An Estimate for no ‘God’
‘God’ cannot be shown or known, so ‘God’ is but wished for and hoped for, which is called ‘faith’, in short. ‘No God’ is also an unknown. The positions are not necessarily equiprobable.
There needs to be a Fundamental capability for all that is, no matter the ‘how’ of it, whether supposed as spontaneous, from ‘Nothing’, permanent stuff or energy, or whatnot. If it had an opposite state, there wouldn’t be anything, and so the capability is of necessity; it cannot not be. As the ground of determination, it is the source of us, and thus there is an ultimateness about it that led to the religious thinking of it as ‘God’, which it could be, or not.
It is not a factor herein that the Biblical and thus necessarily fundamentalist ‘God’ has been demolished by evolutionary science, cosmology, and self-contradiction, leaving no ‘Divine Inspiration’ in Genesis, because it still remains for us to size up what’s left for a ‘God’ who is still a Person-like Mind/Being as the basis of All or is All, with the Biblical myth-takes no longer being relevant.
I will begin posting some points toward ‘no God’, but not all at once.
An Estimate for no ‘God’
1a. All that we observe proceed from the simplest realm of tiny events/things/processes to the larger composite to the more and complex, where we exist, which cascade can continue into the future, where/when we can expect beings higher than ourselves to become.
1b. The unlikely polar opposite of (1a) is an ultra complex system of mind of a ‘God’ being First as Fundamental; however systems have parts, this totally going against the fundamental arts.
2. (1) gets worse, for ‘God’ being, given that there can be no input for any specific direction going into the necessary Fundamental Eternal Capability—the basis of all, this bedrock having to be causeless, with random effects, due to no information able to come in to what has no beginning. It thus appears that it could be everything possible, although not anything in particular, which is also the way it shows, in its constant transmutation at every instant, this according to what we call the laws of nature.
3. So, (2) indicates that there is no ultimate meaning, not that a built-in meaning would be great, for it would be quite restrictive, but at least, as ‘liberating’, there’s anything and everything possible that could have become from the basic eternal state of not anything in particular—our present Earthly life path being one that is being lived now after 13.57 billion years, much of which progression can be accounted for by science.
4. On top of the preceding unlikelihoods, and given that obviously that no Designer made everything instantly, but is curiously constrained to doing exactly what nature could do on its own (and why so slowly?), it is unlikely that all eventualities could have been foreseen by a Deity in starting a universe suitable for life. It seems more like we were fine-tuned to the Earth.
There needs to be a Fundamental capability for all that is, no matter the ‘how’ of it, whether supposed as spontaneous, from ‘Nothing’, permanent stuff or energy, or whatnot. If it had an opposite state, there wouldn’t be anything, and so the capability is of necessity; it cannot not be. As the ground of determination, it is the source of us, and thus there is an ultimateness about it that led to the religious thinking of it as ‘God’, which it could be, or not.
It is not a factor herein that the Biblical and thus necessarily fundamentalist ‘God’ has been demolished by evolutionary science, cosmology, and self-contradiction, leaving no ‘Divine Inspiration’ in Genesis, because it still remains for us to size up what’s left for a ‘God’ who is still a Person-like Mind/Being as the basis of All or is All, with the Biblical myth-takes no longer being relevant.
I will begin posting some points toward ‘no God’, but not all at once.
An Estimate for no ‘God’
1a. All that we observe proceed from the simplest realm of tiny events/things/processes to the larger composite to the more and complex, where we exist, which cascade can continue into the future, where/when we can expect beings higher than ourselves to become.
1b. The unlikely polar opposite of (1a) is an ultra complex system of mind of a ‘God’ being First as Fundamental; however systems have parts, this totally going against the fundamental arts.
2. (1) gets worse, for ‘God’ being, given that there can be no input for any specific direction going into the necessary Fundamental Eternal Capability—the basis of all, this bedrock having to be causeless, with random effects, due to no information able to come in to what has no beginning. It thus appears that it could be everything possible, although not anything in particular, which is also the way it shows, in its constant transmutation at every instant, this according to what we call the laws of nature.
3. So, (2) indicates that there is no ultimate meaning, not that a built-in meaning would be great, for it would be quite restrictive, but at least, as ‘liberating’, there’s anything and everything possible that could have become from the basic eternal state of not anything in particular—our present Earthly life path being one that is being lived now after 13.57 billion years, much of which progression can be accounted for by science.
4. On top of the preceding unlikelihoods, and given that obviously that no Designer made everything instantly, but is curiously constrained to doing exactly what nature could do on its own (and why so slowly?), it is unlikely that all eventualities could have been foreseen by a Deity in starting a universe suitable for life. It seems more like we were fine-tuned to the Earth.
Comments (166)
You cannot use probability theory for this problem. It just does not work like that. The following would be a probabilistic argument:
Imagine we have a set of universes. Some universes have a God. Other universes have no God. If we randomly pick a universe from that set, will it have a God or not?
What you are doing, however, is not probability theory at all.
Probability theory only works within the strict confines of set theory. It only concerns the cardinality of sets and subsets. Furthermore, you must demonstrate that the setup of your problem satisfies the Kolmogorov axioms or Cox' theorem.
Otherwise, what you are doing, has simply nothing to do with probability.
Furthermore, if you consider a statement P and its very opposite ~P to be equiprobable, it is just a way of saying that you do not understand the problem. It does not mean that they really are equiprobable. Of course not. It just means that you know absolutely nothing about the problem.
Hey Poetic, wanted to give you some love over here.
Couple quick thoughts on meaning:
1. I think of meaning as a deterministic cosmic computer [our brains] that transcends its own capabilities. Meaning its not binary, its both A and B working simultaneously. That idea, in effect, would cause the computer to crash or lock-up. In effect then, we have thus fallen and can't get up LOL. So in an anthropomorphic way, we are barred from 'perfect' knowledge. We can build computers; not humans with a conscious mind. Lack of that 'complete' meaning and knowledge then leaves us with a sense of wonder.
2. Wonderment. What is that ? Why do we wonder? For example, why does science insist on saying: all events must have a cause?
So two points; how does consciousness work, and how does wonderment distinguish us from lower life forms (?)
Quoting 3017amen
We are naturally curious and so we are now in the process of asking nature about this complex feat accomplished over a long time. Once there was little or no consciousness in creatures and now it is full blown in us. Since, as in all developments, it wasn't instant, this stands against an All-Might doing it.
This leaves us but with the prospect of a Deity with only the means to start something going that might be workable, it stuttering along through five near extinctions unto our precarious present condition tottering upon a sixth possible extinction from a four degree centigrade global warming rise projected.
5a. It’s still that the religious might then suppose a ‘God’ Deity who is like a scientist who throws a bunch of stuff together that is balanced and energetically reactive enough, but not too much so that it races along too fast, etc., to make for something livable coming out of it, but, again, really, what is a fully formed person-like being doing sitting around beforehand, this also being all the more of a quandary that ever enlarges the question rather than answering it.
5b. But, if it is supposed that life has to come from a Larger Life, then a regress ensues, making this not to be a good template. As for a Deity trying to put workable stuff together, this is much like the idea of a multiverse. We continue to estimate no 'God'.
Actulally, he can.
There are two subsets: "God exists" and "God does not exist". Together they form the superset, "Making statements at god's actual existence".
Please note that both subsets at the same time and at the same respect are proper subsets of the superset, and together they do not negate the superset, although one is the negation of the other. This only means that the subsets are obviously not overlapping, but that's just a side-issue.
The probability of "God exists" is the event that god exists/(god exists + god does not exist) and the probability of "god does not exist" is the event that god does not exist/(god exists + god does not exist).
In the lack of any other information, the two events are therefore equiprobable.
Consider this with the experiment of tossing a flat coin which has a head and tail. the probability that the coin will show a head, or a tail, is
shows a tail / (shows a tail + shows a head) and
shows a head / (shows a tail + shows a head).
Although my operational symbols and conceptual descriptions of the sets are far from the symbols of standard set theory, I hope you see the parallel and agree that the probability of god existing, without any other consideration, is the same as the probability of god not existing.
And more importantly, I hope you agree that the problem or question or whatever CAN be expressed in terms of probability relying on set theory etc.
It just depends how you word it.
It's also whatever people do to weigh the balance either way with their guestimations. I don't think we need to sidetrack into math, set theory, probability theory, and truth tables. We have to estimate about what can't be known for sure.
Well, no, the bureaucracy will throw up another hurdle there.
According to the paperwork factory, his setup must either satisfy Kolmogorov's axioms or Cox' theorem. So, he has to produce all kinds of paperwork that extensively demonstrates that everything is properly stamped, signed, and certified. Otherwise, the official clerk, who works from nine to five, with a thirty-minute break at lunch, will declare the proposal to be irreceivable.
Mathematics is just some kind of extensive bureaucracy of excruciatingly annoying formalisms, not particularly much different from other such obnoxious bureaucracies:
The Dispute Tribunal should also have power to make interim orders, including orders for the suspension of action in any case where there is a good prima facie case and the award of compensation or damages would be inadequate and power to summarily dismiss matters that are clearly irreceivable or are frivolous or vexatious.
Either you reason within a system, or else you reason about a system, because in all other cases, you are just system-less bullshitting.
So, you spout 175 different baseless system-less claims, of which I pick just one.
You refer to probability theory, which is a real system, and which obviously does not belong somewhere in the middle of system-less bullshit. Hence, I ask, what the hell is that serious principle doing in that complete mess of 175 nonsensical declarations?
What you cannot do, is to arbitrarily appropriate the credibility of real systems in order to make your own system-less bullshit sound better.
God is a basic belief in a system of beliefs. There are several such mainstream belief systems that incorporate that basic belief. It is a system-wide premise amongst several other system-wide beliefs. You cannot just lift that one premise out of its particular system and start spouting system-less nonsense about it.
Furthermore, it is a basic belief, meaning that it is part of the construction logic of such system. It is necessarily unexplained, because otherwise it would not be part of the construction logic. Why don't you question why there is an unexplained, basic belief in arithmetic concerning the existence of a successor function? Why don't you call that "equiprobable" with something else? If you want to reject axioms in a system, why don't you pick something like arithmetic? It is full of axioms.
I have never heard anybody say that an axiom would be "equiprobable" with some other axiom ...
Quoting Arnborg and Sjödin
According to this, your demand has been satisfied. There are two states, or two subsets:
- god exists
- god does not exist
And they are mutually exclusive
it is plausible that they have equal probability to be true while they are mutually exclusive
Consistency: If there are more gods, or the possibility of more than one god, then the probabilities get divided into more subsets. That is, (There are no 5 gods), (there are no 5938 gods), their opposite (non-existence of gods) grew to be an equal number of subsets (Five gods don't exist,) (5938 gods don't exist).
I am sorry, @alcontali, but this is not a dissatisfactory application of Cox's theorem.
Equally, I could prove that the system also satisfies Kolmogorov's Axioms, if i were only better equipped to use math symbols on the keyboard. Let this suffice for the time being:
Quoting undetermined
Here, A is "god exists" and B is "god does not exist".
Also, if you talk about more gods, then
A is "X number of gods exist" and B is "X number of gods do not exist."
I am not sure that it can work like that. For the number of gods, you assume a set that looks like this: {0,1}. You do not assume, for example, {0,1,2,3,4,5}. Therefore, you implicitly use information that you do not mention, something like, "There is only one God".
You clearly know more about the problem than you disclose.
In that implicitly-assumed information, you undoubtedly already assume the existence of God. How else do you know it it is just one?
Therefore, you use the assumption that God exists to argue that he possibly does not exist.
If you do not want to use that particular information, then you can perfectly assume any arbitrary set of possibilities {0,1,2,..., k}, with k any natural number. In that case, you cannot assign equal probabilities 1/k to each possibility, because every possible value of k is equally probable. You will simply not succeed in fixing k. Therefore, in my opinion, your proposal does not satisfy Cox' consistency requirement.
I addressed this already. Assuming {1,2,3,4,5} gods, has the counter assumption of not having {1,2,3,4,5} gods. Together they form the probability of 1, that is, the union of the two mutually exclusive sets has the probability of 1.
You can go from here. Everything else falls into place if you look at this this way.
What is the difference between "having 0 gods" and "not having {1,2,3,4,5} gods"? Isn't that the same possibility?
There is a difference. Maybe I used the wrong shorthand for the set. There is not a denying by an atheist of multiple sets of different numbers of gods. The theist has to decide first how many gods there are, and the set must include one specific number, for instance, 4565 in case of Greco-Roman worship.
Then the equal probability is that there are zero gods.
But if you say (there are either 324 gods, or 32 gods, or 7 gods), then negating this will not always yield zero; but zero will always negate this. In other words, if multiple sets of gods can exist at the same time, then the probability of their existing is meaningless, as gods are not a thing that can exist and not exist at the same time and in the same respect by any religion.
So, this whole exercise just depends on what theists say and not on what objectively the possibilities would be? So, if I get it right, you have no way of determining the number of gods, except by listening to theists. Hence, these probabilities are not fixed, because different theists could report different numbers. Again, Cox' theorem does not allow for that:
Consistency – If the plausibility of a proposition can be derived in many ways, all the results must be equal.
The fact that there is one god, is negated not only by the claim that there are zero gods, but also by the different claim, that there are 4 gods. Or that there are 6094 gods.
In fact, there could be one number of god or gods; it could be 0, or 1, or 2, or 3... and they all have infinite number of negations.
In fact, if one god has a certain probability of existing, and x number of gods have a certain probability of existing; and if you consider the likely fact, that each distinct number of god has the same probability as the existence of a different distinct number of gods... then the probability of having X number of gods is 1 out of the total number of different number of gods that can exist.
Please consider that any distinct integer will be a valid number of gods in existence to believe. Each distinct number of gods will have the same probability as any one of a different distinct number of gods.
If you consider that there are an infinite number of integers, then the believer must conisder that the probability of his belief in X number of gods is the probability of 1/(the sum of all distinct possibilies of numbers of gods in existence to believe), or 1/(the sum of 1 count for all different integer numbers), or 1/(1+1+1+1+ infinite times) which is 1/(infinity) which is not defined, but its limit approaches zero,
Therefore the only valid conclusion you can have is that it is impossible to determine which number of gods to beleive in, as in believing in any ONE given number of gods (for instance, in 1 god) is a near-impossible to impossible proposition.
Of course this can be negated in one fell swoop, by saying that the bible is the absolute authority on god count, or the Koran, or the Kama Sutra, etc.
7a. We see that the One of Totality continually transitions/transmutes, never being able to remain as anything particular, which matches its nature supposed due to no information being able to come into the Eternal in the first place that never was, for the One Fundamental Eterne has to be ungenerated and deathless if it is so. But how can there be a finite absolute One with an impossible None outside it?
7b. Or all could be relative if there are no absolutes, for Totality can’t have anything outside it. So then Totality must be relative to itself.
7c. Of course, either way, the capability remains, as necessity, with no alternative, without needing any cause for it to be. It is the Ground of Determination — G.O.D. It has no opposite and so it is not remarkable.
8. Aside from the trivial definition of free will being that without coercion the will is free to operate, and the useless definition of the harmful random will equaling ‘freedom’, the deeper notion of ‘free’ as being original and free of the brain will is of a currency never being able to be stated and cashed in on, leaving ‘determined’ to continue to be the opposite of ‘undetermined’. This stands against a ‘God’.
While eternalism can’t yet be told apart from presentism, the message from both is of a transient ‘now’, whether pre-determined or determined as it goes along. All hope then, is crushed, both for us and the Great Wheel itself having any potency. This is the great humility; all hubris is gone.
It is enough, then, that we have the benefit of experiencing and living life well, sometimes, much more so given this modern age, although still with sweat, tears, and aversive substrates of emotions that those of the future might consider to be barbaric. The early days of humankind were horrendous.
I don't have the formal philosophical background to follow all of your Against God arguments. Yet I generally agree with the assertion that "there is no God" (as defined in Polytheistic and Monotheistic traditions).
However, I have concluded from scientific evidence and rational analysis, that there should be a First Cause or Prime Mover or Cosmic Principle (poetically imagined as The Tao, or Brahman, or Logos, or G*D). These philosophical entities are not presumed to be real, but ideal, not beings, but principles. And they are not to be objects of faith & hope, or worshiped as Lords, but merely accepted as universal concepts and logical necessities.
Quoting PoeticUniverse
I agree that the world was obviously not designed instantaneously, but perhaps it was programmed to evolve gradually over eons, via natural processes. The Laws of Nature are G*D-given "constraints" on Chaos. Natural Selection "fine-tunes" creatures to fit their niche, according to the programmer's criteria.
The hypothetical Programmer would not be creating a playground for bored immortals, or a domain for war-games with Satan, but an ongoing experiment in logical and statistical possibilities that must play-out within the constraints of Logic. Nature is what the program looks like from the inside. When viewed as a Darwinian program, the heuristic course of Nature makes sense. This is not a fact -- it's just a Way of thinking.
I apologize for interrupting your thread, but I just couldn't resist offering an alternative to the perennial God/No-God debate, in the form of my BothAnd G*D. :smile:
THE WAY
[i]The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao.
The name that can be named is not the eternal name.
The nameless is the beginning of heaven and earth.[/i]
? Lao Tse, Tao Te Ching
THE PROGRAM
The G*D that is known is not the eternal Nerd
Inscrutable is the un-named Omniscient
Omnipotential is the Cause of Cosmos & Eardth
___Gnomon
Evolutionary Programming : http://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page13.html
G*D : not the name of a deity, but a job-title : http://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page13.html
I think the eternal first cause needs to be simple and operate at a tiny level, as near-nothing, to qualify as fundamental, and of course would still be doing its eternal thing now, such as with the quantum fluctuations at the base point energy level. (They actually call it the zero point energy; however, the energy doesn't seem to be zero.)
Virtual particles get produced in pairs, probably because the first cause, not able to halt and be still, has to jiggle/divide something into haves that it then has to put back into the base, and so forth, with these two effects always having to both occur, one ever after the other.
Somehow the pair's virtual particles were driven apart (inflation?) and so became separated and real faster than they could annihilate and return the energy.
The above is sketchy, but once we have some particles persisting a bit, the real 'programming'/'coding' would be done at each new level, such as quarks coding for protons and neutrons, those then coding for atoms, the atoms coding for molecules, molecules for cells, etc.
So, rather than all being coded at once, it occurs in stages, at each stable or semi-stable level.
It's kind of like the way language works. The sentence has its own level of rules and comprehension, as well as still being based on the lower levels of phrases, words, grammar, phonemes, letters, and strokes, and such too for its parts if they need to be attended to at their own level.
Can't really have a full-blown Programmer just sitting around as First, it never having been put together from even more fundamental parts.
Quoting Gnomon
No problem, but, thanks, actually, for it is about the first response addressing a proposition in the OP.
So, from our limited perspective, according to this, there is a 50% probability God exists?
Quoting PoeticUniverse
Zero Point Energy (ZPE) is about as basic as it gets in the physical universe : the lowest possible energy of a quantum vacuum. That's as close to nothing as you can imagine. But it's still a Materialistic Space-Time concept that can't explain its own existence. And the notion of powerful nothingness evolved from ancient (Chaos) and 19th century (Aether) theories of emptiness-with-potential. Metaphorically, it's similar to my notion of EnFormAction, But, EFA is not the First Cause, it's merely an ongoing wave of causation, which was in-turn motivated by the Intention of eternal omnipotential BEING or G*D.
A true First Cause (wave origin) would have to precede space-time and matter-energy where the ripples propagate. It would have to be more than a simple accidental quantum fluctuation though. It would have to "program" the Big Bang Singularity with all the information necessary to create a world from scratch. In my thesis, the equivalent to your ZPE was eternal Chaos (random potential), which was enformed by Intention into the organization of our Cosmos.
