I push phenomenology pretty hard because it is the open court where all issues find their final arguments. Only "general" approaches can be comprehensive, and if it not comprehensive, it fails at the outset.Papus79 wrote
I think we're pretty close to winding down on this and figuring out where I think we'd at least 'agree to disagree' as we gather information. The only reason my response is probably of equal length is that I felt like there were still some miscommunications or misframings, and I could be misunderstanding some of the things said about phenomenology but I'm starting to think that will be cleared up better by reading it myself, ie. I think our general approaches might be a bit too different from one another to make arguments that really connect in either direction or which expose anything new or interesting:
But material substance doesn't have properties. It is merely this vacuous presupposition. The worst kind of metaphysics. Nor is the world all idea, the worst kind of reductionism. The world is what is present, simply "there". The epoche delivers this from mundanity.The way I go at ‘material substance’ – we have no clue what it actually is but we do know what it means to us and what important properties it has. Its existence and shape are non-cognitive in nature (not fungible to moods or ideas, some fringe phenomena related to that but for the most part its unmovable). People using the same sensory apparatus experience the same things even if we’re not clear on the details of whether everyone’s red or taste of coffee is the same. The way the contents behave overwhelmingly suggest that it’s a trans-subjective data set.
No lights on, no anything, really. Why is there something rather than nothing? Only one answer to this, I think: value, meaning. The presence of value/meaning in the world changes everything.It sounds like this track of thinking takes a different fork than I’m on and I suppose that’s okay – there’s a lot of knowledge out there and people have reasons to pursue different things. I don’t worry about ‘mental substance’ so much as I think about it from the paradox that the hard problem brings up – ie. that if we go with the idea of what the world looks like from a naïve physicalist perspective, there’s no reason for there to be ‘lights’ on anywhere. Physicalism can chase down neural correlates of consciousness but causation’s a different story (also you express skepticism that there can even be such a thing as ‘correlation’ here – I’d say run that past a neuroscientist if you know any). The only way I think you really get sufficient causation for ‘I’ experiences is if they’re something that the universe does as a rule and that there’s a tendency to dock it in relationships such as we experience. What’s tricky is to figure out how ‘I’ experiences coevolve with transsubjective data sets like ‘matter’, which they clearly do. Can you see a bit better now why the framing of Landry’s philosophy would catch my interest?
Physicalism is fine as a term that simply refers to empirical reality. My cup is a physical thing, period. But as an ontology, it has no place.
I do respect evolution, but not here. Remove the "coevolve" from what is tricky, and then you find "trans subjective data like matter" to be the tricky part. But "matter" is a nonsense term at the level of basic questions. As for data, this is construed apart from such things.
But bringing up this issue makes it difficult to bring this discussion to a close, as you mentioned.Let me ask you then – what determines internal governance philosophies of nations? It was religion in most cases but that’s gone out the window over the past few centuries. Is it financial predation of all against all? This is what people would at least consider ‘late capitalism’ to be. If there’s no ground, no orchestrating narratives, and people know that the way to win is to get your genes into the next generation by any means – then we’ll become a culture where truth is never told, where education is a means for you to mangle other kid’s opportunities for your own kids to beat their kids, it gets thoroughly dystopian. Add exponential technologies that bring the cost of species-extinction events lower and perhaps to smaller groups of people with less money – we’re going to have to work very hard as a species it seems to survive the next couple centuries, unless of course we all agree collectively that it doesn’t matter.
I have argued many times that our political affairs are extensions of our ethical affairs, and these are matters "of parts". The narrative, the dramatic unfoldings in our world are ontological entanglements revealed by basic analysis: I should not harm others. Why? I claim it is because there is the metaethical good and bad. This is a foundational question for me. First philosophy is not about what things are, or how, or any other than the ethical why.
