by Adam » July 26th, 2008, 9:15 pm
::OK. So do abstraction have an individual consciousness?
I see. Thank you for your patience, Robert; now I understand. I imagine that consciousness is part of the participation of the mind in the mind of God; that is, our mind is not one of the created elements which is sustained by the mindfulness of God, but rather it is itself a piece of it.
::No quite exactly, 1st and 2nd order thinking are modes of thought. Perception is a mental image of a thing. A thought is just that, a thought. So When I perceive something, I am made aware of that part of the thing that is physically unalterable. But this is not an informative experience of the thing. Rather, it simply demonstrates experientially the thing to me, mentally, not as a thought but as a conscious awareness of it. Whereas, a thought about a thing is thinking about the thing. And of course thinking about the thought is just that.
I am not sure that I agree that perception is a mental "image" of a thing. We sense an object (pressure), our mind is effected by the data (pain), and we construct an image or concept (sharp, dangerous).
I am also not sure what you mean when you say our perception is of a physically unalterable characteristic of a thing; ignoring distinction between sense, perception, and conception for a moment, I should assert that we always deal with events caused by a thing, or a thing as an event, but we are not storing information of an immutable ideal thing.
Finally, I do not believe that we ever truly "think about thinking." We think about the effects of thought, that is, ruminate on memory or logic or reason or the impact of our decisions and choices, or we contemplate the theoretical mechanics of the process of thought, but it is never something that we actually "see" in any real way, that is, in the sort of manner which would require some degree of externality.
::Well truth may not be, but things that are truly there are. Actually, engaging a free act is the only thing truly creative about us. So I would agree that free will is the creation or construction of a system. But this system is 'made out of' that stuff or material God has created. So, choosing sin is not proof that God creates sin. Rather, it is an example of misappropriation, since one chooses a higher and more significant function for a lower one. It would be like crawling on the floor when one is meant to walk on it. This is not to say that floors are bad, but rather, they are bad to crawl on. We create the crawling action, God creates the stuff we choose to relate or associate ourselves with.
I guess I simply disagree. In the context of your assertion, I should counter that we instead create sin, that our free will is not the choice between a good and a bad but the creation of bad.
::What you just described is classic representationalism and I do not subscribe to it. This is why. When we claim that a memory, thought, or whatever mental event occurs is a symbol of an external (to the mind) event, we admit that some experiences are created by the mind; i.e. a memory, a thought, an emotion 'about' a memory and so forth. However, if you take this reasoning to its logical conclusion the following reductio ad absurdum obtains. Ultimately, the mind is the means by which we know anything of reality. However, the mind, like an interpretor of a foreign language to a speaker, say a German to an Englishman with a bilingual in between, there is no way to know that the interpretor is being relaible in his or her interpretation. For the German could be saying "have a nice day" and the interpretor may say "I hate you." And this situation is like the mind. There is no way to know that what we know of what we sense is accurate if, and only if (iff), the mind is viewed as this sort of faculty This results in a defeator in any case and all epistemic claims are dissolved into uncertainty and even worse contradiction. However, if one views the mind as a means of awareness including epistemic awareness, not of how one is assured knowledge of this supposed external world then this problem dissolves. For the mind may be the means of knowing about reality, but it is not interpretor of the Kantian/Lockeian/Humeian world where senses 'give' the mind the raw materials of knowledge and this is processed by it. No, the more likely conclusion is that the mind knows by sensing those metaphysical properties of things apart from the senses but informed by them.
If you believe that the objective world is both created and sustained by the mindfulness of God, and if I add that the human mind is not created but in some sense begotten of the mind of God, then there is no reason to question the equivalency of the objective world and our conception of the objective world, because the manner in which we interpret the world itself determines the state of the world. This is what must logically follow from the notion that reality is sustained by mindfulness: minds do not merely perceive reality, they create reality, manipulating the raw materials as God did in the act of creation. There is no reason to wonder if the world outside of our mindfulness is the same as the world within our mindfulness because there is no such world: everything that exists, exists because it is being contemplated and in accord with the manner in which it is being contemplated.
Last edited by
Adam on July 27th, 2008, 5:55 am, edited 1 time in total.
"Love is the only art that poorly imitates nature."