Peter said: SOM - mind and matter, it's more than a thinking convention; we have no choice but to act as if it's so - just try pretending the wall isn't there and try to walk through it, you can't.
dmb says: The fact that we can't walk through walls remains even if we reject SOM. Likewise, adopting the MOQ does not entail any claims about being able to walk through walls. Think of it in terms of reversing the relationship between "objects" and "quality". SOM says the wall is an objective reality, a real substance, and its properties or qualities are such that it can not be walked through. It has hardness and flatness. It offers resistance when we put pressure on it. The MOQ says that these qualities come first and that the "wall" is secondary, an interpretation of the qualities felt in experience. And of course the idea of a "wall" works well with many other ideas such as doors and windows. (The idea of a wall also connects to paint, to floors, ceilings, houses, gardens, towns, Berlin during the Cold War, China during the Mongol invasions and, the line between church and state, a place of blindfolded executions, to a lesser or greater degree, to every other idea in the whole lang uage system.) In the MOQ, the experience of not being able to walk through is more real than the "wall". As in the hot stove example, the "wall" is subsequently ascribed as the reason or cause of not being able to walk through. Rejecting SOM in no way denies the experience from which these ideas are derived, it is simply a matter of stepping back to see that subjects and objects are conventional concepts, useful concepts, rather than the starting point of reality or the cause of experience. The MOQ says that experience comes first, that experience IS reality. In that sense, not being able to walk through is as real as it gets. _________________________________________________________________ Use video conversation to talk face-to-face with Windows Live Messenger. http://www.windowslive.com/messenger/connect_your_way.html?ocid=TXT_TAGLM_WL_Refresh_messenger_video_072008 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/
