Ham, Krimel asked me to remind you that you invited questions about your philosophy. He does not think his have been satisfactorily addressed but he has no wish to be nitpicky. You told him that his philosophical position is intractable. Since mine is too, we're both wasting our time.
Our user agreed. Still he thinks a lot about the intractabilitly of his position. He is convinced that his position is to be other-than intractable. Not wishing to waste your time, he considered that perhaps he had been unfair. He admitted that he had failed to read your thesis; literally failed, as several attempts ended in either boredom or frustration. This time he vowed to press on. He converted it to Word and printed it out. It became his Easter devotional. It left our user is mute with sadness. Krimel hasnt the heart for blasting at nits. They agreed that the Mechanical Garden was a Bards quest. And so I offer up these thoughts: When Krimel asked how does your philosophy differ from apologetics; he meant it in the sense of a reasoned defense of the faith. Your whole system seems to revolve around your need to defend Essence, the Primary Source, God. Eventually you conjure up an immortal soul of sorts. You rant against computer disks as digital prayer wheels and atheist existentialists offering hopelessness and despair. Yet your antidote exists in a spaceless/timeless state; unmovable, impersonal, completely abstract and inert. He reminds me of the Pharaoh and the Queen of the Damned in Ann Rices novel. They sit fixed; bodies as hard and ridged as alabaster. They neither desire nor contribute to the world. Only the ministrations of the trickster Lestat can engage their attention. You go on for pages to make Nothing into something. You give it function and force and begin a series of negations that end in us: When an entity negated by Essence negates, it creates the appearance of beingthe dichotomy otherwise known as being-aware. Elsewhere you tell us, We are the negates that stand at the crossroads of empirical time and space. We are negates?" Your empirical space and time are Euclidian. As a youth you envision, a superhuman being with the ability to see beyond the limits of finite perception, and my conclusion was based on speculation that an infinite perspective would overlook the minutia of finite existence. Your superhuman gazes on a line, while mortals are trapped in squiggled segments. Your lines extend into infinity in both directions on a flat spatial plane. But physics no longer regards space as flat. It is warped by mass into gravity wells and curves back on itself in toruses or perhaps saddle shapes. A line might spiral around itself cross its own path, disappear into a black hole. Todays Gods eye view reveals self similarity across scale; complexity and beauty whether we zoom in or zoom out. Your time is likewise fixed. It is a fate accompli. It is only the sequential manifestation of immutable Essence. Existence is predestined and our freedom is an illusion. You tell us ignorance of this illusion is bliss. If you were suddenly granted the key to all knowledge, including the origin, meaning and destiny of your lifecomplete with a timetablewould it be a gift or a curse? Would you be content with the prospect of never having to make a choice, feel surprise, or ponder an unknown fate? Or would this wisdom reduce your life-experience to that of a robotized creature, automatically running its prescribed course under the control of an external source? You picture us negates going through the motions anyway, enriched by ignorance until; The illusion ends, as it begins, with a negation. We are to be consoled knowing that, loss of selfness accounts for most of the fear we associate with death, it behooves us to remember that the truly meaningful experiences and greatest joys in life are those in which we lose ourselves. You offer this up to save us from technology and atheist existentialists. There is a prevailing attitude in our society that technology will one day solve all problems. The idea is a corruption of Darwin/Marxist theories with a dose of altruism thrown in that smacks more of Disney than reality. And yet your vision is so abstract and devoid of life that scientific materialism looks hopefully in its light. Science acknowledges life. It meets it on its own terms. The scientific abstraction of nature is answerable to nature. Science asks questions. It does not make demands. Science does not leave us mercifully blind in a Calvinist world of predestination. You mention the quantum physicists and like so many others, enlist them in your battle to undercut the foundations of the materialist world view. And yet consider what they have done. They have taken your Gods eye point of view far beyond what you imagined in your youth. They urge you to put away childish things and see with new eyes. What would God see if he rode a beam of light? With their equations and instruments scientists have expanded human consciousness into realms beyond our ability to experience. We did not evolve in a world of quantum effects. We have neither the senses to apprehend it nor categories of experience to fit it into. Science offers us new sensory receptors and new worlds to see and make sense of with them. The world is not composed of ever smaller BBs bouncing to Newton in Euclidian space. It is made of process and probabilities. Each quantum decision point is critical to each instant in the flow of time. Each decision determines the flow of the future and the future is affected by each probability outcome. Different out comes, difference futures. I will leave such nits for Krimel to pick. But I wonder, Ham what would sort of experience would drive someone, not so much into Pirsigs high country of the mind up; not just high above the normal world but into a stratosphere devoid of life where even love and hope and joy are dim apprehensions of negated essence, the clanging gong of negate essents. Even the rose in your garden is a phantom. In your garden our senses do not so much reveal beauty as hoodwink us with abstraction. You invite your wife into your garden not to share in its joy but to act as, her own set of sensory data relative to what is, in effect, another experience. I dont have much to say about the logical merits of what you are saying. I know you see this as some kind of intellectually esthetic exercise beyond criticism and validation. I hope that you find joy in it. But it seems to me to reduce experience to ifs and thens and negatations and therefores. You paint us as being doomed to becoming servants to our own machines and offer a Primary Source as salvation. In philosophy, whether it is identified as the Absolute, God, or The One, the primary source is traditionally alleged to be unified, undifferentiated, and unalterable. If we assume this to be true, then it follows that the "first principle"primary reality is the opposite of polarized multiplicity. Your logical convolutions flow from this assumption. You reduce life to negation in its name. Who would choose this kind of salvation? I would prefer to serve my machines. At least the relationship is symbiotic. I would rather serve my car a fresh tank of gas, roll down its windows and let Bob Marley spread redemption down a fractal strip of black top. I would rather gently vacuum Dorito crumbs from my computer keyboard and google an oracle that contains the collected wisdom of my people. But, Ham, if this God you bring us were not already dead, we should form into search parties, track him down and drive a stake through his alabaster immutable heart. Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
