Dr. Bernardo Kastrup, Idealism vs Materialism

[Soul_of_Shu]

In the same way everything in science, including entropy, ceases to be mere metaphor for inexplicable feelings, reserved only for the cognition of the completely opaque Divine Mind, but become literal realities within our consciousness expanded into the lower entropy realms of the higher worlds.

Tom Campbell also talks of a Divine telos being about lowering entropy, which is somehow connected to Love ...

[Steve Petermann]

Cleric,

I think I'm coming to better understand what you are saying. Clearly, much of it seems foreign to me because I haven't been emersed in "spiritual science". That, in and of itself, shouldn't necessarily deter someone from delving deeper, but I think there can be warning signs that arise from personal inclinations that can and maybe should short circuit further investigation. For anyone entertaining a particular metaphysical formulation, those warning signs should be taken seriously but also with an open mind up to a point.

So, here's my take on the approach you are offering. Please correct me where I'm wrong. From what I can gather, ordinary thinking needs to move beyond that to Thinking and Thinking that reveals World Content. Certain exercises are suggested to get that done. Now, I'm all for us examining our thinking and modifying it as we do. If certain exercises help with that, all the good.

So, what does that Thinking reveal? From what I can gather it reveals a hierarchical system for spiritual growth and various spiritual beings. Now some people like a hierarchical approach. For instance, some people really like Ken Wilber's category mad system and hierarchies. Now, I do believe we can grow spiritually but I also have a natural aversion to hierarchies. They smell of elitism. Another reason I don't like the hierarchical view or pronounced metaphysical speculations is that anyone can come up with something like that with no reasonable way for people to adjudicate between them.

I do believe that almost any metaphysical thinking can have elements of truth. Now for me, personally, I get off the bus when, from my perspective, 'things go off the rails'. For instance, from my recent foray into Steiner's thought, I did feel things went off the rails quickly. Way too much speculation that seemed fanciful. Here's a couple of images that, in my opinion, reflect that:




As I've said before, if all that works for someone and isn't harmful, fine as far as I'm concerned. It doesn't appeal to me or seem compelling at all. However, we live in an age of deepening skepticism about traditional religions. I don't view this as necessarily problematic unless it leads to nihilism or leaves people so adrift that they suffer without some spiritual bearings. If that is the case then maybe alternative religious or spiritual metaphysics might be helpful.

[AshvinP]

I think I can understand why Bernardo took up the analogy of dissociation. It offers a readily available picture of the One mind becoming many. However, it breaks down very quickly when we consider his ontology of Mind-at-Large. In his ontology, M@L is undifferentiated. There is no association to be dissociated from.

Instead, here's an alternative analogy/metaphor that might be more apt. It references the second law of thermodynamics. The second law of thermodynamics states that in a closed system, the entropy of the system will never decrease. A rough-and-ready way to describe high entropy is a state of high disorder or low complexity. Such a state of high entropy looks random (no discernable pattern). Now, obviously, in the universe, there are low entropy states of high complexity. The brain is a remarkable example of this. However, for a state to become or maintain a low entropy state there must be an injection of heat (in thermodynamics) or information (information entropy).

So, instead of dissociation, one could think of low entropy states (high complexity) forming. Instead of a dissociative boundary, there would be an entropic boundary where complexity breaks down thus leading to the lack of information flow. The question then is what causes this formation of low entropy states? One option would be random chance. The other would be teleology.

To illustrate here's an image of the Go board:

So, how did this configuration come about? We could think of having a random vibration mechanism vibrating the board and over time this configuration came about. The other is obviously that the minds of players created this. To the unknowledgeable viewer, this board just looks random (no discernable pattern) appearing to be of high entropy(low complexity). (Here we can also think of the inference from a reductionist perspective in quantum mechanics where, from a very limited perspective, the sequence events doesn't seem to have a pattern). However, for those who understand the game, the pattern is very evident and is of low entropy (high complexity). In other words, though it may not be apparent from limited knowledge and perspective, there is a teleology at work. In this case, the low entropy(complexity) is created and maintained because information is constantly injected into the system.

In my view, this dynamic of entropy is part of what divine mentation is doing, thus a divine idealism. Instead of an undifferentiated M@L (with chance at work), there is (metaphorically speaking) a complex mind, the mind of God constantly and teleologically shaping the complexity we see.

However, another thing we can glean from entropy is that not just anything goes. There are constraints. If entropy decreases (more complexity) somewhere there must be an increase in entropy elsewhere. There is a holistic connectedness at work. This is similar to what the Born rule tells us about the probability distribution available for quantum events. In divine idealism, this means that God has made a commitment to a certain type of life (what I call a Divine Life). It is within that commitment that life proceeds where personal freedom, moral realism, meaning, and purpose occur.

