Philosophical Speculations

Soul_of_Shu wrote: ↑Sat Jul 03, 2021 2:55 pm

SanteriSatama wrote: ↑Sat Jul 03, 2021 2:12 pmBefore the question of monotheism vs. polytheism can arise, you need to subscribe in the service of the God of Number Theory (GNT). Is the metaphysical God of existential quantification last word on the issue, the end of theology? Nope.

Bergson's notion of duration is defined as neither unity nor multiplicity. So before GNT we can have Time, independent of GNT. So far Duration has been defined as negation of GNT, but can we have an affirmative expression for duration? Yes, we can. Duration can be defined also as both more and less.. And the definition can be further qualified as dynamic process of open interval. Potential infinity (instead of completed infinity), which is open and unbounded both externally and internally. The duration of an open interval can be written into formal language with relational operators: <>. And no need to throw the baby with the washwater, we can have discrete numbers too, but no longer as the master, but a servant and perhaps a friend. Static structures of discrete numbers can be derived from negation of the more-less process: neither more nor less, aka ><. From that we can derive closed intervals of both unity and multiplicity, e.g. the interval of rational numbers between 0 and 1.

Theology can be quite rational and rationally communicated in the Bergson-duration of open interval. No need for "credo quid absurdum est".

Alas SS, my fine forest-finn friend, your math remains like an elusive BDSM mistress (perhaps Mielikki in disguise?) that does not like to linger long in the airy bedroom of my mind, while I balk at her invitation to join her in some oubliette of number theory ... Mind you, the fetish-wear does look sexy

The phantasies of a wedding in a Procrustean bedding... the freedom of the flight, all the might, the fright, the urge to leave that behind, in search of closures most kind?

SanteriSatama wrote: ↑Sat Jul 03, 2021 3:20 pmThe phantasies of a wedding in a Procrustean bedding... the freedom of the flight, all the might, the fright, the urge to leave that behind, in search of closures most kind?

Brilliant ... Love it ... like Logos bewitched by Eros, poetry after my own heart

DandelionSoul wrote: ↑Sat Jul 03, 2021 11:29 am

Ashvin wrote: We may disagree on that last part too, in which case I will just keep the metamorphic process within this lifetime for now.

I don’t disagree that What-Is which is you is also the What-Is which is me, and my grandmother, and each bacterium in my stomach. And there is a sense, of course, in which I am what I am through what you are, and what my grandmother was, and what the bacteria in my stomach are -- I like Thich Nhat Hanh’s word “interbeing” for this. And so whatever is learned and verified in one lifetime ultimately finds expression through many lifetimes. It may end up being overturned in some other lifetimes, then reestablished in yet others, or synthesized in new ways, or just forgotten. “Learning” and “verification” are always temporal and provisional.

With that said, I don’t believe there’s some kind of personal structure, some aspect of my individual soul, that survives death in order to be reincarnated, such that there will (for example) arrive an infant carrying memories of my experiences. Remember that I affirmed with you the “inseparable connection between the spiritual and the physical.” This non-survival is key to the differences between me and a whole lot of metaphysics and theologies I’ve come across, most of which seem to be seeking out some way of justifying the idea that we survive death.

(Even secular, materialist people with a poetic streak will sometimes twist themselves in knots talking about how the heat in our bodies disperses and is carried by the Universe forever or literally anything to keep from facing death squarely.)

I think I agree completely with the first paragraph (except bacteria part) but not at all with the 2nd, so at least we are splitting the difference

(my response to next portion will also apply to this issue of individual soul surviving death)

DS wrote:

Ashvin wrote: Do you hold the "physical body" to be different in essence from the soul or spirit? If so, then we have a major disagreement there. To attain any higher resolution on what is occurring in the metamorphic progression, we must distinguish between body, soul, and spirit, but I never divide them in essence.

I don’t hold them to be different in essence, and I think that distinction can be useful in some contexts. There’s a danger that “distinguishing” becomes “reifying the distinction,” and I think that’s what I’m smelling in the talk about escaping the physical.

