An excellent concise and accurate statement of the interactive dualism theory of mind

[Laird]

Valmar,

I've selectively reread this thread to check and remind myself of everything you've said re this neutral substance.

In the process, I found that it was me who qualified it as "pure" potential (an unfortunate paraphrasing of your "infinite" potential), whereas, after rereading your descriptions, I see that you consider it as not just potential but also as being (existence), so it is perhaps better described as "unformed being with unlimited potential" than as "pure potential".

I take back, then, my claim that it lacks the capacity to be actualised: as a mixture of actual and potential, it can - at least in theory - self-actualise its latent potential.

I remain skeptical though that it qualifies as a genuine substance (in the philosophical sense). It seems to me better described as a proto-substance.

I also think that my original response stands or at least is a defensible interpretation: that this is just substance dualism with an origin story. It simply describes how the two substances - roughly conceived - of "mind" and "matter" come into being in the first place: via this formless proto-substance spontaneously(?) forming into the actual substances of one or the other.

Whether it is and remains fair for me to have described this proto-substance as transmuting into one or the other, as a different way of saying that it takes on their forms, is open to question, but I've put the question to you twice now with no answer.

I think it would be useful to get an answer, but I get that you're working on an intuitive and abstract level, so you might not want to commit to anything more specific. If you did, one of the questions that would be worth exploring is this:

Once it takes on a form, can that form be "taken back", returning to a state of "unformed being in potential", and then "reformed" into something else?

This would help to determine whether it is more of a substance proper (an actual being(ness) that is reformable) or, as I have suggested, more of a proto-substance (a sort of magic pot of potential beings out of which actual beings spring fully-formed, and to which, as an infinite source, it is meaningless for those beings to be returned for reformation).

In any case, I also think it seems fair to critique this position as not being a strict neutral monism, given that on a stricter neutral monism, the neutral substance wouldn't take on the forms of mind or matter, but would rather function or operate as one or the other depending on the conditions and context. This might seem like splitting hairs, but, especially in the context of the above, it's why I currently interpret it as "dualism with an origin story" as opposed to "neutral monism proper". Perhaps it's even more fairly described as something in between the two, a hybrid.

Finally, before responding to more specific parts of your reply, I want to make a broader point, by reminding you of something you wrote to nbtruthman early in the thread (editing note mine):

Eh, [idealism, monism and dualism are] not nearly as contrasting as I think you make them out to be. They have a lot of overlap in various ways

In that context, I'd like you to try to wrap your head around this:

The main difference between my dualistic framework and your framework is simply that whereas you provide an origin story for the substances of "mind" and "matter" (roughly conceived) - as forming out of a neutral proto-substance - I leave it unspecified how they form(ed) - i.e., where they came from - in the first place, albeit that it seems most likely to me that they have their origin in a personal, creative being, i.e., God.

Otherwise, they are similarly capable of coping with all of the nuances and variations of the different manifestations of form that you object to mine as being incapable of coping with: "mind" and "matter" on my dualistic framework are broad categories which allow for the same nuances and variations that your framework does.

From my perspective, the supposed problem of interaction (which, to reiterate, I don't see as a problem in the first place) is not particularly resolved by positing that mind and matter form out of a proto-substance: in that case, it can simply be said, "Well, OK, so that's where they came from, but now that they are what they are (have been formed into), the situation is not essentially different to that in which I simply take them for granted as they are without stipulating how they formed."

Given that I now better understand your neutral substance, I would no longer describe it as explanatorily irrelevant, but I can simply say, "I have no need of that hypothesis", or, rather, that I leave the question of origins more open. I am more interested, in this ontological context, in developing a coherent conceptual framework for the reality that I observe than in speculating as to how that reality came to be, although, of course, I do indulge in the latter too.

Does all of that make sense, and can you accept it?

Dualism cannot explain why God exists, frankly ~ because what is God, if not a substance-unto-itself? It is distinguished from matter and mind, making it a third substance, contradicting Dualism.

You still don't seem to understand the distinction I make between mind and matter, because, on my view, God is not a third substance, but simply an instance of one of the two substances: a mind. Just to add some nuance to that though: it is possible and considerable that God's mind is (perhaps was from the start) allied - as are ours when we are incarnated - with a body made of the other type of substance ("matter"). This might be interpretable as a type of panentheism.

On that panentheism, your subsequent proposal (which for brevity I haven't quoted) would be possible on a paraphrasing: that God's body is infinite, and that God creates within that body rather than in the emptiness of an external void.

To reiterate in the context of that which I asked you to wrap your head around above: "mind" and "matter" in this dualistic context are very broad categories, generally differentiating between the non-extended "thing"-substances of persons - who experience - and the extended "stuff"-substances of matter-energy-etc which does not, but with which, when formed into a body, a mind (experiencing person) can be allied (or "into" which that mind (experiencing person) can incarnate).

They do not need to specifically connote human-like minds and the physical matter-energy of this universe. There is scope for infinite variety and subtlety within those broad categories.

Do you see now that there is no reason after all to bemoan its lack of explanatory power?

I used to be Idealist

Fine, but that's not in itself a defence against the mentalism suspicion (where "mentalism" is here a synonym for "idealism"). The suspicion only strengthens with comments like this:

I hesitate to call "God" a "universal mind", as what does that even mean for an omni-infinity, beyond even the concept of an entity, perhaps?

Does God as you conceive of God experience? That's enough to qualify God as a mind for me, and if God as you conceive of God is also all of reality, then it seems to me that you're still an idealist after all.

It seems rather arbitrary to distinguish between minds and "stuff"... when minds happily contort themselves into the shape of form to express existence through that form. The ultimate identity of mind may not be matter ~ but mind can identify with the matter of the body so closely that they are indistinguishable, as perception has been so closely identified with.

I (have come to) see it differently than mind "contorting" itself. I don't see mind as extended in the first place, so it can't be contorted in that sense. Rather, its field of awareness can be extended, to the degree that it experiences a body as though that body was a true part of itself, via that extended field of awareness.

I consider the idea of dreams... especially lucid dreams, which occur entirely within our own consciousness, minds, as we sleep. We can create entire worlds filled with inhabitants in them, that range from robotic to curiously aware and intelligent. So... what is the nature of the lucid dream? Why can this physical reality not be akin to a dream, except that there are powerful rules in place, where instead of being the creation of the dreamer-creator of this reality, we inhabit avatars that exist made of dream-stuff? The dreamer being... souls, I guess, considering that there are higher levels of reality than this.

OK, let's for argument's sake say that this physical reality is akin to a dream. There must, then, be some mind which is dreaming it, and somehow our minds "hook in" to that mind's dream (presumably via some sort of telepathic or other psi or psi-adjacent means). We can't literally be "in" the dream because it's a virtual rather than a physical reality. We can only be "in" it in a similar sense as we can be "in" a computer game. So, the question then arises: where are we literally when we're participating in this dream?

There seem to be two options (ultimately, after any and all nested dream realities are resolved, assuming nesting is anyway coherent, which it might not be): firstly, that we are in a base physical reality; secondly, that there is no physical reality and we are all just minds. The first entails dualism, and the second entails pluralistic idealism, which I lightly critiqued in post #31: it seems hard anyway to avoid some sort of dimensional space within which these plural minds exist, which if not a "physical" reality at least invites the question as to why one would deny a physical reality. In summary: dualism seems the more plausible option of the two here.

I'm curious though what you mean by "dream-stuff". Do you mean literal stuff: some type of matter-energy in an extended (dimensional) space? If so, you seem to have a very different idea of what a dream is than I do.

You are using the meaning of substance in the sense of discrete objects. For me, substance is something implying beingness, existence, which doesn't demand that it be stuff that can be sensed. I consider my sense of self to be beingness and existence ~ it is substance in this regard.

I'm simply using "substance" in the philosophical sense that I thought we agreed on: roughly, that which exists independently and which can have properties, attributes, and states, but which is not itself a property, attribute, or state. That's compatible with what you describe, and I agree - and have said all along - that the self (a person aka mind) is a substance, except that I don't qualify "self" with "sense of" here.

Getting back to my point: experience can't be a substance because it is not independent; it is contingent (on the experiencer, who, we agree - though you with a qualifier - is a substance).

That it is contingent is to me self-evident, but it can also be affirmed on the basis that while an experiencer in the absence of experience can be conceived, an experience in the absence of an experiencer cannot. To put it another way, an experiencer (aka mind aka person) who is - at least temporarily - not undergoing any experience is conceivable, whereas an experience which is not being undergone by an experiencer is both inconceivable and incoherent.

Aside from the conceivability of an experiencer absent experience, I can think of two items of empirical evidence for it being an actuality as well:

1. When under a general anaesthetic, it very much seems that experience temporarily ceases. I've been in this state several times myself, so I can confirm this. Some argue that experience doesn't truly stop, it simply isn't remembered. Well, maybe that's true, but it doesn't seem that way to me.
   
2. In the case of Annika and Tristan, during Tristan's absence from the body for several years (to which he refers as death), he did not experience anything. Again, it might be argued that he simply didn't remember his experiences, but, as with me and general anaesthetic, that's not how it seems to him.
   

Thus, I disagree with this (editing note mine):

There is, in a sense, no distinction [between (experiencer-independent) matter and (experiencer-contingent) experience]... because we take on the shape of our experiences, mentally.

I disagree with the first part of that for two reasons. Firstly, because the one (experience) is contingent whereas the other (matter) is not, and secondly because the one (matter) is extended whereas the other (experience) is not. Therefore, there certainly is a distinction.

