Non-Living Objects in an Idealist Ontology: Kastrup
A quick question about idealism, particularly Bernardo Kastrup's version: analytic idealism.
I’ve been trying to grasp the underlying logic of his model.
Kastrup argues that what we call matter is merely the extrinsic appearance of inner experience (mind or consciousness) when viewed across a dissociative boundary. On this view, the physical world is how mental processes appear when viewed across a dissociative boundary, that is, from outside the experiential system to which they belong.
What I struggle to understand is how this framework accounts for the apparent distinction within the world between living entities (animals, plants, bacteria) and non-living ones (chairs, rocks, bottles).
If everything we encounter is mental in nature, then in what sense are some things “alive” and others not? Under Kastrup’s account, are all entities manifestations of mind equally, or does “life” mark a further distinction beyond mere consciousness?
What exactly is a table on this view? If consciousness gives rise to matter as its extrinsic appearance, how does that appearance come to exhibit two apparently different categories, living and lifeless? Is the difference merely one of organizational complexity, degrees of dissociation, or something else entirely?
I’ve been trying to grasp the underlying logic of his model.
Kastrup argues that what we call matter is merely the extrinsic appearance of inner experience (mind or consciousness) when viewed across a dissociative boundary. On this view, the physical world is how mental processes appear when viewed across a dissociative boundary, that is, from outside the experiential system to which they belong.
What I struggle to understand is how this framework accounts for the apparent distinction within the world between living entities (animals, plants, bacteria) and non-living ones (chairs, rocks, bottles).
If everything we encounter is mental in nature, then in what sense are some things “alive” and others not? Under Kastrup’s account, are all entities manifestations of mind equally, or does “life” mark a further distinction beyond mere consciousness?
What exactly is a table on this view? If consciousness gives rise to matter as its extrinsic appearance, how does that appearance come to exhibit two apparently different categories, living and lifeless? Is the difference merely one of organizational complexity, degrees of dissociation, or something else entirely?
Comments (95)
In Kastrup’s analytic idealism, everything is mental in origin but not everything is a subject of experience. Non-living objects are the extrinsic appearances of mental processes that are not dissociated into bounded experiential perspectives, whereas living organisms correspond to dissociated, self-maintaining mental processes and therefore possess an inner life. “Life” does not mark a higher degree of consciousness, but a structural distinction: the emergence of a private point of view within mind-at-large. Tables and rocks exist as stable appearances of mental activity, governed by lawful regularities, but there is 'nothing it is like to be a table'. This distinction — between mentality as ontological ground and subjectivity as a special mode of organization — is developed most systematically in The Idea of the World.
A natural follow-up question is: if non-living objects are the extrinsic appearances of mental processes, whose mental processes are these? This is where Kastrup leans heavily on mind-at-large, a move that has clear affinities with Advaita Ved?nta (he has many dialogues with Swami Sarvapriyananda) and with Berkeley, whom he occasionally acknowledges. But it’s also worth noting that if one tries to conceive of “the world” — a rock, a tree, anything at all — as existing in the total absence of mental processes, one quickly runs into an insoluble conundrum (per Schopenhauer, also the subject of one of Kastrup's books, Decoding Schopenhauer's Metaphysics).
I’ve been critical of Kastrup’s notion of mind-at-large, but I’ve come to see it less as a posit of a cosmic intelligence and more as a way of marking the unavoidable fact that existence always appears within the horizon of consciousness. In that sense, the world exists in and for mind, where “mind” does not name a single metaphysical super-entity so much as the condition that anything be manifest at all — that is, any mind.
Quoting Wayfarer
Yes, his mind-at-large appears to be non-metacognitive and entirely instinctive (unlike Berkeley's God). Does this align well with Eastern notions?
I don’t recall Kastrup inferring from his ontology that there is any sense of an overall plan for life. I know he isn’t arguing against one either; it seems to be bracketed for him. One imagines him eventually getting caught up (hijacked?) in one or other religious perspectives.
Quoting Wayfarer
Do you think, perhaps, that M-a-L is a placeholder for an explanatory gap?
Quoting Wayfarer
It does may me wonder, why tables, and chairs? Why rocks and earth and sky Why even have such a stable appearance of mental activity?
Quoting Wayfarer
There seems to be nothing without perception and experience; the possibility of meaning depends on it, I would have thought.
Caution needed here. I think Kastrup's natural tendency is much more convergent with the Hindu mok?a than Christan eschatology, Are Vedantic or Buddhist perspectives 'religious'? Well, in a way, but they're also very different to the Biblical sense of religion. They're much more concerned with insight into the nature of mind and maybe much nearer to elements of gnositicism than to straight-ahead Christianity. But a large part of our cultural conditioning is to put all of them under the umbrella term 'religion', against which there is considerable animus, as you can see from any number of antireligious polemics on this forum.
I'm actually looking at The Idea of the World again as I write this - I bought the Kindle edition a year ago. The chapter I'm reading on the dissociative boundary is footnoted to many empirical studies of the phenomenon.
Here's a sample of his reasoning:
[quote=Kastrup, Bernardo. The Idea of the World: A Multi-Disciplinary Argument for the Mental Nature of Reality (pp. 136-137). (Function). Kindle Edition. ](An) objection is this: nature unfolds according to patterns and regularities—the ‘laws of nature’—independent of our personal volition. Human beings cannot change these laws. But if nature is in consciousness, should that not be possible by a mere act of imagination?
... Notice that the implicit assumption here is that all mental activity is acquiescent to volition, which is patently false even in our own personal psyche. After all, by and large we cannot control our dreams, nightmares, emotions, and even many of our thoughts. They come, develop and go on their own terms. At a pathological level, schizophrenics cannot control their visions and people suffering from obsessive-compulsive disorder are constantly at the mercy of oppressive thoughts. There are numerous examples of conscious activity that escapes the control of volition. Often, we do not even recognize this activity as our own; that is, we do not identify with it. It unfolds as autonomous, seemingly external phenomena, such as dreams and schizophrenic hallucinations. Yet, all this activity is unquestionably within consciousness. We perceive it as separate from ourselves because the segment of our psyche that gives rise to this activity is dissociated from the ego, the segment with which we do identify.
So that there is activity in universal consciousness that we do not identify with and cannot control is entirely consistent with idealism. This activity is simply dissociated from our ego and its sense of volition.[/quote]
So, do you think as Wayfarer does that it is not merely the possibility of meaning that depends on consciousness, but the possibility even of existence?
I sit with the tentative view that if humans had never existed, then neither would dinosaurs. This is not to say that something approximating the phenomena we now call 'dinosaurs' did not exist, but that the notion of 'dinosaurs' is almost meaningless without human frameworks of language, classification, conceptualization, historical context, and scientific inquiry.
Okay, I don't agree because although 'existence' is an idea, I don't think existence is an idea.
Quoting Tom Storm
If the terms 'Earth ' and 'dinosaur' were understood to most coherently refer to representations or perceptual experiences then in that sense I agree. However I don't agree that those terms do most coherently refer to representations or perceptual experiences. They don't refer to appearances but rather to what appears.
Maybe that's what you mean by "yes and no". I don't know.
Anyway, there wouldn't seem to be much point arguing about it, so I'll leave you to it.
Would you say the chair someone is sat on would stop existing once all consciousness is extinguished? Sure we can’t make any statements or propositions about the world without consciousness but the world exists as a state of affairs despite consciousness. There is a difference between the table existing and the proposition of the “the table exists”.
I agree with you though that propositions don’t exist without consciousness but objects earth, dinosaurs etc do. Consciousness only serves to observe already existing phenomena and does not in anyway affect whether they exist or not.
This can be tricky however because to exist is to be perceived is not true. I know that I exist despite no one perceiving me as my consciousness tells me so. Yet a rock who does not posses consciousness exists independently of me perceiving it. So I think this type of idealism fails to account for continued existence of object after conscious perception of them ceases.
