Bernardo's talk with Lance Butler

[Starbuck]

I think that any argument against 'analytic' philosophy will have to engage BK on an analytic level. BK has repeatedly referred to people like Hegel, Whitehead and to an extent Steiner as being obscurantists. I admit some sympathy with this as I can't get my head around many of the objections posted on this site. The language does not seem precise to me!

Well, I am sure you will at least admit we have tried to explain the objections in just about as many ways as can be imagined at this point. From highly involved essays with pictures, videos, and what not to more bullet point arguments in brief posting. From the angle of modern philosophy, ancient mythology and spirituality, VR simulations, every day experience in the world, etc. Usually it is helpful for questions be to asked if there is genuine interest in clearing up confusion and understanding the objections. (also I was unaware BK addressed Steiner as an "obscurantist", but am interested in knowing the source for that). Recently I explained the objection as follows in response to Ben's article on Hegel v. Kant.

I think that might be the problem - maybe a very concise well worded question (as opposed to loads of extroplation) would be the best way to get the response you want from BK. If you could summarise all your objections to BK in 2 sentences, what would they be?

[AshvinP]

I think that any argument against 'analytic' philosophy will have to engage BK on an analytic level. BK has repeatedly referred to people like Hegel, Whitehead and to an extent Steiner as being obscurantists. I admit some sympathy with this as I can't get my head around many of the objections posted on this site. The language does not seem precise to me!

Well, I am sure you will at least admit we have tried to explain the objections in just about as many ways as can be imagined at this point. From highly involved essays with pictures, videos, and what not to more bullet point arguments in brief posting. From the angle of modern philosophy, ancient mythology and spirituality, VR simulations, every day experience in the world, etc. Usually it is helpful for questions be to asked if there is genuine interest in clearing up confusion and understanding the objections. (also I was unaware BK addressed Steiner as an "obscurantist", but am interested in knowing the source for that). Recently I explained the objection as follows in response to Ben's article on Hegel v. Kant.

I think that might be the problem - maybe a very concise well worded question (as opposed to loads of extroplation) would be the best way to get the response you want from BK. If you could summarise all your objections to BK in 2 sentences, what would they be?

This is obviously not the problem. BK simply isn't aware of anything we have written here, or he is aware and chose not to read any of it. It's not like we're the only people he ignores. He won't debate with anyone unless they are defending pure physicalism.

Moreover, the idea that we could "summarize all objections in 2 sentences" is the objection. We are objecting to excessive fragmentation and abstraction of living ideas. The entire qualitative depth structure of the Cosmos cannot be reduced to the concepts of "MAL", "alter", and "dissociation".

Nevertheless, this is the closest I have come to summing everything up re: Kant/Schop epistemology in that way. I would say, technically, it's no sentences

viewtopic.php?t=767

[Starbuck]

Well, I am sure you will at least admit we have tried to explain the objections in just about as many ways as can be imagined at this point. From highly involved essays with pictures, videos, and what not to more bullet point arguments in brief posting. From the angle of modern philosophy, ancient mythology and spirituality, VR simulations, every day experience in the world, etc. Usually it is helpful for questions be to asked if there is genuine interest in clearing up confusion and understanding the objections. (also I was unaware BK addressed Steiner as an "obscurantist", but am interested in knowing the source for that). Recently I explained the objection as follows in response to Ben's article on Hegel v. Kant.

I think that might be the problem - maybe a very concise well worded question (as opposed to loads of extroplation) would be the best way to get the response you want from BK. If you could summarise all your objections to BK in 2 sentences, what would they be?

This is obviously not the problem. BK simply isn't aware of anything we have written here, or he is aware and chose not to read any of it. It's not like we're the only people he ignores. He won't debate with anyone unless they are defending pure physicalism.

Moreover, the idea that we could "summarize all objections in 2 sentences" is the objection. We are objecting to excessive fragmentation and abstraction of living ideas. The entire qualitative depth structure of the Cosmos cannot be reduced to the concepts of "MAL", "alter", and "dissociation".

Nevertheless, this is the closest I have come to summing everything up re: Kant/Schop epistemology in that way. I would say, technically, it's no sentences

viewtopic.php?t=767

To be fair, BK has debated Phillip Goff and John Verveake several times, though I agree his clashes with materialists probably get more hits.

Park of the problem is when you say 'we' like its a collective thing with all in agreement. I would imagine there are potentially an infinite number of idealisms. Not sure how BK can take that all on! Materialism is also nuanced but it is the prevailing paradigm, and in a sense monolithic - and Im sure you share his critiques if not his solutions.

