Date sent: Sun, 23 May 1999 17:39:28 +0100 To: virus@lucifer.com From: Dave Pape <davepape@dial.pipex.com> Subject: virus: Robin! Things, was coherence and correspondence Send reply to: virus@lucifer.com
> 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.
>
Think of things and the relationships which obtain between them as co-primordial and mutually grounding.