Politics has to be grounded. Consider desert, rights, responsibility, guilt and innocence, and the rest of the ideas that come into play: Do these make sense at all? Financial predation, e.g., is an ethical construction with "predation" at the front of it. Should one be a predator at all? How are victims protected in ethical arguments? These inevitably move to foundations, and here it is the presence of pain and pleasure, suffering and bliss and all contained therein. This is the "that which is in the fabric of things" that literally defines ethical possibility. No pain, joy and the rest, no ethics. Then there is distribution, which leads to entanglements that have to do with who has what in terms of advantages and deficits, and so on. But note: these entanglements have already been analyzed and the ethical essence identified. The rest, the general embeddedness socially, economically, gifts of talents or the lack thereof, and so on, these are impositions upon the ethical, facts that are ethically arbitrary, like being born in the US rather than Mexico. Facts are ethically arbitrary; only the palpable joys and sufferings are "ethical" and this turns to the metaethical: what is the Good? The ethically Bad? (This opens a field of discussion. Only if you're interested.)
So, if you are looking for a description of the ethical foundations of the world that provide a basis for our ethical concerns and inquiries, I think it is about this above. Desert, for example, calls for one to be responsible for what one does and is. Does Einstein deserve all the glory? Do I deserve to be treated more decently because I was born a few miles to the north of a certain border? This is what I mean by facts being ethically arbitrary, and it is the source of genuie insight, for we allow such facts to place significantly in ethical arguments, and they become categorial errors, for geography is not ethics. We make it ethics through pragmatic considerations.
It is claimed that geography matters. Then how? It matters because of entanglements, practical decisions reify into ethics as laws, like laws about borders that separate racially, culturally, and otherwise in terms of social identity. These are practical matters purely. Ones that rest on other practical entangled practical matters, like a person's feeling of being threatened by outsiders or by these outsiders' "predatory" intent, and so on. So there are good reasons why laws exist, but these reasons are driven away from foundational ethical actualities, the palpable experiences of standing in the burning sun waiting for the border guards to turn their backs, the lack of food and security at home, and the rest.
To cut to the chase, the metaethical "Good and the Bad" are embedded in a world's impositions of pragmatically constructed entanglements. This is the world at the level of basic questions. There are questions begged here, but this is only if you want to talk about metaethics.
Don't know how symbol sets work here. But I can't imagine mysticism being about inferring things about animals' private worlds. Nor is it about doing anything. As I review in my head some of the things that express what this is, I think of Rudolf Otto, Meister Eckhart, Pseudo Dionysius the Areopogite, the Abhidhamma of the Pali Canon, there's Mahayana's Prajnaparamita (with commentary); I mean, mysticism throughout the ages, across cultures, and while it is found in many systems of metaphysics, its essence comes across as purely revelatory. It certainly does seem this is not available to all. Heidegger, who is extremely important for describing mysticism, giving, if you will, a profile of what the mystical event would be, was no mystic. Not even a moral person, really.hat I was getting at isn’t kabbalah or kabbalistic symbols, it’s a general observation that holds in a wider sense. I forget the exact terminology for the mirror subjective process of empiricism, ie. when people try scrutinizing subjective content on its own terms, one might use symbol sets to get a result but then the goal is strip those symbols back out to see what it is you’re getting. Something like John Michael Geer talking about how someone actually can project their ‘I’ experience into a bird or wolf, people talking about ‘spirit flight’, a lot of this – to my mind – smacks of jumping domains. It’s one thing for people to say ‘that’s a mystical system’ if one is talking about spheres of the tree of life or symbolic places within a structure defined by a doctrine, it’s not applicable IMHO to specific kinds of first-person experiences that violate our sense of stuck binding to our own brains (and to reiterate because I still don’t think I expunged the likelihood for misunderstanding the above sufficiently – I’m talking about having consciousness do things you wouldn’t have thought it could do, not ‘astral planes’, ‘paths of wisdom’, or anything specific tradition oriented).
I omitted the rest below because it was about organization-specific beliefs and constructs, that wasn’t what I was bringing up.
There is an uncanny profoundity in the standing-in-the-openness of being in the world by standing apart from the knowledge claims implicitly attending perception that is not reducible. Geworfenheit, or, "throwness" it has been called, that shock of being alienated from the familiarity of the world as a world. Rug pulled out from beneath all things, and there's no going back. An existential disillusionment where one's identity and purpose are undermined entirely.
