From a Thomistic perspective, theistic personalism is absurd because theistic personalists treat God as something Superman. — BillMcEnaney

A key concept in Scholastic philosophy, emphasised in Aquinas, is the "analogical way of knowing." He says that we only know something of God by analogy. While we cannot know God's essence directly (since it is beyond our finite human intellect), we can know God indirectly through His works. We can understand aspects of God analogically, by considering the goodness, truth, and being that we observe in creation and reasoning back to their ultimate source in God. However it is not strictly true to say that God is actually goodness or truth. In Aquinas' philosophy, when we say that God is good, true, or beautiful, we do not mean these in the same way as when we describe a human being or a thing in the world as good, true, or beautiful. This distinction arises from Aquinas' emphasis on the infinite and transcendent nature of God, which is fundamentally different from the finite and contingent nature of creatures.

Aquinas employs the analogy of being to navigate between two extremes: univocity (where words mean the same thing when applied to God and creatures) and equivocity (where words have entirely different meanings, making communication about God and creatures incommensurable). The analogical use of language allows for a middle path: words can be applied to both God and creatures, but their meanings are related not by identity but by analogy.

For Aquinas, when we say God is good, we mean that God is the cause of goodness in all things and that God's goodness is superabundant and incomparable to any goodness found in creation. The goodness in creatures participates in or reflects the divine goodness, but it does not exhaust or fully represent it. Thus, the analogical mode of knowing acknowledges that we know something true about God based on the effects we see in the world (such as goodness, being, or beauty), but we also recognize that the divine reality of these attributes is infinitely beyond our finite understanding. Perchance the same principle might apply to the divine simplicity.

(It is in this respect that Duns Scotus argued for the univocity of being, which means that being is understood in the same way of both God and creatures. This does not imply that God and creatures are identical or that there is no qualitative difference between them; Scotus acknowledged the infinite difference in degree. However, it does mean that the concept of "being" itself can be applied in the same sense to both God and creation, facilitating a more direct discussion about God based on natural reason. By asserting a common metaphysical ground between God and creatures, Scotus univocity of being is seen as diminishing the transcendental gap between Creator and creation. This, in turn, is argued to have led to a disenchanted world, where God becomes just another being among beings, albeit the greatest one. I think this is where theistic personalism of the Craig variety originated. ChatGPT helped with drafting this post.)

I don't have the background to be able to respond to any of the detailed points — Malcolm Lett

But regardless

Unless someone can find major holes in my argument there, it makes the case for the need for alternate explanations much weaker. — Malcolm Lett

So if you don’t understand the criticisms, how do you know there are no ‘major holes’?

Let me point to a couple:

The usual argument against such a stance is that it leaves an explanatory gap - that consciousness "feels" a certain way that cannot be explained mechanistically / representationally / reductively / and other variations on the theme.

Point number 1:
Our intuition is the source of that complaint. — Malcolm Lett

Objection: the argument appeals to an indubitable fact, not a questionable intuition. The ‘explanatory gap’ you summarily dismiss was the substance of an article published by a Joseph Levine in 1983 ¹, in which he points out that no amount of knowledge of the physiology and physical characteristics of pain as ‘the firing of C Fibers’ actually amounts to - is equal to, is the same as - the feeling of pain.

The basic point is that knowledge of physical particulars is objective in nature, whereas ‘the experience of pain’ is clearly subjective and so of a different order to any objective description. This point was elaborated in Chalmer’s now-famous ‘Facing up to the Problem of Consciousness’ ²which your argument does nothing to rebut.

We have only one source of information about conscious experience - our own. Not even of yours, or theirs, just my own. A data point of one. — Malcolm Lett

Objection: the fact of one’s own conscious experience is not a data point. It might be a data point to someone else - a demographer or a statistician - but the reality of first-person experience cannot be explained away as a ‘data point’.

You might know that when Daniel Dennett published his book Consciousness Explained, it was parodied - not by the popular media, but by peers including John Searle and Galen Strawson - as ‘Consciousness Ignored’. I say that’s what any eliminative approach must do, regardless of what ‘mechanisms’ it proposes to ‘explain consciousness’.



———————————

1. Levine, J. 1983. “Materialism and qualia: the explanatory gap”. Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 64: 354–361.

2. Chalmers, Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness

I was referring to the argument presented in the OP.

But, assuming panpsychism isn't true, what other ideas being suggested do? — Patterner

Kastrup's Analytical Idealism is a contender, isn't it? The OP mentions Donald Hoffman, who's on the board of Kastrup's Essentia Foundation, although Hoffman appears to draw the opposite conclusion to the OP.

Analytic Idealism is a theory of the nature of reality that maintains that the universe is experiential in essence. That does not mean that reality is in your or our individual minds alone, but instead in a spatially unbound, transpersonal field of subjectivity of which we are segments. Analytic Idealism is one particular formulation of Idealism, which is based on and motivated by post-enlightenment values such as conceptual parsimony, coherence, internal logical consistency, explanatory power and empirical adequacy. — Essentia Foundation

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In any case, what do you think about the argument overall? — Malcolm Lett

Very poor. Relies on conjecture and tendentious arguments.

Where does one go from there? — BitconnectCarlos

Practice, study, contemplate.

Alan Watts’ books are not a bad starting point. He had his flaws but his prose is excellent and he’s adept at explaining esoteric ideas if you’re looking for introductory books.

