Comment by Forrest Curo on 7th mo. 17, 2009 at 5:30pm

What I mean by "physical" forces are not "at the source of existence itself."

Let's try a model universe. It consists of a chess set with two players. (From the point of view of the chess pieces...? Hmm! The point of view of the pieces of one side?-- Well, if one player is strongly identified with his pieces, he might imagine himself down there running around the board.) The pieces themselves, now... Is the source of their world in "chess forces"? If one player's cat (Ooops!) rubs against a piece so as to push it over one square, is that a 'superchessual force' at work?

So I've proposed this universe of self-contained, lawful (via the rules of chess) & natural (for a chess piece.) Big hands reaching down to move one's left bishop to a safe square? An unnecessary hypothesis? (& of course this says nothing at all about the material the pieces are made of; they could consist of patterns of charged semiconductor in a VGA card!)
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It seems to me, if every speck of your universe is busy loving the others, there's something spooky about your matter, hardly what I would call "natural" at all! If you don't see all this as mechanical in its operation, we may be a lot closer in notions than either of us ever suspected!
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But--outside of some forms of Christianity I definitely don't share--Things are not true because they sound pretty, or might be desirable, or for any reason other than being true, in the sense of "If you test it, there it is!" There may be more than one way to know something, but doesn't the truth of it ultimately come down to that potential fact?

Comment by Charley Earp on 7th mo. 17, 2009 at 5:39pm

I am careful not to say all matter was "loving," except somewhat metaphorically. Rather all beings are interdependently interchanging their substance, similarly to Whiteheadean process cosmology. I don't go as far as Whitehead in ascribing primordial intelligence to subatomic entities, but I think he is on to something in rejected the atomistic view that all entities are ultimately isolatable. My worldview has affinities with some pantheisms, though I maintain a skeptical stance towards ontological claims about supernatural beings or happenings.

Comment by Charley Earp on 7th mo. 17, 2009 at 6:35pm

Sorry, I meant to write above that all entities are *not* "ultimately isolatable. That is, all entities are ultimately interconnected.

Comment by Nathan Swift on 7th mo. 17, 2009 at 9:29pm

Whoa! That last entry is really confusing. Let me see if I have it straight in my mind: Whitehead rejected the idea that all entities are ultimately isolable. You agree with that and meant to add that you believe that all entities are ultimately connected. Am I following?

Comment by Charley Earp on 7th mo. 17, 2009 at 10:02pm

Sorry, let me try and clarify. Whitehead proposed that all of reality is composed of entities that are dipolar, that is they are both mental and physical and the mental pole is constantly changing in response to other entities, at the subatomic level. So, yes, no entity is "an island unto itself" or ultimately isolatable, and all reality is interconnected. Where I differ from Whitehead is that I don't hold that mentality operates at the subatomic level. I believe that process does operate subatomically, but that it is not "mental."

Comment by Forrest Curo on 7th mo. 18, 2009 at 3:55pm

So here you are believing something that Whitehead proposed, which you don't know directly.

The life in you, which you do know directly, would seem a more logical starting point. (Do you palpably connect with the life you conjecture is in these particles, via the life that is you?)

Comment by Charley Earp on 7th mo. 20, 2009 at 1:49am

I know that I am physical and that all others are physical and that all but a very few disagree with that. I choose to center my concerns around that which is obvious to nearly all, this physical existence.

Others claim to know that they are more than physical, I cannot disprove that.

Whitehead is relevant here because he anticipated some of the experimental findings of quantum mechanics that the subatomic universe is not composed of inert particles. In one inadequate way of putting it, subatomic entities are constantly exchanging information. To put it more vibrantly, (vibration being pervasive in subatomic phenomena) subatomic realities are exchanging their substance in constant dance of existence.

Comment by Forrest Curo on 7th mo. 20, 2009 at 8:04pm

Well, there's obviously something that we experience in a physical mode... but we continue to experience things in a physical mode when we're dreaming, but when we wake up subsequently, we find that our teeth haven't really all shattered, the rattlesnake under the bed has vanished, and so has our ability to fly by bouncing on the air!

So the conclusion that anything we experience as physical is physical-- That's open to question, which leads to another question: "What does it mean to say that something exists physically?" I mean, it looks like we're talking about it being part of a (fairly) self-consistent & persistent system of objects we call the physical universe, but do we know that's real in its own right? A chess position is real, for people playing chess, but one player might be looking at wooden pieces and the other seeing it on a video screen; the fact that they both interact with it says nothing about what it's "made of".

Your "vibration" itself is only a metaphor that physicists apply to describe the workings of something that they can't see, that shows properties analogous to what we'd call vibration in an object we could interact with physically. It's something you "see" only if you run an experiment designed to detect wave properties. If instead you do something designed to detect particle properties (mass, velocity, momentum etc) to exactly the same stuff, you find particles. You can (I'm told) pretty much define these "subatomic realities" as "what you get if you run the right experiments."

Are you sure you've found something more obvious than your own existence as a foundation of what you know?

Comment by Charley Earp on 8th mo. 5, 2009 at 1:06am

I have had a very different experience of Christian community than some. I was actually part of a commune based on Mennonitism for almost 10 years. Some of the most loving people I have ever known.

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