Can you help me with metaphysical Isms?

[j.joerg@posteo.de]

The key question is: is it possible for the Being to BE, but not to be AWARE? The answer will determine whether the ontology of such Being is idealistic or neutral. Because if it is possible to BE but not to be AWARE, then it's a neutral monism where the awareness becomes an emergent property of the Being, while the Being itself is non-emergent (it always exist and can't not to BE, but it can be not AWARE). If not, then it is idealism in where the Being-Awareness is non-emergent (it can't not to BE and it can't not to be AWARE).

As I conceptualize it, the concept of awareness and the concept of content are both ultimately illusory and not ontic. Two sides of the same coin. Ultimately there is just Being.

[j.joerg@posteo.de]

The dual property monism does not run into the "hard problem", but BK would argue that it is not parsimonious and the addition of the property of "matter" is unnecessary.

In a process version on neutral dual-aspect monism, there is just relating, interacting and perspectives of Being on Being. No mind an no matter. Only Interacting or mutual experiencing. The Being of the subject is the experiencing of he rest of Being (object). So ultimately they are the same. Neither subject nor object are indipendent but rather circularly creating each other. Is that unparsimonious?

[Eugene I]

As I conceptualize it, the concept of awareness and the concept of content are both ultimately illusory and not ontic. Two sides of the same coin. Ultimately there is just Being.
...
In a process version on neutral dual-aspect monism, there is just relating, interacting and perspectives of Being on Being. No mind an no matter. Only Interacting or mutual experiencing. The Being of the subject is the experiencing of he rest of Being (object). So ultimately they are the same. Neither subject nor object are indipendent but rather circularly creating each other. Is that unparsimonious?

The awareness is not a concept, it's the very experiential and existential fact of you having conscious experience right here and now. The problem with your approach is the same as Dennet's: you are ignoring the fundamental fact of the reality of the direct conscious experience. How relations and interactions can give rise to conscious experience if the ability of having such experience is not fundamental (i.e. if it is an epiphenomenon emerging from interactions)? If you deny a non-relational and non-emergent nature of the ability to have conscious experience (not the content of it, but the very ability and existence of it), you immediately run into the "hard problem of consciousness". If you accept a non-relational and non-emergent nature of such ability, then this is idealism which is to pose that the monistic prime is conscious by nature. In the latter case of course the content of conscious experience is always relational, but not the very "existence" of such experience.

[Simon Adams]

Simon, I agree that the Platonic view of the divine origin of ideas is consistent and makes sense. This is the view of the traditional Christian theology.
In the Eastern Buddhist tradition the beingness-awareness as the non-emergent "substratum" has a potential to unfold into conscious forms and phenomena (Nirmanakaya in the Buddhist terms), including ideation forms, and so it naturally unfolds in time in an unlimited variety of phenomena, ideations and forms. Then such forms develop in a process of natural selection and natural development through a vast multiplicity of conscious agents (none of them being a "prime" one) and over time become more sophisticated and cognitive. So, in a way, it's a process philosophy, but without any intrinsic telos. But of course, the potential/possibility of conscious ideations (including meanings and ideas) must be present in awareness intrinsically. Such view can be called non-theistic/non-teleological idealism, or you can call it poly-theistic in a sense that we conscious beings are all equally god-creators. The Vedic tradition is more biased towards theism, although it is not strictly mono-theistic, but rather a hierarchically structured poly-theistic one.

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?

[Simon Adams]

The scientific method changed a lot since medieval times, and currently it is more building scientific concepts and models using cognitive tools such as mathematics, logic etc, and such cognitive model-building tools (math and logic) themselves are defined by the rules that we can arbitrary define or choose. There is no "Reason" or any other absolute standard to judge the truthfulness of such tools and models (at least in modern science). Then we exercise those models in an algorithmic fashion to make them produce predictions and descriptions of the experientially observable phenomena, and then we discard the models that make less predictions/descriptions and keep the models that make the most accurate ones. Over time we find more and more accurate and comprehensive scientific models, yet, they never describe the reality with absolute accuracy, and such process development of scientific models is always asymptotic. In such scientific method there is no way to distinguish between concepts and cognitive models, and Platonic "ideas" that satisfy the "Reason". One can even argue (see your parallel thread on Kant) that such Reason also belongs to the a-priori type of categories, like space and time, and therefore can not be used to distinguish between human-made concepts and ontic "ideas".

If you take a platonic christian perspective, then the divine ideas are not directly accessible in any tangible way. Maybe we can reach through the veil with intuition or imagination at times, but this will only ever be a dim partial insight if so. Instead, the way we know about them is through the forms of the world that were shaped by them. As Paul says, “God’s invisible qualities ... have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made”.

