The world does not exist outside of perception, yet neither does it not exist.

[Wayfarer]

After debating idealism for many years on internet forums, this is the understanding that I've come to (basically a synthesis of neo–Kantian and Buddhist philosophy.)

The accepted view, the mainstream social-consensus philosophy, is realism: that the world exists irrespective of the presence of an observer. Materialism or physicalism adds that what truly exists are the enduring material particles, or nowadays the electromagnetic fields of which particles are said to be excitations, and the physical laws that determine their behaviour. H. Sapiens ('the observer') is said to be a product of those same elementary entities, and has only arrived on the scene very recently, in evolutionary and geological time-scales. Absent that observer, the Universe continues on its merry way, much the same as it did prior to evolution. Intelligent beings and the mind are epiphenomena, fortuitous extrusions of a generally mindless process.

My argument against this common-sense view is simply that any judgement about 'what exists' – whether it concerns something near to hand, like the screen you're reading this on, or something distant in time or space, like the early Earth – relies on an implicit perspective. If you imagine or depict an early earth, prior to the advent of h. sapiens, even containing no intelligent life – this depiction still implies a perspective, a point-of-view. And this is because without a perspective, there can be no scale of either distance or duration. It is precisely that scale, that perspective, around which the mind organises its sense of reality. Absent a perspective, no thing is nearer or further, larger or smaller, in fact there can be no things as such, as it is the mind which designates the 'thing–hood' of particulars as specific objects ('this' object as distinct from 'that' object).

I make this point because even philosophers and scientists debating these matters still exhibit confusion about it. I was watching a panel session yesterday which included Bernardo Kastrup, and this was one of the first points that came up (not from BK, of course!) 'How can you say the "observer creates the world" when we know that h. sapiens have only recently evolved? Surely the world didn't come into existence only then!'

The problem implied in this question is the conflation of two different frameworks, namely the objective, naturalist framework, on the one hand, with a metaphysical framework on the other. In other words, it is looking at the question through an implicitly naturalist point of view, which assumes the reality of the objective domain first and foremost, and then wonders how it can accomodate the idea of mind generating the world. But here it is already looking at 'the observer' or 'the mind' as something in the world – in other words, treating the observer as part of the domain of objects. But it cannot reconcile this, because the two accounts are operating at different levels of explanation. The naturalist account starts from the apparently–indisputable fact of perceived reality of objects and subjects, while the idealist account seeks to be critically aware of these purported facts.

The common objection to the idealist account is based precisely on this confusion. 'You're saying "the world doesn't exist" outside your consciousness of it! " My response to that is that the idealist account is not making exactly that claim, because 'non-existence' is just as much a construct as is 'existence' - you have the idea of the world not existing, or of nothing existing at all. This too is the 'imagined non-existence' of the world. But again, all judgements about what exists or does not exist are themselves mental constructs. And you can't imagine or conceive of anything outside that, because any act of imagination and conception are obviously mental activities ('vikalpa' in Buddhist terminology. Notice also the convergence here with Kant's transcendental arguments. )

Compare with a passage from the early Buddhist texts:

“By & large, Kaccāna, this world is supported by [takes as its object] a polarity, that of existence & non-existence. But when one sees the origination of the world as it has come to be with right discernment, ‘non-existence’ with reference to the world does not occur to one. When one sees the cessation of the world as it has come to be with right discernment, ‘existence’ with reference to the world does not occur to one.

Source

This passage and others like it are said by scholars to be the original impetus for the Madhyamaka school which was to become highly influential in later (Mahāyāna) Buddhism. And from the very outset, the Buddha understood the process of 'world–construction' which the mind cannot help but engage in, and in which most beings (according to him) become entangled.

So that is one aspect of the way I've come to understand idealist philosophy. Still to this day, most people I discuss it with (which is very few people!) will simply dismiss it as solipsism or the idea that 'the world is all in your mind'. They won't have the patience to actually understand the argument.

