Listen now | Does reality entail mind-independence, or what Thomas Nagel called ‘the view from nowhere’? If so, what does it mean to have mind-independent knowledge? To what mindless being, then, would this knowledge belong?
First, I also think there is no view from nowhere. There is no viewer there, so how could there be? Yet, this is the goal we try to get to, even if it is unattainable.
--> According to such a view, then, the cup turns into math when no one’s looking at it. ... This is a pretty weird view if you ask me.
Um, yeah. Because it doesn't chime with my physicalist, scientific understanding of the world at all.
--> But how do you account for the success of science if it doesn’t accurately reflect a mind-independent reality? you might object. My answer: How could an unknown and unknowable reality account for the success of science? It can’t. The success of science makes a lot more sense if reality is not mind-independent.
I don't follow this argument at all. It's not that mind-independent reality cannot be known, full stop. It's that we can never be certain that we have all of it in our grasp. Or that there's not something beyond the view that our senses can give us. So we have to keep checking with each other to build up *intersubjective consensus* on the mind-independent reality that we all seem to agree we are sensing together. What I don't get about your view is how a scientific theory would ever be wrong? How could a mind-dependent reality NOT conform to the hypothesis that a mind makes? The thing that does NOT conform to hypotheses is the mind-independent reality. That makes infinitely more sense to me.
"Because it doesn't chime with my physicalist, scientific understanding of the world at all."
I think this is very common, but I also think this is because we're not all on the same page about what counts as physical. This will require more of an explanation, which I will hopefully get around to doing soon.
"It's not that mind-independent reality cannot be known, full stop. It's that we can never be certain that we have all of it in our grasp. Or that there's not something beyond the view that our senses can give us."
I don't think you're getting what mind-independence is, but that's understandable since people aren't always clear about it. Mind-independence is practically defined as a "not knowable reality". When people talk about mind-independence in an ordinary context, a science article, for instance, they usually just mean 'objective', they're not talking about 'things in themselves' in the Kantian sense (though they may think they are—this is a big source of confusion). Nagel and Chalmers do mean 'mind-independence' in the Kantian way, though.
"How could a mind-dependent reality NOT conform to the hypothesis that a mind makes?"
You hint at the answer yourself in your description of how we come to know mind independent reality. Theories get confirmed through intersubjective consensus. Physical objects are simply given to us—I know I didn't conjure them in my imagination.
"The thing that does NOT conform to hypotheses is the mind-independent reality."
But neither would objective reality. What I'm saying is that nothing changes if we don't accept reality as mind-independent. Nothing changes except our understanding of what it is that we're describing, what it is we're doing.
I've read a lot of Kant and about the phenomena-noumena distinction and I would never have predicted what you mean by your words. And your descriptions of science just don't seem to fit what scientists and philosophers of science say either. So, I'm just going to drop that as a bit of feedback for you since I'm obviously not understanding you. I'll just sit back and watch for a while.
I really enjoyed this one Tina, your style of writing is quite down to earth.
One must keep in mind when discussing subjects like this that the physicalist and/or materialist paradigm as it is currently framed was never intended to reveal the true nature of reality. This is due to the fact that the business of the physical sciences is grounded in and limited to instrumentalism. It is only with the more recent inventions of complex tools such as mathematics and algorithms that the physical sciences have overstepped their mandate as an institution and now assert “realism”.
Lest we forget what we learned in Anthropology 101; Homo Sapiens first and foremost are tool makers; and we are damn good at what we do. A flint Clovis tip is a tool, as is a wheel and a screwdriver. Included in this list of tools are language, mathematics and algorithms. As mature adults, we have to ask ourselves: What do the tools that we invent tell us about the true nature of reality? If we are intellectually honest the short answer is nothing and the long answer is “absolutely” nothing.
I'm not an idealist, a dualist nor a panpsychist, I consider myself to be a pragmatic physicalist. I do not envision our world to be either determinate or random; it is simply "indeterminate" and magical if you will beyond our wildest imaginations. I sincerely believe that if the physicalist paradigm as it currently stands is deconstructed and replaced with a revolutionary foundation of what it means for something to be "physical", a clearer understanding will unveil itself.
It sounds like we're on the same wavelength, and I totally agree we need to get a grip on what we mean by 'physical'. You seem to have anticipated where I hope to go with this!
I think that "wavelength" is the audacity to challenge the conventional wisdom of our time. Lest we forget, as an ontology idealism is also part of that conventional wisdom which needs to challenged as well; but that can be addressed at another time.
After reading the comments from Wyrd and Ed, I understand why they struggle with what and where you are going with this. Not to single them out, but most people would struggle because as a culture, we a held captive by the conventional wisdom that shapes us.
I posted something similar on Suzi's substack yesterday, although I do not expect to get a response because it is too challenging. You should know that I've developed my own theories and come to my own conclusions; but this substack is about what you are doing and if I can collaborate with you on those goals and objective I will as I continue to monitor your progress.
I appreciate this post explaining your views. I've been looking forward to it. As you might expect, though, being a strict physicalist, I don't agree. Let me start by asking if you think the universe existed before any minds evolved to apprehend it, and whether it changed in any way after minds did evolve.
For this is exactly what science means about objective reality. Mind independence seems more a philosophical term than a scientific one. As you wrote, "I suspect what people mean by mind-independent reality is simply objective reality—reality that’s not influenced by our personal feelings or colored by our biases." Yes. Exactly so.
Under physicalism, cups don't turn into math when no one is looking. They remain cups, physically independent objects made from matter which gives them their physical properties (redness, heft, shape). We use math to *describe* objects, but only Max Tegmark thinks they're just math (and he admits his idea is bat poop bonkers).
> "How could an unknown and unknowable reality account for the success of science?"
Because it's not *completely* unknowable. The phenomena we experience come from a persistent physical reality. There is no other way to account for our growing understanding of it. If it depended on human minds, it would be riddled with inconsistencies and outright contradictions. You know, because humans.
> "I believe in the regularity of nature, which seems to do the job just fine."
Wait. Nature does exist independently of us? Now I'm confused. Does objective reality exist for you or not? Is your idealism essentially Kant's T.I. or are you putting minds *above* physical existence?
> "The naive realist makes a mistake not in supposing that objects must persist as they did before, but in supposing that this persistence occurs in a mind-less realm where no one can perceive anything."
I don't think anyone actually thinks that. Under physicalism, objects persist in *our* physical reality.
> "I think science springs up out of a desire to discover the laws that govern the natural world we live in, not the world as it is for no one."
Exactly so.
> "Maybe someday we’ll see its ultimate purpose is to make reality more intelligible, not less."
You want me to say there was no universe before we came along, but that's not what I'm saying. I'm saying this knowledge isn't constituted in a mind-independent reality. It can't be!
"Under physicalism, cups don't turn into math when no one is looking. They remain cups, physically independent objects made from matter which gives them their physical properties (redness, heft, shape)."
Maybe you're right about certain types of physicalism, but I'm talking about the sort of physicalism the majority of non-academic philosophers believe in. Under the scientific view there are objective aspects to things and subjective aspects. Unless there's someone to perceive the object, the subjective aspects can't be attributed to the "thing in itself". Matter isn't perceiveable. Redness, heft, shape are deemed subjective by the scientific view. You're reincorporating them into a mind-independent reality when there's no one there to experience them. But hey, I get it. When the cup is the room all by itself with no one looking at it, I think of it as being the same as when I was looking at it. This is what I meant when I said we are all naive realists, despite our sophisticated theories. It's very difficult to even talk coherently about mind-independence.
As for the regularity of nature, I didn't say it was mind-independent. Objective reality is not the same thing.
I think I responded to your other questions in my reply to Ed or in the post itself.
Well, I'm thoroughly confused. I don’t really understand what you mean by a “mind-independent reality” if not that reality isn’t objective. Tomorrow I'll reread your post and all the comments and see if any light dawns. In the meantime, let me ask:
What is a "non-academic philosopher"?
Could you point me towards someone who asserts cups become just math when not observed? I've pursued science all my life and have never heard anyone assert such a thing (except the aforementioned Max Tegmark, but he thinks cups and everything else are math all the time).
I would say subjective aspects of things are an interaction between the objective properties and our perception of them. If the objective properties don't exist, then the subjective ones cannot. Those objective properties, then, have the potential to induce subjective experience even when not perceived. They are part of the object.
If it is naive to think the cup persists, what is the correct view? What happens to the cup?
I am. You are. People who don't have a Ph.d. in philosophy. People who don't teach philosophy. And this is generally speaking of course.
I didn't mean to emphasize professional philosophers exactly. I meant only that there are numerous philosophies out there that call themselves 'physicalist' that you probably wouldn't agree with. For instance, they might not take a scientific realist position. Or they might be panpsychist.
"Could you point me towards someone who asserts cups become just math when not observed?" You're missing the point here. I'm not saying people assert that cups become math, but that they don't realize that this is what is implied.
"I would say subjective aspects of things are an interaction between the objective properties and our perception of them. If the objective properties don't exist, then the subjective ones cannot. Those objective properties, then, have the potential to induce subjective experience even when not perceived. They are part of the object."
Yes, I understand this is how objective/subjective (or primary/secondary) works. What I want to highlight is: "have the potential to".
I've reread the post and all the comments and find myself as confused as ever. Some of what you wrote even seems self-contradictory to me, so I'm obviously not understanding you at all. 😔
I'll start over in new comment and try to work through it. One thing here:
> "I think science springs up out of a desire to discover the laws that govern the natural world we live in, not the world as it is for no one."
Indeed. This notion of a view from nowhere seems central. I think, in a sense, a view from everywhere is what is implied by a view from nowhere. What science means by objectivity is exactly that: a view of reality that everyone (in possession of sufficient knowledge and evidence) would acknowledge as factual. Our convergent understanding of physical reality.
Demonstrated by the fact that your phone works. These unassuming devices represent a pinnacle of our understanding of the physical world.
Good to see you posting on your views with this. There's a lot here. Wyrd covered a lot of the territory that initially occurred to me.
I guess the question I have is, if objective reality is not independent of minds, then what do you think it is? Are we talking about Berkely's idea that it's all ideas in the mind of God (or a universal spirit)? If so, I wonder how you account for everything appearing to follow regularities that can be discovered and reduced to rules. If we're all in God's dream, he seems to dream in fundamental physics.
I do think you're too quick to dismiss the idea of a simulation. I'll grant that the idea of a perfect simulation is dubious. But a simulation doesn't need to be perfect for it to be undiscoverable. As entities inside it, we may be coming across flaws all the time, yet be utterly incapable of recognizing them as flaws. Or we may be a simulation running in a much more complex universe, although I'm more inclined to say then that we're in a constructed reality.
That said, I still think a reality is a simpler explanation than a simulated reality. I think we need additional justification to add the extra complexity. But I think the same thing for Berkeley's idea. Reality is a simpler explanation than reality being in God's mind. I can't say that either is false with any certainty, but I can say they're more complex than there just being an objective reality, unless we find something about that reality that requires adding the additional entities.
Finally, it seems like the options of an unknowable mind-independent reality and just the appearances of that reality, overlook options in between. I think there is an mind independent reality, and while there may well be aspects of it that are unknowable, we appear able to learn a lot about it, to ever increasingly close approximations. Of course, we never have perfect knowledge with absolute certainty. But if we define "knowing" as only having that level of certainty, the ancient skeptics were right and we can't know anything.
When it comes to Berkeley, I couldn't help but notice that when you drill down into the specifics, the God part of his philosophy feels somewhat superfluous. This is just my interpretation, of course. I suspect his system depends on God less than he says it does. I even wonder whether he was aware of that.
