Computers and all we create, stem from naturally occurring processes but are themselves not naturally occurring processes, hence they are not creative. A theory of fundamental particles, the spacetime in which they live, is a thought process that corresponds, resonates with a real state of the world. Like all scientific theories and experiments associated. But these are all isolated resonances. They can only thrive in a larger process in which our whole being is involved and which can't be described scientifically itself. — Hillary

Computers are naturally occurring processes in the sense that all of their parts are naturally occurring and behave and age the one would expect of metals, silicon and plastic. A philosopher like Deleuze will argues that, while we are doing one thing with a computer( treating it as a non-natural , non-creative device) , its parts are busy making all kinds of natural, creative changes that we are oblivious to. Delving into the physics and chemistry of the parts of a computer is not enough to reveal its
creativity, ai. empirical present theories of physics and chemistry are based on dead matter. Eventually our natural sciences will catch up with where philosophy has arrived.

Do our theories simply ‘resonate’ with real states of the world, or are they designed to produce something absolutely new, that was never there before? Enacting is not just resonance. Knowledge is useful not because it copies pattens in the world but because it changes them. The only way to improve one’s ability to anticipate and predict events in a world is to rearrange the relation between that world and our experience of it. Knowledge is not a mirror or resonance , it is a constantly updated machine we are building.

You say we can’t describe scientifically the larger process our whole being is involved in. What about Kuhn’s theory of scientific revolutions? Can we describe a paradigm change, which gets to the essence of scientific ( as well as philosophical and artistic) creativity? Can we describe the basis of a gestalt shift? We can philosophically, and i. theory we should be able to scientifically, once we enrich our sciences.

What you say is debatable! Wittgenstein was specifically concerned about language in relation to philosophy. He, as far as I can tell, declared, with confidence I might add, that all philosophical issues were, get this, pseudo-problems - they were simply artifacts, so to speak, of language (linguistically-generated illusions) — Agent Smith

Witt wasn’t contrasting philosophy ( or reality) with language, as if language is always at risk of referring inaccurately or in a distorted fashion to real events and things. He didnt think this, because for him language is not a tool for referring to things. Language doesnt refer, it enacts realities, and the danger is that in our interactions with others , we can enact meanings in a way that leads to confusions about what we are doing

1. Can we shift the house of philosophy from the cogito to the truth A?

2. In a sense, cogito ergo sum = there are some truths. — Agent Smith

I think the notion of truth that deals with what is or is not the case in an objective propositional sense is a profoundly inadequate way to ground a philosophy. Philosophy should be about how events are useful and begin with the question of what is use? Relevance is a more fundamental notion than truth.

But at the fundamental level, there hides just one basic stuff. And that stuff is addressed by a ToE, and the name is quite misleading, I agree. It's only the lowest level that is addressed. There are infinite, loosely connected higher level laws of physics. — Hillary

If there is a single synthetic, law-governed truth of the universe and its laws, is this truth a description of something that exists independently of our theories about it? If the universe is continually changing , what about it is protected from relativity and contingency? Popper said that our theories are approximations of a reality that we approach asymptotically. This implies a reality independent of our theories. Kuhn, on the other hand , did not accept this idea of a lawful, deterministic reality. Laws are norms , and norms are contingent and relative. An authentic theory of everything would have to be self-reflexive,, a theory that reveals
its own contingency and relativity.

A theory of everything would trigger a new toe that transforms the previous There would be an endless stream of toe’s, such that it would be necessary to create a theory of theories of everything, one that no longer strives to nail down a single law-governed
scheme but instead describes the structure of self-transformation, how we continually changes ourselves and our world.

As such, creative acts, or life itself, cannot be explained scientifically, and because of that, creativity can't be achieved by computers, nor can computers or AI ever reach the conscious status they have in naturally evolved life. — Hillary

It’s not computers that can’t produce creativity, it’s the moldy models we use to explain what the computers
are doing that are devoid of creativity.
I think that the science of enactivism and autopoietic self-organizing systems theory is a good start at explaining creativity scientifically. But that’s becuase they’ve updated their notion of the empirical and the natural. You model of physics is stuck in an older view of what science does.

