From: Robert Owen (rowen@technologist.com)
Date: Sun Mar 05 2000 - 20:59:35 MST
Technotranscendence wrote:
> ...existence is literally everything that exists...
I'm afraid this is just too circular to be informative. This is what is
bound to happen when you try to turn a concept into an axiom, and
you end by saying something like "existence is exactly what it is and
not something else".
> It's possible that some of
> these things could exist in a non-spatial way.
When you use an undefined term as a verb in the subjunctive mood,
EVERYTHING is possible. The noun "Existence" and the infinitive
"to exist" are entirely different things. As in, "esse est percipi".
> > The approach I personally prefer is to treat things as "virtual objects"
> > which which "exist" only in terms of their relations with each other.
> > That is, they are completely specified by their relationships. To have
> > relationships is to exist.
>
> To be is to be something. To be is to have an identity, or to be is to be
> an identity. To be aware of something, on whatever level, is to enter into
> a relationship with it. Indentification, to whatever degree, is a
> relational process.
Why can't we stick to the action of existing and deal with that? Why do
you insist on simultaneously confronting the action of knowing? It is not
that they lack association, it is that we avoid confusion by taking things
one at a time.
To sum up my position: [1] To be is to relate; [2] Existence is relation-
ality and existing is to be a term in one or more relations; [3] That which
exists does so as a member of an ordered pair or n-tuple insofar as they
instantiate or concretize a relation.
Platonically, the Forms are Relations; objects exist precisely insofar as they
participate in the actualization of a Form.
Once this is out of the way, one can move forward to epistemology by
postulating that that relations and their relata are that which is intelligible
within a perceptual field. I do not need a knowing subject because knowing
is a relationship between two relata; "subjectivity" and "objectivity" are
uselessly unintelligible. There is simply knowledge and known co-existing
in an epistemological field which you can call "consciousness" or, like
Maxwell's mathematical electromagnetic field, call it nothing at all. The
relation that is actualized, the important thing, is "knowing".
Bob
=======================
Robert M. Owen
Director
The Orion Institute
57 W. Morgan Street
Brevard, NC 28712-3659 USA
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