Problems with the body being the external image of experiential states

[PaulSmid]

Hi all,

If I understand correctly, in Bernardo's theory the body is what the non-meta cognitive experiential states of an alter looks like. If you put my brain under the brain scanner, you can see the image of the meta-cognitive part of my psyche. That's seems reasonable to me. But according to Bernardo my legs are the external image of a subconscious part of my psyche. They are the image of a non-meta cognitive part of my psyche, to which I have no access through introspection.

However, if you cut of both of my legs, my personality and experience of life will probably barely change. According to Bernardo, you are cutting off a big chunk of the subconscious part of my psyche! So you would expect big changes in my experiences and in my psychic life after the amputation.

It just seems pretty obvious to me that legs are helpful for walking, and that that is why they evolved. It seems a bit of a stretch to say that my legs are what certain non-meta cognitive processes of my alter look like. I get the sense that the theory kind of breaks down here.

Also, it seems weird that I can be meta-cognitively aware of how my legs feel. I can feel my legs and know that I am feeling my legs. But my legs themselves are what subconscious processes look like from the outside. So I can meta-cognitively experience the inside of the external images of subconscious parts of my psyche? This also seems very strange.

Does someone have an answer to these (seeming) problems?

[AshvinP]

Hi all,

If I understand correctly, in Bernardo's theory the body is what the non-meta cognitive experiential states of an alter looks like. If you put my brain under the brain scanner, you can see the image of the meta-cognitive part of my psyche. That's seems reasonable to me. But according to Bernardo my legs are the external image of a subconscious part of my psyche. They are the image of a non-meta cognitive part of my psyche, to which I have no access through introspection.

However, if you cut of both of my legs, my personality and experience of life will probably barely change. According to Bernardo, you are cutting off a big chunk of the subconscious part of my psyche! So you would expect big changes in my experiences and in my psychic life after the amputation.

It just seems pretty obvious to me that legs are helpful for walking, and that that is why they evolved. It seems a bit of a stretch to say that my legs are what certain non-meta cognitive processes of my alter look like. I get the sense that the theory kind of breaks down here.

Also, it seems weird that I can be meta-cognitively aware of how my legs feel. I can feel my legs and know that I am feeling my legs. But my legs themselves are what subconscious processes look like from the outside. So I can meta-cognitively experience the inside of the external images of subconscious parts of my psyche? This also seems very strange.

Does someone have an answer to these (seeming) problems?

I think about 3-4 people have asked about this "alter", "dissociation", etc. confusion in the span of a week or so. Which speaks to this point I made a few days ago:

Just forget about the concept of "alter", "dissociation", etc. I used to give it a bit of credit for being a useful "low representation" symbol, but now I am coming to realize it can't even be given that much credit, because it causes so much confusion of the sort you are expressing here. You are not the first to wonder WTF is going on there and you won't be the last. It causes way more confusion than clarity at this point.

Associating various 'parts' of the body with various 'parts' of the "personal" psyche is a form naïve realism, not much different than the materialist who looks at the leg and says the physical structure we perceive in the leg is basically what the leg is. A lot of modern age prejudices need to be abandoned here. First and foremost, there is no "personal" psyche or subconscious. Our experience, subconscious and conscious, is always interwoven with the experience of the Whole and all other perspectival beings within the Whole. Once we shift to that view, we begin to realize that none of these 1:1 simple correspondences make any sense - rather the processes and structures of our organism arise from a complex set of relations between the activity of living beings and abstract metaphysical models can never speak to the details of those relations.

[PaulSmid]

Doesn't Bernardo literally associate certain brain activity with the meta-cognitive part of our psyche? So you disagree with Bernardo when he does this? Because in these cases he is certainly associating one part of the body to a part of the psyche.

His whole idea of an alter is that there is 1:1 correspondence between the image of an alter, and the inner life of the alter. So do you disagree with Bernardo on this point?

