Of course: why not? Science certainly seems to show that things existed prior to consciousness; unless you are a panpsychist.

Of course: why not? Science certainly seems to show that things existed prior to consciousness; unless you are a panpsychist. — Janus

Of course your view is the popular and dominant view, and ancestral objects deserve serious discussion, but I think it's ontology's job to interpret the claims of science.

For instance, what is an 11-dimensional physical theory supposed to mean ? A cautious approach might propose computable functions as ways to compress and predict measurements in the familiar world of three dimensions.

unless you are a panpsychist. — Janus

Not at all. There is no subject. There is no consciousness. Not 'really.' Just world-from-perspectives, and not world-from-no-perspective. That's the idea. Nondualism.

Consciousness is being.

So we all have our own take, but you are suggesting that a movement that takes nondual as its name is really just dualist in the usual way. But that loses the quasi-mystical excitement in the position, its contact with identity with the absolute. That radical intimacy and simplicity is the point, the appeal, the breakthrough. I think it'd be better to reject it than transform it into something reasonable but boring. This was my concern with @Wayfarer in the mind-creates-reality thread to the degree that he was just doing (or seemed to be) the interpretation of Kant that makes him a typical indirect realist, a dualist totally compatible with physicalism, with mental magic being ultimately dependent on its radically hidden basis. To insist on some deep trans-experiential Substance is, in my view, missing the point of nondualism. Though it's a respectable, default position for plenty of solid practical reasons (if not, in my view, logically stable).

This first part seems close to Husserl especially.

The point to be reached is a foundational consciousness that is unconditional, self-evident, and immediate (svayam-prakāśa). It is that to which everything is presented, but is itself no presentation, that which knows all, but is itself no object. The self should not be confused with the contents and states which it enjoys and manipulates. If we have to give an account of it, we can describe it only as what it is not, for any positive description of it would be possible only if it could be made an object of observation, which from the nature of the case it is not. We "know" it only as we withdraw ourselves from the body with which we happen to be identified, in this transition

the true Self, pure consciousness [...] the only Reality (sat), since It is untinged by difference, the mark of ignorance, and since It is the one thing that is not sublatable"

The longest chapter of Shankara's Upadesasahasri, chapter 18, "That Art Thou," is devoted to considerations on the insight "I am ever-free, the existent" (sat), and the identity expressed in Chandogya Upanishad 6.8.7 in the mahavakya (great sentence) "tat tvam asi", "that thou art."[275][276] In this statement, according to Shankara, tat refers to 'Sat,[276] "the Existent"[266][267][277][278] Existence, Being,[web 16] or Brahman,[279] the Real, the "Root of the world,"[276][note 53] the true essence or root or origin of everything that exists.[267][277][web 16] "Tvam" refers to one's real I, pratyagatman or inner Self,[280] the "direct Witness within everything,"[14] "free from caste, family, and purifying ceremonies,"[281] the essence, Atman, which the individual at the core is.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advaita_Vedanta

I believe that ‘consciousness,’ when once it has evaporated to this estate of pure diaphaneity, is on the point of disappearing altogether. It is the name of a nonentity, and has no right to a place among first principles. Those who still cling to it are clinging to a mere echo, the faint rumor left behind by the disappearing ‘soul’ upon the air of philosophy.
...
To deny plumply that ‘consciousness’ exists seems so absurd on the face of it – for undeniably ‘thoughts’ do exist – that I fear some readers will follow me no farther. Let me then immediately explain that I mean only to deny that the word stands for an entity, but to insist most emphatically that it does stand for a function. There is, I mean, no aboriginal stuff or quality of being, contrasted with that of which material objects are made, out of which our thoughts of them are made; but there is a function in experience which thoughts perform, and for the performance of which this quality of being is invoked. That function is knowing. ‘Consciousness’ is supposed necessary to explain the fact that things not only are, but get reported, are known. Whoever blots out the notion of consciousness from his list of first principles must still provide in some way for that function’s being carried on.
...
My thesis is that if we start with the supposition that there is only one primal stuff or material in the world, a stuff of which everything is composed, and if we call that stuff ‘pure experience,’ the knowing can easily be explained as a particular sort of relation towards one another into which portions of pure experience may enter. The relation itself is a part of pure experience; one if its ‘terms’ becomes the subject or bearer of the knowledge, the knower,[2] the other becomes the object known.

https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/us/james1.htm

I don't see any other coherent way to interpret the fossil record and cosmology.

