Understanding Steiner's Philosophy

[Cleric]

About our activity is meaning, which expresses itself in thought form.
My first question is, if thoughts are part of my world content, and are not separate, but only come about through thought, and the thoughts are expressions of meaning, then who am I?
The thoughts are there.
Who thinks? isn't this all happening in my consciousness? Often thoughts come without my will. So am I not the perceiving one?
2. when people say you use thoughts or you think, who is meant?
We also work purely phenomenologically, so ontology is metaphysics etc. just a thought-analyzed and conceptualized version of the content of consciousness, which is actually worthless.
However, this conceptualized version works very well (technology).
What exactly is meant by the statement: we must make the thought process its own object?

Guney, I would like to add an illustration to what Ashvin wrote.

Let's start by saying that Eastern teachings are fully correct when saying that there's nothing in our world of perceptions to which we can point and say "That's me" (and this includes thoughts, that is, there's no thought which we can utter which is us). So we should really be on guard any time we find ourselves trying to identify with something perceptible. There's great wisdom in the words "Exit 20:4 Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth." Of course, this shouldn't be misunderstood and lead us to the other extreme where we reject the given experience of feeling like a coherent emitter of spiritual activity and perceiver. There's difference between knowing (being conscious) of our existence and trying to behold it as perception.

The safest way to approach this important question is to point our attention to our living thinking activity. Then we can recognize that we are in the fullest sense only that which is continually becoming at every instant. Thinking is becoming - we transform from 'frame to frame' according to the idea that we want to manifest in words.

This sounds very restrictive at first. What about our body, our feelings, our desires? Are we not all those things? Well... depends on what we imply. Let's build a metaphor.

Imagine a spring. The flow of the water is the image of the flow of our spiritual activity (most lucidly experienced in thinking). Our activity is not the water (the stream of thoughts that we perceive) but it is much rather the invisible force which guides the flow. Water flows through our perspective and continues downstream, which represents the past. As an analogy, let's imagine that we think a small eddy. As the water passes through our vantage point it is shaped by our activity (which we can imagine acts as magnetic field over iron filings) and as it continues downstream and we perceive the eddy, we say "this is my thought". The point of this analogy is that our thought perception (for example verbal thought) is not what our spiritual activity 'looks like'. The thought is the imprint of our activity into the perceptual time flow. For this reason, another very common metaphor is that our thoughts are like dead snake skins that are continually being shed from our spiritual activity. Yet our activity is not identical to the skin. The skin is only shaped by our activity and then cast away.

The goal of these analogies is to help us become comfortable with knowing ourselves through our real-time thinking activity and not by trying to identify with some of the dead husks that have been already separated from thinking. So we know our meaningful spiritual activity by direct intuition but we perceive the effects of our activity only once they become imprinted into the environment. This is contained also in Genesis where the Elohim first do and only then see that it was good.

The other important thing is that the ways in which we can employ our spiritual activity are constrained by the current shape of the river bed. But on the other hand, the way we employ our activity has the possibility to alter the water flow, which can influence the shape of the river bed and thus the future flow. So things are swirling into unity here. On one hand the shape of the river bed constrains the water flow, and thus the possible thoughts we can impress into that flow. On the other hand through our activity we can gently change the water flow, which slowly erodes the river bed in specific ways and changes the future flow, which allows us to employ our activity in even newer ways and so on.

This is a very pleasant image for meditation. It is almost literal Imagination and it is relatively easy to be brought to life. If we manage to enter into the depth of this image, we'll have a very powerful tool to orient ourselves in the flow of our existence.

When the image is understood properly, on one hand it helps us to be safe from trying to identify with the perceptual elements. Instead we can say "All this that I perceive in me is the gradual accretion of my past spiritual activity. The thoughts that I think now, the feelings that I feel, the actions that I do are constrained by what has been prepared in time. For many lifetimes I've been slowly modifying the 'river bed' such that now my activity flows in time in the way I witness it. At the same time I know that with every act of thinking, feeling and willing, I'm modifying the environment and preparing the river bed of the future. It is up to me to develop a high ideal and work in such a way that my current activity, prepares the future river bed which will allow me to unfold my activity in even more free, wise and loving way."

Seen in this way, our body, our desires, our beliefs, etc. are not us but at the same time they are accretion of our activity. So in this sense they are the living conditions which we have prepared for ourselves in the past. This in itself should be making it clear that if we want our future conditions to be conducive for our high aspirations, we need to work now.

And as a last remark it should be noted that no perception is entirely of our own making. Everything is superposition of collective work. There are things where our activity is the prime contributor, like the thoughts that we think fully consciously, but there are countless factors which must also be there in order to hear the thought. We're not directly responsible for the language in which we think, we're not directly responsible to the sound of the voice, for the structure of our body etc. In our metaphor, we can say that we're not directly responsible for the water and the rocks. So there are countless other factors for which other beings are responsible, yet our activity contributes something to that totality, we imprint something unique in it.

