Questions about Christianity from a confused agnostic

Great Debates
261

I hadn’t read the first part of the essence discussion, so now I understand why you get set off by my using existence and reality as synonyms. Bad on me.

When you say “define the abstraction” do you mean define the concept of an abstraction, or define a particular abstraction? I don’t think the latter can be done. We each do our own abstractions, based on the evidence we’ve seen and our reasoning abilities. We often take the abstractions that are out there in the culture, but modify them. When you complain about people referring to the white bearded thunderer, you are referring to a common abstraction for god in our culture. Your description of peoples’ level of understanding is exactly right, for those with little understanding of what god really means will have the hairy thunderer model, while those with a deeper understanding will have more subtle models - whether they believe or not.

Now, if by essence you mean the abstraction as understood by each person, then I agree that the essence (abstraction) is what it is. If the essence is something common to all abstractions, underlying all of them, and with existence separate from our internal abstractions, then it is independent of our personal abstractions - though we abstract the essence also. I had hoped to have gotten a good definition from this thread, but if it is there I missed it.

262

Any site discussing essentialism? The popular philosophical reference site has a link discussing existentialism but not essentialism.

Wiki has some info. Is there any other site that would define and discuss it like the above site?

263

You should be able to Google it. It’s as old as Aristotle, whose phrase “ti ên einai” forced Romans to coin the term “essentia” — essence. The phrase means “what it is to be”; that is, what it is before it exists. It’s about the whatness of a thing. People keep trying to make it an ontological issue, and it isn’t.

264

Thanks Lib. I’ll have to re-read this thread. Essentialism seems to be more intuitive to me but it is definately stretching my mental capacity. And Voyager isn’t helping with his well thought objections :slight_smile:

Great discussion.

265

I believe that our discussion began with a listing of definitions, which you seemed to appreciate. I’ll add a couple more.

Essence: that which a thing, if it is to be, cannot not be.

Perception: the subjective recognition of that which is familiar about a thing.

Now take the moon. To a poet, it is the goddess Selene. To an astronomer, it is a satellite. To a man lost at night, it is the dim light of hope. Though it is essentially the collapse of a probability distribution, it nevertheless is perceived as many different things. That is the nature of the amoral fabric of existence around us — the universe. It is a mis-en-scene which men perceive as real, and within which we act out our moral play.

266

Existentialism is new, and was first formalized by Jean Paul Sartre. To understand existentialism, you must think like a materialist. Its thesis is that existence is reality, and that essence emerges from it. Essentialism is pretty much the opposite of that. But I believe that the more objections Voyager raises, the more he affirms essentialism. Take the compiler, for instance. How can there ever emerge a compiler without aforethought of what it must be? Existentially, a programmer would have to stumble upon a random accumulation of code, which upon being deemed “compiler” would begin compiling.

267

So when writing a compiler program, the preconception of the For loop is the essence that is used to tell the compiler what to recognize?

I think I phrased that poorly.

268

I’m not sure. I guess the way I would put it is that a man who has written a for-loop needs a thing that prepares it for execution on an operating system. Even if a compiler does not yet exist, it still may be conceived, and that which the compiler is to be is exactly what he needs.

269

Okay. Let’s see if I get this.

What the compiler is to be translates what a For loop is to be into machine code?

270

That’s not how it happened. Compilers “evolved” in a sense from more primitive things.
First there was real machine language. Then, as I understand it, my old advisor, who was a student of von Neuman’s, got fed up and wrote the first assembler. In high school I learned to program on a machine with no compiler or assembler, and it is frustrating. I wrote my own assembler for it, but I had the benefit of computer books describing them. Then, in the mid '50s, people doing math on computers thought it would be far more useful to have a language that allowed them to express their problem in the terms of formulas - and Fortran was born. Only then was there a need for a compiler, to bridge the semantic gap between expressing a program in terms they cared about and the native language of the machine.
So, everything stemmed naturally from the existence of the computer and mathematical formulae. If there was a pre-existent “essence” of a compiler there is no evidence that anyone ever tapped into it. And the infrastructure that has sprung up around compilers since then, such as formal syntax, compiler-compilers, code optimization, all evolved out of that initial work, step by step. Compilers didn’t spring fully formed from the brow of Backus, but grew up little by little.

The only counter-example I know of to this incremental development of new things is information theory. When I took a class on it, my professor said that pretty much all of information theory consisted of shortening Shannon’s proofs. But even Shannon had all the input from telephony to start with.

