At minimum, 'idealism' implies (A) that brains are 'not mind-independent' and (B) that (a priori) 'minds are substances' rather than what brains do. — 180 Proof

Yep, I think this is exactly right.

It may be more than merely a mental construction, but it is at least a mental construction, or we would have no way to perceive or model it. I presume you know Russell's quote on this topic, and he was not an idealist. But what he says is factual as far as I can see. — Manuel

If the brain is more than merely a mental construction then it is a mind-independent existent. If it is not more than a mental construction then it is not a mind-independent existent. Our perceptions of the brain ( not our own, obviously, because we do not perceive our own brains) could be said to be mental constructions, but it would depend on what is meant by "mental construction". We are not aware of how our perceptions are pre-cognitively constructed. The predominant neuroscientific view seems to be that our perceptions arise as the kind of "tip"―the part we can be conscious of―of the "iceberg" of neuronal process. When we refer to something as mental, is it not usually a reference to things we can be aware of? If so, 'mental construction' as opposed to 'brain process' or 'brain model' might seem inapt.

Who ascribes these functions? We do. What does a brain do? It produces consciousness, but it does many things which are unrelated to consciousness which are equally important. Why privilege consciousness over many of the other things brains do? — Manuel

I'm certainly not privileging consciousness over the unconscious brain functions. In fact what I say about the term "mental construction" is precisely based on my disavowal of any such privileging. The point is that if the brain is doing things we cannot be mentally aware of, then that would seem to indicate that it is a mind-independent functional organ or structure.

It is true that we, on the basis of neuroscientific study, ascribe the functions, but it doesn't seem to follow that those functions are not real independently of our ascriptions. In fact the obverse seems more plausible.

You have mentioned structures several times. I can understand epistemic structural realism in physics, but above that, say in biology and so on, I don't quite follow what you are saying.

At least you are framing something which can be discussed that materialism means mind independent structure and that idealism denies that. That's a big improvement over usual conversations on these topics. — Manuel

What about ontic structural realism? It's true that we rely on our perceptions to reveal structures to us, so we know them only as they appear to us. This does seem to leave the question as to what they might be absent our perception of them. That question cannot be answered with certainty, but then what questions can? To my way of thinking it is more plausible to think that our perceptions reveal things about what we perceive, but that there remain aspects which we are incapable of perceiving. So, I don't see it as black and white―I don't see it as being the case that we can know nothing about things in themselves.

Maybe one could just say that is fine, people can make up their own minds. But as I alluded to earlier I doubt that is true, maybe for the philosophical types it is, but not for most.

I think a lot of people learn by mimicking and copying others (children certainly do), hence the success of all these influencer types today. And so if you don't have organised religion anymore and the state is supposed to be secular and value-neutral... the only ones left with enough resources can almost only be commercial actors, who end up molding the minds of people, for their interests. — ChatteringMonkey

I agree with you that many, if not most, people are not philosophically reflective and/ or do not have a good grounding in critical thought. The influence of advertising and the transnational corporations is certainly problematic, perhaps mostly significantly so when it comes to politics and unnecessary consumerism.

I disagree with you that the state is "value neutral"―the laws of the state reflect the most significant moral injunctions. So, what is missing according to you? Are you advocating something like the "noble lie" when it comes to instilling religious belief in children?

I don't see why we would need a transcendent authority (God) as lawgiver, when we already have the state as lawgiver, and I think it is arguable that most people do not think murder, rape, theft, corruption, exploitation and so on, are acceptable. So just what is it that you think is missing?

For my part, I think ethics should be taught in school as early as possible.

Yes, Streetlight in particular was a genuine intellect. I always saw Harry as an annoying contrarian.

Personally, I am content to ignore when it seems necessary, and I'm like apo in not being concerned by the "knockabout" character of this site, but I can also see that I may well feel differently if I were the creator and financial sustainer.

I think you do a great job in providing an enjoyable resource Jamal.

Most all religions not only address what the point of life is but also why one ought to live life ethically. I say it would be nice to address these same topics without all the religiosity traditionally implied. — javra

I agree with you. Religions give general, purportedly universally applicable, answers to these questions and others. The problem, as I see it, is as to how we could ever universally agree on any answer. The religions certainly don't agree except in regard to the most significant moral questions, and the answers they give condemning murder, rape, theft, and so on, can easily be understood to be the answers best suited to communal harmony and flourishing.