What I am saying is that phenomenology takes what you just said and makes it a central theme in inquiry. It takes the matter where Darwinists never could imagine, for they do not think at the level of basic questions. Not that they are wrong at all; it just not their field. talk about gene pools and future generations having success in reproduction and survival: I do think about these things, and I think it clear that evolution explains nothing interms of the qualitative nature of consciousness. Consciousness is essentially freedom, but freedom is not a tool, like a grasping hand. Then take emotions ,and appetites: these do direct behavior, but an emotion does not "fit" the task, as if it were simply a directional function of an organism. It is a presence that has no reductive counterpart, something that simply comes into Being, this rage, love, urge, and so forth; and it happens to be good for reproduction and survival. I think this is a very important point, given all the confidence out there in the explanatory powers of evolutionary theory. It explains nothing in terms of qualitative presence.You’re pretty much alienated from the world already the moment you 1) don’t wake up in the morning wondering how many social status points you can rack up today 2) See something true or deep that someone with likely little or no social status is saying that you find interesting and people are looking at you funny like ‘Hello – this guy can’t help you climb social hierarchies’. The moment you start reading books that aren’t strictly speaking popular or listening to music that isn’t strictly speaking popular, if you start engaging with anything that isn’t strictly a social climbing tool or piece of string to put in a nest then it’s a break away, really a sort of failure mode in terms of Darwinian fitness, but on the reverse it’s a desire to actually live in your own integrity and do what works for you even if doing so means that your genes don’t make the next generation and even if you have to admit to yourself that being true to yourself is how animals fail to make it into future generations.
I disagree about Darwinian fitness points. Look at what lies before you, the landscape you speak of. Take suffering. Very useful for evolution, no doubt, but suffering is only there because it was, prior to phenotypic selection, a possibility of phenotypical types built into genotypical codes. Imagine you had a book that could lay out, describe, all phenotypical possibilities of a human genome's almost infinite number of combinatory effects. It would be clear what they are, but there is still the begged question hovering over: What are THESE the possibilities? This struggle we are in has, at the level of basic questions, nothing to do with Darwinian fitness.Average people have to do what they have to do to get Darwinian fitness points, social status points, climb social hierarchies, beat other people in competition, and set their kids up to do the same. That’s something about being ‘human’ that’s a permanent part of the landscape. ‘Enlightenment’ in that context is a complex set of directions on how to fail at that game – meaning they’d be out of their minds to have any interest in spirituality or philosophy whatsoever unless it’s a social structure – like a religion – where they can show up, socially network, get social status points, and incidentally get little drips of philosophy inserted with that without getting in the way of doing what they need to do.
The real danger here IMHO is that there has to be adults curating these structures, ie. so they can do what they have to do in a sustainable (species continues) way rather than having all of the arms races and multipolar traps take us into extinction and – if the rules of their game go that way – they can’t do a thing about it because they’re stuck on the inside.
In that sense I see why intellectuals, autists, LGBT, and other ‘odd-bods’ who aren’t in that perpetual race condition actually have a group or lineage selection value, ie. they help keep the genetic arms races from becoming pure chaos by doing what they can to tame the rules by which those games are played.
What has not occurred with you is the Copernican Revolution. Kant, that is. His Critique of Pure Reason is, alas, essential. Talk about genetics is really out the window.
Mystical systems" is oxymoronic.I’ll forget about my original question here and at least touch on that last comment – I think with respect to metaphysics, and as much mystical systems, Ptolemaic epicycles are what gets boring and useless and the goal is to then take as much of a reductive approach as possible to bring them down or pull them in so that they become things of much more practical use. That said though – massive systems of Ptolemaic epicycles are what happens when a search space can’t be defined well and so it’s an attempt to at least throw ‘something’ out there in order to start mapping it, then agree/disagree over the stability of contents, then when that starts going well see if there are at least stable geometries one can discuss. From there you’re that much closer to taking something that was almost impossible to do anything with but it’s existence was constantly hinted at by experience over to being something more like ‘Yeah – I just bought a laptop last week, isn’t it amazing how many transistors they can fit on a chip?’.