One of the early spiritual books I read that impressed me was The Supreme Identity, by Alan Watts. It is an exploration of the relationship between the individual life and the ultimate nature of being, through the perspective of Eastern philosophy particularly Advaita Vedanta and Mahayana Buddhism, but also with references to Christian mysticism.

Watts discusses the notion of identity in a spiritual context, proposing that the true nature of being is not the sense we have of ourselves as a separated ego. Awakening to this fundamental unity, or "supreme identity," reveals that our customary and ingrained sense of division between self and world, self and other, is an illusory state that inevitably brings conflict (the meaning of 'advaita' is 'not divided' or 'non-dual').

That book provided insights into how those teachings can be relevant and transformative in contemporary culture. While It is true that in the years since I read it, I found out that Watts by no means exemplified the kind of life that he was so adept at explaining, nevertheless the idea of 'the supreme identity' really struck me. What is important about it, is that our normal sense of ourselves is based on a false sense of identity - that in reality, we are of a completely different order to what we normally take ourselves to be. And I've come to realise that this is what philosophical spirituality is always trying to convey, but that it's a very difficult thing to convey and to understand. It involves a kind of dying - 'dying to the known' as one of the Eastern teachers put it. (And as it is Easter time, it is probably appropriate to mention that that is also the esoteric meaning of the Cross.)

The argument that 'the whole is more than the sum of its parts' goes back to Greek philosophy, Aristotle in particular. He observes that living organisms embody a principle of self-organisation which is lacking in non-living things. The pattern of organisation that artifacts exhibit is due to an external cause, namely, the design of the manufacturer. But in living organisms, that pattern is intrinsic to it, and cannot be explained with reference to any particular organ, or to its constitutive elements. I think that is still an issue that is recognised in current biology, as I understand it, and it tends to undercut the reductionist idea that a whole is nothing but the addition of its parts. It is constituted by its parts, and by the organising principle that orders it.

Kierkegaard was right about many things, as was Wittgenstein, but I argue they failed to understand religious metaphysics. — Astrophel

You must be setting a pretty high bar, then. Do you have any examples of those you think might have?

Isn't that what the story of Jesus' life and resurrection was supposed to convey?

In September 1914, Wittgenstein, off duty, visited the town of Tarnow, then in Austrian Galicia, now in southern Poland, where he went into a small shop that seemed to sell nothing but picture postcards. However, as Bertrand Russell later wrote in a letter, Wittgenstein “found that it contained just one book: [of] Tolstoy on the Gospels. He bought it merely because there was no other. He read it and re-read it, and thenceforth had it always with him, under fire and at all times.” No wonder, then, that Wittgenstein became known to his fellow soldiers as ‘the one with the Gospels’. Tolstoy’s book, however, is a single Gospel: hence its name: The Gospel in Brief. It is, as Tolstoy himself says in his Preface, “a fusion of the four Gospels into one.” Tolstoy had distilled the four biblical accounts of Christ’s life and teaching into a compelling story. Wittgenstein was so profoundly moved by it that he doubted whether the actual Gospels could possibly be better than Tolstoy’s synthesis. “If you are not acquainted with it,” he told his friend Ludwig von Ficker, “then you cannot imagine what effect it can have on a person.” It implanted a Christian faith in Wittgenstein. Before going on night-duty at the observation post, he wrote: “Perhaps the nearness of death will bring me the light of life. May God enlighten me. Through God I will become a man. God be with me. Amen.” — PhilosophyNow

Seems an odd quote, as the later Wittgenstein never preached religion, but the article from which it was taken was originally published by the British Wittgenstein Association. But it provides a bit more of a gist later in the article:

“There are indeed things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical.”

In other words, there is a categorically different kind of truth from that which we can state in empirically or logically verifiable propositions. These different truths fall on the other side of the demarcation line of the principle of verification.

Wittgenstein’s intention in asserting this is precisely to protect matters of value from being disparaged or debunked by scientifically-minded people such as the Logical Positivists of the Vienna Circle. He put his view beyond doubt in this sequence of paragraphs:

“6.41 The sense of the world must lie outside the world. In the world everything is as it is and happens as it does happen. In it there is no value – and if there were, it would be of no value. If there is value which is of value, it must lie outside of all happening and being-so. For all happening and being-so is accidental. What makes it non-accidental cannot lie in the world, for otherwise this would again be accidental. It must lie outside the world.”

In other words, all worldly actions and events are contingent (‘accidental’), but matters of value are necessarily so, for they are ‘higher’ or too important to be accidental, and so must be outside the world of empirical propositions:

“6.42 Hence also there can be no ethical propositions. Propositions cannot express anything higher.

6.421 It is clear that ethics cannot be expressed. Ethics is transcendental.”

can you explain the "latent beefiness patent" thinking? — Patterner

'Beefiness' :roll: ?

That quote 'what is latent becomes patent' was from lectures I attended in Indian Philosophy by a distinguished scholar. It was in the context of explaining the Advaita doctrine of manifestation or emanation, by which Brahman manifests as the sensible world. I had previously encountered that idea in the teachings of Swami Vivekananda, who you may know became the original emissary of Vedanta to American society, when he spoke at the World Parliament of Religions in 1888:

The child is the man involved, and the man is the child evolved. The seed is the tree involved, and the tree is the seed evolved. All the possibilities of life are in the germ. ... From the lowest protoplasm to the most perfect human being there is really but one life. Just as in one life we have so many various phases of expression, the protoplasm developing into the baby, the child, the young man, the old man, so, from that protoplasm up to the most perfect man we get one continuous life, one chain. This is evolution, but we have seen that each evolution presupposes an involution. — Swami Vivekananda

I read that much earlier in life, and I don't know if it now withstands critical scrutiny, but it makes intuitive sense.

