Nietzsche and Christianity - Metaphysical Idealist Critique

[Cleric]

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).

I also value the experience of the absence of thoughts but if we take it as epistemological basis we arrive at an incomplete system. If I empty my room of all furniture, the empty room doesn't explain what's my place in the picture - the activity that fills and empties the room. That's what I noted some time ago that we should be very careful not to consider that the empty awareness explains out of itself the existence of thinking. If we are true to our observations we would have to admit that thinking comes 'from a different direction' so to speak. The causative activity is not something that we indifferently observe to raise from the empty awareness and create the thoughts (I speak of active thinking, not hearing words in our head).

This places the whole role of thinking into a subordinate role, as a side effect of the primary awareness. But if we are honest we can't do that. It's the same reductionist error all over again - trying to produce something from the materials that don't contain its essence. This also explains why you see thoughts only as adding 'meanings' that will always float loosely above perceptions.

There's another limitation of the empty room. In our life we awaken in certain situation. We're in a room. That we learn to empty it. OK, that's valuable experience. But are we really objective to claim that we are now at the grounds of existence? Just because we simply observe flies entering and leaving the room? Just because it's the only thing that we know? We need our activity to start exploring our space. Then we find that this is just one room with two windows in a larger palace with many rooms. Then outside the palace we discover a whole world and so on. And please note - and this is an important one - even if we are outside the palace we can still empty our consciousness from 'furniture' that we create. But then in thoughtlessness we behold very different panorama. This relates to what I've been saying about probing the world of ideas through thinking. In this way we expand our knowledge to geometries outside the room which are just as objective as the initial room but put the room and everything else into a much wider perspective. And I repeat - we don't need to support this perspective through thoughts that add artificial meanings - once the idea geometry is expanded and explored we can behold it even without thought activity.

I'm sure you've had such meditative experiences. Just because we have no thoughts it doesn't mean that we find ourselves in the same state every time. Sometimes we clear the thoughts and we feel in a dark spot in our head and nothing around. On 'sunnier' days we clear the thoughts but we experience our whole body from head to toe vibrating - fully objectively, not by holding this as some artificial thought. If you've had similar experiences you'll also be able to understand better what I mean with world of Ideas and that it has nothing to do with postulating some additional philosophical layer. This is what Ashvin meant when he tried to point to thinking only as a more specific form of a much more fundamental form of spiritual cognition. If you really had such experience (I hope so) of feeling the no thought state, while the totality of awareness as a whole holds different meanings, then you'll have to admit that the state where you experience only a dark spot in the mind and nothing else, and the state of a full body perception awareness, even though you don't think about them, still are experienced as different ideal content. You understand, even without thought, that your awareness encompasses two different meaningful situations. Now if you admit as a possibility that through active thinking and meditation it's possible to investigate even wider spectrum of inner geometries, you'll reckon that all of them will be experienced as different ideal meaning - again, even without conceptualizing them. If you grasp these different ideal contents within the different no-thought states, then you'll be closer to what I mean by world of ideas. I hope you would agree that we can't speak about 'adding' any Platonic layer of meaning out of ourselves in this way.

[SanteriSatama]

Actually, I grokked what you say better as I read your current lengthy dialogues. I was reminded of a story from my days with my first meditation teacher. He was giving a workshop on seeing auras. I complained, "I don't see colors." He invited me to come near, close my eyes as he moved my hand randomly near parts of torso. Periodically, he would say, "What color?" and I would respond, "red" - "blue" - "yellow" - etc. At the end, when I opened my eyes everyone was laughing because I had called all the chakra colors correctly. I objected saying, "But I didn't see any colors - those words just came to me." The teacher responded, "Lou, that's how you see." And it's true also for me in my dreams and visions. It's extremely rare for me to see a color but the words come anyway. Reflecting on this self-experience, I thought, "Maybe those lengthy texts are the way Cleric 'sees'. Do you resonate with such a view? I ask because I don't presume that we see the same, which is why I say "I" and not "We". Similarly, in communion, I don't see hierarchies. I see peers, or perhaps more metaphysically, and experientially, I recognize aspects of myself.

