Essence (Part II)

Great Debates
41

I apologize for scribbling so much, but it just sort of poured out when I realized that we had the opportunity to tie together so many premises and inferences made here and there and all over the place.

I’m not sure whether “one” has any meaning in that context. If we say that a man is dressed, we don’t mean that he has on a single, all encompassing garment. It is the composite of his hat, his shirt, his pants, and so on, that constitute his aesthetic for clothing. He might have a different sort of taste for underwear than he has for socks. But all his values come to bear as one when he goes to his closet. And the converse is true. He might like salt on tomatoes but not on watermelon. It really isn’t a matter of how many core values (qua essense) a man has, but rather of how many ways his essence can manifest. Recall that not only is energy required to make a breeze; so is air, and the more of it the more intense the wind. The storms on Saturn are so mind-numbingly violent owing in part to the fact that nothing is there but gas.

Sort of. In a sense, I guess. But I differentiate between morality and ethics in this way: ethics concerns that which is between us and our fellow man, whereas morality concerns that which is between a man and his God or (in the case of, say, Sentient) his conscience — though the former will follow from the latter. Politically, a government should regulate only ethics, but never morality. And Jesus has shown that God has no interest in ethics, but only in morality. Therefore, there is a difference between our external behavior and our internal decision. The behavior is a manifestation of the decision, morally speaking. Remember, the atoms are irrelevant. Whether you decide to knife a man or shoot him has nothing to do with free will in this context. That is a decision made by the brain. The decision made by the spirit is that the man is worthless, and the brain merely does its job of figuring out the most expedient way of executing the moral command.

All of you. That is, all of significant you. You ARE your essence. That is your metaphysical identity. All of your ethical behavior is a result of moral decisions, and these are driven by aesthetical longings. If we do not value God, we will obstruct goodness. For a man with an evil heart even to feed a hungry child and harm him in no way is a moral abomination. (Yes, I understand that that thought takes some getting used to.) A loving heart cannot sin, and an evil heart can do no good. Taking again from Jesus: Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God. And remember when He dressed down the Pharisees, calling them hypocrites and snakes? He said: You brood of vipers, how can you who are evil say anything good? For out of the overflow of the heart the mouth speaks.

Yes.

Yes.

42

Otherwise, if you don’t mind, I’d like to expound on those two yesses just a bit…

It dawns on me that my spiritual epiphany may be very much characterized as a feeling of coming home after a long absence, and finding that my Father wasn’t angry but loved me. Thus, I suppose it may be said that encountering God was the realization, if only for an instant, of all that was past, present, and future in my life here on earth. There was a sense of, “Well, this is finished,” and a deep, almost ineffible contentment. Those are mere emotions to be sure, but they doubtless resulted from the epiphany itself. (It certainly gave new meaning to me when I re-encountered the passage where Jesus was on the Cross and said, “It is finished.”)

And with respect to creating universes without edification, it is important to understand that there is no such thing as no edification at all. God is not local. We all obstruct goodness to some extent because we are morally imperfect, but God cannot die. (Remember, even were He to abdicate, there still is God.) There is some light in us all. If we cannot create a universe, it is not because we are incapable; it is because we essentially do not want to.

43

Well, physicalism says that both are the result of the brain. Do you believe otherwise? If not, what’s the basis of the dichotomy? Can you prove it?

44

Apologize, schmanologize. Personally, I find this both edifying and intellectually fascinating, so apologies are decidedly unnecessary.

Yeah, that does take “some getting used to” but I can already see it’s coherent and rational, given the context in which it’s presented.
I can tell that something still hasn’t quite crystallized for me regarding the tie-ins between free-will, an unchanging essence, the role of the universe, and the manifestations of ethics therein. If you’ll indulge yet another goofy metaphor, this is the picture I get (please adjust/discard as needed):

God creates us, our essence, not unlike creating a dollop of molten gold. He then says: “Gold you are and gold you shall remain for all eternity. However, the form you take is up to you. You may make yourself in any image you choose.” Then, for us to use as a sculpting tool, he hands us the universe. Because we now have, in some sense, access to temporality, we can learn. Specifically, we can come to identify ourselves; literally to know what we are because now, we have a way of experiencing what we’re not (to use your metaphor, we can know what it’s like to wear clothes that are uncomfortable; that simply don’t fit).

