Philosophy Discussion Forums

Thanks, Count Lucanor. Sorry about the misattribution.

Lagayscienza wrote: ↑December 19th, 2023, 6:44 pm
Idealism seems to make a mystery out of why our perceptions conform to the notion that we live in a world of beings, things, and events that exist independently of our perceptions.

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 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.

OK, fine. If you like this view, 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, to say the least. We agree to respectfully disagree.

Dr. David Chalmers PhD 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, 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, and our internal experience of this seeing (a produced image of 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.

So, how does it work in scientific detail ?

How exactly does it happen, according to mainstream physics, that we can see OUTSIDE of our brains also, and not exclusively INSIDE our brains?

Because the 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 are sleeping?

Is it a wrong, or stupid, question?

Is it only me, who makes a problem 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 the following:

“ 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 mind.”

Lagayscienza wrote: ↑December 19th, 2023, 4:43 pm
Thanks Hereandnow. It's funny how I have to agree with what you say about phenomenology and consciousness. Still reading the meditations. And lots about idealism/realism.

The following is what Hereandnow wrote as an advanced comprehensive
introduction to the subject of consciousness, idealism, and meditation :

viewtopic.php?p=451586#p451586

Lagayscienza wrote: ↑December 17th, 2023, 8:32 am
Hereandnow, you say that :

VALUE is reality : nothing is more real that joy, pleasure, suffering and heartache, and the rest...

Our human reality, i.e. the only reality that we have direct access to,
is our mental reality which is solely made of VALUES, QUALITIES (qualia),
and, in my humble opinion, most importantly made of MEANING,
because we all desire to live a MEANINGFUL life.

We all want to be HAPPY & BEAUTIFUL, and happiness & beauty
cannot be neither mathematically calculated, nor physically quantified,
and therefore what is more important in human life are not quantities,
but qualities.

ARE QUANTITIES OBJECTIVELY PHYSICALLY REAL ??

In my humble opinion, and I ask Hereandnow to correct me,
if I am wrong, what we conceptualize as physical or mathematical "quantities",
which we can count, like money, have a purely symbolic nature,
meaning that a "quantity" is merely a particular kind of quality,
because numbers are symbols that we attribute a specific meaning to.

Therefore, in addition to quantum physics, we also need Qualium Physics :

www. quantumantigravity.wordpress. com/nonmaterial/


“ 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 mind.”

Lagayscienza wrote: ↑December 18th, 2023, 9:46 am
But aren't things other than value just as real? Matter and energy and events (other than joy, suffering, etcetera) that occur in space-time are, at least arguably, all just as real as joy and suffering, even though we may not be in a position to know exactly what these other things are "in themselves". But don't we know enough about them to know that they are real?

No, we are not even close to knowing enough about them.

“ Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature.
And that is because, in the last analysis, we ourselves are
a part of the mystery that we are trying to solve.”
― Max Planck, the Father of quantum mechanics.


What is your self ? — viewtopic.php?f=4&t=19194

Lagayscienza wrote: ↑December 17th, 2023, 8:32 am
And didn't space-time, matter and energy exist before humans, and couldn't they continue to exist after humans and their "Value-[ing]" cease to exist?

And how did space-time come into existence?

Due to the Big-Bang? So, what was the physical cause that resulted in the Big-Bang?
It would seem that it must have been Creator God who created the Big-Bang?

And, most importantly, what is space-time made of ?? — viewtopic.php?t=19187

Lagayscienza wrote
I've spent today re-reading this entire thread. I came across a paragraph that I missed before. It is so succinct, concise and clear and precisely what I needed to understand the Idealism/Realism divide. I wish that you had posted this at the very beginning of this thread, Hereandnow, it would have made my work easier. (I started from a very low base, obviously):
Hereandnow wrote: ↑December 18th, 2023, 3:49 pm
To the question: "does anything exist independently of our consciousness?" the antirealist answers: "no, nothing else exists" or "we can never know anything else exists". Another version is: "they do exist, but we can never know exactly how they are, because how they appear to us is caused by ourselves and not by the things in themselves".
In trying to understand where Continental philosophers are coming from, I think, at a minimum, it is essential to take on board one of the above versions. I’m probably wrong and, although I am not in total agreement with it, I’d like to think that the last version would best serve as a basis for a beginner starting to read Continental philosophy. It at least acknowledges the existence of things exterior to our mentation whilst at the same time capturing the fundamental idea that what is perceived will depend on a whole lot of stuff that is already in our heads. If I’d read an introduction to Continental philosophy I might, if I’d been lucky, have come across a similar paragraph. Before I stated reading this thread, I was completely clueless about idealism. But it's clear to me now that one must grasp Idealism to understand Husserl’s Transcendental Idealism.

