How much of shaimanism, old and new, is about promoting faith in something objective? A true religion knows that you can only have faith in something objective, while trying to alter your consciousness seems to be a subjective practice

It would seem that death is a far greater mystery than time

"Nature's highest goal, to become wholly an object to herself, is achieved only through the last order of reflection, which is none other than man; or, more generally, it is what we call reason, whereby nature first completely returns into herself and by this it becomes apparent that nature is identical to that which we recognize in ourselves as intelligence and that which is conscious". Schelling in "System of Transcendental Idealism

Sensations can only be felt in time. So wouldn't animals feel time as well? What humans do differently is in perception and how we emotionalize the experience of objects with feelings that seem to say something about the object. If you at night see a knife coming at you in the dark, the blade is seen as frightening and odious. This is a truth about it. We see children as cute and can't reduce it merely to subjective bias. Time and space can be felt as part of intuition said Kant. Nobody was more aware of time flowing then him among older philosophers

It seems to me that reality and time are the same thing. Time is of our minds but our minds are connected to everything. Time is the space that space moves in

To my mind either God or time has to explain how the present continues its journey to a sure future. Otherwise there is no context for things to move in

Usually the only time that is real is the present. Space? It's what contains material things. But if time travel becomes real it will open many mysterious. Physicists generally believe in time. It's philosophers that reduce it to change. Time is the mysterious thing that we can't detect but which moves the present constantly forward. Taking time away distorts the mysterious in the name of bland "logic"

I think we know time exists intuitively just as we know space is real.

Great thoughts! Language is structured such that the full truth of reality, the ever moving Present, can't be explained in finite time. The qualia of my thoughts may be different from yours but we have language in order to give ideas to each other so there is similarities between our truths. The Present is an eternal Now that constantly moves in time. It can move in eternal time because the past is no more and the future guaranteed. "Now"rests and moves in time at once

Thanks for the thoughts. Allow me to add that if we start out saying that the world is mental the same arguments seem to continue, in an infinite loop, that we see only for fitness. We don't have to know everything about something to reject it, but this is different from saying we observe objects first in order to even have an argument for fitness. So whether the world is mental or not, Hoffman's reasoning is lethal to any understanding of the phenomenal world. It would be an infinite regress.. But this is ok for me because those arguments loop back and from the finite canceling itself out we have the Absolute return in the form of the world. I don't know how someone can believe the world is in their minds. That doesn't have any meaning for me. What we do have is a world we experience without having to put it in a category. I accept the world as it appears and that is reality. What more is needed except that we experience material objects and ourselves as a physical individualized identity? There is the spiritual of course, but our world is a reality unto itself. In a sense Berkeley was right: to be perceived is to be. Noumena is all around.. What comes first is our understanding that we are part of a larger world. The risk of solipsism is too great otherwise

If we can use evolution to say anything about the infinity or finity of an object, then we have contact with it. The only way to say that we have hardly any real knowledge is by comparing our knowledge to something. I have a philosophical problem with how Hoffman deals with data. He trusts his senses for evolution but only to over throw evolution and leave us... where?

Let me add for the reader that Hoffman has to admit that we see enough of reality (gene images, fossils, ect) in order to establish evolution (the basis of his data) in the first place. There is a philosophical difference in how you can interpret his data. Saying "we see incorrectly" could really be "we see incompletely but accurately". It depends on how you think about it. The book is entitled "the case *against* reality" but in reality, it may just establish that there is more to the world than meets the eye

Earlier on this thread you mentioned that humans can't process infinite information. I don't know why you brought that up if you didn't assume there is infinite information out there. Anyway, the simple answer to Hoffman is that we see things accurately, but incompletely. There is no way for him to prove our representations have no counterpart in nature. He doesn't know what the full reality of an object is, and he knows we get information from the object. So how is he going to prove that there is nothing in the perception that sees *something* about the object? You earlier said yourself that we might sense some of reality and that is all I'm saying. If I see a car I see it for real even though there is much we can't see. So maybe we are on the same page

You can understand a tree without knowing everything about it. Shift from knowing nothing about the tree to knowing something

If I am a thought and the tree is a thought, is the argument that the tree is infinitely complex and hence not comprehendable still intact? I think not. Otherwise we can't understand anything around us. But where does this leave arguments of information and storage if ontology doesn't change the science? The arguments work in one ontology and not the other, so ontology matters

