[talk.religion.newage] Strange Experiences

mkent@violet.berkeley.edu.UUCP (02/26/87)

[]

In article <3914@milano.UUCP> wex@milano.UUCP writes:
>In article <2579@jade.BERKELEY.EDU>, mkent@violet.berkeley.edu writes:
>>    When I was a little kid, I used to think plants turned toward the light
>> because "they like the light."  After a while, my teachers in school
>> explained    ...     This is the *real* explanation.
>>    It really amazes me that it took me a good twenty years to realize that
>> this mechanistic explanation says precisely nothing about whether or not
>> plants "like" the light. 
>
>There are many problems today that are quite similar.  For example, I've
>never quite figured out why electrons that have been excited to a
>higher-than-normal energy level insist on emitting photons so that they can
>go back to the original lower-energy position.
>I'm unwilling to say that electrons "like" being at the lowest possible
>energy level - how does it know.

   Well, this is really a deep question:  how does it know? Over in mod.ai
folks are continually batting around the issue of consciousness, who/what
has it and who/what doesn't, how can one tell, etc.  I don't want to get
into that here, except to say that I feel it *is* a real issue and I'm not
prepared to truly dismiss out-of-hand the notion that electrons behave
"with intention." Perhaps electrons are possessed of sense of self. (I
admit this sounds ridiculous to me, but then lots of things sound
ridiculous to me; my dad's side of the family are Nth generation Bostonians
:-)) Perhaps it's not the electrons that have intention, but "God" likes to
see them act that way. (Can't you just see some guy with a white beard,
shooting at the electrons' feet like the heavy in a Hollywood western
shooting at an Indian's feet, yelling "Dance, 'lectron! Dance!" and
laughing maniacally?)

   I think one's "by-default" attribution of intention or the lack of it
has big implications in one's world-view.  If I try on the assumption that
the material world is basically alive, I feel respectful, fascinated,
charmed... a world full of spirit, yeah, that's the ticket... Issues as to
how this intention might be organized, managed, allocated crop up - is it
centralized, One God? - maximally distributed, every subatomic particle an
independent? - hierarchically organized, with individual pseudo-selves
appearing locally among the subtrees at certain levels for reasons clear
only at higher levels?  

>In general, I think it is useful when we
>can provide non-metaphysical explanations for unusual phenomena. 

   I agree, but this is useful in a non-metaphysical sense.  Metaphysical
explanations of phenomena are useful in a metaphysical sense.  "Man" doesn't
live by bread alone, eh?

>I don't see why some metaphysicists insist on interpreting such 
>explanations as attacks.
>Alan Wexelblat

   I'm not sure what you're getting at here, so I'll just take your
statement at face value.  I'm kind of a metaphysicist myself, and I will
sometimes take physical explanations of phenomena as (in a way) attacks.
When I talked about my "plants like the light" ideas as a schoolkid, I
wasn't offered "an alternative explanation of phenomena seen from a
different and possibly interesting/useful viewpoint," I was offered "the
correct explanation to substitute for my incorrect one."  This is kind of
an attack, I think.  Or did you perhaps have something very different in
mind?

   In the movie "Little Big Man," Chief Dan George says words to the
effect, "The human beings (his own tribe, of course :-)) think everything
is alive:  birds, trees, rocks.  But the white man thinks everything is
dead.  If things keep trying to move and live, the white man will rub them
out." Hearing that made me feel bad, because I thought there was a lot of
truth in it.

		- Marty

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Marty Kent
net:  MKent@violet.berkeley.edu
work: Dept. of EMST / 4527 Tolman Hall / UC Berkeley / Berkeley, Ca. 94720
      415/ 642 0288
home: 1129 Bancroft Way / Berkeley, Ca. 94702
      415/ 548 9129
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