Please excuse my butting in. — Banno

Cheers but there is nothing to excuse, it's an open forum.

It's the same objection you're offering here, that our beliefs can be different to what we discover about the world. But notice that Philoonous qua idealist does have an answer to that, along the lines of coherentism. — Wayfarer

It has nothing to do with coherentism. The reality that we can be mistaken about. according to Berkeley, is the human mind-independent reality of what Goid has in mind, as opposed to the materialist reality of mind-independent existents.

You have been challenged to explain how it is that we all perceive the same things, if you reject both the idea of mind-independent existents and Berkeley's human mind-independent ideas in the mind of God. It seems you just don't want to admit you can find no alternative.

You always take one step further than your argument allows. — Banno

:up: That's an apt and succinct way of putting it.

A brick wall's response depends on what you throw at it.

Just to be clear: are you claiming that the world absent any perceivers could not possibly possess any differentiation whatsoever? If that were so, then how to explain the advent of perceivers in a world of difference and diversity?

How did the Great Amorphous Nothing give rise to the Immensely Complex Something?

I am anticipating a verrry long wait...

Edit: Some rhetoric appeared above as I wrote...still waiting for the reasoning.

There are no features without minds. In the absence of minds the universe, such as it is, is featureless, formless, and lacking in any perspective. — Wayfarer

I was just about to write "How could you know that" when I looked directly above and saw that Banno beat me to it.

Inferentially. — Wayfarer

Lay out the reasoning.

the mind creates gestalts, meaningful wholes, by which recognise not only letters, but also the basic features of the world. — Wayfarer

Right. the basic features of the world are not mind-created, but mind-recognized.

Schrödinger proposed this thought-experiment only to show that the 'Copenhagen interpretation' of quantum mechanics is, at best, paradoxical (i.e. does not make sense). — 180 Proof

:100: How easily and how often that is forgotten!

The very idea of a single way to live that would constrain us all as if we lived under actual environmental and thermodynamic constraints! — apokrisis

Yes, there would seem to be little hope for us as a species if we don't find such a way.

What does the job of organising our behaviour in some useful and self-sustaining way? — apokrisis

:up: I think that is what it all comes down to. Philosophy should be about how best to live. Whatever does not inform that, however interesting and creative it might be, is just a diversion in the form of speculation.

Where Kastrup aspires to prove logically that a Cosmic Mind must exist in some meaningful sense, Way says "there is no need to introduce a literal ‘mind-at-large’ to maintain a coherent idealism" {my emphasis}. What he does posit, in the article, is that a philosophical "paradigm shift from scientific materialism to scientifically-informed idealism" is currently underway"*2. And that new paradigm would not say "Abstract generalities can be said to only exist in their material instantiations" {my emphasis}. Which only makes sense from a Materialist perspective.

So, Way presents an alternative form of Idealism, which doesn't require an actual sensable God-in-the-quad to maintain the physical world in the absence of a human observer. — Gnomon

You haven't and Wayfarer hasn't, said what that alternative form of idealism consists in. If it is only that the brain models a world, well I think that is uncontroversial. But to think that what is being modeled exists in its own right seems most plausible to me given all the evidence from our experience as it is given by everday life and by science.

If there are no mind-independent existents and if there is no collective mind to which we are all connected, then how would you explain the fact that we all perceive the same things, including at least some animals? I am yet to see even the beginnings of any such explanation coming from you or Wayfarer.

I can explain it to you, but I can't understand it for you. Over and out. — Wayfarer

See above. You have not explained it. If you had I would have no trouble understanding it, although of course I imagine I probably would not agree with it and would thus critique it. But you have not given me anything at all to work with, just hand-waving. If you don't agree, then respond to this and lay it our as clearly as you can, and then we might get somewhere.

