I wouldn't put Schopenhauer into the same "New Age" box, but I think his philosophy helps the move in that direction. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I agree. Schopenhauer influenced Nietzsche and Tolstoy, both of whom were pretty trippy.

↪schopenhauer1 Other minds have always been a problem for idealists.

And minds in general have always been a problem for materialists.

Trouble is, it’s so unclear what idealism is.

Yes, but this isn't remotely unique to idealism. Physicalism also has an extremely hard time with defining itself, and now that supervenience has fallen out of favor due to seemingly intractable problems, it seems physicalism is most often defined as "scientific realism." The problem here is that it's unclear that science can or should answer questions about ontology, nor is it at all clear that science writ large has anything like a coherent majority opinion ontology, nor that this ontology would qualify as what is generally meant by "physicalism." Hemple's Dilemma seems to be getting more acute, not less. Last I checked, physics has 10+ competing highly metaphysical theories about what physical stuff is, none with majority support within physics itself.

But yes, idealism has difficulty in avoiding solipsism, as I’ve explained previously. It usually needs God’s help.

I don't see this in the history of idealism at all. Maybe if you assume all idealism = subjective idealism. But why should we assume that what is meant by idealism is its most unpopular variant? This is like attacking physicalism on the grounds that physicalism must mean reductive corpuscular materialism, and then pointing out that that ontology has major problems and has thus been dumped.

Idealism has been moribund since the end of the century before last, and of little more than historical interest. That it is so popular in this forum is a peculiarity of the forum.

You can find idealism, panpsychism, dualism, all over the place if you know what to look for. It's easy to mistake respect for naturalism and scientific inquiry with respect for physicalism as a distinct ontology. If anything, I think the mess in defining either of the two terms denotes a serious problem with both isms. They may have outgrown their usefulness.

From my understanding mind (Idea) comes from Will for Schopenhauer. So instead of as for Aquinas where will is a power of the power of reason inside the soul, reason comes after will. But the escape from striving is the Forms for Schop. although Will wins over mind in the end (nirvana?).. This is all very fascinating. The subject creates the world so that the world can create it in turn. All in different respects. However pure will and reason/Idea are two dualities that must fold together into one principle. Freedom is the goal

But why should we assume that what is meant by idealism is its most unpopular variant? This is like attacking physicalism on the grounds that physicalism must mean reductive corpuscular materialism, and then pointing out that that ontology has major problems and has thus been dumped. — Count Timothy von Icarus

This seems to be a "tactic" from some realists/materialists/physicalists. Conflate all idealism with subjective idealism (pace Berkeley).

How does "mind" fit in with Schopenhauer in your estimation? How does time/space/causality and the PSR "come about", and if it is eternal (like the Forms), then why is it the "illusory" part. Whence the illusion? That is where I think Schop's architectonics is murky.

You have undifferentiated Will, you have individualized Will (representation). They are double-aspects (flip sides). However, whence Mind and the Kantian structures of the PSR limitations? Whence Forms? Why is the Will "objectifying" it, and can verbs such as "objectification" even be imputed on the Will being that this seems to entail temporal progression (i.e. first will, then objects). It's all a bit confusing to say the least.

What's doing the objectivication? Well i think it's Will, the primordial faculty. Reason-thinking come from Will. This is interesting because we usually think of a conceptualization and only then an act of will. But will produces thinking and it's object is the Forms. Then thinking reduces to its base, the primordial will. I assume after death for Schopenhauer we are again pure will, pure anarchy, complete freedom. No more thinking, at least as we know that

Well let me break my questions down some more:

How does "mind" fit in with Schopenhauer in your estimation? We have Will, subject-for-object. We have the PSR. Where does mind fit in with all this metaphysical stuff? You have undifferentiated Will, you have individualized Will (representation). They are double-aspects (flip sides). However, whence Mind and the Kantian structures of the PSR limitations?

Is mind the outcome of Will + PSR?

How does time/space/causality and the PSR "come about", and if it is eternal (like the Forms), then why is it the "illusory" part. Whence the illusion?

How does PSR relate to Forms and Will? If Mind is the outcome of Will + PSR, then PSR could not be the outcome of mind. Or is it? If it is, then this begs the question of what is Mind?

Why is the Will "objectifying" it, and can verbs such as "objectification" even be imputed on the Will being that this seems to entail temporal progression (i.e. first will, then objects).

Thus you said:

What's doing the objectivication? Well i think it's Will, the primordial faculty. Reason-thinking come from Will. This is interesting because we usually think of a conceptualization and only then an act of will. But will produces thinking and it's object is the Forms. — Gregory

But how can a verb like "produces" be imputed on Will as the verb indicates an action which is temporal. Will is atemporal. There shouldn't be any ordinality to it.