If a category actually has its own proper integrity it withstands scrutiny and can be cleaned up / reified down to something much more common. Admittedly that may not be a way of proving that something isn’t real on the converse (truly complex systems won’t yield to human intelligence very easily – possibly ever) but you can at least cement something into common usage once it’s been cooked down to a practical level, and I think we need lenses that we can use to say something about the relationship between consciousness and what people for practical purposes call ‘matter’.
Your thoughts about the Ptolemaic speculation is arbitrary.
The "search space" is very well defined; all that is required is the commitment to what is present, in the world, familiar, yet on examination, without foundation. Once this is seen, then one simply follows the breadcrumbs as they appear. Stable geometries? How about the examination of judgment qua judgment? Or, the essence of ethics and art? Or, temporal structure of truth?
'Matter' IS a practical term, as are all terms. But then, second degree burns are not practical terms, but are existential presences. This moves to ethics: what IS the Good? The Bad? Evolution is of no avail; see above. Wittgenstein opens the door in his Lecture on Ethics (online).
The carving is done at a more basic level. The very opposite of murky. We are not in the "cosmos" any more, and the competing theories are not those of science. We are in an analysis of language and the world and the way conscious thought is structured vis a vis the world. Sorry, but Kant does follow this around. Not that we are all transcendentalist idealists, but he makes the case that we live in an empirical reality, a distinction which science ignores, because it is not interested, and of which it is entirely out to lunch, just as it is about basket weaving or ballet. Physicists know nothing nor care nothing about philosophy.Okay, and this actually hits on my problem with this sort of philosophy – there’s an election to provisionally ignore certain things in certain contexts at certain times to focus on a different context and while my issue isn’t with that move by itsef one has to be very careful with how they carve the world up by that technique. You can take ten apples, put six to one side and four to the other, and come up with profound (even persuasive) cosmic reasons for that division is very easily. When you’re grappling with very murky and abstract territory such seemingly arbitrary divisions of content are forgivable because it’s an experimentation in dividing maps where one is trying to build the system to do the inspection to then find the geometries to then reify what can be reified into something useful.
I’m trying to pick my frames at this point by relationships that seem like they’re knock-on solid (ie. not doing kabbalah much anymore) and perhaps I’m also trying to avoid needing to force category splits to say ‘everything to the left I’m not looking at until I figure out everything to the right in its own distinct context’ since those are really just provisional and if I can stay focused on the landscape of interest it doesn’t seem necessary. Framing is a big challenge and while I’m sure there’s some useful stuff getting considered here I just don’t get the impression that it really maps onto my own concerns as presented. I may very well take a shot at reading Husserl and Heidegger in the next few years but I’m probably going to pay most attention to things that actually deal with the map that I have in front of me. At the moment, after I read Landry, I’m really going to get on myself to complete Sir Roger Penrose’s Road to Reality because I do think there’s a lot that’s important in mathematical physics.
Penrose, a physicist. Ask him how it is that anything our there gets in here, pointing to my head. Ask him how epistemology is at all possible. Ask him what a force is, and you will find he has nothing to say, not because he is ill prepared but because physicists do not care at all about this kind of thing, and if they did, they would be thinking in proximity of phenomenology.
But you argue beyond the pale of the discussion. If I say the Nasdeq Composite is not important here, would you say it is important to investors? It is simply the case that it has no bearing Here.It gets important if someone who has a philosophy contingent on the world being six thousand or one hundred thousand years old. These are the more obvious angles of course, there are other ideas that can be falsified.
