In your opinion, what is the ontology that provides the most satisfying answer to the "vertiginous question" ?

[Papanca]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vertiginous_question

"Benj Hellie's vertiginous question is as follows: of all the subjects of experience out there, why is this one—the one corresponding to the human being referred to as Benj Hellie—the one whose experiences are live? (The reader is supposed to substitute their own case for Hellie's.)[1]

A simple response to this question is that it reduces to "Why are Hellie's experiences live from Hellie's perspective," which is trivial to answer. However, Hellie argues, through a parable, that this response leaves something out. The parable describes two situations, one reflecting a broad global constellation view of the world and everyone's phenomenal features, and one describing an embedded view from the perspective of a single subject. The former seems to align better with the simple response above, but the latter seems a better description of consciousness.

David Chalmers has written a response to Hellie, but he did not address the question itself.[2] Hellie's argument is also closely related to Caspar Hare's theories of egocentric presentism and perspectival realism, of which several other philosophers have written reviews.[3][4] Similar questions are also asked repeatedly by J.J. Valberg in justifying his horizonal view of the self.[5] "

I'm not as knowledgeable as people in this forum, so i apologise from the start if this line of thinking seems really naive or stupid, but imho, idealism seems to provide the most satisfying answer to the vertiginous question, consider this :

Either you have a 1 in i don't know how many billions chances odds of existing right now (as it is the case under materialism), or you are bound to exist as you are nothing but how experience is felt (by experience i don't mean anything like a stable self/homunculus/) but just how experience is felt/the perspectival self.

Consider the following allegory that Arnold Zuboff (philosopher) uses with the lottery :

Picture a hotel with one billion rooms and a lottery contest. You have won the lottery, now, you have to decide between two possibilities : someone tells you that there was only one particular number (one in a trillion) that was the winning lottery number. Another person tells you that each room got a winning lottery number, all pressupositions left aside, who would you trust more ?

There is a nuance in this argument, it doesn't work if there are anterior reasons to privilege one ontology over the other, for instance if you have solid arguments that makes materialism the most logical ontology, the argument doesn't make sense : people do win real lotteries, and even a one in a trillion chance is bound to happen in either an infinite or immensely big number of occurences, and only a conscious person (the lottery winner in the allegory) can wonder and make this argument.

But if there is a genuine hesitation/indecision about ontologies, i think that the vertiginous question lend more credence to idealism.

What do you guys think ?

[Lou Gold]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vertiginous_question

"Benj Hellie's vertiginous question is as follows: of all the subjects of experience out there, why is this one—the one corresponding to the human being referred to as Benj Hellie—the one whose experiences are live? (The reader is supposed to substitute their own case for Hellie's.)[1]

A simple response to this question is that it reduces to "Why are Hellie's experiences live from Hellie's perspective," which is trivial to answer. However, Hellie argues, through a parable, that this response leaves something out. The parable describes two situations, one reflecting a broad global constellation view of the world and everyone's phenomenal features, and one describing an embedded view from the perspective of a single subject. The former seems to align better with the simple response above, but the latter seems a better description of consciousness.

David Chalmers has written a response to Hellie, but he did not address the question itself.[2] Hellie's argument is also closely related to Caspar Hare's theories of egocentric presentism and perspectival realism, of which several other philosophers have written reviews.[3][4] Similar questions are also asked repeatedly by J.J. Valberg in justifying his horizonal view of the self.[5] "

I'm not as knowledgeable as people in this forum, so i apologise from the start if this line of thinking seems really naive or stupid, but imho, idealism seems to provide the most satisfying answer to the vertiginous question, consider this :

Either you have a 1 in i don't know how many billions chances odds of existing right now (as it is the case under materialism), or you are bound to exist as you are nothing but how experience is felt (by experience i don't mean anything like a stable self/homunculus/) but just how experience is felt/the perspectival self.

Consider the following allegory that Arnold Zuboff (philosopher) uses with the lottery :

Picture a hotel with one billion rooms and a lottery contest. You have won the lottery, now, you have to decide between two possibilities : someone tells you that there was only one particular number (one in a trillion) that was the winning lottery number. Another person tells you that each room got a winning lottery number, all pressupositions left aside, who would you trust more ?

