Much more elegantly expressed than my attempt at pretty much the same point.

Thanks. This is a very lucid and clear account of your position. Not what I thought you were going to say.

'the world' is, for us, you and me, Tom Storm and Wayfarer, generated or constructed by our fantastically elaborated hominid forebrain, which evolved at a breakneck pace over the last few million years. — Wayfarer

Yes, this I get and I guess phenomenology parses things similarly.

So - he's not saying the universe doesn't exist absent observers, but that conscious observers create it as a meaningful whole by recognising objects and relations between them. He develops the argument that even very simple cognition proceeds in terms of 'gestalts' - meaningful wholes. And take us out of the equation - that meaningful whole, that 'cosmos', no longer exists. Sure all the same stuff remains, but it can't be said to meaningfully exist - whenever we make a statement about 'what exists', we do so from an implicit perspective within which the term 'it exists' is meaningful. — Wayfarer

Yep. This I get too and I have sometimes entertained similar, less developed views.

So I'm arguing that human being is intrinsic to reality, we're not an 'epiphenomenon' or a 'product'. So does that mean, in the absence of h. sapiens, the universes ceases to exist? Have to be very careful answering, but I'm arguing, it's not as if it literally goes out of existence, but that any kind of existence it might have is completely meaningless and unintelligible. — Wayfarer

Ok, now I've got you. I've only understood some snippets before. No doubt I could do a lot of reading to enlarge this brief account to give it nuance and texture.

The idea that I've been contemplating is that through rational sentient creatures such as ourselves, the universe comes into being - which is why we're designated 'beings'. — Wayfarer

I can see why you would contemplate this. There's an element of the poetic in this account, but it has the merit of being grounded, coherent and justifiable.

Would you say this way of understanding the constructivist nature of reality is similar to phenomenology?

The empirical science folks would perhaps find the chief challenge here the constructivist nature of your approach - problems inherent for them in the perspectival nature of reality you describe. I'd need to think more about this.

My question is what flows from this understanding? What then can we meaningfully say about anything if our reality, our quotidian awareness is essentially a hybrid formulation of memory, anticipatory imagination, our senses and the conceptual apparatus of our brains? Would it be your position that if there is foundational grounding underlying human experience it is accessible only through techniques of higher awareness (meditation, mysticism)?

At first there is methodological naturalism - the attitude that science ought to investigate the world as if it were strictly independent of the observer. — Wayfarer

The people I know who defend methodological naturalism may sometimes assume this but they don't generally argue or defend this point should it be identified. They generally hold that the human perspective and naturalism are all we can use to build reliable models of our reality based on the best available evidence at a given time. I think they are generally open to the notion that approaches can evolve and new information can be encountered.

I’m not using that to argue for any kind of ‘mind at large’ or even any metaphysical counter-argument, simply the recognition of foundational nature of the mind. — Wayfarer

Fair enough. Do you have sympathy for a mind-at-large/universal mind model?

But I claim that the world that you will claim ‘continues to exist’ is just the world that is constructed by and in your mind that is the only world you’ll ever know. The incredulity you feel at this point is due to the idea that this seems to imply that the world ceases to exist outside your mind, whereas I’m claiming that this idea of the non-existence of the world is also a mental construction. Both existence and non-existence are conceptual constructions. — Wayfarer

I understand what you are saying but I con't quite conceptualise this in a way which makes it entirely comprehensible. Can you say some more in simple terms or maybe even an analogy? I'm trying to avoid the solipsism thing...

Nice. In my life I have never assumed that people have access to freedom in any radical sense. Some people certainly have more choices and some have a more radically imaginative power that affords them opportunities to perceive and pursue more choices. But I'm afraid freedom hasn't been a theme which has preoccupied me much.

Do you have a working definition of what it is to be a person with freedom in choice and deed? But perhaps this is derailing the OP.

I hear you. Sometimes where we are being deliberate we are actually unconscious of what it is that is informing our choices. We can be deliberate and clueless simultaneously. I do think the familiarity of patterns is a factor.

Did I disagree? That's not my intention.

What do you make of habit? — Moliere

Depends on what you count as habit. An addiction is a kind of habit. I work in the area of addiction and mental illness - people seem to become dependent on patterns. Some personality types more than others. Making substantive change in life is often about developing new patterns (habits).

I think some people are more drawn to predictability and familiarity and ritual than others. Take Kant - he was so predictable people used to set their watches by his daily walk (or se we are told). Perhaps habits are ways of making ourselves more comfortable in our environment. No doubt there is a fancier psychological explanation which would probably bore me rigid. :wink:

In my work I've spent a lot of time in palliative care and end of life services. It's interesting that many religious people I've seen derive no comfort from their faith. They are terrified of dying. Perhaps it's the fear of hell which is so much a part of the Christian story. In the case of my mum, when she was dying she became very angry and refused to see the Pastor. "What's the good of prayer now... it's a done deal,' she fumed. She was absolutely furious not to be part of the ongoing story of her friends and family and felt like she was being taken away from all she knew and loved.