So there is no suggestion that even when we think of 2+2=4, we are directly connected to the divine ideas. We are using the fact that we are a microcosm of god to recreate a shadow of these. It’s never going to be the full picture, but we have the ability to see or establish when one formulation is closer to ‘the true idea’ than another. This is what we mean by truth.

The same goes for all scientific theories, they are our attempts to uncover the true ideas, to make them as close as we are able to that which actually shapes the universe. But they will never (as we are now) be the true ideas.

In some ways, you could say that the same goes for how we are, our lives. The more we are aligned with humility, wisdom, courage, compassion, honesty etc, the closer we are to the divine idea of a human. This is the Platonic meaning of “good”. For Plato a “good” circle is one that most perfectly matches the primal idea of a circle etc.

From your perspective I think you are treating our limited understanding of the divine ideas as the divine ideas? I didn’t like Paul at all when I was first a christian, I was arogant enough to think they should remove him from the bible . Now that I read him almost as if he has a teenage crush (that lasted the whole rest of his life), I value his letters far more now. On this subject he put it well; “Now we see but a dim reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face.”

[Eugene I]

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.

[Eugene I]

If you take a platonic christian perspective, then the divine ideas are not directly accessible in any tangible way. Maybe we can reach through the veil with intuition or imagination at times, but this will only ever be a dim partial insight if so. Instead, the way we know about them is through the forms of the world that were shaped by them. As Paul says, “God’s invisible qualities ... have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made”.

So there is no suggestion that even when we think of 2+2=4, we are directly connected to the divine ideas. We are using the fact that we are a microcosm of god to recreate a shadow of these. It’s never going to be the full picture, but we have the ability to see or establish when one formulation is closer to ‘the true idea’ than another. This is what we mean by truth.

The same goes for all scientific theories, they are our attempts to uncover the true ideas, to make them as close as we are able to that which actually shapes the universe. But they will never (as we are now) be the true ideas.

In some ways, you could say that the same goes for how we are, our lives. The more we are aligned with humility, wisdom, courage, compassion, honesty etc, the closer we are to the divine idea of a human. This is the Platonic meaning of “good”. For Plato a “good” circle is one that most perfectly matches the primal idea of a circle etc.

From your perspective I think you are treating our limited understanding of the divine ideas as the divine ideas? I didn’t like Paul at all when I was first a christian, I was arogant enough to think they should remove him from the bible . Now that I read him almost as if he has a teenage crush (that lasted the whole rest of his life), I value his letters far more now. On this subject he put it well; “Now we see but a dim reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face.”

Yes, tanks, I get it. It's a beautiful Platonic paradigm, very spiritual and moral, no question about that.

[Simon Adams]

Eugene

I have plenty of respect for such an empirical approach, it’s certainly better than the presumed empiricism of materialism. However don’t you then run into the opposite problem from materialists, in that what is there to prevent your eventual destination from being the extreme relativism /absurdism of most postmodernist derived ideologies?

You say “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". We know for sure that many of our experiences are deceptive - if you’re really being empirical, then the only single fact you can be sure of is that you experience, the whole content of your experiences could be delusion, and is no more reliable than the fairies someone claims at the bottom of his garden, or the person claiming that we’re all living in the matrix.

This is clearly an extreme position, but it’s taking your basic method and aims to their ultimate conclusion. Instead we can say that if we take awareness as a starting point, we can establish some things about it which seem consistent. We can apply reason to these elements to make sense of them, evaluate how likely they are to be deceptions etc etc

What we are doing here is going beyond pure empiricism, and to do that we are establishing axioms, we use all our experiences together to make a judgement call that a, b, c, d ... are reasonable assumptions. (a) may that our reasoning is not just a deterministic process that was pre-programmed to come to a certain conclusion , (b) may be that reality is intelligible to our rational capabilities, (c) may be that our rational capabilities are sufficient to make any sense of it, that it’s not like an ant on the wall of cathedral establishing why and how it was built etc etc

So if you have to make axiomatic assumptions to get any further than “I experience”, why not do so from the perspective of everything we know, together? What makes you think reality was constructed so that you can break it into parts, and examine each part empirically, and put those parts together to form a true whole? To me this is the biggest mistaken assumption of pretty much all modern philosophy.

[Eugene I]

Eugene

I have plenty of respect for such an empirical approach, it’s certainly better than the presumed empiricism of materialism. However don’t you then run into the opposite problem from materialists, in that what is there to prevent your eventual destination from being the extreme relativism /absurdism of most postmodernist derived ideologies?

