Criticism

[AshvinP]

]

Again, I agree with most of what you say, but I do not ignore the knowing element. I see our human consciousness (Dasein) as a participant with whatever exists in the act of revealing - a form of entanglement.

Interesting. So evolution has permanently veiled "whatever exists"? Or do you see any evolutionary reasons why we may recover or gain for the first time a capacity to penetrate these veils of intellectual cognition, to start Thinking in Heidegger's sense?

I also want to point something out. I have presented the critique of Kantian epistemology and its implicit dualism which leads him to simply assume "knowing" is something it is not, before determining whether it is possible for noumenon, to many people, most recently people on a German idealism server. These people are verbose, love to argue, and some were professors teaching at European universities who spoke German and
could cite a million writings I had never even heard of. When that critique is presented... crickets. The conversation stops abruptly and I am left feeling like you with BK... they don't respond because it is plainly evident and would force them to reconfigure their entire epistemic approach. I have presented it here several times as well and those are the only comments you have not responded to. So... just wanted to point that out. And the only reason you feel Reason, in Goethe sense of Verstand which unites phenomenal relations, rather than mere intellect (forgot German word) which divides, cannot bring us closer to noumenal relations is because of Kantian epistemology. Goethe is a great example who used only pure Reason to approach the noumenon successfully, without any "higher cognition".

[AshvinP]

I thing Ashvin and I see much the same things in the present world ...

Well, if you and Ashvin are seeing eye-to-eye (or is that I-to-I?), you're gonna love Cleric ... Earth calling Cleric ... Come in Cleric ... (imagine staticy crackling noises here)

We aren't even really close, but who knows... we have really been discussing this same Kantian dualism and demotion of Thinking over and over again in various ways, and it's pretty clear some people still don't understand what the critique is, even though it applies to materialism-dualism and BK idealism alike. Once we get past this issue of whether knowing is even possible... we can begin discussing what can actually be known! Until then, it seems we are stuck playing the game of "who can deny all possible knowledge better than everyone else?".

[JeffreyW]

Usually that sort of claim comes when one is incapable of overcoming and argument. In what way laughable?

Because it is bare metaphysics You take an abstraction that you derive from the math of physics and from your intuitive "feel of energy" (which is by the way not the "energy" itself, but only one of your conscious phenomena) and declare it to be an undisputable ontic fundamental from which consciousness "emerges". By the way, all math of the modern physics can be re-written so that energy will not be used at all. "Energy " in physics is simply a conventionalist and not even necessary mathematical concept, it is useful in physics but not more than that. Ascribing any actual reality to math concepts of physics is a "naive realism".

Let's take a simulated reality hypothesis example. If we live in a Matrix, all math of physics would simply describe the patterns of the phenomena that we observe in such VR and would not correspond to any actual realities. Moreover, all our observations of neural brain activity in such VR would simply be images created by simulations, even though we might find a strong correlation of them with our conscious perceptions and phenomena, in which case some naive scientists would claim that these conscious phenomena are "caused" by and "emerge from" observed brain activity (forgetting that correlation does not mean causation). Can you prove that we do not live in a simulated reality?

And you also did not answer how would you address the brutal emergence hard problem of consciousness arising in such ontology of energy: how exactly conscious phenomena emerge from fundamentally non-conscious "energy". Pls refer to the works for Chalmers for details.

I personally much prefer Rovelli's approach in which physics and natural sciences in general should be agnostic to ontology and only apply to what reality does, not to what reality is. This includes his relational interpretation of QM where QM applies only to the relations between observables. In this approach the models and concepts of physics (and natural sciences in general) do not actually refer to any ontic realities, but only model the patterns of correlations between the observable phenomena.

Analogies are abstractions.

Yes, since analogies are acts of intellectual discourse. But as I said, there are different kinds of analogies. One kind is extrapolating into the realm of unknown of some factual knowledge about a "thing" that has already been experientially proven to exist. And that's what we do in idealism - we indisputably know that conscious phenomena exist and real, and based on that, we make an extrapolative inference of their existence into the realm of the unknown. In this case the question of the existence/reality of the "thing" is not questionable, it is given, the inference is only about the extrapolation of its existence into the realm of unknown. The other kind of analogy is taking a pure mental abstraction from start (where it is unknown and unproven whether it refers to any actual reality) and extrapolating it into the unknown. In the latter case there is much less empirical ground to make such inference. And that is what materialism does, as well as what you do in your ontology of energy.

One major problem is that is a false interpretation of Schopenhauer’s understanding of Will. Schopenhauer puts Will prior to any appearance to us. He even qualifies Will as reductive to the experience of humans as their own striving but is not in any way descriptive of Will in itself. The same is true of consciousness, which Schopenhauer actually rejects.

