Saving the materialists

[AshvinP]

Since Felipe is familiar with BK and focuses a lot of his efforts in dialoguing with analytic idealism, I posted a comment referring him to Cleric's old school deep M@L essay. As long as he can resist automatically treating it as yet another appeal to metaphysical realms and beings, perhaps it will stimulate him to inquire further.

Thanks for introducing this starting point of a phenomenological method, Felipe. Indeed we must “abandon all my beliefs about other minds and mind-independent worlds, and instead focus on studying consciousness from within.”

On that note, you may be interested in a friend’s essay written a few years ago. We can surely dismantle the abstract concepts of dogmatic metaphysics, such as Bernardo’s M@L, but can we also redeem them? This is attempted in the essay by using M@L as a symbol for the intimate depth of our contextualized inner experience (“contextual” in the sense of a paragraph embedding sentences, sentences embedding phrases, phrases embedding words, words embedding letters). Here is a quote that you may resonate with:

“Deep M@L is in full harmony with relativity (not speaking of the mathematical models but the general idea). All we ever experience is a single perspective of M@L. The illustrations above are misleading in this sense. There's no such perspective that can see M@L from such a third person vantage point. Yet through the higher forms of cognition we can know how other perspectives interact with us and even resonate as far as possible with their points of view. In certain sense, solipsism finds its healthy version with this. We are solipsists in the sense that we can never step outside and look on the whole M@L from third person perspective and we accept this. But we also don't need to fantasize separate and inaccessible bubbles of consciousness for every being. All we can know about the different being-perspectives of M@L we'll find through the higher forms of consciousness. There are two important characteristics that distinguish healthy solipsism from the pathological. The first is that we should in no way imagine that we are responsible for anything else than our immediate spiritual activity, which is most clearly expressed in thinking. We have no reasons to believe (and it can never be anything more than belief) that our ego consciousness is somehow responsible also for the dynamics of all other beings. In healthy solipsism we fully embrace the autonomy of other beings and we simply acknowledge that we gain nothing by abstractly fantasizing their consciousnesses as some separate and opaque whirlpools, bubbles or brains. We focus on our interaction with the beings which is the only real thing we can experience. As we progress in our spiritual development these inner interactions become much more deeper and comprehensive, and give us much more intimate experience of the states of other beings, compared to just fantasizing their conscious experiences.”

Full essay - viewtopic.php?p=5010#p5010

[Federica]

Since Felipe is familiar with BK and focuses a lot of his efforts in dialoguing with analytic idealism, I posted a comment referring him to Cleric's old school deep M@L essay. As long as he can resist automatically treating it as yet another appeal to metaphysical realms and beings, perhaps it will stimulate him to inquire further.

That was a good idea, to leverage the focus on analytic idealism. I hope he will be intrigued by the essay. I remember, when I first read it, I found it difficult, especially the last part.
I have tried to imagine or feel what character the soul context must have for thoughts such as the ones expressed in the "phenomenological standpoint" (and the rest of his philosophical standpoint too) to arise. Let's hope the opening provided by the essay can begin to loosen that tension.

[AshvinP]

Since Felipe is familiar with BK and focuses a lot of his efforts in dialoguing with analytic idealism, I posted a comment referring him to Cleric's old school deep M@L essay. As long as he can resist automatically treating it as yet another appeal to metaphysical realms and beings, perhaps it will stimulate him to inquire further.

That was a good idea, to leverage the focus on analytic idealism. I hope he will be intrigued by the essay. I remember, when I first read it, I found it difficult, especially the last part.
I have tried to imagine or feel what character the soul context must have for thoughts such as the ones expressed in the "phenomenological standpoint" (and the rest of his philosophical standpoint too) to arise. Let's hope the opening provided by the essay can begin to loosen that tension.

Although he probably hasn't read the full essay yet, he does seem to resonate with the quote. Let's see if leads anywhere further.

Thank you, Ashvin, for sharing your thoughts and the excerpt from the essay on Deep M@L.

