I appreciated the long-form reasoning. I don't know whether I agree with the entire arc. But the
resonant part is the persistent and [quasi]periodic feedback(s) within and beyond one's
"self". I don't like the talk of "notion of 'the world'" very much. I also
prefer to stick closer to the body.
And given that context, when the mystics claim they take nothing for granted, it feels to
me similar to my claim that what one "takes for granted" is a matter of degree,
not kind. And this is an honest question. Do the mystics we interact with think of things
like doubt and belief, or System 1 vs. System 2, as differences in kind? If so, then they
are posturing grifters.
It takes a) a hero doses of Ψ (or deep meditation, hitting rock bottom, etc.)
and b) methodical practice to crack open and re-think the things you take for
granted. And there's a different character to re-thinking (e.g.) the way you
make coffee versus (e.g) re-learning how to live after losing your legs in a
rafting accident. To boot, such efforts are life-long and domain-specific.
Anyone who does NOT admit those methodological requirements and types of
re-thinking is a poser.
If *that's* what you mean by "mystic", then I'm on your side. But if you mean
people who actually do this work, attempt to un-think and re-think what they take for
granted with (relatively) tried and true methods, then I'm pretty confident I disagree.
(How to tell the difference between posers and authentic seekers is another problem, of
course. I wouldn't trust a guru who claims to doubt everything, yet's never scuba dived
or taken a hero dose. Similarly, I wouldn't trust an adrenaline bro's pseudo profound
bullshit about nonduality.)
I think what I say above hews close to the thread. *If* there's a relation between objective and subjective, it lies in
the mechanisms by which the feedback(s) maintain. I don't like the word "sensation" so much as
"perception". Re-perceiving things previously taken for granted inches one toward the other, the ¬self.
Whether the other is "the world" or not ... well "the world" is an unfortunate controlling idea
that takes work to avoid.
On 12/2/25 4:30 AM, Santafe wrote:
Although, then, to argue against myself, and say that there’s no real logic to
what I said that can carry any weight:
I might imagine what it would be like to have empathy for the non-dual people,
and I might imagine that, for some subset of them, the world is like this:
That they simultaneously carry an awareness that:
one can’t practically have coordinated thought without some notion of “the
world” or “the real world”, and;
even that that demarkation of what is “the world” follows from our patterns of
taking on the postures of mind that entail objective stances, but;
that since those are all entailed in how we take such postures, it’s all
relational and all sensational, and in that sense within the same type-category
as the subjective.
And from there they are happy saying that everything is “contained” within
“consciousness”.
All of which throws us back out to mere epistemology, and the mechanics of the
intersubjective, applied recursively as by Pragmatism, to try to stabilize any
of it (for those who want it to be stable; others still find magic much more
appealing).
Oh well,
Eric
On Dec 2, 2025, at 6:50, Santafe <[email protected]> wrote:
[snip]
Anyway, without further belaborment, you get the point: There are all kinds of
physiological reports of when I am taking something for granted. That I am
standing on a floor in a room and not on top of a flagpole on the Empire State
building, that my head is not underwater, that there is not an uncaged tiger in
the room with me, or one of Stephen Miller’s thugs, or some other known
predatory and sadistic thing whose attention I don’t want on me.
I wanted to assert that the essence of whatever the term “objective” needs to
refer to, was the taking-on of this posture of de facto taking something for
granted. The mystics who claim they take nothing for granted, and everything
is a hypothesis, seem to me to be talking nonsense. Your heart takes all sorts
of things for granted just by persisting in its beating, as we can verify from
the cases when it doesn’t do so. When they say “everything” they might really
be referring to some relatively high-level cognitive integrations, but of
course if they admitted that, they wouldn't be able to hide in their
obscurantism and keep everybody guessing whether they might be magical.
But back from my rant: I want to claim, here in my armchair, that if there are
good, stable foundations for terms like “objective”, or Glen’s (and proper
usage's) “metaphysical commitments”, they should be these: the myriad things
that lie below deliberative thought, rooted as deep as physiology in some
cases, and more shallowly as habit in others, that we _always_ “take for
granted” as part of coordinated mental functioning. Things can migrate a bit
across that boundary — one can come to breathe quite smoothly through a scuba
regulator — and one of the fascinating things, to me, about the changes that
take place as we “come to understand” things that are new to us, is that the
deep fabric of “understanding” involves a reworking of where some activity,
experience, assertion, etc., and their attendant states of mind, fall w.r.t.
this split of taking or not taking for granted.
Relative to the above, “intersubjective” is a quite shallow and procedural
word, having to do with the mechanics of epistemology, and how we scaffold our
discourse and our growth-activities of coming to understand things. These
terms have their own structure, of course, also fine to analyze and get good
language around, but they are quite different from shifts in postures of mind
that we might sometimes have parallax to see. (And then, “subjective’ is a
typological term, about the categories of phenomena that we associate with
“sensations” etc., and for which meaning is inherently about relations, of the
phenomenon to some self, the phenomenon to its sensation-aspect, etc. So a
third, entirely distinct, kind of semantic work the term is doing.)
--
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