The causa sui and the big bang
Thomas Aquinas wrote: "We cannot assume powers in nature according to all proportions of time to any given time". But on the contrary, Spinoza had the idea of the causa sui in nature. Can followers of Marx be right that this could have really happened from a purely materialistic perspective? If consciousness can come from a brain, why can't the universe move itself into the big bang? Can the singularity be it's own causality without making it spiritual? Thanks
Comments (162)
Can the universe create itself from nothing? no.
Can a God create a universe from nothing? no.
Can consciousness create itself from nothing? no.
Can the brain create consciousness from nothing? no.
Can consciousness ever be certain anything beyond itself (e.g. brain or universe) even exists? no.
Does consciousness have any real evidence for anything other then qualia, which is itself. no.
End result: Consciousness concludes itself to be the eternal spiritual creator of everything within/of itself, which is all that exists. I am God.
We only have evidence for qualia and consciousness therefore they must both be the same substance, and be eternal. Neither can increase or decrease itself, or fundamentally change itself. Death is impossible.
Even memory cannot prove change because even memory is just more qualia NOW. So the "past" only proves the present. Absolute truth can only be found right now. Going into the mind for answers will just create more and more philosophy. An infinite regression of illusion.
Sciences big bang idea, and religions god idea, are both logically flawed and therefore false.
“No thing can create anything, because something can't come from nothing. True creation of any kind is impossible because at its heart is the claim that something came from nothing, which is magical thinking.” — An actual thing can most definitely create or make other things, this is the heart of what it means to cause what’s possible to become actual; the very fact of this consequence is creation, in as much as its being is impossible without its having been made actual, or created by, something other than itself; possibility cannot cause itself to become actual, & therefore necessitates something other than itself to make or create it to be as such. Thus creation isn’t impossible.
“We only have evidence for qualia and consciousness therefore they must both be the same substance, and be eternal. Neither can increase or decrease itself, or fundamentally change itself.” — How does having evidence for the former & the latter (signified by two different terms) lead, therefore, to concluding that they’re one & the same substance? Wouldn’t the very fact of having evidence for both of them prove that they’re not identical, i.e., not one & the same thing or substance, in as much as they’re distinguishable from each other? Thus, them being one & the same substance isn’t a rational/logical reality; nor are they invariantly united, for whatever is distinguishable from another thing doesn’t depend on that other thing for it to be (& so can be apart from & without each other); therefore the association of their reality isn’t rationally/logically necessary but merely presumed from a-posteriori experience.
1- We are talking about two different kinds of creation. I'm talking about creating a new substance, a new thing into reality (metaphysics). Which is impossible. You are talking about remixing a pre-existing substance into a new form and calling it creation. Which is possible.
2- Consciousness and qualia are two different descriptions/properties of the same thing. Don't let words confuse you into thinking they are different metaphysically.
Words going into the mind turn into illusions and misunderstandings
2– What’s the “property” of something, as opposed to the thing?
Also, how do the descriptions of the two differ, can you provide a concise description of them or their difference?
Omniscience? Lol, boy, you’re quite the character, with assumptions for days.
2-Consciousness and Qualia are both properties of existence/reality/god/substance. The ultimate and ineffable reality which surrounds and engulfs you, that is you, that you are, here now.
3-All true knowledge ultimately comes from omniscience. You have it too. If you say one plus one equals two you are speaking out of omniscience. When it comes to metaphysics belief is not needed. You do not need belief to know yourself. Anything that requires belief is therefore not you, and therefore doesn't exist metaphysically.
Vacuum state fluctuation is real, and happens everywhere, all the time.
I gather this is what @tim wood was referring to.
Hence the supposition Quoting OmniscientNihilist
is just wrong.
As for the Big Bang...
"God did it" is a poor explanation for anything, not because it doesn't;t work, but because it works too well. It is able to explain anything and everything, and hence is of utterly no use.
Why did the water boil? God did it. Why did the tree grow? God did it. Why did he say that? god made him. Nothing is gained.
Same with he Big Bang. Saying god did its is not providing an explanation.
Quoting Gregory
There are plenty of physical explanations. That we do not know which of them, if any, is right, does not mean that we must conclude that god did it.
2- Present what you think solipsism is, and its flaw, and i will address it. I do not seek to avoid anything, but only to dispel illusions and point to the actual reality.
AN ad hoc reparation on your part. SO what is the vacuum full of?
Look it up. How do you explain my disagreeing wiht you?
2– You realize that you neither describe or answer what either consciousness & or qualia is, nor answer my other question & explain what a “property” is & how it’s distinguishable from a “thing”, here, right? Again, simply assuming/asserting without any explaining. I see how you are, “mr. omniscience”.
3– I don’t want to dispute with you about this, I’ll simply just disagree without pressing the point.
2- It's not my job to look things up that you assume are problems for me. haha. Present the problem yourself in your own words an i will address it.
Now your words become a muddle. I have nothing in my pocket. I'll give you half of it.
And that's what your post - - is. A word muddle.
2-Another word for consciousness can be awareness. Perhaps that will help. Qualia is color, sound, smell, taste, feeling.
But don't worry, you dont need words to know yourself. You can use omniscience, which is intrinsic to your nature. Trying to use words to find yourself will only result in spinning in circles of illusion in the mind. Because you never left yourself.
Only something exists, and it is eternal and omnipresent and unchanging. If a vacuum was truly nothing you would not even be able to see or detect it in any way. Zero is a relative term, and those only exist in the mind for pragmatic purposes.
Mere word play.
Quoting OmniscientNihilist
Especially when you do it wrong.
Two hands clap and there is a sound. What is the sound of one hand? (????????????) —?Hakuin Ekaku
You are now attempting to change the topic.
“In reality everything exists absolutely.” — Yet, the point is that in a given state of reality, a possibility can exist absolutely, too, in as much as it really is a possibility, then & there.
2— The point is to focus on what these words literally refer to & not what they are themselves. Now based on what you’ve just said, do you accept that what you refer to as “qualia” is conscious?
Something only you understand?
2- color, sound, taste, smell, feeling, must be conscious or it would be impossible to experience or know of their existence
when the mind stops and looks you are omniscient, and from that the mind gains absolute truth
2– A scent, according to you, is/must be conscious/sentient? Boy, what are you smoking?
Now that is so much better than your first post.
2- consciousness and sentience are two different things. we should define these terms.
Btu there is also nothing to make it [i]necessary[/I]...
2– They may not signify the same exact thing but are still close enough in meaning (they simply refer to various kinds, or degrees, of consciousness) such that they can be, at certain times & in certain contexts, interchangeably used. Nonetheless, try & answer my question, are you claiming that a scent is not sentient but conscious, when you assert, “smell, must be conscious”?
2- sentience refers to both mind and consciousness, which are two different things, although ultimately the same thing, but only because everything is ultimately the same thing.
"The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it." -Nietzsche
Unless you assume god is a magician that can do magic. But that is magical thinking. One false thing cannot be used to prove another false thing true.
But you already created a bad starting point when you assumed the universe even exists.
The god character is basically just a projection of the human ego illusion. Overcome that and it will disappear at the same time.
Also, the metaphysical isn’t the only reality, as you suggest, it’s just the ultimate one. There are levels to reality.
2– All of that’s beside the point...now, answer my question for once, is a scent, according to you, conscious but not sentient?
2- The only thing that exists is color, sound, feeling, which is all conscious and ordered and flowing. The mind is just an echo of that only reality. A reflection, within it, of it, as part of it.
the mind gets everything backwards and inside out when it goes off on its own and does not rely on omniscience as the source of truth
Remind me never to go bushwalking with you.
If we look in the body/brain do we see any consciousness in there?
SO, do tell us more about the ineffable...