I think Schopenhauer works best as a man who saw the godless [ Darwinian ] deathfuck wheel. I open Dawkins and find Schopenhauer naturalized. In case it's obscure, I mean the loop of breeding and dying, and the generations that come and go like leaves on the tree. Lust leadeth to the horrors of aging, but the young and lusty have not seen this part of the wheel yet, not from the inside, not in the mirror.

Sages of old saw it too, the deathfuck wheel which was just there, shining and dripping. At his best, Schopenhauer was this old school kind of sage, seeing through the illusion of time to the form of the circle, the ancient indestructible Wheel. He believed in The Loop, thought reading Herodotus was enough. He took the world as spectacle, grasped its essence.

He did not need to descend from his balcony for the glory of the revolution. There would be no revolution, not a real one. Just the bloodflower sinwheel forever. He left graffiti for others who might be able to get there sometimes, maybe to help others get there. — plaque flag

:clap:

I like the term "deathfuck wheel". I think it's even worse than that. Rather, add in a bit of Zapffe + Schopenhauer, and you get "Humans- overshot the whole survival thing" to an "existential-being of self-awareness". Somewhere in our ancestral past, the human animal took itself out of time and out of the moment and into a virtualized world that is secondary. Thus the Fall into Time and the Exile from Eden. But not to romanticize any of it. Rather, it's simply playing around with culturally-given forms, internalizing it with our degrees of freedom (i.e. our personality-propensities and decisions) to "get things done".

Materialism has been out of fashion since Newton.

The absurd presumption is that we are obliged to choose between two defunct cannons.

I ran a thread demonstrating the odd discrepancy between professional philosophers and the dabblers around here.

Kant wrote before Dalton's atomic theory and the wave theory of light. I suspect that if we could show Kant the LHC, he'd say something along the lines of "Well, bugger me with the root vegetable of your choice, I got that wrong!"

I like the term "deathfuck wheel". — schopenhauer1

:up:

Somewhere in our ancestral past, the human animal took itself out of time and out of the moment and into a virtualized world that is secondary. — schopenhauer1

:up:
Felix culpa ! Our glory and our fall. Finnegans Wake is between laughter and tears.

Thus the Fall into Time and the Exile from Eden. But not to romanticize any of it. — schopenhauer1

:up:
We need myths to put on the wound. Like those. Our metaphorical grasp of being as a whole is no small thing. I still love all is hebel. All is mist, vapor, vanity, a passing show. I too claim to have seen the greasy sinwheel, which spins without my affirmation and despite my denial. My personal reaction was accounted for in the days before creation. Or might as well have been.
*****

Hopefully you saw my larger point that all most the Kantian bullshit influence in Schopenhauer is disposable cardboard applicator. Images do the work for monkeys who think analogicallly.

The PSR is a concept of the mind, which has intuition and reason. Intuition is the source of our knowledge of the Will. Reason is the consequence of separartion and time. The mind and forms are all illusions. The only way we can talk about the world and noumena is through the categories however. Complete personal individuality is denied by German idealists, as it is in philosophies of India and the Islamic world, and yet freedom rather servile piety is teleogical end. But ye speaking of any teleology or forms is strange and can only be strange from the position that Will is fundamental.

I'm not going to let you get away with that. Philosophy of mind still breaks down most theories at the university level into materialism and dualism.

The two main schools of philosophy of mind are dualism and materialism.

Dualism: Dualism posits that the mind and the physical body are two distinct substances or entities. This view suggests that the mind is not reducible to or identical with the physical brain and its processes. One common form of dualism is Cartesian dualism, named after René Descartes, which asserts a fundamental distinction between the immaterial mind (or soul) and the material body. Dualism can take various forms, including substance dualism, property dualism, and interactionist dualism.

Materialism: Materialism, also known as physicalism or monism, asserts that everything, including the mind and mental processes, can be explained in terms of physical matter and its interactions. In this view, the mind is seen as a product of the physical brain and its activities. Materialism denies the existence of any separate, immaterial substance like a soul. Instead, it holds that mental states and consciousness are the result of complex neural processes and interactions in the brain.

These two schools of thought represent opposing perspectives on the nature of the mind and its relationship to the body and the physical world. There are various nuances and subcategories within each school, and the philosophy of mind continues to be a rich and ongoing area of philosophical inquiry and debate. — ChatGPT

Philosophy of mind still breaks down most theories at the university level into materialism and dualism. — schopenhauer1

Fucksake. As if materialism and dualism were juxtaposed, and paralleled idealism and materialism.

That's just poor . The sort of thing you might get by granting authority to a bullshit-generator instead of thinking for yourself.

And subjective idealism was never popular.

The absurd presumption is that we are obliged to choose between two defunct cannons.

Yup, that was my point.

