Gratis verzending vanaf €35,-
Unieke producten
Milieuvriendelijk, hoogste kwaliteit
Professioneel advies: 085 - 743 03 12

It’s Time for Mindful physics! An introduction to the Time and Mind conference

It’s Time for Mindful physics! An introduction to the Time and Mind conference

Seeing | Physics

Surreal view as a man walking on a pavement road and a suspended clock on his back hanging from the sky. The importance of time in the modern world. Time travel concept.

We begin our coverage of Essentia Foundation’s 2023 work conference with host, Prof. Bernard Carr’s introduction to the conference. He highlights how fundamental mind is to physics, and then elaborates on the intimate relationship between mind and time, suggesting that only a better understanding of time will allow us to make sense of individual minds. The full program of the conference can be found here.

The birth of Idealism in the West (The Return of Idealism)

The birth of Idealism in the West (The Return of Idealism)

Reading | Metaphysics

Thinking Man

Parmenides’s cryptic claim that thought and being are the same has echoed throughout Western philosophy. In this first instalment of our new series, The Return of Idealism, in partnership with the Institute of Art and Ideas (IAI), Prof. Tom Rockmore argues that in making this claim, Parmenides set the foundations for the struggle between idealism and realism, and suggests that unlike many interpretations, Parmenidean idealism ultimately supports the view that we cannot know a mind-independent reality. This essay was first published by the IAI on the 4th of January, 2024.

Philosophy seeks to arrive at, analyze and choose between different views against the background of the ongoing philosophical tradition. Many exponents of philosophy, talented or otherwise, believe that, in at least some instances, there is a correct answer to the difficult questions that continue to attract philosophers. Others, including myself, believe that we cannot go further than framing or at least seeking to frame philosophical questions in the most useful ways possible. This includes what we might consider to be the correct approach to answering a question. But it need not include anything so grand as proposing a solution to any philosophical concerns.

According to Plato, Parmenides, a sixth century pre-Socratic thinker, invented what has since been known as philosophy or perhaps more narrowly Western philosophy. Numerous other qualified observers also believe that Parmenides began Western philosophy, and that once it began, philosophy has always been and still remains Platonic. The relationship of Parmenides to Plato is crucial but complicated. Parmenides advances a theory of knowledge according to which we can, or at least hope to know in some general way. He famously believed that thought (or thinking) and being (or reality) are the same. The meaning of this claim is uncertain, but one way it can be read is as a defense of philosophical idealism. Parmenides then can be seen as the first idealist in the Western tradition. What is more, his idealism is a form of anti-realism, the view that we cannot have direct knowledge of reality.

 

Parmenides on Thought and Being

There is a difference between Parmenides, who began philosophy, and later thinkers beginning with Plato, who sought to build on the Parmenidean view. Parmenides formulated what according to Plato and others became the initial view of philosophy which echoes through the entire tradition, that thought and being are the same. In his claim that thought and being are the same, Parmenides seems to be suggesting that cognition depends on either or both of two basic claims. One possibility is that he is making the ontological claim that when we know something we know mind-independent being, that is, the way the mind-independent reality is. The other possibility lies in the view that we do not and cannot grasp the mind-independent world as it is, but cognition is still possible through an indirect grasp, by the construction of the cognitive object.

At this point in many texts, one might anticipate a series of learned remarks, often of a philological nature, since Parmenides wrote in ancient Greek, intended to demonstrate the true meaning of the Parmenidean view.  This seems unnecessary in the present context. Suffice it to say that Parmenides neither demonstrates nor attempts to demonstrate his thesis which, since pre-Socratic philosophy, continues to function as the only universal criterion of knowledge.

Rationalists like Descartes and empiricists like Locke agree we can know the mind-independent real but differ about how to do so. Others believe that at the end of the day there has never been any progress towards that goal. The alternative to these options of naive realism and extreme skepticism is epistemic constructivism, which I will understand as a three-fold claim: (1) we must avoid cognitive skepticism; (2) though we cannot demonstrate or otherwise show that we know the mind-independent real; (3) we can avoid skepticism since we can at least demonstrate that we know what we construct.

 

Plato’s development of Parmenides

It is often said that Western philosophy begins in Plato, not Parmenides. But if Plato is a post-Parmenidean beyond just coming after him time-wise, then he does not break with, but rather builds on and further develops the Parmenidean theory. Philosophy then starts with Parmenides, as Plato himself thought.

Plato states a version of the relation of his view to Parmenides in several places, perhaps most famously in the tenth book of the Republic. According to Plato, knowledge is based on mimesis, or imitation. He claims that we apply a single form to the things to which we apply the same name.

Take the example of a piece of furniture. Socrates believes craftsmen who, in the process of making things, for instance beds and tables, rely on pre-existent images, which they do not create, but only use as a model for different kinds of furniture. According to Socrates, no individual makes the form of the thing, such as the table or a chair.

The suggested demonstration culminates in a three-fold distinction on three different levels between three kinds of beds. They include (1) the form of a bed that no human being but only a god can make; (2) for instance, the work of a carpenter who relies in turn on whatever the god creates in the process of naming, and (3) the painter who depicts one or more pre-existent objects he does not create.

Parmenides sees the problem, which he formulates but does not solve, and which in turn Plato also sees and also does not solve.  According to Parmenides, cognition is possible if and only if thought and being are the same. In the theory of forms, Plato seeks to show that there is cognition if there are mind-independent forms, which at least some gifted individuals can know. The required demonstration of the identity of thought and being lies in the Platonic view, which is intended to solve the Parmenidean problem. Plato’s suggested solution is his theory of forms, namely the identity between the object we do not make or construct and the object we can know or think.  If this is true, then thought and being are indeed the same, and cognition is possible. Plato is attracted to this argument as a possible solution to the problem of knowledge, since he suggests, some exceptional individuals – men of gold-  can grasp the forms, and therefore the mind-independent world. But the solution fails since even in the Republic itself, we never find out who these exceptional individuals are supposed to be – there are no men of gold.

 

Thought and being after Plato

The Parmenidean problem of cognition, which Plato failed to fully solve, arguably remains on the agenda of the entire later philosophical tradition, still unresolved. The Parmenidean view suggests there are two and only two general ways to know the world.  Let us call them i) materialism (or realism), the view that we can and do grasp the mind-independent real, and ii) idealism (or anti-realism), the view that we can only interact, but never know the mind-independent world as it is.

Materialism is often described as a naïve doctrine that asserts, but cannot demonstrate, claims about the mind-independent world. Materialism is a strategy for cognition through the immediate or direct grasp of the way the world is. Materialists seek to demonstrate that we can have a direct, immediate grasp of the mind-independent world.

Philosophical idealism on the other hand is often understood as the view that mind is the most basic reality, whose inner essence is in some way mental. There are numerous kinds of philosophical idealism, including British and German varieties. Idealist thinkers claim we can only infer, but never know what appears to be the case. In modern philosophy, arguably the best-known idealist is Berkeley. The latter was an immaterialist, who denied the existence of matter in favor of a view of finite mental substance that he understood as a collection of ideas.

 

Kant and Idealism as Anti-realism

In following the path opened by Parmenides, we have distinguished two main cognitive strategies, namely materialism and idealism. The difference between the two cognitive strategies is clear. Materialism is a version of the familiar, realist correspondence view of truth. Materialists think, but cannot show, that our grasp of the real corresponds to what is. Idealists, on the contrary, think that, though we cannot grasp what is, through the interaction between the knower and the knowable, we construct cognitive objects that we know.

