I would much appreciate it if we kept discussing it, as I am interested in your take from a Kantian perspective. — Bob Ross
Kantian idealism has almost no following on this forum….. — Wayfarer
How do you feel about Kastrup's most extraordinary claim, that humans and all conscious creatures are dissociated alters of mind-at-large?
I initially thought that the need for a mind-at-large made Kastrup similar to Berkeley,
Mind-at-large is critical to Kastrup's position. I wonder how we can arrive at a reasonable belief that this entity is all there is and that we are all expressions of it?
In fairness, I do not know whether or not he does. — creativesoul
What’s that ol’ adage? If it was easy everybody’d be doing it? — Mww
Cards on the table kinda thing, I must say, if we’re discussing analytic idealism from a Kantian perspective, I’m not sufficiently versed in the one to juxtaposition to the other. So maybe you should start with a brief synopsis of what analytic idealism is. Or, just start anywhere you like.
This doesn’t negate the fact that one can explain the whole by reduction to its parts and the relationship between those parts in their proper arrangement. — Bob Ross
if one is fundamentally claiming that the mind is a part (or group of parts) of a physical body which emerges due to the specific relationship between those parts, then they are thereby claiming that the mind is reducible to the body. — Bob Ross
A tornado is explained by the reduction of it to its parts (e.g., wind, dust, etc.). — Bob Ross
Physicalism is arguing that it can explain (in terms of the how it works) a mind in terms of the physical biological brain. — Bob Ross
Either a)there are physical things that we are aware of within experience or b) there are no physical things without experience.
It is a soft problem, though, because it is reconcilable in the view; whereas the hard problem of consciousness is a hard problem because physicalism is provably unable to solve it even theoretically. — Bob Ross
I am not claiming that we have evidence of minds existing that have no bodies except for the universal mind. With the universal mind, we do have introspective experience of this. — Bob Ross
Your mind, as the producer of the dream, did not have a body in it. — Bob Ross
The tree appears to you, and as such is part of the phenomenal realm. The tree - in and of itself - is the noumenal. — creativesoul
Is it a matter of opinion?
Hume agonizes over this; he can find no good reason to think objects persist, and yet he finds that he does believe so. It's a sort of prejudice; nature, he suggests, has taken the decision out of his hands, as a matter too important to leave to stumbling human reason. — Srap Tasmaner
Dennett claims that if we grant the premiss that Mary knew everything there was to know about seeing color — creativesoul
I'm not entirely sure what the precise wording is. It matters though. Seems to me that Mary's room aims at the wrong target. — creativesoul
reality is a mind-at-large (i.e., a universal mind) and that is the brute fact (metaphysically necessary) of reality — Bob Ross
Kastrup argues, long story short, that it does account for reality and better than reductive physicalism. — Bob Ross
OK. No problem. Thanks anyway.I am not sure how to simplify it down further! — Bob Ross
Probably only if you accept the somewhat outlandish idea that there is a mind-at-large which we are all 'offshoots' of. — Tom Storm
He declares that the basic doctrine of the Upanishads, namely what he calls the doctrine of Identity, or the thesis that allegedly separated minds are identical with one another, and that our mind is identical with the absolute basis of the world as a whole, is the only credible solution to the apparent conflict between the experienced unity of consciousness and the belief that it is dispersed in many living bodies.
“It is by observing and thinking this way that one may suddenly experience the truth of the fundamental idea of Vedânta. It is impossible that this unity of knowledge, of feeling and of choice that you consider as YOURS was born a few years ago from nothingness. Actually, this knowledge, this feeling and this choice are, in their essence, eternal, immutable and numerically ONE in all men and in all living beings (...). The life that you are living presently is not only a fragment of the whole existence; it is in a certain sense, the WHOLE” *
From his reading of the Advaita Vedânta, and from the basic experience he associated with it, Schrödinger inferred that the basic illusion, in our naive and scientific view of the world, is that of multiplicity. Multiplicity of minds in the living bodies, and multiplicity of things in the material world. About the first type of multiplicity, Schrödinger wrote : “what seems to be a plurality is merely a series of aspects of one thing, produced by deception (the Indian Mâyâ)”. “The doctrine of identity can claim that it is clinched by the empirical fact that consciousness is never experienced in the plural, only in the singular. Not only has none of us even experienced more than one consciousness, but there is no trace of circumstantial evidence of this even happening anywhere in the world” — Michel Bitbol
So, it seems impossible to think that objects don't persist, and some more than others, obviously. So, I don't follow Hume in thinking that we have no reason to believe that objects persist. What makes the case even stronger is observing the behavior of the animals most familiar to us that shows that they also see the same things in the same locations as we do. — Janus
Berkeley's subjective idealism was already "analytic" in the sense that he postulated that observation and conception is tautologically equivalent to existence. Many philosophers misunderstand this principle.