[AshvinP]

The problem implied in this question is the conflation of two different frameworks, namely the objective, naturalist framework, on the one hand, with a metaphysical framework on the other. In other words, it is looking at the question through an implicitly naturalist point of view, which assumes the reality of the objective domain first and foremost, and then wonders how it can accomodate the idea of mind generating the world. But here it is already looking at 'the observer' or 'the mind' as something in the world – in other words, treating the observer as part of the domain of objects. But it cannot reconcile this, because the two accounts are operating at different levels of explanation. The naturalist account starts from the apparently–indisputable fact of perceived reality of objects and subjects, while the idealist account seeks to be critically aware of these purported facts.

The common objection to the idealist account is based precisely on this confusion. 'You're saying "the world doesn't exist" outside your consciousness of it! " My response to that is that the idealist account is not making exactly that claim, because 'non-existence' is just as much a construct as is 'existence' - you have the idea of the world not existing, or of nothing existing at all. This too is the 'imagined non-existence' of the world. But again, all judgements about what exists or does not exist are themselves mental constructs. And you can't imagine or conceive of anything outside that, because any act of imagination and conception are obviously mental activities ('vikalpa' in Buddhist terminology. Notice also the convergence here with Kant's transcendental arguments. )

Hello Wayfarer,

Here is the main issue I see with the metaphysical idealist claim, which we have discussed here quite a bit. If it cannot be reasonably linked to a scientific understanding of how MAL's conscious experience is translated into the appearances on the 'screen of perception', then the materialist scientist (or whomever else) is justified in claiming it lacks any explanatory power. It is justified in claiming that the seeming gap between 'consciousness creates the perceptual world' and the natural evolutionary process needs to be explained in some manner, and idealism fails to do so. Metaphysics or ontology without science/phenomenology is barren - it cannot be considered a viable explanation for World processes, but only hand-waving, whether it is materialist or idealist, realist or anti-realist. 

Furthermore, the Kantian conclusion that these two spheres of inquiry - science and ontology (or spirituality), phenomenon and noumenon, cannot be reconciled through human Reason, could only be the product of dualistic assumptions about the World Process. I am not sure if you followed the comments on the other thread re: soul-spirit and perceptions-conceptions as the outer physiognomy of Nature. We can take our personal experience as the characteristic example - when we perceive ourselves in a mirror, or someone else making gestures with their arms and hands, we know that this is the outer physiognomy of inner soul-spirit experience, i.e. willing, feeling, thinking. Cleric wrote as follows:

If we're able to survey our scientific evolution with unprejudiced eye, we'll see that in a way, today's mathematical science already instinctively tries to find the soul and spirit of Nature's physiognomy... Science today produces mathematical thinking but doesn't want to observe within itself how Nature works in that. It only wants to build an abstract model of that process. In other words, there's still a disconnect - modern thinking still can't connect the dots and see reality as a Mobius strip. If this connection is made, it will become clear that the more we gain deeper knowledge of ourselves and the way soul and spirit express in our physiognomy (which starts with the living experience of thinking), the more we understand also the soul and spirit of Nature (with which we are one) which express themselves as the opaque side of the Mobius strip, as the physiognomy of Nature.

That is one of the key insights which is in the blind spot for the Kantian idealist, which then holds metaphysics/ontology as a separate, discontinuous domain of inquiry from science. It fails to see the World Process as a Mobius strip of Spirit-Matter, Idea-Perception, Subject-Object, etc. With this insight, it becomes clear that our perceptions and, more importantly, our concepts (which includes our concepts of desires and feelings that we experience), are the outer physiognomy of deeper soul-spirit processes which are supra-sensory for the average waking cognition. Our shared concepts are the inner nature of our percepts, and our deeper archetypal soul-spirit process is the inner nature of our concepts. The former lawfully structures the outer physiognomy of the latter.  

You point out that the naive realist appeals to a concept of a 'non-existent world' as an objection to idealism, which is a non-starter because the content of any such concept presupposes the act of conceptualizing within conscious existence. There is no meaningful content to mindless 'non-existence' in that sense. But we should notice how the mystical idealist, or intellectual 'non-dualist', heavily influenced by the Kantian stream, does a very similar thing. He appeals to a concept of 'pure awareness', 'instinctive consciousness', 'nothingness', etc., which supposedly gives rise to our 'epiphenomenal' (metacognitive) thinking and thought-forms, but the content of these concepts cannot possibly be known-experienced outside of that thinking. 





