How to define 2R. We need the clarity of analytical philosophy. "Continental" is part of the problem

I have been trying to nail down what it is that I see differently to most other people involved in 2R, and I am realising now that it has a lot to do with the fact that my philosophical background is strongly analytical, with far less emphasis on the continental tradition. This is partly why I do not see 2R in terms of a progression from modern to postmodern to metamodern. That is Hegelian thinking, and I am no more committed to that than I am to anything else derived from the Continental tradition. From my point of view that entire branch of philosophy was based on a mistake. That doesn’t mean none of it is relevant at all, but it does mean it should not dictate the framing of our thinking about 2R. Another approach is possible.

I have spent many years trying to come up with a way of defining what is wrong with the existing ideological systems of the West. The problem I started with was the fact that nobody can figure out how to replace capitalism. Other people see the book Capitalist Realism as a major step forwards. From my perspective it is just more Continental whingeing and non-answers. It berates Western society for failing to imagine an alternative to Capitalism, while not even attempting to do so itself. How exactly is that helping? So I asked myself what exactly it is that is wrong with capitalism and the answer appears to be that the whole thing was created under the assumption that growth is sustainable and desirable. We need to start with a different assumption – one that isn’t detached from reality. We should start by acknowledging that growth isn’t sustainable and that we need to completely rethink economics for a post-growth era. We don’t even need to mention capitalism. And we don’t need to come up with a post-growth economic system either – all we need to do is change the terms under which the debates take place, both in politics and academia, and ultimately throughout Western society. If nobody is permitted to assume growth is the answer, then we will be forced to invent that part of the new paradigm. A way forward becomes possible. This way forwards involves a completely new start – not a synthesis between previous systems and certainly not any “oscillation”. We need analytical thinking, not continental thinking. And the question is what does post-growth economics look like?

There are two other things which need to go, both of which I have been banging on about since I arrived here. One of them is metaphysical materialism, and in this case the groundwork is already partly complete. Thomas Nagel has provided it in Mind and Cosmos, where he uses a very similar procedure. He doesn’t try to synthesise materialism and something else. Instead he says “OK, materialism is false. Science still works, but it needs to be re-sited on a new, non-materialistic foundation. How can we go about that? What does a new start look like?” The question here is what does post-materialistic science look like?

The other is postmodern anti-realism. We don’t need to get rid of the whole of postmodernism, any more than we need to get rid of the whole of materialistic science or the whole of capitalism. Rather, we need to get rid of the false foundational assumption, which in this case is a hostility to objective truth and realism, and the rejection of the search for a unifying theory of everything (or “metanarrative”). So the question here is something like what does postmodern thinking become if we re-embrace realism and commit to ecocivilisation as the great societal goal of the West?

These three questions can’t be asked in isolation. Instead, they have to be asked at the same time, and we must seek answers which take account of all of them. It is no use creating a post-growth form of economics which fails to take account of post-materialistic science and realistic metamodernism. It all has to fit together, because 2R is all about joined up thinking.

My point is that this whole way of thinking is much more analytical than continental. It gets straight to the heart of the matter and allows us to ask the questions we actually need to ask. From my perspective, this is the only way forwards that stands any chance of actually working. It will have consequences – it draws lines in the dirt which separate which ideas make it into the new paradigm, and which don’t. Some people will either be forced to change their views, or they’ll be “outside the ecosystem”. But that too has got to be part of this paradigm shift – the rubber has got to actually meet the road somewhere, and the whole purpose of thinking about it this way is that I’m defining where those places are. Perhaps there are more of them. I’d be very interested if anybody can suggest what they might be. Is there anything else we can conclusively reject from this new system?

To be clear – the three things I am rejecting aren’t being rejected because of a value judgement. They are being rejected because they are wrong. Growth-based economics is based on an absurd foundational premise. Materialism is logically incoherent. Postmodern anti-realism is false because structural realism is true. So here we are defining a new start point based entirely on logic and reason – there is no morality involved. I am not rejecting these things because they are bad but because they are wrong. For me, this is the beating heart of 2R. Summed up in one sentence, 2R needs to be about fixing our broken relationship with the truth. It is about learning how, both as individuals and as a society, we can start reconnecting with reality.

