The anti-modernist, neo-Romantic thing seems apt to me up here in Nimbin — Janus

Fuckin' weed smoking hippie!

Pretty big in my city of five million as well. Of course, it’s mainly the middle classes and the literate blue-collar types who get on board, like any widespread movement. I recently had a plumber lecture me about how science is the cause of most problems and that we need more people like America’s visionary RFK. I think the culture war we often talk about also unfolds as a battle between the seen and the longed for. Or something like that.

I don't think philosophical materialism is the problem―I think it is consumerism, the obsession with material "goods" and personal comfort that is really the problem. I don't think loss of meaning, in the sense of loss of the ability to be convinced by overarching narratives is the problem either―I think it likely that most people only ever gave lip-service to such religious institutions in the interest of conforming with their social milieu. — Janus

Yes, I think we’ve agreed on this too. I wonder if the fear stirred by issues like climate change, AI, and technological change has helped spark a fresh retreat into comforting stories as a way of avoiding a perceived reality.

I find the implications of phenomenology for the question of dualism interesting but somewhat difficult to understand. I also note that there've been different ways of articulating phenomenology over time.

This is what I think I understand: the mind is not a detached observer, and the body is not merely a machine. They exist together, intertwined within a single field of lived experience. From this perspective, the traditional problem of interaction or dualism might be said to dissolve. Phenomenology does not assume that mind and body are two independent entities that must somehow be connected. Instead, it understands them as co-emerging, inseparable aspects of the way we inhabit and experience the world. Yet it seems to me we can ask whether this really addresses the heart of the mind–body problem, or simply reframes it in a more elegant way, substituting abstract categories like “lived experience” for concrete questions about causality, consciousness, and physical reality that first give rise to the apparent problem.

How do thoughts relate to brain in this model? What would it mean to say a thought is not reducible to a neural process? If phenomenology isn't monist what exactly does co-emergence mean?

Any mention, of divinity, God, faith, or belief derived from any of these religions is referring, perhaps not directly, or unknowingly to the principle of a transcendent ground of being. — Punshhh

But what is the transcendent ground of being; God, Brahman, the One, or all of the above? And how could we ever know that such a foundation exists? It is one thing to adopt a phenomenological perspective and seemingly dissolve the mind–body distinction; it is quite another to posit a principle that underlies everything. What if there is no ultimate ground? What if the very idea of a ground is merely a human desire to impose causes and explanations on the world, constructing answers where there may, in fact, be none? Perhaps it is a question without end, an endless recursion where each answer only leads to another question.

You remind me of Searle too.

(2) We’re in a period of technological nihilism, where we view human beings as essentially machines. The world itself is thought of as a machine, one reduced to substances — a collection of atoms. Our current variant of materialism, where humans are animals with language who go through life with needs to satisfy (inevitably leading to the human being as consumer), is particularly harmful. One consequence is capitalism in various forms. These ideas permeate politics, religion, and business. We did not get here by accident— the objectification of the world (in its modern form starting with Descartes) is an outgrowth of substance ontology. — Mikie

I'm interested in this paragraph. Forgive my meandering and uninitiated response.

We often hear this kind of criticism of the present era from religious people and popular intellectuals like Jordan Peterson and John Vervaeke, both of whom are unlikely to be influences on your thinking. I understand some of their ideas are derivative of Heidegger.

I've often thought that we are living in an anti-modernist, neo-Romantic period where everything is centred around emotionalism and we are no longer generally convinced by reasoning or science, which seem to be widely understood as joy killers, the enemy of the human. Lived experience is seen as overriding institutional knowledge, with self-expression and personal freedom framed as moral imperatives.

I don’t see widespread objectification of the world as an emerging trend so much as a mystification of everything: a vanquishing of certainty, a privileging of subjective experience, an obsession with authenticity and a re-enchantment of nature, bordering on its worship. To me, this looks like a legacy of the 1960s counterculture that never really went away despite the best efforts of the 1980's.

I am assuming that the antidote to our situation (for you) is some kind of deeper connection to being and nature? What might that look like?

Got ya. Thanks.

I admit "ultimate goodness" is a vague term. But I'd say a universe without an eternal torture chamber is, at least, "not ultimately evil" — Art48

Or perhaps just evil (do we need ultimate?).

