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Omnipresent Mind

#1
Magical Realist Offline
Mind as not being contained inside the brain---as some sequestered hallucination of images and thoughts unattached to the real world. Rather Mind as engulfing our being in the world, determining it and changing it in accord with it's own inherent processes. We are in our Minds in the mode of being in SpaceTime. This is the Kantian concept of our mode of being in the world. SpaceTime is the encompassing containment of the Mind of all physical reality, deeper and more vast than any of its empirically manifest constituents. Also, the manifest being of qualia all around us in our world is further proof of the omnipresence of the Mind in our experience.There is no outside to the Mind. We are in it as we are inside of consciousness itself.
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#2
Zinjanthropos Offline
(Jun 10, 2019 09:45 PM)Magical Realist Wrote: Mind as not being contained inside the brain---as some sequestered hallucination of images and thoughts unattached to the real world. Rather Mind as engulfing our being in the world, determining it and changing it in accord with it's own inherent processes. We are in our Minds in the mode of being in SpaceTime. This is the Kantian concept of our mode of being in the world. SpaceTime is the encompassing containment of the Mind of all physical reality, deeper and more vast than any of its empirically manifest constituents. Also, the manifest being of qualia all around us in our world is further proof of the omnipresence of the Mind in our experience.There is no outside to the Mind. We are in it as we are inside of consciousness itself.

Many claims, none supported.
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#3
Magical Realist Offline
(Jun 10, 2019 10:29 PM)Zinjanthropos Wrote:
(Jun 10, 2019 09:45 PM)Magical Realist Wrote: Mind as not being contained inside the brain---as some sequestered hallucination of images and thoughts unattached to the real world. Rather Mind as engulfing our being in the world, determining it and changing it in accord with it's own inherent processes. We are in our Minds in the mode of being in SpaceTime. This is the Kantian concept of our mode of being in the world. SpaceTime is the encompassing containment of the Mind of all physical reality, deeper and more vast than any of its empirically manifest constituents. Also, the manifest being of qualia all around us in our world is further proof of the omnipresence of the Mind in our experience.There is no outside to the Mind. We are in it as we are inside of consciousness itself.

Many claims, none supported.

I'm waiting for CC's wise and astute comment on this.
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#4
Syne Offline
You're describing god.
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#5
C C Offline
Magical Realist Wrote:I'm waiting for CC's wise and astute comment on this.


Oh, yeah, put the pressure on me to concoct a miracle rescue in a few minutes. <wink> Big Grin

(Jun 10, 2019 09:45 PM)Magical Realist Wrote: Mind as not being contained inside the brain---as some sequestered hallucination of images and thoughts unattached to the real world.


Well, the "brain" is first encountered as just another phenomenal resident among countless others in our experiences (chop a skull open and there they are empirically falling out). Then the brain gets biologically conceived and described. Then a correlation is established between experience and neural activity. Then (although it is rarely overtly addressed or publicly exposed as such) the "brain" acquires a counterpart in a metaphysical version of the external world that is treated as the cause of the phenomenal appearances (including the phenomenal version of the brain and the body -- as well as the original, phenomenal external world itself). IOW, one climbs from the concrete ground to the abstract rooftop by ladder, then kicks the ladder away and champions that the rooftop was actually first or that we have always been standing on it.

Quote:Rather Mind as engulfing our being in the world, determining it and changing it in accord with it's own inherent processes.


Whatever "mind" is supposed to mean here, it can't be a specific mind like mine or yours (and I assume it is not). Its meaning must be generic instead or serving as a generative and regulating principle, prior in rank to the human manifestations of experience and their internal order. Morality ironically contributes heavily to that restriction (among other things), and it's possibly humorous that there's no naturalism philosopher or scientist who could go against that social prescription of making "the many" more fundamentally important than the "one" (a particular ordinary mind) without being construed a solipsist. Not that they'd want to even if they stumbled onto a extraordinary reason or motivation to do so, since they're pretty much locked into that stance since childhood like anyone else, barring a pathological degree of self-interest.

Quote:We are in our Minds in the mode of being in SpaceTime. This is the Kantian concept of our mode of being in the world. SpaceTime is the encompassing containment of the Mind of all physical reality, deeper and more vast than any of its empirically manifest constituents. Also, the manifest being of qualia all around us in our world is further proof of the omnipresence of the Mind in our experience.


If a running refrigerator is manifested either visually or by the sound it makes or as felt sensations -- and is also identified/conceived as such an object -- then it is part of convention to classify those as mental affairs (excluding the majority population of naive realists who aren't aware that they're reflexively projecting "subjective" characteristics upon their "objective" world).

And traveling to anywhere in space results in a continuation of things "showing themselves" in that manner, along with those intellectual and remembered understandings of them as whatever label (including the "I don't have any idea what the hell that is" thoughts). But what makes that convention possible is the outstanding belief that entities and circumstance which lack brains -- which are non-biological, period, (embracing %99.9999... of the cosmos) lack any manifestations and cognitive apprehensions whatsoever (there's not even the oblivion of nothingness presented).

The non-metaphysical "external world" that is brutely presented rather than speculated about or rationally inferred... Obviously does have objects composed of qualia (secondary qualities) rather than being stripped of those in the quantitative or technical descriptions of some disciplines of science.

