Search Results (24)

Especially in The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James developed the polar categories of healthy-minded individuals content with their once-born religion versus sick souls who need to become twice-born in order to find religious peace. Biographers of James have concluded that he does not fit well under either of his polar categories. Drawing on both data about James’ life and on his philosophical and theological writings, I demur from the biographers’ conclusion and instead advance the thesis that the overall pattern of William James’ life is best understood as a sick soul searching for—and ultimately finding—twice-born religion in connection with mystical experiences. Notably, James attempted to theorize about mystical experiences as connecting with divine reality/ies in naturalistic ways compatible with scientific knowledge of his time. Scientific knowledge today makes it more difficult to find evidence of direct divine input in religious experiences, yet one might find value in religious experiences in terms of James’ pragmatic criterion for truth: their beneficial or adaptive effects. Full article

Constructive postmodernism is based on the monism of mind and matter, and proposes an organic philosophy which highlights the process and pan-empiricism. Chinese pre-Qin Daoist philosophy on the materiality, dynamism, and information of the Way (Dao) and human intuitive knowledge can be used as the basis for the above-mentioned statements of organic philosophy and pan-empiricism and further answer their unaddressed questions, and can manifest that the pre-Qin Daoist philosophy also has the potential to provide intellectual resources for the discussion of the philosophical mind–matter relationship. This may contribute to the further development of human science and technology. Full article

The article is devoted to the analysis of the theological-academic ontological doctrine of the three types of being formulated within the framework of the Russian theological-academic philosophy of the 19th century. The study of this problem in the context of the general analysis of the phenomenon of theological-academic philosophy allows expanding our understanding of the genesis of Russian philosophy and its religious-philosophical component. The main aim of the article is the historical-philosophical analysis (on the material of philosophical courses of Russian theological academies and original works of professors of academies) of the doctrine about three types of being, which was developed within the framework of the theological-academic philosophy in Russia in the 19th century. The set goal is achieved by means of textual and religious analysis methods, as well as historical-functional, historical-genetic, and comparative research methods. The authors conclude that the specificity of theological-academic philosophizing was determined by confessional affiliation and consisted in its theistic form: the transversal theme of all theological-academic interpretations was the problem of being. Thus, theological-academic ontology took the form of the doctrine of God as an absolute being and the world as its derivative. The theological-academic doctrine of the three types of being and the synthesizing function of the absolute in relation to theological and material being cannot be characterized as quite logical and consistent. The notion of God as an absolute being is conditioned by the aspiration of theological-academic philosophers not to go beyond traditional orthodoxy and is one of the main specific features of theological-academic philosophical interpretations of religious consciousness. At the same time, the historical and philosophical analysis of the works of professors from Russian theological academies allows tracing how the powerful ideological and theoretical potential accumulated in Russian theological academies after their reforms in the 19th century contributed to the development of professional philosophy in Russia, the development of a philosophical categorical apparatus and the systematic formation of Russian philosophical thought. The development of this theme responds to the urgent research tasks of the history of philosophy. Further, this topic is very interesting not only for historians of philosophy but also for historians of religion, historians of orthodoxy, and culturologists. Full article

In this work, an alternative attempt to motivate the Many-Worlds Interpretation (MWI) is undertaken. The usual way of arguing for MWI mostly revolves around how it might solve the measurement problem in a more straightforward and concise manner than rival interpretations. However, here an effort is made to defend MWI in an indirect manner, namely via repeated case discrimination and a process of ‘conceptual elimination’. That is, it will be argued that its major rivals, with QBism and Relational Quantum-Mechanics being among the most noteworthy ones, either face conceptual incoherence or conceptually collapse into a variant of MWI. Finally, it is argued that hidden-variable theories face severe challenges when being applied to Quantum Field Theory such that appropriate modifications may lead back to MWI, thereby purportedly leaving MWI as the only viable option. Full article

