I disagree. If you believe science is not based on presuppositions, then you are one of those people who think there’s no value in metaphysics. — T Clark

Isn't it the case that all epistemic frameworks rest on metaphysical commitments? Science provides a particularly clear illustration. Scientific inquiry presupposes a mind-independent, law-governed reality and the reliability of our cognitive and instrumental access to it, assumptions that science itself cannot justify without circularity.

Kastrup says that he is a naturalist and that mind-at-large just is nature. Soinoza says God just is nature―that is the extent of the comparison I was making. — Janus

I hear you but I think K is being polemical here and is making an equivocation on the world naturalist. Yes he believes consciousness is natural and there is nothing else to nature. I also note that K seems to believe that mind-at-large is developing wisdom or knowledge as it evolves through humans and conscious creatures. I don’t think we can say the same for conventional accounts of nature, which tend to involve entropy. So, while I understand the argument you’re making, I think Kastrup is being cute.

If we have totally separate consciousnesses then how do the stable patterns through which your consciousness organizes itself accord precisely enough with the stable patterns in my consciousness to explain a shared world wherein we will agree on what is in front of us down to the minutest details? — Janus

Let’s flip the argument: why wouldn’t consciousness have discrete offshoots that closely share experiences? Here's one idea. If we all participate in an overarching pattern, our experiences would naturally be shared. Even if individual consciousnesses are separate, they all operate according to the same structural constraints, which include time, space, causality, and patterns of experience. Because these constraints are likely to be universal and experiences are mutually coherent, the stable patterns that constitute objects tend to align across minds, producing a shared world in which everyone sees the same table, the same details, and the same relations.

Whether you are convinced by this germ of an idea is a separate question, but I think the argument can be made, and with some work it could be convincing. Remember, I’m not an idealist, but I’m trying to steelman the idea.

On the view I sketched out, the world appears the way it does because consciousness is self-organising: it stabilises itself into regular, repeatable forms rather than remaining a formless flux. What we call material objects are the way this self-organisation presents itself in experience, giving consciousness a structured, usable world. We all partake in this share reality, it just isn't what we think. Or something like that.

Kastrup uses the word 'consciousness', but I don't think he believes that the universal consciousness is conscious of anything apart from what all the percipients (the dissociated alters) are conscious of. For him it has no plan, but evolves along with everything―it just is nature in the sense that Spinoza's God is nature. — Janus

Personally, I wouldn’t compare K with S. As already noted, K argues that mind-at-large is similar to Schopenhauer’s Will. But his view is still evolving, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he eventually ends up adopting some form of theism. But I could be wrong there.

To say the table is still there when no one is looking means that whenever someone does look again, experience will reliably present the same table in the same place, behaving the same way.
— Tom Storm

That doesn't explain why everyone will see the table there for the first time. — Janus

It probably does, but as I said, someone with more reading on this matter would need to articulate the point properly. My understanding is as follows: In non-theistic idealism, objects like tables aren’t things that exist outside consciousness, but stable patterns through which consciousness organises itself. Experience is constrained by shared, law-like structures (time, causality, space, and intersubjective coherence) so when those conditions recur, the same object reliably appears, even if no one was perceiving it in the meantime. The appearance of material objects isn’t a pointless illusion: without these stable object-patterns, experience would be chaotic and unusable, making memory, action, and a shared world impossible.

Of course, a brief paragraph like this will generate a series of whys and hows that I don’t have immediate answers to. But saying idealism isn’t true because my modest paragraph doesn’t cover all bases isn’t much of an argument. This is clearly a complex idea that requires more investigation.

Interesting, I always assumed that binary, dualistic or black-and-white thinking was a human flaw and, perhaps, unnecessary. If we do privilege duality, I wonder if that is simply a function of biology, we have two eyes, ears, arms, legs, so we tend to bifurcate our experience.

I've also heard it argued that objects persist in idealism (not because a mind is always perceiving them) but because experience unfolds according to stable, law-like patterns. To say the table is still there when no one is looking means that whenever someone does look again, experience will reliably present the same table in the same place, behaving the same way. Object permanence is therefore a continuity of structure and availability, not constant observation by some Great Mind. I imagine that this could be developed into a much more complex account of object permanence, but I'm not fully across the idea.

The question remains why has thought manifested in this way to begin with; why are there inanimate objects or things in a realm of consciousness?

I think @wayfarer may be arguing that an object is just a durable pattern within a set of constraints, so to say it continues to exist means that the same pattern will reappear whenever the relevant experiential conditions are met, even if it is not currently experienced. This reminds me a bit of phenomenology.

Interesting idea for a thread. I’ve never been a science or math guy, so I don’t have strong views on these.

[1] We live in an ordered universe that can be understood by humans. — T Clark

I don’t know about the others, but this one has often interested me. This statement seems to capture what I see as the foundational metaphysical assumption of science: that there is an objective reality which humans can understand.

We take science to reveal consistent patterns across observers, but do these patterns tell us about reality itself, or only about the ways humans organize and interpret our experiences?

The fact that our sense organs and brains are similarly constituted can explain how it is that we see things in similar ways, but it cannot explain just what we see. The content of perception, that is what is perceivable which animals also perceive in their different ways, is contributed by the world, whether that world is physical or mental.

If it's physical then the mind-independent physical existents explain how it is that we and the animals see the same things. If the world is mental then the human independent mind that constitutes the things we perceive explains it. If mind is fundamental then all our minds must be connected (below the level of consciousness, obviously) via that universal mind.

We've been over all this many times and you have never been able to explain how just the fact of our minds being similar, but not connected, could explain a shared world. — Janus

Good question. Isn't the idea that the “world” we perceive is not independent matter imposing itself on us, but a manifestation of mind, or a universal rational structure, so the consistency of perception across subjects reflects the inherent order of this mind?

He would say the ultimate truth is the Absolute, which is a state of unity in which there is no thought because there are no divisions. Thought is the realm of partial truths. In that realm, you can't really escape dualism. — frank

Not sure I understand this but is the point that, at an ordinary level of thinking, dualities appear to us?

That sounds reasonable.

Thought is necessarily dualistic. Implied is some unified world beyond thought. This is Hegelian. He's an example of the way I think. — frank

I thought Hegel was a monist idealist, like Kastrup? Doesn't H see matter as a manifestation of Geist? Or is this what you mean by "unified world beyond"?

As such matter is real and human mind-independent, as it "mind-at-large". — Janus

Depends on what you mean by 'real.' If you mean our perception of reality, then perhaps. But you’d have to take that up with Kastrup or one of his acolytes; I can hardly argue on behalf of a guy whose work I don’t follow closely.

It's not as if mind could exist without matter, any more than matter could exist without mind, for Kastrup. — Janus

This seems to be a separate argument against idealism more broadly, which already takes matter as a given truth. Everywhere you look, Kastrup says things like this below (and obviously, to properly debate these points, you would need to go into his reasoning and move beyond this type of statement)

...materialism is a fantasy. It’s based on unnecessary postulates, circular reasoning and selective consideration of evidence and data. Materialism is by no stretch of the imagination a scientific conclusion, but merely a metaphysical opinion that helps some people interpret scientific conclusions.

Now, I am not particularly interested in debating whether idealism is justifiable; there are already thousands of words on that on the forum. I am interested in exploring what the model is meant to be. Why is the world full of things? How does a chair or a rock relate to a turtle or a human?

Btw, Kastrup's view is vaguely Neoplatonic like Plotinus' view. — frank

Yes. I’m not committed to materialism or idealism; I just want to understand the arguments as best I can. But I’m not a scientist or a philosopher, so like most of us, all I can do is mess around in the shallow end of the pool.

Monists can't seem to nail down how we're all enjoying a big fat illusion, but they're sure we are. — frank

I think it is highly likely that our understanding of 'reality' is mistaken or incomplete, regardless of which framework we've adopted. (This is a fraught sentence because it implies there is a reality and it can be uncovered, I don't necessarily think this is accurate) In a few centuries, assuming civilization endures, scientific models will have evolved beyond recognition, and the reality we take for granted today will likely appear quaint and rudimentary.

Are you a dualist?

Kastrup's philosophy is pretty much Schopenhauer reheated. — Janus

Kastrup is pretty up front about the large influence Schop has had on him. Jung too. I don't think "reheated" sounds right unless you hold a pejorative view of K's work.

I don't think that is what he argues. He argues that matter is what appearances look like to mind. It is the tangible aspect of mind, so to speak, not a separate substance. — Janus

Kastrup is a monist. There is only consciousness; he generally says matter is the extrinsic appearance of mental processes. For details his book Why Materialism Is Boloney sets out the arguments in great and sometimes boring detail. In some respects he's like a more evolved version of Donald Hoffman.

It also follows from this that real objects and beings of all kinds can have existed prior to the advent of human consciousness and that we can coherently talk about that existence as being human mind-independent. — Janus

Strictly speaking matter is not mind-independent in general: it is independent of individual human minds, but not of mind as such, since it is the extrinsic appearance of processes in universal consciousness.

I don't know Kastrup's answer, but there is no scientific definition of life (according to Robert Rosen). — frank

Could well be. My question doesn’t change, however: what is the reason, in idealism, for the division between apparently dead matter and conscious beings? If all that exists is mental in nature, why does some of it present as "lifeless" structure while other portions present as subjects with inner experience?

He argues that there is no matter, only mentation.

Would you say the chair someone is sat on would stop existing once all consciousness is extinguished? Sure we can’t make any statements or propositions about the world without consciousness but the world exists as a state of affairs despite consciousness. There is a difference between the table existing and the proposition of the “the table exists”. — kindred

Yes, I think this is close to where I am at present. How meaningful is it, exactly, to say that something exists if there is no perspective from which to apprehend it? My fame isn't idealism here but a type of constructivism (as far as I can tell).

What is a dinosaur without a name, a description, proposed behaviours? In an important sense, we brought dinosaurs into being by transforming fossils into animals with identities, properties, and histories.

This is not to say that there were no things (that later became dinosaurs) before humans provided names and descriptors for them. Plainly, there were. The point is rather that something becomes meaningful, becomes a dinosaur rather than a mere arrangement of bones, only within a framework of perception, description, and shared inquiry. Existence may not depend on us, but intelligible existence does.

But even having a conversation about this seems challenging, because we smuggle a great many concepts into the chat simply by using words that come with built-in assumptions.

This can be tricky however because to exist is to be perceived is not true. I know that I exist despite no one perceiving me as my consciousness tells me so. Yet a rock who does not posses consciousness exists independently of me perceiving it. So I think this type of idealism fails to account for continued existence of object after conscious perception of them ceases. — kindred

Yes a familiar objection to idealism and you’re raising a separate conceptual framework. I’m not an idealist but I'd like to understand idealism as well as I can.

This is the view that all of reality is fundamentally mental. One of its most prominent contemporary proponents is Bernardo Kastrup. On his account, there is a single, universal consciousness, mind-at-large; a version perhaps of Schopenhauer's Will, which constitutes the whole of reality. Individual minds are not separate substances, but dissociated aspects of this universal mind.

On this view, the persistence of objects or the world does not depend on individual observers, but on mind-at-large itself. What we call the physical world is the extrinsic appearance of mental processes within this broader consciousness, structured so as to make intersubjective experience possible. Or something like this.

My guess is that existence, and any related ideas we might explore, are inseparable from consciousness. Without consciousness, there are no propositions, it seems therefore that we cannot meaningfully speak of existence. The next question you might ask is, 'Did the earth exist before humans? Did dinosaurs?' My tentative answer is both yes and no. These phenomena exist retrospectively, insofar as we interpret them through our current understanding of reality; any meaning we ascribe to them is imposed after the fact.

I sit with the tentative view that if humans had never existed, then neither would dinosaurs. This is not to say that something approximating the phenomena we now call 'dinosaurs' did not exist, but that the notion of 'dinosaurs' is almost meaningless without human frameworks of language, classification, conceptualization, historical context, and scientific inquiry.

I would never have expected a Western Christian frame from K. I use ‘religious’ as a synonym for spiritual system. I see him as moving away from the ineffable and apophatic and to more into an explanatory frame. But I infer this from how he talks rather than writes.

Thanks. It’s tricky stuff, and it forces you to try to conceptualise something counterintuitive (given our conditioning and inclinations).

