[Ham] You seem to be writing with greater clarity now, and I appreciate both your conciliatory tone and your willingness to "speak my language". In fact, I think I can honestly say that we are no longer adversaries, despite our different perspectives.
[Case] I do expect that we will be swapping spit any time soon but perhaps looking at the areas where we have some level of agreement will at least calm to outbursts of hostility. [Ham] Existentially we are products of biological evolution. In the space/time persepective of finite experience, everything you say is true. Our orientation to the physical world is, indeed, necessary and practical for our active participation in this world. The brain and nervous system of a healthy person integrates experience to ensure that he or she is properly oriented to fintude. This is what makes metaphysics and ontological speculation such a difficult discipline. [Case] So far so good although I do not think our ideas about the nature of space/time are all that similar. As I have stated several times I do not regard the future or the past as fixed in space or time. I see the present or NOW as a "point in time", or as Euclid might phrase it; that which hath no duration. In this point in time all probability wave functions collapse to 100%. All points in time forward and in reverse of that instant have probability functions that vary as they move closer to or farther away from the present. Now the biggest object I have heard yet to this notion has to do with the fact that the rate of time varies with motion and is not constant throughout the universe. But no one here has raised this objection and I do not know how seriously it damages my position. Whitehead's explanation of process and "occasions" or "events" is very similar to what I have in mind. [Ham] I assume you are referring to scientific and technological advances, or the application of intellectual constructs to improve the world materialistically. This isn't exactly what I meant by the individual's power to create the world. I'm not talking about building the Brooklyn bridge or solving Al Gore's global warming problem. As the measure of all things, man defines his representation of otherness in terms of the values he perceives. His psycho-emotional attitude toward these values literally determines his reality. [Case] I think the point I was making was that we reconstruct reality around us all the time from the road construction in front of my subdivision to taking out the trash twice a week. We have abstract models for how the world should be and we actively work to reshape the messy world around us into conformity. Sometimes this is about large scale problems, sometimes it is just a matter of personal hygiene. Even a hundred years ago even the average urban dweller could walk for a couple of hours and leave the man made world of her city and be surround by nature. Today many of us have to drive for an hour or more to achieve the same result. This reshaping of the natural environment means we do not live in a world we are naturally adapted to inhabit. Here is a quick example. Studies of the bushmen in Africa indicate that young women become pregnant relatively young. They breast feed their infants for about four years. Lactation is known to effectively halt menstruation and reduce the likelihood of pregnancy. Thus bushmen woman have children about every four years. As a result these women may only menstruate a few times in their entire lives. They also have reduced rates of cervical cancer and other "female" difficulties that are more common among western woman. Regardless of what one makes of this is, it does suggest that reshaping the world around us produces unpredictable consequences. [Ham] You've misread me, Case. If anything can be said to exist it is "otherness". I defined existence as that which appears to occupy space or occur in time. I have problems with the common notion of the proprietary self as an "existent". I believe it is more akin to nothingness with an affinity for value, or to value itself. The primary attribute of proprietary awareness is its value sensibility. [Case] I am not sure we really want to go here. In my view there is the phenomenological internal construction of reality and there are TiTs. We really only talk about our internal constructions. Before we start looking to abstraction I would think it is important to get a handle on what we know about how we do what we do. For example how accurate are our senses? How do we organize sensation into perception? How are memories and internal representations formed? How do these capabilities develop in infants? How are they the same or different from the way other species function? [Ham] Not sure I catch your drift here. Are you saying that the methodology of objective science may take into account the subjective factors of experience? Do you really think that is the aim of experimental psychology and neuroscience? [Case] Yes, several disciplines including psychology and the neurosciences look directly at how sensation works and how perceptions are formed. They use a variety of techniques to do this from electronic monitoring of physiology to the self reports of subjects. They are actually quite clever in their various approaches. 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/
