Philosophy Now Forum

first things first, my idea's in this thread come, in large part, from
a book that doesn't really make sense...

as I have been studying Indian philosophy, I came across a book called,
''Lokayata: A study of Indian Materialism" by Debiprased Chattopadhyaya...
it is a PDF on line...
and I gotta say, I don't think I have read a book that was so enlightening to
me in years.. practically every chapter has a mind blowing idea or thought...
and one of the stories this book reveals is the story of the consciousness
of human beings and that relationship with the idea of materialism
and idealism....

Materialism: a doctrine that nothing exists outside of matter
and its movements and modifications...

Idealism: any of the various systems of thought in which the object
of knowledge are held to be in some way dependent on the activity
of the mind....

one could easily say that the entire history of Western Philosophy is
the question of materialism vs Idealism...Plato was an idealist
and Aristotle was a materialist.. is one way to think about this..

and as for the idea that consciousness has in fact, undergone a change
since pre-history is part of this story... and we will follow this changing
history of consciousness in human beings in our story...
but we will also be working out the history of human beings here also...
the economic, political and theological history of human beings...

in other words, I offer up a radical new understanding of what it means
to be a human being in 2023....

to lay out the groundwork of my theory...

we begin in the vast depth of history... with the first economic system
in the world... that of the hunter/gatherer society...and an understanding
of the consciousness of human beings...

the first thing to note is that for over a million years, human beings engaged
in the hunter/gatherer society.. which means what? that we followed the food
around... and this is very important to note... and what does this mean
to consciousness of human beings? We can see this in children who are young..
that they have no idea of theology or religious thinking... children engage
in magical thinking, not religious thinking and this is vital to understand...
children don't have religious thinking, they have magical beliefs..
and what this means is that things will happen and children have
no sense of cause and effect... a tree will pop up next to a child
and they won't question it or try to guess the reason that a tree suddenly
popped up... it just happened... children don't try to create a cause and effect
reasoning in things happening.. a tree pops up and we might think god put it
there or some other cause.. but, in the minds of children, it just happened..
that is magical thinking.. there is not cause and effect to events around them....
and the original thinking of human beings in the million years of
hunter/gatherer society/state is magical thinking.. but not religious thinking
there is no idea of a god that suddenly put that tree there.. and if you don't
get this idea, the rest of this will make no sense...there is no cause and effect
in human beings until much later in our story...

the thing to note is that the material aspect of existence creates
the way we think... the economic/political system creates the way we
think about our universe...in this time period, there is no such thing
as idealism...products of the mind....theology does not exist.. god
does not exist, cause and effect does not exist...and this way of life
lasted for, depending on who you ask, a million years or more....

the next stage is the pastoral economic/political life...
and in this way of life, human beings didn't just follow the herd around,
we gathered the herd and then we transported it to the lands to graze..
and this has no change on the mind set of human beings... the thinking
was still magical, with no idea of cause and effect... this way of life is
is patriarchal... male dominated...and keep this in mind... there still
was no religious/theological/idealism thinking in pastoral existence...
and the next dramatic change was the agricultural society/state/economic
world and here, here we get dramatic changes in both the society,
the state, the economic and the materialism/idealism ideas of
human beings....

the first thing to note in an agricultural society is that women
were the first ones to create the agricultural world.. and the
agricultural world is a matriarchically world, a women's based world...

(now don't fall into the trap of thinking that all these changes were
going on the same time within each society equally and uniformly...
they were not)

and now we hit the next important thing... that the society of the hunter/gatherer
and the pastoral, were tribal... that is very important to note... for a million
years or more, society/the state was tribal in nature.. and tribes by nature
are small in their numbers.. and most importantly, tribes are, again by nature,
communistic, that they shared and shared alike.. there was no sense of
private goods that we have today...everything a human being got in
life was shared with the tribe, no exceptions...if it could not be shared,
it was thrown away.... there was no mine and thine in the tribal society/state..

and the next change, we turn to roughly around the time period of the
Buddha... and that will be the next post...

