If I already possess that divine "information", I am not aware of it. :smile:

That was precisely my point, we are not aware of it, but our soul is, or perhaps our spirit. It might just be our outer, more physical, self conscious self which isn’t.
Anyway, for me it is a meditation, or contemplation technique. The idea that to realise truth, I don’t need to go anywhere, to do anything else. I’m already at my destination (the answer, the truth) if I could but know it, but realise it. Human nature implores us to do things, to go places to achieve things, it’s programmed into us as a survival technique. In a sense that takes us away from the inner truth. The reason people go into monasteries and retreats is to reverse that process and return to their inner selves to some degree.

Yes the author is right, we don’t know what any of those things are. We know very little about the building blocks of our world.
The reason I say electricity has probably something to do with consciousness is that it has some remarkable qualities which are not in any way present in matter, (if we are thinking of matter in isolation), it provides energy for atoms, which can be provided in relative quantities, it readily forms into fields and it behaves as though it can move around at the speed of light. It almost behaves like an omnipotent God, outside of space and time. It provides the animation in living processes, and provides all sorts of charge fields and electrical processes in living bodies.

Now going back to the idea that consciousness is fundamental like space, time, physical material. What do you think is going on in a star, in terms of consciousness. This is important because the majority of the material in the universe is either present in a star, or has been in the past. A star is like a melting pot in which matter dissolves into plasma, meaning the strong and weak atomic forces somehow merge, we can observe powerful magnetic forces at play in our local star and I can’t imagine what electricity is up to in a place like that. Where is the consciousness in all that?

As for your question about what part electricity may play in consciousness, well, I’m just guessing like everyone else. But for me it is a way in, a portal for consciousness, spirit, perhaps to come into the physical world. As I said before, I see the physical world as an artificial construct, the real world being made up of consciousness and mind, which acts out certain things in the artificial world for some reason, or other.

When I saw the thread title, my first thought was as in communion in Christianity. The presence of spirit. Then I saw that it was really about time.
Surely presence would include the idea of place as well as of time. Because for something to be present in the present, it would also be present in a place?

This is that the Buddha's teaching is like the stick used to stir a fire to help get it burning. But when the fire is burning, the stick is tossed in.

A beautiful metaphor, something I have acted out many times. Thankyou.

Unless there wasn't a time when consciousness didn't exist. If it is fundamental, a property of things, as, for example, mass and charge are, then it was always there. There was always experiencing. Yes, reality started perceiving itself when structures of perception evolved. At which point, there was the experience of perception.

I have a lot of sympathy with your stance and there is an interpretation of my stance which fits with yours. But it comes from an entirely different root to what is being discussed in this thread.

I’ve been thinking of raising the issue of electrical charge and consciousness. As you mention charge, this seems like an appropriate time.
It occurs to me that consciousness might be emergent from the presence of charge in matter (mass, or extension, ie spacetime). Or the other way around, the presence of matter (spacetime) in charge. Although when it comes to extension in space and time and charge, they are all a consequence of extension and rely on it to have existence.

To put that simply, space/time/charge emerge together. Consciousness could be emergent in the presence of charge in matter. The animating part, electricity. We can see how electricity and charge play a fundamental role in life processes. Particularly in the central nervous system, indeed in thought, sentience and the exalted state of consciousness observed in humans. We are an electrical processing device, which processes information for the purpose of increasing our chances of survival.

So rather like your train set aeroplane analogy. We have developed a processing device to be better at survival, but inadvertently produced something which could take us out into space.

You’re taking the derived abstraction ( the empirical third-person account) and making it the basis for the actual phenomenological experience which constructed the abstraction in the first place.

Quite, the experience needs to be stripped bare to the bones. And compared with itself unstripped. And with the social group (or biosphere), not just the individual.