Which is to say, it depends on which level you look. At the fundamental level there can only be one truth, the ToE. There can only be one kind of stuff created which can lead to atheuniverse that we observe. — Hillary

You’re no fun. Maybe we don’t just observe it, maybe we co-produce it in a partnership between conceptualization and the constraints and affordances. that the world presents to us. Maybe what we observe is already a newly changed product of our measuring devices and theories. That seems to be the direction that science studies is moving. Science not as neutral observation, representation , simulation, but as production and transformation.

What do you mean? — Hillary

Words are not identities , they don’t simply refer to concepts. They always produce a new, contextual sense of meaning. It is not just a question of what a word means, but how it means what it means. These aspects of concepts are hidden from view when we do physics , so we assume that. options like causal
determinism are completely coherent.

1. What is it? (Ontology)
2. What happens to it? (Causality)
3. Does it stay the same or does it become something else? (Change & Identity)
3. Does it have to be this/that way? Could it have been different? (Necessity & Possibility)
4. Where is it? When is it? (Space & Time) — Hillary

These are great examples of a way of thinking about reality that forgets the most important question. Not what is it but how is it. When one begins by assuming identity and existence prior to change and creativity one is forced to push aside the valuative aspect of meaning. What is needed is reversing the order between identity and change. We must place difference, change , creativity prior to identity. Identity is merely an effect of difference, not the other way around. Creativity is the the effect of a cause, the Will. Difference is prior to Willing. For this reason a god or gods isnt the condition. of possibility of creativity , but rather difference produces gods. They are mere effects.
This implants also on your notion of time , which also tries to generate change from identity rather than the other way around.

You know i like to quote , so here is a taste of what I’m talking about, from Gilles Deleuze:


“The natural sciences think time starting from movement; time is
understood as that which one has to presuppose in order to think the transition of something in space. Time is thus deduced from movement and movement is understood as the change in position on a spatial grid. This conception does not accord any signifi cant value to movement. After all, the moved thing only differs from the unmoved thing in that it has different numerical coordinates; it has not changed itself; it has not changed fundamentally. This implies that space, and thus also time, do not really infl uence the way in which change occurs; they are reduced to the neutral containers in which change or movement happen. Time and space are the frames within which change occurs.
The neutrality of time and space is then illustrated by the fact that they are understood as homogeneous entities; time and space are the same at every moment or position. Moments and positions are exchangeable. They only differ as variations on the same theme. This is the reason why Deleuze says that within this conception “all is given”,nothing new can ever happen.
Deleuze, in contrast, thinks – and he refers explicitly to Bergson here – that time is not the container in which things take place and in which movement occurs, but is movement or change itself. When time elapses, a thing does not only change its spatio-temporal position; it does not only change in a quantitative way, but also in a fundamental or qualitative way. Time is thus not the same at each of its moments.”(Judith Wambacq, Depth and Time in MP and D)

Metaphysics is not just about words and their meaning. It's about the truth value of words. It's about what the words stand for — Hillary

And not just about the truth value but the value in a more genera sense. In other words, metaphysics isnt just about what is true and false in words but about the conditions of possibility of a sense of meaning. A word does t just convey a truth value- what is or is not the case , but how something is the case.

That there is one absolute reality. An idea leading to misery and suffering, if taken seriously. There are a lot of these realities though. Yours, mine, the Christian's etc. Trying to impose one onto others, in the conviction yours is the only one, is wrong. — Hillary

So there are lots of realities in terms of what is true in science, right? None is absolutely true, they are just pragmatically useful. Right?