Quoting PoeticUniverse
The original Singularity functioned like an egg : once fertilized by Intention, it divides into the "ten thousand things". Each new division necessarily creates pairs. World Creation is division of The ALL (eternity-infinity) from One into Two, and so on, but the whole is still Unitary.
Note : what we call the physical "Universe" was originally presumed to be eternal-infinite, but was recently found to be bounded in space & time, hence not really the Uni-Vers (all encompassing).
Quoting PoeticUniverse
Since, by the law of Logic, no two things in reality can exist in the same space-time, they are necessarily polarized and repel each other.
Quoting PoeticUniverse
The "programming" of Old into New is accomplished by transfer of Information. The new thing inherits some of the data of the old, but then becomes unique by absorbing novel information from each interaction with other things.
Quoting PoeticUniverse
Yes. But a program begins with the original input of a kernel of information (operating system), which is amplified by each iteration of the process into manifold threads of novelty. The hypothetical Singularity was the operating system for calculation of random potential into actual space-time-matter-energy.
Quoting PoeticUniverse
In space-time that is true. That's why I assume that the Programmer must exist eternally as infinite Potential until Intention causes a chain of change. A human programmer is outside the operating system he creates. So why not the Programmer of our Cosmic System?
The EnFormAction Hypothesis : http://bothandblog3.enformationism.info/page23.html
[i]The Tao that refers to here can never be the true tao.
The Name that is used here to designate is not a true name.
The Tao that is unnameable is the Source of the Heaven and the Earth.
The name, once introduced, becomes the Mother of the Ten Thousand Things.
. . . . .
Tao gives birth to one,
One gives birth to two,
Two gives birth to three,
Three gives birth to ten thousand beings.[/i]
___Lao Tse, Tao Te Ching
Personally, I doubt that God must be a ‘person-like mind/being’ of necessity. A mind must experience, a being must be in time. Both of these descriptors create problems in relation to limitations for God, as much as they help us to cement the existence of such a concept in our understanding of what exists. I recognise that to strip these away (or abandon them as attempts at reduction) leaves us with even less to hang our hat on, so to speak. But I don’t think it removes the possibility of existence entirely, so perhaps it’s worth considering.
Quoting PoeticUniverse
How might a necessary-fundamental-eternal-capability begin to develop a system of mind? How might it gain awareness of itself? And what is information, but a manifestation of the most basic awareness-relation-meaning?
It wouldn't have a little mind from which to intend to develop a larger system of mind.
I suppose that depends on how you define ‘mind’ at its most fundamental:
attention; will or determination to achieve something
Still the same; it's too simple and small.
No alternative to it.
Quoting Gnomon
Too complex to be fundamental.
Quoting Gnomon
Yes, necessarily random, having no input.
Quoting Gnomon
Perhaps like one is a positive field lump and the other its a negative field lump (trough).
Quoting Gnomon
I was a programmer at IBM for 31 years; have now been retired for near 20 years.
Quoting PoeticUniverse
Must it intend to develop a larger system of mind, though? What if its intention is simply to be aware, to achieve...something? What if - from this most basic of minds, from the faintest and vaguest attention and will or determination to achieve something - an entire universe can come into being?
Too fundamental for 'intention'. Minds are billions of years into the future.
You’re dismissing this on the assumption that ‘mind’ is necessarily a complex system, when in fact you have no idea what mind is.
It’s all speculation, and there is enough information available and certainly plenty of reasonable speculation that mind, attention and will are more fundamental than the simplest of brain systems - even more fundamental than life itself.
I didn’t expect this level of closed-mindedness from you, PU. It’s disappointing, I must say.
11. God’s operations, curiously restricted to be the same as nature’s has us not being able to tell them apart from nature’s, but which is more likely, the natural or the supernatural? Earth is just where it ought to be, in the Goldilocks zone, and not impossibly out near Neptune.
12. And why must there be a truly distinct transcendent, immaterial, intangible, super realm when it would still have to give and take energy in the physical material language, talking its talk and walking its walk? Dubious, plus the speculation of an invisible realm goes nowhere toward it being so, it tending toward making excuses for what ought to be everywhere.
13. So, we can sit on a fence and go to church half the time or estimate the probability either way, but note that there can be no blame for not knowing what can’t be shown for sure. It’s all in what it does for you.
Let us have wine, lovers, song, and laughter—
Water, chastity, prayer the day after.
Such we’ll alternate the rest of our days—
Thus, on the average, we’ll make Hereafter!
That is indeed the assumption of the Materialist worldview. Most people have difficulty imagining Eternity and Infinity, so they simply expand on their sensory experience : eternity is a long, long time, and infinity is a really far distance. But Philosophers (and Poets and Mathematicians) have been imagining Eternity (timelessness) and Infinity (spacelessness) for millennia. Of course these notions are not physical realities, but they are useful in thinking about metaphysical idealities. The key to understanding those abstruse concepts is to realize what Aristotle was talking about in his second volume of the Physics : not Magic, but Mind, not Spiritualism, but Ontology.
Meta-Physics : http://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page14.html
Quoting PoeticUniverse
Eternity-Infinity is as simple as it gets : Unbounded Potential, Wholeness with no divisions. Only in Space-Time are there boundaries between things. BEING is simple; beings are complex. The potential for existence (power to be) is as fundamental as it gets.
Quoting PoeticUniverse
Chaos is randomness, like the noise on your TV screen, but also infinite Potential upon which unlimited images may be inscribed. Chaos is Formless, but also infinitely enformable, like a lump of clay. The "input" is Intention, which is simply the power to cause change. In space-time we call it Energy. In Virtual Reality we call it Potential. Potential is not Real, but the power to actualize..
Quoting PoeticUniverse
Prior to space-time there was only one lump : BEING, an infinite Aristotelian "substance" (blank slate) with the potential to be anything. Once holistic Infinity divides there exists a "difference" : Information is the difference (change) that makes a difference (meaning).
Quoting PoeticUniverse
You, of all people, should be aware that the programmer is not "in" the program physically, but is "in" the program mentally and meta-physically. You put something of yourself into the program : not a piece of your physical body, but a piece of your metaphysical mind.
The G*D or BEING or First Cause or Creator of my thesis is not a theistic person in Heaven or Olympus, but the Principle of Causation that, like a Programmer, is both "in" and "external to" the running program. One term for such a concept is PanEnDeism.
PanEnDeism : http://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page16.html
Law of Metaphysics :
Since the mechanical laws of physics don’t explain the emergence of metaphysical Life & Mind & Qualia, we must assume that the program for our evolving world includes algorithms for the immaterial aspects of reality. Exactly what those “laws” might be, remain to be discovered. But, like the regulations of physics they are probably mathematical and proportional in nature.
The program doesn't do well; there were five near extinctions, with a sixth on the horizon.
The notion that the observer in the mind is a little homunculus is a Materialistic concept, requiring an infinite regression of observers. In order to understand the relation between Brains and Minds, you must realize that Brain and Mind are composed of the same substance : Information (the power to enform). If you find this difficult to imagine, just remember what the spoon-bending bald kid, in The Matrix, said to Neo, "there is no spoon". You and the spoon are one. It's all Information, all the way down. :cool:
Information :
. . . Claude Shannon quantified Information not as useful ideas, but as a mathematical ratio between meaningful order (1) and meaningless disorder (0); between knowledge (1) and ignorance (0). So, that meaningful mind-stuff exists in the limbo-land of statistics, producing effects on reality while having no sensory physical properties. We know it exists ideally, only by detecting its effects in the real world.
. . . For humans, Information has the semantic quality of aboutness , that we interpret as meaning. In computer science though, Information is treated as meaningless, which makes its mathematical value more certain. It becomes meaningful only when a sentient Self interprets it as such.
. . . When spelled with an “I”, Information is a noun, referring to data & things. When spelled with an “E”, Enformation is a verb, referring to energy and processes.
Conventional programmers aim for specified goals. But Evolutionary Programming intends to explore possibilities. My assumption is that the Cosmic Programmer created an ongoing experiment to explore what's possible within certain limitations (natural laws). In that case, temporary failures are merely stepping stones to the next iteration . . . the process goes on.
Evolutionary Programming : http://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page13.html
Reality/Language analogy:
Capability is the energy/gravity
that papers the covariant quantum fields
that ink the particles of the standard model
that stroke the alphabet letters of the atoms
(as coded in stars)
that word the dictionary molecules
that phrase the biotype DNA cells
that verb the subjects
that sentence the creatures
that paragraph the species
that story the ongoing tree of life
that books the literature of the unified-verse
that libraries the Cosmos.
(something to work on)
Quoting Gnomon
To the Quantum Depths of the Poetic Universe
From quantum non-locality and entanglement, we know that information is more primary than distance, and that things don’t have to have the appearance of being near each other to be connected and cause an effect.
Everything connected to everything would seem to be a ‘perception’ as far as one could be had by that network. The all-at-once connections, as like in a hologram, would seem to provide for for the direction of what goes on in the overall information process. I am thus thinking like a yogi and a guru, the entire cosmos situated within me.
Quantum non-locality seems to imply that every region of space is in instant and constant contact with every other, perhaps even in time as well, and so the holistic universe is governed by the property of the solitary whole—and so that could be the underlying guidance principle. An individual particle might ‘know’ something about what to do, acting according to all the others.
Thus both our consciousness and the holistic universe, each having a singular nature, would be the clue. Maybe they are of the same basis of fundamental consciousness, but separate as two manifestations, each controlling a different realm, such as internal and external, our internal consciousness giving us ‘future’, and the external consciousness granting ‘future’ to the universe. I don't know which has the tougher job.
Lee Smolin has it that qualia are intrinsic, as fundamental, and Chalmers has it that information is fundamental and can express itself in two ways, in consciousness and in matter.
Quantum entanglement suggests that each particle has the entire 3-D or 4-D map of the universe, the information ever updated, the universe being as a single entity. While this may not be consciousness at the level we have, it may help the universe accomplish something of the movements of particles and fields in their energy, mass, and momentum, in some global way that ever goes forward overall.
This may not seem to be saying a whole lot, in depth, but since the quantum realm is beneath everything then one would surmise that thee quantum realm must have all to do with everything that goes on.
It is still that the apparent atoms and molecules make the happenings, via physical-chemical reactions; however, this observation cannot be equated to an ‘explanation’, for we must wonder what underlies the chemical mattering and reacting that seems to have some unity of direction to it.
Well, I’d finished with the yogis and the gurus, and the seers and the oracles only know of the future; so, I surmised, to uncover the deepness of the present, for nature and the conscious animates, I must seek out the Grand Poet in her Uni-Verse, in order to fully apprehend the ethereal phantasms of the entangled and enchanted forest of nature, hopefully bringing them into the light.
Fortunately, I was a poet myself, and so I could gain entrance to the elfin dell, as a human, having to first pass through the neophytes, trying to resist their temptations and spells; however, the sensual can indeed take a back seat to the intellectual, although the ecstasy can be similar.
I had been to FairyLande once before, bringing my epic poem, ‘Flora Symbolica’, unto them, and writing up the results in ‘Elfin Legends’, and so they had bid me to return one day when I had a meaningful quest.
Theirs was more of an ethereal world, whereas mine was often clunky, except when I dreamt at night, and so it was time for me to wander again, to ask about and better understand the quantum guidance principle, especially learning this from those closer to nature and the heavens, they being the elven mixture of spirit–angel-beings and humans, and quite aware of the causal nexus.
I flew to England, to the special place, near Gallienne’s old haunts, and waited for the funnel to open up into a tunnel, and then through it I came out into their realm and walked on for a full day, seeing no one straight out yet, just a few sideward waverings, but noting many new colors hereto–fore unknown, as here there were more waves and frequencies.
Here the blesséd and haunted old forest,
Whereat the base of an oak I rest,
While all about lay wondrous deep coverts,
And a green-turfed path that leads o’er a crest.
They all knew what I was after, as evidenced in the first encounter with one of them.
“To pass and learn of the connectedness of all things, you must kiss me, after which I’ll give you your first clue.”
The kiss vibrated deep within my being, and I felt it to my core, and then she related, “All of life’s entities embrace one another, including cells, organisms, species, and biotope”.
Slumbering in the orient sunbeam,
I soft awoke, as dewdrops all agleam,
Refreshed by the delight of a daydream,
Then rose as mist, carried on the day-beam.
I was on my way again the next morning, the hours having flown by, as when Einstein had sat next to a pretty girl and had noted the much quicker passage of time, over the slower passage when touching a hot stove.
I learned more as I meandered through the labyrinth of the forest.
She said, “Hold me, and I will unveil some of the poetic structure afterward.”
Well, two days went by, someeehow, and she revealed more of my quest, “Living conscious creatures are as a poem, they ever revealing further dimensions and expressing new properties at every level of organization, via strokes, letters, phonemes, words, phrases, and sentences, in and of a [uni]verse of rhythm, reason, rhyme, meter, metric, and melody. This will relate to the quantum All.”
I was hungry for the continuation of life’s quantum poem, and hoped I’d be able to move on more quickly, but her allure was testing my resolve; however, she told me something very soon after we’d rubbed our cheeks together, “Meanings in life are not just discovered or gleaned by mere observation but by understanding through participation, these informationally derived meanings combined to make sense in a non-reductive process, as in the relational reality of life happening at our semantical level of syntactical information exchange, with no breaking of any of the holistic connections, all this as the epic whole of the book of nature.”
It was so still you could hear a nut fall,
And the musical strain of mystic call,
In soft tones flowered upon the silence,
As floating on the surface of the All.
“There is the particle and there is the wave—either one forced on us by our observations, being jointly known as the ‘wavicle’, all three states of which are truly not the actual reality.”
Of man and angel, one yet neither, they came,
To dwell forever, in shadow worlds, between
Form and substance, they, all elfin creatures
And all who float or fly as came from Paradise.
After two weeks with her, I had to survive the passage through the land of skulls and roses.
Finally, I emerged, unscathed, into the Land of Spring, and found out about growth.
“There are no objects that are identical with themselves over time, and the temporal sequence remains open. Nature is a ‘possibility gestalt’, with the world forming anew each moment, from the deeper, enfolded realm which is a unity in the sense of an indivisible ‘potentiality’ which can realize itself in many possible ways, it not being a strict sum of the partial states.”
‘Twas that time of morn when the exiled rise,
Thrown to time’s Earthly bondage through the skies,
Being for an hour their own Heavenly selves,
Their full glory unhidden by disguise.
“It still appears to us, though, that the world consists of parts that have continued from ‘a moment ago’, and thus retain their identity in time; yet, matter really only appears secondarily, as a congealed potentiality.”
These forest fairies, dryads, nymphs, and fauns,
Ever flash their nude blossoms on the lawns.
They beckon me along, for though the air
I pass thoughts of love, verses, and songs.
“In a stable configuration of matter, such as in the inanimate, all the quantum uncertainties are effectively statistically averaged out, this thus ever being deterministic; but in the case of the statically unstable but dynamically stable configurations, the ‘lively’ features of the underlying quantum structure have a chance to surface to the macroscopic level.”
Magical things I saw, that often appear
Elsewhere when one’s eyes close but for a second:
Wingèd ladies, and flowered butterflies,
Whose prints are pressed as dust upon the pansies.
Unicorns and chimeras wandered by,
With nixies, gremlins, and centaur men;
Faeries danced, caught by a believing glance,
As dreamy visions held me sleepy-eyed.
A flush of youth shot through us, as the chain
Of light from angel to faerie added my link,
And my eyes were sparks of bright burning fire,
Sense extended in a new dimension.
And so they told me more, “Physical phenomena are made of information processors that generate overlappings of correlated multi–dimensional wave fields which are propagating through time, as fields of possibility, whose intensity is a measure of the probability of an object-like realization.”
The life of her face is in her deep blue eyes,
Soft-lipped mouth, and the ears that pointed rise,
As the moon and stars reflect in a pool,
Which look as for a lifetime pours surprise.
“So, there is form before substance, relationality before a materiality that is of secondary importance, its information being primary. Impressions of realizations are left in our world by the gestalt that ‘lives’ in the multidimensional spaces of quantum superpositional possibility.”
I dive into her eyes, her soulful gate,
And worship before her heart’s flaming grate,
Midst flowers in the gardens of her dreams,
Then whirl back up through her eyes as her mate.
“There are no point masses then, but only smudged particles, such as we know of in the space-filling representations of the distribution of electrons in the shells of atoms—the ‘cloud’.
“What remains unchanged over time are certain properties that find expression in the laws of conservation of energy, momentum, electrical charge, etc., these necessarily being closer to the basis of all.”
At last, I met the ultimate Poet, the Elfin Queen, who reevealed, “There is a relationship structure that arises not only from the manifold and the complicated interactions of the imagined building blocks of matter, but also one that is substantially more inherent and holistic.”
She continued, “So, then, the weaves of the quantum bits as strokes makes for the letters of the elementals, as the alphabet of the standard model, forming the words as the atoms that go on to form the molecules as the phrases, on into cells as sentences, up to the paragraphs of the organisms, and unto the stories of the species, via the unity of life’s conscious literature as the unified verse in which we live out our poems.”
I’m left with a feeling that’s no mere spell,
But a fact in Heaven that’s fancy in Hell,
Of elemental affinity’s flame,
Deeper than thought, much older than speech can tell.
I headed back home, this taking a few months, never stepping into the same universe twice.
Pictures from my trip:
If a complex system such as the Universe were to be intentionally planned, then the mind that planned it would need to be at least as complex.
That's because the evolutionary program devised by the presumptive Programmer is experienced by us little avatars as Nature, in all its aspects, both good (Enformy) and bad.(Entropy). The values of our program range from Zero (death) to One (life), and everywhere in between. Apparently It's our job as thinking beings to make sense of that disparity, as best we can.
Quoting PoeticUniverse
I must again clarify that I am in agreement with most of your arguments against the obsolete notions of deity based on ancient scriptures. But I am not in agreement with certain atheistic arguments that are based on obsolete science. Prior to the Big Bang theory, it was plausible that the world was self-existent. But now we know that it did not exist before that act of creation. Prior to the Quantum theory, the materialistic belief in fundamental atoms was plausible. But now the foundations of reality fade into virtuality as mathematical fields. So, it no longer seems like the old 19th century materialistic scientific empirical 'reasons" apply here. That's why Enformationism is proposed as an update for both Theistic and Atheistic worldviews.
For further clarification, I'll try to explain that the Enformationism thesis is not Theistic like Christianity and Islam. It is not Occult & Magical like New Age cults. And it is not Superstitious like Paganism and Shamanism. It is instead an attempt to understand the world in both Physical and Metaphysical aspects, by explaining how Quanta and Qualia are instantiated in the world.
FWIW, I sometimes refer to myself as an "Agnostic Deist", because my G*D hypothesis is a gap-filler for the enormous abyss of our understanding of Ultimate Reality.
That complex effects require even more complex causes is true within the space-time universe. But in the hypothetical eternal-state-prior-to-the-Big-Bang all events exist simultaneously (holistically), as in Einstein's Block Universe. Hence, our one-thing-at-a-time-universe seems complex to us because we experience it one-step-at-a-time (now), while all other steps (past/future) are hidden from us. But the presumptive Programmer (The ALL) is all-at-once, hence utterly simple.
One way to imagine this fantastic scientific scenario is to picture the random static on an infinite TV screen. Since there are no objects visible, all you see is a continuous shade of gray. But each of those countless pixels has the potential to become either black (0) or white (1), or any color in between. So, the cosmic Programmer (or TV Producer) can select any subset of pixels and specify their colors in order to produce a meaningful image. Play those images in succession, and you have the "real" world that we experience one-frame-at-a-time.
Black or white, all or nothing, one or zero . . . these are examples of the simplest element of reality : either/or. The potential of Eternity/Infinity is a two-sided coin, but both sides are of the same coin : unity.