Perhaps re the first reason you think that matter, too, is contingent on mind (an experiencer), but then the mentalist suspicion becomes even more pressing: it is not clear in that case how your position actually differs from idealism.

Re the second part of that quote of yours: this is an idea that I have toyed with too, but I am not sure that it is meaningful, and certainly not to the extent that experience is the same as matter just contained within the experiential field of the experiencer, because experience is not extended as matter is, and to claim that it is, it seems to me, is to mistakenly materialise the immaterial (in a sense to reify experience).

Without experience, there is no experiencer

See above as to why I explicitly disagree with this. (Temporarily) non-experiencing experiencers are not just conceivable but appear based on empirical evidence to be actual too.

The experiencer creates its own form through experience

As above: I am skeptical of this idea, but have entertained it too. Since you asked me to poke you on it, perhaps read my toying with it at the link I shared above (and the few posts prior at that link if it's of interest) - consider that to be my poke.

Not for Neutral Monism or Idealism ~ the Creator is existence itself.

You miss the point: in that case, the problem can simply be restated as that of why "the Creator; existence itself" exists in the first place.

Finally, re a personal God: you point to people having experiences ("mystical experiences of an infinite light, of the godhead") which do not involve a personal God as evidence that a personal God does not exist. This is a non sequitur. A mystical experience not involving a personal God doesn't in any way demonstrate that a personal God cannot be experienced at other times.

I have instead provided positive evidence. There is an asymmetry then in the evidence we have each provided. You need a good reason to counter the positive evidence I've provided. In that respect, you essentially claim that people misidentify the being they encounter as God, including on the basis that you have experienced a Jesus entity which confessed to being merely an egregore, etc. Well, maybe that's true, but it's also merely a claim, and one which conveniently supports your position.

You differentiate Krishna from Brahman, but, in fact, Krishna is the personal aspect of Brahman, not a distinct entity, thus nor is Brahman the "source" of Krishna.

There are also philosophical arguments for a personal God, but, as Sci points out, this thread isn't the place to explore this topic in depth.

[Laird]

could there be a reconciliation via Animism?

I'm not sure about reconciliation, but for me, dualism is already compatible with animism in the sense that it is conceivable that a mind (person) could incarnate into (animate; intimately interpenetrate with its field of awareness) any type of matter, not just organic bodies.

Could Everything just be Persons? This doesn't have to mean the chair or car is a Person, but rather it is made up of "Persons".

The key difference from Panpsychism is that there is no combination of smaller conscious "bits" since my Person is distinct from the agents (Persons really) making up the experience of my body. Similarly I may constitute a part of Gaia's body (assuming She exists as a Person) but She is a distinct Person as well.

I've considered this possibility too, as distinct from combinatorial panpsychism as you suggest, and to an extent I think it is probably true: I think it's plausible, for example, that the individual cells in our bodies are (independently) conscious.

Beyond that, though, it seems otherwise potentially to suffer from problems of arbitrariness and redundancy.

By arbitrariness, I mean that other than for those bits that seem to demonstrate agency (like cells), there seems to be no clear way to demarcate them. While cells seem plausible candidates, what about sub-atomic particles? How about collections of cells? Organs? The random subset of your body comprising 12.729% of your liver and 3.68% of the region beyond? Obviously, the last question is facetious, but it illustrates the broader question: where and how do we demarcate those bits which are animated?

By redundant, I mean that where we don't have good evidence of agency, we gain no explanatory power - especially as to our own personhood - by positing it.

Moving on to a later post:

Though I increasingly suspect whether one is a Monist or a Pluralist is tied to how we demarcate the "physical" and "mental".

Personally, I don't think pluralism applies here, because it seems to me that we're really talking about the so-called mind-body problem, for which there are only two live possibilities - monism or dualism - given that there are only two (very broad in this sense) potential substances: mind versus body (aka matter). They are either of or derived from the same type (monism) or they are of different types (dualism).

(Technically, there is another possibility - nihilism, the position that there are no substances, or, in other words, that neither ontological category of mind nor body aka matter exists - but since none of us in this conversation takes that position, we can ignore it).

It's in this context that, ontologically, I identify as a dualist.

It's possible I suppose that one might conceive of substances beyond "mind" and "matter" (or the neutral substance from which they are derived), but that seems to go beyond the mind-body problem. It's also possible I suppose that one might carve up into multiple substances "mind" and/or "matter". Those could result in a pluralism.

Beyond substances, we can consider ontological categories more broadly.^[1]

In that more general context I am most definitely a pluralist.

The rest of your post nicely introduces that more general context and some of the considerations involved.

A while back, inspired by the discussion in the tabulation of mind-body possibilities thread, I drafted a basic ontological taxonomy for discussion and refinement, but I never got around to sharing it.

Maybe that would be interesting to explore in a new thread.

To answer the key question you asked though:

So then does the distinction end up separating Persons from everything else, including feelings/thoughts/reasoning?

In my opinion, yes. As I argued in my post to Valmar above, the experiencer (person) is distinct from his/her experiences (feelings/thoughts/reasoning); the latter are contingent on the former.

The question then arises: well, what exactly is a person then if (s)he is comprised neither of stuff nor experience?

My answer is closest to the third (c) given in the SEP article on dualism under 5.2.2 Unity and Substance Dualism, the ‘no-analysis’ account, which is:

The view that it is a mistake to present any analysis. This is Foster’s view, though I think Vendler (1984) and Madell (1981) have similar positions. Foster argues that even the ‘consciousness’ account is an attempt to explain what the immaterial self is ‘made of’ which assimilates it too far towards a kind of physical substance. In other words, Descartes has only half escaped from the ‘ectoplasmic’ model. (He has half escaped because he does not attribute non-mental properties to the self, but he is still captured by trying to explain what it is made of.)

Foster (1991) expresses it as follows:


…it seems to me that when I focus on myself introspectively, I am not only aware of being in a certain mental condition; I am also aware, with the same kind of immediacy, of being a certain sort of thing…

It will now be asked: ‘Well, what is this nature, this sortal attribute? Let’s have it specified!’ But such a demand is misconceived. Of course, I can give it a verbal label: for instance, I can call it ‘subjectness’ or ‘selfhood’. But unless they are interpreted ‘ostensively’, by reference to what is revealed by introspective awareness, such labels will not convey anything over and above the nominal essence of the term ‘basic subject’. In this respect, however, there is no difference between this attribute, which constitutes the subject’s essential nature, and the specific psychological attributes of his conscious life…

Admittedly, the feeling that there must be more to be said from a God’s eye view dies hard. The reason is that, even when we have acknowledged that basic subjects are wholly non-physical, we still tend to approach the issue of their essential natures in the shadow of the physical paradigm. (243–5)

I qualify this by adding that for me the mistake is not that it's necessarily the case that no analysis is possible, but rather that, if one is, I simply don't know how to provide it using the conceptual tools at my disposal.

[1] Even more broadly, it really depends on what is being counted, and especially whether that is categories or instances: types versus tokens. The SEP article on monism covers this in detail. Interestingly, regarding token monism, it distinguishes between existence monism and priority monism. These might be the technical terms to describe the distinction you seem to want to make between One True Self idealism (an existence monism?) and One and the Many idealism (a priority monism?). It might be that Itay Shani's defence of cosmopsychism against the decombination problem in his paper Cosmopsychism: A Holistic Approach to the Metaphysics of Experience (which I analysed in my thread The decombination problem, related arguments, and potential solutions: an analysis) could be summarised as affirming cosmopsychism as a priority monism rather than an existence monism. It might be worth asking him whether he'd be comfortable with that characterisation. Personally, I'm not convinced that this distinction is all that meaningful (on idealism), but it seemed worth drawing those terms to your attention anyway.

Valmar,

I've selectively reread this thread to check and remind myself of everything you've said re this neutral substance.

In the process, I found that it was me who qualified it as "pure" potential (an unfortunate paraphrasing of your "infinite" potential), whereas, after rereading your descriptions, I see that you consider it as not just potential but also as being (existence), so it is perhaps better described as "unformed being with unlimited potential" than as "pure potential".

I take back, then, my claim that it lacks the capacity to be actualised: as a mixture of actual and potential, it can - at least in theory - self-actualise its latent potential.

I remain skeptical though that it qualifies as a genuine substance (in the philosophical sense). It seems to me better described as a proto-substance.

Then you would have to ignore the primary philosophical definition of "substance" per https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/substance/:

There exist two rather different ways of characterising the philosophical concept of substance. The first is the more generic. The philosophical term “substance” comes from an early Latin translation of the Greek ousia. Ousia is a noun derived from the verb “einai” (to be) and is naturally translated “being”. According to the generic sense, substances are those things that best merit the title “beings”. This is usually interpreted to mean those things that are the foundational or fundamental entities of a given philosophical system. Thus, for an atomist, atoms are the substances, for they are the basic things from which everything is constructed. In David Hume’s system, impressions and ideas are the substances, for the same reason. In a slightly different way, Forms are Plato’s substances, for everything derives its existence from Forms.

Per this definition, infinity is the foundational or fundamental entity for me. It is existence and beingness in its purest, fullest sense, before actualization and formation.

I also think that my original response stands or at least is a defensible interpretation: that this is just substance dualism with an origin story. It simply describes how the two substances - roughly conceived - of "mind" and "matter" come into being in the first place: via this formless proto-substance spontaneously(?) forming into the actual substances of one or the other.

All metaphysics have some kind of origin "story" as it were. You cannot "reduce" Monism to Dualism, as that doesn't make logical sense. Your idea of God-as-a-person is also an origin story ~ with God as the Monad, the first entity, the first mind, that came before creation. So, ironically, I can reduce your Dualism to Monism.

