Hi Ham, Back to our conversation which is my attempt to provide myself an understanding of your ontology, and perhaps further my own within my brain. Some interactive comments below.
On Wed, Nov 10, 2010 at 2:08 PM, Ham Priday <[email protected]> wrote: > > [Ham] > > Mark, what I call "finitude" is the world we live in. It's a fractionated, > individuated, multi-level space/time world where creatures, > plants, and a diversity of things emerge, undergo cause-and-effect changes, > and then return to the dust from whence they came. Since natural phenomena > are programmed by genetics and the forces of nature, it seems reasonable for > the Darwinists to dismiss Intelligent Design is just an argument from > ignorance, i.e., plugging a Creator into the gaps of scientific > understanding. > [Mark] Yes, I see the Darwinist view as yet another view. It certainly has strong support which would indicate that we are designed to think along those lines. Birth, growth, and death obviously help and can be extrapolated the world as a whole. Being at the top of evolution is also a strong enforcer. Darwinists would claim that Nature is the creator, I am fine with that. The impersonal sense of such Nature does not ring true since I interact personally and it is difficult to separate myself from all else. In a way, your personal negation does that kind of separation, in my interpretation, and therefore requires some rethinking on my part to bring it in. > > [Ham] But [to paraphrase a flyer just received from Human Events], as William > Dembski and Jonathan Witt argue in their new book on the subject, the ID > theory is based on a host of discoveries from biology to astronomy about > what scientists DO know. Whereas conclusions reached by the scientific > method are dependable because they can be falsified, Darwinism is the > lynchpin of philosophical materialism which is deeply entrenched in today's > academic, legal and media establishment. ID in contrast, follows the > evidence wherever it leads -- even if it points to a Creator. (For example, > the authors show that it's mathematically impossible for even the simplest > creature to evolve through "random variation", given the limits of time and > space in the universe.) > [Mark] I agree with the flyer by what you have presented. Of course my interpretation of ID is as convoluted as anyones. The Darwinist notion of evolution requires a separation of species from the selection process. In this way, intelligence can be somehow isolated to the human race and not be part of the whole. If one uses simple definitions of intelligence, it is hard to isolated it to the way we, simply as humans, are. ID implies a plan, at least at the beginning. It is quite possible that such a plan took a life of its own (yes, pun), but even this kind of reasoning is not necessary to melt ID and Darwinism together. This whole notion of randomness does not hold together as a statistical model because of our interaction with it. The observer must be separated from that measured for randomness to be brought in. > > [Ham] Now, you may consider evolution "an illusion", an effect of Quality" or "the > natural progression of a moral universe"; but such explanations don't > account for the origin of this process or its reason for being. Since every > "being" is delineated or limited in space and time, it is fallacious to > regard Being -- even in its "supreme" form -- as the ultimate reality. And, > since Quality and Morality simply don't exist without man's sensibility and > reason, I conceptualize existence as that phase or mode of Essence whereby > its Value is incrementally realized by a free agent. My paradigm here is > that of the individual self looking at its Absolute Source from the > "outside", as it were, and creating an objective reality to represent the > value realized. > [Mark] OK, I kind of get that. It is the break in continuity that I have trouble with. I would then qualify Being as that which witnesses through this particular window, but is no different from such ultimate reality. Of course we do not remember anything before birth (at least I don't) so such a break is intuitive, but may be more a function of memory. I would agree, that in this incarnation we can say that it appears that we are differentiating whereas before we were not. Your notion of value realized is similar to mine, except perhaps in a critical point where I state that such value already exists and we are experiencing it. But this can be reified with yours perhaps through some logical link. > > Value-sensibility is as close to physical non-existence (nothingness) as > any known entity can be; yet the Self is the cognitive locus of all that > exists. That's why I put so much emphasis on "nothingness" as the antithesis > of Essence, and why I attribute its actualization to a "negational" Source. > Lastly, inasmuch as Sensibility and Value are both derived from Essence, it > logically follows that their experiential counterparts are the individual's > link to the Absolute. > [Mark] What you say about the link makes sense to me in an objective way. The trick for me is to create the subjective sense. The difference could be indeed subtle but quite remarkable at the same time. Could you explain what you mean by the experiential counterparts (again)? > > Hope the above is a less confusing and somewhat more illuminating synopisis > of Essentialism. > > Cheers and warm regards, > Ham > [Mark] How about this analogy? There is a cake and an eater. When the cake enters the mouth, the sense of taste is realized through the negation of the absence of taste. The taste existed all along, but required its realization. Cheers to you, Mark > > 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/md/archives.html > 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/md/archives.html
