[MD] Ham on Esthesia

[Case]

[Platt]
It's hard to imagine a lot of things, like how does something emerge from
nothing, or how did harmony get to be a criterion of validity in
mathematics?
Breathing is a biological function, but that doesn't mean lungs create air.
An Alternate explanation of the phenomenon of awareness is Whitehead's 
panexperientialism which, incidentally, jibes well with the MOQ in which
even quantum particles exhibit preference, suggesting awareness. 

[Case]
How something comes from nothing is a question I used to ask to traumatize
my children. I believe the current view in physics is that it just exploded.
Whether or not this was the way it worked that way or not is what keeps
physicists employed. But to the extent that I am interested in discovering
and answer to this I am going to continue to look to physicists. Whatever
answer theology, mysticism, philosophy or palmistry provides will give way
to what the physicists say. It has been ever thus.

Harmony is not a criterion for validating mathematics as far as I know.
Harmony is a mathematical idea. It was discovered by Pythagoras. He found
that certain mathematic relationships among musical tones that were more
esthetically pleasing than others. Pythagoreans refined it into the various
Greek scales of music. 

Beauty is a criterion for acceptance of any scientific theory though. I
believe in that context beauty refers to a theory's ability to explain
apparently disconnected ideas. The theory of evolution is beautiful because
it explains so many things in biology, social sciences and to some extent
cosmology. It is a theory about change and change is universal after all.

I don't see what you are getting at with lungs not creating air. Water does
not create liquidity but under certain conditions water is liquid, change
the conditions and water turns to vapor, change them again and it becomes
solid. These qualities of water emerge from its relationship to its
environment. Awareness seems to be a property of matter under certain
conditions and relationships in its environment. From what we know about
life on earth it emerges when the environment can support a wide variety of
possible interactions. Like water being able to assume all three states of
matter for example. We exist in a place and time that has been relatively
static for a long, long time. And this place supports an enormous number of
possible configurations of matter. And the quantities of elements it just
so. An interesting question is how much variation in these relationships can
occur and still support the kind of complex interactions we observe among
living things.

[Platt]
Still waiting for a cogent response from others to your question about
what's different from a monk's mystic experience to a born-again Christian's
mystic experience. To simply say it's a "mystery" doesn't cut it.    

[Case]
I am holding my breath, too.