Eugene I. wrote: ↑Fri Feb 18, 2022 1:23 pm
lorenzop wrote: ↑Fri Feb 18, 2022 1:10 am
Instead of answering my question re ‘meaning’ and ‘world content’ - specifically giving an example of what you are talking about - you throw up another wall of nonsense including nuggets like ‘thought-bubbles’.
I think you are suggesting that the world includes a layer of meaning- ok -can you provide an example of this meaning other than saying meaning is everything we experience.
For example, there is the phrase ‘human being’, and this phrase means something. Are you saying the meaning itself is stored in the world? The universe is also a dictionary?
Ash's version/understanding of idealism is fundamentally Platonic, that explains everything. It's the philosophy of the primacy of the Idea, as opposed to the primacy of Consciousness that is the creator of all ideas. Both of these philosophies claim the territory of "idealism", but in fact they are very different ontologies incompatible with each other and should be named differently to avoid confusion. It is true that in the Western philosophical tradition the term "idealism" has its roots in the Platonic version of idealism, and that the word "idea-lism" points to the primacy of the Idea, but this is just a historical artefact. I think for the philosophy of the primacy of Consciousness Hoffman's term "Consciousness realism" seems to be more appropriate than "idealism".
This is more fair than a characterization of my position than the usual "it is all religious cultic indoctrination", so I thank you for that.
Yes, I hold to a Western idealism which does not add abstract "consciousness", which no one has ever experienced, onto the ideational activity and ideas we always experience. Even in the deep mystical state, the meaning of "pure awareness" is there, which means the Idea is still there, which means our Thinking which perceives ideas is still there. As BK says in that quote, meaning is inherent to Nature and our role is to contemplate and understand it as MAL evolves through our own knowing activity (from our first-person relational perspective).
The only way to circumvent this plain reality is, not by logical reasoning, but by heavy abstraction from experience. That is what Kantian philosophers in the analytic tradition engaged in. We can even see how it regresses in Western culture since Kant, leading directly to the heights of physicalism, and also in BK's own philosophical outlook from The Idea of the World to his latest article. Reminding that I did not start this thread, but another person who clearly perceives the nihilistic digression.
The mind container is real feature of abstract thinking. In the material perceptual world, if I am speaking with an engineer about constructing a bridge and say, "don't worry about the weight, design, load bearing, etc, it's all just steel... it's just matter and energy and so are we", the engineer will appropriately perceive my claim as hyper abstraction, even if theoretically accurate, and ignore me. He may add that I am pridefully reducing the forces at play in the design of bridges to my own mineralized thought-marbles, which is why I say those higher forces don't matter. My thought-marbles and those forces are "equal". They are all equally real, true, etc, so why bother knowing them when I already encompass them with my own thought-marbles?
This is the attitude abstract analytic philosophy now takes towards the ideational forces which structure Nature around us and the entire Cosmic landscape. It's easy to see the nihilism in this attitude. Our own thought-marbles cannot sustain the meaning we naturally seek out and rely upon for motivation, imagination, and inspiration. We cannot rule out the possibility of the higher meaning simply because we have not experienced it or, more accurately, because we are unaware that we are always experiencing it. Our own thoughts take their limited meaning from these higher Cosmic forces. There is real concrete continuity and nothing else, other than our own intellectual ego, is stopping us from seeking it out.