AW! Epistles
The Pleasure of Email Debating is Voyeuristic: From Sam
Abstract
Tuesday, 23 May 2006
One tries to keep up with the twists and turns of the greek method of debating especially in its modern form of email exchanges. Of course it is exciting to see the proponents, the debaters gradually reveal more of themelves as they wrestle with each other verbally, the pleasure is voyeuristic, like watching two ladies in a mud wrestling match hoping to catch a glimpse of their private parts! Enough said of that, the analogy is useful if not exact. Karl clearly is making the most of the opportunity to use you as a sounding board to lay out his long worked out philosophy which turns out to be quite narrowly applied as he admits, and you hold on quite determinedly to a set of core values and beliefs that you have corroborated over the course of your life. It is a rare thing to have ones core beliefs examined in quite such an intense and prolonged way. This is usually the domain of ones life partner, and is usually an accomodating experience.
I thought your analogy was excellent. It certainly brought a smile to my face. And it seems quite apt. You are right, of course, about core beliefs. As Christians are always saying, everyone has to believe something unless you have no brain worth the description. What I have tried to argue is that beliefs should be tested, not just accepted on someone’s say so. Karl says he has found that science is not what it seems, and does not discover anything about reality other than that it is malleable like putty or paint so that we can make useful things out of it, but the fact that we can do it tells us nothing about the reality of it. If he is right, then science is useless for finding out about reality, but so far, clever man as he is, he is in a school of one. He is writing another book that might tell us more. We shall have to wait to see what it says.
I have to say that the experience of investigating all that is is more profound than you both acknowledge, and literally leads one to wordlessness and disassociation. At present you both are full of words that are not your own, and attitiudes which though individual are not your own. The problem is the language that you have learned and accepted, as it is the model of the collective unconsciousness that Carl Jung started to intimate. Of course there are many other models of this in art and music and dance etc, but the most universal and useful and pervasive is language.Where this impinges on your discussion is of course everywhere, from the descriptives of scientist and philosopher to the posits of Science, scientific method, philosophy and metaphysics. You could of course sidestep your current positions, stepping outside them to enjoy the freedom of watching all the possibilities and choices swirling around and through you as alternative life options and world view, at the same time realising that the reasons, the rationale you have for maintaining the one you have chosen or will chose is entirely based in yourself and your own needs as amicrobial colony in a microbial community.
Perhaps it is, but it is precisely through exchanging our experiences through language that we can identify what is common to us all, and therefore talk about what it is to be human, what it is to be duped and what it is to find things out by testing them. You might step aside to look at the wonders you mention, but you would not be able to consider them at all without language. It might be imperfect but until we get telepathy, it is all we have.
Being positive about one view over another is a choice that one can only make in a patterned way, as freedom of choice does nor exist in an absolute sense . We all make choices within a pattern that can be shown to be statistically significant, thus biased. However, it is a nice turn of thought to realise that what value we put on these terms is culturally determined and not at all set in “stone” or “nature” but in ones perceptions. The dicovery that we have receptors and senses implies that there are things to receive and to sense but beyond that all is perception, model, speculation, surmise, and basically not independently or “objectively” knowable. The very best that one can do is realise the supremacy of the principle of acceptance and build a model that has values that satisfy ones microbial colonic needs. For example correspondence or coherence in ones model may be important to you but not to someone else, if you accept that there are others who you are modelling as independent of you in this subjective way. However, note how difficult it is to give these independent others “true” freedom of choice/ free will, and note how subtly it is ones “aim” to get them all to agree with you.
We are all equal in this. It is how we get at any approximation to objectivity. I can describe a horse to one of these independent others and from the feedback I get I can judge whether the independent other sees the same object as I do. I admire Johnson’s refutation of Berkeley’s idea that matter did not exist, and cite it somewhere. If you are not familiar with it, he kicked a large stone, calling out, “I refute it thus!”. The world we live in is not speculation, surmise and so on, and our continued existence in it depends on our knowing it is real. That includes correspondence and coherence. If Bishop Berkeley had been willing to test his idea by attempting to head goals with rocks like that kicked by Johnson, we can be certain, he would not have been arguing for long, and might not have been living for long. The fact that we will die if we jump from a multi-storey car park might not suit some people who reject coherence, correspondence or whatever, but they are never willing to do it to prove themselves right. I was arguing that the categories spoken of by Kant arise through our billions of years of evolution in this world. Our brains have evolved to fit the world, and therefore reflect it. If they had not done, we should have been walking off cliffs, and would never have even gotten here. It is by exchanging views about these things and testing them that we asymptotically approach truth. I will try to persuade you and you will try to persuade me, and both of us will change in the exercise.
