Cy,
Where I disagree is on your take on Freud. At our vantage point of considerable research done about how endocrines affect brain/mind, immune systems, etc., our questioning of Freud’s contributions to science may be a bit anachronistic. Freud was well aware of how neuroses may be caused from “chemical imbalances”. His opinion of that possibilty may be more honest than ours are about his methods. He notes that the chemistry of mental disorders involves a science not yet come to fruition and that, in the meanwhile, talk therapy was his best bet for immediately addressing such disorders. Once again I would recommend Doidge’s “The Brain That Changes Itself” for his understanding of Freud’s contributions to neuroscience.
While I’m still giving Cyrene a chance to follow up on his latest post, and reply to Ierrellus, maybe we can move things along with other people’s view. I’d like to call on either Xunzian or amor fati now. These two seem most appropriate now since they’ve already begun to express themselves in this thread. Either one can respond and maybe we can even juggle both at the same time.
Xunzian,
What little I know of your view, I’ve gather this much (and correct me if I’m wrong): you seem fond of eastern philosophy while at the same time harboring an appreciation for a theory of meaning you’ve called “semantic externalism” in another thread. If I were to guess, I’d say you’re partial to confucianism. Am I right?
Amor,
Based on what you’ve said in this thread, I’ll wager you’re either a follower of Berkeley or a certain interpretation of quantum physics (namely the view that says consciousness causes the wavefunction to collapse). Is it one, the other, or neither (or in some novel way, both)?
Aw, come on folks. This is a decent thread, worthy of input.
Me, broadly;
- I want to kill anyone who dishonours me (not that I will, but that I want to - police are very inconvenient in this regard)
and
- Fuck beautiful women.
Everything else is just intellectual masturbation.
I want to post. I’m just really busy at the moment. I should get to it by the end of the week, if that helps.
=D>
Ah. the taste of youthful vomit! Aren’t we all hos for something? Isn’t even your thought mental masturbation?
I’d say the three axes around which my philosophy revolves are my political, occupational, and religious identifications. I am a socialist, a research scientist, and a Confucian. I view each of these positions as both depending on and strengthening the others. This can make describing my position somewhat difficult since I do fall prey to a rather power hermeneutic circle, so no matter where I start, my justification usually rests on some other aspect of my philosophy.
I may as well start with how the truth is conceived. I believe that truth is idiopathic in nature, that is, the world we are living in is in constant flux. New second, new world. But these moments are related by causality, so patterns can be inferred. Using these patterns, we can asymptotically approach the truth. How do we measure our proximity to the truth? Utility/functionality. That which works is closer to the truth than that which does not work. Patterns that we create that are more reliably predictive are better than patterns we create that are less reliably predictive. That is how science ultimately works, by creating patterns of ever-increasing predictive power.
This works very well with the Neo-Confucian concept of li. Li is often translated as ‘principle’, but if you look at the actual character in question, ‘pattern’ would also be a reasonable translation. This was contrasted with qi, often translated as ‘material force’ in a dynamic that is analogous to the Western notion of matter/energy. However, I think this dynamic is more useful. We have the, for lack of a better term, psycho-physical ‘stuff’ that is constantly engaged in the process of change, and the patterns that arise from that process of change. I consider myself a monist, but I’ve been told I’m an “emergent dualist” because of this li/qi dichotomy. Personally, I think the idea of “emergent dualism” is bunkum. I wake up in the morning and get out of bed (uh-oh, I’m a dualist, there is me and the bed!). Then I eat breakfast (now I’m a trinitarian!), and drink my espresso (tetratarian), and so on. By that reckoning, only extreme solipsism qualifies as monism, and that is clearly not a great idea!
I’ll use the Taijitu to explain my position. Everyone here is already familiar with the Taijitu, you just don’t know it because you call it the yinyang. It is hair-splitting in a Rene Magritte sorta-way: the Taijitu represents yin and yang but it isn’t yin and yang in the same way “this is not a pipe”. But just to be a dick, I’m not gonna use the one you are used to and instead I’m gonna opt for the way it was represented by the 12th century thinker Zhou Dunyi:
I’ll couple that with a passage from the Daodejing:
“The Dao begets one; One begets two; Two begets three; Three begets the myriad creatures.”
So that initial empty circle represents the undifferentiated dao (for the wonks out there, there is a whole separate vocabulary here, but let’s leave that aside for now). But of course, life isn’t monistic for the reasons I listed above. Table, chair, microwave, silk painting, alter of the Earth, ect. So this one thing has to give rise to everything else, right? How does it do that? Note the circle is empty. That isn’t an accident. It is supposed to be. Emptiness is the fundamental nature of reality. That is, everything is engaged in the unceasing process of change.
Enter material force (qi) and principle (li). The next circle is just a different way of drawing the taijitu that you are already familiar with. Same basic idea and it shows their interaction. Now, personally, I’m a monist influence by Fuzhi, Yulgok, and modern science, so I say that material force is first and principle is a function of material force. Other people will argue that one the other way. For the moment, let’s simplify and equate qi with Aristotle’s and Plato’s matter and li with their “form”. It is intuitive that these two should be seen as separate, bricks aren’t a house and you can’t have a house without bricks (not really, but you get my meaning). So I don’t think these elements can be separated and are the same thing with respect to any given thing, even if we occasionally separate the two for convenience of discussion. I’ve talked about various takes on qi theory elsewhere, and the thrust has been that the division between things like matter and form, or matter and energy are arbitrary because they are the same thing, right? So I favor qi theory over matter theory because I think the arbitrary cut the ancient Chinese made between the two is a better representation than the cut the ancient Greeks made. For example, thoughts are qi (with some minor exceptions, the 4/7 debate in Korea is an example of this), which fits with my overall materialistic bent. There is no real argument that thoughts are, or at least can be see as, qi in Chinese thought whereas in the Western tradition “thoughts” are classical seen as a function of the “psyche” or some other decidedly non-physical elements. By aligning qi with dao, that sort of problem cannot arise. Which makes me happy, it simplifies matters a great deal. If you have a little bit of time, there was an essay that I used to be quite taken with though I disagree with now, that describes a lot of what I am saying:
The next step is the five elements, which is about what you’d expect from a 12th century thinker in China. If he had lived in Europe, it would have been four, but you get the idea. These stand in for what we would call the modern (as opposed to platonic) notion of “matter” or “thingness”, the particulars of what makes it and how it is made (as opposed to the more abstract shown above). And then you get the particular thing in question which leads to the myriad of things, which is what I talked about at the beginning of my post. You’ll note this deals exclusively with the phenomenal world. There is no “world of forms” nor is there a noumena. Just straight phenomenon from beginning until end. This formulation also allows for the gradual narrowing of the description that matches the pragmatism I spoke of earlier.
From this it should be clear that I largely identify with the idealistic tradition in Chinese Neo-Confucian thought. For example, my favorite philosopher is Tu Weiming who uses existentialism to marry the post-May Fourth rationalist and idealistic trends in Confucianism. But I tend to think answers like that leave more questions than there originally were!
Like most Neo-Confucian thinkers, I think that principle and material force are unified and I agree with Wang Fuzhi that material force is predominant – that feeds directly into my historical materialism which I feel is supported by Mencius when he said, “In good years the children of the people are most of them good, while in bad years the most of them abandon themselves to evil. It is not owing to any difference of their natural powers conferred by nature that they are thus different. The abandonment is owing to the circumstances through which they allow their minds to be ensnared and drowned. Take what happens to barley. Let it be sown and covered up. The ground being the same, and the time of sowing likewise the same, it grows rapidly up anywhere; and when the full time is come, it is all found to be ripe. Although there may be inequalities of produce, that is owing to the difference of the soil, as rich or poor, to the unequal nourishment afforded by the rains and dews, and to the different ways in which man has performed his business in reference to it.”
Like Wang Yangming, I think that understanding and action are unified. This is very important. The classic “The Great Learning” presents a sort of chain logic (not entirely true, but for our present purposes, it is useful to think of it that way) and at the very center the is “the investigation of things.” This was generally taken to mean things outside of one’s self, but Yangming famously asked, “Can we really derive a guiding principle for action by investigating the anatomy of a bamboo tree?” Instead we have to look inwards and, as Confucius put it, “Overcome the self and return to propriety” which leads to the central irony of Yangming’s thought: true realization can only be found within the self, but the self does not exist. Well, that isn’t entirely true, the self exists just not as we normally perceive it to be. Instead of an autonomous agent, the self is an intersubjective construct that exists in between the relationships that we have. As soon as that is realized, we can manifest what Mencius calls, “The great body” where we expand ourselves to encompass all of humanity – Yangming takes this one step further and seeks to embrace all of reality. An expansive view like this demands that people have an intuitive grasp on the good, right? So, from this perspective, it is impossible to say something like “I know violence is wrong” and commit violence of any sort. Any act that goes counter to theoretical understanding suggests that something is obscuring your understanding of the wrongness of violence. After all, if you understood it and truly manifested yourself as you are, such an act would be impossible.
The notion of an intersubjective self is important because the only thing with provides any continuity is relationships. After all, “I” neither look, think, nor act like “I” did ten years ago, much less twenty. So what provides that continuity? That people recognize me as me, of course. Either broadly, through things like our names (both identifying familial bonds as well as signifying an individual within the group) as well as friends, associates, and so on that continue to view us in the same light. The final cause, inasmuch as it can be said to exist at all, can only be applied externally to a thing. Planets don’t orbit because it is their telos to orbit, the gravitational field of the sun (and to a lesser extent, other bodies) make it the telos of the planets to orbit.
