Wisdom of the Infinite Regress

[guest_of_logic]

There's no QRS, but not for the reason some of you seem to think. There is basically no difference in what they say regarding fundamentals of reality, but only because they recognize something that is greater than them: reason.

The differences that people pick out are the attitudes and approaches of conveying it.

Skip, I generally agree with you here, although I think that Dan has a slightly different view of the relationship between consciousness/mind and reality than certainly David, and probably Kevin too - he hasn't elaborated on it much though so I can't be sure. I also think, though, that there's more to their nearly identical message than that they recognise reason: that they have a shared idiom and a shared focus on certain philosophical concepts largely comes in my opinion from communication amongst themselves.

[Pye]

guest writes: As for transcending logic: yes, in a sense it would entail not that one lose one's grip on the world, but rather that one broaden one's grip out of the tight, clenched fist by which one usually evaluates the world, perhaps even turning one's hand over, splaying it open and allowing reality to rest in one's upheld palm, no longer grasping and squeezing the truth out of the world, but the weight of the world's truth rather pressing into one's upturned flesh.

nice.

It's really a very simple truth that underpins my part of the dialogue here: we can never exceed our own instrumentation when measuring the world. This is, in my estimation, the first, the foremost, and the most absolute truth that can be grasped, and everything else flows out from there. It is also a humbling truth, in the sense that it serves to correct some of our most abstract, metaphysical dreams of god, and a pure point of objectivity. And none of this undermines the project of continuing to look at the world and its phenomena for the consistencies, anomalies, the 'other' truths of its workings. In fact, I think it makes our projects of observation all the more necessary and poignant. We know, given the absolute fact of our limited instrumentation, that the task will require the greatest alertness we can summon.

So what you write above resonates well with me. It strikes me that given the above most absolute truth of all, we ought to be firing on every cylinder our instrumentation possesses, otherwise we squander other avenues of reception. I used to joke with a philosophical acquaintance who has worked many years in the field of AI (artificial intelligence) that until he can make a CPU casing that has open pores and is in free-exchange with the phenomenal world, he will never reproduce the entirety of human intelligence.

[Diebert van Rhijn]

Secondly, no law says that all things must have causes. Show me a single cause! Show me where that cause begins and ends - it cannot be done, so why all this talk of "causes".

Thirdly, why create the notion of a "necessary being" at all? Such a being is actually an unnecessary being. Why must things have an ultimate cause? Why can't causes stem back endlessly?"

The second point is where Kevin raises the issue of causes not really being "there"; by the third point he's treating them as real again, and it's in the context of causes being real that he offers in the form of a rhetorical question his view that they stem back endlessly.

It's not a matter of "now it's real and now it isn't". There seems way more accuracy present here. It's about causes, beginnings and ending being a property of things. It's how we categorize, define, how we name them.

And when someone like Kevin treats a thing as real, it doesn't mean he acknowledges some factual presence in an objective world of solids and boundaries. The thing remains essentially an experience in our consciousness, a fleeting illusion presented so we can deal with the sensory input or references to it in communication. For some that's all the reality they'd consider and following that path we can say causes stem back endlessly: in references, in connections, in ability to trace, mainly because we cannot be omniscient or omnipresent. We cannot be the All and exist as being at the same time.

This seems then the rub: the suggestion of causes stretching back [in time] you interpreted as time itself having to be uncaused as not to land into regression. But the statement was not made in a scientific context but in an experimental, existential context which naturally considers time primary as an intellectual structure to space out ones experiences, a fallout of change management :-).

There's a need for us to refer to something at least resembling causality though, since in this explanation it's due to the quantum world that anything exists at all

Of course, the quantum representation appears to be full of causes and effects, without it there wouldn't be any meaningful measurement of the state changes and so on. For the quanta to appear and interact other causes currently are theorized about. So here again we see causes stemming back endlessly, the only finality being the limit of our own horizon. And there are quite many quantum physicists who would admit that anything not being part of an observable reality remains "suitable assumption". This is not a solid base for your statement that "it's due to the quantum world that anything exists". Better would be: it's a reasonable assumption that quantum behavior forms an important and testable cause for known phenomena.

So then do you consider that it's possible for an atemporal, non-spatial quantum principle to be the source of time, such that time has had a finite duration, as outlined in the second half of the essay?

Sure, but it's fairly familiar ground in theoretical physics so that's why I tongue in cheek categorized it as mildly uninteresting. The topic itself is actually very interesting to me but in the context of the Genius Forum it seems misplaced, unless you want to transpose it into a metaphysical essay somehow but those elements remain underexposed.

[Pye]

Pye posited: we can never exceed our own instrumentation when measuring the world.

