Criticism

[Eugene I]

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.

The "Spiritual Science" version of idealism that you adhere to is a legit and mostly consistent. However, it is a metaphysics, it is based on several metaphysical assumptions. You do not realize these unconscious and implicit assumptions and you see no possibility that its assumptions may turn out to be wrong. This is a hallmark of all religions: religious people can only see reality in one way and can not even admit a slightest possibility that it may be wrong. The reasons are usually psychological and based on fears: for religious people a possibility to be wrong feels very scary. Clear understanding of implicit assumptions and a possibility of them to be wrong is what distinguishes philosophy from religion.

I grew our of religions. IMO religious mindset is a spiritual infantilism. I can contingently accept idealist assumptions because I see how idealism may be a pragmatically useful worldview if used right, but I do not believe in it religiously. I can see how it can be abused if turned into a religion, just like it happened with most of the world religions. By "religious mindset" I do not mean mystical and poetic appreciation of reality, I mean a mindset based on a firm belief that "the way I understand the reality is exactly the Truth with no other alternatives even possible".

[AshvinP]

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.

The "Spiritual Science" version of idealism that you adhere to is a legit and mostly consistent. However, it is a metaphysics, it is based on several metaphysical assumptions. You do not realize these unconscious and implicit assumptions and you see no possibility that its assumptions may turn out to be wrong. This is a hallmark of all religions: religious people can only see reality in one way and can not even admit a slightest possibility that it may be wrong. The reasons are usually psychological and based on fears: for religious people a possibility to be wrong feels very scary. Clear understanding of implicit assumptions and a possibility of them to be wrong is what distinguishes philosophy from religion.

Then please go ahead and point out these "several metaphysical assumptions" we are employing. You won't, Eugene, because you can't, because they don't exist... the Kantian dualism, on the other hand, does exist. Sometimes one must put ego aside and seriously consider the possibility they have taken a philosophical detour due to flawed assumptions and be grateful they have a chance to course-correct. That is what motivates Cleric and myself to post any of these things here - we are grateful that someone else did it for us and we had the opportunity to listen.

[Ben Iscatus]

However, it is a metaphysics, it is based on several metaphysical assumptions.

One such assumption is that thinking can take you closer to the thing in itself than perceiving via the senses: for instance, that thinking about a beech tree can take you closer to it than the experience of a squirrel who often climbs it and nibbles the beech nuts.

If a shaman wants to get close to a beech tree, he might put on a costume and leap about like a squirrel. I wouldn't call this 'thinking', though it is an imaginative exercise, and unless you experience the shaman's dance yourself, its results would probably only be communicable in the form of a story.

[Eugene I]

Then please go ahead and point out these "several metaphysical assumptions" we are employing. You won't, Eugene, because you can't, because they don't exist... the Kantian dualism, on the other hand, does exist. Sometimes one must put ego aside and seriously consider the possibility they have taken a philosophical detour due to flawed assumptions and be grateful they have a chance to course-correct. That is what motivates Cleric and myself to post any of these things here - we are grateful that someone else did it for us and we had the opportunity to listen.

That's exactly what I did in this thread
where I showed what assumptions we need to take to arrive from a pure phenomenology to the Spiritual Science Idealism. No point to repeat them here. These assumptions are not flawed, they are totally legit. But they are just like that: assumptions which make this version if idealism to be a metaphysics. But if you refuse to admit that they are mere assumptions, such worldview becomes a religion. And this would be a lie, because instead of honestly telling people "it is reasonable to assume such and such..." you are saying "This is the ultimate Truth and refusing (our version) of Truth is the cause for all humanity problems. If you do not agree with it then you are plain wrong".

[AshvinP]

However, it is a metaphysics, it is based on several metaphysical assumptions.

One such assumption is that thinking can take you closer to the thing in itself than perceiving via the senses: for instance, that thinking about a beech tree can take you closer to it than the experience of a squirrel who often climbs it and nibbles the beech nuts.

If a shaman wants to get close to a beech tree, he might put on a costume and leap about like a squirrel. I wouldn't call this 'thinking', though it is an imaginative exercise, and unless you experience the shaman's dance yourself, its results would probably only be communicable in the form of a story.

That is not an assumption, it is the lack of assuming that thinking cannot take one closer to Being than what is immediately perceived by the senses. Why would we assume that everything which makes sense of fragmented sense-perceptions, through our conceptual reasoning, has nothing to do with Being itself? There is no warrant for that assumption.

One will start speculating about how a squirrel experiences a beech tree before admitting the particpatory role of their own thinking in making sense of the world content, which they make use of every waking moment of every day to navigate the world. That is the point of complete abhorrence of thinking that we have come to now...

[Eugene I]

However, it is a metaphysics, it is based on several metaphysical assumptions.