Whether it is and remains fair for me to have described this proto-substance as transmuting into one or the other, as a different way of saying that it takes on their forms, is open to question, but I've put the question to you twice now with no answer.

Again, you seem to not comprehend or understand what I am describing ~ I have never described infinity "transmuting" into something else. Everything is still infinity ~ just a manifestation, a form, resulting from the limitation of infinity into finity, giving form and existence.

Existence proper is what I would call Spirit ~ existence in isolation, without form, definition, thus without perceived existence.

I think it would be useful to get an answer, but I get that you're working on an intuitive and abstract level, so you might not want to commit to anything more specific. If you did, one of the questions that would be worth exploring is this:

Once it takes on a form, can that form be "taken back", returning to a state of "unformed being in potential", and then "reformed" into something else?

An existence ~ also an infinity, because it has no innate form ~ can take on a form, and also let go of it, as the form is just a choice, being able to choose another form.

This would help to determine whether it is more of a substance proper (an actual being(ness) that is reformable) or, as I have suggested, more of a proto-substance (a sort of magic pot of potential beings out of which actual beings spring fully-formed, and to which, as an infinite source, it is meaningless for those beings to be returned for reformation).

There is no "magic pot of potential" or any such thing in my metaphysic. A substance is simply just the foundation existence within a metaphysic, and mine is simply what I call "infinity" because I struggle to define something that lacks defining qualities, having all of them in potential.

In any case, I also think it seems fair to critique this position as not being a strict neutral monism, given that on a stricter neutral monism, the neutral substance wouldn't take on the forms of mind or matter, but would rather function or operate as one or the other depending on the conditions and context. This might seem like splitting hairs, but, especially in the context of the above, it's why I currently interpret it as "dualism with an origin story" as opposed to "neutral monism proper". Perhaps it's even more fairly described as something in between the two, a hybrid.

My position is not strictly beholden to Neutral Monism, because I simply shop around for ideas and definitions that can best describe my sets of experiences and the logical conclusions to which they lead me. Thus, I have learned to not be rigidly beholden to any particular box, as otherwise I was just becoming confused, frustrated and feeling like my mind might break from trying to make sense of it. Then I realized I was trying to force things into a particular frame of reference I didn't realize I had, and so further realized I had to let go of all of that, and instead learn to create a new map from scratch that could make sense of what I was experiencing.

Hence Dualism nor Idealism work for me. A Neutral Monism of... infinity, Spirit, something, is better.

Finally, before responding to more specific parts of your reply, I want to make a broader point, by reminding you of something you wrote to nbtruthman early in the thread (editing note mine):


In that context, I'd like you to try to wrap your head around this:

The main difference between my dualistic framework and your framework is simply that whereas you provide an origin story for the substances of "mind" and "matter" (roughly conceived) - as forming out of a neutral proto-substance - I leave it unspecified how they form(ed) - i.e., where they came from - in the first place, albeit that it seems most likely to me that they have their origin in a personal, creative being, i.e., God.

But you don't leave it unspecified ~ you believe that a God-as-a-person created a reality where there is mind and matter, where you reduce God-as-a-person to being a creative being, a mind, thus unwitting creating a Monism of mind where this mind can, for... no logical reason, create a separate substance that is not God... which is more complicated than matter just being an extension of God with particular qualities. More complicated because it not explained how exactly it is simpler or easier or what-have-you. It feels logically easier to work with, perhaps, but I find it a naive approach which doesn't take into account the hidden complexities involved.

Otherwise, they are similarly capable of coping with all of the nuances and variations of the different manifestations of form that you object to mine as being incapable of coping with: "mind" and "matter" on my dualistic framework are broad categories which allow for the same nuances and variations that your framework does.

From my perspective, it really doesn't. Infinity proper is simply infinity ~ it is not mind, but the "ground" upon which "mind" exists, and in which matter can be formed by the creative powers of "mind". "Mind", I find unsatisfying, because it carries too many connotations.

Especially after experiencing the conceptual reality from my Ayahuasca journey, I was left even more convinced that "mind" is a very poor word for something so transcendent. In that state, form was... redundant and optional. I was a point of existence, an infinity, yet my awareness required no form. There was no "matter", either...

From my perspective, the supposed problem of interaction (which, to reiterate, I don't see as a problem in the first place) is not particularly resolved by positing that mind and matter form out of a proto-substance: in that case, it can simply be said, "Well, OK, so that's where they came from, but now that they are what they are (have been formed into), the situation is not essentially different to that in which I simply take them for granted as they are without stipulating how they formed."

It is unsatisfying to just handwave away the problems of interaction as not being so because you don't see the problem, maybe not even being able to acknowledge the problem...

For me, mind and matter don't "come from" infinity ~ that implies a state before creation that things can be possibly obliterated into. No ~ mind and matter are forms of infinity with particular qualities that define them as mind and matter. The most fundamental nature of mind, Soul, cannot be obliterated ~ form can be stripped away entirely, quality discarded, but that essential point of existence is eternal, immortal, infinite, as it is an infinity.

Given that I now better understand your neutral substance, I would no longer describe it as explanatorily irrelevant, but I can simply say, "I have no need of that hypothesis", or, rather, that I leave the question of origins more open. I am more interested, in this ontological context, in developing a coherent conceptual framework for the reality that I observe than in speculating as to how that reality came to be, although, of course, I do indulge in the latter too.

Does all of that make sense, and can you accept it?

I can accept that you believe you are correct, but that I disagree, because you seem unable to think outside of the conceptual box I believe you to have nailed yourself into ~ or perhaps you haven't had a sufficient set of experiences that make your current framework conceptually and logically unworkable.

I feel a need to even leave behind the concept of "God" perceiving it as an artifact of human religion. The existence of Spirit, though, is entirely undeniable ~ even a vast spirit that have a quality of being the closest thing that some would describe as being deity-like.

You still don't seem to understand the distinction I make between mind and matter, because, on my view, God is not a third substance, but simply an instance of one of the two substances: a mind. Just to add some nuance to that though: it is possible and considerable that God's mind is (perhaps was from the start) allied - as are ours when we are incarnated - with a body made of the other type of substance ("matter"). This might be interpretable as a type of panentheism.

This is even more convoluted... why would "God" need to have a body...? Did God give themselves a body? Why would this body be made of something that isn't God? Then I start wondering about God also having an origin, if God has a mind and a body.

On that panentheism, your subsequent proposal (which for brevity I haven't quoted) would be possible on a paraphrasing: that God's body is infinite, and that God creates within that body rather than in the emptiness of an external void.

That resolves... nothing. Why does God need to have a separate mind and body...?

To reiterate in the context of that which I asked you to wrap your head around above: "mind" and "matter" in this dualistic context are very broad categories, generally differentiating between the non-extended "thing"-substances of persons - who experience - and the extended "stuff"-substances of matter-energy-etc which does not, but with which, when formed into a body, a mind (experiencing person) can be allied (or "into" which that mind (experiencing person) can incarnate).

They do not need to specifically connote human-like minds and the physical matter-energy of this universe. There is scope for infinite variety and subtlety within those broad categories.

Do you see now that there is no reason after all to bemoan its lack of explanatory power?

Ah, but there is... extended stuff is just an extension of non-extended stuff... resolving into being the same ultimate substance, just one that is not-extended and the other extended. Though there is still a question of what exactly is meant by "mind" being "non-extended" and "matter" "extended". I am left rather confused as to what is meant here.

For me, "minds" are easily extended to fill form ~ they can take on the shape of form, being defined and expressed by and through it.

Fine, but that's not in itself a defence against the mentalism suspicion (where "mentalism" is here a synonym for "idealism"). The suspicion only strengthens with comments like this:

I do not consider Spirit to be reducible to "mind" ~ it is a superset of that vague idea. "Mind" again contains too many particular connotations. It is too reductive, based on a general human comprehension of what "minds" and "consciousness" are, not taking into account the experience of the transcendental.

Does God as you conceive of God experience? That's enough to qualify God as a mind for me, and if God as you conceive of God is also all of reality, then it seems to me that you're still an idealist after all.

No ~ "God" is the superset. You would be strawmanning me in this case, continuing to misunderstand my arguments by misframing them within your conception of beliefs. But, then, language makes it very difficult to explain and express what I have experienced.

I know what I mean to describe... but both the limits of language and your attempts to redefine my descriptions into something they're not makes that difficult.

I (have come to) see it differently than mind "contorting" itself. I don't see mind as extended in the first place, so it can't be contorted in that sense. Rather, its field of awareness can be extended, to the degree that it experiences a body as though that body was a true part of itself, via that extended field of awareness.

Then "mind" can extend itself... if it can be a field. Can you think past the rigidity of your definitions?

OK, let's for argument's sake say that this physical reality is akin to a dream. There must, then, be some mind which is dreaming it, and somehow our minds "hook in" to that mind's dream (presumably via some sort of telepathic or other psi or psi-adjacent means). We can't literally be "in" the dream because it's a virtual rather than a physical reality. We can only be "in" it in a similar sense as we can be "in" a computer game. So, the question then arises: where are we literally when we're participating in this dream?

It's a metaphor to have something to compare against. If a collective of souls, spirits, can conjure existences outside of themselves in the ground of infinity, then this sphere of incarnate reality can exist as such. So, yes, we can literally be in this metaphorical dream ~ because, well, that is what we experience.

After all, physicality is reducible to quantum stuff, which is anything but physical, despite the weirdness of the naming of the scientific fields that study it.

