Idealism Misses The Point

[Objects Are Real]

Not sure what “the dreamt stone is a mental object, because it has so many bonds, etc. etc.” means, so can't address it.

Yes, what I say about dreams is deduced after much metaphysical contemplation (not original to me, of course, but with which I agree based on evidence). The experience of the dream is an instantaneous knowing, in which one simply has raw experience. Upon waking can he/she think of its various meanings, where it fits within the cosmos, etc. One should ground such contemplation on good ideas which are based in empirical evidence.

Upon waking, it is reasonable to believe that the stone of the dream is incorporeal, and we learn this based on evidence. To disbelieve this, we have two major options which both to me seem unreasonable: 1) Nothing is corporeal, all is a dream; 2) The even more unbelievable claim of, materialism-based illusionism, i.e., that all is matter and there is no experience.

I think an integral cosmos makes the most sense, and so there is no good reason for me to "let go" of that which is empirically based for that which isn't.

[Federica]

Not sure what “the dreamt stone is a mental object, because it has so many bonds, etc. etc.” means, so can't address it.

The above was my attempt to refer to your own words and thought process

Yes, what I say about dreams is deduced after much metaphysical contemplation (not original to me, of course, but with which I agree based on evidence). The experience of the dream is an instantaneous knowing, in which one simply has raw experience. Upon waking can he/she think of its various meanings, where it fits within the cosmos, etc. One should ground such contemplation on good ideas which are based in empirical evidence.

Upon waking, it is reasonable to believe that the stone of the dream is incorporeal, and we learn this based on evidence. To disbelieve this, we have two major options which both to me seem unreasonable: 1) Nothing is corporeal, all is a dream; 2) The even more unbelievable claim of, materialism-based illusionism, i.e., that all is matter and there is no experience.

The dream was an example to show that what might seem reasonable to our current understanding can appear under a very different light when looked at from a higher standpoint. Something similar could be true with regards to what seems reasonable to our standard consciousness. How to be sure that the sense of plausibility we get is not influenced by invisible choices, or thinking habits, that we incorporate in our train of thoughts without realizing?

I think an integral cosmos makes the most sense, and so there is no good reason for me to "let go" of that which is empirically based for that which isn't.

The letting go of our habitual worldview that makes most sense, following instead the pure given of experience as the safest epistemological path, was a suggested experiment meant to recognize and bring within the scope of awareness any potential undetected influences operating on our train of thoughts.

[rezam06]

Also note that, despite the name of this forum, not all of its members are followers of BKs idealism (I am not).

Hello Federica

May I know where you depart from BK's idealism? (Or what's your comment on BK's idealism?).

Thank you

[Federica]

Hello Federica

May I know where you depart from BK's idealism? (Or what's your comment on BK's idealism?).

Thank you

Hello Rezam, sure. Thanks for your question!

In general terms, where I depart from AI - which stands for analytic idealism in this case - is in its methodological approach to the understanding of reality, to start with.

Basically, our common goal is to understand experience, our conscious experience. Still, AI tells us that we should not start by the consideration of just that: what happens when we experience the world. Instead, it tells us that we should start with positing an ontological prime, namely, that reality is of ideal nature.
Incidentally, I know reality is, indeed, of ideal nature, but setting this hypothesis as the starting point already sounds like we are asked to accept a modus operandi that somebody else seems to have arbitrarily decided for us, although it's our direct experience we want to grasp. Why should we start with ontology? “Because one ontic prime is better than two, it’s more parsimonious” BK says. “Because we need to define an abstract rock bottom hypothesis, in order to have a determined starting point for the reasoning”.
But our goal is to enquiry how we cognize reality, something quite concrete. Can we not consider that experience directly? “No - AI tells us - we need to pin down the reasoning somewhere, so we pick a piece of the reasoning, and we make it our postulate of choice, start there, and see if it stands up reasonably. That’s how philosophy works.”

