Comments

  • The Mind-Created World
    And traditionally, and in general, the way many people try to overcome disagreement (and to win verbal disputes) is to posit the existence of an external world of which they claim or imply to have special knowledge, and that anyone who doesn't think the way they do is wrong, bad, evil, or in some other way defective.baker

    :up:

    I'm thinking of using Rashomon and As I Lay Dying as explications of the nondual perspectivist position. Both narratives give us the-world-for-characters. We never get the External Aperspectival World, and I've been claiming that such a thing is a round square, a seductive empty phrase, for we all get the world only as such characters. The world we know is the-world-for-characters. But we dream of stuff that floats without a nose in the picture, because it's a useful dream, however incorrect in some other important sense.

    Related issue. We only have belief, never truth. Or rather 'true' is a compliment we pay to claims we believe. It's no magic sauce. Young Wittgenstein was (impressively) already clear on this, somehow seeing right through the usual superstition, perhaps because he was perspectivist. { He didn't call himself that, but I'll defend a nondual perspectivist interpretation of key passages from the TLP. }
  • The Mind-Created World
    Splendid Hegel quote. Just the kind of thing that Marx inverted.Wayfarer

    :up:

    Since that went over well, I'll add some of Heidegger's updating of the software (of the software's self-articulation.)

    Coming into the world, one grows into a determinate tradition of speaking, seeing, interpreting. Being-in-the-world is an already-having-the-world-thus-and-so.
    ...
    Dasein, whiling away its own time in each case, is at the same time always [also, even primarily ] a generation. So a specific interpretedness precedes every Dasein in the shape of the generation itself. What is preserved in the generation is itself the outcome of earlier views and disputes, earlier interpretations and past concerns.
    ...
    Such a forgotten past is inherent in the prevailing interpretedness of being-together-with-one-another. To the extent that Dasein lives from ... this past, it is this past itself.
    ...
    The world with which we are concerned and being-in itself are both interpreted within the parameters of a particular framework of intelligibility.
    ...
    ... the 'fore'-character in the structure of interpretedness shows us that it is none other than what has already been that jumps ahead, as it were, of a present time pervaded by interpretedness. Guided by its interpretedness, expectant concern lives its own past.
    ...
    Dasein 'is' history.

    I got this nice quote from @Joshs:

    The past is not an earlier position but the now implicitly functioning past....the past functions to "interpret" the present,...the past is changed by so functioning. — Gendlin

    For what it's worth, William James quotes psychologists that were aware of this already in his time. We meet the present as our entire past. Since I am mostly the 'generic human soul' of my generation (the 'who of everyday dasein' or 'the anyone'), much of this past is not personal but cultural. This includes inferential norms, which we experience as binding, as the condition for the possibility of a genuine psychology, and so never reducible to psychological contingency.
    ...
    For you and anyone else, I commend Julian Young's Heidegger's Later Philosophy for its beautiful clarity. All killer, no filler. It agrees with Braver's take in A Thing of This World. It's a spiritual take but not a mystical take. It's all conceptually tight (to me a plus).
  • Neutral Monism / Perspectivism / Phenomenalism

    Despite the occasional lip service, I don't think you understand the spirit of science, or that you are able or willing to get your story straight. Some people are more sensitive to rational norms, more bothered by contradictions or indeterminateness in the story they tell. Others think they have a thought to share, when it's only a Feeling associated with a cloud of unorganized references. Do you not tell me, without irony, that everything is literally nothing ? And yet you don't even bother to clarify for yourself or others what kind of trope must be involved to avoid the obvious absurdity involved. I quote Qoheleth for you, and we seem to gel on that, but then you insist on dogmatically pontificating, squandering the investment of a charitable listener -- implying if not saying that I'm missing the Insight --- which however cannot be articulated.

    As I see it, it's fine to not justify or argue for Spiritual Things, but I suggest you and others who prefer that mode just drop the pretense of rationality altogether. Avoid attacking worthy philosophers you haven't read [ closely ? at all, really? ] for not being irrationalist metaphorical paradoxical mystics in just the way you are.

    Again I quote Nietzsche's sketch of Jesus, because I think it gets 'mysticism' right. And it gets my mysticism right, if I bother to call it that. But one doesn't argue about such things.

