Bo,
Pardon me for jumping in. And
excuse the length, but this is in
response to your mind/body split.
(It is also the very first first part
of a very much longer piece
in reaction to your "The SOL.")
---
BO wrote:
> Hi Ham
>
> 19 Jan. you wrote:
> > Bo, Marsha, Krimel, and all causation theorists --
>
> For my part I am only interested in causation because it's included
> in the "herd" of SOM-induced "platypis" (paradoxes) that the MOQ
> allegedly resolves. And of those I find the mind/matter paradox
> most paradoxical and I wonder if Essentialism offers some
> solution?
>
> You know what the paradox is? Mind is mind how far one pursues
> it and matter is matter, the twain never meet, yet matter (body) and
> mind interacts constantly. For instance I think about moving a
> finger and as long it's a thought nothing happens, but then I make
> up my mind and the thought materializes in a finger movement. It
> works the other way too, I take some chemical "stuff" (a drink) and
> my mind alters.
>
<Snip>
>
mel:
The 'reality' of what one is conscious of is a pervasive illusion.
It is tied to the conviction that oneself, separate, as-a-
consciousness is 'real' and therefore what one is aware of is
likewise real. -or-
Socrates asks questions eliciting statements about the world
'we' share the perceiving of.
Socrates is put to death.
We continue to be conscious of the world after Socrates is
gone.
Therefore Socrates is a subject and the world is the object.
SUBJECT / OBJECT.gong!
MIND / MATTER.gong!
fundamental distinctions, differences, must be true.wrong!
Part of the creation of a "problem" in philosophy is in how a
statement is formed, binding and cleaving assumptions.
Zeno's Paradox, that in traversing space one has to
continually cross half distances and with an infinite number
of halves, one can't 'get there'. Zeno, cleverly, created a
statement that sounds reasonably like it conveys real
meaning. Zeno's Paradox has yet to protect a hockey
player from taking a hard slam from an opponent.
Subject/Object and Mind/Matter are formulations of language
that, while less elegant than Zeno's statement, have proven
themselves more enduring. They are no less creations of
misstated language.
SUBJECT/OBJECT
There are no 'objects', there is no matter, in the sense that
neither is 'fixed' and they therefore lose their claim of being
an unchangeable state. In the unfolding history of physics
in cosmology, there is a sense that behavior coalesces in
provinces-of-particular-range.
Pre-matter, sub-matter, proto-matter or whatever name is
preferred for the primordial pre-coalescent state of what
later became recognizable to our typical physics in the
human world was a poorly understood, barely characterizable
stage of projected after-the-fact fruit of the reductionism of
scientific analysis. It's brilliant, but after the fact we can't
appreciate the full dynamics of the state. We live in it's
subsequent state, bound by and building upon its future,
our past. That it was a necessary stage is about all we
know and a few "cause and effect" attributes.
We seem to understand that quantum eddies underlie
existence of all in the present state of our reductionism.
An eddy leaning one way, if it collpses is matter, leaning
another and it may collapse to energy, but most other
probabilities seem never to collapse. Until we reproduce
a bit we will continue to know little, so, on to something
we know a bit better.
Matter in its fourth state is disassociate. It dances free
in the blessed state of ionized sufficiency and we are
largely ignorant of the patterns of existence in that realm
of freedom.
(All of the words of this sentence are value laden, it can't
be helped, it's where we come from. It seems like there
is a slide towards animism or meaning being
anthro'moph'ed onto matter, but that would miss the point.)
In the plasma realm, the interactions are unrecognizable
from/to the realm of gasses. Aside from equations that
dance with meaning in the minds of the mathematically
gifted, the patterns and 'qualities' of being in the realm of
plasma are unknown to us. The sense is all but nonsense.
We can't know what it means to be plasma.
The actions, the contact, the patterns, the cascades of effect,
are so foreign we can hardly imagine what a language would
be like that begins to capture a dance on wave of gravity as
energy expends itself in an unfolding creation of time ZERO
plus a meaningless fraction that has never been before and
is therefore the leading edge of Quality.
What is the edge of the distinction of what has never been
before? Without contrast, comparison is meaningless, but
afterwards there is a reflexive question that beggars novelty.
Is a dance of plasma at the beginning of time really any
different than the dance of plasma in an ultra-high vacuum
chamber in a laboratory?
If novelty is the measure of the worth of the Dynamic, then
the newly birthed plasma of Time plus 14 Billion years is
just a static yawn. If, however, the province of plasma is
its own state of existence then the Dynamic and the Static
are evolutions within that province. And each birth of a
new 'instance' of plasma is a Dynamic birth that will die
into Static as the province changes. What is entropic
death to plasma is Dynamic birth to the new creations of
gas, (the third state) as ionic sufficiency fails and physical
dynamics of atom and molecular-miscegenation create
something new.
We can follow the evolution of the physical, it gets easier
as it approaches us because it is more familiar, but the
insight we need is yet to be stated. The changability at
any point in physical existence points along vectors of
gradient. Patterns dance and change as the sorting of
similarities of 'interactability' throw together what
coalesces in the same province. This is just description,
at its worst a boring slog, at its best a celebration of existence.
In our own 'human' province, the analogy would be that we
do not expect a canoe in the Amazon to be sunk in a collision
with an iceberg next week, or a woman who lives half way
between Timbuktu and Cairo to fall in love with a traditional
Inuit, whose sled and dogs appear suddenly from over the
ridge. Why discuss this? To make a belabored point
about provinces of existence and the likelihood of interactibility.
MIND/MATTER
Mind and matter are found together because they are in the
same province. The strange thing is that anyone ever thought
they were separate. How can the flame dance above the log?
How can light spontaneously emanate from metal? Hence we
can decide to found a philosophical problem on the light/metal
problem. (lightbulb)
Or we can recognize that within a province of existence that the
temporary state of structure will redirect energy into dynamic
dances that it supports on the evolution to another entropic
rearrangement. The existence of the flame is no less
significant than the existence of the log. The light is no less
significant than the tungsten filament and the screen and the
movie that the audience watches. All of the patterns in our
province of existence, all of the collisions of those patterns in
intersection and union, in sub-set and super-set, are
awarenesses of what-was-becoming-what-is.
The meaning is always an evolving sensibility of what has
just passed and its relative significance. The more complex
the patterns, the understandably more complex the 'splash'
made by their interaction and the more levels of echoes of
those effected patterns surge inward and outward.
Inside the demi-spheroid of biolithic structure, evolved of
four billion years of a 'dance-not-of its-own-making' is a
complex spaghetti structure of branching connections.
Dense, changeable, highly reactive material that configures
and reconfigures in subtle transforms fills that bone dome.
The connections and the power of the transforms to draw
distinction makes this 'brain' a marvel. The patterns of the
transforms and their meanings are our point of interest
here. The physical patterns, support process patterns,
and they support in their processing, meaning. Or patterns
supporting patterns support patterns of abstraction.
The proof of their 'reality' is in the reproducibility and
conveyance.
And being in the physical patterns of a body, brain seems
to reflect and combine the patterns of every 'sense stream'
input that tumbles in as surely as a canyon does the sounds
that pass within, and the echo of the patterns and the
reflection of prior patterns become a complexity of complexity
that repatterns in unbounded ways. So, the patterns of
patterns in mind and the physicality of the body in the world
are indistinguishable as patterns to be apprehended and
processed. Each acts upon the other. Sometimes, in a
period of physical stillness we can become fascinated with
tracing the patterns of patterns abstracted, and it seems a
separate thing in consciousness. And someone named it
'mind' and the problem came when an altar was raised to
it upon the pretense that it was separate in the sense of
independent.
The orthodox statement of this faith is that since mind seems
different from matter, it must indeed be. And all the subsequent
geometry of this faith depends upon this assumption that
intersecting lines will always fail to meet one another.
(Ignoring just one little point in space, of course.)
...
<SNIP>
Thanks for letting me play.
thanks--mel
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