Philosophical Speculations

AshvinP wrote: So you could just say, "fine, then dogs and cats are engaged in Thinking and therefore have purpose." Certainly that is the implication of DS' comment that the cat is "conceptualizing what she wants before seeking it out". But there is a hesitance to say the animals are Thinking, and I think that is precisely because it makes obvious the qualitative difference between what animals engage in and what adult humans engage in or could possibly engage in.

No hesitance on my end: I absolutely think cats are thinking, and dogs, and plants.

SanteriSatama wrote: ↑Wed Jun 30, 2021 6:05 pm

AshvinP wrote: ↑Wed Jun 30, 2021 4:03 pm No the purpose is to restore its distinctive meaning without arbitrarily limiting it to modern rationality, which was not at all how any pre-modern philosophy regarded it. If we say meaning is inherent to willing and feeling or "experiencing", as you were saying, then we are trying to get rid of all distinctions in the qualities of our experience. We are trying to get rid of knowledge as a precondition to experiencing the full extent of what it means to will or feel something. That is convenient, because it convinces us we can stay at the lowest possible resolution on these issues without any further thinking and still gain all the meaning there is to be gained from experience. But without that knowledge via Thinking, we are allowing ourselves to remain chained to the illusion of freedom rather than the actual and living experience of freedom. Again, the fact that you must jump through so many conceptual hoops to divorce these things from each other should indicate to us when we are straying from the givens of experience, i.e. perception-thought and meaning are always found together, to add on abstract assumptions. We then say we are "free" because we can merely talk about "loving kindness" in conceptual terms rather than enriching the meaning of that loving kindness by enriching the mental images we are forming of it. The way to the heart is truly through the head.

"To divorce", again, implicates separation by binary logic in the conceptual chaining. The Way of the Heart is through the heart, and feeds the head.

But of course, if from the start you are stuck in the head, you gotta find a way from head to heart. As long as you are not well grounded (ie. "alienated") there's temptation to try head first, starting from activating Crown chakra first. That's how you let in the "thieves and burglars", as e.g. in the concrete example of Sahaja Yoga, and very potentially make yourself a slave soul victim of of a highly manipulative and authoritarian cult, and/or maintain yourself as a slave soul. Of course every authoritarian cult have a sales speech where slavery=freedom, "Arbeit mach frei" etc. etc. et.

Like I pointed out to you on the other thread (or maybe here, I forget), all cultures implicitly recognize there is no freedom without knowledge. That is reflected in laws around "informed consent", for ex. You may say that is product of Western colonial imperialism or something, but nevertheless I think anyone who reflects on it will eventually recognize the deep connection between knowledge and freedom, and that knowledge comes in many different forms but none of them are discontinuous with each other - so abstract thinking and reason, as many problems as it may have caused in the modern era, is not discontinuous with attention, imagination, inspiration, and intuition. And I should point out that I am specifying what Thinking is, not expanding it to include everything. In fact, the process of specifying it also helps us to see that Willing and Feeling (and "Experiencing", as some people like to add in there) have their own essential domains and roles to play in our experience which Thinking does not provide on its own. The mystic or animist, however, is satisfied to simply lump them all together so that none of them retain their unique qualitative role in the unfolding of our experience and all of them stay at the lowest possible resolution. It's high time for humanity to up the resolution on these matters if it truly wants to move towards spiritual freedom.

DandelionSoul wrote: ↑Wed Jun 30, 2021 4:30 am

So instead of "knowing" or "thinking" element in every experience, let me say there is a "meaningful element" in every experience.

So... what is meaning, in your view?

I am using these terms in the most straightforward way we use them for now. So "meaning" is the ideal content of any experience. It is the beauty of the sunset, the arguments of a philosophy paper, etc. I hold that ideal content to be fundamentally shared and not personal to each perspective of Consciousness.

DS wrote:

Ashvin wrote: This also speaks to my point that meaning is fundamentally shared between all perspectives of the unified Consciousness, rather than being personal to each perspective.