Humans are an existential animal. That is to say, why we start any endeavor or project (or choose to continue with it or end it) is shaped continually by a deliberative act to do so. We generate things that might excite us. Or we generate things we feel we "must do" (even though there is never a must, only an anxiety of not doing based on various perceived fears). — schopenhauer1

I think this is largely accurate.

the human is in a sort of error loop of reasons and motivation rather than instinct. — schopenhauer1

I think this is nice line and it resonates with me.

This is a theme which occurred to me around the time I was leaving high school and pondering what went into human purpose - why people as adults held particular jobs and had families and set up homes. It all seemed frightfully preordained and predictable and utterly lacking in visceral inspiration.

I did. I'm not in a position to assess any of this but as you know, the changing nature of science is how science is meant to work, even if it ends up unexpected places. :wink:

Don’t like the ‘made from’. More later. — Wayfarer

Sure. I'm not wedded to it, it's just a figure of speech, Didn't mean 'made' to be literal.

That said, I find some interest in ideas for their own sake, looking at what each of the different views on the menu would entail, and thinking about what possible difference it could make to human life if they were true (whatever their being true independent of human understanding could even mean). — Janus

Agree. That's kind of my perspective too. I suspect it makes almost no difference to how I would choose live, whether I am an outmoded retro physicalist or an a la mode idealist. I do find idealism hard to imagine and comprehend. This is partly a cultural construct and that was my earlier point - not dissimilar to points made by @Wayfarer about dominant paradigms.

One advantage of the "great mind" ontology is that that truth could, independently of the human, be related to, known by, that universal mind. — Janus

Perhaps, although the versions of great mind of Schop or Kastrup posit a universal mind which is instinctive and not metacognitive. It's not, as I understand it, a personality with preferences and knowledge. Perhaps it can only reach truths through brief expressions of consciousness instantiated through human life. But how would we know?

But if you push the argument that the stuff around us does not exist unless a mind is involved, you are headed towards solipsism. Because other minds are a part of that stuff in the world. — Banno

That seems right. Although are there not forms of idealism that hold that everything you see is real, it just isn't what you think - it isn't material, it is made from the one stuff of the universe - consciousness/Will. That's the Schopenhauer, Kastrup, Hoffman formulation. Here people are all like dissociated alters of the vast pool of consciousness (or great mind) which constitutes all which exists. In other words idelaism does not deal in illusion, we've just come to the wrong conclusions about what we experience as a physical world.

Now the pertinent question would be how the hell does anyone know all this? It's fine to debunk old school materialism, but it's another thing to use this as to support a speculative ontology. It's at best built from some debatable inferences, right? Cue quantum speculations, quotes from Hinduism, Plato's cave, past lives accounts and critiques of scientism....

Fair point.

Thank you. It helps to see this being applied to a problem.

MACS also is silent about the ultimate goal of moral behavior. When MACS's explanation of moral ‘means’ alone cannot resolve moral disputes (perhaps about abortion, euthanasia, or animal rights), people can try to agree on the ultimate goal of moral behavior in their society. Even if that goal is unique to their society, it can still help promote cooperation to achieve that goal within their societies. — Mark S

Interesting.

It does seem as if this particular model is aligned to a secular humanist worldview and as such might struggle to be applied in a society which must balance pluralist worldviews about values and morality. Thoughts?

Do you personally think about morality yourself in terms of ought's and ought nots? Do you ever find yourself needing to work through a potential action in order to determine if it is moral?

So it sounds like this system is only going to have some acceptance amongst secular, not religious people. Are you aware of Christians or Muslims who would find this approach useful?

:lol:

I think a form of neutral monism or panpsychism has seen a rise in David Chalmers, Philip Goff, Galen Strawson. Then there are mathematical Platonists like Max Tegmark who argue for mathematical entities have some sort of reality (even though they are not physical). — schopenhauer1

Agree. And Roger Penrose. My point was idealism has not been constantly mainstream in the West since the Greeks - it had fashions, especially the Germans. Whether it becomes dominant again in the near future is not for me to say.

A blip could indicate incoming ordinance, so beware.

I was going to add, idealism nowadays has rather counter-cultural implications. — Wayfarer

Sure, by blip I wasn't talking about potential future dominant world views.