A question we should ask ourselves is, to what end are we trying to penetrate the depth structure of Reality with our thinking? If the end is to harmonize understanding of shared human existence so that real practical transformations can occur in the world, real tribal divisions can be healed, then there cannot be left any gaping chasm between the philosophical-spiritual and scientific understandings. The focus should shift from debating what 'ism' is more "true" than others to understanding what shared, archetypal soul-spirit processes give rise to all of them. All these 12 worldviews above are like the outer head, chest, limbs, etc. of the inner Cosmic ideational organism which can be examined and used as tools for the perfection of that organism. Our thinking can utilize them through various depth layers of knowledge, as represented in the 'moods' above, and synthesize a holistic understanding of our shared archetypal Consciousness which ideates the outer physiognomy of Nature. In this way modern science, aesthetics, and ontology-spirituality can be spiraled together into a continuous and harmonious Whole.

[Wayfarer]

Here is the main issue I see with the metaphysical idealist claim, which we have discussed here quite a bit. If it cannot be reasonably linked to a scientific understanding of how MAL's conscious experience is translated into the appearances on the 'screen of perception', then the materialist scientist (or whomever else) is justified in claiming it lacks any explanatory power. It is justified in claiming that the seeming gap between 'consciousness creates the perceptual world' and the natural evolutionary process needs to be explained in some manner, and idealism fails to do so.

What is 'MAL'?

As for your rejection of idealism, how does that square with the manifesto of the 'Essentia Foundation', which says that:

Essentia Foundation aims at communicating, in an accurate yet accessible way, the latest analytic and scientific indications that metaphysical materialism is fundamentally flawed. Indeed, clear reasoning and the evidence at hand indicate that metaphysical idealism or nondualism—the notion that nature is essentially mental—is the best explanatory model we currently have.

I had hoped that my post was articulating and supporting metaphysical idealism and nondualism.

I don't maintain 'metaphysics/ontology as a separate, discontinuous domain of inquiry from science.' It's simply that modern science (as discussed in the 'spiritual science' thread) starts from certain realist assumptions that mitigate against the kind of critical self-awareness that metaphysical idealism (and indeed philosophy more generally) is concerned with.

[Federica]

Here is the main issue I see with the metaphysical idealist claim, which we have discussed here quite a bit. If it cannot be reasonably linked to a scientific understanding of how MAL's conscious experience is translated into the appearances on the 'screen of perception', then the materialist scientist (or whomever else) is justified in claiming it lacks any explanatory power. It is justified in claiming that the seeming gap between 'consciousness creates the perceptual world' and the natural evolutionary process needs to be explained in some manner, and idealism fails to do so.

What is 'MAL'?

As for your rejection of idealism, how does that square with the manifesto of the 'Essentia Foundation', which says that:

Essentia Foundation aims at communicating, in an accurate yet accessible way, the latest analytic and scientific indications that metaphysical materialism is fundamentally flawed. Indeed, clear reasoning and the evidence at hand indicate that metaphysical idealism or nondualism—the notion that nature is essentially mental—is the best explanatory model we currently have.

I had hoped that my post was articulating and supporting metaphysical idealism and nondualism.

I don't maintain 'metaphysics/ontology as a separate, discontinuous domain of inquiry from science.' It's simply that modern science (as discussed in the 'spiritual science' thread) starts from certain realist assumptions that mitigate against the kind of critical self-awareness that metaphysical idealism (and indeed philosophy more generally) is concerned with.

Wayfarer,

Thinking of your recent appearance on the forum, I was wondering when this conversation would finally happen, and I am happy you initiated it now! I can’t resist adding two lines, while it’s night for Ashvin.

> MAL is Bernardo’s Mind At Large.

