Criticism

[JeffreyW]

And so we turn to those who have been on this journey all along, letting their direct experience sing through them to presence Itself in our midst, should we let it - the poets, artists, and musicians. It is within their presented experience that we can poetically explore it ourselves.

But you are ignoring a whole bunch of poets and artists who, alhough bring considered excellent at their craft, flatly disagree with your position. Goethe, Coleridge, Emerson, Wagner, are just a couple who wrote at length about how Reason can bring us to the threshold of an entirely new, conscious mode of Imaginative cognition. I already explained the reason why you are ignoring them. You have no motivation to look at their arguments because you already foreclosed on the possibility they have knoweldge of Being to impart.

I am indeed. It isn’t I who is refusing to look at those arguments. That was my starting point decades ago. I outgrew them.

[AshvinP]

I am indeed. It isn’t I who is refusing to look at those arguments. That was my starting point decades ago. I outgrew them.

If that were true, then you would be able to summarize their arguments and/or provide counter-arguments. Instead, when I brought up the arguments here, you responded as if you have never heard of them before, and you don't provide any serious counter-arguments. For ex, Goethe's epistemology:

Without the influence of that dualism, we can perceive how what we bring to the outer appearances from within in the form of concepts belongs to those appearances as much as their color, shape, size, etc., which we call sense-perceptions ("percepts").

3. I vaguely see your point, but of course completely disagree. I should clarify that I resolutely do not see representations as totally created in the mind, but conditioned by the energy impeding our senses, with its own character. We perceive blue, for example, only in response to a narrow band of of the electro-magnetic spectrum, although this blue does not exist outside our subjective sensation. There is a formal and mathematical correspondence between our conceived objects and what they represent. But these remain superficial and reductive for their intended practical purpose

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If you had ever considered Goethe's philosophical-scientific writings carefully and remembered them, or Schiller's for that matter (On the Aesthetic Education of Man) you would not only "vaguely" see my point. And this is the most important point of all the points... the one which prevents you from seriously considering Reason as a means to explore Being. It is what leads you to speculate about "energy impeding our senses" as some fixed feature of Reality, which is a hyper-abstract concept, and also to posit "in the mind", which is already dualism. Steiner predicted your sentiment about "blue" in 1916:

At present the physicists only talk about there being nothing outside us but vibrations, and that it is these that, for example, bring about red in us. What the physicists dream of today will come true. At present they only dream of it, but it will then be true. People will... "know" that all those things are caused by their own organism. They will consider it a superstition that there are colors outside that tint objects. The outer world will be grey in grey and human beings will be conscious of the fact that they themselves put the colors into the world... People who then see only the outer reality will say to the others who still see colors in their full freshness, “Oh, you dreamers! Do you really believe there are colors outside in nature? You do not know that you are only dreaming inside yourself that nature has these colors.” Outer nature will become more and more a matter of mathematics and geometry. ... People in the future will not believe that the capacity to see colors in the outer world has any objective significance; they will ascribe it purely to subjectivity.
- Rudolf Steiner, Necessity and Freedom (1916)

I was hoping you were serious in one of your initial comments about not being beholden to the influences which keep BK from reconsidering his life's work (or even a small portion of his life's work), but I suppose that was really naive of me.

[AshvinP]

Are you aware of what occurs during your deep dreamless sleep?

I may be an unusually active dreamer, but my experience is of non-stop dreaming. Only in retrospect can I surmise that deep dreamless sleep must have happened between one dream and another. But even if in such a state, what is aware of a thunderstorm, for example, that awakens one from it?

Exactly. Whatever we know of this deep dreamless state which occurs every day, it is only through Thinking. We don't immediately know anything about "what is aware of a thunderstorm" until we first awaken and reason through our experiences and lack of experiences. It is quite possible that one's consciousness is totally extinguished every night for some time and comes back at some other time. It is only when we start factoring in other experiences by way of Thinking that we arrive at the conclusion that this speculation is preposterous and hardly a reasonable possibility. If one fails to internalize this logic, then it will seem as if there are other aspects of "direct knowing" which weave our localized perspectives into Being as such, and that is at the root of at least half of all nihilism of the modern age. That half which assumes it has more knowledge of Being than it actually does and therefore finds little reason for any rigorous logical reasoning through experience.

[AshvinP]

Are you aware of what occurs during your deep dreamless sleep?