Again, 'I don't see how'. The fact you don't understand it is not a criterion. It's insight into a general process, one in which we're all involved. It's basic to the human condition, in fact it's basic to any form of organic life. — Wayfarer

There is no point saying that I don't understand some idea if you cannot explain it yourself. I can simply retort that you don't understand it either and that it is just something you vaguely gesture at.

It seems obvious to me that the mind interprets the world, it does not create it. The mind (brain) as well as the language and culture also generate an idea of a self, but the idea is still vague if you want to say that the self is anything more than the body, including its ideas, emotions and its history. But even then, there always seems to be something left out.

The only reality is mind and observations, but observations are not of things. To see the Universe as it really is, we must abandon our tendency to conceptualize observations as things. — Wayfarer

What, I should believe that just because it is said by

a Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Johns Hopkins University, author of many publications on the topics of astrophysics and various forms of astronomy including optical, radio, ultraviolet, and X-ray. — Wayfarer

I understand what is being said, and I think it is an unwarranted conclusion that is incorrect and not in accordance with human experience—observations obviously are of things. I do agree with the last part that says that observations are not themselves things, if we define 'things' as 'what is observable or encounterable in some sense', because observations are not observable.

Who is this "we" to which you just referred? — apokrisis

I would have been better to say 'a world or a self is never encountered'.

Perhaps

"I see this or that makes sense or nonsense within this or that world model or ontic framework." — apokrisis

That seems right, but no framework is THE framework. I think we agree that the nature of things is best given to us by science, which is, when it comes down to it, an extensive elaboration of everyday experience and observation.

Self and world never seem to be found apart, and yet never together either. Curious. It is almost as if each is the other's reflection somehow. An Umwelt almost. — apokrisis

Right, the ideas of self and world are conceptually inseparable. I like the idea of an "Umwelt" or as Jaspers would put it "an Encompassing".

It ican be said of mindfulness meditation that its aim is to gain insight into the mind's 'I-making and mine-making' proclivities, which are going on ceaselessly due to ingrained habits of thought. — Wayfarer

I don't see how you could transcend the "I-making and mine-making proclivities" as long as you cling to the idea that the mind (that is the self) creates the world. Insofar as this places the self at the centre of the world it is not a "Copernican Revolution" at all.

(Which do you prefer, "The conscious self is a construction that arises in the dialectical process that is a world-making" or "Here is a hand"? — Banno

We don't encounter a world or a self, but we encounter many hands. And many hands make light work—but only if they work together.

"The conscious self is a construction that arises in the dialectical process that is a world-making" could be a quote from Edward Caird or T.H. Green. — Banno

I had to look up those two names—I don't know much about the British Idealists other than that they were followers of Hegel. Apparently, the early Bertrand Russell was of that ilk.

That said, I think there is a way of parsing the quoted statement that makes sense: 'The idea of a self co-arises with the idea of a world'. Both ideas are inherently vague—we never actually encounter a whole self, or a whole world.

My criticism of the view that everything is mind is that we really have no idea what that could mean. On the other hand, we know very well what it means to say that everything is material or physical, since we find ourselves in a material world, where everything, except abstract generalities, does seem to be physical. Abstract generalities can be said to only exist in their material instantiations, and we have no way of clearly conceiving and saying how they could exist in any other sense.

The progress hasn’t quite been zero. Nobels have been handed out… — apokrisis

Sure, however I'm not talking about the science, but the various metaphysical interpretations of the implications of QM made by probably mostly non-scientists.

At least science acknowledges that it is all only pragmatic modelling and not a pretence at knowing the ultimate truths. But science can afford to humble brag having achieved so much in telling the structural story of Nature. — apokrisis

I agree with this. though I think the general existential problem is, as Margaret Wertheim puts it in Pythagoras' Trousers, that the scientific world picture is only really accessible to a tiny minority, whereas the older, much simpler religious and mythological models of the Cosmos and Humanity's place in it were much more readily comprehensible, despite that fact that, under critical examination, they prove to be incoherent and rife with inconsistencies. Shared worldviews allow a more closely bonded society, so the challenge for science is to make itself more accessible to the average person.

