Reincarnation and Analytic Idealism

[V. Christodoulides]

I am also curious to know why Analytic Idealism is not the best philosophical theory and how has it been overcome. I would be glad to know more about your take on this. This particular room we are in ("Bernardo gets a room of his own") is not about other theories and approaches but I am sure it will be alright if you post such information here.

Indeed, it would be more than fine to pursue such topics here. This is a great discussion - thank you both! I didn't even notice it until recently because I am in the habit of only checking the General Discussion section. Maybe it would be better to move it to that section in case other readers are also missing it? If you are both fine with that, I'm sure Federica can make that happen.

Awesome. You are welcome! I have no problem with moving over to the General Discussion section.

[ScottRoberts]

The hard problem of Materialism, the combination problem of Panpsychism, and the decomposition problem of Idealism are not the same problem. Each one is specific to its corresponding theory. In essence, they are necessary assumptions within the theories that require substantiation and explanation. Materialism implies the emergence of subjects from objects, Panpsychism implies the formation of big unified subjects through the combination of many separate tiny subjects, and Idealism implies the decomposition of one unified subject into many seemingly separate individual subjects. They are either right or false assumptions. Or more correctly, either possible or impossible. Finding out which is which, will greatly help us in explaining our empirical observations of subjectivity. All I can say about the decomposition problem is that we know for an empirical fact (Dissociative Identity Disorder) that decomposition, in the form of dissociation, can and does happen in nature. To be able to show that your assumption is at least possible is huge progress. The other problems that pertain to the other theories do not have such a clear, unambiguous empirical substantiation.

Actually, idealism need not start with "one unified subject". The concept of "one unified subject" is an abstraction, so the decomposition problem only exists due to positing as fundamental an abstraction, just as the panpsychist posits as fundamental an abstraction "many separate subjects". Instead, one can start with our own experience by noting that our every conscious act involves both the one and the many, noting that the one is many, and the many one. Now analytic philosophy can't handle this, but why restrict one's philosophy to the analytic?

And yes, of course they are all framework-based. What else could they be?

Analytic philosophy may require a framework, but philosophy ("love of wisdom") does not, indeed may find that frameworks are a problem. Where do they come from? What are they doing to us?

[V. Christodoulides]

The hard problem of Materialism, the combination problem of Panpsychism, and the decomposition problem of Idealism are not the same problem. Each one is specific to its corresponding theory. In essence, they are necessary assumptions within the theories that require substantiation and explanation. Materialism implies the emergence of subjects from objects, Panpsychism implies the formation of big unified subjects through the combination of many separate tiny subjects, and Idealism implies the decomposition of one unified subject into many seemingly separate individual subjects. They are either right or false assumptions. Or more correctly, either possible or impossible. Finding out which is which, will greatly help us in explaining our empirical observations of subjectivity. All I can say about the decomposition problem is that we know for an empirical fact (Dissociative Identity Disorder) that decomposition, in the form of dissociation, can and does happen in nature. To be able to show that your assumption is at least possible is huge progress. The other problems that pertain to the other theories do not have such a clear, unambiguous empirical substantiation.

Actually, idealism need not start with "one unified subject". The concept of "one unified subject" is an abstraction, so the decomposition problem only exists due to positing as fundamental an abstraction, just as the panpsychist posits as fundamental an abstraction "many separate subjects". Instead, one can start with our own experience by noting that our every conscious act involves both the one and the many, noting that the one is many, and the many one. Now analytic philosophy can't handle this, but why restrict one's philosophy to the analytic?

And yes, of course they are all framework-based. What else could they be?

Analytic philosophy may require a framework, but philosophy ("love of wisdom") does not, indeed may find that frameworks are a problem. Where do they come from? What are they doing to us?

