How is this statement true? "A consciousness conscious of nothing but itself is a contradiction in terms: before it could identify itself as consciousness, it had to be conscious of something."

Metaphysics and Epistemology
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12 hours ago, DavidOdden said:

I can’t say that I understand what subjective idealism “really” says, because I don’t know how many brands of subjective idealism there are.

There’s only one, since subjective idealism is Berkley’s version; It’s also quite different from the usual strand of idealistic theories, so it’s not very indicative of other western varieties.

12 hours ago, DavidOdden said:

I have never encountered anyone (past my undergraduate days) who posited that there exists only “mind” (singular or plural).

If I get this point correctly, you claim that since ‘mind’ designates an aggregate of existents (logic, thought, feeling, imagination and so on), it’s impossible for only mind to exist. I agree; but I think that, in this thread, ‘mind-only’ means _mental-phenomena-_only, as opposed to a dualist theory where both mental phenomena and physical matter exist.

12 hours ago, DavidOdden said:

My view is that Western attempts to devise a “minds and contents only” theory as promulgated by Berkeley has not been as intellectually successful, compared to Ādi Śaṅkara’s philosophizing (to the extent that this is one individual)

Glad to see Shankara mentioned here. SEP has a systematic overview of his philosophy.

12 hours ago, DavidOdden said:

I suppose that Rand might refute that position the same way that Samuel Johnson did, with a mighty kick (though such an outburst would be out of character for her).

Common sense sometimes means ‘cold air can give you a cold’, and ‘the sun revolves around the earth’. Thankfully, there’s plenty of nutjobs willing to consider the contrary.

12 hours ago, DavidOdden said:

The most important ingredient for a refutation of Berkeley is an understanding of “refutation”.

So, people would never argue if it was impossible to be wrong; and they can only be wrong if reality does not necessarily correspond to human claims. Therefore, facts are independent of claims made by human minds.

Fair enough, but not necessarily exhaustive. It’s true that the Eiffel Tower is in France even if I say it’s in Uganda. On the other hand, try this experiement: declare your existence. How do you do it? You say: ‘I declare my existence’.  This declaration is true in virtue of declaring it. No correspondence theory at play here.

Now, try to declare your existence and, at the same time, declare your non-existence. Can you do it? Probaby not. Your mind is _free _to determine itself; freedom and necessity do not occur apart from each other, there’s an identity between the two. 

Those two observations stand at the core of post-kantian critical idealism. The experience of Selfhood exists, paradoxically, in virtue of being _affirmed _against a non-self - which takes the form of an individual freely subjugating a non-self (nature) to its own purpose. This project is never completed, because the self is a self _in virtue _of determining its being, as opposed to having it determined for him.

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26 minutes ago, KyaryPamyu said:

. . .

Those two observations stand at the core of post-kantian critical idealism. The experience of Selfhood exists, paradoxically, in virtue of being _affirmed _against a non-self - which takes the form of an individual freely subjugating a non-self (nature) to its own purpose. This project is never completed, because the self is a self _in virtue _of determining its being, as opposed to having it determined for him.

You might enjoy reading Tom Rockmore’s Fichte, Kant, the Cognitive Subject, and Epistemic Constructivism

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On 12/24/2022 at 2:27 AM, KyaryPamyu said:

This is why self-consciousness is inseparable from the discovery of consciousness itself. Galt’s argument is probably in this line, that consciousness of consciousness (self-consciousness) depends on perceiving a world of objects and people first.

So consciousness is not defined as awareness. Meaning awareness of awareness is the indicator of consciousness in the context of this thread? Where does existence and the awareness of it fall in? Meaning without awareness of self? It seems that consciousness is being defined at a certain level of awareness. As in a bacteria is not conscious because it is not aware of itself. Perhaps a certain level of ability to identify is necessary.

A lawnmower is not conscious, not because it is not aware of itself, it simply is not aware/conscious. To say a clock is aware of time is a metaphor. Or a car being aware that there is not enough gas.

Sometimes consciousness is shown to be a chemical reaction. Sometimes it an awareness of awareness. Sometimes awareness of self as apposed to other consciousness or possible consciousnesses (plural). And sometimes as having freewill.

18 hours ago, Frank said:

It does not prove consciousness is always on and observing, because it is god, as they believe.

I suspect this is at the core of your question/interest. You are trying to disprove something. I would like to know what are you trying to disprove to “them”? And what is it that “they” believe?

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On 12/24/2022 at 5:28 PM, KyaryPamyu said:

Simple, I just need to rehash the standard O’ist argument:

Q: Why can’t the mind be aware only of itself?
A: Well, refer to the axioms, which boil down to: ‘there is something of which I’m aware’.

Q: Can the something of which I’m aware be produced by my mind?
A: No, you must first go through many experiences before you can have an inner world.

Q: But why aren’t those formative experiences self-produced?
A: Because I don’t feel that I produce them.

Q: What if you do it unconsciously?
A: Hm? How could that happen?

Q: [Describe Hegel’s position, or similar]
A: So, who are you guys voting for in the next election?

(Here’s my attempt to disprove idealism on O’ist grounds, although I don’t personaly subscribe to either realism or idealism).

I see. If we assume tabula rasa, then the very idea of subjective idealism is impossible, because the mind cannot function without content. I’ll be reading your refutation soon. Thanks.

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On 12/24/2022 at 5:46 PM, DavidOdden said:

I can’t say that I understand what subjective idealism “really” says, because I don’t know how many brands of subjective idealism there are. It appear, for example, that there are competing claims that Advaita Vedānta is and is not an example of that approach, though I don’t think there is much controvery over there fact that it reduces the universe to the fundamental reality Brahman. Let’s assume that the claim is that “only minds and content of minds exists”. There would be “competing” claims – that there is only The Mind and Its Content (a single mind), also that there are only minds (no content), or that there is only The Mind. Your question about “refutation” presupposes “mental content”, insofar as it makes no sense to “refute” unless you have an arsenal of mental existents, such as logic (which itself is a very complex existent). The question presupposes that more than mind exists. I have never encountered anyone (past my undergraduate days) who posited that there exists only “mind” (singular or plural).

My view is that Western attempts to devise a “minds and contents only” theory as promulgated by Berkeley has not been as intellectually successful, compared to Ādi Śaṅkara’s philosophizing (to the extent that this is one individual), which I think I understand slightly better. The difference between Śaṅkara and Berkeley, as I understand it, is that Śaṅkara does not deny the existence of the physical, instead he unifies the physical and the mental into a single reality: in essence, “there is a universe, there exists nothing outside the universe”. My mind, and my body, are aspects of that unified reality. An attack on Śaṅkara requires a fairly focused study of what Brahman is (I have better fish to fry). Berkeley seems to deny the existence of my foot or a rock, except insofar as they might be a mental construct in a mind. I suppose that Rand might refute that position the same way that Samuel Johnson did, with a mighty kick (though such an outburst would be out of character for her).

The most important ingredient for a refutation of Berkeley is an understanding of “refutation”. A claim is refuted when it is shown that the claim does not describe (correspond to) reality. “Reality” is not the same thing as “the claim”. On the one hand, you must presuppose “reality” to engage in the act of refutation, on the other hand, the claim being subject to refutation denies that there is “reality”. The subjective idealist therefore has to lapse into the behavior of the 5 year old who answers every statement with “I know you are but what am I?”, or else has to assimilate realist aspects of Vedantic philosophizing and say that there are levels of awareness where “reality” is just a subjective mental construct and we aren’t even aware of the details of that construct, which soon leads to the “I know you are but what am I?” mode of “reasoning”. Ultimately, Berkleyan “consciousness” isn’t even the same kind of thing as normal-people consciousness.

I recommend Stove’s award-winning argument (admittedly not made by Rand, who died 13 years earlier), if you have doubts about reality and the extent to which Berkeley’s argument was the world’s worst argument.

In other words: subjective idealism is based on stolen concepts that presuppose a mind/matter dichotomy. No arguments here. Wittgenstein demonstrated similar, in that solipsism is incoherent due to roughly similar points. Any idealism that denies all of reality, declaring all to be mind, arguably leads to solipsism, so this refutes much of idealism, as well. 

