File spoon-archives/bhaskar.archive/bhaskar_2003/bhaskar.0306, message 141


Date: Fri, 20 Jun 2003 23:07:10 +0100
From: Mervyn Hartwig <mh-AT-jaspere.demon.co.uk>
Subject: Re: BHA: re:Identity (or Stones in Summer)


Dear Guenter,

Now you're being unkind to the stones. Ah well, you historians -- if you 
can't re-think a thing's thoughts, you're not interested. Lost 
potentialities? -- Think of how stone responds when treated with 
reverence, as in an Indigenous ritual object, an old cobbled street, a 
cathedral, a great sculpture, a cliff-face glowing in the sun... It's 
not a question of stones developing mental activity (OK, I was 
misleading about this with my talk of 'just stones' -- there never was 
such a time), but of having an intelligible fine structure, in common, 
it would seem, with the whole of Being. (The quantum particles in my 
body are arranged differently and more complexly than the ones in the 
stone, but both arrangements are in principle intelligible.) Dostoevesky 
thought we should ask forgiveness of the birds. There's a sense, I 
think, in which we should definitely ask the stones to forgive us too. 
Be nice to them Guenter -- there's plenty of opportunity in Oz: as 
someone who loves the outback, you can always get right among them in 
Sturt's Stony Desert or on Gibber Plain.....

Best wishes,

Mervyn


In message <1921101394.20030620232441-AT-unsw.edu.au>, Günter Minnerup 
<g.minnerup-AT-unsw.edu.au> writes
>Dear Mervyn,
>
>On Friday, June 20, 2003, you wrote:
>
>> On the current story of the big bang, I think it does entail this,
>> bearing in mind that we're speaking at the level of possibility and fine
>> structure, and not of the actual: given consciousness as we know it, its
>> possibility must have been enfolded in the particles at the moment of
>> the bang, hence enfolded in all matter as such. The metaphysically
>> materialist story that mind emerged from matter can only be true if
>> matter 'contained' the possibility of mind -- and this must be true at
>> every stage of any diachronic explanatory reduction, including a stage
>> at which there was 'just stones' so to speak. (Unless of course we
>> inhabit two comoses, one in which mind is enfolded in matter and one in
>> which it isn't.)
>
>But isn't that an ahistorical view? Matter has a history, too, and
>while the possibility of consciousness must have been enfolded in
>whatever issued from the Big Bang, under those concrete "historical"
>conditions, it was only actualised through a concrete evolutionary
>history which seems to have passed ordinary stones by. I was musing
>about this only yesterday when I watched one of those huge Australian
>spiders on our balcony, and wondered about the "mental" processes that
>went into its "planning" of the "architecture" of its web: clearly our
>own mental processes which we call "consciousness" is not the only
>form taken by the evolutionary concretisation of that original
>potential, and it is present to various degrees in all life forms. But
>stones and other "inert" matter were not included in this: while the
>subject matter of geology clearly has an evolutionary history of its
>own, there seems no basis for assuming that it has ever, or will ever,
>involve any form of mental activity. I suppose you could call it
>"evolutionary stratification": on the long road from Big Bang to late
>capitalist civilisation, with growing complexity, some "branches"
>developed some potentialities while others lost them.
>
>Regards,
>Gnter
>




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