By the way I would love nothing more than for you to get an hour with Bernardo to go into depth. My guess is you would end up sharing a lot more common ground than you might think. From what I see, his world view could include yours but not vice versa. Think you might be mixing up 'genuine knowledge' with gnosis/enlightenment.

[Ben Iscatus]

Yes, I agree that we might need to "reduce" Ash's "flights of reason and imagination" to something we can more easily get to grips with.
Perhaps we might summarise Ash's stance as follows:
(A) "I can only experience my own thinking. It is an unwarranted abstraction to move from my concrete thinking to a mind or a consciousness"; and
(B) "There is no outside world beyond my own thinking."

(A)
There would be an immediate issue with "unwarranted abstraction". This is because
1) thinking is about percepts and concepts (beyond endogenous awareness, it can't be about anything else); and
2) without the uniting concept of a Mind, you have floating concepts like intuition, imagination, reason, feelings, perceptions which somehow need to be amalgamated into a subjective framework with which we identify (I think BK would mention the Default Mode Network and our internal narratives).

(B)
Need to explain why this is not a version of solipsism.

[Jim Cross]

Yes, I agree that we might need to "reduce" Ash's "flights of reason and imagination" to something we can more easily get to grips with.
Perhaps we might summarise Ash's stance as follows:
(A) "I can only experience my own thinking. It is an unwarranted abstraction to move from my concrete thinking to a mind or a consciousness"; and
(B) "There is no outside world beyond my own thinking."

(A)
There would be an immediate issue with "unwarranted abstraction". This is because
1) thinking is about percepts and concepts (beyond endogenous awareness, it can't be about anything else); and
2) without the uniting concept of a Mind, you have floating concepts like intuition, imagination, reason, feelings, perceptions which somehow need to be amalgamated into a subjective framework with which we identify (I think BK would mention the Default Mode Network and our internal narratives).

(B)
Need to explain why this is not a version of solipsism.

Wow! Thanks for finally somebody summing up Ashvin's view. I could never get through the convoluted arguments and jargon.

As for "solipsism", I've felt that the arguments for primacy of consciousness as the basis for everything only really work if solipsism is true because the concept of consciousness outside my consciousness is nonsensical.

[AshvinP]

To be fair, BK has debated Phillip Goff and John Verveake several times, though I agree his clashes with materialists probably get more hits.

Park of the problem is when you say 'we' like its a collective thing with all in agreement. I would imagine there are potentially an infinite number of idealisms. Not sure how BK can take that all on! Materialism is also nuanced but it is the prevailing paradigm, and in a sense monolithic - and Im sure you share his critiques if not his solutions.

By the way I would love nothing more than for you to get an hour with Bernardo to go into depth. My guess is you would end up sharing a lot more common ground than you might think. From what I see, his world view could include yours but not vice versa. Think you might be mixing up 'genuine knowledge' with gnosis/enlightenment.

I will give you the Goff one, Vervaeke didn't seem like a debate of anything really, but still it was a great discussion.

Yes, there are infinite amount of abstract intellectual formulations of "idealism". That is our critique - no movement is actually made from the abstract intellectual theory to a living undertanding of idealism and its practical applications in the world. The latter requires a narrowing down of the infinite formulations to those which harmonize the facts of experience in a practically useful way. For most people, there is absolutely no difference in their desiring, feeling, or thinking - experience of the world content in general - whether they are "materialist", "dualist", or "idealist". This is a clear sign that these things are only held at the most abstract, non-practical level. They are the fodder for endless intellectual debate, mostly within academic circles, and for book sales and website subscriptions, but nothing else. If that is what some people want and are satsified with, then that's fine. We are only speaking to the people who still feel that understanding these things at a deeper and more practical level are important for current humanity.

The fact that what we seek in things exceeds what is directly given us in them, splits our entire being in two parts; we become conscious of our polar opposition to the world. We confront the world as independent beings. The universe appears to us in the polarity: I and the world. We erect this wall of separation between us and the world as soon as consciousness lights up within us. But never do we lose the feeling that we belong even so to the world, that a bond endures that joins us to it, that we are not beings outside, but rather inside the universe.

This feeling creates the striving to bridge the polarity. And the entire spiritual striving of mankind ultimately consists in the bridging of this polarity. The history of our spiritual life is a continuous searching for the unity between us and the world. Religion, art, and science all pursue this goal. The religious believer seeks, within the revelation which God allots to him, the solution to the world riddle that his “I,” not content with the world of mere phenomena, poses him. The artist seeks to fashion into matter the ideas of his “I,” in order to reconcile what lives in his inner being with the outer world. He too feels himself unsatisfied by the world of mere phenomena and seeks to mold into it that something more which his “I,” transcending the world of phenomena, contains. The thinker searches for the laws of phenomena; he strives, thinking, to penetrate what he experiences observing. Only when we have made the world content into our thought content, only then do we find again the connection from which we ourselves have detached ourselves.