Quite right. You have to understand Kant's idealism, first. But this quote is the Count's, and he brings in analytic assumptions about this "divide" between idealism and realism that create problems. After all, what is "real" and where do we find evidence for filling this concept with meaning?

You know where this goes: we find it in the only place that is ever given to us, which is phenomena. Realists in the philosophical sense can only make sense if they can posit an alternative to phenomena, and this would require something in the world that is not phenomenological, which is nonsense. To SPEAK of something entirely OFF the logical grid?? This is certainly NOT to say the world is not real or is an illusion or is "only" idea. This point is critical: One profound contribution Heidegger made to this discussion is the indeterminative nature of all knowledge claims. The only thing that is truly foundational is interpretation itself, and this has NO determinative grounding itself. Why is this so important? It is not saying things are always on the verge of a new discovery, which simply presupposes a prior discovery that has a standing. It is saying that indeterminacy is what a thing IS because language itself is not something that can determine anything absolutely; language is in its essence taking something AS a language event.

It is simply to say everything stays the same, except the foundational analysis requires a departure from "common" sense. You will never find a realist, in this sense, able to argue her point at this level. What you find is a regression to the terminology that is found familiar and safe and at root, the world is NOT familiar and safe, and I don't simply mean in the preservation of dictionary meanings. It is in the ethical inderterminacy that we are terrified out of our wits, as we should be, but we are not because common sense doesn't allow. Penetrating analysis into our religious situation takes this language/logic superstructure (that Derrida plays so much with) that reveals the play of meanings, and applies it to the ethical dimension of our existence, and as we know this is most clear in the extreme examples of the horrors and miseries we are "thrown into" (geworfenheit).

Hereandnow wrote: ↑December 22nd, 2023, 12:34 am

Lagayscienza wrote
I've spent today re-reading this entire thread. I came across a paragraph that I missed before. It is so succinct, concise and clear and precisely what I needed to understand the Idealism/Realism divide. I wish that you had posted this at the very beginning of this thread, Hereandnow, it would have made my work easier. (I started from a very low base, obviously):
Hereandnow wrote: ↑December 18th, 2023, 3:49 pm
To the question: "does anything exist independently of our consciousness?" the antirealist answers: "no, nothing else exists" or "we can never know anything else exists". Another version is: "they do exist, but we can never know exactly how they are, because how they appear to us is caused by ourselves and not by the things in themselves".
In trying to understand where Continental philosophers are coming from, I think, at a minimum, it is essential to take on board one of the above versions. I’m probably wrong and, although I am not in total agreement with it, I’d like to think that the last version would best serve as a basis for a beginner starting to read Continental philosophy. It at least acknowledges the existence of things exterior to our mentation whilst at the same time capturing the fundamental idea that what is perceived will depend on a whole lot of stuff that is already in our heads. If I’d read an introduction to Continental philosophy I might, if I’d been lucky, have come across a similar paragraph. Before I stated reading this thread, I was completely clueless about idealism. But it's clear to me now that one must grasp Idealism to understand Husserl’s Transcendental Idealism.

Quite right. You have to understand Kant's idealism, first. But this quote is the Count's, and he brings in analytic assumptions about this "divide" between idealism and realism that create problems. After all, what is "real" and where do we find evidence for filling this concept with meaning?

You know where this goes: we find it in the only place that is ever given to us, which is phenomena. Realists in the philosophical sense can only make sense if they can posit an alternative to phenomena, and this would require something in the world that is not phenomenological, which is nonsense. To SPEAK of something entirely OFF the logical grid?? This is certainly NOT to say the world is not real or is an illusion or is "only" idea. This point is critical: One profound contribution Heidegger made to this discussion is the indeterminative nature of all knowledge claims. The only thing that is truly foundational is interpretation itself, and this has NO determinative grounding itself. Why is this so important? It is not saying things are always on the verge of a new discovery, which simply presupposes a prior discovery that has a standing. It is saying that indeterminacy is what a thing IS because language itself is not something that can determine anything absolutely; language is in its essence taking something AS a language event.