- I had an experience of lucid dreamless sleep where there was absolutely nothing and no conscious activity whatsoever, yet it was experienced (="awared") and registered in the memory.
- There may be two reasons why we have no memories of dreamless sleep: it can be that the awareness is indeed absent in such state, or it can be that the awareness is present but the state is not registered in the memory. But there is no way to tell which one is true. And this is because:
- It is in principle not possible to experience a state of the absence of awareness. Therefore it is in principle not possible to experimentally prove from the 1-st person experiential perspective that such state ever exists. We have no capacity to be aware of non-experienced phenomena/meanings/ideas, therefor we have no way to experientiailly prove that such things exist.

This is the problem I keep trying to point to - you have gone from "I have no memories of dreamless sleep" to "it is in principle not possible experimentally prove from the 1-st person experiential perspective that such state ever exists". You, BK, and JW are all making the exact same leap from what is true of your current state of localized cognition, to declarations about the structure of Reality itself. And, according to basic human psychology, the person who has set up this dualism never has any reason to keep asking questions and seeking answers about what can be known in the deep dreamless sleep, because they have declared it "not possible in principle". BK does the exact same thing and so is JW with his "energy which impedes the senses" abstraction. Ironically, JW's appropriate consistency when it comes to avoiding metaphysical assumptions leads him directly into modern materialistic science's abyss of "emptiness of emptiness"... everything in objective Reality is grey on grey without color. Why? Because he is still beholden to the same metaphysical assumption as BK and yourself - Kantian dualism.

You said above that it is impossible to separate any meaning and its awareness (including the meaning of awareness itself), and that is true and can be verified by introspective meditation. But that simply means that they are experientially inseparable and we have no ground to assume that awareness can exist without meanings, as well as to assume that any meanings can exist without awareness.

The real question is, are they only inseperable or also identical? If we were referring to willing and feeling activities, then I think there is logical warrant to make distinctions between those and thinking. But I see no such warrant for "awareness" and thinking.

[Soul_of_Shu]

The difference is we experience non-aware Being every day. We do not experience consciousness outside living beings.

Quite provisional and relative, having known the gaze of non-local awareness outside this corporeal form as it lay cadaver-like on a bed.

[Soul_of_Shu]

Perhaps as good a place as any to plunk this in for critique/commentary, the world according to panspiritism

[Eugene I]

This is the problem I keep trying to point to - you have gone from "I have no memories of dreamless sleep" to "it is in principle not possible experimentally prove from the 1-st person experiential perspective that such state ever exists". You, BK, and JW are all making the exact same leap from what is true of your current state of localized cognition, to declarations about the structure of Reality itself. And, according to basic human psychology, the person who has set up this dualism never has any reason to keep asking questions and seeking answers about what can be known in the deep dreamless sleep, because they have declared it "not possible in principle". BK does the exact same thing and so is JW with his "energy which impedes the senses" abstraction. Ironically, JW's appropriate consistency when it comes to avoiding metaphysical assumptions leads him directly into modern materialistic science's abyss of "emptiness of emptiness"... everything in objective Reality is grey on grey without color. Why? Because he is still beholden to the same metaphysical assumption as BK and yourself - Kantian dualism.

"Unaware Idea" or "unaware Being" are as much abstraction and Kantian divide as "energy which impedes the senses" abstraction. By stating that the structure of reality is something that cannot be experienced in our 1-st person perspective experience (which means that it is experientially unknowable) is the same Kantian divide. The only way to avoid Kantian divide is to infer that reality fundamentally structured in exactly the same way we experience it from our 1-st person perspective. This does not mean that there may not be more deeper/higher level structures and beings, it only means that all of them are of the same essence - of the essence of conscious (aware) 1-st person experience, and therefore in principle (or in the future) knowable to us in our 1-st person experience (which closes the Kantian divide). But in such case there would be no such thing or state as "the absence of awareness", because such state is in principle impossible to experience form the 1-st person perspective.

But if you claim that it is possible to know a state of the absence of awareness (i.e. experiencing a state of the absence of experiencing), please explain how would that be in principle possible (without resorting to abstractions). That statement (a possibility of experiencing a state of the absence of experiencing) would be incompatible with Reason.

You said above that it is impossible to separate any meaning and its awareness (including the meaning of awareness itself), and that is true and can be verified by introspective meditation. But that simply means that they are experientially inseparable and we have no ground to assume that awareness can exist without meanings, as well as to assume that any meanings can exist without awareness.

The real question is, are they only inseperable or also identical? If we were referring to willing and feeling activities, then I think there is logical warrant to make distinctions between those and thinking. But I see no such warrant for "awareness" and thinking.

Sure, but the same applies to the identity of meanings and experiences - they are inseparable, but that does not mean that they are identical. Their identity can only be an inference.