Further, Berkeley and Shankara (some versions of his ideas are seen as pure idealism) both mitigated their own idealism into realism by accident:

1.) All is mind.

2.) This “all” is god’s mind.

3.) God is real, eternal, and ultimately existent.

They stop here, thinking, inexplicably, that they’ve defeated realism.

But, naturally, we now arrive at,

4.) All is real, even more real than we normally consider things to be. Every single thing is ultimately existent, and eternal, because every single thing is god. This realism is much more extreme than any other realism I know of. No other versions make literally everything real and eternal.

On the other hand, if “mind” means “unreal” or similar, like it does for the Madhyamaka and some Yogacara, that’s a different issue, but still self refuting, as it means they aren’t presenting a position, at all. It also is a stolen concept issue, as, the idea of “real” is meaningless if all is unreal, and then, so is “unreal” meaningless, with no “real.” “All is mind,” in this formulation, means “All is unreal” including the idea that “all is unreal.” It is, quite literally, nonsense. Madhyamaka and Yogacara self refute into incoherent babble. I’m indebted to the writings of Ramanuja, Kumarila Bhatta, and Stafford L. Betty for helping me out with that bit.

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On 12/25/2022 at 10:27 AM, Easy Truth said:

So consciousness is not defined as awareness. Meaning awareness of awareness is the indicator of consciousness in the context of this thread? Where does existence and the awareness of it fall in? Meaning without awareness of self? It seems that consciousness is being defined at a certain level of awareness. As in a bacteria is not conscious because it is not aware of itself. Perhaps a certain level of ability to identify is necessary.

A lawnmower is not conscious, not because it is not aware of itself, it simply is not aware/conscious. To say a clock is aware of time is a metaphor. Or a car being aware that there is not enough gas.

Sometimes consciousness is shown to be a chemical reaction. Sometimes it an awareness of awareness. Sometimes awareness of self as apposed to other consciousness or possible consciousnesses (plural). And sometimes as having freewill.

I suspect this is at the core of your question/interest. You are trying to disprove something. I would like to know what are you trying to disprove to “them”? And what is it that “they” believe?

The what I’m trying to disprove is idealism. The “them” is all idealists, generally, but only hypothetically. I’ve had a lot of Yogacara idealists in my life, and read a lot of ancient works on the topic. Ditto for Madhyamaka, and theres a lot of overlap. I don’t talk to any of “them” any longer, as I left Mahayana Buddhism awhile ago. So, I’m trying to defeat arguments I’m aware of, rather than any tangible person.

Perhaps the “them” is, in the end, me lol! I used to be an idealist, I woke up from that asinine worldview, argued against it with other idealists for awhile, realized they are hopeless, and only speak in self refutation they are incapable of comprehending, and moved on. Now I’m tying up loose ends, and jettisoning the last of a broken philosophy from my conclusions on reality. But I don’t accept things without logical reasoning, nor do I want to ever backslide, hence, I’m trying to truly defeat these ideas, rather than merely moving on, with the shadow of hubris on me, only assuming they’re false. 

Specifically, the “them” in your quote of me was about a conversation discussing yogis who think they are conscious eternally, including while asleep, even before they were born, and after death.

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On 12/24/2022 at 9:35 PM, Boydstun said:

Frank, on solipsism, some of my remarks in the immediately preceding post may help (my addition to Rand).

