Czinczar wrote: ↑Thu Jun 03, 2021 1:36 pm
Adur Alkain wrote: ↑Thu Jun 03, 2021 12:23 pm
Another objection I have to Bernardo's analytic idealism is the consistency and regularity in the behaviour of the physical world. Let's take for example Newton's classical laws of motion. If planets and stars and billiard balls are the extrinsic appearance of M@L's inner life, why is this inner life so regular, mechanical and predictable? Our own inner life is in no way as predictable and mechanical as that.
I think Bk responded to that recently by saying that because MAL is not metacognitive and is intuitive, it is very predictable. It doesn't suddenly "change its mind" to do something else, it doesn't plan ahead either. It's like breathing which is happening every second of our life, which is regular and usually out of our metacognitive capacities, but the second we self-reflect on it, our breathing becomes irregular. We shouldn't think that our human consciousness is THE model of consciousness, we shouldn't anthropomorphize MAL.
Also, because space and time are a production of our consciousness, what we see as regularities and irregularities might not necessarily correspond to the same kind of regularities or irregularities in MAL. You are comparing your own inner mental state that you judge irregular to the extrinsic appearance of the mental state of MAL that you judge regular and stable.
Czinczar,
I know Bernardo uses that kind of reasoning all the time, and obviously it's not possible to contradict it directly, since it postulates that M@L is something completely unimaginable to us. I'm just saying I don't find it convincing. It reminds me of old notions of God as some inscrutable mystery that doesn't admit inquiry and doesn't need to make sense.
Do you find satisfactory a version of idealism (Bernardo's) that says that everything we see and perceive is the "external appearance" of something else, about which we can't know anything? And that even our inner experience, which in idealism should be considered as the ultimate nature of everything, is actually nothing like the real thing in itself?
It makes me even wonder if Bernardo's theory deserves the name of idealism, since his notion of M@L has apparently no relation with our inner, direct experience of being aware.
What is the "extrinsic appearance of a mental state"? It just doesn't make any sense to me. Why would mental states have "extrinsic appearances"? There is no reason why they should. Actually, I find it quite nonsensical to think that they could. To say that our brains are the extrinsic appearances of our mental states is simply absurd, if you ask me. Let's say I'm perceiving the colour red. Does it make sense that the state of my brain while I perceive red is the "extrinsic appearance" of the colour red? I don't think it does. Red is red, and it appears red, no matter what.
What does "extrinsic" mean, to begin with? Unless Bernardo is using it in some arcane sense I can't fathom, "extrinsic" means external, "from outside". Outside what? Outside my mind? What does it mean, to be outside my mind? What does it mean to look at my mind from the outside? Can you even be inside or outside a mind? None of this makes sense to me. We
are our minds (taking the word in the broader sense that encompasses the whole of our consciousness). We can't get in or out of our consciousness. We
are it. And we can't look at each other's minds "from the outside".
We can't look at M@L from the outside either. Simply because we
are M@L. There are no "dissociative boundaries". There is no separation.
All these spatial metaphors Bernardo uses constantly simply don't work for idealism, in my opinion.
In my view, mountains are mountains, stars are stars, and brains are brains. They are not "extrinsic appearances" of something else. Everything we see in the physical world is exactly what it appears to be. The physical world is the observed world.
The difference with physicalism is that mountains, stars and brains are not made up of matter, but of observation. They are created by consciousness.
And consciousness is consciousness. Our personal, individual consciousness is no different than cosmic consciousness or M@L. It's not just that both are identical: they are actually the same one consciousness, like all Eastern nondual philosophies teach.