Saving the materialists

[Güney27]

Reading Owen Barfield StA and PoF again made me thinking about the standard theory of perception in the current perspective of mainstream materialism. If, like the materialist think, the world around us is only a dream, somehow generated trough our senses and the stimulis of the unrepresented, that would implicate that the brain and the senses are dream pictures too, and that would negate any knowledge. It would defeat its own axioms. Like Barfield pointed out, that would mean there was no evolution we could know about, and all neuroscience would be worthless. It’s a very simple fact that anybody without training in these fields could understand quite easily. Realizing this more deeply made me think that if it is so easy to acknowledge, why the mainstream world view hasn’t changed after this works been published. Either I don’t understand the mainstream materialistic view completely, or they are really not thinking that far. If this line of thought is completely valid, I’m what sense would scientific research like levins for example, would make really sense under the assumption mentioned above. I really try to understand the materialistic thinking person in a sense. But I don’t know to many in person which are very educated in philosophy or science in real life, which I could ask to investigate their thought context.

[AshvinP]

Reading Owen Barfield StA and PoF again made me thinking about the standard theory of perception in the current perspective of mainstream materialism. If, like the materialist think, the world around us is only a dream, somehow generated trough our senses and the stimulis of the unrepresented, that would implicate that the brain and the senses are dream pictures too, and that would negate any knowledge. It would defeat its own axioms. Like Barfield pointed out, that would mean there was no evolution we could know about, and all neuroscience would be worthless. It’s a very simple fact that anybody without training in these fields could understand quite easily. Realizing this more deeply made me think that if it is so easy to acknowledge, why the mainstream world view hasn’t changed after this works been published. Either I don’t understand the mainstream materialistic view completely, or they are really not thinking that far. If this line of thought is completely valid, I’m what sense would scientific research like levins for example, would make really sense under the assumption mentioned above. I really try to understand the materialistic thinking person in a sense. But I don’t know to many in person which are very educated in philosophy or science in real life, which I could ask to investigate their thought context.

Good question, Guney. Another way to express it is, why did it take so long for us to realize this fatal contradiction in materialistic thinking? Actually, this fatal contradiction also applies to 'critical idealism', as Steiner details in PoF. They all eventually conclude that an 'unrepresented' world, which is generally populated with images borrowed from our bodily experiences in familiar 'represented world' (atoms, waves, forces, beings, etc.), stimulates our organization and gives rise to structured mental pictures according to various 'categories'. But then everything they use to describe how this process takes place is also just 'a priori' structured mental pictures in the same way, as you pointed out, so the whole line of reasoning collapses on itself. No genuine knowledge of the 'unrepresented' should be possible in such a scenario, not even the knowledge that no such knowledge is possible. We hit a complete dead end in this way.

But even when I was debating materialists about the 'hard problem' and so forth, this fatal PoF critique was not evident to me. If it's so simple that its gist can be summarized in a few sentences, why shouldn't everyone who thinks a little bit already be aware of it and be motivated by it to steer clear of adopting materialism, analytic idealism, etc.? In a sense, this kind of question is exactly what spiritual science investigates by inviting us to intimately explore the deeper soul strata from whence the desire to not recognize simple truths about the flow of our experience, originate. What you are asking is a proper mystery and should be treated as such - clearly it can't be explained by our normal opinions and beliefs about "why people think this or don't think that". We can use various concepts to symbolize the inner strata from whence the resistance to truthful experience originates - like "we are highly resistant to taking creative responsibility for our inner thinking gestures and experiencing the truthful consequences of our receded activity" - but the real explanation comes from experiencing those inner strata within ourselves.

We start to move our thinking livingly through these strata, feing their inner 'geometry', and sense the inner resistance that is always present but we are normally insensitive to. Just because we have grasped the contradiction in our thoughts doesn't mean it no longer lives within us and comes to expression in other domains of our feeling and thinking. There are surely intuitive aspects of spiritual reality, for example, that we feel to be an unrepresented world of 'beings' that is disconnected from our mental pictures about that world, and for that reason we shy away from exploring those aspects further. Once we get to know these inner tensions, fears, anxieties, and so on within ourselves as living forces, we also gain intuitive understanding of how they come to expression in the wider World flow of our peers, teachers, colleagues, leading thinkers, and so on.