[PaulSmid]

Just forget about the concept of "alter", "dissociation", etc. I used to give it a bit of credit for being a useful "low representation" symbol, but now I am coming to realize it can't even be given that much credit, because it causes so much confusion of the sort you are expressing here. You are not the first to wonder WTF is going on there and you won't be the last. It causes way more confusion than clarity at this point.

When you drop the concept of the alter you barely have a theory anymore. Without the concept of the alter you are no longer explaining why we have private inner lives! If you leave out the alters, the theory looses all of its explanatory power and becomes pretty much worthless.

[AshvinP]

Just forget about the concept of "alter", "dissociation", etc. I used to give it a bit of credit for being a useful "low representation" symbol, but now I am coming to realize it can't even be given that much credit, because it causes so much confusion of the sort you are expressing here. You are not the first to wonder WTF is going on there and you won't be the last. It causes way more confusion than clarity at this point.

When you drop the concept of the alter you barely have a theory anymore. Without the concept of the alter you are no longer explaining why we have private inner lives! If you leave out the alters, the theory looses all of its explanatory power and becomes pretty much worthless.

We don't have private inner lives. It is precisely that which differentiates a consistent idealism from every other nihilistic philosophy of the modern age. If we maintain those artificial hard boundaries of the "personal" psyche, the metaphysical conception is practically no different than that of materialism-dualism, only substituting material 'things' for mental 'things' that are all cognitively isolated from one another. Like I said, one has to completely abandon modern prejudices to see how the "private inner life" concept is just an arbitrary fiction, and a very dangerous one at that.

[PaulSmid]

We don't have private inner lives. It is precisely that which differentiates a consistent idealism from every other nihilistic philosophy of the modern age. If we maintain those artificial hard boundaries of the "personal" psyche, the metaphysical conception is practically no different than that of materialism-dualism, only substituting material 'things' for mental 'things' that are all cognitively isolated from one another. Like I said, one has to completely abandon modern prejudices to see how the "private inner life" concept is just an arbitrary fiction, and a very dangerous one at that.

Private inner life is an arbitrary fiction? Seems to me like private inner life certainly exists, unless you believe in solipsism. Private inner life seems to me like the main thing you would have to be account for in an idealist metaphysics.

It sounds like your theory of everything is very different from Bernardo's theory. I'm mainly interested in seeing if someone can answer my question from the vantage point of Bernardo's theory.

[AshvinP]

We don't have private inner lives. It is precisely that which differentiates a consistent idealism from every other nihilistic philosophy of the modern age. If we maintain those artificial hard boundaries of the "personal" psyche, the metaphysical conception is practically no different than that of materialism-dualism, only substituting material 'things' for mental 'things' that are all cognitively isolated from one another. Like I said, one has to completely abandon modern prejudices to see how the "private inner life" concept is just an arbitrary fiction, and a very dangerous one at that.

Private inner life is an arbitrary fiction? Seems to me like private inner life certainly exists, unless you believe in solipsism. Private inner life seems to me like the main thing you would have to be account for in an idealist metaphysics.

It sounds like your theory of everything is very different from Bernardo's theory. I'm mainly interested in seeing if someone can answer my question from the vantage point of Bernardo's theory.

It's definitely a different form of idealism than BK. "Private inner life" concept is mostly born from rationalist fragmentation of Mind and "matter", Kantian ontic-epistemic dualism, and general [subconscious] egoistic desire to completely possess experiences-ideas for oneself and share with no one else. We currently have a "private inner life" just like we are unable to see living ideal activity behind the mere outer surfaces of Nature. Or like we don't know how to play a musical instrument. That limitation is not inherent to the structure of Reality itself, but rather it's a limitation of our own vision and cognition.

From the vantage point of BK's theory, I don't think there are any answers to your questions. At least no coherent and reasonable ones that I have come across. But maybe there are some, who knows... I am just as curious as you are to hear those answers.