Yup, that was my point. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Oh, yes, understood.

Fucksake. As if materialism and dualism were juxtaposed, and paralleled idealism and materialism.

That's just poor . The sort of thing you might get by granting authority to a bullshit-generator instead of thinking for yourself. — Banno

I also remember the courses. Broadly-speaking the schools of thought were broken into dualism and materialism.. Dualism went over substance, property, interactionist, dual-aspect, panpsychism etc. Materialism- behaviorism, functionalism, identity theory (token-token, type-type, etc), eliminativism, and the rest.

Get your head out of your pompous ass.

It's "arse".

That's the way it is presented in neophyte philosophy classes, sure. We know better.

You can't get to the thing itself by way of empirical observation. You will never get at it that way. That is where the realists/materialists are missing subjectivity/inner aspect of being, etc.

Hence he says:
Thus we see already that we can never arrive at the real nature of things from without. However much we investigate, we can never reach anything but images and names. We are like a man who goes round a castle seeking in vain for an entrance, and sometimes sketching the façades. And yet this is the method that has been followed by all philosophers before me.
— WWR — schopenhauer1

We have, on the one hand, science which looks without to investigate phenomena and attempts to understand how things behave and interact, the world of phenomena is an interactive world that obviously only reveals itself via perception. We can observe things as they appear to us and this affords an understanding of their existence, as observed phenomena.

On the other hand we have phenomenology which looks within and attempts to understand how we sense, feel, think and understand ourselves and the things which appear as phenomena. It seems to me this is also a case of observed phenomena. A different kind of phenomena to be sure, but phenomena nonetheless.

Humans have always had intuitive imaginings and feelings about how things really are, because we generally don't like uncertainty. However, neither science, phenomenology nor intuitional imaginings about what feels right can be demonstrated to be reliable sources of knowledge of how things are beyond how they seem as observed phenomena.

We can believe, have faith, that any of these investigations yield truth and certainty about the absolute nature of things, but this can never be more than faith.

On the other hand, we can assess what seems to be the most plausible source of knowledge about how things really are, but there are no absolute criteria for assessing plausibility, so it remains for each individual to form their own opinions.

Schopenhauer's claim that introspection yields knowledge of the thing in itself might seem plausible to you, but it does not to me, the reason being that he claims that a blind will is fundamental, and I see that as failing to explain how we all see the same things, unless it is interpreted as energy which is structured to produce the things we perceive, or a universal mind which thinks those things into existence (pace Berkeley). The first would be a materialistic interpretation and the latter an idealistic interpretation, but would there be any difference that actually makes a difference between these models if the latter is not understand as an intentional, or even a personal, universal mind; a God?

That's the way it is presented in neophyte philosophy classes, sure. We know better. — Banno

Ah, so it's used in academia but it's not the "real" academia :roll:. Only those in the know, know.

The PSR is a concept of the mind, which has intuition and reason. Intuition is the source of our knowledge of the Will. Reason is the consequence of separartion and time. The mind and forms are all illusions. The only way we can talk about the world and noumena is through the categories however. Complete personal individuality is denied by German idealists, as it is in philosophies of India and the Islamic world, and yet freedom rather servile piety is teleogical end. But ye speaking of any teleology or forms is strange and can only be strange from the position that Will is fundamental. — Gregory

Blah, cool stuff but not quite getting at the questions I had.

I just don't see the point about science being only about how things appear to us as being difficult to understand or adding anything that hadn't already been pointed out by Kant, and I am skeptical that the predominate attitude among scientists is that science yields absolute knowledge, so I think the purported "blind spot' is a paper tiger.

I just don't see the point about science being only about how things appear to us as being difficult to understand or adding anything that hadn't already been pointed out by Kant, — Janus

How many people do you think have really taken on board Kant's 'copernican revolution in philosophy'? It is far less part of popular culture than 'the selfish gene' or many of the other tropes of neo-darwinian materialism.

Idealism has been moribund since the end of the century before last, — Banno

More 'unjustly neglected'. Furthermore, I know you and I have debated it at length, but I have never once gotten the impression that you really understand it - your rejection of it is invariably based on caricature of it - that 'the world is all in my mind'.

Yep. Those who get past first year do so by criticising what they were told in first year. Those who get past being an undergrad do so by criticising what they were told as undergrads. Hopefully.

When someone nails their flag to the mast, say by using the name of their favourite philosopher as their moniker in an on line forum, they will feel obligated to come to the defence of said favourite at every turn. Makes for an inability to learn.