[Güney27]

Guney,

No apology necessary. Thanks for the thoughtful response. I agree with your critique of BK analytical idealism. I am sure you have seen us also bring that up often. Practically all modern philosophies and sciences end up in dualism, abstraction, and reductionism. It us our default mode of intellectual cognition which is chiefly responsible for that. But it is something we can also overcome now with inner effort, of the sort you are making here in your posts. Genuine liberation from this tyranny of modern abstraction, spiritual, physical, and all of the above, comes through our most intimate and essential thinking agency. Participating in that process is what is more important than forming the "correct" concepts. We will always form disharmonious concepts for awhile, but our link to our own thinking agency makes this an easily redeemable issue.

My own observation of my own intellectual tendencies is that I truly make things harder for myself. The more I observe how my 'illumination' arrives with various topics - especially those surrounding space, time, perception, thinking, and causality (which really sits at the base of all other topics) - the more it is revealed as a lifting of obstacles I myself have put in place. We have many beams to remove from our own eyes, in that regard, before criticizing others or 'reality'. And most of these obstacles came from me starting at a conceptual foundation rather than my own first-person experience of the world content. I highly recommend you also read Cleric's latest post on the other thread with the video game metaphor, in that regard.

Goethe is a fantastic resource for us today. Yes, our thinking perceives ideas, as Goethe concretely perceived the archetypal proto-plant responsible for all particular plant forms. Goethe held to a strict phenomenomogy in science. He says, when we observe objects of perception, we must be absorbed into those objects, and when we reason through the perceptions, we must be absorbed into our own thinking process. Ideally, we stop to also reflect on that thinking process once in awhile. Ask ourselves how and why are we asking the questions about perceptions, and how we are answering them. I am reminded of Victor Frankl, who said, we should not ask "what is the meaning of life?" but first recognize it is we who are being asked by life, and we can only respond to life by being responsible for imbuing that meaning into Nature and Culture.

As you say, theoretical knowledge is no answer to life. It is engaged merely for our own sake, which is fine to a limited extent, but can only be the basis for transitioning into a more active and participatory approach, which benefits not only ourselves but the Whole of the Cosmic organism. Personally, I have found it is indispensable to put aside all philosophical and scientific knowledge, put a bookmark on it for awhile, and return to the foundations of what it means "to know" as humans who will, perceive, and think. Consider our faculty of attention - we are always willing our intention to focus on some portions of the world content and not others. Naturally our underlying desires and feelings influence this attention, but we completely forget that and assume we are freely surveying a broad spectrum of content.

If we can remember this natural trade off that is always occurring, we can actively think to survey more content we normally exclude. Better yet, we can also think through the reasons we may be inclined to focus on some things and others. I mention this because our experience shows "thinking perceives ideas" can remain just as abstract as "MAL produces nature through its ideations". Eventually it will mutate within us into another form of reductionism. That's simply what the intellect does over time, when we don't take a much more active interest in our own thinking process. I hope these considerations help and I am happy to discuss further. I hope to post an essay soon which also elaborates on these points.

Hello Ashvin,
I want to thank you for your effort and willingness to explain these topics to me.

I read through several discussions in the forum and found it more instructive than some books and lectures.
So what I was able to read from some threads is the following: what is given by our perception is the world content, which is the totality of our perception, to which thoughts, will and feeling are also counted here, before it is thought into certain concepts, categories etc .
These tell us nothing about the world.

About our activity is meaning, which expresses itself in thought form.
My first question is, if thoughts are part of my world content, and are not separate, but only come about through thought, and the thoughts are expressions of meaning, then who am I?
The thoughts are there.
Who thinks? isn't this all happening in my consciousness? Often thoughts come without my will. So am I not the perceiving one?
2. when people say you use thoughts or you think, who is meant?
We also work purely phenomenologically, so ontology is metaphysics etc. just a thought-analyzed and conceptualized version of the content of consciousness, which is actually worthless.
However, this conceptualized version works very well (technology).
What exactly is meant by the statement: we must make the thought process its own object?

I also read about the evolution of consciousness.
So what we perceive as gravity used to be perceived as spiritual power. What is the difference, other than using different terms for the same process?
How did humans survive if they didn't have a true self-awareness?