I just don't see how this is true at all, though. So, for instance, suppose someone robs me. That robbery carries one set of meanings for me -- maybe it'll make it difficult for me to make rent this month, or maybe I've lost an heirloom that held a lot of sentimental value for me, or maybe it just means I've had a really bad night. For the thief, though, maybe robbing me means they're able to feed their addiction, or maybe it means they can pay _their_ rent, or maybe it means they can buy medicine for their sick child, or whatever. In any case, this is a shared experience -- robbing this house -- that seems to me to very obviously have different meanings for everyone involved. And, what's more, it's not static. Maybe it means I'm struggling this month, but it also leads me to get renter's insurance, and then later on some natural disaster strikes and I'm prepared because I'm insured: now the robbery, due to downstream effects, has ultimately meant that I didn't lose everything in a natural disaster. And likewise for the robber, maybe they can buy their thing they need tonight, but later on they get arrested for the robbery. Now the robbery has gone from meaning some level of financial boon to meaning that they've lost much of their autonomy. Maybe I visit the robber in jail and through my visits, we become friends, and after they get out, we remain friends, and now the robbery has meant yet another thing for both of us. Maybe after many years it's something we laugh about over drinks.

So meaning seems to me not to be universal, but to be living and evolving, to be negotiated intersubjectively, to be subject to renegotiation, never fixed or final or fully given. It's no different in that way from any other living process.

I would say that entire way of looking at the situation is a result of nominalism, where the fragmented and isolated particulars of the world are taken as more "real" than the elements which all perspectives on the experience share in common. And the ideal content i.e. meaning is always a common element of experience. You can only communicate to me this example of "robbery" because there is ideal content associated with that word I also share, so we can both orient our perspectives around that shared meaning when talking about the particulars. Humanity has now traveled so far from its central Source that, even when we dwell within shared meanings of experience, we can find an infinite number of particulars which differ for every perspective on the experience.

Yet the key to overcoming that is precisely, at first, to re-cognize that this distance from the Source is why the experience presents itself to us in that fragmented way. So instead of looking for the most complex set of circumstances, let's take the experience of something that is still relatively simple - like picturing a "triangle". There is only one meaning of "triangle", so the meaning you experience when you picture it must be the same as the meaning I experience when I picture it. Since there is no point in me restating things someone else has already said better before, I will quote Steiner here:

Our thinking is not individual the way our experiencing and feeling are. It is universal. It receives an individual stamp in each single person only through the fact that it is related to his individual feeling and experiencing. Through these particular colorings of the universal thinking, individual people differ from one another. A triangle has only one single concept. For the content of this concept it is a matter of indifference whether the human bearer of consciousness who grasps it is A or B. But the content of this concept will be grasped in an individual way by each of the two bearers of consciousness.

This thought is opposed by a preconception people have which is difficult to overcome. This bias does not attain to the insight that the concept of the triangle which my head grasps is the same as the one comprehended by the head of my neighbor. The naive person considers himself to be the creator of his concepts. He believes, therefore, that each person has his own concepts. It is a fundamental requirement of philosophical thinking that it overcome this preconception. The oneness of the concept “triangle” does not become a plurality through the fact that it is thought by many. For the thinking of the many is itself a oneness.

In thinking we have given to us the element which fuses our particular individuality into one whole with the cosmos. Inasmuch as we experience and feel (and also perceive), we are separate beings; inasmuch as we think, we are the all-one being; which permeate all. This is the deeper basis of our twofold nature: we see an utterly absolute power come into existence within us, a power which is universal; but we learn to know it, not where it streams forth from the center of the world, but rather at a point on the periphery. If the first were the case, then the moment we came to consciousness, we would know the solution to the whole riddle of the world. Since we stand at a point on the periphery, however, and find our own existence enclosed within certain limits, we must learn to know the region which lies outside of our own being with the help of thinking, which projects into us out of the general world existence.