The ideas you have introduced definitely resonate with the thoughts I laid down in my own account of the phenomenological standpoint — for instance, I write that my aim in expounding on the phenomenological standpoint is “not to endorse solipsism”; and, in a more recent piece called *Crossing the Threshold* I wrote that “The critical philosopher does not endorse metaphysical solipsism, to be sure”.

It is interesting that you introduce the idea of an immanent (as opposed to transcendent) interpretation of the idea of M@L, especially since recently I have been quite intrigued with Maimon’s reply to Kant’s transcendental idealism. Maimon sees a great weakness in Kant’s transcendental idealism because of Kant’s insistence on a dualism between understanding and sensibility, and therefore Maimon introduces an immanent use of the concept of an “Infinite Understanding” as a solution to Kant’s problematic (not unlike the immanent use of the idea of M@L introduced in the essay you’ve shared).


Thanks for introducing Maimon's critique of the implicit dualism, Felipe, and I think that is very important to contemplate further. I may have used this example/exercise before, I am not sure, but it is very powerful in illustrating the domain of imaginative experience where we can realize the fundamental overlap between the spaces of understanding and sensibility.

For example, if we intend to count from 1 to 10 in our mind, we live in the holistic intuitive understanding of the general intent. Then we begin realizing this intent and progress from pronouncing "1" to "2" to "3", etc., i.e. our intuitive understanding becomes sensible. In this experience, we have a very clear intuitive sense of how our momentary verbalizations are structured through time. The auditory vibrations of our inner voice, as we pronounce the words of the numbers, do not meet us like a mysterious foreign object, for example, the erratic movements of a fly buzzing around, but as an orderly progression of inner counting states guided by our meaningful intent to count. If we are currently at "5", even though we haven’t yet reached ten, we have a good intuitive sense of where the process is going and what inner state will soon condense at our mental horizon, even though we haven’t yet pronounced the next numbers in our mind. This intuitive sense also gives us orientation for how we have reached our present “5” state through the previously pronounced numbers.

So it is no longer a question whether the cognitive modes of understanding and sensibility overlap, because we have phenomenologically realized that they do with complete certainty, but a question of how expansive our intuitive clarity of the flow of sensible states can become, i.e. whether we can resonate with not only the flow of numerical counting and similar imaginative states, but also the flow of deeper psycho-physical states which are the objects of philosophical and natural scientific investigations and which seem to involve the interfering intents of relatively autonomous agents. For example, the flow of traffic states on the highway is only comprehended when we intuitively resonate with how the desires, ideas, goals, etc. of autonomous human agents impress into and modulate our first-person agential perspective.

As Maimon seems to suggest, the 'thing-in-itself' can only refer to the limits of our intuitive orientation to this wider World flow at any given time, which can asymptotically grow toward a state of infinite intuitive orientation. The question is then whether that growth can occur through more philosophizing and scientific theorizing about the flow, or instead needs new types of inner cognitive effort. Since you mentioned Gurdjieff in the article, I am curious about whether you have looked into various inner practices for developing cognition and spiritual perception? Do you think it makes sense that such practices would be the natural bridge forward for philosophy and science to be awakened from their slumbering in dogmatic metaphysics?

[AshvinP]

Thank you, Ashvin, for your continued engagement here. Your example illustrating the overlap between sensibility and understanding is insightful — but it still leaves open the question of the nature of the overlap itself, the question of how the overlap is to be explained (whether there is some ontological distinction between understanding and sensibility, or whether sensibility and understanding are one singular activity [that is, not at all separate and therefore do not necessarily “overlap” so much as they are one continuous flow]).

For Maimon, sensibility is an expression of the understanding itself — more specifically, an expression of the Infinite Understanding underlying my experience. Maimon sees experience as a serpent perpetually swallowing its own tail, an infinite striving moving closer and closer to the underlying “Infinite Understanding”, although the Infinite Understanding is always just another step away like the horizon is just another step away with every step I take towards it.