Funny story. After reading Nagel's book I thought, 'Why hasn't someone written The View from Everywhere? Surely someone must have done it." So I googled that title and found Helen Yetter-Chappell's website:
Apparently I'm not the only who thinks God isn't necessary for idealism! Unfortunately the book hasn't published yet. I would have used the title "The View from Everywhere" for this post, but I'm saving that title for a discussion of the book.
So to answer your question, no, the idealism I'm thinking of doesn't appeal to God—that's optional. The idealism I have in mind takes intersubjectivity to be what grounds objectivity. There may also be a transcendent aspect to it, but that would take too long to explain here.
As for how to account for the regularity of nature, I think this is the kind of question that we have an impulse to answer too quickly. It's perfectly natural to do so, of course, but in our rush to fill in some explanation beyond all possible experience we get ourselves very confused. This is what I want to resist. I call myself an idealist because people need to be able to peg each other down, but the truth is, I'm more interested in the epistemology, not in postulating theoretical entities beyond or behind experience. There are idealists who are less inclined to dodge the question who have perfectly coherent answers, but I am not one of them. At least not yet. :)
I agree a simulation doesn't have to be perfect to be undiscoverable. I was just objecting to the notion of a perfect simulated reality, which is in principle undiscoverable. And I was getting back at Chalmers for dissing Berkeley, who has been dissed for a very long time now from people who don't seem to know what he's about. But yeah, reality is simper explanation than a simulated reality!
"Finally, it seems like the options of an unknowable mind-independent reality and just the appearances of that reality, overlook options in between"
The language you're using here reflects an assumption that 'there must be something beyond the appearances which causes them'. 'Experience', it is assumed, must merely be an appearance, a representation of something beyond it. This is precisely the kind of thinking I'm calling into question. How do we know what we think we know? I think we make quick assumptions that don't make sense upon reflection. The 'options in between' aren't constituted in mind independence, but when you think about it, objectivity actually is constituted in all of us.
If God (or some overall ubermind) isn't anchoring objective reality, if it's all a joint project between the other minds, I guess my next question is, how far does this go? You don't seem like a solipsist, so there is a reality independent of your own mind.
And I'm sure you'd agree it's independent of both our minds and those of the people we know. Is any of it independent of all human minds? Do animals minds figure into it? How far back on the phylogenetic tree do we go? Or is that a relevant question under this view?
Which leads to the question, would you say there was a reality before minds evolved? Was there a big bang, evolution of galaxies, stars, planets, pre-mental biology, etc? If so, and if God (or some equivalent) is out of the picture, in what mind were the ideas being hosted in?
You could go old school panpsychist, or even animist, and say minds have been there from the beginning, but then I wonder if we're still in idealist territory.
"How do we know what we think we know?"
I think the answer ultimately comes down to how accurate our predictions are of future experiences. Every other answer I've ever seen anyone provide seems to rest on the foundation of that criteria. I would say that if we can't predict, we don't know in any useful meaning of the word "know".
Of course, we can always add complications to our predictive model that don't add any predictive accuracy. Occam's razor is our heuristic that we shouldn't do that, that every addition beyond that is an opportunity to be wrong, multiplying the probability of being wrong with each addition.
So the question becomes, if an earthquake happens, does it happen because it's an idea someone generated? Or was it due to tectonic plate movement? The tectonic plate movement seems more predictive. To the point above, we can always say the tectonic plate movement is an idea in our intersubjective experience, but what does that extra postulate add in terms of prediction? And how to we account for the surprise, with fatal consequences, populations often have for an event like that?
Or am I making assumptions here I'm not realizing, that if unmade, make these questions moot?
Mike, again, very good questions indeed! Totally relevant. You're way ahead of me, actually. I haven't decided what I think about how far it goes, but I can say definitely yes it would include animals, especially Geordie. I would be inclined to say "whatever is mind" and leave it open. Also, I'm not opposed to an ubermind, as you put it, but this would not be God in the usual sense. Or I should say it doesn't have to be God in the usual sense. To me the really hard question is, where does math live? That's where I'd be tempted to invoke Mind as a transcendental. But I don't know, I haven't come to any conclusions about all this. As I said, I'm more interested in what we experience.
"You could go old school panpsychist, or even animist, and say minds have been there from the beginning, but then I wonder if we're still in idealist territory."
Yeah, I don't care whether you call it idealism or something else. I'm more aesthetically inclined toward a mega mind than to mini minds, but there's no reason you can't have both. I just don't know.
As for knowledge, I don't want to define it, but I do think it's broader than prediction. Knowing what we know and discovering that we don't know what we thought we did is, to me, a kind of knowledge, even if it doesn't say what will happen next but casts what's already there in a new light.
I wouldn't be at all inclined to say an earthquake happens because it's an idea generated in minds. That would the wrong kind of answer. Nowadays we have a tendency to forget that we have given ourselves only one type of cause to work with, the 'efficient' cause, but that's kind of like expecting to fix everything with a hammer. One of the benefits of idealism is that it opens up a broader range of options for causal explanation, one that gives us more intuitively appropriate ways of explaining things, depending on the kind of question that's being asked. Not only can I legitimately say I did x because I wanted to, but this cuts both ways. I don't have to answer every sort of question by attributing it to mind. I still have the option of answering questions about the physical world in the usual way. The physical world is just the same as it was with naive realism in many ways, minus the unfounded assumptions.
"To the point above, we can always say the tectonic plate movement is an idea in our intersubjective experience, but what does that extra postulate add in terms of prediction? "
Well, I'm not proposing an extra postulate. I'm saying such knowledge IS in our intersubjective experience because...where else could it be? The extra postulate is the idea that there is some unknowable reality that may or may not be causing our experiences which we can never have any sort of access to. We're left with a reality composed entirely of representation, but with no 'representation of' for our representations to correspond to.
Anyway, the assumptions you're making are perfectly natural, Mike, and your questions are very much to the point.
Thanks Tina. The questions are really just the ones I hit when I try on the view. But this gives me some insight into where you are with it. I would say that the areas that remain undefined for you are the ones that most physicalists would need answers to if they're going to be tempted by the idealist view.
On knowledge, definitely if we find something is not the case (the prediction fails) we do learn something. It's a reduction in uncertainty. We now know one scenario which won't be the case. So although our next predictions may still be mostly inaccurate, it will be less inaccurate than it was before. So, in my mind, we're still talking about predictions.
On the representations existing without any referent, it seems like *something* has to cause that representation to come into being. And it's worth noting that a representation is itself a prediction, or more accurately, a cluster of interrelated predictions. A representation of a tree is a prediction about what will happen if I walk up to it and try to climb, kick, or eat it, predictions that would be very different from a representation of a mountain, or a bear. It seems like survival, or at least avoidance of pain, means getting these predictions right more often than not.
But I predict we won't convince each other today. :-) Still, interesting conversation!
In rereading your post, I found myself confused right off the bat in your first paragraph. In hopes of understanding what you mean by "mind-independence" (which seems to be other than simply objective reality), I hope you'll indulge me by clarifying it sentence by sentence...
> "SUPPOSE REALITY IS MIND-INDEPENDENT, meaning it exists independently of all minds whatsoever. This isn’t easy to imagine."
Right off the bat I'm at sea because a mind-independent reality (as I apparently incorrectly understand it) is exactly what science posits, and for me isn't at all hard to image. What's hard for me to imagine is that it's anything *other* than that. You continue...
> "Rather, it’s impossible to imagine because mind-independence is by definition utterly unknowable."
From not easy to impossible, and this seems to turn on a circular definition that mind-independence is asserted as unknowable therefore it's unknowable. What if it isn't? What isolates us so thoroughly from the reality that we're a part of? Later in the post you seem to suggest we can rely on our perceptions to give us information about reality, which made me ever more confused.
> "We can’t know the effects of such a reality, or if it has any effects, or if it’s even there."
Is the chair you're sitting in solid? Is the sunlight on your skin warm? You're making an assertion here, but I don't see what evidence or logic supports it, and it's one that directly conflicts with my daily experience.
> "If a mind-independent reality exists, it might as well not exist. Why should we care about it, then?"
Because we're a part of that reality and physical facts matter? But I think I in fact have no clue what you mean by mind-independent reality. Is this at root essentially Kant's notion of Transcendental Idealism?
Consider what the words 'mind independent' mean. We're talking about a reality where there is no one there to perceive it. Every attempt we make to discover it is thwarted by our attempt to discover it. We, who presumably have minds, cannot, by definition, be 'a part of that reality'. The refrigerator light metaphor has been making the rounds lately, so maybe that will help you understand what's going on here. Every time you open the door it appears that the light is already on. You'd have every right to conclude it's always on. But you can't know what it's like inside the refrigerator prior to opening the door and looking (supposedly...I mean, I used to smash my face right up to the crack to watch that magical moment when the light came on, but let's pretend it's impossible to do this). Or maybe a better metaphor would be the observer effect of quantum particles. In any case whenever we assert that we know something about mind independent reality, we're no longer talking about mind-independence.
As for Kant, both Nagel and Chalmers have Kantian noumena in mind. I think Nagel's despair reflects a better grasp of what's at stake, although he can get confused at times too.
What we call physical reality is not the same thing as mind-independence. And yes, I am distinguishing between objectivity and mind-independence. You can think more or less objectively. You cannot think more or less mind-independently; you can't think mind-independently at all.
In other words, the argument isn't even about whether mind-independence is unknowable. It is, by definition. To argue that it's knowable is like trying to argue for square circles. And yet, our minds leap ahead to an unknowable realm, a realm that's always necessarily outside our reach, and we weirdly imagine that we've reached it, somehow.
> "In other words, the argument isn't even about whether mind-independence is unknowable. It is, by definition."
Which seems to make it a self-contained circular definition of something that is imagined. If you are arguing such cannot meaningfully exist, I quite agree, but then my question is who posits this form of mind independence and what would it apply to?
Kant, Nagel, Chalmers, many many other scientists and philosophers. And yes, it is imagined. That's part of my point. What would it apply to? I don't think it applies to anything. I think it's an extrapolation from a natural naive realist's intuition about the world, a vague intuition about lawfulness and continuity that got conceptualized and blown way out of proportion, and I don't see it as necessary.
Here's an apparently defunct Substack post that I found on the same topic a while back that I just now remembered (I meant to link to it in my post). Maybe a computational neuroscientist's version will be easier for you to relate to:
He talks about something he's calling "observer invariance" which gets more into the nitty gritty of what I'm alluding to here in calling for a 'view from everywhere'. It could just as well be called "swapping places". He says:
"... “mind-independence” is a meaningless concept: there is no way, even in principle, that we can slice off the mind from reality and examine the two separately. No one would be ‘there’ to verify our story! Mind-independent reality is often described as the “view from nowhere.” Perhaps it could also be called a “non-view from everywhere”?
Without the concept of mind-independence, does scientific objectivity go out the window? Are we giving intellectual shelter to every flat-earther and conspiracy theorist?
Not really, because we have a concept that is far better than mind-independence: observer-invariance. Objective truths are invariant with respect to swapping out observers. The sun is not “real because it’s there even when no one is looking”, but rather it is “real because almost everyone can observe it and agree on at least some of its properties.” Instead of painting a picture of objectivity that demands the (impossible!) removal of minds from reality, invariance allows us to recognize that minds are the very foundation of objectivity.
I sometimes think that declarations of faith in “mind-independent reality” or “cold hard facts” are a way to avoid the hard work of understanding how the invariants of reality are discovered. It is convenient to imagine that facts are just floating out there independent of us — one can then savor the trappings of objectivity without any real awareness of the transformations that establish invariance."