Well, the universe needs a reason and a kind of sacredness. A non-scientific reason, since I have a scientific description from beginning to end. I don't see how one can go deeper. — Hillary

Maybe your scientific description from beginning to end needs to be turned on its head.
Maybe there is a different kind of science, one not based on moldy Enlightenment assumptions about reason and objectivity, a science in its infancy that doesn’t split apart natural facts and their reasons, the makers and the made, the ineffably subjective and the objective? With this science it wouldn’t be necessary to seek a different realm from the scientific to find rhr kinds of answers you say you can’t find in science.

an

And the sacredness tells that we should treat all life as sacred. — Hillary

How would you define the sacred?

The gods breath the fire, the charge, into them. — Hillary

In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche presents a famous fable explaining the transition from polytheism to monotheism (or what he elsewhere calls “monoto-theism”): when one of the gods declared himself to be the only god (the monotheistic god), the other gods (the gods of polytheism) laughed and laughed and slapped their knees and rocked in their chairs—until finally they laughed themselves to death! Polytheism died of laughter.”

there's the real possibility that brain function is radically unlike that of computers. We'll have to wait for (neuro)science to tell us how as I have a feeling this matter is still not as cut-and-dried as we would've liked. — Agent Smith

Count me among those who think it’s a mistake to treat the mind as a computational device and neurons as 1’s and 0’s. I hew with enactivist cognitive psychology which rejects computationalism and representationalism when it comes to modelling human perception.
Relating this back to your distinction between memory and pattern recognition, I would argue that the neural activity of the brain is constantly changing in response both to external stimuli and its own activity. This means that memory is not stored patterns that remain unchanged until accessed. Meanwhile, what is perceived comes already pre-interpreted based on prior expectations. So memory , in the form
of expectations , co-determines what counts as data in the first place. All perception is recognition because of this contribution of anticipatory neural activity to perception at even the lowest levels.

Do you mean Smolen or Smolin? — Hillary

Why do you ask? Is there a Smolen as well as a Smolin writing about time and physics? Or are you just saying I made a spelling error?

I believe that we are here to express our opinion, however it is formed. If, for example, I ask you, "What do you think about death?", would you answer "Well, Kierkegaard in his Philosophical Fragments said that ...". I don't care about what Kierkegaard said. I asked what do you think
— Alkis Piskas


Better one even! :grin: — Hillary

You like his basking in his anti-intellectualism? Right, let’s dumb down all discussions by shutting off reference to those who have articulated the issues most throughly.

It is good that you know about these guys and their opinions. I also know about what a lot of guys who have or had an opinion about time If cite them, and then other TPF members cite from their own guys, would that be called a "discussion"?

I believe that we are here to express our opinion, however it is formed. If, for example, I ask you, "What do you think about death?", would you answer "Well, Kierkegaard in his Philosophical Fragments said that ...". I don't care about what Kierkegaard said. I asked what do you think. — Alkis Piskas

It would be called a discussion among continental philosophers, who use close readings of texts to buttress their arguments. Not so much on this site, though.

You asked my opinion. I quoted those people because I agree with their views and they make a good starting point for discussion, given that the quotes I included articulated a physics-based view of time as fundamentally unidirectional. So if you don’t care what Bergson, Prigogine or Smolen think about this issue then you don’t care what I think. I dont march in lock-step with their views but relative to your position I’m much closer to what they offer. Never discourage the use of quotes when they can deepen the substance of a discussion. If you have questions concerning the relation of my position to the quotes just ask me. The whole point of the quotes is that I can begin from them and then elaborate my thinking in relation to what has been quoted.

I would love it if you used quotes to clarify your position. It would give me a resource to gain further information from.

You would wake from the dead, get younger, thoughts go backwards, hear before spoken, return oxygen to the air, etc. You would feel like an unwinding poppet with a key clockwork, being pulled along, instead of being in control. You'll be pulled along to shoot back in the womb. How it feels? Dunno! It all depends on the initial configuration. Why isn't that the end of the universe but going in the opposite direction? Behold the problem of the direction of time. — Hillary

This isn’t authentic time you’re describing, it’s a game being played within the bounds of a pre-given schematics masquerading as time. Authentic time is qualitative transformation , not the frames in a movie moving forward or backward. Time moves
neither forward nor backward but otherwise.

