Eugene I wrote: ↑Tue Jul 27, 2021 9:34 pm
AshvinP wrote: ↑Tue Jul 27, 2021 8:49 pm
In my view, the "structures" which give rise to the physical (what you call "natural") and spiritual (what you call "psychological") realms are spiritual beings. We are also spiritual beings. My inner life manifests itself to others with outer appearances of skin, hair, eyes, etc. and various other invisible qualities. The inner life of the higher and lower spiritual beings manifest to us as the physical world and also as various internal physiological and psychological processes. The latter are thoughts (from higher beings) - intellectual, imaginative, inspired, and intuitive thoughts. In our current stage of cosmic development, the thoughts approach us from within and the percepts arriving from other qualities of these spiritual beings approach us from without.
Can we find any common ground in the above and explore further? If not, I am happy to explore whatever your proposed answer is for those questions.
Well, that's a good theory to start with to investigate and scrutinize.
First, under idealism, any existing structures can only be "mind structures". Now, it would be natural to assume that spiritual structures are represented by spiritual beings. However, more problematic to me is how to account for the physical-producing mind structures responsible for generating physical phenomena. From the observation of the physical phenomena we know that they are extremely abundant, mathematically patterned and precise and extremely complicated: there are 10^82 atoms in the observable universe, and the behavior of each of them must be generated in those mind structures with
at least 10^-8 numerical precision. So, to fit these experimental facts to your model, we would need to assume that there are spiritual beings that dedicate their entire life to "simulating", producing and presenting to us all the natural phenomena thar we observe down to the atomic level at the extremely high level of precision and at a massive scale of abundance. I would rather think that these physical-producing mind-structures are layers of the universal consciousness that are structured as some sort of "consciousness computer" rather than a "spiritual being". Any level of spiritual cognition to produce the apparent world of physical phenomena is not really needed, all that is needed is an extremely high computational capacity.
Yes, in my view, these manifold beings, i.e. they are legion, are all mental structures in essence, just as we ourselves are, and some of them are very highly structured beyond our current capacity to even cognize, and they do devote their entire activity to their various tasks. I need to state a point here that I suspect could become important later - what we observe in "physical phenomena" is a partial image of the Reality which gives rise to them, the very tail end results of those underlying processes, and the underlying Reality may not be similar to the outer quantitative properties we observe at all. So we should not make any assumptions about the
details of what is required of the underlying Reality based on physical observation alone. The only way to get that sort of epistemic confidence, in my view, is to actually experience and study the underlying Reality itself via higher cognition. The mathematical precision argument you make above, however, may be an exception to that. I really don't know, but I suspect you are correct. And I do not understand why that cannot be accounted for by the activity of spiritual beings? We should remember there were times in our own human history when people had very specific roles/tasks to occupy and carry out and performed them their entire lives without egoism and envy of others. Obviously that does not seem "fair" to the modern mind, but it is a fact of our existence nonetheless.
Eugene wrote:Now, if we move to the realm of spiritual phenomena, it is quite possible that they indeed originate from the realms of consciousness structured in forms of various spiritual beings, or possibly at lower cognitive levels, as "spiritual modules". There is an interesting branch in psychology called "modular psychology" (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modularity_of_mind), which considers the human psyche as a system of lower level cognitive modules that can have their own sense of beingness and their own specific behavioral/cognitive patterns. In extreme cases of conflicting modules this modularity can lead to DID, but typically these modules coexist and more-or-less peacefully compete with each other and integrate into higher-level spiritual structures while retaining their relative level of autonomy. It is the balance between the integration/communication and the autonomy that makes such structures functional, just like the balance between the integration and autonomy of the biological cells in an organism makes the organism functional.
I can foresee your argument: in a biological organism the simple cooperation of cells is not sufficient to account for the functionality of the organism, there must be the DNA code common to all the cells that defines/guides the development of both the cell-level structures and the integrated organism. The DNA code is in a way a "gestalt", a "Logos" of the organism without which it could not function in a coherent way. In case of a community (herd) of organisms there is no such commonly-shared DNA gestalt, yet, the gestalts of the individuals still have a lot in common, and it is that commonality that makes the communication and cooperation between individuals possible.
So, the bottom line is: it is a common ideal content that makes any conscious functioning of a community of any beings possible.
I don't really have an argument for or against the details of what you say above - obviously those things are related somehow and, in my view, we are perfectly capable of discovering how via higher cognition. The bolded part, yes, I think it is clear that Thinking activity and ideal content is what allows us to
know anything of a community of be-ings and, since knowing is fundamental to be-ing, it does actually make the community of be-ings possible. Any highly detailed connections we try to draw now without higher cognition will simply be abstract speculations, but if we are willing to ask the questions with genuine desire and expectation they will be answered through our own efforts, that is
at least half the battle won, probably more. And, in general, we should become accustomed to thinking that everything matters - no matter how small or big, every phenomenon has its place in the bigger meaningful overall picture.
The question still is: how this ideal content is developed, where does it come from? Does the temporal evolution of the universe of spiritual beings starts from a timelessly pre-existing ideal content and then unfolds according to it (like a metamorphosis of a butterfly unfolds according to the idea/logos of it)? Or does the ideal content naturally evolves and develops in the very process of the evolution of consciousness? As we know from the history of science/philosophy, the first premise constitutes the Platonic and teleological view, and the latter represents a non-Platonic and naturalistic-evolutionary view, and the debates between them are still on-going.
Again, most of the specific details of this process must be left to higher cognition or, at the very least, to in-depth study of ancient mysteries . I have some ideas about the questions above, but first I think its best to just point out a very important consideration under this view - we
are the spiritual beings. The higher spiritual beings are us at later stages of the metamorphic process, and the lower at earlier stages. None of us came into being or go out of being. We have all had many reincarnations and lived many lives in the past, and we will continue to live many lives in the future. So we are not other than our ancient ancestors or our distant future-selves. I think this foundational truth can be verified to a high degree of confidence even with the intellect and some imagination. So "leaving it to higher cognition" is something we can have the utmost confidence will happen through our own efforts plus time and destiny. A good deal can be known even within this lifetime, but over many more lifetimes it is hard to even imagine how much more resolution will be gained.
