I guess I'll add to the discussion about spatial reality the observation that with numbers the finite make up the infinite while with space the infinite makes up the finite

I'm very very interested in infinitesimals. Berkeley called them ghosts of dead space as if space dies as it approaches infinity. My question is why does it approach infinity when we get smaller and smaller but not when going in the opposite direction. With the former you get nowhere and in the later we get limited finitude. How can some thing be infinite and finite in regard to its spatial component? If matter is pure extension as Descartes said there results confusion. Yet Hegel said space was "outside itself" and I try to understand this as curved space. If we have a globe, you can do non-Euclidean geometry on the surface but inside it you can still do Euclidean stuff. However if curvature is prior to other aspects of extension than the whole globe is permeated with a curve. It's from this angle that I am trying to understand infinitesimals and how they loop back into finitude. So you can see I do take this subject seriously.

If the idea of infinitesimals is a black hole in a garden, I see the point about this. Heidegger started saying "what IS being", and in the 60's and beyond everyone is asking "what IS consciousness" . Ideas too big to grapple with one step at a time will spring up and sometimes catch followers. Maybe there is a dialectic behind the whole thing

Oddly the religion physically at the center of the world call themselves Christians and Orthodox yet through the lens of Plato say that light itself is God and that light alone is how the trinity can reveal it to the mind in meditation

Photons don't have mass and therefore time doesn't apply to them. Gravity can bend it though that's what I'm a little fuzzy about. The distinction between time and eternity is discrete

I understand your argument and it is backed up by the claim in physics that light exists in eternity (and it alone as some would add)

Thanks. The phrase "The devil is in the details" was used by the scholastic school mean in the Middle Ages. You weren't allowed to talk about infinitesimals back then. It's actually understandable because questioning how many parts a geometric object has leads to a lot of trouble I fear. It's sounds as if math professors kind of agree that it's best not to tilt at that particular windmill

Dean Buonomano has written a book Your Brain is a Time Machine that has added this to general discussion

i think this is backward. The passing of time is what orders the opposites, not vise versa. The fundamental opposites are past and future, and without the passing of time there is no such order — Metaphysician Undercover

I haven't studied all the fragments of Heraclitus but according to Bertrand Russell's History of Philosophy (on youtube by workingklass0) the Logos is what orders the flux of fire in his system. You seem to be thinking that there is the common Prime Mover position and then pure materialism, and that that's just it. There is actually many positions. Besides subjective idealism (Berkeley, everything is mental) and objective materialism (that human consciosnessness directly creates the entire material order), there are different grades of transcendental idealism (Kant, Fitche), actual idealism (Giovanni Gentile), absolute idealism (Schelling, Hegel), and whatever it was that Charles Peirce was trying to say. THEREFORE,... where does the Logos reside? In God's mind (something beyond us), in our minds, or in no minds whatsoever? Again, could the Time and Space of Newton be reinterpreted to mean the laws of physics (Logos?)? Science has tried to find absolute nothing, but there always seems to be something left over. There would, nonetheless, be the laws of physics and logic if we had nothingness, right? It's not a clear issue, no easy answers. Pure nothingness would be beyond all laws and truths, but then what is beyond pure nothingness? Maybe it's circular and comes back to consciousness. The relationship between mind and matter is hotly debated and much has been said, not simply by Hegel or The Secret book (and documentary), but by many others. Interestingly, Huston Smith said in one of his books that Dao in Daoism means both "law" and "breath", so basically is means "spoken Logos". Yet Daoism refrains from calling this an act of a Person, and Daoism has a lot in common with Hegel, who didn't believe in the traditional God (although he called himself a Christian). Even Hinduism's "brahmin" means "breath" and this breath speaks Aum (of which's sound waves the world is composed), so in Greek terms it's logos. Yet their complex philosophies and theologies point towards the logos being more IN us than outside us

I corrected grammar in my last two posts so now they make more sense now :)

One last shot in the dark before I go to sleep: Bertrand Russell said "Weierstrass, by strictly banishing from mathematics the use of infinitesimals, has at last shown that we live in an unchanging world". So somehow by taking infinity away from space (although it seems to truly belong to it) Russell thought you get to some kind of eternalism. I want to research this more tomorrow (how can one do calculus without infinitesimals for example?). Be well everyone