So, if there is a pre-existing essence, how do we access it in order to express it as an existent thing?

271

When you study programming languages, you learn to distinguish the syntax of a construct from its semantics. The semantics expresses what a construct does, and the syntax describes how it is expressed. The semantics of a for loop is to initialize a variable (or even a set of variables,) to test that variable, and to modify that variable, and to execute a block of code. When these things happen is in the details. The syntax is the definition of the particular sequence of letters and numbers and symbols that denote the construct in a particular language.

If you use a compiler-compiler like yacc, you write the syntax of the language, and then include code fragments at points where a particular chunk of syntax is recognized. While there is usually a production (syntactic rule) for a for loop, nothing much interesting happens there. The action is for the productions that initialize the variable, test it, and modify it. Then, the code fragments generate machine language, an intermediate language, or perhaps the equivalent syntax of another programming language.
The difference between syntax and semantics is demonstrated because you can change the syntax to replace “for” with “do”, say, without changing the code generated (the semantics) at all. In my example a while back, if you by chance wrote a production to recognize “fpr” instead of “for”, for that syntax my second case would be syntactically correct, and my first would be in error.

Now before Lib says that the semantics of a for loop represent its essence, even this varies between languages. Some require you increment or decrement by one, some allow you to increment or decrement by any constant, and some allow any expression. Some require you to initialize the variable, some don’t. And, as I mentioned before, the concept evolved from mathematics and algorithms. If there is an essence of the for loop, it does not seem to have been accessed by anyone.

Now if the essence of a for loop is “that which a thing, if it is to be, cannot not be.” I’m at a loss to figure out what this is. We can have a for loop with no body - a stupid way of adding a value to a variable, but perfectly legal. We can have a for loop where the variable is initialized outside the for loop. We can have one where the test is done in the body of the loop. We can have one where the variable is modified in the body. You can’t have all these things at once, but you can have instances of for loops where each of the vital components is removed in turn, and still have a for loop.

I suppose you still need the word “for” in the header, but saying the essence of a for loop is that the word “for” (or an acceptable misspelling) appears in the header isn’t very satisfying.

272

I see, the intended meaning of essence since it won’t be real until it exists( going back before existence) it is at that time nothing. The point of when nothing becomes something. Essence then, would be the creator of God. Can essence be with out boundries as existence is?

Monavis

273

You say that as if it makes a difference. The Wright Brothers didn’t build the Space Shuttle either, but that doesn’t mean that no one thought of a flyable machine.

I did the same, but I’m sure mine was more primitive. I had a Commodore 64 and photo-copied pages from a book on its machine language (I think I recall that it was 5610). I used Commodore BASIC’s poke statements to write it. It had a switch (address 0, I think) that could be used to bank-switch its ROM in or out.

Out of curiosity, why did you think that mattered?

This point has apparently been missed multiple times, so let me restate it in its various forms all together in one place: essence is not ontological in nature. There is no existing or pre-existing or post-existing essence. Essence is one thing; existence is another. Essence doesn’t exist anymore than the number two exists. Essence precedes existence. Essence is the condition out of which existence emerges. The essence of a thing is that which it is to be. And please don’t say that it’s a technicality. That’s not a technicality anymore than conception preceeding an embryo is a technicality.

That said, the creation of your post emerged from its essence. It was to be what it became and it is what it is, but we all may interpret it differently.

274

To be real, something must be eternal, essential, and necessary. Existence is none of those.

275

I am slowly grasping this (I think). One thing that has me stumbling is:
Is essence absolute and what comes in to existence is a poor representation of it?

To draw on Lib’s statement regarding Voyager’s post.

Would my post be an interpretation of its essence? Then, each person in turn interprets my interpretation?

276

Yes! Well said. I don’t know how that could be improved. Existence is merely one manifestation of essence. The only reason there is an existence at all is because of the essence of goodnesss: edification.

And pretty soon, we have a homeopathic version of the original. That’s why nothing short of a face-to-face personal experience with God will do to tell a person anything at all about God. Filtered through my perceptions, it is doubtless the case that for the person to whom I’m speaking, the God that I’m talking about is unrecognizable.

277

Unless, of course, he’s had essentially the same experience.

278

But they, and Da Vinci, had birds as models. There was no reason to even conceive of a compiler before a computer language was conceived of. The idea of a compiler probably arose with the idea of a language. But there is no reason to think Lady Lovelace ever conceived of the idea of a compiler.