There is no corporal philosophy at the level of other philosophical subdisciplines. A research line has begun whose ultimate goal is to determine whether a somatic philosophy can be built. From a pragmatist and biopolitical approach, the present study investigated why it has not been possible to develop grounded somatic philosophy. As an answer, the “idealist–dualist episteme” is described, which encompasses invariants in the history of idealist philosophy at the ontological, gnoseological, ethical–political, and pedagogical levels. These constants reflect somatophobia, as well as an ontological and gnoseological disregard of the body, which has led to the irrelevance of the body and corporeality in philosophy until the arrival of the “bodily turn”. The critique of this prevailing idealism and dualism will enable a review of current approaches based on these positions, such as embodiment, enactivism, embodied cognition, or embodied artificial intelligence. It opens up a new philosophical line with a universalis scope that is open to the eclectic construction of a pragmatic corporal philosophy that takes into account Chinese, Japanese, or African philosophies. Full article

The metric self-organization of matterspace–time implies a nonlocal correlation of its affine connections and the fulfillment of the volumetric conservation of energy–momentum under shifts in coordinate time. Geodesic forces or accelerations in metric fields of general relativity correspond to local pushes by the Lomonosov gravitational liquid but not to the retarded interactions between distant bodies. The mathematics of Russian Cosmism for the monistic all-unity of ethereal matter–space with the continuous distribution of mass–energy replaces Newtonian gravity ‘from there to here’ with the local kinetic stresses ‘from here to there’ due to the spatial asymmetry of inertial densities within a nonlocal whole. The inverse square law for ethereal pushes of concentrated (visible) masses can be controlled locally by a subtle resonant intervention into their polarized densities. Full article

Balancing economic growth with international commitments to environmental sustainability is a global challenge. One of the main objectives of this study is to address this challenge by stimulating and sustaining motivation for environmental conservation by means of a comprehensive rethinking of the values inherent in nature and the limitations of monetary approaches to biodiversity valuation. This is achieved based on a case study of a transboundary ecological conservation project, the Heart of Borneo (HoB) in Borneo Island, covering Kalimantan in Indonesia, Borneo Malaysia comprising the states of Sarawak and Sabah, and Brunei Darussalam. This study synthesizes critical insights into the multiple ranges of life-supporting environmental values embedded in the HoB natural capital to enhance stronger motivations for environmental conservation. The study also reports on evidence gathered from extensive field studies conducted in Borneo Malaysia, confirming the correlations between environmental beliefs in value pluralism, ecological action, and environmental sustainability, and its implications for sustainable resource use and management. The synthesis is expected to serve as practical guidance for sustainable resource and environmental management decision-making, which is conceptually and universally applicable. Full article

Any successful naturalistic account of consciousness must state what consciousness is, in terms that are compatible with the rest of our naturalistic descriptions of the world. Integrated Information Theory represents a pioneering attempt to do just this. This theory accounts for the core features of consciousness by holding that there is an equivalence between the phenomenal experience associated with a system and its intrinsic causal power. The proposal, however, fails to provide insight into the qualitative character of consciousness and, as a result of its proposed equivalence between consciousness and purely internal dynamics, into the intentional character of conscious perception. In recent years, an alternate group of theories has been proposed that claims consciousness to be equivalent to certain forms of inference. One such theory is the Living Mirror theory, which holds consciousness to be a form of inference performed by all living systems. The proposal of consciousness as inference overcomes the shortcomings of Integrated Information Theory, particularly in the case of conscious perception. A synthesis of these two perspectives can be reached by appreciating that conscious living systems are self-organising in nature. This mode of organization requires them to have a high level of integration. From this perspective, we can understand consciousness as being dependent on a system possessing non-trivial amounts of integrated information while holding that the process of inference performed by the system is the fact of consciousness itself. Full article

Vasily Rozanov was one of the first Russian writers of the fin de siècle to create a nexus between the study of the history of world religions and the history of sexuality. He viewed Christianity’s asceticism as a source of the disintegration of the contemporary family. This article examines Rozanov’s strategy to synthesize religions and to use pre-Christian religions of the Middle East as proof of common physical and metaphysical essence in celestial, human, animal, and mythological human/animal/divine bodies. I argue that while his rehabilitation of the physical life by endowing it with religious value was socially positive, his self-proclaimed “mission of sexuality”, when politically motivated, was manipulative and incorporated the notion of the atavistic ‘survivals’. In conclusion, I explain that Rozanov’s monistic search for the divine in the physical body as well as his strategy to synthesize religions were additionally driven by his personal doubts in the preeminence of Christian eschatology. Full article

