Pye wrote:Matter and energy appear to have risen together (or better yet, have always been present as long as there has been presence [being]), so I am disinclined to imagine one to come before the other, as much as I am disinclined to separate them but for the most conventional of sakes. Particle or wave; thing or motion; so long as our local understanding of physics indicates that neither can be (re)created or destroyed, we are looking at eternity, we are looking at everything even if we cannot see it all at once or from any other point of view.
I see. I think you're equating "spiritual existence" with "energy" and "material existence" with "matter". To me, though, the mapping is different: the matter and energy that you refer to here (those which science has mapped) are
both what I would refer to in total as "material existence" (after all, as you seem to be alluding to, Einstein is said to have proved that they are interchangeable), whereas those of "spiritual existence" haven't been mapped that much if at all by science. I suspect that you probably wouldn't even recognise/acknowledge/accept the types of energy/matter that I would refer to as "spiritual existence" - not that I'm by any means knowledgeable about them myself. And of course, as with many dichotomies, this is probably a somewhat gross and semi-arbitrary one.
Laird: but what I was trying to get at is that there could be a temporal or some other causal sense in which the material aspect to existence is a consequence of the spiritual aspect, so that in some sense "pure spirit" is "behind" the existence that we currently experience . . .
Pye: You can have it that way if you want, Laird, if you want there should be something “unreasonable” about the world . . . . but I‘d be inclined in return to ask why matter must be preceded rather than included in the wonders of being . . . . What would make existence more “valuable” to you in believing spirit – a spirit, energy, what-have-you – does the initial creating out of nothing?
What makes you think I believe what I believe because I want to make existence more valuable to myself? That's not how I form my beliefs. :-)
As for "unreasonable": what at a fundamental level
is reasonable about the world? Why is it that a world should exist at all (as opposed to there not being any existence whatsoever)? As far as I know, we as a species haven't been able to answer this most basic question, and so, as far as we know, the world itself
is "unreasonable", isn't it? (as an aside, I believe that this is what jufa is trying to get across in his occasional barrages of others that question the "logic" for existence). In any event, what is so "reasonable" about a wholly material universe that pops up out of a point of infinite density (assuming you hold to the mainstream scientific cosmological view)?
As for "why matter must be preceded", it's an inference I make out of various experiences of spirit, some my own and some related to me by others (sometimes impersonally, in books). I firmly believe based on these that the human body (including brain and mind) is more than a mere (consequence of a) biological entity; that it has spiritual components which can separate from it, most likely surviving the death of the biological body. This suggests a design to life, and a layer of reality which exists "independently" of "material" existence, and which precedes it (again, granting that this "spiritual" vs "material" dichotomy is a somewhat unwieldy one, especially given my lack of knowledge by which to cut a fine distinction, or even to clearly explain the nature of "the spiritual").
When you refer to an "initial creating out of nothing", I want to make it clear that I have no definite cosmological beliefs beyond the inference that spirit precedes the material. In particular I'm not sure of the origins of spirit nor how it created the material. Especially, I don't posit the spiritual to solve the problem of origins: I'm aware that from a purely logical perspective, that only defers that problem.
Pye wrote:It could be said, Laird, that things have properties to them, but only if these phenomena are played out in existence, are manifest as properties. It could be said that it takes certain circumstances (causes/conditions) for properties to display themselves, but this only happens in tandem with those causes/conditions. If this "property" of something never makes an appearance, how can we assume such a "property" exists in the phenomena?
It's like this: here's a very very heavy object. Just this object itself, all by itself. You might say of such a thing it has the property of gravity to it (inside" it? "hidden"? etc?). But if there is no space for the weight of this object to bend, or no other objects to slide toward it, then where exactly does this "property" reside?
Unfortunately, you picked a bad example, because an object's gravity acts upon the object itself as much as upon other objects. Perhaps a better example is that of a broken circuit in which we ask whether any electric properties of the circuit truly exist "within" the circuit until the circuit is closed. It's still not all that good an example, though, because the concepts of electric fields and electric potentials are well developed.
In any case, I think I understand what you mean. I also think, though, that your objection to properties is a mostly semantic one that might be solved semantically. Usually, we talk of things having properties "to them", or about things "having" properties, or simply about the properties "of" things: in other words properties are "possessed" by things. Perhaps, between you and I, we might agree to talk, instead of possessed properties, about "associated" properties: in other words to say that a property is "associated with" a thing rather than "possessed by" it. So, we would say not that gravity is a property "of" your very very heavy object, but instead that gravity is "associated with" that object. I think that this would ameliorate your objection because associations don't connote permanence in the way that possessiveness does, and nor do they imply that the property can be found "within" the object as possessiveness does: instead, we could simply say that the association is "active" when your "certain circumstances (causes/conditions)" apply (e.g. when the very very heavy object is attracting other objects to it), and inactive otherwise. What do you think?
This is compatible with the notion of a human template because, as I stated in an earlier post, it is possible to deviate from the template (as opposed to from a "fixed" nature).