That's the spirit, and really not that remote from what I want to convey. — Wayfarer

Probably our differences lie more in the conceptual details—about what can be counted as knowledge and what faith. Other than I've always thought we are not so far apart.

But it is interesting how many people will tell of such life-changing experiences if the opportunity arises. — Wayfarer

I agree. Humans are so diverse and interesting; their out of the ordinary stories never fail to fascinate. I have experienced a few life-changing experiences, and for me their capacity to change life consists in the feelings they evoke.

Interesting. We are indeed strange beasts.

:up:

That's what Colin McGinn says, 'mysterianism'. — Wayfarer

I'm not familiar with McGinn. Our experience is intelligieble to us, just as theirs presumably is for animals. Is that not enough?

Which conflicts with the fundamental dictum of Socratic philosophy, 'know thyself'. — Wayfarer

Our experience is intelligible I to us, so I don't see a conflict with Socrates. For me self-knowledge is about coming to understand the patterns of thought that we have unconsciously fallen into which lead to suffering and learning to let them go as much as possible. That is self-knowledge and even that is rare enough.

Neuroscience is beginning to show us that the brain/ body is unimaginably complex and interconnected. Without coordination of its cognitive processes, we could not survive. Even the overall coordination of our bodily processes of metabolism, cardiovascular and immune function are beyond our understanding. This is so even for the more complex animals and still the case to a lesser degree for even the simpler ones.
.
Since we are embedded within these bodily and neural processes of which our conscious awareness and discursive understanding are only tiny fragments, I see no reason to believe that we should ever be able to achieve an overview which is more than a more or less vague sketch. Just as even the most complex computer models of the weather are still vastly less complex than the actual weather systems.

From this our position of radical uncertainty I see no justification for any conclusions about unity in any sense beyond the acknowledgement that there must be coordination in a system too complex for us to understand except in part and in terms of parts.

What could it mean to say that our subjective experience could be disunified, uncoordinated? What could it even mean to say that of the overall weather system.is not unified, coordinated. These are human, all too human concepts.

But, hey, maybe we should just agree to disagree on that. — Wayfarer

:up: To be fair though, I must acknowledge I haven't read the book, only the article.

Subjective experience is certainly real, but how can it be considered material? I don't understand how you can think that. — Wayfarer

These are just words, just definitions. I could say that subjective experiences are not something different than neural events in the body. even though they may seem to be different. Even in their seeming they are felt as changes in the overall state of the body and the perceived world. In another sense they are material insofar as, being real, they matter, even if they don't seem to matter, no experience is immaterial in the sense of not mattering. And I cannot imagine any other sense in which I would want to say they are immaterial.

Right, the theist might say that God's will and God's judgement are all of a piece. For us, on the other hand what we will to be the case and what we judge to be the case are two different matters. The "direction of fit" you often mention.

I meant that truth or falsity is a property of judgements.

When you finally get around to trying to give an explanation you'll find out whether I can be bothered to try to understand it. I can assure you I will. But I won't guarantee not to critique it. Or... right you actually have no explanation. I get it...I can assure you.

Once it has been discovered, you will know it was there already, but not up until then. — Wayfarer

That, as obvious as it is, doesn't seem to change the fact that it was there already.

I have a huge 'to read' list and it's not all that important for me. It's not that I didn't understand what the essay says, but rather that I disagreed with its conclusions and did not find a compelling argument there to support them. I would rather hear you make a case for why we cannot usefully or fruitfully think of the subject and subjective experience as material.

In other words, I would like you to tell me why you think your attitude to the nature of the subject and subjective experience, to whether it is material or immaterial, is crucial to your understanding of the human existential situation and the mindful living of your life. Does it have something to do with the idea of afterlife, with this existence not being "all there is"?

This is why I keep referring to the recent essay and book on the blind spot of science. The blind spot essentially arises from the emphasis on objectivity as the sole criterion for what is real. — Wayfarer

I don't understand this because I see no reason why materialism necessarily eliminates the subject. The subject and subjective experience can be considered to be material without losing either, Subjective experience is just as real as anything else, but it is obviously not an object of the senses. Why should that make it any less material or real? That is what I don't see any argument for either coming from you or in general. To me it simply seems like some kind of category error.

