The difference between philosophy and science is a philosophical difference, and, so, not necessarily amenable to scientific description. The inability to make that distinction is one of the main causes of scientism. Suffice to say, science is principally concerned with what is objectively measurable and empirically verifiable, and with accomodating whatever discoveries it makes within the bounds of an hypotheses that respects those principles. Philosophy is more concerned with qualitative questions and with questions of meaning.

If philosophy of science governs scientific practice... — ucarr

'Philosophy of science is as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds' ~ Richard Feynmann.

:chin: (bows out.)

Only that it suggests some form of dualism, although nearer to traditional than Cartesian.

Then, where do we find that Good in our process of discerning if not 1) by ultimately constructing it, or 2) locating it prefab in memory, or 3) a combination of 1 and 2, I.e. revising what has already been input prefab from history? — ENOAH

Good question. 'Locating it pre-fab in memory' is a bit facile, though. We have proclivities, innate abilities - which is not to say 'innate ideas' - and we also have archetypes (which I learned about from Jung, but which I think go back much further.)

All that is Real is Brahman or Buddha Nature, and ironically we tap into that by being a human being, that animal which shares its nature with the rest of Nature. — ENOAH

You toss these phrases out very casually, as if they're slogans, but I would say that does convey the gist of my view. We are able discern 'the Good' due to that innate capacity (arguably what Christian doctrine also means by 'conscience'.) Yes, we evolved just as biological science says (although the details are constantly changing) but at a certain evolutionary threshhold, then the horizons of being widen, so to speak, and we are acquire these capacities. And notice, even if they are acquired by way of evolutionary development, I maintain that through them, we transcend the biological, in other words, we are no longer simply biological beings (which again in Christian doctrine of the unfortunate doctrine that animals lack souls, something which I don't accept.)

(Interesting point from Advaita - 'viveka', विवेक, 'to discern', means 'to know what is essence and what is not essence (saar and asaar), duty and non-duty properly' - Wikipedia. It is also the root of the name of Swami Vivekananda with whom I presume you are familiar.)

do you not think a lot of metaphysics/religion have focused upon "Spirit" at the expense of the Body? — ENOAH

That's Nietszche, isn't it? "Twilight of the Idols". He outlines the history of the idea of the "ideal world" and declares its final dissolution into mere fable. He posits that the notion of an ultimate, ideal, or "true" world beyond our physical reality is not only fictitious but also detrimental to our appreciation and understanding of lived reality. But I don't think it's the only way of seeing it. (Besides, I've never quite understood the idolisation of Nietszche in modern culture. It seems ironic to me.)

My reading of the history is completely different. The dualism of mind and body, spirit and matter, is post-Cartesian, in particular. It was Descartes' philosophy that gives rise to the 'ghost in the machine' which typified the modern period. I think the genuinely transformative spirituality of pre-modern cultures is something completely different to that. That is why I often refer to the non-dualism characteristic of Indian and Chinese cultures.

Here's my sweeping claim. That there is a real 'dimension of value'. It is neither a social construct, nor a matter of opinion, nor a matter of biological adaptation. H. Sapiens - recall, 'sapiens' meant 'wise' athough that is nowadays dubious - is capable of discerning that domain of value. That is Plato's 'idea of the Good' among other examples. We are able to discern it, but it takes certain qualities of character and intellect to be able to do that. And that the advent of modernity represents the loss of the sense of that domain or dimension, in the transition to the flatland of scientific materialism, where the only values are pragmatic and utilitarian. That conviction is what makes me a generically religious thinker.

'Whatever' sounds about right.

the entire history of metaphysics and religion has been our desperate effort to do the opposite: to suppress the flesh and silence Real organic being, for the sake of glorifying the very thing displacing it. — ENOAH

'Entire history', eh?

Answer 1: Because the penultimate domino made it fall.

Answer 2: Because the number 7 is prime.

