Criticism

[AshvinP]

Anyway, the key questions I want you to ask you at this point, and would appreciate a reply to, are as follows - are you aware that when you write reasoned conclusions about "energy", "esthetic knowledge", etc. that you are, in fact, thinking, even if you normally don't pay attention to that activity while you are engaged in it? Do you acknowledge that the thinking voice in your head is always present in these situations? For ex., when you say "energy is more fundamental than consciousness", or "reason and rationality evolved for a different purpose than aesthetic knowledge", does "energy" or "aesthetic knowledge" relay this conclusion directly through your speech-organ, or is it that thinking voice in your head which arrives to it first? Thanks.

Just so it's clear this isn't a 'trick question', but really at the heart of this entire discussion, as is so often the case in modern philosophical debates, I will provide a helpful quote:

The reason why it is impossible to observe thinking in the actual moment of its occurrence, is the very one which makes it possible for us to know it more immediately and more intimately than any other process in the world. Just because it is our own creation do we know the characteristic features of its course, the manner in which the process takes place. What in all other spheres of observation can be found only indirectly, namely, the relevant context and the relationship between the individual objects, is, in the case of thinking, known to us in an absolutely direct way. I do not on the face of it know why, for my observation, thunder follows lightning; but I know directly, from the very content of the two concepts, why my thinking connects the concept of thunder with the concept of lightning. It does not matter in the least whether I have the right concepts of lightning and thunder. The connection between those concepts that I do have is clear to me, and this through the very concepts themselves.

This transparent clearness concerning our thinking process is quite independent of our knowledge of the physiological basis of thinking. Here I am speaking of thinking in so far as we know it from the observation of our own spiritual activity. How one material process in my brain causes or influences another while I am carrying out a thinking operation, is quite irrelevant. What I observe about thinking is not what process in my brain connects the concept lightning with the concept thunder but what causes me to bring the two concepts into a particular relationship. My observation shows me that in linking one thought with another there is nothing to guide me but the content of my thoughts; I am not guided by any material processes in my brain. In a less materialistic age than our own, this remark would of course be entirely superfluous. Today, however, when there are people who believe that once we know what matter is we shall also know how it thinks, we do have to insist that one may talk about thinking without trespassing on the domain of brain physiology.

[JeffreyW]

Of course, you are quite right it’s reductionist. My preferred approach is a non-reductionist acknowledgment that we can’t even know if there is an “ontological primitive”, let alone say what it is. But Kastrup explicitly makes his argument as a reductionist, for which I have played clips in both my videos, and here I address it within his metaphysical framework as a “what if” to show that even in his reductionism we can show energy to be more fundamental than consciousness.

Kastrup's philosophy is definitely a version of reductionist metaphysics, no question about that.

But if we take your approach, how can then we claim that the "Being" is the "ontological primitive" or at least something that everything else emerges or "springs" form?

My view according to the non-reductionist approach would rather be that "Being" is simply an obvious aspect or quality of every possible thing in the world: every thing "is", it exists, and so has a quality of "being-ness". And this is all we can say about it. To claim that such being-ness quality is fundamental to everything else and all things emerge from the Being is already a reductionist step. And if we further make a stronger claim that there is nothing from which the Being itself emerges (no other "turtle underneath"), then we arrive at a definite "ontological primitive", the very conclusion you were trying to avoid.

This is an excellent question which puts me in the position of giving an objective answer to a a situation that defies objectivism, but I will try it. The only thing that does apply to everything is that it exists, therefore Being. The question then becomes the nature of this Being, which we can only explore through our connection to and experience of existing things that are presented to us. Here is the key: To remain firmly bound to this experience of thing as far as it is presented, and not speak of what remains concealed. And, it is an exploration in experience, not a process of definition.

