Simon,Simon Adams wrote: ↑Thu Jun 03, 2021 10:06 pmI’m not in any way suggesting that you have a young earth creationist view. My point was purely that to suggestion that the development of stars and galaxies was in any way different once biological beings were able to observe it happening, suffers from the same blatant problem that Young Earth Creationists have. There is simply no rational way to explain the evidence we have for things happening eons of time before we were around, especially when the processes happening now look exactly the same as the processes happening then. There are old stars that formed long before any biological life arose, which follow the same process as stars forming now. Of course the very first stars were different, and we don’t understand many areas still, but we know enough to be confident about this.
I don’t think they are meaningless questions, because they are fundamental. In your example of the tree falling, of course if no one hears the sound, there is no sound. However there are still vibrations that travel through the air. There is still a tree that has fallen, and will decay.Let me try to rephrase:
All of these issues related to the person's objection in the BK video come down to the following - what do we have any warrant to claim about existence? The cliché question is as follows - "if a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to see it, does it make a sound?" The meaning of that question is not any different than the meaning of your question about the "two meteors colliding in space". Both questions, if they want serious answers, assume that there can exist a third-person perspective standing apart from the trees or meteors and determining what happens without actually 'being there' and therefore itself participating in the process at issue. Such a perspective for observation does not exist and cannot ever exist (or cannot ever be known to exist, which is basically the same claim under idealism). That is what I mean by saying these are "meaningless" questions. And I think BK fell into the same trap with his answer, which then leads to all sorts of confusions such as those prompting your post about what exactly BK is trying to say. So I hope that clears my point up.
You seem to be suggesting something like Hume’s “bundle theory” where things only exist as properties. So if there are no sensed properties, then it doesn’t exist. However in idealism, these properties are PURELY the representation of the substance, or of the “thing in itself”. It’s not a duality because the image is not separate from that which it is an image of, but there is a reality ‘under’ the representation (sub-stance).
There is no evidence for "things happening eons of time before we were around". Think about what we mean by the word "evidence" under idealism. There is no good definition of "evidence" that is not tied to human experience (perception-thought, will, feelings). You are making claims about events which, by definition, could not have been experienced by humans. Now your response may be that there is a transcendent Creator who was experiencing these things before creating humans - that is again implicating the 3rd person spectator perspective I mentioned before (the one that does not exist in Reality as far as we can ever know).
So from where do you derive the bolded conclusion? Have there been experiments conducted on air vibrations and tree decay in the absence of human experiencing these things? Clearly there is an "objective" reality reflected through these natural occurrences, but any claims made about those occurrences in the absence of human participation in them are unwarranted, unverifiable and unfalsifiable. Therefore, the real explanations for them must be discovered from within. If we keep imagining an "external" reality independent of us and our own activity, then we are always led into philosophical and scientific dead-ends.
This passage from Part III of T-M-T essay may help:
Ashvin wrote:Even the mere intellect, as long as it views the underlying principle of a natural process rather than any specific manifestation of it, will recognize that some living organism, usually a whole constellation of varied living organisms, is essential to its unfolding. That is philosophical realism in the sense of the medieval Scholastics - the archetypal principles which underlie all particular manifestations are the noumenal Reality, and those archetypes are, in Reality, living beings. That is the view Carl Jung took along with Heidegger and Steiner. In this context, it should become more clear how Thinking and only Thinking weaves our experience into that of the noumenal relations.
Human spirits, for example, present to us as a book - we read their gestures, expressions, eye movements, speech, etc. and are thereby drawn closer into their inner experience. If we were to ignore that reality of shared experience, then we would perceive human spirits as lifeless corpses moving around mechanically. In fact, there is a real danger of that occurring in the modern world with modern technology. We may soon be unable to tell any difference between interacting with a human spirit or an AI algorithm pretending to be such a spirit. Yet that same technology, when treated as nothing more than a symbol of an underlying spiritual reality, also reminds us that 'invisible' spiritual forces form all of our social interactions in a highly specified manner.
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We have zoomed out very far on 'left brain' abstractions of the integral structure, so we now embrace the rhythmic tension and refocus our 'right brain' resolution once again. Where do these ideal relations find expression in our everyday experience? We answer this question by first noticing that everything we normally perceive in the 'natural world' is merely the surface contours of deeply integrated spiritual relations. We ordinarily perceive these contours and then fill in the 'horizontal spaces' between them with intellectual concepts. We should imagine the living forces of the spiritual realm working in the vertical direction. They begin with constellating a foundation of ideal content by their deeds which then naturally grows into the contours of ordinary perception. A good analogy for this process is Cymatics: