I wonder what Spinoza, and many of us philosophers would have made of quantum physics. — Jack Cummins

My guess is that he would have concluded, as Einstein & Penrose have, that QM is an incomplete physical theory (à la "Schrödinger's Cat") because it is incompatible with deterministic, local reality (re: EPR paradox, Bell's Theorem) because Spinoza is a strict determinist and realist.

One question may be what are the benefits and disadvantages of throwing the idea of 'God' aside in philosophy?

One benefits by dispensing with 'substance dualism' and superstitious connotations of the (non-explanatory) 'supernatural'. The primary disadvantage of a 'Godless' philosophy is that one must struggle with – to overcome – despair / nihilism / scientism. Philosophical naturalists, like classical atomists and Spinozists for instance, rationally avoid these disadvantages.

What we want is the truth; seeing quantum physics as God's truth is something we need to consider. — Athena

Why "consider" this when "God's truth" about "quantum physics" is not revealed in ANY of thousands extant sacred texts? :eyes:

How is the "distance" between me and the cup closed so my thoughts about the cup are really about that over there called a cup? — Constance

I don't think it can be, for the brain 'paints a face' on the cup as the noumena becomes phenomena.

One time I saw a fire burning at the base of a far away road sign; a closer look showed it to be some ribbons dangling and waving in the breeze.

Many religious believers speak of faith. I am uncertain of the basis of faith as opposed to rational understanding and its relationship to the everyday existential aspects of faith, and fear, in human life. — Jack Cummins

Religious faith is no more than hopes and wishes for there to be a supernatural realm, which doesn't grant it, leaving one but with the wishes and hopes one started with.

I picked up someone from church and apparently the pastor had been talking a long time about the 'foundation of faith', as if it was something, and then he built many more unknowns upon it!

What we want is the truth; seeing quantum physics as God's truth is something we need to consider. — Athena

Quantum Field Theory is by far the most successful truth in the history of science, its scientific model very well showing what goes on.

The quantum 'vacuum' has a base zero-point energy that is never zero and a base zero-point motion that is never zero. Philosophically, we would also conclude that Nothing and Stillness wouldn't have prayer of being so.

Generally, there has been so much harm done by religious beliefs although some find great comfort in them. It is not just religious wars but religious psychosis. I know people who have fears, such as being the devil or the Antichrist. I understand that Marilyn Manson believed that he was the Antichrist at one stage, until he came to the conclusion it was symbolic.

I remember how as a teenager I got so freaked out by some Christian people saying that there were demonic backward messages in certain music. One big example is Led Zeppelin's 'Stairway to Heaven', in which there is meant to be the words 'Satan is God' if the song isplayed backwards.

I was reading Bertrand Russell's summary of Spinoza and thinking about how interesting it is that Spinoza speaks of evil being a necessary aspect of God. I can see why he is radical and can be interpreted as an atheist. His ideas, whether he is regarded as a pantheist, or whatever are a radical departure from the religious ideas of the masses, but different from materialism.

Whether one is a materialist, pantheist, or an existentialist there is the confrontation with ultimate fear. The nature of existentialist fear is about facing the starkness of bitter truths, especially death and the unknown. Fear exists inside and outside of religious framework but is just in a different way.

I am inclined to see patterns and synchronicities in life experiences but that may be about my own narrative story making tendency. It is interesting how different individuals see life and the ideas of purpose and destiny so differently. It may be partly based on what wishes to believe, or some innermost subconscious conditioning, or even the nature of one's own life experiences, or a mixture of all of these. In some cases, some challenging experience, as well as philosophical reading and thinking, may lead to profound shifts in religious or non religious interpretations.