It sounds like you might be recovering from a harsh form of Protestant Christianity and, like many others, are trying to salvage part of the story by reframing some notion of the divine within an ethical system you can fully accept. If not, I apologise for this assumption. Not all Christians have believed that hell entails everlasting punishment. As David Bentley Hart reminds us (That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation), there were many strands of early Christian thought that held a universalist view: that ultimately all are saved, and that hell functions less as retribution than as a process of moral purification or the re-acquisition of virtue.

The Christianity I grew up with described hell not as a place of torment, but as a state or condition defined by the absence of God. We were taught that the Bible is largely a collection of pre-scientific myths and narratives, best understood allegorically rather than literally.

I was never able to accept or comprehend the idea of a god. From the moment I first encountered it, I completely lacked any sensus divinitatis, as Calvin might have it. The idea doesn’t help me with sense-making or everyday living, but I still find it very interesting.

Midnight in Paris was ok. No Country for Old Men and The Killer were diverting but not exciting. I want the big electrical experince I got when I saw Blade Runner (the sequel was bland). I suspect the problem rests with me. I have had my thrills and can't recapture the experience. Actually there's one film I quite liked, Nightcrawler (2014) reminded me of when Scorsese wasn't making Ron Howard films. :wink:

When I say I believe the universe is fundamentally good I am merely the superiority of a FAITH in truth and the ultimate goodness of the universe with the inferior FAITH in some book that has a talking serpent and a talking donkey. They are both types of faith.
— Art48
Sorry, I didn't understand this part. — ssu

I'm not sure I have faith in truth or ultimate goodness. A talking serpent and donkey wound almost as plausible.

I wonder what ultimate goodness means other than a god surrogate. Maybe the word ultimate is the problem. Maybe it is easier to believe in goodness when it's contrasted with badness?

Otherwise I can skip going to the theater. — Mikie

Can't say I've seen a film I've enjoyed in around 25 years. My own theory is that for some of us only have a limited number of films we can watch before the entire enterprise becomes dull.

Though in my mind, the opinion that is the most important is that of the originators of the religion, thus my original conclusion. — LuckyR

But who are these originators? Can you actually sketch the process because it seems a bit vague? The founders are not generally in this vein: the Buddha, or Jesus (if he was a historical person), were not empire-builders. If we take Christianity, who exactly are the originators to whom this claim is meant to apply; Paul, Constantine, the Roman Empire, the First Vatican Council? Does this apply to Judaism and Sikhism as well, or only to one or two religions?

One cannot determine the success or failure of an entity without a concensus on what that entity's goal is. In my opinion, organized religion's goal is to consolidate power and wealth. From this perspective they have been spectacularly successful. From other perspectives, success (and failure) will vary. — LuckyR

I’m sympathetic to this line of thinking, but I don’t think we have good reason to assume that any religion has a single, unified goal. One of my close friends is a priest who regards the Vatican as corrupt and “not the real Church,” and I have met many Catholics who hold similar views, which makes it hard to see how the Vatican and its shifting political perspectives could simply be identified with Catholicism itself. For the same reason, I’m not convinced we can say that the aim of organised religion is the consolidation of power, because it isn’t even clear what “organised religion” consists of: it is mothers and fathers, radicals and reactionaries, good people and bad people, institutions and dissenters, shared traditions and internal conflicts, all pulling in different directions for different reasons, making any claim about a single purpose or intention seems like an oversimplification.

Seeing is part of what's real. No need to split the world in one that we see and another that we supposedly never see. — jkop

But isn’t that the question which matters? How do we cocreate our reality as opposed to see reality?

Whether the question matters is a separate one. As Simon Blackburn put it: An idealist is a realist whenever he walks out the front door.

I can see that.

Kant doesn't explicitly reject direct realism. His empirical realism his transcendental idealism — jkop

I’m no Kant expert but I was referring to that argument specifically. Mind you, if we what we see is phenomena not noumena then what meaning does realism have?

