Lengthy response to Bernardo

[J.F. Martel]

Hello Bernardo & co.,

I've decided to post my latest contribution to our discussion here instead of on the BK website. It just seemed too long and essay-like for the already lengthy comments thread. I also thought posting it here if here might encourage other members of the forum to share their thoughts.

For the unaware, the video and the preceding discussion here.


***


Hi Bernardo,

In what follows I will respond to some of your latest comments while providing a sketch of my own stance with regard to all this stuff. Clarity and thoroughness require that I get into it at some length, for which I apologize.

To be clear, my objection to your idealism hinges on your reification of subjectivity as the source of being. A detail, perhaps, but for me the wild expanses of the imaginal begin where self-existing being can be met on its own inexplicable terms, as I explain below. You and I both are both admirers of C.G. Jung, but whereas you feel the need to correct some of his key terms, I think he had good reasons to speak of the “UNconscious” and the “OBJECTIVE psyche.” Nature may be minded in ways that have nothing to do with subjectivity, personal or otherwise. 

In your responses, you sometimes try to argue that your philosophy transcends the logic of the subject. For instance:

“Under my formulation of idealism, the object IS the subject. There's no distinction, just as Bergson highlights. There's nothing to a vibrating guitar string but the guitar string itself. I use the word "subject" for the essence of mind because language forces me to use some word. But idealism destroys the distinction between subject and object, just as Bergson suggests.”

I don’t buy this. In the intro to our video, you state clearly that “subjective experience is required” under idealism. In WMIB, you write that “the one universal subject exists only insofar as the experiences it has,” implying that even mind-at-large can only be said to exist when it is being a SUBJECT via dissociation. Nor does the fact that you posit only ONE subject abolish the logic of subjectivity. On the contrary, it absolutizes it. Indeed, one could argue that your preference for one subject over Berkeley’s many only makes you an even more radical subjective idealist than he was.


Clarification on Kant and Bergson

You wrote: “The key element of Kant's argument was his agnosticism of the underlying nature of reality, or the noumenal. (…) As such, Bergson seems to go way beyond Kant insofar as he says that reality itself -- the noumenal -- has the qualities of experience."

Kant and Bergson are in agreement to the extent that neither believes reality requires a perceiving subject of any sort. Kant’s argument holds that (1) we can know nothing about the underlying nature of reality except that (2) the noumenon exists in and of itself, independently of mind. Kant does not subscribe to Berkeley’s “esse est percipi,” which equates being with perception.

Bergson argues that what we call perception is the act of apprehending the real qualities of matter. His aim is to develop an ontological model that (among other things) dispenses precisely with what you claim is necessary: a transcendent subject. In his philosophy, matter is real and includes memory, and this is what makes it possible for material entities to become conscious subjects. The qualities we experience are not “qualities of experience” (created by or through experience); they fully belong to the matter that exhibits them.


Esse est percipi

You wrote: "What you describe as the foundation of my philosophy [esse est percipi; "to be is to be perceived"] isn't a foundation (i.e. it isn't an axiom or basic postulate), but an implication of explaining reality in the most parsimonious way possible. You're mixing up implications with postulates."

If I am reading you correctly, you are saying that the notion of “being” is meaningless if conceived apart from conscious perception, because conscious perception is all that necessarily is. I disagree with this. The idea of “being” distinct from perception is immanent to the act of perceiving itself. For no sooner have I opened my eyes than I encounter what you refer to as “facts of reality.” This puts the notion (if not the fact) of non-subjective being at the heart of experience, since “facts of reality” refer precisely to things that appear to exist independently of whether I perceive them or not. Otherwise, no one would ever have made the distinction between themselves and the world.

Your response to this so far has been that you do not deny the reality of a world outside personal perception but only outside “mind itself.” You justify this by saying that you are extrapolating a known “category” – mind – beyond its apparent limits. This is problematic if, as stated above, experience is innately dyadic. Since experience immediately implies “facts of reality,” there are two – and not one – “known categories”: me and not-me, (my) mind and not-(my)-mind. “Mind itself,” that is, mind without experience, is simply not given at the level of direct experience. Try to imagine how you would experience the world without language and it’s pretty hard to miss this.

Let me put it differently for the sake of clarity. In order to make sense, the statement “esse est percipi” (EEP) requires a transcendent form of perception (perception as ground of being). This transcendent form of perception, this “view from nowhere,” is not given in experience, which solely involves localized perception in space and time (“views from here”). Obtaining the idea of a “view from nowhere” when only “views from here” are available requires an act of inference. Therefore, when you claim to extrapolate mind beyond its “face-value limits” in order to then infer mind-at-large, you are begging the question. Mind-at-large – mind as substance beyond experience – must already have been inferred before the extrapolation to take place. The inference of mind-at-large presupposes mind-at-large.

I am not arguing that the world is not mental in nature. My point is simply that EEP is a postulate, which you take as axiomatic in building your philosophy. It cannot be a direct implication of experience because the transcendent mind it requires lies beyond all possible experience. The only experiencer implied by experience is my own localized self, which I can only experience as an element of the world in which it exists. In order to obtain a transcendent mind, you must make an ontological leap from immanence to transcendence. The leap requires the invention of a new category (transcendent mind as substance) that is not immediately given in experience. This was the argument of my very first criticism of your argument, and it remains unaddressed by you.

The hypothetical nature of EEP is all the more obvious when we see that doctrine stopped short of its most radical application, namely solipsism. Your philosophy steers EEP away solipsism because, as you say, solipsism “fails to suitably explain many facts of reality.” Now, given EEP on the one hand, and the “facts of reality” on the other, I have to make a choice. Either: 

(a) things simply don’t need to be perceived in order to exist (i.e., EEP is false), or
(b) EEP is true, and an unperceived perceiver is responsible for dreaming up the facts of reality.

You posit (b) so as to maintain EEP despite the existence of a reality that is independent of personal perception, which happens to be the only kind of perception you know. This seems excessive, to put it mildly, when compared to dropping EEP altogether and inferring that being simply isn’t reducible to perception, i.e., that the things we perceive exist independently of our own – or anyone else’s – perception. Once you drop EEP, the need to infer an unperceived perceiver to make sense of reality disappears. Mind can be conceived, not as a substance or container for perceptions, but rather as a particular type of relation between entities in a universe whose existence does not logically require any form of subjective experience whatsoever.


Luminous matter: an alternative "model"

You wrote: "How do you explain the fact that different human beings share the same phenomenal world? For as long as you fail to address this without contradicting your other stance – namely, that no inferences beyond personal experience are necessary – you will be contradicting yourself. Can't you see it?"

When I said that without EEP, “you don’t need to infer anything,” I was writing specifically in the context of trying to infer the “substance” of reality, its “underlying nature.” It is possible to conceive of a shared phenomenal world without positing such a substance. It is also preferable to do so, I believe, for the following reason. Under materialism and idealism, the most accurate way of describing, say, the experience of seeing a newborn baby, is not to say, “I am gazing at my newborn baby.” Under materialism, the most correct statement would be something like, “I am seeing a bunch of particles that I falsely believe to a newborn baby (with “I” being an epiphenomenon of brain chemistry).” Under idealism, the accurate statement might be, “I am seeing a whirlpool in mind-at-large that I falsely believe to be a newborn baby (with “I” being a dissociated alter of the same mind-at-large).” In both cases, the inference of a transcendent substance (an inevitable outcome of the need to find the “truth” behind the “illusion” of the world) comes between my experience and the object of my experience. Reality is mediated by a transcendent object, whether pure matter (as materialists define it) or pure mind.

It is possible to develop a metaphysics that allows a newborn to REALLY be a newborn while at the same time not constraining it to be NOTHING BUT a newborn? Or put differently, is it possible to develop a metaphysics that allows access to reality without reducing reality to some anthropomorphic, ideological cartoon? I think it is.

The goal of philosophy, as I conceive it, is to do just that: to enable ways of seeing that do not posit a transcendent substance. This may seem strange, because it is only in philosophy that we hear talk of transcendent substances. But if you think about it, all ideologies are basically metaphysical theories positing an underlying “truth.” Much of what passes as common wisdom – the whole realm of “opinion” – is predicated upon concealed transcendent doctrines. The philosopher’s job is to undo these doctrines without building new ones -- a difficult task, which according to Gilles Deleuze was achieved only twice in the history of philosophy: once with Spinoza, and once with Bergson, but only in the first chapter of Matter and Memory (I would add Heraclitus!).

***

You asked me for an alternative to your form of idealism. Here is one:

At the intuitive, non-conceptual level that we share with all forms of life, we are directly cognizant of the real world. We are enmeshed in it. We are elements of it. Yet at the same time, we know nothing about its nature. It remains, ultimately, an absolute mystery. The intellect constructs models of reality, but these models are forever inadequate because reality is infinite. It is worth noting here that Bergson saw consciousness as a reductive faculty that limits the (limitless) real to the particulars that interest the biological organism. The particulars it apprehends – what you call “qualities of experience” – are fully real, but they are finite details of an infinite tapestry.

The “transpersonal scaffolding” that is necessary for us to experience the same phenomenal world is the material world itself. We all see the same world because the world is really there; it exists as it appears to us. That the specific forms in which matter manifests to us (a “red car,” a “yellow house,” etc.) are largely determined by our sensory apparatus and nervous system does not make them any less real or objective. My mind does not produce the qualities of the object before me; it reflects within me aspects of the object that fully belong to it even though they cannot, by themselves, give me access to the object in its totality. The redness of the car is a real redness out there in the world, but the car itself isn’t reducible to redness or to the other qualities I perceive in it. As Trevor Perri puts it in his essay on Bergson, “the material universe … maintains an independence from consciousness insofar as it always exceeds the perceptions that we have of it. In short, matter is not essentially different from the perceived, but it is also always more.”

On this view, consciousness is not, as in traditional idealism and phenomenology, analogous to a light projecting from the subject towards the objective world, bringing it into visible being. Rather, consciousness is a way in which certain organizations of matter reflect certain aspects of reality, making them appear as subjective perceptions. The light of consciousness, then, comes from matter itself. What we call minds are the results of “rifts” in matter, points at which certain regions of the material universe are actualized as subjects. “Matter” includes a mental dimension, but the mentality of nature is a-subjective. Subjective experience is not a substance but rather an event within a psychophysical universe.

For me, the problem with materialism isn’t its notion of matter and a mind-independent world, but its failure to account for the reality of experience as a phenomenon immanent to matter itself. Theoretically, matter could exist without experience. Yet it so happens that experience exists, and this makes a literal world of difference that materialism cannot account for.

I believe that the world exists in and of itself as one reality, yet the intellect perceives this reality as split into equal parts physical and mental (Spinoza’s “God or Nature,” whereby neither is more true than the other). Synchronicities, great works of art, natural beauty, ecstatic visions and paranormal occurrences are examples of phenomena that connect us with this “Nature beyond nature” that Jung called the Unus Mundus or “one world.” This one reality, we should note, is not the universe as it would appear to an omniscient perceiver, but the world as it appears once the localized point of view has been folded back into it, once point of view has given up all pretense to transcendence. In the case of a resplendent landscape that I behold, there is a moment in which the landscape and the point of view that apprehends it as such constitute a single event, a single “object” that Cézanne referred to as an “iridescent chaos”. The ego is subsumed in this pure objective event. In other words, something precedes the division of subject and object, something that is neither the one nor the other, but a “pure immanence” (Deleuze) from which both emerge. That is why I refer to reality as “the Real,” a non-materialist, non-idealist term referring to that which is, but cannot be known in its totality, even though every experience gives us a direct glimpse of some of its infinite aspects.

