Criticism

[Martin_]

This thread rocks.

[Soul_of_Shu]

This thread rocks.

But do rocks rock if there's no awareness of them rocking?

[Mark Tetzner]

This thread rocks.

But do rocks rock if there's no awareness of them rocking?

they are IN rocking. or wait...

[AshvinP]

First, I need to again correct some misunderstandings.

1. If you think I have failed to keep up with the latest developments, please show what has surpassed Rovelli, Penrose, Wigner, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein that would restore Reason as applicable to fundamental truth. You have made this claim several times with no demonstration.

2. Reason itself is the gateway to metaphysics, and as seen in Kant, inevitably leads to duality. I escape duality because I deny anything exists other than the physical reality we encounter. Kastrup escapes duality by denying materiality. I think you are still confusing me with Kant, and perhaps that’s my fault.

My last post only covered the limitations of Reason and left how we can know deeper reality for the next post.
Let’s call my last post Part I: The Unreasonable Applicability of Reason to Reality; and what follows as Part II: Esthetic Understanding.

Let’s start by returning to Goethe’s Morphology and his example of a seed. He attempts to avert duality by asserting there is nothing beyond the sky, and everything is revealed in its apprehension. He takes the further step of positing reality as an unfolding event which reveals the ideal form inherent at its beginning. It is this morphological form I want to focus on for now.

Goethe has inferred from observation that elemental reality consists of continual manifestations of ideal forms at its essence. The seed develops through these forms, the Ideas of which originally reside as this essence. Through reason, we can ascertain these forms and know elemental reality.
As I wrote before, Goethe was an early transitional figure coming out of the Enlightenment. His denial of the noumenal and vision of reality as process are parts of his steps forward, but in conflict with Ideas - a conflict that later thinkers would address.

To that, I will contrast my thinking. I fully agree that the physical world is all of reality, and it is a process of eternal becoming out of its own essential nature. I have spoken about how rational objectification, propositional logic, and reductionism are practical adaptations with no deeper insight into the essence of things, If I were to remain within Kant’s epistemology, this would indeed lead a sort of dualism of phenomenal and noumenal. But I don’t. There is a second more primordial and more profound mode of thought that is essentially esthetic, and one more suited to deeper exploration.
Rovelli repeats what Pythagoras knew millennia ago: the world is fundamentally waves. Everything is a complex playing out of these waves, but playing out only in accordance with the possibilities inherent in its essence, much as in Goethe’s seed. But in this eternal event of playing out, there is no Idea. What appears as an Ideal form to us is only a moment fixed in our mind, a blink of an eye in its eternal becoming that we elevate to permanence. But the history of the universe tells us something quite different. Evolution of life alone shows that what inheres in seeds are not Ideal forms, but continuous change arising out of an essential nature that transcends any notion of form. We can pick an infinite number of points in time and space and in freezing the frame intuit a form. But we mistake becoming for elemental ideas by killing that moment and fixating it with a pin. Again, this is what Heraclitus knew and we only recently remembered.

There is a unity to this universe, one that is an unimaginable manifold. It becomes clearer when we switch the example from a seed to music. Music is our elemental experience of this manifold playing out of waves. It is nothing but wave. There are those who try to understand music as form or as mathematical relations, but there is no longer any music in those representations. What I love most about authentic musicians is that once somebody tries to impose form or theory on them, the immediate response is to break those rules, while the true irrepressible essence of reality laughs. Beethoven and Miles Davis are preeminent examples.

We only understand music as an event in which we participate with the innermost part of our own being. We resonate with reality and thereby know it, but not in a reasoned or analytical way. It is the same with everything else that is important. We know love through sympathetic relations with others. We know morality through the experience of empathy. Both events of becoming from our own essential nature, which is in turn derived from universal essence.
Thus, thinking becomes a consciousness of sensation - a sensing of the experience of the revelation of a deeper harmony - the playing of elemental waves in their true deeper essence. Thought is making sense. Making sense is adjusting our inner being to the essence of the vibrations. This essence is no Idea, no form, nothing conceptual. It is the eternal play of universal spirit we intuit through music elementarily inherent in our every experience.

