[MD] Experience, essentialism, physicalism

[Scott Roberts]

Ham,

To lump Dennett in the "philosophers of Consciousness" camp along with 
Husserl and Merrell-Wolff is about like calling the Pope an atheist. Dennett 
is about as committed a neo-Darwinist as one gets. Though his 
self-description is "functionalist", within your division, he is a 
physicalist. (I would also complain about lumping Husserl and Merrell-Wolff 
together, in that Husserl (I believe) restricted consciousness to 
intentional consciousness (S/O consciousness), while for M-W this is just 
one kind.)

It is also a mistake to identify existentialism with physicalism. There were 
numerous religious existentialists (Kierkegaard and Pascal being considered 
as such retrospectively, then people like Marcel) who were not at all 
physicalists.

- Scott

- Scott
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Ham Priday" <hampday1 at verizon.net>
To: <moq_discuss at moqtalk.org>
Sent: Saturday, April 08, 2006 11:23 PM
Subject: Re: [MD] Experience, essentialism, physicalism



David --


> I see that beyond this finite yet expanding
> cosmos is always some infinity of the possible
> that we may as well call nothing, because from
> this side of the border it is nothing, it is all that
> which is not here and now.
>
> Our world is but one voyage through the totality
> of the possible. You could say that we are just
> one of god's self-explorations, though her own
> vastness, in search of her own identity, which
> may be too vast even for a god (higher level
> pattern of self-consciousness).

I cannot refute the poetic largesse by which you extend "the possible"
to unknown regions and dimensions.  And I can even understand your
calling it nothingness from a perspective "this side of the border".
However, resigning oneself to the position that "anything is possible"
and saying that we may as well call what is unknowable "nothing" is a
metaphysical copout.

I think there is an psycho-emotional need in man to know the
unknowable, and it is rooted in the instinctive feeling that he has
somehow been deprived of the value of the otherness that he surveys.
What he seeks is an answer to the question "Why am I here and
where am I going?"  It is not a question that demands absolute
understanding; rather, it calls for a narrowing down of the unknowns
in order to focus intellectually on those few mysteries that directly
involve him and his reality.

A philosopher is not required to explain everything, nor is there a need
for human beings to know everything.  All that is needed is a reason
for the life-experience and some believable theory of its cause.  This is
what the philosophy of Essentialism purports to do.

In the effort to understand reality as a non-dualistic ontology, there are
only two basic options open to philosophers.  The first and most prevalent
approach is to regard the essence of reality as physical existence.  What
you folks are calling "physicalism" was better
known in the last century as "existentialism".  Its credo is that "being
precedes essence", and its ontology is that the physical world evolves
toward higher, more complex forms, including the emergence of conscious
organisms.  This, of course, is also the underlying philosophy of logical
positivism (naturalism).

Prior to the popularization of existentialism, and starting with Berkley,
Kant and Schopenhauer, there was a move away from materialistic naturalism
toward a renaissance of "subjective idealism".  More recently, Edmund
Husserl, Daniel Dennett, Merrell-Wolff, and to some extent the semioticists,
have turned this approach into a philosophy of Consciousness.

In my opinion, the MoQ and Essentialism are attempts to push philosophical
thinking in a new direction.  While both philosophies may be viewed as
"straddling the fence" between existentialism (physicalism) and idealism, I
see a commonality here in that both philosophies are founded on a
"valuistic" essence.  (I think Pirsig would agree.)  In the MoQ, Quality is
what drives existence toward betterness; in my ontology Value is what draws
the individual toward the Source.  Both philosophies are "idealistic" in the
sense that they posit a value as primary to either beingness or
consciousness, but both also accept existence as the reality of experience.

I don't know if this is a proper response to your elegantly worded statement
but, for what it's worth, it's how I size up the three belief systems of
this topic.

Best regards,
Ham


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