Ultimately (but spiritually speaking, instantaneously), some of us shape ourselves in the image of God, and some of us don’t.
The above goofy metaphor brings up the question: Can all of our joys and frustrations, all our (non-biological) pleasures and (non-biological) pains, ultimately be traced to how closely our behaviors manifest our aesthetic drives?

On preview: Is it your belief that the sense of deep, almost ineffible contentment is a hallmark of , uh, “directly connecting with your essence”, regardless of whether that essence is evil, good, or whatever?

45

Actually, that is what is being discussed in quite some detail. :slight_smile:

46

I wouldn’t change a word of it. You might want to check into Fa-tsang’s essay, “The Gold Lion”. He deals with exactly that sort of metaphor. The answer to your question is yes.

Yes, it is.

47

One more thing, Otherwise, since I’m thinking about it. Now you can clearly understand why I’ve always said that the universe, as conceived, is the perfect mis-en-scene in which free moral agents may act out their moral play. It is amoral (i.e., morally neutral). It is a probability distribution, with the world we live in manifesting as a convergence of probabilities. This leads to a magnificent context in which we can have everything from predictability to miracles. Owing to its laws of electromagnetism, each of us is guaranteed complete and utter subjectivity, being unable, as we are, ever to occupy the same place at the same time and see an event from the exact same perspective. It allows the formation of an epistemology to compliment the aesthetic and the metaphysic. It provides events and objects that serve to calibrate our moral compass. There simply could not be a better design, I do believe.

48

Of course, but apparently you have firm polar views on the matter. So, I don’t think the questions are vacuous.

BTW, what do you exactly mean by ‘world is a probability distribution’?

49

Well, proof is a process. You must be patient. :slight_smile: You’ve observed and asked good questions, which have been answered. The premises are laid out in the OP. Inferences are being drawn throughout the thread. If you spot a logical fallacy or wish to reject a premise, feel free to point it out. The notion of the universe as a probability distribution is with respect to its quantum nature, which is probabilistic. There is a thread in GQ about it. Sentient was kind enough to contribute to the responses. Search for a title containing “convergence” and “probabilities”.

50

Here. I searched for “geckos”. :slight_smile:

51

As much as I hesitate to venture into this thread…

I see two problems with that statement.

  1. QM is simply a model that humans impose on the physical world. There is no inherent truth in it. In fact, QM is not a comprehensive model for the universe, but rather a way of interpretting observations we make on a very small scale. QM will almost certainly be supplanted at some future date by another, better theory.

  2. Statements about the nature of the universe also assume that the human brain is capable of understanding the universe. There is no reason to assume that is true. If you’ll pardon the anthropomorhpic wording: our brains evolved in order to understand macro processes here on earth. We are ill equiped to understand the reality of the micro world or the super-macro world (ie, the universe itself), and may simply be imposing an inaccurate model on what we are incapable of understanding.

If those observations are not relavent to this thread topic, feel free to just tell me so. I don’t pretent to understand what you are actually talking about, but I do know a thing or two about physics and the human brain.

52

And, if I may venture a comment about the larger thread topic…

It seems to me that you have simply defined your philosophy to be true. Too many axioms here. Essence precedes existence, for example. That seems intutitively false, making human existence a requirement for the universe (since essence has no meaning outside our understanding of that term).

Anyway, that may also be irrelevant to your discussion, so I won’t be offended if you tell me it is. :slight_smile:

53

That depends on the nature of the universe, but our brain is part of the universe. Our brain reflects the universe because it is a product of it.

This is a positive assertion that I doubt you can support. What we can say for sure is that we seem to be subject to uncertainty and perpetual change.

54

Thank you!

55

Well, they aren’t, but like I said before, I do appreciate the input of any scientists who wish to correct scientific statements. Especially inasmuch as some of these remarks about QM are interpretive in nature, it is entirely likely that one scientist might disagree with another. So, feel free to insert yours. I appreciate the contributions from you, Sentient, and Gyan.