It is simply to say everything stays the same, except the foundational analysis requires a departure from "common" sense. You will never find a realist, in this sense, able to argue her point at this level. What you find is a regression to the terminology that is found familiar and safe and at root, the world is NOT familiar and safe, and I don't simply mean in the preservation of dictionary meanings. It is in the ethical inderterminacy that we are terrified out of our wits, as we should be, but we are not because common sense doesn't allow. Penetrating analysis into our religious situation takes this language/logic superstructure (that Derrida plays so much with) that reveals the play of meanings, and applies it to the ethical dimension of our existence, and as we know this is most clear in the extreme examples of the horrors and miseries we are "thrown into" (geworfenheit).

Well said! One of your clearest and most succinct expositions heretofore, Hereandnow. Or maybe your previous posts were clear and that it's just now that I'm finally starting to "get it". I think I was catching glimpses of what you were getting at before but the problem was that I didn't really understand idealism, much less Kant's idealism. And so I had no foundation on which to build an understanding of phenomenology. (A note here to teachers about making sure kids have the basics before moving on to higher stuff)

Kant still leaves us a real world. Everything doesn't disappear in a puff of idealistic vapor. I can see now how we can be cognisant of the world of phenomena underlying everything, including science, without losing science. Once we get that, other things, such as how phenomenology might inform science, can start to fall into place. But you can't learn calculus without a grounding in simple algebra. (Note to self: If you don't understand something, speak up before the teacher moves on to harder stuff)

I feel that I can now start to build on my Anglo-American Analytical understanding of morality. I don't think that my previous understanding was necessarily wrong. It was just limited, and constrained by not recognising the "value" underlying morality. You can't do morality with just syllogisms. And you can't do metaethics with only logic.

PS Apologies again (this time to both you and Count Lucanor) for the misattribution. But it was a pithy explanation of basic idealism.

Dr Jonathan Osterman PhD wrote
n my humble opinion, and I ask Hereandnow to correct me,
if I am wrong, what we conceptualize as physical or mathematical "quantities",
which we can count, like money, have a purely symbolic nature,
meaning that a "quantity" is merely a particular kind of quality,
because numbers are symbols that we attribute a specific meaning to.

Holiday affairs are nearly now aside and I can look at this and I also wanted to say something about Buddhism and Hinduism from a strictly phenomenological pov, that is, descriptively, relying on no established thinking.

I have been trying to understand value as a philosopshical concept for a long time, ever sine I read in Moore's Principia Ethica the now infamous statement that value was a non natural property. This has to do with the Good, and keep in mind that Wittgenstein himself was, ironically, a deeply spiritual person who thought divinity was the good, which is from Culture and Value which was written about the same time as the Tractatus in which he says a lot of things that make analytical philosophers squirm, W, after all, being the god of positivist thinking which had little patience for this kind of talk. Russell called him a mystic and W said goodbye. The Tractatus can go both ways, like Kant: you can see it as a rigorous affirmation of what can and cannot be spoken, and you can also see it as an affirmation that what is nonsense to speak of is not nonsense existentially. W is not like Rorty and his ilk who think there is nothing beyond what the proposition can say, no "non propositional knowledge" and the reason he was so adamant about language stepping in to make a claim about "the world" and value is not because logic is so firm, though certainly this, but because when we face such issues they are too important to be trivialized by metaphysics, and it is here I think Eastern methods of liberation and enlightenment are so important. Here I say, while the world cannot be spoken, this is not a statement that precludes thought about liberation and enlightenment, nor even about the world; it is rather to say that the world (W's world, not Heidegger's being-in-the-world. Very different ideas) is not possessed by the language that would claim it, but note: it is IN language that this is affirmed, and I have thereby violated W's prohibition, as he did, famously, in the Tractatus itself. The point is, when we try to construct metaphysical ideas, the effort fails at the outset UNLESS it is a metaphysics of language itself, that is, a turning inward or back upon language to observe the presuppositions of having a language as a medium of apprehending things in the world, and here I do draw on Heidegger: when I behold anything, whether it is a fence post or computer data on neuronal synaptic behavior, I behold it AS a manifestation of language PRIOR to any knowledge claims. It is language in which we have our "narrative" about things, and we ARE a living narrative. The Real is given to us IN the narrative, the construction of a symbolic system that, as Heidegger put it, takes up the world AS, and, as Derrida later advances this idea, our ideas do not stand for the world, but "stand in" for the world.

