I’m not so sure. Water itself is this incredibly complex combination of electrons and protons/neutrons made of quarks, and so on, but it is quite a stable, confident little molecule, isn’t it? I think our minds are similar. Complexity of a magnitude that we can barely comprehend, yet with solid and predictable powers and tendencies. I think the pattern is indeed built by the processes you state, yet can sustain itself without them (i.e., the Afterlife).
Well, here’s the rub, I think: we can choose what to do, but not what we choose to think and feel. Not immediately. A thought can come into the mind to change how we think, but we cannot choose to think that primary-mover thought. Or can we? I’m still not sure.
Of course, we are little beings, who hardly know anything, but your post is brave and true, and I salute you.
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again, it may not be necessary to step outside the universe to understand its local properties, but it is necessary to step outside to be sure (in a logical sense) that those properties are universal and not just local.
you won’t hear it from me that the universe was designed. i think SentientMeat gave some great links for understanding the basis of the anthropic principle and fine-tuning, and i refer you to those.
that’s not true at all. we would have to understand something about our understanding to know that something is beyond it. if there’s something i’m missing, please elaborate, because i still don’t see what’s contradictory.
again, i think you make a mistake here by attributing properties to the wrong “objects”. we can say nothing about a non-logical world, and it has nothing to do with the properties of that world. what is involved, as Lib mentioned, is our language: it is a limitation of our language and our understanding of the world that prohibits such discussion, not anything specific about such a world as we might wish to discuss. logic can be used to say plenty about logic. that all those propositions are tautological does not make them any less true.
on free will: of course we cannot be the primary movers. to what exactly would we attribute this will which we would call free? in the end, it can be but random chance if it is truly “free” and i think few would appreciate that interpretation.
my basic view is that for every decision we make, we have a choice. after that choice is made, the option we chose is the only option we could have chosen, barring fluctuations from random chance.
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I’m not so sure. Water itself is this incredibly complex combination of electrons and protons/neutrons made of quarks, and so on, but it is quite a stable, confident little molecule, isn’t it? I think our minds are similar. Complexity of a magnitude that we can barely comprehend, yet with solid and predictable powers and tendencies. I think the pattern is indeed built by the processes you state, yet can sustain itself without them (i.e., the Afterlife).
Well, here’s the rub, I think: we can choose what to do, but not what we choose to think and feel. Not immediately. A thought can come into the mind to change how we think, but we cannot choose to think that primary-mover thought. Or can we? I’m still not sure.
Exactly. What I feel about the above depends on the mood I am in, which I cannot control. If I am feeling particurlarly optimistic, then I think ‘perhaps there is more to it’, and I am not so sure about us being trapped in a world of utter meaningless and nothingness. When not so happy, I feel utter despair and hoplessness. I truly hope that the former is true, but just like you, I don’t know.
Still, the greatest comfort to me is that we are truly ignorant, and even if the former is true - think this - all the evil in the world is also meaningless!
(In any case, since I believe that statements supervene on the physical, I’m not too concerned with so-called “metaphysical” consequences.)
The way I described it, the universe is effectively any “way it is” somewhere. “Rules” are merely the way offal-based consciousness encodes “how it is”.
They do under certain conditions. In this region of the universe, most of them simply have an enormous half-life.
Truth is itself a human construct, its physical nature being “an offal-based memory/proposition which encodes the universe the way it is rather than the way it isn’t.” I have never understood your contention that objects can be physical but their arrangement in spacetime, for some reason, cannot be. Both objects and their spatial-temporal arrangement surely supervene on the physical?
As for “free will”, I generally deny this as being simply an offal-based “calculation”.
Meaning that it is some undefined entity about which you are making no assertion with any truth value. If I label X/0 as “undefined term”, I am saying nothing about “X/0” (since there is nothing to say), but about undefined terms. In other words, your statement is amphibolous because it is a truncation of “The equation is a singularity”. The point remains that you do not know whether the singularity is timeless or not.
Truth is disquotational because truth is expressed by language; therefore, for obvious reasons there are severe epistemological problems with making statements about undefined things. That’s why you can make a statement about a singularity’s equation, but not about what the equation represents. That’s also why people argue endlessly about things like “God” — so often, they never pause to define what they’re talking about. So, if you can define a black hole, then you can make a statement about it that is either true or false. But if you make a statement about say, obix, how can I or anyone challenge you?
Wouldn’t you say that subsequent statements relate only to the accepted definition of the black hole, and not really to the black hole in and of itself? It’s Epistemology 101, but somehow it seems to be often forgotten around here.
There you are wrong. We no more put the chairs back then gluing the ladle holder together restores it. We may be able to get it close to being the same, close enough for us, but it never is the same.
Perhaps one day, in a John Varley world, we will be able to save our memories and restore them, and thus defeat death. Will we be the same? It depends on whether you are satisfied with close enough, like the chairs, or not, like the ladle holder. But it would never be truly the same.
'R’eality is an unreachable concept. Explanation of R can be subjected to infinite regress, leading nowhere. But the fundamental constraint is that we live entirely as perceptions i.e. seeing, hearing, feeling, thinking, even (the awareness) of being. Reality would presumably involve the essence of perception. This, fundamentally, can never be “known” since ‘knowing’ is also a state of perception. Imagine a robot trying to disassemble itself. At best, it can only dissemble till the remaining intact machinery is functioning. There comes a point when the sole remaining part can disassemble itself because it is the part it is trying to disassemble. We are restricted to Perception and all our efforts are limited to that domain.