. . . which becomes evermore incumbent upon us to wide-open the phenomenal exchange (body/world). The more of the world we take in - in thought, existential attention, spiritual being-here-ness - the larger our instrumentation becomes. It is a case of becoming more, not less, in the problem of ego. As more world enters, the shape of ourselves expands, and myopic ego recedes. Its inward-turning nature is outward bound. We both get large together, in this mutual creation - self & world. We become far more conscious-of.

What I really mean, I think, is being here.
Signed on for the duration.
in Nietzsche-speak: saying the big "yes" to life, to living.
self-create. we have a whole world of phenomena and thought making cosmic collisions; creating universe.

[Steven Coyle]

Toast ya to that. To loosely quote bert, "our goal should be to gather more of the sensate, as it is luminous..."

[Pye]

Steven affirms: To loosely quote bert, "our goal should be to gather more of the sensate, as it is luminous..."

yeah, what he said.
It takes less words :)

[Blair]

What I really mean, I think, is being here.
Signed on for the duration.
in Nietzsche-speak: saying the big "yes" to life, to living.
self-create. we have a whole world of phenomena and thought making cosmic collisions; creating universe.

This you are, being here for the duration. Say yes to life because you are going to be living it for many thousand years to come, and often dreary.

Your soul wants more, but it is gentle and receding.

[Ataraxia]

(We're almost there :)) This is coming very close to the phenomenological truth: consciousness is always consciousness-of. But we are never looking at two separate entities - not consciousness-itself, or the things-themselves. The two happen together, make each other, if you will.

Yes. In existentialism/ phenomenology it is called "Intentionality", or "aboutness"

[Unidian]

hi. I'm always up for that. If the Tao guy is ever into it, I would like to ask him what he understands is the dispensation of the feminine in the Tao. More pointedly, is it something to be rid-of, as a few of the thinkers here seem to insist.

No.

I'm thinking you are acquainted with "VicDan"? Does he still frequent these parts?

He and I do not get along. We had some very nasty arguments about work over the past few years.

[skipair]

I also think, though, that there's more to their nearly identical message than that they recognise reason: that they have a shared idiom and a shared focus on certain philosophical concepts largely comes in my opinion from communication amongst themselves.

Agree about the idiom to a degree but not about the philosophical concepts. Reason as an internal and spiritual process is just that and can't be told to someone. I believe that they share a focus not because of each other but because it makes sense.

[guest_of_logic]

Pye,

I'm going to respond to the first half of one of your older posts now that I realise that you're willing for our dialogue to continue.

(We're almost there :))

For a woman, you're a good judge of distance. ;-)

This is coming very close to the phenomenological truth: consciousness is always consciousness-of.

But is that-which-is always an object of consciousness?

But we are never looking at two separate entities - not consciousness-itself, or the things-themselves. The two happen together, make each other, if you will.

This is very much like something that QRS might say. I'm curious then to ask whether by "thing" you mean what they mean when they use that word - i.e. whether to you a "thing" is an appearance within consciousness, which (the thing), although it has some sort of causal relationship with external reality ("the Hidden Void"), does not represent any object in that external reality since that external reality is inherently unknowable to us and hence does not truly contain any objects.

guest: You seem to be saying that the brain discovers patterns . . .

Pye: Given the above, we can see the language of separation here: patterns existing in the world; brain coming up against them and "discovering." I would be more inclined to say they are created at the same time.

It looks grammatically like the referents of "they" are "brain" and "patterns", which (the brain and the patterns) by your inclination are created at the same time, but I suspect that rather than "brain", you meant "consciousness", as you wrote in the sentence prior to that. I might be wrong though - perhaps you don't distinguish much between brains and conciousnesses.

So: created from what? Obviously one ingredient is consciousness/brain, but is "external reality" the other ingredient? I could continue, assuming that your answer is "yes", but I don't want to make any assumptions at this point.

guest re: gravity: your perspective seems to suggest that it is the property of matter that it attracts other matter

Pye: Not until there is other matter to create this phenomenon.

And would you posit that until that other matter exists, there is latent potential for the phenomenon "in" the original matter?

Again, gravity does not sit inside any given entity inherently (and certainly not in a vacuum). There is no possibility of isolating such a phenomenon from the world setting in which it occurs. Our brains are part of that world-setting.

Here's the meat of the matter. I agree that gravity does not "sit inside any given entity inherently", but I say instead that it might - given the possibility of an atemporal, non-spatial quantum principle that I described in the essay - be accurate to describe gravity likewise as a principle independent of space and time, that nevertheless has effects in those dimensions. I won't give the points of my post prior to yours a reprise because I want to understand your perspective a little better first.

