You’re right that a distinction has been lost in the physicalist paradigm. This is because physicalism has no need for the general concept of being. — Jamal

Thank you. That’s been the point at issue all along. I’ll only add that the term translated as ‘soul’ in that passage, as something which characterises living beings, is the Greek ‘psyche’, which, of course, can also be translated as ‘mind’, depending on the context.

Right. I should highlight the fact that I re-opened the thread because I found what I consider an important book, Thinking Being, Eric Perl, from which I drew the following quotation, because I thought it relevant to the prior debate, and in favour of the ontological distinction I was seeking to draw in the first place:

All things, even inanimate ones, must have some form, or they would not be anything at all. But living things have a distinctive and superior kind of form, called ‘soul.’ For a living thing is far more integrated, more one whole, than a non-living thing. The unity, and hence the identity and the being, of a non-living thing is little more than the contiguity of its parts. If a rock, for example, is divided, we simply have two smaller rocks. In a living thing, on the other hand, the members of its body constitute an organic whole, such that each part both conditions and is conditioned by the other parts and the whole. A living thing is thus one being to a far greater extent than a non-living thing. It evinces a higher degree of unity, of integration, of formal identity, and its soul is this very integration of its parts into one whole. As such the soul is the reality of the living thing, that in virtue of which it is what it is and so is a being: “For the reality is the cause of being to all things, and to live, for living things, is to be, and the soul is the cause and principle of these” (De An. Β.4, 415b13–14). Life in living things, then, is not a character superadded to their mere being. Rather, life is their being, the higher, more intense mode of being proper to living things as distinct from others.

The distinction between living and non-living things is therefore not a mere ‘horizontal’ distinction, as if all things are equally beings, of which some are living and others are not. It is rather a ‘vertical’ or hierarchical distinction: a living thing is more a being than a non-living thing, in that it is more integrated, more a whole, more one thing. (p110) — Eric D Perl Thinking Being - Introduction to Metaphysics in the Classical Tradition

It is this distinction which I say has been occluded by the fact that physicalist ontology only allows for one kind of fundamental substance, namely, the physical, so it can't allow for an in-principle difference between beings and things, of the kind that Aristotlelian philosophy refers to here. (I was told that I was 'bordering on insanity' by one of the mods for bringing it up, speaking of insults.)

I'm quite happy to leave it at that, though.

the difference between beings and things, insofar as there is one (and I think there is) is not about sentience or consciousness. — Jamal

What is it about, then? And does it amount to an ontological distinction?

Whether there is a difference between beings and things is another matter. I think there is. — Jamal

That's basically the only point that was ever at issue in this argument. Didn't mean to be insulting, but I really don't think it makes sense to declare that anything that exists is 'a being'. Again, the noun term 'being' is customarily used for sentient creatures. Of course rocks exist, I spent many a happy hour as a child throwing them.

The only passage about Heidegger that I quoted in this thread was a snippet I found in a Philosophy Now article, to wit:

The formidable task that Heidegger sets himself in Being and Time is to respond to the question ‘What is Being’? This ‘Question of Being’ has a long heritage in the Western philosophical tradition, but for Heidegger, to merely ask what is Being? is problematic, as that emphasis tends to objectify Being as a ‘thing’ – that is to say, it separates off ‘Being’ (whatever it is) from the questioner of Being. This for Heidegger is making unhelpful assumptions of the nature of Being even before interrogating what Being actually is. Therefore, rather than asking ‘What is Being?’, Heidegger begins with the question ‘Whom is asking the question of Being?’ This question – the whom of Being – includes the possibility that the questioners themselves may actually contribute in some way to the Being under question. Heidegger’s starting point thus asks whom is this Being “that in its Being is concerned about its very Being.” (Being and Time, p.11)

We had this uncanny experience at the Tower. Of course it was well known that Her Majesty was at Balmoral and the end nigh, but we couldn’t help feeling that the Yoemen in the tower were agitated about something - hushed conversations in the cloister, so to speak. My dear one took a striking photograph of a misted sun perched above the White Tower pretty well at the exact moment. We didn’t actually know until we went to dinner a couple of hours later near our hotel, but the maitre’d telling us only confirmed our feelings.

:up: I've been getting a lot from Vervaeke's lectures. (Mind you, there’s a lot of ‘em.)

So the idea is that the essential nature of being is beneficial towards all things? — Tom Storm

Deep idea: It is the pleroma, the ‘divine fullness’, or the ‘principle of plenitude’. That is the intuitive wonder at the amazing fecundity of nature, the ever-abundant ‘horn of plenty’ which gives rise to ‘endless forms most wondrous’, such that ‘everything that can be, must be’. It is contrasted with the intuition that existence is a bane or intrinsically distressing due to the transience of all phenomena - ‘all that is born will perish’, But I think the ‘middle way’ is that being (not necessarily the same as existence) is an overall good - where suffering arises is the attachment to the transitory, to the products of that beneficence, whereas ‘the sage’ seeks to return to its source, that which gives rise to the All, but is not itself the all (per Plotinus).