Idealist thought arises in Parmenides and continues in modern philosophy. The term “idealism” was initially used by Leibniz in 1702. Berkeley thinks idealism favors immaterialism, or the view that substance does not exist. Idealists, for instance the later Kant, are constructivists, not realists. Kant began as a representationalist, initially favoring the view that cognition requires the correct representation of the object. He later gave up representationalism in favor of constructivism. In the Preface to the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant suggested that metaphysics, which previously assumed that knowledge must conform to objects, “must [now] suppose that objects must conform to our knowledge” (CPR B xvi).

If this is correct, then the complicated link between Parmenides, who precedes Plato, and Plato, who succeeds Parmenides, turns on demonstrating either one of two general claims. We recall that Parmenides believes that thinking and being are the same. This suggests that thinking and being are two names for precisely the same thing. On the other hand, it paradoxically also suggests thought and being are not similar but utterly different in every way.

Parmenides’s view that thinking and being are the same echoes throughout the tradition from the pre-Socratic beginning of the tradition right up until today. A turning point arises in the transition between two phases in the development of Kant’s position. The turning point occurs in the Inaugural Dissertation (1770). In his initial view, before the Dissertation, Kant defends a pre-idealist representationalist approach to cognition. In this early phase, he understands cognition as requiring an apodictic grasp of what is. After the Dissertation, Kant gives up any claim to apodictic knowledge in favor of his famous Copernican revolution.

In On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres (1543), Copernicus proposes that geocentric planetary motion can be replaced by a heliocentric explanation. In the Preface to the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant suggests that metaphysics, which previously assumed that knowledge must conform to objects, “must [now] suppose that objects must conform to our knowledge.”

Kant was a physicist. In the process of the development of his position Kant changed his mind. He initially held that there is a mind-independent world that we know to a later view and we know it. An example is Newton’s laws, which are supposedly unalterably true or necessarily correct about the mind-independent external world, and will never be superseded.  In other words, Kant’s early view defends a view of science that claims but cannot show that we know the way the mind independent world is. In this initial phase of his development, Kant holds that we know what is necessarily correct since it cannot not be true. This view restates in different language the Parmenidian belief that knowledge requires a correct grasp of being.

Kant later changed his mind in adopting the basically different view according to which the cognition requires no more than the construction of what is on the level of thought. In this later phase Kant no longer believes that cognitive claims are unalterably true or even true at all, a view he abandons in favor of the belief that cognitive claims are not necessarily true but rather depend on our experience.

The evolution of Kant’s conception of knowledge runs from a stronger claim about the mind-independent external world before his Inaugural Dissertation to a weaker claim after the Dissertation about the way we merely experience but cannot know the world. More recent scientists think that cognitive claims are historically limited. In an informal statement, Einstein, the physicist, writes:

Physical concepts are free creations of the human mind, and are not, however it may seem, uniquely determined by the external world. In our endeavor to understand reality, we are somewhat like a man trying to understand the mechanism of a closed watch. He sees the face and the moving hands, even hears its ticking, but he has no way of opening the case. If he is ingenious, he may form some picture of a mechanism, which could be responsible for all the things that he observes, but he may never be quite sure that his picture is the only one which could capture his observations. He will never be able to compare his picture with the real mechanism and he cannot even imagine the possibility of the meaning of such a comparison.

 

Parmenidean idealism

Coming back to Parmenides and his claim that thought and being are one. Plato understood Parmenides to mean that the condition of knowledge is to grasp the unity of thought and being. Following that idea, Plato suggested that knowledge would be possible only if we could know the mind-independent world as it is. But ultimately his theory of forms failed.

The ancient Parmenidean claim runs through the philosophical tradition, returning in different forms in German idealism (e. g. Kant, Fichte and Hegel) in the canonical choice between thinking and being. But if demonstrable knowledge of the mind-independent real is the main thrust of the philosophical tradition, in other words, if materialism/realism is the dominant strain of Western philosophy, then Western philosophy fails. On the other hand, if constructivism is a plausible alternative, cognition can in principle be redeemed through the ongoing interaction between finite human beings and their surroundings, above all in Hegel’s view of epistemology as circular. Though Kant did not invent epistemic constructivism, he gave it a powerful impulse in his later view of knowledge in context.  I conclude that we can and indeed must accept the Parmenidean unity of thought and being as a cognitive condition. But we must reject the unavailing effort to grasp the mind-independent real in favor of a constructivist account of objects as they emerge in experience.

Higher dimensions of consciousness

Higher dimensions of consciousness

Seeing | Cosmology | 2023-12-31

The composition of the space of time, the flight in space in a spiral of Roman clocks 3d illustration

Our brains do not produce consciousness, they ‘filter’ it and consciousness is related to the higher dimensions in string theory. In this thought-provoking conversation, distinguished Professor of mathematics and astronomy Bernard Carr explains his theory of consciousness and psi-phenomena. Happy new year from all of us at Essentia Foundation!

In this final video of 2023, Natalia Vorontsova interviews Bernard Carr, emeritus professor of mathematics and astronomy at Queen Mary University of London (QMUL), about how physics can accommodate consciousness. Carr started his career as a pupil and close friend of Stephen Hawking and has combined a distinguished career in cosmology with a serious interest in consciousness research and psi-phenomena like telepathy, out-of-body experiences and precognition. Long before it became an acceptable idea amongst physicists, Carr became convinced that a unifying theory of physics should accommodate consciousness. From his work in Brane cosmology—a branch of cosmology that builds on the higher dimensions of string theory and M-theory—Carr argues that it is completely reasonable to argue that consciousness relates to a higher dimension from which spacetime emerges. If so, his theory is highly compatible with objective idealism and paves the way for a future physics that can make sense of the qualities of experience.

In this long conversation, Carr not only shares his views on psi-phenomena, consciousness and Brane cosmology, he also touches on the specious present: the shortest time span of immediate consciousness. For humans, under normal mental conditions, the specious present is around one tenth of a second. According to Carr, the concept of the specious present could account for the fact that separate, localized forms of consciousnesses experience the same world. Also, the specious present opens the idea of levels of consciousness with a much expanded or contracted specious present, which could account for well-documented cases in which people experience the slowing down of time, or the extreme speeding up of time. Could it be that, to the universe as a whole—say, the universal Mind—billions of years pass in the blink of an eye?

As 2023 comes to an end, Prof. Carr’s insightful views on the passage of time might be a nice way to look back and celebrate what is to come. Whatever 2024 holds in store for us, wonderfully enough, we  find ourselves in exactly the same specious present, which makes it possible to consciously interact within an objective world that most probably is Mind.

Gödel’s Incompleteness and the Realm of Wildlife

Gödel’s Incompleteness and the Realm of Wildlife

Reading | Philosophy

Yaakov Lichter | 2023-12-24

Four funny ant with their bellies. Ants dancing. Glade, moss. Beautiful rainbow background. The concept of performance, dance, show, concert

Humans relate to nature through the intermediation of abstract linguistic concepts that aren’t themselves part of nature. Animals, on the other hand, relate to nature through actions—gestures, secretions, sounds, etc.—that evoke meaning in a manner directly grounded in the elements of nature. The potential power of this more direct approach has been illustrated by Kurt Gödel, who used elements of mathematics—natural numbers and arithmetic operations—to model mathematics itself and investigate its nature, thereby unlocking great insight. This is analogous to how animals relate to their world. Could Gödel’s insight help us transcend the artificial boundaries created by our abstract concepts and, thereby, better understand reality?

