Ideaism

However, taking it a step further. Without experience of reality (which exists outside if mind in actuality as you say) time and eons pass by in less than a blink, time looses meaning. Even space loses any locality. Where is the universe if there is no mind to experience it?

Pondering this, our view zooms out to realize that all is meaningless and lacks any important existence outside of its meaning to experience. So yes it still exists actually, but not in any sense that matters outside of human experience.

Whats your power level? How do I archive it?

Ur spooked

What would be real philosophy in your opinion, smartass?
Also
>tfw no opium gf

That is not taking it a step further. That is saying the same thing but with bombastic implications.
>time loses meaning
>space loses meaning
>it still exists but not in any sense that matters outside of human experience
That's what he says. So what?

W-what

I didn't mean to attack you.
I just find the concept highly enlightening.

I know you weren't attacking me and in a sense I did not mean to attack you either. It's just that this sort of sensationalism triggers me.
It is just a matter-of-factly thing.
Kant is a boring person and he was trying to say something really boring. I like this about him.

>nothing exist outside our mind.
pleb.

Very fair, sober minded is always good. I come from a heavily religious background so I still fall into the grand schema building of radical protestants.

I guess I'm experiencing a kind of NeoKantian secularism that strips reality of any literal religious significance while still placing man as the only center. It almost feels like an offshoot of nihilism or existentialism, but without the despair over lack of meaning, because meaning is all derivative of man's experience.

It almost feels Gnostic. Like Kant has blown my brains out.

I say Gnostic also, because I came to this realization on my own, then went searching for it and came to Kants transcendental idealism as matching exactly. At least what I understand of it, which is very limited.

Not trying to imply I'm special or anything, it's not a new idea.

It seems so literally True, I almost classify it as a spiritual awakening, if that makes sense.

I almost couldn't sleep last night.

Literally not what he was saying at all.

There are many bad readings of Kant out there, but this one is definitely the worst.

You're gonna be real disappointed to hear that Deleuze wrote a book on Kant

Please, explain where I went wrong.

You went wrong by not reading the third critique

So is this basically the same as
>I will not die, it's the world that will end

In regards to aesthetics or teleology?

literally what he says tho

The only world that matters will end when you cease experiencing it. Except to those still experiencing it.

This quote is out of context, but I assumed commenters would at least be somewhat familiar with his though. Read some of the other posts here and you'll get it.

You're thinking Berkleyan Idealism.

The point is that nobody experiences the world the way you do, which means that the world actually ends when you do.

It's literally a statement of monism; object and subject are not independent of each other, even though they seem that way.

Intersubjectivity is still a phenomenal appearance in your own mind. How do you assert the phenomenal experiences of someone else's mind without simply accepting it for convenience?

Agreed.
Besides, once you die, aeons will pass in less than a blink as time will have no meaning so all will be dead as well. Indeed space will have no meaning, because location will cease as well.

Abstractly, we can still empathize with those who will live briefly after we are gone, but that's more a matter of ethics.

More of a solipsistic stance. I see enough evidence that others exist, but there is no extra charge to believe it's so. Logically it follows, but it would be depressing. Since there is no empirical basis for it, it is somewhat out-of-bounds

Kant was himself a protestant, although his view of faith was quite unorthodox.

To go on a tangent, I find this again and again. Religious orthodoxy has to either be accepted as a convenience or discarded because it can't stand up to pure scrutiny. So we either get a religion of pragmatism ("it just works") or we invent our own take on it, thereby making us unorthodox and rejected by the orthodox system. We can see the latter on Kant, who strongly defended faith, but is vilified as a cold rationalist by orthodox religious people.

Genesis 3:4-5

And the serpent said unto woman, Ye shall surely die: but nature doth not know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing the dialectic.

What I meant to point out is that the Cartesian epistemology, which Kant more or less adopted uncritically, is solipsistic. One man alone in a room in his pyjamas observing a burning candle is not an adequate basis for the phenomenology of realness.

Compare the mise en scene, or performativity of Plato's dialogues and Descartes meditations. In the the case of Plato, truth emerges out of the conviviality of social pleasures ; whereas with Descartes, in a sad parable of the modern age, he beholds the truth in utter isolation.

