Every time you claim that UTOK is materialist, I’m going to repost content like this. Maybe one of these times you will read it and respond to what it says (not what you imagine it says). Among other things from this article: “UTOK is anchored to a Big History behavioral view, not a reductive materialist view of the world.”
https://medium.com/unified-theory-of-knowledge/why-utok-is-an-endo-natural-worldview-dd296d5848d9
This person disagrees. https://www.wisdomlib.org/concept/brahman-which-is-consciousness
Glad you asked! My background is in world history. From that POV, it soon became clear that the usual metamodern cultural evolutionary schemas are grounded in a sort of “Rise of the West” metanarrative. Not satisfied with that, went looking elsewhere.
One starting point to connect all the dots is Habermas, Also a History of Philsophy (vol 1). In that work to explore the genealogy of philosophy in Hellenic civilization, Habermas contrasts it with three other Axial Age emergences: Biblical revelation, Buddhism, ancient Chinese philsophy. To set the stage for how the Axial played out differently in different places, he also does a long survey of classic social science regarding pre-history, the origins of culture, myth, ritual, etc. As a very compressed summary, Habermas sees the emergence of the Axial (in its different forms) from cognitive dissonance arising from urbanization and imperial volatility in the early Iron Age. The prior mythic order was losing explanatory power. So new abstractions emerged.
Regarding what 2R ought to recover - at least the major Axial traditions globally. Beyond that, also the roots of culture sourced from indigenous cultures that predated or avoided the Axial. In short, human experience writ large.
As for why 2R is needed now, we basically have the same problem the early Iron Age did: breakdown of prior order. Although the Axial traditions fancied themselves as universal, they were in different ways quite local. We need a new structure more truly universalizing on a planetary basis.
This is very unclear. What kind of role does a brain have in the process? What kind of structure is the brain? The effect of psychodelic drugs, that you used as in example somewhere, can be to switch off the filtering layers of consciousness. Starting from being human and stripping down to “bare consciousness” - which might be everywhere. I think that’s what Kastrup talks about (even though he refers to it as dis-association). Brain is maybe a structuring structure that takes “bare consciousness” to human consciousness. And it peels off in layers to eventually go back to the universal consciousness once the brain’s gone.
"This notion positions Brahman, defined as consciousness, as a fundamental essence that transcends physical existence. "
Just something that keeps on bugging me - it seems totally irrelevant for this argument (or for 2R, everyday life) whether the world is physical or not. All the laws and patterns we perceive in the world would likely still stand in both idealism and materialism.
What’s the reason(s) we’re talking about it
Thanks! Seeing ones that just say “you’re wrong” (Geoff’s) is kind of disengaging.
So here’s my take on something like “Brahman”.
For me, the meaty part of a word like “Brahman” is what’s under it. What do the sounds and letters point to?
I already responded to this. The problem is right here: UTOK maps the natural world with the Tree of Knowledge System
At approximately 3.8 billion years ago, Life emerges out of Matter on planet Earth as a consequence of natural selection operating on self-replicating chemical systems. Natural selection essentially transforms individual self-replicating chemical systems into self-replicating bio-machines that function via genetic information processing.
How did “the cone of Mind” begin to emerge? What is this statement actually supposed to mean? What does “emerge” mean? How does mind magically “emerge” from the material world? It’s nonsense.
The fourth meaning of the word naturalism in the context of UTOK is to contrast it with materialism. This may be surprising because many see the two as similar. However, materialism here refers to the old idea that stemmed from classical physics that posited that the world was, at bottom, a reductive, mechanical system of cause and effect which can be called “naïve Newtonianism”. Naïve Newtonianism should have been put to rest many decades ago, but, unfortunately, it still is around (see, e.g., Robert Sapolsky’s recent book, Determined, here for a critique).
UTOK is grounded in a universal, natural behaviorism that clarifies the major ontological levels that start with an Energy Information Implicate Order and from there move to the plane of inanimate material objects into the plane of living organisms into the plane of minded animals and then cultured persons. It frames the universe as an unfolding wave of emergent, evolving/emanating, energy information that is behaving at different planes of existence because of different information processing systems and communication networks. As this blog on the error that both Ken Wilber and John Watson make, it is important to differentiate UTOK’s behaviorism from materialism. UTOK is anchored to a Big History behavioral view, not a reductive materialist view of the world.
Ken Wilber is in error, is he?
Let’s have a look at what is alleged mistake is:
If we look carefully at Wilber’s upper right quadrant, we can see how Wilber yokes the behavioral perspective with a materialist ontology.
Wilber is right; Henriques is wrong. Behaviourism is indeed a form of materialism.
We need to move from a reductive, materialistic, mechanistic ontology to an energy, information, emergent, evolving ontology, such as is mapped by UTOK’s ToK System.
NO. We do not need to move to an “emergent” ontology. In one sense Henriques is right – emergentism, strictly speaking, isn’t materialism. Unfortunately, it also does not make any sense. The same problem runs all the way through, which is that Henriques thinks it is possible to somehow magic up consciousness from the material world. As I pointed out the first time you posted this Henriques does not understand the Hard Problem of Consciousness.