And if you are thinking “but this is impossible” then my response is that it only seems that way because of a wrong turn Western philosophy took at the height of the modern age: Kant’s claim that science cannot tell us anything about noumenal reality. This was the point of the schism between continental philosophy on one hand and analytic philosophy and science on the other – the fork in the road. 2R needs to bring those two roads back together again.

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Habermas sorts what he calls “post-metaphysical” philosophy into two main strands, one deriving from Hume, the other from Kant. It’s a bit too simple to say that everything Anglo-American is Humean and everything continental is post-Kantian, but as a rough approximation, close enough. What I can’t figure out about your stance is how you get to anti-materialst idealism from the analytic philosophy tradition that is by and large Humean? What is the observational basis for the ideal? It seems like a deus ex machina.

Habermas sorts what he calls “post-metaphysical” philosophy into two main strands, one deriving from Hume, the other from Kant. It’s a bit too simple to say that everything Anglo-American is Humean and everything continental is post-Kantian, but as a rough approximation, close enough.

Yes, can I agree with that.

What I can’t figure out about your stance is how you get to anti-materialist idealism from the analytic philosophy tradition that is by and large Humean?

I don’t. I am rejecting idealism. That’s why Kastrup recommended a publisher did not publish my book when they sent it to him as a test reader.

I am an anti-materialist, but having rejected materialism I do not then ask the question “Dualism? Or idealism?” Instead I turn to quantum theory and start asking questions about causality and epistemology.

What is the observational basis for the ideal? It seems like a deus ex machina.

I am not sure I even understand the question. I go back to Hume and start again. The question I am effectively asking is how Humean (and Kantian) philosophy would have been different if they had been dealing with quantum theory instead of Newtonian mechanics. And if you do that, then I don’t think we even arrive at the question you are asking me here.

We know that consciousness exists, because we are directly aware of it. We can conclude that a mind-external objective reality exists, because science works. This leaves us with the question of how we deal with (1) the hard problem of consciousness and (2) the metaphysical interpretation of quantum theory and (3) the problems Hume and Kant were trying to solve (which were about the relationship between observable reality and reality as it is in itself – about what Kant called phenomena and noumena).

Does that answer your question?

I’m not quite sure what you’re saying here - It’s possible to have a unified consciousness that creates reality. The consciousness gets “individuated”, so reality isn’t subjective (to individual minds) but is not “mind-external”. Is that not what Kastrup says? I haven’t read any of his books, but have watched a few videos.

Kastrup is an objective idealist. So yes he and I both agree that there is a mind-external reality (ie a reality external to our minds). Our disagreement is about whether that mind-external reality should be categorised as “mental” (or “spiritual” maybe). Kastrup says that is the only legitimate answer. My position is that neutral monism is a better answer, but that at the end of the day this is an argument about semantics. I don’t care whether we claim noumenal reality is categorised as “mental”, “physical” or “neutral”.

From my forthcoming book:

What sort of reality do we actually live in?

I offer a thought experiment. For the purposes of the experiment, we are concerned only with what happens while we are alive, and not with questions about any alleged afterlife. Let us also suppose that we know for certain that everything that happens does so in accordance with the laws of physics, and that we know that the randomness inherent in quantum theory reflects an objectively real randomness – the quantum dice rolls are truly and totally random. I will describe all these characteristics together as being definitive of a “type X reality”.

Many people believe that we actually do live in such a reality. Among them are people claiming to be materialists, physicalists, dualists, idealists and neutral monists, as well as people who aren’t strongly committed to any of those metaphysical positions. Type X versions of all of them can be constructed. If we know our reality is type X, should we even care which sort of type X it is? Is there any important difference between a dualist type X reality and an idealist one? The answer is surely no, unless you have a liking for purely semantic distinctions. What does matter is whether we really do live in a type X reality and not some other kind – one where there is an afterlife, or where sometimes things happen that defy the laws of physics, or where something non-random is hiding in the apparent randomness of quantum mechanics.

