One way to think of eternity is through temporal dimensional consciousness. This is just a complicated way of saying "awareness of time." Anyone that has studied philosophy knows the many issues of infinite regress and the problems of determinism. These are even greatly complicated by notions of eternity and infinity.

Eternity, for example : What was the first cause? Is a question from regression. Eventually, you stumble on eternity to which the Cosmos or something outside of it, must bare as a constant feature. Either time is perpetual or that which created time is. That is the conclusion I reach through my reasoning, that I would say any pondering person would come to reason too, After that, you might consider cosmology or an ontological statement that "All being is contingent upon something eternal."

Infinite duration is the same thing as eternal duration to which I would, as you have, place both in the "same basket." Yet, there can be relatively simple distinctions made between them.

The further you go into the contemplative wormhole the bigger the limits stretch. I'll be happy to share anything you might be able to ask me about when it comes to this subject. This just happens to be where my mind is taken to nowadays when free-thinking. . .

I don't think one person can make everyone humanistic (that is having a fundamental notion of existence as a human), but it never hurts to spread the simplistic ideology. Its a matter of ontology. Accepting that we are ALL human beings at a fundamental level and using it to booster our notions of ourselves, in my ideal is the primary way to reduce such ideological stresses and conflicts.

Like I said, its not something one person can do on their own. "Converting people to humanism" is a life-goal of mine. I doubt that is a viable solution, for the extremist don't give up the religious beliefs they so heartily engender. I know people who wouldn't give up their faith no matter the evidence (or absence thereof) presented to them. Some would rather die than deny their faith. People are unreasonable, and so we have kings against kings, pawns against pawns, on the board.

Understanding and living by principles in economics instead of basing your whole ideology on irrational and unrealistic doctrine is the best way to go. It comes along the way of being humanistic and scientifically minded. Being able to have government leaders that represent the people and having means of being economically reasonable is a facet of any thriving country.

"Is it a change in philosophy that is needed?"

Philosophy is key in opening minds to the realities of human nature and everything that follows from it.

"Alexander the killer?"

I am not sure what you mean here. Perhaps you mean that we should not praise those who are in fact ruthless murderers (have raging psychopathy). I wouldn't excuse how ATG handled his ambitions, but if he were more refined, more civilized, he wouldn't have needed to be a mass murder to change the world. It just so happens that those that have done that, are sometimes seen as MAJOR victors in history. There are other ways to achieve victory.

I am remind of a similar instance in history where millions of Indian people died off (in the Bengal famine of 1943) because the U.K. (specifically Churchill) didn't want to create any humanitarian aid there. This wasn't decided on religious grounds, i.e. they weren't starving because of religious authorities, but it was anthropogenic -- like the given.

Even though the United States is strict on the dictum of "We will not comprise with terrorists" there will probably be other wealthy countries that do provide aid. If no one does all parties involved and not involved can be cast in the light of history as responsible, but I think that most of us will see it, judge it, as the result of extremist theocracy.

If you would have asked that to me when I was a teenager, I would have said that I thought that. So YES I have thought that and taken it literally. Now, I am on such terms with "creator figures" that I would never take the Biblical version too seriously. Why isn't Sean Murray , creator of procedural generated universes, deified? "He should be," is quite preposterous. He is just a creative being, just as most intelligent beings are. LOL

Man, we don't know when our "world" will come to an end. I doubt any mythology really is problematic for fore-seeing such. Science offers us all sorts of end of the world scenarios. If you look it up you would see that the world as :the universe: will not die out (hypothetically, See: Heat Death) for trillions times trillions of "years." Some people that I've known are so set on eschatology that have no scientific backing. I hope those will enter the dust-bin so people can be more realistic about the future of themselves and reality, in a future.

There is some kind of break and convergence between A) Being able to translate languages B) Understanding languages. I am not sure what those differences and similarities are, as I have never posited the two for comparison. Computers are capable of both. I think @TheMadFool is right on defining understanding. It requires referents and those referents require some kind of experience of their objects That is linguistic empiricism in a pure form, but what it doesn't account for is 1) how we know things through rational deduction, where ONE lacks experience yet knows the premises and conclusions to be valid or invalid deductively. 2) And probably a whole different milieu of other cognitive quandaries.