Language may not capture the full nature of the divine or numinous experience. The silence of meditation experiences may capture this, as does those who speak of mystical experiences. Of course, understanding in the rational sense is important, but it is limited. This is with or without the notion of God. The emphasis on the limits of language and silence were spoken of by Wittgenstein. He did not speak of God and it may be that the idea of God symbolises that which lies beyond the realm of knowledge. — Jack Cummins

Actually, I don't think language has any limits at all. Only when one takes language to be something it is not is there an error. If one calls something a tree and thinks thatin the calling there has been some kind of seeing what that IS, apart from the calling, then there is a misunderstanding of the nature of language. Language, rather, takes itself by the tail, like an oroboros, in every utterance. It seizes upon the world, bringing it to light, but in doing so, imposes upon the world an existence that is foundationally indeterminate, meaning language does not ever "penetrate" itself into the being all around it. Ask me what anything IS, and I can consult a dictionary: more words and sentences. BUT: it is IN language that the possibility to penetrate, so to speak, itself is raised. Language inquires "beyond" itself. The question, that "piety of language" Opens into metaphysics, "real" metaphysics, not the contrived stuff of ancient minds. All of this around me is formally tables, chairs, lamps, rugs., etc., as eidetic structures of intelligibility, but it is also, all the metaphysics of the commonplace. And so, back to limitations and language: This cannot be realized outside of language, this sense of alienation from ordinary things that discloses Being as such, any more than my cat can do logic. Language itself belongs to metaphysics, and by this I simply mean all realizations are born out of thought and its logic, and in order for the insight into its own questionability to be possible, language must be on, if you will, the other side of this question. Recall Wittgenstein saying that for something to make sense, its contradiction has to make sense, and hence, as I remember, metaphysics is doomed. But what apparently did not register with Wittgenstein (this is early on) is that this threshold of inquiry is a real "space" for thought to enter. Don't know if you've read any Heidegger, but his idea of space refers to the way thought rises into proximity when one encounters something, like entering a classroom and knowing instantly all about desks, chairs, lecterns, etc.; language games? Sure, but much more. The question is, can language "talk" not about what is beyond language, but what it is to "stand before" what is beyond language, even when what stands before language is language itself. Meister Eckhart comes to mind.

So language seems both finite and infinite, if you will. And in this, its limits are, well, weird and indefinable. A waiting-to-see is where we are. It puts us on the cusp of what-is-not-language.

Quantum Field Theory is by far the most successful truth in the history of science, its scientific model very well showing what goes on.

The quantum 'vacuum' has a base zero-point energy that is never zero and a base zero-point motion that is never zero. Philosophically, we would also conclude that Nothing and Stillness wouldn't have prayer of being so. — PoeticUniverse

That is very different from believing there is nothing between the plants, and what is in space is perfect orbs, and nothing in space changes. Seeing spots on the sun was heretical because that would make the sun imperfect. It was not only the church that did not approve of Galileo, but all the academics who held the explanations of Aristotle as true. I read it was the academics who spurred the Pope to take action against Galileo.

I am dumbfounded by the religious folks clinging to their mythology despite how much our understanding of reality has changed.

Why "consider" this when "God's truth" about "quantum physics" is not revealed in ANY of thousands extant sacred texts? :eyes: — 180 Proof

I like your post, however, I will argue, as long as there is an argument we need to argue. Forums do not restrict membership to those who have an agreement supported by the owner of the forum. :lol: Well I was once evicted from a science forum because I used the word "God". Fortunately, most forums are not so narrow-minded.

The art of debate is worth developing, and we can do that by arguing both sides of the argument.

Also, Jose Arguelles mentions galactic beams as compatible with the Mayan cosmology. Thanks to the Spanish and Christian fanatics, we don't have Mayan textbooks. However, Jose Arguelles gives an interesting explanation of how these beams affect life on Earth. His explanation is rather fantastic, but trying to understand the Mayan concepts is interesting to me. Communicating my understanding and receiving replies is part of the learning process.

I am dumbfounded by the religious folks clinging to their mythology despite how much our understanding of reality has changed. — Athena

What’s Fundamental has to be partless,
Permanent, and e’er remain as itself;
Thus, it can only form temporaries
Onward as rearrangements of itself.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fqQBHH_u5Vw

Yet physically, an optical disk is very different from paper which is very different from a sound wave, which is very different from sound waves. The physical substrate does not seem to matter much. It is the information (form) that matters, and arguably this is "immaterial" in a number of senses. — Count Timothy von Icarus

That there is always some form of physical substrate is the point. There is no "immaterial " information.

Information is like currency...fungible... in that it has to be in some form of physical substrate or other, but is endlessly interchangeable.

