Lovely poem, thank you. I am sure it is true - with the requisite poetic license. Think about this. If a sufficiently advanced alien species arrived here and were able to capture a single strand of human DNA, they would probably be able to infer from it the entire history of Planet Earth. So it ain't that far out, is it?



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Bohm's paradigm is inherently antithetical to reductionism, in most forms, and accordingly can be regarded as a form of ontological holismthings, structures, abstractions and processes, including processes that result in (relatively) stable structures as well as those that involve metamorphosis of structures or things. In this view, parts may be entities normally regarded as physical, such as atoms or subatomic particles, but they may also be abstract entities, such as quantum states. Whatever their nature and character, according to Bohm, these parts are considered in terms of the whole, and in such terms, they constitute relatively autonomous and independent "sub-totalities". The implication of the view is, therefore, that nothing is entirely separate or autonomous.

Well, to respond to only one of the layers in your reply, perhaps we as a culture are dismissive of THE ONE because we generally have no clue as to what it means, in this tremendously complicated multiplex existence in which we now live. The perspective of THE ONE has only ever been available to those who are really able to simplify themselves and their life down to the bare physical basics. Granted, we can now contemplate it in a literary and philosophical kind of way. It has made its way back into the discourse of modernity mainly via the Sixties, Thomas Merton, Indian philosophy, and so on. But it remains a profoundly important idea and one that I think we should approach with great diffidence.

I think that the reason the idea of The One is such a big deal is because of what it represents in relation to the human situation. After all, multiplicity and division seems basic to the very nature of existence. So 'The One' is symbolic of 'that which is beyond division'. In Plotinus and Platonism, 'The One' is the origin of everything but is also beyond conceptualism because our concepts assume the existence of multiplicity. But that Platonic notion of The One is definitely present in Scholastic philosophy, as it came in via Augustine's reading of Plotinus and also the Celestial Hierarchy of (psdeudo) Dionysius, which were both fundamental to scholasticism.

So an interesting question is: was this understanding of the One a casuality of Nominalism? Sounds like an interesting research topic to me.....

Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind. The understanding can intuit nothing, the senses can think nothing. Only through their unison can knowledge arise.

I wonder if this idea of The One expresses the notion of religiousness par excelence.

Beautifully said. But perhaps this points to a different type of religious outlook to that of the Hebrews - so different, in fact, as to warrant a different description to 'religion' as is now understood.

The idea of The One is much more like the Greek (Platonist) and Hindu (Vedic) conceptions. The Greek influences were, I think, preserved in the Catholic and Orthodox systems, but then lost in the Reformation, because of Luther and Calvin's rejection of everything outside Scripture as various forms of paganism.

This is documented in the excellent Theological Origins of Modernity by M. A. Gillespie. He shows how many of the Platonist insights of Ficino and Renaissance humanism, and, in a broader sense, many elements of the perennial philosophy, were basically rejected by Martin Luther and the nominalists, and replaced with the Lutheran attitude of 'faith only in the revealed word of God' who was understood to be completely inscrutable and all-powerful. This has had an enormous impact on the religious view of modernity ( which I think includes atheism), because it essentially precludes consideration of the existential meaning of religious truths in any terms other than Biblical.

It can be argued, furthermore, that much of the impetus behind New Age thought, and the influx of Eastern influences into modern Western culture, has been driven by the necessity of re-discovering these insights which were preserved in Catholic and Orthodox theology but driven out of Protestantism by Luther and Calvin.

To assume that notions of consciousness, or time, for example, are rendered intelligible only when subsumed to the methods and laws of materialism or physicalism is itself a belief regulated by some metaphysical notion of reality which cannot be measured or tested a priori.

That's the essence of my gripe against anti-meta-physicians. Of course we can change the term, but the game remains the same. For me it's obvious that much of our world view does not involved quantified measurement.

To address time once again. I'll give a personal example of existential time. My passion is thought, study, etc. My problem, as a mortal being, is that there is simply not time to learn everything, to think about everything. My priority is to know and understand that best that can be known and understood. But I know enough not to expect some authority to tell me where this is. Indeed, there are all too many authorities with radically different opinions. It's my "existential burden" to wrestle with this, a proud person who is humble enough to seek wisdom in the words of others, and exposed enough to know that he is not as exposed as he wants to be. I have generally made choices in this regard toward a broad synthetic view. For instance, I don't choose to get bogged down in all the endless complexities of calculus, which nevertheless is beautiful to me in its fundamentals. And I also don't see the value of slogging through boring writers just for whatever questionable honor might be associated with such a slogging. As a mortal man with a lust for knowledge, I feel existential time. I generally am too absorbed in something to suffer this, but every once in a while, I am forced to make a choice. Hell, every trip to the library is a fork on the road. Reading about complexity lately, I can tell you that the smallest fork in the road now can put you on a different continent later.

