John West wrote:

I don't mean to be insulting, but could you try to write a bit more to the point then? Your extra lines make it hard to properly interpret what you're trying to say. (It looks like your pointing on the universe's dependence on God to say it's all really mind-dependent at points.)

Timocrates wrote:

John West wrote:

Strictly, God isn't a mind. That's just an (admittedly important) analogy.

I actually have to disagree with that. We must speak about God in our words and ideas; and of them, I think mind is the best, even effective during hyper-skeptical philosophical periods like today, exactly because it renders mind so almost unfathomably mysterious: whatever it is, it is unlike just about anything or everything else we can think or speak of.

It's also the claim you disagreed with.

Yes Mr. West I disagree with an objection to God being associated to mind or God as mind; and I did not say God is a mind.

Reality isn't dependent on mind as if it were radically divorced from mind. Hence I talked about how artificial things owe their very being and existence to mind; indeed, in those cases, even a mind, proximately. Moreover, an artificial thing always has mind, so to speak, in itself. There is a reason it exists even if we guess wrong at that reason, as in historical artifacts: like why the early and ancient Egyptians built the pyramid complex at Giza. There is some reason there and if we don't recognize it we have to believe it is rather a natural product than a human one.

Given human language and general experience, there is no better word or concept than mind to associate with God. It is intuitively accessible. It is the world we subjectively have to live and move in in the first order. If mind is false man is deeply - ahem -  "screwed."  Caveats should be issued when associating God with matter or body, to be sure. But not mind, in my mind at least.

Last edited by Timocrates (7/24/2016 9:40 pm)

iwpoe wrote:

There's also spirit, which is not necessarily the same as mind.

For what it's worth, that seems to me in line with Aquinas's position. (Below is an attempt at summarizing and clarifying that position.)

The intellect isn't the soul, but a passive power of the soul (ST I.79.1[/url]). But it's not a passive power of the soul in the sense of passive power that requires matter. It's a passive power in the broad sense in which even immaterial angels have a passive power to (say) go out of existence ([url=http://www.newadvent.org/summa/1079.htm#article2]ST I.79.2).

What people are trying to get at when they talk about the “Divine Intellect” is that God has various (manifested) passive, intellectual powers (ST I.79.2). Not that God can be univocally named “a mind” or “mind”, which seems to either ignore God's other powers or breach Simplicity. (Sorry. I still find “God being associated to mind or God as mind” unhelpfully vague.)

Last edited by John West (7/24/2016 10:18 pm)

iwpoe wrote:

There's also spirit, which is not necessarily the same as mind. God itself needn't be associated with anything like a mind, though it often is traditionally.

Yes Poe, but that word I don't think is as powerful as mind modernly. I mean, spirit means something or has substance today if or when I talk about doing something in the spirit of ___ (whomever). In the spirit of the Founding Fathers, for example. But a lot of modernists just flat out deny the existence of spirit. But no sober person can deny or question the existence of mind, which is what I meant in my last post about mind being in the first order (for us) and that we live and move, so to speak, within mind.

For Nietzsche too, mind and will are closely associated. That just is spirit but those two categories, so to speak, are so immediate and real they can't really be doubted or questioned or denied. It takes almost no work to demonstrate to a man who would deny mind or will the glaring contradiction he is involving himself in: yes, of course, they can be taken for granted or held cheaply, which causes superficial denial possibly. But if I denied mind or will, and a decent philosopher was engaging with me, he should cause me to pause before speaking my mind because whatever it was I was about to say is the product of my mind, judgment or whatever: then mind is, as it were, staring me in my face. Its reality cannot be denied except superficially,

Last edited by Timocrates (7/24/2016 10:30 pm)

Guys:

I have a lot to do this week, and I think Mihret's questions have been answered. So, I'm going to unsubscribe from this thread.

Thanks for the discussion.