JeffreyW wrote: ↑Mon Nov 15, 2021 3:55 am
AshvinP wrote: ↑Mon Nov 15, 2021 3:46 am
JeffreyW wrote: ↑Mon Nov 15, 2021 3:30 am
Modern neuroscience traces the brain activity as it constructs the meaning. If our brains don’t construct meaning, then how do we go from electric impulses to some valid intuition of the world? The neuroscientist Anil Seth is very good on this.
I am kind of bewildered by the above comment, because it seems that you don't notice that you are
presupposing materialist ontology, with all of its abstractions, before interpreting the science and then hanging the rest of your philosophy on that materialist interpretation of scientific data.
Physical as in energy, not material. Because it is the most elemental thing we know it has to be the starting point. You cannot just skip energy and assume consciousness. If we take away energy consciousness disappears,
JW,
I will say here, though, that at least you have not followed people like Rovelli down into the abyss of "emptiness of emptiness" as the Ground. You seem to have stopped at energy, which is at least a concrete force we can observe in our immanent experience. Some people on this forum, including BK, do not realize how their abstraction of "instinctive consciousness" becomes practically equivalent to the physicalist abstract void over time. Owen Barfield correctly observed this development in the 1950s:
Barfield wrote:I do not think it too sweeping to say that the doctrines of logical of linguistic analysis... are no more than an extensive gloss on this principle. It's corollary, that all the propositions of logic are mere tautologies, is the heart of Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus which Bertrand Russell translated into English in 1922; and it is this broom with which it is hoped to sweep away, as meaningless, all statements not related to physically observable or verifiable events, to limit the sphere of man's knowledge to the increasingly tentative findings of physical science, and to dismiss all other affirmations as meaningless. For all propositions except those from which some observation-statement can be deduced are, it is averred, meaningless, either as misuse of language, or as tautologies...
In the days of Locke and Hume it was felt that science, the newcomer, required a foundation in philosophy; but since then the two have changed places. The startling and largely beneficent achievements of science in the practical business of manipulating matter and carting it to and fro have so impressed the mind of the empiricist that he is content to treat its ever-changing assumptions as 'given'. If he is a philosopher, he regards it as his business, not to question the scientific assumptions of the day, but rather to justify the ways of science to man.
...
Twentieth-century science has abolished the 'thing' altogether; and twentieth-century philosophy (that part of it, at least, which takes no account of imagination) has obediently followed suit. There are no objects, says the voice of Science, there are only bundles of waves or possibly something else; adding that, although it is convenient to think of them, it would be naïve to suppose that the waves or the something else actually exist. There is no 'referent', echoes the philosophy of linguistic analysis deferentially, no substance or underlying reality which is 'meant' by words. There are only descriptions, only the words themselves, though it 'happens to be the case' that men have from the beginning so persistently supposed the contrary that they positively cannot open their mouths with out doing so.
Your position re: energy remains tethered to concrete experience, and that is a positive, but is still ignoring the knowing element underlying physical manifestations of fields, energy, etc. Goethe expresses it succinctly in my footnote - those are all manifestations of the eternal idea through which we become aware and can speak about anything. It is key to understand that I do
not start there as an assumption, though, but arrive there by careful reasoning through our immanent experience of perception-cognition. You are aware, of course, that is phenomenology. I am having a difficult time squaring your position with anything Heidegger writes in his lectures on Thinking. In general, he seems very far away from and critical of materialist ontology. But perhaps there are some passages in the original German which shed more light on that, and I am open to the possibility I have interpreted him incorrectly. As it stands, I think his lectures make clear that Thinking is to be considered a foundational aspect of the Ground i.e. Origin and primordial Logos.