Basically, in our 1-st person experience meanings and awareness are inseparable, that's the experiential fact, but it does not tell us anything more than that. From here we can take a few (metaphysical) inferences:
1. They are inseparable because they are identical and are simply aspects of the same "entity"
2. They are only experienced simultaneously, but fundamentally separate and different essences. This would be a substance dualism ontology which is subject to interaction problem.
3. They are always experienced simultaneously, but one of them is emergent from the other. We now have two options:
3.1. Awareness is emergent from Meaning/Idea
3.1. Meaning/Idea is emergent from Awareness.

In 2.1 case we would be running into the "hard problem of consciousness", so not acceptable. Which means that we are left with only two options:
1. Awareness=Idea, or self-aware Idea
3.1Idea is emergent from Awareness.
Pick your favorite.

[AshvinP]

This is the problem I keep trying to point to - you have gone from "I have no memories of dreamless sleep" to "it is in principle not possible experimentally prove from the 1-st person experiential perspective that such state ever exists". You, BK, and JW are all making the exact same leap from what is true of your current state of localized cognition, to declarations about the structure of Reality itself. And, according to basic human psychology, the person who has set up this dualism never has any reason to keep asking questions and seeking answers about what can be known in the deep dreamless sleep, because they have declared it "not possible in principle". BK does the exact same thing and so is JW with his "energy which impedes the senses" abstraction. Ironically, JW's appropriate consistency when it comes to avoiding metaphysical assumptions leads him directly into modern materialistic science's abyss of "emptiness of emptiness"... everything in objective Reality is grey on grey without color. Why? Because he is still beholden to the same metaphysical assumption as BK and yourself - Kantian dualism.

"Unaware Idea" or "unaware Being" are as much abstraction and Kantian divide as "energy which impedes the senses" abstraction.

But if you claim that it is possible to know a state of the absence of awareness (i.e. experiencing a state of the absence of experiencing), please explain how would that be in principle possible (without resorting to abstractions). That statement (a possibility of experiencing a state of the absence of experiencing) would be incompatible with Reason.

I am not positing any of those experiential states from the outset. That is what you guys are doing, and I am trying to point it out, because doing that leads to an implicit dualism from the very beginning of one's reasoning process (JW assumes he is not doing this, but he is, while you seem to think it's not that big of a deal to posit "awareness" and "thinking" as two modes of Being from the outset). We must first begin with what we actually know from the givens, and that is the Idea (meaning) we find manifested in our immanent experience through our own concrete activity (Thinking).

Basically, in our 1-st person experience meanings and awareness are inseparable, that's the experiential fact, but it does not tell us anything more than that. From here we can take a few (metaphysical) inferences:
1. They are inseparable because they are identical and are simply aspects of the same "entity"
2. They are only experienced simultaneously, but fundamentally separate and different essences. This would be a substance dualism ontology which is subject to interaction problem.
3. They are always experienced simultaneously, but one of them is emergent from the other. We now have two options:
3.1. Awareness is emergent from Meaning/Idea
3.1. Meaning/Idea is emergent from Awareness.

In 2.1 case we would be running into the "hard problem of consciousness", so not acceptable. Which means that we are left with only two options:
1. Awareness=Idea,
3.1Idea is emergent from Awareness.
Pick your favorite.

There is no need for metaphysical inferences. The reason you think the above exercise, which ends in "pick your favorite", i.e. pure personal preference, is necessary is because you don't have trust in living Reason to make the necessary connections which shed light on Being beyond our own immediate experience. You feel all such endeavors are merely "subjective" and not to be relied upon. That is also what JW and BK practically adhere to as well. It is all traceable back to Cartesian and Kantian dualism. It is very ironic that JW criticizes BK and you criticize JW when all holding to the same flawed assumptions - you guys are caught in a 'projection triangle'.

[Eugene I]

There is no need for metaphysical inferences. The reason you think the above exercise, which ends in "pick your favorite", i.e. pure personal preference, is necessary is because you don't have trust in living Reason to make the necessary connections which shed light on Being beyond our own immediate experience. You feel all such endeavors are merely "subjective" and not to be relied upon. That is also what JW and BK practically adhere to as well. It is all traceable back to Cartesian and Kantian dualism. It is very ironic that JW criticizes BK and you criticize JW when all holding to the same flawed assumptions - you guys are caught in a 'projection triangle'.

Reason is based on logic, and where would logic come from? By relying on Reason you are implicitly relying on Kantian a-priori knowledge, another questionable feature of the Kantian philosophy.

