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[Dr Jonathan Osterman PhD]

THE biggest thorn in their paw is in epistemology: putting Kant's synthetic apriori knowledge argument aside, a much simpler and intuitive way to show the nature of the problem lies here:

How does anything out there get in here?

I am infatuated with this question, frankly, for its simplicity is stunning!


Your thoughts?

Here-and-now, from time to time, when the opportunity presents itself, I ask this question of various people I have non-philosophical discussions with, and in my experience, almost all of them do not see any "problem" at all.

And if someone rare senses that it might by a legitimate problem after all, they think that it is merely a small technical problem, a small explanatory gap in the current scientific understanding, or that there must already be a scientific answer to it, and I simply don't know about it.

In my opinion, the nature of this problem can tell us something non-trivial and fundamental about the nature of our own dearest self : viewtopic.php?f=4&t=19194

Moreover, my version of your shortest possible question, is long, and makes all the pieces of the puzzle as complete, clear, and simple, as possible, because as you observed it correctly, the simplicity of this problem is stunning, this being the reason why folks don't see any problem with it. And in my opinion, this problem is where our absolutely overwhelming illusory direct experience of ontological and epistemological DUALITY stems from.

Here-and-now, FIRST of all, I would like to ask you, if in your professional opinion, my below included framing of your above short question is acceptable to your mind? If not, then tell me how to improve it, please.

SECOND, in case my below framing is acceptable to you, I would like you to ask your doting student, La Gaya Scienza, to properly philosophically and scientifically, and at length, express in writing his response to my question below.

Here-and-now, I want to know what La Gaya Scienza, specifically disagrees with, and why? Because La Gaya Scienza's best philosophical argument so far was, and I quote him:

" The old religion BS, the laughable Ken Wilbur BS, the incoherent Kastrup BS, the naive and childish Phenomenology BS, and the useless Transcendental Mysticism BS, will never land even a sigle rover on Mars. Only Western science alone was capable of landing many rovers on Mars, because Western science really works, and all this opium for the masses BS doesn't work at all, and I don't need any above mentioned BS to fill the explanatory gaps in scientific materialism. The Big Bang happened exactly as Albert Einstein proved it mathematically, and Darwinian Evolution is a self-evident scientific fact."

viewtopic.php?f=4&t=19207
===========================================


Why philosophy of Idealism is counter-intuitive?
By Dr. Jonathan Österman, Ph.D., ETH Zürich, Switzerland


The view of the philosophy of Idealism is counter-intuitive to most people, and even to most philosophers.

It is not my intention to try and convert anyone to the philosophy of Idealism.

Many educated people, and many scientists who have educated these people, naturally hold the view of scientific materialism, which believes that “mind” is simply another way of saying that “brain thinks”, and that “consciousness”, as something separate from the brain, simply does not exist in any other way than being an illusion that we all naturally experience and deeply believe in. And therefore, there is no such thing as “free will” either, our apparent “free will” being another associated illusion. Emergence of Life was an accident, and our Universe is essentially meaningless. So, even scientific materialism is not free form asserting existence of various illusions in our human experience. Illusions are here to stay, one way or another.

OK, fine. If you prefer the philosophical view of scientific materialism, then be happy with it. It does not bother me a bit, as a philosophical Idealist that I am. I think your view is naive and philosophically childish, and you think that my view is clearly and obviously wrong, being some sort of useless mystical BS, which will never land even a single rover on Mars. So, we agree to respectfully disagree, as Gentlemen do.

Dr. David Chalmers wrote:

” When I was in graduate school, I recall hearing: “One starts as a materialist, then one becomes a dualist, then a panpsychist, and one ends up as an Idealist”. I don’t know where this comes from, but I think the idea was something like this. First, one is impressed by the successes of science, endorsing materialism about everything and so about the mind. Second, one is moved by problem of consciousness to see a gap between physics and consciousness, thereby endorsing dualism, where both matter and consciousness are fundamental. Third, one is moved by the inscrutability of matter to realize that science reveals at most the structure of matter and not its underlying nature, and to speculate that this nature may involve consciousness, thereby endorsing panpsychism. Fourth, one comes to think that there is little reason to believe in anything beyond consciousness and that the physical world is wholly constituted by consciousness, thereby endorsing Idealism.”

Well, then, in a spirit of open-minded curiosity, let me ask you the following question, and let us know your answer, please.

My question pertains to the physical materialistic explanation of the mechanism (process) of sensory perception.

For the sake of simplicity, let’s consider the process of seeing only, because our sense of sight is dominant in our human experience.

THE PHYSICAL MATERIALISTIC EXPLANATION OF OUR EXPERIENCE OF SEEING:

Please, always correct me if I am wrong, the long story short, photons hit the bottom of our eyes, as a result of it electric signals are being sent from eyes along the optic nerve to the visual cortex. The visual cortex, somehow, manages to do a very complex processing of these electric signals, and the end result of this processing is us seeing the external physical reality, OUT THERE.

The external physical reality OUT THERE, as opposed to the internal physical reality IN HERE, meaning inside the visual cortex, where our seeing happens. Our internal experience of seeing (a produced image of external physical reality), according to the scientific materialism, can’t be happening anywhere else than inside our visual cortex, similar to us being able to see our night dreams inside our sleeping brain. Our night dreams can't possibly be visible to others looking at us sleeping.

So, how does it really work in scientific detail ?

How exactly does it happen, according to mainstream physics, that we exclusively see OUTSIDE of our brains, and not exclusively INSIDE our brains only, like when we sleep and dream?

Because the irrefutable scientific fact is that we all see the external physical reality where it really is, OUT THERE, outside of our visual cortex exclusively, and never inside of it, like when we sleep and dream?

Is it a wrong, or stupid, question?

Is it only me, who makes a problem out of something obvious that is not a problem at all?

Well, I am not alone. Misery loves company!

William P. Byers, Professor Emeritus of Mathematics and Statistics wrote:

“ It is certainly conceivable that the clarity we perceive in the external world is something we bring to the world, not something that is there independent of us. The clarity of the natural world is a metaphysical belief that we unconsciously impose on the situation. We consider it to be obvious that the natural world is something exterior of us and independent of our thoughts and sense impressions; we believe in a mind-independent reality. Paradoxically, we do not recognize that the belief in a mind-independent reality is itself mind-dependent. Logically, we cannot work our way free of the bubble we live in, which consists of all of our sense impression and thoughts. The pristine world of clarity, the natural external world independent of the observer, is merely a hypothesis that cannot, even in principle, ever be verified. To say that the natural world is ambiguous is to highlight this assumption. It is to emphasize that the feeling that there is a natural world ‘out there’ that is the same for all people at all times, is an assumption that is not self-evident. This is not to embrace a kind of solipsism and to deny the reality of the world. It is to emphasize that the natural external world is intimately intertwined with the internal world of the conscious self-aware mind.”