Transcendental ethics would posit that moral truths are not contingent upon individual beliefs, cultural norms, or empirical facts, but rather have a universal and objective reality that transcends human understanding. Any way we can demonstrate that this is the case? — Tom Storm

Isn't Wittgenstein's answer that it can only be shown, not argued about?

I'm curious as to your thoughts on Peck's view. — wonderer1

Thanks for asking! I find it difficult to map what I said against M Scott Peck's criteria and am a bit puzzled as to what you're asking me.

Armstrong was an advocate of scientific materialism (see Count Timothy's post above on 'the scientism problem'). There are many science writers, and many fields of science, that are not materialist in orientation. I don't see his kind of philosophy as at all well-informed about science so much as expressing a longing for scientific certainty in an intrinsically uncertain subject area. He takes the universality of physics as paradigmatic for knowledge generally.

As for epiphanies, in my experience they were vivid, spontaneous, instantaneous, utterly convincing, and impossible to communicate.

Do you feel the same? — javi2541997

I think many people are going through this. I declined confirmation in the Christian church, although my family was not religious and neither was my social milieu so that wasn't regarded as being very important. But I came of age in the 60's and Eastern spirituality was in the air, so that became an influence. Although I was dubious about religion, I became sure that enlightenment was real, and had some vivid epiphanies at quite a young age. I was one of the types who read many spiritual books and later in life made earnest efforts to practice sitting meditation. I sometimes think my engagement with meditation has re-activated a kind of latent religious feeling, although I still can't abide church. Nevertheless, all these questions still weigh on me and I continue to pursue them. I feel I have had some genuine conversion experiences along the way, but they don't add up to deliverance as yet.

Of all those spiritual books I read, some resonated deeply and still stay with me. I have a kind of cross-cultural attitude, I like to think of it as being like 'silk road spirituality' as it involves elements of both Western and Eastern philosophy.

I don't believe that anyone has access to objective morality — Tom Storm

I don't think morality is an objective matter. What's that Wittgenstein aphorism? 'Ethics is transcendental'. It comes from something deeper than that. The Christian teaching is that conscience is an innate faculty which discerns what is right, and I'm sure there's something in that.

Overall, I feel the need for what I regard as a cosmic philosophy. That is, human life has cosmic significance - not from the objective viewpoint, which sees us as a kind of cosmic fluke, children of chance. But because rational sentient beings open new horizons of being. The spiritual quest is sometimes said in Eastern lore to be 'realising the true nature' and that is one of the principles that resonates with me.

Those discussions usually then trail off into meaninglessness — Malcolm Lett

The problem I see with reductive materialism is really pretty simple. It is that the scientific approach that it assumes is defined entirely in terms of objectivity. It is what I describe as 'objective consciousness'. It is, of course, fantastically successful in an objective sense, but not necessarily in an existential sense. There is a vast scope of issues which are amenable to objective analysis, but the problems of philosophy, which are essentially existential in nature, may not be among them.

This goes back to the founding paradigm of modernity, which is Galilean objectivity and the universal reach of physical laws, combined with Cartesian geometry. That forms the basic paradigm of the materialism you're advocating. But as I explained elsewhere, it is analogous to a two-dimensional description of a three-dimensional shape, in that there is a dimension missing. By assigning reality to what is objectively material, the role of the perceiving subject, which synthesises and combines the information about the objective to generate what we understand as 'reality', is omitted or overlooked. But then, as the only criteria that are deemed acceptable are objective in nature, there is no way to demonstrate what, exactly, has been omitted or left out, which is a hard problem.

I like that interview. Note he says consciousness is irreducible, that it’s on a par with an electron’s spin.

The conception of panpsychism I can get on board with is not the Galen Strawson or Philip Goff model of consciousness as an attribute of matter. It’s more the idea that it’s latent and then becomes manifest when the conditions are suitable. ‘What was latent becomes patent.’

Amazon blurb is here - Then I Am Myself the World: What Consciousness Is and How to Expand It https://amzn.asia/d/fthGBYC

The first sentence of the abstract has a distinctly Cartesian ring. But I think he’s obliged to keep re-affirming the ‘physicality’ aspect on pain of alienating the scientific community. (I watched part of a dialogue between him and Kastrup recently.)

Pininng this here as it’s relevant (rather than start a new thread). Christof Koch rejects the mainstream physicalist accounts of consciousness, declaring that ‘the problem of experience’ is such that it must acknowledge the possibility of something beyond matter-energy-space-time. If it is physicalism, it requires extension of the concept of the physical. I think it amounts to a tacit acknowledgement of the hard problem argument.

A naturalistic argument for religion is that only human beings are endowed with the potential ability to discern the sacred. I’ll mention John Vervaeke’s idea of ‘extended naturalism’ in that context.

John Vervaeke's concept of "extended naturalism" explores the interplay between naturalism, spirituality, and the sense of sacredness, moving beyond traditional scientific reductionism and materialism. This approach emphasizes the consilience between structural and content arguments, rooted in neoplatonic thinking, and explores the nuanced relationship between top-down and bottom-up processes in nature. Vervaeke and his colleagues discuss this concept extensively in the context of "Transcendent Naturalism," which aims to bridge the gap between empirical science and deeper spiritual insights, without resorting to reliance on religious dogma.

