Philosophical Speculations

Mark Tetzner wrote: ↑Tue Nov 16, 2021 9:05 pm

JeffreyW wrote: ↑Tue Nov 16, 2021 9:03 pm

Mark Tetzner wrote: ↑Tue Nov 16, 2021 9:01 pm

It seems you responded what I thought JW would say.

One more example of how you have very little understanding of what I say or will say.

I understand very little. It´s hard to understand your position except for "we dont know" which is true enough.
but some like to go further. you reject metaphysics i reject the rejection of it. so lets leave it at that. our
positions dont talk to each other easily.

It would be easier to understand my position if you at least attempt to understand it instead of going off into personal speculations about me. Perhaps if you were to respond to a particular thing I write in a substantive way we could make progress. Or just ignore and go our separate ways. I’m not trying to sell anything and it makes no difference to me.

Same answer. One aspect of where Heidegger and I differ.

JeffreyW wrote: ↑Tue Nov 16, 2021 9:16 pm

Mark Tetzner wrote: ↑Tue Nov 16, 2021 9:05 pm

JeffreyW wrote: ↑Tue Nov 16, 2021 9:03 pm

One more example of how you have very little understanding of what I say or will say.

I understand very little. It´s hard to understand your position except for "we dont know" which is true enough.
but some like to go further. you reject metaphysics i reject the rejection of it. so lets leave it at that. our
positions dont talk to each other easily.

It would be easier to understand my position if you at least attempt to understand it instead of going off into personal speculations about me. Perhaps if you were to respond to a particular thing I write in a substantive way we could make progress. Or just ignore and go our separate ways. I’m not trying to sell anything and it makes no difference to me.

i take the go separate ways. it was interesting to see what you are all about, but progress I dont see happening.
you have a position but its a boring one for those who think differently. it all goes in circles.
peace.

JeffreyW wrote: ↑Tue Nov 16, 2021 9:11 pm You are conflating things again, perhaps to create another strawman, or perhaps through lack of understanding. Energy is the lowest level “stuff” we know of. You continuously try to twist that into my saying it is the lowest, most elemental stuff there is. I make no such assertion about Being because we can know so little about it. We do know things about energy, including we can reduce everything to it, including consciousness. That is why you continuously evade Kastrup’s inadvertent acknowledgement of that through his ATP argument.

No matter how deep you go to the lowest level, all you can ever know and experience is always something "knowable" - some kind of conscious experience/phenomenon. It's either sense perception, or a thought bearing some meaning, or a feeling, or an image, or an act of will - and all of it is consciously experienced. In other words - all of it are conscious phenomena only. So any experience of "energy" is simply another conscious phenomenon, which is automatically part of consciousness. You can not in principle know anything beyond or apart from your conscious phenomena, therefore you can not in principle know anything "prior to" consciousness, anything from which consciousness "emerges". This is simply because anything prior-to consciousness from which consciousness "emerges" cannot be possibly experienced, because you consciousness (ability to have conscious experience) need to be there in the first place in order to experience it. The only way you can know anything non-conscious is by inventing an abstract concept about it.

And again you conflate what is experienced with the mode of experience as if hypnotized into a mantra.

JeffreyW wrote: ↑Tue Nov 16, 2021 9:21 pm And again you conflate what is experienced with the mode of experience as if hypnotized into a mantra.

You cannot in principle know or prove that there is anything "that is experienced" apart from conscious experiencing of it. It's only your abstract idea of separation between what is experienced and what experiences that creates such dichotomy and subject><object duality. You have a concept in your mind that there is "something" that you consciously experience (like "energy") but that exists apart from the experience of it and from you who experience it.

The only thing you know undeniably by direct experience is your conscious phenomena and you conscious experiencing of them. You can also infer about the existence of anything else, but you can only do that by abstraction, including the existence of "what is experienced". And any such inference is only a hypothesis, so you can never claim that you "know" the existence of anything other than your conscious phenomena.

Eugene I wrote: ↑Tue Nov 16, 2021 9:28 pm

JeffreyW wrote: ↑Tue Nov 16, 2021 9:21 pm And again you conflate what is experienced with the mode of experience as if hypnotized into a mantra.

