Soul_of_Shu wrote: ↑Wed Dec 08, 2021 1:51 am
Surprise, surprise, Eugene couldn't quit the addiction after all ... Time to call an AA meeting?
I will use this opportunity to try and make something clear - the reason it seems we are never "admitting that they or Steiner are or have ever been wrong in anything" is simple, if one simply tries to understand without prejudice. If one were to picture the prevalent view of collective human knowledge right now as a tank filling with water, it would look like the tank is 99% full and there is only little room left for more water. This is practically how many people feel about the state of knowledge, regardless of ontology. Even with idealism, the tank has been filled halfway by the simple concept of "Consciousness", another 49% with modern science, and that last 1% is the room for new knowledge to evolve. I know most people won't explicitly agree this is their view (because it is clearly presumptuous and prideful), but that is how the prevalent view
functions in our thought when approaching ideas which are new to us. So now someone like me comes along and I am presenting ideas to others as a teacher and never admitting I am wrong when those ideas are challenged.
With the above view, it is clear why this will be distasteful and, actually, would be pretty absurd. How can this one guy claim to have completely filled the rest of tank? Not only that, but I have
removed water from the tank (representing many interpretations of modern science and assumptions of abstract metaphysics) and refilled it with 'my' ideas. If we simply shift perspective in humility and see that, from where we are now, the tank is barely .01% full with widepsread collective human knowledge, this whole objection evaporates into thin air. Many other people make this same claim in other ways and it is readily accepted by idealist thinkers - Donald Hoffman, for ex. He says that, since the inception of modern science, we have only been studying the outer dynamics of the perceptual interface, which tells us almost nothing about what gives rise to that interface. The reason why this is acceptable is because he doesn't frame the claim in the language of soul or spirit, and that is the real distasteful thing for most people in our age (for many reasons discussed here).
So the ideas I present over and over again are just various ways of trying to clarify the .01% I have discovered in addition to the previous .01%, which are generally not being understood. Most of my essays and posts are exploring that same .01% in somewhat different ways. Some people clearly
assume they have understood, but that is immediately undermined by thier comments here which show they have not been understood. And, if someone like Cleric comes along, then things get much worse, because we are assuming a 3-dimensional spatial tank of knowledge when we should be imagining something more like a 4-D hypercube which incorporates imaginative Time-consciousness, which he has only filled .01% with his wellspring of knowledge (I am just throwing out small percentages here to illustrate the point). And, in many ways, this humble perspective on collective knowledge is the entire basis of our various arguments, which is that we are
not complete beings and have unimaginably vast amounts of cognitive evolution to undergo before we get anywhere close to filling the tanks. I may turn this into a short-form essay soon and expand some more, so I will stop there.
PS - there is also the Kant-Schop view of abstract intellectual reasoning as max capacity of human cognition but unable to fill the tank
at all, so then once again our approach is distasteful and misunderstood, because we are claiming to fill a tank with water-ideas when it is assumed the tank simply cannot be filled!