> Ashvin does not reject Idealism. On the contrary, I would describe it as a fully fledged Idealism, that does not start from a model of reality, or ontology, based on a monistic postulate (reality is of mental nature) and does not end with the de facto dualism introduced by the dissociative boundary, that makes our individual consciousness forever separate from Nature / Mind at Large / One Consciousness, which can never be known precisely.

It's a fully fledged Idealism that does not start from the postulate that reality is mental, but comes to it, through careful reasoning and evidence, starting, exactly as you said, from that missing piece, thinking - “any judgment about 'what exists' relies on an implicit perspective” (and any judgement about anything else, too, relies on an implicit perspective, or act of thinking).

I know I suggested this post already, but you didn't know what MAL meant when I did, so allow me to remake the suggestion: Beyond the Flat MAL.

[Wayfarer]

I'll have to find some time to absorb that post, it's pretty lengthy and deep.

But I just want to add, I don't think I myself am positing the kind of dualism that was criticized in the initial response, certainly not one that implies any form of 'dissociative boundary'. The discontinuity I pointed out was between two explanatory frameworks which I maintain is a valid distinction.

The rhetorical question I had posed was this: 'how can you claim that the mind "creates" the world, as metaphysical idealism does, when science knows that the Universe existed long before h. sapiens evolved?' (I see this argument cropping up in many discussions of metaphysical idealism in social media, often in the dialogues about BK's work).

I'm interested in how you would answer this question.

[Federica]

Wayfarer,

I think a potential ambiguity comes from the fact that you stated upfront that your worldview is neo-kantian buddhist, and you referred to metaphysical idealism (BK, Essentia) in a way that could suggest that you agree with that view. Now your argument against realism is flawless in my opinion, as expressed here:

My argument against this common-sense view is simply that any judgement about 'what exists' – whether it concerns something near to hand, like the screen you're reading this on, or something distant in time or space, like the early Earth – relies on an implicit perspective. If you imagine or depict an early earth, prior to the advent of h. sapiens, even containing no intelligent life – this depiction still implies a perspective, a point-of-view. And this is because without a perspective, there can be no scale of either distance or duration. It is precisely that scale, that perspective, around which the mind organises its sense of reality. Absent a perspective, no thing is nearer or further, larger or smaller, in fact there can be no things as such, as it is the mind which designates the 'thing–hood' of particulars as specific objects ('this' object as distinct from 'that' object).

But the question is how do you substantiate the statement of the primary role of the “perspective”? Do you postulate it, do you reason it out? Do you consider it self-evident? Your reference to metaphysical idealism would suggest that you postulate it (but correct me if I’m wrong).
My impression that you would postulate it, is strengthened when I read your analysis of what the problem is with the naive realist’s question. You say: “The problem implied in this question is the conflation of two different frameworks, namely the objective, naturalist framework, on the one hand, with a metaphysical framework on the other. In other words, it is looking at the question through an implicitly naturalist point of view, which assumes the reality of the objective domain…” That’s right, I think this critique is correct, but then isn’t your solution to specularly assume the reality of the metaphysical framework? And if so, how is this superior to the physicalist assumption? You say: “the idealist account seeks to be critically aware of these purported facts”. How does the idealistic account work out this critical awareness of the facts, if it's not by assumption?


You attempt to put the idealist account in a preordained “level of explanation” in relation to the realist’s, who looks at the observer as “already in the world”, while the idealist would consider the question ‘before’ such assumption, from within a different (better) framework. Well, it seems to me that this is done at the price of assuming such different framework, that the realist is said to conflate with the objective framework, isn’t it? When you speak of those frameworks, you implicitly put yourself in the perspective of the natural existence of those frameworks. You are relying on an ontology. Where does this metaphysical framework come from? How does it pop into reality in a way that allows you to tell the realist “You are conflating two frameworks?” The materialist could reply: “What two frameworks?”


