How is there a world that remains when not being perceived?

[HelenAmery]

From what I understand Bernardo thinks that while you are not looking there are excitations of m@l around you. One of the things I wonder about Bernardo's formulation is whether over time it has become more distinctive of the way we perceive reality outside and what it really is (as in Schopenhauer, for example).

Say more about Schopenhauer. What does he say?

[Shaibei]

Idealists like Maimon and Schopenhauer distinguish between presentation and representation. For example Schopenhauer who was influenced by Kant regards a category like causality as a result of the structure of our consciousness but will at large is beyond causality.
For Maimoni, for example, what is out there is an infinite mind for which time and space are mental categories (that is, representations of changes). At least that's the way I understand it.
Ask yourself, is the external reality transparent to me? of course not. Hence there is a difference between the way I perceive it and what it really is

[Eugene I]

I think this is fatal flaw in the parsimony argument that idealism makes.

To get around this problem there needs to be an assumption of a mind at large that is perceiving what you feel as the chair while you are unconscious. Or that the chair you perceive is composed of little excitations of consciousness itself.

There isn't any way to prove this mind at large exists. There may be hints of something in various transformative experiences but we have no way to know if these hints are errors of perceptions themselves.

Let me rephrase it:

I think this is fatal flaw in the parsimony objectivity argument that idealism materialism makes.

To get around this problem there needs to be an assumption of a mind at large that is perceiving what you feel a material substance as the chair while you are unconscious. Or that the chair you perceive is composed of little excitations of consciousness material substance itself.

There isn't any way to prove this mind at large material substance exists. There may be hints of something in various transformative experiences but we have no way to know if these hints are errors of perceptions themselves.

The bottom line is: There isn't any way to prove that either this mind at large or this material substance exist. One can just roll a dice to decide which one to pick, or not to pick anything and remain agnostic. But there are still a few differences between them favoring idealism:
- Materialism has a huge explanatory gap: the hard problem of consciousness. There is simply no conceivable way materialism can explain the emergence of conscious experience from matter. Idealism simply does not have such problem.
- In addition to hard problem there are multiple inconsistencies and explanatory gaps between materialistic model of causal and local material universe and resent QM experiments. To get around those problems, materialism has to either give up on the causality and locality of matter, or adopt the many-world interpretation.
- Another advantage to idealism compared to materialism is its parsimony.
- In addition, there are multiple ethical and psychological differences

[Cleric K]

Nice edit, Eugene!

I can add one more:
- in idealism there are no principle limits for what our current local conscious perspective can become. Within the intellect we speculate purely abstractly about the structure of MAL (just as the materialist about matter) but through inner transformation the dissociative boundaries can be altered and we can experience the living ideas within MAL which support the chair structure. In materialism the bubble of consciousness is by definition self-enclosed and local to the nervous system.

[Shaibei]

Nice edit, Eugene!

I can add one more:
- in idealism there are no principle limits for what our current local conscious perspective can become. Within the intellect we speculate purely abstractly about the structure of MAL (just as the materialist about matter) but through inner transformation the dissociative boundaries can be altered and we can experience the living ideas within MAL which support the chair structure. In materialism the bubble of consciousness is by definition self-enclosed and local to the nervous system.

I don't know much about QM, but doesn't the idea Eugene is raising about causality make you wonder about the connections between concepts, at least speculating about the possibility these connections can be broken

[AshvinP]

Nice edit, Eugene!

I can add one more:
- in idealism there are no principle limits for what our current local conscious perspective can become. Within the intellect we speculate purely abstractly about the structure of MAL (just as the materialist about matter) but through inner transformation the dissociative boundaries can be altered and we can experience the living ideas within MAL which support the chair structure. In materialism the bubble of consciousness is by definition self-enclosed and local to the nervous system.

And one more
- idealism does not have the 'interaction problem' of explaining how two fundamentally different substances influence each other. We all know how perceptions can influence emotions can influence thoughts, so on and so forth. But we have no idea how exactly 'material stuff' would influence 'mental stuff' and vice versa.