You are right, this is not a necessity. You can substitute 'Idealism' with 'Analytic Idealism' in my paragraph. It is a more parsimonious and in my opinion logical stance to take. All is one unified thing fundamentally. Manyness is an illusory appearance. But it exists as such. It is just a secondary phenomenon that can emerge from the underlying unity. Why would there be multiple distinct subjects from the get-go? (Multiple ontological primitives as Bernardo would say.) You also seem to suggest that there aren't fundamentally distinct subjects, because they are somehow one in a sense. But you also seem to grant real ontological status to the manyness of subjects. I have to admit that my mind cannot fathom how they can be truly one and truly many at the same time. In my understanding, the appearance of the many can be fully explained as excitations (dynamics) within the one. The one however can not be fully explained in its entirety by looking at the many. The one is more than all of the many combined. Under the opposite view, (e.g. Panpsychism) the whole is just all of the many combined. To sum all of this up in simple words, either the 'many' is an abstraction that can be reduced to the One, or the 'one' is an abstraction that can be reduced to the Many.*

(*Everything that we infer could be called an abstraction but notice that even your own idea, "...our every conscious act involves both the one and the many, noting that the one is many, and the many one." is also an abstraction that you infer based on metacognitively interpreting your experience. Our direct experience just is. In and of itself is indeed an integral aspect of reality that we should pay attention to, but it, alone, does not disclose the true fundamental nature of the whole of reality. A patient suffering from DID, for example, would not be able to know from direct experience alone that the multiple dissociated alters are fundamentally one unified subject. Only once the healing takes place and they are all fully reassociated back into the one original all-encompassing subject, does the truth of the matter become directly obvious.)

I agree, philosophy need not be through frameworks alone. But, whenever we are using language to do philosophy (even if we are just describing our most intuitive inner experiences), we are already working within a framework. The only philosophy that utilizes no frameworks whatsoever is personal unmediated introspection that is not communicated, described to anyone, yourself included. The experience gained is yours and yours alone, intimate to your own mind, but you cannot clothe it with any words in your mind, or try to explain it to yourself through any personal context you may have. To do so, would be to couch it within a framework. A limited one also as it is based on our limited human contexts, languages and understanding. So, it is because I understand this limitation that I believe analytic philosophy can be a helpful tool for working within this limitation as efficiently as possible. Experience comes first but it is only through the process of reasoning and conceptualizing that we turn this raw experience into knowledge able to be shared. Therefore, the more rigorously analytical we are with this process of 'translation' from experience to knowledge, the less information we lose along the way, and the more universally comprehensible we make the knowledge.

[Federica]

Indeed, models are not Reality in and of itself. Reality just is. Explanations for this primordial, pre-existing isness of Reality come secondarily and they can only aspire to capture, in representative form, facets of reality and not reality in its fullness. I ultimately agree, all conceptual frameworks no matter how accurate and advanced will fail in that regard. The point is not to take them beyond their reach but it is to utilise them within their respective areas. There lies their value and usefulness.

V, thanks for your thoughtful reply and interest

Am I right if I read in the above something akin to the old Kantian approach to reality - also shared by Bernardo - that yes, absolute reality exists, however it is destined to remain unknown, behind an impenetrable "screen of perceptions"? In other words, the underlying unity, as you call it, is unknowable, and we are condemned to deal with the dashboard of manyness. Is this your position? This also connects with your last question about further inquisitive steps into the true nature of reality, which - we all agree - is of conscious nature, that is, thinking nature.

So the Kantian paradigm - in its original form, as well as in its present-day form of Analytic Idealism, and with it, any other framework-based approach to philosophy - has been overcome only “recently” in human evolution. Only towards the end of the 19th century, the potential of our human consciousness (and our brain with it) has reached a sufficient level for the path of living thinking to be explored and experienced in meta-conscious way by humanity at large.

Before that, human consciousness has passed through many phases. For example, during antiquity (roughly speaking) the modality of human consciousness was much more fused with Nature, or Spirit, in a felt unity with it, that was making human beings of those times consider their thoughts, their feelings, and their actions as emerging from a common forge, so to say, that the gods/spirit/nature were also a part of. This is what Owen Barfield called Original Participation, in case you are familiar with his work.

So today we have at our disposal this relatively new potential, to realize the real-time interplay of our thinking process with perception at the same time that we are immersed in it, without the need - as Scott has hinted to - to rely on frameworks that, if they simplify things by making them ”bitesize”, also artificially segment a process that in reality happens all at once (our perceptions, as we know them, take shape from the hard-to-grasp interplay of sensory stimuli with our cognitive activity itself, and not only from the stimuli). This segmentation is the cause of all our limitations, and the previosuly mentioned hard problems that we face when we stick to frameworks, even the most parsimonious ones.