So, as far as I understand your position, I think your reasoning is good, but there's one piece of the puzzle, one connection, that is missing. Namely, the 'given'. How do you go from the given of experience to the idealist account?
So the given is also the starting point of how I would answer the rhetorical question you posed (when I say “I” of course I mean that I would answer it with those who have answered it before, through history, and straight into the posts of this forum, in a way that is finally completely satisfactory to my understanding). We cannot fight the materialist assumption by countering it with another assumption. Instead we have to start from the given, meaning from the only thing we have, our human experience, and approach the subject-object question from there. We have to start from perception (some alignment of vocabulary may be required, when we refer to perception). The materialist, also, should agree to start there, rather than from a metaphysical account. Another way to say it is, we have to start from phenomenology. From the given of experience, through careful reasoning, we can logically discern the role of the thinking agency, or faculty, in the 'appearance' of reality. This is of course not a complete answer to your question about how I'd answer the realist's "How can you claim that the mind "creates" the world, as metaphysical idealism does, when science knows that the Universe existed long before h. sapiens evolved?” but let’s set the stage first.

[Wayfarer]

But the question is how do you substantiate the statement of the primary role of the “perspective”? Do you postulate it, do you reason it out? Do you consider it self-evident?

I think the response is that this is something that can be directly intuited by reflecting on the nature of experience - on how experience itself is constituted, or to put it another way, this insight may arise from a deep reflection on 'the meaning of Being' (per Heidegger; and also the concern of phenomenology and existentialism. Overall Continental philosophy has been much more aware of this than Anglo-American.)

My reading is that traditional philosophy was also critical - that the origin of traditional metaphysics was itself a critical reflection on the nature of being (and knowing) going back to Parmenides. But that this 'wisdom tradition' was largely abandoned by the Enlightenment rebellion against scholastic philosophy (as the Scholastics mainly preserved the traditional sources). This lead to the dominance of today's basically positivist and 'scientistic' forms of naturalism, which take the 'sensory domain' as the sine qua non of all true knowledge. But now, our culture is becoming aware of many profound explanatory gaps that this leaves (hence the renewal of interest in philosophical idealism and, for instance, Bernardo Kastrup!)

So, here we are.

Returning to Buddhism, one of the divisions of the Buddhist corpus is called abhidharma, a compendium of philosophical psychology. The best known principle of abhidharma is the so–called 'chain of dependent origination' (Pratītyasamutpāda). I won't try and introduce the details which are copious, other than to observe the seminal idea that what it describes is the 'cause of becoming' in terms of a 12-step causal chain. It is sometimes paraphrased as 'this being, that becomes; this ceasing, that ceases'. So Buddhism is in that sense was also a critical philosophy from the outset, in that it is critically self-aware of the (deficient) way the mind construes or constructs experience (or rather, its experience-of-the-world). The point about the 'dharmas' of abhidharma is that they are 'moments of experience' – they're not materially persistent atoms in the Western sense. In this way, Buddhism was phenomenological from the beginning, as it preserves that awareness of a subjective pole of all experience, whereas this is precisely what has been forgotten in the Western 'forgetfulness of Being'.

Finally getting back to Kant (whom I first encountered through Murti's book Central Philosophy of Buddhism), he too makes the argument that both time and space are 'primary intuitions' - i.e. in some vital sense, constructive activities of the mind. Kant's arguments are very difficult to follow but I think something like this is now becoming evident from science itself. One of the passages I often quote is this:

The problem of including the observer in our description of physical reality arises most insistently when it comes to the subject of quantum cosmology — the application of quantum mechanics to the universe as a whole — because, by definition, ‘the universe’ must include any observers. Andrei Linde has given a deep reason for why observers enter into quantum cosmology in a fundamental way. It has to do with the nature of time. The passage of time is not absolute; it always involves a change of one physical system relative to another, for example, how many times the hands of the clock go around relative to the rotation of the Earth. When it comes to the Universe as a whole, time loses its meaning, for there is nothing else relative to which the universe may be said to change. This ‘vanishing’ of time for the entire universe becomes very explicit in quantum cosmology, where the time variable simply drops out of the quantum description. It may readily be restored by considering the Universe to be separated into two subsystems: an observer with a clock, and the rest of the Universe. So the observer plays an absolutely crucial role in this respect. Linde expresses it graphically: ‘thus we see that without introducing an observer, we have a dead universe, which does not evolve in time’, and, ‘we are together, the Universe and us. The moment you say the Universe exists without any observers, I cannot make any sense out of that. I cannot imagine a consistent theory of everything that ignores consciousness…in the absence of observers, our universe is dead’.