Sheldrake insists that there is ample empirical evidence for 'the sense of being stared at' and also people's sixth sense about who is going to call them. Of course many people will rubbish Sheldrake purely on the basis that it can't be so, because it proposes something like 'spooky action at a distance' between minds. I myself am open to such ideas, as I don't hold to materialist beliefs, and I think it's eminently possible that there are biological fields, analogous to but separate from electro-magnetic fields. That is touched on in the discussion at various points. The problem is, there is no way of empirically proving it, other than something like what Sheldrake has tried to do with his experiments on morphic fields, because as they're not electro-magnetic in nature, then what kind of instruments can be used to detect them? Maybe (big maybe!) living organisms detect them, but it is not something one can be consciously aware of. (You can find more about Sheldrake on his site https://www.sheldrake.org/ . I was made aware of him in my 20's when one of my father's professional associates, a reader in medicine, sent him a photocopied article on Sheldrake's first book, back in the 1980's. This associate was rather an adventurous and non-orthodox thinker, hence his interest. There's a link on his website to an article about attitudes towards him, amusingly called 'The Sense of Being Glared At'.)

Also I mentioned in my above comment that Tanya Luhrman reminded me of Julian Jaynes' 'Bicameral Mind' theory. She does explicitly mention that here and there's some discussion of it.

Sheldrake has a major soliloquy starting here ('basically, I think brains are over-rated').

Faith in God is a habit transfer from faith in people to something that that habit transfer creates in the first place: faith in God is a modified faith in people that creates its own target: faith constitutes God as that which is necessary for the tranferred habit to stick. Of course, I don't expect theists to agree, and thus this isn't a good theory if my goal is understanding. So what am I to do? — Dawnstorm

I watched a recording of a recent lecture and discussion session featuring a US anthropologist called Tanya Lurmann (mentioned in another thread). She's done a lot of anthropological work among American evangelicals, asking them questions, surveys, etc. Her book on it is How God becomes Real. It's worth reading the jacket copy as it actually is quite close to what you've suggested here. Important to emphasise she's not an evangelical herself, she says she's an open-minded agnostic on the actual question. But she presents a vivid case and is quite a persuasive.

a stable Republican outlier — Christoffer

The only possible 'stable Republican outlier' is, in fact, Nikki Haley. From the same source I quoted yesterday:

On Saturday, the Trumpified Missouri GOP held its caucuses. Lynn Schmidt, a Missouri Republican, described the scene in an email:

“There were 558 people in the gym for our caucus. When Haley was nominated, the room erupted in boos. Then they asked all of Haley's voters/supporters (62 of us) to line up two by two in the middle of the gym while the other 469 people continued to boo and jeer at us. We were literally lined up in the middle of the gym for all of our neighbors to see… They called us Democrats and talked about hating RINOS.”

You can imagine the MAGA group pelting Halley's followers with rotten fruit and excrement. That's about the level that they've sunk to.

In my view, the net effect of Trump's inevitable victory in the Primaries, is to lead the entire party off a cliff, lemming-like. That it will become obvious between now and the Republican Convention in July that, having won the mantle, there's no way he can actually execute, being so mired in legal problems, and so addled in his thinking.

I believe it's been de-criminalised in the Australian Capital Territory, the area around the national capital. You're not allowed to trade in it, but having it is not illegal. That said I wouldn't expect anyone would want to live in Canberra without a reason :-)

As long as it isn't as burning hot as Australia! — Pantagruel

I'd encourage you to consider Australia (although the price of housing is astronomical). The burning hot zones in Australia are actually pretty remote, the climate on the East Coast cities is generally temperate, outside the occasional heatwave where it will hit 40 degrees or more. But it doesn't happen often. I've lived briefly in the UK and also have immediate family in Wisconsin so am pretty familiar with those areas - Wisconsin is nice but the winters are not too different from your own. Socially and politically, Australia has a lot going for it, currently centrist Labor governments at Federal and most State levels, reasonable standard of living, and lots of space. I couldn't consider living in the UK (was last there in 2022, was actually standing in the Tower of London at the moment the Queen passed away.) My perception of the UK at the moment is that it's pretty frayed around the edges, and has a lot of dreary towns.