Where are we literally? Well... incarnate, in physical forms, in this physical layer of this incarnate reality. This is an... astral(?), spiritual(?) layer to it as well that my loong and tiger spirits inhabit that is just "above" this one... and yet we physically incarnate entities also partially exist there too... how else can the spirits interact with me and me them? This is where the concepts of vibration, resonance, layers, level, frequencies, start to become more useful as descriptors rather than there just being one layer with a range. There are multiple layers with overlapping ranges that do and do not interact. You have to experience it to... first be utterly confused by it existing, then start to make sense of it more and more, and then come back more confused because you now have more questions than answers...

This is why a shamanic perspective makes a lot more sense ~ as shamans the world over have explored this set of realms for millennia, and have mapped it out more or less, albeit with language the West barely comprehends in its scientific and reductionist religious lenses.

There seem to be two options (ultimately, after any and all nested dream realities are resolved, assuming nesting is anyway coherent, which it might not be): firstly, that we are in a base physical reality; secondly, that there is no physical reality and we are all just minds. The first entails dualism, and the second entails pluralistic idealism, which I lightly critiqued in post #31: it seems hard anyway to avoid some sort of dimensional space within which these plural minds exist, which if not a "physical" reality at least invites the question as to why one would deny a physical reality. In summary: dualism seems the more plausible option of the two here.

You don't justify why it is more plausible. Dimensional space does not imply a Dualism. It implies a certain set of concepts and qualities that minds seamlessly interact with, albeit through forms that occupy this dimensional space. Dualism is an oversimplification of a world that is far more complicated that it appears on the surface. Especially when there are layers with forms that do not have physicality, where this forms are conceptual, apparently solid, yet are still much more dynamic than ourselves.

I'm curious though what you mean by "dream-stuff". Do you mean literal stuff: some type of matter-energy in an extended (dimensional) space? If so, you seem to have a very different idea of what a dream is than I do.

A vague-term for trying to compare lucid dreams and all their weirdness to this physical reality composed of the quantum and whatever it is anyways...

I'm simply using "substance" in the philosophical sense that I thought we agreed on: roughly, that which exists independently and which can have properties, attributes, and states, but which is not itself a property, attribute, or state. That's compatible with what you describe, and I agree - and have said all along - that the self (a person aka mind) is a substance, except that I don't qualify "self" with "sense of" here.

We haven't really agreed on a definition, frankly. I've been using it in the primary definition of being foundational, fundamental stuff which all else springs from, sharing the nature of having quality, form and existence.

You are using it in the sense of almost... physical stuff. For me, even Spirit comes from the substance of infinity.

Getting back to my point: experience can't be a substance because it is not independent; it is contingent (on the experiencer, who, we agree - though you with a qualifier - is a substance).

Experience, like all else, is a form, a limitation, of infinity ~ it has qualities, existence, feeling. Thus, it is substance like all else.

That it is contingent is to me self-evident, but it can also be affirmed on the basis that while an experiencer in the absence of experience can be conceived, an experience in the absence of an experiencer cannot. To put it another way, an experiencer (aka mind aka person) who is - at least temporarily - not undergoing any experience is conceivable, whereas an experience which is not being undergone by an experiencer is both inconceivable and incoherent.

I agree ~ an experiencer that is truly not experiencing... is an existence in isolation, beyond perception, even to itself. It would have no form, no perceived existence, it would be logically infinite, having no qualities. Yet it would exist, undoubtedly.

Whereas the Buddhist and such, somehow, believe that there can be experience in lieu of an experiencer, though I am utterly baffled as how they conceive of that. I actually doubt that they do conceive it ~ at least, in any proper, meaningful sense. To them, a monk in transcendent meditation "has no self", there is just "experience" without "experiencer", which still makes no sense, because who is recalling the experience... again, it comes down the definitions of words being a total nightmare, and language imposing limitations on how we can structure and perceive our reality.

After all... if we don't have the words, we seem to struggle with comprehending... which is why my spirit guides have been insisting on me learning to think beyond language and definitions to grasp pure meaning and intention.

Aside from the conceivability of an experiencer absent experience, I can think of two items of empirical evidence for it being an actuality as well:

1. When under a general anaesthetic, it very much seems that experience temporarily ceases. I've been in this state several times myself, so I can confirm this. Some argue that experience doesn't truly stop, it simply isn't remembered. Well, maybe that's true, but it doesn't seem that way to me.
   
2. In the case of Annika and Tristan, during Tristan's absence from the body for several years (to which he refers as death), he did not experience anything. Again, it might be argued that he simply didn't remember his experiences, but, as with me and general anaesthetic, that's not how it seems to him.
   

Thus, I disagree with this (editing note mine):


I disagree with the first part of that for two reasons. Firstly, because the one (experience) is contingent whereas the other (matter) is not, and secondly because the one (matter) is extended whereas the other (experience) is not. Therefore, there certainly is a distinction.

You make it seem like an absolute that "matter" is always "extended" where "mind", "experience" is not, when clearly, they can be, within their own conceptual space, albeit lacking the qualities of physicality proper.

I have felt the experience of being able to extend and expand my mind, yet I cannot describe what that feels like...

Perhaps re the first reason you think that matter, too, is contingent on mind (an experiencer), but then the mentalist suspicion becomes even more pressing: it is not clear in that case how your position actually differs from idealism.

Because "mind" carries far too many connotations that cease to have meaning in the greater reality I have had the blessing of being able to experience, where I have experienced things I feel extremely hard-pressed to reduce to as mere a definition as "mind". A reality where Spirit and form and infinity become much more apparent from direct and raw apprehension. It went beyond mere intuition ~ I was rawly experiencing it, perceiving it in its fullness, up in the... "space" that intuition comes from. It was a most curious experience.

Re the second part of that quote of yours: this is an idea that I have toyed with too, but I am not sure that it is meaningful, and certainly not to the extent that experience is the same as matter just contained within the experiential field of the experiencer, because experience is not extended as matter is, and to claim that it is, it seems to me, is to mistakenly materialise the immaterial (in a sense to reify experience).

Except that in my definition of existence, experiencers are defined by experiences, and to be meaningful, experience must have bounds and limits, thus experience has a "bubble" within which it occurs, with us further setting boundaries between us and what we consider to not be us, yet within our field of perception.

Without experience... there is no experiencer, just non-perceived existence.

See above as to why I explicitly disagree with this. (Temporarily) non-experiencing experiencers are not just conceivable but appear based on empirical evidence to be actual too.


As above: I am skeptical of this idea, but have entertained it too. Since you asked me to poke you on it, perhaps read my toying with it at the link I shared above (and the few posts prior at that link if it's of interest) - consider that to be my poke.


You miss the point: in that case, the problem can simply be restated as that of why "the Creator; existence itself" exists in the first place.

Finally, re a personal God: you point to people having experiences ("mystical experiences of an infinite light, of the godhead") which do not involve a personal God as evidence that a personal God does not exist. This is a non sequitur. A mystical experience not involving a personal God doesn't in any way demonstrate that a personal God cannot be experienced at other times.

I have not stated such a thing. People experience personal Gods, but that does not mean that the experienced entity is the same as the transcendental that defies proper description or experience. The personal God is not experienced as infinite light or the godhead. They are distinct concepts.

I have instead provided positive evidence. There is an asymmetry then in the evidence we have each provided. You need a good reason to counter the positive evidence I've provided. In that respect, you essentially claim that people misidentify the being they encounter as God, including on the basis that you have experienced a Jesus entity which confessed to being merely an egregore, etc. Well, maybe that's true, but it's also merely a claim, and one which conveniently supports your position.

It's not convenient, so much as it must logically be the case ~ people project their ideas based on their prior experiences, whereas the reality may be more than they can comprehend, so they can only comprehend through their prior experiences, limiting how they can interpret what they are sensing.

Besides... maybe it can be a personal God that they experience ~ but that is qualitatively not equal the transcendental infinity many have reported. It logically cannot be.

You differentiate Krishna from Brahman, but, in fact, Krishna is the personal aspect of Brahman, not a distinct entity, thus nor is Brahman the "source" of Krishna.

There are also philosophical arguments for a personal God, but, as Sci points out, this thread isn't the place to explore this topic in depth.

Then you do not understand Hinduist philosophy if you're going to make such a claim. Perhaps brush up on what Brahman is, and how the very gods themselves relate to it. Brahman has no "personal" aspect as such ~ everything in existence is rooted in Brahman proper:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brahman

In Hinduism, Brahman (Sanskrit: ब्रह्मन्; IAST: Brahman) connotes the highest universal principle, the Ultimate Reality of the universe.[1][2][3] In major schools of Hindu philosophy, it is the non-physical, efficient, formal and final cause of all that exists.[2][4][5] It is the pervasive, infinite, eternal truth, consciousness and bliss which does not change, yet is the cause of all changes.[1][3][6] Brahman as a metaphysical concept refers to the single binding unity behind diversity in all that exists.

Brahman is a Vedic Sanskrit word, and it is conceptualized in Hinduism, states Paul Deussen, as the "creative principle which lies realized in the whole world".[7] Brahman is a key concept found in the Vedas, and it is extensively discussed in the early Upanishads.[8] The Vedas conceptualize Brahman as the Cosmic Principle.[9] In the Upanishads, it has been variously described as Sat-cit-ānanda (truth-consciousness-bliss)[10][11] and as the unchanging, permanent, Highest Reality.[12][13][note 1][note 2]

Brahman is discussed in Hindu texts with the concept of Atman (Sanskrit: आत्मन्, 'Self'),[8][16] personal,[note 3] impersonal[note 4] or Para Brahman,[note 5] or in various combinations of these qualities depending on the philosophical school.[17] In dualistic schools of Hinduism such as the theistic Dvaita Vedanta, Brahman is different from Atman (Self) in each being.[5][18][19] In non-dual schools such as the Advaita Vedanta, the substance of Brahman is identical to the substance of Atman, is everywhere and inside each living being, and there is connected spiritual oneness in all existence.[6][20][21]

I'm very much losing the thread of either side of the argument, so a few questions if anyone cares to answer (apologies as I know some of these have been answered in some way, possible multiple times) ->

If two substances interact, does that indicate they are the same substance?