Yes, I think this is close to where I am at present. How meaningful is it, exactly, to say that something exists if there is no perspective from which to apprehend it? My fame isn't idealism here but a type of constructivism (as far as I can tell).
What is a dinosaur without a name, a description, proposed behaviours? In an important sense, we brought dinosaurs into being by transforming fossils into animals with identities, properties, and histories.
This is not to say that there were no things (that later became dinosaurs) before humans provided names and descriptors for them. Plainly, there were. The point is rather that something becomes meaningful, becomes a dinosaur rather than a mere arrangement of bones, only within a framework of perception, description, and shared inquiry. Existence may not depend on us, but intelligible existence does.
But even having a conversation about this seems challenging, because we smuggle a great many concepts into the chat simply by using words that come with built-in assumptions.
Quoting kindred
Yes a familiar objection to idealism and you’re raising a separate conceptual framework. I’m not an idealist but I'd like to understand idealism as well as I can.
This is the view that all of reality is fundamentally mental. One of its most prominent contemporary proponents is Bernardo Kastrup. On his account, there is a single, universal consciousness, mind-at-large; a version perhaps of Schopenhauer's Will, which constitutes the whole of reality. Individual minds are not separate substances, but dissociated aspects of this universal mind.
On this view, the persistence of objects or the world does not depend on individual observers, but on mind-at-large itself. What we call the physical world is the extrinsic appearance of mental processes within this broader consciousness, structured so as to make intersubjective experience possible. Or something like this.
:up: :up:
Quoting Tom Storm
Two questions:
What does "the persistence of ... mind-at-large ... depend on"?
Why assume that "the persistence of objects or the world ... depends on" anything at all?
Not unlike your 3 year silence until not 15 minutes ago, I suppose. Surely there's some philosophical parallels or some tangential point to be appreciated. :grin:
While this can't technically be a "welcome to the forum" post, it's in many ways a "welcome back" (to said forum) sentiment.
But on to the topic, and your (in my view) charitable interpretation or possible alternate take on it. Yes! Indeed! Do not words on a paper, if prepared by the right person, seemingly not only parallel or rival but exceed what we consider "life" or "human qualities" compared to some folk? Absolutely! So is life really a matter of breathing and circulation, not unlike a single-celled amoeba (again I said not unlike, I know they don't "breathe" in the way we do)? Or? Or! Is life simply a quality exclusively reserved for those who "contemplate"? Consciousness, that is commonly referred to. Ability to distinguish oneself from one's environment and other beings similar to one's self. An identity. Ah, this is so fascinating, and so much more to be written and discussed, at your leisure of course. What a joy you've decided to join us, after all this time. :snicker:
I don't think that is what he argues. He argues that matter is what appearances look like to mind. It is the tangible aspect of mind, so to speak, not a separate substance. As I've said on these forums many times an idealism that does not posit universal mind in some form is incoherent and cannot explain what is clear to us from everyday experience?that we live in a shared world.
Kastrup posits universal mind, which then makes it coherent to say that matter exists independently of the human mind and is naturally intelligible and that human consciousness is not central or necessary to existence. It also follows from this that real objects and beings of all kinds can have existed prior to the advent of human consciousness and that we can coherently talk about that existence as being human mind-independent.
Kastrup's philosophy is pretty much Schopenhauer reheated.
@180 Proof
I don't know Kastrup's answer, but there is no scientific definition of life (according to Robert Rosen). What we're referring to by "life" requires the concept of purpose, or final cause. That's not something we detect, per se. It's an idea we use to organize our experience, so it may be like a Kantian category.
Kastrup is pretty up front about the large influence Schop has had on him. Jung too. I don't think "reheated" sounds right unless you hold a pejorative view of K's work.
Quoting Janus
Kastrup is a monist. There is only consciousness; he generally says matter is the extrinsic appearance of mental processes. For details his book Why Materialism Is Boloney sets out the arguments in great and sometimes boring detail. In some respects he's like a more evolved version of Donald Hoffman.
Quoting Janus
Strictly speaking matter is not mind-independent in general: it is independent of individual human minds, but not of mind as such, since it is the extrinsic appearance of processes in universal consciousness.
Quoting frank
Could well be. My question doesn’t change, however: what is the reason, in idealism, for the division between apparently dead matter and conscious beings? If all that exists is mental in nature, why does some of it present as "lifeless" structure while other portions present as subjects with inner experience?
The question goes back a long way, at least to Plotinus, who was an idealist monist. Monism of either variety has this problem, and seems to require eliminativism, in other words, we identify the thing we don't want as an illusion. That was Plotinus' answer: that matter is maximal privation of the Good (which he thought is identical to God and intelligence), and according to his interpreters, he was saying that matter in its fullest extent is an illusion. I went looking in his writings for where exactly he explained it and was disappointed that he didn't address it in a very full bodied way. He just sort of trailed off. Btw, Kastrup's view is vaguely Neoplatonic like Plotinus' view.
That compares to the present moment, when consciousness is the thing some would like to eliminate in favor of monistic materialism (like Daniel Dennett). The same thing happens. If you go to where Dennett is supposed to be tucking this problem away, he resorts to open-ended questions designed to help us doubt that consciousness is what we think it is. Monists can't seem to nail down how we're all enjoying a big fat illusion, but they're sure we are.
Yes. I’m not committed to materialism or idealism; I just want to understand the arguments as best I can. But I’m not a scientist or a philosopher, so like most of us, all I can do is mess around in the shallow end of the pool.
Quoting frank
I think it is highly likely that our understanding of 'reality' is mistaken or incomplete, regardless of which framework we've adopted. (This is a fraught sentence because it implies there is a reality and it can be uncovered, I don't necessarily think this is accurate) In a few centuries, assuming civilization endures, scientific models will have evolved beyond recognition, and the reality we take for granted today will likely appear quaint and rudimentary.
Are you a dualist?
As such matter is real and human mind-independent, as it "mind-at-large". As I read Kastrup, he understands matter to be the "visible" or tangible aspect of mind. It's not as if mind could exist without matter, any more than matter could exist without mind, for Kastrup. It's just mind is the "thing-in-itself" whereas matter is its appearances. I read "appearances" to signify any relation or interaction at all, not just appearances for humans or even animals.
Depends on what you mean by 'real.' If you mean our perception of reality, then perhaps. But you’d have to take that up with Kastrup or one of his acolytes; I can hardly argue on behalf of a guy whose work I don’t follow closely.
Quoting Janus
This seems to be a separate argument against idealism more broadly, which already takes matter as a given truth. Everywhere you look, Kastrup says things like this below (and obviously, to properly debate these points, you would need to go into his reasoning and move beyond this type of statement)
Now, I am not particularly interested in debating whether idealism is justifiable; there are already thousands of words on that on the forum. I am interested in exploring what the model is meant to be. Why is the world full of things? How does a chair or a rock relate to a turtle or a human?
Thought is necessarily dualistic. Implied is some unified world beyond thought. This is Hegelian. He's an example of the way I think.
But it can, though. We live in a shared world, because we have highly convergent minds, sensory systems, and languages. So we will converge on similar understandings of what is real, due to those shared elements. I mean, genetically, we're all identical, up until the top-most layer of differentiation.
There's a thought-experiment I will give to make this point. Imagine a sentient mountain. Mountains have lifespans of hundreds of millions of years. From the perspective of a sentient mountain, humans are far too ephemeral and small to even notice. Rivers, you will notice, because they'll be around long enough to carve out ravines in your sides. But humans are to a mountain as microbes are to humans.
Speaking of microbes, if there were rational sentient microbes then the scale of human existence would likely also be incomprehensible. Humans would be so vast, and their life-spans so long, they would seem like solar systems to humans.