Block Universe : https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-debate-over-the-physics-of-time-20160719/
Eternalism : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternalism_(philosophy_of_time)
Were you tripping in the Astral Plane? I enjoyed your little excursions into fairy-tale fantasy. And also your insightful glimpses into some far-out scientific "aspects of reality". Not many people could pull-off both in the same post. :smile:
Quoting PoeticUniverse
Yes. Materialists won't appreciate this analogy -- due to it's spooky implications -- but "non-locality" is essentially the same thing as Infinity/Eternity, as proposed in Einstein's theory of Block Time (Ultimate Reality). All points in space & time are indeed in contact with each other, because there is no distinction in Unity (wholeness). Yet, we space-time creatures experience Proximate Reality as one point (thing, event) at a time. That's why I have to postulate a "guiding principle" (G*D) to conceive of all possibilities at once, and then to select via Intention a sub-set of infinite what-if maybes (Ideality), transforming them into finite what-is actualities (Reality).
Quoting PoeticUniverse
Subjective Consciousness and Objective Physics are indeed separate manifestations of Ultimate Reality. Subjectively, we experience reality as a sequence of events or as a collection of parts. But Objectively, we can conclude, as Einstein did, that all things are relative, and our personal perspective is only a fraction of absolute reality.
Quoting PoeticUniverse
Precisely. Materialists see only the quantitative aspects of reality, and ignore the intrinsic qualitative aspects, because they are too personal and subjective. But physicist Smolin thinks that's "The Trouble With Physics" : turning a blind-eye to qualia. Information is now viewed by some serious scientists as The Fundamental Element of the universe, being intrinsic in both Mind and Matter. Perhaps the primary reason most physicists object to that interpretation of Information is that it seems to open the door to Magic, Miracles, and Myths, due to the non-empirical nature of subjective consciousness. But Enformationism is an attempt to have the Qualia without losing track of the difference between "as-if" and "as-is". That way we can enjoy fiction & fantasy without compromising facts & science.
Quoting PoeticUniverse
Yes. We need both imaginative Ideality and no-nonsense Reality to see beyond the particular "happenings" of Physics into the holistic "whys" of Meta-physics.
Quoting PoeticUniverse
Have these odes been published in the mundane world?
Were the Fae Folk dismissing your quest for a reconciliation of Poetry and Science as a meaningless mission?
It is that the eternal state was never made and so it has no input and thus it has every possible path in it, but not one special favored path picked out, at least not yet, if we say this using time, and then the Programmer picks a path that becomes our block universe. How's that? More later.
Each frame is a whole new 3D universe, with the frame duration being the Planck time and thee frame pixel being thee Plank size. The Programmer made the ultimate DVD video.
The video of Flora Symbolica isn't out there yet.
Quoting Gnomon
No, they loved it; since they are angels and humans combined or an intermediate stage, they know more than we do.
Specs from his notes:
The Eternal has to be everything,
Superimposed, not a certain pathing;
It can’t have inputs, with no beginning;
So, what chose the song our universe sings?
I didn’t say the Universe was intentionally planned, though.
Personally, I’m not convinced the entire universe is entangled in a single system at the quantum level - and certainly not that each particle has as much information about the universe as you’re suggesting here.
I do think plenty of the universe is entangled, though - in a complex variety of quantum systems formed through particle interactions so far. A meteor that lands on earth contains so much information about its trajectory through space and time - some of which we can already piece together based on the information we have about the systems with which it may have interacted along the way. The potential for us to access much more information about the universe through quantum entanglement is an exciting prospect.
With everything we learn about the universe, we entangle ourselves ever more...
The answer is "yes". Some may argue that the probability is different, provided there is an additional (to me unfounded) belief that the scriptures are inspired by god.
It is mere partizansm. There is no proof god exists; there is no proof god does not exist. I BELIEVE GOD DOES NOT EXIST. But I allow the validity for others to believe god exists.
There is a deeper problem: whether god exists or not, we don't know what he wants, what he wants of us, what he is like, what he can do, what he will do. Those who claim knowledge are either delusional, or believe the scriptures. The sriptures are not god-inspired; they are mere fantasies of thinkers of older times. The lessons in the scriptures are meant to aid societies to keep social order in the manner the sripture writers intended it.
There is no proof that the scriptures were inspired by god. There is no proof that the scriptures were not inspired by god. But the plethora of self-contradictions included in the scriptures; their convoluted messages; their focus on only a few select subjects; their limited scope of reason and knowledge base all point at having been written by very enthusiastic dilettantes. Which, if you listen to a theist, is not what god is imagined to be.
Wow! That was a fantastic trip, and it was drug-free! :up:
I noticed that all the Fae Folk depicted were in the female form. Is there a Freudian explanation for that, or is it simply Fairy Porn? :love:
No. It was Programmed. The difference between a blueprint and DNA is that one produces a predestined object, and the other an open-ended system. We are currently living in a living organism, working out its own destiny. And each of us is a microcosm of that Cosmos. The presumptive Programmer is merely observing the process to see how it turns out. :smile:
Quoting Possibility
Quoting Possibility
When you spoke about "mind, attention and will" being more fundamental than life itself it sounded to me as though you were proposing that the Universe was intentionally planned, but if that is not what you meant to imply then OK.
My moniker has different roots.
This is how it goes:
God knows it exists (if he exists -- let's for a minute suppose he does)
Therefore he needs no faith to believe he exists
Therefore he has no faith
A person who has no faith in a god is an atheist
Ergo, God is an atheist.
The Eternal has to be everything,
Superimposed, not a certain pathing;
It can’t have inputs, with no beginning;
So, what chose the song our universe sings?
The Eternal is as a multiverse,
Potentially, with no information,
As in Bable’s Library of all books,
Being as useless as Nothing’s zero.
The universes might all spring forth, somehow,
Most inert or not going far enough,
With some reaching life after a long time,
Such as ours, precarious as it is.
Or, a Programmer sets if-then switches,
Like eight-way 3D Rubic Cube intercepts,
After having set the quarks and leptons
And coding stars to generate atoms.
Then more precise tweaks, to dark energy,
To umpteen decimal places so rare,
And the forming of the DNA code
To stir life’s ingredients stirring slow.
Darn, the n-body problem is so tough,
For unforeseen side-effects e’er arise,
Among branches of the would-be life-tree,
A zillion variables overlapping.
The Programmer sat up at his terminal,
Brought up his 1,000,000,000 line program,
And opened the patient for surgery.
Working swiftly from a red inked printout
Marked up during a long coffee hour.
He clamped off the bleeding capillaries,
Redid most of their interfaces,
And bloodlessly sealed them shut again,
Although these were only preparatory
And minor repairs in auxiliary areas.
Next, the main arteries had to be incised,
And therefore it was no longer possible
To open and unblock the incursions in sequence,
Since indirect ramifications and side concerns
Concerns quickly arose and wildly flared,
As fleeting thoughts, when one thing led to another,
Thereby requiring immediate attendance,
Lest, they, in the formless impressionism
Of the art of computer programming,
Fade to vague remembrance, and reappear later,
Always at an inopportune time, as defects known as bugs.
The phone rang while he was juggling
These evaporating images and so he had to ignore it;
But, no matter, for PhoneMail would record the call.
Twenty minutes later,
He had sutured the incisions and readied
A compile and regression test which would
Either attest to the quality of the operation
Or reveal its fatal errors and necessitate
The revitalization of the patient or, at worst,
Require a restoration to
Preoperative health from a backup file.
…
Finally, after some fourteen billion years,
Proto-man and then homo Sapiens
Arrives, after seven million more years
Of tinkering with monkey chromosomes.
Extinctions swept away many a kind;
Chromosomes fused, leaving the chimps behind;
RNA remembered all survivors;
‘Good fortune’ smiled on the Sapiens mind.
Inintelligently prrogrammed, many climbs
Were the off-the-shelf reach of nature’s grimes,
A dickering Rube Goldberg ‘invention’,
Our nervous system now ruled by ancient times.
But yet it worked; here we are!
Oh Man! What a piece of work—the mind;
What noble deeds done and undone in kind.
What coding updates programmed all upon—
In the layers of brains the mind is made upon.
What is this sapiens mammal animal?
Still made from slime but of a higher call!
The proof I provided used plain English words. To claim that theists own some words exclusively is absurd.
Did you say this?
I got the message from you (especially because it was in a reply to my explanation why god is an atheist if he exists) that I ought not to use the word "faith", because I shouldn't. It is a word bandied about ONLY by some theists.
Then you said,
Quoting Coben
????
An atheist is one who does not believe in god. A theist is one who believes in god.
God does not believe in god. He KNOWS he exists. Faith or belief is not necessary for his knowledge to know he exists.
Theists don't know god exists. They believe in god.
If god-knowledge was possible for theists and atheists, the question "Is there a god and if we don't know, then should I believe in it?" would disappear overnight.
I appreciate this is true. But I did not claim this. I said,
Quoting god must be atheist
In a sense, however, I believe you are right. "Atheist" means not that one requires no faith in god, but means one has a faith that there is no god. And a person or an entity would never believe that he, himself does not exist.
I admit you are right, I just think you did not put it forward properly, if you don't mind my saying so.
Your thoughts were right on, but your language did not cover your thoughts precisely? I don't know.
I think this above is a better description what an atheist is, then this following:
"An atheist does not believe in god."
The two are not equivalent. As per the thought experiment derived from my moniker.
Has it occurred to you that you are not just a mind, you have a body to? And the important thing about your body is that it is independent of your mind, your reasoning. So you are a reasoning being, but you are also an agent operating, interacting in a place of existence. An interaction which can continue almost entirely in the absence of your thinking and experiencing 'realities', which you thinking is only aware of remotely, through your senses etc. An interaction which may be very different, or more subtle than your mind is aware of.
This realisation gives one an extra tool, besides one's thinking alone.
I am curious what further insight into the existence or nonexistence of god did you gain by realizing you have a body which is independent of your soul.
I will state objections, if I see anything, but I am actually this time genuinely curious how the knowledge of your physical existence in your quest of knowledge of swaying the "equiprobability" in either direction works in helping your to decide the god-nogod dilemma.
Right but I believe you said he doesn't believe, he knows, as if these were mutually exclusive.
Oh, now I've read the second part. I probably made leaps, pardon my jumpy mind. I often make leaps I think make sense, but people wonder how I got there. We seem to be on the same page, now at least.
I followed the thought process of realising that I am a body as well as a mind and that that body might also be God and I am unwittingly being God carrying out my purpose. There are many ways in which such insights can be approached, used and developed into schools of thought and practice. Personally I contemplate insights from studying eastern religions and my personal journey in creative ways.
I would say though that in this process the existence, or not of God, tends to become irrelevant.
If you are familiar with eastern and western ideology of religions, or simply put, you worshipped in both the western and the eastern tradition... then can you tell the difference? Between gods? Is the western god any different from the eastern god? If they are different, how does the difference manifest? and if they are the same, then why talk about eastern and western gods? thanks. It's quite a few questions, sorry, but you really peaked my curiosity.
The Eternal BEING,
being whole & complete
and self-existent,
has no inputs or outputs.
But it may have self-reference,
creating the whirling turbulence
of dismayed dissonance.
rousing the question of "what if?"
That open-ended possibility
was the itching motive
for seeking an answer
to quell the vexed uncertainty.
Hence G*D said "Sing!",
and so it began
the ballad of evolution,
calculating endless possibilities,
Until it found the probability
of Love's permutations,
until the song has expressed
a feeling close to assuredness.
Quoting PoeticUniverse
The man-made meme of multiverse
'tempts to compute
the possibility of Love
from endlessly roiling & random static.
But G*D's song of Love
is enforméd by
the Intention to know,
which guides the world's enforming acts.
The infinite tower of Babel books
is incomprehensible until,
enformed by Intention,
'til Nil Nada now Knows facts.
Quoting PoeticUniverse
Random 'verses will never reach Life
Unless a Selector's informed choice
sets the switch to "what-if?"
computing "what-is" from a zillion variables
Yet, the program lines are finite
because Intention defines the end
of heuristic lines of learning :
Livable, Knowable, and Lovable
Quoting PoeticUniverse
Intelligence programmed evolution
as the mother of invention,
jerry-rigging neuron tangles :
ancient flukes now known as intention.
Quoting PoeticUniverse
Man is but a creature of flesh & blood
made of mundane matter
and icky sticky stuff,
which learns, by doing, to Live
But hearing a higher call still,
to progress from mud
to mind, soul and spirit,
able to Know and also to Love
Sorry! My poetic talent should be hidden under a bushel. But I was suddenly inspired to riff on your themes. :smile:
Or, the superimposed paths that go on the longest are those that have uniqueness and so they may be the workable ones worth real-izing.
The Permanent is all that there is,
It’s transmutations the temporary fizz.
It can’t have direction, with no inputs,
So, it multi verses, seeming as a Wiz.
I love it.
No. As far as Science has been able to determine, Space-Time-Matter-Energy emerged in the Big Bang from nowhere & nowhen. Anything existing "prior" to that point-of-origin is inherently speculative and non-empirical (theoretical, philosophical), including notions of an eternal regression of mystical Multiverses within a self-existent Omniverse*1. Such world-creator concepts were traditionally called "God" and had to be taken on faith. Since the anthro-morphic gods are no longer tenable, I call that inscrutable enigma "G*D" -- defined as an abstraction like Logic or Mathematics : immaterial, but omnipresent in the world. You can call it "Mother Nature", if you prefer a personification.
Since Energy does not seem to be self-existent, we must assume an Unmoved Mover (First Cause) of some kind to get the ball rolling. Besides, your proposed Prime Mover, Energy, has an acute Achilles Heel : Entropy. Anything that starts strong and then simply fades away over time cannot be permanent or fundamental. As PU so aptly expressed, "if it had an opposite state, there wouldn't be anything". Entropy is the inverse of Energy, which is why they are canceling each other over time, fated to end in the Big Sigh, or the Heat Death of the universe.
Instead, there is an emerging opinion among Cosmologists and Mathematicians that the fundamental essence of our world is Information*2. And Energy is now viewed as a sub-form of Information*3. So, I have adopted a novel term "Enformy" to epitomize the YinYang nature of nature's dynamic forces*4. And EnFormAction is the "fundamental capability for all that is"*5. Hence, the eternal Enformer "cannot not be".
*1 Turtles all the way down : http://www.bothandblog.enformationism.info/page41.html
*2 Is Information Fundamental ? https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/is-information-fundamental/
*3 Energy is Information : https://bigthink.com/philip-perry/the-basis-of-the-universe-may-not-be-energy-or-matter-but-information
*4 Enformy : http://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page8.html
*5 EnFormAction : http://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page8.html
Life’s entities embrace one another:
Cell, organism, species, and biotope.
Life seems inspired, although not optimal;
All meaning cannot all be discovered
By observation, but by participation.
A living creature is more like a poem,
Revealing its further dimensions and
Expressing new properties/emergences
At every level of its organization:
Letter, word, phrase, sentence and [uni]verse.
In this lost haunt, out on the Orion arm
Of the Milky Way—as safe from the core’s harm;
The philosophers gather in the forum,
As new Sherlocks unweaving the Cosmic yarn.
We search for the start of the Universe,
The End, the Before, the After, the Kinds,
The Measures, and All That Lies Between—
The music of the Spheres’ Magnificat.
We follow every single avenue,
Whether it’s brightly lit or a dark alley,
Exploring one-ways, no-ways, and dead-ends,
Until cornered where the Truth is hiding.
Since we all became of this universe,
Should we not ask who we are, whence we came?
Insight clefts night’s skirt with its radiance—
The Theory of Everything shines through!
…
Forum Eyes Only—Classified:
We’re hiding out in Timbuktu, Mali,
Africa, for we’re close to the Secret
And must protect it from evil doers.
From the hourglass of time, the desert’s grains
Ever blow, grind, and blast the camel trains
Loaded with opium, pot, and red wine,
These being the potions to jog our brains.
A snatch of poem the camel-driver sings,
And paints with sun-beams what his vision brings—
Of the waving veils adorning the tent,
Of the pipe-dreams floating up in smoke rings…
Which fumes are as sighs sent to Heaven far,
For consideration, from his altar
On this bubbled puff of a worldly sphere,
In case Destiny wishes to shake its jar.
Ramadan’s now past, and Shawwál comes back,
So feast, song, and pleasure no more we lack;
Now porters with their loads stand back to back,
‘Here comes the camel with his precious pack.’
The idea being that one can answer the questions about Gods through spiritual, or mystical practice, while you cannot answer them through intellectual reasoning on its own.
For example spiritual and mystical practices involve the principle of self reorientation, in which the self ( the part of you which does the thinking, this is an oversimplification) forms a kind of narrative between the body and mind through a reorientation of the person and the person's sense of identity and presence in the world.
The idea being that the mind is informed by the body( the world) and that without the body, the mind would be empty, so everything in the mind is derived from the body and so the body is the source of the information in the mind and all the mind needs to do to understand the body is sort and integrate that information in the right way.
This is a different approach to understanding, than the approach of reason in isolation.
I assume that the big bang has happened endlessly in our corner of the cosmos; we don't know if the same phenomena are occurring beyond what we are able to observe, which at this point in time, is "expansion." I assume that at some point, the expansion will reverse itself, and all matter will be drawn back into a mega-black hole that will eventually explode into another big bang.
Yes: beyond the capabilities of our telescopes, we have no idea if the same laws are being followed. As for the nowhere and nowhen: it seems logical to me to assume that matter has always existed.
Information is both Subject and Object, both Noun and Verb, both Matter and Energy. Information, according to current physics, is the essence of everything in the world. Or as the link below says : Information is the only thing that exists. So we, subjects and objects, exist within Information.
“IT FROM bit.” This phrase, coined by physicist John Wheeler, encapsulates what a lot of physicists have come to believe: that tangible physical reality, the “it”, is ultimately made from information, or bits.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg23431191-500-inside-knowledge-is-information-the-only-thing-that-exists/
That's an argument from ignorance. I could say that logically, G*D has always existed, and you could not refute that assertion with evidence. So. we are both speculating beyond the range of our empirical instruments.
Lucretius, in his 99BC ode to Materialism, asserted that Atoms were fundamental and eternal. But modern physics has unpeeled the Atom to discover that there is no end to its layers. The deeper they probe the less materialistic it seems. Current physics has replaced Atoms with Fields, as the fundamental substance of reality. But a field is just a theoretical abstraction, consisting of nothing but mathematical information. So, if anything has always existed, Holistic Information has a better claim than composite Matter.
Information :
• [i]Claude Shannon quantified Information not as useful ideas, but as a mathematical ratio between meaningful order (1) and meaningless disorder (0); between knowledge (1) and ignorance (0). So, that meaningful mind-stuff exists in the limbo-land of statistics, producing effects on reality while having no sensory physical properties. We know it exists ideally, only by detecting its effects in the real world.
• For humans, Information has the semantic quality of aboutness , that we interpret as meaning. In computer science though, Information is treated as meaningless, which makes its mathematical value more certain. It becomes meaningful only when a sentient Self interprets it as such.
• When spelled with an “I”, Information is a noun, referring to data & things. When spelled with an “E”, Enformation is a verb, referring to energy and processes.[/i]
http://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page11.html
Energy is a form of Enformation.
The girl in a red dress is a form of Information. :love:
That seems just about as ignorant as what you claim about my speculation. Your comments about peeling away at matter until we arrive at...??? don't negate the existence of matter.
I don't disagree with what you are trying to say about information, but I want to make a semantic distinction, as it is conflating two different kinds of "information". You use the word enformation, I would agree with this and will point out that information as subject is a particular conscious knowing in a mind. This is a different thing to your, subjects and objects existing within information.
The enformation you are referring to is rather a quality of objects, such objects are not carrying information, but qualitative states. They are not carrying information, subjective knowing of things by a mind. The qualitative states they are carrying are not known, at any point, and there are no minds involved.
Thanks, P, for answering my exhaustive question, to my satisfaction, actually.
