Tuesday, 28 May 2019


One version of idealism is the inverse of panpsychism. Instead of the material ultimates having an inside, a primitive prehension which locally unifies into the various centres of consciousness we say that the primitive phenomena borne like ripples by absolute consciousness have an outside, which is how they appear to the dissociated centres of consciousness which form in the phenomenal field. This is a neat trick because it evades the problem of integration which dogs panpsychism. In the objective field which embraces the outsides of the primitive phenomena there is no problem of integration; these outsides which we know as material reality only interact as only far as the needs of whatever our current field theory requires. It is a dual aspect theory, and hence a kind of dualism, which actually fits together like a neat puzzle. The other version of Idealism is the non-dual or rhizomatic one where all phenomena are the projections of the 'one' subject and the plurality of centres of consciousness is implicit in the branching projection. In this case there seems to be a recurrence of an integration problem since there is no a priori reason why the worlds of projected for each centre should 'experience' integration with each other, their synchrony is, as it were, scripted from outside them. Is this really the difficulty it appears to be, or does it depend on an error of concretising a metaphor? Or again, might it not be truer to seek a sort of dialectical resolution of these alternatives?

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