This is a growing but still slim philosophical stream, felt as orthogonal by both materialists and modern mystics. Rudolf Steiner (who is more widely known for other aspects of his work) has been the first to make the phenomenological foundations of our conscious (and unconscious) experience clear in philosophical terms, demonstrating the central role of our thinking activity in the process of cognition, not by starting from an ontological prime, but from the given of our human experience, thereby showing the failure of the “screen of perceptions” type of Kantian model, failure to stick to the experientially given reality of our metacognitive activity.

Steiner has done that in what he called his most important book, The Philosophy of Freedom. Many other known and less known thinkers could be mentioned here, who have developed this approach, all throughout the 20th century, until this year 2023. For example, an immediate and great way to get a first sense of some core ideas that are helpful at the start of the path, have been outlined in very clear form - also with the help of visuals - right here on this forum by Cleric.

I recommend the two posts linked below, that I am sure you would immediately relate to, in connection with Bernardo’s philosophy. The Time-Consciousness Spectrum reading could be ideally complemented by the great “user manual” to the Time Consciousness Spectrum, that Ashvin has written just today. That post was a reply to Güney’s questions, but I wonder whether Ashvin has also structured the post in the perspective that you maybe would take a look.

The Time-Consciousness Spectrum

Essay: Beyond the Flat M@L

[ScottRoberts]

V.,

One can be more parsimonious than BK's idealism, as follows:

There is thinking, feeling, and sense perception. For convenience, I will call all these together "ideational activity". Non-ideational activity would be activity of which there is no awareness, the sort of thing materialists think there is. (The word 'ideational' indicates that there is some form (idea) involved, where 'form' just means that which distinguishes one ideational act from others.)

So the completely parsimonious starting point is that there is all and only ideational activity. One cannot doubt that there is ideational activity (since to doubt is an ideational act). One can doubt that there is only ideational activity, but that doesn't matter, since one will never experience non-ideational activity.

The term "ideational acticity" does not refer to an abstraction, as you are engaged in it by reading this sentence. While one can doubt that there is a single, unified subjsct, indeed one can doubt that there is any 'subject' at all, one cannout doubt that there is ideational activity. Hence, this an indubitable, completely parsimonous philosophical starting point with no abstractions.

But can one get anywhere with this as one starting point? Yes, one can. (See Federica's post for where to look.) This approach is basically observing and thinking about ideational activity, without bringing in abstractions.

[AshvinP]

So the completely parsimonious starting point is that there is all and only ideational activity. One cannot doubt that there is ideational activity (since to doubt is an ideational act). One can doubt that there is only ideational activity, but that doesn't matter, since one will never experience non-ideational activity.

Scott,

A common objection in this situation is the mystical experience of nothingness, emptiness, pure awareness, the satori consciousness, or whatever it is referred to. Even if we have not had this experience ourselves, we have surely heard of others who have, perhaps even Bernardo, and these reports cannot simply be dismissed. So could you share with us how would you address that in the 'phenomenological idealism'?

[AshvinP]

I understand that someone could paint from all this a crude, new-age picture consisting of invisible so-called subtle bodies (emotional, electrical, ethereal, and light bodies to name a few) floating around and whatnot.9 All I am saying though, is that Bernardo’s dissociation model can be safely expanded in its scope. It can set the guiding example for the development of a rational reincarnation/relocalisation model. If we are to develop such a model (in which the basics of Bernardo’s model are 100% retained), then the idea that individual minds might be directly represented as light bodies may not be so far-fetched after all. Makes you wonder if all those reports describing beings made of light (aka angels) are referring to encounters with unconstrained individual minds. If any such beings exist, they are most probably in a disincarnate state between incarnations.10

Regardless of what our manifested representations might or might not be, there is a most important (and I am sure mutually agreed upon) point to be mentioned. It is the fact that our core, most inner pure subjectivity is not represented in any manifested form at all. It is a singularity when it comes to ‘physical’, or any other description. Nonetheless, it is an intrinsic and inseparable part of us, individual minds, no matter how obscured it might appear to be. Our so-called spirit could be said to be this unchanging, timeless, and ever-present part of ourselves. It is this shared quality that binds us all together as one and the same at heart.