Let me add that, because one set of scientific standards (Hoffman's case) leads to a change once the ontology changes (so that we do know the interfaces), then science does act differently in face of ontologies

Those distort so that it doesn't see completely but perception can see accurately

Well if everything has always been mental entities why cant a mental entity have storage capacity beyond it's form? Hoffman can't continue to apply his theory to his new world

Why not? — Isaac

You're being scrupulous. Why would time change anything, especially a second. You're in direct experience with something. A tiny time lag has no meaning in that context. You're united with the object in thought and your mind just thinks "that was a second before" but the experience of direct knowledge is still there. Even if it was a million years you still know the object and the fact that it's a second or so is felt in experience as meaningless

The closest we could get to 'the idea of a tree' might be some of specialised neural clusters in the frontal cortex. — Isaac

The clusters directly understand the tree as well as the soul that is united with it. They have dual action on an object

you experience a reconstructed memory of neural events a few seconds ago. — Isaac

A second latter doesn't mean it's not direct perception. A few seconds doesn't have any meaning in that context. It's one direct experience

he does mention Hegel by name in the chapter. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Hegel, following Schelling, had a philosopher of nature. He believed the world was real, not a simulation. The real world comes from the spiritual Absolute but matter is matter for Hegel. If Hoffman is correct, then all of science has been refuted and so why follow science at all anymore? As far as I can see that is the conclusion.

See this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cBonZ5suKuU

The world may be infinitely complex, but the brain is part of nature and where the intellect and storage capacity is cannot be permanently found if matter is infinitely divisible. You just take it to the quantum level and than below this to infinity. Or the above video has a point that consciousness emerges from brain and is it's own entity with laws that we can never pin down. It's a philosophical assumption that the building blocks can explain what emerges from it.

The 1792 writing by G.E.L. Schulze entitled "Aenesidemus" brought a Humean critique to Kant's work. Hume didn't doubt that matter was real because he had a 6th sense that it was. Hume thought that all we can know in itself was ourselves and Kant responded that we hold the world in our thoughts. Schulze came along and went back to Hume, arguing that we can know with certainty only the qualia of our mental and psychological states. The struggle to connect self with world persists in the thoughts of many to this day

I'm also not sure I understand what you mean by seeing things in your head that is not outside. That sounds like some psychological thing. If you see something you perceive it, that's it. It's one field coming from a divine source. Trying to put the world in your mind would take away from the experience of perception

Is phenominalism different from phenomenology? My understanding of the later is that we take first person perspective first and work in theories so that they fit with our common sense

Mind is awareness which is a feeling. How can we know if AI has it since it's "biology" is so different from ours? People say they might demonstrate reason in AI, but I'm wondering if this includes awareness

Feeling of mind

Well you are God to your thoughts

The difference between an accidentally infinity and an essential one is pertinent. A mind conceiving an essential infinity recurs back upon truth when doubting or saying truth is non-objective. How can you have consciousness if you are an infinity of doubts?

Do you doubt that you doubt?

Hegel says in his Greater Logic:

"This only perhaps can be remarked, that hitherto the determination of quantity has been made to precede quality and this as is mostly the case, for no given reason. It has already been shown that the beginning is made with being as such, therefore, with qualitative being... It is easily seen from the comparison of quality with quantity that the former by its nature is first... The qualitative determinateness, on the other hand, is one with its being: it neither goes beyond it nor is internal to it, but is its immediate limitedness. Quality therefore, as the immediate determinateness, is primary and it is with it that the beginning must be made."

This is from the beginning of phenomenology. What your senses immediately perceive is reality. We are attached to the world through our bodies and psyches. To reject the world as having no being is to deny the reality of the body which you are. What we sense is first in knowledge. We cannot doubt the world's existence without first knowing the world. That's the consequence of being born. This results from our understanding of truth. Even if we were all just minds like Bekerley said, the idea of truth would be a correspondence of our thoughts with reality, although the reality is purely immaterial. It wouldn't be thought to thought without any reality involved. But we know we are inof this world, so that first thoughts which bind all our others is that we are a part of a world which has true existence

Certainty is clearly not a requirement for acting. — Metaphysician Undercover

He means you have to be certain of something, because when you TRY to doubt EVERYTHING then you can't doubt anything

Physicalism is a factual truth-claim. It's the claim that the physical, which is mind independent, is ontologically more primitive than experience; that the physical supervenes on everything that is. — Count Timothy von Icarus

What about phenomenology?