So, there are shared worlds, on many levels. There's this human world, which is shared by the other billions of humans. But the fact that we inhabit a shared world says nothing about its ultimate nature, whether and in what sense it has a reality above and beyond the sensory and experiential data that we receive and interpret. Kastrup's criticism of materialism is that it posits something beyond and outside those experiential states which account for those states, as being somehow fundamental and ontologically prior to the mind which receives and interprets these data.
The appeal to a universal mind does not arise from idealism as such, but from the attempt to preserve the intuition that the world must exist in the same way when unobserved as when observed. But that intuition is inherited from realism, not established by argument. Once we recognise that any account of what the world is “in itself” already deploys the cognitive resources of the mind, the supposed need for a universal observer evaporates.
As Zen puts it, “Mind is no mind.” That seems to me exactly the point here — mind is not something we can turn into an object, whether individual or universal, even though experience is always for a mind. The mind is the ever-present subject, nowhere to be found.
I thought Hegel was a monist idealist, like Kastrup? Doesn't H see matter as a manifestation of Geist? Or is this what you mean by "unified world beyond"?
He would say the ultimate truth is the Absolute, which is a state of unity in which there is no thought because there are no divisions. Thought is the realm of partial truths. In that realm, you can't really escape dualism.
The fact that our sense organs and brains are similarly constituted can explain how it is that we see things in similar ways, but it cannot explain just what we see. The content of perception, that is what is perceivable which animals also perceive in their different ways, is contributed by the world, whether that world is physical or mental.
If it's physical then the mind-independent physical existents explain how it is that we and the animals see the same things. If the world is mental then the human independent mind that constitutes the things we perceive explains it. If mind is fundamental then all our minds must be connected (below the level of consciousness, obviously) via that universal mind.
We've been over all this many times and you have never been able to explain how just the fact of our minds being similar, but not connected, could explain a shared world.
Not sure I understand this but is the point that, at an ordinary level of thinking, dualities appear to us?
Good question. Isn't the idea that the “world” we perceive is not independent matter imposing itself on us, but a manifestation of mind, or a universal rational structure, so the consistency of perception across subjects reflects the inherent order of this mind?
Yes, if they are manifestations of a universal mind. But that seems to be the point that Wayfarer is denying. In fact he has written on here that it is the very point he disagrees with Kastrup about, and yet hat is the very posit, as also with the role of God in Berkeley's idealism that has explanatory power.
The question remains why has thought manifested in this way to begin with; why are there inanimate objects or things in a realm of consciousness?
I think @wayfarer may be arguing that an object is just a durable pattern within a set of constraints, so to say it continues to exist means that the same pattern will reappear whenever the relevant experiential conditions are met, even if it is not currently experienced. This reminds me a bit of phenomenology.
Dualities necessarily appear to us. We think in pairs, up/down, left/right, male/female, etc. In every case, the meaning of any word contains it's opposite. So if we deleted 'down' from your mind, "up" would also disappear for lack of anything to compare it to.
I’m not claiming that perceptual convergence explains what ultimately exists; I’m claiming that any account of what exists has to start from the fact that the world is first given as a shared
field of perception, not as a metaphysical posit. And that there is no self-existence material substance in terms of which the nature of experience can be explained. No account that treats matter as a self-existent, third-person substance can explain experience, because experience is not one of the things that substance-description captures (which is, of course, stating the hard problem of consciousness again).
[quote=Bishop Berkeley]I do not argue against the existence of any one thing that we can apprehend, either by sense or reflection. That the things I see with my eyes and touch with my hands do exist, really exist, I make not the least question. The only thing whose existence we deny is that which philosophers call ‘matter’ or ‘corporeal substance’. [/quote]
And besides, we do now know what happens when you drill down on apparently solid matter to the most fundamental elements. I don't have to say again what has been discovered.
Quoting frank
That rings true to me, even though I can't claim to really understand it.
Plato would say you're remembering the wisdom of the Anima Mundi.
It's not the idea like Berkeley's that God is always perceiving everything, and that God's perception or thought holds everything in stable existence. Kastrup's idea is that everything is constituted by consciousness that the "stable, law-like patterns" just are the underlying mental nature of things. Kastrup uses the word 'consciousness', but I don't think he believes that the universal consciousness is conscious of anything apart from what all the percipients (the dissociated alters) are conscious of. For him it has no plan, but evolves along with everything?it just is nature in the sense that Spinoza's God is nature.
Quoting Tom Storm
That doesn't explain why everyone will see the table there for the first time.
Quoting Wayfarer
Of course?nothing could be more obvious?that is precisely what is to be explained. You haven't offered any explanation as to how idealism can coherently do without something like Berkeley's God or Kastrup's "mind-at-large".
Why is to be explained? By what is it to be explained? As it happens, I wrote a Medium essay on precisely this topic, explaining how Buddhist philosophy shows that there is no need to posit a 'mind at large'. Gift link, from which
Metaphysics, on the other hand, is about explaining as comprehensively as possible what is experienced. You have offered no account of how an explanation for a shared world can do without either mind-independent existents or the connection of what appear to be separate minds. "Similar constitution" has not explanatory power in that regard.
That said in Buddhist philosophy there is the idea of a "storehouse consciousness" (alaya-vijnana) that (given that that Karma is accepted as real) could be used to explain the fact that we share a world with sentient others, both human and animal (and perhaps plants and fungi).
Personally, I wouldn’t compare K with S. As already noted, K argues that mind-at-large is similar to Schopenhauer’s Will. But his view is still evolving, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he eventually ends up adopting some form of theism. But I could be wrong there.
Quoting Janus
It probably does, but as I said, someone with more reading on this matter would need to articulate the point properly. My understanding is as follows: In non-theistic idealism, objects like tables aren’t things that exist outside consciousness, but stable patterns through which consciousness organises itself. Experience is constrained by shared, law-like structures (time, causality, space, and intersubjective coherence) so when those conditions recur, the same object reliably appears, even if no one was perceiving it in the meantime. The appearance of material objects isn’t a pointless illusion: without these stable object-patterns, experience would be chaotic and unusable, making memory, action, and a shared world impossible.
Of course, a brief paragraph like this will generate a series of whys and hows that I don’t have immediate answers to. But saying idealism isn’t true because my modest paragraph doesn’t cover all bases isn’t much of an argument. This is clearly a complex idea that requires more investigation.
I'm not taking sides but, is this not solved by us being the same species? As in, when we use medical trials on a few patients, we assume they'll work on all of them- with caveats.
Do these questions arise about dogs?
Kastrup says that he is a naturalist and that mind-at-large just is nature. Soinoza says God just is nature?that is the extent of the comparison I was making.
Quoting Tom Storm
If we have totally separate consciousnesses then how do the stable patterns through which your consciousness organizes itself accord precisely enough with the stable patterns in my consciousness to explain a shared world wherein we will agree on what is in front of us down to the minutest details?
Quoting Manuel
I'm not denying that human bodies have similar enough physical constitutions to enable generalizations form medical trials, and for that matter, general medical procedures which work on most everyone. But I don't see what that relevance that has to the point at issue, because I've been saying that only mind-independent physical existents or shared mind can explain the obvious fact that we share a world. Well, I mean I can't think of, and nor has anyone else to my knowledge presented, any other plausible explanation, but I'm open to hearing something different.
Not sure what your question about dogs is driving at.
.
I hear you but I think K is being polemical here and is making an equivocation on the world naturalist. Yes he believes consciousness is natural and there is nothing else to nature. I also note that K seems to believe that mind-at-large is developing wisdom or knowledge as it evolves through humans and conscious creatures. I don’t think we can say the same for conventional accounts of nature, which tend to involve entropy. So, while I understand the argument you’re making, I think Kastrup is being cute.
Quoting Janus
Let’s flip the argument: why wouldn’t consciousness have discrete offshoots that closely share experiences? Here's one idea. If we all participate in an overarching pattern, our experiences would naturally be shared. Even if individual consciousnesses are separate, they all operate according to the same structural constraints, which include time, space, causality, and patterns of experience. Because these constraints are likely to be universal and experiences are mutually coherent, the stable patterns that constitute objects tend to align across minds, producing a shared world in which everyone sees the same table, the same details, and the same relations.