It's really a very simple truth that underpins my part of the dialogue here: we can never exceed our own instrumentation when measuring the world. This is, in my estimation, the first, the foremost, and the most absolute truth that can be grasped, and everything else flows out from there. It is also a humbling truth, in the sense that it serves to correct some of our most abstract, metaphysical dreams of god, and a pure point of objectivity. And none of this undermines the project of continuing to look at the world and its phenomena for the consistencies, anomalies, the 'other' truths of its workings. In fact, I think it makes our projects of observation all the more necessary and poignant. We know, given the absolute fact of our limited instrumentation, that the task will require the greatest alertness we can summon.

So what you write above resonates well with me. It strikes me that given the above most absolute truth of all, we ought to be firing on every cylinder our instrumentation possesses, otherwise we squander other avenues of reception. I used to joke with a philosophical acquaintance who has worked many years in the field of AI (artificial intelligence) that until he can make a CPU casing that has open pores and is in free-exchange with the phenomenal world, he will never reproduce the entirety of human intelligence.

Ironically, what you wrote there is not exactly what I intended with the metaphor that I contributed, and in one sense is even opposed to it, which only goes to show how vague and open to interpretation that paragraph of my writing was. What I intended by the potential of an expanded view of reality was not so much expanding the instruments of one's sensory perception, as expanding the powers of one's comprehension, in a way that might no longer conform to logic-as-we-know-it. Those enhanced powers of comprehension could indeed include "our most abstract, metaphysical dreams of god, and a pure point of objectivity".

I do take your point regarding "our projects of observation [being] all the more necessary and poignant [because we] know, given the absolute fact of our limited instrumentation, that the task will require the greatest alertness we can summon", and of course there is probably a relationship between expanding one's instruments of perception and expanding one's powers of comprehension, as you seem to rightly point out here:

The more of the world we take in - in thought, existential attention, spiritual being-here-ness - the larger our instrumentation becomes. It is a case of becoming more, not less, in the problem of ego. As more world enters, the shape of ourselves expands, and myopic ego recedes. Its inward-turning nature is outward bound. We both get large together, in this mutual creation - self & world. We become far more conscious-of.

It might be that the expanded powers of comprehension which concerned my grasping-hand metaphor can be learnt as "more [of the] world enters" and as "the shape of ourselves expands".

What I really mean, I think, is being here.
Signed on for the duration.
in Nietzsche-speak: saying the big "yes" to life, to living.
self-create. we have a whole world of phenomena and thought making cosmic collisions; creating universe.

I'm in two minds about this, but here and now is not the place to elaborate on my meaning.

I'm thinking you are acquainted with "VicDan"? Does he still frequent these parts?

He was very active here a few months back, but seems to have lapsed again. I had an extended discussion with him in early January regarding animal rights and whether we ought to (and do) consider the value of natural resources to animals or, as his statements implied, whether we ought to (and do) consider their value purely to humans. His most recent post, as you can discover yourself through his profile, was on the 8th of May.

And when someone like Kevin treats a thing as real, it doesn't mean he acknowledges some factual presence in an objective world of solids and boundaries.

Yes, I understand that.

The thing remains essentially an experience in our consciousness, a fleeting illusion presented so we can deal with the sensory input or references to it in communication. For some that's all the reality they'd consider and following that path we can say causes stem back endlessly: in references, in connections, in ability to trace, mainly because we cannot be omniscient or omnipresent. We cannot be the All and exist as being at the same time.

This seems then the rub: the suggestion of causes stretching back [in time] you interpreted as time itself having to be uncaused as not to land into regression. But the statement was not made in a scientific context but in an experimental, existential context which naturally considers time primary as an intellectual structure to space out ones experiences, a fallout of change management :-).

Unfortunately I don't understand your point: I don't see either context as relevant - the facts remain the same. What does it even mean to consider time as "an intellectual structure"? Aren't we employing "intellectual structures" every time we talk conceptually? Isn't "[spacing] out ones [sic] experience" simply a way of describing the effects of time, and if so, then how does it in any way negate the impossibility of an infinite temporal regression?

This is not a solid base for your statement that "it's due to the quantum world that anything exists". Better would be: it's a reasonable assumption that quantum behavior forms an important and testable cause for known phenomena.

Yes, my statement was based on an assumption; an hypothesis.

those [metaphysical] elements remain underexposed.

Can you describe a few of the elements that you would like to see included if the metaphysical aspect of the essay were to be heightened?

Pye: hi. I'm always up for that. If the Tao guy is ever into it, I would like to ask him what he understands is the dispensation of the feminine in the Tao. More pointedly, is it something to be rid-of, as a few of the thinkers here seem to insist.

Unidian: No.

You've taken the "less is more" essence of Taoism to a new level, Nat. :-P

Perhaps you could elaborate.

I believe that they [QRS] share a focus not because of each other but because it makes sense.

Are you still of the opinion then that the QRS philosophy is essentially flawless?

Edit for clarity: changed "regression" to "an infinite temporal regression".