There is a nuance in this argument, it doesn't work if there are anterior reasons to privilege one ontology over the other, for instance if you have solid arguments that makes materialism the most logical ontology, the argument doesn't make sense : people do win real lotteries, and even a one in a trillion chance is bound to happen in either an infinite or immensely big number of occurences, and only a conscious person (the lottery winner in the allegory) can wonder and make this argument.

But if there is a genuine hesitation/indecision about ontologies, i think that the vertiginous question lend more credence to idealism.

What do you guys think ?

As a non-philosopher I sense that TRUTH seeking is a distinctive approach within the canon of Western Civilization and this makes either/or? the fundamental question. Personally, I prefer a shamanic approach of both/and with an emphasis on navigating the Way amidst the often rough waters of duality. Yes, I know of the tricky issues such as "why evil?", etc, etc. One possible resolution is to let go of notions that God-M@L-Etc is one way or the other and accept the Source as the source of all and that manifestation always carries with it an Evil Twin -- good/bad, etc, etc, etc. Facing this possible reality leaves little alternative but to search for the way that works in the now in a dynamic system.

[Eugene I]

This mind-blowing question has been haunting me since my childhood. The way I formulated it was: if I would be one of the pair of identical twins born from the same parents, which one (and why) would be me? Or, if my mother would marry another man and they would have a son, would it be me (the one whose experiences are live)?

I'm not sure if idealism offers any better answer compared to materialism. In idealism there are still a multitude of personal perspectives, and the same question still applies.

[Hedge90]

That's similar to something I wondered about since I was a child. One time when I was little my dad told me about how a human's characteristics are created by chance at the time of conception, and that if it took place a day later I'd probably look and be different. And then I thought: no, that wouldn't be ME. So, what is ME? How absurdly impossibly low the chances were that it was EXACTLY I who got to be born?
I'd say idealism's worldview makes the question a bit easier (since if it's true I'm not actually a unique object, just a configuration of experiences), but not entirely: why I'm the one experiencing this precise perspective, and not any other random person's, is still somewhat mysterious.

[AshvinP]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vertiginous_question

"Benj Hellie's vertiginous question is as follows: of all the subjects of experience out there, why is this one—the one corresponding to the human being referred to as Benj Hellie—the one whose experiences are live? (The reader is supposed to substitute their own case for Hellie's.)[1]

A simple response to this question is that it reduces to "Why are Hellie's experiences live from Hellie's perspective," which is trivial to answer. However, Hellie argues, through a parable, that this response leaves something out. The parable describes two situations, one reflecting a broad global constellation view of the world and everyone's phenomenal features, and one describing an embedded view from the perspective of a single subject. The former seems to align better with the simple response above, but the latter seems a better description of consciousness.

David Chalmers has written a response to Hellie, but he did not address the question itself.[2] Hellie's argument is also closely related to Caspar Hare's theories of egocentric presentism and perspectival realism, of which several other philosophers have written reviews.[3][4] Similar questions are also asked repeatedly by J.J. Valberg in justifying his horizonal view of the self.[5] "

I'm not as knowledgeable as people in this forum, so i apologise from the start if this line of thinking seems really naive or stupid, but imho, idealism seems to provide the most satisfying answer to the vertiginous question, consider this :

Either you have a 1 in i don't know how many billions chances odds of existing right now (as it is the case under materialism), or you are bound to exist as you are nothing but how experience is felt (by experience i don't mean anything like a stable self/homunculus/) but just how experience is felt/the perspectival self.

Consider the following allegory that Arnold Zuboff (philosopher) uses with the lottery :

Picture a hotel with one billion rooms and a lottery contest. You have won the lottery, now, you have to decide between two possibilities : someone tells you that there was only one particular number (one in a trillion) that was the winning lottery number. Another person tells you that each room got a winning lottery number, all pressupositions left aside, who would you trust more ?

There is a nuance in this argument, it doesn't work if there are anterior reasons to privilege one ontology over the other, for instance if you have solid arguments that makes materialism the most logical ontology, the argument doesn't make sense : people do win real lotteries, and even a one in a trillion chance is bound to happen in either an infinite or immensely big number of occurences, and only a conscious person (the lottery winner in the allegory) can wonder and make this argument.