I think the lightbulb finally went on. Let me test my understanding. You're saying Kant's noumena are an example of mind independence, so you're saying his idea of noumena is incoherent. Am I finally on the right wavelength? (As you know, I've said he was wrong about that myself.)
I like the idea of observer invariance. Let me ask whether observers can exist *potentially* or must *actually* exist. The unobserved coffee cup or the universe before any conscious observers existed.
You asked what "mind independence" means to me. I take it literally, but my sense of "independent" is aligned with "unaffected by my mind" rather than "unknowable by my mind". Separate and distinct versus inaccessible.
"Let me test my understanding. You're saying Kant's noumena are an example of mind independence, so you're saying his idea of noumena is incoherent."
You're close! It's not that noumena are an example of mind-independent reality, but that mind-independent reality is an example of Kantian noumena. God, for instance, is a noumenon. The immortality of the soul is too. These are all matters of faith, not knowledge, according to Kant.
"Let me ask whether observers can exist *potentially* or must *actually* exist. The unobserved coffee cup or the universe before any conscious observers existed."
I can't speak for the guy who came up with 'observer invariance', but I would prefer to say 'potentially' simply because I think this preserves how we really think. When I leave a mug in a room and no one is there to observe it, I imagine it stays exactly the same. I imagine it stays red, still has a certain feel, heft, heat, etc. It retains all its qualities, in other words. This naive view of reality is one I would like to preserve.
What you're taking as 'mind-independence' is what I would call 'objects', 'givens', 'objective reality,' or at times simply 'reality'. The world I didn't make or conjure up in other words. I get the impulse to call that mind-independent, I do. But as I see it, this is still the naive realist's assumption, even though it's axiomatic in the scientific community. After all, if you say mind-independent reality can at least be partially known through science, how can we be so sure our science is not yet another case of our minds affecting reality? You see, this is why Kant calls mind-independence a matter of faith.
Oops, I forgot to answer one of your questions. I'm not so much saying mind-independence is wrong or logically incoherent but that people don't understand it properly and assume they can have knowledge of 'mind-independent reality' when they can't. I agree with Kant that mind-independent reality is unknowable. 'Mind-independent reality' isn't known through science; it isn't known at all. But what I'm saying is, why do we bother worrying about it then? It serves no purpose for us. It might as well not exist. Kant, on the other hand, believed we needed it as a limiting concept. I'm not so sure that's true in the case of mind-independent reality. I don't mean to do away with all types of noumena, just this one and 'things in themselves', which is kind of the same.
p.s. In the case of the refrigerator, I was a techno geek even as a kid and noticed the switch obviously activated by the closed fridge door. Press the switch, the light goes off.
Reminds me a little of that meme, "When you don't know how things work, everything's a conspiracy."
Sometimes when you do know how things work, everything's a conspiracy. See for example the political analysis of world events at the World Socialist Web Site.
I've read the article and the comments a few times, and so far I don't feel I have a good grasp of the issues, but I won't let that stop me!
This post seems inspired in large part by Chalmers' _Reality+_, which, from the discussion here, reminds me so powerfully of Descartes' deceiving demon that I wonder if any progress has been made in the ensuing centuries, beyond the chance to amuse ourselves by talking about computer simulations. A demon is a demon, as far as I'm concerned, but I haven't read Chalmers' book.
Susan R. Bordo's _The Flight to Objectivity_ begins with Descartes' demon (actually his nightmares), and far from incidentally, she works into her analysis the dreadful moment when an infant realizes that when its mother disappears, she continues to exist! -- meaning that the mother is a separate being, and the infant is alone, also a separate being. This seems important to the present discussion, but I haven't got a coherent story yet. I'm working on a review of the book (don't hold your breath).
Then there's poor old Nagel, whose first line in _The View From Nowhere_ is “This book is about a single problem: how to combine the perspective of a particular person inside the world with an objective view of that same world, the person and his viewpoint included.” Whether by "objective" Nagel means "mind-independent," as you claim, I can't say for sure, but I don't think so. If the objective view contains the mind itself, then there must be a mind in there taking the view.
A good deal of this discussion turns on distinctions. "Objective" can mean before the mind in a "clear and distinct" way, as Descartes put it -- free of distortions, prejudices, feelings, yet still capable of apprehension by the mind, and indeed requiring a mind for its apprehension. Or it can mean requiring the conceptual removal of all minds, which are all inevitably tainted by the distortions, prejudices, and feelings that come inevitably with their situated perspectives. The latter comes close to a "mind-independent" view, but it stops short of supposing that there is anything to see in the absence of minds; it's more of a hypothetical viewpoint for a hypothetical mind with impossible abilities (such as the ability to see a three-dimensional solid from all possible perspectives simultaneously).
The last useless thing I want to add concerns the shivers that everyone seems to get when the word God comes up. I get that we don't want any "hairy thunderer or cosmic muffin" in here, but the idea of entities that are to us as we are to, say, mushrooms, does not strike me as inherently incoherent. If such an entity must be posited to sustain a certain metaphysical system, there's no need to scramble for the exits.
"This post seems inspired in large part by Chalmers' _Reality+_, which, from the discussion here, reminds me so powerfully of Descartes' deceiving demon that I wonder if any progress has been made in the ensuing centuries, beyond the chance to amuse ourselves by talking about computer simulations."
Haha...yeah, I doubt it. What is it that people find so fascinating about living in a simulation? Maybe it takes someone more well acquainted with computers and technology. Maybe I'm picturing Super Mario Bros. or Legends of Zelda and going, "Nope. That's not where I'm at."
"Whether by "objective" Nagel means "mind-independent," as you claim, I can't say for sure, but I don't think so. If the objective view contains the mind itself, then there must be a mind in there taking the view."
I did? Hm. Well, if so then I meant only that he doesn't seem entirely consistent, though I could be wrong about that. It has been a while. My impression was that he sometimes he talks about objectivity in the more absolute sense, but other times he means it in the more limited way I describe. He definitely recognizes there's a difference between the two, however. Here he explicitly says he rejects idealism and "affirms the reality of aspects of the world that cannot be grasped by any conception I can possess—not even an objective conception of the kind with which we transcend the domain of initial appearances."
The next line is interesting—
"But here it can be seen that physicalism is based ultimately on a form of idealism: an idealism of restricted objectivity. Objectivity of whatever kind is not the test of reality. It is just one way of understanding reality."
He's definitely choosing to believe in mind-independence, not just objectivity. So yeah, we're in clear opposition here, but I mean, hell. I really like the guy.
Yes, a good deal of the discussion depends on distinctions. I don't suppose it's completely one way or another, as objectivity can mean different things in different contexts. Thinking about it in terms of journalism, for instance, can be quite different than other areas.
"I get that we don't want any "hairy thunderer or cosmic muffin" in here, but the idea of entities that are to us as we are to, say, mushrooms, does not strike me as inherently incoherent. If such an entity must be posited to sustain a certain metaphysical system, there's no need to scramble for the exits."
Oh you crack me up. I'll take a hairy cosmic muffin and a quarter pounder minus ecoli onions, thank you very much. He. I'm keenly aware of how people react to traditional idealism (see Chalmers emphasizing Berkeley's reliance on god above) and it's a hard enough sell without bringing religious stuff or anything woo woo into the mix. Most people don't even like to admit the existence of Platonic ideas even though they rely on them for just about everything, like talking, thinking in general terms, etc. They're more likely to believe there are actually a near-infinite number of parallel worlds out there in which I am currently picking my nose instead of responding to a blog post, and so on in all combinations.
Further to the status of the cup in the other room, I can now fill in something of Bordo's potential contribution. Citing Piaget, she writes that "to be able to mentally represent an object in its absence is to conceive of the object as constituted not by this or that transitory perception of it by the subject, but as sustained by a projected multiplicity of perspectives -- as having a 'being-for-others'."
She goes on to say that "Kant's contribution -- the notion of the human mind as actively structuring rather than passively reflecting nature -- is regarded by Piaget as decisive to this development in the history of ideas... For Piaget, as for Kant, the subject/object distinction is the epistemic norm... One may fault Piaget here... His 'developmental theory of ideas' describes the scientific and philosophic development, not of the human species, but of that particular intellectual arc that begins with the pre-Socratics and ends with the European 'Enlightenment'.... The subject/object distinction itself may derive its survival value, and thus function as an 'epistemic norm,' only within a certain environmental context."
That's a bit of a "core dump" from me -- sorry about that. I wondered if it casts any light on philosophical idealism. For my part, elsewhere I've resisted idealism as potentially solipsistic, and the mention here of "being-for-others" is a saving grace that needs to be added. (Panpsychism deals with it handily and without further metaphysical complication about what counts as "others," but I get that it could be construed as overkill.)
I understand ‘mind independent reality’ as ‘mind independent once created’. The creation is done by human minds and if there were no minds in the first place there wouldn’t be any mind independent reality.
The ‘view from nowhere’ must have come from somewhere. We are a product of evolution and the objective way of knowing first appeared in the history of life probably a couple of hundred thousand years ago. It grew exponentially in the past 300 years and a picture of reality was slowly built up through objective knowledge accumulated over centuries.
But then what about the history of earth going back 4.5 billion years? Doesn’t evolution of life begin more than 3 billion years ago?
Reality did not begin with human beings or the ‘objective reality’ they are cooking up. What existed before the emergence of objective knowledge can be metaphorically described as unknowable ‘nature-in-itself’.
Objective knowledge of distant past, say 100 million years ago, is only the knower’s interpretation of reality as it was 100 million years ago. There were no observers to record it and today’s observers cannot travel back in time (travelling back 100m years would imply retrasing the course of evolution, and the observer would disintegrate into a trillion molecules).
As mentioned in Mike’s comment, it is important to consider what it means to know something. I will agree it is broader than the predictable objective knowledge, but it is hard to pinpoint what else can be considered as valid knowledge, and why. Therefore, it is good to start with objective/predictable knowledge, and see where it leads.
I believe a truly evolutionary world view, accepting mind itself as a product of evolution, would lead to viewing reality as neither matter nor mind but unknowable. Knower interprets it as matter and mind. The good part is such objective knowledge is reliable and it appears to be the most convenient and practical approach in the present stage of evolution.
That's a succinct way of putting it, that the whole notion of mind-independent reality depends on minds. And yes, the evolutionary view would have to say our minds evolve too or else explain how we are somehow not part of the natural world, but since it is our minds that come up with the theory of evolution, that leads to an interesting catch 22. What can we possibly know about the world as it is in itself from here?
I confess that in my dimness I can't really get anywhere with all this, much as I may admire the intellectual gymnastics entailed. It seems such discussions are largely based on concepts of 'reality' and 'non-reality', and that these notions are accepted as given instantiations and/or obtain with inherent applicability, as if they had some indisputable meaning and/or (dare I say?) existence. If they *do*, then I'd like to know what their meaning and existence are without resort to great elaborations (which to me indicate only uncertainty, so why perist with the two opposing concepts? — I'm not levelling that at you, Tina). More, and along similar lines, there is the presupposition of the two opposing and discrete conceptual instantiations and/or applicabilities of 'mind' and 'matter'; both somehow instantiating and/or understood within something we call 'consciousness' and yet which humankind cannot form a consenus on as to what the latter actually is or if indeed it exists at all. I'm dimly intuiting that you (Tina) and I are on similar ground — do please correct me if not — in that we both sense or incline to apprehending (or suspect it may be *possible* to apprehend) the world stripped of these presuppositions of reality/non-reality and also mind/matter. If we were able to actualise that, would there be any 'there' there in 'somewhere'? No, because we'd have abandoned the former assumed link between 'space'/'thereness' and 'reality', there would just be a borderless stream of phenomena; so we can perhaps bin those two opposing ideas of 'somewhere' and 'nowhere' also. [Sorry if this all very low-level, naive and uneducated stuff.]
