mutable things or things that are mutable

[JRosemary]

[Adam]

[Adam]

[Robert]

[Robert]

[Adam]

[Robert]

[Adam]

[Robert]

[mitchellmckain]

I really don't want to pick a fight with Adam but I have to say that I just don't have any use for a philosophy that explains reality and elements of the human experience of existence in terms of mental tricks, illusions, abstractions in the mind of God, or whatever you want to call it. What we experience of our existence is our most basic and immediate contact with reality, you just don't get any more real than that, and so trying to dismiss this as unreal or less real in favor of some mental contruct just seems like willfullness to me.

I mean we are certainly free to believe whatever we choose. The naturalist can choose to believe that what science describes is all that is real. I can understand the attraction to this because of this sense that we have that science gets past the willfulness that can be a part of our subjective apprehension of reality. I just can't help feeling that summarily dismissing the fact that this subjective apprehension of it is our most immediate contact with reality, and so replacing this with some objective abstraction seems all too likely to be missing something. BUT I certainly do not feel in the least bit comfortable or justified in abandoning the naturalist position in favor of another philosophy that is just as dismissive of our subjective apprehension of reality.

What I am saying here is not any attempt to put down or attack either Adam's Whiteheadian idealism or the metaphysical naturalism of others -- they have every right to adopt the metaphysical outlook that makes the most sense to them. I just thought I could either just remain silent and uninterested (and I can return to that if you think I am being obnoxious), or I could try to dig into myself in order to find out why this approach of Adam's makes me feel uncomforatable and not something I feel any interest in pursuing.

Arghhh... the rhetoritician in me wants to pre-empt the ridicule I feel is certain to come from Adam... Oh well, I just did it exactly that didn't I... arghh... we are creatures of habit and it so hard to "climb out of our own skins", isn't it?

[Adam]

::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.

[Adam]

::I really don't want to pick a fight with Adam but I have to say that I just don't have any use for a philosophy that explains reality and elements of the human experience of existence in terms of mental tricks, illusions, abstractions in the mind of God, or whatever you want to call it. What we experience of our existence is our most basic and immediate contact with reality, you just don't get any more real than that, and so trying to dismiss this as unreal or less real in favor of some mental contruct just seems like willfullness to me.

What makes the world of my dreams "less real" than the world of my wakefulness? The fact that my dreams are not experienced universally, are neither coherent nor consistent, do not cease or persist according to interpretable law, and the fact that the sense impressions of it jump to conception without perception.

But if I assert that the world of my wakefulness is the world of God's dreams, though it be universal, coherent, consistent, persistent, lawful, and perceptible, yet the connotations of the word "dream" effect your intellect and prevent you from entertaining the notion without presuming that this would somehow make the world "less real." This causes you to make careless equivalencies like "abstraction" and "illusion" until your notion of my idea is quite unlike the idea. Then as a final blow you imagine that this idea is an act of willfulness rather than an exercise of reason.

We are often at odds because your intellect is a bit too practical for me; I prefer theoretical exercises in reason without attention to how useful you may determine it to be or how it makes you feel. Additionally, I think we can agree in a moment of calm that attributing my assertion to stubborness is a violation of sound rules of argument. Finally, I never know quite how to engage your passionate objection to an idea that I am proposing as a mere fancy: I have never been willing even to certainly confess a belief in the existence of a God, nevermind that all of existence is the construction of his mind. But Robert asked an intriguing question and I felt as though I had an intriguing and potent theory to test. An act of willfulness? Nothing could be further from the truth. An act of whimsy, maybe.

::I mean we are certainly free to believe whatever we choose. The naturalist can choose to believe that what science describes is all that is real. I can understand the attraction to this because of this sense that we have that science gets past the willfulness that can be a part of our subjective apprehension of reality. I just can't help feeling that summarily dismissing the fact that this subjective apprehension of it is our most immediate contact with reality, and so replacing this with some objective abstraction seems all too likely to be missing something. BUT I certainly do not feel in the least bit comfortable or justified in abandoning the naturalist position in favor of another philosophy that is just as dismissive of our subjective apprehension of reality.

There is an intellectual critique in there somewhere. The idea that I have asserted is dismissive of perception? Perhaps, though I admit I do not see why holding a handful of dirt that could exist in a vacuum is somehow a truer experience than holding a handful of dirt that only exists because I am holding it. There is a symbiosis in the latter that I appreciate. There could be an element of deception in the former, but only if you believe that it is a common assumption that objects could exist apart from their subjects, that reality could exist apart from perceivers; I would grant that it is a common assumption of western philosophy but I do not think that it is a common assumption of common sense: the psychological lesson that we learn in childhood is that reality could exist apart from our individual perception yet still in the minds of others; our emotional and social lives rely on this lesson. But the idea that reality could exist apart from our individual perception and also apart from the minds of others, this is not psychologically or socially relevant, therefore not an assumption of common sense, therefore a potentially errant assumption of certain philosophies.

::What I am saying here is not any attempt to put down or attack either Adam's Whiteheadian idealism or the metaphysical naturalism of others -- they have every right to adopt the metaphysical outlook that makes the most sense to them. I just thought I could either just remain silent and uninterested (and I can return to that if you think I am being obnoxious), or I could try to dig into myself in order to find out why this approach of Adam's makes me feel uncomforatable and not something I feel any interest in pursuing.

Why not put down and attack it? Anything less always feels patronizing to me and that is why we have difficulty getting along. I don't need your permission to think whatever I want and I don't care if you think it is useful. I do want to know if you think it is reasonable and if you can poke any gaping holes in it.

Adam

[mitchellmckain]

[Adam]

[moogdroog]