But if there is a genuine hesitation/indecision about ontologies, i think that the vertiginous question lend more credence to idealism.

What do you guys think ?

I think this entire way of reasoning is missing the most foundational aspect of idealism - we are all One in essence. It may actually reach that conclusion, but it comes at the expense of flawed reasoning which then undermines the entire efficacy of reaching the conclusion. Basically it asks us to identify with a "personal" ego (as we normally do now), and then reason from there what our "chances" are of having any experience from that perspective under different ontologies. So then it concludes the only reasonable odds come under idealism. In doing so, it perpetuates the modern fantasy that there are "personal" ego-perspectives within the One, rather than all perspectives being microcosmic expressions of the One.

[Papanca]

This mind-blowing question has been haunting me since my childhood. The way I formulated it was: if I would be one of the pair of identical twins born from the same parents, which one (and why) would be me? Or, if my mother would marry another man and they would have a son, would it be me (the one whose experiences are live)?

I'm not sure if idealism offers any better answer compared to materialism. In idealism there are still a multitude of personal perspectives, and the same question still applies.

I have experienced the same confusion since childhood.

Pondering the questions of personal identity, i've rejected "closed indivisualism" , i'm still hesitating between empty individualism and open individualism :

Empty individualism : https://opentheory.net/wp-content/uploa ... .46-PM.png

Open individualism : https://opentheory.net/wp-content/uploa ... .29-PM.png (note that the einstein addition is bogus, i don't know why they put him here)

Closed individualism : https://opentheory.net/wp-content/uploa ... .14-PM.png

[Papanca]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vertiginous_question

"Benj Hellie's vertiginous question is as follows: of all the subjects of experience out there, why is this one—the one corresponding to the human being referred to as Benj Hellie—the one whose experiences are live? (The reader is supposed to substitute their own case for Hellie's.)[1]

A simple response to this question is that it reduces to "Why are Hellie's experiences live from Hellie's perspective," which is trivial to answer. However, Hellie argues, through a parable, that this response leaves something out. The parable describes two situations, one reflecting a broad global constellation view of the world and everyone's phenomenal features, and one describing an embedded view from the perspective of a single subject. The former seems to align better with the simple response above, but the latter seems a better description of consciousness.

David Chalmers has written a response to Hellie, but he did not address the question itself.[2] Hellie's argument is also closely related to Caspar Hare's theories of egocentric presentism and perspectival realism, of which several other philosophers have written reviews.[3][4] Similar questions are also asked repeatedly by J.J. Valberg in justifying his horizonal view of the self.[5] "

I'm not as knowledgeable as people in this forum, so i apologise from the start if this line of thinking seems really naive or stupid, but imho, idealism seems to provide the most satisfying answer to the vertiginous question, consider this :

Either you have a 1 in i don't know how many billions chances odds of existing right now (as it is the case under materialism), or you are bound to exist as you are nothing but how experience is felt (by experience i don't mean anything like a stable self/homunculus/) but just how experience is felt/the perspectival self.

Consider the following allegory that Arnold Zuboff (philosopher) uses with the lottery :

Picture a hotel with one billion rooms and a lottery contest. You have won the lottery, now, you have to decide between two possibilities : someone tells you that there was only one particular number (one in a trillion) that was the winning lottery number. Another person tells you that each room got a winning lottery number, all pressupositions left aside, who would you trust more ?

There is a nuance in this argument, it doesn't work if there are anterior reasons to privilege one ontology over the other, for instance if you have solid arguments that makes materialism the most logical ontology, the argument doesn't make sense : people do win real lotteries, and even a one in a trillion chance is bound to happen in either an infinite or immensely big number of occurences, and only a conscious person (the lottery winner in the allegory) can wonder and make this argument.

But if there is a genuine hesitation/indecision about ontologies, i think that the vertiginous question lend more credence to idealism.

What do you guys think ?

I think this entire way of reasoning is missing the most foundational aspect of idealism - we are all One in essence. It may actually reach that conclusion, but it comes at the expense of flawed reasoning which then undermines the entire efficacy of reaching the conclusion. Basically it asks us to identify with a "personal" ego (as we normally do now), and then reason from there what our "chances" are of having any experience from that perspective under different ontologies. So then it concludes the only reasonable odds come under idealism. In doing so, it perpetuates the modern fantasy that there are "personal" ego-perspectives within the One, rather than all perspectives being microcosmic expressions of the One.