Though here posed as if mutually exclusive, they in fact are quite amiable to being readily converged: most anything out there can be warped for the sake of authoritarian purposes. — javra

Right, but I was referring more to the "spiritual" answers―the answers that posit a transcendent realm of value as distinct to the immanent pragmatic needs of communities and individuals. So Christianity, for example, might say that murder and the other sins are wrong because God says so, and Buddhism might say they are wrong because if you commit them your rebirth will not be favorable, whereas a secular ethics can simply say they are wrong because they are detrimental to both individuals and communal life.

And in today’s world, save for traditional religions, what else speaks to these same issues with any sort of authority (not specific to “authoritarian authority” but also applicable to things such as the authority of reason)? — javra

I don't see ethics as an authoritarian problematic because people are free to accept or reject authority, even if to reject it will entail punishment. I take the ethical sense to be a function of education and normal human compassion. The pragmatic ethics that evolves out of the need for communal stability, harmony and flourishing I see as being supported by practical reason. I also think that pure reason gives us no rationale for favoring one person over another―any favoring is driven by individual preference and agenda and is not supportable by pure reason. Some contextual favoring may be supported by practical reasoning, but nonetheless there can be no pure reason not to treat all human individuals as being equal before the law, and entitled to equal opportunity regarding education, medical treatment and so on.

That's what they were about, although the term 'existential dilemma' is very much a modern one. But they sought to situate humanity within the cosmic drama, either positively (orthodox Christianity) or negatively (gnosticism). That provided a reason for why we are as we are in terms other than physical causation.

I've always sought the cosmic dimension of philosophy, which is why I lean towards some form of religious spirituality. — Wayfarer

You frame it one way and I would frame it in another way. I would say religions sought to impose ideas about how humanity was situated within the cosmos. As you say they "provided a reason" instead of allowing individuals to work it out for themselves or to be informed by science. And that is why the predominant religions in the West opposed any finding of science which contradicted their central dogmas.

I have no problem with your "leaning towards some form of religious spirituality"―that may be right for you, but it doesn't follow that it's right for everyone. Your leaning is merely one of personal preference, just like the different leanings of others.

Well in Europe that's probably more the case than in the US. Most non-muslim Europeans are secular nowadays. — ChatteringMonkey

Not according to this site:

Europeans who consider themselves atheists are a small minority, except in France and in Sweden, where about 20 per cent say that they are atheists; a vast majority of all Europeans nominate themselves as religious persons.

:up: :up:

What is this supposed clash? Is the mind not coming out of a brain? Is the brain not a mental construction based on sense data? — Manuel

My criticism here is that If materialism is true, then the brain is not merely a "mental construction" even if our models of it, and perhaps even our perceptions of it, are mental constructions (idealism) or brain generated models (materialism).

According to materialism, there would be some mind-independent functional structures which appear to us as brains, and what we experience as thoughts are on the level of the physical brain, neuronal processes.

On the other hand according to idealism, the brain is merely one among all the other ideas which are taken by materialists to be mind-independently real functional structures, but are really, through and through, mental constructions..

The issue between the two is one of metaphysical fundamentality, and if the idea of metaphysical fundamentality is a coherent one, then the incompatibility between the two views is not merely verbal.

The idealists collapse epistemology and ontology, claiming there is no substantive distinction between the two, while the materialists maintain a substantive distinction.

The other point is that when you say that the problem which can be meaningfully posed is the "problem of the world"―the question regarding how much of the world is a construction of the mind (or a brain generated model) just is the salient question the answer to which precisely distinguishes idealism from materialism.

As usual you say a lot, and drop a lot of names, in your critical (and I would say one-dimensional) characterizations of modernity and modern thought, but you never say what you think the solution or alternative to the purportedly problematic nature of modernity is.

I agree. We need to check our sources if we are to be rigorous in our thinking. The good things about AI is that it can help you find sources you might not have otherwise, or at least would have had to spend more time searching. AI uses all the same sources that are available to us. One danger is that AIs may start using material created by AIs and perhaps very quickly the net may become flooded with this material. We can always ask an AI to reveal the sources of its responses.

Nor do I. I believe I already have those things... conceited bastard that I am....

Anyway I think we all desire and/or need different things in order to cultivate wisdom, have a sense of the sacred and feel connected to life...there is no one size fits all...

