[Serious] Thomism: Then & Now

[emjay]

For example, the form of Being (capital b) entails consciousness - but is consciousness itself a thing with definite borders or is it a range of interactions that can be graded on a scale with no clear distinction between a state of x and not x?  We all agree that people are conscious and computers are not (or plants, or fungus, or this or that animal..whatever).

Is this relevant to arguments for or beliefs in necessary, first, or ultimate.....beings?  It would seem that any argument which gets (or depends on) the form of being wrong would itself be fundamentally wrong from first principles.  Like vulcan, I'm not convinced by MN - but I think it's relevant and it posits questions which any realist conception needs to answer for.

I'm not sure I'm following you, since I'm not sure how helpful all this is to the discussion, ie people will be arguing about the nature of consciousness till the end of time, and if you're just talking about relative levels of consciousness in different 'levels' of life so to speak... or panpsychism-like ideas... then I'd be the first to accept different levels of consciousness in different animals (or even potentially AI etc)... and have no idea how to differentiate between different levels of that, and therefore grant that that is 'fuzzy' and hard to pin down in definitions. But I'm still not sure how that fits in with the Five Ways, because I'm not sure where I'm seeing your use of the word 'Being' in that context; though that could just be because of how I picture the god/entity of the Five Ways, as something very different from consciousness as we'd think of it, if it had that at all... and that would only be if granting all Five Ways accepted... I don't think any of them individually even attempts to prove a conscious Being. For instance part of consciousness is choice, or at least the illusion of it, but a perfect being, in the sense of all these absolutes and 'omnis', looks constrained to one course of action only, with no capacity for mistakes or learning or anything of the sort, so no different really than determinism. Basically it doesn't look like it defines anything like a conscious Being in the sense we'd think of it. Is that your point or part of it? If you're not talking about that, and instead about how the word (b/B)eing is used in the classical philosophy senses of coming into being, changing, or ceasing to be, I have to admit I still find the various uses of the word, as there are indeed many, to be very confusing. I'll get there in the end, but it is confusing.