Onacruse said:
: Can it truly be said that, when burned out, the candle-flame is "gone"?
Of course. What's the essence of a flame? Heat and light. You burn your fingers if you hold them over a wick that's supporting a flame. If you hold your fingers over a cold wick, are you fingers burned? Do you feel any heat. Do you see any light? No. The essence of flame isn't there. It doesn't exist over a cold wick, before you light the candle or after you extinguish it.
It's all a matter of "perspective." Imagine, for the sake of conversation, that your own sensory perception apparatus enabled you to "see" somewhat farther into the infrared and ultraviolet bandwidths of the EMR spectrum. Then you'd see a "continuum" of the process of the candle-flame, long after that flame itself was "gone." And, if you could fly into the stratosphere, the phenomenon of that flame would still be traceable. And thence, following that same "flame," in the core of the Sun, would be virtually indiscernible. In a flask of liquid helium, such an "observation" would be like a nuclear explosion. But the thermodynamic "essence" of that process continues on, nonetheless, regardless of our own limited abilities to track it.
: the consequences of which continue on unabated in the energy flow-and-ebb of the material universe (local Brownian motion, for example).
Not so. Certain consequences continue, such as the light perhaps propagating through space, or the combustion products dissipating through the air.
But those consequences are exactly the same as the processes which produced them. Cause and effect, effect and cause. In what way do "cause" and "effect" differ? In what way do they cease to be manifestations of the same "reality"?
I think you may be confusing the consequences of a process with the process itself. If you have a headache, you moan and groan because of the pain. When the pain goes away, do you still have it? Of course not, and it's silly even to pose that question. You might retain a memory of the pain, but it's certainly not the same as the pain being there. Pain, of course, is a kind of process.
No, I'm not confused on this. Pain is a process, but a process that relates directly back to our individual "being." Can I remember the pain of my left knee being replaced? Certainly I can. It's not instant to my brain, but my memory of the pain of that surgery is as clear as if it happened yesterday. It's like the "smoke" of the candle.
: That we (within the extremely limited sensory apparatus of our physical organism) simply "cease to see" the flame, per se, means only that that particular manifestation of the 'essentialness' of the flame has disappeared from our awareness.
This sounds like metaphysical gobble-de-goop to me,
Immanuel Kant, Ludwig Wittengstein, and others, would take issue with you on this. However, it seems that they don't post on this board.
along the lines of "If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, is there any sound?" Well of course there's sound, because sound is the process of vibrations propagating through the air. Just because no human happens to hear it doesn't mean it isn't there. And of course, when the sound vibrations die out, and are lost in the background noise, the sound of the tree falling no longer exists.
You know as well as I that the energy vibrations of such an event never die out. That they might become imperceptible is a measure of you and me; not the energy event itself.
Flames and people and consciousness work the same when they dissipate into the background noise.
OK, then...what do you define as "background noise"?
Craig (of the "mental-masturbating" class LOLOL)