Nice story, poet and oracle channeling deeper language directly into words.

Here You do share and show also related visions - Merkaba, Metatron, deep mathematics of holy geometry. As for sense-awareness, there seems to be much difficulty and challenge in opening consciousness to those regions, to be able to also talk about them. They are very touchy issues in our peer-to-peer communication. Yet, the enlightened aspect is only half the story.

[AshvinP]

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.

I don't follow your logic here. Idealism is claiming, "what exists is only what we directly experience - consciousness". What you are calling "Platonism" claims, "the consciousness which pervades the world is always tied to living beings, just as we always experience". So how are either "assumptions/inferences only" rather than natural conclusions from the givens of our experience?

BK does not claim the idea-beings are necessary conclusions from his idealist model, but he still leans heavily in the direction that such idea-beings are, in fact, involved in all natural processes. And his favorite label to use for himself other than "idealist" is "naturalist", so he does see a deep connection between idealism and naturalism. Like we already established, neither of us (and presumably no one else) has experienced mental content disconnected from living beings, so it is a conclusion which naturally flows from the givens of our experience.

[Eugene I]

I also value the experience of the absence of thoughts but if we take it as epistemological basis we arrive at an incomplete system. If I empty my room of all furniture, the empty room doesn't explain what's my place in the picture - the activity that fills and empties the room. That's what I noted some time ago that we should be very careful not to consider that the empty awareness explains out of itself the existence of thinking. If we are true to our observations we would have to admit that thinking comes 'from a different direction' so to speak. The causative activity is not something that we indifferently observe to raise from the empty awareness and create the thoughts (I speak of active thinking, not hearing words in our head).

This places the whole role of thinking into a subordinate role, as a side effect of the primary awareness. But if we are honest we can't do that. It's the same reductionist error all over again - trying to produce something from the materials that don't contain its essence. This also explains why you see thoughts only as adding 'meanings' that will always float loosely above perceptions.

Oh no, we discusses it before, I never said that we would neglect the active/volitional ability of consciousness. All I'm saying that in order to conduct a comprehensive study of consciousness to the best of our abilities, we need to start from the base: an empty awareness, understand how it is experienced directly etc, and then start adding and studying (experientially) more and more features to it. In my previous post I did not mention the volitional/active/causative ability, and you are right, it is something we would never know if we would only limit our view on consciousness based on the empty state. Thinking is definitely the active and volitional by its nature.

I'm sure you've had such meditative experiences. Just because we have no thoughts it doesn't mean that we find ourselves in the same state every time. Sometimes we clear the thoughts and we feel in a dark spot in our head and nothing around. On 'sunnier' days we clear the thoughts but we experience our whole body from head to toe vibrating - fully objectively, not by holding this as some artificial thought. If you've had similar experiences you'll also be able to understand better what I mean with world of Ideas and that it has nothing to do with postulating some additional philosophical layer. This is what Ashvin meant when he tried to point to thinking only as a more specific form of a much more fundamental form of spiritual cognition. If you really had such experience (I hope so) of feeling the no thought state, while the totality of awareness as a whole holds different meanings, then you'll have to admit that the state where you experience only a dark spot in the mind and nothing else, and the state of a full body perception awareness, even though you don't think about them, still are experienced as different ideal content. You understand, even without thought, that your awareness encompasses two different meaningful situations. Now if you admit as a possibility that through active thinking and meditation it's possible to investigate even wider spectrum of inner geometries, you'll reckon that all of them will be experienced as different ideal meaning - again, even without conceptualizing them. If you grasp these different ideal contents within the different no-thought states, then you'll be closer to what I mean by world of ideas. I hope you would agree that we can't speak about 'adding' any Platonic layer of meaning out of ourselves in this way.

