God's purpose

[annnnoid]

Alone? Hardly. There are many theists who regard the deity or some of or all of the deities that they believe in as not especially caring about humanity, and plenty of god concepts are floating around to much the same effect. "Father figure" and "cares about humans" are not even remotely necessary traits for a god concept to have, after all.

…of course…it could be argued that merely giving us the opportunity to exist in the first place with all our immeasurable and incomprehensible range of experiences, attributes, and opportunities more-than qualifies as ‘caring’. Presumably…if there is something that created / creates us…and it didn’t give the slightest damn…then it wouldn’t have created us in the first place!

..let alone provided us with a skill and experience set that gives us the capacity to explore and evaluate to such a vast degree. Not necessarily the mark of a 'caring creator'...but then again, hardly a sign of utter indifference either.

 

[Jodie]

If we co-created ourselves and our environment then what you've said is meaningless Annnoid.

 

[Thor 2]

Alone? Hardly. There are many theists who regard the deity or some of or all of the deities that they believe in as not especially caring about humanity, and plenty of god concepts are floating around to much the same effect. "Father figure" and "cares about humans" are not even remotely necessary traits for a god concept to have, after all.

Yes you're right about that, but I was referring to Jodie's idea that we are part of the creator, as it were, and as she has outlined in other posts. Sorry, I should have fleshed it out a bit more I suppose, but then I did address it to Jodie, and assumed she knew what I was on about.

 

[annnnoid]

If we co-created ourselves and our environment then what you've said is meaningless Annnoid.

Not necessarily. We may indeed ‘co-create’ to some degree…but the ability to do so may not be – and realistically, can hardly be argued to be – our own creation. IOW…whatever involvement we may have in whatever we’re involved in…that involvement ultimately occurs by the grace of whatever it is that creates us.

…again…not something that would conventionally be regarded as a metric of indifference.

 

[Aridas]

…of course…it could be argued that merely giving us the opportunity to exist in the first place with all our immeasurable and incomprehensible range of experiences, attributes, and opportunities more-than qualifies as ‘caring’. Presumably…if there is something that created / creates us…and it didn’t give the slightest damn…then it wouldn’t have created us in the first place!

Just about anything can be argued. That doesn't mean that it can be argued well, as you're quite demonstrating. That something has created a universe does not imply any particular reason for why it was created, nor does it imply any hint of caring about any particular consequences of having done so. Either way, you're making quite the jump in the quoted from "giving us the opportunity to exist" to talking about direct and intentional creation.

Yes you're right about that, but I was referring to Jodie's idea that we are part of the creator, as it were, and as she has outlined in other posts. Sorry, I should have fleshed it out a bit more I suppose, but then I did address it to Jodie, and assumed she knew what I was on about.

That we are "part" of some creator in some way isn't exactly a new or revolutionary concept, though. Certainly not worthy of leading to

Train of thought? ........ spasmodic utterance perhaps.

Trying to invoke co-creation, though, i.e.

If we co-created ourselves and our environment then what you've said is meaningless Annnoid.

at best, leads to very real questions of what, exactly, "we," "co-created," and "ourselves" actually mean, specifically, with the note that even in the rather limited cases where that statement can work without necessarily invoking one or more fallacies, conflation is a very real danger and over-simplification is a rather valid criticism when trying to use those particular words to communicate the concept(s) in play.

 

[Donn]

If we co-created ourselves and our environment then what you've said is meaningless Annnoid.

Ooh, snap! A schism. Duelling deities at dawn!

 

[Jodie]

That we are "part" of some creator in some way isn't exactly a new or revolutionary concept, though. Certainly not worthy of leading to Trying to invoke co-creation, though, i.e. at best, leads to very real questions of what, exactly, "we," "co-created," and "ourselves" actually mean, specifically, with the note that even in the rather limited cases where that statement can work without necessarily invoking one or more fallacies, conflation is a very real danger and over-simplification is a rather valid criticism when trying to use those particular words to communicate the concept(s) in play.

No , it's not, but I've noticed it gets ignored. I'm assuming it's because it's easier to discredit the concept of a personal creator, a concept that I don't agree with either.

And yes, you are right, those are questions I have and when trying to explain the position sometimes words don't adequately convey the meaning.

 

[Pup]

No , it's not, but I've noticed it gets ignored. I'm assuming it's because it's easier to discredit the concept of a personal creator, a concept that I don't agree with either.

And yes, you are right, those are questions I have and when trying to explain the position sometimes words don't adequately convey the meaning.

