Don't think it's a moral debate worth having. If it can be done it will be and I don't suspect any of us are going to win an argument with a 400 IQ posthuman with a brain full of cybernetic implants and lab grown add ons, nor prevail against their 9'8 stature, 6 brawny arms, and adamantium bones. So, I'd prefer to join them and be an X-Man too.

To be sure, God will liquidate them if they are abominations, but this could be the next step in our redemption. The ape brain isn't so good at avoiding sin.

Plus the Chinese are already looking at it so we have to, and then I'm sure the ETs already did it so humanity has to. It's a highly modified techno dog eats regular bio dog universe out there if Earth is any example.

Everyone. There are more humans on Earth than we have the ability to sustain without releasing GHGs that in turn warm the planet.

Some have a larger impact than others. The US, Canada, and Australia have the highest emissions per person. Part of this is climate. North America is a lot less temperate than Europe. Massachusetts towns have lower average winter lows than Moscow or Helsinki, with the Mid-West being significantly colder, while large part of the population lives in deserts that are far hotter. More energy is required for heating and air conditioning. Much lower population density as well as intentional policy decisions to support cars over public transport also feed into it. Some poorer countries have surprisingly large carbon outlays though, Iran is on par with Europe. Poorer countries tend to use less.

That will likely change over time though. Technology offers a lot of ways for wealthy countries to reduce net emissions, so poorer countries may eventually have higher net emissions per person, which isn't great since they will also continue to experience rapid population growth.

Probably the place to focus policy wise is on optional choices people make that increase emissions a lot. Living in large dwellings, a majority of Americans driving trucks or SUVs, eating meat every meal. It's particularly bad in the US. Protein, eating meat every meal, is marketed as a way to lose weight, instead of, you know... eating less. People think passenger cars will explode if they touch a gravel road. In fact, every car I've owned I've taken up dirt roads for camping, even used to bring a crappy Ford station wagon up high clearance roads with the help of a wood board. Meanwhile people with Jeeps end up crashing them in 5 inches of snow in the South. We probably add at least another large country's worth of emissions because people refuse to learn to drive. Although really it's more of a fashion statement. Somewhere in the last 15 years using a pick up as the family vehicle became stylish.

In reading a lot of this thread, it strikes me that the many competing theoretical physics models of how the Big Bang might have occured are not particularly useful for answering this question in the sense it is often asked.

Swerve and symmetry breaking as causal explanations don't get at the more essential question: why is there something rather than nothing? From whence all this matter and energy? Or, as important of a question, why does it behave the way it does?

It's unclear to me if physics can give us an answer on this. Physics is the study of relationships between physical forces, but how can it study why those relationships are what they are?

The problem with setting up the existence of matter and energy, or their fundemental behaviors as "brute facts," is twofold.

1. Many things we once considered brute facts have turned out to be explained by even more fundemental forces and particles. The onion keeps being peeled back. A lack of ability to progress in explanation does not mean there is no deeper explanation.

2. This answer is highly unsatisfactory, and explanations of theoretical models with varying levels of empirical support and claims of predictive power all amount to so much window dressing on "I don't know, it is what it is."

Of course, the entire question also seems to presuppose some sort of "God's Eye View" through which all truth corresponds to facts of being. I am not so sure this sort of correspondence epistemology actually makes any sense. On the one hand, it seems beset by the skepticism that has hung like a cloud over modern philosophy, "how can I be sure of anything except for my internal states," and on the other it takes a view of knowledge as somehow pure and ahistorical, when it appears that knowledge is more something that evolved and changes forms over time.

Yes.
Don't know. How would it be rolled out? There are gaps in the current system. All most people got as proof of vaccination is a flimsy paper card that is easily lost or destroyed. My first shot was recorded by my health insurance company but my second, at a mass vaccination site while traveling was lost in the ether. Mandatory vaccination for school districts works because the case load is low and pediatricians have had decades to be forced into adequate records compliance. With the vaccine, my fear would be people losing their jobs, access to services, because the shots were flooded out without good records keeping. This would also probably hit poor people worst. This is less of an issue if it continues to be shown that additional shots aren't a risk, since people could just get another.
Yes.

