In message <3.0.2.32.19990523231811.007f3090@pop.dial.pipex.com>, Dave
Pape <davepape@dial.pipex.com> writes
>At 14:57 23/05/99 -0500, Joe wrote:
>
>>> >Not sure I believe in Things, myself, but if there's nothing "out
>>> >there", how do you account for all the consistencies in our perceptions?
>>>
>>> Cos I believe in relationships. The way I see it, and I'm a bit of an
>>> armchair dosser thinker, is that Things, when you look at them, look like
>>> arrangements of other Things.[...] I ended up
>>> thinking that maybe the relationships between Things are realler than the
>>> Things themselves.
>>
>>Think of things and the relationships which obtain between them as
>>co-primordial and mutually grounding.
>
>I'm trying. Doesn't do a massive amount for me, though.
Think of it this way: all that's "really real" is stuff like strangeness, charm, and "things" that wink into existence for a few nanoseconds then blink out again. That stuff happens to cohere (!) in larger scale patterns, which are what we perceive. All that we know, and that we can know, is patterns, information. Both "things" and "relationships" are abstractions, swirls in the quantum soup, like whirlpools and eddies in a mountain stream.
Nice, eh? :-)
-- Robin Faichney Visit The Conscious Machine at http://www.conscious-machine.com