[ScottRoberts]

I'm mainly interested in seeing if someone can answer my question from the vantage point of Bernardo's theory.

Here is how I would answer the question -- not sure if BK would agree with it. It is that it is not quite accurate to say my legs are the external representation of a portion of my subconscious. Rather, one might say that I, as long as I have legs, have "borrowed", so to speak, various thoughts of collective consciousnesses -- those that think into existence the organic molecules, the cells, the walking function, and so on. When I die, or my legs amputated, those instances of those collective thoughts are returned to the collectivity. While alive, I am to some extent in control of them, afterwards, not.

Of course, it might take pages to get precise about all this, but I doubt that it is worth the effort.

[AshvinP]

Doesn't Bernardo literally associate certain brain activity with the meta-cognitive part of our psyche? So you disagree with Bernardo when he does this? Because in these cases he is certainly associating one part of the body to a part of the psyche.

His whole idea of an alter is that there is 1:1 correspondence between the image of an alter, and the inner life of the alter. So do you disagree with Bernardo on this point?

I didn't see these questions before.

I generally disagree with BK, but not because those concepts lack any truth - it is because the imagery and terms are so low resolution that they are misleading at best, and generally counter-productive. "Meta-cognition" is a good example - BK has explained on an interview that this is not an absolute state of a being, but a function of that being's relational perspective. I am meta-cognitive in relation to my infant self, but not in relation to my future Self (hopefully). Even that is not technically accurate, though, because "meta-cognition" is the capacity to reflect on some portion of experience and develop abstract representations of those experiences which can then be studied and manipulated. If I were to evolve into a much higher level of cognition where I no longer need to develop abstract representations because I can directly perceive-cognize the sources of my experience (which I hold is possible), then technically I am no longer "meta-cognitive", but I am still much more lucidly conscious of Reality than my lower self who must abstractly represent most of its experiences to make use of them.

In most places, BK gives the impression that "meta-cognitive" is an absolute state, as we see clearly reflected in the understanding of people who follow him, and that we can think of MAL, which would be the totality of all relations, meta-cognitive or not, as purely instinctive like an animal. I have no idea how he arrives there from the relational perspective. The 1:1 "alter" correspondence is an even worse concept IMO because associating the image of a being (i.e. all of its outer, normally observable structures and processes) with the totality of its inner life (qualities of experiential meaning) is naïve realism and incorrect from any sound philosophical or scientific perspective. It actually only remains a coherent position under materialism, but of course materialism has a million other fatal flaws, including its irreconcilability with all the conclusions of modern science over the last 100 years or so, and its inability to explain the existence of inner life to begin with.

[PaulSmid]

Here is how I would answer the question -- not sure if BK would agree with it. It is that it is not quite accurate to say my legs are the external representation of a portion of my subconscious. Rather, one might say that I, as long as I have legs, have "borrowed", so to speak, various thoughts of collective consciousnesses -- those that think into existence the organic molecules, the cells, the walking function, and so on. When I die, or my legs amputated, those instances of those collective thoughts are returned to the collectivity. While alive, I am to some extent in control of them, afterwards, not.

Of course, it might take pages to get precise about all this, but I doubt that it is worth the effort.

I think this kind of an interesting idea, but I think it's not what Bernardo would say. He pretty explicitly says that the body is image of the subconscious part of the personal psyche. But maybe your idea is actually better than his on this particular issue.

At the same time, the idea that legs would then be made out of 'leg thoughts' that mind at large is having, and that we are temporarily using these thoughts, seems much less elegant then the traditional idea of gradually evolving a pair of legs because it's good for survival.

I think I might just not be able to see how the evolution of the body fits in with Bernardo's Idealism. Because it seems so obvious that the body evolved to help us be effective at surviving in the outside world(whatever that really is). But according to Bernardo there is not even space or time outside the dissociative boundary. We as alters construct space time! So how on earth could you get evolution without space or time? So I don't get how evolution would work at all within Bernardo's theory.