Look at the related wikipedia links, you will find "Open individualism" that basically agrees with your position.

[Papanca]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vertiginous_question

"Benj Hellie's vertiginous question is as follows: of all the subjects of experience out there, why is this one—the one corresponding to the human being referred to as Benj Hellie—the one whose experiences are live? (The reader is supposed to substitute their own case for Hellie's.)[1]

A simple response to this question is that it reduces to "Why are Hellie's experiences live from Hellie's perspective," which is trivial to answer. However, Hellie argues, through a parable, that this response leaves something out. The parable describes two situations, one reflecting a broad global constellation view of the world and everyone's phenomenal features, and one describing an embedded view from the perspective of a single subject. The former seems to align better with the simple response above, but the latter seems a better description of consciousness.

David Chalmers has written a response to Hellie, but he did not address the question itself.[2] Hellie's argument is also closely related to Caspar Hare's theories of egocentric presentism and perspectival realism, of which several other philosophers have written reviews.[3][4] Similar questions are also asked repeatedly by J.J. Valberg in justifying his horizonal view of the self.[5] "

I'm not as knowledgeable as people in this forum, so i apologise from the start if this line of thinking seems really naive or stupid, but imho, idealism seems to provide the most satisfying answer to the vertiginous question, consider this :

Either you have a 1 in i don't know how many billions chances odds of existing right now (as it is the case under materialism), or you are bound to exist as you are nothing but how experience is felt (by experience i don't mean anything like a stable self/homunculus/) but just how experience is felt/the perspectival self.

Consider the following allegory that Arnold Zuboff (philosopher) uses with the lottery :

Picture a hotel with one billion rooms and a lottery contest. You have won the lottery, now, you have to decide between two possibilities : someone tells you that there was only one particular number (one in a trillion) that was the winning lottery number. Another person tells you that each room got a winning lottery number, all pressupositions left aside, who would you trust more ?

There is a nuance in this argument, it doesn't work if there are anterior reasons to privilege one ontology over the other, for instance if you have solid arguments that makes materialism the most logical ontology, the argument doesn't make sense : people do win real lotteries, and even a one in a trillion chance is bound to happen in either an infinite or immensely big number of occurences, and only a conscious person (the lottery winner in the allegory) can wonder and make this argument.

But if there is a genuine hesitation/indecision about ontologies, i think that the vertiginous question lend more credence to idealism.

What do you guys think ?

As a non-philosopher I sense that TRUTH seeking is a distinctive approach within the canon of Western Civilization and this makes either/or? the fundamental question. Personally, I prefer a shamanic approach of both/and with an emphasis on navigating the Way amidst the often rough waters of duality. Yes, I know of the tricky issues such as "why evil?", etc, etc. One possible resolution is to let go of notions that God-M@L-Etc is one way or the other and accept the Source as the source of all and that manifestation always carries with it an Evil Twin -- good/bad, etc, etc, etc. Facing this possible reality leaves little alternative but to search for the way that works in the now in a dynamic system.

Can you tell me more/provide links/ressources about the shamanic approach ? I'm very interrested.

[Eugene I]

I have experienced the same confusion since childhood.

Pondering the questions of personal identity, i've rejected "closed indivisualism" , i'm still hesitating between empty individualism and open individualism :

Empty individualism : https://opentheory.net/wp-content/uploa ... .46-PM.png

Open individualism : https://opentheory.net/wp-content/uploa ... .29-PM.png (note that the einstein addition is bogus, i don't know why they put him here)

Closed individualism : tinyurl.com/ap8fy372

The link on closed individualism is missing.

I think the very essence of the vertiginous question has nothing to do with the ego or sense of "me" or the concept of the "knower". Those (the "knower", sense of "me" and ego) are unconscious interpretative intuitions and abstract concepts developed in the situation of the seeming isolation of individuated fields of conscious experiences. The variants of the empty, closed and open individualisms are only valid if the existence of the "knower" is assumed. If there is no "knower" (only "knowing"), those schemes become irrelevant.

