Post by nymph on Apr 29, 2018 3:56:11 GMT -5
[8:33 PM] iso-jellyskelly | TiSe (II-I): First some necessary preamble on why body doesn’t cause mind, or vice versa, for Spinoza.
For Spinoza God is the only true substance that is exists and Godsubstance has an infinite number of attributes. In other words God is everything that could possibly exist in the universe, and everything is God even if qualitatively different. Nothing too crazy there; lots of us think God is just everything.
Humans are only able to experience two of those attributes: 1. Extension; and 2. Thought. Instances of those attributes are called modes. For example your body is a mode of extension, and your idea/concept of your body is a mode of thought. As I mentioned, for Spinoza, extension can never ever ever be the cause of a thought. Which seems silly, because we like to think our thoughts are caused by the extended world around us. Most of our current paradigms dictate so. Nonetheless, for Spinoza, only extended things can be the causes of extended things, and only thinking things can be the causes of thinking things. So, perception is simply extended things causally effecting your extended body. The attribute of thought will have a corresponding idea of that effect. In this manner, each attribute (extension and thought) contains an infinite causal chain (because God contains all the causes). But they are separated.
Still, the order of the causes and effects on each chain align in a one to one correspondence in the mind of God. So each extended thing and its causes, always has a perfectly corresponding idea of that respective thing and cause...in the mind of God. It has to be that way otherwise God would have the wrong ideas about the wrong things. In other words God has an isomorphic relation between extension and thought, but one cannot be used to explain the other.(edited)
[8:34 PM] iso-jellyskelly | TiSe (II-I): Avoiding extension (let’s call it E) as the causal explanation for thought (let’s call it T), or vice versa, is actually logically necessary for a bunch of reasons.
Ultimately, Spinoza knew that:
1. If all thought was causally determined by some externality, then a human could never think of a truly self-derived axiom.
Spinoza thought these were among the only things that accurately reflected the Mind of God. Why? Because they represent innate knowledge are an essential properties of the entire attribute. If one comes to know a logical axiom without appealing to E, that necessitates that the attribute of T must have some other cause that is not extension — and more importantly, that permeates through the entire attribute, because certain logical axioms are an essential property of T.
On the other side of the coin, he thought the attribute of extension had its own essential properties. For E, we might say the obvious laws of physics or geometrical principles, qualia etc. were essential properties of the Attribute E. Therefore humans also possess the idea of those properties just as they are in the mind of God, because it’s a property of attribute T.
Outside of those sorts of things, Spinoza thought perfect divine knowledge of the attributes was not truly possible. Human thought and perception was “confused”.(edited)
[8:35 PM] iso-jellyskelly | TiSe (II-I): 2. The second reason Spinoza maintains a strict causal separation of thought and extension is for the purpose of holism in thought, which is a very good reason, just on the grounds that it seems intuitively necessary. We have finite modes of thought, which have finite causes, and we can only have certain thoughts existing in a network of related and previously acquired thoughts which caused those thoughts.
Significantly, this is also related to the matter of delineating individuals — individuals cannot have the exact same spatiotemporality, and are according to Spinoza “bounded self preserving entities in motion”. Therefore individuals cannot have the exact same correspondent thoughts for their bodies. This is related to mind-relativity across individuals, but also, because the thoughts cannot be the same as God’s thoughts otherwise we’d never be wrong about anything.
Okay so those are the parts that matter for what I say about Jung’s Metaphysics. Moving along. Brb.
[11:16 PM] iso-jellyskelly | TiSe (II-I): (cont’d)
I’ve said before, Jung’s biggest problem for his theory of the collective unconscious (and by extension, synchronicity/acausal) is that he was never quite able to get the locality of this archetypal container just right. He ran the gamut from suggesting other dimensions, inscription in the germ cells, platonic form like structures, and probably a ton of other stuff...as have his followers. He was very unsure about this stuff, but deeply wanted it to be considered ontological and material, and not simply a matter of the subjectivity. The transhistorical/universal/pervading nature of the archetypes has to be preserved, of course. Thats the appeal. But how do they get from there to in the individual mind? Did it simply permeate through matter? Causal problems and questions abounded and he tried to solve this problem with quantum physics and Pauli and became a bit of a laughing stock in certain circles. Poor guy. He should have just used Spinoza.
Apparently Jung thought Spinoza was some sort of tyrannical radical materialist and heretic, but he ignored the very part of Spinoza that allows for what, I think, is an actual philosophically tenable acausal framework and coherent metaphysical collective unconscious — Spinoza’s very strict rule of non-causality, which conveniently, also happens to allow for a matching/correspondent external and mental world.(edited)
[11:17 PM] iso-jellyskelly | TiSe (II-I): To show how this potentially works, recall above, where I described the “essential properties of attributes”, as being the only perfect truths humans can ever know that can accurately reflect the knowledge that exists mind of God. To reiterate:
ESSENTIAL PROPERTIES
Essential properties of the attribute of thought are innate logical principles. Ideas such as negation, conjunction, synthesis, triangulation, entailment, conditionality...whatever necessary operators we require to have intelligible thoughts.