Well, it really isn't like this. You think as if there is nothing qualitatively different in the claims made by Husserl and others. But there is. And to see this one has to read it. It is not the empirical, but the structure of the empirical that is at issue. How to get to this? One must ask philosophical questions, and these are questions about what is presupposed by empiricism. Just look at logic, e.g. Logic is not empirical (though, then, there is that Quine paper Two Dogmas), but Kant produced a thesis that to this day is a challenge that remains unrefuted; ignored, after a hundred years of center stage, but not refuted. Criticized endlessly, imperfectly conceived, but never refuted.Things which are considered distinctly untestable tend to just be things that we don’t feel like we can get our fingernails under in the sense of producing them on demand or how to split certain problems we see at the joints that seem to be one big abstract mess (part of my job is solving problems like that). There are other weird things too, like strong synchronicity and mystical experiences often rolled up rather tightly, where there clearly something there but it’s really f’ing elusive. Philosophy of science and it’s speculation IMHO seem to be mostly about guiding hypothesis as well as working on organizing stories for the scientific endeavor, what it’s doing, what it should be paying more attention to or what it’s already paid too much attention to.
Maybe my bold thought here – we’re dealing with ‘one’ reality and whether its science, philosophy, mysticism (at least done in a disciplined rather than ‘brain falling out’ way), are just different ways at probing the same thing from different directions. This is again part of why I don’t think any of these should be in the discard heap relative to the others or why any one of these shouldn’t be informed by the other two where the information seems solid.
We are following in the tradition set forth by Kant, the father of phenomenology, as well as the father of positivism. To begin to get there, one has to take that question about how something put there gets in here seriously. You should notice that as irritating as this sits with common sense, there is no answer to this. Epistemology becomes impossible. Then phenomenology steps forward.
Mysticism is what lies before one when apophatic philosophy runs its course.
As I see it, there is only one question: does a person really want to know the truth at the level of basic questions? Nothing else.You also have to look at people like us, ie. who can have a conversation about something other than literal bible or atheism, or who don’t decide that an idea is relevant or irrelevant as a social power abstraction based on how many people believe it and accordingly whether it’s a worthwhile social hierarchy to climb. To that end, actually caring about these things on their own terms rather than a way to get things seems incredibly rare.
I’m not saying we shouldn’t be doing what we’re doing, just that if the way the world works looks nothing like us or where we even tend to get ourselves in trouble by not thinking on other people’s wavelength – there’s a reason.
No, that's not it. It is much simpler that this. I said it before: talking about metal activity issuing from a brain is easy. Just observe some surgical procedure that shows this. But talk about a physical brain issuing from mental activity, now THAT is difficult. After all, how is it that you can at all confirm a physical brain? Such confirmation BEGINS in thought, i.e., mental activity, and remains in thought unless you can say how it gets OUT of thought.I don’t know that this last bit is quite right. You have to be assuming that the thing under inspection is something like the furthest boundary that we can see in some direction and that we’d have to be on the other side of that boundary in order to survey it. To even take that stance on consciousness though is assuming a framing even more specific than saying that the universe rests on consciousness, it suggests that consciousness has a one-sided relationship from outside the universe and that it can only be observed and understood from outside the universe as well. I’m not sold that this is the case, particularly with just how tightly intertwined brain and mind seem to be (it at least suggests that mind has causal or top-down power over body – which would be difficult to develop in a situation where they’re somehow both just riding along in parallel with no causal contact).
So there is a brain, and there is this brain in my thoughts. How does it get there?
Certainly not discarding the scientific method! that would be discarding thought itself. No, not knock down solid. You carry in your thinking a recalcitrant trust in these things. Needs philosophical review. I can't give you Kant's Copernican revolution. It has to be read.I think we’d really need to break down the ‘natural attitude’ here because if I read it the way it’s been stated through this thread, would could be forgiven for thinking that Husserl et al are discarding the scientific method more because they find it restrictive than anything else. I can’t ignore facts on the ground or ‘natural attitude’ trappings because it’s really the only thing we have that’s anywhere close to being knock-on solid and it keeps us away from having the ‘garbage-in-garbage-out’ formula spin in place forever. It’s rule sets that don’t bend or waver at the macro level regardless of who’s looking at them. At the very worst – to look at a 13 billion year old universe, 4.5 billion year old planet, and a bit over 1 billion years of biological life, one could flip context by taking about the eternal now or some other relationship (I’m going to be as bold as to say) that inverts context, it can invert or pivot context but it won’t shatter structure, meaning Darwinian evolution won’t be overthrown and current models of physics will only be recontextualized, be proven wrong in small ways, sourced by yet not understood rule sets, etc.. The only valid arguments against persistently observed, tested, and confirmed scientific facts is that the assumed context they’re embedded in could be wrong, and in a lot of cases I would assume this is the case because we don’t have the tool kits to see past our current limits in a way that ties back to them (and when we hit those layers I’m sure many of our current assumptions will look sophomoric). Completely discarding science as something ‘non-philosophic’ sounds like a great way to make all kinds of mistakes that don’t need to be made.
