On 13/07/07, Brent Meeker <meekerdb.domain.name.hidden> wrote:
> > Brent, all that David is getting at is saying nothing "reflexively
> > exists" without being observed.
>
> Observed in what sense? Consciously, by a conscious being? Or decoherred into a quasi-classical state, as in QM? "Reflexive" would seem to imply it's observed by itself.
No, it's not meant to imply that it's 'observed' by itself: rather
just that it *is* itself, which is what I think you meant by
'existence simpliciter'. Another term might be instantiation. In
qualifying existence by the term 'reflexive', my point was just that,
when we originally entertain the idea of something 'existing' or not,
we temporarily *abstract* a more tentative sense of 'existence' from
any possible instantiation. The abstraction is then 'non-reflexive':
it no longer refers to itself, but rather putatively to a referent
from which it has (or could have) been abstracted. The danger is that
such abstraction may be the very act that seems to rob it of something
that is in fact the brute characteristic of instantiation.
The argument from 'the One' is that its (and derivatively, any)
self-awareness and consciousness derive ultimately from brute, or
reflexive, self-access, and hence can't be understood independent of
such instantiation. The 'deletion' of these aspects in the
specification Torgny makes for the B-Universe can then be seen as
precisely characteristic of the abstracted sense of 'existence' - i.e.
the free-standing (i.e. non-reflexive) idea - but as making no sense
in the context of reflexive instantiation.
This doesn't in itself constitute any argument for materialism,
because the 'instantiation' could be in terms of any 'possible' world
from the plenitude of such, all of which, in this formulation, derive
from the One. But my point is that, if a 'world' is arbitrarily
specified as not possessing the brute 'reflexive' characteristic of
instantiation, then this may just be because such a 'world' is in fact
merely the kind of abstraction that is - by this very token -
incapable of such instantiation, and hence not 'possible' either.
The term I used to attempt to convey the brute characteristic of
instantiation was 'reflexivity', in the sense of primitive
self-reference or self-access. 'Observation' by contrast has the
sense of a complex derivative of this brute characteristic in which
various emergent entities are placed in certain kinds of relation *to
each other*. Russell's sense of 'reflexive' vis-a-vis observation may
indeed also be a useful one, but it's not in fact the point I was
making.
David
>
> Russell Standish wrote:
> > On Tue, Jul 10, 2007 at 04:28:51PM -0700, Brent Meeker wrote:
> >> I don't see that "relexive" adding anything here. It's just "existence" simpliciter isn't it?
> >>
> >
> > Brent, all that David is getting at is saying nothing "reflexively
> > exists" without being observed.
>
> Observed in what sense? Consciously, by a conscious being? Or decoherred into a quasi-classical state, as in QM? "Reflexive" would seem to imply it's observed by itself.
>
> Brent Meeker
>
> >The tree falling unobserved in the
> > forest does not exist reflexively, but may exist in other senses of
> > the word. It seems quite a useful concept - I may have called it
> > anthropic existence elsewhere, but it doesn't seem to have an accepted
> > name.
> >
> > Cheers
> >
>
>
> >
>
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Received on Fri Jul 13 2007 - 07:16:31 PDT