Concerning idealism, the burden should be on the idealist to show that the world is not as it is perceived to be, namely, as existing and in the ways it does exist and as independently of our discernment of it. That independence element is part of what is in our perceptions. We have ways of teasing out particular elements in our perceptions that depend upon our own location, state of motion, or perceptual system. Such would be the enlargement we have of the moon near the horizon in our perception of it. We take a photograph of the witnessed scene, and it shows no such enlargement. Similarly, with the Mach-band illusion we experience when we carefully cut out a particular chit of gray from a number of those color strips you can get at the paint store. Placing the chits of the same grey we have cut out side-touching-side snugly on a table before us, it will appear that the grey darkens near the abutting edges. And we know perfectly well that each of those chits was uniform in its grayness all over its surface. Unlike the moon illusion, science has identified how the Mach-band effect comes about: through the pattern of circuitry (lateral inhibition) of the receptor neurons of the retina. But when it comes to idealism, there has to be a general argument given for it, aiming to show that all percepts or fundamental facets of all percepts are in some systematic way contributed by the conscious subject. Then the work of the realist can begin, which is to show what error there is in that general argument. (I think Moore did this with Berkeley, and I presume an Objectivist refutation of the arguments Berkeley gave would differ somewhat from Moore’s.)

That’s a good point. And when we shift the burden of proof onto the idealists, we find they can only talk in looping, self referential, and ultimately,  self refuting statements. If all is mind/unreal, nothing can be proven. Proving things to be unreal also disproves the proof, because they’d demonstrate that their proof is false, they merely imagined it lol! It cannot be done. Without “real,” proof is impossible. 

And I think Objectivism is a good argument against slipping from there into doubt about the burden on realism, into skepticism. 

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On 12/24/2022 at 11:16 PM, Eiuol said:

Would you truly say that when meditating, you are not conscious of anything but consciousness itself? Sure, you can say that you are focused on nothing but consciousness, yet at the same time, I would say that you are conscious of whatever is on the periphery. As far as I understand, even when you attain the friend of mine after a few hours of meditation, you are directing your attention in a way that physical sensations fall by the wayside. I think this can be demonstrated with fMRI research. But in a more philosophical way, consciousness is experienced in reality, on top of how consciousness is the unity of various contents; when consciousness is focused on itself, as a totality, consciousness still includes all the sensory experiences of the body. You couldn’t scrub away everything underlying consciousness, even if you wanted to.  

Deep jhana meditation is said to be literally nothing but a floating imaginary light, or nothingness, or pure consciousness (whatever that means), or neither perception nor non perception (again, whatever…), etc. Supposedly people in these states can’t sense anything until they emerge.

It is an argument worth considering, as it’s not just normal meditation where one still hears dogs bark, feels the wind, etc.

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10 hours ago, Frank said:

Deep jhana meditation is said to be literally nothing but a floating imaginary light, or nothingness, or pure consciousness (whatever that means), or neither perception nor non perception (again, whatever…), etc. Supposedly people in these states can’t sense anything until they emerge.

Yeah, I understand that they say this is what’s going on. But I think the idea of “pure consciousness” already presumes a metaphysical stance about the nature of consciousness, so it would make sense that such a deep meditative state could only be described as pure consciousness. I mean, as far as I understand, attaining such a state they would claim is approaching or transcending our illusory notions of reality, therefore all that could remain is pure consciousness. And this would seem legitimate, because it involves a very “birdseye view” of one’s thinking and one’s place among all conscious entities. I don’t deny that this experience is real, and is a type of experience I think is consistent with what the human brain can do. But since I have a totally different stance about the nature of consciousness, on a metaphysical level, my description is necessarily different from theirs. It’s not that they are peeling away the illusions all around us, but that they are altering the way that they control conscious attention. 

To be a little more clear, these meditative states don’t prove that consciousness can in fact be conscious of nothing but itself. A metaphysical stance about consciousness comes first, or at least that’s something Rand would agree with. Only later can we really get at discussing the scientific details of how the brain attains these states. 

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15 hours ago, Eiuol said:

Yeah, I understand that they say this is what’s going on. But I think the idea of “pure consciousness” already presumes a metaphysical stance about the nature of consciousness, so it would make sense that such a deep meditative state could only be described as pure consciousness. I mean, as far as I understand, attaining such a state they would claim is approaching or transcending our illusory notions of reality, therefore all that could remain is pure consciousness. And this would seem legitimate, because it involves a very “birdseye view” of one’s thinking and one’s place among all conscious entities. I don’t deny that this experience is real, and is a type of experience I think is consistent with what the human brain can do. But since I have a totally different stance about the nature of consciousness, on a metaphysical level, my description is necessarily different from theirs. It’s not that they are peeling away the illusions all around us, but that they are altering the way that they control conscious attention. 