You’ll notice that various socialist elements have cropped up in this section (historical materialism, encumbered self, and a humanity as a socially realized being) so taking it that extra step and saying that we ought be our brother’s keeper isn’t too difficult.
Hope that clarifies my views somewhat.
I absolutely loved what you wrote above. Need to read it a few more times. My brain assimilates slowly.
I especially loved:
-and-
So you use the word consciousness also to describe the part of the the mind that is subconscious? Did Spinoza use “awareness” and “knowing” to also describe the unconscious or subconscious?
There are many many people who also disregard the role of the senses when it comes to attaining knowledge. Perhaps they can lead one to illusion but I also feel that they can work hand in hand and point the way to “something” that is there, albeit others cannot or will not sense it.
Xunzian,
Thanks for your comments, and for being clear. In fact, your clarity leaves me with very little to probe into - you’ve laid everything out on the page.
There is one thing, however: qi and the emptiness of dao. The only way I can conceive of qi coming from an empty dao is if the natural form of qi is something like the western concept of energy - a sort of immaterial widely expansive force that may potential permeate all of space (or a sweeping range of it). If this is the natural state of qi, then it is a sort of emptiness of matter and things, but as we know from western science, energy is convertible to matter, so it makes sense that the energy which is this emptiness can give way to material things and corporeal existence. Is this the right conception of the relation between qi and dao, or have I misunderstood the idea?
Fair question, especially since that is the part I most glossed over. Partially because describing it can veer into the pedantic even more-so than my post did. Neo-Confucian metaphysics/cosmology are largely a reaction to the introduction of Buddhism into China (Daoism had a similar reaction, btw, which would eventually give rise to Zen Buddhism). So you end up with a lot of Buddhist concepts that have been re-spun to fit with in with the local ideas. The idea of ‘emptiness’ in Buddhism just means that things are not fixed, it is another way of expressing the flux I was talking about. It is also worth noting that Buddhism (and Daoism) are ‘silence-seeking’ philosophies, venerating things like “The Uncarved Block” and “The Don’t Know Mind”, whereas Confucianism is an engaged philosophy, venerating the fully engaged state. A clear-cut example of this would be that Daoists view the mind of a child as man’s authentic mind, whereas Confucians think that a sage is man’s authentic mind. So the emptiness of the Dao is its unceasing creativity. Perhaps this passage from the DDJ will help clarify:
As for the natural state of qi, I think it is worth clarifying that it is a formal concept. You can’t point to it and say, “That is qi!” without violating several laws of identity. That sort of thinking leads to pantheistic ideas that I don’t much care for. Instead qi is meant to give us a means to think about how things operate. So I am inclined to think of qi, not as energy, but rather as “ontological being”. Qi is “what is changing” while li is “how it is changing”.
Part of why I like the qi/li dichotomy as opposed to the matter/energy dichotomy is because I think it works better with regard to modern scientific discoveries. We have established the equivalency of matter and energy. Which is fine and dandy, since they are both qi 
Thoughts are qi too, and since I believe in a fairly strict materialism where “the mind” is ultimately reducible to states in the brain, that works out well for me too.
Thanks for that clarification, Xunzian. It makes perfect sense.
amor fati,
Sincere apologies, sir. I had no right to insert my opinions of who posts when and why into Gib’s thread. I was out of line, probably drunk.
Arc Ri,
Thanks for your vote of confidence. I’ll have to think on your question.
Xun,
Brilliant, as usual. Have you resolved your problem with apparent dualisms?
Arcturus Rising,
Spinoza would not have considered consciousness as having precursors or subdivisions. His concern was with how to describe paritculars as integral parts of a whole. The idea of a subconscious is Freud’s. I made the distinction between “counsciousness” as brain states, which is supported by current neuroscience, and Spinoza’s sense of “awareness” as an adaptational constant. In processes of development, no such distinctions apply if either is described as anything more than a phase or plateau in growth and development. Please remember that I mentioned Haekel in error. The person who describes an adaptational constant in Uexkull.
For now I’m just rejecting the notion of emergent dualism. shrugs Not the best fix, I’ll admit but on the other hand, if emergent dualism is true in the way it is normally taken to be, then you run into a massive problem of expansion and we’re all n-ists, where n=the total number of things in the universe as opposed to dualists/monists/whatever.
Would the Greek idea of plenitude help? The idea that a whole can contain an ultimate variety of parts, which are seen as contradictory only from the local point of view?
I’m not quite sure I see how that relates. Mind clarifying?
X,
Maybe I misinterpreted your post about emergent dualism and offered a solution not called for. Could you elaborate on that post?