I’ll have to read this more carefully. A couple of fun physics notes, though: in special relativity, there is no notion of an absolute present! Simultaneity is relative and subjective, though subjective in a readily quantifiable manner. General relativity gets even more interesting: only certain classes of spacetimes, called globally hyperbolic, have a globally well-defined present at all; with others, you can only define a localized and relative present. Admittedly, these cases are pathological in several regards, but they aren’t unthinkable, at the very least.
Interesting reflection. Some food for thought. I wonder though if part of the puzzle isn’t that what happens once happens in a sense for all time. It’s our horizontal modern thinking that can’t grasp this.
This was quite wonderful to read this morning — and the season is always more poignant for me these days for all the normal reasons and because dad died on November 16th, but his birthday was November 1st. It drove him nuts that I would always call it "All Saints Day," but it does particularly hold a place close to my heart. There's a story about a radio I've seldom told, when my brother and sister and I were hauling out all of the stuff from dad's house (he was a recovering hoarder), we had to have the power off. There was a non-battery powered radio — one with a plug — that had been going. When we cut the breaker box to the house, the music was still on. Country music. Something we had blaring so that folks would be scared from breaking in while we got rid of dad's things. The music continued. It spooked us out, but Heath and I went and unplugged the outlet, thinking the house was wired weird or something.
But when we unplugged it, it was still going.
It was a love song about a man begging his kids to leave all the junk on the curb.
So that's pretty much what we did with two 40' dumpsters.
Again, your piece reminds me of the reified persons and the personified objects (either puppets or abstractions) that unite in Personhood. And with The Discarded Image, I'm reminded too that everything has a spirit in the sense that you said: even the fae creatures, the longlaevi, give spirits to river, stock, and stone.
A locus classicus for thinking about ghosts in classics (ha) is in Pliny's Epistle 7.27. He opens by asserting his "desire to know thoroughly, whether you [his friend, Sura] think that there are ghosts and they have their own proper figure and some kind of numen or whether they are empty and vain and take their image from our fear" (Igitur perquam velim scire, esse phantasmata et habere propriam figuram numenque aliquod putes an inania et vana ex metu nostro imaginem accipere). Pliny asserts that he does believe (ego ut esse credam) for three reasons, two of which by way of appeal to famous historical personages that had ghost encounters. The first is Curtius Rufus, "to whom was offered a figure of a woman grander and more beautiful than a human one" (offertur ei mulieris figura humana grandior pulchriorque). This woman prophesies Rufus's future, that he would go to Rome, achieve high political honor, return to Africa, and die there; this happens, and Rufus sees the woman upon his return to Africa.
The second story is the more famous one: Athenodorus, the Stoic philosopher, came to Athens and rented a house haunted by a ghost of "an old man finished with thinness and squalor, with his beard having grown out with prickly hair; shackles on his legs, and he was carrying and shaking chains with his hands" (senex macie et squalore confectus, promissa barba horrenti capillo; cruribus compedes, manibus catenas gerebat quatiebatque). Athenodorus rents this house after learning that it is haunted. When he sets up shop in the front part of the house, he dismisses all his servants and sets about writing. As Pliny tells it: "At first, just like everywhere, the silence of the night; then the shaking of iron, the chains are moved. He did not lift his eyes, did not set aside the stylus, but firms his mind and stretches it forward with his ears. Then the crashing grows, it arrives and now is heard as though in the threshold, now as within the threshold! He looks back, sees and knows that it is the likeness that had been told to him." The ghost gestures for Athenodorus to follow him, but Athenodorus lifts a finger to gesture to the ghost to wait until he finishes writing; then, grabs the light and follows after. The ghost disappears on a spot in the courtyard, which Athenodorus tells the magistrates to dig up the next day; sure enough, there is buried a skeleton, wrapped in chains. Buried properly, the ghost dissipates.