Through the fact that the thinking in us reaches out beyond our separate existence and relates itself to universal existence, there arises in us the drive for knowledge. Beings without thinking do not have this drive. When other things confront them, no questions are aroused thereby. These other things remain external to such beings. With thinking beings, when confronted by an outer thing, the concept wells up. The concept is what we receive from the thing, not from without, but rather from within. Knowledge is meant to yield the balance, the union of the two elements, the inner and the outer.

DS wrote:

Ashvin wrote: The purely instinctive creature is immersed in a world of meaning (much more so than modern man who experiences only dull meaning in most perceptions), but it does not make clear distinctions between meanings or ask itself questions about those meanings

The more I think about it, the less I think I know of any creatures of pure instinct. Even single-celled organisms demonstrate the capacity to learn. But I'm going to take "creature of pure instinct" as "creature without the ability to conceptually reflect upon itself," and then proceed to ask you, what does making distinctions between meanings entail? Or, in other words, how is it a failure to distinguish between meanings if a lion knows that this experience calls for fighting and that experience calls for sex, and this experience calls for care and caution, and that experience calls for rage? My sense is that an organism's consciousness is most basically discernment, the capacity to tell this from that, and that discernment is always already grounded in a contrast of meaning (which is grounded in purpose, which is grounded in desire, which is grounded in what it is to be alive, just to keep the structure of concepts in my thesis clear).

I think, oddly enough, we may be reaching a point of convergence here with something you said several pages ago: "The very essence of the Cosmos is meaning." After all, if things only appear at all by means of distinction, if they are only constituted as what they are by contrast with what they are not (and this is the case, on my view), which is to say, if relation is the fundamental category, then that which distinguishes is what creates the world. Since all living things distinguish, all living things co-create the world. Much of the horror wrought by humanity in the last several centuries has been wrapped up in forgetting that and inventing a Great Chain of Being with us near the top of it. We were born into a world already created for us by our nonhuman elders, and in all that we do, we participate in what they were already doing.

So I hope Steiner's quote above cleared up some of this as well. When I said purely instinctive animal does not "ask itself questions about those meanings", I was saying practically the same thing as "the concept wells up within" when a thinking being is confronted by an 'outer thing'. What we are pointing to is pretty trivial - there is a difference between merely sensing meaning and reacting, and knowing meaning and distinguishing within that meaning, or distinguishing with other meanings, or combining with other meanings, etc. There are even times in our adult lives when we may sense something we barely perceive and react, and then later reflect on it (or not). I think it is a pretty established fact of our experience that these things happen. We also know many animals do not perceive the world as we do, even down to the level of basic sense organs, so I find it hard to believe that they are cognizing the meaning of experience in the same way we are. I find that to be an added assumption (or projection) that strains credulity at this time in human understanding.

So I know you made more points, which are pretty important ones of contention, but I see you have already responded to my more recent post as well, so I hope the above is sufficient for this portion and we can move along.

DandelionSoul wrote: ↑Wed Jun 30, 2021 9:12 pm

Ashvin wrote: I am intrigued by this "mystification" concept as expressed above but still fuzzy on it (side note: this is also close to how Steiner refers to "mysticism" often). The above quote seems like it would apply very well to the philosophical divides of Descartes or Kant. I don't think they were intentionally trying to enslave anyone, but their philosophies have the effect of convincing people there are mind-matter divisions and fundamental limits to knowledge inherent in the structure of reality (nature and gods). And therefore "revolt has no meaning" because we cannot "even dream of any other" possibility if we unconsciously accept those divides. Do you think that's a correct application?

Interestingly, I usually use "mysticism" to mean something very different: the set of practices and techniques which enable one to experience reality without the blinders of mystification. They have at their heart the word "mystery" (or, rather, the Greek word mysterion) but I think they're almost opposites: mystification makes the world more impenetrably mysterious to someone, and mysticism is how someone penetrates to the heart of Mystery.

