Intuitive Idealism vs. Analytic Idealism (Part II): An alternative formulation of idealism

[JustinG]

My experience has been the exact opposite of yours when reading Steiner, Barfield and Cleric - their writing is a pure breath of fresh air compared to the suffocating abstractions of modern philosophy which attempts to formulate everything of importance in terms of those dead abstractions, such as "mathematical ontologies".

I'm reading Barfield's Saving the Appearances at the moment. IMO, whilst it has some great insights, in itself it does not seem to provide much philosophical grounding for an idealist worldview.

Barfield's notion of 'final participation' is postulated as being a destination which is arrived at after the retreat inward to the imagination from physicalist idolatry (Pan has shut up shop and gone indoors - p. 130). So it's like a dualist route to idealism. .However:

- Barfield starts off by utilising the physicalist premise that the unrepresented is 'particles' (p. 17).
- Later on he speculates that the unrepresented might also be phenomenal and 'take its place among the collective representations' (p. 153).
- But Barfield (p. 154) states that whether it is the case that the unrepresented is actually representational is something that 'everyone will decide for himself' and is something for which he will 'assume its validity'.

So whilst Barfield makes a good argument for dualism, there does not seem to be much of an argument for idealism. The belief if in idealism seems to me to be more of a leap of religious faith.

[Adur Alkain]

Adur,

Well thought out and written essay.

First, I also disagree with BK's dissociative analogy. Being tied to Dissociative Identity Disorder gives it a negative connotation but it also doesn't fit in with his characterization of Mind-at-Large or Universal Consciousness. He thinks M@L is instinctive and undifferentiated. So, what's to dissociate from? In DID there is an associated personality to begin with.

Thank you, Steve!

You are making a very good point there! It had never occurred to me.

So, let me say a few things about simulation metaphors that might spark some thoughts for you with your system.

Like you, I have also offered a simulation analogy. Like yours, it's an MMORPG (massively multiplayer online roleplay game). Here's a link where I offered it in response to Bernardo's DID. Analogies for Idealism . I realize that metaphors have their limits but let me comment on where I think the typical simulation analogy goes awry. It is algorithmic or rule-based. This might appeal to materialists but it also offers no way to affirm our existential intuitions. I'm a proponent of acknowledging that intuitions are an important part of metaphysics. We have intuitions that there is genuine free-will (could have done otherwise), objective value( moral realism), and real meaning and purpose. In law-based or algorithmic-based systems none of these are possible without supernaturalism or magic because the universe (including us) just hums along autonomically. Even in BK's system with instinct as fundamental, there is no room for these either. He has even acknowledged (in one of his videos) that we don't have libertarian free-will. Even Mind-at-Large only has a compatibilist type of free-will. Having said that, I do think the RPG metaphor is helpful but only if it is actively and continually intention-based. No laws and no chance. No algorithms. No autonomics. Every event is intentional. Both the regularities and novelties are intentional -> a juggler metaphor. Accordingly, no supernaturalism or magic is necessary to get those existential affirmations because there is nothing to override. It means there is a source for free-will, meaning, objective value, and purpose which we can have a share of. Now, this obviously leads to some cosmic or transcendent agent having the intentions. That's where things get complicated but for me, that agent is God within a form of divine idealism.

Now, I think a major failing for many metaphysical systems is too narrow a focus. Many current ones are trying to solve the consciousness dilemma. Fair enough. However, in their formulations, they often ignore other pressing questions — namely existential issues like I mentioned. This means they can spend a lot of time trying to solve a narrow problem and then when it comes to addressing these other issues (they will come up) their formulation won't accommodate them without ill-conceived contrivances, obfuscations, or questionable brute facts. I think this problem with other issues is what Bernardo's system is having to deal with now. He's made a good case against materialism but with his ontology (just a semantically different form of autonomics), I don't think he can provide answers that affirm our intuitions.

So, with your great work so far, I would suggest you see how you might address all the pressing issues, at the same time.