I wouldn't say your dimness is the reason you couldn't get anywhere with this, Hariod, as it appears you are not alone.
Since you and I have discussed Kant before, I'll just use his lingo here. When I talk about "mind independent reality", I'm talking about none other than Kant's noumena. For some reason people are getting tripped up over this phrase, "mind-independent reality", and here I was thinking this phrase would be less perplexing than introducing the technical term 'noumena' but maybe I was wrong.
"I'm dimly intuiting that you (Tina) and I are on similar ground — do please correct me if not — in that we both sense or incline to apprehending (or suspect it may be *possible* to apprehend) the world stripped of these presuppositions of reality/non-reality and also mind/matter."
I would agree with that characterization, if I'm following you properly, regarding the mind/matter conundrum, though I think the reality/non-reality distinction may be important to make sense of experience—I think it's there in the naive realist's perspective in a crude, hazy, non-philosophical, non-absolute way, and I'd probably want to preserve that because I'm a commonsensical kind of gal. The mind/matter conundrum in particular seems to come about from a certain of confusion of perspectives, though it's hard to articulate the problem. I suspect we have a tendency to take up a god's eye view while at the same time taking up a limited perspective, which I think is not done intentionally or legitimately. We see our own minds from our own perspective, but also from some strange, mind-less god-like perspective as merely a thing in the world.
"If we were able to actualise that, would there be any 'there' there in 'somewhere'? No, because we'd have abandoned the former assumed link between 'space'/'thereness' and 'reality', there would just be a borderless stream of phenomena; so we can perhaps bin those two opposing ideas of 'somewhere' and 'nowhere' also."
I'm not sure I'm following here. I think we could still have some notion of space and 'there-ness' and 'somewhere' if we retained something very close to the naive realist's perspective without the notion 'mind-independent reality'. To make this concrete, if I place a red coffee mug on the table before me and leave the room, I think the mug continues to be red and to feel the way it did in my hands, just as it did when it was in my hands. Nothing about the mug's qualities changes by my leaving the room. What happens when no one is looking at the mug is that the mug stays the same, AS IF I or someone else were looking at it, even though no one is looking at it. So space is, in the somewhat naive realist's view, essentially the not-worth-thinking-about nothing-ness between objects—certainly not curved spacetime, whatever that is. Maybe I'll elaborate on this in another post!
Thanks Tina, and it would be good to read your further thoughts regarding in what sense you/one may regard 'space'/'thereness' as something other than a form of relational ideation — i.e. a mind apprehends the cup, then infers, imputes, attributes locational qualities, etc. Okay, so then we can go on to say (actually, *assume*) that the observing mind itself somehow occupies space and so also has a thereness quality to it. Is the *derived* thereness quality of the cup, which is an aspect of our assumed 'reality': a) purely in one's head? b) is it apart from the cup? c) is it within the cup? d) is it everywhere including and between the mind and the cup? e) is it solely ideation insofar as it is experienced as 'reality'? We know that the brain generates the thought: 'The coffee cup is over there'; and it's useful to apply a metric (however vague) to the supposed distance between it and our brain. So when we know whether the cup's whereness quality obtains as either of a/b/c/d or e, then we can look at how real it and it's assumed redness/hardness is. [I've got a horrible feeling this is all too elementary for this place, so please forgive me if it is.]
Since the threads here have quieted down, I wanted to ask if this talk of space and thereness has anything to do with Whitehead's views on "simple location," which he regards as a major misconception of the modern era. I'm not sure I understand what he's saying about it, despite having read several of his books. The related matter of "locatedness" has come up in Susan R. Bordo's <i>The Flight to Objectivity</i>, and she quotes Whitehead on simple location. Locatedness has to do with a conception of the self that arises at the time of Descartes, and is foreign to the ancient Greek and medieval experience of the world. Bordo cites Morris Berman, C. S. Lewis, and Owen Barfield concerning the transition.
My next blog posts on Bordo's book are coming along, but I could use some input on this aspect of the Cartesian revolution.
Jim, thank you for bothering to read my blurry ramblings on this. I'm afraid I know nothing of the references you cite — I am not an academic — although they sound most interesting and I'll read your post should you touch on the matter of locatedness. Fwiw, I think we're in danger in this whole discsussion of conflating two levels of understanding: 1) What Tina refers to as our 'commonsensical' views of the world and which are vital for us to hold in order to successfully navigate life; and 2) How things actually are beyond the general scope of our capacity to comprehend or envisage them — though we may at times intuit deeper understandings than logical thought processes may access. I used Perplexity's Pro Search to learn a little in advance of your potential article: https://www.perplexity.ai/search/what-are-whitehead-s-views-on-epyP_IcfSi6e9EyuJMnnRQ#locale=en-US
I think what Whitehead has in mind is that spatial location corresponds to 1) and, uh, something else corresponds to 2). The latter surely has to do with developments in relativity and quantum physics that were just breaking as he wrote (as a mathematician, he would have had more insight into them than most at the time.)
I'm planning at least three posts on Bordo's book. Two are pretty much ready, the third I'm trying to figure out, and who knows, I might have to go to a fourth. They'll go up on my WordPress site at intervals once I'm comfortable with their overall shape. I don't have anything on Substack except the comments I've posted on Philosophy and Fiction -- although strangely, I have a few followers. I should probably post at least a redirect message, but I haven't the first idea how.
I wouldn't worry about redirecting 'followers'. Followers don't matter unless you start posting on Substack Notes, and even then, there's no guarantee anyone will see what you post. It's a Twitter-like aspect of Substack. "Subscribers" won't matter either until you start putting up posts, but you may get a few subscribers as well, even if you haven't written anything. No need to do anything about it!
I'm not sure I'm following here, Hariod, but I do tend to think about space in Kantian terms, but without the Kantian ontology. In other words, I don't see space as a 'thing' 'out there'. I'll talk more about this in future posts, though!
N'er mind, dear Tina; I realise I'm treading on territory that's perhaps more suited to metaphysical discussion. That said, and having looked briefly at Whitehead's rejection of 'Simple Location', then I find myself sympathetic to it. From perplexity TLF to Perplexity AI:
'Whitehead coined the term "fallacy of simple location" in his 1925 book "Science and the Modern World". He defined simple location as the notion that material can be said to be "here" in space and "here" in time, or "here" in space-time, without requiring any reference to other regions of space-time. In other words, simple location suggests that things exist independently and discretely in specific points of space and time. Whitehead strongly rejected this concept, considering it a fundamental flaw in the 17th-century conception of nature. He argued that the idea of simple location is inconsistent with modern scientific understanding and leads to numerous philosophical problems.'
Sorry I’m late to the party on this article, this was a great read Tina. I love seeing more discussion of the details of idealism, it’s criminally neglected in discussions of consciousness.
It’s an interesting question of where the line can be drawn between the existence of the world and how it’s manifested to consciousness. What would be the ontological status of a substance that “can’t” be known?
And this point isn’t to say that the universe must “actually” be known to some mind, but that it must at least be “potentially” knowable, it’s properties must be such. It must consist of some kind of rational syntax at minimum, a realm of purely quantitative relations.
But what are those quantitative relations other than rational intelligibility? If there are no phenomena that can be reduced to measurable quantities, can we even say this unknown universe exists as quantum potentialities?
And if this potential for measurement must be there for us to say something exists in any meaningful sense, then for us to say something exists we also must say it has the potential to be known to consciousness.
And so, mind can’t be derivative of the physical order, since ifff we grant that we end up with
a contradiction, because we’re forced to admit mental properties are already present in that physical order. Mental properties are necessary for even the possibility of something to exist.
"And this point isn’t to say that the universe must “actually” be known to some mind, but that it must at least be “potentially” knowable,"
Yes! Mind-independence is an impossible standard to place on reality. It puts reality entirely beyond our reach. We've never needed such a notion of reality, and we don't in fact believe it. I'm having a hard time getting people to see that this is what mind-independence means, and that every claim to know mind-independent reality at all is an overreach. Thanks for commenting, Prudence. And yes, idealism is very poorly understood in public discussions. I think part of the problem is there are so many different idealisms. The possibilities are incredibly vast!
I think people are so conditioned to think in naturalist terms they have trouble understanding idealism. Naturalist thinking claims to be a monism, but it actually requires a Cartesian style dualism, because the idea of a self-sufficient, or mind-independent natural order is incoherent.
It’s not just the claim to “know” the mind-independent reality that’s a problem. It’s also the fact that this unknown reality can’t have any kind of measurable relations, even space and time. To describe the universe in basic terms of temporal causal sequences of measurable phenomena is impossible under naturalism. Because those are all concepts, rational relations. And concepts are properties of the mind, some emergent ghost according to naturalism. Even to say it consists of space time means you’ve introduced properties that belong to the mind into the universe itself.
Exactly. You're making great points here. A mind-independent reality can't be measured and it can't be assumed to have a causal relationship to anything we experience, so it can't be the basis for our scientific theories. Both measurement and causality are our concepts.
And yes, space and time are our concepts too, not concepts we can attribute to some mind-less realm. I'll go into this more in the next post and hopefully manage to talk more explicitly about Kant without too many heads exploding. I get the feeling talking about Space and Time as a priori forms of our "intuition" as opposed to "spacetime" will be a tough nut to crack, though. As you say, we are conditioned to think in naturalist terms.
Looking forward to your next post Tina. I know you are not into Eastern philosophy as such, but Kant is the one who brought the Buddhist Monk Nagarjuna's "Two Contexts of Reality" to the West. Kant canonized the term noumena to represent the Ultimate Reality and phenomena to represent our Conventional Reality.
I'm frustrated about the cup. I'm trying to understand the assertion that, under scientific realism, it turns into math when no one is looking. It's part of the argument against physicalism, but I see no basis for it. Why the assertion?
I don't see a mystery in knowing what's outside our minds. Perhaps there is a leap of faith in accepting that the phenomenon we experience come from external sources, but taking it leads us to a coherent picture of that converges on that putative reality supporting its existence. Denying it seems to require denying my experience of a persistent logical material world.
It suddenly occurred to me you might be talking epistemologically rather than ontologically, and a search for "epistem" turned up something you said to Mike: "I call myself an idealist because people need to be able to peg each other down, but the truth is, I'm more interested in the epistemology, not in postulating theoretical entities beyond or behind experience."
Oh. And perhaps oops. Is your view similar to Kant's T.I.? I take it as an epistemological statement, because I see Kant's things-in-themselves as physical realism (but disagree we can learn *nothing* about them). If you're saying that we can never have that cogito ergo sum certainty about reality, I agree, full stop. There is definitely a leap of faith, but it seems a reasonable and necessary one to escape solipsism.
First, I also think there is no view from nowhere. There is no viewer there, so how could there be? Yet, this is the goal we try to get to, even if it is unattainable.
--> According to such a view, then, the cup turns into math when no one’s looking at it. ... This is a pretty weird view if you ask me.
Um, yeah. Because it doesn't chime with my physicalist, scientific understanding of the world at all.
--> But how do you account for the success of science if it doesn’t accurately reflect a mind-independent reality? you might object. My answer: How could an unknown and unknowable reality account for the success of science? It can’t. The success of science makes a lot more sense if reality is not mind-independent.