You might be right here, I was never a fan of Schop and so never took time to study his works. It looks like Bernardo picked a wrong predecessor.

I’m not sure if you’re strawmanning or you really misunderstand me this badly. Either way, your claim of metaphysics derived from the math of physics won’t become true through repetition.

First of all, I am not resorting to any mathematical model since that is something that comes after experience and needn’t come at all. The ancient Greeks had the notion of energy with no mathematics around it at all. Energy is the word we use to signify any force and in its common usage it isn’t something reduced to mathematics. It can be abstracted into the models of physics, but that would have nothing to do with my usage here. What is stranger is your claim that I “declare it an undisputable [sic] fundamental”. I explicitly said it was the most elemental reality we know of, but would be foolish to claim anything to be the most fundamental - and that applies to consciousness as well as energy. But I have to point out your repeated evasion of Kastrup’s resorting to energy through ATP as the marker separating consciousness from no consciousness. If this energy is the distinguishing mark of consciousness then it necessarily is more fundamental and consciousness is reducible to it. There just is no way around that, which is probably why you continue to evade it.

Second, you sound as if you consider consciousness to be a hermetically sealed entity with an inside and outside - a relic of obsolete metaphysics. It is rather our physical connection to the world. The energy you oddly refuse to acknowledge, mostly electromagnetic energy in this case, impacts our sense neurons, entangling us in the world. In that entanglement there is neither a subject/object relationship nor an isolated consciousness - just a relational event. This happens whether or not we create abstract models and is our only means of perception. Upon this entanglement we have two modes of understanding - esthetic and rational/objective, but this experience is always an event of mutual participation. What we call it is of no importance at this first level of awareness.

To summarize so far, you have distorted my use of energy into a reductive use in physics, which has no relation at all to my point; falsely claimed I posit energy as the ontological primitive, and ignore Kastrup’s resorting to energy to distinguish consciousness. Of course it is much easier to ignorantly dismiss it as laughable instead of addressing what I actually wrote.

I’ll skip over the simulated reality hypothesis as irrelevant to my position, as well as the fact that we don’t live in one.

It is another distortion to say I didn’t address what some call the hard problem. I explicitly said that nobody, including Kastrup, understands consciousness, although quantum mind theory offers interesting possibilities. Kastrup just offers metaphysics of the gaps, claiming that cosmic consciousness solves that problem. It in fact resolves nothing at all since there is no reason to believe it exists. We might as well just say god did it.

What reality are you referring to in the case of Rovelli if we know nothing outside consciousness? I do agree that science can only tell us how but not what, but that is of course just a common truism We learn what is through non-metaphysical thinking from direct experience.

Your remark on analogies strikes as a bit forced and evasive. You are still caught in the solipsistic trap of only knowing your own consciousness which in no way validates imagining any such thing outside your limited consciousness. It is no more than empty metaphysics and far weaker than the claim that energy we sense cannot be counted as real. But then you got confused about reality in the Rovelli bit also.

If it weren’t for his influence on Nietzsche, I doubt we would even remember Schopenhauer today. You aren’t missing anything here.

I had hoped for more honest conversation here, but if we are just going to repeat our mantras and dismiss opposing views as laughable with no honest counter we should just leave it at this.,

[JeffreyW]

I thing Ashvin and I see much the same things in the present world ...

Well, if you and Ashvin are seeing eye-to-eye (or is that I-to-I?), you're gonna love Cleric ... Earth calling Cleric ... Come in Cleric ... (imagine staticy crackling noises here)

We aren't even really close, but who knows... we have really been discussing this same Kantian dualism and demotion of Thinking over and over again in various ways, and it's pretty clear some people still don't understand what the critique is, even though it applies to materialism-dualism and BK idealism alike. Once we get past this issue of whether knowing is even possible... we can begin discussing what can actually be known! Until then, it seems we are stuck playing the game of "who can deny all possible knowledge better than everyone else?".

A game I have little time for. Nobody really believes knowledge is impossible - it’s more of a pose which I refuse to take seriously.

[AshvinP]

Which does not imply either that I completely agree with [Rovelli] or that he is an actual great philosopher - only the closest thing we have to one now.

