I think your essay (and I've used the video here as a springboard to reading the piece and its comment-spurred follow-up on your blog) is clear, compelling, and even brilliant. Some of the language is a little fanciful and almost poetic at times, but that's fine in my book. I like the juxtaposition of the rhapsodic and the rigorous. And I do find your argument here to be about as rigorous as any others I've read or heard. That said, I have to acknowledge that I'm coming at this from a perspective that's already largely aligned with what you're arguing for here, and even then I didn't get there via strictly logical considerations, so I really can't say whether I'd find this argument persuasive if I were a convinced physicalist. To unpack that a bit, I think it's good to adduce strong, sound arguments such as yours against physicalism. But I also suspect it's about as likely to prove effective as strong, sound arguments against (or for) religion tend to do; which is to say, it might not be likely to convince anyone who's not already teetering precariously on the fence anyway. The reason I say this is that I think many arguments against physicalism tend to be perceived or interpreted by physicalists as 1) arguing for anti-realism, and 2) at the very least, opening the door to theism**, which, of course, the materialist/physicalist paradigm's ascendency over the past several centuries is a poignant reaction against. And not all of the baggage complicating these arguments is historical and paradigmatic: I believe that the premise of physicalism supports a deep psychological need some people have to see that death equals the end of experience and thus the end of suffering. And it's not hard to see how this assumption or belief might be even more influential if the individual was brought up in a religion that included an eschatology of eternal torment for non-believers, etc. Clearly, the end of all experience is a better prospect, no? That's what physicalism promises. As for the seemingly contraindicative fact that at least some materialists purport to consider the end of all experience at death to be terrifying, I think it's telling that they often speak of this speculative "end" using expressions like "eternal darkness" or even simply "nothingness", which both share at least a suggestion that this putative "end" is getting reified as a condition of deprivation or lack, as if this would pose some sort of threat to the one imagining it while very much alive today... In short, I think that anyone who interprets the prospect of an absolute end at death as scary is confused, and hasn't gotten to the bottom of the fear. The fear is never about "nothing" but always "something," and not knowing what "something" might be in store. ** I say "at the very least, opening the door to theism" because, in my observation, many who argue for idealism are either theistically inclined (including the many who are in the "spiritual but not religious" camp), or outright religious (which includes proponents of the generic theism known as intelligent design, I would say). To be clear, I'm not suggesting that everyone who argues for any form of idealism is guilty (intentionally or not) of "god smuggling." I've just noticed a lot of instances of it. _"Experience is, strictly speaking, a concrete, living Substance-it is a Substance within which Subjectivity and Objectivity are abstractly-distinguishable, coordinate factors, aspects, or determinations."_ This reminds me a lot of Franklin Merrell-Wolff, especially the mention of a "living Substance" (right down the to capital S), but also your choice of words in the second half of the sentence. If you haven't read him, you should look into his work, as I think you'd find a resonance with his writing on several levels. Not that you'd necessarily agree with him on everything (nor need to; indeed, I myself don't), but it's rare to find a trained (Harvard and Stanford) mathematician and philosopher who was also deeply (mystically) realized. _"...within Experience, we find the Subject of Consciousness and Object of Consciousness to be two, abstract, mutually-implying determinations, aspects, or moments, of that “Many-felt-in-One” that the Materialist so desperately seeks to explain."_ I really like that you suggest a mutual interdependence of subject and object, while also not tending to reify either. This is also echoed in the transpersonal and nondual insight reached by advanced meditators. The way I've put it is that there are seemingly subjective and objective _aspects_ of any experience, while the experience itself is not reducible to either aspect. That said, I think one sticking point for even a sensitive and open-minded physicalist is that the subject of experience is, and can only ever be, _implicit_ in experience, as, by definition, anything that's explicit - no matter how subtle - is an object. When one turns back, as it were, to find the presumed subject, all that's found are more phenomena (objects) constitutive of experience: thoughts, feelings, intuitions, perceptions, interoceptions, etc. I even wonder if this unfindability of the subject could be the genesis of that otherwise most absurd of contemporary contentions: eliminativism. I haven't read Dennett _et al,_ so I don't want to speculate beyond this. But I do find it interesting that, here too, some forms of meditation and contemplative deconstruction tend to bring one to a similar place vis-à-vis the radical unlocatability of a center or even phenomenological "ground" of experience. Taken in the abstract, this might come off as nihilistic or even scary, but as a direct (i.e., not conceptually mediated) recognition or realization, it's actually deeply liberating. Okay, this has gotten super long! Thanks for posting this excellent essay.
Hey Pessimistic Idealism, just discovered your awesome channel and subscribed and I have a question to ask. What do Idealists such as yourself think of Neoplatonism?
Thank you! I’ve skimmed through some Plotinus, and I found his ideas to be very interesting and in harmony with a few of my own views (even though there are significant differences). However, I am not familiar enough with Neo-Platonic thought to lay down a definitive answer to your question.