JW,

Thanks. I have a lot to reply here, but unfortunately I sprained my right index finger badly playing basketball and am very slow typing with other fingers, esp since I am keeping index and middle taped now. You know there is some serious philosophical debate going on when one party is sidelined due to injury hopefully I can respond more by tomorrow afternoon. Maybe Cleric will substitute in the meantime. We'll see.

In short, there is very little I disagree with in the above post except the non-ideal aspect and the conclusions. I think you are missing this aspect bc the human stage of Reason has been unnecessarily disconnected from aesthetic mode of cognition, whereas Goethe is a great example of where one can go when they remain connected under a consistent and immanent monist-idealist framework. The reason for the disconnect is because the fundamental and immanent reality of Thinking in absolutely all of our experiential activity, including music, is being ignored. Cleric wrote about this in response to Eugene. I will leave it there for now.

I will also provide a quote re: music and ideal forms from a recent essay I wrote.

"In the “perception of a melody", we distinguish the tone given now,which we term the “perceived”, from those which have gone by, which we say are “not perceived.” On the other hand, we call the whole melody one that is perceived, although only the now-point actually is... Objectively considered, the measure no longer appears as “present” but as “past.” The whole melody, however, appears as present so long as it still sounds, so long as the notes belonging to it, intended in the one nexus of apprehensions, still sound. The melody is past only after the last note has gone."

- Edmund Husserl, On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (1928)

Husserl was speaking of the musical melody as an overarching idea which unites the 'frames' of the particular notes. We all have the experience of listening to new music and anticipating notes and lyrics before they are played and spoken. How do we explain this prophetic capacity? It is only because we perceive the overarching ideas of "melody" and "story" with our cognition - ideas which 'hover above' the individual parts of the song and invisibly unites them - that our cognition is able to discern those particular aspects of the composition within the ideal structure before they are individually perceived (heard). Take a few moments and let the implications of that observation sink in. What holds true for the "melody"-idea in music holds true for all overarching temporal ideas in our experience, such as "getting out of bed to take a shower", "finishing a paper for school", "going to work for the day", "taking a two-week vacation", "entering my 35th year of life", and so on. It is as if the ideal content of all activities, past and future, is already present in the ideal "now". We can also perceive how many ideas with shorter timespans are nested within increasingly fewer ideas as the timespans increase. The meaning of "going to work for the day" has no separate existence apart from the overarching idea of "living through my 35th year of life". Without the latter, the former ceases to have meaning.
...
We saw before how our concrete experience is structured by a 'cone' of nested ideas, with the shortest timelength ideas at the bottom and the longer timelengths manifesting as we move up towards the tip (this is simply a visual symbol and should not be understood as a literal "cone"). All shorter timelength ideas only have meaning in the context of the longer timelength ideas, and it is that totality of the ideal content - the single, eternal Idea (Goethe) - which structures our immanent experience of Nature's ever-evolving phenomena. How can all of these ideas with different timelengths, some as long as "the last 5000 years of humanity's evolution", structure a single moment of our experience? The most straightforward answer to this question, without going beyond the givens of our experience, resides in the fact that experiential time is not uniform. Hours will feel like minutes to someone who is engaged to Nature in deep cognitive activity, relative to how those same hours will feel to someone merely flirting with her. This 'sped up', more meaningful experience of time occurs precisely because our cogntive activity has bravely risked venturing into a more comprehensive and overarching idea further up the 'cone'.

Always try to remember that we are only working through what is given to our experience without layering any assumptions on top. What we have discovered in our phenomenology so far is also what Albert Einstein developed in a more precisely mathematical form with his Theory of General Relativity. His equations demonstrated that our experience of time will depend on our 'speed' in relation to other 'observers'. If we imagine "speed" and "observers" to be mere abstract measurements or entities which exist independent of the experiencing subject, however, then we have added an unwarranted assumption and have gone beyond the immediate givens of experience. What do we actually know, from experience alone, about our relative motion within spatial dimensions? We know that we only move anywhere when we are either seeking specified goals (or someone who is moving us is seeking their own goals), consciously or subconsciously, which sometimes is the goal of returning to where we were before. So when Emerson observed, "physical distances behind or before us are our images for memory and hope, respectively", he was sticking with what the phenomena of movement in spatial dimensions experientially disclosed to him and nothing more.

