Banjo wrote: "Because nobody existed before mankind arrived."

I hear kookaburras in back laughing.

interestingly..at the end..of catalyst..
http://www.abc.net.au/catalyst/stories/3836881.htm
there was put..a strange...*concept of duality..[dual-causality]

[read transcript]

http://www.abc.net.au/catalyst/stories/3836881.htm

Dr Graham Phillips
Here's..a great enigma...Evolution seems to have made..our brains too good...Like all animals,..we evolved through the survival-of-the-fittest laws of the jungle...But our brains are able to do much more than just survive.

We can understand..complex mathematics,..for example,..and physics. We can do something..so removed from daily survival ..as study the beginnings of the universe...Why?

NARRATION
This fact bothered Einstein too...He remarked,..'The most *in-comprehensible thing..about the world..is that it is *comprehensible.'

Maybe minds..play a big role in the universe,
even having a hand in..*designing it...

Get ready
for a truly mind-bending idea.

Dr Graham Phillips
Paul Davies..thinks the universe..is indeed fine-tuned..for minds like ours...*And who fine-tuned it?..Not God,..LOL..

HERE GOES..
not god[lol]<<..but minds from the future,
OR..perhaps even our distant descendants,[past]..;that have reached back through time..lol..to the Big Bang..and selected the very laws of physics..that allow for the existence of minds..in the first place.

YES*..Sounds bizarre,
but quantum physics actually allows..that kind of thing.

NARRATION
It's like a loop through time,..stretching from the far future back to the Big Bang,..the future selecting the past*..and the past allowing the future*..-

mind-bogglingly,
*both causing each other.

Professor Paul Davies
The universe,..its laws and its observers
*all explain each other..in a self-consistent package.

NARRATION
As wacky as the idea sounds,..it was championed..by the extremely eminent physicist John Wheeler,..famous for naming black holes.

Professor Paul Davies
He believed - the way he put it,
that the laws of physics all came out of 'higgledy-piggledy'.

In other words,..back in the Big Bang,
the laws hadn't really sort of congealed - lol

..<<they were still very loose and approximate -..and that as the universe expanded and cooled,..the laws focused down on the set that we now have,..which turns out to be a set*..that is friendly to life.

NARRATION
Of course,..while this idea is consistent with physics,
it is highly speculative...[yes i willsay/athiestic logic?]

..<<Then again, the existence of a multi-verse
..is fairly speculative too.>>

no its NOT*
swedenberg said 9 other earths..[thats it]

<<For the moment,..the fine-tuning question..remains unresolved.>>

fair enough

Dear Banjo,

So we agree that Yin and Yang are not “things” of the same kind as qi (chi), i.e. forces. We also agree on the expression Yin-Yang complementarity, although I prefer to look at it as a principle rather than a pair of entities .

I agree with what you wrote about Chinese culture, however, one cannot judge Chinese philosophy, way of thinking, from folkloristic cultural manifestations, any more than one can Western philosophy.

Accidentally I came accross the paper http://www.indigenouspsych.org/Interest%20Group/Li_p/Submission%2010-11-2010.pdf. It uses a language that is somewhat strange to me, however it speaks of the “salient source of Ying-Yang balance as a legitimate frame of thinking” which sounds like what I called the Yin-Yang principle as an “epistemological tool” (with the SLR camera metaphor).

.

Dear George,

.

« ... one cannot judge Chinese philosophy, way of thinking, from folkloristic cultural manifestations, any more than one can Western philosophy”
.

Quite right, George. Folklore is simply the archaeological trace of ancient culture, mores, beliefs and superstitions.

Whereas yin and yang is what Anne Cheng, a professor at France’s leading oriental language school in Paris, describes as an “anthropo-cosmology” uniting mankind to the cosmos in perfect harmony.

The process which gave rise to the yin and yang concept did not consist in projecting anima (to employ a term coined by Jung) on nature, but rather in the duality of nature having inspired anima - the duality of nature being an integral part of reality, not just an image – nor a simple, theoretical, “epistemological tool”.

As for the essay published by the Indigenous Psychology Organization for which you kindly provided the link (“The Salient sources of Chinese Yin-Yang Balance - toward a Mind-Language-Brain Meta-hypothesis”), I must confess that I have very serious doubts about the scientific value that could be attributed to this study of a “theoretical Chinese mind” in all its cognitive and psychological aspects.

To apply the authors’ own criticism (as regards human thought processes) to their own methods of study, it seems to me that “they tend to be so simplified that they distort reality beyond recognition”.

I wonder what the results would be of a similar theoretical study of the mind of Jesus in all its cognitive and psychological aspects – and what value such a study would have for Christianity.

.

Dear Banjo,

>> the duality of nature being an integral part of reality, not just an image – nor a simple, theoretical, “epistemological tool”.<<

The point I was trying to make, that Yin and Yang, can be seen as having both an ontological (forces, entities, principles) and epistemological (epistemological tool, frame of thinking) meaning. Of course, this is a Western distinction that did not exists as such, in the Chinese philosophical tradition. So you are right that the original idea of Yin and Yang as found in the I Ching is closer to its ontological interpretation by us, Westerners:

“All things have both aspects, a Yin aspect and a Yang aspect. They are not separate, but are always found in relationship to one another.” (http://www.bmeacham.com/whatswhat/TaoTeChingOntology.html).

I think David’s, analogy with mathematics is illuminating: Pure mathematics has its own world of sets, real numbers, Hilbert spaces etc that is not the same as the world of physical reality studied by science, the same as the Yin and Yang entities as such are not something that can be explained (by science) as part of (pysical) reality as we, Westerners, understand it (and I am not going to speculate how they may relate to “supernatural” reality that our religions try to depict). However, mathematics can be applied in various different situations to understand the physical world, (and science, mostly physics, makes use of it abundantly) so one could call applied mathematics an “epistemological tool”. It is a similar epistemological application of the Yin-Yang complementarity that I had in mind.

>> As for the essay … I must confess that I have very serious doubts about the scientific value <<

Maybe so, I am not a psychologist or cognitive scientist, I was just attracted by the term “frame of thinking”.

last night ..i watched the workings of faith..[in the power of chi]
just watch the way..[ta0]..of chi

first two vidios
http://www.google.com.au/search?q=super+human+drill

as separate from yin/yang