In other words, we are told that the reasoning itself is actually anchored to nothing, it would gladly fly around in the world of abstractions, if it was for it. Therefore, we need to pin it down. We do as if one link in the chain of reasoning was real/true. We don’t know if it’s the case, because the whole thing is not our direct experience, it flies in the air (it’s abstract), but we just postulate like so. In this way we have a”rock bottom” to “rely on”.
To me, this does not sound like a very good start. It sounds like we are compromising a lot before we even get started. So I prefer to depart from such an approach

For me, it’s as if you are an investor, let's say. You have funds. You are ready to go out there, and make your choices to place your stacks in various markets. But you are told “Please sit down, now let’s play Monopoly. Here's your game piece, here are the game rules, let’s play. You: “But I have real money, I don’t want to play in the abstract, according to the fictional rules of this table game, I want to get in touch with the real world, and make real placements, in the real market, with real money, not with these colorful tokens!" In the same way, AI plays a game of "let’s postulate this, then let’s submit that, and let’s treat this possible objection like so" etc. etc. (which is probably true for other philosophical approaches as well).

But the thing is, we are interested in our own process of cognition of reality and we have a sense that matter can't explain consciousness. Therefore reality should be of ideal nature, ideas should be the backbone of reality. But let's notice at the same time that ideas are also "inside" our process of experience, obviously, not only "outside". In other words, we are considering a nature of reality that seems to exist both inside and outside our human perspective. We are evidently entangled in it in a complex way. Yet AI tells us: no worries, sit back, no need to look at things from first-person perspective, you can conveniently take yourself out of the equation and play around with hypotheses and statements, as with colorful tokens. You can try various configurations, from various hypotetical starting points, and see what “makes most sense”.

As if it was possible to treat the whole question like someone else’s question, like a table game. But how can we try to grasp experience (the connection of perceptions with ideas) by looking at the question in the hypothetical capacity of an external observer, like a game we can run in various ways? It seems clear that as soon as we think about it, we are having an experience, we are changing our flow of experience from within. We are activating and moving that same 'thing' that we are trying to explain. So it's impossible to treat it as a fidget toy that we can manipulate at will, without being ourselves changed in the process. Clearly our experience changes in the process of trying to explain experience, and so we can't 'sit back' and play around with a 'fidget-model' of it.


This is just an initial idea of where I depart from AI. If you were looking at some more specific objections, actually my very first posts on this forum were objections to BK’s model. How do you depart from analytic idealism?

[rezam06]

Thank you very much Federica for your sound answer. I think I should also read your specific comments (viewtopic.php?p=17172#p17172). I would come back to you if I had any points worth mentioning. Thanks again.

[Federica]

Thank you very much Federica for your sound answer. I think I should also read your specific comments (viewtopic.php?p=17172#p17172). I would come back to you if I had any points worth mentioning. Thanks again.

You're welcome, rezam. It might be a lot to watch and read, but if you are interested in objections to AI, and want to watch Bernardo's reply to them, including to mine, plus counter-comments, here are the links:




comments on video reply


Anyway for me, the most interesting would be what you think, so please don't hesitate to share your own thoughts.

[rezam06]

You're welcome, rezam. It might be a lot to watch and read, but if you are interested in objections to AI, and want to watch Bernardo's reply to them, including to mine, plus counter-comments, here are the links:



comments on video reply

Anyway for me, the most interesting would be what you think, so please don't hesitate to share your own thoughts.

Thank you so much for providing the links. I’ll surely see them.

My own thoughts?! Except the endless questions not really much to say . . .

[Federica]

My own thoughts?! Except the endless questions not really much to say . . .

Really? What endless questions? (No worries I will not insist further after this post)

[lorenzop]

The two most obvious aspects of reality are 1) your consciousness; 2) material objects external to you.

