Criticism

[Soul_of_Shu]

What humanity needs, and by "humanity" I mostly mean the younger generations who will inherit the world we leave behind, is genuine spiritual knowledge to work back from the brinks of perpetual nihilism and totalitarianism - not abstract or even artistic knowledge that there is a spiritual reality somewhere out there with meaning, but concrete knowledge that a meaningful life with continuity of experience goes on beyond physical death and that the Spirit-Soul which lives in each individual is eternal. Confidence in that kind of knowledge only comes from direct perceiving of the spiritual realms and beings across the threshold who have structured and will continue to structure our daily experience. It is just that direct perceiving and knowing which most modern philosophies and sciences claim is impossible.

I totally agree with that

And I'm confident that all who are intimately familiar with that direct knowing will not be dissuaded from it by any dubiousness that BK, or anyone else, expresses to the contrary—notwithstanding they may still derive much of value from his pointing to the primacy of Consciousness as the ever-present origin of all realms and beings.

[Ben Iscatus]

BK leaves the spiritual stuff to Rupert Spira. And a blooming good job he does of it.

[JeffreyW]

The only Heidegger that interests me is the post-turn Heidegger, and you just quoted from one of my favorite books. Your quote actually accords with what I’ve been saying. To access Being we have to completely jettison the stubborn habits of understanding stemming from metaphysics by returning to pre-Socratic thinking of Being in the fullness of logos. That means an opening up to what is right in front of us and has been all along - the presence of things in the present, instead of metaphysical inventions. It means remembering the fullness which still is barely remnant in language - in the word. But he further explains that that opening toward Being is a hearkening to the call of Being in its mysterious concealedness and what is unconceals.

I don’t know if you can read the German, but things are much more apparent in the words “thinking", "thought", "thanks" and "memory” which all play off the word denken (thinking). Denken, Gedacht, Andenken, and Gedächtnis, which taken together show a reverential musing on what is revealed. This is in stark contrast to the appropriation of beings in metaphysics and technology, The point is actually embedded in the approach in this demonstration. Metaphysics and its generations of analytic philosophy and objectification misappropriate meaning in words by defining them, which annihilates all the manifold of meaning in a word such as Denken. It takes a “living” history to kill it and fix it to a specimen table with a pin. Words are not for defining, but for exploring, and in that exploration remembering back to its “Ursprung” - its original springing forth from the ground of Being through esthetic experience of what was disclosed.

Thanks JW, and yes I could sense the above in your previous posts as well, especially the first one. We are in much agreement about the major prejudices of metaphysics and analytic philosophy, including idealism. I suspect the main point of departure between us will be on the nature of Western cognitive and cultural evolution. I think Hegel was spot on when he observed:

“The bud disappears when the blossom breaks through, and we might say that the former is refuted by the latter; in the same way when the fruit comes, the blossom may be explained to be a false form of the plant’s existence, for the fruit appears as its true nature in place of the blossom. The ceaseless activity of their own inherent nature makes these stages moments of an organic unity, where they not merely do not contradict one another, but where one is as necessary as the other; and constitutes thereby the life of the whole.”
― Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit

We could analogize the 'blossom' to the modern age, which is a stage of "spiritual" (practically synonymous with "perception-cognition" in my view) evolution no less real or necessary to the whole than all previous and future stages. So the deep dive into modern nominalism, rationalism, materialism-dualism, Kantian idealism, and overall abstraction serves a purpose, but not a purpose of some external agent guiding the world from afar, but a purpose which naturally unfolds from the inner logic of evolution. Books could be written on that purpose and have been, but I will sum it up crudely as, "instructing the individual human soul to become completely independent in his inner thought-life, thereby (hopefully) re-membering what was first revealed as external Wisdom as inner knowledge and beginning on a journey to authentic spiritual freedom". It is most definitely a remembering back to the primordial Logos and "esthetic experience of what was disclosed", but it is not a mystical returning to any past state of evolution. Instead it is a truly novel synthesis of ancient Wisdom, living Reason, and modern scientific-mathematic cognition.

How you feel about that?

We agree on far more than we disagree, I see evolution guided by the essence of Being itself playing itself out. The path of essential plying out isn’t guided by any logic, and much metaphysical error has come about through a logical teleology. I do think we can see a general arc, however. If we watch the evolution of life itself we see not just an unalterable will to survive, but a survival toward a purpose of contemplative experience and open embrace of the university and other individuals within it. Our reductive understanding of evolution as a chemical genetic process conceals much.

[findingblanks]

"Confidence in that kind of knowledge only comes from direct perceiving of the spiritual realms and beings across the threshold who have structured and will continue to structure our daily experience."