Answer 1: efficient cause

Answer 2: formal cause

The meaning of a word supervenes on these letter-changes, and because written letters are physical realities, the meaning is supervening on physical realities. — Leontiskos

I'm inclined to believe that the same principle applies in the case of rational inference and neural biology, contra 'neural reductionism'.

a mind is infusing material reality with meaning — Leontiskos

Consider this analogy. There is a sentry in a watchtower, looking through a telescope. The watchtower stands on top of a headland which forms the northern entrance to a harbour. The sentry’s job is to keep a lookout. When he sees a ship on the horizon, he sends a signal about the impending arrival. The signal is sent via a code - a semaphore, comprising a set of flags. One flag is for the number of masts the ship has, which provides an indication of the class, and size, of the vessel; another indicates its nationality; and the third indicates its expected time of arrival - before or after noon. When he has made this identification he hoists his flags, and then tugs on a rope which sounds a steam-horn. The horn alerts the shipping clerk who resides in an office on the dockside about a mile away. He comes out of his office and looks at the flags through his telescope. Then he writes down what they tell him - three-masted ship is on the horizon; Greek; arriving this afternoon. He goes back inside and transmits this piece of information to the harbourmaster’s cottage via Morse code, where it is written in a log-book by another shipping clerk, under ‘Arrivals’.

In this transaction, a piece of information has been relayed by various means. Firstly, by semaphore; secondly, by Morse code; and finally, in writing. The physical forms and the nature of the symbolic code is completely different in each step: the flags are visual, the morse code auditory, the log book entry written text. But the same information is represented in each step of the sequence.

In such a case, what stays the same, and what changes?

I am a little bewildered at how often I've heard versions of this in response to submissions that God either doesn't exist, or if It does, is beyond good and bad, right and wrong, (and all other dualisms arising only to a species like us who have constructed difference.) — ENOAH

Recall that question I asked you about 'biological reductionism'. Here you are deploying that again. The ability of a 'species like us' to understand the fact of mortality, and to understand that there are moral and immoral acts, is what differentiates us from animals. And that difference is not only biological, it is also existential.

You might recall I mentioned Alan Watts' book, The Supreme Identity, earlier in this thread. The 'supreme identity' means realising one's identity as being beyond life and death. I think this is what is mythologised by popular religion, as clearly it is something that seems inconceivable. (There is, however, a 2011 book by an analytical philosopher named Mark Johnson, called Surviving Death, which approaches a similar point but from a more technical and ostensibly naturalistic perspective.)

The problem arises from appealing to Darwinism as a philosophy of life. Darwinism, or more properly, the neo-Darwinian synthesis, is not a philosophy of life. It's a biological theory dealing with the origin of species. So viewing existence purely through the lens of Darwinian theory is inevitably reductionist, which is one of the unfortunate characteristics of today's culture. This is why appeals to Darwinism feature so prominently in new atheist polemics from the likes of Dennett and Dawkins - were are gene machines, blindly following a survival program that dictates our existence in the service of survival of the species. It's actually the complete opposite of philosophy.

Here are a couple of opinion pieces which tease out some of the implications - It Ain't Necessarily So, Antony Gottlieb, Anything but Human, Richard Polt.

I have no beef with entomology or evolution, but I refuse to admit that they teach me much about ethics. Consider the fact that human action ranges to the extremes. People can perform extraordinary acts of altruism, including kindness toward other species — or they can utterly fail to be altruistic, even toward their own children. So whatever tendencies we may have inherited leave ample room for variation; our choices will determine which end of the spectrum we approach. This is where ethical discourse comes in — not in explaining how we’re “built,” but in deliberating on our own future acts. Should I cheat on this test? Should I give this stranger a ride? Knowing how my selfish and altruistic feelings evolved doesn’t help me decide at all. Most, though not all, moral codes advise me to cultivate altruism. But since the human race has evolved to be capable of a wide range of both selfish and altruistic behavior, there is no reason to say that altruism is superior to selfishness in any biological sense. — Richard Polt

meditation is an annihilation of ones "existence". — Astrophel

It's a dramatic way of putting it, but I believe this means 'the negation of ego'. 'Not my will but thine', in the Christian idiom. Dying to the self. It is fundamental to religious philosophy. (Please correct me if I'm wrong.)

