Janus

:up: I guess things could be ideas (or impulses?) in an instinctive universal mind equally as they could be in a meta-cognitive one. Spinoza's God is ...

We don't need to be concerned with something in order to be concerned with it. The interminability of these kinds of arguments on this forum attest to...

If I held that the human-independent nature of reality was ideas in a universal mind would I not count as an idealist? In other words the Universe exi...

That's dead easy: we know what we experience, and we know what we don't experience. We don't experience the human-independent nature of reality, we ex...

Of course the same problem exists with materialism; how could you know that everything, independently of anything human, is material or even what that...

Right, anything we understand must be a part of the model and not of the purported "external forces". We know we are constrained by external forces, w...

Why thank you...? Just another one of life's illusions...

The Black and White Minstrel strikes again!

If I'm reading you right I agree. There is 'something' independent of any and all human experience and understanding which appears to us as the empiri...

To my way of thinking abstraction is generalization, and a generalized concept requires symbolic language. It also seems obvious that things must stan...

Do you think abstract thought is possible without language? It is possible to slow down the internal dialogue, and my own experience shows me that in ...

OK, fair enough. :cool:

All our responses are "defiled" by preconceptions and expectations. As Wittgenstein says "Don't for heaven's sake, be afraid of talking nonsense! But ...

There is an everyday usage of 'phenomena' which arguably restricts the term to appearances of the external kind. But, as I understand it, the term has...

The ordinary state of non-dual awareness is "inconceivable", simply because all conceptions are dualistic. The question I asked is along a different t...

I agree; all appearances, images, sensations, impressions; whether "internal" or "external" count as phenomena in my book.

I imagine the ordinary mind of the Japanese is suffused with Japanese culture just as the ordinary mind of a westerner is suffused with western cultur...

I'm not promoting the idea that animals live in some kind of aesthetic rapture, or even that humans who attain non-dual awareness do. I think non-dual...

I voted "the question is too unclear to answer". If I were asked "do you experience a world that seems to be external to your body?" I would answer 'y...

I'm wondering why you speak in terms of "generating" phenomenal experience. It would seem that phenomenal experience is ongoing for percipients as lon...

It just sounds to me like you lack the experience, because that is not at all in accordance with mine. Human experience is mediated by abstract though...

Yes, all that seems obvious; since they would need symbolic language to think "what am I doing here?" or "what does being an elephant mean, really?", ...

Fair enough, I suppose...but I draw a distinction between "eating shit" and eating shit. :lol:

I like the "ephemeral", the "coprophagic" not so much. If you were offered the chance to live forever as long as you ate nothing but shit would you ta...

I don't believe animals parse experience in terms of subject/ object. To see non-dually is to see without the discursive overlay. Distinguishing thing...

I haven't assumed you are not interested; I did include the "if". Practice is to let go of thoughts and incentive is desire.

If you have no sense of the numinous then what to do? If you want to let go, then you must practice, but you would need incentive. It takes you to whe...

:lol: You've sinned (missed the mark) yet again; you're headed straight for hell! Or maybe you're already there, since it must be hellish for you havi...

Yes, I think the mundane is exalted when the creative joy of living has been sucked out by the internal dialogue, by seeing ourselves as somehow set a...

:up: There's quite a lot in what you say there, most of which I agree with, but I have to go do something now, so a more comprehensive response will h...

I see ignorance as consisting, not in holding one view rather than another (except in the empirical context) but in being wedded to some (necessarily ...

Yes, there is always the illusion of progress bolstered by the obvious progress of the sciences, but philosophy is not like that in my view. The idea ...

:up: I think the application of "material" or "immaterial" in an imagined absolute sense to computations is a category error. It's like saying, for ex...

:up: :up: We can only say what interaction between what we think of as non-perceiving objects is like for us. Personally I find metaphysical theories ...

:up:

I don't know about @"Banno", but I think @"Isaac" would agree that different organisms perceive the tree differently. Organisms' perceptions are affec...

With "learning to perceive truly" do you mean something like 'learning to see richness instead of paucity'? I don't understand Heidegger as ever being...

I don't understand this comment; can you explain?

Wittgenstein cannot have really believed that "philosophy leaves everything as it is" since he saw it as a therapeutic, transformative process of libe...

But this is trivially true regardless of one's metaphysics. The idealist or anti-realist can equally say that "the tree has leaves" is about the tree ...

I think it pays to remember that there is no "accurate picture" of an external world, except relative to the context of our collective representation:...

Right, we perceive things as they really are for us, not as they really are for an ant or an aardvark. It's the idea that we see things as they really...

The idea that we perceive things "as they are' seems incoherent to me. But that is indeed the naive assumption; that our eyes are like windows through...

Our heads are just collective representations like the rest. We don't experience things as being in our heads. but as being outside. So, we could say ...

As I understand Kant the empirical world is real only in the sense of being a collective representation.

I'm actually quite gratified to hear that you consider my words to be ordinary; I'd be horrified if you found them interesting, just as I'd be concern...

If I take the direct route to town, it still takes five minutes; I don't arrive instantaneously. Are we directly affected by the light reflected off o...

:rofl: That so encapsulates the image I have of your character. Yes, it is. Some wordplay is more interesting and some less.The wordplay varies accord...

Experientially considered perception seems direct, but scientific analysis of the organs of seeing show that it is a process. Does that mean it is ind...

This thread has given me a good laugh. both sides of the debate are so convinced they are right and neither side of the "debate", seems to realize tha...