Ed Feser's Aristotelian Proof of the Existence of God

[HopOnPop]

This all sounds on point to me.

Whew...glad to see the issue with empiricism is over (or, rather, never actually existed...just a product of online cross- or mis-communication). I thought all along this all must be something like that. It was such a "philosophy 101" kind of discussion, if you know what I mean (the only people that I find who fight this point usually just haven't been exposed to formal philosophy before....which clearly didn't apply to you, so I was rather baffled by the debate over it).

The latter idea I'm giving as an idea of logical extension-- that a framework that includes mind might originate with/in/from a creative quantity which also includes mind.

I believe we are still on the same page here. My previous socratic exercise wasn't really dependent upon me actually acknowledging what specific idea you were actually discussing at the time, but merely that you were using an example that suggested "something (anything)" bridged this divide between 'here' and 'not here' in some way.

BTW, I believe this specific notion you now described above, in my experience, has been a fairly common staple explanation made by panentheists regarding consciousness/mind origins in their worldview. Are you perhaps an agnostic who is more apt to entertain notions blowing in from that realm?

And since we are talking of the notion that mind-may-be-a-product-of-another-'beyond-our-ken'-kind-of-agent (i.e. a god), don't you find an overwhelming impulse to yank out Occam's razor when you contemplate ideas like that? A superficial list of contingent premises alone (i.e. another kind of thinking being, being able to possibly make another universe, having the ability to tran-locate in two different contexts that are likely wholly unrelated, make the mind-being connection to a being in another context, the existence of a beyond-our-ken locality itself, just to name a few) seems almost hyper-complex. Isn't it a rather a tall order to casually attribute this complex of an idea to be merely a "logical extension"? I realize you haven't said or even suggested this notion of "psychogony" as you coined it, is something that you take all that seriously, but this conversation does make one wonder how seriously you might weight this kind of thing when weighing out the possibilities in your own head.

Isn't it far more compelling to you to listen to what neuro-science today is largely seeing in their work -- that the mind very likely merely originates with/in/from the brain itself, simply as an emergent property that arrises out of the brain functions themselves (not unlike, say the way the programs we "experience" on our computer which are an emergent property of the selective flow of electricity across various computer hardware components)?

Just curious how you tip that scale.