So, if science tells us about the world "as it appears to us", is there any way to get to know the world as it actually is, that is beyond the appearance, or is there only the appearance? — IP060903

This, it seems to me, is the question most philosophical discussions eventually come down to. Can we gain access to ultimate reality (God/idealism/consciousness) and/or is the notion of an ultimate reality just a mirage, a legacy of Greek philosophy?

:up: I'd like to see some development of philosophical ideas between members here. I'm no philosopher and am here out of a late interest in philosophy and what I might have missed. I apologise if I came off as rude when you arrived here. I often feel the need to prod people to see what they think.

Whether one looks at the idea of perfection from one religious perspective or from a purely philosophical one, one could ask what does perfection mean? Is it the absence of mistakes and is it something which can be measured at all, especially in relation to action. Is perfection more a state of mind? It can also be disputed at how it can be achieved and whether it may be arrived at intrinsically or after learning from mistakes and does this matter in how the concept of perfection is viewed? — Jack Cummins

That's exactly the right approach, I think, if you are going to ask such a question.

Average, whenever we talk it seems to me you don't engage with the points I make and go off on an unconnected tangents. Since this doesn't happen with too may others here I'm going to assume we don't connect.

highly doubt you believe success is connected to what we voluntarily chose to do. Isn’t success dependent upon objective necessity — Average

Is this what I said? Read my response. No point going further if this is your take home message. Here's a clue - you are talking about a flawless life. How is this defined?

[ Sure, but what does it mean to say a person lived a flawless life? If it only means succeeding in what they chose to succeed in - this is problematic. It means we can include thieves, racists, murderers if they achieve their objectives. And it also begs the question, what about the areas they did not choose to excel - possibly friendship, family, morality? Is someone with enormous gaps in their life flawless?

It's an astonishing work.

Hmm. Are you really asking this or just taking the piss? Most qualities you name have to be understood in relation to something, that's how it works. No debate here.

Let me ask you - what is flawlessness and who do you decide if something is flawless?

I’m not sure I understand what you mean by “as it applies to human beings”. Would you mind providing some clarification? — Average

See my first answer when I asked about flawlessness. Same thing.

:up:

You're fine. No probs. :wink:

Thanks for clarifying.

ou say that every human being is imperfect but if that’s true by definition, because you said that they’re synonymous, then it seems like circular reasoning to me. Please correct me if I’m wrong. — Average

I'm just having a bit of fun, man. It's my opinion that human beings are imperfect - all problems with induction aside. This is a presupposition I hold it does not require defending. You are welcome not to accept this view. Find me a perfect person and I will change my mind - but first define perfection as it applies to human beings. As I said the question itself is unfinished. Which brings us right back to my first response.

all swans we have seen are white, and, therefore, all swans are white? — Average

All human beings we have seen are imperfect, therefore all human beings are imperfect. Yep. I think human being is a synonym for imperfection, set aside falsifiability. I call this one a priori. :cool:

I think this is self evident. When was the last time you met a perfect human being?

Is it possible to live a life that is flawless or are we destined to live lives that are less than ideal? — Average

My take on this is that the question isn't answerable and isn't entirely coherent. What does flawless mean? Flawlessness can only be measured in relation to some agreed upon criteria. What would that be? Christianity? Rorty's postmodernism? Camus' existentialism? Your own subjective predilections?

If you are asking is it possible to be a human being and not make the wrong choices occasionally or often the answer I think is 'no'.

*

Interesting essay.

Quick reaction from a non philosopher. So often in philosophy argument seems to come down to the view that we require transcendental justification for morality or aesthetics for them to be meaningful. Values can't be coherent or even brought into being without either God and/or a version of idealism. In other words, idealism or god are the necessary requirement for ineligibility. The logical absolutes and even the existence of language could be claimed to be dependent on this too.

The idealism of our present time seems to be this notion of inter-subjective communities of agreement which help us to establish shared but subjective truths. In the era of the dead metanarrative this seems as optimistic as we are able to be about truth, beauty and goodness.

I think the latter approach resonates stronger for me but I understand the powerful narrative and tradition of the first. The first seems to say that right and wrong and notions of beauty are a kind of magic that are inaccessible to secular thought. I certainly know that there are Christians with presuppositional apologetics who would argue that atheists are indeed able to tell right from wrong, but only because God wrote this knowledge 'upon their hearts.' Perhaps another vestigial trace of the Logos in Neo-Platonist guise.