I bought a C64 when it was expensive, and it is much, much more sophisticated than the machine I’m talking about. This was an LGP 21, built in 1962, the transistor model of the LGP 30 from the mid-50s. 4K of rotating memory. No interrupts. This was pre-ASCII. 16 instructions. Their hex code was not even abcdef like ours today, but fgjkqw. No floppy, or even cards. We saved programs on paper tape. I learned to program in 1968. The C64 was a lot more sophisticated than the PDP-11 which I taught when I was in grad school, and which I did my MS thesis on. But that had disks - washing machine sized disk drives, and platters bigger than the entire C64.
Real programmers don’t use BASIC. :slight_smile:

What I should have say is that the essence precedes the existence of the thing it is the essence of. I do get your point, but I didn’t express myself well. My point is that what the essence of a for loop is is hard to define in this case. I think you give it meaning in the meta-sense - that is, you can talk about essences as if they mean something, but that does not mean they are well defined.(I am trying to avoid the word “exist” - but if essence has meaning, beyond that of an element of discourse, they must exist in a meta-realm even if the term exists has no meaning for them in ours. )

If I understand you correctly, essences do not relate to only atomic things. But that’s the problem. We group together certain configurations of machine instructions and their semantics as a for loop, but that is only for convenience. The reason a compiler writer has no problem with this issue is that she never emits a “for loop” as an entity, but only certain instructions that come from well defined syntax, including choices. (Such as the loop test can be there or can be null.) Consider species. Is there an essence of species? But species is not well defined - while there are cases where we can say two animals are members of different species, there are cases where this is not so clear. But species is just a convenience - all that really exists is distinct individual creatures with distinct characteristics. Mapping this convenience into an essence is giving “isness” to something that doesn’t really deserve it.

So my point is that when you try to pin down what the essence of something means, it vaporizes. There are only atoms and molecules and collections of these - we can attach names to sets of these collections, but all these names are fuzzy at the edges.

279

Thanks for that summary. It points out the basic difference in our positions.

We both agree that people disagree about the definition of existent things. LIberal’s position is that this stems from our inability to completely and accurately represent what is contained in the essence of that thing. I’m not sure if he thinks that we have contact with it in all cases, but I’m sure he’d say we can’t express it properly.

I think that the reason for this is that the essence is a chimera - that there are only things and collections of things and interactions between things, and that attempting to assign a common name and description to a set of things in the macroworld will always be imprecise. Attempting to understand an essence makes no more sense than measuring the pH of water in a mirage.

280

That’s the same point I made earlier, but it supports essentialism. The essence of what a compiler is preceded the creation of it; it had to, otherwise it couldn’t have been conceived before it existed.

I don’t put sugar on my porridge either. :wink: But the BASIC Poke statement made it very easy to laod the machine code. You just poked the instructions into whatever area of RAM you wanted.

You can feel free to use the word “is”. An essence is this or that. Some people confuse the copula of identity with the predicate of existence (which is what I think Monavis does), but you and I know the difference. Just because we say that a unicorn is a horse with a horn, that doesn’t mean we’re making an ontological statement. If, on the other hand, we said that a unicorn exists as a horse with a horn, then we are making an ontological statement.

Life is another one. Very poorly defined, and yet used all the time. Force, on the other hand, is very clearly defined: mass amplified by its acceleration. A point I tried to make earlier, that might make more sense now in this context, is that it really doesn’t matter whether an essence can be pinned down or not. There is nothing compelling you to pin it down. If you do, fine. If you don’t, no sweat. It really doesn’t matter what you know about the thing since only our perception is epistemically charged. But what will happen is that you will be attracted to it or repelled by it (or some degree of one or the other) because you either value it or find it worthless. That is an aesthetic, rather than an epistemic, judgment. And it’s that judgment that matters. We are always drawn toward what we value.

Sure, but that only implies that the essence of the universe is vaporous. That’s why I call it (and everything in it — which includes existence) a probability distribution. Heisenberg quite nicely summed up the essence of the universe. In the end, that’s all it is: quantum fluctuations bubbling up to our macro level as fairly recognizable things and fairly predictable events. It isn’t even real. It’s an illusion built on probabilities.

“The atoms or the elementary particles are not real; they form a world of potentialities and possibilities rather than one of things or facts.” — Werner Heisenberg