yes, roughly correct. The mathematical metaphor is imprecise, but if you intend it to mean, how one relates to materiality, then yes. You could say sattva is the "up" and tamas is the "down" within the "ups and downs of life" if that makes sense.

And Rajas is mixed nature, so yes you could see it as tamasic. Or as a middle point. Both are correct.

I think I got sattva and rajas mixed up.

Sattva: Existence in the mode of purity and goodness.
Rajas: Existence in the mixed mode of both aspects.
Tamas: Existence in the mode of corruption and evil.

Our true nature is sattva, because we are carriers of the Divine Spark. But our illusion of being material beings and only material things existing leads us to follow the modes of Rajas (passion and hedonism for material things) and Tamas (indulging in unhealthy, vile, evil or insane phenomena).

Our true nature is sattva, because we are carriers of the Divine Spark. But our illusion of being material beings and only material things existing leads us to follow the modes of Rajas (passion and hedonism for material things) and Tamas (indulging in unhealthy, vile, evil or insane phenomena). — Dharmi

So how does good give birth to evil?

Well, because we chose to live our lives outside of God. If we didn;t choose this material nature, we'd still be with Godhead. We decided to choose materiality over Godhead, and evil is a result of finding ourselves in the material nature.

In our system, God is pure and absolute love. So, he cares deeply and truly for us more than we can even care for our own selves. So, he respects us thoroughly. If we decide to exist apart from Him, he obliges our request.

So, we chose to live in this prison, and God loves us, and respects us deeply, so he gave us what we desired.

We decided to choose materiality over Godhead, and evil is a result of finding ourselves in the material nature. — Dharmi

But materiality is supposed to be an illusion, right? Did God create this illusion or did we?

He created it for our enjoyment, because he attends to our desires. But we have utilized it to our detriment, our suffering and our doom.

Because nothing can make us happy. Except being with our most sublime love, God.

So we made up the idea of materiality and he created it for us?

We made up our minds that we should live our lives separated from God. Since God loves us, he created this world for us to reside in.

And by "us" not humans, but all organisms with spirit soul. So, even a blade of grass has spirit soul.

We made up our minds that we should live our lives separated from God. — Dharmi

I see.

Schopenhauer has it right, to me. The world is empirically real and transcendentally ideal. No objects without subject, but more interestingly, no subject without object.

The interesting question to me, is part of the title of this thread, namely the "a priori". Nevermind definitions. In actual lived experience, it's not at all clear to me that we have a good grasp of what is not a priori, in principle. In other words, if we had enough information, we would know everything we could know about how the world is given to us. But we don't, so we investigate it. But what we investigate must have a "correlative" in our nature, because otherwise we couldn't make any sense of experience.

So I actually think that all speculative views have some serious clarifying to do when it comes to the a priori. It's a really hard question to elucidate.

Arthur Schopenhauer formulated his philosophy after reading the Vedic Scriptures. It's also based on Kantianism which all German Idealism is ultimately predicated on.

According to Schopenhauer as well as to his biographers, he developed his thought before reading the Vedas and after reading Kant. He just happened to read the Vedas after he finished his main work, and he found remarkable similarities in it with his philosophy.

He does base himself on Kant, as he says several times. But I also think he's more profound, but I'm in a minority position here.

I think they're complimentary. Kant and Schopenhauer, same with Husserl.

I think they're complimentary. Kant and Schopenhauer, same with Husserl. — Dharmi

Husserl’s work represented an explicit critique of Kant. Kant invested the transcendental subject with formal (categorical) contents and the world with independent reality. Husser rejected both categorical subjective content and independent external reality.

I'm not denying there are differences between him and Kant, but there are clear continuities also.

But I also think he's more profound, — Manuel

:up:

That’s not saying very much. Most 20th and 21st century movements in philosophy are inconceivable without Kant ( Hegel, Marx, Kierkegaard, Whitehead, Bergson, Dewey, Nietzsche, Heidegger , Wittgenstein, etc.)

What you're saying is true. Kant is the turning point in modern philosophy, for all kinds of philosophers and schools.

