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    The article on neutral monism is a bit scanty, but something is better than nothing.
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    Mach and James understand neutral monism as an especially radical form of achieving perceptual contact with the world. It might be understood as a limiting case of naïve realism—a case in which the relation between the subject and its perceptual object becomes the identity relation. In perception “subject and object merge” (James 1905: 57). A single reality—a red patch, say, when we see a tomato—is a constituent of two groups of neutral entities: the group that is the perceiver, and the group that is the tomato. The mind and its object become one. In James’s words:

    A given undivided portion of experience, taken in one context of associates, plays the part of the knower, or a state of mind, or “consciousness”; while in a different context the same undivided bit of experience plays the part of a thing known, of an objective “content”. In a word, in one group it figures as a thought, in another group as a thing.
    ....
    The most frequent type of objection to the traditional versions of neutral monism is that they are forms of mentalistic monism: Berkleyan idealism, panpsychism, or phenomenalism. The core argument is simple: sensations (Mach), pure experience (James) and sensations/percepts (Russell) are paradigms of non-neutral, mental entities. Hence there is nothing neutral about these neutral monisms. This type of objection—the “mentalism suspicion”—has been articulated by a diverse group of philosophers...
    **************************************
    https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/neutral-monism/#MindBodyProb

    The objection is initially understandable. There's a tendency of neutral monists to cling to a still-subjective terminology. But I hope I've explained this tendency. What is given (just check yourself) is a care-structured 'streaming' of being with a sentient body as its roving center. Small wonder then the tendency to conflate the no-longer-subjective transcendental ego with the psychological ego. Both are associated with the same body, and we reason about others in terms of their awareness and what they have a right to claim.
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    A man from the country seeks "the law"[1] and wishes to gain entry to it through an open doorway, but the doorkeeper tells the man that he cannot go through at the present time. The man asks if he can ever go through, and the doorkeeper says it is possible "but not now (jetzt aber nicht)". The man waits by the door for years, bribing the doorkeeper with everything he has. The doorkeeper accepts the bribes, but tells the man he only accepts them "so that you do not think you have left anything undone". The man does not attempt to gain entry by force, but waits at the doorway until he is about to die. Right before his death, he asks the doorkeeper why, even though everyone seeks the law, no one else has come in all the years he has been there. The doorkeeper answers, "No one else could ever be admitted here, since this gate was made only for you. I am now going to shut it."
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Before_the_Law
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    The instant field of the present is at all times what I call the ‘pure’ experience. It is only virtually or potentially either object or subject as yet. For the time being,it is plain, unqualified actuality, or existence, a simple that.

    'Experience' a slightly confusing synonym for [perspectival, care-structured ] being, in other words.
  • FrancisRay
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    our tone has sometimes been, from my POV, too much on preachy / condescending side. I view us as doing something like science here. When you bash Wittgenstein (a primary influence on this thread), you sound a bit crankish (a bit envious-bitter maybe of the fame of the charismatic man .) And you speak of Russell thinking Wittgenstein was a fool, but that's contrary to the well known details of their story. I've read biographies of both. And this is not a matter of my sentimental attachment. If you recklessly speak contrary to the facts or tear down the 'mighty dead,' then that's a stumblingblock to your credibility. You ought to explain how all the other shrewd readers could be so silly as to get things so wrong.plaque flag

    All this is very fair. I should have been more careful.

    Russell did express uncertainty as to whether Wittgenstein was a genius or a fool, and it's true that I think he is not worth reading. As you say, however, I can't just waive my arms around but must make the case.

    I should have made it clear that I think most of western philosophy is also a waste of time. Nobody claims to understand philosophy and it just just goes round and round in circles. In the perennial tradition people who don't understand the topic don't write about it. . . .

    I once spoke on the phone with George Spencer Brown, a colleague of Russell's, and asked him why Russell had been unable to see the meaning of Brown's book Laws of Form,, which is of vast importance in metaphysics.,despite praising it as presenting a valuable new calculus. He replied in a friendly and wistful tone, 'Ah, Bertie was a fool'. This does appear to be the explanation and it is my view also.