You'd better avoid me then, because I, as the antagonist of Socrates, happen to know everything. — Metaphysician Undercover

I enjoy reading your perspective. We may disagree about some things, but I'm no philosopher and I'm here primarily to understand more about world views different to my own and the reasons/arguments people provide in defence of them.

Yes, well put. I agree with you. I find idealism fascinating and am not running a campaign against it. I might be an atheist, but I am not committed to scientism or have an obsession with reason. I think truth is elusive to humans and generally avoid people who think they possess it.

Ok, I'm not really convinced - we've also had 2000 years of Christianity without much commitment to the Gospels or social justice and the creation of extremely materialist cultures within Catholicism and the inevitable schism of Protestantism. What people do is more important than what they say they believe. It's actually something @Banno helped remind me of.

And I don't think it's controversial to say that the last really influential idealists were the German idealists - Hegel, Schopenhauer, Schelling, Fichte. The British idealists, like Bradley, were very much part of the same overall movement. — Wayfarer

I know this and agree. But it's a blip.

Perhaps I don't understand the crux what you are trying to articulate. All I am picking up so far is the notion that morality can be understood as an expression of cooperation strategies. That certain actions we describe as moral or immoral are agreed upon in culture owing to the way they support trust cooperation amongst members of that culture.

Surely if everyone agreed upon the Koran as a basis for guiding all action, then we would have a cooperative basis for an ethical system and a cooperative, trusting culture. But would this culture be moral?

You could ask the same question about "How would it work?" regarding utilitarianism or virtue ethics. — Mark S

It's the question I would ask of any moral system. But at least with virtue ethics it is me asking how I want to behave in a situation. It's more immediate. But my moral system boils down to 'prevent suffering' - I am not a theorist.

I can't quite work out how your system would apply to an individual in their day to day choices or how we would involve a community in discussing or implementing it.

It technically goes back to Plato in the West. — schopenhauer1

My point is I don't think there was a tradition of uninterrupted idealism that was displaced in the 19th century.

That idealism is commonly opposed with materialism would be a good indication that idealists are less materialistic. Don't you think? — Metaphysician Undercover

Not at all. I know rich socialists. It's a thing - we even have the expression Bollinger Socialism.

What matters is what people do, not the theories they claim to believe. Don't you think?

I think idealism as any kind of majority view died with the 19th Century. — Wayfarer

But when did it start and what do we count as idealism - are you talking about various trends of mysticism believed in by certain groups or privileged communities? Or do you start in the West with Berkeley? When was idealism held by the average person in the West?

After all we live in an individualist, materially-oriented, technocratic culture, and will naturally adopt philosophies that support this milieu. — Wayfarer

I feel like pushing back on this a little. Can you demonstrate that idealists are less individualist or materialistic? I spent a lot of time with Buddhist and Theosophical Society community members, including serious practitioners of meditation and yoga and Hindu mysticism in the 1980's (and still know some of them) and they were as wracked by ambition and materialism as anyone else. And sometimes they just replaced owning useless consumer goods with claiming access to higher truths, which they cherished in the manner of showing off a new sports car.

MACS’s principles can be additional criteria for judging how to refine cultural moral norms to meet human needs and preferences better. — Mark S

How does that operate in a culture? Surely you would need a panel or body which can understand the model and help to implement it? I suppose at heart I am asking - 'Ok so you have a model what ideally would happen next?"

Like past and present cultural moral norms, our psychologically satisfying inclination for retribution for evil deeds such as murder is part of cooperation strategies. Specifically, our feeling or righteous indignation motivates the punishment of violation component that is a necessary part of reciprocity strategies. Indeed, our moral senses’ judgments and our other moral emotions of empathy, gratitude, loyalty, shame, and guilt are also explained as parts of cooperation strategies. — Mark S

So I am now confused. How does your model decide then if capital punishment is morally good or bad?

I may well be missing something but I still struggle to see how a cooperation strategy is of itself useful or even entirely comprehensible to a diverse community, where cooperation is understood differently and where society is understood differently. A Muslim culture, for instance. Or an atheist culture. When we get to issues like abortion or capital punishment or gay rights, or whether creationism should replace evolution in school learning - how do we determine what is right?

What need to happen, then, is that he takes a couple of steps back, is reborn in a simpler form - say a lizard - that has fewer and simpler choices, so that he can learn to make them correctly, before he gets another shot at the difficult ones. — Vera Mont

If there's one thing I can't abide, it's lizards who make bad choices.

:ok:

. You're doing a Socrates, eh?

Al Bowlly 1931

Not sure why these sorts of questions matter.

Isn't it the case that in most constructions of God 1) God is transcendent and is outside time and space and 2 God being 'omni' can do whatever God wants and is not subject to any laws, since God created them? So trying to parse what god can and cannot do, or where God resides and in what form is pointless and subject to the paucity of human understanding. If the laws of physics get in the way of a person's understanding God then they're not doing it right...