Essential Properties of extension might be certain fundamental geometric principles found in nature, fractal patterns, the laws of physics, the difference between animate and inanimate, velocities, force. (One’s list might differ on what counts as essential in the material world).
MATERIAL ESSENCE IS IMMANENT IN THE MIND
Extension is reflected in Thought, so we must have ideas of the essence(s) of Extension, as well as our innate logical thinking rules, and we also listed some possibilities above.
The essence of an attribute, must always be present because attributes contain all the causes and effects, so they’re present all the time. If the essence is not there, the attribute will cease to exist. Therefore, essential properties are always present, and always isomorphic.
PARALLEL, RELATIVE, & UNCONSCIOUS
Essential properties within mind and matter will always have respective parallel correspondents. In individuals that means essential properties affecting you bodily will also affect you mentally in an analogous way. What does it mean to be affected by a geometric principle? We experience them by extension, but what effect does it have it on psyche?
—(edited)
[11:18 PM] iso-jellyskelly | TiSe (II-I): Jung is often quoted as metaphorically comparing the archetype to the geometrical structure of a crystal. While the perfect form is never realized in the actuality of the crystals manifestation. However the essence is still contained within. This is meant to illustrate by example image of archetype is not the archetype itself but rather one of many manifestions, mythos, etc. but the archetype is still essential.
He ultimately described archetypes as “universal organizing principles, that structure the psyche and the world around us”. Something to that effect. I’d be remiss if I didn’t go on to point out their alignment with Spinoza’s essential properties (if they aren’t glaringly obvious yet):
- inherited and innate (essence is immanent)
- transhistorical (attributes are this way)
- Organizing and dynamic
- Existing everywhere but also subjectively represented (universal laws and mind-relativity)
- Psychological states are acted out in certain patterns, and embodied in appearance/signifiers (mind-body parallelism).
Why are we not taking Jung’s crystal metaphor more literally, I wonder? Geometry as a sacred and divine life organizing principle is obviously not a new idea. We see these concepts used to describe all sorts of esoteric things — Hegel’s dialectic comes mind. The dark/light sides of psyche are seen as affirming/negating. Numbers take on special meanings. The Egyptians used to say that “meaning is angle”.
Much like the archetype, the essential attributes of thought do not contain the skeletons of ordering principles alone — the principles are applied to an individuals mental contents, gleaned from unique personal experiences. It’s not that hard to imagine how geometric principles and physical ideas like inertia and dispersion might organize and drive your psychological content and actions, identically.(edited)
[11:19 PM] iso-jellyskelly | TiSe (II-I): We use this sort language in CT all the time — Ji retraction. Pinching and meticulous thought. We don’t need to have a causal connection that glues the act-thought together. They’re self-evidently connected — that’s how Auburn ascertained them. (under Spinoza then, Ti is one complex idea that corresponds to one complex set of extended bodily signs)
Another great example here is Rupert Sheldrake’s theory of Morphic Resonance, which is very much dependent on such organizing principles, as they apply to the natural world. He, like Jung, has no (intelligible) idea where the hell morphic fields can be found. Similar to Jung, he posits morphogenetic fields exist outside spatiotemporality. Like Jung, he also sought to defer to quantum physics to situate his biological ordering principles — which also, not coincidentally, had been empirically studied in crystallization processes. Another hint that perhaps that we ought to take Jung’s metaphor literally.(edited)
[11:25 PM] iso-jellyskelly | TiSe (II-I): Here is an example of such an endeavour:(edited)
[11:25 PM] iso-jellyskelly | TiSe (II-I): cogprints.org/1836/1/jap94web.html
[11:28 PM] iso-jellyskelly | TiSe (II-I): I’ll give a cookie to the person who can show how Spinoza can be finessed a bit prove Astrological principles are valid :smiley:
[11:42 PM] iso-jellyskelly | TiSe (II-I): Damn @phibious that is a very cool mathematical breakdown. I would like to be in your brain for a day haha
[11:43 PM] iso-jellyskelly | TiSe (II-I): I was never good at stuff like that
[11:55 PM] iso-jellyskelly | TiSe (II-I): Oh I forgot to add the following:
While for Spinoza your thought is limited to your own body (with good reason) — the Rule of Containment means that you might be a constituent part of a larger body (a self-preserving unity of parts in motion together).