Vervaeke's discussions often touch on the limitations of traditional propositional knowing in fully comprehending concepts like sacredness, proposing instead that sacredness can be viewed as an inexhaustible and paradoxical fountain of intelligibility. This perspective sees the sacred as something that transcends traditional notions of understanding, pointing to a depth of reality that goes beyond the surface level of empirical facts. In his podcast, Vervaeke delves into concepts like the soul and spirit as ineffable aspects of human experience, highlighting our capacity for self-transcendence and the role of symbolic ideals and transcendence in enriching philosophical discourse.

One of the key insights from Vervaeke's work is the idea that truth and reality possess layers that cannot be fully captured through rational analysis or empirical observation alone. This "extended" form of naturalism suggests that understanding the deeper aspects of existence requires an openness to experiences of transcendence, where one can encounter truths about reality that are not accessible through conventional means.

(citation:1,Redefining Spirit, Soul, and God | Transcendent Naturalism #3 – Dr. John Vervaeke – Podcast – Podtail](https://podtail.com/en/podcast/john-vervaeke/redefining-spirit-soul-and-god-transcendent-natura/) [oai_citation:2,Vervaeke-Henriques 'Transcendent Naturalism' - The Philosophy Forum](https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/14505/vervaeke-henriques-transcendent-naturalism) [oai_citation:3,Redefining Spirit, Soul, And God | Transcendent Naturalism #3 Dr. John Vervaeke podcast](https://player.fm/series/dr-john-vervaeke/redefining-spirit-soul-and-god-transcendent-naturalism-3).

I am not familiar with the term "perennialism" — Leontiskos

The ‘philosophia perennis’ is the idea that there is a kind of mystical universalism of which all the primary spiritual traditions are expressions. Specifically, ‘perennialism’ refers to a group of mainly independent scholars who wrote on those themes in the 20th century. Those Hart mentions are René Guenon and Frithjof Schuon but there are several others (including Ananda Coomaraswamy and Julius Evola). As Hart notes, many of them tended towards reactionary fascism as they despised modernity and political liberalism (indeed the definitive textbook on them is Against the Modern World by Mark Sedgwick. I’m not an admirer of those writers in particular but I accept the basic idea that there is a common theme in many classical spiritual philosophies. There is one ‘perennialist’ philosopher, Sayyed Hussein Nasr, of Iranian origin, whom I believe enjoys a reasonable reputation in current scholarship.)

The obvious reason why the interviewer mentioned John Hick is that they were discussing syncretism and defining that in distinction from ‘perennialism’. If you read Hart’s The Experience of God it is a thoroughly syncretist book.

Differentiates syncretism (which he likes) from perennialism (which he doesn’t). Describes John Hick as a ‘well-meaning syncretist thinker, not a perennialist’. Sees value in syncretism and says the different faiths complement each other (as did I).

It seems to me that if there is only one "sacred" then everyone must be worshipping the same god; the phenomenal elements of each religion each derive from one and the same noumenal reality. Metaphysical polytheism is logically incompatible with Hick's theory, no? — Leontiskos

'The sacred' is a category, not an entity. Consider David Bentley Hart's depiction of God in The Experience of God - 'one infinite source of all that is: eternal, omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent, uncreated, uncaused, perfectly transcendent of all things and for that very reason absolutely immanent to all things.' " From a review. He sees commonality between diverse theistic traditions. Is he also falling into Hick's 'barren relativism'?

we have observed that physical processes can form complex objects without human intervention, such as trees: if we assume that another quality is fundamental (ignoring consciousness), and this quality is used to make a complex system like a tree, which seems to have fundamental components working together to form a complex system, why can’t the same be true of consciousness? — amber

The cardinal difference is the subjective unity of consciousness: we experience ourselves as a single entity, not a combination of micro-processes. When we drop a rock on our toe, we don't hear about it second-hand, as if the message is transmitted through a series of separate sub-consciousness units.

when someone finally develops the very first ever model of how a soul might work, — flannel jesus

Interesting that one of the Greek words for soul was 'psyche' (not spelled exactly like that) but it's also the root of 'mind', as in 'psychology'. So I wonder if 'soul' and 'mind' might be synonyms, to all intents. With the caveat that I think 'soul' or 'psyche' conveys the idea of the totality of mind, including the unconscious and subconscious, not simply the 'conscious mind' or what one is consciously aware of.

As to which aspect of the mind (or soul) might not be physical, there is an account of that in medieval philosophy that I find, at least, suggestive. The physical or appetitive aspects of the psyche are what 'receives the sensations' e.g. the senses of sight, touch, hearing etc. The immaterial aspect is what recognises the form of the object. That is an intellectual judgement, which is the aspect of the psyche that is associated with 'the rational soul'. And I can think of an argument in support of that idea, but I'll leave it at that for now.

Significant that the original texts of Advaita were called the Upaniṣads. The term is derived from 'sitting near'. They were texts imparted from teacher to student, memorised by heart and repeated constantly. The systems of Indian philosophy are called 'darshana' which literally means 'seeing'. What is implied is that proximity to a teacher is important as to the means of transmission of the knowledge of the sacred texts. They are religious texts, conveying a radical philosophy. I'm interested in exploration of non-dualist principles, but the broader context needs to be taken into account. They may not be very effective as bare propositions in a forum context.

(I've been listening to some talks and debates from an Advaita teacher, Swami Sarvapriyananda of the Vedanta Society of New York. He has quite a large collection of lectures and is a very erudite fellow. His profile is to be found here.)