Surely the Reptilians would resist that though. They already have a monopoly on powerful people.


inanimate matter -> animate matter -> animate, thinking matter (us) -> the attaining of the Absolute

That's why the ETs are observing us, to see if we can do it. Hence all the wild UFO sensor readings on US military aircraft.

That's how I think of the simulation problem too. I think people are getting ahead of themselves when they start worrying about stuff like the speed of light being potential evidence for the universe being simulated. We already are in a simulation. We don't interact with the real, the noumenal. We interact with internal simulations of them. When I see a car roll up to a stop sign I only understand it in relations to the symbols superimposed on the purr sense immediacy. The sight alone is just a riot of colors and shapes, it's the simulation I understand (and of course, even sense immediacy is a simulation of what is going on outside).

So we're in a simulation. I suppose we could also be a simulation in a simulation, but rather than a universe running on a PC, we could be the thoughts of another being thinking of what it is like to be an "other.' This is the interpretation of God of the mystic Jacob Boehme.

God is everything. God wants to know Itself, and must do so through Its self. Thus it posits that which it is not, other minds, through which to know Itself. We know there is something not nothing, because we're here. A thing is defined by what it is not, the negative, and so it makes sense that God must create the other to be as something can not be without a definition.

Who is thinking?
It's probably better to think of what is doing the thinking. While folk psychology generally has an individual as a unified whole, an indivisible actor, modern psychology and neuroscience paints a picture of multiple interlocking systems, with varying degrees of specialization and autonomy. And indeed this view predates modern science by millenia, with plenty of writers pointing out that we often don't act as a unified whole. Nietzsche was writing about a "congress of souls" instead of a unitary soul at the opening of Beyond Good and Evil long before we had MRIs.

When Descartes went to "I think, therefore I am," he is perhaps making a bit too much of a leap with the "I" part of the claim (this was a critique of Hume's).

As an example of this, people with split brains, brains that have had the major connections between the two hemispheres of the brain severed, experiences a lot of abnormal cognitive issues. For instance, if you ask them to write down their ideal career, each hand will give a different answer, and they will not be aware of the discrepancy. So which answer is the real one? I'd say both. Both are the results of thought, they just aren't being edited into a single result due to lack of communication.

You see this with the experience of volition as well. Folk psychology posits an individual decider, the soul or ego, which makes choices and enacts voluntary actions. However, when testing voluntary movement, research finds that the begining of a voluntary motion begins before a person experiences the sense of deciding to move. The movement begins, and the sense of choosing is retroactively formulated.

This is common to all movement, but blindsight provides another good example. People with damaged eyes can't see, but they can still imagine sights and dream of vision. On the other hand, people with a sufficiently damaged visual cortex do not experience sight, despite having working eyes. They cannot visualize and do not dream of vision. However, some of the connections from the eyes to the brain don't run through the visual cortex, some run to the motor cortex. And so you get blindsight. People who don't experience sight can nonetheless navigate rooms using vision and even catch things thrown at them. When they make these movements based on a sight they do not experience, they come up with all sorts of explanations for why they made the 'voluntary' movements they did that appear to be inaccurate. Again, an example of a lack of unity in thought.


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As for your position that thought isn't created in the brain, how do you explain the fact that injuries to the brain result in profound effects on thought?

Is thought non-physical, existing in a sort of ether?

If so, how does this non-physical thing interact with our physical bodies?

Why do drugs radically alter perceptions by changing the chemistry of the brain? Thought should be safe if it doesn't live in the brain.

Why are brain imaging techniques so effective at predicting mental health disorders or the effects of brain injury?

I think this to mean that bits of matter somehow represent ideas, in the same way that codes represent objects in, say, computer systems. It seems natural, even obvious.

The problem is that even very simple mental operations can generate enormously divergent patterns of neural activity. Very simple stimulus and response patterns in mice are subject to what is called 'representational drift' - the same stimulus evokes responses in very different regions in the brain over time. Same thing happens with humans, albeit even more complicated. I read that long neurological studies attempted to trace characteristic patterns of activity in human brains when learning simple tasks, like memorising a new word, but that the activities were so divergent that researchers could detect no consistent pattern despite years of studies (see Why Us?, James le Fanu.)

