F. Frank LeFever wrote:
> In <6oiq4s$87u$1 at nnrp1.dejanews.com> kyan1 at vaxc.hofstra.edu writes:
> >
> > Everything (p)1998 July 11
> >
> > * beginning with solipsism. Im trying to make sense of the
> world...
> COMMENT: Lots of luck; you're operating with a severe handicap.
Actually, Kyan is making a proper start. All true philosophers, famous
and obscure, start this way. Wouldn't it be wonderful if *everyone* would
start this way, begin at the "beginning," and try to duck out of the
culturally conditioned box!
> > * coronary: everything (in physical world) contributes to (my)
> > consciousness. clouds in the sky etc etc
> >
> COMMENT AND COMPLAINT: coronary?!? are you trying to give me
> one?!? I nearly "had a coronary" when I read this. Maybe you
> mean "corollary"? (Not a typo? you repeat it below)
Maybe he means "crown"? A cornonary (major) feature of his speculation?
> > * if a cloud can contribute to my consciousness, it may also
> > contribute to "other consciousnesses" ===> everything has
> > consciousness
> >
> COMMENT: Whoa! curb those non sequiturs! You can be conscious
> OF a cloud--is that what you mean? It doesn't follow
> that "everything" is conscious of a cloud...
> (Of course, on October 22--I forget the year--Fechner
> had a sudden conviction that he knew how to prove that
> everything in the universe was conscious. He wasn't
> thinking clearly--just woke out of a deep sleep--but
> his method DID prove useful)(i.e. the psychophysical
> method)
Yes, on face value, it is a nonsequitur. Perhaps at a deeper level than he
expressed, they are connected?
Fechner is not the only seeker to have awakened out of a lucid dream to
grasp that the quintessence of the universe is MIND. (Cf., Australian
Aborigines---paleolithic, and probably basically like all other
paleoliths; metaphors in all or most known neolithic cultures;
metaphors---verbal and depicted---in ancient cultures; Heraclitus,
Socrates, Plato & Aristotle, Berkeley, Jung, David Bohm & Archibald
Wheeler. . . .) Everyone who truly seeks to understand the universe
(philosophers) comes up with the idea that it is fundamentally MIND, not
matter. Everyone else (the sophists) comes up with that it is MATTER.
.I would not call it "consciousness," as this is another matter entirely.
Cognition, perhaps.
I disagree with Frank's value assessment of psychophysics. Fechner &
Weber were outrageously idiotic with their "equations." At their time, as
today, the nonphysical sciences (knowledge pursuits) were very covetous of
the physical sciences' success (mostly physics), and mistakenly believed
that it was due to "math." This misapprehension continues today. The
success of the physical sciences, IMO, is that they *observed.*
Carefully, with their *minds.* The seeking and relatively unfettered mind
is capable of controling variables on its own. It "instinctively"
utilizes the scientific method of REASONING.
> > * coronary: that other minds appear to be inscrutable to me, is
> only
> > because our means of interaction (language, fornication etc
> etc...)
> > is limited
>> COMMENT: see reference to handicap (supra); problem may be
> worse for some people than for others...
>> >
> > [Image]
> >
> > * other minds... and other inanimate things previously thought to
> > be without consciousness (such as Barbie Doll, for that
> matter)...
>> COMMENT: I tend to believe Barbie Dolls are still without
> consciousness; and consciousness may be rather limited in
> adults who play with them or attribute consciousness to them.
>> Frank
Matter does seem to be imbued with some kind of "mind." So many modern
people have perceived dimly that their cars, their calculating
machines---even their computers seem to have "minds of their own." And
don't forget such colloquialisms as "the walls have ears," and "if these
walls could talk. . .." I have difficulty with this at the surface of
things, but if mass-energy is created out of purely meta-physical (outside
of the parameters of the set of things we call mass-energy), then every
quantum would possess mind. Not *human* mind, of course. What
differentiates animate from inanimate matter is the former's ability to
control their own destinies vis a vis the environment. A rock, a grain of
sand, is at the mercy of erosion. Nucleotides seem to have found a way
around this, limitedly, by coalescing into walless bundles. Then they
in-vented (in-"winded") walls---the primordial virus; next came the
internal storehouse of materials to maintain the code (cytoplasm)---the
prokaryote, and so on. Only mind could do this. Statistics and random
chance plays a role only in what the environment provides at any given
moment. A mind *discerns,* then *learns,* then *chooses.*
> > & that humans have 5 senses is only an evolutionary contingency
On the right track, I would say, except that who says humans have only 5
senses? But even that with which we were endowed have greatly weakened
over the last 7 millenia from nonuse, misuse, and abuse.