Right away you've got yourself in a bit of a bind . . with 2) . . . we don't really have any evidence for "material objects external to you"
Physicalism/materialism presupposes that external material objects exist as a shared world as an explanation for why we share experiences, but these external material objects, as in external to me, external to you; these material objects have never been found.
We have never found this physical world existing outside of awareness.
Idealism simply posits 2 things, 1) there is one fundamental 'substance', and 2) this substance is mental\consciousness.
There are many provisional definitions of consciousness, and these various definitions spawn all sorts of flavors of Idealism.
If I had to put serious money on any metaphysical\ontological questions, I'd suggest that all ism's miss the mark.
If I had to suggest which ism best explains human experience, that would be Idealism hands down. Idealism certainly wins out if one's goal is to live a happy fulfilled and generous life.
If one is looking for an ism for the development of a more efficient steam engine, sure go with Materialism.

[Objects Are Real]

I am very partial to idealism, and I agree with you that idealism is vastly better than materialism. But, I don't think that idealism goes far enough.

From a personal perspective, it is most obvious that, firstly, one is having an experience and secondly that, in time, one notices that material objects (CORPOREAL objects) exist external to oneself. A corporeal object is NOT a physical object. The corporeal object is any object with spatial extension that contains qualities. Given this, quantum systems are not corporeal but anything associated with a classical physics is corporeal (it has spatial location). The second point, that corporeal objects are external to one's mind, is assumed once one notices that corporeal external to oneself do not change based on will alone. And so, I think it safe to say that these two points are natural givens. It could be the case that material objects don't exist and we're all solipsistic. But, I don't think that's reasonable.

Regarding your point that material objects have never been found: Firstly, we must delineate between a physical object (pure physics, pure abstraction) and CORPOREAL objects (perceptive objects which have QUALities). For corporeal objects, I think they've been found in two ways: 1) raw experience; 2) classical physics which described the quantitative aspect of corporeal objects.

The materialist gets himself in a bind because he makes the same mistake that Bernardo makes, and that is that the materialist, like Bernardo, thinks that corporeal objects (QUALitative objects) are actually just a bunch of quantum (QUANtitative) particles smooshed together to make a corporeal object. This, I think is as unreasonable as to think that if you get enough non-conscious stuff together in a certain complexity (brain bio and chemistry) then out pops consciousness. Ironically, Bernardo makes the same mistake by suggesting that we can just get a bunch of non-qualitative, non-local quantum particles together and, poof, out pops a qualitative, local object. What the violation of Bell and Leggett inequalities seems to be saying is that, "It is not the role of quantum particles to bestow, but TO RECEIVE, being."

You say, "We have never found this physical world existing outside of awareness" and I COMPLETELY agree with you. There is no physical world, given that it is pure abstraction. This is why materialists are absolutely upside down by trying to make physics an ontology. Physics cannot be an ontology and that's because abstractions are not ontological, i.e., abstractions lack being. The primary QUALitative object, which is the thing from which the abstraction is deduced, is the being. And so any ontology must be qualitative. This is why corporeal objects are not physical. Corporeal objects are ontological, i.e., they have being.

As you know, "the physical" is mere description of quaNtities, and quaNtities are not the real/corporeal object, just as the apple's circumference is not the apple. Conversely, the real apple is corporeal, i.e., it is its quaLities, and those quaLities are perceptible, whereas quantities can never be experienced, quantities can only be measured. If you rebut that the quantities are perceptible BECAUSE we describe them, I would retort that this is not the case, because while the description (calculating .003 grams of something) is experienced, the quantity (the abstraction) is not.

Corporeality (objects bound by both space and time) is the bottom most level in a hierarchical ontology, mind which is above corporeality is bound by only time, not space, and the highest level in this tripartite cosmos is the "aeviternal," i.e., that which is bound by neither space or time. The aeviternal is that which ties the two lower strata together, and acts instantaneously. We know that there is a causation outside of space and time (the violation of Bell inequalities). Idealism, a process bound by time, cannot account for instantaneity, whereas the aeviternal can. This is why I believe that the materialist is stuck in the lowest tier (the corporeal, i.e., only material objects exist); idealism is stuck in the second tier (only mind exists), but both lack a necessary cause, and for that, I believe, we must appeal to the aeviternal.

I agree with you that idealism is the better ism, compared to materialism - hands down. Getting an steam engine is not at all materialism, it is just science. Materialism is the metaphysical commitment that the science of steam engines would and could never make.