[Hereandnow]

Lagayscienza wrote

I'm going to try to overcome my aversion to Heidegger. Do you think one really need to read him?

I am afraid so. Heidegger more than any other philosopher. He was the one who understood that Kant had only opened a door, and what was needed was a full exposition of human existence. Of course, he stands on the shoulders of others, Husserl especially, but he is so much more than those he borrows from. If you find him daunting at first, read on. Introductions do not explain, they give an overview, and so the reader is naturally lost if the concepts are new. But then things become more familiar as you realize his analyses actually make sense, and it is only in the full analysis of each subject, pages and pages long, that one sees this, not in the introductory statement.

You will understand a lot more than you think at first. The Greek is irritating, but limited to only a handful important terms, and in these they are VERY important. Heidegger' views of truth, for example, are not about drawing conclusions from premises, for he uses 'aletheia' and I am not a Heidegger scholar and that means I am limited on technical questions, but this is not very important if one is not trying to get published in a journal because the more you read, the clearer he becomes: his theme is being, and so he has to break away standard assumptions, so the effort is to describe the manner of appearing. He certainly doesn't deny logical argumentation, but this has a more basic analysis which is historical. When one observes an object, it is a historical event, for language is historical, both at the personal level and at the cultural level.

To get the the entirety of the sources of Heidegger's thinking takes an education far beyond mine. He drew from the vast wisdom of the ages, and is an extraordinary mind to encounter and assimilate into one's own thinking. I think it holds true for anyone who tries that as one moves into Being and Time, one gets caught up in a huge matrix of philosophical thought, and then one has get one's footing in this strange new world.

You've inspired me to read division II again. I have been having trouble recalling things. Thanks for that!

[A Material Girl]

You've inspired me to read...

Hey

Maybe you would also know what space is made of ?

P. s.

I hope you could be kind enough to address my valid concerns here, too:
viewtopic.php?p=452242#p452242

[Hereandnow]

A Material Girl wrote

At home, we have a dog, and a cat, too.

When the sun is shining, my cat looks at me and sees me
as a weird "cat", I guess? I would love to know what my cat
really thinks about me. Here-And-Now, what does your cat
think about you, my friend?

I look at my cat and I see him as my lovely cat.

I can tell when my cat is hungry, and then he eats his cat-food.
Sometimes he is interested in my-food, too.

My cat and me like to bask in the sun's golden warmth.

In the winter, my cat loves the warmth of my body,
and I love warmth of his body. We are buddies!


Here-And-Now, you wrote above:

"... and, as Derrida later advances this idea,
our ideas do not stand for the world,
but stand in for the world."

I don't get it. Would you like to elaborate on it for me, please?


And here is where I have to strongly disagree
with your mystical BS:

"Obviously, they do not all say the same things,
but there is in the Eastern notion of liberation and
enlightenment something they all share that unites them,
the idea that we are all living in an illusion."

Here-And-Now, speak for yourself, please!
I have no illusions about my life, OK?

Yes, I want to be a little bit more spiritual. True.
I have read a book by Deepak Chopra, I am a vegetarian,
I hug trees, I love my dog, I do Hatha Yoga,
I have a Dancing Shiva statue on my desk, next to my laptop,
and I feel a strange attraction to all your sweet narratives in this topic.

But, I also very much like the idea of Western SCIENCE being
an atheistic spiritual path to objective TRUTH:
viewtopic.php?f=4&t=19207
Don't you? What's wrong with this? Could you be honest with me, please?

First, Derrida: It goes back to at least Kierkegaard, who was responding to Hegel's rationalism, you know, the real is rational, and K said Hegel had forgotten something strangely important, which was that we actually exist. This became a major theme for phenomenology (existentialism), which I think can only be made clear by the most vivid examples. Take a lighted match and apply it to a finger, and take note (phenomenology is essentially descriptive) that the terrible pain is NOT in any of its observable features propositional. This may sound trivially true to you but it's not. The pain is not propositional, but the understanding that it IS pain is, and so your understanding is bound up in thinking, yet the existence that is thought "about" is not at all like this, and it is indeed radically different, entirely OTHER than the language that makes a knowledge claim about the pain.

I think the affective dimension of our existence is where the clarity for discussing the concept of existence at all rests, but it really does apply across the board to every encounter one can have, for affectivity, and this is critical, is, like all of our words, a categorical distinction only. I mean by this that when we talk about the world, the way we separate trees from lakes from seismic events from cats and so on and so on, is through a categorical imposition. Ask: does this philosophy club exist? Yes and no, and we are already in an existential ambiguity, for prior to there being a club, there was no club, and so, putting one together constructs a new existence, but certainly not in the "existential" puzzling way a "thing exists". A club is just a logical, pragmatic construction, an organizing principle, a label for reference and comparing and evaluating and all sorts of things. I can summon one into "existence" with a phone call. Here is one needs to pay attention: there are here two ways to think of something existing: the philosophically puzzling way which the way the world IS, or, that it IS, and the way this term is infinitely viable and malleable, which refers to the way language works, takes up this or that in a "language game" about cars, or economics or anything. Note how I can casually speak of something like General Motors in propositions like, "General Motors is still a major company." "IS" ?? Does GM exist? But when I refer to the Pacific Ocean, there is this actuality, this Other existential counterpart of the name given.

So, this way of language to speak about things is not the came as being a thing. The former is wide open for novel content, but restricted to logical structure; the former is individual and concrete, that is, this one shovel, here, and not any other. Or: the former is conceptual, cognitive, universal and "apriori" and the latter actuality, Real existence. These are categorically different kinds of existence. If that sounds confusing, it should, because central to the problem is, to talk at all is be in the former, and not the latter., and so what does this say about my ability to "speak" about my cat, who is not at all a principle, a pragmatic organizational entity? This is, of course, a radical simplicity of what philosophers are talking about, but the idea itself is fairly clear, I think: when I think, I am in a very different modality of "existence" than as I am as an existential entity.

Thus, to speak at all about the world is to stand apart from the world, and IN another world of logical sense making. But what about reference? I use the term "cat" to refer to my cat. This is the problem, and if you can understand this, then you understand something philosophically important. Think again about the excruciating pain in your finger, the most vivid example I can think of to exemplify the latter! When we see that language "works" to interface with the world, but does not apprehend the existence of the world, the world "as such" becomes transcendental, completely OTHER than the language used to speak what IS. This is the "space" Derrida deals with, the space between language and the burning finger, for the language is, again, this infinitely malleable and transforming medium of apprehension and the finger is this crisis that is radically other than this.

