I suspect that this would appeal to some people, but many would struggle to make this work. If the numinous is not tied to the transcendent, but is essentially an emotional reaction, then I suppose it's tantamount to enjoying music or a painting. But at least with art, there is a tangible artifact that serves as the source of the experience. Bathing in one's subjective sense of the numinous might also be somewhat indulgent and narcissistic. You may be more receptive to this, how do you see it working? — Tom Storm

I don't see the numinous as excluding the darkness and the suffering and the tragedy of living and dying. It doesn't overcome the mystery, and it has nothing to do with the transcendent. We are cast upon the shores of life like flotsam. The shores of life, the shores of death, they are the same shores. The ocean out of which we came is right there, but we don't know its depths. What is there, which we can only superficially understand, is irrelevant to the numinous dimension of living and to the mystery of dying.

How could the numinous be "tied to the transcendent' when the transcendent can be nothing to us? The meaning of our lives is found in feeling, not in thinking. How could anything be meaningful except insofar as it feels meaningful? We are washed up on the shores of life and death with nothing to lose. We learn to gain and then we find ourselves having something to lose. So we begin to dream of salvation, of liberation. We think they must be transcendent, but how can there be liberation of salvation in nothing?

Salvation, liberation, freedom are dreams of perfection. This world is not perfect, so they cannot be found here we think. So, in the face of the nothing which is the transcendental we look back to ancient wisdom, imagining that something has been lost—there was a Golden Age, an age of Perfect Intellect, of perfectible thought and understanding. This is pure fantasy. Even for the elites there was no such thing—they were condemned to live and die just like the masses.

We think that there is a darkness in modernity. Well, of course there is—there is a darkness in everything. Without the darkness there would be no light. The only salvation, liberation, freedom is to be found in acceptance of our condition. We cannot be free of suffering, but we can be free of the attachment to our suffering in acceptance of it.

This is a disposition, and dispositions are matters of feeling not of thinking. Or at least they are not matters of Pure Thought—we must think with our feelings and feel with our thoughts. It is that immanence, that acceptance of absolute mystery, and the embracing of limitation. Which is the numinous. There is a reason that the greatest beauty in literature and the other arts is to be found in tragedy.

It is not merely "bathing in one's sense of the numinous"—we are always already drowning in it. It is the vacuous distractions afforded by dreams of transcendence that leave us blind to the terrible. the beautiful, truth of our most intimate companion—the numinous.

The corpse's particles all still have the same properties they had when the organism wads alive. — Patterner

But apparently not the same relations with one another.

I've watched about 30 of those lectures, but quite a while ago now, and I agree with you that they are kind of nebulous and they do become repetitive.

It seemed to me that he is saying we should trust our experiences of the numinous, not in that they give us any actual knowledge about anything, but in that they can be personally transformational, they can change the way we feel about life.

I quite liked his distinctions between kinds of knowledge, much along the lines of what I've been banging on about for years.

Philosophical accounts of theism are not necessarily more sophisticated, so I'd start by pushing back at that built in bias. — Hanover

It's worth noting the relation between the terms 'sophisticated' and 'sophistry'; to sophisticate may be to make sophistical, if the elaboration does not reflect a well-founded and understood increase in complexity.

Yes. I was thinking of mechanization as an improper model for understanding how humans -- and other forms of life -- coexist with each other. Otherwise, it has its uses. Technology, as you say, is neither good nor bad. — J

I agree with the idea that organisms, at least complex organisms, such as us and the so-called "higher animals' cannot be understood comprehensively in reductive mechanistic terms. The reductive models have their uses in understanding animals, including humans, but they have their limitations.

What is the reason for thinking matter cannot subjectively experience at one level when we know it subjectively experiences at another level? Why is it deemed impossible at the micro when it is a fact (possibly the only undeniable fact) at the macro? — Patterner

OK, so we know matter can experience, as we and the other animals are material beings and we know they and we experience things. Other emergent properties such as wetness, hardness and so on don't obtain at the level of fundamental particles because they are the result of interactions between particles, so why should we think the case is any different with experience or consciousness?

