New topic split from 'concise criticism of analytic idealism' thread.

[Soul_of_Shu]

So whose redemption are we talking about?

I think that the main question in your question is ‘Who is the ‘I’ who seeks redemption?’ Are we protected enough from the materialist ‘I’ who got kicked out through the door, trying to sneak back in through the window, asking: ‘Hey, where is my redemption?’

Well yes, that's one way of contemplating it: insofar as anyone can be redeemed, everyOne is eventually redeemed, since there is no-One else to be redeemed, other than the conceiver of a state to be redeemed from. And should that time arrive, it will of course be here and now, the only time there really is. And so, as eternity is reckoned, what's a few eons more or less?

Meanwhile, one can be content that the danger of frost has apparently passed, so the soil can be tilled, the compost spread, and the seeds can be planted and nurtured, as from the rot a new harvest is begot ... and likewise is the psyche's lot.

[Federica]

...

Let me expand some more on this topic of human thinking. The dualism I refer to above is only natural when we forget the role of our own thinking in the ever-evolving World Processes. In this sense, I am not claiming BK or anyone else is unaware that they must use logical thinking to reach a philosophical conclusion. If asked about this, they will say, "of course I had to think for my conclusion." The claim is that they have forgotten the simple fact that everything which is perceived in the world or in thought, would be a "blooming, buzzing confusion" in the absence of intuitive (mostly subconscious) thinking which weaves together perceptions and concepts into coherent wholes of experience. It is a fact we can discern from our immanent experience of the world around us as we confront its content, and has also been confirmed many times over by modern psychology and cognitive science, and theoretical physics as well (think the 'uncertainty principle' or double-split experiments in QM).

Interesting attempts have been made to arrive at the relation between thinking and perceiving by imagining them actually divided from each other. You may remember Williams James's supposition of a confrontation between, on the one hand, the environment... and, on the other, a man who possessed all the organs of perception, but who had never done any thinking. He demonstrated that such a man would perceive nothing, or nothing but what James called "a blooming buzzing confusion". Well, he was only expressing in his own blunt way the conclusion which always is arrived at by all who make the same attempt, whether philosophers, psychologists, neurologists, or physicists. Unfortunately it is also a conclusion which is commonly forgotten by those same [people] almost as soon it has been arrived at; or certainly as soon as they turn their minds to other matters - such as history or evolution - but which I personally decline to forget. I mean the conclusion, the irrefragable consensus, that what we perceive is structurally inseparable from what we think.
...
The distinction between [perceiving and thinking] is... rather easy to lose sight of, once we begin to reflect or philosophize, for this reason: that the single experience we call "consciousness" - our inwardness at any given moment - is not composed either of perceiving alone or of thinking alone, but of an immemorial and inextricable combination of the two. Indeed it is better to call it an interpenetration rather than a combination. We soon learn, once we begin to reflect, that what we have been accustomed to refer to in everyday speech as "perceiving" - as for instance when we speak of perceiving a chair... or for that matter a neuron or chromosome - is in fact perception heavily laced with thinking, with habitual thought, with mental habit.

Kant actually understood this aspect of experience - he knew concepts were always interwoven with perceptions of the world. But Schopenhauer had to forget this aspect of Kant, and his own thinking experience, to declare the "blind instinctive Will" is fundamental. He thought of humans as tiny thinking men riding the shoulders of a blind Willing Giant. Consider this comparison with materialist thinking. Newton formulated the now standard accepted color theory after setting up an experiment, in which a prism is introduced into an environment and light which passes through it is perceived as differentiating into colors of the rainbow. His conclusion was, "these colors all exist within the 'light-itself' and make themselves known to us when some dynamic of the prism draws them out."

What is not accounted for in this conception? The fact that the human thinking agency created the conditions for colors to manifest in this way. We should all ask ourselves whether we also think of light and similar phenomena like Newton did. Do we say, "of course there is a human involved, but it doesn't matter, because the light and its embedded colors exist whether I am there to arrange the experiment or not... these things all preexist human thinking experiments." If we think this way, then that means we are under duress of this modern forgetfulness and 'view from nowhere'. It doesn't matter what the "essence" of Light is right now - we can't reasonably speak of philosophical or scientific conclusions about Light and colors after abstracting out human thinking agency. We have then simply ignored at least half of the given facts which need to be accounted for.

That is what Schopenhauer and many others did and are still doing. The 'blind Will' can never be experienced or known, because it is always the self-aware, lucid, awakened thinking agency which is experiencing and knowing. Once this is understood, however, then our logical reasoning leads to an Idealism, not only in theory, but in its full reality and significance. It leads to what has traditionally been known as "spiritual reality" which is entirely interwoven with and responsible for our normal waking experience. That is quite the opposite of what Schopenhauer and BK want to conclude. Then the stories 'we tell ourselves' as MAL are not only hallucinations and fantasies bubbling up before we return to the instinctive Will, but the exact opposite - they are archetypal reflections of the structure of higher worlds - more Self-aware than we can currently imagine - to which we consciously return after death.

AshvinP,

I am puzzled reading this.

BK spends pages and pages, in The idea of the World for example, arguing for just the same thing you are asserting, namely non-contextuality in QM, the Copenhagen and the relational interpretations, the empirical fact that the perception or observation of a physical phenomenon has now been known to be contextual to the given observer for decades, and simply does not exist independently of an observer (as opposed to the predictions of newtonian physics) and how this dismantles the materialistic worldview...

I don't understand when you say 'That is quite the opposite of what Schopenhauer and BK want to conclude'.

BK agrees with the idea that perception is interwoven with concepts, and the thinking that makes them up. The example of how we arbitrarily perceive and conceptualize a car for example, is an illustration of just that.
I admit I still do not exactly get what this 'blind instinctive will' is supposed to be, however what does unfold in BK's model is that, just as you say, the stories we tell ourselves are archetypal reflections of the structure of higher worlds.

Wouldn't it be better to just leave at least Shopenhauer and his giant will behind once and for all?