Which brings me to the mystical BS: Well that 's entirely up to you, but it can be argued that you should have a certain measure of mystical regard for the world. After all, if language and the world are so indeterminate in their relation at the level of the most basic assumptions (of course, no one is arguing that you can't make assumptions about things in the everyday affairs of living), then this indeterminacy goes directly into the relation itself, that is, you and the sky above or the floor below, for neither you nor anything in perceptual range are not a fiction turned into in existence (GM) but a Real actuality. And you don't have to set your finger on fire to see this. It just takes understanding that this knowledge relation with things in the world is foundationally impossible. Why impossible? Because affirmations of anything in the world stand apart from the world, and there you are, witnessed something for which there is no explanation at all. For you are now IN metaphysics.

If you really want to be more spiritual, I say understand just this first. Then someone like Ralph Waldo Emerson or pseudo Dionysus the Areopogite (sp?) will begin to make sense. A mystic is a person who lives in existential indeterminacy, and the world IS existentially indeterminate.

[Hereandnow]

A Material Girl

Maybe you would also know what space is made of ?

Too tempting to pass up: There you are minding your own business then your philosophy professor comes along and and asks you about the nature of space. Here is what Heidegger said (it'll mildly annoy): The bottom line is this event occurs in Time, so when the prof asks you this question, it is not as if he said something entirely alien to your understanding. In fact, you understood every word prior to being asked at all. You are already in possession of everything the questions asks regarding space, what it means for something to be made of something, what is meant by "the nature of something", and you understand that she, the prof, is a fellow interlocutor of shared understanding of what words mean in general, and what questions are about, and put it this way: you are resourced with a truly vast repository of knowledge that informs this occasion from a practical understanding of the way prepositions are used to what you read about Einstein's theory of space-time, and when this question appears occurrently, these resources are spontaneously put into play. they rise to "meet" the inquiry, allowing you to say recall something about Einstein or Descartes or Kant, or whoever you have read.

So space is no different from anything else you might be asked about in its basic structure. 'Space' is an interpretative term contextualized within a specialized "region" of organized thinking. Ask what knitting is and the same applies. Of course, this disappoints, because you expected an exposition about just this specialized region in physics, but this is NOT philosophy. Cosmology is not philosophy. This latter deals in ontology, which is thematically all inclusive, and not just what science has to say. When the physicist speaks authoritatively, she presupposes that which the philosopher takes up explicitly. Tell me how star light traverses the universe, and you beg questions that have nothing to do with astrophysics, questions about the nature of language that speaks about star light, or the logic that holds a thought together, or the aesthetic dimension of a meaningful utterance, or the being of the objective, posited conditions of things and their properties, or, especially, the epistemic relation between the physicist and the world affirmed. Before a star is affirmed to be a star at all, let's look at what it means for language to symbolically represent the things IN the world.

Of course, Heidegger makes this his own: to perceive is to "de-sever" a certain totality of categorical engagement, and so on. Look it up if like, but if you are like me, it will puzzle you, but only until you are provoked into actually reading Being and Time. Then you see what he's saying, and then your understanding of the world has a heart attack because you never dreamed the world could be thought about like this. No kidding--absolutely fascinating! But you have to REALLY want to know.

[A Material Girl]

Of course, this disappoints, because you expected an exposition about just this specialized region in physics, but this is NOT philosophy.

Cosmology is not philosophy. This latter deals in ontology, which is thematically all inclusive, and not just what science has to say.

When the physicist speaks authoritatively, she presupposes that which the philosopher takes up explicitly.

Sure.

So, let me be more specific and philosophical with you.

I agree with you that physics is NOT philosophy.

However, there is Philosophy of Science, and also philosophy of physics.

When the physicist speaks authoritatively of physical matter being made of atoms, the job of the philosopher is to answer the question of what is the ontological status of an atom of matter.

The job of the philosopher is also to explain epistemological aspects of the physicist looking at few atoms of a simple inorganic molecule under an electron microscope.

We all know that empty space exists, because we see it directly with our own eyes.

So, for you, as the philosopher, to be able to do philosophy of physics with empty space as an ontological entity, first you would need to know what the physicist claims about it from the scientific standpoint of experimental physics.

My impression is that you are not a philosopher of science, and even if you were one, you simply do NOT know what physics claims the empty space to be made of, in so far as a matter of physical substance is concerned.

Therefore, I would much prefer that instead of the empty space, you rather honestly address the entire following very interesting epistemological issue without being evasive, and without doing selective cherry-picking: viewtopic.php?p=452309#p452309

Your response to the above will clearly tell me not only what kind of philosopher you are, but most importantly, what kind of person are you.

[Hereandnow]

Dr. Jonathan Österman, Ph.D wrote

So, how does it really work in scientific detail ?

How exactly does it happen, according to mainstream physics, that we exclusively see OUTSIDE of our brains, and not exclusively INSIDE our brains only, like when we sleep and dream?

Because the irrefutable scientific fact is that we all see the external physical reality where it really is, OUT THERE, outside of our visual cortex exclusively, and never inside of it, like when we sleep and dream?

Is it a wrong, or stupid, question?

Is it only me, who makes a problem out of something obvious that is not a problem at all?
”

But you know, it is worse yet, far worse, for if you want the reductive talk about physical systems of a brain-thing to be THE basis for foundational philosophy, then there is no visual cortex, or brain, or anything you can imagine, for these are just manifestations of neuronal events...no wait--there are none of these either, nor are there words and sentences or truth, for there is simply nothing IN systems like this that is not reduced out of "real" existence. This is in fact Richard Rorty's world, and there is something about this that is just madness, for this is what you get when you remove metaphysics from philosophy: a self contained world that really is not self contained at all since to be this one has to have an idea of what it means to NOT be self contained, and when it comes to metaphysics, this "other than" this world is just nonsense. Not "not a fitting theory" but just complete nonsense. Rorty gets this from Heidegger and Wittgenstein. It is a fascinating lineage of the generation of this idea that begins with an affirmation of God found IN the finitude of our existence (this freedom and the openness of spirit) and ends in the metaphysical nihilism of Rorty (and really all of the analytic philosophers who refuse to think about Kant again). This story about Rorty is a long one, but I think it is important to
see this: To remove metaphysics from philosophy both removes something In our existence, from our finitude, that cannot be removed, and in doing this, trivializes what we are, and this is blatantly contradicted by the ethical, that is, the metaethical, dimension of our affairs that is found in this question: why are we born to suffer and die? Or more to the point, what is the justification for the aesthetic/ethical dimension of our existence?