Kant threw the metaphysical projects of Plato and his successors into deep doubt. You have to first provide a link between the phenomena and noumena or else any attempt to account for the noumena through appeal to rationality and the mind, which are phenomena, is doomed to the arbitrary assumption that the mind does access noumena. The most you can say without such an error is about how we conceptualize the noumena (the pointer) rather than the noumena itself (what we're attempting to point at). "But, thinkers like Plotinus did themselves recognize that what is ultimately real, The One, is transcendent of the mind," you might say. Well, then by what device is The One known by or accessed? Their response seems to be something like, "mystical experience." There seems to be a similar line of reasoning in Palamism with the essence/energy distinction: God's essence is beyond us and not dependent on our experience of it (it's noumena), but God's energy, which is caused by his essence, is what we experience, particularly through mystical experience. But given that mystical experience is, by definition, another experience and thereby another form of phenomena, their answer seems to be unsatisfying to me. I've been in mystical states myself, and while I agree with cognitive scientists, like John Vervaeke, that contend that mystical experience seems more real and ultimately salient then normal everyday life, I also must admit that they're simply more phenomena. Salient, but still phenomena.
Material data doesn’t equate to knowledge. Interpretation is the true key to comprehension. To understand everything, you must comprehend the perspectives of everyone. Normal people have a habit of disregarding unpopular opinions simply because they are taboo. Even when provided with sources that validate these beliefs, they disregard them as outliers because they constitute a minority in comparison to the mainstream beliefs of academia. People tout the scientific community as some monolithic source of truth. The fact of the matter is that while science is objective, the scientific community isn’t. As Prof. Edward Dutton has pointed out, many innovations have been the work of outsiders. It was precisely their positions as pariahs that made them willing to explore different avenues of thought. A beggar with neurosyphilis can be more right than a pompous intellectual, as they aren’t limited by the threat of academic ostracization. «The future is inevitable and precise, but it may not occur. God lurks in the gaps.» - Jorge Luis Borges, national poet of Argentina
@@azimny97 Thank you for the interesting comment. If I understand your argument correctly, you believe that scientific conclusions always originate from prior beliefs. If the belief was wrong, then the experiment was flawed and the conclusion’s validity is dubious. I agree there’ll always be an element of bias in experiments. However, the truth itself never changes. If the conclusion is a misinterpretation of the facts, this doesn’t mean the real answers have died on the vine. They’ll be found eventually. Like how Kurt Eggers viewed war as a grand exposé on people’s inner strength, so too does research function through trial and error.
I think your essay (and I've used the video here as a springboard to reading the piece and its comment-spurred follow-up on your blog) is clear, compelling, and even brilliant. Some of the language is a little fanciful and almost poetic at times, but that's fine in my book. I like the juxtaposition of the rhapsodic and the rigorous. And I do find your argument here to be about as rigorous as any others I've read or heard. That said, I have to acknowledge that I'm coming at this from a perspective that's already largely aligned with what you're arguing for here, and even then I didn't get there via strictly logical considerations, so I really can't say whether I'd find this argument persuasive if I were a convinced physicalist.
To unpack that a bit, I think it's good to adduce strong, sound arguments such as yours against physicalism. But I also suspect it's about as likely to prove effective as strong, sound arguments against (or for) religion tend to do; which is to say, it might not be likely to convince anyone who's not already teetering precariously on the fence anyway. The reason I say this is that I think many arguments against physicalism tend to be perceived or interpreted by physicalists as 1) arguing for anti-realism, and 2) at the very least, opening the door to theism**, which, of course, the materialist/physicalist paradigm's ascendency over the past several centuries is a poignant reaction against.
And not all of the baggage complicating these arguments is historical and paradigmatic: I believe that the premise of physicalism supports a deep psychological need some people have to see that death equals the end of experience and thus the end of suffering. And it's not hard to see how this assumption or belief might be even more influential if the individual was brought up in a religion that included an eschatology of eternal torment for non-believers, etc. Clearly, the end of all experience is a better prospect, no? That's what physicalism promises.
As for the seemingly contraindicative fact that at least some materialists purport to consider the end of all experience at death to be terrifying, I think it's telling that they often speak of this speculative "end" using expressions like "eternal darkness" or even simply "nothingness", which both share at least a suggestion that this putative "end" is getting reified as a condition of deprivation or lack, as if this would pose some sort of threat to the one imagining it while very much alive today... In short, I think that anyone who interprets the prospect of an absolute end at death as scary is confused, and hasn't gotten to the bottom of the fear. The fear is never about "nothing" but always "something," and not knowing what "something" might be in store.
** I say "at the very least, opening the door to theism" because, in my observation, many who argue for idealism are either theistically inclined (including the many who are in the "spiritual but not religious" camp), or outright religious (which includes proponents of the generic theism known as intelligent design, I would say). To be clear, I'm not suggesting that everyone who argues for any form of idealism is guilty (intentionally or not) of "god smuggling." I've just noticed a lot of instances of it.
_"Experience is, strictly speaking, a concrete, living Substance-it is a Substance within which Subjectivity and Objectivity are abstractly-distinguishable, coordinate factors, aspects, or determinations."_
This reminds me a lot of Franklin Merrell-Wolff, especially the mention of a "living Substance" (right down the to capital S), but also your choice of words in the second half of the sentence. If you haven't read him, you should look into his work, as I think you'd find a resonance with his writing on several levels. Not that you'd necessarily agree with him on everything (nor need to; indeed, I myself don't), but it's rare to find a trained (Harvard and Stanford) mathematician and philosopher who was also deeply (mystically) realized.
_"...within Experience, we find the Subject of Consciousness and Object of Consciousness to be two, abstract, mutually-implying determinations, aspects, or moments, of that “Many-felt-in-One” that the Materialist so desperately seeks to explain."_
I really like that you suggest a mutual interdependence of subject and object, while also not tending to reify either. This is also echoed in the transpersonal and nondual insight reached by advanced meditators. The way I've put it is that there are seemingly subjective and objective _aspects_ of any experience, while the experience itself is not reducible to either aspect. That said, I think one sticking point for even a sensitive and open-minded physicalist is that the subject of experience is, and can only ever be, _implicit_ in experience, as, by definition, anything that's explicit - no matter how subtle - is an object. When one turns back, as it were, to find the presumed subject, all that's found are more phenomena (objects) constitutive of experience: thoughts, feelings, intuitions, perceptions, interoceptions, etc. I even wonder if this unfindability of the subject could be the genesis of that otherwise most absurd of contemporary contentions: eliminativism. I haven't read Dennett _et al,_ so I don't want to speculate beyond this. But I do find it interesting that, here too, some forms of meditation and contemplative deconstruction tend to bring one to a similar place vis-à-vis the radical unlocatability of a center or even phenomenological "ground" of experience. Taken in the abstract, this might come off as nihilistic or even scary, but as a direct (i.e., not conceptually mediated) recognition or realization, it's actually deeply liberating.
Okay, this has gotten super long! Thanks for posting this excellent essay.
Pretty excited for this.
I found your channel from oppy kastrup debate. I like your conent.
Thank you so much!
Hey Pessimistic Idealism, just discovered your awesome channel and subscribed and I have a question to ask. What do Idealists such as yourself think of Neoplatonism?
Thank you! I’ve skimmed through some Plotinus, and I found his ideas to be very interesting and in harmony with a few of my own views (even though there are significant differences). However, I am not familiar enough with Neo-Platonic thought to lay down a definitive answer to your question.
Kant threw the metaphysical projects of Plato and his successors into deep doubt. You have to first provide a link between the phenomena and noumena or else any attempt to account for the noumena through appeal to rationality and the mind, which are phenomena, is doomed to the arbitrary assumption that the mind does access noumena. The most you can say without such an error is about how we conceptualize the noumena (the pointer) rather than the noumena itself (what we're attempting to point at).
"But, thinkers like Plotinus did themselves recognize that what is ultimately real, The One, is transcendent of the mind," you might say. Well, then by what device is The One known by or accessed? Their response seems to be something like, "mystical experience." There seems to be a similar line of reasoning in Palamism with the essence/energy distinction: God's essence is beyond us and not dependent on our experience of it (it's noumena), but God's energy, which is caused by his essence, is what we experience, particularly through mystical experience.
But given that mystical experience is, by definition, another experience and thereby another form of phenomena, their answer seems to be unsatisfying to me. I've been in mystical states myself, and while I agree with cognitive scientists, like John Vervaeke, that contend that mystical experience seems more real and ultimately salient then normal everyday life, I also must admit that they're simply more phenomena. Salient, but still phenomena.
❤❤
Material data doesn’t equate to knowledge. Interpretation is the true key to comprehension. To understand everything, you must comprehend the perspectives of everyone. Normal people have a habit of disregarding unpopular opinions simply because they are taboo. Even when provided with sources that validate these beliefs, they disregard them as outliers because they constitute a minority in comparison to the mainstream beliefs of academia.
People tout the scientific community as some monolithic source of truth. The fact of the matter is that while science is objective, the scientific community isn’t. As Prof. Edward Dutton has pointed out, many innovations have been the work of outsiders. It was precisely their positions as pariahs that made them willing to explore different avenues of thought. A beggar with neurosyphilis can be more right than a pompous intellectual, as they aren’t limited by the threat of academic ostracization.
«The future is inevitable and precise, but it may not occur. God lurks in the gaps.»
- Jorge Luis Borges, national poet of Argentina
@@azimny97 Thank you for the interesting comment. If I understand your argument correctly, you believe that scientific conclusions always originate from prior beliefs. If the belief was wrong, then the experiment was flawed and the conclusion’s validity is dubious.
I agree there’ll always be an element of bias in experiments. However, the truth itself never changes. If the conclusion is a misinterpretation of the facts, this doesn’t mean the real answers have died on the vine. They’ll be found eventually.
Like how Kurt Eggers viewed war as a grand exposé on people’s inner strength, so too does research function through trial and error.