Right, so here we both agree that the ideal meanings (with or without conceptualization) are some fundamental "things" that consciousness is able to create, experience and volitionally manipulate. And I was saying exactly that in my recent post about meanings of thoughts. There is no question about the reality of ideal meanings, we experience them directly as a content/meanings of our thought forms and in that sense they are absolutely real . The Platonist shift occurs once we introduce an inference that the meanings/ideas can "exist" without and apart from thoughts that carry them. And that proposition is experimentally unprovable, because we never experience meanings apart from thoughts. Basically, for us thoughts are "carriers" of ideas (again, I'm including not only conceptual ideal, but all kinds of non-conceptual ones as well). Thoughts-phenomena are what allows the ideas to be experienced. Without thoughts ideas can not be directly experienced by consciousness. That basically means that such standalone-ideas are in the same category as matter - some property or fundamental that cannot be experienced directly by consciousness, but only indirectly through senses. Similarly, ideas can only be experienced through "carrying" thoughts and never directly without them. So, by adopting this hypothesis we do add to idealism an extra inference of the "standalone" existence of ideas apart from thoughts, with such "standalone" ideas inaccessible to conscious experience. Needless to say, such addition is not very parsimonious, which would definitely trigger BK's "parsimony alarm"

An alternative "bare idealism" approach is to infer that ideas and ideal meanings are definitely real, but they are simply the qualia of thoughts and never exist apart from thoughts. This is the most parsimonious approach.

[Eugene I]

I don't follow your logic here. Idealism is claiming, "what exists is only what we directly experience - consciousness". What you are calling "Platonism" claims, "the consciousness which pervades the world is always tied to living beings, just as we always experience". So how are either "assumptions/inferences only" rather than natural conclusions from the givens of our experience?

BK does not claim the idea-beings are necessary conclusions from his idealist model, but he still leans heavily in the direction that such idea-beings are, in fact, involved in all natural processes. And his favorite label to use for himself other than "idealist" is "naturalist", so he does see a deep connection between idealism and naturalism. Like we already established, neither of us (and presumably no one else) has experienced mental content disconnected from living beings, so it is a conclusion which naturally flows from the givens of our experience.

See my response to Cleric. The key question is - are the idea-beings conscious, meaning that is there a conscious experience of these ideas in the spaces of experience/awareness of these idea-beings themselves? If yes then ok, this is still basic idealism, only with the addition of the inference of existence of idea-beings, but without adding an extra "layer" to existence. And that is not Platonism, because Plato posed the existence of pure ideas and never meant that they are "conscious beings".

However, now we are back to corner one again. If we assume the existence of such being-ideas bearing conscious experience of their ideas, then such conscious experience is experienced within their unified spaces of awareness. So, the idea-beings are experiencing those ideas directly already in their spaces of awareness. Then, how can we also experience the same identical ideas, have exactly the same qualia of idea-experiences without breaking the unity of experiential spaces? We are back to the subject combination problem again.

[AshvinP]

I don't follow your logic here. Idealism is claiming, "what exists is only what we directly experience - consciousness". What you are calling "Platonism" claims, "the consciousness which pervades the world is always tied to living beings, just as we always experience". So how are either "assumptions/inferences only" rather than natural conclusions from the givens of our experience?

BK does not claim the idea-beings are necessary conclusions from his idealist model, but he still leans heavily in the direction that such idea-beings are, in fact, involved in all natural processes. And his favorite label to use for himself other than "idealist" is "naturalist", so he does see a deep connection between idealism and naturalism. Like we already established, neither of us (and presumably no one else) has experienced mental content disconnected from living beings, so it is a conclusion which naturally flows from the givens of our experience.

See my response to Cleric. The key question is - are the idea-beings conscious, meaning that is there a conscious experience of these ideas in the spaces of experience/awareness of these idea-beings themselves? If yes then ok, this is still basic idealism, only with the addition of the inference of existence of idea-beings, but without adding an extra "layer" to existence. And that is not Platonism, because Plato posed the existence of pure ideas and never meant that they are "conscious beings".

However, now we are back to corner one again. If we assume the existence of such being-ideas bearing conscious experience of their ideas, then such conscious experience is experienced within their unified spaces of awareness. So, the idea-beings are experiencing those ideas directly already in their spaces of awareness. Then, how can we also experience the same identical ideas, have exactly the same qualia of idea-experiences without breaking the unity of experiential spaces? We are back to the subject combination problem again.