One of the key concepts of any viable model is the need to adapt to new data received by our receptors. This essentially means that any model that one builds or labours over is out of date from comception and needs to be readapted to the new data. Any fixed explanatory schema is in fact explaining what obtained yesterday or even months and years and centuries ago! Keeping your eye on the ball and your hand in the game are what it is all about in one view.
The scientific view. The religious view is set in stone, or at least in the pages of an ancient book. That cannot be good for anyone.
One really must try to avoid making gods of these abstractions like Rationality, Logic, Nature, Truth /Falsity, Good /Bad, Right /Wrong, Justice /Fairness, Fate/ Fortune… These are all intensely human process concepts and their validity value is determined by the process that is used to validate them.
We are human, so the tools and mental tools we invent are human ones, but it is not to say they are valueless or why would we have invented them? No one is making a god out of rationality, but one has to decide whether it is beneficial to us to be rational or irrational. Surely no one advocates irrationality per se, but they will do it under the guise of religion.
My present conceit is that I exist among all that is, and that I is a constructed psychological concept that emerges from the microbial colony that I refers to. Infinite possibility space is what I exist in and of which I consist, and infinite possibility space transforms into definite and statistical probaility,Boser einstein type condensates within infinite possibility space at all points in the sequence from transformation to transition back to infinite possibility space. The condensates are photonic in nature both positive and negative and clump togrther by vortices promulgated by the transformation from infinite possibility space to photonic pairs in definite probability statistically distributed condensates.
As you can see describing even in detail is simple, What is difficult is making predictive statements based on your sympathy with your description that one can have independently described by others that you accept in your conception of existence.
If it is difficult, then the predictions will fail, and we shall look for something that has better predictive value. As for descriptions, they are what we have to agree on, but if sometimes it gets hard, it is because we already agree on the simple stuff, except when someone thinks their personal fantasy is reality.
I wrote to you earlier because some of your comments seem to intimate a god concept was still operating in your psyche. Further reading of your website and comments explains that. Adelphiasophism and the Goddess pages you characterise as true religion. Does this fairly explain your “god” concept?
I have no concept of an anthropomorphic god at all, male or female. I do not think Nature thinks, or it did not until it evolved intelligent people like us. We might well be Nature’s brain and senses, though we are a poor shot at them, and will probably not survive to become them permanently. Most people, as far as I can see have God in their heads. God is the set of morals they were indoctrinated with or developed themselves through experience. God is the watcher over their own guilt at breaking or sometimes even thinking about breaking these personal morals. I certainly have these, just as others do. They are not based on any idea that there is a supreme brain listening in to my thoughts and ready to judge me at death. Basic morals evolved with us, conditioning how we interact with others of our species, and when we became intelligent enough to think about them, we have refined them consciously. The trouble is that the social rules that these constitute were imposed by rulers, and they pretended they were handed down from God. That way, everyone thought their sense of guilt was God watching them, and the laws were therefore self-regulating to a large degree. I have nothing against laws as long as they are just. I do object to inventing fantasies to make ignorant people think they are something they are not.
I have found your pages of immense value in providing an alternative and credible explanation of many of the basic social and cultural paradigms in the west and their adoption and adaptation of ancient near eastern ideas, biases and conceptions. There is a breathtaking quote from King Shulgi which I reproduce here:
Now, I swear by the sun god Utu on this very day—and my younger brothers shall be witness of it in foreign lands where the sons of Sumer are not known, where people do not have the use of paved roads, where they have no access to the written word—that I, the firstborn son, am a fashioner of words, a composer of songs, a composer of words, and that they will recite my songs as heavenly writings, and that they will bow down before my words…
King Shulgi (c 2100 BC) on the future of Sumerian literature.
Now assuming that this is an accurate translation it reveals the scheming nature of all ancient magicians (forgive the value judgement). At any rate it reveals the conception of making a religion based on literature was not foreign to the translator.
Thanks for the quotation. It is interesting. Shulgi knew what he said was true because his laws had to be obeyed, and will have been presented as being the word of God transmitted to the world via Shulgi. It is the origin of our own religion Christianity, except that it actually did come from magicians, since it was a variant of Persian religion, devised by the magi, and meant to enforce the rule of the king of kings, the Persian shah.