PS: have you read "taking appearance seriously"?
Kind regards

Guney,

The most important thing to realize is that we can't understand the reality we are involved in by starting from any concept of 'absolute reality', i.e. what the world is in its essence and, similarly, what I am in my essence. That is why abstract metaphysics leads to no greater understanding of who we are and what we can do to know, feel, will, perceive, and act in more integrated ways. Phenomenology of thinking starts from our most immanent appearances of thinking and thought-forms and works from there. There comes a point when we also realize the process of this concrete reasoning is one and the same with the 'reality' we are reasoning towards. That we have found an activity within ourselves where appearance and reality truly coincide. We get back into the living flow from which all concepts originate.

So, as a really general conceptual answer, we could say we are perfectly united "willing-and-feeling organism who Thinks". That is our essential spiritual essence, our essential"I". Again, the spiritual freeing potential comes from reasoning this out for ourselves from the outer-inner appearances - from engaging our essence to reveal our essence. Phenomenology becomes epistemology becomes ontology. Appearance becomes Reality, mediated through Thinking. Everything harmonizes and integrates and converges. Not as concepts which are matched up with each other by the intellect, but in the very way we perceive ourselves and the world through our inner activity. It is a very gradual spiritual awakening, but now is the critical juncture for the human soul to be reborn in its higher spiritual consciousness.

re: gravity - yes, we used to perceive the inner moral dimension of meaningful activity more directly. Gravity is an active moral force which stabilizes our being within the spiritual Cosmos through attraction of inner qualities. When we speak of "spiritualizing" the perceptual forms and forces, it is, in principle, nothing other than perceiving the inner meaning of them more concretely and livingly. How that can manifest in our consciousness, however, is generally in a way modern people find fantastic and impossible. Yet clearly our ancestors who produced the rich mythology and ancient art of the world were closer to this mode of consciousness.

I have not read that, only "saving the appearances" by Barfield, which I highly recommend. Notice the double entendre - he presents a spiritual evolutionary narrative which makes sense of the experiential facts (a "likely story"), and also which is undertaking the task of saving the world's appearances, including the Earth and all its kingdoms, from death in rigid atomized perceptions, when engaged by the thinking human spirit in good faith. 

Ashvin,

how do you explain the fact that without atp (molecules in the brain) there is no consciousness and therefore no thinking?
I had a zoom conversation with jeferry williams (a critic of kastrup who was also on this forum) and he brought it up as an argument against idealism.

What about people who are born deaf and dumb? they cannot think, what about their spiritual activity?

Can't gravity be explained by space-time curvature? Why did people see something spiritual in gravitation?

Kind regards

[AshvinP]

Ashvin,

how do you explain the fact that without atp (molecules in the brain) there is no consciousness and therefore no thinking?
I had a zoom conversation with jeferry williams (a critic of kastrup who was also on this forum) and he brought it up as an argument against idealism.

What about people who are born deaf and dumb? they cannot think, what about their spiritual activity?

Can't gravity be explained by space-time curvature? Why did people see something spiritual in gravitation?

Kind regards

Guney,

Yes, I remember JW and our dialogue here

We don't need to explain that fact, because it isn't a fact. It's a pure abstract materialist assumption. JW started arguing that for a few pages before finally clarifying that "ATP is necessary for consciousness" was his interpretation of BK's arguments, not his own position, and it's not even a valid interpretation of BK. JW's position is something like, "matter and consciousness are 'entangled' with each other and we cannot actually know anything about either of them via human reason". In short, JW's is the most abstract metaphysical thinker I have ever come across, even though he claims to be criticizing abstract metaphysics. If you have any other specific arguments from him you want to run by me, I am happy to explain why they are the result of pure abstract thinking without any living connection to first-person conscious activity, including Thinking activity. Logic always has the upper hand, because its living power is perpetually presupposed and present within all the attempts to ground the World in some concept supposedly beyond it and immune to it. Whether that something is called "God", "Will", "Matter", "ATP", "Emptiness", etc. makes no difference, because its essential meaning is always imbued by the Logic through which it is formed. Without that meaning, it simply doesn't exist.

re: deaf and dumb - see Cleric's illustration above. "They cannot think" is an assumption which identifies a person's essential spiritual activity with any given thought-eddy within the living flow. There is no warrant for that naive realistic assumption.

re: Gravity - we must seek the inner meaning of these outer word-forms and concepts like "space-time curvature". The latter without that inner meaning are simply dead snake skins, mere husks of meaning disconnected from their life-source. The inner meaning is always found in relation to our own first-person experiential activity in the world. Ancient people perceived that inner meaning more than we do because their inner activity was more united with the World Processes, whereas ours is completely alienated and isolated. That was necessary for human freedom. When we felt ourselves as entirely undifferentiated within collectives, flowing along with the natural rhythms of the Cosmos without any agency, we may have been more at peace, but we were not more free. Now, despite our anxiety from the extreme atomization which has occurred, we are more free. The question is, how are we going to use that freedom? Are we going to atomize further by endlessly creating new symbols via idle speculation? The symbolic world we perceive now is about as complex as it could possibly get. That complexification is precisely what makes us feel lost at sea without a living connection with other humans, other living organisms, Nature as a whole, and the Cosmos as a whole. Reintegration of the symbols through our own reentry into the living thinking-flow which produces them maintains all the benefits born from the spiritual descent into form while also alleviating the atomization and fragmentation.