[JeffreyW]

Anyway, the key questions I want you to ask you at this point, and would appreciate a reply to, are as follows - are you aware that when you write reasoned conclusions about "energy", "esthetic knowledge", etc. that you are, in fact, thinking, even if you normally don't pay attention to that activity while you are engaged in it? Do you acknowledge that the thinking voice in your head is always present in these situations? For ex., when you say "energy is more fundamental than consciousness", or "reason and rationality evolved for a different purpose than aesthetic knowledge", does "energy" or "aesthetic knowledge" relay this conclusion directly through your speech-organ, or is it that thinking voice in your head which arrives to it first? Thanks.

Just so it's clear this isn't a 'trick question', but really at the heart of this entire discussion, as is so often the case in modern philosophical debates, I will provide a helpful quote:

The reason why it is impossible to observe thinking in the actual moment of its occurrence, is the very one which makes it possible for us to know it more immediately and more intimately than any other process in the world. Just because it is our own creation do we know the characteristic features of its course, the manner in which the process takes place. What in all other spheres of observation can be found only indirectly, namely, the relevant context and the relationship between the individual objects, is, in the case of thinking, known to us in an absolutely direct way. I do not on the face of it know why, for my observation, thunder follows lightning; but I know directly, from the very content of the two concepts, why my thinking connects the concept of thunder with the concept of lightning. It does not matter in the least whether I have the right concepts of lightning and thunder. The connection between those concepts that I do have is clear to me, and this through the very concepts themselves.

This transparent clearness concerning our thinking process is quite independent of our knowledge of the physiological basis of thinking. Here I am speaking of thinking in so far as we know it from the observation of our own spiritual activity. How one material process in my brain causes or influences another while I am carrying out a thinking operation, is quite irrelevant. What I observe about thinking is not what process in my brain connects the concept lightning with the concept thunder but what causes me to bring the two concepts into a particular relationship. My observation shows me that in linking one thought with another there is nothing to guide me but the content of my thoughts; I am not guided by any material processes in my brain. In a less materialistic age than our own, this remark would of course be entirely superfluous. Today, however, when there are people who believe that once we know what matter is we shall also know how it thinks, we do have to insist that one may talk about thinking without trespassing on the domain of brain physiology.

This looks like another misunderstanding of my approach. I never deny thinking in the question of Being, but rather the type of thought. We can think practically in reasoned reduction and objectification, or we can think poetically on what we encounter. Both are modes of thought. I also pointed out before that all of us, me included, are staying firmly in the rational reductionist mode here, not poetic thinking, which would be an entirely different sort of discourse.

[AshvinP]

Anyway, the key questions I want you to ask you at this point, and would appreciate a reply to, are as follows - are you aware that when you write reasoned conclusions about "energy", "esthetic knowledge", etc. that you are, in fact, thinking, even if you normally don't pay attention to that activity while you are engaged in it? Do you acknowledge that the thinking voice in your head is always present in these situations? For ex., when you say "energy is more fundamental than consciousness", or "reason and rationality evolved for a different purpose than aesthetic knowledge", does "energy" or "aesthetic knowledge" relay this conclusion directly through your speech-organ, or is it that thinking voice in your head which arrives to it first? Thanks.

Just so it's clear this isn't a 'trick question', but really at the heart of this entire discussion, as is so often the case in modern philosophical debates, I will provide a helpful quote:

The reason why it is impossible to observe thinking in the actual moment of its occurrence, is the very one which makes it possible for us to know it more immediately and more intimately than any other process in the world. Just because it is our own creation do we know the characteristic features of its course, the manner in which the process takes place. What in all other spheres of observation can be found only indirectly, namely, the relevant context and the relationship between the individual objects, is, in the case of thinking, known to us in an absolutely direct way. I do not on the face of it know why, for my observation, thunder follows lightning; but I know directly, from the very content of the two concepts, why my thinking connects the concept of thunder with the concept of lightning. It does not matter in the least whether I have the right concepts of lightning and thunder. The connection between those concepts that I do have is clear to me, and this through the very concepts themselves.

