hubble9458 wrote: ↑Thu Aug 18, 2022 3:29 am
But my question is also oriented around the purpose of metacognition. Kastrup seems to think MAL is gathering information to fulfill a goal (self knowledge?), even if the motivation to achieve it is purely instinctual. I guess I’m curious what the end state of a universe might look like if it was informed about itself?
I believe I remember Kastrup has addressed the 'question of MAL's why' by saying that the question itself suffers anthropomorphizing and that 'Nature/MAL does what it does because it is what it is'. This is not an exact report and unfortunately I can't indicate the specific video where he speaks of that. I haven't been watching those recently and the exact memory is failing me, but maybe you can search for the topic in one of those 2/3-hour conversations on his Youtube channel, probably a 2021 video. What I can tell you is that you wouldn't find the answer to your question in the book The idea of the world, the book where BK's philosophy is exposed in an orderly manner.
Regarding Cleric's comment on the understanding of time, I want to say that I also came to this forum with specific questions about Kastrup's philosophy, that I was trying to adopt, and had I read such a comment on that first day, I would have found it simply off-topic. Maybe that's how you find it as well?
Because I had a similar experience of coming here with the intention of asking questions and deepening my understanding of reality, I want to say that in case you don’t find, in your current inquiries, complete satisfaction within Kastrup’s philosophy, then maybe you might be curious what an alternative/next step could be to approach your question about telos in a way that breaks free from the circular reasoning of the type 'it does what it does because it is what it is'.
So I would like to share what that subsequent step has been for me, at that initial point, that I found on this forum. It is this question: in this overall process of inquiry that we are engaging in, when we sit down and are willing to put in time and energy, with the best intentions, and we ask ourselves those tough questions, and try hard to apply our reasoning to them - because we simply need to understand! - what is it that we are doing exactly, in this philosophical exploration? Is it really legitimate to jump into the object of our inquiry, say MAL's telos, without paying any preliminary attention to the mental movement that we are taking in order to jump into the inquiry? How does this act of directing attention to that object of inquiry work, are there any precautions we want to gain awareness of before we just go all in? Or is it fine to simply go in and start reasoning, instinctually? Is it fine to start analyzing and pondering the best we can, right off the bat, the moment we realize we own the quest?
It's in a sense like in science. Before one jumps in and starts practically experimenting on something, it's important to have a few considerations about method - what am I doing exactly, how should I frame and set up the experimentation, is what I am doing reproducible and falsifiable, etc etc. In other words, there should be some attention paid to some
philosophy of science, before one jumps in and starts operating. We want to first check that we are not just 'coming as we are' to the experiment, although with the best intentions. We know that 'come as you are' is a good tagline for an invite to a friendly garden barbecue, but not really for an invite to a scientific endeavor.
Similarly, before we tackle a philosophical quest by simply starting the thinking, does it not make sense that we pay some preliminary attention to a sort of
'philosophy of philosophy' where we first look at how we are going to use the tools we are about to leverage - thinking, reasoning, analyzing… Is there anything we should realize or pay attention to before we open the floodgates of our inquiry, in order to set us up for an aware and free approach to the big questions?