However, in order to get a 'coherent story' that includes both insights, I acknowledge that I have to posit a consciousness of some sort that can truly be regarded as the ground of intelligibility. Panentheism is a way, I believe, to overcome and at the same time accept the 'main message' of the antinomy you are referencing.

I entirely agree, although I expect our interpretations will differ somewhat.

So, an individual sentient being can't know directly anything 'in itself'.

I’m not so sure about this, yes with the sensory apparatus we have, I would agree with this. But it doesn’t mean we can’t bear witness to it, or be hosted by a being who can know it.

But this is much larger that 'the philosophy of Descartes', as it is woven into the cultural grammar of modernity - we naturally tend to 'carve up' reality along those lines.

Yes, I know, the conditioning is so deep, it goes to every fibre of our being. But we must remember, that that being and the nature we are being conditioned by is all natural and is perhaps closer to the truth than we might think.

Perhaps it's like that. The irony is that I see Wayfarer's thinking as dualistic, whereas he claims that I am coming from a Cartesian standpoint, whereas, while I acknowledge that any discursive thinking is going to be inherently dualistic as that is just the nature of our language when it is doing analysis, I'm saying I see no point in claiming the mind is immaterial, even though we obviously have that conceptual distinction between material and immaterial. Every concept automatically invokes and evokes its opposite.

Right at the beginning of my interest in philosophical thinking, back in the mists of time. The first thing I learned to do was to think outside the box, so to speak. I was reading a book written by a Sufi Guru/ mystic (I can’t remember the author, or the book, if I say which book it was, I might have confused it with another, so I won’t, it was quite well read, you might have read it yourself). He kept going back to the same idea, from different angles and it stuck with me.
Basically that, intuitive thinking is a skill that can be developed and it is like trying to listen to someone in the next room, talking quietly, while sitting in a noisy room, with someone talking at you, trying to convince you of something. The person trying to convince you of something is your conditioned self. In a philosophical context your Cartesian, or empirical self.
The idea being that for the Sufi, they are concerned with what that quiet person is saying.

What I’m saying is that there is a way of stepping out of this dualistic thought process. To develop a sense of things which can become like an alternative approach, or perspective on an issue. Over time, it becomes like a reference system, but not dualistically based, but intuitive/feeling based. It helps if you are dyslexic, which I am, because you have to work out your own alternative ways of thinking, because you just can’t do the simple stuff like learning how to read and write. (Learning to read was a Herculean task for me, I still don’t know how I did it).

Anyway what I’m thinking of in this discussion and what I think Wayfarer is trying to put across is that there is something about the subject which is deeper, more fundamental than what the Cartesian thinking can allow. The Cartesian fish can’t see the water, doesn’t know it’s there and when it’s told there is water there, it says, yes I know, so what?

Now I know I might come out with some pretty weird stuff, but I don’t necessarily believe any of it. They are all just working hypotheses for me. Like alternative ways of reading when the part of my brain that reads the written word, doesn’t work properly.

Right, consciousness is determined by material conditions, and without material conditions there would be nothing to be conscious of. On the other hand without consciousness there would be no one to be aware of material conditions. So, a conclusion might be that neither is primary, and that they co-arise. On the other hand we can certainly imagine that material conditions were present prior to the advent of consciousness or least prior to consciousness as we understand it. All our scientific evidence points to that conclusion.

I’m going to say something controversial, another conclusion to the one in bold is that they didn’t co-arise, but that consciousness was introduced, to a pre-existing world. It makes more sense to me than the idea that consciousness was always present, even in the Big Bang.

( I’m quite happy with the Cartesian view that consciousness might have arisen when life emerged from the primordial soup. I just don’t give it much weight in the light of alternatives that I have worked out)

One could say then that without the subject there is no time to produce the glue which makes the objectively real possible. The formal structure of time is not to be understood as ‘inside‘ the subject, however. It requires the exposure of the subject to a world, and therefore there is no subject prior to a world. There are no things in themselves, whether those things are objects outside the subject or an inner realm inside the subject. The subject has no interior since it is not an in-itself but the exposure to a world. It is also not a fixed perspective but the empty capability of generating perspectives.