Obvious in the sense of obviously true or obviously problematic?
— Joshs

Former, IMHO. :smile: — jgill

Sometimes it takes philosophical probing to bring out hidden dimensions in what was taken to be obvious and common-sensical.

Exemplars of the obvious. — jgill

Obvious in the sense of obviously true or obviously problematic?

Do you agree to replace, for example, the notion of individual sexual drives with the concept of the impersonal collective machinic desire? — Number2018

Only if it makes my orgies more enjoyable. Seriously though, I think D &G have done a brilliant job of integrating the conscious and the unconscious, the cognitive and the bodily-affective, and these with the social and the empirical-material, without giving preference to any particular of these domains. I do wonder, though if Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological approach to time might not offer a more intimate understanding of the site of difference.

the question is, the fundamental question, is: why does entropy grow? Why doesn't it get smaller, so time moves in the other direction, i.e., the direction of less total, universal, or global entropy? This could have been the case. — Hillary

Could you describe for me what time moving in the other direction would look like in everyday experience, or would it look just the same as it already looks to us, given that life is a bubble of resistance to entropy?

In deterministic physics, all processes are time-reversible, meaning that they can proceed backward as well as forward through time
— Joshs

This is not true. In deterministic physics, not all processes are time-reversible. There are no reversible processes in nature. All processes are irreversible processes. The question is why they are moving towards higher entropy and not to lower entropy. — Hillary

Would you agree with this?

“Thermodynamics, then, appears to be one of the only physical processes that is NOT time-symmetric, and so fundamental and ubiquitous is it in our universe that it may be single-handedly responsible for our perception of time as having a direction. Indeed, several of the other arrows of time noted below (arguably) ultimately come back to the asymmetry of thermodynamics. Indeed, so clear is this law that the measurement of entropy has been put forward a way of distinguishing the past from the future, and the thermodynamic arrow of time has even been put forward as the reason we can remember the past but not the future, due to the fact that the entropy or disorder was lower in the past than in the future.”

Also, Hawking seems to have believed that Cosmological time is reversible:

“Dr. Hawking described three ''arrows'' of time: the Psychological Arrow, which he defined as ''the direction of time in which we remember the past but not the future''; the Thermodynamic Arrow, related to entropy and the Cosmological Arrow.
Dr. Hawking argued that the Psychological Arrow was controlled by the Thermodynamic Arrow so that both would always point in the same direction. But the direction of the Cosmological Arrow depends on whether the universe is expanding. If it started to contract, the arrow would change direction.”

Not according to Ilya Prigogine or Lee Smolen. For them time is fundamentally unidirectional..
— Joshs
I don't know about these persons. And good for them if they believe that "time is fundamentally unidirectional". (BTW, does "fundamentally" mean that it can also be otherwise?) — Alkis Piskas

Form Wiki:

“Smolin argues for what he calls a revolutionary view that time is real, in contrast to existing scientific orthodoxy which holds that time is merely a "stubbornly persistent illusion" (Einstein's words).[1] Smolin reasons that physicists have improperly rejected the reality of time because they confuse their mathematical models—which are timeless but deal in abstractions that do not exist—with reality.[1] Smolin hypothesizes instead that the very laws of physics are not fixed, but that they actually evolve over time.”

“In his 1996 book, La Fin des certitudes, written in collaboration with Isabelle Stengers and published in English in 1997 as The End of Certainty: Time, Chaos, and the New Laws of Nature, Ilya Prigogine contends that determinism is no longer a viable scientific belief: "The more we know about our universe, the more difficult it becomes to believe in determinism." This is a major departure from the approach of Newton, Einstein and Schrödinger, all of whom expressed their theories in terms of deterministic equations. According to Prigogine, determinism loses its explanatory power in the face of irreversibility and instability.

