[MD] Wanted: A proper foundation

[MarshaV]

A lovely symphony...





At 10:56 AM 1/22/2009, you wrote:
>Bo,
>
>Pardon me for jumping in. And
>excuse the length, but this is in
>response to your mind/body split.
>(It is also the very first first part
>of a very much longer piece
>in reaction to your "The SOL.")
>---
>
>BO wrote:
>
> > Hi Ham
> >
> > 19 Jan. you wrote:
> > > Bo, Marsha, Krimel, and all causation theorists --
> >
> > For my part I am only interested in causation because it's included
> > in the "herd" of SOM-induced "platypis" (paradoxes) that the MOQ
> > allegedly resolves. And of those I find the mind/matter paradox
> > most paradoxical  and I wonder if Essentialism offers some
> > solution?
> >
> > You know what the paradox is? Mind is mind how far one pursues
> > it and matter is matter, the twain never meet, yet matter (body) and
> > mind interacts constantly. For instance I think about moving a
> > finger and as long it's a thought nothing happens, but then I make
> > up my mind and the thought materializes in a finger movement. It
> > works the other way too, I take some chemical "stuff" (a drink) and
> > my mind alters.
> >
><Snip>
> >
>mel:
>  The 'reality' of what one is conscious of is a pervasive illusion.
>It is tied to the conviction that oneself, separate, as-a-
>consciousness is 'real' and therefore what one is aware of is
>  likewise real.  -or-
>      Socrates asks questions eliciting statements about the world
>          'we' share the perceiving of.
>      Socrates is put to death.
>      We continue to be conscious of the world after Socrates is
>          gone.
>
>Therefore Socrates is a subject and the world is the object.
>SUBJECT / OBJECT.gong!
>MIND / MATTER.gong!
>fundamental distinctions, differences, must be true.wrong!
>
>Part of the creation of a "problem" in philosophy is in how a
>statement is formed, binding and cleaving assumptions.
>Zeno's Paradox, that in traversing space one has to
>continually cross half distances and with an infinite number
>of halves, one can't 'get there'.  Zeno, cleverly, created a
>statement that sounds reasonably like it conveys real
>meaning.  Zeno's Paradox has yet to protect a hockey
>player from taking a hard slam from an opponent.
>
>Subject/Object and Mind/Matter are formulations of language
>that, while less elegant than Zeno's statement, have proven
>themselves more enduring.  They are no less creations of
>misstated language.
>
>      SUBJECT/OBJECT
>
>There are no 'objects', there is no matter, in the sense that
>neither is 'fixed' and they therefore lose their claim of being
>an unchangeable state.  In the unfolding history of physics
>in cosmology, there is a sense that behavior coalesces in
>provinces-of-particular-range.
>
>Pre-matter, sub-matter, proto-matter or whatever name is
>preferred for the primordial pre-coalescent state of what
>later became recognizable to our typical physics in the
>human world was a poorly understood, barely characterizable
>stage of projected after-the-fact fruit of the reductionism of
>scientific analysis.  It's brilliant, but after the fact we can't
>appreciate the full dynamics of the state.  We live in it's
>subsequent state, bound by and building upon its future,
>our past.  That it was a necessary stage is about all we
>know and a few "cause and effect" attributes.
>
>We seem to understand that quantum eddies underlie
>existence of all in the present state of our reductionism.
>An eddy leaning one way, if it collpses is matter, leaning
>another and it may collapse to energy, but most other
>probabilities seem never to collapse.  Until we reproduce
>a bit we will continue to know little, so, on to something
>we know a bit better.
>
>Matter in its fourth state is disassociate.  It dances free
>in the blessed state of ionized sufficiency and we are
>largely ignorant of the patterns of existence in that realm
>of freedom.
>(All of the words of this sentence are value laden, it can't
>be helped, it's where we come from.  It seems like there
>is a slide towards animism or meaning being
>anthro'moph'ed onto matter, but that would miss the point.)
>
>In the plasma realm, the interactions are unrecognizable
>from/to the realm of gasses.  Aside from equations that
>dance with meaning in the minds of the mathematically
>gifted, the patterns and 'qualities' of being in the realm of
>plasma are unknown to us.  The sense is all but nonsense.
>We can't know what it means to be plasma.
>
>The actions, the contact, the patterns, the cascades of effect,
>are so foreign we can hardly imagine what a language would
>be like that begins to capture a dance on wave of gravity as
>energy expends itself in an unfolding creation of time ZERO
>plus a meaningless fraction that has never been before and
>is therefore the leading edge of Quality.
>
>What is the edge of the distinction of what has never been
>before?  Without contrast, comparison is meaningless, but
>afterwards there is a reflexive question that beggars novelty.
>Is a dance of plasma at the beginning of time really any
>different than the dance of plasma in an ultra-high vacuum
>chamber in a laboratory?
>
>If novelty is the measure of the worth of the Dynamic, then
>the newly birthed plasma of Time plus 14 Billion years is
>just a static yawn.  If, however, the province of plasma is
>its own state of existence then the Dynamic and the Static
>are evolutions within that province.  And each birth of a
>new 'instance' of plasma is a Dynamic birth that will die
>into Static as the province changes.  What is entropic
>death to plasma is Dynamic birth to the new creations of
>gas, (the third state) as ionic sufficiency fails and physical
>dynamics of atom and molecular-miscegenation create
>something new.
>
>We can follow the evolution of the physical, it gets easier
>as it approaches us because it is more familiar, but the
>insight we need is yet to be stated.  The changability at
>any point in physical existence points along vectors of
>gradient.  Patterns dance and change as the sorting of
>similarities of 'interactability' throw together what
>coalesces in the same province.  This is just description,
>at its worst a boring slog, at its best a celebration of existence.
>
>In our own 'human' province, the analogy would be that we
>do not expect a canoe in the Amazon to be sunk in a collision
>with an iceberg next week, or a woman who lives half way
>between Timbuktu and Cairo to fall in love with a traditional
>Inuit, whose sled and dogs appear suddenly from over the
>ridge.  Why discuss this?  To make a belabored point
>about provinces of existence and the likelihood of interactibility.
>
>    MIND/MATTER
>
>Mind and matter are found together because they are in the
>same province.  The strange thing is that anyone ever thought
>they were separate.  How can the flame dance above the log?
>How can light spontaneously emanate from metal?  Hence we
>can decide to found a philosophical problem on the light/metal
>problem. (lightbulb)
>
>Or we can recognize that within a province of existence that the
>temporary state of structure will redirect energy into dynamic
>dances that it supports on the evolution to another entropic
>rearrangement.  The existence of the flame is no less
>significant than the existence of the log. The light is no less
>significant than the tungsten filament and the screen and the
>movie that the audience watches.  All of the patterns in our
>province of existence, all of the collisions of those patterns in
>intersection and union, in sub-set and super-set, are
>awarenesses of what-was-becoming-what-is.
>
>The meaning is always an evolving sensibility of what has
>just passed and its relative significance.  The more complex
>the patterns, the understandably more complex the 'splash'
>made by their interaction and the more levels of echoes of
>those effected patterns surge inward and outward.
>
>Inside the demi-spheroid of biolithic structure, evolved of
>four billion years of a 'dance-not-of its-own-making' is a
>complex spaghetti structure of branching connections.
>Dense, changeable, highly reactive material that configures
>and reconfigures in subtle transforms fills that bone dome.
>The connections and the power of the transforms to draw
>distinction makes this 'brain' a marvel.  The patterns of the
>transforms and their meanings are our point of interest
>here.  The physical patterns, support process patterns,
>and they support in their processing, meaning.  Or patterns
>supporting patterns support patterns of abstraction.
>The proof of their 'reality' is in the reproducibility and
>conveyance.
>
>And being in the physical patterns of a body, brain seems
>to reflect and combine the patterns of every 'sense stream'
>input that tumbles in as surely as a canyon does the sounds
>that pass within, and the echo of the patterns and the
>reflection of prior patterns become a complexity of complexity
>that repatterns in unbounded ways.  So, the patterns of
>patterns in mind and the physicality of the body in the world
>are indistinguishable as patterns to be apprehended and
>processed.  Each acts upon the other.  Sometimes, in a
>period of physical stillness we can become fascinated with
>tracing the patterns of patterns abstracted, and it seems a
>separate thing in consciousness.  And someone named it
>'mind' and the problem came when an altar was raised to
>it upon the pretense that it was separate in the sense of
>independent.
>
>The orthodox statement of this faith is that since mind seems
>  different from matter, it must indeed be.  And all the subsequent
>geometry of this faith depends upon this assumption that
>intersecting lines will always fail to meet one another.
>(Ignoring just one little point in space, of course.)
>...
><SNIP>
>
>Thanks for letting me play.
>
>thanks--mel
>
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Metaphysics is a restaurant where they give you a thirty thousand 
page menu, and no food.
(Robert M. Pirsig)
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