Paul Davies, The Goldilocks Enigma: Why is the Universe Just Right for Life, p 271.

I think that intuition is thoroughly Kantian. My intuition is that, through sentient rational beings, the Universe literally 'comes into being'. Of course, for reasons I explained, that doesn't mean it didn't exist beforehand - only that whatever existence it had is basically unintelligible and meaningless (see this book.)

Where does this metaphysical framework come from? How does it pop into reality in a way that allows you to tell the realist “You are conflating two frameworks?” The materialist could reply: “What two frameworks?”

I'll put it another way - the naturalist view, that the universe 'exists independently of any observer', is basically a methodological postulate. For the purposes of natural philosophy it is of course perfectly sound. But when discussing philosophical issues, such as the relationship of the observer and observed, mind and matter, and so on, then those same assumptions don't necessarily apply; they're questions of a different kind. Trying to fit them within the procrustean bed of philosophical naturalism has a distorting effect (this is the 'hard problem'.)

But then the problem becomes as the 'critical reflection on the nature of being' is something that has by and large withered away in modern culture, your interlocutor will not necessarily have any kind of conceptual space against which the idea of a metaphysical framework can be considered. This is where the 'observer problem' in quantum physics has more or less forced metaphysics back into the debate, although you do have to have some kind of metaphysical intuition, and not everyone does.

[Cleric K]

Wayfarer, thank you for your participation! I'm just adding this as a kind of map of where this discussion is moving.

To grasp where Asvhin and Federica lead this, please consider the following. Let's say we disentangle our perspective by unchaining the 12-step causal chain. Now the critical question is: where does this leave us? It can be said that we are now an enlightened being, like the Buddha. Yet we still perceive reality through a perspective, through the prism of a bodily environment. So what we have really liberated from? If this liberation was leading us to the actual top-level container of reality then we should be able to reimagine the Cosmos in any way we would like. Yet we're still following a perspective within this entanglement, even though our mind has found a way to lift itself from the Merry-go-round of thoughts.

This becomes more clear when we consider that our consciousness is not simply flattened 'mind'. It is simply untruthful to say that my perceptions of a wall are the same thing as a thought-image of a wall. For this reason, besides mind, we should also recognize feeling and willing. In our thinking we feel more or less free. We can move thought-images at will. When we come to feelings it becomes more difficult. We can't that easily think away a depressive mood, for example. Rather it feels as a kind of soul atmosphere within which our mind is forced to operate. Like weather patterns, the qualities of that atmosphere change but it's not just a simple matter of abolishing a thought-image. Then we come to willing. There we feel as we rub against something that is not in the least impressed by our mental images (except through the images that activate the bodily will). So here it is even more untruthful to say that our body, let alone the remaining outer world, are just thought-images in the mind (in the sense that our mental images are).

I believe you would agree that even the liberated mind still lives within the constraints of a physical body until death. What in our view is the nature of this final entanglement that prevents us to experience the whole of reality as mental pictures that we can move around? You say:

Of course, for reasons I explained, that doesn't mean it didn't exist beforehand - only that whatever existence it had is basically unintelligible and meaningless

So does this cause any concern to you: that we can disentangle our personal perspective up to a point, yet we still remain entangled in a more mysterious stratum of reality where our bodily nature belongs? Do you conceive of a potential perspective which can experience itself consciously creative within the forms and organs of the body and the whole of Nature for that matter? Or the body and Nature are things that forever remain beyond the scope of the liberated mind, which just has to wait for death in expectation of the final liberation?

[AshvinP]

Here is the main issue I see with the metaphysical idealist claim, which we have discussed here quite a bit. If it cannot be reasonably linked to a scientific understanding of how MAL's conscious experience is translated into the appearances on the 'screen of perception', then the materialist scientist (or whomever else) is justified in claiming it lacks any explanatory power. It is justified in claiming that the seeming gap between 'consciousness creates the perceptual world' and the natural evolutionary process needs to be explained in some manner, and idealism fails to do so.