Hick's novel thesis that everyone is worshipping the same god comes across as flat-footed. — Leontiskos

He doesn’t say that at all. His thesis is that religions originate with ‘the encounter with the sacred’, which is then interpreted in divergent ways from the outset, according to the way in which it is expressed by the originator and the culture in which it is interpreted. So cultures conceive of ‘the sacred’ in vastly divergent ways. Whether there is one or more ‘sacreds’ is kind of a silly question, which is also the point.

Whilst l like John Hick's kantian distinction between appearance and ultimate reality. The problem is he relegates the truth claims of all world religions to the domain of appearance or mythological claims. — Sirius

Insofar as it’s a claim, perhaps it’s not the truth. The best words can do is point. And as far as philosophy is concerned it can only ‘take you to the border’ and drop you there. Then it's up to the individual.

I'll share an odd fact. I discovered Kant through T R V Murti's Central Philosophy of Buddhism. He makes extensive comparisons between Buddhist Madhyamaka and Kant's CPR (and also other idealists. A mid-last-century book, it's criticized by more recent scholars as excessively eurocentric.) But one of the comparisions Murti makes is between the 'two-truths' teaching of Madhyamaka and the Kantian distinction between phenomena and the noumenal. Conventional truth, samvritti, corresponds with the phenomenal realm, paramartha is ultimate truth, but at the same time, empty of own-being and beyond predication, as it were. Nāgārjuna (who authored the principle text) said he makes no claims and holds no thesis of his own. He has no absolute truth to proclaim and writes only as a kind of propadeutic. The analogy is, words are like a stick used to stoke the fire, but once the fire is ablaze, the stick is thrown in with it.

Maybe, the ultimate reality doesn't abide by the laws of logic. — Sirius

Not so much doesn't abide by, but overflows, because it is beyond coming and going or dying and being born. That is why it is the subject of a kind of negative dialectic, rather like apophatic theology (although not explicitly theistic in the case of Buddhism).

As far as pluralism is concerned, Buddhism was born and came of age in the pluralistic culture of ancient India. It was quite a different milieu to the Semetic, as there was a thriving culture and counter-culture of orthodox and heterodox philosophies and spiritual movements. There was a vigourous exchange of ideas between these many movements (at least up until the Mughal invasion.) As a consequence, dialectic reached a very high plane. It's been said that Vedanta and Madhamake each helped define the other because of that. Similarly with many other schools of Indian philosophy (technically 'darshana'.)

I know it's a contentious and contested area, but I came into the subject through comparative religion, so I tend to see through that prism. But I'm not going to go all in, it's simply a perspective that I find valuable, but that I understand others may not. (I've also read a some of Raimundo Pannikar who is likewise a comparitivist, but then, his mother was Indian and his father Spanish, so maybe he was naturally inclined towards syncetism. A lot of Jesuits tend to having that syncetistic, broad outlook, that was what made them such exemplary emmissaries in the Colonial era.)

What's your issue with his theory of mind? — Relativist

‘The Nature of Mind’ begins with the simple assertion that "men have minds", and Armstrong claims that modern science may be the best tool with which to investigate the nature of the mind. He says that it seems that scientific consensus is converging on an explanation of the mind in "purely physico-chemical terms". He acknowledges some disagreement on the matter, but says that dissent tends to be on primarily non-scientific grounds.

He and C C Smart (both Australian, as it happens) were what I regard as lumpen materialists. I think any such argument is susceptible to the criticism made in Chalmer's Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness, in fact, I would bet that Armstrong (along with Dennett) was just the kind of philosopher Chalmers had in his sights.

If we start out with an a priori desire to seek out commonalities, then—lo and behold!—we will find commonalities, and we will come to the conclusion that the similarities are very great. If we start out with an a priori desire to seek out differences, then the opposite will occur. — Leontiskos

Quite! Your points are well-taken.

Unfortunately this genuine transcendent truth seems also to be ineffable, so we are left with a posited and theoretical alternative which can't even be described or assessed. — Tom Storm

I don't know if I agree. Yes, there is an ineffable truth, but within the specific domains of discourse which have grown up around that truth in it varying forms, there are ways of imparting it, ways of conveying it, and ways of understanding it. In Buddhist, Hindu and Christian religious orders, there are ways of assessing the progress, or lack of progress, of the aspirants. Those insights form the basis of many great and lasting works of sacred art and architecture.

We're in an historically unique moment where we have instantaneous access to these vast stores of information about any subject, but I wonder if that ease of access makes us jaded. Many of the teachings which can now be so easily accessed from the comfort of your study, were once upon a time nearly impossible to get. The Chinese monks whose pilgrimages were made at enormous peril across the ancient trade routes to India to bring back the precious Buddhist scrolls that formed Buddhism in China. Likewise the Nestorian Christians who were exiled to ancient China and composed the Gospels in Chinese using Buddhist idioms. Whereas now these texts are digitized and freely available at the click of a mouse.

As far as the absolute and the contingent are concerned, the 'unmade' or 'wisdom uncreate' has to all intents vanished from public discourse (at least since the decline of idealism in philosophy where it still had a foothold.) It has dissolved into the nihilism that Nietszche foresaw.

If we say that Trump voters and Bernie Sanders voters are really just different expressions of the same truth about politics, — Tom Storm

Only one of the two has expressly stated an intent to undermine the constitution, so it's a false equivalence. Anyway that belongs in another thread.