[Cleric]

Reading Owen Barfield StA and PoF again made me thinking about the standard theory of perception in the current perspective of mainstream materialism. If, like the materialist think, the world around us is only a dream, somehow generated trough our senses and the stimulis of the unrepresented, that would implicate that the brain and the senses are dream pictures too, and that would negate any knowledge. It would defeat its own axioms. Like Barfield pointed out, that would mean there was no evolution we could know about, and all neuroscience would be worthless. It’s a very simple fact that anybody without training in these fields could understand quite easily. Realizing this more deeply made me think that if it is so easy to acknowledge, why the mainstream world view hasn’t changed after this works been published. Either I don’t understand the mainstream materialistic view completely, or they are really not thinking that far. If this line of thought is completely valid, I’m what sense would scientific research like levins for example, would make really sense under the assumption mentioned above. I really try to understand the materialistic thinking person in a sense. But I don’t know to many in person which are very educated in philosophy or science in real life, which I could ask to investigate their thought context.

Ashvin gave the deeper aspects. If we look on a more superficial level my guess is that most will justify their view on its practical value. Think about Cypher in the Matrix:



If one thinks it through, they would have to admit that there's no way to be certain whether they live in a Matrix. Someone may say that a mystical or a psychedelic trip hints that we're in a kind of spiritual Matrix, but then we can still say that the mystical experiences are also a playback of the Matrix, and thus its true reality forever remains on the other side.

In this sense, most sensible materialistic people would simply declare some kind of fundamental agnosticism - that we simply cannot know what the true nature of reality is (those who maintain physicality as the true essence can do so only as a kind of religious belief). So such a person will say "Illusionary or not, I still need to develop the processes and tools to grow the grain, feed the cattle, slay it, butcher it, cook it, and finally eat the steak." As we can see, none of these steps require any philosophy about what reality is in its essence. We simply explore the constraints of the gameplay and discover ways of applying our inner inputs, such that we can guide the metamorphosis of the game state in a desired direction. So we may not know whether there's a real physical steak out there, but we can still develop an interior-Matrix science about how to get one.

And in fact, spiritual science doesn't claim otherwise. It only shows that there are other degrees of freedom of our inner activity, through which we can transform the World state, starting from our own organization. It doesn't say what the nature of reality on the other side of our inner experience is, it only shows that it is from within the inner experience that the metamorphoses of the experiential World state are guided (at different scales). In that sense, materialism becomes a problem only when it begins to place ideological constraints on what our inner activity is capable of. A spiritual scientist that may want to eat a steak, would still need to use the same science, tools, and processes as the materialist.

[Federica]

It works (28 sec clip)

[Güney27]

Reading Owen Barfield StA and PoF again made me thinking about the standard theory of perception in the current perspective of mainstream materialism. If, like the materialist think, the world around us is only a dream, somehow generated trough our senses and the stimulis of the unrepresented, that would implicate that the brain and the senses are dream pictures too, and that would negate any knowledge. It would defeat its own axioms. Like Barfield pointed out, that would mean there was no evolution we could know about, and all neuroscience would be worthless. It’s a very simple fact that anybody without training in these fields could understand quite easily. Realizing this more deeply made me think that if it is so easy to acknowledge, why the mainstream world view hasn’t changed after this works been published. Either I don’t understand the mainstream materialistic view completely, or they are really not thinking that far. If this line of thought is completely valid, I’m what sense would scientific research like levins for example, would make really sense under the assumption mentioned above. I really try to understand the materialistic thinking person in a sense. But I don’t know to many in person which are very educated in philosophy or science in real life, which I could ask to investigate their thought context.