Objects of Perception: "We have seen that for the naïve realist, objects that are not actually being perceived continue to have all the properties we normally perceive them as having. For the scientific realist, however, only some of the properties we perceive continue to be possessed by objects when there are no perceivers around, these being their primary qualities. [...] Scientific direct realism is often discussed in terms of Locke’s distinction between primary and secondary qualities. The Primary qualities of an object are those whose existence is independent of the existence of a perceiver. Locke’s inventory of primary qualities included shape, size, position, number, motion-or-rest and solidity, and science claims to be completing this inventory by positing such properties as charge, spin and mass. The secondary qualities of objects, however, are those properties that do depend on the existence of a perceiver. "

The "primary properties" aren't actually direct. Shapes are abstracted from the manifested instances of objects; and other primary properties are inferred with the help of experiments. Kant did suspend belief about even primary properties applying to a transcendent level, but not from scientific realism. In the latter context "shape" would be a technical description, anyway (or like a formula for generating shapes in a computer image editor). Rather than the phenomenal version of a shape (a point-of-view dependent manifestation of what an object is outside itself).

In addition, in the "external world" we do have access to... quantum fields are replaced by everyday things like chairs, birds, stars, etc. Which is to say, using physics to pursue what a so-called "true world" is like is going to take one to a destination just as "crazy" or even farther removed from "normal" as what ancient philosophers came up with. If deciding to go down the yellow brick road of what existence is like outside of experience's showings, we can't conveniently stop when things get too weird for our taste. Because that's essentially admitting we never had any legitimate commitment to getting behind appearances to begin with. We only wanted to go far enough to trash the folk beliefs of another group, but not our own as well.

Quote:There is no outside to the Mind. We are in it as we are inside of consciousness itself.


Even the either biologically described or metaphysical counterpart of the phenomenal brain that is treated as causing experience (and understanding) would feature an "outside environment" in the context of our extrospective sensations. But yeah, there is no non-mental "outside" or presentation of an external world since by definition such excludes both experiential and intellectual evidence of anything. Barring our going down the route of Hume's bundle-theory offspring and such seemingly treating phenomena (impressions) as prior in rank to to their organization or bundling as a "mind" and everyday objects (retrospectively labeled "pan-phenomenalism"). Which in turn might be the only way to make any sense out of direct realism, when the latter is not roughly equivalent to Kant's empirical realism.
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#6
Zinjanthropos Offline
Quote:IOW, one climbs from the concrete ground to the abstract rooftop by ladder, then kicks the ladder away and champions that the rooftop was actually first or that we have always been standing on it. 

That’s pretty good CC. I’ve always championed somewhere before something.  Don’t see any way around it other than somewhere being the omnipresent mind itself and I think that’s what Ostro is intimating. Why a mind would be the first or only thing to pop into existence is the bigger question.
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#7
C C Offline
(Jun 11, 2019 03:01 PM)Zinjanthropos Wrote:
Quote:IOW, one climbs from the concrete ground to the abstract rooftop by ladder, then kicks the ladder away and champions that the rooftop was actually first or that we have always been standing on it. 

That’s pretty good CC. I’ve always championed somewhere before something.  Don’t see any way around it other than somewhere being the omnipresent mind itself and I think that’s what Ostro is intimating. Why a mind would be the first or only thing to pop into existence is the bigger question.


Even "existence" -- when treated as something more substantive than the changing content of consciousness which we're intimately familiar with -- is a general concept abstracted from that parade of fleeting, specific experiential events. Apparently stimulated by the ancient rationalist need to assert that there is something beyond or more enduring and fundamental than those phantoms of "becoming".

Lenin, obviously a Marxist materialist who was no friend to these guys, once related how followers of Ernst Mach ridiculed materialism by calling it equivalent to belief in something invisible, meta-phenomenal, or supernatural-like: "The materialists lapse into "Kantianism" (Plekhanov, by recognising the existence of "things-in-themselves," i.e., things outside of our consciousness); they "double" the world and preach "dualism," for the materialists hold that beyond the appearance there is the thing-in-itself; beyond the immediate sense data there is something else, some fetish, an "idol," an absolute, a source of "metaphysics," a double of religion ("holy matter," as Bazarov says). Such are the arguments levelled by the Machians against materialism, as repeated and retold in varying keys by the afore-mentioned writers."

IOW, that historic mockery of the Machians toward materialism is illustrative of where the aversion to metaphysics came from in some of the empiricist schools of the past. It's similar to what transpires in religion to them.

Of course, even sub-atomic particles are phenomenal if they can be detected or "shown" by instruments. It is their abstract descriptions -- if construed to be referencing whatever their "true" nature of being is after stripped of qualitative mental properties -- that are devoid of such and unreachable apart from (again) mathematical activity drawing inferences and models from experiments.

I guess one could even venture that "be-ing" for some radical empiricists would be the manifestations themselves (since metaphysics is spurned as folly) instead of those treated as mere (mental) representations. A type of existence which "shows itself" instead of being invisible doesn't have to be attributed to or called a "mind", though. If going David Hume's route of asserting that "impressions" or phenomenal affairs are prior in rank to any bundling, organizational behavior, or conception of them as a mind-stream and various everyday entities. Such pan-phenomenalism might arguably be rubbing shoulders with naive or commonsense realism, in terms of the latter's non-thinking everyday occurrence in people (rather than that articulated as a doctrine or trying to understand it deeper than that belief's non-deliberate occurrence).

And for the opposing flavor of rationalist who deems experiences and personal mental affairs to be non-fundamental or even superfluous illusions of language, "be-ing" is instead non-mental (or at least lacks manifestation) and thereby is as invisible as supernatural entities -- in terms of what it is to itself -- devoid of phenomenal properties.
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