As such, societies can be individuals collectively — and as a constituent, we inherit the essential properties of that container. It would work with any system. Like maybe...the solar system? Are there not some essential geometrical principles in that individual for which we may or may not have a psychically isomorphic equivalent? :thinking::laughing::dizzy:
For Spinoza God is the only true substance that is exists and Godsubstance has an infinite number of attributes. In other words God is everything that could possibly exist in the universe, and everything is God even if qualitatively different. Nothing too crazy there; lots of us think God is just everything.
Humans are only able to experience two of those attributes: 1. Extension; and 2. Thought. Instances of those attributes are called modes. For example your body is a mode of extension, and your idea/concept of your body is a mode of thought. As I mentioned, for Spinoza, extension can never ever ever be the cause of a thought. Which seems silly, because we like to think our thoughts are caused by the extended world around us. Most of our current paradigms dictate so. Nonetheless, for Spinoza, only extended things can be the causes of extended things, and only thinking things can be the causes of thinking things. So, perception is simply extended things causally effecting your extended body. The attribute of thought will have a corresponding idea of that effect. In this manner, each attribute (extension and thought) contains an infinite causal chain (because God contains all the causes). But they are separated.
Still, the order of the causes and effects on each chain align in a one to one correspondence in the mind of God. So each extended thing and its causes, always has a perfectly corresponding idea of that respective thing and cause...in the mind of God. It has to be that way otherwise God would have the wrong ideas about the wrong things. In other words God has an isomorphic relation between extension and thought, but one cannot be used to explain the other.(edited)
[8:34 PM] iso-jellyskelly | TiSe (II-I): Avoiding extension (let’s call it E) as the causal explanation for thought (let’s call it T), or vice versa, is actually logically necessary for a bunch of reasons.
Ultimately, Spinoza knew that:
1. If all thought was causally determined by some externality, then a human could never think of a truly self-derived axiom.
Spinoza thought these were among the only things that accurately reflected the Mind of God. Why? Because they represent innate knowledge are an essential properties of the entire attribute. If one comes to know a logical axiom without appealing to E, that necessitates that the attribute of T must have some other cause that is not extension — and more importantly, that permeates through the entire attribute, because certain logical axioms are an essential property of T.
On the other side of the coin, he thought the attribute of extension had its own essential properties. For E, we might say the obvious laws of physics or geometrical principles, qualia etc. were essential properties of the Attribute E. Therefore humans also possess the idea of those properties just as they are in the mind of God, because it’s a property of attribute T.
Outside of those sorts of things, Spinoza thought perfect divine knowledge of the attributes was not truly possible. Human thought and perception was “confused”.(edited)
[8:35 PM] iso-jellyskelly | TiSe (II-I): 2. The second reason Spinoza maintains a strict causal separation of thought and extension is for the purpose of holism in thought, which is a very good reason, just on the grounds that it seems intuitively necessary. We have finite modes of thought, which have finite causes, and we can only have certain thoughts existing in a network of related and previously acquired thoughts which caused those thoughts.
Significantly, this is also related to the matter of delineating individuals — individuals cannot have the exact same spatiotemporality, and are according to Spinoza “bounded self preserving entities in motion”. Therefore individuals cannot have the exact same correspondent thoughts for their bodies. This is related to mind-relativity across individuals, but also, because the thoughts cannot be the same as God’s thoughts otherwise we’d never be wrong about anything.
Okay so those are the parts that matter for what I say about Jung’s Metaphysics. Moving along. Brb.
[11:16 PM] iso-jellyskelly | TiSe (II-I): (cont’d)
I’ve said before, Jung’s biggest problem for his theory of the collective unconscious (and by extension, synchronicity/acausal) is that he was never quite able to get the locality of this archetypal container just right. He ran the gamut from suggesting other dimensions, inscription in the germ cells, platonic form like structures, and probably a ton of other stuff...as have his followers. He was very unsure about this stuff, but deeply wanted it to be considered ontological and material, and not simply a matter of the subjectivity. The transhistorical/universal/pervading nature of the archetypes has to be preserved, of course. Thats the appeal. But how do they get from there to in the individual mind? Did it simply permeate through matter? Causal problems and questions abounded and he tried to solve this problem with quantum physics and Pauli and became a bit of a laughing stock in certain circles. Poor guy. He should have just used Spinoza.
Apparently Jung thought Spinoza was some sort of tyrannical radical materialist and heretic, but he ignored the very part of Spinoza that allows for what, I think, is an actual philosophically tenable acausal framework and coherent metaphysical collective unconscious — Spinoza’s very strict rule of non-causality, which conveniently, also happens to allow for a matching/correspondent external and mental world.(edited)
[11:17 PM] iso-jellyskelly | TiSe (II-I): To show how this potentially works, recall above, where I described the “essential properties of attributes”, as being the only perfect truths humans can ever know that can accurately reflect the knowledge that exists mind of God. To reiterate:
ESSENTIAL PROPERTIES
Essential properties of the attribute of thought are innate logical principles. Ideas such as negation, conjunction, synthesis, triangulation, entailment, conditionality...whatever necessary operators we require to have intelligible thoughts.
