There are a lot of conceptions of God out there. Some of them make room for a God that is both changeless and changing; Ein Sof in the Kabbalah, Paul Tillich's "God Above God", etc. And the idea of us having "a relationship" with God is a pretty modern, Evangelical notion. I'm not aware of it existing in other religions in the way it does in Evangelical Christianity, but I could be unaware. — Noble Dust

Interesting. But aren't the concept of changeless and changing contrary?

But if God is simultaneously inside as outside us, then, to the extent that our lives are as much having a developing relationship with ourselves (getting to know ourselves more), surely we do have a relationship with God. — Sunshine Sami

What God being inside and outside us has to do with relationship with God? There is a gap in line of your reasoning.

Alright, you clearly aren't understanding the things I'm saying. Is English your first language, or no? I feel like there's a language barrier, but I could be wrong. — JustSomeGuy

Yes, English is my second language and I am physicist. Where do you think I lack understanding?

Isn't 1+1=3 illogical?

What does 1+God mean? — JustSomeGuy

It could mean anything. if 1+1=3 is possible then 1+God=whatever is also possible.

I didn't say anything about us "striving on illogic". — JustSomeGuy

You accept illogic is possible, 1+1=3?

Either you're misunderstanding me, or I'm misunderstanding you, or both. What you asked has nothing to do with what I said, as far as I can tell. — JustSomeGuy

I think I understand you and didn't understand me. 1+God could be whatever if we strive on illogic.

There cannot be any beginning if there is still a before.

You have the problem of before the beginning. It cannot be anything before the beginning.

One has to tell why the act of creation out of noting is logically possible and the process of noting to something is logically impossible.

What if the stuff was there at the beginning? This make sense since there is no before the beginning.

So what is the domain of philosophy of religion?
— bahman

We're doing philosophy of religion right now. Philosophy of religion is just a philosophical examination of religious concepts.

Could God make 1+1=3?
— bahman

If the God we are referring to is omnipotent, then yes. If God is all-powerful, he can restructure reality in any way he wants to. That's what omnipotent means. — JustSomeGuy

What is the point of defining religious concepts when there is no logic behind it? 1+G=whatever.

are you assuming ample of autonomy or free will? — Dzung

I am talking about free will.

why would you choose to go right or left in your daily routes? what would happen if you now reverse all?
That's so you can think about the consequences of absolute free will. — Dzung

I most of the time choose between right and left whether they have advantage for me. I can also do things which brings disadvantage to me.

Free will is the difference between won't and can't. — TheMadFool

Are you trying to define free will?

You won't do the opposite but it doesn't mean you can't do the opposite. — TheMadFool

I perhaps would not but I can.

Of course. Logic is something we created to help us explain and understand the world, and it is a very good tool, but why would God be bound by something we created? Logic doesn't even apply to the entire physical world. Quantum mechanics has shown us that something can essentially be both true and false at the same time. — JustSomeGuy

So what is the domain of philosophy of religion? Could God make 1+1=3?

I agree with what you stated. The question however is whether we can do opposite of what God reveals?

True foreknowledge would encompass all our decisions and ''decide the opposite'' would then be meaningless. — TheMadFool

Therefore you don't have free will.

If one is above time, it does not mean that one cannot use time. — Lone Wolf

What do you mean with above time?

So God can do consecutive tasks and act, but these things do not limit him. — Lone Wolf

Doing consecutive tasks and acts require time.

Agree. But I thought my meaning was quite clear. I'm questioning the entire notion of a timeless state. — curiosity in action

I see.

Furthermore, even a spaceless thought has time occurring concurrently. While a time can be can be created, altered and destroyed, time itself is beyond all of the aforementioned possibilities. — curiosity in action

I have an argument which shows time cannot be created. You can find it here.