I say it's the be all and end all because it is open ended and it addresses things at the most basic level. Analytic philosophy does not. Ask, for example, an analytic epistemologist how it is that in the traditional analysis of knowledge, one can affirm P at all. S knows P; but what is P? Merely assumed. countless paper on t he Gettier problems (you might want to look this up, just for fun), yet P is NOT a basic term. It is a thing of parts. Only Phenomenology's hermeneutical approach takes the pressure off of affirming P.I can’t comment one way or the other on that, just to say that I haven’t seen anything in the conversation that suggests that it’s making contact with reality in any of the ways that I’m interested in understanding. To say that I guess I’m also saying that I don’t get the assertion that phenomenology is the be-all-end-all. I’ve seen a lot of suggestion to that effect but very little persuasive (and I’m really more out to learn something than win – which makes that seem like something of a loss).
Persuasion only comes with reading. Otherwise, it is like convincing someone literally speak a foreign language. One has to be weaned off everyday thinking.
It is not that taxes are unimportant. It is that here, they are irrelevant. Don't see why this is a problem. I do my taxes, then get back to reading Heidegger. I eat lunch, too.One snaps out of meditation and – at least here in the US – taxes are due on April 15th, one can file extensions if they miss their filing but if they miss them enough unfriendly encounters with a rather large bureaucracy ensue. This is my problem with what’s being stated above – the ‘mundane’ isn’t in the least trivial, nor is it fungible, and I don’t see what’s gained by pretending that it is or that it’s completely disconnected from ‘actual’ reality. At the very worst it has to be a particular layer of abstraction and an extremely riveting/compelling one at that.
If I’ve learned anything in my life, repeatedly, its that you ignore or minimize the mundane at your peril and that any system of thought you come up with really has to accurately account for every bit of it and predict it going forward in an accurate manner.
Other people's word games is just a pejorative way of referring to things you are not inclined to read. Can't read everything, of course, but if you are looking for the most powerful body of thinking that penetrates into the foundations of the human reality, then phenomenology is for you. You can't be dismissive because you think it actually might be convincing, and you would a pawn in someone else's game. Was Heidegger a "pawn" of Kierkegaard's? Einstein a pawn of Maxwell?You’re really making me wonder if I might be one of the only people alive who isn’t living on the back of other people’s word games. I have a couple rather stable baskets of a) gruelingly persistent physical and social realities, b) mystical experiences where goddess has winked at me and even played with me like a little brother (as well as loads of sychronicities, entity encounters, etc.). From that combination I’m not going to find eliminative materialism persuasive, nor the number of Phd’s the author has, nor how stately their beard is nor how sharp they look in a pressed suit. I’m also quite well aware that if someone jumps off a building thinking they can fly they’ll be quite dead at the bottom, and any form of new age spirituality that attempts to ‘break’ reality keeps running people into being broken by it instead. I do my best by not getting hypnotized by personality nor the loftiness of names. The soundness of the ideas and how well they match actual observations on the ground is what tells me whether there’s more worth pursuing or whether it’s someone else pursuing their own truth and that I should leave them to it.
