Tfindlay wrote:Belinda wrote:I think that the tree does not fall in the forest if there is nobody(bug, sparrow or human) to whom this would have any meaning.
The corollary of what I think about this is that without consciousnesses that make meanings, nothing happens.
I don't agree that without meaning there are no things or events. It is things and events that we make meaningful by embedding them in the context of our experiential and inherited history. Our consciousness has evolved from non-conscious processes.
Belinda wrote:
I'd go further though and say that vibrating air is a meaning and therefore presupposes consciousness.
Are you saying vibrating air has meaning even if no living thing experiences it? I can't agree with this. For the phenomenon of vibrating air to mean something it must be given meaning by a conscious organism experiencing it.
Tfindlay , about your first comment, how can things and events be discrete things and events without consciousness?Isn't it only by relating a **** to a (not a ***) that we can identify any thing or event? Therefore I submit that without God, as Berkeley claimed, there is no pre-established existence of any thing or event.
Some people, some pantheists, claim that God and nature are the same, being different names for pre-existing cosmos, but I am not that sort of pantheist. My claim about nature is that it is the sum of all past and future perceptions. Without perceptions there is no cosmos that we call 'nature', not as far as we know.We cannot know that there is any pre-existing cosmos that we call 'nature', because our concepts of nature are not absolute, but are relative to any given state of knowledge or reasoning.
Tfindlay wrote
For the phenomenon of vibrating air to mean something it must be given meaning by a conscious organism experiencing it
I agree. (My previous explanation I admit was unclear). With this, TFindlay seems to be agreeing with me that there is no what I call ' pre-existing cosmos' but that cosmos, to exist at all, requires consciousness.
Tfindlay replied to Flikissimekado
In the end the significance of a perceived difference is fundamentally subjective
.which is consistent with my position on the nature of existence.There is such a thing as social meanings though, which are mediated by language and other arts,and through arts of all sorts we can 'see' each others' meanings as well as we possibly can.I therefore think that art,understood as structures for social meanings, is the key to what religion can be at its best. Art is dynamic: religion is typically stuck in its own outworn doctrines, and religions should be like art, should be arts.
Flikissimekado wrote in reoply to Tfindlay
Are you attributing some cosmic order of consciousness to the natural world, wherein any act with physical consequences is inherently registered and therefore in some way meaningful? Or is it rather that the physical consequences of such acts, whilst not impacting on consciousness themselves, may be perceived after the event whereupon they become 'meaningful' (which here I would posit, erm, 'means' something different again; the fact of a broken twig's 'meaning' to one who finds it already broken seems to me to suggest the inductive powers of the finder before it bestows a more existential meaning on the breaker)?
I think Flikissimekado agrees with me that there is no pre-established, ordered, cosmos, but that ordered cosmos happens 'after the event'. But I go further and claim that there isn't' any event at all until consciousness has created an event out of that consciousness's previous memories plus its inherent categories such as time, space and causality.