Criticism

[JeffreyW]

That we entangle in consciousness does not in any way imply we and what we entangled with are the same thing. Further, thought does not immediately occur in that entanglement, but is processed from the sense data which we receive as energy and transmit to the brain as energy.

Eugene is correct here. Physicalism and its concepts of mind-independent "energy", "fields", etc. is no less a modern metaphysical abstraction than the "consciousness" of idealism. They are both thoroughly metaphysical assumptions and unwarranted under any phenomenological investigation of our experience. Reducing our willing-feeling-thinking activity to abstract "energy" is practically the same as reducing it to abstract "consciousness". Whatever we know about experience, and whenever we know it, thinking-thoughts are already present. All claims to experience-knowledge presuppose thinking. It is only dualist prejudice of the modern age, which allows speculation from a non-existent 3rd person perspective, that convinces us there can be a state of existence prior to any thought.

Just the opposite. Our most direct and primitive perception is the shock. Any claim of consciousness outside our own experience is the metaphysical leap taken from the pre-conceptual shock.

[JeffreyW]

That we entangle in consciousness does not in any way imply we and what we entangled with are the same thing. Further, thought does not immediately occur in that entanglement, but is processed from the sense data which we receive as energy and transmit to the brain as energy.

Eugene is correct here. Physicalism and its concepts of mind-independent "energy", "fields", etc. is no less a modern metaphysical abstraction than the "consciousness" of idealism. They are both thoroughly metaphysical assumptions and unwarranted under any phenomenological investigation of our experience. Reducing our willing-feeling-thinking activity to abstract "energy" is practically the same as reducing it to abstract "consciousness". Whatever we know about experience, and whenever we know it, thinking-thoughts are already present. All claims to experience-knowledge presuppose thinking. It is only dualist prejudice of the modern age, which allows speculation from a non-existent 3rd person perspective, that convinces us there can be a state of existence prior to any thought.

“ All claims to experience-knowledge presuppose thinking.”

That does not imply that what we are thinking of is thinking also.

Just the opposite. Our most direct and primitive perception is the shock. Any claim of consciousness outside our own experience is the metaphysical leap taken from the pre-conceptual shock.

[JeffreyW]

An electric shock is in no way an abstraction.

Right, and it is the case exactly because the electric shock is actually your direct conscious experience, your direct sensations. But intellectually explaining it by using the concept of "energy" (that you can never experience directly) is abstraction.

But that is my point, which makes the claim of cosmic consciousness the metaphysical leap. Energy is abstraction from present sense data. Cosmic consciousness is not.

[JeffreyW]

Why do you think Kastrup calls his idea Metaphysical Idealism?

[Mark Tetzner]

Which makes the actual perception of energy prior to conceptualization. Even Kastrup didn’t go to this extreme when he declared ATP as a marker of consciousness, thereby reducing consciousness to energy. It undermined his the basic claim of his metaphysics that consciousness is irreducible. It’s foolish to claim any concept as the irreducible ontological primitive, but energy is the most elemental existence we now know.

Bernardo says that emperically we have no reason to believe that rocks or computers are consciouss, only the things that have metabolilsm are consciouss. Its basically his way of saying no to panpsychism and stop unwarrented speculations which he calls conceivability-traps.

All the ATP-stuff: Under this idealistic model an organism is a knot of mind in mind. There is no reason to assume the universe needs ATP. It does not have sense-organs and it does not live on planet earth. Its state of being should be completely different than ours.

Not energy but experience is the one thing we can know of and it is a metaphysical leap, alright, of the only category we know to exist: experience. If it holds true we will see soon.

[JeffreyW]

Which makes the actual perception of energy prior to conceptualization. Even Kastrup didn’t go to this extreme when he declared ATP as a marker of consciousness, thereby reducing consciousness to energy. It undermined his the basic claim of his metaphysics that consciousness is irreducible. It’s foolish to claim any concept as the irreducible ontological primitive, but energy is the most elemental existence we now know.

Bernardo says that emperically we have no reason to believe that rocks or computers are consciouss, only the things that have metabolilsm are consciouss. Its basically his way of saying no to panpsychism and stop unwarrented speculations which he calls conceivability-traps.

All the ATP-stuff: Under this idealistic model an organism is a knot of mind in mind. There is no reason to assume the universe needs ATP. It does not have sense-organs and it does not live on planet earth. Its state of being should be completely different than ours.

Not energy but experience is the one thing we can know of and it is a metaphysical leap, alright, of the only category we know to exist: experience. If it holds true we will see soon.

And that is where his metaphysics breaks down, as all metaphysics do. Not for the first time he had to refer to physicality to defend a claim - in this case energy. If ATP is the marker and consciousness disappears without it, then consciousness reduces to energy and there is no basis to claim that all energy is conscious. Seriously, it’s over at that point.

