[MD] Experience, essentialism, physicalism

[Ham Priday]

Scott and David --


When I asked David what the "stuff " is that we are observing, he replied:

> Stuff is an an idea, a differentiation of
> experience only made possible once concepts
> of internal/external, time, space, etc come into being.
> I doubt you will get this as usual.

He elaborated again on the "stuff" in his more recent message (to Scott):

> Well there is stuff we sense without too much cultural
> interpretation like colours or wetness or hardness and
> can point at so we call these material, and there is stuff
> that requires culture, like linking up a connection between
> ice, water and steam, or making some paper special and
> calling it money, so these are ideas, and they are both real,
> but there are important differences and we need both to
> have any chance of saying something as basic as that
> the world exists.

David also said:
> What I would like to say about anti-essentialism
> is that it rejects all essentialisms, and therefore
> ends up with a very simple and obvious ontology,
> i.e. that it is all contingent, it may all have been
> different, the universe is a free-form-verse. It may
> have repeat lines in it for some reason, and there
> could be no science without this SQ/repeats/order,
> but bar the repeats it is all DQ, creative, disordered.
> Or equally it is all a matter of agency, for me agency
> is what collapses the wave function to reduce the
> possible to the actual, so that the under-determined
> (the lack of precedent to repeat) can be actual and
> not just suspended superpositions.

 Scott said:
> My view is that without something like an essence,
> there couldn't be concepts or memory, and therefore
> no thinking. On the other hand, a concept is dependent
> on its expression, so one can't be an essentialist.
> In other words, I see anti-essentialism and essentialism
> as being two ways of falling off the Middle Way.

I find this dialogue interesting.  Both of you reject a primary essence, yet
David speaks of an "agency" reducing the possible to the actual and Scott
rejects the essence logically needed for concepts on the ground that "a
concept is dependent on its expression", whatever that means.  Now an agent
implies a source or authority on whose behalf the agent acts, while concepts
and experience (as Scott suggests) couldn't exist without an essence.

In view of these statements and the fact that you both agree that experience
and concepts exist, I don't understand why you are determined to bend
conventional logic in order to renounce essentialism.  I would have assumed
that both of you would see DQ as the essential source, as problematic as the
dynamics of a progenitive Quality would be.

I know that you both regard my thinking as a throwback to Cartesianism, but
it seems to me that you can't have either a "you" or "your concept" without
a prior source.  As a starter, perhaps Scott will be kind enough to explain
what he means by "a concept is dependent on its expression", and why this
rules out essence.

Regards,
Ham