I'm not entirely sure how the details of these things go, but wouldn't she align with the Lincon Project and draw together the Republicans who don't want to be part of the MAGA cult? — Christoffer

I don't know either, but I've been following US politics pretty closely - probably too closely - and it seems obvious the current Republican party is incapable of governing. As you will know, two weeks ago they sunk a bill that their own delegates had spent months working on, purely because Trump said it would make Biden look good. They're wasting massive amounts of time on the faux 'impeachment enquiry' on Biden just to help Trump settle imagined scores. Trump, meanwhile, is reduced to near-complete confusion and incoherency - he doesn't know who is President, he keeps confusing all of his many legal cases and simply babbling on stage. He's a complete mess and plainly incapable of governing anything whatever. So if an independent candidate DID win (it's a thought-experiment, not an actual prediction) he or she would have to turn to the Democrats because the Republicans can't manage a piss-up in a brewery.

Agree, but I think Pandora's Box would be the better analogy ;-)

Why is divine hiddenness a thing? Why would gods, who in scripture interact with humans - whether Islam, Judaism or Hindu scriptures - now only be available through faith or some old books or via a priestly caste? — Tom Storm

I might chip in here to say that in some contexts, or in some respects, what you can see depends on the kind of person you are, or perhaps the kind of life or experiences you have had. People will see things differently, in a loose sense, depending on the kind of sensibility we bring to it. In the case of religion(s) there are the factors of prophecy and of revealed truths. They would claim that the prophet sees things that we don't see. Obviously a contestable claim and not one that I'm actually defending, but in the context, I think it's relevant. Perhaps there is a real meaning to the old word 'seer'. But our culture has no criteria to judge those kinds of utterances other than the scientific or empirical (although bear in mind, that is the subject matter of the tradition of hermenuetics). I have noticed in my reading of early Greek philosophy, that the very early philosophers, Heraclitus, Parmenides, and Pythagoras, were all said in some sense to have had a kind of 'vision of the Gods' or to 'see as Gods', in other words, to see beyond what us mortals are able to see (which presumably has something to do with the fact that their names are still known to us after millenia.)

Customarily, in religious traditions, the idea of the salvation is linked to the belief that the ordinary human, the hoi polloi, the common man, will be generally precluded from reaching that plateau of understanding, so we are forced to rely on the grace of God or another supreme being (depending on cultural context.) But in some cases, especially early Buddhism, 'faith' was taken as a kind of quality of confidence in the Buddha, but that it would eventually be supplanted by certain knowledge (Jñāna) when the conditions were fulfilled and liberating insight acheived. But then, that general understanding is also conveyed in the Apostle Paul's 'we see through a glass, darkly', the implication being that in the fullness of time, we will see clearly. Faith is, in that context, eventually vindicated by knowledge, not by our narrowly-defined 'falsifiable hypotheses'.

i didn't mean to argue that his ideas preclude a personal God, just that his thinking had been somewhat too lofty to focus on this narrow subject, given that Heidegger seems to regard the project of being as significant enough to be getting on with. — Tom Storm

There was his notorious exclamation in a very late interview in the German media, 'only a God can save us now'. Courtesy of Google, I can now reproduce it, and it's oddly consonant with the remark above:

Q: Now the question naturally arises: Can the individual man in any way still influence this web of fateful circumstance? Or, indeed, can philosophy influence it? Or can both together influence it, insofar as philosophy guides the individual, or several individuals, to a determined action?

A: If I may answer briefly, and perhaps clumsily, but after long reflection: philosophy will be unable to effect any immediate change in the current state of the world. This is true not only of philosophy but of all purely human reflection and endeavor. Only a god can save us. The only possibility available to us is that by thinking and poetizing we prepare a readiness for the appearance of a god, or for the absence of a god in [our] decline, insofar as in view of the absent god we are in a state of decline. — Heidegger, Der Speigel interview

I don't know what commentators have made of that, but it is a telling comment.

Read this about Haley today:

"Both national and swing state polls show Haley is a dramatically stronger candidate than Trump in the general election. (A new Marquette University poll has Haley beating Joe Biden by 16 percentage points, while Trump and Biden are in a statistical tie.)"

As there is now a murmur that she might consider running as an independent. In the very unlikely event that she was elected as a third-party candidate, which party would she be more likely to be able to negotiate policies with, in light of the dysfunction that characterises the MAGA-GOP? I think she would get no traction with the Republicans, who would be apoplectic at loosing, and that she would, in effect, be forced into a coalition with Democrats to pass any actual policies.

(Trump is even giving a pretence of presenting policies or ideas for governing any more. He's just ranting.)

That you’re still going on about this is borderline insane. — Mikie

I've presented arguments and citations in support, and in the face of nothing better than pointless ad hominems and incomprehension. The reason I re-opened the thread is because over February I read the first several chapters of Eric Perl's book Thinking Being, from which the quotes above are taken. And the fact that you don't recognise a distinction that I claim is largely forgotten is not an argument against it.

rocks... are...beings. — Mikie

Am I take to it you're pan-psychist?