[AshvinP]

AshvinP,

I would like to adopt your nutshell explanations of idealism’s trajectory and start from there. Obviously I can’t, however they do give me insights into your line of thought. Thank you for going to that trouble, it helps, but from my near-blank state I am still struggling to grasp what you mean by ‘a return to the Idea aspect of idealism as emphasized until Kant’.

Now, commenting on what I do feel I can grasp - Bk’s post on human mind’s self-deceptive nature.
Pessimism in this post is only a thin veil, attached to vocabulary perhaps… we read ‘deception’ and we go: ‘Oh.. so sad’. That’s it. Beyond that first level semantics, there is no pessimism there, in my opinion.


It seems to me that one can only mourn a ‘solid waking reality’ - one that would not be conjured up by mind in the same way a drug hallucination is - from the standpoint of someone who is somehow, in a corner of their mind, nostalgic of materialism. Only from such a place the self-deceptive nature of mind is destabilizing, sad, and pessimistic. Only the idealist who bravely gave up on the solid ground offered by ‘reality’ but is gritting their teeth at the same time, will be left with a sour taste by the idea that 'this waking reality too is not outside mind'.
But for the fully-fledged idealist it's just... business as usual! Howelse? It seems you do not grant BK the capacity to take responsibility for his own philosophy? From my perspective, I have some criticisms, but at least this I would grant him...


You write: ‘I am sure you will agree he is denying the ability of human reason to reach essential knowledge in this article’. I don’t think he is.
First, what is ‘essential knowledge’? The knowledge human reason can reach is mental, and essentially-mental knowledge is all the knowledge there is to the human mind, so yes, absolutely, the human reason can reach essential knowledge. This is what I read in this article. The only way to be sad about that and to be pessimistic, is to be grieving an essential physicalist-style type of knowledge.


And second, for an idealist ( for BK, I gather?) human reason is so far apart from being everything. So far apart from being our true nature. Why should the idealist be so deeply concerned and depressed by what human reason can or cannot reach? Consciousness is one. Human reason is a localization, or a temporary pattern of excitation, of and within it. So what human reason, or the separate self, or the body-mind, or the ego-mind identity, or the dissociated alter, or whatever we wanna call it can or cannot reach is quite relative in BK’s system, isn’t it?
I don’t see why this observation about the works of human reason as the modality (universal) mind uses ‘to talk to, and make sense of, itself’ should ascribe BK into a tradition of pessimism.

(this was a partial reply, sorry, I need more time to assimilate the rest of your comments)

Frederica,

Let me first say, I am only focusing on BK's outlook as an approach to the broader ideas at play, which it is clear to me are pervasive throughout Western culture and thinking, regardless of ontology. We can abandon Kant, Schopenhauer, and BK altogether and simply discuss the underlying issues, if you prefer. Since you are familiar with BK's writings, though, I feel it may be helpful to use what he has written recently as a stepping stone to these deeper issues. And I don't think it's fair to say BK has left Schopenhauer behind in any sense. Are you familiar with this book, Decoding Schopenhauer's Metaphysics? I am also not suggesting none of Kant, Schop, or BK is valuable philosphical insight. Quite the opposite - the worst habits of thinking for modern man to deal with are those which include a lot of valuable insight but leave out that tiny portion of underlying logic which then leads to radically different conclsions. This isn't about what is "sad" or how it makes me feel, but what is logically consistent under idealism? Since we all agree that idealism is the proper ontological framework, this should be the question to answer.

Let's focus on this article BK wrote. The question is, how is this functionally any different from mind/matter dualism? It has simply placed the subject/object dualism in the realm of Mind. It has disconnected ideas and ideation (subject) from will/perceptions (objects). It makes the latter fundamental and says the former is self-deceptive activity which somehow arises from 'blind Will'. That reflectively thinking individuals who cognize science, aesthetics, and moral ideals somehow emerged from instinctive consciousness which began with smaller 'dissociated' whirlpools of consciousness and then evolved, or somehow became, more complex and sentient, and start telling these aesthetic and moral tales to itself to appease the pain during a life under the oppression of the blind Will.  In this sense, it is little different from what atheists and rationalists claim about spiritual outlooks as well - they are subsconsious 'wish fulfillments', or 'opiates for the masses'.

On the topic of blind Will evolving into sentient Thinking, let's notice how the concept of simple, instinctive mind-like things combining together to form complex, sentient beings like us is the functional equivalent of material evolutionary theory. It has all the same hard problems, such as the problem of how life comes from non-life and how sentience comes from non-sentience. It has only deluded itself into thinking it bypassed these hard problems, but it hasn't. Perhaps we feel like we lose the ground beneath our feet if we question standard evolutionary theory. But, as Donald Hoffman often points out, modern science has only been studying dynamics of perceptions within the interface. Standard evolutionary theory itself is Maya, and only the logical axioms underlying it can be utilized to reach a deeper understanding of ideal evolution.


https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant/#TraIde

Perhaps the central and most controversial thesis of the Critique of Pure Reason is that human beings experience only appearances, not things in themselves; and that space and time are only subjective forms of human intuition that would not subsist in themselves if one were to abstract from all subjective conditions of human intuition. Kant calls this thesis transcendental idealism. One of his best summaries of it is arguably the following:

"We have therefore wanted to say that all our intuition is nothing but the representation of appearance; that the things that we intuit are not in themselves what we intuit them to be, nor are their relations so constituted in themselves as they appear to us; and that if we remove our own subject or even only the subjective constitution of the senses in general, then all constitution, all relations of objects in space and time, indeed space and time themselves would disappear, and as appearances they cannot exist in themselves, but only in us. What may be the case with objects in themselves and abstracted from all this receptivity of our sensibility remains entirely unknown to us.

Schop and BK adopt the above position as well, but carve out an exception for "blind Will". It is ironic how these critical idealists deny the capacity of reason to reach essential truths (I know you are unsure of this, but it's easily verifiable in the Standford philosophical encyclopedia), but when it comes to the most essential dynamic we know of - the metamorphoses of the Cosmos and its life - critical idealism simply transposes materialist theory onto a "mental" ontology. It's a case of talking a lot about "Maya", but not acting like Maya is a real thing which needs to be overcome by modern science. We really need to sense how most sciences have not even begun to understand essential dynamics yet, since it is only theorizing about interface perceptions abstractly, stripped of all ideal (qualitative) significance.