Can two substances have their own causal explanations, or does there have to ultimately be one explanation for all causation? If the two substances interact, then are there three causal explanations?

Can the One be a Person yet also not a Person?

If the One is not a Person, does this mean the Many are uncreated & Eternal existing on some common Ground of the Real?

I do still lean toward Monism of a sort, though it might strangely be a Dualism or Trialism as follows ->

There is the Experienced and the Experiencer. Physical stuff - particles, fields, energy, and so on - seems to be consensus Experience, Mental stuff seems to be private Experience, and the Experiencer seems to be apart from both.

The distinction we make between the consensus Experience as Real vs the way fiction is imagined consensus Experience suggests there is an important difference between the "physical" and "mental". We also distinguish between hallucinations and dreams versus what we consider real in the consensus.

There's also the immediate causal efficacy of the consensus Experience. A fire burns, water soaks. Where this gets tricky then is Psi phenomenon, where a thought can affect the consensus Experience.

In the realm of the Mental, we can divide my thoughts about different things from the taste of fudge or any other "raw feel", and both are different in some from a mathematical proof even if the latter requires both to reveal....with some debate over whether said revelation is the discovery of something already out there or something invented.

Is Time over and above the Physical & Mental? It seems that way given both seem subject to Time's passage.

To me it seems you could have Monism, Dualism, Trialism, and so on depending on how to make the "cut" of what is and isn't a distinct substance?

I'm very much losing the thread of either side of the argument, so a few questions if anyone cares to answer (apologies as I know some of these have been answered in some way, possible multiple times) ->

To be honest, it's slowly losing the thread too ~ I feel like both Laird and I are too... convinced of our ontologies, for reasons which we both feel highly convinced by.

If two substances interact, does that indicate they are the same substance?

I would consider them both derivative substances of an ultimate substance, infinity, albeit distinct and unique in their derived state, as each can have a different set of finite qualities and expressions. Something can feel and appear entirely different from something else, despite them sharing the same ultimate nature ~ the tricky bit being that this ultimate nature is unobservable, due to being non-phenomenal ~ infinity contains all phenomena and qualities as unformed potential, so it cannot be distinguished or known. Maybe you could know, but maybe you'd go completely insane.

Can two substances have their own causal explanations, or does there have to ultimately be one explanation for all causation? If the two substances interact, then are there three causal explanations?

The odd thing is that I sort of believe that there are three... the ultimate cause, and the causal powers that the derived substances have due to their current natures, their qualities giving them certain causal powers, which they have due to their shared ultimate nature. Infinity is undefined in its limits, so it can cause anything. Finite, derivative substances have defined causal powers according to their defined qualities ~ causal stuff we can know about, if in part.

Can the One be a Person yet also not a Person?

I believe it to be inherently impossible ~ how can unformed infinity, containing all potential and possibilities, be a Person? Though I consider manifest infinity ~ Spirit, Soul ~ to be a Person, sort of, if you really stretch it, though there are infinite such manifestations, I believe, each being distinct from each other, so being able to know each other through their differences.

If the One is not a Person, does this mean the Many are uncreated & Eternal existing on some common Ground of the Real?

Yes ~ I use Oneness and the Many as just a sort of pointer. They've always existed eternally, never having a moment where they have not existed. There is just an eternal shift from one form to another, infinitely, according to the whims of the Many ~ or their eternal core, existence, at least, beyond form.

I do still lean toward Monism of a sort, though it might strangely be a Dualism or Trialism as follows ->

There is the Experienced and the Experiencer. Physical stuff - particles, fields, energy, and so on - seems to be consensus Experience, Mental stuff seems to be private Experience, and the Experiencer seems to be apart from both.

And this is where I think we get completely confused by, and so lost in, language and definitions ~ are we definitions, mental models, or are we existence? I believe that the above is useful as a logical and intellectual model, but we must take care not to conflate and confuse it for reality proper, whatever it is.

It is why the conceptual reality I experienced in my Ayahuasca trip was so... different, in retrospect. Up there, I feel like anything would have been valid, because I could imagine it. Nothing was off limits there, it felt. Raw imaginative power is everything up there.

The distinction we make between the consensus Experience as Real vs the way fiction is imagined consensus Experience suggests there is an important difference between the "physical" and "mental". We also distinguish between hallucinations and dreams versus what we consider real in the consensus.

Only at this level, plane, whatever, of existence ~ we have the private reality of our mind, and the public, shared reality of... phenomena, some of which are physical, others being qualia-based.

So, the difference is caused largely in part by our egos, our minds, our personalities, and how that is shaped by incarnation, expression and perception through a physical form ~ yet another mental model, albeit shaped by physicality in part.

There's also the immediate causal efficacy of the consensus Experience. A fire burns, water soaks. Where this gets tricky then is Psi phenomenon, where a thought can affect the consensus Experience.

Because at this physical level, all physical things share the same physical nature, so as we interact on this level attuned to, resonating with physical forms, we have a mental model that tells us how we should experience things. Like... our minds are taught to know how our physical form should sense this particular thing ~ fire burning, water soaking. Perhaps the form itself is informative by its nature. Consider the difference between the human form, and the... grasshopper form. Or the tree form, or whatever you find interesting to compare.

In the realm of the Mental, we can divide my thoughts about different things from the taste of fudge or any other "raw feel", and both are different in some from a mathematical proof even if the latter requires both to reveal....with some debate over whether said revelation is the discovery of something already out there or something invented.

All are ideas and concepts, despite having different manifest natures, so they're both different and the same, without contradiction.

Is Time over and above the Physical & Mental? It seems that way given both seem subject to Time's passage.

The physical... sure. The mental... eh, time gets weird ~ time can crawl, time can flash by, depending on where your mind is at. Psychedelics do very strange things to the perception of time... one person's trip comments feeling like 1 minute on their clock felt like an eternity, and they panicked because of it. They were lost in loops, they'd look at their clock, and then an eternity perceived later, they looked again, and were aghast that only a minute had passed.

To me it seems you could have Monism, Dualism, Trialism, and so on depending on how to make the "cut" of what is and isn't a distinct substance?

They're all mental models, abstractions, attempts to understand reality as felt and perceived. In an infinity, they're all right and all wrong... sort of.

If we can be so convinced of a mental mode... it becomes a reality within our minds, as everything is shuffled through that model. We can hold very rigid beliefs about the world ~ heaven, hell, judgement, a wrathful God, God having a son that died for some set of stated sins, blah. And people can believe it so very strongly, with every conviction.

I would consider them both derivative substances of an ultimate substance, infinity, albeit distinct and unique in their derived state, as each can have a different set of finite qualities and expressions. Something can feel and appear entirely different from something else, despite them sharing the same ultimate nature ~ the tricky bit being that this ultimate nature is unobservable, due to being non-phenomenal ~ infinity contains all phenomena and qualities as unformed potential, so it cannot be distinguished or known. Maybe you could know, but maybe you'd go completely insane.

I can accept this as a possibility, but do you think this way because you observe seemingly disparate "stuff" interacting? Or because of some revelatory experience that is private to yourself, at least as far as members of this forum are able to discern?

The odd thing is that I sort of believe that there are three... the ultimate cause, and the causal powers that the derived substances have due to their current natures, their qualities giving them certain causal powers, which they have due to their shared ultimate nature. Infinity is undefined in its limits, so it can cause anything. Finite, derivative substances have defined causal powers according to their defined qualities ~ causal stuff we can know about, if in part.

So the seeming substances are really governed by the "ultimate cause"?

I am not sure we can assume Infinity, anymore than we can assume "God". As an abstraction Infinity is undefined in its limits, but then so is God depending on who you ask.

I believe it to be inherently impossible ~ how can unformed infinity, containing all potential and possibilities, be a Person? Though I consider manifest infinity ~ Spirit, Soul ~ to be a Person, sort of, if you really stretch it, though there are infinite such manifestations, I believe, each being distinct from each other, so being able to know each other through their differences.

Well this again might need its own thread but consider that Universals of math & logic are mental entities so we should expect them to be located in a Mind. This could go back to the One-Many distinction not being a definitive separation, so the aspect of the One shared by the Many is where said mental entities reside.

However, [if] we do posit a One, and the One's Mind is the home of Universals, it would be difficult for me to see how the One holds the Universals of Logic in Its mind yet is not itself rational. And if it is rational, it is self-reflective....or so I'd think?

Yes ~ I use Oneness and the Many as just a sort of pointer. They've always existed eternally, never having a moment where they have not existed. There is just an eternal shift from one form to another, infinitely, according to the whims of the Many ~ or their eternal core, existence, at least, beyond form.

Yeah this gets into the question of whether there needs to be - or even could be - a singular Ground-of-Being that is itself conscious.

But it does seem that if the One is not the origin of Person-hood, then the creation of Persons seems quite the task unless Persons are immortal if not Eternal.

And this is where I think we get completely confused by, and so lost in, language and definitions ~ are we definitions, mental models, or are we existence? I believe that the above is useful as a logical and intellectual model, but we must take care not to conflate and confuse it for reality proper, whatever it is.