Essential Properties of extension might be certain fundamental geometric principles found in nature, fractal patterns, the laws of physics, the difference between animate and inanimate, velocities, force. (One’s list might differ on what counts as essential in the material world).
MATERIAL ESSENCE IS IMMANENT IN THE MIND
Extension is reflected in Thought, so we must have ideas of the essence(s) of Extension, as well as our innate logical thinking rules, and we also listed some possibilities above.
The essence of an attribute, must always be present because attributes contain all the causes and effects, so they’re present all the time. If the essence is not there, the attribute will cease to exist. Therefore, essential properties are always present, and always isomorphic.
PARALLEL, RELATIVE, & UNCONSCIOUS
Essential properties within mind and matter will always have respective parallel correspondents. In individuals that means essential properties affecting you bodily will also affect you mentally in an analogous way. What does it mean to be affected by a geometric principle? We experience them by extension, but what effect does it have it on psyche?
—(edited)
[11:18 PM] iso-jellyskelly | TiSe (II-I): Jung is often quoted as metaphorically comparing the archetype to the geometrical structure of a crystal. While the perfect form is never realized in the actuality of the crystals manifestation. However the essence is still contained within. This is meant to illustrate by example image of archetype is not the archetype itself but rather one of many manifestions, mythos, etc. but the archetype is still essential.
He ultimately described archetypes as “universal organizing principles, that structure the psyche and the world around us”. Something to that effect. I’d be remiss if I didn’t go on to point out their alignment with Spinoza’s essential properties (if they aren’t glaringly obvious yet):
- inherited and innate (essence is immanent)
- transhistorical (attributes are this way)
- Organizing and dynamic
- Existing everywhere but also subjectively represented (universal laws and mind-relativity)
- Psychological states are acted out in certain patterns, and embodied in appearance/signifiers (mind-body parallelism).
Why are we not taking Jung’s crystal metaphor more literally, I wonder? Geometry as a sacred and divine life organizing principle is obviously not a new idea. We see these concepts used to describe all sorts of esoteric things — Hegel’s dialectic comes mind. The dark/light sides of psyche are seen as affirming/negating. Numbers take on special meanings. The Egyptians used to say that “meaning is angle”.
Much like the archetype, the essential attributes of thought do not contain the skeletons of ordering principles alone — the principles are applied to an individuals mental contents, gleaned from unique personal experiences. It’s not that hard to imagine how geometric principles and physical ideas like inertia and dispersion might organize and drive your psychological content and actions, identically.(edited)
[11:19 PM] iso-jellyskelly | TiSe (II-I): We use this sort language in CT all the time — Ji retraction. Pinching and meticulous thought. We don’t need to have a causal connection that glues the act-thought together. They’re self-evidently connected — that’s how Auburn ascertained them. (under Spinoza then, Ti is one complex idea that corresponds to one complex set of extended bodily signs)
Another great example here is Rupert Sheldrake’s theory of Morphic Resonance, which is very much dependent on such organizing principles, as they apply to the natural world. He, like Jung, has no (intelligible) idea where the hell morphic fields can be found. Similar to Jung, he posits morphogenetic fields exist outside spatiotemporality. Like Jung, he also sought to defer to quantum physics to situate his biological ordering principles — which also, not coincidentally, had been empirically studied in crystallization processes. Another hint that perhaps that we ought to take Jung’s metaphor literally.(edited)
[11:25 PM] iso-jellyskelly | TiSe (II-I): Here is an example of such an endeavour:(edited)
[11:25 PM] iso-jellyskelly | TiSe (II-I): cogprints.org/1836/1/jap94web.html
[11:28 PM] iso-jellyskelly | TiSe (II-I): I’ll give a cookie to the person who can show how Spinoza can be finessed a bit prove Astrological principles are valid :smiley:
[11:42 PM] iso-jellyskelly | TiSe (II-I): Damn @phibious that is a very cool mathematical breakdown. I would like to be in your brain for a day haha
[11:43 PM] iso-jellyskelly | TiSe (II-I): I was never good at stuff like that
[11:55 PM] iso-jellyskelly | TiSe (II-I): Oh I forgot to add the following:
While for Spinoza your thought is limited to your own body (with good reason) — the Rule of Containment means that you might be a constituent part of a larger body (a self-preserving unity of parts in motion together).
As such, societies can be individuals collectively — and as a constituent, we inherit the essential properties of that container. It would work with any system. Like maybe...the solar system? Are there not some essential geometrical principles in that individual for which we may or may not have a psychically isomorphic equivalent? :thinking::laughing::dizzy: