I'm glad Donald DeGracia was on the show.
I'm not. He was the worst guest ever.
I'm glad Donald DeGracia was on the show.
I'm not. He was the worst guest ever.
Thanks to Michael Larkin for exposing this charlatan. All these preachers of oneness must be named and shamed.
Hi again, Dan. Yep, you nailed it. What you said is one way to describe the Absolute in words. I have a chapter in the book that links this back to Leibniz' monad theory where each monad "reflects" all other monads.
When you say the idea is unsatisfying, I guess it depends on your perspective. I mention in the book that Leibniz' idea gets the maximum explanation out of the minimum of concepts, which Leibniz himself appreciated. This was one of the earliest expressions of what is now called "least action" in physics, that nature gets the most out of the least action. This is a very important guiding principle in physics now and is actually very satisfying intellectually. But that is perhaps tangential to what you were getting at. As a model of consciousness, I don't know what you are looking for to be satisfying. But Nature is what it is no matter what we want it to be. Consider for example quantum mechanics. The theory drives everyone crazy because it has no intuitive interpretation. But the math works 100% all the time. So the lesson here is that nature is what it is, the math works, and our intuition of what should be is the problem! LOL!
Best wishes,
Don
Somewhere in DeGracia's books, he talks about an idea from India that says things can both exist and not exist simultaneously. Sounds a lot better coming from him. Maybe information would be like that. I wonder if information would be similar to Kant's noumena as DeGracia describes it?
If we had powerful enough hardware and software, could we use measurements of the current state of the universe and use (hypothetical) math to calculate the underlying information?
DeGracia also talks about complexity theory/chaos theory. As a metaphor, maybe there's a "complexity boundary" that is formed by shear size of the universe data sets and by shear complexity of how the data interacts. The paradoxes and conflicts that come up at the edges of human inquiries into these questions may be the beginnings of the complexity boundary. That's not to argue against the idea that it's all information, because maybe it is. But I keep coming back to the problem that if we can't penetrate the underlying information very deeply and there's a heaping load of information that we don't understand, what does it mean to say it's information?
I wonder, Don, if you're reading this, whether Hindus would view other traditions with the same generosity? I'm not being at all polemic -- it's a genuine question, to which I don't know the answer.
This raises a few issues. If we're annihilated in God, do we cease to exist as individuals? If so, why do we instinctively find that frightening? The most precious thing to us seems to be our individuality, and it does appear that we are instantiated as individuals in the illusion of this life. It seems not unnatural to think that losing that individuality would be a catastrophe. Would we lose it entirely in the process of (re-?)becoming Brahman or MAL (or whatever one's preferred term might be)?
Thanks for all your comments, Don. I think you're a really cool dude. :) I like the way you think and put ideas together, and you are clearly passionate and committed and generous.
I will definately dig more into your material and check out the Liebniz monad material.
I also like what you say about how many ideas come from actual experience and that experience is an important part of all of this.
I think for me, some ideas are not satisfying if they don't hold up according to my own subjective feeling of logical sense.
Like the Schrodinger quote from beyond the physical;
“The isolated knowledge obtained by a group of specialists in a narrow field has in itself no value whatsoever, but only in its synthesis with all the rest of knowledge and only inasmuch as it really contributes in this synthesis. . . "
I feel like if an idea doesn't logically connect with my "core ideas or beliefs" about the world, then it takes a leap of faith to bring it into my perspective in a committed way. I grew up in a deeply religious context, so I feel like I have a highly tuned sense for where "knowledge ends and faith begins."
The irony is that even some of the most logical and "settled" knowledge still rests, in some respect, on a foundation of axioms that are taken on faith. And I know, at the end of the day, my sense of logical core ideas is an intuitive, subject enterprise, but I still feel driven to let it be a guiding energy for myself.
I want to study a little more of Graham Priest's paraconsistent logic. He has a great youtube series of 6 videos of about ten minutes each. They are basic, with a few more complicated references to Hegel and such, but these are definately watchable as good beginning approach to formal logic.
He says in the second video that logic is not neutral when it is applied to metaphysics. In the fourth video, he talks about paraconsistent logic. I need to watch that one and study more to understand the details and try to figure out how to apply those ideas to the questions at hand.