Kant said time can only be represented by a single line. He might be wrong. There are esoteric materials that apply sacred geometry to quantum mechanics. I don't know if it has any value, if it can be applied to time, or if it's implicit Platonism makes thinking about time easier. Just something that came to mind

There was Berkeley's position that objects are mental, Hume's position that objects are indefinite, and Kent's position that objects are phenomena of noumena. In none of these systems or in Aristotle's scheme is the possibility of confusion and the rise of "The Absurd" (Camus) removed. In the literature of religions and cultures situations arise that reveal the the confusion that the outer world can cause in our minds. What is called "quantum mysticism" can be consistent with Kant's philosophy but how cant we ever have a true theory of everything if we cant get out hands on the ultimate substrate?

The passage of time is like the fire of Heraclitus. For him, ordering the fire was the Logos of opposites, kinda a dialectical yin and yang thing. Knowing what this Logos says to our minds is hard, if not impossible. Of course the trick to knowledge is to realize we cant prove everything from the very bottom to the top. Maurice Blondel, Maritain, and Karl Rahner agreed with Kant that the questions of substance and a universal substrate are beyond a certain level of truth. Those thinkers found meaning in action, a dynamic religion; Alfred Whitehead wrote about an even more extreme form of dynamic religion. To me though the question of whether rites (the Mass, indigenous ceremonies, spells, incantations) can change matter is straightforward forward and it's irrelevant whether there is a God behind it or if our mental vibrations alter the vibrations of things that aren't us

Verificationalism
Positivism
Logical analyism
Pragmatism
Functionalism..

these all seem almost too related to be considered separate from each other. If science works common sense says stay the course. WHY it works is a different question I believe

People who believe in physics, know time to be an illusion. — Present awareness

By physics do you mean alchemy? Science might really be alchemy, idn. There may be no way to test how our thoughts affect reality. We surely can wonder what our thoughts happen in, though. Intellectuals around Newton argued that his physics (unlike Descartes's vortex) required theism. They thought they "knew" how their physical laws led to philosophical "truths". Who is to say what will come after the post modern age, what new ideas will arise

Imagine a chess board (The world) being played by Mr. Sole Principle. He is the only thing with force in the universe. Each piece of the game (which I guess he plays against himself) has no principles inside them. They are totally empty. Just because he has played the game up to 2021 a certain way, doesn t mean he won't play it differently tomorrow. I can feel force in my body but when I see a plane flying, Hume asks how we can know what is truly moving it. The Sole Principle might be another dimension, Malebranches God, or anything. At least this is Hume's case. He really dug a hole that is hard to get out of. The mathematical part does relate to the difference between random and determined I talked about, but when can one become the other? At the moment of the big bang all mathematics breaks down

"The bread, which I formerly eat, nourished me; that is, a body of such sensible qualities, was, at that time , ensure with such secret power: But does it follow, that other bread must also nourish me at another time, and that like sensible qualities must always be attended with like secret powers? The consequence seems nowise necessary."

" May I not clearly and distinctly conceive , that a body, falling from the clouds, and which, in all other respects, resembles snow, has yet the taste of sat or feeling of fire? "

Hume.

His poetic imagination was able to combine the sensible is any way he wanted. I was recently wondering if Newtonian Time and Space was really just the rational laws behind our reality. I don't know if these laws are mathematical or simply about logic, or about something else, but it makes seeing Newton in light of Einstein easier I think. After all, we are able to coordinate frames of reference in ways that make sense

The world is very relatively in tune with the world wrote Andre Breton. Surrealism in poetry was prominant during the rise of quantum physics, interestingly.

Hume denied that

1) objects must have laws in them

2) that causality must in the world

The number one principle of science is that "identical objects act identically in identical situations." Hume denied that (1) and (2) even had meaning. Laws, force, power, substance, and energy were ideas that for him which (1) meant nothing and (2) didn't apply to the world as we know it. He would have made a great Buddha way back when perhaps. He brings up interesting illustrations though for me to consider in my relation to the world in the form of conceptualization.