Prigogine traces the dispute over determinism back to Darwin, whose attempt to explain individual variability according to evolving populations inspired Ludwig Boltzmann to explain the behavior of gases in terms of populations of particles rather than individual particles.[24] This led to the field of statistical mechanics and the realization that gases undergo irreversible processes. In deterministic physics, all processes are time-reversible, meaning that they can proceed backward as well as forward through time. As Prigogine explains, determinism is fundamentally a denial of the arrow of time. With no arrow of time, there is no longer a privileged moment known as the "present," which follows a determined "past" and precedes an undetermined "future." All of time is simply given, with the future as determined or as undetermined as the past. With irreversibility, the arrow of time is reintroduced to physics. Prigogine notes numerous examples of irreversibility, including diffusion, radioactive decay, solar radiation, weather and the emergence and evolution of life. Like weather systems, organisms are unstable systems existing far from thermodynamic equilibrium. Instability resists standard deterministic explanation. Instead, due to sensitivity to initial conditions, unstable systems can only be explained statistically, that is, in terms of probability.“

What is it that is measured by the clock? If the periodic clock process has completed x periods, then what corresponds this x to? And what if time proceeds in steps, then how does the process know when a static scene has to progress to the next? How does it know it takes a Planck time? — Hillary

Husserl, Heidegger, Derrida, Deleuze and Bergson have shown in different ways that a quantifiable, mathematizable nature presupposes the kind of time which consists of self-presences transitioning from future to present to past in sequential movement (existing ‘in' time). What does it imply to make a time measurement based on clock time, to state that it takes certain amount of time for some process to unfold?

A clock-time calculation counts identical instances of a meaning whose sense is kept fixed during the counting . To count is to count continuously changing instances OF something that holds itself as self-identical through a duration or extension.

The above writers agree that there are no self-identical objects, but rather qualitatively changing events, and clock time results from an idealization in which we posit enduring objects that are either at rest or in motion. The seemingly simple conpet of movement is a complex psychological construction.

I didn't say that we have created time. That would be totally ridiculous. I talked about the concept of time. In fact, in bold letters. I couldn't stress it more ...

The things we are attempting to measure are in themselves incoherent without the prior being of time.
— Joshs
We are not "attempting" to measure. We are measuring them. Time is just a dimension. As is length. They do not actually exst. — Alkis Piskas

Measurement presupposes a concept of measurement, so there is an ‘attempt’ prior to the measurement. Time understood according to certain long-standing assumptions shared by philosophy and science is just a dimension. But to philosophers like Bergson and the phenomenologists it is the structure of reality itself. Dimensions are convenient abstractions that are useful
to us, but original time is not an abstraction, an invention, an idealization. If time as dimension is a human invention, what features of the world can you point to that are not human inventions?

Yes, but the motion was periodic in time too. Virtual particles can be represented, if not coupled to real particles yet, as a closed propagator line in space time, or energy momentum diagram. A vacuum bubble is just a single particle rotating in spacetime (so not a particle-antiparticle pair). — Hillary

Linking somewhere deep within the presuppositions
informing this physics vocabulary is a philosophy of time, but I’m not familiar enough with the physics jargon to get at it.

The unidirectionality of time is an illusion. It is we who have assigned this quality time. After of course having created the concept of time itself. Time itself does not exist. — Alkis Piskas

Not according to Ilya Prigogine or Lee Smolen. For them time is fundamentally unidirectional. We didnt create time, although we create various theories about time. The things we are attempting to measure are in themselves incoherent without the prior being of time.

The pre-inflationary state can be seen as a perfect pendulum. Not going backwards in time, nor forwards, as thermodynamic time still had to emerge. What kind of motion was that? — Hillary

You don’t consider that periodic motion?

for D & G the ethical task is to disclose and identify one’s desiring machines so that “we can fix our aims on a given path.” — Number2018

Would you agree that a desiring machine , with its aim and path , is already internally differentiated, so that this flow is never a matter of the repetition of the identical aim and path?

what I said above doesn't imply that there's no, as you put it, jnside to consciousness; it's just that we can't discuss it among ourselves in a meaningful way (beetle-in-a-box gedanken experiment). — Agent Smith

Your notion of consciousness and self is a bit too Cartesian. There is no inside to consciousness in the sense of some container with a substance, essence or content that sits there waiting to be reflected on. Consciousness is self-changing. That IS its only essence.
It makes no sense to talk about reflection as a mirror or distortion of something that is never simply itself but is always a new differential.

