On Feb 16, 8:18 am, "Stathis Papaioannou" <stath....domain.name.hidden> wrote:
>
> If you built a model society and set its citizens instincts, goals,
> laws-from-heaven (but really from you) and so on, would that suffice to
> provide "meaning"?
>
It would not provide ultimate meaning for two reasons. (Note that I
am not the originator of these reasons, although I'm just shooting
from the hip without citing references which don't come to me right
now. They have been expounded many times by people who are more
intellectually strong than I am.) But here goes. One reason is on
the "logical" level (i.e. repeatable facts, propositions and
inference). The other reason on the "spiritual" level (i.e. you have
to "see" it with your intuition, "expanded consciousness", faith [not
blind faith],..).
1) Logical reason, but still important and inescapable: If the source
of meaning was from within the "system", i.e. the observable/
controllable universe, then we can always ask the why question when we
find the source. This is not acceptable as part of a scientifically
observable causal universe, as it contradicts it. A closed system
which is supposedly totally explainable will always have at least one
fixed point that is unexplainable. This is the old positivism
problem. This is actually part of the problem with a straw-man
caricature god, in our image, i.e. any thing that we (as part of the
universe) can think up.
2) Spiritual reason, but no less important and inescapable: Perhaps
this one is more for people (like Bruno, and Jesse Mazer?) who accept
the possible existence of difference levels of reasoning, based on
different ways of "seeing" truth (a la G and G*). We just know
somehow that there is something inexplicable about personhood. There
is a hunger in us that wants to always ask the question why, a hunger
for the meaning behind whatever layer of stuff we just discovered.
Perhaps it's like looking for our true home, or for the reason why
this is or is not our true home. It's like Neo in the Matrix. And
there have been signs the meaning behind this existence poking in this
existence now and then, and seen by different people. Yes, we can
always imagine how someone could have thought these signs up, or
interpretted them up, and thus explain everything back down to the
purely logical level, dealing only with repeatable things. Like a 2-
dimensional shadow world can make up laws that somehow explain the
behavior of shadows and say that there are only shadows, but it is not
seeing the whole reality.
> On 2/16/07, Tom Caylor <Daddycay....domain.name.hidden> wrote:
> > Yes. Now we're startin' to talk! I don't know much of the language,
> > but I think that when people experience what some may call words like
> > "enlightenment", "cosmic consciousness", etc. they are experiencing
> > something that is really there. In fact, they use words like "seeing"
> > reality as it "actually" is, etc. They speak of "wholeness" and
> > "integralness".
>
> Except that people would still have the same experiences whether or not
> something were really there, just as they would still experience the sky as
> a dome whether or not it is in fact a dome. In other words, if you imagine a
> being in a universe without meaning, cosmic consciousness, enlightenment and
> all the other significant things which are supposed to be there, but with
> otherwise the same physical laws etc., can you think of any reason why such
> a being would or wouldn't come up with the same ideas as humans have,
> assuming similar evolutionary provenance?
>
> Stathis Papaioannou
This is like saying "If you imagine a being in a universe who cannot
see the true reality of the universe, but with otherwise the same
reality, can you think of any reason why such a being would or
wouldn't come up with the same ideas as humans have, assuming similar
evolutionary provenance?" If he/she cannot see the true reality, then
the ideas would not reflect the whole reality, regardless of how he/
she came up with them. The ideas may be locally useful, but as I said
above, there is more to it than that. Humans are deeper than that.
Tom
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Received on Sat Feb 17 2007 - 23:30:07 PST