Good question, Guney. Another way to express it is, why did it take so long for us to realize this fatal contradiction in materialistic thinking? Actually, this fatal contradiction also applies to 'critical idealism', as Steiner details in PoF. They all eventually conclude that an 'unrepresented' world, which is generally populated with images borrowed from our bodily experiences in familiar 'represented world' (atoms, waves, forces, beings, etc.), stimulates our organization and gives rise to structured mental pictures according to various 'categories'. But then everything they use to describe how this process takes place is also just 'a priori' structured mental pictures in the same way, as you pointed out, so the whole line of reasoning collapses on itself. No genuine knowledge of the 'unrepresented' should be possible in such a scenario, not even the knowledge that no such knowledge is possible. We hit a complete dead end in this way.

But even when I was debating materialists about the 'hard problem' and so forth, this fatal PoF critique was not evident to me. If it's so simple that its gist can be summarized in a few sentences, why shouldn't everyone who thinks a little bit already be aware of it and be motivated by it to steer clear of adopting materialism, analytic idealism, etc.? In a sense, this kind of question is exactly what spiritual science investigates by inviting us to intimately explore the deeper soul strata from whence the desire to not recognize simple truths about the flow of our experience, originate. What you are asking is a proper mystery and should be treated as such - clearly it can't be explained by our normal opinions and beliefs about "why people think this or don't think that". We can use various concepts to symbolize the inner strata from whence the resistance to truthful experience originates - like "we are highly resistant to taking creative responsibility for our inner thinking gestures and experiencing the truthful consequences of our receded activity" - but the real explanation comes from experiencing those inner strata within ourselves.

We start to move our thinking livingly through these strata, feing their inner 'geometry', and sense the inner resistance that is always present but we are normally insensitive to. Just because we have grasped the contradiction in our thoughts doesn't mean it no longer lives within us and comes to expression in other domains of our feeling and thinking. There are surely intuitive aspects of spiritual reality, for example, that we feel to be an unrepresented world of 'beings' that is disconnected from our mental pictures about that world, and for that reason we shy away from exploring those aspects further. Once we get to know these inner tensions, fears, anxieties, and so on within ourselves as living forces, we also gain intuitive understanding of how they come to expression in the wider World flow of our peers, teachers, colleagues, leading thinkers, and so on.

As a young person I don’t have a long philosophical history which I can take as living material for investigation. I never really had a philosophical journey. As a child (when I was 4 or 5) I began to ask what death is and what happens after it. These questions where always very present in my life and quite intense. I was never a materialistic thinking person too, I didn’t start as a materialist when I first engaged with philosophy, in the contrary, I was always very afraid and opposed to materialism. I had the fear that it might be true, and that I’m too weak to accept it. I still sometimes experience the feeling of doubt, i think that maybe I’m just waste my time with my prayers, reading …… . But it’s not the same as before, I really have a better understanding of certain things, than a couple years ago. I think it’s a problem that I came so young in contact with Steiner and cleric works, because I don’t looked so much in other branches of philosophy after it, and I don’t build a good foundation. Now I try to test myself more, in searching debates and conversations with educated people. I became aware of this forum almost 4 years ago, I now turn 21 soon and I think that it’s now a good time to seek out other souls and try to experience their standpoints.


It’s off topic but I contacted Jeffrey Williams (it’s only trough him, that I came to this forum) and asked him:
„Do you think that thought is just a subjective copy of the world out there?
Is there a dichotomy for you?“

Jw,s answer:
“I don’t see thinking as purely subjective or as a copy of the world. Thinking begins with an entanglement that defies a subject/object dichotomy. Consciousness exists through our entanglement with superpositional prime existence which we perceive through a reductive act as the aspect of Eigenstate. It’s an awareness (Wahrnehmung”) that arises as a cooperative energy event between our mind and prime reality. At this level all is just energy fields from which we derive two modes of thinking: Esthetic/Mood (Stimmung), and Objective/Practical. I like the German “Stimmung” for its overtone meaning of “voicing” - a sympathetic vibration with what we entangle. It’s why experiencing music is more powerful than reading the score. This in not a copy of the world, but an enactive experience with it. Directly from this experience can arise thoughts quite different from objectification - more logos than logic. This isn’t reducible to subject/object dichotomy.
The latter is purely representational in the sense used by Kant and Schopenhauer. It reduces sense data from which it projects before us something akin to a hologram. This project is what is commonly thought to be the universe, but it doesn’t exist outside the human mind. It isn’t a copy of the world, but a depiction of a world we create from input from prime existence. These representations are not arbitrary but conditioned by the imposed sense data and our conditions of objective thought.”

