monistic cosmology
Aug. 18th, 2005 04:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sophiaserpentiaIs it possible that the Prime Mover is also the Prime Moved Object?
In a comment this morning to yesterday's post on "intelligent falling" i voiced objection to the idea of God as "all cause and no effect," that is, a causal agent who is not in turn the recipient of any effect.
The concept of "causation," dichotomizing cause from effect, sets us up to demand there be a first cause.
However, suppose that instead of a dichotomy of cause and effect, there's just effect, stemming from potential plus present condition? In other words, instead of a universe made of billiard balls rolling around and smacking into one another, what we have is a universe where the events which occur in each location build on what existed previously, creating a chain of events each one building on what happened just before.
In this view essentially the entire universe is the "cause" of any single event. Interpreters have used the metaphor of sequential lights on a Broadway sign giving the appearance of a single object in motion. One light does not "cause" the next, but rather, they are all together an explication of a deeper, hidden order. This view is not nearly as farfetched as it sounds, given the nature of quantum entanglement, and the fact that gravity interconnects every object with every other. This brings us to the view of the universe as a "holomovement," an implicate wholeness, as described by David Bohm.
"Causation" seems a more intuitive way to see the world because we, as the descendents of predators, perceive things using cognitive shortcuts that evolved over generations. Our brain takes the perception of something and makes from it a "hard" distinction between "this" and "not-this." We draw a box around something and then darken the lines of that box, as if to pretend that it has a special essence that distinguishes it from not-it.
Our use of language reinforces the darkened lines of subject vs. object, as does our interaction with one another in society.
Consider the alternative of "levation", which means to "raise up" in our awareness a thing or pattern while at the same time refusing to darken the lines of the box around it.
With holomovement replacing causation, we have no longer a need for a Prime Mover, but we might need a Prime Observer or Prime Explicator.
In a comment this morning to yesterday's post on "intelligent falling" i voiced objection to the idea of God as "all cause and no effect," that is, a causal agent who is not in turn the recipient of any effect.
The concept of "causation," dichotomizing cause from effect, sets us up to demand there be a first cause.
However, suppose that instead of a dichotomy of cause and effect, there's just effect, stemming from potential plus present condition? In other words, instead of a universe made of billiard balls rolling around and smacking into one another, what we have is a universe where the events which occur in each location build on what existed previously, creating a chain of events each one building on what happened just before.
In this view essentially the entire universe is the "cause" of any single event. Interpreters have used the metaphor of sequential lights on a Broadway sign giving the appearance of a single object in motion. One light does not "cause" the next, but rather, they are all together an explication of a deeper, hidden order. This view is not nearly as farfetched as it sounds, given the nature of quantum entanglement, and the fact that gravity interconnects every object with every other. This brings us to the view of the universe as a "holomovement," an implicate wholeness, as described by David Bohm.
"Causation" seems a more intuitive way to see the world because we, as the descendents of predators, perceive things using cognitive shortcuts that evolved over generations. Our brain takes the perception of something and makes from it a "hard" distinction between "this" and "not-this." We draw a box around something and then darken the lines of that box, as if to pretend that it has a special essence that distinguishes it from not-it.
Our use of language reinforces the darkened lines of subject vs. object, as does our interaction with one another in society.
Consider the alternative of "levation", which means to "raise up" in our awareness a thing or pattern while at the same time refusing to darken the lines of the box around it.
With holomovement replacing causation, we have no longer a need for a Prime Mover, but we might need a Prime Observer or Prime Explicator.