As it pertains to your question concerning Gurdjieff — I see a lot of parallels between the teachings of Gurdjieff and the philosophy of Fichte (interestingly, Fichte developed the greater part of his philosophy [his “Strebungphilosophy”] following his interaction with the writings of Maimon). Fichte’s philosophy is characteristic because it involves a self-conscious and explicit break with the contemplative tradition of Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz. For Fichte what is important is not what I theorize but what I *do* — for Fichte what is important is not what speculative theories I come up with but that I actively struggle to realize a free will. Fichte believes that speculating about the freedom of the will is a useless endeavor; one must actively struggle (rather than theorize) in order to realize a free will. Hence, I see a great relationship between the work of Fichte and Gurdjieff, where the main point is struggle or striving (active struggle, active striving).


Right, but notice how the feeling that we need some *other* explanation for the overlap other than the overlap itself, is actually the birth of dogmatic metaphysics or, alternatively, the problematic dualism that some critical philosophers fall into. In other words, we continually expect something to arrive from a direction orthogonal to our intuitive orientation and illuminate the 'nature' of the phenomenal flow, rather than the active struggle within the experience itself. It becomes like the carrot held in front of the donkey - a goal that we are striving for but, by the very nature of our activity, can never reach. (here I am not speaking of the final goal of infinite understanding, but even the intermediary steps toward that understanding).

To better feel the contrast between these two approaches, we can imagine that, just when we pronounce "5", we somehow *forget* that we are intentionally counting. Then we hear in our mind "5", but it sounds like a thought that randomly pops in our mind. We have no intuitive sense of why it appeared or that something else should appear afterward. In this case, we make a mental picture of the sound "5" and then try to complement it with other mental pictures that should 'explain' it, like chemical reactions, neurons, supernatural beings who projected the sound in our mind, and so forth. We feel satisfied with our explanation when these mental pictures are snapped together like puzzle pieces and seem to make intuitive sense, i.e. they feel internally consonant with each other and with other phenomenal facts of experience in a way that we call ‘logical’. Notice, however, how this explanation made of snapping mental images together remains abstract. We don’t know with certainty whether our mental puzzle faithfully reflects reality or not, even though the pieces may fit together very convincingly.

Now we can contrast this standard process with the experience of suddenly *remembering* our counting activity. This provides us with a completely different kind of ‘explanation’ for “5”. We no longer need to assemble mental puzzles to find an explanation for it, but instead, our intent to count fills the vacuum and makes intuitive sense of why the "5" appeared in our consciousness. The fact that these different explanatory approaches emerge from forgetting or remembering what we are always doing with our cognitive activity illustrates how the difference is simply a matter of *perspective* on our mental pictures and their lawful relations. When we remember our intent to count, our perspective on the “5” inverts and we feel that our intent *becomes* the explanation that we were otherwise asymptotically seeking through abstract arrangements of mental puzzle pieces.

The question is whether our active struggling within the domain of cognitive will can spark the remembrance of higher-order intentional activity that intuitively explains the wider phenomenal flow out of its own intrinsically experienced movements, just as our conscious counting activity.


Thank you, Mr. Pandurangi, for your further engagement here. I’d like to note that an “explanation for the overlap other than the overlap itself” can have a perfectly useful, regulative, and heuristic employment — the key is to keep in mind its metaphorical/regulative status, the key is to not confuse the map with the territory itself (while all the while keeping in mind the heuristic value of the map).

I say this because one of my chief aims recently, especially after my recent deep engagement with the work of Maimon, has involved actively struggling with the problem of Kant’s understanding-sensibility dualism — solving the problem of the dualism via an “explanation for the overlap other than the overlap itself”, sure (but all the while with the clear awareness that the explanation is metaphorical and heuristic).