To be a little more clear, these meditative states don’t prove that consciousness can in fact be conscious of nothing but itself. A metaphysical stance about consciousness comes first, or at least that’s something Rand would agree with. Only later can we really get at discussing the scientific details of how the brain attains these states. 

Interesting. I wonder how she would explain these states? In the Objectivist understanding, what is happening when people experience these things?

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We could speculate, but I don’t think Rand really started to dive into philosophy of mind or the nature of consciousness as much until near the end of her life. As she thought about free will, her answer would be that what is happening would be a scientific question. A philosophically consistent answer for her would be one that integrates body and mind. Harry Binswanger has developed ideas about consciousness, although personally, I found that his ideas are unsatisfactory. The point I’m making is that analyzing what is happening in all kinds of states of consciousness is a very cutting-edge research question for neuroscience and psychology, and requires a wide range of concepts to understand on a philosophical level, a wider range than was even available in Rand’s time.

 

 

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5 hours ago, Frank said:

Interesting. I wonder how she would explain these states? In the Objectivist understanding, what is happening when people experience these things?

According to Branden she would tell him that she doesn’t know much about psychology. These states are psychological states. As in different states of sleep. Phenomena like flight or fight responses or even near death experiences when oxygen is limited.  Or rebirthing experiences induced by certain breathing. Or who knows what comes up with LSD. None of them come to a point of demonstrating that “you create existence” … objectively speaking. Subjectively, okay, fine, you do.

But ultimately what you create is the choice to focus or not. That’s what you create. Otherwise, contradictions can exist. Your mind can create anything. If existence is your imagination, then anything goes. There is no need to use logic. Just imagine the truth.

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On 12/25/2022 at 6:27 PM, Easy Truth said:

So consciousness is not defined as awareness. Meaning awareness of awareness is the indicator of consciousness in the context of this thread? Where does existence and the awareness of it fall in?

The post-kantians claim that all consciousness is basically self-consciousness (this is also true of indian philosophy, but I’ll limit myself to the former). The argument can take this form: self-awareness is a quality possesed by certain objects of observation (humans), but not by other objects (like rocks). Now, if you have no clue what self-awareness is, you are unable to recognize it, even if you encounter it a quintillion times. You must have a prior acquaintance with it, even to recognize it in your own person. This prior acquaintance is demonstrated by showing how all human judgements, without exception, have a universal abstract form, which could be formulated like this: ‘I’m aware of my self-awareness’.

Take the statement: ‘I love the Spice Girls’. What is its basic form? ‘I know that I’m acquainted with my musical taste’; I know (awareness), that I’m acquainted with myself in some way (self-awareness). Another example: the statement ‘Tiger Woods did not properly study his opponents’ occurs in a declarative form: ‘I know that I’m acquainted with my opinions about Tiger Woods’. 

Now, do you imagine your reality? Well, not quite. The mind does have the power to delimit itself to particular thoughts; however, to delimit itself to something is, nevertheless, a form of being limited. Those two perspectives are reconciled by synthesis: consciousness is theoretically unlimited, but practically limited. That is, there’s no theoretical limit to how much you can alter your world, but there’s the practical limit of being constrained by your past choices and shortcomings. By the time you finished reading the previous sentence, you’ve already deduced time, space and Kant’s categories (which he merely lifted from Aristotle). This kind of dual-consciousness is Rand’s starting point, and she never considers anything other than what is given in it: ‘I don’t feel that I create nature, therefore I don’t. I feel that I’m free, therefore I am free. Q.E.D.’

Inspired by Kant’s third critique, Hegel and Schelling consider the possibility of an original non-difference of freedom and determinism. The unconscious plant has no clue what its doing, yet it appears utterly purposive, as if it was consciously grasping at some end-goal. The kantians try to strip away the mistique surrounding freedom by proposing that determinism and freedom could be a single phenomenon: a blind, mechanical march of nature towards increasingly sophisticated tools of self-knowledge (organisms). Under this model, there’s no skepticism about whether the world of mental phenomena conforms to the world of material objects, since they’re one world, not two. This is a proto-darwinian view that suggests the possibility of laws which are both mechanical and somehow purposive (laws of evolution).