There are many corollaries you instigated with this claim, and I mention only two of them:
1. If faith is primarily and overwhelmingly a mystical practice, and it does not rely on the intellect, and it is untouchable by reasoning (both of which I accept), then perhaps faith and man's relationship to an alleged god ought not to be discussed on a philosophy site, as philosophy is strictly an intellectual pursuit.
2. If faith is as above, then proselytizing with reason and intellectually convincing arguments ought not to work, and therefore it is futile when tried.
And a third question, which is the fundamental problem of a missionary: if faith is untouched by reason and by the intellect, how can you impress reasonable people?
@Punshhh, I think your observation is spot on. Very good insight, indeed.
If you think about it, the biggest topic and the source of strife on the pages of this site is religion, religiosity, and/or the lack of it. Why? Because 1 and 2 that you touched on are true.
And why have missionaries such a hard time converting anyone? because of the unnumbered point.
Or in other words wisdom is not about being really clever and using logic, but being yourself in the world.
The onion analogy does not "negate the existence of matter". It merely indicates that the essence of matter is Information. Matter is real; Fields are ideal. In current physics, fields are more fundamental than particles. If a field is not a mathematical abstraction, what is it? Is it made of matter? Or is matter made from fields? Mathematics = Information.
"Quantum Field Theory (QFT) is the mathematical and conceptual framework for contemporary elementary particle physics."
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/quantum-field-theory/
Are Quantum Fields Real? : https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2018/11/17/ask-ethan-are-quantum-fields-real/#50c1bd6e777a
Your semantic insight is spot-on. That's because Information plays dual roles in the world. Originally the term referred to the immaterial contents of a mind, such as ideas. But since the advent of Quantum Theory, "Information" has also been described as the essence of matter : "It from Bit" (John Wheeler).
So I spell the word differently depending on which role I'm referring to. As ideal mind-stuff, I spell it with an "I" to indicate its traditional meaning. But when referring to real matter or energy, I spell it with an "E". When I'm talking about the ultimate unitary form of Information, I spell it "EnFormAction". In my thesis, EnFormAction is equivalent to Spinoza's "single substance" of the world.
What is EnFormAction? : http://bothandblog2.enformationism.info/page29.html
You can't. Fortunately, some believers have not completely taken leave of their reason. I have found at least one door-knocking Jehovah's Witness, who will engage in a reason-based dialog. I haven't convinced him that the bible-god is man-made, but I have enjoyed our discussions.
BTW, technically, I am an A-Theist. But I prefer Agnostic-Deist. The existence of transcendent G*D is unprovable by empirical methods, but can be approached by logical methods. I don't know for sure that my hypothetical First Cause exists. But I am convinced that there are only two reasonable explanations for the existence of our world of matter & minds : 1> a spontaneous random accident (statistically a Black Swan), or 2> the intentional act of an eternal self-existent Mind (statistically, incalculable due to lack of quantifiable evidence). Hence, #2 requires not slavish Faith, but an intrepid Leap of Logic. :smile:
This is the first time someone called me wise. I am being myself in the world.
Every creature, every stone, every tapeworm, every star is wise. Even my wife**.
Wow.
**Had she heard you call her wise, she'd hit you with a frying pan in the head, with these words: "What??? ME?? Wise? Why, you little slouch, I'll teach you wise!"
What does an intrepid leap of logic require? :-) Bravery? Aye, there is the rub. I'm a chicken, in a sheepskin coat.
Christianity, the biggest and meanest :-) western religion has spiritual texts called the Bible,and the ideology taught in those are God worshirp, and such. I don't know if it is possible to separate god worship and ideology in W religions in to god worship and something else than god worship.
In eastern religions, you can tell me anything possible, or even impossible, because I don't know them.
The Eternal/Timeless/Permanent First Cause as Capability/Possibility/Potential/Energy has to be mandatory, given no infinite regress, that there is something, and that 'Nothing' hasn't anything to it for anything to come out of 'it'. Spontaneous is still available but there still needs to be the capability for it.
The Permanent First Cause has no direction able to be put into it, so it really can't know anything. Its supposed nebluous nature, then, being not anything in particular is a superposition of all possible paths, as like towards a multiverse, which seems to be the cleanest solution, not requiring an intelligence that really shouldn't be there since that violates the fundamental art by having parts in a system.
As it took 13 billion years for life to form, the universe seems to be just plodding along slowly and naturally.
It requires deductive reasoning from available (conditional) evidence to logical conclusions. But the conclusions are only as true as the premises. If you don't like my amateur premises, check-out the expert references.
Philosophers, who deal with metaphysical theories rather than physical facts, must have the courage to make a leap into logical probabilities.
Deductive Reasoning : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deductive_reasoning
You are describing random Chaos, which the Greeks proposed as the source of our Cosmos. But, as the presumed eternal-infinite source-of-all-things the unbounded Prime Cause must, by definition, encompass all possibilities, including all directions, and intentions. There are no patterns or directions, no change or novelty in pure static randomness. Darwin understood this; which is why his theory proposed Random Mutations guided by Natural Selection as the formula for new species.
In Evolution, what gives direction to random mutations is Selection according to some criteria (such as fitness for a niche or function). So, lacking purpose (goals, criteria) an accidental Multiverse would wander blindly forever before stumbling on the magic formula for the initial conditions plus matter, energy, life & mind that we find in our world. But, an intentional Creator could imagine an infinity of possible worlds, from which to select one to actualize. Can you imagine an Intentional Omniverse? That's what I call "G*D".
Cynical attitudes toward the "blind watchmaker" of Evolution are assuming a maker who intended to create perfection immediately, as a Garden of Eden. Yet, since our world is obviously not perfect, but progressing, we may infer that it is developing toward some more complete future state. For those who deny any progress in evolution, I can only conclude that they are "blind" to long-term trends in historical patterns. See Progressophobia and Cosmic Progression Chart below.
So, whether you prefer to speculate about a nebulous hypothetical eternal Omniverse, or the infinite potential of Eternal BEING, all things that are found in Reality (the Effect) must be possible in the Source (First Cause). Our world, according to quantum physics, is essentially mathematical information, and the permutations of that cosmic code (analogous to DNA) have resulted, not just in quantitative physical things, but qualitative metaphysical forms of Life, Mind, and Love. A random accidental Omniverse, without direction, would be impotent. That's why I insist that G*D must include the power of Intention, in order to Cause anything. Whether that requirement includes Knowing, I'll leave you to figure out. :smile:
Designed to Evolve : http://bothandblog5.enformationism.info/page8.html
Cosmic Progression : http://bothandblog3.enformationism.info/page28.html
Progressophobia : http://bothandblog2.enformationism.info/page9.html
PS___ When you have plenty of time, I have an explanation for how an eternal Whole can have "parts of the system". Hint : frame of reference.
Oh, ye of little faith! :smile:
Check out the Cosmic Progression Chart in the previous post.
Note : Nature progresses arithmetically, but Culture progresses exponentially.
It has all the time in the World, and more, ha, ha.
Quoting Gnomon
I have the time in the Cosmos since I'm retired.
Quoting uncanni
Hope it's not a White Hole coming at us!
Quoting Gnomon
This is one of the TOEs being developed at our research center in Timbuktu (we'll send a camel for you) and it has a repair attempt going forth, too, since the universe is not doing so well:
Butterflies On the Edge of Forever
The Great Extinguisher Problem
[i]Our planet is very good at promoting life,
But it is much better at extinguishing it.
Of the billions upon billions of living things,
99.99% are no longer around here living.[/I]
The human race had been degenerating, for the CMBR antenna that broadcasts our universal reality show had long been out of whack, as had been discovered in ThePhilosophyForum as part of the true Theory of Everything.
So, some funding was obtained from a top-secret government organization, and a poll was held. Member Nobody Nowhere was chosen as the “no one” most likely to succeed in whacking the transmitter back into adjustment, for he could operate with scarce a trace of not being there.
Background:
The corrupted DNA of the Universe:
No one yet fully understands the irreducible complexity of the DNA double helix, which is the template for all carbon based life. It is so complex that the slightest change along the myriad of interrelated ladder of events causes the total collapse of the organism. DNA is made of four nucleotides arranged in such a way that a large number of perfectly cascading events form a living thinking life form.
Now, what about the DNA at the universal level?
*** TOP SECRET *** EYES ONLY *** TOP SECRET ***
Likewise, a much more complex universal DNA template is the common thread of a much greater type of exponentially encrypted digital code of Everything which forms our entire universe, generating it in a virtual holographic way, that is:
[b][i]The Infinite radiates through a DNA matrix,
Using Information or Energy to create
The Cosmic Microwave antenna, which broadcasts
Interference patterns of virtual reality.[/i][/b]
The problem was that the celestial music of the spheres had fallen out of tune.
You're babbling at bit here.
But seriously, are you really yourself in the world? Or are you simply a culturally conditioned persona, believing a collection of pieces of information given you by imperfect people in your environment?
I wasn't referring to Christianity, but even there, there is a large body of spiritual teaching and it's not all about worship.
In reference to Eastern religions, there is the system of Yoga in Hinduism and meditation on Nirvana in Bhuddism and a vast body of work about spiritual personal development.
It's true I have little faith in humnakind, but I have infinite faith in the cosmos, i.e., mother nature.
I want to go, too. Bamako, Mali!!! I want to go!!!!!!!
That is exactly what you would expect if our world was not intended to be a perfect Garden of Eden, but instead an experiment in freedom. If G*D is eternal-infinite, then there is no time or room to grow, to develop, to improve. But if all things are possible, given unlimited time & space, then G*D could make room internally, so to speak, for a finite bubble universe that is free to start from nothing (Singularity) and develop into something (Seity). Within the limits of space-time, it is programmed to explore all possibilities (random mutations) guided only by natural laws (selection criteria). The mutant entities that don't meet the criteria of fitness for G*D's purpose are abandoned (extinction). Imagine Edison trying hundreds of permutations for his goal of creating a practical electric light. Where are those failures now? His arduous experiment, although fraught with failures, was a success. The dark world has been transformed by his creation.
Note 1 : Philosophers tend to compare Reality with Ideality, and not surprisingly, find reality to be less than ideal. A pragmatic attitude would make the best of what-is, without unrealistically pining for what-ought-to-be.
Note 2. Cynicism is what passes for sophistication among many intellectuals. Romanticism is the refuge of those sensitive souls who find reality unbearably bleak. A better alternative is not Pollyanna optimism, but up-beat get-er-done Pragmatism.
Note 3 : The Eternal could create a perfect world, but it would be predestined. And what's the point of that? Unpredictable Freedom is more Fun. :smile:
Quoting PoeticUniverse
That is an erroneous perception, due in part to the popular media's penchant for reporting nasty gossip and bad news. "if it bleeds, it leads". But in reality, the human race is ethically and technically superior to the race of upright apes that walked out of Africa.
The Better Angels of Our Nature : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Better_Angels_of_Our_Nature
The Moral Arc : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Moral_Arc
Quoting PoeticUniverse
No. The problem is that a percentage of humanity is tone-deaf. The celestial symphony continues to play magnificently, but cynical misanthropes focus on the down notes and miss the high notes.
Cheer up! The dismal science of Misanthropy focuses on the losses, and fails to enjoy the gains. :wink:
What? Have you given-up on "true reality", and place your hope in a new reality? That's the attitude of pessimistic Christians, who are willing to abandon the real world to Satan, and grimly live on faith in a new Heaven or a new Earth in some sublime perfect future. What makes you think the New Big Bang will be any better than the old one?
Why not try to make an imperfect situation better? That is what Pragmatists do, despite disappointments. :smile:
Quoting uncanni
If humans are the black sheep of Mother Nature's family, why do you have faith in such a bad mother? If the current Cosmos is such a failure, why imagine that it will turn-out right the next time? Unless you expect to experience that future perfect Cosmos, why not make the best of the one you have in hand? :cool:
We need you; look for a flying camel on your lawn. Don't mention this at your job. Many governments and others are after our TOE information; our refuge is tenuous; eventually, we're going to have to join up with a decent and suitable paramilitary organization of martial artists.
We will soon be heading back in time to better tune the Cosmic DNA antenna. It's do or die!!!
This was not a total attempt to revise human history, per say, for that mess was but a fairly typical happening that had way too much dumbness in it to be salvageable. The whims of fate would only create new fools, for wild and uncontrolled emotions had proved to be all that there was to say about all the miseries and follies that had been sadly written into the human chronicle.
Yet, there was always a danger of even more negatively affecting the past, and so Nobody Nowhere wore a light-bending suit that made him invisible, and furthermore contained most of his emanations. This would minimize most of his effects on the past and on the future that arose through interaction with the past, even that eventually magnifying of merely being seen with name brand clothes on.
The microwave background radiation was the source interference pattern of the Holograph in which our reality exists. Behind it, a light radiance passed through a very complex matrix looking somewhat like DNA.
Graybeard, RascalPuff, Profpat, Fredrick, and others were in contact with Nobody through a video phone that was hooked up to the Hubble telescope that was in turn trained on the display screen of the ‘Guardian of Forever’.
Austin was on a secondary line from New Jersey while surfing on the ethereal waves, though sometimes he was merely scraping along on the particulate matter of the beach. Crowds logged onto ThePhilosophyForum, ready to view the latest posts from everywhere and nowhere.
Nobody, knowing very well that time was Nature’s way of keeping everything from happening at once, took one small step for man into the past and found himself back standing right back in front of the ‘Guardian’ again, and so he took a giant leap for mankind.
Nobody stood in noplace during nowhen in the middle of nowhere, although space really has no center, as he navigated solely by the landmarks of his imagination towards the control panel of the CMBR antenna. He had butterflies in his stomach and flew like a bee.
It was like taking the chance of betting the entire company on either red or black in roulette, but more like Russian roulette in that really bad things could happen; however, the human race was quite desperate for clearer thinking, having really had enough of pettiness and silliness. Not to mention (which I will) that the angels of insight didn’t appear as often anymore, and that many humans even dozed off while good fortune passed right on by, nor had they recognized Lady Luck except in lotteries. Furthermore, as Flip Wilson once said, “The cost of living is going up and the chance of living is going down”. In addition, many were living a TV sitcom life. True, genius has its limits, but stupidity… (unknown author)
Many people even wasted no time reading forum posts. Even more said that some things, like ESP, had to be believed to be seen. Others, the types who quickly became bored on rainy Sunday afternoons, invented gods to grant them eternal immortality. Even worse, after all was said and done, more was always said than was done. Signs in subways said, “There is no gravity. The earth sucks.” Everyone was only looking out for #1, not realizing that this often caused them to step in #2.
And Ghandi, when asked what he thought of Western civilization, said, “I think it would be a good idea.” And lots of people said “eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we diet, since the waist was a terrible thing to mind.” Yes, there were more horse’s asses than horses. Some even put Horace before Descartes (Donald O. Rickter).
The big bang is neither perfect or imperfect; it just is what it is.
Quoting Gnomon
Who said she was a "bad mother"? Nature is not our primary caretaker!
'God' seems to be restricted to using evolution by natural selection and the laws of nature.
Inspired by Bill Bryson:
MASTODONS AND EXTINCTIONS
In the late 1700’s, Cuvier could take heaps of bones
And whip them into shapely forms not in the stones.
After describing and naming the fossil elephant the mastodon,
He put forward for the first time a theory on extinction.
He said that from time to time there were global catastrophes
In which some groups of creatures “became history”.
This raised uncomfortable implications at the time,
For why would God create and destroy eithout reason or rhyme?
This suggested an unaccountable casualness by someone unseeing
And greatly troubled the belief in The Great Chain of Being,
Which held that the world was carefully ordered for us—
And that every living thing thus had a place and purpose.
Meanwhile, William Smith noted a correlation in fossils
In rocks to find the relative rock ages that were possible.
At every change in rock strata, certain fossils vanished,
While in others they carried on into subsequent levels.
Now it was seen that God
Had wiped out creatures extinct
Not only occasionally but repeatedly—
Which made us think Him not only careless
But having an outright hostile distinction.
There had been more than
The Biblical Noachian deluge extinction.
WAY WAY BACK
In 1909, in British Columbia, near the town of Field,
Walcott and wife were riding horses
Along a mountain trail, beneath the Burgess Ridge
When his wife’s horse slipped a stone,
Tipping and turning over a slab of shale.
He got down and looked;
There were fossil crustaceans unknown.
The next summer he climbed up the mountain’s side,
Having traced the presumed route of the rock’s slide,
And there he found a shale outcrop as long as a block,
Imprinted with Earth’s ancient and tiny livestock.
‘Twas from the dawn
Of life’s great and complex profusion
From so very long ago—
It was the famous Cambrian explosion.
From my Enformationism perspective, I would say that eternal-infinite G*D intentionally "restricted" space-time to natural selection and laws of physics. But those limitations do not apply to the Programmer who lives outside the frame of the game of evolution. My god-model is PanEnDeistic, not PanDeistic : all-in-god, not god-in-all.
PS__Enformationism is perfectly compatible with The Unified Theory of Evolution. In which Darwin's (pre-genetic) non-progressive mechanism is united with Lamarck's updated notion of progressive development via epigenetics. : https://aeon.co/essays/on-epigenetics-we-need-both-darwin-s-and-lamarck-s-theories
If Mother Nature had bad children (humanity), who is blame? No, I don't think Mother Nature is bad just because there are a few bad apples in her family tree. Mother Cosmos is imperfect, but not Evil. :smile:
:grin:
In the Experiment, Practice makes Perfect… Maybe in the next Big Bubble…
Quoting uncanni
The Eternal Return
Behind the Veil, being that which e’er thrives,
The Eternal IS has ever been alive,
For that which hath no onset cannot die,
Nor a point from which to impart a Why.
Some time it needed to learn Everything for,
And now well knows how these bubbles to pour,
Of existence, in some like universe,
As those that wrote your poem and mine, every verse.
So, as thus, thou lives on yester’s credit line
In nowhere’s midst, now in this life of thine,
As of its bowl your cup of brew was mixed
Into the state of being that’s called “mine”.
Yet worry you that this Cosmos is the last,
That the likes of us will become the past,
Space wondering whither whence we went
After the last of us her life has spent?
The Eternal Saki has thus formed
Trillions of baubles like ours, and will form,
Forevermore—the comings and passings
Of which it ever emits to immerse
Of those universal bubbles blown and burst.
So fear not that a debit close your
Account and mine, knowing the like no more;
The Eternal Cycle from its pot has pour’d
Zillions of bubbles like ours, and will pour.
When You and I behind the cloak are past
But the long while the next universe shall last,
Which of one’s approach and departure the All grasps
As might the sea’s self heed a pebble cast.
One if the oldest divinities is the sun. Schamesh (or something like that) is an old Sumerian name.
One version if the epic of Gilgamesh starts with the people of Uruk appealing to Schamesh to save them from their king, who is an asshole.
Schamesh hears them and is moved to help them. He doesn't fix the problem himself, but hands it off to the primary goddess. She deals with it effectively.
Schamesh is the sun. Schamesh is divine. My question is: does Schamesh exist?
This is the only case where I would hold neither nature nor nurture responsible for bad humans. Mother Nature didn't physically, sexually or verbally abuse humans, or in any way deprive love. That's not how it operates. Nor do I find the Great Breathing Cosmic Womb in any way imperfect: it does exactly what it's supposed to do.
It's only humans (and perhaps cats, who have a tendency to be overly cruel with their prey) who don't do what they're supposed to do: all other species take appropriate care of the environment and thus thrive, until they have to move on (i.e., plagues of locusts). Humans, on the other hand, wantonly and wilfully destroy their own environment, not to mention the obscenely horrific way they have treated other humans throughout history. My fundamental premise is that human cruelty, greed and exploitation of nature are "bad." They may have produced technology in general, but the entire enterprise has reached catastrophic proportions now, as most of the world recognizes.
Earth could not answer; nor the Seas that mourn
In flowing Purple, of their Lord Forlorn;
Nor rolling Heaven, with all his Signs reveal’d
And hidden by the sleeve of Night and Morn.
