If you think of it psychologically, consciousness, as sensation, is prior to the abstraction of being and of the recognition of the external world as external.
"Being" presupposes non-being, it's an incoherent concept otherwise, but consciousness as simply sensation precedes any such distinctions. — Count Timothy von Icarus
Being" presupposes non-being, it's an incoherent concept otherwise, but consciousness as simply sensation precedes any such distinctions. — Count Timothy von Icarus
Strange that Jung of all people accepts such a standard metaphysical view. — Mikie
I think that Jung makes that statement in the context of seeing psychology as a departure from the framework of 'rationalist philosophies'. In On the Nature of the Psyche, he wrote extensively upon the resistance against accepting models of the mind involving unconscious processes. Here are some of his remarks concerning German Idealism:
The soul was a tacit assumption that seemed to be known in every detail. With the discovery of a possible unconscious psychic realm, man had the opportunity to embark upon a adventure of the spirit, and one might have expected that a passionate interest would be turned in this direction. Not only was this not the case at all, but there arose on all sides an outcry against such an hypothesis. Nobody drew the conclusion that if the subject of knowledge, the psych, were in fact a veiled for of existence not immediately accessible to consciousness, then all our knowledge must be incomplete, and moreover to a degree that we cannot determine. The validity of conscious knowledge was questioned in an altogether different and more menacing way than it had ever been by the critical procedures of epistemology. The latter put certain bounds to human knowledge in general, from which post-Kantian German Idealism struggled to emancipate itself; but natural science and common sense accommodated themselves to without much difficulty, if they condescended to notice it at all. Philosophy fought against it in the interests of an antiquated pretension of the human mind to be able to pull itself up by its own bootstraps and know things outside the range of human understanding. The victory of Hegel over Kant dealt the gravest blow to reason and to the further development of the German and, ultimately, of the European mind, all the more dangerous as Hegel was a psychologist in disguise who projected great truths out of the subjective sphere into a cosmos he himself had created. We know how far Hegel's influence extends today.....
Hegel offered a solution of the problem raised by epistemological criticism in that he gave ideas a chance to prove their unknown power of autonomy.They induced that hybris of reason which led to Nietzsche's superman and hence to the catastrophe that bear the name of Germany. Not only artists, but philosophers too, are sometimes prophets.....
The peculiar high-flown language Hegel uses bears out this view: it is reminiscent of the megalomanic language of schizophrenics, who us terrific spellbounding words to reduce the transcendent to subjective form, to give the banalities the charm of novelty, or pass off commonplaces as searching wisdom. So bombastic a terminology is symptom of weakness, ineptitude, and lack of substance. But that does not prevent the latest German philosophy from using the same crackpot power-word and pretending it is not unintentional psychology. — Jung, On the Nature of the Psyche, 358
In that case the Tao is being as a whole — existence. The individuated beings (things) that we differentiate in perception have as much existence an anything else, as beings. — Mikie
It wouldn’t exist as a linguistic entity— but animals interact with apples all the time. They seem to differentiate between them and what we call rocks just fine. — Mikie
In general, I think this requires subsuming the subjective and objective into a larger whole, not one subsuming the other, as in physicalism and many forms of idealism.
However, assuming the primacy of one or the other is certainly pragmatically useful (see most models in the natural sciences, phenomenology, some aspects of psychology, etc.). — Count Timothy von Icarus
Like I said, this is thinking of it psychologically. My 11 month old son experiences sensation, he does not have any concept of being as such. — Count Timothy von Icarus
IMO, there is something missing in this schema. It takes abstractions that exist as part of mental life to be more fundamental than the rest of mental life. However, these abstractions are just parts of mental life, formed from subjective observation and reasoning. A full explanation needs to also explain how the reasoning subject constructs the model and the bridge between the model of the objective that is an element of subjective life and the external world simpliciter. In general,I think this requires subsuming the subjective and objective into a larger whole, not one subsuming the other, as in physicalism and many forms of idealism. — Count Timothy von Icarus
The main problem I see with this schema is that there is a strong tendency to describe the objective world in terms of what it would "look like" for a subjective observer that, contradictorily, lacks objective being. This is the "view from nowhere," "view from everywhere," or "God's eye view." — Count Timothy von Icarus
What is more, most of the natural sciences try to represent the results of their investigations as though these had come into existence without man’s intervention, in such a way that the collaboration of the psyche – an indispensable factor – remains invisible. (An exception to this is modern physics, which recognizes that the observed is not independent of the observer.) So in this respect, too, science conveys a picture of the world from which a real human psyche appears to be excluded – the very antithesis of the “humanities.” — Carl Jung
The victory of Hegel over Kant dealt the gravest blow to reason and to the further development of the German and, ultimately, of the European mind, all the more dangerous as Hegel was a psychologist in disguise who projected great truths out of the subjective sphere into a cosmos he himself had created - Jung, On the Nature of the Psyche, 358 — "
The formidable task that Heidegger sets himself in Being and Time is to respond to the question ‘What is Being’? This ‘Question of Being’ has a long heritage in the Western philosophical tradition, but for Heidegger, to merely ask what is Being? is problematic, as that emphasis tends to objectify Being as a ‘thing' – that is to say, it separates off ‘Being’ (whatever it is) from the questioner of Being. ” — Heidegger's Ways of Being
One motivation for suggesting that mind or consciousness precedes being is the view that it seems impossible that consciousness emerges from systems the components of which are severally non-conscious. However it seems to me there is a similar problem with putting consciousness as primary, namely his hard to see how extension, locality, differentiation and so on can emerge from consciousness alone — bert1
I have read some articles suggesting that Kant and Schopenhauer anticipate Freud's discovery of the unconscious - which seems fairly obvious when you think about it. For Kant, much of what we think we know is determined by categorial structures that lie beneath the threshold of conscious awareness. For Schopenhauer, transcendence can be sought through art as a symbolic form of the Sublime. Whereas Hegel attempts to explain everything, to make it all explicit, but in so doing, 'projected great truths out of the subjective sphere into a cosmos he himself had created.' It seems a sound analysis to me. — Wayfarer
At the very least, would you accept the idea is completely foreign to Kant? — Paine
As a naturalist I find that B is most consistent internally as well as with all that we know scientifically – publicly – so for about narure.A. The universe emerged from intelligence.
