I can’t wait! Let us sharpen our blades and cut toward the center of the mystery! May I suggest this paper as a preliminary reading?
Lib, again, bear with me here.
If essence is a quality that a thing possesses, and love is the essence of God, then God is a thing?
If God is a thing (like photons or cells are things), isn’t God phenomenal rather than noumenal? How is God any different from, or any more real than, a photon or cell?
Steady on, Hoodoo - I’m a little busy this week, but I’ll do my best. And the esteemed John Searle is indeed required reading: It is the link between a memory of a thing and a linguistic sound/symbol referent by which I find my way out of his Chinese Room, where that link is rather artificially severed, IMO.
If abstractions are things, and things are abstrations, how do you justify or determine the distinction between a thing and a real thing?
I’m having a hard time reading this as anything other than “Everything is real”. Yet you seem to hold an Orwellian “some things are more real than others” Weltanschauung, and I’m not understanding the justification for this.
Bleh.
Sentient, please change the above question to:
“If abstractions are things, and things are abstrations, how do you justify or determine a distinction between the two?”
[quote]
If abstractions are things
[quote]
Yes…
Whoa! Some things are abstractions, but those things in the universe before the process called “abstraction” appeared weren’t.
Given that all I can do is think and output decisions, it’s all just a matter of opinion: even a distinction between things having, say, “mass” or not might be utterly mistaken.
My memory of my grandfather is real: he no longer is. My thought about a unicorn is real: unicorns themselves aren’t.
The existent God is a thing; the essential God is love. God and love are synonyms. God is the Facilitator of Goodness.
(I’m not short-answering you, by the way, Other-wise. I’m just cooperating with the spirit of your request to take it tiny chunks at a time. The more I might exposit without a specific question or comment from you, the more I might derail your process.)
But that’s not the context. The context is whether language created the past. That doesn’t make sense. “There were no large quadrupeds in the Triassic?” is a question with words that go against themselves in that context. Large quadrupeds were a part of the triassic period. It is one of the ways we could distinguish it from other eras (especially if we get more specific about them). The general definition of the period deals with its approximate time frame, but the characteristic megafauna are pretty important to its conceptualization, I trust you’d agree since you mentioned it. So either I answer the question incorrectly because I don’t know what the words mean, or I look at it as not making any sense. “There were no large quadrupeds in the Triassic?” as a standalone question is answered, “That is incorrect. There were.” But it isn’t the standalone question you asked. We were talking about language’s expressions and what impact they had on past events. That is, I think, a nonsensical question. At best the answer is, “None,” but it is hard for me to even understand what impact language is supposed to retroactively have on the past in the first place to justify any kind of yes/no response.
I think this whole thing was successfully dismissed within the first few posts on the first page. I have little to add but the endorsement of the following:
If the Universe were not real, how would it be different?
If we can’t argue that question (that is, at least have in mind how the real and unreal versions of the Universe would differ), then we are just performing a word churn here and nothing more.
The same thing comes up in the ever-popular arguments about “free will.” OK, there are two universes–one with free will and one with not. How are they different?
People cannot conceive of an answer to either question; hence, we know we are discussing moot qualities: they are verbal conundrums, nothing more.
If those things in the pre-sentience universe weren’t abstractions, are you really saying that now there are no things which are not abstractions? I’m not accusing you of saying this, but somone might take it that way.
No - “for example” should have finished that sentence. Of course there are all kinds of things in the universe at the moment which nobody has yet thought about.
Leaving aside your identification of your mystical experiences with God, is it not possible that they are a manifestation of a “truth” which your “ordinary” mental state might be suppressing?
Let me refer to my rephrased question above: “If abstractions are things, and things are abstractions, how do you justify or determine a distinction between the two?”
How can we even say (or know) anything at all about the nature of reality before the process called “abstraction” appeared?
After all, isn’t the billion-year-old reality you’re thinking about an abstraction?
I’ve now lost count of the number of times I’ve answered that question. I’ll just call it “umpteen”. The real universe would be eternal, essential, and necessary. I’ll just call this “umpteen and one”.
Entirely possible. All kinds of “truth” are possible. I’m saying why I picked the one I did.
By categorisations such as “abstractions don’t have mass” and suchlike - even then, like I said, I might be mistaken.
Well, I say stuff and you say other stuff in response. Where we disagree, we say more stuff until we don’t. How’s that?
And a thing, say I.
Other-wise, thanks for an example of the point of my question to SM about abstractions and things.
Lib, do you feel like Butch and Sundance against the entire Bolivian Army?
Okay.
Okay.
CLANK!
I’m not wrapping my head around this. Essences and things aren’t synonyms. How is God simultaneously essence-and-thing? If I can use my own previous analogy, it seems almost as if you’re saying that God is the user-interface for love.
Like I always told you: two different views of the same path, and headed to the same place. If heaven doesn’t have the likes of you there, what’s the point of it?
Well, you’re right. Analogous is a better word. God is the existent Facilitator-of-Goodness . Love is the essential facilitator-of-goodness.
God is the user-interface for goodness. I guess I would call love its operating system. An operating system whose essence is to edify would of necessity produce an interface for its users. But this is becoming a bit tedious.