[AshvinP]

That we entangle in consciousness does not in any way imply we and what we entangled with are the same thing. Further, thought does not immediately occur in that entanglement, but is processed from the sense data which we receive as energy and transmit to the brain as energy.

Eugene is correct here. Physicalism and its concepts of mind-independent "energy", "fields", etc. is no less a modern metaphysical abstraction than the "consciousness" of idealism. They are both thoroughly metaphysical assumptions and unwarranted under any phenomenological investigation of our experience. Reducing our willing-feeling-thinking activity to abstract "energy" is practically the same as reducing it to abstract "consciousness". Whatever we know about experience, and whenever we know it, thinking-thoughts are already present. All claims to experience-knowledge presuppose thinking. It is only dualist prejudice of the modern age, which allows speculation from a non-existent 3rd person perspective, that convinces us there can be a state of existence prior to any thought.

Just the opposite. Our most direct and primitive perception is the shock. Any claim of consciousness outside our own experience is the metaphysical leap taken from the pre-conceptual shock.
...
That does not imply that what we are thinking of is thinking also.

Just the opposite. Our most direct and primitive perception is the shock. Any claim of consciousness outside our own experience is the metaphysical leap taken from the pre-conceptual shock.

From what is the concept of "direct and primitive shock" getting its meaning from? Thinking. All meaning is imbued by Thinking. The same holds true for the concept of "pre-conceptual", which is already an assembly of various space-time intuitions and rational concepts. Thinking is truly prior to all metaphysical distinctions, i.e. ideal-real, spirit-matter, subject-object, ego-substance, conscious-unconscious, etc..

The problem here is that you are conceiving "thought (idea)" and "thinking" abstractly, which is exactly how the metaphysical (critical) idealist conceives it. That itself is not a problem if we continue to reason through our experience. But, instead of doing that, we project our own abstraction onto the Cosmos and say "this abstraction cannot support the weight of the Cosmos, so there must be a prior abstraction". The metaphysical idealist also does that with "thought-idea" and determines the prior abstraction to be "thoughtless (instinctive) consciousness" or "instinctive Will". The metaphysical materialist determines it to be "thoughtless energy". Neither abstraction can ever be experienced or known, in principle. It will never be discovered through a genuinely phenomenologial approach which reasons from direct experience. It is a textbook case of modern abstract metaphysics.

[JeffreyW]

You miss the point that we are conscious of the shock before we attribute meaning. Meaning is literally an afterthought. If we were to stay within Schopenhauer/Kantian epistemology as Kastrup claims to do, conceptualizing from the actual sense data, as in the case of an electric shock is not metaphysical but objective reality. It becomes metaphysical when we go beyond the experience of sense data, as when we claim the shock came from another consciousness.

[AshvinP]

You miss the point that we are conscious of the shock before we attribute meaning. Meaning is literally an afterthought. If we were to stay within Schopenhauer/Kantian epistemology as Kastrup claims to do, conceptualizing from the actual sense data, as in the case of an electric shock is not metaphysical but objective reality. It becomes metaphysical when we go beyond the experience of sense data, as when we claim the shock came from another consciousness.

That is why I disagree with Kant, Schopenhauer, and BK. Not just a little, but whole-heartedly But there are plenty of phenomenologists who concluded monism-idealism (did not start from it) and rejected Kantian epistemology. Phenomenology cannot possibly conclude "we are conscious of the shock before we attribute meaning". We attribute it subconsciously, but we are still attributing it. There cannot be an experience of "shock" devoid of all meaning. The fact that we cannot even speak of meaningless "shock" is a clue which points towards the meaningful essence of the primordial Logos.

[Eugene I]

Just the opposite. Our most direct and primitive perception is the shock. Any claim of consciousness outside our own experience is the metaphysical leap taken from the pre-conceptual shock.

Of course, we all read Hume. But if we do not make such claim (or at least assumption) that anything may exist outside our own experience, we end up in solipsism. So, if we are to avoid solipsism, we do need to make a metaphysical leap and assume existence of something outside our own conscious experience. At the very least, we need to assume the existence of other instances of conscious experiences ("other human minds"). But by making such minimalistic assumption, we are not inventing any new things/entities that are fundamentally different from the ones we already know from our conscious experience - the thinking activity and the conscious phenomena associated with it. The existence of our own conscious phenomena and thinking activity is given and experientially proven. The only thing we need to (metaphysically) assume is the existence of the same sort of thinking activity and conscious phenomena outside our own field of experience.

Any claim of the existence of anything outside our own experience is always a metaphysical leap, including other conscious experiences, "energy", "matter" or any other "things" or entities. The difference occurs when we assume the existence of "things" that are fundamentally different from the phenomena of conscious experience. Because we can never directly experience such "things", we have no way to prove that they actually exist at all. Their existence can only be a metaphysical leap and abstraction. However, the existence of conscious phenomena is obvious, experientially proven and intimately given to each of us, we do not need to invent and abstract anything here.