[MD] Some Abiding Beliefs-Part 2

[Case]

[Platt]
When will we have the privilege of reading a summary of your basic beliefs?

[Case]
I gave a fairly broad overview not very long ago in the Probability thread:
http://www.opensubscriber.com/message/moq_discuss@moqtalk.org/4417310.html

To that I would add:

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"Vanity of Vanities, all is Vanity," 
-Ecclesiastes 
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Meaning, that which would quench the bonfire of vanities, does not reside in
the inorganic world. Meaning emerges from organic processes, like us, which
emerge from the inorganic. 

I believe there is an actual objective world. The hard sciences and
mathematics strive for and have been very successful in describing this in
terms that independent observers can agree upon. We can predict with
extraordinary precision the position of the planet Jupiter in space at any
time in the past or future. Our understanding of the planet Jupiter has
changed over time from identification with the King of the Gods to giant
orange gas bag. Ok, so it hasn't changed that much; we are still working on
it. But Jupiter is unchanged by our beliefs about it and would be unchanged
if every living thing in the universe ceased to exist. When our ideas and
beliefs about Jupiter come into conflict with our observations of Jupiter.
It is our ideas that must change. Jupiter sets the standard.

The idea that there is some cosmically purposeful, acausal or first causal
"consciousness" leads to nothing but muddy thinking. Once you accept the
idea of purpose in the inanimate or in the supernatural you are left with
the task of figuring out what it is and you are no longer constrained by
anything but your imagination. You can say whatever weird thing you want and
there is no standard for evaluating your statements, beyond: it sounds good
or it feels right... This is as true of mysticism as it is of theism. In
addition, cosmic purpose only becomes meaningful when individuals adopt it.
Individual adoption and acting on such a purpose may or may not be aligned
with a "proper" understanding of the "true" mystic purpose. One can not read
the words of Jesus and think that he supports the accumulation of wealth,
yet many Christians are wealthy.

Materialism asserts that there are objects of perception. Perception is the
act of organizing information drawn from the senses. It is the act of
classifying, of seeking similarity and discerning difference. It is finding
the connections between things remembered and things just seen. But it is
fundamentally about something, something indifferent to what we think about
it. It is the search for the intersubjective, that is, a way to understand
the objective world we share in common.

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"The name that can be named is not the true name." 
-Lao Tzu
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The eastern mystical view expressed by some MoQites is that the world is
illusion. But illusion in the sense of a dream or fantasy or a trick. I
recently suggested to Dan that there are also illusions of visual effect.
The drawing of the young woman and the crone. The faces and the wine glasses
or Magic Eye graphics. These are visual examples of perceptual shifts in
understanding; where the underlying drawings remain unchanged but our ideas
change, radically and all at once, around them. I think this is a more
appropriate understanding of illusion. 

When you make a gestalt shift like that produced by visual illusions, it is
not as though you lose your previous vision. Rather you add another. Visions
are hard to subtract. Once you see them they won't go away. It is my
understanding that for the Buddha, to see through the illusion was to see
the connectedness of things. More along the lines of the Great Spirit of the
American Plains than the restless dream of the Hindus. Buddha was a Hindu
and the idea of illusion as dream is strong in the tradition but not
universal.

In my view the MoQ is Taoist and is led astray by Buddhists and Hindus. In
Zen it is the Buddhists who adopted Taoist metaphysics not the other way
around.

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"In the beginning there was the ratio 
and the ratio was with God and the Ratio was God."
-John 1:1
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Much has been made about the Greeks inventing the intellect. I don't believe
this for a second but I do believe they were the first "rational" people.
The Greeks believed that any number could be expressed as a ratio of one
number to another. In other words they were rational. Greek philosophy was
driven by Greek mathematics and Greek mathematics was driven by Greek
philosophy. 

"The infinite and the void had powers that frightened the Greeks. The
infinite threatened to make all motion impossible, while the void threatened
to smash the nutshell universe into a thousand flinders. By rejecting zero,
the Greek philosophers gave their view of the universe the durability to
survive for two millennia."
-Charles Seife, "Zero"

When I suggested recently that Eternity and the Void were mathematical not
mystical terms, SA got all upset and dmb threatened to ignore my posts,
calling the idea goofy. I stepped back a bit but after rereading sections of
Charles Seife's "Zero" I would only add that the mathematical terms are
meaningful, precise and useful. As used in the several threads here recently
"infinity" and "fractal structure" are little more that high sounding
nonsense.

One of the products of the enlightenment has been that math and physics
reign over religion and philosophy. It is the task of philosophers and
theologians to understand math and science not the other way around.
Newton's physics strengthened a deterministic philosophy, Einstein opened
the way for relativism, Darwin, first led to the disaster of Spencer's
Social Darwinism but, opened the doors to ecology the ethology. 

Quantum physics, Gödel and deterministic chaos are showing us another world.
A world in which order emerges as a natural consequence of disorder. A world
in which we as creatures evolved because the traits possessed by our
ancestors equipped them to pass along their genes. A world in which the
ability to transcend time via memory increases the probability of survival.
This view is easily accommodated by Taoism and the MoQ. I think ignoring the
insights of science in favor of some vague mysticism, theism or abstract
philosophy has slowed the progress of understanding in the past and will
continue to do so in the future. 

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"Duh, duh, duh, duh, dat's all folks,"
-Porky Pig
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I believe the length of a post is inversely proportional to the number of
people who will bother to read it. This one has gotten long enough to have
repelled even those who made it past the "From:" line. I think the first
post on Probability laid out my position a bit better, but this does add to
it. I have still managed to skirt the issue of Purpose and apologize. If you
are interested I will work on something focused solely on that. But first I
have been trying to show why I think there is a "real" world. Why it is not
purposeful and why the MoQ has something useful to say. But in the end I
still say it is a matter of faith. I choose to value materialism and I
choose to devalue theism and mysticism.