Seeing the truth is not conductive to survival

[DandelionSoul]

You would agree that all cognitive science so far holds that an infant does not act with the same sort of intent that a full-grown adult acts with, right? You may claim that a human being always acts with some intent, regardless of age, but I don't see how you can claim infants act with equal degree and quality of intent as full-grown adult without contradicting many empirical studies of these things.

Oh, absolutely. I think maybe you read my explanation for the line of questioning after you wrote this, but I was, at that point, not intending to challenge the ideas you were expressing, but their consistency with your metaphilosophy (that is, the tension between shying away from talking about animal cognition due to our lack of first person experience with it and then proceeding to say all manner of third-person things).

I would also point out that Hegel may have been more popular when he was alive, but his philosophy has not fared well at all compared to Kant or Schopenhauer since then.

You might enjoy "Hegel For Our Times", a short essay by Judith Butler. Arran Gare is another philosopher who draws heavily on Hegel in outlining his process philosophy. And Hegel has enjoyed a good deal of engagement in theology. But you're right on the whole: he's mostly been a foil for various flavors of opposition (including by the existentialists, who have been incredibly influential on me). I think that in itself speaks to his importance in philosophy

The reconstruction can never give us the dimensional value of walking through the actual city.

I am not sure what "dimensional value" means here, but I think I grasp the meaning of "intuition" as you're using it.

I am not speaking of what I have personally experienced, but rather what can possibly be experienced from first-person perspective.

How do you know what can possibly be experienced if you haven't experienced it?

Yet the implication of that gradient, for me, is that there is actually a possible state in which there is no intent, no purpose, and no freedom, or so little of those that there may as well be none for all intents and purposes (I know, this pun has probably worn out its welcome by now).

Oh, of course there is -- all these things enter the world with the first life, but prior to that are absent in exactly the same way as I experienced no purposes or intentions before I was born (bracketing the question of reincarnation for now). The jump from "zero" to "one" happened at the origin of life. But now let's fast forward some three and a half billion years from that moment. Life has been complexifying, diversifying, dancing in intricate feedback loops with its environment, and the first humans were born into unfathomably ancient ecosystems, embedded in a living web bursting with creative adaptations from the level of individual organisms all the way up to herds and flocks and colonies and entire biomes. I can't get my head around the idea that none of these creatures or these ecosystems felt any glimmer of purpose until humans were born into it and gave it one. And I can't get my head around it because it would make liars of my eyes: to look at life in process is to look at intentional actions, goal-driven acts, a struggle against entropy -- in short, purpose carried out.

This is part of why Kastrup's discussion of the telos of nature strikes me as so wrong -- the Living All is for itself. It's not for us, a thing that exists only to give us images to facilitate sublimely contemplating the Eternal Ideas. We inherit purposefulness from it. It's our birthright, not because we are human, but because we are living, and life was replete with purpose long before it birthed us. We have the privilege of making explicit the implicit through art and story and myth and philosophy, through dance and song and ritual. But it seems a terrible mistake to believe that in making purpose explicit, and by contributing to it, we're inventing it, or that it first appeared with us, or only exists for us, that our peculiar set of gifts is the necessary precondition for purpose.

[AshvinP]

My own view on reincarnation is that there was only ever one "soul" to be incarnated, and it's incarnated as every living thing all at once across all of time. I suppose instead of believing in reincarnation, it might be more accurate to call my view panincarnation.

In my view, every individual is a microcosm of the macrocosm, so in a real sense lives out the entire metamorphic progression of the Cosmos, but over the course of many lives and there is true novelty of experience.

I agree with the microcosm/macrocosm idea... sort of. I think we each contain the Cosmos that contains each of us, sort of the way each part of a fractal or hologram contains the whole fractal or hologram, or the way every facet of a gem is visible in each facet of a gem, or Indra's Net, or something along those lines. I'm not sure how to put the intuition into words, because it also contains a notion of the continuous generation of novelty which seems missing in all the above images.

(Santeri probably knows more about fractal math than I do; I just know that if you zoom into any part of a Mandelbrot long enough, you'll eventually come back around to that one shape that I've affectionately termed the Mandelbrot Guy.)