I think your use is probably pretty close to what she means. She uses "mystification" pretty frequently in The Second Sex to mean something like the way the world at that time was structured such that women were from birth taught all kinds of things about who they were meant to be (subservient to men, only good for having children, etc.) -- in this case, the acts of mystification were legion and were sort of baked into everything from religion to politics to education, so that women were born immersed into a world where they were put at a distance from the knowledge of their own freedom.

Yes and I didn't mean to leave any impression that Steiner discards "mysticism" as unimportant - he actually discusses the thoughts of many people who would be called "mystics", especially in the medieval era, and places great importance on their contributions. The shadow side of mysticism, though, is that side which ignores the metamorphic progression of the Spirit and therefore feels the ancient mystical practices are sufficient for current spiritual purposes. It remains at the low resolution on the Source because it sees no need to go to any higher resolution and/or considers it impossible. So I would say Simone de Beauvoir was right on the money to use the term "mystification" in that regard. But if someone wants to call themselves a "mystic" yet also penetrate into the Mysteries with thought, then that's fine with me. Whatever works. Another key assertion I would make here is that the Mysteries were all pointing to the One who was to come, and that One came in the person of Christ Jesus. He set in motion a new covenant and a new means of initiation into it.

DS wrote:

Ashvin wrote: Right, I don't really disagree with any of that. But I think we just need to be careful that we are not assuming we have adequately stepped into another perspective, i.e. enough to truly understand that other perspective, when we are only operating in the realm of abstract thinking rather than intuitive thinking. The latter only comes about through much discipline and effort in my view. But that is not to say we cannot have useful intuitions about these things with normal cognition.

Right, but my sense is that it's far more abstract to begin with a concept of "automatic instinct" and "free action" and then try to suss out which of a creature's actions fall into which category, rather than to engage in an intuitive mutual recognition with the creature.

Enslavement to the physical consists of the actual physical limitations of our existence in bodies and also the psychic enslavement to only perceiving-cognizing spiritual reality in physical terms, and those two are not unrelated in my review. I believe "spiritual freedom" is possible to overcome a significant amount of the latter psychic enslavement in our current lifetimes, and the former physical enslavement will also be overcome in a much longer timespan.

How do you define "physical" here? What are the "actual physical limitations of our existence in bodies" that are to be overcome?

Is it? I mentioned in the other post we can probably remember a few times where we ourselves acted on relatively pure instinct - can we say those actions were free? It reminds me of the example of Darwin going to a snake exhibit at the zoo - even though he knew there was glass between him and the snake and it could not get to him, he jumped back every time it darted at the glass. I do not call that a "free action" precisely because it does not at all depend on our knowledge and is perfectly predictable (the latter not being as important as the former for my definition of "spiritual freedom").

I should say the overcoming of "physical limitations" is at very low resolution for me... it is still a very long ways off. But, according to my basic understanding, it really means what it sounds like it means. It is ascension back into the spiritual realm where corporeality is no longer necessary for our spiritual existence and activity.

AshvinP wrote: ↑Wed Jun 30, 2021 10:24 pm Like I pointed out to you on the other thread (or maybe here, I forget), all cultures implicitly recognize there is no freedom without knowledge.

I doubt you have been authorized to speak for all cultures, human or other. Pretending to be able to do so is very, very bad form.

That is reflected in laws around "informed consent", for ex. You may say that is product of Western colonial imperialism or something, but nevertheless I think anyone who reflects on it will eventually recognize the deep connection between knowledge and freedom, and that knowledge comes in many different forms but none of them are discontinuous with each other

Ie. "Knowledge can mean pretty much anything, but in the end it means what it means in contemporary English, which is epistemic knowledge of conceptual and rational language."

You keep claiming that you are not making rational arguments, cause that way you would instantly lose the game, you just repeating a loop of rational arguments while claiming that you are not playing that game.

All you really got is lawyerly sophistry of extending the ordinary meaning of words, so that you can rescue their core meaning as "continuous", and maintain the core meaning in control. And from that position of control keep on making universalist claims such as above, that the colonizing mental disease is infamously famous for.