Nice, I add interconnected worlds too. Well layered and interconnected, with a layered and interconnected subject.

Yes, I know. I was illustrating that the definition doesn’t apply when the influence is for love, cooperation, compassion etc.

I incited my wife to marry me. There, it exists.

I can understand both positions here and as before it appears that you both agree, but are looking at the same thing from different starting positions, or perspectives. But when the argument comes to an end, you haven’t quite met in the middle. Which results in the gears not quite meshing. You need some synchromesh, or oil here.

You know what I was saying about a lightbulb moment, where something clicks and it colours your world in a new light. But nothing in the world has changed, only your perspective has changed slightly. But it is almost impossible to convey that to someone else, because nothing in the world has changed, it was just a tiny little tweak in your own mind.

Wayfarer is trying to convey something like that. You’re both only millimetres apart, but there seems to be an insurmountable gap that just can’t be bridged between you.

It’s like the goldfish in the goldfish bowl. Wayfarer is saying the goldfish doesn’t realise there’s water there, it can’t see the water and takes it for granted. While you are saying, I know the water is there, but it’s no big deal. But then he says, but without the water you’d be lying on the bottom of the bowl and you say I know I’m suspended in water and it’s primary to me being suspended, but again it’s no big deal.

Yes, it’s weird the way that happens.

That’s such a vapid response, or should I say vampiric response. It doesn’t deserve a response.

It’s a good point, but as I was trying to say it’s addressing something else, which isn’t happening. The censure which is going on in the U.K. is in respect of incitement to violence, or racial prejudice. There is also an issue around harassment and keeping the peace, but this is a side issue.
Should we have the freedom to insight people into violence, or racial prejudice?
Should our freedom of speech extend to being able to tell people to kick vulnerable people in the balls, when they need to use the lavatory, on a public platform.

Also there is the issue, when this extends into politics of populists exploiting the duty of impartiality on media broadcasters. Farage is a skilled operator in this regard, he will get his followers to spread a malicious rumour across social media, for example two tier policing. Eventually it will become widespread enough that media broadcasters will report on it. Then Farage will be invited onto TV to discuss it. He will misrepresent facts around the issue and when challenged, say I’m just asking questions, questions which the people are asking. On the assumption that he’s a man of the people, speaking for them. Then the next day newspapers lead by the Daily Mail will splash their front pages with disinformation about two tier policing. Papers funded by dark money, with shady interests around smearing the government (always left wing, or socialist, never on the right). For the purpose of installing Farage into government so the business interests can extract wealth from the population, spread corruption and rule by divide and rule principles.

Thank you for your reply it helped me with context, as I often find myself getting into discussions between philosophers about other philosophers and their philosophical ideas without having read their work myself.
It’s like a foreign language, where I’m sure I’m thinking about the same ideas, but in a foreign language and need interpreters.

I was hoping that someone else could explain how they know that the Cosmic Mind is transmitting thoughts into human brains.

Well the way I envision this is that I consider the idea that separation is illusory. In which case there is no requirement for anything to be transmitted. The information is already at its destination. In a sense our whole world, body, brain, mind is an elaborate mechanism preventing us consciously accessing the information that we already know. If we knew it (the information), it would have let the cat out of the bag and the whole edifice of our world would become an irrelevance and lose all meaning and necessity. ( there is an esoteric version of this, in which the world is a construct for the very reason of obscuring the information from us, that we arrive at the information ourselves, through our own ingenuity).

So a spiritual narrative would be that souls are incarnated into a training ground (our world), so as to develop a wide range of skills and abilities prior to returning to heaven. Where they will enrich the experience of heaven. That truth is veiled from them during this period for the purposes of the training.
There is a more sophisticated version of this and there are varieties found in most religions. I could go into considerably more detail, but I would be loath to bore people.