You say “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". We know for sure that many of our experiences are deceptive - if you’re really being empirical, then the only single fact you can be sure of is that you experience, the whole content of your experiences could be delusion, and is no more reliable than the fairies someone claims at the bottom of his garden, or the person claiming that we’re all living in the matrix.

This is clearly an extreme position, but it’s taking your basic method and aims to their ultimate conclusion. Instead we can say that if we take awareness as a starting point, we can establish some things about it which seem consistent. We can apply reason to these elements to make sense of them, evaluate how likely they are to be deceptions etc etc

What we are doing here is going beyond pure empiricism, and to do that we are establishing axioms, we use all our experiences together to make a judgement call that a, b, c, d ... are reasonable assumptions. (a) may that our reasoning is not just a deterministic process that was pre-programmed to come to a certain conclusion , (b) may be that reality is intelligible to our rational capabilities, (c) may be that our rational capabilities are sufficient to make any sense of it, that it’s not like an ant on the wall of cathedral establishing why and how it was built etc etc

So if you have to make axiomatic assumptions to get any further than “I experience”, why not do so from the perspective of everything we know, together? What makes you think reality was constructed so that you can break it into parts, and examine each part empirically, and put those parts together to form a true whole? To me this is the biggest mistaken assumption of pretty much all modern philosophy.

Simon, the reason I wanted to establish that bottom-line empirical approach is that it is no-fault free from any inferences that can be doubtful, unnecessary or misleading. Simply speaking, I fooled myself enough all my life with misleading beliefs that made my life miserable, and I don't want to do that anymore. But that does not mean that I/we can not and should not go further and "conditionally" assume some extra inferences and axioms to "extend"/stretch this position into the spiritual and metaphysical dimensions. I have my own preferences for such extensions (namely, subjective awareness-grounded idealism), other people here and elsewhere have their own ones. The problem is that there is plenty of such axioms that we can assume (yours are the examples of some of them), with all of them being non-verifiable and many of them contradicting each other, so now the question becomes how do we choose or cherry-pick them? The practical approach that I see is that I can assume some of these axioms "provisionally" (instead of adopting them "religiously") and practically apply them to see what benefits they can bring (including moral, spiritual and psychological ones) and how can they help me/us to further develop our consciousness. In a way, such axioms become "working hypotheses" for me. So far I can see significant practical benefits for me personally from the axioms that I chose and practices that I apply in my life based on these axioms (the ones of the subjective awareness-grounded idealism), so at this point I 'm reasonably satisfied and going to continue with them. That does not mean that I plan to be stuck with them forever, and I remain open to adapt and change my views if I can find some better working axioms/hypotheses.

[Simon Adams]

Simon, the reason I wanted to establish that bottom-line empirical approach is that it is no-fault free from any inferences that can be doubtful, unnecessary or misleading. Simply speaking, I fooled myself enough all my life with misleading beliefs that made my life miserable, and I don't want to do that anymore. But that does not mean that I/we can not and should not go further and "conditionally" assume some extra inferences and axioms to "extend"/stretch this position into the spiritual and metaphysical dimensions. I have my own preferences for such extensions (namely, subjective awareness-grounded idealism), other people here and elsewhere have their own ones. The problem is that there is plenty of such axioms that we can assume (yours are the examples of some of them), with all of them being non-verifiable and many of them contradicting each other, so now the question becomes how do we choose or cherry-pick them? The practical approach that I see is that I can assume some of these axioms "provisionally" (instead of adopting them "religiously") and practically apply them to see what benefits they can bring (including moral, spiritual and psychological ones) and how can they help me/us to further develop our consciousness. In a way, such axioms become "working hypotheses" for me. So far I can see significant practical benefits for me personally from the axioms that I chose and practices that I apply in my life based on these axioms (the ones of the subjective awareness-grounded idealism), so at this point I 'm reasonably satisfied and going to continue with them. That does not mean that I plan to be stuck with them forever, and I remain open to adapt and change my views if I can find some better working axioms/hypotheses.

Yes that makes sense, a logical and diligent approach. In a way it’s a more sophisticated version of what I used to follow, that took me to atheism, then to credible and verifiable spirituality like Buddhism, Ramana Maharshi, Tai Chi etc. Now I’ve switched tracks so to speak, or the tracks were switched for me (I’m still not sure which), but I certainly appreciate wanting to find a reliable way to find where to step and avoid the potholes and cliffs...