[lorenzop]

Re atp and consciousness, some otherwise very smart people get correlation and causation mixed up. Not only is there no scientific causal explanation for consciousness, there isn’t even any wild-ass hunch. To date consciousness can’t even be observed.
Re gravity and spirituality, there doesn’t have to be any hidden or deep meaning in things. A carrot can just be a carrot, it doesn’t have to be a message from God. On the other hand, ‘stay thirsty my friend’.

[Güney27]

Ashvin,

how do you explain the fact that without atp (molecules in the brain) there is no consciousness and therefore no thinking?
I had a zoom conversation with jeferry williams (a critic of kastrup who was also on this forum) and he brought it up as an argument against idealism.

What about people who are born deaf and dumb? they cannot think, what about their spiritual activity?

Can't gravity be explained by space-time curvature? Why did people see something spiritual in gravitation?

Kind regards

Guney,

Yes, I remember JW and our dialogue here

We don't need to explain that fact, because it isn't a fact. It's a pure abstract materialist assumption. JW started arguing that for a few pages before finally clarifying that "ATP is necessary for consciousness" was his interpretation of BK's arguments, not his own position, and it's not even a valid interpretation of BK. JW's position is something like, "matter and consciousness are 'entangled' with each other and we cannot actually know anything about either of them via human reason". In short, JW's is the most abstract metaphysical thinker I have ever come across, even though he claims to be criticizing abstract metaphysics. If you have any other specific arguments from him you want to run by me, I am happy to explain why they are the result of pure abstract thinking without any living connection to first-person conscious activity, including Thinking activity. Logic always has the upper hand, because its living power is perpetually presupposed and present within all the attempts to ground the World in some concept supposedly beyond it and immune to it. Whether that something is called "God", "Will", "Matter", "ATP", "Emptiness", etc. makes no difference, because its essential meaning is always imbued by the Logic through which it is formed. Without that meaning, it simply doesn't exist.

re: deaf and dumb - see Cleric's illustration above. "They cannot think" is an assumption which identifies a person's essential spiritual activity with any given thought-eddy within the living flow. There is no warrant for that naive realistic assumption.

re: Gravity - we must seek the inner meaning of these outer word-forms and concepts like "space-time curvature". The latter without that inner meaning are simply dead snake skins, mere husks of meaning disconnected from their life-source. The inner meaning is always found in relation to our own first-person experiential activity in the world. Ancient people perceived that inner meaning more than we do because their inner activity was more united with the World Processes, whereas ours is completely alienated and isolated. That was necessary for human freedom. When we felt ourselves as entirely undifferentiated within collectives, flowing along with the natural rhythms of the Cosmos without any agency, we may have been more at peace, but we were not more free. Now, despite our anxiety from the extreme atomization which has occurred, we are more free. The question is, how are we going to use that freedom? Are we going to atomize further by endlessly creating new symbols via idle speculation? The symbolic world we perceive now is about as complex as it could possibly get. That complexification is precisely what makes us feel lost at sea without a living connection with other humans, other living organisms, Nature as a whole, and the Cosmos as a whole. Reintegration of the symbols through our own reentry into the living thinking-flow which produces them maintains all the benefits born from the spiritual descent into form while also alleviating the atomization and fragmentation.

Ashvin,

I think jeffrey williams is an intelligent man.
He studied physics and philosophy and has a remarkable knowledge.
He is over 60 and has been dealing with these topics for decades and I am 18 and have only been doing it for 4 years (he speaks good German to him, which is good because German is my mother tongue).
I was able to take something away from the conversation, especially about Heidegger, who also overcame the subject-object dichotomy.
My objection was that being physicalism runs into known problems (hard problems etc).
He then said that he works without assumptions and that he deduces from perception that if the brain is damaged, for example, consciousness is lost, this is evidence for him.
He said that everything is made up of compositions of energy. This is the fundamental level that we know about. We still talked about near-death experiences, which he takes for stories and doesn't pay much attention to.
He's a supporter of carlo rovelli (whom I don't think appreciate after his interview at theories of everything). I would like to say that I am not really familiar with physics. It is him considering whether there will be a second interview.

Can you elaborate on what you meant by your statements about logic, because I didn't fully understand them.