Well, would we agree that Hick has attempted to eclipse first-order religious claims? — Leontiskos

I don't think 'eclipse' them, as much as viewing them in a wider context. As I said, many will say here, and I've been presented with it many times, that all religions claim to be the sole custodians of truth, and as they all disagree with one another those are grounds for claiming they all cancel each other. How can they all be right, if they're making conflicting claims? From the perspective of analytical philosophy, not to say common sense, it seems clearly contradictory. I won't repeat the excerpt I copied from Hick's essay but I stil say that at least it provides a framework which makes sense of pluralism. And also, this is a philosophy forum, I'm not inclined towards quoting scriptures except insofar as they can be taken to make a philosophical point.

I could say that my view is that spiritual enlightenment or illumination are universal phenomena. The three philosophical traditions that I am at least slightly familiar with are Christian Platonism (my native tradition), Vedanta, and Mahāyāna Buddhism. Certainly, they all differ, but their distinctions can be seen as complementary rather than conflicting. The world is a global village nowadays and those who are secure in their faith need not feel threated by those of other persuasions.. And by viewing it that way, a case can be made for a kind of 'religious naturalism', in that the phenomena of spiritual illumination have cross-cultural characteristics, which indicate that there is something deeper than just culture in play.

I also want to add that a factor in all these debates about naturalism and the sacred, is the overwhelming influence of what I think of as 'the objective orientation'. I have an intuition that prior to modernity, we had a different kind of relationship with the world - as the world was understood as an expression of the Divine Will, so the relationship with it was 'I-thou' rather than today's assumed subject-object relation. But from the subject-object perspective, it is assumed that 'the sacred' is some kind of object, entity or thing, the addition of which to the objects and entities of naturalism makes no sense. And that is true - it doesn't!

Here, I'm reminded of Terry Eagleton's 2006 review of Dawkins' The God Delusion, which is what drew me to forums in the first place:

Dawkins holds that the existence or non-existence of God is a scientific hypothesis which is open to rational demonstration. Christianity teaches that to claim that there is a God must be reasonable, but that this is not at all the same thing as faith. Believing in God, whatever Dawkins might think, is not like concluding that aliens or the tooth fairy exist. God is not a celestial super-object or divine UFO, about whose existence we must remain agnostic until all the evidence is in. Theologians do not believe that he is either inside or outside the universe, as Dawkins thinks they do. His transcendence and invisibility are part of what he is, which is not the case with the Loch Ness monster. This is not to say that religious people believe in a black hole, because they also consider that God has revealed himself: not, as Dawkins thinks, in the guise of a cosmic manufacturer even smarter than Dawkins himself (the New Testament has next to nothing to say about God as Creator), but for Christians at least, in the form of a reviled and murdered political criminal. The Jews of the so-called Old Testament had faith in God, but this does not mean that after debating the matter at a number of international conferences they decided to endorse the scientific hypothesis that there existed a supreme architect of the universe – even though, as Genesis reveals, they were of this opinion. They had faith in God in the sense that I have faith in you. They may well have been mistaken in their view; but they were not mistaken because their scientific hypothesis was unsound.

Dawkins speaks scoffingly of a personal God, as though it were entirely obvious exactly what this might mean. He seems to imagine God, if not exactly with a white beard, then at least as some kind of chap, however supersized. He asks how this chap can speak to billions of people simultaneously, which is rather like wondering why, if Tony Blair is an octopus, he has only two arms. For Judeo-Christianity, God is not a person in the sense that Al Gore arguably is. Nor is he a principle, an entity, or ‘existent’: in one sense of that word it would be perfectly coherent for religious types to claim that God does not in fact exist. He is, rather, the condition of possibility of any entity whatsoever, including ourselves. He is the answer to why there is something rather than nothing. God and the universe do not add up to two, any more than my envy and my left foot constitute a pair of objects. — Terry Eagleton - Lunging, Flailing, Mispunching

I have a materialistic theory of consciousness that I believe provides a good in-road into explaining phenomenal consciousness. — Malcolm Lett

An explanation comprises explanans and explanandum. The explanandum is what it is that needs to be explained, and the explanans is that which provides the explanation. But then, any act of explanation, including the explanation of consciousness, is a conscious act. This means that consciousness is also a part of the explanans. When we articulate a theory or a model to explain consciousness, we are doing so using our conscious understanding, reasoning, and cognitive faculties.

This dual role of consciousness leads to a sort of circularity: we use consciousness (as part of explanans) to explain consciousness itself (the explanandum). It's akin to trying to illuminate a light bulb with its own light—it's both the source and the object of the inquiry.

Eliminative materialism doesn't address this problem. Instead, it ignores it, which is why Daniel Dennett's first book on the subject, Consciousness Explained, was parodied by many of his peers as Conciousness Ignored.

Dennett asks us to turn our backs on what is glaringly obvious—that in consciousness we are immediately aware of real subjective experiences of color, flavor, sound, touch, etc. that cannot be fully described in neural terms even though they have a neural cause (or perhaps have neural as well as experiential aspects). And he asks us to do this because the reality of such phenomena is incompatible with the scientific materialism that in his view sets the outer bounds of reality. He is, in Aristotle’s words, “maintaining a thesis at all costs.” — Thomas Nagel, Review of From Bacteria to Bach and Back

I'm aware of Armstrong, that he is author of Materialist Theory of Mind, which has always been anathema to me.