“Tthe teaching is merely a vehicle to describe the truth. Don’t mistake it for the truth itself. A finger pointing at the moon is not the moon. The finger is needed to know where to look for the moon, but if you mistake the finger for the moon itself, you will never know the real moon. The teaching is like a raft that carries you to the other shore. The raft is needed, but the raft is not the other shore. An intelligent person would not carry the raft around on his head after making it across to the other shore. My teaching is the raft which can help you cross to the other shore beyond birth and death. Use the raft to cross to the other shore, but don’t hang onto it as your property. Do not become caught in the teaching. You must be able to let it go.” -Thich Nhat Hanh
Yes - il n'y a pas besoin de cette hypothèse. e.g. Once upon a planck-scale spacetime, a quantum fluctuation had tunneled from (higher? false?) vacuum state to another (lower? less false?) vacuum state - "big bang" - in a runaway (inflationary?) entropic process - universe (which is still "banging", that is, accelerating towards maximum entropy).
[quote=Banno]"[So if there is nothing outside the universe,] there is nothing then to make it contingent and it would be necessary."
— Gregory
B[ut] there is also nothing to make it necessary...[/quote]
Thus, a universe [is] necessarily non-necessary ...
?tim wood :up:
[quote=OmniscientNihilist]?Gregory First cause arguments are all flawed because they predicate something coming from nothing. If causation exists it must therefore be eternal. Nothing real can ever begin. Motion cannot just start up from nothing. [/quote]
(a) Please differentiate Nothing from NothingNess.
(b) Also, if motion isn't fundamental, or absolute, give us an account (sketch) of fundamental, or absolute, non-motion (i.e. stasis).
To wit: Why (relative) motion rather than (absolute) stasis? :yawn:
Yeah, this is a set-up, but you've rolled out a lot of "End result ... I am god" flypaper so far and I'd like see how you buzz yourself woo-woo silly bouncing around in the fly-bottle - or if you can show the rest of us some way out. Doubt you can, OmNihil, but I dare you to try.
(Now I'm going to go fuck off in the corner and ... :smirk:)
If nothing governed the 'big bang', in other words, if it were a truly chaotic event - like a regular explosion - then there would be no reason to expect order to arise from the resulting chaos. Laws of entropy being what they are, one might expect only further chaos (although of course we wouldn't be around to expect anything whatever.) But it does seem that there is no natural reason to expect why an utterly chaotic and disordered event could give rise to the order of nature.
This of course is the 'fine-tuning argument' which doesn't seem to have been brought up yet in this thread but is quite relevant. It is based on the observation that there is a very small number of mathematical constants and ratios which must exist in a very precise range for stars, and so matter, and so complex life to form - hence the 'goldilocks universe', one which is not too hot, nor too cold, for life to form, but just right. In fact one of the motivations for the multiverse conjecture is to defuse the so-called fine-tuning argument.
DOES THE MULTIVERSE REALLY EXIST? By: Ellis, George F. R. Scientific American. Aug2011, Vol. 305 Issue 2, p38-43. 6p.
I think the ancient philosophical intuition that was incorporated into Christian theology with neo-platonism, is that the underlying order which allows the universe to form, is mirrored or reflected in the intellect (nous). So there was a sense in which the philosopher sought to grasp the logos of the whole cosmos.
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/09328a.htm
Exactly. And "no reason" to expect order not to arise from chaos either. Thus, order - such as a cosmos - is fundamentally contingent: it possibly comes to be; or it possibly continues to be; or it possibly becomes otherwise; or it possibly ceases to be: without any of these states being inevitable or necessary (i.e. permanent, perdurable).
The point is that there is far greater likelihood of the magnitude of billions to one - of order [I]not[/i] arising; that the chance of order arising spontaneously from chaos is incalculably slight. So it’s not an equal bet. And what kind of philosophy says ‘well it just happened’?
it can’t be the case that everything is contingent. ‘Contingent’ has a dependency relationship on ‘necessary’.
Quoting Gregory
I would also think about the issue in terms of 'meaning' rather the 'consciousness'. The mind (or properly 'intellect') is what is able to grasp meaning and rational relations, which is the fundamental ability of the rational intellect. But it's absurd to think of 'meaning' or 'reason' as any kind of object or thing. Indeed it is the intellect which enables you to know what ‘a thing‘ is. And meaning is not inherent in things, but in the context in which a thing is interpreted - which opens out to a far more mature stance than trying to figure out what kind of ’thing’ consciousness is.
It doesn't have to be "an equal bet". No time-parameter since time constitutes (or structures) the Order at issue (i.e. the universe). Probability ("likelihood") is meaningless in this scope; thus, quantum fluctuations, like virtual particles, occur randomly. You're right though, Wayf: philosophy doesn't say "well it just happened" any more than mathematics says "well there's no pattern". :roll:
Firstly:
big bang creating/causing itself,
god creating/causing universe,
brain creating/causing consciousness,
mind creating/causing choice,
is all predicated something coming from nothing and are therefore impossible. Therefore I do not need to waste my time reading any books based on those illusions, and getting lost in details that are all based on false beginnings, like you have.
-We currently have substance therefore it must be uncreated and eternal.
-We currently have motion therefore it must be uncreated and eternal.
-We currently have order, therefore it must be uncreated and eternal.
Build your conclusions or science from and within those absolute starting points.
Secondly:
Don't assume the universe or the brain continue to exist when you're not looking at them. The only thing that's proven is this consciousness here now, as it is here now, and nothing else. Any other belief just happens in consciousness here now. A belief in the universe, the brain, matter, all happens in and of consciousness here now and therefore proves nothing except for consciousness here now.
Build your conclusions around that absolute starting point.
Consciousness is not in the body the body is in consciousness,
Consciousness is not in the universe, the universe is in consciousness,
and it must be eternal.
So you see my good sirs I AM the creator of the universe.
Not just that.
Every particular was vanishingly unlikely.
Every particular unfolding of our universe is vanishingly unlikely in the sea of possible worlds.
Focusing particularly on life or consciousness (as we know them) is perhaps a bit anthropocentric.
It’s a huge cop-out, the ultimate ad hoc argument.
[b]The superior student listens to the Way
And follows it closely.
The average student listens to the Way
And follows some and some not.
The lesser student listens to the Way
And laughs out loud.
If there were no laughter it would not be the Way.
-Lao Tzu[/b]
You make it sound like "order" is a single event, and "chaos" is a single event that happens when order doesn't. In reality, lots of stuff is self organising on the back of this chaos.
The oldest structures we know of (afaik) are primordial stars; which still took about 100 million years to form. Think of it. A whole universe's collective activity takes 100 million years for something interesting (large stable structures) to happen. That must make interesting things incredibly unlikely. But primordial stellar accretion is still a process, once underway and all else held equal it has a propensity to continue absent sufficiently strong external perturbations.
That's the dance of contingency and necessity; stuff is contingent and full of flux; the flux has propensities (contingencies) to do stuff which refine their trajectories (actualities), limiting their options (necessities) absent external factors disrupting everything (the contingency of necessity). This whole thing is as it must be ontologically (the necessity of contingency).
It is a strange universe, a strange Milky Way, perpetually fine tuned for life but still populated by world destroying comets.
These words, going into my mind, turned into illusions and misunderstanding.
I too now know nothing about everything and everything about nothing. I have climbed the ladder of nonsense and let it drop behind me so that others may use it & join me in the clouds.
The universe is an optical illusion. shift your point of view and it disappears
To where. :P
-
off your mind and onto reality
^^
...
Put the bong down.
"What changes is not real, what is real does not change." -Nisargadatta
Where?
What I take from that is that you never put the bong down.
Is not the constant Way ..."[/i][/b] ~Laozi
@Wayfarer -
Saying the universe is unlikely is not even wrong.
Compared to what is it unlikely? And in what context, other than itself, are there computable parameters?
"Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen." ~L.W.
"A finger pointing at the moon is not the moon. The finger is needed to know where to look for the moon, but if you mistake the finger for the moon itself, you will never know the real moon." -Thich Nhat Hanh
why do things change? because they are made of something else. and if they are made of something else then they are not really themselves but what they are made of. for what they are made of was merely impersonating something else and fooled you
for example: i shape some gold into a bird and give it to you. what do you have? a bird or gold?
Qualia shapes itself into a person, what do you have? a person or qualia?