A natural follow-up question is: if non-living objects are the extrinsic appearances of mental processes, whose mental processes are these? This is where Kastrup leans heavily on mind-at-large, a move that has clear affinities with Advaita Vedānta (he has many dialogues with Swami Sarvapriyananda) and with Berkeley, whom he occasionally acknowledges. — Wayfarer

Yes, his mind-at-large appears to be non-metacognitive and entirely instinctive (unlike Berkeley's God). Does this align well with Eastern notions?

I don’t recall Kastrup inferring from his ontology that there is any sense of an overall plan for life. I know he isn’t arguing against one either; it seems to be bracketed for him. One imagines him eventually getting caught up (hijacked?) in one or other religious perspectives.

I’ve been critical of Kastrup’s notion of mind-at-large, but I’ve come to see it less as a posit of a cosmic intelligence and more as a way of marking the unavoidable fact that existence always appears within the horizon of consciousness. — Wayfarer

Do you think, perhaps, that M-a-L is a placeholder for an explanatory gap?

“Life” does not mark a higher degree of consciousness, but a structural distinction: the emergence of a private point of view within mind-at-large. Tables and rocks exist as stable appearances of mental activity, governed by lawful regularities, but there is 'nothing it is like to be a table'. — Wayfarer

It does may me wonder, why tables, and chairs? Why rocks and earth and sky Why even have such a stable appearance of mental activity?

But it’s also worth noting that if one tries to conceive of “the world” — a rock, a tree, anything at all — as existing in the total absence of mental processes, one quickly runs into an insoluble conundrum. — Wayfarer

There seems to be nothing without perception and experience; the possibility of meaning depends on it, I would have thought.

I haven't read Mein Kampf, but Steiner mentions it more than once in explaining the climate of post WW1 Germany.

It always struck me that populists don’t really do ideas, they do slogans.
— Tom Storm

I don't think Hitler was a populist. Populists don't usually have substantial agendas. Hitler obviously did. — frank

I’m fairly comfortable with the notion that Hitler was a populist armed with a hate manual: a list of resentments, given a little order by Hess. I don’t think he had ideas as such, he operated with axioms and statements of belief, mostly untethered from reasoning. Interestingly, Ian Kershaw (one of the better AH historians) doesn't regard Hitler as a populist in a strict sense, largely because the label belongs to a later era. He instead frames Hitler as a charismatic authoritarian. That works just as well from my perspective.

Thanks, yes I understand parts of his project in overview. But when I’ve read him it seems far deeper and more radical than the overviews would suggest.

As an aside, Hitler was no philosopher - he seemed to be a variety of romantic (all blood, providence, destiny) I wonder how he and his impatient cronies made sense of Heidegger. Can we find any contemporary assessments about how they might have made it fit? It always struck me that populists don’t really do ideas, they do slogans.

Is it correct to say that, for Heidegger, an authentic life carries no inherent moral content? Does his philosophy largely avoid the concept of the good life? Are right and wrong understood as indirect indicators of taking Being seriously?

I've mainly been trying to figure out how Being and Time connects to Heidegger's fascism. — frank

Are you open to the possibility that it may have no connection and is more concerned with his attempt to retrieve the way Being was originally encountered before it was conceptually distorted by centuries of bad metaphysics? I can make no sense out of the work, so I'll rely on those who have studied it to let me know. :wink:

I think this is right. As an Australian I’m very fond of America and American things; literature, art, architecture, music, cinema, technology, and the American people. Sometimes we hear that the opinions of the rest of the world don’t matter to Americans. I think this may be true, but America has led the West for decades and its actions have great impacts on the world. We all have an interest in who the president is and what conflicts he may or may not support or end. The Trump issue is complex because to an outsider it looks as if America has installed a fool and opportunist who will employ hate do great damage to the country and world on his way through the political process before he is inevitably shitted out (if you’ll forgive my coarse description).

Before one can decide which position is preferable, yours or his, it is necessary to be able to effectively summarize each position from within its own logic. — Joshs

An ability which seems surprisingly rare.

... I think Bitbol’s interpretation of phenomenology owes more to Michel Henry than to Husserl. Like Henry, Bitbol’s focus is on consciousness in Kantian terms as immanent structural conditions of possibility for an individual subject, whereas for Husserl, Merleau-Ponty and enactivists like Varela and Thompson exposure to intersubjectivity is equi-primordial with subjectivity. — Joshs

I was wondering what the difference might be (and its influences).