Why did this happen? We can say the ideal pole is half of all reality. That is, the invisible meaningful context which embeds its polar opposite- the visible, perceptual world. Standard science only takes into account the latter. The ideal pole is ignored because it can't be seen with a microscope or telescope, and it takes less thinking effort to only study one half of reality - the visible half - than to account for both. Analytic idealism does the exact same thing by declaring the ideal pole unknowable. It places that half behind a hard dissociative boundary between 'alters' and 'MAL', like the materialist does with black holes, quantum voids below the Planck scale, etc. Then they go on speculating with abstract models exactly as the materialist does. This is simply materialism and reductionism dressed up in idealist language. The archetypal ideal depth structure is entirely missing - the point is not that they won't admit this strucuture is possible in theory, but that we can't precisely know its dynamics during life on Earth.

And this is what constitutes spiritual progress, that man integrates with the surrounding world. It is of little use to speak of these things theoretically. It is not particularly profound mystically to say that you are one with the world by merely thinking that you are, if you do not begin to experience the fact that when you are thinking you are living in the entire Earth's light.

There is also a clear logical inconsistency in the fact that BK and other analytic philosophers are always engaging in systematic reasoning activity, and engaging this activity presupposes that they are moving towards a more comprehensive understanding of Truth with this reason. The intellect denies the possibility of what it is actually doing; thinking denies Thinking. His last two sentences in that article are a great example of this dynamic - (1) "The demiurges and aliens are all, indeed, just mind-made hallucinations; but so is this, right now." (2) "If you can wrap your mind around that, you will see the world with very different eyes." What does it mean to "see the world with different eyes"? Does it not mean to see the world better than you were seeing it before, to move from hallucination of Maya closer to reality? The very concept of "seeing better", especially in the philosophical context, implies a move towards a more harmonious understanding of Reality itself. But, according to BK approach, we must declare this understanding so reached a self-deception as well, i.e. we are not seeing the world any better through its lens. The only other alternative is to say, "once we reach a story that I prefer, we have reached the essence of things."

We can't ignore the practical dimension either - what is the point of philosophy if not to make a practical difference in our living experience of the world and ourselves? This is not about how his arguments make anyone feel, but how it translates into the world where people desire, feel, and think. BK himself has stated he is interested in combatting the 'meaning crisis' of Western culture through his philosophy. Yet his position, which is the same dominant position of Western philosophy over the last few centuries, entails the abandonment of all essential truth, aesthetics, and morality as expressed through our stories - it entails a deepening of the meaning crisis. According to BK, we are just dreaming about aliens from the Pleiades and may as well stop torturing ourselves with things like "humility", "compassion", "sacrifice", "service". This is the logical outcome of these beliefs whether it is admitted or not. "Good, evil, spirit beings, aliens... it makes no difference!" But it does make a difference for all those people in the world who are not armchair intellectuals and can discern the great tragedies coming our way from this nihilistic and apathetic outlook.

[AshvinP]

I don't understand when you say 'That is quite the opposite of what Schopenhauer and BK want to conclude'.

BK agrees with the idea that perception is interwoven with concepts, and the thinking that makes them up. The example of how we arbitrarily perceive and conceptualize a car for example, is an illustration of just that.
I admit I still do not exactly get what this 'blind instinctive will' is supposed to be, however what does unfold in BK's model is that, just as you say, the stories we tell ourselves are archetypal reflections of the structure of higher worlds.

Wouldn't it be better to just leave at least Shopenhauer and his giant will behind once and for all?

Let me address this by elaborating on the ideal pole, hopefully making it more concrete. What better place to understand the ideal pole than in our own ideation? Let's say we have the idea to "play 'canon in D' on piano". We form intention and body goes into movement - we walk to the piano, sit down, and start moving our fingers. This gives rise to a flow of beats, notes, and chords. These are perceptions of the material-visible pole - we sense these with our hearing. Yet the meaning of the song actually lives in the tempo - the spacing between the musical perceptions. As we deviate from the proper tempo, we start to hear either chaotic array of sounds on the one end, when the tempo is sped up too much, or, on the other, when slowed down too much, nothing at all.





This is the polar relation between idea and perception, invisible and visible, for all forms we perceive in the world. Idea is associated with Time while perception is associated with space at our current stage of cognitive development. The concept of polarity arose in philosophy in the last few centuries to express this relationship better without lapsing into duality, where one pole is thought to exclude the other or one can be reduced to the other. With polarity, we come closer to understanding, as far as possible for the intellect (which is not very far), that one pole gives rise to the other by working against it and neither pole is reducible to the other. Now let's apply this to theory of evolution.

When we consider our own ideational activity, we feel this as 'top-down' activity, instead of bottom-up, right? Our consciousness sets in motion a series of perceptual states of being from the top-down, including the sounds, which then feed back into our ideas, our intentions and actions. Now if we are analogizing this to Consciousness at large, which exists in the same polar relation, and its higher dynamic doesn't exist behind some impenetrable veil to human thinking, but instead is concentric with our own ideational activity, then we see how a radically different understanding of Cosmic evolution develops. Our ideas are like the perceptual states, the musical notes, of beings and their higher ideations, precipitating from the top-down.

Most importantly, there is no principle reason why our consciousness cannot expand to encompass those higher ideations with inner effort. Do you see the difference between this and simply saying, "MAL differentiated into alters somehow, and then these evolved into us, and now we must simply wait for death to find out the truth of how exactly this all happened, for the 'dissociative boundary' to dissolve"? Either that, or we dissolve back into instinctive consciousness and never come to know what's happening to make our ideational experience possible. This is what is at stake here - whether we are destined to only abstractly speculate about what's behind it all until we die, or whether we can know precisely, through experience, some of the higher ideations concentric to our own.