Perception and mind are not limited to humans for all "objects" perceive (prehend)their surroundings and have degrees of freedom in response that involve mind like and perceptive properties. In some sense all entities have interior (mind like and perception like) and exterior (physical) properties of which science only can measure and detect exterior properties. Thus the partial and incomplete view of science with relationship to the experiential aspects of reality. This also explains a great deal about quantum paradoxes for the observer and the event are all part of an interdependent and interrelated reality.

Is there a difference between mind and mind-like?
Are you suggesting that all animals experience a world per se?
It seems to me that animals do experience something, although I am cautious to call what they experience a world.
Also, Im wondering if you consider the interior world and exterior world separate phenomena, and what is the cut off between a form of life with and without a mind?

Time is merely the perception of the change which occurs in reality.

actually a point which is coming out of all of this for me is that knowledge is active. This was said by Aristotle. We are not, as Locke says, a passive recpient of sensations which are impressed upon the tabula rasa of consciousness. In which case, time is not merely the perception of a change which occurs in reality, but the means by which the intellect orders the content of consciousness (cf Kant).

Somewhere, in all of this, there is a philosophical payoff associated with the idea of us being passive recipients of impressions......

Those who maintain that human "mind" and human "perception" play a role in the construction of reality and have casual efficacy in the world as for example in "the quantum collapse" are essentially correct.

The fundamental flaw in this line of thinking is limiting properties of "mind" and properties of "perception" to humans and perhaps a few higher animals. In truth all of reality is perceptive of its surroundings and realitonships and all of reality has at least primitive properies of mind and casual efficacy. In short for the most part this line of thinking is still too anthropomorphic and anthrocentric. Natue is pan experientialist and pan psychist. We are not talking about sense based perception or conscious self awareness as mind but much more primitive and inherent modes of perception and interiority. The story of science essentially leaves out this experiential aspect of nature much as the objective description of mind leaves out mental experience.

The concept of the "one" is intimately related to this notion of the interdependence of all of reality and the perceptive relationships between all things.

Reality is not composed of "substances" but of events that occur in space time and which have both material and mental aspects.

Time is merely the perception of the change which occurs in reality.
Time is the human subjective perception of the change which is fundamental reality.
This is essentially the process view of time, reality and quantum paradox.

Those who maintain that human "mind" and human "perception" play a role in the construction of reality and have casual efficacy in the world as for example in "the quantum collapse" are essentially correct.

The fundamental flaw in this line of thinking is limiting properties of "mind" and properties of "perception" to humans and perhaps a few higher animals. In truth all of reality is perceptive of its surroundings and realitonships and all of reality has at least primitive properies of mind and casual efficacy. In short for the most part this line of thinking is still too anthropomorphic and anthrocentric. Natue is pan experientialist and pan psychist. We are not talking about sense based perception or conscious self awareness as mind but much more primitive and inherent modes of perception and interiority. The story of science essentially leaves out this experiential aspect of nature much as the objective description of mind leaves out mental experience.

Those who maintain that human "mind" and human "perception" play a role in the construction of reality and have casual efficacy in the world as for example in "the quantum collapse" are essentially correct.

The fundamental flaw in this line of thinking is limiting properties of "mind" and properties of "perception" to humans and perhaps a few higher animals. In truth all of reality is perceptive of its surroundings and realitonships and all of reality has at least primitive properies of mind and casual efficacy. In short for the most part this line of thinking is still too anthropomorphic and anthrocentric. Natue is pan experientialist and pan psychist. We are not talking about sense based perception or conscious self awareness as mind but much more primitive and inherent modes of perception and interiority. The story of science essentially leaves out this experiential aspect of nature much as the objective description of mind leaves out mental experience.

actually a point which is coming out of all of this for me is that knowledge is active. This was said by Aristotle. We are not, as Locke says, a passive recpient of sensations which are impressed upon the tabula rasa of consciousness. In which case, time is not merely the perception of a change which occurs in reality, but the means by which the intellect orders the content of consciousness (cf Kant).

Somewhere, in all of this, there is a philosophical payoff associated with the idea of us being passive recipients of impressions......