>>> "Dace" <edace at flinthills.com> 04/03/00 08:30PM >>>
-----Original Message----- From: Charles Brown
>>>>> "Dace" <edace at flinthills.com> 04/02/00 04:13PM >>>
>>
>>Information retrieval is not the meaning of the word, "memory." When we
>>remember something, we are bringing the past into the present.
>>
>>_________
>>
>>CB: This sounds like not only time travel, but time removal. You must be
>speaking metaphorically.
>>
>I mean that we bring past perceptions and thoughts into the present.
>
>_________
>
>CB: What we bring forward is like a photograph, a record of a past event, a
trace reflection, an imitation of the perception or thought.
>
Yes, photographs are an imitation of (visual) memory, but why assume that
memory itself is an imitation of memory?
________
CB: Think of memory as an imitation of something that happened in the past, but is no longer happening.
________
The assumption here is that nature involves nothing more than whatever a few clever humans have concocted in their laboratories.
_________
CB: The assumption here by whom ? Not me. ___________
Nature and life are just a kind of warm-up to the really great achievement, which is Western technology.
____________
CB: I am more of an internationalist, stone age economist enthusiast. I like the wheel and the discovery of fire in terms of human technology. And I like Eastern technology, and Southern, and African.
___________
>
> Matter
>is the existence of the present. Mind is the existence of the past.
>
>_______
>
>CB: And the present is all that exists (for now :>)). There is nothing in
the world but matter.
>
And do you say this every night before you go to bed?
_________
CB: No, only when explaining elementary philosophy.
________
>Mind exists in the present too, as perception. It is, in part, in memory,
the imitation of the past in the present.
>
Now, this is a perceptive comment.
_________
CB: A perceptive comment about perception, from a practical-critical activist.
_________
Bergson makes much of this point. For him, it demonstrates that matter and mind are not two separate things. There is *one* thing which we abstract into two, and then-- prefering one over the other-- "reduce" the other to the first. The elimination of mind is thus a mind game.
___________
CB: The " I think therefore I'm not" game.
_________
According to Bergson, sensory perception is both mental and material. It is mental in that it provides the ground for later memory, and it's material in that it concerns the present. Moreover, he asserts that perception is unmediated. That is, we do not create visual images in our brains. It's not as though we're all watching TV in the backs of our heads. We see the actual images of things-- in light-- not images of images reconstructed in the dark in our heads. Vision does not separate us from the object of our perception by constructing a representation of it. Instead, it unites us with the object. Thus perception joins mind to brain and subject to object.
__________
CB: Perception is apprehension of the phenomenal level of objective reality, and can be imitated and symbolized in memory and thought. Perception is active as well as passive.
>
> This
>does not mean there are two existences. Of course, there is only one
>existence: Time. Consciousness, which joins body and mind-- present and
>past-- is the microcosm to time's macrocosm. This is Bergsonian
>metaphysics. The substance of reality is time.
>
>_________
>
>CB:
>
>There is one existence: matter. "There is nothing in the world but matter
in motion, and matter in motion cannot move otherwise than in space and
time." - Lenin
>
Do you have any reason for believing this, or is Lenin your Paul (with Marx
in the role of Jesus)?
__________
CB: My reason for believing it is my experience, perceptions in life, supported by empirical evidence. It is an a posterieri presumption, corroborated by Lenin, Engels' and other Marxists ( by the dozens) writings. I am an atheist. My attention to Lenin is the like attention to a leading scientist in the history of the discipline we are discussing, nothing like a religious uncritical belief, dummy.
CB
CB