[MD] Experience, essentialism, physicalism

[David M]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Ham Priday" <hampday1 at verizon.net>
To: <moq_discuss at moqtalk.org>
Sent: Sunday, April 09, 2006 7:23 AM
Subject: Re: [MD] Experience, essentialism, physicalism


> DM said: 
> 
>> 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, through 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.
> 

DM: Well, I think we need to try and understand where we have come from,
where we are at, and where it might be possible for us to go. Then we need
to live and make some serious choices about what we want to be and go
for it.