Anil Seth says he's 'entirely comfortable' with 'the mind extending beyond the brain', holding up his iPhone to make the point, one I agree with. Overall, I liked Seth's presentation, although I would question his claim that 'the mystery of life' has been 'solved' due to our better understanding of organic biochemistry. It might be that we come to quite clearly understand the biochemistry of the origin of life but that doesn't necessarily mean we understand everything there is to know about the question (for instance, is there any sense, and any reason, that life evolves towards greater levels of intelligence?)
Nevertheless, I think from Seth's perspective as a cognitive scientist, most of what he says makes perfect sense, although that also points to the many meanings that 'consciousness' may have, depending on context and interpretation - he differentiates 'consciousness' and 'mind' in ways that philosophy of mind may not. (I think he very much sees consciousness in terms of 'conscious awareness'.) I also question what it would mean to 'explain' consciousness - explain it in terms of what, exactly? What are the constituents of it, such that understanding those constituents would account for the first-person nature of experience? He says that science is 'chipping away' at that issue, but it seems a category mistake in some ways.

Tanya Lurhmann is very interesting, I hadn't encountered her before. The similarities with Julian Jaynes 'bicameral mind' thesis jumped out at me. Thoughts 'cross the mind-world boundary'. She talked of the 'porosity' of the mind, that the individual mind, or some of them, have a sense of openness to other minds, or to Spirit as mind, and also that thought could 'pass into' the world. Being an anthropologist, though, she's done a lot of empirical work - questionnaires and surveys, she's reporting first-person accounts of others. Never heard of 'tulpamancy' before! Gives new meaning to the criticism that some religious people have 'invisible friends'.

Re Sheldrake, I have 'The Science Delusion' and 'Presence of the Past'. I'm probably more open to Sheldrake than many but I'm afraid most of what he has to say won't change any minds, I suspect. I will review a bit more of the Q&A later.

Anyway, as to the question, 'does consciousness extend beyond brains?', as I've entered the fray, I will review at least some of this 2.5 hour ( :yikes: ) presentation.

Sorry, mis-typed - I meant to say, show me where I said that 'humans were magic'. But I then noticed that you had said:

Humans are not some separate and magical species that exists apart from all of nature. — Philosophim

To which I replied

With the advent of language, reason and symbolic thinking, h. sapiens crosses a threshhold which marks it off from the rest of the animal kingdom. — Wayfarer

I said that this threshold corresponds to an ontological distinction - a distinction in kind - between humans and other animals.

I don't expect any agreement, but at least some clarity about the point. I believe @Patterner is arguing something similar.

Give me some example that makes humans magic — Philosophim

Show me where said that human beings are magic. I actually used a philosophical term to differentiate human beings from animals - can you recall what that might be, or its significance?

some understanding of the way things reduce to biology is a matter or being educated. — wonderer1

A recognition of the importance of biological conditions and human nature need not involve biological reductionism. — Wayfarer

The issue the Supreme Court focussed on was the consequences of States taking it on themselves to decide who can stand on a Presidential Ballot, which, they said, would lead to 'chaos'. They said it would take a Congressional resolution to determine disqualification. But it should be recalled that after the Jan 6th insurrection, McConnell said:

Former President Trump’s actions that preceded the riot were a disgraceful, disgraceful dereliction of duty. Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of the day.

.

He still voted to acquit, saying:

We have a criminal justice system in this country. We have civil litigation. And former Presidents are not immune from being held accountable by either one.

So he punted it back to the legal system, which has now punted it back to Congress. 'Heads I win, tails you loose'.

But since then, Trump has been found guilty in two significant civil cases and indicted on 91 criminal counts. Of course if Trump had any decency or judgement, laughable though that suggestion is, he would immediately withdraw from the race rather than continue to drag the nation through his quagmire of lies and delusions.

:clap: :ok:

You're familiar with the term 'biological reductionism'? Definition here.
— Wayfarer

No, and I'm not sure how it fits into the discussion. — Philosophim

Because it is what you're appealing to by declaring that humans are 'just another species' and that the differences between humans and other species is no more significant than the differences between species, generally. The definition I linked to was as follows:

Biological reductionism: A theoretical approach that aims to explain all social or cultural phenomena in biological terms, denying them any causal autonomy. Twentieth-century incarnations of biological reductionism have relied to varying degrees on Darwin's theory of evolution and principles of natural selection. Within the human sciences, there have been attempts to explain observed differences in group behaviour—such as performance on intelligence tests, rates of mental illness, intergenerational poverty, male dominance or patriarchy, and propensity for crime—as being biologically determined, by claiming that groups have different biological capacities or evolutionary trajectories. The theories of Social Darwinism, eugenics, and sociobiology often involve biological reductionism. A recognition of the importance of biological conditions and human nature need not involve biological reductionism.

Biden Campaign: 'We Don't Really Care'. They hadn't placed any particular significance on the case in the first place. Good call.