I hope that this helps clarify the points on which you and I agree (i.e., mind is essential) and disagree (i.e., mind is innately subjective; reality is necessarily a subjective experience). I also hope it explains why I lean towards panpsychism rather than materialism or idealism. The reason I don’t outright identify as a panpsychist I don’t believe in systematic philosophy. Even the model I’ve just provided looks like a joke when contrasted with the actual complexity, richness and strangeness of the real world. In our Skype conversation, I mentioned that I was an animist. I stand by that, knowing full well that animism is a religious idea, not a philosophical one. And by “religious” I simply mean that animism is a practice, not a theory.


Last things

You wrote: "No, I do NOT have the conviction that the intellect can describe the ultimate nature of reality. In fact, I hold the conviction that it cannot. How can someone who claims to be fluent with my work make such a statement?"

You’re right. That was unfair. I am sometimes misled by the aggressive tone of your more grandiose assertions, which sometimes give this impression ("Truth and only truth, whatever the cost."). You do make it clear in BPB and WMIB that all we can do as humans is build models. How could anyone say otherwise?

***

You wrote: "But I also don't think that the intellect is useless and valueless! That's extreme and rather blindly fundamentalist on the other end of the spectrum."

Few things are more useful than the intellect. But I believe that any philosophy that stands a chance to help us out of the current mess must recognize that the intellect alone is unable to make any real sense of reality or experience.

You say the world needs a new ontology. So do I. But my sense is that the ontology we need will not come from the realm of philosophy but from the religious realm. In other words, what we need isn’t a new theory but a new myth. I don’t mean this in the political sense of an illustrative metaphor devised from theory for the benefit of the ignorant masses; I mean a real myth arising unbidden from the depths of the unconscious (that is, from nature), opening up new possibilities in every sphere, including metaphysical thinking. We can’t consciously produce or deduce such a myth; we can only hope for it. As Heidegger said, “Only a god can save us now.”

[Bernardo]

Hi JF,

Kant's argument was epistemic, not ontological. So your interpretations of his views are quite puzzling to me. But I don't want to argue about Kant here. There's enough scholarship around his work that I feel we can leave it alone.

Perception is only one category of experience. There are others: emotion, abstract thought, imagination. My position is that experience alone -- in all its categories, not only perception -- is sufficient to explain reality. And, as a model, I discuss experience as excitations of a fundamentally unknowable subject called mind-at-large. After all, experience entails a subject by its very definition, since experience only exists insofar as experienced by something or someone. There's nothing to experience but mind-at-large (the one subject), for the same reason that there's nothing to a vibrating guitar string but the guitar string.

You seem to acknowledge the existence of experience but deny that which experiences. This is incoherent. You want to say that redness exists objectively, without a subject who experiences redness, while there is nothing to redness but what is experienced. Experiences entails a subject who experiences; by definition. The only point of discussion is whether the subject is human or human-like, or something entirely else. If redness exists 'objectively' -- i.e. independent of human psyches -- then that implies the existence of a non-human mind where redness can exist in the form of an experience. You can't, on the one hand, deny the subject and, on the other hand, try to find ontological space for the existence of redness. Redness is nothing but an experience; it must be experiencED in order to exist. There cannot be redness without that which experiences red for exactly the same reason that there cannot be love without that which experiences love. Neither you nor Bergson can escape this. In my view, Bergson denied only that human-like psyches were necessary for redness to exist.

We both seem to accept that reality consists in the qualities of experience, just as it seems to. Talking of a transpersonal mind where those qualities can be experienced is not an ontological cartoon or an unnecessary reduction, but a direct implication of the nature of experience. Experience entails the subject who experiences.

Cheers, B.

[J.F. Martel]

"Perception is only one category of experience. There are others: emotion, abstract thought, imagination. My position is that experience alone -- in all its categories, not only perception -- is sufficient to explain reality. "

I was using the word "perception" in its widest sense, i.e. synonymous with experience. That's how Berkeley uses it, that's how you use it in your four-point argument against materialism, and besides, the context of my post makes my meaning quite clear. Even thoughts, emotions and dreams are perceived as events by me as subject. 

"You want to say that redness exists objectively, without a subject who experiences redness, while there is nothing to redness but what is experienced."

You are presupposing (once again) that phenomena are necessarily experiences. What I am proposing is that phenomena (redness, or softness, or car-ness, or house-ness) are apprehended by conscious creatures as subjective experiences. These subjective experiences access real qualities of the real world (real redness, real car). However, they cannot access the total object (they never capture the red car as it would appear to the eyes of an omniscient God). There is no logical reason why a red car can't be both red and a car outside of all perception unless you assume EEP, which I argue is an abstraction, given its postulation of a transcendent entity -- "mind itself" -- which is not given in personal experience but must be inferred (and inferred unnecessarily, in my view).

"We both seem to accept that reality consists in the qualities of experience, just as it seems to."

I agree that the qualities of experience are real aspects of reality, but I argue that reality exceeds the qualities we perceive in it, because the nature of our perceptions is determined by our bodies, our memories, our cultural baggage, and our location in space and time. 

"Talking of a transpersonal mind where those qualities can be experienced is not an ontological cartoon or an unnecessary reduction, but a direct implication of the nature of experience. Experience entails the subject who experiences."

I didn't mean to describe your system as a cartoon. That said, I don't agree that transpersonal mind is a direct implication of the nature of experience for reasons laid out in my post. The only experiencer implied by MY experience, which is the only experience I know, is my own localized self, which I can only experience as an element of the world in which it exists, and without which there would be no experience to speak of.

Hopes this helps you understand my argument.

Best,

JF 

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[Person]

On Thursday, August 27, 2015 at 2:02:17 PM UTC-4, J.F. Martel wrote:

because the nature of our perceptions is determined by our bodies, our memories, our cultural baggage, and our location in space and time. 

I'm guessing this is where the disconnect is. I think the argument is that bodies, memories, cultural baggage, space, and time themselves are mere perceptions/experiences, and that giving them an ontological status beyond that is inflationary and unneeded. If you think otherwise, then I think this is going to permanently drive a wedge between your views and Bernardo's.

[Bernardo]

JF,

that's how you use it in your four-point argument against materialism

No. I consistently use the word 'perception' exactly as what it means: perception (i.e. experience associated with one of the five senses). Thus not emotion, not abstract thought, not imagination. This includes my use of the word 'perception' in my four-point argument. In fact, it is essential to my four-point argument that I say perception and not imagination, abstract thought, or emotion. Not sure why you would think otherwise.

You are presupposing (once again) that phenomena are necessarily experiences. What I am proposing is that phenomena (redness, or softness, or car-ness, or house-ness)...

You contradict yourself quite directly in this short space. The lack of rigor in your discourse is frustrating some times. I am not presupposing anything. Redness and softness ARE EXPERIENCES. If you want them to be something else you need to invent another language. And car-ness and house-ness are something else entirely: they are concepts. Your conflation here is surprising.

Now, as experiences, redness and softness and love and sweetness only exist insofar as they are experiencED (by an experiencER). No amount of handwaving will ever be able to change this simple fact.

real qualities of the real world (real redness, real car)

If redness -- an experience -- is a real quality of the world, the world is necessarily experiencED by an experiencER. This is a direct implication. If you disagree, I'm happy to leave it at that because, frankly, there's nothing further that can be argued here.

I agree that the qualities of experience are real aspects of reality, but I argue that reality exceeds the qualities we perceive in it

If experiences are 'out there,' then there necessarily is mind out there as the subject who experiences them. This is implied by the nature of experience. And, in that case, there is no need to infer or postulate anything else, for nothing is left unexplained. Of course, you can always believe that there is more, but that isn't ontology. It's just belief or opinion.

This is going in circles, JF. You aren't tackling the points I am making. The discussion isn't rigorous and explicit enough to converge. So I will take the liberty to no longer react unless new points of substance are raised.

Cheers, B.

[J.F. Martel]

There are no contradictions, Bernardo. Your presuppositions are blinding you to what I am saying. 

However, I admit that I was using the term "redness" to mean "red." Because if Bergson's formulation of realism is correct, there is essentially no difference.

Quick recap to read at your leisure, or not:

There is a world. In that world, there are experiences. These experiences are apprehensions by entities of events in the world. Experience is dyadic: there is always a point of view and a view. Both are real, without requiring there to be any underlying substance that makes them real. You can't have one without the other.

Red-ness is an experience. Experiences are events in the world. The experience of red-ness is an event in the world. The colour red is real. The colour red exists in the world, available to all entities who have the visual apparatus required to apprehend it.

Physical things are events in the world. Thoughts are events in the world. Dreams are events in the world. There is only one world, which human beings experience dualistically as psyche and matter.

It's not nonsense. It's just not idealism.

All best,

JF

[J.F. Martel]

Hi Person (if that's your real name!),

I attribute ontological reality to bodies, memories, cultural baggage, space, and time because I don't see any reason to believe that they are mere perceptions/experiences. That's what my post above is all about. See the "Esse est percipi" section.

Once you see that "to be is to be perceived" is an unnecessary postulate, everything is free to exist outside experience. Experience is in the world, not the other way around. 

I don't think anyone is helped by philosophies according to which bodies, memories, cultures, rain forests, dreams, oceans and toddlers are most accurately defined when preceded by "mere" or "nothing more than". 

[Bernardo]

There is a world. In that world, there are experiences. These experiences are apprehensions by entities of events in the world.

Therefore the experiences (the redness, the softness) are not in the world but generated by/in the entities, who are the apprehending subjects. But wait... err...

Experience is dyadic: there is always a point of view and a view. Both are real, without requiring there to be any underlying substance that makes them real.

A point of view and a view... what does this mean? Does it mean that each experience has two points-of-view? That sounds like my ontological position, which is an articulation of idealism.

You keep dancing with worlds trying to do poetic magic and having it all ways.

[Bernardo]

Experiences are events in the world. The experience of red-ness is an event in the world. 

Oh, OK. Then, since experiences are in the world, the world necessarily entails an experiencER, since experiences only exist when experienced (by someone or something). But uhh...

On Thursday, August 27, 2015 at 9:42:24 PM UTC+2, J.F. Martel wrote:

[Bernardo]

Thoughts are events in the world. Dreams are events in the world. There is only one world, which human beings experience dualistically as psyche and matter.

Wait... I thought thoughts and dreams were in the world? But if human beings experience the world, then thoughts and dreams -- which are nothing but experiences -- are in the human beings... but uhh... they are in the world... so they are experiences of the world, which is then a minded subject...? But then human beings are...? Uhh...

Apologies, not trying to poke fun, but you forced into a place where I either ignore you or use this kind of rhetoric.