You're talking about mysticism. We're supposed to be talking about science and philosophy. "Eternal now" isn't a logical term; its not meant to be taken literally. It's meaningless in the context of science and philosophy. — JustSomeGuy

We are talking about philosophy of religion with God as one of its item using logic. Do you think that God can defy logic?

The very definition of the term "instant" is "a precise moment of time". How is "a moment of time" the same as "no time"? It clearly isn't. — JustSomeGuy

Some people call timeless state as eternal now. The present.

Does the 3D image cause something, just because it is useful? If I hallucinate a bridge where there is none and plunge down the chasm, does the hallucination become real just because it caused something? — Pseudonym

Could we learn about 3D image without sensing it? Everything becomes indifferent if there was no shape to experience.

Why do you think this? Don't just make a claim, provide your reasoning.

I don't think it makes sense for us to be able to understand something that we have zero experience of. Our brains aren't capable of comprehending a lack of time, just like they aren't capable of understanding infinity. — JustSomeGuy

Think of one instant. It is just a point. There is no before and after in it.

Yes. — Lone Wolf

Doesn't that mean that He could not do consecutive tasks, like decision and act?

Serves some purpose.

In the case of the 3D image, the purpose is to help our imagination get a more accurate picture. In the case of conciousness it would be to help our cells reproduce, but I don't think it's valuable on a philosophy forum to get tied up in exactly what conciousness might have evolved to do.

One can never establish what a feature evolved to do. The Black Crane uses it's wings primarily as a cowl to lure fish into the shade, but it would be ludicrous to suggest it evolved them for this purpose.

The point, from a philosophical perspective, is the the arm movement experiments give us a question to answer about concious decision, we know the answer can't be that we (the concious self) decide to do something and then instruct the rest of our body to carry out that something. We speculate that conciousness might well be an illusion. A counter argument to that theory would be if illusion served no purpose in evolution.

We've demonstrated that it could serve a purpose, and so removed that particular counter argument. What that purpose actually is is a matter for evolutionary biologists, not philosophers. Philosophically, it is sufficient that such a purpose could exist. — Pseudonym

Purpose, useful, etc... Consciousness does something. It cause something.

The question I have is: "How much of our mental structure (conscious, unconscious) was evolved and is present in other animals?" I am quite sure that we were not the first draft of consciousness, or sub-consciousness. I suspect many animals evolved features that are present in our minds, only to a lesser degree, and in many cases, a lot lesser degree. — Bitter Crank

I agree.

So a dog's mind obviously has less capacity to think than we do, but people have observed the outcome of "dog thought". Dog thought isn't very elegant, as far as I can tell. A lot of what they think about seems to be how to get us to do things they want us to do. Or, how to circumvent limitations (like fences) that we have placed on them.

We didn't evolve from dogs, but we have common ancestors and a lot of animals display varying levels of mental activity, sometimes fairly complex. Not just dogs; think of parrots and crows; primates, of course. And other animals. — Bitter Crank

I agree.

God is not restrained by time, nor is time necessary for His existence. Yes, I agree that one is either timeless or temporal, but that statement does not apply to God. It is like saying a potter must be a pot to create pots. It is absurd. — Lone Wolf

I don't understand you. Can we agree that God is timeless?

"God is in state of timeless where there is no before and after (this is true since time is part of creation)."
Does God not have a before and after? It seems to me he must have a sequence of events. On what basis would God be denied such a reality? Assuming God existed before creation, then time must have existed before creation. I would propose that time is the one understanding that he could not create, but rather ran concurrent throughout the eternity of his existence. For those who say he is all knowing, time is the one item beyond his all-powerfulness. The only power he could have over it is the power of suicide. He could permanently kill himself and thereby destroy that time which is limited to his existence. But any time existing beyond his existence (i.e. time he allowed beyond his existence) would be unaffected. — curiosity in action

There cannot be any sequence in a timeless state since the state becomes ill-defined. In this case God is decided and undecided in a timeless point.

