Philosphical Idealism Quotations

ALL IS MIND - THE UNIVERSE IS A MENTAL PHENOMENA..

"Even Bertrand Russell one of the greatest analytic philosophers of the 20thC and the inspiration of the Logical Positivists, develops a phenomenalism and accepts that science has to employ logical fictions and models; and that there was no fundamental difference between mind and matter."

http://forum.philosophynow.org/viewtopic.php?f=16&t=5345

“The illusion that the self and the world are broken into fragments originates in the kind of thought that goes beyond its proper measure and confuses its own product with the same independent reality. To end this illusion requires insight, not only into the world as a whole, but also into how the instrument of thought is working. Such insight implies an original and creative act of perception into all aspects of life, mental and physical, both through the senses and through the mind, and this is perhaps the true meaning of meditation.”

“There is a universal flux that cannot be defined explicitly but which can be known only implicitly, as indicated by the explicitly definable forms and shapes, some stable and some unstable, that can be abstracted from the universal flux. In this flow, mind and matter are not separate substances. Rather, they are different aspects of our whole and unbroken movement.”

David Bohm, Wholeness and the Implicate Order

“I do not know what the word - materialism - means. Speaking as a physicist, I judge matter to be an imprecise and rather old-fashioned concept. Roughly speaking, matter is the way particles behave when a large number of them are lumped together. When we examine matter in the finest detail in the experiments of particle physics, we see it behaving as an active agent rather than as an inert substance. It’s actions are in the strict sense unpredictable. It makes what appear to be arbitrary choices between alternative possibilities. Between matter as we observe it in the laboratory and mind as we observe it in our own consciousness, there seems to be only a difference of degree but not in kind.”

“This view of our place in the cosmos may not be true, but it is as least logically consistent and compatible with the active nature of matter as revealed in the experiments of modern physics.”

"Mind and intelligence are woven into the fabric of our universe in a way that altogether surpasses our understanding. The universe shows evidence of the operations of mind on three levels. The first level is the level of elementary physical processes in quantum mechanics. Matter in quantum mechanics is constantly making choices between alternative possibilities according to probabilistic laws. The second level at which we detect the operations of mind is the level of direct human experience. It is reasonable to believe in the existence of a third level of mind, a mental component of the universe. If we believe in this mental component and call it God, then we can say that we are small pieces of God's mental apparatus "

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"It appears that mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent inherent in every atom. The universe as a whole is also weird, with laws of nature that make it hospitable to the growth of mind. I do not make any clear distinction between mind and God. God is what mind becomes when it has passed beyond the scale of our comprehension.

God may be either a world-soul or a collection of world-souls. So I am thinking that atoms and humans and God may have minds that differ in degree but not in kind. We stand, in a manner of speaking, midway between the unpredictability of atoms and the unpredictability of God. Atoms are small pieces of our mental apparatus, and we are small pieces of God's mental apparatus.

Our minds may receive inputs equally from atoms and from God. This view of our place in the cosmos may not be true, but it is compatible with the active nature of atoms as revealed in the experiments of modern physics. I don't say that this personal theology is supported or proved by scientific evidence. I only say that it is consistent with scientific evidence.

I do not claim any ability to read God's mind. I am sure of only one thing. When we look at the glory of stars and galaxies in the sky and the glory of forests and flowers in the living world around us, it is evident that God loves diversity. Perhaps the universe is constructed according to a principle of maximum diversity.

The principle of maximum diversity says that the laws of nature, and the initial conditions at the beginning of time, are such as to make the universe as interesting as possible. As a result, life is possible but not too easy. Maximum diversity often leads to maximum stress. In the end we survive, but only by the skin of our teeth."  -  Freeman Dyson

Freeman Dyson was a theoretical physicist and mathematician, famous for his work in quantum electrodynamics, solid-state physics, astronomy and nuclear engineering

Kurt Gödel's Philosphical Idealism

"I had begun to think that consciousness is really nothing more than simple existence. By way of leading up to this, I asked Gödel if he believed there is a single Mind behind all the various appearances and activities of the world."

"He replied that, yes, the Mind is the thing that is structured, but that the Mind exists independently of its individual properties.

I then asked if he believed that the Mind is everywhere, as opposed to being localized in the brains of people."

Gödel replied, “Of course. This is the basic mystic teaching.”

In materialism all elements behave the same. It is mysterious to think of them as spread out and automatically united. For something to be a whole, it has to have an additional object, say, a soul or a mind. “Matter” refers to one way of perceiving things, and elementary particles are a lower form of mind. Mind is separate from matter.