Thanks. :up: :up:

Objections to direct realism are typically based on arguments from illusion or hallucination. — jkop

Kant’s concern was more structural and general: he focused on how the mind contributes to experience. Our sensibility provides raw intuitions, structured by space and time, while our understanding organizes these intuitions into coherent experience through concepts, or categories. As a result, everything we experience: the phenomenal world, is filtered through these mental faculties. This framework implies that our perceptions can misrepresent the “thing-in-itself,” whether through error, illusion, a range of factors. However, Kant didn't need to discuss specific perceptual errors to make this point, his argument is systematic: we never access things directly, only through the mind’s structuring. This argument (in a simple form) occurred to me when I was very young and always seemed more convincing to me than arguments from illusions or hallucinations.

A question out of curiosity: do you have any views on the idea that certain spiritual states or "higher consciousness", might allow direct (whether partial or complete) access to noumena?

Be that as it may, of course; the thread title doesn’t implicate Kant anyway. — Mww

I don't mind who gets implicated, as long as it's interesting. :wink:

I have sympathy for the position you are expounding. It's tricky stuff because to discuss it we are already deeply immersed in human framing, possibly smuggling in assumptions.

I'm not overly convinced by the idea that a dog sees a fish just as we do. The phrase "just as we do" seems unproven. Does a dog see a fish? Obviously not: it has no language. It perceives "prey" in some form, perhaps. But does it interact with a conceptual world or an instinctive one? I'd suggest the latter. When we see a fish, do we perceive food, prey, another animal, an allergy threat, or even potential mercury poisoning? I think a dog engages with a fundamentally different world, one that shares the same raw material to some extent, though ours is elaborated and structured by conceptual frameworks and language which transform it entirely. Reducing this to "well, we both see a fish" overlooks critical distinctions and makes assumptions about just what is shared.

Could those same standards be applied to non-scientific thinking? Of course. Science isn’t the only way to know things or the only good way to know things, but when it’s done right, it is a good way to know things. Isn’t that good enough? — T Clark

I think you’re making the point that Haack argues: there is nothing intrinsic to the scientific method that other disciplines cannot also employ. We sometimes fetishize science, which can lead to scientistic worldviews: the belief that only science can deliver truth to human beings. This is a foundational presupposition of old-school physicalists. I thought it worth tabling given the discussion.

This is the kind of thing that Habermas wouldn't have been able to accept because he and others perceived that the Holocaust was a manifestation of the indulgence of irrationality. In fact, the Nazis in general were thought of as such a manifestation. For Habermas, it was imperative to bolster rationality in every way possible to return to psycho-social stability. — frank

Wasn't the Holocaust also a product of scientisitc thinking and misapplied rationalism with a technocratic final solution? Zygmunt Bauman ( a philosopher and death camp surviver) argues that the Holocaust was a product of modernity, made possible by bureaucratic rationality, which allowed ordinary people to participate in genocide without personal hatred or direct violence. I have always thought of the Holocaust as what happens when rational calculation overrides people’s emotions and moral instincts.

Not a moral content but an ethical process. Authenticity guards against reifying experience into totalizing moral categories, and that is an ethical achievement. — Joshs

We need a thread on this alone. :wink:

So, one “presupposition” underlying all science – still today - is that it is a way to accumulate knowledge – that science is a process, conducted according to the rigor of the scientific method – — Questioner

Sure but interestingly there are different views on the scientific method.

Susan Haack (a philsophy of science and epistemology stalwart) takes the position that there is no single, special “Scientific Method” that sharply distinguishes science from other forms of inquiry. In her paper Six Signs of Scientism Haack writes there is "no mode of inference or procedure of inquiry used by all and only scientists, and explaining the successes of the sciences." Essentially science shares its approaches to reasoning with everyday inquiry. What distinguishes science is not a unique method but the more rigorous, systematic, and socially organized application of ordinary evidential standards such as responsiveness to evidence, logical consistency, and openness to criticism.

Science provides a particularly clear illustration. Scientific inquiry presupposes a mind-independent, law-governed reality and the reliability of our cognitive and instrumental access to it,
— Tom Storm

I'm trying to think of one human endeavor that does not ... you can be describing fishing. — Questioner

That’s a fun line, and I can see why you might lean that way, though it feels a bit slippery. Does science not rely on the assumptions mentioned above? If not, explain how it avoids them.