B. Intelligence/s emerged from the universe.
C. The universe emerged from 'infinite' intelligence, then 'finite' intelligence/s emerged from the universe.
D. The universe itself is intelligent.
E. Either the universe or intelligence or both are illusions (maya).
your post doesn't even address how your idiosyncratic usage of "being", as Jamal has argued, is justified in public discourse. — 180 Proof
I say that beings are subjects of experience, which is a simple fact. As for the various meanings of the verb 'to be', it's a different matter, but it's not relevant to the question implied in the OP. — Wayfarer
As a naturalist I find that B is most consistent internally as well as with all that we know scientifically – publicly – about narure so far. — 180 Proof
What is more, most of the natural sciences try to represent the results of their investigations as though these had come into existence without man’s intervention, in such a way that the collaboration of the psyche – an indispensable factor – remains invisible. (An exception to this is modern physics, which recognizes that the observed is not independent of the observer.) So in this respect, too, science conveys a picture of the world from which a real human psyche appears to be excluded – the very antithesis of the “humanities.” — Carl Jung
Behind the Blind Spot sits the belief that physical reality has absolute primacy in human knowledge, a view that can be called scientific materialism. In philosophical terms, it combines scientific objectivism (science tells us about the real, mind-independent world) and physicalism (science tells us that physical reality is all there is). Elementary particles, moments in time, genes, the brain – all these things are assumed to be fundamentally real. By contrast, experience, awareness and consciousness are taken to be secondary. The scientific task becomes about figuring out how to reduce them to something physical, such as the behaviour of neural networks, the architecture of computational systems, or some measure of information.
This framework faces two intractable problems. The first concerns scientific objectivism. We never encounter physical reality outside of our observations of it. Elementary particles, time, genes and the brain are manifest to us only through our measurements, models and manipulations. Their presence is always based on scientific investigations, which occur only in the field of our experience.
This doesn’t mean that scientific knowledge is arbitrary, or a mere projection of our own minds. On the contrary, some models and methods of investigation work much better than others, and we can test this. But these tests never give us nature as it is in itself, outside our ways of seeing and acting on things. Experience is just as fundamental to scientific knowledge as the physical reality it reveals.
The second problem concerns physicalism. According to the most reductive version of physicalism, science tells us that everything, including life, the mind and consciousness, can be reduced to the behaviour of the smallest material constituents. You’re nothing but your neurons, and your neurons are nothing but little bits of matter. Here, life and the mind are gone, and only lifeless matter exists.
To put it bluntly, the claim that there’s nothing but physical reality is either false or empty. If ‘physical reality’ means reality as physics describes it, then the assertion that only physical phenomena exist is false. Why? Because physical science – including biology and computational neuroscience – doesn’t include an account of consciousness. This is not to say that consciousness is something unnatural or supernatural. The point is that physical science doesn’t include an account of experience; but we know that experience exists, so the claim that the only things that exist are what physical science tells us is false. On the other hand, if ‘physical reality’ means reality according to some future and complete physics, then the claim that there is nothing else but physical reality is empty, because we have no idea what such a future physics will look like, especially in relation to consciousness. — The Blind Spot of Science
Using "being" in reference to a sentient or conscious entity, e.g. human being, is perfectly reasonable in philosophy or everyday speech. — T Clark
I say that beings are subjects of experience, which is a simple fact — Wayfarer
The verb 'to be' has many other meanings, including 'whatever exists'. That is the sense in which Mikie and Jamal believe it should be used — Wayfarer
So you can't even honestly reply without a wall of quoted texts to this poll . Pathetic. :shade:Of course. — Wayfarer
I can say that rocks are beings and also say they're conscious — Jamal
I was showing that when philosophers say that everything that can be said to be is a being (which should be obvious), they are not advancing a metaphysical view. — Jamal
The definition of "being" that Wayfarer is using can be perfectly reasonable in both everyday and philosophical discussions, depending on context. — T Clark
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