Bitbol treats social influences as secondary to the transcendental or structural conditions of intelligibility, whereas Husserl treats intersubjectivity as co-original with subjectivity. The transcendental ego is always already a transcendental-collective ego, insofar as the world it constitutes is already populated by others and the meaning of objects is co-constituted through shared experience. — Joshs

Cool. Are you more partial to Husserl's approach?

That's a useful exposition of Mr Bitbol's views. I've enjoyed a couple of his lectures.

For yourself do you see his work more as a starting point for further work, or as a system/approach that is of itself useful as a philosophical practice?

I have an incomplete understanding of this material but would you say that Bitpol seems to be closer to Kant than other phenomenologists? He views reality as jointly shaped by the observer and the world within certain constraints, rather than seeking ultimate essences or structures that exist independently of how we experience them. Like Kant’s phenomena, these co-constituted realities cannot be understood as things-in-themselves; we can only describe and engage with them as they appear within the constraints of our experience and conceptual frameworks.

Bitbol does not seem to delve as deeply into Being or the essence of experience, and he appears to recognize epistemic limits more explicitly. Do you think this is accurate, and what is the significance of this for philosophy?

I would argue that a moral claim is simply an affirmation or denial of value that one is prepared to be wrong about, — Esse Quam Videri

Prepared to be wrong? But isn't this antithetical to antifoundationalism as it seems to presuppose a foundational standard of correctness.

Personally, I'd argue that such denial fails to account for the fact that we do judge communities to be morally mistaken and traditions to be ethically distorted, and we do speak meaningfully of moral progress against communal consensus. Fallibilism is socially mediated, but not socially grounded. — Esse Quam Videri

I think you’re saying that we may assess other communities from a position of our intersubjective values. One potential problem with this is that there are conservative and religious intersubjective communities that would see the present era (and perhaps our community) as a failure of moral progress. How do you determine which intersubjective community has the better case?

But it seems like it's being misused or misapplied in the context of the present day world. — Questioner

There’s a popular trope that the present day world is in decline and that everything used to be better. You see it in YouTube comments under old music or movie clips, and in conversations about governments and society more broadly. I’m not convinced. Every period has its problems, and ours is no different. What seems distinctive about our time is a heightened fear of others and a kind of moral panic that fuels tribalism and culture wars. Social media amplifies this to the point where it appears far more pervasive than it is.

You said: Relativism says what’s right or wrong depends entirely on culture or individual preference..
This is a claim (see the epistemic meaning of a claim or assertion), which the relativist cannot make because it is self-contradictory. — L'éléphant

Not sure why we’re talking about relativism or what it can or cannot say. We’ve already discussed the well-established relativist fallacy in this thread and dealt with it, I do not disagree with it.

I’ve been trying to explore anti-foundationalism.

Is hate an emotion, or is it more of an attitude, or a judgement? — Questioner

It’s how people feel, so yes, it’s an emotion, though one that may stem from a judgment and a predisposition. A great deal of reasoning seems to me to be motivated or framed by prior emotional dispositions, values, and preferences.

Is hate more irrational or logical? — Questioner

Who knows? I think reason is arrived at through affective preferences, so there's that.

Does hate serve a purpose? — Questioner

Almost everything serves a purpose, the question is, is this purpose useful or warranted?

Do love and hate always express themselves? — Questioner

Not sure what you mean by express. If you mean do people suppress thier feelings and are they sometimes in denial, then yes.

Why is it that both love and hate can result in both heroic and evil actions? — Questioner

Is this true of any emotion; greed, envy, lust? Almost any emotion can lead to negative consequences for someone. I generally avoid the word evil, since it strikes me as a primitive way of describing something much more complex.

Which one has the wider radius of effect? — Questioner

Depends what you mean. Hitler's hate had a much bigger radius of effect than my parent's love. Etc.

Is hate what happens when someone is not loved? — Questioner

Sometimes. I generally think hate is often an aspect of fear and a failure to make sense of something.

Is hate a stronger force than love? — Questioner

Unanswerable except by romantics. It depends on the example. In most cases, love is contained and intimate, while hate is often externalised.

Are destruction and construction two sides of the same coin? — Questioner

As second-rate poetry, perhaps. Eastern religions often hold this view, as do some philosophers. For them, opposites stand in a mutual relationship and continuously transform into one another. The cycle of birth and death may be cited as an example. Personally, I see no particular use for this view, even if it is true.