We cannot possibly comprehend anything outside of the limitations of our own perception. If something were to be "outside" of time or the universe, we could not understand it or say anything about it whatsoever. This is not to say that it's not possible, only that trying to apply our own universal laws and constraints to it is nonsensical. To talk of an entity outside of time being unable to decide isn't logical because the concept of decision itself is a product of the universe we live in and how it operates. Even thinking of God having a mind doesn't make sense if He is outside of time. It seems to me, if you believe in a creator God who is separate from the universe, you cannot say a single thing about what He is like. If you want to be able to say anything about God, any of His characteristics, He must be part of our universe. But that would mean He did not create our universe. The only other option is something like Spinoza's God, which is the universe. Everything that exists, mind and matter, is an extension of God, a part of Him, like cells in a body. I recommend reading his Ethics if this sounds interesting to you, or at the very least finding a good summary of it online. — JustSomeGuy

I think we can understand timeless.

Either that or he does not exist. X-) — Sir2u

Yeah. God as a person does not exist.

God transcends time; he merely created it. I don't see how that is indecisiveness. — Lone Wolf

You are either timeless or temporal. There is no other option. Timeless means that you are not subject to time. What do you mean with "God transcends time"?

Lots of assumptions and presumptions. I count nine; how many do you count. Now what do you suppose a conclusion based on so many assumptions is worth? — tim wood

It doesn't matter how many assumption we have. Assumptions must however be coherent.

I don't have time just right now to read the whole thread, but I want to add this, in case it hasn't been raised.

The brain where consciousness and subconsciousness reside is a system. It does a lot of things, everything from triggering heart beats, breaths, putting you to sleep and waking you up, to imagining the plots of novels, and deciding what kind of canned tomatoes to buy. The various facilities of what we call "the mind" aren't discrete parts as much as they are the products of this "system".

We probably over-rate the conscious mind. I don't know what exactly consciousness is, but I am pretty sure it is supported by a much more extensive not-conscious part of the brain that not only does a lot of heavy lifting, but also, in a very real sense, runs the conscious mind. Since we can't access what is going on second by second in the subconscious, non-conscious 'mind', we think the conscious mind dominates. It is a subtle process to tease out what the non-conscious mind is doing.

You are your conscious and non-conscious mind. There isn't "something else" or "somebody else" between your ears: It's all you, all the time. — Bitter Crank

I agree with what you stated. That however is not a answer to question of this thread.

the question is, why did 'evolution' result in the ability to, oh I don't know, understand the age and size of the Universe? Amazing the things you pick up, chasing wildebeest, considering. And then it comes to the point of trying to work out what kind of animal can do this, and wonders what is odd about the question. — Wayfarer

That is also an interesting question. Perhaps we needed very high level of intelligence to live in poor condition that we used to live. Now we are rich and that intelligence is used for something else.

Get back to basics. The sense of self is a perceptual contrast the brain has to construct so as to be able to perceive ... "the world". Even our immune and digestive systems have to encode some sense of what is self so as to know what is "other" - either other organisms that shouldn't be there, or the food the gut wants to break down. And so too, the brain has to form a sense of what is self to know that the world is other. — apokrisis

I don't think that the sense of self is create in order to allows us to perceive the world. That is off topic so lets please put it aside.

A second basic of the evolved brain is that it is needs to rely on forward modelling the world. You probably think the brain is some kind of computer, taking in sensory data, doing some processing, then throwing up a conscious display. Awareness is an output. But brains are slow devices. It takes a fifth of a second to emit a well learnt habitual response to the world, and half a second to reach an attentional level of understanding and decision making. We couldn't even safely climb the stairs if we had to wait that long to process the state of the world.

So instead, the brain relies on anticipation or prediction. It imagines how the world is likely to be in the next moment or so. So it is "conscious" of the world ahead of time. It has an "illusion" of the next split second just about to happen. That creates a feeling of zero lag - to the degree the predictions turn out right. — apokrisis

I agree with what you stated but these are off topic.