The back-story to all of this is that I used to mount an argument as follows. It was based on distinguishing ontology from science. My argument was that the word 'ontology' was based on the present participle of the Greek verb 'to be' - which is, of course, 'I am'. I said this implied a distinction of the study of 'being' as distinct from science, which is the analysis of what objectively exists. (There's also a resonance with the religious significance of the 'I AM' in both Biblical and Hindu texts.) Anyway, I got severely criticized by a poster (who was also a mod) over this, saying that this was an 'eccentric' definition of the term 'ontology'. This lead to a long debate, one which I think is important, on the distinction between 'beings' and 'things', which I claim is a distinction that is largely lost in modern philosophy. He eventually sent me an essay by a distinguished classics scholar, The Greek Verb 'To Be' and the Problem of Being, Charles Kahn, which I read very carefully. I think it supports my argument, although he never accepted that, and he's since left the Forum. Kahn argues that the use of the Greek verb 'to be' generally conveys the meaning 'what is truly so', as distinct from 'what exists' (see also this comment.)

'Virtue is it's own reward' ~ Another Aristotelian chestnut :cool:

By the way, I love Zizek’s take - ‘quantum physics has caught God with his pants down’:

https://youtube.com/shorts/ywVHFo1na38?si=7Jp75TEU0q5BkLGF

I believe Schrodinger's rhetorical point was to drive home the absurd nature of superposition with a life-size example. Even the proverbial cat wouldn't be both alive and dead, which is only a metaphor for the indeterminate state of the supposed object of measurement. (Read ChatGPT's assessment of this response here.)

'Whenever I hear of Schrodinger's Cat, I reach for my gun' ~ Stephen Hawking

'What did you do to the cat, Erwin? It looks half-dead!' ~ Mrs Schrodinger.

What threshold is this that is unique to human beings? — Philosophim

As I said - language, reason, technology, and so on. H. sapiens is able to interrogate the nature of meaning and being in a way that other species cannot.

We are just another species — Philosophim

You're familiar with the term 'biological reductionism'? Definition here.

‘In Buddhism, we have a case study showing that when groundlessness is embraced and followed through to its ultimate conclusions, the outcome is an unconditional sense of intrinsic goodness that manifests itself in the world as spontaneous compassion.”(Thompson)

But I never understood how assuming a groundless ego leads to spontaneous compassion and benevolence. — Joshs

Buddha nature is inherently blissful. Part of enlightenment (bearing in mind, 'enlightenment' was coined by an English translator for the Buddhist term 'bodhi', which in many contexts is translated as 'wisdom') is realising that, which is why it's salvific. It is a fountainhead of ecstacy.

Phenomenal awareness as transition from one kind of relational unity to another can just as well be malevolent as benevolent. — Joshs

But Buddhism, along with the other sapiential traditions, is about breaking through to a different form of awareness altogether. I don't think you'll find it in phenomenology or existentialism although there may be hints of it at various places. There's some references to it amongst the German idealists (Schopenhauer's 'better consciousness', Fichte's 'higher consciousness'). But it will usually be categorised with religion by many, to their detriment. This is where the insights of non-dualism are especially relevant.

A footnote: in my view, modern Western culture tends to idolise 'the natural' as a symbol of purity. Accordingly, we want to situate humans on the continuum with other animals, as part of nature or a product of nature. Hence also the romanticizing of first-nations people and traditional culture. It is then seen as 'arrogance' to declare that humans are different from other species to which we are purportedly related by evolution. We long for a kind of re-union with nature, which might actually be a sublimated spiritual longing. But in this context, 'nature' has been substituted for 'the unconditioned', an insight into which has been generally lost to modern philosophical discourse.

But you understood the point that the intellectual gap between a bat and a fly is as wide as the intellectual gap of a human and a bat right? The point is that us being a 'different kind' from other animals is simply the same pattern repeated in nature again and again. — Philosophim

That's not the point at issue, though. Obviously there is massive divergences between species, that is not at issue. I am protesting the tendency to overlook or deny what I see as an obvious fact about h. sapiens - language, reason, tool-making, and the implications of all of that. No, we're not 'an alien species', the biological descent of h. sapiens is abundantly obvious, but with the advent of those capacities, we crossed a threshold beyond what can be understood solely through the lens of biological science.

Don't you think plant behaviors could be replicated by fairly simple machines (or a system of pretty simple machines)? — RogueAI

You've heard of John Conway's 'Game of Life?' It was a 1970 program that replicates many of the salient features of evolutionary development by use of a fairly simple algorithm. So such behaviours can be emulated quite easily using software, but actually creating an organic molecule that replicates like living organisms is a very different thing. You can symbollically represent the processes, but actually making them work is another thing.

Look at the gulf between a bat and a fly. — Philosophim

One that neither a bat nor a fly will ever know.

