April 05, 2005
Origin Ruminations 3
First off, Kudos to Marshall.
I've been rethinking Origin Ruminations 2.
I'm convinced now that it is crap.
I'm not going to pull back from Origin Ruminations. While Two is about positing why a First cause exists, One is about just finding somewhere to place the world upon.
How'd I get here? I read my philosophy professor's paper arguing for a first cause. I began to realize that the people who will argue for a First cause, often honestly don't give a rats ass about developing a secular framework on which to rest the the world, but instead are taking the backdoor to proving a god.
I've been redebating some of these ideas. My understanding of the Buddhist tradition is that there is no need for such constructs. To quote Marshal: "universe a single, unified, conscious, eternal, super-material entity."
But the other question is can reality be a loop? This would remove the need for a first cause and remove the need to speculate that the universe is infinitely existing and somehow attempt to justify that. I'ven't thought more on how this would work, but it definitely is an idea that I'ven't seen explored, but I might delve into it more.
If by "reality" you mean "material reality, the world, the visible universe" and etc, I think the Vedic/Buddhist philosophers would agree it is something of a loop: in the sense that it arises from, utterly depends upon, and ultimately returns to the underlying non-material ultimate reality. The worlds we inhabit - they insist - and the personalities we enjoy within them are all illusions: something like bits of the eternal that have fallen asleep (forgotten their true nature) and are dreaming they have an independent existence apart from the One. But the energy required to sustain the illusion always decays, and thus the self-conscious lives of these dreamers always eventually drift away into senescence and death and return to the non-material. Those who have seen through the illusion of matter abandon their dream of individuality and are reabsorbed into the timeless, deathless and all-knowing; those who are still attached to their illusions are born again to repeat the cycles of life and wonder what-the-fuck is going on and futilely try to justify things. :)
The "problem of God," of course (as I pointed out in my earlier rant), is that He is used to justify everything, while He Himself cannot be justified, explained, or even questioned - in the pious mind. They dismiss scientific enquiry into the origin of things by curtly announcing that God created all; and totally miss the seemingly obvious next question: where did God come from, then? The Buddhist cosmology eliminates this mischievous middleman and also cuts the ground out from under all the ceaseless Western speculations about "why God allows evil, disease, suffering, death" and etc by simply declaring that all material phenomena - good, bad, beautiful and ugly - are self-created illusions that ultimately mean nothing (and in fact are nothing, when compared to superconsciousness of the All-in-All).
Whether these ideas are loopy enough to fit your questions about reality-as-a-loop, I cannot say. The best answers are always the ones that raise the most fruitful new questions, after all. "We need your help putting the mirror back together to get the Froot Loops cereal back. You can click and drag the broken pieces into the mirror to help solve the rainbow puzzle."