@Daniel -- when you write, ''The shift from materialism to idealism or panpsychism is already...'' are you implying that panpsychism and idealism are interchangeable or that there are more than 1 option from materialism? If the former, then to me there is an issue of consistency as panpsychism is basically everything has consciousness whereas idealism is everything is consciousness.. this is no small distinction and to me, panpsychism is a more subtle materialism.
"On its most basic level, consciousness—as functional awareness and responsivity to the environment—is a property found in many living beings."
No need to hedge on this point if you're pushing an idealist metaphysics. It should read "all living beings." Under idealism if it's alive and a being it's the appearance of mentation across a dissociative boundary.
Thank you Daniel. I find the inquiry, "What guiding stories have led us, invisibly, to this crisis point?" a rich one.
Unexamined and believed stories, no matter their content or meaning will likely lead us to a crisis point because they will limit our capacity to be present with life and what is happening and therefore the inspiration that is in connection with the emergent, ever-present flow that we can sense when we are open and absent of those preconceptions.
What if we stepped out of the patterns of conditioning which hold onto the knowns which were confabulated to placate our fear of the unknown long enough to not replace one ism for another?
What if we get still enough to unveil and feel our porousness and interconnection with life? How might that change what we notice or the muse and music and the way we respond and choreograph to it?
I ask "What within recognizes and seeks towards the ideal?" What of that is innate and moving towards itself greater realization in manifestation? What is it within that moves towards, aspires for, or even recognize goodness, truth, beauty and the honoring of all of life as not other than "self interest"?
~~~
"If you can get a handle on it, it's probably a door.
I'm wary about doors. And doorways. Doors are anticipated architectural technologies. They grant access, they permit exits. What's critical to note about doors is that they maintain the logic of the architectural frame. They are systemic agents granting mobility within familiar fields. As such, like the solutions we often offer to our most persistent civilizational challenges, doors allow us to shuffle within the already-known, to move the pieces around in the name of innovation, while maintaining the design.
Doors 'behave'.
You know what doesn't 'behave'? Cracks.
Architects don't design cracks, don't anticipate cracks. Cracks are not part of the furniture; they are the excessiveness of the frame. Design's ecstasy. They are neither external to the frame nor internal. They are not 'solutions', not guarantees, not final answers. But something about them marks deterritorial tensions, and obliquely trace out new realities. " Bayo Akomolafe
~~~
Different subject: Did the artist that created the work pictured in the top image you are using for this manifesto give her permission to you to use this image without giving her credit? In case not, and in case I did not miss where you might have named her, I would like to see her honored by at least naming her. The artist's name is Rachel Garrard
I had not known of her, yet the image, which I love, felt beautiful to me and familiar. I looked up images of some of the more well known contemporary, minimal, spiritual artists I do know thinking it was one of their works and then I google searched the image and saw that it was Rachel Garrard. So thank you for introducing me to her and illuminating more about her through your article linked below. I also just saw a bunch of her videos. I am a new fan.
In addition to being a creative person with expressions through different disciplines and media, I am the archivist and manager of my late mother Channa Horwitz’s estate, so I have a special sensitivity to seeing fine artists credited. I might have not noticed she was not credited had I not been so drawn to the image and curious about who the artist was behind it.
I’m with you on the introduction. Looking forward to understanding how the myth becomes the message, to bastardize McLuhan.
I’ve just finished binge-reading Ken Wilber’s latest, Embracing Radical Wholeness, so like any good hot take artist, I feel like an expert in integral theory.
I really admire the theory that reality can’t be reduced beyond his four quadrant model. Interior vs Exterior and Singular vs Plural.
Science, he says, has decided to only focus on the Exterior Singular quadrant (reducing everything to generic, interchangeable parts).
And systems theory doesn’t do much better: it reduces everything to the Exterior Plural (to how the relationships between things influence reality—“the problem isn’t one bad cop, it’s a system that’s comprised of incentive landscapes that promote unethical behavior”)
It seems to me that analytic idealism brings the Interior Singular perspective (the qualia of being an Geoff vs the qualia of being a bat vs perhaps the qualia of being a thermostat or even the extremely primitive qualia of being a quark), while the idea of a Collective Consciousness brings the Interior Plural dimension (the Soul Field that drives us all to behave in certain ways).
If this has been enough of a summary to make his points clear (and I’ve interpreted them correctly) what do you think of the idea that a good myth for society should encourage Showing Up (as Wilber calls it) in *all four* Quadrants?
Perhaps to be our best selves we need to create wonderful, authentic, awakened experiences for our subjective Selves, we need to honor the needs of the “I, Thou” intersubjective relationships we’re embedded within, we need to act urgently to fix the systems that are causing ecological destruction and social injustice, and we need to do it by changing one little thing at a time—tending to the part of the garden we can touch.