For some reason, that line reminded me of the Austrian Emperor telling Mozart that his opera had “too many notes”. :smiley: Not that I’m Mozart or anything, but c’mon. I mean, Peano used five axioms just to prove that 1 + 1 = 2. :smiley:

I can understand why you might say that, but you must realize that it seemed intuitively true for literally thousands of years. Existentialism, on the scale of philosophical history, is very modern, and in my view is a strain to the intuition. Certainly, I would think that most scientists would agree. After all, they speak of particles coming into existence. Consider carefully the syntax of that statement — existence is predicated on the particle. If existentialism is true, then it is a nonsense statement. Existentially speaking, something undefined came into existence. It could be anything, even an elephant or the number 8.

I’m glad you’re participating. I don’t have all the answers, but together we can derive them. Logic doesn’t care about our points of view. :slight_smile:

56

An important observation, and a great explanation of why empiricism as an epistemology is complete, and therefore inconsistent. The brain may indeed be the universe for all we, um, know.

57

What does it mean for a brain to “reflect” the universe? Yes, it’s a product of the universe, but that doesn’t mean it’s capable of understanding the universe. I’m not saying that we can’t understand the universe, just that there is no reason to assume that we can.

Yes, it wasn’t worded very well. Rather, the evolutionary heritage that shaped our brain did not include the aparent vagaries of the physical world at the atomic level. Rather than saying we are ill suited, I should have said there’s no reason to think that we are well suited.

But the only point I’m trying to make is that one should not extrapolate scientific models into the realm of metaphysics that concerns a quest for “truth”. Scientific models are approximations; things we impose on the physical world to aid our understanding in a way that we can understand.

58

One of my favorite lines from that movie…

True, there isn’t anything inherently wrong with a laundry list of axioms, and the one I picked (the first one) isn’t a good example of what I meant anyway. Some of your other axioms assume that God exists (if I understand them correctly), which seems like an incredible stretch. OTOH, I wouldn’t expect someone to prove that God exists, so if you philosophy includes God, you probably do have to assume He exists.

You also assume that, in a universal sense, there is something called “good”. I view that as simply a human invention. The universe isn’t moral, it just is. We derive our morality, our sense of good and evil, from our social interactions, which themselves are simply a product of our evolutionay heritage. (But again, I’m probably speaking tangential to your overal subject, since I’ve already admitted I don’t understand what it is.)

I just see that last part as a limitation of our language and the models we use to describe the physical world, not a fundamental truth (ie, axiom) that can be pulled out of the data.

59

I think Lib’s ‘goodness’ is not derived from the social concept of ‘goodness’, but from the basic experiential notions of resonance and consonance, as opposed to dissonance. On a graded spectrum, we like pleasure, crave eudaemonia, are repelled by pain, and chained by depression. This indicates a bipolarity in affectation. The agreeable ones are instances of ‘goodness’.

They don’t need to. Like you alluded to, atomic physics is a conceptual structure devised by human minds to be consonant with sensory data. So are our traits necessary for survival, which itself requires understanding nature. But the human brain doesn’t have modules dedicated for ‘macroscopic scale survival’, just a general cognitive/conative algorithm that for most of our existence dealt with certain types of data. Now, your sentiment may ultimately be true, but this explanation of evolutionary focus seems misplaced.

60

So, in a nutshell, goodness is pleasure?

Correct-- we don’t have a “module” for detecting macroscopic scale phsyical events, but rather our senses and language often fail us at the atomic level. We speak of light being both a wave and a particle, when in fact it is neither. Light is light. But it helps to understand it if we speak of it in macroscopic terms.

We say particles “come into existence” as **Lib **noted above, but we might just as well say particles “enter a detectible state”. That doesn’t speak to existence, nor does it reflect on the issue of “essence preceding existence”.

What I’m trying to wrap my brain around here is a concept that doesn’t contain implicit assumptions due to an artificial constraint of language. Does that make sense to you? In trying to understand Lib’s assumptions, I mentioned that they aren’t intuitive to me. Certainly one can start with any assumptions one wants, but if they aren’t in some sense intutively true, then they don’t seem to be of much value. At any rate, I don’t think he wants a debate on the relative merits of his assuptions, so I’ll try to stay away from that as much as possible.