You know what is discontinuous with control? Letting go of control. You know what is discontinuous with internal dialogue of self-narrative? Letting the internal dialogue pause. You know what is discontinuous with slavery to "informed consent"? Freedom.

The mystic or animist, however, is satisfied to simply lump them all together so that none of them retain their unique qualitative role in the unfolding of our experience and all of them stay at the lowest possible resolution. It's high time for humanity to up the resolution on these matters if it truly wants to move towards spiritual freedom.

Again another ignorant strawman. You are not in position to speak for animistic or shamanic experience, as everything you say and argue tells that your animistic experience is still very limited. Merleau-Ponty, another story, also Jung, so European conditioning is not an hard obstacle, just a bit sticky in some spots.

Whether we call the low resolution trinity "will, feel and mind" or "guts, heart and head", the trinity as such is very low resolution number theory, but it serves as useful distinction on this level of discussion. If you want to call well balanced and complementary functioning of guts, heart and head "lumping together", your loss. Conceptualizing by definition remains low resolution compared to fulness of sentience and bolidly awareness.

The main argument is about direction. You still keep saying, again and again in various ways: Head must rule, and make heart and guts serve the headmaster! No my friend, that top-down direction is not the good direction, that is how thinking stays stupid and spirit unfree. Before we can flow well in both directions, there's a lot of bottom-up learning and self-realization, so that guts and heart can freely feed the mind and support rigid and top-down colonized thinking transforming into creative intelligence.

SanteriSatama wrote: ↑Thu Jul 01, 2021 12:13 am

AshvinP wrote: ↑Wed Jun 30, 2021 10:24 pm Like I pointed out to you on the other thread (or maybe here, I forget), all cultures implicitly recognize there is no freedom without knowledge.

I doubt you have been authorized to speak for all cultures, human or other. Pretending to be able to do so is very, very bad form.

That is reflected in laws around "informed consent", for ex. You may say that is product of Western colonial imperialism or something, but nevertheless I think anyone who reflects on it will eventually recognize the deep connection between knowledge and freedom, and that knowledge comes in many different forms but none of them are discontinuous with each other

Ie. "Knowledge can mean pretty much anything, but in the end it means what it means in contemporary English, which is epistemic knowledge of conceptual and rational language."

You keep claiming that you are not making rational arguments, cause that way you would instantly lose the game, you just repeating a loop of rational arguments while claiming that you are not playing that game.

No, as usual in this point of the "discussion" (to use another term which is probably a product of evil colonial empire), you are hearing things in your head I have never written, because you are letting your feelings of anti-colonialism and anti-individualism and whatever else dictate to you what your reasoning mind should actually be figuring out for itself in freedom. I never once said I am "not making rational arguments"... that would be absurd. The fact that you still do not even recognize the argument I am making tells me, as usual, it is time to quit with you because nothing productive will come from here. Only an ever-deepening spiral of misrepresentations and misunderstandings by you that I will try to keep up with but will never catch because the centripetal force has already crossed the event horizon beyond which all of your logic and reason remains trapped, and that part of your shadow which wants to destroy all productive conversations looms large. That much is evident from the rest of your belligerent post which fails to address a single point I actually made. So I will just continue with DS from here if she wants. Thanks for the somewhat fun even if entirely unenlightening chat as usual!

AshvinP wrote: ↑Thu Jul 01, 2021 12:57 am feelings of anti-colonialism and anti-individualism

This is rather important.

In your heart, is the will and/or want to identify as pro-colonialism and pro-disassociation? Or to liberate from such mental and spiritual structures?

Oh boy. I think we're hitting the center of the dispute here finally. Right at this moment, I can't put nearly the amount of care that I'd like to into responding, but if I could sketch a rough outline of what I think we might most fundamentally disagree on (a "low-resolution" sketch, to be sure, but I think useful enough for our purposes), it might help us refocus the conversation.