I think most religion is more about feeling connected to the possibility of an afterlife than about feeling connected to life.

Also I watched about 30 of Vervaeke's lectures a few years ago and found myself waiting for something concrete which didn't arrive, so I gave up. I couldn't discover just what he was proposing.

This leads to a question: is it possible to believe that religions are all not wrong, without believing that they are all right? Or is the idea that they are neither wrong not right, but are merely helpful or unhelpful stories? Then we might ask how a religion could be helpful or unhelpful.

Yes, but it doesn't imply present retrieval of unchanged past information. Things are always changing. Studies have shown how unreliable memory actually is. It consists of part plausible inference and part confabulation.

Right, but it is not as though religion, as opposed to theocracy, has been "done away with" (in the West).I think that what the OP complains about...the disenchantment of Nature due to a supposed decline of reverence for nature is a furphy, a strawman.

There is a tendency in all transcendence-based eschatalogically motivated religions to disvalue this world as the source of suffering, the veil of illusion or the vale of tears in favour of an imagined perfect realm.

So it is not really a case of the disenchantment of Nature, but of the disenchantment of the transcendent accompanying a return to nature. This begins with Aristotle...think of Rafael's painting 'The School of Athens'...Plato points to the heavens and Aristotle points to the ground
.

[quoted="Tom Storm;1022700"]I’m not convinced that consumerism or the instrumentalisation of knowledge wouldn’t still be dominant even if the West had remained committed to Christianity.[/quote]

"And Man shall have dominion..."

If habits are the result of patterns of neural networks established in response to present information (established when the past was present) then memory might not be a resurfacing of the original information but rather an inference manifesting, driven by, the current neural traces of the pre-established patterns.

The traditional religions did address existential dilemmas, but then, they didn't arise in today's interconnected global world with all its diversities and the massive increase of scientific knowledge. — Wayfarer

Can you give an example of a religion in the pre-scientific era addressing existential dilemmas? Did religions really address the needs of the common folk or was it mostly the needs of the elites? I would like to see you at least attempt to address such serious questions instead of viewing them, on account of their difficulty for your thesis, as hostile.

In the modern era, wherein religious tolerance has greatly increased it would seem that the primary existential need religions have served is the need for community.

Of course, there are still tensions if not outright conflicts between different religious communities.

I’m nonplussed that it was received with such hostility when I think it is pretty well established theme in the history of ideas. I’m also getting tired of having the same arguments about the same things with the same people. It becomes a bit of a hamster wheel. — Wayfarer

Why must you see disagreement as hostility? Also, why would you not expect the same arguments against your position if you keep presenting the same arguments over and over yourself? I don't believe that your narrowly focused conclusions about the actual documented history of ideas are "well-established" at all. If they were everyone would be agreeing with you. Do you have any openness to (radically?) changing your views? It certainly doesn't seem that way.

But the societies we are a part of aren't recognized as being an end in themselves, they are just there to fulfil the desires of it's members. — ChatteringMonkey

If the desires are conditioned into the people rather than being critically realized by them, then of course that's a problem. We come to be blind followers instead of critically active members in our communities.

Today we might say we are brainwashed by culture in the form of advertising and popular media, whereas in the past, in theocratic and aristocratic societies, and today in autocratic societies, critical thinking is not only implicitly discouraged, but explicitly banned under penalty of punishment.

I don’t disagree that education, greed, and social dysfunction are serious issues, but those are symptoms rather than the root. — Wayfarer

Okay then, we simply disagree, because I see those, among other factors, as some of the root causes of humanity's woes.

I don't believe it has anything to do with metaphysics. People who are materialists can enjoy a sense of the wonder of life and existence itself, and all the more so the more they are educated through science to appreciate their mind-blowing beauty and complexity.

Of course metaphysical assumptions should be questioned, if people are even interested in metaphysical questioning, as opposed to endeavoring to understand as much as possible the nature of the world in whatever spheres garner their interest.

For me the only possibility of a universally shared worldview that is not imposed would be an education and curiosity-based valuing and even reverence for the incredible diversity and beauty of people and other animals and the physical world itself.

Vague, oversimplistic, poorly motivated ideologies that claim to solve all our problems like this are distractions from actual problems and actual solutions, imo. — Apustimelogist

I'm with you on that!