On Thursday, August 27, 2015 at 9:42:24 PM UTC+2, J.F. Martel wrote:

[Bernardo]

 attribute ontological reality to bodies, memories, cultural baggage, space, and time because I don't see any reason to believe that they are mere perceptions/experiences. 

So the redness of the car, as a MERE perception OF something in the world, is not in the world? So redness is in you? What is it that is in the world then? What is the red that exists in the world and not in the perceiving human psyche?

[Bernardo]

Once you see that "to be is to be perceived" is an unnecessary postulate, everything is free to exist outside experience. Experience is in the world, not the other way around. 

You are all over the place! "Everything is free to exist OUTSIDE EXPERIENCE," but "experience IS IN THE WORLD." Where are the things that exist outside experience then? In the world too? So in the world we have all experiences AND all these things that are free to exist outside experience? And I am the one making "unnecessary postulates," huh?

I say, go for it, be happy. It's beautiful poetry in a way.

I'm done.

On Thursday, August 27, 2015 at 11:40:34 PM UTC+2, J.F. Martel wrote:

[J.F. Martel]

You said you wouldn’t respond unless I offered “substantial” content. Then I come back and you’ve posted five rather nasty comments, none of which had much substance. If my thoughts are such a waste of time, why bother?

Here is what I was saying:

 

Human beings are conscious creatures who perceive real things in a real universe, the existence of which does not require a universal perceiver (i.e., things do not need to be experienced in order to exist). We perceive red cars the way cameras photograph red cars (red cars do not require cameras in order to exist). Phenomenologically, however, the world we inhabit has two sides: there is the exterior realm of physis and the interior realm of psyche. Both realms belong to the same world, and neither requires subjective experience (that's why Jung called the interior realm the collective unconscious or objective psyche). Therefore, psychic events such as dreams and thoughts are real events in the world, just like physical events. It's all real. That is all.

Over and out.

 

JF

[Bernardo]

JF,

I am not addressing the content anymore. This post is about our discussion itself.

Needless to say how seriously I take you: with nobody have I ever spent so much time and energy in engaging. Words are redundant in contrast to this self-evident fact. Yes, I have been incisive in responding, but this started with also incisive criticism you chose to offer of my position (frankly, I was rather surprised with your first essay, though I'm totally OK with it). Insofar as your criticism rests directly in trying to articulate your alternative ontology, my defense must poke holes in your position. It's true, though, that mild frustration has come into play -- certainly on my side -- because I seem unable to get you to use words clearly, consistently and unambiguous. At some point I thought I understood you (thinking you were actually an idealist who understood the term differently than I did), but now I think I never did: I don't really understand what you are saying. We speak two different languages: one more intuitive and suggestive, the other more rigorous and explicit. The differences are OK except when each tries to criticize the other in its own terms and ground. Then things go wrong and here they did. So yeah, let's stop.

I hope you don't construe any of this as a sign of disrespect, for it has been precisely the opposite. As someone who knows me well pointed out privately to me, I "obviously like JF." As you remarked yourself, if I thought you were a waste of time we wouldn't be here now.

Be well, Bernardo.

On Friday, August 28, 2015 at 5:20:28 AM UTC+2, J.F. Martel wrote:

You said you wouldn’t respond unless I offered “substantial” content. Then I come back and you’ve posted five rather nasty comments, none of which had much substance. If my thoughts are such a waste of time, why bother?

Here is what I was saying:

 

Human beings are conscious creatures who perceive real things in a real universe, the existence of which does not require a universal perceiver (i.e., things do not need to be experienced in order to exist). We perceive red cars the way cameras photograph red cars (red cars do not require cameras in order to exist). Phenomenologically, however, the world we inhabit has two sides: there is the exterior realm of physis and the interior realm of psyche. Both realms belong to the same world, and neither requires subjective experience (that's why Jung called the interior realm the collective unconscious or objective psyche). Therefore, psychic events such as dreams and thoughts are real events in the world, just like physical events. It's all real. That is all.

Over and out.

 

JF

...

[Peter Jones]

My two cents...

This discussion illustrates the problem for idealism. If we reify the subject then we are dead in the water, while the word 'idealism' implies we have to do just that. Yet to get rid of the objective we have to get rid of the subjective, while to protect one or the other means not being able to get rid of either.

'Only untruths can be experienced'. This would be because experiences are had by unreal subjects. The guitar string cannot be a subject or an object, and so on....

I'm still unsure whether your position is nondualism, Bernardo, but if it is not then maybe this is why these annoying objections arise. I'm confused as to exactly where JFM is coming from but I think his objection is made possible by this emphasis on the subject. It allows a sceptic to turn the argument on its head an emphasise the object. Then it's a stalemate. Better to get rid of this distinction once and for all. 

JFM writes: --"You say the world needs a new ontology. So do I. But my sense is that the ontology we need will not come from the realm of philosophy but from the religious realm. In other words, what we need isn’t a new theory but a new myth. I don’t mean this in the political sense of an illustrative metaphor devised from theory for the benefit of the ignorant masses; I mean a real myth arising unbidden from the depths of the unconscious (that is, from nature), opening up new possibilities in every sphere, including metaphysical thinking. We can’t consciously produce or deduce such a myth; we can only hope for it. "

If you would be happy with a myth then that's your decision. I would reject all myths as not being knowledge and would argue that what we need is philosophical analysis instead of myth-making. I do not endorse this pessimistic views of human reason.   

--"There is a world. In that world, there are experiences. These experiences are apprehensions by entities of events in the world. Experience is dyadic: there is always a point of view and a view. Both are real, without requiring there to be any underlying substance that makes them real. You can't have one without the other."

Yes and no. Experience is dyadic and thus a part of this world of opposites and not ultimate. Neither would be real, or, not in the way we usually assume, as per the doctrine of dependent existence and the theory of emptiness. There would be no requirement for an underlying subject or object since there would be no real (irreducible) subject or object.  

It would be only when we reify subjects or objects that ontology becomes impossible.

--"

I attribute ontological reality to bodies, memories, cultural baggage, space, and time because I don't see any reason to believe that they are mere perceptions/experiences."

This would be why you cannot make sense of metaphysics. Once you start reifying stuff the world becomes logically absurd. 

You say 'experience is in the world'. Is it? Or is experience what the world is?

Bernardo - You say "We both seem to accept that reality consists in the qualities of experience, just as it seems to ....;"

Do you mean 'reality'? Or do you mean Maya? I notice that sometimes you use 'reality' for the space-time world and find this use confusing. Would you not endorse the idea that what is ultimate is real and what is not is merely appearance? (This was going to be my comment on page 57/58 of your  'MTA' draft). I'm not sure whether this is about language or a difference of views but suspect the former. 

     

.

  

    

     

  

 

[Bernardo]

Pete,

This thread is only the end of a much longer thread started in my blog. As I explained there, my position is nondualism: insofar as subject and object are co-defined, getting rid of the 'object' by definition empties the 'subject' of meaning. Yet, language forces us to use one or the other to talk about something, otherwise we get completely stuck like many nonduality teachers. I choose to use the word 'subject' to emphasize my denial of anything outside mind/consciousness. I do so because our culture has come to associate mind with the 'subject' and non-mind with the 'object.' By saying that there is a universal 'subject' I am basically making a cultural concession in order to be able to say something. It is also a cultural concession to language: semantically, experience requires an experiencER, which we might as well call a 'subject without objects.'

These is only mind/consciousness, whose intrinsic nature is forever transcendent, but whose behaviors/excitations are experiences. Are these experiences 'illusions'? Only insofar as we define illusion to be something entirely mental. Only then is the entire world an illusion. But if we simply acknowledge the world to be just what it seems to be -- i.e. a set of experiences -- then those experiences are real as such: as experiences; as excitations of mind.

Cheers, B.

[Bruce Snyder]

Hi J.F.,

 

 My first response to your first post on this Forum was, “No way I’m going to take my pisser anywhere near that pissing contest." Yet, here I am, a walking talking contradiction. But I won’t stay long, and I only want to comment on the context rather than the content of your posts. My interest is in the last paragraph of your first post:

 

“You say the world needs a new ontology. So do I. But my sense is that the ontology we need will not come from the realm of philosophy but from the religious realm. In other words, what we need isn’t a new theory but a new myth. I don’t mean this in the political sense of an illustrative metaphor devised from theory for the benefit of the ignorant masses; I mean a real myth arising unbidden from the depths of the unconscious (that is, from nature), opening up new possibilities in every sphere, including metaphysical thinking. We can’t consciously produce or deduce such a myth; we can only hope for it. As Heidegger said, ‘Only a god can save us now.’”

 

I also agree we need a new ontology, and I have been working on one for a long time. My new ontology does not come from religion. Religion comes from it. It does not come from philosophy, but uses philosophy to translate it into something we can talk about. It was born from experience, confirmed and defined by mathematics, and is currently being translated by a number of disciplines into a narrative that can be understood by nearly anyone and everyone including the ignorant masses. I think it is about time I write an essay about this new ontology and I very much like your idea of “myth” and your definition that goes with it. I am thinking of the title, “A New Myth,” and referencing your definition (if you would feel so inclined after reading it).

 

A couple of basics on this new myth: It says that Reality is non-dual. And, with non-duality comes uncertainty, paradox and contradiction. It is part of the package. So my model fits in these uncertainties etc., showing a larger perspective that is inclusive, and negates the necessity to resolve the conflicts that so often lead to pissing contests. This New Myth says that the more certain you are about your position (claim, belief, theory, etc. the farther away you are from reality). You can probably deduce what I think about “pissing contests.”

 

 I thought I would give you an example from this New Myth that sort of fits in with the discussion you have been having with Bernardo: Bernardo says “Materialism is insane.” I say, “He is too generous. Materialism is totally insane, based on a totally insane dogma.” Let me take you through the math as quickly as I can.

The New Myth says that Objectivity is an epi-phenomenon of Subjectivity.
Materialism says that Subjectivity is an epi-phenomenon of Objectivity.
The New Myth definition of Insanity is: “deviation from truth and reality. The opposite of truth and reality is ‘total insanity.’”
Therefore: Materialism is totally insane.
There is not a shred of evidence to support the notion “Subjectivity is an epi-phenomenon of Objectivity.” That notion is pure dogma.
Therefore: Materialism is a totally insane dogma             Q.E.D.

Regarding your statement: “We can’t consciously produce or deduce such a myth; we can only hope for it.”  I would say, “We can also discover it.”

Regarding Heidegger’s statement: “Only a god can save us now.” I would say, “a god has already saved us. We just need to wake up to the fact.”

 

Thanks, Bruce

[Bernardo]

Whether an ontology is ultimately true or not is a very tricky, perhaps unresolved question. My goal is not to find 'the true' ontology, but the best ontology we can articulate as a culture, given reason, empirical observation, and the scope of our language. The need for this is entirely pragmatic: the culture will always have a story, so we might as well give it our best shot. More here: http://www.bernardokastrup.com/2014/03/why-did-i-write-this-book.html.