In the spirit of Newton’s call to build more bridges rather than erect more walls, here an analogy is suggested between the stratagem of Gödel’s proof of his Incompleteness Theorems and the modes of behavior that enable animals in the wild to effectively be one with nature while still spreading their intentions and signaling their status. I suggest that Gödel’s most fundamental intellectual insight—which resides in the world of human thought—parallels what animals possess naturally.

The language in what follows is intended to be accessible to non-mathematicians and provide a preliminary introduction to Gödel’s revolutionary and profound work.

 

Direct sensations and language

Simone de Beauvoir proclaimed that “humans are the talking animals.” We do not know of any other animal that uses abstract symbols—such as written letters and spoken syllables—as a means of communication, which members of the species have deliberately pre-agreed on. It would be far-fetched for us to think that any other living creature uses abstract words such as mind, consciousness, justice, happiness, sorrow, and so on. In that respect, humans are a unique species. Dr. Doolittle, who allegedly conversed with animals using human concepts, existed only in Hugh Lofting’s fictional books. Being talking and thinking creatures ourselves, when we read Lofting’s books Dr. Dolittle’s talking animals become a sort of reality for us, but a reality in our mind.

Abstract symbols combine in linguistic formulations—such as words, sentences, formulas, etc.—to eventually create for us, humans, stories of various types, ranging from tag lists and simple accounts to legends, narratives, novels, and theories. These abstract symbols—whether written or spoken—do not mean anything to any other living creature.

A human baby is born devoid of language. However, the potential to understand language and use it is inborn in it. Babies start internalizing language the moment they first hear it. This rather cryptic, even mystifying, process is profoundly influential; it creates our framework of thinking. Humans are very self-reflective: they think about themselves, about their experiences and about their very existence. Language causes us to process all of this in a consistent way, thus creating one of the two sources of our knowledge.

Indeed, two essentially different human experiences feed, increase and sustain human knowing. One is our inborn, unmediated, direct natural sensory experiences that are naturally ‘engraved’ in our consciousness, very much like any other animal. This source is not conditioned by knowing any language or the products of language, such as tales, narratives, or theories. The other source emanates from our linguistic experience of becoming acquainted with an ever-increasing number of words, names, statements, etc.

Søren Kierkegaard spoke of the outstanding change that takes place in one’s mind when, for the first time, the fact that everything in their life depends on the way they think invades their consciousness, where they understand that the absoluteness of thought—which stems from the absolute definitiveness of language—takes the place of alleged reality.

Two essentially different realities—one stemming from our direct sensory experiences, and the other from our language-thought experiences—meet and interact in our consciousness in a very complicated, intricate and, in fact, mysteriously entangled way. This interplay yields tremendous human capabilities, with qualities that are unmatched by any other living creature. These unmatched creative capabilities span from profound artistic, literary, and scientific works to horrendous acts of killing and destruction.

One of the most brilliant human achievements of all times is Kurt Gödel’s analyses of the foundations and structure of mathematics as a formal language, as well as its properties. Gödel published his revolutionary work in 1931, thus changing forever not only widespread popular beliefs about mathematics, but also shattering for good what world-leading mathematicians and logicians thought about it.

Gödel’s outstanding logical genius is discussed in a plethora of books, papers, essays, lectures, movies, and video clips. However, perhaps something unique has been overlooked in at least most of them. When comparing Gödel’s most fundamental stratagem—without which the very body of his work would not have been possible—to the way animals get along and ‘communicate’ in nature, an interesting and rather instructive parallel may be drawn.

 

Metatheories

When Aristotle wrote his teachings about nature—which he called “phusika” (φυσική, in Greek)—he realized that it was impossible for him to explicate nature’s concrete causes and effects, as discerned by the senses, without inventing abstract concepts indicating entities and properties that cannot be directly sensed by us. In order to formulate his philosophical teachings about nature, he had to incorporate these abstractions as an integral part of his text. His disciples decided to gather the definitions and explanations of these abstract terms in a separate section or volume, and then place it right after his physics teaching. The word ‘after’ in Greek is μετά (pronounced ‘meta’), and thus the word ‘metaphysics’ was created. As such, the metaphysics of a certain physical theory is concerned with the investigation, analysis, and description of the theory itself.

This is not exclusive to physics and metaphysics. Each theory can have a metatheory, which investigates, analyzes, and critically describes the concepts, symbols, and inference rules of the theory itself. A particular case of a metatheory is metamathematics.

Understanding that any theory is eventually a story made of language, Rudolf Carnap suggested the following definition for a metatheory: “if we investigate, analyze, and describe a language L1 [and call this study L2] … the sum total of what can be known about L1 and said in L2 may be called the metatheory of L1.”

For a variety of considerations, which are out of the scope of this essay, we will refer to mathematics not as a theory of quantities, but as a theory of abstract symbols free of any interpretation, practical agenda, or empirical experience.

We are now setting out on a journey that takes place solely in the world of human language and thought. Later we will contemplate this abstract world from a standpoint located in the concrete world of direct sensory experiences. Both these worlds constitute the contents of human consciousness.

 

Formality, consistency and completeness

Historically, the development of mathematical thought has always been accompanied by the emergence of  paradoxes. The intensity of this process surged during the 19th century, to the point of becoming a fundamental problem in mathematics and related sciences. David Hilbert, a leader in the community of mathematicians and logicians, called on them to prove that mathematics can be simultaneously a formal, consistent, and complete theory.

The adjectives ‘formal,’ ‘consistent,’ and ‘complete’ are not what mathematics—either as a theory of quantities or a theory of symbols—is about. They are, instead, metamathematical.

What do we mean when we say, ‘formal theory’? The Collins English Dictionary states that it is “a system of uninterpreted symbols and combinations thereof, whose syntax is precisely defined, and on which a relation of deducibility is defined in purely syntactic terms.” That is to say, the truth or validity of one such a theory stems solely from rules and laws related to symbol manipulations, which the theory considers legitimate. A famous example of a formal theory is the basic geometry of the plane, formulated by Euclid thousands of years ago without reference to drawings or plausible experiences. Euclid’s theory is taught in high schools to this day.

It is much simpler and seemingly more intuitive to define ‘consistency’: a theory is consistent when we believe that its text is free of contradictions (it will be understood later why we use the words ‘intuitive,’ ‘believe’ and ‘seem’ in this supposedly simple definition).

The third terms is ‘complete.’ We say that a theory is ‘complete’ if all of its propositions (or formulas) can be proven to be either true or false based on the theory’s axioms and inference rules.

We want to relate the above to mathematical theories. The root of mathematics is arithmetic, so we can widen our field of interest to any theory that includes arithmetic in it. Including arithmetic in a theory simply means that the list of symbols (alphabet) of this theory should include the symbols for the natural numbers (), plus the multiplication, addition, and equality symbols ().

For the sake of brevity, in what follows let the acronym FCAIT denote a Formal, Consistent, Arithmetic-Including Theory.

 

The fundamental stratagem behind Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems

In response to Hilbert’s challenge, Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead published their monumental three-volume book, Principia Mathematica, about the foundations of mathematics. Their book included their new “Theory of Types,” which emanated from their insight that paradoxes exist only in the world of language and thought, their source being self-reference, which language allows. In the context of language, a self-referential statement is one that entails a reference to itself. The ancient symbol of the Ouroboros—a dragon that eats itself—denotes self-reference and illustrates the paradox of something defeating itself.

