Way off-topic :First job was to wind you back from confusing cognition as epistemic method with cognition as some kind of ontological mind stuff that grounds mind-independent reality. — apokrisis
If you looked at the Mind Created World piece, I explicitly state that I am not arguing for any such thing. — Wayfarer
I just read an article, in Beshara magazine, entitled Mind Over Matter*3. It's an interview with Bernardo Kastrup about his Analytical Idealism beliefs. One of his responses refers to Matter as an "extended transpersonal form of mind". Again, that sounds like Cosmic Mind-stuff (res cogitans) is a non-local ideal substance that can be molded into various forms of extended substance (res extensa). — Gnomon
Cheers.Thanks — Wayfarer
Et tu? I can't accept GPT as authoritative. In any case, if your idealism claims that the world is inherently mental, it must respond to the three puzzles - other people, that we are sometimes wrong, and novelty. If your idealism claims only that our beliefs are mental, it misses the relation between the world and what we believe.I asked ChatGPT... — Wayfarer
You are probably aware already of my disregard for the Kantian notion of the thing in itself. — Banno
It is apparent that there is a distinction between what we believe and how things are. This distinction explains both how it is possible that we are sometimes wrong about how things are, and how we sometimes find novelties. In both cases there must be a difference between what we believe is the case, and what is the case. We modify what we believe so as to remove error and account for novelty; which is again to seek a consistent and complete account. — Banno
I can't accept GPT as authoritative — Banno
I can't see how to make sense of (the in itself) in a way that enables it to be useful. If there is a way that things are that is outside of our comprehension, then it is irrelevant to that comprehension. The only practical consequence can be a nod to the mysterious, and silence. We cannot access "the world as it is in itself", not because it represents some profound fact about the world and our relation to it, but because the thing-in-itself is a useless metaphysical construct. — Banno
You are probably aware already of my disregard for the Kantian notion of the thing in itself. I can't see how to make sense of it in a way that enables it to be useful. — Banno
In any case, if your idealism claims that the world is inherently mental, it must respond to the three puzzles - other people, that we are sometimes wrong, and novelty. — Banno
Your use of the Cake metaphor sounds like you think it's a bad (magical?) idea to try to have it both ways ; perhaps like Jesus multiplying five loaves of bread into enough nutriment to feed five thousand people. But I view 's broadminded worldview as a useful philosophical attitude ; that I call BothAnd*1. It's a flexible binocular perspective that combines two conceptual frames into one philosophical worldview ; where you're not forced to choose one side to stand on.I can't help but contrast your response to me and your response to Gnomon, here: ↪Wayfarer
. Analytical Idealism is not, so far as I can make out, a form of Epistemological idealism. So again, you seem to me to want your cake and to eat it, by answering issues I raise from the point of view of Epistemological idealism while answering issues others raise from the point of view of ontological idealism. — Banno
In my last two posts on this thread, I responded to 's and 's challenges for you to state a firm either/or (cake or eat) position on the multi-faceted concept of Idealism. And one facet that you seem to waver on is the "mind at large" notion, which seems to imply some kind of God-mind ; although even Kastrup seems to be "of two minds" regarding the nature of that hypothetical entity.As for as Kastrup’s idealism - I do question the ‘mind at large’ idea in this essay - Is there ‘mind at large’? - — Wayfarer
I suspect that we both envision a middle-ground or transition between the poles of Mind and Matter. — Gnomon
In your Mind At Large article, you distinguished Scientific Materialism from Scientifically-Informed Idealism. — Gnomon
For me, it's definitely not the God of Theology, but more like the Way-Path (organizing principle) of Taoism, or the Logos (rational principle) of Western Philosophy. Is my reckoning even close to your standpoint? :smile: — Gnomon
So the mistake in terms of idealism is to treat "mind" as something as foundational as substantial being. — apokrisis
Even if the organism is also still a self-organising dissipative structure, just now self-organising in a self-interested fashion by virtue of being able to encode information. — apokrisis
As for as Kastrup’s idealism - I do question the ‘mind at large’ idea in this essay - Is there ‘mind at large’? - although it’s quite a long piece so don’t feel any obligation. — Wayfarer
Without the organising capability which consciousness brings to the universe, what exists is by definition unintelligible and unknowable. The mind brings an order to experience in light of which data is interpreted and integrated into meaningful information — this is an intrinsic aspect of the meaning of ‘being’. But the sense in which the universe exists apart from or outside that activity is by definition unknown, so there is no need to posit a ‘mind-at-large’ to account for it. We need to learn the humility to accept that the unknown is indeed the unknown, and not to try and fill in the blank with a mysterious ‘super-mind’.