    ...he regarded only subjective realities as realities, as “truths” ... he saw everything else, everything natural, temporal, spatial and historical, merely as signs, as materials for parables...
    ...
    The “kingdom of heaven” is a state of the heart—not something to come “beyond the world” or “after death.” .. The “kingdom of God” is not something that men wait for: it had no yesterday and no day after tomorrow, it is not going to come at a “millennium”—it is an experience of the heart, it is everywhere and it is nowhere....
    ...
    This faith does not formulate itself—it simply lives, and so guards itself against formulae. ...It is only on the theory that no word is to be taken literally that this anti-realist is able to speak at all. Set down among Hindus he would have made use of the concepts of Sankhya, and among Chinese he would have employed those of Lao-tse—and in neither case would it have made any difference to him.—With a little freedom in the use of words, one might actually call Jesus a “free spirit”—he cares nothing for what is established: the word killeth, whatever is established killeth. The idea of “life” as an experience, as he alone conceives it, stands opposed to his mind to every sort of word, formula, law, belief and dogma.
    — Nietzsche
  • The Mind-Created World
    I won't go any more in this direction in this thread, but it's no small feature of 'mind' that it is profoundly timebinding and historical. The "mighty dead" are gone as flesh but not as spirit. Indeed, the updates they made to the cultural software of the West are more or less alive in us. In thinkers like Hegel, the process began to grasp its own historicity, its own essence.
    The bodily forms of those great minds who are the heroes of this history, the temporal existence and outward lives of the philosophers, are, indeed, no more, but their works and thoughts have not followed suit, for they neither conceived nor dreamt of the rational import of their works. Philosophy is not somnambulism, but is developed consciousness; and what these heroes have done is to bring that which is implicitly rational out of the depths of Mind, where it is found at first as substance only, or as inwardly existent, into the light of day, and to advance it into consciousness and knowledge. This forms a continuous awakening. Such work is not only deposited in the temple of Memory as forms of times gone by, but is just as present and as living now as at the time of its production. ... The conquests made by Thought when constituted into Thought form the very Being of Mind. Such knowledge is thus not learning merely, or a knowledge of what is dead, buried and corrupt: the history of Philosophy has not to do with what is gone, but with the living present.
    ...
    Since the progress of development is equivalent to further determination, and this means further immersion in, and a fuller grasp of the Idea itself-that the latest, most modern and newest philosophy is the most developed, richest and deepest. In that philosophy everything which at first seems to be past and gone must be preserved and retained, and it must itself be a mirror of the whole history. The original philosophy is the most abstract, because it is the original and has not as yet made any movement forward; the last, which proceeds from this forward and impelling influence, is the most concrete. This, as may at once be remarked, is no mere pride in the philosophy of our time, because it is in the nature of the whole process that the more developed philosophy of a later time is really the result of the previous operations of the thinking mind; and that it, pressed forwards and onwards from the earlier standpoints, has not grown up on its own account or in a state of isolation.
    — Hegel
    https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/hp/hpintroa.htm#A1a

    Of course Heidegger has his own, often-gloomier version of this. Key point is that we are thrown into an inheritance, which we eventually pass on, having hopefully made a worthy improvement, correction, or addition. Our cultural world is especially 'mind'-created.

    I claim that this evolving ontology articulates the world, manifesting an ideal perspective. A little personification will probably be alright, especially given that our implicit goal (those of us who are serious, anyway) is to achieve this ideal perspective (move toward it at least.)
  • The Mind-Created World
    The point was simply that both Leibniz' and Berkeley's metaphysics fall apart if you remove God.Janus

    Actually that wasn't the point.
  • Rationalism's Flat Ontology

    It seems to me that you are ultimately arguing that argument is not decisive. I hope you are offering more than the reminder that we could always be wrong, that life is not just about logic.

    But this is all (to me) way too existential compared to what the OP cares about. The point is getting out of the mud of dualism and seeing that 'mental' and 'physical' entities are always already entangled in a single nexus.

