Stephen writes > I would like for you to consider that we should not take OMs as > "objective processes" but the result of "objective processes".
Of course, I will bow to whatever word usage is favored by most of the people, or by those who have the longest experience with the term. I merely want to assert that I don't and never have found any real value in what is not objective. For example, if I am poked with a needle and cry out, one may wish to proclaim to me "see, you do have a subjective reality". "Oh, that really hurt," I'll admit "but if you want to really know what happened then the needle caused some nerves in my finger to fire, which caused other nerves to fire and so on. I am a process fashioned by evolution to object to actions like poking me." > I shudder every time I read of notions that imply some kind of > knowledge of "reality in itself"! Yeah, well now you know how it feels! :-) Feels, that is, every time that someone speaks of inner truths not accessible to anyone else, not accessible in *principle* to anyone else. I don't consider those things to rank very highly on the scale of truth. It boils down, as you hint, to what we mean by "knowledge". Casting aside the incredibly mistaken quest for "certainty", we ought to speak of that which can be objectively known in principle. It doesn't ever do any good to speak of anything else. Sure, ask someone if he or she has a headache---but if you want to think about it strictly, then it is a state (or a succession of states constituting a process) in that person's brain. I repeat my challenge: find *one* thing that is subjectively "known" or investigable or knowable by introspection that was not "known" by the ancients. > How is it that we simply can not seem to acknowledge what we can not > know Existence in-itself and merely must rely upon logical rules, gleamed > from multiple attempts, to figure out good models of "what we think is going > on" and not try to fool ourselves that we can somehow abstract away > ourselves from our deliberations about the nature of *Reality*? First, the models (as you call them) were provided by evolutionary processes that finally led to one's own embryonic and fetal development. As a two year old, you know that sometimes it's light and sometimes it's dark, unless your brain is malformed or malfunctioning. There is *so* much true knowledge of that form accessible to a two-year old that it's staggering. Yet no one except a naive child supposes that there is any absolute certainty to his knowledge, or is unaware of the processes that put information about outside events (and some internal ones) into his brain. So I reject the claim that I or people like me believe "we can know Existence in-itself" as you write. > Let me try to boil this down a little, how is it even consistent to > claim that some "set of states" completely represents a "process"? The > assumption here seems to beg us to assume that a static representation can > faithfully capture all of the transitive properties implicit in the notion > of process. Oh, here I agree with you. I consider the speculations of the Everything Platonic monists to be, er, speculations only. Those conjectures have not even *begun* to pass the test of time, i.e., have not endured much criticism as yet, and certainly cannot be said to have survived much criticism. Your real knowledge, (for example, that some people have been to Hawaii or that you have two hands or that four gas giants revolve around the sun), has survived the tests of time. Lee P.S. I'll reply to Colin's post in a while. > For me this is equivalent to claiming that Becoming can be > derived from Being. I would truly like someone to explain this idea to me! > >From what I can figure it is easy to show how Being can derive from > Becoming, so why the kicking against the pricks trying to go backwards?