So (coming back to debatable territory) each of us, split-off personalities in the mind of nature, could be generally called individual spirit/mind/body complexes. The spirit and body aspects are also essentially mental, but there is a clear distinction between each of the three components assigned to a dissociated complex inside the mind of nature. The spirit part is eternally permanent, and the body part is impermanent. As for the mind part, there is an aspect of the individual mind that persists throughout the whole of its universal cycle. There are also aspects of the individual mind that are a product of only each particular incarnation and are very shallow. As transient as the corresponding incarnational body itself. During the incarnation, the totality of the individual mind is pinpointed into a tiny fraction of the overall stream. The rest, which is the majority, is filtered out.

V.,

I just wanted to say that I really enjoyed your essay and it is a surprisingly logical way of deducing what some would call 'esoteric' concepts as referred to above, particularly that of the spirit-soul-body structure and the subtle bodies, which indeed make reincarnation more philosophically comprehensible. I am curious, did you start with any general affinity for such concepts and then seek to logically deduce them from the analytic idealist framework?

[ScottRoberts]

So the completely parsimonious starting point is that there is all and only ideational activity. One cannot doubt that there is ideational activity (since to doubt is an ideational act). One can doubt that there is only ideational activity, but that doesn't matter, since one will never experience non-ideational activity.

Scott,

A common objection in this situation is the mystical experience of nothingness, emptiness, pure awareness, the satori consciousness, or whatever it is referred to. Even if we have not had this experience ourselves, we have surely heard of others who have, perhaps even Bernardo, and these reports cannot simply be dismissed. So could you share with us how would you address that in the 'phenomenological idealism'?

First, by noting that the mystical experience is remembered. This implies that there is overarching ideational activity that spans the 'nothingness' state with the 'normal' state.

A more complicated answer would be to point to the mystics (like Merrell-Wolff) who experienced such states, but later experienced higher states, in which the 'nothingness' state is experienced as simply the opposite pole of 'somethingness' states, leading to such claims as "nirvana is samsara', 'emptiness is not other than form', and so on. While the normal intellect cannot understand this (which is why one must go beyond analytic idealism), one can philosophize around it, which of course is what I attempted (not entirely successfully, but that's another story) in the tetralemmic polarity essay.

[AshvinP]

So the completely parsimonious starting point is that there is all and only ideational activity. One cannot doubt that there is ideational activity (since to doubt is an ideational act). One can doubt that there is only ideational activity, but that doesn't matter, since one will never experience non-ideational activity.

Scott,

A common objection in this situation is the mystical experience of nothingness, emptiness, pure awareness, the satori consciousness, or whatever it is referred to. Even if we have not had this experience ourselves, we have surely heard of others who have, perhaps even Bernardo, and these reports cannot simply be dismissed. So could you share with us how would you address that in the 'phenomenological idealism'?

First, by noting that the mystical experience is remembered. This implies that there is overarching ideational activity that spans the 'nothingness' state with the 'normal' state.

A more complicated answer would be to point to the mystics (like Merrell-Wolff) who experienced such states, but later experienced higher states, in which the 'nothingness' state is experienced as simply the opposite pole of 'somethingness' states, leading to such claims as "nirvana is samsara', 'emptiness is not other than form', and so on. While the normal intellect cannot understand this (which is why one must go beyond analytic idealism), one can philosophize around it, which of course is what I attempted (not entirely successfully, but that's another story) in the tetralemmic polarity essay.

Alright, so it seems a key part of the phenomenological idealist approach is to highlight how all ideational experience is temporally extended. The normal habit of thinking has a difficult time remembering this fact and often lifts snapshots of experience out of a continuum in order to reach philosophical conclusions. Thereby it convinces itself that there are forms of 'non-ideational' activity, whether mindless (materialist) or instinctively conscious (mystic, philosopher of will, etc.).