I sympathize with this position, as it does seem we hit a point where there just isn't a good way to dig deeper metaphysically. So there just the "Ineffable Source" or whatever we want to call it.

It is why the conceptual reality I experienced in my Ayahuasca trip was so... different, in retrospect. Up there, I feel like anything would have been valid, because I could imagine it. Nothing was off limits there, it felt. Raw imaginative power is everything up there.

There may be imaginative power but is everything imagined destined/doomed to become actual? That would seem to be more a burden than a freedom to me?

Only at this level, plane, whatever, of existence ~ we have the private reality of our mind, and the public, shared reality of... phenomena, some of which are physical, others being qualia-based.

This still leaves us with the divide of Experienced and Experiencer since you are relating an experience, though I do recognize the problem has been noted since antiquity as per the oft-referenced Plotinus quote->

"For how can one describe, as other than oneself, that which, when one saw it, seemed to be one with oneself?


This is no doubt why in the Mysteries we are forbidden to reveal them to the uninitiated.'

So, the difference is caused largely in part by our egos, our minds, our personalities, and how that is shaped by incarnation, expression and perception through a physical form ~ yet another mental model, albeit shaped by physicality in part.

Then is the ego illusory? But does this mean the Self is illusory, which would mean Personhood is illusory? Yet I find it difficult to see how that could ever be the case...

Because at this physical level, all physical things share the same physical nature, so as we interact on this level attuned to, resonating with physical forms, we have a mental model that tells us how we should experience things. Like... our minds are taught to know how our physical form should sense this particular thing ~ fire burning, water soaking. Perhaps the form itself is informative by its nature. Consider the difference between the human form, and the... grasshopper form. Or the tree form, or whatever you find interesting to compare.

Is Psi then a sort of beneficial amnesia, where we forget we need to play by the rules?

All are ideas and concepts, despite having different manifest natures, so they're both different and the same, without contradiction.

I feel the challenge is this is easy to say but feels hand-wavy?

The physical... sure. The mental... eh, time gets weird ~ time can crawl, time can flash by, depending on where your mind is at. Psychedelics do very strange things to the perception of time... one person's trip comments feeling like 1 minute on their clock felt like an eternity, and they panicked because of it. They were lost in loops, they'd look at their clock, and then an eternity perceived later, they looked again, and were aghast that only a minute had passed.

Time seems to get weird even at the physical level, given relativity. But yeah I concede experience of time by an individual can be vastly varied.

They're all mental models, abstractions, attempts to understand reality as felt and perceived. In an infinity, they're all right and all wrong... sort of.

The "sort of" leaves a challenge for those of us who haven't had the One-ness experience. Admittedly I'm not sure everything is One anymore than I am sure there is a definitive Many. I lean toward both of these being wrong in some sense as well, yet of course we are then hitting a point where it's difficult if not impossible to articulate.

Is this a sign of approaching wisdom, or an error in judgement? Seems one could argue either way?

If we can be so convinced of a mental mode... it becomes a reality within our minds, as everything is shuffled through that model. We can hold very rigid beliefs about the world ~ heaven, hell, judgement, a wrathful God, God having a son that died for some set of stated sins, blah. And people can believe it so very strongly, with every conviction.

But there is a rigidity to belief that all is One as well, just look at the Absolute Idealists interviewing Faggin. He talks about immortal selves on an infinite journey and they try to push him into toward their preferred idea that the Many are illusions.

I can accept this as a possibility, but do you think this way because you observe seemingly disparate "stuff" interacting? Or because of some revelatory experience that is private to yourself, at least as far as members of this forum are able to discern?

The former arising from the latter that I am trying to convey the experience of by trying to ground it in the known. A tough challenge, but a fun one. One I hope to overcome by finding the right concepts to be inspired by that fit the bill, I guess.

So the seeming substances are really governed by the "ultimate cause"?

I am not sure we can assume Infinity, anymore than we can assume "God". As an abstraction Infinity is undefined in its limits, but then so is God depending on who you ask.

Not "governed"... more the... source of each essential existence's innate power to exist and create.

Every concept is an abstraction, alas, of the reality to which it points. Thus "infinity" is just my clumsy way of trying to describe what I intuited from the raw experiences I've had, alongside trying to comprehend the nature of transcendent experiences others have reported, whether that be the mystic's experience of the godhead, so to speak, or of a psychedelic user's experience of becoming temporarily one with the universe.

Well this again might need its own thread but consider that Universals of math & logic are mental entities so we should expect them to be located in a Mind. This could go back to the One-Many distinction not being a definitive separation, so the aspect of the One shared by the Many is where said mental entities reside.

However, [if] we do posit a One, and the One's Mind is the home of Universals, it would be difficult for me to see how the One holds the Universals of Logic in Its mind yet is not itself rational. And if it is rational, it is self-reflective....or so I'd think?

Oneness is the source and ground of concepts proper, so Oneness is the source of both the rational, irrational, and everything else within that group of concepts. Indeed, Oneness is the nature shared by the infinite Many, though each individual manifestation of the Many express the different natures of Oneness, of which there are infinite.

Yeah this gets into the question of whether there needs to be - or even could be - a singular Ground-of-Being that is itself conscious.

But it does seem that if the One is not the origin of Person-hood, then the creation of Persons seems quite the task unless Persons are immortal if not Eternal.

It is still the origin of Person-hood, though Persons have always existed eternally, immortally. You're thinking with a reference of time, which leads to confusion. Time itself is a concept that we think with, because we exist within a flow of time. Oneness and the essential existences of the infinite Many do not. We just happen to be an aspect of the Many that do experience a flow of time, so we get lost in trying to conceptualize everything within that framework, as our incarnate existence's framework needs a flow of time to be properly defined and existent. Just the nature of it.

I sympathize with this position, as it does seem we hit a point where there just isn't a good way to dig deeper metaphysically. So there just the "Ineffable Source" or whatever we want to call it.

Ultimately... however the Many still inexorably exist beyond question. The Many are all instances of Oneness, all sharing the nature of Oneness, yet being unique compared to each and every other instance.

There may be imaginative power but is everything imagined destined/doomed to become actual? That would seem to be more a burden than a freedom to me?

Not "doomed" or "destined"... just as a natural consequence of existence. Existence is infinite, so there's no burden when you can choose the reality you want to experience, inhabit, become. That does raise an interesting question... what are lucid dreams but... a sort of reality within us that we have temporarily created? Everything in a lucid dream is ultimately still us, so nothing is obliterated once the dream ends ~ just energy changing form.

This still leaves us with the divide of Experienced and Experiencer since you are relating an experience, though I do recognize the problem has been noted since antiquity as per the oft-referenced Plotinus quote->

"For how can one describe, as other than oneself, that which, when one saw it, seemed to be one with oneself?


This is no doubt why in the Mysteries we are forbidden to reveal them to the uninitiated.'

The divide is rather artificial, I feel, because the Experiencer is what decides what it is and isn't, within its field of Experience. The Experiencer can simply choose to fully identify with everything in its field, without boundaries. So, it is really the Experiencer itself that creates the duality, the divide, based on the structure of concepts and ideas and categorizations. Through the power of discrimination, we identify and isolate qualia into discrete objects.

Thus, unwittingly, our mind becomes an object, though fully private, as we set the boundaries of where our mind begins and ends. It's even more curious ~ many Physicalist claims logically result in the world not existing except in our brains as interpretations of an otherwise empty reality. Rupert Sheldrake has an even more curious idea ~ that the act of vision involves an extension of consciousness to "touch" the thing in our vision ~ his hypothesis to explain the sense of being stared at.

So... what are minds? Strictly something, or dynamic and fluid, defined by the concepts that we identify with, wittingly or unwittingly? Of course, incarnation does shape the range of perceptions and ideas we can know and comprehend. I'm reminded of Jung's Archetypes... we being expressed through the archetype of the human psyche, though we individual existences each bring our own nature, flair and expression to it.

Then is the ego illusory? But does this mean the Self is illusory, which would mean Personhood is illusory? Yet I find it difficult to see how that could ever be the case...

The ego is just a structure and structuring of experience. The structure is no illusion ~ we can just temporarily expand beyond its bounds for a short while while incarnate. But, while incarnate, the ego-structures exerts a subtle pull in any case.

Is Psi then a sort of beneficial amnesia, where we forget we need to play by the rules?

I'm not sure I understand the question, in the context of Psi...

I feel the challenge is this is easy to say but feels hand-wavy?

It can... but I'm struggling to define the shared nature of ideas and concepts as being... forms that have qualities. I've been considering just making a drawing to try and visualize my complicated ideas. But I'm not great at drawing... well, maybe I need to try.

Time seems to get weird even at the physical level, given relativity. But yeah I concede experience of time by an individual can be vastly varied.

Yeah, it definitely can ~ gravity seems to distort time, somehow...

The "sort of" leaves a challenge for those of us who haven't had the One-ness experience. Admittedly I'm not sure everything is One anymore than I am sure there is a definitive Many. I lean toward both of these being wrong in some sense as well, yet of course we are then hitting a point where it's difficult if not impossible to articulate.

Yes, that is the challenge... to articulate experienced concepts that another has not. Maybe that's beauty of philosophy... :|

I feel like there's no contradiction, because all concepts are existences with qualities, and qualities need not necessarily cancel out, except in theory. Of course, imagination can struggle if you've not experienced paradoxical sensations, like hot and cold at the same time.

Is this a sign of approaching wisdom, or an error in judgement? Seems one could argue either way?