[Unidian]

You've taken the "less is more" essence of Taoism to a new level, Nat. :-P

Perhaps you could elaborate.

Lao-Tzu is said to have has a female teacher. Beyond that, there are several passages in the Tao Te Ching which suggest the value of the feminine dimension of consciousness. For example, chapters 6, 10, and 28 make direct reference to it. Additionally, Lao-Tzu refers to the Tao as the "mother of things" repeatedly throughout the text. He does not use the patriarchal "father" terminology which is more familiar in the West.

The Tao Te Ching is widely considered a feminist text, or at least one that is in sympathy with feminism. While I reject most aspects of the aggressive, politically-charged version of "feminism" that has emerged in the West, I would have to agree that the overall flavor of the Tao Te Ching is quite favorable to the feminine. This is why it has always surprised me that QRS claim to be fully consistent with Lao-Tzu.

[Loki]

I can remember it being said on this forum that to be wise, you must eventually drop both masculinity and femininity. Whereas, the Tao Te Ching states quite clearly that you must "Know the male and keep the female." Something along those lines..

[skipair]

I believe that they [QRS] share a focus not because of each other but because it makes sense.

Are you still of the opinion then that the QRS philosophy is essentially flawless?

This to me would be asking are those people flawless, because real philosophy in my opinion is the most personal thing there is. I'm sure I can't say whether or to what degree they are living up to their own standards, but seeing that there's a pretty strong overlap between theirs and mine I give them my best.

[guest_of_logic]

That seems like a bit of a dodge to me, Skip, but I won't press you further.

[skipair]

Yeah, it's a dodge because it seems to me personalizing reason is a messy thing and hard to make concrete statements about it in the general sense. When I try it's usually like "don't be an idiot" or something like that. So, I think the philosophy is flawless to the degree that they are amongst the least idiotic people I've met.

Personally, it probably wouldn't occur to me to use language like "buddha" or to refer people to literature to help teach and sell the idea of reason being a valuable thing. Potentially useful but for me more confusing than anything. Small concern overall though, because presentation isn't the real deal.

How's that? :)

[guest_of_logic]

Much better. :-)

[Pye]

guest asks: But is that-which-is always an object of consciousness?

I am forced to conclude from the limits of my own instrumentation that there is indeed plenty more of the what-is of the world than my own consciousness can at once contain. Of course, to do this, I must still become conscious-of this condition itself.

guest again: This is very much like something that QRS might say. I'm curious then to ask whether by "thing" you mean what they mean when they use that word - i.e. whether to you a "thing" is an appearance within consciousness, which (the thing), although it has some sort of causal relationship with external reality ("the Hidden Void"), does not represent any object in that external reality since that external reality is inherently unknowable to us and hence does not truly contain any objects.

I thought Diebert was doing rather well with this in the following sentences from this thread:

It's about causes, beginnings and ending being a property of things. It's how we categorize, define, how we name them.

And when someone like Kevin treats a thing as real, it doesn't mean he acknowledges some factual presence in an objective world of solids and boundaries. The thing remains essentially an experience in our consciousness, a fleeting illusion presented so we can deal with the sensory input or references to it in communication.

As for the the idea of a Hidden Void and an "external reality" (I assume this means a reality outside of us), this simply strikes me as an expression of the same phenomenological condition the human finds itself in. If consciousness is created by the dynamic exchange between the things and itself, then there is never a time we can assume to know those things in themselves [hence, they are hidden or external]. We can only know them in ourselves [that is, consciousness + things]. I am not one to go the whole solipsistic hog over this condition, as the solipsistic hog will do, and say that there is no world at all except that which occurs in consciousness. Dramatic bravado to make a point, but nothing more. My phenomenological condition already tells me I am not alone in the world, or I would not have anything to think about; be conscious-of.

guest surmises: I suspect that rather than "brain", you meant "consciousness"

yes.

guest asks: So: created from what? Obviously one ingredient is consciousness/brain, but is "external reality" the other ingredient? I could continue, assuming that your answer is "yes", but I don't want to make any assumptions at this point.

Yes, "external reality" is the other ingredient, but with all caveats above included.

guest asks: And would you posit that until that other matter exists, there is latent potential for the phenomenon "in" the original matter?

Ah, that word potential! It has given philosophy many niggling problems, for as Descartes once insisted, potential is, strictly speaking, nothing yet.
My phenomenological truth tells me otherwise. Potential is not-nothing, but rather already demonstrating phenomenological reality: there is an "it" about which we are concerned, and a consciousness-of its likely unfolding, and a set of conditions into which that unfolding could take place. We are never thinking about nothing when we think about potential - for there is not nothing; there is only existence.
And since I can never be "in" the original matter to look after what is potential within it; and further, that potential cannot be seen as anything without the phenomenal world itself to manifest it - even in idea, then I cannot assume that there is "latent potential" for the phenomenon existing within that thing itself. It is not even a thing until there is a world of things of which it is not. And as soon as there is a world of things, they are already creating the cause dance together.