Another passage from the Buddhist texts. 'The Tathagata' is the Buddha (means 'thus gone' or 'gone thus'. 'Reappears' refers to being reborn in some state or other. 'Vaccha' is Vachagotta, a wandering ascetic who personifies the asking of philosophical questions in the early Buddhist texts. )

Freed from the classification of consciousness, Vaccha, the Tathagata is deep, boundless, hard to fathom, like the sea. 'Reappears' doesn't apply. 'Does not reappear' doesn't apply. 'Both does & does not reappear' doesn't apply. 'Neither reappears nor does not reappear' doesn't apply." — Aggi Vachagotta Sutta

I think my position on faith is fairly robust. What approach do you have to demonstrate which person's faith is correct and which one is not? — Tom Storm

We all have to make a decision. It's quite possible that we'll make a wrong decision, that goes with the territory. I was attempting to address the question of 'why belief?' Many will say that matters of religious faith are only ever a matter of belief, as there's nothing that can be known, they're illusory in principle, but then, the person to whom my comment was addressed does not see it that way. There are many with their minds made up already, I generally won't attempt to change that.

Spoken from the true secularist perspective!

Now while this is clearly racist bullshit, where do we draw the line between a legitimate appeal made to faith and one which is dubious? Could it be that all we have is reason after all? — Tom Storm

You also have conscience.

Craig says he takes theological disputes to the "bar of Scripture." — BillMcEnaney

Protestants say that, but because every matter of faith is then taken to be arbitrated by the individual conscience, in practice this results in a kind of hyper-pluralism. (Subject of a book The Unintended Reformation, Brad Gregory.)

:up: Thanks for the recommendation.

Chalmer's view is based on his intuition about whether he can conceive of something or not. — Malcolm Lett

Not so. The distinction between the feeling of pain and the objective description of pain is a factual distinction.

Sometimes the answer is: "You don't understand, because you're not ready to understand it." - highly unsatisfactory, but nonetheless true sometimes? — Tzeentch

:100:

why is the belief superfluous to spiritual repose? — javi2541997

What I meant was, for those who know, belief is no longer necessary, but that up until then, it has to be taken on faith. That is illustrated in this Buddhist text, which says those who have not known have to take it on conviction, whereas those who know and see would have no doubt or uncertainty:

...Those who have not known, seen, penetrated, realized, or attained it [Nibbana] by means of discernment would have to take it on conviction in others that the faculty of conviction... persistence... mindfulness... concentration... discernment, when developed & pursued, gains a footing in the Deathless, has the Deathless as its goal & consummation; whereas those who have known, seen, penetrated, realized, & attained it by means of discernment would have no doubt or uncertainty that the faculty of conviction... persistence... mindfulness... concentration... discernment, when developed & pursued, gains a footing in the Deathless, has the Deathless as its goal & consummation. ... — Pubbakotthaka Sutta

I think religious faith is not necessary for those who are able to retrace the footsteps of the sage and understand their teachings. — Tzeentch

I wanted to circle back to this as it makes an important point. Originally this pursuit of 'retracing the footsteps' was very much the practice of ancient philosophy (as Pierre Hadot explains in his books). 'The sage' was regarded as exemplar, one whose conduct and understanding were exemplary, and whom the students, often referred to as disciples, were to emulate and follow. In that respect ancient philosophical schools were more like a religious order than is today's philosophy (a point Hadot also makes).

But there's another factor in respect of religious traditions, and that is the idea of revealed truth or spiritual illumination which provides the liberating understanding that is being sought by the disciple. 'You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free', said the Biblical Jesus. But it turns out that 'knowing the truth' is a pretty difficult ask. 'Be ye perfect, even as your father in Heaven is perfect', was another commandment. Also daunting, right? We don't know, and we know that we don't know, and we also know that we are sometimes in:

a state of awareness where I feel my soul is rotten — javi2541997

It may be true that we can reach a state of perfect equanimity, insight and eternal repose, but it seems very hard to square with the reality of the human condition which is typically considerably more fraught. And that is where belief enters the picture, even if, in an ideal existence, it may not be necessary, or it might become superfluous.

