lorenzop wrote: ↑Thu Feb 17, 2022 6:16 pm
Ashwin,
It would be helpful if you could give an example of a 'meaning' as a 'scientific conceptual form' you mention above . . . maybe you are using the word 'meaning' in a different manner. I suggest this because science is a relatively crisp body of knowledge.
I mean scientific worldview, along with other worldviews, are themselves "conceptual form". Put another way, they are objects we can observe, study, and connect together through meaningful principles just like any other object in the world. One of the biggest issues with "critical idealism" is that it puts the limited human ego at the very top perspective on the world content. Everything else is considered to be contained within its own perspective as thought-marbles. This is evident in materialistic and mystical worldviews especially. But also the critical idealist view.
The philosophical reason this happens is because our world of inner experience and meaning is considered "subjective" and naively real. The analytic idealists have no problem rejecting naive realism of outer perceptions, but then adopt a naive realism of inner perceptions. We are always tempted to consider our perceptions of inner experiences as the totality of the meaningful activity which led to them, rather than the very end product. When we see a rock outside, we say that is the very end result, outer surface, of ideational activity of "MAL" (which is easily reasoned out and confirmed by modern science). But when we perceive our thought-forms, we feel those are 'things-in-themselves'.
We forget that there is this entire history to our own thoughts and we are only perceiving the end result. Naturally, if we confuse the end result for the totality of meaning of our "thoughts", we have no motivation to try and trace back the 'scars' to the entire flow of activity which resulted in the thought-perception. This is like someone seeing splashes of water on the pavement and assuming the splashes explain the entire nature of water and its activity, forgetting that it precipitated from the atmosphere and flowed through oceans, rivers, lakes, pipes, and a hose to result in those water splashes.
It is really a result of egoic greed and pride (which is entirely subconscious). We want our inner experiences, our thought-marbles, all to ourselves and we want them to be the last word on what can be known. "If I can't overcome my knowing limits, no one else can either. It must be a hard limit of Reality itself." I'm sorry, but Eugene is prime representative of this view, as once again reflected in his last comment. He simply refuses to consider the possibility that his own thought-marbles about spirituality are not the last word and his own limits are not the limits of the world. We are all constantly tempted by this egoic force and the only way to mitigate it is to first recognize it really exists within us (this is the spirit of repentance). It is no coincidence the people who have the hardest time with this also are uneasy about Christian notions of sin, guilt, and repentance.
When that egoic assumption is resisted, it's easy to see how science points us directly towards our inner meaningful activity. When meaning is not arbitrarily excluded from the "real" world content, we can study its various manifestations and transformations in an objective and verifiable way. Our inner world is just as lawful and structured as the physical world we perceive as outer. In fact, depth psychology and cognitive science shows that we structure the outer world
through our ideational activity, which is not only limited to our own egoic perspective. This only stands to Reason and the structure of this inner world is what we call Logic.
The meaning we experience in outer and inner forms precipitates from much more richly meaningful activity. Again, it is the intellectual ego which declares its own localized meaning to be more structured and "real" than the meaning which fashioned the entire Cosmic order we perceive in the heavens above and the various kingdoms of Earth. There simply is no logical warrant for that assumption and it runs into all sorts of hard problems, because it has reduced Cosmic meaning to mineralized thought-marbles, like the materialist reduces it to mineralized particles, and then tries to reconstruct the Cosmic order from those marbles. When it can't, it declares Cosmic meaning to be non-existent or forever beyond the capacity of human reason. This conveniently projects our current cognitive limits onto Reality and absolves of us our guilt for refusing to save the appearances of Nature.