    I'm afraid that from the perspective on anyone who has understood the perennial philosophy people like Russell and Wittgenstein look foolish for not studying it and for not understanding philosophy as a consequence.

    This attitude looks arrogant and deluded to others, since most people think they know that philosophy cannot be understood and is like quantum mechanics,such that anyone who claims to understand it must be unable to understand it. Meanwhile, in the perennial tradition many people claim to understand it and it is an expectation of students that one day they will. .

    Of course, both were very clever people. Russell was brilliant as a communicator and deserves respect for his his activism on social issues, nuclear arms for instance. But like his protege he failed to solve any problems, refused to study mysticism and made surprisingly basic mistakes. . .

    I completely understand the point you make here. and normally you'd be completely right to make it. The point for me though is that we cannot understand philosophy unless we can see the mistakes made by Russell and Wittgenstein that prevented then from doing so, and once we have done so they do appear rather foolish. If I make any bold remarks that look naive or deluded then you can always ask me to put my money where my mouth is and justify them.

    But okay, I see your point and should have been more circumspect. My impatience with the western academic approach to philosophy got the better of me. The 'mighty dead' you speak of were in some ways mighty, but if they did not understand philosophy then their mightiness was of limited scope. .
  • FrancisRay
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    The world is not just thought. Thought is merely something like its intelligible structure.plaque flag

    I see this as an opinion since you cannot prove it. I would suggest it's an unnecessary assumption,and that it's best not to make it. Cartesian doubt and all that. I feel it's best to start with verifiable facts and build on this foundation.
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    I see this as an opinion since you cannot prove it. I would suggest it's an unnecessary assumption,and that it's best not to make it. Cartesian doubt and all that. I feel it's best to start with verifiable facts and build on this foundation.FrancisRay

    Just to clarify, I mean simply that there is sound, color, hunger, pain. I mean that there are trumpets and not just the thought of trumpets. I mean that real babies get themselves born, that their bodies develop in the real wombs of their mothers. I believe in gingivitis and diarrhea.

    You speak of 'verifiable facts,' but it's hard to make sense of such a phrase in the light of the assumption that only thought exists. We can roughly identity thought here with signitive intention (empty or unfulfilled or unchecked hypothesis or picture of the world). Then a fulfilled intention is us going and looking at the situation. I see that there are two eggs in the fridge. Color, shape, the cool feeling of them in my hand, the crack sound as I smack them against a cast iron edge.
  • FrancisRay
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    But I'd say it's metaphorically nothing, unless that 'nothing' is supposed to point at the framework character of space and time.plaque flag

    Eckhart is very clear. He states they are 'literally nothing'. They are something as appearances, of course, but for an ultimate analysis they are nothing, This is the Buddha;s teaching and more generally that of the perennial philosophy. It is logically proved by the Buddhist master Nagarjuna in his 'Fundamental Verses on the Middle Way. . . . .

    The Buddha's words you quote are consistent with Eckhart's statement. .

    Note that I'm not claiming to be a Buddhist. Instead I'm getting a more universal (perennial?) idea of transcendence in terms of detachment. The world becomes a spectacle. We get 'distance' on it. We find ourselves less 'immersed in the object.'

    We get distance by detachment, although oddly we also get closeness. But this detachment indicates an underlying truth, which is that there is nothing from which to become detached. It is all illusion, and when we see this we are finally and fully detached. The practice of detachment helps us to achieve it, but to fully achieve it requires enlightenment and an understanding of phenomena. . .

    . As far as I can tell, there's not much more to be sought or had than the continual re-attainment of an always fragile state of grace or play. We always fall off the horse again, find ourselves petty and resentful, or just tormented by a health issue, or forced to deal with a dangerous situation where stress (tho never panic) is appropriate.

    Do we agree on this ? Or do you find something that radically 'cures' life in what you call mysticism?

    I would strongly disagree, both on logical and experiential grounds. The teachings of the Buddha are said to be a medicine and this would be the cure. It has to be self-administered since nobody can become enlightened on our behalf, but the teachings are the label on the bottle. The last of the Four Noble Truths is the cessation of suffering. At a certain point in the progress of our knowledge It is revealed as an illusion, as is the person who suffers. Nothing extended in time and space would really exist, and this would include the suffering and the sufferer. .