From a Thomistic perspective, theistic personalism is absurd because theistic personalists treat God as something Superman. — BillMcEnaney

A key concept in Scholastic philosophy, emphasised in Aquinas, is the "analogical way of knowing." He says that we only know something of God by analogy. While we cannot know God's essence directly (since it is beyond our finite human intellect), we can know God indirectly through His works. We can understand aspects of God analogically, by considering the goodness, truth, and being that we observe in creation and reasoning back to their ultimate source in God. However it is not strictly true to say that God is actually goodness or truth. In Aquinas' philosophy, when we say that God is good, true, or beautiful, we do not mean these in the same way as when we describe a human being or a thing in the world as good, true, or beautiful. This distinction arises from Aquinas' emphasis on the infinite and transcendent nature of God, which is fundamentally different from the finite and contingent nature of creatures.

Aquinas employs the analogy of being to navigate between two extremes: univocity (where words mean the same thing when applied to God and creatures) and equivocity (where words have entirely different meanings, making communication about God and creatures incommensurable). The analogical use of language allows for a middle path: words can be applied to both God and creatures, but their meanings are related not by identity but by analogy.

For Aquinas, when we say God is good, we mean that God is the cause of goodness in all things and that God's goodness is superabundant and incomparable to any goodness found in creation. The goodness in creatures participates in or reflects the divine goodness, but it does not exhaust or fully represent it. Thus, the analogical mode of knowing acknowledges that we know something true about God based on the effects we see in the world (such as goodness, being, or beauty), but we also recognize that the divine reality of these attributes is infinitely beyond our finite understanding. Perchance the same principle might apply to the divine simplicity.

(It is in this respect that Duns Scotus argued for the univocity of being, which means that being is understood in the same way of both God and creatures. This does not imply that God and creatures are identical or that there is no qualitative difference between them; Scotus acknowledged the infinite difference in degree. However, it does mean that the concept of "being" itself can be applied in the same sense to both God and creation, facilitating a more direct discussion about God based on natural reason. By asserting a common metaphysical ground between God and creatures, Scotus univocity of being is seen as diminishing the transcendental gap between Creator and creation. This, in turn, is argued to have led to a disenchanted world, where God becomes just another being among beings, albeit the greatest one. I think this is where theistic personalism of the Craig variety originated. ChatGPT helped with drafting this post.)

I don't have the background to be able to respond to any of the detailed points — Malcolm Lett

But regardless

Unless someone can find major holes in my argument there, it makes the case for the need for alternate explanations much weaker. — Malcolm Lett

So if you don’t understand the criticisms, how do you know there are no ‘major holes’?

Let me point to a couple:

The usual argument against such a stance is that it leaves an explanatory gap - that consciousness "feels" a certain way that cannot be explained mechanistically / representationally / reductively / and other variations on the theme.

Point number 1:
Our intuition is the source of that complaint. — Malcolm Lett

Objection: the argument appeals to an indubitable fact, not a questionable intuition. The ‘explanatory gap’ you summarily dismiss was the substance of an article published by a Joseph Levine in 1983 ¹, in which he points out that no amount of knowledge of the physiology and physical characteristics of pain as ‘the firing of C Fibers’ actually amounts to - is equal to, is the same as - the feeling of pain.

The basic point is that knowledge of physical particulars is objective in nature, whereas ‘the experience of pain’ is clearly subjective and so of a different order to any objective description. This point was elaborated in Chalmer’s now-famous ‘Facing up to the Problem of Consciousness’ ²which your argument does nothing to rebut.

We have only one source of information about conscious experience - our own. Not even of yours, or theirs, just my own. A data point of one. — Malcolm Lett

Objection: the fact of one’s own conscious experience is not a data point. It might be a data point to someone else - a demographer or a statistician - but the reality of first-person experience cannot be explained away as a ‘data point’.

You might know that when Daniel Dennett published his book Consciousness Explained, it was parodied - not by the popular media, but by peers including John Searle and Galen Strawson - as ‘Consciousness Ignored’. I say that’s what any eliminative approach must do, regardless of what ‘mechanisms’ it proposes to ‘explain consciousness’.



———————————

1. Levine, J. 1983. “Materialism and qualia: the explanatory gap”. Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 64: 354–361.

2. Chalmers, Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness

I was referring to the argument presented in the OP.

But, assuming panpsychism isn't true, what other ideas being suggested do? — Patterner

Kastrup's Analytical Idealism is a contender, isn't it? The OP mentions Donald Hoffman, who's on the board of Kastrup's Essentia Foundation, although Hoffman appears to draw the opposite conclusion to the OP.