It's true most human activities, including fishing, implicitly rely on assumptions about the stability of objects, causal patterns, and the reliability of perception. Science goes further by explicitly acknowledging such assumptions and systematically testing them through observation, experimentation, and modeling, thereby building a cumulative knowledge base grounded in these methods. By continually probing the regularities of nature and refining our understanding of the laws that seem to govern reality, science not only relies on metaphysical foundations but also clarifies and extends them, making it a particularly clear illustration of the assumptions underlying all belief. All true in the case of pre-1900 science, I would have thought.

I disagree. If you believe science is not based on presuppositions, then you are one of those people who think there’s no value in metaphysics. — T Clark

Isn't it the case that all epistemic frameworks rest on metaphysical commitments? Science provides a particularly clear illustration. Scientific inquiry presupposes a mind-independent, law-governed reality and the reliability of our cognitive and instrumental access to it, assumptions that science itself cannot justify without circularity.

Kastrup says that he is a naturalist and that mind-at-large just is nature. Soinoza says God just is nature―that is the extent of the comparison I was making. — Janus

I hear you but I think K is being polemical here and is making an equivocation on the world naturalist. Yes he believes consciousness is natural and there is nothing else to nature. I also note that K seems to believe that mind-at-large is developing wisdom or knowledge as it evolves through humans and conscious creatures. I don’t think we can say the same for conventional accounts of nature, which tend to involve entropy. So, while I understand the argument you’re making, I think Kastrup is being cute.

If we have totally separate consciousnesses then how do the stable patterns through which your consciousness organizes itself accord precisely enough with the stable patterns in my consciousness to explain a shared world wherein we will agree on what is in front of us down to the minutest details? — Janus

Let’s flip the argument: why wouldn’t consciousness have discrete offshoots that closely share experiences? Here's one idea. If we all participate in an overarching pattern, our experiences would naturally be shared. Even if individual consciousnesses are separate, they all operate according to the same structural constraints, which include time, space, causality, and patterns of experience. Because these constraints are likely to be universal and experiences are mutually coherent, the stable patterns that constitute objects tend to align across minds, producing a shared world in which everyone sees the same table, the same details, and the same relations.

Whether you are convinced by this germ of an idea is a separate question, but I think the argument can be made, and with some work it could be convincing. Remember, I’m not an idealist, but I’m trying to steelman the idea.

On the view I sketched out, the world appears the way it does because consciousness is self-organising: it stabilises itself into regular, repeatable forms rather than remaining a formless flux. What we call material objects are the way this self-organisation presents itself in experience, giving consciousness a structured, usable world. We all partake in this share reality, it just isn't what we think. Or something like that.

Kastrup uses the word 'consciousness', but I don't think he believes that the universal consciousness is conscious of anything apart from what all the percipients (the dissociated alters) are conscious of. For him it has no plan, but evolves along with everything―it just is nature in the sense that Spinoza's God is nature. — Janus

Personally, I wouldn’t compare K with S. As already noted, K argues that mind-at-large is similar to Schopenhauer’s Will. But his view is still evolving, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he eventually ends up adopting some form of theism. But I could be wrong there.

To say the table is still there when no one is looking means that whenever someone does look again, experience will reliably present the same table in the same place, behaving the same way.
— Tom Storm

That doesn't explain why everyone will see the table there for the first time. — Janus

It probably does, but as I said, someone with more reading on this matter would need to articulate the point properly. My understanding is as follows: In non-theistic idealism, objects like tables aren’t things that exist outside consciousness, but stable patterns through which consciousness organises itself. Experience is constrained by shared, law-like structures (time, causality, space, and intersubjective coherence) so when those conditions recur, the same object reliably appears, even if no one was perceiving it in the meantime. The appearance of material objects isn’t a pointless illusion: without these stable object-patterns, experience would be chaotic and unusable, making memory, action, and a shared world impossible.

Of course, a brief paragraph like this will generate a series of whys and hows that I don’t have immediate answers to. But saying idealism isn’t true because my modest paragraph doesn’t cover all bases isn’t much of an argument. This is clearly a complex idea that requires more investigation.

Interesting, I always assumed that binary, dualistic or black-and-white thinking was a human flaw and, perhaps, unnecessary. If we do privilege duality, I wonder if that is simply a function of biology, we have two eyes, ears, arms, legs, so we tend to bifurcate our experience.