It feels like this is a way to grow my sense of core beliefs to incorporate more exotic ideas. ;)
What is Logic -- Graham Priest
@Don DeGracia Your website and free books are goldmine of information! Thanks for your generosity.
Hmmmm, I get your points, perhaps I should have said 'higher order' as opposed to information. Plato's cave works for me, except I dislike the one-way nature of the projector analogy..... so I used the phrase 'informational realm' hoping to imply a two way interaction between higher and lower orders: Form flows out of the higher, but experience, novelty, etc. flows from the lower back into the higher, affecting the whole of what flows out again.
I also don't see why the projection would have to be considered an illusion. Couldn't they both be 'real' (even if the projector is primary) at their appropriate level of observation and in the right context? So, to this end, I might try mount a pygmy defence of sense realism.
Trying to collapse the strict wall of dualism between perception and reality could be of use here:
OK, firstly, Rupert Sheldrake's staring experiments strongly suggest a degree of reaching outward towards the perceived object. Under pure representationalism the act of focusing attention on an object contained within a visual field would, in reality, be the act of focusing attention on a simulation of an object contained entirely within a human brain. So, for attention to have observable external consequences, surely our perceptions/senses must, to some degree, reach out towards the object of attention in space, effectively 'clothing' it 'out-there' and not just within the confines of our own skulls?
Second, perhaps the bind of an internal consciousnesses representation vs. an external object is an outcome of overly objectifying the useful abstractions into which we parse reality. For one thing, we assume perception to be the act of an entity perceiving the world within which it is contained.... when it's more likely closer to the truth to state that perception is the act of part relating to whole.
In this sense (excuse the pun) perception is not a transcendent process but is rather a part of the dynamic flow of reality in which parts imbibe and interact with the whole (including its other parts): I see a light, the light has an impact on my optic nerve, my brain, my mind, my memory, the light has changed me. I have, to an extent, imbibed something of the nature of the light which I then carry forward. I have taken on-board something of the essence of the other.
The irony is that even some of the most logical and "settled" knowledge still rests, in some respect, on a foundation of axioms that are taken on faith. And I know, at the end of the day, my sense of logical core ideas is an intuitive, subject enterprise, but I still feel driven to let it be a guiding energy for myself.
@Don DeGracia Your website and free books are goldmine of information! Thanks for your generosity.
Lastly, given that sense perception can be incredibly useful in navigating our little corner of the world, isn't it likely that our perceptions are indeed valid representations of a certain level reality?
..., but they do hold Hindu philosophy to be a pinnacle of achievement.
Well, if everything is the one consciousness, then at the level of that consciousness, I suppose solipsism is real enough. And, if Bernardo Kastrup's version of Idealism is true, then as MAL's dissociated alters (with our "constricted" kind of consciousness as Don Degracia might put it), at our level we usually appear to ourselves as non-solipsistic beings.
Don says in his book (which I've only so far got to the third chapter of) -- I assume paraphrasing one of Van der Leeuw's points: When one passes through the bindu, one becomes all things in Eternity. There is no longer individuality of any kind, only an overwhelming unity of being. Maybe that implies there is a kind of solipsism in place (aloneness as he seems to refer to it?).
But still, I say to myself, if there's no individuality on the other side of the bindu, then what is it that experiences this overwhelming sense of unity? Is the experience only something we label as such on this side of the bindu? Clearly, there is something that one is at least able to recall (if one has ever been there) of what it's like on the other side.
In the Abrahamic traditions, there's Christian mysticism and its counterpart in Judaism (Kabbalah) and Islam (Sufism). Here, they speak of the ultimate as being complete annihilation in God: a reabsorption of the essential self into its source.
This raises a few issues. If we're annihilated in God, do we cease to exist as individuals? If so, why do we instinctively find that frightening? The most precious thing to us seems to be our individuality, and it does appear that we are instantiated as individuals in the illusion of this life. It seems not unnatural to think that losing that individuality would be a catastrophe. Would we lose it entirely in the process of (re-?)becoming Brahman or MAL (or whatever one's preferred term might be)?
I think that all of the Abrahamic mystery traditions would acknowledge that there are many ways to arrive at the destination, including via non-Abrahamic means such as Hinduism and Buddhism, not to mention pure serendipity. I wonder, Don, if you're reading this, whether Hindus would view other traditions with the same generosity? I'm not being at all polemic -- it's a genuine question, to which I don't know the answer.
Lastly, there's the question of why we seem to be here at all if eventually we all return to Source. Is Source getting anything out of it? Is it in some sense learning something it doesn't already know, or experiencing something it couldn't experience in any other way? Is it evolving through our agency as sentient beings? Or does it never change?
That sounds interesting, if it is readable at my level of mathematics - i.e. maths for chemistry and physics.There is a great book by Morris Kline called "Mathematics: The Loss of Certainty" and he gets into this very issue. He discusses the shift to axiomatics in the 20th century...actually "laments" the shift is a better way to put it. Norman Wildberger on youtube also gets into this.
Hi DavidThat sounds interesting, if it is readable at my level of mathematics - i.e. maths for chemistry and physics.
Unfortunately Amazon don't seem to have an electronic version of the book, and they don't give you a glimpse inside.
My feeling is that some of the greatest flourishing of maths often used intuitive techniques that lacked rigour, and people still learn the non rigorous versions of calculus (say). For example, without the neat syntax of calculus (which I think was invented by Liebniz) the subject would be far less tractable.
David
That sounds interesting, if it is readable at my level of mathematics - i.e. maths for chemistry and physics.
Unfortunately Amazon don't seem to have an electronic version of the book, and they don't give you a glimpse inside.
My feeling is that some of the greatest flourishing of maths often used intuitive techniques that lacked rigour, and people still learn the non rigorous versions of calculus (say). For example, without the neat syntax of calculus (which I think was invented by Liebniz) the subject would be far less tractable.
David
The “return to source to be annihilated” theory gets bashed a lot on the Facebook metaphysics forum that I’m on. There are a lot of smart and experienced people on that forum. Not that this makes them right; obviously, but the group has a lot of accomplished Astral travels (Jourgen Ziewe in on their) with others. A lot of people I look up to over there are really at odds with this notion based upon their experiences. To me it seems it would be a cruel twist of fate. Losing yourself, if that’s what it would entail, sounds like oblivion to me. In short, it sounds like a nightmare.
nice. I've become interested in AI lately... our limitations in dealing with complexity are more and more obviousDeGracia also talks about complexity theory/chaos theory. As a metaphor, maybe there's a "complexity boundary" that is formed by shear size of the universe data sets and by shear complexity of how the data interacts. The paradoxes and conflicts that come up at the edges of human inquiries into these questions may be the beginnings of the complexity boundary. That's not to argue against the idea that it's all information, because maybe it is. But I keep coming back to the problem that if we can't penetrate the underlying information very deeply and there's a heaping load of information that we don't understand, what does it mean to say it's information?
nice... thx for all the bonus material :)Thank you too for the very kind comments! There is a neuroscientist, Rudulpho Llinas, who I believe has a really smart concept about the relationship between perception and reality. His first point is, from an evolutionary perspective, our perceptions do not need to be exact mirrors of reality. They only need to correlate with reality good enough to allow us to survive and reproduce. Given the space of all possible ways to represent the world by the brain, and given that there is only one real world the brain is representing, the odds are overwhelmingly in favor of the representations NOT being mirrors of the one reality.
Hi dp
Thank you too for the very kind comments! There is a neuroscientist, Rudulpho Llinas, who I believe has a really smart concept about the relationship between perception and reality. His first point is, from an evolutionary perspective, our perceptions do not need to be exact mirrors of reality. They only need to correlate with reality good enough to allow us to survive and reproduce. Given the space of all possible ways to represent the world by the brain, and given that there is only one real world the brain is representing, the odds are overwhelmingly in favor of the representations NOT being mirrors of the one reality.
Llinas' second main point is how the brain represents reality. His idea requires some basic understanding of how math equations work. An equation has both variables and parameters, like y = mx + b, the equation of all possible straight lines. When you input numbers for m and b, you get a specific straight line. Llinas draws analogy to this for how perception works. All possible perceptions are genetically encoded in the brain, and can be thought of as some (unspecified) set of equations. Then, sensory input serves the same purpose substituting numbers for parameters does in an equation. That is, sensory input parameterizes the "functions" coded in the brain to give specific perceptions.
This is only a super simple description of Llinas' views and if you are interested, you can look up his books that go into the topic in great detail.
Finally, I too consider Hindu philosophy and also yoga to be pinnacles of human achievement.
Best wishes and thanks for commenting,
Don