From what I understand, the conscious beings are what we are referring to as "ideas", "ideal content", etc., rather than beings which have ideas. Their activity appears to us as thought-forms until we reach higher modes of cognition and directly see their activity, like peeking behind a curtain to see the puppet-master pulling the strings of the puppets (perhaps not the best analogy). I don't think that is inconsistent with Plato and his Forms, but that's a whole different discussion.

I think Cleric already explained a few times how the ideal content can be uniquely experienced yet also belong to a shared pool of content. I still kind of think the combination problem is mostly an artifice of unexamined philosophical axioms. Although Cleric may disagree with me there, I am not sure. Not that it really matters, because the experiential givens point to genuinely shared ideal content with also unique perspectives on that content.

[Eugene I]

The bottom-line is, there are three choices:
1. The ideas are simply meanings of thoughts. OK, but that means that when two conscious beings share and experience the same idea, they actually experience their own "copies" or representations of this idea, otherwise we run into subject combination problem.
2. Platonism: there are such "things" as standalone ideas-by-themselves (with no conscious experience of them whatsoever), but we can experience them indirectly through thoughts. Also, these ideas can be shared between multiple conscious beings, each being experiencing exactly the same idea through their thoughts.
3. Assumption of the existence of conscious idea-beings having their own private spaces of experience - see above and also runs into subject combination problem if we attempt to assume that we experience these same exact ideas as they are experienced by idea-beings.

[Eugene I]

From what I understand, the conscious beings are what we are referring to as "ideas", "ideal content", etc., rather than beings which have ideas. Their activity appears to us as thought-forms until we reach higher modes of cognition and directly see their activity, like peeking behind a curtain to see the puppet-master pulling the strings of the puppets (perhaps not the best analogy). I don't think that is inconsistent with Plato and his Forms, but that's a whole different discussion.

I think Cleric already explained a few times how the ideal content can be uniquely experienced yet also belong to a shared pool of content. I still kind of think the combination problem is mostly an artifice of unexamined philosophical axioms. Although Cleric may disagree with me there, I am not sure. Not that it really matters, because the experiential givens point to genuinely shared ideal content with also unique perspectives on that content.

That's fine, I understand that the idea-beings ARE ideas. The question is: is there a conscious experience that pertains to these beings? The word "beings" sort of assumes that there is.

[SanteriSatama]

"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.

Yes, most definitely number theoretical conditioning. The fact that most people are consciously unaware of p-adic numbers and their structure does not mean that they are not spiritually affected and conditioned by it to various degrees. Mathematical cognition happens mostly on various M@L levels, which uses human etc. subjects as subroutines in it's evolution. In its immaterial spiritual aspect mathematical cognition can't scratch cuneiform on clay tablets, do knot theory in bacterial DNA. The highly abstract math is much easier than the fine detail. Testing coherence of highly abstract ideas in concrete computation is the hard part.

Mathematical physics as we know it, is a god in a very concrete sense. On the level of human scientists, that god is most unaware of its deity. And in the fields and regions of our love, the artwork of that god can and should be deconstructively criticized. Likewise in the region of pure mathematics and its deeply spiritual connotations.

Of course, Poetry of mathematics is not the only force and aspect of Creation. Very important aspect, but not the whole of it. The roots of the Tree feeds on minerals, mineral shards of platonic solids etc. It feeds from the light particles of the p-adic Sun. Yet, there's much more than just mathematical metabolism to a Tree. It takes a whole universe and all the love in the world to grow a Tree. Blessed be!

[Cleric]

All I'm saying that in order to conduct a comprehensive study of consciousness to the best of our abilities, we need to start from the base: an empty awareness, understand how it is experienced directly etc, and then start adding and studying (experientially) more and more features to it.

As I said, I agree that these states must be explored, nothing should be excluded but we really must be careful what we infer when we say that this state is base. (I don't know if the following is your position but I'll just mentioned it here for completeness) For example, I can format the hard drive of my computer and start installing a new OS. In certain sense the formatted hard drive is a base state. But what about the computer itself? It is already preexisting. So that's what I mean. That we find ourselves at a starting point of our investigation but we'll be making very serious assumption if we suppose that the blank mind state is actually the same state from which the whole World and our body are directly created (or if we suppose that they are simply thin dream images within that blank state).