And this forward modelling is necessary just to allow for a continual perceptual construction of our "self". We have to be able to tell that it is our turning head that causes the world to spin, and not the other way round. So when we are just about to shift our eyes or move our hand, a copy of that motor instruction is broadcast in a way that it can be subtracted from the sensory inputs that then follow. The self is created in that moment because it is the part we are subtracting from the flow of impressions. The world is then whatever stayed stable despite our actions.

It is not hard to look at the cognitive architecture of brains and see the necessary evolutionary logic of its processing structure. And a running sense of self is just the flipside of constructing a running sense of the world.

Then on top of that, brains have to deal with an actual processing lag. And the best way to deal with that is to forward-model the shit out of the world.

Then on top of that, it is efficient to have a division of labour. The brain wants to do as much as it can out of learnt habit, and that then leaves slower responding attention to mop up whatever turns out to be novel, surprising or significant during some moment.

That leads to consciousness having a logical temporal structure. You have some kind of conscious or attention-level set of expectations and plans at least several seconds out from a moment. About half a second out, attention is done and learnt, well-briefed, habit has to take over. It does detailed subconscious predicting and reacting. If someone steps into the road while you are driving, you hit the brakes automatically in about a fifth of a second. After that, attention level processing comes back into it. You can consciously note that thank god you are so quick on the brakes, and what was that crazy guy thinking, and why now is he looking angry at me, etc.

So [conscious prediction [subconscious prediction [the moment] subconscious reaction] conscious reaction].

This is all proven by psychological experiment. The whole issue of reaction times and processing times is what got experimental psychology started in the late 1800s. — apokrisis

Thanks for illustration.

Where does human freewill come into it? Well what I've outlined is the evolution of the cognitive neurobiology. The basic logic is the same for all animals with large brains. They all need to construct a running sense of self so as to have a running sense of what then constitutes "the world". They all have a division of labour where they can act out of fast learnt habit or slower voluntary attention.

But humans are different in that we have evolved language and are essentially social creatures mentally organised by cultural evolution. Yes, memes.

So now our perceptual sense of self takes on a social dimension. We learn to think of "ourselves" in terms of a wider social world that we are representing. We learn to "other" our biological selves - this running perceptual self with all its grubby biological intentionality - and see it from an imagined social point of view. We learn to be disembodied from our own bodies and take an introspective or third person stance on the fact we can make choices that our societies might have something strong to say about.

So freewill is a social meme. It is the cultural idea that being a human self involves being able to perceive a difference between the "unthinking" selfish or biologocally instinctual level of action and a "thinking", socially informed, level of self-less action.

An animal is a self in a simple direct fashion - a self only so far as needed to then perceive "a world". A human, through language, learns to perceive a world that has themselves in it as moral agent making individual choices. That then requires the individual to take "conscious responsibility" for their actions. Every action must be judged in terms of the contrast between "what I want to do" and "what I ought to do".

So the idea of freewill is an ideal we strive to live up to. And yet the temporal structure of actual brain processes gives us plenty of dilemmas. We do have to rely on "subconscious" habit just for the sake of speed and efficiency. The gold standard of self-control is attention-level processing. But that is slow and effortful. However - as human culture has evolved - it has set the bar ever higher on that score. As a society, we give people less and less latitude for sloppy self-control, while also making their daily lives fantastically more complex.

A hunter/gather level of decision making is pretty cruisey by comparison. You go with the flow of the group. Your personal identity is largely a tribal identity. You get away with what you can get away with.

But then came institutionalised religion, stratified society, the complex demands of being a "self-actualising" being. A literal cult of freewill developed. The paradoxical cultural demand - in the modern Western tradition - is that we be "self-made".