So, I'm sorry I can't get these two things to notch together nicely for us. I can assume things from the truth of my phenomenological condition, but I can never assume to know the things-in-themselves. And they cannot even be things without the rest of the things in the world that they are not. We cannot make good science (or philosophy) with the isolated phenomenon. Isolated phenomenon is oxymoronic in itself :)

guest writes: Here's the meat of the matter. I agree that gravity does not "sit inside any given entity inherently", but I say instead that it might- given the possibility of an atemporal, non-spatial quantum principle that I described in the essay - be accurate to describe gravity likewise as a principle independent of space and time, that nevertheless has effects in those dimensions. I won't give the points of my post prior to yours a reprise because I want to understand your perspective a little better first.

I understand what it is you are wanting to posit here. It's a world of forms that posits a world-before-this-world out of which everything about our phenomenal world flows and is directed-by. It has to be this, or such a thing as a principle could not transcend space and time - could not be there before there is being itself.

You're working on the god-thought here, Laird. This is kin to all god-thoughts in nature. God-thoughts are characterized as causal beginnings that transcend all laws of the concrete existential world (that is, they don't have any causes for their own appearance in the world). They precede the world; they would be there even if there wasn't a world manifesting them; they are not bound by the concrete laws of existential reality, hence, they are perfect, eternal, unchanging, etc. (not like messy existence), and they are 'responsible,' as it were, for there being any world/phenomena at all. Such an idea collects into that one-word idea (god) and is really running on sort of the same sentiment every time it's asserted. Is this the world-behind-the-world you mean? Are you positing a world-behind-this-world at all? By definition, it seems you are.

guest re: VicDan: His most recent post, as you can discover yourself through his profile, was on the 8th of May.

Yes of course, thanks, sorry. I am selectively focused to the point of handicap with some of these net-things.

guest teases: For a woman, you're a good judge of distance. ;-)

Ah, Laird . . . . you must know that an intelligent woman can never be a full-fledged comrade in this joke, no matter how good-naturedly it is meant. To do so requires that she summon all of her good nature, at the expense of her higher one . . . .


.

[Jamesh]

The first problem with beginningless time: the traversal of an actual infinity

This problem is often referred to in words similar to these: "it is impossible for an actual infinite to exist, and the traversal of an infinity of time constitutes such an impossible actual infinite

Not if Time itself is everything.

Time has one attribute only - an attribute that is unknowable, other than by deduction.
It exists in one way only - one could say it "expands".
Times arrow is simply time expanding, continuously.

Rebutting the response to the first problem with beginningless time

To say that a moment is past is to say that it was once the present moment, before the present moment moved forward from that moment. All past moments have been "actualised" in this manner, and it follows from this that all of the past has been actualised, which is what the phrasing of the objection - "actual infinite" - refers to.

The fact that the past has been actualised means that the present moment has traversed over the entirety of that past moving in a forwards direction.

That is actually close to the case.

One does need to examine the word "forward" though. In an absolute sense Time does not move forward, but rather it expands. We only refer to it as going forward because it does not ever give an appearance of going backwards. That’s because time - viewed as it's essence, not as the appearances created via the relativity process - has one attribute only, not two.

The phrase "the present moment has traversed over" is also somewhat awry. The present moment does not exist to us (we observe After the real event, and the brain combines data to create a present moment). It is "outside" of all us things. The present moment is actively/causally different to the past only in that it is more than the past - there is more time now than there was then. The present moment is the frontier of the past. The present moment is just another word that can be used as a descriptor for what Time actually does.

The present moment has no form to observe. As the present moment continuously expands, it is not bi-directionally relative to anything else (though it is as the past) - although it flows out from the past thus has a "forward direction" there is nothing "on the other side", nothing for it to be relative to. The present moment is just the "most outer" present moment, it is not separate from the past.

Note that the Past is still Time - it is all expanding, it has the same attribute as the present moment - but the key is that the present moment is always a bigger present moment, than a moment ago (that is "ago" in a measured time sense - I'm not suggesting Time, has a quantum nature - its infinite and has no differential gap, a quantum nature is an appearance, an effect).

Time being time within past, though still the same attribute, does have a boundary. It is bounded by all the new time that occurred since it was the "largest" present moment, that is now expanding back into the past. This "contains" its expansion, and relative to more recent time, it gives the appearance of spiralling into itself. This is the beginning of the quantum effect. As an aside, this is also how we see things - some light disappears down into these time spirals (represented physically as forms like atoms) and changes the nature of what is remaining that is then reflected to our eyes.