    Those who are not fully enlightened may to some extent know this and be able to transcend suffering to some degree, but as you say they will sometimes fall off the wagon. It seems Jesus fell off for a moment,while on the cross and feared his non-suffering state had forsaken him. If you check out the story of the brutal execution of the Sufi master Al-Hallaj by the Islamic church you'll see an example of how utterly detached from life, death and suffering one can become and how stable this state is once fully attained. .

    This achievement is within the power of all of us, since it is no more than a recognition of who we are. Thus the cure for suffering is to 'Know Thyself'. This is the entire method of mysticism in two words. All the rest is about helping us to succeed. .

    As the mystics often say for the sake of humility,, 'Thus I have heard'.
  • FrancisRay
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    You speak of 'verifiable facts,' but it's hard to make sense of such a phrase in the light of the assumption that only thought exists. We can roughly identity thought here with signitive intention (empty or unfulfilled or unchecked hypothesis or picture of the world). Then a fulfilled intention is us going and looking at the situation. I see that there are two eggs in the fridge. Color, shape, the cool feeling of them in my hand, the crack sound as I smack them against a cast iron edge.plaque flag

    Unless one is a meditative practitioner It would impossible to sort these issues out without a close study of metaphysics, and this would mean starting with the undecidability of metaphysical questions. This is verifiable regardless of what is and is not a thought. It is a solid foundation on which to start building an extended theory. If we cannot explain this philosophical fact then metaphysics will be incomprehensible.to us. It cannot be explained by Western thinkers, so they believe metaphysics is incomprehensible. It is explained in the perennial philosophy and in a very simple way, but most philosophers don't think this solution is worth studying .It;s an area of philosophy left blank and marked 'Here be dragons', and this is considered a rational approach to philosophy. . . ..
    . . .
  • plaque flag
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    It cannot be explained by Western thinkers, so they believe metaphysics is incomprehensible. It is explained in the perennial philosophy and in a very simple way, but most philosophers don't think this solution is worth studying .It;s an area of philosophy left blank and marked 'Here be dragons', and this is considered a rational approach to philosophy. . . ..FrancisRay

    To me it seems you are underestimating Western philosophy. The greats have not feared to charge the edges of the map. Lately I've been looking into Husserl, who is bold radical ambitious etc. To me this narrative is (I must be honest ) suspiciously vague. The bad guy is vague and so is the good guy, with the skeptical-discursive Western philosopher as the bad guy of course, and the mystical perennial philosopher as the hero.

    You suggest that the skeptical-discursive approach is irrational, but it seems to me you have it backwards. This is just my perspective, but here goes: I take you to be presenting some kind of theory of Direct Insight or Mystical Intuition, associated with a Gnosis that is basically Ineffable. You haven't put it that way, I conceded, but that to me is the gist, the background structure. I could of course be mistaken, but I'll respond to this type of approach in any case.

    My issue with that is that the ineffable is either ineffable or it's not. If the true knowledge is trans-conceptual or trans-discursive, then there's a performative contradiction in arguing for it. And showing up to argue something in the first place is the pursuit for recognition discussed by Hegel and Kojeve, manifesting the sociality of reason and the centrality of conversation (dialectic, rationality, discursivity) after all.

    I imagine the 'ineffable' sage to be beyond the need for recognition, consistent enough to not bother arguing for what argument can never reveal. Are such people out there ? Probably a few. But they don't show up. Maybe some of them once showed up, but then they realized the futility of talking. I myself embrace the partial futility of talking. Most seeds land where the plant cannot grow.
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    To me phenomenology is a kind of positivism. Husserl : We [phenomenologists] are the true positivists.

