Dialoguing - A Neo-Buddhist and a Symbiotic Panentheist
Clyde G. is a respected thinker and Neo-Buddhist who has been acknowledged for his ability to ask questions going to the heart of issues regarding metaphysical models of reality.
Our ability to affect ‘The Whole of Reality’ - Part I
[050528 cg] During a recent contemplation I thought of “that which is created and thereafter eternal”: information. I mean information in its broadest sense. This would include knowledge, facts, and data, …
[050529 djs] Correct but keep in mind that the passive existence of ‘data’, ‘facts’, ‘knowledge’, has no meaning without a ‘knower’/consciousness/’soul’/…
[050530 cg] While I understand the relationship of knower and the object known, facts have an existence at least as real as our existence. For example, the relationship of pi to the circumference and radius of a circle existed before sentient beings discovered that fact and will continue to exist even should sentient beings cease to exist in the universe.
[050530 djs] Agreed, the question becomes what is the purpose of facts without knowing? The purpose of knowing can be described as: Knowing exists to experience. Experience what becomes the question. The experiencing does not necessarily have to do with facts. The experiencing may incorporate love, happiness, sadness, art. The experiencing may deal with the creativity of knower. The physical acts both as a ‘place’ within which ‘facts’ emerge and a place within which ‘art’ emerges influenced by the ‘facts of life’.
[050531 cg] You ascribe ‘purpose’ to facts and to knowing. I do not. If, as you propose, facts exist for knowing and the purpose of knowing is to experience, then what is the purpose of experience? If you answer that the purpose of experience is to create new facts, then OK, but it is circular.
[050603 djs] The argument: ‘The purpose of existing is to experience and create new facts’ is only circular if one leaves the argument at this point. If, however, one then asks and answers the question: ‘But what is the purpose if experiencing and creating new facts?’ The answer to the question, then breaks the circular argument into being simply a question followed by an answer which in turn leads to an examination of human purpose, of human ‘functionality’, of the purpose for the existence of discrete entities of knowing as opposed to the ‘whole’ of knowing.
Having said that let me break the circular argument by asking the question and answering the question:
Question: ‘But what is the purpose of experiencing and creating new facts?’
Answer (Potential rationale – one must always keep in mind that there is nothing one can ‘know’ as a fact. We can only define truths as best we can and move on from that point. Science itself is based upon this principle: Example: Tomorrow the sun will rise in the east and set in the west. Well perhaps but that would not be an absolute truth because the universe could collapse between now and tomorrow.)
If the whole of knowing is omniscient and timeless, then it would take no time for the whole of knowing to know all there is to know. As such the whole of knowing would have no choice but to recycle all its knowing again and again and again … Philosophers call the ‘eternal recurrence’.
To circumvent ‘eternal recurrence’, the whole of knowing has but to ‘live’ a ‘new experience’ or ‘create’ a ‘new fact’.
The question: ‘But what is the purpose of experiencing and creating new facts?’
The answer: To avoid ‘eternal recurrence’.
Simple and rational.