For example, they take the principle to imply that unobserved items disappear from existence. But this doesn't follow from the principle, for according to the principle it isn't false that unobserved objects exist, but nonsensical. — sime
That is not what Berkeley's idealism is claiming. — Wayfarer
Such ideas are not remote in principle from various formulations of panentheism or the kinds of cosmo-psychism found in Advaita Vedanta and is also not too far removed from the idea of the Intellect (nous) in neoplatonic philosophy. — Wayfarer
What we need to grasp is that all we know of existence — whether of the rock, or the screen you're looking at, or the Universe at large — is a function of our world-making intelligence, the activity of the hominid forebrain which sets us apart from other species. That’s what ‘empirical reality’ consists of. After all, the definition of ‘empirical’ is ‘based on, concerned with, or verifiable by observation or experience.’ So, asking of the Universe ‘How does it exist outside our observation or experience of it?’ is an unanswerable question. — Wayfarer
That synthesis constitutes our experience-of-the-world. It is not an hallucination or figment of the imagination, but the mind constitutes the imaginative matrix within which all of this exists. — Wayfarer
We, as ‘minds’, are disassociated alters of that universal mind, such that we are ‘cut off’ from experiencing everything at once. — Bob Ross
The ‘physical’, in the colloquial sense of the term (viz., tangible, solid objects within conscious experience), is an extrinsic representation of the mental — Bob Ross
Analytic Idealism posits that one can come to know the world from two sides: the representations (which is the physical stuff) and the mental events which are being represented. — Bob Ross
For Kastrup, the thing-in-itself, like Schopenhauer, is the universal mind. — Bob Ross
What we need to grasp is that all we know of existence — whether of the rock, or the screen you're looking at, or the Universe at large — is a function of our world-making intelligence, the activity of the hominid forebrain which sets us apart from other species. — Wayfarer
This is what supports Aristotle's definition of "man" as rational animal. — Metaphysician Undercover
Actually, he says "zoon politikon" (political animal), yet given his monumental Organon, Aristotle tends to get tagged with that "rational animal" (which I think actually comes from Plato). Anyway, our uniquely distinguishing feature as a species, I think, is that, despite mostly being delusional, we are collaborative knowledge-producers. :fire:Aristotle's definition of "man" as rational animal. — Metaphysician Undercover
This is only part of it. You are leaving out important information that cannot be gained simply by looking at an arrangement of parts. An engine does work. That work depends on parts but is not in any of the parts or combination of parts. The whole cannot be explained without an explanation of what the engine does, how it functions as a whole within another whole, a car for example.
I am claiming that there are no disembodied minds. We find bodies that seem to be without mind, but no mind without bodies. The physical is ineliminable.
An actual tornado is not an assemblage parts. Wind does not combine with dust, etc. The forces that create the tornado create the wind and raise the dust.
What is at issue is methodological rather than ontological. Because we do not have access to disembodied minds we must look to the embodied minds of living being. That is the only place we find mind.
”Either a)there are physical things that we are aware of within experience or b) there are no physical things without experience. “
a) states that there are physical things and that we are aware of these things within experience. If, however, you accept b) then it is not simply that we are aware of these things in experience but that they would not be without experience.
If one cannot be solved in terms of the other this cuts both ways.
And once again, it has not been proven that physicalism is unable to solve it even theoretically. You are convinced it can't. You should leave it there.
I have no introspective experience of a universal mind. Private experience cannot stand as public, shareable evidence. In your mind is the idea of universal mind. That idea in your mind is only evidence that your embodied mind can entertain the notion of a non-embodied mind .
My mind that produced the dream is an embodied mind.
Whatever I dream, whether a body is present in it or not, it is the dream of an embodied mind.
OK. No problem. Thanks anyway.
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