Hi Marsha See below.
> If I use tongs to take a rock out of a fire after being in the fire for > hours, is the rock hot? > No, the rock is a rock and does not have the ability to be hot, it can't > understand hot - it is a rock. Hot is what we are when we touch the rock. > It > is a concept used to describe our perceived quality of the rock. The hot > concept is in us, not the rock...the rock just is. The universe just is, > it - like a rock doesn't hold concepts like design - that quality, like > all > humans concepts resides in us, not without us. > Our senses provide data on reality which we order to form our perceptions > and can lead to knowledge, and two or more humans will have shared > objective > reality. DM: Sure being 'burnt' by a 'hot rock' is a word for what we experience when we touch a rock with a high temperature (or chronologically the other way round). But we can also talk objectively of rocks with high temperatures that we have measured the temperature of without touching. So the rock objectively has a certain potential when hot that it does not have when cold. But what is a rock? Again it is only the name for certain patterns that we may experience. Same for the universe. Now we happily move from our experiences of something as hot to talk about something being hot as it has a certain potential that can be recognised less directly, e.g. measure with an instrument. Now if you want to know if a rock experiences being hot or having purposes there is no way to answer such a questions other than by analogy with our own experiences. Sure we do not see rocks sweat, jump back, draw up plans, etc. But there are other analogies you can make. You can try to break a rock and it will resist you, its behaviour demonstrates some form of resistance. Now why is this and does the rock experience anything? In my experience being pulled apart is a bad experience and I have a desire and intention to resist this. So it may well be the same for the rock within the confines of its extremely limited ability to resist and respond to it environment (yet it does respond or otherwise it would have no properties at all). Sure its lack of analogy to us does mean it must be very different but how far this goes we cannot know. All being is a form of behaviour, the belief that some of this is in some sense necessary or mechanical and not agentive is not at all easy to demonstrate. Feel free to have a go. David M 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/