Furthermore, consider the way in which a divergence of symbolic forms can be used to convey the same idea. A number can be represented by a variety of symbols, but they all specify the same idea. So the meaning of the idea is in some sense separable from its physical form. The mind, of course, can recognise such equivalences and translate one form to another - but again, can that be understood as a physical process? I think rather that it's a pretty cogent argument for dualism.

Right, when memes are said to live in the host, it isn't in a particular set of synapses we're talking about, it's a set of processes that give rise to a corresponding, similar-enough, set of mental phenomenon. Memes are abstractions that live as part of the emergent system of conciousness in their hosts. However, I think memes can still be understood as physical processes. The evidence for this is that people with damaged brains stop being able to understand ideas. If there is a powerful idea in a society, one that dominates their conciousness, and that society and its texts are destroyed, the meme vanishes until some lost text is found and translated by archeologists. It doesn't hang out in the ether, or if it does, no empirical evidence for it can be produced. So maybe it is the case that the idea lives on in an eternal realm, but the eternal realm is not necissary to explain ideas.

That you can't pinpoint the physical location of an idea, and that the activity that makes up the idea changes from moment to moment isn't at all incompatible with the findings of neuroscience, it's what we should expect. If ideas corresponded to hardwired structures then we'd have a finite memory capacity and would loose very specific bits of information with age and neuronal death, which isn't what we see. I would also disagree with the code analogy. I think brains as computers analogies generally do more harm than good in explaining things. When you write code, the meaning of your operations doesn't shift over time. Individual strings remain constant. That's not how brains work. The pattern of neuronal activity associated with something as simple as a smell varies over time, eventually corresponding to entirely different sets of neuronal activity. Since the subjective mental phenomena don't appear to change over time, this appears to suggest that the process, not the medium in which it occurs, creates the mental phenomena.

It's like how ecosystems exist but aren't located in a singular location as well. The movement of ideas works the same way that a terraforming operation could recreate an ecosystem in any physical space using none of the same material.

So I don't think you need non-material ideas to make sense of ideas. You just need a model where there are myriad ways to represent the same idea. The other problem for eternal ideas is that, if they are not material, how do they interact with our material brains? It seems like you'd need some version of Decartes pineal gland in place for that.

Which is not to address that the "material world" is itself a subjective abstraction made up of ideas, and that, in every sense, our understanding is the product of ideas. I find valid arguments for forms of idealism or dualism in that direction, just not in Plato's original direction of pointing to seemingly eternal ideas.

I never really bought the idea that reducing the number of forms and making actualities be the product of mixtures of a smaller set of forms solved the Third Man problem. Plato himself gets at this in the Parmenides when he says there aren't forms for dirt and mud, but that there might be for more essential items. However, you still have the problem of infinite regress with the form of the large or small. The only solution I find particularly appealing there is to boot out the forms that are necissarily comparisons (e.g. small, large, bright, etc.), but then you still have to deal with them in some way.

Aristotle's categories seem to get around this issue in a much better way. I mentioned Hegel before because I think the synthesis there provides an explanation of how the universal and the particular can interact in being in a "circle of circles," while avoiding the Third Man Problem, through rejecting epistemological realism entirely.

Not really. I'm not saying it's the case, it's just a model that explains the forms and how they could arise from material processes.

Yeah but for the materialist, these mental objects are located in the brain. There is a model for explaining how concepts like God or math can spread across billions of human minds, memes, parasitic reproducing bits of idea. They have a physical being in the neurons of their hosts. God is just a very effective meme.

For memes undergoing natural selection pressures as they reproduce in their hosts it only makes sense that ones that explain the world well and have predictive power would come out on top. Mathematical ideas are memes they are successful because they have utility for their host.

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To get back to the original post, from an idealist perspective , Hegel, you have the universal (forms) producing the specific, since we can only understand the world through ideas (universals). Since the true is the actual, and the truth is the whole, it follows that it is these ideas that give rise to the world of experience, the only world we can speak of directly. It also develops that world to become more complete, to reach a higher stage of truth.