Another confirmation of this qualitative relativistic time-experience is our dreams. Everyone who has taken a quick nap with dreams has experienced how, what felt like several hours of rich and meaningful experience, was actually packed into 30 minutes of "normal" clock time. Is one time-experience of meaning more or less "real" than the other? Again, only our own unwarranted assumptions, imposed on the phenomenal states of wakefulness and dreaming, can reach such a conclusion at this point. What we know from the givens is that our time-experience shifts in our daily experience, with the concretely felt time expanding and contracting depending on what degree and mode of cognition we are engaged in. Are we meaningfully and intensely engaged with the phenomena we are contemplating, or are we mechanistically and begrudingly surveying them in our thoughts? Are we thinking in a state of wakefulness or in a dreaming state?

[JeffreyW]

First, I need to again correct some misunderstandings.

1. If you think I have failed to keep up with the latest developments, please show what has surpassed Rovelli, Penrose, Wigner, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein that would restore Reason as applicable to fundamental truth. You have made this claim several times with no demonstration.

2. Reason itself is the gateway to metaphysics, and as seen in Kant, inevitably leads to duality. I escape duality because I deny anything exists other than the physical reality we encounter. Kastrup escapes duality by denying materiality. I think you are still confusing me with Kant, and perhaps that’s my fault.

My last post only covered the limitations of Reason and left how we can know deeper reality for the next post.
Let’s call my last post Part I: The Unreasonable Applicability of Reason to Reality; and what follows as Part II: Esthetic Understanding.

Let’s start by returning to Goethe’s Morphology and his example of a seed. He attempts to avert duality by asserting there is nothing beyond the sky, and everything is revealed in its apprehension. He takes the further step of positing reality as an unfolding event which reveals the ideal form inherent at its beginning. It is this morphological form I want to focus on for now.

Goethe has inferred from observation that elemental reality consists of continual manifestations of ideal forms at its essence. The seed develops through these forms, the Ideas of which originally reside as this essence. Through reason, we can ascertain these forms and know elemental reality.
As I wrote before, Goethe was an early transitional figure coming out of the Enlightenment. His denial of the noumenal and vision of reality as process are parts of his steps forward, but in conflict with Ideas - a conflict that later thinkers would address.

To that, I will contrast my thinking. I fully agree that the physical world is all of reality, and it is a process of eternal becoming out of its own essential nature. I have spoken about how rational objectification, propositional logic, and reductionism are practical adaptations with no deeper insight into the essence of things, If I were to remain within Kant’s epistemology, this would indeed lead a sort of dualism of phenomenal and noumenal. But I don’t. There is a second more primordial and more profound mode of thought that is essentially esthetic, and one more suited to deeper exploration.
Rovelli repeats what Pythagoras knew millennia ago: the world is fundamentally waves. Everything is a complex playing out of these waves, but playing out only in accordance with the possibilities inherent in its essence, much as in Goethe’s seed. But in this eternal event of playing out, there is no Idea. What appears as an Ideal form to us is only a moment fixed in our mind, a blink of an eye in its eternal becoming that we elevate to permanence. But the history of the universe tells us something quite different. Evolution of life alone shows that what inheres in seeds are not Ideal forms, but continuous change arising out of an essential nature that transcends any notion of form. We can pick an infinite number of points in time and space and in freezing the frame intuit a form. But we mistake becoming for elemental ideas by killing that moment and fixating it with a pin. Again, this is what Heraclitus knew and we only recently remembered.

There is a unity to this universe, one that is an unimaginable manifold. It becomes clearer when we switch the example from a seed to music. Music is our elemental experience of this manifold playing out of waves. It is nothing but wave. There are those who try to understand music as form or as mathematical relations, but there is no longer any music in those representations. What I love most about authentic musicians is that once somebody tries to impose form or theory on them, the immediate response is to break those rules, while the true irrepressible essence of reality laughs. Beethoven and Miles Davis are preeminent examples.

