Why German Idealism Matters

"German idealism is an invitation to exercise our freedom of thought and to consider that what at first appears impossible may become necessary."

Our sensory experience, attended to in earnest, reveals itself to be infinite, sublime; it is only after reflective consciousness has manufactured for us a finite, determined world that this infinity is obscured. In attempting to descend below the veil of transcendental reflection into the depths of the sensible, Schelling reverses the typical orientation of philosophy toward the intelligible. His aesthetic (un)grounding of philosophy is a challenge to the Hegelian notion that philosophy ought to overcome itself by arriving at a finished “system of science.” His Naturphilosophie is an infinite creative task, not a finished system. It is not a philosophy about nature but “Nature itself philosophizing” (autophusis philosophia), as he put it. Where Kantian philosophy put the human subject at the center, Schelling argued that “Nature is a priori.”

What makes the human being unique among earthly creatures is that it knows reality’s ground is incomprehensible. Wise to our ignorance, we can either use our new found freedom to flee upwards by way of idealistic transcendentalism, or we can fall deeper in love with cosmogenesis via a naturalistic and descendental approach. The former option, freedom without love, quickly devolves into alienation. Idealists like Kant and Fichte tried to overcome this devolution by privileging practical over theoretical philosophy. To save the possibility of love between free humans they had to deny the possibility of a loving knowledge of living nature. Schelling moved away from the modern equation of knowledge with power in favor of what Goethe termed a “gentle empiricism” or loving knowledge. Rather than recoiling from the abyss of the sensible to a supposedly stable intelligible ground, as transcendental philosophy does, Schelling dives heart first into its radiant darkness.

Are species like ours, largely - for now at least - "condemned" to communicate through intermediaries like TV/Internet/Radio/etc destined to crash against the hard cliff face of technologies incompatibility with our evolved "sensorium"?

To expand:

- We evolved not to solve scientific mysteries nor to figure out the balance between the individual & society, but at the least the latter is necessary for us to move forward as a species.

- Many of our cognitive biases are due to issues we have with meta-cognition, yet short term success favors exploitation of such biases.

- Our fear/combat responses seem to be more and more easily triggered, as is our "ability" to talk past each other.

- Social Media seems to exacerbate the problem, and thus the Internet isn't necessarily a boon over the long term.

However, I wonder if the problems we face in communicating with each other have to do with the boundaries of our subjective experience. Perhaps species that communicate via spores or some symbiote could better manage the issues that face our planet, in that they can exchange their first-person views? Or would they have even made it this far - perhaps that kind of direct communication is where madness lies?

How Quantum Mechanics Could Be Even Weirder

Why doesn’t the world make sense? At the fundamental level of atoms and subatomic particles, the familiar “classical” physics that accounts for how objects move around gives way to quantum physics, with new rules that defy intuition. Traditionally these are expressed as paradoxes: particles that can be in two places at once, cats that are simultaneously alive and dead, apparently impossible faster-than-light signaling between distant particles. But quantum rules are perfectly logical and consistent—the “paradoxes” are the result of our trying to impose on them the everyday reasoning of classical physics.

What’s more, over the past several decades we’ve come to understand that the classical and quantum worlds don’t exactly operate by “different” rules. Rather, the classical world emerges from the quantum in a comprehensible way: you might say that classical physics is simply what quantum physics looks like at the human scale.

All the same, we’re confronted with the question: why is the quantum world the way it is? Why do fundamental particles dictate this set of rules and not some other? Normally that question carries an implication that quantum particles are being a bit perverse by not behaving like billiard balls, reassuringly solid and definite and thing-like. But that might be the wrong way to think about it. Last December, I spoke with Romanian-British physicist Sandu Popescu of Bristol University in England, who told me that things could have been even stranger than quantum.

In fact, Sandu said, we’re not even completely sure that things aren’t even stranger. Maybe we just haven’t detected this extra strangeness yet.

The Mystery of Consciousness | Sam Harris

Consciousness—the sheer fact that this universe is illuminated by sentience—is precisely what unconsciousness is not. And I believe that no description of unconscious complexity will fully account for it. It seems to me that just as “something” and “nothing,” however juxtaposed, can do no explanatory work, an analysis of purely physical processes will never yield a picture of consciousness. However, this is not to say that some other thesis about consciousness must be true. Consciousness may very well be the lawful product of unconscious information processing. But I don’t know what that sentence means—and I don’t think anyone else does either.

Digging into metaphysics that can explain the Bakkerverse, Marshall's Monadology seems to give us an Idealism (God Dreams) that would also explain why the Progenitors mastered the seeming atomic/physical reality before gaining a hint of their eternal fate.

Transforming the World Into Experience: An Idealist Experiment.

by Paul Marshall

In summary, I pursue an idealist rehabilitation of the external world through the following stages.

    Set up a world of objects external to perceptual experience (representative realism).

    Make the external world purely physical (dualist representative realism).
 
   Observe that causal relations between the physical external world and conscious
    states are problematic (mind–body problem).

    Defuse the problem by transforming the physical external world into an experiential
    external world (experiential realism).

    Accommodate modern physics in the account by organizing external experience from
    a multiplicity of centres (panpsychic experiential realism).

http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/cover_story/2016/03/ego_depletion_an_influential_theory_in_psychology_may_have_just_been_debunked.html?wpsrc=sh_all_dt_tw_top

In 2011, Baumeister and John Tierney of the New York Times published a science-cum-self-help book based around this research. Their best-seller, Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength, advised readers on how the science of ego depletion could be put to use. A glass of lemonade that’s been sweetened with real sugar, they said, could help replenish someone’s inner store of self-control. And if willpower works like a muscle, then regular exercise could boost its strength. You could literally build character, Baumeister said in an interview with the Templeton Foundation, a religiously inclined science-funding organization that has given him about $1 million in grants. By that point, he told the Atlantic, the effects that he’d first begun to study in the late 1990s were established fact: “They’ve been replicated and extended in many different laboratories, so I am confident they are real,” he said.

But that story is about to change. A paper now in press, and due to publish next month in the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science, describes a massive effort to reproduce the main effect that underlies this work. Comprising more than 2,000 subjects tested at two-dozen different labs on several continents, the study found exactly nothing. A zero-effect for ego depletion: No sign that the human will works as it’s been described, or that these hundreds of studies amount to very much at all.

This isn’t the first time that an idea in psychology has been challenged—not by a long shot. A “reproducibility crisis” in psychology, and in many other fields, has now been well-established. A study out last summer tried to replicate 100 psychology experiments one-for-one and found that just 40 percent of those replications were successful. A critique of that study just appeared last week, claiming that the original authors made statistical errors—but that critique has itself been attacked formisconstruing facts, ignoring evidence, and indulging in some wishful thinking.

For scientists and science journalists, this back and forth is worrying. We’d like to think that a published study has more than even odds of being true. The new study of ego depletion has much higher stakes: Instead of warning us that any single piece of research might be unreliable, the new paper casts a shadow on a fully-formedresearch literature. Or, to put it another way: It takes aim not at the single paper but at the Big Idea.

Baumeister’s theory of willpower, and his clever means of testing it, have been borne out again and again in empirical studies. The effect has been recreated in hundreds of different ways, and the underlying concept has been verified via meta-analysis. It’s not some crazy new idea, wobbling on a pile of flimsy data; it’s a sturdy edifice of knowledge, built over many years from solid bricks.

And yet, it now appears that ego depletion could be completely bogus, that its foundation might be made of rotted-out materials. That means an entire field of study—and significant portions of certain scientists’ careers—could be resting on a false premise. If something this well-established could fall apart, then what’s next? That’s not just worrying. It’s terrifying.

Comment from Richard Horton in Lancet:

http://www.thelancet.com/pdfs/journals/lancet/PIIS0140-6736%2815%2960696-1.pdf

The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness. As one participant put it, “poor methods get results”

Can bad scientific practices be fixed? Part of the problem is that no-one is incentivised to be right. Instead, scientists are incentivised to be productive
and innovative. Would a Hippocratic Oath for science help? Certainly don’t add more layers of research redtape. Instead of changing incentives, perhaps one could remove incentives altogether. Or insist on replicability statements in grant applications and research papers. Or emphasise collaboration, not competition. Or insist on preregistration of protocols. Or reward better pre and post publication peer review. Or improve research training
and mentorship. Or implement the recommendations from our Series on increasing research value, published last year. One of the most convincing proposals came from outside the biomedical community. Tony Weidberg is a Professor of Particle Physics at Oxford. Following several high-profi le errors, the particle physics community now invests great eff ort into intensive checking and rechecking of data prior to publication. By fi ltering results
through independent working groups, physicists are encouraged to criticise. Good criticism is rewarded. The goal is a reliable result, and the incentives for scientists are aligned around this goal. Weidberg worried we set the bar for results in biomedicine far too low. In particle physics, signifi cance is set at 5 sigma—a p value of 3 × 10–7 or 1 in 3·5 million (if the result is not true, this is the probability that the data would have been as extreme as they are). The conclusion of the symposium was that something must be done. Indeed, all seemed to agree that it was within our power to do that something. But
as to precisely what to do or how to do it, there were no fi rm answers.

Those who have the power to act seem to think somebody else should act first.