Kind regards

[Güney27]

Re atp and consciousness, some otherwise very smart people get correlation and causation mixed up. Not only is there no scientific causal explanation for consciousness, there isn’t even any wild-ass hunch. To date consciousness can’t even be observed.
Re gravity and spirituality, there doesn’t have to be any hidden or deep meaning in things. A carrot can just be a carrot, it doesn’t have to be a message from God. On the other hand, ‘stay thirsty my friend’.

Consciousness isn't observable, only elechtro-chemical activity. I'm guess that other people are conscious. No solipsism

Kind regards

[Güney27]

About our activity is meaning, which expresses itself in thought form.
My first question is, if thoughts are part of my world content, and are not separate, but only come about through thought, and the thoughts are expressions of meaning, then who am I?
The thoughts are there.
Who thinks? isn't this all happening in my consciousness? Often thoughts come without my will. So am I not the perceiving one?
2. when people say you use thoughts or you think, who is meant?
We also work purely phenomenologically, so ontology is metaphysics etc. just a thought-analyzed and conceptualized version of the content of consciousness, which is actually worthless.
However, this conceptualized version works very well (technology).
What exactly is meant by the statement: we must make the thought process its own object?

Guney, I would like to add an illustration to what Ashvin wrote.

Let's start by saying that Eastern teachings are fully correct when saying that there's nothing in our world of perceptions to which we can point and say "That's me" (and this includes thoughts, that is, there's no thought which we can utter which is us). So we should really be on guard any time we find ourselves trying to identify with something perceptible. There's great wisdom in the words "Exit 20:4 Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth." Of course, this shouldn't be misunderstood and lead us to the other extreme where we reject the given experience of feeling like a coherent emitter of spiritual activity and perceiver. There's difference between knowing (being conscious) of our existence and trying to behold it as perception.

The safest way to approach this important question is to point our attention to our living thinking activity. Then we can recognize that we are in the fullest sense only that which is continually becoming at every instant. Thinking is becoming - we transform from 'frame to frame' according to the idea that we want to manifest in words.

This sounds very restrictive at first. What about our body, our feelings, our desires? Are we not all those things? Well... depends on what we imply. Let's build a metaphor.

Imagine a spring. The flow of the water is the image of the flow of our spiritual activity (most lucidly experienced in thinking). Our activity is not the water (the stream of thoughts that we perceive) but it is much rather the invisible force which guides the flow. Water flows through our perspective and continues downstream, which represents the past. As an analogy, let's imagine that we think a small eddy. As the water passes through our vantage point it is shaped by our activity (which we can imagine acts as magnetic field over iron filings) and as it continues downstream and we perceive the eddy, we say "this is my thought". The point of this analogy is that our thought perception (for example verbal thought) is not what our spiritual activity 'looks like'. The thought is the imprint of our activity into the perceptual time flow. For this reason, another very common metaphor is that our thoughts are like dead snake skins that are continually being shed from our spiritual activity. Yet our activity is not identical to the skin. The skin is only shaped by our activity and then cast away.

The goal of these analogies is to help us become comfortable with knowing ourselves through our real-time thinking activity and not by trying to identify with some of the dead husks that have been already separated from thinking. So we know our meaningful spiritual activity by direct intuition but we perceive the effects of our activity only once they become imprinted into the environment. This is contained also in Genesis where the Elohim first do and only then see that it was good.

The other important thing is that the ways in which we can employ our spiritual activity are constrained by the current shape of the river bed. But on the other hand, the way we employ our activity has the possibility to alter the water flow, which can influence the shape of the river bed and thus the future flow. So things are swirling into unity here. On one hand the shape of the river bed constrains the water flow, and thus the possible thoughts we can impress into that flow. On the other hand through our activity we can gently change the water flow, which slowly erodes the river bed in specific ways and changes the future flow, which allows us to employ our activity in even newer ways and so on.

This is a very pleasant image for meditation. It is almost literal Imagination and it is relatively easy to be brought to life. If we manage to enter into the depth of this image, we'll have a very powerful tool to orient ourselves in the flow of our existence.

When the image is understood properly, on one hand it helps us to be safe from trying to identify with the perceptual elements. Instead we can say "All this that I perceive in me is the gradual accretion of my past spiritual activity. The thoughts that I think now, the feelings that I feel, the actions that I do are constrained by what has been prepared in time. For many lifetimes I've been slowly modifying the 'river bed' such that now my activity flows in time in the way I witness it. At the same time I know that with every act of thinking, feeling and willing, I'm modifying the environment and preparing the river bed of the future. It is up to me to develop a high ideal and work in such a way that my current activity, prepares the future river bed which will allow me to unfold my activity in even more free, wise and loving way."