Before I reply to him more concretely, I will try to live trough his idea
But he’s answers sound really much like 4 years ago. But at that time I couldn’t understand his views completely. Maybe I can now. We’ll see.

[Federica]

But he’s answers sound really much like 4 years ago. But at that time I couldn’t understand his views completely.

I can't understand this view now.
What does this: "Consciousness exists through our entanglement with superpositional prime existence which we perceive through a reductive act as the aspect of Eigenstate" mean?

[AshvinP]

As a young person I don’t have a long philosophical history which I can take as living material for investigation. I never really had a philosophical journey. As a child (when I was 4 or 5) I began to ask what death is and what happens after it. These questions where always very present in my life and quite intense. I was never a materialistic thinking person too, I didn’t start as a materialist when I first engaged with philosophy, in the contrary, I was always very afraid and opposed to materialism. I had the fear that it might be true, and that I’m too weak to accept it. I still sometimes experience the feeling of doubt, i think that maybe I’m just waste my time with my prayers, reading …… . But it’s not the same as before, I really have a better understanding of certain things, than a couple years ago. I think it’s a problem that I came so young in contact with Steiner and cleric works, because I don’t looked so much in other branches of philosophy after it, and I don’t build a good foundation. Now I try to test myself more, in searching debates and conversations with educated people. I became aware of this forum almost 4 years ago, I now turn 21 soon and I think that it’s now a good time to seek out other souls and try to experience their standpoints.

This is a great inner disposition to embrace! I think we all wish we had come to certain things earlier or in a different way, but as we progress with our intuitive resonance, we will start to discern the infinite Wisdom embedded in our particular life path, how it led to precisely those opportunities and inner qualities that we needed. Starting out young is in fact the greatest blessing as long as we recognize how the incarnation of more Time is needed to grow the flesh around the bare conceptual bones of spiritual science. What you are doing now, trying to experience the inner standpoints of other souls, is perhaps the best way to do that.

It’s off topic but I contacted Jeffrey Williams (it’s only trough him, that I came to this forum) and asked him:
„Do you think that thought is just a subjective copy of the world out there?
Is there a dichotomy for you?“

Jw,s answer:
“I don’t see thinking as purely subjective or as a copy of the world. Thinking begins with an entanglement that defies a subject/object dichotomy. Consciousness exists through our entanglement with superpositional prime existence which we perceive through a reductive act as the aspect of Eigenstate. It’s an awareness (Wahrnehmung”) that arises as a cooperative energy event between our mind and prime reality. At this level all is just energy fields from which we derive two modes of thinking: Esthetic/Mood (Stimmung), and Objective/Practical. I like the German “Stimmung” for its overtone meaning of “voicing” - a sympathetic vibration with what we entangle. It’s why experiencing music is more powerful than reading the score. This in not a copy of the world, but an enactive experience with it. Directly from this experience can arise thoughts quite different from objectification - more logos than logic. This isn’t reducible to subject/object dichotomy.
The latter is purely representational in the sense used by Kant and Schopenhauer. It reduces sense data from which it projects before us something akin to a hologram. This project is what is commonly thought to be the universe, but it doesn’t exist outside the human mind. It isn’t a copy of the world, but a depiction of a world we create from input from prime existence. These representations are not arbitrary but conditioned by the imposed sense data and our conditions of objective thought.”

Before I reply to him more concretely, I will try to live trough his idea
But he’s answers sound really much like 4 years ago. But at that time I couldn’t understand his views completely. Maybe I can now. We’ll see.