One such assumption is that thinking can take you closer to the thing in itself than perceiving via the senses: for instance, that thinking about a beech tree can take you closer to it than the experience of a squirrel who often climbs it and nibbles the beech nuts.

If a shaman wants to get close to a beech tree, he might put on a costume and leap about like a squirrel. I wouldn't call this 'thinking', though it is an imaginative exercise, and unless you experience the shaman's dance yourself, its results would probably only be communicable in the form of a story.

Well, in SS this would still qualify as "Thinking", just under a different category of it - imaginative thinking. The assumption of SS is that Thinking is all what the reality is and there is nothing in the world other than Thinking. Of course there are plenty of the modes of Thinking in addition to discursive and logical (intuitive, imaginative, esthetic etc).

But what's weird is that it turns out that they claim that Awareness/Experiencing is emergent form Thinking. In other words it is possible to think without actually consciously experiencing it. Such view runs into the "hard problem of consciousness" and essentially not much different from materialism posing that there is some "essence" (matter, energy) more fundamental than conscious experience from which conscious experience emerges. Such essence (since it is unaware) necessarily must act non-metacognitively as a mechanistic machine.

[AshvinP]

Then please go ahead and point out these "several metaphysical assumptions" we are employing. You won't, Eugene, because you can't, because they don't exist... the Kantian dualism, on the other hand, does exist. Sometimes one must put ego aside and seriously consider the possibility they have taken a philosophical detour due to flawed assumptions and be grateful they have a chance to course-correct. That is what motivates Cleric and myself to post any of these things here - we are grateful that someone else did it for us and we had the opportunity to listen.

That's exactly what I did in this thread
where I showed what assumptions we need to take to arrive from a pure phenomenology to the Spiritual Science Idealism. No point to repeat them here. These assumptions are not flawed, they are totally legit. But they are just like that: assumptions which make this version if idealism to be a metaphysics. But if you refuse to admit that they are mere assumptions, such worldview becomes a religion. And this would be a lie, because instead of honestly telling people "it is reasonable to assume such and such..." you are saying "This is the ultimate Truth and refusing (our version) of Truth is the cause for all humanity problems. If you do not agree with it then you are plain wrong".

No, you didn't. It doesn't take much effort to simply list out the assumptions without any further detail or argument. Or just one assumption. That's all. Ben gave it a shot at least, so you can too.

[Ben Iscatus]

it is possible to think without actually consciously experiencing it.]

Well, in that case I'd say the squirrel is thinking too. And I intuit (sic!) that the squirrel knows much more than the shaman about the beech tree, even after he's done his dance.

[AshvinP]

But what's weird is that it turns out that they claim that Awareness/Experiencing is emergent form Thinking. In other words it is possible to think without actually consciously experiencing it. Such view runs into the "hard problem of consciousness" and essentially not much different from materialism posing that there is some "essence" (matter, energy) more fundamental than conscious experience from which conscious experience emerges. Such essence (since it is unaware) necessarily must act non-metacognitively as a mechanistic machine.

False. We deny the dualism of "Experiencing" vs. Thinking in the first place. All Thinking is not other than experiencing, so there is no emergence of one from the other. The latter is generally another word for "perceiving", and Cleric already tried to explain to you the polar relation of Thinking-Perceiving (Idea-Perception), to which you responded "yes I agree" without understanding what it is you are "agreeing" to, as usual.

[Eugene I]

False. We deny the dualism of "Experiencing" vs. Thinking in the first place. All Thinking is not other than experiencing, so there is no emergence of one from the other. The latter is generally another word for "perceiving", and Cleric already tried to explain to you the polar relation of Thinking-Perceiving (Idea-Perception), to which you responded "yes I agree" without understanding what it is you are "agreeing" to, as usual.

I agree and was saying exactly the same thing all along. What are we arguing about again?

The only thing I'm saying that this is still a metaphysics based on certain reasonable assumptions. I don't want to lie to people and tell that it is unconditional Truth not based on any assumptions. People still have a choice and freedom to adopt such assumptions or not. I personally actually do adopt them (as a contingent view but not as a religion), but that does not mean anyone else has to.

No, you didn't. It doesn't take much effort to simply list out the assumptions without any further detail or argument. Or just one assumption. That's all. Ben gave it a shot at least, so you can too.

Stating that anything else other than the content of your own 1-st person experience exists is already an unprovable assumption. It is a very reasonable assumption and necessary for us to adopt in order to function, yet it is still an assumption. You can break from Hume's solipsism only by adopting certain assumptions.

Another assumption is that nothing else than Thinking exists in reality. How do you ever prove that? The fact that you can never experience anything other than Thinking and its phenomena does not make such assumption automatically true. It is possible in principle that there is something more fundamental to Thinking from which Thinking (consciousness) emerges. Such assumption does run into the "hard problem", but the "hard problem" is not a proof, it is only an explanatory gap.