Whether materialism is true or false makes a functional difference because materialism entails naturalism. The same does not apply (at least in a general way) to the other three – there are versions of dualism, idealism and neutral monism that are consistent with naturalism, but there are also versions that aren’t. If something other than the material world exists, and is capable of interacting with the material world, then things can happen that aren’t reducible to the workings of the material world. If the material world is all there is, then that is not possible. This is why people who believe materialism is true find it impossible to take any sort of woo seriously.

I am much more interested in what is actually going on in our reality (about causality, in a general sense) than I am in whether a particular type of reality should be categorised (for example) as neutral monist or objective idealist. Dualists, objective idealists and neutral monists all believe in an objective world external to our minds. Dualists say it is material, objective idealists say it is mental, and neutral monists say it is neither. My view is that I’m not interested in arguing about the label. I’m committed to ESR – that there is indeed an objective reality and that we have knowledge of its structure. I will simply refer to it as “objective reality”, and leave open for now the question of what it is made of, or instantiated upon, or what else it might contain along with the structures that correspond to the material reality we’re experiencing. All that matters for my argument is that it exists, and we can know and say something about its structure.

Can you point where Kastrup says that the reality is outside our mind (collective consciousness)? If it is - then he’d be talking about some external mental entity, and that would be your “objective” reality.

How can this be explained? How’s “real” randomness possible in a world based on causality and objective laws? Multiverse scenario might explain it to some degree, but what are we observing then?

As I said, Kastrup is an objective idealist. He agrees that there is a reality outside our minds, but he says that this reality is itself mental. That is what objective idealism is.

My disagreement with this is twofold, as explained above. Firstly I think neutral monism is a better answer – that rather than claiming this objective reality should be thought of in terms of mind or matter, we should just say it exists and we can know something about its structure. I am saying structural realism is enough. We don’t need to say “what objective reality is made of”.

I believe the underlying cause of this dispute concerns belief in life after death. The only thing that is different if you claim objective reality is mental is that it becomes easier to defend a belief in disembodied minds (minds which aren’t dependent on brains). But that’s exactly the sort of contentious belief – and badly motivated – which is could throw a spanner in the works of 2R. In other words, if the motive for choosing idealism is because you want to defend a belief in the afterlife, we’re probably heading for ideological problems.

So how do we avoid all this trouble? My answer is that having rejected materialism, we do not leap to any hasty conclusions about what should ontologically replace it. We should note the difference between Nagel’s neutral monism and Kastrup’s idealism (having already rejected UTOKian materialism) and then ask some other questions, which might help to clarify where we should take this system of thought next. Specifically we need to think about the fate of naturalism if materialism is rejected. Which is exactly what Nagel’s book is about.

I’m not an expert on objective idealism but I don’t see that it disagrees with reality emanating from universal consciousness. In that case, reality is not mind-external. Plese send me some links because I might be mistaken.

You don’t need a link. You just need to think about what I am actually saying. When I say “mind-external” I mean external to HUMAN minds. I am saying that there is indeed a reality that is external to human (and other animal) minds, and that because such a thing is not dependent on a brain then it should not be considered to be a mind.

To be clear – I agree with the core claim of Hindu idealism – that Atman is identical to Brahman. But I do not categorise Brahman as consciousness. Rather, it is the root of all being, which is also the root of personal consciousness. Objective reality is also directly dependent on Brahman, but it has a different relationship – a relationship which is direct rather than brain-mediated. As a result, it should not be called “mental”.