Russell and Whitehead’s Theory of Types seemed like a complete solution free of self-referential propositions, thus avoiding the paradoxes that arise from them.

When Russell and Whitehead published their book, Kurt Gödel was a child. After having read their book not many years later, he felt—with his extraordinary intellect and mathematical intuition—that it must be impossible to get rid of self-reference in mathematics and, apparently, in any FCAIT.

Gödel’s brilliant intellect led him to a profound stratagem, which enabled the proofs of his revolutionary Incompleteness Theorems. He decided to adopt Plato’s philosophical view that natural numbers should be regarded as a special type of reality in themselves. Though they do not belong to kind of direct sensory experience that we intuitively accept as reality, we should still consider them ‘real’ in our world of language and thought, which ceaselessly interferes with our sensory experiences.

Thus, Gödel devised a code that converts any alphabetical statement or formal proposition into one unique natural number, and vice versa, in a one-to-one mapping. The code he suggested is very simple indeed, and based on the rules of arithmetic. For reasons of brevity, I will not go into its details here (in any case, there are many different methods to create such a code, so the details are less important). The profound point is Gödel’s understanding that such a code is a necessary condition for proving his theorems. It is a necessary condition, but not a sufficient one. He came up with additional ingenious ruses, which are not mentioned here so we can focus our attention on the code only.

By converting formal statements into natural numbers in a bijective way [Editor’s note: i.e., in a way that ensures that each and every formal statement corresponds to one and only one natural number, and vice-versa], it becomes technically, or symbolically, possible for us to replace (a) the verbal concepts and statements with numbers and (b) the inference rules with arithmetic operations. That gets us from the world of regular verbal language, such as English, into the formal language of arithmetic.

This is a change of a medium; will it create a new message? Apparently, it did. It allowed Gödel to prove revolutionary theorems.

 

Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems

The first of Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems claims that FCAITs are necessarily incomplete; i.e., an FCAIT always has statements that can be neither proven nor disproven, which are therefore called ‘undecidables.’ FCAITs necessarily include undecidables.

The second theorem, which is easily proven from the first, says that there is no consistent FCAIT that can prove its own consistency. This is the final fatal blow to Hilbert’s hope—as expressed in the challenge he posed to the global mathematics/logic community—to preserve the image of mathematics as both consistent and complete.

In even simpler language, what we can say with mathematical certainty, based on Gödel Incompleteness Theorems, about the concepts of completeness, consistency, and decidability for any given arbitrary FCAIT is as follows.

Completeness: does every statement that must be true in a theory have a proof in the theory? No.

Consistency: is a theory certainly consistent? Can we be sure that it is free of contradictions? We cannot know the answer to these questions from the theory itself; the property of consistency cannot be proven or refuted within the theory.

Decidability: is there a finite algorithm that can always determine whether a statement follows from the axioms of a theory? No.

 

Gödel’s realm and wildlife

Gödel’s code is a transformation between two human forms of description, both belonging to the human world of language and thoughts; both using abstract symbols. One form is our regular language, such as these sentences, which we ordinarily use to describe the world and think about it. The other entails the concepts of natural numbers and arithmetical operations.

Animals, as we understand them, do not have a world of conceptual language and abstract symbols. They cannot describe or communicate to other members of their own species, or to other animals, in this fashion.

Originally, I had titled this section “How natural living creatures communicate.” On a second thought, I chose a different title, as you can see above. In my book, Life & Theories: Encounters of the Third Kind, I went even further, referring to animal interactions as messages of nature itself.

The reason I tried to avoid using the word ‘communicate’ is because communication ordinarily implies some form of human-like language—i.e., an ordered combination of abstract symbols like spoken syllables, written letters, mathematical formulas, formal logical statements, etc. Too many people think that we can interpret the way animals conduct themselves as analogous to human language, but animals in nature do not possess such capability. What they do, instead, is to use the objects of nature itself, such as bodily gestures, touches, sounds, tastes, odors, even bodily secretions, which can all be naturally discerned by the senses of living creatures.

For example, we are all familiar with the yawn reflex, which exposes the teeth of the tired animal, thus discouraging any predator that could otherwise take advantage of its fatigue. We see how the fur of a cat bristles and its back becomes curved when a dog attacks it, so the cat looks bigger than it is. Another interesting example is a procession of ants walking along a trail, coordinated by the secretion of various substances (like pheromones). Ants also exercise involuntary physical contact, which excite certain reflexive responses such as opening their mouth to let other ants sense what it carries. They sense the subtle but penetrative sounds of legs strumming the creases on the side of an ant’s stomach. And there are also tastes and smells that ants pass to one another. All these are concrete components of direct sensory reality; all are concrete—none is abstract.

 

Conclusion

In summary, the means that animals employ to effectively be one with nature, and yet spread their intentions and signal their status, are made of the very entities that nature is made of and do not entail indirection via pre-agreed abstractions. Is the resourcefulness and ability of animals to survive and reproduce in nature, as well as live in sustainable balance with it, a result of their being an integral part of nature?

It is clear that Gödel’s profound stratagem of using solely the very elements of the ‘reality’ of mathematics—natural numbers and arithmetic operations—to relate it to metamathematics itself served as a fundamental key to unlocking the unexpected results of his theorems. A parallel between Gödel’s stratagem and the behavior of animals in nature then seems to emerge: the use of elements of a given reality to relate it to its metareality. This may avoid the barriers caused by a language whose concepts are foreign and irrelevant to the reality it tries to describe. Can it be a clue to deeper insights?

Newton said, “We build too many walls and not enough bridges.” Can the above be the beginning of a bridge that will enable better theories?

 

This essay reiterates some of the ideas in the author’s book, Life & Theories: Encounters of the Third Kind, 2023.

Reconciling the dancing polarities

Reconciling the dancing polarities

Reading | Philosophy

Fred Matser | 2023-12-17

Orange and blue lightning, cold and hot electrical discharge, element danger

In an essay meant to give us food for meditation during the holiday period, as we take account of the year now behind us and the—tragic and otherwise—events that marked the year, our Founder and Chairman speaks to the importance of maintaining, in a mature fashion, the dynamic balance between the often extreme polarities that characterize human society.

In holding polarities apart, resistance creates continuous tension between opposites. By ‘tension’ I don’t mean something negative, but simply a force, a pull. In our case, we can think of this tension as the impetus underlying the interplay between (a) male and female modes of being, (b) intellectual and intuitive modes of cognition, (c) the felt urges to give and receive, (d) the raw power of assertiveness and the enchanting power of vulnerability, and many other polarities. Our very lives rest on the dynamic tension between these opposites being maintained, for without such tension we would live in a world of static aloofness. The tension is the driving force of both people and societies; it is what makes them move, even strive; it is the impetus behind every action, individual or collective; it is the engine of both personal and social growth, authentic growth.

Therefore, the secret to a healthy and functional life, as well as to a healthy and functional society, lies—it seems to me—in ensuring a dynamic harmony between the polarities, whereby neither pole dominates, subdues or overwhelms its opposite but, instead, the tension between them is maintained. This dynamic harmony can be best visualized as a dance performed by each pair of opposites. The better the dance is—that is, the more refined the balance and harmony of the choreography—the more functional is the result. The dance of the polarities isn’t meant to achieve a certain goal or arrive at a particular destination, just as two people dancing a tango aren’t trying to arrive at a specific place on the dance floor. The point is the dance itself, just as the point of sailing is to sail, not to go around buoys.