>Ye shall surely die
It's "Ye shall not surely die" if you're using the KJV. Or in contemporary English "You will not die" (NRSV).

Interesting take as far as orthodoxy goes.

Let me some of my thoughts along this line. To believe the orthodox tradition of Christianity, that Christ died and came back from the grave, literally, is rediculous. It simply did not happen. Not to be edgy, that is just the likely case.

I however find the religious experience to be a very literal, phenomologically speaking, and beneficial to coming into contact with Truth.

Like the perennial tradition, along with Kants belief in the structure of the mind being priori to experience itself, the religious truth is reexperienced and rises in a new manifestation of somthing inherent to being.

A kind of Jungian Campbellian experience of "dvinity." I have this from time to time, a mythic experience.

But literally religion is a blight and a war on truth as far as im concerned.

If Kant is solipsistic, I reject that portion. I however am skeptical that he was given his take on ethics and the catagorical imperative and his religious beliefs.

You haven't demonstrated a rational reason for intersubjectivity there. You're totally correct that there's empirical reasons to accept it. But empirical evidence can't prove itself, it works in a pragmatic sense and we can certainly accept it as probably pointing to something objective. But ultimately it can't be proved, it's always "probably".

>Logically it follows, but it would be depressing
What do your depressive feelings mean in this context? Do they provide evidence against the view that intersubjectivity is itself a phenomenal experience in the individual's mind?

That's basically my point. It is interesting to follow the Cartesain line of anything being possibly an illusion, but it can't be proven either way so I follow the pragmatic definition of truth in this case that "while others may be figments of my mind, it appears to me they are independent subjects like myself." The evidence for this is that they act like they are independent of myself. Same goes for the belief in an objective reality. Can it be proven? No. Do I get much benefit from doubt? Also no.

No one will stop you from believeing solipsitically, I just rejected it because there is no evidence either way so I base it on my best judgement and that which will make me more potent in my actions.

I am not sure what you are talking about exactly.
We can think of something as real or imaginary, as necessary or possible, as certain or uncertain etc.etc. which means our mind CAN and DOES function that way. Kant's philosophy rests on the observation that there are some things that we can't help but think of as true.
If we decided to be solipsistic we could say that what we perceive as true is just randomly assigned as true at any given moment and that there is no meaning behind it and any consistency we perceive from one moment to the other is also merely illusory and randomly assigned.
But, you see, that thing is that no one could ACTUALLY believe that because it simply doesn't fit our criteria of truth. And that's about it.

I'd say that this pereniallist or Jungian archetype way of viewing religion can only show that religious experience is real. In my own subjective experience, that's trivially true since I've had experiences that seem to fit the criteria of being religious. But can you draw any inference from that using pure rationality?

In an empirical sense, they imply a cause (since we can collect empirical evidence for causes and effects). But does the experience *in itself* tell us anything about its cause? Buddhism (and Hinduism) emphasises knowledge through experience, rather than knowledge through understanding which many western thinking subscribe to. Personally, I have experiences some "knowledge" of Buddhism through meditation, such as universal compassion, it's something that seems to come naturally when I meditate using Buddhist techniques. But does that tell me anything about where

I think we're in agreement here.

To return to my point about orthodoxy: maybe I'm wrong, but Christian orthodoxy seems to assume so much that I can't accept it as an a priori truth (which is what it claims to be, as far as I can tell). For example, a physical being living in the 1st century AD who was referred to as Jesus/Yeshua by his fellows, must have existed for orthodox Christianity to be true. But this whole position assumes a naive empirical view of the world that historical events are true (in some sense, the Christian scriptures themselves never delve into this), thus the material world exists, and thus empirical evidence must be valid in an absolutely objective sense. Otherwise, we simply don't know if there was a Jesus or if he was crucified or resurrected, etc. etc. This isn't even aknowledged in the Christian scriptures, which have a layperson's view of history i.e. history is factual and actually happened. For me, that makes Christian orthodoxy suspect because it doesn't build itself up from philosophical principles but just assumes that the historical claims it makes can be accepted as truths, which then undergird the phenomenal religious experiences of Jesus. But without first proving a material world that Jesus existed in, these experiences of Jesus are floating in our minds with no objective support. If we're going down that route, any religious experience can only be evaluated by the subjective experience itself and by the subjetive changes it makes in our own thoughts.