Mind does not “emerge from life”. That isn’t the answer.
The division between endo- versus exo- allows UTOK to not get bogged down into potentially distracting debates about the world outside the natural world.
Distracting?
Henriques has also got a broken definition of “naturalism”. Naturalism isn’t about worlds. It is about causality. As explained many times already, I reject the term “supernatural” and split it into “praeternatural” for probabilistic supernaturalism and “hypernatural” for physics-defying supernaturalism. Hypernatural phenomena are real and they exist in THIS world. It is all one world. There are two kinds of causality, not two kinds of world! Unus Mundus. The natural and the hypernatural work together to produce our reality. Henriques says he is open to paranormal phenomena, but he’s closed off the possibilities for it actually existing in our world, and he’s done it because of his failure to understand why he is using the word “emerges” in a meaningless or illogical manner.
It gives us the right holistic map to map the language game of science.
No it does not. It is the wrong map, because Henriques has failed to understand the true nature of the Hard Problem. You’re right, he’s not a materialist. He’s also talking nonsense. He still thinks like a materialist. His system is not radical enough. It is not the right way to incorporate science into 2R.
I keep going on about the importance of Mind and Cosmos. Nagel’s position completely contradicts Henrique’s and the reason for this incompatibility is that Nagel actually does understand the Hard Problem. His arguments in M&C are logically flawless, and faced with Henriques emergentism he would reject it for exactly the same reasons I am.
I agree, in the same way that we study religious text or classical philosophy. Vervaeke and J. Hall dug into that beautifully.
This is the problem trying to mix up eastern philosophy and western philosophy. I am using the term “Brahman” simply to mean “the root of all being”, and I am also equating it to the root of all consciousness. If you don’t require precision then you could think of this as idealism, but we do need precision and we are doing Western philosophy in the 21st century. We aren’t re-inventing Hinduism.
While these old concepts are important and relevant, we cannot just point to Hinduism and take definitions and words and then insert them into Western philosophy without checking for hidden mistakes slipping in. This is one of those cases. If you like, I’ll stop using the Eastern terminology. In my own, I call the root of all being 0|∞. It is prior to consciousness. It is even more fundamental to existence.
I’d say the problem is NOT mixing up eastern and western philosophy! Global dialog seems needed for most everything that matters nowadays.
That is an extremely important question, and it is what Henry Stapp’s book Mindful Universe is all about. The first thing we need to understand is that the brain we’re talking about in this case is not a phenomenal brain – it’s not the grey lump of meat you see if you cut open a skull. It’s a noumenal brain, and under Stapp’s system that means it is in a superposition. Conscious processes therefore involve not just the normal physical causality that science understands, but a continuous interaction between the Participating Observer and the noumenal brain. All the time you are mentally focused on something, especially when you are making important decisions (free will choices) then the PO is involved. A mind is an emergent phenomenon, but it does not emerge from a physical brain in the way Gregg Henriques thinks it does. Instead it emerges from the complex system created by the PO and a noumenal brain. In this scenario, “emergence” actually makes sense, because there is enough scope in the system for consciousness to actually emerge. Without the PO it is inexplicable magic. I believe only in explicable magic – magic that actually fits into our model of reality.
It is very far from irrelevant. If the physical world is all there is then consciousness can have no explanation and all forms of praeternatural phenomena are inexplicable too.
Tell it to Prigogine. (And most of the thinkers on the 2R map. Emegentism is one of the main common denominators of various schools and authors on the liminal web).
?? Material world can emanate from consciousness. So whether that emerging world is material or just perceived as material is (the way I see it) not very relevant
You cannot just take words from eastern philosophy and insert them into a debate which is not using that set of concepts. My position is compatible with both Hindu idealism and Buddhist materialism, but it is incompatible with both idealism and materialism as understood in the Western tradition.
We need to be very careful. We can’t just say “See…this person disagrees with you” when the context is significantly different.
I really think that ultimately everything comes under “inexplicable magic”. Your idea of objective randomness proves it. I really enjoy the conversation, it’s mind provoking but we can’t explain reality tautologically.
Says who? How are they justifying this claim?
If we are talking about theories of emergence then what matters is whether the component parts of the thing which is emerging are present in the thing from which they are claimed to emerge. The problem with claiming mind can emerge from matter is that nothing about matters suggests minds could emerge from it – there’s no way to conjure up a subjective viewpoint from the material world apart from saying “Hocus Pocus, magic it up!” That’s not intelligible. We can’t make sense of it, because it doesn’t make sense.
The problem with claiming that matter emerges from consciousness is that science tells us that the material universe existed for billions of years before there were any conscious organisms in it. The only way around this is to say “but consciousness is everything!” which is a straightforward assumption of your conclusion. You are effectively defining the word “consciousness” to mean “existence”.
Looking forward to an explanation of how that works! For one thing, I was not aware that “Brahman” is a western philosophical idea independent of Vedantic roots.
I am not following you. Objective randomness isn’t magic. It’s just randomness. To be magic, the apparent randomness has to be non-random – something else has to be going on. It is leading somewhere. To a synchronicity, or a free will action, or the evolution of conscious life, etc…