Felix wrote: ↑August 31st, 2019, 2:19 pm
So my question is an obvious one: How can eternally orderly things, especially god-like things, exist and act in a random universe.
Here I’m going to attempt to explain my ideas about pure chance, Platonic Forms and my theism. What I have written so far has been heavily criticized as being full of inconsistencies. I have been accused of not really understanding the very idea of God or of a Platonic Form. Oh my! I love a good brawl.
My defense is going to rely heavily on Bertrand Russell’s notion of Propositions. Propositions must not be confused with sentences, in spite of common usage. Take a sentence, any sentence. Slightly rearrange the words but only enough so the sentence has the same meaning. Adverbial phrases and clauses can be moved about easily. Change active to passive. Give a artsy or poetic feel to it. Those many sentences or expressions all refer to the same proposition. Remember I am using the word “proposition” in the Russellian sense. Now translate the sentence into different languages, into computer language, into Morse code and hieroglyphics and weird icons. It is still the same one proposition, but expressed differently.
So now what about that so-called proposition according to Bertrand Russell, G. E. Moore and other early Logical Analysts? Most importantly it is non-linguistic, non-mental and eternal. That may seem odd, but that’s the idea as it existed in early Logical Analysis. It is a Platonic Form. Russell was a Platonic Realist. He was in rebellion against German Idealism, which tended to think of propositions and psychological or social constructs. A proposition was an eternal thing external to the mind. And certainly external to the brain. There are other interesting aspects to the idea of a proposition, but that’s enough for what I have to say here.
Now for the act of writing. Devise some way of generating a random collection of words. When I was teaching English, I used to have the student perform the following exercise. Arbitrarily select a page out of any book or magazine. Close your eyes and run you finger down the page. On impulse stop and copy down what word it has landed on. Do that until you have built up a collection, which you may want to arrange in a number of columns. Now stare at those columns until sentences form. Write them down. Eventually, you will have a paragraph or a poem. Or maybe a mantra.
My students, I discovered, were afraid of that exercise. They would fidget and often couldn’t do it. Today I understand why. It is an exercise in the paranormal. Or, if you want, the gods prowl in the doing.
The essential thing is that you just stare at the collection of things gathered by pure chance until you “see” something. Maybe you have done the same thing with the abstract patterns in a curtain or in the paint on the wall or in some twilight bushes outside your window. Anyway, what you are doing with words is you are waiting for an eternal proposition to appear. Words will come together into a sentence. It will no doubt be not an ordinary sentence. It will be somewhat queer. It will need interpretation. And that is where the reader must do his part. Reading is just as mystical as writing. And you will probably be afraid of it.
Whenever you look as a religious/paranormal artifact, you will always see that it is strange, skewed, queer, even ridiculous. Hindu idols are particularly odd. And the Vedas are very difficult to make sense of, if there is in fact any sense there at all. Pundits have been called on to give it meaning and cover over the inconsistencies. It’s the same with the New Testament.
Do propositions, in the Russellian sense, exist? Eternal things and true. Can we conjure them up? Are they sexual beings?
I, of course, answer, Yes, to all those questions. I write philosophy, an exercise in magic. The rationalist among us will disagree. But we need such a one, such a stick in the mud, so we can orient ourselves.
I like to stare at the form of a boy. A sexual thing. And wait. Sentences form and I write them down. Sexual feelings are important for making the eternal appear.
The Kantians will think it is psychological and the positivists will think it is sociological. The skeptic will wave his hand and mutter. And the moralists will call the police.
My point in all that is that in order to write the eternal Platonic Forms you must first have at hand some objects or words gleaned by pure chance from your surrounding. You must totally let go of your ego as the author of what you will eventually publish. You must let the words write themselves.
A jhakri, a Hindu shaman, will put rice grains on his drum, throw them into the air and then look to see where they land among the religious idols. Then he read them. Pure chance is somewhere in every religious ritual. It is our connection with the other world.
Btw, if you look at a magical mantra, you will see the same maddening, non-mental, non-linguistic, eternal thing. impossible to understand. It exists external to any person or mind that utters it. And they can be very dangerous if not chased away when the shaman dies.
- By Pattern-chaser
- By Cathal