And the failure to love God and others because of this love, which is our truest purpose, is far more important than what the thoughts rattling in our head have to say about God.

Skeptics live and die in their heads. — Joe Mello

I'd be interested to hear a bit more about your ideas. Those are claims. They may well be true. but perhaps you could show us more about how they work. I have been interested in nondualist approaches and have read and appreciated work by Father Richard Rohr. Do you see him as useful in your system?

Thanks for clarifying. Glad you are ok.

is to create societies predicated on the primacy of individual human consciousness. — Garrett Travers

What are you thinking here?

So, what say you, Philosophers? Will you join me in this? — Garrett Travers

I should claim an exemption from this as I do not count myself a philosopher.

But I'd like to understand better what you are saying. The tone of the OP is grandiose and messianic. You ok? Can you summarize your idea in less apocalyptic language in a few dot points? I understand from this you want to set out key philosophic principles to help save the world from a coming crisis?

Tom, you just labeled me a newbie, crank, and dogmatist. — Joe Mello

Well I can see that 2 of the 3 fit pretty well. I myself am a crank, but I was a newbie.

You seem to like jumping to conclusions, I though that was a no-no in philosophy.

Tom, you labeled my post according to your ideas about Catholic apologists, and then told me to look up your and other's arguments against these Catholic apologists. — Joe Mello

Actually, no, that's not what I meant. I thought it might be useful as a newbie for you to see how these kinds of debates played out here, given the argument you raised comes up regularly, that's all.

There's always room for more cranks and dogmatists here.

It is unknowable, and that position is acceptable, — Mww

I hear you. I sometimes wonder how we can know if something is unknowable in perpetuity?

Thinking laterally, you were the accountant or cook? — praxis

:rofl:

Welcome.

My posts will not be huge paragraphs, Google searches, or filled with big words that will distract from what I'm simply saying. — Joe Mello

As compared to who?

And the Metaphysical Principle that I discovered long ago (and that has never been refuted by any scientific discovery, or even known by any scientist) that is the foundation under the "necessity" for the existence of an omnipotent power in the creation and evolution of our Universe is this:

No combination of lesser things can create a greater thing without something greater than the greater thing added to the lesser things. — Joe Mello

Can you connect this to an example to illustrate your point in action?

So you'll be defending the Christian/Catholic idea of god from the perspective of the traditional arguments, possibly Aquinas' Five Ways?

Perhaps do a bit of a search to see how these arguments have been explored earlier.

It isn’t a question of being a complete model, but rather, whether it is accepted as such. So it is that either the model is complete but wrong insofar as it begins from the wrong path, or it is incomplete insofar as it disregards that which doesn’t belong to it, but should. — Mww

Food for thought. It's certainly not my subject, so I defer to your reading on this. It seems to me that there are a number of things that remain unclear or incomplete (certainly to me) - the nature of the noumenal world for one (which by definition is unknowable but is this an acceptable position?) and it seems to me the nature of Big Mind not well understood in Kant or Schopenhauer. Does that make sense?

I'm sorry, this just seems like carping. I've yet to receive any substantive answers suggesting alternatives to the causal dynamics of matter as an even possible basis for any kind of reality... — Michael Sol

I'm just responding to dogmatism. I'm not saying you are wrong just that it seems odd that you have succeeded in solving one of the great mysteries of science and philosophy. Hence the Nobel Prize quip. I say this as an atheist with no superphysical beliefs.

We have a Theory and empirical evidence, to which you oppose, there are alternative theories, even if I don't know them? — Michael Sol

We don't always have all the evidence and some distinguished thinkers posit mysterianism on the subject of consciousness precisely because an account of how it came about seems to have eluded us.

And, uh, I have a completed, a priori theory that shows how consciousness was produced through evolution, a successful Thought Experiment, and the Fossil Record — Michael Sol

I guess a Nobel Prize awaits you.

And General Relativity is just another a priori imagining of the Universe - got an alternative for that one, too? — Michael Sol

It's not about alternatives. As I said that approach seems to be a fallacy from incredulity. "We don't know" is a perfectly reasonable answer. :wink:

It's pretty clear that the precise nature consciousness has not yet been resolved (tentative answers, sure - Metzinger on the left/Kastrup on the right) and it is doubtful that the true answer will be revealed on a forum for dilettantes.