I'll just throw out there that Dawkins has arisen a lot emotion on this question. Some say explaining improbabilities by multiverses is ridiculous. Others say that saying an infinite mind explains everything is strange and anthropomorphic. Every time I get into religious discussions, being an atheist, I walk away thinking "how is it possible for 2 humans to think so differently". Maybe that thought is the good that results from the debate. Cheers

Asking "why is there something rather than.nothing" and why leaves are green from the perspective of philosophy is probably to ask something pretty petty

Faith posits stuff like "The world can't have the reason for its existence in itself". That's highly abstract though. Faith makes the abstract seem concrete and nontrivial because people are told doubting is a sin and leads to punishment. We can easily posit faith to be a sin against reason because in faith you pursue the desire to know the object of your intellectual desire without holding back by any doubts whatsoever. After such an exercise of faith it is near impossible to be convinced you used faith throughout the previous thought exercise and instead you think you were simply doing demonstrations. In a sense through faith you irreversibly tie yourself up into a position you can't get out of

To me talk about quantum mechanics always falls into talk about philosophy eventually. Distance is space and who knows what time is. As Augustine said "if someone asked me if I knew what time was I would say yes. If he asked what it was I would say I didn't know". I like the PBS digital studios series on physics that is on YouTube. To my mind the talk falls into philosophy every couple minutes in almost every video nonetheless. I started out this little thread with the force-energy-power thing because it was Hume who had first got me thinking about this stuff. He said "natural philosophers" ( scientists) throw these works around when there was (in Hume's opinion) no way to define them. He even did a kind of Cartesian self-analysis to see if he could find these concepts in terms of internal experience. All and all I think he took skepticism too far and that we don't have to choose to be so doubtful. If we try we can find some meaning to words which we apply to phenomena we might be successful. But the line between physics and philosophy appears to be incurably blurry. Too bad for those scientists who dislike philosophy I guess..

Thanks for the above replies guys.

I just found these:

https://medium.com/@paulaustinmurphy2000/graham-priests-contradictions-in-the-world-zeno-s-arrow-and-legal-inconsistencies-9eb6fd7d2e00

http://paulaustinmurphypam.blogspot.com/2016/11/graham-priests-dialetheic-logic.html

Interesting points on both sides of the discussion it seems

Eternalism basically says that causality is real in our world but the casual series is subsumed under (or into?) something more fundamental (greater?).

As you can see there is a lot involved in the concept. Individualism means a lot in certain countries, but you'd be surprised how different peoples with different philosophies see reality. I could take the example of aboriginal tribes and what I learned from Huston Smith about their ideas of "oneness with the earth", but I think I'd like to direct you to Actual Idealism and Giovanni Gentiles. Many many Italian works from this period have not been translated into English because of WWII and I am not advocating any political system here. But the idea of Gentiles that we swallow up and become one with our country (ontologically) by literally being one "great Mind" in the "soul State" (each nation has a government and again im not promoting politics) was probably believed by many nations, tribes, and empires of the past. In the West we think only in terms of individual souls and believe that this view is the most accurate and advantageous. Lateral think might be dangerous, that's true.. but sometimes truths can be found where you don't expect them. The idea of individualism as understood in modern times might have started with Descartes. There was hundreds of thousands of years of humanity before him..

A lot of Christians do take the old Testament to mean God can and does demand the killing of completely innocent individuals by his followers. These Christians are not different from radical muslims. In a Christian society will they have a "God commanded it" defense in the law for murderers? What if in that society someone claimed God ordered an abortion? I don't find these ancient religions appealing, logical, or meaningful.

It could be argued that "sucklings" could refer to children over 7 who were in the eyes of Jews "sinners". If one is open to seeing it, the ways of interpreting these texts is almost limitless. We can't cross examine the writers. Here's another example: maybsubjext idea of "reality" as we modern people speak of it was unknown to former eras. They may have spoken as if they thought in that category yet there philosophy and religion might have been entirely epistemic and existential. We have no way to know.

The relationship between culture (and thought) and how biology has evolved over the thousands of centuries leading to us would be an interesting subject, although again there might be little we can discover with clarity

My main point is that our knowledge of past cultures passes through the shapes and forms of each generation back until you have reached the culture you wish to study. You can't skip centuries and millenia to peer into a civilization. Ergo, older cultures will be harder to correctly understand

If, just for argument sake, the peasant understands his class with 60 percent accuracy and the modern historian knows the whole age with say 15 percent acuracy, which of the two has greater knowledge?