The notion that his worldview could "include" ours is also the result of abstraction. You feel the bare concepts of "MAL", or the basic metaphors of "dissociation", etc. are actually explaining our experiences in the world. We disagree. We say this is explaining next to nothing about that experience. It is just labeling the experiences, putting them into the box of "mind", sealing up the box, and that's it. Now everything has been "explained" somehow. Shouldn't a creative and evolving worldview actually present novel forms of ideas, illustrations, arguments, etc? Again, regardless of what you think about our arguments, I don't think it can be reasonably denied we are doing this (assuming you actually follow the essays/posts), while BK endlessly debates materialists about the same "hard problem" over and over. You are right, though, that we don't consider BK's view "wrong" in any fundamental way, only incomplete.

It should be clear that the concepts in these infernal loops are not fundamentally "wrong", but rather they are incomplete because they remain within a flattened and circular plane of thinking. What is common to all such loops? They all lethally undermine the central role and efficacy of our own thinking activity . Moreover, they all force the person engaged in the loop to rely on increasingly more abstract concepts as they seek more understanding. The religious fundamentalist, for example, must perpetually generate doctrines and dogmas, with endless intellectual interpretations, to remain relevant in any spiritual conversation. That is because the other alternative - direct perceiving and knowing of what the doctrines are symbols for - has been excluded from the thought-loop. None of these infernal loops are logically necessary or warranted from our given experience. They are simply the consequence of an intellect which has subconsciously decided to stop reasoning through its experience whenever reaching its subconsciously desired conclusion. It is the software program repeating or terminating itself once it has cycled through its pre-programmed code.

[AshvinP]

Yes, I agree that we might need to "reduce" Ash's "flights of reason and imagination" to something we can more easily get to grips with.
Perhaps we might summarise Ash's stance as follows:
(A) "I can only experience my own thinking. It is an unwarranted abstraction to move from my concrete thinking to a mind or a consciousness"; and
(B) "There is no outside world beyond my own thinking."

(A)
There would be an immediate issue with "unwarranted abstraction". This is because
1) thinking is about percepts and concepts (beyond endogenous awareness, it can't be about anything else); and
2) without the uniting concept of a Mind, you have floating concepts like intuition, imagination, reason, feelings, perceptions which somehow need to be amalgamated into a subjective framework with which we identify (I think BK would mention the Default Mode Network and our internal narratives).

(B)
Need to explain why this is not a version of solipsism.

Wow! Thanks for finally somebody summing up Ashvin's view. I could never get through the convoluted arguments and jargon.

As for "solipsism", I've felt that the arguments for primacy of consciousness as the basis for everything only really work if solipsism is true because the concept of consciousness outside my consciousness is nonsensical.

Why do we need a uniting concept of a "Mind"? We have the living reality of this Mind right at our immanent disposal. We are constantly uniting the fragmented desires, feelings, perceptions, and thoughts into more integrated spheres of laws, principles, and archetypes through our Thinking activity. That is what our Thinking does, whether in philosophy, science, art, or any other field. This is the stance - we can directly, immanently, practically experience the integrating Mind and its qualitative Thinking activity without relying completely on abstract concepts, i.e. mere outer labels.

re: solipsism - we have discussed before how the "anti-solipsist" position ends up being the most solipsistic of all. The former reflects our subconscious desire to take possession of all experience-ideas and hoard them within our own personal bubble of consciousness. We don't want anyone else to partake in our ideal life; to take a peek at what we are desiring, feeling, and thinking. It must all remain forever walled off within our own limited ego. Cleric wrote a fantastic comment about this on my solipsism essay.


viewtopic.php?p=11975#p11975

Let's consider an example. At some point or another we have all come across a beggar and we gave him some change. Our motives for this act are not always very clear. On one hand we do that for our own personal well-being. We feel that we're not that bad person after all, we give something freely from ourselves. Yet we don't really care if the person will buy bread or alcohol with the money. So basically we're only motivated to please our conscience. If we really cared about the person we would speak to him and ask what he needs. If he says he's hungry, we go and buy him food. If he says he needs money for drugs, we reply "Sorry but I don't want to fuel your further downfall."