To grasp the value of life from this perspective requires a certain sense of aesthetics. As Plato suggested, beauty is truth. The most truthful, functional way of life is thus the one that entails the most beautiful dance, the most exquisite choreography. And no tango is beautiful if one of the partners is dominated or stomped into oblivion by the other, is it?

Yet, subduing one of the poles for the benefit of the other has been, consistently, throughout our history, the way we operate. Most conspicuously, we have put physical, assertive power on a pedestal, while neglecting the indispensable role of vulnerability in life, which we see as a weakness. But without the enchanting power of vulnerability life would be impossible. Think of all unborn and newborn animal life, insect larvae, fish fry, plant seedlings, etc.: how vulnerable, yet indispensable, they all are! To use assertive power is perfectly okay as long as it is dynamically balanced with the power of vulnerability, so as to maintain functional tension. Alas, even a cursory observation of our social dynamics reveals that we are far from achieving such an ideal.

There are many more examples of imbalance. Take, for instance, how we value the intellect much above feeling and intuition, as if only the intellect could convey valid information and arrive at valid conclusions. Already since early education, this bizarre and skewed notion is inculcated in children: whatever you know through feeling or intuition is only acceptable if you can persuasively argue for, or justify, it in conceptual terms, using words and numbers. Otherwise, it’s just fantasy, delusion, wishful thinking. Such devaluation of our feeling faculty amounts to a veritable amputation. It artificially and arbitrarily cuts us off from capabilities nature has endowed us with for a reason. It’s like voluntarily gouging out an eye and believing we are better off for it. Because the amputation is not as immediately visible as a missing limb or eye, we don’t realize the magnitude of our loss.

Moreover, the intellect expresses itself innately through discrimination: it is always attempting to draw a line between true and false, right and wrong, valid and invalid, appropriate and inappropriate, belonging and not belonging, etc. Choices made through intellectual mediation are thus intrinsically exclusionary: they exclude what we judge to be false, wrong, invalid, inappropriate or not belonging. In contrast, choices mediated by the feeling faculty—heart-based choices— tend to be inclusionary, to draw things and people together based on their unique strengths and relative value. Consequently, our tendency to value the intellect much above the feeling faculty leads to the myriad ways in which our society excludes people, communities, countries, animals and even nature at large.

One of the most recognized imbalances in our society and way of life is that between male and female modes of thinking, feeling and acting. Therefore, correcting this particular imbalance also gets most of our attention and effort. The problem is that, even in contexts or situations wherein women have managed to break through the glass ceiling and achieve positions of influence, the price they pay for doing so is often to sacrifice their very femininity by imitating the dysfunctional behavior of men. This is too high a price, for it defeats the very purpose of the effort to reduce the imbalance in the first place. Indeed, the detrimental imbalance here is not merely a question of gender, but of modes of being and acting.

If our society embodied a proper dynamic balance between male and female modes of being—regardless of gender—we would arguably be seeing less dysfunctional competition, less wars, less loneliness, more understanding, more sharing and compassion. There is much to be gained by working towards a dynamic balance.

But in order to do so, we must be prepared to revise our values. Balance can only be achieved if each pole is valued on its own terms, not in terms of the qualities of its opposite. This is a subtle but crucial point. For instance, male business leaders who sincerely want to contribute to a better balance between male and female principles at work may still value the intellect and assertive power above intuition and vulnerability; and so, they will support and promote women who think and act like men. At the end, no balance is achieved.

Proper dynamic balance requires a kind of cognitive leap that enables one to contemplate each pole from an Archimedean vantage point; a neutral perspective from which one can objectively assess the polarities within their total context, recognizing their respective contributions to the whole. It is extraordinarily difficult to attain such a neutral vantage point, for we are all immersed in the values we happen to embody. Yet, attaining it is essential if we are to live harmonious, functional lives. This is the key challenge at hand, and it is formidable.

UAPs, NDEs, and foundations of physics: it all makes sense under Idealism

UAPs, NDEs, and foundations of physics: it all makes sense under Idealism

Seeing | Philosophy | 2023-12-10

UFO concept. Glowing orbs, floating above a misty road at night. With a silhouetted figure looking at the lights.

Only a form of objective idealism can account for UAPs, NDEs, and the latest discoveries in foundations of physics and the neuroscience of consciousness, while remaining consistent with the whole of science and rational inquiry. Learn more in this discussion between Hans Busstra and Bernardo Kastrup.

Analytic Idealism is the new worldview that can make sense of anomalous phenomena—whether it is NDE’s, altered mental states or UAP’s—whilst remaining 100% compatible with our current understanding of physics.

In this video Hans Busstra discusses questions from viewers of our channel with Bernardo Kastrup (director of the Essentia Foundation).

Physicalism offered an equilibrium for around two hundred years. But if one closely looks in the fields of neuroscience, physics and philosophy, anomalies are piling up. The only way to still entertain the idea that physicalism can make sense of unexplainable empirical phenomena—ranging from loophole-free Bell inequality tests, to altered mental states, to undeniable new evidence around Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP’s)—is to literally ‘don’t look up,’ to paraphrase the hilarious Netflix film that actually was a painfully accurate cultural critique of our times.

In this Q&A Hans Busstra and Bernardo Kastrup discuss questions coming in around anomalies in the fields of NDE’s, UAP’s and fundamental physics. Though analytic idealism can’t offer clear-cut answers to most of these questions, it can—and this is a crucial difference with physicalism—in principle build testable theories around these phenomena. For instance, if nature consists of mental states, it is not unthinkable that when dissociative processes weaken—for instance, during NDE’s—that people can experience other people’s experiences. And if UAP’s in some cases seem to present themselves as mental phenomena, under idealism it doesn’t follow that they are imaginary.

If we want to continue the scientific endeavour of accurately describing and predicting the behaviour of nature, we need to ‘look up’ under all circumstances; analytic idealism offers us a new telescope to do so confidently. Our YouTube channel is the place where we look through the telescope playfully, allowing ourselves to be troubled as well as excited: a revolutionary shift in science seems ahead and we want to report it to you from the forefront.

Self-cultivation, individuation, and the mind-body problem

Self-cultivation, individuation, and the mind-body problem

Reading | Philosophy

Mark F. Rossbach, MA | 2023-12-03

Young woman performing Wing Chun stance on the beach at sunset time. Concept of sports lifestyle

If the fundamental layer of reality is understood to dissolve the seeming metaphysical differences between mind and matter, psyche and soul, then bodily practice becomes a direct means for psychological and spiritual development. Such development, in turn, conveys the direct experience of the unity between mind and matter, psyche and body, self and world. This is the central point of this short essay by anthropologist, Jungian analyst, and martial artist Mark Rossbach.

Could practices such as meditation and martial arts offer us a glimpse into a more fundamental layer of reality?

According to our modern, Western, materialist worldview, this cannot be the case. But if we look in other directions and other modes of thinking, we can find different answers. Eastern philosophies, for example, developed in radically different ways. One of the main differences lies in the understanding of mind and body as being ultimately one, the opposite perspective of our modern materialist worldview.

By regarding mind and body as ultimately one, Eastern philosophies understood that reality was not something outside, separate from ourselves, but something closer and more fundamental. This led to the understanding that reality could never be comprehended solely by thinking, but had instead to be lived through direct experience. In this worldview, thought was not divorced from lived experience, and philosophy developed with strong practical components to it.