It's a take I find appealing. More than I do Neoplatonist or Gnostic versions, which have the forms living in a kind of magical soul dimension of pure mind and pure ideas. The problem there, is that, as Aristotle showed, and Plato acknowledged in the Parmenides, the world would be filled with various infinitely regressing forms- a whole dimension of reductio ad absurdum infinities.

Maybe it's the framing of physics that is throwing me, but, at least in that context, "universe" does not apply to a class. Nor does it do so vis-a-vis the Big Bang. The universe is the sum total of actual energy and matter that exists, and the volume occupies. Thus the Big Bang talks about the universe expanding. Indeed, some of the best evidence for the theory comes from evidence of this expansion. Classifications don't expand, these text books clearly refer to an expanding material entity, the universe. References to "other universes" generally don't mean "other classes," they mean parallel sum totals of mass and energy that don't interact with each other, or only interact in the magic of science fiction.

In modern English, the class argument probably applies better to the word "being," but I suppose decades of Big Bang being a headline theory might have changed the sense of the word universe since Russell.

I think the idea would be that several aspects of the universe, namely physics' fundemental forces, would be uncaused brute facts; they simply are and produce effects. You can't talk about what does not exist as part of the universe in the same way you can't talk about a round square. "Universe" is just a category for the set of things that can have meaningful statements made about it.

I think this gets back to Parmenides and the problem of language in dealing with actual potentialities versus actualities. So the idea of a unicorn exists, it exists as a meme that lives encoded in human neurons, but the actuality doesn't exist, but it doesn't not exist in the same way as a round circle does, i.e. ruled out by contradiction.

It's been a while since I read Aristotle and it's 5 am in Mountain time, just couldn't sleep, so I'm not going to hazard an explanation of him here, but I feel he did a pretty good job parsing out the difference between potential and actual events, which answers the Parmenidean problem of how what is not can exist in our minds, or exist in the past. In that sense, it is meaningful to talk about potential actualities, and I think using the universe as "the material world" in which the potential becomes actual is a useful definition.

I'll try to find the relevant passages. I think universe could be used meaningfully. The problem is you really have two definitions, the physicalists universe as all actual material, and its potential states, versus the subjective world with all potential experience. Confusion there is a problem of definition though, not a problem of logical contradiction. "That" and "the" aren't nouns and the universe is and I think Russell's claim runs into the problem that universe certainly can be defined meaningfully in the way the word is most commonly employed.

I suppose the problem for physicalism in asserting various aspects of material being is a set of brute facts is on the one hand, that we keep peeling back layers on the onion and finding that these brute facts do have causes resulting from other layers of fundemental forces, and our elementary particles prove they can break down into even more elementary particles. Newton's gravity was brute fact, and highly predictive and it ultimately was disproven. This is more of a problem vis-a-vis the Big Bang because generally we have to posit fundemental forces changing in that enviornment. The other part of the problem is the Hard Problem of Conciousness, and a gap in explaining how subjective experience arises, and how, if everything is filtered through it, we can posit meaning without it. Because to talk about meaning without an understander can also be said to be meaningless.

These don't seem to be problems for Russell because he is handwaving it all away as meaningless, but if I read him right he seems to be falling back into a Parmenidean trap. It always struck me that Russell fell into the habit of mistaking what his analytical tools worked on for being synonymous with being worth consideration. If the tools he favored didn't work for a problem, the problem wasn't real, was meaningless, or at least should lay outside philosophy.

Is good then defined by the absence of evil?

I suppose many philosophers would have said yes. I like the Gnostic argument that the material world as a whole is simply an accident, but who can say?

At this rate, the party is coming to represent nothing more or less than personal loyalty and subservience to the infallible personage of Donald Trump.

For me, it's that the cave is in fact sealed, a tomb.

Kant showed us that we cannot interact with our physical world. Everything is mediated by the structures of the mind. We cannot see the noumenal world.

