Philosophising on the Evo vs Creo debate.

We are using the hand as a symbol. The hand represents a pointer, an arrow. When you point your finger at the dog food, the dog, who perhaps does not understand symbols, licks your finger instead of turning his head toward the food.This message has been edited by robinrohan, 05-05-2006 07:22 AMThis message has been edited by robinrohan, 05-05-2006 07:22 AM

I don't think I understand the topic very well. There is a sense in which all is process, since all is changing, but I would think there would have to be something to be processed. These somethings are objects. I don't think you can have an "event" without a something to go through the event.This message has been edited by robinrohan, 05-05-2006 10:18 AMThis message has been edited by robinrohan, 05-05-2006 10:19 AM

I just meant that our activities are so full of symbols that they hardly register to us as symbols. One theory about animals is that they can't think in terms of symbols. I don't know myself. Anyway, we can use our hands as symbols, but that doesn't mean it's something else when we use it as such. It's just a symbol--an abstraction.

I guess it is a possibility. I don't see why not.An emotional reaction to the idea: it feels suffocating to me think that all is mental.

I don't think so. Seems like that would be tantamount to saying that whatever idea that pops into our head is real.

What do you mean by the "whole mental thing"?

I think we are running into some confusion about what the word "real" means (which is normal). And this gets even more confusing if we deny the reality of physicality. It becomes a messy maze, too deep for me.

I think you are saying that the way our experience is construed is false (all is process, there are no individuals, etc--that's the reality).Yes, my emotional preference is for discreetness--that is, clear distinctness between things. I think it's important to register emotional reactions to ideas. It can be a bias. It may be, though I can't see it, that I have an emotional bias against the idea that something can come from nothing since so many posters said it was fine with them.I can recall reading Emerson in graduate school (he was a 'transcendentalist'--at least during his younger years) and my emotional reaction to reading him was extreme suffocation: everything is everything else, he seemed to be saying. I didn't want everything to be everything else. I wanted things to be separated out).

If you mean what I think you mean by "knower bias," there is no such thing, in my view. If I rationally intuit that this cannot be, then there must be a contradiction somewhere in the idea that something comes from nothing. An emotional bias is different. If I like an idea for some reason--say because it makes me feel good about myself--then I may have a tendency to think that idea true even if I have logical doubts. This is what one must guard against.

Yes, but I was trying to suggest that how I FEEL might be a bias against these Eastern ideas. It wasn't meant as an argument or justification.

I didn't mean cultural: I meant personal.ABE: I know not 'cultural.'This message has been edited by robinrohan, 05-05-2006 07:07 PM

So you agree with me that it is impossible that something can come from nothing?

I would include everything ifen.

In my view, something had to be forever if anything exists. Otherwise, we are saying that something came from nothing. It could be anything, but it had to be around forever.

What I meant was that something or someone has to be eternal unless something can come from nothing.