This transparent clearness concerning our thinking process is quite independent of our knowledge of the physiological basis of thinking. Here I am speaking of thinking in so far as we know it from the observation of our own spiritual activity. How one material process in my brain causes or influences another while I am carrying out a thinking operation, is quite irrelevant. What I observe about thinking is not what process in my brain connects the concept lightning with the concept thunder but what causes me to bring the two concepts into a particular relationship. My observation shows me that in linking one thought with another there is nothing to guide me but the content of my thoughts; I am not guided by any material processes in my brain. In a less materialistic age than our own, this remark would of course be entirely superfluous. Today, however, when there are people who believe that once we know what matter is we shall also know how it thinks, we do have to insist that one may talk about thinking without trespassing on the domain of brain physiology.

This looks like another misunderstanding of my approach. I never deny thinking in the question of Being, but rather the type of thought. We can think practically in reasoned reduction and objectification, or we can think poetically on what we encounter. Both are modes of thought. I also pointed out before that all of us, me included, are staying firmly in the rational reductionist mode here, not poetic thinking, which would be an entirely different sort of discourse.

I understand - there are two fundamentally different modes of "knowing" for you, rational reductionist (which includes all logical reasoning) and poetic. We have come across this dual "knowing" argument many times on the forum. In my experience, this has always been due to holding "thinking" and "knowing" as abstract concepts, rather than concrete and immanent reality. It is the reduction of Thinking activity as such into only the thought-forms, which then appears as a dualism of "knowing" when considering how different abstract representational thoughts seem from imaginative thoughts. My own view is reflected in this quote from Emerson:


"Space, time, society, labor, climate, food, locomotion, the animals, the mechanical forces, give us sincerest lessons, day by day, whose meaning is unlimited. They educate both the Understanding [abstract intellect] and the Reason. Every property of matter is a school for the understanding,— its solidity or resistance, its inertia, its extension, its figure, its divisibility. The understanding adds, divides, combines, measures, and finds nutriment and room for its activity in this worthy scene. Meantime, Reason transfers all these lessons into its own world of thought, by perceiving the analogy that marries Matter and Mind."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature (1836)


I am curious about your view on the details of how this came about. Do you hold there was right hemisphere originally and then left hemisphere evolved some millions years ago in various non-human animals? Or is it simply impossible to know how the the RB-LB evolved?

[Eugene I]

This is an excellent question which puts me in the position of giving an objective answer to a a situation that defies objectivism, but I will try it. The only thing that does apply to everything is that it exists, therefore Being. The question then becomes the nature of this Being, which we can only explore through our connection to and experience of existing things that are presented to us. Here is the key: To remain firmly bound to this experience of thing as far as it is presented, and not speak of what remains concealed. And, it is an exploration in experience, not a process of definition.

Right, I agree. But now, let's try to stay consistent with your approach. If we firmly bind to to this experience of things, then, in addition to being-ness, there is another obvious quality of each such experience - each of them are known, experienced. Based on that approach, we have no ground to claim or assume that there are "things" in the world that are not experienced. On the other hand, we similarly can not conclude that such non-experienced things do not exist. We simply do not know, unless we adopt a certain assumption (whether non-experienced things exist or not).

Another thing to point is that in your statement " experience of thing as far as it is presented" there is an implicit assumption here: there is an experience and there is a "thing presented" to the experience. However, if we remain true to your experiential approach, we can not even conclude that there exist any "things" that are "presented" to our experience but exist independently of our experience of them. That would be another unwarranted assumption. Of course, we can not also assume otherwise and claim that such things (that exist independently of our experience of them) do not actually exist, that would be another unwarranted assumption. Again, as above, we do not know.

So, if we are to remain true to the anti-metaphysical approach, we can not make any definite claims whether non-experienced things or things existing independently of our experience of them do or do not exist.

Now, idealism does take sides in this question and does adopt an assumption that such non-experienced things existing independently of our experience of them actually do not exist. In other words, it claims that the only kind of things that exist are the things that are 1-st person experienced and such things do not exist independent of their 1-st person experience. And from our experience we know that such things definitely exist - these are the phenomena of our direct experience that we experience every moment and there can be no doubt about it. In other words, according to such assumption, every existing thing, in addition to Being-ness, has also a quality of Experience-ness. In that sense idealism is definitely a variant of metaphysics, or a religion if you want to call it that way, no question about that.