I don't follow this argument at all. It's not that mind-independent reality cannot be known, full stop. It's that we can never be certain that we have all of it in our grasp. Or that there's not something beyond the view that our senses can give us. So we have to keep checking with each other to build up *intersubjective consensus* on the mind-independent reality that we all seem to agree we are sensing together. What I don't get about your view is how a scientific theory would ever be wrong? How could a mind-dependent reality NOT conform to the hypothesis that a mind makes? The thing that does NOT conform to hypotheses is the mind-independent reality. That makes infinitely more sense to me.
"Because it doesn't chime with my physicalist, scientific understanding of the world at all."
I think this is very common, but I also think this is because we're not all on the same page about what counts as physical. This will require more of an explanation, which I will hopefully get around to doing soon.
"It's not that mind-independent reality cannot be known, full stop. It's that we can never be certain that we have all of it in our grasp. Or that there's not something beyond the view that our senses can give us."
I don't think you're getting what mind-independence is, but that's understandable since people aren't always clear about it. Mind-independence is practically defined as a "not knowable reality". When people talk about mind-independence in an ordinary context, a science article, for instance, they usually just mean 'objective', they're not talking about 'things in themselves' in the Kantian sense (though they may think they are—this is a big source of confusion). Nagel and Chalmers do mean 'mind-independence' in the Kantian way, though.
"How could a mind-dependent reality NOT conform to the hypothesis that a mind makes?"
You hint at the answer yourself in your description of how we come to know mind independent reality. Theories get confirmed through intersubjective consensus. Physical objects are simply given to us—I know I didn't conjure them in my imagination.
"The thing that does NOT conform to hypotheses is the mind-independent reality."
But neither would objective reality. What I'm saying is that nothing changes if we don't accept reality as mind-independent. Nothing changes except our understanding of what it is that we're describing, what it is we're doing.
Oh.
I've read a lot of Kant and about the phenomena-noumena distinction and I would never have predicted what you mean by your words. And your descriptions of science just don't seem to fit what scientists and philosophers of science say either. So, I'm just going to drop that as a bit of feedback for you since I'm obviously not understanding you. I'll just sit back and watch for a while.
I find myself in the same boat.
I really enjoyed this one Tina, your style of writing is quite down to earth.
One must keep in mind when discussing subjects like this that the physicalist and/or materialist paradigm as it is currently framed was never intended to reveal the true nature of reality. This is due to the fact that the business of the physical sciences is grounded in and limited to instrumentalism. It is only with the more recent inventions of complex tools such as mathematics and algorithms that the physical sciences have overstepped their mandate as an institution and now assert “realism”.
Lest we forget what we learned in Anthropology 101; Homo Sapiens first and foremost are tool makers; and we are damn good at what we do. A flint Clovis tip is a tool, as is a wheel and a screwdriver. Included in this list of tools are language, mathematics and algorithms. As mature adults, we have to ask ourselves: What do the tools that we invent tell us about the true nature of reality? If we are intellectually honest the short answer is nothing and the long answer is “absolutely” nothing.
I'm not an idealist, a dualist nor a panpsychist, I consider myself to be a pragmatic physicalist. I do not envision our world to be either determinate or random; it is simply "indeterminate" and magical if you will beyond our wildest imaginations. I sincerely believe that if the physicalist paradigm as it currently stands is deconstructed and replaced with a revolutionary foundation of what it means for something to be "physical", a clearer understanding will unveil itself.
Thanks! I appreciate that.
It sounds like we're on the same wavelength, and I totally agree we need to get a grip on what we mean by 'physical'. You seem to have anticipated where I hope to go with this!
I think that "wavelength" is the audacity to challenge the conventional wisdom of our time. Lest we forget, as an ontology idealism is also part of that conventional wisdom which needs to challenged as well; but that can be addressed at another time.
After reading the comments from Wyrd and Ed, I understand why they struggle with what and where you are going with this. Not to single them out, but most people would struggle because as a culture, we a held captive by the conventional wisdom that shapes us.
I posted something similar on Suzi's substack yesterday, although I do not expect to get a response because it is too challenging. You should know that I've developed my own theories and come to my own conclusions; but this substack is about what you are doing and if I can collaborate with you on those goals and objective I will as I continue to monitor your progress.
Great job Tina.........
I appreciate this post explaining your views. I've been looking forward to it. As you might expect, though, being a strict physicalist, I don't agree. Let me start by asking if you think the universe existed before any minds evolved to apprehend it, and whether it changed in any way after minds did evolve.
For this is exactly what science means about objective reality. Mind independence seems more a philosophical term than a scientific one. As you wrote, "I suspect what people mean by mind-independent reality is simply objective reality—reality that’s not influenced by our personal feelings or colored by our biases." Yes. Exactly so.
Under physicalism, cups don't turn into math when no one is looking. They remain cups, physically independent objects made from matter which gives them their physical properties (redness, heft, shape). We use math to *describe* objects, but only Max Tegmark thinks they're just math (and he admits his idea is bat poop bonkers).
> "How could an unknown and unknowable reality account for the success of science?"
Because it's not *completely* unknowable. The phenomena we experience come from a persistent physical reality. There is no other way to account for our growing understanding of it. If it depended on human minds, it would be riddled with inconsistencies and outright contradictions. You know, because humans.
> "I believe in the regularity of nature, which seems to do the job just fine."
Wait. Nature does exist independently of us? Now I'm confused. Does objective reality exist for you or not? Is your idealism essentially Kant's T.I. or are you putting minds *above* physical existence?
> "The naive realist makes a mistake not in supposing that objects must persist as they did before, but in supposing that this persistence occurs in a mind-less realm where no one can perceive anything."
I don't think anyone actually thinks that. Under physicalism, objects persist in *our* physical reality.
> "I think science springs up out of a desire to discover the laws that govern the natural world we live in, not the world as it is for no one."
Exactly so.
> "Maybe someday we’ll see its ultimate purpose is to make reality more intelligible, not less."
That is the exact mission of science.
You want me to say there was no universe before we came along, but that's not what I'm saying. I'm saying this knowledge isn't constituted in a mind-independent reality. It can't be!
"Under physicalism, cups don't turn into math when no one is looking. They remain cups, physically independent objects made from matter which gives them their physical properties (redness, heft, shape)."
Maybe you're right about certain types of physicalism, but I'm talking about the sort of physicalism the majority of non-academic philosophers believe in. Under the scientific view there are objective aspects to things and subjective aspects. Unless there's someone to perceive the object, the subjective aspects can't be attributed to the "thing in itself". Matter isn't perceiveable. Redness, heft, shape are deemed subjective by the scientific view. You're reincorporating them into a mind-independent reality when there's no one there to experience them. But hey, I get it. When the cup is the room all by itself with no one looking at it, I think of it as being the same as when I was looking at it. This is what I meant when I said we are all naive realists, despite our sophisticated theories. It's very difficult to even talk coherently about mind-independence.
As for the regularity of nature, I didn't say it was mind-independent. Objective reality is not the same thing.
I think I responded to your other questions in my reply to Ed or in the post itself.
Well, I'm thoroughly confused. I don’t really understand what you mean by a “mind-independent reality” if not that reality isn’t objective. Tomorrow I'll reread your post and all the comments and see if any light dawns. In the meantime, let me ask:
What is a "non-academic philosopher"?
Could you point me towards someone who asserts cups become just math when not observed? I've pursued science all my life and have never heard anyone assert such a thing (except the aforementioned Max Tegmark, but he thinks cups and everything else are math all the time).
I would say subjective aspects of things are an interaction between the objective properties and our perception of them. If the objective properties don't exist, then the subjective ones cannot. Those objective properties, then, have the potential to induce subjective experience even when not perceived. They are part of the object.
If it is naive to think the cup persists, what is the correct view? What happens to the cup?
"What is a "non-academic philosopher"?"
I am. You are. People who don't have a Ph.d. in philosophy. People who don't teach philosophy. And this is generally speaking of course.
I didn't mean to emphasize professional philosophers exactly. I meant only that there are numerous philosophies out there that call themselves 'physicalist' that you probably wouldn't agree with. For instance, they might not take a scientific realist position. Or they might be panpsychist.
"Could you point me towards someone who asserts cups become just math when not observed?" You're missing the point here. I'm not saying people assert that cups become math, but that they don't realize that this is what is implied.
"I would say subjective aspects of things are an interaction between the objective properties and our perception of them. If the objective properties don't exist, then the subjective ones cannot. Those objective properties, then, have the potential to induce subjective experience even when not perceived. They are part of the object."
Yes, I understand this is how objective/subjective (or primary/secondary) works. What I want to highlight is: "have the potential to".
I've reread the post and all the comments and find myself as confused as ever. Some of what you wrote even seems self-contradictory to me, so I'm obviously not understanding you at all. 😔
I'll start over in new comment and try to work through it. One thing here:
> "I think science springs up out of a desire to discover the laws that govern the natural world we live in, not the world as it is for no one."
Indeed. This notion of a view from nowhere seems central. I think, in a sense, a view from everywhere is what is implied by a view from nowhere. What science means by objectivity is exactly that: a view of reality that everyone (in possession of sufficient knowledge and evidence) would acknowledge as factual. Our convergent understanding of physical reality.
Demonstrated by the fact that your phone works. These unassuming devices represent a pinnacle of our understanding of the physical world.
Good to see you posting on your views with this. There's a lot here. Wyrd covered a lot of the territory that initially occurred to me.
I guess the question I have is, if objective reality is not independent of minds, then what do you think it is? Are we talking about Berkely's idea that it's all ideas in the mind of God (or a universal spirit)? If so, I wonder how you account for everything appearing to follow regularities that can be discovered and reduced to rules. If we're all in God's dream, he seems to dream in fundamental physics.
I do think you're too quick to dismiss the idea of a simulation. I'll grant that the idea of a perfect simulation is dubious. But a simulation doesn't need to be perfect for it to be undiscoverable. As entities inside it, we may be coming across flaws all the time, yet be utterly incapable of recognizing them as flaws. Or we may be a simulation running in a much more complex universe, although I'm more inclined to say then that we're in a constructed reality.
That said, I still think a reality is a simpler explanation than a simulated reality. I think we need additional justification to add the extra complexity. But I think the same thing for Berkeley's idea. Reality is a simpler explanation than reality being in God's mind. I can't say that either is false with any certainty, but I can say they're more complex than there just being an objective reality, unless we find something about that reality that requires adding the additional entities.
Finally, it seems like the options of an unknowable mind-independent reality and just the appearances of that reality, overlook options in between. I think there is an mind independent reality, and while there may well be aspects of it that are unknowable, we appear able to learn a lot about it, to ever increasingly close approximations. Of course, we never have perfect knowledge with absolute certainty. But if we define "knowing" as only having that level of certainty, the ancient skeptics were right and we can't know anything.
Interesting post Tina!
Great questions, Mike!
When it comes to Berkeley, I couldn't help but notice that when you drill down into the specifics, the God part of his philosophy feels somewhat superfluous. This is just my interpretation, of course. I suspect his system depends on God less than he says it does. I even wonder whether he was aware of that.
Funny story. After reading Nagel's book I thought, 'Why hasn't someone written The View from Everywhere? Surely someone must have done it." So I googled that title and found Helen Yetter-Chappell's website:
https://yetterchappell.net/Helen/
Apparently I'm not the only who thinks God isn't necessary for idealism! Unfortunately the book hasn't published yet. I would have used the title "The View from Everywhere" for this post, but I'm saving that title for a discussion of the book.
