DM, I am taking a sabbatical but you made a couple of point recently that I would like to comment on:
DM: I think SOM in your thinking is stoppping you from getting what I am suggesting. I'd be very interested in what others think and would point out that my view Agrees with the one in Sneddon's thesis on Anthony's site. But your answer is an honest one and at last I think we can clearly see what We are disagreeing about. [Case} I have a few problems with Sneddon thesis not the least of which is his toleration for Pirsig's teleological view of evolution and I am not terribly thrilled with Whitehead's theology, but as Sneddon points out Whitehead makes a valuable contribution with his notion of Process and his identification of "occasions" as the primary units of process and reality. Occasions unlike experience do not require the involvement of subjects. In fact experiences are subsets of occasions. I was especially taken with this: "The occasion is the fundamental unit of reality, but it is characterized by change--it is not something static. On the contrary, when the occasion acquires the 'phase' of creation, or finished product, it is no longer in the process of creativity, and it ceases to be an occasion. It becomes history, eternally unchanging in the form it has taken." Sneddon - 1995 I think there is much to Sneddon's view that Pirsig is a "process philosopher". Elsewhere you said: DM: This is an exception and an unusually simple situation, most processes are far more complex and have many possible outcomes. In fact the ball could fly off according to quantum theory, only not very often. Science began with such simple situations because they were the only ones it could model. There is order in this cosmos, but disorder dominates. Science has to go to alot of trouble to create experiments that exhibit significant levels of order. See Roy Bhaskar's philosophy of science. [Case] I do not think that quantum theory would account for anything as macroscopic as a ball flying off or being otherwise displaced in space and time. If all that weirdness were not resolved at the submicroscopic level I doubt if the macroscopic level would have enough stability for us to be here. On the other hand this did get me thinking about how such quantum weirdness might relate to the Big Bang. I have not really looked into this so it is probably nonsense but one thing about the Big Bang has always bothered me. If all that matter had all that gravity pulling in into a point how could it get loose? If you have all of the matter in the universe compressed into a Euclidian point and all of the force of physics had achieved symmetry and gravity fluctuated for even the tiniest fraction of a second, imagine the explosion that might result. 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/
