> From: "Platt Holden" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> If experience is reality, and reality existed before we arrived on the
> scene, then experience must have existed before we arrived on the
> scene.
What makes you so damm sure that reality existed before you were on the
scene?
Who are you anyway?
And did you have a sneak preview?
.....The Fridge-Light Theory of Everything.
Hm. Since DQ is continuous, it doesn't make sense to talk about it in
tensed terms *at all*. Neither before nor after nor (in the general sense
of) now but eternally and out of time. The *eternal* "now". DQ cannot be
said to exist "before" us any more than we, considered as the conscious
experience of DQ, can be said to exist "before" it. There are no breaks or
joins here in either DQ or consciousness - after all a major point of MOQ is
just this observation or non-particularity. This is connected with my worry
about whether there can really be said to be such a thing as a "moment of
death", or "moment of coming-to-be". Check those abortion dilemmas.
Experience exists before you do, you say. Well when is that exactly? You
want to hang your whole philosophy on this? In that case we need some
precision so that we can evaluate your claim. Suddenly a birth-date seems
inadequate and imprecise. Five O'clock in the morning? Just before five or
just after? By how much? But this is on a hidding to nothing, a mismatch
between the continuity of the real phenomena and the discrete particulars of
hospital registrars. I just don't think we can ever get a handle on what
this supposed "before" you are talking about actually *means*.
It can't mean anything: because what it's trying to temporalise is
essentially out of time. Consciousness is not something *to which* things
happen - it is *where* they happen. Not being an event or a relation of
events, it makes no sense to talk about "before" consciousness. Or "after"
either. Perhaps we can talk about before and after *persons*, given that
they are perhaps to be considered complexes of behaviours and histories and
character traits. But *person* and *consciousness* are not the same concept
at all, linked through they are.
*Personally* I incline towards the view that "DQ" and "consciousness" are
two words for the same reality, that reality being cut up by grammar only.
(Maybe static/dynamic isn't the first cut, but the second after
quality/consciousness.) In anycase, if you hope to establish some
chronological relation between distinguished DQ and consciousness by radio
carbon dating or a birth certificate or some such, you are making some
mistake about what sort of thing consciousness and DQ are. They are not
like wine bottles. You can't stick a date stamp on either DQ or
consciousness.
Say, isn't there a song on Revolver to that effect?
Each day just goes so fast
I turn around it's past
You don't get time
To hang a sign
On me
Maybe it's time we all followed George Harrison's example. (I mean *read
the Bhagavad Gita*, not *take LSD*).
Toodlepip,
Elephant
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