Anecdotally, my thoughts and actions have been changed by Buddhist practices and beliefs. But does that tell me anything about noumena beyond my phenomenal experience? Does it imply Siddhartha Gautama existed in an empirical sense?

Everything you've written here seems solid to me. I don't find any logical holes. I wish I could say more, but you've got it covered very nicely.

Religious experience is how I derive meaning, in this life. I don't really care about what it means for the life to come, becuase I doubt it exists.

My intuition says that there is a great deal of power that can be "unleashed" from these experience, and that in itself gives it importance.

Inducing religious experience is what it is all about for me, for the experience itself.

At least we have you.

Someone make a Heidegger apu.

I am saying that reality is something normatively determined and is therefore a social construction. Reality is not a thought-experiment, it can't be deduced from a syllogistic proposition. This is why, in my humble opinion, it makes little sense to ask: What is reality? Better to ask: Why do some definitions prevail over others?

*Why do some definitions of reality prevail over others?

>it can't be deduced from a syllogistic proposition
Yes.
>reality is something normatively determined
No?

My apologies!

You can deduce anything syllogistically, assuming you observe the principle of noncontradiction. However, you can't DERIVE reality from a syllogism, as if it were an ideational sediment.

It's not that bad, the man wasn't a moron. He was just espousing some things that didn't need to be expounded upon.

I agreed with that already. Reality is something that is object to sensibility. That is why it can't be deduced.
I don't understand what you mean by normatively determined. Reality is not subjective.

>Inducing religious experience is what it is all about for me, for the experience itself.
That's very cool, actually. I've had religious experience that involve specific beliefs of very different traditions. For example, while I was reading the book of Mormon I meditated on it and had a vision of the globe showing me how God's word had spread to the Americas, seemingly backing up the Book of Mormon. But when assessing the empiricial evidence, Mormonism is bullshit, the founder was a conman and there's no evidence for any golden plates or ancient American jews. I have to aknlowedge my ignorance here and say I can't draw any absolute conclusions from this, but it seems to suggest that religious experiences don't necessarily relate to empirical evidence at all. So a worldview that combines the two (which Christian orthodoxy seems to do) needs very careful consideration Alternatively, one can make the judgement that they're not reconcilable and simply not be a Christian.

In short: this is why I'm agnostic.

>the world will cease to exist when no man is alive
>being this retarded
Noumena will live on regardless.

Obviously that's not what I meant.

>Implying true intersubjectivity exists and there isn't an infinite amount of knowledge in the world that prevents us from understanding it from a modal perspective
Nice try spook

Rly makes u think

While German Absolute Idealism is rediculous if taken seriously, I think there is a great deal to learn from it. In basic part, they seem to imply that all being is a part of spirit, there is no objective reality, thus all reality is a part of the mind. How it really differs from subjective reality is difficult for me to lay my finger on.

Here is where I think it can be useful. The idea that our entire reality is a representation of our mind.

reality as I experience it is not reality-in-itself. To some degree, reality as I experience it is a representation of my own mind; thus it is representitive of my own mind, conciously & unconciously.

Conciously, I am giving value judgements to reality. My own biases are represented in the characteristic i abscribe to undifferentiated being.

Unconciously, the cognitive funtion of my mind is ordering what my senses percieve befroe it is even revealed to me as an experience.

Our biases and underlying myth is being fed back to us in the very reality we are experiencing.

>While German Absolute Idealism is ridiculous if taken seriously ... in basic part, they seem to imply that all being is a part of spirit, there is no objective reality, thus all reality is a part of the mind.

I'm no expert on German Idealism, but that seems to me only to characterize Hegel's definition of Absolute Idealism - and not Schelling, the originator of the term, as Schelling never posited spirit, but that is perhaps a pedantic point for me to make.
Anyways, I believe Hegel and Schelling do believe in objective reality, as this was the fundamental criticism they held of Kant and subsequently Fichte. Schelling my memory is fuzzy on, but
for Hegel a large portion of the Phenomenology of Spirit was to demonstrate that there is objective reality by way of the master-slave dialectic. That for the subject to consider themselves rational and
independent, they must have another being of equal status recognize them as such, hence there is something outside of the I, and thus a reality exterior to the I.