Analytic Idealism is a theory of the nature of reality that maintains that the universe is experiential in essence. That does not mean that reality is in your or our individual minds alone, but instead in a spatially unbound, transpersonal field of subjectivity of which we are segments. Analytic Idealism is one particular formulation of Idealism, which is based on and motivated by post-enlightenment values such as conceptual parsimony, coherence, internal logical consistency, explanatory power and empirical adequacy. — Essentia Foundation

-----

In any case, what do you think about the argument overall? — Malcolm Lett

Very poor. Relies on conjecture and tendentious arguments.

Where does one go from there? — BitconnectCarlos

Practice, study, contemplate.

Alan Watts’ books are not a bad starting point. He had his flaws but his prose is excellent and he’s adept at explaining esoteric ideas if you’re looking for introductory books.

One of the early spiritual books I read that impressed me was The Supreme Identity, by Alan Watts. It is an exploration of the relationship between the individual life and the ultimate nature of being, through the perspective of Eastern philosophy particularly Advaita Vedanta and Mahayana Buddhism, but also with references to Christian mysticism.

Watts discusses the notion of identity in a spiritual context, proposing that the true nature of being is not the sense we have of ourselves as a separated ego. Awakening to this fundamental unity, or "supreme identity," reveals that our customary and ingrained sense of division between self and world, self and other, is an illusory state that inevitably brings conflict (the meaning of 'advaita' is 'not divided' or 'non-dual').

That book provided insights into how those teachings can be relevant and transformative in contemporary culture. While It is true that in the years since I read it, I found out that Watts by no means exemplified the kind of life that he was so adept at explaining, nevertheless the idea of 'the supreme identity' really struck me. What is important about it, is that our normal sense of ourselves is based on a false sense of identity - that in reality, we are of a completely different order to what we normally take ourselves to be. And I've come to realise that this is what philosophical spirituality is always trying to convey, but that it's a very difficult thing to convey and to understand. It involves a kind of dying - 'dying to the known' as one of the Eastern teachers put it. (And as it is Easter time, it is probably appropriate to mention that that is also the esoteric meaning of the Cross.)

The argument that 'the whole is more than the sum of its parts' goes back to Greek philosophy, Aristotle in particular. He observes that living organisms embody a principle of self-organisation which is lacking in non-living things. The pattern of organisation that artifacts exhibit is due to an external cause, namely, the design of the manufacturer. But in living organisms, that pattern is intrinsic to it, and cannot be explained with reference to any particular organ, or to its constitutive elements. I think that is still an issue that is recognised in current biology, as I understand it, and it tends to undercut the reductionist idea that a whole is nothing but the addition of its parts. It is constituted by its parts, and by the organising principle that orders it.

Kierkegaard was right about many things, as was Wittgenstein, but I argue they failed to understand religious metaphysics. — Astrophel

You must be setting a pretty high bar, then. Do you have any examples of those you think might have?

Isn't that what the story of Jesus' life and resurrection was supposed to convey?

In September 1914, Wittgenstein, off duty, visited the town of Tarnow, then in Austrian Galicia, now in southern Poland, where he went into a small shop that seemed to sell nothing but picture postcards. However, as Bertrand Russell later wrote in a letter, Wittgenstein “found that it contained just one book: [of] Tolstoy on the Gospels. He bought it merely because there was no other. He read it and re-read it, and thenceforth had it always with him, under fire and at all times.” No wonder, then, that Wittgenstein became known to his fellow soldiers as ‘the one with the Gospels’. Tolstoy’s book, however, is a single Gospel: hence its name: The Gospel in Brief. It is, as Tolstoy himself says in his Preface, “a fusion of the four Gospels into one.” Tolstoy had distilled the four biblical accounts of Christ’s life and teaching into a compelling story. Wittgenstein was so profoundly moved by it that he doubted whether the actual Gospels could possibly be better than Tolstoy’s synthesis. “If you are not acquainted with it,” he told his friend Ludwig von Ficker, “then you cannot imagine what effect it can have on a person.” It implanted a Christian faith in Wittgenstein. Before going on night-duty at the observation post, he wrote: “Perhaps the nearness of death will bring me the light of life. May God enlighten me. Through God I will become a man. God be with me. Amen.” — PhilosophyNow

Seems an odd quote, as the later Wittgenstein never preached religion, but the article from which it was taken was originally published by the British Wittgenstein Association. But it provides a bit more of a gist later in the article:

“There are indeed things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical.”

