Criticism

[Mark Tetzner]

Yes, and no personal offense intended, but your (and many others') confusion about how I could conclude idealism yet still completely disagree with BK and value JW's thought more is also the basis for JW's critique of BK. Basically, there is no value in convincing physicalists to adopt another form of physicalism called "idealism". How can I justify that equivalence? Because, when a system of thought gets so abstract, it practically becomes the same as physicalism. That is the entire reason for critiquing physicalism in the first place - it abstracts from concrete experience and then confuses the abstractions for the Ground from which all phenomena can be explained (or can be denied any possibility of explaining). That is exactly how "MAL", "alter", "dissociation", etc. have began functioning in BK's philosophy. I don't think it was necessarily always this way, but it is very clear to see now.




No, he has responded to a lot of my comments and even said he would seriously consider reading Steiner's PoF. That's more than I can say for a lot of people here and certainly for BK. I am actually surprised at how much he has responded to here considering the quality and tone of some comments to him...

Ok, I disagree on the tone towards him, he said extremely disrespectful things, wrong things and had a strong tone of contempt before he was even invited here, I only invited him because I thought there could be a small chance B. would talk to him for the sake of content or write a blog-post for the sake of content. Thats all I am after.
Doesnt mean hes not not a well-read guy on philosopy and physics, which he studied.
He even quotes german words like mitstimmung that definitely dont exist, except maybe
in the mind of the one person who may have invented it. It could in principle exist as a
composite but it doesnt exist in the real world of Germans, even a google-search
did not return anything nor did entering it into dictionaries.

All that aside if I had not seen some substance he would not be here.
How you sort people according to whether they read your PDFs if interesting.

Can you give me an example how Bernardos idealism is abstract?
I agree that BK has not invented anything new, I came up with the same stuff on my own.
He just added quite a few bells and whistles and helped made a few things click
even better. "There is nothing new under the sun" as he said once himself.
Hence: renaissance of idealism.
Funny how toxic people are towards him in this very forum.

[AshvinP]

Ok, I disagree on the tone towards him, he said extremely disrespectful things, wrong things and had a strong tone of contempt before he was even invited here, I only invited him because I thought there could be a small chance B. would talk to him for the sake of content or write a blog-post for the sake of content. Thats all I am after.

I am sure it is, but why should all you are after be all anyone else is after? I am certainly not after what makes BK write a blog post in rebuttal of someone, but what is actually true (or leads in the general direction of truth) and, therefore, practically relevant to our daily experience of the world around us and within us.

Doesnt mean hes not not a well-read guy on philosopy and physics, which he studied.
He even quotes german words like mitstimmung that definitely dont exist, except maybe
in the mind of the one person who may have invented it.

Kidding aside if I had not seen some substance he would not be here.
How you sort people according to whether they read your PDFs if interesting.

Can you give me an example how Bernardos idealism is abstract?

I am not sorting anyone... you asked about JW's interaction on this thread, and I told you my genunine impression of his responses to everyone here. This sort of misrepresentation is also what is plainly evident in your comments to and about JW, which he has nevertheless put up with.

Yes, I can give plenty of examples and have given plenty in essays and posts here. One major one would be BK's view of evolution - he simply adopts the physicalist view of tiny mindless ("instinctive") abstractions combining to form ever-more complex and sentient living beings over billions of years in linear time. None of that is consistent with concrete idealism.

And JW may agree with that view of evolution as well, but he is also not claiming to be idealist or assuming it must be true from the outset.

[Mark Tetzner]

Ok. I completely disagree with you on me misrepresenting him, I always added what he said and you can read it yourself. But lets forget about that. I think feathers of the same bird flock together, or how does that go again, and that you are having the blindspot. You can not just dish out, sometimes there will be a reaction. Under normal circumstances he could have never dreamed to talk to BK anyway. But okay. This is my genuine response to yours.

The typical camp-stuff I guess.

Lets move on:
I may not be as smart as you, but I never looked at it that way, in my view it is reality itself that forms the alters, it is "thought" doing it.
There is only thought under idealism, so how is that abstract?
If I can find your essays somewhere, let me know.

