LW Sleeth said:
At last I see why we are disagreeing so strongly on this issue, which has been a mystery to me because we seem to agree about more important things.
I have to say, respectfully, that your first statement above doesn't make sense to me, while your second statement seems to provide a clue about why you believe it.
Well, I would say your second para. contradicts the first, but it doesn't matter.
I would bet my britches you do science all the time with things you want to achieve in your home or profession.
I agree that I do science every moment of the day, as you say. My life probable depends on it.
Can you honestly say that approach doesn't work with all such things that can be observed with the senses, or that you personally don't find it valuable to surviving or being more comfortable on this planet?
I've never suggested this. I definitely find science useful, up to a point. (Perhaps we ought to define science sometime). My point is that the usefulness of science to me has no bearing on its 'truth' as an explanation of things, or its value as a human activity, and little on its epistemological status.
So what if science cannot explain what it is that establishes the "physical"?
So science cannot provide an explanation of anything, it can only model interactions.
As you imply, you and others of us think the answer to that is metaphysical, which is why it is outside the domain of science.
To be honest I do not think metaphysics is much more help than science. They are two sides of a coin. Science cannot explain anything precisely because metaphysical questions are unanswerable. (Heidegger is good on why this is so).
I mean, really, why judge science by what it cannot do?
How else can one judge it? I enjoy studying science because it provides a lot of evidence as to the nature of reality. However that evidence clearly shows that reality is not scientific.
Another problem we seem to have is how concretely you take things I say. My analogy is not about water.
Yes sorry. I wasn't just picking on water. I was suggesting that there is nothing of which you can conceive that could logically act as 'water' in your metaphor. I'll come back to this below.
It isn't easy to understand, but if it were (and if it is also true of course), then we'd already understand it. But here we run into a big problem with your persective on knowing reality. You say you don't care about the understandings science gives us, yet if I could give you a monistic model that accounts for the physics of things, you wouldn't be able to understand it. So where does that leave us?
This is a tricky issue. In my view monism is not logical, which is why I can't understand it, if you see what I mean. Again see below. Btw it's not that I don't care what science says, it's just that I do not consider that it represents a true understanding of reality. I would say that the existence of metaphysical questions makes that inarguable.
I don't know why you find it so hard to see monism as a possibility because if you start breaking down matter, which is the basis of the universe, you find energy, light, forces . . . i.e., just a few basic traits which are able to assume an incredible variety of shapes to give us "appearances." Is it that difficult to imagine those basic traits derive from something even more basic?
I agree in outline but let's focus on this ultimate monist substance/entity. Is this something or nothing? Does it exist or not-exist? Neither of these are logical answers to the question according to philosophers. In metaphysics it is an undecidable question (if true it is false, if false it is true, since either answer leads to contradictions). This is the problem with monism
However I do half agree with you about monism, in the sense of all things reducing
in a wayto one thing. But to make this work logically requires seeing this one thing in a 'non-dual' way, otherwise it's back to the 'problem of essence' and undecidable questions. Note that 'non-dual' means 'not two', and not 'one'.
However, I didn't say we'd never know experientially, I only said it can't be known intellectually or through the senses, and therefore scientifically. There is the possibility I've already spoken of, which is to learn to experience the "essense" of our own consciousness, and thereby come to know the absolute foundation of one's own existence.
Here we agree.
If you could develop that internal skill, you might just see that the basic stuff of your consciousness is the same basic stuff that makes up everything else.
In my view there is no 'might' about it. It is possible and countless people have done it, and will in future. Can't prove this unfortunately, although the scientific evidence supports the idea.
So there are two main issues in the monistic model: what is the formless foundation, and how does it get structured into "form."
Is not the main issue how a single substance can logically exist without changing the meaning of 'exist' (because existence is always relative)?
It is in the nature of reality that metaphysical questions cannot be answered. There must be a reason for this, just as there is for why apples fall down. Monism does not explain our inability to reason our way to the truth, but simply accepts it as a fact. In this sense monism is an appeal to mystery, for it says that if monism is true we cannot ever know why anything exists or what it is. (That's a shortcut through the arguments, I'll expand if it sounds ad hoc). A proper understanding would make clear why there is always an inevitable explanatory gap.
Yes, but I am claiming what "physical" means is some minimum degree of structure.
I agree. This implies that ultimate reality is immaterial, without phsyical properties. This is where I feel monism fails. It cannot get across this gap between the physical and the absolute for it suggests that the absolute exists, and how can something without properties exist (using 'exist' in an everyday sense)?
I passed through monism on my way to the Buddhist view, but I could never make sense of it for these kinds of reasons, and because it does not seem to explain anything, does not lead to any understanding.
Light as we know it has the structure of transverse oscillation, whose wavelength by the way, is stretching as the universe expands. What if the ground state of light is some non-oscillating but vibrant condition, and not "particles" at all. When compressed it accentuates its vibratory quality, polarizes it, and "particlizes" it? When it decompresses enough I am suggesting it will lose its form and blend into an infinite continuum of formless ground state light.
Not sure I understand all that but I'd agree that light plays some fundamental role in cosmogeny. Let there be light and all that. However I don't agree that light can be truly fundamental, for logical reasons outlined (or hinted at) above.
That's a joke, right? Buddhist theory could fill a library.
Buddhist explanations and teachings could fill a library. However these are not based on theorising, they are based on experience. Of course skilled Buddhists theorise about all sorts of things, but if a skilled Buddhist says something is true then it is not an assertion based on a theory. Theoretical knowledge is not considered knowledge. Either you know or you don't.
Maybe the Buddha himself didn't theorize, but plenty of Buddhists have and still do speculate about the nature of things.
In a sense it's true that Buddhists theorise and speculate. But you won't find any of those theories or speculations in the literature. Theorising and conjecturing may be a means to an end, but if all one has is theory then one is not a skilled Buddhist.
But since you've brought up Buddhism, the Buddha did speak of a ground state, that's what we attain union with in "enlightenment." The monist conception very much fits with Buddhist thinking.
I'm afraid this is a misunderstanding, albeit a widespread one. Buddhism is very specifically not monism or dualism. This is why there are no unanswerable metaphysical questions in Buddhism (or Taoism etc). The logic is different. Bear in mind the constant references to the absolute as the 'one and many', or the
two Brahmans etc. This is also the reason that the absolute cannot be characterised in words without self-contradiction.
I don't know the Suttras well but there's a great passage in one (Surangama) where the Buddha explains that not only does the absolute neither exist nor not-exist, but that it is a mistake to think
either that it both exists and not-exists,
or that it neither exists nor not-exists. It is something that cannot be characterised properly in dualistic terms (or any terms at all come to that).
I know how illogical that sounds but if you're into the issue of self-reference and axiomatic systems it can be explained logically, or perhaps 'meta-logically' is a better word. (This is what logician George Spencer-Brown's 'Laws of Form' was all about, and he turns out to be a friend of Wu Wu Wei, highly respected Advaita master).