Seen in this way, our body, our desires, our beliefs, etc. are not us but at the same time they are accretion of our activity. So in this sense they are the living conditions which we have prepared for ourselves in the past. This in itself should be making it clear that if we want our future conditions to be conducive for our high aspirations, we need to work now.

And as a last remark it should be noted that no perception is entirely of our own making. Everything is superposition of collective work. There are things where our activity is the prime contributor, like the thoughts that we think fully consciously, but there are countless factors which must also be there in order to hear the thought. We're not directly responsible for the language in which we think, we're not directly responsible to the sound of the voice, for the structure of our body etc. In our metaphor, we can say that we're not directly responsible for the water and the rocks. So there are countless other factors for which other beings are responsible, yet our activity contributes something to that totality, we imprint something unique in it.

Cleric,

Thank you for your time and effort in making these things easier to understand for me.
I read your posts and find them very instructive, especially the trilogy "the center of the central topic".

Kind regards

[Güney27]

Ashvin,

how do you explain the fact that without atp (molecules in the brain) there is no consciousness and therefore no thinking?
I had a zoom conversation with jeferry williams (a critic of kastrup who was also on this forum) and he brought it up as an argument against idealism.

What about people who are born deaf and dumb? they cannot think, what about their spiritual activity?

Can't gravity be explained by space-time curvature? Why did people see something spiritual in gravitation?

Kind regards

Guney,

Yes, I remember JW and our dialogue here

We don't need to explain that fact, because it isn't a fact. It's a pure abstract materialist assumption. JW started arguing that for a few pages before finally clarifying that "ATP is necessary for consciousness" was his interpretation of BK's arguments, not his own position, and it's not even a valid interpretation of BK. JW's position is something like, "matter and consciousness are 'entangled' with each other and we cannot actually know anything about either of them via human reason". In short, JW's is the most abstract metaphysical thinker I have ever come across, even though he claims to be criticizing abstract metaphysics. If you have any other specific arguments from him you want to run by me, I am happy to explain why they are the result of pure abstract thinking without any living connection to first-person conscious activity, including Thinking activity. Logic always has the upper hand, because its living power is perpetually presupposed and present within all the attempts to ground the World in some concept supposedly beyond it and immune to it. Whether that something is called "God", "Will", "Matter", "ATP", "Emptiness", etc. makes no difference, because its essential meaning is always imbued by the Logic through which it is formed. Without that meaning, it simply doesn't exist.

re: deaf and dumb - see Cleric's illustration above. "They cannot think" is an assumption which identifies a person's essential spiritual activity with any given thought-eddy within the living flow. There is no warrant for that naive realistic assumption.

re: Gravity - we must seek the inner meaning of these outer word-forms and concepts like "space-time curvature". The latter without that inner meaning are simply dead snake skins, mere husks of meaning disconnected from their life-source. The inner meaning is always found in relation to our own first-person experiential activity in the world. Ancient people perceived that inner meaning more than we do because their inner activity was more united with the World Processes, whereas ours is completely alienated and isolated. That was necessary for human freedom. When we felt ourselves as entirely undifferentiated within collectives, flowing along with the natural rhythms of the Cosmos without any agency, we may have been more at peace, but we were not more free. Now, despite our anxiety from the extreme atomization which has occurred, we are more free. The question is, how are we going to use that freedom? Are we going to atomize further by endlessly creating new symbols via idle speculation? The symbolic world we perceive now is about as complex as it could possibly get. That complexification is precisely what makes us feel lost at sea without a living connection with other humans, other living organisms, Nature as a whole, and the Cosmos as a whole. Reintegration of the symbols through our own reentry into the living thinking-flow which produces them maintains all the benefits born from the spiritual descent into form while also alleviating the atomization and fragmentation.

Ashvin,

Why is JW's claim only an assumption?




What is meant by the term "higher cognition", which I read a couple times in the forum?

[AshvinP]

Ashvin,

how do you explain the fact that without atp (molecules in the brain) there is no consciousness and therefore no thinking?
I had a zoom conversation with jeferry williams (a critic of kastrup who was also on this forum) and he brought it up as an argument against idealism.

What about people who are born deaf and dumb? they cannot think, what about their spiritual activity?

Can't gravity be explained by space-time curvature? Why did people see something spiritual in gravitation?