I completely agree with everything you say. I read your essays about the simulation analogy and I like them a lot. I usually don't use in my essays the word "God", because it's been (and still is) so misused in our culture, but I am quite aware that if my theory is correct (and it involves specific predictions in quantum mechanics) it would prove the existence of God. That is, the existence of a universal intelligence observing the universe from outside space-time, using the physical bodies of all living organisms as its "measurement apparatus". I make that clear in my essay "The Observing Universe".

As for those existential issues you mention, I am a student of the Diamond Approach, and I personally find that A. H. Almaas addresses all those issues (meaning, value, true will, purpose, etc.) in a completely satisfactory manner. I feel there is nothing I could possibly add to that.

I hope I made clear in my essay that my simulation metaphor is just a metaphor, and that I don't believe mathematical algorithms have anything to do with fundamental reality. In my view, mathematics and computation are the result of information processing performed by the brain. The idea of mathematical natural laws ruling the physical universe is an illusion derived from the fact that human scientists use mathematics (which is a product of the human brain) to make their measurements.

[Adur Alkain]

The simulation metaphor: the law of consistency in action

This is how the law of consistency gives rise to the regularity of the observed world. At the beginning of the game, the players would be free to perceive the world around them behaving in any possible way they could imagine. As the game progressed, those perceived behaviours would become “natural laws”. The freedom of the players to perceive whatever they might would diminish, but their impression of being in a “real world” would accordingly increase.

So this is your completely immersive virtual reality game. It would enhance the players’ freedom and creativity. They would be unwittingly creating their own virtual world as they played. There is no way to predict what kind of world they would create. Each new set of players (you could relaunch the game as many times as you liked) would probably end up in a completely different universe. You, as the game designer, would save a lot of work. You could just sit back and watch. And the game would be anything but boring.

I'm afraid this is again too simplistic model. The players don't just see consistent images. When they analyze their images down to very microscopic level and up to very mega-scopic level, they find that their images are not only consistent to each other, but also always precisely consistent with specific mathematical rules (Schrodinger equation, laws of special and general relativity etc). How did that happen? When did they agreed to introduce those precise rules in the game? And why did they forget about those rules and had to later re-discover them?

Eugene, you are missing the whole point of the metaphor. Within the simulation game (which is just a thought experiment) there wouldn't be (at least at first) any mathematical rules, the players' perceptions would be consistent in an obvious, intuitive way (like the perceptions of playing children are consistent: children don't use complex mathematical measurements to find out if their perceptions really are consistent or not).

Further on, still inside the game, if players decided, like you say, to analyze their perceptions with mathematical precission, then and only then the mathematical "laws of nature" would arise. And there is no reason to suppose that every set of players would necessarily end up with the very same set of mathematical rules. The players could end up in a virtual universe where people could fly freely through the air, for example. And they would find, if they did scientific experiments, mathematical laws consistent with that.

My whole point is that the mathematical "laws of nature" are not fundamental. This would explain why it's so difficult (probably impossible) to integrate general relativity and quantum mechanics: these are sets of "laws" that result from completely different types of measurement. These measurements are consistent with each other, but that consistency is not the result of any mathematical "great unifying law".

Something that has always interested me is the strange way in which many of these "fundamental laws" are discovered. Schrödinger's equation is a particularly good example: he apparently wrote it down in a flash of inspiration, and voila! it was the right equation! The way I interpret this is that those "flashes of inspiration" come from a direct intuition of the underlying reality: a universal intelligence observing the physical universe.

Mathematical measurements performed by human scientists give rise to a "mathematical consistency" (which didn't exist previous to those measurements). Then, some genius scientist (with some intuition of universal consciousness) comes up with a mathematical equation that describes that mathematical consistency. But that mathematical equation is always just an approximation. We know this was the case for the Newtonian equations, for example. And in the case of Schrödinger's equation, the approximative nature of the equation becomes explicit: it only provides probabilities.

I believe that mathematics is created by the human brain, and doesn't exist outside it. Universal consciousness uses the human brain to observe the physical universe, so it's inevitable that the universe observed in this way would seem to follow mathematical laws. But the mathematical laws of science are just an approximation to an underlying non-mathematical law: the Law of Consistency.