I agree in part. Anything consistent with the laws of pattern and number must come into being, but the rub is that a contradiction cannot come into being.
And here, I think, is an interesting argument (my own, heh): Suppose somewhere there is a partition of Reality (or the Universe) that is defined as completely uninflenced by and unknown to any other. Well and good, but somewhere else there is a partition that is defined as influencing and knowing all others. How is this contradiction resolved? I don’t know. But this thought experiment leads me to believe that, while partitions are possible, everything in Reality is still connected. That is, there is only one Universe, though different worlds can be layered one on another (the Afterlife is said to be a world separated not from our own by space, but by vibration).
Undoubtedly such reasoning offends your reductionist-materialist sensibilities, but the point still has pertinence. If the Universe is “every which way” somewhere, then in some brane or other location there ought to be a black hole or other feature capable of destroying everything in every other partition. If you counter-argue that there are branes or partitions that are completely separate from, and unknowable to, our own, then I would argue further that such a place is, logically speaking, equivalent to something that does not exist at all.
I find the term “offal-based consciousness” quite negative and gross. Why do you insist on such a negative phrase?
At any rate, I think the word “merely” in your point is dangerous. How do you explain the incredible congruence between our “mere” encoding and Nature, which has given us such power over it? If we then agree that our rules do give us power and seek to explain just how they do so, we are certainly not lead to the conclusion that chance alone is the cause. If chance is not the cause, then what is? I am not the only person to argue that the congruence of our understanding of pattern and number to the physical world implies that the latter is also, at bottom, pattern and number.
Point taken, the neutron itself is an unstable particle outside the nucleus. But the larger point is that even such a breakdown itself follows rules. Why so? My conclusion, although not particularly profound, is that the pattern of our physical universe is intelligently (thought NOT consciously, as by God) determined. Determined in condradistinction to other partitions, though not entirely separated from them.
A self-contradicting set of propositions. Unless of course you don’t intend to convince anyone, which goal would require the concept of “Truth,” which, according to concept itself, is not “mere truth.”
I would say that the concept of “physical” isn’t really all that profound to begin with. It comes from, I think, our homo sapiens experience of bumping into big, clunky things while noticing that we also have things like songs, and consciousness, and recipes: things that are important to us but which we don’t bump into. Ultimately, I think, it’s pattern all the way up and all the way down.
I agree that “free will” is a concept without a foundation, since we can’t really point to a function of “will” in the mind.
nothing, because it doesn’t. There is no path. There is just whatever is happening now. It will lead to something, but what that is is not ordained. It’s just that something is going to happen. If we rewound the clock to any arbitrary point in the past something else might happen. Read Stephen Gould’s Wonderful Life for a better explanation of this.
A simpleminded answer to a difficult question: It just does. Seriously though, the fundamental components of matter and energy–quarks, electrons, photons, etc.-- have a certain amount of staying power. They’re just not going to blink out of existence. Since they’re here, and they interact in such a complex manner that allows stuff like life and self-awareness to develop, reality is self-supporting. What these things “really” are, and how they came to be in the first place is a question no one can answer. Not now at least, and probably never.
I’m not sure that standard science agrees. No part of space-time exists any more than any other. The present seems to be the present to us only because of the relationship of our mind/brain to it. 2004 has no more existence to it than 1995 or 2020.
Yes, they have staying power. My question, though, isn’t just why they don’t just disappear; that’s just the most drastic example. The broader question is why the properties of anything are what they are and why they don’t change. And one of those weird (to me) properties is that they do stay the same and allow for Reality to take one path instead of another.
Just an hour or two ago I was watching my wife walk across the room, and struck me as weird that she was there, now here, yet the consciousness of the whole “event” is so fluid, just marching right along with time itself.
Dear friend, I think you might be on the wrong track.
Point, line, and plane are the undefined terms of classical geometry, but we can certainly say many things about them. Moreover, we can communicate much of them by demonstration. We can get things about them.
As for the singularity, well, I think that’s a can of worms. It’s a theoretical construct, thought up to tell a story and make sense of how things are in the Universe at present. And the story, as it goes, makes a lot of statements about it. It was not in time and space, time and space came from it. Etc. etc.
I think it is a mistake to think of the singularity as a “real object.” It is an element of a story. That’s not to say that the things we say about it aren’t “true,” but the things we say about it have the same somewhat satisfying truth value as a statement like, “The man was taller than average and I’m sure his name didn’t begin with an M or S.”
Offended? Not at all. Believe what you like, and let us explore the consequences of our respective beliefs.
No, by “every which way” I alluded to a continuum of those parameters, not that ‘somewhere’ there was, say, a universe of centaurs playing Jenga with prosthetic limbs.
Agreed, these branes might be unobservable and unfalsifiable and thus unscientific. All we would be left with is their logical and mathematical consistency and that they might be predicted by a theory which has other consequences which are observable: this is perhaps marginally more convincing than mere “faith and maths alone”.
I find the term succinct and accurate. I will eschew it if you wish, but unless you eat brains then I’d suggest you could accurately describe them as “offal” also.
Encoding the universe how it is rather than how it isn’t allows useful and ‘powerful’ prediction and manipulation. This is not “chance” any more than a computer calculation is “chance”. What is the cause of a computer’s ‘power’?
My proposal was that those parameters are different “elsewhere”, such that the breakdown does follow different rules “elsewhere” and atoms are not so permanent (or do not even form from cooling plasma in the first place).
How so?
And why can pattern not supervene on the physical? You are perfectly welcome to deny the physical if you wish, but I would appreciate your explanation of why I cannot deny the non-physical.