Right, so here we both agree that the ideal meanings (with or without conceptualization) are some fundamental "things" that consciousness is able to create, experience and volitionally manipulate. And I was saying exactly that in my recent post about meanings of thoughts. There is no question about the reality of ideal meanings, we experience them directly as a content/meanings of our thought forms and in that sense they are absolutely real . The Platonist shift occurs once we introduce an inference that the meanings/ideas can "exist" without and apart from thoughts that carry them. And that proposition is experimentally unprovable, because we never experience meanings apart from thoughts. Basically, for us thoughts are "carriers" of ideas (again, I'm including not only conceptual ideal, but all kinds of non-conceptual ones as well). Thoughts-phenomena are what allows the ideas to be experienced. Without thoughts ideas can not be directly experienced by consciousness. That basically means that ideas are in the same category as matter - some property or fundamental that cannot be experienced directly by consciousness, but only indirectly through senses. Similarly, ideas can only be experienced through "carrying" thoughts and never directly without them. So, by adopting this hypothesis we do add to idealism an extra inference of the "standalone" existence of ideas apart from thoughts, with such "standalone" ideas inaccessible to conscious experience. Needless to say, such addition is not very parsimonious, which would definitely trigger BK's "parsimony alarm"

Eugene, now you're just dodging the ball
Personally I don't think there's any practical difference if the the world of ideas does or doesn't exist when there's no thought to experience it. From the perspective of the intellect this is an undecidable problem. It's just as Einstein's conjecture if the Moon exists while no one is observing. But it doesn't matter. These are the kind of things that academic philosophers today waste their time with. It would matter if while no one looked at the Moon the ocean tides disappeared but this doesn't seem to be an issue. So even if we imagine that the Moon doesn't exist, everything else still acts 'as if' the Moon exists.

It is the same in our inner world. If in meditation we focus entirely in our left hand and nothing else, we experience a specific ideal constellation. Then we can switch to the right hand. Now can we claim with some intellectual certainty that the ideal content of the left hand experience exists somewhere 'out there'? I can't claim such a thing. But there's also no need to. The fact of experience is that the right hand ideal state is not something that exists in full isolation. I can begin tracing my right hand along the arm through the chest and to the left hand. All these intermediate ideal states are interrelated. In certain sense the right hand experience would never be what it is if it didn't exist in it's interrelations to all other possible ideal states - irrelevant if we try to imagine them as existing as something 'out there'.

It's the same in math - If I focus on the number 3, does this mean that all other numbers cease to exist? For me at least, such questions are waste of time. The important thing is that I know from experience that I can go in either direction and consistently find every other number. In this way I view also the world of ideas. Yes, at any given time I have only a fragmentary glimpse of it but experience shows very consistently that this ideal fragment exists in quite concrete relations to other fragmentary states. If at some point I'm able to widen my horizon such that I encompass fragments which I've previously experienced only sequentially, in isolation - so much the better. In this sense we can experience in meditation focus on both hands simultaneously - now we've found a higher ideal unity integrating the previous separate left and right states.

In conclusion, I couldn't care less if the world of ideas exists as something 'out there', as a 'thing in itself'. What matters to me is that fragmentary ideal states exists in very concrete relationships and through the exploration of these states I can even find more holistic states that integrate previously separate ideal content.

However, now we are back to corner one again. If we assume the existence of such being-ideas bearing conscious experience of their ideas, then such conscious experience is experienced within their unified spaces of awareness. So, the idea-beings are experiencing those ideas directly already in their spaces of awareness. Then, how can we also experience the same identical ideas, have exactly the same qualia of idea-experiences without breaking the unity of experiential spaces? We are back to the subject combination problem again.

No need for extra spaces. We are also idea-beings - at any point we experience the unique symbol (totality of perceptions) reflecting our ideal content (constellation of ideas). What I said above can be used here. There's no need to postulate and imagine anything. Neither Platonic world of ideas, existing independently 'out there', nor separate conscious spaces. All we need is to explore the states and their relations.