And then finally, it has to be made clear that the only means of acknowledging a brain at all is through observation, and observation is a brain event, so a brain is presupposed in positing a brain. This is question begging that is so obvious it is a mystery that naturalism in philosophy has any place at all. what comes first, if you like, consciousness or the brain? Logically, the brain presupposes consciousness, and consciousness does not presuppose a brain. Certainly not that there is no brain to conscious event connectivity. Such an idea is not worth defending given how obvious it has been made by science. But then, science itself is not prior to consciousness. Science presupposes consciousness and its phenomena. The matter seems to be at an impasse: on the one hand, consciousness IS logically prior to (presupposed by) ANYTHING that can be thought of at all, yet on the other hand, these events we witness in our everydayness are not fictions, and this lamp being over there and not my consciousness but OTHER than my consciousness is undeniable as well. Much of what science wants to say about the independence of objects we encounter in the world is true, and I don't care go the way of Kant and draw that hard line between what is noumenal and what is phenomenological. No: the phenomenological IS noumenal!

Consciousness is capable of acknowledging what is not consciousness. Husserl is no help here, for intentionality does not deliver the object from its transcendental status. I may like, hate, fear, conceive, anticipate, suspect, and so on, and thereby hold the object in place and bring it into my awareness, but I also understand the object's independence. Here is the trick: One cannot think, as I mentioned, like Kant and hold metaphysics impossibly apart from phenomena, for noumena to have any meaning at all must be presented in phenomena, and this presentation is found in the intuited radical otherness of the object, its transcendence. Kant had to postulate noumena because after all, representations cannot be about nothing, but this aboutness never did apply to a metaphysical abstraction, but is found IN the manifestness of phenomena. This is how this lamp can be both intuitively other than me and apprehended by me at once. But the real problem lies not in the analytic of the apriority of our thought, but in the status of content, and this matter is only to be resolved in the issue of hermeneutics. When I observe the lamp, I am implcitly bringing this radical other into an interpretative pov. And this applies to everything, we witness, including consciousness itself, indeed, the world of my dasein (my existence) and all other beings I encounter are under the grip of an interpretative imposition of meaning.

This is pretty darn interesting, I think. Our interpretative bringing the world to heel is a powerful pragmatic temporal dynamic. Time needs to be discussed. My view is of course derivative, and I'll say it flat out: time is attachment, it is the "vessel" of keeping the world ordinary and familiar, such that when I enter a room the past "speaks" implicitly in every glance, informing the moment of the language, the "habits" and predictability of things. This is what Buddhists are really doing, they are annihilating the world of interpretative possibilities that construct our finitude, for the "real" object, the lamp on my desk, belongs to metaphysics, as do we, as do all things. This is the nature of maya, Hindu's illusion of the world. It is Kierkegaard's inherited sin. There is a very long discussion I am not going into. It would take a dissertation.

This is how I read the Abhidhamma on what English has as "ultimate reality". I take this very seriously and consider myself a kind of radical threshold personality. Go figure.

[Lagayascienza]

Lagayscienza wrote

I'm going to try to overcome my aversion to Heidegger. Do you think one really need to read him?

I am afraid so. Heidegger more than any other philosopher. He was the one who understood that Kant had only opened a door, and what was needed was a full exposition of human existence. Of course, he stands on the shoulders of others, Husserl especially, but he is so much more than those he borrows from. If you find him daunting at first, read on. Introductions do not explain, they give an overview, and so the reader is naturally lost if the concepts are new. But then things become more familiar as you realize his analyses actually make sense, and it is only in the full analysis of each subject, pages and pages long, that one sees this, not in the introductory statement.

You will understand a lot more than you think at first. The Greek is irritating, but limited to only a handful important terms, and in these they are VERY important. Heidegger' views of truth, for example, are not about drawing conclusions from premises, for he uses 'aletheia' and I am not a Heidegger scholar and that means I am limited on technical questions, but this is not very important if one is not trying to get published in a journal because the more you read, the clearer he becomes: his theme is being, and so he has to break away standard assumptions, so the effort is to describe the manner of appearing. He certainly doesn't deny logical argumentation, but this has a more basic analysis which is historical. When one observes an object, it is a historical event, for language is historical, both at the personal level and at the cultural level.

To get the the entirety of the sources of Heidegger's thinking takes an education far beyond mine. He drew from the vast wisdom of the ages, and is an extraordinary mind to encounter and assimilate into one's own thinking. I think it holds true for anyone who tries that as one moves into Being and Time, one gets caught up in a huge matrix of philosophical thought, and then one has get one's footing in this strange new world.

You've inspired me to read division II again. I have been having trouble recalling things. Thanks for that!

Thanks Hereandnow.

I've started on Heidegger. You're right about the Greek. When I copy and past the Greek terms into google translate I get Gibberish. I'll have to come back to those terms and try to translate them after I finish reading the first section.

As I read Heidegger, his history keeps popping into my consciousness - his Nazism and his disavowal of Husserl because he was Jewish, despite his debt to Husserl. I must try to set that aside as I try to understand what he's saying about "Being". He is difficult to understand but I will persevere as you, and many others, say that Heidegger is important. But I'll only read the first section of B&T before going back to finish Husserl's Ideas1 and the Meditations. After that I will return to Heidegger and re-read the first section and the rest of the book.

Thanks again.

[Hereandnow]

A Material Girl wrote

I agree with you that physics is NOT philosophy.

However, there is Philosophy of Science, and also philosophy of physics.

When the physicist speaks authoritatively of physical matter being made of atoms, the job of the philosopher is to answer the question of what is the ontological status of an atom of matter.

There is a philosophy of art, which is interesting because art is an entangled mess. One wonders if conceptual art is actually an oxymoron, or if art's essence is is found in experience (Dewey) or if art is an institutional matter (see Danto on this) and so on, but all of these issues are due to confusions about concepts are constructs of an historical nature, and one wants to ask about the essence of art. This takes one out of these issues and into the search for what they presuppose. We want a "final vocabulary'" to use Rorty's term that doesn't defer the matter into other ambiguities of context. But then, language itself, as Derrida put it, has no finality in the possible things that can be meaningfully said, and so we run into a metaphysical indeterminacy in art, but have we, in the search for something final and determinate, gotten to where the language runs out (Putnam's term)? This would be where we have escaped language's contingencies, that is, the way one set of ideas defer to other ideas that defer to still others and so on (and this is Derrida). In art, this would be aesthetics, certainly not free of discussion, but aesthetics is the existential assumption that constitutes the possibility of art: no aesthetics, no art; aesthetics has this existential counterpart, which we all know is our affectivity (borrowed from my current fascination, Michel Henry): the beautiful and the sublime, the angst and the burden of living, and all of the words that crowd our emotional existence. Give this FORM (see Clive Bell's Art on aesthetic rapture and significant form), and you have art.

We have political philosophy, and the same can be said as the above of the confusing entanglements philosophers talk about in social contract theory, the nature of a society's authority over individuals, questions about just and unjust wars, laws, anarchy or anarchism, the sword of the sovereign, and so on. But again, these issues emerge out of the problems we create, and this is true about language itself. I aksed earlier, does General Motors exist? How about Brazil? And then, how about my cat, does she exist? Careful here, for when one actually looks into what it IS that brought the concept "into existence" you will not find that-over-there-on-the -couch. You will find a historical matrix of language that has its generative source in the problems that have arisen, been dealth with, and found "consummation" in the dynamic process (Dewey). But again, when we look into the presuppositional underpinnings of politics, is there not some existential counterpart that can ground these affairs outside of language? This would be ethics. No ethics, no political affairs at all.