I am going to paste below an image of the sort of progression I am speaking of in our return to the spiritual (created by Owen Barfield).

Oof, talk about low resolution! I tried to zoom in to the image in the hopes of reading the text on it but it’s largely illegible to me.

Ashvin wrote: But I think you are also falling prey to arguing from how the world "ought to be" in the opposite direction - because the permanence-eternality aspect of prior world-conceptions has led to many problems in your view (and I certainly acknowledge those), then any such aspect in any world-conception becomes "the same lie our mythic ancestors" accepted naively. That is no different from the "ought to be" fallacy in my view

I agree and disagree with you. I agree that I think that if the consequences of totalizing world narratives have been, on the whole, terrible, then that should prompt a hard look at the tree the fruit is growing from. I’m open to the possibility that the hard look will reveal something about the Bad Totalizing Stories that’s missing from some of the others, and for that reason I disagree that I’m beginning with a fallacious presupposition. Incidentally, I wasn’t always the pluralist weirdo I am today. I began in just such a view, then moved through several others in a... well... metamorphic progression, you might say. I find some of them insightful, and others I find beautiful (Hart’s Universalism is almost exactly the view I held a decade ago, for instance, and it’s lovely), and I continue to find in them valuable conversation partners. At the end of the day, I just don’t agree with them. I see them as untruthful. And for me, it’s the same basic untruth, whether it’s spawning compassion and poetry or, well, death camps and gulags.

I thought the image would link back to the better version, this should be better version:







So, keeping in mind I am only talking about distinctions when using "physical", "soul", or "spirit", in my view the position that our physical bodies must remain is an example of "reifying" the world that appears as physical "on the screen of our perception" (BK language). I hold there was a 'time' when physical forms did not exist and that, given the patterns of the progression we can clearly observe, there will be a 'time' when they are no longer necessary. Our souls will be able to once again live in the purely spiritual realm. But this part of my overall view is low resolution and not very important to the basic issues humanity, via each individual, needs to try and sort out in the next few hundred years.

I'm really trying to figure out why you cannot agree with any of them if it is not simply based on your dislike for the fruit they have produced so far. And, by the way, I completely agree with Nietzsche that totalizing ethical systems so far have been failures. But I don't agree with Nietzsche (or likely you) about why they have been failures, and I think Steiner's "ethical individualism" philosophy adequately addresses that issue - they have so far left out completely our own participatory role in bringing about harmony from disharmony, which we can only do in complete freedom which comes as a natural consequence of growing in Knowledge of our true Self.

But I am wondering if you have a reason different from any of the standard ones which dismiss those moral systems for failure to produce good fruit? (also I don't think it's that black and white - many of them have produced some good fruit in my view and most of them proved necessary in humanity's process of spiritual growth). Do you think Christian spiritual tradition, for ex., as reflected in scripture, makes contradictory claims or something totally out of alignment with our experience? That's the sort of thing I am trying to clarify from your perspective.

DS wrote:

Ashvin wrote: Also, I do not hold our mythic ancestors bought into any lie, rather they directly experienced what we now call "imaginations" and "intuitions" and had no choice but to accept them naively. That is what we find reflected in the ancient mythologies of the world. We now have a choice whether we want to come to know from within what they experienced naively from without.

Oh, I meant our mythic ancestors as in the myth of Adam and Eve being deceived by the serpent in the Garden. That’s the lie they bought into: “You will not surely die.” So long as we let ourselves believe that lie, so long as we keep chasing the Holy Grail or the Fountain of Youth or whatever image-symbol you want to use for immortality, we remain enslaved to death. I was going to go on, but I wrote a short piece ages ago where I kind of unpack this whole idea and I have to go to bed soon, so instead of reinventing the wheel, I’ll just leave this here.

No, I mean Christ incarnate in Jesus. Yes I do mean a unified Self that we all are, in essence.

