I feel like Bernardo is getting carried away in a scary direction

[lorenzop]

Ashwin,

It would be helpful if you could give an example of a 'meaning' as a 'scientific conceptual form' you mention above . . . maybe you are using the word 'meaning' in a different manner. I suggest this because science is a relatively crisp body of knowledge.

[Lou Gold]

Meaning is what we experience, all the time, everywhere, in every activity we consciously engage. Cleric already explained this to you in the most simple possible terms on the other thread. It's really pretty amazing that people have abstracted so far from experience of the world that they can no longer understand the meaning of "meaning" or perceive it in the world around them. The only reason we can make sense of the world, communicate, do science, create and appreciate art, etc. is because of the shared meaning. Besides that, the entire premise of philosophical idealism is that idea/meaning is essential. It seems a few people here only like to call themselves "idealist" without understanding what it means. I guess that's what happens when meaning is denied existence.

If 'meaning' is what we experience, then why use the word 'meaning' when experience is sufficient? Meaning implies an added something . . . like 'my cup of coffee is telling me something' . . . so waht do you mean by 'meaning'?
Yes we make sense of the world from what we are taught, and programmed by our culture. This is a garden, this a wall, this is how to behave at dinner, etc. People who accept a set of beliefs (like Christians/Jews/atheists) - they have their own peculiar set of 'meanings' - - - but this does not mean these meaning(s) are embedded in reality.

lorenzop,

but this does not mean these meaning(s) are embedded in reality.

Doesn't this depend on whether or not you see yourself as separate from reality? How would it look if you see reality as embedded with your participation including your meanings (and others as well)?

[Eugene I.]

The meanings and ideals do exist as forms of consciousness and like any other forms of consciousness - perceptions, imaginations, acts of will, thoughts etc. They are all creations of consciousness, and they are all experienced by consciousness. There is no nihilism here. But they do not exist somewhere in a "Plationic world of ideas" beyond consciousness and have no absolute existence of their own independent of consciousness. And the sets of these ideas and ideals is unlimited. None of them is better or higher or more valuable or truer than the other in any absolute sense. That is because the criteria of truthfulness and value are also ideas and creations of consciousness, and there is also an unlimited variety of such criteria. How would consciousness know which criterium of truthfulness is the "right one"? It would need another higher-level meta-criterium of truthfulness for the criterium of truthfulness, and for that to be defined another meta-meta criterium of truthfulness will be needed, and so the search for the criterium of truthfulness goes into a bad infinity. Does it mean that the criteria of truthfulness do not exist, or that they are all wrong? No, they do exist, and they are right but each only on its own terms and grounds. It is the same as to ask which of the infinite number of mathematical geometries is "true" and which is "wrong". There are no true and wrong geometries, they are all valid and lawful on their own terms, and they all equally exist in the realm of mathematical ideas.

The times of naive absolutist views on reality with beliefs that in the world of forms there is only one world, one truth, one true geometry, one true frame of reference and one true time in the universe, one true ethics, one true God, one true Church, are gone. The reality of the world of forms is multidimensional and unlimited, and that is because consciousness is unlimited in its ability to create any forms and ideas. So then, is there anything absolute and not dependent on or conditioned by such unlimited variety of forms? Of course there is: it is consciousness itself - "That" which creates and experiences all these forms and ideas. It is futile to search for anything unconditional, permanent, absolute or true in the realm of forms and ideas. The only absolute and unconditional here is That which is searching - the consciousness/thinking itself.

[lorenzop]

Doesn't this depend on whether or not you see yourself as separate from reality? How would it look if you see reality as embedded with your participation including your meanings (and others as well)?

The above 2 are one circumstance, one sees onself as seperate and as participating. This is an 'honest' circumstance but as Buddha, Christ and other great teachers would claim - it is a mis-diagnosis.

[Lou Gold]

Doesn't this depend on whether or not you see yourself as separate from reality? How would it look if you see reality as embedded with your participation including your meanings (and others as well)?

The above 2 are one circumstance, one sees onself as seperate and as participating. This is an 'honest' circumstance but as Buddha, Christ and other great teachers would claim - it is a mis-diagnosis.

Is interdependent co-arising a mistaken diagnosis?

[lorenzop]

Doesn't this depend on whether or not you see yourself as separate from reality? How would it look if you see reality as embedded with your participation including your meanings (and others as well)?

The above 2 are one circumstance, one sees onself as seperate and as participating. This is an 'honest' circumstance but as Buddha, Christ and other great teachers would claim - it is a mis-diagnosis.

Is interdependent co-arising a mistaken diagnosis?

As I understand the ‘model’ this is no-self no mis-diagnosis. Haha
Qi

[Lou Gold]

The above 2 are one circumstance, one sees onself as seperate and as participating. This is an 'honest' circumstance but as Buddha, Christ and other great teachers would claim - it is a mis-diagnosis.

Is interdependent co-arising a mistaken diagnosis?

As I understand the ‘model’ this is no-self no mis-diagnosis. Haha
Qi

Perhaps, an "answer" is whatever makes the question go away.

[AshvinP]

Ashwin,

It would be helpful if you could give an example of a 'meaning' as a 'scientific conceptual form' you mention above . . . maybe you are using the word 'meaning' in a different manner. I suggest this because science is a relatively crisp body of knowledge.