I can see why you would say that, but your perspective is predicated on the physicalist notion that mind is 'the product of' the brain. — Wayfarer
I find his metaphysics hard to fathom, but he does say that 'matter is effete mind'. — Wayfarer
That is central to his idea of agapē-ism, that love, understood as a creative and unifying force, plays a crucial role in the development and evolution of the universe and is a fundamental principle that guides the growth of complexity and order in the cosmos. — Wayfarer
He believed that the creative and purposive aspects of evolution could not be fully explained by natural selection alone. In that he was a lot more like Henri Bergson than Richard Dawkins. — Wayfarer
From an idealist standpoint, it is equally plausible to see the emergence of organic life as the first stirrings of intentionality in physical form. — Wayfarer
. Of course primitive and simple organic forms have practically zero self-awareness or consciousness in any complex sense, but already there the self-other distinction is operative .... Alan Watts' cosmic hide-and-seek, in which the Universe appears to itself in any number of guises. — Wayfarer
While dialectic has a certain appeal, I'm not as enamoured by it as you. I see two major issues. First, and most obviously, in classical logic asserting something and its negation leads to contradiction, not to some third option. Priest and others have addressed this wonderfully by playing with the law of non-contradiction, developing some intriguing alternatives. But it remains that the sort of contradiction seen in dialectic is not the sort of contradiction found in formal logic. What a dialectic contradiction is remains, I think, ambiguousThis would make more sense if we paid attention to the dichotomistic manoeuvre involved. — apokrisis
Why?The task is to build ourselves as beings with the agency to be able to hang together in an organismic fashion. — apokrisis
. First, and most obviously, in classical logic asserting something and its negation leads to contradiction, not to some third option. — Banno
And secondly, even if we supose that dialectic does not breach non-contradiction, the result is not clear. — Banno
The result is mathematically clear. Reciprocals and inverses are pretty easy to understand as approaches to mutually complementary limits of being. A dialectical “othering”.
The dialectic doesn’t have to worry about breaching the PNC. It is how the PNC is itself formed. It is the division of the vague on its way to becoming the holism that is the general - the synthesis following the symmetry-breaking. — apokrisis
From an idealist standpoint, it is equally plausible to see the emergence of organic life as the first stirrings of intentionality in physical form.
— Wayfarer
But then you would have to explain how exactly. What changes? What creates this epistemic cut? — apokrisis
We are modellers that exist by modelling. There are naturally progressive levels to this modelling. Words and then numbers have lifted humans to a certain rather vertiginous point. Numbers as the ultimate abstractions – variables in equations matched to squiggles on dials – take the basic epistemic duality of generalisation and particularisation to their most rarified extreme. I don't really see what comes next.... — apokrisis
How easily you slide from the germane to the ridiculous. — apokrisis
Nagel’s starting point is not simply that he finds materialism partial or unconvincing, but that he himself has a metaphysical view or vision of reality that just cannot be accommodated within materialism. This vision is that the appearance of conscious beings in the universe is somehow what it is all for; that ‘Each of our lives is a part of the lengthy process of the universe gradually waking up and becoming aware of itself’.
That "ought" thing, again. — Banno
:up: :up:But it remains that the sort of contradiction seen in dialectic is not the sort of contradiction found in formal logic. What a dialectic contradiction is remains, I think, ambiguous.
And secondly, even if we supose that dialectic does not breach non-contradiction, the result is not clear. Given the Principle of Explosion, anything could follow from a contradiction, so given a thesis and an antithesis, the nature of the resulting synthesis is far from fixed.
So I would rather not glorify dialectic by calling it a "logic". — Banno
:100:Indeed, what we know is mental, but that does not imply that the world is mental...
The argument attempts to show that the world is partially mental, but only succeeded in showing that the what we say about the world is "mental".
That is, the argument presented here does not demonstrate it's conclusion. — Banno
aybe it's because the only aims in your philosophy are instrumental and pragmatic. No 'beyond'. — Wayfarer
The reason you're critical of reductionism is not philosophical, but technical - semiotics provides a better metaphor for living processes than machines. And yet your descriptions are still illustrated with 'switches' and 'mechanisms' and energy dissipation — Wayfarer
Basically I agree that the dialectic doesn't have "to worry" about the PNC in the sense that it's philosophically legitimate. — Moliere
The part here that I'd like to better understand -- and is part of why I find Hegel frustrating -- is the "leap" from prior-to-PNC to PNC, or some variation thereof. — Moliere
The result of contradiction in classical logic is not just vague - it's quite literally anything. — Banno
Get involved in philosophical discussions about knowledge, truth, language, consciousness, science, politics, religion, logic and mathematics, art, history, and lots more. No ads, no clutter, and very little agreement — just fascinating conversations.