In other words, there is a categorically different kind of truth from that which we can state in empirically or logically verifiable propositions. These different truths fall on the other side of the demarcation line of the principle of verification.

Wittgenstein’s intention in asserting this is precisely to protect matters of value from being disparaged or debunked by scientifically-minded people such as the Logical Positivists of the Vienna Circle. He put his view beyond doubt in this sequence of paragraphs:

“6.41 The sense of the world must lie outside the world. In the world everything is as it is and happens as it does happen. In it there is no value – and if there were, it would be of no value. If there is value which is of value, it must lie outside of all happening and being-so. For all happening and being-so is accidental. What makes it non-accidental cannot lie in the world, for otherwise this would again be accidental. It must lie outside the world.”

In other words, all worldly actions and events are contingent (‘accidental’), but matters of value are necessarily so, for they are ‘higher’ or too important to be accidental, and so must be outside the world of empirical propositions:

“6.42 Hence also there can be no ethical propositions. Propositions cannot express anything higher.

6.421 It is clear that ethics cannot be expressed. Ethics is transcendental.”

can you explain the "latent beefiness patent" thinking? — Patterner

'Beefiness' :roll: ?

That quote 'what is latent becomes patent' was from lectures I attended in Indian Philosophy by a distinguished scholar. It was in the context of explaining the Advaita doctrine of manifestation or emanation, by which Brahman manifests as the sensible world. I had previously encountered that idea in the teachings of Swami Vivekananda, who you may know became the original emissary of Vedanta to American society, when he spoke at the World Parliament of Religions in 1888:

The child is the man involved, and the man is the child evolved. The seed is the tree involved, and the tree is the seed evolved. All the possibilities of life are in the germ. ... From the lowest protoplasm to the most perfect human being there is really but one life. Just as in one life we have so many various phases of expression, the protoplasm developing into the baby, the child, the young man, the old man, so, from that protoplasm up to the most perfect man we get one continuous life, one chain. This is evolution, but we have seen that each evolution presupposes an involution. — Swami Vivekananda

I read that much earlier in life, and I don't know if it now withstands critical scrutiny, but it makes intuitive sense.

Transcendental ethics would posit that moral truths are not contingent upon individual beliefs, cultural norms, or empirical facts, but rather have a universal and objective reality that transcends human understanding. Any way we can demonstrate that this is the case? — Tom Storm

Isn't Wittgenstein's answer that it can only be shown, not argued about?

I'm curious as to your thoughts on Peck's view. — wonderer1

Thanks for asking! I find it difficult to map what I said against M Scott Peck's criteria and am a bit puzzled as to what you're asking me.

Armstrong was an advocate of scientific materialism (see Count Timothy's post above on 'the scientism problem'). There are many science writers, and many fields of science, that are not materialist in orientation. I don't see his kind of philosophy as at all well-informed about science so much as expressing a longing for scientific certainty in an intrinsically uncertain subject area. He takes the universality of physics as paradigmatic for knowledge generally.

As for epiphanies, in my experience they were vivid, spontaneous, instantaneous, utterly convincing, and impossible to communicate.

Do you feel the same? — javi2541997

I think many people are going through this. I declined confirmation in the Christian church, although my family was not religious and neither was my social milieu so that wasn't regarded as being very important. But I came of age in the 60's and Eastern spirituality was in the air, so that became an influence. Although I was dubious about religion, I became sure that enlightenment was real, and had some vivid epiphanies at quite a young age. I was one of the types who read many spiritual books and later in life made earnest efforts to practice sitting meditation. I sometimes think my engagement with meditation has re-activated a kind of latent religious feeling, although I still can't abide church. Nevertheless, all these questions still weigh on me and I continue to pursue them. I feel I have had some genuine conversion experiences along the way, but they don't add up to deliverance as yet.

