To say something occurs 'in the mind' is not the same as to say it occurs in your mind or my mind alone. Consciousness is a collective. — Wayfarer
Also the idea of either is nebulous, what could such a thing be? Are human minds connected at some deeper level, or only in the sense that we participate in a common culture? — Janus
I’m going to be lazy and hide behind the following quotes. Let me know if they answer your question.
Ratcliffe says:
“The unquestioned givenness of the objective world that is constitutive of scientific descriptions cannot capture the way in which the given is disclosed by a meaning-giving background. Thus, if anything, it is the transcendental, meaning-giving account that has ontological priority over an objective/causal description.”
Zahavi concurs with Ratcliffe:
“Ultimately, what we call “reality” is so deeply suffused with mind- and language-dependent structures that it is altogether impossible to make a neat distinction between those parts of our beliefs that reflect the world “in itself” and those parts of our beliefs that simply express “our
conceptual contribution.” The very idea that our cognition should be nothing but a re-presentation of something mind-independent consequently has to be abandoned.” — Joshs
Well, that depends on what you consider ‘the world’ to be, as distinct from ‘we’. At what point do we end and the world begins? My point is that affect refers to a relative aspect of energy at the level of potentiality. Language structure insists on a subject-object distinction, describing the relation of ‘affect’ as a verb - but I think this can limit our understanding of what affect is in potentiality. The more we understand the broader scope of affect in potentiality, the more self-consciously we can collaborate in the process. — Possibility
Kastrup argues that Jung was an idealist and that the collective unconscious (Jung I think describes it as a primordial reservoir we all draw from) is a version of Mind at Large. You'll note that Jung stated these images were shared across all human cultures. Hence Joseph Campbell's book A Hero with A Thousand Faces which draws together the collective imagery and narrative traditions of the world's hero myths via Jungian archetypes. The basis of the scripts for Star Wars... — Tom Storm
it doesn't seem that the world depends on us, on our perceiving it, in order to exist. — Janus
To this idealism is opposed transcendental realism, which regards space and time as something given in themselves (independent of our sensiblity). The transcendental realist therefore represents outer appearances (if their reality is conceded) as things in themselves, which would exist independently of us and our sensibility and thus would also be outside us according to pure concepts of the understanding. CPR 369
Kant calls transcendental realism the “common prejudice” (A740/B768) and describes it as a “common but fallacious presupposition” (A536/B564; cf. Allison 2004: 22). Transcendental realism is the commonsense pre-theoretic view that objects in space and time are “things in themselves”, which Kant, of course, denies.
— SEP
I think the idea of God is not nebulous — Janus
Strange. I think it is the nebulous idea par excellence. — Wayfarer
God is not a determinate object, obviously, but people can, have and do think quite coherently about the idea of God. — Janus
I am saying that whatever that is, everything we know seems to tell us it must be independent of our perceptions; i.e., that it would still exist regardless of whether we perceive it — Janus
But there is vast disagreement about that. The Great Schism between Orthodox and Catholic for starters. Theistic personalism v classical theology. List could go on indefinitely, let's not get bogged down in that. — Wayfarer
but people can, have and do think quite coherently about the idea of God. Can you say the same about the ideas of Plato's forms, the collective unconscious, etc.? — Janus
surely it must be said that things in themselves are necessary for the appearance of phenomena, no? — Janus
The other point is that to "eliminate" the thing in itself is to posit an alternate necessary condition for the appearance of phenomena. — Janus
I have never thought the idea of a god was coherent — Tom Storm
myth was a programme of action. When a mythical narrative was symbolically re-enacted, it brought to light within the practitioner something "true" about human life and the way our humanity worked, even if its insights, like those of art, could not be proven rationally. If you did not act upon it, it would remain as incomprehensible and abstract – like the rules of a board game, which seem impossibly convoluted, dull and meaningless until you start to play.
Religious truth is, therefore, a species of practical knowledge. Like swimming, we cannot learn it in the abstract; we have to plunge into the pool and acquire the knack by dedicated practice. Religious doctrines are a product of ritual and ethical observance, and make no sense unless they are accompanied by such spiritual exercises as yoga, prayer, liturgy and a consistently compassionate lifestyle. Skilled practice in these disciplines can lead to intimations of the transcendence we call God, Nirvana, Brahman or Dao. Without such dedicated practice, these concepts remain incoherent, incredible and even absurd.
From a phenomenological perspective, in everyday life, we see the objects of our experience such as physical objects, other people, and even ideas as simply real and straightforwardly existent. In other words, they are “just there.” We don’t question their existence; we view them as facts.
When we leave our house in the morning, we take the objects we see around us as simply real, factual things—this tree, neighboring buildings, cars, etcetera. This attitude or perspective, which is usually unrecognized as a perspective, Edmund Husserl terms the “natural attitude” or the “natural theoretical attitude.”
When Husserl uses the word “natural” to describe this attitude, he doesn’t mean that it is “good” (or bad), he means simply that this way of seeing reflects an “everyday” or “ordinary” way of being-in-the-world. When I see the world within this natural attitude, I am solely aware of what is factually present to me. My surrounding world, viewed naturally, is the familiar world, the domain of my everyday life. Why is this a problem?