The foundational issues philosophy is supposed to be dealing with are language issues. This has support in places ignored or dismissed by analytic philosophers as they resent to Kantian legacy of taking metaphysics seriously, which is what happens when phenomenological studies in language structures replaces science's bedrock physics. 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 by this question, frankly, for its simplicity is stunning, unlike Kant, yet it carries the one half of the gravitas of the entire philosophical enterprise. The other half has to do with value, the qualitative matter. When I talk about value, I refer to the dimension of our existence that is found in our value engagements: the affectivity of our existence, and for every affect there is an existential-value counterpart: I fear the tiger's aggression, but more to the point, the pain of being bitten, and it is the latter, not the former, that must take center stage in philosophical inquiry. Not that the fear is incidental, but fear is an embedded concept: I know this forest, have had friends attacked by lions, resort to religious rituals to keep me safe, and so on, and so when I fear something, it is always already contextualized implicitly, and therefore the pure phenomenology of fear is muddled. Raw pain! now THERE is a reality. It far exceeds any philosophical thesis about the real, or the qualia of being appeared to redly, I mean, when we talk about the real, WHAT is it we are talking about? res extensa or res cogitans??!! These suspicious, over-regarded terms are simple abstractions, that is, concepts of "states of affairs" as W put it or Heidegger's "presence at hand" that are a kind of paused-waiting in the ready for some "environment of equipmental possibility" to seize upon it. The term "mere fact" applies, as in it being a mere fact that the moon light is reflected sunlight, a contingent matter whose meaning is found on the grid of other such "dictionary meanings" about the sun, the moon, the principles of light reflection and absorption, and so on. It is difficult to identify pain as such in general experience because of this very embeddedness, and anglo american philosophers, bound to clarity over content, tend to stick with things that are already language anchored in other contexts of clarity (Dennett leaps to mind; but they are all like this) and are dismissive of such an "irreducible" presence as a stabbing pain. After all, what can one "say" about this?; and yet herein lies the the very essence of what makes life a living affair. The philosopher should be blown over by this "impossible" dimension of our "dasein" and philosophers like Michel Henry really do stand in amazement. They follow Husserl's essential phenomenological "method" of the phenomenological reduction down to the very core of our existence, the pure givenness of the world. This givennes is a revelation, and NOT immediately recognized in our day to day affairs. It takes a method to liberate one from the dominant narrative of a society. This narrative is what Heidegger called das man, Kierkegaard called inherited sin, Husserl called the naturalistic attitude and what Buddhists call attachment. 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 a illusion.

Here is an interesting question: here am I and there is my cat, and I know the cat is there. It is literally impossible (a matter of entailment) that I know this cat is there if the only operative epistemic principle in play is causality, for there is nothing about causality that is epistemic (something I do grow tired of saying, but things like this have to be repeated to be even noticed). By causality's standard of explaining relations, my knowledge of the cat being a cat is a miracle. See Wittgenstein's Lecture on Ethics: a man's head suddenly turns into a lion's head and everyone is shocked, that is, until science proceeds to explain this, and this is how justification settles belief. What if science were completely baffled? And worse, there was no paradigmatic novelty to replace the old established paradigms as, say, Einstein brought about. Rather, one had to reach entirely outside of paradigmatic possibility altogether in order to explain this. This is where knowledge about the world, or anything, stands, and why W just refused to talk about it, for causality is a logical concept, and there is no "discussion" here. But then, take the matter entirely away from the W and from the prohibited discussion, and all eyes are on my cat. On the one had, I know there is a cat there, yet on the other, the terms of my knowing can never affirm this, and thus, the intentionality that holds that cat in place, so to speak, has been completely undermined, for the temptation of idealism encounters the cat, over there, not me, a transcendental object that is entirely Other than the nexus of determination that would bring it into the fold of knowledge. I argue/affirm that IF one attends to this seriously for, heh, heh, long enough, the intuitive grip the knowledge claim has on perception begins to slip, and one no longer sees the cat AS a cat at all. The presence of what I generally call my cat is "liberated" from the cat supposition! and the encounter released from mundanity, and something very, very different confronts me.

