It would be worth it to take a little time and sum up this article in a few paragraphs - one of your most important. (1) by its nature, the mind can’t know the meaning and purpose of the universe, thus, science, based on mind, can’t either (2) just so stories like the anthropic and fine tuning principles are tautological therefore meaningless; (3) mind, and thus science, cannot account for order or for what Artistotle referred to as final, as opposed to material or efficient causation; and I would add, though you didn’t touch on it (4) we have no immediate access to a purely naturalistic, material universe and have no need for such a hypothesis as it explains nothing (David Bentley Hart thinks this last point alone is sufficient to refute materialism)
I always wonder why you say that science can't account for order, and what this has to do with final causes? A crystal can be an ordered structure that can be accounted for without final causes. But I guess you mean something else.... (?)
“Accounted for” means explained, .How does the order of a crystal come about? When you describe the past forms of order that lead to a crystal, how do they come about? ALL “explanations” of order in science only account for the material or efficient cause, not the formal or final cause. And no philosopher of science that I know of has ever explained science in terms of doing more than describing processes, which nobody in ordinary day to day life considers an explanation.
“Johnny, why did you take Susie’s ice cream?”
“Well,” Johnny explains, “because according to the laws of nature, the visual perception of that image of her ice cream triggered, based on past conditioning, the movement of certain complex neuronal pathways in my brain which in turn led to movements of my body and arms. That’s why I took her ice cream.”
You don’t have to be a philosopher to know that’s not an explanation. The reason this is not obvious to us when it comes to physical things is we’re not inside them. We have no access to teh consciousness which moves all things. When I can “become” the various processes that led to the formation of the crystal, the explanation of how this came to be in terms of external processes will be as obviously absurd as Johnny’s attempt to explain his theft in terms of purely physical processes. It’s the same with all scientific attempts to explain order. It’s not an explanation.
However, as a description, it’s no doubt exceedingly elegant.
Let me ask you - what do you think Steven Weinberg’s physicist friend meant when he told Steven, “You know, science doesn’t really explain anything, it only describes”
Isn’t this the same thing that Sri Aurobindo meant when he said science only gives you the process, not the Truth of things? The beautiful thing is you don’t have to invoke anything beyond materialism to see this. Weinberg was sufficiently horrified by his friend’s comment as to spend time writing a LONG article trying to refute it - which he coudn’t (he simply shifted from his friend’s correct observation that science doesn’t deal - AT ALL - with final or formal causes, only material or efficient ones.”
If you want to redefine “explanation” to material and efficient causes only, then science does that quite well. But human beings, asking why, NEVER really (or rarely really) care about efficient or material causes. But because people don’t think this through, it seeps into our culture and we think the universe is meaningless and pointless because formal and final causes DON’T EXIST in the universe, thus all teleology is seen as unscientific nonsense - yet we persist in attempting to see our own behavior in terms of teleology.
The deadliest result of this is that we turn ourselves into machines:
“I can’t diet because I’m the slave of my body.”
“I have no responsibility for my trauma or anxiety or depression - it’s all about chemical imbalances.”
“I can’t stop playing video games because of my dopamine addiction.”
It pervades all of our societies and turns human beings into zombies.
I think science deals with formal causes as well. For example the form of the water molecule causing ice floating. It only denies the existence of final causes. What is the final cause necessary to explain the ordered structure of crystal?
I think the problem with ignoring the elephant in the room is all explanations are off if we don’t take into account we have no evidence whatsoever for anything consciousness-independent. You don’t need yoga or meditative insight of any kind of know this. This is the foundation of Hart’s critique, Kastrup, Bertrand Russell, Anton Zeilinger, Planck, Jeans, Heisenberg (it is not nature we study but nature’s responses to our questions) and countless other - it is not matter we study (not consciousness independent matter, at least) but images in awareness. Full stop.
It’s only when you get totally clear about that that ANY talk of causation, even material causation, can be seen as absent from science.
It gets back to the game of pool. I hold the pool stick and knock the ball into the side pocket. What was the “material” cause of the ball moving? The pool stick? Obviously, the “cause” of both the ball moving and the pool stick moving was my intention to move it.
If there is a conscious will moving all things in the universe - being the material, efficient, formal and final cause of all movement - then obviously, science doesn’t deal with that. This is NOT a yogic statement. It’s a simply case of logic. Science observes images in awareness, period. It extracts from those quantitative patterns. How can quantitative patterns “explain” th movement of images in awareness? It makes no sense.