For whatever it is worth — and, interestingly, this thought occurred to me in what I may call a sort of *mystical* revelation last week, after I had been going over Maimon’s work — it came to my mind that the relationship between understanding and sensibility is like the head-and-tail of an ouroboric serpent (the tail/body is the sensibility, while the head is the understanding). Insofar as the serpent is continually swallowing its own tail, experience is unfolding. However, experience ceases when the serpent is not actively swallowing its tail. What I mean is that experience itself, metaphorically speaking, arises when the understanding ouroborically swallows its own tail (sensibility); and, as it swallows and swallows, it determines the quality of experience. And the quality of experience can be modified depending on the quality of the swallowing/biting (to, again, speak metaphorically); so that if the understanding bites/swallows with *intensity y*, this will correspond to a *modification y* in sensibility; if the bite/swallow is of *intensity x*, then we will see *modification x* in sensibility. This is very closely related to the idea, as expounded in James Allen’s book *As A Man Thinketh* (the idea is that how one thinks actively determines how one senses/perceives his environment).

Now, this model has more than mere theoretical value because it can have a very real positive impact in live moral action. If a man is intuitively aware that his own thinking is actively determining his empirical situation, this can lead to a tremendous insight and can have practical implications in daily life. But again, I do see your point about how an “explanation for the overlap other than the overlap itself” can lead to dogmatism or problems if the explanation is not understood heuristically/regulatively.


Thanks, Felipe, your point about understanding the explanatory frameworks as heuristics and metaphors is a good one. As long as we are vigilant in using it that way, we are safe from the metaphysical trap.

I often experience the same ouroboric intuition that you describe when contemplating the perceptual landscape, for example, the starry heavens. The latter acts as a perceptual anchor for the intuitive forces which structure my capacity to observe and contemplate, which of course is the same capacity I am using to contemplate the heavens. There is a perpetual feedback loop of intuition and perception in that sense and our "I" is always mediating between these poles, but normally we don't pay any attention to this dynamic process.

A key question is whether we can purify and intensify the experience of this ouroboric intuition? When we contemplate the sensibility of our emotions, for example, we feel like these emotional currents must stem from a swallowing/bite that modifies our sensibility in a more pronounced way than that which unfolds in our strictly imaginative pictures. We feel like we can easily work into the stream of our inner voice and redirect it, whereas it's not so simple with the stream of anger, frustration, and so on. We are hardly conscious of the swallowing/biting that steers those deeper emotional currents, rather we can only use our mental pictures, where we do feel to have creative capacity, to philosophize about it.

So initially we only have the intimate experience of the ouroboric intuition in our imaginative life, the continual feedback between intuitive meaning and sensible mental pictures that embody that meaning (like the audible counting states), and we can abstractly extrapolate this experience into the rest of the perceptual landscape. The test of whether we are dealing with intimate experience or abstract extrapolation is our degree of creative control within the ouroboric feedback loop - if we can't actively struggle with our will and modify the feedback, as is often the case with strong emotions, then this domain remains abstract. The intuitive thinking path, however, develops scales of cognitive will which can awaken deeper within the ouroboric process and creatively steer through those meaningful domains of experience.

There is no doubt that our abstract models of this intuition can also have inspiring and practically motivating effects, yet eventually we experience diminishing returns and hit a limit. I think that is practically what gives rise to modern thinkers who began postulating absolute 'limits of knowledge'. They sensed how their models of reality, no matter how cleverly developed to symbolize deeper intuition, kept them on the outside looking in to a large extent. Most of them didn't suspect that there was a portal to the inner dimension of the ouroboric process, hiding within the very imaginative activity by which they constructed their models. Once we can squeeze our spiritual activity through this portal, so to speak, the practically transformative imaginations, inspirations, and intuitions only grow more expansive and intense.

[Federica]

This dialogue is remarkably conducted, thanks for sharing it here. It has sure bridging potential.

[Federica]

Sabine gets seriously worked up about the nonsense in the foundations of physics. Hopefully it's the story of the last theoretical storms before the calm of a new cognitive paradigm in science, as MS recently conjectured.

[Cleric]

Sabine gets seriously worked up about the nonsense in the foundations of physics. Hopefully it's the story of the last theoretical storms before the calm of a new cognitive paradigm in science, as MS recently conjectured.

Yeah... In SH's case, the downside is that she doesn't really offer any alternative. And in a way I can understand why she gets much hate.