But even If we set the sense and concept of "the knower" and the "me" aside and just look at the bare facts of experience, there is still a mystery here. If we are not individualistic solipsists, we assume that there is a multiplicity of individuated conscious fields of experiences seemingly "simultaneously" co-existing in the world. The question still is: why only one of them (which is right now experienced in "this"/"my" field of experience) is experienced live?

One of the possible answers to such formulation of the "vertiginous question" is the classical solipsism: there is only one "live" field of experience exactly because there is in fact only one. Another answer is the "sequential live experience": there is only one "live" experience but it traverses sequentially through all individuated fields of experience "one at a time". There is also a possibility of the existence of a multitude of live experiences, but this possibility still faces the "vertiginous question" (why "this" live experience is experienced exactly "here" in this individuated field right now?)

[Lou Gold]

As a non-philosopher I sense that TRUTH seeking is a distinctive approach within the canon of Western Civilization and this makes either/or? the fundamental question. Personally, I prefer a shamanic approach of both/and with an emphasis on navigating the Way amidst the often rough waters of duality. Yes, I know of the tricky issues such as "why evil?", etc, etc. One possible resolution is to let go of notions that God-M@L-Etc is one way or the other and accept the Source as the source of all and that manifestation always carries with it an Evil Twin -- good/bad, etc, etc, etc. Facing this possible reality leaves little alternative but to search for the way that works in the now in a dynamic system.

Can you tell me more/provide links/ressources about the shamanic approach ? I'm very interested.

Aloha Papanca,

I'm just starting to read "Pantheologies: Gods, Worlds, Monsters", which you may find interesting. It's blurb says:

Pantheism is the idea that God and the world are identical―that the creator, sustainer, destroyer, and transformer of all things is the universe itself. From a monotheistic perspective, this notion is irremediably heretical since it suggests divinity might be material, mutable, and multiple. Since the excommunication of Baruch Spinoza, Western thought has therefore demonized what it calls pantheism, accusing it of incoherence, absurdity, and―with striking regularity―monstrosity.

In this book, Mary-Jane Rubenstein investigates this perennial repugnance through a conceptual genealogy of pantheisms. What makes pantheism “monstrous”―at once repellent and seductive―is that it scrambles the raced and gendered distinctions that Western philosophy and theology insist on drawing between activity and passivity, spirit and matter, animacy and inanimacy, and creator and created. By rejecting the fundamental difference between God and world, pantheism threatens all the other oppositions that stem from it: light versus darkness, male versus female, and humans versus every other organism. If the panic over pantheism has to do with a fear of crossed boundaries and demolished hierarchies, then the question becomes what a present-day pantheism might disrupt and what it might reconfigure. Cobbling together heterogeneous sources―medieval heresies, their pre- and anti-Socratic forebears, general relativity, quantum mechanics, nonlinear biologies, multiverse and indigenous cosmologies, ecofeminism, animal and vegetal studies, and new and old materialisms―Rubenstein assembles possible pluralist pantheisms. By mobilizing this monstrous mixture of unintentional God-worlds, Pantheologies gives an old heresy the chance to renew our thinking.

You may find interesting this article on Aztec Philosophy:

"Conquest-era Aztecs conceived philosophy in essentially pragmatic terms. The raison d’etre of philosophical inquiry was to provide humans with practicable answers to what Aztecs identified as the defining question of human existence: How can we maintain our balance while walking upon the slippery earth? Aztec philosophers addressed this question against an assumed metaphysics which held that the cosmos and its human inhabitants are constituted by and ultimately identical with a single, vivifying, eternally self-generating and self-regenerating sacred energy. Knowledge, truth, value, rightness, and beauty were defined in terms of the aim of humans maintaining their balance as well as the balance of the cosmos. Every moment and aspect of human life was meant to further the realization of this aim."

I'm not a philosopher but I've been immersed for about 25 years in a shamanic spiritual path called Santo Daime, which is a syncretic mix of mystical Christian, African and Amazonian ways. I would not say that its ontology is way-finding instead of truth-seeking but its emphasis on finding the balance leading to health, wholeness and holiness through ritual and psychoactive sacrament is quite shamanic.