Your labeling of physicalism as an “upside-down” approach reminded me of this quote from Schopenhauer, which you would no doubt approve of:
Of all systems of philosophy which start from the object, the most consistent, and that which may be carried furthest, is simple materialism. It regards matter, and t with it time and space, as existing absolutely, and ignores the relation to the subject in which alone all this really exists. It then lays hold of the law of causality as a guiding principle or clue, regarding it as a self-existent order (or arrangement) of things, Veritas aeterna, and so fails to take account of the understanding, in which and for which alone causality is. It seeks the primary and most simple state of matter, and then tries to develop all the others from it; ascending from mere mechanism, to chemism, to polarity, to the vegetable and to the animal kingdom. And if we suppose this to have been done, the last link in the chain would be animal sensibility —
that is knowledge — which would consequently now appear as a mere modification or state of matter produced by causality. Now if we had followed materialism thus far with clear ideas, when we reached its highest point we would suddenly be seized with a fit of the inextinguishable laughter of the Olympians. As if waking from a dream, we would all at once become aware that its final result — knowledge, which it reached so laboriously, was presupposed as the indispensable condition of its very starting-point, mere matter; and when we imagined that we thought matter, we really thought only the subject that perceives matter ; the eye that sees it, the hand that feels it, the understanding that knows it
Thus the tremendous petitio principii reveals itself unexpectedly; for suddenly the last link is seen to be the starting-point, the chain a circle, and the materialist is like Baron Munchausen who, when swimming in water on horseback, drew the horse into the air with his legs.
I still think it is a confused philosophy, but it is a memorable and powerful passage.
Although Schopenhauer set himself against people like Hegel, his outlook still seems to have been a sort of theistic Berkeleyan idealism, in which everything that exists owes its existence to being the object of a universal consciousness; the difference between Hegel and Schopenhauer being, that Hegel calls this universal consciousness rational and good, whereas Schopenhauer calls it irrational and evil, a cosmic Will whose local manifestation in oneself should be annulled through the pursuit of indifference.
But I’m much more like a materialist, in that I think of the world as consisting of external causal interactions between multiple entities, some of which have a mindlike interior, but which don’t owe their existence to their being posited by an overarching cosmic mind. I say a large part of the problem is just that physicalism employs an insufficiently rich ontology. Its categories don’t include the possibility of “entity with a mindlike interior”.
To put it another way: Among all the entities that the world contains, are entities which we can call subjects or persons or thinking beings, and these entities themselves “contain” “ideas of objects” and “experiences of objects”. My problem with physicalism is not that it refuses to treat all actual objects as ideas, or otherwise embed all objects into subjects; it is just that it tries to do without the ontological knowledge obtained by self-reflection, which is the only way we know that there are such things as conscious beings, with their specific properties.
Somehow, we possess the capacity to conceive of a self, as well as the capacity to conceive of objects independent of the self. Physicalism tries to understand everything using only this second capacity, and as such is methodologically blind to the true nature of anything to do with consciousness, which can only be approached through the first capacity. This bias produces a “mechanistic, materialistic” concept of the universe, and then we wonder where the ghost in the machine is hiding. The “amputation of the subjective part” really refers to the attempt to do without knowledge of the first kind, when understanding reality.
Your labeling of physicalism as an “upside-down” approach reminded me of this quote from Schopenhauer, which you would no doubt approve of:
I still think it is a confused philosophy, but it is a memorable and powerful passage.
Although Schopenhauer set himself against people like Hegel, his outlook still seems to have been a sort of theistic Berkeleyan idealism, in which everything that exists owes its existence to being the object of a universal consciousness; the difference between Hegel and Schopenhauer being, that Hegel calls this universal consciousness rational and good, whereas Schopenhauer calls it irrational and evil, a cosmic Will whose local manifestation in oneself should be annulled through the pursuit of indifference.
But I’m much more like a materialist, in that I think of the world as consisting of external causal interactions between multiple entities, some of which have a mindlike interior, but which don’t owe their existence to their being posited by an overarching cosmic mind. I say a large part of the problem is just that physicalism employs an insufficiently rich ontology. Its categories don’t include the possibility of “entity with a mindlike interior”.
To put it another way: Among all the entities that the world contains, are entities which we can call subjects or persons or thinking beings, and these entities themselves “contain” “ideas of objects” and “experiences of objects”. My problem with physicalism is not that it refuses to treat all actual objects as ideas, or otherwise embed all objects into subjects; it is just that it tries to do without the ontological knowledge obtained by self-reflection, which is the only way we know that there are such things as conscious beings, with their specific properties.
Somehow, we possess the capacity to conceive of a self, as well as the capacity to conceive of objects independent of the self. Physicalism tries to understand everything using only this second capacity, and as such is methodologically blind to the true nature of anything to do with consciousness, which can only be approached through the first capacity. This bias produces a “mechanistic, materialistic” concept of the universe, and then we wonder where the ghost in the machine is hiding. The “amputation of the subjective part” really refers to the attempt to do without knowledge of the first kind, when understanding reality.
Have you read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance?
The climactic realization is
gung vzzrqvngr rkcrevrapr vf havgnel, ohg gur zvaq dhvpxyl qvivqrf vg vagb jung vf vafvqr gur frys naq bhgfvqr gur frys.
...That’s the sound made by a poorly maintained motorcycle.
No, I haven’t read it; thanks for the recommendation.