"it's not your ideals, nor your personal desires which I want to problematize, instead, I want to critique your method." I would never critique someone's personal desires. I speak for the words. If their desires make sense for the words they use, then I would be happy to shut up, and if they made no sense then I would be equipped to offer advise. I only advise from a transcendental perspective. Experience in a delusional age is only worthwhile if I want to get a drink on the Titanic, for which a rock climber bartender would be excellently suited. The method I am critiquing is to conflate consciousness and mind, since we are too late in the game to keep playing that card and reaping benefits.
Two frogs meet by the pond. It starts to rain. "Quick, jump in the water before we get wet." I'm about to get very critical, but I want you to know that it's not your ideals, nor your personal desires which I want to problematize. Instead, I want to critique your method.
People are tired of fear from above, almost as much as hope from above. The currency of ideas depends upon the stock of the idealist for its success, and only tangentially upon the ideas' internal logic. Without the rigor of a categorical imperative, any idea will transparently decay into the personal wants and desires of someone in a position to make the case. In this response, I will qualify the transcendent elements missing from a consciousness-idealism.
But first, the practical actions of your manifesto belie any ideals of peace, unity, and common worthiness among humanity, since you support more division (instead of addressing the source of rightwing antagonism) and more myth making (where your own ideals hardly inspire). Transcending the self without taking it with you, the solution to other people's inadequacy is not elitism, except insofar as the basis you establish is transcendent for its necessity, as opposed to its desireable idealism. But the approach, which is based in comparing self-interest, cannot hope to align with the meaning of consciousness as the ontological basis.
To identify antagonistic elements while also calling for consciousness-raising misaligns the very ideal you seek to establish. Ultimately, idealism is a tried and tired option, one which I still support provisionally. An important provision is to stop unqualified consciousness ontologizing, since without localizing the omnipresent aspect of consciousness, the mind will take up its own body and values as the worthy cause. Therefore I need to call out and address the "mind ideal" which your aforementioned personal idealism of the potential movement so strongly espoused. Tthe side-effects of self interest led to increased caution, less responsivity to idealism, and more shallowness in the voice of authority
There is a big difference between consciousness and thought. Thought is the realm of ideal-ism, since one's mind evaluates ideals in their relative importance (like for myth- and self-making paradigms, as we saw in the potential movement.) Therefore the effort to "enlighten" people has always been frought with rising public antagonism, not because the people are wrong, but because the misunderstanding of words requires regular reformation. For this manifesto, the locus of action is not consciousness itself, but rather comparative self-interest which cannot apply to transcendent selfless quality like consciousness.
Remember satcitananda. Cit is the consciousness, and cint is the root for thought. It's very close, but the quality of returning to source is that bliss and truth include each other in the knower. The main job of idealism is less sexy than promoting myths, it's untangling delusion, turning from greed, and absolving hate when possible.
To do this, we need to truly treat consciousness as the locus of action, for which we have to consider a few predicates which would make us worthy of doing so. I use the term "forms" as decompositions of the ontological factor you called consciousness, which I critique to have an unhelpful overabundance of mind.
1: the known set of forms may be incomplete (therefore humility and open-mindedness should guide consciousness in self-realization.)
2. The completeness of that set may be impossible to prove (leading to infinite decay if certain ideals are held above others, which means we need steadfastness.)
If we then seek to reunify ourselves as consciousness in consciousness, then idealism as a marketplace of values is actually the least necessary element, because any idea worth repeating belongs to the oncological basis and needs no myth making, marketing, or endless paper publishing. I have established consciousness in a categorical imperative. This is putting the market before the man, so to speak. It allows for an empire of senses, but at the end of its lifespan, we all get to choose a real idealist elevation. Not in storytelling, but in rational deconstruction of all fallacies which lead and return to self-interest. This peaceful turn of reason will allow for the power establishment to continue to enjoy desire-fulfillment, while raising the standard of living collectively. Once the people have a foundation in reality, where their connection to consciousness allows for self-transcendence and forgiveness, then we can all take the step to planetary civilization.
The short-comings of idealism prevent it from being a viable worldview in my opinion, i. e. it makes no attempt to account for the origin of the universe (I suppose because it assumes that the universe is co-extensive with the underlying mind, is this primordial mind eternal therefore the universe is eternal?), same with the origin of life and information i.e. DNA. It doesn't provide an agent that is the cause of the universe that theism does, making it non-explanatory of the cosmos as a whole. We see that the universe seems to have a beginning, and that the fine-tuning of the universe from the beginning seems to indicate evidence for a provider of constraining parameters for the universe to even get going. Idealism also doesn't seems to provide a world-founding mythology that can sustain a society, its more of a technical description.