— FitzOmar
So the fear factor is that you accept the unproven as proven, and as such, you accept it to be the premise on which an argument is built to lead you to your conclusion.
Well. This is contentious. What if my unproven and assumed-to-be-true premise is incongruent with yours?
Then we play chicken, who will leap first? Or just simply not engage in an argument?
I quoted you VERBATIM.
Then you called me babbling.
What does that say about your opinion? To me it means, that you were babbling in the first place. And not only did you not realize it, but you seem to despise and condescend to those, who agree with what you say.
It is disturbing when you see yourself in the mirror and you realize only a bit later, maybe by someone explaining it to you, that it's your own reflection.
Whatever I am: conditioned by culture, beleiving in pieces of information that imperfect people gave me: I am still me. I am I, and I am not not I.
I can't not be me, however was I produced to be who I am.
True. But Kindness, Generosity, and Conservation of Nature are good. Unlike animals, humans are moral agents. They have a choice to do good or bad. But most are pretty good or not so bad. Only a few are excessively extreme in their saintliness or demonism. That's why, in an imperfect world that seems to be gradually getting better (morally), we need to appreciate the moderate. It's OK to be just OK.
Philosophers shouldn't become despondent about the world's flaws, but merely work to make their little corner of the world better. In view of Aristotle's Golden Mean and the modern Mediocrity Principle, "The idea is to assume mediocrity, rather than starting with the assumption that a phenomenon is special, privileged, exceptional, or even superior". As moral beings, we can imagine Utopia, which gives us something to work toward as we muddle through our mundane lives. But, unless you expect God to rapture you directly to Heaven, just be grateful that this is the best of all "real" worlds. :smile:
Steven Pinker on The Better Angels of Our Nature: 'reasons to be grateful' : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8GUdPIVymKQ
The Mediocrity Principle : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediocrity_principle
Desiderata : https://mwkworks.com/desiderata.html
"I was born this way" ___Lady Gaga
That's why we have philosophy. Not to decide what's true, but what's reasonable. :smile:
Well, truth is more of a stranger in this story than fiction, so Nobody was well on his way to the early days of oblivion…
“How’s it going,” asked Rascal of Nobody.
“It’s raining,” answered Nobody.
“Hardly?” inquired Puff, the better side of the plurality of he and himself.
“It’s hardly raining hardly,” answered Nobody.
“What does that mean exactly?” asked Rascal, along with many others.
“Never mind,” said Nobody. “I have an umbrella!”
Austin piped in that the English language was becoming slightly affected, via the interruptions in past, but encouraged that the journey go on, and so it continued as it progressed and went on.
“By the way, what’s the antecedent of ‘it’ in “It’s raining?” posted WiseGuy, thinking he had posed quite a tough question.
“Nothing,” said Nobody, “in the form of reverse gravity and forward light, the ultimate antecedent, of our time dilation called reality. I’m getting damp.”
Rascal added that “A little rain never hurt Nobody,” a new and original saying that suddenly appeared in the book of the 2501 greatest sayings ever.
“I hope the rain keeps up,” said Nobody.
“Why?” inquired Profpat.
“So then it won’t come down!”
“How’s it going, Nobody?” asked Rascal again, figuring that Nobody’s watch was fast from relativity and that some hours had passed.
Nobody replied, “I heard that the universe was a free lunch, so I’m having it in a restaurant on an asteroid.”
“How is it?”
“The food is great, but there’s no atmosphere.”
Now, there’s always someone who interrupts threads with off the wall stuff, so ChickenMan tried to catch Rascal unawares with “Why did the chicken fly across the road?” and “Did the egg cross into God’s universe before the chicken?”
Rascal, taking all this in stride during a lull, replied, “As allowed by Einstein’s relativity, the road moved to the other side of the chicken, then, the chicken didn’t land so much as the road rose to meet the chicken, as it extended in 4D, much like the baseball field rises to meet the pop up, since All is expanding. Furthermore, chickens can’t fly! Also, the chicken came first, for I can’t really picture ‘God’ sitting on an egg to hatch it. Now, we’re trying to better tune in the universal DNA here, so no more chicken shit posts please!”
“Hold it,” warned Graybeard. “Some critical atoms must have been disturbed by Nobody’s journey. Now the “Ace”, a new name for the formerly bottommost playing card, the lowly “one”, is now higher than the King in many kinds of card games; this is a sacrilege and a travesty! Wait until London hears about this.”
Mkirkpatrick somehow got into the conference call and said, “Just heard, but relax. The All is the One; the “A” on the card really stands for “All”, for this is what gave rise to the monarchy. And of course the one is the One.”
“It’s okay,” Fredrick said calmly, being an expert on numbers and on playing them, “the play and strategy of all affected card games has not been altered in any way. Keep on going, Nobody.”
While some old times passed, Graybeard stood around looking at the man in the moon and watching the grass grow. Fredrick checked his watch to see if he was wearing it and then counted to five on his left hand. Fine. On the other hand, he still had five fingers, so, all was still going well in the good old days. Profpat sharpened his pencil until it got down to the eraser.
Rascal interjected, “Some sort of high stakes poker mania called “Texas Hold ‘em” has broken out in some countries. Googling now. It’s even replacing baseball on many TV channels!”
“It’s okay,” reassured Fredrick, “No harm done. We’ll pass it off as another fad.”
Nobody was heading billions of years into the past, having left the asteroid before he got a polaroid from sitting on it too long, and was passing many frolicking Dodo birds, along with the beginnings of such ancient notions as alchemy and astrology. (Hey, why are hemorrhoids not called asteroids?)
A rickety old rope bridge of rotting planks finally led Nobody past many antiquities such as one-cent stamps and on to the control panel of the ancient broadcasting station of CBS—the Cosmic Broadcast Station.
“Be careful,” advised Profpat. “Be so very delicate with any adjustments. Remember, on Earth, how the tiniest minute adjustment of a shower knob of even a millionth of an inch causes the shower water to become totally steaming hot! No plumber in the universe has ever been able to resolve this problem. It has something to do with quarks, quicks, and quacks.”
“Don’t worry,” answered Nobody. “I’ll be gentle; I’ll just breathe on it slightly. We want clarity in the universe’s DNA and ours, as in improving the reception of a TV set, not unproving it back into the stone age of three channels, all of them baseball games, and the weather, with snow and static on the others. I’ll do my best, come hell or hot water.”
Nobody sprayed a few atoms toward the antenna and waited. His data/video link soon improved but then overloaded from the high transfer speed and burned out. Nobody’s cell phone soon rang, but it was only a solicitor trying to sell him some time-share condos; however, Graybeard finally got through and said “Great, the stars are becoming clearer and I can even see some galaxies with the naked eye, but take it slow; we don’t want to upset the balance of nature by making it too bright at night. It’s good to tighten a screw, but if we tighten it too much and we’re screwed.
“Wait, hold it! I can see Venus, the goddess of love and passion all too well. Yikes, I didn’t know she was that old! Plus, I now have x-ray vision and can see into all the apartments, but the worst thing is that I can hear everything they are saying. Some things should be obscene and not heard! Also, I’m getting something called ‘cartoons’ on my TV set, and they’re really weird, very unreal looking and everyone in them is doing silly things.”
Nobody took out a hand held ‘vacuum’ cleaner and brought a few atoms back in as a fine adjustment.
“Good,” cheered Graybeard, “that’s a good balance. Try something a little higher up and let’s see what happens. I am reading some fluctuations out of kilter around there.”
Notions of up and down were useless in space, so Nobody picked a direction at random.
“No,” said Graybeard. “Not that way; use your other ‘up’.”
“Okay, I’m switching. Back in kilter?”
Graybeard answered, “I don’t know; I’m seeing another goddess.”
Suddenly, the Chicago Cubs, which had finally made it to the World Series of baseball, were swept in four straight games, while the Easter Bunny, Santa Claus, and other unbelievables in attendance looked on in horror.
Then Michael Jordan gave up basketball for baseball and then switched back to basketball again. Global warming picked up and then an ice age began. Jesus, born a Christian, became Jewish, then converted back again. Hell froze over and then thawed out. The same with the River of Forgetfulness; everyone was walking on water for a while and running like Hell from Hades.
Profpat warned “Watch that shower knob, Nobody; the River Styx just boiled away and a bunch of dead people drowned after many more escaped!”
“Where are they going?” inquired Nobody.
Profpat replied, “They don’t know; they say they have CRS disease.”
“What’s CRS stand for?”
“Can’t Remember Shit.”
“OK guys. A little upper, Nobody” requested Graybeard. “That other direction was a downer.”
Nobody reached up and out, but the bridge creaked and groaned, causing Nobody to slip a bit as a rope frayed, and all the TOE researchers feared that his adjustment time was now quite limited.
Meanwhile, Barry Bonds had broken the home run record, but, of course, steroids would be blamed for it. Mount Rushmore had briefly turned into Presidents Nixon, Ford, Carter, and Reagan, but just as soon returned back. However, the Boston Red Sox still won a World Series for the first time in 100 years.
Also, it turned out that someone named Yogi Berra had said many sayings that seemed to make sense, but really didn’t, like “That restaurant is so crowded that no one goes there anymore”, “It gets dark early out here”, “If people don’t want to come out to the ball park, nobody’s going to stop them”, “It’s deja vu all over again”, “I didn’t really say all of the things I said”, and many more unsayings.
Silly signs appeared on highways, like “Road Works” (it doesn’t work well during construction), and “Speed Zone” (meaning slow down). Something called rap music had become ever-present, as well as a new word, “oxymoron”, which was probably a related event. A funny thing happened to President Clinton, but he wasn’t impeached for it. He neither inhales nor does he have sex.
“This one may be hard to explain,” lamented Fredrick, “but we’ll chalk it up to human nature.”
Nobody did some fiddling of some knobs that he wasn’t supposed to touch, twiddling “More of This-ness”, and, as a result some people on Krypton started to make every shot in basketball games, even from 50 miles away, being really IN THE ZONE, plus doing many other superhuman things. All the TOE viewers from Earth were cheering this, but Fredrick warned them that total perfection might take all the fun out of life.
“Better hold off,” Graybeard suggested.
Nobody dialed the knobs back a little.
RascalPuff interjected, “Some people are now reporting that they can fly like superman in some new event called ‘sleeping hallucinations’ or ‘night dreams’.”
Also, zeroes began to look like the alphabetic letter ‘oh’, causing much confusion, along with ‘one’ looking like ‘el’, and some words began to have the same sound, as called a ‘homonym’ but not a ‘homonim’, and some with similar meanings; as called a ‘synonym’, although it had none itself, and some words now had multiple meanings. And how come ‘monosyllabic’ wasn’t? Nor was ‘phonetic’ spelled the way it sounded. And why was ‘abbreviation’ such a long word without any? Also, ‘love’ was reduced to having only the two good rhymes of ‘dove’ and ‘above’, which soon became overused and stale, frustrating many poets and their readers.
Austin reported that a part of Hawaii had sprung up in Wildwood, NJ, named ‘Sunset Bay’ and that it had had big fat singers, torches, palm trees, waterfalls, tropical flowers, a half-ship at the end of a pier that served as a bar, good food (ordering raw oysters well done), although it consisted of only waves and fields (lucky that his brain turned the noumena into phenomena), and sand all around as a floor. Also, he said that many more ‘o’s had appeared in the word ‘Goo…ooogle’.
Fredrick suggested that the sleeping visions were harmless and probably helped us in some way, that homonyms gave poets even more rhymes, that synonyms and words with multiple meanings would enrich the language, that zeroes could have a slash added through them for differentiation, that typewriters were obsolete, that we could get used to the odd words, perhaps some day getting even with them, that the word ‘of’ now rhymed with ‘love’, that ‘Hawaii in New Jersey’ would be seen as a planned tourist attraction, and that Google’s extra “o’s” would probably get used in a marketing ploy as denoting the internet page ranges of interest.
That's just as much baloney as the idea of a holy trinity.
Let's assume that you're right.
I am now X. But if there is a god, then I am X+Y.
So I am X+Y. And I am not any more than X+Y, because the extra thing got added to me in the case of a god belief, so I continue to be, precisely no more and no less, than me, X+Y.
[s]It's like saying, "If there is a god, you will weigh five lbs more than you weigh", or "... you will run five miles an hour faster than you run," etc.[/s]
It actually does not matter what I think I am, in the determination of what I am. If I am X, then whether I think I am X+Y or else if I think I am less then X, say X-Z, then I am NOT what I think, but I am still precisely me.
Has anyone here other than @PoeticUniverse read the above post (quoted for verification of antecedent) end-to-end without even skipping parts?
A Massive Big Bang explosion hardly seems to be a good way of intelligently designing a universe, but rather appears as if something really got out of hand.
Perhaps some opposite quantum fields, although having a great lightness of being nevertheless piled up so much that they reached the limit of density, infinite density not being possible, and then blew all to hell, with elementary particles as centers of oscillation.
The wave lengths make for extension into dimension; the wave frequencies make for energy; the opposite wave amplitudes made for positive and negative charge defining matter from antimatter; the waves becoming protons or quarks; the wave envelopes becoming electrons…
Or Somebody spilled something or had an accident or inhaled too much.
Segno (Sign) # 0
“There’s the aether”, replied the other, apace,
“The 5th state, one that pervades all of space,
Yet there are no signposts of it up ahead,
Or anywhere, since it’s of every stead.
“We regard it as the stuff of which Gods are made,
That lively spirit of elixir that their nature bade,
For, just as all mortal creatures inhale the air,
So do immortal and divine natures inhale the aether.”
“The intimation is the mark of their manifestation,
A demonstration and a token of the evidencention—
The aetheric and Heavenly sign of things to come,
Both the portent of the miracle and its omen.
“It is of the warning and the notice let,
Presaging both the promise and the threat.
Of this sign the aether follows, the gesture beckons;
‘Tis the signal, the wave and gesticulation reckoned.
“We can read the writing in the sky, the marquee,
Daubed with symbols marking the cipher free,
With characters, figures, and hieroglyphs of time,
The ideogram of the rune, the emblem of the Divine.”
Yet only a hair (like an Alef) divides the false from the true…
Segno (Sign) # 1
“There is the ‘vacuum’”, replied the other,
“A base state, one pervading all of space,
There being no signposts within it,
Or anywhere, since it moves in no direction.
“We must regard it the stuff of which things are made;
For just as all living creatures inhale the air,
So do all the real natures inhale the vacuum.”
“This intimation is the mark of manifestation,
A demonstration that’s the token of the evidence;
The aetheric and heavenly sign of things to become,
Both the portent and the omen of so much possibility.
“It is both the warning and the present notice,
Presaging both the promise and the threat.
“Aft this sign, that the vacuum ‘indirects’,
Then the real gestures ever beckon;
They of an unsignal faint,
The wave and gesticulation of you.
“We read the noise of the quantum theater—no marquee;
All is daubed without symbols, to mark no cipher, bare,
No letters, characters, figures, or hieroglyphs there,
No ideogram of the rune of order,
No emblem of the Divine.”
Quoting god must be atheist
Nobody Nowhere is well on his way to repairing God's universe.
A test of good reading or speed reading?
And did anyone watch the 'Programming the Universe' video?
Some 'fortunate' accidents of nature to support either a design or a multiverse:
So you are what you think or know yourself to be and that's all?
How wise indeed (not).
I think it's perfect: intelligent design, in my mind, is physics, is what is. "Intelligent design" is a bit too anthropomorphic of a phrase for my preferences.
I like the story of the tsimtsum because it's poetic: I imagine a very lonely G_d, holding its breath, wondering how on earth to fix the catastrophic creation of evil. Humankind has fallen far behind vAs far as we know, it's only a problem on our little speck of a planet.
I am what I am regardless of what I think. And I can't be more than what I am.
I did not say I can't be more than what I think I am.
You asked me two incongruent questions in two different parts of this thread:
1.
Quoting Punshhh
2.
Quoting Punshhh
To 1. the answer is yes. The answer to 2. is not sure.
Please notice precisely what you asked.
And enough of this already.
The Kabbalah has a complex explanation for the imperfections of the creation, with lots of magical symbols and characters, which lends itself to myth-making.
My thesis of Enformationism, has a different rationale; based on modern scientific understanding, instead of imaginative (magical) interpretations of ancient scriptures. It's rather abstract and has only one "character", hence not much fodder for mythologizing. Instead of "emptying himself", G*D created space, *a bubble", within Infinity, simply by trans-forming Generic Information (the essence of G*D) into specific forms (real things). Since G*D is all-information-all-the-time, that bubble of space is full of the essence of G*D : EnFormAction or Energy (science magic). Logically, if the bubble was perfect and complete, it would be G*D, eternal & infinite. So, by necessity, it is incomplete, which leaves it free to expand (space), and imperfect, which allows it to evolve (time) within Infinity.
Like the Kabbalah, this is a made-up story, and not to be taken literally. It's only useful as a way of thinking about the otherwise unimaginable. The Kabbalah is too complex & technical to be a popular creation story. So it appeals primarily to a few intellectuals who enjoy mystical puzzles. Enformationism is also too unfamiliar & technical & non-magical to become a popular account of creation and evolution. So, it will likely appeal to only a minority of pragmatic philosophers, who might enjoy a novel approach to an ancient mystery. The Enformationism thesis is a hypothetical account for how the world came to be, and to become, and should be accepted only as food for thought. It's no more true than any other scientific postulate. :cool:
Generic Information : Information is Generic in the sense of generating all forms from a formless pool of possibility : the Platonic Forms.
EnFormAction : http://bothandblog2.enformationism.info/page29.html
That's why my alternate version of the scientific theory of "creation" is called Intelligent Evolution. Astronomer Fred Hoyle, who assumed the world was eternal, labeled the proposed Expanding Universe theory as a "Big Bang", in order to ridicule the notion that all of space-time could have emerged from a pin-point in the abyss of no-where & no-when. Imagined as an explosion, it would seem to be self-destructive. Which now seems more plausible, since the fading final days of the universe are currently labeled "Heat Death".
By contrast with the down-hill dead-end of the Big Bang theory, Intelligent Evolution proposes that the world is progressing from essentially nothing toward something positive. It's imagined as a computer program beginning from a kernel code (singularity) and calculating all possible permutations of random freedom constrained by a specific set of laws, and initial conditions. This theory is just the opposite of Intelligent Design, which assumes that the world began as a perfect Garden of Eden, and was corrupted by Satan-inspired humans. After the Original Sin, it was all down-hill, until the perverted world is finally destroyed by its disappointed and thwarted creator.
The Intelligent Evolution theory infers from the same evidence that the Garden of Eden was not an end in itself, but that the process of upward evolution was the point of the exercise. The evolutionary program will eventually run its course, of course, but it will have produced the answer to The Programmer's question, "what will happen if . . ." For all I know, the answer might be "42". :smile:
Intelligent Evolution : http://gnomon.enformationism.info/Essays/Intelligent%20Evolution%20Essay_Prego_120106.pdf
Cosmic Progression : http://bothandblog3.enformationism.info/page28.html
It's delicious!! I like it a lot.
Time to take more control…
Just about then, the moth-eaten walkway began its collapse, and all the cell-phoners quickly warned Nobody, for they could see the whole scene unfolding before their eyes knew about it.
“Run!” they all said in unison, and with text messages, as well. “Run for your life. Get out of there. The bridge…” All contact was lost, for Nobody’s cell phone roaming charges had become astronomical and overdue, causing his account to be canceled.
There was now nothing but nothing under Nobody’s feet, an impossibility, of course, for nothing can’t exist, but it was there, never the less; however, Nobody didn’t begin to fall right away, as in cartoons when no one falls until they realize through consciousness that there is nothing holding them up, and so he gained a precious second and leapt, just in time, back onto the falling bridge, having had the presence of mind during that split second of warning to attach a piece of tin foil to the antenna, a last ditch attempt to help humanity progress beyond TV sitcoms, Lindsey Lohan, Donald Trump, and Paris Hilton.