I found this talk by Veritasium interesting:



At least it leans a little toward the phenomenological experience of thinking. The talk is about 45min. The QA can safely be skipped.

[Federica]

Sabine gets seriously worked up about the nonsense in the foundations of physics. Hopefully it's the story of the last theoretical storms before the calm of a new cognitive paradigm in science, as MS recently conjectured.

Yeah... In SH's case, the downside is that she doesn't really offer any alternative. And in a way I can understand why she gets much hate.

I found this talk by Veritasium interesting:



At least it leans a little toward the phenomenological experience of thinking. The talk is about 45min. The QA can safely be skipped.

Thanks, Cleric. Well, SH says at 13:22: "What we should do instead is focus experiments on areas where we either have an internal inconsistency in the theories, like in quantum gravity, or an existing inconsistency between data and theory, like in astrophysics. Why, for example, do we not have a billion-dollar research program for quantum gravity? This would by all reasonable measures be a considerably better investment. I also worry a lot that there is so little research on the foundations of quantum physics. It seems entirely possible to me that with all the quantum technology developments going on, there is a physics breakthrough hidden in the data already. But we don’t know about it because we have no theory that tells us what to even look for in the data."


Regarding Veritasium's video, I appreciate the overall message about the difference a teacher can make in education beyond any technological innovation, but the considerations on how we learn don't seem entirely convincing to me. Especially when he says: "There are no general thinking skills/problem solving skills. There are only complex webs of long-term memory". And that being expert in a field means nothing in terms of being expert in another field. It's only a matter of effortfully practicing in a specialized field, to accumulate specific memory and make tasks more and more automatic and effortless.

In other words, he adopts in full the behavioral approach, thereby confusing, in my opinion, thinking and ideation with specialized practice. For him the goal of higher ed is to "train memory until problem solving feels automatic". So intuition is nothing more than the repository of past practice, an accumulation of effortful practice in a specialized field, ready to be used automatically in the future. Like the chess master knows what to do and has no need to figure out the moves, because he has accumulated long effortful practice in just playing chess. There is an important part played by practice, but also a clear transferability of problem solving skills across domains, which his selective examples can't disprove. By the way, this mechanistic view also forces him to conclude that the reason why a caring teacher, and not AI, makes the real difference in education is through learning being a social activity.

In fact, this doesn't seem too phenomenological to me. First he has adopted the theoretical-behavioral framework of "Thinking fast and slow" and then he has used it as a map to decide where to look, what social psychology examples to select and how to read them. I really appreciate his natural science videos (I was about to post a different Veritasium video ) more than this exercise in social sciences.

[AshvinP]

I found this talk by Veritasium interesting:

At least it leans a little toward the phenomenological experience of thinking. The talk is about 45min. The QA can safely be skipped.

Thanks, Cleric, this was a fantastic presentation for kindling intuitions about the nature of our thinking experience! I think he used many relevant examples that overlap with our discussions here in terms of 'slowing down' and attaining a more intuitive perspective of the Whole that 'explains' our particular experiential states.

I really appreciated the Chess example, which is something that I have been thinking about a lot lately, since I started playing. When he presented the board configuration, I was thinking that the GMs would not do as well at remembering if the configuration was something that would rarely arise in a chess game, since they have not moved their imaginative activity through those experiential states many times before, and sure enough, that's where he went. Chess is generally fertile soil for constructing metaphors for what we seek through the spiritual path. It allows for relatively pure descriptions of metamorphosing imaginative states in the context of at least one other agency's activity that interferes with our own.

Another metaphor I was thinking about recently, which also has relevance for this topic of what it means 'to learn', is how modern chess software allows for 'takebacks' if the opponent agrees. This is very understandable in the case of misclicks, which are usually obvious to spot, but what about when the person avoids 'system 2' thinking and makes an impulsive or ill thought-out move, only spotting the error after the fact? At first, I felt it was always better to allow the takeback, but then I realized that is only 'helping' the other player if the goal is winning the game. If the goal is to improve one's thinking-learning process, on the other hand, then it is better for us to live with the full consequences of our thinking errors, the suboptimal board configuration that we are left with, so we can properly integrate the feedback and also adapt to the new board circumstances, discovering creative ways to rebalance our position.

