Posts
But the sad fact is that even if we don’t acknowledge or actively deny them, most of us have at least an operational ism we accept, if not consciously then certainly subconsciously.
If isms are hard to avoid, we may as well be explicit about our isms, whether we’re a card-carrying proponent of a particular ism, or simply a passive and helpless vector for the more malicious types of isms out there.
This essay seeks to help you ask the questions to flesh out what ism or isms you find appealing, or the isms you hope to reject, in the area that I’m calling loosely “the philosophy of reality,” but what is known in philosophy as ontology or metaphysics.
The basic question that ontology/metaphysics seeks to answer is this: What is real? This question is the basis for all other philosophical questions, so it’s good to have a handle on this.
I became interested in isms at a young age, having spent some time with a commune as a 10-year-old, which challenged conventional views about religion, science and spirituality, and I’ve always had a philosophical turn of mind. However, I didn’t get very serious about my isms until my early to mid-30s when I began reading more deeply in the philosophy of mind.
I had a favorite philosopher in my late teens, Bertrand Russell, an Englishman born in 1872 known for being brilliant and unconventional. I read some of his work in metaphysics, philosophy of religion and social philosophy, and while I could follow along with his rejection of Christianity and his more radical social ideas, much of his metaphysics went over my head at that age.
I also read some great books by Douglas Hofstadter and Dan Dennett in my late teens and early 20s that got me thinking about the philosophy of mind, which is closely related to ontology. The philosophy of mind seeks to answer, among other questions: What is the nature of mind and its relation to the material world? This is the classic mind/body problem, which was rebranded in the mid-1990s by the now well-known philosopher David Chalmers as “the hard problem” of consciousness.
Chalmers’ book, The Conscious Mind, made me think more seriously about the philosophy of mind, but it’s not an easy read, and when I read it way back in the 1990s I didn’t come to any firm conclusions.
My favorite isms I continued to read casually in philosophy over the years, including Teilhard de Chardin’s book, The Human Phenomenon, which made a big impression on me in my early 20s.
But I remember a particular car ride with my father, driving down from Northern California to San Francisco, where I began to think more seriously about my philosophy of reality, my ontology. I was in my early 30s at this point. The question I asked myself went something like this: What are the fundamental components of reality that a good philosophy needs to include? At the time, I included the following ideas: matter, energy, space, time and mind. These concepts still seem to me like they must be included in a good philosophy of reality.
Since that time, I’ve added God or Source to my list, and this represents to me the ground or ocean of being. It’s the metaphysical ground from which our manifest reality grows.
Along these lines, here’s the first question I suggest for creating your very own philosophy of reality:
1. What concepts do you need to include in your philosophy of reality?
Concepts aren’t reality, but since we’re human and we’re talking about human-created philosophies, words and concepts are our tools. What concepts — words or phrases that refer to something about reality — do you need to include in your philosophy?
I’ve suggested six seemingly fundamental concepts above, but another common concept that makes it into various ontologies is the idea of information. Physicist John Wheeler talked about “it from bit” as the new implication of quantum mechanics and modern physics. It from bit means that things come from information, the opposite of the usual idea of “bit from it,” or information coming from or being based on physical stuff.
Personally, I don’t consider information to be a fundamental concept, since I’m in the “bit from it” camp, but that’s just me.
In eastern philosophy, we have in the Vedanta tradition, Brahman as a basic concept. Brahman is fundamental reality. Only Brahman is real and all else is caused by Brahman in some manner. My preferred translation for Brahman is Source or ocean of being, and I have found a strong place for this concept in my ontology that is fleshed out in my 2017 book, Mind, World, God.
In Buddhism, Emptiness plays a similar but not identical role. Emptiness is mostly a concept that states that there is no fundamental reality, only relationally/dependently arising processes. But in some Buddhist philosophy Emptiness takes on the character of Source/Brahman also, an ontological concept. This is a good longstanding debate.
Read more...
Source: Noozhawk