Further spirit isn't the main constituent of reality, but is an activity thereof and operates in degrees such as subjective spirit which is individual minds, objective spirit which is customs, laws, state and so on, absolute spirit
which takes the formal qualities of art, religion and philosophy - in essence, spirit is varying levels of self-consciousness, but self-consciousness is not all reality, as it is predicated on the existence of nature.
Part of Hegel's critique was also the claim that subjectivity qua self cannot be the highest level of existence as appearances of objects come to us unbidden, and outside our conscious control.

Lastly, Hegel did believe that we experienced reality as it is in-itself, because he thought the distinction of noumena was incoherent.

Thank you. I'm just listening to a lecture on German idealism so I must've misheard.

However, I believe Kant did believe in an objective reality. That's what his Noumena is.

Idealism is actually true though. If there are no sentinent beings with spirit like us, there would be no observable reality that can be categorised, so in a way it would not exist

Yes, but the issue with noumenal things - at least in Kant's case, is that he cannot by definition provide an account about how we could get to know them.

The issue more or less is in two parts,
i) that by Kant's terms the subject only knows a priori of objects of which it creates according to its own inherent laws, and since its a priori is the necessary
condition of all knowledge, the self only knows its own creations and not reality as it is in-itself.

ii) further Kant thought we only knew of objects by way of appearances, which are in experience, but noumena is by definition exterior to experience, and to
be consistent Kant (as some charge at least) would have to admit that we could only know of representations of, in effect, nothing.

So, if we keep the noumena-phenomena divide, we are in a bit of trouble.

Fichte tried to resolve this by putting his vore fetish to good use.

Id like to think so, Absolute Idealism is beautiful, but seems like religious thought is its basis.

Do you find that German Idealism is am accurate view of reality?

Do either of you know of a secular idealism?

It's hard for me to say.

On one hand, there are some parts that I think are undeniably brilliant, for all their faults, Kant, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel still continue to take my breath away.
Intellectually, the German Idealists are if anything bold and daring. Though that may seem a strange way to characterize notoriously wearisome writers to read.

As a view of reality, I do think they offer a great deal of insight into what we can actually say about our knowledge of reality, and also ways of understanding reality.
The one looming issue I see with the strain of German Idealism though is the fact that they are totalizing systems, or theories of everything (though, Kant maybe less so),
and though I have yet to read them in a serious capacity, the existentialists, pragmatists, analytics, continentals as I understand really take them to task for this.

At the moment, it is one of most forceful accounts of metaphysics I have ever read, but I think I need to learn more before I can say anything more conclusive.
I would lean towards the positive side though.

I cannot think of any which would be secular in the precise meaning of the word. Closest I would reckon would be Hegel (he did practice as a Lutheran, but he had a rather radical
pantheistic conception of God at the same time, more in line with Spinoza), and maybe Schelling? Schelling is a strange one though, so I am not sure.
I could tell you a bit more about Hegel's concept of God if you are interested though.

Yeah, let's hear about hegels god

It's called nationalism. Fichte also categorised that

You guys are unironically quite smart, tfw a complete brainlet white trash.

Mate I've been reading philosophy for the last 5 years and thinking about it daily(especially German Idealism since I learned about it) and I can just understand what is written in this thread, yet I can barely write more than a few sentences(probably can do better in my own language though). You need to start first and then find out if you really are a brainlet.

>where were you

I am not somewhere. Where is someme.

>the self only knows its own creations and not reality as it is in-itself
This creates the unnecessary illusion of opposition. Saying "the mind knows only its own creations" is like saying "reality is subjective".
There is a difference between a representation and a "creation of the mind". The mind cannot "create" anything with from pure rules. It still needs input from the external world. It still perceives reality, just mediately and not directly, which makes sense when you think about it. Just how do you do about perceiving something "directly"? Can you drink sensory data? Can you eat it?