Is hate ever positive? Is love ever negative? — Questioner

Of course. I doubt there is anything that doesn't have a shadow side or a silver lining.

Hatred and concomitant anger can underpin heroism, just as they can underpin cruelty.

So what do we have? Are you trying to integrate an understanding hatred into your world view?

The evolutionary advantage of love seems obvious, considering we are a social species. Attachment to our kith and kin better ensured we all survived. — Questioner

This could just as easily be rewritten with the word 'hate' substituted for 'love', and it would still make sense. Hatred has often been adaptive: it 'helps' in conflict and war, and provides the motivation to defeat rivals; individuals and tribes alike to protect our kith and kin. From a grubby, scientistic and evolutionary perspective, there is every reason to see why hatred might be regarded as having advantages.

Yes, that is close to a view I’ve held. One might say that some forms of empathy, when they are shared, amount to an intersubjective agreement that can look like objectivity if not examined closely.

I can’t get a fix on what point you’re making about empathy and what exactly it tells us about morality.

:up:

Chopin Nocturne Op 9 #2, while reciting, reading and or listening to Nietzsche's Night-Song, from Thus Spake Zarathustra, Thomas Commons translation for those who don't know it in German. The super abundance experienced in the Dionysian Oneness that occurs is easily a case against suicide. — DifferentiatingEgg

Different strokes for different folks. To me, that sounds more like an encouragement for suicide, not an escape.

Of course, it’s just personal taste. I’m not sure music or books have ever offered me much consolation. I’ve sometimes thought it might be nice to overdose to Strauss’ Four Last Songs (Jessye Norman) and some good whisky. I rarely read and listen at the same time.

Thanks. Yes, there often seems to be a default fear or suspicion of people or things we don’t understand.

Being social primates, it is instinctive in us to care about the way others see us, so it isn't a matter of "should care". — wonderer1

To some extent, although you’ve phrased it as “the way others see us” - do you mean that we only do it for show?

I think we are just as hard-wired not to care as any out-group or disparaged tribe will demonstrate. How do we explain the fact that we tend to care about people like us, but not so much about immigrants, the homeless, people with substance-use challenges, or trans people? Huge groups of humans seem to flip into hate, resentment and moral indifference fairly readily and generally find ways to rationalise neglect.

Feelings are far from arbitrary. They’re appraisals of situations which inform us of our relative preparedness to cope with , anticipate and make sense of them. That is, affect reports the significance and salience of events , why they matter to us. Without them, words like betrayal, cruelty and rape are ethically meaningless. — Joshs

This seems to me to be an important insight, despite its apparent simplicity.

Thanks. :up:

:up:

People experience empathy very differently. I overheard a man talking about the mass-murder of Jewish people on a Sydney beach the other day. He said, to some approval, “they started this.” Clearly, the feelings this event generates are not experienced in the same way by everyone. Especially not by people whose values include antisemitism. The same might be said of people’s empathy for trans people or for illegal immigrants. So if all we have to go on are people’s feelings, whose feelings are supposed to matter and how are they a reliable guide?

I’m not sure this can be answered in a satisfying way, except by opting out entirely and saying that it doesn’t matter, that everyone has to decide for themselves how they feel. But for me, morality is a social phenomenon: it concerns how we behave toward one another, so some account of shared value has to enter the picture.

Just look at this forum, for example. There are, for example, some prominent posters here who are vocal proponents of charity, humanism, and liberalism. And yet from the way they treat other posters here it's clear that they themselves don't practice what they preach. — baker

But even in instances of the most belligerent replies here, we can really make no substantive claims about people’s real world commitments to ideals. How do we know if people are liberal or charitable in real life? I think it’s far from clear what people practice and from their words alone we have to be wary of interpretations. Do you hold a view that if someone appears irritable and intermittently vicious on a chat forum they must be nasty and hypocritical in life? Or are you just referring to more constrained, on line hypocritical behaviours?

Because it makes practical sense to do so. Empathy exists. — I like sushi

But this doesn’t resolve the problem, since empathy is unevenly distributed across causes and cohorts. How are we to decide whose empathy sets the standard, and which feelings deserve moral weight?