The Free Energy Principle (FEP) is currently one of the most promising frameworks with which to address a unified explanation of life-related phenomena. With powerful formalism that embeds a small set of assumptions, it purports to deal with complex adaptive dynamics ranging from barely unicellular organisms to complex cultural manifestations. The FEP has received increased attention in disciplines that study life, including some critique regarding its overall explanatory power and its true potential as a grand unifying theory (GUT). Recently, FEP theorists presented a contribution with the main tenets of their framework, together with possible philosophical interpretations, which lean towards so-called Markovian Monism (MM). The present paper assumes some of the abovementioned critiques, rejects the arguments advanced to invalidate the FEP’s potential to be a GUT, and overcomes criticism thereof by reviewing FEP theorists’ newly minted metaphysical commitment, namely MM. Specifically, it shows that this philosophical interpretation of the FEP argues circularly and only delivers what it initially assumes, i.e., a dual information geometry that allegedly explains epistemic access to the world based on prior dual assumptions. The origin of this circularity can be traced back to a physical description contingent on relative system-environment separation. However, the FEP itself is not committed to MM, and as a scientific theory it delivers more than what it assumes, serving as a heuristic unification principle that provides epistemic advancement for the life sciences. Full article

The purpose of this study was to characterize early Donghak thought as the fusion of two horizons, one Confucian and the other Catholic. In particular, the study divided the Donghak founder Su-un Choe Je-u’s view of divinity into three stages, and showed how the evolution of his thought through these stages can be explained as the product of a dialogue between the Confucian monist tradition based on qi or vital energy and the Catholic dualist tradition based on Thomistic scholasticism. The study adopted a comparative and historical methodology, whereby comparison was limited to similarities and differences between Su-un’s works and sources in the Confucian or Catholic tradition that we can reasonably assume to have been available to Su-un. It was found that Su-un’s thought in the early stage was marked by theistic features similar to the scholastic view of God, and that in the middle stage Su-un sought to accommodate this theism within a pantheistic framework based on the Confucian monist tradition. For convenience’ sake, this theism-within-pantheism can be referred to as Su-un’s “panentheism”. It is suggested that the creative tension within this panentheism motivated Su-un to introduce innovations in his thought. First, in the middle stage, Su-un rejected the monism of li or pattern that was prevalent in the Neo-Confucian orthodoxy of his day, reverting to the older tradition of qi-monism. Second, in the late stage of his thought, he appears to have rehabilitated li as intelligent pattern that is the source of all signs of intelligence in the natural and moral order. As for the value of the approach adopted in this study, it enables us to make better sense of obscure details in Su-un’s works by placing them in their proper historical context, as evinced by the reading of Su-un’s late stage work “Buryeon Giyeon” presented herein. It is hoped that this approach will be applied more rigorously in future studies to deepen our understanding of the intellectual history of Donghak and Cheondogyo, along with various other new religions that emerged in Korea’s modern history. Full article

Mental causation is vitally important to the integrated information theory (IIT), which says consciousness exists since it is causally efficacious. While it might not be directly apparent, metaphysical commitments have consequential entailments concerning the causal efficacy of consciousness. Commitments regarding the ontology of consciousness and the nature of causation determine which problem(s) a view of consciousness faces with respect to mental causation. Analysis of mental causation in contemporary philosophy of mind has brought several problems to the fore: the alleged lack of psychophysical laws, the causal exclusion problem, and the causal pairing problem. This article surveys the threat each problem poses to IIT based on the different metaphysical commitments IIT theorists might make. Distinctions are made between what I call reductive IIT, non-reductive IIT, and non-physicalist IIT, each of which make differing metaphysical commitments regarding the ontology of consciousness and nature of causation. Subsequently, each problem pertaining to mental causation is presented and its threat, or lack thereof, to each version of IIT is considered. While the lack of psychophysical laws appears unthreatening for all versions, reductive IIT and non-reductive IIT are seriously threatened by the exclusion problem, and it is difficult to see how they could overcome it while maintaining a commitment to the causal closure principle. Yet, non-physicalist IIT denies the principle but is therefore threatened by the pairing problem, to which I have elsewhere provided a response that is briefly outlined here. This problem also threatens non-reductive IIT, but unlike non-physicalist IIT it lacks an evident response. The ultimate aim of this survey is to provide a roadmap for IIT theorists through the maze of mental causation, by clarifying which commitments lead to which problems, and how they might or might not be overcome. Such a survey can aid IIT theorists as they further develop and hone the metaphysical commitments of IIT. Full article