Kropotkin

You can't possibly know what they thought because there is no record of it.

Attitudes about social organization, property, religion, gods ... who knows.

keep in mind, that this story I tell, has a lot of moving parts..
and one has to keep track of the various aspects of what is happening...

think back to India around 1500BC or so.. (again, different tribes
would engage in different economic, political, social arrangements..
so, one tribe would still be involved in hunter-gatherer lifestyle,
and another tribe, just a few miles away was engaged in the pastoral
lifestyle...and just a few miles away from them, would be a tribe
that began the movement toward being an agricultural society..
don't think that these changes were equal or uniformed)

so around, 1500 BC or so, the Indian society began to change from the
pastoral world, into the agriculturally world... this change wasn't fast
or uniform...but by the time of the Buddha, enough tribes have changed
from being a pastorally or hunter/gatherer society to being an agriculturally
society/state... that it was being noticed....with the changing of the economics
state from the tribal pastoral, traveling with the herds to the agricultural
world in which cities and towns were being built.. the new society/state
was being build on the destruction of the old way of life.. the old way
of tribes that existed for millions of years, was being destroyed...

(now also note that around the world, came changes of note..
that within a 150 year time period, came the Buddha, Socrates,
Confucius.. and the reason for this came around with the new
reality of the tribes being destroyed and the rise of agriculture
and cities/towns.. now one might say, that agriculture had
been around since roughly 10,000 BC.. or perhaps several thousands
years before this time period...why this delay? simple, that
human beings are very resistant to change... we are, by nature,
creatures that practice inertia... and change is never, never
ever a straight line.. it goes forward and backwards and stops
all together at times)

so, in the time frame of history, from rise of agriculture and the slow
end of tribalism, we have a slow change in the mind set of human beings...

with the rise of agriculture and cities/towns, come the next phase of
human understanding...the rise of theology, the change from
magical belief in human beings to the rise of belief in god...
spiritual matters can only happen with the change in the material
world that exists around us...with agriculture and cites,
comes the need for cause and effect that was not necessary before...
the movement of human beings was from magical thinking to religious
thinking...and part of this was due to the changing nature of human
existence... with the rise of agriculture and cities, we need to stop
being totally materialistic in our thinking and move towards
thinking in terms of thoughts...and we can see this in the
writing of India at the time... in the writings of the Rig Veda...
perhaps the most ancient writings we have in Indian history...
and the "prayer" most commonly used in the Rig Veda is not
the spiritual ''prayer" we are used to... the Rig Veda is a
very materialistic writings... the most common form of
''prayer" is for cattle and food... especially food... recall that
the society before the Buddha was pastoral... where food was
king... and the question before human beings was not to find god
or be religious, but of basic survival.. and wealth
was counted in terms of how many cattle you had...and the entire
focus of individuals was to increase their food/cattle...
but again, recall that the pastoral society was tribal, that
anything the individual got, was shared collectively within
the tribe...so, you asked for food which you then shared with
the tribe, not keep individually as we would...no mine, no thine...
and we have a change in consciousness within both tribes and individuals...
with the new ideals of private matter... we also note that the first
money created in the world was around 600 BC.. or within
a couple of hundred years or so before the Buddha and Socrates and Confucius...
coincidence.. I think not...

With the loss of tribal life, came the rise of individual greed and
the new acquisition of wealth and money... the rise of kings
engaged in the public attempts to gain wealth by wars...
and with this new consciousness, comes the change in
how we view religions and god... we began to see the universe
and existence in terms of cause and effect.. this is the rise
of religions and theology and god...

the next thing we must think about is that the rise of cities
and cause and effect means that we begin the change in
how we view the world in terms of materialism and idealism....
within tribal life, we were very much into materialism...
but with the growth of the city and cause and effect,
we now change our vision to becoming idealistic,,,
the life of the mind begins...we see this, once again,
in the Rig Veda... In which the people complained that
the order of the universe, or what the word ''RIG'' actually
means.. which is order.. RIG is a pre-idealistic thought
about the order within the universe.. very similar to
the Chinese word, TAO... that the RIG or order has left
the world.... think about the world around the time of
the Buddha... the world was in flux and changing due to
the loss of the tribal and pastoral world that human beings
have existed within for thousands of years... the rise
of cities and agriculture has change how people now
view the world...and with it, comes the new order of
idealism and finding cause and effect... we see the rise
of theology and religions in this time period...
human beings go from magical thinking to religious thinking during
these centuries... and we got god coming into focus as we know
what god and spiritual thinking is... but again, it didn't happen
until the change in the world cause by agriculture and the rise of
cities/towns...the changing material world caused a change
in how we view and understand the world at large....
so, the world changed and then, and only then did we
slowly changed from material/magical thinking to idealistic/
theological thinking..

and this was the problem faced by the Buddha... how to cope
with a new reality/ a changing world with the loss of tribal
thinking of materialism and magical thinking?

how did the Buddha solve this problem?

Next post...

Kropotkin

phyllo wrote: ↑Thu Sep 07, 2023 7:11 pm You can't possibly know what they thought because there is no record of it.

Attitudes about social organization, property, religion, gods ... who knows.

K: actually you can know it... read the RIG Veda.. perhaps the oldest
known document we have and see how they approached the world...
and if that doesn't float your boat, try reading, as I did,
the PDF...

Lokayata: a study of Indian Materialism...by Chattopadhyaya...

Kropotkin

ok, we have several different human beings around
the same time, trying to understand the new world around them
the loss of magical thinking and the tribal life that had existed
for centuries...

how did they solve this problem, the Buddha, Socrates
and Confucious?

all three, surprisingly enough, were reactionaries...
in other words, they didn't look ahead but they
looked behind for answers...the basic format
of the society favored by the Buddha was tribal in form...
thus it was democratic and communistic...just like the tribes...
with statements against the new way of greed, and desire and
wants that filled the world.....

Socrates also gave his answered in terms of the past, not
in terms of what could be, but what was....

(if one knows Athenian history, around 600 BC, that the figure Solon,
reformed Athens from a tribe based society into 4 classes,
into a society that where you lived, determined your status,
not your tribe.. this major achievement was due to the social
and class unrest that dominated Athens for decades...and Athens
was made into a democracy about 50 or 70 years ago before
Socrates was born and again, recall that money was invented
about 150 or so years before Socrates birth)

and in Athenian philosophy, we can say that the rise of sophist,
which Socrates fought, his solution was to remain firmly
on the path of the old ways.. in which the gods were the gods
in the old way, Socrates believed in the old gods.. not the new
gods that the Sophist brought about.. and Socrates was perhaps,
the most religious man in Athens...and unlike the others in Athens,
Socrates wrote nothing... and that was the old way...one writing
philosophy was a new thing... philosophy's name in Greek was
called Inquiry... as was history and social sciences, such as they were...
and Socrates had a respect for the law that was, by his time,
rather old fashion...and his avoidance of politics, was just
another old fashion idea...
and his faith in the gods, he followed that idea his whole life...
for example, when told that the Oracle of Delphi, had
proclaimed him to be the "Wisest man in Athens"
he followed that idea all his life... he spent his time
in fact, trying to prove the oracle wrong...
and slowly the realization came to him, that in fact he might
be the wisest man in Athens due to his "not knowing" anything..

and then we have Confucious who brought about the worship of
Ancestors as the highest idea of existence...and the worship
of Ancestors isn't a forward thinking idea, it is a backwards
step.... and the solution for all three, Socrates, the Buddha
and Confucius was not in terms of looking forward but
an engagement with the past...

I hope our next thinking is going forward, not backwards...
and the next post is what does any of this has to do with
our modern times?

Kropotkin

Peter Kropotkin wrote: ↑Thu Sep 07, 2023 7:31 pm

phyllo wrote: ↑Thu Sep 07, 2023 7:11 pm You can't possibly know what they thought because there is no record of it.

Attitudes about social organization, property, religion, gods ... who knows.

K: actually you can know it... read the RIG Veda.. perhaps the oldest
known document we have and see how they approached the world...
and if that doesn't float your boat, try reading, as I did,
the PDF...

Lokayata: a study of Indian Materialism...by Chattopadhyaya...

Kropotkin

Rigveda dates from 1500-1000 BC

The oldest known writing is from around 3400 BC

Nowhere near the "million years" you refer to in the OP.

so here, we will go over some idea's already presented,
to see if they are valid or not..

we first see about this idea of the old way of thinking as
being about magical thinking, not religious thinking...

children, and I am a father, children cannot think abstractly..
abstract thinking is idealism.. the mind thinking...children
are very materialistic... there is no thought about money, time,
god, or cause and effect....

children simply lack the ability to think idealistically, or
abstractly... for example, if children could think about
something abstractly, like god, for example, why do
we spend years teaching children about god? if they
could think idealistically, abstractly, they would automatically
know or understand the concept of god, as spirit... as we adults
understand it...but they can't..... abstract thought is actually
a fairly advance form of thinking... I have seen adults not
being able to think about things abstractly...
or to say it differently, children have to reach a certain level
of conscience to be able to think abstractly..
it is not automatic or something everyone has..... and it
only happens later in life, not at birth or even when a child is
young... but later in life....and the same is true of civilizations,
tribes, and people.... various idea's move at different times
and rates, depending on the person, tribe, society or state in question....
for example, the economic system of Feudalism moved at different
rates and times, depending on the country or state in question....
Feudalism existed, in some fashion, in the West until the French Revolution..
and it still existed in Russia until the mid 19the century..
and Feudalism never hit many areas like North America or
South America....

and we can think about materialism and idealism in the same way...
there is no uniform path or method that materialism and/or idealism
travels.. and this is true today as it was true in the times of the Buddha
and Socrates... beliefs and thoughts and idea's travel at different
speeds and in different formats with different people, groups,
families, governments and states....

and religious thinking is very abstract thought... for in
thinking about religion, what is physical and present
in in religious thought? There is nothing to touch or feel
in abstract thought, and there is certainly nothing to
touch or feel in religious thought... can we touch god or
heaven or angels or good or evil or sin? all abstract thought
and all but impossible for children under a certain age and
quite difficult for a tribal, pre-agriculture age...

Kropotkin

phyllo wrote: ↑Thu Sep 07, 2023 8:23 pm

Peter Kropotkin wrote: ↑Thu Sep 07, 2023 7:31 pm

phyllo wrote: ↑Thu Sep 07, 2023 7:11 pm You can't possibly know what they thought because there is no record of it.

Attitudes about social organization, property, religion, gods ... who knows.

K: actually you can know it... read the RIG Veda.. perhaps the oldest
known document we have and see how they approached the world...
and if that doesn't float your boat, try reading, as I did,
the PDF...

Lokayata: a study of Indian Materialism...by Chattopadhyaya...

Kropotkin

Rigveda dates from 1500-1000 BC

The oldest known writing is from around 3400 BC

Nowhere near the "million years" you refer to in the OP.