A) Artificial intelligence can utilize any sensory device and use it to compute. If you understand this you can also compare it to human sensory experience. There is little difference. Can you understand that? There is no doubt in my mind, that B) even if computers can not understand everything understandable by humans NOW in A future they will be able to. This (b) is clearly demonstrated by the advancements in computing devices that has taken decades to improve; where-upon their intelligences have gone through such testing as the the Turing Test and others.

When you have reached a point where the both philosophies of life are crossed, it is up to your freedom of choice which you will apply. The option is part of your natural liberty. You can be content with what you have or seek to increase the value of your materials and personal status. When it comes to materialism, you may one-day ask yourself, I have this (x) (car, tv, offspring) do I want more of it, or do I want to increase my asset values? You may answer to yourself, "yes, I have enough, or "no it not good enough", while other things you might want to reach for. In both cases there is room for contentment and happiness. Of course, getting "being" and "having" mixed up is easy, but in one way (the materialist way) they are the same street.

I mean, I don't see anything replacing it anytime soon. We might be over-run by some primitive teachings, but that's a low probability. Science is as valuable and useful as its ever been. If we could measure such a thing, we'd see that the value of the sciences has increased over time.

I am somewhat supportive of transhumanism. I think there are extremes that could be considered outside of my support, similar to how I think of religious fantasism. I think we should take it slow and steady when it comes to converting ourselves into machine entities, if we do. I do think that the only way we are going to survive off our home world is by transitioning our main Sapient Hominoid species over to something purely mechanical or somewhat cyborg. I actually wrote a blog that turned into a short book on what I call "Robot Life." You can find it on amazon. I look forward to reading the posts here. Hearing other people's thoughts on the matter is of some interest to me.

"I think we can measure the utility of an idea considering of how effective it is to both parts: the one who developed the idea and then the other who perceive it." Agreed. I think this idea can be expanded upon.

The substance of an idea or its correlate is the thing itself. So an appraisal of an idea's utility would have to be some function of the material utility of what it represents???

I can say, "Some meat is a high source of vital proteins." ...but it means more than it is worth. Though the idea represents the value mentioned, the idea itself, is useless less applied in some sense. Living out the idea is more valuable than just thinking of it. So ideas are more valuable per their applicability. Now I just need to back track that to your point and make some sensical links there (fecundity and utility).

Hopefully, I can turn some of this into a blog. It will require much more contemplation, critical thinking, and questioning, though. I will link this page as a source on said blog, if it ever happens. :)

"Since, as per Wittgenstein, we can have our way with words, there's no point measuring utility - every word (idea) would be of equal utility, only the limits of imagination getting in the way of infinite utility." "Equal utility" because they can all be used in a worthy structure/syntax? I wonder what an idea without any utility would look like? Bringing up any idea kind of engages the idea with some kind of importance/utility.

I think Chomsky's famous non-grammatical sentence is a case when words with out "proper syntax" lack utility. WIKI - "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously is a sentence composed by Noam Chomsky in his 1957 book Syntactic Structures as an example of a sentence that is grammatically correct, but semantically nonsensical."

Its cool to think that the structure of a sentence/idea can add to its utility. Is there any reading you might suggest that works with the this and/or the main thesis?

I would like to see (or be referenced to) cross-culture studies of NDEs? What are the common denominators among cultures? I found some of poetic universe's ideas quite interesting, but I'll take a scientific article on the topic more seriously.

I think madfool provided some examples, and at the same time pushed us into bewilderment by noting "some series of variables can always repeat but we don't know when." Pattern recognition works easier when it is limited to a number of repeating sequences. I thought about your question for some time this week. xyxyxy=input xy = output is a recognition of pattern. However, visual cognition in AI can detect xy after only having it input once, such that input = xy output = xy. Very linear compared to pattern recognition which requires vast amounts of mathematics (which I have no notion of). I will ponder from from here on out. If you have any questions I will most likely come back to answer them, if I do repeat the initial behavior of visiting this site. :)

I am not a computer scientist but I would think that what is behind pattern recognition is to be considered a hardware problem, i.e. pattern recognition is a "natural capacity" of the brain to compute.

