Saving the materialists

[Federica]

Yeah, that's what I meant. I think the word "subjective" is just misleading here, let's just drop it. I think it would rather be more appropriate to use the word "experiential". Thinking is fundamentally experiential, we cannot separate and abstract thinking from the immanent first-person experience of thinking. And since the world itself is only a content of thinking, the world is also experiential by nature, whether it is experienced from our human immanent perspective, or from the perspective of the higher-order beings who create the ideal content of the world and experience it directly as their creation. We can of course ignore the experiential nature of it, and that is what people most often do, but ignoring it does not make it any less experiential. As a matter of fact, thinking always experiences itself directly and it is always inseparable from its own experiencing, but it can ignore and draw its focus of attention away from this fundamental intimate experience.

Basically, we cannot separate the ideal content from thinking and from direct immanent experience of the ideal content and thinking. It all comes as an inseparable package as a matter of fact if we closely look at our direct experience. But what usually happens is that we abstract them and treat them as if they are separate independent realities, labeling them as "subject", "objects", "world" etc. But the funny thing is that it is still the same thinking that is doing this abstraction trick on itself. So, in a way, thinking is so powerful that it can deceive itself into thinking-believing that there exists anything other than the unity of experiencing + thinking + ideal content of thinking.

Yes, I guess this is one way to say it, that a filament of it deceives itself in its manifestation through the aperture of the current human brain. It takes a splitting detour through the density of the brain organ.

[Stranger]

Now you've (above) reduced your arguments to mere ad hominem . . . there were extended conversations on the older BK forum how BK's Idealism as specified in his book (Materialism is Baloney) was essentially a flavor of Materialism. I can't speak to your comments above because they're mere ad hominem.

Regardless of how people interpret the BK's idealism (which is their own problem), BK himself always insisted that in his paradigm all of the reality is fundamentally of "mental" nature, which means that it is technically a flavor of idealism.

[AshvinP]

There is a wide variety of materialism\physicalism thought - from simple to more nuanced - some that address QM, some that dance around it.
I'm not aware of any materialist thought that denies the reality of the 'physical world itself' . . . even if that physical world be only abstractions such as Information, or Probability Waves. I belief your writings (and Clerics) have suggested there's underlying Immortal Ideas and\or Content\Meaning which would also label as a flavor of materialism. IOW, Materialism = belief in any inherent structure whether that structure in mentation or physical.

So you went from criticizing Guney for inappropriately characterizing and strawmanning materialism as understanding the world as a perceptual dream, to then equating BK's idealism (belief in inherent structures of mentation) with materialism

Lorenzo, I just have to assume that, unlike Eugene for example, you are not interested in discussing in good faith and learning about these things. It seems like you just want to pop in on occasion to have an argument and 'put us in our place', so to speak. Now you are saying spiritual science is also 'a flavor of materialism', which simply means you haven't even attempted to understand our writings yet after all these years. The understanding of everyone else on this forum who is still around has deepened and evolved, but yours seems to remain static and even regresses. That is simply because you don't allow yourself to engage with the unfamiliar ideas in humility and good faith.

Now you've (above) reduced your arguments to mere ad hominem . . . there were extended conversations on the older BK forum how BK's Idealism as specified in his book (Materialism is Baloney) was essentially a flavor of Materialism. I can't speak to your comments above because they're mere ad hominem.

Sorry if you perceived it as ad hominem, but I wasn't making an argument. It's just an observation about patterns of comments, and if anything a statement on why I am unsure on whether there is any point putting effort into making additional arguments (or rather presenting additional illustrations or lines of reasoning, since I am not trying to convince you of some theoretical philosophical position).

I don't think you made an argument either, just stated your opinion that various things are 'flavors of materialism'. It seems like anything that speaks of realities beyond a randomly disconnected frame of experience is now a 'flavor of materialism'. Let's say you decide to count to 10 and when you reach "5", you have an intuitive sense that other numbers preceded it and more numbers will follow. Then you come to the forum and say, "guys, while I was counting and pronounced the word '5', there was a background intuition of what I was doing, how my mental experience got there, and where my mental experience was going". Would I be justified in responding to your description of that intuitive experience, "aha, Lorenzo, you are telling us about your belief in an inherent structure of reality - some 'background intuition' of mental states - and therefore your particular flavor of materialism"?

What I just wrote and asked isn't so much an argument as an extremely simplified and condensed way of bringing attention to the simple error that is being made in your thinking about this topic. The 'inherent structures of reality' that we write about on this forum are exactly of the same nature as the background intuition of your experiential states while counting. If this isn't understood, then it can only be because you won't allow yourself to understand it, since you are obviously capable of understanding it.

