Bernardo vs Graham Oppy!!

[findingblanks]

"So what I am claiming is not all disparaging to BK or singling him out."

I didn't say you were disparaging him. I said you were 100% incorrect that BK's view rules out top-down involution of Spirit. The fact is that BK has acknowledged that there could be layers of dissociation that create hierarchies. of alters that envelope alters. In saying this he has said that he doesn't favor it but that it fits perfectly well within his model of idealism. I lean more towards heircharical layers, personally.

And so your claim that his view rules out the possibility of higher ideational forms working their way way into earthy evolution is not correct. As I said, the only way earthly forms could evolve is in interaction with the incredibly intricate realities from which they sprang. Those realities are intrinsically meaningful and teleological.

[findingblanks]

Starbuck, I would say that. And I think that the intrinsic excitations might by necessity fit the definition of 'intelligent,' especially as BK tends to use it.

[AshvinP]

"So what I am claiming is not all disparaging to BK or singling him out."

I didn't say you were disparaging him. I said you were 100% incorrect that BK's view rules out top-down involution of Spirit. The fact is that BK has acknowledged that there could be layers of dissociation that create hierarchies. of alters that envelope alters. In saying this he has said that he doesn't favor it but that it fits perfectly well within his model of idealism. I lean more towards heircharical layers, personally.

And so your claim that his view rules out the possibility of higher ideational forms working their way way into earthy evolution is not correct. As I said, the only way earthly forms could evolve is in interaction with the incredibly intricate realities from which they sprang. Those realities are intrinsically meaningful and teleological.

FB,

I can imagine BK saying that, actually. In the same way he has remarked, "maybe our individuated self continues after death and we get to experience everyone else's memories". It is pure speculation about the spiritual 'beyond'. Since the spiritual realms are black holes of knowledge for him, it is unavoidable that he will speculate about "alters that envelope alters" and many other such things. According to his model, that is obviously occurring within living organisms on Earth to some extent, so maybe it is also occurring somewhere else. But that all relates to his speculative and biased view of his own model. A neutral observer will clearly see how such speculations are rife with logical contradictions of his model. BK cannot embrace "natural" secular scientific models and also top-down involution of Spirit (and let's remember all such "models" are simply extrapolations of current observations indefinitely into the past and future). The entire secular understanding of evolution changes when the involutionary process is accounted for. Are you denying that?

Since Cleric's take on this issue was brought up, here is a very relevant comment from him:

TC quickly skims over the idea that the Whole fragments into pieces, which then go on to explore the possibilities. This is once again the already well known Flat MAL paradigm. Pretty much everything is a kind of pan-psychism from where the universe begins to be built up entirely in bottom-up fashion. It's never ending increasing in complexity. This is practically the dream of the materialist too - our whole civilization builds upon layers after layers of complexity. The problem of course is that this complexity is of mechanical nature. Everyone today shudders at the thought what will happen if the electric grid or global communications fail. The whole edifice of modern civilization is resting upon fragile foundations.
...
The complexity of the Natural world is already there. Is there reason to look further than the human brain, the most marvelous structure known? It doesn't make sense to hijack this already existing reality and keep convoluting it into more and more complex relations and call that 'lowering the entropy'. Any complex biological energetic process on Earth can be traced back to the Sun - it is Solar energy that supports the entropic gradient. When we trace this process we can follow how low entropy energy travels through space, enters the Earth atmosphere, interacts with chlorophyll, propels the whole biological world and so on. This is in purely physical sense. It is similar in spiritual sense, where instead of tracing the abstract concept of energy, we trace the processes in the Divine Mind, which become increasingly convoluted (higher entropy) and ultimately lead to our current state, where we're facing impossible complexity. Lowering our entropy is the actual fully conscious transformation of our being such that, just as we normally live with our own thoughts, so we live in higher order Cosmic Thoughts, which are that actual causal factors behind the dissipated higher entropy states. It is quite clear that TC doesn't speak of that. Everything that we speak of here is completely collapsed and lost between the 'Consciousness broke down to pieces, so that it can interact with itself'. There's absolutely nothing between Consciousness and the 'piece'. Everything that exists is the build up of 'information' into more and more complex relations. This is also why people feel comfortable with the 'instinctive MAL' paradigm - it's a very convenient upgrade of materialism, we again build up the World order from the bottom-up, except that we do that from pieces that have inherent capacity of consciousness.

[Starbuck]

'Blind will' doesn't mean meaningless or random. I know three people who need to grok that.

Indeed, Why cant the intrinsic excitations of universal subjectivity 'look like' intelligence?

Exactly. FB is denying that BK holds this position as you state it above. He is saying that BK's idealism incorporates eternal self-awareness of MAL and beings within MAL who are non-corporeal, i.e. beings who are evolving apart from any "planetary environment".

Is that your understanding of BK's position as well? I don't think anyone who is familiar with BK would ever take that away from what he has written or said on the topic.

Yes that is my understanding. As you state, he is a naturalist. I would say he confers intelligence unto his ontic base to no more or less a degree than a quantum physicist confers intelligence upon the forms emerging out of the quantum vacuum.