So to answer your question, no, the idealism I'm thinking of doesn't appeal to God—that's optional. The idealism I have in mind takes intersubjectivity to be what grounds objectivity. There may also be a transcendent aspect to it, but that would take too long to explain here.
As for how to account for the regularity of nature, I think this is the kind of question that we have an impulse to answer too quickly. It's perfectly natural to do so, of course, but in our rush to fill in some explanation beyond all possible experience we get ourselves very confused. This is what I want to resist. I call myself an idealist because people need to be able to peg each other down, but the truth is, I'm more interested in the epistemology, not in postulating theoretical entities beyond or behind experience. There are idealists who are less inclined to dodge the question who have perfectly coherent answers, but I am not one of them. At least not yet. :)
I agree a simulation doesn't have to be perfect to be undiscoverable. I was just objecting to the notion of a perfect simulated reality, which is in principle undiscoverable. And I was getting back at Chalmers for dissing Berkeley, who has been dissed for a very long time now from people who don't seem to know what he's about. But yeah, reality is simper explanation than a simulated reality!
"Finally, it seems like the options of an unknowable mind-independent reality and just the appearances of that reality, overlook options in between"
The language you're using here reflects an assumption that 'there must be something beyond the appearances which causes them'. 'Experience', it is assumed, must merely be an appearance, a representation of something beyond it. This is precisely the kind of thinking I'm calling into question. How do we know what we think we know? I think we make quick assumptions that don't make sense upon reflection. The 'options in between' aren't constituted in mind independence, but when you think about it, objectivity actually is constituted in all of us.
Thanks Tina!
If God (or some overall ubermind) isn't anchoring objective reality, if it's all a joint project between the other minds, I guess my next question is, how far does this go? You don't seem like a solipsist, so there is a reality independent of your own mind.
And I'm sure you'd agree it's independent of both our minds and those of the people we know. Is any of it independent of all human minds? Do animals minds figure into it? How far back on the phylogenetic tree do we go? Or is that a relevant question under this view?
Which leads to the question, would you say there was a reality before minds evolved? Was there a big bang, evolution of galaxies, stars, planets, pre-mental biology, etc? If so, and if God (or some equivalent) is out of the picture, in what mind were the ideas being hosted in?
You could go old school panpsychist, or even animist, and say minds have been there from the beginning, but then I wonder if we're still in idealist territory.
"How do we know what we think we know?"
I think the answer ultimately comes down to how accurate our predictions are of future experiences. Every other answer I've ever seen anyone provide seems to rest on the foundation of that criteria. I would say that if we can't predict, we don't know in any useful meaning of the word "know".
Of course, we can always add complications to our predictive model that don't add any predictive accuracy. Occam's razor is our heuristic that we shouldn't do that, that every addition beyond that is an opportunity to be wrong, multiplying the probability of being wrong with each addition.
So the question becomes, if an earthquake happens, does it happen because it's an idea someone generated? Or was it due to tectonic plate movement? The tectonic plate movement seems more predictive. To the point above, we can always say the tectonic plate movement is an idea in our intersubjective experience, but what does that extra postulate add in terms of prediction? And how to we account for the surprise, with fatal consequences, populations often have for an event like that?
Or am I making assumptions here I'm not realizing, that if unmade, make these questions moot?
Mike, again, very good questions indeed! Totally relevant. You're way ahead of me, actually. I haven't decided what I think about how far it goes, but I can say definitely yes it would include animals, especially Geordie. I would be inclined to say "whatever is mind" and leave it open. Also, I'm not opposed to an ubermind, as you put it, but this would not be God in the usual sense. Or I should say it doesn't have to be God in the usual sense. To me the really hard question is, where does math live? That's where I'd be tempted to invoke Mind as a transcendental. But I don't know, I haven't come to any conclusions about all this. As I said, I'm more interested in what we experience.
"You could go old school panpsychist, or even animist, and say minds have been there from the beginning, but then I wonder if we're still in idealist territory."
Yeah, I don't care whether you call it idealism or something else. I'm more aesthetically inclined toward a mega mind than to mini minds, but there's no reason you can't have both. I just don't know.
As for knowledge, I don't want to define it, but I do think it's broader than prediction. Knowing what we know and discovering that we don't know what we thought we did is, to me, a kind of knowledge, even if it doesn't say what will happen next but casts what's already there in a new light.
I wouldn't be at all inclined to say an earthquake happens because it's an idea generated in minds. That would the wrong kind of answer. Nowadays we have a tendency to forget that we have given ourselves only one type of cause to work with, the 'efficient' cause, but that's kind of like expecting to fix everything with a hammer. One of the benefits of idealism is that it opens up a broader range of options for causal explanation, one that gives us more intuitively appropriate ways of explaining things, depending on the kind of question that's being asked. Not only can I legitimately say I did x because I wanted to, but this cuts both ways. I don't have to answer every sort of question by attributing it to mind. I still have the option of answering questions about the physical world in the usual way. The physical world is just the same as it was with naive realism in many ways, minus the unfounded assumptions.
"To the point above, we can always say the tectonic plate movement is an idea in our intersubjective experience, but what does that extra postulate add in terms of prediction? "
Well, I'm not proposing an extra postulate. I'm saying such knowledge IS in our intersubjective experience because...where else could it be? The extra postulate is the idea that there is some unknowable reality that may or may not be causing our experiences which we can never have any sort of access to. We're left with a reality composed entirely of representation, but with no 'representation of' for our representations to correspond to.
Anyway, the assumptions you're making are perfectly natural, Mike, and your questions are very much to the point.
Thanks Tina. The questions are really just the ones I hit when I try on the view. But this gives me some insight into where you are with it. I would say that the areas that remain undefined for you are the ones that most physicalists would need answers to if they're going to be tempted by the idealist view.
On knowledge, definitely if we find something is not the case (the prediction fails) we do learn something. It's a reduction in uncertainty. We now know one scenario which won't be the case. So although our next predictions may still be mostly inaccurate, it will be less inaccurate than it was before. So, in my mind, we're still talking about predictions.
On the representations existing without any referent, it seems like *something* has to cause that representation to come into being. And it's worth noting that a representation is itself a prediction, or more accurately, a cluster of interrelated predictions. A representation of a tree is a prediction about what will happen if I walk up to it and try to climb, kick, or eat it, predictions that would be very different from a representation of a mountain, or a bear. It seems like survival, or at least avoidance of pain, means getting these predictions right more often than not.
But I predict we won't convince each other today. :-) Still, interesting conversation!
"On the representations existing without any referent, it seems like *something* has to cause that representation to come into being"
I agree. Which is why I question the idea that everything must be a representation. As Husserl once put it, "To the things themselves!"
Yes, we won't convince each other today. That's all right. Thanks for entertaining the possibility with an open mind!
In rereading your post, I found myself confused right off the bat in your first paragraph. In hopes of understanding what you mean by "mind-independence" (which seems to be other than simply objective reality), I hope you'll indulge me by clarifying it sentence by sentence...
> "SUPPOSE REALITY IS MIND-INDEPENDENT, meaning it exists independently of all minds whatsoever. This isn’t easy to imagine."
Right off the bat I'm at sea because a mind-independent reality (as I apparently incorrectly understand it) is exactly what science posits, and for me isn't at all hard to image. What's hard for me to imagine is that it's anything *other* than that. You continue...
> "Rather, it’s impossible to imagine because mind-independence is by definition utterly unknowable."
From not easy to impossible, and this seems to turn on a circular definition that mind-independence is asserted as unknowable therefore it's unknowable. What if it isn't? What isolates us so thoroughly from the reality that we're a part of? Later in the post you seem to suggest we can rely on our perceptions to give us information about reality, which made me ever more confused.
> "We can’t know the effects of such a reality, or if it has any effects, or if it’s even there."
Is the chair you're sitting in solid? Is the sunlight on your skin warm? You're making an assertion here, but I don't see what evidence or logic supports it, and it's one that directly conflicts with my daily experience.
> "If a mind-independent reality exists, it might as well not exist. Why should we care about it, then?"
Because we're a part of that reality and physical facts matter? But I think I in fact have no clue what you mean by mind-independent reality. Is this at root essentially Kant's notion of Transcendental Idealism?
Consider what the words 'mind independent' mean. We're talking about a reality where there is no one there to perceive it. Every attempt we make to discover it is thwarted by our attempt to discover it. We, who presumably have minds, cannot, by definition, be 'a part of that reality'. The refrigerator light metaphor has been making the rounds lately, so maybe that will help you understand what's going on here. Every time you open the door it appears that the light is already on. You'd have every right to conclude it's always on. But you can't know what it's like inside the refrigerator prior to opening the door and looking (supposedly...I mean, I used to smash my face right up to the crack to watch that magical moment when the light came on, but let's pretend it's impossible to do this). Or maybe a better metaphor would be the observer effect of quantum particles. In any case whenever we assert that we know something about mind independent reality, we're no longer talking about mind-independence.
As for Kant, both Nagel and Chalmers have Kantian noumena in mind. I think Nagel's despair reflects a better grasp of what's at stake, although he can get confused at times too.
What we call physical reality is not the same thing as mind-independence. And yes, I am distinguishing between objectivity and mind-independence. You can think more or less objectively. You cannot think more or less mind-independently; you can't think mind-independently at all.
In other words, the argument isn't even about whether mind-independence is unknowable. It is, by definition. To argue that it's knowable is like trying to argue for square circles. And yet, our minds leap ahead to an unknowable realm, a realm that's always necessarily outside our reach, and we weirdly imagine that we've reached it, somehow.
> "In other words, the argument isn't even about whether mind-independence is unknowable. It is, by definition."
Which seems to make it a self-contained circular definition of something that is imagined. If you are arguing such cannot meaningfully exist, I quite agree, but then my question is who posits this form of mind independence and what would it apply to?
Kant, Nagel, Chalmers, many many other scientists and philosophers. And yes, it is imagined. That's part of my point. What would it apply to? I don't think it applies to anything. I think it's an extrapolation from a natural naive realist's intuition about the world, a vague intuition about lawfulness and continuity that got conceptualized and blown way out of proportion, and I don't see it as necessary.
Here's an apparently defunct Substack post that I found on the same topic a while back that I just now remembered (I meant to link to it in my post). Maybe a computational neuroscientist's version will be easier for you to relate to:
https://open.substack.com/pub/yohanjohn/p/maybe-its-time-to-retire-the-phrase?r=schg4&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
He talks about something he's calling "observer invariance" which gets more into the nitty gritty of what I'm alluding to here in calling for a 'view from everywhere'. It could just as well be called "swapping places". He says:
"... “mind-independence” is a meaningless concept: there is no way, even in principle, that we can slice off the mind from reality and examine the two separately. No one would be ‘there’ to verify our story! Mind-independent reality is often described as the “view from nowhere.” Perhaps it could also be called a “non-view from everywhere”?
Without the concept of mind-independence, does scientific objectivity go out the window? Are we giving intellectual shelter to every flat-earther and conspiracy theorist?
Not really, because we have a concept that is far better than mind-independence: observer-invariance. Objective truths are invariant with respect to swapping out observers. The sun is not “real because it’s there even when no one is looking”, but rather it is “real because almost everyone can observe it and agree on at least some of its properties.” Instead of painting a picture of objectivity that demands the (impossible!) removal of minds from reality, invariance allows us to recognize that minds are the very foundation of objectivity.
I sometimes think that declarations of faith in “mind-independent reality” or “cold hard facts” are a way to avoid the hard work of understanding how the invariants of reality are discovered. It is convenient to imagine that facts are just floating out there independent of us — one can then savor the trappings of objectivity without any real awareness of the transformations that establish invariance."
