Nietzsche and Christianity - Metaphysical Idealist Critique

[Eugene I]

To experience absence of thoughts and flow with some nebulous totality is not that much. But when we experience that the actual structure of the Cosmos is one and the same with our own 'geometry' of consciousness, the 'geometry' of the world of ideas, then our whole existence receives totally new meaning. This is probably one of the most enlightening moments that we can have on Earth.

Just a comment here (I remember writing about it before). The value of the experience of the absence of thoughts is very practical and epistemological tool, its an experimental method to gain insights into the mechanism of consciousness and cognition. In that state we have a chance to experience the base reality of our direct conscious experience: the presence of the space of awareness and its unifying property (which we never noticed before). Then when we start adding to that clean empty state sensory phenomena or feelings, we start to experience and understand how the phenomena of consciousness appear and disappear in the space of the awareness but never are separate from it and always united into the wholeness of right-now totality of experience. And then we start adding thoughts to that and examine how they work and notice that the thoughts are similarly conscious phenomena, but they also carry meanings (their qualia). The meanings may be ideas, imaginations, intuitions and a whole range of very subtle spiritual meanings. But the key is to see how the meanings are different from the very reality of experiencing them, the awareness of them, and different from the rest of the phenomena. There is absolutely nothing wrong with thinking and thinking is the most amazing faculty of consciousness. However, without understanding of the nature of thoughts and their meanings, we typically fall into cognitive mistake and confuse the meanings with reality. That is exactly what materialist do: they create an imaginative scheme of the "material world out there", which is nothing else as a bunch of meanings, and then take this world as reality and disregard the direct realty of their direct conscious experience (hello Dennet ). When we drop materialism, we usually just adopt a different intellectual model of reality (idealistic or other) but still remain living in the world of the meanings "as if" it is our new reality, and never return to the actual reality of our direct conscious experience. So, it's a matter of learning how to properly use this powerful tool of the intellect: we can use it to its full capacity only if we learn to recognize the base reality of conscious experience and distinguish from the "fabricated" reality of the meanings of the thoughts. Once we do that, we can fully use the thinking mechanism but will never be again fooled by believing that the meanings are the actual reality, we will only see them as at best representations and reflections of reality (more or less accurate, or even entirely false in many cases).

[AshvinP]

Yes the argument is that thinking is a fundamental ontic aspect of consciousness, which fits with panentheistic conception of God(s). The response to meditation argument is that the fundamental thinking is still present even if we convince ourselves it is not through meditative process - it never disappears since it is fundamental. Again, "thinking" is being used in very broad sense of cognition which goes beyond merely rational cognition.
ontological-epistemic limits (that's my working hypothesis, anyway).

As Santeri also pointed, the only way to differentiate between different aspects of consciousness is to study them practically in meditation and learn how to differentiate thinking and its products from other aspects such as awareness itself, perceptions, feelings etc. The products of thinking are always meanings or meaningful imaginations. We can say that meanings are the qualia of thoughts. You are right that many of them happen unconsciously and we do not notice the difference between the raw content of the direct conscious experience and the meanings produced by thoughts. This is of crucial importance, because inability to distinguish the reality of experience from the meanings leads to confusions: we take the meanings for reality. Kids imagine Santa Claus (that's a meaning/content of a thought) and, since they are unable to differentiate between meanings from reality of raw experience, they believe that Santa is real (and this belief is also another meaning). Note that meanings of thoughts are also part of our direct conscious experience, but they are the "content" (qualia) of thoughts, while thoughts themselves are the primary phenomena of conscious experience.

That's not a great analogy, because actually the small child experiences the true Unity of willing, feeling, and thinking more clearly than an adolescent and most adults. They are naïve about it, though, and cannot extract any higher spiritual realities through that experience without first going through the Fall of apparent separation. That process is analogous to what happens at the scale of collective humanity. I guess I should ask another question before going further just to make sure - are you claiming here that we truly experience contents of consciousness without any meaning whatsoever and then add the meanings later? That seems to be the case based on earlier comments and what is written below.

So, buy gaining this skill of differentiating meanings from direct experience one can also see that the unity of the space of experience, by its experiential quality, is not a meaning of a thought, but a fact of the direct raw conscious experience. But this is an experiential observation/fact and you really need to experience it and study in meditation, you can't arrive at this conclusion only intellectually.

The empirical observation which supports that is the given of our experience without adding any philosophical assumptions - there is unity and continuity of experience within individual and between individuals, including feelings and thoughts. The fact that we can communicate, empathize, share in the same thoughts as we do on this forum, etc. The notion that these are qualia "copies", "telepathic" messaging between fundamentally separate spheres of experience, etc. are assumptions being added on to the givens of experience. Most likely due to the self-imposed philosophical combo problems which are function of Cartesian and Kantian ontological-epistemic limits (that's my working hypothesis, anyway).

I agree with that and I said it before: the unity of our private space is am experiential fact, but the rest are only intellectual inferences. But if you want to arrive at a different model, it needs to be logically consistent and you need to explain how to integrate the experience of multiple spaces into unity without breaking "into pieces" the unity of each private space. I'm not saying it's impossible, but you need to come up with a consistent model of it.

Basically what we are doing here is a spiritual science of consciousness and cognition. But we cannot do science only by intellectual exercises, we need a strong experimental/experiential basis to be able to verify/falsify our hypotheses as much as possible. and such experiential basis can only be achieved with much meditative and spiritual work. Theoretical physics could not do anything without a lot of work and progress in experimental physics, and the same applies to the spiritual science.