Not for everyone, I suppose.TBH I’ve spent a fair amount of time with meditation, heck I went through Israel Regardie’s One Year Manual and decided to stretch it out to 18 months (1 ½ per step) thinking it would assure better results – not quite convinced. For me the strongest stuff is self-inquiry and reflection. It’s scrutinizing my own beliefs, my feelings, situations I’m in and how I react, scrutinizing the behavior of other people, institutions, public figures, etc., and additionally it’s pulling in as many coherent (even if abstract) maps as I can to see where I think they join to form congruent connections. When it comes to meditation it seems, for me at least, that its best served as a focus on an object or symbol set, which is why I’d rather do something like Middle Pillar or William G Gray’s triple cipher any day of the week than do a complete emptying meditation – I can do it, just that I don’t see much benefit or gain other than relaxation from the later and when Yuval Noah Harari talks about doing those sorts of meditations for two hours per day or Donald Hoffman talks about doing them for three hours per day – it’s tough for me to relate.
Platonist? You mean a kind of rational realism? But what has this to do with being human, aside from the rational structure of judgment? And how does the structure of thought enter into things outside of thought? Is there truth "out there" where there are no minds? Are propositions out there?I only agree here to a point. Nima Arkani-Hamed’s amplitouhedron? Mathematical physics seems to be the thing that’s most likely to make the journey back around behind us and can even pierce the veil of spacetime. My own intuition is that it will continue to reveal more unusual things (like Lie groups) and as we come to understand those structures better we might actually see some of the mathematics that puts consciousness provisionally inside skulls as consciousness seems very much like living mathematics. I’m really trying to say that I’m pretty sure the ‘physical’ world, if one looks deep enough into it and starts getting at the places where it fades into something more Platonist (in Penrose terms). If it weren’t joined in some deep manner like this I’d have a heck of a time keying this sentence. I take it to be that way just as much if it turned out that the universe we live in is fundamentally idealist – it would just have to keep its rules congruent at higher and deeper levels to what we see at ground level.
It's a colorful way to look at what is cosmic, but no, I am not saying that. I'm saying the point is to unclutter thought, so that the opacity of one's reading does not fill the horizon of interpretation; if, that is, the desire is to get at something important. The construction of resources that can fill conversation is a virtue, I would say. But not here.Are you suggesting here that there’s such a thing as cosmic ‘meaning’? As far as I can tell the trouble we get into is that meaning is short-range, local, contextual, and we fall down when we’re looking for the whole of human existence to have meaning. This is part of where I take the alchemical story, like the Azoth of Basel Valentine, or the Masonic Great Work, with a pinch of salt – ie. they’re lovely stories, and to some degree you can see the alchemical process in the transformations people go through, but there’s so much chaos in the frame and so much ‘x happened because physics allows it’ that I’m hard pressed to consider any of these stories congruent. Really, if you want some insight into why I’m as skeptical as I am of head-first philosophy, it’s because it seems as though the only thing I’ve found that hasn’t broken under stress is physics. Really physics, and the necessities it applies on human life, seem to break just about everything else. That, IMHO, makes them more real or salient than the things they reliably break.
Then you sound like a perfect candidate for radicalizing your interpretative resources. Phenomenology, I say, awaits.I feel like a few things are wedged together. I identify as ‘me’, I identify as the guy whose been looking out of these eyes since birth. There’s a certain flavor to my energy. There’s a certain framing of it that’s still on some version of the same trajectory from childhood. I do find it laughable (really rather sad though) if as many people can’t imagine themselves outside a career role, on one level I’d say ‘must be nice – I can’t imagine a life with that much professional stability’, I didn’t have that luck, but then I realize that when automation, or Covid business changes, or anything else hit these people – they’re rent/broken. Their realities fall down. That’s where I’m glad that I didn’t have that stability if it would have meant getting tricked into thinking that I were x profession (in my own case I’d doubt it – the lights are on a bit too bright upstairs).
What falls down? How so? It doesn't fall down. Deepities rarely register with Dennett's and the analytic ilk. These are too infatuated by philosophical puzzles to think in terms of deepities. One has to forget terms like "cosmos". Good for astronomers, bad for philosophy.Profound meant in the context of broad-reaching projection. I think of what Dennett said about ‘deepities’, where someone can make a brief statement that sounds axiomatic, in a gentler sense it may hold true in a specific relevant range but when stated in a monolithic manner as if the cosmos revolves around it – that’s where it falls down.