Who knows, frankly. Even intuition and feeling can be confusing, despite the clarity of what is being perceived. When you experience apparent logical impossibilities, what else is there to do but bow to experience? I've been forced to do that many times now, so many things get called into question for me.

Like... parallel physical realities with parallel incarnate lives can apparently exist without issue... it's easy to conclude that it's just delusion. But curiosity got the better of me, or maybe that was necessary to happen... and so, I'm left more convinced than ever by the grounded nature of them, where the personalities I interact with have their own continuity, their own lives, own struggles... there's no free lunch, not all sunshine and rainbows, too structured and ordered to be mere imagination.

But there is a rigidity to belief that all is One as well, just look at the Absolute Idealists interviewing Faggin. He talks about immortal selves on an infinite journey and they try to push him into toward their preferred idea that the Many are illusions.

Well, Monism has its branches too ~ extending to the Non-Dualists, who tend to believe that the self is an illusion. Monism has no problem with the existence of the Many ~ the Many are just infinite expressions and manifestations of Oneness, apparently immortal and eternal in nature.

Many look at it as reduction to nothing ~ but that cannot be if the Self does not die. If Oneness is infinite and eternal, then so must the Many expressions of it share that same nature. Oneness is... like a jewel... and each facet on this infinite jewel is the infinite Many. All of the Many are Oneness in essential nature, yet are entirely unique and quite real compared to the other, each immortal and eternal due to their root in Oneness. All are as real as Oneness, thusly.

Sorry for the wordiness, but it's difficult to find the right metaphors to describe something sometimes.

[Laird]

Valmar,

We seem to be approaching the point of diminishing returns in this exchange as it is currently proceeding, so I'll try to switch gears in this post to take a big-picture perspective on it and see if it leads anywhere productive, otherwise, it might be time for us to disengage for now.

Of most interest to me in our exchange is trying to work out where we differ in meaningful as opposed to merely semantic or otherwise relatively trivial ways - like arbitrary conceptual carve-ups (riffing off Sci's language).

You don't like the word "mind". I suspect that "consciousness" isn't particularly satisfactory to you either. I'm instead, then, going to use "experience" to point out why, conceptually, I favour substance dualism over substance monism. It's quite simply this: that there is, in virtue of the nature of experience, a qualitative and essential difference between that which experiences and that which does not experience. That nature is this: experience confers on that which experiences something that it is like to be that which experiences, whereas there is nothing that is it like to be that which does not experience.

I think that you recognise this distinction too, because you seem to recognise the existence of both that which experiences and that which does not experience.

In the context of the so-called mind-body problem (in which the body is conventionally understood to be made of matter), I simply adopt the conventional terms for the very broad categories represented by this distinction: that which experiences is "mind" (aka "consciousness", "person", "soul", etc) and that which does not experience is "matter" (aka "stuff" including "astral matter", "spiritual matter", "ectoplasm", etc).

To me, this is so fundamental and categorical a qualitative distinction between ontological substances that I take them to be two different substances, hence substance dualism.

As far as I can see, although you recognise both elements of this distinction, you choose to see them as two different forms of a singular substance, a substance which is not separate from its forms but which is being itself. To me, if it were framed as an argument, it would look a little like this: "All beings have being, therefore (given that 'being' is singular) monism". You probably would want to convince me that that's not as asinine as it seems to me (and that, in turn, it is my own position that is asinine), but that's not really the point: the point is that this in itself doesn't seem to me to be a meaningful difference between us given that we both recognise the distinction between that which experiences and that which does not; we simply respond to it intellectually in different ways.

However, it would be a meaningful difference if your view is ultimately compatible with monistic idealism, because while that ontology seems to also recognise the experiencing vs non-experiencing distinction, it doesn't really, and it turns out to be incoherent or at least so severely flawed that it might as well be.

By this I mean that really it posits that all that exists is experience, so there is really only that which experiences, not that which does not experience. It tries to sneak the latter in though as the "non-experiencing experiences" (tables, chairs, etc) of the singular Experiencer, who - and here's the incoherence - is at the same time plural experiencers. Setting aside that incoherence and allowing for a true plurality of experiencers, the further incoherence or at least severe flaw is revealed in the question: whose experiences are those?

If they (tables, chairs, etc) are the experiences of the singular Experiencer, then they are contingent on and private to that Experiencer, so how on earth do the (other) plural experiencers simultaneously experience them as their own private experiences, and not just from a singular perspective (which one would expect given a singular Experiencer), but from their own unique perspectives?

This analysis is why I wonder whether Sci is making a terrible error when he writes this:

Physical stuff - particles, fields, energy, and so on - seems to be consensus Experience

He might not be - it depends on what he means by "consensus Experience". Taken at face value though, his suggestion falls prey to the analysis I've just described. Alternatively, in the context of his proposed trialism, it might fall prey to a different problem: free-floating Experiences divorced from the (singular) Experiencer (on Whom they ought to be contingent and to Whom they ought to be private). You and I, Valmar, have agreed that experience absent an experiencer - as some Buddhists propose - is incoherent. I hope that Sci, too, can agree with that.

To get to the point: I have been trying to understand whether this analysis applies to your (Valmar's) ontological framework, because, if it does, then this really would be a meaningful as opposed to mere semantic or otherwise more trivial difference between us.

That's why I've asked you how you defend your position against the mentalist suspicion. It's also why I've asked you "Does God as you conceive of God experience? [And do you also] conceive of God [as] all of reality[?]"

Now that you know why I asked those questions, perhaps you can answer that deeper question which motivated them. I couldn't quite work out the answer from your answers to the more specific questions, but the sense I get from especially your answer to the latter is that your answer would be (is), "No, the analysis does not apply, because I do not posit that all that exists is experience. I posit a genuine distinction between that which experiences and that which does not experience; I do not posit a pseudo-distinction which merely assigns certain experiences of the Experiencer the supposed role of that which does not experience (tables, chairs, etc)."

On the other hand, you also say things like this (emphasis added by me) which seem similar to Sci's potential error, which suggest that maybe the analysis does apply to your position:

at this level, plane, whatever, of existence ~ we have the private reality of our mind, and the public, shared reality of... phenomena, some of which are physical, others being qualia-based.

In the end, your position seems ambiguous: it is motivated by a need to transcend idealism for its perceived limitations, without recognition of the more important need to transcend idealism for its incoherence, and so those incoherent "idealistic ideas" linger in the background, surfacing only occasionally in quotes like the above.

I'm not really sure how best to seek clarity from you on this given that you might still not even recognise why monistic idealism is incoherent or at least severely flawed, and thus not really understand what I'm seeking clarity on. Perhaps you do get it though, in which case I'll leave it to you as to how you clarify.

I've also decided to leave this post at that, because, while there's a lot more to broach even at this big-picture level, I think it's best we resolve this question first, since it's the biggest potential difference between us, and the process of resolving it could help really get to (a deeper understanding on my part of) the meat of what you are actually saying.

(Just to flag a few other things potentially for later so you know what I have in mind and what I am otherwise not simply dismissing and ignoring: whether or not experience itself is or can be extended, and if so in what sense(s); whether or not an experiencer is and is nothing more than its experiences; the location of immaterial minds even if there is a base material reality; whether or not and in what sense God is personal; whether or not and why it is meaningful to distinguish between God as mind and as body; whether or not Brahman has a personal aspect as Krishna).

@Sciborg_S_Patel, I am also deferring a response to the questions you asked in post #114 until this has been resolved, but I hope to answer them if further discussion does not make them redundant.

This analysis is why I wonder whether Sci is making a terrible error when he writes this:

I meant that divide not necessarily as ontological, but as the basic fact of epistemology.

From there one can ask questions like "Is there some noumena "underneath" the experience?" or "Can there be an experiencer without anything to be experienced?".

But just observing reality it seems to me we have to begin with the fact that there is that which is experienced - whether that's emotion or light - and someone who experiences those things. We can then note there are experiences which are more private and *feel* more "mine" like my emotions and my thoughts, and others which are expected to be shared like my senses telling me I am sitting at my desk.

And then one can ask about metaphysical questions....

Valmar,

We seem to be approaching the point of diminishing returns in this exchange as it is currently proceeding, so I'll try to switch gears in this post to take a big-picture perspective on it and see if it leads anywhere productive, otherwise, it might be time for us to disengage for now.

Of most interest to me in our exchange is trying to work out where we differ in meaningful as opposed to merely semantic or otherwise relatively trivial ways - like arbitrary conceptual carve-ups (riffing off Sci's language).

You don't like the word "mind". I suspect that "consciousness" isn't particularly satisfactory to you either. I'm instead, then, going to use "experience" to point out why, conceptually, I favour substance dualism over substance monism. It's quite simply this: that there is, in virtue of the nature of experience, a qualitative and essential difference between that which experiences and that which does not experience. That nature is this: experience confers on that which experiences something that it is like to be that which experiences, whereas there is nothing that is it like to be that which does not experience.

I think that you recognise this distinction too, because you seem to recognise the existence of both that which experiences and that which does not experience.

Yes, I do. However, you're making too great a distinction ~ non-experiential stuff is still a form of existence, albeit without the animating force of will, consciousness, spirit. It is not truly distinct from that which created it ~ because every creation has the mark of its creator. It just lacks the will of its creator, being inert. So, again, the divide is still rather artificial. The reason that form can be animated so readily is because is of the same essential nature of spirit or soul or consciousness.

In our imaginations, we can create objects that have no will or existence of their own. But, we can additional imbue these objects with will, creating thought-forms, tulpas, servitors, agents, what-have-you. That are, in a minor sense, pseudo-incarnations, derived from our own will. We can even split them off from ourselves proper ~ we can truly create something to be independent of us. That is where we get egregores from, actually ~ collective power of belief creating something eventually independent, though to what degree can be questioned.

