Peter Larkin wrote

Quote It's helpful, say, when reflecting on Randolph's interesting
remark: if there's only meaninglessness, then any pattern can emerge".
This seems the limit-case of basic ontological openness, but I still
feel that it's too ontic (knowing the way of things) and the ontic
drifts back to an ontological norm Unquote


I think I wrote _if there's enough meaninglessness_ which is a less
committal hypothesis. There doesn't seem to me to be a way to determine
whether the world is meaningless or not. By meaningless I think I mean
random. Any structures in the world can be described in terms of the kind
of patterns that do emerge from random systems or indeed in terms of a
system under some directing purpose. I wasn't proposing one as opposed to
the other, just celebrating undecideability.

Peter also wrote
Quote
If it might be a non-
autonomous finite world, then there is a possibility, not of random
openness (ie ontological stability) but a more radical openness-to,
an infinitude (not the mathematical one!)finitely apprehensible.
Unquote

This is an attractive idea. But to digress slightly there are more than one
types of mathematical infinity. First theres the whole nujmber kind where
one envisages infinity as something which cannot be reached by mere
accumulation. I don't see numbers as striving for this kind, it seems
almost entirely negative in construction. Fractions are more interesting.
Even two fractions as close together as can be have an infinite number of
fractions between them. The average of the two is a fraction, the average
of the first and this average is another fraction and so on. A more fertile
kind of infinity and one which is astonishingly close at hand. Things get
even richer with the continuum of so called real numbers. I love Cantor's
argument that if one takes any section between two fractions and assign it
a cardinal number N then the cardinal of the corresponding section of the
continuum is two to the power of N. Which leads to layers and layers of
apparently larger and larger infinities. This led to extraordinarily
intense rows among the mathematicians of the day.

Douglas Oliver wrote
Quote
There is a proper question
whether an eidetic realm lies behind ordinary memory, blocked from us
perhaps
by adult rationalising processes. I incline from my personal meditations
to
think Husserl was right to think such a realm does lie there
Unquote

There are quite a few bits and pieces of evidence for something like this.
If memory works by any kind of synaptic pattern thing then the available
space seems to utterly dwarf what we normally thingkof as our memory.
(Incidentally I bought a book on memory recently and was very disappointed
to find it mainly discussed forgetting) Also isn't there talk somewhere
about a woman who turned up at a hospital entirely confused, speaking
gibberish. Then someone spotted that she was reciting the Iliad in Greek.
Turned out she used to clean for a classics student and her subconscious
mind or eidetic realm was sweating away at the old stand without her being
any the consciouser. Then there's Penfield's experiements where he
stimulated regions of people's brains with an electric probe and they had
what appeared to be more than memories as such. They felt that they were
completely re-experiencing older events.

Oh, and Doug, that thing I mentioned about the realer than thou forms and
the eidetic was way off beam.

best

Randolph Healy

Visit the Sound Eye website at:
http://indigo.ie/~tjac/sound_eye_hme.htm



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