Carl Fink:
> See, as a science-trained person that sounds like a
> non-sequitur. We understand lots of things that we
> can't experience personally. I understand
> the QUANTUM, which is pretty darn weird.
I'd say if you fully understand quantum mechanics and its implications, you're wasting your talents in the wrong forum!
> So one suspects that Greg's using the word
> "understand" somewhat differently from me.
For my money, Greg's use the word in question is well within the normal usage. There's a valid and feasible difference to be drawn between being able to intellectualise about something (rightly or wrongly), and being able to comprehend it as an experience. It's possible to have one without the other, or even have have the two in contradiction to one another. (Like the hyper-determinists who will tell you with a straight face that consciousness is an illusion, arising from entirely predictable (in principle) physical processes. Which would be something of an advanced mystical practice exercise if one were to try to emotionally reconcile oneself with this, which of course is the bit that tends to get missed out...)
Greg:
> They were concurrent because no consciousness existed to separate
> time and space.
If there's no (separate) time, it's not strictly accurate to talk about 'concurrency' either, mind you... But I think the point is made.
But never mind the 'Green' Age, the Orlanthi don't believe in "time" before 0ST. But in either case, it's possible discern "events", with "causes" and "effects", though the further one goes "back", the less possible it seems to be to coherently associate actual time intervals (or even linearity) with said events. (Witness the largely made-up looking "timeline" for the Dara Happan golden age, and the total lack of same for earlier.) Perhaps the diffentiation between time and space is both on the one hand progressive, and on the other, itself subjective.
[and in a later message]
> In the Green Age you and I are not separate things. We are members of the
> same people, not individual beings. We are the clan, for instance.
> I know this is difficult for us to understand in the modern western way of
> thinking.
This is Group Consciousness then, is it?
Presumably this is also the level of consciousness that elves retain some of; or it's the largest such part, at least. Anecdote seems to imply that they retain a common level of empathic connection with their own "forest", but are by no means incapable to sticking it to alydrami of a different sort (much less non-A.).
[and another...]
> It might be interesting to debate whether science every really knows
> anything except the effects of the physical world.
The self-described domain of the scientific method is anything you can formulate a hypothesis about, devise an experiment to test, and observe the results of in such a way as to support or negate the hypothesis. So the above proposition hangs on: is there something other than "the physical world", which isn't subject to the above? (Health warning: Publically answering such questions may lead to you being called a "Vitalist", "Positivist", or other rude names.)
(Which isn't to say that one doesn't still get "scientific theories" which are apparently or in principle untestable and unfalsifiable, mind you.)
> But I do not wish to debate that hee since it will lead nowhere
> useful for us
Since when is "lead somewhere useful" part of this list's remit? I thought it was the dumping ground for all the stuff the moderators of the "useful" lists didn't want? ;-) (Well, half ;-), anyway.)
> But I think that a better example of what I am talking about would be to
> ask whether you understand what happened before the Big Bang.
There are, to be fair, plenty of theories about this too. (There is no 'before'; collision in 11-space of different m-branes; leaving aside various "big bang deniers"...) None of these would I dignify, personally, as "understanding" or "knowing", though.
It's an intruiging exercise, mind you, to analogise events in the cosmology of out own physical universe, and Glorantha myth. My own stab would be along the following lines:
Durapdur: m-space, the multiverse, _everything_. Atrilith: big bang, up to the end of cosmic inflation. Vith: 'cooling' of the universe to be transparent to light, and aftermath.
I trust that was a suitably uninformative exercise...
Keith:
> The science that I think gives me the most clear analogue to the way I
> understand the Mythic ages (or at least, the Green Age) is Child Development.
> New born babies have a very different "understanding" of the world to 2 year
> olds. They have no concept of there being different people, or of time
> passing. Even as children develop they have peculiar (to us adults)
> understandings of the way other people percieve things (for example, the "if
> I can't see you, you can't see me" type phenomena).
This is more than a little reminscent of Mashunasan's "mythology as states of consciousness" take, though I shudder to think of a school of mystics that took your analogy _too_ literally...
Cheers,
Alex.
--__--__--
Powered by hypermail