I wrote to you to say that the paradigmatic problem with any conception of Reality is the facr that ancient magicians have queered the pitch by the invention of the alphabet and written language and conventions in general. For example the charactrerisation of nature as a godess is of ancient origin. However it is refreshing to see that a scientist has acknowledged the godess paradigm is what lies behind the use of the word nature. We are all free to use old words in any way we wish and to define them in any set of nested clauses that we can imagine , but at the end of the day it is not what we mean by the terms we use but what others understand by the terms we use. The personal nature of consciousness means that one is really on their own in their conception of all things. Thus one of the major indicators of a religious cast of mind is the need to influence others into ones world view. Science is no less and no more of a religion than any other movement or worldview.
I agree with much of what you say, except the last bit. For all of us there is only one world, and that is the one that registers in our heads via our own senses. In a real sense, the world ends when we die. I, however, am not willing to bet on the world being only my own construction. Some Christians are, and are willing to blow up the world with nuclear, or nucular, as they call them, devices. The Reverend Carl McIntire advocated nuking the Soviet Union boasting, “Thank God, I will get a view of the Battle of Armageddon from the grandstand seats of the heavens.” It is the same mania as that of the Moslem suicide bombers. These people think a good god wants them to kill other people, and will reward them for it. Now, to this simple infidel, that is insanity, and yet I do not recollect any other, more reasonable Christians marching the streets in protest that these cracked pots would happily have seen them blasted to smithereens. They must all think the same. A religion based on science would place all the emphasis on reality and its importance to us. The goddess metaphor comes from Nature giving birth. Evolution is a long line of births, so the essence of Nature is feminine, in that it is a mother. We live in a womb, and when we harm it too much, we shall be rejected as any malformed foetus would be.
That being said I look into your world view through the medium of a common magician inspired language with interest, noting similarities in thought expression and word and grapheme arrangement, as well as thematic and topic choice.
At 65 I hope and wish upon you happiness in all that you do and orgasmic love peace joy vigour and caring. May you feel blessed.
Many thanks. If I get to 13 October, I should be eligible for a pension. If not my Christian critics say I shall be frying for eternity in hell.
I have the following comments on: What is Truth? - God’s Truth or Pious Lies? The question I suppose is a general philosophical one, and an ancient one at that; but most of us will have met this question involved with the event surrounding Yh~shuah. This obviously dates the text in which it is found to a time when this was a dominant philosophical question in debate. This question like so many that are deceptively simple in presentation is designed to trap the unwary in an endless fruitless quest and expose the flank to alternative religious or systemic philosophies that ultimately enslave despite the "freedom" they posit. The “truth will make or set you free” is another such spell. These along with many other magical spells are ancient in there cast yet fresher than a new day. When magical shaman and intellectuals invented the written language and developed the spoken language it was to give themselves power over the general populace in the most subtle and effective way, and questions like this one are illustrations of the power they harboured to themselves in secrecy for so long.
I will now cast such a spell on you, using ancient magical terms cast in modern parlance and see if you can extricate yourself from its effects. It must be as it must be, some say. Never you mind it . Let it be.
Truth is the greatest lie that we as humans can believe. Interestingly you start with the question about whether it is more natural to lie. You build a case for the essential honesty of reality given the lieing nature of camouflage, but it is unconvincing. “The lie” has not the same universality as “the truth”. The idea is simply constructed differently and by different power groups. The truth is constructed by abstractive absolutists who construct the lie as weaker and obstructive, minimalist and easy to penetrate by the truth, by those with the right intellectual and philosophical and magical knowledge. The lie, according to them is multiple and prevalent, but only able to obscure not annihilate the truth. However the truth vanquishes the lie and sets its followers free. If you want to be outside of this powerful paradigm you have to drop the language and the idioms. The extrication from this paradigm goes deeper than not using the terminology but it suffices to show one that things are not as described hence not “true” according to one definition of truth.
Of all the sensate impressions we experience what drives us to verify? This is a truth process which i use to get at the process that is taking place here not to establish true or truth. In fact I use it to introduce the notion of cohering and adhering which i generalise from a physical example of say a substance forming around another object and filling every nook and cranny of that object so as to form a mould from which copies can be moulded or cast; to the notion of exactness and accuracy and symmetry and congruence.
So what drives us to congruence? The answer to this questions lies in the microbial paradigm. And the fact that we have to choose paradigms both to ask and to answer questions is indicative that there is no truth that is not essentially constructed and which is not also a lie in some other paradigm, or not admissible.
Paradigm on/in paradigm, context on/in context nested looped… whatever way you want to experience it, this is the nature of the process that you go through when described using one paradigm.
So Truth is relative and not at all absolute. The question really is what are we getting at when we use the concept, What were the magicians attempting to construct , and from what were they attempting to construct it?