The blind Will speculation simply ignores the ideal pole, as I have outlined it above. As mentioned, it is the mirror image of materialism. The latter says we started with a unified singularity of some sort, which then differentiated into the fundamental forces and particles, and then these recombined to form purely instinctive living organisms which evolved into thinking beings. So the only difference is, instead of mindless forces and particles, BK has given them the 'privilege' of starting out with instinctive consciousness, like a clever animal (he has used example of a crocodile before), before evolving into thinking humans. Either way, the conceptual systems function the same way and both give us the same one-sided understanding of the how MAL differentiated, i.e. what exactly is awaiting us after death and what can we precisely know about its ideational dynamics now.

Is it a coincidence that both materialism and analytic idealism erect this hard boundary at death, beyond which we cannot perceive and cognize? This is also related to your initial criticism of the flawed bodily boundary erected by AI. Materialism does the same exact thing. Another coincidence? They both deny the shared reality of existential values like morality, tying these in with 'self-deceptive stories'. No coincidence here either - it is simply the natural consequence of reasoning from flawed dualistic premises to begin with, which divide the ideal from perceptual pole and prioritize the latter while practically ignoring the former. They reach mirrored conclusions in all questions of existential importance because they conceive of the world from the same abstracted perspective, in which the ideational subject and its top-down activity has been removed from consideration for all practical purposes and intents.

PS - if you question whether I am accurately representing BK's position, that's fine and we can discuss that as well, but more importantly I want to know what are your thoughts on what is written above, regardless of BK's position on it?

[Lou Gold]

[Federica]

This exchange is taking a somewhat improbable turn, AshvinP, I suspect.
Not sure why you are going to this trouble, but ok, let me try to do as if a phylosophical background wasn’t an insurmountable hindrance. It's interesting. Let’s see.

All right:
‘Familiar with Decoding Shopenhauer’s Metaphysics?’:
No… this is to me the absolute least appealing BK book ever, so I haven’t even considered reading it. My interest is not to become good at practicing philosophy, or to become knowledgeable of philosophy, but only to explore philosophical views as one possible path among others toward meaningful being.

‘This isn’t about what is sad or how it makes me feel’:
Yes, but pessimism is strongly evocative of sentiment, right? Or is there any specifically philosophical meaning to the word that I should be aware of?


‘The question to answer should be what is logically consistent under idealism’:
To be honest, the question that interests me is to find a philosophical system that is able to
1. explain reality - which to me means, on one side, ideate an explanation that is both encompassing and continuous, and on the other side, more importantly, able to accommodate experimental evidence of all kinds; and
2. - which should follow from 1. - inspire individuals and humanity as a whole out of dysfunctional modes of existence.
When it comes to aiming for logical consistency, I suspect philosophical complications might arise. I loosely know (correct me if I’m wrong) that philosophers have come up with more than one logic, not necessarily compatible with each other…
So a focus on logic sounds a little alarming to me. I am not interested in a chess-game-like philosophy (not saying that you are) or in a math-like philosophy that lives and dies in an abstract playground of axioms and logic (not saying that you are).
My interest is to understand reality and then bring that understanding into being. I am only interested in apprehending logic in this perspective.

‘Let’s focus on this article BK wrote’:
Ok, what I am writing here is tentative. I would need to compare with an alternative idealism, one that does not do all the faux pas you raise here.
It seems to me that by putting mind and matter, or subject and object, into the realm of Mind, BK has well kept them connected? continuous? entirely made of the same fundamental, non-material, experiential stuff?
I don't understand the disconnection you are pointing to, other than perhaps, again, in opposition to Kant. You say: ‘he has disconnected ideas and ideation (subject) from will/perceptions (objects)’. I understand he puts perceptions on the subject side, and will too, on the subject side. There is only subject. The only thing that makes will disconnected from subject is the poor membrane of dissociation. This is really not much of a thing, and it’s porous, and it’s subject to all sorts of impingements and waves. How can this thin membrane be held accountable for disconnection, and worse for being the foundation of a whole dualistic system? That would be a dualism between water inside and water outside a fish net.

‘It makes the latter (objects) fundamental and says the former (subject) is self-deceptive activity which somehow arises from blind Will’:
What is self-deceptive there is not the subject, it's perception. It’s the waking-state, dream-like perception of the world…
Now, what seems to bother you is the lack of detailed evolutionary explanation of how metacognition has arisen and evolved out of and parallel to ‘blind’, or predictable, mentation. Yes, this is true, and it would have been nice indeed to have a more satisfying answer than just “it has arisen through the appearance of metabolism/life”. But that you then take leverage on this shortfall to suggest that in BK’s system metacognition is there for Mind to appease human suffering through telling itself the soothing story of religion, seems a little acrobatic: metacognition and its self-deceptive nature is the cause of suffering there, not its remedy!


‘...let's notice how the concept of simple, instinctive mind-like things combining together to form complex, sentient beings like us...’:
This concept of combination from simple to complex is absent from BK’s system. It is just not there. Metacognition is not the result of a combination of mind-like basic things. The question that BK’s idealism has to solve is rather de-combination: how to explain the emergence of localized, somewhat delineated, separated, limited (human) consciousness from an ocean of hyper-complex, all encompassing universal mentation.
By the way, I have no problem with putting evolutionary theory under inquiry. More: I have the intuition that this might well be a crucial point…

‘as Donald Hoffman often points out, modern science has only been studying dynamics of perceptions within the interface’:
Yes

'Schop and BK adopt the above position (Kant’s) as well, but carve out an exception for "blind Will"':
It is a little misleading to go on assimilating these two. BK never speaks in terms of blind will, so it would be useful if you could be more precise about where BK is carving out this exception.


‘It is ironic how these critical idealists deny the capacity of reason to reach essential truths (I know you are unsure of this, but it's easily verifiable in the Stanford philosophical encyclopedia)’:
I only opposed this in relation to BK (and I guess the Stanford encyclopedia cannot fault me in this regard?) For Shopenhauer, it might very well be, I just don’t know.