@Daniel -- when you write, ''The shift from materialism to idealism or panpsychism is already...'' are you implying that panpsychism and idealism are interchangeable or that there are more than 1 option from materialism? If the former, then to me there is an issue of consistency as panpsychism is basically everything has consciousness whereas idealism is everything is consciousness.. this is no small distinction and to me, panpsychism is a more subtle materialism.
yes I agree, I was throwing panpsychism a bone there!
"On its most basic level, consciousness—as functional awareness and responsivity to the environment—is a property found in many living beings."
No need to hedge on this point if you're pushing an idealist metaphysics. It should read "all living beings." Under idealism if it's alive and a being it's the appearance of mentation across a dissociative boundary.
Point taken!
Thank you Daniel. I find the inquiry, "What guiding stories have led us, invisibly, to this crisis point?" a rich one.
Unexamined and believed stories, no matter their content or meaning will likely lead us to a crisis point because they will limit our capacity to be present with life and what is happening and therefore the inspiration that is in connection with the emergent, ever-present flow that we can sense when we are open and absent of those preconceptions.
What if we stepped out of the patterns of conditioning which hold onto the knowns which were confabulated to placate our fear of the unknown long enough to not replace one ism for another?
What if we get still enough to unveil and feel our porousness and interconnection with life? How might that change what we notice or the muse and music and the way we respond and choreograph to it?
I ask "What within recognizes and seeks towards the ideal?" What of that is innate and moving towards itself greater realization in manifestation? What is it within that moves towards, aspires for, or even recognize goodness, truth, beauty and the honoring of all of life as not other than "self interest"?
~~~
"If you can get a handle on it, it's probably a door.
I'm wary about doors. And doorways. Doors are anticipated architectural technologies. They grant access, they permit exits. What's critical to note about doors is that they maintain the logic of the architectural frame. They are systemic agents granting mobility within familiar fields. As such, like the solutions we often offer to our most persistent civilizational challenges, doors allow us to shuffle within the already-known, to move the pieces around in the name of innovation, while maintaining the design.
Doors 'behave'.
You know what doesn't 'behave'? Cracks.
Architects don't design cracks, don't anticipate cracks. Cracks are not part of the furniture; they are the excessiveness of the frame. Design's ecstasy. They are neither external to the frame nor internal. They are not 'solutions', not guarantees, not final answers. But something about them marks deterritorial tensions, and obliquely trace out new realities. " Bayo Akomolafe
~~~
Different subject: Did the artist that created the work pictured in the top image you are using for this manifesto give her permission to you to use this image without giving her credit? In case not, and in case I did not miss where you might have named her, I would like to see her honored by at least naming her. The artist's name is Rachel Garrard
Yes! Rachel is a friend and she is credited on the book... thanks for mentioning that here. I should have caught it and I love her work!
article I wrote about her a while back: https://www.dazeddigital.com/artsandculture/article/15328/1/daniel-pinchbeck-selects-rachel-garrard
I had not known of her, yet the image, which I love, felt beautiful to me and familiar. I looked up images of some of the more well known contemporary, minimal, spiritual artists I do know thinking it was one of their works and then I google searched the image and saw that it was Rachel Garrard. So thank you for introducing me to her and illuminating more about her through your article linked below. I also just saw a bunch of her videos. I am a new fan.
In addition to being a creative person with expressions through different disciplines and media, I am the archivist and manager of my late mother Channa Horwitz’s estate, so I have a special sensitivity to seeing fine artists credited. I might have not noticed she was not credited had I not been so drawn to the image and curious about who the artist was behind it.
I’m with you on the introduction. Looking forward to understanding how the myth becomes the message, to bastardize McLuhan.
I’ve just finished binge-reading Ken Wilber’s latest, Embracing Radical Wholeness, so like any good hot take artist, I feel like an expert in integral theory.
I really admire the theory that reality can’t be reduced beyond his four quadrant model. Interior vs Exterior and Singular vs Plural.
Science, he says, has decided to only focus on the Exterior Singular quadrant (reducing everything to generic, interchangeable parts).
And systems theory doesn’t do much better: it reduces everything to the Exterior Plural (to how the relationships between things influence reality—“the problem isn’t one bad cop, it’s a system that’s comprised of incentive landscapes that promote unethical behavior”)
It seems to me that analytic idealism brings the Interior Singular perspective (the qualia of being an Geoff vs the qualia of being a bat vs perhaps the qualia of being a thermostat or even the extremely primitive qualia of being a quark), while the idea of a Collective Consciousness brings the Interior Plural dimension (the Soul Field that drives us all to behave in certain ways).
If this has been enough of a summary to make his points clear (and I’ve interpreted them correctly) what do you think of the idea that a good myth for society should encourage Showing Up (as Wilber calls it) in *all four* Quadrants?
Perhaps to be our best selves we need to create wonderful, authentic, awakened experiences for our subjective Selves, we need to honor the needs of the “I, Thou” intersubjective relationships we’re embedded within, we need to act urgently to fix the systems that are causing ecological destruction and social injustice, and we need to do it by changing one little thing at a time—tending to the part of the garden we can touch.
