Replies

Thanks, Mark. As to an example, I’ll have to depend on Matt. I think I can get him involved by replying to his entry.

Wow! Thanks for your extensive reply, Matt. This is going to take some study. It’s a area of Whitehead I didn’t even know existed.

Thanks, Scott. Any ideas on this?

Good point, Chris. My version is much too mild to explain Dan’s experience. I had in mind a longing or sense of dissatisfaction. All that’s too low on the emotional Richter scale to account for the more dramatic experiences even those less dramatic than Dan’s. I envy Dan: I’ve meditated for years but have never had much of a spiritual experience.

Thanks, Chris. I was hung up on the idea that W’s ontology required possibilities to be “somewhere” and so wondered about evil possibilites. All too big concepts for my small mind.

Great point about offloading responsibility for thinking, Dennis. I think it’s rampant in Christian Nationalism. (And thanks for your kind comment.)

Never mind answering my question on this topic. It was studied in a post by Kathleen in the prior session.

Joel, I’m reading a book that might address your question about the value of beauty, although it addresses beauty from the viewpoint of art: “Your Brain on Art: How the Arts Transform Us” by Susan Magsamen and Ivy Ross. Magsamen is a faculty member at John Hopkins and Ross is Vice President of Design for the Hardware Product Area at Google. As to the “value” of the beauty of art, look at these chapter titles: “Cultivating Well-Being,” “Restoring Mental Health,” “Healing the Body,” “Amplifying Learning,” and “Creating Community.”

I see where you’re coming from, and it makes me wonder if I really understand perception in the mode of causal efficacy. Hosinki says, “Rather, the human subject’s reception of the datum in causal efficacy has the character of “feeling” or “emotion.” Is this the answer, or is H talking about something different? We’ve got the two modes, but that just gets the data in. Is there a third something whereby aesthetic experience happens?

Thanks for your reply, Kathleen. I suppose my hang-up is that if I try to teach this at my church, I’m afraid someone is going to ask the kinds of questions I posed, and I wouldn’t know how to answer them.

The statement “that apart from the experiences of subjects there is nothing” really is stunning. Is that saying that experience is fundamental to reality, on the same level as creativity? I can see how that would be true: reality is composed of perishing active occasions experiencing prehension and the translation of the many into one. So experience all that is happening.

Your statement “One wants this to be real in that particular way” seems right on. Isn’t it a matter of us experiencing not just becoming but also being, though the emphasis is on becoming? Maybe I’m oversimplifying.

Once again, a beautiful picture. But to me, it does have contrasts (though I may be reading too much in):
blue/white
little ridges in the snow/little valleys

…at least to this beholder’s eye

Interesting depiction of Panpsychism, Eric. What I take away is chaos–like trillions upon trillions of active occasions making decisions that sometimes work with, sometimes work against one another. How do harmony and beauty ever come about in this mess? I think this is where the lure of God comes in. God lures all of these “consciousnesses” toward order.

The picture is beautiful, Dennis, and there’re lots contrasts here:
Colors: Blue sky, white clouds, white snow, green needles, black trunks and branches
Sky/earth
Movement (clouds)/stillness (the trees and earth)
Bare branches/branches covered with snow/branches with needles
etc.
I’m struggling though, because, I haven’t grasped yet how contrasts lead to beauty. It seems that harmony is necessary for beauty. But I realize this is a vast topic, and I’m not sure the term “beauty” in Process Thought is supposed to suggest aesthetics; it seems to be much broader.

I remember my math professors talking about a proof being beautiful and elegant. I sense what they meant just like I sense the beauty in your photograph or how we might call a friendship “beautiful.” So there almost a sense that I know what it is intuitively, but can’t expresse it. Alas.

Regarding your statement “this implies that what we see in ourselves we might also see in God”…Charles Hartshorne suggested (I can’t remember where) that to try to understand something like god, we have to rely on analogy. If he’s right, that guarantees that our vision of god will be anthropomorphic. But I don’t see that in the two aspects of god, at least not in god’s primoridal nature.

As to the interlation between the two, I’d like more info like you do. In PRP 98, Mesle just makes the statement that they are “woven together.” I wonder what that means.