I love Cassirer. He never says 'this is the most reasonable way to understand this religion". Hegel incorporated Aristotle into his system, a system very different from Aquinas's religion. Every century sees new interpretations of the past, which seem novel but could for all we know be the original! Then again maybe I misunderstand Hegel and Heidegger, but thusly.. there is no infallible knowledge in historical criticism. Some people find it incredible that others don't take events from thousands of years ago seriously, but we all have different thresholds when it comes to this subject I've raised here

I don't think there is any way to demonstrate that there are and only are spirits who are below humans or that there is one or several supreme ones who are infinitely above humans. I am not greatly interested in math but there may be 100 percent proof in that subject (unless psychologism is true). It seems that there just has to be something that is true even if we could never grasp it. The principle of science that seems obvious is that "identical objects act identically in identical situations". I don't know how the mind can deny this principle, however science precedes with various degrees of certainty. The same applies to historical critical studies of ancient language(s).

I don't know what you mean by restrict, but quantum biology is a field of study on par with many others

Thank God someone brought in another religious tradition. This is helpful. Thanks

I would like to add by saying that it's wrong to use the "copies of copies of copies for thousands of years" argument, because we do have ancient texts themselves. However the understanding of those documents doesn't fall from the sky. The understanding comes from the generation to generation thing I mentioned, how language evokes (and culture and even biology evolve too). So there is a separateness between us and the past and (although this might be argued against) I think in have a case that the further we go back in history (testing artifacts and writings with science to determine age) the harder it should be to really have certainty over common ancient text. So ye we know Gettysburg happened, but it seems to me we know about it far more surely than about the punic wars

Good points. What counts as being "most reasonable" about ancient text and how we are to take them doesnt seem to have one simple answer however. Reading Heidegger and how he would translate and then interpret texts was eye opening to me. I think the topic I've brought up has no clear answer. I wanted to juggle things up and get us thinking in several ways about the past in this thread. I'm not saying someone can't have a certain type of certainty about the Bible or Shakespeare, but ones person's certainty is another person's doubt

QM can predict the activity of something that is a millionth of a millimeter in size with the accuracy of someone guessing the distance from Paris to Rome within the precision of a single hair. Ontology is a much more subjective topic imo

Also how can God, being all happy and perfect as they say he is, even do anything truly moral, good, and virtuous. Applying these questions to God are not inappropriate but instead insightful

"God" cannot be necessary and have free will at the same time. This is intuitively obvious to me. If he is necessary than he can't do evil. Not because of a compatabilism theory but from necessity. Then his essential initial acts are necessary and not free. He would then no longer be fully free, but bound by his self. Therefore God cannot be necessary

Maybe you can't take yourself out either. Maybe you would just go to Hades or Sheol. Who knows

My last points:

1) Logic might be able to be broken. Is experience supreme? Maybe

2) Logic has not shown that "contingency" or "necessity" reside in the substance-core-essence of anything whatsoever. Cause and effect is real, yes. I can break a cup or spill apple juice in the hall. Those are meaningful for experience. Contingency and necessity properly belong to logical puzzles, and so this whole thread has plunged from Avicenna, in my opinion, into the den of Anslem, Duns Scotus, Descartes, Malebranche, Spinoza, and Leibnizs' "ontological argument. People say those writers each have slightly different versions of that argument or that the modern modal argument for God is a different beast completely. But.. nop. You can't prove anything thing exists whatsoever from logical categories alone

Well in the Kantian system it seems we emerge from nothing (pure action) into substance (extended biological body). So essence is achieved after activity. Hegel expressed this as a logical act of nothing and being sublating each other. (This is consistent with emergence theory in newer debates) To then consider one's body and objects around and conclude they must be created by a spirit seems to me an impossibility and Kant said as much. He offers an alternative to classical physics which Avicenna's whole system is based

This seems germane to the question of a necessary substance

It appears to me that "essence comes after existence" also means "action comes before substance". Allan Watts said Buddhists sometimes say "take responsibility for your birth". We act to come into this world and obtain a body (substance) afterwards. Is this congruent with your thoughts?