Another noteworthy point on miracles, is that, given our understanding of nature (and how mystical it really is--e.g., quantum physics, general/special relativity, etc.), it isn't implausible that an extradimensional being (or one with representative faculties capable of representing not in time or space) may exist and still be a part of the natural processes of nature. — Bob Ross

'Miracles are not contrary to nature, but only what we know of nature' ~ Augustine.

as I understand it, something is metaphysical if it has some form of existence that is independent of physics. — Malcolm Lett

I see. Thanks for clearing that up.

This is the Cartesian thesis, that the mind exists in some other plane of existence beyond the physical. — Malcolm Lett

Descartes' form of dualism, in particular, does posit res cogitans, literally 'thinking thing'. I think it's a problematic concept, but I won't try to spell that out here. But suffice to say that Aristotelian metaphysics (and metaphysics originates from Aristotle's writing, although he did not devise the term, which was devised by a later editor) does not assume the body-mind division that Descartes does. Rather his was the duality of matter and form, a.k.a. hylomorphism, which is very different to Cartesian dualism, although that too would be a major digression.

But to return to Chalmers, I think to get a better idea of what he means, return to this key paragraph in his original Facing up to the Problem of Consciousness, to wit:

The really hard problem of consciousness is the problem of experience. When we think and perceive, there is a whir of information-processing, but there is also a subjective aspect. As Nagel (1974) has put it, there is something it is like to be a conscious organism. This subjective aspect is experience. When we see, for example, we experience visual sensations: the felt quality of redness, the experience of dark and light, the quality of depth in a visual field. Other experiences go along with perception in different modalities: the sound of a clarinet, the smell of mothballs. Then there are bodily sensations, from pains to orgasms; mental images that are conjured up internally; the felt quality of emotion, and the experience of a stream of conscious thought. What unites all of these states is that there is something it is like to be in them. All of them are states of experience. — David Chalmers

So, I don't think that is referring to a 'metaphysical substance' of the kind you appear to be envisaging, although that is an easy inference to draw if you think of it in Cartesian terms. The key point Chalmers is making is about the first person nature of conscious experience - that experience is something that occurs to, is felt by, a subject. And no third-person, objective description can ever embody that.

He prefers panpsychism: the theory that everything is physical (no metaphysical stuff needed), but that there's some new fundamental physics that we can't yet measure. — Malcolm Lett

'Chalmers characterizes his view as "naturalistic dualism": naturalistic because he believes mental states supervene "naturally" on physical systems (such as brains); dualist because he believes mental states are ontologically distinct from and not reducible to physical systems' (~wikipedia). But again, I don't believe this posits any kind of 'thinking substance' in a Cartesian sense. He writes about panpsychism, but I'm also aware he's discussed the 'combination problem' implicit in panpsychism, i.e. how can simple conscious units combine to create the unified subject that we experience as self.

In an elaborate way, he uses his p-zombie to conclude that panpsychism is correct. — Malcolm Lett

No, he does not. I still say you're misunderstanding the intent of his thought-experiment - or perhaps you're seeking to define it in such a way that it doesn't undermine the reductive materialism that you say you're proposing.

My interpretation of the issue is this. The fundamental puzzle of mind, is that it is never truly an object of cognition, in the way that physical objects are. Again, no metaphysical posit is required to prove that. Something nearer a perspectival shift is required: the reason the mind is not objectively graspable, is that it is the subject of experience, that to which or to whom experience occurs, that which cognises, sees and judges. But as Indian philosophy puts it, the eye can see another, but not itself; the hand can grasp another, but not itself. Again, no metaphysical posit required, but it does throw into relief the elusive nature of the subject and its intractibility to the objective sciences.

I get that. I don’t mean mechanical technology but advanced bioengineering. Although I don’t know if it’s relevant.

For example, in The Conscious Mind, Chalmers (1996), pg 96 "someone or something physically identical to me (or to any other conscious being), but lacking conscious experiences altogether". ...The two are stated as being identical a priori, independent of measurement. That form of p-zombie is the strictest kind, and its conceivability hinges on the conceivability of some form of metaphysics - ie: something outside of physics that has the conscious experience. This is th e dualism to which I am referring. — Malcolm Lett

I don't understand what you're getting at here. Let me try and re-phrase it. You're saying that in this example, there's a p-zombie truly indistinguishable from a human.

So, it reacts and speaks as would a human, but it is not really a subject of experience at all.

The p-zombie in this example is a physical thing - quite literally, a physical object, albeit one that is indistinguishable from a human subject. So how does that constitute 'something outside of physics that has the conscious experience'? How is it 'outside of physics'?

(Incidentally, I agree that a p-zombie indistinguishable from a human is hard to imagine, but then, if you had advanced enough robotic technology, it might not be inconceivable. I think the replicants in Blade Runner were biological beings, even if they were the result of bioengineering, so I don't think they'd be considered p-zombies.)

I have the feeling that we have very different ideas of what metaphysics, and what dualism, mean, but let's get to that after clearing the first point up.

However, if dualism is false, then I hold that anything with the same neural structures as humans (as empirically measured via today's technology) will experience phenomenal consciousness. — Malcolm Lett

Odd reasoning, it seems to me. There is only one form of being that has 'the same neural structures as humans', that is, humans. If one were able to artificially re-create human beings de novo - that is, from the elements of the periodic table, no DNA or genetic technology allowed! - then yes, you would have created a being that is a subject of experience, but whether it is either possible or ethically permissible are obviously enormous questions.

I can conceive of the possibility that dualism is true — Malcolm Lett

What form of dualism can you concieve of as possibly true? Hylomorphic? Cartesian? Some other variety? What do you think dualism means?