Oh, I’m looking forward to this branch of the conversation. I don’t have time to type a whole lot more, but let me ask you this before I go: what do you suppose happens to our ostensibly individual and distinct selves as we -- per your perspective -- evolve into Christ?

Thanks, I will check out your essay on death and respond with more thoughts. I would characterize the serpent in the Garden as stating Plato's "noble lie", or maybe even a painful truth. Without knowledge of good and evil, we will live but in ignorance and without any added qualities of experience, such as Truth, Love, Beauty, or Goodness With that knowledge, we will surely die but we will also have the opportunity of being Resurrected into that fullness of experience. On that note, I would clarify that our "individual and distinct selves" is the "I AM" of Christ - our limited ego-self in its current fragmented perspective is a necessary but ultimately illusory concept. When St. Paul says, "I have been crucified with Christ... and it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me", I say we should take that very literally.

Soul_of_Shu wrote: ↑Sat Jul 03, 2021 1:45 pm

DandelionSoul wrote: ↑Sat Jul 03, 2021 11:29 amMy position is that neither the One nor the Many is fundamental -- the One is really the Many and the Many are really the One. This is an area where I find fault with most ontologies: they try to subsume one of those categories into the other. Ultimately that’s what I mean by “monism”: the belief that plurality, that distinction, is illusory, that the Many reduce to the One. So reality is unified, and it’s not unified. I suppose we could call my position antireductionism: all apparent lines of demarcation can be problematized, but, by turns, so can every apparent unifying category. That’s why I use the term “nondualism.” “Nondual” -- not-two -- is a purely negative term for an ontology whose positive expression is inexhaustible.

I mostly resonate with this—i.e. the One is the Many, and the Many are the One—however if the One/Many fusion can't be reduced to some prior non-conscious state, thus making consciousness the irreducible, uncaused ontological primitive, which the One/Many can't be apart from, then isn't this still essentially a monist ontology, if ultimately there is only consciousness? Also just seems an extrapolation of the Heart Sutra's aphorism: 'formlessness is not other than form, and form not other than formlessness', if the one equates with formlessness, and the many with form ... no?

I see it like this: there is no One apart from the Many, nor any Many apart from the One. To try to pry them apart such that we're imagining a One (that is to say, a Big Singular Consciousness) that precedes -- or antecedes, if we're talking about some future Unitive State type of eschatology -- its expression in infinite forms is to run headlong into nothing. This was the topic of my first thread here: I don't see a difference between Kastrup's "no-thing"/"pure potential" (that is, how he tries to substantivize Mind At Rest) and just nothing. So the One can only be what it is by being what it isn't -- the Many. To be what it is in itself is just not to be at all. Deleuze puts it as "pluralism = monism."

So to reduce the two to one is a trap, and to try to split them is also a trap, and the only way through the trap is the way the Heart Sutra takes: to negate the dualism between one and many, between formlessness and form. Or I suppose all that stuff Santeri is saying about math. That's a route we could try, too. Just remember: the safe word is "Bergson."

DandelionSoul wrote: ↑Sat Jul 03, 2021 8:24 pm

Soul_of_Shu wrote: ↑Sat Jul 03, 2021 1:45 pm

DandelionSoul wrote: ↑Sat Jul 03, 2021 11:29 amMy position is that neither the One nor the Many is fundamental -- the One is really the Many and the Many are really the One. This is an area where I find fault with most ontologies: they try to subsume one of those categories into the other. Ultimately that’s what I mean by “monism”: the belief that plurality, that distinction, is illusory, that the Many reduce to the One. So reality is unified, and it’s not unified. I suppose we could call my position antireductionism: all apparent lines of demarcation can be problematized, but, by turns, so can every apparent unifying category. That’s why I use the term “nondualism.” “Nondual” -- not-two -- is a purely negative term for an ontology whose positive expression is inexhaustible.