    The basic affirmations of positivism are (1) that all knowledge regarding matters of fact is based on the “positive” data of experience and (2) that beyond the realm of fact is that of pure logic and pure mathematics. Those two disciplines were already recognized by the 18th-century Scottish empiricist and skeptic David Hume as concerned merely with the “relations of ideas,” and, in a later phase of positivism, they were classified as purely formal sciences. On the negative and critical side, the positivists became noted for their repudiation of metaphysics—i.e., of speculation regarding the nature of reality that radically goes beyond any possible evidence that could either support or refute such “transcendent” knowledge claims. In its basic ideological posture, positivism is thus worldly, secular, antitheological, and antimetaphysical. Strict adherence to the testimony of observation and experience is the all-important imperative of positivism.
    https://www.britannica.com/topic/positivism


    It is a more honest or shrewd positivism in that it doesn't simply assume a crude sense-data picture of experience, which indeed is merely a traditional metaphysical prejudice, or a gap between experience and the real world in the first place that goes along with such a picture.

    Others take their phenomenology differently, but I like to take in in the spirit of philosophers like Ernst Mach or William James --- in a scientific as opposed to a mystical spirit. Given that positivism is metaphysical in some sense, it must be anti-metaphysical with respect to a certain kind of constructive or 'floating' metaphysical system. Nothing is hidden. Or, more accurately, we concern ourselves with what is 'given,' with what can be checked by all participants in a basically scientific inquiry, but one that includes a 'radical' or 'first-philosophy' investigation of the very meaning of such scientificity.
  • FrancisRay
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    To me it seems you are underestimating Western philosophy. The greats have not feared to charge the edges of the map.plaque flag

    There are a few exceptions, of course, but for most philosophers it has only become practically possible to study this area of knowledge in recent times. I believe Schopenhauer was the first to dive into this rabbit hole. After hon there are others but they;re few and far between. The average professor know next to nothing on this topic. .

    As you say. even those who do tend to speak vaguely and not helpfully. But please don't think the sceptical rational approach is at fault in any way. It;s t he approach I take. I;m suggesting that this approach demands a study of mysticism, and that it this is avoided it is not a sceptical rational approach. .In other words, I would accuse most philosophers in the tradition of Kant and Russell of doing t heir job badly, not of using the wrong methods. My complaint against the academic community is poor scholarship, not poor methods.

    It's not my approach that is backwards, it's the approach you think I'm taking. I'm just doing philosophy the usual way. A plausible theory must be proved in logic, not just wafted around as an idea.

    I;m certainly not suggesting we must settle for the 'ineffable sage'. For a not-practitioner the only way to make sense to hat such people say is a cold-hearted sceptical study of metaphysics. This is what I was suggesting earlier. It would be pointless expecting anyone to conduct a study of metaphysics and mysticism it it has to depend on ineffable ideas and unprovable conjectures.and only a great sage could understand it. I;m suggesting that most people could understand it.once they know the trick.

    Of course,this approach doesn't lead to a sages understanding of the world, but understanding how to make sense of metaphysics is a much easier task.
  • FrancisRay
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    The basic affirmations of positivism are (1) that all knowledge regarding matters of fact is based on the “positive” data of experience and (2) that beyond the realm of fact is that of pure logic and pure mathematics. Those two disciplines were already recognized by the 18th-century Scottish empiricist and skeptic David Hume as concerned merely with the “relations of ideas,” and, in a later phase of positivism, they were classified as purely formal sciences. On the negative and critical side, the positivists became noted for their repudiation of metaphysics—i.e., of speculation regarding the nature of reality that radically goes beyond any possible evidence that could either support or refute such “transcendent” knowledge claims. In its basic ideological posture, positivism is thus worldly, secular, antitheological, and antimetaphysical. Strict adherence to the testimony of observation and experience is the all-important imperative of positivism.

    This is exactly the sort of approach that I would warn everybody to avoid. If we do philosophy like this we will become lost forever in a muddle of ideas and details. Clearly the positivists have no understanding of metaphysics and what it does and does not prove. this passage is typical of the hopelessness of western academic philosophy. It depends on the idea that metaphysics is incomprehensible,and we might as well just speculate wildly and in all sorts of complex ways and make life hell for students of the subject. .

