User:Visarga/Hegel and Kashmir Shaivism

Hegel's Absolute Idealism

• Kashmir Shaivism is very similar to Hegel's Absolute idealism
• ontologically monistic
• the being as an all-inclusive whole
• object is in identity with the subject -> same problem is discussed in Isvara Pratyabhijna ?
• absolute is essentially a dynamic -> Sakti, Spanda
• the unfoldment of the absolute, creating the world
• interaction of opposites generates as the creative principle -> see Siva-Sakti
• "All reality is spirit"
• "the ideality of the finite" - interpreted as implying that "what is finite is not real"
• "nature is not different from the spirit"
• we do not relate to the world as if it is other from us
• Hegel's dialectic, "Thesis, antithesis, synthesis" - is the same process employed by Abhinavagupta in his works, and in a larger sense, in the Indian philosophy; also his concept of building an inclusive phisosophy; the idea of critique as a method of assimilation, not of rejection;
• the idea of freedom as the absolute and final aim ; the means for realising it, i.e. the subjective side of knowledge and will, with its life, movement, and activity
• scholars like Howard Kainz explain that Hegel's philosophy contains thousands of triads
• BUNGE, M. Levels and Reduction
• emergent properties; irreducibility
• Not only does Hegel's monism thus contradict divine personality, it takes away much of the meaning and reality from human personality - Monism, Pluralism, and Personalism, John Wright Buckham

Further research

• Josiah Royce "the objective idealist" - reality as a universe of ideas or signs which occur in a process of being interpreted by an infinite community of minds. These minds, and the community they constitute, may themselves be understood as signs
  • Objective idealism - "there is in an important sense only one perceiver, and that this perceiver is one with that which is perceived"

• Timothy Sprigge "panpsychist" - The Vindication of Absolute Idealism: book open to read online [1]

• Thomas Nagel "the anti-reductionist" - tension between objective and subjective perspectives
  • Nagel is probably most widely known within the field of philosophy of mind as an advocate of the idea that consciousness and subjective experience cannot, at least with the contemporary understanding of physicalism, be reduced to brain activity

• George Berkeley "the subjective idealist" - existence is tied to experience, and that objects exist as perception, but not as matter separate of perception

• Kant - objects of which we are sensibly cognizant are merely representations of unknown somethings—what Kant refers to as the transcendental object
  • the existence of a noumenal world limits reason to what he perceives to be its proper bounds, making many questions of traditional metaphysics, such as the existence of God, the soul, and free will unanswerable by reason
  • I ask then, if perception is possible, what is the link between the subject and the external object? Such a link existing, does it not imply a common substrate? And such a substrate must be related to consciousness otherwise there would not be subjective experience (consciousness) in this world.

• Spinoza, Bertrand Russell - The idea that the physical description of the brain leaves out its mental essence and that we need to reform our concepts accordingly is not new. A version of it is found in Spinoza and it is at the heart of Bertrand Russell’s neutral monism, expounded in The Analysis of Matter, An Outline of Philosophy, and other writings

• Bertrand Russell - If there is any advantage in supposing that the lightwave, the process in the eye, and the process in the optic nerve, contain events qualitatively continuous with the final visual percept, nothing that we know of the physical world can be used to disprove the supposition

• Brand Blanshard - two forms of idealism
  • epistemological idealism - the position that all objects of direct experience exist only in consciousness
  • ontological idealism - the position that the world in itself is mental, or made of mind-stuff
  • strongly critical of reductionist accounts of mind (e.g. behaviorism), he maintained to the contrary that mind is the reality of which we are in fact most certain

• George Berkeley - ontological idealism, that "esse est percipi" (to be is to be perceived)
  • there are no material objects, only minds and ideas in those minds. Berkeley summarized his theory with the motto "esse est percipi" ("To be is to be perceived"), but went on to elaborate it with God as the source of consensus reality and other particulars.

