A Flaw in Solway's reasoning?

Discussion of the nature of Ultimate Reality and the path to Enlightenment.
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Jamesh
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Post by Jamesh »

Nevertheless, we can logically know and "fathom" that the hidden void cannot possibly be identified as a finite thing.
Sure, but that does mean the void is one thing alone that is infinite in all possible ways, as in that there is only one void thing that is completely non-bounded. The void is not God, it cannot create something from nothing, it is just the domain where things originate. Not being God, the void cannot create differentiated things without itself being differentiated. Nor can the void contain more than two differentiations, for with any more than two differentiations it automatically must be a thing. The massive array of different appearances we can observe can all be deconstructed down to dualistic causes - providing these dualistic causes are both capable of being bounded to a degree and non-bounded to a degree.

Even if the void has parts but is conceptualised as a whole, as a "void totality", it still seems to be bounded by the "finite totality". If the void was not bounded by the "finite totality", then I cannot see how any thing could exist, because no separation at all between the void and things could occur and everything would be the same as the void – yet, even though things themselves consist entirely “of the void” there is a form of separation. All the general properties things have are an indication that there is such separation. If anything exists, as does the set of all physical things, then this existence is causal, and it is dualistically causal in that its action flows both forwards (the causes flow on to affect something else) and backwards (existing existence changes the nature of the preceding cause by merging with it to become the causal form that flows forward). Backwards causal action is just another name for “boundaries”.

These last points are rather interesting – it may be an indication the word boundary is not a sufficiently appropriate term for what I’m talking about here. Nothing fully bounded can unify, yet without the existence of a boundary to block the causal action and cause it to change into a unified thing, neither will anything be caused to unify. All differentiation in the physical universe is an Effect, thus every point in the universe is an effect (even a point one micron away from another in empty space is different to the other). The unification of opposites creates the static nature of Effects, which will then result in the boundary of backwards causal action to non-unified forward causal action, while the non-unification contained in a thing, provides for the movement of these unified Effects (the forwards causal effect which will be bounded by existing unified causes).
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sschaula
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Post by sschaula »

David,

A hidden void doesn't appear.
- Scott
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David Quinn
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Post by David Quinn »

So it would appear.
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Kelly Jones
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Post by Kelly Jones »

David Quinn wrote:Kelly,
DQ: The hidden void is an appearance too.

K: Are you referring to mutual integration ?
No, more along the lines of mutual abandonment. The hidden void is as much an appearance to us as the trees, clouds and mountains we experience in everyday life. It is a dualistic illusion which has to be abandoned along with every other appearance.

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I was referring to the "rank" of mutual integration, used in the Jewelled-Mirror Samadhi scripture. On second thoughts, though, I think you're referring to the rank of the Real within the Apparent. The abandoning allows one to enter the "Coming from within the Real".

I'm not sure what mutual integration refers to, yet.


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Steven Coyle

Post by Steven Coyle »

Kelly,

This site may be of interest to you.

http://www.angelfire.com/electronic/bod ... -rank.html
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Cory Duchesne
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Post by Cory Duchesne »

David,
DQ: The objective reality of an infinite chain of worlds extending infinitely in all directions is also impossible. It can only ever exist as a perceptual reality

Cory: Says you. I don't see any reason why what I percieve with my senses, cannot continue to act beyond. For instance, bread that I forgot about in the cupboard now has mold on it. The last time consciousness cast itself on the bread (a week ago) there was no mold. Now there is plenty of mold. Obviously there was something happening to the bread during the time when consciousness was not cast upon it. In other words, we take what our senses tell us, we reason about that empirical data, and we use logic to extrapolate our way to the conclusion that objective reality continues beyond the senses.

DQ: Imagine you are having a dream at night, wherein you place a piece of bread on a table and then come back to it some time later to find there is mold on it. Are we to conclude from this that the dream-bread slowly accumulated mold outside of the dreaming state while you were away doing something else?
Don't you think this is a bad analogy? The images in our dreams are mainly the result of accumulating and replaying the data of our waking life. Comparing the dream world to waking life, at least in the way you are trying to, does not seem reasonable.

Waking life involves all sorts of involuntary perceptions. In fact, objective reality in some respects is largely an inconvenience. If things were purely subjective, life would be void of bad consequences - - food could be left out without any thought of whether it might go bad, we could eat whatever we want without consequence, defecating could be vetoed, children wouldnt require much attention or care, cocaine could be enjoyed without consequence, we could jump off a building and fly, we wouldnt have to work to provide food and shelter, etc, etc. In short, we could do whatever we want without any need for paying heed to the way things actually are.
Last edited by Cory Duchesne on Fri May 18, 2007 3:40 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Cory Duchesne »

David Quinn wrote:Cory,
DQ: The hidden void is an appearance too.