[lorenzop]

Now you've (above) reduced your arguments to mere ad hominem . . . there were extended conversations on the older BK forum how BK's Idealism as specified in his book (Materialism is Baloney) was essentially a flavor of Materialism. I can't speak to your comments above because they're mere ad hominem.

Regardless of how people interpret the BK's idealism (which is their own problem), BK himself always insisted that in his paradigm all of the reality is fundamentally of "mental" nature, which means that it is technically a flavor of idealism.

If one takes the Materialism playbook and simply search\replace physical with mental, matter with consciousness, etc . . . one does not end up with Idealism but a flavor of Materialism.
I think the difference between believing in inherent structures as mentation vs inherent structures as physical - this distinction is arbitrary - especially considering both terms are equally squirrelly.
I fully admit to taking an extreme view, but a view I think is honest.

[Stranger]

If one takes the Materialism playbook and simply search\replace physical with mental, matter with consciousness, etc . . . one does not end up with Idealism but a flavor of Materialism.
I think the difference between believing in inherent structures as mentation vs inherent structures as physical - this distinction is arbitrary - especially considering both terms are equally squirrelly.
I fully admit to taking an extreme view, but a view I think is honest.

BK specifically emphasized in his talks that all that ever exists has the nature of conscious mental experiences. This is the key feature that distinguishes idealism of any kind from non-idealism of any kind. So, it's not just substituting one word for another, but pointing to certain kind of actual reality. If the claim is that all that exists is only cognizable mental experiences (exactly of the same quality-kind as our own first-person conscious experiences), then that's idealism. If the claim is that there is something that exists but can never be in principle directly consciously experienced and cognized because it fundamentally has a nature different from cognizable mental experiences, then that's not idealism, but some flavor of Kantian transcendentalism (materialism being one of a kind). Usually, such non-idealistic metaphysical systems include the claim that consciousness is an emergent property or function of that non-experienceable "something".

Obviously, all such paradigms must include and account for the existence of observable structures, including the laws of physics and other empirical scientific knowledge. So, the fact that a philosophy embraces and accounts for the structures of the observable world does not necessarily make it "materialistic in disguise". Different kind of philosophies address a meta-reality beyond the area of empirically observable structures and natural sciences, while they always have to account for the existence of such structures.

[AshvinP]

If one takes the Materialism playbook and simply search\replace physical with mental, matter with consciousness, etc . . . one does not end up with Idealism but a flavor of Materialism.
I think the difference between believing in inherent structures as mentation vs inherent structures as physical - this distinction is arbitrary - especially considering both terms are equally squirrelly.
I fully admit to taking an extreme view, but a view I think is honest.

BK specifically emphasized in his talks that all that ever exists has the nature of conscious mental experiences. This is the key feature that distinguishes idealism of any kind from non-idealism of any kind. So, it's not just substituting one word for another, but pointing to certain kind of actual reality. If the claim is that all that exists is only cognizable mental experiences (exactly of the same quality-kind as our own first-person conscious experiences), then that's idealism. If the claim is that there is something that exists but can never be in principle directly consciously experienced and cognized because it fundamentally has a nature different from cognizable mental experiences, then that's not idealism, but some flavor of Kantian transcendentalism (materialism being one of a kind). Usually, such non-idealistic metaphysical systems include the claim that consciousness is an emergent property or function of that non-experienceable "something".

Obviously, all such paradigms must include and account for the existence of observable structures, including the laws of physics and other empirical scientific knowledge. So, the fact that a philosophy embraces and accounts for the structures of the observable world does not necessarily make it "materialistic in disguise". Different kind of philosophies address a meta-reality beyond the area of empirically observable structures and natural sciences, while they always have to account for the existence of such structures.

I think Lorenzo is pointing to something valid here, which is that analytic idealism is a form of Kantian transcendentalism. Any philosophy which fails to recognize the 'noumenal' Spirit has incarnated in our first-person thinking experience is necessarily forced to conceive that reality can only be found on the 'other side' of our thought representations. Whether the mental pictures of that 'other side' are imbued with the meaning of material/physical, mentation, instinctive consciousness, abstract beings, emptiness/nothingness, or something else, doesn't make a difference. Materialism, analytic idealism, and modern mysticism (including JW's version) all fall into this same trap and they all appeal to realities which are principally beyond first-person thinking experience. So I wouldn't say BK's idealism is a flavor of materialism, but that they are all a flavor of abstract philosophy that keeps real-time thinking experience in the blind spot. And I think Lorenzo's mystical philosophy also falls into that category, since he feels thoughts pop out of the mysterious void and cannot be traced to experientially verifiable spiritual processes, assuming that's still his general feeling.