It seems that modern 'learning' (and culture in general), now resting on the crutches of technologies like AI, is practically synonymous with a chess game of continual takebacks. There are increasingly fewer opportunities for souls to live with the consequences of their suboptimal thinking process and integrate the feedback, since that process is externalized onto the technological crutches. AI can theoretically be developed to point out the errors in our reasoning to us and prompt us to think through the consequences of those dissonant flows, but practically speaking, people will use it to 'undo' the errors and act as if they never happened. That is, their interest will reside solely in 'winning the game' which, however, comes at the expense of true education and learning, which is also learning what it means to learn.

[Cleric]

Thanks, Cleric. Well, SH says at 13:22: "What we should do instead is focus experiments on areas where we either have an internal inconsistency in the theories, like in quantum gravity, or an existing inconsistency between data and theory, like in astrophysics. Why, for example, do we not have a billion-dollar research program for quantum gravity? This would by all reasonable measures be a considerably better investment. I also worry a lot that there is so little research on the foundations of quantum physics. It seems entirely possible to me that with all the quantum technology developments going on, there is a physics breakthrough hidden in the data already. But we don’t know about it because we have no theory that tells us what to even look for in the data."

Yes, you are right. I guess my point was that even if these billions were redirected to the programs she proposes, very soon they would become the exact same sinks. The error here is to think that there's no progress because there's not enough investment in these fields. The problem is of the same essence as if someone says, "Why spend all these billions on large colliders when they can be spent on abiogenetic origin of life research instead?" And the even greater irony is that the need for colliders comes precisely because scientists were trying to figure out such inconsistencies. If she needs to devise an experiment for quantum gravity, gradually she'll figure out she needs something similar to a large collider anyway.

Regarding Veritasium's video, I appreciate the overall message about the difference a teacher can make in education beyond any technological innovation, but the considerations on how we learn don't seem entirely convincing to me. Especially when he says: "There are no general thinking skills/problem solving skills. There are only complex webs of long-term memory". And that being expert in a field means nothing in terms of being expert in another field. It's only a matter of effortfully practicing in a specialized field, to accumulate specific memory and make tasks more and more automatic and effortless.

In other words, he adopts in full the behavioral approach, thereby confusing, in my opinion, thinking and ideation with specialized practice. For him the goal of higher ed is to "train memory until problem solving feels automatic". So intuition is nothing more than the repository of past practice, an accumulation of effortful practice in a specialized field, ready to be used automatically in the future. Like the chess master knows what to do and has no need to figure out the moves, because he has accumulated long effortful practice in just playing chess. There is an important part played by practice, but also a clear transferability of problem solving skills across domains, which his selective examples can't disprove. By the way, this mechanistic view also forces him to conclude that the reason why a caring teacher, and not AI, makes the real difference in education is through learning being a social activity.

In fact, this doesn't seem too phenomenological to me. First he has adopted the theoretical-behavioral framework of "Thinking fast and slow" and then he has used it as a map to decide where to look, what social psychology examples to select and how to read them. I really appreciate his natural science videos (I was about to post a different Veritasium video ) more than this exercise in social sciences.

I agree. Maybe what caught my attention was the emphasis on the fact about how much of our personality actually lies beyond the tip of the iceberg experienced in the few mental images that bubble at each moment at the focus of our experience. And we know how the non-understanding of this fact is even greater in many 'spiritual' people, who take the whole complex web to be simply their pure and unquestionable being. So even if a few people from the auditorium left with a little appreciation about how much lies beyond our immediate control, and how we are nevertheless responsible to continuously metamorphose this web through minute steering movements at our focal point, that would be a great victory. I was happy to hear MS also touching upon this in the video you linked. I don't recall the exact words, but he also emphasized how our momentary state is embedded in the evolving context.