I think most people are at least aware of religions where god(s) create humans, the Abraham religions being big examples. But the idea that humans helped create everything doesn't have an easy frame of reference.

For example, in the usual creation stories, I know that a god created the ancestors of living humans, whether Adam and Eve or somebody else. You and I then got here the normal genealogical/biological way, except maybe with souls inserted at conception or birth.

But in this other creation, I'm unclear whether we--you Jodie and me Pup--were part of the original creation of the universe or if that was our ancestors. Or were our souls there creating and our souls were just put in these bodies when we were born? Why don't we remember any of this?

It's not as easy as saying you know, like God made Adam from dust, only Bor's sons made people out of trees by the shore.

 

[Jodie]

If our existence as separate beings is an illusion then discussion of someone's individual soul isn't relevant. Hawking discusses information and how that can survive a black hole intact. He also discusses the illusion of our memories. Start at marker 23:00 of this lecture.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h_d7O9JGo_s

Consciousness and the soul may not be the same thing. Max Tegmark discusses how consciousness is an emergent property of how our brain cells are arranged. That feeling of being alive is our brain processing information much like a lens focuses on the subject to be photographed. This emergent property can be expressed as a mathematical equation which in turn is a type of information.

If you watched the last few minutes of the lecture above you will hear Hawking state that no information can ever be destroyed. In that respect, I think our individual lives contribute to that whole universe that we are a part of. If memories are illusions and the future is yet to be determined with multiple potential outcomes then all we ever really have is "now".

You take that "now" and apply Lorenz concept of deterministic chaos where the longer a system exists the less predictable it will be. Let's consider the universe that system. The sentient life in this universe would then act as the attractors that would affect those potential outcomes thus making us co-creators of our own reality. Since no information is ever lost then that would make us eternal, but only in terms of the whole organism i.e. the universe.

 

[Pup]

If you watched the last few minutes of the lecture above you will hear Hawking state that no information can ever be destroyed.

Not interested in youtube lectures because I can't ask Hawking the answer to the obvious question: anybody who has had a harddrive crash knows information can be destroyed. Manuscript collections can burn in museums. Information is destroyed every second. What do you mean it can't be? To say it's not destroyed requires redefining words from their normal meanings and I'm not sure the purpose of doing that.

 

[Beelzebuddy]

Not interested in youtube lectures because I can't ask Hawking the answer to the obvious question: anybody who has had a harddrive crash knows information can be destroyed. Manuscript collections can burn in museums. Information is destroyed every second. What do you mean it can't be? To say it's not destroyed requires redefining words from their normal meanings and I'm not sure the purpose of doing that.

The concept of information in physics isn't limited to the useful stuff. When a book is burned, the information encoded in its physical structure gives rise to information encoded in the patterns of ash and swirls of CO2. If you could rewind time somehow, the book could be unburnt. If the information were truly destroyed, like it pops through a singularity into nothingness, there's no way to rewind that.

That's not to say that Jodie is right, or for that matter even wrong. She seems to be arguing for a watered-down version of the Rapture of the Nerds, in which some superintelligence in the far-flung future is gonna gather up all the quantum whatsits and reincarnate us. Every book unburnt, every circle unbroken. Because reasons, but won't it be nice when it happens.

 

[Donn]

When a book is burned, the information encoded in its physical structure gives rise to information encoded in the patterns of ash and swirls of CO2. If you could rewind time somehow, the book could be unburnt.

This is the sort of thing that my mind can't fathom. I see the pages burning, the printed letters each making a different smoke as the whole cloud mingles like milk into coffee. How can those atoms be sought-out and placed into their strict matrix such that they are paper and (correct) letters again?

Does each atom contain a history of spacetime coordinates? I am fairly sure it doesn't, but I don't know this stuff.

If a brain is dead it must be like the burning book — the physical structure that was the mind is degrading and with that morphing the mind is gone.

Jodie wants, as you say, a nerd rapture. A handy black hole in which to squirt the dead brain might preserve that mind for some future retrieval, I suppose. Very sci-fi.

 

[Beelzebuddy]

This is the sort of thing that my mind can't fathom. I see the pages burning, the printed letters each making a different smoke as the whole cloud mingles like milk into coffee. How can those atoms be sought-out and placed into their strict matrix such that they are paper and (correct) letters again?

How is not the question being asked. There doesn't have to be a practical way of doing it, at any point in the forseeable future. But each of the elements in the burning - the combustion, the convection - are, technically, reversible physical processes. If you could track all of those processes somehow, each atom maybe, you could in theory wind the whole thing back. The information in the book may be lost, but it wasn't destroyed.