By the way, I put the question to ChatGPT which responded like so. The key phrase I took to be the following:

...the absence of subjective experience in the philosophical zombie suggests that consciousness entails something more than just physical or observable properties. This leads to the conclusion that consciousness has aspects that are not fully captured by physical explanations alone, implying a need for an expanded understanding that possibly includes non-physical dimensions. — ChatGPT

In other words, that it would appear conscious, without actually being conscious. Again,the thought-experiment purports to demonstrate an inherent shortcoming in objective description in respect of ascertaining the reality of subjective states.

why, thanks! Nice of you to say so. I'm afraid I'm rusted on to this forum :love: (I'll take in what you have to say and may come back with more later.)

This stems from _why_ he's using the analogy - which is to address the conceivability of phenomenal consciousness residing in something nonphysical. — Malcolm Lett

I don't think that's the point of Chalmer's thought-experiment.

Previously my view had been that you could catch a p-zombie out with a simple question, like 'what are you afraid of?' or 'what is the most embarrasing thing that ever happened to you?' or even 'how are you?' As the p-zombie has no inner states or feelings whatever, it could never be embarrased or fearful or answer how it is. So, 'gotcha!'

But then I realised that if it was realistic enough - and since I first starting thinking about the issue, ChatGPT has come along - it could fake an answer to those questions.

And that's what made me realise the point of the thought-experiment. Providing that the fake was totally convincing, it could be a very well-constructed mannequin or robot that says 'I fear this' or 'that would be embarrasing', 'I feel great' - and there would be no empirical way of knowing whether the entity was conscious or faking. So I take Chalmer's point to be that this is an inherent limitation of objective or empiricist philosophy - that whether the thing in front of you is real human being or a robot is impossible to discern, because the first-person nature of consciousness is impossible to discern empirically, as per his Hard Problem paper.

And if biological reductionism is somehow anathema (I don't know that it is, I'm assuming) perhaps it is redeemable with some fresh modifications. — ENOAH

Hey no problems, it's a discussion forum, we're here to kick ideas around.

I have an aversion to the kind of evolutionary naturalist accounts of mind advanced by Dennett and evolutionary materialism, that we're all just gene machines acting out a survival algorithm for unconscious biological drives. But then:

We too, in Reality, are beings driven by evolution to respond to triggers in various ways. What is real human consciousness? Aware-ing those processes, those triggers, drives, responses, organically. What is beyond that for humans, no less than for dogs, is what Mind, a system of evolved Signifiers, superimposes on those drives and responses.

Signifiers become the almost exclusive triggers for organic responses, like feelings and movement; empty, fleeting images stored in memory, autonomously constructing Fiction in ways evolved over dozens of millennia, and still evolving, and displacing Reality; usurping sensation, displacing it with perception, feelings with emotions, and image-ing with ideas. — ENOAH

is a pretty far-out post, really. There ways of interpreting it, but I think, here, you're kind of extrapolating the idea of biological evolution beyond its proper domain.

You can look at mind as the manifestation of brain-consciousness. Or you can look at mind as the correlate of the products of the "sciences of the spirit" (Geistwissenschaften). — Pantagruel

That is an area in which German culture has an advantage of the Anglo-american. There is no equivalent term in English.

Plenty of other places seem plenty in favor of critical thinking. — Count Timothy von Icarus

One of the characteristic views of today's atheism is that all faith is blind faith, that faith can only ever amount to 'belief without evidence'. There might be a recognition as faith is important to some, then respect is accorded to it on the basis of freedom of conscience, but that is implicitly relativising, reducing its grounds to the purely personal or subjective. And furthermore that secular culture has no criteria for discriminating between the truth value of, say, Scientology, and the Orthodox Church.

But many great figures in religious history wrestle mightily with doubt. I remember reading that Mother Teresa, a favourite target of Christopher Hitchens, was tormented by the possibility that her faith might be in vain. There are many other examples to be found. Not every religious believer is a complacent fundamentalist.

While Hick is far and away more coherent than anything that is occurring in this thread, I would still argue that he represents little more than an academic fad in philosophy of religion. A little over a decade ago I took a graduate seminar on interreligious dialogue, and even at that time Hick was already but a footnote in the history of that field. When we did the historical overview each student was assigned one or two figures to research and present on, and I was assigned Hick along with Paul Knitter.

Thomas Nagel's The Last Word includes no chapter on religion proper, but if it did Hick would be the subject of that chapter. — Leontiskos

Well, glad to have come across someone who actually knows who John Hick is. (And Paul Knitter.) But I don't necessarily agree that he's guilty of the kind of relativism that Nagel critiques. I would have thought in our pluralistic world that a philosophical framework which allows for many divergent perspectives would be something of value. Many here regularly say that, as all religions claim to have the absolute truth, and they all disagree with one another, then in effect that cancels out the entire subject matter (not in those exact words, but it's a frequently-expressed sentiment.) I rather like the expansive view of John Hick (and Huston Smith and Karen Armstrong, to mention a couple of other names.)

That's not to say I subscribe to the kind of 'many paths up the mountain' approach, either. I think there are genuine and profound distinctions to be made between different religious philosophies. But then, there are also genuine and profound distinctions between different cultures, but they're still human cultures. But, we're called upon at some point to make a decision as to which we belong in, I guess.

Naturalism best explains it as law realism: there is order, because there are laws of nature that necessitate it; and laws of nature are relations between universals. — Relativist

Interesting you mention universals, they are not spoken of much in most contemporary discourse about naturalism. What's your view of their role?