I think your Epistemological approach is more appropriate for a philosophy forum, than the Empirical methods that some advocate. Besides, the Uncertainty Principle of Quantum Physics seemed to open the door to Epistemological discussions. But injecting Philosophy into Physics often raises objections of Mysticism and Woo-woo. So, we typically avoid using the fraught term "spiritual" when referring to Mental, as opposed to Material, essences & causes. Does Phenomenology successfully bridge over the spooky abyss of Spiritualism? :smile:The approach in the Mind Created World is epistemological rather than ontological - about the nature of knowing rather than about what the world is made from or of. I said 'The constitution of material objects is a matter for scientific disciplines (although I’m well aware that the ultimate nature of these constituents remains an open question in theoretical physics).' Also notice the word 'spiritual' does not appear in it. — Wayfarer
Does Phenomenology successfully bridge over the spooky abyss of Spiritualism? — Gnomon
The urge to devour and assimilate what is not oneself. — Jamal
Don't feel bad. — Jamal
if you don't agree then you must not have understood" — Janus
The urge to devour and assimilate what is not oneself. — Jamal
That's an interesting take. Instead of oneself being a small part of the Universe, the Universe must instead be seen as being a small part of oneself. — Janus
What I think I see is that conversations on the forum often get stuck around 1) the justification of axioms, 2) accusations of misunderstanding or bad faith, 3) acrimony. It’s as if we’re hard-wired for conflict over difference. The worst offenders seem to call others liars and sophists when they are challenged by difference. — Tom Storm
Not all the exchanges in this thread have been acrimonious, in fact they're the minority. — Wayfarer
As far as being dogmatic is concerned, please be so kind as to indicate where you think this shows up in the OP. — Wayfarer
These are good points Tom. I think people often forget that what they are presenting is merely one perspective. If they react defensively it seems to indicate that they have so much invested in their particular hobbyhorse that critique feels threatening. Hence the accusations of misunderstanding and lack of education. — Janus
The irony with the situation between Wayfarer and myself is that I am very familiar with all the arguments he presents, — Janus
we know that the cosmos was visible prior to the advent of percipients, otherwise there never would have been any percipients. — Janus
An unfortunate deductive error inferring from our inability to say with certainty what kind of existence unperceived objects have to a conclusion that there could be no such actual existence, and that saying there is any such existence is incoherent. It's called 'confusing oneself with a truism'; the truism being that it is only minds that can know anything. — Janus
To be clear: I’m not arguing that the universe didn’t exist before percipients. I’m arguing that the very concept of the universe — including any claims about its being — is bound to the framework of cognition. That’s not speculative metaphysics. It’s critical philosophy — and it was precisely this confusion that Kant sought to untangle. — Wayfarer
I don't have an agenda - I have an interest in recovering what I think is the meaning of philosophy proper, which is not at all obvious, and very difficult to discern. I say that philosophical and scientific materialism is parasitic upon philosophy proper. — Wayfarer
I copied a couple of paragraphs from the original post, and then added commentary to the effect that it is not being argued that there was no universe prior to observers. — Wayfarer
The question I’m raising is not whether the universe existed, but what it means to say so. — Wayfarer
When you say “the cosmos was visible prior to the advent of percipients,” you're smuggling in a category — visibility — that only has meaning within the context of experience. That’s the point I keep returning to. — Wayfarer
It's about the conditions for meaningful discourse — the structure that allows us to form concepts like “universe,” “visibility,” or “existence” in the first place. I’m not making a deductive claim about what did or didn’t exist. I’m making a transcendental claim about what makes it possible to talk about existence at all. — Wayfarer
When we forget this distinction, we turn methodological naturalism into a metaphysical doctrine — and mistake the limits of our mode of knowing for the limits of what is. — Wayfarer
I don’t have the academic credentials to make the cut in a journal of that kind, but I’d suggest that the core argument of Mind-Created World would be regarded as fairly stock-in-trade in that context — not a mistake, but a well-recognized philosophical position. — Wayfarer
the meaning of philosophy proper, — Wayfarer