The Japanese notion of Shugyo is a perfect expression of the way practice is understood as a means of achieving a lived experience of more fundamental layers of reality. At first, the concept was used to refer only to religious Buddhist ascetic practices, but with time it spread more widely thru Japanese culture, as religious thought itself permeated different layers of society.

Yuasa Yasuo was a Japanese philosopher who translated Shugyo as ‘Self-cultivation.’ He analyzed the concept through different perspectives and associated it with paranormal phenomena and Eastern metaphysics. In Carl Gustav Jung’s Analytical Psychology, Yasuo found a way to bridge this concept with the West, for Jung had developed a theory of psychological functioning that not only allowed a psychological interpretation of Eastern practices, but also understood that psychotherapy should offer a way for Western individuals to develop a symbolic understanding of life, recovering something that in essence is proposed by all religious thinking: a lived, individual experience of totality. This meaningful understanding of life is closely relatable to Eastern philosophies, as is pointed out by Yasuo, especially if we take the idea of Self-cultivation as a starting point.

But what does it mean to cultivate the Self?

According to Yasuo, Self-cultivation is a way of training the mind through the body, in meditative practices such as martial arts and crafts. The idea implied is that, alongside technical development, the practitioner should seek spiritual development throughout his practice. This spiritual development signifies a deep transformation of one’s personality, as well as the lived experience of deeper aspects of reality.

In contrast, in the West bodily practice has been regarded as having merely recreational or health value. Either way, bodily practice has not been considered a means to achieve profound spiritual transformation.

The reason for this contrast may be found in the mind-body problem, since our main Western religious traditions contributed to a dualist and dichotomous paradigm initiated in the Enlightenment period through Cartesian thinking. Such dichotomous understanding of reality considers mind and body two different substances. From this our current materialistic worldview was born, wherein objective reality (body) has higher value and importance than subjective, experiential reality (mind), as the former is thought to come first. The famous hard problem of consciousness is a direct consequence of such dualist thinking.

Eastern traditional philosophies have not been heavily influenced by Cartesian dualism. And neither have they divorced mind and body through a similar socio-political movement as the Enlightenment—at least not until the last century. In contrast, Eastern philosophies developed a nondual worldview, investigating the inner, experiential part of life by taking mind-body oneness as the starting point.

In notions such as Shugyo, mind-body oneness is an experiential state achieved through continuous practice. It leads to the experience of Satori, which is the individual enlightenment lived by Buddhas. Nonetheless, it is important to emphasize that Satori is not a specific experience, but rather a broad term to refer to different experiential states achieved through the cultivation the Self. We could also say that Satori refers to different lived experiences of altered states of consciousness.

To claim that the experience of mind-body oneness is achievable through practice means that, although mind and body may be perceived as two different substances, both are in fact the same; there is but one substance perceived by us in two different ways. And the experience of this one substance can only be achieved through practice. As such, according to Shugyo, the seeming dualism of reality is not fundamental.

Yasuo maintains that mind-body practices show the difference between Western and Eastern metaphysics, the former being occupied with what lies behind the experience of nature (physis), whilst the latter is engaged with what lies behind our inner nature—that is, what lies behind the human ‘soul’ (psyche), as Yasuo puts it, which in turn is investigated on the basis of mind-body inseparability as the starting point.

Yasuo found in Analytical Psychology (developed by Carl Gustav Jung) a bridge to compare the aims and the psychological mechanisms entailed both in meditation practices and psychotherapy (as understood in Analytical Psychology). According to Yasuo, psychotherapy aims at restoring an individual afflicted with an abnormal state back to his normal state of behavior, by restoring the link between consciousness and the unconscious.

On the other hand, meditation aims at ‘transcendental’ states of consciousness, many times regarded as altered states, in which an integration of consciousness with the contents of the unconscious takes place, thus enabling one to learn how to control one’s emotional states.

According to Yasuo, while psychotherapy aims at helping someone deal with abnormal states of consciousness that cause suffering and meditation (Shugyo) at achieving higher states of consciousness, the underlying psychological mechanisms are the same. In this light, Shugyo can be understood as the way of seeking the experience of mind-body oneness through practice.

This transformation of the personality, according to Buddhist traditions, is accompanied or fomented by experiences of losing sight of oneself, of leaving the body, as well as hallucinatory experiences similar to psychedelics, near-death experiences, etc. What happens here is that the ego, which is closely related to the body, loses its place as the center of the personality, and the whole world starts to be comprehended as also being part of one’s psyche; inner and outer experiences start to merge in these ‘hallucinatory’ states, forcing the ego to surrender.

Jung also understood that the goal of life is to transform one’s personality, shifting the center of the personality from the ego to what he called the Self (Selbst). The concept of the Self simultaneously refers to the unique and most individual parts of oneself, as well as the whole of the collective unconscious. The latter, according to Jung’s cosmology, encompasses everything in nature. In Analytical Psychology, this process of integration between consciousness and the unconscious is called individuation.

According to Jung, individuation is a process that occurs naturally and is the telos (goal, purpose) of individual life. The problem is that, when our personality’s center is the ego, our lives become focused solely on strengthening consciousness, unilaterally, thus causing a split between it and the unconscious. The goal of Analytical Psychology is to help the individual to understand how to deal with the confrontation between consciousness and the unconscious, supporting the process of individuation, which results in a deep transformation of one’s personality.

But how is the idea of Shugyo related to Jung’s individuation process?

Shugyo means understanding practice as a way of achieving enlightenment through the lived experience of altered states of consciousness—through a continuous cultivation of the Self. It entails a deep understanding of the fundamental layer of reality, resulting—just as in individuation—in a profound transformation of one’s personality.

But although this transformation is something present both in Jung’s individuation process and Yasuo’s depiction of Shugyo, for Yasuo a key difference between Eastern Self-cultivation practices and psychotherapy is the idea of normal and abnormal states of being. Yasuo states that psychotherapy tries to restore the individual’s normal state of being, which corresponds to what is culturally expected—i.e., ‘normal behavior.’ On the other hand, Self-cultivation practices actively seek a transcendent mode of being, which usually corresponds to deep religious experiences such as observed in Buddhism, yoga, and even traditional martial arts.

The differences between Shugyo and Jung’s individuation might not only entail the specifics of the states they aim to achieve, but also the moment when their goals can be fulfilled. For according to Jung, the process of individuation can only be fully achieved in death, the completion of life.

Nonetheless, both Yasuo and Jung agree that there is a fundamental layer of reality that encompasses both mind and body. Both agree that the goal of psychological development is the integration of opposites—mind and body, psyche and matter—such integration being the lived experience of totality. According to both Yasuo’s understanding of Shugyo and Jung’s cosmology, the ego should not be the center of the personality, but instead play a merely mediating role. After all, the ego may be central to human meta-cognitive life, but not the center of life itself.

Shugyo offers a way to understand life as something containing meaning, and so does Jung’s Analytical Psychology. According to both Shugyo and Jungian practice, the fundamental layer of reality is experiential, and we are here to express or live it in its totality. Practice becomes not only a way of seeking leisure and health, but a means to transform our personality and express meaning through spiritual growth.

This worldview is radically different than the one provided by our post-Enlightenment paradigms, which deprive life of meaning. According to it, reality is fundamentally experiential and there is meaning to be found, expressed, and experienced during life.