I've also heard it argued that objects persist in idealism (not because a mind is always perceiving them) but because experience unfolds according to stable, law-like patterns. To say the table is still there when no one is looking means that whenever someone does look again, experience will reliably present the same table in the same place, behaving the same way. Object permanence is therefore a continuity of structure and availability, not constant observation by some Great Mind. I imagine that this could be developed into a much more complex account of object permanence, but I'm not fully across the idea.

The question remains why has thought manifested in this way to begin with; why are there inanimate objects or things in a realm of consciousness?

I think @wayfarer may be arguing that an object is just a durable pattern within a set of constraints, so to say it continues to exist means that the same pattern will reappear whenever the relevant experiential conditions are met, even if it is not currently experienced. This reminds me a bit of phenomenology.

Interesting idea for a thread. I’ve never been a science or math guy, so I don’t have strong views on these.

[1] We live in an ordered universe that can be understood by humans. — T Clark

I don’t know about the others, but this one has often interested me. This statement seems to capture what I see as the foundational metaphysical assumption of science: that there is an objective reality which humans can understand.

We take science to reveal consistent patterns across observers, but do these patterns tell us about reality itself, or only about the ways humans organize and interpret our experiences?

The fact that our sense organs and brains are similarly constituted can explain how it is that we see things in similar ways, but it cannot explain just what we see. The content of perception, that is what is perceivable which animals also perceive in their different ways, is contributed by the world, whether that world is physical or mental.

If it's physical then the mind-independent physical existents explain how it is that we and the animals see the same things. If the world is mental then the human independent mind that constitutes the things we perceive explains it. If mind is fundamental then all our minds must be connected (below the level of consciousness, obviously) via that universal mind.

We've been over all this many times and you have never been able to explain how just the fact of our minds being similar, but not connected, could explain a shared world. — Janus

Good question. Isn't the idea that the “world” we perceive is not independent matter imposing itself on us, but a manifestation of mind, or a universal rational structure, so the consistency of perception across subjects reflects the inherent order of this mind?

He would say the ultimate truth is the Absolute, which is a state of unity in which there is no thought because there are no divisions. Thought is the realm of partial truths. In that realm, you can't really escape dualism. — frank

Not sure I understand this but is the point that, at an ordinary level of thinking, dualities appear to us?

That sounds reasonable.

Thought is necessarily dualistic. Implied is some unified world beyond thought. This is Hegelian. He's an example of the way I think. — frank

I thought Hegel was a monist idealist, like Kastrup? Doesn't H see matter as a manifestation of Geist? Or is this what you mean by "unified world beyond"?

As such matter is real and human mind-independent, as it "mind-at-large". — Janus

Depends on what you mean by 'real.' If you mean our perception of reality, then perhaps. But you’d have to take that up with Kastrup or one of his acolytes; I can hardly argue on behalf of a guy whose work I don’t follow closely.

It's not as if mind could exist without matter, any more than matter could exist without mind, for Kastrup. — Janus

This seems to be a separate argument against idealism more broadly, which already takes matter as a given truth. Everywhere you look, Kastrup says things like this below (and obviously, to properly debate these points, you would need to go into his reasoning and move beyond this type of statement)

...materialism is a fantasy. It’s based on unnecessary postulates, circular reasoning and selective consideration of evidence and data. Materialism is by no stretch of the imagination a scientific conclusion, but merely a metaphysical opinion that helps some people interpret scientific conclusions.

Now, I am not particularly interested in debating whether idealism is justifiable; there are already thousands of words on that on the forum. I am interested in exploring what the model is meant to be. Why is the world full of things? How does a chair or a rock relate to a turtle or a human?

Btw, Kastrup's view is vaguely Neoplatonic like Plotinus' view. — frank

Yes. I’m not committed to materialism or idealism; I just want to understand the arguments as best I can. But I’m not a scientist or a philosopher, so like most of us, all I can do is mess around in the shallow end of the pool.

Monists can't seem to nail down how we're all enjoying a big fat illusion, but they're sure we are. — frank

I think it is highly likely that our understanding of 'reality' is mistaken or incomplete, regardless of which framework we've adopted. (This is a fraught sentence because it implies there is a reality and it can be uncovered, I don't necessarily think this is accurate) In a few centuries, assuming civilization endures, scientific models will have evolved beyond recognition, and the reality we take for granted today will likely appear quaint and rudimentary.

