From: ian glendinning (psybertron@gmail.com)
Date: Fri May 27 2005 - 02:53:10 BST
Scott,
If I'm going to happy spending my life as a poor deluded modernist,
you're really going have to explain "modernist" in simple terms ....
but I think we're closer than might appear.
I may think "intellect" has arisen (evolved in my case) from a world
without it, but I didn't mention consciousness. As I've said many
times, I do in fact believe, there is something physical behind
conciousness, that is not yet understood.
Your (1) - yes, with you on these triplets.
Your (2) - I did just say in a parallel thread - the 4D-Spacetime of
"pop-science" is clearly only a convenient metaphor, but not much like
reality it turns out.
Your (3) - the "modern" language is losing me ... but you end up with
what is now mystical is the normal of the future. I agree. Mystical =
Unexplained.
The "undifferentiated aesthetic continuum" I prefer to think of the
word aesthetic here as simply to draw attention away from objective /
empirical aspects of experience - obviously aesthetics as we would
know it, has arisen from human behaviour post-experience, but I don't
believe that's what Northrop was talking about.
What I can or cannot say about form and formlessness - I've seen that
tetralemma before, naturally. The problem is you get back to
fundamental liguistic problems, and I can hardly say anything. I did
in fact say "aspects of form and formlessness" not that it existed as
both, but we're getting into lingusitic knots.
Ian
On 5/27/05, Scott Roberts <jse885@localnet.com> wrote:
> Ian,
>
> Scott said
> The phrase "intellectual convenience" presupposes the modernist, nominalist
> point of view to which I object ... The word for [creating value-based
> distinctions] is intellect.
>
> Ian said:
> Not sure why you say modernist, but nominalist yes - it's about
> taxonomy - choosing to name some sub-set of everything. Where you
> reject it - I say use with caution (cos it's never black and white).
> But, if I've summarised you correctly in [..] above, then we agree
> about what intellect is.
>
> Scott:
> Well, here we are at a 'tis/'taint impasse, namely, it appears that you hold
> with the modernist belief that consciousness and intellect emerged from a
> universe without them, while I reject that. Here, again, are my reasons for
> rejecting it:
>
> 1. The irreducibility of a semiotic event (necessarily ternary: sign,
> interpretant, and referent) to some combination of non-semiotic events
> (binary, e.g., force acting on a particle).
> 2. That the experience of "now" is extended in space and time, and there is
> no way that a fundamentally spatiotemporal universe could produce such an
> extended experience, given the separation in space and/or time of each
> fundamental event from every other event. Hence, given that we already know
> that color, boundaries, tones, touch are produced in the perceptive act, it
> makes sense to include space and time as also produced in the perceptive
> act. Hence, the fundamental level is eternal (non-spatiotemporal), which
> makes the modernist view untenable.
> 3. (1) and (2) are, in themselves, not proofs, but just arguments or
> intuitions. However, in the experience of mystics (e.g., Plotinus, Rudolf
> Steiner, Franklin Merrell-Wollf), they are givens, not arguments. Add to
> this Barfield's arguments that the modernist consciousness is something that
> is evidentially different from pre-modern consciousness (original
> participation), and that for the pre-modern consciousness, the Intellect
> behind the wordly appearances was experienced, then one can conclude that
> modern consciousness is a stage toward further development, so what is now
> called mystical becomes normal (final participation).
>
> So those are my reasons. Unless you can counter them, I'll stick to them,
> and consider your position that of a poor deluded modernist.
>
> Ian said:
> Not sure how we got from intellect to intelligent creation. The
> intellect (of intelligent participants in the world) is simply
> classifying the messy world (out there) for pragmatic reasons - to
> live life - creatively.
>
> Scott:
> I would say we get from creativity to intellect (and value and awareness).
> Intellect creates new forms as well as classifying existing forms. You
> apparently believe in something like Northorp's "undifferentiated aesthetic
> continuum" that exists prior to classification. I would argue that that is a
> contradiction in terms, in that there is no aesthetic without
> differentiation.
>
> Ian said:
> In the DQ (formless) / sq (form) split you quote
> "form is not other than formlessness, formlessness is not other than form."
>
> I say - is / is not - this is the doubt in my shades of grey. Things
> have form and formless aspects, but apart from intellectual
> constructions, no one thing is entirely one or the other.
>
> If you think LCI is a better model than MoQ - then I'd better shut up
> for a bit and read about it.
>
> Scott:
> Just for example, the LCI, recall, is a rephrasing of the age-old Buddhist
> tetralemma, which you violate above. It would go:
>
> One cannot say it (whatever) is form
> One cannot say it is formless
> One cannot say it is form and formless
> One cannot say it is neither form nor formless.
>
> So when you say "Things have form and formless aspects" you are violating
> the third horn of the tetralemma.
>
> Ian said:
> (Although I espouse classification - I'm very wary of the destructive
> power of the analytic knife - things fall apart in your hands under
> analysis. I prefer to be synthetic rather than analytic - to build
> something better, from the best bits of what we already have - not
> discard or destroy something because it's not 100% perfect to start
> with - ie I hope I'm a constructive pragmatist - like evolution
> itself.)
>
> Scott:
> Right: intellect is creative. Hence the MOQ is wrong to say that intellect
> merely "responds" to DQ. As creativity it *is* DQ/SQ.
>
> - Scott
>
>
>
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