‘It's a case of talking a lot about "Maya", but not acting like Maya is a real thing which needs to be overcome by modern science. We really need to sense how most sciences have not even begun to understand essential dynamics yet, since it is only theorizing about interface perceptions abstractly, stripped of all ideal (qualitative) significance.’:
To be precise, science is about observing and testing - not abstractly - the interface, and it is about theorizing, abstractly, about what lies behind the interface. So how could science overcome the interface? Science has to be grounded in experiment and observation, and the only access to experiment is the interface. Maya/the illusion of perception, is a real thing that needs to be overcome by philosophy, not science.


‘This is simply materialism and reductionism dressed up in idealist language. The archetypal ideal depth structure is entirely missing - the point is not that they won't admit this structure is possible in theory, but that we can't precisely know its dynamics during life on Earth.’:
BK writes quite a few things about the archetypal patterns underlying MAL. It is not entirely missing at all. Have you read Decoding Jung’s Metaphysics?

'The very concept of "seeing better", especially in the philosophical context, implies a move towards a more harmonious understanding of Reality itself. But, according to BK approach, we must declare this understanding so reached a self-deception as well, i.e. we are not seeing the world any better through its lens. The only other alternative is to say, "once we reach a story that I prefer, we have reached the essence of things."':
Yes, this was a very well put criticism. I have to agree.
There would be more to be said about the 'I prefer' alternative..


‘...his position, which is the same dominant position of Western philosophy over the last few centuries, entails the abandonment of all essential truth, aesthetics, and morality as expressed through our stories - it entails a deepening of the meaning crisis. According to BK, we are just dreaming about aliens from the Pleiades and may as well stop torturing ourselves with things like "humility", "compassion", "sacrifice", "service". This is the logical outcome of these beliefs whether it is admitted or not. "Good, evil, spirit beings, aliens... it makes no difference!" But it does make a difference for all those people in the world who are not armchair intellectuals and can discern the great tragedies coming our way from this nihilistic and apathetic outlook.’:
Ok… I am under the impression that there is too much intertwined here, going perhaps beyond philosophy. I agree to some small extent, but I will not try to unravel all this, for now...

[Martin_]

How can this thin membrane be held accountable for disconnection, and worse for being the foundation of a whole dualistic system? That would be a dualism between water inside and water outside a fish net.

I agree. I don't see BK's philosophiy as being dualistic either.
However, this still requires a fish net, which I believe is what some people are having a problem with.

[Cleric K]

I don't understand the disconnection you are pointing to, other than perhaps, again, in opposition to Kant. You say: ‘he has disconnected ideas and ideation (subject) from will/perceptions (objects)’. I understand he puts perceptions on the subject side, and will too, on the subject side. There is only subject. The only thing that makes will disconnected from subject is the poor membrane of dissociation. This is really not much of a thing, and it’s porous, and it’s subject to all sorts of impingements and waves. How can this thin membrane be held accountable for disconnection, and worse for being the foundation of a whole dualistic system? That would be a dualism between water inside and water outside a fish net.

Federica, maybe it's worth specifying more clearly what duality it is here spoken of.

In the most general sense we can speak of two kinds. The first we can call theoretical. The second is the actual, living, experiential, practical. The former is very easy to define and resolve. For example, I can say "It's all One!" There - I'm the greatest non-dualist one can ever be. What could be more inclusive than this? But let's try to introspect more closely what we're really doing in this way. We're summoning a thought within the field of consciousness - in this case a verbal thought. Normally, the thoughts that we produce are mental images of something. For example, the verbal thought 'red' is a mental image of the qualitative experience of redness. Note that the verbal thought in my mind is not colored red. It's not even a color perception, it's a sound. Yet it exists in resonant relation with the color qualia of red, so when I hear 'red', together with the sound, a remembrance of the color experience is summoned.

Now when we say "water inside and water outside the fish net" we also have a verbal thought, a sound. Hopefully this mental image should exist in resonant relations with actual living experience. If that's not the case, we say that the thought is abstract. It's abstracted away from any real experience, we don't even know how to imagine what it speaks of.

So this is the first thing to be vigilant of. We should be clear that ideally our thoughts should always be images of actual living experience. In certain sense the thoughts (concepts) are like holographic symbols, handles for the much more encompassing constellation of spiritual phenomena that we want to pinpoint.

When Ashvin speaks of BK succumbing to dualism, it is implied that this experiential perspective from which the words can be seen as symbols of living experience, is not sought. Of course, 'on paper' BK is non-dualist - we have the water inside, water outside and the porous fish net. Very elegant solution. Yet most will agree that the former sentence exists as thought image within the interior of the fish net, in our personal consciousness. But what if we're not satisfied only with the symbolic arrangement of the words 'water', 'fish net', 'inside', 'outside'? What if we want to seek the living experience from whence such words can be seen as direct testimonies, in the same way the verbal thought 'red' is a testimony for the spiritual experience of redness? Here things become more problematic and here's the concealed dualism. The intellect (for example in the form of arrangements of verbal thoughts) remains entirely within the bounds of the fish net. It can postulate that it's essence is part of an ocean and the fish net interior is in constant exchange with the outside through the pores but what is the living experience which can be described in such a way? Here most will speak of the mystical experience or the psychedelic experience but these remain entirely inexplicable phenomena. Anyone with sober sense for their inner life will have to admit that whatever these experiences are, ultimately we're left once again with the intellect in the interior, which builds abstract theories that should explain the inexplicable experience. That's the reason why one can have a lot of experience with psychedelics and still remain a materialist. If the brain can generate any kind of subjective experience why not create also an experience which feels to be boundless ocean of consciousness? Why should the brain be forced to create subjective experiences which only feel to be the size of the head?

This is the actual dualism. Ultimately we have a wall of phenomena and we build intellectual models of the within and the beyond. For some, outside is Heaven and God. For others, it is the water demarcated by porous membrane. The fact remains that the intellect lives strictly within the soul space - whatever its nature is - and even if it theoretically postulates continuity between the interior and exterior, experientially we continue to behold only the inner wall (interface) and speculate about the essence of what's behind it. Unless we get a very real feel for this fact, nothing of what Ashvin speaks of will be grasped.

