it constantly working. A passive experience of a meaningless process that is only there to drive us as animals forward in line with nature.
What is it like being a slave to an algorithm? Within the blissful illusion that you are not a slave to it?
Why do we attribute explanations that avoid accepting us as part of an indifferent natural process? Even if the dimension of our experience of that process feels deeply meaningful, doesn’t mean that it is.
And we keep being limited by the illusion playing us so effectively that we believe it is profound when it’s not.
What is it like to be the system? We are experiencing it right now. What else is there to it? Other than the system’s desire to figure out what it’s like to be the system, in order to satisfy its need to change and adapt to the tension this unanswered question poses for us.
The question is, in my opinion, if I’m right, will our system ever be satisfied with such an answer of meaninglessness? Or have we run into the very limit of our ability to function with our cognition, seeing that the answer seems to form a new tension that requires change in an endless loop…
Maybe this is why we never reach satisfaction in this topic, as the final answer may be so unsatisfying that it doesn’t trigger the system to stop trying to adapt to the situation, and we continue to form new ideas, religiously or philosophically.
Slaves to one of the final existential questions about us.
Indeed. But as we’ve also previously discussed, I think that when Kant drew his distinction between the thing-in-itself and the thing-for-us he was reacting to the Renaissance distinction of primary and secondary qualities — and accompanying representational theory of perception — that led to a “forgetting” of the notion of intrinsic intelligibility. This was the legacy of Plato and Aristotle who, each in their own way, saw knowledge as an achievement in which the mind grasps an intelligibility not of its own making, but the very intelligibility of Being itself.
So Kant was right in one sense. The transcendental realist does end up generating skepticism if she places the object wholly outside of cognition and then demands that we somehow compare our representations with it.
But I think that, due to this “forgetting”, Kant presents us with a false dilemma. Either the object is “given in itself” independent of all conditions of cognition (transcendental realism), or the object is co-constituted by the transcendental conditions of possible experience (transcendental idealism). If those are your only options, transcendental idealism wins handily. But are those really the only options?
Consider what the “comparison” problem actually assumes. It assumes that knowing is fundamentally a matter of matching — holding a representation up against a thing and checking for correspondence. If that’s what knowing is, then yes, we’re stuck, because we’d need to access the thing independent of any representation in order to verify the match, and ex hypothesi we can’t do that.
But what if knowing isn’t matching at all? What if it’s not a comparison between two items (representation and thing) but an identity — a case where the intelligible structure of the thing and the content of the act of understanding are one and the same intelligibility, existing in two different modes? The physicist’s grasp of inverse-square gravitational relations and the actual structure governing planetary motion aren’t two items being compared. The understanding is the intelligibility of the thing as received in the mode of cognition.
On this account, the “comparison problem” never arises — not because we’ve given up on mind-independence, but because knowing isn’t the sort of thing that requires an “external” comparison. Thanks to the identity of knowing and being, it’s self-correcting from within. When inquiry goes wrong, we don’t discover the error by stepping outside cognition to peek at the thing-in-itself. We discover it because further questions, further evidence, further acts of understanding reveal tensions and inadequacies in our current grasp. The correction comes from within the dynamism of inquiry, but what drives that correction is the real intelligibility of what we’re investigating.
So I want to resist the move from “objects are not given apart from conditions of disclosure” to “objects are co-constituted by those conditions.” The first claim is trivially true — nothing is known except through acts of knowing. But the second is a much stronger claim, and I don’t think it follows. The conditions of disclosure are conditions under which we access intelligible structure; they don’t produce that structure. The fact that I can only see the landscape from some particular vantage point doesn’t mean the vantage point co-constitutes the landscape.
You say that “the empirical domain is objective, but not wholly so.” I’d actually want to flip this. The empirical domain as we currently grasp it is always partially objective — our understanding is finite, situated, revisable. But the direction of inquiry is toward a fuller objectivity, not toward the recognition that objectivity was always partly constituted by us. The fact that our grasp is conditioned doesn’t entail that what we grasp is conditioned in the same way.
And this, I think, is where the enactivist appropriation of Kant inherits a problem along with the insight. The insight — that cognition is active, embodied, situated, not passive reception of a ready-made world — is genuinely important. The problem is the slide from “cognition is active” to “the object is co-constituted by cognitive activity.” That slide only looks compulsory if you’re already inside the Kantian framework where the only alternative to co-constitution is the naive transcendental realism Kant rightly rejected. But there’s a third path: the object is intelligible in itself, our access to that intelligiblity is always mediated and conditioned, and the dynamism of inquiry is precisely the process by which we progressively (and fallibly) uncover what’s there — not what we’ve put there.
It seems clear to me (and someone put me right if this seems obviously wrong) that philosophy of mind exists, and the science of consciousness exists.
Philosophy of mind necessarily includes philosophy of consciousness. I don’t quite understand the OP in this sense.