Whether you are convinced by this germ of an idea is a separate question, but I think the argument can be made, and with some work it could be convincing. Remember, I’m not an idealist, but I’m trying to steelman the idea.
On the view I sketched out, the world appears the way it does because consciousness is self-organising: it stabilises itself into regular, repeatable forms rather than remaining a formless flux. What we call material objects are the way this self-organisation presents itself in experience, giving consciousness a structured, usable world. We all partake in this share reality, it just isn't what we think. Or something like that.
Sure, for each species of animals, us included, we share the same pool of empirical evidence as it were. That is, I think it is reasonable to say that humans experience the world as other humans do and owls experience worlds as owls do.
We can't see like mantis shrimp do, but another mantis shrimp very-likely see almost exactly the same thing, etc.
The point about the dog was that we assume that if one dog likes to chase a thrown object- virtually all of them will, because they are the same species.
Quoting Janus
If that implies that we all see the same structure on a cross-species level is something I don't quite understand.
Was just reacting to that specific comment- don't have much to say about Kastrup because I don't understand what he means when he says that even unconscious knowledge is (or can be) conscious. His "debate" with Maudlin left me a bit sour- but he still has interesting observations.
I'm out of time for this so I'll just respond to this for now. I of course agree that all consciousnesses are subject to the same general constraints you listed, but that cannot explain why we all see the same particulars at the same places as far as I can tell. I'm open to hearing how it could explain that, but so far I am yet to hear it.
What you seem to be saying is something like that the stable patterns are independent of individual minds. If so, those stable patterns could be physical or mental, and I would have no argument with that. All you would be saying is that there are stable patterns of something (energy, mind, or whatever) that affect the senses of percipients, but are independent of them. I would have no argument with that.
Quoting Manuel
I'm out of time so have to be quick. It's not exactly the same structure, but the same things ( although I'm not sure if that is a different claim), albeit seen perhaps very differently. Insects see fruit as food, just as we do. Dogs see fish as food just as we do. Dogs see the steps at the front of my house?they don't bump into them, but climb them to get to the verandah. They see the door into the house at the same location i do.
There are countless examples which prove beyond question that we humans, and even some animals, see the same things in the environment, whatever the explanation for that might be. I'm not claiming we all see things exactly the same way, but we do see the same things. Imagine you and I are looking as a large sheet of paper with little mutlicoloured marks all over it. I ask you to point to one of the marks, and sure enough I will also see a mark at the exact place you point to, If I ask what colour the mark is we will also agree.
By the way I'm not saying I agree with Kastrup, but I do think his kind of idealism at least has explanatory power that most other forms don't. I don't agree with him that physicalism is necessarily "baloney".
Well that covers all the bases, doesn’t it ;-)
I don't see this. I am trying, but I can't imagine it as you describe it. I can't attribute stairs to a dog, surely as you would admit, on a conceptual level, because animals don't have concepts which require language use.
But the issue is phenomenology, I don't deny there is something there which we call "stairs", but the form or how these things are carved out, I can't say. Maybe a dog interprets whatever is out there as a gray step, instead of the whole thing.
Things become much harder if we attempt to understand what a bird or a bee might see when they encounter what we call a "stair".
Quoting Janus
Sure, he tries to be quite rigorous and is successful to some degree. The issue is often semantic when analyzed a bit more closely in my experience.
What you are saying is of the same kind as what Kastrup is saying and what I said is the only explanatory idealist model. You say consciousness has "offshoots", and the point is that they would all be offshoots of the one consciousness and so not really separate at all.
Aagin, I cannot see a difference between this and Kastrup's (and Schopenhauer's) kind of view. It is not that our consciousnesses are completely independently self-organizing of stable patterns of perception, because if that were so it would only result in seeing things in the same kinds of ways, but could not explain seeing the very same things. Of course we are not conscious of being parts of a greater consciousness or mind, and so the separation seems real, but if the separation were real there could be no shared world.
Quoting Manuel
I'm not suggesting the dogs have a linguistically mediated concept 'stairs' but merely that they must perceive them, as it is shown by their use of the stairs.
A bird or bee not so much as a stair is not, in its "stairness", an affordance for them.
The point is only that the configuration 'stair' is not dependent on the human mind even if the concept is and that this is amply demonstrated in relation to everything in our environments by all our experience.
What the "ultimate nature" of things is is a separate question.
[quote=Albert Einstein, letter of condolence]A human being is a part of the whole, called by us "Universe", a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest — a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. The striving to free oneself from this delusion is the one issue of true religion. Not to nourish the delusion but to try to overcome it is the way to reach the attainable measure of peace of mind.[/quote]
Quoting Manuel
Was that the Kurt Jaimungal episode, where Kastrup just refused to continue the interview because of what he perceived as the impertinance of Maudlin?
.
Yep. I watched it (twice) and I thought that Kastrup does what he claims Maudlin did to others. Which is fine, but then don't complain about it.
Doesn't make his views weak or anything, but it would have been productive to see that conversation develop.
As for Kastrup, looking back on it, I hardly spent any time on him in 2025, unlike the two years prior. I got a bit tired of his schtick, in a way. Not that I don't like him.
Because (some) animals sometimes react to things in a way that resembles what we do (which says little about what we perceive when we do that thing) does not validate the argument that they perceive objects because there is a similar "structure".
At most you could say that some animals react to different environmental cues relevant to certain species-related tendencies.
This does not show that they individuate, discriminate or make attributions to things in a way that resembles our experience.
What gives you what you have is reading into animals what we do in some cases, not others.
Yeah that's fair enough. I'll give Kastrup props for making idealism a topic of debate, but there are other formulations which are more interesting.
I don't even understand what you mean exactly by "individuate, discriminate or make attributions to things". For example do you think doing those things would require language?
I'm saying that observation of dogs, the animal example I've been using, shows they see much the same environmental features: doors, balls, walls, stairs trees to piss on etc as we do. Their behavior demonstrates this. They don't see a wall where I see a door, or vice versa, otherwise they'd be bumping into walls trying to get outside, and failing to see exists where they are available.
Anyway, the point is very clear to me. If oy disagree then I would like to see a cogent explanation for their behavior towards the things we see in the environment being consistent ours. To be honest I have not been able to understand at all what you objections to this have been.
Dogs (or other animals) do not need language to discriminate, individuate or make attributions to objects. I also, repeatedly have said that they perceive something. The issue here (as I see it) is one of thinking that because animals engage in certain interactions with objects implies shared perceptual phenomenology.
That dogs avoid running into walls or urinate on the trees only implies things like avoiding pain or easing discomfort, etc. But it is precisely when you say that the behavior of a dog in relation to a tree or a door is evidence of a shared structure, you are smuggling in what you are trying to prove: that dogs see balls as balls, or walls as walls (I am explicitly putting aside cognitive content, I am only speaking about objects we refer to as balls or walls).
The burden of proof is not on me to show what other animals think - I don't know what they think or how they interpret the world, that's why there are essays like Nagel's What's It Is Like to Be a Bat?. If you can't say (as I can't) what it's like to me (a human being), how am I in position to say what is it like to be a dog? They avoid pain. That is a reasonable, conservative guess.
Identical behavior does not tell you what is going on inside. The very same evidence that you use to argue that dogs see a "structure' of a ball, is one anyone can use in relation to the behavior of ant in relation to the ball, or fish for that matter.
If you don't understand this, I literally cannot express myself better, but we can't proceed much more.