Your claim is that philosophy has its philosophy of science, and particular field of entanglements. Certainly one has to be baffled by quantum physics, and string theory, and the human genome, whether the red shift in a star's spectrum indicates an expanding universe, and on and on; but I think you will agree that this is not what philosophy is concerned with. This is speculative science, just as an art historian speculates about how David's neoclassicsim deviates from the classical tradition, or as the political scientist speculates whether the Vladimir Putin has a justification in invading Ukraine. All of the matters like this certainly have a striking indeterminacy about them that can argued, and these arguments DO turn philosophical, but note how this turn goes: it goes to the more foundational issues. Art moves to aesthetics and political philosophy moves to ethics for their foundational examination. Where does science move to? Observation. And what philosophical idea has its focus here? Epistemology.

Kuhn, you know, was a Kantian. And Popper's hypothetical deductive method aligns with Heidegger's analysis of time. These implicitly or explicitly call into question the metaphysics of science, which is one form or another naturalism or physicalism or materialism, and I am not interested in t he nuanced distinctions these have, because the very idea itself is patently question begging. All one has ever witnessed or can witness is phenomena. I consider this to be so clear that it is absurd to consider its contradiction. After all, to observe at all is to experience, and as Rorty put it, the brain is not a mirror. Indeed, it is entirely epistemically and physically opaque.

All roads lead to metaphysics. There is a philosophy of knitting sweaters, speaking loosely, but ask about this in a more rigorous way, and where will inquiry take you? Into the assumptions, the presuppositions of knitting, and where does this lead? Into the irritating questions deconstructionists ask: what do you mean by that? Oh, and what does that mean? Like a child's attempt to aggravate parents (they can be like that). But there is a good reason for doing this as it shows the basic indeterminacy of our knowledge claims. This is where the philosophy of science ends up.

Philosophy is inquiry into anything at the most basic level of assumptions. I consider this to be flat out true. And all "philosophies of this or that" beg more basic questions, and a comprehensive philosophy, the philosophy of everything, if you will, is phenomenology.

We all know that empty space exists, because we see it directly with our own eyes.

Not really, but more interesting: when you "see" you implicitly think. You "think" space.

So, for you, as the philosopher, to be able to do philosophy of physics with empty space as an ontological entity, first you would need to know what the physicist claims about it from the scientific standpoint of experimental physics.

No, because philosophy is an apriori inquiry. It asks, what are the presuppositions of what science says? Not, what does science say? It is an important point.

My impression is that you are not a philosopher of science, and even if you were one, you simply do NOT know what physics claims the empty space to be made of, in so far as a matter of physical substance is concerned.

You refer to speculative science, not philosophy. If you take your cues from what you find in analytic philosophy, then you will be apt to think like this, that speculative science is philosophy, but remember, this anglo american tradition said its goodbyes to the Germans and the French long ago, and set on a course nicely illustrated by Moore's "here is one hand" "argument" not unlike the way Diogenes the Cynic refuting Zeno, ignoring, happily, Kant, for Kant had ruled philosophy (Moore himself was a one time Kantian) for over a century.

I am guessing you haven't read Kant. We will never see eye to eye until you do. Apologies. Kant is just the beginning.

your response to the above will clearly tell me not only what kind of philosopher you are, but most importantly, what kind of person are you.

I've written enough. Now, why don't you introduce yourself to me. Tell me where you stand and don't be shy. If you've read what I've written you know full well the kind of person I am. I just want to see what kind of person you are.

[Count Lucanor]

I was looking at the sunset here this evening and I understood for the first time, in a very real way, that the sun isn't what I've learned to think of it as. It was like waking up and seeing the sun for the first time. It's like when I first saw the ocean as a child who had known only the endless dusty plains of inland Australia. My first sight of the ocean was a mind-blowing revelation. I was consumed by the experience.

[…]None of this is to say that astrophysics is not about what the sun is. It is about the sun. The data of astrophysics are true, but the data are not what the sun IS. We cannot draw the territory out of the map and know the territory - we have to experience the territory, trek into it, walk up the hills and through the forest. Similarly, we cannot draw the meal out of the menu. We have to experience the food. All this has been brought home to me

That would be fine if you imply that your claim about the data of astrophysics related to the sun being true, at the same time that it is true that it is not what the sun is, simply means that the scientific knowledge of the sun, the one provided by the data of astrophysics, which includes the notion that the sun is a material object independent of our minds, is not ALL we can say about our experience of the sun, but nevertheless it is the factual, true description of what the sun really is as something more than a perceptual experience, a concrete entity, what it is at every time, what it has been for million of years, in itself, independently of any conscious apprehension of it, even before there was any conscious experience at all. That would be no different than saying that you can see the sun poetically, which of course does not invalidate the scientific, materialistic image, as an accurate, objective, realistic view of the sun, one we cannot eliminate from our understanding without falling into error.

If you ever suggested that our knowledge about the sun from astrophysics is merely one interpretation of what the sun is, standing side by side with the interpretation of the Egyptian and Aztec priests, without any metaphysical commitment as to its real, mind-independent nature, you’re taking the antirealist, antiscientific stance of idealist phenomenology, which is a bankrupt philosophy, precisely for being against science.

Thinking about consciousness with all this in mind, I now think that it will not be possible to understand consciousness, either, in just a simple, materialistic way. We will need science, but I cannot see how understanding the neural correlates of consciousness (NCCs) alone can get us there - consciousness cannot be reduced
to the data any more than we can pull territory out a map, or pull the sun out of astrophysical data. More than the NCCs will be needed. The study of the phenomenal structure of consciousness will have to be part of the story.

I wonder what you mean by the “materialistic way” being simple. I mean, the materialistic way of science understanding the sun does not look so simple, actually it has demanded the higher intellectual skills, hard work and collaboration of many specialized disciplines to get there, it’s not something that has been accesible to the common man at first hand. In any case, by a materialistic way of understanding the sun we mean that the ultimate nature of the sun is material and it is a real object, independently of our perceptions, but you seem to be suggesting now that the sun is merely “mind stuff”, just as consciousness supposedly is, otherwise you would not deny the materialistic way of understanding it. Bear in mind that phenomenalism does not necessarily entail the denial of realism and materialism, it is a stance about knowledge that highlights the fact that it is founded on our perception of things.