It's not a matter of saying that it is impossible that particles experience, but that we have no idea how it could be that they experience anything. In other words, we don't know what it could even mean to say that particles are conscious. We are satisfied with saying that particles have the potential, in their interactions with each other, for other emergent properties, so why not think the same for consciousness?

For some God makes life more bearable, meaningful, attractive. But I suspect this only works if you think God is real, not if you think it is merely a charming fiction. — Tom Storm

Sure, and as I said I have no argument with people's faiths—provide they don't think it is more than that. When that happens, they start expecting others to agree with them. History is full of examples. I also think that people who need such beliefs to give their lives meaning lack imagination.

Sure. I think where you sit on this depends on what you go through and how your experince makes you feel. — Tom Storm

Certainly! And it might also be a matter of neurotransmitters in some cases.

Me too. I even appreciate the little I understand of mysticism and spirituality. — Tom Storm

Yep. I also appreciate the poetry and imagination of some mysticism and spirituality. I also think think that life, even just existence. is, ultimately, a mystery.

I think we both agree that if you're looking for vulgar, shallow displays of status and materialism; gaudy expressions of soulless wealth - you'll find no shortage of examples in religion, spiritual traditions, and cults alike. Even the ostentatious wealth of the Vatican shows us how Mammon and spiritual traditions are not necessarily incompatible. — Tom Storm

Yes, much in religion is also materialistic and consumerist. The Catholics insofar as they yield obeisance to Mammon, do not follow the teachings of Jesus, which makes them hypocrites in my view.

Amen. Totalitarianism, mechanization, and, as you discuss so well, the tendency to treat humans as sophisticated bits of matter with "needs" and "goals" that must be arbitrary. — J

I agree that totalitarianism is bad per se, but is mechanization bad as such? Are humans not material beings with needs and goals, some of which are arbitrary and others pretty much necessary (and by necessary I don't mean the need for consolation, I count that as one of the "arbitrary needs")?

Must we gild the lily?

For me it seems more aesthetic or about meaning making - the wish for life to be significant - as a bulwark against the tragedy of living. But no doubt it is different things for differnt folk. — Tom Storm

Surely the ideas themselves have their own beauty. Why would we need to believe they are literally true to enjoy that beauty? To claim that would be to claim there is no beauty or meaning in fiction.

How can life be more significant than it already is? It would only seem so if we believed there is more of it, and a much better life to boot that lasts forever. That is the essence of Buddhism, Hinduism and the Abrahamic religions. If someone is able to believe such things, then I have no argument with that, but better that they keep to their beliefs and do not reveal their doubts by wishing to convert others for moral support. That shows weakness of conviction.

Also living is not wholly a tragedy in my view. On balance I would say there is more joy and interest than misery and boredom.

In any case what does 'god as ground of being' offer for the seeker of consolation? Does the ground of being care about us, or the animals or any life? To think so would seem to be a gross anthro-projection.

There are parts of religion I admire—mindfulness, stillness, equanimity, acceptance, love, compassion—you don't need all the superstitious stuff for those. In fact, I think it only gets in the way by confusing the issue.

But no doubt some will argue that the word of disenchanted rationalism and modernity has allowed us to retreat into crude things like money in place of spiritual riches. — Tom Storm

They might argue that and in my view they would be wrong. The world of consumer culture is disenchanted to be sure. But the world of science is anything but disenchanted. And we still have all the old worlds of music, poetry, literature, painting, architecture, the crafts, the natural world. We lack nothing the ancients had except their superstition. And when I say we lack their superstition I do not mean to refer to the multitude. That said, I would say the multitude are far less miserable today than they were in ancient times.

Some people confuse materialism as a philosophical view with materialism in the sense of consumerism—a sad misleading conflation!

I'm not sure what this gives us - god as immanence - what does a human do with such an account. Any thoughts? — Tom Storm

I could just as well ask what the account of 'god as transcendence' gives us. At least god as immanence is more comprehensible. According to some accounts Einstein agreed with Spinoza's view in seeing god as the laws of nature.

What does 'god as the ground of being' give us? Is that god different than Spinoza's? If so, how? For that matter what does any account of anything that cannot be seen, heard, felt, touched etc., give us?

It seems to me the only motivation for believing in god is the wish to be cared for. The wish of the child.

