/lit/ - Literature

Averroes had this same idea which was taken up by Dante.
>The intellect acts as a ghost ship, a mechanical contraption, a demon who possesses the mind of individual human beings, a wall capable of perceiving colours that are reflected in it. Ficino expanded on the anti-Averroistic imagery. He compared the Averroist intellect to a monstrous octopus with a giant head and countless tentacles which fall and grow incessantly in accordance to the individual imaginations of which it feeds. These images had the rhetorical function of highlighting the absurd claim that human thinking is the act of being thought by another intellect. Human beings do not “intellect”, they are “intellected”, and what is more, they do not even know that they undergo this unremitting process of “being intellected”. Indeed, they are led to believe that they are in control of their own thinking activity. The absolute objectivication and reification of human thinking -man is an object and not a subject of thought – was the aspect of Averroes’s philosophy that was perceived almost from the beginning in the Latin West as most distasteful.
This reaction caused a revival of individualism in the Renaissance.

>>16528325
Very interesting anon, thank you

bump

>>16528325
You don't even exist, faggot. Only I do.

bump

>>16528303
>When our physical beings die, the bit of consciousness we have is absorbed back into the Greater Soul, or the web

Ah but you see, if we had bits of consciousness which were parts of the greater whole of the Greater Soul; then, were this Greater Soul to exist anywhere, then it must necessarily exist in the parts of which it is made, because if it did not exist within its parts then it wouldn't exist anywhere else and would be non-existent. But if the Greator Soul is the whole, then it cannot exist within its parts, because the whole, by definition, cannot be contained within individual parts which are incomplete components of the whole; because then the same Greator Soul would be both the complete whole and the incomplete non-whole, violating the law of non-contradiction.

Therefore, the relation of parts and whole is false and without any basis in reality; there being only the one undivided and partless totality. The existence of our consciousness being undeniable, our consciousness is this undivided and partless totality, which is God, Brahman, Tao, etc. There are really no conscious "parts" of a greater sentient "whole", but there is only one undivided and partless infinite Sentience which uses Its power to project within Itself the false appearance of multiplicity and distinctions. If you accept the premises of your post but apply logic to them, it leads to the conclusion that the position of Advaita Vedanta is correct.

>Based off my beliefs, what should I read to confirm my views?

https://estudantedavedanta.net/Eight-Upanisads-Vol-1.pdf
https://estudantedavedanta.net/Eight-Upanisads-vol2.pdf

>>16529214
I would be careful about reading Advaita Vedanta interpretations such as Shankara's as a commentary to the Upanishads, they are extremely reliant on Buddhist philosophy (Shankara is called a "cryptobuddhist" by most Hindus, and most scholars agree). If you want to read the Upanishads, work through them with editions and commentaries that aren't sectarian, or at least read an interpretation that is closer to the original meaning of the Upanishads, rather than Shankara's 9th century AD quasi-buddhism.

>>16529221
>posted 57 seconds after the post it was replying to

Kek, you reactivated your spambot I see, after lying and denying for a week or so that you were using bots

>inb4 "No I didn't you are just doing it yourself to spam Shankara", nevermind that nobody would ever spam something attempting to attack and discredit the person they are trying to promote.

Collective consciousness doesn't exist

>>16529214
holy based...