I'm drawing on experience here to define the limits of what seems to be possible ~ which is quite a lot. There seem to not be many hard and fast rules as to what is the experiencer and what is the experienced, when the latter can easily be imbued as to become a former. When distinctions become very blurry, well, we can only question is there is a true distinction, or whether it is just a degree.

In the context of the so-called mind-body problem (in which the body is conventionally understood to be made of matter), I simply adopt the conventional terms for the very broad categories represented by this distinction: that which experiences is "mind" (aka "consciousness", "person", "soul", etc) and that which does not experience is "matter" (aka "stuff" including "astral matter", "spiritual matter", "ectoplasm", etc).

To me, this is so fundamental and categorical a qualitative distinction between ontological substances that I take them to be two different substances, hence substance dualism.

Then you distinction is far too strict and arbitrary, because it logically denies the possibility for "matter" to be imbued with "mind", as I have given many examples of. Now... does that mean that imbued "mind" becomes or can become a distinct existence from the "matter" it was created within, of, defined by? Initially, no. Some imbued existences are just... robotic. They cannot become more, and are fully defined by their form. When that form dissolves, so does it. That is the nature of a complex ~ you can create complexes in the mind, that can be possess you, yet they don't exist beyond that form. They are that form, in essence. Then you have degrees of progressively more complex forms and imbued existences, extending to fully independent.

And actually... yes, I would oddly now consider incarnation to be like this, albeit we are still rooted fully in the soul, not separated from it in any way other than because our physical frame limits the ease of connection. Souls... seem capable of incredibly strange feats ~ from our perspective, anyways.

As far as I can see, although you recognise both elements of this distinction, you choose to see them as two different forms of a singular substance, a substance which is not separate from its forms but which is being itself. To me, if it were framed as an argument, it would look a little like this: "All beings have being, therefore (given that 'being' is singular) monism". You probably would want to convince me that that's not as asinine as it seems to me (and that, in turn, it is my own position that is asinine), but that's not really the point: the point is that this in itself doesn't seem to me to be a meaningful difference between us given that we both recognise the distinction between that which experiences and that which does not; we simply respond to it intellectually in different ways.

However, it would be a meaningful difference if your view is ultimately compatible with monistic idealism, because while that ontology seems to also recognise the experiencing vs non-experiencing distinction, it doesn't really, and it turns out to be incoherent or at least so severely flawed that it might as well be.

Not everything compatible with Idealism is purely belonging to the territory of Idealism... Idealism is just a certain framing, which has severe limitations and flaws as to what it can ultimately allow per the logic of its framing. When you frame certain things in certain ways, you limit what can be conceived of, how something can be conceived, and so some existences become denied as impossible. Idealism does not allow for the creation of form that be deliberately not imbued with life, such as non-biological matter, so I needed an expanded framework that allows for the reality that I am experiencing as being apparently possible.

Idealism as a framework does not make it the only way to examine mentalism, nor does abandoning imply some artificial distinction between the mental or the non-mental. You are limiting yourself by the framework by which you force everything to need to fit into, because that is how your logic rigidly works.

I am working with experiences that have expanded how I am able to perceive things, so I need something that is neither Dualism nor Idealism.

You could call my framework a Shamanic one, perhaps, because even ectoplasm can be imbued with life... or be part of a living being's existence in some way, so it is not apparently "material" in a true sense. Reality is more than our frameworks, so we cannot so easily force things into one particular frame. I cannot... not anymore.

By this I mean that really it posits that all that exists is experience, so there is really only that which experiences, not that which does not experience. It tries to sneak the latter in though as the "non-experiencing experiences" (tables, chairs, etc) of the singular Experiencer, who - and here's the incoherence - is at the same time plural experiencers. Setting aside that incoherence and allowing for a true plurality of experiencers, the further incoherence or at least severe flaw is revealed in the question: whose experiences are those?

If they (tables, chairs, etc) are the experiences of the singular Experiencer, then they are contingent on and private to that Experiencer, so how on earth do the (other) plural experiencers simultaneously experience them as their own private experiences, and not just from a singular perspective (which one would expect given a singular Experiencer), but from their own unique perspectives?

Because each incarnate experiencer is perceiving through a similar human frame, which shapes the quality of experience to be rather similar. Hence, we will experience the same thing similarly, excepting errors in DNA or the physical form that distort how the incarnate being is experiencing stuff. Hence, colour-blindness. The eye is physically damaged, or DNA is missing something, so the... aura is missing information on how to interpret something, so there is just a substitution, or nothing.

This analysis is why I wonder whether Sci is making a terrible error when he writes this:


He might not be - it depends on what he means by "consensus Experience". Taken at face value though, his suggestion falls prey to the analysis I've just described. Alternatively, in the context of his proposed trialism, it might fall prey to a different problem: free-floating Experiences divorced from the (singular) Experiencer (on Whom they ought to be contingent and to Whom they ought to be private). You and I, Valmar, have agreed that experience absent an experiencer - as some Buddhists propose - is incoherent. I hope that Sci, too, can agree with that.

To get to the point: I have been trying to understand whether this analysis applies to your (Valmar's) ontological framework, because, if it does, then this really would be a meaningful as opposed to mere semantic or otherwise more trivial difference between us.

That's why I've asked you how you defend your position against the mentalist suspicion. It's also why I've asked you "Does God as you conceive of God experience? [And do you also] conceive of God [as] all of reality[?]"

Because in my Shamanic framework, not every form is imbued with life or mind, even if it can be, so the mentalism suspicion is meaningless. For me, "God" is a particular frame which carries certain connotations, and for you, "God" must logically be a "Person", so you believe that it must either logically conclude in Idealism or Dualism, and Idealism is out because there are apparent non-mental existence. A logical error, because you haven't thought outside of that limited set of possibilities.

Now that you know why I asked those questions, perhaps you can answer that deeper question which motivated them. I couldn't quite work out the answer from your answers to the more specific questions, but the sense I get from especially your answer to the latter is that your answer would be (is), "No, the analysis does not apply, because I do not posit that all that exists is experience. I posit a genuine distinction between that which experiences and that which does not experience; I do not posit a pseudo-distinction which merely assigns certain experiences of the Experiencer the supposed role of that which does not experience (tables, chairs, etc)."

A rather unwittingly reductionist analysis... but expected, because of how you seem to perceive things, making it difficult it for you not to reduce. I used to be like that, frankly... I couldn't understand what life was in relation to matter, but after certain experiences, it seems shockingly simple to comprehend. The the experiencer is defined by experience, and that the experiencer can create forms within or outside of itself that it can choose to optionally imbue with itself or not, giving the imbued existence more or less independence. All extensions of infinity being able to limit self without losing anything.

On the other hand, you also say things like this (emphasis added by me) which seem similar to Sci's potential error, which suggest that maybe the analysis does apply to your position:


In the end, your position seems ambiguous: it is motivated by a need to transcend idealism for its perceived limitations, without recognition of the more important need to transcend idealism for its incoherence, and so those incoherent "idealistic ideas" linger in the background, surfacing only occasionally in quotes like the above.

All part of the difficulty of trying to bring words to experiences that make it clear that the bounds of what are possible are much less defined than words can easily describe. An expansion beyond Idealism cannot be reduced back to Idealism because the expanded framework includes concepts that idealism does not logically support. Like qualitative forms being able to be created without consciousness, yet being able to be perceived by multiple subjects the same way with the same framing of being incarnate human forms.

I'm not really sure how best to seek clarity from you on this given that you might still not even recognise why monistic idealism is incoherent or at least severely flawed, and thus not really understand what I'm seeking clarity on. Perhaps you do get it though, in which case I'll leave it to you as to how you clarify.

Oh, I do recognize that Idealism is incoherent ~ even fatally flawed ~ because it does not match the experiences and intuitions I have received, which have resulted in a Shamanic framework which is not Idealist, Dualist or even Animist. So, "Neutral Monism" of a Shamanic framing became suitable ~ albeit dynamic, because the set of experiences I have shared with this forum have lead me to realizing that reality has far more depth than I could have conceptualized previously, so I must adapt to new experiences, seeking a defined framework that is able to hold these experiences without contradiction or confusion.

It's my intellectual side seeking union with my intuitive side ~ which has always been previously very tough...

I've also decided to leave this post at that, because, while there's a lot more to broach even at this big-picture level, I think it's best we resolve this question first, since it's the biggest potential difference between us, and the process of resolving it could help really get to (a deeper understanding on my part of) the meat of what you are actually saying.

I hope this extended ramble can help the conversation further somewhat ~ being forced to evolve my use of descriptive language is always a positive.

(Just to flag a few other things potentially for later so you know what I have in mind and what I am otherwise not simply dismissing and ignoring: whether or not experience itself is or can be extended, and if so in what sense(s); whether or not an experiencer is and is nothing more than its experiences; the location of immaterial minds even if there is a base material reality; whether or not and in what sense God is personal; whether or not and why it is meaningful to distinguish between God as mind and as body; whether or not Brahman has a personal aspect as Krishna).

@Sciborg_S_Patel, I am also deferring a response to the questions you asked in post #114 until this has been resolved, but I hope to answer them if further discussion does not make them redundant.

All good ~ it's nice to be able to refine a metaphysical framework through discussion. Helps to force an internal look at what I myself am confused on ~ it helps to trigger my intuition, somewhat, to ask whether I'm looking at something distortedly. That's how my mind seems to work anyways... strength of intellectual curiosity triggering intuition at points.