Ontological Arguments (Humans)

by xeno6696 , Sonoran Desert, Tuesday, September 28, 2010, 02:24 (5170 days ago) @ dhw

MATT: Maybe asking "why materialism was wrong" was the WRONG question. David's arguments about God (as they exist on this forum) was my target, and I fear that the experiential nature of our existence made too easy a fodder for you. 
> While I have no technical problem reducing my feelings of love for my wife to a burst of oxytocin in my brain, I fully realize that no language that exists encapsulates the feeling I get.
> 
> MATT (to David): He [= dhw] was informing me that experience itself is something that cannot be encapsulated into language!
> 
> Um...no...actually I wasn't. The second section of my post is a direct response to your question why materialism is wrong, and that has nothing to do with language. It concerns experiences (like love, creativity, aesthetic appreciation) which we cannot attribute to any known materials. These experiences are a major factor in my own agnosticism, and I can understand why they might tip the balance for a theist, just as materialism tips the balance for an atheist. Of course you and David must sort out the ontological problem between you (good luck to you both!) but ... I hope this isn't too presumptuous of me ... I'd say you were asking the RIGHT question and are now skating away from your real problem, which is your reluctance to abandon materialism. I don't think your love for your wife is due to a burst of oxytocin in your brain, any more than your terror when confronted by a masked gunman is caused by the pounding of your heart. You query your own epistemology, but at the same time you shy away from things you can't study. Why? I would say that is "the deeper question".-Would it be fair to say that I really don't know what to do? To be blunt, if you can't study it, how can you really talk about it? How can you share it? We already know that language is imprecise, especially when dealing with experience. The best thing we have is metaphor. About the only thing I could think of to handle this would be to post old song lyrics I've written in a former life? I don't know what you expect me to do; I don't have a tool to study experience. My time in Buddhism taught me much about "the present moment" but the core principle I learned there (and I still have in my heart) is that experience is right here, right now, and that's it. You don't get to talk about it or study it. You just feel it and it's gone. It's as fleeting as it is persistent. I've asked you a couple times how you handle these things, and at least on those occasions, you didn't seem to have an answer other than that you are open. How do you handle them epistemologically? That's my target here, and everyone seems to ignore it every time I ask it. Is it so obvious that you think I'm just dense? -I've never been closed to hearing about other things, but at the same time the topic makes me uncomfortable, not because it challenges materialism, but because the imprecise nature of dealing with experience pretty much means that the discussion isn't going to be terribly fruitful. We all agree that I can't communicate to you the experience of "red," so why do we insist? Why should we? When you talked about your experience with the juju, what is it about that that I could possibly get from that without having at least a similar experience? Do you understand a little better why I tend to just let these matters lie? -Another good possibility on why its so difficult for me is that for my entire life, I've lived in a mental world. As an only child to a single parent, you get quite a bit of time for reflection and internal model-building. Or, maybe the part of the brain that causes "ultra-religiousness" in Temporal Lobe Epilepsy is downright the opposite direction in my head. There's an evangelical saying, "Everyone has a god-shaped hole in their heart." I can safely say, I've never felt that hole. Does that mean that the Evangelicals are correct, and I am broken? Or like the current Pope has said, that I am less than human?

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\"Why is it, Master, that ascetics fight with ascetics?\"

\"It is, brahmin, because of attachment to views, adherence to views, fixation on views, addiction to views, obsession with views, holding firmly to views that ascetics fight with ascetics.\"