I suggest that contemporary physicists' obsession with a theory of everything is socially irresponsible. In expecting society to provide billions of dollars to support this quest, TOE physicists have become like a decadent priesthood, demanding that the populace build them ever more elaborate cathedrals, with spires reaching ever higher into their idea of heaven, Since a theory of everything would be not only utterly irrelevant to daily human life and concerns, but also incomprehensible to the vast majority of people, TOE physicists can be likened to the late medieval Scholastics. This is the twentieth-century equivalent of asking how many angels could dance on the head of a pin.
From Pythagoras' Trousers

If you don't take a metaphysical position then you haven't put your faith in anything. I also try to avoid taking any metaphysical position.

When it comes to the simple question about whether the world existed before humans, I think all the evidence suggests it did and acknowledging that does not involve metaphysics.

I don't beleive that Quantum physics

has called the 'mind-independence' of what were thought to be the fundamental constituents of existence into question. — Wayfarer

although of course some want to interpret the results that way.

The metaphysical speculations about the results of quantum physics are of course untestable as I already implicitly acknowledged, as is the idea that reality is mind independent. That's way I say that for me, and I think taking parsimony and accordance with experience, and the incoherence of idealist speculations into account, the mind independence of reality is simply the most plausible assumption; but of course, it remains a question of faith and individual assessments of plausibility.

The only "philosophical significance" I can see in these metaphysical interrogations and in metaphysical speculations in general is that it is a fact of the human condition that people cannot help but fall into continuing to speculate in those ways. And as I've said many times, I see no problem with that except where people begin to imagine that they could ever come to know the answer to such questions. Apart from that error, they may be creative exercises of the imagination (although it doesn't seem as though anyone has come up with much new material in the last couple millennia, except for semiotic, enactive and information theory and related ideas, which at least have some connections with science.

That’s only a problem for solipsism - that only MY mind is real I didn’t explain it, because feel no need to. — Wayfarer

No, it's a problem that goes way beyond solipsism. If there are mind independent existents that would explain how it is that we see and hear the same things. The only other way to explain it is to posit some kind of universal connection or collective of minds, and hence we have Berkeley's "mind of God", Jung's "collective unconscious" and Kastrup's "mind at large".

I'd rather say that reason points to something beyond itself. But you will often say that anything that can't be understood in terms of maths or science is to be categorised as 'faith'. — Wayfarer

I missed this earlier. How you have characterized what I often say is not quite right. I think the only things we can know are those things which are tautologous, or which we directly observe, and with the latter we know only how things appear to be. Scientific theories are never proven, only may be disproven or surpassed, so faith operates there as well when we place our provisional confidence in them. Of course, the fact that some scientific theories have been observed to yield accurate predictions countless times is a point in their favour. The same cannot be said for metaphysical speculations, because they make no predictions that can be rigorously tested.

Yes, I think consistency with our experience is important. I'm not a fan of religious faith at all, at least insofar as it makes ontological or metaphysical claims. When I said philosophy is a matter of faith I meant that each of us, in taking some position or other, necessarily is placing their faith in what seems most plausible and consistent with our experience. It's difficult or impossible to determine truth in that context though, unless it is a simple matter of logic or empirical observation, and hence the role faith must play for each of in deciding what to think philosophically speaking.

And re-visiting it, I think perhaps rather than invoking the spooky 'mind at large', I would just use the term 'some mind' or 'any mind' or 'the observer'.) — Wayfarer

The problem I see is that without positing either some mind-independent reality or collective or universal mind it is impossible to explain how it is that we all see and hear the same things in the environment. Even animals see and hear the same things we do, albeit maybe not in just the same ways. That is what
needs to be explained, and reading your essay, I found nothing there that could explain it.

