[MD] Ham on Esthesia

[Platt Holden]

> [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.

Your  faith in physicists is admirable, but sooner or later they run into
Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle. Besides, the mystics tell us 
"Thought is not a path to reality."
 
> 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.

Harmony is often associated with beauty. But I wonder. How does a 
physicist or a materialist of any kind explain beauty?

> 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.

Your analogy of lungs with water doesn't work. Lungs don't exist in 
different states. Lungs are like other bodily organs that interact with 
the environment, drawing from it what the body needs to survive. The 
brain, a bodily organ - a bulb of nerve tissue - can likewise be 
thought to draw awareness from a conscious environment for survival 
purposes. 

As for "emergence" from complexity being a favorite explanation of 
change among some contributors here, I like Ken Wilber's comment:

"To Schelling's burning question, 'Why is there something rather than 
nothing?,'  there have always been two general answers. The first might 
be called the philosophy of 'oops.' The universe just occurs, there is 
nothing behind it, it's all ultimately accidental or random, it just 
is, it just happens --oops! The philosophy of oops, no matter how 
sophisticated and adult it may on occasion appear -- its modern names 
and number are legion, from positivism to scientific materialism, from 
linguistic analysis to historical materialism, from naturalism to 
empiricism -- always comes down the same basic answer, namely, 'Don't 
ask.'

"The other broad answer that has been tendered is that something else 
is going on: behind the happenstance drama is a deeper or higher or 
wider pattern, or order, or intelligence. . . . Although different 
vanities of the Deeper Order certainly disagree with each other at many 
points, they all agree on this: the universe is not what it appears. 
Something else is going on, something other than oops." 
 --from "Sex, Ecology and Spirituality," vii.

There's little doubt that the MOQ comes down on the side of "something 
else going on."

Platt


> 
> [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.
> 
> 
> 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/