What we describe here is nothing other than prayer in the true sense of the word. As said many times elsewhere, true prayer has nothing to do with asking for favors from some God who might or might not be there. The prayer we're talking about here is an actual spiritual exercise that sets our soul and spirit in motion. It's actually the most pleasant and one of the most effective exercises, although it requires a certain level of openness. When we concentrate our thinking and imagine that we're practically bathing in this lower entropy spiritual Sun Light, we can clearly ask it - it is living and intelligent - to flow into us, to vivify, resuscitate, enlighten, heal every fiber of our body, every thought, every feeling. We shouldn't be tense and expect that something should happen. Such expectations only paralyze us. I guess everyone here has had experience of the following sort. Remember when someone threw something, for example a ball, and yells "watch out, it's falling!"? I guess most of us go for a very strange reflex that we simply freeze in place, we dare not to look upwards, we simply stiffen our body and wait in terror. Well, this is how we look when we perform exercises like these and can't get rid of the tension of expectation, that something must happen any moment. This tension practically blocks the very thing that we want to allow enter in us. The thing that we expect won't come from above or below, from the back or the side. It won't come from any direction that the intellect can conceive. In olden times people still had proper feeling for the within. Today this is practically lost in geometrical abstractions. The intellect imagines that within comes from the geometric interior of the body. This has nothing to do with the actual facts. The within we're speaking about can't be grasped by the intellect because the intellect itself exists only as ripples on the higher order waves of this within. Many people have intuition about this but they go in the way of the person declaring "there's no way to have conscious experience of the lower entropy states of the within". This way exists and it is only up to us to investigate it. If the description of this exercise makes us feel very uncomfortable, vulnerable, exposed - we're on the right track. It is the direction of our subjective depths that very few are willing to explore. Yet it is precisely this that we must do. Not in order to be drowned in the swamps of our lower nature but in order to connect with the Sun and illuminate them with lower entropy cognition.

Cleric,

This is an amazing post all around, especially the above. It really illustrates the superficiality of modern rationalist attitude towards spirituality, as we find in thinkers such as Marx and Freud - spiritual tradition is "opiate of the masses" and "wish fulfillment" respectively. Yet, among other things, that rationalist explanation has no account for what is written above - why would our unconscious wishes cause us to create "fantasies" which are the most elusive and difficult for our normal cognition to grasp? Of course, there is also no account for how those traditions capture the most intuitive (what modern people now call "counter-intuitive", as everything is inverted) aspects of our experience, such as praying (or intellectual thinking) with expectation of effortless spiritual vision yielding paralyzing stiffness, but prayer with genuine devotional desire for our soul and spirit to be steadily and surely quickened by the Spirit always yielding fruit. No rationalisms, especially those of modern or 'post-modern' theology, can account.


Steve,

I really hope you can re-read Cleric's post without prejudice against "hierarchy" or anything else, and see how he took your metaphor and extended its own logic further as it naturally unfolds in every person's experience. Your initial reaction is exactly what Cleric wrote about here in that same post:


"One can say "It is not possible to experience knowingly anything of lower entropy than our thoughts!" But where this certainty comes from? For someone who knows these things from firsthand experience, any such statements sound like someone staring at the Go board and declaring "It's nonsense that there's some order in this board. You who speak of some order in the board are simply mistaking your own fantasies of some hoped for order in the board, for actual order". Well, any Go player knows that such a statement comes only from the person's own unwillingness to learn something about the game. In reality he wants to justify his own ignorance by declaring everyone else being delusional, so that he can rest blissfully without feeling the need to exert any effort."


Also, every worldview adopts hierarchical structures of one sort or another, as systematic thought cannot occur without them. Your blog is chock full of them. Here is a hierarchy you posited a few comments ago on this thread:


"My view is that everything from quarks to amoebas to humans and ETs is a mental creation, an imagined entity in the mind of God."


Finally, what you posted from Steiner are conclusions his spiritual scientific approach reached after transfiguring rigid intellectual thinking into higher cognition in the manner Cleric has been describing. Of course the conclusions by themselves will not be "compelling" if you remain confined to abstract intellect and skip over the entire reasoning process.