What is 'MAL'?

As for your rejection of idealism, how does that square with the manifesto of the 'Essentia Foundation', which says that:

Essentia Foundation aims at communicating, in an accurate yet accessible way, the latest analytic and scientific indications that metaphysical materialism is fundamentally flawed. Indeed, clear reasoning and the evidence at hand indicate that metaphysical idealism or nondualism—the notion that nature is essentially mental—is the best explanatory model we currently have.

I had hoped that my post was articulating and supporting metaphysical idealism and nondualism.

I don't maintain 'metaphysics/ontology as a separate, discontinuous domain of inquiry from science.' It's simply that modern science (as discussed in the 'spiritual science' thread) starts from certain realist assumptions that mitigate against the kind of critical self-awareness that metaphysical idealism (and indeed philosophy more generally) is concerned with.

Wayfarer,

I am not arguing to reject idealism or any other 'ism', but rather to integrate all 12 of them through a more holistic, self-conscious understanding of how they arise through our thinking consciousness to begin with. As long as we remain within a debate of whether one is more 'true' than another, then we are making the same mistake that we criticize the naïve realist of outer perceptions for making. Namely, we are treating our inner concepts about Reality (whatever it is) as naively real. This blinds us to the fact that the actual process of Reality is to be found in that activity which manifests our metaphysical concepts as outer physiognomy. Instead, this outer physiognomy can be directly observed in our own first-person thinking activity. We can shift focus from the conceptual content of our thinking to the activity of thinking itself. Instead of scientific findings only supporting metaphysics-spirituality, or metaphysics-spirituality only aligning itself with scientific findings, science can become metaphysics-spirituality, giving the latter a real practical significance in both individual lives and world affairs.

Notice how most of modern science relies on realist assumptions precisely because it keeps the first-person, real-time activity of thinking in the blind spot. We can take Newton's color theory as a characteristic example - he set up a prism in a dark room and passed 'white light' through it. When the white light differentiated through the prism into the colors of the rainbow, he concluded that there is naively real 'light-in-itself' which contains all the colors within it, completely independent of any conscious agency. What's missing is the fact that Newton, a conscious ideational agency, initially set up the conditions through which any of this color differentiation could take place. The same exact thing occurred with the Kant-Laplace nebular hypothesis. It is a simple omission for us to notice but a terribly inconvenient one for modern thinkers, since all the non-conscious, non-thinking idols would need to be abandoned if it was taken seriously.

Like you said, it would make the natural scientific method much more difficult within its various domains to integrate first-person conscious agency, even though it's intuitive that this agency is just as much of a part of the World Process as anything else which is observed. But that is where we come to the key question - does this additional difficulty mean that it is impossible to do? Kant answered "yes" to that question - it is impossible for human cognition, which is trapped within the phenomenal domain of its own intuitive making, whereas there is a separate noumenal domain which remains 'unintelligible and meaningless' to scientific inquiry. An image of this Kantian understanding would no longer be the Mobius strip (through which our individual consciousness is embedded), but a phenomenal strip which permanently steps in front of a separate noumenal strip as we can only view the former 'from the side'. There we come to what Cleric asked about, i.e. the 'more mysterious stratum of reality where our bodily nature belongs' (and the whole of Nature/Cosmos).

So I will leave it there and feel free to just take this as an additional consideration while continuing the discussion with Federica and Cleric.

[Wayfarer]

Thanks all for the responses, they're very thought-provoking, and also for the welcome. I should say upfront, I'm pursuing a particular thread through the labyrinth, with elements from Plato, Kant, and the Buddha. I find a lot of Kastrup's work congenial and useful, and I have a lot more to learn from him. But I'm trying to stay focussed on a particular theme which is a philosophical analysis of 'how mind creates world' (Kastrup's book on Schopenhauer has been particularly germane.)