It is the past that causes form. The present moment as an expansionary cause exists everywhere. Time expands out from itself, and the present moment is the outside, but it also continuously expanding into itself, there is no actual "outside" to expand into as it is already "everywhere". Therefore as well as expanding out Time creates increasing "pressure" within - it starts to overlap itself - it is a perpetual relativity machine. When it has sufficiently overlapped we begin to notice it - we observe things and feel forces in play. The overlapping is not like physical things overlapping, it's not building blocks, but rather picture it more as altering degrees of the pressure of time within and against itself. Aggregated appearances of this are called things, and the pressure flows are called forces. Time, everything, has no need of a battery - it is its own power source.

[Diebert van Rhijn]

I would like to ask him what he understands is the dispensation of the feminine in the Tao.

I would have to agree that the overall flavor of the Tao Te Ching is quite favorable to the feminine. This is why it has always surprised me that QRS claim to be fully consistent with Lao-Tzu.

It's important to note that the equilibrium suggested through Eastern writings doesn't necessarily mean a peaceful, balanced mixture. Lets take fire and water to represent masculine and feminine. While seen from a broad view both elements will always remain, nevertheless fire will naturally evaporate water and water naturally will tend to extinguish the flame. A wood fire will not burn when you keep pouring water on it. It's in this context I see for example Quinn's writings in his essay "Woman: An Exposition for the Advanced Mind".

After all, when consciousness is posited, its shadow: "unconsciousness", rises necessarily. With wisdom rises ignorance, and so on.

In the Tao The Ching one can find hardly any specific feminine elements in the sense of how the feminine is described by Quinn et al. A female psychology was likely not even considered in ancient China because the female as specific "opposing" gender around the time was a near to non-existent factor. The feminine aspect here was always portrayed as mere physical element or quality in all processes including the movements of the mind, like its grasping and yielding.

[guest_of_logic]

Pye,

I've done a little reorganising of quotes in what follows.

[my edits]

guest asks: So: [patterns are] created from what? Obviously one ingredient is consciousness/brain, but is "external reality" the other ingredient? [...]

Pye: Yes, "external reality" is the other ingredient, but with all caveats above included.

I am forced to conclude from the limits of my own instrumentation that there is indeed plenty more of the what-is of the world than my own consciousness can at once contain.

You are not, then, a solipsist, and you admit of an external reality beyond your consciousness, yet you do not admit of the independent existence within that external reality of patterns and principles: you maintain that those patterns and principles are co-created with the union of consciousness and external reality. I hope that I've summarised your position accurately.

I wonder, then, whether you will accept this statement: "Where sufficient consistency outside of consciousness is lacking, this union of the outside and the inside of consciousness produces patterns that are but a figment of the imagination". You might sense where I am going with this, for, if you accept it, then I would suggest that you ought also to accept that where there is sufficient consistency outside of itself, consciousness is recognising that consistency rather than "co-creating" it - and what is "consistency" in this context but a variation on "patterns and principles"?

If consciousness is created by the dynamic exchange between the things and itself, then there is never a time we can assume to know those things in themselves [hence, they are hidden or external]. We can only know them in ourselves [that is, consciousness + things].

The notion of not being able to know things "in themselves" has always struck me as a curious one, because I don't know what the notion negated means, lest it refer to some sort of omniscient awareness beyond the conventional senses; another possibility being that it refers to what it might be like to be conscious as those "things-in-themselves".

guest asks: And would you posit that until that other matter exists, there is latent potential for the phenomenon "in" the original matter?

Pye rejoins: [S]ince I can never be "in" the original matter to look after what is potential within it; and further, that potential cannot be seen as anything without the phenomenal world itself to manifest it - even in idea, then I cannot assume that there is "latent potential" for the phenomenon existing within that thing itself. It is not even a thing until there is a world of things of which it is not. And as soon as there is a world of things, they are already creating the cause dance together.

Whilst we are considering a world of "things", are you not making an arbitrary distinction between the "thing" of gravity, and the "thing" of matter, and indeed of more specific "things"? Granted, some things are more abstract than others, yet given the impossibility you maintain of having access to a thing-in-itself, are not your conceptions of any "tangible" thing abstractions too, albeit in a less recognisable form? Yet surely you would not say that, "The 'pattern' of this orange peel is co-created by external reality and my consciousness, and does not exist independently in external reality" - or would you?

I understand what it is you are wanting to posit here. It's a world of forms that posits a world-before-this-world out of which everything about our phenomenal world flows and is directed-by. It has to be this, or such a thing as a principle could not transcend space and time - could not be there before there is being itself.

Again, you're using temporal terms to refer to the atemporal: when referring to the atemporal, there is no "before", just as there is no "after" or "now". This might in part be where we're not seeing eye to eye: you envisage me trying to postulate a world before this one, when really I am trying to postulate a world cotemporary with every moment of this one.