C: David, don't you think it's worthwhile to establish a distinction between what we percieve with our eyes, and what we imagine with our thought?

Or are you implying that when one looks at a tree, a pond, a cloud, etc, one is looking at a particular face of the void?
Sometimes it is accurate and useful to make distinctions between sense-perception and thought; at other times, not.

When it comes to examining the issue of existence in and of itself, then all existences need to be grouped in the same box. The existence of a thought is just as real as the existence of a mountain or a hidden void. They each consist of an appearance presented to consciousness.
If I have a concept of the hidden void, then yes, 'thought' is an appearance, it manifests when I am aware of myself thinking.
As for your second question, I see trees, ponds, and clouds as being faces of Reality.
Ok, that's fine.
The hidden void is just another face of Reality.
How is something that is not-experiencable, a face of reality?
It is as much a manifestation of Reality as all these other things are.
But it doesnt manifest. Furthermore, I havent the slightest clue what the hidden void is. So far, I can only regard it as a contrivance.
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David Quinn
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Post by David Quinn »

Cory,
DQ: Imagine you are having a dream at night, wherein you place a piece of bread on a table and then come back to it some time later to find there is mold on it. Are we to conclude from this that the dream-bread slowly accumulated mold outside of the dreaming state while you were away doing something else?

Cory: Don't you think this is a bad analogy? The images in our dreams are mainly the result of accumulating and replaying the data of our waking life. Comparing the dream world to waking life, at least in the way you are trying to, does not seem reasonable.
I think it's apt. It illustrates that the experience of a particular world doesn't have to be generated by a similar world existing independently of the mind. It can be generated, for example, by neurons and chemical firings alone.

Another example is a simulated world in a virtual reality machine, wherein the subjective experience of a world is generated by algorithms.

Waking life involves all sorts of involuntary perceptions. In fact, objective reality in some respects is largely an inconvenience. If things were purely subjective, life would be void of bad consequences - - food could be left out without any thought of whether it might go bad, we could eat whatever we want without consequence, defecating could be vetoed, children wouldnt require much attention or care, cocaine could be enjoyed without consequence, we could jump off a building and fly, we wouldnt have to work to provide food and shelter, etc, etc. In short, we could do whatever we want without any need for paying heed to the way things actually are.
Agreed. However, I think you're misunderstanding my position. Abandoning the concept of an independent world of objects beyond the mind doesn't have to involve turning our own perceptual worlds into purely subjective affairs.

I'm not saying that the hidden void - i.e. that which is beyond consciousness - is non-existent or non-definite. It is obvious that whatever it might be, it does have the power to generate the kind of ordered, predictable world that we experience.

All I'm arguing against is the idea that this hidden void consists of a world of independent objects which resemble the world we experience. That, to me, is an impossibility, owing to the fact that any such world can only ever exist as a perceptual reality.

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Elizabeth Isabelle
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Post by Elizabeth Isabelle »

Cory Duchesne wrote:Comparing the dream world to waking life, at least in the way you are trying to, does not seem reasonable.
I agree with Cory on this one.
A=A
Dream state=Dream state
Waking state=Waking state

Different rules for different states.
.
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David Quinn
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Post by David Quinn »

Cory,
DQ: Sometimes it is accurate and useful to make distinctions between sense-perception and thought; at other times, not.

When it comes to examining the issue of existence in and of itself, then all existences need to be grouped in the same box. The existence of a thought is just as real as the existence of a mountain or a hidden void. They each consist of an appearance presented to consciousness.

Cory: If I have a concept of the hidden void, then yes, 'thought' is an appearance, it manifests when I am aware of myself thinking.
Strictly speaking, it exists whenever it presents an appearance to consciousness - which means that, like consciousness, it exists as a conceptual reality.

DQ: The hidden void is just another face of Reality.

Cory: How is something that is not-experiencable, a face of reality?

We experience it through our concepts.

DQ: It is as much a manifestation of Reality as all these other things are.

Cory: But it doesnt manifest. Furthermore, I havent the slightest clue what the hidden void is. So far, I can only regard it as a contrivance.