That there is always some form of physical substrate is the point. There is no "immaterial " information. — Janus

:up: :up:

Are you familiar with any of the physicists who suggest that information is ontologically basic and that matter and energy emerge from it? Sometimes it is dependent, but sometimes it is put on par with energy, or even prior to it, which is a pretty abstruse conversation. Suffice to say, I am not sure how matter could exist without the other, so if it is prior it, it must be a sort of logical or ontological priority (unless one holds to the idea that information is a sui generis product of mind and perspective, which some do).

If mass/energy is the potential to receive form, it's nothing without some informing determinacy. But we have no (observable) potential as such, but always a certain sort of potentiality in fields, even "void" being filled with all sorts of activity (which seems, by definition, to include information). Indeed, nothing could be measurable without information (one of the better arguments for why it cannot he a sort of "illusion" produced by mind; the "difference that makes a difference" seems to be prior).

You seem to be suggesting that our memories could be copied to another form and re-attached to our souls after death.

If memories and persons were "nothing but information" this would be the case. It follows from many versions of computational theory of mind. We could even be reinstantiated in a clever information processing system made up of paper towel rolls and rubber bands, if it had the same data structure. I actually find this a bit absurd, but it's not an unpopular idea. On a classical view, Laplace's Demon (or any Omega Point) should be able to resurrect us at will in any media of sufficient complexity, although the media we are formed from would have nothing to do with our experience of ourselves and our environment (a knock against such theories perhaps, since it suggests a sort of skepticism, and a greater ubiquity of Boltzmann Brains or stray Boltzmann thoughts flitting through the aether under dual aspect theories).

Sure, this is logically possible, but it's an ad hoc hypothesis that lacks supporting evidence. If this is something that occurs, I wonder why the deity bothers at all with brain-storage of memories, and why she fails to help out dementia patients with access to this resource.

I am not convinced that the exact substrate for producing minds is not important. Note that, while Augustine's experiences might be passed around in innumerable ways, they are only experienced when human minds interact with these records.

I won't speculate about God except to say that the existence of a regular third person substrate through which we can affect one another, and yet not simply merge into one another, seems to be a prerequisite for us to be individuals at all.

Are you familiar with any of the physicists who suggest that information is ontologically basic and that matter and energy emerge from it? — Count Timothy von Icarus

The idea makes no sense to me since information, as far as I know, is always carried by a material substrate. Also science informs that for the majority of its existence the universe contained no interpretants, which would mean that although there was a physically existent universe, there was no exchange of information. That said, some semioticians advocate for pansemiosis, and it really depends on how attenuated you are prepared to allow the concept of 'interpretant' (not to mention 'mind') to become.

That something can be a sign for something else is a process which cannot be modeled entirely in physical terms, but it does not follow that the processes involved are anything other than physical, it just follows that they cannot be a matter of mere efficient causation.

As @apokrisis often reminds us, there is an interplay in the physical world between global conditions and local causation, or in Aristotelian terms, final (and/or formal?) causation and efficient causation.

That said, some semioticians advocate for pansemiosis, and it really depends on how attenuated you are prepared to allow the concept of 'interpretant' (not to mention 'mind') to become. — Janus

As a pansemiotician, it is heartening that physics has arrived at this dichotomy of information-entropy. An Aristotelean tale of form and matter that speaks of a reciprocal local-global order to Nature that can be measured or weighed in fundamental Planck-scale units.

Information is physical in being the global holographic horizon on the Cosmos. The lightcone causal structure. Entropy is then the other thing of the local material fluctuations or degrees of freedom.

So it is holomorphism made science. It is the systems view after it has been modernised by special relativity and quantum mechanics.

Although the physicists who push the informational turn in physics don’t quite understand that this is what they have done. Or at least in the popular accounts, information is spoken of as the very stuff of reality - the new substance that replaces the old material substance.

As ever, when dichotomy such as hylomorphism arises, it is treated as a dualism that needs to be reduced to a monism. And the systems approach says that instead the dichotomy is the path to larger whole that is a hierarchical structure. The triad of an upper and lower limit to reality, with reality then being the stuff - the informed being - to be found inbetween.