Pattern recognition is a sense of repetition. When variables repeat patterns form. I don't understand how that is sensed, though.

I think a computer scientist could explain this with far more depth.

Meditation doesn't stop human need. Any knowledge that is practical is applicable to fulfilling the rational needs of people. Both can be bizarrely irrational, especially in the extremists positions. The code of conduct for both religions is usually admirable, stop suffering/be kind, and love your neighbor as yourself. Great moral codes but you will probably prosper more from studying economics or business in the modern world.

A way of determining which is better is not about the plea of popularity but rather a determination of which religious countries profit the most, have the highest standard of living. If your wisdom doesn't mean you profit or someone else profits from its application it likely defunct.

Good and evil, like most other things, are potentials.

When a being is developed with conditioning that make him good he is good, when conditioned to do evil, he is evil. Once you reach a certain age in development, maturity, you are by the states ruling, free to act on these potentials. As reason befits them, so they act.

Some people's goodness is stronger than their evil side, and visa versa.

There is also genetics to consider, but I am a philosopher not a geneticist. I can only claim that some people are more prone to act certain ways, behave, more or less towards moral degrees, because of their genetics. .

Having a Moral Sense is very important. Since most religions teach of doing good and being good, religious culture offers good people

To act for good in and of itself is another step up the chain of moral notation..

I could do some creative thinking on this myself, but I am here to get other input than my own rationale will avail.

You can represent the whole of reality as "the total" reality, but you can't express such a reality in a representation that has all elements of itself. The tao that can be spoken is not the eternal tao. Studying branches of science, diminishing the vagueness of interpretations, I have found that the ultimate reality is hierarchical in structure or dimension. From the astronomical down to the quantum, where we exist somewhere in between (in what I call the fourth domain). Other than this one can regress back to Kant and his distinction between thing in itself and thing as it appears, nomena and phenomena. Lastly, I think the ultimate reality is the foundational reality which is "being." Everything has being. Awareness of having being is nearly an ultimate reality.

1. Layered Structures of Existence - http://lucidityhaslevels1.blogspot.com/ Also see: Hierarchy of the Sciences. 2. My work on progress and regress as well as some articles on advancing technologies. http://progressasconvergence.blogspot.com/

Reality emerges from reality. In the same way that atoms move the body, and the body moves the atoms. To ask, what does reality emerge from other than itself?

I just thought I had some input on this. How is it that religious people are so separate and defensive in their ideological bent identities that they can not see the unity behind their own being? We are all human beings, and if we could identify with that, even from a rougher scientific vantage point, I don't think such warfare would occur. As long as there are men with conflicting ideological or religious values, there will be limited peace. Its really an ontological issue, but I don't think those responsible for the murder of each other really see it that way. Because of this it is very sad what human's do and have done because of the aforementioned.

I am confused, how can something that exists in nature (mental reference of survival/existence) not be natural and understandable? If it were possible a leopard could know: 'that it had spots, and what that might mean for its existence." The spots don't disappear simply because he doesn't reflect on their natural causes." Man's natural position I don think it outside of nature, but internal and inherent in it. As spots are to a leopard.

God-of-the-gaps theory comes to mind. Accordingly, you can place a creator into an explanation, as a gap filler for any phenomena. An external cause or external creator as an argument from cosmology could be made but how can we know what this being is like? Such a being could exist, but how do we determine it without observation? I wouldn't think myself, in my interpretation of scriptures that such a being interacts with our world, although as I said others are inclined by the principle of gaps to fill them with a creative being. Such is the case in the positions of occassionalism vs. hard naturalism/materialism, which are the extremes of this kind of epistemological postulating.

There are three origins of insight namely: memory, sensation, and the rational faculty

Archimedes discovery into the fact that his sensations were telling him something he didn't have a memory of, a law of fluid dynamics, is an example of how insight can come from sensation.

To remove insight as from memory is biologically impossible. It would be like removing the frontal cortex and than asking someone if they had concept of who they were, or getting someone to generate a step by step process having had a frontal lobotomy. The thing is, the hippocampi and the rest of the brain work dependently,. So insight without memory is like unto this.