From a phenomenological perspective, this naturalizing attitude conceals a profound naïveté. Husserl claimed that “being” can never be collapsed entirely into being in the empirical world: any instance of actual being, he argued, is necessarily encountered upon a horizon that encompasses facticity but is larger than facticity. Indeed, the very sense of facts of consciousness as such, from a phenomenological perspective, depends on a wider horizon of consciousness that usually remains unexamined. Any individual object, Husserl wrote:
“Is not merely an individual object as such, a ‘This here,’ an object never repeatable; as qualified ‘in itself‘ thus and so, it has its own specific character, its stock of essential predictables which must belong to it … if other, secondary, relative determinations can belong to it.”
Hence, any individual object necessarily belongs to multiple “essential species,” or essential structures of consciousness...
But there is vast disagreement about that. The Great Schism between Orthodox and Catholic for starters. Theistic personalism v classical theology. List could go on indefinitely, let's not get bogged down in that. — Wayfarer
'The transcendental realist therefore represents outer appearances (if their reality is conceded) as things in themselves, which would exist independently of us and our sensibility and thus would also be outside us according to pure concepts of the understanding.'
The italicized phrases mean the same, do they not? — Wayfarer
Actually, the ding an sich is necessary for perception, the passive impression on the sensory apparatus. Post-impression, it is the active faculties of representation that intuits the sensation, which gives phenomenon. You know the drill.....“arranges the matter of the object according to rules”. — Mww
Epistemological juxtaposition: the thing we represent to ourselves, the ding an sich is the thing we don’t. Not to be thought of from an ontological perspective at all; the ding an sich certainly exists....as whatever it is. The whatever it is we know as something.....is the thing. — Mww
You're partly on the money here I think but I'm somewhat struck by this as I have never thought the idea of a god was coherent, unless you opt for a Protestant anthropomorphic, personal god, which to me would seem somewhat unsophisticated and lacking in plausibility. Is god 'energy' or the ground of being.... what can it mean? Theology may well amount to great scholarly edifices made of paying cards for all we know.
Nevertheless, I think god seems more graspable than Platonic forms on the basis of god's centrality to our culture despite its supposed secularism. Think of all the movies, TV shows and art featuring god/s. Comedian George Burns played god in a hit movie back in the 1970's, but who would you get to play the collective unconscious or the Platonic realm? It would have to be Daniel Day Lewis or Toni Collette... — Tom Storm
if we want to say that those things existed prior to the emergence of humans (which seems obviously to be the case) — Janus
'Everyone knows that the earth, and a fortiori the universe, existed for a long time before there were any living beings, and therefore any perceiving subjects. But according to Kant ... that is impossible.'
Schopenhauer's defence of Kant on this score was [that] the objector has not understood to the very bottom the Kantian demonstration that time is one of the forms of our sensibility. The earth, say, as it was before there was life, is a field of empirical enquiry in which we have come to know a great deal; its reality is no more being denied than is the reality of perceived objects in the same room.
The point is, the whole of the empirical world in space and time is the creation of our understanding, which apprehends all the objects of empirical knowledge within it as being in some part of that space and at some part of that time: and this is as true of the earth before there was life as it is of the pen I am now holding a few inches in front of my face and seeing slightly out of focus as it moves across the paper.
This, incidentally, illustrates a difficulty in the way of understanding which transcendental idealism has permanently to contend with: the assumptions of 'the inborn realism which arises from the original disposition of the intellect' enter unawares into the way in which the statements of transcendental idealism are understood.
Such realistic assumptions so pervade our normal use of concepts that the claims of transcendental idealism disclose their own non-absurdity only after difficult consideration, whereas criticisms of them at first appear cogent which on examination are seen to rest on confusion. We have to raise almost impossibly deep levels of presupposition in our own thinking and imagination to the level of self-consciousness before we are able to achieve a critical awareness of all our realistic assumptions, and thus achieve an understanding of transcendental idealism which is untainted by them. This, of course, is one of the explanations for the almost unfathomably deep counterintuitiveness of transcendental idealism, and also for the general notion of 'depth' with which people associate Kantian and post-Kantian philosophy. Something akin to it is the reason for much of the prolonged, self-disciplined meditation involved in a number of Eastern religious practices. — Bryan Magee, Schopenhauer's Philosophy, p106
Like, I said, can someone Conceive of another way of creating consciousnesses except through Evolution? — Michael Sol
If you are going to comment please address what I have actually said and point out what you think is wrong with it. — Janus
The other logical possibility is that consciousness is uncreated. — Janus
it still is a material phenomenon of the Subject's brain and other physiological systems. — Michael Sol
Give it up: what you see is what you get.... — Michael Sol
when we think about the transcendental from our point of view it is ideal ( because it is whatever is beyond what can be accessed via the senses, and thus can only be (more or less) thought about, imagined. — Janus
I don't know any of the specifics..... — Michael Sol
the physical conditions (...), are all implicit in the image — Michael Sol
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.