Kind regards

Guney,

Yes, I remember JW and our dialogue here

We don't need to explain that fact, because it isn't a fact. It's a pure abstract materialist assumption. JW started arguing that for a few pages before finally clarifying that "ATP is necessary for consciousness" was his interpretation of BK's arguments, not his own position, and it's not even a valid interpretation of BK. JW's position is something like, "matter and consciousness are 'entangled' with each other and we cannot actually know anything about either of them via human reason". In short, JW's is the most abstract metaphysical thinker I have ever come across, even though he claims to be criticizing abstract metaphysics. If you have any other specific arguments from him you want to run by me, I am happy to explain why they are the result of pure abstract thinking without any living connection to first-person conscious activity, including Thinking activity. Logic always has the upper hand, because its living power is perpetually presupposed and present within all the attempts to ground the World in some concept supposedly beyond it and immune to it. Whether that something is called "God", "Will", "Matter", "ATP", "Emptiness", etc. makes no difference, because its essential meaning is always imbued by the Logic through which it is formed. Without that meaning, it simply doesn't exist.

re: deaf and dumb - see Cleric's illustration above. "They cannot think" is an assumption which identifies a person's essential spiritual activity with any given thought-eddy within the living flow. There is no warrant for that naive realistic assumption.

re: Gravity - we must seek the inner meaning of these outer word-forms and concepts like "space-time curvature". The latter without that inner meaning are simply dead snake skins, mere husks of meaning disconnected from their life-source. The inner meaning is always found in relation to our own first-person experiential activity in the world. Ancient people perceived that inner meaning more than we do because their inner activity was more united with the World Processes, whereas ours is completely alienated and isolated. That was necessary for human freedom. When we felt ourselves as entirely undifferentiated within collectives, flowing along with the natural rhythms of the Cosmos without any agency, we may have been more at peace, but we were not more free. Now, despite our anxiety from the extreme atomization which has occurred, we are more free. The question is, how are we going to use that freedom? Are we going to atomize further by endlessly creating new symbols via idle speculation? The symbolic world we perceive now is about as complex as it could possibly get. That complexification is precisely what makes us feel lost at sea without a living connection with other humans, other living organisms, Nature as a whole, and the Cosmos as a whole. Reintegration of the symbols through our own reentry into the living thinking-flow which produces them maintains all the benefits born from the spiritual descent into form while also alleviating the atomization and fragmentation.

Ashvin,

I think jeffrey williams is an intelligent man.
He studied physics and philosophy and has a remarkable knowledge.
He is over 60 and has been dealing with these topics for decades and I am 18 and have only been doing it for 4 years (he speaks good German to him, which is good because German is my mother tongue).
I was able to take something away from the conversation, especially about Heidegger, who also overcame the subject-object dichotomy.
My objection was that being physicalism runs into known problems (hard problems etc).
He then said that he works without assumptions and that he deduces from perception that if the brain is damaged, for example, consciousness is lost, this is evidence for him.
He said that everything is made up of compositions of energy. This is the fundamental level that we know about. We still talked about near-death experiences, which he takes for stories and doesn't pay much attention to.
He's a supporter of carlo rovelli (whom I don't think appreciate after his interview at theories of everything). I would like to say that I am not really familiar with physics. It is him considering whether there will be a second interview.

Can you elaborate on what you meant by your statements about logic, because I didn't fully understand them.

Kind regards

Yes, I can elaborate. First let me preface as follows - I have not overcome dualistic and abstract thinking, of the negative sort we are conveying here, by any stretch. The only reason I can perceive it within my own thinking and others is because I have allowed myself to approach something unfamiliar with open heart and mind. Without that, not only can we not overcome abstract thinking, we won't know there is anything to overcome. If we remain only familiar with this thinking mode, the only option is to project it onto every person, worldview, philosophy, religon, etc. we encounter. That is because we are social beings who desire to express our views with others. The more intelligent we are, the more we want to express that intelligence with as minimal effort as possible.

IMO this is what JW did - he had shut himself down completely to any new experience of thinking, so he couldn't fathom any argument which was pointing to such a new way of thinking. He assumed it must be the same old way of purely abstract thinking about "thinking" or "idea" as the Ground of existence. You are here asking questions, so that by itself shows some openness. JW did not ask a single question for clarification here. He responded with short phrases, a couple sentences at most. These are telltale signs of ideological thinking. Everything is chopped up into sound bites, and it is assumed this is sufficient for conveying meaning. That is only sufficient for conveying the most abstract, superficial husks of meaning. It also indicates he is only here to teach and assumes he has nothing to possibly learn.

So intelligence has no bearing. The politicians, bankers, corporate execs, etc. who run the developed world are highly educated and intelligent, but they are also the most abstract thinkers, creating supremely generalized one size fits all policies with no relation to living experience of individuals and communities. With that said, the simple answer here is that "ATP prior to consciousness" is impossible to experience, in principle. All genuine knowledge must be rooted in experience. An easy way to test this is to ask, "what perspective would I need to have experiences which could build confidence in this assertion." If the answer is a 3rd person "view from nowhere", which stands apart from first person consciousness and somehow perceives mindless ATP existing prior, then it is pure abstraction.