So sure, there must be some evolutionary logic to this. There must be a reason why the freewill meme is culturally productive. But the point also is that it is a psychologically unrealistic construct. It runs roughshod over the actual cognitive logic of the brain. — apokrisis

That is the key point. What is the use of free will?

We just shouldn't beat ourselves up for not being literally in charge of our actions at all times. We are designed to be in some kind of flow of action where we let well-drilled habit do its thing. And of course our minds will wander when we are being expected to consciously attend to the execution of stuff we can handle just as well out of habit. The idea that we can switch our concentration off and on "at will" just cuts against the grain of how the brain naturally wants to be. Attention is there for when things get surprising, dangerous, difficult, not for taking charge of the execution of the routine. — apokrisis

How could we deliberately switch on and off our attention if there is no free will?

So "freewill" sits at the centre of so much cultural hogwash. There is good cultural reasons for it as a meme. It is really to modern society's advantage to have us think about our "selves" in this disembodied fashion. It allows society to claim control over our most inadvertent or reflexive actions.

But it is also a demonstrably unhealthy way to frame human psychology. If we just recognise that we have slower voluntary level planning and faster drilled habitual responses, then this unconscious vs conscious dilemma would not create so much existential angst.

We are not a conscious ego in possible conflict with an unconscious id (and also under the yoke of a social super-ego). Our "self" is the skilled totality of everything the brain does to created a well-adapted flow of responses to the continually varying demands of living in the world - a world that is both a physical one and a social one for us as naturally social creatures.

The actual freewill dilemma arose because Newtonian determinism appeared to make it paradoxical. If we are just meat machines, then how could we be selves that make our own rational or emotional choices?

But physics has gone past such determinism. And the very fact that the brain has to forward model to keep up with the world means that it is not being neurally determined anyway. Its knowledge of how the world was an instant or two ago is certainly a constraint on the expectations it forms. But the very fact it has to start every moment with its best guess of the future, and act on that, already means we couldn't be completely deterministic devices even if we tried.

Universal computation is logically deterministic. A programme - some structure of set rules and definite data - has to mechanically proceed from an input state, its initial conditions, to an output state.

But the brain is not that kind of computer. So it is neither physically deterministic (as no physics is that in the LaPlacean sense), nor is it computationally deterministic.

Thus "freewill" just isn't a real ontological problem. There is no metaphysical conflict. (Unless you are a dualist who believes "mind" to be a separate substance or spirit-stuff. And of course there are many who take that essentially religious view still. But for psychological science, there just isn't an ontological-strength problem.) — apokrisis

So you believe that free will is a meme for cultural control.

What do you mean with useful?

Deleted.

Why would you say that? — charleton

Because I think there are many mutations are needed in order that we have illusion of free will.

Free will is not a concept carried by the genes. — charleton

The illusion of free will is carried by genes because we experience it.

It's a conclusion drawn from experience and expressed and reproduced by logical logic. Such concepts are more like memes that genes, and like god or fairies do not have to confer any specific advantage, but can evolve through culture without any reference to somatic evolution or reproduction. Such "memes" can persist and move into other cultures like viruses move across species. — charleton

Illusion of free will is not like a meme. You experience it.

Sorry, I have no idea what that even means. — Pseudonym

Could consciousness be causally efficacious? It is mere illusion.

Illusion cannot have any functioning.

As I said above, the point is to highlight potential discrepancies in stimuli. If we're expecting all our stimuli to be coherent then we are more able to spot when one might be in error. It allows us to shortcut thought processes that might otherwise consume too much energy "what shall 'I' do next?" is quicker than "let's just consult all the various influences that might have a view on what this body should do next". Being able to predict other people's behaviour is also useful and much quicker if we think of people as individuals. There's loads of potential advantages, but they're all just using the conscious self as a shorthand sketch of what's really going on, it's not accurate. — Pseudonym

But all you mentioned is not possible to be done with single conscious process. For example, what is error and how we could distinguish it consciously if there is nothing to compare?

That is a separate premise.