Aren't both sides being argued for in this thread?

Yes, I suppose so, but isn’t one side just saying nothing has changed and the other side insisting things have changed.

I do not honestly think anything has gotten much worse overall in day-to-day life.

What I’m referring to here is a the rise of Reform, to the point where they are regularly polling above 20% in the polls, in the lead above the other party’s throughout 2025. Nigel Farage is spreading populist fuelled anti immigration hate. This can be seen clearly in the media, when his party won control of a council in the north last year, he gave a speech which was almost word for word like a Trump speech. In which he said things like all DEI (diversity, equality and inclusion) officers and case workers will be sacked immediately (there weren’t any). Budgets would be slashed across all departments etc etc. He often cites antifa an anti fascist left wing group as taking over the country (it doesn’t exist).
This is another incarnation of the British National party (BNP) or the National Front. Which has become mainstream through the spread of miss-information on social media, gaslighting millions with their lies.

Much worse compared to when exactly? What is the metric? I am not being snarky at all here, just want to know on what kind of information you are basing this on.

I don’t know if it’s worse than in the Enoch Powell rivers of blood speech era. As I was young and wasn’t exposed to it at the time.The hatred is palpable at the moment, recently thousands of St George’s flags were secretly erected on lampposts in most towns and villages around the country overnight. Roundabouts painted red white and blue. And aggressive rows and abuse reported when people would take down the flags, or put up other ones in protest.

This alongside a narrative of accusing people of what they themselves (the populists) are doing. Such as shouting that their freedom of speech is being restricted, while demanding the people who push back against their hatred and racism be silenced, or branded as unpatriotic. While wearing a St George’s flag and shouting that it is them who are patriotic, while in the next breath shouting Tommy Robinson (this is a caricature, but is reflective of what is going on).
The Daily Mail and the Telegraph are pushing all this hatred and lies. The BBC news is dumbed down and doesn’t give any pushback and the people believing the lies are taking their news from social media anyway.

So it’s the same pattern as in the past, of the periodic swing from political correctness, to the push back from the BNP and predjudice, which would then swing back again and so on. But this time the swing is bigger and there’s a chance that the racists will get into power.

I have friends and family there who say things have generally gotten worse in many areas of life; financially, socially and politically.

Yes, the cost of living crisis is starting to hit a lot of people now.

Well if we can agree that the freedom of speech issue in Britain is being whipped up by the populists and the Tory’s who are aping the populists, along with the media organs aiding them in this. Then we need to identify what freedoms are actually being attacked and what is media hype, gaslighting, conspiracy theory being pushed by the above actors (or in other words false attacks on freedom of speech).
As a person on the ground I can’t think of any speech, which wasn’t already taboo, being restricted in the population. What there is is some cancellation in University speaking events around sensitive issues such as gender, transsexuality, issues which have been exploited by the populists and some political correctness around these issues in institutions. These are limited circumstances and forums, while the public at large has no restriction at all on their free speech.

However we do seem to now have freedoms of speech extended to be racist in public and on media platforms, mysogonist, to lie in the media, unquestioned and to spread conspiracy theories as fact.
It now seems to be much worse to accuse someone of being racist (you’re not allowed to) than it is to actually be racist (which is fine).

Yes, it must be obsession. We mustn’t forget how depraved Trump is, he is literally Putin’s poodle, eager to roll over and have his tummy tickled. I can’t see how American society can survive this seeing their highest office dragged down into the gutter and the President defecting to the Kremlin.