[Steve Petermann]

Judging from the comments of Cleric and Ashvin, I may have inadvertently created a misunderstanding with my Go game metaphor. I'm not suggesting that anyone has a privileged position over others to unambiguously recognize teleology. Ambiguity is part of life. As I mentioned about quantum mechanics we (all) have a limited perspective that may not recognize the holistic teleology at work. We can, however, recognize features in life that point to a teleological origin, and the more we learn and experience life, the more compelling teleology may become.

[AshvinP]

Judging from the comments of Cleric and Ashvin, I may have inadvertently created a misunderstanding with my Go game metaphor. I'm not suggesting that anyone has a privileged position over others to unambiguously recognize teleology. Ambiguity is part of life. As I mentioned about quantum mechanics we (all) have a limited perspective that may not recognize the holistic teleology at work. We can, however, recognize features in life that point to a teleological origin, and the more we learn and experience life, the more compelling teleology may become.

I just want to point out to anyone paying attention that this has happened quite a few times in the last week or two. Metaphors/analogies are created and then disavowed when their logic extends their insights beyond where the creator intended. It reminds me of Einstein who hated the fact that his equations predicted black holes, as he felt they were "messy" results that shouldn't exist, so he denied that aspect of his own equations. Of course later those predictions of the equations were proven correct. It's really no mystery to spiritual science why this happens - if the metaphor involves anything tied to concrete experience such as music, games, etc., i.e. anything which naturally evolves (which is actually every phenomenal experience), then it will be an image of our own spiritual Thinking activity and, therefore, the inner logic of the metaphor will naturally lead to the reality of higher cognition which can make sense of the lower-order (higher entropy) thinking processes which created the metaphor.

[Cleric K]

Tom Campbell also talks of a Divine telos being about lowering entropy, which is somehow connected to Love ...

Thanks, Shu. I intended to relate Love to the picture but it seems it has become lost in the keystroke linearization process.

It's worth noting that the view on entropy that Campbell describes is of quite different kind that what was elaborated here. TC's Big TOE is really an 'interesting' phenomenon. It's a fine example of the intellect going wild and practically building a sci-fi universe. The good thing is that TC doesn't claim it to be otherwise. Yet there are people who are fascinated by such ideas and make a following.

TC quickly skims over the idea that the Whole fragments into pieces, which then go on to explore the possibilities. This is once again the already well known Flat MAL paradigm. Pretty much everything is a kind of pan-psychism from where the universe begins to be built up entirely in bottom-up fashion. It's never ending increasing in complexity. This is practically the dream of the materialist too - our whole civilization builds upon layers after layers of complexity. The problem of course is that this complexity is of mechanical nature. Everyone today shudders at the thought what will happen if the electric grid or global communications fail. The whole edifice of modern civilization is resting upon fragile foundations.

TC's view builds in the same spirit, of course with the notion that we should do that out of Love and not fear. But there are many kinds of Love. The cat eats the mouse out of Love too. So the whole philosophy that everything will be fine as long as we support each other and everyone is free to pursue their desires, completely crumbles when it faces reality. Social conflict issues precisely when everyone wants to pursue their unquestioned desires. As soon as these desires clash, a sacrifice has to be made but who will be the first to make the step? These are things of basic human psychology that people simply don't want to look into for the simplest reason that they don't want to question the nature of their own desires, opinions, views, etc. That's why the solution is always projected outwards - "only if science discovers cure for cancer ...", "only if everyone would live out of Love and not out of fear ...", "Only if everyone would abandon the ego and live in the uncreated nothingness ...". The last thing we want is to consider the possibility that it is our own being that must be transformed, and not seek social and spiritual systems that hopefully organize life in such a way that we can exercise our whims unhindered.

The complexity of the Natural world is already there. Is there reason to look further than the human brain, the most marvelous structure known? It doesn't make sense to hijack this already existing reality and keep convoluting it into more and more complex relations and call that 'lowering the entropy'. Any complex biological energetic process on Earth can be traced back to the Sun - it is Solar energy that supports the entropic gradient. When we trace this process we can follow how low entropy energy travels through space, enters the Earth atmosphere, interacts with chlorophyll, propels the whole biological world and so on. This is in purely physical sense. It is similar in spiritual sense, where instead of tracing the abstract concept of energy, we trace the processes in the Divine Mind, which become increasingly convoluted (higher entropy) and ultimately lead to our current state, where we're facing impossible complexity. Lowering our entropy is the actual fully conscious transformation of our being such that, just as we normally live with our own thoughts, so we live in higher order Cosmic Thoughts, which are that actual causal factors behind the dissipated higher entropy states. It is quite clear that TC doesn't speak of that. Everything that we speak of here is completely collapsed and lost between the 'Consciousness broke down to pieces, so that it can interact with itself'. There's absolutely nothing between Consciousness and the 'piece'. Everything that exists is the build up of 'information' into more and more complex relations. This is also why people feel comfortable with the 'instinctive MAL' paradigm - it's a very convenient upgrade of materialism, we again build up the World order from the bottom-up, except that we do that from pieces that have inherent capacity of consciousness.