Before the question of truth even comes into play, this ontology should has to be: coherent, internally consistent, empirically honest, explicit and unambiguous. There are no excuses for failing in any of these criteria if one engages in a philosophical dispute. If one fails here, one simply loses the argument; it's that simple. Nobody should be surprised about this: our entire culture, and the entire philosophical tradition of the West, has been based on just this kind of arguments and disputes; or 'pissing contests,' as you so kindly put it. These pissing contests lie at the heart of philosophy and of our culture in general. Those who want to avoid them should opt for religious dogma instead of starting debates. Otherwise, debates become a sham: we lack all criteria for determining the validity of any argument, and it becomes a relativist free for all. What a great cultural narrative that would generate: gnomes and unicorns -- or better: Pleiadians -- just around the corner.

Now, beyond the internally-consistent and empirically-honest ontology that we need for our cultural narrative, comes the tricky question of what is actually true. There you can't avoid the demons of contradiction, paradox, and the rest of it. But that's something for personal insight, not an ontology that aims to replace materialism. If one gets flaky and ambiguous in the cultural debate, one will simply be ridiculed; and appropriately so. This is what keeps us honest and avoids hysterical delusions. If one proposes an ontology that isn't even internally consistent, one will at best not be taken seriously. It's fine to start a new religion, but to bring that into the context of a rational philosophical debate is counterproductive.

So I see two valid endeavors here:

(1) A cultural debate to replace materialism with a better, rational, self-consistent and empirically honest ontology. Here, there cannot be flakiness or ambiguities;

(2) A personal quest for insight and transcendence, where one must grapple with questions that go beyond the boundaries of neat rationality.

As far as (2) is concerned, no pissing contests are useful. The issues are too slippery and subtle to be captured in language (I just wrote a book about it). But as far as (1) is concerned, pissing contests are the very essence of the debate. They drive the cultural narrative. If you can't piss far enough your efforts may be noble but are ultimately pointless. Now, notice that the very moment one engages in a philosophical debate about ontology, using language to make arguments, one is implicitly and necessarily addressing (1), not (2). Regarding (2), there are no argumentations, just direct experience. Clearly, thus, my discussion in this thread finds its place under (1) and the pissing context is entirely valid.

[George]

So I see two valid endeavors here:

 

(1) A cultural debate to replace materialism with a better, rational, self-consistent and empirically honest ontology. Here, there cannot be flakiness or ambiguities;
(2) A personal quest for insight and transcendence, where one must grapple with questions that go beyond the boundaries of neat rationality.

A very nice summary. So are we essentially saying:

 

(1) A new conceptual framework which is intentionally designed to have certain attractive properties from a cultural point of view (perhaps implicitly driven by ethical and moral concerns) which the current dominant narrative lacks.

• Not truth - since we are designing an ontology based on and intended to be persuasive to a shared culture, we necessarily exclude empirical observations do not serve that end. Ironically, for this to happen the framework does have to be accepted as "true" by a majority of people, in some cases in preference to direct experience.
  

(2) A new conceptual framework whose only purpose is to encapsulate actual personal experience as completely as possible.

• Truth - since there are no limits to the empirical observations that can be included. Ironically, all frameworks here would be treated as essentially "untrue" and merely useful ways to discuss direct experience, which is primary.

Do you think maybe that quite a lot of the arguments in this forum arise because people are assuming that the project is (2) when actually it is (1)?

And because (1) sometimes involves taking positions or pursuing metaphors which (2) contradicts?

It strikes me that perhaps the pursuit of (1) requires saying "STOP" at a certain point - possibly the point at which we go beyond the foundational statements that are adopted for the "cultural purpose" -  in a way similar to how objectivity must stop where subjectivity begins. And this is the point where many discussions start to go wrong...

[Sciborg]

To me 1) would be the rejection of mechanistic thinking first and foremost, with everything else being secondary.

-Sci

[Bruce Snyder]

On Friday, August 28, 2015 at 12:41:36 PM UTC-7, Bernardo wrote:

Whether an ontology is ultimately true or not is a very tricky, perhaps unresolved question. My goal is not to find 'the true' ontology, but the best ontology we can articulate as a culture, given reason, empirical observation, and the scope of our language. The need for this is entirely pragmatic: the culture will always have a story, so we might as well give it our best shot. More here: http://www.bernardokastrup.com/2014/03/why-did-i-write-this-book.html.

    I'm OK with that,but let's do it from a position of understanding Reality, not just Illusion.

 

Before the question of truth even comes into play, this ontology should has to be: coherent, internally consistent, empirically honest, explicit and unambiguous.

 

So, that means we should have an ontology for the Illusion only, because "unambiguous" does not fit in to Reality. Example: In the Illusion, Schrodinger's cat is either dead or alive. In Reality it is both dead and alive, and every state in between, and every state beyond.

 

There are no excuses for failing in any of these criteria if one engages in a philosophical dispute. If one fails here, one simply loses the argument; it's that simple. Nobody should be surprised about this: our entire culture, and the entire philosophical tradition of the West, has been based on just this kind of arguments and disputes; or 'pissing contests,' as you so kindly put it. These pissing contests lie at the heart of philosophy and of our culture in general.

   
  I say, these 'pissing contests' at a higher level are called 'wars' and our culture in general is insane, largely due to a history of elevated 'pissing contests.'   
 

Those who want to avoid them should opt for religious dogma instead of starting debates.

 

You mean that's my only option, religious dogma? I didn't start this debate, I reluctantly tip-toed in.

Otherwise, debates become a sham: we lack all criteria for determining the validity of any argument, and it becomes a relativist free for all. What a great cultural narrative that would generate: gnomes and unicorns -- or better: Pleiadians -- just around the corner.

 

Hey, Cool! Beats pissing contests. 

Now, beyond the internally-consistent and empirically-honest ontology that we need for our cultural narrative, comes the tricky question of what is actually true. There you can't avoid the demons of contradiction, paradox, and the rest of it. But that's something for personal insight, not an ontology that aims to replace materialism. If one gets flaky and ambiguous in the cultural debate, one will simply be ridiculed; and appropriately so. This is what keeps us honest and avoids hysterical delusions.

 

Yes, we must play in the Materialist playground.

 

If one proposes an ontology that isn't even internally consistent, one will at best not be taken seriously. It's fine to start a new religion, but to bring that into the context of a rational philosophical debate is counterproductive.

So I see two valid endeavors here: Take it away George!

[MrBeezweeky]

A new ontology that only holds truths has to accept everyones beliefs or veiws and the contradictions and. paradoxes that arises from this. The thing is, is that that is exactly how reality is right now.
Materalist experience a objective reality.
Idealist experience an subjective.
And so on and so on....

All these veiws and beliefs ARE being experienced IN reality right now. If this is a reality contains only real true experiences then then it has to accept all experience no matter how contradictory or paradoxical they may seem. I personal think reality is doing a good job at being since it has to leave room in its vastness to let an experiencer change or adapt his beliefs according to his experience.

BUT beliefs and views are hardly ever formed through direct experience so....:P

[benjayk]

This is quite a spicy conversation.
Yet, I found your debate at times hard to follow.

I feel that if we expand abstractions far enough, they transform in strange ways and even "break" at the point of greatest strain. It is an almost physical process and it does not need to make sense.
I think that's why trying to hold that kind of debate on a somewhat rigorous level is bound to fail. The very notion of rigor dissolves in some circumstances. You cannot apply rigor while falling asleep. You cannot apply rigor while someone puts a bullet through your head.
And you cannot apply rigor while using extremely open-ended, indefinite concepts like experience and mystery and subjectivity and being.

We should not underestimate philosophy. It can be an electroshock therapy to the abstract mind. "WAKE UP! Language does not make sense." it screams.

If we expand concepts until they break or become "supra-fluid" in nature so that they kinda flow all over the place we cannot expect to have a meaningful rigorous discussion. It's like trying to make a classical experiment with definite results in the QM realm.

Do we have to insist on the notion that language always makes sense when we feel we have a point? Perhaps sometimes we go into a direction that is "clear" and thus perhaps it feel like you're right, yet language ceases to make much sense.

And perhaps we - including me as I wrote this text above - are just indulding into our intellectual faculties, no more inherently significant than overconsuming Mars bars. I don't know, it seem plausible enough.
Maybe it would be more honest and to the point to say "Does any of that really matter?". I feel you both are basically on the same page and in a way arguing on how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.

I feel there is really much commonality in this community, yet sometimes there is pointless debate or dry, overly technical conversation.
I can certainly understand because I certainly know such tendencies from me as well.

I mean, some of what is talked about here is significant, and can reach deep into our lifes.
Wouldn't we be well advised to focus more on what we have in common and how it is significant to us?
Certainly there is plenty to talk about in that regard or not?

Perhaps we need a bit more naive excitement or something? I don't know.
...I just know I just spent almost 2 hours writing a post just as I was ready to go to bed.
:( :( Silly human. Just wanted to communicate. :(

[Bernardo]

Hmm.. I don't quite agree with the way you initially put it. I said we should strive for the best ontology we could articulate in language, in order to base our cultural narrative. But the best isn't the most sexy, attractive, etc. In my view, the best is the closest to the truth that we can bring in the form of language. I am not interested in an 'attractive' ontology, but one as close to truth as possible, given what we know, understand, and can articulate in words. In other words, I strive to help articulate the most honest and parsimonious story we can tell about the nature of reality. Materialism isn't that.

As for your question, yes, I do think a lot of the issues here, and a lot of the criticisms I get from certain communities, arise because people implicitly mix up (1) and (2). For instance, different ones among my books address different points:

Rationalist Spirituality: (1)

Dreamed up Reality: (1) and (2)

Meaning in Absurdity: (2) mostly

Why Materialism Is Baloney: (1) all the way

Brief Peeks Beyond: (1) mostly

More Than Allegory (upcoming): (2) all the way

I also agree that the pursuit of (1) must say "stop" at some point; a point where ineffable personal experiences and insights cannot be brought into the fold. The reason is that (1) must be, by definition, communicable in a clear and unambiguous way (otherwise it wouldn't be a cultural narrative).

Cheers, B.

[Bernardo]

Hi Bruce,

It all rests on how you define 'illusion.' There is this world of experience around us, illusion or not. The cultural narrative is a story, articulated in language, that allows us to make some intellectual sense of this world. If we define 'illusion' so the world becomes an illusion, than fine, what we need is an ontology of the illusion.

I didn't mean to say that you, personally, want to avoid pissing contests and turn religious. My statement was truly meant generically. I wasn't taking a passing jab at anyone.

I also disagree that 'pissing contests' are the materialists' exclusive playground. The Greeks were engaging in philosophical pissing contests more than two thousand years ago. Even in the East there are pissing contests. One school of Buddhism, for instance, uses dialectic, 'spiritual pissing contests' as a path to enlightenment. There is something to be said about pissing contests. I have personally learned a lot from them and I truly believe that, at a cultural levels, they are essential to keep us honest. They haven't been working enough -- obviously -- but we would be worst off without them, in my view.

Cheers, B.

[Bernardo]

If you are right and one's reality is whatever one believes in, than you've just made a case for a form of idealism.

[Bernardo]

I don't think language always makes sense. I don't think language can capture the deepest and most essential truths of reality (in fact, I just wrote a book saying it). I don't think the intellect can touch the ultimate truth.

