BEING, MIND AND THE ABSOLUTE:
THREE LEVELS OF RELATIONSHIP IN THE WORLD
I.
Consciousness, Mind and Nature
II. Consciousness, Mind and World
III. Being and the Absolute
ANIL MITRA PHD, COPYRIGHT © 1999 REVISED May 2003
Document status May 15, 2003: No further action needed
for Journey in Being
I have reviewed the content and
the essence of those ideas and arguments with which I agree have been absorbed
elsewhere, primarily to Journey in Being
Relative to the frames and the HTMLHelp formats, the present straight html version is most
current [changes are minor]
Commentary: I have come quite
some distance since writing this essay: my understanding of mind,
consciousness, being is far advanced relative to where I was
I no longer subscribe or need to
subscribe to any idealism to understand the place of mind… I used the
idealism of this essay because of the difficulty of incorporating mind in a
materialist framework and the point that the idea was much more concrete than
imagined has become the point that matter, mental content are not the definite
and separate entities we may think them to be… and the difficulty of the
mind / matter question has been absorbed into an analysis of the objects and
our understanding of them
My approach to understanding,
especially the generalized transcendental method, which, though not new, has
become much more refined, more powerful, more direct and stripped of parochial
logic
Further action if and when I
decide to focus on mind / consciousness: Here is what may be useful
The logic of the
“graded” idealism
Some insights such as the
diffusion of consciousness and identity
Suggestions for research
Note, however, that even though
Journey in Being is not specialist it often goes far
beyond the present essay in its own domain. Therefore, various suggestions for
research / thought are resolved while others are more clearly stated… an
example is the binding problem of consciousness
PREFACE
My thought on mind and consciousness and
their place in the world is at three levels. The first level
is scientific. At this level I seek to understand and explain mind and its characteristics,
especially consciousness, as a part of the biological and physical world that
in its elemental description -i.e. physical and biological- contains no
explicit reference to mind. At this level my thinking is informed by the recent
work on consciousness and, more generally, by the Western Tradition
Before continuing, I want to make some comments
on the biological and physical world
or bio-physical world. I
include both biology and physics because I do not want to get into a biology vs. physics debate; that is not a topic without
interest but, relative to the concerns of this essay, it is marginal. My second
comment is that the bio-physical world is usually thought by most academic
workers in philosophy, science and related fields in the English speaking world
to encompass or constitute nature.
The precise definition of nature is not important but it includes the ideas of being elemental, having full and independent existence,
something that is not constructed or
reconstructed by man and society. Mind is usually thought to be
part of nature but not possessed of fully independent existence, i.e., while
mind may not be reducible to [bio-physical] nature, it is caused by or
explainable in terms of [bio-physical] nature. Finally, I believe that there is
exactly one world in the metaphysical sense and, relative to that meaning, have
been using “world” in a common metaphorical way
At the second
level I see mind as having an existence that is independent of
the [bio-physical] natural world and the questions of priority and relationship
between mind and nature arise. This split is dependent on a narrow concept of
nature that is materialist in
that the fundamental elements of nature are defined in physics and biology. I
believe that many - though certainly not all - academic workers in science and
philosophy in the English speaking world find the idea of mind as something
outside of nature, even in its bio-physical sense, as incorrect and
incomprehensible. The expectation is that mind, like life, will yield to
naturalist-materialist explanation. [This is not a one dimensional attitude in
that materialism comes in a number of forms: explicit materialism - also called
central state materialism or physicalism when referring to mind, behaviorism,
functionalism, computer functionalism and cognitivism, and biological
naturalism.]