We only understand music as an event in which we participate with the innermost part of our own being. We resonate with reality and thereby know it, but not in a reasoned or analytical way. It is the same with everything else that is important. We know love through sympathetic relations with others. We know morality through the experience of empathy. Both events of becoming from our own essential nature, which is in turn derived from universal essence.
Thus, thinking becomes a consciousness of sensation - a sensing of the experience of the revelation of a deeper harmony - the playing of elemental waves in their true deeper essence. Thought is making sense. Making sense is adjusting our inner being to the essence of the vibrations. This essence is no Idea, no form, nothing conceptual. It is the eternal play of universal spirit we intuit through music elementarily inherent in our every experience.

JW,

Thanks. I have a lot to reply here, but unfortunately I sprained my right index finger badly playing basketball and am very slow typing with other fingers, esp since I am keeping index and middle taped now. You know there is some serious philosophical debate going on when one party is sidelined due to injury hopefully I can respond more by tomorrow afternoon. Maybe Cleric will substitute in the meantime. We'll see.

In short, there is very little I disagree with in the above post except the non-ideal aspect and the conclusions. I think you are missing this aspect bc the human stage of Reason has been unnecessarily disconnected from aesthetic mode of cognition, whereas Goethe is a great example of where one can go when they remain connected under a consistent and immanent monist-idealist framework. The reason for the disconnect is because the fundamental and immanent reality of Thinking in absolutely all of our experiential activity, including music, is being ignored. Cleric wrote about this in response to Eugene. I will leave it there for now.

I will also provide a quote re: music and ideal forms from a recent essay I wrote.

"In the “perception of a melody", we distinguish the tone given now,which we term the “perceived”, from those which have gone by, which we say are “not perceived.” On the other hand, we call the whole melody one that is perceived, although only the now-point actually is... Objectively considered, the measure no longer appears as “present” but as “past.” The whole melody, however, appears as present so long as it still sounds, so long as the notes belonging to it, intended in the one nexus of apprehensions, still sound. The melody is past only after the last note has gone."

- Edmund Husserl, On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (1928)

Husserl was speaking of the musical melody as an overarching idea which unites the 'frames' of the particular notes. We all have the experience of listening to new music and anticipating notes and lyrics before they are played and spoken. How do we explain this prophetic capacity? It is only because we perceive the overarching ideas of "melody" and "story" with our cognition - ideas which 'hover above' the individual parts of the song and invisibly unites them - that our cognition is able to discern those particular aspects of the composition within the ideal structure before they are individually perceived (heard). Take a few moments and let the implications of that observation sink in. What holds true for the "melody"-idea in music holds true for all overarching temporal ideas in our experience, such as "getting out of bed to take a shower", "finishing a paper for school", "going to work for the day", "taking a two-week vacation", "entering my 35th year of life", and so on. It is as if the ideal content of all activities, past and future, is already present in the ideal "now". We can also perceive how many ideas with shorter timespans are nested within increasingly fewer ideas as the timespans increase. The meaning of "going to work for the day" has no separate existence apart from the overarching idea of "living through my 35th year of life". Without the latter, the former ceases to have meaning.
...
We saw before how our concrete experience is structured by a 'cone' of nested ideas, with the shortest timelength ideas at the bottom and the longer timelengths manifesting as we move up towards the tip (this is simply a visual symbol and should not be understood as a literal "cone"). All shorter timelength ideas only have meaning in the context of the longer timelength ideas, and it is that totality of the ideal content - the single, eternal Idea (Goethe) - which structures our immanent experience of Nature's ever-evolving phenomena. How can all of these ideas with different timelengths, some as long as "the last 5000 years of humanity's evolution", structure a single moment of our experience? The most straightforward answer to this question, without going beyond the givens of our experience, resides in the fact that experiential time is not uniform. Hours will feel like minutes to someone who is engaged to Nature in deep cognitive activity, relative to how those same hours will feel to someone merely flirting with her. This 'sped up', more meaningful experience of time occurs precisely because our cogntive activity has bravely risked venturing into a more comprehensive and overarching idea further up the 'cone'.