Of all those spiritual books I read, some resonated deeply and still stay with me. I have a kind of cross-cultural attitude, I like to think of it as being like 'silk road spirituality' as it involves elements of both Western and Eastern philosophy.

I don't believe that anyone has access to objective morality — Tom Storm

I don't think morality is an objective matter. What's that Wittgenstein aphorism? 'Ethics is transcendental'. It comes from something deeper than that. The Christian teaching is that conscience is an innate faculty which discerns what is right, and I'm sure there's something in that.

Overall, I feel the need for what I regard as a cosmic philosophy. That is, human life has cosmic significance - not from the objective viewpoint, which sees us as a kind of cosmic fluke, children of chance. But because rational sentient beings open new horizons of being. The spiritual quest is sometimes said in Eastern lore to be 'realising the true nature' and that is one of the principles that resonates with me.

Those discussions usually then trail off into meaninglessness — Malcolm Lett

The problem I see with reductive materialism is really pretty simple. It is that the scientific approach that it assumes is defined entirely in terms of objectivity. It is what I describe as 'objective consciousness'. It is, of course, fantastically successful in an objective sense, but not necessarily in an existential sense. There is a vast scope of issues which are amenable to objective analysis, but the problems of philosophy, which are essentially existential in nature, may not be among them.

This goes back to the founding paradigm of modernity, which is Galilean objectivity and the universal reach of physical laws, combined with Cartesian geometry. That forms the basic paradigm of the materialism you're advocating. But as I explained elsewhere, it is analogous to a two-dimensional description of a three-dimensional shape, in that there is a dimension missing. By assigning reality to what is objectively material, the role of the perceiving subject, which synthesises and combines the information about the objective to generate what we understand as 'reality', is omitted or overlooked. But then, as the only criteria that are deemed acceptable are objective in nature, there is no way to demonstrate what, exactly, has been omitted or left out, which is a hard problem.

I like that interview. Note he says consciousness is irreducible, that it’s on a par with an electron’s spin.

The conception of panpsychism I can get on board with is not the Galen Strawson or Philip Goff model of consciousness as an attribute of matter. It’s more the idea that it’s latent and then becomes manifest when the conditions are suitable. ‘What was latent becomes patent.’

Amazon blurb is here - Then I Am Myself the World: What Consciousness Is and How to Expand It https://amzn.asia/d/fthGBYC

The first sentence of the abstract has a distinctly Cartesian ring. But I think he’s obliged to keep re-affirming the ‘physicality’ aspect on pain of alienating the scientific community. (I watched part of a dialogue between him and Kastrup recently.)

Pininng this here as it’s relevant (rather than start a new thread). Christof Koch rejects the mainstream physicalist accounts of consciousness, declaring that ‘the problem of experience’ is such that it must acknowledge the possibility of something beyond matter-energy-space-time. If it is physicalism, it requires extension of the concept of the physical. I think it amounts to a tacit acknowledgement of the hard problem argument.

A naturalistic argument for religion is that only human beings are endowed with the potential ability to discern the sacred. I’ll mention John Vervaeke’s idea of ‘extended naturalism’ in that context.

John Vervaeke's concept of "extended naturalism" explores the interplay between naturalism, spirituality, and the sense of sacredness, moving beyond traditional scientific reductionism and materialism. This approach emphasizes the consilience between structural and content arguments, rooted in neoplatonic thinking, and explores the nuanced relationship between top-down and bottom-up processes in nature. Vervaeke and his colleagues discuss this concept extensively in the context of "Transcendent Naturalism," which aims to bridge the gap between empirical science and deeper spiritual insights, without resorting to reliance on religious dogma.

Vervaeke's discussions often touch on the limitations of traditional propositional knowing in fully comprehending concepts like sacredness, proposing instead that sacredness can be viewed as an inexhaustible and paradoxical fountain of intelligibility. This perspective sees the sacred as something that transcends traditional notions of understanding, pointing to a depth of reality that goes beyond the surface level of empirical facts. In his podcast, Vervaeke delves into concepts like the soul and spirit as ineffable aspects of human experience, highlighting our capacity for self-transcendence and the role of symbolic ideals and transcendence in enriching philosophical discourse.