Noumena or the raw 'stuff' that somehow gives rise to our empirical relationship with the world does not require a god or some variation of cosmic consciousness to exist. I guess it is in this knowledge gap that we can insert any number of notions relating to higher consciousness - reincarnation, karma, spirits, clairvoyance, etc. — Tom Storm

I agree that we cannot know with certainty what lies beyond human experience. But it seems most plausible that whatever it is, it must give rise to the commonality of experience I mentioned in my reply to Wayfarer above. To my mind positing a universal or collective mind, or a karmic storehouse consciousness, or whatever to explain that commonality is way less parsimonious and way less in accordance with our everyday experience than positing a much less problematic mind-independent reality. All the evidence, all our knowledge and all our scientific theory indicates that the Universe existed for an almost unimaginable period prior to the existence of any humans.

I'm entangled in the hindrancesand have attained nothing by way of higher states. But that's the philosophy or 'way' that I am attempting to understand in some degree. At least it provides, as it were, a vantage point, and also, however remote, a sense of there being a destination. — Wayfarer

Without actual renunciation such social entanglements are inevitable. And even with renunciation, complete disentanglement is not possible, because complete renunciation is impossible. If you attempt to understand Buddhism or any mystical way analytically you will fail they cannot be rendered as coherent and consistent philosophy, they can only be "lived' via faith. Philosophy itself ultimately consists in faith, not in knowledge or understanding in a scientific, mathematical or logical kind of sense.

But does he do so coherently? Not that I have seen.

Ok, whereas I - and perhaps apokrisis - take mind to arise within the world. — Banno

Yes, there is no coherent way to render mind ontologically fundamental, since the notion has its roots only in our naively intuitive apprehension of our own experience. @Wayfarer claims he doesn't agree with Kastrup's "mind at large", which I would say is itself an incoherent idea, but he apparently cannot offer any coherent alternative. So, all he can do is vaguely gesture towards something he doesn't seem to want to give up, rather than being able to state a cogent position constituting an ontology.

I really can't blame him for this because I don't think a cogent (consistent and compete) ontologically is possible.

I read the idea of the impossibility of a private language as being based on the fact that if you tried to create a private language of your own from scratch, you would have to relate all your new words to, that is translate them into, the language you were already familiar with in order to establish their meaning.

Since you would be relying on the public language you are already familiar with, your new language would not really be a private language except in the sense that only you might know about it. Languages evolve naturally, we must think, over many generations, so to create one from scratch that relied on no existing language would be an insurmountable, and completely pointless even if it were possible, task.

The other salient question, it seems to me, is whether there could be any novel "private language" that could not be taught, even in principle, to others. If not, that might disqualify it as being a "private language". So again, this is because it seems that if you were to be able to teach it, it would need to be related to a public language the student was already familiar with.

The interpretation I dislike is the one that says that to ask "why are their clouds and why do they produce rain?" is to have become bewitched or fallen into incoherence. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Would that question not be simply what produces clouds and how do they in turn produce rain— a scientific question? I can't think of any other way to coherently frame the question. I mean you could feel a sense of great wonder that there are clouds and rain, and indeed a world at all, but I don't see any coherent question that sense of wonder could be transformed into other than the scientific ones.

Are you asking if they have the intelligence at par with human beings? Sure. Equal or more. — Bob Ross

torture, abuse, mass genocide — Bob Ross

OK, humans torture, abuse, commit genocide, but it is arguably on account of aberrant social conditioning. Other social animals don't have symbolic language, and thus being free of the potential for ideology based aberrant social conditioning, they are generally good to their own species.

So, what is it that causes this "devil species" to torture, abuse and commit genocide? Do they do these things to their own species, or only to other species? If they do it to other species, what is the explanation for why they do it?

The reason I say it is incoherent is because I can't imagine such a species, more intelligent than we are and in possession of symbolic language, not being bedeviled by ideologies, just as we are, which would mean such aberrant behavior would not be universal among them, just as it is not universal with us.

Is it a human-level intelligent species?