I think the lightbulb finally went on. Let me test my understanding. You're saying Kant's noumena are an example of mind independence, so you're saying his idea of noumena is incoherent. Am I finally on the right wavelength? (As you know, I've said he was wrong about that myself.)
I like the idea of observer invariance. Let me ask whether observers can exist *potentially* or must *actually* exist. The unobserved coffee cup or the universe before any conscious observers existed.
You asked what "mind independence" means to me. I take it literally, but my sense of "independent" is aligned with "unaffected by my mind" rather than "unknowable by my mind". Separate and distinct versus inaccessible.
"Let me test my understanding. You're saying Kant's noumena are an example of mind independence, so you're saying his idea of noumena is incoherent."
You're close! It's not that noumena are an example of mind-independent reality, but that mind-independent reality is an example of Kantian noumena. God, for instance, is a noumenon. The immortality of the soul is too. These are all matters of faith, not knowledge, according to Kant.
"Let me ask whether observers can exist *potentially* or must *actually* exist. The unobserved coffee cup or the universe before any conscious observers existed."
I can't speak for the guy who came up with 'observer invariance', but I would prefer to say 'potentially' simply because I think this preserves how we really think. When I leave a mug in a room and no one is there to observe it, I imagine it stays exactly the same. I imagine it stays red, still has a certain feel, heft, heat, etc. It retains all its qualities, in other words. This naive view of reality is one I would like to preserve.
What you're taking as 'mind-independence' is what I would call 'objects', 'givens', 'objective reality,' or at times simply 'reality'. The world I didn't make or conjure up in other words. I get the impulse to call that mind-independent, I do. But as I see it, this is still the naive realist's assumption, even though it's axiomatic in the scientific community. After all, if you say mind-independent reality can at least be partially known through science, how can we be so sure our science is not yet another case of our minds affecting reality? You see, this is why Kant calls mind-independence a matter of faith.
Oops, I forgot to answer one of your questions. I'm not so much saying mind-independence is wrong or logically incoherent but that people don't understand it properly and assume they can have knowledge of 'mind-independent reality' when they can't. I agree with Kant that mind-independent reality is unknowable. 'Mind-independent reality' isn't known through science; it isn't known at all. But what I'm saying is, why do we bother worrying about it then? It serves no purpose for us. It might as well not exist. Kant, on the other hand, believed we needed it as a limiting concept. I'm not so sure that's true in the case of mind-independent reality. I don't mean to do away with all types of noumena, just this one and 'things in themselves', which is kind of the same.
A few more questions:
So, Kant's noumena are a larger category than mind independent things as you define them?
Is there such a thing as not naive realism?
Do you have a basis to suggest science is "yet another case of our minds affecting reality"? An example or logical reason?
p.s. In the case of the refrigerator, I was a techno geek even as a kid and noticed the switch obviously activated by the closed fridge door. Press the switch, the light goes off.
Reminds me a little of that meme, "When you don't know how things work, everything's a conspiracy."
Sometimes when you do know how things work, everything's a conspiracy. See for example the political analysis of world events at the World Socialist Web Site.
I've read the article and the comments a few times, and so far I don't feel I have a good grasp of the issues, but I won't let that stop me!
This post seems inspired in large part by Chalmers' _Reality+_, which, from the discussion here, reminds me so powerfully of Descartes' deceiving demon that I wonder if any progress has been made in the ensuing centuries, beyond the chance to amuse ourselves by talking about computer simulations. A demon is a demon, as far as I'm concerned, but I haven't read Chalmers' book.
Susan R. Bordo's _The Flight to Objectivity_ begins with Descartes' demon (actually his nightmares), and far from incidentally, she works into her analysis the dreadful moment when an infant realizes that when its mother disappears, she continues to exist! -- meaning that the mother is a separate being, and the infant is alone, also a separate being. This seems important to the present discussion, but I haven't got a coherent story yet. I'm working on a review of the book (don't hold your breath).
Then there's poor old Nagel, whose first line in _The View From Nowhere_ is “This book is about a single problem: how to combine the perspective of a particular person inside the world with an objective view of that same world, the person and his viewpoint included.” Whether by "objective" Nagel means "mind-independent," as you claim, I can't say for sure, but I don't think so. If the objective view contains the mind itself, then there must be a mind in there taking the view.
A good deal of this discussion turns on distinctions. "Objective" can mean before the mind in a "clear and distinct" way, as Descartes put it -- free of distortions, prejudices, feelings, yet still capable of apprehension by the mind, and indeed requiring a mind for its apprehension. Or it can mean requiring the conceptual removal of all minds, which are all inevitably tainted by the distortions, prejudices, and feelings that come inevitably with their situated perspectives. The latter comes close to a "mind-independent" view, but it stops short of supposing that there is anything to see in the absence of minds; it's more of a hypothetical viewpoint for a hypothetical mind with impossible abilities (such as the ability to see a three-dimensional solid from all possible perspectives simultaneously).
The last useless thing I want to add concerns the shivers that everyone seems to get when the word God comes up. I get that we don't want any "hairy thunderer or cosmic muffin" in here, but the idea of entities that are to us as we are to, say, mushrooms, does not strike me as inherently incoherent. If such an entity must be posited to sustain a certain metaphysical system, there's no need to scramble for the exits.
"This post seems inspired in large part by Chalmers' _Reality+_, which, from the discussion here, reminds me so powerfully of Descartes' deceiving demon that I wonder if any progress has been made in the ensuing centuries, beyond the chance to amuse ourselves by talking about computer simulations."
Haha...yeah, I doubt it. What is it that people find so fascinating about living in a simulation? Maybe it takes someone more well acquainted with computers and technology. Maybe I'm picturing Super Mario Bros. or Legends of Zelda and going, "Nope. That's not where I'm at."
"Whether by "objective" Nagel means "mind-independent," as you claim, I can't say for sure, but I don't think so. If the objective view contains the mind itself, then there must be a mind in there taking the view."
I did? Hm. Well, if so then I meant only that he doesn't seem entirely consistent, though I could be wrong about that. It has been a while. My impression was that he sometimes he talks about objectivity in the more absolute sense, but other times he means it in the more limited way I describe. He definitely recognizes there's a difference between the two, however. Here he explicitly says he rejects idealism and "affirms the reality of aspects of the world that cannot be grasped by any conception I can possess—not even an objective conception of the kind with which we transcend the domain of initial appearances."
The next line is interesting—
"But here it can be seen that physicalism is based ultimately on a form of idealism: an idealism of restricted objectivity. Objectivity of whatever kind is not the test of reality. It is just one way of understanding reality."
He's definitely choosing to believe in mind-independence, not just objectivity. So yeah, we're in clear opposition here, but I mean, hell. I really like the guy.
Yes, a good deal of the discussion depends on distinctions. I don't suppose it's completely one way or another, as objectivity can mean different things in different contexts. Thinking about it in terms of journalism, for instance, can be quite different than other areas.
"I get that we don't want any "hairy thunderer or cosmic muffin" in here, but the idea of entities that are to us as we are to, say, mushrooms, does not strike me as inherently incoherent. If such an entity must be posited to sustain a certain metaphysical system, there's no need to scramble for the exits."
Oh you crack me up. I'll take a hairy cosmic muffin and a quarter pounder minus ecoli onions, thank you very much. He. I'm keenly aware of how people react to traditional idealism (see Chalmers emphasizing Berkeley's reliance on god above) and it's a hard enough sell without bringing religious stuff or anything woo woo into the mix. Most people don't even like to admit the existence of Platonic ideas even though they rely on them for just about everything, like talking, thinking in general terms, etc. They're more likely to believe there are actually a near-infinite number of parallel worlds out there in which I am currently picking my nose instead of responding to a blog post, and so on in all combinations.
In case you didn't know, the "cosmic muffin" line is from National Lampoon's satirical poem "Deteriorata," a snarky rewrite of the "Desiderata."
Two of my favorite pop poetry pieces!
Further to the status of the cup in the other room, I can now fill in something of Bordo's potential contribution. Citing Piaget, she writes that "to be able to mentally represent an object in its absence is to conceive of the object as constituted not by this or that transitory perception of it by the subject, but as sustained by a projected multiplicity of perspectives -- as having a 'being-for-others'."
She goes on to say that "Kant's contribution -- the notion of the human mind as actively structuring rather than passively reflecting nature -- is regarded by Piaget as decisive to this development in the history of ideas... For Piaget, as for Kant, the subject/object distinction is the epistemic norm... One may fault Piaget here... His 'developmental theory of ideas' describes the scientific and philosophic development, not of the human species, but of that particular intellectual arc that begins with the pre-Socratics and ends with the European 'Enlightenment'.... The subject/object distinction itself may derive its survival value, and thus function as an 'epistemic norm,' only within a certain environmental context."
That's a bit of a "core dump" from me -- sorry about that. I wondered if it casts any light on philosophical idealism. For my part, elsewhere I've resisted idealism as potentially solipsistic, and the mention here of "being-for-others" is a saving grace that needs to be added. (Panpsychism deals with it handily and without further metaphysical complication about what counts as "others," but I get that it could be construed as overkill.)
Interesting post and discussion, Tina.
I understand ‘mind independent reality’ as ‘mind independent once created’. The creation is done by human minds and if there were no minds in the first place there wouldn’t be any mind independent reality.
The ‘view from nowhere’ must have come from somewhere. We are a product of evolution and the objective way of knowing first appeared in the history of life probably a couple of hundred thousand years ago. It grew exponentially in the past 300 years and a picture of reality was slowly built up through objective knowledge accumulated over centuries.
But then what about the history of earth going back 4.5 billion years? Doesn’t evolution of life begin more than 3 billion years ago?
Reality did not begin with human beings or the ‘objective reality’ they are cooking up. What existed before the emergence of objective knowledge can be metaphorically described as unknowable ‘nature-in-itself’.
Objective knowledge of distant past, say 100 million years ago, is only the knower’s interpretation of reality as it was 100 million years ago. There were no observers to record it and today’s observers cannot travel back in time (travelling back 100m years would imply retrasing the course of evolution, and the observer would disintegrate into a trillion molecules).
As mentioned in Mike’s comment, it is important to consider what it means to know something. I will agree it is broader than the predictable objective knowledge, but it is hard to pinpoint what else can be considered as valid knowledge, and why. Therefore, it is good to start with objective/predictable knowledge, and see where it leads.
I believe a truly evolutionary world view, accepting mind itself as a product of evolution, would lead to viewing reality as neither matter nor mind but unknowable. Knower interprets it as matter and mind. The good part is such objective knowledge is reliable and it appears to be the most convenient and practical approach in the present stage of evolution.
Hi Shajan,
That's a succinct way of putting it, that the whole notion of mind-independent reality depends on minds. And yes, the evolutionary view would have to say our minds evolve too or else explain how we are somehow not part of the natural world, but since it is our minds that come up with the theory of evolution, that leads to an interesting catch 22. What can we possibly know about the world as it is in itself from here?
Nice to meet you, and thanks for commenting!