So what of the nominal world, the world of eternal forms, names in themselves? It seems to me that we also have a Kantian turn here in modern semiotics. Symbols forever refer to other symbols. Indeed, they help construct perception from the top down at least as much as sensory data does from the bottom up. However, symbols aren't eternal; they change, their meaning and are in constant flux, even at the level of individual understanding. My idealized form of the Good isn't what it was a decade ago, and there is no absolute truth to it outside references to other symbols. "There is nothing outside the text."

Thus, we can climb ever higher in our cave, but we can never escape to the light of the Absolute. Not only that, but we aren't truly in the cave together. We're alone in our own cave, only hearing others as they bang upon the walls of their own tombs. The shape of our tomb destroys these echos, so we never truly hear them either.

Perhaps, in a sort of Nietzschean mold, it is this climb itself from which we create meaning, not from any escape? Maybe, but I think we're more like Wiley Coyote, sprinting over thin air, about to plummet the second we look down.

Potential infinity is a matter that's settled. However, actual infinity is highly controversial.

My refutation of Anselm's argument:

Actual infinities don't exist.

I believe I may have found a problem with one of your premises though.

"Actual infinities don't exist," doesn't seem to follow from their being controversial.

I wouldn't get your hopes up. If there was solid information linking Trump to crimes it probably would have leaked by now. His CFO might go to jail. I wouldn't be surprised if Rudy goes to jail, but that's about all that can be hoped for. He can tie up any civil penalties for years, likely until he is dead, and one of the lessons he seemed to have learned from his decade of losses in the 80s is to risk other people's capital instead of his own, so his wealth will probably keep soaring on passive investment.

I don't know if I agree with that. The argument is that you can tell that your mind is a real one. You know that for sure, and that certitude us a real difference. On other minds it is necissarily agnostic.

That's one way to spin it...

That's a program for community outreach policing, C3, etc. Exactly what advocates have asked for.

And given both the:

A. Demonstrable low quality of many forces and;
B. Surging murder rates in urban areas and sustained high murder rates in the US generally,

I'd say it might be a wise investment. Several US cities have homicide rates higher than the Latin American states we have refugees fleeing from, it's not like crime doesn't need funding.

I don't think I'd blame it on a "rotting core." Was the US rotting in the 1960s when crime began to rise? Seems to me it was at its apogee then. The Baby Boomers had arguably the best period of widespread economic growth and social stability of any people in the history of the species, and crime boomed. Did the US radically get its act together in the 2000s? Crime plunged from the early 90s on, to its second lowest point in US history, yet income inequality was surging then too, and the foundations of Trumpism were being laid.

That's certainly one way to look at it. I think Whitehead is instructive here:

Whitehead makes quite explicit the fact that his theory of space-time structure differs in two major respects from the Newtonian theory. First, the theory of space-time structure in the Whiteheadian cosmology is a relational theory as opposed to the "receptacle-container" theory in the Newtonian cosmology (PR 108f, 441). Space-time structure concerns relations between and sustained by the actual occasions of the universe; it is not an actual thing in which the real events of the world occur. Second, the extensive continuum, of which spatiotemporal extensiveness is a more specific determination, is a "real potential" factor of thc universe in the Whiteheadian cosmology as opposed to absolute space and absolute time continua as real and actual things comprising the universe in the Newtonian cosmology (PR 113f; cf. 101-06). The coming-to-be of present actual occasions actualizes -- specifically, spatializes and temporalizes -- an extensive order for the universe. These two points will be referred to again as this investigation concludes.

https://www.religion-online.org/article/whitehead-and-newton-on-space-and-time-structure/

That is, space-time as a description of relationships between point events, as opposed to a real container.

One of the problems with global warming is that the costs aren't distributed evenly. North America, Europe, and East Asia gain the most from using carbon fuels, while the costs will be borne most by Sub-Saharan Africa.

The scale of the problem is almost mind boggling. Population growth in Sub-Saharan Africa across the century even for low level projections is astounding. A region that just passed a billion people five years ago will be more populous than all of Asia by 2100. More than half of all children on Earth will live in SSA (and this supposed massive out migration as well).

The obvious problem is that areas of SSA, with the exception of Bangladesh, will be the high density population areas most effected. Part of this is geography (Bangladesh for example is vulnerable due to its low elevation), and another large part is state capacity and resources. You have a situation where there is exponential population growth even as the climate deteriorates as state capacity is low, or as is the case in areas of CAR and the DRC, practically non-existent.

Just as the threat of WWI could be seen on the decades leading up to it, we now have the setting for a disaster that could dwarf both the World Wars emerging.

The effects in wealthier nations might be mitigated, although prior evidence suggests the influx of people fleeing distressed areas could easily lead to a destablization or even collapse in governance. Without strong states, mitigation will likely only occur in wealthy pockets, with investment at the local level.

So for example, the Las Vegas strip might be saved, even as the city is abandoned.

Thanks! I wanted to give Strauss credit but I was traveling and didn't have the book on me. He credits him in the text. I haven't had a time to finish the whole commentary because I have such a backlog that I have three Genesis commentaries alone I've started, The Man Who Wrestled With God by Sanford, a Jungian analysis, Mysterium Magnus, Boehme's rather mystical commentary, and this.

On a side note, I don't get why anyone bothers arguing about the six days vis-a-vis science. There is literally a second origin story in the next chapter that goes differently. Genesis clearly isn't focused on a scientific retelling of creation.

I think you're getting at a weakness there with the anti-natalism, but not via the direct route to "why?" The issue is when. How do you scope your moral calculus of harm? Providing humanity with petroleum science in 1600 would help alleviate suffering on a massive scale, perhaps for centuries, but would also help spur on massive population growth and pollution. When the two intersect, as they are now, you now get harm on a gargantuan scale from the same actions that reduced harm.

The US had this very issue with grain donations after WWII. The US grows a massive food surplus. Donating food to nations with starving people helps reduce harm. However, it then undercuts the price of domestic agricultural products in those countries, which in turn causes poverty and retards economic growth, creating harm.

The harm principal may appear to be grounded in something objective, but any sort of attempt at utilitarian analysis to pick between mutually exclusive moral actions shows it to be grounded in a subjective perception of the estimated effects of our actions.

We don't say someone is immoral because they tried to reduce suffering and unknowingly increased it, nor do we call someone moral if they intentionally try to increase suffering, but their actions actually reduce suffering down the line. So objective suffering doesn't actually seem to have anything to do morality, only our subjective predictions on how our choices might effect future suffering. Objective suffering is another thing in itself we can never truly grasp, we can only grope around the edges, at our perceptions of probable outcomes.

Even if we leave grounding aside, you still have an issue of scope. There is no objective reason to prioritize the end of suffering today against the suffering of ten thousand years from now. However, if you take a long enough view, you could justify acts of extreme harm to others today on the premise that they would reduce harm tomorrow.

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Anyhow, I would take it in a different direction. Altruism at the species level is based on the logic of reciprocity. The rules of reciprocity can be shown using game theory. Morality can be objective in that one could define optimal strategies for reciprocity that result in maximum benefit.

Ha, gotcha. That idea was a joke though.

[censored for secrecy]

Maybe 14 billion years of history and four fundemental physical forces is a huge simplification. Our creators could be dealing with 14 trillion years of history and forty fundemental forces working similar to gravity, the strong nuclear force, etc.

Anyhow, Yaldaboath doesn't need to simulate that entire universe, he and his Archons only need to simulate your experience, and really only the self conscious parts, so perhaps only 50 bits at a time. If you assume no free will, they also have a pretty good way to keep ahead of the information required to keep the simulation up, and they can always have you go to sleep to do patch updates.

I think the closer we get to being able to create brains in a vat in this world, the more likely it is that we actually are brains in vats.

There is also the possibility that our simulated universe differs from the "real" one (or at least the universe that is the next level up from us, since we could be a simulation in a simulation) to such a degree that whatever we are is very different from a brain in a vat. Our creators might have generated our world as an experiment to study the evolution of simulated matter that works in profoundly different ways from "real" matter, in which case, we can't extrapolate what we really are as seen by our creators.

It could explain the lack of intelligent life in our very vast "local" area. No need to explore space, a difficult proposition using anything but Von Neumann probes on absolutely massive timescales. Just get a Dyson Sphere going, plug into 2 billion years of power, and spawn a simulated universe.

