Metaphysics - Idealism without woo-woo

[AshvinP]

I differentiate faith from belief and use that descriptor only when it is experience-based. Are you saying that my experience is baloney?
And I'm still curious as to whether the poem aligns your metaphysics? BTW, please understand that I'm not trying to refute your metaphysics, which I found interesting. I'm just trying to establish whether it and my experience are on the same page.

Faith is a religious term. it is the same as saying "just trust what your masters tell you (or else) ..." . It is a kind of child abuse, that children try to reconcile themselves with to avoid realising that their parents lied to them to control them

That's a shockingly shallow and rationalist perspective on faith, i.e. Freud's view that religious faith is simply "wish fulfillment" or Marx's view that religious belief is an "opiate of the masses". They were both way off. Faith is more akin to a trust that Reality will continue to provide us meaningful experience in the 'world' despite our severe limitations of experience/knowledge and our inevitable suffering from such limitations. Everyone has faith in some beliefs about themselves and the world, otherwise they could not continue to find any meaning in their lives.

[Lou Gold]

I differentiate faith from belief and use that descriptor only when it is experience-based. Are you saying that my experience is baloney?
And I'm still curious as to whether the poem aligns your metaphysics? BTW, please understand that I'm not trying to refute your metaphysics, which I found interesting. I'm just trying to establish whether it and my experience are on the same page.

Faith is a religious term. it is the same as saying "just trust what your masters tell you (or else) ..." . It is a kind of child abuse, that children try to reconcile themselves with to avoid realising that their parents lied to them to control them

I accept and respect that this is what 'faith' means to you. To me it means "I have faith that the sun will set this evening", which is a vastly greater certainty than saying, "I believe the sun will set this evening."

It is the child and not the adult who sees that the Emperor has no clothes. BTW, I really like the Feynmann quote used as your signature, which I sum up as "play as a child does."

Again, I'm not challenging your metaphysics. I'm just wondering if you accept my experience?

[Eugene I]

Yet the beauty of the Great Mysteriousness is that it constantly rediscover itself in new degrees of freedom, which throw light on the former states. ... When we assume a given intellectual position, we lose the sight of others. This can be illustrated with the famous cube illusion. Once we see it one way, the other way ceases to exist. It is similar in our thought life and rarely understood correctly. We, humans, seem to have the firm conviction that our perspective is always fully objective. But illusions like the above show us that very often, when we see things intellectually in one way, we lose our ability to see them in other ways. So it is not about "which cube is the correct one" but how can I conduct my spiritual activity in such a way that I can freely utilize every perspective in its appropriate place.

I very much agree, and that is the point of my position of questioning the validity of the "subject"/noun nature of the spiritual activity. Interpreting such activity as a subject-kind "entity" is already a chosen intellectual position that restricts the degrees of freedom. We derived our concept of noun (object/subject) and verb (activity) through generalizing of observations of conscious phenomena. There is no reason to believe that we can extrapolate them to the very nature of consciousness and to its spiritual activity. We can certainly make such assumptions, but if we do not realize that these are only contingent assumptions and start to take them as implicit axioms or truths, we would also blind ourselves to the aspects of the Great Mysteriousness that lie beyond the frameworks of our concepts of subjects, objects or actions. So, I’m not suggesting agnosticism and it's OK to make assumptions and ideas about consciousness because this is how we can approach the Mysteriousness using the tool of thinking available to us. We just need to understand and accept its limitations and the dangers of locking and limiting our perspectives if we choose to stick with specific beliefs or assumptions about the nature of consciousness that we take as axioms.

This returns us to the question "How does it know that it exists if it can't see itself". Here seeing refers to what can be perceived in sensory-like manner. We hear our thoughts, see thoughts within the shapes and colors of our imagination. The actual understanding, that we are creatively producing these thoughts, is not contained in the sensory-like perceptions of the thoughts. It is something different, it is the living experience of ideas that project the thoughts - our ideal experience explains the existence of the sensory-like elements. The point is that we don't see as perception the totality that explains from where our ideas come and how they become perceptions.