"it's not your ideals, nor your personal desires which I want to problematize, instead, I want to critique your method." I would never critique someone's personal desires. I speak for the words. If their desires make sense for the words they use, then I would be happy to shut up, and if they made no sense then I would be equipped to offer advise. I only advise from a transcendental perspective. Experience in a delusional age is only worthwhile if I want to get a drink on the Titanic, for which a rock climber bartender would be excellently suited. The method I am critiquing is to conflate consciousness and mind, since we are too late in the game to keep playing that card and reaping benefits.
Two frogs meet by the pond. It starts to rain. "Quick, jump in the water before we get wet." I'm about to get very critical, but I want you to know that it's not your ideals, nor your personal desires which I want to problematize. Instead, I want to critique your method.
People are tired of fear from above, almost as much as hope from above. The currency of ideas depends upon the stock of the idealist for its success, and only tangentially upon the ideas' internal logic. Without the rigor of a categorical imperative, any idea will transparently decay into the personal wants and desires of someone in a position to make the case. In this response, I will qualify the transcendent elements missing from a consciousness-idealism.
But first, the practical actions of your manifesto belie any ideals of peace, unity, and common worthiness among humanity, since you support more division (instead of addressing the source of rightwing antagonism) and more myth making (where your own ideals hardly inspire). Transcending the self without taking it with you, the solution to other people's inadequacy is not elitism, except insofar as the basis you establish is transcendent for its necessity, as opposed to its desireable idealism. But the approach, which is based in comparing self-interest, cannot hope to align with the meaning of consciousness as the ontological basis.
To identify antagonistic elements while also calling for consciousness-raising misaligns the very ideal you seek to establish. Ultimately, idealism is a tried and tired option, one which I still support provisionally. An important provision is to stop unqualified consciousness ontologizing, since without localizing the omnipresent aspect of consciousness, the mind will take up its own body and values as the worthy cause. Therefore I need to call out and address the "mind ideal" which your aforementioned personal idealism of the potential movement so strongly espoused. Tthe side-effects of self interest led to increased caution, less responsivity to idealism, and more shallowness in the voice of authority
There is a big difference between consciousness and thought. Thought is the realm of ideal-ism, since one's mind evaluates ideals in their relative importance (like for myth- and self-making paradigms, as we saw in the potential movement.) Therefore the effort to "enlighten" people has always been frought with rising public antagonism, not because the people are wrong, but because the misunderstanding of words requires regular reformation. For this manifesto, the locus of action is not consciousness itself, but rather comparative self-interest which cannot apply to transcendent selfless quality like consciousness.
Remember satcitananda. Cit is the consciousness, and cint is the root for thought. It's very close, but the quality of returning to source is that bliss and truth include each other in the knower. The main job of idealism is less sexy than promoting myths, it's untangling delusion, turning from greed, and absolving hate when possible.
To do this, we need to truly treat consciousness as the locus of action, for which we have to consider a few predicates which would make us worthy of doing so. I use the term "forms" as decompositions of the ontological factor you called consciousness, which I critique to have an unhelpful overabundance of mind.
1: the known set of forms may be incomplete (therefore humility and open-mindedness should guide consciousness in self-realization.)
2. The completeness of that set may be impossible to prove (leading to infinite decay if certain ideals are held above others, which means we need steadfastness.)
If we then seek to reunify ourselves as consciousness in consciousness, then idealism as a marketplace of values is actually the least necessary element, because any idea worth repeating belongs to the oncological basis and needs no myth making, marketing, or endless paper publishing. I have established consciousness in a categorical imperative. This is putting the market before the man, so to speak. It allows for an empire of senses, but at the end of its lifespan, we all get to choose a real idealist elevation. Not in storytelling, but in rational deconstruction of all fallacies which lead and return to self-interest. This peaceful turn of reason will allow for the power establishment to continue to enjoy desire-fulfillment, while raising the standard of living collectively. Once the people have a foundation in reality, where their connection to consciousness allows for self-transcendence and forgiveness, then we can all take the step to planetary civilization.
This has been the mask, falling from a player.
The short-comings of idealism prevent it from being a viable worldview in my opinion, i. e. it makes no attempt to account for the origin of the universe (I suppose because it assumes that the universe is co-extensive with the underlying mind, is this primordial mind eternal therefore the universe is eternal?), same with the origin of life and information i.e. DNA. It doesn't provide an agent that is the cause of the universe that theism does, making it non-explanatory of the cosmos as a whole. We see that the universe seems to have a beginning, and that the fine-tuning of the universe from the beginning seems to indicate evidence for a provider of constraining parameters for the universe to even get going. Idealism also doesn't seems to provide a world-founding mythology that can sustain a society, its more of a technical description.