When it comes to reincarnation I don't understand the relationship here, i.e. I have little to go on (vague memory). :) Some say there are inherited tendencies or natures based on the laws of rebirth and karma/dharma, but I don't understand them in relation to biology or in relation to some transcendental or supernatural rules..

Great question, though. I look forward to reading other responses.

The rules of this universe and the laws of all universes are not all the same. There is the all possible world's interpretation which runs parallel to m-theory.

The model I use to conceptualize time is cyclical. The two types of singularity in the Cosmos are interconnected, and movement from one to another creates what I call Cosmic Time. The universe in this model is a perpetual motion machine, self-causing, self-creating, self-contained. I admire the working analogy for time as a single line of dominoes, but this analogy doesn't fit in with the Cyclical Model. it doesn't apply. Its more like the inflating and deflating of a balloon. The fundamental physics of Cyclical Time at as of yet very basic, at least mine are. They will improve their explanation power with time.

Yeah, but that's a start. I think I will widen my search. You guys have been helpful. Thanks.

I regard the values and thoughts of the technocratic thinker Jacque Fresco as what should be taught. I am also a transhumanist, and think that technology, science, and philosophy, should replace the values of religion. I'd say virtual reality has become the new religion for most of the newest generation of sapients.

This is very agreeable to me, concurring with some of my own thought on this matter. You can't get much better than that. :D

I think its a legitimate issue that philosophy deserves an educational revival. I for one have noticed that in the public schools logic is NOT an elementary lesson, but I think that it should be.

As far a creating some new form of thought or combined form of philosophy and science, this article doesn't seem to offer much. "Bringing back natural philosophy" seems to me as to trade apples for apples. Science was considered natural philosophy for most of history.

Thanks though, I liked reading the majority of it.

I have written on the nature of universal "cause and effect/teleology" in my book, "On Being and Consciousness." I hadn't read much of Leibniz before, but have been inspired to do so because of the content posted here. In my second edition I may have to add some of these ideas to the book for they speak of sufficient reason much more than I have done with my own contemplation.

Secondly, I didn't see much of inquiry here. Did you have questions about this philosophy or were you just putting it up looking for counter statements?

I think biology should replace religious morality. Understanding ourselves, and sensing wrong and right, should be an extrapolation of biological realities. Where there isn't a place yet met, go with practical wisdom, religious or not.

I am currently reading Rand. I bought her book "Anthem" for 3 bucks. Its definitely worth the monetary value and more.

If you weigh the evidence, the fors and the againsts, you will probably arrive at a probability, and thence confer with your conscience objectively about this.

See: LIGHT BODY

I think this is a purely mathematical question with a mathematical resolve. I, for one, do not have the motivation to resolve the issue mathematically.

I think there are other variables that unite man. I haven't had an inclination to the conclusion that hope is what unites man. I have been in and out of mental institutions my whole life, and hope there can be very lacking. These people have gone through wars through major loses, grief stricken, struggling with hardship. Hope by itself with no defined consequence (general as it would have to be) is rather obscure, and to conclude that hope itself is unifying would seem false to me personally.

Most of us have a sacred sense of life, where we conclude that almost any condition of life is worth living. Look at the highly disabled, immobilized by disability, we keep alive, because why? we think they have some worth to us. Your life isn't probably that morose compared to the life of others, who in theory may conclude that their lives are worth living.

Just because you can't see yourself doing something you set out to, doesn't make life any less worth-while. There are plenty of things you can do in life to feel worthy, from small things to bigger things. I wouldn't be able to judge your life worth just on what you have stated here, so I didn't vote.

Ends can exist in finite minds. I don't see why he has said they don't, nor do I follow to the same conclusion of there being an "infinite mind" from the given premises. Every cause has an effect, to this I agree, but I don't see how that can be used as a valid premise to reach a sound conclusion that God exists.

In any case I appreciate this post because it familiarizes me with an argument for God's existence I wasn't familiar with. Anselms ontological argument is much harder to refute or shoo away, but that's not part of the discussion at hand.