Jumping across many philosophical and abstruse arguments and considerations the essence of this fulminating experience is the psychological orientation in consciousness. Taking consciousness as axiomatic and essentially nascent and not definable but inately appreciable leads one to experience existence as a space of infinite possibilities within and without, in some way that is totally intertdependent upon what one chooses to accept. Skipping down many stages in the description i highlight the probabilistic nature of the choices and the statistically distributed nature of the sequencing of events assuming a mathematical definition of event consistent with probability theory. My point here is that before i get to any secure notion of reality i have to accept as inate the interdependence of what is my experience of things and the probabilistic and statistical and sequential nature of it. Along the way to this thought, objective and subjective "reality" precursors arise, but only as polar descriptors of the experiential continuum. There are many polar descriptors of the experiential continuum such as good and bad, right and wrong , true and false etc. but these serve to highlight the experiential continuum as the entity that we preconsciously deal with in some inate way. The experiential continuum is thus the precursor to my notion of reality and encapsulates a whole schema of choices that i have accepted in terms of handling sensate data through what i acknowledge as inate sensors which are localised throughout a definite volume of space, which itself is within an indefinite volume of space that i sense inately as remote. That is simply NOT of the definite and sensor rich volume of space which i have intimate experience of.
This rich sensory experience is microbial in nature. Which seeing person for example can fail to experience the pixellated nature of vision? Thus the symbiotic and therefore cooperative action of many cells is revealed as contributing to a major part of my consciousness. It is therefore possible to understand that the microbial contiguity in which we all move and breathe and have our very being is the source of consciousness and is indeed conscious by any definition od conscious. However conscious is essentially an indefinable term in any language. It is merely apprehendable.
Again skipping by many evidences to support the above description, I point out the following corollary of the premises thus far hinted at: microbial mitosis and beyond that the DNA RNA mechanism for copying is the basis for our psychological motivation to congruence. And since congruence lies at the heart of all notions of accuracy and exactness and from there symmetry and asymmetry, i find a microbially inate transitional source for concepte of true and right, which also includes the prevalence of what is not true or right in this sense. I introduce these terms now as a definition of them not as a vehicle to interject existing notions of them.
At this level we find no “lie” but only different versions of what is true, We find copying and hence the essential basis for camouflage and we also find the prime motive for camouflage which is the promotion of symbiotic behaviour over antibioticc behaviour for the survival of the camouflager.That this also allows the camouflager to introduce a trojan horse into the host microbial community is the unfortunate side of this proclivity. It is thus exposed as a function like all other functions that are non moralistic and purposeful. It promotes symbiosis while leaving the symbiotic entitiy vulnerable to antibiosis. This is an outcome of the probabilistic quality of infinite possibility space, everything has a limit. Whatever descriptor you are examining the finite quality of the microbial system lends itself to this limitation: any process can be used for good or bad. Value laden terms which i use for brevity only.
I might argue that equating the lie with camouflage gives one a moralistic code for lying! However as always the situation is more complex. Essentially “lieing” is not a moral spiritual issue but a functional one if you place any weight that is on the terms moral or spiritual, which i do not. They are religious constructs at best.
The importance of congruence and exactness is in my opinion the ability it gives us to copy and faithfully transmit possibilities within infinite possibility space as mediated by the microbial contiguity in which we all live.
Bless you in this, and let it be. Let it be just so.
You write as if you are abstracting or summarizing a longer argument. As it is, I cannot understand what you are saying. I cannot extricate myself from it because I cannot get into it! I understand a sentence or two then lose the thread in the next one. Is that the spell?
Thanks for your reply, which reveals much. The spell such as it is cannot be recast. I have cast it and now all that can be done is to block it or counter it in some way. Your initial defense is good and reveals the scientific caste of mind as a defense against magical spells and mumbo jumbo, however the deeper part of the spell has eluded your defenses. The bits you say you understood only to lose it again indicate the process at work in you. Casting a spell back to the caster is a simple defense which sometimes catches the unwary magician in his own weavings!
As the caster, I would ordinarily reinforce the spell by casting a supporting or corollary spell. However the point of this whole pointless exercise is to illustrate the machinations of ancient wizards in developing language as a supreme vehicle for spell casting. You may find it irresistable to put this spell down, as it deals with the issue of truth. However the insights it contains may or may not be what you are looking for in terms of understanding truth. If you do let it go you will still find that it has impacted your conceptions in ways you had not thought possible. Hold on to your core beliefs in defiance of it , or else be prepared to swim in the turbulence of change.