I might be completely wrong about this. But I think it's an interesting and novel idea. And here is the thing: If I'm correct, we are at the end of mathematical physics. No new "fundamental" mathematical laws will ever be discovered. The new goal of physical science will be to understand what "consistency" actually means, and how it works. This isn't a small question, I believe.

[Adur Alkain]

This is only understood when factoring in metamorphic progression of consciousness. That is a great example of a qualitative essence which we can test and verify via experience and Reason. A lot of modern anthropomorphic prejudices must be abandoned, like the insistence on strict rational "rules" that the dynamics follow, which Stephen also pointed out above. But we will also see how this essential dynamic makes living sense of all human development of culture, myth, art, religion, philosophy, socioeconomics, science, and ethics.

It has nothing to do with whether we abandon any prejudices or not. The dynamics of sensual experiences that we observe always follow these exact patterns/rules: it's a fact of our experience. We observe those rules every single time we make quantitative measurements (in natural science). If spiritual science has an ambition to explain the origin of the perceived world, it also has to explain the origin of these rules. Why the observed sensual phenomena always and exactly follow the rules of the Schrodinger equation to the extremely high precision? The model presented in the essay does not explain it.

This is actually the biggest explanatory gap in almost every version of idealism and a target of a valid criticism from the materialistic and panpsychistic camps, and from ordinary people too. Idealism has to come up with a plausible explanation of why the observed conscious phenomena that relate to the "physical world" always follow these exact mathematical patterns described by Schrodinger and other basic physical equations.

Eugene, I think I did exactly that in my previous reply. Your criticism is very helpful, though. I realize I'll have to introduce that explanation in the essay itself, to make more explicit the way I think the Law of Consistency explains all the apparent "natural laws".

[Eugene I]

I might be completely wrong about this. But I think it's an interesting and novel idea. And here is the thing: If I'm correct, we are at the end of mathematical physics. No new "fundamental" mathematical laws will ever be discovered. The new goal of physical science will be to understand what "consistency" actually means, and how it works. This isn't a small question, I believe.

I think you are. I agree that mathematical laws are (most likely) not fundamental and only present an approximate description of the observable phenomenal patterns. Yet, there is little doubt that the patterns of of phenomena that they approximate exist independent of whether people discover these mathematical equations or not. Physicists collected a lot of unexplained experimental data long before they discovered that all this data can be with high degree of accuracy approximated by the Schrodinger equation.

[Eugene I]

If quantitative is always an abstraction of qualitative, then why would you think the quantitative could ever provide an explanation for the qualitative? An abstraction cannot explain that which it is abstracted from. That has been the gist of your argument here - that we need to provide "convincing" natural scientific explanation for the entrenched academic and average person, and since natural sciences can only be "objectively" investigated and verified by mathematical abstractions (according to you), that is the type of explanation you are seeking. But now you admit such an explanation is always dealing with abstractions of the noumenal qualitative realm, so how do you propose to bridge that gap to find this convincing and objectively verifiable explanation?

Quantitative math never explain anything, they are merely a concise expressions describing consistent patterns of phenomena observed in nature. The metaphysical question is why and how the observable nature always precisely and consistently follows these patterns. This question has nothing to do with math.

Also, when in your experience has a fundamental question of any importance been answered without a substantial investment of time and effort on your part? You can't find something until you start looking for it! And that was the purpose of Cleric's essay - not to answer all riddles of the Cosmos in a few pages - but to point people in the direction of where to start looking. You say the Time-Consciousness wave cycles manifested by higher order beings is "one of the possible explanatory models" of global-to-local manifestation of qualitative experience. So what is one other possible explanatory model which encompasses all the same data points, i.e. rhythms and qualities of our immanent experience? Surely you have at least one other model/approach in mind to be so confident that his is only one of many other possible ones.