If magnetic fields(hysteresis) echo in the objects they were in theres no reason thoughts while not physical in our modern sense might not scar places aswell
The sort of dualism I'd hold would be circumscribed within an idealist metaphysics, so that the moment of dualism, as it were, is neither absolute nor abrogated in the whole.
Yes, with the caveat that most aspect dualisms lack the metaphysics of personhood (or "Spirit") just as much as substance metaphysics do. The difference is that the former typically regards the dualism as aspectual modes of a single substance. Whereas my brand of personalist idealism would complicate the idea that God is merely a single substance just as much as it would the idea that all that is not God is a play of atomistic substances or modes of the divine substance (which alone is real).
I'm confused by this notion of personalist idealism. How does that compare to something like a more...monistic(?) idealism where all phenomena are different modes or aspects of the same, singular Divine substance?
It means that persons, divine or otherwise, are that which produces and that about which are ideas. A monistic metaphysics typically assumes the self-evidence of a notion like "substance" or "mode." But the person, or Spirit, is that which is one (monos) only in generating two or more. It is a metaphysics of the subject that does not reduce nor exclude the person as such from the task of reason; indeed it sees reason perfected in and as person, as their mutual knowing, as love. It's unclear what such notions would mean in a substance monism.
I'm afraid I'm still not quite understanding. I may just not have the educational background or framework to understand, or it could just be I find your writing style difficult. Either way, I appreciate you trying so diligently to teach me. I am stubborn.
That said, I want to try my hand at sharing my own understanding of what you said: it sounds like a kind of subjective idealism, almost solipsistic. Either that or, going off this quote "It means that persons, divine or otherwise, are that which produces and that about which are ideas", something like all the ideas that we have are actually entities/people(?) Similar to how Christ is both a person and a principle, an idea. Under this system, it sounds like water would have a spirit, a person that sustains it and is related to by another subject. How wrong am I? Help a layman wading in the deep end here, friend.
I’ll have to read this more carefully. A couple of fun physics notes, though: in special relativity, there is no notion of an absolute present! Simultaneity is relative and subjective, though subjective in a readily quantifiable manner. General relativity gets even more interesting: only certain classes of spacetimes, called globally hyperbolic, have a globally well-defined present at all; with others, you can only define a localized and relative present. Admittedly, these cases are pathological in several regards, but they aren’t unthinkable, at the very least.
Got this on repeat. Thank you. Among other things it brought to mind the short story by Roberto Bolaño: Clara (https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/08/04/clara-roberto-bolano).
This was fascinating thank you.
Interesting reflection. Some food for thought. I wonder though if part of the puzzle isn’t that what happens once happens in a sense for all time. It’s our horizontal modern thinking that can’t grasp this.
This was quite wonderful to read this morning — and the season is always more poignant for me these days for all the normal reasons and because dad died on November 16th, but his birthday was November 1st. It drove him nuts that I would always call it "All Saints Day," but it does particularly hold a place close to my heart. There's a story about a radio I've seldom told, when my brother and sister and I were hauling out all of the stuff from dad's house (he was a recovering hoarder), we had to have the power off. There was a non-battery powered radio — one with a plug — that had been going. When we cut the breaker box to the house, the music was still on. Country music. Something we had blaring so that folks would be scared from breaking in while we got rid of dad's things. The music continued. It spooked us out, but Heath and I went and unplugged the outlet, thinking the house was wired weird or something.
But when we unplugged it, it was still going.
It was a love song about a man begging his kids to leave all the junk on the curb.
So that's pretty much what we did with two 40' dumpsters.
Again, your piece reminds me of the reified persons and the personified objects (either puppets or abstractions) that unite in Personhood. And with The Discarded Image, I'm reminded too that everything has a spirit in the sense that you said: even the fae creatures, the longlaevi, give spirits to river, stock, and stone.