Any practice can be Shugyo, as long as the goal of the practice is to develop oneself, thus achieving the experience of mind-body oneness. The fundamental layer of reality, and thus of ourselves, can only be understood in and through practice. Jungian psychology entails similar ideas, and a similar openness to different practices. In both perspectives, theoretical confabulations have limits, the totality of reality—with its paradoxes—being accessible only through direct experience.

 

Bibliography

  1. Yuasa, Yasuo (1987). The Body: Toward an Eastern Mind-Body Theory.
  2. Yuasa, Yasuo (1993). The Body, Self-Cultivation, and Ki-Energy. Suny Press.
  3. Jung, C. G. (1960). Collected Works of C.G. Jung, Volume 8/2: On the Nature of the Psyche. Princeton University Press.
  4. Jung, C. G. (1969). Collected Works of C.G. Jung, Volume 11/5: Psychology and Religion: West and East. Princeton University Press.
  5. Jung, C. G. (1968). Collected Works of C.G. Jung, Volume 12: Psychology and Alchemy. Princeton University Press.
  6. Jung, C. G. (1970). Collected Works of C.G. Jung, Volume 14/2: Mysterium Coniuntionis. Princeton University Press.

Light or Darkness? Suhrawardī’s philosophy of illumination

Light or Darkness? Suhrawardī’s philosophy of illumination

Reading | Philosophy

Natalia Vorontsova, MA | 2023-11-26

Lighthouse under the Milky Way

Is the conflict between good and evil—light and darkness—ultimately a false dichotomy? Could nature be best described as a hierarchy of illumination instead? This brief essay is an introduction to the illuminationist thought of Persian philosopher and theologian Suhrawardī. It will hopefully make you curious about the work of this great thinker, and motivate you to study his legacy further. The essay is a follow-up to last week’s theme: Islamic philosophy.

Perhaps no other metaphor in the history of philosophy and religion—not to mention our language and culture—is as widespread as that of light and darkness. People who like to say to each other: “Don’t turn to the dark side! May the Force be with you!” must have a special appreciation for this metaphor [1,2].

Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that.’ (Mahatma Gandhi)

In the midst of darkness, light persists.’ (Martin Luther King)

The metaphor is often associated with two polar opposites: good and evil, right and wrong. But if we turn to the Master of Illumination, Suhrawardī—a Persian philosopher and theologian who founded a new tradition in Islamic thought, that of Ishrāq (‘Illuminationism’)—then only Light is a fundamental reality.

According to Suhrawardī, all reality is Light, which no concept or proposition can adequately describe or convey. Only the experiencing of the reality of Light itself can reveal it. Whoever encounters it knows it immediately and directly, by presence and not by concepts, for it is axiomatic and self-evident.

Anything in existence that requires no definition or explanation is evident. Since there is nothing more evident than light, there is nothing less in need of definition [4].

What then is darkness? In the philosophical doctrine of Suhrawardī, it is the absence of Light: everything that is neither illuminated nor Light itself. Hence it is Light that is a basic reality, and everything must be defined in terms of it, expressed in varying degrees of intensity, ranging from pure immaterial light to darkness and shadow. In essence, the doctrine is a hierarchical and emanatory scheme based on two principles: light (independent ) and darkness (dependent). And every emanative act is an overflow from the Light above it as an act of luminescence whose reflective nature gives rise to another. Furthermore, no causal relation exists between emanative acts; there is no material or temporal precession. Here is a high-level outline of key emanations in Suhrawardī’s cosmology:

  1. Incorporeal (pure) Light: axiomatic, independent in and of itself.
    • Light of Lights: the Necessary Being, the Source of Light, God.
    • Immaterial Lights: Forms, Souls, Angels, Archangels and Platonic Archetypes.
  2. Accidental Light: Light inhering in another, such as the light of stars.
  3. Suspended Images: A special emanation that mediates between incorporeal and corporeal emanations, also known as Mundus Imaginalis. Autonomous images of the medium through which the incorporeal world of lights communicates and interacts with the corporeal world of shadow and darkness.
  4. Corporeal (pure) Darkness & Shadow: things whose nature is darkness in itself, an absence of Light, such as physical bodies (barriers, ‘dusky substances’).
  5. Accidental Darkness: depends on something other than itself, such as the shapes of physical objects. In also includes aspects of incorporeal lights that give rise to a corporeal

Similar to Avicenna’s concept of the incorporeal intelligences, the incorporeal lights are aware of their essence and their dependence on the emanating principle, namely the light above them in ontological rank. This establishes the relationship of dominion and love between all members of the hierarchy. Those of higher ontological rank exercise dominion over the lower members, while the lower members desire and love the lights above them. Thus, all existence unfolds in accordance with the underlying principles of love and dominion. In addition to this vertical hierarchy, the immaterial lights, through complex interactions, form a ‘horizontal’ layer to govern the multitude of emanations below them. These are the ‘masters of species,’ of minerals, plants and animals, but also of water, fire, earth and air [6].

For Suhrawardī, philosophy and mystical experience were inseparable. Thus, for him, the “pillars of wisdom” were Plato, Empedocles and Pythagoras, along with Zoroaster and the Prophet Mohammed [3,4,11]. His Philosophy of Illumination is thus deeply rooted in the metaphysical hierarchies of Neoplatonism, set in the context of Zoroastrianism and Shi’a Islam [5].

It is also important to bear in mind that Suhrawardī received his philosophical and theological insights as visions and revelations. In order to articulate them in a given language, pre-existing mental constructs are often used, even if they originally meant something different from what is being articulated. In Zoroastrianism, for example, the struggle of light against darkness is central and directly related to the forces of good and evil. In Islam, too, Allah is Light (nūr) and appears as light in the heavens and on earth [7].

Suhrawardī’s philosophical doctrine is certainly non-dual at its core, for here darkness has no independent existence and is merely the absence of light. But can his emanation cosmology be interpreted in the context of good versus evil? On the face of it, Suhrawardī is simply using an already conceptually available allegory of light and darkness to outline the creation by emanation from the omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient incorporeal reality that contains all that there is, to that of our corporeal universe, which is finite, ephemeral, limited and constantly changing. Incidentally, one can appreciate Suhrawardī’s intermediate emanations between the level of Light of Lights and that of Pure Darkness. For the gap between these two levels of reality is so great that without all the intermediate layers, such a scheme could be compared to lighting a light bulb directly from the sun.

But can light and darkness, with all the shades in between, be understood simply as colors with which Suhrawardī paints a picture of his illuminationist philosophy? It would seem that by conceptualizing emanation as a gradation of illumination and shadow casting, he is outlining proximity and relationship to the Divine, rather than a scale of good and evil. Nevertheless, the degrees of intensity of light seem to allude to the degrees of perfection: the closer to the Light of Lights or the Divine, the more perfect are the emanations [8]. In the Hermetic tradition in general, we find references, for example, to man’s re-conquest of his Perfect Nature—his soul, the ‘Illuminated Man’ or the ‘Man of Light’ in Zoroastrianism. And Suhrawardī is no exception, for in his view those on the mystical path who succeed in regaining their Perfect Nature become the disciples of Hermes [9].

Suhrawardī’s own visions and intuitive insights undoubtedly influenced his illuminationist doctrine. In his most important work, the “Wisdom of Illumination” (Ḥikmat al-ishrāq), Suhrawardī presents a unique conception of philosophy that combines the intuitive mystical path with rigorous philosophical discourse:

The best student is the student of both intuitive philosophy and discursive philosophy. Next is the student of intuitive philosophy. And then the student of discursive philosophy [4].

