(April 19, 2012 at 6:01 pm)ChadWooters Wrote: My use of 'wants' and 'striving' here is anthropromorphic out of convenience; although, I do in fact believe reality does express a kind of will. I cannot fully substanciate that belief at this time.
Okay. You can take your time to figure it out.
(April 19, 2012 at 6:01 pm)ChadWooters Wrote: Not sure if that exactly describes what I'm trying to do. It goes back to my assertions elsewhere about substance and form. For things that are truly real, we can recognize the form of a thing and we can recognize its substance. From that recognition we can make a mental contruct of the thing's form or substance. In reality; however, neither substance or form happen apart from each other. They are merely recognizable aspects of a complete thing. Form cannot be a part, nor can substance be a part. I'm saying this. The whole of reality is one thing. That one thing includes all of substance, as it really is, in a form that contains within it all possible true relationships. As you say, we compare recognizable aspects of parts to the recognizable aspects of other parts. I add the idea that a recognizable aspect of a part can be compared to a recognizable aspect of a whole. The perfect example of this idea is a fractal.
Again, more confusion here about the substance and form. From our earlier discussions, I was under the impression that the thing in itself was the substance and the mental construct we make of it was the form, rather than both form and substance being intrinsic attributes of the same thing. Maybe you are using the words "form" and "substance" in a different sense than what we were using them in earlier. Care to re-clarify?
(April 19, 2012 at 6:01 pm)ChadWooters Wrote: Yes, I was avoiding the question. I wasn't clear that you gave me the go ahead. Thinking it through a bit more, I'm starting to see problems with thinking of integrity as the means to the end of happiness. I also need to avoid the mistake of connection happiness and integrity by definition. I think I had the idea backwards. Instead of increasing the happiness of the self, what I'm thinking is increasing the self that experieces happiness. As the self becomes more complete (integrated) the capacity for a fuller happiness increases. The moral standard which I propose is known by comparing features of a individual moral agent, as a part of reality, and recognizable features intrinsict to the whole. In this case I look to the whole of reality, the All, as the perfect example of what it means to be integrated. But does that make one more 'moral'? I must think more about that.
Okay. So I guess that now you know the shortcomings of your philosophy, you can work on getting it right.