To be honest, the question that interests me is to find a philosophical system that is able to
1. explain reality - which to me means, on one side, ideate an explanation that is both encompassing and continuous, and on the other side, more importantly, able to accommodate experimental evidence of all kinds; and

Here we should make another thing perfectly clear. I'm not saying that you intend it in this way but most certainly it is so for the vast majority. When we seek explanations, even without knowing it, we've assumed a specific epistemological stance. We may not even know what epistemology is, we may not know what philosophy is but in general we expect some explanatory thoughts that should feel satisfactory, they should be resonant with all our perceptions. If they are not resonant we feel cognitive dissonance and we simply say that the explanation doesn't make sense, it doesn't fit reality.

When we seek explanations in this way, we subconsciously assume that knowledge about reality as attained by building a thought image of reality which should be matched against all perceptions. But this leaves one important factor out of the question - what is thinking itself? We assume that thinking exists for the sole purpose to create a mental mirror image of reality, then we go on to say that this image-creating activity exists only within the fish net. We create a mental image of the outside but postulate that all thought dissolves as we cross the net. This is the duality - that the intellect can only speculate about the essential nature of the beyond the net but decides that it can only know about it from its own interior part by building mental idols of the ocean.

The question is, can we proceed from the mental idols to living reality, such that we discover deeper spiritual activity of thought-like nature, which only crystalizes into intellectual thought forms as it crosses the net pores? The most crucial thing to realize in this prospect is that thinking is now not merely a mental mirror of reality. The experience of thinking in itself is part of the World Process. This already gives us a very different insight into what explaining/knowing reality means. When we speak of our bodily will, we know there's great difference between having the mental picture of, for example, a gymnastic exercise and actually performing it. The latter is also a kind of experiential knowledge which we can attain to only by setting our will in motion. Then we have real practical influence on reality, our will imprints in the tapestry of perceptions. We need similar understanding also about thinking. The experience of consciously willing our thoughts is in itself a kind of experiential knowledge through which we understand how our thinking spiritual activity imprints into the perceptual tapestry. From this point we only need to open up for the possibility that there's such activity also beyond the personal net and that our ordinary intellect is only its crystalized form. Thus it becomes possible for us to seek these higher order World Thoughts, which govern the large scale metamorphosis of the perceptual tapestry. These Thoughts can also be seen as images, as World Imagination but also within them are the World Ideas, the Cosmic meaning which drives their metamorphosis. Only in this way the duality can be reconciled in practice and not only on paper.

To summarize, analytical idealism today postulates the World Mind (Mind At Large), yet human thoughts exist only within the porous net. Even though they are both called 'water', there's practical discontinuity between the human mind and the World Mind. The former can only speculate about the latter through abstract mental images and assume that inexplicable mystical and psychedelic experiences somehow indicate the reality of the World Mind.

This should be contrasted with the possibility that this World Mind has World Thoughts. These are not merely reflective mental images of some reality-in-itself but the impressions of meaningful will, which shapes the flow of being. Our microcosmic (within the net) flow is embedded within the macrocosmic flow. True knowledge consists into expanding consciousness such that we live fully consciously along the gradient of being. Then knowing the Thoughts is no longer a mental copy of some supposed reality beyond but living together with the spiritual forces which shape the flow of reality. These spiritual forces are experienced from the same side as we experience our "I"-activity, yet we don't contain them, as we feel we do our intellectual thoughts. Instead, we glimpse at the first-person perspective Thoughts within which our human perspective is carried. This resolves the duality in the true sense, since we bridge within ourselves human and Cosmic Thought. And I stress once more that this bridging can't be attained to only on paper. It's an actual inner transformation of how we experience ourselves as spiritual beings. It's as different as being in a dream and dimly speculating about lucidity vs. actually doing the inner gestures which transform our dream experience and turn it into a lucid dream. There's a great difference between being a dream character and having intellectual theory about the waking world and actually stepping into lucidity. The latter is no longer merely theoretical explanation but living experiential knowledge. In the same manner, when we awaken to the place of thinking in our inner landscape, we're on our path towards lucidity, where we awaken within ourselves to a higher order world, with higher order World Thoughts which shape the dreamscape. Each of these World Thoughts can be experienced when we gain lucidity at the particular level of being. These levels of being are all concentric, they look at the inner dream world tapestry from the same side, so to speak. It's like there are different levels of self which shape the macrocosmic flow of the dreamscape, while at our human level we've become entangled into arrangements of intellectual thoughts, which build ever heavier mental picture of reality, instead of seeking lucidity within the higher order spiritual activity which shapes the dreamscape.

I think anyone would agree that there are no attempts on BK's side to seek such a possibility for awakening to higher order strata of the dreamscape and discover that there is actually living meaningful activity of higher beings, which Think the dream context from the same side as the one from which our "I" thinks thoughts, and our human perspective is only a dim aperture, where we've lost our coherency with the meaningful flow of the dream context and see it as external reality which opposes us and demands explanation by making a coherent mental mirror of it.

[Federica]

...

AshvinP, thank you for this illustration. Ok, let's do it:

'..if you question whether I am accurately representing BK's position, that's fine and we can discuss that as well, but more importantly I want to know what are your thoughts on what is written above, regardless of BK's position on it?'
I do think your representation of BK's position is biased, but OK, I will refrain from commenting on that. I am only giving you my thoughts on what is written above.


'This is the polar relation between idea and perception, invisible and visible, for all forms we perceive in the world. Idea is associated with Time while perception is associated with space at our current stage of cognitive development.'
So the claim here is that raw perception does not exist and that we are bound to (some form of) thinking. We cannot just look at a tree leaf and merely perceive it, because we can't help conceptualize it, and even before that, the fact that we decided to go look at it can't be independent of the perceptual state itself. Yes, this statement makes sense. It seems to be consistent with new foundations of physics, etc.
Now, to make this into a polarity as described, is an additional step, isn't it? Seems sensible too, however I would like to read more extensively about this approach.