Don't despair, Kant is pretty hard to wrap your head around.

I recommend second lit rather than straight up reading the critiques. Schopenhauer also does a good job of explaining (and expounding on) Kant, read World as Will and Representation

I read Schopenhauer in high school without previous philosophical knowledge and I don't remember anything from his ontology other that it read like a bad sci-fi novel. Does it actually sound less stupid after you've read more on the subject?
What does he say about Kant? All I remember is that he complained that Kant liked symmetry too much. Which I agree with. Kant's system is just way too orderly and logical.

>Where were you when the mind became the center of reality again?
In my mind, obviously

Kant has opened me up to a realization brothers and sisters. He himself fell back on divinity, but if you are like me, and doubt the life after this, our limited perception in this life is not only all that is to us, it is all there will ever be. Once we are gone, all will be gone in a flash.

This is not nihilism, becuase this is the only meaning. Your mind is the only meaning.

There has been a crime comitted, there is a large scale war on truth. The power structure has robbed us of the vast range of human experiences and potential. They have castrated the function of man.

Reject the false structures that are given to you. Reject the norms that are not to your benefit. Reject the leeches, reject the fear. We are being lied to on a vast scale. The power structure is in a deliberate war on truth.

It is possible for us to experience the infinite here and now. If you dont experience it here, you won't experience it anywhere.

The problem, as I see it, is that there is an opposition for Kant, and while he wants to affirm an objective reality, by his terms he cannot.
The way you see it is along the lines that Hegel argued (and that which I agree with), that appearances cannot just be of the mind because they
come and go beyond our will.

Although, I think to argue it as,
>There is a difference between a representation and a "creation of the mind".
>The mind cannot "create" anything with from pure rules.
>Just how do you do about perceiving something "directly"? Can you drink sensory data? Can you eat it?
begs the question, insofar as it presupposes certain externalities before proving their necessity from the standpoint of the subject.

This is perhaps a subtle, and certainly pedantic point on my part, but one I think that is important to make.

A quick and dirty characterization would be that, Hegel has a "completed" version of pantheism.
His most basic assumption about God is that God is immanent, and not transcendental as often portrayed in most religions.
He reasons along the pantheist lines that the infinite that God is assumed to be must also encapsulate the finite which is our universe,
hence Hegel says, "Without the world God is not God".

He also criticizes Christianity on the grounds similar to most enlightenment thinkers, that the Christian ethic of love cannot work in wider society (simply, it seems near impossible
to love anyone and everyone), that Christians taking after Augustine see life as only a pilgrimage through this world and thus wish to retreat from the world, miracles and such do not stand up to historical scrutiny,
and as mentioned above, God cannot be transcendent of the world.
It should also be noted that Hegel did not believe in the immortality of the soul, and though that finitude (that things eventually perish) was a very real thing, counter to other pantheists who thought that things were
"absorbed in the eternal".

Hegel's end point is pretty much echoing Aristotle in all honestly, that God is rational, it acts only according to its own nature, is purely actual, which is to say as REAL as real can get, and the things contained within it this actuality i.e. you and I are inseparable from this actuality (where else could we be?), dependent on actuality, but actuality does not depend upon us to exist.

This does seem a bit nuts I'd imagine, but it makes more sense in Hegel's more complete system and as he said, God is the last thing we ought to consider.

>there is an opposition for Kant
>the way you see it is along the lines that Hegel argued
Really? I haven't actually read Hegel yet. I thought I was simply parroting Kant more or less but there is probably some sort of subtle distinction I can't perceive?
>appearances cannot just be of the mind
How does saying that the mind perceives reality according to some preset rules suggest that appearances are just of the mind? From engineering perspective the idea that input data should be processed in according to some rules sounds like the most intuitive and natural thing.

As far as I gather the assumption, no, necessity that noumena exist follows from our perception of causality, which, like it or not, is not something you can argue with. So the problem you have with Kant is that you can't logically prove that the things we perceive a priori do "truly" exist? The thing is that according to the theory "truth" doesn't even exist at such level. It bothers you that you can't find logic in things that logic doesn't apply to?

>where were you
The subject does not belong to the world but it is a limit of the world.