Go on, Om, you just keep fingering your ... I'll brb. :yawn:
It's by no means a single event; it's an order, a pattern, that shows up in events, that in some sense 'governs' them. And 'self-organising', which is one of the questions implicit in the OP, is a vexed question in its own right. The point about the anthropic principle is that the process by which organic matter was created, required first of all that stars went through their entire life-cycle. ('We are stardust'.)
Quoting tim wood
I notice you've been endeavouring to start some threads on 'philosophy of religion' but, pardon me for saying so, you don't display much understanding of it.
Let's divide up the turf like this: young-earth creationists, who believe that the world was created a few thousand years ago, and that everything in the Bible is literally true. They're the kinds of people I think you have in mind.
Secondly, the cultural disdain of religion drives the attitude that 'well, speculative mathematical physics may be completely untestable and a total fantasy, but at least it's not religious. Therefore no matter how outlandish mathematical physics is, it's scientific - whereas, this is the very point that is being called into question about string theory, etc.
But here's a quotation - see if you can guess the provenance.
Quoting 180 Proof
This is the context. Bertrand Russell's essay, early 20th C, part of of the canon of Enlightenment rationalism, A Free Man's Worship:
[quote=Bertrand Russell]That Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man's achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins--all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul's habitation henceforth be safely built.[/quote]
This belief that the universe is a cosmic crapshoot, and that living things a kind of runaway chemical reaction (which is also the explicit philosophy of neo-darwinian materialism) is no longer credible, in light of the findings that the conditions that are required for the evolution of life, seem to have been woven into the 'fabric of the cosmos'.
This passage from a PBS essay puts the dichotomy very clearly:
My bolds. That's what I was referring to before as a 'cop-out'. Sure, DON'T believe in God - put it down to 'we don't know'. Because we don't! But this invocation of baroque mathematical extravaganzas because we don't like what the science seems to be suggesting, is completely disingenuous in my opinion.
I think the underlying dynamics is that of science colliding with 'Enlightenment rationalism': that Russell's confident declaration that we but 'the product of the accidental collocation of atoms' is undermined by what has been discovered since, and that it's an inconvenient truth, something we'd rather not admit.
Silicon lattices are made of silicon. They can still change.
Quoting OmniscientNihilist
Silicon lattices are not silicon lattices since they are made of silicon.
Quoting OmniscientNihilist
Silicon impersonating silicon.
Quoting OmniscientNihilist
Silicon lattices being anything but their constituent silicon is an illusion dependent upon a perspective.
Quoting OmniscientNihilist
A gold bird. A bird made of gold. Gold shaped into a bird.
A great sage does not stink of Zen. You stink of Zen.
Quoting Wayfarer
Zoom back in time to stellar accretion; what makes you say life must happen, rather than being very likely to? How could you possibly distinguish a universe governed by necessities from one governed by the accumulation of chances? What could happen next appears retroactively as what must have happened.
I'm just waiting for the comet (metaphorically or literally) to strike.
there is your answer
now ask yourself what is shaped into a body, a world, a universe?
"To the Self the world is but a colorful show, which he enjoys as long as it lasts and forgets when it is over." -Nisargadatta
I'd like to challenge you in a different way. Let's assume for the sake of argument that some kind of creative intelligence is responsible for big bang. What then? As long as this intelligence is something we all only vaguely assent to, how do we get more out of this than another philosopher's god? How is this better than deism? Unless we get afterlives and/or commandments that are manifest.?
As long as humans must speak and act for this God (promises and threats without miracles that leave the possibility of doubt), I don't see that much is solved. I'd expect 10,000 versions of what this God demands or promises from 10,000 self-anointed mouthpieces or bloody right hands.
Good quote! Reminds me of the roller coaster metaphor. If only the self was always the Self...
You think the ‘fine-tuning argument’ is a straight-forward question? But then, if it can’t be reduced to an acerbic aphorism then it’s probably not of interest, right?
Quoting fdrake
Because without some very specific forces, ratios - order, in short - there will be no accumulation of anything. For anything to accumulate, there has to be repetition, and there can’t be repetition without order.
Quoting jellyfish
What indeed. We live in a culture where the default position is that we’re an outcome of accident. So if that is brought into question, a lot follows from that. It changes your orientation.
What I am often drawing attention to is that because science has arrived at such a mind-boggling understanding of the cosmos (with caveats!), that we unquestioningly believe that science explains the order of the cosmos. But it doesn’t explain it - it assumes it, and rightly, because it is a given. But why this order is a question of a different nature to the questions that can be answered on the basis of empirical observation; to talk about ‘why’ is straightaway to enter the domain of metaphysics. But then, as we reject metaphysics, we don’t even understand why ‘questioning the order’ is a metaphysical question, which is analogous to being in a locked room, and throwing the key out the window, and then wondering why we can’t open the door.
Quoting jellyfish
I think the key term in both ancient philosophy and religion was that we ourselves are related to that intelligence. And again that is existentially significant, don’t you think? From the SEP entry on Schopenhauer:
I’m dubious about ‘energies’ here, but I’ll let it go. In any case, from a very high level, what theistic philosophies are seeking is congruence or relationship with the source of that order. It becomes ‘deism’ when it is reduced to an empty concept; in reality, spiritual philosophies generally are always engaged with drawing us out of that ‘verbal-conceptual’ aspect of the intelligence, except for in respect of the many subjects for which it is useful. But if that symbolic-verbal intelligence is used to delimit the bounds of understanding, then we are no longer h. Sapiens, we become h. Faber. Welcome to Planet of the Apes. ;-)
From a Feuerbach-influenced perspective, I think it's unavoidable. Even if we reject Feuerbach's notion that such intelligence is merely a projection, it's hard to fathom a God worth having shorn of the 'divine' predicates already dear to us as humans, and even to atheists.
[quote=Feuerbach]
You believe in love as a divine attribute because you yourself love, and believe that God is a wise and benevolent being because you know nothing better in yourself than wisdom and benevolence.
...
The predicates have a reality of their own, have an independent significance; the force of what they contain compels man to recognise them. They prove their truth to man directly through themselves. They are their own proof and evidence. Goodness, justice, and wisdom do not become chimeras if the existence of God is a chimera, nor do they become truths simply because the existence of God is a truth. The concept of God depends on the concept of justice, kindness, and wisdom – a God who is not kind, not just, and not wise is no God. But these concepts do not depend on the concept of God.
[/quote]
Quoting Wayfarer
I agree. To me it seems that even atheism and humanism can be interpreted as variants of theism that take the incarnation all the way, leaving nothing behind in the sky. The species becomes god and/or reason becomes god. The divine predicates never go out of fashion.
[quote=Wayf's quote]For that reason it is thought that one can come into contact with the nature of the universe if one comes into substantial contact with one’s ultimate inner being.[/quote]
[quote=Feuerbach]
From the standpoint of a later religion, the earlier religion turns out to be idolatry: Man is seen to have worshiped his own essence. Man has objectified himself, but he has not yet recognised the object as his own essential being – a step taken by later religion. Every progress in religion means therefore, a deepening of man’s knowledge of himself.
...
And our task consists precisely in showing that the antithesis of the divine and human is illusory; that is, that it is nothing other than the antithesis between the essential being of man and his individual being...
[/quote]
I lean toward interpreting theism as the projection of 'the essential being of man.' This leaves the ultimate source 'inhuman' and mysterious. I don't know why we're here. Even calling it a crapshoot doesn't satisfy me. We can postulate this or that probabilistic law, but I currently can't see how we don't finally discover a radical contingency --that the law is X and not Y. Nevermind the problem of induction.
Perhaps that's the issue. In my view the 'human form divine' (which is not the human body but more like language and feeling which Hollywood can install in squids who see that time is flat circle) is itself just something that happens to be here.
Appeals to the nature of the divine that attempt to escape this contingency are betrayed by that word 'nature.' If the divine has a nature, it is subject to some law or order which is itself unexplained. This doesn't close the possibility of feeling some kind of logic and necessity at the heart of things.
Maybe the problem is thinking consciousness comes from a brain rather than the other way around? Brains are found in consciousness, but how do we really know that is what exists out there - material brains? What does it even mean to say it's "material" and to imply that consciousness is something different than material? Implying that consciousness and brains are somehow different substances creates more problems, like how do they interact?
