Sunday, January 30, 2011

OBSCURANTISM -- INESCAPABLE COST OF POINT OF VIEW

OBSCURANTISM IS THE INESCAPABLE COST OF EVERY MORTAL POINT OF VIEW:

What is "The Superior Reality?"  One may conceptualize it as being mainly or solely quantitative, or as being mainly or solely qualitative.  One's worldview concerning purposefulness will color one's conceptions.  If one orients and devotes one's identity and purposefulness towards uncovering a quantitatively useful Model for leveraging governance over everything, one will pursue a conception consistent with that purpose.  If one devotes oneself towards uncovering a qualitatively useful Myth or way for inspiring or facilitating sustainable communications and empathies of apprehension, one will pursue a  conception consistent with that purpose.  The utility of each model, myth, or conception will depend largely on (1) purpose (moral or practical), (2) point of view, and (3) frame of reference.  However, there may abide a way to synthesize those two main worldviews (externally empirical and internally intuitionist).  For example, a philosophy of Will seems to be devise-able that could respect the domain of both, without doing violence to either.

Synthesis (?):  Consciousness of Will, whether of aspect of Active present (conscious choice-making) or of accumulated Default (inanimate obedience to forces of nature), Qualitatively and spiritually defines one's unfolding experience of Universe.  However, Conscious Will is Quantitatively (scientifically) constrained to the possible choices open to Conscious Will, in fuzzy respect for how it has invested its Identity in ways that have signified its path to the present.  Unfoldment of Chaos is both tool and container of Will.  Universe is neither random nor predetermined, but is constrained to unfolding purposefulness.  Depending upon one's purpose, point of view, and frame of reference, Universe presents some faces that are mainly predictable and some that are mainly inscrutable.  Universe cannot be solely ruled or predicted, either by scientific empiricists or by spiritual intuitionists.  Neither philosophy of quantitative Empiricism nor of qualitative or post-modern Obscurantism can fully explicate Universe.  To  know Universe, one would have to know oneself, but this, in space-time, one cannot accomplish.  At best, One may apprehend and appreciate One's role in quantum, discrete series of dance steps and feedback among other perspectives of Oneself (which process avails illusions of continuosity).  Thus, to know oneself cannot be the beginning of wisdom, but only the aim of wisdom.  To regulate in hope of eliminating uncertainty and establishing scientific sustainability is both vain and soul stifling.  We should pursue harmony, not in sole respect of our quantifiable history and nature, but in humble regard for our qualitative purposefulness and  spirituality.  We ought not allow America's lamp of liberty to be snuffed.  The truth is not solely out there; the important truth is mainly within ourselves, yet still inscrutable.

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Our experience of quantitative choice-making is inextricably coupled with the quality of our appreciation of that which unfolds in response to our choice-making. We can minutely study the nature of all that unfolds, but we cannot reasonably say, in exclusivity, either that nature emerges from consciousness or that consciousness emerges from nature. In our mortal being, neither consciousness nor nature shows to be entirely artefactual of the other.

Much of the truth about our existence pertains to paths and fuzzy inclinations, which unfold in response to a meta quality of appreciative functioning of conscious choice-making ("free will"). We may do better more to appreciate the quality of Will that is about the Truth, and less to seek to prove quantitative Truth about Will. Truth about free will is not something that can be analyzed under a microscope.

Presentment of material possibilities affects how meta, immaterial, conscious will makes choices. How conscious will makes choices affects succeeding sequences of presentations of possibilities. Ultimately, no mortal, completely free of obscurantism, can describe or study, in simultaneity, the interfunctioning of nature and will, the observed and the observer, the beloved and the lover.

Even so, the relationship that unfolds between possible choices and choices made manifest is always signed by information that is stored in all that is presently manifested in quantitatively measurable substance. However, this unfoldment proceeds in loops of feedback along the way of the "eternal present": the nature of possible choices affects the Will that selects choices to be made manifest, which affects the field of possible choices, which then affects the choices to be made manifest, and so on.

Neither our possibilities nor our mortal choices are exclusively the cause or the effect of any aspect of our unfolding situation. Rather, depending on purpose, focus, and context, either nature or consciousness can be analyzed as cause or effect, the determiner or the determined (not in completeness, but in partiality). Being mortal, each person's purpose, focus, and context, is always obscured, at least in part --- even from himself.

Somehow, obscured beyond ouf mortal ken, a field of consciousness is wedded to all of nature, throughout, as it unfolds its manifestations. Absent such coupling, it seems that no aspect of the potential of nature could be chosen to unfold into manifestation.

PERIL: We have been nurtured to a context in which the interconnectedness and communication of our choice-making has become perilous to the continuation of our civilized state of being --- unless we become receptive to vision appropriate to our appreciation of a Field of consciousness --- with which we must always reconcile. We will strive to a survivable consensus about those aspects (which accompany the obscurantist position of being mortal) which are musical, or our civilization will again fall to a divided babel of noise.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Useful idiots always believe the leader of a socialist movement has their interests at heart. So, they seek to install visions of ever bigger government, replete with "scientific" notions of checks and balances. Problem is, once government becomes so big, intrusive, connected, and nervously watchful, it takes only the first despot to render all legal promises asunder. Notwithstanding the best of intentions of would-be lawgivers, if a society is ignorant, or made so, the first despot tends to arrive early. We have no business wasting our treasury trying to democratize illiterate societies that are deeply conditioned to despotism. Indeed, we would do better to tend to the logs in our own eyes, that have rendered us stupid about our own failing, representative democracy.

Anonymous said...

Except in respect of context, which is continuously changing, most words lack capacity for conveying meaning. We need an institution to preserve the meaning of the words as used in the Constitution in a way that allows us to retain a meaningful connection with our past and our unfolding purposes. For that, we have relied on the Supreme Court. Should Congress, beholden as it is to the fickle concerns of a more and more addled, mis-informed, and easily bribed electorate, now be charged with any such role? Problem is, with one more appointment, Obama would turn the Court itself into an easily manipulated bevy of addled fruit loops. It's not that our electorate has been dumbed down. It's worse. It's that our electorate has been "taught" so much that is not so. In this state of affairs, I don't see a "solution." What we need is a miracle, for which we, in our lack of faith, have little hope. Somehow, we need to find leaders who can restore common sense to our populace, and then we need to give the federal government a major haircut. It's simply not possible to preserve constitutional consistency (i.e., the rule of law) when the number of new laws reaches beyond human capacity for common sense. Not even if we suddenly invented A.I.