And 'direct perceiving' of that kind will be defined within communities of people who verify each other's kinds of experiencings. It makes sense that these will vary massively in many cases. But even when they vary in small ways, we find that they can split communities and cause the establishment of new ones.

"BK leaves the spiritual stuff to Rupert Spira..." and Spira leaves the spiritual models to the clairvoyants of all traditions, to his credit.

[Eugene I]

And I'm confident that all who are intimately familiar with that direct knowing will not be dissuaded from it by any dubiousness that BK, or anyone else, expresses to the contrary—notwithstanding they may still derive much of value from his pointing to the primacy of Consciousness as the ever-present origin of all realms and beings.

Shu, I agree, BK's work definitely has value, powerful argumentation and pointers to the primacy of Conscious, especially for people at the stage where they are dissatisfied and ready to turn away from materialism. On the other hand, I think we all agree that it also has significant limitations.

Furthermore, beyond the limits of strictly analytical idealism, there will always be differences in views and certain disagreements between people following different flavors of "transcendentally extended" idealism, and we can always discuss them openly. But I think it's counterproductive to raise confrontations and religious wars between different versions of idealism because it will only confuse people and scare them away. We had enough religious wars in the human history.

[JeffreyW]

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.

Our personal consciousness disappears with our death, that is not in dispute. When the whirlpool in the lake disappears it reduces to what itself is: Water. Not to something else like in your consciouness reduces to energy example.
Just asking you to understand the model and not beg the question all the time. Just try to imagine there is just once substance. One category: experience.

I assure you I fully understand the model - it’s not a difficult concept. But it keeps being presented almost as a mantra while ignoring the objections to it,

[JeffreyW]

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.

Under your assumption, experience other than your own consciousness is no more knowable than anything else outside your own consciousness since all you directly experience is your own. Other consciousness is merely an inference by analogy from your own.

[Eugene I]

Under your assumption, experience other than your own consciousness is no more knowable than anything else outside your own consciousness since all you directly experience is your own. Other consciousness is merely an inference by analogy from your own.

Exactly, it's inference by analogy (to what is already experientially proven and known), not inference by abstraction (as in the case of all non-consciousness-based ontologies).

[JeffreyW]

JW seems to be on a mission to prove metaphysics a failed enterprise, given up by all the great modern minds - self-confessed failures- with whom he aligns himself. To him, the divine substrate is, and will forever remain, unknowable quantum foam (which, paradoxically, he claims to know a bit about).

Thus he is reduced to criticising those who say otherwise. He does this by watching a couple of videos and nitpicking at them with lugubrious scorn.

Just one example: in his book "Decoding Schopenhauer's Metaphysics", BK uses quotes from Schop's own work to show how he believed that Will and Consciousness are equivalent. JW does not even do BK the justice of reading this when, repeating the misunderstandings of old Schop critics, he denounces the idea.

BK brings in evidence from modern neuroscience, foundations of physics, psychedelics and psychiatry to renew the ancient idea that Mind is at the root of everything. Observing that Mind is all we can know, BK starts with mind, works with mind and ends with mind. He shows that even if there is more than that, we have no need for it to account for the reality we experience. To BK, metaphysics is alive.

If you were BK, would you want to debate with some odd bod who thinks metaphysics is dead and insinuates that you don't even understand the meaning of the "meta" in metaphysics? It's just insulting.

Yes I would. Actually, I have referred specifically to Schopenhauer’s words. The problem with Kastrup is he gets the physics and philosophy wrong so often. Examples are his twisting of the Leggett Inequalities into meaning something very different and his missing the role of consciousness in Rovelli. But if I were somebody who honestly thought there was still a role for metaphysics I would not hesitate to debate in its defense. Kastrup never faces a challenge that I know of by someone who actually has competence in these areas.

[JeffreyW]

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.

And as I awaken from last night's dreamscape to all these "good night" wishes, what should appear to this wondering mind but a battle of minds. And here I thought that Ashvin and Jeffrey were on the same page in their respective critiques of BK's ideas—well, apparently not so. And is that really any wonder, when as far as one can tell JW's critique is actually a rejection of idealism, i.e. the world as idea construction, period, while AP's critique is not that BK is positing idealism, but rather that his positing doesn't go nearly far enough into the profound implications of the world as idea construction. Will there be any reconciling of this, any bridging of this divide? Stay tuned ... but be prepared to stay in for the long haul ... you know, like for-friggin-ever!

I thing Ashvin and I see much the same things in the present world but, as you rightly pointed out, differ in our approach. I am convinced that Metaphysics was indeed the fatal error of Western thought.