Schopenhauer's claim that introspection yields knowledge of the thing in itself might seem plausible to you, but it does not to me, the reason being that he claims that a blind will is fundamental, and I see that as failing to explain how we all see the same things, unless it is interpreted as energy which is structured to produce the things we perceive, or a universal mind which thinks those things into existence (pace Berkeley). The first would be a materialistic interpretation and the latter an idealistic interpretation, but would there be any difference that actually makes a difference between these models if the latter is not understand as an intentional, or even a personal, universal mind? — Janus

I think that there isn't much of a difference, and it would seem to me, Schop wouldn't have a problem with that either.

He was making a series of jumps from our "immediate object" (the self), to other objects. But the bigger jump was that this immediacy was some sort of illusory interplay that the Will carries out as its "devlish" double-aspected "representation" (the PSR applied to Forms I guess).

I must admit, I do not get how Will-Proper (Will unaffected by the PSR), is somehow the "real" reality if it is all double-aspect all the way down.

How many people do you think have really taken on board Kant's 'copernican revolution in philosophy'? — Quixodian

The richest man in the world suggested that we live in a simulation. The Matrix was huge. Continental philosophy is mostly post-Kantian far as I can tell. Braver's A Thing of This World makes him, Kant, the official father of a rich tradition that takes the entanglement of subject and object for granted. After Finitude understands itself as a rebellion against this clearly dominant and oppressive 'correlationism,' that cuts us off from being cut off from the Real.

But I do think there is indeed a blind spot in some thinkers. It's a macho thing. Toughminded tech-oriented I'm-a-truth-computer thing. Only sissies notice personality.

The Matrix was huge. — plaque flag

There was a fascinating BBC article a few years ago on why Inception, Matrix, and other multiverse fantasy films were such huge drawcards in popular culture. It suggests they play to our sense that we - including scientists - don't really know what is real any more, that the whole of existence could be a simulation, fantasy or dream. (I've gone back and looked for the article but can never find it.) There's also that fabulous 1990's movie, The Game, Michael Douglas, in which the protagonist is caught up by an EST-type organisation. But Schopenhauer's style of philosophy is far more compatible with these kinds of ideas than is stodgy realism.

How many people do you think have really taken on board Kant's 'copernican revolution in philosophy'? It is far less part of popular culture than 'the selfish gene' or many of the other tropes of neo-darwinian materialism. — Quixodian

I don't know everyone, so I can't answer that. I do doubt that there are not many well-educated people, including scientists, who realize that all we know is how thing appear to us. I find that there are some in science, in phenomenology, in religion or spirituality who want to claim that absolute knowledge is possible, but I see all of those as fundamentalists, the most deluded and potentially dangerous kinds of people.

I also think there are probably many, likely a good majority, of people who have no interest in thinking about these kinds of questions, so we are really only talking about people who are, at least in some sense, philosophically minded.

Yep. Those who get past first year do so by criticising what they were told in first year. Those who get past being an undergrad do so by criticising what they were told as undergrads. Hopefully. — Banno

Look, I know that graduate level philosophy of mind is heavily based on "materialism" or takes that for granted to the point that it's not even materialism. It's Philosophy of Science adjacent and Cognitive Science heavy. That is to say, the easier problems.

What I think has happened is that philosophy of mind has expanded to many things, not just the hard problem. Fodor's idea of mentalese was in style for a bit. Debates over connectionism and computationalism. Finding correlates of consciousness in various brain domains. There are parallels with anthropology and social learning.. Extended and embodied cognition..flirting with ditching qualia and folk psychology in eliminativism, neural networks and their implications.. language and its implications (concept formation, semantics and meaning, representation, etc.). But these seem to not touch on the hard problem.

What I think happened rather, is perhaps the hard problem was put on the back burner for a while, and it has come back with a vengeance. Just my interpretation of the trends and such.

When someone nails their flag to the mast, say by using the name of their favourite philosopher as their moniker in an on line forum, they will feel obligated to come to the defence of said favourite at every turn. Makes for an inability to learn. — Banno

Oh blah. No, I don't even necessarily agree with Schopenhauer on his metaphysics and I've said that multiple times. I do however, find his ideas fascinating and try to be charitable to them as they are still relevant in the questions asked and the unique way he answered them. Obviously, if you look at the questions I am asking about his ideas, I find there to be some large conundrums and confusion with the ideas.

Plato and Aristotle weren't right on all accounts either, but many topics they brought up are still relevant today, and may papers are still using their ideas.

It suggests they play to our sense that we - including scientists - don't really know what is real any more, that the whole of existence could be a simulation, fantasy or dream. — Quixodian

:up:

The world is mediated for us by screens. Maybe it used to be rumors brought by travelers, but at least then it was words which were clearly just words. Now we are moving toward screens that can lie to our eyes convincingly. These screens are even able to learn to lie better and better, because we've taught computers to program themselves --- to learn from examples and nothing else. We can't even understand the logic hidden in a billion parameters trained with enough electricity to run a small town for a week.