I'm not overly convinced by the idea that a dog sees a fish just as we do. The phrase "just as we do" seems unproven. Does a dog see a fish? Obviously not: it has no language. It perceives "prey" in some form, perhaps. But does it interact with a conceptual world or an instinctive one? I'd suggest the latter. When we see a fish, do we perceive food, prey, another animal, an allergy threat, or even potential mercury poisoning? I think a dog engages with a fundamentally different world, one that shares the same raw material to some extent, though ours is elaborated and structured by conceptual frameworks and language which transform it entirely. Reducing this to "well, we both see a fish" overlooks critical distinctions and makes assumptions about just what is shared.
Well put! What you are saying closely matches my own intuitions.
It is hard because what we see is so obviously that it is very hard to step out of it.
That's not true, I'm not smuggling anything in, but just making simple observations.. I'm not talking about structures I'm talking about trees. The fact that the dog urinates on trees consistently shows that it consistently sees something I call a tree at the same location I do. When I throw the ball for the dog it watches me intently and when I raise my arm it begins to run anticipating that I will throw the ball. It sees my body and can read the body language. It sees the ball going in the same direction as I see it. If I throw a brick instead of a ball he will not chase it or if he does he will not try to pick it up when he gets close enough to see it is too big for him to pick up. Just as I see it as 'not-to'be-picked-up-by-the dog, so he also see it as not-to-be-picked-up. This consistency demonstrates clearly that the dog and I share a world at least at the most basic level.
Quoting Tom Storm
What you're missing is that the dog undoubtedly sees what we call a fish, because we observe him picking it up and eating it. It is also undeniable that the dog recognizes the fish as food, just as we do, although obviously not in a linguistically mediated way. The salient point is that the dog sees the fish at the same location in space and time as we do, and from that it follows that "something", mind-independent ontic structures which are either fundamentally physical or mental or neutral (it doesn't matter), ensures there is a shared world as perceived. Science tells us that dogs see only in shades of yellow and blue, so of course things are not going to look just the same to a dog as to a human. And when we consider insects, of course the differences could be vast.
Put another way, I am not saying the world depends on minds. I’m saying that the distinction between mind-independent and mind-dependent is itself a distinction drawn from within experience, and cannot be used to step outside experience altogether.
Where this falls foul of empiricism is the belief that the world is strictly mind-independent, that it exists as it is independently of the mind. Whereas the counter to that is that reality is not something we're outside of or separate from, so this presumed division between mind and world doesn't ultimately hold. (This last is especially suggested by non-dualism, which is more characteristic of Asian than European philosophy.)
The world as perceived is obviously not independent of the perceivers. But it seems obvious there is a "contribution" to what is perceived from a perceiver-independent reality that ensures the possibility of a shared world among perceivers. That "reality" could be mental or physical or neutral in ultimate constitution, and that is a separate question (probably unanswerable).
For my own clarification:
I think we are talking past each other. Now you're talking about trees rather than structures, which is not a distinction I introduced.
The issue remains the same: you're treating anthropomorphic descriptions as if animal behavior shares our phenomenology. I don't believe these descriptions serve to establish what you are claiming. It may be obvious to you, but it isn't for me.
Since this is the case we disagree at a fundamental level, so, I think it's best to move on. You can have a final say.
No I'm not and that's not what I've been saying at all. Anyway I think I've reached the point of diminishing returns so I'm happy to leave it where it is.
…the world (as perceived), is presupposed, and from such temporal antecedence….
Quoting Janus
….the independence of it with respect to perceivers, is given necessarily. That which wasn’t already there (and is so for whatever reason and in whatever manner), cannot be something there (merely from its effect on some form of sensibility).
The world as perceived not independent of perceivers, is far too close to tautological meaninglessness, insofar as perception is not independent of perceivers.
The world (…) is independent of perceivers….is true;
The perceived (…) is independent of perceivers….is false;
The world (perceived) is independent of perceivers….is true;
The perceived (world) is independent of perceivers….is false.
On the other hand, insofar as that which is perceived necessarily exists given its effect on sensibility, to then grant such existence is obviously not independent of perceivers, says far too much with respect to both perceiver and perceived, for the simple reason existence has nothing to do with perception, but is only the necessary condition for its possibility. Whatever the relation between existence as such, and the form of its manifestation in things, which just is that necessary condition, occurs further intellectually/rationally downstream than mere sensation.
Is time just some overblown metaphysical concept, or is it something which seldom receives proper attention.
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Quoting Janus
…from a perceiver-independent reality contradicts the obviously not independent of the perceivers.
The contribution to what is perceived, just is whatever is perceived. But it does not follow, given sufficient distinctions in species-specific intellectual capacities, worldly contributions to perceptions of one species have any apodeitic commonality with worldly contributions of another, for granting such certainty is tantamount to equating rational intellect with mere instinct.
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I had a JRT, I was her one and only human her entire life. For 18 years she was a job-dog, a hiking partner, a pillow thief. Every once in awhile, when I said something to her, she’d tilt her head in that oh-so-cute sorta way, and it occurred to me…she’s wondering what I meant. Only after a few of those, I began to think maybe she was wondering….WTF am I supposed to do that??? There’s no way to tell, from a mere tilt of the head, whether the confusion it suggested belonged to her because of her, or to her because of me. The point being, not the confusion, which may not have even been, but the possibility of correcting it, which may not have even been necessary.
Some nature show tells me aspen trees, given their interconnectedness, correspond according to a root system. Then I try to imagine trees talking to each other, and I get nothing. But I cannot say they don’t talk to each other, only that I can’t imagine how they do. Or, they really don’t and some other natural condition gives that appearance. I mean, a chemical injected in one tree showed up in another, miles away. If I deny anthropomorphism, trees are just trees and anything that connected will interact naturally, I’m not any part of it and therefore shouldn’t get all prophetic over it.
My New Year’s resolution…don’t bug so much.
Wish me luck?
As to JRTs and dogs in general, I shared a life with two of the former for 15-16 years until they died, and now with two cattle-type dogs. When they tilt their heads like that they are wondering what the sounds or the gestures we are making signify?we can read their body language, and they ours since they are not so different from us. Go with your intuitions and don't overthink it.
You don't bug me, so no need for that New Year's resolution. I do wish you luck in whatever other tasks you may have set yourself, though.
I thought about applying some pure reason to this universal consciousness idea, but….turns out…it’s too much like aspens communicating with each other: cool idea but without any possibility of obtaining certainty. And without that possibility, it is then commonly called a waste of time, makes no difference whether true or not, which is synonymous with being irrelevant.
The common rejoinder then becomes…yeah, but it’s fun to play with, right? But no, it isn’t, if it follows that your consciousness has anything whatsoever, in any way, shape or form, to do with mine, which seems plausible given its ground as a universal condition. I summarily reject your consciousness as having anything at all to do with mine, simple as that. Easy to see that if I reject yours, I must also reject anyone else’s, which is to reject every instance of it except my own, which just is to reject the universality of it.
(BOOM!!!)
Or, how about this: is it just me or is there a teeth-grinding contradiction in “extrinsic appearance of inner experience”? Have we not yet come to grips with the certainty that no experience is ever of appearances on the one hand, and no experience is itself an appearance, on the other?
Even the thread title implies an inconsistency, in that the strictly metaphysical doctrine of idealism as such concerns itself only with the internal machinations of human subjects, for which, regarding the being of external things in general, there is not the least import. Descartes may be forgiven for labeling internal machinations/external things in general as different substances, with its accompanying ontological implications, as long as he is credited as first to demonstrate the necessity for there being such a difference in the first place, and in which ontology as such falls aside.
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Quoting Janus
True enough, for folks like us. On higher levels, alternative turns of phrase lead to completely different philosophies, in which case the philosopher’s alternative conceptualizations revert to the Everydayman philosophiser accepting them, which then very well could be his mere misunderstanding.
Like, me, and, universal consciousness. Extrinsic appearance.