This is really important if we are to stand any chance of getting the scientific community on board. Materialism is false, but it does not follow that minds can exist without brains. It is reasonable to expect a scientific revolution based on the rejection of materialism. It is not reasonable to expect a scientific revolution based on a new sort of idealism. The first is supported by pure reason. The second is not supported by pure reason, but is motivated by a desire to believe in the afterlife. This difference is very important.

I disagree with this. I think that Brahman is consciousness. In other words - consciousness is everything.

Not sure what position is this?
Is it analogous to a TV set? Mind would be your “individuated” consciousness or “disassociation”. When the TV gets destroyed - the means of individuation is broken?

And why do you think that?

How do you justify the claim that noumenal reality is mental, given that the only examples we have of consciousness are brain-dependent?

Everything is dependent on Brahman. It does not follow that everything is conscious. Consciousness needs brains.

Not sure what position is this?

It is the position 2R needs to take. Materialism and physicalism are logically incoherent, but we have very good reasons for believing that scientific realism is true, and that minds are dependent on brains. This is the position defended by Nagel in Mind and Cosmos, and I am in total agreement with it.

Is it analogous to a TV set? Mind would be your “individuated” consciousness or “disassociation”. When the TV gets destroyed - the means of individuation is broken?

I use a different analogy to explain it. From the book:

Necessity and sufficiency

There is one particular objection to the conclusion that materialism is false which I encounter so frequently that it is worth mentioning here. This objection is not a serious philosophical objection – it is not made by professional philosophers – but it is ubiquitous among people who discuss these things on social media. The objection is that we have a vast amount of relevant scientific evidence: we know a great deal about the effects on consciousness of a wide variety of mind-altering drugs and different ways that brains can be damaged. This is scientific evidence; why isn’t it relevant? Why isn’t this scientific justification for the belief that minds are nothing but brain processes?

The answer is that this evidence only establishes that brains are (or appear to be) necessary for consciousness. It does not follow that they are sufficient. The impossibility of psycho-physical reduction suggests that something else is also necessary. An analogy makes this easier to understand. It involves an old-fashioned reel of film and the movie that is projected when the film is played. The correlation between the film and the movie resembles that between brain and mind: if you damage the film, then corresponding damage appears when you play the movie. However, it does not follow that the movie can be reduced to the film, or that the movie is the film. Neither does it follow that the movie “emerges” from the film, although that is arguably closer to the truth than the other two proposals. The proper description of the situation is that the film is necessary for the movie (without the film there can be no movie) but it is not sufficient (something else is needed, in this case a projector).

This kind of scientific knowledge does not provide a defence for materialism – it is relevant to the easy problems, but the hard problem remains untouched. It brings us no closer to an explanation of the missing internal viewpoint. If we can account for that internal viewpoint then we can start to imagine how the contents of consciousness might be derived from the brain, or maybe from the brain and other parts of the physical world to which it is connected. But this missing thing cannot “be” anything material. The subjective viewpoint is missing from the materialistic conception of reality and there’s no way to introduce it without the resulting system ceasing to be a coherent version of materialism.

This does not lead to idealism. It leads to a form of neutral monism or neo-Kantianism.

EDIT: but I should make clear that having explained why materialism is false, I do not ask “What then, ontologically?” I believe that is the wrong question to ask. It just leads us back to old arguments which can be avoided altogether if we ask better questions.

Sorry…I missed this post.

The laws of quantum theory are indeed deterministic, but they are also probabilistic. If taken literally, they imply that all physically possible outcomes happen (which is why some people believe the MWI). But in fact we only experience one outcome. This is the measurement problem – we’ve spent 100 years not being able to agree on what this is actually telling us about the nature of reality.

The type-X reality I described above is only one of the possible options. From the book:

What we need to know about quantum metaphysics

Quantum theory differs from classical physics in many ways, the most important of which is that instead of making a single prediction about what we will observe, it provides a range of possible outcomes and assigns them various probabilities. This raises the question of why we only ever observe the particular outcome we actually observe, rather than one or all of the others. This process (if that is what it is) of turning a set of probabilities into a single manifested outcome is known as the collapse of the wave function. The collapse occurs when a quantum system is “observed” or “measured”, but there is no consensus about what an observation or a measurement actually is (i.e. what those words actually mean in the true account of the nature of reality). There is fundamental disagreement about how, when, where or why the collapse occurs, and even about whether it happens at all.

