Initial Rebuttal

Working in the Netherworld between the Transcendental and the Mundane

Or

Shit Mike: I still work for a living, I can't stay up all night pondering stuff like this (or maybe I can)

Anyway, I have two dozen of the recreational cookies available for consumption at my place anytime anyone shows up.  However, considering the vagaries of the region between our current enlightened attitude here on the left coast and Jeff Seesions, and not discounting my lack of desire to be raped in a federal prison, I believe that I will allow any and all to to come and fetch them.

I guess that I am looking at this in a different way.  I think that A.S. is trying to tell us that our minds are structured around the mundane necessities of the world that we live in.  The categories that we use in analyzing the mundane are survival characteristics, hardwired somewhere in the regions between the basal ganglia and the neocortex. To be a human is to engage in pattern recognition, it is both a gift and a trap.

The mundane world requires this ability as the price that one pays for survival. We need the ability to recognize pattern and extrapolate from them is to be able to survive in a changing world. But that ability too colors our ability to analyze that of the transcendent, we keep wanting to use our patterns of this world to analyze that which is not.

Here is where the problem lies, that is why I wonder (but have in no way accepted) the roles of magic in the world. Our minds tend toward the appreciation and cataloging of phenomenon. In order to know “how we are to solve the riddle of this dream of life” something more is required. What that something consists of has been the source of heated discussions for millennia.

Religion and some flavors of philosophy have taken up the challenge and came up with some remarkably awful (at least in my mind) explanations of the origin and meaning of the world. Most of them posit mankind serving as a central, and perhaps dominant role in this worldview and explanation of the riddle. But these century-old explanations, built upon a western worldview and a Judeo-Christian mythology are looking shopworn. Other religions seem to dance around the problem and have equal problems.

Science and the general populace have taken an easy way out. With the insistence on experimental proof and “common sense” they have slyly taken religion and faith out of the game. They insist that the patterns that define the mundane are the only patterns that can be proved and that “matter”. But non-spaciotemporal “things” are difficult, if not impossible to understand in a way that is consistent with the patterns that our minds use to make sense of the mundane.

But Philosophy keeps trying to push past the constraints draped on it by these patterns. But to use language itself is to fall into the trap. To understand the transcendent, and to explain such to another meat-unit requires words. And words themselves come preloaded with meaning. To say things like bench and glass brings in a density of meaning and patterns. To say infinite opens up the universe for discussion. To say non-spaciotemporal merely brings sullen silence.

What I think A.S. is saying is; that we need to develop a set of tools to recognize a different class of patterns. The tools we have just aren’t up to the job.