On 23 February 2014 19:04, Craig Weinberg <whatsons...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > After all, the standard objection to starting from the putative >> universality of consciousness is why does it appear that so much of the >> world of appearance is *unconscious*? >> > > That is the only criticism that I have come up with so far of my own > position that has some potential. > Then it is the one you should concentrate on. > It is very hard to imagine that what we see as inanimate objects could be > just the tip of an iceberg of non-human storytelling, > You might be surprised how similar this analogy is to my personal metaphor for the sensible worlds of CTM. That's why I sometimes call it the Programmatic Library of Babel. If Borges had known about CTM, I'm sure he would have relished it. > however, it really is no more far fetched than imagining the underlying > microphysics of any given object. > True dat. > All that it really means is that the relation that we enjoy with the world > is in some sense the fundamental relation of all natural phenomena. > But what sense is that? You say that it is the relation of common, ordinary sense, as though that alone will prime our intuition to leap the gap between the human scale and that of - well what precisely? Are we perhaps to suppose all conceivable relations to be those of reciprocal perception and acting-upon? That's out there as the poetic precursor to an idea. Gregg Rosenberg, for example, has re-analysed the notion of causality from first principles in order to argue that the effective (i.e. motive) notion of physical causality at the micro-scale cannot be fully coherent without a receptive (i.e. sensory) dual. But he struggles mightily to cash this out consistently at the macro-scale. I'm not suggesting that this is necessarily precisely equivalent to your basic assumption, but I do believe that you cannot avoid a similar struggle with these difficulties because they are inherent in the topic. All of the objectionable anthropocentrism can be potentially alleviated by > applying exponential filters of insensitivity > No doubt, if we can indeed elucidate precisely what is entailed by exponential filters of insensitivity. > which are proportional to distance, scale, and unfamiliarity. It would > make sense also, > Make sense to whom? I'm not being facetious: we should be very careful in theory-making that we are not merely projecting terrestrial notions of what makes sense on to the cosmic scale. You yourself have used the analogy of the Galilean paradigm replacing the Ptolemaic and there are countless others. > that in a universe produced from the start as an experiential phenomenon, > that the partitioning of experiences, particularly those which are to > contain psychologically sophisticated participants, must be especially firm. > Must be indeed. But how specifically? > It may not be possible even for my hypothesis to gain traction on these > grounds. It may be too much of a spoiler and too many storylines would have > to be dropped. > Well this is the interesting and also the hard part. Your doubt does you credit. But I really think you may be making it harder by setting your face so resolutely against CTM, or at least what such an approach has to teach us (which is really Bruno's fundamental aim). I'm sure there must be a more mutually informative way of approaching such über-puzzling issues that isn't merely a wearisome recycling of yes-it-is no-it-isn't. David -- 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 everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
