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The idea of 1,000 monkeys typing
for a million years
in a certain museum comes to mind.
Would their writing come closer, albeit distant,
to Dr. Dick's
The Foundations of Physical Reality
or to the responses?
Harv:
"If you agree that your model is a clever human invention, then it's value can only be stated in terms of its useability. How can we use your model Dick?"
Me:
It's a meditation... an alternate view
which is self-consistent and which differs from conventional views. The exercise of traveling between two large coherent systems has exercised Harv's noodle. Possibly has other, more successful applications.
Harv:
"What does it do? From what I can tell all it does is sit on a harddrive somewhere and take up a few megabytes of storage space. Other than that, I don't see it creating new technology, or finding any new insights to our human understanding of nature.
Me:
Okay, now. That's not nice. Pachelbel's Canon sat for 300 years in a stack of music before it became so well-enjoyed. Popularity, you have said before, is your guide to "genius." The popular view is often way behind. Get it?
Harv:
"If you say it supports the findings of science, then how can it do that if it is just an invention? Inventions are just fabrications of nature, they aren't able to provide any 'truths'."
Me:
As an example, the invention of penicillin was an accident of meditation, not proceeding from natural phenomena but entirely mental. Fleming's mind was not looking for "popular" understanding, but measuring the warld against an internal model.
When he saw someting new, his internal model contained the subtle machinery and ability to make new relationships on the "drawing board" -- an ability that nature ( and some folks posting here) did not have.
There was an inadvertant spill. The goo would have just sat there, if the matter had been left only to any part of nature except 'mind.'
A better example of an invention that is what you call "just a fabrication of nature (that isn't) able to provide any 'truths'" might be
your invention of using a comma between sentences. That's a popular one, btw. Or was that just a typo? If so, my apologies on that point.
Harv:
"If you look at all human truths as inventions, then they are really no truths at all - just fabrications of human ideas to produce useful notions."
Me: This quite opposes the definition
of "Truth" with which Dr. Albert Einstein begins his book titled "Relativity", In that passage, "truth" is defined as being dependent on the relationships between defined terms -- whose definitions can be anything we want, so long as they are internally consistent. His example is in geometry, and he admits the matter might be difficult to take beyond geometry. Dr. Dick's paper appears to take up that challenge. Whether the system of thought he proposes is comprehended and enjoyed 300 from now is not quite up to you.
How about reading the first chapter of Dr. Einstein's book and giving your response? D
o you agree with Dr. Einstein, or do you take a different view?
If you had "come into the world to bear witness to the truth," then popular correctness would not be your foundation.
If Dr. Dick's gruffness and occasional sarcasm toward you makes you feel justified in covering his posts with "popular wisdom" that does not make your ideas MORE true than his. Question is, are your ideas internally consistent? If not, you are primarily a "critic" -- a fairly honest profession in careful hands -- but not a player in a deeper sense. You do not have a philosophy of your own beside which you can place your real name, as Dr. Richard Stafford has done. Your
popularity with some folks here notwithstanding, your real contribution must be measured against how annoying it is that you don't have a philosophical system of your own to stand by...even though you post more words than anyone else, I think.
If you are personally opposed to him, a good way to show it would be just what you do...fail to comprehend it and assail it using popular wisdom.
Someone here has used the phrase "Harv is correct." It seems they use a definition for that term "correct" which can be different from
"What Harv says is accurate (or true)." The idea of correctness derives from orthodoxy -- the popular definition of what is true in a given age or to a particular group. Correctness may quite perishable, or it might be quite lasting.
What is popularly correct today is sometimes not the same as what is popularly correct to honest observers 300 years from now.
It would be unrealistic to expect a satisfactory response. I would rather you went deep and acquired the wherewithal to respond satisfactorily
later
than have your usual quick, disrespectful response
sooner. I mean this with warm sincerity. The truth of it gives me no warmth, but only the prospect of the benefit which you may create merely by allowing yourself the time and peace for such deep contemplation, undisturbed by any need to rush to defend an indefensible body of
"critic's" analysis. Nobody can defend their "critic's" analysis. That is why honest, friendly criticism is such a benevolent activity -- it plays second fiddle to the melody.
Regards,
Boxholder
"It's just a Box of Rain. I don't know who put it there. Believe it if you need it. If you don't, just pass it on." -- Grateful Dead lyric.
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