I mostly resonate with this—i.e. the One is the Many, and the Many are the One—however if the One/Many fusion can't be reduced to some prior non-conscious state, thus making consciousness the irreducible, uncaused ontological primitive, which the One/Many can't be apart from, then isn't this still essentially a monist ontology, if ultimately there is only consciousness? Also just seems an extrapolation of the Heart Sutra's aphorism: 'formlessness is not other than form, and form not other than formlessness', if the one equates with formlessness, and the many with form ... no?

I see it like this: there is no One apart from the Many, nor any Many apart from the One. To try to pry them apart such that we're imagining a One (that is to say, a Big Singular Consciousness) that precedes -- or antecedes, if we're talking about some future Unitive State type of eschatology -- its expression in infinite forms is to run headlong into nothing. This was the topic of my first thread here: I don't see a difference between Kastrup's "no-thing"/"pure potential" (that is, how he tries to substantivize Mind At Rest) and just nothing. So the One can only be what it is by being what it isn't -- the Many. To be what it is in itself is just not to be at all. Deleuze puts it as "pluralism = monism."

So to reduce the two to one is a trap, and to try to split them is also a trap, and the only way through the trap is the way the Heart Sutra takes: to negate the dualism between one and many, between formlessness and form. Or I suppose all that stuff Santeri is saying about math. That's a route we could try, too. Just remember: the safe word is "Bergson."

Mumorphism is how we take the above to higher resolution without torturing ourselves with math, or letting Scott and SS debate all the math while we watch safely from the sidelines

https://sites.google.com/site/nondualis ... authuser=0
Definition of mumorphism

"The word 'mumorphism', modeled after the Aristotelian word 'hylomorphism', is a compound of 'mu' -- Japanese for 'not', or 'no', or 'nothingness', but here, taking some liberty, to be understood as 'formlessness' -- and 'morphe', Greek for 'form'.

It is shorthand for

"Formlessness is not other than form, form is not other than formlessness" (Heart Sutra)

and

"Awareness of objects is the Universe. Awareness of absence of objects is Nirvana. But to Consciousness-without-an-object these two are the same." (Franklin Merrell-Wolff).

and

"Two forces of one power, expanding life and confining form" (Coleridge)

and

"The Infinite defines itself in the finite, the finite conceives itself in the Infinite. Each is necessary to the other's complete joy of being. The Infinite pauses always in the finite; the finite arrives always in the Infinite. This is the wheel that circles forever through Time and Eternity." (Sri Aurobindo)"

As someone with a deep-seated Continental bent in my thought, I think I'd say something like "All is form/less."

Unfortunately, I'm not going to have time to give detailed responses to your replies to me, Ashvin, until tonight sometime, but you indicated that you weren't quite done anyway, so I look forward to seeing where you go with it.

DandelionSoul wrote: ↑Sat Jul 03, 2021 9:05 pm Unfortunately, I'm not going to have time to give detailed responses to your replies to me, Ashvin, until tonight sometime, but you indicated that you weren't quite done anyway, so I look forward to seeing where you go with it.

No problem! I actually ended up writing several different posts in response, sorry for that... I know that makes it much harder to respond. If Dana could take the time to consolidate them into one post, if it's not too much of a hassle... that would be really great! I can no longer edit them.

AshvinP wrote: ↑Sat Jul 03, 2021 9:08 pm No problem! I actually ended up writing several different posts in response, sorry for that... I know that makes it much harder to respond. If Dana could take the time to consolidate them into one post, if it's not too much of a hassle... that would be really great! I can no longer edit them.

Oh, it's not a big deal. I have a system: I open a Google Docs tab and compose my response there, and then I have a Forum tab for the responses I'm currently responding to and I just go down that one to pull quotes, and another for hunting back through the conversation where I need to, so I don't lose my place.

AshvinP wrote: ↑Sat Jul 03, 2021 5:26 pm (except bacteria part)

Come on, every body knows that humans are just space suits and Application Programming Intephases for anaerobic endogastric bacteria, which became necessary after the plants poisoned the air with oxygen.