    Now flat and rationalist come together. We already explain going to the dentist (“physical”) in terms of a toothache (“mental”). We already explain hearing music (“mental”) in terms of hammers on strings (“physical”). We might explain going off the road by a hallucination and that hallucination by the ingestion of a drug. Given all of these typical inferential connections between the supposedly fundamental categories, the famous mental/physical dyad loses (or ought to lose ) its prestige. A single 'continuous' blanket ontology becomes possible, with the nonalienated immanent (even centrally located ) rational community as the spider on the web.
  • Rationalism's Flat Ontology
    Valid argument can be mounted from any premise you like, soundness (in the case of metaphysical arguments at least) is undecidable.Janus

    So is the nature of argument at least truly universal and binding on all humans ?
  • The Mind-Created World
    I add this in case anyone wants to pick up the thread.
    The new ontology argues that we can only ever speak of being as it is for us. Depending on the philosophy in question, this “us” can be minds, lived bodies, language, signs, power, social structures, and so on. — The Democracy of Objects, Chapter 1, by Levi R. Bryant

    (1) We 'can only ever speak' of being as something we are speaking about. This tautology is supposed to be offensive. But one could also tease when it's presented as a profundity.

    (2) The 'for us' can be reduced to pure perspectival being, as in Wittgenstein. The world 'just happens' to gather around sentient flesh. But this can be thought of as merely contingently true. It takes effort, but one can (and I think Husserl did) imagine a pure bodiless worldstream. But there will be an implicit 'eye' implied by the visual space (a perspectival space) , even if no eye is actually posited, for that's the kind of space we can talk sensibly about.
  • The Mind-Created World
    Even just their importance as members of the canon relies on their system being accepted as a whole.Janus

    To me that's a bold claim which I very much dispute. I take an opposite Hegelian view. The timebinding [ scientific ] philosophical Conversation is the actual protagonist, and relatively ephemeral personalities become relevant if they catch up with it enough to help it along.

    Your thinking, applied to physics, would reduce Newton to dust -- as if we weren't basically still Newtonians. To be sure, we aren't pure Newtonians anymore.
  • Why is the Hard Problem of Consciousness so hard?
    It depends on how you want to define the terms.Janus

    :up:

    Sure. And that's the essence of my response.
  • Rationalism's Flat Ontology

    We don't need some perfectly determinate and final set of inferential and semantic norms to do science. Science is fundamentally social and cooperative. We consciously seek consensus with a kind of synthetic-critical method, a 'second order tradition' (Popper).

    Your view (so far, on this thread) implies the denial of the possibility of [genuine ] philosophy.
  • Rationalism's Flat Ontology
    Problem is that there is no one rational understanding. Humanity is diverse.Janus
    But do you see how that's self-cancelling relativism ? If you argue for it, then that's just 'your' logic, no ?
  • The Mind-Created World
    I am then led to wonder whether that possibility of perception, when engaged, effects an actualization of perception, such that we are really encountering a perception/image rather than the thing itself. For me the possibility of perception is derivative on the thing that exists in itself. The thing is more than a possibility of perception, even though we always know by means of perception.Leontiskos

    The problem of hallucination, right ? I can decide that what 'seemed like' an X was 'really' a Y. But I can changed 'my mind' yet again. One 'appearance' 'corrects' another. Belief is the intelligible structure of the world given perspectively. There is no stuff out there beyond all perspectives. Not in my system. Wouldn't have it. [Smile] So the world-for-me itself flickers and smokes with possibility and uncertainty. Despite our practical and shrewd repression of this aspect of the world.

    To quote early Notebook boy Wittgenstein, 'p is true' just means 'p.' Which means that the world is like this rather than that [the world for me, but I have to remind myself of that sometimes.] We can learn a detachment or distance from our beliefs, so that we call them 'beliefs' and not just (like a fanatic) the obvious truth.

    derivative on the thing that exists in itself

    Can you unfold this ? My bias is that you won't find more than what Mill described, but perhaps you'll surprise me.
  • The Mind-Created World
    Good to know. I figured as much, even though you both consider yourselves correlationists.Leontiskos
    Just to clarify, you mean @Wayfarer ? I don't know if he embraces the term. But, for the record, we can do without the subject before we can do without the world. [The empirical subject is part of the world, albeit a central part.] [The world is just 'Being' --- how it is, all that is the case in all its sensuousness, etc. ]
  • The Mind-Created World

    Ontology would no longer be the investigation of being qua being in all its variety and diversity regardless of whether humans exist, but rather would instead become a"n interrogation of Dasein's or human being's access to being. — The Democracy of Objects, Chapter 1, by Levi R. Bryant