The notion of a "devil species" seems entirely incoherent to me, so I'm not seeing that there is a point to be missed.

" ...it is empirically true that the Universe exists independently of any particular mind."
yet
"...its existence is inextricably bound by and to the mind we have" — Banno

Right, so just what claim is being made? We know, because it is obvious that experienced reality is transjective, but it doesn't follow that the real as such has any subjective element.

I would also ask as to why it matters to those it seems to matter to. Could it be because they cannot bear the idea that this life is all we get?

I think he also wants to make a claim without making a claim.

Generally, yes. But would it be morally intuitive to say that a social species that maintains their society by torturing another social species as doing something 'good'? That's what is implied by Aristotelian ethics if the social species requires it to fulfill their nature. — Bob Ross

How could you maintain your society by torturing others? Unless you are talking about something like torturing slaves to keep them in line? If so, you are again talking about humanity, not other animals.

Social animals care about their own; otherwise, their societies could not last.

So they are doing it for the sake of something good, being that it is in accordance with their nature to gain well-being through the suffering of other species, but must aim at bad things to achieve it. So your counter here seems to miss the mark, don’t you think? — Bob Ross

You are describing humanity.

Except that on the scale we now inflict suffering, degradation of environments, extinctions of other species and so on is not rational at all, because even from the point of view of a "selfish rationality" what we are doing will not be to our ultimate benefit.

Also, there is really no "selfish rationality" because from a purely rational perspective one's flourishing or suffering are no more or less important than the flourishing or suffering of others.

Is justification the same as reason, apology, exculpation, defense, plea, rationale, rationalization, pretext, excuse - or something else? — Vera Mont

Justification consists in giving reasons. There would seem to be an ineliminable normativity inherent in the very idea of giving reasons, whether to oneself or to others.

What criteria do you use when judging someone's justification for a policy or a course of action? Is it different from the criteria you apply to justifications for an isolated act? — Vera Mont

As I see it a policy or a course of action should be judged not just on moral grounds but in consideration of its likely effectiveness in achieving its aims. An isolated act would analogously be judged in terms of its consequences.

When justifying your own actions or statements, according to what factors do you formulate your argument? — Vera Mont

The central criteria here would be intention, honesty and good will with regard to statements, as well as consequences in relation to actions. Consequences may also be salient criteria in the case of statements, but it depends on context.

On what grounds do you decide whether a justification is appropriate and valid? — Vera Mont

On the grounds of relevance, coherency and consistency.

Cheers. I'm similarly insufficiently tutored, so I cannot understand all the subtleties of formal logic, unless they are clearly enunciated in natural language. It seems to me, since formal logic is only an adjunct, a helpmate, to natural language, that anything that cannot be translated back into natural language such as to make intuitive logical sense, is useless (for philosophy if not tout court).

One of the problems in this thread has been that the OP was not couched in formal logical terms, and just what was meant by 'notB' was not explained.

Some A's have a plurality of implications. If A implies both, B and C, then "A implies B" and "A implies not B" is better understood as "A implies B and C". C is not B. — creativesoul

Same point I made earlier about alternative readings.

1. You ought do this
2. You should do this
3. You must do this
4. You are obliged to do this
5. You have an obligation to do this
6. You have a duty to do this — Michael

I said that when you make a promise, if you are being honest, you are obligating yourself, barring unforeseen circumstance that prevent you, to do what you have promised. Note the caveat "if you are being honest'.

The social mores do not differ too much in substance if not form from culture to culture. This reflects the fact that people naturally generally want to be able to trust and feel safe with their fellow citizens, friends and family.

As @Mww points out you are looking on mores merely as kinds of impositional commands The salient question is 'what do you expect from yourself'? Would you be comfortable making promises to others that you had no intention of keeping?

People are giving you answers that reflect a perspective that is participatory, whereas you are ignoring what they are telling you, looking at yourself as an isolated individual and complaining about not knowing what the obvious means.