You're working on the god-thought here, Laird. This is kin to all god-thoughts in nature. God-thoughts are characterized as causal beginnings that transcend all laws of the concrete existential world (that is, they don't have any causes for their own appearance in the world). They precede the world; they would be there even if there wasn't a world manifesting them; they are not bound by the concrete laws of existential reality, hence, they are perfect, eternal, unchanging, etc. (not like messy existence), and they are 'responsible,' as it were, for there being any world/phenomena at all. Such an idea collects into that one-word idea (god) and is really running on sort of the same sentiment every time it's asserted. Is this the world-behind-the-world you mean? Are you positing a world-behind-this-world at all? By definition, it seems you are.

What I posit with respect to patterns and principles in general need not entail a world-behind-the-world; it simply requires that the patterns and principles are recognised as being as intrinsic as that which they are abstracted out of, which itself is abstract anyway, seeing as how we have no access to things-in-themselves.

guest teases: For a woman, you're a good judge of distance. ;-)

Pye chides: Ah, Laird . . . . you must know that an intelligent woman can never be a full-fledged comrade in this joke, no matter how good-naturedly it is meant. To do so requires that she summon all of her good nature, at the expense of her higher one . . . .

Let me try again then: for a personally conscious being, you're very diplomatic.

----------------

Jamesh,

guest_of_logic: This problem is often referred to in words similar to these: "it is impossible for an actual infinite to exist, and the traversal of an infinity of time constitutes such an impossible actual infinite

Jamesh: Not if Time itself is everything.

OK, let's explore that idea.

Time has one attribute only - an attribute that is unknowable, other than by deduction.
It exists in one way only - one could say it "expands".
Times arrow is simply time expanding, continuously.

If in your view, time is continuously expanding, then does it have an origin - a single point from which it started expanding?

The present moment is actively/causally different to the past only in that it is more than the past - there is more time now than there was then. The present moment is the frontier of the past. The present moment is just another word that can be used as a descriptor for what Time actually does.

So Time is like a substance under continuous expansion, and the present moment is the outermost edge of that substance.

Time being time within past, though still the same attribute, does have a boundary. It is bounded by all the new time that occurred since it was the "largest" present moment, that is now expanding back into the past.

I have trouble understanding what you're getting at here. I think that you mean to explain the above when you write below that "The present moment as an expansionary cause exists everywhere", but I'm not sure how that statement relates to your earlier contention that "The present moment is the frontier of the past". How can the present moment be both a frontier and everywhere?

This "contains" its expansion, and relative to more recent time, it gives the appearance of spiralling into itself.

It seems that you're asserting that time expands "backwards" into the past. How can this spiralling appearance be realised, though, seeing as how for humans, we experience time in a linear fashion?

It is the past that causes form. The present moment as an expansionary cause exists everywhere. Time expands out from itself, and the present moment is the outside, but it also continuously expanding into itself, there is no actual "outside" to expand into as it is already "everywhere". Therefore as well as expanding out Time creates increasing "pressure" within - it starts to overlap itself - it is a perpetual relativity machine. When it has sufficiently overlapped we begin to notice it - we observe things and feel forces in play. The overlapping is not like physical things overlapping, it's not building blocks, but rather picture it more as altering degrees of the pressure of time within and against itself. Aggregated appearances of this are called things, and the pressure flows are called forces. Time, everything, has no need of a battery - it is its own power source.

And where is the contracting force in all of this? You seem to generally be concerned with the opposites of expansion and contraction, but here I see only expansion.

----------------

Due to changed life circumstances, my further replies might be delayed.

[Steven Coyle]

It's just sea, b. Ride tide and wave - inner/outer is the reason for your salt.

[Tomas]

.



-Pye-
If consciousness is created by the dynamic exchange between the things and itself, then there is never a time we can assume to know those things in themselves [hence, they are hidden or external]. We can only know them in ourselves [that is, consciousness + things].

-Laird-
The notion of not being able to know things "in themselves" has always struck me as a curious one, because I don't know what the notion negated means, lest it refer to some sort of omniscient awareness beyond the conventional senses; another possibility being that it refers to what it might be like to be conscious as those "things-in-themselves".


-tomas-
Just noting that God exists outside of the universe, and is thus not subject to its laws; given that he created them along with the universe itself. Any creation or destruction of the universe or anything in it is done by God outside of the universe itself.

Oh, and if the universe simply existed, the universe would be God.
You're just calling it a different name. Read a book, kid.

"There is no doer behind the doing" ~ Nietzsche

.

[Robert]

Just noting that God exists outside of the universe, and is thus not subject to its laws; given that he created them along with the universe itself. Any creation or destruction of the universe or anything in it is done by God outside of the universe itself.