Are you a dualist?

Kastrup's philosophy is pretty much Schopenhauer reheated. — Janus

Kastrup is pretty up front about the large influence Schop has had on him. Jung too. I don't think "reheated" sounds right unless you hold a pejorative view of K's work.

I don't think that is what he argues. He argues that matter is what appearances look like to mind. It is the tangible aspect of mind, so to speak, not a separate substance. — Janus

Kastrup is a monist. There is only consciousness; he generally says matter is the extrinsic appearance of mental processes. For details his book Why Materialism Is Boloney sets out the arguments in great and sometimes boring detail. In some respects he's like a more evolved version of Donald Hoffman.

It also follows from this that real objects and beings of all kinds can have existed prior to the advent of human consciousness and that we can coherently talk about that existence as being human mind-independent. — Janus

Strictly speaking matter is not mind-independent in general: it is independent of individual human minds, but not of mind as such, since it is the extrinsic appearance of processes in universal consciousness.

I don't know Kastrup's answer, but there is no scientific definition of life (according to Robert Rosen). — frank

Could well be. My question doesn’t change, however: what is the reason, in idealism, for the division between apparently dead matter and conscious beings? If all that exists is mental in nature, why does some of it present as "lifeless" structure while other portions present as subjects with inner experience?

He argues that there is no matter, only mentation.

Would you say the chair someone is sat on would stop existing once all consciousness is extinguished? Sure we can’t make any statements or propositions about the world without consciousness but the world exists as a state of affairs despite consciousness. There is a difference between the table existing and the proposition of the “the table exists”. — kindred

Yes, I think this is close to where I am at present. How meaningful is it, exactly, to say that something exists if there is no perspective from which to apprehend it? My fame isn't idealism here but a type of constructivism (as far as I can tell).

What is a dinosaur without a name, a description, proposed behaviours? In an important sense, we brought dinosaurs into being by transforming fossils into animals with identities, properties, and histories.

This is not to say that there were no things (that later became dinosaurs) before humans provided names and descriptors for them. Plainly, there were. The point is rather that something becomes meaningful, becomes a dinosaur rather than a mere arrangement of bones, only within a framework of perception, description, and shared inquiry. Existence may not depend on us, but intelligible existence does.

But even having a conversation about this seems challenging, because we smuggle a great many concepts into the chat simply by using words that come with built-in assumptions.

This can be tricky however because to exist is to be perceived is not true. I know that I exist despite no one perceiving me as my consciousness tells me so. Yet a rock who does not posses consciousness exists independently of me perceiving it. So I think this type of idealism fails to account for continued existence of object after conscious perception of them ceases. — kindred

Yes a familiar objection to idealism and you’re raising a separate conceptual framework. I’m not an idealist but I'd like to understand idealism as well as I can.

This is the view that all of reality is fundamentally mental. One of its most prominent contemporary proponents is Bernardo Kastrup. On his account, there is a single, universal consciousness, mind-at-large; a version perhaps of Schopenhauer's Will, which constitutes the whole of reality. Individual minds are not separate substances, but dissociated aspects of this universal mind.

On this view, the persistence of objects or the world does not depend on individual observers, but on mind-at-large itself. What we call the physical world is the extrinsic appearance of mental processes within this broader consciousness, structured so as to make intersubjective experience possible. Or something like this.

My guess is that existence, and any related ideas we might explore, are inseparable from consciousness. Without consciousness, there are no propositions, it seems therefore that we cannot meaningfully speak of existence. The next question you might ask is, 'Did the earth exist before humans? Did dinosaurs?' My tentative answer is both yes and no. These phenomena exist retrospectively, insofar as we interpret them through our current understanding of reality; any meaning we ascribe to them is imposed after the fact.

I sit with the tentative view that if humans had never existed, then neither would dinosaurs. This is not to say that something approximating the phenomena we now call 'dinosaurs' did not exist, but that the notion of 'dinosaurs' is almost meaningless without human frameworks of language, classification, conceptualization, historical context, and scientific inquiry.

I would never have expected a Western Christian frame from K. I use ‘religious’ as a synonym for spiritual system. I see him as moving away from the ineffable and apophatic and to more into an explanatory frame. But I infer this from how he talks rather than writes.