Has philosophy settled the question of what truth is? Last I checked there were several positions still being argued for. Unless the deflationary one won out, but then I doubt there would be a conflict between scientific claims and philosophy if that were the case, since truth claims depend on the domain in a deflationary account. — Marchesk

Wittgenstein in his book On Certainty: "If you tried to doubt everything you would not get as far as doubting anything. The game of doubting itself presupposes certainty."

To doubt the world is to doubt everything because the world is everything we experience. We have a priori knowledge of the world. This is the foundation at which doubt procedes/ Truth is the correspondence between reality and the mind, and also it applies to truths that lead to full knowledge because all knowledge falls before the Absolute. You doubt that truth exists by claiming to have the truth. That can't be done. It's circular.

Formal logic is a part of philosophy, which defines truth. You couldn't think at all without the concept of truth. As for colors, they change is relationship to each other but they are objective. All these science people have preconceived notions they don't question

I would also add that Hoffman rejects our natural sense of shape of body. For him everything spatial is an illusion, as with Kant. If science says something that is obviously wrong philosophically, follow philosophy because it can define what truth is and science can't. Hoffman even admits that they don't know everything about the brain. This means he hasn't proven anything

He starts with physicalism

I would say instead that the mind is infinite intelligence and that Hoffman is coming from this from a materialist scientific frame of mind instead of with philosophy. Science can continue to find aspects of an object that we can't ordinarily sense but what we sense is real. Color tests are tricky but in the real lived world apart from electronics someone with good eyesight can tell what a true color is. Finally, you do need a definition of real and true if you set out to deny them.

Also, how can they map the terrain and compare with storage capacity if there is no terrain?

They will never to able to say how much information a brain can process because it is first person experience alone that knows how it processes information. Also how the noumena reveals itself is not science but phenomenology. Knowledge is inexplicable

I don't see how that works. You still have a world full of concepts, symmetries, cause and effect, etc. Why this plethora of entities and endless variety instead of nothing?

If the world around us shows us causes preceding effects it is natural to ask: "what causes things to be?"

What the Boehme inspired idealists try to do is show how being emerges from logical necessity. You don't need a demiurge shaping the world based on some sort of Platonic blueprint, you just need for there to be something and not nothing. This then sets up the being/nothing contradiction, resulting in our experienced world of becoming. The rest, all the differences and possibilities of our world, flows from logical necessity.

Hegel takes this to its most complete form, having physical science, cognition, and history flowing from this necessity and progressing to the point where all being becomes known object to itself, finally resolving all contradictions. — Count Timothy von Icarus

But with what first principle do you start with. Descartes argues there must exist something that is at least as great as all our ideas. This he calls God, and he goes on to reason that this God must not deceive. So it was like going around a triangle, from himself, to God, to the world. Hegel starts with being, which he says is also a nothing, because it is pure becoming. This seems to say matter is necessary and the way to understand "why" there is something is almost mechanical: because there is a cause behind every cause

I don't think many people are thinking about it, although I'd be glad to be proven wrong. Aristotelian or scholastic realism, represented by Aquinas, does have its contemporary defenders in the form of 'analytical Thomism'. They're not generally identified as idealist, although they're surely no friends of materialism either. But it should be recalled that the very term 'idealism' only came into use in the 17th century, it was never used by the ancients or medieval philosophers.

Incidentally I thought I'd mention the Essentia Foundation https://www.essentiafoundation.org/ which is associated with Bernardo Kastrup and also Donald Hoffman, among many others. It's a think-tank of sorts, dedicated to current idealist philosophy and science. — Wayfarer

My problem with Hoffman is that you can't encode at a very basic level the idea of "seeing reality in itself" and "seeing only an appearance" into game theory (which he works on). The subject must accept the object as it is and from there and from then only can you say that it perceives it wrongly. Only on the condition that it can see rightly can it see wrongly (in terms of science).

Maybe the medievalists were idealist though. Their rejection of nominalism suggests this, and Kant's Critique of Judgment seems to suggest this to me as well