He moved quickly and soon accelerated to the speed of light, which was a lot faster back then, on the bridge that was literally (or virtually) crumbling as he ran across it.
No one knew where Nobody was or if he did nothing or didn’t do nothing. Concern set in. Worry followed. Despair appeared. Woe rang the doorbell. Grimness sat on the front steps. A bill collector drove up.
Rascal saddened, but kept Googling to keep his mind busy, while Graybeard stopped ogling the virgin super clusters of Virgo with both of his naked eyes, although noting, “chaste makes waste”, keeping one eye open, and even put off the opening off a beer. Fredrick, getting all teary eyed, tried to remember the good times with Nobody. Well, that was easy; they were all good times. RascalPuff checked all of his copyrights. “Darn, they’re still there. Why is there no sign of Nobody and why is Nobody not home, and what is the meaning of what I am saying? Or not.”
Well, although we are all supposed to know “everything”, or at least the theory of, we might as well just ask our teen-age offspring, for they know it all.
Michael even left his lounge chair and put down his laptop. Austin, although silently alarmed, fed french fries to a thousand seagulls, his step-kids laughing and taking a video of it… until he ran towards the kids, throwing more fries to lead the flapping flock onward toward them. He thought that Nobody might never make it, and began preparing a remembrance:
The Possibility of Being
This is the creature there has never been.
They never knew it, and yet, none the less,
They loved the way it moved, its suppleness,
Its neck, its very gaze, mild and serene.
Not there, because they loved it,
It behaved as though it were.
They always left some space.
And in that clear unpeopled space they saved
It lightly reared its head,
With scarce a trace of not being there.
They fed it, not with corn,
But only with the possibility of being.
And that was able to confer such strength,
Its brow put forth a horn. One horn.
Whitely it stole up to a maid —
To be within the silver mirror and in her.
(from Sonnets To Orpheus Second Part,
R. M. Rilke 1923)
IN HONOR OF NOBODY,
[i]Who can under-stand the universe,
Not even needing a place to stand,
That is nowhere and everywhere,
A wizard creating something of nothing,
Whose imagination reaches the edge
Of forever, beyond, and before.[/i]
The Edge of the Universe
[i]Existence extends its electromagnetic preach
As far as its atomic influences can reach;
Beyond all of that there is nothing there
But the naught of very thin ‘air’. (nothing)[/i]
Profpat, sidelined by so many recent TOE readings and contributions, had gotten back on his feet by missing two car payments. His career now in ruins, he switched to archeology.
MJA said, “Nobody was the most equal man I ever knew.”
Lloyd pondered the linguistics of “Time flies like a bird and fruit flies like a banana”.
Steven Wright said, “I have an existential map. It has ‘You are here’ written all over it.”
Meat Loaf sang “Some days it don’t come easy… and these are the days that never end… and some nights are breathing fire… and some night are nothing I felt or seen before… or will again… no one else can save you now but you…”
Baden finally asked for one minute of silence on ThePhilosophy Forum.
The Procession of the Constituents of Reality
[i]Sad Yesteryear, Forever, and Everywhere,
They all came, to weep for Nobody Nowhere,
With Why and How, Then, Now, When, & What and Where,
Led but by their tears and sorrow. Your posts zing
With things that ‘none’ can bring: Everything.[/i]
More time passed, as the minutes went by like slugs and snails slowed down by older slugs and snails in their way, like when we get stuck walking behind old people in Florida.
Smoking in the desert near Timbuktu:
Quoting Gnomon
Yogi Berra suddenly came out with “The future isn’t what it used to be.”
Fredrick smiled. Although Yogi’s typical observation sounded like it had a negative connotation, Fredrick knew better, for many negatives had been developed into positives during his days of study that were numbered as the dates of his calendar. Also, although all the pluses and minuses added up to zero, Fredrick had the wisdom to know the difference, as well.
“He’s alive!” reported Fredrick. “He’s out there somewhere! …where no man has gone before. And I don’t mean the ladies room!”
Profpat posted, “I knew he wouldn’t depart, pass on, leave us, expire, perish, pass away, decease, or go to a better place.”
Graybeard hinted, “You mean die?”
“Yes.”
“Well, that’s the last thing he’s going to do.”
‘Lifts’ in the UK soon became ‘elevators’ in the US; car ‘bonnets’ turned into ‘hoods’, and the ‘muzzies’ of Australia still stung as American ‘mosquitos’, but luckily nothing much else of any serious nature in this vein of language had diverged in any harmful way other than “apples of the ground” now being referred to as ‘potatoes’. Meat Loaf recorded his greatest song of “I’ll Do Anything for Love, But I Won’t Do That.” Let’s not get into country music song titles.
Time was like a river, so Nobody followed the currents through all their twists and turns, not even stopping to ask directions, for there weren’t any (unlike Moses, who didn’t, and got lost for 40 years), swimming the butterfly stroke all the way back to the safety of Earth, 2019, almost taking a wrong turn at Albuquerque. All applauded his return, giving a great reception to the improver of reception, and told him of Earth’s many new marvels, for the tin foil had beat the odds, accomplishing some fantastic things:
Color had arrived in the world, along with color TV, in the late 1950’s (just look at the black and white TV shows made before then for proof). High Definition and 4K had arrived, as well, which allowed us to examine in detail the pimples on a person’s face.
Three types of “heavenly” things had become permanent features of the world: flowers, night dreams, and elfin creatures, the latter of which were the long sought missing link between man and angel (unfortunately some angels had gone bad, although many had remained good, and thus many leprechauns couldn’t be trusted).
The Dark Ages had gotten brighter sooner (the Y1K problem), the printing press had been invented a century earlier, a book of Omar Khayyàm’s thousand year old quatrains was “discovered” in the Bodleian library by a janitor, not having been noticed there before, along with Plato’s new book of the month, ‘Beyond Metaphysics’, and Apple computers and products were ever improving and catching on to let us tune out reality (of all things) with the ipod, iphone, and the ipad.
Someone named Shakespeare had gotten over his writer’s block of trying to open a lock with a fish and so had written some of the greatest stuff ever. Blondes began to prefer gentlemen. James the Lesser was shown to really have less, actually being Mary Magdelane. 10 years had been added to the human life span, meaning that 60 was not old anymore!
However, we were stuck with cartoons, but, hey, they keep kids busy! Ernie Kovak’s saying of “Television is a medium because anything well done is rare” still stood firm, but we could better see what was worthless. People still told others to “have a nice day” even though they probably had other plans. Everyone still talked with their hands, even while on the phone. However, men now had nipples, but no matter.
Enlightenment grew bright, consciousness becoming more that just “that boring time between naps”, but some still didn’t know and didn’t care one way or the other to know the difference between ignorance, apathy, and ambivalence. As for why a ‘building; was called that after it was built, no one knew. And why wasn’t a thesaurus a type of dinosaur?
A new and useful color had appeared that was not even in the rainbow: “brown”. Humor was now more widespread, due to expanded and duplicate word meanings. The price of penny candy went up to a nickel; cigarettes now cost $1000 a pack. (I insured all of my packs, but they were eventually consumed by a series of small fires. My insurance company wouldn’t pay, so I took them to court, where I was convicted of arson.) However, all in all, the world was a better place, in that the worst times were now only the “worser”.
Everyone on ThePhilosophyForum was awarded a free annual trip around the sun and one special trip to Poughkeepsie, NY. Second place was two trips to Poughkeepsie; third place, three trips to Poughkeepsie.
‘Everything’, at least locally, had indeed turned out to be a single whole in the space of “=” by MJA, but only in that every part of a hologram contained the whole. Quantum entanglement had always suggested this, as well, and now it was could be seen that we all have access to the entire universe at every point of the holographic interference pattern, the many more fractional points that were added by Nobody the better for its resolution. Everything connecting to everything proved to be a kind of perception in and of itself and so it begat a forum thread called “The Waving Grains of Sand”, for
[i]Every part of a hologram contains the whole,
The whole universe contained within a
Grain of sand, all eternity within a moment,
The universe rumbling when an electron vibrates.[/i]
Another missed hint of our 3D projection had been that the entropy of black holes depends on the surface area of its event horizon, not on its volume. Could something like the rippled CMBR microwaves be that esoteric radiant interference pattern? Yes, indeed.
Is that ok?
The nobody that is necessary to understand our universe "hung upon nothing" is the wizard that I credit with creating the Cosmos so vast that it is beyond our senses, but not imagination. :smile:
Nowhere Man
Time future, time present, and time past
Are all at once, with not a bit of it to last.
The glorious light flashes us into being shone,
As the light ‘eternal’ of all time to be known.
We are the beings of the everlasting light dream,
As products time and time again, by its means,
Of the eternal return, as baubles blown and burst,
Though draughts of time that quench life’s thirst.
We butterflies, on the edge of forever’s flight,
Spread fast our wings on the ocean of light
That is of the ageless photonic opposing waves
In no time, mass, or space that is thereby made.
Like the light from a star already spent,
Our ‘get up and go’ has long gone and went.
We all birthed, lived, and died right away;
There’s nothing left but the slo-mo replay.
Our parentheses in eternity
Flashes as a twinkling, but’s extended
By ‘time’ into a phantasmic life dream
That’s existent the same as if it were.
A life dream’s like a rainbow, not really there,
A false phenomenon become tangible
Through relativism, this faux true,
Molding temporary significance.
:smile: :razz: :grin: :blush: :cool:
Bohm, too, suggested that the whole universe could be thought of as a kind of giant, flowing hologram, or holomovement, in which a total order is contained, in some implicit sense, in the same finite space.
In reality, time is an illusion. The explicate order is a projection from higher dimensional levels of reality, and the apparent stability and solidity of the objects and entities composing it are generated and sustained by a ceaseless process of enfoldment and unfoldment, for the illusions of subatomic particles are constantly dissolving into the implicate order and then recrystallizing. So, our reality dissolves and reforms in a constant dance that, like moving pictures, cannot be perceived by the mind’s eye.
We knew that this same type of stunning virtual reality was likely, for it is presented to us in our night dreams for our amusement or self-improvement, or some such reason.
It would be interesting to know more of how the holographic reality operates, of course, so we could get to the next step, maybe even build our own virtual reality. Mr. Spielberg would surely buy into that.
Perhaps, instead of building VR, though, we could tap into the one that already exists within us and is flexible enough to produce great movies: again, our own night dreams. If we could only record them, keeping the ones with movie quality film and exciting story lines, we could make and sell movies without paying millions of dollars to writers, directors, actors, and filmers.
But who or what is the source of these night dream movies? Who is the producer, the director, etc.—for night dreams seem to contain surprises, a production capacity way beyond that of ourselves, of people acting in character modes that we as individuals might not even possess, say, that of being singers or comedians or whatever. I don’t see us putting Spielberg out of business soon, but I have many lucid dreams and I like to observe them closely; they are really quite spectacular. Sometimes, I just watch; other times I amaze the onlookers with my ability to fly and hover.
One time, some music kept playing for a minute or so after I awoke. Other times, I am just amused by the viewpoint: I was in a plane that was crashing through a jungle, but the viewpoint suddenly switched to one that was from outside the plane, just as real movies do. So, dreams, their mere happening, should be telling us something remarkable about reality, and these kinds of clues are what I try to make significance of.
I too, have toyed with the notion of a holographic universe as an extension of the Enformationism thesis. If the uni did indeed begin as a minuscule Singularity, then 4 billion years of expansion has stretched the original information over the 2D surface of a thin membrane. In that case, there is no stuff inside the bubble and there is nothing left at the center. Instead, our 3D reality is an interpretation of the 2D information of our FlatLand. Hence, Real Reality is 2D, and Virtual Reality is 3D.
Not being a mathematician or physicist, I don't find that notion very useful in everyday life. So I still assume that the world is really as it appears to me, in my brain's interpretation of what's out there. :smile:
FlatLand : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flatland
THE HOLOGRAPHIC UNIVERSE
[i]When a tree falls in the forest
And there’s no one around to hear it,
Does it make a sound?[/i]
No, for there is no ear to turn
The sound waves into sound.
Nor is there a smell, for there is no nose
For the odorous molecules to attach to,
Nor has it any color, for there is
No retina to decode the light frequencies.
What does it look like, then?
It doesn’t look like anything,
For there is no brain to put it all together
By detecting form, color, texture,
Size, taste, smell, or vision.
Since the entropy of a black hole is known
To depend on the surface area of
The event horizon and NOT on its volume,
Then our third dimension MIGHT BE a projection.
A projected illusion, as in a hologram,
May still be used as it were really there
Since we can make sense of it, so to speak,
But, in truth, the third dimension may not exist.
Thus, apparently separate particles,
Like created photon pairs,
Copy the other when one is changed,
Because, in truth, they are still
The same thing in the projector room.
If the universe is holographic,
Then the tree in the forest,
Whether seen or not,
Is, at heart, an interference pattern
Brought to life only when we tune it in.
This is the mystery of the realness
Of sleeping dreams revealed:
We tune in to the interference patterns,
Whether awake or asleep,
To bring alive the reality projected.
Everything connects to everything else
Through overlapping interference patterns,
And so nothing is so separate at all, as it seems,
But is one large all-encompassing whole.
Memory, too, seems to be holographic,
Residing everywhere in the brain,
Every piece associated with others related,
Instantly broadcasting all the connections.
Every part of a hologram contains the whole,
The whole universe contained within
A grain of sand, all eternity within a moment,
The universe rumbling when an electron vibrates.
We are part and parcel of everything—
We are the cosmos; we are life; we are love;
We are all that is; we are the creator
Of the dance as well as the dancer.
Whether the past is recorded and accessible
As part of the holographic whole is not known
Or whether the other two dimensions are
Projected, as well, but perhaps we shall see.
This then is the secret of the universe,
Knowing of that which underlies all reality:
Fundamental, absolute, indestructible,
Omnipresent, indeterminate, but all pervasive.
Why absolute and fundamental?
Because it is made of one piece—itself,
And therefore indestructible, and eternal, too,
And makes up all that there is, everywhere.
(The Infinite may radiate through a matrix,
Using Information or Energy to create
The Cosmic Background antenna which broadcasts
Interference patterns of virtual reality.)
If you must.
I would say I can also be less than what I think.
Let's settle with "most likely I am different from what I think I am", although in exceptionally rare cases, a person can be precisely what or who he thinks he is.
Frank Zappa wrote a song about this, titled "What kind of girl do you think we are?" He was in an all-male band.
Perhaps before we descend too far into the logical complexity, we might consider the simplistic premise. Can God be known? Of course. Are wishing and hoping the substance of faith? Of course not.
The premise, along with each of the subordinate points, was formed within a context of not knowing God, was it not? In the absence of a valid premise, where does the logic lead?
But we don't know god. From our point of view now, God is not known. He is in hiding. We don't know what he is like, what he wants, what he wants of us. All these are matters of faith.
Can god be known? Yes, but only if he exists. And we have no clue if he exists or not.
Likewise with science, in a sense, science is blind, it only provides information about what it has discovered and any other knowledge derived from science is human reasoning again.
So all this logic and reasoning is irrelevant in the question addressed in th OP, or if otherwise, the OP is mistaken in making that suggestion.
In reality the only way this question can be addressed is through a science of self, of which there is a large body of work.
I can elaborate if anyone would like, but you can't just dismiss these realities.
*by "world" I am referring to the conscious world of humanity, in which the thinking of people resides.
I would agree with this, although I don't think you can say we don't know God, that is a presumption. Also, any rational analysis cannot include faith as evidence in itself.
Time future, time present, and time past
Are all at once, with not a bit of it to last.
The glorious light flashes us into being shone,
As the light ‘eternal’ of all time to be known.
We are the beings of the everlasting light dream,
As products time and time again, by its means,
Of the eternal return, as baubles blown and burst,
Though draughts of time that quench life’s thirst.
We butterflies, on the edge of forever’s flight,
Spread fast our wings on the ocean of light
That is of the ageless photonic opposing waves
In no time, mass, or space that is thereby made.
Nobody’s Theory of No Absolutes
(The first line of each stanza is the title)
Absolute Totality vs. Relative Totality
None isn’t ‘outside’ nor can be in here,
Nor can Finite One be, with None outside;
Thus, there is no absolute One or None,
Which forces a relative ‘in-between’.
‘One’ as an Absolute Totality Fails Even More
Thus, we can’t step into what isn’t there,
Nor can a One expand into a None,
Nor can there be spacers of None
Within the arena of a One.
Relativism
Absolute time, space, particles, and motion
Are impossible, which forces relativeness—
Of fractional/fractal relations of
Near endless variations of quanta.
The Oddness of Light Photons
Light is ‘null’ to time—not a part of it,
Nor is light of space—it makes space-time ‘lit’.
On a light beam there’s no extent or time!
Light seems to have neither reason nor rhyme.
Already There
Light’s full speed in a true vacuum
Of no time and no space is as ‘infinite’,
For it is already everywhere;
In other words: everywhere in no time.
Light/Matter
Light photons colliding make for
Electrons and positrons, and vice-versa,
With the forward-time of photons being
Canceled by the backward-time gravitons.
Forth and Back and Forth
Photons are made of something and its anti,
Releasing them as electrons and positrons,
In collisions, regaining them in their union
Upon annihilations, this zero-point stretched.
The Zero-Point Extended Broadcast
This point of creation-annihilation
Is extended into a faux reality,
Both by finite consciousness and by
Light slowed by virtual particle pairs.
Phantasmal Being
Each ‘now’ that’s created and recreated
Over the various relative quanta
Has really already happened, coming, going,
And never ever returning, gone in a flash.
Once Upon a ‘Time’
Of course, it did all really happen ‘once’,
As in all-at-once, in the timeless realm
That must be the state of the ‘eternal’ IS,
With IS being close to what’s called the ‘Wiz’.
Nether-Nor
So, neither absolute solidity
Nor absolute vacuity can be,
Leaving relativism as a necessity,
Dooming ‘God’, permanence, meaning, and free.
The Play
Our ‘reality’ is as a flip-book’s pages turning,
The still pictures changing a bit, granting
An apparent motion, such as in a movie;
However, we do get to experience it!
Come and Gone
Like the light from a star already spent,
Our ‘get up and go’ has long gone and went.
We all birthed, lived, and died right away;
There’s nothing left but the slo-mo replay.
Being Nothingness
Our parentheses in eternity
Flashes as a twinkling, but’s extended
By ‘time’ into a phantasmic life dream
That’s existent the same as if it were.
In the Eye of the Beholder
A life-dream’s like a rainbow, not really there,
A false phenomenon become tangible
Through relativism, this faux true,
Molding temporary significance.
Arbitrary
Life’s indeterminate and not, the same
Being brought by the virtual as the true,
The mechanics being as incidental
As why ‘color’ chose its wave frequencies.
The Mechanics of Reality
The result, being the message, is undeniable,
But herein we speak of the messenger,
Which is the implementation,
As that of a recording, over a live band.
The Balance of Opposites
Life’s here, as like virtual particles
Born this side of an event horizon
Of a Black Hole, real-eyes(ed) by their presence
In the realm of what’s been radiated.
What Makes No Difference is No Difference
There is no difference in what makes none;
‘Relativism’ is now playing, the living film—
A reality show in the inner theater
Of the mind’s eye, with the ‘I’ observing.
Existence Has No Opposite
‘Possibility’ is what’s fundamental,
For all that can be must first be possible.
This ‘Potential’ for All is the default,
Since a NOT can’t be, or even be meant.
The Math
0/0 = n (all variations), since any n times 0 = 0,
So, 0/0 is as nonexistence divided by itself
Into all of the various relative states;
No absolutes, so there’s only the temporary.
More Math
Zero is the greatest number, for it represents
The sum of negative and positive infinities.
Note that an actual infinity cannot be,
For it cannot be capped, and thus has no being.
Lighting the Way
Our finite speed of light, ‘c’, is such
Because it is slowed by virtual particles,
But, even so, to ride it makes time instant,
With all space shrinking to a point.