    I can't speak for all correlationists, but I take speculative realism to be an empty promise, grounded in nostalgia. The investigation of being (ontology) is something like grasping its essence in concepts. So it's weird to talk about grasping forever-ungraspable being. And of course our 'talk' is a contamination of this 'being.' So what now ? The speculative realists tend to present themselves as tough-minded types, but I feel like I'm the genuine positivist in such a context, up against mathematical mystics whose attachment to physics is supposed to obscure the mysticism.
  • The Mind-Created World
    plaque flag, I was reading your thread, "Rationalism's Flat Ontology," and so far I'm on the third sentence.Leontiskos

    :)

    I appreciate you checking it out. I'd be happy to clarify my weird prose, of course.
  • The Mind-Created World
    The problem is their systems fall apart when the lynchpin is removed, which raises the question as to how we might think their systems are important when they are in a shambles.Janus
    I'll let their ghosts debate that issue with you, since neither system is my own. Wittgenstein basically states my own current position in the TLP and early notebooks. Mach gives a powerful, more detailed presentation. James is also there in Does Consciousness Exist ? None of them hammered home the implied perspectivism, though, which gives me something useful to do.
  • Why is the Hard Problem of Consciousness so hard?

    there can be no definitive demonstration of truth regarding metaphysical propositions.Janus

    That sounds like an analytic proposition, with metaphysical propositions thereby implicitly defined. Which is fine, if endlessly debatable. I like the word ontology better myself.
  • The Mind-Created World
    And as 'the world' and 'experience' are not ultimately divided (per non-dualism) then this is why mathematics is uncannily predictictive. That, I think, is the thrust of McDonnell's book.Wayfarer

    To me it's not math itself but theories in that syntax that are predictive. Math allows for precise measurement and precise prediction. It also allows for more and more complex models, with more and more impressive inferences allowing us to move from general theory to a prediction in this or that specified context.

    The world just happens to be orderly, it seems to me. Maybe the anthropic principle is worth something here. Without order to exploit, there could be no life. (?)
  • The Mind-Created World
    My view is that they're real, but they're not phenomenally existent; they're inherent in the way the mind categorises, predicts and organises its cognitions.Wayfarer

    Sure. And they also exist culturally, viscerally, just as the rest of our mentality does. As a student of math, I'd be lost with pencil and paper (I've been working on math when stepping away from here, a construction of the real numbers.) Much of mathematical thinking is externalized, embodied. And more generally reduce pure subjectivity to pure being itself. The psychological subject is part of the world, and we can articulate all kinds of causal relationships between it an its environment --do the usual psychology.
  • Why is the Hard Problem of Consciousness so hard?
    There is a clear conceptual distinction between 'knowable' and 'unknowable'. Can it be proven that everything is knowable or that some things are unknowable? Fitch's Paradox of Knowability?Janus

    Given the Kantian background, I'm slower to commit, because metaphysical types can come up with some strange phrases (I don't mean you, but just the context of this forum.) But the world (as I understand it) includes all sorts of possibilities, including 'unknown unknowns,' but this kind of speech is at the limit of intelligibility. Consider how many paradoxes there are in naive set theory. It's very easy for humans to snap together words into phrases that do not compute.
  • The Mind-Created World
    For Leibniz there is a "master monad" who coordinates all the rest: God.Janus

    Sure, but I thought it was obvious that I wasn't just adopting Leibniz's entire theory. I've been trying to follow the evolution of perspectivism in Western philosophy, and Leibniz and Berkeley are important, but they come with the expected theological baggage of their time, which I don't need of course.

    For me there is no world-in-itself: some weird collection of asperspectival stuff. Hence ontological cubism. A world shattered into perspectives on that world. This isn't an empirical claim. It's a semantic claim. People can't even say what they mean by it. Or so I claim.