JW,

I realize I quoted myself instead of you in previous comment re: Kantian epistemology and my critique that it contains implicit unwarranted dualism. This time I will quote directly from Steiner who is discussing Goethe's epistemology i.e. his concept of what "knowing" actually is.

https://wn.rsarchive.org/Books/GA001/En ... 1_c10.html

If I ask about the possibility of a thing, then I must first have examined this thing beforehand. But what if the concept of knowledge that Kant and his followers have, and about which they ask if it is possible or not, proved to be totally untenable; what if this con cognitive process were something entirely different from that defined by Kant? Then all that work would have been for nothing. Kant accepted the customary concept of what knowing is and asked if it were possible. According to this concept, knowing is supposed to consist in making a copy of the real conditions that stand outside our consciousness and exist in-themselves. But one will be able to make nothing out of the possibility of knowledge until one has answered the question as to the what of knowing itself. The question: What is knowing? thereby becomes the primary one for epistemology. With respect to Goethe, therefore, it will be our task to show what Goethe pictured knowing to be.

The forming of a particular judgment, the establishing of a fact or a series of facts — which according to Kant one could already call knowledge — is not yet by any means knowing in Goethe's sense. Otherwise he would not have said about style that it rests upon the deepest foundations of knowledge and through this fact stands in contrast to simple imitation of nature in which the artist turns to the objects of nature, imitates its forms and colours faithfully, diligently, and most exactly, and is conscientious about never distancing himself from nature. This distancing of oneself from the sense world in all its directness is indicative of Goethe's view of real knowing. The directly given is experience. In our knowing, however, we create a picture of the directly given that contains considerably more than what the senses — which are after all the mediators of all experience — can provide. In order to know nature in the Goethean sense, we must not hold onto it in its factuality; rather, nature, in the process of our knowing, must reveal itself as something essentially higher than what it appears to be when it first confronts us. The school of Mill assumes that all we can do with experience is merely bring particular things together into groups that we then hold fast as abstract concepts. This is no true knowing. For, those abstract concepts of Mill have no other task than that of bringing together what is presented to the senses with all the qualities of direct experience. A true knowing must acknowledge that the direct form of the world given to sense perception is not yet its essential one, but rather that this essential form first reveals itself to us in the process of knowing. Knowing must provide us with that which sense experience withholds from us, but which is still real.

Everything depends on what one conceives the relationship between idea and sense-perceptible reality to be. By sense-perceptible reality I mean here the totality of perceptions communicated to the human being by the senses. Now the most widely held view is that the concept is a means, belonging solely to human consciousness, by which consciousness takes possession for itself of the data of reality. The essential being of reality, according to this view, lies in the “in-itselfness” of the things themselves, so that, if we were really able to arrive at the primal ground of things, we would still be able to take possession only of our conceptual copy of this primal ground and by no means of the primal ground itself. This view, therefore, assumes the existence of two completely separate worlds. The objective outer world, which bears its essential being, the ground of its existence, within itself, and the subjective-ideal inner world, which is supposedly a conceptual copy of the outer world. The inner world is a matter of no concern to the objective world, is not required by it; the inner world is present only for the knowing human being. To bring about a congruence of these two worlds would be the epistemological ideal of this basic view. I consider the adherents of this view to be not only the natural-scientific direction of our time, but also the philosophy of Kant, Schopenhauer, and the Neo-Kantians, and no less so the last phase of Schelling's philosophy. AII these directions of thought are in agreement about seeking the essence of the world in something transsubjective, and about having to admit, from their standpoint, that the subjective ideal world — which is therefore for them also merely a world of mental pictures — has no significance for reality itself, but purely and simply for human consciousness alone.

I have already indicated that this view leads to the assumption of a perfect congruency between concept (idea) and perception. What is present in the latter would also have to be contained in its conceptual counterpart, only in an ideal form. With respect to content, both worlds would have to match each other completely. The conditions of spatial-temporal reality would have to repeat themselves exactly in the idea; only, instead of perceived extension shape colour, etc., the corresponding mental pictures would have to be present. If I were looking at a triangle, for example, I would have to follow in thought its outline, size, directions of its sides, etc., and then produce a conceptual photograph of it for myself. In the case of a second triangle, I would have to do exactly the same thing, and so on with every object of the external and internal sense world. Thus every single thing is to be found again exactly, with respect to its location and characteristics, within my ideal world picture.

We must now ask ourselves: Does the above assumption correspond to the facts? Not in the least. My concept of the triangle is a single one, comprising every single perceived triangle; and no matter how often I picture it, this concept always remains the same. My various pictures of the triangle are all identical to one another. I have absolutely only one concept of the triangle.

Within reality, every single thing presents itself as a particular, quite definite “this,” surrounded by equally definite, actual, and reality-imbued “those.” The concept, as a strict unity, confronts this manifoldness. In the concept there is no separation, no parts; it does not multiply itself; it is, no matter how often it is pictured, always the same.