• John Locke - was the first philosopher to define the self through a continuity of "consciousness"
  • the self is that conscious thinking thing, (whatever substance, made up of whether spiritual, or material, simple, or compounded, it matters not) which is sensible, or conscious of pleasure and pain, capable of happiness or misery, and so is concerned for itself, as far as that consciousness extends
  • "the body too goes to the making the man" - the Lockean self is therefore a self-aware, self-reflective consciousness that is fixed in a body

• Bernard Bosanquet was a follower of Hegel and the "…central theme of Bosanquet's idealism was that every finite existence necessarily transcends itself and points toward other existences and finally to the whole

• William James - Religious genius (experience) should be the primary topic in the study of religion, rather than religious institutions—since institutions are merely the social descendant of genius
  • The intense, even pathological varieties of experience (religious or otherwise) should be sought by psychologists, because they represent the closest thing to a microscope of the mind
  • Overbelief - philosophical term for a belief adopted that requires more evidence than one presently has
  • James claimed that it was only when he was under the influence of nitrous oxide that he was able to understand Hegel (LOL, that's rich!)
  • the revelations of the mystic hold true, they hold true only for the mystic; for others, they are certainly ideas to be considered, but can hold no claim to truth without personal experience of such

Egocentric epistemic bias

• the view that “egocentric epistemic bias” is legitimate—is defended in Wedgwood [2]

Metaphysics are meaningless?

• Logical positivism -> opposition to all metaphysics, especially ontology and synthetic a priori propositions; rejection of metaphysics not as wrong but as having no meaning
• So is art for an overstressed or hungry person, but does that mean we must raise the practical ends over all?
• Metaphysics as in western philosophy might look like mere sophisticated mind gymnastics, but for the eastern philosophies, it can be lived and breathed; for example the kundalini experience is clearly a mystical state deeply connected to philosophy; also the state of spiritual illumination - clearly an altered state of mind with peculiar properties; also samadhi; also the mind states one discovers by using mantras -> they are real, just as real as eating some entheogens will make you feel different

Irreducibility/emergence or consciousness

• Here's how a physicalist sees it (some guy on a forum): there are billions (perhaps trillions) of individual processes occurring between the individual units of thought, in the neocortex, and so it would be impossible to comprehend each individual action. Instead, the entire process is looked at, and the emergent algorithm is quantified as it's own entity (going by such names as "subjective experience" and simply "consciousness"). Because the algorithm describes the behavior of all or many of the parts, in a pattern that they form together, it is not a property of any of the individual parts, giving the sense of irreducibility. [3]
  • ME: -> so the interaction of 2,3,N processes is irreducible to properties of individual particles?
  • for example Pressure (as an emergent property) is reducible to notions of kinetic energy of individual particles; why would the actions of many neurons not be definable in terms of complex functions? just add up all the neuron functions, make a huge equation for the whole brain. isn't that theoretically possible?
  • I propose the question: where does consciousness start? with half a brain? 1000 neurons? 1 neuron? 1 atom? where is the threshold from inconsciousness to consciousness?
  • for that matter, the question is very applicable in the case of the human conception. Where does a fetus become conscious? Is the ovum conscious, the sperm? Are we uniting two consciousnesses? Or maybe it becomes conscious at a later stage, then, what is that stage? 4 months into the carriage? at birth? 1 year old? - this might be of interest for the "pro life / pro choice" dispute
  • so my view is that consciousness does not "magically" appear at some complexity threshold. it preexists as an intrinsic property of the physical. thus even a stone is conscious in a limited way; ain't that pretty?
  • maybe the notion of putting the behavior of even a single neuron in a function is wrong; the neuron is made of atoms which are fluctuating in a state of quantum uncertainty; the state of the neuron is not definite; brain itself is a quantum computer and as such it might not be computable; in such a brain coherence happening here and there is not so far fetched; the subjective self might just be a coherence state inside the brain/body; others have tried this idea before. hehe.

• Thomas Nagel - The logical gap between subjective consciousness and neurophysiology seems unbridgeable, however close may be the contingent correlations between them
  • On Emergence of Properties: Even if there are laws governing the behavior of molecules in large numbers that are genuinely higher-order and not merely the statistical consequences of the probabilistic or deterministic laws governing the individual particles – holistic laws, so to speak – it still does not affect the point. Facts about the macroscopic properties of a substance like water, or an event like a thunderstorm, would still be constitutively entailed by the facts about the behavior of the microscopic or submicroscopic constituents – whatever kinds of laws might
  • Rejecting Property Dualism - Simply to say that mental events are physical events with additional, nonphysical properties is to force disparate concepts together without thereby making the link even potentially intelligible
  • Mental events, can be roughly located in space and time, and are

causally related to physical events, in both directions. The causal facts are strong evidence that mental events have physical properties, if only we could make sense of the idea.

• • • ME: I would say it works the other way too: because mental events are causally related to physical events, it might prove that physical events could possibly be of the mental kind

Forum discussions

• Consciousness discussions at physicsforums.com [4]