This view from nowhere only arose in philosophy and science in the modern age, mostly after Cartesian subject/object dualism. Then the subject who was inquiring into phenomena was abstracted from the inquiry altogether, as if the thinking inquiry has no influence on the phenomena being observed. We know now with modern science, more than ever, this is quite absurd approach with no relation to real dynamics of existence. JW knows this as well, which is why he speaks of "entanglement" between mind-matter, but he still adopts the view from nowhere in all of his arguments! Again, that's because he knows no other way to approach philosophy, but he also doesn't want to remain silent. We don't have to remain silent if we simply approach with humility, sincerity, patience, and effort towards what is currently unfamiliar to us.

[AshvinP]

Ashvin,

how do you explain the fact that without atp (molecules in the brain) there is no consciousness and therefore no thinking?
I had a zoom conversation with jeferry williams (a critic of kastrup who was also on this forum) and he brought it up as an argument against idealism.

What about people who are born deaf and dumb? they cannot think, what about their spiritual activity?

Can't gravity be explained by space-time curvature? Why did people see something spiritual in gravitation?

Kind regards

Guney,

Yes, I remember JW and our dialogue here

We don't need to explain that fact, because it isn't a fact. It's a pure abstract materialist assumption. JW started arguing that for a few pages before finally clarifying that "ATP is necessary for consciousness" was his interpretation of BK's arguments, not his own position, and it's not even a valid interpretation of BK. JW's position is something like, "matter and consciousness are 'entangled' with each other and we cannot actually know anything about either of them via human reason". In short, JW's is the most abstract metaphysical thinker I have ever come across, even though he claims to be criticizing abstract metaphysics. If you have any other specific arguments from him you want to run by me, I am happy to explain why they are the result of pure abstract thinking without any living connection to first-person conscious activity, including Thinking activity. Logic always has the upper hand, because its living power is perpetually presupposed and present within all the attempts to ground the World in some concept supposedly beyond it and immune to it. Whether that something is called "God", "Will", "Matter", "ATP", "Emptiness", etc. makes no difference, because its essential meaning is always imbued by the Logic through which it is formed. Without that meaning, it simply doesn't exist.

re: deaf and dumb - see Cleric's illustration above. "They cannot think" is an assumption which identifies a person's essential spiritual activity with any given thought-eddy within the living flow. There is no warrant for that naive realistic assumption.

re: Gravity - we must seek the inner meaning of these outer word-forms and concepts like "space-time curvature". The latter without that inner meaning are simply dead snake skins, mere husks of meaning disconnected from their life-source. The inner meaning is always found in relation to our own first-person experiential activity in the world. Ancient people perceived that inner meaning more than we do because their inner activity was more united with the World Processes, whereas ours is completely alienated and isolated. That was necessary for human freedom. When we felt ourselves as entirely undifferentiated within collectives, flowing along with the natural rhythms of the Cosmos without any agency, we may have been more at peace, but we were not more free. Now, despite our anxiety from the extreme atomization which has occurred, we are more free. The question is, how are we going to use that freedom? Are we going to atomize further by endlessly creating new symbols via idle speculation? The symbolic world we perceive now is about as complex as it could possibly get. That complexification is precisely what makes us feel lost at sea without a living connection with other humans, other living organisms, Nature as a whole, and the Cosmos as a whole. Reintegration of the symbols through our own reentry into the living thinking-flow which produces them maintains all the benefits born from the spiritual descent into form while also alleviating the atomization and fragmentation.

Ashvin,

Why is JW's claim only an assumption?

What is meant by the term "higher cognition", which I read a couple times in the forum?

I think the assumption issue was answered in last post. I forgot to address your question re: Logic.

Let's define "Logic" as the inner force which allows meaningful connection between outer forms. The latter also include our meaningful concepts, like "ATP/energy", "consciousness", "idea", "will", "matter", etc. That is how Logic functions in math, philosophy, science and reasoning in general. If I connect the concept of "consciousness" with the concept of "banana", as in "consciousness looks like a banana", we will say this is nonsense because the inner logic which makes it a meaningful connection is mostly missing. The concepts don't cohere into more meaningful idea, i.e. they are incoherent in that form. The point here is that there can be no coherent meaning in any string of concepts without that inner force of Logic which meaningfully unites them, even ones that sound somewhat valid like "ATP/energy must be prior to consciousness".

Higher cognition is faculty which can perceive the higher order Logic which unites perceptions of the World Content, including concepts and ideas. For example, it can become conscious of the logical structure underlying a musical symphony, just like intellectual reason can generally become conscious of the logical structure underlying a sentence of words or an entire human language. Actually even we can become conscious of the logical structure in musical symphony, but higher cognition would perceive this more effortlessly and also perceive the logical structure between domains of experience, like language, music, dance, painting, etc.