And those thinking Kant a phenomenologist. (Sigh)
Are you rejecting the existence of other consciousnesses or just the idea that they have any actual connection with yours, as distinct from merely a similar constitution to yours? Kant would seem to espouse the latter, while Schopenhauer would seem to espouse the former. Kastrup follows Schopenhauer in saying that we do know something of the noumenon in that we are instances of it, and in that we know ourselves both form the outside, as manifest entities and form the inside via introspection.
That said, he doesn't claim that we know for sure what the nature of the noumenon is; he says that he sees no reason why evolved earth monkeys such as ourselves should be able to know with certainty the ultimate nature of reality. He says instead, that the something we do know of the noumenon via inner experience allows us to make educated guesses as to its nature, but we can never be sure those guesses are true.
Personally, I'm not convinced that consciousness is universal and fundamental, but as I've said many times, I think that any coherent ontological idealism cannot do without universal consciousness as a substitute for actual existents, to explain the obvious fact that we all perceive the same things at particular spatiotemporal locations.
Quoting Mww
So, experiences are of things not appearances? And experiences are not appearances but experiences of what appears? Language gets tricky in these kinds of matters.
Quoting Mww
By "higher" I take it you refer to professional philosophers? I don't think their insight is necessarily any greater just on account of their more elaborate and systematic grasp of philosophical systems (except of course their insight into those systems). The basic ideas that philosophical systems elaborate are quite simple and are part of the common currency of "Everydayman" in my view.
I've been reading a study by Iain McGilchrist calle The Master and His Emissary that elaborates on the findings of studies investigating the differences between right and left hemispheres. I'm on board with the idea that we have two modes of attention and understanding. The more diffuse, holistic, synthetic and metaphorical understanding being the function of the right hemisphere and the more focused, reductive, analytical and literal understanding being the function of the left.
We need both, but McGilchrist thinks the right is the master and the left the emissary. He also thinks that there have been three periods in human history where the left came to dominate, and that since the Enlightenment we are in one of those periods. He think the instrumental nature of left hemisphere thinking is largely the cause of the terrible, dire situation humanity finds itself in today.
I have no warrant for rejecting the validity, or indeed even the constitution, of resident consciousness in other human subjects, but I am perfectly within my justifications for denying, a priori, if there should be such consciousness in other subjects, the influence of it beyond its own range.
The point was, that the universality principle which holds for each and every instance of a particular, re: human subjective consciousness, is not the universality principle which holds for each and every possible objective condition in general. In other words, the universality of consciousness is one thing, but universal consciousness is quite another. The former the negation of which is contradictory, the latter the affirmation of which is impossible. All of which reduces to….it’s fine to say everyone has his own consciousness, but the possibility of such truth cannot stand as sufficient ground for saying consciousness is universal.
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Quoting Janus
This is why I let three pages here go by without commenting: I don’t know Kastrup at all, so I have no reason to think he follows Schopenhauer. But I do know Schopenhauer, and he doesn’t so much favor the knowledge of noumena as he does the knowledge of the Kantian ding an sich. So if Kastrup says Schopenhauer says we know something of the noumena because we are instances of it, he is in utter and complete conflict with Kant, who was the originator of the modern version of both noumena and ding an sich, and possibly in some conflict with Schopenhauer in that the latter only concerns himself with the fact Kant disavows any possible knowledge of the thing-in-itself, which Schopenhauer argues we certainly do, iff the thing-in-itself is represented as will, which has nothing to do with noumena in the Kantian sense at all.
And here, of course, is what you were talking about with that alternative turn of phrase. Kastrup and Schopenhauer apparently both treat noumena differently than Kant, and maybe ever differently than each other. But regardless of all that, it amazes me to no end, how it is even possible to suggest we are instances of noumena in the first place, without, first, representing the concept outside its original definition, and second, accepting the newly represented concept as having some sufficient form of additional explanatory power.
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Quoting Janus
So the argument for sufficient explanatory power resides in the notion we know ourselves in two different forms of ourselves. Which is true enough, insofar as we know ourselves as both subject and object. But these are different kinds of knowledge, re: empirical/a priori, originating under different conditions, re: theoretical/speculative, and are not connected in any way with each other except transcendentally, for the belonging of both to a single consciousness.
None of which is sufficient reason to suggest we humans are instances of noumena, insofar as the very notion of noumena in its original Enlightenment sense, has no possibility of ever having an object subsumed under the conception of it.
Again, I’m not familiar with the preemptive conditions necessary in Kastrup, that facilitates the suggestion of a possibility in his philosophy that has been established as impossible in its predecessor.
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Quoting Janus
Yes, language is tricky, but here I think it’s more a matter of systemic procedure. In short, though, no, experience is not of things or of appearances; experience is of representations of appearances, and appearances are the effect of things on sensibility. You could get away with saying experience is of phenomena, which is a representation of that which caused sensation, sensation being whatever affect the appearance of a thing has. Technically, in theoretical constructions, more is required for experience than mere phenomena, but it isn’t really wrong to begin with it. It’s like…you can’t get to the conclusion of a scientific theory from mere observation, and you can’t get to the conclusion of a hypothetical judgement with only a major premise.
And, correct, experiences are not appearances; one is the temporally/methodically opposed extreme of the other. For human intelligence in its empirical domain, there is nothing for it before the not-known of appearance, and there is nothing for it after the known of experience.
The correspondence of the unknown appearance, to the known experience, through representation, depends exclusively on relations prescribed by the system itself (however metaphysically speculative that may be) and therein resides the commonality between various instances of that system in separate human subjects. It never was the contribution of the thing; it was the contribution of the system to which the thing (“…the undetermined object of empirical intuition….”) is given, which is functionally identical for all otherwise rationally-capable humans.
If an object is as round for you as it is for me, it does not follow it is round because of the object, which may only possibly be the case, but because your system and my system are so much alike yours tells you the object is round and mine tells me the object is round, which is necessarily the case. It is impossible to determine roundness from the object alone, but can only be determined from the effect the object has. We are supported in this, for the roundness of objects for us with our intelligence, does not necessarily hold for forms of intelligence in which roundness is impossible for us to be acquainted. If the object was indeed round in itself, and the same object was given to any other kind of intelligence it would necessarily be round for that intelligence as well as our own, which is something impossible for us to know.
Things that don’t appear to sensibility cannot be known by means of the system, but can be inferred from within the system;
Things that are inferred from within the system may never be given as appearances to the system, hence may never be known by means of the system, but that is NOT to deny their existence;
Things that are inferred may never be appearances, hence may never be known by means of the system, and that IS to deny their reality.
Inference implies the proper use of logic. But human intelligence is prone to mere thought, which is a use of logic in form but not necessarily in accordance with rules of proper inference. In other words, as I’m sure you’re aware, we can think whatever we want. Carrying these threads out to their conclusion is found the absurdity of proclaiming humans as instances of noumena, or asserting the roundness of things to a fish, unless the rules themselves are changed. And if the rules change, that which the rules governed must also change….so how in the HELL would the idea that humans are instances of noumena ever have been formed in the first place?
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Quoting Janus
I’m with you. I’ve always been a proponent of the intrinsic human dualistic nature, so would you also admit to being one? Maybe you’re of the opinion that being on board with an idea, isn’t the same as being a proponent of what the idea suggests. Or maybe being dualistic in some aspects of human nature is not to be dualistic in toto. What say you?
I’m also with you…or him anyway…regarding the instrumental nature of left hemisphere, but I’m not so sure about it being the causal condition of all that bad stuff.
But then…there’s today’s major headline…..(shrug)
I don’t think he does. I have Kastrup’s book Decoding Schopenhauer’s Metaphysics, and he’s very careful not to misrepresent. Kastrup isn’t saying that Schopenhauer overturns Kant by gaining theoretical knowledge of noumena. Schopenhauer accepts Kant’s critique of object-knowledge, but not Kant’s assumption that all knowledge must be objectifying. Will is not a noumenon in the Kantian sense, nor an object behind appearances, but what is disclosed in immediate self-awareness prior to representation. The conflict with Kant is therefore deliberate and principled, not a confusion — and Kastrup’s reading tracks this distinction rather carefully.