Then another confusion is that biosemiosis is the further step that is an organism that models the world in terms of a semiotic system of interpretance. A subjective point of view gets inserted into the pansemiotic or hylomorphic physics. A physics that is ruled only by its completely general finality of thermalising.

So physics has moved to a pansemiotic story. Yet a lot of effort continues to go to making it sound like the new monism which a reductionist metaphysics must arrive at.

And yes, semiosis and pansemiosis are the same thing at a deep level, yet also completely different in that physics has no internal model or internal point of view. It just emerges in a regular dissipative structure fashion.

While life and mind can take a personal interest in how entropy is produced as organisms can encode the information to impose their own mechanical constraints on the physics of the world. Organisms can have habits of interpretance that are the behaviours freely emitted when the organism feels it has been given the right signs by Nature.

I don't think it can be, for the brain 'paints a face' on the cup as the noumena becomes phenomena.

One time I saw a fire burning at the base of a far away road sign; a closer look showed it to be some ribbons dangling and waving in the breeze. — PoeticUniverse

One step further: That phenomenon which is a cup cannot be conceived as apart from its noumenality if 'noumena' can be made sense of at all. There can be no "other side" of noumena, for one would have to draw a line upon the noumenal itself. All that is metaphysically sustainable, is so because its ground lies IN the world before us. Noumena is a term that abstracts from the given of the world. That cup as it is before you IS the metaphysics of the world. The question then goes to how phenomena sustains the positing of noumena.

The question then goes to how phenomena sustains the positing of noumena. — Constance

Qualia are the brain's own invented language?

As a pansemiotician, it is heartening that physics has arrived at this dichotomy of information-entropy. — apokrisis

As far as I understand in biosemiotics it is the membrane which is the basic interpretant. So, I wonder what serves as interpretant in the pansemiotic conception. Hoffmeyer seems to think of the evolution of the membrane as the origin of 'minding'.

I don't have any kind of grasp of holomorphic functions (my general understanding of mathematics leaves a lot to be desired). Is there any way you can make "Information is physical in being the global holographic horizon on the Cosmos" understandable to me despite my being math-challenged?

The idea of entropy as local material fluctuations or degrees of freedom is new to me. I think of entropy―the omnipresent tendency to dissipate― as the most universal global constraint.

The idea of information as substance has never made much sense to me―some like to think that information, since it can be manifested in different media, is independent of any substrate―but that seems to transform information into a ghost. Can we make sense of the notion of a ghost as substance―not the ghost in the machine, but the machine as ghost?

As far as I understand in biosemiotics it is the membrane which is the basic interpretant. — Janus

The membrane is certainly one of the expressions of a biosemiotic relation. But what does it represent? It speaks to the organismic imperative of being able to separate self from "other". And so the immune system is also frontline in that. It is constantly making judgements about molecules and whether they are part of the self or an intrusion on that self.

Is the viral particle part of me? Is that arthritic bone spur part of me? Is that mushroom I ate something to be digested or violently rejected?

So a membrane is a general barrier. But it is also a system of gateways – pores that just passively regulate the molecular traffic for the simple stuff or actively manage it for the critical stuff. And interpretance would be that general orientation of the organism to being able to maintain its integrity, plus then the further thing of acting from that position to achieve its larger purposes.

With interpretance then, the membrane would only be basic in the sense of creating the most physical level of separating the me inside from the world outside. It all then gets much more complex even just with the intelligence built into the pores that do the actual trans-membrane regulating based on a larger traffic of signalling.

Is there any way you can make "Information is physical in being the global holographic horizon on the Cosmos" understandable to me despite my being math-challenged? — Janus

A holomorphic function is something else. It is a function that is "holistic" in the sense that it uses a number base that is more complex than the reals. Instead of counting points, you are counting something else like rotations.

Holography is the idea in physics that the dimensionality of the world is just as real as the material events it contains. If you have a dimensional boundary – such as arises due to the speed of light at the horizon of a black hole or the cosmic event horizon – then that becomes a necessary element of the physics. It imposes constraints on what can even occur in terms of the local material events.