Cleric's Time-Consciousness wave is an analogy of a well-known Fourier theorem stating that any function (with certain limitations) can be expressed as a superposition of harmonic (wave) functions. But similarly, any function can be can be expressed by a superposition of any other set of functions representing a complete functional basis, so, similarly, in the realm of temporal unfolding of conscious states these states can be a superposition of other types of temporal basis states, for example, wavelet, polynomial etc patterns of time-conscious states.

Answered above. If you refuse to take the approach Cleric is describing to answer this question, that is not an "explanatory gap" of his approach, it's just your refusal to bridge the gap.
Clearly there is none. As well as no answers to the rest of the questions.

We have been over this far too many times to count and I am not going to do it again. Suffice to say, there is no "ineffable transcendental dimension of reality" where cognition i.e. Thinking (spiritual) activity is entirely absent. You have even admitted to this many times before, so I have no idea why you keep making this critique.
If thinking activity is ever present, it does not mean that it is able to fully comprehend the reality. But I get it - you deny the very existence of the ineffable which has been the spiritual experience of a lot of people through many traditions. Fair enough.

[Adur Alkain]

Wonderful essay and interesting critiques. Just a few brief suggestions:

BK's analytic idealism vs intuitive idealism: I think there's room for both. I don't think BK has done a good enough job playing by the rules of materialism and explaining his ideas. The problem with materialism is not really an intellectual one but both an instinctive and intuitive one. You just have to find some way to integrate some strict, contemplative discipline with the intellectual analysis. BK was totally closed to this idea when I first proposed it to him in 2013 but he seems to have been warming up to it in recent years. His videos at the Essentia foundation are a start, but there needs to be more experiential stuff accompanying the logical arguments.

sensation vs perception: Adur, you should look at Owen Barfield's "Saving the Appearances" - particularly what he says about how thought and sensation are never separate, and his concept of "figuration.".

If you look up "Saving the Appearances" on youtube, you'll find a set of animations based on Barfield's book. Here's #1:

Combine this with Alan Wallace's contemplative science and his correct insistence on developing research teams of contemplative scientists who have relative mastery of attention (rapid shifting to a state of effortless awareness in which the mind is completely silent) - and you'll have a new science.

Good luck!

Thanks for your comment!

I read Saving the Appearances a few years ago, and I enjoyed it very much. But at times it was difficult for me to see what Barfield was actually trying to say. I think I need to go back and read it again, since Owen Barfield comes up again and again on this forum.

I'd never heard of Allan Wallace, I'll check him out!

Thanks again

[Adur Alkain]

Materialism is currently under threat, not from philosophers, but from scientists doing actual experiments in quantum mechanics. But as far as I know, nobody has done yet the kind of simple experiment I'm proposing. Since I'm not an expert, it is impossible for me to know if this experiment is possible or not. My hope is that somehow my idea will reach some professional physicist that might find it worthwhile and try it out.

It seems ridiculous, of course, to think that a complete amateur like me could come up with an idea for an experiment that has never occurred to any professional physicist. But the thing is, I don't think that any professional scientist has thought about QM in the way that I do. I sincerely think that my idea, and my version of idealism, is completely new.

Chances are I'm wrong, of course. But I believe it's worth giving it a try. And I'm doing my best to put my idea out there. That's all I can do. In any case, I'm having lots of fun in the process

Adur, that sounds interesting, can you point me to a description of this experiment idea, or may be just post it here?

Also, do you have any answer to this question?

Hi again Eugene, I described the experiment in my essay "The Observing Universe", which I posted here: viewtopic.php?f=5&t=371&p=6939#p6939

Any feedback on that would be greatly appreciated!

[AshvinP]

If quantitative is always an abstraction of qualitative, then why would you think the quantitative could ever provide an explanation for the qualitative? An abstraction cannot explain that which it is abstracted from. That has been the gist of your argument here - that we need to provide "convincing" natural scientific explanation for the entrenched academic and average person, and since natural sciences can only be "objectively" investigated and verified by mathematical abstractions (according to you), that is the type of explanation you are seeking. But now you admit such an explanation is always dealing with abstractions of the noumenal qualitative realm, so how do you propose to bridge that gap to find this convincing and objectively verifiable explanation?