Partly explains the popularity of reality tv shows like Big Brother, where God/BB creates and manipulates everything inside the house as he seems fit, but not actually be in the house, always outside it.

[Jamesh]

Hi Laird. From your post 29-08.

RE: OK, let's explore that idea.

I don't like posting much anymore, and will rarely respond unless something novel interests me and I feel like a bout of thinking. I'm not going to do the to and fro business.

Jamesh wrote:
Time has one attribute only - an attribute that is unknowable, other than by deduction.
It exists in one way only - one could say it "expands".
Times arrow is simply time expanding, continuously.

Laird: If in your view, time is continuously expanding, then does it have an origin - a single point from which it started expanding?

Literally No but really Yes.

Literally No - there is no origin, because there is nothing outside of it. Time has no outside.

For it to have an origin would logically mean it was caused to manifest from an "outside", and then expand from a point. If you think of anything that could be outside of time, let me know.

Really Yes because the single point is itself. The one-dimensionality caused by having a single attribute, expansion.

This seems illogical because expansion by default implies 3-dimensionality, however, I would suggest to you that the normal accepted meaning of 3-dimensionality is not necessarily applicable at the very most fundamental level of creation or the essence of all things.

There is automatic 3-dimensionality in everything. A single point is really a pure abstract concept - a necessary tool for human measurement and physical judgment. It implies a staticness that does not truly exist anywhere. Staticness exists only in a relative sense, and anything relative is a layered entity. Even Space is not static, it is generally thought to be expanding, in which case it could not be static.

I do not see why you insist that Time should have a beginning. I am unable accept that the change from No-Time to Time, is a logical possibility.

The dualistic rules that apply to things, by default do not apply at the fundamental level of reality, dualistic rules and logic are reversed. For duality to "'be", then it must be a result of non-duality.

The first plane of duality, the first "cause", is simply the continuous creation-by-expansion of a "smaller"-than-the-present "past" (I mean a conceptual past otherwise no different from the present, it lacks any "thingness" other than expansion-of-itself).

The second plane, the primary "contracting" force, is what occurs when the present expands into itself, and occurs simultaneously. Combine these two and we get Space. Add in the expansion still occurring within the "past", and note that the expansion of the past would find less resistance to its expansion in the time that has since manifested - so the past flows more into its future than into its own past.

These trifold effects observed as whole and within the flow of time (which our brains categorise as a period of time), create the affect of differentiation, which when there is sufficient complexity of flows into the present from the past (evolution), literally when enough time has occurred, allows us to observe thingness.

Ultimately reality is not dualistic, it does not have multiple beginning "points" or "forces" or "gods".

Jamesh wrote:
The present moment is actively/causally different to the past only in that it is more than the past - there is more time now than there was then. The present moment is the frontier of the past. The present moment is just another word that can be used as a descriptor for what Time actually does.


Laird: So Time is like a substance under continuous expansion, and the present moment is the outermost edge of that substance.

Yes, but a substance only of one force. An eternal force that cannot ever be of another action than what it is.

Jamesh wrote:
Time being time within past, though still the same attribute, does have a boundary. It is bounded by all the new time that occurred since it was the "largest" present moment, that is now expanding back into the past.


Laird: I have trouble understanding what you're getting at here. I think that you mean to explain the above when you write below that "The present moment as an expansionary cause exists everywhere", but I'm not sure how that statement relates to your earlier contention that "The present moment is the frontier of the past". How can the present moment be both a frontier and everywhere?

It's entire essence in being expansion is that of a frontier, but the newest is least immediately bounded by the past. As time expands it will become increasingly bounded. The problem is that this occurs without spatiality, and is therefore ultimately indescribable and unknowable in a direct sense. I simply believe it can be known by what it cannot be - which is everything other than Time. I know of no other concept that only has one attribute and must be absolutely infinite.

Jamesh wrote:
This "contains" its expansion, and relative to more recent time, it gives the appearance of spiralling into itself.

Laird: It seems that you're asserting that time expands "backwards" into the past. How can this spiralling appearance be realised, though, seeing as how for humans, we experience time in a linear fashion?

Abstractly. Really only in a henid fashion, however these henids can still lead to a sense of knowing.

Today I read this comment of Weininger's on the train. It could be rephrased to apply to my theories above. The past is always extant.

"Even the greats genius cannot understand the nature of all men at the same time, on one and the same day. The comprehensive and manifold rudiments which a man possesses in his mind can develop only slowly and by degrees with the gradual unfolding of his whole life. It appears almost as if there were a definite periodicity in his development. These periods when they recur, however, are not exactly alike; they are not mere repetitions, but are intensifications of their predecessors, on a higher plane. No two moments in the life of an individual are exactly alike; there is between the later and the earlier periods only the similarity of the higher and lower parts of a spiral descent."