Tuesday, August 04, 2009

Nature cannot be a condition of consciousness because consciousness is the condition of nature

[A metaphysical realist, thus, is one who insists that we may call something "true" only if it corresponds to an independent, "objective" reality. [4] ...
Often that is no more than a rearrangement of well-known building blocks, a slight shift in the starting-point, or the splitting of a traditional concept... In spite of Kant’s thesis that our mind does not derive laws from nature, but imposes them on it, [5] most scientists today still consider themselves "discoverers" who unveil nature’s secrets and slowly but steadily expand the range of human knowledge; and countless philosophers have dedicated themselves to the task of ascribing to that laboriously acquired knowledge the unquestionable certainty which the rest of the world expects of genuine truth. Now as ever, there reigns the conviction that knowledge is knowledge only if it reflects the world as it is. [6]
An Introduction to Radical Constructivism
Ernst von Glasersfeld ANTIMATTERS 2 (3) 2008.
Originally published in Die Erfundene Wirklichkeit, a volume edited by P. Watzlawick (Munich:
Piper, 1981, pp. 16–38). English translation in The Invented Reality (New York: Norton, 1984,
pp. 17–40).
AntiMatters]

[Immunology: UPDATED
Kant’s third antinomy, for example, defends humans from neurology by refusing the gesture of identification of the mind with the body. Similarly, Husserl’s phenomenology defends consciousness from the ravages of evolutionary theory and neurology by arguing that nature cannot be a condition of consciousness because consciousness is the condition of nature. Likewise, the so-called “critical stance” allows us to dismiss those features of the world we do not like in relation to us by charging them with being dogmatic.
from
Larval Subjects . - Jul 31, 2009]

[The two key principles of onticology are the ontic principle and the principle of translation. Throughout his post John draws a distinction between reality or the “really real” and illusion. But it is precisely this distinction that is undermined by the ontic principle. As I argue in my post on Flat Ontology, there are not two worlds– one consisting of the really real or “mind-independent objects” and another consisting of mind and the social –but rather only one world, the real, of which mind is counted as a member. Consequently, the first point to make is that the phenomena that take place in the mind regarding the game are themselves real. They are not less real than the game itself, nor “other” than the real. Emergence and the Structure of Possibility
from Larval Subjects . by larvalsubjects]

[The Hermeneutics of Suspicion: A Case Study from Hinduism
Moreover, he had to be constantly engaged in the practise of Yoga: "He must be well-versed in his grasp of the Absolute or Brahma (Brahma-dharana: [1.93]) ...// The “hermeneutics of suspicion,” which has emerged in recent times as a lens for examining historical texts, is a hermeneutic which involves a fundamental philosophical reorientation. Consciousness...is now considered to consist primarily of the relationship between the hidden and the swown, between what is concealed and what is revealed. Consciousness therefore needs decoding, and so also the texts which embody it. Arvind Sharma
Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Harvard Divinity School]

While the basic urge of ontological inquiry is a contested domain in the Western speculative tradition, in India it takes on a sacred hue as the much coveted Brahma-dharana. [TNM]

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