A locus classicus for thinking about ghosts in classics (ha) is in Pliny's Epistle 7.27. He opens by asserting his "desire to know thoroughly, whether you [his friend, Sura] think that there are ghosts and they have their own proper figure and some kind of numen or whether they are empty and vain and take their image from our fear" (Igitur perquam velim scire, esse phantasmata et habere propriam figuram numenque aliquod putes an inania et vana ex metu nostro imaginem accipere). Pliny asserts that he does believe (ego ut esse credam) for three reasons, two of which by way of appeal to famous historical personages that had ghost encounters. The first is Curtius Rufus, "to whom was offered a figure of a woman grander and more beautiful than a human one" (offertur ei mulieris figura humana grandior pulchriorque). This woman prophesies Rufus's future, that he would go to Rome, achieve high political honor, return to Africa, and die there; this happens, and Rufus sees the woman upon his return to Africa.
The second story is the more famous one: Athenodorus, the Stoic philosopher, came to Athens and rented a house haunted by a ghost of "an old man finished with thinness and squalor, with his beard having grown out with prickly hair; shackles on his legs, and he was carrying and shaking chains with his hands" (senex macie et squalore confectus, promissa barba horrenti capillo; cruribus compedes, manibus catenas gerebat quatiebatque). Athenodorus rents this house after learning that it is haunted. When he sets up shop in the front part of the house, he dismisses all his servants and sets about writing. As Pliny tells it: "At first, just like everywhere, the silence of the night; then the shaking of iron, the chains are moved. He did not lift his eyes, did not set aside the stylus, but firms his mind and stretches it forward with his ears. Then the crashing grows, it arrives and now is heard as though in the threshold, now as within the threshold! He looks back, sees and knows that it is the likeness that had been told to him." The ghost gestures for Athenodorus to follow him, but Athenodorus lifts a finger to gesture to the ghost to wait until he finishes writing; then, grabs the light and follows after. The ghost disappears on a spot in the courtyard, which Athenodorus tells the magistrates to dig up the next day; sure enough, there is buried a skeleton, wrapped in chains. Buried properly, the ghost dissipates.
Nice!
If magnetic fields(hysteresis) echo in the objects they were in theres no reason thoughts while not physical in our modern sense might not scar places aswell
Mr. Wood, do you hold to a dualist metaphysics, a dualist philosophy of mind by chance?
The sort of dualism I'd hold would be circumscribed within an idealist metaphysics, so that the moment of dualism, as it were, is neither absolute nor abrogated in the whole.
Would that be closer to an "aspect" dualism then? As opposed to a "substance" dualism?
Yes, with the caveat that most aspect dualisms lack the metaphysics of personhood (or "Spirit") just as much as substance metaphysics do. The difference is that the former typically regards the dualism as aspectual modes of a single substance. Whereas my brand of personalist idealism would complicate the idea that God is merely a single substance just as much as it would the idea that all that is not God is a play of atomistic substances or modes of the divine substance (which alone is real).
I'm confused by this notion of personalist idealism. How does that compare to something like a more...monistic(?) idealism where all phenomena are different modes or aspects of the same, singular Divine substance?
It means that persons, divine or otherwise, are that which produces and that about which are ideas. A monistic metaphysics typically assumes the self-evidence of a notion like "substance" or "mode." But the person, or Spirit, is that which is one (monos) only in generating two or more. It is a metaphysics of the subject that does not reduce nor exclude the person as such from the task of reason; indeed it sees reason perfected in and as person, as their mutual knowing, as love. It's unclear what such notions would mean in a substance monism.
I'm afraid I'm still not quite understanding. I may just not have the educational background or framework to understand, or it could just be I find your writing style difficult. Either way, I appreciate you trying so diligently to teach me. I am stubborn.
That said, I want to try my hand at sharing my own understanding of what you said: it sounds like a kind of subjective idealism, almost solipsistic. Either that or, going off this quote "It means that persons, divine or otherwise, are that which produces and that about which are ideas", something like all the ideas that we have are actually entities/people(?) Similar to how Christ is both a person and a principle, an idea. Under this system, it sounds like water would have a spirit, a person that sustains it and is related to by another subject. How wrong am I? Help a layman wading in the deep end here, friend.