This perspective is from the ‘outside’ that comes before and indeed determines the subject of interests. The difficulty here is that we should access this outside through experimentation or just speculate about the productive unconscious process. For D & G, it is the crucial ethical point, the opportunity to find out "where our chances lie." — Number2018

As an ethics , intensive difference is also irreducibly violent, the basis of blame.

The takeaway seems to be that languages are unable to penetrate the inner sanctum, pain taken as representative, of consciousness. Can a coder/programmer code for private experiences like the ones Wittgenstein talks about in his well-known private language argumen? Perhaps our inner private lives are linguistically inaccessible because the creator of the simulation, if we are in one, wanted to, well, hide something in there from us. You see two heads are better than one, more the merrier, but in this case, no number of heads can solve the riddle of consciousness. — Agent Smith

If we incorporate phenomenology to supplement Wittgenstein’s focus on interpersonal linguistic situations , we find that there is no such thing as ‘inner’ pre-linguistic experience. All sensory perception ( pain, vision, touch, hearing) is irreducible interpretive , a blending of prior expectation and appearance. All perception is constructive and perspectival. There is no ‘inside’ to consciousness, awareness is out in the world , as our interactions. So ‘inner’ perception works much the way that Wittgenstein’s language games function, as a pre-verbal language of sensation From this perspective the idea of a matrix, a simulation by an evil genius, is non-sensicalx, since whatever stimulation is beanies our way, we have to intercept it from our own perspective in ways that are pragmatically useful
for us. So the ‘same’ simulation or matrix will always be experienced in differing ways by different persons.

From a Wittgensteinian standpoint there's no essence to either illusions/simulations or reality that could aid us in telling them apart. — Agent Smith

Wittgenstein explains that in interacting with others, we create the sense of meaning of words out of the context. These senses of meaning are realities constructed out of the fusion of our past histories with words with the novelty of the immediate context. I’m not sure that this idea of the real as socially constructed sense is compatible with your real vs illusion binary, which seems to depend on the context and culture-independence of what is real.

Atheism isn’t a single belief system.
— Joshs

It isn't a system at all. It's singular. — whollyrolling

I think you pulled that one out of your ass. What the heck does ‘singular’ mean? A belief system is singular. It’s a holistic frame that includes many elements. Do I need to spell out for you the complexity of issues and ideas that form the basis of a decision whether to believe or not believe in a god? Ask any individual why they are an atheist and they will give you a series of arguments that link together as a totality. This complexity is implied by the decision and it is a system. The meaning of their atheism for them isn’t a dictionary definition but their own personal story and reasons.

I am not a theist. — whollyrolling

I must have misunderstood. What would you call yourself?

Overstimulated perception is the source of traditional schizophrenia. This is the easiest form to diagnose because it inclines to produce more obvious behaviors such as reacting to things that are not there, confused or delusional thinking, becoming agitated or catatonic for reasons which are not alw — Enrique

I dont know how this impacts on the main aim of your paper, but whether schizophrenia( and there are probably many kinds of schizophrenia of different etiologies) involves over or under-stimulation of groups of neurons, I have found a useful way of understanding behaviors typically associated with schizophrenia as being the result of fragmentation in processing concentrated in language-related areas. Unlike something like LSD, schizophrenia does not produce a direct alteration in simple perception, at least not apart from meaning-connected expereince. The language centers of brian are designed to take lower level perceptual information form the various sense modalities and synthesize unified concepts from these inputs. It also filters these concepts relative to appropriate context. When these synthesizing functions are disrupted, one’s language comes disassociated from context, and such things as word salad result. The first associations to a word that we hear or think don’t lead, as they do in ‘normals’, to further associations that belong to a focused and unified context of current goal-directed behavior but produce a string of simple associations based on sound or rhyme or visual quality that lead to endless dead ends. This fragmenting of the unity of goal-directed meaning is also exemplified in hearing voices. These are not simple auditory hallucinations, as is the case with lsd. One’s own flow of meaningful thought becomes split from itself such that one experiences it as if it were coming from another person, but heard inside one’s own head alongside one’s own thoughts. The disease fragments language and it also fragments the sense of self. Even the boundaries of one’s body in relation to the world become blurred or absent.