The premise being pushed here in this thread is a misunderstanding of the situation. Namely that freedom of speech in the U.K. is under attack. It isn’t and what is being perceived and pushed by right wing compliant media as evidence of free speech under attac, is evidence of a government struggling to keep the peace in a politically unstable period compounded by an under resourced police force struggling to keep up with the chaos being caused by the above mentioned right wing of politics and compliant media, competing with extreme right wing populists. This inevitably results in some measures to try and keep a lid on things, which is fuel to the fire being lit with petrol being thrown onto it by the right wing compliant media. All this results in lots of shouting finger pointing and handwringing by disingenuous people and media organisations openly hostile to the government and any hint of liberalism (progressive politics).

This springs from the split in the Tory party forming a new party called Reform (previously Brexit Party and UKIP). They have been fighting like cats in a sack with each other throughout this whole sorry saga. The Tory party has literally lost touch with reality, descending into political bankruptcy. All their policies are in ruins and all they have left is populist culture war rhetoric and disingenuous political point scoring. While Reform is struggling to keep the leash on hard core racists and libertarians, which they want to keep quiet until they get into government at which point they will be let off the leash and we will have Trump mark 2 here in the U.K.

I've always said that if you would have a democracy that would be the closest to libertarian values, the libertarians themselves would be the ones very disappointed with the system. But that's their problem, not mine.

You’ve nailed part of the problem in the U.K. here. The bellicose right of politics who brought us Brexit, Boris Johnson and Liss Truss with the help of a compliant media are the most unhappy people. All that winning, they got everything they wanted since 2016 and they are still crying and throwing their toys out of the pram and shouting louder and becoming more extreme.

Fortunately we avoided the worst nightmare of all which would have been Boris Johnson as PM at the same time as Trump’s second term. They would have trampled across the world stage hand in hand opening the floodgates to corruption. Fortunately we got a principled, yet boring Prime minister instead and can breath a sigh of relief.

It’s interesting that most people saying the U.K. has a problem with free speech are not in the U.K.
Not only that, but the examples they cite are only within the areas of commentary being stoked up by the far right. Where the issue is not being stoked up, not a word.

Yes and I would add;
Being a strong leader.
Last week Putin said the European leaders were weak, “piglets”. While laughing at them.
In a setting where he is portrayed as absolute leader. A strong man who will not show weakness.

Then we have his annual address to the nation, where he is depicted as a benevolent leader attending to each citizen’s needs. Any Russian citizen can send in a request, or question and it will be addressed.

That said, Sellars's critique of the Myth of Given is specifically directed toward those who would conflate sensation with propositional knowledge. Sellars might argue that knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by participation are merely latent or implicit forms of propositional knowledge that have simply not yet been made explicit by being appropriated into understanding and judgement.

I would say that knowledge by acquaintance and by participation (and to this I would add knowledge by witness), doesn’t need to be appropriated in this way to become propositional knowledge. Perhaps it does do, to become intellectually articulated. But for me it doesn’t need to reach that point of intellectual analysis to become a unit of knowledge which can be squared with other units of knowledge in a way in which it can affect the person in terms of feeling, attitude, or orientation. Or in other words to become an object in intuition, which later might be appropriated into thought, as an after thought.

Like my dick!

I had spotted dick for pudding tonight.

Yes, I realise that, your just telling the way you see it playing out. I hope you’re wrong.
I won’t be coming to visit any time soon, now that they are saying they require all your social media account details when filling out the U.K. citizen visa waver form.

The US will take Canada and Greenland, continue to undermine Central and S. America, and head into increased global warming alone.

So full on MAGA, I’m not seeing it. But I’m not in America.
I can give arguments for why that isn’t going to happen, but it might do all the same and you sound convinced anyway. Or maybe you are just saying these things, so you don’t get singled out and pushed up against the wall when it happens.

Most Europeans hate Americans don't they?

I doubt that, Trump maybe and his acolytes. The issue is though that Trump has lit the touch paper for the U.S. to withdraw from Europe. Not necessarily as a result of what Trump has said, but in the unassailable fact that the U.S. is now an unreliable ally. The post war settlement is fractured. It may well be re-established after Trump has left office, but Europe will have re-armed by then and the U.S. has squandered her position as the unipolar superpower.