But what is the phenomenal structure of consciousness? And even more important: which consciousness, yours? Everyone’s? Because as it turns out, you can only make inferences about other people’s minds by observing their behavior as material entities in the external world, just as the sun. But aren’t they perceptual experiences, phenomena, too? You don’t experience that consciousness, only data related to it, including the key insight that material brains and bodies house such conscious processes, so how can you explore that territory, trek into it, without taking into account the material properties necessarily involved in its structure?

And so we get back to the OP, to the nature of religion. Here, too, as Hereandnow has suggested, I'm guessing it will be helpful to forget a lot of stuff I "know" about religion. I am now more open to the idea of a "radical indeterminacy" at the base of it all. I can lay all the accreted doctrine and dogma to one side and (hopefully) see more clearly what is going on. This doesn't mean I'm becoming a theist. It will just mean, hopefully, that I will have a better understanding of the phenomenon of religion in it's deepest yearning and well as in it's dangerous surface nonsense.

I don’t understand why you should forget, why is it that you cannot simply enrich an already insightful view, such as the view that comes from the merge of natural and social sciences. Why would we need to say that this knowledge is all of the sudden useless, dogmatic, as if it were a misguided interpretation, far from the reality of what’s been studied?

[Lagayascienza]

Thanks for your response, Countlucanor.

I respect science as much as anyone, but I’ve come to understand that it can only take me so far. And from that point on, if I still have questions about what’s behind the whole show, I can either make up nice stories that I “choose” to believe, or I can resort to philosophy, to metaphysics.

As you know, I’m new to Idealism so I’ll try to respond to your points from an idealistic POV insofar as I have been able to understand its Transcendental form. I’m sure others could do much better, but I’ll give it my best shot.

I was looking at the sunset here this evening and I understood for the first time, in a very real way, that the sun isn't what I've learned to think of it as. It was like waking up and seeing the sun for the first time. It's like when I first saw the ocean as a child who had known only the endless dusty plains of inland Australia. My first sight of the ocean was a mind-blowing revelation. I was consumed by the experience.

[…]None of this is to say that astrophysics is not about what the sun is. It is about the sun. The data of astrophysics are true, but the data are not what the sun IS. We cannot draw the territory out of the map and know the territory - we have to experience the territory, trek into it, walk up the hills and through the forest. Similarly, we cannot draw the meal out of the menu. We have to experience the food. All this has been brought home to me

That would be fine if you imply that your claim about the data of astrophysics related to the sun being true, at the same time that it is true that it is not what the sun is, simply means that the scientific knowledge of the sun, the one provided by the data of astrophysics, which includes the notion that the sun is a material object independent of our minds, is not ALL we can say about our experience of the sun, but nevertheless it is the factual, true description of what the sun really is as something more than a perceptual experience, a concrete entity, what it is at every time, what it has been for million of years, in itself, independently of any conscious apprehension of it, even before there was any conscious experience at all. That would be no different than saying that you can see the sun poetically, which of course does not invalidate the scientific, materialistic image, as an accurate, objective, realistic view of the sun, one we cannot eliminate from our understanding without falling into error.

That’s what I thought I said. What I was getting at was that, once I was able to momentarily bracket the astrophysical account, I was able to experience the sun in a powerfully new way. That’s all. That does not mean that I think that the account science has furnished is wrong. Science looks at all the pointer readings, the data, perfects theory, makes accurate predictions… Nothing holds a candle to science in this respect.

If you ever suggested that our knowledge about the sun from astrophysics is merely one interpretation of what the sun is, standing side by side with the interpretation of the Egyptian and Aztec priests, without any metaphysical commitment as to its real, mind-independent nature, you’re taking the antirealist, antiscientific stance of idealist phenomenology, which is a bankrupt philosophy, precisely for being against science.

The data of science tell us heaps of true stuff about the sun, its mass, its temperature, the gravity that pulls it all together and the nucleosynthesis that converts mass into heavier elements and powers the light and heat we enjoy. Of all this, science gives us the only believable physical account we have. But that account is an abstraction. The sun is not the astrophysical theory and data. Theoretical models and data cannot tell us what the sun is in itself. We are in no position to know that, and science cannot help us. And so, if we have further questions, we need to leave science to do what it does so well and go to metaphysics. Science does not go into foundational questions such as what’s behind it all, the nature of “being” and so forth. We cannot expect science to do that. Once we accept this, we can then ask how else we might look at the sun and the earth, at rocks and at trees and at the “being” of matter itself, and at consciousness. Metaphysically, I cannot see any way other than to start with the primacy of phenomena given in consciousness (which, BTW, includes the perceptions of astrophysicists and their perceptions of the astrophysical data) and to adopt some form of idealism. I still have confidence in what science tells me. Phenomenology, and Kant’s Transcendental Idealism are not anti-science. Metaphysics just takes up where science leaves off. There’s no competition here. One is philosophy and the other is science. [/quote]

Thinking about consciousness with all this in mind, I now think that it will not be possible to understand consciousness, either, in just a simple, materialistic way. We will need science, but I cannot see how understanding the neural correlates of consciousness (NCCs) alone can get us there - consciousness cannot be reduced
to the data any more than we can pull territory out a map, or pull the sun out of astrophysical data. More than the NCCs will be needed. The study of the phenomenal structure of consciousness will have to be part of the story.

I wonder what you mean by the “materialistic way” being simple. I mean, the materialistic way of science understanding the sun does not look so simple, actually it has demanded the higher intellectual skills, hard work and collaboration of many specialized disciplines to get there, it’s not something that has been accesible to the common man at first hand. In any case, by a materialistic way of understanding the sun we mean that the ultimate nature of the sun is material and it is a real object, independently of our perceptions, but you seem to be suggesting now that the sun is merely “mind stuff”, just as consciousness supposedly is, otherwise you would not deny the materialistic way of understanding it. Bear in mind that phenomenalism does not necessarily entail the denial of realism and materialism, it is a stance about knowledge that highlights the fact that it is founded on our perception of things.

Yes, of course the sun is still there when we are not observing it. It’s not “just” mind stuff. And I agree that Phenomenology does not entail the denial of physical matter insofar as science can explain it. But science is all pointer readings and data. Which I respect and have confidence in. But that does not tell us what matter is in itself. We cannot expect the astrophysical models and data to do that. And Transcendental Idealism does not pretend to do that. It’s just about phenomena that are given in consciousness. Heidegger, who I’m currently trying to read and who is said to go beyond phenomenology, may go more deeply into the nature of being and time, but I doubt he tell me what matter is in itself either. He’ll be more into what “being” matter “means”.

But what is the phenomenal structure of consciousness? And even more important: which consciousness, yours? Everyone’s? Because as it turns out, you can only make inferences about other people’s minds by observing their behavior as material entities in the external world, just as the sun. But aren’t they perceptual experiences, phenomena, too? You don’t experience that consciousness, only data related to it, including the key insight that material brains and bodies house such conscious processes, so how can you explore that territory, trek into it, without taking into account the material properties necessarily involved in its structure?