Not at all. There is no subject. There is no consciousness. Not 'really.' Just world from perspectives. Never world-from-no-perspective. That's the idea. — plaque flag

I can't make sense of what you say here. I am a non-dualist ontologically speaking, but I am not a non-distinctionist epistemologically speaking. In the non-dual context there are no distinctions but I don't think it follows that there are no differences, but rather just that there is no separation.

I agree that there is no world in the sense of 'perceived and conceived world' without consciousness but not that nothing exists absent consciousness.

I don't see any other coherent way to interpret the fossil record and cosmology. — Janus

For me the issue is semantic. I think of 'physical' objects as enduring possibilities of perception.
I lean toward verificationism when it comes to scientific claims about such objects. How does the ancestral object exist ? If I was there (with a time machine), I could see it. Or as a possible premise in a reasoning that takes such perceptual givenness for granted, without paying any metaphysical tax on that assumption.

I am a non-dualist ontologically speaking, but I am not a non-distinctionist epistemologically speaking. In the non-dual context there are no distinctions but I don't think it follows that there are no differences, but rather just that there is no separation. — Janus

This is difficult to parse. Perhaps you mean that consciousness is always consciousness-of ?

How does this sound to you ? I think Sartre intends the same idea.

The Ego is the specific object that intentional consciousness is directed upon when performing reflection—an object that consciousness “posits and grasps […] in the same act” (Sartre 1936a [1957: 41; 2004: 5]), and that is constituted in and by the act of reflection (Sartre 1936a [1957: 80–1; 2004: 20]). Instead of a transcendental subject, the Ego must consequently be understood as a transcendent object similar to any other object, with the only difference that it is given to us through a particular kind of experience, i.e., reflection. The Ego, Sartre argues, “is outside, in the world. It is a being of the world, like the Ego of another” (Sartre 1936a [1957: 31; 2004: 1]).
....
Sartre devotes a great deal of effort to establishing the impersonal (or “pre-personal”) character of consciousness, which stems from its non-egological structure and results directly from the absence of the I in the transcendental field. According to him, intentional (positional) consciousness typically involves an anonymous and “impersonal” relation to a transcendent object:

When I run after a streetcar, when I look at the time, when I am absorbed in contemplating a portrait, there is no I. […] In fact I am plunged in the world of objects; it is they which constitute the unity of my consciousness; […] but me, I have disappeared; I have annihilated myself. There is no place for me on this level. (Sartre 1936a [1957: 49; 2004: 8])

The tram appears to me in a specific way (as “having-to-be-overtaken”, in this case) that is experienced as its own mode of phenomenalization, and not as a mere relational aspect of its appearing to me. The object presents itself as carrying a set of objective properties that are strictly independent from one’s personal relation to it. The streetcar is experienced as a transcendent object, in a way that obliterates and overrides, so to speak, the subjective features of conscious experience; its “having-to-be-overtaken-ness” does not belong to my subjective experience of the world but to the objective description of the way the world is (see also Sartre 1936a [1957: 56; 2004: 10–11]). When I run after the streetcar, my consciousness is absorbed in the relation to its intentional object, “the streetcar-having-to-be-overtaken”, and there is no trace of the “I” in such lived-experience. I do not need to be aware of my intention to take the streetcar, since the object itself appears as having-to-be-overtaken, and the subjective properties of my experience disappear in the intentional relation to the object. They are lived-through without any reference to the experiencing subject (or to the fact that this experience has to be experienced by someone). This particular feature derives from the diaphanousness of lived-experiences.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sartre/#TranEgoDiscInte

I think of 'physical' objects are enduring possibilities of perception.
.... How does the ancestral object exist ? — plaque flag

I would say each object exists (as long as it does) as a reliable possibility of a very specific and unique set of perceptions, and I don't think of that perceptible existence as depending on the existence of percipients.

This is difficult to parse. Perhaps you mean that consciousness is always consciousness-of ? — plaque flag

Yes, if there were nothing to be conscious of, and of course if there were no conscious entity, then there would be no consciousness. So the way I think of it, prior to the advent of conscious entities all the rest of the cosmos existed as a vast array of perceptible existents, perceptible but obviously not perceived.

.

I'd say that those ideas and details are philosophy. Tho I will grant you that the point is to grasp some 'theorems' of value. In math, for instance, a theorem might be 'obviously' true after a certain amount of experience. But proofs are a kind of hygiene: we make sure we aren't deluded, and we find a ladder to aid the intuition that really matters. — plaque flag

They are philosophy, yes, but look where it gets the people who take this approach.

