Scivillage.com Casual Discussion Science Forum

The fact that they occur so frequently demonstrates them true. It's a reliable character trait of yours. Every time I've tried playing nice with you, it's failed miserably, as you always start up the personal insults first. You attacking FIRST, will always tend to invite attack in return. Just simple human nature. You know, those social skills. You've repeatedly proven you cannot learn or better yourself in any way. You always get defensive, instead of simply taking clarifications in good faith.

But yes, keep telling yourself you are blameless in making personal attacks first (just because you get preemptively defensive). It's a sure fire way that you will never have to think about growing as a person, and it allows you to keep crying like a stuck pig every time you clearly provoke it. The funny part is that you're literally inviting what you whine about. It's a self-fulfilling victimhood that seems to be the core of your being.

Hell, even your need to explain and defend yourself here is just more of the same. But... you'll never learn. 9_9

Once again just baseless claims and generic insults reminiscent of a simmering grudge over losing arguments. Again it's all about you. This is your little self-serving shit show, and it has nothing to do with me. You've basically turned my creative thoughts thread into your own personal toilet.

Aw, does that soothe your fragile ego. Gotta keep that defensiveness up... at any cost.
Go re-read how this started. If you have any intellectual honesty or self-reflection, you'd see that I was trying to gently lead you to realizing something about yourself. But you decided to crap on your own thread.


9_9

“There is no future. There is no past. Do you see? Time is simultaneous, an intricately structured jewel that humans insist on viewing one edge at a time, when the whole design is visible in every facet.”― Alan Moore, Watchmen

Consciousness rises up like a star in the infinite nothingness of mere Being. The abyss inside matter is all lit up. Stars and galaxies and black holes and human beings. Then the star descends back into the void, veiled by the darkness it once illuminated. It begins in miraculous wonderment, and ends in inexplicable tragedy. But not fully. For it merely returns to where it came from.

“I love, because my love is not dependent on the object of love. My love is dependent on my state of being. So whether the other person changes, becomes different, friend turns into a foe, does not matter, because my love was never dependent on the other person. My love is my state of being. I simply love.”― Osho

Perspective is everything...

Very rarely if ever do we perceive what is actually there. Rather we perceive what we expect to perceive, allowing us to comfortably navigate our way thru our environment with minimal distractions. This guiding expectation or ideal, of the thing as it is expected to be, is the sole basis for our belief that it is a thing in itself independent of all perceptions. That belief could never be a fact that we perceive since every perception is merely a shifting succession of perspectives and never a phenomenal perception of a thing in itself. The objectivity of the thing can only arise as the thought or projection of our minds upon a succession of images--a habitually instantiated and unvarying gestalt or whole imposed on the ongoing movie of our own minds.

Think of matter just like we do energy. There are only forms of energy but no energy in itself. Light and electricity and heat and motion. Energy is just a useful abstraction not some thing in itself. In the same way there are only forms of matter but no matter in itself. IOW, matter is not some substance or essence lurking in the depths of the atoms. There is only wood, glass, steel, air, water, flesh, etc. All of which derive their unique natures from their form and atomic structure. Matter in itself was always just a generalization, a categorization, never meant to be something in itself. Just like there only types of fruit, but no generic fruit in itself.

This way of looking at things, of ridding ourselves of the ghost of some underlying in-itself substance, can be extended to other phenomena as well. There are for example only forms of life, but nothing like life in itself. There are also kinds of selves, but no self in itself. There are also kinds of truth, but no truth in itself. And perhaps there are even just forms of consciousness, but no consciousness in itself. Everything deriving its essence, its whatness, its very being, from the interaction of its components and the world in general. All being situational and not discrete. Everything it seems can be seen to derive its nature entirely from its relations, both internally and externally, to other things. Its geometricity, it systemic dynamism, its context, its statistical waveforms, its history, its constraints, its emergent properties, and even the mathematical regularities and laws governing its properties. It is why we are always looking for absolutes and universals, but only ever turn up structures and processes and events.

And it's no accident that this is precisely the realm of non-physical abstractions and mental entities, which turns out to be the source of somethingness but not a thing in-itself either. Only endless varying forms of being, but no being in itself. Forms within forms within forms, structures and patterns and platonic Ideas, imparting their own ideational nature to the being or essence of all things. No in-itselfs. Simply the vast creative matrix of order and intelligibility dialectically giving rise to all things. Things are only the things they are because of mental properties they organically instantiate. This also explains the phenomena of emergence, of seeming irreducible properties and behaviors, because at every point of the hierarchy of its components it remains in contact with the implicate order or mindlike source of novelty and creativity.

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Extending the above thesis more broadly, we could also say that there are only forms of space, or places, or points, or fields, but no space in-itself. And there are only forms of time, or events, or processes or possibilities, but no time in-itself.. This also results in our being able to relocate the nature of space and time from the idea of an given and absolutely real substrate to a state of energetic interactivity of its various forms. Space and time simply abstractions or categories for all the instances of spatialization and temporalizing that are being dynamically generated in the universe. Leibniz was right, not Newton. Whitehead was right, not Hegel.

"We have reversed the usual classical notion that the independent "elementary parts" of the world are the fundamental reality, and that the various systems are merely particular contingent forms and arrangements of these parts. Rather, we say that inseparable quantum interconnectedness of the whole universe is the fundamental reality, and that relatively independent behaving parts are merely particular and contingent forms within this whole."---David Bohm

“The world is not merely physical, nor is it merely mental. Nor is it merely one with many subordinate phases. Nor is it merely a complete fact, in its essence static with the illusion of change. Wherever a vicious dualism appears, it is by reason of mistaking an abstraction for a final concrete fact.”
― Alfred North Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas

"Creativity is the universal of universals characterizing ultimate matter of fact. It is that ultimate principle by which the many, which are the universe disjunctively, become the one actual occasion, which is the universe conjunctively. It lies in the nature of things that the many enter into complex unity."--Alfred North Whitehead

“The unquestioned acceptance of the Aristotelian logic has led to an ingrained tendency to postulate a substratum for whatever is disclosed in sense-awareness, namely, to look below what we are aware of for the substance in the sense of the ‘concrete thing.’ This is the origin of the modern scientific concept of matter and of ether, namely they are the outcome of this insistent habit of postulation.”---Alfred North Whitehead

Consciousness arises from the brain in exactly the same way that music arises from the sounds of the instruments playing. And yet at no point is it reducible to being just that. It's being or essence is derived from it having its own dynamic structure and character independently of the physical processes generating it. Like music, and in fact film and art and literature too, consciousness transcends its medium of representations to unveil a pure phenomenality of immediate experience.