Always try to remember that we are only working through what is given to our experience without layering any assumptions on top. What we have discovered in our phenomenology so far is also what Albert Einstein developed in a more precisely mathematical form with his Theory of General Relativity. His equations demonstrated that our experience of time will depend on our 'speed' in relation to other 'observers'. If we imagine "speed" and "observers" to be mere abstract measurements or entities which exist independent of the experiencing subject, however, then we have added an unwarranted assumption and have gone beyond the immediate givens of experience. What do we actually know, from experience alone, about our relative motion within spatial dimensions? We know that we only move anywhere when we are either seeking specified goals (or someone who is moving us is seeking their own goals), consciously or subconsciously, which sometimes is the goal of returning to where we were before. So when Emerson observed, "physical distances behind or before us are our images for memory and hope, respectively", he was sticking with what the phenomena of movement in spatial dimensions experientially disclosed to him and nothing more.

Another confirmation of this qualitative relativistic time-experience is our dreams. Everyone who has taken a quick nap with dreams has experienced how, what felt like several hours of rich and meaningful experience, was actually packed into 30 minutes of "normal" clock time. Is one time-experience of meaning more or less "real" than the other? Again, only our own unwarranted assumptions, imposed on the phenomenal states of wakefulness and dreaming, can reach such a conclusion at this point. What we know from the givens is that our time-experience shifts in our daily experience, with the concretely felt time expanding and contracting depending on what degree and mode of cognition we are engaged in. Are we meaningfully and intensely engaged with the phenomena we are contemplating, or are we mechanistically and begrudingly surveying them in our thoughts? Are we thinking in a state of wakefulness or in a dreaming state?

Actually, philosophy injuries are quite common. At U of Chicago, where athletics were eliminated, we considered debate our contact sport.

[Eugene I]

Actually, philosophy injuries are quite common. At U of Chicago, where athletics were eliminated, we considered debate our contact sport.

I have a sense that we are all here somewhat brain-injured by practicing too much of the philosophy (me included)...

[AshvinP]

Ok. 2nd try.
the Intellect gave us separations such as "E", etc.
It was Reason which recognized the unity in "E=mc²"
as per quote from Steiner:

The intellect causes the separation of the individual configurations — because they do indeed confront us in the given as individual elements [ 52 ] — and reason recognizes the unity.

The fact that it was done in a domain of extremely abstract thought forms that might not be particularly meaningful to most of us, does not mean it wasn't Reason which unified them.

Martin,

I think it's fair to say Reason is what was working through Einstein to perceive a higher-order unity between the fragmented concepts of E, m, and c. But as Cleric said, this is still held by him as an abstracted equivalence. After all, it's not as if Einstein was the first person to experience what the "E" symbol is representing. In fact, he was perceiving it much more dimly than people living 2000 years earlier, if he was perceiving it at all. It helps to think of concrete perception as discernment of living processes (as in processes which are occurring within you now) in the conceptual unities while abstraction perceives ever-more dead and decomposing 'things'.

Ironically, it is that abstraction of "Reason" which makes it very difficult for us to understand or connect to our immanent perception. That is what led to the Kantian divide, when the latter is understood as an actual reality of living processes becoming dead things in our cognition. Then there appears to a be a disconnect between abstract representational thought-perception (including Reason) and higher spritual sight. That is why we don't perceive the continuity between Reason and higher order cognition such as Imagination. And so Eugene claims Cleric is excluding everyone without spiritual sight from participating in genuine knowledge, because of his own assumption of cognitions as abstracted and dead things in the world, which creates the apparent discontinuity.

Eugene, JW, BK, and many others are trying to find the continuity of cognition within the abstract representations, where it will never be found, instead of within the higher order spiritual processes from which the representations go forth. Those processes weave together through a world consisting in what we broadly refer to as "imaginations", "inspirations", "intuitions", "ideals", "purposes", "morals", and even more generally, "meaning". These must be understood as concretely as possible - in terms of our immanent desires, feelings, and thoughts which precipitate from our experience of their meaning. A simple analogy is going from a horizontal view of the world in 'front' of us to a bird's eye view of the world 'below' us - the underlying meaning of this analogy is what we should hold on to (not the abstract pictures).

It is only from that spiritual perspective we will find the concrete continuity of all modes of cognition, and the first, and perhaps most important step, to attaining it is realizing we don't already have it.