There are humans with enough cognitive impairment that they cannot learn what 'prime' is either. Same with young children until they reach a certain age. Does this mean they aren't conscious Wayfarer? — Philosophim

Everyone, indeed every being, deserves to be treated humanely, but that says nothing about the capability that distinguishes h. Sapiens from other species. I think one of the unfortunate consequences of popular Darwinism is the myth of h. Sapiens being ‘just another species’. There’s a leap - an ontological gulf - between h. Sapiens and other species. We’re of a different kind.

A quote from a text on classical metaphysics about the distinction between living and non-living particulars:

All things, even inanimate ones, must have some form, or they would not be anything at all. But living things have a distinctive and superior kind of form, called ‘soul.’* For a living thing is far more integrated, more one whole, than a non-living thing. The unity, and hence the identity and the being, of a non-living thing is little more than the contiguity of its parts. If a rock, for example, is divided, we simply have two smaller rocks. In a living thing, on the other hand, the members of its body constitute an organic whole, such that each part both conditions and is conditioned by the other parts and the whole.** A living thing is thus one being to a far greater extent than a non-living thing. It evinces a higher degree of unity, of integration, of formal identity, and its soul is this very integration of its parts into one whole. As such the soul is the reality of the living thing, that in virtue of which it is what it is and so is a being: “For the reality is the cause of being to all things, and to live, for living things, is to be, and the soul is the cause and principle of these” (De An. Β.4, 415b13–14). Life in living things, then, is not a character superadded to their mere being. Rather, life is their being, the higher, more intense mode of being proper to living things as distinct from others.

The distinction between living and non-living things is therefore not a mere ‘horizontal’ distinction, as if all things are equally beings, of which some are living and others are not. It is rather a ‘vertical’ or hierarchical distinction: a living thing is more a being than a non-living thing, in that it is more integrated, more a whole, more one thing. (p110)

For Aristotle, the hierarchical ordering of the different kinds of beings is based on the extent to which form predominates over matter in each. Non-living things have the lowest degree of form, of unifying selfhood, of activity that proceeds from themselves. Although they have some form, some nature, some behaviors of their own, without which they would be nothing at all, they come closer than all other things to being purely material, purely passive. A living thing, characterized by organic unity and the ability to nourish, maintain, and reproduce itself, is far more one, more active, exhibits a far higher degree of formal identity. A sentient living thing, an animal, exercises not only these life-functions but also consciousness, which, as the capacity to receive forms without matter, is a still higher degree of formality, of immateriality. A human being, in turn, has not only life and sense but the capacity for the wholly immaterial activity of intellection, which has as its content, and thus is one with, purely immaterial ideas. (p117) — Eric D Perl Thinking Being - Introduction to Metaphysics in the Classical Tradition

*Note that the term translated as 'soul' is the Greek 'psyche', which is, of course, the root of the modern words 'psyche' and 'psychology'. Indeed the passage in which the term occurs could equally use the term 'mind', with the caveat that it obviously would not mean 'conscious' or 'rational' mind. Perhaps ‘capable of intentional action’ might be a way of parsing it.

The point of this passage is to make an ontological distinction between living and non-living particulars, which is a distinction based on different ways or modes of being.

Humans are not some separate and magical species that exists apart from all of nature. — Philosophim

Try teaching the concept 'prime' to your dog. With the advent of language, reason and symbolic thinking, h. sapiens crosses a threshhold which marks it off from the rest of the animal kingdom. I say this is another ontological distinction.

There's a passage in the Upaniṣads - the philosophical texts of the Vedas - about the exact issue of 'the eye that cannot see itself'. The online text is here https://www.swami-krishnananda.org/brhad_00.html . I can't vouch for the quality of the translation although the website is published by a mainstream Hindu organisation and I'm sure it's legitimate.

The passage in question is reproduced below. The context is a dialogue between the sage and a questioner, who is seeking instruction on the nature of the Self, ātman, which is often translated as 'soul', although it's worth noting that the literal meaning of the term is 'I am'. Here the questioner is pressing Yājñavalkya, the guru, for an exact definition. He says:

"You have only told me, this is your inner Self in the same way as people would say, 'this is a cow, this is a horse', etc. That is not a real definition. Merely saying, 'this is that' is not a definition. I want an actual description of what this internal Self is. Please give that description and do not simply say, 'this is that' –

Yājñavalkya says: "You tell me that I have to point out the Self as if it is a cow or a horse. Not possible! It is not an object like a horse or a cow. I cannot say, 'here is the ātman; here is the Self'. It is not possible because you cannot see the seer of seeing. The seer can see that which is other than the Seer, or the act of seeing. An object outside the seer can be beheld by the seer. How can the seer see himself? How is it possible? You cannot hear the hearer of hearing. You cannot think the Thinker of thinking. You cannot understand the Understander of understanding. That is the ātman."