I agree with you. The purportedly historical account that says we have "lost something" without ever being able to say what it is that we have lost (apart from the capacity for believing that what our wishful imaginations tell us must be true, and of course there are a great many who have not lost that at all). Is the world as understood by science really less enchanting than the ancient myths? Not to me. Which is not to say the ancient myths have no literary value. The Odyssey is still a great read.

I can't see that you're saying anything that means anything.

It's the difference between the subjective experience of an information processing system and the subjective experience of a particle. — Patterner

The notion of a subjective experience of a particle makes no sense.

No. Proto-consciousness is subjective experience, not the potential for it. I use proto-consciousness to refer to the subjective experience of particles, and consciousness to refer to the collective subjective experience of groups of particles that process information. But whether it's a particle's consciousness or a human's, the consciousness is the same. The difference is what is being subjectively experienced. A particle is not experiencing thoughts, hormones, vision, hearing, being alive, or anything other than being a particle. — Patterner

Why not just use 'consciousness' to denote subjective experience? There is no "collective subjective experience of groups of particles" there is just subjective experience. You are multiplying entities unnecessarily. You list all the things a particle is not experiencing; and "being a particle" is not an experience unless it involves experiencing something, and being is not something, so can you say what it is experiencing or in other words aware of?

Okay, then perhaps try legal microdosing with psilocybin or cannabis if available. Or cognitive behavior therapy. I don't know what else to suggest. There may be other solutions, I'm no expert. Dwelling on these kinds of thoughts will only reinforce the cycle and exacerbate the problem it seems to me.

Though if it is just due to a chemical imbalance that would be unfortunate. Though evidence does seem to show that the chemical imbalance is a myth when it comes to depression. — Darkneos

I don't think the evidence shows that at all. Quite the contrary. My own experience has also showed me this: years ago, I experimented for a while with MDMA. The following day or two I would be horribly depressed, almost inconsolable.

The point is that your thoughts will reflect your mood, and your mood can indeed be subject to neurotransmitters. I have a friend who found life so intolerable that she always said she will end her life when her two children are no longer dependent on her. About five years agio she decided to try SSRIs and she told me she couldn't believe how differently she felt and thought about her life. She wished she had discovered them twelve years earlier.

Yes, that's the problem. All the emphasis these days is on economic performance, neither party will propose anything that will obviously negatively affect the constituents' bottom line.

Because this is how God has traditionally been understood in classical theism. It's not an evolution; it's a return to earlier thinkers like Gregory of Nyssa and Maximus the Confessor. — Tom Storm

Were they not Christians? Why not just return to Spinoza? I think his theology is more sophisticated than any Christian theology, including ideas such as identifying God with "being itself".

And vice versa, and so on with all other emergent properties. I wonder, though, why you keep speaking about human consciousness, as though humans were the only conscious entities.

Although human consciousness does not exist in microphysical particles, their properties cause them to combine in certain ways under certain circumstances, which cause the emergence of human consciousness. — Patterner

I agree with this, except I would just say "consciousness" and drop the "human".

I do, however, consider the possibility that consciousness is a ubiquitous field that accomplishes the same thing proto-consciousness does. — Patterner

So what is the difference between consciousness and "proto-consciousness? Does the latter just mean "potential for consciousness" in which case we could talk about fundamental particles, even quarks, having "proto-wetness"?

Whether subjective experience is due to the particles being animated by such a field, or a property of the particles, might amount to the same thing. — Patterner

It might, but it only requires that the field have the potential to cause consciousness or wetness, not that the field itself be conscious or wet.

I encourage you to seek out a professional therapist. Feeling a lack of joy may be indicative of a mental health need or signal depression. — NotAristotle

No, it's due to the potential logical conclusions of thinking about this.

Therapists can't help because they cannot address such philosophical questions, let alone even understand them. — Darkneos

We can feel depressed due to dopamine or serotonin deficiency or depletion, and this can lead to the kinds of thoughts you seem to be having. On the one hand you are saying it's all just chemicals and yet on the other you say that these thoughts about it all being chemicals are not due to chemicals but are "logical conclusions". Do you not see that you are contradicting yourself?

