Arlo -- > I've read your post several times and I still have no idea if, > according to Essentialism, the universe existed before man. > On one hand you seem to say "no", dismissing the concept > of "before" as non-existent before "man". On the other hand, > you propose an evolutionist ontogenesis to "man", so I can't > help but wonder how whatever it is than man evolved "from" > existed "before man", since you seem to deny that that is possible. > Certainly from this statement, "Homo sapiens as biological > creatures appear to have evolved from earlier primates in > Darwinian fashion", one finds direct refutation of the idea that > without "man" to view it the universe is "dead". It wasn't very > "dead" for those "earlier primates", was it?
You drive me up the wall, Arlo. However, as your query appears to be a genuine quest for edification, I'll try to break this cosmology down for you. 1. The universe existed before man according to the historical view of evolution, that is, if we are talking about biological creatures emerging in a space/time world. 2. If we are talking about metaphysical reality, the appearance of a space/time world is an intellectual construct based on experience. What we experience is process over time as observed from the perspective of an individual organism. 3. Experience, in turn, is derived from Value which is sensed incrementally and converted to the experience of finitude (i.e., relational objects and events). This is how difference is manifested as existence. In other words, existential reality (being-aware) is unique for each organism. 4. There is no "before" or "after", "here" or "there", prior to this intellectualization of experience. All such dualisms are valuistic representations of the primary self/other dichotomy. 5. All experience has the same fundamental referent -- value-sensibility that links self to other, subject to object, awareness to beingness. Thus, objective knowledge has universality which relates all observers within the space/time system. At the same time, the value-sensibility of each observing subject is unique to that individual. > ""Before" and "after" are time-related precepts to which > we are all habituated as SOMists." > > So until "man" appears, there is no "time"? No "before" and > no "after"? Does this mean that everything which we parse into > "past-present-future" existed "simultaneously"? Forget about how "man appears". That's biological evolution which you can explain as well as I can. I'm talking about primary reality, the fundamental ontogeny. Time and space are the mode of experience. Difference and dimensions begin as the self becomes aware of otherness, and they frame all experience. > "So the fact that awareness "creates" our experience of > the world does not change the way evolution works in our > scientific (intellectual) interpretation of process." Exactly. > Our awareness creates OUR experience? Okay. > I suppose in the same way that for those early primates > their awareness created THEIR experience. If this is > what you mean, we have (at the very least) a small > convergence of agreement. But this is a bit different from > saying that the universe had to be observed by "man" > in order for it to exist. That we create an internal > representation of our experiences and then call this > "the world" is not shocking, and I'm not sure who disagrees > with it (although you envision a lone man painting this > representation in blessed isolation while I envision a > social man painting this representation in blessed interactivity). I'm saying that experience "creates" existence. This isolated "representation" IS existence, but we communicate and interact with other individuals who are objects of our being-aware. It's the universality of existence that makes cooperation and social interaction possible. > In other words, saying "our awareness creates our experience > of the world" is quite different (in my book) from saying "our > awareness creates the world", which you had seemed to > propose in your last posts, suggesting that until something is > gazed upon by "man" it does not exist. Pragmatically, it may not > "exist" for us, I give you that. > But again that's quite different from proposing it simply does not > exist "at all" until man's observations somehow pull it into being. All we know is what we experience. All knowledge is proprietary. I see no difference between our experience of the world and the world we experience. If it doesn't exist for us, it doesn't exist --period, end of discussion. --Ham 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/