So if you imagine space and time in the classical Newtonian fashion as an infinite Euclidean void, then they are just a passive backdrop that place no constraints on what can happen physically within them. You just have atoms banging about and a vacuum which plays no causal role in that.

But once you relativise spacetime, then the speed of light – c – becomes a bounding limit. No causal connection can exceed c. And that then forms horizons that are perfectly real. A part of Nature with its own measurable consequences that the physical theory can't ignore.

So when matter falling into a black hole passes a threshold, even the radiation can't escape. Radiation moves at c, but the gravitational gradient is sucking it down faster that that rate. The radiation thus disappears from the lightcone which defines our physical reality. The light that has gone over the black hole's horizon can no longer affect us causally, just as we can no longer interact with it.

The same with the cosmic event horizon as a global boundary on our small corner of the Universe.

In a Universe being accelerated by dark energy, an event horizon forms where even light that crosses the boundary can no longer return. Like a swimmer stuck in a rip tide, it can strike out towards us at c, but the tide of space under it is now moving away at a superluminal rate. Like the Red Queen's race, the horizon becomes the spot where light is running is fast as it can just to stand still.

The current event horizon is sat about 16 billion light years from us. That is the cut-off. Light emitted by stars to the other side now can't reach us anymore.

So the horizon isn't particularly material. It just reflects the fact that the relativistic view of spacetime creates a structure of boundaries that then have direct consequences in terms of the decoherence of quantum events. The Universe rather than being causally continuous and infinite is instead holographically finite. Able only to impose its light-speed causal connections within a finite region and so only able to decohere or collapse a finite number of local events.

Its sort of like if you buy a fish tank. For a certain size tank, you can safely house a certain number of fish. Container and content are in a physical relation. And for physics, the relation between the two becomes mathematically exact.

A difference would be that over-fill your fishtank with entropy or local quantum degrees of freedom and the gravity of matter content would collapse the tank into a blackhole. It is more dramatic than the fish just dying.

Alternatively, endow your fishtank container with an accelerating expansion and the fish will find themselves becoming lonelier and lonelier as all their tankmates get physically carried over the horizon that is the threshold speed at which any fish could swim. No matter how hard they might struggle to remain together in a fishy school, spacetime itself would look to be carrying them off away from each other at an ever greater rate.

So holography is a holistic view on causality. It says dimensionality is just as much a causal player as the supposed contents. It is as real as the local particles are real.

Even if the vacuum is driven to its heat death, it will still have its dark energy content because there is a cosmic event horizon. The horizon will in effect radiate with a last faint sizzle of photons. Just as a black hole also evaporates so that all its gravitationally bound matter eventually escapes (the black hole horizon contracting, and the evaporation speeding up, in proportionate manner.)

So the physical meaning of "information" is very different here to the lay meaning. It is a way to count physical degrees of freedom – the bits that are the atomistic contents of some spatiotemporal container.

Qualia are the brain's own invented language? — PoeticUniverse

Qualia is very much to the point. The brain is not. I argue that true qualia is not the appearance absent its concept (what Kant would call the "blind" intuition). For such a thing, like "being appeared to redly" is nothing at all, just being there which is the same as "being" as such. Its "thereness" lacks categorical distinction. But what it really lacks is affective categorical distinction---Qualia as it is discussed so disparagingly in analytic philosophy, is an abstraction from the original experience which is saturated with meaning, call it "value qualia," the importance and interest the color red is invested with in the perceptual event, this is what makes qualia a meaningful concept. The cup is possessed by the interest, however small, I have when I observe it, and this makes this relation between myself and the cup a singularity that stands apart from mere empty being. This is my position on qualia.

The brain? Hard to fathom this, I guess, but look at it like this: what does one do with the qualia we call the brain? Qualia, recall, does not have any particular object, rather, any and all objects are first qualia in the bare phenomenon. We tend to think the brain is first, the source of the conscious event in which the brain is seen, but this is not what is shown. Rather, we see the brain appearing as an appearance, and this appearance therefore is the real ontological ground for consciousness. Put plainly, consciousness and its appearances is PRIOR to any idea of a physical brain. The true ground for all existence is consciousness.

Put in Kant's terms, the brain itself is just a representation, like everything else. It has no privileged ontological status.