The Cosmic Egg
The cosmos is as a giant neutron or photon,
The crests and troughs waving, in a
Relative existence, between Zero and One,
Unable to reach either, jiggling-rippling.
Not Unbreakable, Not Unmakeable
The necessity of no One and no None
Makes for no absolutes, which means
That time, space, matter, and motion
Have no intrinsic, indivisible qualities.
The First Cause
Thus, our ‘reality’ is only apparent,
Yet this effect happens always, everywhere,
For the causeless-defaulted ‘cause’ of this
Potential-Possibility must always be such.
Total Solidity and Complete Vacuity Can’t Be
The One and the None cannot mix;
Then there would be two opposite absolutes;
Plus, what is solid could not move,
So, neither can cut it; relativism rules.
The Duos and Duels of Nature
Dualities seem to assist nature:
Good-evil, on-off, hot-cold, man-woman,
Up-down, left-right, here-there, past-future, and
So, neither can exist without the other.
Opposition Now and Thus Always
Object and Subject are of what Man is made,
Qualia brightly floating in Nature’s shade
Of consciousness, and so then down through history
Opposition’s trace of steps is there to see.
Never/Ever Becoming
What’s said to be eternal isn’t made—
It’s here, from not anything, with no debit paid,
Which is to say, too, it’s not from anywhere,
And that seems pretty much like from nowhere.
No Source
Well, there’s nothing to make anything of,
So, then, that is ever what it’s made of,
Whether eternal or always becoming,
In that nether-land of the law of no laws.
Uncaused
For what is causeless there is no point
At which any specific direction
Can be imparted to it; thus, there is none:
Everything that is possible can happen.
Dichotomy
There must be a duality of Yin and Yang,
Such as Being and Nothingness combined,
For what is complete unto itself has no
Catalyst from which to initiate change.
Binary Dialectic Dichotomies Bifurcate
Of Being and Nothingness the Universe
Banged forth space and time intertwined,
And within this became the contrast
Of electromagnetism’s transition.
The Oppositional Essence Continues On
Of electromagnetism then
Particles and radiation become,
Opposed, as lumps and fields, as incarnate:
Electrons, six quark types, and the photon.
The Why of Being and Nothingness
Being and all that it is not exhausts
All Possibility, as opposites,
And so they must form a duality,
For there’s no point to specify either.
Beyond Local Reality
Time, space, stuff, change, and form are real-ized from
The Fundamental Possibility,
Becoming the penultimate reality,
One possible from the probabilities.
Quantum Superposition is Real
Our reality comes not from nothing,
But exists always as possibility,
One that amounts to something workable,
Among all in superposition.
The First Impossibility
No form of a penultimate realness
Could exist alone before the rest, since
Everything is quantum-known-all-at-once;
For what could make the choice among many?
The Second Impossibility
Nor comes it from an absolute nothing,
Since there can be no such ‘thing’ at all,
So, since either way is impossible,
Fundamental Possibility IS.
The Unbelievable Truth
This ultimate basis of reality,
Though not much like our local reality,
Is hinted at by quantum physics—
It forms reality real as can be!
The Verifiable Truth
So how else could it be, for particles
Do appear and disappear from somewhere,
Going from here to there, with no between,
Manifesting from no-where to now-here.
The Shimmering Gleam
We butterflies, on the edge of forever’s flight,
Spread fast our wings on the ocean of light
That is of the ageless photonic opposing waves
In no time, mass, or space that is thereby made.
Here and Now Only
We are as beings of the everlasting light dream,
As products time and time again by its means,
Of the eternal return, as baubles blown and burst,
Though frames of time that quench life’s thirst.
Nowhere Man/Woman
Time future, time present, and time past
Are all at once, with not a bit of it to last.
The glorious light flashes us into being shone,
As the light ‘eternal’ of all time to be known.
Back and Forth
The photon secrets something and its anti,
Releasing them as electrons and positrons,
In collisions, regaining them, in their union
Upon annihilations, this zero-point stretched.
The Age-Old Question
Why is there something rather than nothing?
Well, the question is now moot, for there’s neither
An absolute something (it’s relative)
Nor an absolute nothing. Neither can be.
Nothing Outside
What is that which is outside the universe?
There can be no absolute universe
With an absolute nothingness
Outside, so the question’s become moot.
In No Time and No Space
What came first, the matter or the light,
Since it seems that each needs the other to be?
There’s no first, only at the same ‘time’.
Photons, electrons, positrons are all-at-once.
Relativism, Ever In-between
Why is the relative universe
So incredibly ‘infinitely’ large?
Because the small has to be so
Incredibly infinitesimal, as the simple.
Instantaneous
Where did relative existence some from?
There is nothing to make it of, but it had to be,
Since it is here, so it all cancels out,
Instantly; it’s simultaneous.
The Default Condition
Who or what made our relative existence?
No one and no-thing, for it is
Of the simple brute force of all scenarios—
As relatively existing between Zero and One.
No Such Thing
How could some absolute existents
Be indivisible-unbreakable, and unmakeable?
There aren’t any, so the problem is moot.
‘Nothing lasts’—it’s the “nonexistent absolute”.
One of the Better Universes
The flowing through all paths of everything
Guarantees that the best solutions will be found,
Which beats Intelligence that tries to foresee all,
But never can; nor can the complex be First.
The Lumping is Still a Wave
Is the two-slit experiment result perplexing?
No, for fields are primary, not ‘particles’,
For what is thought of as ‘particles’
Are field quanta; a wave will go through both slits.
It is Just to Be
What is the purpose of our existence?
None, but we do ‘exist’ in one of the
Relative scenarios whose path led to us.
Our existence was inherent, all along.
Indirect Existence
But 99.99999 percent of the ‘time’
We were not around, and perhaps ‘we’ are
Not there in 99.99999 percent of all ‘space’.
We weren’t a primary objective, nor was any.
Being
Did the universe have a beginning?
No, because the universe cannot be
Affected by anything outside it.
It just is, and, beyond’, it also isn’t.
Why Not Any Certain Way?
If the relative universe is eternal,
Then what is there to explain the way it is?
It is ‘universes’ in every way,
And so not any universe in particular.
No Linear Movement Through Space
Does a whole new universe appear at every ‘now’?
Yes, one doesn’t step into the same universe twice,
This somewhat analogous to someone clever,
Who said, that we never step into the same river.
Greatness
What is the source of all this existence,
For that still seems to make it great?
Unconsciousness, nothing, no-mind is
The be-all, start-all, and end-all, as ‘great’.
Nature’s Mistake?
Should we then let go of all our ego?
Not necessarily, for the ego is
An input to our resultant zest for life;
However, take it all in with a grain of salt.
Step Back
Yes, detach from it all when necessary.
It is as a play within no play,
In no place in no time, just relative.
The timeless-formless is as ‘nothingness’.
Still Asking
What is the meaning in all that?
Only what we have and enjoy
In the here and now, internally.
Externally, there isn’t anything.
No Real Reality
Forget about indivisible fundamental substance;
It would be unbreakable and thus unmakable.
For the ‘null’, look to the unconscious,
‘Finite’ to consciousness, ‘method’ to the subconscious.
The Gateway to Perfection
Enjoy the play that you get to act in,
Sometimes retreating to the back row,
As the distanced audience, witnessing afar,
Finding peace and everlasting gladness.
Quoting god must be atheist
Then to the rolling Heav’n itself I cried,
Asking, “What Lamp had Destiny to guide
Her little Children stumbling in the Dark?”
And—“A blind understanding!” Heav’n replied.
— FitzOmar
:up:
Quoting PoeticUniverse
My G*D model is defined as ALL, the Whole of which humans are curious particles.
Quoting PoeticUniverse
My personal illusion of Reality is created in my own mind by interpreting those incoming signals (wave patterns) according to some inherent (significant) commonality. Like Morse Code, both sender and receiver must speak the same language. In my thesis, the common language of the universe is Information, which boils down to 1 or 0, on or off, dot or dash, From that cosmic communication, we know "part & parcel", absence & presence, "life & love".
.
I was just reminded, by your physical/metaphysical poetry, of the book by Gevin Giorbran : Everything Forever, Learning to See Timelessness.https://www.amazon.com/Everything-Forever-Learning-See-Timelessness/dp/0979186102/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=everything+forever&link_code=qs&qid=1572222362&sourceid=Mozilla-search&sr=8-1
He was a poet-scientist , who wrote a mind-boggling book about the universe as a whole. I say "was", because he committed suicide in 2008, shortly after publishing the book. Apparently, his website has been taken down, but here is an old interview on YouTube : https://youtu.be/-SI5MgGnP1g
It occurred to me that your poet-scientist mind might be better able to understand his far-out concepts than less imaginative prosaic thinkers. For example, the eternal "universe" (what I call G*D) is perfect symmetry, and our temporal-material universe is broken symmetry. I don't know if his hypothesis is true -- he discusses Many Worlds and Multiverse conjectures, along with the "God" concept -- but it presents some visionary ways to interpret the Reality that seems bottomless, the deeper we look into it.
EVERYTHING FOREVER
[i]Time is one enormous moment
Where children play
not knowing of a tomorrow
where people walk along an ocean
and gaze in wet air
This sense of separation and loss
is all illusion
though old men tell of the past
as if it is gone somewhere else
to children who listen
as if it used to be
We all walk here in time
not yet knowing
as we ponder the mystery
and animals listen
that all in this same moment
the world begins
and the world ends
while these waves
crash upon the shore
regardless
And now as I touch your hand
time will stand still
and trap something there forever
for us to view from some heaven
as we are forever born
into an endless moment”[/i]
? Gevin Giorbran, Everything Forever: Learning to See Timelessness
https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/61155.Gevin_Giorbran
You are a genius, for a digest of 'Everything Forever' is next in the poem, completing it, as 'The Final Answer', although it's rather long; Nobody's portion is done, but he referenced Giorbran in a forum post and so must have liked Gevin's idea. Nobody is probably not dead but cannot currently be found anywhere online.
Time Forward
The Alpha of the Beginning can’t be
From the impossible nonexistence;
Only time begins, and so the universe
Must be such that time moves frames forward.
Grouping Order to Symmetry Order
Wherefore why the ‘improbable’ Alpha,
It being the most complete grouping order—
Separated matter / inverse matter?
Only then is the pull toward symmetry.
To the ‘Improbable’
All the possibilities of the imbalances
Must trace back to the one and only state
Of the most probable beginning of all,
The separation of matter and anti-matter.
Between River Shores and Lakes Alpha/Omega
The ultimate, flat, symmetry order
Of the Omega—the end of all, draws
The river of time along, guiding it,
Through the probability patterns.
The Wave Function of the Universe
Totality is in a superposition,
All at once—of no time and of no space,
The quantum probability patterns
Really being so, not just a math tool.
From Grouping Order to Blended Symmetry Order
The Time River of Probabilities
Flows smoother and further near its center,
While near the shores there are eddies and swirls,
Contrasts, lumpiness, ebbs—even back flow.
Timeless ‘Time’
The pages turn and the living film plays,
Motion but apparent, as successive frames—
All the alternate plot’s scenarios being,
Which will blend into ‘everything forever’.
We Reflecting the Universe Start-End
The two brain hemispheres, too, must reflect
The nature of the universe itself,
As the grouping order versus and with
The whole of the symmetry order.
The Hare Beats the Turtle
The universe expands, forming a light cone;
The arc of the ‘ice-cream’ end getting flatter,
Seeming to take forever to straighten—
Accelerating expansion bridges the gap.
It Has Always Been
Nonexistence can’t be, nor even meant;
So it is that existence must be here;
There’s no other option, by necessity,
And thus herein these pages we learn its ways.
Divergence and Convergence
Top-down drives the bottom-up ‘events’,
The future ever affecting the present;
The flat whiteness of the Omega End
Brings forth diversified prismatic colors.
Enfoldment/Unfoldment
Electrons, protons, seem ‘bottom-up’
But are ‘enfolded’ in the top-down whole,
As with Bohm’s implicit order guiding
The blooming, unfolding, explicit order.
The Second of the Final Laws
Boltzman’s increasing disorder (entropy),
Due to there being many more states of
Disorder than order, is close to the mark,
But it’s more-so of the ungrouped patterns.
As Well, There Are Many More Ways For…
The universe to be lumpy, in degrees,
Than for it to be perfectly smooth,
And that’s why there’s still a grouping order,
As with galaxies and solar systems.
The Opposite ‘Improbable’
The not so ‘improbable’ symmetry
Of uniformity comes at future’s end;
This Omega symmetry order is
The opposite of Alpha’s grouping order.
Bohm’s Poem of Home
Classical physics says that reality
Is of particles that separate
The world into independent elements;
But now I am proposing the reverse…
Close Condensations Approximate a Track
The fundamental reality is en-un-foldment;
Particles are abstractions from that.
Electrons don’t exist continuously
But are coming, going, then coming again.
Real Quantum Mechanics
Possibilities are actualities, so
Possibilities exist, in a timeless way,
So then we have a simple solution
To why our universe came from a dense state.
All at Once
All the possible patterns of the past
And future exist simultaneously,
Independent of the passage of time frames,
So, the history of a temporal universe…
Why Time
Moving through those possible patterns
Will inevitably trace backward to
The extreme, greatest imbalance, and hence
To the severe order of the Alpha start.
Time’s Direction
It seems strange that time began from Alpha,
Unless patterns are physically real.
Then time invariably originates
From the greatest imbalance of them all.
Toward Balance
Time’s forward direction is ever toward balance.
And so when it’s traced backward, that same path
Invariably originates from imbalance;
The temporal universe is as it must be.
Time Explained
Any path of time embedded within
A physically real pattern space would
Exhibit a history that originates from the
Single most improbable location of all: Alpha.
Probable Existence
Since pattern space is existingly there
Then the flow of time is built into reality,
Causing probable time-worlds to exist, while
Extremely improbable time-worlds do not.
What Exists
All possibilities must exist,
Because nonexistence cannot be so.
Existence is inevitable. What does exist?
Whatever is possible to exist does exist.
Our Existence is Not Absurd
Time-worlds are secondary, subject to
The realer reality of timeless patterns.
Time’s passage must pass through patterns;
‘Tis no more spectacular than a moment.
What Patterns Lead to
The must-existence of patterns is great—
For the hierarchy of atomic elements,
Stars systems, bio-life, consciousness,
And finally intelligence and wisdom.
No Chaotic Change
If time and change were not restricted
To probability’s arrow of time
Built into pattern space then anything
Could happen and would happen, as chaos.
Quantum Collapse
Quantum events are a “handshake” between
Past (retarded waves) information
And future (advanced waves) information,
Causing the probabilities to collapse to ‘now’.
Probabilities Produced From the Whole
Time doesn’t simply roll into the future,
For there’s a mesh of probabilities
Where possible pasts and futures meet,
Which scientists correctly call ‘non-local’.
The Complete Transaction
When we stand in the dark and look at
A star not only have the retarded waves
From the star have been long traveling,
But advanced waves have reached into the past.
The End Promotes the Means
Time’s river, having a specific ending, explains
Why the universe’s wave function is specific.
If what’s possible was just coming from the past,
There’s no reasonable explanation…
The Guidance Goal: Lake Alpha to Lake Omega
For the control of all the probabilities,
Such as the wave density of atomic particles,
A river only from the past would be
Flowing outward into chaos, but it can’t.
The New Natural Selection
‘Evolution’ is thus an ordered happening,
From the unnoted neutral order in the future,
Along with the positive order of the past.
(So now we know there must be a negative.)
The Whole Thing
The positive order in the Alpha past
Is only half of the Cosmos’ puzzle,
Merely half of a larger duality, one side
Of the great divide, one side of the coin.
The Chess Board
Our Alpha is one chess player as the game begins,
When all the pieces of one color are divided apart,
Half of the most extreme case of grouping order;
Both Alphas are the highest imbalance and contrast.
Time, and Time Again
Time travels from positive to neutral,
While anti-time travels from negative to neutral,
But, note that time & anti-time are much identical.
We may even be alternating back and forth.
Matter Traveling Backward in Time
If matter is evolving forward in time,
Anti-matter is matter evolving backward in time,
In the direction of our own positive Alpha,
Explaining why anti-matter is unstable on our side.
Other Matters
Stable anti-matter exists on the other side
Of ours in anti-time, traveling inversely in time,
Not backwards, but away from the negative Alpha
Toward the universal Omega.
Space-Time Distance
Since time is a direction in space,
Then the space that we’re within is special.
It’a not a 3-D space in which things move about;
It is instead what Einstein called space-time.
4-D, Not 3-D
Space-time is a product of “4-D directions”
In space that travel through a series of many
3-D block-like spaces, jumping from one to the next,
As a new volume dependent on the 4-D directions.
The Probability of Balance
Exterior to the 3-D spaces, the 4-D volume
That we exist within changes and transforms;
It evolves because most of the spacial
Directions move from Alpha toward Omega.
The Unnoted Dimension
This 4-D volume is what collapses
In the phase of accelerating expansion (Big Rip),
Even though the actual universe is expanding.
This acceleration is inevitable.
Driven by Opposites
This dominant probability
Makes our volume (our space) positive
In reference to the volume of
Anti-time which is negative.
Inversion
Anti-time is a negative space,
Or negative space-time,
Which is properly referred to
As negative volume.
The Unseen Scene
Inverse matter can only exist in
The negative volume of anti-time.
We cannot observe the negative density
Of an inverse-proton in our positive space.
Two Worlds
Our positive volume would collapse
Before the inverse proton could
Exist spatially extended, on our side
Of the dividing line between worlds.
Amazing
The negative electron is but a point particle.
Our positive volume collapses before
The negative density that gives the electron
A definite mass can exist spatially extended.
Front and Back
Electrons are one side of inverse-protons in anti-time,
Which means the back side of our protons
Are inverse electrons, and our electrons
Are the back side of someone else’s protons.
For Opposites to Move To Balance
The whole progression of time is driven
By a slow cosmic influx of negative density leaking
Into our positive volume from the other side;
A slow merging of the two sides is occurring,
Expansion
The two sides must slowly and gradually unite,
Which from our perspective causes
The cosmos to grow larger and expand,
In the first steps away from Alpha,…
Divergence
Time is stepping away from the uniformity
And sameness of a perfect positive state
And is necessarily moving into the
Beginning of variety and diversity.
Intermixed
The negative can visibly invade Alpha
By tunneling into its positive space,
Creating fluctuations in the CBR, or at
Micro-scales as negative charge point particles.
The Cosmic Plans
In order to control the cosmos,
In the necessity to bring itself about,
Omega must even rigidly regulate
The early cosmos in its first moments.
Equality
As if planning to bring about complexity and life,
The early fluctuations in expansion are moderate,
The masses of electrons all kept equal,
The ratio of electrons-protons kept even.
Has to Be
With the precision of a watchmaker,
The inevitable future carefully designs
The stable particles with properties that will
Produce the periodic table, molecules, even DNA.
Only Two Ways
Why just the proton and electron?
Why just two stable fundamental particles?
Why are they matched with polar charges?
They are forged with a specific goal in mind.
All the Pieces of the Puzzle
We know what we think of as a material universe
Is really an intricate interplay of imbalances.
All that is known are positives and negatives,
As the stable protons and electrons.
The March of Time
Following time backward only increases imbalance,
In seeing that time originates fully positive,
And then slowly becomes less positive,
Until it becomes neutral, centered.
The Trend Shows
We now realize there actually should be
Great imbalances evident in the world around us.
There should be even much greater
Imbalances evident in our Alpha past.
1836 Times More Massive
The proton should be heavier than the electron.
We don’t note an equal number of anti-matter galaxies.
We shouldn’t expect there to be equal amounts
Of matter & anti-matter near the beginning of time.
The Mystery
The question that has haunted us for so long,
“Why is there something rather than nothing?”
Is related to asking “Why is there asymmetry?”