Quoting OmniscientNihilist
No, I am God, and you are merely scribbles on a computer screen that I am the actual author of. It seems that you just explained yourself out of existence - or at least the existence of a human being that can type posts on a forum and submit them. From my perspective you only exist as scribbles on a screen with no cause. If I am the primary cause, then "your" posts are actually my posts - it's just that I don't remember typing them.
Also true If you get into a car accident and loose your memory and login under a different account and reply to your old posts, haha.
If a rock spoke back to me when spoken to, and i could have long and interesting conversations with it, i would. Not because it is sentient but simply because it is interesting.
Same reason we respond to these scribbles on a screen. Same reason we will spend hours talking to A.I. machines in the future. Same reason the mind can and will even talk to itself sometimes.
Same reason the hand closes slightly as if grasping an object when there is none. Because hands are meant to grasp and minds are meant to talk. Grasping just happens and talking just happens. It's unstoppable.
Futile to ask, I know, but WTF are you talking about? :meh:
Quoting 180 Proof
To read "fine-tuning argument" in what I actually wrote you have to be either woefully ill-informed or utterly disingenuous - the jury's still out! Like my question of your claim that "philosophical/scientific materialism is fallacious", you refuse to answer here, from which it's reasonable to assume you cannot without exposing your ... :shade:
What is "substance"?
What is in motion?
It doesn't seem that order is eternal or uncreated at all. Chaos is uncreated and order comes about only by finding, or creating, patterns in the chaos. That is how it seems to me. It seems that what is the Self is orderly and what is not (the universe) is chaos, and that I try to project my created order onto that uncreated chaos.
Why would I have this experience this moment in typing my post and then later, after submitting and re-reading it have the experience of remembering typing it and only any others that are preceded with the scribbles, "Harry Hindu"? It seems a strange coincidence of experiences to have if I can claim authorship of all posts, and not just the "Harry Hindu" ones.
What does that say about the meaning of the word, "authorship", or "plagiarism"? "Words" and "language" become meaningless as language is meant for social environments - one in which many minds exist and exchange information through the shared medium of a shared world. How could such a thing as "social" or "language" come to exist in a reality where there is only one mind? What does that say about the words, "consciousness", "mind" and "reality"?
Quoting OmniscientNihilist
And you created the universe just so you could argue with yourself? Great show!
chaos is a relative and pragmatic term only. it doesnt exist on an absolute level.
"randomness is just a pattern to big to see" -unknown
there is no choas, only order, and it must necessarily be eternal. because something cannot come from nothing. sure we see entropy but we also see emergence, so its just an eternal ying yang going around in circles. perfection.
an eternally looping pandeism of sorts
I see the point of this. But that doesn't simply make it fallacious. Indian philosophy is often sceptical or dismissive of conventional religion - maybe that is what Feuerbach meant by 'later religion'. Schopenhauer himself was scathingly dismissive of Biblical religion. And yet, you find in Schopenhauer a defense of asceticism:
[quote=SEP]Schopenhauer believes that a person who experiences the truth of human nature from a moral perspective — who appreciates how spatial and temporal forms of knowledge generate a constant passing away, continual suffering, vain striving and inner tension — will be so repulsed by the human condition, and by the pointlessly striving Will of which it is a manifestation, that he or she will lose the desire to affirm the objectified human situation in any of its manifestations. [This corresponds with the Buddhist 'nirodha' meaning 'turning away' or 'revulsion'.] The result is an attitude of denial towards our will-to-live ['egocentricity'], that Schopenhauer identifies with an ascetic attitude of renunciation, resignation, and willessness, but also with composure and tranquillity. In a manner reminiscent of traditional Buddhism, he recognizes that life is filled with unavoidable frustration [the 'first noble truth'], and acknowledges that the suffering caused by this frustration can itself be reduced by minimizing one’s desires. Moral consciousness and virtue thus give way to the voluntary poverty and chastity of the ascetic. St. Francis of Assisi (WWR, Section 68) and Jesus (WWR, Section 70) subsequently emerge as Schopenhauer’s prototypes for the most enlightened lifestyle, in conjunction with the ascetics from every religious tradition.[/quote]
So despite his vociferous criticism of religion, was Schopenhauer in fact religious? Well, it depends on what you mean. It has to be remembered that religions have to address a wide audience, they adopt to the myths and tropes of the times and cultures in which they're taught. But transcending religious dogma is different to simply abandoning it.
Quoting jellyfish
That's the 'who made God?' objection. But the answer to that from the perspective of theistic philosophy, is that 'necessary being' is the terminus of the enquiry 'why does anything exist?' in the same way that '4' is the terminus of the enquiry 'what does 2 + 2 equal?
Quoting tim wood
Whether it is science is in fact highly contested. There is a debate raging about whether string theory and the multiverse conjecture in indeed a scientific theory at all, on account of it not being a testable hypothesis. There are those who argue that the requirement for falsification has been superseded by such developments, and others saying that because it can never be tested it's 'fairytale physics'.
Quoting tim wood
No, I'm not considering 'creation science'. What I'm saying is that you automatically equate any kind of religious philosophy with 'creation science'. (That quote I gave above, which could be interpreted as a rejection of anything like 'biblical creationism', was from St Augustine.)
Quoting tim wood
Pardon me, but I'm not pushing or shoving, I'm debating.
Religious philosophies have been firewalled off behind the boundary of 'personal belief', and we object strenuously to the suggestion that they might be anything other than that. We have a map in which science and religion are essentially incompatible, but in a liberal fashion, recognising the importance of personal choice and conscience, so will tolerate religion on those grounds. But I'm questioning that, and I think it's a perfectly legitimate question.
For me it's not the the 'who made God?' objection. Let's grant that there is a God. If 'He' is intelligible at all, he has a structure or nature. Why does he have that nature and not some other? If we try to answer this question in terms of the nature of this God, that seems circular.
Quoting Wayfarer
Personally I still love the good book.
[quote= Romans 7:14]
For we know that the law is spiritual, but I am carnal, sold under sin.
[/quote]
Or:
[quote = Matthew 27:46]
And about the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, saying, Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani? that is to say, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?
[/quote]
Feuerbach the 'atheist' still has this to say:
[quote=F]
Every limitation of reason, or of human nature in general, rests on a delusion, an error. To be sure, the human individual can, even must, feel and know himself to be limited – and this is what distinguishes him from the animal – but he can become conscious of his limits, his finiteness, only because he can make the perfection and infinity of his species the object either of his feeling, conscience, or thought But if his limitations appear to him as emanating from the species, this can only be due to his delusion that he is identical with the species, a delusion intimately linked with the individual’s love of case, lethargy, vanity, and selfishness; for a limit which I know to be mine alone, humiliates, shames, and disquiets me. Hence, in order to free myself of this feeling of shame, this uneasiness, I make the limits of my individuality the limits of man’s being itself. What is incomprehensible to me is incomprehensible to others; why should this worry me at all? It is not due to any fault of mine or of my understanding; the cause lies in the understanding of the species itself. But it is a folly, a ludicrous and frivolous folly to designate that which constitutes the nature of man and the absolute nature of the individual, the essence of the species, as finite and limited.
[/quote]
Humanism declares more or less explicitly that humanity is divine.
[quote=Kant]
Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-imposed nonage. Nonage is the inability to use one's own understanding without another's guidance. This nonage is self-imposed if its cause lies not in lack of understanding but in indecision and lack of courage to use one's own mind without another's guidance. Dare to know! (Sapere aude.) "Have the courage to use your own understanding," is therefore the motto of the enlightenment.
Laziness and cowardice are the reasons why such a large part of mankind gladly remain minors all their lives, long after nature has freed them from external guidance. They are the reasons why it is so easy for others to set themselves up as guardians. It is so comfortable to be a minor. If I have a book that thinks for me, a pastor who acts as my conscience, a physician who prescribes my diet, and so on--then I have no need to exert myself. I have no need to think, if only I can pay; others will take care of that disagreeable business for me. Those guardians who have kindly taken supervision upon themselves see to it that the overwhelming majority of mankind--among them the entire fair sex--should consider the step to maturity, not only as hard, but as extremely dangerous. First, these guardians make their domestic cattle stupid and carefully prevent the docile creatures from taking a single step without the leading-strings to which they have fastened them. Then they show them the danger that would threaten them if they should try to walk by themselves. Now this danger is really not very great; after stumbling a few times they would, at last, learn to walk. However, examples of such failures intimidate and generally discourage all further attempts.