As you mentioned , emotional stress can trigger episodes, just as stress can impair the unity of thought in non-schizophrenics. Medications sedate the thinking process in a non-targeted way, which may help by making it harder for the mind to take concpet-formation down blind random tangents. Given the multitude of cause of the disease ( it is actually many loosely related diseases) , I wonder how an analysis at the molecular , much less quantum, level could impact what is essentially a behaviorally-defined syndrome.

there are even now associations of self-proclaimed ‘voice hearers’ who argue that they should not be pathologized but instead respected as merely non-typical.


I suspect that trying to find a single cause or mechanism of schizophrenia is like trying to find a cause of psychological gender.

I don't see atheism as a belief system, so if something involves a belief system I don't consider it to be atheism. Some people label their belief system "Atheism" and then proceed to spend a great deal of time thinking and speaking about God--significantly more time than an average Christian. — whollyrolling

I will put this differently. We all have belief systems, whether we are aware of it or not. Every scientific theory rests on a larger framework of beliefs( you could call this a worldview). Atheism isn’t a single belief system. Rather, it refers most generally to a history of evolving god-based beliefs, ranging from fundamentalist to heretical. Atheism is also an evolving continuum of belief systems and there are myriad overlaps between theism and atheism, especially when we consider liberal forms of religion influenced by writers like Kierkegaard, Levinas and Buber. I find many points of agreement with theistic contributors to this forum like Constance and Wayfarer, because their philosophies of religion not not far removed from my philosophical orientation even though I consider myself an atheist. My belief system is likely farther removed from yours, not because you are a theist and I am an atheist , but becuase your philosophy of religion is a more traditionalistic one than the above contributors. I suggest it is not atheism per se that you oppose your faith to , but modern and postmodern belief, whether god-based or atheistic.

You have apparently found a way to bypass these complexities and ambiguities by reducing faith and atheism to cartoonish categories.

... each thing, as far as it lies in itself, strives to persevere in its being
— Ethics IIIP6
that, like inertia or current, is harnessed – by modern technocapital(?) – in various productive modalities which, IIRC, D & G call "desiring-machines" ... — 180 Proof

Except that for Deleuze , there is no identity , no in-itself, no essence, even temporarily. Desiring -machines are self-differentiating.

↪180 Proof also Will to Power, eh? — Albero

And eternal recurrence of the same.

And so the whole project of putting a positive spin on things. Deleuze difference ad nauseum the same as Whitehead's creativity ad nauseum? — schopenhauer1

Good question. I’m not familiar enough with Whitehead to answer that, but I don’t see how his theism, as unconventional as it is, is compatible with Deleuze’s immanentism.

Deleuze on the other hand posits that desire is rather “productive” and has no lacking involved-it is instead an interplay between positive forces. How can this be? — Albero

any interest in attaining x is motivated by a prior engagement with whatever structure x belongs to — Albero

I think there is a larger point to be made about the positivity of desire for Deleuze. This goes to the heart of his critique of concepts like opposition, contradiction and negation, which are central to Hegelian and Marxist dialectic. These forms or relation are attempts to cancel difference by equalizing it in the form of a dialectical reconciliation or synthesis. The equal and the unified are assumed to cancel the negativity of the lack. But for Deleuze difference , as the irreducible basis of reality, is not a problem to be solved, a lack to be compensated, but an endlessly repeated fecundity (productivity), an eternal recurrence of the same absolute difference.