Materialism and the two levels of being Marterialism is the philosophy which assert that there is only one "stuff" in the universe, and that is matter. This works perfectly well in the physical sciences, but has problems when consciousness is brought into the picture, for consciousness is dipolar, with a subjective observer or subject at one end of a dipole and what he is observeing (some object in an objective world) at the other end of the dipole.
This dipole constitutes a conscious experience. Buddhism and material theorists resist the idea of more than one level of being, and thus tend to consider the dipole as some additional properthy of matter or that subject and object are somehow combined together (Dennett). The problem with this approach arises when you try to state what the subject is like, for that makes him an object, and that is by definition forbidden. Leibniz seems to be the only philosopher to answer this dilemma, his solution being that the observer is on a higher level, which makes him superhuman or divine (such as Plato's One or Christianity's God). This of course raises red flags for the hard-core materialist, so that Leibniz is rarely taken seriously. But the subjectivity issue inevitably brings him back into the picture. Dr. Roger B Clough NIST (ret.) [1/1/2000] See my Leibniz site at http://independent.academia.edu/RogerClough -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
