Federica wrote: ↑Mon Aug 14, 2023 5:34 pm
V. Christodoulides wrote: ↑Sat Aug 12, 2023 6:31 pm
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.