You cannot in principle know or prove that there is anything "that is experienced" apart from conscious experiencing of it. It's only your abstract idea of separation between what is experienced and what experiences that creates such dichotomy and subject><object duality. You have a concept in your mind that there is "something" that you consciously experience (like "energy") but that exists apart from the experience of it and from you who experience it.

The only thing you know undeniably by direct experience is your conscious phenomena and you conscious experiencing of them. You can also infer about the existence of anything else, but you can only do that by abstraction, including the existence of "what is experienced". And any such inference is only a hypothesis, so you can never claim that you "know" the existence of anything other than your conscious phenomena.

Nonsense. That would mean you can only assume your own consciousness, an error stemming from your misconception of consciousness as a hermitic container rather than entanglement with the world - a relic of subject/object metaphysics. It’s a pose you don’t actually believe or you wouldn’t acknowledge the existence of me, this board, or your computer - which you implicitly do every time you respond.

I heard him say he will make this available long time ago, I am sure you guys are aware of it, it not, just found it.
https://repository.ubn.ru.nl/bitstream/ ... 090pub.pdf
Btw is this forum pretty dead or is there lots of action in the other threads?
Good night.

JeffreyW wrote: ↑Tue Nov 16, 2021 9:11 pm We do know things about energy, including we can reduce everything to it, including consciousness.

How do you reduce consciousness to energy?

JeffreyW wrote: ↑Tue Nov 16, 2021 10:03 pm Nonsense. That would mean you can only assume your own consciousness, an error stemming from your misconception of consciousness as a hermitic container rather than entanglement with the world - a relic of subject/object metaphysics. It’s a pose you don’t actually believe or you wouldn’t acknowledge the existence of me, this board, or your computer - which you implicitly do every time you respond.

We already discussed that, so here it is again.

I do make an abstraction-inference that other conscious experiences exist outside of my own consciousness, I'm not a solipsist. The way I do such inference is that I take the facts that I already know from experience - the existence of my own conscious phenomena, and then extrapolate by inference that similar conscious experiences exist outside of my own consciousness, including the conscious experiences that exist in your consciousness. The "board" and "computer" are only content of my and other personal conscious experiences, I honestly do not believe that such "things" as non-conscious computers exist anywhere "outside" consciousness. I also accept that it is only my unprovable hypothesis that there are conscious phenomena existing outside of my own consciousness. But I think it's a reasonable hypothesis to hold because I'm not inventing the existence of something that I experientially can not prove to exist outside of my consciousness (like any non-conscious stuff). I'm only suggesting the existence of the stuff outside my consciousness that is already experientially proven to exist - conscious phenomena.

What you are doing is different. You invent by abstraction that there exist some "stuff" or objects (like "energy", computers or "external world" of non-conscious objects) that you can never experience directly (because all you can ever experience are the phenomena of your own conscious experience). You cannot prove that such things even exist, you can only hypothesize about their existence. Then you extrapolate by inference that such objects or "energy" actually exist in the world outside your consciousness, and you as consciousness experience it as an object of experience. It is plain metaphysics - you claim an existence of things you can never prove to exist, and you refuse to accept that it's only your hypothesis.

And yes, consciousness is entanglement with the world - with the world of consciousness outside of my own consciousness. But consciousness can not in principle entangle with anything that is unconscious by nature (per interaction problem).

JeffreyW wrote: ↑Tue Nov 16, 2021 8:08 pm Why should anybody accept coherence, internal consistency, parsimony, explanatory power and empirical adequacy adequacy as the determinants of truth?

It is ironic that this is the only argument that materialists are left with. Materialism started its triumph by establishing scientific method and scientific truth criteria of coherence, internal consistency, parsimony, explanatory power and empirical adequacy. But when it turned out that it can not withstand such determinants, so it rejected them and turned instead to "poetic mysterianism" as the last resort.

By the way, claiming that consciousness "emerges" from non-consciousness is materialism, renaming "matter" with "energy" does not change anything here, the premise remains the same: claiming that consciousness is an emergent byproduct and epiphenomenon of something originally non-conscious. And then refusing to face the "hard problem of consciousness" that inevitably arises from such premise.