Criticism

[JeffreyW]

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,

I'm sorry JF but this is laughable
End of discussion

Usually that sort of claim comes when one is incapable of overcoming and argument. In what way laughable?

[JeffreyW]

No, this is definitely incorrect. BK has never engaged in phenomenology or even mentioned phenomenology (Goethe, Steiner, Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger, Barfield, etc.) as a basis of his own philosophical conclusions. If one starts with abstractions about "MAL", "consciousness", "Will", etc., then the conclusions end up being completely wrong, because the living Thinking activity underlying the abstractions is never discovered.

Take a look at this thread about new Essentia creed and my response - viewtopic.php?f=5&t=632

Ashvin, this is your misunderstanding of BK's philosophy. In many videos BK mentioned that for him "Consciousness" or "Mind" is not an abstraction, but it is a linguistic label for the universe of actually experienced conscious phenomena. The same applies to Schopenhauer - his "Will" is just another linguistic term pointing to the same reality of consciously experienced phenomena.

The real difference between Berkley's/Hagel's lineage of idealism and BK's/Schopenhauer's is the interpretation of the state of cognition of Consciousness at Large. In BK's/Schopenhauer's version the MAL is instinctive and non-metacognitive, it does not reflect on what it is doing, so that it creates the universe of ideations without pre-meditation and any cognized purpose. That is why they call it "Will" - a pointer to its conscious but instinctive nature. The Berkley's/Hagel's version is "theistic" one where Consciousness is highly meta-cognitive and creates the universe of ideations purposely and pre-meditatively.

One major problem is that is a false interpretation of Schopenhauer’s understanding of Will. Schopenhauer puts Will prior to any appearance to us. He even qualifies Will as reductive to the experience of humans as their own striving but is not in any way descriptive of Will in itself. The same is true of consciousness, which Schopenhauer actually rejects.

[JeffreyW]

If you were BK, would you want to debate with some odd bod who thinks metaphysics is dead ...

Well, in the unlikely event that BK were to chime in, it seems he would pretty much repeat the following ...

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.

Beyond that, anything else that BK might say is a moot point.

I am presupposing physicalism prior to abstraction. There is a critical difference between abstract objectification and direct esthetic knowledge.

[JeffreyW]

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, I hasten to add that I do not define Being as energy. I don’t give it any definition at all because it is beyond definition. But I have that same objection to consciousness. Consciousness and energy are our emergent experience of something far deeper and primordial that we can experience, but cannot grasp definitely.

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:

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.

Again, I agree with most of what you say, but I do not ignore the knowing element. I see our human consciousness (Dasein) as a participant with whatever exists in the act of revealing - a form of entanglement.

[JeffreyW]

But JW did say more or less that Rovelli is the only philosopher of any importance today...

Which does not imply either that I completely agree with him or that he is an actual great philosopher - only the closest thing we have to one now.

[JeffreyW]

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).

Analogies are abstractions.

[Eugene I]

Usually that sort of claim comes when one is incapable of overcoming and argument. In what way laughable?

Because it is bare metaphysics You take an abstraction that you derive from the math of physics and from your intuitive "feel of energy" (which is by the way not the "energy" itself, but only one of your conscious phenomena) and declare it to be an undisputable ontic fundamental from which consciousness "emerges". By the way, all math of the modern physics can be re-written so that energy will not be used at all. "Energy " in physics is simply a conventionalist and not even necessary mathematical concept, it is useful in physics but not more than that. Ascribing any actual reality to math concepts of physics is a "naive realism".

Let's take a simulated reality hypothesis example. If we live in a Matrix, all math of physics would simply describe the patterns of the phenomena that we observe in such VR and would not correspond to any actual realities. Moreover, all our observations of neural brain activity in such VR would simply be images created by simulations, even though we might find a strong correlation of them with our conscious perceptions and phenomena, in which case some naive scientists would claim that these conscious phenomena are "caused" by and "emerge from" observed brain activity (forgetting that correlation does not mean causation). Can you prove that we do not live in a simulated reality?

And you also did not answer how would you address the brutal emergence hard problem of consciousness arising in such ontology of energy: how exactly conscious phenomena emerge from fundamentally non-conscious "energy". Pls refer to the works for Chalmers for details.

I personally much prefer Rovelli's approach in which physics and natural sciences in general should be agnostic to ontology and only apply to what reality does, not to what reality is. This includes his relational interpretation of QM where QM applies only to the relations between observables. In this approach the models and concepts of physics (and natural sciences in general) do not actually refer to any ontic realities, but only model the patterns of correlations between the observable phenomena.

Analogies are abstractions.

Yes, since analogies are acts of intellectual discourse. But as I said, there are different kinds of analogies. One kind is extrapolating into the realm of unknown of some factual knowledge about a "thing" that has already been experientially proven to exist. And that's what we do in idealism - we indisputably know that conscious phenomena exist and real, and based on that, we make an extrapolative inference of their existence into the realm of the unknown. In this case the question of the existence/reality of the "thing" is not questionable, it is given, the inference is only about the extrapolation of its existence into the realm of unknown. The other kind of analogy is taking a pure mental abstraction from start (where it is unknown and unproven whether it refers to any actual reality) and extrapolating it into the unknown. In the latter case there is much less empirical ground to make such inference. And that is what materialism does, as well as what you do in your ontology of energy.

One major problem is that is a false interpretation of Schopenhauer’s understanding of Will. Schopenhauer puts Will prior to any appearance to us. He even qualifies Will as reductive to the experience of humans as their own striving but is not in any way descriptive of Will in itself. The same is true of consciousness, which Schopenhauer actually rejects.

You might be right here, I was never a fan of Schop and so never took time to study his works. It looks like Bernardo picked a wrong predecessor.

[AshvinP]

]

Again, I agree with most of what you say, but I do not ignore the knowing element. I see our human consciousness (Dasein) as a participant with whatever exists in the act of revealing - a form of entanglement.

Interesting. So evolution has permanently veiled "whatever exists"? Or do you see any evolutionary reasons why we may recover or gain for the first time a capacity to penetrate these veils of intellectual cognition, to start Thinking in Heidegger's sense?

[Dojo Mojo]

Trial balloon II.

I tried to copy and paste from notepad and it appears my original comment was culled, Here is a shorter version:

Jeff, on your first YouTube video of Kastrup’s interview with Craig Reed, down in the comment section you had a brief but very illuminating exchange with another YouTuber that went like this -

Other YouTuber asked Too Late For The Gods -

“And what does physical evidence stand on if not experience?”

Too Late For The Gods replied -

“Of course it stands on experience. I can’t even imagine what point you meant to make there.”

That you agree physical evidence stands on experience seems to barely be a rewording of idealism’s core premise, maybe I’m the one missing the whole point, but I think your missing the point was the point (being cheeky)?

Also wanted to congratulate you on being on the forum. Idealism needs all of the critics it can get. I’d much rather read what the critic has to say, no matter how triggered I get.

I am grateful to have found this out about philosophy, how it gets my mind out of its own comfort zone.

[Soul_of_Shu]

I thing Ashvin and I see much the same things in the present world ...

Well, if you and Ashvin are seeing eye-to-eye (or is that I-to-I?), you're gonna love Cleric ... Earth calling Cleric ... Come in Cleric ... (imagine staticy crackling noises here)