Lacewing wrote:I've chosen neither. Limited choices and definitions are manmade.
What a curious statement. It implies that there is some other pole, some other consciousness, or a not-consciousness, to which we humans should refer. I imagine all of us have had this thought at one time or another. Yet, if we are to propose that there is some other consciousness either in the world, or in any world, that is 'not-human', what would it be? and how would it see 'the world", the Cosmos?
And if one has to refer to something non-human in
our world ... what would
that possibly be? A dolphin? a whale? an eagle? a mountain? a sea? On one hand we might refer to automated sensors that could describe the 'energy' event and transcribe it, somehow, for our consideration. We might invent - or assemble - some sort of AI unit that would do this for us and would then provide us with a 'correct' and non-contaminated view/description of 'reality'. This is what some aspect of the scientific revolution implied was possible. Or this is where it tended, didn't it?
But since we
are human, and since we are perception beings, we seem to be stuck in our limitations and the limits of the possible within the human category. But therein lie many different puzzles and opportunities. And again it resolves back into the nature and the quality of the perception-instrument, the nature and quality of
the psyche. And this psyche ... we really have no way to define it ... it is an unknown quantity/instrument ... unless we resort to a materialist/biological model and reduce it to epiphenomena.
Yet that model, or shall I say with that tool of view - all the choices that go into that - and which
produces that model, allows for no interpretive oeuvre. All you can do is describe mass, location, etc., and you can only do this in a dry, computer-voice. But when we do this we perform a strange manoeuvre against
ourself, against the human.
This leads to an odd problem: we then are forced to
redefine the human, and some part of that is to do away with the historically human! But wait! Nobel Obvious referred to a noble (and they are noble) race: the Aborigines. Cannot we become them? Is that where we must go? Is that what we must pull off? So, we have to stop being humans of one sort (the humans gone astray and turned evil) and become good human once again.
All interpretation involves the psyche, and the human instrument
qua human! So, instead of becoming less human or more non-human, it would seem that one would need to become either more human or differently human. And this brings back the Aborigines, an image of possibility that will always stand before us: What is our 'original' human mode? What does it mean to be really human? or truly human? So, perhaps we go back to the Earth itself and live at a subsistence level but truly, nobly, or we take humanness to an ultramodern level, the level of fine tuned Star Trek warriors (they are essentially warriors of a new era). Sounds like a joke but it's not.
These questions are not small, by no means. A whole generation, or a few of them, in our own post-Sixtes era (a notable generation) ran up against these questions and made herculean, sometimes desperate, sometimes wacky, and sometimes quite mad efforts to answer the questions. I would suggest that we have all, in one way or another, come under the spell of this 'quest'.
People are accustomed to others coming down firmly not only in what they believe, but what others should also believe as well. They will sometimes hide their expectations behind a vaneer of tolerance and acceptance.
You're just another anti-theist bigot.