If you do what's right because you're trying to satisfy others, that's a lesser form of morality. If you do what's right because otherwise you'd let yourself down, that's the higher form. — frank

I see the two as integrally connected, entangled, unless "satisfying others" for you means purely a matter of appearances, like wishing to merely seem honest, compassionate or whatever as opposed to actually being those virtuous things.

We all want basically the same things which I outlined in my reply to Michael above. So from the point of view of actually caring about others, satisfying others and being satisfied with yourself are not two different things.

Why is it clearly not the case? Because we use the sentence "you ought not kill"? I think it's far simpler to just interpret this as the phrase "don't kill". You haven't actually explained what makes the former any different, you just reassert the claim that we ought (not) do things. — Michael

"You ought not kill" is a counsel, whereas "don't kill" is a command; that's the difference between the two.

When you sincerely promise to do something, you intend to place yourself under an obligation to do that thing, you understand yourself to be under an obligation, on account of your sincere promise, to do what was promised.

That it is possible that you could change your mind only entails that you cannot be forced to do what you promised. An obligation does not consist in some external force, but in internal consistency. If you want to say that obligations cease if and when people change, then the recognition of that should forestall you from making promises. It is dishonest to make a promise that you do not believe you will be able to keep.

The very proposition of "there both a) is a self and b) is no self" has (a) and (b) addressing the exact same thing - irrespective of how the term "self" might be defined or understood as a concept, the exact same identity is addressed — javra

The point is that if there is no determinate entity that 'the self' refers to, if there is only the concept, and if there is no actual entity, then saying that we are speaking about the same thing is incoherent. On the other hand, if you stipulate that the self is, for example, the body, then what would A be in the proposition (A implies B) where B is 'there is a self' ? Let's say that A is 'the perception of the body': this would be 'the perception of the body implies that there is a self". 'The perception of the body implies that there is no self' would then be a contradiction to that.

"the presence of water implies the presences of oxygen"

is not an "if then" statement, since 'the presence of water' and 'the presence of oxygen' are noun phrases, not propositions. — TonesInDeepFreeze

An alternative way of putting it would be 'if water then oxygen'. 'If water then no oxygen' contradicts 'if water then oxygen' according to the logic of everyday parlance.

My point earlier with taking an alternative interpretation, that is with the 'notB' not being interpreted as 'not oxygen' but rather as signifying something other than oxygen, say hydrogen, then the two statements would not contradict one another.

As in the concept/meaning of self as "that which is purple and square" vs. "that which is orange and circular" or any some such? And this in relation to "there both is and is not a self"? — javra

This makes no sense to me.

Again, one perspective being the mundane physical world of maya/illusion/magic-trick and the other being that of the ultimate, or else the only genuine, reality to be had: that of literal nondualistic being. — javra

The notion of a self from the perspective of "the mundane physical world of maya/illusion/magic-trick" is not the same as the notion of a self from the perspective of "literal non-dualistic being", so you are not talking about one thing.

That said, the self has no definitive definition, so introducing such a thing in the context of discussing whether anything could be the same in different contexts or thought under different perspectives seems incoherent from the get-go.

Consider the following substitutions which do not suffer from such ambiguities: Render (A implies B) as "the presence of water implies the presences of oxygen" and (A implies notB) as " the presence of water implies the absence of oxygen": do the two statements not contradict one another?

No, as per my previously given example, they are (or at least can be) speaking about, or else referencing, the exact same thing via the term "self" - but from two different perspectives and, hence, in two different respects (both of these nevertheless occurring at the same time). — javra

No, "two different perspectives and, hence, in two different respects" just is two different interpretations of the concept or meaning of 'self'.

Consider: the metaphysical understanding of reality, R, entails both that a) there is a self and b) there is no self. — javra

Firstly, which metaphysical understanding of reality are you referring to? Those different entailments rely on different interpretations of what is meant by"self' so they are not speaking about the same things.