Four types of solution are available. The correct answer to the measurement problem must fall into one of these categories:

Category 1 is the Many Worlds Interpretation. In the MWI there is no collapse and no observer, because all possible outcomes occur in a vast array of ever-diverging realities. Once diverged, these realities lose all contact with each other. They are not interdependent.

Category 2 is an objectively random single world. In these cases only one outcome occurs, and the apparent randomness is always objectively random. “Objective” here means it really is random, and doesn’t just appear that way to us because we lack the information that would allow us to see why it isn’t really random.

Option 3 is a deterministic single world. Again only one outcome occurs, but in these cases the apparent randomness is really the result of deterministic laws or naturalistic principles that we are currently unaware of (it is only subjectively random). It might be the case that we will never discover these laws or principles, but regardless of this they are governing what happens.

Option 4 is a praeternaturalistic single world. Again only one outcome occurs, and the collapse is caused by interaction with a non-physical participating observer (i.e. something outside of the physical system). The external observer can also potentially load the quantum dice. This includes the von Neumann / Stapp interpretation, but it could also involve anything outside the physical system that can load the quantum dice, including all of the things I categorised as praeternatural. To be clear, these things (free will, synchronicity, etc.) aren’t what we normally consider to be observers, but they are taking the place of an observer in quantum theory. By this I mean that they are causing the collapse, and potentially influencing the probability of which of the possible outcomes occurs.

Various combinations of single world interpretations may be possible. It is possible we live in a reality where the apparent quantum randomness is sometimes objectively random, sometimes the result of hidden determinism, and sometimes the result of praeternatural phenomena.

Science and reason, on their own, cannot tell us which of the above 4 options are correct. So can we decide which one is correct?

The answer: it’s complicated, but very much worth exploring. My book is a defence of options 1 and 4. A two-phase history of the universe, with the Cambrian Explosion as the point of the shift. This is what is missing from Nagel’s theory in Mind and Cosmos. All he says about QM is that it is probabilistic, and that’s relevant in some way. He says we are nowhere near being able to explain why, and I think he’s wrong. I think he’s overlooked the answer, and so has everybody else.

EDIT:

“praeternatural” = probabilistic supernaturalism (eg teleology in psychegenesis, free will, synchronicity, karma, …?)
“hypernatural” = physics-busting supernaturalism (eg feeding of the 5000, the Resurrection).

The heavy focus on Western, European(*1) philosophy will not solve or even come to properly understand the pandora’s box of problems that arose from Western, European society. To truly move forward and create something new, philosophical frameworks taken from the East and indigenous cultures (what little has been preserved) should be the focus. Perhaps this is the present glaring hole of 2R, and the real renaissance will be born from initiatives rooted in Eastern and indigenous philosophy (if anyone has suggestions on that front they’d like to share, that would be most welcome).

(1) For clarity, this includes countries that came to be colonised by European powers and which carried forward their worldview - essentially, around 3/4 of the world (arguably more). Though, in some quarters, parts of Western thought also integrated different world views, but usually in a tokenistic manner to better smooth ‘integration’ (aka control).

This is interesting, but something about objective randomness doesn’t sound right… I’m not familiar with the subject, so forgive my ignorance. Also, the answer can’t be “it’s complicated…”

Yes I’d agree with this, a nice way of putting it - though again I’m not clear why there couldn’t be useful contributions to the 2R project from those who have a different take on these metaphysical issues.

You’re certainly not alone in wanting analytical rigour here. My background is in analytic philosophy too - though I also studied continental philosophy, and think it is useful to understand the parallels between the two traditions. For example, while I think you’re right that postmodernism is broadly characterised by anti-realism, there are exceptions (Deleuze comes to mind - he talks about ‘transcendental empiricism’) and within analytic philosophy too there has been a big debate between realism and anti-realism, leading to I think useful progress in understanding of what those terms actually mean (see e.g. Challenges to Metaphysical Realism (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy))

It needs a whole book. I’ve tried for years to explain this to people piecemeal, and it is close to impossible. People need to be walked through it, from first principles, without allowing pre-existing assumptions and terminology to confuse matters.

“Objective randomness” means that the cosmos is fundamentally random – that some things happen for no reason, with no explanation. Why does a particular radioactive atom decay at the precise moment it does? In an objectively random cosmos the answer is “There is no reason. It is random.” In other words it is even random from a “God’s eye perspective.”

“Subjective randomness” is something that merely appears random to us because we lack the information required to understand why it is, in fact, being determined by something (via hidden deterministic laws operating within the cosmos).

Free will doesn’t fall into either category. In this case what appears from a scientific perspective to be random is not random, but it is not determined by anything else in the physical cosmos either – it is willed by an agent of free will.

This is a false dichotomy. It should be possible to do both.

And 2R certainly doesn’t ignore Eastern and indigenous worldviews. Far from it.

In order to make 2R work, certain things need to be excluded. These things share certain characteristics – they are foundational claims, they are demonstrably false and they are major contributory factors to the West’s ideological problems.

I specify three, and I think you already agree with 2 of them. Can there be useful contributions to 2R from people who think growth-based economics is legitimate? Can there be useful contributions from people who deny structural realism?

Well…only if they are willing to accept that their foundational claims are false, and their contributions don’t depend on the rejected foundational claim. We need to reinvent economics for a post-growth era, and we need to re-invent politics without the pathological antirealism. That doesn’t mean that capitalists and postmodernists can’t contribute, but it does mean they have to drop their false foundational assumptions. If their contributions still stand up after the assumptions have gone, then that is fine.

Our disagreement is about the third one, which is metaphysical materialism. The problem with materialism is that it is both incoherent, and it necessarily implies naturalism – it is the primary reason for “the disenchantment of reality”, and it is based on a misunderstanding. For me, this is every bit as crucial as the other two – in fact I view it as the most important of all, because it is the key to getting the scientific community shifting towards 2R, without which I don’t think it can happen. I think we need to re-invent science too, and in this case the false assumption is that materialism makes sense or that physicalism is really anything other than materialism in fancy dress. I think UTOK’s approach is fundamentally misguided, and therefore not a useful contribution to 2R. It is actually a major problem from my point of view, because this is a hangover from the old paradigm which people are trying to incorporate into 2R. I therefore have to do everything I can to prevent this from happening. It is why I spent 16 years writing this book – that project began as a way of explaining to materialists why materialism is wrong. I am an ex-Dawkinsian. I used to be the admin of Dawkins’ own forum. Naturalism is also false, but unlike materialism I cannot prove this to anybody. It can only be known through subjective experience. At least some probabilistic supernatural phenomena are real. Synchronicity is real – and it is in fact just a mild version of what can happen. Synchronicity is a single note; Reality is a whole symphony.

You said your PhD was in the hard problem – about whether there could be some language-based solution to it. I responded with a very long and detailed explanation of exactly why this approach cannot work. That is why that post is book-ended with references to Wittgenstein, and the whole post is strongly focused on definitions and language usage. The Hard Problem of Consciousness and 2R - General - Second Renaissance Forum

It would be very helpful if you’d respond to that post. If you’ve done a PhD in exactly this area, surely you have something to say about it?

I should also re-iterate that I think Kastrup’s idealism is also wrong, and that my book is being independently published because Kastrup rejected my neutral metaphysics when he reviewed it for a publisher. I think both materialism and idealism belong to the old paradigm. Each of them is one half of Cartesian dualism: Yang without Yin and Yin without Yang.

Yes, am looking forward to reading and responding to that when I have the time to give it the attention it deserves.

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