roach et al Ok - just a little something quickly in response to the bit on objectivity, relativism, and meaning in the way we perceive the world.
it seems to me that we have to separate the subject matter at hand. the first part is the world the way it "really is." this world is beyond our ability to comprehend, understand, or truly analyze and grasp. what we are left with is the second part - the world as we perceive and interpret it. in this sense, i think i agree with what you posted above. i despise what i consider to be the relativistic position, in that it seems to desire to attribute everything away to useless semantics, and in the end there is no knowledge, only feelings and desires. i think this is a criticism with merit on our interpretations of reality, but not of reality itself. and while it has merit, i suppose i see it as something of a winnowing process, whereby the danger is in throwing away the projections of reality as if they had
no use, when i believe it is more a question of being aware...of what you think you are aware of. in as far as we agree that we create intepretation and meaning, which i suppose is inherent in our naming processes - and not the things we are attempting to actually name, then i hold a similar position to your own, as far as i understand it. some naming conventions would seem to be be better than others, in the sense that they seem more consistent - but this doesn't make them true. they are only as good as we can do, at the present, given what we think we know. that "given what we think we know" is always the stickler, i suppose.
i can also understand what i'm guessing (and it is guessing) is the root issue of the work of atlan. essentially, what if we had cut it up differently to start with? or what if we moved the different scales we've been trained to perceive to new cutting point
now, and see which part of the intepretations hold, and which don't. unfortunately, i can also see how this might very easily come to involve essentially "reinventing the wheel," as the way we have discretized phenomena at this point is firmly grounded in the assumptions we made to start with. at the end of the day, a part of me wants to simply go to "does it work?" i'm guessing
atlan is looking at systems where it may not be "working." i would guess that in the biological systems he is interested in, there is not such a clear distinguishing line that affords clear boundary conditions to disparate models. this happens in non-biological systems too - but i think frequently its exploded. at many material interfaces, there is a clear boundary at the scale of cm -> micrometer. but if you build up to the scales of an entire working system, such as a building or a factory or an integrated chemical system - the question of where you draw your boxes becomes much more artificial, in as far as i can tell. same thing when you go down to sub-picometers and such.
i think this moves over to my personal criticism of most religions, in that they are so slow to incorporate new knowledge - they are so inflexible. i think this is at least partially a result of them having been originally formed in times where information generation and communication mechanisms were inherently slower. a slow reaction to new information was probably pragmatic at a time when information itself was slow. this is no longer seemingly the case - and while there is certainly something to be said for not bouncing around too much in the message at hand in your religion or philosophical stance, modern theological positions still seem to me to be tied down too much to stagnant belief systems and accepted common "knowledge." i don't personally care if my interpretions, on a philosophical stance that might approach "spiritual" are
correct, but only if they seem to work "enough" for me. As I said, when it comes to such things, embracing the knowledge that I don't know anything provides something of a conduit to try to skip interpretation, but that's a much murkier thing. Probably bordering on psuedo-philosophy
that might be interesting: do you think its possible to go beyond "knowledge?" is the reality that these forms of knowledge try to capture capable of being interfaced, or even appreciated, in a way that might set a framework for spirituality - or for understanding analogs of what religions most likely evolved from? does our desire for knowledge destroy our ability to appreciate the constant process of the evolution of reality and the trailing process of creating meaning in a spiritual sense?
i guess what i'm saying is that i don't have any problem with what i think the guys who must have started these religions were doing. they were interested in deep questions, and they grabbed ahold of what knowledge they had, wrestled with it until they felt they had pinned it down as best as they could, and they spread their interpretation. what i have a problem with is the notion that we have to hold on to these messages as anything other than another perspective, and the tendency we have to recite passages of knowledge that we really have no way to accurately interpret as though we didn't create whatever interpretion we're pulling out of them. it just seems pointless to me, ergo why i can't do any theistic approach i've been exposed to.