Nonetheless, he seems to value intuitive, direct knowledge over mere reasoning and rational speculation, since only direct experience guarantees the acquisition of true knowledge [8].

Theorising and rational arguments are like empty shells and are fruitless without grounding in the intuitive and direct apprehension of reality. [6]

In other words, discursive philosophy should be based on intuitive, direct insights communicated in images and symbols.

…symbols by their very nature are openings onto a mystery that can never be wholly explained and can never be exhausted [10].

For Suhrawardī, a symbol is a way of communicating what cannot be expressed in words. It is a way of bypassing the rational intellect so to arrive at an intuitive insight. Meditation on images and symbols can lead the soul to connect with a higher ontological reality. The soul ‘inhabits’ both the immaterial world of lights and the sensory world of physical forms simultaneously. Thus, the soul incarnates to acquire wisdom, but also remains in the world of the immaterial lights as the perfect nature of the initiate, as a guardian angel. The soul is therefore the microcosmic counterpart of the Mundus Imaginalis or the world of Suspended Images, which mediates between the sensory and intelligible worlds. The Imaginal World is neither corporeal—with a spatiotemporal existence in the sensory world—nor purely incorporeal, but rather comparable to images suspended in a mirror.

The mirror is the locus in which the form in the mirror is made evident. The forms are suspended and are in neither a place nor a locus. The imaginative faculty is the locus in which the forms of the imagination are made evident and are suspended [6].

It is on the plane of the Mundus Imaginalis that visionary events take place, which are more real than those in the sensory world. For they are more ‘illuminated’ or energized by their proximity to the world of the Immaterial Lights. The Mundus Imaginalis is the world that the spiritual pilgrim encounters in his mystical experiences, the “land of visions” and the “land of resurrection”, where it is possible to be reunited with the soul, with Perfect Nature. And man has access to it by means of a special faculty of the soul, namely the active imagination [6,11].

Suhrawardī has gone down in history as the founder of an illuminationist philosophical tradition—an influential philosophy that has been studied extensively both in the Islamic East and later in the West. But it is remarkable how far and wide in human history we can find references to what he outlined in his emanatory cosmology: the Imaginal World (Mundus Imaginalis), Perfect Nature and Active Imagination. Here are just a few examples [8,10,11,12]:

  • In the Zoroastrian tradition, Mundus Imaginalis is referred to as the “Land of the Emerald Cities” or the Eighth Region of the World.
  • According to a Sufi tradition originating in Yemen, Khezr-Elijah—the name of Perfect Nature, the Angel of Knowledge, man’s most luminous nature—dwells where the celestial and terrestrial oceans touch.
  • Paracelsus spoke of the faculty of imaginatio vera, true imagination, which he urged should not be confused with fantasy.
  • Martin Ruland, in his Lexicon alchemiae (1612), stated that “Imagination is the star in man, the celestial or supercelestial body.”
  • Jacob Boehme spoke of the Imaginal World in the guises of the “Holy Element” or the “Soul of the World,” where Sophia (wisdom) dwells.
  • Carl Gustav Jung observed that the Magnum Opus of alchemy was as much a psychological operation, concerned with self-transformation, as the transmutation of metals. For him, true imagination was a fundamental key to understanding the Great Work. The in-between reality of the Imaginal World he called psychic.

And didn’t even Newton write in his alchemical texts that the real truths are embodied in myths, fables and prophecies [11]?

 

References

[1] https://dictionaryblog.cambridge.org/2020/06/17/from-darkness-into-the-light-metaphors-of-darkness-and-light/
[2] https://www.britannica.com/topic/Star-Wars-film-series
[3] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/suhrawardi/
[4] Suhrawardi & The Philosophy of Illumination,  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XbD8vfzsEHA&t=861s
[5] Cheetham, T., All the World An Icon: Henry Corbin and the Angelic Function of Beings, North Atlantic Books, 2012.
[6] Suhrawardi’s Science of Mystic Lights, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01qrFgEYhqI&t=190s
[7] Surah An-Nur Ayat 35 (24:35 Quran).
[8] https://plato.stanford.edu/Archives/Spr2013/entries/suhrawardi/
[9] Rebisse, Chr., Rosicrucian History and Mysteries, Athenaeum Press Ltd, 2007, pp. 110-111, 115.
[10] Cheetham, T., All the World An Icon: Henry Corbin and the Angelic Function of Beings, North Atlantic Books, 2012, p.68.
[11] Rebisse, Chr., Rosicrucian History and Mysteries, Athenaeum Press Ltd, 2007.
[12] Harpur, P., The Philosophers’ Secret Fire: a history of the imagination, The Squeeze Press 2009, p.123.

Does the Renaissance have roots in Islamic philosophy?

Does the Renaissance have roots in Islamic philosophy?

Seeing | History of Philosophy | 2023-11-19

Statue,Of,Averroes,In,Cordoba,-,Spain

Natalia Vorontsova interviews Prof. Peter Adamson about the importance of Islamic philosophy for Western thought. Although little known in the West, philosophers such as Ibn Sīnā (Avicenna) and Ibn Rushd (Averroes) played an absolutely crucial role in preserving, building on, and transmitting to the West the wisdom of Aristotle, Plato, and the Neoplatonists during the Middle Ages. Similarly, Suhrawardī’s Philosophy of Illumination and Ibn Arabī’s doctrine of the Unity of Being continue to influence Western thought to this day. If we want to understand the history of European philosophy, we cannot ignore these influential scholars and sages. You can also view the interview directly on YouTube.

Announcing ‘Time and Mind,’ a FREE online conference!

Announcing ‘Time and Mind,’ a FREE online conference!

Reading | Physics and Psychology

Poster with photos

Reserve the dates November 30th and December 1st, 2023, on your calendars, for our online conference is happening again! And it is unmissable. This year the theme is Time and Mind. The event will be guest-hosted by Prof. Bernard Carr, PhD, Professor Emeritus of mathematics and astronomy at Queen Mary University of London. Luminaries such as Lee Smolin, Paul Davies, George Ellis and many others will be giving live, free-to-watch talks on the edges of science, where physics and psychology come together. CLICK HERE to watch the conference live!

The role of time in mainstream physics—as it arises in Newtonian theory, relativity theory, quantum theory and the 2nd law of thermodynamics—is relatively well understood. However, there is a profound mystery concerning the passage of time associated with consciousness. Many physicists maintain that this passage is purely a feature of mind, going beyond physics itself, while others argue that it points to some new physical paradigm, perhaps associated with the marriage of relativity theory and quantum theory. Certainly, the status of time in any final theory of physics remains unclear.

The possibility that physics may eventually accommodate and elucidate the nature of consciousness and associated mental experience suggests the need to address issues that are currently viewed as being on the borders of physics and philosophy. It also impinges on developments in neurophysics, cognitive science and psychology. So this is an interdisciplinary problem and this conference brings together experts in all the relevant fields. There are contributions from the physicists Bernard Carr, Paul Davies, George Ellis and Lee Smolin, the neurophysicist Alex Gomez-Marin, the cognitive neuroscientist Julia Mossbridge, and the psychologists Jonathan Schooler and Marc Wittmann.

Although the conference is organized by Essentia Foundation—which is associated with the philosophical tradition of Idealism—it shall cover a wide range of approaches. Our vision is to cover topics that are relevant to Idealism, but not to exclude alternative views from the conference.

CLICK HERE to watch the conference live and for free, without registration!

Screenshot 2023-11-27 at 16.49.05
Screenshot 2023-11-27 at 16.49.26