Again, I agree with that and I also mentioned that mystery of the “totality” of consciousness in my previous post. But my point is that fitting this mysterious totality and ability of awareness to be aware of itself and of all phenomenal qualia, as well as to be able to creatively produce phenomena, is beyond a simplistic logical scheme of a “subject”/”I” (perceiver/doer) making “actions” or perceiving "objects". We developed this simplistic model to orient ourselves and survive in reality and it’s OK to use it in the everyday life or in philosophy as a simple and approximate model as long as we understand its limitations and do not claim that this is what the nature of consciousness truly is. This is in a way similar to the cognitive mistake of naïve materialism: it is OK to use the idea of “elementary particles” in physics as part of its mathematical model of reality, but it’s a mistake to claim as an undeniable truth that such particles exist as real material “entities”.

[Lou Gold]

Ashvin,

Everyone has faith in some beliefs about themselves and the world, otherwise they could not continue to find any meaning in their lives.

My faith is experience-based, not belief-based. I'm agnostic toward belief.

[Eugene I]

My faith is experience-based, not belief-based. I'm agnostic toward belief.

mine too!

[AshvinP]

Ashvin,

Everyone has faith in some beliefs about themselves and the world, otherwise they could not continue to find any meaning in their lives.

My faith is experience-based, not belief-based. I'm agnostic toward belief.

We don't perceive (experience) the world or ourselves without also thinking about them at the same time. Percept without concept is a "blooming buzzing confusion", or at least that's what it is fancied to be. Claiming agnosticism towards belief is itself a belief.

[Lou Gold]

Ashvin,

Everyone has faith in some beliefs about themselves and the world, otherwise they could not continue to find any meaning in their lives.

My faith is experience-based, not belief-based. I'm agnostic toward belief.

We don't perceive (experience) the world or ourselves without also thinking about them at the same time. Percept without concept is a "blooming buzzing confusion", or at least that's what it is fancied to be. Claiming agnosticism towards belief is itself a belief.

For me -- I emphasize I'm speaking personally -- isness is neither precept or concept. If it is for some a "blooming buzzing confusion" I must accept that for them but not for me. I simply do not fancy that to be. However, I agree that, "Claiming agnosticism towards belief is itself a belief." Compared with faith, it's rather weak. The nice thing about genuine agnosticism is that it holds open the door to faith. To each in her/his time.

[AshvinP]

Ashvin,



My faith is experience-based, not belief-based. I'm agnostic toward belief.

We don't perceive (experience) the world or ourselves without also thinking about them at the same time. Percept without concept is a "blooming buzzing confusion", or at least that's what it is fancied to be. Claiming agnosticism towards belief is itself a belief.

For me -- I emphasize I'm speaking personally -- isness is neither precept or concept. If it is for some a "blooming buzzing confusion" I must accept that for them but not for me. I simply do not fancy that to be. However, I agree that, "Claiming agnosticism towards belief is itself a belief." Compared with faith, it's rather weak. The nice thing about genuine agnosticism is that it holds open the door to faith. To each in her/his time.

So how does being (isness) reveal itself to you without any perception or conception?

[Eugene I]

We don't perceive (experience) the world or ourselves without also thinking about them at the same time. Percept without concept is a "blooming buzzing confusion", or at least that's what it is fancied to be. Claiming agnosticism towards belief is itself a belief.

That's right, it's just a matter of priority. We again come to finding the balance between extremes, in this case the extremes of beliefs only that disregards experience, or experience only that disregards beliefs or any thinking. After all, consciousness has the abilities to both experience and think and it has all rights to use and explore both. The question is to what degree we want to keep the beliefs grounded in experience. It's a matter of personal choice, but my preference is to keep beliefs grounded in the direct experiences. This is not to limit the unlimited realm of thinking and imagination, but just to say that when thinking starts making beliefs about the nature of reality itself, it's better to ground such beliefs and check their validity against the direct experience.

[Lou Gold]

We don't perceive (experience) the world or ourselves without also thinking about them at the same time. Percept without concept is a "blooming buzzing confusion", or at least that's what it is fancied to be. Claiming agnosticism towards belief is itself a belief.

For me -- I emphasize I'm speaking personally -- isness is neither precept or concept. If it is for some a "blooming buzzing confusion" I must accept that for them but not for me. I simply do not fancy that to be. However, I agree that, "Claiming agnosticism towards belief is itself a belief." Compared with faith, it's rather weak. The nice thing about genuine agnosticism is that it holds open the door to faith. To each in her/his time.

So how does being (isness) reveal itself to you without any perception or conception?

Ooops. I read 'precept' and not 'percept' -- my error. However, assigning those words to my experience seems as a separation -- like talking about it. Yeah, I grok that's what philosophy does, it talks about it.