[AshvinP]

Ok. I completely disagree with you on me misrepresenting him, I always added what he said and you can read it yourself. But lets forget about that. I think feathers of the same bird flock together, or how does that go again, and that you are having the blindspot. You can not just dish out, sometimes there will be a reaction. But okay.
The typical camp-stuff I guess.
Lets move on:
I may not be as smart as you, but I never looked at it that way, in my view it is reality itself that forms the alters, it is "thought" doing it.
There is only thought under idealism, so how is that abstract?
If I can find your essays somewhere, let me know.

I agree, let's actually forget all that, i.e. not continue to misrepresent, and start over.

"Thought forms the alters" - this is what I call abstract to the maximum (even beyond BK's view). Think of it this way - where can we possibly go from there to get a better, more precise understanding of what's actually happening in the development of sentient living beings? If you have a suggestion, then I will consider it, but I suspect there is nowhere to go.

For my essays, I would recommend just starting with the latest series on "a phenomenology of mechanism" (I don't directly critique BK or any current thinker in the essays, except I think Rovelli and Annakka Harris in one) - viewtopic.php?f=5&t=603

[Mark Tetzner]

Ok. I completely disagree with you on me misrepresenting him, I always added what he said and you can read it yourself. But lets forget about that. I think feathers of the same bird flock together, or how does that go again, and that you are having the blindspot. You can not just dish out, sometimes there will be a reaction. But okay.
The typical camp-stuff I guess.
Lets move on:
I may not be as smart as you, but I never looked at it that way, in my view it is reality itself that forms the alters, it is "thought" doing it.
There is only thought under idealism, so how is that abstract?
If I can find your essays somewhere, let me know.

I agree, let's actually forget all that, i.e. not continue to misrepresent, and start over.

"Thought forms the alters" - this is what I call abstract to the maximum (even beyond BK's view). Think of it this way - where can we possibly go from there to get a better, more precise understanding of what's actually happening in the development of sentient living beings? If you have a suggestion, then I will consider it, but I suspect there is nowhere to go.

For my essays, I would recommend just starting with the latest series on "a phenomenology of mechanism" (I don't directly critique BK or any current thinker in the essays, except I think Rovelli and Annakka Harris in one) - viewtopic.php?f=5&t=603

1. Respect is important when looking for an appointment.
Wer ficken will muss freundlich sein.
But for all others, too. So lets reset this.
2. We have no where to go. An educated spec, thats it.
We kind of know from our perspective as far as the abiogenese-guys do know it.
You are asking what it looks like from inside "Mal"?
No idea. There is obviosly a mystery.
But we are alters, we can point at the mirror and say: there is the alter.
I still dont understand why thats an abstraction but maybe I dont
know different examples of abtractions, I think I understand
the main points of what an abstraction is.

3. Thanks for your stuff, will check it out later.
Bed time.

[Martin_]

"Thought forms the alters" - this is what I call abstract to the maximum (even beyond BK's view). Think of it this way - where can we possibly go from there to get a better, more precise understanding of what's actually happening in the development of sentient living beings? If you have a suggestion, then I will consider it, but I suspect there is nowhere to go.

So you're equating something being useless with something being abstract? I don't get it.

[AshvinP]

"Thought forms the alters" - this is what I call abstract to the maximum (even beyond BK's view). Think of it this way - where can we possibly go from there to get a better, more precise understanding of what's actually happening in the development of sentient living beings? If you have a suggestion, then I will consider it, but I suspect there is nowhere to go.

So you're equating something being useless with something being abstract? I don't get it.

Yes that is a great definition of abstraction (in the sense I am using it to critique BK's idealsim) - something which, whether true or not, cannot possibly have practical consequences for us.

[AshvinP]

Appearances can be deceiving which, with some thought, can be corrected, for example, the sun appearing to revolve around the earth. For us (most of us), some energy appears to us as having no conscious aspect. But this was not necessarily always the case. As consciousness evolves, so do appearances. We are now naive dualists. A case has been made that once people were naive idealists. For more on this see my essay Idealism vs. Common Sense.

And those earlier mistakes were only resolved from further observations, not metaphysical speculation. If we ever have observable evidence to support consciousness in non-living things, I will then reconsider my view. Until then, I have no reason to seriously consider such speculation.