Let's say we disentangle our perspective by unchaining the 12-step causal chain. Now the critical question is: where does this leave us? It can be said that we are now an enlightened being, like the Buddha. Yet we still perceive reality through a perspective, through the prism of a bodily environment. So what we have really liberated from?

I suppose as I introduced Buddhist philosophy I could refer to the Aggi-Vachagotta Sutta where the Buddha is asked just this question.

The significance of this particular verse is that it describes and then dismisses the 'unanswereable questions' i.e. whether the Cosmos is eternal or not, whether the soul is the same as the body or not, and so on (there are ten, I think). The protagonist 'Vachagotta' respresents 'the philosopher' in the dialogues, typically posing what would be considered metaphysical or philosophical questions - it is from these examples that Buddhism gets its reputation of being opposed to metaphysics (although that has to be interpreted carefully as śūnyatā is a metaphysic). In this sutta, the Buddha also gives a very brief description of the Tathagatha's state - 'Freed from the classification of consciousness, Vaccha, the Tathagata is deep, boundless, hard to fathom, like the sea.'

According to Buddhist lore, Vacha's doubts are eventually overcome and he takes refuge.

(it's still a theoretical posit from my perspective as I'm far from a liberated being.)

So does this cause any concern to you: that we can disentangle our personal perspective up to a point, yet we still remain entangled in a more mysterious stratum of reality where our bodily nature belongs? Do you conceive of a potential perspective which can experience itself consciously creative within the forms and organs of the body and the whole of Nature for that matter? Or the body and Nature are things that forever remain beyond the scope of the liberated mind, which just has to wait for death in expectation of the final liberation?

They're deep questions, but tangential to the particular line of enquiry that I'm exploring. I am concentraing particularly on the question of how 'mind creates world'. The book I mentioned above, Mind and the Cosmic Order, by Charles Pinter, has been extremely enlightening - it's not a spiritual book, nor even really a philosophy text, it's mainly based on cognitive science and evolutionary theory. But it has profound philosophical implications and is quite close to what Bernardo Kastrup and Donald Hoffman are writing about, I feel (he mentions Hoffman at several points but not Kastrup).

Namely, we are treating our inner concepts about Reality (whatever it is) as naively real. This blinds us to the fact that the actual process of Reality is to be found in that activity which manifests our metaphysical concepts as outer physiognomy.

Right! Now I get you. That's what yoga is grounded in, is it not? (Real yoga, not exercise-class yoga.) The physical poses (asanas) representing or realising specific aspects of being. There are teachings about somatic meditation and awakening of the body. Is that close?

I agree with you, insofar as one mistakes abstractions and words for reality.

Like you said, it would make the natural scientific method much more difficult within its various domains to integrate first-person conscious agency, even though it's intuitive that this agency is just as much of a part of the World Process as anything else which is observed. But that is where we come to the key question - does this additional difficulty mean that it is impossible to do? Kant answered "yes" to that question - it is impossible for human cognition, which is trapped within the phenomenal domain of its own intuitive making, whereas there is a separate noumenal domain which remains 'unintelligible and meaningless' to scientific inquiry.

One of Krishnamurti's paperbacks was called 'The Impossible Question'. ' "If you put an impossible question, your mind then has to find the answer in terms of the impossible - not what is possible' was the byline. Kind of like a Zen koan. It's a question that is intended to transform the questioner not simply to elicit an answer.

I don't know if Kant really had that breakthrough into the (Eastern) enlightened perspective - Jacques Maritain said he didn't - but his work is still seminal in our day.

As for 'human cognition being trapped' - the Biblical explanation of that is with reference to 'the fall'. In the Eastern traditions, there is no 'fall' but there is the principle of the 'beginningless ignorance' in which humans are entangled. So what all of the spiritual traditions are aiming at is a spiritual transformation. I don't think that there is anything corresponding to that in naturalist philosophy. Remember Carl Sagan: "Cosmos is all there is, ever has been, and ever will be'. And by that, Sagan means the cosmos discoverable by instruments and senses. A proper metaphysic can accomodate the natural sciences but not vice versa.