We could introduce two similar observations here - 1) animals who appear to be consciously aware without thinking/memory, 2) dreamless sleep states. For #2, it seems that the response would be similar to that for the 'nothingness' state. We don't remember the dreamless sleep experience but we sense duration that bridges the normal state from the previous day to the current normal state. Is that correct and how would you address #1?

[V. Christodoulides]

Indeed, models are not Reality in and of itself. Reality just is. Explanations for this primordial, pre-existing isness of Reality come secondarily and they can only aspire to capture, in representative form, facets of reality and not reality in its fullness. I ultimately agree, all conceptual frameworks no matter how accurate and advanced will fail in that regard. The point is not to take them beyond their reach but it is to utilise them within their respective areas. There lies their value and usefulness.

V, thanks for your thoughtful reply and interest

Am I right if I read in the above something akin to the old Kantian approach to reality - also shared by Bernardo - that yes, absolute reality exists, however it is destined to remain unknown, behind an impenetrable "screen of perceptions"? In other words, the underlying unity, as you call it, is unknowable, and we are condemned to deal with the dashboard of manyness. Is this your position? This also connects with your last question about further inquisitive steps into the true nature of reality, which - we all agree - is of conscious nature, that is, thinking nature.

So the Kantian paradigm - in its original form, as well as in its present-day form of Analytic Idealism, and with it, any other framework-based approach to philosophy - has been overcome only “recently” in human evolution. Only towards the end of the 19th century, the potential of our human consciousness (and our brain with it) has reached a sufficient level for the path of living thinking to be explored and experienced in meta-conscious way by humanity at large.

Before that, human consciousness has passed through many phases. For example, during antiquity (roughly speaking) the modality of human consciousness was much more fused with Nature, or Spirit, in a felt unity with it, that was making human beings of those times consider their thoughts, their feelings, and their actions as emerging from a common forge, so to say, that the gods/spirit/nature were also a part of. This is what Owen Barfield called Original Participation, in case you are familiar with his work.

So today we have at our disposal this relatively new potential, to realize the real-time interplay of our thinking process with perception at the same time that we are immersed in it, without the need - as Scott has hinted to - to rely on frameworks that, if they simplify things by making them ”bitesize”, also artificially segment a process that in reality happens all at once (our perceptions, as we know them, take shape from the hard-to-grasp interplay of sensory stimuli with our cognitive activity itself, and not only from the stimuli). This segmentation is the cause of all our limitations, and the previosuly mentioned hard problems that we face when we stick to frameworks, even the most parsimonious ones.

This is a growing but still slim philosophical stream, felt as orthogonal by both materialists and modern mystics. Rudolf Steiner (who is more widely known for other aspects of his work) has been the first to make the phenomenological foundations of our conscious (and unconscious) experience clear in philosophical terms, demonstrating the central role of our thinking activity in the process of cognition, not by starting from an ontological prime, but from the given of our human experience, thereby showing the failure of the “screen of perceptions” type of Kantian model, failure to stick to the experientially given reality of our metacognitive activity.

Steiner has done that in what he called his most important book, The Philosophy of Freedom. Many other known and less known thinkers could be mentioned here, who have developed this approach, all throughout the 20th century, until this year 2023. For example, an immediate and great way to get a first sense of some core ideas that are helpful at the start of the path, have been outlined in very clear form - also with the help of visuals - right here on this forum by Cleric.

I recommend the two posts linked below, that I am sure you would immediately relate to, in connection with Bernardo’s philosophy. The Time-Consciousness Spectrum reading could be ideally complemented by the great “user manual” to the Time Consciousness Spectrum, that Ashvin has written just today. That post was a reply to Güney’s questions, but I wonder whether Ashvin has also structured the post in the perspective that you maybe would take a look.

The Time-Consciousness Spectrum

Essay: Beyond the Flat M@L

You are welcome Federica. Thank you very much for your response and for providing various resources for study! I have a lot of digging to do.