And another which isn't quite as compelling but still...
-idealism has been the default view for most of human history; our ancestors perceived the 'material' world as being imbued with 'mental' activity for many thousands of years.

[Jim Cross]

Bernardo's idea of a mind at large in the way I understand really makes no sense.

Normally when we are talking about mind, there is something that experiences and something that is experienced, or a subject and object.

This makes perfect sense in common language when we talk about seeing or feeling the chair. I - the subject, my mind - experiences the chair and the chair - the object - is what is experienced. If you insert the concept of an alter for subject, my mind, it still makes sense. The alter experiences some external reality.

So the original question for this thread was: "How is there a world that remains when not being perceived?"

If everything is mind, what is the external reality that persists when I don't perceive?

So the answer is mind at large.

As I understood Berkeley, this mind at large is God. So God makes everything exist through His perception and that is what causes it to persist even after an individual mind no longer perceives it. The subject/object concept is preserved. God is the subject and the world the object.

But in BK's philosophy is no God, no Universal Mind that perceives everything. There is simply excitations of mind without subject or object. But the whole concept of mind makes no sense without a subject/object distinction.

What you have are simply excitations that are perceptions themselves. But they are perceptions without perceiving anything and without anything doing the perceiving. In effect, the excitations are no different from waves or fields.

[Eugene I]

But in BK's philosophy is no God, no Universal Mind that perceives everything. There is simply excitations of mind without subject or object. But the whole concept of mind makes no sense without a subject/object distinction.

What you have are simply excitations that are perceptions themselves. But they are perceptions without perceiving anything and without anything doing the perceiving. In effect, the excitations are no different from waves or fields.

It's actually the other way around: the whole concept of subject/object distinction makes no sense with the concept of mind, and the whole concept of mind only makes sense without the concept of subject/object distinction. That is exactly the point of the Eastern non-dual philosophy of consciousness (Advaitic/Buddhist). The subject/object distinction is only a concept, a hypothesis, a model. We habitually use it in our everyday life as a simplistic scheme to model or explain the patterns of phenomena, but we have no evidence whatsoever that it also applies to the reality on the metaphysical level and that it corresponds to any metaphysical realities. In idealism we have to give up on our fabricated concept of subject/object distinction just like we have to give up on our concept of absolute space and time in relativity physics.

[Cleric K]

I don't know much about QM, but doesn't the idea Eugene is raising about causality make you wonder about the connections between concepts, at least speculating about the possibility these connections can be broken

I'm also not exactly sure what Eugene means.
What is usually meant by causality is that previous states fully determine the next state. My experience of time is that higher order living ideas span forward and backwards in time and serve as context shaping the palette of possible states that can be experienced within more finer resolution progression of states. In this way we can understand how Karma works. A certain idea is embedded within the idea of the destiny for our current incarnation. As we go on with our life, even without knowing it, the palette of states that we realize as our next funnels into the realization of the Karmic idea. This is related with what Shu said about that the dream world (astral) and the higher spiritual are always present. We're simply preoccupied with sensory perceptions and thoughts about them within the waking state. We think we are truly free in our everyday life, that we choose our thoughts, feelings and actions freely but we are always choosing from a unconscious palette of possibilities. We are also unconscious that this palette is not something static but results from the interaction of living ideas/beings, which make the 'substance' of the higher worlds. At some cardinal points of our life the palette converges in such a way that it leads us, even if we don't know it or believe it, towards the realization of the Karmic idea.

[Shaibei]

If you are a solipsist m@l separates between object and subject, if you are an idealist it doen't.
I do not know if the word consciousness is the word I would use for m@l since our consciousness experiences reality not only through thought and will, but also through senses, sight hearing and so on. We have no idea how M@L experiences reality and hence the contradictory statements between idealists themselves regarding its nature