[MD] Truth and Relativity 2.9.9

[118]

Hi dmb,

And yes, of course you are right.  I saw no reason to respond to this
misinformation, since I am tired of correcting it.  Many posts ago I
tried to lead Marsha to the idea that we create experience, we do not
receive experience.  Perhaps now that she has read some Watts, she has
come around.  Perhaps once she has deconstructed everything into
patterns she will attempt to reconstruct something from it.  It is a
game of Legos in such cases.  I do not see the purpose.

Watts has no interest in making measurements between things or in
saying that our awareness is simply a process of our mechanically
computing what we get in and then spitting it out, which is the
"relative" dictate.  Things exist relationally in that you cannot
separate them.  The relative analysis pretends to do just that.  If we
are relative to our environment, it means nothing.  We and our
environment are intrinsically linked, and there is not way to separate
one from the other as the term relative would imply.

There is relative time, and there is intuitive time.  Both are
completely different as Gödel figured out through mathematical
metaphysics.  Oh, if you want to read a good book, read Gödel, Escher,
Bach, which came out a few years after ZAMM.  It is entertaining and
thought provoking.

AsI said, I have grown weary of pronouncements driven by the Google
search of two words and resulting first page results as to how they
occur together.  This leads to the posting of "interesting quotes"
which have no explanation tied with them.  I prefer to do my own
Google searches.  There really is not much thought going on in that as
the countless insignificant (and evasive) replies to my explanatory
posts have taught me.

Thanks for your post,
Mark

ps: By the way, the only way to fully comprehend Watts, imo, is to
listen to him.  Reading him is insufficient.  I have an app on my
iphone that allows me to do just that.  I also have a pretty complete
collection of CDs put out by his son.  The spoken word is more
efffective than the written word since it conveys much more.  Written
words can be very static.

On 2/13/12, david buchanan <dmbuchanan at hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> Howdy MOQers:
>
> There is relativity in the Einsteinian sense and there is relativity is the
> "anything goes" sense, but Watts is talking about relativity in neither of
> those senses. He's making a point about the RELATIONAL nature of existence.
> He's saying that "things" are what they are by virtue of being tangled up in
> a total situation, in a context, in RELATION to all other "things". "They
> exist in relation to each other," he says. As you can see here, Watts goes
> on to explain this sense of relativism:
>
> "... Indeed, it would be best to drop the idea of causality and use instead
> the idea of relativity. For it is still inexact to say that an organism
> “responds” or “reacts” to a given situation by running or standing, or
> whatever. This is still the language of Newtonian billiards. It is easier to
> think of situations as moving patterns, like organisms themselves. Thus, to
> go back to the cat (or catting), a situation with pointed ears and whiskers
> at one end does not have a tail at the other as a response or reaction to
> the whiskers, or the claws, or the fur. As the Chinese say, the various
> features of a situation “arise mutually” or imply one another as back
> implies front, and as chickens imply eggs—and vice versa. They exist in
> relation to each other like the poles of the magnet, only more complexly
> patterned."
>
> Because of this kind of kind murky confusion, which is fairly constant, I
> think it would be very unwise for anyone to take MOQ lessons from Marsha.
>
>
>> From: valkyr at att.net
>> Date: Mon, 13 Feb 2012 03:51:25 -0500
>> To: moq_discuss at moqtalk.org
>> Subject: Re: [MD] Truth and Relativity 2.9.9
>>
>>
>> For those Alan Watts fans, he writes "it would be best to drop the idea of
>> causality and use instead the idea of relativity."
>>
>>
>> From 'THE BOOK: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are' by Alan Watts
>>
>> "As soon as one sees that separate things are fictitious, it becomes
>> obvious that nonexistent things cannot "perform" actions. The difficulty
>> is that most languages are arranged so that actions (verbs) have to be set
>> in motion by things (nouns), and we forget that rules of grammar are not
>> necessarily rules, or patterns, of nature. This, which is nothing more
>> than a convention of grammar, is also responsible for (or, better,
>> "goeswith") absurd puzzles as to how spirit governs matter, or mind moves
>> body. How can a noun, which is by definition not action, lead to action?
>>
>> "Scientists would be less embarrassed if they used a language, on the
>> model of Amerindian Nootka, consisting of verbs and adverbs, and leaving
>> off nouns and adjectives. If we can speak of a house as housing, a mat as
>> matting, or of a couch as seating, why can't we think of people as
>> "peopling," of brains as "braining," or of an ant as an "anting?" Thus in
>> the Nootka language a church is "housing religiously," a shop is "housing
>> tradingly," and a home is "housing homely." Yet we are habituated to ask,
>> "Who or what is housing? Who peoples? What is it that ants?" Yet isn't it
>> obvious that when we say, "The lightning flashed," the flashing is the
>> same as the lightning, and that it would be enough to say, "There was
>> lightning"? Everything labeled with a noun is demonstrably a process or
>> action, but language is full of spooks, like the "it" in "It is raining,"
>> which are the supposed causes, of action.
>>
>> "Does it really explain running to say that "A man is running"? On the
>> contrary, the only explanation would be a description of the field or
>> situation in which "a manning goeswith running" as distinct from one in
>> which "a manning goeswith sitting." (I am not recommending this primitive
>> and clumsy form of verb language for general and normal use. We should
>> have to contrive something much more elegant.) Furthermore, running is not
>> something other than myself, which I (the organism) do. For the organism
>> is sometimes a running process, sometimes a standing process, sometimes a
>> sleeping process, and so on, and in each instance the "cause" of the
>> behavior is the situation as a whole, the organism environment. Indeed, it
>> would be best to drop the idea of causality and use instead the idea of
>> relativity."
>>
>>
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