Good point about mathematics. It is this 'hygene' that I'm advocating. .

t's only a narrow, prejudiced version of positivism that's problematic, — plaque flag

I can agree with this. A positivism that dismisses metaphysics as meaningless is not so much extreme as simply wrong.

You yourself say that metaphysical questions are undecidable. That's a fairly positivist claim, it seems to me. — plaque flag

I suppose you could say it;s a positive claim, but it;s not a positive metaphysical statement. Whatever it is it's a verifiable and demonstrable fact. It's the precise reason why logical positivism exists.

The great thinker is only realized (for me) within my own cognition. I have to 'become' that great thinker in order to understand them. So the false humility thing is indeed a confusion, though a true humility with respect to fallible and endless interpretation is fitting. — plaque flag

Yes. Nobody can understand philosophy for us. But what I;m suggesting is that you don't need to be a great thinker to do this. One just has to take account of the facts.

Look how many great thinkers failed to understand philosophy. Clearly being a great thinker is not enough. Indeed, I sometimes wonder if being very clever is a drawback. .

I think 'illusion' has to be a kind of metaphor here. As I see it, all 'experience' is 'real.' — plaque flag

Hmm. I see no reason to make this assumption.It;s something to work out or explore, not to preempt with assumptions.

In this context, the so-called illusion becomes so with the detachment.

Your realisation of its unreality will grows with practice, but the practice of detachment will not be enough to reveal it. It would be necessary to 'see' its unreality, and this would require realising what is not unreal. Only from the perspective of the real does the world of change seem unreal. But one can calculate its unreality for the sake of a metaphysical theory.

I transform the world into an 'empty' spectacle by a change in attitude or investment.

Maybe, but this would have nothing to do with whether or not it is unreal and some sort of illusion..

How would you define 'enlightenment'? I've tended to be wary of binary understandings of t

It is said that full enlightenment is union with reality, the death of the individual and the ego.and the transcendence of life and death. To be a little enlightened would be to have glimpsed beyond the veil and realised the possibility of being fully enlightened. Not many people can be authoritative on this topic but there is plenty of literature.

. .

I've look into that book, but I didn't find it gripping enough to keep going. I may give it another chance. I'm trained as a mathematician, so I recall it being technically daunting. — plaque flag

I have no comprehension of the mathematics and for philosophy it's not necessary to know more than that it works. The point is his reduction of form to formlessness, and his explanation of how the world is created by the multiplication of categorical opposites. Also, his dismissal of the idea that there is a 'set of all sets'. . .

My mere suspicion is that it'll be similar to Wittgenstein somehow, who also worked at the intersection of mysticism and logic. If you care to paraphrase the gist of the work, I'm all ears. What does it mean to you ?[/qquote]

Wittgenstein had no idea what mysticism is. From his writings it is not clear he ever read a book about it. Brown is in another league.

Roughly speaking Brown is saying that the original phenomenon is free of all distinctions, this a mathematical point, true continuum, unity or void, ((all of which are partless) and the first distinction or 'mark' in this tabula rasa is the beginning of the creation. In set theory this is the idea that for a Venn diagram the blank sheet of paper is fundamental and mathematics begins with the first mark we make or circle we draw.

Was 'Bertie' a fool ?

Only in certain respects. He failed to understand Bradley or Brown, and this was because he rejected mysticism without bothering to find out what it is. I'd say this is just plain stupid, although call him merely foolish because this was prior to the internet. He also believed that containers can contain themselves, and then wondered why he encountered a paradox in set theory, which to me looks like a careless beginner's mistake. . . , ,

Still, this is all just gossip basically

Its all relevant and interesting, but it's a bit like chatting about complex mathematics before sorting out arithmetic,

I think you should justify your dismissal of Wittgenstein. In my view, you are underrating him. I'm not his agent, and I don't take him for an authority. It's just think he deserves the fame. Same with Heidegger -- though I'd drag into Husserl more and stress some undernoticed early Heidegger (lectures 1919 on.) — plaque flag

I'd put Heidegger in a different class to Wittgenstein. I can't make head or tail of the Tractatus but the later Philosophical Investigations are naive and ill-informed. Heidegger was a great and perceptive thinker and I'm a fan, but he muddles the issues to the point of incomprehensibility and did not crack the case. (Sherlock Holmes is my model for a good philosopher, albeit he was concerned with other matters). . .