Just checking if you read my essay. The second half (addressing the 'why' question) does engage in metaphysical speculation, so feel free to ignore it, but the first half does not.

JW,

I am also curious as to your thoughts on Scott's essay. I am quoting a small section below, but the essay is not very long either.


https://www.bernardokastrup.com/2017/07 ... sense.html

It appears that many people find idealism implausible simply because it does not match up with what they consider to be common sense. Well, they are correct. If by "common sense" we mean our pre-philosophical understanding of what things are like—an understanding that is held in common with most everyone around us—then the philosophical name for that understanding is dualism. It is dualist in that it makes a distinction in our experience between controlled (or at least controllable) and uncontrolled, between what seems to come from within us and what seems to come from outside. The contents of our sense perceptions are uncontrolled, while our thinking, feeling, and acting is, or at least can be, under our control. Further, much that is not under my control does not appear to be controlled by any mind at all. Hence, common sense divides reality into the mental and the non-mental.

This was not always the case. If one goes back to 2500+ years ago, the common sense of that time was that behind every natural phenomenon was the mind of some god or nature spirit. While people now are naive dualists, back then people were naive idealists. And so we are faced with two possibilities:

Modern common sense is correct, meaning ancient common sense was a bunch of made-up stories and superstitions to explain things that modern science explains very differently.

Ancient common sense, like modern common sense, was a consequence of direct experience, but the nature of direct experience has changed. Ancient common sense was a consequence of the mentality of natural phenomena being directly perceived, somewhat like the way we detect the mentality that lies behind the utterances of people. But experience has changed, and we no longer have that sort of direct experience of mind in nature.
A materialist or substance dualist must of course choose the first option. But an idealist has ontological room to inquire into the second. Furthermore, that inquiry comes up with not only providing evidence for the second option, but also with an explanation of how we have changed from being naive idealists to being naive dualists.

The results of that inquiry can be found in Owen Barfield's Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry. What Barfield points out is that the distinction between mind and matter, or inside and outside, didn't exist in early peoples. (This is also the basis of Julian Jaynes' The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, though being a materialist, Jaynes explains this with the dubious theory that our thinking was done unconsciously in one cranial hemisphere, which then "talked" to the other.) Thinking happened to the person, and was not felt as being produced by the person. In the beginning of the Iliad, Achilles is angry because Agamemnon has taken Achilles' slave-girl away from him. Achilles naturally wants to kill Agamemnon, but if he does that would be the end of the Greeks' siege of Troy, so he doesn't. We would say that reason prevailed, but what Homer says is that Athena tells him not to. It is something outside of Achilles that controls his action. And of course, Homer credits his own work to the Muse. One may also note that it is only recently that "genius" came to mean a great thinker, and not some external source that inspires the thinker. There was innovation in ancient times, but such innovation was credited to divine kings and prophets, not to a common individual's cleverness.

[JeffreyW]

I play an ES 335

Yeah, I saw that beauty in your video chat with Adrian ... Been a long time since I played electric, now limited to a made-in-Quebec acoustic Seagull Coastline, mostly stored in its case as of late, away from any excess humidity. Now and then, when the brothers-in-law show up, we jam a bit; as along as I keep the chord progression and finger-picking very basic, 12 bar blues is still manageable.

A long time ago I played professionally in Chicago - Jazz, Blues, and R&B. One of my sons is a drummer and we play a lot.

[JeffreyW]

Appearances can be deceiving which, with some thought, can be corrected, for example, the sun appearing to revolve around the earth. For us (most of us), some energy appears to us as having no conscious aspect. But this was not necessarily always the case. As consciousness evolves, so do appearances. We are now naive dualists. A case has been made that once people were naive idealists. For more on this see my essay Idealism vs. Common Sense.

And those earlier mistakes were only resolved from further observations, not metaphysical speculation. If we ever have observable evidence to support consciousness in non-living things, I will then reconsider my view. Until then, I have no reason to seriously consider such speculation.

Just checking if you read my essay. The second half (addressing the 'why' question) does engage in metaphysical speculation, so feel free to ignore it, but the first half does not.

Not yet, but I will soon.