Thus it is very difficult for the individual to work himself out of the nonage which has become almost second nature to him. He has even grown to like it, and is at first really incapable of using his own understanding because he has never been permitted to try it. Dogmas and formulas, these mechanical tools designed for reasonable use--or rather abuse--of his natural gifts, are the fetters of an everlasting nonage. The man who casts them off would make an uncertain leap over the narrowest ditch, because he is not used to such free movement. That is why there are only a few men who walk firmly, and who have emerged from nonage by cultivating their own minds.
[/quote]
Note that we are all here appealing to reason, our own human reason, in order to determine the divine more exactly. What isn't rational we as philosophers refuse to regard as real. And discourse that ignores or denies some aspect of the real we refuse to regard as complete. Hence philosophy is implicitly a humanism, though of course we can consider a continuum that runs between myth-metaphor-mysticism and careful arguments.
Quoting tim wood
Well, there was:
Quoting tim wood
Which sounds very much like you frame the alternatives as (rational) science vs (irrational) religion.
Whereas, I am appealing to the 'fine-tuning argument', which has precedents in philosophical theology. You don't have to accept them, they are certainly not universally accepted, nor should they be in my view. But those kinds of arguments are not creationism, nor 'vicious fraud'. And I will say that I find the argument of natural theology on the basis of there being a pre-ordained order in the Universe, more persuasive than the attempt to defray it on the supposition of there being infinitely many universes - even if the latter is more scientifically fashionable.
Quoting tim wood
I took that to be the meaning of this:
Quoting tim wood
Was I mistaken?
Quoting tim wood
I think the fine-tuning argument is a sound philosophical argument. It's concerning a matter of fact, not a matter of belief, but is also one that is beyond the horizon of empirical discovery, for obvious reasons.
Time to move on.
Quoting jellyfish
Well, as I've remarked previously, I think the question has to arise from a sense of necessity, not as conjecture. I mean, internet discussions of deity are full of allusions to Russell's teapot, the Flying Spaghetti Monster, and so on, most of them idle conjecture. There are clues - evidence, if you like - to the 'divine nature' in many different cultures.
Quoting jellyfish
I've mulled over that passage from Kant many times, it's one of the foundational texts of the Enlightenment. I can't disagree with it - but the question is one of philosophical anthropology. What is man, in the end? A creature, a phenomenon, a 'moist robot', a gene-carrier? What end are we trying to achieve? Interplanetary conquest? Fame and riches? Master of arts and sciences? I think Kant was diffident, for his own reasons, about the 'question of ultimate concern'.
Consider Renaissance Humanism. It was generally condemned by the Church, but it still retained much of the spirituality of the Western classical tradition, from Platonism, Hermeticism and related traditions. Whereas, Darwinism as a philosophical stance tends to undercut all of that as well. So the secular~scientific attitude of mainstream culture does not preserve those ancient insights which are still even preserved in the German idealists - Fichte, Schelling, et al (as you know).
The asker of precisely that question?
Quoting Wayfarer
At the very least, man is the creature who can dream that he is any or all of these things.
The human is (one might say) the question incarnate, a permanent identity crisis. This would be the gloomy/ecstatic existentialist answer, which virtuously (for it) faces our facelessness. Another answer is some kind of ideal society that justifies all the suffering it took to get there, towards which the world sneaks as it merely seems to be on fire and out of control.
Quoting Wayfarer
IMV the living 'religion' of a culture is manifest in what high-status people like to be seen doing. In this we see a collision of answers to the question: 'what is the human?' Philosopically our age seems 'late' and hyper-self-conscious.
[quote=SEP]
The history of Being is now conceived as a series of appropriating events in which the different dimensions of human sense-making—the religious, political, philosophical (and so on) dimensions that define the culturally conditioned epochs of human history—are transformed. Each such transformation is a revolution in human patterns of intelligibility, so what is appropriated in the event is Dasein and thus the human capacity for taking-as (see e.g., Contributions 271: 343). Once appropriated in this way, Dasein operates according to a specific set of established sense-making practices and structures. In a Kuhnian register, one might think of this as the normal sense-making that follows a paradigm-shift.
[/quote]
This next one reminds me of the word made flesh.
[quote=Zizek]
The Medium here is not the message, quite the opposite: the very medium that we use -- the universal intersubjectivity of language -- undermines the message.
[/quote]
We the people of reason must also be the people of rhetoric, since reason is a kind of ideal or point at infinity, a lusted-after purified rhetoric --cleansed of bias and small self and the stink of time. No wonder then that philosophers have ached to be mathematicians of the spirit and railed against 'systemless bullshit' that can't be verified by a dead machine. I think one can even read the opposition to later philosophers as a denial of the incarnation. Derrida is a good up-to-date Christian (?).
This fascinating quote sheds light on that one, and touches on the OP:
[quote=Zizek (emph. added)]
The implicit lesson of Plato is not that everything is appearance, that it is not possible to draw a clear line of separation between appearance and reality (that would have meant the victory of Sophism), but that essence is "appearance as appearance," that essence appears in contrast to appearance within appearance; that the distinction between appearance and essence has to be inscribed into appearance itself. Insofar as the gap between essence and appearance is inherent to appearance, in other words, insofar as essence is nothing but appearance reflected into itself, appearance is appearance against the background of nothing - everything appears ultimately out of nothing.
[/quote]
I'm not picking any new nits which generations of scientists and other defeasible thinkers haven't already thoroughly picked when I point out that given the volume of this planet almost entirely consists of conditions inimicable to life and, likewise, the volume of the observable universe is exponentially even more lifeless, it's patently unsound to conclude anything other than that the cosmos either is (A) "fine-tuned" for lifelessness or (B) not "fine-tuned" at all, but only appears "fine-tuned" due to our self-serving/flattering cognitive biases (such as how we misrecognize that our scientific models & philosophical concepts work because we "fine-tune" them in order to anthropocentricize life, earth & the universe (i.e. mistaking our maps for territory à la reification fallacy)). If the MWI is a "cop-out", as you(?) say, Wayf, then by comparison "fine-tuning" is a fact-free, just-so story so ad hoc and incoherent it's not even wrong. :roll:
Quoting 180 Proof
'A physicist', said Neils Bohr, 'is just an atom's way of looking at itself'.
The mind is inextricably an aspect of the universe, or, put another way, we don't know anything about the universe other than how it appears to the human being (pace Kant). So the idea that science 'reveals' a universe that exists or would exist just as if there was nobody observing it, is a falsehood in its own right.
This is doubtful, and that's what multiverse speculation makes evident. "Universe" is to say all is one. "Multiverse" is to say all is a multiplicity. The two are incompatible. That's why there's a gap between quantum principles and general relativity, and the theory of everything is nowhere to be found.
It seems to me that order would just be the opposite side of the coin of chaos and doesn't exist on an absolute level. Order and chaos would be mental categories dependent upon the existence of the other, like hot and cold, small and big, etc.. It seems that the universe is simply eternal, not chaotic or orderly as those would be anthropomorphic projections based on our current view or understanding of the eternal.
[quote=Metaphysician Undercover]"Universe" is to say all is one. "Multiverse" is to say all is a multiplicity. The two are incompatible.[/quote]
Since there is no "all" (i.e. its as incoherent a concept as e.g. "the largest number"), these conceptions are indistinguishable on this basis (e.g. continuum 0-1 = continuum 0-infinity). Universe is more analogous, I think, to an unbounded sheet of paper (N-d) and multiverse to that same unbounded sheet folded into an origami (+N-d) - of course, viewed only from within its manifold structure. (Extending the analogy a step further, "the big bang" inflation era marks the earliest and most prolific process(es) of 'foldings', etc ...)