For sure, but that explanation appears to be a ways away: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-05097-x

As someone who has woken up during surgery while under drugs designed to knock out conciousness, and reguarly can recall deep sleep dreams (as opposed to more common REM ones; deep sleep dreams much more like disjointed, repetitive fretting), my intuition is that memory is essential to ground experience. In this view, memory, particularly short term, plays a larger role than many people imagine. Living with someone with Alzheimer's makes me think this too. Ungrounded experience that doesn't record itself loses a lot of its character. I'm not totally sure how to describe it. Even if you can recall it, it is fairly alien.

You also have trains of thought and ideas vanishing into irretrievable oblivion as others shift into focus, while there is no clear sensory input. I think something analogous happens in regular conciousness, but the breadth of information coming in along with recursive processes to make the experience into an understandable whole help form it together.

This is pretty much the view of Boehme, and was picked up by Fichte and Hegel. I haven't read Schelling directly, but I believe his ideas fit here too based on secondary sources.

In the first creation story God created light before the sun, as well as plants. This obviously doesn't make sense from a pure natural sciences perspective. "Days" are themselves meaningless with no sun; this was readily apparent even in antiquity.

Thus, delimiting creation to 144 hours never made sense.

The Bible is a humanist story functioning on several symbolic levels. The creation story pairs things created on the Earth and things created in the heavens. So, each Earthly thing has a counterpart creation in the heavens. The next organizing principal is that each thing created as more freedom than the next. So plants come first as a fixed form of life, as do the immovable heavens. Creates progresses in levels of freedom, so for example, beasts have more freedom of movement and decision than plants, the stars move throughout the night sky and have more freedom in their relative paths and so come later. This culminated in man, having the most freedom due to access to reason coming last.



This book has a good breakdown of the symbolic linkages and ways the creation verses split into pairs.

Interesting stuff. The idea that the universe as information has always fascinated me on a few fronts.

First is how we should view universal laws, such as the speed of light, or gravitational forces. These appear to be wholly arbitrary, and indeed, it's a question if why they are what they are can ever be solved by physics. Physics is the study of the relationships between physical objects, relationships that can be described as laws. I'm not sure if it will ever have anything to say about why these laws are what they are.

This is relevant to the idea of God because if these laws were set to slightly different parameters, intelligent life, or life at all would be impossible. Tweak the force of gravity a bit and you don't get planets. And indeed, some theories do have these laws bending in the early universe.

Our universe seems to be finite both in size, history, and in divisibility. An infinitely divisible universe also causes all sorts of problems for the generation of material and is relationships with other material.

Thus, we have a universe of finite information, with rules of relationship that allow for the eventual creation of intelligent life.

This seems relevant to both theism and simulation theory. The laws of physics act as firmware, whereas the universe and the relationships of physical objects are code. It's the type of thing you'd expect to see in a simulated universe.

There is also a nice dovetail between these aspects of reality and the image of God as a being that must create something outside itself to define itself and thus exist; something like the theology of Boehme.

Interesting question I thought of related to this:

Suppose we were introduced to strong evidence that the universe was a simulation, such as say, some aliens coming down and pausing some of the laws of physics and telling us as much.

So the universe that our species evolved in is an advanced simulation running on some sort of "computer" in a "higher" reality.

What would you call that?

It sure doesn't seem like idealism to me, although idealist epistemological claims could still be relevant. However, it also doesn't seem like materialism. I mean, you could suppose that the universe that contains the computer running our simulation truly does exist materially, but your evidence for that would necissarily be limited since you're stuck in the simulation. You'd also have to posit the likelihood that you are in a simulation of a simulation, which could itself be simulation, and so on.

What exactly holds there, some sort of souless neo-gnostic monism?

I suppose an advantage of the thought of Boehme and his descendants is that it paints a logical, beautiful world that can encompass all these contingencies. However, Boehme tilts towards the mystic and away from the more concrete world of philosophy, although I think his major impact in philosophy is underrated. And the system breaks down in its coherence as you continue from the logic of negation and make the leap to Christ.

I don't see Poland and the Baltics letting the German army in for an invasion whose success would have been dubious.