Very often we fiercely reject precisely that which we ourselves have but are blind for it (first cast out the beam out of thine own eye ...). In our age of extreme fragmentation of soul and spirit, where we feel utterly isolated, we feel (and we must thank for that!) that others must also have their inner experiences. So we feel a kind of pleasing feeling for our conscience when we say "I'm not such a bad person. I may otherwise not believe in anything but I'm benevolent and generous enough to give the pictures of humans walking on the screen of my consciousness, the privilege of having their own "I" experience. I would really be a wicked man if I were to deny this to them."

...

The truth is that in this act of 'generosity' we are far greater solipsists than the solipsist-image that we despise. How could that be? Let's simply think logically. What does it mean to understand someone? It really means not only to understand what his sensory picture impresses into our own thinking but to try and assume the same ideal perspective as the person's, to see things through his thinking eyes. What does it mean to have empathy? To be able to put ourselves in the same feeling aura as the person, to experience pain and pleasure as if they happen to us. So really, it is not simply about granting the walking pictures in our dream their imagined separate bubbles of experience, such that we don't feel too wicked, or simply because we're afraid of loneliness and would much rather fantasize that there are also other bubbles. It's much rather about understanding the perspectives of beings, to partake in their ideal and feeling life. If we do that, we really begin to understand that there's only one soul space.

In the physical realm we understand that our bodies share their substances with the whole Cosmos. When we are in a room with other people, do we realize that what we breathe in was just a minute ago part of the organism of someone else? Similarly, in the realm of soul and spirit we're living in shared medium. In fact, the physical world is only a mineralized shadow of this higher medium.
...
So in short, it is precisely when we rebel against solipsism, that we secretly are the greatest solipsist. The more fiercely we insist that everyone has their separate bubbles of consciousness (we feel this to be an expression of good manners, even benevolence), the more we declare our own isolation - our personal-bubble solipsism.

Our moral worth is not measured by giving spiritual change to walking pictures in our consciousness, such that we can rest comfortably in our personal-bubble solipsism but by seeking to perceive and live with the thoughts and feelings of other beings. To this someone will object "But how do we know that we're experiencing the other's person's soul and spirit life and we're not simply imagining them in our solipsistic personal bubble?" Asking such a question in itself must scare us. I practically admits that we can't know in principle if other beings have inner life. We only grant them inner life because of confused feelings of guilt, generosity, loneliness. Even though it's in principle impossible to prove that other beings have inner experience, we chose to believe so, because it comforts our conscience.

It is completely true that we may as well be fantasizing thoughts and feelings as if they belong to someone else but if we don't stop at isolated phenomena but seek their place in the totality of existence, then we'll also know if we really feel another person's pain and joy, or we're just repurposing our own. We simply need to drop the prejudice (and it's nothing but prejudice) that there's some ontological barrier that thoughts and feelings can't cross. There's nothing to cross - there are only unique perspectives of the same soul and spirit reality, just as we experience unique spatial perspectives of the same physical world.

[lorenzop]

Yes, I agree that we might need to "reduce" Ash's "flights of reason and imagination" to something we can more easily get to grips with.
Perhaps we might summarise Ash's stance as follows:
(A) "I can only experience my own thinking. It is an unwarranted abstraction to move from my concrete thinking to a mind or a consciousness"; and
(B) "There is no outside world beyond my own thinking."

(A)
There would be an immediate issue with "unwarranted abstraction". This is because
1) thinking is about percepts and concepts (beyond endogenous awareness, it can't be about anything else); and
2) without the uniting concept of a Mind, you have floating concepts like intuition, imagination, reason, feelings, perceptions which somehow need to be amalgamated into a subjective framework with which we identify (I think BK would mention the Default Mode Network and our internal narratives).

(B)
Need to explain why this is not a version of solipsism.

I also thank you for this summary of Ash's position - not sure if Ash would agree with your summary however.
The major difference between Ash's position and spiritual positions is that Ashwin wants to preserve/enrich the seperate self at all costs, where as spiritual traditions suggest the seperate self doesn't exist except as a thought with content of a seperate self. Needless to say, I can't guarantee that Ashwin would agree with what I just wrote.

[Ben Iscatus]

Ashwin wants to preserve/enrich the separate self at all costs, where as spiritual traditions suggest the separate self doesn't exist except as a thought with content of a separate self.

Yes, there is a major difference here of intent with BK, too: BK would like the separate self (the dream alter) to disappear asap. I too see it like this, though I like to think I remain open to persuasion that carrying on the separate self (after this experience packet) might be worthwhile...in some circumstances.

[Starbuck]

This is rather good - though all straying off topic a bit