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8 hours ago, KyaryPamyu said:

This kind of dual-consciousness is Rand’s starting point, and she never considers anything other than what is given in it: ‘I don’t feel that I create nature, therefore I don’t. I feel that I’m free, therefore I am free. Q.E.D.’

I don’t follow how this viewpoint is anything like Rand’s starting point about consciousness. On the other hand, it actually isn’t clear what you mean by this kind of dual consciousness. More than that, I don’t think Rand would say there is any essential difference between awareness and consciousness. For her, we have perceptual consciousness, and conceptual consciousness, neither of which are different broadly speaking except what kind of content or the form of content. 

 

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5 hours ago, Eiuol said:

it actually isn’t clear what you mean by this kind of dual consciousness.

It means that consciousness is split into volitional and non-volitional aspects, as described in the paragraph from which you quoted. As for the Rand connection, she claims that because sense perception is lawful (as shown even during illusions, such as the stick appearing bent in water), this adds to the proof for realism. Her other claim is that free will is axiomatic, because looking for proof presupposes that you only accept claims which you_ _can vouch for. But idealism of the Hegel variety does not actually claim that there’s no lawful perceptual apparatus coming into contact with a world; nor does it prove freedom simply by appealing to the experience of adjusting your level of focus.

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10 hours ago, KyaryPamyu said:

It means that consciousness is split into volitional and non-volitional aspects, as described in the paragraph from which you quoted. 

I read the paragraph a few times. This might be what you’re trying to say, but what you actually wrote in the first place seems to be demonstrating something very different than anything Rand has said about consciousness. Could you write it more clearly?

It’s pretty confusing to talk about Hegel and post-Kantianism when the thread is talking about the Eastern philosophy version of idealism and when nobody brought them up. 

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3 hours ago, Eiuol said:

It’s pretty confusing to talk about Hegel and post-Kantianism when the thread is talking about the Eastern philosophy version of idealism and when nobody brought them up. 

Read the title of this thread, then read the first posts. Perhaps, since you contributed some posts about meditation, you forgot that this thread is not about a particular kind of idealism. Berkley, Eastern philosophy and my contribution (a post-kantian stance) were brought up later for the sake of discussion. 

I won’t rewrite the paragraph, because I didn’t claim that O’ism is compatible with idealism. I said that Rand takes the feeling of freedom to be actual freedom, and the experience of passive receptivity (sense perception) to be actual passivity. Idealists don’t. Simple.

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1 hour ago, KyaryPamyu said:

I won’t rewrite the paragraph, because I didn’t claim that O’ism is compatible with idealism.

Didn’t mean to suggest that you were claiming that. Nothing wrong with describing other kinds of idealism. It got messy when you mentioned:

On 12/28/2022 at 11:48 AM, KyaryPamyu said:

This kind of dual-consciousness is Rand’s starting point, and she never considers anything other than what is given in it: ‘I don’t feel that I create nature, therefore I don’t. I feel that I’m free, therefore I am free. Q.E.D.’

It’s not clear what the kind of dual consciousness is, and when you mentioned volition versus non-volitional, that didn’t add clarity. I’m not trying to make an argument there, I’m saying I would like to understand what you’re saying, so it would help me if you explained the idea in a different way. 

But I am saying that from the gist I get, I say that it’s false Rand considered the nature of consciousness in the ways that you described. Feeling free is not proof that you are free for Rand, the proof is in the activity of focusing. Not feeling that you create nature isn’t proof that you don’t create nature for Rand, the proof is in the way that being conscious of something means being conscious of something outside that internal experience. There is no duality present, there aren’t wholly distinct modes of consciousness. There’s just consciousness or not. As far as I understand, your point was along the lines of “here’s what a Hegelian would think, here is a shared question or idea that Rand considered a starting point, and here is how she goes in a different direction than a Hegelian”. My question or dispute is that she is in a totally different headspace and conceptual space, and is more along the lines of “throw all of this out, and start someplace completely different”. 