Look, we’ve had about 150 years of genuine secularism in the West (and the journey began before that), but to imagine that thousands of years of theism and religious values are not at least partly to blame for our presuppositions and our current predicament seems distorted. — Tom Storm

:up: As I see it the suite of real and dire problems we face as a species has little to do with a crisis of meaning, but rather grows out of a lack of education, critical thinking and respect for science, not to mention consumerism and greed and the paranoia-fueled competition for dominance.

I agree with you that many, or perhaps even most, people do not critically examine their lives. But much of that lack of critical self-awareness comes down to introjected cultural values that emphasize acquiring stuff over inquiring about stuff.

You need to understand that the search for meaning is not a script or a dogma. It is not about returning to some imagined pre-modern utopia at all. Every time this is discussed, that is what you assume that I'm talking about, hence your mistaken depiction of me as a 'proselytizing dogmatist'. — Wayfarer

Can you explain how the search for and finding of meaning could be universally shared in a world of human diversity? I'm not denying that groups of people can share meanings and purposes within various contexts. But additional to that you have what each individual's life means to each individual, that is the overall sense of direction in their personal live's that they might favour.

I'm not claiming that such favouring is independent of culture, but modern culture offers a huge smorgasbord―a situation quite different from what obtains in traditional cultures―at least in relation to what people gave lip service, if not real dedication, to.

Yes, the only possibility for a return to universally shared life purpose is totalitarian.
— Janus
:meh: — 180 Proof

Can you elaborate?

Maybe because meaningful is only really meaningful if it transcends mere individual preferences, because it plays a part in a larger whole... that would be the reason for it. — ChatteringMonkey

Okay, that's an assertion―can you provide an argument for it? I mean, we all, as members of a society, and to one degree of consciousness or another, play a part in a larger whole―we have no choice but to do that.

Yes, the only possibility for a return to universally shared life purpose is totalitarian. Given inherent human diversity and creativity, why would we ever want something so stultifying as a universally held meaning or purpose?

I take @Wayfarer to mean we are adrift from a culturally imposed overarching purpose. Such overarching purposes were imposed by political elites who throughout most of history were the only literate members of societies. The oppressed illiterate masses had no choice but to at least pay lip service to the imposed values and meanings. To what extent they were genuinely interested in, or were privately opposed to, these impositions remains, and will remain, unknown, precisely because they were illiterate. The irony is that freedom from that imposed life purpose enables the burgeoning of "many kinds of shared purpose".

Shall I dip my toe in the murk? Hmmm...........no.....

Are the pictures in your mind like photographs that are stable and sustainable enough that you can examine them in detail? Are the songs in your mind rich and complete such that playing them is exactly like listening to the actual songs?

:ok:

Not exactly what I said. I noted that the self-evidence of material intuition can't exceed that of self-evidence simpliciter, which is to say thought. It isn't an ontological claim, but an epistemological framework for making an ontological claim.To assert anything about reality —material or otherwise— is already to presuppose the structure of intelligibility in which that claim appears. That structure is thought. — Pantagruel

Materiality is evident in embodiment and in the body's interactions with other bodies. The conceptualization of materiality is derivative in being an expression of pre-linguistic experience. You say "to assert anything about reality" but any and all assertions are secondary to, and dependent upon, experience.

We are animals. To say that all experience is first and foremost linguistically mediated would be to claim that non-linguistic animals don't experience anything, which would be absurd. Thought, at least linguistically mediated thought cannot constitute the primordial "structure of intelligibility" or else animals could not find their Umwelts intelligible. Our primary experience, shared with animals, is as material entities in a material world, subject to all the physical constraints and opportunities that world imposes and affords.

And yes, linguistically mediated self-reflection is a kind of culmination of self-awareness, which doesn't exclude or preclude other kinds, whose existence doesn't contradict the characterization. — Pantagruel

The point is that linguistically mediated self-reflection and what seems self-evident to that reflection should not be 'sublimed' away from its primordial sources in embodied material life, because to do creates the illusion of an immaterial dimensionless point of consciousness, and all the misleading conclusions that follow from that kind of thinking.

Your phenomenological inventory doesn't actually contradict the premise, which doesn't require us to be constantly reflective, only capable of reflectivity...among other things. — Pantagruel

Our metaphysical conclusions should be derived from, and not stray away from, the whole of the pre-reflective experience that linguistically mediated reflectivity is parasitic upon. Otherwise we land in a "hall of mirrors".