I mean scientific worldview, along with other worldviews, are themselves "conceptual form". Put another way, they are objects we can observe, study, and connect together through meaningful principles just like any other object in the world. One of the biggest issues with "critical idealism" is that it puts the limited human ego at the very top perspective on the world content. Everything else is considered to be contained within its own perspective as thought-marbles. This is evident in materialistic and mystical worldviews especially. But also the critical idealist view.

The philosophical reason this happens is because our world of inner experience and meaning is considered "subjective" and naively real. The analytic idealists have no problem rejecting naive realism of outer perceptions, but then adopt a naive realism of inner perceptions. We are always tempted to consider our perceptions of inner experiences as the totality of the meaningful activity which led to them, rather than the very end product. When we see a rock outside, we say that is the very end result, outer surface, of ideational activity of "MAL" (which is easily reasoned out and confirmed by modern science). But when we perceive our thought-forms, we feel those are 'things-in-themselves'.

We forget that there is this entire history to our own thoughts and we are only perceiving the end result. Naturally, if we confuse the end result for the totality of meaning of our "thoughts", we have no motivation to try and trace back the 'scars' to the entire flow of activity which resulted in the thought-perception. This is like someone seeing splashes of water on the pavement and assuming the splashes explain the entire nature of water and its activity, forgetting that it precipitated from the atmosphere and flowed through oceans, rivers, lakes, pipes, and a hose to result in those water splashes.

It is really a result of egoic greed and pride (which is entirely subconscious). We want our inner experiences, our thought-marbles, all to ourselves and we want them to be the last word on what can be known. "If I can't overcome my knowing limits, no one else can either. It must be a hard limit of Reality itself." I'm sorry, but Eugene is prime representative of this view, as once again reflected in his last comment. He simply refuses to consider the possibility that his own thought-marbles about spirituality are not the last word and his own limits are not the limits of the world. We are all constantly tempted by this egoic force and the only way to mitigate it is to first recognize it really exists within us (this is the spirit of repentance). It is no coincidence the people who have the hardest time with this also are uneasy about Christian notions of sin, guilt, and repentance.

When that egoic assumption is resisted, it's easy to see how science points us directly towards our inner meaningful activity. When meaning is not arbitrarily excluded from the "real" world content, we can study its various manifestations and transformations in an objective and verifiable way. Our inner world is just as lawful and structured as the physical world we perceive as outer. In fact, depth psychology and cognitive science shows that we structure the outer world through our ideational activity, which is not only limited to our own egoic perspective. This only stands to Reason and the structure of this inner world is what we call Logic.

The meaning we experience in outer and inner forms precipitates from much more richly meaningful activity. Again, it is the intellectual ego which declares its own localized meaning to be more structured and "real" than the meaning which fashioned the entire Cosmic order we perceive in the heavens above and the various kingdoms of Earth. There simply is no logical warrant for that assumption and it runs into all sorts of hard problems, because it has reduced Cosmic meaning to mineralized thought-marbles, like the materialist reduces it to mineralized particles, and then tries to reconstruct the Cosmic order from those marbles. When it can't, it declares Cosmic meaning to be non-existent or forever beyond the capacity of human reason. This conveniently projects our current cognitive limits onto Reality and absolves of us our guilt for refusing to save the appearances of Nature.

[lorenzop]

Instead of answering my question re ‘meaning’ and ‘world content’ - specifically giving an example of what you are talking about - you throw up another wall of nonsense including nuggets like ‘thought-bubbles’.
I think you are suggesting that the world includes a layer of meaning- ok -can you provide an example of this meaning other than saying meaning is everything we experience.
For example, there is the phrase ‘human being’, and this phrase means something. Are you saying the meaning itself is stored in the world? The universe is also a dictionary?

[AshvinP]

Instead of answering my question re ‘meaning’ and ‘world content’ - specifically giving an example of what you are talking about - you throw up another wall of nonsense including nuggets like ‘thought-bubbles’.
I think you are suggesting that the world includes a layer of meaning- ok -can you provide an example of this meaning other than saying meaning is everything we experience.
For example, there is the phrase ‘human being’, and this phrase means something. Are you saying the meaning itself is stored in the world? The universe is also a dictionary?

Lorenzo,

I am assuming we have at least intellectually assented that mind/matter dualism is not viable metaphysics. It sounds like you want me to go through the entire arguments of idealist philosophy which challenges that dualism. It's really simple - meaning is what we live in and what we are. There is no abstract spatial dimension, because that is our physical representation of currently imperceptible (ideal) meaning. So there is no "storage" of anything, anywhere, in any spatial sense. The word-form "human being" is a symbol we use to point towards shared meaning. Many symbols can point to the same meaning. Just like I may point towards a tree to direct your attention to it, we use speech as thinking-gestures to point our own or someone else's attention to shared meaning. There is not "my tree" and "your tree", only the tree we are both looking at from different spatiotemporal angles.

But maybe these word-forms will suddenly make more sense to you once you know they are coming from BK, in his still relatively non-nihilistic phase, instead of me:

Chapter 15 then addresses the implications of idealism with respect to the significance and purpose of life in the world. Indeed, whereas physicalism denies the semantic meaning of the world by construing it to be a mechanical contraption governed by blind laws and mere chance, idealism regards the world as the symbolic appearance of what religious traditions throughout history have referred to as ‘God’s Mind.’ This way, according to idealism, nature holds hidden but inherent semantic meaning. One could even go as far as to hypothesize that, under idealism, the telos of life is to contemplate and understand ‘God’s thoughts’ from a perspective unavailable to ‘God.’

Kastrup, Bernardo. The Idea of the World (p. 201). John Hunt Publishing. Kindle Edition.