[Aspaqlaria] Aspaqlaria

[Aspaqlaria]

Aspaqlaria

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What Exists?

Posted: 26 Feb 2009 02:57 PM PST
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Aspaqlaria/~3/XcJJUCyTzDg/what-exists.shtml


Bishop Berkley said that  reality is a set of inputs G-d feeds into our  
souls. In His compassion, he allows us to work together by giving us  
consistent worldviews with each other. Which is why when a tree falls in  
the forest and there is no one there to hear it, it makes no sound. But  
then, there is really no tree nor that part of the forest, either.

I dont believe that.

The Tanya (the defining text of Chabad chassidus) says that the only thing  
that exists is G-d, then when we say there is none but Him we dont just  
mean no other gods, but nothing at all else exists but Him. The Lurianic  
notion of tzitzum, Divine withdrawal to make room for the universe is  
deemed an illusion. Thus, the problem Im avoiding by a judicious use of  
quotes, or throwing in a so to speak, they use to prove it cant be real.  
G-d cant really limit Himself. He gave us free will, and thus the illusion  
of being independent entities. And everything else we see that we think is  
independent is part of that illusion. Its a different form of reality is  
all in our heads, in creating such a gap between the One Real Thing and the  
many things we think are there. In Chabad writings this is associated with  
yeish meiAyin (something from nothing, the Hebrew version of ex nihilo),  
which they would have to write with that capital A. From G-ds perspective,  
He is the Yeish (Something), and everything else is ayin (nothingness).  
 From without our illusion, He is the Ayin, and we are the yeish that comes  
from that nothingness.

Kant was less extreme. He spoke of the neumenal, that which is actually out  
there, and the phenomenal, the world as experienced. He believed there  
actually is a neumenal universe that lies behind what we do physics on, but  
we dont really know whats its like. E.g. he tried to prove that time and  
space are phenomena, not inherent.

Esnst Mach (after whom they named the speed of sound) and Einstein took  
this one step further and used it to explain why science is possible. The  
latter often said, the most incomprehensible thing about the world is that  
it is comprehensible. How is it that our minds logic matches the worlds  
rules? Not just one the gross scale, which is obvious what shaped that  
mental logic was the ability to make sense of the events around us. But  
even in details like coming up with tensor calculus just a few years before  
it became the central way of expressing General Relativity? Science has  
gone well beyond the intuitive or that which would give a particular kind  
of mind more survival value. And yet we can still reason about the  
universe. Their solution: We are analyzing the phenomenological universe   
the kinds of things we can measure and find patterns in is itself shaped by  
the structure of that mind as the theory created to explain it.

Rav Dessler has his own variant of this notion. He asserts that the flow of  
time is a phenomenon, created when man ate from the fruit, and his whole  
worldview became centered on desire, pursuit, and attainment (or  
frustration)  a time sequence. He uses that idea to discuss time during the  
week of creation; according to R EE Dessler, the concept is entirely  
incomprehensible, and one could give it any duration depending on how you  
look at it. It was literally a week, literally billions of years (but thats  
a sadly materialistic perspective, in his opinion), and also literally the  
subsequent 6 millenia of human history. Doesnt make sense? Right  neumenal  
time doesnt fit how we think.

He has a similar approach to nature vs miracles. A person has to be very  
different than the norm, but he could reach the level where moral law  
defines his phenomenological universe more than physical law. Such a person  
experiences miracles. Even if it means someone else would experience a  
conflicting reality!

(My own position is along Rav Desslers lines, as you can tell from all the  
links to places where I discussed various elements of it in more detail.)


This posting includes a media file:  
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Aspaqlaria/~5/0ArPbu07ZGE/beshalach.pdf

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