Sunday, November 27, 2005
An extremely short sketch on the nature of things.
The nature of things is dependent on many factors. These factors are, of course, other things. Those other things depend on yet more things. Surely, somewhere down the chain, one of the dependent factors is the original thing or thought to which the original statement is ascribed, and when such an idea is realized it makes the nature of things somewhat easier to grasp..
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Hi Laura. This is an extremely interesting thought. Plato or Aristotle (or maybe both because the dialogues of Aristotle reveal most of what we know about Plato, refered to this concept as the ultimate cause. Thus your line of reasoning is a form of mechanistic determinism. Ienstein (mis-spelled on purpose because he was such a cad and mean to his first wife and son) hated quantum theory. He said: God does not play dice with the universe" The ultimate cause being God. Of course Mormon writings are full of things which teach or imply that freedom of the will is a reflection of the ultimate nature of God. It has been argued persuasively (not by me) that Mormonism has a strong tendancy towards determinism. Here determinism is not the determinism of the ultimate cause (God)like most Christians believe, but of seperate and un-numbered eternal intelligences. (Book of Abraham) We have the principle of repentance as one of the four corners of the gospel (#4 of Articles of Faith). This implies change which also implies freedom to choose one's way. There are (or at least is) one specific scripture to deflate this argument refering to the Pharoah of Egypt at the time of the Semitic exodus. It says that Pharoh was one of those to destined to be vessles of God's wrath. This implies that his nature was so implacably hardened that no repentance was possible. Today we might throw in genetic, social-environmental, nurturing, childhood nutrition and maternal health as determining and extensively controling factors in the formation of character and personality. The bible doesn't go into much of that (naturally), it just says what it says and you are left to work the rest out.
AS a long preamble to my main point, Einstein was vehemently opposed to the then developing science of quantum mechanics (brought to us by Bohr, Shroedinger (sp?) Heisinberg(sp?)and a bunch of other smart Jews and the uncertainly surrounding their description of ulitimate reality. Einstein turned out to be wrong as everthing from the eventual evaporation of black holes to the decay of radioactive matierials is fundamentally involved with quantum process or to put it the way I like to refer to it: dependend upon nothing whatsoever!....Nothing more than a substantially unrelated merely chaotic series of events which have no cause-effect relationship. Thus although all things are mutually dependent (Bhudda figured this out 500 BC)-what determines the nature of the multitude of things is a statistical rendering of chaos.
I regret to inform you that your theory of the "Nature of Things" is deterministic and contrary to the reality of things. Love, DAd
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