"What Turing disregards completely is the fact that mind, in its use, is not static, but constantly developing. … Therefore, although at each stage of the mind’s development the number of its possible states is finite, there is no reason why this number should not converge to infinity in the course of its development."

"I don’t think the brain came in the Darwinian manner. In fact, it is disprovable. Simple mechanism can’t yield the brain. I think the basic elements of the universe are simple. Life force is a primitive element of the universe and it obeys certain laws of action. These laws are not simple, and they are not mechanical."

"Consciousness is connected with one unity. A machine is composed of parts."

"The brain is a computing machine connected with a spirit."

Whole and part—partly concrete parts and partly abstract parts—are at the bottom of everything. They are most fundamental in our conceptual system. Since there is similarity, there are generalities. Generalities are just a fundamental aspect of the world. It is a fundamental fact of reality that there are two kinds of reality: universals and particulars.

Whole and unity; thing or entity or being. Every whole is a unity and every unity that is divisible is a whole. For example, the primitive concepts, the monads, the empty set, and the unit sets are unities but not wholes. Every unity is something and not nothing. Any unity is a thing or an entity or a being. Objects and concepts are unities and beings.

Philosophy as an exact theory should do for metaphysics as much as Newton did for physics. I think it is perfectly possible that the development of such a philosophical theory will take place within the next hundred years or even sooner

Kurt Gödel's philosophical viewpoint

1.The world is rational.

2.Human reason can, in principle, be developed more highly (through certain techniques).

3.There are systematic methods for the solution of all problems.

4.There are other worlds and rational beings of a different and higher kind.

5.The world in which we live is not the only one in which we shall live or have lived.

6.There is incomparably more knowable a priori that is currently known.

7.The development of human thought since the Renaissance is thoroughly one-dimensional.

8.Reason in mankind will be developed in every direction.

9.Formal rights comprise a real science.

10.Materialism is false.

11.The higher beings are connected to the others by analogy, not by composition.

12.Concepts have an objective existence.

13.There is a scientific (exact) philosophy and theology, which deals with concepts of the highest abstractness; and this is also most highly fruitful for science.

14.Religions are, for the most part, bad—but religion is not.

Religion may also be developed as a philosophical system built on axioms. In our time rationalism is used in an absurdly narrow sense ….

Rationalism involves not only logical concepts. Churches deviated from religion which had been founded by rational men. The rational principle behind the world is higher then people.

Then I asked him my last question: “What causes the illusion of the passage of time?” … Finally he said this:

The illusion of the passage of time arises from the confusing of the given with the real. Passage of time arises because we think of occupying different realities. In fact, we occupy only different givens. There is only one reality.

I wanted to visit Gödel again, but he told me that he was too ill. In the middle of January 1978, I dreamed I was at his bedside. There was a chess board on the covers in front of him. Gödel reached his hand out and knocked the board over, tipping the men onto the floor. The chessboard expanded to an infinite mathematical plane. And then that, too, vanished. There was a brief play of symbols, and then emptiness—an emptiness flooded with even white light.

The next day I learned that Kurt Gödel was dead.

Gödel demonstrated that every logical scheme, including mathematics, is dependent upon axioms that it cannot prove and that cannot be reduced to the scheme itself. In an elegant mathematical proof, introduced to the world by the great mathematician and computer scientist John von Neumann in September 1930, Gödel demonstrated that mathematics was intrinsically incomplete. Gödel was reportedly concerned that he might have inadvertently proved the existence of God

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“The implications are rather obvious, an imaginary space-time dimension has to be defined along with the four real space-time dimensions to fully represent all physics parameters. This shall upgrade all physics units into a set of space-time dimensions, one with real and the other with imaginary, resulting into at least one complex 4 dimension space time. This requires no major change in physics, but from thereoff, ALL quantities have to be assumed to be complex values, that is, have BOTH REAL & IMAGINARY COMPONENTS of space-time.”  -  Xavier at Blazelabs --- http://www.blazelabs.com/f-p-hole.asp

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Metaphorically.. we might say the Primary Field feeds on our memories… so even when our body dies.. the memories are retained because.. even though they were created in the temporal material world..  they exist in the eternal too.. and this is how the ancient wise men were confident enough to tell us that eternal life existed. In the end.. we are.. an accumulation of everything we have experienced.. thought.. felt.. and desired.. and this accumulation of all these metaphysical elements are what we call – THE SOUL.. while – THE SPIRIT.. is the SOUL’S ACTIVITY.

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If... in the future... computers could create a virtual reality that is indistinguishable from reality.. as we know it..

But how would we know.. it hadn’t already been done.. and the universe itself was acting like a cosmic brain?

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