Idealism singles men out from the world as unique, solipsism singles me alone out, and at last I see that I too belong with the rest of the world, and so on the one side nothing is left over, and on the other side, as unique, the world. In this way idealism leads to realism if it is strictly thought out.

The view I endorse may be called Transcendental or Absolute Idealism. It would not be possible to confuse this with realism. I dislike calling this Idealism, however, since there are too many ways of interpreting this word.

This is early Wittgenstein. A lean, direct presentation of nondualism.

A bit too lean for me to read it as nondualism. In any case he'd given up any hint of nondualism by the time of the Investigations.

But (I think we agree) the 'deep' subject is no longer subject but the very being of the world itself -- its only kind of being (that we can know of, speak of sensibly.)

Yes, although I'd prefer to say there is no 'deep' subject and that in the final analysis being is also non-being.
.

That metaphysical questions are undecidable is also my view. As soon as we say anything like "reality is mind-dependent' or 'being is nothing but consciousness' we have gone off-track.

Distinctions begin with consciousness. — Janus

That metaphysical questions are undecidable is not a view any more than that F=MA is a view. .

It is said that full enlightenment is union with reality, the death of the individual and the ego.and the transcendence of life and death. To be a little enlightened would be to have glimpsed beyond the veil and realised the possibility of being fully enlightened. Not many people can be authoritative on this topic but there is plenty of literature. — FrancisRay

Recall that I don't acknowledge authority in this context. I'll consider claims. But vanity and delusion are always with us. As humans we easily get drunk on talk of round squares. We get drunk on talk that must remain cloudy, so that it's relative emptiness is hidden for us. There's a joke about a woman being a Monet [the painter ]. From far away she's beautiful. Close up she's a mess.

Much of Spiritual talk is like that. It's dependent on a distance effect ('the envelope in the letter') which includes the-subject-who-is-supposed-to-know. Before long you;ve got people who are content merely believing that someone is Enlightened but not really concerned to get there themselves. The belief in the distant possibility suffices (hence the envelope being the letter, with mere promise enjoyed as performance.)

Note that I don't take binary talk of Enlightenment seriously, though I do think some human beings are superior to others in this or that way. Still, everything flows. The self is not like a stone. I can fall off my 'horse.' I can get back on.

That metaphysical questions are undecidable is not a view any more than that F=MA is a view. — FrancisRay

As I see it, we all see the same world, but we do see from different positions. You see the world and understand metaphysical questions are undecidable so that the claim fits or articulates the world.

You give offer your testimony. But (as I've stressed elsewhere), saying that P is true is just saying that you believe P. Is just claiming P. Your testimony is your testimony. And that's it.

To quote Wittgenstein:

"p" is true, says nothing else but p.
https://archive.org/stream/notebooks191419100witt/notebooks191419100witt_djvu.txt
See 6.10.14

"P" is the structure of the world 'given to me,' the [slice of the ] world I am.

Maybe, but this would have nothing to do with whether or not it is unreal and some sort of illusion.. — FrancisRay

It tries to give meaning to a metaphor --- or to a tendency to treat some experience as somehow 'unreal.'

Hmm. I see no reason to make this assumption.It;s something to work out or explore, not to preempt with assumptions. — FrancisRay

That's just it. I simply take experience as experience, as 'real.' It's you (in my view) who are simply deciding to ignore this or that aspect of experience.

Note that 'real' tends to have a merely practical or honorific use. It matters whether I 'actually' paid the rent or just dreamt it. But dreams exist, as do prime numbers.

Nobody can understand philosophy for us. But what I;m suggesting is that you don't need to be a great thinker to do this. One just has to take account of the facts. — FrancisRay

I agree that we don't have to be a great thinker in the sense of obtaining a great breakthrough that'll get us in the canon. But we do have to understand some of the great thinkers, and this involves being them in a certain sense, seeing the world as they saw, with the help of their words. I agree that facts are important, but we also have to think (reason carefully from or on the facts.)

Note that they are only great thinkers in the first place because, having understood them, we feel empowered, that we see things more clearly. So it's always about the ideas, the 'theorems.'

Yes, although I'd prefer to say there is no 'deep' subject and that in the final analysis being is also non-being.
. — FrancisRay

:up:

All is הֶבֶלl .