I get a kind of neo-Gnostic sense from you (Ashvin): highly influenced by Platonic and Neoplatonic thought. Some of your assertions would fit very well within Valentinian texts, for instance. For you the great hope is to escape the bonds of the physical world and merge with the Source, the immortal One, from which the physical world and our incarnation within it represent distance. This distance was bridged by Jesus, the manifestation of the Source in flesh, who, in your reading of his teachings, teaches us how to unify with the Source once again. Is that a fair (albeit low-resolution) reading of your sort of Big Picture theology/philosophy?

DandelionSoul wrote: ↑Wed Jun 30, 2021 4:30 am

Ashvin wrote: We actually come closer to this sort of experience when we are dreaming. Various things manifest in our dreams and they all have immense meaning to us, but we do not ask why they are popping up or how we came to encounter them in the first place.

We take the dream world and its underlying logic as given, but we do -- or at least I do -- frequently find myself interrogating situations according to the dream logic itself, drawing on background knowledge that, as the dream-character, I apparently have, in order to make good decisions within the dream. It's the mind of the dream character that divides up the dream world and allows it to appear as a world at all.

Well these things get tricky since we only reflect on the dream later and, in our attempts to remember it, we can easily insert patterns of thought which we normally have in waking consciousness. BK discusses this some when he speaks about dreams as well. I am not saying we can never attain to higher consciousness of dream-life, and I think I would disagree with BK on what the essence of dreaming is, but until that happens it seems there is a lot of intermingling of waking thinking when we try to "remember" what or how the dream-character was thinking.

DS wrote:

Ashvin wrote: How are we differentiating "non-life" from "life" here?

Life is self-generated, self-organized conatus, a localized, self-motivated struggle against entropy, an integrally complex homeostasis reflecting, modeling, and integrating the environment from which it’s inseparable -- these are ways of saying the same thing, which is ultimately just to describe the process of living.

How are we determining the timeline of when humans came into the scene? (clearly that is the mainstream physicalist view, but I think we agree that we do not need to accept physicalist conclusions for empirical data re: evolution of outer living forms).

This question tells me that you already know what I mean by "life"; you phrased it as "outer living forms." To answer the question itself, I don’t think we need to assume time has some independent existence for us to posit its dependent existence prior to us being here to experience it. Time depends, sure, but it doesn’t depend on humans. I think to make an argument that it does risks flying closer to solipsism than either of us wants to go.

If what you mean by "life" is also what I meant by "outer living forms", then we are definitely in major disagreement about the meaning of "life". I take the essence of life to be interior qualities of experience, not the outer quantitative forms we perceive. That is also part of the reason I conclude all is life - there is nothing in existence which is not alive according to me. This assertion only becomes a problem if we assume some sort of naïve realism about the outer forms we perceive.

Like you have no problem saying all animals Think, I have no problem flying close to solipsism

I would say the nature of Time is the phenomenal appearance of fragmented experience-states which are qualitatively related to each other. The way those states are related to each other is given meaning by human perception-cognition. So, in that sense, the experience of time is dependent on human perspective. Of course that is a crude summary of a very deep topic. But I think we should note that our experience of time can and does change in various circumstances, as in the dreaming state we discussed before. That is also shown by Einstein's theory of GR for people moving at different velocities. These things are an inexplicable curiosity for the materialist and even for some idealists, but we should see how the experience of time is deeply tied into our perspective and knowledge. Even at low resolution it should become evident that we cannot simply project back current experience of time and determine when human beings "came into existence" to experience some pre-existing entity of time.

DS wrote:

Ashvin wrote: What if we were to develop AI machines which looked exactly like "life in process" and therefore "purpose carried out" - would those machines be acting with purpose-intent?

