Simon Adams wrote: ↑Sun Apr 11, 2021 9:42 am
Out of interest, I assume you would agree that the eastern idea of full enlightenment is when the individual transcends the distinction between their mind and the “non-emergent "substratum"? If so, why do they never come away with a deeper understanding of some aspects of “potential/possibility of conscious ideations (including meanings and ideas)”?
I’ve never heard of someone becoming enlightened, and then revealing some new insight into maths, chemical reactions, evolution, quantum mechanics, weather formations, star life cycles, planetary movements etc etc. All these things follow deep natural laws written into nature, so where do they ‘live’? Are you saying that the laws of nature just evolve in mind, but mind is not aware of them?
Enlightenment does not mean gaining some "new" insights into the questions that you posed about the origins of the natural laws and the "place" where they reside. And your questions are quite valid, but you should not believe any "enlightened" persons who would tell you that they know the answers. The metaphysical scheme that I sometimes propose (the "non-emergent substratum" etc) is only an unprovable inference, I myself do not believe in it religiously, but just consider it as a possibility. And by the way, I actually do not know what "enlightenment" means and never claim that I am "enlightened". Different Eastern traditions have different understandings of what "enlightenment" means.
My personal view is very empirical-based, it is basically subjective idealism close to the Buddha's, Hume's, William James's' and Husserl's. I only know the content of my private 1-st person field of direct conscious experience (FOE) here and now. Below statement is simply a statement/description of the experiential facts and does not include any inferences about what it is metaphysically or how it works:
- The FOE includes a content of ever-changing phenomena that appear to be experienced always at the moment of "now"
- The phenomena differ in their qualities and I can "conditionally" distinguish them by their qualities. Such distinctions includes qualities of feelings, audible, visual and tactile sense perceptions, and thoughts. The thoughts phenomena seem to carry certain "meanings" and mental "images".
- Each phenomenon has a recognizable quality of being "present" and "experienced'. There are no phenomena in the FOE that are not "present" and not "experienced". So, the quality of "presence" and "being experienced" seems to be the invariant of all the phenomena of the FOE and of the FOE as a whole. Obviously it is impossible to have a phenomenon in the FOE that is NOT "present" and not "experienced". I use the linguistic label "non-emergent" or "non-conditional" to describe these two unique qualities of the FOE and all its phenomena. I draw no further inferences about the nature of these qualities (whether they are "ontic", "substratum" or else).
- The FOE as a whole possesses an "mysterious" quality of "oneness": even though every phenomenon seems to be distinct, all phenomena inseparably belong to the wholeness/unity of the FOE at the moment of now.
- To avoid the trap of solipsism I make only one unprovable inference: I accept the assumption that my 1-st person FOE is not the only one existing FOE and there are multitude of other FOEs (that I linguistically call "other people conscious experiences").
- Now the tricky epistemological part. The thoughts have some interesting qualities that I can observe empirically. The thoughts are very flexible and can be manipulated volitionally. They carry "meanings" and "imaginations" as their qualia. All thoughts with their meanings are inseparable part of the FOE and are not different from it in any way. Now, the epistemological question is: what is the correspondence between the meanings of thoughts and the rest of the phenomenal content and qualities of the FOE? What I find empirically is that there can be certain "correspondences" between the phenomena of the FOE. For example, the visual perception of a "round apple" can correspond to a tactile perception of "roundness" of an apple. Now, I can also have a thought-imagination of a "round apple" and find that it has some correspondence/resemblance with the visual and tactile phenomena of the "round apple". I can also imagine a "square apple" but empirically find that it has no correspondence with my sensory phenomena. Likewise, I find no correspondence of the thought-meanings/imaginations of a "flying spaghetti monster" or "Santa Claus" with my sensory phenomena. Now, things get more complicated if I for example have a thought of a "material round apple existing is an external material world", or "a round apple as an idea belonging to the ideal-content" (as per Ashvin's objective idealistic paradigm), or "an apple consisting of a set of superstirings". But how do I know which one of these meanings are "true" and which ones are "wrong"? I refuse to use the terms "true" and "wrong" and I have no criteria to make such distinction. But I can use simple empirical criteria of correspondence and parsimony. I find certain thought-meanings corresponding "better" with the data of the phenomenal perceptions in a sense that they describe it more accurately and adequately and allow me to make more accurate predictions of how the phenomenal perceptions will change. I also find that certain thoughts carry some "extra" meanings that are not necessary and do not carry any information that corresponds with perceptions. For example a thought-meaning that the sense perceptions of an apple are "caused by a material apple existing in the external material worlds" or the sense perceptions of an apple as a consequence of the "idea of an apple existing in the divine mind", or a thought that they are caused by "fairies", carry some meaning-content that does not correspond to any actual sense perceptions and cannot be verified or falsified based on the phenomenal data of the conscious experience. So if I simply drop these extra meanings, my thoughts do not loose any accuracy of correspondence with the data of perceptional experience. In other words, these extra "metaphysical" meanings are simply unnecessary and auxiliary. That does not mean that they are "wrong" or "unreal" and have to be discarded. They are simply useless in a practical sense, or, in philosophical terms, the are not "parsimonious".
- Yet, there is nothing wrong with using the faculty of intelligence to play with meanings, be they philosophical or mathematical or scientific or psychological, and to develop some metaphysical or scientific "models" of reality, it's fun and may give us some insights into the inter-relations between various phenomena of experience and may be even into the nature of reality. This is what science and philosophy attempt to do and there is nothing wrong with that. I have some personal preference towards some of these "models" (particularly, the subjective-idealistic ones), but I never take them "religiously" due to the lack of any "truthfulness" criteria. But in most cases I find that such meaning games lack any ways to verify, falsify or establish any correspondence with the phenomenal data of conscious experience.
- I make no inferences of what is "ontic" or not, what is "real" or not. But conditionally I use the linguistic label term "real" to designate that all this content of the FOE is experienced. In other words, the "real" by "my" definition of this term is equivalent to "experienced". There may be other definitions of the term "real", but I do not subscribe to them.