spelnxpert wrote: Laird wrote:How do you really know that this is the best way of viewing reality?{all things connected}
I'll pose the same question to you that I posed to Steven Coyle in the thread, "Another Wisdom Test":
How do you know that it's not even more correct to view things as essentially separate but reacting, responding and communicating with one another?
You never did get an answer to this difficult question, did you man?
Let me take a stab at it.
Consider a loaf of bread. Person A cuts it into 5 slices and says, "There are 5 slices in a loaf of bread." Person B cuts another into 7 slices and responds, "No, there are 7 slices in a loaf of bread," and points to his loaf to back up his assertion. Person C does not cut his loaf, and declares, "A loaf of bread has no slices."
We wouldn't make a separate thread - or heaven forbid, create an entire new forum! - with the intent of solving the question as to which person is more correct, A, B, or C. And yet how different, really, is this question from the "connectedness" question?
Is either viewpoint truly less correct than the other? It is not original, or particularly illuminating, to aver the connectedness of all things. It does not say how they are connected, except resorting to the same phrase over and over again: "cause and effect." Taking any two events and asserting that they are thusly connected is empty. To ascertain
how they are connected, one must trace the immediate causes of each - for there are always more than one - and then trace the cause of each of
those causes, back until we have a cause that is common to both histories. QRS are saying this can always be done in principle. In practice, it is seldom possible in an open system, that is, in a non-experimental setting, in the real world. With people, it is more possible, due to the "5 degrees of separation" effect. This requires consciousness at each step if the way. Two
physical events, on the other hand, have evolved through a causal history that may not have included an observer, thus rendering the establishment of their "connectedness" all but impossible. UNLESS: if one postulates a kind of Oversoul that sees to it that
all things,
all events, are observed by some consciousness or another. If there have been no humans involved in the observation, then another agency must have been. In other words, a God or gods have delegated the task of witnessing all things either to divine or mortal entities or consciousnesses. In the respect that this includes every sentient human, we are all connected. We all have the same purpose. In the respect that we are all individuals not each knowing every other possible human or consciousness that exists, we are all
separate and
reacting and
communicating in some fashion with other beings.
There is more than enough bread to go around.