 

[Emily's Cat]

Most of what I see on the forum are issues with this anthropomorphic type of cosmology which isn't what everyone believes even if they do believe in some type of eternal life. I don't think it's strictly an either/or debate IMO.

Mmm... I suppose. Although I don't know that this would be considered a "creator". There's an implied aspect of sapience and volition in there, and active intelligence. I think that, despite the amount of anthropomorphizing that humans do, it's really that active intelligence aspect that trips up most atheists.

For giggles, I enjoy brainstorming about Karma as a universal process for balance - non-sentient, non-intelligent, just a force that we haven't yet identified I just don't have any evidence to support that speculation.

 

[Emily's Cat]

I think most people are at least aware of religions where god(s) create humans, the Abraham religions being big examples. But the idea that humans helped create everything doesn't have an easy frame of reference.

It's easier in non-abrahamic traditions. My hinduism is pretty shaky... but...

Brahma is everything that exists. All of existence is created by and through Brahma. All of the plants and animals that exist in this cycle are part of Brahma, existing within but independent of Brahma.

Vishnu governs existence while it cycles. Vishnu is now, and creates the laws by which the world exists.

Shiva the destroyer turns the wheel of time, unwinds Vishnu's laws, and returns all things to Brahma.

This is waaaaaay oversimplified, I know. But it serves as an example of a fairly large religion where it could be argued that all of life was involved in the creation of life - we are all part of Brahma.

 

[Emily's Cat]

Not interested in youtube lectures because I can't ask Hawking the answer to the obvious question: anybody who has had a harddrive crash knows information can be destroyed. Manuscript collections can burn in museums. Information is destroyed every second. What do you mean it can't be? To say it's not destroyed requires redefining words from their normal meanings and I'm not sure the purpose of doing that.

The concept of information in physics isn't limited to the useful stuff. When a book is burned, the information encoded in its physical structure gives rise to information encoded in the patterns of ash and swirls of CO2. If you could rewind time somehow, the book could be unburnt. If the information were truly destroyed, like it pops through a singularity into nothingness, there's no way to rewind that.

This is the sort of thing that my mind can't fathom. I see the pages burning, the printed letters each making a different smoke as the whole cloud mingles like milk into coffee. How can those atoms be sought-out and placed into their strict matrix such that they are paper and (correct) letters again?

The conservation of information is one of those things that physics talks about, and takes as given, that I don't grok. To me, it seems to rely on the assumption of a perfectly deterministic universe - every particle has a perfectly predictable path through all of space time, if one only knows all the math.

To me, that seems in direct contradiction to quantum mechanics, as well as the entire principle of uncertainty. We've already established that it is impossible to know both 1) a particle's exact velocity and 2) a particle's exact position. If you cannot know both, you cannot 'rewind'.

 

[Jodie]

Not interested in youtube lectures because I can't ask Hawking the answer to the obvious question: anybody who has had a harddrive crash knows information can be destroyed. Manuscript collections can burn in museums. Information is destroyed every second. What do you mean it can't be? To say it's not destroyed requires redefining words from their normal meanings and I'm not sure the purpose of doing that.

Couldn't possibly repeat the math he cited in another lecture on the topic, but in a nut shell, he said there was a way for it to survive. I took him at his word.

 

[Jodie]

The concept of information in physics isn't limited to the useful stuff. When a book is burned, the information encoded in its physical structure gives rise to information encoded in the patterns of ash and swirls of CO2. If you could rewind time somehow, the book could be unburnt. If the information were truly destroyed, like it pops through a singularity into nothingness, there's no way to rewind that.

That's not to say that Jodie is right, or for that matter even wrong. She seems to be arguing for a watered-down version of the Rapture of the Nerds, in which some superintelligence in the far-flung future is gonna gather up all the quantum whatsits and reincarnate us. Every book unburnt, every circle unbroken. Because reasons, but won't it be nice when it happens.

Rapture of the Nerds? OK I don't think I've heard that one before. What I got out of it is that perhaps time was the issue here, or that there might be a difference in how we perceive time versus how time really works. In that case, we wouldn't be gathered. We are already a part of the whole like a skin cell is part of your body.

 

[Jodie]

Not argumentative here - what other options do you have in mind?

Your simplified explanation for Hinduism was good. I think it was you, but it might have been someone else that mentioned the Taoists, the Tao being the cosmic order of things.

 

[Emily's Cat]

Your simplified explanation for Hinduism was good. I think it was you, but it might have been someone else that mentioned the Taoists, the Tao being the cosmic order of things.

Yep, it was me. I find religions fascinating