That's a bit of an overstatement but hey, I needed to use the photo and I like alliteration.
I'm reading a book by Bernardo Kastrup called Meaning in Absurdity. Though the book is quite short, I can't hope to sum it up at all... or offer any shorthand of what Kastrup is on about except to say that I find some of it convincing and all of it inspiring.
The thing I wanted to draw attention to here was what he says about 'bivalence'. From what I understand, this forms a foundation for logic - it's basically that p cannot equal not-p. To put that is more normal speech, something cannot be both true and false. There either is or is not a laptop on my desk in front of me. So the theory has it.
But consider this sentence:
This statement is not true.
Or consider the bizarreness of the quantum world - that photons can affect each other at a distance. That observation changes, or seems to change, the behaviour of particles.
There's a lot more in that vein, which tends to blow the mind.
The big picture claim is that our consciousness creates the world we experience - which suggests that the world we experience is made of mind not matter... and that seems to suggest that all is mind.
I would like to ask him what this means for dogs. I mean, is their world utterly different? Or just simpler? Or a variant? What about an octopus - do all its minds in its different arms create different, though consistent and coherent worlds?
But I would also like to ask him how this impacts ethics. If we accept that we make the world, or rather, we make the world that we inhabit, constrained by coherence and agreement with a kind of universal consciousness, which we reconstruct with new paradigms (as Thomas Kuhn suggests at with the paradigm shifts in science) then... wee, what about morality? This view admits that it's constructed.... but then... what?
It also connected in my mind with the latest interview on Shrink Rap Radio . Dr. Dave speaks to a cultural anthropologist who argues that we construct ideas of normality vs abnormality, sanity vs madness. His view is that there's a continuum or spectrum - and I am happy to agree with that. But what if there's no true/untrue, sane/insane. What if we're often both... or neither? And how does the shared consciousness idea play into this?
I've just finished Mind Fixers, a book about the history of psychiatry - and the perceived - but false - dualities in that profession: mind and body, nature and nurture, genes and environment. One thing that struck me - in every new era there has been a perceived 'crisis of mental health'. So, in the late 1800s, when mental asylums were first opened, they thought they'd need space for a certain number of people but once they were in place they seemed to need four times the spaces. Then it was believed there was an epidemic of anxiety, then depression... think how rates of autism, ADHD, PTSD suddenly blossom. We create a category and then reality floods it.
To separate experience into us and the world somehow doesn't seem to align with what actually happens...
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