[MD] What is the MOQ?

[Arlo Bensinger]

Ham,

I've read your post several times and I still have no idea if, 
according to Essentialism, the universe existed before man. On one 
hand you seem to say "no", dismissing the concept of "before" as 
non-existent before "man". On the other hand, you propose an 
evolutionist ontogenesis to "man", so I can't help but wonder how 
whatever it is than man evolved "from" existed "before man", since 
you seem to deny that that is possible. Certainly from this 
statement, "Homo sapiens as biological creatures appear to have 
evolved from earlier primates in Darwinian fashion", one finds direct 
refutation of the idea what without "man" to view it the universe is 
"dead". It wasn't very "dead" for those "earlier primates", was it?

I certainly do not expect everything to be reducible to monosyllabic 
grunts, but it seems to me if you can't answer such a simple question 
without a thesis of complex rhetoric then this is just so much 
obfuscation as to be pointless (to me). But let me try.

""Before" and "after" are time-related precepts to which we are all 
habituated as SOMists."

So until "man" appears, there is no "time"? No "before" and no 
"after"? Does this mean that everything which we parse into 
"past-present-future" existed "simultaneously"?

"So the fact that awareness "creates" our experience of the world 
does not change the way evolution works in our scientific 
(intellectual) interpretation of process."

Our awareness creates OUR experience? Okay. I suppose in the same way 
that for those early primates their awareness created THEIR 
experience. If this is what you mean, we have (at the very least) a 
small convergence of agreement. But this is a bit different from 
saying that the universe had to be observed by "man" in order for it 
to exist. That we create an internal representation of our 
experiences and then call this "the world" is not shocking, and I'm 
not sure who disagrees with it (although you envision a lone man 
painting this representation in blessed isolation while I envision a 
social man painting this representation in blessed interactivity).

In other words, saying "our awareness creates our experience of the 
world" is quite different (in my book) from saying "our awareness 
creates the world", which you had seemed to propose in your last 
posts, suggesting that until something is gazed upon by "man" it does 
not exist. Pragmatically, it may not "exist" for us, I give you that. 
But again that's quite different from proposing it simply does not 
exist "at all" until man's observations somehow pull it into being.

Arlo