Do we share the world, or live in private dreams?
- The "hard problem of idealism"
- Explaining the continuity of our shared world
- Berkeley, Schopenhauer and Mind-Only Buddhism
- Do we have agency as individuals?
This session was an immersive comparison of subjective and objective idealism, and the reasons Bernardo considers objective idealism the superior philosophy:
In 'The Matrix' people seem to occupy a shared world. But in reality, they are each receiving a transmission from a central source, each person in a private dream.
“A world is not being shared. The illusion of sharing is being engineered deliberately.”
Switch off all the transmissions, and the world is no more. The mountains and stars only exist when perceived, and there is nothing more to them than that.
This is similar to how subjective idealism might explain the continuity and intersubjectivity of our reality, but for Bernardo, this explanation is way too convoluted.
In objective idealism, the story is simple: We really do occupy a shared world. Our perceptions do not bring the world into being.
But instead of representing physical states, our perceptions represent other mental states.
"The reason this has sounded counterintuitive for the past four or five hundred years is that we’ve gotten used to the notion that mental states can only exist inside living beings.”
If you can overcome this cultural conditioning, objective idealism can explain continuity, intersubjectivity, and accommodate scientific enquiry.
Objections to objective idealism
Whilst our perceptions of the world are a legitimate experience, they are not the experience the world is having of itself. Just like the perceptions you have of me are legitimate, but not the experience I am having of being myself.
In one sense, you perceive the world, but don't experience it.
I wondered if this was the objection that Iain McGilchrist and Sthaneshwar Timalsina had to Bernardo's idealism, despite being idealists themselves. A distaste for an apple which is mere representation, rather than a taste of the real thing.
Perhaps they lean more towards Berkeley's subjective idealism, in which the world continues to exist because it is always perceived by God. On this account, could the apple you taste be the very reality that God perceives?
Bernardo seems to separate us from the apple. Its colour and taste mere representations of a deeper, but inaccessible reality.
But at a deeper level of understanding, for Bernardo God is the Universe, "but God is you and me too.” Therefore, “God does have the experience of seeing and biting into an apple.”
Not because our perception is not also a representation, but because the subject looking through our eyes is universal subjectivity itself.
You are universal consciousness, tasting the apple from the particular perspective we call you.
Are we agents or mere puppets?
This point was really brought home in the last 40 minutes of this meeting.
Bernardo contends we really do have true agency, and he took us on a detailed philosophical enquiry to understand how.
We can totally accept that you can play a game of chess against yourself, by switching places on each move.
All we need to recognise is that dissociation across time can happen across space too. It is your agency reading this newsletter, and it was yours writing it. You're doing the whole thing!
I encourage you to meditate on this section deeply, and then to harness this agency to share your thoughts in the comments below.
With appreciation and anticipation,
Amir
Timestamps
00:00 Greetings and catchup
14:30 Subjective idealism
16:00 overlap with solipsism
18:30 Representationalism (including analytic idealism & materialism)
19:50 Accounting for the continuity
21:40 God is always perceiving the world
22:20 What is the relationship between God and alters
23:00 Modern subjective idealism solutions to its problems
23:20 Virtual headset receiving signals analogy
24:50 Analytic Idealism says we really do share a world
25:00 representationalism:
28:00 How it accounts for intersubjective world
31:30 Objective idealism: to be is to be, irrespective of being perceived
33:00 Headless Way
What you feel like isn’t the same as what you look like
35:00 Solipsism: the world is like a cartoon
37:40 Intersubjectivity in subjective idealism is convoluted
41:40 The motivation to stay with subjective idealism
43:10 Did Bernardo flirt with other idealisms?
46:20 The problem analytic idealism solves: boundaries between beings
47:00 You need boundaries to have perception
47:20 Schopenhauer on cognitive associations
50:00 “The hard problem of idealism”
51:30 Subjective idealism in Buddhism: Yogācāra
53:30 How analytic idealism accounts for causality
56:00 How subjective idealism and solipsism are ultimately true
1:00:00 Does a tree falling in a forest make a sound?
1:01:00 There was a universe before living beings
1:02:00 For objective idealism no, for subjective idealism yes
1:04:00 For Berkeley does the world represent God's will?
1:06:00 Representation vs Imagination
1:12:00 Two kinds of experience in analytic idealism
1:15:00 Objections to objective idealism: Iain McGilchrist, Sthaneshwar Timalsina
1:19:00 Universal Consciousness is you, biting the apple
1:21:30 Do individuals have agency?
1:25:00 You are all the players
1:36:00 Spiritual reverence can obscure its relevance
1:38:00 The one agency that exists
1:42:00 Studying consciousness with anesthesia
1:50:30 Playing all the roles
1:54:00 Reincarnating as everyone, everywhere, all at once.
1:55:00 Spirituality need not be esoteric
1:57:30 Before the enlightenment, everyone spoke symbolically
