Reply #132: Agreed as far as

[aneerkoinos]

The naturalism/materialism based line of inquiry has reached its limits.

Your choise is theism, which has problems of its own, and depending on the given definition of theism, inconsistencies with evidence.

I think the basic search much start with the question how forms and structures (actualities) differentiate and "unfold" from the formless, infinite potentia, and what can be said about the laws or tendensies guiding that process of differentiation.

When consciousness is taken as real, unreducible quality of being, hierarchical subject-object/observer-observed divisions that are still the cornerstone of the naturalistic paradigm, run into major problems. Uncertainty Principle could be taken as fundamental manifestation of the intuitively evident more general principle that it is logically impossible for differentiated observer/measurer to observe and measure itself accurately.

I suppose we are still mostly in agreement. I'm not sure about the next cornerstone of the new Heraclitian paradigm, that instead of differentiated, separate object-beings we are limited to talking about events, as phenomenology and process oriented inquiry seem to be the only ways out of the current impasse.

Platonic idealism is indeed interesting avenue, because of the central role of mathematics and mathematical imagination in science, which has now also moved with probability math from the qualitative study of algorithms into quantitative calculus power as the cutting edge of science, calculus power has become a quality in itself, and even more so with future quantum calculus by quantum computers. But Platonism and mathematical idealism are anything but clearly understood, they themselves are inherently open to many approaches and lines of investigations, open to philosophizing. Forinstance, it's a huge effort to try to understand what Plato thought and not fall into a trap of "naturalized" Plato. Indeed, the for the Greeks (and Bohm) the highest form of truth was jumping on the bandwagon of Dialogue, as the ultimate openness of any linguistic definitions was very clear at least to Plato. To develop modern understanding of these issues and beyond, I'm beginning to believe that for Western minds Heidegger's reading of the classics is inescapable. I'm now on the page 50 of Heidegger's 'Plato's Sophist', which in regard to ontology clearly takes the dynamical position and refutes the essential position.

Now to the main point, criticism of theism. The logical inconsistency of an omniscient, omnipotent personal benevolent being has been beaten to death many times, so let's leave that issue at rest. Where the real challenges currently lie, are our understanding of causality itself, as our psychologically all important unidirectional notions about time are crumbling. Buddhist and especially Nagarjuna's skepticism about causality rejecting all causal relationships as fundamental but dependent arising is so far the only logically consistent position, and it is the one that dynamic paradigm can very well live with. But not theism presuming PersonalLy Intentional Creator or Unmovable Mover, which is not only logically extremely problematic, but still bounded and presupposed by our (faulty) psychological theory of causality as fundamentally time-related, and not not only time-related but ruled by only unidirectional time.

To conclude, (semi-mystical restricted by Uncertainty Principle)mathematical study of dynamic forms (strange attractors etc) offers much more promising avenues for scientific inquiry than all-mystical theism (which by definition is out of bound of scientific knowledge) or semi-mystical time-bound notions about causal, purposefull and thus personal Creator. Platonism beats theism.

UGH.