Overall, consciousness studies are empirical - we’re trying to find hte mechanics. Philosophy of Mind correctly, imo, uses “mind” so that we’re in truly philosophical territory about experiences and pieces fitting together. Which is why i very much disagree with one earlier take in the thread:
I don’t recognize this in my travels through this area.
I’m comfortable blaming Kant, but culturally I think we’re living in the shadow of Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche, that hermeneutics of suspicion, every perception through some distorting lens, every intellectual commitment part of some system you may not even be aware of, every motivation open to question.
I don’t know how many people there are like me who came to philosophy originally precisely in the spirit of what you say here—stop and think, try to set aside your prejudices and see—but having come to philosophy were most vulnerable to and ended up receiving the biggest dose of the hermeneutics of suspicion. After that, for a long time, we are stuck with a worldview that is too clever by half (usually various forms of cultural and linguistic determinism, more warmed over Kant).
Of course, at one level an argument is just neural activity and patterned sound. But when we are debating, we are not responding to neural firings — we are responding to meanings and reasons. If first-person experience is merely a passive registration of algorithmic output, then it becomes difficult to see how reasoning differs from noise. Yet the very practice of philosophical argument presupposes that we are not merely systems emitting outputs, but agents capable of recognizing reasons as valid or invalid. The normative dimension of reasoning cannot be captured by the causal description alone.
Right! I would completely agree. But isn’t that basically a form of Aristotelian realism, or ‘participatory realism’? That is much nearer the classical form of intelligibility, i.e. the concordance of thinking and being. In my essay on Berkeley, I pointed out that
The 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 (psuchē) is, in a way, all things,” meaning that the intellect becomes what it knows by receiving the form of the known object.
My argument there was that Berkeley’s idealism grew out of the severing of the sense of ‘participatory knowing’ by the emerging empiricism of early modern science.
So that’s not really the form of realism that I have in my sights. I’m saying the Cartesian division’ is still an operative factor in mainstream scientific naturalism.
Who would you consider to be a current representatives of the kind of ‘participatory knowing’ that you’re advocating?
@Pat — Thanks, and I think you’ve put your finger on something that doesn’t get talked about enough.
I think the hermeneutics of suspicion is genuinely illuminating up to a point. It is important to recognize that perception can be shaped by interests, that intellectual commitments can serve functions we’re not fully aware of, that motivation is more complicated than it presents itself as being. Those are real insights, and ignoring them would be naive.
But there’s a difference between saying “inquiry is conditioned” and saying “inquiry is nothing but its conditions.” The hermeneutics of suspicion tends to slide from the first into the second — and once you’re there, you can’t get back out, because any attempt to get back out is itself just another expression of some conditioning you haven’t yet unmasked. It becomes self-sealing. Every claim to have seen something true is preemptively reframed as a symptom of something else.
But what’s ironic is that the suspicious stance itself claims to see things as they really are — claims that the “real” story is the one about power, or libido, or class interest, or linguistic construction. So it hasn’t actually escaped the aspiration to truth; it’s just redirected it while pretending to have transcended it. That’s the sense in which it’s too clever by half, as you say. It applies its own hermeneutic to everything except itself.
The way back, I think, isn’t to pretend the suspicious insights never happened — you can’t unlearn them and shouldn’t try. I think it’s to recognize that the capacity to identify distortion already presupposes a orientation toward undistorted understanding. You can’t recognize a lens as distorting unless you have some grasp, however partial, of what things look like without it. The very success of the hermeneutics of suspicion — the fact that it genuinely does unmask real distortions — is parasitic on the possibility of the honest inquiry it claims to have debunked.
So I’d say the struggle you describe is a common and, perhaps, necessary pattern of intellectual maturation. Rather than being a sign that something went wrong with your philosophical development, it’s part of a normal (and healthy) developmental trajectory. The naive starting point gets complicated by legitimate suspicion, which then threatens to become total, which then gets recognized as self-undermining, which opens the door to a chastened realism that takes conditioning seriously without fully surrendering to it. I’d say that the fact that you came out the other side wanting to do “honest work” suggests the dynamism of inquiry was operating in you all along, even when/if it felt like you were stuck at times.
The interesting question that your post raises is whether this same pattern may play out at a cultural/collective level as well. From that perspective it may be the case that Western culture as a whole is still trying to find a stable landing place on the other side of naivete.
If I were a different sort of dilettante (than the kind I am, that is) I might say something here about the dialectic. Or quote Little Gidding.
Loath as I am to treat “Western culture” as having a referent, I think—and here we’re still circling the notional topic of this discussion—it’s all about science.
First, because science, I remain convinced, is most of what philosophy ever aspired to be. Second, because it is perceived as a force of disenchantment. Third, because even if not disenchanting, it tends toward the uncanny. All of which suggests to me that we have still, after all this time, not quite digested science, culturally speaking. We set it running, and have been trying to catch up ever since.