But I do think we can get closer to truth with a more honest and parsimonious intellectual narrative than we have today. That's the point of improving our culture's ontology. Beyond that ontology, there is personal insight that cannot be communicated in language. But that's then an issue of personal enlightenment, not of cultural narratives. That's (2), not (1). (2) is not debatable, but only experienceable.

I think that's why trying to hold that kind of debate on a somewhat rigorous level is bound to fail.

Ontological debates at a cultural level (1) must be rigorous, otherwise they aren't debates but mere exchanges of loose intuitions. Trying to 'win' a debate without rigorousness is fundamentally a cheat; an attempt to hand-wave one's way out of valid criticism and avoid been pinned down. Ontology debates should be bound to the limits of reason and rigorousness; they should go no further because, beyond, argumentation is useless and you are no longer talking about shared, but personal and incommunicable experiences (2). The discussion becomes ambiguous, slippery, contradictory, and fundamentally goes nowhere as far as all criteria of validation. For constructing an ontology for contemporary society, that won't do. An ontology is an intellectual, linguistic model that should be as consistent with the facts of reality as words can articulate it, with clarity and internal consistency.

The moment one says to another: 'your ontology is wrong because...' one is already playing an intellectual game. And intellectual games are governed by rules of clarity, reason, logic, consistency, coherence, empirical accuracy, etc. People who have an understanding of the ultimate truth that no words can convey will not try to articulate or argue that ultimate understanding, but will instead try to help others to experience that understanding directly, by themselves. Spiritual teachers play the latter game. I mostly play the former, and try to help build a cultural narrative more conducive to the latter.

Cheers, B.

[George]

In my view, the best is the closest to the truth that we can bring in the form of language. I am not interested in an 'attractive' ontology, but one as close to truth as possible, given what we know, understand, and can articulate in words. In other words, I strive to help articulate the most honest and parsimonious story we can tell about the nature of reality. Materialism isn't that.

Materialism certainly isn't that, true!

Perhaps some of the pushback is about where we choose to draw the line between (1) and (2), and the position of the line dictating to what extent it seems that an ontology is being slightly (if not exactly intentionally) compromised in order to be acceptable to a large enough audience. That line is, surely, drawn based on what can be agreed upon as "the common experience". But what is the common experience can be changed or extended as well as reinterpreted.

In fact, as you point out in your books, much of the common experience is ignored because it doesn't fit into today's narrative (e.g. psi type experiences, the apparent malleability of personal experience, etc). Which is a bit chicken and egg: a truly comprehensive narrative would incorporate things that today are considered "unreal", but the unreal has no place in a cultural narrative, however its unreality is its absence from the cultural narrative...

I'd say the boundary between (1) and (2) isn't the point of ineffability, then, it's which experiences are admitted into the "shared real" category. I think the (1)-limit needs to be explicitly and more clearly incorporated into (2) to make it worthwhile. Otherwise we just keep flipping between the two, in a new subjective-objective contest. (As I've said before, I think this probably means that we need to deliberately avoid "spatial" metaphors when it comes to describing the world, and talk about "resources" or something similar.)

Oh, quick question: We say that brains are images in consciousness. Is your brain an image in consciousness, right now?

[Bernardo]

Oh, quick question: We say that brains are images in consciousness. Is your brain an image in consciousness, right now?

No, but it would be if a neuroscientist were looking at my brain... a hypothetical situation that, in the now, is entirely unreal, but which must be admitted under (1).

Cheers, B.

[George]

No, but it would be if a neuroscientist were looking at my brain... a hypothetical situation that, in the now, is entirely unreal, but which must be admitted under (1).

Can we wrestle with this a bit? Because this is the moment that we cross over from (2) to (1) in the current narrative. What we're trying to avoid here is, of course, solipsism; that's why we hold onto the link between the neuroscientist seeing my brain ("my brain as an image of me in their perspective") even though I never do. Can we do this differently?

So, if I follow your argument from before, it goes something like:

• I know that I exist as a "consciousness having an experience"
• The form I experience myself as is that of a human shape.
• I see other human shapes like me.
• Therefore I extend to them the assumption that they exist as a "consciousness having an experience".
• This implies or assumes (which? both?) that we are experiencing a shared "space" with multiple viewpoints, at the "same time".

The problem is, that (2) reveals to us that  the second point is incorrect. We are not in fact a human form; all that human-form perception is "out there", in mirrors and in the perceptual space and so on.  The human form is part of the world rather than what we are. And if I am not actually a human shape, then equating human shapes with independent experiences in a shared space and moment isn't a valid step?

NOTE: This is not to say that the world isn't shared in some other way, that there are no others or no other perspectives, just it can't be supported as being this way, in this way.

[Peter Jones]

On Friday, 28 August 2015 12:43:56 UTC+1, Bernardo wrote:

Pete,

 

"This thread is only the end of a much longer thread started in my blog. As I explained there, my position is nondualism:"

Sorry, yes, we have got past this one. I understand the usefulness of your approach but feel that the price may be this sort of objection. You're damned whichever way you come at it. :)

   

[Peter Jones]

Bernardo - "... also disagree that 'pissing contests' are the materialists' exclusive playground. The Greeks were engaging in philosophical pissing contests more than two thousand years ago. Even in the East there are pissing contests. One school of Buddhism, for instance, uses dialectic, 'spiritual pissing contests' as a path to enlightenment. There is something to be said about pissing contests. I have personally learned a lot from them and I truly believe that, at a cultural levels, they are essential to keep us honest. They haven't been working enough -- obviously -- but we would be worst off without them, in my view..."

Very much agree.  The Dalai Lama comments "Without contradiction there is no progress".  The dialectic method takes us straight to emptiness.  Kant saw this philosophical pissing contest and called it an 'arena for mock fights' and he saw that one has to reduce these contradictions for a solution rather than decide them. Reducing them is progress, trying to decide them is futile and leads to centuries-long pissing contests. .

 

[J.F. Martel]

I'm really enjoying the discussion that has emerged from the ruins of the ill-fated debate. Lots of awesome, interesting stuff. Don't mean to interrupt. 

Bernardo, thank you for your illuminating distinction between (1) and (2). We have come a long way, evidently, from the last paragraph in your post on my original critique:

...I am not here to accommodate sensitivities; I'm not here to collect a large audience by catering to the inclinations of the highest possible number of people; I'm not here to find compromises that give everyone a warm and fuzzy feeling. My commitment is to truth, and truth alone, whatever the cost. 

Now, you are saying that "truth" is a purely subjective experience. I absolutely agree, and that's why I said that philosophy is not about discerning and communicating truth. You are saying that (1) is less about conveying truth than it is about the old "winning of hearts and minds." Again, this makes perfect sense to me. In fact your (1) / (2) dichotomy reads like a perfect distillation of the distinction I make in my book between artifice and art. 

I have never had the least interest in getting involved in the "cultural debate" over the underlying nature of reality (endeavour 1). My goal in engaging with you was to show that your system relies on axioms, just like everyone else's. I did this because of the way you spoke of your system as the best and most elegant one available while characterizing rival positions as insane or dangerous. The truth, of course, is that there are brilliant thinkers working in every -ism (even materialism). It just seemed incredible to me that you were unaware that you were starting from postulates.

In your last post addressed to me directly, you wrote: "Insofar as your criticism rests directly in trying to articulate your alternative ontology, my defense must poke holes in your position."

You are welcome to poke holes in my ontological position, but my ontology was not the issue. In your post-pissing comments, you seem to be trying to make it look like I was pitting my system against yours. I do have beliefs about the nature of reality, but I have no clue whether these beliefs are valid, because they are based on all kinds of assumptions -- again, just like everyone else's. That was my argument all along. My epistemological position makes all formal ontology hypothetical and speculative (at best).

That said, I still believe that your formulation of idealism is the best one available. So the respect obviously goes both ways. And once I manage to wrap my head around how the term "subject" is purely a linguistic device in your work (how's that for ambiguity?), I may be able to get behind the essential elements of your philosophy.

*

Benjayk, you said:

"Maybe it would be more honest and to the point to say "Does any of that really matter?". I feel you both are basically on the same page and in a way arguing on how many angels can dance on the head of a pin."

Well put. We are all on the same page in that we are all in this big mystery we call reality, or the universe, or whatever, and some of us have raised our head from the mud and seen how strange it all is, and now we're trying to figure it out in our own way. From this perspective -- perhaps the only vital one -- Bernardo and I are in perfect agreement. The rest, as you say, is details. 

What matters is life. And philosophy is only valuable insofar as it serves life in this world (ethics). Does it matter whether reality is made of mind-stuff, dead matter, "luminous" matter or something else? Probably not -- we'll never know. Does it matter that the world is inexorably mysterious to humans, and always will be? To me, yes, very much. And I think it's possible to write philosophy that puts this at the forefront. However, this philosophy could never belong to endeavour (1). It can only be done with (2), which is indeed the realm of religion, but also the realm of art. And my experience has been that philosophy becomes truly transformative (personally and collectively) only when it becomes an art form, with all the ambiguity that this implies.

Like Bernardo, I reject the idea that "pissing contests" are a waste of time. Something is always gained. For me, the best thing to come out of this particular urinal duel is a suspicion that, with all this pissing, I may have accidentally shat out whatever lingering interest I might have had in "formal ontology." That'll be a nice feeling once I've had the chance to clean my shorts.

I leave you with a couple of passages from Lev Shestov's "All Things are Possible." I happened upon them just last night:

"The first assumption of all metaphysics is, that by dialectic development of any concept, a whole system can be evolved. Of course the initial concept, the a priori, is generally unsound, so there is no need to mention the deductions. But since it is very difficult in the realm of abstract thought to distinguish a lie from a truth, metaphysical systems often have a very convincing appearance. The chief defect only appears incidentally, when the taste for dialectic play becomes blunted in man, as it did in Turgenev towards the end of his life, so that he realises the uselessness of philosophical systems. It is related that a famous mathematician, after hearing a musical symphony to the end, inquired, "What does it prove?" Of course, it proves nothing except that the mathematician had no taste for music. And to him who has no taste for dialectics, metaphysics can prove nothing, either. Therefore, those who are interested in the success of metaphysics must always encourage the opinion that a taste for dialectics is a high distinction in a man, proving the loftiness of his soul." 

AND:

"Philosophers dearly love to call their utterances "truths," since in that guise they become binding upon us all. But each philosopher invents his own truths. Which means that he asks his pupils to deceive themselves in the way he shows, but that he reserves for himself the option of deceiving himself in his own way. Why? Why not allow everyone to deceive himself just as he likes?"

On Sat, Aug 29, 2015 at 7:24 AM, Peter Jones <peterjo...@btinternet.com> wrote:

Bernardo - "... also disagree that 'pissing contests' are the materialists' exclusive playground. The Greeks were engaging in philosophical pissing contests more than two thousand years ago. Even in the East there are pissing contests. One school of Buddhism, for instance, uses dialectic, 'spiritual pissing contests' as a path to enlightenment. There is something to be said about pissing contests. I have personally learned a lot from them and I truly believe that, at a cultural levels, they are essential to keep us honest. They haven't been working enough -- obviously -- but we would be worst off without them, in my view..."