In any case, as I noted above, I don't quite share your view of reincarnation, but I don't know if our views here are incompatible enough to quibble over here.

The key for me right now, in the spirit of Steiner, is seeking highest possible resolution on these issues. The modern era has convinced people such resolution is simply impossible when it comes to matters of the Mind-Spirit, which are "private" and merely "subjective". We cannot possibly study these spiritual matters in the same resolution as chemistry or biology, for ex. (even though chemistry and biology, rightly understood, is only ever about spiritual matters). So while your formulation on reincarnation above may very well be true, it's just too low resolution to be useful. Everything must eventually be judged by both its coherency in light of Reason and also its practical utility for spiritual growth (the two should never be at odds). Because I do not have any such high resolution on this process of reincarnation, I really try not to even speak about it. I suspect its relevant for this issue of "implicit memories", but I can't say for sure. So I mention this just to keep in mind going forward

re: microcosm of macrocosm - yes I completely agree the fractal analogy is a good one, and that also captures the novelty aspect as well.

I am pretty confused by the above. Even if the "mystified" person is not acting with intent from "their own perspective", shouldn't they still be acting with "purpose" under your view, since they are living beings acting out of some sense of instinct? Or you are saying the mystification basically eliminates their instinctual capacity as well?

Basically yes. Self-reflection is the capacity to make thought the object of thought, including instinctive thoughts, which allows us much more self-determination in terms of how we value our instinctive thought at any particular moment and how we will act on it. It also enables us to make ourselves, holistically, the object of thought, such as when we wonder how we came across to someone else in an interaction or think about what we're doing with our life. We're able to "step outside of ourselves," in a sense, and see ourselves through the gaze of another (the world at large, or some particular person, or the God of our religion, or whatever).

Fundamentally, self-awareness gives us an awareness of our freedom, but it can also be used to negate that freedom by convincing us that we don't actually have any. This kind of manipulation, I see as a nullification of purpose because the impetus for the subject's actions is no longer internally supplied; they have been made an object, made to see themself as an object, and cut off from avenues of thought and feeling that might give the lie to that self-conception. But it can only be done where self-conception is possible in the first place: that faculty is the tool of the oppressor.

To be clear, I do not think this outcome -- where self-determination self-nullifies -- is stable. It must be continually reinforced, and even at that, purpose (which is to say, freedom) never quite dies. I don't know that it's possible to view oneself as always and only an object consistently all the time, since internally supplied desires constantly push back against the twisting of self-reflection. But to the degree that the subject is acting out their mystification rather than acting from their own purposes, I would call their actions purposeless.

So I think what you are calling "mystification" here is what I call the normal state of affairs in the modern age. We are self-aware, but mostly we do not truly reflect on our Selfhood and how it manifests in our spiritual activity of W-F-T. Instead, we seek our meaning and purpose in 'things' external to us, whether they are religious or secular, natural or cultural, etc. We act out of compulsion and blind obedience rather than genuine knowledge and desire to act the way we do. We definitely have the capacity for Self-determination, but very few people are Self-determined to a significant extent. Yet I also think this course of evolution - this "dark night of the soul" - was necessary to bring about the conditions from which we can truly overcome our enslavement to the physical world and external agents and gain our spiritual freedom from within. It should never be thought of as "stepping outside ourselves", though, because the whole point is to see how we ourselves are participating in the unfolding of our experience, in the co-creation of the phenomenal world.

I disagree that feeling itself is a sort of knowing, rather it always co-exists with a knowing aspect which serves a distinct role from feeling.

In the interest of tightening up the line of argumentation here, I'd like to poke at what seem to me to be some tensions running throughout your argument across this thread.

On the one hand, you said that true knowledge can't happen apart from self-reflection. On the other, you've affirmed that there is always already knowing bound up with experience. And animals experience, because they are ensouled, and so do infants. But you've affirmed also that animals and infants are non-self-reflective. So knowledge is already self-reflective, and experience always entails knowledge, and animals experience, so animals know, but animals are non-self-reflective, so animals don't know. I kind of wonder if you're using knowledge-language in two different ways. You specified "true knowledge" when you said that knowledge can't happen apart from self-reflection, so does that make instinctive knowledge false knowledge? If so, then what is false knowledge? What is knowledge such that it can be false?