Oh, and I missed fourth, science does not suffer from the same problem of the hermeneutics of suspicion, at least not in the blind-alley way, because it institutionalized self-overcoming. Science is maybe not the “stable landing place” you mention, but it is the reliable process for keeping inquiry from getting bogged down in ideological quicksand. (There’s already a touch of Sellars here, for those itching to recommend I read PSIM.)
I think Kant is often blamed for subjectivism in a way that conflates him with later interpretations (not all of them correct, either). Kant was trying to secure the objectivity of science by grounding it in universal conditions of experience, not to reduce reality to individual perspective. The hermeneutics of suspicion associated with Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud represents a very different move — one that treats reason itself as conditioned or distorted. That shift isn’t entailed by Kant’s transcendental project.
Kant also lectured in astronomy, physics, and geology, among other things, and his ‘nebular hypothesis’, revised by La Place, is still considered scientifically respectable.
Kant’s criticisms are exceedingly subtle and thus very easy to mischaracterise as a kind of outright relativism.
I’ll also add that I personally abhor the ‘anti-science’ attitudes of e.g. climate change denialists, vaccination sceptics, and the like. I wouldn’t want to be associated with anything like that. But if you believe that these are among the implications of Kant’s criticism of ‘transcendental realism’ then I’m afraid you’re missing the point.
Modern science, in particular, developed out of the preceeding forms of philosophy and early science. But its questions are by definition and as a matter of procedure, far more stringently defined than those of philosophy. You could argue that a large part of Galileo’s genius lay in being able to introduce stringent and observable definitions. But philosophy’s concerns are much broader, and correspondingly more difficult to define precisely.
What are these specific conclusions you are talking about? My argument is that we have good reason to believe that there is a form of causation which will never be able to be accounted for with the methods of science. My primary premise, that the nature of free will and final cause provide evidence of this form of causation, you rejected as “off the rails”.
Clearly the issue is that you are not sympathetic to immaterial causation, in any sense, or you would not have said that. Since you reject my premise, as off the rails, my only recourse is to point you in the direction of an overwhelming amount of evidence which supports it. Obviously I can’t make you accept the evidence, just point you at it.
I used that premise because it is consistent with the subject of the thread, philosophy of mind, and consciousness. However, since it appears like the reality of immaterial causation is what gives you the problem, I can provide a very simple proof for you. Every material thing exists as an organized body, so the cause of that organization must necessarily precede the material body. The cause of the first material body must be immaterial.
This makes no sense at all. You say, that my conclusion only follows if anything which is not physically determinate is non-physical. Of course anything not physically determinate is non-physical. To say otherwise would be contradiction, ‘there is something not physically determinate which is physical’. How is that anything other than contradiction. What else could “not physically determinate mean?
Therefore you only avoid the force of my argument by assuming something contradictory, something not physically determinate which could still be physical. Would could you hope to mean by this? Then you make the totally unsubstantiated claim that there are well-developed accounts of potentiality, probability, and real possibility that don’t require an ontology of the immaterial.
It’s becoming very evident that you are the one making “off the rails” claims, without any supporting arguments. If you really believe this, then please provide for me one account of ontological possibility which describes it as a physical substance.
Some things are unknown, there is no shame in admitting this.
This is nothing but bias. We have a very good framework for understanding how final cause works, the one I described as free will and intention. It’s just a completely different type of knowledge therefore a different type of framework. Now, your bias has driven you to go further than simply rejecting it as “off the rails”, but you will not even accept that it is a framework for understanding how anything happens. Do you live in a crevice, and do you totally reject morals and ethics and laws as completely irrelevant to “how anything happens”?
That’s not true. It shows that regularities emerge, not “why” they emerge. nor “how” they emerge, unless you are using “how” in a way which only implies a representative model, void of explanation. Such models are descriptive work, not “explanatory work”. It’s just like my example, we can describe how the sun rises at different places on the horizon, for 365 days in a year, to form a regularity, but this provides no explanation of the solar system.
Oh, look how the tables have turned. You were the one claiming that all ought to be reducible to one mode of description, and I claimed that this is impossible.
The difference, is that I did not claim that the two are irreconcilable. My argument is that the two can be reconciled with a proper representation of time which denies continuity through the present, making the past substantially different from the future. You are now claiming that contradictory models of time are required for the different modes of existence at the different levels of intelligible structures. This renders your different modes of description as incompatible and irreconcilable. It appears like you have run yourself into an interaction problem.
— I’ve spent plenty of time with the metaphysical tradition, and I’m quite sympathetic to the reality of immaterial causation in some sense — but you haven’t yet earned the specific conclusions you’re drawing. Telling me to go study more isn’t a substitute for actually making an argument. If the argument exists and has “stood the test of time,” then it should be easy to sketch it out rather than gesturing vaguely at your own prowess and asking me to take it on faith. Looking at the arguments that you have provided so far doesn’t inspire a ton of confidence.