That's interesting. I never found my hands again. Although I have to admit that I didn't apply myself to the preliminaries with any consistency, and I soon forgot about the whole enterprise. Perhaps I should try again. The idea certainly intrigues me. Did you have any success entering lucid dreaming states?

I also never got very far with Beelzebub's Tales to this Grandson. Gurdjieff's other books were more comprehensible to me, and Ouspensky's were that much clearer again. As I understood it the idea was that higher states of consciousness/ being consisted in higher or "finer" 'vibrations' of energy. As I remember it, according to Ouspensky (explicating Gurdjieff of course) everything has a material reality, even God and the human soul with the difference between "brute' or 'dead' matter and higher states consisting in fineness of vibration, like the gradation of musical tones. Man is in the natural state, asleep, a reactive machine.

The beginning of the path on the "fourth Way" was the establishing of a 'magnetic centre'. I stayed a fair time with the school and this was largely due to the fact that I had married one of the women who was pretty much totally committed. We were not only married but together ran a successful garden design and landscaping business.

I had been struggling with my skepticism for years (the organization seemed to be becoming progressively more cult-like and I was only interested in finding ways to alter my consciousness without continuing to resort to psychotropics) and when I finally could continue no longer my wife could not accept that I was going to leave and our marriage fell apart.

What you recount here is fascinating to me and makes me wish I had tried harder with or been more naturally talented in lucid dreaming. As I said I have always had very strange dreams, but I have never experienced exercising my will in dreaming. I did experiment with writing whatever i could remember of my dreams on waking, and I found the more I practiced this the more I could remember.

I always wondered though whether I was recording genuine memories of all the details (which became very elaborate) of these dreams or whether a good part what I wrote was not fabricated after the fact. The thought occurred to me that In way it doesn't matter because in either case I would be mining the unconscious.

I experimented intensively with hallucinogens from the age of 17 to about 19 and first read The Teachings of Don Juan at around 16-17 and subsequently all his books the most evocative of which was The Art of Dreaming.

I tried to find my hands in my dreams but the only time I ever did, I was sucked into a kind of deathly vortex which seemed to be a state of paralysis between waking and sleep. Lucid dreaming never worked for me, but I have always had the most vivid and bizarre dreams usually involving people I have never met and places I have never been in real life.

I believe our unconscious is always trying to tell us stuff about our lives, but it is all imagistic and hard to fathom. I have come to the conclusion that it is best to draw no ontological conclusions about such imaginative experiences, because wishful thinking is always knocking at the door and can only be a source of confusion and pseudo-knowledge.

I also spent 18 years participating in Gurdjieff groups and practiced meditation every day. This led to several powerful experiences which are impossible to describe but were, despite their short duration, as or even more compelling than my experiences with mind-manifesting substances.

I agree. I have no idea what he is wanting to say. So far as far as I can tell his objections have been a series of misrepresentations. I haven't received a response from @Leontiskos to my last post.

Being a theist he could say that the cat is on the mat is true because God is there to judge it to be so. I guess we can say that truth is a property of judgements, if a judgement would qualify as a a kind of proposition, although that question would open up some other issues I suppose.

"X will be tomorrow"? What does that mean, other than, "X will be true tomorrow?" — Leontiskos

It's coherent to say 'it is true that the planet will still exist when humanity has become extinct'. Do you think it is coherent to say 'when humanity is extinct it will be true that the planet will still exist'?

They are not saying the same thing; one says it is true now and the other says it will br true then. This is so regardless of whether you think the latter is true and coherent. If you think truth is just a property of propositions then the second sentence cannot be true or coherent. If you think truth is something more than that them the second sentence may be true and coherent but it still doesn't mean the same as the first.

Also would it be possible for most of us to shelve the deeply ingrained proscription against incest such that we could do it without emotional and psychological harm to both?

If not I guess that would still not make it morally wrong, given mutual consent and lack of coercion, but rather inadvisable. That said an argument could be made that it is morally wrong on account of the effect on family and friends if they knew about it. Of course it could be kept secret.

