Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Perennial philosophy

aeon.co

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–28 of 28 posts

Re: Perennial philosophy

#21

Post by dr_dshiv »

curo wrote: post #20
dr_dshiv wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's good. This does seem to assume, a bit too strongly for my taste, that spirituality is only contained in the nothing/non-thought. For another model, I see the way science and spirituality were integrated in the early days of the scientific revolution by folks like Kepler, Mersenne, Kircher, Descartes, Leibniz, Hooke, Newton, etc. All adopted a spiritual frame of (roughly) "there is a universal harmony" and a sc…

Absolutely, it's certainly auspicious when your life work is an act of devotion. And also it would be too strong for my taste as well to say devotion and contemplation is only contained in some sort of nothing-apart-from-something. To harmonize them would be to realize that nothing can be apart from Nothing (and so all is allowed).

> nothing can be apart from Nothing

Clarify? There are mysteries in the one, such as the fact that if there is something surrounded by nothing (like a black dot on a sheet of paper), that is already a Twoness, not a Oneness.

Re: Perennial philosophy

#22

Post by curo »

dr_dshiv wrote: post #21
curo wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely, it's certainly auspicious when your life work is an act of devotion. And also it would be too strong for my taste as well to say devotion and contemplation is only contained in some sort of nothing-apart-from-something. To harmonize them would be to realize that nothing can be apart from Nothing (and so all is allowed).

> nothing can be apart from Nothing Clarify? There are mysteries in the one, such as the fact that if there is something surrounded by nothing (like a black dot on a sheet of paper), that is already a Twoness, not a Oneness.

You can allow for conceptual twoness but both have to exist within the same space. Space itself is said to pervade the sheet, the dot, the pencil, etc. So if you take one more step back from space, then you say, in which common substratum do space, time, constraints, etc exist? What pervades these like space pervades the sheet and dot?

A panpsychist would say whatever this is, it must contain the most fundamental building blocks from which we derive conscious experience. But you don't have to go that far, you just have to sit still and inquire into that original zero point that allows for your own individual (seemingly dualistic) subject experience.

You could make an analogy (this is borrowed from Advaita): yes there are many waves on an ocean, but the ocean itself is one. Conceptually there are many waves but in reality there isn't anything such as a wave.

Similarly your own bubble of conscious experience is tied to local instrumentation (your eyes, your brain, etc). But like bubbles in a basin of soapy water, it's really not substantially apart.

If you think of matter probabilistically, you realize the best analog is just "information" — every experience of this information arises from something. Of course twoness in this information is a matter of fact, but it's easy enough to say yes, these are abstractions of One. Or these are abstractions of Zero.

It's just a matter of language and what you prescribe to reality or what you prescribe to conceptual illusion.

Re: Perennial philosophy

#23

Post by sysbin »

I’m a hard determinist and I’m finding this philosophy similar to religion. It’s my first time reading about it but my impression is perennial philosophy is for people trying to force meaning by clinging to a constructed belief without the foundation of anything other than hopefulness. I understand the logic of all knowledge builds from collective thought. But the idea there is meaning just reflects wishful thinking.

Re: Perennial philosophy

#24

Post by cion »

dr_dshiv wrote: post #15
dunkelheit wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure why you are being downvoted, because it is a valid and important question (even if stated in this somewhat adversarial manner). For me the promise of philosophy is in examining the deepest assumptions that we use to interpret our experiences and guide our thinking. This is a hard task because just like sea creatures that are surrounded by water their whole lives and thus don't notice it, we don't notice thes…

Because philosophy can't itself prove all truths (Godel incompleteness), we must accept that the point of philosophy is better living . Once that is in place, philosophy can become much more valuable.

I don't understand the reference to Gödel. Do you mean the theorem that in every formal system capable of representing arithmetic there exist sentences "P" such that neither "P" nor "not P" are derivable in the system?

It doesn't seem to me that from this it follows that "the point of philosophy is better living". It might be obvious, but I just don't see it.

Re: Perennial philosophy

#25

Post by procgen »

Erlich_Bachman wrote: post #8
msla wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the point of this philosophy? What does believing it help one do or understand? That question is likely forbidden, in that philosophers don't seem to give reasons for their philosophies, but it's still important to ask, for the same reason it's always important to ask why someone is so enthusiastic about something.

I'm not an expert, but it seems that the utility comes from using the existence of consciousness as an assumption and presupposition of the continued following studies. Without this theory, science assumes no such thing, and ultimately ends up with a very difficult problem of defining where consciousness begins and where it ends. Existence of consciousness is obvious and intuitive to most people, it is rarely dispute…

Giulio Tononi's Integrated Information Theory provides just such a framework for determining where consciousness 'most prominently manifests itself': https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_information_theory

Re: Perennial philosophy

#26

Post by chrstphrhrt »

cion wrote: post #24
dr_dshiv wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because philosophy can't itself prove all truths (Godel incompleteness), we must accept that the point of philosophy is better living . Once that is in place, philosophy can become much more valuable.

I don't understand the reference to Gödel. Do you mean the theorem that in every formal system capable of representing arithmetic there exist sentences "P" such that neither "P" nor "not P" are derivable in the system? It doesn't seem to me that from this it follows that "the point of philosophy is better living". It might be obvious, but I just don't see it.

I like to think of it as all formalisms are tautologies. Therefore we can go along with some common sense and fuzzy logic rather than having to prove every possible axiom, which isn't actually possible or would take unlimited time. It's analogous to the halting problem.

Re: Perennial philosophy

#27

Post by catawbasam »

sysbin wrote: post #23

I’m a hard determinist and I’m finding this philosophy similar to religion. It’s my first time reading about it but my impression is perennial philosophy is for people trying to force meaning by clinging to a constructed belief without the foundation of anything other than hopefulness. I understand the logic of all knowledge builds from collective thought. But the idea there is meaning just reflects wishful thinking.

So why bother writing your response? What was the point if it has no meaning?

Re: Perennial philosophy

#28

Post by jfengel »

Modern civilisation, he writes, is ‘organised lovelessness’; advertising is ‘the organised effort to extend and intensify craving’; the 20th century is ‘The Age of Noise’.

Hoo boy. Huxley living in the 21st century would just explode.

Post reply on HN