What does Idealism need to accomplish?

[Metaphysician by calling]

The concept of idealism arises within the context of our physical existence, as an attempt to explain the self-evident world we find ourselves within. Regardless of how it was originally formulated through myths and religions, it took as a given that some human experiences were best understood as

• giving a meaningful account of some realm beyond the physical of everyday life,
• allowing humans in special cases to transcend their normal limitations while remaining with the physical world,
• allowing humans to communicate with beings that were not physically alive and present at the time.

These experiences could arise spontaneously, as a result of rigorous training, or by the ingestion of certain substances. Different cultures took different approaches to explaining, dealing with, and making use of such experiences.

With the advent of the scientific approach to rationality, great strides were made in explaining the operation of the physical world, improving humanity’s survival within it, and enjoyment of it. This forum is possible only through the advances of science. As less and less of the content of myths and religions were found to be factually accurate, the tendency was to dismiss the rest as well. A full accounting of physicality seemed possible and those experiences that might be outside its scope were ignored or dismissed as mistaken because they were not universal or easily replicable within an experiment. The one stubborn exception to the power of science to explain by lawful occurrences was consciousness.

Given these limitations, a new focus on idealism is emerging to goes beyond the offerings of myths and religions, an idealism that seeks to utilize the same rationality that science found so powerful. But it faces a number of significant problems:

1.  how to sort through the accumulation of myths and religions to determine what is valid and useful, and what is not;
2.  how to utilize rationality while avoiding the presumptions that science takes for granted when employing it;
3.  how to evaluate/validate possible answers that experience may not be able to confirm;
4.  while useful in explaining this world, by limiting idealism to this function the full scope and power of idealism is not fully realized and appreciated.

Perhaps the most efficient means of overcoming these problems is to find an irreducibly simple starting point and then to determine what would be necessary for it to develop into the world we experience as well as any other possibilities. The notion of awareness of being having infinite potential for further evolution can serve as just such a starting point, provided that it is accepted on its own terms and not misidentified with similar accounts from the past of idealism. That being said, our starting point is in fact a beginner mind, but not the beginner’s mind that sees the world without preconceptions, but a mind that see no world and needs to evolve enough to create one. In fact, it needs to evolve enough to recognize that it is a self and that it can evolve.

In trying to determine the likely path(s) of evolution taken from this rudimentary starting point, we wish to employ rationality to the fullest extent possible while accepting that it alone will not be sufficient. There will be times when leaps need to be made, if only because we know the other side is there and see no smaller steps available to reach it. Even more important is the fact that at the starting point rationality itself just a possibility within the infinite but unknown potential. Before the beginner mind can be rational, the ability to think has to be discovered and developed. All of the functions of mind that we take for granted when we consider idealism have to first be discovered and then developed in order to be useful. But while rationality may have limits that does not mean that we are completely free to adopt whatever explanations we personally find appealing. We need to function within a framework bounded by parsimony and inference to best explanation. We want elegant hypothesizes that are as simple but powerful as possible, similar to the elegance of the laws of science for explaining the physical world. And we wish to provide answers that foster consensus and cooperation.

A basic “to do” list may help clarify the task originally before the beginner mind, and now ours as idealists to accomplish, would include:

•             Develop all of the functions of mind now known and used: awareness, emotions, thinking, imagining, deciding, remembering;
•             Create/discover the tools necessary to best utilize the mind for each function, preeminently to include logic, mathematics, language, qualia;
•             Create/discover the concepts of change, stasis, differentiation, integration, time, space, subjective, objective, et cetera;
•             Create/discover the possibility of dissociating so that multiple perspectives can simultaneously, but independently, be taken, and different paths followed;
•            Create/discover what criteria to apply when making choices on how to proceed.

It is important to recognize that the inherent direction of this approach is outward, evolutionary. It is from simpler to more complex, from less advanced to more advanced. It is future vision pulled not past event pushed, evolving toward not devolving from some imagined idyllic state. It is in fully appreciating the task before us and the infinite potential we have for tackling it that gives meaning to life and makes the contribution of a fully developed idealistic metaphysics significant. Seen in this manner it is reasonable to claim that humans can be serving as ‘point man’ at the leading/bleeding edge of one path of evolution. While science is concerned with simply rediscovering the coding required to produce a physical world (a variant of historical research), the ultimate task of idealism is in determining what we want to become and how to achieve it. This is a task too important to be left to the inertia of the past or to those who are neither transparent nor held responsible/accountable for the choices they (the gods) would make for us.

As such this requires the construction of a new paradigm.

•  Consistent with such, your well considered thoughts, criticisms, suggestions are welcomed.
• Half-assed, incoherent, habitual responses left over from the old paradigm not so much.
• Neither are what you think others, likely long dead, might have meant when they said something from within the old paradigm. If what they said remains true for you, own it.

 

 

[Dana Lomas]

Very pertinent musings. Currently, I know of no model that is exempt from revision or elaboration, or that adequately encompasses the vast spectrum of our experience. Really, I'm more intuitive mystic and poet than analytical metaphysician, so I tend to concede that role to others. Again, along with Bernardo's model, I remain open to all efforts in that regard.

[Scott Roberts]

On Monday, June 3, 2019 at 7:11:02 AM UTC-10, Metaphysician by calling wrote:

Neither are what you think others, likely long dead, might have meant when they said something from within the old paradigm. If what they said remains true for you, own it.

Yes. I like to quote G. E. Lessing on this: "Revelation is not rational when it is revealed, but is revealed so that it may become rational."

One bit of revelation that I think can be made rational is "In the beginning was the Logos, and the Logos was with God, and the Logos was God. .... All things came into being through It, and without It not one thing came into being."

'Logos' an be translated as either 'word' or 'reason', as at that time speaking and thinking were not much distinguished (which is why most people until modern times could only read by reading aloud). Since in the beginning there were likely no vocal cords or air to vibrate or pens, I would think that 'reason' is the better translation, and so this revelation affirms idealism, which is to say that what exists is thought into existence.

This is a different view than the view that the fundamental state is undifferentiated awareness of being with infinite potential, as the latter requires that thinking is originally -- like everything else -- only potential and not actual. Hence some other process is needed to produce thinking. But any productive process of consciousness might just as well be called thinking. So it seems to me that it is a lot simpler to say that fundamental reality is thinking, rather than bring in abstractions like "awareness of being" or "potential". (I also think it is good to exploit the ambiguity of "is thinking" -- that we don't just name it "thinking" but also that it is doing something, namely, thinking.)