Very much agree.  The Dalai Lama comments "Without contradiction there is no progress".  The dialectic method takes us straight to emptiness.  Kant saw this philosophical pissing contest and called it an 'arena for mock fights' and he saw that one has to reduce these contradictions for a solution rather than decide them. Reducing them is progress, trying to decide them is futile and leads to centuries-long pissing contests. .

 

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[benjayk]

Am Samstag, 29. August 2015 09:24:35 UTC+2 schrieb Bernardo:

I don't think language always makes sense. I don't think language can capture the deepest and most essential truths of reality (in fact, I just wrote a book saying it). I don't think the intellect can touch the ultimate truth.

 

OK, I know we agree there. However what I am saying is a little different: Sometimes language breaks up or becomes very slippery, beyond simply being limited. It may still be evocative at this point, but it isn't rigorous.
It's akin to paradoxes in language. There often is no clear solution because we pushed language into region where it is ill-defined.
 

But I do think we can get closer to truth with a more honest and parsimonious intellectual narrative than we have today. That's the point of improving our culture's ontology. Beyond that ontology, there is personal insight that cannot be communicated in language. But that's then an issue of personal enlightenment, not of cultural narratives. That's (2), not (1). (2) is not debatable, but only experienceable.

I do completely agree on the point of providing a better intellectual narrative, and I applaud your work in that regard... it's when we get to ontology that it gets tricky.

I think that's why trying to hold that kind of debate on a somewhat rigorous level is bound to fail.

Ontological debates at a cultural level (1) must be rigorous, otherwise they aren't debates but mere exchanges of loose intuitions. Trying to 'win' a debate without rigorousness is fundamentally a cheat; an attempt to hand-wave one's way out of valid criticism and avoid been pinned down. Ontology debates should be bound to the limits of reason and rigorousness; they should go no further because, beyond, argumentation is useless and you are no longer talking about shared, but personal and incommunicable experiences (2). The discussion becomes ambiguous, slippery, contradictory, and fundamentally goes nowhere as far as all criteria of validation. For constructing an ontology for contemporary society, that won't do. An ontology is an intellectual, linguistic model that should be as consistent with the facts of reality as words can articulate it, with clarity and internal consistency.

 

The problem I see is that it seems to me that you *are* going further, while still trying to hold on to rigor:
You are using concepts like consciousness in an open-ended manner, even invoking MAL.

How is consciousness not a slippery concept, unless you limit it to a very relative notion we all agree on (like "consciousness is what is there when I am awake as opposed to being in dreamless sleep")?
It seems you are quite firm about not limiting it in that way, but in this case the notion of consciousness seems to include an arbitary amount of slipperiness.
Given that in your model consciousness is completely open-ended (it included MAL with vast realms of complete unkowns) it's pretty much as unclear as anything could ever be what you mean with that word!
How that is compatible with rigor?

You could still try to *appear* rigorous. I guess I can understand that, but frankly I feel at this point you are not really doing honest philosophy anymore but philosophistry.
I feel you don't need to do that, as you are a good writer that has a lot to offer that is of value to people.

Let me add that I do think you can win debates in a relatively rigorous when when it comes to the evidence of phenomena beyond the scope of present science, or the inadequacy of materialistic thougt systems.
Here where we can deal with evidence, and more defined notions.

[J.F. Martel]

PeterJ,

Obviously, I didn't intend my latest post as a direct response to yours. I posted it there accidentally. It should have appeared where this one is now.

Best,

JFM

[Bernardo]

JF,

You seem to suggest a contradiction that never existed:

Now, you are saying that "truth" is a purely subjective experience. 

Since I am an idealist, to me everything is always purely 'subjective.' But here you seem to suggest that I am now saying that intellectual models cannot be judged based on their truth value. If so, no, that's not at all what I've said. There is no change in my position from what you quoted below. In both cases, it's all about the truth. The question is whether the truth can be fully -- or only partly -- captured by a linguistic, intellectual model, or whether it requires direct experience to be apprehended in completion. My statement was that the latter is the case, which doesn't invalidate the fact that intellectual, linguistic models can still be judged based on how much of truth they capture. There certainly are robust ways to evaluate the validity (or lack thereof) of intellectual models: some are simply malformed, internally inconsistent and aren't even false; others are entirely false; others are partly true but have false aspects; yet others are largely true but don't capture all the truth. I strive for the latter and truth is still the golden reference for judging it. It's still all about getting as close to the truth as possible given the limitations of the intellect and of language. Nothing has changed in my position.

You are saying that (1) is less about conveying truth than it is about the old "winning of hearts and minds."

I am not saying this at all. What I said is that, as far as the cultural narrative is concerned, we need an ontology amenable to language (otherwise it can't be communicated and form a cultural basis), within constraints of reason. These constraints will inevitably prevent it from capturing the whole truth, but we should still strive to get as close to the truth as possible, given the constraints. (1) is not at all about playing to the crowd and winning hearts and minds; (1) is about accepting the constraints of the intellect and language and still trying to get as close as possible to what is true within those constraints. It's still all about truth.

My goal in engaging with you was to show that your system relies on axioms, just like everyone else's.

Logic itself is axiomatic, and thus so is reason. I wrote that quite explicitly in Meaning in Absurdity and elsewhere. To that extent, surely any ontology that is based on reason is axiomatic. The entirety of philosophy and of Western culture is axiomatic at this level, since they largely assume reason. But this has never been the issue of our discussion. You have always implicitly assumed the validity of logic and reason in your criticisms against my ontology, by saying e.g. that 'it isn't parsimonious.' The character of your argumentation against me is one that appeals to some form of reason. Now, within the axioms of logic that we both implicitly assumed, my claim is that you have not shown any problem with my ontology.

I did this because of the way you spoke of your system as the best and most elegant one available while characterizing rival positions as insane or dangerous. 

I stand by this under the qualification that I didn't say that all rival positions are insane and dangerous. I was very explicit and specific about which positions I was referring to. Within the constraints and limitations of reason and language, I maintain that the above is true. And, of course, it falls under (1).

If you want to go to (2), you cannot argue in language anymore. But you use labels and language yourself when you criticize my work. You call your position 'panpsychism' and claim it to be better than mine. The moment you make such a claim, the onus is on you to (a) define clearly and unambiguously what you mean by 'panpsychism' and (b) argue logically why you think your panpsychism is right and my position is wrong. You either abandon reason and language and appeal to direct experience (which you never did), or you use reason and language but then bite the bullet. You can't attack someone else's system making logical arguments with words and then, when confronted with a rebuttal, change or obfuscate the meaning of the words in a way that becomes impossible to pin down what you mean.

It just seemed incredible to me that you were unaware that you were starting from postulates.

The entire cultural narrative starts from postulates, JF. So does language. If you want to abandon all axioms, you can't construct a single meaningful sentence. But the axioms I use are those of reason itself; they are about the validity of certain patterns of thought. They aren't ontological postulates, which is what you have been arguing against all along. So, no, I do not agree with this characterization. You were claiming that I made unnecessary postulates about ontological entities, which I denied and continue to deny.

And once I manage to wrap my head around how the term "subject" is purely a linguistic device in your work (how's that for ambiguity?)

This isn't complicated at all. Before the intellect infers objects outside that which experiences, there is only one thing. That one thing -- i.e. that which experiences -- can be called 'X" or it can be called a 'subject,' I don't care much. I am happy calling it a 'subject' because our language and culture associate experiences to a subject, and I deny anything outside that which experiences. That's all. It couldn't be simpler. Any complication here arises from implicit intellectual assumptions.

Cheers, B.

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[Bernardo]

We can keep it very simple: I acknowledge only the existence of that which experiences, denying all other inferred ontological entities. I see experiences as a behavior of that which experiences.

Oh, and yes, I happen to use the words 'consciousness' or 'mind' to refer to that which experiences, since these are the closest words our language has to offer.

[Bernardo]

If it helps, here is a summary of my position, framed so as to clarify points raised in this thread:

1. I consider it self-evident that experience exists;
2. Therefore, I acknowledge the ontological existence of that which experiences;
3. I see no reason to infer any other ontological entity, besides that which experiences;
4. I argue that experiences are behaviors of that which experiences;
5. I model those behaviors as oscillations, or vibrations, or excitations of that which experiences;
6. I label that which experiences 'mind' or 'consciousness;'
7. Given our usual linguistic associations, I consider it valid to say that that which experiences is a 'subject.'

Cheers, B.

[J.F. Martel]

Thanks for your cogent response, Bernardo, and for your very helpful summary. 

Final remarks --- I still believe that you are indeed presenting an ontological postulate, as benjayk points out in his post above. I also believe that there are ambiguities in your discourse: you use terms such as truth, subject, consciousness, mind, reality, and illusion in shifting ways that seem to require a lot of footnoting and caveats. But I believe that this will be the case for any metaphysical system.

To bring our debate to a real close, here is a summary of my position (for what it's worth). I wrote it so that it corresponds with yours:

1. I consider it self-evident that the subject exists insofar as it experiences something outside of itself, whether psychic or material in nature

2. Therefore, I acknowledge the existence of a non-subjective world

3. I see no reason to infer a transcendent substance behind the immanent world we experience

4. I believe that experiences are partial apprehensions of events that exist independently of experience

5. I model those events as real finite objects, but infer that in reality they are infinite

6. I label the locus in which experience takes place, but which experience neither generates nor delineates, the "Real"

7. I argue that the Real is always experienced by the human intellect as dyadic, and that reason is incapable of transcending this duality (viz., the Real cannot be conceptualized)

Very best,

JF.

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[Bernardo]

Fair enough, JF.

Inspired in this thread, I just published this:

http://www.bernardokastrup.com/2015/08/the-elevator-pitch-of-world-in-mind.html

I hope it helps clarify my position to you all.

Cheers, B.

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[Person]

On Saturday, August 29, 2015 at 11:11:44 AM UTC-4, J.F. Martel wrote:

1. I consider it self-evident that the subject exists insofar as it experiences something outside of itself, whether psychic or material in nature

I suppose I just don't see why you see it this way. Galen Strawson writes,

A global replace 

So here I am. I already know that the most parsimonious hypothesis compatible with the data is that concrete reality—the stuff that realizes the concretely existing structure that physics picks up on—is wholly a matter of experience, experiencing, experientiality. Experience like ours certainly exists and it follows, given No Jumps or No Radical Emergence, that experience must be among the fundamental properties of concrete reality. (To try to hold on to non-experiential being by holding that reality is non-experiential in its fundamental nature but is nevertheless and at the same time ‘protoexperiential’ seems to be to try to paper over a crack in reality with a word. The crack—or chasm—remains untouched.) 

So when it comes to considering the question of the fundamental nature of concrete reality the choice lies between supposing that both experientiality and some form of nonexperientiality like hylality are among the fundamental properties and supposing that only experientiality is. I haven’t been able to make sense of the dual option, compatibly with retaining monism, and I don't think there could ever be a good argument for dualism, so long as the two stuffs posited by dualism are supposed to interact causally (briefly, I don't see what argument could undermine the claim that causal interaction is a sufficient condition of same substancehood). So I seem to be forced into panpsychism. 

