Eduk wrote:Saying there has to be root fundamentals just means you are saying there must be a reason. I agree with that. I just don't know what the reason is. Any positive claim is almost certainly wrong and requires proof.
I think most of the problem tends to be a categorical one. For example we can talk about a lot of different properties of things, like gold, like water, luminescent materials, etc.. that have somewhat unique qualities but insofar as we can tell those are attributable to a proton count or a particular combination of atoms. Similarly evolution has cause things ranging from apes, elephants, and peacocks to things as unusual as cuttlefish, Portuguese man of war colonies, and sea cucumbers. Between both of those categories is a pretty impressive array of differences, however they still seem to fall into different kinds of permutation and express possibilities of what kinds of different structures can be created by the permutation of genes and succeed in survival or, in the case of metals and compounds, we see both the stability and instability of such things as well as the many odd characteristics they have.
Along side that though I try to think of anything we see in nature that springs out blunt-force as either it's own cause or purely a secondary cause. I could be suffering from a shortage of creativity on this front but I can't think of many.
Eduk wrote:Now pantheism as you describe at it's root could be something I am broadly agnostic towards. As in it is possibly possible. So it is certainly an entertaining thought and on that level well worth the time and effort (if you so desire). However the issue I have is the conclusions drawn and the addition of further properties, which for me become less and less reasonable with each property added.
I'm not even sure I'd consider myself a pantheist as that still has a twist of Platonic/Neoplatonic tautology. At least sticking to what seems observable or within the realm of what can be sought and experienced reliably I tend to find a fair amount of agreement with Gordon White that there doesn't seem to be much evidence, if any, of any sort of supreme deity and that life - much like evolution - is left to fend for itself. What did strike me though, over the last four years of plowing through, at least at first, the new age reading gauntlet and then into the more heavyweight Masonic, Martinist, Rosicrucian, Golden Dawn, Thelemic, etc. is that they seemed to be describing the movements of what's in the universe rather than the things, and if you try to pin anyone down as to what on earth they're talking about by still taking Aristotle's wheel of the elements seriously at any level it seems like they're making behaviorist categories and playing with them.
What seems suggestive to me is that there's one thing all of the mystic/occult religions tend to agree on - my first major encounter with it was reading John of the Cross and hearing him diagram Mt. Carmel, that followed with Theresa of Avila's Seven Castles, talk of at least two particular dark nights of the soul along with contacting something very intensely luminous within themselves. One thing lead to another as I realized that actually mapped quite well to another diagram, ie. the Tree of Life. That's a very neoplatonist system but whether it's the Hermetic Golden Dawn, whether it's Crowley and his OTO or A.'.A.'. it seems like the aim is identical to what was before that - ie. what they call Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel, which also maps on quite well to what Carl Jung seemed to be referring to when he talked about 'individuation'.
I still don't know what all of that means or even how much of it I'd stake much faith in. When I do try to bring the universe together, along with animal and human existence, and try to look at it in a way that's congruent along with the stuff I mentioned above - it seems like nature is filled with various emergent layers and these layers take on a particular sort of governance of their own. Systems that gain a certain degree of integrity tend to gain complexity and in some ways by that have a way of acclimating the environment around them to themselves, you see that with not just the life in particular natural biomes but also the ways in which it also seems to effect rainfall and the like. While I have doubts that there's such a well-built and robust planetary logos or Gaia hierarchically forming from all the life on earth (if it were that strong we'd have clear evidence of it) it seems tough to discount the possibility that recursive systems might have at least something of our own nature - particularly considering that our nervous systems themselves are in that same sort of constant recursion, ie. drawing up stimulus from our peripherals and sense apparatus, bundling those impulses, processing that data, and sending it back down as reactions and responses both to internal and external environments. Daniel Siegel had a short on Big Think, seems like he got lambasted a bit for it getting called something as pretensions as 'A Scientific Explanation of the Human Mind'. It seems like there's a lot out there to suggest that we're not special when considering the nature of our own internal cycles (which to think of it would be odd to expect much else) and I might take that a step further and consider the possibility that consciousness, or at least the bare roots of it in say primitive forms of awareness, might not be nearly as special either as we might have thought.
Eduk wrote:For example I mistook you for a Christian because of some of the properties you appear to endow your god/s with. Namely this property of good and evil, and evil being a potential problem. So you start by assuming consciousness isn't explainable (which is already a very strong claim) and you then further add good/evil which for me have nothing to do with the first claim. I don't get the leap of logic.
Actually I wasn't going there so much as walking out my own analytic process on how I have a very difficult time accepting theism, either in it's benevolent or malevolent sense, that is I don't see evidence that there is something of superior mind and power watching over us in a self-aware manner. My examples were that if there were something malevolent up there it would far more than likely want everything to do with us, mainly for gratifying its own ego and we'd be living in something like a global DPRK. If there were something both supremely aware on a conscious level and benevolent - evolution of the sort we have here is about as bloody, savage, cruel, and even anti-moral systems that such a being could have brought life about with.
If one comes to the conclusion after that, especially if they've been an atheist or materialist for any amount of time and then start running into things that simply aren't suppose to happen or exist per their worldview, they're stuck trying to figure out how such things could come to pass in a naturalistic context. That's where I think functionalism stands out as one of the strongest candidates in that it proposes consciousness, at least with a big C, being endemic to self-organizing dynamic systems and in a rather holographic manner - such that much like I could think of my own body as cells, organs, or a self I can think of ants as individual ants or a colony, a flock of birds as individuals or sort of a complex amoeba flying through the sky, or I could think of people as individuals, communities, and nations. Also when I look at the really weird stuff people run into, especially what people like to call the whole UFO, cryptoid, and by a broader expanse of the account the 'fairy phenomena' it seems like the consistency and oddity of that behavior seems like it's more akin to a natural force, like lightning or something of that nature, but rather it's a strange form of discharge that seems to hit the earth in different places, different times, and always seems to slightly lead whatever people already believe in that given culture or at that time in history. A lot of these things pile up for me where while I'm a ways away from taking something like astrology seriously I do feel like any sense I'd have for squaring parsimony with pitting everything on human delusion takes more of a stretch than I'm comfortable with.
As for how I feel comfortable with my own sort of mental map of at least psychological entities and relationships, I feel particularly strong with a four-pole: Christ Logos and Isis/Sophia as the masculine and feminine of Mercy, the Beast and Babalon as the masculine and feminine of Severity. Even though I'm really still not sure how literally I'd take the Tree of Life I do think there's at least one really wholesome idea in it - that it's not about strictly running toward good and away from evil, rather were both and we have to metabolize all of it to keep ourselves moving toward productive ends in life. Doing otherwise causes lots of neurosis, imbalance, and I really like how Jordan Peterson in a lot of his lectures constantly relates to the issues of the Jungian shadow - ie. that people need to have it not only processed but mobilized and at the ready. He also suggests that people who don't digest that part of themselves are dangerous and have a way of being swept up in mobs or doing almost anything to placate others, whether for good or for ill. I look at our culture and I see where we're apply a lot of our old management strategies particularly badly and without even much to call a road map.