I rather like the idea of, say, having an AI guide to Plato's Dialogues, which would read the text on demand, and then also provide commentary from authors of your choosing. I'm sure all this is going to be happening soon. — Wayfarer

I was thinking similarly re Heidegger. You could choose the AI guide of your preferences - the existentialist reading or the post-modern reading, say, and do immediate contrasts from the text. Do we need to get out more often?

They were formed by traveling pastors, often with limited education, with fire and brimstone speeches in their distinctive barking voice, with the powers of heaven causing wild gyrations, speaking in tongues, and protecting them from the serpents they handle. — Hanover

American expressions of culture and religion fascinate me. ( I say that as an Australian).

I think ‘radical’ depends upon your foundational beliefs. It’s one of those words. The Bishop here disdainfully called them 'maverick' priests.

The priest was obviously Catholic and would not have been as influenced by the Protestant traditions — Hanover

We spend a lot of time talking about radical priests - Thomas Merton, Richard Rohr - who are not always well liked by the church hierarchy and often influenced by mystic and Eastern spiritual traditions. The Catholic church is also engaged in a nasty internal culture war between progressives and conservatives. Doing good and making change in the world is far more important than doctrine for the progressives.

An interesting and paradoxical thing about many fundamentalists I have known is that they are not particularly familiar with the Bible - apart form a few frequently recycled quotes. Pastors may in theory have the same status as others in the congregation, but generally hold a degree of power over interpretation and the culture of their church, often through charisma or personality.

:up:

:up:

:up: I've always had time for J Krishnamurti - the anthology Think on These Things was revelatory in my youth three decades ago. But of course now I'm a somewhat tedious atheist and philosophical neophyte. :wink:

Thanks. That's a sophisticated lens you are applying. I'll need to think it over.

And then I would like to forbid any discussion about the existence or non-existence of these, because the game is to realise them in one's life — unenlightened

This reminds me of my friend John (who is a priest) who says 'Forget Jesus, be Christlike!' Is this the kind of thing you mean?

One might believe in 'truth, justice, and the American way', but no serious person could claim they exist, only that they seek to manifest them in the way they conduct own life. — unenlightened

Ok, there it is again. I think I get it. Does this come from a broader philosophical system or school? It seems to be focused on practice and virtue.

I'm not saying that Christianity has the answers, or that any religion has the answers. I'm not saying that things were better in the good old days. — unenlightened

I'm not saying that you did.

The scientific mythos is so impoverished as to be useless - mind as malfunctioning computer. — unenlightened

What do you mean by scientific mythos (and perhaps avoid fundamentalists like Dawkins in this)?

The language of human psychology is always mythological, because psyche cannot contain a complete understanding of itself — unenlightened

I often think all language is metaphor, whatever it might be.

Mainly what I am attacking is the implied moral superiority of the modern mind. It is the same mind as the primitive mind, but has lost the language with which to even talk about the conflict, never mind resolve it. — unenlightened

This is an interesting thesis. I've often argued that we replaced the worship of god with the worship of 'reality' and I don't think we have access to reality or can even define it, except in the shallowest terms.

Where do you see the solutions to these problems you have described?

I and others would give anything to not be this way, but we learn to deal because there is nothing else. It's almost like trying to acknowledge that fact would make folks question themselves. — Darkneos

I think that sounds fair enough. It can be aggravating to have people tell us that we can be the best we can if we just love ourselves and 'find strength' in our differences.

I hear you. I just wondered what the difference might be in behaviours between literalism as reaction and how to live as direction.

Are you seeing the triumph of open-minded tolerance all around you? — unenlightened

In the world I experience directly, yes. In the world provided to me through media, not much. Although tolerance is a funny word; do I want to be 'tolerated' or understood and accepted?

Do you have a view about what Christianity was like before this period of reaction against atheism? Was its concern with how people should live exercised with more tolerance and open mindedness?

I don't place Granny outside the time period described by unenlightened in his reference to the rise of Christian fundamentalism. — Hanover

Her chronological time is incidental, her faith came from a direct line going back to before the middle ages. :wink: Nevertheless she was unspoiled by media and modernism. And I wouldn't say she was a fundamentalist, more of a primitivist.