Have you ever observed the sun sitting in the horizon, a little off center so as not to stare yourself into blindness, and "realized" that the sun is something else altogether? And you realize as if for the first time that the sun is actually there, a presence without name, prior to name, and this carries a profundity of meaning that is makes clear why religion ruled the minds of ancient thinkers, and why someone might conceive of the sun as a God. This can be carried further, but I'll stop here. I "practice" the method of jnana yoga, a sometimes apophatic, sometimes building and extending, sometimes yielding--in the spirit of Heidegger's gelassenheit, approach that tries to realize, as Kierkegaard put it, the reality of my existence and the rabbit hole is astonishingly deep yet, there, in the midst of things.

Your thoughts?

Lagayscienza wrote

I feel that I can now start to build on my Anglo-American Analytical understanding of morality. I don't think that my previous understanding was necessarily wrong. It was just limited, and constrained by not recognising the "value" underlying morality. You can't do morality with just syllogisms. And you can't do metaethics with only logic.

I guess that is pretty much the way I think about it as well. I just dive deep into the existential indeterminacy of the lived experience. It beckons, if you will. Reading Ricoeur's Time and Narrative now. I am referred back to Augustine's Confessions, then to Kierkegaard, then to Heidegger, but there is unfolding in all of this an intimation of the nature of time, a liberation FROM the narratives that possess our perceptual encounters.

No greater way to spend one time, I say. Let me know how your thinking goes from time to time. I have a huge library, as you know, and you are welcome to it, all 22 gbs.

Hereandnow wrote: ↑December 28th, 2023, 1:36 pm
Dr Jonathan Osterman PhD wrote:

In my humble opinion, and I ask Here-And-Now to correct me, if I am wrong, what we conceptualize as physical or mathematical "quantities", which we can count, like money, have a purely symbolic nature, meaning that a "quantity" is merely a particular kind of quality, because numbers are symbols that we attribute a specific meaning to.

Holiday affairs are nearly now aside and I can look at this and I also wanted to say something about Buddhism and Hinduism from a strictly phenomenological pov, that is, descriptively, relying on no established thinking.

I have been trying to understand value as a philosopshical concept for a long time, ever sine I read in Moore's Principia Ethica the now infamous statement that value was a non natural property. This has to do with the Good, and keep in mind that Wittgenstein himself was, ironically, a deeply spiritual person who thought divinity was the good, which is from Culture and Value which was written about the same time as the Tractatus in which he says a lot of things that make analytical philosophers squirm, W, after all, being the god of positivist thinking which had little patience for this kind of talk. Russell called him a mystic and W said goodbye. The Tractatus can go both ways, like Kant: you can see it as a rigorous affirmation of what can and cannot be spoken, and you can also see it as an affirmation that what is nonsense to speak of is not nonsense existentially. W is not like Rorty and his ilk who think there is nothing beyond what the proposition can say, no "non propositional knowledge" and the reason he was so adamant about language stepping in to make a claim about "the world" and value is not because logic is so firm, though certainly this, but because when we face such issues they are too important to be trivialized by metaphysics, and it is here I think Eastern methods of liberation and enlightenment are so important. Here I say, while the world cannot be spoken, this is not a statement that precludes thought about liberation and enlightenment, nor even about the world; it is rather to say that the world (W's world, not Heidegger's being-in-the-world. Very different ideas) is not possessed by the language that would claim it, but note: it is IN language that this is affirmed, and I have thereby violated W's prohibition, as he did, famously, in the Tractatus itself. The point is, when we try to construct metaphysical ideas, the effort fails at the outset UNLESS it is a metaphysics of language itself, that is, a turning inward or back upon language to observe the presuppositions of having a language as a medium of apprehending things in the world, and here I do draw on Heidegger: when I behold anything, whether it is a fence post or computer data on neuronal synaptic behavior, I behold it AS a manifestation of language PRIOR to any knowledge claims. It is language in which we have our "narrative" about things, and we ARE a living narrative. The Real is given to us IN the narrative, the construction of a symbolic system that, as Heidegger put it, takes up the world AS, and, as Derrida later advances this idea, our ideas do not stand for the world, but "stand in" for the world.