A neat point. I'm not sure how convincing it would be for a true idealist. I think you might find that they might argue that since the cosmos was not seen (and could not be seen) before percipients appeared, there is no proof that it was visible. We won't be impressed, of course.Right, so we know that the cosmos was visible prior to the advent of percipients, otherwise there never would have been any percipients. — Janus
Oh, I don't mean to suggest that seeing is not more complicated than it might seem. One difficulty is that the borderline between seeing and understanding is, let me say, a bit moot. Arguable, you will have some description for what you see, which implies some level of understanding. If I see a smudge on the horizon on Monday, and it turns out on Tuesday, when the ship arrives in port that it is a Russian oil tanker, did I see the tanker on Monday, (but did not see that it was a Russian oil tanker) or did I see a smudge on Monday, which turned out to be a Russian oil tanker on Tuesday. I think seeing is achieved on contact, so to speak, whereas understanding is never complete.I'd say there is always more to be seen in the seeing of anything, more and finer detail and also different ways of seeing as per the different ways, for example, different species see things. — Janus
I could pick at the wording. But I broadly agree. The issue arises in "Percipients do determine their objects". "Determine" and "determinate" are more complicated than they seem. An idealist would take "determine" in that sentence in the sense that a law-maker determines the law. A realist would take it in the sense that a scientist determines the level of pollution in a river.When the OP says "a world that is fully real and determinate independently of mind", what could 'determinate' mean in a world containing no perceivers? How could something be determined when there is no one there to determine it? Percipients do determine their objects. If they could not do that they could not survive. It seems to follow that things were determinable , just as they were visible and understandable, but obviously not seen, understood or determinate, prior to the advent of percipients. — Janus
I think that may be common ground. The issue may be what the implications are. I think we have also agreed that our knowledge of how the world was before evolution kicked in, or percipients or homo sapiens appeared is a matter of extrapolating or projecting what we know (present tense). I've suggested the format of these exercises is a counter-factual conditional. If there had been observers, this is what they would have observed. (Berkeley accepts counterfactuals as compatible with his idealism, so I am not presenting it in the way of refutation.)So though we know that prior to the evolution of life there must have been a Universe with no intelligent beings in it, or that there are empty rooms with no inhabitants, or objects unseen by any eye. What their existence might be outside of any perspective is meaningless and unintelligible, as a matter of both fact and principle. — Wayfarer
This is where the distinction between Cambridge changes or relations and non-Cambridge changes or relations kicks in. For me, the "mental aspect" of reality is a Cambridge relation, that is, that the world before percipients and observers was constituted by objects and their relations.But what we know of its existence is inextricably bound by and to the mind we have, and so, in that sense, reality is not straightforwardly objective. It is not solely constituted by objects and their relations. Reality has an inextricably mental aspect, which itself is never revealed in empirical analysis. — Wayfarer
I can just about get my head around "conditions of the possibility of knowledge". I've never had a firm grip on what metaphysics is supposed to be. My philosophical education was most remiss about that.These aren’t speculative metaphysical questions — they are conditions of possibility for scientific knowledge itself. Ignore them, and you don’t avoid metaphysics — you fall into it unwittingly. 'No metaphysics' ends up becoming a particularly poor metaphysics. — Wayfarer
That's all fine, until we get to the "it neither exists nor doesn't exist". It is true that nothing can be said about "unknown unknown", except that nothing can be said - or known - about them. Very little, but not nothing, can be said about "known unknowns". I would say, however, that we know that both exist.I’m not denying the reality of the universe prior to observation — I’m saying that what it is, apart from any possible mode of perception, conception, or representation, is not something that science can tell us, because science already presupposes intelligibility, structure, and observation. That is Kant's 'in itself' - to which I add, it neither exists nor doesn't exist. Nothing can be said about it. — Wayfarer