You deal more completely and more thoroughly with the limitations WITHIN physics, biology and neuroscience than anyone else I know. But your job would be SO much easier if you’d contextualize the presentation of scientific empirical limitations within the simple philosophic observations. These are not complicated; when explained (!) simply to people, they get it. Bernardo has ALWAYS, in his presentations and writings, started from this simple point.
Sam Harris got it within 15 minutes of talking to Rupert Spira. Actually, I think it may have taken him 5 minutes, and maybe another 10 minutes to start to grasp (and run away from) the implications.
Here’s my vote for the most important foundations for a criticism of materialism:
1. All we know are images in awareness. There is not and can never, by definition, be ANY evidence for pure stand alone matter. And such a theory does not contribute anything to our understanding of science. If someone wants to claim such a theory has any validity, the onus is on them to provide some logical support for it, not on us to disprove what has never been proved.
2. Observing the behavior of images in awareness cannot give us any insight into their causes, if we grant the possibility that causes lie in teh domain of awareness (which is all we know), To assume otherwise is a leap of faith, entirely unwarranted.
3. If we assume, based on faith, not on evidnece, that life, mind, consciousness, intelligence do not play a role in the emergence and evolution of the universe, life and mind, then we are left with a series of inexplicable paradoxical occurrences. On the other hand, if we grant (purely theoretically, not through yoga) the omnipresence of life, mind, consciousness and intelligence, everything in the universe is perfectly explicable.
THEN, once you establish this (and I admit, nobody I’ve seen yet, has done this in a simple accessible way - that’s the goal of our group, by the way), present every page of “Spirit Calls Nature” and it’s much much much easier to understand and accept - in fact, you don’t even have to make arguments - it just fleshes out the basic philosophic observations so you can see more explicitly how utterly absurd the attempt is to make the beautiful, exclusively concentrating method of science into an absurd, incoherent materialist philosophy is.
I never heard Kastrup (let alone Russell, Zeilinger, Planck, Jeans, or Heisenberg) saying that science explains nothing, and that science can’t explain order. Can you provide a link or reference. This might help me to place things into context.
As I understand it, what you mean is that everything we know is always and only images in awareness and, thereby, trying to “explain” the cause of these images with other images in awareness is no explanation at all. We don’t realize that we are looking for the cause of abstractions with other abstractions. In a sense I would agree, but would not start with statements such as science explaining nothing, rather would place this as an arrival point, not a starting point.
It would be worth it to take a little time and sum up this article in a few paragraphs - one of your most important. (1) by its nature, the mind can’t know the meaning and purpose of the universe, thus, science, based on mind, can’t either (2) just so stories like the anthropic and fine tuning principles are tautological therefore meaningless; (3) mind, and thus science, cannot account for order or for what Artistotle referred to as final, as opposed to material or efficient causation; and I would add, though you didn’t touch on it (4) we have no immediate access to a purely naturalistic, material universe and have no need for such a hypothesis as it explains nothing (David Bentley Hart thinks this last point alone is sufficient to refute materialism)
I always wonder why you say that science can't account for order, and what this has to do with final causes? A crystal can be an ordered structure that can be accounted for without final causes. But I guess you mean something else.... (?)
“Accounted for” means explained, .How does the order of a crystal come about? When you describe the past forms of order that lead to a crystal, how do they come about? ALL “explanations” of order in science only account for the material or efficient cause, not the formal or final cause. And no philosopher of science that I know of has ever explained science in terms of doing more than describing processes, which nobody in ordinary day to day life considers an explanation.
“Johnny, why did you take Susie’s ice cream?”
“Well,” Johnny explains, “because according to the laws of nature, the visual perception of that image of her ice cream triggered, based on past conditioning, the movement of certain complex neuronal pathways in my brain which in turn led to movements of my body and arms. That’s why I took her ice cream.”
You don’t have to be a philosopher to know that’s not an explanation. The reason this is not obvious to us when it comes to physical things is we’re not inside them. We have no access to teh consciousness which moves all things. When I can “become” the various processes that led to the formation of the crystal, the explanation of how this came to be in terms of external processes will be as obviously absurd as Johnny’s attempt to explain his theft in terms of purely physical processes. It’s the same with all scientific attempts to explain order. It’s not an explanation.
However, as a description, it’s no doubt exceedingly elegant.
Let me ask you - what do you think Steven Weinberg’s physicist friend meant when he told Steven, “You know, science doesn’t really explain anything, it only describes”
Isn’t this the same thing that Sri Aurobindo meant when he said science only gives you the process, not the Truth of things? The beautiful thing is you don’t have to invoke anything beyond materialism to see this. Weinberg was sufficiently horrified by his friend’s comment as to spend time writing a LONG article trying to refute it - which he coudn’t (he simply shifted from his friend’s correct observation that science doesn’t deal - AT ALL - with final or formal causes, only material or efficient ones.”