Quantitative math never explain anything, they are merely a concise expressions describing consistent patterns of phenomena observed in nature. The metaphysical question is why and how the observable nature always precisely and consistently follows these patterns. This question has nothing to do with math.

So there is no mathematical objectively verifiable explanation of the consistent phenomenonal patterns, and also no such spiritual explanation... what do you propose then?

]

Also, when in your experience has a fundamental question of any importance been answered without a substantial investment of time and effort on your part? You can't find something until you start looking for it! And that was the purpose of Cleric's essay - not to answer all riddles of the Cosmos in a few pages - but to point people in the direction of where to start looking. You say the Time-Consciousness wave cycles manifested by higher order beings is "one of the possible explanatory models" of global-to-local manifestation of qualitative experience. So what is one other possible explanatory model which encompasses all the same data points, i.e. rhythms and qualities of our immanent experience? Surely you have at least one other model/approach in mind to be so confident that his is only one of many other possible ones.

Cleric's Time-Consciousness wave is an analogy of a well-known Fourier theorem stating that any function (with certain limitations) can be expressed as a superposition of harmonic (wave) functions. But similarly, any function can be can be expressed by a superposition of any other set of functions representing a complete functional basis, so, similarly, in the realm of temporal unfolding of conscious states these states can be a superposition of other types of temporal basis states, for example, wavelet, polynomial etc patterns of time-conscious states.

Cleric was using this language to describe his concrete qualitative experience. Instead of looking towards the qualitative realm of your inner experience to confirm or deny what he claims, you are translating that back to abstract quantitative terms! You are expressing the modern age in a nutshell - anything and everything, including your own inner experience, is reduced to quantitative abstractions so as to avoid confronting the qualitative spiritual exprience.

Answered above. If you refuse to take the approach Cleric is describing to answer this question, that is not an "explanatory gap" of his approach, it's just your refusal to bridge the gap.

Clearly there is none. As well as no answers to the rest of the questions.

We have been over this far too many times to count and I am not going to do it again. Suffice to say, there is no "ineffable transcendental dimension of reality" where cognition i.e. Thinking (spiritual) activity is entirely absent. You have even admitted to this many times before, so I have no idea why you keep making this critique.
If thinking activity is ever present, it does not mean that it is able to fully comprehend the reality. But I get it - you deny the very existence of the ineffable which has been the spiritual experience of a lot of people through many traditions. Fair enough.

You really don't get it. We don't deny the ineffable, we just refuse to accept that it can only be experienced as vague mystical smearing out of ideal content. You know that, Eugene, as we have discussed it dozens of times with you now and is also laid out in all the essays which you apparently never read, so please stop intentionally misrepresenting our positions.

[Steve Petermann]

I usually don't use in my essays the word "God", because it's been (and still is) so misused in our culture,

Yes. I used to avoid the term "God" because I knew many people cringed when hearing the word. Also, the term is so ambiguous in meaning. However, eventually, I started using it all the time because so many people relate to it in a personal way. I think that is important and that the word needs to be rehabilitated in culture. The main focus of my theology is for those who don't find the religious traditions compelling anymore and may even wonder if ideas about God are just nonsense but still want some form of spirituality in their lives. For that group, I think it's important to know that traditional ideas about God need not be the only alternative and perhaps there are ways to think about God that are science-friendly and reasonable.

As for those existential issues you mention, I am a student of the Diamond Approach, and I personally find that A. H. Almaas addresses all those issues (meaning, value, true will, purpose, etc.) in a completely satisfactory manner. I feel there is nothing I could possibly add to that.

Thanks, I'll check him out. I'm all for the exploration of many new approaches in metaphysics and theology. As I said, some people who have become religiously unaffiliated or even non-religious from the start may still want some spiritual orientation in their life. For some, they feel no need for anything systematic or rigorous but others may. My feeling is that if a person has a religious or non-religious metaphysical framework that enhances their life and isn't harmful, I'd say that's fine. After all, we are talking about metaphysics. That is always underdetermined and speculative. Given the vast pluralism both in personality and culture, I don't think there is one solution for everyone.