[findingblanks]

One of the reasons that Rudolf Steiner sang the praises of the pure materialist Ernst Haeckel was because he simply loved his thoughts. Guess what, Ernst Haeckel's thoughts were inferential and speculative, linked by logic and grounded in 100% materialist assumptions about the nature of reality.

Who cares if Bernardo speculates? Seriously, are we looking to Bernardo to explain everything we are interested in or are we simply noticing that he makes arguments against materialism and presents a model of idealism that is coherent and consistent? .

I'm not going to stray away from the only point I felt called to make in this context. You are simply wrong in claiming that BK's model rules out a spiritual teleology as intrinsic to the evolution of that has led to the human on Earth. Steiner implored people to read and understand the deep significance of Ernst Haeckel. You constantly complain that Bernardo hasn't provided you with a model that specifies various topics you love.

I think you'd do well to take BK's work for what it is rather than what it isn't. You should read Steiner's lectures on Haeckel and you'll start to see why Steiner would have also recognized BK's model for what it was worth. He had no problem with speculation based in grounded thinking, even if the thoughts themselves were 100% grounded in materialistic assumptions.

You haven't provided one sentence from BK that states or implies his model can't accommodate the possibility hierarchies of intentional agents acting within each other's evolution. To me it is clear exactly how his model makes room for this. And it is clear (to me) why BK's preference is to think in terms of one primary dissociation that does not include a hierarchy that the entity would move through pre-post earthly life. I can't imagine why we'd expect Bernardo to be going into to topics other than the topic he is most of focused on. It would be as if we read Ernst Haeckel's work and then went online to complain that he was a materialist who totally excluded the possibility of spiritual beings guiding evolution. Some folks wrote little books praising the guy and basically begged people to read his work directly. All I'm doing is saying that BK's model doesn't deny a spiritual teleology. In fact, it is very very difficult to understand how the first 'alter's would NOT be 100% immersed in the very teleological processes from which they emerged. Modern evolutionary biologists merely hand-wave when talking about how life could ever have come about. BK's model specifies that life comes about because the fundamental ground of reality pushes itself towards expansion via incarnating itself as newborn life. I use the word 'incarnate' where BK might speak about how it generates dissociation. Either way, his model places at the ground floor a subjective Person whose core activity is to extend itself creatively into forms of life that evolve to incorporate more and more reality via their capacity to recognize their true nature.

I guess it's a shame to some people that BK isn't a spiritual scientist? But maybe it's not a shame that he doesn't deny the possibility?

[findingblanks]

Starbuck the only think I might disagree with (if I'm understanding you) is that Bernardo maintains that the very nature of Reality is 'moving towards' creation in a way that can be described as intelligent, whereas the typical modern physicalist will strip all teleology out of the reduction base. Kastrup not only claims the base must be 'moving towards' but he claims it is an experiencing subject, The Subject. I might be misunderstanding what you are equating, in which case feel free to ignore my blabbering at you

[findingblanks]

Hey Ben,

I see there is a really great conversation about the possibility of layers of dissociation within BK's model. It is in the discussion room that is for focusing on BK specifically. What a relief that there is a spot that specifically asks all of us to focus on one topic!

Do you know if there is a special code to enter that conversation? I seem to be blocked from it. Ironic, considering my constant annoyance that when focusing on BK's specific model itself so often we must encounter lectures about other models or be told there is no point in discussing BK when somebody else has such a better understanding. Ugh. Anyway, until I learn the secret knock, I'll just read from my dissociated alter.

[AshvinP]

I'm not going to stray away from the only point I felt called to make in this context. You are simply wrong in claiming that BK's model rules out a spiritual teleology as intrinsic to the evolution of that has led to the human on Earth. Steiner implored people to read and understand the deep significance of Ernst Haeckel. You constantly complain that Bernardo hasn't provided you with a model that specifies various topics you love.

You haven't yet understood Cleric or my own arguments in this regard at all, or, for that matter, Steiner's arguments against "critical idealism" in PoF. The implicit dualism and naive realism of critical idealism necessitates a flawed understanding of spiritual evolution and evolution in general. How could it be any other way? If one artificially divides Reality into the spiritual and the physical, the reality and the mere appearance, the noumenon and the phenomenon, what can't be known and what can be, then one will end up with a flawed understanding of Reality. There is no rocket science here, just basic logic.

You said Cleric would 100% agree with you - "I promise you something huge; nobody here, not even Cleric, believes that BK's model rules out evolution of life inherently involving teleology. Fact." - now that I have posted his actual take on this issue of Flat instinctive MAL... will you remain silent and reneg on your promise? Are you going to avoid that quote of Cleric altogether? Because it directly addresses everything you say in the rest of the comment in defense of BK's FLat MAL model. You are slowly watering down your claim to, "there is nothing inconsistent with BK's idealism and teleology...". OK... and what does that have to do with any of my previous comments on this thread, specifically about spiritual evolution?

I think you'd do well to take BK's work for what it is rather than what it isn't.