[JeffreyW]

Just so it's clear this isn't a 'trick question', but really at the heart of this entire discussion, as is so often the case in modern philosophical debates, I will provide a helpful quote:

This looks like another misunderstanding of my approach. I never deny thinking in the question of Being, but rather the type of thought. We can think practically in reasoned reduction and objectification, or we can think poetically on what we encounter. Both are modes of thought. I also pointed out before that all of us, me included, are staying firmly in the rational reductionist mode here, not poetic thinking, which would be an entirely different sort of discourse.

I understand - there are two fundamentally different modes of "knowing" for you, rational reductionist (which includes all logical reasoning) and poetic. We have come across this dual "knowing" argument many times on the forum. In my experience, this has always been due to holding "thinking" and "knowing" as abstract concepts, rather than concrete and immanent reality. It is the reduction of Thinking activity as such into only the thought-forms, which then appears as a dualism of "knowing" when considering how different abstract representational thoughts seem from imaginative thoughts. My own view is reflected in this quote from Emerson:


"Space, time, society, labor, climate, food, locomotion, the animals, the mechanical forces, give us sincerest lessons, day by day, whose meaning is unlimited. They educate both the Understanding [abstract intellect] and the Reason. Every property of matter is a school for the understanding,— its solidity or resistance, its inertia, its extension, its figure, its divisibility. The understanding adds, divides, combines, measures, and finds nutriment and room for its activity in this worthy scene. Meantime, Reason transfers all these lessons into its own world of thought, by perceiving the analogy that marries Matter and Mind."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature (1836)


I am curious about your view on the details of how this came about. Do you hold there was right hemisphere originally and then left hemisphere evolved some millions years ago in various non-human animals? Or is it simply impossible to know how the the RB-LB evolved?

Before I can go further, there is another little twist that I need to straighten. I was not referring to any distinction between knowing and thinking, I was strictly talking about poetic thought and representational thought. Perhaps you think of these as abstract concepts, but you need not do so, and I don’t. I know these both immediately through constant use.

[AshvinP]

Before I can go further, there is another little twist that I need to straighten. I was not referring to any distinction between knowing and thinking, I was strictly talking about poetic thought and representational thought. Perhaps you think of these as abstract concepts, but you need not do so, and I don’t. I know these both immediately through constant use.

Right. Then you conclude one mode of thought (representational) is dedicated to knowing quantitative spatio-temporal abstractions and one mode (poetic) is dedicated to knowing Being, and there is little or perhaps no overlap between their spheres of knowing. Am I am following that correctly?

If so, the question is, how do you suspect these two modes of knowing came about via evolutionary process?

[JeffreyW]

This is an excellent question which puts me in the position of giving an objective answer to a a situation that defies objectivism, but I will try it. The only thing that does apply to everything is that it exists, therefore Being. The question then becomes the nature of this Being, which we can only explore through our connection to and experience of existing things that are presented to us. Here is the key: To remain firmly bound to this experience of thing as far as it is presented, and not speak of what remains concealed. And, it is an exploration in experience, not a process of definition.

Right, I agree. But now, let's try to stay consistent with your approach. If we firmly bind to to this experience of things, then, in addition to being-ness, there is another obvious quality of each such experience - each of them are known, experienced. Based on that approach, we have no ground to claim or assume that there are "things" in the world that are not experienced. On the other hand, we similarly can not conclude that such non-experienced things do not exist. We simply do not know, unless we adopt a certain assumption (whether non-experienced things exist or not).

Another thing to point is that in your statement " experience of thing as far as it is presented" there is an implicit assumption here: there is an experience and there is a "thing presented" to the experience. However, if we remain true to your experiential approach, we can not even conclude that there exist any "things" that are "presented" to our experience but exist independently of our experience of them. That would be another unwarranted assumption. Of course, we can not also assume otherwise and claim that such things (that exist independently of our experience of them) do not actually exist, that would be another unwarranted assumption. Again, as above, we do not know.

