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I appreciate your explanation and have a question for you (and I mean this with genuine curiosity): what about where God came from then? Is he/she/it a reflecti

I appreciate your explanation and have a question for you (and I mean this with genuine curiosity): what about where God came from then? Is he/she/it a reflection of some other entity's perception? Or does it just not matter (like, this God is a singularity of cosmological understanding -- it is not possible to know what's beyond that level)? This same question can of course be asked of any explanation of how the universe came to be (religious, scientific, or otherwise)... which is what makes this question so fascinating to me. It makes me realize that some things just can't be understood by causal logic alone.

meric 10y ago
Sometimes things like numbers, which we cannot observe in the real world, have implications for the calculations we do make. We cannot observe them, and yet they have real implications for how we do things. And yet, where did mathematical laws come from? It's almost as if they're more discovered and remembered than invented...timeless, and everywhere. And that's how I think God is. It's the unified theory of everything for me. EDIT: removed imaginary it was distracting the point
- SomeStupidPoint 10y ago
  Im pretty sure calling them "imaginary" was meant to be a slur when they were first invented, and is exactly not meant to help us actually understand them. I prefer "complete numbers", cause they're the algebraic closure of the reals.
SomeStupidPoint 10y ago
I think of it like this: It's fairly straight forward to build the other numbers from a starting value, 1, but defining 1 itself requires a full understanding of the infinite structure, and the other things it can build. So you can view 1 as both more basic than the other numbers and also more complex than any of them. Similarly, the argument would be that God is both things: nothing but the fundamental notion that the universe does stuff (or is), and also the full complexity of structure built from that fundamental doing. In the same way that mathematics ultimately tried to eat its own tail -- using advanced theory and structures to loop back and define its base structure -- science is attempting to tell the story of how a singular type of fundamental perturbation self-acting can give rise to the plethora of structures and phenomena we see, and must inevitably do so. That we keep running in to the same sorts of definitional loops, fractal structures, notions of duality, etc across both efforts suggests something of the nature of God -- or at least the computational structure of the universe we live in, as it is built atop a singularity. Getting a little further afield -- modern physics suggests that reality can be interpreted as a quantum computer operating on universal scale and timelimes, so in a very real sense, we're just a subset of the singularity computing. I would argue that many primitive people intuited this fact before we had the terminology to really articulate it, and that we see this splashed across religion, covered by later political additions.
- meric 10y ago
  Yes exactly like this, and reminding myself of this singularity helps me become more concious of my own heart and mind and I hope I will not be led by my ego, greed or lust. That's all. In this universe I'm insignificant, and yet every action I do take reverberate across the entire universe in ways I never intend and can never imagine. And I think my belief helps me to reduce "damage" or "suffering" my actions may cause.
- redial 10y ago
  The difference is this; when you go back to redefine 1, you don't change the nature or meaning of the number 1, it still fits everywhere it did before, in all cases operates like it did before, all the changes happened in you, in your understanding of it, 1 changed in absolutely no way, if anything, now it's bigger. The same analysis applied to god had the opposite result. It shrink the idea of god, so much, that now no one defends the notion of god directly causing earthquakes any more, certainly no one on this thread, as you are all too smart to try to back that up. God has been at most, relegated to the position you just voiced. Certainly that is the only position left to retreat, because you have stripped god of so much, it has become so vague, an almost synonym with everything and truth, whatever that means, that you can't really refute an idea that is barely an idea. The two are not really alike.
  - SomeStupidPoint 10y ago
    Please don't put words in my mouth. Earthquakes are caused by the ultimate God, and mediated by various other dieties or angels, depending on your preferred terminology. You seem to be assuming that God thinks like us or is interested in us, and I would point out that is the younger, more recent idea, which I regard as nothing but ego and politics masking the original idea for reasons of memetic potency in human thinking. Our understanding of why and our ability to predict them has changed, but what you describe is a confusion rather than a retreat: just because we can give two names to something doesn't mean one stopped applying. That confusion underlies your comment: people still say that God directly causes earthquakes, we just dropped the political nonsense about it being because leader said not to do X and we did it. If anything, that's viewing God as larger, not lesser, and reflects us letting go of our own ego, and returning to the base idea, rather than our own nonsense atop it.
ZeroFries 10y ago
I think the great mystics would say, God is beyond beginning and endings, beginnings and endings are in the mind, not reality, although reality makes the appearance of beginnings and endings possible.