One of the key insights from Vervaeke's work is the idea that truth and reality possess layers that cannot be fully captured through rational analysis or empirical observation alone. This "extended" form of naturalism suggests that understanding the deeper aspects of existence requires an openness to experiences of transcendence, where one can encounter truths about reality that are not accessible through conventional means.

(citation:1,Redefining Spirit, Soul, and God | Transcendent Naturalism #3 – Dr. John Vervaeke – Podcast – Podtail](https://podtail.com/en/podcast/john-vervaeke/redefining-spirit-soul-and-god-transcendent-natura/) [oai_citation:2,Vervaeke-Henriques 'Transcendent Naturalism' - The Philosophy Forum](https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/14505/vervaeke-henriques-transcendent-naturalism) [oai_citation:3,Redefining Spirit, Soul, And God | Transcendent Naturalism #3 Dr. John Vervaeke podcast](https://player.fm/series/dr-john-vervaeke/redefining-spirit-soul-and-god-transcendent-naturalism-3).

I am not familiar with the term "perennialism" — Leontiskos

The ‘philosophia perennis’ is the idea that there is a kind of mystical universalism of which all the primary spiritual traditions are expressions. Specifically, ‘perennialism’ refers to a group of mainly independent scholars who wrote on those themes in the 20th century. Those Hart mentions are René Guenon and Frithjof Schuon but there are several others (including Ananda Coomaraswamy and Julius Evola). As Hart notes, many of them tended towards reactionary fascism as they despised modernity and political liberalism (indeed the definitive textbook on them is Against the Modern World by Mark Sedgwick. I’m not an admirer of those writers in particular but I accept the basic idea that there is a common theme in many classical spiritual philosophies. There is one ‘perennialist’ philosopher, Sayyed Hussein Nasr, of Iranian origin, whom I believe enjoys a reasonable reputation in current scholarship.)

The obvious reason why the interviewer mentioned John Hick is that they were discussing syncretism and defining that in distinction from ‘perennialism’. If you read Hart’s The Experience of God it is a thoroughly syncretist book.

Differentiates syncretism (which he likes) from perennialism (which he doesn’t). Describes John Hick as a ‘well-meaning syncretist thinker, not a perennialist’. Sees value in syncretism and says the different faiths complement each other (as did I).

It seems to me that if there is only one "sacred" then everyone must be worshipping the same god; the phenomenal elements of each religion each derive from one and the same noumenal reality. Metaphysical polytheism is logically incompatible with Hick's theory, no? — Leontiskos

'The sacred' is a category, not an entity. Consider David Bentley Hart's depiction of God in The Experience of God - 'one infinite source of all that is: eternal, omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent, uncreated, uncaused, perfectly transcendent of all things and for that very reason absolutely immanent to all things.' " From a review. He sees commonality between diverse theistic traditions. Is he also falling into Hick's 'barren relativism'?

we have observed that physical processes can form complex objects without human intervention, such as trees: if we assume that another quality is fundamental (ignoring consciousness), and this quality is used to make a complex system like a tree, which seems to have fundamental components working together to form a complex system, why can’t the same be true of consciousness? — amber

The cardinal difference is the subjective unity of consciousness: we experience ourselves as a single entity, not a combination of micro-processes. When we drop a rock on our toe, we don't hear about it second-hand, as if the message is transmitted through a series of separate sub-consciousness units.

when someone finally develops the very first ever model of how a soul might work, — flannel jesus

Interesting that one of the Greek words for soul was 'psyche' (not spelled exactly like that) but it's also the root of 'mind', as in 'psychology'. So I wonder if 'soul' and 'mind' might be synonyms, to all intents. With the caveat that I think 'soul' or 'psyche' conveys the idea of the totality of mind, including the unconscious and subconscious, not simply the 'conscious mind' or what one is consciously aware of.

As to which aspect of the mind (or soul) might not be physical, there is an account of that in medieval philosophy that I find, at least, suggestive. The physical or appetitive aspects of the psyche are what 'receives the sensations' e.g. the senses of sight, touch, hearing etc. The immaterial aspect is what recognises the form of the object. That is an intellectual judgement, which is the aspect of the psyche that is associated with 'the rational soul'. And I can think of an argument in support of that idea, but I'll leave it at that for now.