Just to clarify, "naive" here just means how we perceive and think about things before we philosophize about them. So I call myself a "naive dualist" because I perceive rivers and rocks as mindless, while I perceive people and animals as engaging in mindful activity. It is only after the philosophical effort of adopting idealism that I can claim that rivers and rocks are the appearance of mindful activity. But that doesn't change the fact that I still don't perceive that mindful activity.Ben Iscatus wrote: ↑Tue Jan 09, 2024 9:46 pm Scott,
If you look at the comments below your essay, you will see that I read it and enjoyed it at the time. But I now think that “final participation” is a promissory dream. Even if it’s not, I choose what I perceive or currently experience over what I’m sometimes asked to believe. For instance, I perceive that Mars is a dead world, so if I’m asked to believe that it’s the Buddha’s new home, I am sceptical, even if Mars has incorporeal planes of existence (which I cannot perceive). But if you can perceive them, or believe in them with the promise of one day perceiving them, then OK: perhaps that means you’re more evolved than me. Still, in my defence, I do reject the label of "naive dualist".
Regardless of what one thinks of Final Participation, there is the evidence that 3000 years ago, people did perceive that mindful activity, yet we don't. Which is to say that we have evolved from being original participators to having no conscious participation in our perceptions of the physical world. Yet we have subconscious participation. That is, we engage in subconscious mental activity to perceive, say, a tree. Without that, we would only perceive disconnected color splotches. What all this means is that if idealism is true, then we should be perceiving nothing but mindful activity. But we don't. We are not perceiving reality as it is. The name I give to this state is "insanity", although one could give less harsh terms to it, like "Maya". But whatever one calls it, I think it indicates that we need fixing. (Note: this does not mean that the original participators, who were naive idealists, were sane. Just not insane in the way we are.)