The world is empirically real and transcendentally ideal. No objects without subject, but more interestingly, no subject without object. — Manuel

It sounds like you’re retaining Kant’s reification of subject and object here.

if we had enough information, we would know everything we could know about how the world is given to us. But we don't, so we investigate it. But what we investigate must have a "correlative" in our nature, because otherwise we couldn't make any sense of experience. — Manuel

What do terms like ‘information’ and ‘given to us’ imply here? It sounds like the world as an independent reality that the idealist subject organizes according to internal categories. But aren’t the subjective and the objective
merely poles of an indissociable interaction , before any a priori subjective formalisms or empirical realities can be claimed? Isn’t THIS the primordial a priori , that of radical interaction of the subjective and the objective? Don’t we need to jettison both the ‘empirically real’ and the categorical apriori?

What do terms like ‘information’ and ‘given to us’ imply here? It sounds like the world as an independent reality that the idealist subject organizes according to internal categories. But aren’t the subjective and the objective
merely poles of an indissociable interaction , before any a priori subjective formalisms or empirical realities? Isn’t this the primordial a prior , that of radical interaction of the subjective and the objective? — Joshs

I'm not entirely clear what you're describing. I'll attempt to reply as I understand it. The term "information" here is taken as a convenient label to describe everything that we can cognize or assimilate in terms of interactions as well as all the aspects of the world which we ascribe meaning to. You could use the term "sense data" as well. The given, as I see it, is what the world implies, what we take to be the world. Right now, for me, it includes a room, many books, a TV and so on. If I look out the window I'll see a few tress, maybe a few people, etc.

I'm not sure what "primordial a priori" would mean in this context. There's this thing we call the world, there are subjects, and the a priori should be what we bring to the world prior to experience. But it looks to me that, on close scrutiny, experience cannot be disentangled from the a priori consistently or clearly. We can still speak of after experience or a posteriori for convivence and as a way to let others know that "this experience, event, whatever X" occurs on occasion Y.

But the whole causal structure must be determined by the way we organize the world. In principle, if we knew how to stimulate the brain properly, know everything we could about the world, or maybe if our dreams were accurate enough. But that's in principle, in fact we won't reach these levels of understanding, I don't think. Beside that, I can't think of something more a priori than that, in that there's nothing to say, no world or anything.

Things become more complicated, however, if we consider things in themselves. In that situation, I think I can point to something beyond what out best science can say, at least conceptually. So it's a kind of a posteriori a posteriori. :p

There's this thing we call the world, there are subjects, and the a priori should be what we bring to the world prior to experience. — Manuel

How can we bring anything to the world
prior to experience? I know that is Kant’s argument but the phenomenological argument is that only IN experience, and not before or outside of it, is there anything that we bring to the world, and what we bring to it is not fixed but co-constructed along with what we experience in the world, and the tow are constantly changing each other. Put differently, we interpret what we experience in the world according to our previous history of experiences in the world. So how we organize the world is constantly being transformed by the world itself. But the world itself has no meaning apart from how we organize it. This is structural coupling , or reciprocal causality. so no ‘thing in itself, since ‘things’ are themselves the products of subject-object reciprocal causality.

How can we bring anything to the world
prior to experience? — Joshs

Really?.

All our concepts (tree, large, planet, rock, danger, river, person, pleasure, interesting, book, left, right, animal, dust, grass, etc., etc.) , our ability to experience anything, language, the capacity for all our senses - all of these are innate. The world helps activate them, but the world doesn't "teach" us to see or to conceptualize.

Yes, I agree about what you say about "things", but I think there's independent existence absent human beings. But I don't think we can access this independent existence.

You have access to nothing whatsoever outside of your own mentation. — Dharmi


How do you know that? — frank

Because nobody does. — Dharmi

So, it follows that the nobodies you refer to are not "outside your mentation"?

All our concepts (tree, large, planet, rock, danger, river, person, pleasure, interesting, book, left, right, animal, books, grass, etc., etc.) , our ability to experience anything, language, the capacity for all our senses - all of these are innate. The world helps activate them, but the world doesn't "teach" us to see or to conceptualize. — Manuel

I was talking about perceptual and conceptual contents, not the innate biological capacities for experience( but even these biological structures are shaped and realized in relation to an environment). All of the concepts you mentioned (tree, large, planet, rock, danger, river, person, pleasure, interesting, book, left, right, animal, books, grass, etc., etc.) are constructed via interaction with a world. There are no innate concepts or perceptions, and that includes the concepts of number, space and time.

I think there's independent existence absent human beings. But I don't think we can access this independent existence. — Manuel

Do we access existence or do we construct it? Does our knowledge mirror an independent world or do we construct that world , contribute to its development? Is knowing copying an outside or is it an interaction that transforms what we see?