So critical intelligence is the cause of literal-minded ignorance? Freethinking causes unthinking violence? Logical thinking causes magical thinking? The decentering Mediocrity Principle & Darwinian Evolution cause reactionary Manichaean conspiracies & "end of days" cults? "Atheism" has caused the Christian blood libel of Jews, the Crusades against Muslims, millennia of Hindu castes, well over a millennium of pogroms persecutions tortures and executions of indigenous heathens, "heretics", Jews, Gypsies, "witches", homosexuals, et al culminating in cyclical fraternal blood orgies aka "Wars of Religion" principly in Europe & the Middle East? then modern day Jihadi & Zionist terrorisms? and all In The Name Of God ... "because of the infidels"?! :eyes: — 180 Proof

Nicely put. :clap: I suspect that religion has increasingly appeared more fundamentalist and inadequate as education and human knowledge have expanded, while the role of god has diminished. No doubt many practitioners of religion have had to double down, become louder and more truth denying in order to justify their unwarranted value systems and supernatural beliefs against reason and scepticism.

My grandma, who was born in the 1880's, was a typical European Christian of her time. In the 1970's she told me no one had ever gotten to the moon because God and heaven 'are in the sky and people can't get there until they die'. So much for post-Nietzschean, death-of-God nihilism. She was a sweet lady, but like most of her kind, celebrated ignorance because it glorified her scriptures and reinforced that faith alone was the right answer to every question. She got there without the help of any atheists.

However, since it is provably impossible for explain consciousness under physicalism, — Bob Ross

I wonder if this is a bit dogmatic? I don't think we can say it is impossible yet. I agree that there is no obvious answer at hand, but thinkers like Metzinger point in certain directions. But even if all forms of physicalism end up being superseded, this does not make mind-at-large necessary - there might be any number of other explanations we have not yet considered. I wonder about our expertise to make totalising statements on this highly complex and speculative subject. I also wonder about the limitations of human cognition to solve some of the problems we seem to identify.

Yes, I think that's very interesting too but conceptually very complex.

What we need to grasp is that all we know of existence — whether of the rock, or the screen you're looking at, or the Universe at large — is a function of our world-making intelligence, the activity of the hominid forebrain which sets us apart from other species. That’s what ‘empirical reality’ consists of. After all, the definition of ‘empirical’ is ‘based on, concerned with, or verifiable by observation or experience.’ So, asking of the Universe ‘How does it exist outside our observation or experience of it?’ is an unanswerable question. — Wayfarer

I think that's a helpful summary and I don't think I can do better as a provisional overview.

That synthesis constitutes our experience-of-the-world. It is not an hallucination or figment of the imagination, but the mind constitutes the imaginative matrix within which all of this exists. — Wayfarer

Almost a Kantian position.

Object permanence. My limited understanding of Berkeley is that things 'exist' when no one is looking because God is looking.

That is not what Berkeley's idealism is claiming. — Wayfarer

Berkeley has the mind of God to hold everything in place. Ditto Kastrup with mind-at-large. Kastrup devoted quite some time on this in one of his lectures - the role of great mind and object permanence is precisely the matter I am hoping to hear more about. Kastrup actually says something like the reason his car is there in his garage when he is in bed at night is mind-at-large.

Such ideas are not remote in principle from various formulations of panentheism or the kinds of cosmo-psychism found in Advaita Vedanta and is also not too far removed from the idea of the Intellect (nous) in neoplatonic philosophy. — Wayfarer

Yes, I think that's very interesting.

Kastrup argues, long story short, that it does account for reality and better than reductive physicalism. — Bob Ross

Probably only if you accept the somewhat outlandish idea that there is a mind-at-large which we are all 'offshoots' of. I'm not sure this is a better account or in any way demonstrable. But I like his ambition.

At what point might Kastrup's answer to materialism be a case of 'mind-at-large of the gaps'?

As I see it, Kastrup does two jobs. 1) He undermines accounts of physicalism (but probably not all accounts) and 2) he posits an alternative account or 'reality'. He rather relies upon the frailties of the former in order to justify his version of latter. I think the first job is easier than the second.