NASB Translation :
breath (5), delusion (2), emptily (1), emptiness (2), fleeting (2), fraud (1), futile (1), futility (13), idols (7), mere breath (2), nothing (1), useless (1), vain (3), vainly (1), vanity (19), vanity of vanities (3), vapor (1), worthless (2)

Heidegger was a great and perceptive thinker and I'm a fan, but he muddles the issues to the point of incomprehensibility and did not crack the case. — FrancisRay

This source [ Theodore Kiesel ] places Heidegger's primary breakthrough at the lecture KNS 1919: THE IDEA OF PHILOSOPHY AND THE PROBLEM OF WORLDVIEWS.

In fact, it was in this semester which inaugurated his phenomenological decade that he first discovered his root metaphor of the 'way' to describe his very kinetic sense of philosophy. Philosophy is not theory, outstrips any theory or conceptual system it may develop, because it can only approximate and never really comprehend the immediate experience it wishes to articulate. That which is nearest to us in experience is farthest removed from our comprehension. Philosophy in its 'poverty of thought' is ultimately reduced to maintaining its proximating orientation toward the pre-theoretical origin which is its subject matter. Philosophy is accordingly an orienting comportment, a praxis of striving, and a protreptic encouraging such a striving. Its expressions are only 'formal indications' which smooth the way toward intensifying the sense of the immediate in which we find ourselves. It is always precursory in its pronouncements,a forerunner of insights, a harbinger and hermeneutic herald of life's possibilities of understanding and articulation. In short, philosophy is more a form of life on the edge of expression than a science. That phenomenology is more a preconceptual, provisory comportment than a conceptual science, that the formally indicating 'concepts' are first intended to serve life rather than science, becomes transparent only after the turn...
...
Philosophy is 'philosophizing', being 'on the way to language,' ways ---not works.

One way to understand phenomenology is in terms of digging in to an experience that tends to be taken for granted. It is (aspiring toward) a 'radical wakefulness for existence.'

I take myself to have understood nonduality through a scientific/logical approach. This understanding doesn't solve the problem of life. It's 'just' an improved arrangement of concepts, an ontological breakthrough. Does it make me a better person ? I think it's only me climbing one of many possible conceptual ladders. I merely understand what Mach and James and Wittgenstein were getting at. But life goes on.

As far as 'wisdom' goes, I can believe from experience is a relative detachment -- that all is הֶבֶל [hevel]. I could quote some dark humor from Freud, but suffice it to say that various 'infantile longings' are put aside. One learns how to enjoy this dirty nasty beautiful actuality. One gets cozy in the meatgrinder, no longer so attached to the dying host body, more and more a cultural being identified with relatively durable patterns that leap from host to host.

The ego is as little absolutely permanent as are bodies. That which we so much dread in death, the annihilation of our permanency, actually occurs in life in abundant measure. That which is most valued by us, remains preserved in countless copies, or, in cases of exceptional excellence, is even preserved of itself. In the best human being, however, there are individual traits, the loss of which neither he himself nor others need regret. Indeed, at times, death, viewed as a liberation from individuality, may even become a pleasant thought.
...
Similarly, class-consciousness, class-prejudice, the feeling of nationality, and even the narrowest-minded local patriotism may have a high importance, for certain purposes. But such attitudes will not be shared by the broad-minded investigator, at least not in moments of research. All such egoistic views are adequate only for practical purposes. Of course, even the investigator may succumb to habit. Trifling pedantries and nonsensical discussions; the cunning appropriation of others' thoughts, with perfidious silence as to the sources; when the word of recognition must be given, the difficulty of swallowing one's defeat, and the too common eagerness at the same time to set the opponent's achievement in a false light: all this abundantly shows that the scientist and scholar have also the battle of existence to fight, that the ways even of science still lead to the mouth, and that the pure impulse towards knowledge is still an ideal in our present social conditions.

The primary fact is not the ego, but the elements (sensations). ... When I cease to have the sensation green, when I die, then the elements no longer occur in the ordinary, familiar association. That is all. Only an ideal mental-economical unity, not a real unity, has ceased to exist. The ego is not a definite, unalterable, sharply bounded unity. None of these attributes are important; for all vary even within the sphere of individual life; in fact their alteration is even sought after by the individual. Continuity alone is important.... But continuity is only a means of preparing and conserving what is contained in the ego. This content, and not the ego, is the principal thing. This content, however, is not confined to the individual. With the exception of some insignificant and valueless personal memories, it remains presented in others even after the death of the individual. The elements that make up the consciousness of a given individual are firmly connected with one another, but with those of another individual they are only feebly connected, and the connexion is only casually apparent. Contents of consciousness, however, that are of universal significance, break through these limits of the individual, and, attached of course to individuals again, can enjoy a continued existence of an impersonal, superpersonal kind, independently of the personality by means of which they were developed. To contribute to this is the greatest happiness of the artist, the scientist, the inventor, the social reformer, etc. — Mach

https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/mach.htm

I understand 'learning how to die' in terms of a disidentification with the petty body-ego, which is simultaneously an identification with a kind of 'generic' gnosis.