Ok, good to know.
Quoting Wayfarer
And this is what Kastrup says? Or what Kastrup says Schopenhauer says? I’d agree will is not noumena, but would argue S says will is that thing-in-itself impossible NOT to know. Which is fine for him to say, but it is still in direct conflict with Kant. Be that as it may, of course; the thread title doesn’t implicate Kant anyway.
As a matter of interest, though, I wonder how will, being that which is disclosed in immediate self-awareness prior to representation, connects itself to “world”. As in….World as Will and Representation, 1844.
I don't mind who gets implicated, as long as it's interesting. :wink:
Difficult to say without referring to the book.
I asked my friend Chuck about where Schopenhauer differs with Kant on knowledge of the self. The response:
“For Immanuel Kant, the self appears in two fundamentally different ways:
1. Empirical self:
• The self as it appears in inner sense
• A sequence of mental states in time
• Fully phenomenal, subject to causality
2. Transcendental self (the “I think”)
• The condition of the unity of experience
• Not an object, not knowable, not describable
• A necessary function, not a thing
Kant insists that we have no knowledge whatsoever of the self as it is in itself. Even inner sense gives us only appearances. The noumenal self is strictly unknowable.
This is where Schopenhauer parts company. Schopenhauer’s core claim: we know ourselves twice
For Schopenhauer, the self is given in two irreducibly different ways:
(a) As representation
• I know myself as an object in the world
• As a body in space, with mental states in time
• Governed by causality, like everything else
This much Schopenhauer accepts straight from Kant.
(b) As will
• I know myself immediately as willing
• Not by observation, inference, or representation
• But through lived striving, desire, effort, pain
This second access is non-representational. It is not knowledge of something, but by being something.”
Much of this is elaborated by later phenomenology and existentialism (particularly Sartre).
I don't know if Kastrup says Schopenhauer says, but he most definitely did say in the interview I mentioned that he thinks we have access to the noumenon via introspection.
Also I'd be interested if you can provide a citation from Kant where he explicitly says that the noumenon is not the thing in itself., and/ or if you could provide a coherent distinction between the two concepts. I can see a distinction between things in themselves and the noumenon because things in themselves are for Kant either real things or just kind of formal placeholders. But Schopenhauer rejects things in themselves and collapses the idea to the thing in self. If the noumenon cannot be multiple, then the term noumena, which suggests plurality (as with phenomenon and phenomena) is incoherent.
Hmmm. I guess my view would be that I don’t have one? I can’t make positive judgements with respect to spiritual states or higher consciousness, insofar as I have no idea what either of them might be like, so their relation to noumena would be impossible for me to describe.
On the other hand, given what I understand of noumena, irrespective of spiritual states and higher consciousness, there is no possibility of accessing noumena at all. Even so, that is not to say they are impossible, from which follows access to them is not impossible, from which follows given sufficient means, they might actually be accessible. Just…you know…not by humans, iff humans really do have the type of intelligence that informs both of the origin of them, and of the impossibility of access to them because of it.
Still, even if we don’t actually have the type of intelligence from which noumena as we think of them originate, that in itself is not sufficient reason for permitting spiritual states and higher consciousness to have access to them. Even those would have to be in some form of intelligence so different from ours we still wouldn’t have access, insofar as we wouldn’t understand how some other intelligence works.
The whole point of the critique of pure reason: overloading the system beyond its legitimate bounds will never get us where we want to go.
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Interesting what Chuck says. Thanks.
I can do that. It’ll be here by the time you get back tomorrow.
….300 years ago, physical science, while no longer in its infancy, was nonetheless still a toddler, and of more significance than what it’s done is what it hasn’t, the foremost of which is to dislodge Greek logic from its pinnacle of pure human thought;
….Kant was the chair of metaphysics and logic, of the Greek variety necessarily, from which it is reasonable to presume he must ground his original metaphysical thesis in the established logic he himself taught, even in the face of the as-yet unrealized enormous power of physical science;
….in Greek logic, the prime considerations are identity and contradiction: this is only this and never that. In Kantian duality conditioned by identity and contradiction there is no need of the excluded middle, but what is required are those conditions by which it is provable this is indeed only this and never that, which is accomplished by the mere definition. In a brand new philosophical structure having no procedural precedent whatsoever, it is simply a matter of validating a conception by defining what it’s supposed to do (A727/B755).
….the reader should always guard himself against putting words into Kant’s mouth, speaking for himself but calling it Kant. While Kant admits to constructing merely a theory, and acknowledges there is nothing to prove his theory is indeed the case, and recognizing the absolute necessity in sometimes leaving well-enough-alone, re: dismissing infinite regress as theoretically permissible by admitting there is that for which explanation is more confusing than beneficial (A496/B54), it remains internally consistent and logically united, which is all a theory is ever meant to be.
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Some groundwork:
….when Kant says his brand new metaphysics is complete, he means he’s given you everything you need to follow along, from the names of the faculties required to perform tasks, the names of the tasks required for the system to function, and their relation to each other and to the whole;
….beginning with a logical ground, coupled with specificity in definitions of terms, progressing through purposeful methodology, ending in a complete prescriptive intellectual system, results in a paradigm shift in philosophy itself. One can now take it or leave it, but he is not rationally justified in changing it.
….for Kant, in his speculative metaphysics, external things are given, such that no ontological conditions need be considered, insofar as what we think about and what we deem ourselves as having knowledge of as experience, is far less important than the method by which thought and knowledge are even possible in the first place;
….Kant’s system is in effect for each and every perception, every single one of them, ever and always, on the one hand, and congruently for each and every instance of pure thought on the other. The system cannot be turned on and off, it is a constant companion of the otherwise rational intellect, the fundamental condition of humanity in general. Hence the complexity of the philosophy itself, in accounting for how all that works, and why it should be that way;
…the Kantian system will not work for those thinkers for whom the dualistic nature of human cognition is indefensible, or downright wrong. One must acquiesce to human cognitive dualism, or stand aside from Kantian metaphysics.
Now, return to your seats ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls; the shows about to begin.
(OOOO!!! Aaron Copeland, aka, Emerson Lake and Palmer:
“Welcome back my friends
to the show that never ends.
We’re so glad you could attend
Come inside, come inside.
Come inside, the show's about to start
Guaranteed to blow your head apart
Rest assured you'll get your money's worth
The greatest show in Heaven, Hell, or Earth
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What's pertinent here, then, is the term noumenon or noumena, already given in Greek logic, the modern version only so for statements regarding, not of what it is as that was left unchanged from the Greek, but its origin, its validity and the placement in the new system it may or may not occupy;
….understanding is the faculty of thought, thought is represented in conception, conception is the spontaneity of thinking;
….I can think whatever I please (fn, Bxxvi), understanding being the faculty of thought, understanding then, is the origin of thinking whatever I please;
….a problem with thinking whatever I please, a problem with understanding being the origin of any thought whatsoever, is that understanding has no limit imposed on itself by itself. (A238/B297)
….before anyone objects, that understanding is regulated by rules of logic, it must be remembered understanding the faculty (the origin of conceptions) is not understanding the cognitive activity (the synthesis or conjoining of conceptions to each other). The faculty understanding is not under the rules of logic, these belonging to judgement, which informs of the correctness of synthesis but not of the spontaneous origin of conceptions synthesized;
….because it is not contradictory for understanding to merely originate conceptions, it is perfectly warranted to originate any conception it can think, any conception which arises spontaneously from it, is legitimate merely from being thought;
….there is nonetheless a control for understanding; it is reason, which has nothing to do with experience (A302/B359).
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….the standing definition of noumenon, established by the Greeks and left undisturbed in Kant, is simply that object of thought. Period. No more, no less. An object of thought in Kant, however, is a conception, from which follows noumena in Kant is merely conception. Period. No more, no less.