And so we get back to the OP, to the nature of religion. Here, too, as Hereandnow has suggested, I'm guessing it will be helpful to forget a lot of stuff I "know" about religion. I am now more open to the idea of a "radical indeterminacy" at the base of it all. I can lay all the accreted doctrine and dogma to one side and (hopefully) see more clearly what is going on. This doesn't mean I'm becoming a theist. It will just mean, hopefully, that I will have a better understanding of the phenomenon of religion in it's deepest yearning and well as in it's dangerous surface nonsense.

I don’t understand why you should forget, why is it that you cannot simply enrich an already insightful view, such as the view that comes from the merge of natural and social sciences. Why would we need to say that this knowledge is all of the sudden useless, dogmatic, as if it were a misguided interpretation, far from the reality of what’s been studied?

I do not say it’s useless. I would just say that the sciences have no explanation of the ultimate nature of valuing that underpins the majority of human life. Science might be able to tell us lots of things about morality, and about religion in all it’s crazy nonsense, but I’m not sure that it can tell us anything about the valuing underpinning it. Questions about value are philosophical questions, metaphysical questions rather than scientific questions. For example, I believe that science, in the form of evolution by natural selection, has a more or less true story to tell about the origins and forms of our moralizing. Our moralizing was what our genes came up with for helping us, or at least helping our genes, survive and reproduce out on the savanna. But, having understood this, science cannot tell me about whether valuing getting my genes launched into the future is worthy of my valuing. What would it mean to value that? Why shouldn’t I just tell my genes to go jump in the lake? Why should I value anything? On this science is silent. Phenomenology, in so far as I’ve been able to understand it, does not have any final answers either. It might ask about what valuing is like. It’s just a different way of looking at things and it asks questions that science does not deal with.

I'm still and atheist. I don' believe in gods. I believe in science. And where science leaves off I resort to metaphysics.

[Lagayascienza]

I wanted to add that metaphysics is not necessarily mysticism. Albeit that some metaphysicians, like some scientists, are of a mystical bent. Others are not. And Idealism is not necessarily mystical either. One can be an atheist and a metaphysical idealist.

[Count Lucanor]

Thanks for your response, Countlucanor.

I respect science as much as anyone, but I’ve come to understand that it can only take me so far. And from that point on, if I still have questions about what’s behind the whole show, I can either make up nice stories that I “choose” to believe, or I can resort to philosophy, to metaphysics.

As you well know, resorting to metaphysics alone was what was done before the arrival of systematic scientific thought (physics) and it was a monumental failure. The whole ontological domain was populated with the characters and forces of religion, so metaphysics could not get free from the hold of theology. Idealism remains committed, one way or the other, to mysticism. That’s why its program requires an attack on natural science and its intrinsic materialism.

I was looking at the sunset here this evening and I understood for the first time, in a very real way, that the sun isn't what I've learned to think of it as. It was like waking up and seeing the sun for the first time. It's like when I first saw the ocean as a child who had known only the endless dusty plains of inland Australia. My first sight of the ocean was a mind-blowing revelation. I was consumed by the experience.

[…]None of this is to say that astrophysics is not about what the sun is. It is about the sun. The data of astrophysics are true, but the data are not what the sun IS. We cannot draw the territory out of the map and know the territory - we have to experience the territory, trek into it, walk up the hills and through the forest. Similarly, we cannot draw the meal out of the menu. We have to experience the food. All this has been brought home to me

That would be fine if you imply that your claim about the data of astrophysics related to the sun being true, at the same time that it is true that it is not what the sun is, simply means that the scientific knowledge of the sun, the one provided by the data of astrophysics, which includes the notion that the sun is a material object independent of our minds, is not ALL we can say about our experience of the sun, but nevertheless it is the factual, true description of what the sun really is as something more than a perceptual experience, a concrete entity, what it is at every time, what it has been for million of years, in itself, independently of any conscious apprehension of it, even before there was any conscious experience at all. That would be no different than saying that you can see the sun poetically, which of course does not invalidate the scientific, materialistic image, as an accurate, objective, realistic view of the sun, one we cannot eliminate from our understanding without falling into error.

That’s what I thought I said. What I was getting at was that, once I was able to momentarily bracket the astrophysical account, I was able to experience the sun in a powerfully new way. That’s all. That does not mean that I think that the account science has furnished is wrong. Science looks at all the pointer readings, the data, perfects theory, makes accurate predictions… Nothing holds a candle to science in this respect.

If you ever suggested that our knowledge about the sun from astrophysics is merely one interpretation of what the sun is, standing side by side with the interpretation of the Egyptian and Aztec priests, without any metaphysical commitment as to its real, mind-independent nature, you’re taking the antirealist, antiscientific stance of idealist phenomenology, which is a bankrupt philosophy, precisely for being against science.

The data of science tell us heaps of true stuff about the sun, its mass, its temperature, the gravity that pulls it all together and the nucleosynthesis that converts mass into heavier elements and powers the light and heat we enjoy. Of all this, science gives us the only believable physical account we have. But that account is an abstraction.

Everything we deal with is an abstraction of ours. Every reflection on the world, every issue, since processed by our minds, is an abstract thought. We cannot escape that no matter what method of inquiry you choose. Certainly metaphysics or Phenomenology cannot escape from that constraint either, so there’s no point in arguing that one has to leave science behind because of that restriction. Without the facts of science, every metaphysical speculation remains like that, mere speculation.

The sun is not the astrophysical theory and data. Theoretical models and data cannot tell us what the sun is in itself. We are in no position to know that, and science cannot help us. And so, if we have further questions, we need to leave science to do what it does so well and go to metaphysics. Science does not go into foundational questions such as what’s behind it all, the nature of “being” and so forth. We cannot expect science to do that.

I’m not sure what you mean by “foundational”, but science does get into the fundamental nature of reality, which is material reality, the only reality we know of. Surely, science is founded on realist and materialistic assumptions, which is why you cannot stay with science and still reject its realistic and materialistic foundation. It’s not possible, as you can see from the fact that Idealism always aims its cannons towards the scientific models.

Once we accept this, we can then ask how else we might look at the sun and the earth, at rocks and at trees and at the “being” of matter itself, and at consciousness. Metaphysically, I cannot see any way other than to start with the primacy of phenomena given in consciousness (which, BTW, includes the perceptions of astrophysicists and their perceptions of the astrophysical data) and to adopt some form of idealism. I still have confidence in what science tells me. Phenomenology, and Kant’s Transcendental Idealism are not anti-science. Metaphysics just takes up where science leaves off. There’s no competition here. One is philosophy and the other is science.