Nobody can know the ātman inasmuch as the ātman is the Knower of all things. So, no question regarding the ātman can be put, such as "What is the ātman?' 'Show it to me', etc. You cannot show the ātman because the Shower is the ātman; the Experiencer is the ātman; the Seer is the ātman; the Functioner in every respect through the senses or the mind or the intellect is the ātman. As the basic Residue of Reality in every individual is the ātman, how can we go behind It and say, 'This is the ātman?' Therefore, the question is impertinent and inadmissible. The reason is clear. It is the Self. It is not an object-na vijñāter vijñātāraṁ vijānīyāḥ, eṣa ta ātmā sarvāntaraḥ.

"Everything other than the ātman is stupid; it is useless; it is good for nothing; it has no value; it is lifeless. Everything assumes a meaning because of the operation of this ātman in everything. Minus that, nothing has any sense".

Then Uṣasta Cākrāyana, the questioner kept quiet. He understood the point and did not speak further. — Source

I personally have always found the analogy of 'the eye that cannot see itself' very persuasive and even self-evidently true, although having discussed here and also on the dharmawheel (Buddhist) forum, I know that many others don't see it that way. But a point to note is that it has also been adopted by at least some phenomenologists. There's a marvellously erudite French philosopher of science, namely Michel Bitbol, who has a paper in which he explicitly quotes this passage, It Is never known but it is the Knower (.pdf, on academia.edu.) This is related to the 'blind spot of science' argument, the 'blind spot' being the exclusion of the subject from the reckonings of science, but then taking the resulting objectively-defined knowledge as being comprehensive.

A great deal of further material on Vedanta can be found on the website of the Vedanta Society of New York https://www.vedantany.org/ . The head teacher, Swami Sarvapriyananda, is an erudite fellow and frequently engages in debates and dialogues with philosophers and scientists. You can find many of his lectures and talks on youtube here

the Cambridge Handbook of Western Mysticism and Esoterica — Count Timothy von Icarus

:clap: Thanks for the recommendation, those Cambridge Handbooks are usually :100:

//ps// a goldmine, that book.//

We may dress up our individual egos in drag with Islam or liberalism or existentialism, but in the end we are emotionally driven creatures who make choices based on what (we think) pleases us and how we as individuals interpret ideas. — Tom Storm

Might that sentiment not be more accurate if expressed in the first-person singular? It's very much a projection of the liberal bourgouis consciousness, I think.

I recall when I encountered the teachings of Advaita Vedanta in my youth, much was made about the falsehood of egoic consciousness, and that this is what has to be seen through or overcome - 'cut off at the root', was the expression, which was distinguished from the effort to 'prune' it through some attempt at self-discipline. I was to realise later that the Chinese Communist Party, for example, also deprecates the individual, with generally malign consequences, and that individual freedom is in fact a vitally important principle of liberal culture, and something also often violated in theocratic cultures, such as Iran. (Accordingly, I continue to believe in the sovereignty of the individual, although I also recognise there's a fundamental difference between philosophical self-abnegation and such politically-coerced conformism.)

In any case, the principle of transcending egoic consciousness is fundamental to many faith traditions. It doesn't even have to be particularly religious - it characterises anyone who is selflessly devoted - but that is where it is generally spelled out. 'Not my will, but thine', is a characteristic expression. (Although I have a rather interesting philosophical text, Surviving Death, Mark Johnston, who claims to demonstrate a thoroughly naturalistic (as distinct from supernatural) account of the idea of a 'higher self'.)

That is, as the certainty of calculation. Only because being is understood via the persistent presence of subject and object can modern science and technology, as well as humanism, be thought. What is real is what is consistently present, and the object’s reality is made possible by its being represented by a self-present subject. A=A because, more fundamentally, the ‘I’ equals itself. — Joshs

Makes perfect sense to me. I do see a convergence between Heidegger and elements of non-dualism, although of course there are also many differences.

In the wake of Descartes, God was replaced by the human subject , the consciousness of the ego, as the source of absolute certainty. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Right - as I was saying up-thread, the advent of liberal individualism, the individual ego as arbiter of truth.

Not sure why we arrived at nihilism in this discussion — Tom Storm

I admit it was a bit of a flight of ideas on my part. But the gist was that the denial of order in the Universe tends towards nihilism, in the sense that it denies the possibility of causal connections and any intrinsic meaning. That is what made me think of Nietszche and Heidegger, as it was among their central themes.

But does this transcend our cognitive apparatus? I guess as a form of Platonist you would say, 'yes' (eg, maths as found rather rather than invented). — Tom Storm

Kant distinguishes 'transcendental' from the 'transcendent' where the former concerns the conditions of possibility of knowledge itself, such as space and time as forms of sensibility and the categories of the understanding. But they're still 'givens' inasmuch as they are already present as the constituents of the understanding, so in that sense, beyond or not accessible to conscious awareness. They're 'always already the case'. There are connections between Plato and Kant but it's a rather esoteric topic, but I think it's safe to say that Kant was certainly not nihilistic. I don't think he had encountered that chasm yet.

