JeffreyW wrote: ↑Mon Nov 15, 2021 3:55 am
AshvinP wrote: ↑Mon Nov 15, 2021 3:46 am
JeffreyW wrote: ↑Mon Nov 15, 2021 3:30 am
Modern neuroscience traces the brain activity as it constructs the meaning. If our brains don’t construct meaning, then how do we go from electric impulses to some valid intuition of the world? The neuroscientist Anil Seth is very good on this.
I am kind of bewildered by the above comment, because it seems that you don't notice that you are
presupposing materialist ontology, with all of its abstractions, before interpreting the science and then hanging the rest of your philosophy on that materialist interpretation of scientific data.
Physical as in energy, not material. Because it is the most elemental thing
we know it has to be the starting point. You cannot just skip energy and assume consciousness. If we take away energy consciousness disappears,
We should really look at how many times we speak about "knowing" when arguing for some other non-thinking foundation for Reality. The word "know" sits there like the word "I" (or "we" since we are, after all, One), always present and always binding the meaning of all other parts of the sentence together, but their underlying meaning completely ignored by our rational intellect. I feel really bad for these words and the centuries of complete ignoring they have endured at this point...
But the reason we don't notice those words is precisely because the words indicate activity which is
prior to all abstract Grounds of the world content. It is our own activity emanating from our most essential Self, but the spiritual "I" cannot observe itself like the physical "eye" cannot either. Therefore the meaning of these words are simply taken for granted in all prosaic speech, but it is also consciously ignored. Poetic speech, on the other hand, is more Self-aware of the "I" who "knows".
"Know’st thou what wove yon woodbird’s nest
Of leaves, and feathers from her breast?
Or how the fish outbuilt her shell,
Painting with morn each annual cell?
Or how the sacred pine-tree adds
To her old leaves new myriads?
Such and so grew these holy piles,
Whilst love and terror laid the tiles.
Earth proudly wears the Parthenon,
As the best gem upon her zone,
And Morning opes with haste her lids
To gaze upon the Pyramids;
O’er England’s abbeys bends the sky,
As on its friends, with kindred eye;
For out of Thought’s interior sphere
These wonders rose to upper air;
And Nature gladly gave them place,
Adopted them into her race,
And granted them an equal date
With Andes and with Ararat."
- Emerson
But there are plenty of phenomenologists who concluded monism-idealism (did not start from it) and rejected Kantian epistemology. Phenomenology cannot possibly conclude "we are conscious of the shock before we attribute meaning". We attribute it subconsciously, but we are still attributing it. There cannot be an experience of "shock" devoid of all meaning. The fact that we cannot even speak of meaningless "shock" is a clue which points towards the meaningful essence of the primordial Logos.