The deeper consequence of this is that the inquiries of philosophy, science, art, and religion are divorced from the higher-order lawfulness (such as karmic lawfulness), and therefore people maintain the illusion that the former are irrelevant to 'true reality' and/or are adequately accounted for by studying the lawfulness of only our mental pictures and developing 'laws', 'principles', 'doctrines', etc. on only that basis. Yet the trends of modern empirical science reveal that such laws continually break down when expanding to consider more of the totality of first-person human experience, so the general trend is to consider the 'laws of nature' as convenient fictions that we use for practical aims but those aims and human experience in general is entirely orthogonal to some other form of reality that remains inaccessible and inconceivable. In other words, the evolutionary process of spiritualizing the intellect and therefore expanding intuition of spiritual lawfulness (which also includes sensory lawfulness) is halted, simply because the real-time thinking perspective engaging in philosophy and science remains in the blind spot.

[Stranger]

I think Lorenzo is pointing to something valid here, which is that analytic idealism is a form of Kantian transcendentalism. Any philosophy which fails to recognize the 'noumenal' Spirit has incarnated in our first-person thinking experience is necessarily forced to conceive that reality can only be found on the 'other side' of our thought representations. Whether the mental pictures of that 'other side' are imbued with the meaning of material/physical, mentation, instinctive consciousness, abstract beings, emptiness/nothingness, or something else, doesn't make a difference. Materialism, analytic idealism, and modern mysticism (including JW's version) all fall into this same trap and they all appeal to realities which are principally beyond first-person thinking experience. So I wouldn't say BK's idealism is a flavor of materialism, but that they are all a flavor of abstract philosophy that keeps real-time thinking experience in the blind spot. And I think Lorenzo's mystical philosophy also falls into that category, since he feels thoughts pop out of the mysterious void and cannot be traced to experientially verifiable spiritual processes, assuming that's still his general feeling.

The deeper consequence of this is that the inquiries of philosophy, science, art, and religion are divorced from the higher-order lawfulness (such as karmic lawfulness), and therefore people maintain the illusion that the former are irrelevant to 'true reality' and/or are adequately accounted for by studying the lawfulness of only our mental pictures and developing 'laws', 'principles', 'doctrines', etc. on only that basis. Yet the trends of modern empirical science reveal that such laws continually break down when expanding to consider more of the totality of first-person human experience, so the general trend is to consider the 'laws of nature' as convenient fictions that we use for practical aims but those aims and human experience in general is entirely orthogonal to some other form of reality that remains inaccessible and inconceivable. In other words, the evolutionary process of spiritualizing the intellect and therefore expanding intuition of spiritual lawfulness (which also includes sensory lawfulness) is halted, simply because the real-time thinking perspective engaging in philosophy and science remains in the blind spot.

I see you point, Ashvin. On one hand, BK claims that all that ever exists has the nature of conscious mental experiences akin to our own first-person experiences and in principle can be known (for example, after dissolution of the "Markov Blanket"), and that qualifies his philosophy as idealism. On the other hand, in his paradigm there is a complete disconnect between the realm of the first-person thinking experience of the alters and the one of MAL which for the alters always remains an inaccessible abstraction. So yeah, it's still kind of half-way Kantian split, and the same argument applies to other flavors of academic philosophies.

[AshvinP]

I think Lorenzo is pointing to something valid here, which is that analytic idealism is a form of Kantian transcendentalism. Any philosophy which fails to recognize the 'noumenal' Spirit has incarnated in our first-person thinking experience is necessarily forced to conceive that reality can only be found on the 'other side' of our thought representations. Whether the mental pictures of that 'other side' are imbued with the meaning of material/physical, mentation, instinctive consciousness, abstract beings, emptiness/nothingness, or something else, doesn't make a difference. Materialism, analytic idealism, and modern mysticism (including JW's version) all fall into this same trap and they all appeal to realities which are principally beyond first-person thinking experience. So I wouldn't say BK's idealism is a flavor of materialism, but that they are all a flavor of abstract philosophy that keeps real-time thinking experience in the blind spot. And I think Lorenzo's mystical philosophy also falls into that category, since he feels thoughts pop out of the mysterious void and cannot be traced to experientially verifiable spiritual processes, assuming that's still his general feeling.