[quote=Metaphysician Undercover]That's why there's a gap between quantum principles and general relativity ...[/quote]
Maybe the "gap" is what binds them ... like a parallax of complementary models constructed with incommensurate metrics. The jury's still out, MU, on whether or not they can be reconciled by reducing them to, or deriving both models from, an even more fundamental model.
:wink:
[b][i]"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy."[/i][/b]
~Hamlet (1.5.167-8)
[quote=Metaphysician Undercover]"But here's what we know: there is a universe."
— tim wood
This is doubtful, and that's what multiverse speculation makes evident.[/quote]
:roll:
Science is model ? evidence convergence; evidence, observation, experimental results accumulate, and models converge thereupon. The models incorporate constants, e.g. lightspeed, elementary charge, the molar Planck constant, 3+1 dimensional spacetime.
So, in analogy, we build a reasonably working machine (model), then wonder why changing that wee cog (constant) over there breaks the machine (model). Not just that; while attempting to generalize our assessment wholesale, we overlook what kinds of dull and wondrous machines might be built in other universes. Because we still only have a sample size of one; but that's how the fine-tuning argument proceeds nonetheless. For that matter, some religious people still claim the likes of heaven and hell, which presumably then are supposed to be other possible worlds (however anthropocentric).
Fine-tuning comes through as a pseudo-argument, at least when based on how "fine-tuned" is sometimes used in science. Something similar holds for intelligent design arguments.
Besides ...
This is just the human ego (separate self with free-will) illusion projecting itself onto existence. Destroy your own ego illusion and the god illusion will disappear along with it.
Intelligence does not exist. Can not exist. What we think of intelligence is actually just another pattern, which is one with all the other patterns in and of the ultimate pattern. All necessarily: eternally one, eternally ordered, eternally causal, and eternally omnipresent.
Free-will begets something coming from nothing and therefore a god cannot have it anymore then a human can. Starting points are illusions of ignorance of previous causality within the eternal chain. Whether that starting point is the big bang OR a choice in the mind of god.
The god idea does not solve the 'starting point' problem. It simply pushes it back one step and hides it behind a deeply rooted illusion.
Then it causes religion to form. Little ego's (humans) that want the big ego (god) to save it. The little ego can never be saved, only destroyed. Eternal bliss is on the other side.
Stars do not create matter, they simply create higher elements from lower elements through fusion caused by lots of gravity. Lower elements like hydrogen atoms get "crushed" together creating more complex atoms like carbon needed for human life.
Even atoms were formed from something deeper, and so on, but eventually you must necessarily hit something eternal and omnipresent, which is here now, that I AM.
The timeless 'is' is necessarily all possible events in all possible universes because there cannot be any direction imparted to what has no start. So, it is at least an 'it', but not necessarily an 'I' of mind.
'It' is not optional, but mandatory, of necessity, for the non-alternative of it, as 'Nothing', cannot have beingness, so that takes care of why it has to be.
It's self refuting to claim "I dont exist". Therefore you must claim "I exist". And anything that currently actually exists must necessarily be eternal, and omnipresent. I AM GOD.
But reasoning to this conclusion is not required. It can simply be known immediately and directly omnisciently. I AM THAT I AM.
As for me, as 'I', I am necessarily an expression of the overall 'it' and, as such, have what 'it' has.
I am more interested herein in explaining the one and only 'it' as All there is and have supplied the philosophical reasons for the how and the why of it, we then hardly needing to worry about the what of what has to be.
explaining the 'it' is mental masturbation. you are not separate from it, there is no need to look outward and do science to know "it". look within and there it is. here it is. it is you. i am it.
It's merely the outline of the TOE, if anyone is interested in that. Ah, what an orgasm!
Quoting OmniscientNihilist
Yes, indeed.
TOE is the mind trying to play god. Trying to gain false omniscience. The mind can never have omniscience, it comes from directly from consciousness to consciousness.
We are that which is All, as you said.
The mind looking with the eyes sees only the universe.
Bypass both and look directly with consciousness. and know yourself omnisciently.
In conscious life all is known: I am the holistic unity of the One as well as the linear multiplicity of the details.
consciousenss cannot come from brain because something cannot come from nothing. so either consciousness is eternal or it doesnt exist. to say it doesnt exist is self refuting, your using it to say it. therefore it must be eternal. so birth and death are illusions and only apply to the body.
and lack of memory of the past does not prove non existence of self but only non existence of memory now. therefore i have no proof i did not exist 1000000 years ago
Stop telling on yourself already. :eyes:
intelligence and knowledge, neither are real.
taking two unknown things and comparing them is not real knowledge. but that is the only knowledge the mind has.
the mind is nothing but a reflection of the unknown.
reflecting and comparing the unknown will never make it known
watch "intelligence" and you will see its nothing but a recording then used as a map to avoid pain and attain pleasure
I missed the part where brains were nothing.
Perhaps we should all put a little hatch in our skull, to use the empty space for a handy storage compartment.
...
To say concousness cannot be caused by brains because it cannot come from nothing is incoherent. Brains aren't nothing. There is no cause which is nothing. The entire point of giving any causal account is that something is involved in producing something else--i.e. to claim a causality is to assert something came for something else.
the brain producing consciousness is like a hat producing a rabbit. where is the magic wand?
matter cannot produce spirit and spirit cannot produce matter
the brain cannot create consciousness and god cannot create a universe
two totally different fundamental substances
and even if they werent what would the brain make consciousness from? what did god make the universe from? spare parts they had lying around? haha
whatever substance exists must exist eternally
causality (motion) must also be eternal
:up:
Quoting OmniscientNihilist
Using his "nonexistent intelligence", Spinoza demonstrates that your statement is wholly incoherent. (vide Ethics Ip13-14) :victory:
causality only moves things that already exist, it cannot produce something new
its related to motion not substance
and since motion cannot come from stillness and we currently have motion then it must be eternal
Not a worry here, since conscious instances are just another state of matter.
There are states of the brain interact with other states (bodies, the environment, etc.) to produce states of consciousness. Causality is functioning like anything else where interacting states produce a new state.
The states in question are just brains and instances of conscious experience, rather than say a germ and an illness or carbon under heat and pressure forming diamond.
Causality is not any sort of acting entity. It's a reference to what various states are doing and what results from their interaction.
abracadabra poof the rabbit comes from the hat
you just need the right incantation or magic wand and the rabbit can come from the hat
not to worry
if we just arrange the hats in the right order the rabbits will come! haha
either your using magical thinking or your doing something else and claiming all matter is conscious. either way is flawed.
mental gymnastics to avoid the paradigm shift. just like they did with the geocentric solar system
if one atom is not conscious then no arrangement of them will ever produce it
and if one atom is conscious then they all are
and we havent even got into the fact that there is no direct evidence for matter in the first place, only qualia. haha
Neither, I'm saying there specific states of matter which are conscious experiences. There's no need for all states of matter to be conscious.
All that's required is some states of matter (conscious experiences) be caused. No magic wand or hat. Just states of matter producing different outcomes. Sometimes we get diamonds, other times we get states of conscious experience.
There is no "evidence" for matter for a very good reason: it's not an emprical state we might observe. It's a logical/metaphysical category.
false analogy.
what is a diamond, is it atoms? then its nothing but cold dead dark matter. is it a bright and shiny thing? then its consciousness. decide which. and pick one. both are fundamentally different and neither are remotely compatible with each other.
you try and blur the subject by analogizing to another thing you have blurred. but i see through your tricks. your spinning around in circles of illusion and im standing outside the illusion looking at it and laughing.
Nope.
A diamond is a diamond. Atoms are just some material states. They are not them all. And although a diamond may involve atoms, it is not just atoms. It has its own particular existence beyond just any of its atoms.
We need to clarify some matters here, especially what a thing is and how we might best think about what nothing is.
A thing, or something, is, strictly speaking, some thing in the world. If we are to speak carefully, we should avoid ever calling fundamental reality--what some call the world--a thing. It isn't a thing-in-the-world among other things. Basketballs and rivers are things. The whole of everything taken altogether at once cannot be pointed to like things can.