Likewise, you suggested that an infant's consciousness is so interwoven with the world as a whole that the consciousness is incapable of differentiating between the infant and an object. But you also acknowledge that non-self-reflective consciousnesses have the experience of lack, and experience always entails a knowing, and so what is lacked is, to some extent, known in its absence, and I don't see how we escape either the conclusion that self-reflection is always already present, but implicit prior to becoming explicit (what you might call "intuitive") OR the conclusion that, in fact, self-reflection isn't necessary to ground these distinctions but is ultimately grounded by them.

The first horn of the dilemma plays well with your notion of the eternal Ego-Self, but it does not seem to play well with your notion that animals and infants are devoid of purpose in their actions. The second horn is... well... the view I've been promoting this whole time. And that's the view that comports best with my first-person experience: whenever I engage in self-reflective thought, I find that its objects are thoughts, memories, intuitions, feelings, etc. that existed prior to my reflecting upon them, so I find in my experience no reason to believe that the self on which I'm reflecting came into being with the reflection.

I can see where this claim gives rise to confusion - because I say there is a time when "purpose" does not exist due to lack of self-reflection, but now I say Self is eternal and likely never existed without some reflection.

As I was rereading your post and mine before I hit submit, I realized that I am very confused about this tension, and your explanation about relational metaphysics doesn't do much to resolve my confusion. Can you elaborate?

Let me try, because I definitely see where the confusion is coming in, and it's mostly due to my own careless use of the words. So instead of "knowing" or "thinking" element in every experience, let me say there is a "meaningful element" in every experience. This also speaks to my point that meaning is fundamentally shared between all perspectives of the unified Consciousness, rather than being personal to each perspective. The purely instinctive creature experiences meaning in everything it encounters. It is fundamentally the same meaning we encounter in reading these posts, for example, but the ability to write the posts comes from our ability to reflect on meaningful experience. That ability to reflect is what I say is required for "true knowledge". The purely instinctive creature is immersed in a world of meaning (much more so than modern man who experiences only dull meaning in most perceptions), but it does not make clear distinctions between meanings or ask itself questions about those meanings. We actually come closer to this sort of experience when we are dreaming. Various things manifest in our dreams and they all have immense meaning to us, but we do not ask why they are popping up or how we came to encounter them in the first place.

[AshvinP]

You would agree that all cognitive science so far holds that an infant does not act with the same sort of intent that a full-grown adult acts with, right? You may claim that a human being always acts with some intent, regardless of age, but I don't see how you can claim infants act with equal degree and quality of intent as full-grown adult without contradicting many empirical studies of these things.

Oh, absolutely. I think maybe you read my explanation for the line of questioning after you wrote this, but I was, at that point, not intending to challenge the ideas you were expressing, but their consistency with your metaphilosophy (that is, the tension between shying away from talking about animal cognition due to our lack of first person experience with it and then proceeding to say all manner of third-person things).

I would also point out that Hegel may have been more popular when he was alive, but his philosophy has not fared well at all compared to Kant or Schopenhauer since then.

You might enjoy "Hegel For Our Times", a short essay by Judith Butler. Arran Gare is another philosopher who draws heavily on Hegel in outlining his process philosophy. And Hegel has enjoyed a good deal of engagement in theology. But you're right on the whole: he's mostly been a foil for various flavors of opposition (including by the existentialists, who have been incredibly influential on me). I think that in itself speaks to his importance in philosophy

The reconstruction can never give us the dimensional value of walking through the actual city.

I am not sure what "dimensional value" means here, but I think I grasp the meaning of "intuition" as you're using it.

I am not speaking of what I have personally experienced, but rather what can possibly be experienced from first-person perspective.

How do you know what can possibly be experienced if you haven't experienced it?

The animal cognition issue is not due to the 3rd person perspective, but I just didn't think it made sense to use hypothetical animal cognition we have never experienced when we can use human cognition to discuss the same issues. Especially since I am challenging the notion that a human infant acts with purpose-intent, or even an adult human in certain circumstances. But I guess there have also been enough studies on animal cognition for that to be helpful data to invoke if necessary.