Yes, it sounds much the same to me as well. Once people become intoxicated with the 'critical philosophy', I have noticed they start to feel like all the mysteries of existence have been basically worked out in their conceptual framework - they already know where all the limits and possibilities of inner activity reside, and whatever else is communicated them can only be minor details about other alternative ways of communing with the 'prime reality'. Then they say, "I am happy with my preferred way of communion and thinking about communion, so no thank you, but feel free to do your own thing." At the root is the Kantian habit of imagining a prime reality-in-itself that is inaccessible to human cognitive faculty (what JW identifies as 'logic' or 'objective/practical' above). In the face of this self-imposed nihilistic limitation of cognition, the neo-Kantians search for ways to at least maintain some nebulous aesthetic connection with the prime reality (Stimmung). In this case, however, he doesn't imagine the prime reality as spiritual in nature (as Kant) but as material/energetic.

I have been in a similar discussion with someone on the BK Facebook community:

Indeed, far from precluding investigation of the categorical conditions of experience, Kant’s critical philosophy explicitly demands such investigation as essential to what he terms “modest but thorough self-knowledge” (KrV, A 735). The transcendental deduction itself represents precisely such an investigation into how and why the categories function in our experience. When you ask whether Kant admits the possibility of investigating these conditions, you appear to overlook that his entire critical project constitutes exactly such an investigation—one that is, as you say, “immanent and practical”.

Furthermore, your suggestion that spiritual scientific investigations might be incompatible with Kant’s framework misses how the critical philosophy actually creates space for such investigations—provided they remain immanent rather than transcendent. Kant’s emphasis on the regulative validity of the ideas of reason specifically allows for the systematic investigation of experience in all its dimensions. When he speaks of reason’s regulative employment, he is not relegating certain domains to mere faith but rather establishing how reason can legitimately guide investigation even where constitutive knowledge proves impossible.

The crucial point here is that Kant’s critical restrictions on knowledge aim not at foreclosing investigation but at securing its proper basis. When he writes that “criticism alone can sever the root of materialism” (B xxxiv), he points toward the possibility of investigations that transcend mere material determination while remaining within the bounds of legitimate inquiry. Your own characterization of spiritual scientific investigation as “immanent and practical knowledge” suggests it might actually find its philosophical justification precisely in Kant’s critical framework—provided we understand that framework correctly.

In essence, far from setting artificial limits on investigation, Kant’s critical philosophy establishes the necessary conditions under which genuine investigation becomes possible. His distinctions serve not to create impenetrable domains but to prevent confusion between different modes of inquiry while securing the possibility of knowledge in each according to its proper nature. The question isn’t whether we can investigate the categorical conditions of experience—Kant’s own work demonstrates we can and must—but rather how we can do so without falling into transcendental illusion.

I will try to build from this to stop debating Kant and point toward a fruitful path of inner investigation, but I already suspect that the concepts communicated will eventually be thrown into the bucket of "transcendental illusion". We saw this with Eugene for some time as well, although lately he changed direction on this question, to his credit. Whatever concepts symbolizing supersensible realities are communicated, if they are at any tension with underlying soul factors, they will be declared as pointing to a transcendent realm beyond our cognitive capacity and its inherent structuring. And that is usually what is happening in most modern philosophical and religious/spiritual systems, so it is a justified concern. Yet this concern is automatically applied to genuine Initiatic science as well and rules out its pursuit in good faith. In other words, the concept of "transcendental illusion" becomes a mental picture of 'denied space and time' that acts to confine imaginative activity from feeling its way through supersensible realities.

Anyway, I look forward to hearing how things progress with JW, but again, don't feel like you are doing a bad job communicating if he becomes combative or unresponsive. From his forum activity and his comment above, which indeed mirrors that activity 4 years ago, it seems he is thoroughly entrenched in a metaphysical position that he has convinced himself is non-metaphysical and purely experiential. In fact, his prime concept of 'energy fields' is a replica of bodily experience (for ex. when we intend to physically do something and meet resistance from the wider World groove, i.e. "expend energy") which is projected into some 'unrepresented' domain of reality and made into the foundation from which thinking emerges.

