Synthesis:Beliefs and Worldviews

EPEEs are profoundly intertwined with beliefs, metaphysics and philosophy. This domain includes a huge variety of relative idiosyncratic or culturally informed beliefs of the individual, as well as their ultimate beliefs — usually the same as or related with their cultural's worldview but not always — which include the following aspects:

• Metaphysics
  • Cosmology  (Origins of the world)
  • Epistemology
  • Ontology
  • Soteriology
• General beliefs or views about life in general
  • Implicit
  • Explicit

Note that the following is a draft that needs to be re-written.

A word on metaphysics

Metaphysics is the realm of our most deeply held beliefs about and representations of the universe and the beings it contains, its origins, the nature of our experience, and what may lay beyond our subjective experience - whether they be the images of ourselves we hold in our hearts, our sense of the cosmos we inhabit, our notions of what is real or not, and what at the innermost level we hold as being true. One may reasonably argue that all people have metaphysical beliefs, whether they are aware of them or not. In fact, some claim that "whole cosmologies are wrapped up in single perceptions" (Rob Burbea). Thus it is very interesting — and has been a very common practice throughout history and even today — to ask questions about metaphysics and shed an introspective light on our own beliefs.

Worldviews abound. Many authors, schools of thought, religions, philosophies, and even scientists, have proposed views and conceptions about the beings that populate this universe, the ultimate nature of our experience or of the cosmos, and of the ways to reach truth. Depending on what they consider as "really" existing and whether that is one, two, or many things, we can distinguish between various systems.

A word on epistemology

How can we know what is ultimately true, or is true for us? This is the question of epistemology.

Scientific epistemology relies on empirical testing and retesting (reproducibility), reliability and predictive power.

Religious epistemologies often stresse the authority of specific texts or doctrinal sources.

Contemplative, phenomenological, and mystical epistemology often rely on direct experience, but also other modes of knowing such as revelation, intuition, oracles, etc.

Revelatory epistemology: "Revelation from the Beyond through Mediums is how we get Truth" (Prophetic perspective in the Bible and Torah; State Oracles in ancient Greece and contemporary Tibet; Various divination method in the Roman republic, described by the Augur Cicero in De diuinatione, etc.).

Rationalist epistemology (Descartes, mecanistic philosophies) would see reason a the source of any valid knowledge; or

Empirical epistemology (the British Empiricists) considering that only through experience and experimental procedures do we derive "true facts" — taken to the extreme, leads to positivism (Comte) and culminates in scientism, the idea that only "science" can lead to "truth" and statements such as "what exists is what can be measured" (Kelvin), evacuating intuition and human subjectivity.

Transcendental epistemologies such as Kantian idealism which distinguished between a posteriori (or empirical) knowledge, and a priori knowledge (non-derived from experience).

Pragmatic perspectives (William James): "by their fruits shall ye know them"...

One of the core aspects of the work underlying the EmergeWiki is to explore how epistemic pluralism is possible, and how we can reconcile various perspectives in a coherent whole.

The classification we give here should be taken with a grain of salt. The reality of people's views is, as always with people, vastly richer than this. People rarely agree on all aspects of their beliefs. In fact, they rarely even agree with themselves about their views: someone can very well hold implicit beliefs which contradict their explicit beliefs, without being aware of it or not, and even consciously hold contradictory beliefs without it being a problem at all. Thus, these types of views should be seen as this: schematic types.

Substantialist Metaphysics

A question of Substance

"Substantialism" refers to all beliefs that consider that there are truly, independently existing "entities", "beings", "things", or "essences", which may or may not correspond to the objects and subjects of our everyday experience.

"Substance" comes from latin substantia, and is composed of the prefix "sub-" which means "under", and "stance" from "stāre", which means "to stand". For the etymology geeks out there, sub is the latin equivalent of the greek "ὑπό", or "hypo"; replacing the latin prefix by the greek yield the word "hypostasis"” which is a commonly used word in metaphysics.

Thus, one may hear the word substance as pointing to what stands under appearances, to the real being that corresponds to the fleeting phenomena we experience.

In many ways, this touches on the essence of metaphysics : what stands under appearances ? What is the relationship between appearances and real being ?

It is immediately clear that the answer to this is not straightforward and could invite many, many types of theories, answers, and even speculations about what is "out there".

Prominent critic of metaphysical speculations, Friedrich Nietzsche, called these "other worlds" existing beyond our experience "backworlds" and considered these as figments of the imagination which only served to distract us from the real experience of our actual lives.

One may disagree with Nietzsche, but his words do point to a recurring theme in all human societies : the beyond, and the relationship with the beyond.

A particular meaning of the word "metaphysics" (René Guénon, Oriental Metaphysics) is that it refers to what is beyond ("meta-") the physical world ("physis", a Greek word which can be translated as "nature"). Physics and metaphysics are related terms. If physics is concerned with the laws of nature, then in some literal sense then, metaphysics is concerned with what is "beyond" or "above" (in latin, super-) nature" : the super-natural.

Interestingly, this would imply that physics, the physical world, is the world of appearances, of our experience. If we accept this meaning of the term, then we realize that the current meaning of scientific physics is a reversal of its original use, since physics is presently concerned, not with a description of our natural, lived experience, but with the description of the laws and theories about the realities which "govern" these appearances, which are never directly manifest inexperience, but somewhat produce them and can be indirectly deduced from the observation of experience.

The epitome of this gap is embodied by the most advanced of physical theories, quantum mechanics, which seems to describe a quantum world that is so exotic and seemingly foreign to the world of our everyday experience that physicists and philosophers alike have been shocked and baffled by it since its inception in the 20 th century.

One must see clearly, here, that, keeping in mind the previous definition, quantum mechanics is a metaphysical theory. One that is rooted in scientific methodologies, empirical testing, and continual revision, allowing for a level of technical control and predictive power which is unparalleled - but a metaphysical theory nonetheless.

The question is then - what is the status of scientific theories ? Current cutting-edge approaches, rather than substantializing or re-ifying - that is to say, "making into a real thing" - the objects and laws described by contemnporary physical theories

By contrast, a non-substantialist perspective would argue that there is nothing that stands under, or beyond, appearances. An interpretation of physical theories that may stem from such an attitude, could be to consider that instead of representing an external substantial reality beyond appearances which the theories describe, these theories are formalizations of know-how and prediction-making tools, which account for there probabilistic nature - instead of reality being inherently probabilistic. This is beyond the scope of our discussion, but students interested in this may look into recent developments in the area of philosophy of science which seek to provide a phenomenal grounding to quantum theories.

Monisms

Monist theories generally believe that there is only one real substance and this substance exists independently of my experience of it").

Idealist Monisms

Monism can be idealist ("there is only thought, or consciousness, or ideas"), and there is quite a variety of idealist monisms (e.g. Stoicism, Cittamatra philosophy, authors like Berkeley, Kant, Schopenhauer, Hegel) depending on what the specifics of the really existing substance are.

Materialist Monisms

There are also materialist monisms (who hold that "there is only matter") — but what that substance is varies —subatomic particles, atoms, brain...

These doctrines vary in their account of lived experience: illusory epiphenomenon for eliminativist physicalism, which holds that we should reduce the illusory level of lived experience to the "true level" of material forces or brain structures; phenomenal representation of the unknowable "thing in itself" belonging to the domain of the "noumenon" for kantian idealism; a universal property of material objects for pan-psychism — meaning that panpsychists hold that there is only "matter", but that all matter contains as a property the fact of "being conscious", like it has mass or spin; "phenomena" as aggregate of sensations with no "underlying substance" beyond lived experience, except that there is a god that makes all this happen, but this god is absent from experience and unknowable and irrepresentable (Berkeley); Federico Faggin's theory of CU's and quantum fields is a form of realist monism which echoes Leibniz' older monadology; Franklin Merrill-Wolff, etc.

Other Monisms

Then there are sort of strange monisms such as Spinoza, who posited one true substance — God — with an infinity of attributes, two of which constitute human life — "Thought" and "Extension", mind and body (including sensations), essentially — these being considered as distinct but not ontologically separate, two sides of the same one coin. This is sometimes called dual-aspect monism, but Spinoza considered there were infinitely many aspects of the one being,

Dualisms

There are also Dualisms. Schematically, these tend to believe that "there are two really existing substances which are different" and the question is then how these interact. Descartes comes to mind, but also lots of traditional spiritualities ("there is the body, there is the soul, there is this material/experiential world, and there is the beyond where the soul goes back to at death" — e.g. Allan Kardec's Spirit ideas, or certain interpretations of Neo-platonism (The One, The Noous, The Intellect, etc.).

Notice that both monisms and dualisms of this type are realist in some way, or more accurately, substantialist, as they posit the true existence of some "thing" (res, in latin) independent of the perception of it; and then the question is, "how do we know that thing?", which is a question of epistemology.

Pluralisms

Plato's theory of forms is an idealistic pluralism.

Allan Kardec and spiritist ontologies.

Theosophy

Anthroposophy

Akashic records.

Etc.

The similarities between the different types of substantialist perspectives led to Wittgenstein's famous assertion, that "both realism and idealism, taken to their extreme, lead to the other" — ie, materialist and idealist monisms are logical equivalents.

However, there are other perspectives which open things out more — various perspectives which are less substantialist or not substantialist at all.

Non-substantialist or non-realist metaphysics

The idea is that non-substantialist metaphysics do not consider that there are real "objects" (res; onta) or "entities" (ens) which exist independently or, or "stand under" appearances, or independently of the act of obsving. In some sense, they modify, reverse or cancel the meaning of "metaphysics" if we accept it refers to that which is beyond appearances, since these positions consider that being and appearing are strictly equivalent, a position which defines phenomenological ontologies. How can something be metaphysics if it states there is nothing beyond the "natural" world of appearances? If we just take the word to refer to "theories of reality", then this problem is fixed.

Phenomenal ontologies

A phenomenal ontology hinges on the premise that "Being is Appearing" (phenomenalism), and relies on the suspension (in greek, épochè) of the implicit beliefs in the intrinsic existence of objects of perception.

In other words, classical phenomenology, as its name indicates, is a radical return to the lived-world, the Lebenswelt, to the "mothers of all knowledge", as Husserl called it. In fact, Classical Phenomenologists (authors like Heidegger, Sartre, Michel Henry, Merleau-Ponty, Renaud Barbaras, Michel Bitbol) basically all have in common is the idea that objective knowledge and in fact any objectivities, objects of perception of all types, are constituted within, by, and as lived experience; in other words, they reverse the status of transcendence: transcendance is constituted within and as immanence.

A major consequence is the suspension of transcendence — in the sense of an independent existence above and beyond appearances, which is in fact the mode of being we tend to attribute to the objects and subjects of our daily lives, naturally, implicitly. This is why Husserl, a major figure of classical phenomenology, called this gesture the "suspension" of the "natural attitude". This means that "sub-stance" in the sense of "what stands under appearances" (see above) is "suspended" or negated. Clearly different phenomenologists actually hold different ontologies, but they generally share a degree of such non-substantialism.

Phenomenological approaches are epistemologically correlationist — they all have in common that they acknowledge the role of the experiencer in the constitution of objects of perception, and conversely. This is sometimes called a transcendental perspective, and is in fact a landmark of Kantian and post-Kantian philosophies: knower and known are co-relative, they co-constitute each other and are mirror-processes. Note that many people use the word "transcendental" to mean "transcendent", or to refer to something extraordinary.

This then questions the usual status of scientific theories, and sets limits to what they can and can't do: are they images of a "real" world given "out there" beyond and independent of everyone's experience? Or, are they intrinsically experiential themselves, through and through, and thus, for instance, are entirely powerless in providing any ultimate account of lived experience and thus, in fact, reality, since, as a matter of fact, any scientific or philosophical theory pre-supposes experience in order to even manifest: how could they explain something which they need in order to even come into being?

Non-foundationalist non-substantialism

This has to do with the question of the foundations of knowledge. No absolute or ultimate metaphysical conclusions can be drawn from empirical evidence, because this relies on epistemological assumptions which cannot be given any ultimate ground. What is the absolute justification that empirical experience from phenomenal observation is a valid source of truth about reality? Suppose that there is a  "real reality" out there from which our lived reality (consciousness) originates. Why suppose that it obeys the laws of our phenomenal existence? And why suppose the genesis of our phenomenal existence happens in ways which resemble the causality our lives seem ruled by?

Many of the world's great mystics expound views which fall in this sort of category. After all, the word "mystic" comes from "mystery". that of these systems which exhibit the radical limitations of any objective knowledge, theoretical knowledge, representational knowledge. This is sometimes done in favor of non-objective knowledge. Thus we are brought back from the order of metaphysical theories to the realm of practice — for non-objective knowledge is practical knowledge.

This is sometimes dismissed as "Mysterianism".

For instance Meister Eckhart or his forebear Dionysius the Areopagite. Many buddhist schools - madhyamika in particular - are also non-substantialist ; in fact, i would even say that as far as I'm aware, madhyamika philosophy and related metaphysical doctrines of tibetan buddhism are non-substantialist (there is no "really existing" entity or substance "out there" beyond appearances, but "appearances" and awareness are not to be reified into a "really existing" thing independent of the experience of it in the moment either) and also non-foundationalist.

This is rarer, as it means that epistemologically one considers there is no ultimate foundational principle, thus sort of emptying out the whole concept of truth. Obviously, all the philosophical schools mentioned previously are all more foundationalist than not. In fact, in terms of anti-foundationalism, it is rather late-modern and post-modern thinkers that come to mind: As mentioned, Wittgenstein was, but also Nietzsche, Foucault, William James.

The relationship between states and metaphysical beliefs… and back

Bitbol on the relationship between particular mind states and metaphysical theories.

"Instead of hoping that the nature of conscious experience will be revealed by a theory, it is from now on inevitable to instead ask fluxing experience itself to exhibit the nature of theories. [...] Each thesis about conscious experience depends on a state of conscious experience; [...] abstractedly defending a theory about conscious experience amounts to contracting into one of the possible postures of experience being lived. [...] There is a mutual dependency between conceptions of consciousness and the state of consciousness of those who defend them."