If a person claims that they have observed a spiritual realm (by lifting off veil on "physical" realm) in which certain beings are directly responsible for my physiological processes, for ex., then I cannot automatically rule out the claim because it is entirely possible such observations could occur. If that person claims there is a God who is responsible for all natural processes, but he exists entirely separate from the realm of knowing human mind, then I rule out that claim because the God, by definition, cannot possibly be observed or known. Does that make sense?

Yet the implication of that gradient, for me, is that there is actually a possible state in which there is no intent, no purpose, and no freedom, or so little of those that there may as well be none for all intents and purposes (I know, this pun has probably worn out its welcome by now).

Oh, of course there is -- all these things enter the world with the first life, but prior to that are absent in exactly the same way as I experienced no purposes or intentions before I was born (bracketing the question of reincarnation for now). The jump from "zero" to "one" happened at the origin of life. But now let's fast forward some three and a half billion years from that moment. Life has been complexifying, diversifying, dancing in intricate feedback loops with its environment, and the first humans were born into unfathomably ancient ecosystems, embedded in a living web bursting with creative adaptations from the level of individual organisms all the way up to herds and flocks and colonies and entire biomes. I can't get my head around the idea that none of these creatures or these ecosystems felt any glimmer of purpose until humans were born into it and gave it one. And I can't get my head around it because it would make liars of my eyes: to look at life in process is to look at intentional actions, goal-driven acts, a struggle against entropy -- in short, purpose carried out.

This is part of why Kastrup's discussion of the telos of nature strikes me as so wrong -- the Living All is for itself. It's not for us, a thing that exists only to give us images to facilitate sublimely contemplating the Eternal Ideas. We inherit purposefulness from it. It's our birthright, not because we are human, but because we are living, and life was replete with purpose long before it birthed us. We have the privilege of making explicit the implicit through art and story and myth and philosophy, through dance and song and ritual. But it seems a terrible mistake to believe that in making purpose explicit, and by contributing to it, we're inventing it, or that it first appeared with us, or only exists for us, that our peculiar set of gifts is the necessary precondition for purpose.

I will have to get back to you on this one. But I think the 3rd person perspective is invoked when we speak about events happening "prior to" any human perspective from which to observe those events. Also, related to that, I think it is very problematic to assume linear time as an essential aspect of reality which exists prior to beings who reflect on the meaning of past, present, and future, cause and effect, etc.

[AshvinP]

Oh, of course there is -- all these things enter the world with the first life, but prior to that are absent in exactly the same way as I experienced no purposes or intentions before I was born (bracketing the question of reincarnation for now). The jump from "zero" to "one" happened at the origin of life. But now let's fast forward some three and a half billion years from that moment. Life has been complexifying, diversifying, dancing in intricate feedback loops with its environment, and the first humans were born into unfathomably ancient ecosystems, embedded in a living web bursting with creative adaptations from the level of individual organisms all the way up to herds and flocks and colonies and entire biomes. I can't get my head around the idea that none of these creatures or these ecosystems felt any glimmer of purpose until humans were born into it and gave it one. And I can't get my head around it because it would make liars of my eyes: to look at life in process is to look at intentional actions, goal-driven acts, a struggle against entropy -- in short, purpose carried out.

This is part of why Kastrup's discussion of the telos of nature strikes me as so wrong -- the Living All is for itself. It's not for us, a thing that exists only to give us images to facilitate sublimely contemplating the Eternal Ideas. We inherit purposefulness from it. It's our birthright, not because we are human, but because we are living, and life was replete with purpose long before it birthed us. We have the privilege of making explicit the implicit through art and story and myth and philosophy, through dance and song and ritual. But it seems a terrible mistake to believe that in making purpose explicit, and by contributing to it, we're inventing it, or that it first appeared with us, or only exists for us, that our peculiar set of gifts is the necessary precondition for purpose.

I will have to get back to you on this one. But I think the 3rd person perspective is invoked when we speak about events happening "prior to" any human perspective from which to observe those events. Also, related to that, I think it is very problematic to assume linear time as an essential aspect of reality which exists prior to beings who reflect on the meaning of past, present, and future, cause and effect, etc.

So there is a lot to unpack here. Let me try the approach of just asking some questions of you for my clarification and also your consideration:

- How are we differentiating "non-life" from "life" here?

- How are we determining the timeline of when humans came into the scene? (clearly that is the mainstream physicalist view, but I think we agree that we do not need to accept physicalist conclusions for empirical data re: evolution of outer living forms).

- What if we were to develop AI machines which looked exactly like "life in process" and therefore "purpose carried out" - would those machines be acting with purpose-intent?

If we are going to use the "who do I believe, you or my lying eyes?" argument, then I think we need to be clear we are implicitly assuming naïve realism - whatever it looks like to us is what it actually is in essence. Of course, that view simply cannot be reconciled with idealism or our own experience of the world. Now if you mean "looks like" as in, after reasoning through everything you know about living process, i.e. looks like to your informed thought, that is much less of a problem. But I want to be clear that I am not arguing animal instinctive behavior (or early human infant behavior) is actually a mechanical process like the copier in my office or something, so it should definitely look alive and dynamic to our perception-thought, but I don't see why looking alive and dynamic necessary entails it is purposeful-intentional.

In that connection, I want to also be clear that I agree Nature and its instinctive behavior is the place from which all human reflection, representation, and agency was born, and that is very clearly reflected in mythology as you say. But, again, saying those things were born from instinctive Nature, for me, implies that they were not in existence before (keeping in mind I am using temporal language because I have to, but I do not hold to realism of linear temporality). And that is the key issue here - whether something was actually born in and through humans which sets us apart from the mere "implicit" potential of purpose-intent that was previously yearning in Nature to be freed.

Much of how he view human nature and human spiritual activity turns on the answer to that question, such as where the process of developing purposeful agency is now taking us after it is has been partially freed from Nature through us but is by no means totally free or complete.

[SanteriSatama]

If we are going to use the "who do I believe, you or my lying eyes?" argument, then I think we need to be clear we are implicitly assuming naïve realism - whatever it looks like to us is what it actually is in essence. Of course, that view simply cannot be reconciled with idealism or our own experience of the world.

What is at issue, is extending (and or reflecting) what is technically called theory of mind.

There's no a priori need to extend theory of mind to other humans any more than to other animals. Theory of mind does not offer any objective criterion to differentiate between humans and other forms, or forms in general, to demarcate what forms are mindful and what forms are not. Theory of mind as such can't be used to extract humanism from animism. Extending theory of mind is not a 3rd person definition, it's a self-realizing truth procedure, becomes true by the act or event as such.

In idealist setting, the basic presupposition is that all forms are mindful, exist in mind and and are full of mind. So the question arises the other way around, how and when and why, for what purpose, is theory of mind limited or denied from some perspectives? First comes to mind the difference between life and death: in life spirit enacts and participates in metabolism of eating and procreating. NDE experience can have memory of and yearning for eating, but no actual possibility to participate in metabolism as long as staying in Hades.

As in neutral idealism compassion and empathy are given, metabolic relations and their conditions lead to complex qualitative differences, metabolic qualia emerge from the purposes arising from the ground of compassion.

Hence, the historical process of humanism can be traced back to multiperspectival social conditioning (and "objective" only in that sense) of qualitative denying the given of mind and spirit from everything that hungry spirits of humanism want to devour.

[AshvinP]

If we are going to use the "who do I believe, you or my lying eyes?" argument, then I think we need to be clear we are implicitly assuming naïve realism - whatever it looks like to us is what it actually is in essence. Of course, that view simply cannot be reconciled with idealism or our own experience of the world.

What is at issue, is extending (and or reflecting) what is technically called theory of mind.

There's no a priori need to extend theory of mind to other humans any more than to other animals. Theory of mind does not offer any objective criterion to differentiate between humans and other forms, or forms in general, to demarcate what forms are mindful and what forms are not. Theory of mind as such can't be used to extract humanism from animism. Extending theory of mind is not a 3rd person definition, it's a self-realizing truth procedure, becomes true by the act or event as such.

In idealist setting, the basic presupposition is that all forms are mindful, exist in mind and and are full of mind. So the question arises the other way around, how and when and why, for what purpose, is theory of mind limited or denied from some perspectives? First comes to mind the difference between life and death: in life spirit enacts and participates in metabolism of eating and procreating. NDE experience can have memory of and yearning for eating, but no actual possibility to participate in metabolism as long as staying in Hades.

As in neutral idealism compassion and empathy are given, metabolic relations and their conditions lead to complex qualitative differences, metabolic qualia emerge from the purposes arising from the ground of compassion.

Hence, the historical process of humanism can be traced back to multiperspectival social conditioning (and "objective" only in that sense) of qualitative denying the given of mind and spirit from everything that hungry spirits of humanism want to devour.

That sort of "theory of mind" a priori assumes Cartesian-Kantian divides into personal bubbles of consciousness and then asks how each bubble interacts with other bubbles in their fundamentally limited ways. It can get nowhere because of such assumptions. Likewise, the assumption of physical "forms" as boundaries of an organism is itself an arbitrary demarcation of where one organism ends and another begins. Modern science shows that such assumptions are problematic in many ways. I point this out to say that we do not make any headway into the essence of mind through such approaches. It is approach of nominalism, where the particular manifestations are considered more "real" than the natural archetypal principles underlying those manifestations. And it is almost trivial to point out that only humans are capable of knowing such principles and translating them into world of action, if not for the modern age which makes what is trivially true hard to accept.

[SanteriSatama]

That sort of "theory of mind" a priori assumes Cartesian-Kantian divides into personal bubbles of consciousness and then asks how each bubble interacts with other bubbles in their fundamentally limited ways. It can get nowhere because of such assumptions. Likewise, the assumption of physical "forms" as boundaries of an organism is itself an arbitrary demarcation of where one organism ends and another begins. Modern science shows that such assumptions are problematic in many ways. I point this out to say that we do not make any headway into the essence of mind through such approaches. It is approach of nominalism, where the particular manifestations are considered more "real" than the natural archetypal principles underlying those manifestations. And it is almost trivial to point out that only humans are capable of knowing such principles and translating them into world of action, if not for the modern age which makes what is trivially true hard to accept.

My only criticism is the bolded language.

You presented a rationalistic-epistemological argument in the humanism vs. animism discussion, I just showed where the rational argumentation leads. You wanna pick a different game instead, OK.

[AshvinP]

That sort of "theory of mind" a priori assumes Cartesian-Kantian divides into personal bubbles of consciousness and then asks how each bubble interacts with other bubbles in their fundamentally limited ways. It can get nowhere because of such assumptions. Likewise, the assumption of physical "forms" as boundaries of an organism is itself an arbitrary demarcation of where one organism ends and another begins. Modern science shows that such assumptions are problematic in many ways. I point this out to say that we do not make any headway into the essence of mind through such approaches. It is approach of nominalism, where the particular manifestations are considered more "real" than the natural archetypal principles underlying those manifestations. And it is almost trivial to point out that only humans are capable of knowing such principles and translating them into world of action, if not for the modern age which makes what is trivially true hard to accept.

My only criticism is the bolded language.

You presented a rationalistic-epistemological argument in the humanism vs. animism discussion, I just showed where the rational argumentation leads. You wanna pick a different game instead, OK.

I am not sure which argument of mine was "rationalistic"? I only see an argument against naïve realism, which I think we all agree is a bad assumption.

[SanteriSatama]

I am not sure which argument of mine was "rationalistic"? I only see an argument against naïve realism, which I think we all agree is a bad assumption.

You interpreted an argument as naive realism. A strawman riationalism - and you tend to do that quite a lot, perhaps something to do with professional background, dunno.

[AshvinP]

I am not sure which argument of mine was "rationalistic"? I only see an argument against naïve realism, which I think we all agree is a bad assumption.

You interpreted an argument as naive realism. A strawman riationalism - and you tend to do that quite a lot, perhaps something to do with professional background, dunno.

Which argument did I incorrectly interpret? It sounded like naive realism when DS said:

And I can't get my head around it because it would make liars of my eyes: to look at life in process is to look at intentional actions, goal-driven acts, a struggle against entropy -- in short, purpose carried out.

But I also left open possibility he (?) was using that as metaphor for what it looks like to his thought and not only his eyes.