What we normally call a thing is nothing more than a state of affairs in the world that our minds draw a line around and consider as one unified object separate from other objects. It has nothing to do with how reality is in itself, but rather is an artifact of the way our brains organize perception with a high-level description that makes navigating the world and communicating more manageable. A tiger is not really separate from its environment and no two tigers are exactly alike, but to have to specify the entire state of the universe at a subatomic level every time we want to scream "TIGER!" would be terribly impractical. So we classify, we group, we carve up, and so on. But all of this is merely a convenience. Such objects are not real. These lines we draw in the world and the labels we assign to them are not in the world itself. There are an infinite number of arbitrary ways we could conceivably carve up the world, with many intersecting boundaries, at least one such "object" for every possible combination of one or more particles.
Things, understood in this way, being just states of affairs in the world, just temporary and contingent arrangements, might be said to be created and destroyed. Let's use wax as a metaphor for a fundamental, irreducible substance. I know it is, in fact, reducible. But let's pretend it isn't. For our purposes, it is bedrock ontological bottom. We can take this wax and shape it in many different ways. We can make it into a bunch of cubes. We can smoosh the cubes together and make a dinosaur sculpture. In this way, we might say that we have "created" a dinosaur. But this is all something happening in the way we think about the world. What is new is the activation of an object recognition circuit in our brains that at some point suddenly recognizes the shape of a dinosaur and says, "There's a dinosaur!" But has any fundamentally, rock-bottom-reality been created? No. No matter what you do with the wax, which is what is really real here, the wax is conserved. And the wax is what "occupies" that form, what gives it being. It is that which finds itself in the form of a dinosaur. The dinosaur doesn't find itself as anything. It isn't real in-itself, apart from our seeing at such. This is not to say that the wax understands itself to be a dinosaur either, only that it is that which is "there" in the dinosaur, holding that form.
But now let's expose a problem with wax as a way of thinking about the fundamental substance. Obviously, wax is actually a form of something more fundamental, just a way of arranging particles. Not only that, but when we think of wax, when we think of forming it, there is always something that is not wax, namely the space around it. The wax is differentiated from something. Only in this way is it possible for it to have any form at all. In order for something to have form, there must be something to which it can be compared, something to which it is related.
Ultimately, everything is one. This is the guiding principle of advances in physical theory, which proceeds unification by unification. The closer you get to rock-bottom fundamentals, the fewer different kinds of things there are. Seemingly different things are reduced to something common. Also, great philosophers like Spinoza persuasively argued this point. Unlike things cannot interact. In order for things to interact, they must ultimately be made of the same stuff, or be part of the same reality.
Any time you see distinctions at all, it means you are not yet at rock bottom. The things distinguished must be different forms of a deeper reality. Empty space, what we normally think of as nothing, is actually something. And the "empty" space of modern physical theory is anything but empty. In Einstein's theory, it bends. It has its own degrees of freedom. In quantum field theory, "empty" space is full of "vacuum fluctuations", of virtual particles and the like. And so-called "empty" space is what we distinguish matter from. It is the background against which we see the figure. Also, consider that even classical space has such features as dimensions and differentiable points. Spatiality is a kind of differentiation. We are talking about structure and order here. Can true nothingness have any structure? Can anything be said about its features? Physical space can have all sorts of different structures, including different topologies.
It is hard to think of empty space as "something" partly because of how we think of what it means for something to exist. The word exist means to stand forth. Material things stand forth, or protrude, in the world. Space doesn't.
Think of this another way. Imagine a blank computer screen, all black pixels. Now lets draw a white figure on it with white pixels. The black pixels, in fact, are something, are a state of affairs. And there is something which is non-black.
Imagine Conway's game of life with white pixels being "on" or "alive" and black pixels being "off" or "dead". You could invert the world and it would be functionally indistinguishable.
Let's get to the ultimate point of all this. When you are at true rock-bottom, nothing can be said. There is nothing to compare ultimate reality with. It isn't related to anything else. There is nothing outside it. It doesn't have form. It isn't a state of affairs in the world. There is no background against which to see it. It isn't a something in relation to a nothing, nor is it a nothing in relation to a something from which it is distinct.
Whatever is ultimately real is eternal, is permanent, always-already-the-case. It cannot be created or destroyed. It isn't self-caused. Such would be absurd. Such would be like saying it is reducible to itself or that it stands under itself or prior to itself. Reality-in-itself is necessarily beyond time and space, these being modes of differentiation that apply only to what is differentiable, which is never rock-bottom.
Fundamental reality, regardless of its nature, whether it really is true nothingness, will always look like nothing, as nothing can be said of it. It is impossible to notice. This is taking the idea of a fish not noticing the water all the way. Even water for a fish is different from something, the fish being one such thing from it can be distinguished. And fish can discover the water-air boundary. But reality isn't different from anything. No such comparisons can be made. There is something outside the water, namely air, rocks, et cetera. But there is nothing outside reality.
Reality is omnisymmetric. What do I mean by that? Symmetry is present anywhere something can be transformed in a way that doesn't change it. For example, a perfect circle, when rotated in two dimensions around its center, is exactly the same after the rotation. No difference. A truly bilaterally symmetrical shape can be flipped left to right without changing it. In such cases, there is no sense in saying that it even has an orientation where it is symmetric. It is pointless to specify the rotational angle of a perfect circle, or the left-right orientation of an upright isosceles triangle.
All form is asymmetry. All form is information. All information is difference. Everything that is noticeable, everything measurable, is difference, is variance, is information. But that which is always conserved is invariant, is symmetric. What is most fundamentally real must be in all ways invariant, indifferentiable, beyond all informational distinction.
This looks an awful lot like nothing. But consider that even if it has some inner nature, we could never point to that. We couldn't put language to it. We couldn't measure it.
If everything were truly made of wax, there would be nothing that is non-wax. All we could detect would be variations within the wax, but never the wax. The wax would have no boundaries. Nothing would be non-wax. Obviously, wax here is a poor analogy, as everything we imagine when thinking of it involves ways in which we differentiate it from other things in our experience.
Here is the essential thing to understand:
0 = -1 + 1
This is all conservation laws in a nutshell. And is tautologous. It is pointless to say that -1 + 1 came from zero or that zero caused it. There is no arrow here. There is only equivalency, or really, identity. It is just another way of saying "0 = 0" or "1-1 = 1-1".
When you understand all this, it is not suprising that in physics we have all these symmetries, all these invariances, all these conservation laws, and such things as Noether's Theorem. And what do they tell us? It is not said or understood enough, but the quantity conserved is zero.
Consider conservation of momentum. No matter what happens in a system, the total momentum of all the objects in it stays the same. Momentum can be transferred from one billiard ball to another, but total momentum in any given direction remains always the same. But can't we say that the whole system has a nonzero momentum? We can, but only if we compare it to things outside that system, in which case we are now considering a larger whole system, which itself has no changing momentum unless we compare to a further "outside", in which case we are then once again considering a larger system, ad infinitum. And when we talk about everything, or ultimate reality, well, there is clearly nothing else to compare it to. It can't be moving relative to anything. It is meaningless to talk about it as having momentum. So what's the total momentum? Necessarily, it is either zero or undefined, however you like to think about it.
Total energy bound up in matter as mass is exactly canceled by its negative gravitational potential energy. Total energy is zero. What is conserved always is zero.
Fundamental reality is conserved. All "thingness" belongs to things-in-the-world, not the world itself (conceived as ultimate reality). The world cannot be created either by anything else (there is nothing else) or by itself, as it can't stand prior to itself to create itself. It just is. But it also seems exactly to be what is probably best thought of as nothing, which is the most natural and expected situation of all, one that calls for no explanation. Only differences from nothingness call out for explanation, making us ask why there is something rather than nothing.
The world, or reality, ultimately, is not different from the indifferentiable. When we say something is created from nothing, that something is differentiable from that state of affairs that we wrongly call nothing, that blackness we imagine prior to the spark or whatever that is thought to have arisen. The two, what we think of as nothing and what we think of as something, are able to be found to be different. So neither of them can be rock-bottom.