Except "that something will exist" is a propositional truth. So he hasn't managed to speak about existence apart from propositions and truth. — Leontiskos

I've already addressed this objection:

No we cannot make claims about what exists or will exist without (implicitly at least) proposing that what we say is true. But what will exist or not exist does not depend on what we say. — Janus

Do you want to say that, "X will be true tomorrow," is different from, "Tomorrow, X will be true"? I don't see a proper distinction between the two. — Leontiskos

I'm not saying X will be true tomorrow, but that it is true now that X will be tomorrow. If truth is a property of propositions, then it follows that 'no propositions, no truth'. If existence is not a property of propositions, then it does not follow that ' no propositions no existence'. truth

But is there an existence-claim that is not simultaneously a truth-claim? Can we talk about what exists apart from what is true? — Leontiskos

No we cannot make claims about what exists or will exist without (implicitly at least) proposing that what we say is true. But what will exist or not exist does not depend on what we say.

Sure, God knows the true from the false. A theist could uncontroversially say that even if all humans died, truth would remain. — Leontiskos

That seems right, although I would have used 'consistently' instead of 'uncontroversially'. By the same token an atheist who believes that truth or falsity is a property of propositions, but that existence is not, can consistently say that something will exist, even in the absence of humans. but cannot consistently say that truth can be in the absence of propositions.

:ok:

Yes, it is most satisfying!

I've already read the preceding article as you should know from our discussions. Why should I read the book? Is there something there that is not adumbrated in the article? If there is why not lay it out?

Yes, that works for me.

Two readings of that idiom come to mind: (a) some of what you say is true, and some of it is false; (b) some of the truth is encompassed by what you say, but some of it isn't. — Srap Tasmaner

The more I think about it the less I seem to be able to distinguish between these two options, except perhaps in the second option there are not only or not even falsities, but in addition or instead, irrelevancies.

There is some truth in natural science, according to him, but not the whole truth, and not because we're just not finished, but because we are excluding something important. More than not looking for it, when we stumble across it, we push it back out. — Srap Tasmaner

@Wayfarer and I disagree on this point. I find The Blind Spot in Science to be making a point which is either trivial or irrelevant (or maybe those are the same). I have made the analogy with the epoché in phenomenology where the question of the existence of the objective world is "bracketed" for methodological reasons (since what is being investigated is the nature of our experience of things). In science the subjective nature of experience is bracketed because its aim is to investigate the attributes of the things themselves rather than the attributes of our experience of them.

There is some truth in natural science, according to him, but not the whole truth, and not because we're just not finished, but because we are excluding something important. More than not looking for it, when we stumble across it, we push it back out. — Srap Tasmaner

So, I think this view is mistaken. Of course science is not the whole truth and nor is phenomenology. They are investigations in two different paradigmatic contexts. How would you incorporate for instance subjective experience into the study of physics, chemistry, geology or even biology? Such an attempt, even if possible, would not be helpful, to say the least; or at least I can't imagine how it could be. I have made this objection many times to wayfarer, but he never attempts to address it. If you have any ideas along those lines l'll be interested.

Now if you hold such a view, your ontology of the entities in this "plane" might also be hierarchical, because some creatures are sensible of the other reality (or realities) and some aren't. — Srap Tasmaner

This is the nub I think. Religions come with a built notion of hierarchy. The shaman who knows things the rest don't. The prophets who have received revelation from on high. The angels and archangels and God himself, the absolute. All of this can be understood in terms of the human propensity for power over others, for unquestionable authority.

That said, I don't doubt that different people have different kinds of consciousnesses, and that it is possible to enjoy altered states where novel insights seem to abound. But they always remain subjective insights, there is no way to measure them such as to make the intersubjectively compelling. As a guru you would always be preaching to the converted, and people believe what they believe for their own reasons no doubt.

All in all the study of so-called higher consciousness cannot be made a science, even if reliable techniques to alter states of consciousness can be found and employed. There is no way , outside the intersubjective contexts of things that can be measured, to determine if my insight is more real or true than yours. And even if there were could that mean that my very being would be more real or true than yours?

One area I do see what appears to me at least a real difference is in the arts. Different works of art. music. poetry and literature seem to be more alive or more 'true to life than others, in multifarious ways. But again, this is not something that can be definitively determined or perhaps even determined at all, intersubjectively speaking.

:lol: Right, so a conspiracy then...

As far as my perception informs me, it was unchanged, which is merely to highlight that to say change is always of things is not to say there is always change in the thing. — Mww

There probably is always change in the thing even though we cannot perceive it. Again, though that is a matter of perspective —the 'for us' vs the 'in itself'.

One Copernican Revolution to rule them all. — Mww

It's odd to call Kant's critique a "Copernican Revolution" though because he put humanity right back at the centre of things.