If you want to redefine “explanation” to material and efficient causes only, then science does that quite well. But human beings, asking why, NEVER really (or rarely really) care about efficient or material causes. But because people don’t think this through, it seeps into our culture and we think the universe is meaningless and pointless because formal and final causes DON’T EXIST in the universe, thus all teleology is seen as unscientific nonsense - yet we persist in attempting to see our own behavior in terms of teleology.
The deadliest result of this is that we turn ourselves into machines:
“I can’t diet because I’m the slave of my body.”
“I have no responsibility for my trauma or anxiety or depression - it’s all about chemical imbalances.”
“I can’t stop playing video games because of my dopamine addiction.”
It pervades all of our societies and turns human beings into zombies.
I think science deals with formal causes as well. For example the form of the water molecule causing ice floating. It only denies the existence of final causes. What is the final cause necessary to explain the ordered structure of crystal?
I think the problem with ignoring the elephant in the room is all explanations are off if we don’t take into account we have no evidence whatsoever for anything consciousness-independent. You don’t need yoga or meditative insight of any kind of know this. This is the foundation of Hart’s critique, Kastrup, Bertrand Russell, Anton Zeilinger, Planck, Jeans, Heisenberg (it is not nature we study but nature’s responses to our questions) and countless other - it is not matter we study (not consciousness independent matter, at least) but images in awareness. Full stop.
It’s only when you get totally clear about that that ANY talk of causation, even material causation, can be seen as absent from science.
It gets back to the game of pool. I hold the pool stick and knock the ball into the side pocket. What was the “material” cause of the ball moving? The pool stick? Obviously, the “cause” of both the ball moving and the pool stick moving was my intention to move it.
If there is a conscious will moving all things in the universe - being the material, efficient, formal and final cause of all movement - then obviously, science doesn’t deal with that. This is NOT a yogic statement. It’s a simply case of logic. Science observes images in awareness, period. It extracts from those quantitative patterns. How can quantitative patterns “explain” th movement of images in awareness? It makes no sense.
You deal more completely and more thoroughly with the limitations WITHIN physics, biology and neuroscience than anyone else I know. But your job would be SO much easier if you’d contextualize the presentation of scientific empirical limitations within the simple philosophic observations. These are not complicated; when explained (!) simply to people, they get it. Bernardo has ALWAYS, in his presentations and writings, started from this simple point.
Sam Harris got it within 15 minutes of talking to Rupert Spira. Actually, I think it may have taken him 5 minutes, and maybe another 10 minutes to start to grasp (and run away from) the implications.
Here’s my vote for the most important foundations for a criticism of materialism:
1. All we know are images in awareness. There is not and can never, by definition, be ANY evidence for pure stand alone matter. And such a theory does not contribute anything to our understanding of science. If someone wants to claim such a theory has any validity, the onus is on them to provide some logical support for it, not on us to disprove what has never been proved.
2. Observing the behavior of images in awareness cannot give us any insight into their causes, if we grant the possibility that causes lie in teh domain of awareness (which is all we know), To assume otherwise is a leap of faith, entirely unwarranted.
3. If we assume, based on faith, not on evidnece, that life, mind, consciousness, intelligence do not play a role in the emergence and evolution of the universe, life and mind, then we are left with a series of inexplicable paradoxical occurrences. On the other hand, if we grant (purely theoretically, not through yoga) the omnipresence of life, mind, consciousness and intelligence, everything in the universe is perfectly explicable.
THEN, once you establish this (and I admit, nobody I’ve seen yet, has done this in a simple accessible way - that’s the goal of our group, by the way), present every page of “Spirit Calls Nature” and it’s much much much easier to understand and accept - in fact, you don’t even have to make arguments - it just fleshes out the basic philosophic observations so you can see more explicitly how utterly absurd the attempt is to make the beautiful, exclusively concentrating method of science into an absurd, incoherent materialist philosophy is.
I never heard Kastrup (let alone Russell, Zeilinger, Planck, Jeans, or Heisenberg) saying that science explains nothing, and that science can’t explain order. Can you provide a link or reference. This might help me to place things into context.
As I understand it, what you mean is that everything we know is always and only images in awareness and, thereby, trying to “explain” the cause of these images with other images in awareness is no explanation at all. We don’t realize that we are looking for the cause of abstractions with other abstractions. In a sense I would agree, but would not start with statements such as science explaining nothing, rather would place this as an arrival point, not a starting point.
Take another look at this. I haven’t looked at it for a few years and it still seems to cover all the most important bases:
https://www.integralworld.net/salmon3.html