Metaphysics - Idealism without woo-woo

[Lou Gold]

With "woo-woo" I basically refer to any attempt at "explaining" what "the things in themselves" are. Be that some kind of transcendental access, a "mind at large" and everything else. My first axiom of metaphysics, experience is all I can base anything on, leaves no room for access to what I cannot experience

Do you have a second axiom that says, "I can experience everything" ?

In metaphysics I would not refer to "things" ... check out the last few minutes of the video in the OP. There are the axioms.

Interesting, Mandibil! Perhaps synchronously, I thought I should have phrased the axiom as "I can experience all" (not every-thing). But more metaphysically and mystically and mysteriously, I love this poem very much. Does it align with your philosophy?

[Mandibil]

In metaphysics I would not refer to "things" ... check out the last few minutes of the video in the OP. There are the axioms.

Interesting, Mandibil! Perhaps synchronously, I thought I should have phrased the axiom as "I can experience all" (not every-thing). But more metaphysically and mystically and mysteriously, I love this poem very much. Does it align with your philosophy?

You only have access to what you experience - and no reference to whether or not you could/should experience more. "I can experience all" is therefore not a valid argument

[Cleric K]

Nice try , but I'm still not convinced. Yes, our field of awareness has a mysterious quality of wholeness, all our experiences, thoughts and perceptions are always inseparably integrated into the oneness of consciousness. Yet, this does not mean that such wholeness represents a noun ("entity"), it can as well be be a wholeness and continuity of an activity. But the fact of its continuity and its wholeness creates an "impression" (or illusion) of the existence of some "entity" to which such wholeness pertains. Take for example computer AI as an analogy. There is an algorithmic activity and there is also a memory, and there can even be meta-cognition in AI (nowadays meta-cognitive AIs are being developed by some researchers). Yet all of it does not result in the existence of any "subject" of activity or continuity in AI. There is no "self" or "I" to AI. Similarly, there can certainly be an ideation of the "wholeness" and "continuity" in our thinking process. However, such ideation is simply a meaning of a thought, an abstraction of the fact of the presence of the memory, the wholeness and continuity of our perceptional and thinking process. I'm not saying that your argument is wrong, it may be true, but there is still a leap of inference in it to extrapolate the fact of the wholeness of conscious experience into the existence of an "entity" to which this wholeness presumably pertains.

Got it. Sorry, Eugene. Seems I've misunderstood the exact core point of the question. Thought you were looking for the far reaching implications of an "I". That's why I went with memory.

Now to address the actual issue. The source of the problem betrays itself if we start going backwards towards it origins.

Let's start with the state of conflict. We are in a position where we experience the use of the pronoun "I" as something unnatural. It feels to be artificially implanted, inferred, axiomatically postulated. Let's try and see if we can trace this out.

How do we explain this feeling? By saying: spiritual activity, being activity (verb), tries to assert itself as something which it is not - a thing (noun). Alright but why stop here? Let's see how we reached the conclusion that spiritual activity is indeed only activity. Easy: we simply observe. We simply have the experience of constant transformation, of bubbling and sparkling activity. So far so good. But what in the world content tells us that this activity is just activity? And here we begin to sense the problem. It is we, the spiritual activity, that defined ourselves.

This is the key moment. Spiritual activity does not have any apriori understanding about itself. Everything it knows about itself, comes from its own experiences. The activity projects its own nature into thoughts and contemplates them. At some point, it assumes that its own thoughts tell something true about its own nature.
We can express this in the following way: "I, the spiritual activity, postulate that my essential nature is pure activity. There's no 'thingness' in me, no doer. For this reason, from this moment on, I consider the use of the pronoun 'I' as illusionary. There's no 'I', I'm not a 'thing'."
It could be of great value if we can trace in our real life, when things like this happened. Of course, they are never expressed explicitly in such a form. But effectively, it is something like this that happens.

Examples like this should make us aware how what we (the spiritual activity) think about ourselves, becomes a mould, a framework, against which we measure every other thought and experience. But we are always more that what we can express into a concrete thought. This returns us to the question "How does it know that it exists if it can't see itself". Here seeing refers to what can be perceived in sensory-like manner. We hear our thoughts, see thoughts within the shapes and colors of our imagination. The actual understanding, that we are creatively producing these thoughts, is not contained in the sensory-like perceptions of the thoughts. It is something different, it is the living experience of ideas that project the thoughts - our ideal experience explains the existence of the sensory-like elements. The point is that we don't see as perception the totality that explains from where our ideas come and how they become perceptions. That is, we don't see ourselves as laid down, like we can see a computer and say "Aha, so this is where the inputs come, this is where they are transformed and here they are being output". Instead, we have only the clear experience of projecting concepts into thoughts or of connecting concepts with perceptions but what's going on behind the scenes is a Great Mysteriousness, as Lou would say

And this is the point - spiritual activity produces pictures of itself. If it was already seeing itself, it would not need to do that. It would simply observe itself. But it feels that what it sees is only a part. That's why it tries to objectify itself, to make itself perceptible to itself. It says "I'm this, I'm that, I'm neurons, I'm energy, I'm pure activity, I'm a soul, I'm information, I'm an illusion etc." But every such self definition can turn into a self imposed constraint. Spiritual activity draws chalk lines and says "There, these are my limits, this is what's possible for me. I'm a brain only if I stay within the head. If I extend my activity outside, I'm no longer a brain". Yet the beauty of the Great Mysteriousness is that it constantly rediscover itself in new degrees of freedom, which throw light on the former states.