I don't know, but as these would be machines engineered and programmed to behave in particular ways rather than actual life in process, it's very difficult for me to imagine that they would be. We can make computers do some pretty incredible things, but I don't think "live" is one of them. My sense is that life cannot be manufactured or engineered

It's interesting, though, that you felt the need to qualify "machines" with "AI," as opposed to some other sort of machine, some unintelligent kind. I would, too, if I were asking that question, because I see all life as intelligent. It can't be otherwise (within my view), because intelligence is inseparable from the idea that its actions are purposeful, because intelligence is most basically the capacity to discern meaning in the service of purpose; I don't see any fundamental difference between what I've called "living consciousness" and "intelligence."

Ashvin wrote: If we are going to use the "who do I believe, you or my lying eyes?" argument, then I think we need to be clear we are implicitly assuming naïve realism - whatever it looks like to us is what it actually is in essence. Of course, that view simply cannot be reconciled with idealism or our own experience of the world.

I was being a touch poetical, though now you’ve gone and gotten that Eagles song stuck in my head. I agree with you here, though. I don’t know that a thoroughgoing naive realism is even coherent: to see at all is already to interpret. They are inseparable. Something about meaning as a fundamental component of all experience? In any case, replace “eyes” with “experience” if you like.

Ashvin wrote: Now if you mean "looks like" as in, after reasoning through everything you know about living process, i.e. looks like to your informed thought, that is much less of a problem. But I want to be clear that I am not arguing animal instinctive behavior (or early human infant behavior) is actually a mechanical process like the copier in my office or something, so it should definitely look alive and dynamic to our perception-thought, but I don't see why looking alive and dynamic necessary entails it is purposeful-intentional.

Oh, I’m not arguing that it does: already we can manufacture shockingly verisimilar simulations of life. Nevertheless, granting that things that aren’t alive can still look alive, we still have to grapple with what is alive and what it means to be alive.

I am sensing a circular argument going on here - you are saying what is living has purpose-intent and you know that because it looks to your "experience" as that which acts with purpose-intent. What does acting with purpose-intent mean? It means the being in question is alive. Then I ask if machines which produce "shockingly verisimilar simulations of life" also have purpose-intent, you respond that you don't know because they might not be alive. So my next question is, how do you know anything is alive rather than one of those simulations of life?

DS wrote:

Ashvin wrote: And that is the key issue here - whether something was actually born in and through humans which sets us apart from the mere "implicit" potential of purpose-intent that was previously yearning in Nature to be freed.

For sure, something was -- not purpose, but the capacity to witness purpose, to make explicit the implicit through concepts and symbols (art, myth, music, dance, etc.), and through this, to feed back into the web of purpose, generate our own novel purposes as every new creature does, and let those purposes generate new meanings.

And here a clarification is in order: implicit is not potential. Implicit is actual-but-unspoken. Implicit things are not conceptually or symbolically represented, but they are still present. So, for example, suppose I call into work with a stomach bug. Implicit in, “I can’t come in; I have a stomach bug” are the details of the symptoms of the stomach bug, which it would be distasteful to name explicitly. So they’re left implicit, but very much present.

Ashvin wrote: such as where the process of developing purposeful agency is now taking us after it is has been partially freed from Nature through us but is by no means totally free or complete.

I have no idea what you mean by “freed from Nature.” Would you elaborate?

Okay, I’m gonna end this post here since it’s already absurdly long and I’ll respond to the discussion between you and Santeri as I can.

I guess its possible I dug my heels too far in here, because I do not hold there is a world without any purpose, then human beings pop up, and now there is suddenly purpose in the world. We can imagine all of these things existing on a gradient and the point remains - humans (not just any humans but relatively recent humans) have effected a qualitative transformation in the sort of purpose Nature can realize in her upward strivings (back towards the spiritual realm from which she descended). That transformation is intimately linked to self-reflective Thinking and knowledge. Her upward strivings are freed from mere instincts which revolve cyclically and, through thinking humanity, can spiral upwards towards her most perfect and complete essence.

AshvinP wrote: ↑Thu Jul 01, 2021 4:24 am

Sorry for the empty quote box, but I suspect I'd been writing my last (short) post as you were writing yours and I wanted to draw your attention to it in case you'd overlooked it, and I figured that way you'd get a notification.