RE: this very moment

From: Higgo James <james.higgo.domain.name.hidden>
Date: Fri, 12 May 2000 08:45:36 +0100

An extravagant claim is one that requires you to believe more, rather than
fewer, unproven or unprovable theses. Your scheme below, what I understand
of it, makes a series of assumptions which I have no need of. There really
is no necessity for a thinker to have a thought, any more than there is a
necessity for a watchmaker to make a watch. That is probably the most common
fallacy that exists, and it is what prevents almost everyone from
understanding what we are saying here.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Brent Meeker [SMTP:meekerdb.domain.name.hidden]
> Sent: Friday, 12 May, 2000 2:49 AM
> To: everything-list.domain.name.hidden
> Subject: Re: this very moment
>
>
>
> On 11-May-00, Higgo James wrote:
> > The problem is that you are a devoted materialist, wheras the ideas
> Bruno,
> > Jacques and I put forward are idealist.
> >
> > There may or may not be 'real, tangible walls'. But there are certainly
> > ideas of walls; 'my current thought' incorporates such an idea. There
> are
> > ideas of walking through walls. There is 'your' idea that you are a
> human
> > being of x age in front of a computer wondering if people can walk
> through
> > walls. There is an idea of 'I am a person and I am walking through a
> wall'.
> > There an idea, 'I am a mathematician who has found the square root of a
> > prime number'. All ideas exist.
> >
>
> This seems like a very extravagant claim. In what sense does an idea
> exist if
> no one has it. And what is an "idea" anyway - a thought, something that
> can be
> expressed by a declarative sentence. If the latter, then does the idea
> expressed by, "This is not an idea" exist? If there is to be a theory of
> everything - including ideas - then it seems it would have to be something
> like
> Russell's neutral monism; in which the basic "stuff" of our lives are sets
> of
> monads some of which are related so as to represent a physical external
> world
> (these we mostly call perceptions) and another related set which constitue
> an
> internal mental life (which we call our thoughts). The fact that these
> two
> sets are also related to each other in a certain order constitues the
> passage
> of time (both physical and psychological) and together they constitute a
> person who we say 'experiences things in time.' A TOE would presumably
> predict,
> at least probabilistically, these monads and their relations.
>
> Brent Meeker


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Received on Fri May 12 2000 - 00:51:47 PDT