The foundational issues philosophy is supposed to be dealing with are language issues. This has support in places ignored or dismissed by analytic philosophers as they resent to Kantian legacy of taking metaphysics seriously, which is what happens when phenomenological studies in language structures replaces science's bedrock physics. 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 by this question, frankly, for its simplicity is stunning, unlike Kant, yet it carries the one half of the gravitas of the entire philosophical enterprise. The other half has to do with value, the qualitative matter. When I talk about value, I refer to the dimension of our existence that is found in our value engagements: the affectivity of our existence, and for every affect there is an existential-value counterpart: I fear the tiger's aggression, but more to the point, the pain of being bitten, and it is the latter, not the former, that must take center stage in philosophical inquiry. Not that the fear is incidental, but fear is an embedded concept: I know this forest, have had friends attacked by lions, resort to religious rituals to keep me safe, and so on, and so when I fear something, it is always already contextualized implicitly, and therefore the pure phenomenology of fear is muddled. Raw pain! now THERE is a reality. It far exceeds any philosophical thesis about the real, or the qualia of being appeared to redly, I mean, when we talk about the real, WHAT is it we are talking about? res extensa or res cogitans??!! These suspicious, over-regarded terms are simple abstractions, that is, concepts of "states of affairs" as W put it or Heidegger's "presence at hand" that are a kind of paused-waiting in the ready for some "environment of equipmental possibility" to seize upon it. The term "mere fact" applies, as in it being a mere fact that the moon light is reflected sunlight, a contingent matter whose meaning is found on the grid of other such "dictionary meanings" about the sun, the moon, the principles of light reflection and absorption, and so on. It is difficult to identify pain as such in general experience because of this very embeddedness, and anglo american philosophers, bound to clarity over content, tend to stick with things that are already language anchored in other contexts of clarity (Dennett leaps to mind; but they are all like this) and are dismissive of such an "irreducible" presence as a stabbing pain. After all, what can one "say" about this?; and yet herein lies the the very essence of what makes life a living affair. The philosopher should be blown over by this "impossible" dimension of our "dasein" and philosophers like Michel Henry really do stand in amazement. They follow Husserl's essential phenomenological "method" of the phenomenological reduction down to the very core of our existence, the pure givenness of the world. This givennes is a revelation, and NOT immediately recognized in our day to day affairs. It takes a method to liberate one from the dominant narrative of a society. This narrative is what Heidegger called das man, Kierkegaard called inherited sin, Husserl called the naturalistic attitude and what Buddhists call attachment. 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 a illusion.

Here is an interesting question: here am I and there is my cat, and I know the cat is there. It is literally impossible (a matter of entailment) that I know this cat is there if the only operative epistemic principle in play is causality, for there is nothing about causality that is epistemic (something I do grow tired of saying, but things like this have to be repeated to be even noticed). By causality's standard of explaining relations, my knowledge of the cat being a cat is a miracle. See Wittgenstein's Lecture on Ethics: a man's head suddenly turns into a lion's head and everyone is shocked, that is, until science proceeds to explain this, and this is how justification settles belief. What if science were completely baffled? And worse, there was no paradigmatic novelty to replace the old established paradigms as, say, Einstein brought about. Rather, one had to reach entirely outside of paradigmatic possibility altogether in order to explain this. This is where knowledge about the world, or anything, stands, and why W just refused to talk about it, for causality is a logical concept, and there is no "discussion" here. But then, take the matter entirely away from the W and from the prohibited discussion, and all eyes are on my cat. On the one hand, I know there is a cat there, yet on the other, the terms of my knowing can never affirm this, and thus, the intentionality that holds that cat in place, so to speak, has been completely undermined, for the temptation of idealism encounters the cat, over there, not me, a transcendental object that is entirely Other than the nexus of determination that would bring it into the fold of knowledge. I argue/affirm that IF one attends to this seriously for, heh, heh, long enough, the intuitive grip the knowledge claim has on perception begins to slip, and one no longer sees the cat AS a cat at all. The presence of what I generally call my cat is "liberated" from the cat supposition! and the encounter released from mundanity, and something very, very different confronts me.

Have you ever observed the sun sitting in the horizon, a little off center so as not to stare yourself into blindness, and "realized" that the sun is something else altogether? And you realize as if for the first time that the sun is actually there, a presence without name, prior to name, and this carries a profundity of meaning that is makes clear why religion ruled the minds of ancient thinkers, and why someone might conceive of the sun as a God. This can be carried further, but I'll stop here. I "practice" the method of jnana yoga, a sometimes apophatic, sometimes building and extending, sometimes yielding--in the spirit of Heidegger's gelassenheit, approach that tries to realize, as Kierkegaard put it, the reality of my existence and the rabbit hole is astonishingly deep yet, there, in the midst of things.


Your thoughts?

My thoughts?

Well, it was a pleasure for me to slowly and carefully read your above beautifully and smoothly weaved, and at places colourfully sparkling narrative, which has a unique valuable style. You made philosophy almost into poetry.

You are a quality story-teller, bro!

And then, at the end of it, I was left speechless...


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?

Hereandnow wrote: ↑December 28th, 2023, 1:58 pm

Lagayscienza wrote

I feel that I can now start to build on my Anglo-American Analytical understanding of morality. I don't think that my previous understanding was necessarily wrong. It was just limited, and constrained by not recognising the "value" underlying morality. You can't do morality with just syllogisms. And you can't do metaethics with only logic.

I guess that is pretty much the way I think about it as well. I just dive deep into the existential indeterminacy of the lived experience. It beckons, if you will. Reading Ricoeur's Time and Narrative now. I am referred back to Augustine's Confessions, then to Kierkegaard, then to Heidegger, but there is unfolding in all of this an intimation of the nature of time, a liberation FROM the narratives that possess our perceptual encounters.

No greater way to spend one time, I say. Let me know how your thinking goes from time to time. I have a huge library, as you know, and you are welcome to it, all 22 gbs.

Thanks, Hereandnow. Getting back into philosophy has been both a joy and a burden. So much to read! I've been like a humming bird, flitting from flower to flower, getting a quick taste here, then moving onto the next flower over there, without really getting the full flavor of any of them. I need to be more disciplined. So, I'm going to finish Husserl's Ideas1 and the Mediations, before moving on.

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

Hereandnow wrote: ↑December 28th, 2023, 1:36 pm
Have you ever observed the sun sitting in the horizon, a little off center so as not to stare yourself into blindness, and "realized" that the sun is something else altogether? And you realize as if for the first time that the sun is actually there, a presence without name, prior to name, and this carries a profundity of meaning that is makes clear why religion ruled the minds of ancient thinkers, and why someone might conceive of the sun as a God. This can be carried further, but I'll stop here. I "practice" the method of jnana yoga, a sometimes apophatic, sometimes building and extending, sometimes yielding--in the spirit of Heidegger's gelassenheit, approach that tries to realize, as Kierkegaard put it, the reality of my existence and the rabbit hole is astonishingly deep yet, there, in the midst of things.

Your thoughts?

The setting sun is a really good example, Hereandnow. If we can put away (bracket) all we "know" from science, history, religion and art about the sun and just experience the sunset innocently, as a pure phenomenon, it dawns on us that science, whilst necessary, and good at what it does, is not the whole story. I read elsewhere of the idea of remembering what it was like when we were very young children and knew almost nothing. All we had was the wonder at pure phenomena presenting to consciousness. I think that is similar to what you say about experiencing the setting sun phenomenologically.

Further to the above, it can be astounding when, for the first time as an adult, one who has been schooled only in the Western, materialist, analytic tradition, is reawakened to phenomenological truth. I've been reading a lot in phenomenology lately. It has not been easy. Anyway, after reading what Hereandnow said above about the sunset, 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.

I'm still learning about phenomenology, but I'm trying to do this regularly - to get into a frame of mind where I can see everything, including the sun, anew. 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

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.

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.