Well Cleric has been building that model for us in many different ways from many different angles, which of course we must experience for ourselves rather than take on faith. But my point is that what he is trying to describe for us naturally flows from what we experience in even our normal 'lower' states of experience-cognition. No philosophical assumptions are added onto it, except maybe idealism (all is idea-beings) which we all agree with. So yes it is a "spiritual science", but it is not only intellectual exercises. In fact that is one of the few points he keeps stressing over and over again in almost every other sentence... it's all about never-ending empirical observations and testing.

[Cleric K]

"One", "unity", etc. You, Cleric, etc. are still speaking from a number theoretical conditioning and projecting it to the bubbles, spheres, individuals of experience.

Santeri, you can't be serious Projecting number theoretical conditioning? Before the numbers can become abstract concept they are first experienced as idea-qualities. Only then these qualities can be conceptualized and abstracted. For example, the toddler learn that there's something in common between two legs, two hands, two eyes. There's a quality of "twoness" that is easily distinguishable much in the same way the quality of "redness" can be distinguished.

[Eugene I]

Cleric, I appreciate your long post on the subject. I agree that the ideas by themselves are not the same as their "representations"/instances in our thoughts, providing that there are such things as pure ideas "without" thoughts that carry them. Basically, you presented a Plationic solution to the problem that we are discussing, and it is indeed a beautiful and consistent worldview and consistent solution to the problem of shared experiences. Still, it is only an inference, we do not know if the ideas can exist "by themselves" apart from thoughts, and we have no way to prove or disprove that. By far not all people will agree with Platonism (I'm sure Santeri will not), although nobody has been able to refute Platonism so far, and it still has many subscribers to it (especially among mathematicians).

[Eugene I]

Well Cleric has been building that model for us in many different ways from many different angles, which of course we must experience for ourselves rather than take on faith. But my point is that what he is trying to describe for us naturally flows from what we experience in even our normal 'lower' states of experience-cognition. No philosophical assumptions are added onto it, except maybe idealism (all is idea-beings) which we all agree with. So yes it is a "spiritual science", but it is not only intellectual exercises. In fact that is one of the few points he keeps stressing over and over again in almost every other sentence... it's all about never-ending empirical observations and testing.

Well, it also turns out (see above) that Cleric added Platonism in addition to a bare idealism. This is not to say that it's wrong, just to note that we need to admit this fact. Idealism in its basic form does not include Platonism. Platonism is an "extra" layer that can be added to it.

[AshvinP]

Well Cleric has been building that model for us in many different ways from many different angles, which of course we must experience for ourselves rather than take on faith. But my point is that what he is trying to describe for us naturally flows from what we experience in even our normal 'lower' states of experience-cognition. No philosophical assumptions are added onto it, except maybe idealism (all is idea-beings) which we all agree with. So yes it is a "spiritual science", but it is not only intellectual exercises. In fact that is one of the few points he keeps stressing over and over again in almost every other sentence... it's all about never-ending empirical observations and testing.

Well, it also turns out (see above) that Cleric added Platonism in addition to a bare idealism. This is not to say that it's wrong, just to note that we need to admit this fact. Idealism in its basic form does not include Platonism. Platonism is an "extra" layer that can be added to it.

Have you ever experienced a mental content-process not associated with any living being? I have not. Again we seem to have this weird tendency of making experiential givens into assumptions and assumptions into givens. I say "we" because most all of us do it to some extent or another - it is a very deeply ingrained habit of mind in the Western world (or any places highly influenced by the West, which is almost everywhere now).

[Eugene I]

Have you ever experienced a mental content-process not associated with any living being? I have not.

I have not either. But what does it have to do with Platonism again?

[AshvinP]

Have you ever experienced a mental content-process not associated with any living being? I have not.

I have not either. But what does it have to do with Platonism again?

The "Platonism" is not being added on to idealism as another assumption, they both naturally flow from the given experience of our existence.

[Eugene I]

The "Platonism" is not being added on to idealism as another assumption, they both naturally flow from the given experience of our existence.

They are both assumptions/inferences only. Bare idealism is the most simple and parsimonious, I agree with that, and that's why I'm with it. Platonism is an extra icing added to it. "Natural" is a very subjective criterium. What feels "natural" to you may not feel "natural" to me. For example, BK never uses the argument that idealism is "natural", but he does use the argument that idealism is parsimonious, and that's a valid argument. Platonism is not so parsimonious, it adds an extra layer to the existence: the world of ideas, just like panpsychism would add an extra layer of "mater" to the existence in addition to consciousness. And that is also why BK did not add Platonism to his idealistic model. Personally I'm open to Platonism, but, I would say, "sceptically" Plato was definitely a philosophical and spiritual genius, no question about that.

[SanteriSatama]

Thinking in the broad sense is the unity of percepts and concepts. Thinking. Feeling, Willing. Yes all three are a Tri-Unity, fundamental and inseparable, we will never find only one without the others, but they can be distinguished as you say. My basic point to Eugene was that thinking is not added on to sensations ex post facto under this panentheistic framework.

Yes, not ex post facto. But I would not use the term 'unity' (which is an idealized aim from certain perspective/frame). More accurate expression is that thinking is a force and process of cohering. And whether the force of cohering is primary to or codependent polarity, also decohering forces are involved, both analysis and synthesis. Dialectic between analysis and synthesis of not only thought-objects, but also between subjects, perspectives etc. generally non-referential and intransitive forms.

In the experience of void, if and when that can be referred to, only thought on some level remains, as the intrusion of its own boundary creation, as the escape trip leaving behind the world of forms, which becomes diminished and contained in some symbolic form, and finding it's way back to the world of forms.

In the void/kenoma, there's nothing to feel and to be felt by. In the pleroma of love, we feel and are felt, pleroma/love/feel is the ground where forms can be built, where unique perspectives come possible. In the pleroma of love, to feel and to be felt does not necessitate thinking.