What we empirically experience is not 'material stuff' but merely qualities of experience. Someone, somewhere, sometime, decided to call these qualities 'material' but there's no actual reason to do so. And as far as I know, nobody has ever given a reason to do so. — Dharmi

Yes, this is a robust and familiar argument against materialism. Bertrand Russell described this one well decades ago in the History of Western Philosophy. John Searle has a series of rebuttals to this argument which I will try to dig up.

I think the best we can do is say this - as soon as someone can find a way to acquire reliable knowledge outside of what we call methodological naturalism, let's hear it. Until then we have no choice but to assume that physicalism is all we have access to and can measure. It serves us well.

Qualities exist, what they are called is, as far as I can tell, irrelevant. The real question is: are these qualities true, and real? — Dharmi

For me it comes back to the question what alternative epistemology we should be using to decide what we will call true? (Bear in mind that a methodological naturalist generally does not believe in certainty or capital T truths, just truth we can justify.)

but even these biological structures are shaped and realized in relation to an environment — Joshs

Partly, yes. What we see is a representation of that environment, not the only one. The one which we construct, categorize and make sense of. But we are the ones that do it, not the world.

All of the concepts you mentioned (tree, large, planet, rock, danger, river, person, pleasure, interesting, book, left, right, animal, books, grass, etc., etc.) are constructed via interaction with a world. There are no innate concepts or perceptions. — Joshs

"Objects" in the world incite and elicit responses from us, but the world can't teach us what a tree is or what danger is nor what a book is. We have the concept book, tree and we apply it to certain objects in the world. A dog does not have the concept tree, nor does a wolf or an owl. In fact, most of the exotic animals we know of, we don't even encounter ever. We might get the idea from another person describing it, or from a book. Yet we've never experienced it.

Not only animals but most of the world, we never experience, yet we know what these things are. Our exposure to the world is way too brief to account for the richness of the reply we have of it.

If we have no innate concepts, how would we get them? You'll say from the world, but a similar creature to us, an ape, does not get any concept, which is not to deny it has a rich experience of objects. So here we are two creatures exposed to the world, one has concepts the other does not. Apes extremely likely have a construction of there own, but not in concepts.

Do we access existence or do we construct it? Does our knowledge mirror an independent world or do we construct that world , contribute to its development? — Joshs

I think we largely construct the world. I don't think our manifest experience mirrors the world, though science appears to do so, in some respects.

as soon as someone can find a way to acquire reliable knowledge outside of what we call methodological naturalism, let's hear it. — Tom Storm

Sounds reasonable , but are you taking into account the problematics of the scheme-content distinction that motivated Kuhn, Rouse , Fine and others to level
the playing field between science and other modalities
of cultural creativity? Is ‘reliable knowledge’ a pragmatic construction that is simply useful in relation to human goals or an attempt to make knowledge
correspond to an independently existing external
world? Is science simply a relation between propositions or the relation between a proposition and ‘the way the world really is’?

Yes, this is a robust and familiar argument against materialism. Bertrand Russell described this one well decades ago in the History of Western Philosophy. John Searle has a series of rebuttals to this argument which I will try to dig up.

I think the best we can do is say this - as soon as someone can find a way to acquire reliable knowledge outside of what we call methodological naturalism, let's hear it. Until then we have no choice but to assume that physicalism is all we have access to and can measure. It serves us well

My epistemic state is not one of "reliable knowledge". I can't even justify my belief in the existence of other minds. I take it on faith. What reliable knowledge do you think methodological naturalism has provided us? That is to say, how do you know this sentence is false: "methodological naturalism does a great job of describing the dream world I've created"

However, in an a priori state of knowledge, we know that ideas and at least one mind exists, so to claim reality is made of mind(s)/thoughts begs a lot of interesting questions that don't have answers, but it has one crucial advantage over materialism: the existence of mind and ideas can't be doubted. — RogueAI

True. Materialism is a theory, and as such, it can't be proven. Nothing can be proven. The only thing we know (not via proof, but via the mechanism of the structure) is cogito ergo sum.

Is this equivalent to "Does Materialism Have an a Priori Problem?" A problem...? You mean it is self-contradictory? No it is not. Is it a paradox (meaning switching between "yes" and "no" states depending on the state, which immediately brings us to its opposite state)? No. The problem, if you wish, is that it is not proven, it is not given. It is an assumption.

Are assumptions problems? That's a value judgment, not a given. If I want, it's a problem, if I no want, it is not a problem.