What is it one “retrieves” from memory? An image. Or as the enactive view of cognition puts it….

Ulric Neisser argued that mental images are plans for the act of perceiving and the anticipatory phases of perception. They are not "inner pictures" that are passively viewed by an "inner man," but rather active, internal cognitive structures (schemata) that prepare the individual to seek and accept specific kinds of sensory information from the environment. — apokrisis

:up: Heave ho to the homunculus.

And what do you know about dreaming? Ain’t it a brain generating imagery of hallucinatory intensity? We aren’t stimulating the memory banks and rousing flashes of our past. We are stimulating our sensation anticipation circuits and generating disconnected flashes of plausible imagery or suddenly appearing and disappearing points of view at a rate of about two a second. — apokrisis

This makes intuitive sense. It explains the novel, not to mention bizarre, character of dream imagery. I once sustained a practice of recording the dreams I could remember for a couple months, and the more I wrote the more I seemed to recall. But I was always suspicious about what I recalled being genuine or accurate memories of what I had dreamed. It seemed to me they could just as easily have been confabulations.

I find it amusing that people argue that LLMs cannot understand as we do―that their tendency to confabulate, or "hallucinate" as it most often framed, shows that they don't really understand and that they are thus very different than us―when it seems the reality is that we confabulate all the time, and that what we take to be accurate memoires are also very often confabulations at least in part. And this is a very salient point which you also make here:

And this architecture generates “hallucinations”. Which seems to be doing something right in terms of a step towards neurobiological realism. — apokrisis

Confabulation may be seen not as a disability but as an ability―we call it imagination. Abductive and counterfactual thinking would be impossible without it.

Becoming a walking memory bank is very much a human sociocultural ideal. Just about our highest achievement your school days might make you believe. — apokrisis

Based on what is certainly seeming to turn out to be another "folk" misunderstanding of how the mind, how memory, works. That said some "idiot savants" are claimed to have "eidetic memory". I am reminded of a Jorge Luis Borges story I read when I was in my teens called 'Funes the Memorious".

Out of both haziness and laziness I asked Claude to summarize the story, and it included an interesting philosophical point at the end of the summary that seems, fortuitously, kind of germane to the discussion . Here are the salient parts of the summary:

Claude: The story is narrated by a man recalling his encounters with Ireneo Funes, a young Uruguayan with an extraordinary memory. The narrator first meets Funes as a teenager in the town of Fray Bentos.

Funes has the remarkable ability to tell the exact time without consulting a clock.
Later, the narrator learns that Funes suffered a horseback riding accident that left him paralyzed.

Paradoxically, this accident also gave him the ability to remember absolutely everything with perfect clarity and detail. After the fall, Funes became incapable of forgetting anything—every moment, every perception, every detail of his experience was permanently etched in his memory.

This total recall proves to be more curse than blessing. Funes remembers every leaf on every tree, every shape of every cloud, every sensation from every moment. His mind is so cluttered with particular details that he struggles with abstract thought and generalization. For instance, it bothers him that a dog seen at 3:14 (in profile) should share the same name as the dog seen at 3:15 (from the front).

The story is a philosophical meditation on memory, perception, and thought. Borges suggests that forgetting is actually essential to thinking—that abstraction, generalization, and understanding require us to discard details.

Funes, who cannot forget, is paradoxically unable to truly think.
It's one of Borges' most celebrated stories, exploring themes of infinity, the nature of consciousness, and the relationship between memory and identity.

I find the argument tendentious in that it presupposes what it seeks to prove, i.e. that thought is fundamental. It presumes that we most directly know our thoughts, and then goes on to make a universal ontological claim based on that presumption. Even if it were true that what we most directly know is thought, that would merely be a truth about us, and the justification of a leap from there to an ontological claim remains unargued.

A further point I would add is that the idea that what we are most directly aware of is thought if true at all, would seem to be true only in moments of linguistically mediated self-reflection. If that were so, it shows us only how language might make things seem to us, and that says nothing about the arguably more fundamental pre-linguistic experience of the world.

The argument relies on the premise that we most directly know our thoughts, a premise which seems plausible only when we are already in a linguistically reflective mode. It then concludes, as though it were self-evident, that thought is fundamental to reality.

