So I was browsing Hackett Publishing's philosophy books, and I came across a book by Robert Solomon titled "Introducing The German Idealists". I don't need any introduction to German idealism, I'm just interested if the book might have any interesting, maybe creative or new content, that utilizes the German idealist philosophers. I couldn't find a pdf anywhere online, so I'm appealing to the people who've read it or are familiar with Solomon's work. Am interested in possibly buying.

Sense data are analogous to fossils, metaphysics is the artist interpretation of how the animal may have looked. While we can never know exactly how they looked in life, we can still intelligently extrapolate beyond direct perception. And that process should grow as our understanding of the world grows. Instead of a solitary concept, idealism is more of a workshop of "all future metaphysics."

All life evolved from a common ancestor. We can ask realists: If we perceive reality directly, to what extent did the Last Universal Common Ancestor perceive reality? The absurdity of a single cell perceiving as we do should be enough to plant an itch.

Amateur enthusiast, just wanted to share my thoughts with someone else who might understand.

For our podcast this week, we read Schopenhauer's essay - On The Indestructibility of Our Essential Being By Death. In it he argues about the ending of a personal life cannot be seen as something bad as their conscious suffering would come to and end while will would live eternally, passing on to all living things to follow. Further, that sate of being dead is equatable to the state of not being born yet.

I personally find this type of nihilism - the negation of the importance of conscious, personal, existence to be forsaking the importance of what we know for the hope of non-existence - to be a mistake. But maybe I am missing something.

What do you think?

Indeed, since mature consideration of the matter leads to the conclusion that total non-being would be preferable to such an existence as ours is, the idea of the cessation of our existence, or of a time in which we no longer are, can from a rational point of view trouble us as little as the idea that we had never been. Now since this existence is essentially a personal one, the ending of the personality cannot be regarded as a loss. (Schopenhauer - On The Indestructibility of Our Essential Being By Death)

Link to full episode if you're interested:
Apple - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/pdamx-28-1-schopen-how-life-is-suffering-w-brother-x/id1691736489?i=1000670002583

YT - https://youtu.be/SyLV4TEXQps?si=bz57bF7h5nvZugcE

Evolution can produce anything given enough time for complexity. Which is also why significantly decreasing the complexity of a problem also reduces the time necessary to produce a solution. Idealism benefits drastically from this imposed dimensionality reduction when compared to Realism.

A Realist imagines a universe existing independent of minds. The existence of this reality causally precedes any perception, which means that we need to simulate the environment before we know any relevant parameters. With idealism on the other hand, we actually start with the perceptual system of the species. Instead of using traditional continuously variable values in the neural nets, we restrict each weight to integer values within the connection's base.

One can imagine a given connection to be of base-5, meaning that its possible values would be one of the following integers: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. DNA has such dense information storage potential that our entire human genome is represented using only 46 molecules. And its code only needed 4 bases to evolve into the complexity of all life on Earth: A, T, C, G. This means that every diploid genome is represented as some set of closely paired points in a four dimensional fitness space. The paired points correspond to each copy of the same chromosome, and the rest being separate chromosomes.

Kant pointed out that there is no perception without the anschauung of space and time. The four dimensions we now use to represent our environment may somehow fundamentally correspond to the base-4 nature of our DNA. If we could develop a mapping from DNA space to fitness space, genomic engineering suddenly becomes way easier.

Let's make the future happen sooner.

And by fiction I mean any ideas outside the scope of contemporary discourse in public philosophy journals. Then people could share their ideas on future incarnations of idealism (or whatever other competitors may exist to scientific realism).

This has become increasingly important since the 2022 Nobel Prize winners in Physics disproved any version of Realism with Localism. I politely jumped ship into an updated version of Kant’s camp, but I’ve failed to see an associated wave in contemporary popular discussions on philosophy. Metaphysics aren’t typically discussed with philosophy outsiders. They’re seemingly the last thing you’d expect to be wrong about and therefore ever require updating.

More importantly I believe making a space for popular discussions on philosophical ideas can only contribute to the established university publishing infrastructure. We can be a parallel experiment of evolution that the gods of academia can hopefully one day copy off of.

Let’s make the future happen sooner!

Just had an insight into an idealist inspired way of modeling cognition and wasn't sure where to post this so let me know if this is inappropriate here.

Since the 2022 Nobel Prize winners in Physics proved that local realism doesn't exist, I've been thinking of how idealism can replace it as the default scientific worldview.

If spacetime, as idealists believe, doesn't actually exist and functions as a mediated translation of whatever actually exists, then dimensionality would have to be something we evolved. There must be some benefit to setting up your mind to run on essentially linear algebra.

If this is genuinely how we think then one thing that would follow is that we currently are incapable of forming lossless three dimensional memories. The way in which the Pythagorean theorem extrapolates to three dimensions combined with Fermat's Last Theorem leads me to believe that we extrapolate higher dimensions as combinations of separate lower dimensional renders.

This would also imply that our version of math, the only known universal language, is actually a subset of a fuller, better math. Maybe the best task for an ASI is to explore the maths of higher dimensions, and eventually into something competitively improving upon dimensionality. That'd be the best way to influence its attention since that goal is limitless for the superintelligence, yet would have the most beneficial consequences for all intelligences to thrive in the future.

Again if this is the wrong place for this type of content let me know. I'm just searching for a community that thinks prospectively in this manner sometimes.

The periodization of Schelling's work is controversial.

[Walter Schulz](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Schulz_(philosopher\)) distinguishes between 4 periods:

1. the early philosophy influenced by Fichte, which he considers to be preparation for
2. the identity system, the subsequent
3. theosophical phase and
4. the system of late philosophy, which consists of negative and positive philosophy.

Horst Fuhrmans also divides Schelling’s work as 4 periods:

1. philosophy before 1800,
2. the philosophy of identity (1800–1806),
3. the middle philosophy (1806–1827) as the most important phase and
4. Late philosophy (from 1827)

Nicolai Hartmann distinguishes five periods:

1. natural philosophy (until 1799),
2. transcendental idealism (around 1800),
3. the philosophy of identity (1801–1804),
4. the philosophy of freedom (around 1809) and
5. the religious philosophy and mythology of the late Schelling (from about 1815 onwards)

Christian Iber distinguishes seven periods in his Schelling monograph (which argues from the perspective of his development)

1. Schelling’s early writings (1794–1795/96),
2. the writings on natural and transcendental philosophy (1796–1799),
3. the system of transcendental idealism (1800),
4. Philosophy of Identity (1801–1809),
5. Philosophy of freedom and world ages (1809–1820),
6. Erlangen Lecture (1821/22) and
7. Late Philosophy (1822 ff)

via wikipedia (German)