Again, the entire critique is that the gaping holes left artificially in our ability to know Reality via reasoning activity inevitably become fatal flaws of our "models". My latest short essay on idolatry of space is precisely a critique of how the cessation of logical reasoning of philosophical and scientific inquiries into the phenomenal world, thereby leaving an eternal "what it isn't", is how ALL major errors of modern worldviews are born. The most important aspect of the critique is what is in bold below. BK will gladly accept the underlined, but also succumbs to the bold. That is because he unquestioningly holds to Kant and Schop's critique of "pure reason". If you are genuinely interested in becoming familiar with our critique, then I suggest you take a look at the essay and comment or ask questions. If you feel your understanding of our critique is 100% rock solid, even though we keep telling you that it isn't, then I suppose there is no point wasting anyone's time.

As Barfield observed at the outset of this essay, we will only overcome the idolatry of space through space itself, and that is only IF we do not arbitrarily cease our reasoning through spatial phenomena whenever we reach our desired conclusions. By logically reasoning back through the shadowy idols of spatial dimensions, we can begin to perceive the ideal sources of Light who cast them with ever-increasing clarity. Once we come to realize space itself as the overarching idol of our current stage of cognitive metamorphosis, it will be much easier to perceive how all phenomena occurring within these spatial dimensions are also potential idols. If Reality is durational, rather than spatial, in its mobile essence, then all such spatial phenomena are reflecting moments of an organic and cosmic Unity. The latter is then seen as a living organism who is evolving through our own ideational activity. To cease our logical reasoning through these moments - to fix them in space and idolize them - is nothing less than inviting stagnation, decay, and death.

"And in this I give advice: It is to your advantage not only to be doing what you began and were desiring to do a year ago; but now you also must complete the doing of it; that as there was a readiness to desire it, so there also may be a completion out of what you have. For if there is first a willing mind, it is accepted according to what one has, and not according to what he does not have." - 2 Corinthians 8:10-12

[AshvinP]

Indeed, Why cant the intrinsic excitations of universal subjectivity 'look like' intelligence?

Exactly. FB is denying that BK holds this position as you state it above. He is saying that BK's idealism incorporates eternal self-awareness of MAL and beings within MAL who are non-corporeal, i.e. beings who are evolving apart from any "planetary environment".

Is that your understanding of BK's position as well? I don't think anyone who is familiar with BK would ever take that away from what he has written or said on the topic.

Yes that is my understanding. As you state, he is a naturalist. I would say he confers intelligence unto his ontic base to no more or less a degree than a quantum physicist confers intelligence upon the forms emerging out of the quantum vacuum.

I agree and that's a perfect analogy. There is a void of some sort or another and all that we call "intelligence", "self-awareness", "aesthetics", "ethical values", emerge out of that void as secondary epiphenomenon. There is no sense trying to make his argument into something it isn't and which no one really understands it to be. That only serves to confuse and halt all productive discussion, because no one is clear on anyone else's position anymore.

My argument is that BK's definition of "natural" practically excludes half of all reality, if we want a simple way of imaging it. The depth structure behind our inner experience is excluded from "natural". The realm of currently imperceptible spiritual activity and noumenal meaning. Why? That's what we are trying to explain by way of PoF and also posts completely independent of PoF. There are very sound philosophical and scientific arguments for why.

[Soul_of_Shu]

Yes that is my understanding. As you state, he is a naturalist. I would say he confers intelligence unto his ontic base to no more or less a degree than a quantum physicist confers intelligence upon the forms emerging out of the quantum vacuum.

I agree and that's a perfect analogy. There is a void of some sort or another and all that we call "intelligence", "self-awareness", "aesthetics", "ethical values", emerge out of that void as secondary epiphenomenon. There is no sense trying to make his argument into something it isn't and which no one really understands it to be. That only serves to confuse and halt all productive discussion, because no one is clear on anyone else's position anymore.

My argument is that BK's definition of "natural" practically excludes half of all reality, if we want a simple way of imaging it. The depth structure behind our inner experience is excluded from "natural". The realm of currently imperceptible spiritual activity and noumenal meaning. Why? That's what we are trying to explain by way of PoF and also posts completely independent of PoF. There are very sound philosophical and scientific arguments for why.

It's perhaps worth pointing out that this isn't the first time this has been pointed out, or at least implied in some of the exchanges dating back to the early days of the old MS forum, when there was quite a bit of posting/discussion regarding Aurobindo, mostly initiated by and involving Don Salmon. He would regularly offer long involved posts, quoting huge tracts from The Life Divine, explaining the inter-being evolution/involution dynamic. And while BK never really outright dismissed it, per se, one could tell that he was not into it, and not about to encourage it by indicating that he subscribed to it in any way. Here is just one thread from the old MS forum in which Don was clearly finding BK's take on idealism somewhat lacking—which BK did not respond to—although Don also points out that if BK's primary focus was on winning over some wavering academics still tentative about altogether abandoning materialism, it was understandable that BK had to keep it 'digestible' to their mindset, by taking the path of least resistance, while a vision like Aurobindo's, for example, would be a hard sell ... Don writes from Aug 3, 2014