If we understand entropy in the way physics finds it, then we reckon that there isn't 'absolutely nothing' between Consciousness and the piece but in fact everything is there. Then lowering entropy is not further increase of complexity (even though it is hoped that would bring greater harmony between the pieces) but the actual conscious penetration into the living processes that are already responsible for the complex picture we observe on the natural sensory surface.

When things are seen in this way, Love also enters most naturally into the picture. Not as the Pollyanna vision that 'only if everyone was good to each other, we would be able to fulfill our deepest whishes unhindered' but as the Love for something greater, which is our true essence, yet it far outgrows our narrow personal interests (which can only arise because of an incomplete view). In this Love we realize that we must sacrifice precisely our egoistic desires that perpetuate the soul frictions which ultimately dissipates consciousness as 'heat' and lead us into high entropy state where we can no longer make any sense of the World Content except for a closed handful of ideas that revolve around the biography of our bodily self.

[Cleric K]

Judging from the comments of Cleric and Ashvin, I may have inadvertently created a misunderstanding with my Go game metaphor. I'm not suggesting that anyone has a privileged position over others to unambiguously recognize teleology. Ambiguity is part of life. As I mentioned about quantum mechanics we (all) have a limited perspective that may not recognize the holistic teleology at work. We can, however, recognize features in life that point to a teleological origin, and the more we learn and experience life, the more compelling teleology may become.

I don't have anything else to add than what Ashvin already pointed out.

I still find it odd, though, that hierarchies smell of elitism to you. The table with spiritual beings that you referenced is nothing else but a higher resolution version of your own Venn diagrams. So it's not really about hierarchies but about the insistence that any such higher resolution view can not possibly be attained to (because we are by definition a bubble of consciousness completely opaque to the Divine Consciousness). Since any possibility for higher order consciousness living in the same spiritual space as the Divine and concentric to it, is dismissed out of hand, the only possibility left is to declare any such higher resolution views derived from careful investigation of the higher realms, to be nothing but power structures (another kind of Church) forced upon humans for their enslavement.

So before even addressing these higher resolution diagrams, one must examine himself and be clear: what is it in me that resist the idea of consciousness growing into the Divine? Whose interests I'm really protecting by fiercely maintaining the rigid walls of my personal consciousness?

[Soul_of_Shu]

Tom Campbell also talks of a Divine telos being about lowering entropy, which is somehow connected to Love ...

TC quickly skims over the idea that the Whole fragments into pieces, which then go on to explore the possibilities. This is once again the already well known Flat MAL paradigm. Pretty much everything is a kind of pan-psychism from where the universe begins to be built up entirely in bottom-up fashion. It's never ending increasing in complexity. This is practically the dream of the materialist too - our whole civilization builds upon layers after layers of complexity. The problem of course is that this complexity is of mechanical nature. Everyone today shudders at the thought what will happen if the electric grid or global communications fail. The whole edifice of modern civilization is resting upon fragile foundations.

Yeah, while TC's VR game/avatar model no doubt has its appeal in this cyber-age, it's not one that has greatly appealed to these sensibilities. Likewise with the notion of a 'Larger Consciousness System' fragmenting into 'Individuated Units of Consciousness'. Guess I'm more intrigued by the One Mind having one never-ending blast of a masquerade party which all of its idea constructions are compelled to attend ... including this One.

[Steve Petermann]

Guess I'm more intrigued by the One Mind having one never-ending blast of a masquerade party which all of its idea constructions are compelled to attend ... including this One.

This might be akin to a D&D tabletop (my son has been a dungeon master for years). What I saw was the fun and interest of participants enjoying taking on a different persona and interacting with others from that perspective. Exploring their role and embracing uncertainty seemed to be the appeal, as well as the allure of the imagination.

[Soul_of_Shu]

This might be akin to a D&D tabletop (my son has been a dungeon master for years). What I saw was the fun and interest of participants enjoying taking on a different persona and interacting with others from that perspective. Exploring their role and embracing uncertainty seemed to be the appeal, as well as the allure of the imagination.

For whatever unknown reason I was never much into board games, pretty much loathing Monopoly, but had D&D been around in my wayward youth, it might have drawn me into its allure.