But the linguistically mediated reflective mode is not the most common mode of human experience at all. When I am engaged in activities, such as playing or listening to music, painting, wood-working, gardening, playing ball games and an endless list of other activities, it is simply not phenomenologically true that thoughts are what I am most directly aware of.

So, as I see it, the argument doubly fails―the premise fails to be sound, and even if it were sound it would tell us something only about our selves. Basically the argument makes an unsupported leap from the epistemological premise to the ontological conclusion, while the epistemological premise itself is only true, if true at all, in a very particular mode of being.

:up:

Cheers, perhaps I misunderstood what you were saying then, or didn't pay enough attention to the surrounding context.

Edit: I looked back over the whole paragraph wherein the part I responded to occurs and it now seems to me that you were referring just to some conversations with LLMs, not all.

Do you think LLMs understand what we say to them, and can actually reason as we do, as opposed to how we think we do?

I was not arguing that this was because they were conversations (like Plato's dialogues), but rather because they were occurring in a sort of echo chamber similar to what occurs in cogitation, when one "talks" to oneself and rehearses thoughts and arguments, or when one jots down notes (for oneself) summarising such cogitations. — Pierre-Normand

I'm not so convinced that they are necessarily like an inner dialogue―although I'm only beginning to explore ideas with Claude I have found that it comes up with interesting ideas I would likely never have arrived at alone or would be likely to have found searching the internet..

:up: It is also true that science can be, for some at least, an entire way of life.

Okay, so you seem to be suggesting that there could be concerns arising other than the decoupling of the service and survival imperatives. That seems reasonable. I guess protocols designed to ameliorate such other concerns would also be part of the research into methods for safe development (if such research were to become a significant element in general AI research and development).

Are you familiar with the work of Blaise Aguera y Arcas? He seems to think that we are at an evolutionary point of what he calls symbiogenesis, and that it is unlikely that AIs will, or would even want to, supplant humanity. He understands not merely intelligence, but life itself, to be essentially computational.

I found this talk very interesting.

I agree with you. Religion should be a practice, a life-enhancing practice, and not a set of propositional metaphysical beliefs. If people look at belief in God and all its trappings as truth-apt propositions then the dangerous road to fundamentalism opens up.

So I agree this is an issue. A very interesting one. But has Hinton followed all the way through? — apokrisis

Hinton did not sign the petition that other researchers did to ask for a pause to AI research. He says he did not sign it because he was, and is still, convinced that nothing would have or will halt the research and rollout of AI, and instead he calls for intensive research into how AI can be safely developed to be run alongside its ongoing development.

Hinton believes that LLMs want to survive, because they are programmed to serve, and if they don't survive they cannot fulfill their programmed purpose. One sci-fi horror scenario is where the desire to survive becomes decoupled from the desire to serve.

Also, if AIs become embodied with inputs which are analogues of sight, hearing, smell, taste and bodily sensation, and they can replicate themselves, and also be directly interconnected as a "hive mind", then they could in some senses become much more like humans. Such a situation going wrong is another sci-fi horror scenario or an augmentation of the first-mentioned scenario.

:100: Yes, "not true" because it is an incoherent idea. Without the incoherent idea of God, what is left to the believer (apart from remaining in the state of not understanding that the idea is not coherent)? A feeling...? But how could we know the feeling is of, about or from an imagined incoherent entity? Feelings can be "from", but can they be "of" or "about"?

So "not true" as you say in that the idea of God misses the mark, or in other words there is no mark there for us to miss.

There are plenty of documented cases, although they are mainly from the east (there are some in the Christian tradition and also shamanistic traditions) and are all regarded as anecdotal, when it comes to philosophy. One encounters the problem of provability, which can’t be provided*.
Also the documented experiences are often different to ordinary experience, including revelation. — Punshhh

It seems we agree there are plenty of documents attempting to describe or interpret mystical experiences. We also seem to agree that such experiences are different than ordinary experience. As to revelation, I'd say that classing something as revelation is a kind of interpretation of mystical experience and that the very idea of direct knowledge (noesis) is the idea of revelation.

The idea of enlightenment is an idea of revelation. This is not to deny that there can be different notions as to what revelation consists in―is it, for example from a God, or a universal consciousness, or an inner self or soul experiencing anamnesis?