I'm saying that morality cannot exist without God. Within God's definition is the moral. So it's not that morality exists because God exists; it's that if God exists, morality exists, and if God doesn't exist, morality doesn't exist. — Hanover

How do you know that?

If I declare moral realism, where is this moral realm? — Hanover

Buggered if I know.

:up:

There is a factual difference between 'data' and 'information'. 'Data is an individual unit that contains raw materials which do not carry any specific meaning. — Wayfarer

I guess I'm getting too micro now because I struggle with the idea that raw data isn't already subjected to implicit ordering and categorisation before we then consciously set out to assimilate it further in some way. We have to recognise it as raw data to begin with, right?

My theism requires a creator. That's it. With it comes the power to create. From it, derives purpose, meaning, and a basis for morality missing in secular humanism. You cannot have an absolute morality without something anchoring it beyond human reason, which means murder is wrong unless I think it's not. It also establishes humanity as holy, sacred, and separated from all else. — Hanover

But that just sounds like a magic spell - it seems to be declaring that purpose, sacredness and objective morality exist because god exists. Presto! Can you explain how you know that a god makes this possible? Isn't it simply the case that theists formulate a subjective morality based on what they think a god wants? The personal preferences of theists seem to be the foundation of god-based morality. Hence the broad range and incompatible moral views theists hold, even within the one religion.

Your claim that absolute morality can only exist if there is a guarantee of that absolute morality is reasonable to a point, but it doesn't seem tied to anything substantive. Isn't it like saying absolute morality exists if there is absolute morality? I'm not clear how you have demonstrated 1) That there is a god 2) How you know that god is the foundation of morality. 3) How you or anyone knows what this god's morality consists of.

I'm sure your account of god is more subtle and philosophical than anthropomorphic and personal, but I wonder how you know anything about this 'entity' that can be used to guide any practices or choices made in life.

How do you feel about Kastrup's most extraordinary claim, that humans and all conscious creatures are dissociated alters of mind-at-large?

I initially thought that the need for a mind-at-large made Kastrup similar to Berkeley, for whom all consciousness exists in the mind of God. Like Berkeley, Kastrup requires some way to explain object permanence and refute solipsism. Kastrup explains the differences in his blog (August 13, 2015).

My formulation of idealism differs from Berkeley's subjective idealism in at least two points: (a) I argue for a single subject, explaining the apparent multiplicity of subjects as a top-down dissociative process. Berkeley never addressed this issue directly, implicitly assuming many subjects; and (b) I argue that the cognition of the non-dissociated aspect of mind-at-large ('God' in Berkeley's formulation) is not human-like, so it experiences the world in a manner incommensurable with human perception (details in this essay). In Berkeley's formulation, God perceives the world just as we do.

Mind-at-large is critical to Kastrup's position. I wonder how we can arrive at a reasonable belief that this entity is all there is and that we are all expressions of it?

Data is not built, it is the raw material. What is built is interpretation, what the data means - that is the difference between data and information. — Wayfarer

But wouldn't it be naive to think we have access to data that is unmediated or raw? Or are you saying that the raw material is like noumena - there is something there but we don't see it as it is.

If data is built by us from our perspective, then doesn't this come from 'inside' us - our cognitive apparatus, our values, our language?

But the answer I was looking for was: you can’t find it, because it’s not there. The perspective is always outside. — Wayfarer

Outside? I thought perspective came from inside us.

So the observer plays an absolutely crucial role in this respect. Linde expresses it graphically: 'thus we see that without introducing an observer, we have a dead universe, which does not evolve in time', and, 'we are together, the Universe and us. The moment you say the Universe exists without any observers, I cannot make any sense out of that. I cannot imagine a consistent theory of everything that ignores consciousness...in the absence of observers, our universe is dead'. — Paul Davies, The Goldilocks Enigma: Why is the Universe Just Right for Life, p 271

Dramatic language. I don't disagree but what does this leave us with? Obviously the best we can do is develop tentative, fallibilistic accounts and theories that often work in the world pragmatically. I don't think this says we can use philosophy or spirituality to transcend the perspectival trap we appear to be in, or is this your proposed way out of the bottle?

where, in the objective data, is ‘the perspective’? — Wayfarer

I'd flip that, perhaps - where in the perspective is the objective data? Answer: who can say?