meric 10y ago

Sometimes things like numbers, which we cannot observe in the real world, have implications for the calculations we do make. We cannot observe them, and yet they have real implications for how we do things. And yet, where did mathematical laws come from? It's almost as if they're more discovered and remembered than invented...timeless, and everywhere. And that's how I think God is. It's the unified theory of everything for me. EDIT: removed imaginary it was distracting the point

SomeStupidPoint 10y ago
Im pretty sure calling them "imaginary" was meant to be a slur when they were first invented, and is exactly not meant to help us actually understand them. I prefer "complete numbers", cause they're the algebraic closure of the reals.

SomeStupidPoint 10y ago

I think of it like this: It's fairly straight forward to build the other numbers from a starting value, 1, but defining 1 itself requires a full understanding of the infinite structure, and the other things it can build. So you can view 1 as both more basic than the other numbers and also more complex than any of them. Similarly, the argument would be that God is both things: nothing but the fundamental notion that the universe does stuff (or is), and also the full complexity of structure built from that fundamental doing. In the same way that mathematics ultimately tried to eat its own tail -- using advanced theory and structures to loop back and define its base structure -- science is attempting to tell the story of how a singular type of fundamental perturbation self-acting can give rise to the plethora of structures and phenomena we see, and must inevitably do so. That we keep running in to the same sorts of definitional loops, fractal structures, notions of duality, etc across both efforts suggests something of the nature of God -- or at least the computational structure of the universe we live in, as it is built atop a singularity. Getting a little further afield -- modern physics suggests that reality can be interpreted as a quantum computer operating on universal scale and timelimes, so in a very real sense, we're just a subset of the singularity computing. I would argue that many primitive people intuited this fact before we had the terminology to really articulate it, and that we see this splashed across religion, covered by later political additions.

meric 10y ago
Yes exactly like this, and reminding myself of this singularity helps me become more concious of my own heart and mind and I hope I will not be led by my ego, greed or lust. That's all. In this universe I'm insignificant, and yet every action I do take reverberate across the entire universe in ways I never intend and can never imagine. And I think my belief helps me to reduce "damage" or "suffering" my actions may cause.
redial 10y ago
The difference is this; when you go back to redefine 1, you don't change the nature or meaning of the number 1, it still fits everywhere it did before, in all cases operates like it did before, all the changes happened in you, in your understanding of it, 1 changed in absolutely no way, if anything, now it's bigger. The same analysis applied to god had the opposite result. It shrink the idea of god, so much, that now no one defends the notion of god directly causing earthquakes any more, certainly no one on this thread, as you are all too smart to try to back that up. God has been at most, relegated to the position you just voiced. Certainly that is the only position left to retreat, because you have stripped god of so much, it has become so vague, an almost synonym with everything and truth, whatever that means, that you can't really refute an idea that is barely an idea. The two are not really alike.
- SomeStupidPoint 10y ago
  Please don't put words in my mouth. Earthquakes are caused by the ultimate God, and mediated by various other dieties or angels, depending on your preferred terminology. You seem to be assuming that God thinks like us or is interested in us, and I would point out that is the younger, more recent idea, which I regard as nothing but ego and politics masking the original idea for reasons of memetic potency in human thinking. Our understanding of why and our ability to predict them has changed, but what you describe is a confusion rather than a retreat: just because we can give two names to something doesn't mean one stopped applying. That confusion underlies your comment: people still say that God directly causes earthquakes, we just dropped the political nonsense about it being because leader said not to do X and we did it. If anything, that's viewing God as larger, not lesser, and reflects us letting go of our own ego, and returning to the base idea, rather than our own nonsense atop it.

ZeroFries 10y ago

I think the great mystics would say, God is beyond beginning and endings, beginnings and endings are in the mind, not reality, although reality makes the appearance of beginnings and endings possible.