[Güney27]

But he’s answers sound really much like 4 years ago. But at that time I couldn’t understand his views completely.

I can't understand this view now.
What does this: "Consciousness exists through our entanglement with superpositional prime existence which we perceive through a reductive act as the aspect of Eigenstate" mean?

I think ashvin is the only one that understands in depth, but I would say that he means that consciousness arises, when the brain is connected (entangled) with quantum fields or whatever he means with prime existence. Ashvin and Jw had a very long discussion 4 years ago, the thread is named criticism.

[Federica]

But he’s answers sound really much like 4 years ago. But at that time I couldn’t understand his views completely.

I can't understand this view now.
What does this: "Consciousness exists through our entanglement with superpositional prime existence which we perceive through a reductive act as the aspect of Eigenstate" mean?

I think ashvin is the only one that understands in depth, but I would say that he means that consciousness arises, when the brain is connected (entangled) with quantum fields or whatever he means with prime existence. Ashvin and Jw had a very long discussion 4 years ago, the thread is named criticism.

Ok, thanks. Would be interesting how you will turn your response. By the way, I have only been here for 2,5 years not 4, still it's clear that your writing has changed significantly during this period.

[Cleric]

Jw,s answer:
“I don’t see thinking as purely subjective or as a copy of the world. Thinking begins with an entanglement that defies a subject/object dichotomy. Consciousness exists through our entanglement with superpositional prime existence which we perceive through a reductive act as the aspect of Eigenstate. It’s an awareness (Wahrnehmung”) that arises as a cooperative energy event between our mind and prime reality. At this level all is just energy fields from which we derive two modes of thinking: Esthetic/Mood (Stimmung), and Objective/Practical. I like the German “Stimmung” for its overtone meaning of “voicing” - a sympathetic vibration with what we entangle. It’s why experiencing music is more powerful than reading the score. This in not a copy of the world, but an enactive experience with it. Directly from this experience can arise thoughts quite different from objectification - more logos than logic. This isn’t reducible to subject/object dichotomy.
The latter is purely representational in the sense used by Kant and Schopenhauer. It reduces sense data from which it projects before us something akin to a hologram. This project is what is commonly thought to be the universe, but it doesn’t exist outside the human mind. It isn’t a copy of the world, but a depiction of a world we create from input from prime existence. These representations are not arbitrary but conditioned by the imposed sense data and our conditions of objective thought.”

Actually JW's response is not bad (if we try to take it in an optimistic way). What he calls "Esthetic/Mood (Stimmung) and Objective/Practical" are practically the vertical and horizontal thinking from the phonograph metaphor. In a way, just like we described vertical/depth thinking activity as bringing into focus spread out aspects of the Cosmic intuitive context, so he means something along similar lines with Stimmung - voicing.

The problem is - as revealed from the long conversations that Ashvin had with him in the past - that in the end, the inner experiential aspect of this prime reality (just like for all mystics) remains something that can only be aesthetically felt. Lucid intuitive life is admitted only at the level of voiced thoughts. The experiential aspect of prime reality remains something completely orthogonal to the intuitive movements of our intellectual self.

For example, if we consider poetry, we can sense aesthetic satisfaction even when listening to poetry in a foreign language. We can still enjoy the rhythms, the rhymes, the articulations, etc. Unless he has changed his stance in the meantime, he feels the prime reality as such aesthetic poetry, yet it is denied that these rhythmic vibrations are actually expressions of fully conscious intuitive life at Cosmic scales, let alone that our intellectual self can find its concentric stance within that Life.

The tricky thing (as seen in the conversation posted above by Ashvin) is that if we speak of knowing this prime reality, he would affirm that it is possible and we do that with Stimmung. It is very difficult to point out what it means to know that reality in a higher sense. I guess one way to show that something more is implied, is by asking whether he conceives of a Cosmic scale, fully conscious inner existence that, for example, shapes the inner reality of the planetary systems, within which our micro life is embedded.