Hi Glove, Dave, others,
Great posts guys. I will come to Dave's post in my next post, so we don't mix
things up. First I want to reply to Glove's post. We have never agreed so much
as we do now, and that's great! I want to look at what we still disagree on and
I want to try to put things so clear that we're sure that in the end we are not
agreeing on things because of vagueness.
A point where we seemed to disagree was 'time'.
I wrote:
> I don't believe time is a conceptual agreement
Glove wrote:
> [..] time cannot be known as an external reality "independent" of our consciousness.
> Time as we understand it is in fact dependent upon our consciousness of it.
Of course it is Glove, I agree with you on this too! When you talked about time *being*
a conceptual agreement, I concluded that for you time is ONLY a conceptual agreement.
With my disagreement I meant: "I don't believe time is MERELY a conceptual agreement".
To be absolutely clear about this, I mean that without any consciousness to form
conceptual agreements there would still be 'time'. And I'm not talking about hours and
minutes here, but about time in its most basic form: change and irreversability.
I now see what caused the confusion. You coming from the Idealistic side and me coming
from the Realistic side, both afraid that the other cuts of two levels from reality. We meet
eachother halfway and discover that we never really disagreed. Or am I too positive here?
I've seen this cause confusion in philosophy books too. Philosophers that are talking about
reality known to man (the epistemological perspective), being misunderstood because others
mistake this epistemological reality for, let's say, universal reality.
I wrote:
>Reality known to the human consciousness is 'influenced' by the very
>structure that accounts for this consciousness and in that sense the
>reality known to the human consciousness, although external, always
>comes *after* the intellectual patterns formed.
> Glove:
> If you leave out the words "although external" I can agree with you on this.
I agree with this too. The 'reality known to the human consciousness' is internal
not external.
Again, to be absolutely clear about it all, I summed it all up "a la Roger":
1 There IS a reality that is independent of the existence of consciousness
2 This reality can be partly known to man.
As Pirsig said "we take a handfull of sand from the endless landscape of awareness
around us and call that hand of sand the world".
3 The reality known to human consciousness is NOT independent of this
consciousness, but 'influenced' by the very structure that accounts for
this consciousness.
Do we agree here Glove? (Dave?)
Dtchgrtngs
Walter
Glove:
> I leave you with a quote from one of my favorite authors (Hermann Hesse)
I love Hesse too Glove. I've read almost all his books. Especially "Narciss
und Goldmund" made an impression on me.
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