And even if we allow this, which is a pretty huge leap, negotiating to invade Russia through other countries means losing the element of surprise, which was Germany's only hope. Once they got into a war of attrition they were doomed against the USSR.

Maybe if they get material support from the Western Allies? But that seems fanciful.

I'm not plugged into the counter terrorism world the way I was back when I worked in it, but I believe this stems from the mobilization of previously largely online anarchist groups during the 2020 riots, a similar phenomenon to the Boogaloo Boys.

Some of these individuals were involved in arson, producing fire bombs to use on police, etc. Setting a building with people in it on fire fits the bill pretty well IMO. There were also explosives used on a police station in Seattle although the damage was not extensive.

Probably also a political hedge. You know, "we're getting all sides." But also people don't want to fall into the mistakes of the 2010s again. We ignored far right terrorism because it produced very few fatalities, and was generally low level arson. Then we started having mass casualty attacks. You don't want to wait until you're on your 5th mass shooting to start infiltration and CVE efforts like we did with the radical Right.

One of the biggest ironies of the China issue is that a carbon tax would do wonders to help move manufacturing back to the US.

Chinese goods are cheap because Chinese labor is cheaper, sure, but it's also because the externalities and carbon impact of shipping goods back and forth across the ocean, and producing goods in a place with fewer regulations, are not factored into the price.

Instead of arbitrary, reversible tarrifs, Trump could have had a lasting system that boosted domestic production in carbon taxation.

I've always been more interested in World War I.

I think it's because of the complexity of Great Power politics back then. I find the Great Game conflict between Russia and the UK in Central Asia particularly fascinating.

By contrast, Germany in WWII was led by people who believes their own extreme ideology, and made them ignore military and economic realities. While Germany could conceivably win WWI without too many things changing, it's very hard to see a situation where they could win WWII. It was essentially hopeless.

So, I collect memoirs from around that period, mostly diplomatic. But selection is pretty limited, so I pretty much just grab all 19th and early 20th century diplomatic memoris I can find.

I think this actually the problem. There are multiple ways to define physicalism. I've seen physicists refer to their own experiments on non-local causality as "experimental metaphysics," but perhaps others would say the term doesn't fit.

My beef with some of the definitions of either physicalism or materialism (they get used somewhat interchangeably in many places) are those theories that expand their definition to mean essentially "whatever is shown as true fits the definition." Thus, non-local causality is now "physical." If we were to discover solid support for panpsychism and "phi" at work in the universe (IMO, unlikely), this too would become physical/material. The term becomes a stand in, not for any real hard set of statements about the world, but "whatever ends up supported by science." Again, the problem of nearing tautology.

This can be seen in the fact that materialism died as "everything is material," when physics began identifying things that are non-material, and was forced to accept more components of its monism. Now it seems likely it will have to do a paradigm shift into something new again. If physics has to start accepting things like phi (this is a dot out on the horizon now, not a real challenge) then physicalism might as well become defined as the statement that "real things are reality."

This was the equivalent of watching a boxer go out with the strategy of bobbing and weaving so vigorously, without ever throwing a punch mind you, that they hoped their opponent would get dizzy and knock themselves out...

The point I was making was that the materialist position was stronger a a century so ago when we felt we had a good grip on what matter was and it seemed like all that was left was to tie up some loose ends. The problem is in claiming all reality is something, and then being unable to define what that something is. Without a definition for the material you risk falling into a tautology, "everything that exists is matter. What is matter? It's everything that exists."

Physical models of yore would have rejected non-local causality as magical nonsense, but here it is. The necessity of an observer might be here to stay too. Maybe the definition of the physical can be stretched to contain these factors, but at that point it seems at risk of becoming meaningless, a stand in for "reality." It would be quite different from the materialism of the 19th century. Yet because that 19th century model is simple and useful, we still use it routinely, out of convenience and habit. However, we shouldn't confuse "useful" with "true."

As to impotence, if results are what matter, the idealists have plenty of those. As the grand father of communism and nationalism, the arch idealist Hegel certainly can't be accused of not getting results; the last two centuries have revolved around the ideas he helped birth.