Eugene - I really hope you take the time to read the above as well, and especially the bold part. If you do, then it should not be necessary for me to explain why our epistemic position is completely opposed to that of BK in any future discussions.

[Eugene I]

Eugene - I really hope you take the time to read the above as well, and especially the bold part. If you do, then it should not be necessary for me to explain why our epistemic position is completely opposed to that of BK in any future discussions.

I did read it and I agree. The bold also applies to Descartes dualism which historically became the implicit foundation for the scientific method. However, I'm not so sure it applies to BK, since in his scheme the human sense perceptions are the perceptions manifested by MAL's ideations (across the "Markov's blanket") which are also subjective by nature, therefore there should not be in principle any non-traversable gap between the MAL ideations behind the sense perceptions and our human ideas about them. In other words, the MAL ideations can be in principle knowable, shareable and accessible to us. I guess he never elaborated on that, but I assume it would be natural to conclude this from his philosophy. But I can now see that BK probably made a mistake by associating his philosophy with Schopenhauer's, even though I'm not qualified to make any judgements here because I'm really ignorant about Schop's philosophy (and have no interest in studying it).

[JeffreyW]

Which does not imply either that I completely agree with [Rovelli] or that he is an actual great philosopher - only the closest thing we have to one now.

JW,

I realize I quoted myself instead of you in previous comment re: Kantian epistemology and my critique that it contains implicit unwarranted dualism. This time I will quote directly from Steiner who is discussing Goethe's epistemology i.e. his concept of what "knowing" actually is.

https://wn.rsarchive.org/Books/GA001/En ... 1_c10.html

If I ask about the possibility of a thing, then I must first have examined this thing beforehand. But what if the concept of knowledge that Kant and his followers have, and about which they ask if it is possible or not, proved to be totally untenable; what if this con cognitive process were something entirely different from that defined by Kant? Then all that work would have been for nothing. Kant accepted the customary concept of what knowing is and asked if it were possible. According to this concept, knowing is supposed to consist in making a copy of the real conditions that stand outside our consciousness and exist in-themselves. But one will be able to make nothing out of the possibility of knowledge until one has answered the question as to the what of knowing itself. The question: What is knowing? thereby becomes the primary one for epistemology. With respect to Goethe, therefore, it will be our task to show what Goethe pictured knowing to be.

The forming of a particular judgment, the establishing of a fact or a series of facts — which according to Kant one could already call knowledge — is not yet by any means knowing in Goethe's sense. Otherwise he would not have said about style that it rests upon the deepest foundations of knowledge and through this fact stands in contrast to simple imitation of nature in which the artist turns to the objects of nature, imitates its forms and colours faithfully, diligently, and most exactly, and is conscientious about never distancing himself from nature. This distancing of oneself from the sense world in all its directness is indicative of Goethe's view of real knowing. The directly given is experience. In our knowing, however, we create a picture of the directly given that contains considerably more than what the senses — which are after all the mediators of all experience — can provide. In order to know nature in the Goethean sense, we must not hold onto it in its factuality; rather, nature, in the process of our knowing, must reveal itself as something essentially higher than what it appears to be when it first confronts us. The school of Mill assumes that all we can do with experience is merely bring particular things together into groups that we then hold fast as abstract concepts. This is no true knowing. For, those abstract concepts of Mill have no other task than that of bringing together what is presented to the senses with all the qualities of direct experience. A true knowing must acknowledge that the direct form of the world given to sense perception is not yet its essential one, but rather that this essential form first reveals itself to us in the process of knowing. Knowing must provide us with that which sense experience withholds from us, but which is still real.

Everything depends on what one conceives the relationship between idea and sense-perceptible reality to be. By sense-perceptible reality I mean here the totality of perceptions communicated to the human being by the senses. Now the most widely held view is that the concept is a means, belonging solely to human consciousness, by which consciousness takes possession for itself of the data of reality. The essential being of reality, according to this view, lies in the “in-itselfness” of the things themselves, so that, if we were really able to arrive at the primal ground of things, we would still be able to take possession only of our conceptual copy of this primal ground and by no means of the primal ground itself. This view, therefore, assumes the existence of two completely separate worlds. The objective outer world, which bears its essential being, the ground of its existence, within itself, and the subjective-ideal inner world, which is supposedly a conceptual copy of the outer world. The inner world is a matter of no concern to the objective world, is not required by it; the inner world is present only for the knowing human being. To bring about a congruence of these two worlds would be the epistemological ideal of this basic view. I consider the adherents of this view to be not only the natural-scientific direction of our time, but also the philosophy of Kant, Schopenhauer, and the Neo-Kantians, and no less so the last phase of Schelling's philosophy. AII these directions of thought are in agreement about seeking the essence of the world in something transsubjective, and about having to admit, from their standpoint, that the subjective ideal world — which is therefore for them also merely a world of mental pictures — has no significance for reality itself, but purely and simply for human consciousness alone.