You're still missing the point. You argue that microphysical particles must be conscious because consciousness is always found in certain configurations of particles. I pointed out that is like saying that microphysical particles must be wet because wetness is reliably found in certain configurations of microphysical particles.

I haven't denied that the potential for wetness and consciousness does not exist in microphysical particles, but that is a different claim altogether. And I haven't said that anything just happens randomly or by chance either, so that is a red herring..

You haven't answered the question. I'm asking about atoms not molecules. I could be asking about what properties of electrons, protons and neutrons or even quarks give rise to wetness.
All you're telling us is that wetness emerges at the molecular level. What you've given is just description of what happens not explanation.

i'm saying there must be an explanation for our consciousness in the properties of the particles that we are made out of. Just as there is an explanation for wet in the properties of the particles that whatever the liquid in question is made out of. — Patterner

What is the explanation of wetness in the properties of the hydrogen and oxygen atoms?

It seems you're claiming that particles must be conscious because some aggregates of particles are conscious. That seems like saying that particles must be wet because some aggregates of particles are wet. What's the actual argument?

What is DNA if not chemical combinations? Of course not all chemical complexes are conscious...it doesn't follow that none are, or that consciousness cannot emerge in certain kinds of chemical systems.

Physical connections aren't enough. — Patterner

Perhaps it's more like "some, or even most, kinds of physical connections aren't enough".

The phrase "seem plausible" refers to an individual's attitudinal approach to the ideas rather than the soundness of the ideas. — Metaphysician Undercover

"Evidence" is fundamentally subjective, as the result of judgement, and the evidence must be judged as credible. There is no such thing as "a claim without any evidence" because the claim itself is evidence. — Metaphysician Undercover

You contradict yourself, so nothing more need be said.

:cool:

:up:

I can't imagine what the weak sense of the word would be in this connection...'seems most plausible given the evidence we do have perhaps'...?

I was taken it to mean "evidenced". An unsubstantiated claim is a claim without any evidence. — flannel jesus

Two things which "seem" to be different must be proven to be the same before they can be accepted as being the same. — Metaphysician Undercover

What do you mean by "substantiated" if not proven? Scientific theories, much less philosophical claims, cannot be proven. Your apparent demand for absolute certainty (proof) leads if the logic is followed consistently to absolute skepticism. In that case just forget about claiming anything at all that is not analytically true or tautologous.

Nothing can ever be proved either way. proofs are obtainable only in the domain of math and logic. The best we can do is investigate empirically as much as possible and then provisionally accept what seems most plausible. What seems most plausible to one will not necessarily seem most plausible to another.

I think I know what you're getting at, but . . . if you use a word like "seeming," you're inevitably faced with the question, "Then what is it really?" Do you want to reply, "Neural processes"? Why is the "seeming" of a mental process less actual than the "reality" of a neural process? This sounds like another version of physical reductionism. — J

I'm not denying that what things seem are part of it. As I said earlier in this thread (I think) I count experiences of things as being as real or objective as the things are absent their being experienced. Remember Spinoza's idea that extensa and cogitans are two modes of the one substance or in our modern parlance, two descriptions of or perpsectives on the one thing. So what I'm saying doesn't amount to reductionism.

:up:

But that doesn't mean that an individual thought (or "reasoning") is caused by the brain's wetware. Likewise, we don't have to postulate mental causation as somehow closing the loop and making changes in the neurons. — J

If by "wetware" you mean neural activity, I'd say individual thoughts just are neural processes, and that the brain provides the conditions under which both neural activity and individual thoughts are possible. So I wouldn't say that mental states cause changes in the neurons. I would say that mental states just are neural processes (taking 'states' here not in a 'static' sense but as signifying process).

We are 'blind' to neural processes in vivo, so of course mental processes don't seem to us to be neural processes. I think this "seeming" is what causes all the difficulties.

" You've written a lot there Timothy and I'll have to some back to try to address it when I have more time.

Yes, all this is plausible, because we've allowed ourselves the placeholder term "correlated". But what else can we do? We don't know the right word yet. — J

There is a distinction, as is well known, between causation and correlation. If two things are necessarily correlated I don't think it necessarily follows that one is the efficient cause of the other. There are also distinctions between difference kinds of causes. For me the basic distinction is between efficient (local) causation and (environmental or global) conditions.