It will be important to rebuild the alliance in the future for the troubling times ahead and to offset China. But it will be on different terms.

The US government thought that, and to that end, the US gave western Europe about $13 billion, hoping that would be enough to get them back in business.

Even so, the structural circumstances had changed, surely they were aware of that?

Was he asking to be banned, in a round about way? That’s what I thought. Otherwise he was pushing, or testing the boundaries repeatedly while saying I might be banned for this.

Ok but it has been the case for decades now that democracy hasn't delivered governments that align with the will of the people on key issues, immigration of course being the prime example.

Yes, there is change in the air as a result of world events and the politicians are very slow to catch up. In many cases, they seem to ignore it and stick doggedly what they used to do in the past.
There is a broader shift going on though, with big tectonic plates within society moving and we don’t know where we are going, how to get there, or where we will end up. I think more blame can be laid at the door of the financial crisis of 2008 than on the issues around migration, or the growth of social media. Especially in the U.K., where the Tory’s dominance in the political sphere since Thatcherism was built on the idea of tight fiscal policy, reducing taxes, privatisation and freeing the markets. This backfired spectacularly with the financial crisis, throwing this whole ideology and the Tory party into chaos ( I’m working on the assumption that Blair and Brown continued Thatcherite policies 1997-2010). Privatisation was throwing up all sorts of profiteering and failed services. Then Austerity starved institutions of funds to the point that they now don’t work, as you say.

I’m very much of the opinion that the Tory politicians and their wealthy backers came to a realisation that capitalism was broken, we had passed the peak in 2008 and from now on it was about extracting as much wealth out of the population as possible over the next decade and run for the hills. This was compounded by the disastrous decision to have an EU referendum on a 50/50 majority.

Now we have populists filling the void left by the implosion of the Tory party and the rise of culture wars. I do see your concerns over immigration, but the issue is definitely being inflated by populist rhetoric and used as a means to getting them into power. However it is important to address the issue of immigration and hopefully Starmer is going to get a grip of it eventually. He repeatedly says that Reform are a one trick pony and take the immigration issue away and they have no other policies.

That's why I continue to argue that mind is not an emergent phenomenon, an unexplained add-on to the doings of matter and energy but is intrinsic to the order of nature. Not as a consequence but as its ground.

Yes, very much so, for me mind is not just the intelligent part of us we are consciously aware of, but something about the whole being. Also that there is a transcendent aspect to it like the way that mathematic principles have an air of the transcendent about them.
The idea that the physical universe is also a mental construct is what I was getting at, but not in the mind of us little minnows. But greater beings, perhaps in a hierarchy of beings.

Personally, I don't think that it is even coherent to think of some kind of 'unstructured reality'. Clearly, their 'structure', which might be regarded as some sort of 'information', doesn't exist outside their physical instantations

Yes, this quite the conundrum. We’re either missing something, or have a perspective which generates these paradox’s.
I like the idea that mathematical information is innate in existence when it comes into existence. But it doesn’t solve the conundrum. Only suggests that the rational conclusion is that there never was a before before existence. But that leads to an infinite regress.

Your referenced material is deeply politically biased to the right. In the U.K. two tier policing is a deeply divisive culture war issue whipped up by the far right. There’s no basis for it, media organs like the Daily Mail and The Telegragh take every opportunity to take one off cases where the situation can be dramatised as ambiguous, blow it up into a national media storm. Not to mention their extreme political biases to the right on a whole host of issues. I recall they said Brexit was the best thing for the country, Boris Johnson was a stand up guy and Liss Truss’s budget was the best in U.K. history. No they are saying Starmer is destroying the country after the Tory’s salted the earth before they left office.

When you read the above tweet, did you feel yourself reaching for the pitchfork?

I think you’re addressing the wrong crowd, I’m sure we’re nothing but a bunch of harmless philosophers.