Can this last position really be said to be a form of materialism? Surely—the point should be familiar by now. Many materialists hold that all concrete being is simply energy existing in one form or another—i.e. [1]. The panpsychist proposal is simply that the intrinsic nature of this energy is experientiality. The panpsychist hypothesis performs a ‘global replace’ on physics as ordinarily conceived. In so doing it leaves the whole of physics—everything that is true in physics—in place. So too for all the other sciences. I’m a robust realist about physical objects [xxxreality], the theory of evolution, and so on, but I know of no argument that gives us any good reason to suppose that there is any non-experiential concrete reality. 

The claim that experience is all that exists isn’t the incoherent claim that everything that exists only in or ‘in’ some mind or other (that’s incoherent because a mind can’t exist only in or ‘in’ itself). It has nothing to do with standard idealism or phenomenalism, and it certainly isn’t committed to the implausible view that tables and chairs are subjects of experience. It leaves the physical world untouched, as ‘out there’, relative to each one of us, as it ever was—however inadequate our idea of its Existenzraum or dimensionality.

—‘So there’s no distinction between materialism and what amounts to a form of “absolute idealism”.’ 

Not if ‘absolute idealism’ implies [B] thing monism; but yes insofar as it’s a form of pure panpsychism. I hope you don't think this is comic or absurd because it looks as if it’s materialism’s best guess as to the nature of the concrete reality about which physics says many true things. Eddington and Whitehead saw this clearly nearly 100 years ago. You don't have to call it ‘materialism’ (‘physicalism’) if you don't want to. I continue to call it ‘materialism’ (‘physicalism’) because, once again, concrete reality understood in this way is what physics describes in its own magnificent and highly abstract way and says many true things about (e = mc 2 , the inverse square laws, the periodic table, etc.), things which I take to hold good of everything that concretely exists. 

—‘But still—why not suppose that the basic nature of concrete reality is non-experiential rather than experiential?’

In that case we face again all the problems posed by No Jumps and No Radical Emergence. Suppose those problems solved. Then I reply to your question—‘Why suppose that the basic nature of concrete reality is experiential?’—with another question: ‘Why suppose that it’s non-experiential—either in its basic nature or in any respect at all?’ 

What evidence is there for the existence of non-experiential reality, as opposed to experiential reality? None. There is zero observational evidence for the existence of nonexperiential reality—even after we allow in a standard realist way that each of us encounters a great deal in concrete reality that is not his or her own experience. Nor will there ever be any. All there is is one great big wholly ungrounded wholly questionbegging theoretical intuition or conviction. 

—‘There isn’t any evidence that the intrinsic nature of reality is wholly experiential either.’ 

True—but we know that some of it is experiential. We know it for certain because 

[22] In the case of experience, the having is the knowing. 

To have experience is not only to be directly acquainted with the fundamental nature of experience—at least in certain respects. It’s also of course to know that the experiential exists. The view that there is any non-experiential concrete reality is, by contrast, wholly ungrounded. It’s a radically and irredeemably verification-transcendent belief. Hume knew this. So did many others including Quine, who famously judged that physical objects that are assumed to be non-experiential are ‘posits comparable, epistemologically, to the gods of Homer’ (1951: 44)

I don't agree with everything Strawson says, but on this point (except for maybe small details here and there), I think he's more or less got it. 

[J.F. Martel]

Hi Person,

Seems to me that Strawson clearly states that by experience, he does not mean any kind of subjectivity, as evidenced in the following bit from the passage you posted:

The claim that experience is all that exists isn’t the incoherent claim that everything that exists [exists] only in or ‘in’ some mind or other (that’s incoherent because a mind can’t exist only in or ‘in’ itself). It has nothing to do with standard idealism or phenomenalism, and it certainly isn’t committed to the implausible view that tables and chairs are subjects of experience. It leaves the physical world untouched, as ‘out there’, relative to each one of us, as it ever was—however inadequate our idea of its Existenzraum or dimensionality.

I say in statement 1 that psyche exists outside of subjective experience. This means that psyche is fundamental to nature, but is a-subjective (in psychoanalytic terms, it's un-conscious). 

However, in my summary, I did at two points unintentionally conflate experience itself (meaning psyche, or what James Hillman calls Soul) and subjective experience  That's an error. So I will reformulate:

1. I consider it self-evident that the subject exists insofar as it experiences something outside of itself, whether psychic or material in nature

2. Therefore, I acknowledge the existence of a non-subjective world

3. I see no reason to infer a transcendent substance behind the immanent world the subject experiences

4. I believe that subjective experiences are partial apprehensions of events that exist independently of subjective experience

5. I model those events as real finite objects, but infer that in reality they are infinite

6. I label the locus in which subjective experience takes place, but which subjective experience neither generates nor delineates, the "Real"

7. I argue that the Real is always experienced by the human intellect as dyadic, and that reason is incapable of transcending this duality (viz., the Real cannot be conceptualized)

[Person]

I suppose the issue ultimately comes down to what, exactly, the "subject" is, and what, exactly, it means to be "outside" of it...

[Bernardo]

Strawson is talking about individualized minds ('some mind or other'), not mind-at-large as the unified substrate of all reality. And this very articulation of panpsychism is the one I attacked in my original essay against panpsychism: http://www.bernardokastrup.com/2015/05/the-threat-of-panpsychism-warning.html.

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[J.F. Martel]

"I suppose the issue ultimately comes down to what, exactly, the "subject" is, and what, exactly, it means to be "outside" of it

Precisely.

On Sat, Aug 29, 2015 at 12:21 PM, Person <perso...@gmail.com> wrote:

I suppose the issue ultimately comes down to what, exactly, the "subject" is, and what, exactly, it means to be "outside" of it...

--

[benjayk]

Am Samstag, 29. August 2015 16:16:25 UTC+2 schrieb Bernardo:

We can keep it very simple: I acknowledge only the existence of that which experiences, denying all other inferred ontological entities. I see experiences as a behavior of that which experiences.

Oh, and yes, I happen to use the words 'consciousness' or 'mind' to refer to that which experiences, since these are the closest words our language has to offer.

Yes, great, let's keep it simple.

I don't see how we need to infer any ontological entities at all, not even experience.
The very thought of experience is an inference. Many people are not even capable of making that inference. They just poop their pants...
Surely that is a more parsimonious ontology.
Joke aside, we simply need not to conceive of an ontology, and indeed this makes for a simpler thought framework.

As a summary I could say that I consider experience/consciousness as a relative, vague concept meaning different things in different contexts, and not an ontological category.
With that further ontological considerations simply don't make sense.

In that sense I can not really *disagree* because there is nothing to disagree with when I don't understand the way the concepts are used.
I am just somewhat critical that other people *really* understand what they are talking about; or if they merely constructing something that "sounds nice".

[Bernardo]

I don't see how we need to infer any ontological entities at all, not even experience.
The very thought of experience is an inference. Many people are not even capable of making that inference. They just poop their pants...
Surely that is a more parsimonious ontology.

:-)))

we simply need not to conceive of an ontology, and indeed this makes for a simpler thought framework.

I think this is a valid, perhaps even wise personal choice. But it can't be a cultural narrative, since it denies the narrative.

As a summary I could say that I consider experience/consciousness as a relative, vague concept meaning different things in different contexts, and not an ontological category.

The ontological category would be that which experiences, whatever experience itself may intrinsically be. People who disagree about the meaning of 'experience' are looking for explanations for experience, instead of simply acknowledging the presence of experience itself, which is self-evident.

Cheers, B.

[benjayk]

Am Samstag, 29. August 2015 19:01:41 UTC+2 schrieb Bernardo:

I don't see how we need to infer any ontological entities at all, not even experience.
The very thought of experience is an inference. Many people are not even capable of making that inference. They just poop their pants...
Surely that is a more parsimonious ontology.

:-)))

we simply need not to conceive of an ontology, and indeed this makes for a simpler thought framework.

I think this is a valid, perhaps even wise personal choice. But it can't be a cultural narrative, since it denies the narrative.

Does a narrative need to be ontological in nature? Isn't "Let's just have fun! Who gives a shit about anything, I wanna party." a narrative as well, for example?

As a summary I could say that I consider experience/consciousness as a relative, vague concept meaning different things in different contexts, and not an ontological category.

The ontological category would be that which experiences, whatever experience itself may intrinsically be. People who disagree about the meaning of 'experience' are looking for explanations for experience, instead of simply acknowledging the presence of experience itself, which is self-evident.

I am not sure I understand. I don't quite know what experience or the experiencer is, let alone that it has an intrinsic nature.
Even acknowledging the presence of experience seems problematic because presence is an experience, as is absence. There is nothing about my experience that is innately present as opposed to absent as far as I can tell.

[Bernardo]

Can you agree that there is experience? That there is this thing present which we call experience? Don't try to explain or define it, merely recognize that it is there. If you do, then the very presence of experience implies an experienceER. That experiencER can be said to exist and, as such, it is the sole ontological category we need to make sense of reality.

Regarding the narrative, I meant specifically a cultural narrative about the nature of reality; i.e. an ontological narrative. Most people seem to need it. If you don't, you have an edge over the rest.

Cheers, B.

[Bruce Snyder]

Damn! I just got my pisser tuned up and we’re at “Final Remarks.” Always a day late and a dollar short! At my stage in life, I always consider the possibility that my Final Remarks might be my FINAL REMARKS, but I will try to be brief. There are two points I want to address, and for clarity I want to give a couple of definitions first:

When I say “Reality” I mean consciousness, mind, God, Brahman, Nirvana, and quite a few other labels. When I say “Illusion” I mean physical world, space-time, matter, Samsara, and quite a few other labels. I do not want to reduce these definitions down to a precious few labels, for reasons I may cover later.

The first point I want to address is my “pissing point” with Bernardo. I will give my view: If you want a new ontology that is unambiguous, you restrict the possibilities immensely. The only thing I can think of that comes close to that requirement is the “Uncertainty Principle.” It will give you the exact, precise mathematically verifiable relationship between Reality and Illusion, God and physical world, mind and matter, objectivity and subjectivity, etc. with math that has been around for hundreds of years. And, all of those relationships are defined by the same (two) equations.

http://www.thefouriertransform.com/

However, that doesn’t tell you much about those conjugate variables, those transform pairs, like Reality and Illusion, mind and matter, etc. To include those things in detail, you need to include ambiguity, paradox, contradiction and all those things you abhor. Sorry, but that’s the way the particle waves.

The other point I want to address is “Pissing Contests.” To those of you who are champions of the pissing contest, I want to paint you a picture: Imagine you are out on the savannah (Africa not Georgia) and you are sitting there, by yourself, maybe eating some bugs you dug out of a tree stump, and up wanders a stranger you have never seen before. So you let out a few grunts, and you mark your territory, and then only moments later he crosses the line--into your territory. And you are infuriated. You gave him clear warning, so you pick up a bone lying on the ground and bash him with it… and he runs off yelping into the brush. A little later he returns, with two of his friends, and they are all carrying bones and sticks.   …..Fast forward a few millennia, and imagine you are in your office. You just finished a satisfying bout of back and forth on the internet. You turn on your TV, and it happens to be on a news station, and you watch numbly for a while as it rotates endlessly through local, national, and global insanity… including nuclear proliferation and possible global suicide. And you think to yourself, “HTF did we get in this position? And WTF do we do about it?