….in the Kantian system, conceptions in general are necessary but conception alone is useless. To think a conception, to have the spontaneous origin of one given, signals an end in itself (thoughts without content are empty, A51/B75), insofar as there is nothing to conjoin to a single conception, a singular instance of spontaneous thought, thus it is that noumena is an empty conception;
….an empty conception such as this, while valid and non-contradictory, is therefore called noumena represented in a negative sense, meaning to indicate that conception representing a thing, not a thing of sensible intuition which is already called phenomenon, but a thing of thought alone for which there is no intuition of any kind at all. (The faculty of thought does not intuit, the faculty of intuition does not think. A52/B76, this is this and not that, a fundamental ground of dualistic transcendental philosophy)
But….why?
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…there is no why, or, any why makes no difference with respect to any other why. Kant used mathematics to prove the possibility and validity of synthetic a priori cognitions, and by the same token used noumena to prove understanding can think whatever it wants, and by association I can think whatever I please. He would have been logically inconsistent and his metaphysics would not be complete, if he proclaims I can think whatever I please, then not present a worthless example as easily as the worthwhile, of doing it;
….so the why understanding does its thing having been said, that being just because it can, still leaves the why of the uselessness of the conception itself, other than the fact it is a singular thought, which reduces to….why is it only a single thought, and, why does it follow that because it is a single thought it is unknowable;
….understanding is the source of conceptions, thought is the synthesis of conceptions. To synthesize conceptions presupposes a relation of separate instances of them, from which follows that in understanding….more correctly judgement, most correctly imagination….to synthesize conceptions, it must seek from itself through spontaneity of thought, or from consciousness through the collection of all antecedent cognitions, those conceptions to be conjoined;
…any synthesis of conceptions in understanding is for the express purpose of cognizing empirical objects; there is no other use of understanding in its empirical sense except experience (A237/B296);
….given that understanding is for the express use for experience, any conceptions imagination uses in its synthesis towards cognition of things of experience must themselves be empirical conceptions;
….that to which all empirical conceptions point, is sensibility, insofar as all empirical conditions whatsoever, arise externally from and are given to the system through the senses;
…the origin of those necessary conditions for the empirical understanding of existent things by means of the cognition of their representations, then, is intuition, from which follows that which imagination synthesizes with conceptions in understanding, must come from intuition;
(To shorten it up, I leave out the origin of phenomena, which represents the synthesis of conceptions in intuition, and thereby the separation of aesthetic sensibility from logical understanding)
…but for noumena, again in its negative sense, originating not externally and given to the senses, but spontaneously arising from thought alone, there is no phenomenal representation from which imagination in understanding uses in its synthesis of conceptions into a cognition;
…hence, noumena remain an empty conception, meaning there are no intuitions to conjoin with it, and for which the express purpose of understanding for the possibility of experience, is therefore denied to it.
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Quoting Janus
….there isn’t one, but the reader’s sufficient familiarity with the thesis as a whole can grasp the fact Kant wants….actually needs….it to be understood they are nowhere near the same. In fact, they cannot be the same and have the text maintain its accordance with established logic;
….sufficient familiarity looks like, Kant specifically states the understanding treats noumena as it treats the thing it itself (A255/B310), insofar as they both originate as single conceptions, meaning neither of them have conceptions subsumed under them, meaning neither of them relate to cognizable things. Just understanding once more thinking whatever it wants, the difference here is, the thing in itself, while not cognizable as such, still has validity because of what it is not;
….the fact noumena represents things that cannot be cognize says nothing about the things that can, and noumena cannot because they lack intuition, they lack intuition because there is nothing given to sensibility relating noumena to the pure forms of intuition, space and time;
….that which can be cognized, then, does have associated intuition, which then requires an exposition for the possibility of intuition;
….for the possibility of intuition is the necessity of an external object given to the senses, which is called a undetermined object of empirical intuition (A20/B34), or, an appearance in the sense of being presented to, as opposed to looking-like. Appearing to, not appearing as;
….all well and good, but the thing that appears was at some time that same thing which didn’t, or hasn’t, or won’t, appear, in which case it is nonetheless an object, just that object having no effect of he senes, or, which is the same thing, isn’t an appearance;
….but the thing given must be distinguished as to its causality, either it is given merely from being perceived, or, it is given because it was already a real, physical existent, for otherwise we are forced to affirm the appearance of something without that which appears (Bxxvi), the thing…without the thing, the thing now…the thing before now;
….it is much more rationally determinable, and much less potentially contradictory, to grant the thing given to sensibility was an already real, physical existent, which still begs the question as to what it was before became an appearance, which is for the understanding alone to discover;
….understanding thinks its conceptions, therefore to think the thing before appearance, to think the conception and represent it as the thing-in-itself, is a perfectly legitimate activity of understanding in its transcendental sense, meaning thought with respect to all cognitions in general, not just this or that particular cognition.
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Quoting Janus
Noumenon and thing-in-itself are both objects of thought, neither are appearances to sensibility, therefore neither are knowable through discursive cognition (A260/B315);
Noumena are not knowable because they have no intuition, they have no intuition because, as an object of thought, there is nothing to give to sensibility to intuit in any time;
The thing in itself is unknowable because it has no intuition, it has no intuition because as an object of thought, the thing-in-itself is not given to sensibility to intuit at any time, but there is a change of state through one time, wherein the thing-in-itself as conception becomes the thing of existence, and that is what appears;
That thing-in-self, upon being subjected to sensibility as an appearance hence no longer in itself, then becomes experience, its representation resides in consciousness, therefore does not revert back to being in itself when not perceived, but we can still think of it as it was when it was a thing-in-itself, only now it is thought as a thing in general. Discursive thought from conception becomes transcendental thought from an idea.
My version of coherence, while leaving out a lot of detail.
Thanks for asking. Hope I didn’t disappoint. Got questions, ask.
Quoting Mww
This seems to capture what I was alluding to. Noumena cannot be cognized, whereas things in themselves can be cognized, only not as they are in themselves. That said Noumena" suggests plurality. The term "thing in itself" has an ambiguity about it?it could refer to the thing which appears to us and is represented as a phenomenon or it could refer to the perceptually unknowable "whole" which Schopenhauer posits as the singular noumenon. Since the unknowable whole cannot be cognized, then it seems it might count as noumenal.
That's all I've time for now. (it is 8.29AM here in Australia).
PS: I realized I left a bracket off the quote from you which means you probably were not alerted to my response. I just edited this a little, and I think I have no more to say at the moment. If you want to respond I will be interested to read.
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Quoting Mww
This may be a naive question, but it sometimes seems to me that noumena represent a compromise between direct realism and idealism. It’s as if Kant doesn’t want to be a full-blown idealist and therefore argues that there must be things-in-themselves which are unknowable, and what we recognise is the product of our senses and cognitive apparatus.
Note - fixed syntax
I'd say the producer, not the product, of our senses and cognitive apparatus seems more apt.
Correct, he does not want to be thought of as a full-blown idealist. He does, on the other hand, state for the record (A370), of all the idealist doctrines he lists, he is of the transcendental variety. It is this variety alone which argues as you say.
He argues against all full-blown idealists, such as Descartes and Berkeley, and even the quasi-transcendental idealists, here and there, but those mostly because they don’t realize that’s what they really are, or are oh-so-close to really being if they’d just gone one or two steps further, such as Mendelssohn, Libneitz, Wolff, Baumgartner, et al.
As for noumena directed/indirect compromise…maybe, maybe not. I don’t have any interest in it, and Kant didn’t even know about the direct/indirect dichotomy. Or perhaps what it represents he would have called it something else.
But at any rate, noumena in the Kantian sense is not a compromise of any kind, but rather an example of understanding coloring outside its own rule-bound lines.
That's a nice way of framing it.