People often ask why there is something rather than nothing. I say that the solution to this mystery is to grasp that there in fact isn't something rather than nothing (the true nothing). No true, irreducible asymmetries have emerged. Whatever it is that we are experiencing, the null ultimate reality is conserved. The puzzle then is to grapple with how then we come to experience difference. I suspect that it is a kind of illusion that has to do with perspective and partial apprehension of reality. Reality-in-itself, in toto, involves complete cancellation of all differences. It is omnisymmetric perfection. And it is our own true nature and ground. We are reality experiencing itself as us. When we ask what we are, and we really point that question all the way to its ultimate destination, that destination must be the ultimate ground of being, ultimate reality.
There is only substance (in Spinoza's sense) and its modifications. That which goes through the changes, or in other words, that which remains the same throughout the modifications, or that which is really real, or that to which all is reducible, is that which experiences being all things. And there is only one such fundamental ground, one experiencer, one ultimate destination of all self-referential pointings or askings. States of affairs don't experience themselves. That which has states of affairs is what experiences them.
That to which the "I" thought, for all, ultimately refers, is the one fundamental reality, the one substance, the one experiencer, the one true identity, that which remains the same through all changes, and which ultimately, is beyond all change. Call it nothingness. Call it God. Call it Self. Call it No-Self. Call it I am. Call it Apeiron. Call it whatever you want. It is not created. And there is nothing apart from it that can be regarded as its creation. It is neither effect nor cause. There is no before or after it. There is no above or below it. It is neither subject nor object. It is neither here nor there, though it is everywhere present to itself.
I don't think this is what most people imagine when they think of God, nor is it what people imagine when they think of nothingness or of self or as that which preceded the Big Bang or stands under things now. And realizing that you, yes you, are identical with this, is no haven for you as a person. It isn't a soul. What is conserved is not your identity as a person, not this finite, temporary, relative state of affairs, this thing you normally think of as yourself and the memories that are part of it. So there is nothing like a traditional religious comfort to be found in this idea. But you are secure in a sense. That which you really are, that which is prior to all modification, is indeed permanent. You, the true you, can't be separated from reality. You are reality. You are all of it. You are everyone. You cannot die. What you normally mistakenly take yourself to be, however, is bounded in time and space, and it is a mistake to take it as yourself. But that ultimate reality which you are, when taken in-itself, in toto, is also that which we find to be indistinguishable from nothing. So "all is one Self" and "all is no-self" are really not different. What you really are is what we can't avoid equating with nothingness. Atman is Brahman. And Brahman is no-self. The Ultimate is beyond subject and object, here and there, something and nothing (taken conventionally).
So, with lots of qualifications, yes, you are immortal, you are God, you are all that is, you are free (not constrained by anything outside, there being no outside), and so on. But all of this is transcendent in the Kantian sense. All that you see out in the world, secondary to the principle of individuation, including your thoughts, body, sensorium, memories, and so on, is doomed to die (in the sense of being time-limited). It is a world of woe as long as you identify with the things in it. You would be wise to cease to exclusively identify yourself with any of it, with anything that has a beginning and an end in time. Realize that you transcend all of it and you shall know eternal life, not as a human, but as that which has mistaken itself for one of its many forms. To know the truth, go inward, toward that which is behind perception, to the noumenal ground, not toward the outer phenomena, or the wall of the cave. Withdraw your identification from this form. As a wise man once said:
if you examine every single property you use to define an atom or diamond you will see every single one of them is either imaginary or an aspect of qualia. and both are aspects of consciousness itself.
think about an atom or diamond and its an object in your mind which is consciousness. look at an atom or a diamond and you will be seeing qualia, which is consciousness
looks like you did some real fancy mental gymnastics there to try and prove something that i already know is absolutely impossible.
knowledge cannot refute absolute truth. something cannot come from nothing. end of story.
instead of building knoweldge from assumptions build it instead from absolute truth. and then you will really get somewhere
That's why you realise no state is given by the definition of a form. Definitions of properties are indeed imaginary.
They are also necessary, since definitions don't change.
All together incapable of giving existence, since that depends upon whether or not a being exists (states of consciousness included).
i have direct evidence right here now of 'state of consciousness' and therefore i need no argument to show their existence as merely probable. which is all the mind can do.
i have no, and never had any, evidence of matter, world, or universe
look up the word qualia and you will see its a more accurate definition of reality
there is also no objective evidence of consciousness in the brain. look in there and see there is nothing in there but more brain. so science has no right to claim anything without any evidence, otherwise its doing philosophy and peddling it as science.
You clearly didn't read my post. You didn't even have time to do so. If you read it, you might find that I agree with you. But I won't blame you if you don't. It is long and attention spans are small. I was just articulating my own thoughts, not really expecting an audience. But you might like what I have to say. It fits your handle.
if so then your preaching to the choir
its often not helpful to delve into big mental constructions to try and asist the proof of an absolute truth. because the confused will often becomes even more lost, or find little things within your constuctions to pick at and side track from the point
i am too busy atm, perhaps i will skim through it after dinner if im listening to music
or i will reference it if someone really presses me for some mental constructions backing that absolute truth
I agree you have understand states of consciousness are present. My point wasn't to suggest we didn't know they existed.
Rather, it was about what their existence entailed. If I am speaking existing experinces, I am no longer in the space of imagined definitions.
Yes, I might imagine a definition of consciousness and who has it, but this is not how any state of conciousness
exists.
If we are dealing with existence, something more than our imagination is involved. We are speaking about a supposed presence in existence. A truth determined not by our imagination, but by existence of one state or another.
Let me show you are example. I can imagine definitions where you think the world is without consciousness. Does the fact I've imagined thus make it true?
No, it does not. Since your understanding of consciousness is an existing state, that I've imagined it doesn't make it true.
You exist with states of consciousness that hold the world has consciousness. What I imagined is false by what exists.
the only thing the brain orders is electrical impulses, not perception. the mind organizes that.
its impossible to experience anything other then consciousness. and you cannot even imagine unconsciousness/nothingness. for even empty blackness is still conscious or you wouldnt be able to experience blackness.
the idea of anything existing outside consciousness is an idea that happens inside consciousness. and anything that really was outside would have to transform itself into consciousness upon entry into concsiousness for it to be known and then again it would be nothing but consciousness.
consciousness is the black hole of every idea youve ever had. wiping you clean and leaving you with nothing but your meditating self.
solipsism refutes everything. get used to it. build upon these absolutes. dont fight them
Great post! Plus it agrees with my first post today, a ways back. It also agrees mostly with Gevin Giorbran's 'Everything Forever', in which the 'Everything' is total blend symmetry of balance, pulling time forward from the only way time could begin as asymmetrical, such as a severe grouping order imbalance of matter and anti-matter which then pushes time forward.
The 'Everything' can be a multiverse as taken from the wave function being actual as well as being such because the ultimately real is permanent, with no start, and thus can't have any particular solution put to it and so thus must contain the 'everything' of all solutions.
For those not liking eternalism, the One of presentism can be seen to be continually transmuting into topological temporaries that can never last as anything particular, the One ever remaining as itself overall as the 'wax'.
Something has to be because 'Nothing' cannot; however, they both have an information content of zero, if that's kind of what you mean. Or that a perfect blend of symmetry is not anything in particular, like the colors hidden within white, and approximates a new kind of 'Nothing' as a minimal something. The 'white' would be like the permanent something and the colors would be as but temporaries and thus akin to 'nothing'.
you will never find reality using your mind, only more and more mind. science and philosophy knowledge explore the mind, nothing more. the map is not the territory
Luckily, the Fundamental must be simple; no map but logic is required. The real fun with da mental concerns the temporary complexities above and beyond.
"Universe" signifies the complete whole of all that exists. It's contradictory to say that the universe is in something else (multiverse), because this implies that there is something outside of, therefore other than the universe.
Acceptance of multiverse as an ontology leaves the concept of "universe" as incoherent.
Quoting tim wood
How is this relevant? "Rabbit hole" doesn't signify the complete whole of all that exists, so of course there might be more that one rabbit hole. But this doesn't justify the contradictory notion that there could be more than one universe.
To say that there is more than one universe requires changing what "universe' means. How would one define "universe' in this case?