Some one said: “The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did.” Precisely, and they are that which we know.
...
What is to be insisted upon is that the poet must develop or procure the consciousness of the past and that he should continue to develop this consciousness throughout his career.

What happens is a continual surrender of himself as he is at the moment to something which is more valuable. The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality. — Eliot

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/69400/tradition-and-the-individual-talent

This continual extinction of personality is also its enlargement.

Men are admitted into Heaven not because they have curbed & govern’d their Passion or have No Passions, but because they have Cultivated their Understandings. The Treasures of Heaven are not Negations of Passion but Realities of Intellect, from which all the Passions Emanate Uncurbed in their Eternal Glory. The Fool shall not enter into heaven let him be ever so Holy. Holiness is not The Price of Enterance into Heaven. — Blake

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/A_Vision_of_the_Last_Judgment_(1982)

As mystic as Blake is thought to be, he's also a 'scientist' here. Cultivate their understandings. Not purity or self-mortification. But 'realities of intellect' --- empowering-liberating realizations.

Also, his dismissal of the idea that there is a 'set of all sets'. . . — FrancisRay

Just so you know, that's not an innovation on his part. It's standard axiomatic set theory.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axiom_schema_of_specification
Because restricting comprehension avoided Russell's paradox, several mathematicians including Zermelo, Fraenkel, and Gödel considered it the most important axiom of set theory.

There's also the issue of the gap between a formal theory and our ontological interpretation of it. This is related to ontology's interpretations of the claims of physics. A statement may be warranted within a certain discourse (that may be uncontroversial), but what that statement means might be problematically indeterminate in the total context of life.

In his Phenomenology of Perception (first published in French in 1945), Merleau-Ponty gave a phenomenological analysis of perception and elaborated how one constitutes one's perceptual experiences, which are essentially perspectival.

The essential partiality of our view of things, he argued, their being given only in a certain perspective and at a certain moment in time, does not diminish their reality, but on the contrary establishes it, as there is no other way for things to be co-present with us and with other things than through such "Abschattungen" (profiles, adumbrations).

The thing transcends our view, but is manifest precisely by presenting itself to a range of possible views. The object of perception is immanently tied to its background—to the nexus of meaningful relations among objects within the world. Because the object is inextricably within the world of meaningful relations, each object reflects the other (much in the style of Leibniz's monads).

https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Perspectivism

Clearly being a great thinker is not enough. Indeed, I sometimes wonder if being very clever is a drawback. . — FrancisRay

This resonates with me. Great thinkers are of course clever, but I would say a much great factor is their obsessiveness.

That metaphysical questions are undecidable is not a view any more than that F=MA is a view. .We can certainly agree on your final vastly important point. . — FrancisRay

I agree in the sense that it can clearly be seen that metaphysical questions are undecidable, and in that sense, it is a realization rather than a view. On the other hand, like any proposition, it is open to being negated, so someone can always hold the (erroneous or myopic) view that metaphysical questions are decidable.

Before long you;ve got people who are content merely believing that someone is Enlightened but not really concerned to get there themselves. The belief in the distant possibility suffices (hence the envelope being the letter — plaque flag

Yes, this is an issue. But the work is not for everyone.

As I see it, we all see the same world, but we do see from different positions. You see the world and understand metaphysical questions are undecidable so that the claim fits or articulates the world.

You give offer your testimony. But (as I've stressed elsewhere), saying that P is true is just saying that you believe P. Is just claiming P. Your testimony is your testimony. And that's it. — plaque flag

If you cannot conceded that metaphysical questions are undecidable and feel it;s just my opinion then there will be no purpose in our talking about metaphysics, We can shoot the breeze about this and that,but we won;t get anywhere.

It tries to give meaning to a metaphor --- or to a tendency to treat some experience as somehow 'unreal.' — plaque flag

What metaphor? That the space-time world is unreal (in a specific sense) is a result of analysis, not a metaphor.or anything to so with your attitude.