"To be convinced" can be understood in two ways. Someone can convince me to invest all I have in crypto. Now who knows if my conviction is in place? It's a bet. But the conviction we're talking here is one that motivates us to reconsider our current convictions, to trace their origins. When we do that, we no longer feel as if we have simply switched our bet from black go red. Instead, we experience additional degrees of freedom within our spiritual activity. We feel as we have been locked into a certain perspective and were trying to justify it. Now we are free to zoom in and out of our previous perspective and do the same with many others, which we didn't even know exist.

When we assume a given intellectual position, we lose the sight of others. This can be illustrated with the famous cube illusion. Once we see it one way, the other way ceases to exist. It is similar in our thought life and rarely understood correctly. We, humans, seem to have the firm conviction that our perspective is always fully objective. But illusions like the above show us that very often, when we see things intellectually in one way, we lose our ability to see them in other ways. So it is not about "which cube is the correct one" but how can I conduct my spiritual activity in such a way that I can freely utilize every perspective in its appropriate place.

The thought "I think" is a completely natural experience - it is spiritual activity testifying of its own self awareness. In this, subject and object are one. It is only when we add additional constraints through thinking, that we succumb into paradoxes. The "I" in "I think" is not something that is inferred, that is postulated. To be inferred means that it did not exist at first but then we combined some thoughts and came to the experience of it. But in our case it's the other way around - we first have the experience of self aware spiritual activity and only then we start to speculate if this experience is justified. If this was not the case, there would be no hard problems of consciousness. We would know how we can combine elements to create or infer "I" experience.

The pronoun "I" is only a placeholder, a symbol for something that exists as real experience. We do not presuppose what this "I" is, what it is capable of, what are its limits. It's only an expression that spiritual activity projects out of itself when it encounters itself. The "I" becomes something different only when while thinking the above, I presuppose some other meaning, as "I (the brain) think" or "I (the illusion) think". Then yes, this "I" already points at something external.

We build a paradox when we, in our thinking, deny the ability of spiritual activity to be conscious of itself. We assert that spiritual activity can only "do", it can not recognize itself as something that exists. And suddenly, we, the spiritual activity that produced the above thought, become a phantom, a non-existence - we begin to put clouds of smoke between us and the happenings within experience. In other words, spiritual activity is satisfied only when it experiences its own activity as something external, as something that "just happens".

As long as "I think" can be experienced in its purity, free of any preconceived ideas, it signifies only a very simple fact of experience - I, the Great Mysteriousness, whatever my true nature can be called, encounter and recognize my own being within the things that I produce.

[Lou Gold]

Interesting, Mandibil! Perhaps synchronously, I thought I should have phrased the axiom as "I can experience all" (not every-thing). But more metaphysically and mystically and mysteriously, I love this poem very much. Does it align with your philosophy?

You only have access to what you experience - and no reference to whether or not you could/should experience more. "I can experience all" is therefore not a valid argument

My experienced-based faith is that all can be accessed co-creatively, metaphysically and mystically and mysteriously, which is what the Ibn' Arabi poem describes. The error or Maya or sin is to think one can do it separately. Do you consider this as Woo-Woo?

[Lou Gold]

We build a paradox when we, in our thinking, deny the ability of spiritual activity to be conscious of itself. We assert that spiritual activity can only "do", it can not recognize itself as something that exists. And suddenly, we, the spiritual activity that produced the above thought, become a phantom, a non-existence - we begin to put clouds of smoke between us and the happenings within experience. In other words, spiritual activity is satisfied only when it experiences its own activity as something external, as something that "just happens".

As long as "I think" can be experienced in its purity, free of any preconceived ideas, it signifies only a very simple fact of experience - I, the Great Mysteriousness, whatever my true nature can be called, encounter and recognize my own being within the things that I produce.

True! Ramana says, "I see God in the tree because I see the tree as a tree." Understood (stood under) this way, there is no mystery when Blake says,

To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour

Or, following Ibin' Arari, when the path of separation is destroyed, there is only the extraordinary-ordinary and when the separate 'I' sense is destroyed there is only the choiceless-choice. Be Here Now.

[Lou Gold]

oops, I meant to say (above)

"... when the separate 'I' sense is in union with the Beloved, there is only the choiceless-choice. Be Here Now."

[Mandibil]

You only have access to what you experience - and no reference to whether or not you could/should experience more. "I can experience all" is therefore not a valid argument

My experienced-based faith is that all can be accessed co-creatively, metaphysically and mystically and mysteriously, which is what the Ibn' Arabi poem describes. The error or Maya or sin is to think one can do it separately. Do you consider this as Woo-Woo?

Faith is baloney. Check my axioms at the end of my presentation

[Lou Gold]

My experienced-based faith is that all can be accessed co-creatively, metaphysically and mystically and mysteriously, which is what the Ibn' Arabi poem describes. The error or Maya or sin is to think one can do it separately. Do you consider this as Woo-Woo?

Faith is baloney. Check my axioms at the end of my presentation

I differentiate faith from belief and use that descriptor only when it is experience-based. Are you saying that my experience is baloney?
And I'm still curious as to whether the poem aligns your metaphysics? BTW, please understand that I'm not trying to refute your metaphysics, which I found interesting. I'm just trying to establish whether it and my experience are on the same page.

[Lou Gold]

Mandibil,

Coincidentally or serendipitously, the story of The Hole-y Bucket just arrived in one of my feeds.

[Mandibil]

Faith is baloney. Check my axioms at the end of my presentation

I differentiate faith from belief and use that descriptor only when it is experience-based. Are you saying that my experience is baloney?
And I'm still curious as to whether the poem aligns your metaphysics? BTW, please understand that I'm not trying to refute your metaphysics, which I found interesting. I'm just trying to establish whether it and my experience are on the same page.

Faith is a religious term. it is the same as saying "just trust what your masters tell you (or else) ..." . It is a kind of child abuse, that children try to reconcile themselves with to avoid realising that their parents lied to them to control them