As I said earlier many times, there is a huge variety of axiomatic logical systems in modern mathematics that are very different from the classical Aristotelian logic. If we would base our Reason on some of those different logical systems, we would arrive to very different conclusions about Reality. The only thing special about Aristotelian logic is that it was historically developed prior to other logical systems. Now, how do you know which logical system is actually applicable to reality?

And lastly, I think you should stop harassing people with "Kantian divides". We actually do not know what reality is. We can only hope (and infer) that it is homogeneous to our ability to know it and so we can exhaustively know it in principle and there would be no un-traversable Kantian divide between the reality as it is and our knowledge of it. But this can only be a belief or inference. We actually do not know, and it may turn out that Kant was right and we cannot know the reality as it is ("thing-in-itself" noumenon). You cannot close Kantian divide by wishful thinking. Such closure can only be an inference, a matter of belief. It is a reasonable belief to assume, but you can not force people to assume it, that would be a violation of the freedom of beliefs.

[AshvinP]

There is no need for metaphysical inferences. The reason you think the above exercise, which ends in "pick your favorite", i.e. pure personal preference, is necessary is because you don't have trust in living Reason to make the necessary connections which shed light on Being beyond our own immediate experience. You feel all such endeavors are merely "subjective" and not to be relied upon. That is also what JW and BK practically adhere to as well. It is all traceable back to Cartesian and Kantian dualism. It is very ironic that JW criticizes BK and you criticize JW when all holding to the same flawed assumptions - you guys are caught in a 'projection triangle'.

Reason is based on logic, and where would logic come from? By relying on Reason you are implicitly relying on Kantian a-priori knowledge, another faulty feature of the Kantian philosophy.

As I said earlier many times, there is a huge variety of axiomatic logical systems in modern mathematics that are very different from the classical Aristotelian logic. If we would base our Reason in some of those different logical systems, we would arrive to very different conclusions about Reality. The only thing special about Aristotelian logic is that it was historically developed prior to other logical systems. Now, how do you know which logical system is actually applicable to reality?

What Kant calls "a priori knowledge" is what we now call "subconscious", i.e. those ideations which we are not explicitly aware of when they arrive with the perceptual content. He assumed that this subconscious was an absolute limit to what we could know, rather than existing in a polar relation with consciousness.

By its postulation of the 'unconscious' as an antipode to consciousness, present-day psychology has perpetrated a falsification of primordial psychosomatic actualities. Such terminology and the consequent falso structuration of phenomena is a classic example of the error which follows from a radical application of dualistic principles. There is no so-called unconscious. There are only various modalities (or intensities) of consciousness...

Consciousness is the ability to survey those interconnections which constitute us; it is a continuous act of integration and directing. And we must observe the fundamental point that there is more to consciousness than mere formal or reflective knowledge. Consciousness is not identical with the process of reflective thinking, nor is it limited to the awareness of the ego. Its illuminative function is definitely not restricted to spacialization or temporalization. It is not a mere counterpart of objects and appearances; rather it is an observant onlooker and an active agent with regulatory functions...

Just as with mythic, philosophical, aesthetic, and cultural systems in general, we can trace the exact development of logical and mathematical systems over the evolution of cognition (and Gebser does this in The EPO). The former reflect the latter. They are not separate systems without relation to each other, but evolutionary stages of an organic whole. With this understanding, we can see how logic (Logos) is not something arbritary that we impose on the World content, but it reflects the inner structure of Thinking which unfolds from epoch to epoch, which we take from the lawful-structured transformations of the World content.

And lastly, I think you should stop harassing people with "Kantian divides". We actually do not know what reality is. We can only hope (and infer) that it is homogeneous to our ability to know it and so we can exhaustively know it in principle and there would be no un-traversable Kantian divide between the reality as it is and our knowledge of it. But this can only be a belief or inference. We actually do not know, and it may turn out that Kant was right and we cannot know the reality as it is ("thing-in-itself" noumenon). You cannot close Kantian divide by wishful thinking. Such closure can only be an inference, a matter of belief. It is a reasonable belief to assume, but you can not force people to assume it, that would be a violation of the freedom of beliefs

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I would if you showed any signs of understanding it - it is literally the basis of all your misunderstandings and failures to follow the logic of our comments here over many months. All of your responses to us display this lack of awareness of how the divide is working in your thinking, including the one above. And it also forms the basis of your conclusion that all we can say about Reality is what we can "only hope and infer" and maybe "Kant was right". It's frankly amazing that you could say that and also claim I am unjustifiably "harrassing" people with the Kantian divide. You just admitted in the very same comment that you hold open the possibility that Kant's dualism is valid, so my repeated attempts to point this out to you are perfectly justified.