I think it is implausible that any thought occurs without accompanying physical (neural) process. Spinoza's solution allows the unproblematic idea that the mental does not cause physical processes, and vice versa. The two run in parallel, so to speak. No epiphenomenalism is then required

But this conceives of a "reason" as a particular event that occurs in my mind at time T1. If the "same reason" occurs to you as well, it isn't actually the same reason, on this understanding, because it's in a different mind at a different time. But the more usual way to think about reasons puts them in a rational world of meanings or propositions, so that you and I do indeed share the "same reason" for X. Taken in that sense, it seems more plausible to me that reasons are not necessarily correlated with neural processes. — J

I'd say that 'reason' is a generalization like any other. A particular act of reasoning is an event that occurs in your mind at a particular time. So even if i have the same reason for doing or thinking something that you do, my attendant acts of reasoning will never be exactly the same as yours.

So I agree with you that reasons (as distinct from reasonings) are not necessarily correlated with neural processes.

There's plenty of room for reasons. — J

Do you think it is plausible that we could entertain reasons without that being correlated with neural processes? Say on reason or reasoning leads to the next and say the first reasoning is correlated with some neural processes and the reasoning that follows is correlated with further neural processes. Do you think it is plausible that there are causal connections between the neural processes, just as there are logical connections between the reasonings?

Perhaps the understandings or lack of understandings of logical entailments are themselves correlated with neural networks. The idea doesn't seem implausible or problematic to me. Like Spinoza's idea that cogitans does not cause extensa and vice versa, it gets around the supposed conundrum that thoughts processes being causally connected neural processes rules out the rational /logical connections between ideas. They are just two different descriptions of the one set of phenomena..

Its singularity is a universal, like seeing a tree and knowing its a tree is an instantiation of the general idea. No general idea, no singularity. — Astrophel

I disagree. One can see a tree without thinking of it as a tree. Animals obviously do this.

It's a good question. I'd start conservatively and argue, what do we know about substance? Well, for one thing it is a concept, and in this regard is mental. — Manuel

Yes, 'substance' is an idea—the question is whether the idea refers to something real or is merely an idea. How could we find out?

Beyond that? Well, traditionally, it was argued that it that which binds things (properties) together, so that we don't have a kind of Humean world: just properties all over the place. — Manuel

Yes properties were traditionally thought to inhere in something and that something would be substance. So, Aristotle thought individual entities as the bearers of properties are substances—I'm a substance, you're a substance and your cat is a substance and so on.

If we go down to the microscopic level, I think it's not coherent to say that say, atoms or fields are substances. — Manuel

We have the idea of chemical substances, which have different properties. But then microscopic and subatomic particles are thought to have properties too.

The other idea of substance, as I said earlier, is 'the ultimate constituent of things'. That could be energy, for example, or mind if you're an idealist.

I suppose we should refine it a bit more. But there's a possibility it's just our commonsense way of viewing the world, and thus not literally true, that not something in the extra-mental world. — Manuel

Right, it might just be our way of making sense of things, although it is hard not to think of the extramental world as consisting in something. The problem is how could we ever know we had found the most fundamental constituent of things when it is always possible that there could be something more fundamental that eludes our grasp.

And it raises an interesting question—can we ever come to know what substance is, and if so, how? Via science? Philosophy? Some other way?

One last thing: The phenomenology of consciousness -- how we do experience subjectivity -- is an entirely different matter, one that science is powerless to speak about. For that we need philosophy. — J

I was going to object to your first two paragraphs, but when I read this final one, I realized we are largely in agreement.

Although I will point to a couple of things which presents some difficulties for scientific investigation and understanding of consciousness—that is that with all the fMRI advances in understanding which parts of the brain do what, the investigators still rely on personal reports from the subjects as to what they are experiencing or thinking about and so on—which means we haven't really gotten away from phenomenology in this investigation.

Also, the so-called hard problem of consciousness seems much more intractable, because it attempts to deal with the question of how processes in the brain, which can be understood in causal terms, can give rise to subjective experience, which, if we are to accept that subjective experience is just as it seems to us, and to phenomenological analysis, cannot be strictly understood in causal terms, but is better understood in terms of reasons.