The deeper consequence of this is that the inquiries of philosophy, science, art, and religion are divorced from the higher-order lawfulness (such as karmic lawfulness), and therefore people maintain the illusion that the former are irrelevant to 'true reality' and/or are adequately accounted for by studying the lawfulness of only our mental pictures and developing 'laws', 'principles', 'doctrines', etc. on only that basis. Yet the trends of modern empirical science reveal that such laws continually break down when expanding to consider more of the totality of first-person human experience, so the general trend is to consider the 'laws of nature' as convenient fictions that we use for practical aims but those aims and human experience in general is entirely orthogonal to some other form of reality that remains inaccessible and inconceivable. In other words, the evolutionary process of spiritualizing the intellect and therefore expanding intuition of spiritual lawfulness (which also includes sensory lawfulness) is halted, simply because the real-time thinking perspective engaging in philosophy and science remains in the blind spot.

I see you point, Ashvin. On one hand, BK claims that all that ever exists has the nature of conscious mental experiences akin to our own first-person experiences and in principle can be known (for example, after dissolution of the "Markov Blanket"), and that qualifies his philosophy as idealism. On the other hand, in his paradigm there is a complete disconnect between the realm of the first-person thinking experience of the alters and the one of MAL which for the alters always remains an inaccessible abstraction. So yeah, it's still kind of half-way Kantian split, and the same argument applies to other flavors of academic philosophies.

It qualifies to be called idealism as much as Kant/Schop philosophy qualify for idealism. But I think the problem is more severe - the conscious mental experiences he imagines to populate MAL are not akin to our first-person experience. The latter is characterized by intentional cognitive activity - whenever we are consciously perceiving, we are spiritually active. Even if we are sitting still and diffusely gazing at an object, we are continuously active. When we are listening to others, watching a movie, listening to music, etc., normally felt like passive experiences, we are constantly performing inner soul movements that imitate the meaning experienced (but normally we are insensitive to them because our attention is sucked into the perceptual content). We can only know that we are alive and conscious through this continual spiritual activity.

BK does not imagine that MAL is spiritually active and its activity is continuous with our own, shaping and constraining the latter's space of potential experience. In fact, Kant himself was the one to first highlight the nature of this problem:

Only the Critical Philosopher will comprehend that knowledge cannot possibly go beyond the bathos of experience; in turn, the dogmatist (for instance, Mr. Kastrup) will fall into “transcendental illusion, by which metaphysics has hitherto been deceived, leading to the childish endeavor of catching at bubbles” (Kant, Prolegomena, §13). “[A]ppearance, as long as it is employed in experience, produces truth, but the moment it transgresses the bounds of experience, and consequently becomes transcendent, produces nothing but illusion” (Kant, Prolegomena, §13)

Any philosophy that leaves this first-person experiential reality of being spiritually active in the blind spot will weave in mental pictures of the 'noumenal reality' that is expected to be found on the "other side" of our spiritually active experience (usually only after death, if at all). Kant soon fell into the same trap that he first highlighted in his philosophy. Although some people like Felipe would disagree, and say Kant only posited 'noumenal reality' as a possibility, which is potentially an 'empty concept' that is useful for studying the limitations/possibilities of immanent cognitive experience. For example (I am not sure that I agree with this interpretation of Kant, though):

It is a common misconception that Kant assumed that there is a noumenal realm—Kant cannot either affirm or deny a constitutive noumenal realm without thereby violating his own critical strictures upon knowledge and without thereby engaging in the same dogmatism he condems (the noumenal, at best, has regulative worth for Kant). Kant insists that we can think of the noumenal, but he insists that we cannot have knowledge of the hypothetical noumenal, such that he does not commit to its existence or non-existence. Kant is explicit in pointing out that the noumenal is problematic—not assertoric, not apodeictic—when he writes in his first Kritik that “we have an understanding which problematically extends further, but we have no intuition, indeed not even the concept of a possible intuition, through which objects outside the field of sensibility can be given, and through which the understanding can be employed assertorically beyond that field. The concept of a noumenon is thus a merely limiting concept, the function of which is to curb the pretensions of sensibility; and it is therefore only of negative employment” (A 255).

