Much of the article is a partial transcript of this podcast episode with Seaford https://shwep.net/podcast/richard-seafo ... interview/. The article also includes excerpts from one of Scott Roberts’ essays on BK’s website.
By Way of background, Seaford’s latest book The Origins of Philosophy in Ancient Greece and Ancient India: A Historical Comparison https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B081HGKYBQ compares the development of philosophy in ancient India and Greece, and their correlation with the development of monetary and property systems.
Here are some comments on the article in the context of previous discussions on this forum regarding Barfield, the evolution of consciousness and related issues:
- BK writes that “Under idealism, the physical is simply the contents of perception, a particular type of phenomenality. As such, what we call ‘physical interference with the brain’ is the extrinsic appearance of phenomenality external to an alter that disrupts the inner experiences of the alter from across its dissociative boundary”.
- It follows from this that social practices - the way people act and interact with each other through the mediation of their sense organs - could affect the consciousness of an alter as much as the ingestion of food or psychedelics can.
- Thus, including socioeconomic factors in idealist explanations of the evolution of consciousness does not go against idealism any more than incorporating insights from the natural sciences does.
- Including such factors is also not necessarily incompatible with spiritual or religious accounts of the evolution of consciousness. Just as mystical or psychedelic experiences can be examined form an ‘inner’ experiential perspective as well as from an ‘outer’ neurophysiological perspective, so too can the evolution of consciousness be explored from an ‘inner’ experiential perspective and from an ‘outer’ anthropological and historical perspective.