The issue here is not metaphysics vs science, but metaphysical Idealism vs materialistic science. Materialism is the ontological basis of science. Idealist Phenomenology, such as the one advocated by Husserl and Heidegger, is clearly anti-science when it comes to dealing with the nature of reality, all as a result of a purely epistemological assumption about ontology. But epistemology cannot say anything of what really is, it can only deal (barely) with how we get to know things. We can also engage with the objects of the world in many other meaningful ways: poetically, morally, etc., but that only discloses our particular and contingent entanglements, our human relations with those objects, but not the reality of those objects in themselves, which remains true even when they do not appear in our experience. There was an ancestral Earth, Sun, dinosaurs, etc., as has been made evident by science, a reality without any dependency or intervention of the human mind. Just because we engage the world consciously, does not mean that the world itself is a pure domain of consciousness. Actually, as conscious beings, we are embedded in the world, and the consciousness within ourselves, is part of it. There must be the world before consciousness emerges. The Idealist Phenomenologist’s take is that the world emerges from consciousness, is constituted by it, which is fundamentally wrong.

Thinking about consciousness with all this in mind, I now think that it will not be possible to understand consciousness, either, in just a simple, materialistic way. We will need science, but I cannot see how understanding the neural correlates of consciousness (NCCs) alone can get us there - consciousness cannot be reduced to the data any more than we can pull territory out a map, or pull the sun out of astrophysical data. More than the NCCs will be needed. The study of the phenomenal structure of consciousness will have to be part of the story.

I wonder what you mean by the “materialistic way” being simple. I mean, the materialistic way of science understanding the sun does not look so simple, actually it has demanded the higher intellectual skills, hard work and collaboration of many specialized disciplines to get there, it’s not something that has been accesible to the common man at first hand. In any case, by a materialistic way of understanding the sun we mean that the ultimate nature of the sun is material and it is a real object, independently of our perceptions, but you seem to be suggesting now that the sun is merely “mind stuff”, just as consciousness supposedly is, otherwise you would not deny the materialistic way of understanding it. Bear in mind that phenomenalism does not necessarily entail the denial of realism and materialism, it is a stance about knowledge that highlights the fact that it is founded on our perception of things.

Yes, of course the sun is still there when we are not observing it. It’s not “just” mind stuff. And I agree that Phenomenology does not entail the denial of physical matter insofar as science can explain it.

Allow me to clarify that I said “phenomenalism”, not Phenomenology. The latter is a radical antirealist form of phenomenalism. As you can see from this forum and everywhere else, the commitments of Phenomenology to an ontology that acknowledges the physicality of the world is, at best, elusive.

But science is all pointer readings and data. Which I respect and have confidence in. But that does not tell us what matter is in itself. We cannot expect the astrophysical models and data to do that. And Transcendental Idealism does not pretend to do that. It’s just about phenomena that are given in consciousness. Heidegger, who I’m currently trying to read and who is said to go beyond phenomenology, may go more deeply into the nature of being and time, but I doubt he tell me what matter is in itself either. He’ll be more into what “being” matter “means”.

I don’t see what justifies the claim that science cannot tell us what matter in itself really is. As someone said, it is trustable knowledge that lands a rover on mars and flies planes. If the justification is phenomenalism, then there’s a big problem, because such approaches eventually only lead to solipsism, epistemological nihilism, irrationalism, and so on, including the rejection of science. It’s the bankruptcy of Idealism. I wouldn’t try to study biochemistry with Phenomenology, it cannot tell us nothing insightful.

But what is the phenomenal structure of consciousness? And even more important: which consciousness, yours? Everyone’s? Because as it turns out, you can only make inferences about other people’s minds by observing their behavior as material entities in the external world, just as the sun. But aren’t they perceptual experiences, phenomena, too? You don’t experience that consciousness, only data related to it, including the key insight that material brains and bodies house such conscious processes, so how can you explore that territory, trek into it, without taking into account the material properties necessarily involved in its structure?

And so we get back to the OP, to the nature of religion. Here, too, as Hereandnow has suggested, I'm guessing it will be helpful to forget a lot of stuff I "know" about religion. I am now more open to the idea of a "radical indeterminacy" at the base of it all. I can lay all the accreted doctrine and dogma to one side and (hopefully) see more clearly what is going on. This doesn't mean I'm becoming a theist. It will just mean, hopefully, that I will have a better understanding of the phenomenon of religion in it's deepest yearning and well as in it's dangerous surface nonsense.

I don’t understand why you should forget, why is it that you cannot simply enrich an already insightful view, such as the view that comes from the merge of natural and social sciences. Why would we need to say that this knowledge is all of the sudden useless, dogmatic, as if it were a misguided interpretation, far from the reality of what’s been studied?

I do not say it’s useless. I would just say that the sciences have no explanation of the ultimate nature of valuing that underpins the majority of human life. Science might be able to tell us lots of things about morality, and about religion in all it’s crazy nonsense, but I’m not sure that it can tell us anything about the valuing underpinning it. Questions about value are philosophical questions, metaphysical questions rather than scientific questions. For example, I believe that science, in the form of evolution by natural selection, has a more or less true story to tell about the origins and forms of our moralizing. Our moralizing was what our genes came up with for helping us, or at least helping our genes, survive and reproduce out on the savanna. But, having understood this, science cannot tell me about whether valuing getting my genes launched into the future is worthy of my valuing. What would it mean to value that? Why shouldn’t I just tell my genes to go jump in the lake? Why should I value anything? On this science is silent. Phenomenology, in so far as I’ve been able to understand it, does not have any final answers either. It might ask about what valuing is like. It’s just a different way of looking at things and it asks questions that science does not deal with.

To put it in a simple way: science will tell us what really is and how it is, not what ought to be. Science is not normative about moral behavior, we can easily agree on that. But it seems that Phenomenology does take a stand on what it is and how it is, even if elusive, speculative. In that sense it clashes with realistic approaches to understanding our human condition and the social environment where we live. That’s why Phenomenology fails in getting the key insight on religion.

[Count Lucanor]

I wanted to add that metaphysics is not necessarily mysticism. Albeit that some metaphysicians, like some scientists, are of a mystical bent. Others are not. And Idealism is not necessarily mystical either. One can be an atheist and a metaphysical idealist.

Mysticism doesn’t need to involve personal deities, so while it is true that you can be an atheist and a metaphysical Idealist, most of Idealism tends to mysticism in terms of some transcendent realm beyond the material world, or by claiming that the latter does not exist but only as constituted by an all-encompassing esoteric realm of mental stuff, to which of course only a privileged class of the initiated, mostly of priests and preachers, has access.

[Lagayascienza]

Yes, there are different form of Idealism. Transcendental Idealism still leaves us a material world. It's just that we cannot know the material world in it's entirety, as it is in itself[i/i]. Science remains untouched and incontestable. It's the only tool we have for understanding how the physical world, insofar as we can apprehend it, operates. No priestly class needed or wanted.