'When we consider our own ideational activity, we feel this as 'top-down' activity, instead of bottom-up, right? Our consciousness sets in motion a series of perceptual states of being from the top-down, including the sounds, which then feed back into our ideas, our intentions and actions.'
This brings us to the question of individual free will, right? A difficult question for me at the moment. I am not satisfied with much of what I have heard about it. But this idea of hierarchy here, doesn't seem to be of much help either...


'Now if we are analogizing this to Consciousness at large, which exists in the same polar relation, ... Our ideas are like the perceptual states, the musical notes, of beings and their higher ideations, precipitating from the top-down.'
If our ideas are the top-down precipitations of a conscious movement set in motion by higher conscious beings, how does this tie in with the ‘inner effort’ that should allow us to expand our consciousness from the bottom up?


'Most importantly, there is no principle reason why our consciousness cannot expand to encompass those higher ideations with inner effort. '
If there is no in principle reason for not being able to expand our consciousness upwards, what are the de facto reasons why this is not happening?
And are these higher beings, or conscious ideations, a plurality? In which case what is the rationale behind their differentiation?


'This is also related to your initial criticism of the flawed bodily boundary...'
Yes, setting this boundary as one with the physical body seems arbitrary to me. But the segmentation of universal consciousness has to be explained somehow. What makes for the separation of ideations, both across and within levels of your hierarchy?

[Federica]

I don't understand the disconnection you are pointing to, other than perhaps, again, in opposition to Kant. You say: ‘he has disconnected ideas and ideation (subject) from will/perceptions (objects)’. I understand he puts perceptions on the subject side, and will too, on the subject side. There is only subject. The only thing that makes will disconnected from subject is the poor membrane of dissociation. This is really not much of a thing, and it’s porous, and it’s subject to all sorts of impingements and waves. How can this thin membrane be held accountable for disconnection, and worse for being the foundation of a whole dualistic system? That would be a dualism between water inside and water outside a fish net.

Federica, maybe it's worth specifying more clearly what duality it is here spoken of.

In the most general sense we can speak of two kinds. The first we can call theoretical. The second is the actual, living, experiential, practical. The former is very easy to define and resolve. For example, I can say "It's all One!" There - I'm the greatest non-dualist one can ever be. What could be more inclusive than this? But let's try to introspect more closely what we're really doing in this way. We're summoning a thought within the field of consciousness - in this case a verbal thought. Normally, the thoughts that we produce are mental images of something. For example, the verbal thought 'red' is a mental image of the qualitative experience of redness. Note that the verbal thought in my mind is not colored red. It's not even a color perception, it's a sound.
Side question: how is it not a color perception? What is the difference between the conjunction mental image of the red experience + sound and the conjunction mental image + sight of a red flower, once we have said that perception (sound or flower) is inseparable from thought / mental image.
Yet it exists in resonant relation with the color qualia of red, so when I hear 'red', together with the sound, a remembrance of the color experience is summoned.
Ok, I understand your point here.

Now when we say "water inside and water outside the fish net" we also have a verbal thought, a sound. Hopefully this mental image should exist in resonant relations with actual living experience. If that's not the case, we say that the thought is abstract. It's abstracted away from any real experience, we don't even know how to imagine what it speaks of.

So this is the first thing to be vigilant of. We should be clear that ideally our thoughts should always be images of actual living experience. In certain sense the thoughts (concepts) are like holographic symbols, handles for the much more encompassing constellation of spiritual phenomena that we want to pinpoint.

When Ashvin speaks of BK succumbing to dualism, it is implied that this experiential perspective from which the words can be seen as symbols of living experience, is not sought. Of course, 'on paper' BK is non-dualist - we have the water inside, water outside and the porous fish net. Very elegant solution. Yet most will agree that the former sentence exists as thought image within the interior of the fish net, in our personal consciousness. But what if we're not satisfied only with the symbolic arrangement of the words 'water', 'fish net', 'inside', 'outside'? What if we want to seek the living experience from whence such words can be seen as direct testimonies, in the same way the verbal thought 'red' is a testimony for the spiritual experience of redness?

I understand what is meant by dualism then. But now the question becomes:
Are you saying that you will only allow yourself to do philosophy if you can maintain this lived, experiential, non-abstract quality all throughout the thought process in your construct? What is a speculation then, apart from the given name of this forum?
Can one go anywhere free from speculations or postulates of any sorts in philosophy?
Yes, I was aware of BKs being a theory. Not a theorem that can be irrefutably proven within a given world, like a mathematical one can, under a certain set of abstract starting conditions. But a theory, that requires the reader, or listener, to accept to be presented with it, to be sold the theory, to ponder it at the best of their abilities and affinities, and then, bluntly said, decide for themselves whether they what to buy it or not (I realize I might be using thinking in an inappropriate way here, but.. Is there anything else I can do?)

And are you also saying that your approach is freed from this inappropriate commerce, and if so, is there anything that makes people not adopt this approach other than laziness or intellectual weakness?
What I wasn’t aware of is that there was a way to ‘seek the living experience from whence the words 'water', 'fish net', 'inside', 'outside' can be seen as direct testimonies’. And if it’s so that you don’t have the burden to sell it, then I guess my only hope is to ask what the price is and hope I will be able to afford it?


Here things become more problematic and here's the concealed dualism. The intellect (for example in the form of arrangements of verbal thoughts) remains entirely within the bounds of the fish net. It can postulate that it's essence is part of an ocean and the fish net interior is in constant exchange with the outside through the pores but what is the living experience which can be described in such a way? Here most will speak of the mystical experience or the psychedelic experience but these remain entirely inexplicable phenomena.
Well, to be fair there is a little bit more living experience there than just tripping: meditation, parapsychological experiences, synchronicities, mysticism, religious devotion…
Anyone with sober sense for their inner life will have to admit that whatever these experiences are, ultimately we're left once again with the intellect in the interior, which builds abstract theories that should explain the inexplicable experience. That's the reason why one can have a lot of experience with psychedelics and still remain a materialist. If the brain can generate
..can the brain generate them..?
any kind of subjective experience why not create also an experience which feels to be boundless ocean of consciousness? Why should the brain be forced to create subjective experiences which only feel to be the size of the head?