K: and at no point, do I say that writing is a million years old, I said
that human beings have existed for a million years and that
in thinking, if they do think, is not done abstractly, but done
in terms of magical thinking.. which is done with no thought
to cause and effect..

the problem here is your lack of imagination in thinking about this...
you are thinking in terms of material thinking and not with
any imagination... try to imagine the world before ''history"
the long pre-history of human beings before there was writing
and agriculture and the bronze age...think about the nature
of thinking.. and what does it take to think about god vs
thinking about sheer survival...in thinking about survival,
we don't think abstractly.. we don't think about god or
the nature of human beings or what is the soul, no, not at all...
the name of the game is survival and with that thinking, comes
material thinking...how am I going to eat tonight? where am I going
to find food to feed my tribe?

abstract thinking can only come with some success in feeding people...
the only way abstract thinking happens if, if, there is a surplus of food
and goods within a society/state... and that didn't come until
human beings established cities... and even with the creation
of cities and state, quite often, a city would face drought
and famine.. survival for most of human history was a very tricky
thing to achieve... and in this case of trying to survive,
we leave abstract thought behind and try to survive with what
we have, we face material and magical thinking, not rational,
abstract thinking..

Kropotkin

K: and at no point, do I say that writing is a million years old, I said
that human beings have existed for a million years and that
in thinking, if they do think, is not done abstractly, but done
in terms of magical thinking.. which is done with no thought
to cause and effect..

You said that you knew what people were thinking and doing a million years ago. Here it is:

"and now we hit the next important thing... that the society of the hunter/gatherer
and the pastoral, were tribal... that is very important to note... for a million
years or more, society/the state was tribal in nature.. and tribes by nature
are small in their numbers.. and most importantly, tribes are, again by nature,
communistic, that they shared and shared alike.. there was no sense of
private goods that we have today...everything a human being got in
life was shared with the tribe, no exceptions...if it could not be shared,
it was thrown away.... there was no mine and thine in the tribal society/state.."

You can't possibly know their attitude towards "private goods".

That's your ideology talking.

the problem here is your lack of imagination in thinking about this...
you are thinking in terms of material thinking and not with
any imagination...

This is a philosophy forum. The truth is important.

If want to use your imagination, if you want to make up stories, then try a creative writing class.

phyllo wrote: ↑Thu Sep 07, 2023 7:11 pm You can't possibly know what they thought because there is no record of it.

Attitudes about social organization, property, religion, gods ... who knows.

That is not so.
There are many areas in the world where hunter/gather subsistence survived right up to the 20thC, even today they still exist in very remote areas.

These groups have been the subject of antropological invenstigations for 150 years, and have for the most part formed the greatest subcategory of the discipline.

What is understood is the vast and varied social strategies adopted by these societies. THese include an amazing range of diferent gender attitudes and marriage arrangements, as wel as attitudes to neighbouring groups.
There is more variation in social strategies amongst "pristine" H/g social organisation than currently exits today modern Western Society.

now we hit the next step, which is about the here, now and
the future...

we know, both from our own experiences and watching others, our children
for example, that consciousness changes... how we perceive others
and how we perceive the world changes as we grow older... an event
at age 14 is experienced as one thing and that same event at 54, will
mean something different... that is the change in consciousness we
all have as we go from birth to death...

but we not only have individual changes in consciousness, but
we also go through collective changes in consciousness...
I point out the various revolutions of the last 500 years in this..
we have had changes in consciousness in terms of the scientific
revolution, the social revolution, the philosophical revolution,
and the various political revolutions of the last 250 years,
the American revolution, the French revolution, the Russian revolution...
all of these are changes in how we view things..
the monarchy is viewed as the direct path from god, or so the various
monarchies would like to be viewed... and they were viewed as such,
until they weren't... Louis the XIV said this:

'L'etat c'est moi'

and that is an understanding of a viewpoint.. a conscious viewpoint...
and it worked until it wasn't a viewpoint... that the French revolution
changed that perception...it took a collective change in, a change
in the mindset of many people in France to overcome, to be able to
create the French Revolution... we have seen, time and time again,
how a change in the collective consciousness of the people has created
change in that state, society, civilization...

and given the dramatic changes in our world over the last 200 years,
the Industrial revolution and the technological revolution,
we have also created a new viewpoint, a new understanding of what
it means to be human... we just haven't expressed it out loud due
to the fact that we haven't accepted it yet...

