On 13/07/07, Brent Meeker <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Brent, all that David is getting at is saying nothing "reflexively > > exists" without being observed. > > Observed in what sense? Consciously, by a conscious being? Or decoherred > into a quasi-classical state, as in QM? "Reflexive" would seem to imply it's > observed by itself.
No, it's not meant to imply that it's 'observed' by itself: rather just that it *is* itself, which is what I think you meant by 'existence simpliciter'. Another term might be instantiation. In qualifying existence by the term 'reflexive', my point was just that, when we originally entertain the idea of something 'existing' or not, we temporarily *abstract* a more tentative sense of 'existence' from any possible instantiation. The abstraction is then 'non-reflexive': it no longer refers to itself, but rather putatively to a referent from which it has (or could have) been abstracted. The danger is that such abstraction may be the very act that seems to rob it of something that is in fact the brute characteristic of instantiation. The argument from 'the One' is that its (and derivatively, any) self-awareness and consciousness derive ultimately from brute, or reflexive, self-access, and hence can't be understood independent of such instantiation. The 'deletion' of these aspects in the specification Torgny makes for the B-Universe can then be seen as precisely characteristic of the abstracted sense of 'existence' - i.e. the free-standing (i.e. non-reflexive) idea - but as making no sense in the context of reflexive instantiation. This doesn't in itself constitute any argument for materialism, because the 'instantiation' could be in terms of any 'possible' world from the plenitude of such, all of which, in this formulation, derive from the One. But my point is that, if a 'world' is arbitrarily specified as not possessing the brute 'reflexive' characteristic of instantiation, then this may just be because such a 'world' is in fact merely the kind of abstraction that is - by this very token - incapable of such instantiation, and hence not 'possible' either. The term I used to attempt to convey the brute characteristic of instantiation was 'reflexivity', in the sense of primitive self-reference or self-access. 'Observation' by contrast has the sense of a complex derivative of this brute characteristic in which various emergent entities are placed in certain kinds of relation *to each other*. Russell's sense of 'reflexive' vis-a-vis observation may indeed also be a useful one, but it's not in fact the point I was making. David > > Russell Standish wrote: > > On Tue, Jul 10, 2007 at 04:28:51PM -0700, Brent Meeker wrote: > >> I don't see that "relexive" adding anything here. It's just "existence" > >> simpliciter isn't it? > >> > > > > Brent, all that David is getting at is saying nothing "reflexively > > exists" without being observed. > > Observed in what sense? Consciously, by a conscious being? Or decoherred > into a quasi-classical state, as in QM? "Reflexive" would seem to imply it's > observed by itself. > > Brent Meeker > > >The tree falling unobserved in the > > forest does not exist reflexively, but may exist in other senses of > > the word. It seems quite a useful concept - I may have called it > > anthropic existence elsewhere, but it doesn't seem to have an accepted > > name. > > > > Cheers > > > > > > > --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
