It seems your position is basically that metaphysical speculation is a waste of time (even though you do it as well).
Actually I am anti-metaphysics but I can see how that could be regarded as a metaphysical position.
As I wrote:
Where is science on the question of the “fundamental nature of reality”? Most people without hesitation would say science is materialistic or physicalistic. Many scientists would say they are materialists. For most of them, materialism is the opposite of the supernaturalism, the opposite of believing in things that can’t be measured. Most idealists think modern science is materialistic. Bernardo Kastrup, probably one of the leading idealist of this time, sees the connection.
The popularity of materialism is founded on a confusion: somehow, our culture has come to associate it with science and technology, both of which have been stupendously successful over the past three centuries. But that success isn’t attributable to materialism; it is attributable, instead, to our ability to inquire into, model and then predict nature’s behavior.
Kastrup has this much right. What contemporary science is about isn’t the fundamental nature of reality. It is about measuring and predicting. Calls for a post-materialist science, such the The Manifesto for Post-Materialist Science, or Phillip Goff’s calls for new scientific methods, as in Galileo’s Error: Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness, are off the mark. But so is any scientist who think that a materialistic worldview is the only possible scientific worldview.
Science is anti-metaphysical. It doesn’t care about the ultimate nature of what it is observing and measuring. Its models, its particles, forces, and fields, are not models of fundamental reality. They are useful abstractions that provide a common language for discussing relationships and measurements nothing more. They are useful until better ones come along but they are not descriptions of the reality.
Some may object that a sort of anti-metaphysical, pragmatism is a form of metaphysics. Well, perhaps, it is. But, if it is, it is a metaphysics that doesn’t care about the fundamental nature of reality, that maybe considers it a pointless question.
It seems your position is basically that metaphysical speculation is a waste of time (even though you do it as well).
Actually I am anti-metaphysics but I can see how that could be regarded as a metaphysical position.
As I wrote:
Where is science on the question of the “fundamental nature of reality”? Most people without hesitation would say science is materialistic or physicalistic. Many scientists would say they are materialists. For most of them, materialism is the opposite of the supernaturalism, the opposite of believing in things that can’t be measured. Most idealists think modern science is materialistic. Bernardo Kastrup, probably one of the leading idealist of this time, sees the connection.
The popularity of materialism is founded on a confusion: somehow, our culture has come to associate it with science and technology, both of which have been stupendously successful over the past three centuries. But that success isn’t attributable to materialism; it is attributable, instead, to our ability to inquire into, model and then predict nature’s behavior.
Kastrup has this much right. What contemporary science is about isn’t the fundamental nature of reality. It is about measuring and predicting. Calls for a post-materialist science, such the The Manifesto for Post-Materialist Science, or Phillip Goff’s calls for new scientific methods, as in Galileo’s Error: Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness, are off the mark. But so is any scientist who think that a materialistic worldview is the only possible scientific worldview.
Science is anti-metaphysical. It doesn’t care about the ultimate nature of what it is observing and measuring. Its models, its particles, forces, and fields, are not models of fundamental reality. They are useful abstractions that provide a common language for discussing relationships and measurements nothing more. They are useful until better ones come along but they are not descriptions of the reality.
Some may object that a sort of anti-metaphysical, pragmatism is a form of metaphysics. Well, perhaps, it is. But, if it is, it is a metaphysics that doesn’t care about the fundamental nature of reality, that maybe considers it a pointless question.
Yes and that's exactly what I have been saying, perhaps more on other threads than this one. A materialist, by definition, is someone who is making a metaphysical claim about the fundamental nature of reality. The reason they feel warranted in doing so is because they have forgotten the "useful abstractions" are only abstractions. They have elevated the abstractions to the level of fundamental reality and then try to derive all other experiences and the capacity to consciously experience from the abstractions.
Now you can claim that most scientists are not thinking of "materialism" in that way, but at the very least they are unconsciously accepting materialism or mind-matter dualism to be true. These are deeply ingrained habits of mind we have all inherited from the modern era. Everyone is operating under some metaphysical framework or another whether they realize it or not. Tying it back into Iain McGilchrist's work, naively adopted materialism-dualism is a prime example the left brain's meteoric ascendancy in recent centuries.
The left brain views the world as a place of 'things' which should be carved up, isolated and studied in fragmented manner, and it also tells itself stories about why it's doing what it's doing when it does not actually know why. It is pretty much the opposite of the wise old man or wise-merciful King archetype. It does not seek humility and wisdom but rather exhibits arrogance and certainty in its own models. Iain's work in this area raises undeniable implications about how Western civilization has developed as it has, namely because it evolved to focus its attention on the formed aspects of our experience to the exclusion of all other formless aspects.
"Most people would sooner regard themselves as a piece of lava in the moon than as an 'I'"
Thank you, and I will look into it when I have some time as there is something compelling at one level. I have often thought that the way we remember or recognise stuff is like a kind of resonance, and any physical mechanism for that would presumably involve the interaction of two fields.
Nonetheless, from my perspective the best this could be is a mechanism within consciousness, not something that could possibly give rise to it. So whilst I try to keep an open mind, there is a gulf that no theory like this can possibly cross.
Ideas are certain original forms of things, their archetypes, permanent and incommunicable, which are contained in the Divine intelligence. And though they neither begin to be nor cease, yet upon them are patterned the manifold things of the world that come into being and pass away.
St Augustine
