At 08:39 19/05/99 +0100, you wrote:
>(Sorry for the delay in responding to this -- it got lost among all the
>other stuff I have "pending".)
>
>In message <3.0.2.32.19990513201444.007e4bf0@pop.dial.pipex.com>, Dave
>Pape <davepape@dial.pipex.com> writes
>>>
>>>That's quite a good account of philosophical idealism, Dave. Do you
>>>really believe there's nothing "out there"? :-)
>>>--
>>>Robin
>>
>>Actually, pretty much Yes. I don't believe in Things. :-p
>
>Not sure I believe in Things, myself, but if there's nothing "out
>there", how do you account for all the consistencies in our perceptions?
Cos I believe in relationships. The way I see it, and I'm a bit of an armchair dosser thinker, is that Things, when you look at them, look like arrangements of other Things. That observation feeds back, in that you can take the output of the analysis (the other Things) and stick it back in again (the other things are made up of yet other things). I ended up thinking that maybe the relationships between Things are realler than the Things themselves. As language is Thing-orientated to the hilt, I'm still so buzzing with my own cleverness that I feel it necessary to make controversial-sounding claims about the subject at any and every opportunity.
One thing I started thinking about but didn't get very far with, was the idea that for "Things" to persist, the relationships of which they're composed must be self-reinforcing: EG, a chemical bond looks like mutual attraction- "things" keeping other "things" close enough for them to attract each other. A kind of feedback loop, in this case so simple it looks trivial.
But atanother level, replicators are big complexes of feedback relationships which kind of meta-self-reinforce... oh I dunno, it's as woolly as a mammoth-jumper, this one. I was kind of after a physics/metaphysics based on relationships that unified the cognitive and physical worlds, then again who isn't yawn yawn yawn.