Tom. I don't think there are any deliberate conspiratorial machinations or plots at work here or in any other grand materialist or idealist epistemological systems — charles ferraro

I agree, I was just satirizing one of the views out there.

I think the problem with idealism in general is that it is an incomplete model - there's a reason it hasn't reemerged (yet) as the default setting for our thinking and it isn't just down to the conspiratorial machinations of physicalism and the plot to disregard true knowledge...

Indeed. Some of my gay friends at school were 'camp' before they were 10. Pretty sure they had not been into any clubs or bars and certainly they had no models to borrow from.

As we cannot even Imagine a means of Creating a Consciousness other than by Evolution in a Material Reality, then isn't the Consciousness itself Proof of the Objective Material Universe? — Michael Sol

Isn't this just a classic fallacy from incredulity? We can't imagine any other way.... therefore X...

The absence of an alternative explanation doesn't mean the only one you are aware of is right, surely?

What do you say to those who argue that quantum mechanics demonstrates that matter only comes into existence when observed? Are you saying you are an old school materialist?

Infinite Regression is Absurd, because there is no such thing in our conception or experience that is an infinitude. — Michael Sol

Isn't this also a wonky inference? Another fallacy from incredulity, perhaps?

But the purported thing-in-itself, being transcendent to both the sensory and the transcendental, is NOTHING from the framework of human consciousness. — charles ferraro

I hear what you are saying about nothing, but what's it all mean, what's your conclusion?

but people can, have and do think quite coherently about the idea of God. Can you say the same about the ideas of Plato's forms, the collective unconscious, etc.? — Janus

You're partly on the money here I think but I'm somewhat struck by this as I have never thought the idea of a god was coherent, unless you opt for a Protestant anthropomorphic, personal god, which to me would seem somewhat unsophisticated and lacking in plausibility. Is god 'energy' or the ground of being.... what can it mean? Theology may well amount to great scholarly edifices made of paying cards for all we know.

Nevertheless, I think god seems more graspable than Platonic forms on the basis of god's centrality to our culture despite its supposed secularism. Think of all the movies, TV shows and art featuring god/s. Comedian George Burns played god in a hit movie back in the 1970's, but who would you get to play the collective unconscious or the Platonic realm? It would have to be Daniel Day Lewis or Toni Collette...

Agree with you on all counts.

Also the idea of either is nebulous, what could such a thing be? Are human minds connected at some deeper level, or only in the sense that we participate in a common culture? — Janus

Kastrup argues that Jung was an idealist and that the collective unconscious (Jung I think describes it as a primordial reservoir we all draw from) is a version of Mind at Large. You'll note that Jung stated these images were shared across all human cultures. Hence Joseph Campbell's book A Hero with A Thousand Faces which draws together the collective imagery and narrative traditions of the world's hero myths via Jungian archetypes. The basis of the scripts for Star Wars...

To say something occurs 'in the mind' is not the same as to say it occurs in your mind or my mind alone. Consciousness is a collective. — Wayfarer

I was simply restating the questions Kastrup himself has said are the key questions we need to resolve if we are going to fully apprehend the idea of idealism and a Universal Mind.

The idea of a collective unconscious (I'm very familiar with Jung) doesn't of itself really answer the questions Kastrup has raised. Positing the notion of the human as dissociated alters goes some way to make sense of it more fully. Then all you have to do is explain dissociated alters, and so on...

Cultural norms are philosophy too. A parent teaching their child right and wrong is philosophy. — SkyLeach

I understand that - it wasn't clear what your perspective was.

The other day, I watched a David Suchet (British actor from Agatha's Poirot TV series) interview and his reason for being religious was that he - his mind & heart - just couldn't accept that this (physical reality) is all there is, there has to be more. — Agent Smith

It's that old chestnut that people are drawn to religions because of the fear of death and/or meaninglessness. About ten years ago I asked a Catholic convert friend of mine about why they did it. A Suchet style answer: "I couldn't allow myself to accept that this life is all we have." It's a pity when such self-knowledge isn't applied more acutely. I'd opt for Camus over Catholicism.

Now that makes a bit more sense, thanks. Personally, I think many people (and I know quite a few) live without philosophy or religion with no ill effects, but perhaps you count the quotidian secular beliefs of the early 21st century as a philosophy.