Ham: It seems that both of you are conversant with Leslie who is new to me. What about Rescher and Novick who get equal billing in Witherall's analysis? Mark: Hi Ham, I have no knowledge of Rescher or Novick. Thanks for bringing them to my attention though - i shall read the article and give it some thought.
Ham: Mark, in your rejection of the Anthropic principle, you come up with two conclusions that I don't see supported by "Existence": "Therefore, humans...", and "Therefore humans are values...". Is the absence of a middle premise in your syllogism how Leslie's 'Axiarcism' is supposed to work? And what does "humans resonating with other values" mean? I don't understand this logic. That is, I don't accept unrealized Value as a meaningful term. Mark: ...bountiful empirical evidence to support the postulation that value pre-exists: 1. Existence. 2. Therefore, humans to aesthetically appreciate values because they are values. 3. Therefore humans are values resonating with other values. Axiarcism places value before existence. That anything exists at all is due to a principle of ethical requirement. In other words, existence IS value. Humans are part of that which exists, so humans ARE value also. When humans observe that which may be distinguished from them (like a far galaxy for example), and as galaxies are also value (because they too exist due to the principle of ethical requirement), humans resonate with other value. I didn't intend for this to be a syllogism. Apologies for presenting it so it looks that way Ham. The principle of ethical requirement in Leslie's Axiarcism is drawn from Plato. It's application is Neo-Spinozist so Leslie is advocating Pantheism, which boils down to a form of Idealism the way he describes it. Leslie is happy to deal with a multiplicity of Universes of which ours is as we experience it. This undercuts the Anthropic principle because if there are an infinite number of Universes it should come as no surprise that one was like ours - finely tuned to be as we experience it. God, on Leslie's terms, is what i shall call a scientific God and not one theologians would entertain too easily. He appeals to phenomenology for the unity of experience over abstracted structures. When he does this he flirts very closely to an unconditioned/conditioned ontology perhaps? What's more, the conditioned is rather arbitrary but conforms to a value of unity. Again, there are appeals to experiments in quantum entanglement and coherence to support this. The basic stuff of existence is conscious, and this is the only thing of value for Leslie, but the principle of ethical requirement precedes consciousness. I'm still thinking about Leslie's position. Best wishes, 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.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
