I said ideas, but not necessarily ideas expressed in a language, you might call it imagination or spiritual experiences, sometimes we experience things that are so different from anything else that we see it either as a connection to another dimension or plane of existence, or as us being able to freely create experiences that aren’t simply combinations of other experiences. — leo

I'm reading Masks of God, so I'm not allergic to these other planes of existence. I do object, however, to presenting them as a kind of alternative physics. Joseph Campbell takes a good approach in my view. He tries to mediate these experiences without forgetting the demands of reason.

Of course you are free to argue a metaphysical position, but this argumentative approach pays a suspicious tribute to reason, as if you want to have your cake and eat it too. What does it mean that you want your theory recognized as rational?

Of course you are free to argue a metaphysical position, but this argumentative approach pays a suspicious tribute to reason, as if you want to have your cake and eat it too. What does it mean that you want your theory recognized as rational? — Eee

What’s wrong with looking for a rational model of existence? The ideas I’m presenting offer an alternative to the materialist view that is itself metaphysical, why do you not react the same way to the metaphysical position of physicists and cosmologists regarding the nature of the universe, its future and our place within it? That seems to be a double standard.

Existence can be seen as change. What would it mean to model that change without reason, without looking for relationships or structure within that change? That’s what physicists do, however they limit themselves to a subset of all experiences, while I attempt to take into account all experiences, why would you find it suspicious for me to use reason and not them?

Maybe you simply do not recognize the metaphysical assumptions of mainstream science.

He tries to mediate these experiences without forgetting the demands of reason. — Eee

I was listening to the radio one morning about ten years ago. It was a discussion between Lawrence Krauss and the then-morning radio host, who was pretty scientifically literate. The question of dark matter came up. Brief discussion of dark matter. Then the host said, 'really it's possible we're completely sorrounded by dark matter and we wouldn't even know'. 'Could be', said Krauss.

The conversation moved on.

What’s wrong with looking for a rational model of existence? — leo

Nothing. But what do we mean by 'rational'?

I said ideas, but not necessarily ideas expressed in a language, you might call it imagination or spiritual experiences, — leo

Once a person starts talking about 'ideas' that aren't expressed in language, they seem to be leaving reason and logic behind. And that's fine. But it doesn't persuade those attached to clarity who therefore prefer to confess just not knowing where there is a here here and why it is the way it seems to be. And thinking about thinking suggests to me that perhaps it's a necessary blind spot, though obvious we act on useful hypotheses which themselves depend for their intelligibility on tacit know-how and being 'in' a language and a world. I'm quite fascinated by the lifeworld or groundless ground that makes science possible in the first place, which I don't expect science but rather philosophy to articulate.

The ideas I’m presenting offer an alternative to the materialist view that is itself metaphysical, — leo

Fair enough, but I'm not defending the materialism.

Maybe you simply do not recognize the metaphysical assumptions of mainstream science. — leo

I recognize some of them. Maybe no one has articulated all of them. Lately I've been trying to articulate the notion of reason itself. That's why I asked you what it meant to you to seek recognition for your ideas as reasonable. I'm trying to point out the tension in your notion of private experience (ideas that aren't in language) and the claim on universal, human reason.

In contrast, technology just works. And (ideally if not actually) science is falsifiable. This does not, in my book, make it a replacement for philosophy. It's like the Cantor issue I've been discussing. A person can make use of Cantor's math without adopting his mysticism of the infinite. There are far more than two positions.

'Could be' applies to so many things. That's the 'problem.' While some skeptics may be so in the mode of scientism (and not so skeptical after all), others acknowledge various possibilities as possibilities and reason as well as they can about which they should take seriously.

Returning to the OP, I'm a big fan of anti-realism. A Thing of This World is a favorite text in its ability to organize anti-realism as a narrative from Kant to Derrida. Presumably Krauss would hate it. The identification of reason with natural science is problematic, especially since phenomenology (for instance) is reasonable and seeks to articulate what makes science possible in the first place.

First, let us elucidate the remarkable character of philosophy as it unfolds in ever-new special sciences. Let us contrast it with other forms of culture already present in prescientific man, in his artefacts, his agriculture, his architecture, etc. All manifest classes of cultural products along with the proper methods for insuring their successful production. Still, they have a transitory existence in their environing world. Scientific achievements, on the other hand, once the method of insuring their successful creation has been attained, have an entirely different mode of being, an entirely different temporality. They do not wear out, they are imperishable. Repeated creation does not produce something similar, at best something similarly useful. Rather, no matter how many times the same person or any number of persons repeat these achievements, they remain exactly identical, identical in sense and in value. Persons united together in actual mutual understanding can only experience what their respective fellows have produced in the same manner as identical with what they have produced themselves.24 In a word, what scientific activity achieves is not real but ideal.

What is more, however, whatever validity or truth has been gained in this way serves as material for the production of higher-level idealities; and this goes on and on. Now, in the developed theoretical interest, each interest receives ahead of time the sense of a merely relative goal; it becomes a transition to constantly new, higher-level goals in an infinity preindicated as science's universal field of endeavor, its 'domain'. Thus science designates the idea of an infinity of tasks, of which at any time a finite number have already been accomplished and are retained in their enduring validity. These constitute at the same time the fund of premises for an endless horizon of tasks united into one all-embracing task.

Here, however, an important supplementary remark should be made. In science the ideality of what is produced in any particular instance means more than the mere capacity for repetition based on a sense that has been guaranteed as identical; the idea of truth in the scientific sense is set apart (and of this we have still to speak) from the truth proper to pre-scientific life. Scientific truth claims to be unconditioned truth, which involves infinity, giving to each factually guaranteed truth a merely relative character, making it only an approach oriented, in fact, toward the infinite horizon, wherein the truth in itself is, so to speak, looked on as an infinitely distant point.25 By the same token this infinity belongs also to what in the scientific sense 'really is'. A fortiori, there is infinity involved in 'universal' validity for 'everyone', as the subject of whatever rational foundations are to be secured; nor is this any longer everyone in the finite sense the term has in prescientific life.26 — Husserl

http://www.users.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/husserl_philcris.html

I'm interested in that 'everyone,' not only in relation to physical science, but also in relation to philosophy and every 'reasonable' discourse. Far from just harping about 'reason, reason, reason,' it's the infinite clarification of what we even mean by 'reason' that fascinates me. As Husserl and others have noted, it involves time and it involves an 'infinite' subject. But such things can't be essentially hidden or private but mere unnoticed as too close to us and therefore potentially clarified as 'obvious.' While Heidegger is especially known for this, the idea is older than that, naturally.

We don't want to get stuck on anti-scientism, since scientism is not a sufficiently interesting philosophical position.

Here's another quote that applies.

There is a sharp cleavage, then, between the universal but mythico-practical attitude and the 'theoretical', which by every previous standard is unpractical, the attitude of thaumazein [Gr. = to wonder], to which the great men of Greek philosophy's first culminating period, Plato and Aristotle, trace the origin of philosophy. Men are gripped by a passion for observing and knowing the world, a passion that turns from all practical interests and in the closed circle of its own knowing activities, in the time devoted to this sort of investigation, accomplishes and wants to accomplish only pure theoria36. In other words, man becomes the disinterested spectator, overseer of the world, he becomes a philosopher. More than that, from this point forward his life gains a sensitivity for motives which are possible only to this attitude, for novel goals and methods of thought, in the framework of which philosophy finally comes into being and man becomes philosopher.
...
With an attitude such as this, man observes first of all the variety of nations, his own and others, each with its own environing world, which with its traditions, its gods and demigods, with its mythical powers, constitutes for each nation the self-evident, real world. In the face of this extraordinary contrast there arises the distinction between the represented and the real world, and a new question is raised concerning the truth - not everyday truth bound as it is to tradition but a truth that for all those who are not blinded by attachment to tradition is identical and universally valid, a truth in itself. Thus it is proper to the theoretical attitude of the philosopher that he is more and more predetermined to devote his whole future life, in the sense of a universal life, to the task of theoria, to build theoretical knowledge upon theoretical knowledge in infinitum. — Husserl

The open-ness toward infinity seems important here. And, perhaps more important, the distance that philosophy enjoys from local gods.

Only with the Greeks, however, do we find a universal ('cosmological') vital interest in the essentially new form of a purely 'theoretical' attitude.27 This is true, too, of the communal form in which the interest works itself out, the corresponding, essentially new attitude of the philosophers and the scientists (mathematicians, astronomers, etc.). These are the men who, not isolated but with each other and for each other, i.e., bound together in a common interpersonal endeavor, strive for and carry into effect theoria and only theoria. These are the ones whose growth and constant improvement ultimately, as the circle of cooperators extends and the generations of investigators succeed each other, become a will oriented in the direction of an infinite and completely universal task. The theoretical attitude has its historical origin in the Greeks. — Husserl

It's the interpersonality that seems crucial here, along with a distance from immersion in the practical world.

How are we, then, to characterize the essentially primitive attitude, the fundamental historical mode of human existence?30 The answer: on the basis of generation men naturally live in communities - in a family, a race, a nation - and these communities are in themselves more or less abundantly subdivided into particular social units. Now, life on the level of nature is characterized as a naïvely direct living immersed in the world, in the world that in a certain sense is constantly there consciously as a universal horizon but is not, merely by that fact, thematic. Thematic is that toward which man's attention is turned. Being genuinely alive is always having one's attention turned to this or that, turned to something as to an end or a means, as relevant or irrelevant, interesting or indifferent, private or public, to something that is in daily demand or to something that is startlingly new. All this belongs to the world horizon, but there is need of special motives if the one who is caught up in such a life in the world is to transform himself and it to come to the point where he somehow makes this world itself his theme, where he conceives an enduring interest in it. — Husserl

http://www.users.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/husserl_philcris.html

I’m not assuming its negation, rather I am saying it’s a meaningless proposition. — PessimisticIdealism

No, that's not how your argument is structured. You don't argue that the proposition is meaningless.Your argument says that the realist proposition is impossible to justify, but in order to be able to determine the requirements for justification, a proposition has to be meaningful in the first place - otherwise all of your argument becomes meaningless.