So, if we are to remain true to the anti-metaphysical approach, we can not make any definite claims whether non-experienced things or things existing independently of our experience of them do or do not exist.

Now, idealism does take sides in this question and does adopt an assumption that such non-experienced things existing independently of our experience of them actually do not exist. In other words, it claims that the only kind of things that exist are the things that are 1-st person experienced and such things do not exist independent of their 1-st person experience. And from our experience we know that such things definitely exist - these are the phenomena of our direct experience that we experience every moment and there can be no doubt about it. In other words, according to such assumption, every existing thing, in addition to Being-ness, has also a quality of Experience-ness. In that sense idealism is definitely a variant of metaphysics, or a religion if you want to call it that way, no question about that.

There are some fine points that need to be established here, which may take a few turns. This first is important: Being is not a quality, but the very truth of existence. Being, as the ground of existence, cannot be a quality of something else, and as such cannot be compared to experience. There is nothing else for Being to be a quality of. I suspect we will be returning to this several times.

In our basic experience we encounter things, and the perpetual appearance of new things lets us know there are many things we have yet to encounter. To stray from this basis of experience, such as to suggest these aren’t things or they only exist when we observe them is the metaphysical speculation that arises from straying from experience.

[JeffreyW]

Before I can go further, there is another little twist that I need to straighten. I was not referring to any distinction between knowing and thinking, I was strictly talking about poetic thought and representational thought. Perhaps you think of these as abstract concepts, but you need not do so, and I don’t. I know these both immediately through constant use.

Right. Then you conclude one mode of thought (representational) is dedicated to knowing quantitative spatio-temporal abstractions and one mode (poetic) is dedicated to knowing Being, and there is little or perhaps no overlap between their spheres of knowing. Am I am following that correctly?

If so, the question is, how do you suspect these two modes of knowing came about via evolutionary process?

I wouldn’t rule out the possibility of some overlap, in fact rational thought often is an abstraction from poetic thought.
The general understanding I have of evolution is that esthetic thought is primordial, and yet today still our primary relation to the world. We are primarily feeling beings, as are all animals. Sometime late in hominid development on the Savanna, we developed enlarged frontal cortexes and the ability to produce icon-like representations and reason in order to predict and manipulate. Anil Seth is very good at explaining this.

[AshvinP]

Before I can go further, there is another little twist that I need to straighten. I was not referring to any distinction between knowing and thinking, I was strictly talking about poetic thought and representational thought. Perhaps you think of these as abstract concepts, but you need not do so, and I don’t. I know these both immediately through constant use.

Right. Then you conclude one mode of thought (representational) is dedicated to knowing quantitative spatio-temporal abstractions and one mode (poetic) is dedicated to knowing Being, and there is little or perhaps no overlap between their spheres of knowing. Am I am following that correctly?

If so, the question is, how do you suspect these two modes of knowing came about via evolutionary process?

I wouldn’t rule out the possibility of some overlap, in fact rational thought often is an abstraction from poetic thought.
The general understanding I have of evolution is that esthetic thought is primordial, and yet today still our primary relation to the world. We are primarily feeling beings, as are all animals. Sometime late in hominid development on the Savanna, we developed enlarged frontal cortexes and the ability to produce icon-like representations and reason in order to predict and manipulate. Anil Seth is very good at explaining this.

I am pretty confused now from the bold. Let's take a concrete example:

So can we say the LB abstract representational thinking (I assume you associate this with 'left brain' activity as I do) really manifested in its fullness in ancient Greek thinking (and elsewhere but we have the most evidence from Greco-Roman culture), and then went to a whole new level of dominance over RB poetic thought in the 15-16th centuries, i.e. there was deep continuity of Thinking throughout those epochs leading into ancient Greece and eventually into Western Europe? Put another way, was that the result of an inner evolutionary logic which was 'destined' to proceed in the way it did, or can we chalk it up to a complete 'accident' that we can't seem to ever 'undo' anytime soon?

The main issue I think we need to settle is whether one can 'retrace' abstract representational thought to poetic thought via Reason.