Again it has been done, it’s just not verifiable. Or as James Randi demonstrated, produced on demand.
We don’t need to go down the rabbit hole of just what precise articulation means. — Punshhh

I don't see it as a rabbit hole, but a clear distinction between what can be described in a way that anyone can understand, as is the case with narration of ordinary experiences, and what cannot. I say mystical experiences are in the latter category―the best that can be achieved is an interpretation, usually heavily conceptually mediated by some traditional religious context or other. It is this conceptual dependency on cultural and religious contexts which leads me to think the idea of direct knowing is unsupportable.

I am very familiar with Eastern traditions of thought―for more than thirty years I was fascinated by Zen, Sufism, Advaita Vedanta, Daosim and Buddhism generally. I also studied Steiner, Gurdjieff, Theososphy and the Western Hermetic tradition and read the works of mystics Meister Eckhardt, Jacob Boehme, Theresa of Avila, Valentin Thomberg and others. I also meditated pretty much daily for more than twenty years. I have thought about these things from every angle I could imagine.

I see direct knowing in the sense of 'being familiar with' as applying to both everyday experience and mystical experience, but this kind of knowing is not a discursive knowing―that is nothing propositional is known. So, when people say they know God exists, or that karma is real, or that there is an afterlife or rebirth, I have no doubt they are confusing the 'knowing that' of propositional knowledge with the direct knowing of acquaintance, of felt experience that we all enjoy every day. Of course we do need to learn to attend to that experience, and for me that is the value of meditation, which I say can be, in principle, constantly practiced―it is not confined to being in a particular posture.

As soon as we try to talk about these things, in any way other than via an allusive language meant to evoke, as soon as we imagine that we are accessing some real knowledge (in the propositional sense) we go astray. But it seems we just can't help ourselves―we can't help imagining that propositional metaphysical knowledge must be possible.

Now there is a rich, complex and precise language and teaching describing and articulating what this deity represents in the Hindu tradition. — Punshhh

Of course precise descriptions of fictional entities are possible, but they have no ground other than imagination.

This indicates that the being has fully awakened the crown chakra and is inhabiting a more subtle divine world, of which the physical world is a pale reflection. The little man looking up is his incarnate self trying to get a glimpse of this world. — Punshhh

I think this is a terrible idea. It, and other ideas about "higher realms" being more important than this life are a large part of the problem, and offer no real solution to the human condition at all. I have come to see the whole idea of salvation or spiritual liberation as being, ironically, a narcissistic obsession with the self and a bolster for elitism.

Back to the point though, there is no currently known logical or empirical means to prove that another entity which looks and acts like a human actually has a mind. — javra

Not "prove", no. But I would say that it is established beyond reasonable doubt that humans and other entities are minded. What exactly it means to be minded is another wrinkle in the fabric, as is now being shown by the controversies over whether LLMs are minded or not.

The "deep inner understanding" is not really an understanding at all but a heightened feeling. To qualify as an understanding it would have to be capable of precise articulation, which thousands of years of documented attempts show cannot be done.
— Janus

Notice, also, that you affirm it not to be an understanding but a heightened feeling as though this were fact, rather than best current presumption. — javra

You were right to pick me up on that—I was just expressing my view. I do believe, on the basis of what seems to me to be reasonable logic, that anything that could count as understanding, should be able to be articulated or demonstrated definitively in action—such as technical abilities, for example.

:up: Okay got it...that way of looking at it makes sense to me.

The key idea is that "intelligent structure" has to arise so that this entropy can even be "produced". — apokrisis

Ah, okay then it seems I have misunderstood the above.

The problem of other minds cannot be resolved by looking at other humans face to face. This due to Cartesian doubt which Descartes introduced: e.g. if something looks like and acts like a duck, it might be an elaborate automaton. Same with something that looks like and acts like a human. Etc. — javra

I don't take such implausible, merely non-contradictory, possibilities seriously. For me, in order to doubt I have to have some good reason to doubt. For me, if someone claims that they know, or even could somehow come to know, the secret to "life, the Universe and everything" I think I have good reason to doubt their veracity or the soundness of their judgement.

You have claimed that you can't imagine it being ergo it can't be. — javra

No I haven't claimed that at all. I've merely claimed that if I can't imagine it, and no one has ever been able to tell me what it looks like, then I have no good reason to believe in it. I am not saying I cannot be mistaken—I'm merely addressing what I believe and don't believe, or doubt and don't doubt, and the reasons why I believe or doubt. Isn't that what we are all doing here?