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.