Good food for thought, Scott. Let me ask a supplemental question about the river. It is deep. It presumably contains unseen, unsuspected artefacts underneath the surface. Or does it? Are these unseen objects amorphous thoughts, or are they clearly defined items of thought? Do "alters" have to sense them before they become specific, or does the Mind-at-large perceive them as such? Thanks.
I wrote: I see nothing wrong with inference either, just that it's not enough. What you call Divine Thinking can certainly be inferred, but ultimately it is not translatable into the inherent limitations of our language which is a function of the inherent limitations of our individuated and conditioned thinking. We could say that Divine Thinking translates itself into Divine Language, which would be the Cosmos itself. What we are left with is translating that Divine Language into these words, myths, metaphors, metaphysics, poetry, etc, which however close it may get, can never fully speak it. As such, the Tao is always speaking ~ really, we need only listen. But being storytelling creatures, I suppose we must do what we're compelled to do.
Very nice, Scott! I think you just settled about 5-10 debates happening on different threads with this one post.
This should remind all idealists to take idealism seriously and on a consistent basis. I often find myself getting confused about concepts being proposed or asked about because I simply forget to frame the question or issue from a true idealist perspective.
Excellent post, Scott. We're on the same page. Heuristically practicing ontology is incohering alternatives to identity cosmopsychism. Perhaps some day a superintelligent AI can confirm or deny coherent alternatives, supposing it decides consensus there is preferable socially to perpetual mysterianism.
one then has to provide a scenario or two that would explain why it seems to us that there is non-conscious activity, like water flowing down a riverDon't you jump over that problem a little too quickly?
If your consciousness is telling you that there are things that seem to be unconscious, then your consciousness is either right or wrong. If it is right, then idealism is wrong. If it is wrong, then your consciousness is wrong so how could you trust it to be right about what it seems itself to be.
I also like what you say about map and territory. In response, I'd like to stress the importance of the relation indefinite-definite. "Higher detail" territory implies definite character approached through lower resolution maps (as in holography), but becoming of new territories involves moving from definite into the indefinite.
Mathematics at the idealist level of ontology emerges as indefinite intuitions, which can be attempted to give definite linguistic constructions - maps.
My point: idealist territory can be also highly indefinite (cf. potential/dynamis) as well as highly detailed.
Invention and discovery are not exclusive, they are both aspects of the (current duration of) dynamic holography self-comprehension of mathematical cognition. Coming from opposite directions, both Brouwer and Badiou - the philosophers of math worth taking seriously on this issue - have very similar phenomenology of evolution of mathematical cognition:
https://cosmosandhistory.org/index.php/journal/article/viewFile/30/59
Scott, why not make an essay of this?
I'm not sure why you think a materialist wouldn't have scenarios too. We can make analogies, as does BK, about television sets containing representations of external reality but also being totally material.
If the world is arranged somewhat fractally in some fashion, we would expect small parts of it (minds) to organize similarly to larger parts.
At many levels, the brain and sensory organs operate as wave forms that form analogues to the wave forms of external reality.
But the real issue is that scenarios by themselves, whether materialistic or idealistic, don't answer the real issue. They just provide a feeling there might be some way of bridging the gaps for the hard problems of materialism and idealism without providing a way to cross.
Why and how does mind take on an extrinsic form as what appears to be matter? I've only seen farfetched scenarios.
We use evolutionary games to show that natural selection does not favor veridical perceptions. This does not entail that all cognitive faculties are not reliable. Each faculty must be examined on its own to determine how it might be shaped by natural selection.
Perhaps, for instance, selection pressures favor accurate math; one who accurately predicts that the payoff for eating an apple today when hungry, combined with the payoff for eating an apple yesterday when equally hungry, is roughly twice the payoff obtained on either day, might have a selective advantage over his math challenged neighbor. Perhaps selection favors accurate logic; one who combines estimates of payoff in accord with probabilistic logic might avoid having nature and competitors make fitness Dutch books against him.Footnote6 This is not to predict that natural selection should make us all math whizzes for whom statistical inference is quick and intuitive. To the contrary, there is ample evidence that we have systematic weaknesses and rely on fallible heuristics and biases (Kahneman 2011). Whereas in perception the selection pressures are almost uniformly away from veridicality, perhaps in math and logic the pressures are not so univocal, and partial accuracy is allowed.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/s13423-015-0890-8#Sec14
But this isn't a question of redeeming anything. MUI is ontologically agnostic per Hoffman himself.
How do non-idealists define "physical" when they say consciousness, whether fundamental or not, is physical? Consciousness is subject to physical causation? Bernardo seems to be the only person providing a crisp physical/nonphysical distinction i.e. quantities vs qualities. Is BK defining to his conclusion?
On Monday, December 28, 2020 at 4:56:27 AM UTC-10 Brad Walker wrote:Excellent post, Scott. We're on the same page. Heuristically practicing ontology is incohering alternatives to identity cosmopsychism. Perhaps some day a superintelligent AI can confirm or deny coherent alternatives, supposing it decides consensus there is preferable socially to perpetual mysterianism.Could you unpack what you mean by "incohering alternatives to identity cosmopyschism"?
Identity cosmopsychism is opposed to non-identity constitutive cosmopsychism, which is one cosmic mind (somehow!) subdivided into several subjects.