My position at this second level, simply
stated, is as follows. The establishment of any system of explanation occurs
through success rather than explicit proof. There are good reasons - scientific
and existential - to consider alternatives to any narrow naturalism. It
is valid, while paying adequate heed to Occam’s principle of economy of
hypotheses, to combine systems of explanation - but not to confuse them. It is
important to be imaginative in the generation but rigorous in the [final]
selection of ideas. My position here is naturalist but not materialist: it
recognizes mind as a fully independent element of nature. The attitude is not
essentially anti-materialist, for it leaves open the relative weights,
distributions and relations to be attached to matter, life and mind. Once this
general position is established, it forms the framework for further ontological
specification. An example of this is considered below in the second circle, Consciousness, Mind and World
There are various problems related to the
assignment of an independent ontological status to mind. These may be summed up
under “tradition” but include the scientific world view or
materialism and common sense. However, this tradition has not at all succeeded
in explaining mind in its own terms and therefore mind stands as a very real
reminder of the possibility of ontological or metaphysical incompleteness of
the tradition. It is therefore reasonable to entertain an ontologically
independent status for mind
The idea or possibility
of an independent ontological status to mind [implied by the second level] is
itself questionable in that mind itself or mind and matter together may be
ontologically or explanatorily insufficient principles. Thus I entertain a third level, the level of Being, at which the nature of being is
much an unknown as it is a given. As an alternate to the idea of Being, I have
recently been considering the system of concepts that center on the Noumenon as described by Kant and
Schopenhauer; however the development of this possibility is something that I
am currently working with and is not yet ready for communication
When I stated above that the first level is
scientific, I did not imply that the second and third levels are not
scientific in content or are counter-scientific in attitude. Rather, I
meant that -at the present stage of development- science [as usually
construed] must be supplemented by philosophy and constructive imagination in
order to obtain a picture of mind and world
..
I have been attempting to work out the
relations at the three levels for a while. One of the problems that arises, especially at the second level, is that there are a number
of interdependent ideas that require mutual formulation - it is not sufficient
to focus on each idea and work [modify] it in isolation. Thus in the fall of
1998, while hiking in the mountains of Northern California, I conceived of a
certain set of relationships, arranged in a circle, among mind, minds and
world... I scribbled down the ideas on a scrap of paper and, later, wrote them
up as Consciousness, Mind and World:
The set of details of each circle
is worked out in a text article. The text for the first circle is a separate
document, Problems
in the Science and Philosophy of Mind. The
articles for Consciousness, Mind and World and for Being and the
Absolute are part of the present web document
The text article for the first
circle is a structured and comprehensive review of the problems of mind and
consciousness. The focus is on modern research in consciousness and considers
alternatives and solution frameworks. In this first article I consider what it
means to have a materialist or naturalist [in the limited sense] explanation of
mind and consciousness. I suggest that our concepts of matter may be radically
changed as prerequisite to establishment of such explanations
In the second article, Consciousness, Mind
and the World I find an approach that some persons will label absolute
idealism. Any such approach will necessarily have a basis in unifying
concepts. The present approach has the following additional characteristics:
It is founded in natural observation and reflection.
It requires significant reworking of the nature of the idea, and ideational
relations. The work finds that our common notion of the idea lacks scope and
substance
The progression from a limited to
a more encompassing naturalism and, specifically, the relations within mind,
among minds and among mind and world considered in the second article open up
considerations on relations among world, mind, actual and absolute being. [Such
considerations remain naturalistic and stand indifferent to any impressed
theism.] These topics are the contents of Being and the Absolute
The question of sources and acknowledgements
is complex. Problems in the Science
and Philosophy of Mind includes some
discussion of the issue and a bibliography and reference section. My thinking
regarding the second and third circles does not draw as significantly from the
literature. This is not to say that my ideas regarding idealism and being are
pure creations even though my thinking has been fairly independent. The
concepts of idealism are part of a number of cultural heritages. The idea of
Being has been with us explicitly since Aristotle, and the idea of Being as a
question is suggested by analogy with algebra [solve the equation f[x] = 0] or
the idea of philosophy that includes the question “what is
philosophy?” Thus my indebtedness to thinkers such as Husserl and Heidegger
is less direct than may be thought even though I do have some acquaintance with
Being and Time and with Husserl’s thought. My real debt is to the various
cultures and to the great natural universe within which I live
Anil Mitra
October, 1999
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