It's a pretty straightforward concept. What is beyond consciousness is "hidden" because it can never be directly experienced by anyone or anything, and "void" because it cannot have any form, not even the form of nothingness or non-existence.

I wouldn't call it a contrivance. All it does is identify the nature of what lies beyond consciousness. I think of it as a solution to a particular empirical issue, one that enables us to move onto more profound and interesting issues. As far as understanding the nature of Reality is concerned, I don't consider it to be all that philosophically relevant.

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David Quinn
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Post by David Quinn »

Elizabeth wrote:
Cory: Comparing the dream world to waking life, at least in the way you are trying to, does not seem reasonable.

Elizabeth: I agree with Cory on this one.
A=A
Dream state=Dream state
Waking state=Waking state

Different rules for different states.
There are enough similarities between the two states to make valid comparisons.

It is like understanding that elephants and rocks are both "things" and can be compared on that basis. The truth that elephant=elephant and rock=rock doesn't prevent this comparison from taking place.

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Elizabeth Isabelle
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Post by Elizabeth Isabelle »

Although elephants and rocks are both things and can have valid comparisons based on thing-ness, there are specifics that are not comparable. Both an elephant and a rock take up space, and in both waking and dream states one has experiences. An elephant can bleed, but one can not get blood from a stone.

In waking states the experiences do all take place inside one's mind just like in a dream state; but in a waking state experiences have certain kinds of limitations more significantly imposed from the outside world than in a dream state. In a waking state, if a tiger eats your heart, you die. In a dream state, unless your heart in the waking state is weakened to the point that such a fright could cause a heart attack, a tiger eating your heart may not cause death even in your dream.

I understand that you are trying to prompt thinking in the Ultimate Reality sense, but the correlations between waking states and Ultimate Reality are more like karma than like mold growing on your dream bread while you are awake (which essentially could happen if one's subconscious mind kept tally of time and correlated various laws of waking reality to the dream world).

The substance of dreams is one thing, the substance of the waking world is another, and the substance of Ultimate Reality is another. One can likely correlate reality to Reality in the same sort of order of magnitude of difference as a dream state to reality, but the particular comparison as you presented it above does not convey that.
DQ: The perception of an infinite chain of worlds extending infinitely in all directions is still just a dualistic illusion existing in the moment, as is the hidden void.

Cory: A 'perception' of an infinite chain of worlds extending infinitely in all directions is impossible. You know as well as I do that percieving infinity, as well as conceptualizing it, is not possible.

DQ: The objective reality of an infinite chain of worlds extending infinitely in all directions is also impossible. It can only ever exist as a perceptual reality

Cory: Says you. I don't see any reason why what I percieve with my senses, cannot continue to act beyond. For instance, bread that I forgot about in the cupboard now has mold on it. The last time consciousness cast itself on the bread (a week ago) there was no mold. Now there is plenty of mold. Obviously there was something happening to the bread during the time when consciousness was not cast upon it. In other words, we take what our senses tell us, we reason about that empirical data, and we use logic to extrapolate our way to the conclusion that objective reality continues beyond the senses.

DQ: Imagine you are having a dream at night, wherein you place a piece of bread on a table and then come back to it some time later to find there is mold on it. Are we to conclude from this that the dream-bread slowly accumulated mold outside of the dreaming state while you were away doing something else?
I do see that you ended this in a question, so I give you the benefit of the doubt in that you were not finished with your comparison.
.
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Post by David Quinn »

Yes, there are differences as well as similarities between dreaming and the waking state. Basically, the core difference can be summed up as - the nightly dramas are a person dreaming, while the wakeful state is Nature dreaming.

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Jamesh
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Post by Jamesh »

I wouldn't call it a contrivance. All it does is identify the nature of what lies beyond consciousness. I think of it as a solution to a particular empirical issue, one that enables us to move onto more profound and interesting issues. As far as understanding the nature of Reality is concerned, I don't consider it to be all that philosophically relevant.
So what are these more profound and interesting issues? By default they must be issues of detail; issues relating to finiteness rather than the infinite, such as the masculine versus feminine debates that arise here.
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Post by Cory Duchesne »


DQ: Imagine you are having a dream at night, wherein you place a piece of bread on a table and then come back to it some time later to find there is mold on it. Are we to conclude from this that the dream-bread slowly accumulated mold outside of the dreaming state while you were away doing something else?

Cory: Don't you think this is a bad analogy? The images in our dreams are mainly the result of accumulating and replaying the data of our waking life. Comparing the dream world to waking life, at least in the way you are trying to, does not seem reasonable.