    But our best physical theories are great at transforming coordinate systems, till maybe we forget that measurements are finally done by embodied perspectival beings --that physical theories refer, finally, to actual and possible human experience. [Or they aren't science anymore but mysticism written in difficult mathematics, which isn't that hard to do really.]
  • The Mind-Created World
    Seems to present a kind of Pythagorean idealism, although I've barely started reading it yet.Wayfarer

    Questions I might ask: Is color real (are there really colorful things) ? Is sound real ? Are feelings of love real ? That we humans got good a measuring things and finding mathematical patterns in those measurements is undeniable. But why do certain thinkers pretend/claim that the visceral-embodied measurement process is unreal ? It's all real. The numbers too, but not only the numbers.
  • Why is the Hard Problem of Consciousness so hard?
    I'm down with that although I would say it depends on what we mean by "world"; do we mean "human world' or simply 'world' as in 'everything that is' including what may be unknowable to the human?Janus
    That gets us into metaphysical details. Is there a difference in the first place ? I will of course grant that humans always have more to learn, that we are always surrounded or fringed by darkness.
  • Why is the Hard Problem of Consciousness so hard?
    This theory states that nothing really exists or ever really happens, so it is quite easy to distinguish from the ideas you mention.FrancisRay

    Such a theory is so obviously false that it only make sense if understood as ironic or metaphorical. It's like 'all is vanity.' Or there's a line in Kafka's journal to the effect that 'nothing has yet happened.' Poetic, maybe profound, but hard to see as something one argues about. Along these lines, I would never argue that 'all is vanity.'
  • Why is the Hard Problem of Consciousness so hard?
    We could equally say that being is fundamental, but 'being' is also just a word, and also misses the non-dual mark.Janus

    To me 'being' is just empty enough to work. But it is indeed just a word. The nondual stuff doesn't even need a name. We might also agree with James that monism is just as easily conceived as a radical pluralism. There are all kinds of things as many as we care to come up with. But those things are, so 'being' is not so bad, seems to me. The 'world' is also good, if it's understood to include everything.
  • The Mind-Created World
    And this, again, within an idealistic system.javra

    How so, if you don't mind my asking ?
  • The Mind-Created World

    I think you are agreeing with John Stuart Mill, that objects are permanent possibilities [and actualities, of course ] of sensation.
  • The Mind-Created World
    I cannot imagine a consistent theory of everything that ignores consciousness.. — Paul Davies, The Goldilocks Enigma: Why is the Universe Just Right for Life, p 271

    :up:

    My approach to this is to stubbornly demand some actual meaning from physical theories. The 'silence of algorithm' (often math that just has no definite interpretation or only an absurd-counterintuitive interpretation) is finally brought down to earth and the lifeworld and genuine meaning through the [ understandable ] measurements it 'compresses' [ see algorithmic information theory ] and predicts. Then there's the associated technology, which we experience in the usual, familiar way.

    As far as I can tell, some people experience the math involved as mystical hieroglyphics, like the streaming green source code in The Matrix. I think Tegmark is like this, but such thinking has left the empirical scientific spirit behind. It's bad metaphysics drunk on its close association with good physics.
  • The Mind-Created World
    For the classical realist the extramental world can be known in itself precisely through the rational, perspective-grounded mind.Leontiskos

    Let me know if my paraphrase is acceptable ?

    The object itself (better phrase for my money than the object-in-itself) and not some representation of it is known. Others may see the object itself from the other side of the room, and they will therefore see it differently, but they also see the object itself, not a representation.

    I think we agree on:

    Mediation is unnecessary here. Perspective is the better way to approach the varying of the object's givenness. The complicated machinery of vision is a often-mentioned red herring, in my view. The intended object is always out there in the world. 'I see the object' exists in Sellars' 'space of reasons.'
  • The Mind-Created World
    The "inferential role" idea adds a great deal.Leontiskos

    It'd be great to get your thoughts on this aging OP, but no pressure.
  • The Mind-Created World
    Exactly! And thus if indirect realism's critique of direct realism is thoroughgoing (as Kant's tends to be), then it saws off the branch on which it sits (as you already noted). That's the part that is always hard to see for the first time.Leontiskos

    It may be hard to see because radical indirect realism is so sexy. I watched a Donald Hoffman Ted talk, and it was gripping. I knew it was fallacious and confused, but I still enjoyed it. I felt the pull of the sci-fi. I could be one of the those in on the Secret, while others were lost in the shadow play on the cave wall.
  • The Mind-Created World
    has radically failed to understand what objects are. — Schopenhauer’s Philosophy, Bryan Magee

    I can't say what Magee meant, of course, but I embraced this quote from my own [confessedly weird ] 'perspectival phenomenalist' position. What I can mean by 'broom' is (as I see it) limited by my experience. To be sure, this experience is always 'fringed' or 'horizonal.'