I have already indicated that this view leads to the assumption of a perfect congruency between concept (idea) and perception. What is present in the latter would also have to be contained in its conceptual counterpart, only in an ideal form. With respect to content, both worlds would have to match each other completely. The conditions of spatial-temporal reality would have to repeat themselves exactly in the idea; only, instead of perceived extension shape colour, etc., the corresponding mental pictures would have to be present. If I were looking at a triangle, for example, I would have to follow in thought its outline, size, directions of its sides, etc., and then produce a conceptual photograph of it for myself. In the case of a second triangle, I would have to do exactly the same thing, and so on with every object of the external and internal sense world. Thus every single thing is to be found again exactly, with respect to its location and characteristics, within my ideal world picture.

We must now ask ourselves: Does the above assumption correspond to the facts? Not in the least. My concept of the triangle is a single one, comprising every single perceived triangle; and no matter how often I picture it, this concept always remains the same. My various pictures of the triangle are all identical to one another. I have absolutely only one concept of the triangle.

Within reality, every single thing presents itself as a particular, quite definite “this,” surrounded by equally definite, actual, and reality-imbued “those.” The concept, as a strict unity, confronts this manifoldness. In the concept there is no separation, no parts; it does not multiply itself; it is, no matter how often it is pictured, always the same.

Eugene - I really hope you take the time to read the above as well, and especially the bold part. If you do, then it should not be necessary for me to explain why our epistemic position is completely opposed to that of BK in any future discussions.

First I perhaps need to make it clear that I am not a Kantian and fully agree he continues the error of Cartesian dualism. I make use of Kantian epistemology here because that is the framework within which Kastrup works. Kant had no idea of the possibility of esthetic knowledge, which starting with the Romantics and later through Nietzsche and Heidegger, took on the prominent role.

[JeffreyW]

]

Again, I agree with most of what you say, but I do not ignore the knowing element. I see our human consciousness (Dasein) as a participant with whatever exists in the act of revealing - a form of entanglement.

Interesting. So evolution has permanently veiled "whatever exists"? Or do you see any evolutionary reasons why we may recover or gain for the first time a capacity to penetrate these veils of intellectual cognition, to start Thinking in Heidegger's sense?

Yes, I very much do.

[JeffreyW]

Trial balloon II.

I tried to copy and paste from notepad and it appears my original comment was culled, Here is a shorter version:

Jeff, on your first YouTube video of Kastrup’s interview with Craig Reed, down in the comment section you had a brief but very illuminating exchange with another YouTuber that went like this -

Other YouTuber asked Too Late For The Gods -

“And what does physical evidence stand on if not experience?”

Too Late For The Gods replied -

“Of course it stands on experience. I can’t even imagine what point you meant to make there.”

That you agree physical evidence stands on experience seems to barely be a rewording of idealism’s core premise, maybe I’m the one missing the whole point, but I think your missing the point was the point (being cheeky)?

Also wanted to congratulate you on being on the forum. Idealism needs all of the critics it can get. I’d much rather read what the critic has to say, no matter how triggered I get.

I am grateful to have found this out about philosophy, how it gets my mind out of its own comfort zone.

I mean it in a very different way from idealism, which assumes a transcendent ultimate truth. For me, truth is only revealed through a non-metaphysical experience of what is revealed in this world, which appears in no way to be rational or governed by ideas, but rather a constant becoming that rebels against any attempt to define, quantify, or systematize it.

[AshvinP]

First I perhaps need to make it clear that I am not a Kantian and fully agree he continues the error of Cartesian dualism. I make use of Kantian epistemology here because that is the framework within which Kastrup works. Kant had no idea of the possibility of esthetic knowledge, which starting with the Romantics and later through Nietzsche and Heidegger, took on the prominent role.

Ahh ok, my apologies then, because that threw me way off (and also the Rovelli stuff), and now I can see how your view is more reconciled with Heidegger.

So now it seems you are calling what Steiner refers to as "Imaginative cognition", which fully developed in the late 19th century, but certainly had prefigurements earlier, as "esthetic knowledge". Do you feel this is just a more poetic way of looking at the world or that it can actually inform future objective scientific inquiries (in a much more comprehensive way than it already has in the 20th century)?