I had an interesting debate with one of my housemates, a good friend of mine, the other night. He's a hopeless romantic (living, oddly enough, in the body of a 20-year-old womanizing bastard) and firmly believes that love conquers all because it is an unstoppable universal force.
So I asked him if this meant that love had existence outside of the consciousness that feels it, meaning that love itself would continue to exist even if there were no living things in existence - and he said yes. Of course, this sparked an extended debate. I mean, if love has real, actual existence apart from those things that partake of it, what about the rest of Plato's Forms? Virtue, justice, piety... and the banal ones pointed out in Parmenides, like redness or unhorseness. He conceded that sure, there could very well be an infinity of ideas that are an inherent property of any universe, and any consciousness "having ideas" is simply "partaking of the Forms" (to put it in the Platonic sense). We went back and forth for a while, and came to two separate conclusions. In his view, ideas are created at the same time as the universe, whether or not there is a divine creator involved, because ideas are inherent to universes. In my view, consciousness has the ability to spontaneously generate ideas. What this boils down to is this: either the laws of conservation (no spontaneous generation allowed) are violated once, when the universe comes into existence, and that violation is of infinite magnitude... or there are infinite violations, each of magnitude 1 (one idea at a time per consciousness). We couldn't agree on which made more sense.
Anyone have any thoughts on the subject?
I thought it might be fun to open something like this up for debate...
So I asked him if this meant that love had existence outside of the consciousness that feels it, meaning that love itself would continue to exist even if there were no living things in existence - and he said yes. Of course, this sparked an extended debate. I mean, if love has real, actual existence apart from those things that partake of it, what about the rest of Plato's Forms? Virtue, justice, piety... and the banal ones pointed out in Parmenides, like redness or unhorseness. He conceded that sure, there could very well be an infinity of ideas that are an inherent property of any universe, and any consciousness "having ideas" is simply "partaking of the Forms" (to put it in the Platonic sense). We went back and forth for a while, and came to two separate conclusions. In his view, ideas are created at the same time as the universe, whether or not there is a divine creator involved, because ideas are inherent to universes. In my view, consciousness has the ability to spontaneously generate ideas. What this boils down to is this: either the laws of conservation (no spontaneous generation allowed) are violated once, when the universe comes into existence, and that violation is of infinite magnitude... or there are infinite violations, each of magnitude 1 (one idea at a time per consciousness). We couldn't agree on which made more sense.
Anyone have any thoughts on the subject?
I thought it might be fun to open something like this up for debate...
