On 1/27/2013 7:13 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote:
On Sunday, January 27, 2013 10:06:37 PM UTC-5, Brent wrote: On 1/27/2013 2:35 PM, freqflyer07281972 wrote:Hey everyone, I've been following this group a lot. I read it everyday and enjoy all of the wonderful stuff that comes up, even if some of it tends towards ad hominem, argument from authority, and petitio principi. Hey, we're humans, right? That means we get to make these fallacies, in good conscience or bad. Anyway, I wondered about what anyone/everyone thought about the notion of 'chosenness' as a way to understand where we are here in the world. It seems to me that concepts like MWI, Bruno's comp/mech hypothesis and the 'dreams of numbers' ideas of subjectivity, and even Leibniz's 'best of all possible worlds' don't actually do something like flee away from our everyday responsibility to accept the basic fact that we have been CHOSEN -- and when I say this, please don't immediately put a bunch of theological baggage on it. I'm not saying God chose this reality as opposed to another, although this might be a convenient shorthand. But what I am saying is that, out of all the staggering possibilities that we know exist with regards to our universe, our galaxy, our solar system, our planet, our society, and even our individual selves, things could have very easily turned out to be different than they were. The fact that they have turned out in just this way and not another indicates this kind of chosenness, and along with it, comes a certain degree of responsibility, I guess? It seems to me that all the various 'everything' hypotheses (MWI, comp, Leibniz, and others) try to apply the Copernican principle to its breaking point. True enough, there is from a purely 3p point of view nothing special about our cosmic situation re: our planet and our sun. BUT, from an existential 1p point of view there is a huge privilege that we have, i.e. we are sentient observers, who love, feel pain, feel desire, and long for transcendence.There's a desire to respect the Copernican principle (don't assume we're 'special') but also to avoid randomness. This then leads to the hypothesis that *everything* (in some sense) exists. That way you avoid randomness without assuming that we're special.Moreover, the 3p point of view is a pure abstraction, kind of like eating the picture of a meal rather than the actual meal. How do we know what any kind of 3p account of truth would be? What would it even look like? A universe with no observers. A falling tree without a hearer/listener. This, to me, is nonsense. Aren't things like MWI of quantum physics and comp hypothesis of universal dovetailer trying to, at a fundamental and existential level, an attempt to try to run away from the concreteness and absolute 'givenness' (gift) of the world as we find it? And isn't our role, in creation, as freely choosing beings (sorry, John Clark, free will is more than just a noise) to choose what will make other people with us now and in the future feel more love and less pain? And isn't this why we were chosen?To say we're chosen is just another way to avoid randomness.To say we are avoiding randomness is to assume that there is something other than randomness to be embraced.
That's what being 'chosen' implies - that there is a 'choser', an alternative teleology to be embraced.
Why should anything that exists want to avoid randomness?
Ask somebody else, I'm not avoiding it. Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