Models of consciousness are usually developed within physical monist or dualistic frameworks, in which the structure and dynamics of the mind are derived from the workings of the physical brain. Little attention has been given to modelling consciousness within a mental monist framework, deriving the structure and dynamics of the mental world from primitive mental constituents only—with no neural substrate. Mental monism is gaining attention as a candidate solution to Chalmers’ Hard Problem on philosophical grounds, and it is therefore timely to examine possible formal models of consciousness within it. Here, I argue that the austere ontology of mental monism places certain constraints on possible models of consciousness, and propose a minimal set of hypotheses that a model of consciousness (within mental monism) should respect. From those hypotheses, it would be possible to construct many formal models that permit universal computation in the mental world, through cellular automata. We need further hypotheses to define transition rules for particular models, and I propose a transition rule with the unusual property of deep copying in the time dimension. Full article

The process of human understanding of the world starts from viewing complex chaos, proceeding to monism followed by the contradiction theory, and finally returning to complexity theory, but without giving up the pursuit of monism. Lao-Tzu and Heraclitus put forward their own theories of unity of opposites at almost the same time. The thought of unity of opposites has long been contained in the theory of yin and yang and the Book of Changes. In the ontology of information evolution, existence and nonexistence (you and wu in Chinese) can also be roughly interpreted as a contradictory relationship. Existence and nonexistence are two opposing worlds. Our understanding of existence needs medium. We can only indirectly grasp the current meaning of existence after the transmission of multilayer mediums and the distortion and loss of information. Aristotle mentioned the notion of medium, but the real world cannot be explained by his ideas. All transformational processes of existence rely on medium. The transformation process of existence and nonexistence is different from the transformation process in the domain of existence. There is no need to rely on medium. Full article

Herein we are not interested in merely using dynamical systems theory, graph theory, information theory, etc., to model the relationship between brain dynamics and networks, and various states and degrees of conscious processes. We are interested in the question of how phenomenal conscious experience and fundamental physics are most deeply related. Any attempt to mathematically and formally model conscious experience and its relationship to physics must begin with some metaphysical assumption in mind about the nature of conscious experience, the nature of matter and the nature of the relationship between them. These days the most prominent metaphysical fixed points are strong emergence or some variant of panpsychism. In this paper we will detail another distinct metaphysical starting point known as neutral monism. In particular, we will focus on a variant of the neutral monism of William James and Bertrand Russell. Rather than starting with physics as fundamental, as both strong emergence and panpsychism do in their own way, our goal is to suggest how one might derive fundamental physics from neutral monism. Thus, starting with two axioms grounded in our characterization of neutral monism, we will sketch out a derivation of and explanation for some key features of relativity and quantum mechanics that suggest a unity between those two theories that is generally unappreciated. Our mode of explanation throughout will be of the principle as opposed to constructive variety in something like Einstein’s sense of those terms. We will argue throughout that a bias towards property dualism and a bias toward reductive dynamical and constructive explanation lead to the hard problem and the explanatory gap in consciousness studies, and lead to serious unresolved problems in fundamental physics, such as the measurement problem and the mystery of entanglement in quantum mechanics and lack of progress in producing an empirically well-grounded theory of quantum gravity. We hope to show that given our take on neutral monism and all that follows from it, the aforementioned problems can be satisfactorily resolved leaving us with a far more intuitive and commonsense model of the relationship between conscious experience and physics. Full article