[Eugene I]

Eugene, JW, BK, and many others are trying to find the continuity of cognition within the abstract representations, where it will never be found, instead of within the higher order spiritual processes from which the representations go forth. Those processes weave together through a world consisting in what we broadly refer to as "imaginations", "inspirations", "intuitions", "ideals", "purposes", "morals", and even more generally, "meaning". These must be understood as concretely as possible - in terms of our immanent desires, feelings, and thoughts which precipitate from our experience of their meaning. A simple analogy is going from a horizontal view of the world in 'front' of us to a bird's eye view of the world 'below' us - the underlying meaning of this analogy is what we should hold on to (not the abstract pictures).

It is only from that spiritual perspective we will find the concrete continuity of all modes of cognition, and the first, and perhaps most important step, to attaining it is realizing we don't already have it.

OK, this sounds fantastic, but then why is it that those esoteric initiates who claimed to attain the higher cognition and the knowledge of the higher-order spiritual processes, such as Steiner, Goethe, Cleric, could not get any sensible knowledge from those higher domains other than vague descriptions of the "curvatures of meanings", and bizarre ideas about Atlantis, supremacy of Germanic nation, Zodiacs, blood pumping itself, Willows curing arthritis, and no clues of any actual knowledge of the processes of the natural world? I think it would be very natural to ask such people: if you claim to have any supra-natural abilities of clairvoyance and knowledge of higher-order truths, then prove it. If you can prove it than we might believe you, otherwise, sorry, nice try.

[JeffreyW]

To that, I will contrast my thinking. I fully agree that the physical world is all of reality, and it is a process of eternal becoming out of its own essential nature. I have spoken about how rational objectification, propositional logic, and reductionism are practical adaptations with no deeper insight into the essence of things, If I were to remain within Kant’s epistemology, this would indeed lead a sort of dualism of phenomenal and noumenal. But I don’t. There is a second more primordial and more profound mode of thought that is essentially esthetic, and one more suited to deeper exploration.

We only understand music as an event in which we participate with the innermost part of our own being. We resonate with reality and thereby know it, but not in a reasoned or analytical way. It is the same with everything else that is important. We know love through sympathetic relations with others. We know morality through the experience of empathy. Both events of becoming from our own essential nature, which is in turn derived from universal essence.
Thus, thinking becomes a consciousness of sensation - a sensing of the experience of the revelation of a deeper harmony - the playing of elemental waves in their true deeper essence. Thought is making sense. Making sense is adjusting our inner being to the essence of the vibrations. This essence is no Idea, no form, nothing conceptual. It is the eternal play of universal spirit we intuit through music elementarily inherent in our every experience.

So, JW, you are saying that the world is only physical. This means that it is inherently void of ideas and meanings that are simply by-products of human consciousness having nothing to do with the reality of the physical world, and the human consciousness itself is a emergent byproduct of unfolding physical processes. Yet, somehow, the essence of the physical world is esthetic, and it is through its esthetics and through our sense of esthetics that springs form the universal non-conscious physical spirit where we can connect to the deepest essence of reality. But aren't you just replacing one way of wishful thinking (that we can know the non-conscious physical reality through intellectual cognition or reason) with another kind of wishful thinking (that you can perceive the essence of reality through your esthetic sense)? Being a musician myself, I fully resonate with esthetic way of perceiving the world. But how do you actually know that what you are perceiving through your esthetic sense is actually the very essence of physical reality and not just another byproduct of your human consciousness? And how/why would a non-conscious physical reality have anything to do with esthetical beauty? How and why a non-conscious physical world by itself would employ esthetical beauty? Beauty can only be appreciated by consciousness. A non-conscious reality should not have any reason to unfold specifically in harmonious and beautiful forms. You can still believe that it can and it does, but how is it not another kind of religious or metaphysical belief?

Personally, I do think that the reality is esthetic in essence and we indeed have a capacity to connect to its essence through our esthetic sense, so I'm on the same page with you. I just think that there is a different reason for that: the world is esthetic exactly because it is consciousness, because only consciousness can experience and manifest esthetic forms. Isn't that just another king of belief? Yes, it is. It just makes more sense to me, not rationally, but exactly esthetically.

You bring up a central point. I won’t be able to address it until very late tonight or tomorrow.

[JeffreyW]

Actually, philosophy injuries are quite common. At U of Chicago, where athletics were eliminated, we considered debate our contact sport.

I have a sense that we are all here somewhat brain-injured by practicing too much of the philosophy (me included)...

It’s the brain injuries that lead to creative thinking.