    I can chisel ESSE EST PERCIPI on a mountainside somewhere. Then somehow all of the species dies, and that inscription remains. But I understand its so remaining in terms of possible experience. If someone had survived, they might have found it and read it. If aliens arrive, they may be able to decode it. So for me the point is semantic. The neorationalism inspired by Brandom starts to sneak in here.

    An agent is rational in Brandom’s preferred sense just in case she draws inferences in a way that is evaluable according to the inferential role of the concepts involved in those inferences, where the inferential role of a concept is specified in terms of the conditions under which an agent would be entitled to apply, or prohibited from applying, that concept, together with what else an agent would be entitled or committed to by the appropriate application of the concept. This articulation of the content of concepts in terms of the inferential role of those concepts, and the specification of those roles in terms of proprieties of inference, is combined with a distinctive brand of pragmatism. Instead of the content of a concept providing an independent guide or rule that governs which inferences are appropriate, it is the actual practices of inferring carried out in a community of agents who assess themselves and each other for the propriety of their inferences that explains the content of the concepts.
    https://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/reason-in-philosophy-animating-ideas/

    Note that inferential role semantics is a flavor of structuralism, which is famously the salt to phenomenology's pepper, the peanutbutter to its jelly. A concept (to some degree) has its meaning in the role it plays in which inferences are allowed and disallowed. Meaning is fundamentally normative, systematic, and social, and concepts all function in sets. FWIW, it's this deep sociality of langauge that glues all the 'monads'/perspectives together. We intend [ discuss ] the same objects in the same world, however differently we perceive them.
  • The Mind-Created World
    Yes, good point. I agree.Leontiskos

    Thanks. Once this criticism occurred to me (I was inspired by Nietzsche*), the absurdity of Kant's system (as a whole, but not in all its details) became obvious. Indirect realism is, without realizing it, dependent upon direct realism.

    Others say even that the external world is the work of our organs? But then our body, as a part of this external world, would be the work of our organs! But then our organs themselves would be the work of our organs! — Nietzsche
    https://gutenberg.org/files/4363/4363-h/4363-h.htm
  • The Mind-Created World
    This is what I don't really agree with.Leontiskos

    You mean this : Objects 'are' possible and actual experiences ?

    For me the point is to examine with real seriousness what we mean by 'physical object.' I always see the spatial object as a kind of continuous series of adumbrations from various perspectives. To be sure, I don't experience the object as a mere projection. Instead the wolrd pours in. I live in the system of possibilities that is only analyzed theoretically, brought to attention to phenomenology, for instance.

    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
  • The Mind-Created World
    Good quotes. I wish you had given the sources.Leontiskos

    Thanks ! And sorry about leaving out the sources. Here they are:

    https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/scientific-realism/

    https://www.gutenberg.org/files/3207/3207-h/3207-h.htm
  • The Mind-Created World
    From an excellent blog post on idealism and non-duality,Wayfarer

    :up:
    the key to non-dual consciousness lies in recognizing that one’s individual person is part of the object side of experience (together with the ‘outside’ world) and that therefore the individual person cannot be the true subject of experience – this true subject being rather non-individual consciousness free from the subject-object duality of individual and outside world.
    This is exactly what I'm also saying. The empirical subject is in the world. The transcendental 'subject' is so pure-transparent-diaphanous ( a mere 'nothingness') that we finally grasp it as being plain and simple. The outside vanishes with the inside. We can call the stream 'transcendental consciousness' or 'pure experience,' but these subject-biased terms are a bit misleading.

    the duality of subject and external object – and thus the sensory affection of the former by the latter – is a phenomenon appearing in transcendental consciousness and therefore not a property of this consciousness which pre-conditions all phenomenality.

    In this sense, Kant’s recognition of the phenomenal nature of the inner sense / outer sense duality should have clearly shown to him the non-dual nature of transcendental consciousness itself. That is, it should have made it perfectly clear to him that the transcendental subject, whose self-consciousness unifies all phenomena, is a non-dual subject, i.e. a subject without an external object (“one without a second” in the language of the Upanishads).

    https://critique-of-pure-interest.blogspot.com/2021/02/non-duality-and-problems-of-western_12.html
  • Neutral Monism / Perspectivism / Phenomenalism
    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
  • Neutral Monism / Perspectivism / Phenomenalism
    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.
  • Neutral Monism / Perspectivism / Phenomenalism
    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.