Now, here's another point of divergence. In the 17th century, scientists foreswore the hidden realities of the (Aristotelian) scholastics. The function of science was to understand the realities that we actually experience - except those things that we experience that were not amenable to mathematical treatment - but that was treated as a marginal note. So science was about reality as it appears to us - so about appearances. This got confused by philosophers with their idea of appearances as curious phenomena that hid reality from us. So you remark about "knowledge of appearances" is ambiguous. For science, there is no distinction between appearance and reality. The idea that there are two distinct categories of - I'll call it existence - appearance and reality, is a philosophical invention. In reality, appearances are real and reality is what appears to us. So, the distinction between appearances and reality unconditioned by perspective is a chimera.That’s the critical point: science gives us knowledge of appearances, not of reality unconditioned by perspective. When we forget this distinction, we turn methodological naturalism into a metaphysical doctrine — and mistake the limits of our mode of knowing for the limits of what is. — Wayfarer
Yes, according to modern cosmology, the physical universe existed for about 10 billion years without any animation or "cognition" : just malleable matter & causal energy gradually evolving & experimenting with new forms of being ; ways of existing. So, you could say that the universe was not awake or aware until the last 4 billion years : the fourth trimester. Could that pre-conscious era be described metaphorically as Gestation : the period between Conception and Birth?On the empirical level, of course we say the cosmos existed long before us. But from the standpoint of critical philosophy, what we mean by “cosmos,” “existence,” or “visibility” only makes sense within the framework of our cognitive faculties. — Wayfarer
In the 17th century, scientists foreswore the hidden realities of the (Aristotelian) scholastics. The function of science was to understand the realities that we actually experience - except those things that we experience that were not amenable to mathematical treatment - but that was treated as a marginal note. — Ludwig V
The modern mind-body problem arose out of the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, as a direct result of the concept of objective physical reality that drove that revolution. Galileo and Descartes made the crucial conceptual division by proposing that physical science should provide a mathematically precise quantitative description of an external reality extended in space and time, a description limited to spatiotemporal primary qualities such as shape, size, and motion, and to laws governing the relations among them. Subjective appearances, on the other hand -- how this physical world appears to human perception -- were assigned to the mind, and the secondary qualities like color, sound, and smell were to be analyzed relationally, in terms of the power of physical things, acting on the senses, to produce those appearances in the minds of observers. It was essential to leave out or subtract subjective appearances and the human mind -- as well as human intentions and purposes -- from the physical world in order to permit this powerful but austere spatiotemporal conception of objective physical reality to develop. — Mind and Cosmos, Pp 35-36
I can just about get my head around "conditions of the possibility of knowledge". I've never had a firm grip on what metaphysics is supposed to be. My philosophical education was most remiss about that. — Ludwig V
Murti draws a strong parallel between Nāgārjuna’s Madhyamaka philosophy and Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Both begin with the insight that our experience of the world is structured by the mind and that we never encounter reality as it is in itself. For Kant, this leads to the distinction between phenomena (what appears to us) and noumena (the in-itself), showing that the categories of the understanding shape experience. Nāgārjuna similarly shows that all concepts and views are dependent and relational—empty of inherent nature or intrinsic reality (śūnyatā). Where Kant outlines the transcendental conditions of experience, Nāgārjuna critiques all fixed views, including metaphysical and epistemological views, to reveal the dependently-originated and non-substantial nature of all appearances.
Yes, according to modern cosmology, the physical universe existed for about 10 billion years without any animation or "cognition" : just malleable matter & causal energy gradually evolving & experimenting with new forms of being ; ways of existing. — Gnomon
Get involved in philosophical discussions about knowledge, truth, language, consciousness, science, politics, religion, logic and mathematics, art, history, and lots more. No ads, no clutter, and very little agreement — just fascinating conversations.