    These are not empty words. But I can't back them up without presenting an argument and this means going back to the undecidability of metaphysical questions. . .
  • plaque flag
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    This is exactly the sort of approach that I would warn everybody to avoid. If we do philosophy like this we will become lost forever in a muddle of ideas and details.FrancisRay

    I'd say that those ideas and details are philosophy. Tho I will grant you that the point is to grasp some 'theorems' of value. In math, for instance, a theorem might be 'obviously' true after a certain amount of experience. But proofs are a kind of hygiene: we make sure we aren't deluded, and we find a ladder to aid the intuition that really matters.
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    But please don't think the sceptical rational approach is at fault in any way. It;s t he approach I take. I;m suggesting that this approach demands a study of mysticism, and that it this is avoided it is not a sceptical rational approach.FrancisRay
    :up:

    I might agree with you here. 'Mysticism' is not easy to define exactly. But I will agree that plenty of 'skepticism' can be close-minded, which is to say that it makes 'unconscious' assumptions.

    I ask you not to make that kind of error here tho with my talk of positivism. The basic affirmations of positivism are (1) that all knowledge regarding matters of fact is based on the “positive” data of experience and (2) that beyond the realm of fact is that of pure logic and pure mathematics. What is so offensive in this ? To me it's pretty much the requirement that we know what we are talking about -- that we speak from experience. This is almost a tautology.

    It's only a narrow, prejudiced version of positivism that's problematic, in my view. For instance, some people simply assumed that only 'sense data' were given. But this is a complete fiction, a superstition. What we find when we just look is a rich and meaningful lifeworld. Breaking things up into elements (sensations) is a late, sophisticated theoretical act. Now this act has value (Mach used it powerfully), but it is obviously not 'the given' or the 'raw' 'data' of experience. Husserl (inIdeas II, for instance) and Heidegger (in many lectures leading up to and within Being and Time) convincingly sketch the structure of this lifeworld --- of pre-theoretical experience. That's genuine positivism: describing how it is. Not my fancy theory of what it must be.
  • plaque flag
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    this passage is typical of the hopelessness of western academic philosophy. It depends on the idea that metaphysics is incomprehensible,and we might as well just speculate wildly and in all sorts of complex ways and make life hell for students of the subject.FrancisRay

    But I can't back them up without presenting an argument and this means going back to the undecidability of metaphysical questions. . .FrancisRay

    You yourself say that metaphysical questions are undecidable. That's a fairly positivist claim, it seems to me. The positivists are saying 'we might as well talk nonsense' but just the reverse. There's a serious scientific intention positivism and phenomenology. I do understand that there's a personality type associated with the term. One might fairly expect that a positivist is also a physicalist who hates spiritual traditions. But I say not so fast. Wittgenstein is a famous exception, but we can also think about John Stuart Mill. There's a streak in empiricism that leads directly into the nondual tradition. A strict or serious positivist wants to know, with Berkeley, what 'matter' can even mean if it's not merely patterns in experience. But of course experience is only 'mental' against the contrast of some kind of elusive non-mental stuff. So we get the breakthrough to monist neutral phenomenalist perspectivism --- ontological cubism -- or whatever one wants to call it.
  • plaque flag
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    It's not my approach that is backwards, it's the approach you think I'm taking. I'm just doing philosophy the usual way. A plausible theory must be proved in logic, not just wafted around as an idea.FrancisRay

    :up:

    I very much appreciate the clarification and the politeness with which you addressed my concern. To quote an excellent show (The Bear) : heard, chef.
  • plaque flag
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    I should have made it clear that I think most of western philosophy is also a waste of time. Nobody claims to understand philosophy and it just just goes round and round in circles. In the perennial tradition people who don't understand the topic don't write about it. . . .FrancisRay

    I'll meet you half way. There's a certain type of philosopher who is a fundamentally and even methodically boring. Maybe this is connected to the ways of academia and more generally to the usual conformism of respectable types. All roads lead to a certain sanitized vaguely pro-science political correctness. To saying almost nothing but I'm Clean.

    This attitude looks arrogant and deluded to others, since most people think they know that philosophy cannot be understood and is like quantum mechanics, such that anyone who claims to understand it must be unable to understand it.FrancisRay

    I can relate to this in terms of my point above. We might call it idolatry or fame-worship. It's like people believing in genius or insight only at a distance. No one 'here with me in Nazareth' actually gets it.

    But I invoke [genuine ] positivism again. What have I experience ? What have I personally verified ? Can I paraphrase the thinkers I pretend to understand ? Can I personally generate proofs or at least make a strong case for my major theses ?

    This is part of my rejection of 'Kantianism' (and yet my acceptance of a certain interpretation of Kant). It's pointless to gesture beyond experience, beyond what I understand, except as a mere horizon of possible experience and understanding. The great thinker is only realized (for me) within my own cognition. I have to 'become' that great thinker in order to understand them. So the false humility thing is indeed a confusion, though a true humility with respect to fallible and endless interpretation is fitting.
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    We get distance by detachment, although oddly we also get closeness. But this detachment indicates an underlying truth, which is that there is nothing from which to become detached. It is all illusion, and when we see this we are finally and fully detached. The practice of detachment helps us to achieve it, but to fully achieve it requires enlightenment and an understanding of phenomena.FrancisRay

    I think 'illusion' has to be a kind of metaphor here. As I see it, all 'experience' is 'real.' But of course we make practical distinctions, and the word 'real' mostly functions that way.

    In this context, the so-called illusion becomes so with the detachment. I transform the world into an 'empty' spectacle by a change in attitude or investment.

    How would you define 'enlightenment'? I've tended to be wary of binary understandings of this word. In my experience, our spiritual focus or transcendence is highly variable. We fall off the ludic hobbyhorse, forget to laugh, forget that all is 'empty' procession (hebel).
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    I once spoke on the phone with George Spencer Brown, a colleague of Russell's, and asked him why Russell had been unable to see the meaning of Brown's book Laws of Form,, which is of vast importance in metaphysics.,despite praising it as presenting a valuable new calculus. He replied in a friendly and wistful tone, 'Ah, Bertie was a fool'. This does appear to be the explanation and it is my view also.FrancisRay

    I've look into that book, but I didn't find it gripping enough to keep going. I may give it another chance. I'm trained as a mathematician, so I recall it being technically daunting. My mere suspicion is that it'll be similar to Wittgenstein somehow, who also worked at the intersection of mysticism and logic. If you care to paraphrase the gist of the work, I'm all ears. What does it mean to you ?

    Was 'Bertie' a fool ? Anecdotally, my opinion on him has jumped around. His crude attack on Nietzsche in his history of philosophy is embarrassing, but politics and its intense tribalism brings out the stupid in people. I found him quoted in Szasz lately, and I was impressed by the quotes. The whole I-hate-Hegel thing associated with people like him is annoying, but maybe it's good that some people started from scratch, if only to re-achieve Hegelian insights in a lingo in which they were more at home.

    Still, this is all just gossip basically. I think it's good to fess up to biases, but it's not the real work of course. I've 'hated' thinkers who ended up being important to me. So I've learned not to trust initial reactions. It's as if we always first try to save ourselves the trouble of assimilation with an uncharitable reading.
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    The point for me though is that we cannot understand philosophy unless we can see the mistakes made by Russell and Wittgenstein that prevented then from doing so, and once we have done so they do appear rather foolish. If I make any bold remarks that look naive or deluded then you can always ask me to put my money where my mouth is and justify them.FrancisRay

    I think you should justify your dismissal of Wittgenstein. In my view, you are underrating him. I'm not his agent, and I don't take him for an authority. It's just think he deserves the fame. Same with Heidegger -- though I'd drag into Husserl more and stress some undernoticed early Heidegger (lectures 1919 on.)


    Aesthetically, the miracle is that the world exists. That what exists does exist.
    ....
    This is the way I have travelled: Idealism singles men out from the world as unique, solipsism singles me alone out, and at last I see that I too belong with the rest of the world, and so on the one side nothing is left over, and on the other side, as unique, the world. In this way idealism leads to realism if it is strictly thought out.

    Is belief a kind of experience?
    Is thought a kind of experience?

    All experience is world and does not need the subject.
    — Witt : Notebooks

    This is early Wittgenstein. A lean, direct presentation of nondualism. Thou art that. The 'false' (or relatively shallow) subject is of course the body and the psychological-normative subject. But (I think we agree) the 'deep' subject is no longer subject but the very being of the world itself -- its only kind of being (that we can know of, speak of sensibly.)
  • Janus
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    That metaphysical questions are undecidable is also my view. As soon as we say anything like "reality is mind-dependent' or 'being is nothing but consciousnes' we have gone off-track.

    Distinctions begin with consciousness.
  • plaque flag
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    That metaphysical questions are undecidable is also my view. As soon as we say anything like "reality is mind-dependent' or 'being is nothing but consciousnes' we have gone off-track.

    Distinctions begin with consciousness.
    Janus

    I not disagreeing with distinctions begin with consciousness, but I don't so why this isn't the answer to a metaphysical question. I suggest that even positivism is at least implicitly metaphysical.
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    Here's Hume on selves:

    they are nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement. ...The mind is a kind of theatre, where several perceptions successively make their appearance; pass, re-pass, glide away, and mingle in an infinite variety of postures and situations. ... The comparison of the theatre must not mislead us. They are the successive perceptions only, that constitute the mind... — Hume

    Given the nature of language/logic, this is perspectival perception of the world [that world's beingthere, in fact] , and so we have world-streamings.
  • Janus
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    It seems to me that to say distinctions begin with consciousness is to articulate a phenomenological observation based on reflection on a question: to wit 'how could there be a distinction without consciousness'?

    This is not to say that there could not be differences without consciousness, as there seems to be no way of making sense of the idea that distinction or consciousness without difference.
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    I'm looking into nondualism in other traditions.

    ...there is in reality no duality between the "experiencing self" (jiva) and Brahman, the Ground of Being.

    According to Ram-Prasad, "it" is not an object, but "the irreducible essence of being [as] subjectivity, rather than an objective self with the quality of consciousness."[122]

    The jivatman or individual self is a mere reflection of singular Atman in a multitude of apparent individual bodies.[9] It is "not an individual subject of consciousness,"[120] but the same in each person and identical to the universal eternal Brahman,[128] a term used interchangeably with Atman.[129]

    Atman is often translated as soul,[note 25] though the two concepts differ significantly, since "soul" includes mental activities, whereas "Atman" solely refers to detached witness-consciousness.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advaita_Vedanta

    To me this all reads exactly like what I'm calling nondual perspectivism.

    "it" is not an object, but "the irreducible essence of being [as] subjectivity,

    Being-as-subjectivity is body-centered perspectival worldstreaming. The stream of becoming is pure 'world' (really prior to world or self) but also structured as a person, even seated in a person. Heidegger's Dasein is not a bad description of the character of this being, a doing-of-dishes, a biting-of-nails, a writing-of-non-dual-philosophy.
  • Janus
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    ...there is in reality no duality between the "experiencing self" (jiva) and Brahman, the Ground of Being.plaque flag

    I interpret that to mean that consciousness is not separate from being, not that consciousness is being or that being is consciousness through and through.
  • plaque flag
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    I interpret that to mean that consciousness is not separate from being, not that consciousness is being or that being is consciousness through and through.Janus

    If you don't mind, what do you mean by consciousness is not separate from being ?
  • Janus
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    I would say it means that consciousness cannot stand or exist apart from being.
  • plaque flag
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    It seems to me that to say distinctions begin with consciousness is to articulate a phenomenological observation based on reflection on a question: to wit 'how could there be a distinction without consciousness'?Janus

    I agree that distinctions depend on consciousness, but I understand consciousness as [perspectival ] being itself. Of course this only makes sense, so far as I can tell, in that perspectivistic context. I expect the world to outlast me, in as other worldstreamings.

    Consciousness is world-from-perspective, and it's correlated or associated with sentient flesh. So I can talk about whether someone else is conscious or not. Their body (after a head injury perhaps) may or may not be an independent 'site of being' or 'spatial origin' for a 'worldstreaming' --- even as their heart pumps on.
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    I say it means that consciousness cannot stand or exist apart from being.Janus

    But being can stand apart from all consciousness ?
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