This is the actual dualism. Ultimately we have a wall of phenomena and we build intellectual models of the within and the beyond. For some, outside is Heaven and God. For others, it is the water demarcated by porous membrane.
By now if anything, I have come a little closer to what you mean by dualism. Thank you.
The fact remains that the intellect lives strictly within the soul space - whatever its nature is - and even if it theoretically postulates continuity between the interior and exterior, experientially we continue to behold only the inner wall (interface) and speculate about the essence of what's behind it. Unless we get a very real feel for this fact, nothing of what Ashvin speaks of will be grasped.

To be honest, the question that interests me is to find a philosophical system that is able to
1. explain reality - which to me means, on one side, ideate an explanation that is both encompassing and continuous, and on the other side, more importantly, able to accommodate experimental evidence of all kinds; and

Here we should make another thing perfectly clear. I'm not saying that you intend it in this way but most certainly it is so for the vast majority. When we seek explanations, even without knowing it, we've assumed a specific epistemological stance. We may not even know what epistemology is, we may not know what philosophy is but in general we expect some explanatory thoughts that should feel satisfactory, they should be resonant with all our perceptions. If they are not resonant we feel cognitive dissonance and we simply say that the explanation doesn't make sense, it doesn't fit reality.

When we seek explanations in this way, we subconsciously assume that knowledge about reality as attained by building a thought image of reality which should be matched against all perceptions. But this leaves one important factor out of the question - what is thinking itself?

I still wonder: what else can we do?
We assume that thinking exists for the sole purpose to create a mental mirror image of reality, then we go on to say that this image-creating activity exists only within the fish net. We create a mental image of the outside but postulate that all thought dissolves as we cross the net. This is the duality - that the intellect can only speculate about the essential nature of the beyond the net but decides that it can only know about it from its own interior part by building mental idols of the ocean. This is clear.

The question is, can we proceed from the mental idols to living reality, such that we discover deeper spiritual activity of thought-like nature, which only crystalizes into intellectual thought forms as it crosses the net pores? The most crucial thing to realize
Realize and not postulate? Realize through thinking? Experiencing then?
in this prospect is that thinking is now not merely a mental mirror of reality. The experience of thinking in itself is part of the World Process. This is supposed to be gained by realization?
This already gives us a very different insight into what explaining/knowing reality means. When we speak of our bodily will, we know there's great difference between having the mental picture of, for example, a gymnastic exercise and actually performing it. The latter is also a kind of experiential knowledge which we can attain to only by setting our will in motion. Then we have real practical influence on reality, our will imprints in the tapestry of perceptions. We need similar understanding also about thinking. The experience of consciously willing our thoughts
The very first step of my ‘philosophical quest’ has been to ‘realize’ how much of my thought process was NOT the effect of volition!
is in itself a kind of experiential knowledge through which we understand how our thinking spiritual activity imprints into the perceptual tapestry. From this point we only need to open up for the possibility (this seems to be a very dangerous choice of verb in your construct...) that there's such activity also beyond the personal net and that our ordinary intellect is only its crystalized form. Thus it becomes possible for us to seek these higher order World Thoughts, which govern the large scale metamorphosis of the perceptual tapestry. These Thoughts can also be seen as images, as World Imagination but also within them are the World Ideas, the Cosmic meaning which drives their metamorphosis. Only in this way the duality can be reconciled in practice and not only on paper.

Not sure if I will be able to afford it, however I do feel I grasp a little more of this approach by now. Thank you, Cleric K!

To summarize, analytical idealism today postulates the World Mind (Mind At Large), yet human thoughts exist only within the porous net. Even though they are both called 'water', there's practical discontinuity between the human mind and the World Mind. The former can only speculate about the latter through abstract mental images and assume that inexplicable mystical and psychedelic experiences somehow indicate the reality of the World Mind.

This should be contrasted with the possibility that this World Mind has World Thoughts. These are not merely reflective mental images of some reality-in-itself but the impressions of meaningful will, which shapes the flow of being. Our microcosmic (within the net) flow is embedded within the macrocosmic flow. True knowledge consists into expanding consciousness such that we live fully consciously along the gradient of being. Then knowing the Thoughts is no longer a mental copy of some supposed reality beyond but living together with the spiritual forces which shape the flow of reality. These spiritual forces are experienced from the same side as we experience our "I"-activity, yet we don't contain them, as we feel we do our intellectual thoughts. Instead, we glimpse at the first-person perspective Thoughts within which our human perspective is carried. This resolves the duality in the true sense, since we bridge within ourselves human and Cosmic Thought. And I stress once more that this bridging can't be attained to only on paper. It's an actual inner transformation of how we experience ourselves as spiritual beings. It's as different as being in a dream and dimly speculating about lucidity vs. actually doing the inner gestures which transform our dream experience and turn it into a lucid dream. There's a great difference between being a dream character and having intellectual theory about the waking world and actually stepping into lucidity. The latter is no longer merely theoretical explanation but living experiential knowledge. In the same manner, when we awaken to the place of thinking in our inner landscape, we're on our path towards lucidity, where we awaken within ourselves to a higher order world, with higher order World Thoughts which shape the dreamscape. Each of these World Thoughts can be experienced when we gain lucidity at the particular level of being. These levels of being are all concentric, they look at the inner dream world tapestry from the same side, so to speak. It's like there are different levels of self which shape the macrocosmic flow of the dreamscape, while at our human level we've become entangled into arrangements of intellectual thoughts, which build ever heavier mental picture of reality, instead of seeking lucidity within the higher order spiritual activity which shapes the dreamscape.

I think anyone would agree that there are no attempts on BK's side to seek such a possibility for awakening to higher order strata of the dreamscape and discover that there is actually living meaningful activity of higher beings, which Think the dream context from the same side as the one from which our "I" thinks thoughts, and our human perspective is only a dim aperture, where we've lost our coherency with the meaningful flow of the dream context and see it as external reality which opposes us and demands explanation by making a coherent mental mirror of it.