“Why are there imbalances present?”
The Results
Form and material things, substance itself,
Are products of the imbalances that
Exist within the cosmic balance—
Everything a great tapestry of imbalance.
Further Why
And when we ask the question “Why are
There imbalances instead of why somethingness?”
It’s simple and unavoidable that imbalances exist.
Imbalances are natural inside any overall balance.
Should Have Known the Timeless Everything
Our finite world could only be an imbalanced system.
We exist because a balanced whole exists,
Which we incorrectly see as nothing,
And worse still, confuse with nonexistence.
The Forces Explained
All forces are probabilities, simply the
Most predictable events we experience.
In fact, gravity is the probability
For time to travel backwards.
Gravity is Time Moving Backwards
Gravity is trying to recreate the past.
In an expanding universe the past
Is increasingly denser; less expanded.
Gravity battles with the universe’s expansion.
Expansion is a Force From the Future
The trend of nature is not at all toward disorder,
But it is for balance to increase.
Being drawn toward the balance of zero
The universe invariably expands.
Two Steps Forward, One Step Back
The universe’s expansion is time moving forward.
Cosmological expansion isn’t a consequence
Of some chance explosion in the past.
It is a force, just like gravity (Gravity’s losing).
Electromagnetism is Time Moving Forward
Electromagnetism is the perfect balance
Of the future’s absolute zero influencing the present.
The balance of the future, the most probable state,
Is a great cosmic attractor of all universes-change.
Push-Pull
We can feel absolute zero pulling
And pushing the cosmos around.
We feel this balance of zero
As electricity and magnetism.
Moving Toward Greater Balance
Positive and negative particles
Are moving nearer to the balance,
For like particles will naturally repel
While opposite particles attract.
Imagine Electromagnetism in Reverse
Like particles would then attract
And opposite particles would repel.
Such a force would cause positive and negative
Particles to divide apart into separate groups.
Nucleon Binding
In fact, when like particles such as
Positive protons bond together,
Time is actually moving backward.
The strong force is electromagnetism in reverse.
How it Works
The strong force battles against electromagnetism,
Causing positive protons
to attract at short distances.
If protons and neutrons get close enough,
The repulsion of electromagnetism is overcome.
The Ranges
The strong force holds the nucleus together,
Just like gravity holds-creates stars and galaxies.
The strong force is the short range gravity;
Electromagnetism dominates on the larger scale.
The Power Broker Breaker
Something must overcome the strong force,
Because electromagnetism cannot break
The bond between like protons by itself.
Electromagnetism-expansion beats gravity-strong.
Forces Are the Possible Directions of Time
At some point in the future the weak force
Has to break down all the complex atoms in
The universe into individual protons and electrons.
The Weak Force is time moving forward.
The Power of the Weak
The weak force is an extension of electromagnetism.
The weak force grew out of electromagnetism
In the early stages of the big bang,
Prior to which there was just the electroweak force.
No Absolute Motion
Objects do not move about in Newton’s vessel
Of empty space because a real perfectly
Flat space would be absolutely chock full.
Thus, the relative, not absolute universe.
Empty Curvatures
Objects can only exist as distinct forms
In a space where their opposites have
Been removed or displaced to create
A half space or parallel regions.
Space, the Final Frontier
This creates the present interdependence
Between matter and space which led Einstein
To describe space as an extension of mass.
‘Space’ seems to be the ultimate challenge.
The Ultimate Puzzle
We’ve learned about space relative to materials.
A common theme is that matter and space
Are two forms of the same thing. Not exactly.
Matter is really an absence of content.
All Told and Tolled
If the cosmos stretches totally flat,
Then matter and space are equivalent,
But this leads to a very dramatic switch
In how we evaluate the universe, whereby we see…
What Matters
That particles are holes in a primary full space,
Rather than material things arisen
Above and more primary than space.
Matter is a bi-product of space.
Two Apples Means Two More Anti-Apples
For our universe to exist, an identical
But opposite anti-matter universe
Has to be removed from space.
Why are we separate from our other half?
Half and Half
Perfect symmetry doesn’t create nonexistence.
Perfect symmetry is just everything experienced
At the same time in the same space.
Opposites don’t cancel—we’re here observing half.
In Order For There to be Symmetry
From our place in the world, we cannot
Or would not directly observe unified symmetry.
It’s hidden, in our future or in our past.
We need to be here; there has to be asymmetry.
Nonexistence Isn’t; Perfect Symmetry Is
The combination of our galaxy
With an inverse anti-matter galaxy,
As combined, and every other pair of galaxies,
All exist joined together in ordinary space.
Taken and Placed Somewhere Else
And so matter is not more than space;
It is less than space; it’s what happens
When part of something whole is taken away,
Taken from the place and time we call ‘now’.
The New Normal
It’s difficult to re-normalize after such a switch,
But the fullness or substantive aspect we attribute
To matter is present in space more than in matter.
Dense matter’s an absence, as in the tiny early universe.
Things Aren’t More Than Nothing
Mass and density are both a measure of absence.
Objects cannot exist unless their opposite
Is removed from that seeming emptiness.
Things are then less than everything.
Accentuating the Positive
A negative density can only
Exist in a negative volume, just as
Positive density can only exist in a positive volume.
This allows the mass value to ever remain positive.
Curves
Matter is like bubbles in a water aquarium—
Tiny voids in a denser medium.
Density is a positive or negative void
That causes the curvature of the bubble.
Going, Going…
We live in a positive bubble (volume)
That is actually collapsing,
As distant galaxies expand away from us
At speeds beyond the speed of light.
Everything Leaks
We detect the mass of a negative
Density as a point of zero volume,
Or what is called a point particle;
Electrons leaked over from the anti-time side.
Each as Half of Totality
The electron leak is in response to the
Existence of protons on our side,
Which is why the ratio of electrons
To protons in the universe is exactly even.
The Point of It
So why does the electron point particle
Have a defined mass, as opposed to infinite?
A negative density cannot be
Spatially extended in a positive volume.
Confined to a Point
The electron mass exists in a negative
Volume that opens up beyond the point of the
Electron in the ghostlike invisible partner.
Negative density also explains polarity of charge.
Credited Debits
Positive and negative things are debts
That have to be repaid to a larger neutral space.
Charges reflect imbalances in a spatial content.
To create particles creates indents, or curvatures.
The Flow
The only way for the plus-minus puzzle pieces
To exist separate from one another
Is if time originates from such a state,
An imbalance, then moves toward equilibrium.
One Way
Equilibrium never breaks down into imbalance;
Something does not come from nothing.
But time will start from something imbalanced,
And evolve toward balance, or ‘nothing’.
A Four Dimensional Space
When you combine an infinite past and future,
Time is-was relative (allowing the infinite).
Everything exists in one huge moment of now,
Which supersedes the possibility of existential change.
The Printed Pages
Time-worlds are imprinted within the great moment,
So the time of such worlds must travel linearly
From a beginning on to an ending.
Books have binding; movie frames are projected.
The Clock-Block Universe
At any tick of the clock the world is
In a particular condition or state,
Which is called lateral time, and each distinct
Moment is in an individual universe.
Linear and Lateral Time
How can distinctly separate blocks of space
Be simultaneously fused into a linear progression?
If they are fused then they are not distinct;
If they are distinct, then they aren’t really fused.
The Separate and the Common
What separates one block of time from another?
Only the definition of each time block
Maintains it as separate from other states, and
Spaces are always linked by a common existence.
The Sum of the Fragments
They are all embedded in the same great
Never ending moment—all fragments of the whole.
Each spatial pattern is a tiny internal part,
And only the patterns’ sum creates the whole.
The Lateral
There exist directions in space which travel across
Or through the multiplicity of these blocks—
A 4-D that independently constructs
The lateral component of its surroundings.
Governed by the Innate Probabilities
Each individual direction moving through
The blocks becomes a sort of parent
To a lateral time world—its own 4-D space,
Strictly relative to that single parent direction.
Replacing Chaotic Freedom
Each of these directions in space are free to find
Their way through the overall multispatiality,
Except the direction of travel, and so each path
Is governed by the probabilities of the superspace.
A Very Strict Guidance System
The result is a fourth dimensionality of space,
In which the lateral surroundings of each 4-D
Parent direction are uniquely constructed
Strictly relative to that single parent direction.
The Series of Stills
Time passes through many spaces, and
Each block is an individual moment.
An object does not move through the spaces,
Rather it stays and exists frozen in each space.
Time Rules
Only time, which is actually a
Special direction in space, is able
To pass through multiple 3-D spaces,
Traveling from one moment to the next.
4-D Touches All of 3-D
An undivided existence of all
Conceivable 3-D configurations
Would inevitably create the 4-D of
Spatial directions passing between the blocks.
The Full Range
We will invariably observe a sampling
Of galaxies which reflects the widest range
Of configurations that pattern space dictates, plus
Ranges of solar systems, planets, moons, asteroids.
All
We will observe the whole range of geography,
The whole range of possible chemistry,
The whole range of other lifeforms,
The whole range of personalities.
Connections
All is then integrated into the parent direction,
Inevitably causing expansion and growth—
Letters, words, phrases, sentences, verse (uni).
We ourselves are the evolution of time.
Do you have a link to "The Final Answer"? Was it written by Nobody or by you?
It's all there already, as combined in Nobody's part and Gevin's part. I wrote and arranged both parts into the poem based on what they said in prose. Nobody Nowhere was on the forum, ToeQuest, long ago.
So, per Giorbran, for Cosmic and biological evolution, it looks like we need more than just 'random' but less than God, since the superpositions must either trace back to total order (imbalance) or trace forward to disorder (balance), and so time can only begin from order, as with matter separated from antimatter—time thus pushed forward by this past arrangement and further pulled forward by future disorder.
While we ponder this and all, we have some comic relief as Nobody returns from adjusting the DNA of the universe in the continuing story of 'Butterflies At the Edge of Forever':
Nobody’s Fake Home Movies of the CMBR Trip
Nobody invited everyone from the forum and the government over to see some home movies of his trip to the CMBR. The CIA, FBI, NSA, DNA, and three former Presidents attended, as well. President YoungerBush would’ve come, but was on vacation for a month, shooting lame ducks and leakers.
Pasta and antipasta was served for dinner, depending on one’s universal orientation. A few mixed it, trying to cancel out the effects of eating too much, and promptly exploded from both ends.
“Thanks, everyone, for your support,” said Nobody. “The reception was great; no static or noise. I can take some questions before we start the film that filmed the start.”
Shakespeare raised his hand.
“What’s the question?” said Nobody.
“To be or not to be.”
“Good answer.”
“How did you survive after you left the last Daily Planet restaurant?” asked Austin.
“I picked up some frozen food in the Ice Age.”
“But how did you cook it?” persisted Austin, his brain having been temporarily fried, boiled, and sun roasted in New Jersey.
“Remember, there were microwaves all around.”
“Where did you get that “vacuum” cleaner?” asked Profpat.
“I always carry one, for I have another at home. The salesman said that it would cut my work in half, so I bought two.”
“Any great words to characterize the epic journey to the CMBR?” asked RascalPuff.
“‘Veni, Vidi, Velcro’; I came, I saw, and I stuck around.”
“Did you get lost?” asked Fredrick.
“I never get lost, even if I’m told to; I discover alternate destinations.”
“Did you make enough money to retire, and, if so, can I have your old tires?” inquired Graybeard.
“Yes, I did, but it’s really a cruel choice: Work or watch daytime TV.”
“Did you understand Everything? asked Fredrick.
“Often I thought I did, but then I regained consciousness.”
ChickenMan probed, “Were any chickens harmed during the making of your film? Also, did Mother Earth and Father Time produce the cosmic egg?”
“Inconceivable, but I like your approach… now let’s see your departure.”
“What’s reality, really?” asked Mkirkpatrick.
“Much ado about nothing.”
“Is your journey responsible for Hillary running for President?” asked Bill Clinton.
“No, but there was a Presidents’ Day sale at Macy’s and all men’s pants were half off.”
“I’m cured now,” said Bill. “There is no relationship, depending on what the meaning of ‘is’ is. There is really no safe sex from aides. Also, I went to a self-help group for compulsive talkers; it’s called On and On Anon.”
“Why are the two President Clintons always out beating the Bushes?” quizzed ElderBush of Bill.
“Because Al tried to Gore you and lost to Chad, so I must run for First Gentleman to restore our dynasty over yours. Plus, one handy lady bird is worth two bushes anytime.”
“Okay Presidents,” interjected Nobody, “no politics, a word that means many blood sucking insects. I’m still taking questions.”
“What are all the answers?” asked someone in training, “and why are the answers so hard?”
“The answers are easy; they are ‘yes’, ‘no’, and ‘maybe’, which to kids all mean yes. It’s the questions that are hard.”
Graybeard pleaded, “My X-rated x-ray vision has degenerated; I’m only seeing skeletons now!”
“Maybe you could get a job at an airport.”
“What did the arts graduate say to the engineering graduate?” asked Profpat.
“Would you like fries with your order, sir?”
“Did you meet any of your ancestor’s ancestors?” asked Graybeard.
“I saw my family tree.”
“What the heck!” wondered Graybeard out loud.
“My great-ancestors descended from the trees.”
“What is the moon really made of?” asked Rascal.
“Swiss cheese.”
“But it’s all hard and crusty, although it does have holes.”
“That’s what happens when you leave cheese out.”
“How do you make holy water?” questioned Profpat.
“You boil the hell out of it!”
“What do you think about sex on TV?” wondered Lloyd.
“It can’t hurt you unless you fall off. Now let’s get serious, folks. We’re all used to the new language features by now and the joke industry that they spawned.”
“What did you see in the Garden of Time?” asked Mkirkpatrick.
“There were glimmers and gleams and golden dappled lights like stars hovering and floating slowly about the scene, and a door that invited me into the inner sanctum of the night watchmen’s mainspring. There I found CARE, a gentle old man who sat silently by the sundial in Time’s Sanctuary and slowly marked the hours by the shadows that crept over the face of eternity. I asked him, ‘What time is it?’
“And he answered to my surprise, ‘Do you mean now?’”
“Yogi?” I asked.
“‘No, Yogi is my distant relative, twice removed, but he kept coming back. Anyway, here is the riddle of now:
A moment contains eternal reward;
Both past and future are rolled thereinward.
Time never passes; it stays as it is;
Still, it is ceaselessly moving onward.’”
“I continued on to the CMBR,” said Nobody, “but I could see through it and the universal DNA matrix off toward the radiant void and there I saw JOY, forever young, who turned toward the glow of the fair light that from the infinite did show, basked in its golden beams, and spread her radiance to everything that’s so.”
“God is a woman?” Hillary asked.
“Yes, Mrs. President-to-be who is no longer to be.”
“Now that we know the secrets of the universe, what remains as the ultimate question?” RascalPuff asked.
“It is, ‘Why do squirrels always run back under your car after they are already in the clear?’”
“Some things remain unfathomable,” ruminated Puff.
“How are you feeling? Wasn’t the trip quite a strain on you?” wondered Fredrick.
“Yes, I fell into an upholstery machine, but I am fully recovered now, but if I don’t pay my exorcist I may get repossessed. Also, I entered a period of great inflationary expansion and suffered a small cut on my forehead when the road rose up to meet me, but I have since lost some weight.”
“Did you hear that the short fortune-teller who escaped from prison was a small medium at large?” asked WiseGuy.
“I have now. That was sure a puny pun that deserves punitive measures.”
“Does “nothing” exist out there?” asked Fredrick.
“No, nada, null, zilch, naught, nix, nil, and zippo. Nothing is unconceivable of existence, while the pregnancy of possibility is the mother of all invention. Austin told me to say that.”
“Since the government mostly paid for this trip, isn’t the money tainted?” asked Profpat.
“A lot of money is tainted. Taint yours and it taint mine.”
“What is the purpose of life?” asked Austin, seriously.
“To let it flow through you.”
“What is your first memory of flowing life?” continued Austin.
“I do remember being a gleam in my father’s eye, my first glint of spirit. And half of me seems to remember shooting down some sort of tube and emerging into some liquid, then some kind of Olympic swimming race and a merging with an oval football kind of thing and an endless floating about for many months. Then, about a month before I was born, I heard some sounds, like ‘Cootchy-cootchy-coo. Who’s in there?’
“Then, the day before I was born, a voice told me that there is a whole big world out there, and I thought, no, there can’t be; there is only water and calm and darkness; that’s all there is; there can be nothing more. I guess I was not such a visionary back then. Then, the next day—I remember it well since I was born right on my birthday (but had no party until a year later), I was thrust into the light, and I think my first words were, well, it’s a bit hard to recall them since I was very young when I was born, but, since I am a writer, I did speak my first words early, and I think they were: ‘Does anyone have a pair of sunglasses; it’s awfully bright out here.’”
Abraham Lincoln asked, “Why did they move my birthday?”
“Well, February is a confusing short month; for example, this year Fat Tuesday is on February 12, which used to be your birthday, before they moved it, and is the big finale of Mardi-Gras, when we’re supposed to eat enough pancakes and sausage to get us through the 40 days of Lent’s fast food (Wendy’s & McDonalds), I mean fasting, and give up sweets, as of Ash Wednesday, the 13th, a sort of smoke-in day when we remember dust to dust and that we will eventually make ashes of ourselves, then VD on the 14th, I mean Valentine’s Day, when we are supposed to eat a lot of sweets again! What a mixed-up time. Also, Abe, we wanted another three-day weekend, so we combined all of youse guys birthdays into President’s Day. Plus, it is the month of love, as well as skunk mating season, but I repeat myself.”
“I don’t understand the new road signs,” stated Virginia, the only woman on ToeQuest, who is actually Austin’s mother. He signed her up so he could try to use her WebTV to get on ToeQuest from Chicago (it didn’t work very well).
“A 4-WAY-STOP sign means to use the foot brake, then downshift, pull the emergency brake, and drag your foot. STOP A-HEAD says that a head is in the road! WATCH OUT FOR CHILDREN means: Don’t hug, fondle, kiss, touch, or sweet-talk beneath the sign, for you may do the conceivable. So, get a room. BIKE PATH: The official path for bikes is between the two yellow lines in the middle of the road. Also remember that if you speed up when you see a yellow light it will never turn red, since its frequency shifts toward green as you near C, the speed of light! Furthermore, morons always drive slower than you and idiots drive faster than you! Finally, jay walkers have the right of death.”
It was time to show the movie again, but larger, so Nobody powered up his 8 foot diagonal iphone. The video showed someone in the 1800’s riding a horse, then someone riding a horse in the previous century, and so on back for tens of thousands of years, then hundreds of thousands of years of cavemen walking.
Profpat, bored, tried to sneak out the window to go do some exciting accounting. Fredrick tried dividing by zero on his calculator. Abraham Lincoln wrote an address on the wrong side of an envelope. Graybeard counted the spots on the ceiling and connected the dots into a pleasing image. Austin fell asleep. Mkirkpatrick went to Turkey before it could be devoured by Hungary. Rascal slipped off into the 7th dimension for a while (the Heavenly realm). MJA said that boredom is not really equal to excitement after all.
“The trip wasn’t all that interesting at first,” said Nobody, “as we now live in the most amazing of all time. Soon, we may be able to alter our own DNA and speed evolution on its way. We have just heard the Big Bang and have sprung off of the starting line… The human race is on. We are perhaps 1% of the way along to perfection. The possibilities for the finish line are endless, for scientific revelations are entering the fast lane almost daily. Life now is really a royal diadem of momentous gems shining through us all. We live in the best of times, as the universe is truly ours to experience. It is the ultimate free lunch (how do you account for that, Profpat?). Please contribute to ThePhilosophyForum, for that’s where Everything is happening. We accept all denominations, but we prefer fifties and hundreds.”
Nobody sped up the video of the past and soon everything went back into the stars and then the stars dispersed into dust which went back to form the words “The Beginning”, as the film ended.
Whew! :joke: