• ucarr
    1.5k
    We know from ourselves that our universe is a consciousness-bearing universe.

    We also know from QM there is crosstalk between observer and observed, thus establishing the essential sociability of both existence and consciousness.

    With amazement we see at the sub-atomic level bi-directional negotiation between observer and observed regarding the identity of each.

    These facts alert us to the social design of our universe. It is not a place of isolation and solitude in any absolute sense.

    Few disagree that the natural world of our everyday lives is socially configured and socially negotiated. These are echoes of what physicists perceive more starkly at the sub-atomic level.

    Theism claims God-Spirit dwells beyond the natural world and, moreover, causes its histories and experiences as physical events.

    There is an issue with this claim that can be labeled the point-of-contact Venn diagram problem. As we know from geometry, when two circles overlap partially, they create a shared space or common ground known at the Venn diagram. It’s obvious that within the boundaries of the Venn diagram, the two circles exist as one. Well, if two circles intersect, it cannot be the case they simultaneously lie beyond each other.

    Point-of-contact precludes parallelism and thus all relationships assume positive values of sameness between inter-related things. Since theism centers the dialogue between God-Spirit and human, it necessarily assumes a positive degree of sameness of the correspondents. It even asserts human being created in the likeness of God-Spirit.

    With such claims, theism’s claim of God-Spirit’s transcendence of human’s physical realm establishes an untenable contradiction. If God-Spirit’s realm is parallel to our human realm, how does God-Spirit talk to us? How does providence nurture us into the good life?

    The unintelligible mystery of existence offers an answer to the point-of-contact Venn diagram problem.

    The short version of the answer simply says, “existence is social.”

    God socializes with human by way of the axiom.

    No one, neither God-Spirit nor human, stands alone. God-Spirit didn’t so much create human as allow for the co-creation of human alongside God-Spirit. This is why human has free will. This is love. This is Tevi walking out to the fence that encircles his hovel and having talks with God-Spirit, sometimes agreeing, sometimes arguing.

    Through the lens of theism, God-Spirit talks to science through axioms. Experiments like all other types of narratives must have a beginning. They take recourse to the axiom, assumption without argument.

    Every narrative boils down to some axiom or other because narrative is existence organized into meaning. Without the filter of narrative, sensory overload en route to chaos ensues.

    One might argue God-Spirit is fulminating creation without restraint. For this reason Moses on Mount Sinai had to look askance from the Presence lest he get ripped apart by excess of possibility.

    Now we have a useful synonym for mysticism, fulminating creation without restraint.

    Axioms as self-evident truths without argument is scientific mysticism.

    Existence is the limit of logic, the infra-structure of narrative.

    Narrative is human talking towards existence. The big “however” here is the presupposition of existence towards narrative.

    There’s no escaping this dog chasing its tail.

    Axiomatic existence is the arbitrary and necessary starting point for consciousness. Narratives can explain themselves up to the point of the naked fact of their existence.

    Existence, fulminating creation without restraint, remains unintelligible without consciousness giving it limitation and thereby form.

    Reality is the upshot of the negotiation of the yin-yang creative conflict of the two inseparable formative powers.

    Existence is divine. Consciousness is sacred.

    God-Spirit speaks the language of axioms. This is IAM speak.

    Denial of God-Spirit establishes a cosmic solitude for sentient beings in relation to existence; they are not solitary in relation to each other. As a whole, sentience by view of atheism is an arbitrary existence since science cannot explain or justify existence.

    Is life peer-to-peer? Given the recent lab fabrication of synthetic cells, the answer is almost “no.” Human is still operating at the Dr. Frankenstein phase of reconstruction of pre-existing vital parts towards construction of a sentient being.

    If we suppose, however, that human can fabricate sentience from the scratch of organic compounds, such fabrication fails no less than before regarding human silence face-to-face with the mystery of existence.

    Logic is a continuity. Existence is the limit of continuity. This is why there is not nothing. Nothing is the ultimate dis-continuity and continuity (and its categorical negative) cannot arrive at existence.

    God speaks in axioms. This IAM speak. Axioms to science is IAM speak. This is spirit world to science, as science is limited to continuity.

    Science gets its holy writ - self-evident truths from IAM speak.

    Atheism, denial of IAM speak = cosmic solipsism. It assumes physicalist sentience is alone in existence. But what about the axioms that science cannot create? These axioms ground science.

    Atheism = reductive physicalism. Theism is compatible with non-reductive physicalism.

    Existence is not a continuity. It is a serially transcendent holism. The spontaneous popping into existence of elementary particles is propagation from a physicalist ground; it exemplifies serial holism. Life propagating spontaneously from a physical ground is transcendent holism. Existence is peer to peer. Existence never propagates from non-existence.

    The mystery of otherness is ordained by the inherent sociability of QM entanglement of knowing_being. This cosmic tango requires a minimum of two. Given the essence of creation as a duet, we also have as essentials self-and-other and to-and-from.

    By action of its own intimate partner science, atheism is precluded from extirpating cosmic otherness.

    The two parts of the creation: self and other at present remain rooted in mystery. Existence is not a continuity, so space and time cannot tell us anything about the mystery of the cosmic duet.

    Serial holism is a fiction of language trying to rationalize existence which cannot be rationalized at the level of a 3D matrix.

    Perhaps 4D logic, another fiction of language, attains to a level of “continuity” that gives meaning to serial holism.

    Theism through faith knows we come from God but does not understand God.

    Atheism, though faithful, in the absence of physicalism explaining existence, has no idea where it comes from.

    The universe cannot create herself except through the mysterious dialogue of self and other.

    Existence, positioned beyond meaning, brooks no isolation and that is the undying hope of the cosmos.
  • Paine
    2.5k
    The spontaneous popping into existence of elementary particles is propagation from a physicalist ground; it exemplifies serial holism. Life propagating spontaneously from a physical ground is transcendent holism. Existence is peer to peer. Existence never propagates from non-existence.ucarr

    How do you know that a 'physical ground' is bereft of life? It seems like you excluded the possibility as an assumption in order to introduce it as a necessity.
  • Joshs
    5.7k
    The universe cannot create herself except through the mysterious dialogue of self and other.ucarr

    Atheism, though faithful, in the absence of physicalism explaining existence, has no idea where it comes from.ucarr

    This is the dilemma that both modern religious and scientific thinking has created for itself. It has managed to extricate itself from static mechanistic and rationalist models in order to embrace a perspective of holism, historical transformation, organicism, dialogical relationality and interdependence. And yet it still insists on deriving this dynamism, interconnectedness and historical becoming from a ground which is anything but dynamic. Why does change have to ‘ come from’ something unchanging , some dead first cause, either nothingness or a God who creates axioms? Isn’t such a creator the essence of solitude and isolation? Why not let time and history stand on their own, without having to nail them down to a beginning?
  • ucarr
    1.5k
    How do you know that a 'physical ground' is bereft of life? It seems like you excluded the possibility as an assumption in order to introduce it as a necessity.Paine

    If life has no discrete physical boundaries, does not emerge from non-vital substance, then the universe is wholly alive and the animism of the ancients has always been true. I hold no opposition to this claim. If I have implied otherwise, I have blundered in some of my assumptions and in some of my language.
  • Paine
    2.5k

    You have introduced a 'non-vital' substance to surprise us with what it is not. Aristotle took a different approach.
  • ucarr
    1.5k
    This is the dilemma that both modern religious and scientific thinking has created for itself.Joshs

    ...it still insists on deriving this dynamism, interconnectedness and historical becoming from a ground which is anything but dynamic.Joshs

    Why does change have to ‘ come from’ something unchanging , some dead first cause, either nothingness or a God who creates axioms? Isn’t such a creator the essence of solitude and isolation?Joshs

    I have tried to show that God-Spirit is never alone, was co-created alongside of human. I have tried to say identity is socially negotiated by insight of QM. I have placed the self-and-other dialogue at the core of reality. The gist of my premise, that IAM speak forestalls the isolation of solipsism, abhors a vacuum. Where have I said or suggested the creation is static?
  • ucarr
    1.5k
    How do you know that a 'physical ground' is bereft of life?Paine

    You first suggested I deal in the currency of non-vital substance.
  • Paine
    2.5k

    Did you not introduce transcendence as what the 'physical' could not provide?
  • 180 Proof
    15.4k
    We know from ourselves that our universe is a consciousness-bearing universe.ucarr
    Anthromorphizing compositional fallacy at the very least. And, without a clear conception of "consciousness" either in philosophy or science, the phrase "consciousness-bearing" is uninformative. The rest of your post, trafficking as it does in pseudo-science / misinterpreting QM's 'observer effect', doesn't make much sense either except maybe as wishful thinking (i.e. "theology"). Lastly, I don't recognize the theisms of Abrahamic, Vedic, or any other pagan faiths in your account, ucarr, so on that point, again, I don't know what you mean by "theism" or, for that matter, "atheism".
  • ucarr
    1.5k
    Did you not introduce transcendence as what the 'physical' could not provide?Paine

    Life propagating spontaneously from a physical ground is transcendent holism.ucarr

    In the above statement I'm trying to say consciousness is an emergent property of elements and compounds. This claim presumes a physical foundation of awareness that supports it non-reductively. The foundation and the emergent property, being linked, are not mutually exclusive.
  • Paine
    2.5k

    Yes, I see that you are not saying that one realm excludes the other. But how do we know enough about consciousness to recognize it as a player in the universe in relationship to 'physical' components you refer to as accepted facts?
  • ucarr
    1.5k
    Anthromorphizing compositional fallacy at the very least.180 Proof

    If there's one thing that's not anthropomorphic, it's human consciousness. What does human consciousness look like? Does your sentience, considered as a whole, look like your physical body? Yes, your sentience has an impression of your physical body. Does that motivate you to claim your sentience is a facsimile of your body?

    ...without a clear conception of "consciousness" either in philosophy or science, the phrase "consciousness-bearing" is uninformative.180 Proof

    We also know from QM there is crosstalk between observer and observed, thus establishing the essential sociability of both existence and consciousness.ucarr

    Without addressing its veracity, can you elaborate how the above claim is devoid of intelligible content?

    The rest of your post, trafficking as it does in pseudo-science / misinterpreting QM's 'observer effect', doesn't make much sense either except maybe as wishful thinking (i.e. "theology").180 Proof

    Is QM's vector-cloud of probability and its collapse not part of the observer effect? Is Shroedinger's cat never super-positioned as a life/death ambiguity? Is the wave function not hard to establish and easy to collapse within the lab?

    Lastly, I don't recognize the theisms of Abrahamic, Vedic, or any other pagan faiths in your account, ucarr, so on that point, again, I don't know what you mean by "theism" or, for that matter, "atheism".180 Proof

    Theism claims God-Spirit dwells beyond the natural world and, moreover, causes its histories and experiences as physical events.ucarr

    What is it about the above description of theism you fail to recognize?

    Does my premise that atheism, in denying God-Spirit's dwelling outside of the phenomenal universe, (thus rendering it a solitude of self-contained physicalist sentience), position itself as a point of obscurity to you?
  • ucarr
    1.5k
    But how do we know enough about consciousness to recognize it as a player in the universe in relationship to 'physical' components you refer to as accepted facts?Paine

    More than one physicist living today has claimed QM the most experimentally and phenomenally verified scientific theory of all time. Please present your counter-narrative.
  • Paine
    2.5k

    I was not questioning the validity of QM. It is the connection of that theory to the emergence of consciousness that needs more than wishful thinking.
  • 180 Proof
    15.4k
    Is QM's vector-cloud of probability and its collapse not part of the observer effect?ucarr
    Wtf?

    Is Shroedinger's cat never super-positioned as a life/death ambiguity?
    IIRC, the "live/dead cat" is only a construct within a thought-experiment that makes explicit some of the ways measurements of quantum phenomena are epistemically inconsistent with classical physics; the "live/dead cat" is not itself an actual phenomenon.

    Is the [u[wave function[/u] not hard to establish and easy to collapse within the lab?
    "Wave functions" are only mathematical structures and not concrete, or real, things (i.e. misplaced concreteness fallacy). Also, there are more than a few interpretations of QM in which "the wave function" does not "collapse", so ...
  • Shawn
    13.2k
    Perhaps 4D logic, another fiction of language, attains to a level of “continuity” that gives meaning to serial holism.ucarr

    What's 4D logic? Just curious...
  • ucarr
    1.5k


    I agree with you. Entanglement has all interested parties ruminating. Great!
  • ucarr
    1.5k
    Is Shroedinger's cat never super-positioned as a life/death ambiguity?
    IIRC, the "live/dead cat" is only a construct within a thought-experiment that makes explicit some of the ways imeasurements of quantum phenomena are epistemically inconsistent with classical physics; the "live/dead cat" is not itself an actual phenomenon.
    180 Proof

    I hope you'll agree thought-experiments are road maps to practice and experience. Google's qubit computer is not a thought-experiment. Is it?
  • ucarr
    1.5k
    What's 4D logic? Just curious...Shawn

    It is continuity of spacetime dimensional expansion within a hyper-cube.
  • Joshs
    5.7k
    I have tried to show that God-Spirit is never alone, was co-created alongside of human. I have tried to say identity is socially negotiated by insight of QM. I have placed the self-and-other dialogue at the core of reality. The gist of my premise, that IAM speak forestalls the isolation of solipsism, abhors a vacuum. Where have I said or suggested the creation is static?ucarr

    If God was “co-created alongside of human”, what accounts for the dualistic split between the natural( the human as a physical and biological entity) and the spiritual? These two realms seem to be interacting from across an unbridgeable divide. What makes scientific naturalism ‘isolated and solipsistic’ if not as
    one pole of a nature-spirit dialectic? In other words , don’t we first have to assume your nature-spirit co-creation , and then by subtracting away God arrive at a solipsistic physical nature? Don’t we eliminate the problem by not starting from the dualism of nature and god? That is , if all there is is the natural , by comparison to what can we call it ‘isolated’? I agree that the ‘hard problem’ of consciousness is the product of a certain approach to naturalism, but there are ways of dissolving it through a modification of the understanding of naturalism. Your way leaves the dualism intact, leaving the interior of both nature and spirit as solipsisms even as they superficially interact. Kant made human conceptualization and empirical nature inseparably co-dependent, and yet Kantianism is accused of a solipsistic conception of subjectivity.
  • deletedmemberbcc
    208
    Anthromorphizing compositional fallacy at the very least. And, without a clear conception of "consciousness" either in philosophy or science, the phrase "consciousness-bearing" is uninformative. The rest of your post, trafficking as it does in pseudo-science / misinterpreting QM's 'observer effect', doesn't make much sense either except maybe as wishful thinking (i.e. "theology"). Lastly, I don't recognize the theisms of Abrahamic, Vedic, or any other pagan faiths in your account, ucarr, so on that point, again, I don't know what you mean by "theism" or, for that matter, "atheism".180 Proof

    Well said, 180. :fire: :100:
  • god must be atheist
    5.1k
    Anthromorphizing compositional fallacy at the very least. And, without a clear conception of "consciousness" either in philosophy or science, the phrase "consciousness-bearing" is uninformative. The rest of your post, trafficking as it does in pseudo-science / misinterpreting QM's 'observer effect', doesn't make much sense either except maybe as wishful thinking (i.e. "theology"). Lastly, I don't recognize the theisms of Abrahamic, Vedic, or any other pagan faiths in your account, ucarr, so on that point, again, I don't know what you mean by "theism" or, for that matter, "atheism".180 Proof

    :up: :100: :cheer:
  • ucarr
    1.5k
    If God was “co-created alongside of human”, what accounts for the dualistic split between the natural( the human as a physical and biological entity) and the spiritual? These two realms seem to be interacting from across an unbridgeable divide.Joshs

    What do you make of the Venn Diagram problem?

    What makes scientific naturalism ‘isolated and solipsistic’ if not as
    one pole of a nature-spirit dialectic? In other words , don’t we first have to assume your nature-spirit co-creation , and then by subtracting away God arrive at a solipsistic physical nature?
    Joshs

    Do you find the unparsible nature of axioms interesting? Since nature has no approach to axioms save acknowledgement, there is the implication of duality with respect to origins: a) nature; b) unsearchable self-evident truths as arbitrary starting points for narratives. The natural sentient can decide the source of axioms is a mysterious power beyond the physical world or embrace natural phenomena as a creation of unknowable origin or understand the natural world as an eternal system without origin.

    That is, if all there is is the natural , by comparison to what can we call it ‘isolated’?Joshs

    Do you understand the natural world as an eternal system without origin?

    Kant made human conceptualization and empirical nature inseparably co-dependent,Joshs

    I see this is Kant's prescient understanding of QM that you told me of earlier.
  • ucarr
    1.5k
    Is QM's vector-cloud of probability and its collapse not part of the observer effect?
    — ucarr
    Wtf?
    180 Proof

    QM perceives the vagueness of the electron's position within an attached nucleus as a cloud of possible positions of the electron prior to establishment of a definitive valence under observation.
  • ucarr
    1.5k
    To Joshs,
    God_human, though co-created simultaneously, are Venn diagrams, thus overlapped only partially; much of the makeup of each does not overlap. Just as different languages don't translate completely, God_human don't translate completely. This untranslateability entails some of the mystery of otherness.

    Eliminate essential mystery and the understanding becomes overburdened. By rubbing against the unknowable, we keep ourselves vital and our imagination fertile.

    I know from your writing you already know all of this. I'm just letting you know I too respect some of the essential and necessary contradictions that glitch the complacency of a smooth running understanding.
  • ucarr
    1.5k
    Some of the American Founding Fathers embraced an ideology that posits God the creator as the power that designed nature, there after withdrawing to his own council of self-sufficiency. Human was left to tease out the natural attributes by power of reason.

    by reason the inherent features of the natural by the power of reason.

    Partly for political reasons this ideology sets divine will and reason upon level ground. The Christian mandate for a transcendent God could thereby be somewhat appeased while the human pursuit of reason and practical production thereof could go forward free of incursions by a meddling church.

    This ideology is Deism. It is an eighteenth century iteration of intelligent design. It discovers by rational examination teleology within natural processes. The headwaters of reason are acknowledged to be God’s will expressed as axioms funding and organizing the algorithms of rational practice.

    Atheism, the ideology of only nature, no God* immerses itself within rational practice with axioms included. Axioms are “explained” as self-evident truths. Self-evident truths are claims of reason without reasoning arguments to support them.

    Existence is the limit of reason. With an existing thing embraced as a given, reason proceeds thereof towards myriad permutations of rigorously parsed continuities.

    Reasoning upon an existing thing can unfold and compact itself through oscillations that are sometimes deemed natural cycles.

    When a new narrative gets expressed such that it turns a curve in the established narrative unfolding from self-evident truths, the comprehensive rational understanding deepens and new tributaries of reasoning emerge. This is a paradigm shift.

    A paradigm shift occurs when a new facet of an existing thing flashes its presence like a scintillation into the comprehending mind of a thinking sentient.

    Manipulation of permutations of self-evident truth continuities, logic, ranges out from its tether, the axiom. In so doing, logic falls prey to becoming arrogant, believing its axiomatic foundation is another part of itself, albeit a self-sufficient part.

    Reason is a derivation of existence that only completes itself in the doing of being as presence. Presence, an existing thing, stands mystical in the pantheon of creation because the knowing of reason doesn’t know whereof presence arises.

    Atheism, reason falsely divorced from the inscrutable otherness of axiom, the IAM speak of Deus, talks to itself within the oscillations of self-referential logic. It bites the hand that feeds it, axiom. Instead, it praises itself, swathed in the glowing raiment of self-referentiality. When you deny otherness, self-referentiality is all that remains.

    We have thus the Big Bang Theory. This is the grand oscillation of nature. It is a continuity writ large that enfolds itself like a Mobius as it remains silent upon the seminal question of the origin ontology of the singularity.

    Shall we intuit the singularity as the axiom of existence of the self-evidently true and physical universe?

    *180 Proof
  • 180 Proof
    15.4k
    Atheism, the ideology of only nature, no God* immerses itself within rational practice with axioms included.ucarr
    I do not understand atheism as an "ideology" or as derived from "axioms". One who claims, as I do, that theism is demonstrably not true and, therefore, disbelieves in every theistic deity, is an atheist. However, most nonbelievers merely say 'I do not believe in God or gods', usually not for specified reasons, but from (lazy) incredulity or lack of the emotional need for a god. In my own case, philosophical naturalism (e.g. Democritean atomism in particular) made sense to me only after I'd recognized at 16 that I, despite 11 years of Catholic indoctrination and observance, disbelieved in the "God of Abraham" for similiar reasons I'd disbelieved in the gods of "pagan" myths, comic book superheroes & magic. In no way I'm aware of, ucarr, does atheism entail anything about existence as such (e.g. "the origin of the universe").

    Furthermore, there's nothing "axiomatic" about philosophical naturalism either because it's only a paradigm (i.e. a criterion for judgment, methodology or interpretation) and not an indefeasible system for deducing formal truths from "self-evident truths". The best available theories of the natural sciences, especially those in fundamental physics and cosmology, are properly used as testable approximate explanations of nature and not as "final" (metaphysical?) "truths". Thus, to the extent a natural science contains supernatural notions, its theories do not explain nature, begging more questions than they answer by introducing in their models untestable mysteries (e.g. "Goddidit" "First Cause" "Unmoved Mover" "teleology" "phlogiston" "demons" "horoscopes" etc). A naturalist, whether or not she is a believer, usually agrees with the great polymath scientist Pierre-Simon, marquis de Laplace ...
    Napoleon: M. Laplace, they tell me you have written this large book on the system of the universe, and have never even mentioned its creator.
    Laplace: Je n'avais pas besoin de cette hypothèse-là.
    180 Proof
    :fire:
  • deletedmemberbcc
    208
    In no way I'm aware of, ucarr, does atheism entail anything about existence as such (e.g. "the origin of the universe").180 Proof

    Forgive me for stating the obvious, but it seems to me that the only logical consequences of atheism wrt e.g. ontology, metaphysics, cosmology, etc, are negative; i.e. the exclusion of theistic propositions: in other words, atheism doesn't dictate any particular position on how (or whether) the universe began... only that whatever it is, God had nothing to do with it.

    And same for positions on traditional philosophical disputes like materialism/idealism, Platonism/nominalism, and so on: atheism is logically independent of both positions (so atheists can be materialists or idealists, they can be realists or anti-realists wrt truth, value, abstract objects, etc), except for the one thing atheism necessarily excludes: i.e. anything involving the existence of God/gods
  • 180 Proof
    15.4k
    ... atheism doesn't dictate any particular position on how (or whether) the universe began... only that whatever it is, God had nothing to do with it.

    ... the one thing atheism necessarily excludes: i.e. anything involving the existence of God/gods
    busycuttingcrap
    This is true only of theistic God/gods (of which deism, I think, is a subset).
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