I don't know why you make the point whether Heidegger was 'theistic', as if I were suggesting that he was, or defending 'theism'. Heidegger's point, like Nietszche's, is not by any stretch to defend religion, but to point out that in its absence, and the collapse of the traditional source of value, we are faced with the prospect of a meaningless cosmos into which we are thrown by chance, and for no real reason, other than the reasons we ourselves can manufacture. All existentialists deal with that question one way or another, although some are theistic and others are not. I don't think Heidegger was theistic although I have read that his philosophical preoccupations were very much shaped by his early theological concerns (he originally studied divinity). Anyway, as I say, a bit of a flight of ideas on my part.

Grammar varies with languages and one culture's grammar looks like chaos to another's. — Tom Storm

Chomsky says not, that there's an underlying 'universal grammar'.

Isn't that how nihilism shows up in life? I asked my friendly AI helper about Heidegger's view of nihilism, and received the following response:

One of Heidegger's key contributions to the discussion of nihilism is found in his interpretation of Friedrich Nietzsche's proclamation of the "death of God" and the ensuing crisis of values in Western culture. Heidegger interprets Nietzsche's declaration not just as a theological statement but as a metaphysical one, indicating the culmination of Western metaphysics and its inability to provide a grounding for values or meaning. This crisis, according to Heidegger, leads to nihilism, understood as the devaluation of the highest values, and signals a fundamental emptiness or lack of meaning in the modern world.

In his lectures, such as those compiled in "Nietzsche, Volumes I and II," Heidegger explores Nietzsche's thought and its implications for the problem of nihilism. He critiques the Western metaphysical tradition for leading humanity into a state of forgetfulness regarding the question of Being, which he sees as the root cause of nihilism. For Heidegger, overcoming nihilism involves a re-engagement with the question of Being and a move away from the metaphysical conception of truth and values.

Furthermore, in "The Question Concerning Technology" and other essays, Heidegger discusses the role of technology in shaping modern human existence and its contribution to the nihilistic condition. He argues that the essence of technology as a mode of enframing reveals a world where everything is seen as a resource to be exploited, further distancing humanity from a meaningful engagement with Being.

I put it that this raises the question of what a 'meaningful engagement of Being' amounts to. I said we've become distanced from Being because of the illusion of otherness or separation, the sense that we are standing apart from or outside our experience-of-the-world, which in turn is based on the conceptual framework that we view it through:

Your reflection touches on a profound aspect of Martin Heidegger's philosophy, particularly his critique of the modern age and the technological mindset that, according to him, leads to a form of existential alienation. Heidegger's entire project, starting with "Being and Time" (1927), is an attempt to reawaken the question of Being, which he believed had been neglected since the time of the ancient Greeks. This neglect, in his view, leads to a form of nihilism because it results in a world where things are valued only for their utility, what he calls "the enframing" (Gestell). (e.g. valuing reason only for of its adaptive utility, what use it provides ~ wf.)

Heidegger's engagement with nihilism isn't always direct but can be inferred from his critique of the history of Western metaphysics, which he saw as progressively obscuring our relationship to Being. According to Heidegger, this alienation is not just a matter of mistaken thought but is deeply embedded in the way we interact with the world and each other, particularly through technology, which turns everything, including humans, into resources to be exploited. This condition exacerbates the sense of otherness or separation you mentioned, where we come to view ourselves, others, and the world around us as objects among objects, rather than being integrally connected to the world.

A "meaningful engagement with Being," for Heidegger, involves a fundamental shift in our understanding of ourselves and our place in the world. It requires moving away from a conceptual framework that emphasizes separation, utility, and objectification, towards a more original experience of Being. This involves what he calls "thinking," a kind of contemplation that is different from the calculative thinking that dominates the modern world. It's a thinking that dwells on the mystery of Being, that appreciates things in their presence (what he terms "presencing") rather than just their utility.

This shift also entails a different way of relating to the world and others, characterized by what Heidegger calls "care" (Sorge) and "being-with" (Mitsein). Instead of seeing ourselves as isolated subjects confronting an external world, Heidegger encourages us to recognize our fundamental interconnectedness with the world and others (this is where aspects of Heidegger have been compared to the Buddhist principle of dependent origination ~ wf). This recognition can help overcome the alienation and nihilism of the modern condition by fostering a sense of belonging and responsibility for the world.

Your observation about the illusion of otherness ties directly into this Heideggerian critique. The challenge, as Heidegger sees it, is to overcome this illusion not by denying the reality of our individual experiences, but by recognizing that these experiences are always already situated within a world that we share with others. This involves a more profound engagement with the question of Being, one that acknowledges our fundamental interconnectedness and the ways in which our understanding of ourselves and the world is shaped by this interconnectedness. — ChatGPT