First of all, you are right except when it comes to our own self. Our own mental inner life is known directly by our own selves. The noumena are knowable in this case. Schopenhauer has pointed out this missing fact in Kant's philosophy with his book, "The World as Will and Representation". We know our own selves directly and immediately as 'Will' without the need for representations or inferences. However, when it comes to your own 'Will' for example, I do not have direct access to it, like you do. I only have indirect access through the use of representations and inferences. The same goes for the 'Will' of the rest of the world at large. We, incarnated humans, seem to be behind a very very hard-to-penetrate "screen of perceptions" that seems to distort almost everything that passes through its lens. We do get hints of this underlying unity though. One way is by escaping the confines of our dashboard in so-called "transcendent experiences" of felt union with the world or even with another individual being, wherein there seems to be a merge of two previously dissociated consciousnesses. A possible and interesting second way seems to be the conscious and focused act of deeply contemplating the readings of our very dashboard. They too have something to tell about this unity. The dashboard with its readings is an intrinsic part of reality and thus all it can possibly be truly about is the underlying unity. Everything, no matter how distorted it may seem, is an aspect of this underlying unity.

(Before I move on to your 2nd paragraph, I want to clear up something. I think that we may be using two different definitions for the word 'framework'. For me, every attempt trying to explain reality, including your philosophical approach, falls under the characterization of 'framework-based'. What you are trying to communicate to me is certainly pointing to our lived experience that is beyond the philosophical framework itself, but I do not see how any Idealistic theory differs from this. Analytic Idealism for example, points to the same lived experience. The difference between different theories is only that they try to explain and describe the same lived experience in different ways.

The Kantian paradigm has been overcome by the Schopenhauerian one and now Analytic Idealism is refining and updating the latter according to new knowledge and insights (scientific and otherwise). Analytic Idealism pertains to the field of analytic philosophy. So, how has it been overcome exactly? And how did you come to the conclusion that humanity has evolved, in the way you are describing, around the end of the 19th century? Also, what do you mean by the "path of living thinking"? (Excuse me if the answers are to be found in the links you provided. I haven't read everything yet.)

I more or less agree with your 3rd paragraph. Humans do evolve through stages, and indeed the connection between spirit and man was stronger back then. However, I am not sure this was a different stage in the evolution of human consciousness per se. There were no fundamental differences, as far as I'm aware, between humans back then and modern humans. They were much more in touch with the spiritual aspect of reality because of their openness to such ideas and possibilities. We, modern humans, have not lost this potential, but we have restricted our own selves to a self-imposed limiting picture of what we truly are and are capable of. We are less open to the possibilities as a culture. Furthermore, can you please explain to me how this ancient way of living is different from the more recent breakthrough you are proposing?

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe that our innate perceptions and cognitive activity themselves already segment the world before we even try to put it in frameworks. This innate segmentation comes with being a normal individual human that is naturally limited in its ability to fully experience the holistic nature of reality. Our very senses for example, already cut this unified reality into different bits and pieces -> (visual, auditory, tactile, gustatory, olfactory). I do admit though that there is indeed a real argument to be made about frameworks' tendency to further segment reality. But since I believe that philosophy can only be shared through frameworks, the point is to come up with the frameworks that best retain, and point to, this holistic aspect of our lived experience. I am totally with you here. In that reality is basically one and we should strive to experience it as such.

Now, I still don't see how have these problems been solved by your approach, or how they are only a byproduct of our faulty way of thinking and thus do not really exist. Idealism, through Analytic Idealism, has almost entirely solved the decomposition problem by the way. There is a clear and plausible argument made as to how the problem is solved. The only thing left is finding the full explanation for the mechanism of dissociation. My opinion is that an explicit account of how exactly this process functions on the universal level to bring about the appearance of multiple dissociated mental complexes is necessarily hard (if not impossible) to obtain while in incarnated dissociated form. But, since this pursuit is quite recent, this remains to be seen. If you ask me personally, I am more than satisfied with what basic explanations we already have. For reference, you can take a look at this short essay from Bernardo and/or this longer essay from Bernard Carr that utilizes a more scientific approach to tackle this.

Again, thank you for every resource you shared with me. Hopefully, I will read everything and come back to talk with you about them in the context of our conversation. But, it may take quite some time until I get an adequate understanding of them. Right now I am too ignorant to comment on any of them.