(I would argue even the mere conceptual possibility of a 'noumenal realm' in this sense leads to transcendental illusion, since we never be sure that the immanent content of our thinking represents the 'true reality' or not)

Anyway, if his attention was directed to this critique and he was asked about how he can experientally derive MAL's instinctive consciousness, BK would probably point to lower animals or infants and appeal to their 'instinctive consciousness', but that is again falling into the trap of transcendental illusion, projecting mental pictures imbued with meaning principally inaccessible to first-person spiritual activity. The only way we would know the first-person experience of animals is by expanding our spiritual activity into resonance with their perspective (just like we do at low intensity via zoology), which means we will never attain knowledge of such perspectives independently of the experience of being spiritually active, just like we could never gain knowledge of our dream experiences except through our waking perspective. It's the same thing with mystical states.

So the main issue is that all abstract philosophy, science, theology, and mysticism continues to search for the 'nature of reality' where it can never be found, in its already finished (and therefore dead) mental pictures and concepts. The latter have been shed from the living spiritual process animating our thinking movements like dead skin from the snake. Yet instead of discarding those dead pictures (redirecting attention from them to the living inner process), the living inner process is discarded and cannot be recovered in any other way. It cannot be reconstructed from the dead and finished pictures anymore than the intuition of 'algebra' can be reconstructed from particular perceptions of algebraic equations - the idea always incarnates from the 'opposite direction' of the perceptual content, from within our living spiritual activity, for which the perceptual content can only serve as kindling to bring our intuitive movements into its vicinity.

[Stranger]

So the main issue is that all abstract philosophy, science, theology, and mysticism continues to search for the 'nature of reality' where it can never be found, in its already finished (and therefore dead) mental pictures and concepts. The latter have been shed from the living spiritual process animating our thinking movements like dead skin from the snake. Yet instead of discarding those dead pictures (redirecting attention from them to the living inner process), the living inner process is discarded and cannot be recovered in any other way. It cannot be reconstructed from the dead and finished pictures anymore than the intuition of 'algebra' can be reconstructed from particular perceptions of algebraic equations - the idea always incarnates from the 'opposite direction' of the perceptual content, from within our living spiritual activity, for which the perceptual content can only serve as kindling to bring our intuitive movements into its vicinity.

I think I already agreed with this fundamental flaw of all flavors of abstract philosophy, theology and mysticism. However, just like not all philosophy is doomed to be abstract and disconnected from the living introspective experience, with spiritual science being one of the exceptions from this general trend, likewise not all mysticism is doomed to the same disconnect. It is true that many flavors of mysticism have this flawed approach, but at the same time many others do not. At least the mystical practices that I personally pursue are fully experiential, they are solidly based on the introspective first-person experience of mystical states while being fully spiritually active, and embracing these experiences as means of pushing the boundaries of the actual realm of living experiences. In these practices there is a clear understanding of all the flaws of abstract thinking. It's not that abstract thinking is forbidden, it can be used as one of the cognitive tools for pragmatic reasons, but there is just a clear understanding of their limited applicability for gaining the introspective knowledge of Reality.

For example, you said: "just like we could never gain knowledge of our dream experiences except through our waking perspective. It's the same thing with mystical states." However, in the practice of dream yoga (lucid dreaming, which I practiced myself), the knowledge of dream experience is acquired while being in a fully lucid inner living state.

[Federica]

(...)Kant insists that we can think of the noumenal, but he insists that we cannot have knowledge of the hypothetical noumenal, such that he does not commit to its existence or non-existence. (...)

So the main issue is that all abstract philosophy, science, theology, and mysticism continues to search for the 'nature of reality' where it can never be found, in its already finished (and therefore dead) mental pictures and concepts.

Yes - I will repeat that with other words in case it can be of help to anyone.

Felipe here is falling into the same error as the transcendental or critical idealists, illusionists, realists, physicalists and all their relatives. It is contained in the sentence he wrote above: he supposes that having knowledge of some-thing stands altogether aloof from thinking, and that the existence of a thing is demonstrated the moment we can have some form of mental picture of it, a perception of it, that would support that. But the problem is always the same: it's impossible to establish anything about things (it’s impossible to establish if something exists or not) based on the mental pictures we can form about them. The mental picture that, according to Kant and Felipe would, if it existed, convey knowledge of the noumenal, would be on the same exact level as the mental picture “problematic, mysterious noumenal”. The two mental pictures would dance with each other, floating in abstraction, with no sure anchorage in reality, precisely like in an optical illusion.

And so, however the question is addressed, we continually come to the same conclusion, if one strives for rigorous and unprejudiced thinking: solid bearings in the nature of reality are only found when starting from a thinking-first perspective. Not simply thinking-first in our mind, but thinking-first above and beyond the cognitive activity of man (that we can then endeavour to reconnect with experientially).