First, of course, while some do indeed experience existential angst when grappling with the assumption that the universe – and their own life – is essentially amoral, meaningless and purposeless, others are more than willing to settle for all of the many, many fulfilling and satisfying experiences they can accumulate by way of their own rendition of existential meaning.
As with most things philosophical, what you conclude about the meaning of life can easily be placed on the back burner [or kicked off the stove] if the circumstances of your life are really, really, really good.
For example, concluding philosophically that the universe is essentially amoral and meaningless doesn’t make the music you listen to any less sublime, or the food you eat any less delicious, or the orgasms you experience any less exhilarating, or the friendships you sustain any less valuable.
Or, sure, if feeding the pigeons does the trick for you, spend hours and hours in the park luxuriating in that. Become really, really knowledgeable about them as well if that appeals to you.
Whatever works I always say.
Oh, and merely assume you have free will here and see if that doesn’t work for you too.
Okay, let him explain to us how, when the human brain evolved from living matter that evolved from non-living matter that evolved from whatever the explanation is for the existence of matter itself, this free will came into existence. What specially is the chemical and neurological evidence that science has accumulated to explain that definitively.
Or philosophers?
Or is his “proof” here that if you share the definitions of all the words that comprise Regularity Theory this comes the closest to the optimal resolution. Or perhaps even the only rational resolution of them all?
As with most scholars here, he loves to “argue”.
So, he has an argument for Mary that explains to her how his own rendition of determinism still demands of her that she accept the moral responsibility for flushing Jane down the toilet. Theoretically in particular.
No doubt about it. And that’s probably because as nonliving matter evolved into living matter evolved into human brains, its complexity exploded. But that doesn’t demonstrate how specifically this complexity resulted in human autonomy. Science is still working on that part.
And then the part where human brains can create a dream reality such that in the dream we are no less certain that we are calling the shots. Until we awaken and think, “wow, that was all the making of my brain!”
But then we still insist, “but my wide awake brain, well, that’s just different”.
The problem is with the isms. An idea is a pretty clear thing, we all know what an idea is. A thought with a revelation in it. And material too, it’s just stuff.
But to make a doctrine of either is, on its face, ridiculous. Or, at least, detached from reality.
You will find this definition of Idealism in various dictionaries:
Idealism: Any of a group of philosophical doctrines that share the monistic view that material objects and the external world do not exist in reality independently of the human mind but are variously creations of the mind or constructs of ideas.
The Metaphysical Idealism that I have put at the basis of our discussion is from Bernado Kastrup. His work has been leading the modern renaissance of metaphysical idealism, the notion that reality is essentially mental.
Materialism (or realism - see above) is, by comparison, a theory that physical matter is the only or fundamental reality and that all being, and processes and phenomena can be explained as manifestations or results of matter. You can see the conflict there.
I appreciate this sentiment and follow your intention, but we all have a propensity towards wanting to understand our predicament. We react in different ways to the seemingly huge paradox we are living in, and in the context of a lived life, the respective reactions are understandable. Of course, there are all sorts of escapism, and we can find ways to distract us from the existential questions that arise in our minds, or we can move towards the questions, accepting them as something that is perhaps calling us out of our distraction.
I believe that the ancients answered the questions with their means. They worked out an incredible amount of knowledge considering the times they lived in and the tribulations they faced each day. They used their faculties, left and right hemisphere, gaining a large picture and also looking at detail, as we would expect, and they used the metaphors of their cultures to formulate what they had discovered to describe incorporeal influences that they new were there but couldn’t grasp.
I believe that McGilchrist is right in saying that at various stages throughout history, a tendency arose, to lose the larger picture from sight, and to concentrate on the particulars. With time (colloquial) materialism was the game in town and in the West, everything was judged by a materialist standpoint.
The result of the developments in the West (and sadly recently in the East as well, which is learning from us rather than us learning from them) is that more people are being thrown into a vortex of confusion, out of which there is the only escape into distraction, by whatever means. That way, they can remain in the game, and find some respite in whatever distraction they have found. Observing people around me, they think it is a crazy game, especially in view of the damage were are observing and the depletion of natural resources, but they must join this frenzied game each morning and know of no other way.
What people like McGilchrist and Kastrup in their own ways are saying, is that we make this reality. That means that we have it in our hands, by attending to life differently, to change the outcome. Each has their own field of research and I see them as contributing towards developing a way out of the madness we find ourselves in.
Small mammals – Skunks regularly eat mice, rats, moles and other small mammals, but usually in the winter time. Lizards and salamanders – Small lizards like salamanders, skinks, or anoles make a great source of protein for skunks. Frogs – Skunks will make a meal out of just about anything smaller than they are, including frogs and toads. Snakes – Skunks will even hunt and eat venomous snakes since skunks are immune to snake venom. Fish – Skunk prefer hunting on land, but will eat fish on occasion. If you have a koi pond watch out for skunks. Birds – While skunks don’t typically eat flying birds unless they get the drop on them, they do have a reputation with chickens.
…they gobble down.
In fact, they probably eat pigeons.
Bottom line: Nature is nothing short of the savage interactions between predator and prey. And, given that the human species is a part of nature, we certainly add our own savagery to the mix. And, sans God, how could it not all be essentially meaningless?
If any of those creatures were absolutely meaningless, you wouldn’t be able to name them, unless naming were meaningless too in which case we couldn’t understand what each other are saying. So yes all those creatures are meaningful to us.
Gruesomeness enhances the meaning it doesn’t subtract from it. The pain of loss makes the lost object more valuable to the loser. It makes the loser aware of the objects value. And in the consciousness game, awareness is everything.
But it seems that gruesomeness is not metaphysically decisive. It could occur in a world that is fundamentally mind just as well as in a material world.
Indeed without the sense of loathing and pain in the mind evoked by a gruesome scene, the gory event is nothing more than a reorganizing of subatomic particles which does not entail the emotional reaction expressed by the word gruesomeness.
Or at least that’s how it seems to me. Can you parse it differently?
Sounds like what the quantum mystics are selling these days - “the observer causes the observed”.
I suspect that is occurring because They are “essentially mental”.
Although I understand your refutation counter to the argument you proposed, the one you proposed would not have been my argument.
At first I thought you were talking about the spiritual versus the material - but you have added a lot to that concern. It seems that you are not merely saying that material is not real - but that mind is real - “mind” being substantially different and more complex than mere ideals or concepts.
No - I don’t see the conflict.
I think it has been well established that the material is the changing of the changing of the changing (or as James stated it “affect upon affect upon affect”). That appears to be an old established fact that science hasn’t ever challenged. The question is really about “what is idealism” such that a material universe somehow forbids it.
You are talking about the changing of the changing happening only in the mind (different than it being merely an idea in the mind). Materialism doesn’t dictate WHERE the changing is occurring. If the changing is occurring in a mind then materialism exists within that mind - QED.
And if “idealism” refers to the universe existing only in the mind - where is the conflict? Material necessarily exists within the mind else there could never be any changing of anything - no changing of the mind - no learning - no active thoughts - no sensations of time - no experiencing - everything totally stagnate.
A mind cannot exist without change within - and any change is what material is. A mind cannot exist without materialism - but materialism CAN exist without mind (having nothing to do with brains one way or another).
Still what you are saying “idealism” represents - seems more like mentalism - different and beyond mere ideals and an ontology of idealism - it is an ontology of mentalism.
When have I ever discussed skunks and pigeons and the brutal slaughterhouse that is nature itself [between extinction events] as absolutely meaningless? Meaning is something that each of us ascribes to nature based on the manner in which I construe meaning here as a manifestation of dasein.
Also, if the Big One hadn’t wiped out the dinosaurs and mammals were not able to evolve into us there would be no minds around to encompass the meaning of anything at all.
Or suppose the Big One had wiped out the dinosaurs a million years earlier. And human beings came on the scene a million years earlier as well. Imagine us as a species today then? A million more years to grapple with what anything means at all.
My point about Dan’s point is that he seems to root meaning here in a nature that not only possesses meaning itself but value and virtue. I merely put that in perspective by offering another take on nature.
Were there no human minds around the idea that nature is savage or gruesome would not be around either. That’s our thing and not something that skunks and pigeons and all the other creatures out there take into consideration. At least to the best of my knowledge.
What I do is is to differentiate essential meaning from existential meaning in our reactions to nature.
Parsing here as it pertains to this distinction given a particular context. Parsing as well in regard to differentiating materialism from idealism in regard to nature.
I’m just considerably more obsessed with the is/ought world here than the either/or world.
I hope you don’t mind that I had to take respite from the banality of some comments here.
Well, I suppose if you had read what I quoted from Kastrup, you would have understood it better. Where did you get the idea that I or Kastrup have said the material “is not real”? I am, to be honest, very perturbed that such a statement could be made, and it is a sign of the decline of conversation here on ILP. It is also a statement that ruins for me your otherwise intelligent contribution, because it doesn’t take me seriously.
In Kastrup’s hypothesis, Mind (or consciousness) is the very basis of being and out of which everything (including material) comes. The material universe is the expression of the cosmic consciousness if you like and has been seen to be undergoing an evolutionary process. The development of degrees of individual consciousness in living creatures has provided each with an “interface” (Kastrup says he is reliant upon metaphors, like all scientists) with reality in the service of survival, which “obfuscates” the details that get in the way of survival. This is the brain, which is suited to each level of consciousness.
The problem here is that you talk of “a” mind, rather than a Mind at large, or cosmic Mind, in which the “changing” you are talking about takes place. “Colloquial” Materialism suggests that the mind is inside a brain, but the opposite is the hypothesis. There is no conflict as long as we have this as our premise.
Call it what you want, the important thing is that you get the idea.
The question then is whether metaphysical idealism versus metaphysical materialism imply different is/ought world’s. While metaphysical materialism dominates the modern secular world, metaphysical idealism dominated the world before the development of modern science.
To put it in a word, for better and for worse, the so-called Age of Reason or Enlightenment disenchanted the world. To modernists like Steven Pinker that’s an unadulterated good. But to critics of modernity it resulted in a moral flatland.
Any way, I think Bob is trying to work out for us what a new idealism would look like. I don’t think anyone here wants to go back to the pre-modern age lock, stock and barrel.
That’s the problem with arrogant delusional snobs - they become self-righteously, presumptuously judgement - believing that only they deserve any form of grace. It’s no wonder there are so so many atheists in the world - over confidence religious snobs become intolerable company.
To me, that’s the part where some feel considerably more comfortable discussing absolute meaning and absolute value and absolute virtue. I’m more inclined toward the existential myself.
The implications of the Big One above are anything but metaphysical in regard to Dan’s take on nature. Though, sure, we can imagine the next Big One being so big that it renders the human species itself extinct. Then “metaphysically” we can speculate on meaning and value and virtue in a world where there are no minds around to think of them at all. Maybe God would still be there to keep them relevant.
I have no idea how this pertains to my post above. Disenchanted? Given what context pertaining to meaning, value and virtue? Same with unadulterated good and moral flatland. This is all borderline meno stuff to me.
Well, whatever his conclusions might be in regard to that I am more then ready to explore it – re meaning, value and virtue – “given a particular context”.
This reminds me of a silly joke that my father told me when I was young:
“I speak every language except Spanish!”
Someone speaks French, he replies, “That sounds Spanish to me!”
I’m particularly dismayed when someone is flummoxed by the word “disenchanted”. It really shows you how far we have come away from enchantment that I was only just enjoying in Emerson’s poems as a young man. I was reading Emily Dickinson before that and had to think that there was a naivety expressed in both of their poetry. I was more into poetry before I joined the army 48 years ago, but the experience drove it out of me for a while. I had fleeting moments during that time when, having met a teacher a little older than I was, she recognised the glimmering wick in me and tried to kindle my interest. But that relationship was too complicated. The flame returned when I went to evening school here in Germany and I was confronted with German poetry.
Writing about an ecstatic/mystical experience as an archetypal need in The Reenchantment of Art, the artist and cultural critic Suzi Gablik has written:
I’m not sure whether to laugh or cry, but I’ll choose the laughing.
I’ve been observing people in between reading McGilchrist and others, and it is quite revealing to see the lack of creativity in everyday people. I have noticed for some time that particularly creative people seem to be left-handed, whereas the great bulk of people are right-handed, and if you follow them into their lives, it hits you straight on, how we lack creativity in our societies. Of course, there are enough creative people to compensate, who give our lives colour and beauty, who give us the rhythms and the melodies, who give us words to enchant us. But the thesis of McGilchrist is that we have become restricted by our tendency to choose dominance of the left-hemisphere.
This is one reason why we tend to choose materialism over idealism, because we have the feeling it is graspable, it provides quick solutions, and we don’t have to think about it. I think this is the problem we are facing generally. Idealism, on the other hand, is counter-intuitive, and has been said by some critics to resemble a new spirituality.