I confess that in my dimness I can't really get anywhere with all this, much as I may admire the intellectual gymnastics entailed. It seems such discussions are largely based on concepts of 'reality' and 'non-reality', and that these notions are accepted as given instantiations and/or obtain with inherent applicability, as if they had some indisputable meaning and/or (dare I say?) existence. If they *do*, then I'd like to know what their meaning and existence are without resort to great elaborations (which to me indicate only uncertainty, so why perist with the two opposing concepts? — I'm not levelling that at you, Tina). More, and along similar lines, there is the presupposition of the two opposing and discrete conceptual instantiations and/or applicabilities of 'mind' and 'matter'; both somehow instantiating and/or understood within something we call 'consciousness' and yet which humankind cannot form a consenus on as to what the latter actually is or if indeed it exists at all. I'm dimly intuiting that you (Tina) and I are on similar ground — do please correct me if not — in that we both sense or incline to apprehending (or suspect it may be *possible* to apprehend) the world stripped of these presuppositions of reality/non-reality and also mind/matter. If we were able to actualise that, would there be any 'there' there in 'somewhere'? No, because we'd have abandoned the former assumed link between 'space'/'thereness' and 'reality', there would just be a borderless stream of phenomena; so we can perhaps bin those two opposing ideas of 'somewhere' and 'nowhere' also. [Sorry if this all very low-level, naive and uneducated stuff.]
I wouldn't say your dimness is the reason you couldn't get anywhere with this, Hariod, as it appears you are not alone.
Since you and I have discussed Kant before, I'll just use his lingo here. When I talk about "mind independent reality", I'm talking about none other than Kant's noumena. For some reason people are getting tripped up over this phrase, "mind-independent reality", and here I was thinking this phrase would be less perplexing than introducing the technical term 'noumena' but maybe I was wrong.
"I'm dimly intuiting that you (Tina) and I are on similar ground — do please correct me if not — in that we both sense or incline to apprehending (or suspect it may be *possible* to apprehend) the world stripped of these presuppositions of reality/non-reality and also mind/matter."
I would agree with that characterization, if I'm following you properly, regarding the mind/matter conundrum, though I think the reality/non-reality distinction may be important to make sense of experience—I think it's there in the naive realist's perspective in a crude, hazy, non-philosophical, non-absolute way, and I'd probably want to preserve that because I'm a commonsensical kind of gal. The mind/matter conundrum in particular seems to come about from a certain of confusion of perspectives, though it's hard to articulate the problem. I suspect we have a tendency to take up a god's eye view while at the same time taking up a limited perspective, which I think is not done intentionally or legitimately. We see our own minds from our own perspective, but also from some strange, mind-less god-like perspective as merely a thing in the world.
"If we were able to actualise that, would there be any 'there' there in 'somewhere'? No, because we'd have abandoned the former assumed link between 'space'/'thereness' and 'reality', there would just be a borderless stream of phenomena; so we can perhaps bin those two opposing ideas of 'somewhere' and 'nowhere' also."
I'm not sure I'm following here. I think we could still have some notion of space and 'there-ness' and 'somewhere' if we retained something very close to the naive realist's perspective without the notion 'mind-independent reality'. To make this concrete, if I place a red coffee mug on the table before me and leave the room, I think the mug continues to be red and to feel the way it did in my hands, just as it did when it was in my hands. Nothing about the mug's qualities changes by my leaving the room. What happens when no one is looking at the mug is that the mug stays the same, AS IF I or someone else were looking at it, even though no one is looking at it. So space is, in the somewhat naive realist's view, essentially the not-worth-thinking-about nothing-ness between objects—certainly not curved spacetime, whatever that is. Maybe I'll elaborate on this in another post!
Thanks Tina, and it would be good to read your further thoughts regarding in what sense you/one may regard 'space'/'thereness' as something other than a form of relational ideation — i.e. a mind apprehends the cup, then infers, imputes, attributes locational qualities, etc. Okay, so then we can go on to say (actually, *assume*) that the observing mind itself somehow occupies space and so also has a thereness quality to it. Is the *derived* thereness quality of the cup, which is an aspect of our assumed 'reality': a) purely in one's head? b) is it apart from the cup? c) is it within the cup? d) is it everywhere including and between the mind and the cup? e) is it solely ideation insofar as it is experienced as 'reality'? We know that the brain generates the thought: 'The coffee cup is over there'; and it's useful to apply a metric (however vague) to the supposed distance between it and our brain. So when we know whether the cup's whereness quality obtains as either of a/b/c/d or e, then we can look at how real it and it's assumed redness/hardness is. [I've got a horrible feeling this is all too elementary for this place, so please forgive me if it is.]
Since the threads here have quieted down, I wanted to ask if this talk of space and thereness has anything to do with Whitehead's views on "simple location," which he regards as a major misconception of the modern era. I'm not sure I understand what he's saying about it, despite having read several of his books. The related matter of "locatedness" has come up in Susan R. Bordo's <i>The Flight to Objectivity</i>, and she quotes Whitehead on simple location. Locatedness has to do with a conception of the self that arises at the time of Descartes, and is foreign to the ancient Greek and medieval experience of the world. Bordo cites Morris Berman, C. S. Lewis, and Owen Barfield concerning the transition.
My next blog posts on Bordo's book are coming along, but I could use some input on this aspect of the Cartesian revolution.
Jim, thank you for bothering to read my blurry ramblings on this. I'm afraid I know nothing of the references you cite — I am not an academic — although they sound most interesting and I'll read your post should you touch on the matter of locatedness. Fwiw, I think we're in danger in this whole discsussion of conflating two levels of understanding: 1) What Tina refers to as our 'commonsensical' views of the world and which are vital for us to hold in order to successfully navigate life; and 2) How things actually are beyond the general scope of our capacity to comprehend or envisage them — though we may at times intuit deeper understandings than logical thought processes may access. I used Perplexity's Pro Search to learn a little in advance of your potential article: https://www.perplexity.ai/search/what-are-whitehead-s-views-on-epyP_IcfSi6e9EyuJMnnRQ#locale=en-US
I think what Whitehead has in mind is that spatial location corresponds to 1) and, uh, something else corresponds to 2). The latter surely has to do with developments in relativity and quantum physics that were just breaking as he wrote (as a mathematician, he would have had more insight into them than most at the time.)
I'm planning at least three posts on Bordo's book. Two are pretty much ready, the third I'm trying to figure out, and who knows, I might have to go to a fourth. They'll go up on my WordPress site at intervals once I'm comfortable with their overall shape. I don't have anything on Substack except the comments I've posted on Philosophy and Fiction -- although strangely, I have a few followers. I should probably post at least a redirect message, but I haven't the first idea how.
I wouldn't worry about redirecting 'followers'. Followers don't matter unless you start posting on Substack Notes, and even then, there's no guarantee anyone will see what you post. It's a Twitter-like aspect of Substack. "Subscribers" won't matter either until you start putting up posts, but you may get a few subscribers as well, even if you haven't written anything. No need to do anything about it!
I'm not sure I'm following here, Hariod, but I do tend to think about space in Kantian terms, but without the Kantian ontology. In other words, I don't see space as a 'thing' 'out there'. I'll talk more about this in future posts, though!
N'er mind, dear Tina; I realise I'm treading on territory that's perhaps more suited to metaphysical discussion. That said, and having looked briefly at Whitehead's rejection of 'Simple Location', then I find myself sympathetic to it. From perplexity TLF to Perplexity AI:
'Whitehead coined the term "fallacy of simple location" in his 1925 book "Science and the Modern World". He defined simple location as the notion that material can be said to be "here" in space and "here" in time, or "here" in space-time, without requiring any reference to other regions of space-time. In other words, simple location suggests that things exist independently and discretely in specific points of space and time. Whitehead strongly rejected this concept, considering it a fundamental flaw in the 17th-century conception of nature. He argued that the idea of simple location is inconsistent with modern scientific understanding and leads to numerous philosophical problems.'
Interesting. I just got that book in the mail the other day and it's next on my list.
Sorry I’m late to the party on this article, this was a great read Tina. I love seeing more discussion of the details of idealism, it’s criminally neglected in discussions of consciousness.
It’s an interesting question of where the line can be drawn between the existence of the world and how it’s manifested to consciousness. What would be the ontological status of a substance that “can’t” be known?
And this point isn’t to say that the universe must “actually” be known to some mind, but that it must at least be “potentially” knowable, it’s properties must be such. It must consist of some kind of rational syntax at minimum, a realm of purely quantitative relations.
But what are those quantitative relations other than rational intelligibility? If there are no phenomena that can be reduced to measurable quantities, can we even say this unknown universe exists as quantum potentialities?
And if this potential for measurement must be there for us to say something exists in any meaningful sense, then for us to say something exists we also must say it has the potential to be known to consciousness.
And so, mind can’t be derivative of the physical order, since ifff we grant that we end up with
a contradiction, because we’re forced to admit mental properties are already present in that physical order. Mental properties are necessary for even the possibility of something to exist.
Thanks, Prudence.
"And this point isn’t to say that the universe must “actually” be known to some mind, but that it must at least be “potentially” knowable,"
Yes! Mind-independence is an impossible standard to place on reality. It puts reality entirely beyond our reach. We've never needed such a notion of reality, and we don't in fact believe it. I'm having a hard time getting people to see that this is what mind-independence means, and that every claim to know mind-independent reality at all is an overreach. Thanks for commenting, Prudence. And yes, idealism is very poorly understood in public discussions. I think part of the problem is there are so many different idealisms. The possibilities are incredibly vast!
I think people are so conditioned to think in naturalist terms they have trouble understanding idealism. Naturalist thinking claims to be a monism, but it actually requires a Cartesian style dualism, because the idea of a self-sufficient, or mind-independent natural order is incoherent.
It’s not just the claim to “know” the mind-independent reality that’s a problem. It’s also the fact that this unknown reality can’t have any kind of measurable relations, even space and time. To describe the universe in basic terms of temporal causal sequences of measurable phenomena is impossible under naturalism. Because those are all concepts, rational relations. And concepts are properties of the mind, some emergent ghost according to naturalism. Even to say it consists of space time means you’ve introduced properties that belong to the mind into the universe itself.
Exactly. You're making great points here. A mind-independent reality can't be measured and it can't be assumed to have a causal relationship to anything we experience, so it can't be the basis for our scientific theories. Both measurement and causality are our concepts.
And yes, space and time are our concepts too, not concepts we can attribute to some mind-less realm. I'll go into this more in the next post and hopefully manage to talk more explicitly about Kant without too many heads exploding. I get the feeling talking about Space and Time as a priori forms of our "intuition" as opposed to "spacetime" will be a tough nut to crack, though. As you say, we are conditioned to think in naturalist terms.
Looking forward to your next post Tina. I know you are not into Eastern philosophy as such, but Kant is the one who brought the Buddhist Monk Nagarjuna's "Two Contexts of Reality" to the West. Kant canonized the term noumena to represent the Ultimate Reality and phenomena to represent our Conventional Reality.
I'm frustrated about the cup. I'm trying to understand the assertion that, under scientific realism, it turns into math when no one is looking. It's part of the argument against physicalism, but I see no basis for it. Why the assertion?
I don't see a mystery in knowing what's outside our minds. Perhaps there is a leap of faith in accepting that the phenomenon we experience come from external sources, but taking it leads us to a coherent picture of that converges on that putative reality supporting its existence. Denying it seems to require denying my experience of a persistent logical material world.
It suddenly occurred to me you might be talking epistemologically rather than ontologically, and a search for "epistem" turned up something you said to Mike: "I call myself an idealist because people need to be able to peg each other down, but the truth is, I'm more interested in the epistemology, not in postulating theoretical entities beyond or behind experience."
Oh. And perhaps oops. Is your view similar to Kant's T.I.? I take it as an epistemological statement, because I see Kant's things-in-themselves as physical realism (but disagree we can learn *nothing* about them). If you're saying that we can never have that cogito ergo sum certainty about reality, I agree, full stop. There is definitely a leap of faith, but it seems a reasonable and necessary one to escape solipsism.
I have a lot to get done today, and for the next few days, but I'll talk in greater detail soon!
Okie dokie!