2 hours ago, KyaryPamyu said:

Rand takes the feeling of freedom to be actual freedom

I don’t think she even considers the question about feeling free or not. Doesn’t matter what you feel, because you are present within the doing. Not the subjective feeling of doing, but the activity of consciousness in the first place. 

2 hours ago, KyaryPamyu said:

the experience of passive receptivity (sense perception) to be actual passivity.

This might not be an important point, but I don’t think she makes any argument for actual passivity in perception. Passive in terms of not a volitionally directed process, your perception still does something actively and with purpose. 

Maybe what I’m really getting at is something like when you wrote this:

On 12/28/2022 at 11:48 AM, KyaryPamyu said:

Inspired by Kant’s third critique, Hegel and Schelling consider the possibility of an original non-difference of freedom and determinism. The unconscious plant has no clue what its doing, yet it appears utterly purposive, as if it was consciously grasping at some end-goal.

Except I would say that Rand doesn’t consider the possibility of there being a difference between freedom and determinism. It’s just an incoherent idea for her philosophy, for there to be a difference. 

If any of this sounds aggressive, I don’t mean to be.  I find the topic fascinating so it would be interesting to hear you expand. I’m just pushing back to say that Rand for the most part it ignores any kind of idealism, including not spending much time bothering to refute it. Not just her thinking that idealists get it wrong, but that they utterly lost their minds even in the questions they ask.

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39 minutes ago, Eiuol said:

3 hours ago, KyaryPamyu said:

the experience of passive receptivity (sense perception) to be actual passivity.

This might not be an important point, but I don’t think she makes any argument for actual passivity in perception. Passive in terms of not a volitionally directed process, your perception still does something actively and with purpose. 

These metaphors could confuse the points being made. Consciousness is a process or in a sense a potential. Volition is “doing something/choosing”. This (consciousness) process can be “done” or it can just happen. Passivity can simply mean it happened which it can, non volitionally i.e.  perceptually.

Consciousness is the faculty of awareness—the faculty of perceiving that which exists.

Awareness is not a passive state, but an active process. On the lower levels of awareness, a complex neurological process is required to enable man to experience a sensation and to integrate sensations into percepts; that process is automatic and non-volitional: man is aware of its results, but not of the process itself. On the higher, conceptual level, the process is psychological, conscious and volitional. In either case, awareness is achieved and maintained by continuous action.

48 minutes ago, Eiuol said:

Except I would say that Rand doesn’t consider the possibility of there being a difference between freedom and determinism. It’s just an incoherent idea for her philosophy, for there to be a difference. 

Again are you saying freedom to mean freewill? To be a difference or to not be a difference?

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Suppose I say that strawberry yogurt is a light dessert. I take it that the word ‘light’ means ‘easy on the stomach’, not that yogurt is made of sunlight, or that it’s light like a bird’s feather, or that yogurt is an easygoing individual. How is that obvious? By refering to the full sentence, its surrounding paragraph (after all, it might be a post about things made of sunlight), and cues from earlier posts. It doesn’t look like this is a popular idea on ObjectivismOnline.

For example, this part:

22 hours ago, KyaryPamyu said:

(Idealists do not) prove freedom simply by appealing to the experience of adjusting your level of focus.

…makes reference to Rand’s theory of volition as focus-regulation. A few hours later, the same poster makes this claim:

9 hours ago, KyaryPamyu said:

I said that Rand takes the feeling of freedom to be actual freedom.

which means: for Rand, the shift from lesser to sharper focus is ‘your fault’ simply because you feel that you’re the one producing that shift. 

My point? Not everybody assumes that feeling like you’re ‘seizing the reigns’ of your mind, is an argument. And not everybody assumes that passively receiving visual and tactile sensation proves that the mind does not unconsciously originate its contents. However, everybody starts with the experience of perceiving an allegedly external world and of having control over one’s mind.

This is not a serious level of discussion, so I will not be replying to any further requests for clarification. Everything is ‘messy’ when it’s read in a certain manner.

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