I can make no sense at all of "degrees of reality". Reality is not something that can be measured, the idea 'real' is the binary opposition to 'iimaginary' or 'artificial'. Something cannot be partly real and partly imaginary or artificial in its wholeness.

God, no. We tolerate every species of fool in my country; dunno about yours. But tolerate them we do, because freedom of speech is a rights-based equality, available to all. — J

Right, and outside of particular contexts there are no degrees of knowledge. One can be a better physicist or mathematician than another, but there is no measure to determine purportedly different degrees of "insight into reality itself', as opposed to insight into or knowledge of real things.

That is a very thin attempt at an explanation. What are the two putatively different claims, how are they different, and which one am I supposed to be making? — Leontiskos

I already explained it. We can say something is true now about what would be in the future. Can we say it would be true in the future absent us? So if truth or falsity is a property of propositions and it is true that the gold will exist in the non-human future do you say it will also be true in that non-human future that there is gold when there are no propositions?

In other words I'm suggesting that truth is propositional and existence is not.

Banno makes that statement as an atheist who is presumably not assuming non-living minds (whether or not God counts as a non-living mind). — Leontiskos

Would God be capable of knowing what is true and what is false?

it is not time or change that changes but things.
— Janus

Not really. Or, not always. I just ate dinner from the same plate I ate dinner from last week.

Anyway….not that important. — Mww

Are you sure the plate was exactly the same? Anyway my point was not that things must change, but rather that change itself does not change, just as time does not change. That said time is always changing or at least the times are. :wink:

It is true that there is gold in Boorara. If all life disappeared from the universe, but everything else is undisturbed, then it would still be true that there is gold in Boorara.
It is true that even if all life disappeared from the universe, but everything else were undisturbed, that there would still be gold in Boorara. — Leontiskos

The mistake you are making is failing to notice the difference between "is true" and "would be true". It is true for us now that there would be gold etc., even if all percipients were wiped off the face of the Earth. That is not the same as to say it would be true that there is gold even if all percipients etc.

Actually it surprises me that being a theist you don't believe it would still be true because God would be there to know it.

Frankly, I am surprised there are as many grants for philosophy as there are. — jgill

I wonder why there is no Nobel Prize for philosophy.

Even the instantaneous cogito? — Moliere

I don't believe there is any instantaneous cogito.

Not quite; time is the representation of change, change presupposes time as the means by which changes are determinable. Change requires things that change, usually in the form of movement, but nevertheless, something empirical, whereas time itself does not change. — Mww

The way I see it time is change not the "representation" of change. You say change presupposes time, but I say that equally time presupposes change. You say that change requires that things change, and I would say that is tautologically true, and that what is also true is that time requires that things change. You say that time itself does not change, and I agree but would add that change does not change either and that it is not time or change that changes but things.

Well he literally said, "If all life disappeared from the universe, but everything else is undisturbed, then it would still be true that there is gold in Boorara." This is clearly committing to the view that truth exists where no minds do.

But apparently you hold a different view, namely the view that we can make truth-apt statements about unperceived events? — Leontiskos

Not saying you've done it deliberately but I think you have phrased that in a way that is misleading. The way I would put it is: "It is true that even if all life disappeared from the universe, but everything else were undisturbed, that there would still be gold in Boorara."

@Banno will confirm whether or not this misrepresents his view, but in any case, it is my view. So, yes I do think we can make truth-apt statements about unperceived events. The alternative, that truth depends on knowledge, seems absurd to me.

For me the strangeness of Banno's position is the claim that truth can exist where no minds do. — Leontiskos

It's not clear to me that is what @Banno is claiming. We can make truth-apt statements about what would be the case in the absence of any percipients. It is that which is really the point at issue as I see it.

That would depend on there being a valid objection. — Wayfarer

If you think an objection is not valid the way to engage would be to explain why you think that. Having observed the way you participate here for a long time it seems much more likely to me that you ignore objections to which you have no comeback.

The OP does not mention the Evil Demon. In any case once such a ridiculous idea as an Evil Demon is allowed it could bring about a state of being fooled in regard to anything at all

It takes time to think and to be.

What a strange question! Time is nothing more than change. Time as measured is a measure of change. The pendulum is constantly changing position when we are aware of it, as it does when no one is aware of it.

It's time for a change—it's time you started genuinely engaging with your interlocutors. You never know—you might learn something new.