Saturday, July 9, 2022

Personal Reflection 17

 I shall explore the problem of existence even more in this writing, to further solidify the radical ontological argument of the existence of God. The reason most people will not accept this kind of argument is due to the understanding of what existence is. Existence is simply put the presence of an object inside reality, thus leading to the existence of an associated truth. Now what is truth? Truth is simply the fact that there is something. How do we know that there is truth? We know by our experiences of truth.

Now, existence in this viewpoint is much more independent of experience, it is eternal and it is of the essence, not of the actuality. As such all objects have 2 levels of existence, the essential existence and the actual existence. The essential existence relates to the basic eternity of the essence while the actual existence relates to the interaction or contact between that essence and the conscious being. So when we say that X exists, we must define first in what level of existence does X exist. We can eventually define a formula, "All things exist in their essence, but not all things exist in their actuality."

How do we know that all of this is true? The answer is we simply established this as truth, as a fundamental interpretation of experience. Thus the full understanding of this matter can only be achieved by understanding first knowledge that is experience. In this viewpoint, we desire to abstract everything to their highest and most general levels. At any point of time, we are first faced with the truth of experience, and then the truth of existence. Why must experience come first and not existence? It is because those are the basic facts of the matter which cannot be denied.

Now many philosophers would inspect their experience to gain some insight on the nature of reality. I do not do that, I simply inspect the fact of experience and not the content of experience. For I believe that the content of experience can be anything and it will not tell us anything useful about reality. For the contents of experience, that is our personal reality, is not a necessary reality but a contingent one, it is the way it is but no law of reality obliges it to be that way. For that reason I do not inspect the contents of experience.

There are 3 revelations of knowledge at the exact same time yet at different orders. In the beginning we have experience, and from that revelation proceeds 2 revelations at once, the revelation of existence and the revelation of truth. Of course, there are many more revelations than just those 2, but those are the ones fundamental to our understanding of reality. This can be demonstrated with the following sentences, "There is experience", "There is is", "There are 3 sentences."

Now, it is rather interesting that the 3 revelations comply with the Trinitarian generation and procession doctrine. First we have experience as the sole object, then of the experience we attribute existence by the mere fact of it, then we attribute truth to the collective facts of experience and existence. The revelation of experience is the Father, the revelation of existence is the Son, and the revelation of truth is the Holy Spirit. Of course the actual appropriations may differ, but it is a neat coincidence.

The concept or essence of experience is known to all but undefinable. One may only explain the examples, that is the members of the category that is experience. It is undefinable due to its primacy and fundamentality in the order of knowledge. It is also one of the primary categories of reality other than existence. The concept or essence of existence is also known but undefinable, it may be referred only as the *is* or *there* of an object. That the object *is* and *is there*, means that it exists.

However, due to the nature of our reality, we only ever have experience and the existence of that experience to meddle around in our understanding of reality. By the inference of the containment principle we can reach the understanding that existence is separate from experience. Experience is then a subtype of existence, but it is not equivalent to existence itself, though for every object there is a corresponding experience. This is the correspondence model of experience and existence, or as I once say, the causal model.

What is the inference of the containment principle? It is this, we understand that experiences come and go, they begin and end. Before they begin, they must have an origin where they are potential and their essence exist in potentiality. In that potential essential existence, they are not an experience but rather a separate being from experience. For the essence of an experience is to be experienced by a subject, in divorce from a subject, it no longer becomes an experience.

Finally we arrive at the essence of truth. What is truth? Truth can be seen in 2 ways, the subjective truth and the objective truth. The subjective truth is the correspondence between an idea or thought with the actual reality, in other words it is an idea about reality. The objective truth is truly identical with reality itself. I used to think that truth is an immaterial abstract record on any object, yet what is the essence of such immaterial abstract record? 

The view of truth as an immaterial record of things, or the enabler of knowledge and experience leads to the conclusion that each object is its own truth. Truth is simply identical with reality itself. For the enabler of knowledge is nothing else but the object itself. When we know an object fully, we experience the object fully and we possess that object fully as well. So if Truth and Reality are identical, then why do we distinguish between the 2, or speak of them as if they are different things? 

As truth refers to the capacity of reality to be received by the conscious being. While reality refers to the essence of reality itself independent of any conscious being. Since objective truth is indistinguishable from the object, the only concept of truth left that we have is the correspondence model, that is the containment of an object within a container called ideas or thoughts. Thoughts and ideas then again are not really containers, they are merely a special kind of experience distinct from actual experience.

With these elaborations, the revelations of experience, existence, and truth is complete. Now we shall move on to the grand problem, the attainment of knowledge of existence. The fact that essences have no beginning points to the possible reality that essences have no end as well, meaning that they are fundamentally eternal. However, can we determine that they indeed have no end and are truly eternal? We can refer back to the truth. When an essence leaves experience and ceasing to be united with experience in our perspective, the truth of its being does not change, the essence remains what it is unaltered by any of our actions.

For it is simple fact that an essence or any essence is unaltered by anything at all and is preserved in a single eternal point of time. The question is how is this fact of essence known? This I have difficulties with, it is simply an axiomatic interpretation of the facts of reality. Thus considering that essences are all eternal, then there is one essence, the essence of essences which are highest of all and most eternal, this essence we know to be God.

So God exists absolutely, in all meanings of what He is. The question is does He interact with us, or in what worlds is He manifest more? Is our world one of those worlds? Atheists should drop their idea of the non-existence of God and instead argue for the relative non-existence of God. That is relative to us, God exists or does not exist, but nobody can claim the absolute non-existence of God. For the mere thought of God points to the truth of God and to His essence, thus the essence of God must exist absolutely.

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