It's all in the perspective - the view from somewhere.

If you posit special significance for humanity, you're not concerning yourself with truth. You're just lying to yourself for some pragmatic reason. — Hanover

That's more like it. I hope this turns into a fruitful discussion. :wink:

I think it's very important to challenge all theistic claims Tom. YES! it does remotely matter. — universeness

I was saying whatever the story is meant to mean doesn't remotely matter.

I just asked my friend (a Catholic Priest) to explain the Trinity to me. After he stopped laughing he said that all three are dimensions of God which provide us with different levels of spirituality. Jesus provides redemption and everlasting life and a model of sacrifice; the holy spirit allows us to relate to God's message and communicates it to us; and God is the ineffable creator from which all emanates - including intelligibility, the true, good and beautiful.

Needless to say I am not a customer for any of this god business but I like to get the accounts people offer me as straight as I can. There are of course numerous accounts of the Trinity... this is just one of them.

@universeness Here you go, Comrade. :wink:

So that passage quoted from Magee, which I have no argument with, puts paid to Kastrup's notion of mind at large, and even to Schopenhauer's notion of "noumena as will", since "will' is a human category. — Janus

I would say that Kastrup would argue that Magee does not go far enough. For Kastrup all that is is mentation and for him mind at large is necessary because it allows - as Kastrup says 'for my car to remain extant in my garage when I go inside.' Mind at large allows for object permanence. I think in this way Kastrup is closer to Bishop Berkeley. Abstract from Kastrup's The Universe in Consciousness, 2018

I propose an idealist ontology that makes sense of reality in a more parsimonious and empirically rigorous manner than mainstream physicalism, bottom-up panpsychism, and cosmopsychism. The proposed ontology also offers more explanatory power than these three alternatives, in that it does not fall prey to the hard problem of consciousness, the combination problem, or the decombination problem, respectively. It can be summarized as follows: there is only cosmic consciousness. We, as well as all other living organisms, are but dissociated alters of cosmic consciousness, surrounded by its thoughts. The inanimate world we see around us is the extrinsic appearance of these thoughts. The living organisms we share the world with are the extrinsic appearances of other dissociated alters.

I tired to read books in Kindle form. I can't. Any articles I read I also ususally have to print out first. I have to have books - the feel, the smell, the technology of pages is part of the process of reading for me. Screens just don't hold my attention.

My surprise and puzzlement is about the continued interest in the illusion of imperative oughts among people who spend their lives studying morality - moral philosophers. — Mark S

Oh I see. Surely there must be several reasons. One being the attraction so many minds have for certainty and truth. Surely that quest has often created a type of blindness.

But that's not his hypothesis (or he's being disingenous). Kastrup's hypothesis is idealism. Idealism claims that this is all the dream of a cosmic mind/god. Mutations, entanglement, physics, the universe, the Big Bang, etc., none of it is real. It's all just elements of the dream. — RogueAI

Does he use this dream metaphor, I must have missed this?

To be fair he doesn't say 'it is not real' he says it is not what we think it is. All reality is mind and those mutations, the universe, entanglement, etc - are aspects of how mind presents itself when viewed through the dissociative divide - through our perspective as 'alters' of Mind-at-Large. It's an elaborate narrative and you'd need to read his detailed account to make better sense of it. At this point I don't have enough interest to do this.

Nice. Thank you.

This is nonsense. Of course you know what it's like to be you. If physicalists have to make this sort of move to salvage their position, they've lost. It's not convincing to anyone. — RogueAI

I didn't say this as a physicalist but as someone trying to make sense of 'what it's like to be.' Maybe you can explain what it means as I am unable to access an experience that coherently matches the statement.

Fair assessment. How do you respond to the claim that science is founded on a metaphysical position - that reality can be understood? Or do you view science as being less totalising than this claim and more tentative in its approach?