DQ: I think it's apt. It illustrates that the experience of a particular world doesn't have to be generated by a similar world existing independently of the mind. It can be generated, for example, by neurons and chemical firings alone.
You are trying to say that it's all output, and no input - and I don't see how this is a logically warranted stance to take. The neurons and chemicals (aside from being independent from the mind to begin with) are acted upon. Neurons and chemicals are acted upon by natural forms which the the neurons and chemicals interpret/record.

There have been very repeatable experiments done where it has been revealed quite clearly that our model of the world is not generated by neurons and chemical firings alone, but rather, our sensory model of the world is generated with the help of input from the outside. For example, scientists did an experiment where they raised kittens in pitch black, and at intervals, they exposed the kittens only to horizontal strips of light. The result was that the kittens grew up to be incapable of detecting any sort of vertical motions. This experiment shows that yes, the world we percieved is generated by the mind, but not without the help of an objective world of some sort, acting on the objective hardware of the mind.
Another example is a simulated world in a virtual reality machine, wherein the subjective experience of a world is generated by algorithms.


But again, every form and manifestation in this virtual reality, can be traced back to a corresponding manifestation in the machine. This machine of course is the objective reality. So you see, in order for your analogy to work, you need to propose an objective sort of world, indepedent of thought.
Cory: Waking life involves all sorts of involuntary perceptions. In fact, objective reality in some respects is largely an inconvenience. If things were purely subjective, life would be void of bad consequences - - food could be left out without any thought of whether it might go bad, we could eat whatever we want without consequence, defecating could be vetoed, children wouldnt require much attention or care, cocaine could be enjoyed without consequence, we could jump off a building and fly, we wouldnt have to work to provide food and shelter, etc, etc. In short, we could do whatever we want without any need for paying heed to the way things actually are.

DQ: Agreed. However, I think you're misunderstanding my position. Abandoning the concept of an independent world of objects beyond the mind doesn't have to involve turning our own perceptual worlds into purely subjective affairs.
Well, then what is it then that you have against the term 'objective reality'?
I'm not saying that the hidden void - i.e. that which is beyond consciousness - is non-existent or non-definite.
But its not existent either.....

You see, this is where I find that we are crippling ourselves in definitions and words.
It is obvious that whatever it might be, it does have the power to generate the kind of ordered, predictable world that we experience.
That's right - - so you see you are accepting some sort of objective reality.
All I'm arguing against is the idea that this hidden void consists of a world of independent objects which resemble the world we experience.
But there must be a world of indepedent form that is connected and corresponds to the world we percieve.
That, to me, is an impossibility, owing to the fact that any such world can only ever exist as a perceptual reality.
Why not say that a world can exist that our consciousness is not capable of knowing?
Steven Coyle

Post by Steven Coyle »

If God is anything, it is the nature of the hidden void.
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Cory Duchesne
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Re:

Post by Cory Duchesne »

David Quinn: Imagine you are having a dream at night, wherein you place a piece of bread on a table and then come back to it some time later to find there is mold on it. Are we to conclude from this that the dream-bread slowly accumulated mold outside of the dreaming state while you were away doing something else?

Cory: Don't you think this is a bad analogy? The images in our dreams are mainly the result of accumulating and replaying the data of our waking life. Comparing the dream world to waking life, at least in the way you are trying to, does not seem reasonable.
Then later David says:
David Quinn wrote:Yes, there are differences as well as similarities between dreaming and the waking state. Basically, the core difference can be summed up as - the nightly dramas are a person dreaming, while the wakeful state is Nature dreaming.
So I guess that analogy implies that nature has the capacity to awaken from it's dreaming?
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Re: awaken?

Post by keenobserver »

haha!
no, Nature is in a permanant coma.
(sometimes i wish she would, though!)
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Re: A Flaw in Solway's reasoning?

Post by David Quinn »

Cory,
So I guess that analogy implies that nature has the capacity to awaken from it's dreaming?
Well, the analogy breaks down there. Nature can lucid dream - i.e. become aware that it is all a dream - but it can't wake up from the dream. There is nothing beyond the dream to wake up to.

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Elizabeth Isabelle
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Re: A Flaw in Solway's reasoning?

Post by Elizabeth Isabelle »

David,

How are you defining Nature's awareness in this context?
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Re: A Flaw in Solway's reasoning?

Post by David Quinn »

In a nutshell, all consciousness.

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