or to put this in other terms, we are exactly at the same point that
the great thinkers of yesterday were at... the Socrates, Buddha, and Confucious
all tried to make sense of the massive changes that occurred within the prior
200 years before they were born...

but as usual, human thinking, human consciousness is behind the
events on the ground.. we are trying to catch up to the new reality
we are facing.. just as the Buddha and Socrates were trying to catch
up to the new reality they were facing... the loss of the tribes and the
rise of the state.. and these are two completely different ways of thinking..
how does the human consciousness catch up to the new reality we find
ourselves in? We stop and take inventory... which we haven't done yet...
today, we are at a critical crossroads in history...and our decisions will
determine what our future will look like...both individually and
collectively....

what do we see today? I see conservatives and liberals having
different perceptions of reality.. listen to the MAGA/GOP crowd
and you will hear about the total destruction of cities by people
of color, WOKISM, BLM, and the violence that make those cities
unlivable... and what drives the MAGA/GOP, what drives
conservatives is fear.. that is the motivating factor of
the conservative... they live in fear, of well, everything...
listen to them.. read what they write, even here on this website
and others... they are deathly afraid of so many things that I can
barely keep track... they are afraid of, in no particular order,
CRT, WOKISM, Obama, people of color, the constitution, civil rights,
humor, love, Soros, change, education, ideas, puppy dogs (that's a joke, son)
laws, welfare, Muslims, religion, immigrants, gays, trans people, vaccines,
to name a few fears that conservatives have....

and those fears drive conservatives into certain values or beliefs....
and those fears, values are really just viewpoints, understanding
of the reality of the world they live in... and because the conservative holds
to the wrong understanding of the world, they have the wrong answers to
the questions facing us...their viewpoint of the world is wrong...
pure and simple...to enter the future, we must have values
and beliefs that allow us to engage with the future, not to
passively enter the future, but actively engage with the future
that we want to create.....

so, what values and beliefs should we engage with?

individually and collectively, we must think about what kind of future do
we want....actively denying the reality of our times, is not the path we
need to take... for example, denying climate change, denying equality/justice,
denying how income inequality is threating the world, denying that
our resources are becoming limited, denying the fact that we are engaged
in a wholesale extinction event in the world.. and to deny these facts is
to bring about the end of our country and possible the end of the world...

of course, many around here engage in the ''Kropotkin is wrong'' theme,
no matter what I write, so I hope that you might engaged in some
thinking of your own into what future you want to see to happen?
and then decide on what actions you need to take to implement that
future..

not the Kropotkin is wrong theme, but the "what if Kropotkin is right"
theme...

Kropotkin

we have had types of changes in our collective consciousness,
going from magical thinking to religious/theological thinking, so
what now is the next step?

what does the future suggest to us?

I would say that the change coming which has already started, is the
change from our current religious thinking to Nietzsche's
''no god'' world thinking.... and what does the world look like in
a ''no god" world?

that many of the ism's that are driven by religious ''god" thinking
will soon vanish... for example, capitalism is a religion driven
by thinking that somehow by our individual vices we create some
sort of public good.. and it is never explained how that miracle
happens.. with one of 5 examples offered in Smith's book,
"The Wealth of Nations" that the "invisible hand of god" somehow
creates that public good...and that sort of religious thinking
ends during the next phase of our collective thinking...

in a "no god" world, we human beings are bound to our collective fate..
in other words, my existence depends on you and your existence depends
on me....instead of 500 people holding more than half the wealth on planet earth,
we spread the earth's wealth far more equally, which is another way of saying
with justice for all.....that instead of our focus on increasing our own
personal wealth at the expense of others, we treat others gains, as our
own.... justice in our human world requires us to be treated as equals,
and equality/justice requires us to be treated equally politically,
socially, and economically....

that is the new way of consciousness.. to think of the whole before the
part.... and to work for justice before our own individual gains....

Kropotkin