I say, “The answers are available. Look within.”

[benjayk]

Am Samstag, 29. August 2015 20:39:49 UTC+2 schrieb Bernardo:

Can you agree that there is experience? That there is this thing present which we call experience? Don't try to explain or define it, merely recognize that it is there. If you do, then the very presence of experience implies an experienceER. That experiencER can be said to exist and, as such, it is the sole ontological category we need to make sense of reality.

 

I guess I could say to you: "Right now I am experiencing sitting in front of a screen". However there is nothing metaphysical about that.
It's just a narrative I construct to communicate with you.

Other than that... I don't know!
Subjectively the question does not even arise. It is a non-question. It genuinely seems like I could say nothing meaningful about that.
 

Regarding the narrative, I meant specifically a cultural narrative about the nature of reality; i.e. an ontological narrative. Most people seem to need it. If you don't, you have an edge over the rest.

OK... For some reason it confuses me! I simply disregard it for the sake of clarity I guess.

[benjayk]

What I do notice is that this kind of question is confusing and unsettling me quite a bit.
I guess it is because it messes with my intellect in some way; something wants to make sense but somehow it doesn't add up. It's almost a bit painful...

I feel it's better for me to avoid this kind of inquiry. If I don't think about there is no question.

[Bernardo]

Hi Bruce,

The fact that the mathematical models of quantum mechanics work so well and reliably shows that it has no ambiguity as a predictive tool. Yet science isn't an ontology; it provides just models that predict observations, not interpretations of those observations. Although Quantum Mechanics clearly presents ontological challenges, I think it's way too early to throw in the towel and say that no unambiguous ontology is possible. Even I made an attempt: http://www.bernardokastrup.com/2014/08/my-philosophy-and-quantum-physics.html. Indeed, I'd say the ontological challenges of Quantum Mechanics are seen as difficult mainly because we tend to think in realist/materialist terms. The moment you step back and clear those assumptions, things may seem a lot less daunting to interpret. The history of science and philosophy shows that things that appeared to be impossible to make sense under one paradigm of thought, turned out to be perfectly explainable later, when looked at under a different angle.

Cheers, B.

[benjayk]

Man, somehow this is really bothering me. It feels like I am missing something...
In one way I feel you have a point, however somehow it does not quite seem to add up.

I think the issue really is that in a vacuum the concept of experience does not have clear meaning to me. It's constantly eluding me and leading me in different directions, trying to make sense of it.
Of course in some way or another it's there, I guess, after all we speak about it. But then, is experience really present? Doesn't this suggest experience is an object in space-time?
Can we really speak about "it" in this way, or this just creating an imaginary object? It seems to me it is, because I can't find a thing "experience".
Even if experience is there, does it need an experiencer? Why? And who says there is only the experiencer? Isn't the experiencer just an experience as well? Why would it be "sufficient" as basic category? Isn't it just a presumption that there is nothing beyond experience/the experiencer, based on our limited intellect?
We may "feel" that we can kind of sort everything into that category, but that is not proof that this actually makes sense. "Things" may just become too subtle for us to grasp.

I can only use "experience" as a conceptual portal, but this portal may lead into confusion or negation of itself or all kinds of other directions...

I really think it would be better to just let it go, but somehow something is hooking me to it. Undoubtably experience is an evocative concept in some way.
However at the end of the day it is just that, a concept. I feel I won't be going anywhere trying to find a conclusive place to land with it, even though you seem to find one....

Geez, I'm confused. Sorry for my rambling... ;)

[Bernardo]

You're speaking not from a conceptual perspective, but from living, personal intuition (2). This raises the stakes a lot. For you, these things aren't intellectual games but your real, daily life. I'm afraid you sense profound things other people don't even suspect, like the 'emptiness' of experience ('self-referentiality' would be a better term), which can't be linguistically captured or made sense of. The Heart Sutra of Buddhism says "Form is Emptiness \ Emptiness is Form.' I made my own poetic attempt to hint at the emptiness of experience here: http://www.bernardokastrup.com/2014/12/confessions-of-truth-seeker.html.

This is a cross you may have to carry: you're attuned to things that far transcend what the vast majority of people can sense. And these things you are attuned to cannot be corralled into a linear, coherent, closed storyline. If you insist in trying, you may just cause yourself tremendous aggravation (been there). There is an art of letting go here. Not letting go of the intellect, but letting go of the notion that the intellect can neatly put everything into a box. Accepting the boundaries of the intellect can help one make peace with the intellect.

I've just written a new book about this. If you like a peek of the manuscript, send me a private message with an email address. It may help you, but may also make things a lot worse, because it will initially get you to think even more. Indeed, the book tries to make you think your way out of thinking.

Nonetheless, whether experience is empty/self-referential or not, whether it's an ontological category or not, there is this phenomenon we're talking about, which we spontaneously call 'experience.' If it weren't there in some way, empty and illusory as it may  be, we couldn't be discussing it, could we?

The need for the experiencER is ultimately linguistic, though I won't make this admission in public. ;-) (Remember, I am in mode (2) now) It's language that forces us to always grant the existence of an experiencER the moment we grant existence to experience itself. Experience, by linguistic definition, cannot exist in a vacuum; that would make no sense linguistically. But although this is 'just' a linguistic necessity, don't underestimate the importance of language: we reason in language, even when not communicating our reasoning. As Noam Chomsky has argued, language is a reflection of our hardwired patterns of thinking. Language is a reflection of what we are and how we process information. So trying to transcend language is entirely equivalent to trying to transcendent the intellect altogether. As such, if one wants to ignore the necessities and implications of language one must also give up on logic and on coherent arguments. One is 'out of culture' at that moment, and in the lonely helm of pure, ineffable, personal experience of transcendence.

Hang in there.

Bernardo.

[Bernardo]

...lonely REALM...

[Peter Jones]

JFM - "Now, you are saying that "truth" is a purely subjective experience. I absolutely agree, and that's why I said that philosophy is not about discerning and communicating truth"

To me this would seem to be a mistake. We have to get past the subject/object division in order to ground an epistemology. We can know what we are, and that is enough to know all we need to know. Ontology and epistemology, like all distinctions, turn out to be aspects of the one thing in the end.  Knowledge would be possible precisely because truth is not subjective or objective. One can BE truth, as Al Halaj makes clear to his own considerable cost. .      

Bernardo - "Can you agree that there is experience? That there is this thing present which we call experience? Don't try to explain or define it, merely recognize that it is there. If you do, then the very presence of experience implies an experienceER. That experiencER can be said to exist and, as such, it is the sole ontological category we need to make sense of reality."

Would not the experiencer have to be reduced for a fundamental theory? 

[Peter Jones]

PS - Bernardo - Pardon me. I missed your comment about the experiencer being necessary as only a convention. 

If you go much deeper you might have to explain the doctrine of two worlds and then explain that you are speaking conventionally. Perhaps this has been the cause of some of our niggles, that it is not always clear whether the discussion is operating at a conventional or ultimate level.  

I see the point of keeping it conventional (there is an experiencer etc) for communication purposes, but the danger is that people will conclude that this world-view is philosophically unsound. It's a tricky problem.       

[Bernardo]

I think at the level of analytical philosophy, particularly formal ontology, it is completely defensible to maintain that the experiencER is an ontological primitive. After all, formal ontology is linguistic in essence.

[benjayk]

Am Sonntag, 30. August 2015 09:24:03 UTC+2 schrieb Bernardo:

You're speaking not from a conceptual perspective, but from living, personal intuition (2). This raises the stakes a lot. For you, these things aren't intellectual games but your real, daily life. I'm afraid you sense profound things other people don't even suspect, like the 'emptiness' of experience ('self-referentiality' would be a better term), which can't be linguistically captured or made sense of. The Heart Sutra of Buddhism says "Form is Emptiness \ Emptiness is Form.' I made my own poetic attempt to hint at the emptiness of experience here: http://www.bernardokastrup.com/2014/12/confessions-of-truth-seeker.html.

This is a cross you may have to carry: you're attuned to things that far transcend what the vast majority of people can sense. And these things you are attuned to cannot be corralled into a linear, coherent, closed storyline. If you insist in trying, you may just cause yourself tremendous aggravation (been there). There is an art of letting go here. Not letting go of the intellect, but letting go of the notion that the intellect can neatly put everything into a box. Accepting the boundaries of the intellect can help one make peace with the intellect.

Yes, clearly. I've been on this road for quite some time.

It's just that sometimes I get sucked up into those whirlpools of mental confusion and uncertainty... where the intellect, as inadequate as it may be, is - or appears as - a kind of refuge.
Surely there is no simple formula to solve all that. The intellect and thoughts have their place, and they also have their limitations, and yes, dangers!

 

I've just written a new book about this. If you like a peek of the manuscript, send me a private message with an email address. It may help you, but may also make things a lot worse, because it will initially get you to think even more. Indeed, the book tries to make you think your way out of thinking.

Nonetheless, whether experience is empty/self-referential or not, whether it's an ontological category or not, there is this phenomenon we're talking about, which we spontaneously call 'experience.' If it weren't there in some way, empty and illusory as it may  be, we couldn't be discussing it, could we?

 

Hm, the problem isn't that "it" is "not there", but that it's not clear what, if anything I am thinking about.
The problem already comes up at deciphering the language or the conceptual schemes behind it.
I can still say "Yes, the word means something to me in one way or another, depending on the context", but I can't proceed in any stringent manner and reason my way to some conclusion.

I guess our main divide is that I can't seem to abstract from that, and go to (1), where I could construct a linear narrative that makes sense to me, or even understand one.

But really, I feel it doesn't matter. If it makes sense to you and many of your readers, good for you! I need not concern myself with it.
I guess my real important point was providing a balance to the "intellectual game" going on in this conversation. And I feel, based on your reactions, that I suceeded in that.
Seems that this is enough for now. :)

[Bernardo]

I guess my real important point was providing a balance to the "intellectual game" going on in this conversation. And I feel, based on your reactions, that I suceeded in that.
Seems that this is enough for now. :)

Yes. :)

[Peter Jones]

On Sunday, 30 August 2015 14:28:23 UTC+1, Bernardo wrote:

I think at the level of analytical philosophy, particularly formal ontology, it is completely defensible to maintain that the experiencER is an ontological primitive. After all, formal ontology is linguistic in essence.

Hooray! We still have something to argue about. I see your point, but even before stumbling into mysticism I would have queried the idea of an experiencer existing prior to the experience. It seems to cause the same problem as 'to be is to be perceived'.  It's a chicken and egg problem.     

[Bernardo]

Linguistically, an experience must be had (by someone or something)... and the idea that experience is merely an excitation -- a behavior -- of the experiencER overcomes the need to make the experiencER different from experience. They are the same, ontologically, for the same reason that a ripple is water; a particular behavior of water.