Thanks for clarifying. Sounds challenging.

A simpler answer would have been nice, but morality is complicated. — Mark S

That's why I chose this issue, to see how the idea works in practice with a more complex issue. That's a helpful summary, thank you.

Capital punishment is part of a strategy that solves cooperation problems. It punishes reciprocity violations about not killing each other with the intended outcome of reducing future killing. Capital punishment can thereby increase or maintain the future benefits of cooperation in societies. This is why it has commonly existed. — Mark S

Another take is that it provides retribution and consequences for a bad deed, which people seem to find psychologically satisfying in a way which may not be easy to measure - psychological wellbeing might be one approach. But I understand your position here.

The morality of capital punishment comes down to if it will, on balance, increase or reduce the trust needed for a cooperative society. — Mark S

How do you determine which of these it does? How would a state set up a mechanism to assess all potential moral choices people could make in society?

:up: Thanks. I imagined that Buddhism and Hinduism have a rich source of potential ideas in this space - Schop certainly thought so...

The hardest part for me is trying to conceptualise what all 'reality' being the product of mentation actually means. Why does it appear as it does - as physicalism? Why do we have the laws of physics we appear to have? What is physical suffering? More banally, why do UV rays cause skin cancer and just how can this phenomenon be understood as consciousness - mind when seen from a particular perspective? It's challenging to fit it, even provisionally.

I'm not an idealist, but I think I understand the ontology more charitably than G.E. Moore and I also understand its attractions. I still think the most engaging, pellucid accounts of idealism I've encountered are those of Bernardo Kastrup - mainly via the odd paper, his blog and his engaging series of Essentia Foundation lectures on Analytic Idealism on YouTube. I haven't yet attempted the key books.

My argument is that the ideas of what constitutes existence and non-existence are too simplistic. I don't believe that any mature idealism actually claims that the object (whether it be 'an apple' or the entire world) literally vanishes when not being perceived. What I think idealism is arguing is that any idea we have of existence (and so, non-existence) is in some basic sense a mental construct - vorstellung, in Schopenhauer's terminology, vijnana, in Buddhist philosophy. That is what the massively-elaborated h. sapien forebrain does with all that processing power - it generates worlds. — Wayfarer

I think this is an elegant summary. Is it not the case that for 'object permanence' to hold (your car not vanishing when it is locked up in the garage), it needs some kind of guarantor for its 'ongoingness'. We seem to require some form of cosmic or universal consciousness or mind-at-large which holds the objectivity or scope of reality we inhabit.

I suspect it is this bit that is a big stumbling block for many, it's not just down to the fact that humans don't have access to some Archimedean point and essentially co-create reality.

Do you have thoughts on this mind-at-large? Schopenhauer calls it a striving blind, instinctive will. Berkeley, of course, calls it God. But clearly it doesn't have to be a God surrogate.

“What is morally normative regarding the means of interactions between people is what all well-informed, mentally normal, rational people would advocate as moral.” — Mark S

Sorry Mark, but I can't seem to follow what you are advocating. The language seems really unclear to me.

So is your model predicated on making moral choices about those who we decide can make moral choices? How do you determine 'well informed mentally normal or rational'? I think you might find that many of Hitler's prominent supporters fit this description. This is what makes cultural expressions of evil so challenging for us to understand. Morality is complex.

I need to see this in action or it continues to remain a strangely opaque theoretical ideal.

Can you tell me how would you assess capital punishment as a penalty for, say, killing someone? Is capital punishment morally sound - how do you go about answering or contextualizing this using your method?

I hold a similar position to @Fooloso4 in as much as what we call reality is of a human perspective - which doesn't make it unreal or not real... it just means that the representation is specific to our apparatus, cognition and worldviews, etc. The idea of 'as it really is' seems to me to be intellectual quicksand, however. It can surely only ever be something in relation to something else? Do you think this is bad thinking?

Well said, but who's Virgil? — praxis

If Virgil was Dante's guide, Agent Smith was our Jiminy Cricket...

Is there an external world? Yes.
Do we experience it as it is? No.
Is our knowledge of it an accurate representation of it? We try. — Fooloso4

I guess this would be my answer too. But...

I struggle with the words 'as it is'? Can there ever be a final 'as it is' that is not also subject to a particular perspective? Isn't the implication of such wording a god's eye view? (I know you are not arguing for this)

Neitzsche touched on the physiology and general health of philosophers. He saw Kant as anemic, but admired the likes of Plato. — Mikie

A dangerous project to begin with, especially for a lonely, sickly, unlucky in love, son of a pastor like Freddie. :razz: