Nietzsche and Christianity - Metaphysical Idealist Critique

[SanteriSatama]

By far not all people will agree with Platonism (I'm sure Santeri will not),

Depends from what is meant by Platonism. I prefer Intuitionist philosophy of mathematics, which is closely related (both are idealist philosophies), but not the exact same. I&I rejects final theory of transcendental eternalism on the ethical grounds of evolution. In this sense Platonism is easy to beat, it has no Will.

[SanteriSatama]

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

For thought-process to experience void necessitates accepting that during that trip, the thought is experiencing (merely tasting) a death of a sort. Associations come in many sorts of relations, and of course also life and living being is associated by various chains of association.

[AshvinP]

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.

Yes the beings are conscious like all beings are.

Re: combo problem - upon further thought, it's only a problem if we assume there are at least two separate spheres of beings. One being has one set of experiential boundaries and another being has another separate set of boundaries. Then we start wondering how the boundaries could become shared between beings without collapsing the whole experiential field into one and erasing all different perspectives.

Do you see the unexamined and unnecessary assumption here? It is that the concept of experiential boundaries is defined in a way that shared boundary always means collapse or disintegration, similar to Kantian boundary where the world amenable to sense perception and knowledge is defined as always disconnected from noumenal world. No matter how good the philosophical logic may be, that always remains an unverifiable assumption by definition.

And it just so happens to be an unverifiable assumption which makes all experiences of reality unverifiable. Do you see the pernicious effect? It's a vicious cycle of intellectual deconstruction which can only result in nihilism.

[Eugene I]

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.

Sure, that's all fine. The question we were discussing was was whether multiple subjects experience exactly the same idea or each is experiencing its own private copy of the idea. But you may say the same thing: I don't care, it's just splitting the hair. But the answer to it is related to the subject combination problem and determine whether we believe that subjects with their unique subjective perspectives/experiences can combine into higher-order group-subjects with the "combined" experience while the individual subjects will continue having their individual subjective perspectives. Tis is what is called "subject combination problem".

[SanteriSatama]

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.

To comprehend Plato's theory of Forms, the conclusion of that investigation is given in the Sophist. In a word, the conclusion is dynamis. Mathematical Platonism follows from that conclusion, study of abstract relations in idealist ontology. And as said, in that respect Intuitionism is more philosophically coherent than what is usually meant by mathematical Platonism.

In spiritual, meditative and philosophical study of regions beyond the enlightened subluminal bubble of daytime reality, many sorts of forms and archetypes and elements are met. These experiences are shared and unique to various degrees, phenomenology that parsimony needs to take into consideration.

As for Plato, pre-Socratics can be even more interesting and deep.

[Eugene I]

Do you see the unexamined and unnecessary assumption here? It is that the concept of experiential boundaries are defined in a way that shared boundary always means collapse or disintegration, similar to Kantian boundary where the world amenable to sense perception and knowledge is defined as always disconnected from noumenal world. No matter how good the philosphical logic may be, that is always remains an unverifiable assumption by definition.

"Boundaries" are indeed only hypothetical but the combination problem has nothing to do with boundaries. It has to do with breaking the unity of individual subjective experiences (which is a fact, not a hypothesis) if we assume that the same experience is shared between two subjects.

Subject combination problem is a very subtle one...
One really needs to experience the unity of the space of experience directly to understand that it is not a product of thought, and that it is impossible to take one of the phenomena of it and make this exact phenomena belong to some other individuated and indivisible space, because the phenomena of our experience are inseparable from the totality of the awareness of the space of direct experience. When you see it experientially you will know that it is impossible.

[Lou Gold]

Cleric,

Yes, Lou. This is exactly what it is. At our stage of evolution it's much more important to 'see' the ideas.

Hmmm. I don't wanna do circles again but truly I sense a difference. Let me try to illustrate. You say:

Remember the Himba tribe. They don't see colors that we see because they don't have concepts for them. On the other hand they have concepts and see fine grades of colors which we can hardly distinguish. This is a clear example that we can perceive only what we have (or can discover) concepts for.

Many aboriginal people see a blue/green continuum rather separate blue and green. The Himba are an African desert people living under a big sky so they see just a bit of green in the continuum. Many rainforest peoples also see a continuum but, living under a vegetative canopy, they see lots of green. Now, jump to the modern New Yorker standing in Times Square who sees lots of colors. This is ecological and technological. People's concepts don't generate colors. What they see combined with their concerns (creative and survival) cause them to create meaningful concepts. Here's a bit of the science. Moderns, in this fundamental sense of experience are not more "highly" developed. They are working within a different set-and-setting.

But the vaster part of reality can't at all be captured by mineral-like concepts. We need to set our thinking in motion, to turn it into something completely different. Not to use it for chaining together trains of dead concepts but to feel with our fluid thinking the structure of the world of ideas. When we develop our spiritual activity in such fluidic way, we begin to literally perceive processes and beings that can only be captured by such living ideas. And we don't perceive them as something external, outside of us - our very spiritual activity is the touching organ that explores the living geometry of the spiritual world - which is what we are.

"Living geometry" seems a bit like my "choiceless-choice" -- abstraction is representation and not life itself. It seems you want to integrate the living and the dead with a priority given to the not alive, to the abstraction. I say "both/and".

Actually, I prefer a biotic model like a microbial or fungal network, vastly entangled and multidirectional. To the ascent bias I say, "get down and dirty, humus-like, humble."

[SanteriSatama]

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.

In Zen, a common test is that pupil goes into a meditative state cleared from thoughts. Master tests this state empirically by hitting the pupil with a stick from behind. If the pupil can dodge, he passes the empirical test.

Empty awareness, in the sense of awareness locally cleared from thoughts, is not the base in this sense. The base is the region where pupil can sense and react without thought. Buddhism talks, more coherently IMHO, of sentient beings instead of conscious beings. Conscious metacognition is methodologically present in philosophical dialogue, which is its own form of meditation. In terms of dependence hierarchies, sentience appears more fundamental than cognition, but indirectly, universally creative metacognition can be requirement for sentience to take place. This is an open question, which can be also genuinely undecidable.

[Lou Gold]

Hey,

Is there a whole section of page 28 now missing in this thread?

I was referencing an exchange with Cleric when the section seemed to vanish.

[AshvinP]

Do you see the unexamined and unnecessary assumption here? It is that the concept of experiential boundaries are defined in a way that shared boundary always means collapse or disintegration, similar to Kantian boundary where the world amenable to sense perception and knowledge is defined as always disconnected from noumenal world. No matter how good the philosphical logic may be, that is always remains an unverifiable assumption by definition.

"Boundaries" are indeed only hypothetical but the combination problem has nothing to do with boundaries. It has to do with breaking the unity of individual subjective experiences (which is a fact, not a hypothesis) if we assume that the same experience is shared between two subjects.

Subject combination problem is a very subtle one...
One really needs to experience the unity of the space of experience directly to understand that it is not a product of thought, and that it is impossible to take one of the phenomena of it and make this exact phenomena belong to some other individuated and indivisible space, because the phenomena of our experience are inseparable from the totality of the awareness of the space of direct experience. When you see it experientially you will know that it is impossible.

There is all kinds of circularity going on above. You say the breaking of individual unity of experience is a fact (directly experienced?) when same experience is shared, but that the latter is impossible. So how are you directly experiencing the breaking of unity?

We do not figure out what is impossible by direct experience, only what is possible. Impossible means we are foreclosing on the potential to ever experience different content and/or in a different way, and that is the antithesis of any good empirical science. See what I mean?