[MD] Food for Thought

[Ham Priday]

SA, Platt, and all? --

Thanks for your responses to the Avital essay which I'm still perusing.

Incidentally, to get directly to the page I was quoting from, leave off the
"http://" and just type www.mi.sanu.ac.yu/ on the address bar.  There's lots
of other stuff here that should interest the "chaos/probability" people like
Case, Jos, and Chin, as well as the artists in this group.

SA:
> So, basically what your saying is, for any "otherness"
> to occur, negation is the act of separation in which
> something is now some - thing (the '-' separates, thus,
> is negating some from thing), for example.

As Avital says, "negation is what creates otherness."  I see this as primary
to any creation cosmology.  Negation marks the differential mode of Essence.
It would be incorrect to say "something" is now some thing, because Essence
is not a thing.  Instead we can say Oneness takes on the appearance of the
many, or that the Absolute actualizes finitude, or simply that Difference is
created.

SA:
> Thus, negation is the force of separation and your whole
> explaining is to try to explain how separation is possible?
> If so, how does negation not become something 'outside of'
> the whole process? ...

What is outside of (or beyond) Essence is Nothing.  That's the whole point
of this theory.  Existence is grounded in nothingness; it's the negated
nothing that splits awareness from the whole and actualizes Difference.  We
look at Essence from the perspective of nothingness and construct a reality
of "other-beingness" for ourselves that we call existence.  From the
perspective of Essence, however, there is no other because Essence has
negated the nothingness that actualizes it.

SA:
> What I'm learning is the difficulty in having a beginning
> is that a beginning inherently sets-up time barriers.
> Thus, to use your thesis, how does essence all of a
> sudden negate?  Before negation no beginning of
> universe:  after negation or during negation beginning
> of universe.  Thus, how does negation occur all of a
> sudden?  It would seem essence wouldn't 'know' any
> differently.  It would seem essence just woke up one
> day and decided to negate, yet, negation was never
> with essence.  Negation just seemed to come out of
> nowhere?  Where does negation come from?  Unless,
> negation was always here, negating away and essence
> must therefore, to use your thesis as an example,
> always included negation.

You (and Platt) are making the common mistake of describing existence as it
is perceived, and assume (intellectually) that events must progress from a
beginning to an end.  This [SOM?] notion comes from the fact that human
experience gives us a "serialized" view of existence; we don't see it as a
whole, but incrementally and fragmented.  Thus our knowledge is cumulative
and never complete.  The difference between existence and Essence is that
experience is process, difference, and relation, whereas Essence is
constant, undivided, and absolute in itself.  Precepts like "before",
"after", "beginning", and "all of a sudden" have meaning only in the context
of existential experience.

Platt:
> I had the same questions, SA, only not so well formed
> or expressed. Where did nothing and or negation (can't
> tell the difference) come from?  Or is it negations, like
> turtles, all the way down?

Only created things "come from" something else -- namely, Essence, which is
uncreated.  Man creates his reality, in a valuistic sense; but he does not
create himself or the source of this reality.  Everything in existence is
subject to change and process.  The source is immutable and does not change.
Likewise, negation is constant; which is why I've said that Essence is
"negational" in principle.

Platt:
> Furthermore, to even know Essence is to posit something
> outside of Essence or Essence couldn't be recognized as
> such by us mere mortals. When it comes to beginnings,
> both science and philosophy appear to be flummoxed.
> And they don't seem to be sure about endings, either.

Your first statement is on target: to know Essence is to posit something
outside Essence.  That's precisely WHY we cannot experience Essence
directly.  What we experience (I prefer to call it "sense") is the Value of
Essence, divided up into the finite fragments we call "things".  Think of it
as SQ extracted from DQ.  As Atival puts it, "no distinction is possible
without negation, and negation and double negation therefore preceded all
distinctions that followed. ...God was very bored amidst Perfect Symmetry,
in which absolutely nothing happened.  Then accidentally He sighed, 'Oh No!'
This created the first Asymmetry, which brought into being the other
mindprints... and the rest is History."  History, of course, is the
evolution of nature as observed by man.  But evolution is 'process' which,
like all other transition, occurs only in the subject/object reality of
experience.

I don't know if Avital is familiar with Cusa's principle of
non-contradictory identity, but he's expressed it quite well in this
metaphor.  I also find it interesting that the author sees "affirmation" in
the double negation, which supports my hypothesis that the negated self
negates otherness to affirm the value of Essence.

Again, see what I said above about beginnings and endings.  (Wouldn't Pirsig
would call this SOM talk?)

I appreciate your feedback on this material over the holiday, and am hoping
that someone will see a way to apply Avital's concepts to the MoQ -- or,
perhaps, reject them outright.  Also, I'm not sufficiently schooled in
quantum theory to determine whether Avital's inclusion of complementarity is
valid in his analysis of symmetry-asymmetry, but possibly others will make
this judgment for us.

Enjoy the remainder of your holiday week.

Regards,
Ham